What every other PC maker has failed at, Apple nails: the touchpad on the Air works better with Windows 7 than any other Windows laptop on the market. Everything works as it should with Windows; navigating with two fingers on the pad is smooth with no jumping cursors, two-finger scrolling is smoother than anything I’ve seen on any other Windows 7 laptop, and palm rejection is top notch.

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I could go on and on about how much better the touchpad experience is on the Air, but the big question I’ve always had is: why? Why is it that other laptop makers haven’t mastered the touch experience and Apple has been able to make it work so fluidly, even with another operating system? It turns out a lot of it has to do the hardware. According to Synaptics’ Ted Theocheung, it’s Apple’s use of high quality glass, an image sensor, a wider pad, and a USB controller to connect to the motherboard that makes the experience better than most Windows laptops.

There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.

They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

Don’t fill up the hole in your heart with garbage.

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority

Even with a Galaxy Nexus, or the quad-core EeePad Transformer Prime, there is no way to guarantee a smooth frame rate if these two design constraints remain true. It’s telling that it takes the power of a Galaxy Nexus to approach the smoothness of a three year old iPhone. So why did the Android team design the rendering framework like this?

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritise UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

Android makes so many changes from version to version that apps have to be rewritten anyway. Might as well bite the bullet and rewrite the rendering framework sooner rather than later.

David Pogue reviewing the Kindle Fire:

Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.

iPad killer, it is not.

Well, at least if you get so frustrated with the Fire that you throw it against the wall, it’s only $200 that goes up in smoke.

Gadi Amit, founder of the design firm which worked on the revolutionary design of the Lytro camera:

There’s a moment that happens during the best projects, when 10 people in a room realize that there’s something so pure about a solution that it works.

Point and shoot. Can’t get any purer than that.

“Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered.”

“Most impressively, Windows Phone is not a feeble-minded copycat. Microsoft came up with completely fresh metaphors that generally steer clear of the iPhone/Android design.”

“Microsoft’s work here deserves attention, praise and sales. Maybe it’s not quite as mature as the iPhone or Android. But the world is a more interesting place with Windows Phone in it.”

When was the last time you could say that about a Microsoft product? Things have certainly changed.

What Siri offers that is not equally true for Google Voice Actions … is broad and deep integration into the phone and a more conversational style of interaction. This is subtle but meaningful in comparing the experiences of using Siri and Google Voice Actions. Siri has personality whereas Google Voice Actions does not. Siri is also generally more intuitive. In terms of most features, however, Google Voice Actions and Siri are fairly comparable — though Siri does more things.

Steve Jobs
1955 – 2011

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

– Steve Jobs

If you were to design a piece of hardware that was only used for one single task, to read books, how would you design it?

If you look at the iPad, it’s clearly a device that is not meant for one specific task. It’s just a frame; the application you run on it defines what the device does. That’s why the iPad barely has any hardware buttons. What buttons would you add that would be useful to most iPad apps? Even the volume buttons are of questionable use; most apps don’t need them, or provide their own on-screen volume control.

But a device you use for one very specific thing, and one thing alone, is an entirely different proposition. Since you know exactly what people will do with it, you can design the hardware specifically for that task.

So why, then, do the new Kindle Touch devices look like small, grey iPads?

They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’. But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.

They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.