The Apple iPad has an IPS screen, which apparently stands for Wide Viewing Angle. Take that away and the device becomes less interesting.

Here’s a scenario, based on many true stories:

The family is gathered in the kitchen talking about what movie they want to watch that evening. “What about Up“, suggests Stephanie. Her mother and father—as always—are out of touch and haven’t heard of it. Their daughter rolls her eyes, pulls out her iPod Touch and seconds later the trailer is ready to roll. She hands the iPod to her mother.

Father wants to watch too.

And he can. But to see properly, he has to get so close to his wife that they’re practically making love (in the kitchen; in front of their daughter; which is bad form). The iPhone and iPod Touch screens are not built to be viewed by more than one person at a time. They are too small to stand back from. And with more than one person it is impossible to look at head-on, so the image starts to distort.

I see similar scenarios all the time with people trying to share something on the screen of their mobile phones (and even laptops). Usually what happens is everyone takes turns looking. With a single photograph this isn’t terrible. With videos or several photographs, usually people tire of waiting their turn.

The iPad has a larger screen than a mobile phone of course, which means it can be put down and everyone can watch from further away. But this is a device designed for holding more than one for putting down and standing back from, and that means a wider viewing angle is crucial.

Here’s another scenario:

Grandma is visiting and wants to see some photographs of the grandchildren. Her daughter picks up the iPad from the coffee table (it’s always on standby and ready to go), taps to photographs and opens up an album. Even though she has technophobia and even has trouble operating her new television, Grandma knows how to swipe-gesture to the next picture.

Her granddaughter sits beside her answering “who’s that” type questions and can see because the viewing angle on this screen allows her to without being grandma-kiss-close. Meanwhile, Grandpa is sitting in the armchair opposite; busy resting his eyes.

Grandma starts laughing at something in one of the photographs and Grandpa stirs, coughs and grunts out a “Woz’that?”. Grandma flips over the photograph for him to see. The iPad is now upside down, but the photograph is not because Apple have thought to automatically flip it.

Would the iPad be better and more ‘social’ if it had a camera for Skype video calls? Yeah, sure. But most companies would have added that feature and forgot about getting the important details right. Maybe they put in a cheaper screen that looks great but can’t be viewed at an angle. Or perhaps they pick the expensive screen but then don’t think about flipping the photograph. The other company has added more features, but they are a little frustrating to use.

The iPad is the ultimate social device for a very different reason. Yes, it will handle the Facebook stuff and whatever other social network. But this will be social for people who are in the same physical location too. It will be passed back and forth, held up so others can see from across the room, even operated together.

Social without the internet? Yeah, Apple haven’t forgotten about real life. They’re not led by trying to build new innovative devices, with tonnes of features and taking advantage of the latest trends in social networks. They think how the masses could use it and then they obsess over making that experience great. They think through hundreds of scenarios and make sure their technology supports how people behave. Their goal is to make the technology disappear. Far too many tech companies want to make the technology as obvious as possible.

Like every other company, Apple has to make compromises. But they choose a different set of compromises to everyone else. The camera will come later because the camera makes sense to the masses. But it isn’t their priority. Other features won’t get added at all, because Apple have decided it doesn’t fit any experience that an ordinary person would desire.

This frustrates a lot of people. Some of those frustrated people go to Microsoft, Google, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Asus or wherever. Some, like me, live with it because we like stuff that works really well, hate technology that gets in your way and are willing to follow the Apple vision. And many people don’t have any idea what they want and just enjoy the advantages of the products.

This is what makes Apple a leader.

Yet so many of the vocal people on the Internet tried to predict what Apple would produce. Things that they want. Things that they want NOW! They shout ‘FAIL’ when Apple doesn’t do what they want. For some what they think they want.

These people dream like Microsoft. Or Nokia. Or Sony.

Well Apple doesn’t invent for the vocal minority geek brigade. They don’t feed off the buzz; they create it. They try to change the world by inventing for the masses.

If you want to judge the iPad, you have to judge it from the right angle. Not on its ports, or cameras, or command lines or features or lack of. With Apple people come first, not technology.

Sometimes they fail there too. They just succeed more than most because they try so hard.

I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great by Jim Collins and have just finished a great chapter on confronting the harsh realities that people love to sweep under the proverbial rug. This paragraph really struck me:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Acting with reality versus talking about dreams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The sprout of an idea occurred to be a couple of years ago while watching Bill Gates give his keynote at CES. He was doing his kitchen-of-the-future thing. Your kitchen worktop, he predicted, was going to be a touch screen monitor that showed you recipes. He followed this with his bedroom-of-the-future, where the walls were covered with monitors and you decorated your walls with the wallpaper of the operating system. Putting aside the nightmare of sleeping in a room surrounded by the Windows desktop, something else was bothering me: I knew this was never going to happen how he imagined it. And even if it did, it would be too many years away and pointless enough that it was not worth caring about.

The same month Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and introduced the iPhone. He said:

When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.

It struck me then why I had started to enjoy these Apple keynotes; every announcement came with a shipping date. They didn’t say anything until they’d built it. They weren’t talking about their plans; they were talking about what they had already done. They waited until they were forced to announce it to start talking.

Since then I’ve noticed this quality in others (though very much in the minority). I have grown to admire it. It’s far more interesting to hear what people have accomplished already, rather than what their goals are. Most people plan, dream and set goals, but how many of these actually get accomplished? I’d prefer someone to tell me they got up early this morning and ran a mile, than to hear them dream of running an ultra-marathon. Reality always trumps the dream.

But I had always thought that telling people your goals was a good thing. Tell a friend or publicly announce your goals and you will be held to account if you fail, right? Well I’ve tried this strategy and it has a fatal flaw: people don’t hold you to account. It is not embarrassing to give up; it just means you are like everyone else.

I started to try the opposite strategy: don’t announce what you are doing until you’ve achieved it. Planning to run that marathon? A week after training you can tell people you’ve been running every morning, but don’t mention the marathon you signed up for until you absolutely need to. This strategy, to my surprise, doesn’t just make you look like someone who gets stuff done rather than breaking promises, it is also motivating in itself. There is something far more motivating about telling people your accomplishments than your plans. It becomes something to look forward to. It’s frustrating to stay in stealth mode because you are excited about your plans, so you make sure you get stuff done so you can talk about it.

This strategy also stops you wasting time. I remember an evening many years ago when my dad couldn’t stop chatting away about a leaking tap in the bathroom. It sticks in my mind because he really didn’t have anything to say, but he kept on and on and I grew very bored. Actually fixing the tap took about five minutes. When you’re bored, you really notice how time consuming talking can be. Well that time stacks up whether you are being boring or not.

A year’s worth of gradual understanding recently got summed up by Mike Cane on Twitter:

A lesson I have learned the Hard Way: Those who talk about doing, NEVER DO. Those who STFU and show what they’ve DONE, win.

Shut the Fuck Up and DO IT.

STFU.

Yesterday this was running through my head while I was writing an email meant to motivate someone into getting some work done.

STFU, I thought.

And I did.

If my own motivation gets derailed by talking too much, maybe trying to motivate others by communicating a bold vision is actually destructive too. Maybe the way to motivate someone is not to express a compelling vision of what we can create. Maybe it’s just to start setting tasks and getting something done. To celebrate the achievement; not the vision. To let the motivation build itself.

Having goals, dreams and being visionary are all important. But I’m no longer convinced talking about them is a good idea. Not if you want your ideas to feed reality.

Of course no politician ever got elected by shutting up; so there’s already one case where STFU is bad advice. But then again, how much of what any given politician says actually gets done?

Well, I should probably STFU now.

What’s this? A blog post?

Yes. Yes, it is.

That’s the thing I like about my blog. It’s here when I want to write something and when I don’t, I keep it out of sight.

It wasn’t always this way. Not long ago I used to worry about posting on my blog. And I used to worry that I’d gone a week without plucking a guitar string. Or a whole month without putting lead to paper.

Then I thought, screw it.

I’m really only doing these things because I enjoy them. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if learn to play like Clapton, draw like da Vinci, speak German like a German.

Because I’m the kind of person who likes learning new things, and taking on challenges, I don’t really need to pressure myself into trying harder. I’m already trying too hard as it is.

I used to be the kind of guy who would have panic attacks when he visited the library. Too many books. How was I ever going to read them all?

I’m amazed how long it took me to figure out that I didn’t need to.

I’m even more amazed that people are still complaining about this same thing. It’s getting worse they say. Social networks, text messages, blogs, twitter, facebook. How does one keep up? Information overload has becoming a serious problem and it’s only going to get worse.

Or perhaps it’s all in their heads.

I’ve just looked it up. I have 197 subscriptions to various blogs. I probably get about 400 posts to read every day. But I have a secret. There’s this little button in Google Reader called ‘Mark all as read’. And what some people don’t know is you can press that button even if you haven’t actually read all of them! Seriously! I’ve been doing it for months now, and I’m totally getting away with it. Nobody checks.

And here’s the really amusing thing: If you step back from the noise for a while and gain some perspective, you’ll realise that the ones who try so hard to keep up are the ones who keep up, but the ones who don’t try to keep up are the ones everyone else is trying to keep up with.

These days I mostly read my news via the internet. It’s becoming a totally different experience to consume the news in this way rather than through traditional means. Today I scanned through the Daily Mail to find just one report on Burma, buried deep within the paper. It had a full page, but it was hardly front page news. On the Internet, however, I have about 20 articles coming through every day. It’s a completely different weighting.

On the other hand, these reports tend to swamp news of other issues.

The reason is that I am have more control. I can choose to follow one issue in particular and follow other stories less so. It is becoming more customisable.

One part of that is my recent adoption of Google News. I googled ‘Burma’ a few days back to try and get some back story and Google News was the top result. I clicked on it, and found a stream of news stories covering the issue. Most importantly I could subscribe to the RSS feed, directing this stream into my feed reader.

Now, everyday, I’m receiving news reports from a wide variety of publishers each with their slightly different take on the subject.

Currently it is a little overwhelming, since there are so many reports. And it tends to drown out other reports. But it is a great way to get up to speed on an issue and stay committed to following it.

I’ve just signed up to the Darfur feed too.

Is it better to put pressure on a corrupt ruler through sanctions, or to continue doing business for the good of the common people?

Not only is China receiving pressure to impose sanctions on Burma, but individual companies dealing with Burma are also being put under pressure. The Independent reports:

Paris, and the company, argue that Total’s presence is, on the whole, a force for good. Withdrawal would allow carte blanche for Chinese or other companies which would be “less respectful of ethical issues”.

“Our departure would threaten a worsening of the situation for the (Burmese) population,” Total said ina communiqué.

But if this is true, why are they also urging a freeze on new investments in the area? From the same article:

President Nicolas Sarkozy has also drawn criticism this week for urging French companies to “freeze” new investments in Burma. No other French company operates in the country. Total, as the President presumably knew, has not made new investments in Burma for years.

A French diplomat told the newspaper Liberation off the record yesterday: “Annoucing a freeze of what is already frozen is hardly revolutionary. It allows (the president) to surf on the notion of a French ‘new deal’ for human rights, while protecting French economic interests.”

The Australian government is coming under similar criticism:

Greens senator Kerry Nettle said Prime Minister John Howard has rejected trade sanctions against the south-east Asian country because Australia did not “have a lot of trade with Burma”.

“We now find that there is a Liberal Party-linked company that is doing business with the Burmese military regime in oil and gas exploration,” Mr Nettle said.

[...]

Senator Nettle called on Prime Minister John Howard to ask his “Liberal Party friends” to discontinue their investment in Burma until human rights conditions in the country improved.

“For Alexander Downer to say China isn’t taking action (against Burma) because of their trade relationship with Burma, at the same time as his Liberal Party family are making money out of their relationship with the Burmese military dictatorship, is great hypocrisy,” she said.

The arguments for investment in the country are not without merit. However, it is difficult to take them seriously when actions point more towards economic interests back home than the good of the Burmese people.

Politicians have a habit of ruining good arguments with too much spin. The latest report on Bush’s campaign for the Iraq war is a particularly worrying example. Even minor offences of this should be brought to account and challenged.

Straight talking and honest politicians? Almost makes the bid for world peace seem trivial.

World Changing has an article titled ‘How Mobiles and Blogs Don’t — and Do — Help Human Rights‘. The author, Emily Gertz, writes:

In the world of online activism, expectations have not inflated to the level of a few years ago, when a wave of techno-utopian optimism swept the activist ‘net that maybe a “technical intervention,” that is blogging, could stop the mass killings in Darfur — an effort which, on those terms, failed.

I think the mistake here is to believe that one story will suddenly change the world — and if it doesn’t it means failure. Change happens slowly, but each story raises awareness and gets people talking and thinking about it. One particular trait of the Internet over traditional media, is that it is active; and becoming much more so. It’s easy to move from story to story on TV news; with the sport or weather sticking as the last thing in your head. But the way we engage with the Internet (comments, Facebook groups, our own blogs, and even hyperlinks) encourages more of us to actively engage with it.

Meanwhile, globalisation is becoming ever more important; meaning every country that depends on it must think about the economic consequences before doing so.

It is difficult to make solid predictions based on Darfur or other historical events, because so much is different. Although it is a good reminder that we can sometimes get a bit carried away with our optimism.

Heading back into their archives, I also discovered this excellent interview with Ethan Zuckerman from mid-2004, discussing technology and the developing world. A few quotations:

In Ghana in 2000 we had a pretty critical presidential election. The leader who’d taken power in 1979 was stepping down. For the first time an opposition had a chance to stand and there was widespread fear — for good reasons — that there would be election fraud and intimidation.

The coping strategy that everyone came up with was fascinating. It basically involved cellphones and talk radio. What happened is guys would go out to polling places with their cellphones, they’d see someone obstructing access to the polls, and then they’d call a talk radio station and describe what was going on. That put enough pressure on the police that they had to show up and investigate. It proved remarkably effective.

and

It’s pretty hard to expect technology to turn non-democracies into democracies. Where I think technology can make a huge difference is where you have a young and fragile democracy. In those cases, I think what helps is finding ways to empower individuals.

and

It’s corruption when you’re a shopkeeper trying to get your shipment of widgets in and the guy won’t let them through unless you pay him a thousand dollars under the table. But it’s not corruption when you’re a farmer and you’re trying to buy a piece of land and literally no one knows who owns it. That’s just incompetence and bureaucracy and the challenges of dealing with legacy systems. In many developing nations, those challenges are at least as substantial as the problems of corruption.

Well worth a read.

I keep coming across interesting reports. Further to news that the junta military have cut off Internet access, it seems that they are taking much more of a proactive response to technology and the press.

From The Age:

Meanwhile, Government pressure and unresthas forced several of Burma’s private newspapers to stop publishing, an industry leader said today.

“Some publications may have been forced to close down because they refused to carry the government’s propaganda,” he said on condition of anonymity.

Censors in Burma, also known as Myanmar, always exert tight controls over the media to limit their reporting, but pressure has become unusually high.

People found with mobile phones or cameras were beaten by soldiers yesterday, witnesses said, while a Japanese photojournalist died after being shot.

The newspapers were also struggling to operate because unrest in the streets over the last two days made it impossible for vendors to sell papers, the source added.

“Their people can’t get out there selling them because of the problems,” he said.

Four weekly newspapers printed by the Eleven Media group, two weeklies by Yangon Media, and three weeklies titled Kamudra, Voice and Market have all stopped publishing, he said.

Another newspaper group, Pyi Myanmar, was planing to completely shut down, he added.

The Myanmar Times newspaper indicated it would continue publishing.

Somewhat of a tug-on-your-heartstrings production, but a rather nice first introduction to the crisis and to Auug San Suu Kyi. And a reminder for all those who already recognise her name. It may not seem like it will do much, but it is important for us all to learn her name. It will help us talk about it.

This is not just about Burma. If we can have some success here, it will be a story we can use to peacefully fight human violations around the world. But right now we are learning. Let’s see if we can make this the story we contrast with Iraq.

From Ko Htike’s blog:

Dear All,

I sadly announce that the Burmese military junta has cut off the internet connection throughout the country. I therefore would not be able to feed in pictures of the brutality by the brutal Burmese military junta.

I will also try my best to feed in their demonic appetite of fear and paranoia by posting any pictures that I receive though other means (Journos!! please don’t ask me what other means would be??). I will continue to live with the motto that “if there is a will there is a way”.

We probably need to lobby the Chinese government or UN envoy to Burma to ask the junta to switch on the Internet. Please!

This was inevitable, unfortunately. It will be interesting to see how much news can still get out. People can still record and document, and I’m sure it will get communicated eventually. But how quickly? And how much will it matter overall?

Let’s face it; every child knows more swearwords than Gordon Ramsey. What they’re less good at is using language in sophisticated and appropriate ways. So encourage them to read the elocutionary delight that is Stephen Fry’s new blog. He swears occasionally, but you feel his appreciation of the English language in every letter.

Grow children up on proper swearing like this and you might help replace “[grunt, grunt] Fck ya u cnt [grunt]” as the default rhetoric.