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Technology Lessons from Travel

For the past week or so, I’ve been on the road, so to speak, travelling on holiday in Mexico. A frequent traveller who likes to soak up the culture of the country in which I find myself, I’m nonetheless unable to disconnect from reality and spend much of my time connected through social media, email, Skype, podcasts and RSS feeds to the friends, family and world back home.

I’m always milling through a few questions in my mind before I travel, such as:

1. which device/s to take;

2. how to get connected – whether through wifi, 3g or a combination of the two; and

3. which platforms to use for blogging, sharing and communicating.

Central to my decision-making in all of the above is the extent to which I need to be productive while on holiday, the tools that I know and the workflows that support the things I generally need to do. This holiday’s been a really interesting one for two reasons: first, having to attend the conference in Grand Rapids, I opted to take the technology ‘works,’ including my iPhone (unlocked), iPod, iPad, digital camera and MacBook; and, second, the fact that my MacBook died on me three days into the trip, leaving me with the iPad as my primary computing device.

A frequent blogger, I need to be able to compose entries offline and include images, videos and audio where necessary. For this reason, I love third party applications that connect with WordPress and Blogger APIs and often use MarsEdit on the Mac or Blogsy on the iPad. My main concern with these tools, and with web apps generally is the extent to which they genuinely support offline use and the extent to which they cater to users with limited bandwidth. Having to subsist on the iPad, I’m happy to report that with a combination of Blogsy for blogging, Photogene for image resizing and uploading and the iPad SD card connector, I’m able to blog through both WordPress and Blogger with relative ease and on a very limited connection (resizing the images down to 640×480 reduces each image from a whopping 1.9 mb to a mere 140 kb). It’d be nice if Blogsy let me position and queue the images and text offline, but for now I’ll make do – and I’ll certainly consider the iPad sufficient for the next holiday.

Having said all of this, trips where I’m often scrounging for a wifi signal and wasting valuable time uploading images when I could be just enjoying myelf make me appreciate a nice constant broadband or good-quality 3G connection. They also make me aware of the circumstances in which the vast majority of people in the world get connected (or not) on a daily basis. In as much as I’ll pressure the developers of the apps I use to support offline and limited connectivity/bandwidth, I’d also like to pressure app and website developers to consider users in developing world contexts, especially those who access the web through tiny mobile devices and much older 2G and 1G standards. If we’re serious about equity and the potential of technology to vastly improve the living standards of so many around the world, we need to be thinking about how we support older technologies and limited access at the same time as paving the way forward for the world of newer and faster.

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Blogger’s Frustration – the Technology or Us?

Having spent the past few days in Fiji, I thought I’d share some of my frustrations – and hopefully insights – about the perennial choice between netbooks and tablets for productivity and consumption with technology. As I’m now fully grappling with some of the strategic decisions regarding which device to recommend for my school’s 1-1 implementation later this year, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to take along my ASUS eeePC 901 and Apple iPad for the holiday and see which device would prove the best for which situation.

My typical uses for these technologies included:

– RSS reading
– Checking, posting and replying to emails
– Social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
– Updating this blog (WordPress)
– Updating my travel blog (Blogger)
– Drafting blog posts with Google Docs

My eeePC usually runs Ubuntu Linux but as part of the experiment, I installed Windows 7 to see how it would fare with some of the more proprietary programs I like to use (iTunes, Word, Excel, MobileMe, Evernote, etc.) I currently use an Apple bluetooth keyboard with my iPad that I purchased in the US a few months ago.

It’s interesting to note that with just a few days of milling around in my spare time and trying out all of the above on each device, it’s very clear to me when each device comes to the fore as the best device for certain tasks (granted, many people have already written on this but it helps to experience the difference for yourself). All of this said, there were a few issues that really complicated things and need to be noted first, especially given that they apply to many people around the world (including many of the kids I teach):

1. Many applications and/or operating systems are not geared properly for offline-use or use with slow and/or patchy internet connections. This especially applies to circumstances where there is no good alternative to web platforms such as Facebook – which needs to be constantly “on” and is very data intensive (side note: Facebook used to have a “lite” edition that worked very well with poor internet connections – where did that go?)

2. Blogging is especially difficult where the internet connection is patchy and slow. Although there are some good offline blogging platforms, very few properly utilize a WYSIWYG approach to editing, especially when it comes to including and manipulating images as I frequently need to do in my travel blogs.

3. We are so often restricted by proprietary affiliations between different applications and/or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions – such restrictions stifle creativity. For example, when using Windows Live Gallery to manipulate images, the user can only upload images to certain services like Facebook with a mandatory MSN account. On Picasa, ‘Blog This!’ only works with Google’s Blogger.

In any case, I found the following:

1. The iPad – Powerful and Slick (but on Apple’s terms)

The iPad quickly showed its power as a superb email device, RSS and ebook reader, handy tool for social networking and reasonable device for drafting the text for my blog posts. Not having a SD card reader adapter, however, I immediately hit a wall when it came to importing/editing photos, having to rely on Windows Live Gallery instead (although I usually run Picasa on Ubuntu) through the netbook. Nonetheless, with my bluetooth keyboard, and unified inboxes on the iPad’s email app, I was easily able to stay in touch with friends and family. The email app also works very well when wifi is patchy, saving a message to the outbox and sending it when the next connection becomes available. Apps like the very successful Yoono also allowed me to quickly stay in touch with all of my social networks on the one screen. As for RSS reading, MobileRSS has now become my indispensable go-to application for staying in touch with all my never-ending feeds.

Where the iPad fell short – and where the netbook picks up – is in the limitations and restrictions of the apps and the highly restricted functionality of the up-to-now mandatory Safari browser. Writing in either Blogger or WordPress through the browser was next-to-impossible, with half a draft disappearing in smoke the minute the wifi signal dropped out. While drafting text is all well and good in Notes, Pages or the WordPress app, I needed to upload and manipulate images for my blog and to date, as far as I’m aware, this is simply not possible.

2. The Netbook – Highly Functional, Flexible and Open (if you can weather the lag)

As for being a reasonably full-functional and familiar computer, the net book shines, as long as you set it up properly and don’t expect the world in performance (this is precisely why I will never again run Windows 7 on an Atom processor!) Being a huge fan of customizing an OS, pimping out my browser and tweaking everything to be the way I like it, I’m also a fan of any device that truly lets me do this. Short of jail breaking, apps on the iPad are forever restricted to Apple’s approval which is, as we know, becoming harder and harder to gauge and even harder to predict.

While I got away with – and rather enjoyed – doing most things on the iPad, there was that familiar sense of joy that I got when firing up Firefox and having my favourite skins, toolbar buttons and plugins. There’s also a familiar sense of woe in accepting that such an open browser is unlikely to make a debut on Apple’s poster child any time soon.

So the verdict? Unfortunately I remain in two very divided technology worlds and two minds on the subject. While the CES convention has unmistakably touted 2011 to be the year of the tablet (and an Android one at that), the real test in my view will be the extent to which the device can be genuinely shaped to suit the needs of the user, by the user. These days, I have increasingly less time for being told how I should be using a device. While there’s no silver bullet (and probably never will be), there’s plenty of scope for putting pressure on the big players to collaborate, keep things open and listen to us. That much should give anyone cause for optimism, at least for now!