Nimdae's Blog

DRM, at least as advertised to the public, is designed to thwart piracy. However, it completely fails to do this.

The real purpose of DRM is to control devices. It does this quite well, but still does not prevent people from doing their own thing.

I have run into Blurays from Netflix that do not work in my bluray drive. From what I can find, the only solution is to upgrade the bluray drive as it’s not a key issue, but a format issue. (on that note, how can you call it bluray if you changed the format?).

I downgraded my Netflix account because I didn’t feel like playing this game. Getting rid of the bluray option also saves me $4/mo.

So I get my first round of DVDs since that change. I found one that would not play in any DVD player/reader. I reported it as bad and Netflix sent another. Same result for the same movie.

Measures taken to prevent piracy by making it difficult for the end user to keep up only pushes them to piracy. As it stands now, if I want to see this movie, I have to pirate it because it is not available for streaming and their disks break format in the name of copy protection.

Want to solve the piracy problem? Stop making it difficult to be a legitimate user and provide a better product than piracy does.

Once upon a time, I use to identify the part of a piece of software the user interacts with the User Interface. Whenever I heard someone refer to UX, I assumed they were talking about the UI. Eventually, I learned there’s a big difference between User Interface and User Experience.

It’s possible to have a consistent UI in your cross platform application, and a vastly differing UX.

Case in point, look at speedtest.net’s application available for Android and iOS. Same UI, different UX.

Being the owner of an Android device and an iOS device, I’m starting to see why it’s difficult to switch between the two platforms. Applications are developed so differently between the two platforms, not only is the UX different, but so is the UI.

Case in point, look at the Starbucks application. They are completely different applications between Android and iOS achieving the same goal.

I understand they are completely different platforms, but that is not an excuse for your development teams to not communicate and agree on UX, let alone UI design.

I’ve used Android devices for some time now. I’ve had 3 of them, including my current Galaxy Nexus, which I absolutely love. It’s not the latest and greatest, but I am able to keep it up to date thanks to projects like CyanogenMod. Still, if I ran the base OS in a locked fashion, I would actually not lose much. And thanks to the hardware being pretty decent, it performs well enough that I don’t feel the need to upgrade for more speed. The only problem I have with it is battery life.

When I started working at the company I am at, they gave me a Blackberry Curve. It was the cheapest one they could find. I felt like my boss hated me or something. I honestly struggled to use it. I’m a technical person: I have been running Linux/Unix servers for some time and know how things can get complicated. Still, I struggled with the Blackberry to the point that I avoided using it, if at all possible.

It was pretty much relegated to being just a phone while I used my Android phone to access work email, keeping my personal number out of company hands.

With my job change, my new boss felt like this was a problem and ordered me an iPhone 5. I was happy to finally be getting something that will actually help me work more efficiently on the go. Android devices are prohibited from accessing corporate services (doh) so they would not pay for me to use an Android device.

So I’ve had it a day now. Already it is leaps and bounds better than the Blackberry. I already have messaging, mail, etc, all set up, which I never managed to get fully functional on the Blackberry.

But, it’s not as good as Android.

I recently read an article that I can’t seem to find of a guy that had the same complaints I did. I have some others as well.

• The keyboard is terrible. It’s designed to be as simple as possible, but it takes longer to enter various things on my iPhone than it does on my GNex (ie: passwords).
• Apple made a pretty big focus on having as few buttons as possible. My GNex has 1 fewer button and 1 fewer switch. The switch is kinda odd, really, but I actually understand it. Still, it’s kinda annoying to have a mechanical button to get to home.
• The app store is really bad. Search results are one item per screen view with no way to flick through results. At least, this is the experience I’m having with it. Searching through apps in the Play store is so much better.
• App management is done through the home screens. If I want the app on the iPhone at all, it has to be on the home screen. No way around it as far as I can tell. There are items I’d prefer to not have there.
• Am I allowed to mention again, for emphasis, that the keyboard is bad?
• I can’t charge the iPhone on a powered USB hub that is not connected to a computer. This is my work phone. I am on call. I need to have my phone nearby while I sleep. This makes the possibility difficult. However, I found a relatively new USB standard addon called USB Battery Charging that is, unfortunately, only available on a single USB hub device.
• Oh yeah, I really dislike the keyboard. No predictive typing, no error correction (at least, it seems so even though I’ve seen evidence of it elsewhere), no alt functions, and it slows me down.

I realize I can get around many of the limitations by jailbreaking my iPhone, but realize also that this is not my personal phone and doing so is likely a company policy violation.

Still, I like the iPhone. This is the first one I’ve seriously used and I can see the appeal for it. I can now honestly say I own one and can provide a more objective opinion about it. As a business phone, it is tons better than a Blackberry, but I have to say I think it’s about time Android get some serious consideration. Android still lacks some of the security required in various corporations and I hope Google addresses this very soon.