Tag Archives: google

Google’s official Android Studio is at version 1.0

December 9, 2014 onlyconnect 2 Comments

Google has released version 1.0 of Android Studio.

This Java/Android IDE has been in preview/beta since Google IO in May. It is based on the excellent JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA.

You can get Android Studio here. It is now the official Android IDE and developers using Eclipse are encouraged to migrate – like it or not.

One of the key features is a new build system based on Gradle. Another notable features is a visual layout designer; you can toggle between visual and text modes.

Presumably one reason for Google developing its own Android IDE is to integrate more tightly with its cloud services. There is a Google Cloud Module on offer in the IDE.

Android development has its hassles. I seem to spend far too much time in the Android SDK Manager downloading new versions of the SDK, which is frequently updated.

Another annoyance is that the Intel Emulator Accelerator (HAXM) is incompatible with Hyper-V, the official Windows hypervisor. You either have to uninstall Hyper-V, or put up with a slow emulator. I would prefer it if Google/Intel/JetBrains used the standard Windows component.

android, google, mobile, software development, Web

Android apps on Chrome: how it works and what it may become

September 25, 2014 onlyconnect

Google announced at its I/O conference in June 2014 that Android apps are coming to its Chrome OS. Earlier this month product managers Ken Mixter and Josh Woodward announced that the first four Android apps are available in the Chromebook app store: Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words and Vine.

I delayed posting about this until I found the time to investigate a little into how it works. I fired up an Acer C720 and installed Evernote from the Chrome web store (in addition to Evernote Web which was already installed).

When you install your first Android app, Chrome installs the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta) (ARC) automatically.

Incidentally, I found Evernote slightly odd on Chromebook since it is runs in a window although the app is designed to run full screen, as it would on a phone or tablet. This caught me out when I went to settings, which looks like a dialog, and closed it with the x at the top right of the window. Of course that closes the app entirely. If you want to navigate the app, you have to click the back arrow at top left of the window instead.

But what is the App Runtime for Chrome? This seems to be an implementation of the Android runtime for NaCl (Native Client), which lets you run compiled C and C++ code in the browser. If you browse the parts of ARC which are open source, you can see how it implements the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for arch-nacl: a virtual processor running as a browser extension.

Not all of ARC is open source. The docs say:

Getting Started with ARC Open Source on Linux

=============================================

A small set of shared objects can be built which are part of ARC currently.

A fully running system cannot currently be built.

It is early days, with just four apps available, ARC in beta, and developers asked to contact Google if they are interested in having their Android apps run on Chrome OS. However, an independent developer has already ported ARC to desktop Chrome:

ARChon runtime lets you run unlimited number of Android APKs created with chromeos-apk on Chrome OS and across any desktop platform that supports Chrome.

The desktop version is unstable, and apps that need Google Play services run into problems. Still, think of it as a proof of concept.

In particular, note that this is Android Runtime for Chrome, not Android Runtime for Chrome OS. Google is targeting the browser, not the operating system. This means that ARC can, if Google chooses, become an Android runtime for every operating system where Chrome runs – with the exception, I imagine, of Chrome for iOS, which is really a wrapper for Apple’s web browser engine and cannot support NaCl, and Chrome for Android which does not need it.

Imagine that Google gets ARC running well on Windows and Mac. What are the implications?

The answer is that Android will become a cross-platform runtime, alongside others such as Flash (the engine in Adobe AIR) and Java. There has to be some performance penalty for apps written in Java for Android running in an Android VM in the browser; but NaCl runs native code and I would expect performance to be good enough.

This would make Android an even more attractive target for developers, since apps will run on desktop computers as well as on Android itself.

Might this get to the point where developers drop dedicated Windows or Mac versions of their apps, arguing that users can just run the Android version? An ARC app will be compromised not only in performance, but also in the way it integrates with the OS, so you would not expect this to happen with major apps. However, it could happen with some apps, since it greatly simplifies development.

android, apple, cloud computing, development, iphone, microsoft

Microsoft repositions for a post-Windows client world

July 10, 2014 onlyconnect 3 Comments

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has penned a rather long public letter which sets out his ambitions for the company. It is not full of surprises for those who have been paying attention, but confirms what we are already seeing in projects such as Office for iPad: Microsoft is positioning itself for a world in which the Windows client does not dominate.

The statement that stands out most to me is this one (the highlighting is mine):

Apps will be designed as dual use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life and with the respect for each person’s privacy choices. All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways. They will be built for other ecosystems so as people move from device to device, so will their content and the richness of their services

Microsoft is saying that it will build work/personal data partitioning into its applications, particularly one would imagine Office, and that it will write them for ecosystems other than its own, particularly one would imagine iOS and Android.

This is a big change from the Windows company, and one that I will expect to see reflected in the tools it offers to developers. If Microsoft is not trying to acquire Xamarin, you would wonder why not. It has to make Visual Studio a premier tool for writing cross-platform mobile applications. It also has to address the problem that an increasingly large proportion of developers now use Macs (I do not know the figures, but observe at some developer conferences that Windows machines are a rarity), perhaps via improved online developer tools or new tools that themselves run cross-platform.

Nadella is careful to avoid giving the impression that Microsoft is abandoning its first-party device efforts, making specific mention of Windows Phone, Surface, Cortana and Xbox, for example.

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life. Surface Pro 3 is a great example – it is the world’s best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we’ll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.

Here is another statement that caught my eye:

We will increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes.

The company has become increasingly bureaucratic over the years, and that is holding back its ability to be agile (though some teams seem to move at high speed regardless; I would instance the Azure team as an example).

Nadella’s letter has too many flowery passages of uncertain meaning – “We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences.” – but I do not doubt that major change is under way.

google, microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Google I/O 2014: impressive momentum, no wow moments

June 26, 2014 onlyconnect 4 Comments

I am not in San Francisco but attended Google I/O Extended in London yesterday, to hear the keynote and a couple of sessions from Google’s annual developer conference.

I found the demographics different than most IT events I attend: a younger crowd, and plenty of start-ups and very small businesses, not at all enterprisey (is that a word?)

The main announcements:

A new version of Android, known as Android L (I don’t know if this will expand eventually to Lollipop or Liquorice or some such). Big release with over 5,000 new APIs, we were told (when does Android start being called bloated, I wonder?). Themes include a new visual style called Material Design (which extends also to the Web and to Chrome), and suitability for more device types including Android TV, Android Wear (smart watches) and Android Auto. A new hardware accelerated graphics API called Android Extension Pack which implements OpenGL ES for better game performance, with support from NVIDIA Tegra. Android graphics performance will be good enough for a considerable subset of the gaming community and we saw Unreal Engine demoed.

Android L does not use Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Java code. In its place is ART (Android Runtime). This is 64-bit, so while Java code will run fine, native code will need updating.

Google is working hard to keep Android under its control, putting more features into its Play Services, the closed part of Android available only from Google and which is updated every 6 weeks, bypassing the operator obstacle to OS updates. There is also a new reference design including both hardware and software which is designed for affordable smartphones in the developing world: third parties can take this and build a decent Android mobile which should sell for under $100 as I understood it. I imagine this is designed to ward off fractured Android efforts like Microsoft’s Nokia X, aimed at the same kind of market but without Play Services.

There are new Android smart watches on the way, and we saw the inevitable demonstration of a user using voice control to the watch for ordering taxis or pizzas, getting notifications, and sending simple messages.

Voice control demos always seem to be nervous moments for presenters – will they be understood? Unfortunately that uncertainty remains for real users too, as evidenced by Xbox One Kinect which is amazing in that it often works, but fails often enough to be irritating. Voice recognition is a hard problem, not only in respect of correctly translating the command, but also in correctly detecting what is a command (if the person standing next to me shouts “Taxi please” I do not want my watch to order one for me).

The smart watch problem also parallels the TV problem. The appeal of the watch is that it is a simple glanceable device for telling the time. The appeal of the TV is that it is a simple sit-back screen where you only have to select a channel. Putting more smarts into these devices seems to make sense, but at the same time damages that core feature, unless done with extreme care.

Android TV puts the OS into your television, though Google’s messaging here is somewhat confusing in that, on the one hand, Chromecast (also known as Googlecast) means that you can use your Google device (Android or Chromebook) as the computer and the TV as the display and audio system, while on the other hand you can use Android on the TV itself as an all-in-one.

We are inching towards unified home entertainment, but with Google, Microsoft (Xbox One), Sony (PlayStation) and Apple all jostling for position it is too early to call a winner.

Material Design – Metro for Android?

We heard a lot about Material Design, which is Google’s new design style. Google borrowed plenty of buzzwords form Microsoft’s “Metro” playbook, and I heard expressions like “fast and fluid”, clean typography, signposting, and content-first. Like Metro, it also seems to have a blocky theme (we will know when the next design wave kicks in as it will have rounded corners).

Material Design is not just for Android. You can also implement the concept in Polymer, which is a web presentation framework built on Web Components, a standard in draft at the W3C. Support for Web Components (and therefore Polymer) is already in Chrome, advancing rapidly in Mozilla Firefox, probably coming in Apple Safari, and maybe coming in Microsoft IE. However, a JavaScript library called Polyfill means that Polymer will run to some extent in any modern browser.

Whenever IE was mentioned by a presenter at Google I/O there was an awkward/knowing laugh from the audience. Think about what that means.

One of the ideas here is that with a common design concept across Android and web, developers can make web apps (and therefore Chrome apps) look and behave more like Android apps (or vice versa). Again, there is a similar concept at Microsoft, where the WinJS library lets you implement a Metro look and feel in a web app.

Microsoft may have been ahead of Google in this, but it has done the company little good in that adoption for Metro has been weak, for well-rehearsed reasons connected with the smartphone wars, legacy Windows desktop and so on. Google has less legacy weighing it down.

How good is Material Design though? Apple’s Steve Jobs once said of a new OS X design update that it was so good you want to lick it. Metro lacks that kind of appeal, and judging from yesterday’s brief samples, so does Material Design, whatever its other merits in terms of clarity and usability. It is early days though.

Business features: Samsung Knox, Office support, unlimited storage

Google announced a couple of features aimed at business users. One is that Samsung Knox, app sandboxing and data security for business users, has been donated to Google for integration into Android. Another is that Google Docs will get the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in their native format, removing an annoyance for users who previously had to convert documents to and from Google’s own format when exchanging them with Microsoft Office users.

This seems to be an admission that Microsoft Office is the business standard for documents, and you can take it either way – good for Google because compatibility is better, or good for Microsoft because it cements Office as the standard. There will be ifs and buts of course.

Google is also offering unlimited online storage for business users, called Drive for Work, at $10 per user per month, upping the ante for everyone in the online storage game – Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and so on.

Google’s Cloud Platform

Google showed new features in its cloud platform, with a focus on big data analytics using an approach called Cloud Dataflow. “We don’t use MapReduce any more”, said the presenter, explaining that Cloud Dataflow enables all of us to use the same technology Google uses to analyse big data.

Greg DeMichille, a director of product management for the cloud platform, appeared on stage to show features for in-browser tracing and debugging of cloud applications. I recall DeMichille being much involved in Microsoft’s version of Java back in the days of the battle with Sun; he also had a spell at Adobe getting behind Flash and Flex for developers.

No Wow moments

The Google I/O 2014 keynote impressed in terms of numbers – Android growth continues unabated – and in terms of partners lining up behind initiatives like Android TV and Android Auto. The momentum seems unstoppable and the mass market for mobile and embedded devices is Google’s to lose.

On the other hand, I did not notice any game-changing moments such as I experienced when first seeing the Chromebook, or the Google Now personalisation service. Both of those still exist, of course, but if Android will really change our lives for the better, Google could have done a better job of conveying that message.

google, microsoft, windows

Google, Bing: time to junk these parasitic download sites

May 21, 2014 onlyconnect 4 Comments

“Users of today’s PCs live on a precipice. One false click and the adware and malware invades,” I remarked in a recent comment on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 launch.

The remark was prompted by a recent call from a friend. His PC was playing up. He was getting all sort of security warnings and being prompted to download more and more apps supposedly to fix problems. It all started, he said, when he went to Google to install iTunes.

After the clean-up, I wondered what had happened. I went to Google and typed in iTunes.

The top hit is Apple, which perhaps to prevent this kind of problem has actually paid for an ad on its own brand name. However my friend, understandably, went for the link that said iTunes Free Download (actually I am not sure if this was the exact link he clicked, but it was one like it).

Note how the ads are distinguished from the organic hits only by a small yellow indicator.

Microsoft’s Bing, incidentally, is even worse; I presume because Apple has not paid for an ad:

Using a secure virtual machine, I investigated what happens if you click one of these links (I advise you NOT to try this on your normal PC). I clicked the Google one, which took me to SOFTNOW.

I hit the big Download button.

It is downloading a setup from drive-files-b.com which claims to be iTunes, but it is not, as we will see.

The file passes Microsoft’s security scan and runs. The setup is signed by Perion Network Ltd.

Now here comes iTunes – or does it?

I clicked to see the Terms of Service. These are from Perion, not Apple, and explain that I am going to get an alternative search service for my browser plus other utilities, on an opt-out basis.

However I doubt my friend clicked to see these. Probably he hit Next.

Apparently I have “elected to download Search Protect”. There are more terms to agree. The Skip and Skip All buttons are in grey; in fact, the Skip button looks disabled though perhaps it is not.

Now here comes a thing called Wajam which is going to recommend stuff to me.

And another horror called WebSteroids with more terms of use:

I am going to get “display ads (banner ads), text ads, in-text ads, interstitial ads, pop up ads, pop under ads, or other types of ads. Users may see additional ads when using their internet browser or other software”.

Thanks.

Now “iTunes” seems to be downloading.

Once it downloads, I get an Install Now button. Apparently all those Next buttons I clicked did not install iTunes after all.

This last button, of course, downloads the real setup from Apple and runs it. Unfortunately it is the wrong version.

Who is to blame for all this? Well, the warning signs may be obvious to those of us in the trade, but frankly it is not that unreasonable to go to your trusted search engine, type in iTunes, and click the download link.

The blame is with Google (and Bing) for taking money from these advertisers whose aim is to get to you download their intrusive ad-laden extras.

Apple iTunes is free software and you can get it from Apple here.

Note that Google is experimenting with removing the address bar altogether, so you can only navigate the web by searching Google (which is what people do anyway). This would make users even more dependent on the search providers to do the right thing, which as you can see from the above, is not something you can count on.

amazon, cloud computing

Amazon AWS and the continuing trend towards cloud services. Desktops next?

March 19, 2014 onlyconnect 1 Comment

It was a lightbulb moment. The problem: how to migrate a document store from one Office 365 (hosted SharePoint) instance to another. Copy it all out and copy it back in, obviously, but that is painful over ADSL (which is all I had at my disposal) since the “asynchronous” part of ADSL means slow uploads; and download from Office 365 was not that fast either.

Solution: use an Azure virtual machine. VM hosted by Microsoft, SharePoint hosted by Microsoft, result – a fast connection between the two. I ran up the VM in a few minutes using Microsoft’s nice Azure portal, used Remote Desktop to connect, and copied the documents out and back in no time.

There is a general point here. If you are contemplating cloud-hosted VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), there is huge advantage in having the server applications and data close to the VDI instances. All you then need is a connection good enough to work on that remote desktop, which is relatively lightweight. If the cloud vendor is doing its job, the internal connections in that cloud should be fast. In addition, from the client’s perspective, most of the data is download, transferring the screen image to the client, rather than upload, transmitting mouse and keyboard interactions, so that is a good use case for ADSL.

The further implication is that the more you use cloud services, the more attractive hosted desktops become. Desktops are expensive to manage, which is why I would expect a service like Amazon Workspaces, hosted Windows desktops as a service, to find a ready market – even at $600 per year for a desktop with Office Professional 2010 preinstalled, or $420 per year if you install and license Office yourself, or use Open Office or some other alternative.

Workspaces are currently in limited preview, which means a closed beta, but there are hints that a public beta is coming soon.

Adopting this kind of setup means a massive dependency on Amazon of course, which is a concern if you worry about that kind of thing (and I think you should); but how much business is now dependent on one of the major cloud providers (I tend to think of Amazon, Microsoft and Google as the top three) already?

Thinking back to my Office 365 example, it also seems to me that Microsoft will make a serious play for cloud VDI in the not too distant future, since it makes so much sense. The problem for Microsoft is further cannibalisation of its on-premise business, and further disruption for Microsoft partners, but if the alternative is giving away business to Amazon, it has little choice.

I was at an Amazon Web Services briefing today and asked whether we might see an Office 365-like package from AWS in future. Unlikely, I was told; but many customers do use AWS for hosting the likes of Exchange and SharePoint.

The really clever thing for Amazon would be a package that looked like Office 365, but using either open source or internally developed applications that removed the need to pay license fees to Microsoft.

What else is new from AWS? I have no exclusives to share, since Amazon has a policy of never pre-announcing new features or services. There were a few statistics, one of which is that Redshift, hosted data warehousing, is Amazon’s fastest-growing product.

Amazon also talked about Kinesis, which lets you analyse streams of data in a 24-hour window. For example, if you wanted to analyse the output from thousands of sensors (say,weather) but do not need to store the data, you can use Kinesis. If you do want to store the data, you can integrate with Redshift or DynamoDb, two of Amazon’s database services.

The company also talked up its Relational Database Service (RDS), where you purchase a managed database service which can currently be MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon handles all the infrastructure management so you only need worry about your data and applications.

RSD pricing ranges start from $25 a month for MySQL, to $514 a month for SQL Server Standard (which is actually more expensive than Oracle at $223 per month for the same instance size). Higher capacity instances cost more of course. SQL Server Web edition comes down below Oracle at $194 per month, but I was surprised to see how high the SQL Server costs are. Note that these prices include all the CALs (Client Access Licenses). The prices are actually per hour, eg $0.715 for SQL Server Standard, so you could save money if your business can turn off or reduce the service out of working hours, for example.

How much premium does Amazon charge for its managed RDS versus what you would pay for equivalent capacity in a VM that you manage yourself? I asked this question but did not receive a meaningful reply; you need to do your own homework.

My reflection on this is that just as supermarkets make more money from pre-packaged ready meals than from basic groceries, so too the cloud providers can profit by bundling management and applications into their products rather than offering only basic infrastructure services. You still have the choice; but database admin costs money too.

Finally, we took a quick look at AppStream, which is a proprietary protocol, SDK and service for multimedia applications. You write applications such as games that render video on the server and stream it efficiently to the client, which could be a smartphone or low-power tablet. In this case again, you are taking a total dependency on Amazon to enable your application to run.

If you are interested in AWS, look out for a summit near you. There is one in London on 30th April. Or go to the Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in November.

My overall reflection is that the momentum behind AWS and its pace of innovation is impressive; yet it also seems to me that rivals like Microsoft and Google are becoming more effective. The cloud computing market is such that there is room for all to grow.

cloud computing, facebook, google, professional

Privacy and online data sharing is a journey into the unknown: report from QCon London

March 6, 2014 onlyconnect

I’m at QCon London, an annual developer conference which is among my favourites thanks to its vendor-neutral content.

One session which stood out for me was from Robin Wilton, Director for Identity and Privacy at the Internet Society, who spoke on “Understanding and managing your Digital Footprint”. I should report dissatisfaction, in that we only skated the surface of “understanding” and got nowhere close to “managing”. I will give him a pass though, for his eloquent refutation of the common assumption that privacy is unimportant if you are doing nothing wrong. If you have nothing to hide you are not a social being, countered Wilton, explaining that humans interact by choosing what to reveal about themselves. Loss of privacy leads to loss of other rights.

In what struck me as a bleak talk, Wilton described the bargain we make in using online services (our data in exchange for utility) and explained our difficulty in assessing the risks of what we share online and even offline (such as via cameras, loyalty cards and so on). Since the risks are remote in time and place, we cannot evaluate them. We have no control over what we share beyond “first disclosure”. The recipients of our data do not necessarily serve our interests, but rather their own. Paying for a service is no guarantee of data protection. We lack the means to separate work and personal data; you set up a LinkedIn account for business, but then your personal friends find it and ask to be contacts.

Lest we underestimate the amount of data held on us by entities such as Facebook and Google, Wilton reminded us of Max Schrems, who made a Subject Access Request to Facebook and received 1200 pages of data.

When it came to managing our digital footprint though, Wilton had little to offer beyond vague encouragement to increase awareness and take care out there.

Speaking to Wilton after the talk, I suggested an analogy with climate change or pollution, on the basis that we know we are not doing it right, but are incapable of correcting it and can only work towards mitigation of whatever known and unknown problems we are creating for ourselves.

Another issue is that our data is held by large commercial entities with strong lobbying teams and there is little chance of effective legislation to control them; instead we get futility like the EU cookie legislation.

There is another side to this, which Wilton did not bring out, concerning the benefit to us of sharing our data both on a micro level (we get Google Now) or aggregated (we may cure diseases). This is arguably the next revolution in personal computing; or put another way, maybe the bargain is to our advantage after all.

That said, I do not believe we have enough evidence to make this judgment and much depends on how trustworthy those big commercial entities prove to be in the long term.

Good to see this discussed at Qcon, despite a relatively small attendance at Wilton’s talk.

facebook

What’s up with Facebook acquiring “we don’t sell ads” WhatsApp

February 20, 2014 onlyconnect

Facebook has acquired WhatsApp for a breathtaking $16 billion. Too much money by any normal valuation; but that might not matter if it makes sense strategically.

What is the value of WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable.

says Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is purchasing an extension to its “social graph”, a billion people’s interconnections. The obvious goal is to accomplish two things:

Defend Facebook from disruption and keep users on its network – particularly the younger demographic that may be drifting away.
Gather more data which will be used for targeted advertising and potentially rich future services.

There are two companies which dominate the Internet today, and they are Facebook and Google. Their business model is mainly advertising, but they may be better perceived as data companies than as advertising companies. The big bet is that future technology will revolve around smart, deeply personalised services that will improve our lives, based on what they know about us, our friends and connections, our location, our preferences and and our schedule. The clearest expression of this is Google Now which can notify you when to leave for your meeting based on current traffic – without you having to spend time configuring settings or entering data. Google looks at your schedule (which it knows through your calendar), your location (which it knows through your smartphone), mashes that data with its mapping and traffic services, and surfaces the result as a notification.

The trade-off is that you hand over your data to Google (enabling it to provide ever-richer services) while receiving in return an easier life.

Does the deal have a dark side? Undoubtedly. Might future services be paid for, might Google or others take advantage of that data in ways we dislike? Quite possibly. This is the bet though; and it is everywhere.

Take the automotive industry for example. I wrote up the latest buzz in automotive marketing for the Guardian, and heard this from one of the experts I consulted:

“The actual car; the engine, the wheels, the drive shaft, the bodies, those have become commodities. The differentiator for cars is the in-dash system, the computer," says Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya. “If car companies can connect with their customers’ social login, they can build a permanent lasting relationship. If the car company tracks things about me like my driving habits and where I go, it is actually a value add insight. That is a reason to stay with that car company”

Salyer thinks that Facebook, Google and automobile companies are in a war to own that data. It is all about the data.

This therefore is what Facebook is buying: future data, in a messaging service that because of its mobile orientation may prove to be a kind of successor to email and SMS messaging.

That is the rationale, but will it work? The problem with WhatsApp is that it is fashionable; and what comes into fashion can go out, too, especially for the young. You can bet too that Google (Facebook’s biggest problem) will counter by using its OS platform, Android, to point users towards its own messaging services. If you have an Android phone you are already logging into Google, no need to sign up for another service.

Who knows, two to three years from now we may be joking about how much Facebook paid for WhatsApp. But Facebook can afford a few big gambles, and does not need for all of them to come off.

Postscript: you should read WhatsApp founder Jan Koum’s blog post on Why we don’t see ads while it is still online.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Money, as songwriter prophet Bob Dylan observed, does not talk. It swears.

cloud computing, google, microsoft

Microsoft Office 365 and the battle for simplicity

February 18, 2014 onlyconnect 6 Comments

Last week I reviewed a Google Chromebook. Next, I assisted a small business move from Office 365 to Office 365 – yes, Microsoft’s software as a service (SaaS) offering is divided into plans, such that if you want to move from certain plans to certain other plans you have to start again with a new account and copy your data across as best you can, which seems contrary to the smooth experience the cloud is meant to offer. The experience prompts some reflections.

Do not move between Office 365 plans then, you might argue; but this is not the only complication with Office 365. There are two reasons for its complexity:

1. Although it is SaaS, Office 365 uses a hybrid model in that users are expected to run desktop Office as well as having an Office 365 account. This is a strength in that Word, Outlook and especially Excel are mature and capable products which many users (myself included) find more productive than equivalent browser-based apps, though familiarity is a factor in this. It is also a weakness, since you have a traditional desktop installation working alongside cloud services. Further, if your PC is stolen, you cannot just pick up another PC, log in, and carry on where you left off. You need to install Office first.

Contrast this to the Chromebook, which adopts a pure cloud model. Technically, many browser apps do run locally, in that JavaScript, Flash applets or Google’s native client executes on your local machine just like Office. This is hidden from the user though, and any installations are tucked away in temporary internet files. If you sign into Chrome on another computer, your settings, bookmarks, history, passwords and browser extensions are synched automatically.

Microsoft has made great strides with its Office installer. Office 2013 installs in most cases using application virtualisation, based on Microsoft’s App-V technology, which means it runs in an isolated environment and is not prone to problems like dynamic library version conflicts or registry errors. The application streaming is also smart enough to let you run applications before they are fully downloaded, by downloading the essential features first and finishing off in the background. The speed with which you can get started with desktop Office, when downloaded as part of an Office 365 subscription, is impressive.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has not eliminated all the issues with desktop software. Outlook was tricky to migrate, for example, in the move with which I assisted. You have to go to the Mail applet in Control Panel, delete the Outlook profile, and create a new one. If you are not careful you can get a scenario where Outlook tries to start up, pauses for a while, and finally announces “Cannot open the Outlook window” and quits. Then you need a web search or a Windows expert to help you out. This kind of experience is less likely with a Chromebook or any pure cloud model where you simply log onto your cloud service.

The worst example of desktop complexity spoiling cloud simplicity is the SharePoint client confusingly called SkyDrive Pro. It is meant to synch SharePoint documents with your local computer but does not work reliably, and trying to fix it involves fiddly instructions to clear your cache, and subsequent re-download of lots of data (I recommend that you do not use SkyDrive Pro).

2. Office 365 is based on applications which were originally built to be managed by system administrators. The core of it is Exchange and SharePoint, both of which come with a myriad of dependencies and configuration options. In their Office 365 guise, these complications are somewhat hidden, and Microsoft has wrapped them with a decent web user interface, both for end users and Office 365 administrators. Nevertheless, the complexity remains, and there is not much in on-premise Exchange that is not also available in Office 365, particularly if you are willing to log on with PowerShell.

This is not a bad thing as such. For businesses with sophisticated Exchange setups it is a good thing, since the features they need are available in Office 365, and the tools with which to configure it are familiar.

However, it does mean that administering Office 365 is more demanding than perhaps it would have been if designed from the ground up as a cloud application. There are also odd limitations and overlapping features. Let’s say you want to have contacts shared between multiple users. Do you use a SharePoint list, or an Exchange public folder? If you use a public folder, why is it that a top-level public folder can only contain mail items whereas a sub-folder can contain contacts, tasks or calendar items? And if you use an Exchange public folder, don’t forget to go into Outlook and add it to public folder favorites, which enables magic like offline access, and to check the option to “Show as an Outlook address book” so you can select email addresses from it when sending an email – all knowledge which comes from experience of Exchange and Outlook, and which is not intuitive or obvious.

The battle of simplicity versus productivity and features

Considering how Office 365 was created, and Microsoft’s desktop heritage, the progress Microsoft has made in wrestling it into a comprehensive and relatively low-maintenance cloud platform is impressive; but more needs to be done before it comes close to Google’s offering in terms of ease of use and freedom from the hassles of maintaining PCs. Microsoft’s battle is to achieve Google-like simplicity of use but without losing the productivity and features which users value.

The question on Google’s side is how quickly it can offer enough of the features for which users and administrators value Microsoft’s platform to tempt more businesses to make the transition. That means the ability to work on documents and spreadsheets in Google’s browser apps without missing Word and Excel, as well as archiving, compliance and management features to match Exchange.

Many are already happy to work in Google apps, of course. I would be interested to hear from others what keeps them on Microsoft’s platform, or alternatively, why they have found Google (or another cloud provider) a satisfactory alternative.

laptops, mobile, reviews

Review: Acer C720 Chromebook and reflections on Chrome OS

February 12, 2014 Tim Anderson

When I saw the first announcement of Chrome OS I was amazed and wrote a breathless post:

I’m watching Google’s press briefing on the forthcoming Chrome OS. It is amazing. What Google is developing is a computer that answers several of the problems that have troubled users since the advent of the personal computer.

That was in November 2009. Unfortunately it has taken me a while to try a Chromebook (the generic name for a computer running Chrome OS) for myself; but I have been trying out an Acer C720 and what follows is in part a review of this machine, and in part some wider reflections on the Chrome OS and Chromebook concept.

In terms of hardware, a Chromebook is another take on the netbook idea: a small, light laptop but running Linux rather than Windows. The earliest netbooks also ran Linux but the mass market could not cope with it; Google has done what is necessary to make it work for non-technical people, not least by hiding almost all of the operating system other than the browser.

I have given detailed specifications at the end of this post, but in summary this is an 11.6″ traditional clamshell laptop/netbook with 1.4Ghz Intel Haswell processor, 2GB RAM and 16GB SSD. It weighs just 1.2Kg

It’s cheap. You can pick one up for just under £200 at Amazon; it’s smart looking and does not feel as cheap as it is.

At left we have power input, HDMI out, USB 3.0 port and a standard headset socket.

On the right there is an SD card slot, USB 2.0, and a lock attachment point.

You can get a touchscreen version for an additional £80 or so but it does not seem worth it to me.

When you turn on for the first time, you have to accept the Google agreement. You won’t read it all, but here is something you should note:

You acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you…

You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details, or any files or other content which is contained in your account.

Chromebook pros and cons

A Google Chromebook has several big advantages.

One, it’s safe; not entirely safe perhaps, but relatively immune from malware given that most users never get deeper into the operating system than the web browser, and therefore neither does anything else – though the machine is in fact hackable (in a good way) if you switch to Developer mode, and you can do things like getting shell access or installing Ubuntu if you want.

Second, it is good value. You are not paying for Windows or Office, and whatever deal Google makes with OEMs like Acer must be generous enough to allow for low prices.

It would actually make sense for Google to subsidise Chromebooks if it needed to, since they drive users to its services.

Third, a Chromebook is cloud-centric. If you lose it, or upgrade to a new machine, all your data will be there on Google’s cloud and you will hardly notice, with seamless sync of settings when you log in.

Fourth, Google and its hardware partners (in this case Acer) have done a good job. Sleep and resume works reliably – more so than any Windows machine I have known – and boot from cold takes seconds. Performance is fine, provided you have a strong internet connection.

There is no unwanted third-party software here unless you count Google’s own services; but if you did not want them you probably should not have bought a Chromebook. The out of box experience is good.

What are the annoyances? Here are a few.

The user interface is effective and not difficult to learn, though I do find that the screen fills with multiple tabs which is ugly and not that easy to navigate. You can float a browser window by dragging it down, in which case you get something that behaves as a new instance, and you can switch between instances with alt-tab.

Printing is awkward in that you have to set up Google Cloud Print and send your documents to Google and back even if the printer is right next to you.

Working offline is a problem but maybe not as bad as you have heard. The app store has a section devoted to apps that work offline, and you can create and edit documents offline other than spreadsheets, which are read-only. There is no problem with playing some videos or music from the built-in storage or from a USB drive when on the move and offline. If you are going to be offline a lot though, this is probably not the best choice.

Is this machine locked to Google? Maybe not as much as you would expect. There is no alternative web browser, but you can set your search engine to Bing, DuckDuckGo or anotehr if you prefer. Or you can enable developer mode and you install Linux, either in place of, or alongside Chrome OS. The two obvious choices are ChrUbuntu and Crouton, and setup is nicely explained here

http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/498

Does this machine breach your privacy? That is tough to answer; but it is worth noting that Chromebook offers, as far as I can tell, the same privacy settings that are in the Chrome browser. If you are happy using the Chrome browser in Windows or elsewhere, there is no reason not to be happy with a Chromebook from this perspective.

That said, this machine is committed to, on the one hand, cloud and web apps, and alongside that, the Google life. The two main objections to the Google life, it seems to me, are that Google’s business model depends on advertising and mining personal data for that purpose; and that it has been known for individuals to get locked out of their Google accounts for what might be arbitrary reasons whereupon comeback is difficult. It may be though that I worry too much, since this is uncommon, and trusting everything to Google is probably not high on the list of the most stupid things to do in IT.

Summing up

This is not a machine for every task. It is not a powerhouse, and in case you had not noticed, will not run apps other than browser apps. Either of those could be deal-breakers and might mean that you need a different device.

It is early days for laptops that run only browser apps, and there are areas of immaturity. Some file types are not supported or badly supported. The app store has limitations, and although there is a browser-based solution to most common tasks, it may not equal what can be done with a conventional app. The user interface is reasonable but utilitarian. Tastes vary, but personally I do not find Google Apps the equal of Microsoft Office yet, and I even miss Outlook, despite its many annoyances.

There are compromises then; but this is still a great little laptop, light and convenient, quick and responsive, and almost immune to PC-style problems and slowdowns.

In business or education, it is easy to see the attraction of a machine that is low maintenance and simple to replace if it breaks, provided that its capabilities match the tasks that are required.

The comparison with Windows RT is interesting and will be the subject of a separate post.

Watch this space. Chromebooks are already making inroads into the market for budget laptops, and in education, and I would expect this momentum to gather force as the platform matures.

Detailed specification:

Intel Celeron 2955U 1.4 GHz processor
2GB RAM
SD card slot
16GB SSD
11.6″ 1366 x 768 TFT screen
Intel GMA HD Graphics
Webcam and Microphone
3.5mm headset socket
HDMI out, 1USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0
Wireless: 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 +HS (High Speed)
3950 mAh battery, quoted 8.5 hr battery life
Weight: 1.25 Kg

Tim Anderson's IT Writing