Digital Revolution

There are few tasks that a iPhone can not do better than a Apple Watch. Thus, for Apple Watch to succeed, its functionality must be much more focused and streamlined. John Gruber wrote, "... Apple never needed to reverse course with Apple Watch. They just needed to identify and focus on what Apple Watch was best for: notifications and fitness/health tracking." The list should go beyond notifications and fitness. Apple Watch shines whenever iPhone is not immediately available, like riding a motorcycle or during emergencies. There are many tasks that can arise. Suppose a person is on his/her way to a gathering and late. He/She can use the Apple Watch to compose a message on the road to tell others about it and possibly how much time before arrival. The information may involve apps like Calendar to specify the gathering, Contacts to look up people, Maps to estimate time before arrival, and Messages to send out the word, etc. It's a complex process. As the post App Interopera...

Complex tasks often require multiple apps to accomplish. Companies bank on app interoperability to promote app suites. The combination of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign in digital publishing is hard to break, partly because features like linking and embedding make working across these apps seamless and fluid. App interoperability is easy to overlook, but can be great to have when needed. Possibly due to rapid development of mobile gadgets, the implementation of app interoperability is often ad hoc. To annotate a photo on iPad, one imports the photo into Notes app, annotates, and then takes a screenshot to send back to Photos for further cropping. Screenshot and cropping feel somewhat foreign from the perspective of workflow. There should be better ways to do it. Better app interoperability means better user experience. Don't underestimate that.

Since modern tablets launched, the expectations changed a lot. At the beginning, Apple intended to position the iPad as a whole new category of device for daily-life computing. Then with the launch of Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, tablets seem more suited to specific tasks like graphic design and painting. Now we are hearing that the ideal of tablets is to replace laptops, due to the availability of Magic Keyboard. At each shift in expectations, the originality of tablets was undermined. Is the original goal of making tablets daily-life computers justified? If so, why did tablets keep "failing"? The answer is likely complex, but it does seem that the app and content ecosystem isn't ready for tablets yet. In previous posts about digital library and research publications , it's clear that tablets have potential, but supporting technologies aren't there. Tablets today excel at video consumption, but there is much more to do. Android tablets failed early at least for GU...

Research publications are dominated by the paper model with deep roots in print. Although most publications are available online, the format is still raw digitization of print material. It's almost as if even the most innovative academics reject the idea that digital revolution could bring positive changes to research quality. Take science publications for example. During active research, researchers often employ large data sets for study. At the end of the process, only tiny bits of selected statistics appear in published paper. Since data generally can not be reduced to statistics due to Shannon entropy, the conclusion based on statistics may be dubious. One hears lies, damn lies, and statistics not for trivial reasons. Often, there is no way for a reader to verify a published paper without original data. Yet, academics cling to the traditional paper model. Digital technology should be employed to improve verifiability of research publications! Programs and data may be bundled to...