Kapil Israni

So we all had our experiences with our phone carriers and we all reliase how much they suck, iPhone users probably have more stories than their counterparts. Last week, I had one such experience with AT&T and this definitely deserves a mention.

Now let me be absolutely clear, this is not about the customer support representative on the other side of the phone, he did a great job. Also this is not about a phone issue that I had. This story starts when my dear friend IM’ed me from NYC airport, as she was flying in home to SFO. And as it happens often, she left her 2-month old precious Blackberry in the cab on her way to the NYC airport. She contacted me, after she realized that the cabby or whoever had her phone had no intention of returning it back.

She wanted me to call AT&T to deactivate her phone. After going through a painful 45 minutes with AT&T, I was able to get her phone deactivated. So whats the big deal, you ask? Well what I learned from this experience is that I can pretty much get anyones phone disconnected, the only information I need is the phone # and the persons name. Thats it!

So let me run through some of the details of the call. After explaining the situation to the support guy, he gathered some basic information about the phone - number, name. To deactivate the phone he wanted the internet password, my friend did not know the password, because she’s probably never used her online AT&T account. This is what surprised me. Internet password, thats AT&T secret question, really? He refused to move forward if I did not give that password. I was ready to give out my friends SSN, mother’s maiden, DOB…anything, but no AT&T wanted that password. How bizarre is that? I can access my 401k using my SSN but not my phone account. After some convincing, I was able to move past the password requirement. Meaning AT&T proceeded to deactivate the phone using just a phone # and the person’s name. Big process hole.

Then came another shocker. So this phone was under a corporate account (which apparently has hundreds of thousands of employees). And the deactivation system had no phone number search mechanism, it only had a phone a/c owner search feature. Meaning the representative could only search for the corporation name , after which he had to manually scroll down and look for the phone # and that big long list ended up being about 30 minutes long. I was in complete disbelief as the guy on the other side was manually scrolling down the list. Thats the system AT&T has in place for its consumers. Leaves me not surprised at all on the quality of service we have come to accept from AT&T.

When Apple released the iPad in late march, I was one of the nay sayers. I, like many others in the geek world back then, was expecting to see a Apple tablet with OS X with a touch interface. But what we got was disappointment in the form of a big iPhone (actually Jon Stewart’s joke that he uses it to pretend to his kids that hes shrinking, was super funny). That was my first impressions of it as well. Since then however it has changed, I think Apple may have got it right. Although I will still say, lack of front-facing web cam and flash is little disappointing.

iPad to me first and foremost is a device for content consumption and less for content creation. Though Apple tried to set that perception right by demoing iWorks on the iPad on the day it was released. But I still do believe content consumption is where it will be used most. Having said that I think creating music, photoshopping images, editing videos should still be fun on an iPad and we will see more apps doing that. At the recent ReadWriteWeb Mobile Unconference, I also saw a few iPad users taking notes during sessions. So even though we will see examples of content creation, consumption of content is where iPad’s potential is.

If you want to know on why apple may have got the iPad right, you have to look at the news of last two weeks. HP announced the acquisition of Palm. Along with it came the news of HP ditching Win7 for their Tablet devices in favor of the more suited platform for such devices namely - WebOS. More than a business decision, this was also a technical decision, prompted by what iPad has delivered. What iPad has demonstrated is that consumers are looking for a different kind of experience on their Tablet. Lets face it Desktop centric OS’s are still fairly complicated to use, not for the average geek but definitely for the rest. Don’t forget the role of tech support some geeks have to play when your mom or dad or friend or girl friend calls on how to  recover from a crash or how to setup that printer. Then there are other advantages of a lighter OS - light on battery and hardware.

Blackberry made a similar announcement that they will use their own mobile OS for their tablet devices. The success of iPad has definitely contributed to the decision made by these respective companies.

Before the iPad most tablet devices distributed the traditional PC based OS’s on the tablet. These OS were not built around touch interface. Touch interface was an after thought and thats where the devices failed. Apple on the other hand, tested their touch OS on the iPhone and how well they tested. Then they took the same touch centric OS and ported it to a bigger form factor device and called it iPad. And this strategy might work out just great. Now that everyone is over the disappointment of not seeing OS X in a touch interface avatar, and the slow explosion of cool and intuitive apps, this looks like a win for Apple.

This success has made every other vendor turn around their Tablet strategy and pretty much follow the apple path. Take the existing mobile touch OS and port it to a bigger sized portable devices. As again, Apple may not be the first one to create a product, but they are definitely the first one to actually define it.

The success of Android too will enable multiple vendors to launch Andorid based Tablets fairly soon. WePad from Germany is expected to be out soon, although it’s new name is WeTab after Apple made them change the name or at least thats the rumor going around.

So get ready to see more Tablets from new vendors with existing mobile or touch centric OS’s. It will be most interesting to see what will be Microsoft’s tablet strategy. I had a chance to get a look at Windows Phone 7 yesterday and the user experience is amazing. Will Microsoft too switch to their new OS for portable tablet devices?

Well I recently made the move to Mac from Windows and yes I got me a i7 :) and I have  a few friends asking about the move and development tools on Mac, so I thought I will share them here.

Its been close to 2 months and I absolutely love it. Have no regrets at all on my “bid adieu” to Windows. I have one word for the Mac - Inspiring. Being an engineer my Mac is setup to be a hack machine. First thing I noticed about Mac is the Terminal, never thought a shell could look so beautiful. It is pretty.

Most of the editing is done on TextMate and it is a great tool for any developer who plans to write code in any language. I tried Coda, but not really my kind of tool. I use TextMate for PHP, Ruby, Scala, HTML. For Java related stuff I use the tried and tested Eclipse, I think its a great editor and keeps getting better. My Web runtime is MAMP & Locomotive. Add to this Xcode for Objective-C. For CSS I use CSSEdit, a really awesome tool.

I have to give a shout out to Balsamiq, it is a really good mockup tool. I know there are some really good ones out there, but I really like Balsamiq. I know the developer of the tool is raking in some serious cash on this tool, so good for him. This is Adobe Air based tool, so its not really Mac only.

My code repository is SVN in the cloud and I usually use command line. There are some really nice looking SVN clients out there, but I haven’t felt the need yet.

There are some dashboard widgets that I end up using sometimes. There’s the Rdoc and PHPConsole.

Apart from the development tools there are some other content consumption tools that I really like. First and foremost is Tweetie. Again a tool that personifies Mac’s philosophy - easy to use & beautiful. If you are a Twitter junkie, this is a must. And if you are not a Twitter junkie, I say why not. A quick plugin for Twitter, lot of people confuse it for being a social network, well yes it could be if thats how you want it to be. But more than that, Twitter is a information network. So get on it and soak in all that information.

And theres the RSS reader from NewsGator, it is pretty decent. Lot of people just prefer google reader, I guess.

There’s the developer productivity category tools that I think deserve a mention. My top in this list has to be Evernote. Two words “Thank you” for Evernote. Next on the list is Sketch, very useful for taking screen snapshots and sharing them in a snap :)

I also use iGTD quite a bit for my ToDo list, but I think it all depends if you are a ToDo kind of a developer. I for one don’t quite rely on RAM, I like them persistent.

One other tool that deserves a mention is Fluid. Their punchline says - Turn your favorite websites into Mac desktop applications. And thats pretty much what it does. I have learnt to use it to speed up some of my daily workflows. Web based email clients is one example.

One last thing is SFTP/FTP client. I use Flow, which I was able to grab in the MacHeist bundle. I wont recommend it, it crashes on me all the time. Transmit is probably the best for this, Cyberduck is decent and it comes free.

The thing that I find missing on the Mac is probably a Visio replacement. Sometimes my work requires me to draw boxes to architect solutions and thats one area where I am left wanting.

So yeah thats my hack environment on my new Mac and I must say I feel really productive. I don’t know if its the inspiring Mac or the tools or both combined. Whatever it is, I am happy about my switch to Mac.