By Stefan Koell on Friday, January 29, 2010 11:19:19 AM

A lot of people and most of my friends are disappointed with Apple’s latest creation. “It’s nothing more than a bigger, oversized iPod Touch” they say and basically they are right but having an oversized iPod Touch has it’s advantages. The size and form factor alone allows you to do so much more in a much more comfortable manner. In the beginning, I was very skeptical as well and was completely underwhelmed with the iPad announcement but after watching the keynote yesterday, I think it may have a bigger impact than I thought first.

 

For once the form factor seems to be right. I am a huge iPhone fan and love all the apps I downloaded and purchased over time. I cannot imagine how it was back in the days without this little gadget. You can do so much with an iPhone but some things on the iPhone are just not that comfortable. I mean, browsing the web to quickly look up something is fine. Answering an email with “Ok, let’s do that” is just fine. Playing the casual game is just fine. Writing a longer email, taking meeting notes, browsing the web with the iPad seems to be much better (not to mention using the physical keyboard accessory).

 

Lot’s of my friends are complaining that the iPad has a stripped down version of OS X (like the iPhone) installed. They prefer to have a full running version of OS X or Windows on it. I admit, that this would have it’s advantages but in my opinion Apple made the right decision. I’m not a fan of the App approval process and the Big Brother – Attitude of Apple and find it really annoying. I understand that this will protect most users like my parents but I really miss the “Ok, I am an adult and take the risk to install and use dangerous software”-button to do crazy stuff with a device like that. On the other hand, imagine running full OS X or Windows on a device like this. Windows, pull down menus, buttons, it’s just not built for a device like that. Imagine a Finder or Windows Explorer running on a device and by mistake you wipe your finger and move some folders around your hard drive. It’s just not right. Apple pulled something off what Microsoft failed to achieve. They (re-)invented the UI for such devices. The only “problem” is, that they achieved that with the iPhone. Yes, the UI was born with the iPhone and it was genius. There’s nothing wrong to take this approach further to the iPad. Obviously it worked great for the iPhone to enable multi-touch so why not bringing it to the iPad? My guess is, that everyone who is disappointed with the iPad announcement expected another similar breakthrough invention as the iPhone and it’s UI.

 

Look at Windows 7. It claims to be multi-touch enabled but where’s Microsoft’s effort to build a Shell and API’s, User Controls, etc. to enable developers bringing great multi touch apps to Windows? Looking at HP’s Slate PC they introduced earlier this year, I thought, wow, you can run Windows 7 on this tiny little device? Great! But on second thought: will that be practical? What can I really do with it? Yes, I can start Outlook and Word and whatever but how will it feel?

 

After seeing the iWork demo, I am convinced that you really can work with such a device. I’ve seen people with a Windows Tablet and stylus running around, trying to get meeting notes and even these guys admitted that working with a stylus sucks.

 

To sum it all up: Apple may have made the right decision and the motto “Less is more” seems to be appropriate. The iPad will not replace your desktop PC, laptop or iPhone. Doing heavy duty work will always be done on your fully capable desktop OS. It’s the daily tiny stuff like communication, entertainment, infotainment such as emails, games, browsing and what ever cool apps will see the light of the day where the iPad will shine.

 

Just my two cents…

By Stefan Koell on Sunday, January 17, 2010 6:55:09 PM

Progress report #1, on Version 2 of Royal TS. Hopefully I manage to do this more often and I would be grateful for any feedback.

As you may know from the previous post, Royal TS will allow you to open multiple documents at the same time. This might be handy if you are working in a team and have spread your configuration across multiple documents, or if you want to have one document for each of your clients, etc.

Similar to Version 1.5x or later, Royal TS Version 2 will also allow you to encrypt your passwords with a password/passphrase. So if you have a couple of documents protected with the same password, it might be annoying when you get a prompt for each and every document you open in the same instance of Royal TS.

So I invented the “Password Cache” (patent pending ) which basically holds a secure copy of your password in memory. The next time you open an encrypted file, Royal TS will try if one of the cached passwords will work and will spare you the password prompt.

The check box “Remember this Password”, which is checked by default, allows you to control whether you want to cache this password or not.

For security reasons, the cache will not work when you want to edit an encrypted document. Editing a document also allows you to change the password for a document (or remove password protection), therefore, Royal TS will always prompt for the document password in that case.

The Password Cache lives in the RTSApp.exe process, so as soon as you quit your Royal TS instance the cache will be cleared.

One more thing: I also create a Facebook page for Royal TS, so if anyone is interested to join: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Royal-TS/237851900921

cheers,
Stefan

By Stefan Koell on Friday, January 01, 2010 12:42:57 PM

I hope you all had nice and refreshing holidays. I know that I did. Despite the fact that I am still recovering from my minor surgery two weeks ago, I am feeling very well again.

The coming year will bring some major changes to Royal TS and I bet you all are very excited about this. I will not reveal much in this post but you can expect regular progress reports over the next weeks bringing you more and more details about the new features coming to Royal TS in Version 2. There are still some minor nasty bugs in 1.6.8 and you can also expect an update here.

As many of you already know from the forums, Version 2 of Royal TS will be almost a complete rewrite and there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. We are still deciding for some features to be included in Version 2 or to be postponed. We hope that we can provide a beta version of Version 2 some time in Q1/Q2 2010.

Here’s what we know to be included:

Version 2 will have an “Object Explorer” which is basically replacing the current “Navigation Tree”. Why object explorer you may ask? Simply because you can now create not only RDP connections, you can also create and organize other connections and objects.

Using the object explorer you can create/manage the following “Objects”:

• Documents: you can now have more than one document open in the same tree
• Folders: you can now have nested folders in each document
• RDP Connections: pretty much the same as Royal TS can do now, of course some new features and options will be included.
• Web Connections: instead of connecting to a remote desktop session, you can now open a web page. Very handy if you have some web based admin pages for routers, firewalls, WIKI pages, Sharepoint sites, applications, etc.
• Tasks: pretty much the same as Royal TS can do now, only that the tasks can be organized in the tree like any other object.
• Credentials: a credential is nothing more than a username/password pair which can be defined in your document. You can then refer to these credentials in your connections/folders. You can refer to them explicitly by choosing the Task from your tree or you can instruct Royal TS to look for a credential with a specific name. This feature has a great impact if you are using the same document in a team. In your Document you configure each connection credential to look for a credential named “Domain Admin Account” and if you want to connect to this session Royal TS looks in all your open documents or in your application store (Tasks and Credentials can also be stored in something called Application Store to be available all the time in your Royal TS installation, we will talk more about the application store in another post) to find a credential with this name. This way, login information will be separated from the document but it is also possible to have auto-logon functionality.

The last bullet in the list hints another feature many of you requested: Assigning credentials/tasks on a folder level. You can now optionally assign default credentials, a pre-connect task and a post-disconnect task on a folder in your hierarchy and configure your connections to use the configuration of your parent folder instead of the individual configuration.

That’s it for now.

I wish you all happiness and prosperity in the new year. Thank you for being our customer and we look forward to continuing our relationship in this new year!