Top Bananas | Tag Archives: innovation

The Benefit of the Touch Screen

Posted on May 5, 2018 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Automated kiosks are replacing cashiers in restaurants.

Go to any fast food restaurant and chances are good you’ll have to talk to another person who takes your order. From a business point of view, order takers are necessary but slow and not always accurate. Even worse, cashiers who take orders are a major cause of employee theft. That’s why more restaurants are relying on touch screen kiosks to take orders instead.

Food trucks are even using automated kiosks to take orders because it’s fast, accurate, and more appealing for customers to use because they can leisurely view their options without feeling like they’re making up someone else’s time. When people pay through a kiosk, no money changes hands so no employee theft is possible. What makes automated kiosks possible is the touch screen.

Touch screens eliminate physical buttons and allow greater versatility. The greatest innovation of the iPhone was introducing the touch screen interface that eliminated the need for convoluted fold out keyboards or rows of buttons like Blackberry phones used to display. The touch screen has defined the best user interface for simple input.

Expect more restaurants to offer automated kiosks in the future because it’s more cost effective, accurate, faster, and more appealing for customers while reducing employee theft at the same time. When you look at what jobs machines are taking over, it’s always repetitive jobs that require little thinking whether it’s physical activities like taking orders at a fast food restaurant to creating boilerplate legal documents. Any time a job involves repetition, expect a computer to take it over. If your job involves repetition, beware. You’re a prime candidate to be replaced by a machine.

The best way people can make themselves indispensable is to be versatile. The worst way people can cling to a job is to hope for the best and develop no further skills beyond doing repetitive work. If a touch screen can replace you, then you’re probably in a job that’s not very interesting in the first place.

Improving the iPhone Camera

Posted on May 2, 2018 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: Olloclip offers clip-on lenses for the iPhone.

The built-in camera of the iPhone has improved drastically over the years to the point where many professional photographers use the iPhone as their main camera. Of course, dedicated digital cameras will always capture better pictures than the iPhone but that’s because dedicated cameras always have more space for changing lenses. The drawback is that you must lug around a bulky dedicated camera whenever you want to take pictures.

Still, the iPhone camera is better than dedicated cameras of the past. Even though dedicated cameras will always have the size advantage over the iPhone to provide better quality lenses, for many people the iPhone camera is good enough, even for professional photographers. Now for those who need to improve the quality of their pictures even more captured by an iPhone, there’s the Olloclip add-on that clamps on to an iPhone and adds additional lenses.

The iPhone combined with the Olloclip can now capture images that rival those captured by dedicated cameras. The huge difference is that the Olloclip and the iPhone are far more convenient to carry than a dedicated camera. If you insist on lugging a dedicated camera around, you’ll gain a trivial amount of additional quality. So ultimately the question is whether a dedicated camera is even worth it any more?

If professional photographers can use an iPhone camera without any additional lenses at all, think of what major quality difference the Olloclip and the iPhone can give professional and amateur photographers. The iPhone camera is like having an older dedicated camera in your hand. Add the Olloclip accessory and you now have the power of a dedicated camera in the smaller size of an iPhone.

Dedicated cameras still have their place, but that place is rapidly shrinking. If you demand higher quality photographs, then consider getting an Olloclip with your iPhone. Then again, you may be able to get along with just the iPhone alone.

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Choosing a WiFi router

Posted on April 30, 2018 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: Apple recently discontinued their AirPort WiFi routers, so you need to find a third-party solution instead.

Although WiFi is there crucial link keeping computers, tablets, and even smartphones connected to the Internet, Apple chose to let their AirPort WiFi routers languish until they finally announced they’re discontinuing this product line. That means if you want a WiFi router, you’ll have to rely on a third-party solution instead. Apple likely dumped their WiFi routers because third-party solutions were cheaper and updated more often. Apple didn’t update their AirPort products often so they usually fell behind compared to their competitors.

WiFi routers are a commodity so Apple likely decided they didn’t want to waste time duplicating the features of third-party products. So if you need a WiFi router, this is what Apple suggests you look for:

IEEE 802.11ac, which is the latest wireless-networking standard
Simultaneous dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz), which allows the router to transmit over both frequencies at the same time, so no matter which band your wireless devices use, they automatically connect to the best available band for the fastest possible performance
WPA2 Personal (AES) encryption, which is currently the strongest form of security available in a Wi-Fi router
MIMO or MU-MIMO, which can offer improved performance when many devices use your Wi-Fi network simultaneously, you want to take full advantage of a high-speed Internet connection, or you need Wi-Fi coverage over a larger area

MU-MIMO (Multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output technology) allows a Wi-Fi router to communicate with multiple devices simultaneously. This can reduce choppy video and continual buffering that creates a stop and go experience when viewing videos or playing online games. This is the feature you need to look for to improve your WiFi experience.

So is Apple dropping their AirPort routers a big problem? Not really because Apple didn’t offer anything that third-parties couldn’t offer just as well. Apple excels when they offer hardware that rivals can’t duplicate or compete against. WiFi routers need to follow a standard so third-parties offer better solutions than Apple ever did.

While Apple may be selling AirPort routers cheaply to get rid of them, it’s probably not a good idea to get one since you’ll be buying obsolete technology. Stick with a newer WiFi router even if you have to pay a little more. You’ll be happier in the long run.

To learn more about MU-MIMO and why you want it in your next WiFi router, click here.

Apple Working on Eye Tracking Technology

Posted on April 27, 2018 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple recently filed a patent for eye-tracking technology.

In 2017, Apple acquired SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI), an eye-tracking firm. SMI had been working on smart glasses where images are beamed directly on to a user’s retina. By pairing smart glasses with an iPhone, such eye-tracking technology would let people see images without unlocking and view their iPhone screen.

Eye-tracking technology is essentially a new form of user interface. Just as touch screens eliminated the need for a mouse, so will eye-tracking eliminate the need to physically touch a screen to give commands. Eye-tracking, combined with voice commands, creates a hands-free computing environment. Eye-tracking requires smart glasses, so this is more evidence that Apple is working on smart glasses that will rely on augmented reality to display images to a user without blocking out the real world.

For example, imagine looking at an unfamiliar street. Augmented reality can display directions so you can see your surroundings and see the direction you need to go. Currently, dating apps help people get together, but augmented reality would let everyone broadcast their availability to others. Imagine seeing a certain color, icon, or message floating over a stranger’s head, letting you know in advance who that person might be. Then you could connect through chats until you’re both ready to meet in person.

Right now, augmented reality requires holding up an iPhone or iPad in the air so you can view the screen. This ties one hand to holding your smartphone or tablet. Tomorrow, you’ll be able to view augmented reality just by viewing it projected on your retina through smart glasses, freeing your hands to do something else.

Eye-tracking technology may be years away from implementation, but it’s definitely coming as part of a smart glasses user interface. Whatever augmented reality can provide in the near future on the iPhone or iPad, it will do much better on smart glasses. We just have to wait for it.

Live Photos Capture Motion and Sound

Posted on April 22, 2018 by admin Posted in Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: A man wrote Tim Cook to thank him for Live Photos since it captured his 87-year old grandmother’s laugh.

Technology companies usually get it wrong. They think if they pile on a laundry list of features, then their products will be superior to a rival product that offers fewer features. Actually, nobody cares about features. Everyone really cares about what those features will do for them.

That’s why creating curved screens or exchanging contact information by bumping phones together is useless if people don’t find them handy. Features are only useful when people find them useful for solving problems they didn’t know they even needed solving. One man recently wrote to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and thanked him for Live Photos. It turns out that Live Photos captures a few seconds before actually capturing a picture, so when you look at a Live Photo, you can see a few seconds of motion if the subject of your picture was moving at the time.

Even more surprising is that Live Photos also captures audio. Unlike a traditional picture that’s static and silent, Live Photos captures motion and sound. As a result, this man took a picture of his 87-year old grandmother and captured both her movement while laughing and the sound of her laughter itself. Now that his grandmother is gone, his Live Photo of her captures her essence for the rest of his life to cherish. That’s what a useful feature is all about.

Most of the time, Apple focuses on features that help people. Other technology companies focus on features emphasizing speed or size using acronyms like MHz or RAM, expecting people to decipher the meaning of this. Only tech-savvy people understand what these arcane features mean and how they may benefit from them, but the rest of us do not. Even if these features are useful, few people will bother trying them if they don’t understand how to use them. That’s why Live Photos works by default so there’s nothing to turn on. Other features often require the user to customize their device, which means most people never do it so they never see if that feature will help them or not.

The real purpose of technology is to solve problems. Until ordinary people can see how technology can solve problems, that feature is useless. If you’re looking to buy a product and see only a laundry list of technical specifications, chances are good those features won’t improve your life one bit. What you need is to see those features in action and then you might better understand how those features can help you. Until technology companies focus on solutions instead of technical specifications, their products will always be useless to the vast majority of consumers.

China’s Amazing Facial Recognition Technology

Posted on April 13, 2018 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: China has the world’s most advanced facial recognition technology that recently caught a suspect in a crowded concert.

How do you catch a criminal in a country as crowded as China? The Chinese government’s answer is to use facial recognition technology, which is now considered the best in the world. Recently the Chinese facial recognition technology spotted a suspect in a crowded concert of 60,000 people. Police arrested the suspect, who’s surprised that the police could locate him within the crowded concert venue.

For fighting crime, facial recognition technology can be like having millions of witnesses constantly scanning for particular suspects. The big danger is what the government decides might be a crime. Free speech? Trying to expose corruption in the government? Struggling to bring about equality and fairness? Governments can decide what’s a crime and root out troublemakers anywhere they might go in public. That essentially turns China into a massive police state.

To catch criminals is fine. Now the only question is what will China consider to be “criminals”?

Imagine how any dictator could use facial recognition technology to maintain power by tracking down and eliminating political rivals. China is not using facial recognition just to find petty criminals. They’re planning to use it to keep the population in line. While China is much freer than in the past where people can live and say whatever they wish, they cannot protest against their own government without incurring the wrath of that government. As long as the Chinese government is benevolent, everyone will be happy, but what might happen if the Chinese government suddenly turns into a harsh dictatorship?

If China’s facial recognition technology can spot a suspect in a crowd of 60,000 people, it can easily spot anyone who dares show their face in public just once. Facial recognition technology can bee used for good, but like any tool, it can also be used for evil purposes. The future has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with human behavior and given the history of human behavior, expect facial recognition technology to make people more oppressed than ever before.