Forget it. Nope! It can’t be done. I for one am unable to fully shake the Interweb.

Mentally prepared to ditch all calls, emails, texts, and social network pings, I was convinced I would be able to enjoy my nine day beach vacation in good old fashioned peace and quiet, exactly for the courage to disconnect myself from constant digital connectivity.

I know, probably no small feat for someone otherwise “always on” (I work in New York, on Wall Street, and for a telco. Oy!), the idea was, just once, no Blackberry voice or office email, no laptop, no iPod or iPad, or whatever else would get me to the Web.

Yet, come Monday (day three), I was back “on the wagon”, scouring for IP access as if I had money riding on it.

Turns out, according to The Economist I do!

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We’ve been written before about the smart move the New York Times made a  few years ago: instead of dreading internet technology as a potentially fatal threat to their business model, they instead ‘made lemonade’ and decided to embrace change by increasing their coverage of all things internet.  The New York Times has since become known as one of the leading technology business and consumer technology news sources out there.

As part of that increased coverage, last week the ‘paper’ launched a series entitled “The Sofa Wars”, about  something else we’ve written about before: the stubborn problem of getting internet video over to the television where it belongs.

The first two pieces are here and here, and they’re really worth a read.

So the other evening I decided to finally get around to setting up my home Windows 7 machine to print to the printer hosted by my wife’s XP machine in the other room.  I wasn’t expecting it to take too much time: both machines were already sharing files across our Windows Home Group, I’d installed my share of printers on my share of Windows Server networks back in the day, Windows 7 is the result of a chastened post-Vista Microsoft ‘getting religion’ on user friendliness, and the printer in question is a popular current model from Hewlett Packard.  No problem.

Well… Problem.  Here’s how it ended up taking me over an hour and a half of the limited amount of time I have at home in the evenings during the week to get this done (and bear with me, there’s a point).

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Since moving to Germany I’ve been relying on the Good Reader iPhone app more than ever, frequently referring to a PDF map of the Berlin subway system I have stored locally on the phone.  That got me to thinking…

Question: It appears the security issues involving both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash are somewhat similar (just last month came word of the latest zero-day threat affecting both).  Why then is Apple allowing PDF files onto the iPhone by bestowing the App Store blessing on apps like Good Reader, while maintaining its very firm (and very public) anti-Flash stance?

One one hand, if a head-to-head comparison of Apple’s Preview and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is any indication, there could well be some truth to Apple’s low opinion of Adobe software: as we’ve said before, it’s hard to come up with another instance in which two applications that do exactly same thing differ so much in quality and usablility.  Preview is lightweight, fast-loading, and features a very nice contextually-based search function - all qualities utterly lacking in Acrobat Reader.  That the inferior product is made by the same folks who design and maintain the platform itself is even more remarkable.

On the other hand, maybe Adobe’s code isn’t so uniformly horrible after all - maybe there’s another reason Apple is perfectly OK with letting their mobile devices not only view PDF files but also to store them locally, while Flash is treated as if it had some type of digital cooties. I find the most-often offered rationale - that the advent of HTML 5 is upon us and will make Flash unneccesary - to be a bit of a red herring.  First of all, HTML 5 in any meaningful form is still years away.  Secondly, significant issues remain to be worked out, while the various competing browser-builder agendas have made reaching agreement on something as basic as the underlying codecs an exercise in cat-herding.  Also consider that HTML 5 has yet to address ad serving, encryption, and digital rights management - which, for all its faults, Flash has.  In short, the Flash platform offers the tremendous advantage of a standardized layer of abstraction across multiple browser implementations, Adobe’s figured a lot of things out about getting a video stream from point A to point B across the internet, and the platform works well enough to have prevailed in the open market - it’s not going anywhere soon (for more on why, here’s a post worth reading - from, of all people, an HTML 5-loving Google/YouTube engineer).

Answer In Cupertino, though, animosity towards Flash runs deep, and it runs strong.  So much so, in fact, that what amounts to an anti-Flash manifesto was recently published on company website - written by the CEO himself, no less.  What could be differentiating factor between Apple’s very different attitudes towards Acrobat and Flash?  We think it could well involve an as-yet unannounced push by the company to attempt to solve the stubborn problem of getting internet video onto your television.

After all, at the intersection of internet technology and consumer electronics (the Apple sweet spot), the getting the internet television experience right (as opposed to the computer-dependent internet video experience) is undeniably the big prize - the ‘elephant in the room’, a market with the potential to dwarf even the smart phone market.  There’s that pesky little problem of Flash, though - any 3rd-party technology simply won’t do if Apple is to go to the trouble of getting into internet video in a big way, given the company’s vertically integrated business model.  That’s why there is not, and will never be, Flash on the iPhone (until the day the App Store model itself is successfully challenged in court).

Prediction With iTunes, Apple’s already shown that they know how to make selling premium digital content over the internet user-friendly enough to work.  They just blew through their Q3 earnings forecasts and they enjoy a level of brand loyalty unmatched within the CE industry.  With all that in mind, it’s almost obvious in what direction the company’s headed in next:  Within the next 1-2 years, look for Apple to launch a new Apple TV box and maybe even a standalone internet-enabled television with Apple TV baked in and an RF cable interface for backward compatibility  -  all to access a new and dramatically enhanced Apple TV service.

A standalone Apple television?  Well that’s just crazy talk, you might say.  However, bear in mind two points: they have the monitor manufacturing supply chain and expertise already in place, and (maybe more importantly) it’s the hardware where Apple makes their money, not the software.

While that’s not exactly a new opinion here at digitalmissive, it bears repeating.  Pure conjecture?  Yep. (But remember, you heard it here first - OK, maybe not first, but early on enough to make it interesting).

Obstacles Flash?  Small pickings - Apple has clearly made the determination the Adobe Systems is a company that can be dissed at will (or, given the current Apple market cap, even acquired).  No, the real challenge for Apple here is that any plan to get into internet video in a big  (i.e. Ipod, iPhone) kind of way would of course require going up against the vested interests of the highly lucrative, heavily regulated  (and even more heavily lobbied) industry that is broadcast/cable television.

If, with all that he has going for him, Jobs still decides not to go for the ‘brass ring’ of consumer electronics that television represents, it can only be that a clear-eyed assessment of the power and entrenchment of the incumbent industry players will have dissuaded him from mounting the challenge.

Adobe is clearly well within the envelope - but doing battle against a unified Comcast/NBC and Viacom?   That’s another st0ry entirely…

And even if you’re Apple, sometimes you have to pick your battles.

(The opinions expressed above are entirely unaffected by whether or not I own Apple stock - there aren’t that many digitalmissive readers out there - but in the interest of full disclosure, I do)

If you’re like me, there are certain software products you use every single day.  If you’re even more like me, you start to have certain ideas; ideas about how that software could be friendlier to the user. Some of these ideas are more obvious than others, but what’s truly baffling is when an already-implemented feature remains unavailable to its relevant use cases - which brings me to Google Language Tools (the lower link to the immediate right of the Google search textbox).

A few months ago, after enough assorted brilliant ideas for application and OS workflow improvements had accumulated to warrant a quick post about them  (“a short wish list”), we wrote: “wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess)?”
Well, Google Language Tools still doesn’t include this admittedly small but user-friendly feature.  However, it was recently pointed out to us by an astute reader that Google Translate has exactly this feature (see below). Upon further research, it turns out it’s been there since May of 2008, and the mobile Google Language page has it as well…

Google Translate is the web service-based incarnation of their Language Tools, and is designed to be “mashed” into other websites. There are still a lot more people using Google on computers than smartphones. All of which begs the question: why does this cool little feature show up on a web service where it’s arguably less needed (since the language of any given website is of course not a mystery to the publisher and remains static) - and not out there on the main Google Search/Language Tools page, where millions of us web-surfing humans are visiting sites in multiple and different source languages all the time?

A Mountain View mystery.  Meanwhile, try out the Google Translate web service below - now you can read digitalmissive in Belarusan if you want to - pretty nifty…

When we moved here to Berlin about a month ago, I was expecting - and looking forward to - experiencing all the differences, large and small, between life in the US (if the New York City area qualifies) and life here in Germany.  A lot of what I’ve come across here was entirely expected: the healthy work-to-live attitude, the not-so-healthy attitude towards smoking (the otherwise cautious and sensible Germans seem not have gotten that memo yet), the smaller personal environmental footprint, the thoroughness and competency, that inscrutable Northern European reserve - the list goes on and on…

I’ve come across some unexpected differences, too  - for one thing, I now consider New York a relatively polite place (there is a German term for “excuse me” - but I can assure you that you won’t hear it on the sidewalks or subways of Berlin - ever).

On the other hand, there are more than a few pleasant surprises to be had  here as well - and one of them is the consistently high quality of German photojournalism.  Granted, when I pick up a copy of Der Spiegel or Stern, I can’t do much other than look at the pictures (yet) - but even so, the quality, honesty, and story-telling impact of the print media photography I’ve seen here is striking.  Photojournalism here in Germany, it seems, is simply operating at a higher level than what we’re used to (or what we’ve become used to) back in the US.

A paean to the lowly magazine photograph on a technology/new media blog?  Why not - because at the end of the day, doesn’t content quality deserve at least as much mention as any technical aspects of the medium and/or the delivery platform(s) carrying that content?

So if a picture is in fact ‘worth a thousand words’, maybe it would be worth 1024 words here on digitalmissive - but even though I’m sorely tempted to grab a few of the compelling photos from the “Fotografie” sections of the Der Spiegel and Stern websites and republish them here in an effort to entice you to visit the websites yourself, you’ll just have to take my word for it: although the best shots seem to be reserved for the print editions, both publications’ sites are still well worth a visit.

Tscheuss von Berlin…

Grab a seat, sit back, and enjoy the show as the two uncontested giants of their field appear destined to wage a battle of epic proportion…  If it’s Google and Apple we’re talking about, developments on several fronts just this past week have only contributed to the inevitability of just such a scenario:

• Apple goes into advertising (the iAd platform that’s an integral part of the just-released Iphone OS 4)
• Google’s Android mobile OS makes solid advances in the high-growth Smartphone market (Gartner recently reporting that Android will overtake Apple’s iOS by 2012)
• Both companies continue to quietly work away on the last frontier: the stubborn problem of implementing a viable lean-back  internet video solution (I have a hunch that Apple is leveraging their monitor expertise and building a television)
• Both CNET and the WSJ report that Google is planning to unveil a music streaming/download service tied to their search engine, while Apple works to move iTunes from a desktop app to the cloud.

Meanwhile, although largely overshadowed by World Cup soccer, this past week also saw the start of Wimbledon - so if the uncontested giants we’re talking about are Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, recent events also offer the possibility of a similar clash of the titans.  If the two can manage to make it to the mens’ singles finals, tennis fans around the world will grab a seat, sit back and enjoy a show of their own: a rematch of the 2008 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, often considered the greatest tennis match ever played.

It’s maybe a good time, then, for a few thoughts on Google (arguably the Roger Federer of consumer internet technology) and Apple (perhaps the Rafael Nadal of consumer electronics)…

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An interesting thing happened at the New York Times over the past 10 years as the paper has shifted an ever-increasing amount of focus and resources from its print edition to its web edition in response to the rise of the internet:  America’s newspaper of record, the flagship of a print journalism industry facing arguably the most direct internet-related challenges of any industry you could name, has instead embraced internet technology - not only as a delivery medium, but as a newsworthy subject in and of itself.

And by doing so, the Times has evolved into one of the more important technology news destinations on the web.

Understandably, some of the Times’ technology and media coverage is geared purely towards the casual general reading public  (a recent Andy Rooney-esque lamentation on the demise of the Filofax comes to mind).  If you haven’t noticed, though, there’s also an impressive amount of reliably high-quality technology journalism coming from 8th Avenue these days: the top-level NY Times technology section contains feature articles by the Times’ able stable of tech writers, more informal and interactive coverage can be found in the Bits Blog, and lastly, for coverage of technology for the consumer there’s the “Personal Tech” section (since non-sales driven coverage of new CE products is pretty tough to come by, I find this section particularly refreshing).

It doesn’t stop there, though - the Times is also a reliably discriminating  aggregator of worthwhile tech coverage from external sources such as redwriteweb.com and venturebeat.com.

In short, I find the NY Times technology coverage well-considered, timely, and (maybe most importantly) comparatively hype-free.  It’s a web destination that’s well worth your time (and of course it’s all also available as RSS feeds and/or email newsletters).   So, props/kudos to the NY Times - for not only meeting the challenge of the  internet head-on, but for seeing an opportunity there.

Here are two recent NY Times articles that touch on subjects we’ve written about here as well:

• The privatization of internet We’ve been noticing an unmistakable trend towards the privatization of certain areas of the internet for a while now.  In fact, it’s been one of our favorite topics (we’ve written about it here and herehere).   For both purely technical and business-driven reasons, we’re looking for the trend to continue - and here’s a good NY Times article on one aspect of it: ‘peering’, the shift from public internet backbone routing to private networks:  Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-shifting Net

• Paying via credit card Back in February we wrote about how donating to the Haitian earthquake relief  fund via text message was so utterly painless that we had completely forgotten about it by the time the next phone bill showed up with those several unexpected $10 charges.   Here’s a Times article from a month or two later about more advanced (non-text based) methods : Cellphone Payments Offer an Alternative to Cash

Every now and then I find myself coming across things I wish an application could do - or could do better. Here then is a short and informal list of a few such ideas I’ve accumulated over the past few weeks - small ways the apps I use every day could be improved.

Anyone out there have some to add? (or, on the other hand, if some of these have already been implemented in ways I don’t know about yet, let me know!)

iPhone Zoom and crop on photos when emailing. You can zoom in and move around to any part of an image when setting it for your wallpaper. Why not when you email a photo too?

Adobe Acrobat Better search. I’m still baffled at Acrobat Reader’s primitive search functionality.  In a program that’s ostensibly all about documents, it’s not unreasonable to assume you should be able to search on multiple terms and receive results regardless of the order in which those terms appear - in other words, an <or> condition, like a web search engine.  Instead, an Acrobat Reader search for “Apple ” and “Flash” is treated as a search for “Apple Flash”.  Speaking of Apple, Steve Jobs just might have a point regarding his assessment of Adobe technology - the free PDF reader app ‘Preview’ that ships with OS X not only loads much faster than Acrobat Reader, it searches documents how exactly how one would expect  it to, and displays results organized by relevancy.

Windows 7 Smart scrolling. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you dragged a window to the right so the scrollbar was off the right edge of the desktop, the scrollbar popped over to the (still visible) left side of the window? Well wouldn’t it?

Firefox Search snippets highlighted in page. I usually make my decision as to which search result is worth clicking through to by that handy 1-2 sentence “search snippet” returned under the Google URL. Wouldn’t it be nice if that content (which is usually exactly what I’m interest in) was highlighted in the page when you clicked through to it? I often end up having to do this manually via a <copy> on Google and a <find> on the source page, and I’m wondering why I can’t find a Firefox add-on yet to do this for me.

Google Language Auto-detect source language. This is a simple one - when I paste some German text into the “Translate Text” box, wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess) for me? Incidentally, here’s a fun Google Language game - translate some English text to another language and back to English and note the (sometimes amusing) artifacts produced by translation error. Then do the same but go through several other languages before returning to English and note the (even more amusing) errors produced - sometimes they’re hilarious. Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.

Firefox Turn Google into a left-pane navigation device. With today’s wide-screen and high-resolution monitors, it might be nice to have your search browser persistently resident on the left pane of your browser - then clicking on a link would populate the large main pane. This too could be a Firefox add-on (but now that I think about it, where would the text ads that pay the bills for Google go?)

Lastly, Speaking of add-ons… My favorite Firefox add-on that should be a preference. I love me some tabbed browsing. So much so that I can accumulate quite a few tabs in no time at all - way too many to fit across my window. That’s why my favorite Firefox add-on is Tab Mix Plus, a simple plug-in that allows your tabs to create multiple rows rather than that little out-of-space dropdown.  In action, it looks like this:

To all our avid digitalmissive readers:

You may have noticed a slowing down in the postings over the past month or two.  Well, we’ve been a little more busy than usual lately: Brian’s been working with a start-up (and pulling those start-up hours) while simultaneously getting ready to move to Europe.  Andreas has been busier than usual as well, with little indication that this will change.

What this means is that in the near term at least, our pearls of wisdom may be coming fewer and farther in between.

We’ve always tried to make what we do post on digitalmissive well worth your time to read, though, and will continue to keep the focus on quality rather than quantity - so we hope you continue to check in from time to time, or better yet, take the time to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Have a great summer,

Brian and Andreas