Top Bananas | "Thinking About Apple (and the Impact of Technology)."

The Importance of the Swift Programming Language

Posted on March 13, 2015 by admin Posted in Programming Leave a comment

What it is: Swift is a modern programming language designed to be easier to learn, write, and understand while offering the latest features of programming design. Swift is Apple’s programming language of OS X and iOS for the future.

Almost every time Apple introduces an innovative new product, hordes of critics claim that Apple didn’t innovate anything. Then those same critics rush to support products that closely mimic Apple’s innovation that completely changes the market. To those who lack imagination, innovation only becomes obvious after everyone else has already accepted it.

When Sylvan Goldman invented the shopping cart on June 4, 1937, nobody would use them. Men thought that shopping carts looked too effeminate while women thought it looked too much like a baby carriage. “I’ve pushed my last baby buggy,” an offended woman informed Goldman. Only after Sylvan hired greeters to show shoppers the advantage of the shopping cart did the public finally accept them. When confronted by innovation, most people don’t understand it and often fear and hate it.

Alexander Bain invented the fax machine in 1843. Look how long it took before that innovation finally caught on over one hundred years later. The next time you hear someone criticizing something as either useless or not innovative, take a second look. Far too many people see the world only by comparing it with what they already know. Anything outside their limited sphere of knowledge simply gets dismissed, tossed aside, or attacked as useless.

Although everyone expects Apple to release innovative products every few months (while failing to apply that same standard to any other company), they often fail to recognize those innovations when they do appear simply because they were expecting something completely different.

At Apple’s latest developer’s conference, Apple introduced a new programming language called Swift. While the idea of a new programming language might not sound innovative, it can be surprisingly innovative in ways that you may not think.

First, Swift is meant to overcome the problems and flaws of Objective-C. If you ever tried writing a program in Objective-C, it often winds up looking like a series of cryptic and redundant symbols. Yet Objective-C was meant to overcome the problems and limitations of C++, which was meant to overcome the problems and limitations of C.

C itself was meant to overcome the deficiencies of assembly language, which was meant to overcome the problems of machine language. Every programming language evolves but eventually adding so many new features makes the language complex and cumbersome, making it easy to make mistakes. That’s why even Microsoft decided to overcome the flaws of Java and create C#.

Besides making programming easier, Swift introduces two innovative features to make programming more reliable and versatile. First, Swift is one of the few programming languages that allow constants and variable names to use Unicode symbols, which includes the Roman alphabet but also mathematical symbols and foreign language characters.

Currently most programming languages rely on the Roman alphabet, which means Arabic, Chinese, and Russian programmers need to write programs using mostly English. Imagine the reverse situation if American programmers had to use Arabic, Chinese, or Russian characters to write a program. Guess how many Americans would want to do that? Now you can imagine how many people in other parts of the country don’t learn programming because they’d rather write programs in their native language.

To show you how two different groups of people respond to innovation such as the ability for Swift to use non-Roman alphabet characters, first you can read this comment from someone who fails to see any type of innovation in letting programmers use their native language to write programs:

“Stupid and useless, except for teaching programming to…uh…kids. Professional and experienced programmers know Roman characters and if you haven’t noticed yet, they have been using them to program everything till today, iCrap invention.”

Now look at the other extreme at someone who can recognize innovation and can see how it can be useful in ways that current technology can’t offer:

“For the domain I care about, math/physics, it means the ability to use variables names that are greek (and perhaps to be even more ambitious, we shall see—maybe a variable named ∫α rather than integralOfAlpha?)

Another domain where I could imagine this to be useful is code that is either targeting a foreign language, or targeting somehow translations between two languages. I’m sure if you’re Chinese, for example, you’d prefer to have your variable names in Chinese.”

By reading both comments, you can see how one person recognizes innovation and how it can be used in ways that current programming languages can’t offer. Yet another person sees the same ability to use non-Roman alphabet characters as “stupid and useless” and to support his argument, claims that Roman characters have been used to program everything till today. Therefore there must be no point in offering features that can make programming accessible to more people who speak other languages.

Apple is specifically wooing developers in other countries to create iOS apps for specific regions such as China. By making programming more accessible to people who use non-Roman alphabets, it’s easy to see how Swift can encourage more programmers to create apps for Apple products instead of any of their rivals.

Notice the similarity of criticism between Swift’s non-Roman alphabet feature and how critics typically react to anything introduced by Apple? When Apple introduced the iPad, some people saw the iPad as useless because people were already using netbooks for computing on the road, so why did they need anything else? After all, the iPad didn’t have a removable battery, a physical keyboard, or the ability to run Adobe Flash like a netbook.

Critics who fail to recognize innovation often claim that innovation is useless because what currently exists is good enough so what’s the point of ever changing? When the iPhone appeared, critics claimed it wasn’t innovative. When the iPad appeared, critics claimed it wasn’t innovative. When the Macintosh appeared, critics claimed it wasn’t innovative. Anyone recognize a pattern? Critics consistently fail to recognize innovation because it doesn’t exactly duplicate what already exists, which contradicts the meaning of innovation in the first place.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of Swift is called Playground. Back in the early days, programming meant writing a program, then compiling it so you could run it and see if your program worked. This made programming tedious, especially for beginners.

That’s the reason why the BASIC programming language was originally a simplified interpreted language. That meant you could type a command and immediately get feedback from the computer if that command worked or not.

Such immediate feedback made BASIC programming fun and more instructive than other programming languages. That’s the basic idea behind Playground. Just type Swift code and Playground lets you see the visual results of your code right before your eyes. With Playground, you can also freely experiment with your code to see how it changes the final result. Now you can spot and fix problems right away, making programming easier for beginners and professionals alike.

It’s easy to claim there’s no innovation in anything if you’re unwilling to look for it and unwilling to acknowledge it right in front of your face. Think of Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone while claiming that Windows Mobile, which had roughly 20-30 percent of the mobile phone market share at the time, was a better strategy.

With the Swift programming language, Apple has introduced a programming language that prevents common errors that Objective-C, C++, and C cannot prevent, makes programming accessible to a global audience who may prefer using non-Roman characters, and makes programming interactive so it’s more fun while providing immediate feedback on possible errors.

If you’re a developer following the trend towards mobile and wearable computers, now is the time to start learning Swift. With Apple’s projects involving real-time health monitoring through ResearchKit, HealthKit, and the Apple Watch, Swift will play a crucial role in the future of wearable computing. With CarPlay and HomeKit, Swift will play a crucial role in car and home automation.

Despite what critics may think, Swift is innovative. Now we just have to see how Swift will help Apple change the world while all the harshest critics are proven wrong. Again.

About Swift.

Understanding ResearchKit

Posted on March 12, 2015 by admin Posted in Medical, Programming Leave a comment

What it is: A software framework for real-time health monitoring through mobile or wearable computers.

On March 9, 2015, everyone was waiting to see what Apple would have to say about the Apple Watch. What most people missed was the real innovation, which was ResearchKit.

Like most innovations, ResearchKit is meant to solve a pressing problem that current technology can’t solve easily. In this case, the big problem with medical research is getting enough data from test subjects.

In the old days, this meant posting flyers on bulletin boards and hoping people would call or show up. This time-consuming method typically attracted a small number of test subjects, and only people who physically lived near the researcher’s facilities.

What ResearchKit does is open medical research up to the whole world. Analyzing data gathered from a small sample of people who live in the same city provides far less information than far greater data collected from all over the world from people who live in different climates, environments, and situations that could all affect that person’s health in subtle ways. With ResearchKit, both the quantity and quality of data can be vastly increased.

More importantly, ResearchKit allows real-time health monitoring, which is not practical with today’s research methods. To watch people 24 hours a day, researchers would have to confine test subjects in a laboratory. On the other hand, ResearchKit allows researchers to examine test subjects in their everyday lives while providing second by second information automatically. Such data was impossible to collect in the past. With ResearchKit, that problem no longer exists.

Apple made ResearchKit open source for several reasons. First, open source means that anyone can examine the code to make sure it’s accurate and doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy. Second, open source allows others to port ResearchKit to work with other operating systems including Android or Windows. Third, open source discourages rivals from duplicating the functions of ResearchKit and encourages everyone to share and collect critical medical data in the same format.

Since ResearchKit also ties into HealthKit, this also encourages more people to work with HealthKit, which means working with iOS. By making ResearchKit open source, Apple ensures that more people will want to use it. With their head start in medical research, Apple will likely define the new standard for medical research and indirectly define the standard for mobile and wearable computers at the same time.

Real-time health monitoring and data collection was simply not possible before the popularity of the iPhone. With so many people using the iPhone, they now have one more reason never to switch. With so many people using alternatives, these people now have one more reason to switch to the iPhone, especially if their health depends on it.

ResearchKit promises to change world health, which makes it the most innovative technology Apple has ever created, but which most people still fail to recognize. When ResearchKit helps find a cure to save your life, you’ll be thankful that Apple created it.

About ResearchKit.

The Real Innovation is Value

Posted on March 11, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: By focusing on providing value, Apple products help people of all walks of life solve problems while making Apple one of the most profitable companies in history.

Like most companies, Apple is in business to make money. However, where most companies go wrong is that their sole goal is to make money at the expense of the customers, the quality of their products and services, and even their own workers. When companies focus only on the bottom line, they’ll try to build the cheapest products, use deception in their marketing, look at customer service as a liability instead of as a marketing tool, and ignore the needs of their own workers and customers.

What Apple does is focus on the customer. If you can satisfy your customer, then that customer will likely buy from you over and over again. In any business, it’s expensive to attract new customers but it’s far more profitable to sell to repeat customers. The easiest way to stay in business is to sell multiple products to repeat customers, but the only way you can get repeat customers is by making them happy.

What makes people happy isn’t necessarily the money they save buying a product since they’ll quickly forget that. What makes people happy is feeling they constantly get value from a product or service they bought no matter what the actual price might be.

Thomas Pynchon, the author of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, once said that “If you can get people to ask the wrong questions, they’ll never find the right answer.” The wrong question to ask is how to make more money? The right question to ask is how to create more value to the customer.

If you compete on price or features, you’re playing a losing game since anyone can always undercut you in price or add a trivial feature like a slightly faster processor that fails to translate into improved customer experience.

However, if you’re like Apple, you compete on value because satisfying the customer is more than just worrying about the bottom line on an accounting spreadsheet or cramming a laundry list of technical specifications into a product and believe that’s innovation.

Creating value is about solving problems. Solve a small problem and you earn a small amount of money. The manager of a McDonald’s restaurant can’t take orders by him or herself. So the manager needs to hire cashiers. When you work as a cashier, you solve the manager’s problem of taking orders. Since running a cash register is a small problem, it earns only a small amount of money.

Solve a big problem and you earn a large amount of money. How much does a heart surgeon make? Obviously a lot more than a cashier at a fast food restaurant. That’s because a cashier solves a small problem, but a heart surgeon solves a large problem.

Solve a small problem for a lot of people and you can still earn a lot of money. Ray Kroc, the man who created the McDonald’s franchise, earned a huge amount of cash by solving the simple problem of providing fast food to people in a hurry. While a heart surgeon solves a huge problem for a handful of people, McDonald’s solves a small problem for a large number of people.

So with few exceptions (Ping, MobileMe, etc.), Apple just looks for ways to solve problems that typically focuses on eliminating the current, frustrating user experience with existing products.

The Macintosh makes computers easier to use than Windows PCs. The iPhone makes smartphones easier to use than Blackberry or Nokia smartphones. The iPad makes mobile computing simpler than lugging around an underpowered netbook. The iPod and iTunes makes finding and buying music far more convenient than visiting a music store and buying music stored on bulky CDs. Apple Stores make it easy to test products, learn about them, and get problems solved by an expert.

When you solve problems for others, customers will eagerly give you money. When you try to deceive, cheat, and frustrate customers, you’ll always drive away repeat customers and rely solely on price and deception to attract new customers.

Providing value indirectly earns more money. Pursuing money at the expense of value will always earn less money. Apple’s innovation isn’t in making fancier products but in making products and service that minimizes frustration and maximizes productivity. Apple products may not always be the cheapest, but they’re usually the best in terms of physical quality, user experience, and customer support.

As long as you focus on making more money, you’ll always struggle to make more money. As long as you focus on solving problems and reducing the frustration of others, you’ll always make more money as a result. The way to make more money isn’t to cut costs and cheat the customer. The way to make more money is to please the customer and that’s Apple’s greatest innovation that rivals have yet to copy.

About Apple.