Random Thoughts on Recent Products

Something got me thinking about products recently and how they have changed the world.  It's quite sad when you think of how much we as a society have changed in just the last 10 years with all our modern technology that feels so different than what we used to use.  The reason it's sad is because what really has changed about us?  I still see the same lifestyle before as after.  Nothing has really gripped us in a way that changed everything; the most grandiose and recent I can think of is the Internet itself.  Recent products come down to fads or stupid ways to do something slightly simpler or faster than before, but nothing that has really changed the world.  There is always a bottom line, so perhaps that has something to do with it; a quick way to make a buck and move on.

My First Year at WWDC - A Recap

Once every summer, Moscone West in San Francisco becomes the Apple Mecca for a week as people from all over the world attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). For WWDC 2012, I managed to obtain one of the only 5000 available tickets; this is an unthinkable feat once you realize the event sold out in only two hours. Suddenly it was time to depart to SFO, and for a week I was in tech heaven. As Silicon Valley becomes more and more cramped, the overflow of tech companies and startups like Atlassian, Square, and Google began pouring into the city. The result is San Francisco has become young and techy; driving down the highway I saw billboards that proclaimed “Your CMS is in the cloud, why not your phones?” something that maybe 5% of Americans actually understand.

The Future of Form Factor

Form factor nowadays seems to be going wild.  Ever since the mobile revolution started, manufacturers have been trying out every form factor and seeing what sticks with consumers.  A few interesting results of this are attempts to combine devices, like turning a tablet into a netbook or a phone docking into a laptop.  One of the things about the future of mobility is that it is highly unpredictable.

To add an example of this, a very unknown fact about Apple is that they actually started working on the iPad years before the iPhone.  It suddenly hit Steve one day that the application of a mobile OS X was perfect for a phone, so he ordered the iPad project shelved and made iPhone the top priority.  Nowadays, the future of Apple products looks like they are moving away from the operating system and more into mobility.  Predictions say that OS X will begin functioning more and more like the iPad, and a lot of the features in OS X Lion and Mountain Lion are starting to show this foundation.

I want to take some time to lay out some ideas about the future of mobility and where I think it is heading.  Form factor plays a huge part in this as people become more and more disconnected from the desktop and live more and more in a cellular world.

Good Design + Fragility = ?

As an enterprise app developer on the Apple iOS platform, I am in a role where I have to be an evangelist of everything Apple.  In general, the mobility revolution is something I am very eager and enthusiastic about, but there is one thing that suddenly bothered me recently.

I would define a mobile device as technology or computing that is wireless, lightweight, and useful for  in-the-field scenarios.  Something that I never really considered before, was durability.