Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

iPad – first hands on reactions

This week I finally got my iPad. Let’s dive right in about what I’ve experienced.

1. I got the iPad WiFi version not 3G. The reason is simple – without paying $130 for the 3G version, you can tether the iPad over wifi to any 3g wireless access point. So you could get Sprint MiFi, a jailbroken iPhone with MyWi (note: I don’t condone this, carrier charges may apply, bla bla bla), or any variety of wireless access points, and as the technology gets better you can always tether to 3G, 4G, 5G, and on and on. So no point in spending extra cash for 3G in the iPad, imho. Besides we all know AT&T is a complete fail when it comes to 3G, although that might be improving soon-ish, one would hope.

2. Reading on this screen is an absolute pleasure. Reading the web, and especially news with something like the Early Edition RSS reader which turns your feeds into a newspaper style layout, is a hell of a lot more efficient than doing it on your computer. I have a 27″ iMac. I prefer to read feeds on the iPad. Nuff said. I do have some concern with reflections in some lighting conditions so I’m considering getting an anti glare film cover.

3. Music apps. I completely didn’t think about this when I bought the iPad but it’s incredible for making music. Already tons of awesome synth, sequencing, drum machine, and other apps have been put out. Many of them as accurate emulations of very expensive hardware. A $500 device whose UI can be morphed to that of any music making machine (and beyond) is pretty incredible. For just a small taste check out the video here of just one of the midi controller Apps available. Having the iPad is like having a minimoog, a kaoss pad, a multitude of sequencers, and all kinds of apps that aren’t even possible with real hardware. All in one portable device you can take on the go and work on music. The music apps tend to be $3-$10 a piece which is very reasonable considering their multi-hundred-dollar hardware equivalents. Actually being able to touch the buttons on screen works a ton better than trying to play an onscreen keyboard with a mouse on my computer. What’s more, people have actually come with some great apps that let your iPad control your computer via MIDI/OSC, over WiFi. With computer to computer networking the latency can be reduced to 2-5ms (I haven’t tried this yet), which is apparently below perceivable threshold.

4. Feel in the hand – it’s a little too heavy to be held with one hand. Very comfortable for two hands, or while sitting down and resting in your lap area. But we still have a little ways to go until we have Star Trek style tablets that don’t seem to weigh anything at all. I expect Apple to be releasing an iPad TNG sometime in the next five years as technology improves, so no worries there :). What is absolutely certain is that this form factor is the way of the future 90% of tasks you do on your computer don’t require much typing, and for interacting with content, a touch screen is a lot more efficient and of course more fun, than messing around with a computer. I wish it had a brightness switch that was easier to access than through the settings menu. But I’m sure a jailbreak will solve that soon enough if it hasn’t already.

5. iPad as radio and tv – this is pretty great. I have it docked next to my computer so while I’m working I can listen to radio separately on this screen. Yes it’s an expensive $500 radio, but the touch interactivity and browsability of the excellent Pandora and NPR apps makes it worth it. You can also stream Netflix and ABC videos to it so it works great as a small desktop TV. The only thing I wish it had was proper iTunes video streaming (on my computer I can start watching a movie while it downloads). Couldn’t figure out how to make that happen on iPad. Probably something that will be fixed in a future software release.

6. It’s *fast*. I mean blazing fast, apps open instantly. Even though we’re getting multitasking in 4.0, it almost feels unnecessary with the speed of switching between apps. Safari opens with the last page you viewed instantly, so does Mail, and other apps. Third party apps are a tiny bit slower but even the most demanding ones like a software synth only take about 3 seconds to open.

7. Games are z-o-m-g. I’m not a gamer, but I just had to download NOVA (that’s basically Halo for iPad). The graphics are amazing and because the UI is not limited by any physical controller you get innovative things like being able to drag your controls around the screen to place them where it’s comfortable for you. There’s also the ability to use multitouch gestures in games, for example two finger swipes to throw grenades or opening doors by turning their locks with three fingers. Graphics are gorgeous and fast. Another cool game that’s completely free is GodFinger which lets you control a little world. I bet people who are into farmville will fall in love when they see this app. This is by the same people who made Rolando. Very clean vector style graphics and a great physics engine.

8. The popular apps that I’ve downloaded so far, by and large show a level of UX thoughtfulness and clean design that goes beyond most anything I’ve seen on desktops or on the web, even among apple software. It’s just a pleasure to use all these apps. Most every app that has an equivalent website (amazon, ebay, npr, weather.com, bloomberg, etc). All these apps are designed better, work better, and are easier and faster to use than their web equivalents using a keyboard and mouse. Either it’s some kind of UI guidelines that Apple has put out, or maybe just people stepping up their design game, but I’m really happy to be using these apps. There’s an incredible design renaissance going on here and in large part it’s thanks to Apple for providing a device like this.

9. Battery life. Is pretty much awesome – in standby mode it can live seemingly forever. Two days without any charge, with very moderate use (15 minutes per day) and it’s still at 95%. If you do intensive things like gaming the battery goes down significantly. But I believe the 10 hour advertised battery life is not far from the truth, with ’standard’ use (internets, and such).

10. It pairs nicely with the bluetooth keyboard that shipped with my iMac. The only problem is that many of the ’shortcuts’ you’d expect (like apple-L to get to the search bar of safari) don’t work. So you have to use your finger to select stuff, and switch back to the keyboard for typing. A little more thought put into interacting with iPad via keyboard would be awesome. For example having shortcuts to go to the home screen, ability to select an app from homescreen using arrow keys, a shortcut for getting to the search screen, etc. All these would make keyboard usage instantly more pleasant. Hopefully something like this will come in a future update.

On the lack of Flash: um..really haven’t noticed it. YouTube works. TED.com works. Netflix works. ABC shows work. Vimeo works. Flickr videos work. CNN, Reuters, and NYT videos all work. Customized news apps deliver even more video content if all that isn’t enough. And honestly I don’t miss any of the evil flash ads. Look at all these sites who rushed to embrace HTML5 video because of Apple’s abandonment of Flash. I applaud this effort. Good riddance to a crashy, cpu-hogging, outdated hack for cross platform video.

That is all for now.

Want some stock tips? Part 1 – Amazon

A friend recently asked me for some stock tips. I am not a professional trader or any kind of stock analyst. In fact, I know very little about trading stocks. I barely know what a P/E ratio is, and usually I don’t care about it. Read that again: I do not really analyze the financial performance of any companies I invest in. So take this advice with a grain of salt and don’t hold me liable :)

My policy of buying stocks is simple. I pick the companies that are market makers, and are or will be the market leaders ten years from now, and then I hold them, and buy more when they go on sale.

This post – it’s just my view of the future. I’m going to start by analyzing one company we all know and love – Amazon (AMZN).

This is a company that permeates our lives (even my grandpa has ordered things from Amazon), but most people have only a vague idea about their real business. Amazon has two core businesses (again, this is all my opinion and understanding and has no specific basis in financial data).

The first business which we all know and love is their retail store network. You can get anything under the sun there — and I have. I live in a city and I don’t have a car. It may drive the mailman nuts, but I get packages delivered almost every week. When I lived in a big apartment building with mostly older people, I was known as the package guy. They thought I was running some kind of shady business – but I was just shopping for my daily essentials. Whether it’s some knicknack I need for one of my many hobbies (photography, music, etc), household items, art supplies, and of course books – it all comes from Amazon.

Now let’s look at my generation – Millenials, Gen Y, Echo Boomers, whatever you wanna call us. Second largest generation in history (after our Boomer parents). More of us live in cities. We’re more affluent. We drive less. We lead busier lives. We’re phenomenally Internet savvy, and thus empowered to be market mavens. We’re connected 24×7 — some of us through multiple mobile devices. We desire customized shopping experiences. We carry a strong sense of entitlement combined with a lack of patience and an expectation of on-demandness (I want it now!)

Shopping online, whether at a desktop or on the go is the perfect solution for us. It wastes little time, it offers vast choice, and it gives us a customized experience based on the recommendations of others. What this adds up to is lots of money lining Amazon’s pocket as we choose to do our shopping with one click. And let’s not forget that many of us are starting to have kids. And that these kids are going to be ten times more connected than we ever were.

The second business, which most consumers just don’t know the first thing about – is cloud computing (cloud infrastructure, to be more precise).

Somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the traffic through Amazon Web Services (this is all of their APIs, or interfaces for programmers who build services on top of Amazon infrastructure) exceeded the traffic of their entire global retail network. Read that last line again, it’s important.

Is this (going to be) a *huge* business for Amazon? You bet your sweet behind. Amazon has been expanding its cloud business by leaps and bounds, providing many a startup and a few very savvy enterprises a way to save significant money while gaining lots of flexibility, by moving their infrastructure into the on-demand cloud.

With four years in the running, Amazon is pretty much the undisputed heavyweight champion of the cloud infrastructure market. Now, yes – Google is probably building something to truly compete with Amazon’s offering (App Engine was just a taste of things to come). But with enough lead time, market presence, and enough cash on hand (more than six billion) to buy up and coming startups in the space, Amazon is looking strong to remain the leader in cloud infrastructure, or at the very least a very strong second if it starts getting more heat from Google.

Amazon is up 338% over the last 5 years (that of course includes the recent financial crisis and recession). How’s your index fund doing?

Yellow cab fail

Yellow cab: here’s how a policy of training your employees to be replaceable cogs with no ability to think for themselves has cost you my business.

I’m standing outside in the rain, sick, coming from the doctor. I dial yellow cab. Can I please get a taxi at 14th and Castro? Sorry sir, I need an address. I don’t know the address, I’m at the corner of 14th and Castro standing out in the rain trying to catch a cab, can you please send a cab here? Sorry I need an address. Click. They actually hang up on me.

Yellow cab, you’ve permanently lost me as a customer. I don’t get it. In an industry where pricing is fixed, why not optimize for excellent service to get customer loyalty? Do you think there’s an infinite number of customers who will always dial yellow cab because of its name? A couple more blog posts like this, and that name won’t mean a whole hell of a lot.

To those looking for reasonable cab service in San Francisco, I recommend DeSoto cab, which apparently has no problem sending a cab to a well known intersection. Good to know that there are places where common sense still prevails.

Make the easy stuff free

The other day I thought I had lost my Kirkwood ski resort season pass. So I sent an email to the season pass office wondering what it would cost to replace it. Their reply: $50. Now, that’s kind of ridiculous. It takes about 5 minutes of employee time and probably only a couple bucks in marginal material costs (plastic card and printer) to reproduce the pass. Given that purchasing a season pass I have already committed several hundred dollars to the resort, why should they charge me so much for a replacement?

I think there are two philosophies at play here. Their philosophy is that every opportunity to make money should be taken. By charging a large pass replacement fee, they capitalize on their customers’ misfortune and land a little extra cash. However, people lose their passes rarely so the question is: is the occasional extra $50 in their pocket really worth the bad customer service. Am I really going to think about buying another pass when I know it costs another $50 if I lose it? In comparison, Copper Mountain in Colorado charges $15 to replace a very similar pass, so I’m not just making numbers up when I say it can be done cheaper.

BUT, imagine if I had contacted them, and they said “because you’re a valued customer and have committed to skiing with us, your season pass replacement is FREE”. Might I not be inclined to tell my friends about the awesome customer service I just received? I might even be inclined to tell the whole world how awesome Kirkwood is. Is it better to have my $50 or my eternal gratitude, that will bring more of my friends to the resort? Which makes more money for the business in the end?

Of course at the end of the day, I did find my season pass, so I won’t be forking over $50 to them any time soon, but…now there’s inspiration for this blog post…. The moral of the story is: if it’s easy for you, make it free for your customers, and make them feel special. That’s worth much more in future dollars than the money you can make from their misfortune.

pritzkerphoto.com relaunched – portrait photography in San Francisco

Yesterday I relaunched Pritzker Photo, as a home for my portrait photography in San Francisco. I’m starting to take requests for portrait sessions on weekends and some weeknights. If you need a new headshot for your facebook page, dating site profile, to promote your business or creative work, talk to me! 100% satisfaction or your money back guarantee, and get a $15 referral bonus or $25 session credit for telling your friends. Check out the new site and don’t forget to fan me on facebook. Thanks!

(I also apologize to my readers for this blatantly self-promotional post, but you know how the SEO game goes…)

Why I left bluehost: shared hosting doesn’t work

This blog is now proudly hosted on slicehost.com! It seems somewhere in the last couple days, bluehost touched something on my shared hosting account that caused php-mysql to break, and this blog was displaying a message about this breakage.

This was the last straw for me. I previously wrote about how bluehost would not admit to overselling even in the face of clear problems and claiming that restarting mysql regularly was an accepted practice to solve problems, and storing my password in plain text. I was reminded last night why shared hosting is a failure (besides the problems of shared resources in a non-isolated way) – you simply don’t have control over what the host decided to do with the server.

Isolated, virtualized hosting is the way of the future. You get completely predictable behavior – no one will be messing with this server but me. I would run this blog on EC2, but at this point the processing needed is just way too small so I went with slicehost and their $20 256M slice because EC2 does not offer a comparable cheap product. Slicehost is not ideal because they don’t allow you to provision your images from the outside (in other words, to use a product like CohesiveFT’s elasticserver.com to create a bill of materials for a server and provision it predictably (disclaimer: I work for this company, but I also use the product for personal use with Planypus)), but it cheaper than EC2 and for my personal blog, that wins over the convenience of dynamic provisioning for now.

Goodbye bluehost, and good riddance.

What you don’t get about the iPad

The iPad is not a general purpose device. It is not a smaller version of a regular computer, and it should not be.

It doesn’t run all my programs! So what? I’ve seen netbooks running Windows on their tiny screens – the user experience is awful.

General purpose apps run on a smaller screen just don’t work. You’ll spend more time squinting at the screen than getting anything done.

It doesn’t multitask! I’ve had a phone in my pocket for the last year that doesn’t multitask.

Here’s a secret – humans don’t multitask. Not really.
Maybe we can context switch quickly but it’s actually counterproductive according to a lot of studies.

Let me tell you something else: I agree with Joe Hewitt – using Facebook on the iPhone is already a better user experience than the site itself, and on the iPad it will be significantly better.

Reading feeds on the iPhone with the NetNewsWire app – a better experience than my desktop NetNewsWire, or Google Reader.

I know, for example, I can’t read feeds on my laptop, I’m distracted after 5 minutes. When I read feeds on my phone, I am engaged, I am interested, I am learning things.

Generally, the UI for apps on the iPhone: reading email, browsing the web, watching video, looking at photos — focusing on one thing at a time — are all more pleasant, and mostly more productive than the laptop counterparts.

The only thing that’s lacking is the screen size.

So let’s really consider. Does it make sense to take a general user experience like Mac OSX and shrink it down to a smaller screen, so that the user experience sucks?

Or do we take a user experience optimized for small mobile screens, like iPhone OS, and expand it, enlarge it and make it better?

Which is really the smarter choice in moving forward in experience, happiness, productivity? I’d rather have a device that does the 10 things that make me productive really well, than one that does 1000, and all poorly. Because for all the apps, and crapps, and software that’s out there, I use about 10 of the same apps and pieces of software per day. Choice seems like a good thing, but choice actually makes you less happy.

P.S. Apple not supporting Flash on the iPad is a bold and correct move. Just like the web developers who are finally standing up to IE6 and dropping support, we must make aggressive moves to drop technologies like IE6 and Flash. They are holding back the progress of the web, and the only way to deal with them is to quit cold turkey. When the iPad gold rush hits, developers will be forced to move away from Flash, and thus the revolution will have begun.

What the iPad is good for

This is going to be one of those thinking-out-loud, trying to justify dumping half a grand on a new toy posts. So bear with me :) How I plan to use the iPad…

• Watching movies and surfing in bed without annoying MBP fan noise and overheating.
• Taking it with me instead of the MBP when I go on vacation. This will depend on whether light dev work is possible on it (jailbreak + terminal + vim?). Or a TextMate port?
• Using it as a photographer’s tool – if it’s easy enough to offload from SD card to iPad, then it may become a very nice tool for getting large screen previews during photo shoots.
• Sharing photos with friends, family, and clients (on a photo shoot). Again, this implies that iPad will have some type of Lightroom Lite that can handle my photo albums, because iPhoto doesn’t cut it for me.
• As an accessory screen to my normal desktop. For example – leave a twitter client running on it, or something with news headlines. It could work as a non-disruptive peripheral vision information accessory to my normal desktop/laptop setup.
• Reading books? This one I have doubts about, because of the stupid glossy screen. Have you ever tried to use an iPhone without a matte cover? It sucks. Now imagine applying one of those matte covers to a 9.7″ screen. Welcome to air bubble and finger smudge hell.

Other thoughts

• With its lack of multitasking and inability to run native OSX apps (rather than native iPhone apps) – surprising given its powerful processor, I can see the iPad may not be targeted toward power users per se, but with a bit of jailbreaking, I bet it can be made quite useful.
• Where to stick it? Am I going to carry my big laptop bag around for the iPad? If not, where does it go? Doesn’t fit in my pocket, and seems too small for a bag of its own. Will we see the return of the eHolster? Will I have to acquire a Jack Sack man purse?
• The 3G versions are probably going to be useless. AT&T can’t even handle the iPhone. In San Francisco, I’ve had Edge outside the city work faster than 3G inside the city. When the iPad hits, the network will crumble completely unless AT&T steps up its game significantly. I wouldn’t mind paying $20 more per month if it means they get the network infrastructure right. I know they’re kind of in a rough spot having to maintain competitive data plan prices, yet supporting Apple’s mobile devices which get very heavy use. Anyway, I am convinced 3G and mobile broadband in general is a general fail, and with city-wide WiFi around the corner, and WiFi on planes, frankly there’s just no need for it.

Five Rules for Writing Good Code

1. Write for an audience

Code tends to outlive jobs. When we create code, we are not writing for ourselves, but for an audience of peers and progeny that will look upon it and have to maintain it. Do we want them to do so with awe and respect, or with fear and disgust? Writing maintainable code not only makes our life easier, but the lives of those around us, and garners admiration, praise, and rewards – if not always financial, at the very least karmic.

2. Establish a clean framework for future changes

If we start writing new code, and the pattern we establish is that we’ve copied and pasted a line across ten functions, what will happen when someone else comes along to add an eleventh function? Let’s face it, even the neatest programmers can get lazy. If something has been copy-pasted ten times, it will get copy-pasted for the 11th time, and a year later, when we find out we have to change the logic or content of that line, we are now changing 50 lines where we could have had one. Untangling code is always a lot harder than writing it, and we could have prevented the spread of the copy-paste disease by evaluating our code initially for repetitive statements. Always establish a framework for others to follow by writing clean code that reduces repetition, and encourages maintainability by isolating each piece of logic and content to one spot only.

3. Be brief, self-descriptive, and avoid inline comments

Five line functions with descriptive names are easy to understand. They require no comments. Thirty line functions take quite a bit of brainpower to digest, and usually have smelly comments scattered all throughout trying to explain bits of the function. Hundred line functions are an assault on all that is holy and stink to high heaven. If we see lots of comments interspersed in a method, it is a good sign that the code cannot be easily understood. Break it down into lots of little functions with descriptive names, and all of a sudden our code reads like a very clear and concise recipe, and we find that the comments become redundant. Most comments that live inside functions are parasitic organisms, treat them with suspicion.

4. Follow language standards and community conventions

If we break conventions, the next person to read our code will wonder why we did so. When our code raises questions about its style, the reader may start wondering if there was some specific reason that we coded it that way. Worse, they may perpetuate our unusual style through imitation and copy-paste tactics. This makes code harder to understand and wastes other people’s time. I’ve heard an argument from more than one person that they will code with the style they are comfortable with rather than follow language convention. This is especially true of people migrating from one language to another without investing their time in learning new habits and techniques. Remember that most of the time, we are writing code that someone else will be maintaining. Make their job easier by conforming to widely acknowledged standards, so they don’t have to spend any extra mental energy reading through it. It may take we a larger effort initially, but it will pay off with dividends when it comes to maintenance.

5. Really learn the language and the framework

Lots of bad code is written because of language or framework ignorance. If we don’t know the framework we use, we might reinvent the wheel or write obtuse code because we’re not taking advantage of the conventions and helpers already created for us. No need to be a walking encyclopedia, but remember to occasionally open up that encyclopedia and read through it so that you know at least what’s out there. I am sometimes surprised by new things I find in a framework I’ve used for quite a while, that makes my life a whole lot easier. Don’t neglect the docs, and don’t neglect to keep up with blogs that discuss new techniques.

I’m not really back, I’m just pretending. That’s all for now :)

How Facebook can dramatically improve Pages

Despite all the bitching and moaning, I think the recent facebook redesign is great. Focusing on the stream, and the ease of sharing a variety of content works very well. But Facebook Pages feel like an afterthought that was tacked on, hacked on, and clearly never thought through. And now, let the Airing of Grievances begin.

1. Music pages need a prominent and centered Music Player. For all the fail of Myspace the one thing they got right is that a band’s page is about its music. The first thing front and center needs to be a Music Player. Instead we get a half-assed music player option which either has to sit quietly in the bottom left hand corner below the fold, or on the Boxes page (if you make Boxes page the default), but then your page looks fairly stupid, because the rest of the good content (Wall) is elsewhere. So – a very quick and dramatic improvement would be to place the Music Player box right at the top of the Wall tab, so that visitors can hear the music and read the news and talk with the band at the same time.
2. A Page’s administrators need a way to get a solid news stream from the page including all comments, likes, and etc. Without this feature it is difficult to communicate with fans. I run a page for my photography on facebook, but I find there is no good way to get all the comments. Instead I have to notice that someone commented, then find the photoset and look at the photoset’s comments to find the actual comment. There is no good way to know that someone’s written on the page’s wall either, unless you have the wall display in Page + Fans mode, and physically check back. A page can only be an effective tool if it enables the administrators to communicate with the people, but without a feed it’s nearly useless.
3. RSS. Come on facebook, it’s 2009! What is the excuse for not having an RSS feed for the page? What’s more, several places on the site have very carefully hidden RSS links (such as Notes), but they don’t even bother putting in the proper HTML LINK element to get it to show up in the browser’s url bar. Get with the program, please.

I don’t doubt that facebook’s engineers are busy cooking up the next redesign and improvement, but I think that if facebook wants Pages to be a successful tool for businesses, bands, and other commercial-ish entities that are starting to make facebook their home, then that area should be their next target for a redesign and rethink.