The-Asterisk

(The-Asterisk asterisk: I was writing this post before the Apple announcements on September 9, 2014) I am not an expert in the minutiae, but I know a bit about security. Here is my 'simple man' idea to fix the rash of fraudulent credit card charges and debit card withdrawals happening more and more these days. Let's first stipulate that just about everyone has a smart phone onto which an app can be installed, or to which a text message can be sent. Every credit card on file would be registered with an app installed on a phone belonging to the cardholder. Even with multiple cards of various types, the user would be covered (hopefully by a single app.) So, when you go into Target or Home Depot to make a purchase with your compromised credit card, you swipe it at the point of sale (POS) and during the verification process, a challenge procedure is triggered. The credit card clearing house would send an alert message to your app (or a text message to your phone). Thi...

As someone who has written software, I became aware of the term creeping elegance early on. It is the natural tendency to add features and to keep tweaking at the user interface making the application "just a little bit better". If you succumb to the siren call, you can end up spending a lot of time creating (and fixing) features that no one really wants, while avoiding spending time innovating. It is my humble opinion that Apple has swerved into the world of creeping elegance with its latest v7.0 and v7.1 releases of its iOS. Apple released the new v7.0 in September 2013. I resisted upgrading my iPhone and iPad for a while, adhering to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" maxim, as well as the "don't upgrade until the .1 version is out" theory. When I finally upgraded sometime in November, I was underwhelmed by what I saw. It appeared to me that Apple changed the user interface (UI) just because it could. After all, how can you be e...

While I am getting used to using my new 3G iPad, I am thinking ahead to what might be next... actually, what I want to be next. I was struck by three events that happened this week. HP purchased Palm for a cool $1.2 Billion, Microsoft dropped its Courier (two screen foldable) tablet project and HP has also dropped its plans for a slate device based on Windows 7. Things are definitely happening in the mobile computing space, and happening quickly. As I have tweeted and talked about before and Dave Sobel has actually demonstrated , the iPad can be used as a kind of portable thin client. I don't yet know how well it works, but any kind of application like this is a good thing for business computing. We keep hearing over and over about cloud this and cloud that. We also hear about how Apple is the devil incarnate to application developers who are stymied by Apple's restrictions on what can be developed for the iPad and iPhone. And do not forget Steve Jobs' obsession with keep...

This week was the week that Apple finally released their iPad, the long awaited and breathlessly anticipated tablet computer. At the 'unveiling', Steve Jobs announced that the iPad (a name scorned by many, but one I think fits well within Apple's iNomenclature) would be based on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and that all 140,000 applications previously developed for the platform would work on it as well. I think this was a wise decision, giving the iPad immediate access to a plethora of working applications, instead of having to dumb-down Macintosh applications, or worse yet, have to develop a whole new ecosystem around the iPad. Something that was actually shown twice at the announcement (once when Steve sat down and demonstrated the functionality of the iPad and then again when several new iPad-focused applications were showcased) was the New York Times app. I think this is very revealing because for this device to be more than a novelty, it needs the ubiquitous 'kil...