Πριν από περίπου τέσσερα χρόνια υπέπεσε στην αντίληψή μου το geodata.gov.gr. Ήταν ένα από τα οράματα του τότε Πρωθυπουργού, για μια Ελλάδα τεχνολογικά ανεπτυγμένη, κοινωνικά δίκαιη, δημοσιονομικά εύρυθμη κλπ. Το geodata.gov.gr ήταν (αναφέρομαι εκούσια και επιτηδευμένα σε παρελθοντικό χρόνο) ένα portal δημόσιας γεωγραφικής πληροφορίας που στόχο είχε να συσσωρεύσει δημόσια πληροφορία και να την διαθέσει στο κοινό, συχνά κάτω από όρους ευνοϊκούς τόσο για προσωπική όσο και για ερευνητική ή εμπορική χρήση.

Ταυτόχρονα με το geodata.gov.gr έγινε αισθητή και η κρίση και το (αφελές) όραμα του τότε Πρωθυπουργού μετασχηματίστηκε σε έναν (έμπρακτο) οικονομικό, πολιτικό και, εν τέλει, κοινωνικό εφιάλτη από τον οποίο ακόμη δεν έχουμε ξυπνήσει. Η πρώτη προσπάθεια δημιουργίας μιας ενημερωμένης, πλούσιας βάσης γεωχωρικών δημόσιων δεδομένων σύντομα άρχισε να δείχνει την ηλικία της. Μέχρι το φθινόπωρο του 2011, όταν διατέθηκαν τα δεδομένα του δικτύου του ΟΑΣΑ, η παρακμή ήταν ήδη εμφανής: τα περισσότερα από τα στοιχεία του geodata.gov.gr ήταν ήδη παρωχημένα, ενώ τα μόλις ανακοινωθέντα δεδομένα του ΟΑΣΑ, που διατέθηκαν βάσει του προτύπου GTFS που σχεδιάσε και χρησιμοποιεί η Google για να προσφέρει λειτουργίες πλοήγησης σε δίκτυα ΜΜΜ ήταν τόσο προβληματικά που ο Phil Stubbings, ένας βρετανός μηχανικός λογισμικού που κατοικούσε εκείνη την εποχή στην Αθήνα και είχε δημιουργήσει, μετά από πολύ κόπο και μεράκι, το zee.gr, ένα φανταστικό project καταγραφής και κωδικοποίησης του δικτύου των ΜΜΜ στην Αθήνα με σκοπό την δημιουργία ενός διαδικτυακού journey planner, έγραφε στο FAQ του zee.gr:

The data however contained many errors, for example buses traveling at the speed of light, missing and corrupt trips and incorrect ordering of stops. For this reason, I have corrected many schedules, added/removed routes and in combination with my initial data-set, effectively have a distinct set of transit data. I believe that OASA (and soon OAS.TH) will provide an updated feed. If interested, keep checking here for updates.

Δυστυχώς, η πίστη του Phil στην Ελληνική κυβέρνηση μάλλον τον πρόδωσε. Παρ’ότι ο ΟΑΣΑ ανανέωσε τον περασμένο Δεκέμβριο τα δρομολόγια (ομολογώ πως δεν έχω ελέγξει την ποιότητα των νέων δρομολογίων για να μπορώ να κρίνω αν είναι καλύτερα από τα παλαιότερα που αναφέρει ο Phil παραπάνω) οι στάσεις και το γενικότερο δίκτυο του οργανισμού παραμένει ανενημέρωτο από το 2011. Η ίδια εικόνα επικρατεί στις περισσότερες άλλες κατηγορίες πληροφορίων, με τον αριθμό των ενημερώσεων που έχουν λάβει χώρα στον δικτυακό τόπο τον τελευταίο χρόνο να μετρούν λιγότερες από δέκα.
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These past few years have been a somewhat turbulent time for Apple. Its market dominance in the smartphone race diminished, its profits holding strong, but investor and analyst confidence evaporated, its once infallible strategy, product line, image and appeal gone and its appeal lacklustre compared to the past.

The post-Steve Jobs Apple gradually shifted its culture as new executives took the reigns and old ones departed. Much publicised was Tim Cook’s change regarding the company’s relationship with analysts and shareholders with the company giving out dividends for the first time in many years, after Steve Jobs steadfastly refused to do so. Also widely reported was Scott Forstall’s firing back in 2012, allegedly for refusing to apologise for botching Apple Maps.

And while Apple’s products are probably as polished as they ever were, there are issues here and there that are more subtle, less obvious and less publicised than Forstall’s joke of a Maps application; issues that differ significantly from Steve Jobs approach of releasing feature-limited versions of extremely polished software cheaply and slowly building upon it until it became a class-leading product with an extremely solid foundation. iOS 7, with its revamped UX and æsthetic was initially riddled with an insane amount of bugs, but also with subtle usability regressions that Apple has been struggling to fix these past few months with its numerous point releases. Design issues like the fact that e.g. in the Calendar application you cannot slide your finger over dates and quickly see events scheduled for the date under your finger, as you could do in the iPhone calendar since the very beginning. Or the moronically coloured shift key in the iOS 7.x keyboard that is way less usable and whose state is not as obvious as it were in the classic iOS keyboard. Or in OS X on the menu bar where the Time Machine icon changes so subtly when a backup is in progress, in stark contrast to earlier versions where an animated icon clearly indicated backup activity. UX regressions that are not merely bugs; they are design decisions.

We have not heard much about the next release of OS X, other than the fact that many of iOS 7’s ‘revamps’ are coming to the Mac. Hopefully the slew of iOS 7 issues and usability regressions will have taught Apple a lesson and 10.10 (or whatever they may number it) won’t suffer from usability issues, regressions and ‘rushed’ releases that were previously not part of Apple’s playbook.

It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as that would amount to several millions of units sold for a device that was, in many ways, severely lacking and overpriced (at launch). The iPhone came out, and despite having significantly inferior technical specifications in some of the most crucial benchmarks, such as the quality of its camera, the lack of 3G, the extremely slow CPU, the lack of MMS-support (a relatively obscure, yet somewhat ubiquitous feature of ‘feature’ phones, especially in Europe) and others, managed to exceed the 1% goal that Steve Jobs had set a year earlier. It soon became that the reference state-of-the-art device that exemplified everything that Apple had to offer in its nascent post-iPod era, where mass market was apparently successfully coupled with premium quality design and manufacturing and extremely high margins.

At the same time Google had already bought and was preparing for the launch of the Android Platform, an open source new generation smartphone platform based on linux and a slew of open-source libraries and APIs (including Java running on Google’s Dalvik VM) with a large ecosystem of vendors and supporters and Google at its centre. Google originally hoped to create a large ecosystem of OEMs, carriers and application developers all working for it and not against it. I had high hopes for Android in 2007, the same kind of high hopes you’d find developers, engineers, and ‘geeks’ worldwide having about ‘desktop linux’ around ten years earlier.

Contrary to desktop linux — and similarly to Microsoft Windows — Android gradually prevailed in the early smartphone wars, now commanding around 80% of the market share. But Android did not turn out what I (or Google, for totally different reasons) hoped it would; instead it evolved into a sprawling, chaotic, in some ways brilliant and others completely backward platform, combining the best of new technology, and geeky, specification based computing metrics and the worst of the technology industry compromises that accompanied computing since its early days. Fundamental concepts of mobile computing were butchered, like basic navigation, consistency, to manually controlling the power saving, managing tasks, having well-thought out, stable APIs, coupled with mediocre devices, widely varying user experiences and a generally poor roster of applications, as different device manufacturers created their own “skins” — as well as their own set of poorly designed and implemented software to accompany them — resulted in a desperate effort to differentiate their offerings from those found in the stock version of the operating system and an ever increasing pool of mediocrity. The irony, of course, was that the stock operating system was practically nowhere to be found except for Google’s own Nexus series of devices, a showcase of Google’s vision that permeated the developer community and diffused into the wider smartphone-toting populace. Devices cost just a small fraction less than Apple’s ‘closed’ iPhone, but demonstrated horrific deficiencies in performance and quality; the software stack was not optimized, power efficiency was poor, even with batteries much larger than those found on iOS devices. The hardware also lacked in some cases, like the response of the touchscreen, often blamed purely on the sub-par performance of Android, but apparently also caused by inferior hardware. Yet android was improving.

In a couple of years the number of android devices sold surpassed that of iPhones. Coupled with the global financial crisis, the iPhone failed to become a commodity device (at least outside of the large metropolises of the West, where salaries did not reach, let alone exceed, tens of thousands of $ or €) in the same way that the iPod had succeeded in doing a few years earlier. It was still the leading device, both from the design and technology perspective, but it was rapidly losing ground in terms of sales as people chose cheaper android devices. Apple was unfazed: it’s margins were still high, it still had the mind share. Above all, it still produced the definitive smartphone, the reference device that everybody else copied in one way or another.
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