For those of you who love Windows as much as I do (I’m just a tech advocate, so I love pretty much all technology), you’re probably interested in hearing where Microsoft is going with the new version of Windows. I’m running Windows 8.1 right now, and in general, computer software versioning follows a fairly rigid convention. When you launch a version with a lot of major new features, you move to the next whole number (so the next version after 8.1 is logically 9). Most companies give their software code names, so between Windows 3.0 and Windows 7, they used names like Windows 95, 98, XP, ME, Vista, etc., but those versions also had official numbers internally between 3 and 7. This jump to Windows 10 (instead of 9) seems very arbitrary, and if you watch the video, they try to explain it, but to me it sounds like an arbitrary decision.
One of the things that Apple has almost always been good at during product launches is making sure that they deliberately tell a story that makes sense within the context of the company, especially when it comes to naming their products. If there isn’t a linear succession of naming, there is a reason for it. So when this newest version of Windows was called Windows 10, I started thinking why that might be.
This spring, at the Microsoft Build conference, Microsoft debuted some features that would be making it into the next version of Windows, including some updates to changes made between Windows 7 and 8 that many users found jarring. These changes were mostly seen as the company backpedalling on their Windows 8 vision with the tiled Start menu and touch-friendly controls. It was said that these updates would be coming in the fall, and most people sneered or derided the company for regressing in the look and feel of Windows.
It’s not just me that thinks Joe Belfiore looks like Ed Norton, right?
The new Windows 10 that was first unveiled yesterday is an early look at software that will be released to the public sometime in 2015. It would seem to me that internally, Windows 9 was deemed to not contain enough meaningful forward progress from Windows 8. From what I’ve seen, it mostly contained changes to placate enterprise users, as well as those who are still intent on running Windows XP in favour of learning the way a slightly different looking operating system might function. I’m not saying Windows 8 was perfect, but it certainly didn’t function THAT differently from Windows 7, and there were marked improvements made to the platform.
So my thought is that Windows version 9 was named and tested extensively internally, but just wasn’t ever released to the public. The company wanted to really make sure they were making upgrades to the system that were simultaneously worthwhile to enterprise customers upgrading from XP or Windows 7 (let’s be honest, no enterprise updated to Windows Vista), while still appealing to Windows 8 customers who are familiar with the Metro interface. I think they have done that in Windows 10.
Now, let’s get back to the story that Microsoft told yesterday about the name. They mentioned naming it Windows 9 as a successor to Windows 8, but hand-waved that away by saying it wasn’t something they wanted to do. Keep in mind that people were expecting a fully-functional operating system with this annual fall announcement, so it’s strange that we didn’t get that. Then they mentioned their lineup of products: Xbox One, OneDrive, OneNote, and said maybe they should call it Windows One. They then mentioned that it’s really too bad that name is already taken, showing a picture of Bill Gates holding an old Windows 1.0 floppy disk. They also mentioned the “giants that came before us”, but missed a major storytelling point in making the move to version 10.
In my vision of what Apple PR and execs would do in a situation like this (or really anybody in computer science would first think of in this situation), a compelling narrative would have been:
We think Windows 1.0 was a huge step forward in the modern computing world, and we also think that the improvements and unification that we’ve built in to the next version of Windows are a whole order of magnitude better than the original version of Windows.
Then they could put up the Windows 1.0 text on the screen, animate the decimal to move one position to the right, and slowly fade it out.
We’re taking Windows on every device to a whole new level, with Windows 10.
This is a much more powerful and future-focused way of telling the story of Windows 10 than how it was done, and though I’m excited to try out Windows 10, I hope Microsoft know what they’re going to do to move the platform forward, if they can get enterprise customers to finally trust them again.
In this video, I talk about how on the iPhone 5S, for the first year I’ve had it, the Touch ID sensor (Apple’s fingerprint scanner) hasn’t worked right for me. I’m really hoping the iPhone 6 will be able to help me out with this, but just know that there are people out there in the world around you for whom fingerprint scanners just aren’t an effective security solution. Post iPhone 6 purchase update: Well, so far the iPhone 6 fingerprint scanner is working a lot better! It’s fairly consistent, we’ll see if that changes over time.
This entry is not so much a gripe session as it is a telling of the story I’ve gone through in making digital entertainment and putting it on the Internet. We’ll call it part one of perhaps many:
VIDEOS
I have been making videos and putting them on YouTube since around the beginning of 2013. It started out very simply, and I’ve been getting better and better as the technology and know-how in my life has very deliberately grown. I am now producing 2-3 videos a week for YouTube (usually 4-5 minutes each) on various channels. I have made music videos, done interviews, talked into a camera about myself or the things I’m interested in, it’s been really fun. The thing that I love most about YouTube is that it takes something REALLY hard (getting video onto the internet and then into the hands of literally billions of people) and removes absolutely all of the hard work from it. If you have a camera phone and the internet, you can create a video that has the potential to be seen by a billion people. YouTube does absolutely all of the heavy lifting for you. Yes, obviously you can put more work into the video itself, but that is the easy part of making a movie. Distribution has been the hardest part of interpersonal communication since the dawn of time, and with the internet, and YouTube, we’ve absolutely cracked it. I can now chat in real-time with somebody across the world instantly, and when I post a video on YouTube, Australians can see it just as fast as Canadians can. It’s a beautiful service, and Google has taken huge steps towards making it even better since they bought the company in 2006. Getting your videos seen is absolutely another hard part of the process, but Google also takes lots of steps to help people like me get their videos seen, as I’ll get to later.
AUDIO
I made this video the day the podcast died (story below).
I’ll call this entry podcasts, but really, as you’ll see, it is a LOT more complicated than YouTube is for videos. I first did what you’d really call a live video podcast (what I call a webcast) in February of 2014. Now, with the help of YouTube, Google+ and Hangouts on Air, doing that was very easy, simple, and trouble-free. Later, when I decided to take that video series and turn it into an audio-only podcast for people on the go, is when things started to go downhill fast. I now run 3 different podcasts (a feed of audio conversations with accompanying text descriptions that you can subscribe to, and find on a website on the internet) and they have mostly been a nightmare, logistically. You see, there is no YouTube for podcasts. The great thing about YouTube is that it is absolutely free to use. Anybody on earth* can put up a video or series of videos, and everything just works. For podcasts, which are basically just videos but without the picture, things are almost infinitely more complicated unless you want to pay quite a bit. Logically, this doesn’t even make sense. Audio is about 1000x smaller** than video of a similar quality, and technically speaking, it doesn’t make much sense how expensive podcast storage is when YouTube is free.
How YouTube Works
It will probably help you to have a little backstory at this point. Every type of media has to be stored somewhere. Back before the Internet, they kept TV and movies on tapes and stored them for broadcast, distribution, and archiving. Like with tapes, you can’t just have a digital file living ON the internet, it has to be stored somewhere. Luckily for us, whereas you would have to go and get a tape from a storage locker, or Blockbuster, or your cabinet, when you have a digital file, you can store it digitally on a server (this serves files to you the same way a server at a restaurant would serve you your meal).
So what YouTube does (and keep in mind that in 2014 they get about two hours of video uploaded every minute) is take your video, put it in storage, and keep it for you forever, for free. I don’t even really understand how this is possible, but that’s what they do. All the time, for the last 10 or so years. For free. They actually also take many steps to do things like stabilize shaky footage, fix things about your video, and store separate versions of your videos in HD and non-HD formats to play them on any phone, tablet, computer or TV as fast as possible.
Not to mention that they also store copies of all of these files in multiple places around the world so everyone can access them quickly, and they cut all of your videos into short clips so that if your connection suddenly slows way down, the video won’t pause, it will just become a lower quality stream, and you don’t have to start the download over again. And it does all of that completely seamlessly. And again, it’s all FREE.
How Podcasts Work
So, back to podcasts. The majority of podcasts are between 20-100 MB (around 1 CD of music, for comparison), but no company has a really good free solution for hosting these files (hosting is the verb used for a server keeping your files for you; computer scientists are REALLY good at physical metaphors, seriously). I should point out that most podcasters do not make a lot of money, and so having a free solution to this problem (or at least a cheap one that actually works) would be super helpful.
I will now chronicle for you the time I am having trying to host music files online, in the order I’ve been trying them. If you haven’t heard of any of these storage solutions, they are all very good in their own right, I will include links where I think it’s appropriate, although each different service seems to have its own reason why it just won’t work to host podcasts.
I have been using Dropbox for a good 4-5 years at this point, and they’ve been really great to me in a lot of ways. I don’t really have to worry about losing any files to a computer crash anymore, because I just keep all of my files on Dropbox. They provide lots of storage for free, and give bonuses for being a student and for referring people to the service, they do a lot of good work. However, free accounts are limited to sharing only 20 GB of (hosted) files per day. This means that your typical podcast (~50 MB) would only need to be downloaded 400 times in a day before going over Dropbox’s limit (at which point you get a warning and your account is temporarily locked).
Now, I should point out that even a moderately successful podcast can get those kinds of numbers (as I did back in August), and so now I can’t use Dropbox to host podcasts. I should point out that you can pay to upgrade Dropbox storage (from 2+ GB free to 100+ GB) and bandwidth limits (to 200 GB), but that still only gives you 4000 downloads per day. Now, I may never get to that point, but having a file host that will disconnect your account automatically after only 1 warning if you become too successful is just a terrible way to do business, and there is no way to up your limit after that, for any price.
While getting a link to download files in Google Drive is a little bit harder than it needs to be, this seemed to be a pretty good system for hosting files. You get 15 GB of free storage, and you can pay only $1.99 more per month to get 100 GB of storage. The problem here comes again when you try to share these files. In the case of Google Drive, you don’t get cut off at a certain size of file, but rather when you hit 30 downloads of a file. This limit isn’t posted anywhere, and so when I switched from Dropbox in August, for the first morning all seemed well, but by that afternoon the downloads had stopped, and I had to scramble to try to find a solution. Google Drive is great in a LOT of ways, but it doesn’t work for podcast hosting.
Today is September 18th, 2014, but it shall be known to me as the day that Archive.org just stopped working. For about a month, all of my audio files were totally fine at archive.org. They make it really easy to add files in bulk, so even switching ~50 URLs wasn’t very hard. And then today, all of a sudden, it just stopped working. None of the links work at all, including the one for the podcast I uploaded on Tuesday night and posted this morning. It has been this way for about 8 hours, leaving me again scrambling to post a Dropbox link to the file while I find another file host that will store my file without all of the issues I talk about above.
Today (September 18, 2014)
Here is where the story pauses, because we are at today. I have been using OneDrive, the Microsoft-powered file service, for about 3 hours. It seems to be holding well, and so perhaps I will be able to follow up with some good news soon. I will say, right off the bat, OneDrive doesn’t make it easy to get a direct link to a file, like Archive.org or Dropbox do, but it working once you have the link is the most important thing to me at this point. And it’s possible that Archive.org will start working again and all will be well, but it will be hard for me to take that chance after today.
On that note, I am definitely looking into hosting my files elsewhere for money (such as SoundCloud), but that costs $150 per year, so I will need to find sponsors and/or funding to make that happen.
Thanks again for reading guys, and wish me luck with Archive.org!
*Does North Korea have YouTube, I imagine not… **This is a guess, it REALLY depends on quality and bitrate.
I recorded this video on February 6th, 2014. Seems almost prescient, and I still think it’s a good idea. Maybe something Apple was already planning to announce? Only next week will tell!
Sometimes, you find yourself wanting to recommend cool things to friends and acquaintances. At times like these, I like to blog about them. My music and podcast recommendations of the week are: John Mayer: Born and Raised – Music on Google Play
I listened to this album again at work this week and it just reminded what an awesome guitarist/soloist this guy is!
I’m going to talk to you today about self-improvement. As somebody who makes a lot of stuff and then puts it on the Internet, it is very easy for me to look through my “back catalogue” and see that the thing I did two months ago is just TERRIBLE. I can’t even bother comparing my 8-week old project to the one I just finished, because they are on completely different levels. Take, for instance, a recent episode of Future Tech Chat:
Now, compare that live video to one from April:
I “accidentally” listened to the older one last night, and it is absolutely painful for me to compare the first minute of the two shows. Now, don’t even bother comparing the two title cards, as I have recently redesigned them to look consistent and clean, but not in a boring way. I’m just talking about my tone, my purposefulness, and my preparedness in starting the two episodes. I was actually probably a little more excited to talk about wearable devices than I was about bicycles, but it’s no contest if you ask me which is the better introduction to a show.
Honestly, what comparing my present self to past versions of me has shown time and again is that if I keep putting effort into improving myself, eventually the bicycles episode will seem just as terrible as the wearables episode does now. I can only improve by continuing to try. The guys over at +AsapSCIENCE, (a GREAT YouTube channel in case you were wondering) made a little video about their first upload this week, and they felt exactly the same way I do.
So, where does that leave me? Basically, I will keep working every single day to get better and to feel more comfortable doing the work I do.
I know I’m kind of burying the lede on this one, but frankly I’m a little nervous about asking people to help me out and to continue to improve. I’ve created a profile on a creative support (aka crowdfunding) platform called Patreon, with absolutely no expectations as to where it will go or how much it will help me. I will continue in earnest with all the projects I’ve already been working on (I’m so lucky that basically everything I do on the Google platform is effectively free), but having some funds available will enable the technology I work with to improve, and I’ve tried to include some perks that will encourage you to help me out. The Patreon funding model is either on a per-project, or per-month basis, but I’m told that you can make a donation for a month and then simply cancel your subscription and support me in a small, lump sum kind of way. Honestly, any positives the use of this platform gets me are more than I’m expecting. You can find me on Patreon at the link below, and thank you to all of you who are already supporting me by sharing my work and chatting about important or mundane things with me on a regular basis, it means more than I can possibly tell you. I would also welcome other methods of support, financial or otherwise, if you’re skeptical about crowdfunding but would still like to help. I just really want to keep making stuff.
