Top Bananas | Tag Archives: iOS

The iOS 11 Files App

Posted on September 20, 2017 by admin Posted in Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The Files app in iOS 11 gives users access to file management on iOS devices.

For the longest time, many PC users criticized the iPad as a toy because it wouldn’t allow you to manage individual files. Instead, the iPad limited each app to accessing only its own files. While this made it easy to find files used in specific apps, it made managing files much clumsier. The advantage of not having a file management system made the iPad easier to use, but for power users, the lack of a file management system made the iPad too limiting.

Now with iOS 11, Apple has introduced the Files app, which gives power users the ability to manage files while giving most other users the ability to ignore the Files app completely if they wish and continue using their iPad exactly the same as before. This compromise works for everyone because managing files is often the hardest part of using a computer for many novices. By shielding novices from the complexity of file management, the iPad can satisfy their needs without excess complexity. By giving power users file management capabilities, they can use the iPad as a more powerful mobile computer than ever before.

The introduction of the Files app shows that the iPad is gradually becoming the new laptop computer of tomorrow. Before the iPad appeared, the other alternative for an inexpensive mobile computer was the netbook. Netbooks first appeared running Linux but Microsoft quickly dropped the licensing fees of Windows to make Windows the standard netbook operating system, especially when people got frustrated with learning Linux on netbooks and trying to share files with their Windows PC.

Yet as soon as the iPad appeared, the netbook market disappeared practically overnight. The iPad was simply better than the netbook in every way. Of course, people still preferred the greater versatility of laptops so many people used both. This helped give rise to the 2-in-1 device market defined by the Microsoft Surface that’s a combination laptop and tablet. 2-in-1 devices are typically great ultraportable laptops and mediocre tablets, but for people who need a laptop that’s as small and light as a tablet, 2-in-1 devices are perfect.

Now that the iPad has more capabilities such as its file management capabilities, the iPad will only get more powerful over time. That means the traditional laptop will be in danger of getting overtaken by the iPad just as netbooks were overwhelmed by the original iPad. The days of laptops are numbered.

As further evidence that the iPad can replace a laptop, Apple’s processors are getting more powerful, rivaling even Intel’s low-end processors used in the MacBook Pro laptop. As the processors in the iPad grow in power, expect the iPad to start cannibalizing laptop sales. People will see that a laptop that acts like a mediocre tablet will never be as useful as a tablet that acts like a superior laptop. The iPad Pro isn’t quite able to replace laptops, but that’s the future and it’s clear the iPad is targeting the same market as laptops.

Your next laptop will probably still be a laptop, but the replacement for that new laptop will likely be a tablet. Laptops are the only major growth market in the PC industry and once the iPad starts eating into sales of laptops like they ate into sales of netbooks, expect the laptop market to collapse and wither away. People will still need laptops, but they might not always want or need a Windows laptop any more.

The First Wave of Augmented Reality Apps

Posted on September 19, 2017 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: With the release of ARKit and iOS 11, Apple has made augmented reality accessible to the masses.

Augmented reality is going to change the way people interact with their smartphones as much as the touch screen interface literally changed the way smartphones work. With the official release of iOS 11, augmented reality apps have started flooding the App Store. By examining these augmented reality apps, you can get a glimpse at the future. Best of all, many of these early augmented reality apps are free.

Most of these early augmented reality apps are games that let you play video games overlaid over the actual image as seen through your iPhone’s camera. A simple, non-game augmented reality app lets you view cars in your driveway so you can see what different cars might look like parked in front of your own home.

Such early uses of augmented reality may be trivial, but just remember that the early iPhone apps used to be trivial such as iFart that let you play different farting noises on the iPhone. When that app first came out, it earned up to $10,000 a day. Nowadays it probably earns far less, but that just shows you how excited people were to find any apps on the App Store in those early days.

The same processor excitement for trivial apps will occur with augmented reality. Some of the more sophisticated augmented reality apps let you measure items without an actual ruler or look in the skies to see constellations in the sky. As developers see what’s possible with augmented reality and get more sophisticated, expect to see more useful augmented reality apps in the near future.

Augmented reality has suddenly given the iPhone a huge advantage over Android devices. If you want to use augmented reality, you won’t find as many augmented reality apps available for Android (and you certainly won’t find them at all for Windows Phone). As augmented reality becomes commonplace, expect to see similar augmented reality apps start popping up on Android. However, augmented reality only works on the most advanced hardware so with Android devices fragmented across so many hardware configurations, only a small subset of all available Android devices can run augmented reality. That creates a frustrating experience for Android users.

In comparison, if you own one of the latest iPhones or iPads, you’ll have no problems using these latest augmented reality apps. Apple’s choices make it easy to run augmented reality. Android’s fragmentation makes it harder to know whether augmented reality will run on certain devices or not.

Try a free augmented reality app and that will give you a clue what the future might bring. Between using augmented reality apps to help you view dance steps to a dance or viewing human anatomy by pointing your iPhone at someone to see their internal organs depicted, augmented reality will change the way we work with smartphones. Android is already behind the augmented reality market and rival operating systems have little chance to catch up. (Think Tizen or Windows Mobile 10.)

The future of iOS belongs to augmented reality. Upcoming versions of iOS will simply continue making augmented reality a game-changer in the smartphone market that Android can never match.

Apple’s Growing Processor Expertise

Posted on September 17, 2017 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: Apple released the new A11 processor along with their own graphics processing unit.

Apple recently broke off collaboration with Imagination Technologies, which was creating graphics processing units for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. During the recent announcement of the latest iPhone, Apple quietly introduced their own graphics processing unit, which means Apple has long been working on a graphics processor for years and finally felt that their own efforts surpassed anything Imagination Technologies could offer.

One huge problem with relying on third-party products is that those products are generic. Anyone can buy and use them too so Apple doesn’t want the iPhone to contain the exact same components as rival Android smartphones and tablets. More importantly, Apple wants to optimize their graphics processor so it runs faster and more efficiently than anything rivals can offer. That puts rival products at a severe disadvantage because they must use less efficient, slower components. This is partly the reason why Android smartphones tend to offer more RAM and faster processors, yet still run slower than the iPhone. When you dump third-party components together, it’s difficult to optimize them to work together.

The fact that Apple is now designing their own processors simply means that Apple will continue focusing on its own hardware to make it better than any rivals could offer. This makes the typical laundry list of technical specifications meaningless because if you compare to smartphones and one has more RAM than another, it seems like the one with more RAM should be superior. But in actual practice if the one with more RAM runs slower, then it’s actually inferior. The fact that some Android devices need twice as much RAM to run slower than an iPhone with half as much RAM clearly highlights the inefficiency of relying on third-party products.

Other than Samsung, who else can make their own hardware? LG, HTC, Huawei, and others cannot. That relegates them to the relying on third-party products and selling their products for the lowest possible price to gain customers.

The choice is clear. You can pay more to get more with an iPhone, or you can pay less and get less with most rival Android devices. You can even pay just as much for an iPhone and still get an Android device that’s not as good as the iPhone, which makes no sense at all.

As Apple continues to improve its processors and as rivals continue relying on the same components that aren’t as good, the gap in hardware quality will continue to grow. Do you want an optimized device or do you want a less optimized device? The less optimized device is fine if you’re willing to pay a lower price, but makes no sense if you pay just as much as an iPhone. Toss in the optimization Apple can do with iOS to work with specific hardware and how Google cannot optimize Android to work with any particular hardware and the optimization between the iPhone and Android devices grows even larger.

Android gets the job done and if that’s all you want, it will work just fine. However, if you want the best, then the choice is clear. You want an iPhone.

Deutsche Bank Dropping Blackberry

Posted on September 2, 2017 by admin Posted in Business, Software Leave a comment

What it is: Deutsche Bank has finally dropped Blackberry as their standard smartphone.

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Blackberry dominated the enterprise market. Ten years later, Deutsche Bank was one of the few major companies still relying on Blackberry although they also allowed employees to bring their own devices as well. Now Deutsche Bank has officially dropped Blackberry in favor of Apple’s iOS devices instead.

Blackberry has been dead in the smartphone market for years, but lo0ok how long it still managed to linger with a company as large as Deutsche Bank. That just shows how slow the enterprise market is to switch platforms, despite consumers already voting with their pocketbooks years ago. This also shows how the enterprise is warming up to iOS as the standard mobile operating system device.

In the past, the enterprise market standardized on Windows as the desktop operating system, and in most corporations, Windows is still deeply entrenched with no signs of losing its grip. However, iOS has staked out the mobile market, which is growing faster and will changing more rapidly. The mobile market is where the future lies.

This is why Microsoft tried to position Windows as a desktop and tablet operating system (and now a smartphone operating system as well) so they could keep Windows entrenched in the enterprise market. However, it’s unlikely corporations will stick solely with Windows when Windows currently doesn’t run on smartphones and only works as a suboptimal tablet operating system. Given a choice between using Windows on a tablet or iOS (or even Android) on a tablet, most people prefer anything but Windows.

Microsoft’s Surface devices work best as ultraportable laptops and tablets as a secondary feature. Few people are buying Surface devices solely to use them as tablets. That just indicates that Windows is not the tablet operating system of the future but iOS already is.

With Deutsche Bank finally dropping Blackberry, it’s apparent how slowly and reluctantly the enterprise market adopts software standards. Windows will likely be around for another decade or more but Windows simply can’t make much inroads in the mobile market that iOS has already captured. Given a choice between using an iPad as a tablet or a Microsoft Surface device as a tablet, guess which one more corporations will likely choose?

Just walk through any major corporations and you can still see Windows XP running on many PCs. To expect corporations to shift away from Windows on PCs is nearly impossible, but that’s why every day makes iOS more and more of a corporate standard. One day we’ll see corporations still relying on old iPads alongside Windows XP PCs. When that day finally arrives, we’ll know that iOS has finally dominated the enterprise market.

Apple’s September 12 Event

Posted on August 31, 2017 by admin Posted in Hardware, Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple announced a September 12 event where they will announce new products.

On September 12, Apple will use the new Steve Jobs theater to announce new products, specifically the iPhone 8. While most people will be looking at the hardware improvements such as wireless charging along with changes in the Home button, hardware improvements are trivial. Expect the camera to improve (as usual), but the real change will be in the software.

First, expect facial recognition. Second, look for different ways the iOS 11 user interface allows multitasking. Finally, the real revolutionary feature will be Apple demonstrating its own augmented reality apps.

This is what most companies do. They release new technical features and then expect everyone too be wowed by the technical features without a clear understanding of what those technical features might be good for. Think of Microsoft releasing their motion-sensing Kinect and then promptly ignoring it.

What Apple typically does is that they offer a technical feature and then demonstrate how that technical feature can be useful. Way back when Appel first introduced the Macintosh, they didn’t focus on the graphical user interface. Instead, they focused on how easy the graphical user interface made it to draw (MacDraw and MacPaint) along with displaying fonts in a document (MacWrite). That alone clearly demonstrated the advantages of a graphical user interface that technical specifications could never do.

So Apple released ARKit to allow developers to create augmented reality apps, but you can be certain Apple has created their own augmented reality apps that they will demonstrate on September 12. The obvious use for augmented reality should appear in the Maps app where you can point your camera at a street and see street names and store names superimposed over the image. The Maps app should also use augmented reality for both outdoor and indoor directions such as walking directions in an airport terminal or stadium.

FaceTime should be another app that uses augmented reality. Apple had previously acquired a company called FaceShift that worked on facial recognition along with another company called Emotient that worked on identifying emotions in a person’s face in real-time. This would allow FaceTime to recognize faces and the emotions of the person looking back at you, which might be a good reason not to use FaceTime if you have to deal with an unpleasant conversation.

Apple could also release a new app that scans 3D objects. That’s because Apple acquired a company called Flyby Media that could identify 3d objects, which could be used to scan items for later 3D printing and to identify objects seen through a camera. Flyby Media’s technology will likely be used to identify objects in a camera to overlay augmented reality items over it such as in an indoor Maps direction app.

On September 12, the real star won’t be hardware advances but software advances, specifically in augmented reality. Apple announced ARKit in the summer and September 12 will be their chance to show everyone how augmented reality can be useful just as Apple showed the world how graphical user interfaces could be useful through MacDraw, MacPaint, and MacWrite.

Technology advances alone are meaningless. The best technology advances are those that include useful demonstrations that clearly show why those technical features are needed by ordinary people to solve previously unsolvable problems.

September 12 isn’t just about the iPhone 8 but about augmented reality. Watch for Apple’s augmented reality apps because they’re going to define the future of augmented reality just like the iPhone defined smartphones.

Google Introduces ARCore for Android

Posted on August 30, 2017 by admin Posted in Hardware, Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Google announced ARCore, a set of tools for creating augmented reality apps on Android.

Three years ago back in 2014, Google introduced Project Tango, which hoped to offer augmented reality to Android. Yet Project Tango didn’t seem to ignite any interest in augmented reality since that time. Then Apple introduced ARKit in 2017 and suddenly developers are rapidly creating augmented reality apps for the upcoming iOS 11.

To encourage Android developers to embrace augmented reality, Google recently announced ARCore, based on Project Tango. The main idea behind ARCore is to give Android developers access to augmented reality on Android. The huge obstacle facing Android is hardware. Many Android devices don’t possess the necessary processors to display augmented reality, which means only a handful of Android devices will be able to take advantage of ARCore. On the other hand, ARKit makes augmented reality accessible for recent models of the iPhone and iPad Pro.

So even though Android has a larger market share, fewer Android devices can run ARCore. In the meantime, iOS has a much smaller market share than Android, but a large majority of those users will be able to use augmented reality.

That means a large percentage of iPhone and iPad users will be able to use augmented reality while a large percentage of Android users will not. That will create a frustrating experience for Android. Whether that drives Android users to switch to iOS remains to be seen, but it’s likely that augmented reality will become popular first on iOS and then later become popular on Android. That big question is how long will it take before augmented reality on Android becomes as commonplace as augmented reality will become on iOS this fall?

Augmented reality will be the major difference between iOS and Android. If you can see the potential of augmented reality, then you’ll want an iPhone or iPad. If you have no use for augmented reality, then it won’t make much difference which platform you choose.

Android devices have largely caught up to the iPhone and iPad in terms of hardware, but they stumble consistently in trying to catch up to iOS in software. Android devices typically need faster processors and more memory just to fall behind slower iPhone/iPad processors that use less memory. Now with augmented reality about to arrive this fall, Apple has a new way to differentiate their products from Android competitors. Android can fight back with ARCore, but ARCore does no good if it can’t run on the majority of Android devices available today.

Augmented reality is Apple’s way of convincing people to skip Android and get an iOS device. Already third-party developers have demonstrated augmented reality apps, but it’s likely that Apple will demonstrate their own augmented reality apps for Maps and other apps that come with iOS.

The future belongs to augmented reality. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how much of a lead Apple can create between themselves and Android when it comes to the growing augmented reality market.

To read more about ARCore, click here.