Two years after Guitar Rig 3 was released in autumn 2007, the fourth iteration of the software modelling application for guitarists was released by Native Instruments. This time around a combination of an ever increasing workload, little free time and the fact that Guitar Rig 3 was ‘good enough’ for my needs meant it took me a while before deciding to buy Guitar Rig 4.

A special offer by Native Instruments landing in my email inbox a few weeks ago, some free time to play the guitar — after weeks of not touching it — and the ease of buying software online meant that Guitar Rig 4 was running on my MacBook Pro in no time.

This release is the first one that dropped support for Power PC Macintosh computers, around three and a half years after Apple stopped selling them. There is no good reason for this change, Guitar Rig 4 would run comfortably on PowerMac G5s and maybe even the last generation of PowerPC-based iMacs.
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If its anything like the demo video Microsoft’s Courier is the closest device I’ve seen to Apple’s — now classic — demonstration entitled the Knowledge Navigator. See the resemblance?

From the few images and videos around, the device seems beautiful, but that’s not the point; as the Mac and then the iPhone have demonstrated, it’s all about the software and Courier seems to have a great combination of writing recognition using a stylus, a great touch user interface including multi-touch support for hand gestures and a great visual and ergonomic user experience paradigm to manage it all.

Most of the concepts and paradigms found in the Courier were introduced by Apple, yet Apple recently introduced the iPad, a device definitely more limited — from what we can tell without having used either — than Courier¹. Apple introduced a great ‘touch’ interface with the Newton and then redefined the whole industry with the iPhone. Apple Inc., the pioneer, is effectively doing all the applied research work for Microsoft — something I’ve also argued in earlier posts; concepts that the company comes up with and realises in the form of amazing products are, a few short years later, found — sometimes successfully, others in more kitsch, mediocre and definitely tasteless versions of their former self — in Microsoft products and technologies. At the same time, the one, single segment where Microsoft is truly and firmly leading the pack is basic research, the kind of stuff that is high risk, that may not lead to profit in the next five years, the kind of thing that costs a lot, that startups don’t have the money, need or desire to do, the kind of thing that idiots waving their MBAs would probably dismiss without a second thought, but — ultimately — the kind of stuff that changes technology and as a consequence the world we live in.

If the Courier is anything like what we see in the video (see below) then I think they’re on to a great product and I’m very interested in seeing how it’s going to play out between them, the various Android and Chrome OS devices coming out soon and of course Apple, the company that everyone uses as a point of reference and that which will most probably will continue to surprise us all in the coming decade.

1. Of course Courier is merely a demonstration while the iPad is a real device hitting the Apple Store[s] very soon.

It must have been sometime near mid-December when I first actually saw and used — albeit briefly — a Nexus One. A Googler, the owner, graciously let me use it for a bit after receiving it as part of the Google corporate gift that the device got — more a publicity stunt rather than an actual trial in my opinion. More encounters with the phone, again owned by friends or acquaintances working for Google, let me get a clearer look at what widely became an online sensation over the holiday season, generating too much buzz, well before sites like techcrunch, gizmodo, engadget et al. started publishing early, unofficial reviews.

And what I saw was good, even great in some respects, although far from what Google tries to make it seem. The Nexus One is far from just another smartphone; it is a message and a demonstration. A message from Google to the telcos, that the company is seeking a departure from the status quo. A demonstration, to everyone, but mostly perhaps to manufacturers, and Google’s competitors, that the platform, in this crucial moment where expectations are high and the mindshare is there and the spotlight is on them, of the standard that Google is seeking with regards to device design and also regarding the control it has on the software that runs on those devices.
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Upstart is the ‘new’ event-based sysvinit replacement by Canonical, that has been widely adopted in the linux world ever since it first appeared in late 2006. The idea is centred around causality, that is, defining relationships that are not loosely defined by some measure of time, but by the presence (at runtime that is) of processes that a service depends upon. For example, if you need service X to run after service Y, you shouldn’t have to ‘wait’ for Y to start before starting X, but, instead, you should be able to specify that X depends on Y in some canonical form and the system would try to start X as soon as Y was up and running. In other words as a user/administrator of a machine you shouldn’t have to go through all that S?? and K?? silliness from SysV.

Upstart is by no means the first such service management system; Apple has incorporated its own version of such a system, called launchd, since the mid 2000s and so has Sun Microsystems with SMF. In fact, launchd was considered as a sysvinit replacement for Ubuntu 6.10, before Upstart was anything but a crude replacement for the /sbin/init daemon, but the idea was scrapped due to licensing issues (launchd was at the time licensed under the somewhat controversial Apple Public License; it has since been relicensed under the Apache License).

In the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 release Upstart has reached another milestone, ‘just’ three years since it first made its appearance as a project; a number of core scripts have been rewritten as Upstart jobs (yay). Despite the fact that Upstart has been adopted by a number of systems (including Fedora, Maemo and — soon — Debian, among others) there are numerous issues (and practically no documentation for most of the system) as well as extreme volatility in both the format and structure of Upstart jobs and — alas — the aimed featureset. The only thing that’s been ’stable’ in Upstart is the actual daemon, while the configuration/job format has been changing (and being moved around) every few months.
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It should be no surprise that Verizon would invest in Android, given the onslaught that AT&T’s exclusivity with the iPhone has brought to everyone, despite the fact that Verizon’s network is superior to AT&T’s, the fact that it has a number of popular handsets and services etc.

And while Europe remains the place where mobile telephony reigns, it is the United States and Asia, with HTC, Apple and Google providing great next-generation devices and Nokia — the reigning king — becoming increasingly irrelevant where it matters: profits, mindshare and innovation.

The new Motorola Droid, a phone launched by Verizon and developed in collaboration with Motorola and Google as its own ‘iPhone killer’ is the first to feature Android 2.0 and a seemingly powerful device in terms of hardware features. Expected to be using the same CPU family as the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre, an ARM Cortex A8 processor and most probably the powerful OMAP3430 by Texas Instruments, the Droid features a high-resolution display and an assortment of features that puts its firmly in N900 territory and far exceed those of the iPhone 3GS. That’s as far as the hardware is concerned, because in the software realm things are so much better than Nokia’s half-baked, joke of an environment and network platform (Ovi). Even before launch, the Android platform is rapidly gaining ground in terms of application availability; with its modern APIs and evolving feature-set make it a great adversary; software matters as the iPhone has demonstrated, with its superior UI and the vast library of applications — more than 85,000 of them as of late September 2009, a massive number compared to 10,000 for the Android and only 2,000 for the BlackBerry.

So how is the Motorola Droid going to compare with the iPhone, the BlackBerry (especially the latest Storm 2) and the competing Android offerings by other manufacturers? I guess it’s going to do pretty well in the United States, especially if Verizon holds its on in terms of marketing and sales. To me ‘Droid’ looks retro. Typical of the stuff that I’m used to seeing from Motorola; this doesn’t necessarily mean that the device is bad and I would refrain from passing judgement about its appeal until actually using one.
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