A Whole Lotta Nothing

How to make your own Fusion drive

I've got a previous generation iMac, the first that came with a 256Gb SSD drive as an option, and I also had a 2Tb hard drive added to it, for longer term storage of things like photos, music, and movies that didn't fit on the first drive. It has worked well since I bought it a couple summers ago, the OS and applications reside on the SSD and are lightning fast, totally worth the expense of adding SSD as an option, while archived stuff and media still work well on the larger hard drive.

The downside to this setup was that it required lots of hacks to do things like symlink home folders to the larger drive and I had to tell every app to store data in a custom location on the bigger hard drive (apps always defaulted to storage on the SSD). It was a pain to manage and when my storage needs exceeded the 256Gb+2Tb capacity, I recently bought a new iMac featuring a 3Tb Fusion drive.

Last Fall, the newest iMac debuted with a Fusion drive, based on a combination SSD/HD setup that puts most frequently used files on the SSD to speed up operations while automatically moving larger files and seldom used files to the hard drive. It "cloaks" the two disks into appearing as a single disk, making file management among your apps and OS much easier.

As I recently found out, if you have the dual SSD/HD setup in a mac, you can also create a Fusion drive, combining the two. I found loads of conflicting information about this online but wanted to write up what worked for me.

1. This will require erasing your drives eventually, so it works best when you're setting things up from scratch or when you're ready to start over. Be sure to backup all your old data to external disks before proceeding. I suggest Carbon Copy Cloner to backup both existing drives in your iMac to a single external large drive.

2. Download the OS X Recovery tool and install it onto a USB key. This lets you boot to a USB thumb drive and run a minimal set of tools like disk utility and the terminal, both necessary for the operation. You must do this on the machine you intend to turn into a Fusion drive. 

3. Boot up your mac with the option key held down to boot to your recovery drive. Select the orange USB drive option and it should say "Recovery Disk" on it.

4. Follow the instructions here at cnet. It starts with making new single partitions on each drive, both your SSD and your hard drive. Then you close Disk Utility and go to the menu bar to run Terminal. Do the set of commands listed at cnet. My commands to create the combined drive used disk0 and disk1s2.

5. When complete, quit Terminal and the main utilities menu will pop up again. You can double-check your work by seeing only one physical disk in the Disk Utility app, and when you're done simply run the  "Reinstall OS X" option and let it do its thing.

Listening to podcasts piecemeal: huffduffer & Instacast

For the past few years, there's been a site called huffduffer (started by Jeremy Keith) that lets you link to bits of audio you find online and it shows you popular items across the service. I've always thought of it as Instapaper or delicious for audio, but I never found myself considering it a useful tool that met any of my own audio needs.

Last year I found Instacast, an iPhone app that fully replaced my podcast listening through iTunes. It works around Apple's previous limitations that require you to sync your phone to a computer and requring wifi to download episodes. It's a great app and keeps you up to date on everything you love, even when you're on 3G.

What's weird is in the years since podcasting came out, the world has changed and there are lots of different podcasts producing infrequent content. You also hear about one-off events or shows, or single stellar episodes in an otherwise established series. I finally found a personal use for huffduffer recently as a way to collect all the single podcast episodes I want to hear without the committment of subscribing to a podcast and having to download every one of its 100s of episodes.

Take for example the Marc Maron show. He's at 339 episodes, many of which go beyond a couple hours, and though it's an incredible comedy interview show you're talking a pretty significant chunk of time if you subscribe to the show. On the other hand, I've had friends that listen to the show say there are 4 or 5 episodes you shouldn't miss, and I've been happy to listen to those but I simply don't have the time to follow 2hrs of new content a week from the podcast forever. Another example is friends doing a guest spot on a show I've never heard of, it's a great way to just pluck out that single episode and save it to huffduffer. This also works the other way. If I hear three good single episodes of a podcast chances are I'll subscribe to the full feed.

How To

The final step in the puzzle is wiring your huffduffer feed to instacast. It's easy, but I couldn't find any instructions for this online so I'll post them here. Sign up for huffduffer, use the bookmarklet to add single episodes to your account, then look for your personal podcast feed, which takes the form of:

http://huffduffer.com/{your username}/rss

Next, go to your Instacast client, hit the + button to add a new podcast, then click the link button in the upper left. Put your huffduffer podcast URL listed above and save.

That's all there is to it, whenever you hear about an amazing episode of a podcast or someone you follow on twitter guest stars somewhere, add it to huffduffer, pop open your phone and enjoy.

Lightning Adapters in the Elevation Dock

Remember my last post where I was talking about 3D printing? After writing it, I contacted my friend Michael Buffington, who recently won a Makerbot at the XOXO conference.

I showed him a few basic lightning adapter designs on Thingaverse, which he printed, but then we realized in testing them out they all had drawbacks. The fit wasn't perfect in any of them, one was great at holding a cord but you could push the cord out of the device when connecting it on a table top. None of them dealt with the bend of a new Apple lightning cable very well.

Buffington tweaked some things and made a new second part that holds the cable down while also forcing the hard bend. Photos of the dock with the parts mounted are here in a Flickr slideshow:

 

and here is video of the dock being used on my desk:

It's just two pieces of printed plastic and a couple off-the-shelf nuts and bolts going into existing holes to put it all together. Buffington's design is now on Thingaverse, my hope is anyone else with a Elevation dock can upgrade it to allow for iPhone 5 charging.

As always, 3D printing your own parts in real-time is totally awesome and I can't wait until everyone has a desktop 3D printer at home.

3d Printing and the speed of progress

This is fascinating, someone has made a 3d printed insert for the Elevation Dock to hold a new lightning cable. In August, I received a few Elevation Docks after funding it earlier this year, and I loved using it each day as my phone finally had a nice bedside charger. Since I replaced my iPhone I've missed using it and disassembled an Elevation Dock the other day to see if I could wedge one of the new iPhone cables into it. Unfortunately, the plastic trim that holds the 30-pin connector in place is too narrow to squeeze/hold the lightning adapter high enough for charging in the dock.

I was considering cutting some of the plastic and trying to get it to work but found out Mike Hellers already solved this by putting up a design on Thingaverse which you can get printed/shipped for about $10 from Shapeways.

This is great for owners of a new iPhone that backed the Elevation Dock. I'm impressed at how quickly this 3d model was conceived and printed and is now available. As I was disassembling my dock, I looked at the electronics that Casey, the designer behind the Elevation Dock created and realized it was mostly unnecessary if you could just bend/hold an existing iPhone charger cable. Casey told me at the XOXO conference he was working on a new connector for the lightning connector, but rumors are there's a chip in the cable that would make 3rd party cables impossible.

The most interesting aspect is how 3d printing disrupts things. Casey built these heavy, beautiful docks and spent months creating a circuit board to support charging that is now incompatible and likely impossible to replicate for the new connector. In some industries, I could see a company/creator going after someone making rogue parts like this printed cable holder, but I really hope in this case Casey partners with Mike and figures out a way to print/ship these to existing Elevation Dock owners. It would reduce the Elevation Dock to basically a hunk of heavy aluminum that simply holds a cable inside, but from the outside the existing dock isn't much more than that. (via jdd)

Great iOS software: Pillboxie

I have a simple pharmaceutical regime, but a complicated schedule. Three drugs total, one needs to be taken every morning one hour before I eat, a second immediately after I eat (along wth some allergy meds and vitamins at that time). The third one is trickiest, it has to be right before I go to sleep, but only on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

I've had this schedule since November of 2009, and I did pretty well for the first two years or so. It was ok to forget once in a while for 2 out of the three drugs but a couple years in I started to lower my dosages and I started forgetting at least one a week, then more than once a week. I tried the standard alarms on my iPhone, but they were a bit too invasive (they always went off audibly, usually hours after I took the pill already) and no one likes an alarm at 10pm twice a week when you're starting to go to sleep.

Eventually I found pillboxie. I've been using it for a couple months and it works great. Every morning an hour after I normally take a pill I have it set to remind me with a silent notification on my home screen. I can check off when I remembered to take it, and take it if I forgot. Since I check my phone when I wake up and when I go to sleep, during those once or twice a week times I might forget to take a pill, my phone has a nice notification telling me to and I haven't forgotten a pill since I started using Pillboxie. It's simple and it works, and if you have medications on different timetables and you use an iPhone I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Yosemite iOS apps (yes, really)

Last month I had a lovely time in Yosemite with my family. I grew up in Southern California so I've been to Yosemite a dozen times before, but I really love going in the Winter because barely anyone is around. You can hike to many places in peace, you can get dinner at every restaurant, and you can enjoy views without having to rush along. 

On a lark, the week before we went I searched the App Store for "Yosemite" just to see what came up. I downloaded half a dozen things and most weren't much help during my trip but there were two apps worth mentioning because I found myself using them many times during our week there.

California State Parks ($0.99) Every time you're in a California State Park, there are maps. Maps they give you when you go in, maps of shuttles, maps of parking lots, etc. This app had a free downloadable pack of Yosemite maps and I used this daily while in the park. I not only got to see myself as a nice blue dot on any of the maps, when we were pressed for time, I could locate the nearest shuttle bus stop, I could tell where to park near hiking trails, and I could tell which route was shortest to a waterfall. Totally worth the buck and way easier to carry than a stack of maps.

The Photographer's Guide to Yosemite ($6.99) There are lots of photo classes in Yosemite Valley and there are professional courses you can take to learn where to stand and when to take the best shots possible. These classes start at about $100 and go up into the thousands for a several-day outing with the pros. One pro photographer took everything he knew about shooting photos at Yosemite and put them all into this amazing app. You can tell the app when you're in the park and what time of day it is, and it will tell you the exact places and shots you can get if you follow their tips. It's really incredible because some of the tips involve windows of only a few days a year where something is lit up just right. I didn't plan my vacation around this app, but when I had some time in the afternoon, I knew where the best place was to park and get out and take a shot of Half Dome seen above (on a bridge a couple hours before sunset).

That said, Verizon phone coverage was generally pretty spotty in the valley, and even my high end accomodations at the Ahwahnee came with spotty WiFi so getting online or uploading photos was dodgy at best all week. Both of the apps above worked fine offline (once you download the right map pack over WiFi).

World travel with the unlocked US Verizon iPhone 4S

 

 

I've had the Verizon iPhone 4S since it launched last Fall, and I've now taken trips to three countries to use it. I've spent extensive time in Belgium and New Zealand using local micro SIM cards to great effect, and due to a Verizon snafu I've had to use their international service in Belgium as well and I can report it indeed is grossly overpriced. I figure I would share a couple tips and do a quick review after a few weeks abroad.

Step 1: Call Verizon after 60 days and ask for an "International Unlock"

The key step before you go abroad is to make sure you own your Verizon 4S for at least two months and then call customer service to request an International Unlock (I found out about that at ZDnet). They will try to pitch you their international calling plan but refuse it or say you will consider it if the unlock doesn't pan out. 

You have to do this over the phone, the reps I talked to inside a Verizon store couldn't do the procedure. Also, make sure the person on the phone knows how to do this, because the first time I called it was the person's first attempt at ever doing it and it turned out they didn't complete the task properly, causing problems later on.

Step 2: When you get off the plane and through customs, look around the airport for SIM card kiosks

In Belgium after I got my bags and before I left the airport, there was just one little booth selling cards from BASE.be, a local mobile provider. They were fantastic, offering 500Mb of data plus 15 Euro of talk time and texting for only 15 Euro. I also set up topping up the card via SMS, so after a few phone calls and some heavy downloading on my laptop (you can tether the connection) I could simply send a text to get more credit. 

In New Zealand's Auckland international airport, there were two options, Vodafone or Telecom and I selected Vodafone since I'd heard of them before (seen them on soccer jerseys). They offered 250Mb of data plus a bunch of texting and calls for $45NZ. I used up all the bandwidth halfway through my week and topped it up again via SMS.

My local Verizon rep said the USA is the only country in the world that requires you to have an expensive phone plan with hundreds to thousands of minutes of talk time plus data plus texting. Every other country does fine with these cheap pay-as-you-go cards. I would LOVE to have the same setup I had in Belgium, where 10 Euro could last me weeks of heavy phone use instead of the $70/month plan I have with Verizon.

Step 3: Carry a paperclip and a holder to keep your old Verizon SIM in when you're not using it

I have an old SD card case (pictured above) I carry in my travel backpack with all my old micro SIMs and a paperclip. It's really easy to pop the paperclip into the side of your iPhone, slide out the tray, and drop another card in. Every card has its own unlock code and you have to be sure to remember them because they can get locked out from use if you fail on four attempts. It's also fun to feel like a character in The Wire as you can jump from SIM to cheap SIM, switching to a new number each time. Be sure to keep your original Verizon SIM for when you get back home to the US, otherwise you'll have problems.

Warning: don't use Verizon for international use

Since my first attempt at unlocking didn't work, my first use of an International SIM in Belgium didn't quite work out. I could get onto the new network, but I couldn't make calls or get any data. I eventually had to pop in my Verizon card and call Verizion to have them double check (and I also enabled an international plan in case that didn't work out). Data cost me $20.54/Mb in Belgium as I checked the Verizon.com site for a contact number, then I had to wait on hold at several dollars per minute. When they fixed my unlock, new SIMs worked fine, and in the meantime I tried out another local provider and it seemed to work too. I also had no trouble using my Verizon phone in roaming mode in Canada while at the airport, using data from Verizon's own plan.

Verizon's top international plan costs $125 for only 300Mb of data (On AT&T last summer, I used their $200 800Mb plan for two weeks in Australia without going over) and thankfully Verizon counted my international call/data time before I enabled it into my $125 option (I didn't have to pay the $20.54/Mb price). 

Bonus: crazy local numbers aren't all bad

You might want to keep your phone's local US number when abroad (especially when traveling with other Americans that want to call you easily), but I'm more of a texting person and thanks to Apple's iMessage feature, I could text any other American I knew while traveling using data instead of my SMS allocation. Getting a local number proved handy for having a way for local people to contact me without them having to use international talk time as well.

Beware of international data hogs

One last tip: in my experience and talking with friends, it seems like Google Maps is the worst culprit when it comes to data use. It is super useful for getting around, but all those map tiles quickly add up. I was lost in Sydney my first afternoon in Australia last summer and by the end of my first 24hrs, I had amazingly used up 200Mb of my 800Mb allocated for the 2 weeks. After that I took the advice of friends and moved to using OffMaps as much as I could, which uses OpenStreetMaps along with your GPS location to give you a good idea of where you are without tons of network use (you download your maps on wifi, then use them in an offline way). 

It's also a good idea to take advantage of free/cheap WiFi in cafes, hotels, and at business offices as much as possible.

Conclusion: international unlock rocks

Considering that in Belgium I got more than Verizon's top plan for the equivalent of $13, it's a no brainer: get your Verizon 4S unlocked and always go with the cheap local SIM option. It's quick and easy to get a local SIM at the airport, and pop it in. The first time I did this, I had to be on WiFi and connected to iTunes to "activate" my SIM slot, but my last trip to New Zealand didn't require that and a new SIM worked fine after popping it in.

Verizon vs. AT&T iPhones in NW Oregon

A friend asked me to review my switch after 3+ years on AT&T to Verizon with the iPhone 4s. I've been using the Verizon phone for nearly 3 months and I spent all summer sitting next to an intern using the first Verizon 4 iPhone, so I got to use them side by side before switching. Here are my thoughts after a few months of usage:

In general I always have coverage everywhere I've been in Portland and in cities beyond, more so than when I had an AT&T phone in the area. I haven't noticed the reported call sound quality increases (cell phones just generally sound like talking into a tin can and still do) but I do have to say I've never dropped a call since I left AT&T. When I would be driving on the freeway in Portland, my calls on AT&T (through bluetooth, of course) would drop about half the time. It was almost like clockwork when I'd hit the city limits of Portland that my calls would begin to drop on AT&T. That has never happened with Verizon. In nearly three months, I've never gotten a "network busy" error either, which is something that happened a couple times a month on my old AT&T phone.

The only downside I've found is that data is a bit slower. Not super slow and you get used to it really fast and forget about it, but I remember thinking web pages I always accessed on AT&T were loading on Verizon in a few more seconds than usual. I do tons of stuf online with my phone so this can be a dealbreaker for people working 100% online that require the fastest data connection, but I gave up a slight bump in speed for reliable networking. The Verizon phone always seems to have a 3G connection.

There was one other aspect aside that also made me switch and it was the increased coverage that Verizon has over everyone else. I noticed in the coverage maps that Verizon extends a mile or two into the wilderness more than AT&T and every single time I went for a mountain bike (MTB) ride in Oregon (Bend, Dallas, McMinnville, McKenzie River, Mt St Helens, Hagg Lake) my AT&T connection would disappear either in the parking lot or the trailhead. I've taken a couple MTB rides since I switched and on one ride I always had a connection whenever I stopped to check and another I had a connection about 3/4 of the stops (only in a small valley of dense forest was there no connection). This was really important to me since I broke my wrist last year -- I know I'm no longer invincible and if anyone riding with me ever crashed on a MTB ride, normally we'd all be screwed and have to hike out with an injured person. Having some chance of phone service made me feel a bit safer whenever I go off road.

That's about it, increased coverage, calls never drop, but data speeds are a tad slower. The costs are about the same but I have liked switching to Verizon since the local store has a very competent staff that helped me get phones on launch day and have fixed a couple of tiny issues since I got the phones (like changing callerID, etc). The local AT&T store was mostly unhelpful in the three years I would sporadically interact with them.

How to port your AT&T iPhone number to a new Verizon iPhone quickly

I'm going to write up all the steps to move off a AT&T phone onto a new Verizon phone because I had to assemble all this info from disparate sources and figure others might save time if they knew about all the steps to do it yourself.

Before you call you will need a lot of info that might take some digging. It requires:

1. Your AT&T account number (mine was 12 digits, all numbers)
2. Your AT&T account secret PIN (mine was all numbers, 6 digits)
3. The last 4 digits of either your Social Security number for a personal account or the business EIN for a business account
4. Your new (temporary) Verizon phone number
5. Your old AT&T number you'd like to port over.

Once you have all that written down, follow these steps. 

• Take out your new iPhone, sync it to your iTunes, probably restore from your other phone's backup
• call Verizon's number porting system at 866-465-5415 (probably on a home phone, with speaker phone so you can enter lots of digits)
• Enter the old AT&T phone number, get an error, press 2 to proceed, then press 3 to replace a number with an old one, enter current temp Verizon number, then they will ask for your last four digits of your Social Security Number or EIN business number.
• Go through the menus, eventually you will need to give the old AT&T phone number again and then your AT&T account number and your PIN on your account.
• You will get a "port request began" success message at the end.
• Hang up and go to verizonwireless.com/port to check the status. It should say that porting is in progress. They say this will take 3-24hrs, but I would suggest waiting about 10-15 minutes before going to the next step.
• Start your new iPhone, dial *228 and follow the prompts to activate your new phone and it should say your new phone is activated.
• Let your phone sit after hanging up. You will be kicked off the Verizon network and then join back on about a minute later, with your AT&T number.
• If your phone still has the temp Verizon number, wait another 5-10min and then call *228 and activate your phone again, when it comes back onto the Verizon network, chances are your old number will be attached to it.
• Wipe/restore your old AT&T phone and sell it to someone else

The number porting process says you will get a text message at some point when it is all complete, but that never happened for me, and if you have all this information handy and you follow these steps, you can get your number ported in about ten minutes without any need for human intervention. Good Luck!

Apple Keynote feature request: easy recording of your talks

Summary: It should be easier to film your talks when practicing at home. Not everyone can make it to a conference or meeting where you present, but it's really easy to share a video of your talk with the entire world on Vimeo or YouTube. Sal Khan has shown how one guy can change the world with some screencasts, and I'd like to see the power of that fall into the hands of anyone with a Mac. I wish Keynote made it easier, and hopefully the next version does. 

 

My last post linked to my SXSW talk that I recorded at home. A lot of people asked me how I did it, and it required the following steps:

- get two macs running ichat that can talk to each other (one computer was using my AIM screenname, the other my .Mac screenname). Disable all audio in/out on the second computer you don't present on.

- Start a video chat between the computers, then drag your keynote file into the lower half of the video chat window to start "iChat Theater" on the computer you will present from.

- Resize the video chat window to something around 1024x768 in size, then start screencasting software (I use ScreenFlow) to record the entire desktop and make sure to capture the computer's audio.

- Walk back to your presenting computer, give your talk.

- Walk over to your screencasting computer, hit stop. Edit out the beginning and end of walking between computers, zoom the video so only your presentation shows in the viewport, then save.

- Export video out (I used the 960x540 AppleTV size, and it took about an hour to render) then upload to Vimeo.

 

You can currently rehearse your talks in Keynote, but it creates a slides-only video with your recorded audio. Most macs all have iSight cameras in them, so I'd really like to see a single mac option to record a video exactly like the screenshot above, without the need for a second mac or complicated screencasting software. 

About the only change that would be necessary and is currently lacking is that I can't see my presenter notes when using iChat Theater. The presenter sees something like this:

You can collapse the small image of your current slide and just have the forward/back controls, but I really wish notes were in that panel, like so:

Overall, I think this would make a killer addition to the next version of Keynote, and let people share their knowledge much easier and to wider audiences.

Innovation with Solitaire?!

Last summer I was bored one day and searched the app store for solitaire apps. I admit, this is like telling the universe you give up, you're so bored that you'd like to play the most boring game known to man, the game most synonomous with isolation and going it alone.

I started playing the free version of MobilityWare's Solitaire and realized quickly that the love affair I ended in 1999 with Windows 95's included Solitaire had been rekindled and I quickly paid the 99 cents for the "gold" version to remove ads. It was a fun way to pass time when I was bored but I also found it quieted my mind and was a great way to get to sleep, by playing 5-10 hands until I was so tired I was about to drop my phone.

Enter Game Center

A few months later, the game was updated to add features with Apple's Game Center, and they presented a list of 20 acheivements as part of the game. Funny enough, I had already done about half of them in my months of casual play but it was enough of a motivator to complete the rest that I started playing solitaire not just to cap off a day and get ready to sleep, but increasingly I found time during the day to chase goals. Three of them were quite difficult. One was scoring above 10,000 points on a hand and it requires not just a near-perfect randomly dealt hand but you have to learn how to do a speed run since points are increased for shorter times. As I was sitting there speed running solitaire games for hours a day waiting for the elusive easy hand so I could finish an entire game in about 60 seconds, I knew this was ridiculous, but a couple days later I surpassed the goal. The other two acheivements were playing 5,000 hands and 10,000 hands. I was somewhere around 3,800 hands when the app was updated so a couple weeks of playing it grinded me over the 5,000 mark and though the 10k mark seems far off (as I've gone back to casual play) I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,800 games played and I'm sure I'll hit ten thousand by the end of the summer.

They also added some social scoring via Game Center and at one point I was in the top 100 of all players for some metric and I was on the leader board, though the people near the top were a magnitude away from me in terms of games played and points scored, so this aspect never appealed to me.

Then it went all social

This week, the creators released a new version with something they call "Winning Hands" which will tell you when you're playing a new hand that it is indeed solvable and if you get stuck, you can replay someone else's method for solving that puzzle. At first, this sounded a bit goofy but I could see it coming handy when you get stuck with a seemingly impossible puzzle. I played a few games with the settings tweaked to give me more Winning Hands plays to check my skills against random previous players. I found I could solve them easily about 9/10 hands, but once in a while something would get me stuck and it was fun to watch someone else replay a hand, though it often included them making some crazy move when presented with a few options (where I took a more sensible path).

Another innovative thing is that you can click the "winning hands" indicator and be told what the fastest time, most points, and fewest moves was for that hand in the past. This has become a new motivator to keep playing as the feature is new and I can easily take a minute off the best time, score thousands of points more, and often save a dozen moves.

I never thought I'd say Solitaire makes for a fun social game, but the latest version is pretty impressive and knowing that I'm competing against others has changed the motivation to play completely. Knowing my process and moves can be viewed by others is also pretty cool.

With enough players and hands dealt, it seems like the creators of this app can very well exhaust every possible hand in solitaire, tell you which plays are solvable (I'm curious what the global statictics are on overall winning percentages), and show you the exact moves someone, somewhere used to finish it.

For a solitary pursuit, it's pretty amazing that the game developers came up with a way to record everyone's games, and let advanced players gain recognition for a job well done as well as use that play to teach less experienced players the tips and tricks for solving the seemingly impossible. I know it's just solitaire, but I could envision an app operating in much the same way allowing real-world impossible-seeming problems be solved by tapping social aspects of a large userbase trying their best, sharing the successes and showing the exact process of their solution, letting others build upon that quickly and easily.

Mac App Store: It's all about installation usability

I think the biggest thing that Marco and Rafe are missing in predicting the success of the Mac App Store is the (current) pointlessly complicated installation process on a Mac. Have you ever taught someone how to install apps on a new Mac? Or remember what it was like the first time?

Since most people come from Windows, they're used to this process:

1. Download an .exe/.msi installer (or if it is a zip, unzip to get your installer)
2. Run the installer, run the app

On a Mac, the process usually goes like this:

1. Download a zip file
2. Unzip
3. Drag application to Applications directory
4. Delete downloaded zip and extracted contents, then run application

or

1. Download .dmg file
2. double click it to "mount"
3. Follow whatever instructions are given, usually have to open a new finder window to drag application into Applications
4. unmount disk image after installation is complete, run app

or 

1. Download zip/dmg (unzip if needed)
2. Run .pkg file installer
3. Give your admin password, complete install
4. remove/unmount downloaded files, run app

As easy as the Mac is to use, I've never understood why the installation process is so varied and tedious (I understand there are obvious security issues that complicate the process, it still sucks for the user that wants everything to be easy). I've had to walk friends and family through this several times and it takes half a dozen tries before they start to get it right on their own (Try explaining to someone new to computers why you must "unmount the disk image" or what that even means conceptually). People often get tripped up when nothing happens after they download a .dmg file (Why do I have to mount it first to use it, why doesn't it just work?).

My biggest Mac app installation pet peeve is when a mounted disk image runs in its own Finder window without the helpful sidebar, so I can't simply grab the application and drag to the Applications folder on the sidebar, but I have to open a new Finder window because the features were disabled by the application writer.

Make no mistake, every Apple store in America is selling new Macs like hotcakes, to many people that have never owned one before. I bet a large percentage of new owners just stick with the shipping apps of iTunes, Safari, Mail, iLife, etc and don't install apps without help from the Genius Bar or friends. It seems crazy to someone like me that has used a computer daily for 20 years, but you can probably do a lot of things with a stock Mac without installing any additional apps.

A Mac App Store is going to be a boon for developers and Mac owners because it'll finally get rid of the clunky installation process and make the whole thing as easy to use as installing an app on an iPhone. Click into the App Store. Click an App, Click Buy, Run the App.

Marco (and Rafe) are right that this will be huge, I just think everyone is underestimating the potential upside of improving the usability of Macs in a big way that has been overlooked for far too long.

 

Apple's September 1st Special Event

First impression of the video stream viewed in Safari 5 on my mac: insane, like watching a 480p video on YouTube without a single hiccup or buffering message. Back in 1999-2002, I used to be able to try and watch Macworld keynotes and even the times I was at UCLA using Internet2 with their prioritized feeds, the online video barely worked and I usually gave up. Today's perfect streaming to many, many more people is a pretty impressive accomplishment. In the end, I got about 30 seconds of flashing video about halfway through the stream, but otherwise it was perfect for over an hour.

Airplay teaser: whoa, my favorite and most often used app on the iPad, AirVideo, is dead. I'll get the same functionality without the app in iOS 4.2

iPods: Shuffle seems like a step back, but probably a good idea. The Nano is barely bigger than a Shuffle, but the video screen looks very small (is watching video on a 1" screen even possible anymore?). The Nano is so small that Steve Jobs' fingers look too large to even use it in the demo. The Nano does have a dock connector on it, which means it can be used in every sort of iPod accessory, especially cars with iPod connectors. The iPod Touch finally gets cameras, and even gets Facetime. Pretty nice updates all around.

iTunes: The new icon is kind of ugly, and still music-centric even though it does a lot more.

Ping: Holy crap, it's like Napster 1999! Seriously, Napster perfected new music discovery in 1999 (for me at least) and it worked better than anything I've used since, but Ping is looking pretty strong. Last.fm and Rdio must be crapping themselves right now. I wonder if it will log songs from non-iTunes sources though (like Amazon MP3s)? In the demo, Ping looks a bit like a Facebook clone with tons of "buy now" links everywhere. There's also an event planner, like upcoming.org. Comments, photos, and video seem like a stretch for iTunes, it's almost as if Apple looked at iTunes usage of people hitting play and minimizing it and wondered how they could instead have people use it for hours a day.

AppleTV: Holy cow, 1/4 the size, and a better remote. No more purchases is weird, my 5 year old daughter likes to watch the same movies over and over again. Looks like it's going all-streaming like people predicted. Netflix streaming means I now have 6 devices in my house that can do netflix streaming (Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, TiVo, AppleTV). Airplay looks good, but I wish I could send any video from my desktop Mac to my AppleTV. $99 seems like a no-brainer given there's no hard drive in it anymore. I suspect someday they may even be free given they drive so many sales to iTunes.

Bolt-on

Driving across California yesterday, my daughter was watching Mary Poppins on an iPad and I couldn't help but notice the iPad is a great entertainment device, but also has touch screen games, music, and more.

I thought about how a lot of cars come with drop-down DVD players bolted into headliners (usually as a costly $1k+ option) and I instantly remembered how people used to have phones bolted into their cars, with numbers that were specific to only reaching someone when they were in that specific car driving, back before we all walked around with our own phones.

Chalk it up to another product disrupted by the mobile device maker.

Apple and Toyota

I've had an iPhone 4 for about three weeks now, and so far I've found better reception and fewer calls dropped when compared to my previous 3GS iPhone. I do have one area of poor reception at home where calls dropped about half the time on my old phone, but it hasn't happened once with the new one.

I've seen a youtube video or two of people that can produce a drop in their reception by touching the lower left of their phone, but I can't reproduce it. I've heard news of class action suits, official responses from Apple, and even an upcoming news conference at Apple tomorrow.

The whole thing reminds me of what Toyota has went through in the past year over their Prius. Right from the start, the story sounded fishy to me, that cars were suddenly accelerating uncontrollably. As Toyota officials got hauled in front of congress I wondered if there really was a technical issue with the cars or if it was more about American lawmakers scoring points with constituents by knocking down a foreign-owned #1 car company (remember Gung Ho?).

Early on, someone noticed that a majority of affected Prius owners tended towards very old, where driver error becomes increasingly common and I was surprised to find it didn't really gain much traction in the whole story of the Prius recall. In the end, driver error was the culprit in all but one case.

I'd argue that after decades of the Ford Taurus being the #1 car sold in America shifting to the Toyota Camry, there was a lot of pent-up resentment with Toyota's success. The Prius is certainly a success in its own right, showing that American consumers wanted better economy so badly they were willing to sit on six-month long waiting lists to get their new Prius, and they were willing to pay $25-30,000 for a sparsely appointed economy car that without hybrid technology probably could have sold for $15k.

Same goes for Apple. The iPhone has taken over the mobile market, eating up profits from other makers over the last few years. Apple has been steadily gaining market share in the laptop market as well, and the same decades-old lingering annoyances with all things Apple (pretention, absurdly high costs, "cooler than thou" factor) feels like it's resurfaced with the iPhone 4. The moment the opportunity to strike against Apple presented itself, people pounced.

I'd say there are likely a small number of iPhone 4 handsets in certain areas of low reception affected by how they are held in such a way that the phone can drop calls. Maybe it's 1%?Maybe it's 5%? It's the best phone I've ever owned and likely the best phone made to date, but headlines declaring "Product Maker releases good product" don't sell pageviews as well as "iPhone 4 antenna FAIL!!!"

The folding Palm bluetooth keyboard works great on an iPhone

I made a quick video showing how those folding bluetooth keyboards setup and collapse, and give you the ability to write using a real keyboard:

Sadly, the same keyboard I got for $43 on Amazon in December is now over $100 from a reseller. You could probably find one cheap on eBay. 

A folding keyboard is a handy thing to have in a backpack that lets you write pages of text if need to and are away from a laptop or desktop.

iMovie on the iPhone 4

The other day I was at a friend's house and we set up a slip 'n slide for our daughters to play on. I took out my new phone, recorded a couple clips of the setup and a few clips of them using it. I had downloaded iMovie earlier (it's $5 in the app store unfortunately) so I wanted to try it out for the first time.

I opened iMovie, created a new project, and selected my clips. With its minimal interface and no instructions, I guessed correctly that you can customize output by double clicking items. I added a title and a background song in just a couple clicks, and then it was done.

Here's the output:

What I'm most amazed about is that all the complexity of video editing was taken away and automated but the default settings are very, very good. I'm blown away that an application running on my phone let me edit a little movie, it added cross-dissolve transitions and auto-ducked the music when there was audio on the mic, and even had all the title fade sequences worked out. The whole thing is amazing and pretty incredible for a phone app.

(if you want to see what the app can do in the hands of a pro, check out this video on Vimeo)

Why there is a Save button on Gmail's compose new email screen on the iPad

 I figured out why there is a giant "Save" button on the new mail screens of Gmail on the iPad. 

I was writing a long email to a friend, and I wanted to copy/paste a URL into the message. The URL was already in another open tab, so I simply switched over to it, waited for it to reload, copied the URL from the address bar, then switched back to my Gmail screen.

...and my gmail new message window was blank. Poof! My unsent email was gone.

Turns out I had a 400 comment monster thread loaded in another tab and the iPad seems to not do so well with memory allocation for rendering all your open web windows, clearing out and reloading them whenever you re-request them.

The funny part is that after five years of using Gmail, I've grown so used to its automatic saving of drafts that it never occurred to me that I even had to hit that Save button myself. I assume the javascript necessary to auto-save drafts isn't available on mobile safari, but the big takeaway here is hit the Save button whenever you're in the middle of writing an email and you want to switch apps or switch windows.

Crap I love: The Tiko portable iPhone/iPad holder

Last fall, I bought a Tiko iPhone/iPod holder to prop up my iPhone while playing movies on planes, after hearing about it on Not Martha.

On my way out on the last trip, I decided to throw this barely-larger-than-a-business-card holder in my backpack in case I needed it.

After a cross country trip where I watched about five hours of video on my iPad, I'm happy to report that this designed-for-iPhone stand is barely heavy duty enough to work for holding an iPad on a airplane tray table.

Here's a shot of it holding my iPad on a desk. Best ten bucks I ever spent.

Netflix on the iPad

One of my favorite apps for the iPad is Netflix's streaming service. I started out watching tons of documentaries. I really enjoyed two recent ones: Beer Wars and The Union. 

Beer Wars is an inside look at the world of microbreweries and how it's nearly impossible for them to sell at major stores thanks to the near monopoly held by Bud, Coors, and Miller. The Union is yet another "pot should be legalized" movie, but it's better than any I've seen before, with a long slow exploration of all the angles of the "why is pot illegal?" that doesn't fall for cheap tricks or emotional pleas and comes off as an intelligent run-down of how crazy the US laws are around pot and how they got to be that way.

Eventually, I found I didn't always have 90 minutes to sit around watching films and I eventually found the streaming TV shows listing at Netflix. It's really fantastic to have all three seasons of Arrested Development just a click away, or any number of TV shows I've never watched when they were first broadcast.

I thought my favorite app for the iPad would be Air Video, but that requires me to seek out shows and movies, download them, then stream. Netflix has surprisingly become my go-to app for relaxing and enjoying video on the iPad. It's a bit buggy and crashes whenever I finish an episode, but other than that, it's pretty great.

Streaming iPhone video

Air Video is an amazing app I have wished for but never thought I'd see actually happen, given the App Store's dodgy rules about approving applications like this.

The other day I had a bit of insomnia, noticed my phone on my nightstand and wondered to myself if there was any hack, any way I could somehow stream videos from my desktop computer downstairs (both downloaded video and iTunes movies/shows). I was just thinking about trying out some media server apps to see if I could make it work when I saw this pop up on Lifehacker today. I've downloaded, installed, and gotten this app to work wonderfully. You can even jump ahead to different parts of a streaming movie and it'll render in just a few seconds.

It's a pretty handy app if you use one desktop computer as a "base" for a media center with other devices (like AppleTV, iPhone, etc) talking to it. Plus, you don't have to take up any space on your iPhone (and I guess iPad eventually) with the movie itself, as it is just streamed in real time. 

I haven't tested remote access outside my network, but if I could stream a new show from home to an iPhone sitting in my hotel room while traveling, I would say we're truly living in the future now.

My recommended kid games

It started out innocuously. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant, my daughter was about two years old and fidgeting. I checked the App Store on my iPhone for a kid genre, found a fake phone game, and let her go to town on it. It saved the day and bought us 20 min of quiet time. Since then I've downloaded a lot of games and educational apps for my daughter (who is now four and a half) and I've been meaning to write up the ones I think are worth a few bucks and have stood the test of time, and here they are.

This is my "Kid Games" screen of my iPhone that I go to when I find myself somewhere with my daughter and we're both bored. This happens sporadically in doctors offices, in lines while running errands, and most often at a restaurant. I'll quickly recap each one here with an appropriate age range after.

Fairy Trails -- Augmented Reality for Kids! If you have a newer iPhone 3GS, this is a game that initializes the camera and you pan around the room, clicking the screen when you see a fairy fly by. It's pretty simple and kind of silly but can entertain kids for longer than you think (3-5 years).

Brushes -- fairly advanced drawing tools than can trip up younger users (by them accidentally zooming out or in), but for general drawing works pretty good (3-12+ years).

iPlayPhone -- the first kid game I downloaded. Mostly just a noisemaker for the youngest to mash on without messing up your phone (6mo-2 years)

Ballonimals -- Pretty fun virtual ballon animal game from IDEO. You blow in the mic to make an animal, tap it to make it dance, then explode it by over-inflating. Good fun (2-6 years)

DinoMixer -- It's a mix and match game of dinosaurs, with about a dozen different animals in three parts plus different foregrounds and backgrounds. Fun and a good learning experience (3-10 years)

TicTacToe -- there are about 100 different TicTacToe apps in the App Store but this one allows for WiFi play, which I've done with my daughter using another iPod Touch. Good times (3-10 years)

ZenGarden -- a really great simple "drawing" app where there is no color or brushes to choose from, you just push a line in the sand, and shake for a new blank canvas. Perfect for young artists (1-4 years)

Heat Pad -- much the same as ZenGarden, you just drag a finger across and colors change, this one is a fake "heat map" based on how long your finger stays in place. Gets old kind of quick, I've found (1-4 years)

Cute Math -- A nice basic number identification, counting, and eventually basic addition/subtraction app. (2-6 years)

LunchBox/WhenIGrowUp -- Both THUP games come from a developer that is a member of MetaFilter where I heard of them. Great pre-school games, one is basic number and color identifier, the other is basically dressing up a monkey. My daughter loves both. (2-6 years)

AnimalMatch -- My daughter loves Memory card-matching games and this one offers flexible grids of different sizes/difficulty. There was a time she wanted to play this for hours (2-6 years)

Let's Color -- A Curious George/PBS app, this is just a paint-bucket coloring book style app. If your child is a fan of the show, they will like it (2-4 years)

DoodleBuddy -- Amazing drawing app that is free(!) in the App Store, and is perfectly between something full-featured like Brushes and simpler apps. It even offers collaborate WiFi drawing between iPhones/iPods as well. It's worth $5 even though the basic version is free (3-10 years)

Pickin Time -- Fun simple reaction-time game where you click on fruits/veggies as fast as you can. Works well when competing among several people to see who gets the highest score but game gets old quick (3-10+ years)

I've tried dozens more and deleted them all when my daughter grew out of them or no longer found them interesting. These have stood the test of time and lasted several months to several years, and most are just a buck or so.

Though I wouldn't suggest using these to ignore your kid or thinking that you just have to have them around all the time (crayons and paper are usually a bigger hit than an iPhone) these apps have come in handy when there's been dead time to fill and nothing to play with.

Imaginary iPad conversations with critics over the last week

But you can't program on it! It's locked down. I'd never be a programmer if this was my first computer.

There are thousands of programmers working in the world of gaming, making tomorrow's next big console hit. Heck, most every web professional knows at least one old buddy working at EA or doing texture mapping at Blizzard. 

What does a new xbox360 do these days besides simply play a disk you paid $60 for? Sure it's got some networking but doesn't come with a keyboard and you can't see the source code for any games, but you know what? The industry seems to be healthy and doing fine, and those kids that grew up playing black-box consoles with no root access still decided they wanted to make new games and found the tools and job to make that possible.

It doesn't support Flash!

A lot of ink has been spilled on this one and it baffles me. Aside from the rare times I waste some time with flash games, this is really no big deal. In 2.5 years using an iPhone, I've learned that missing out on content thanks to being in flash is a rare event and usually only found on badly designed restaurant websites (where I end up getting the info from Google instead) or advertising. I've never been stuck somewhere due to flash blocking my way to information, plus thanks to sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo adoptiong HTML5, I can even view web video directly in my iPhone. The iPad will be just fine without Flash.

The app store and OS are too closed, you can't run any program you want on it!

My first thought when seeing web browsing in the iPad demo was delight that this was more of an appliance than a computer and that it could just plain Get Shit Done. 

I have a Mac Pro as my main machine at home but I travel occasionally with a MacBook Air. I pull out the Air once every couple weeks and realize I have a whole other computer I have to manage, with multiple Software Updates to download and install, programs to keep in sync with my desktop, and applications I need to download and install to match my desktop work environment. It's a hassle that adds time to packing and preparing for trips and often I wish the Air worked more like an iPhone where everything was in sync all the time and I could just pluck it off and shelf, and head to the airport.

Also, have you ever used an unlocked iPhone? There are good reasons why closed systems like the App Store work. Unlock your iPhone for a few days and find that battery life turns to absolute shit, programs randomly crash and lock up your phone and are generally unreliable after you load more than 3 or 4, and finding new apps on the unlocked app directories is all about needles in haystacks. In the end, I gave up on unlocked iPhones when I installed a display theme that bricked my phone. Let me repeat: changing the appearance using a springboard replacement app made my phone inoperable and had to be fully restored from scratch. I began to appreciate controlled closed programming environments after that.

No support for multitasking!

Again, I have to refer to my 2.5 years on an iPhone where I've found this a problem only once or twice, where I needed to switch from an app to the web to look up info, went back to the app only to find it reset itself and lost my state. Among the tens of thousands of times I've launched and used applications on my iPhone, I've only run into this a handful of times and managed to figure workarounds out anyway. This is not a problem, especially for the kind of simple email/web/etc apps run on the iPhone/iPad.

So far, the iPad looks like the ultimate device to have on a plane (no pesky keyboard to get in the way of cramped coach seat spaces + 10hr battery life while watching movies?!), it's the ultimate web surfing device to use on the couch and around the house, it'll make toddler games with my four year old even better than an iPod Touch/iPhone, and it'll be great to have in the kitchen to look up recipes without the huge footprint of a laptop (while also being easier to read than a phone). I'm planning to get one (wifi only) and looking forward to how it'll work when traveling versus a laptop. I suspect it will be a laptop replacement for travel in almost all circumstances (photo/video editing is about the only away-from-home use case I'd need a laptop for).

Four weeks with a Droid (and two weeks with an unlocked Nexus One)

In response to my first few frustrating hours with a Droid, my friend Gina asked if I'd post my thoughts four weeks on, instead of first impressions which can often be deceiving (but amusing -- I encourage others to do it sometime even if half your blog entry ends up bemoaning the difficult packaging to get to the item). Now that I've learned the ins and outs and gotten to kick the tires on Android, the Droid, and a Nexus One, I feel like there is a lot to say about it, especially in comparison to my years on an iPhone and previous to that, a Blackberry.

I'm much less frustrated by Android and the devices it runs on, after tweaking things and getting to know it better. There are a lot of similarities to the iPhone, many places I think it even excels over the iPhone, and quite a few areas that can be improved. In no particular order:

The Good

- Though I didn't like it at first, I've grown to like the desktop metaphor for the Android home screen. Simple shortcuts to just the apps or views of apps that you use the most, it's a great timesaver and once tweaked to my liking, I found I only hit the applications button once every couple days because all the key things are on my desktop.

- The Android 2.1 OS in the Nexus One is brilliant looking and the desktop and apps views are much nicer looking that earlier releases. It's a shame they don't deploy those equally to all Android devices.

- The software keyboard is on par with the iPhone's, though I miss the hidden hold-drag shortcuts (on an iPhone you could hit the 123 button, hold it, and slide over to that one number you needed, when released the keyboard would bounce back to alpha). I love the suggested words showing up above the keypad and I've found it to be a huge timesaver, guessing correctly for what I'm typing over half the time and saving valuable keystrokes.

- The hardware keyboard on the Droid is too small and largely useless to me. The auto-correct and suggested words go away on my Droid when you pop out the slide-out keyboard, even though I type just as many if not more mistakes than the software keyboard. It adds quite a bit of thickness and weight to the Droid, both of which I'd prefer to go without.

- The way Android and Google Chrome on the desktop integrate the search bar and the web address bar into a single UI feature (when every other browser separates them) is pure genius. On my Android phones, I don't even have to recall the full URL of anything, just remember a keyword or two that I know will end up at that site. On the Android, I get location awareness with a phone number, map, and link to driving directions in the Navigation app.

- The Google Navigation app is simply incredible. I bought a TomTom GPS unit for my wife's car a couple years ago and liked it enough to get the TomTom app on my iPhone for driving directions when I travel and rent a car, but I've found the TomTom iPhone app is difficult to input addresses to and has minimal integration with the iPhone's address book (it requires me to confirm every aspect of stored addresses). The Google Navigate app can be launched from addresses found in the Android browser, offers several views of your trip, and it's remarkably easy to enable or disable the voice prompts when driving (every other app and unit buries that several menus deep). It's a pleasure to use and I carry my Droid in my car even though I already have a factory installed navigation system in it.

- Gmail and Google Voice are also killer apps for Android. For people addicted to scanning and archiving items out of their Gmail inbox, the Gmail client is a pleasure. Google Voice is incredible and sorely missed from the iPhone and the stupid iTunes App Store policies that barred it from entry. Google Voice gives you the same sense of freedom and control over your daily interruptions that a DVR attached to a TV does -- once you've experienced it you can never go back.

- The Android ecosystem doesn't require a computer at all. At first I found this slightly frustrating as it takes some tweaking to get music on or off the device, or get movies playing back smoothly, but over time I've come to appreciate this and enjoy it. Having to dock my iPhone to a computer (and wait for it to backup and transfer files when I just want to go out the door with a new podcast on it) is a regular hassle and I can tell the Android OS was designed for people that may very well not even own a desktop or laptop computer. The phone itself is almost as powerful as a laptop. I haven't played with podcasting apps much on Android, but I imagine it must be as easy as it is to update apps and download music from Amazon.

- The form factor of the Nexus One is amazing. Super thin and light, with a huge bright screen. Being that I don't have a SIM card in it, its first charge ran for a week with occasional use over wifi. My Droid feels blocky, heavy, chunky, and barely holds a charge for a 24hr day of use. 

- Verizon on the Droid is a much better phone service than AT&T on the iPhone. I know, totally obvious, but the difference is so great that I'm paying for a second cellphone because AT&T has gotten so bad in the last few months. I live outside of Portland, Oregon, and while 3G and phone service works great in my small town of few iPhone users, the moment I go near the city of Portland I get dropped calls galore and 3G data issues. I've taken to calling friends back on the Verizon Droid often enough that having a backup phone on another network is a necessity.

- I missed multi-touch the first time I used Android, but after a day or two I got used to double-tapping to zoom in apps and dragging with one finger to accomplish the same thing. It probably sucks for games to not have multitouch, but it's fine in apps.

- The notifications bar with pull-down alerts is great for finding out a bunch of information coming from a variety of your apps at once. I wish the iPhone had something like that.

- Being able to "return" any app in the Android Market within 24hrs for a full refund is fantastic.

- Having all your apps, desktop wallpapers, etc. saved on the server side somewhere at Google is a pretty amazing thing. After I popped onto the Nexus One for the first time and inputted my Google details, the phone picked up most of my preferences from my Droid phone. This will make switching phones in the future from one Android device to another much smoother.

- It's clear Android is going to be a popular phone operating system available on pretty much every carrier in the US. Overall, I'd say it's about 80-90% of the way to the kind of experience you get with an iPhone with several things I feel it does better than an iPhone.

Areas for improvement

- The iPhone came from the iPod world so it's an incredible media playback device and the Droid and Nexus One feel like multimedia is just an add-on that isn't central to the device. There's no iTunes to sync with Android (I tried doubletwist and it was buggy) so you either have to buy music directly from the Amazon MP3 store (which I actually prefer to the iTunes store for music even on my Mac desktop due to cheaper songs and no DRM) or you have to navigate mounted USB folders in the file system by hand, which is a chore at best. It took a bit of reading forums and blog posts to figure out the correct Handbrake settings to get a movie to playback smoothly on either Android device, and I had to make a directory called "Video" in the right place and download a playback app from the Android Marketplace to even watch it. The Nexus One has a bigger, brighter screen than any iPhone or iPod I've used so you'd think they'd make media more a focus given the great hardware.

- The Android Market for Apps is good but feels like it could be a lot better. There doesn't seem to be nearly as much curation as the iPhone App Store for making you aware of the best of the best (I had to rely on twitter and blog posts to figure out what to try out). The reviews are listed by the last three reviews first, even if they are a frustrated user (iPhone App Store lists highest rated first, right?) so the reviews are choppy (lots of either 1-star I HATE IT or 5-star AMAZING reviews). There is no "Update all apps" single button to push which gets tiresome as your Android device tells you every few days you need to update four apps by clicking over and over and over.

- The iPhone has only one button, Android has four along the bottom. iPhone puts it on developers to code up their own navigation buttons and labels, while Android just gives developers hooks to those four hardware buttons. The problem? There's no consistency and a distinct lack of labeling on Android. On an iPhone, developers have to create "back" buttons and they get to label them as well so you always know where you're going to end up if you push it (like "Inbox" or "back to twitter"). On Android it's a blind button without a label and sometimes when you hit the back button in a web browser you go back a page and sometimes you jump back to an application that launched the web browser. Sometimes the back button lets you go backward in an app and many times you get the haptic buzz telling you THERE IS NO BACK BUTTON and you're stuck on that screen. I've played with an Eris Android phone as well and the big surprise there was the four hardware buttons aren't even in the same order as my other two Android devices. That seems insane to me.

- Google's internal teams sometimes slap existing features into their apps or they change key features of public apps with little warning (like Google Reader suddenly making the Share button public ages ago). Android is a phone, and every phone needs an address book, right? Google decided to slap my Gmail contacts into the phone and call that the same as an address book, which was a surprise to me. My Gmail contacts are mostly people I email often (including tech support questions to my many websites) and the Venn Diagram of people I email a lot and people I call a lot are vastly different things. I didn't have phone numbers stored in my Gmail contacts for longtime friends I would like to call from the device, so essentially the moment I logged into Google I had a phone with hundreds of people I barely know over email that I would never need to call plus I didn't even have phone numbers for the few I did want to call. If I want to morph this into a usable address book, I have to delete a lot of people and add a lot of data to my contacts, but that might affect how Gmail works on my desktop browser. If I delete someone does that mean their new emails to me might show up as unknown spam? I don't know.

- The iPhone has a lot of "hidden" features. Stuff like holding down keys on the virtual keyboard giving you new options, and screenshots by touching two buttons at once, but the amount of what I'd classify as "hidden" features in Android feels much longer. Every button has a separate long-hold state that offers up menus and options you can't find unless you know to click. The web browser doesn't show you how many windows are open like Mobile Safari. I never know how many apps are even open and running aside from the reports in the upper taskbar. I didn't know silent mode could be accessed from holding the top button for a long time. Every day there's a new hidden feature I'm accidentally stumbling upon to the point the phone feels like a linux command line or a wiki with its own cryptic syntax you have to learn slowly to the point of memorizing lots of keystrokes.

- The trackball on the Nexus One is next to useless. It's much faster for me to point and tap something I want on the screen than scroll through every option with a trackball. It's easy to ignore though.

Like I said, overall, I'm happier with the Android OS, and I'm in love with the Nexus One hardware. The moment the Verizon branded Nexus One goes on sale, I'll pick one up and try to unload my blocky Droid. Despite some issues I have with the iTunes App Store, I do love almost everything about the iPhone for its intuitive interface, great gaming, fantastic multimedia playback, and overall utility, but Android is definitely going to give it a run for its money and I look forward to both platforms innovating. At this point, I feel like each platform has enough strengths that I've become the kind of weirdo that carries two phones around, using the best of both worlds depending on usage.

End to end problems

I know it's a cliché for mac users to bitch about Windows, but I'm giving an old PC of mine to a friend and after wiping it clean and setting everything up, I can't believe how hostile the process is to the user. Every aspect of it is tainted, because someone, somewhere can make a buck at each stage of the process. There's Microsoft, nagging you for updates and virus protection and 30-day demos. There are applications themselves trying to install toolbars and upsell you to the paid pro version. There are download websites trying to trick you into also installing a "registry cleaner" as if you'd need one. Then there are all the pre-installed apps on the HP box, where half of the Start menu items seem to be "special offers" for online services, games, and software suites. I feel like I've run through an obstacle course for the past three hours trying to avoid every trap door that surrounded me.

There's something to be said about Apple's end-to-end control from the smallest bits of hardware all the way to the operating system, including installed applications and out-of-box experience. At least they know new customers aren't going to be harrassed for hours after spending hundreds-to-thousands on a computer.

I'm trying to imagine if I just came home from Best Buy with this HP computer, how insulted I'd feel by the process and how I'd think I just wasted my time and money.

An iPhone lesson I wish I hadn't learned today

If you leave your iPhone on vibrate 90% of the time like I do and you use the iPhone as an alarm clock when you travel, remember to turn off vibrate before you go to sleep, because the sound that wakes you up won't be Marimba, it'll be Airport Shuttle Guy Banging On Your Door, which is a much less pleasant tone.

1st gen iPhone battery life issues: it's the apps?

I've had my original iPhone for over a year now, and I've had a pretty stable use pattern. I charge the phone often (every time I'm in a car (daily) and every other night attached to my computer) and rarely see the battery dip below maximum. For usage, I typcially use it for about 15 minutes of internet stuff in the morning, I'll use it for about 10 minutes or so around lunch, and I'll often go out for 60-90 minutes of daily exercise time using it as a music player. I probably make an average of only 3-5 calls on it a week, so it's mostly an internet device to me, acting in place of a laptop whenever I'm outside of my house.

In the week since the launch of the 2.0 OS, I've loaded my iPhone up with about a dozen apps, but mostly I've just tested them out or played with them for five minutes and haven't launched them a second time. The one app I surprisingly use (surprising because I'm not normally into games and not into cards/gambling at all) is the Texas Hold 'em game. I've probably played it an hour a day since I got the iPhone 2.0 OS.

What I've noticed so far is that if I play a few hands in the game, then hit the sleep button at the top to throw the phone in my pocket or put it on a table to be ignored, when I come back my battery will be down to a half or less. It happened the other night when I played the game before bed. I woke up to a nearly dead iPhone on my nightstand.

It's weird because I've never "exited" or "quit" iPhone's native apps before and I've never had battery life issues. I often just hit the sleep button when I'm reading email or in the camera app, and the battery will be fine hours later. Yesterday I noticed I played some poker, hit the sleep button, went away for one hour, and my battery was half drained.

I know it's a pain that Apple screens all the apps and I bet 3G and GPS are power drains on the new iPhone, but I have a feeling even the well-vetted apps are causing a lot of power consumption that wasn't happening in the past.

I'll concede this is just a hunch and I may be wrong, but after a year of a constantly full battery under mild use, the only changes I've made in the past week were using one new app, and my battery is now getting drained much faster.

Will MobileScrobbler work in the new iPhone SDK?

Here's something I've been wondering about. Ever since Apple released the roadmap of iPhone development and the SDK details, they mentioned that third-party apps can't run in the background. After avoiding it for months, I finally did the jailbreak on my iPhone last month because I realized I listened to music/podcasts constantly on the device, and none of that data was reaching my last.fm account. I opened up my iPhone to third-party apps just to get MobileScrobbler running, and it works great.

But it does the magic in the background (even over EDGE, which I optionally allowed). You play songs as normal, and every so often a tiny ping goes out to last.fm, logging the music played. I imagine that won't be possible with the official SDK but I haven't seen anyone mention this app specifically.

So mac/iPhone nerds: will I have to keep a jailbroken out-of-date iPhone to keep using MobileScrobbler come June when the new iPhone stuff is released?

Keynote Index Fund

A few months ago I was thinking about Apple's rise in value after the iPhone and how Steve Jobs does a great keynote every year, and naturally I thought "I wonder if there's a way to make money off quick investments around the keynotes?" Then I thought "What if you did this every year, for just a day or two of investment?"

I ran the numbers and here they are, on this new 1-page website: Keynote Index Fund

The five minute Leopard review

After installing Leopard on three machines and using it for the past four days I figure I might as well write down my first impressions. Here are the high and low points for me:

• The installer is a bit buggy in that it doesn't seem to recognize hard drives with any sorts of special partitions made for previous versions of Boot Camp (made by Apple themselves!). One Mac required wiping out the Boot Camp partition completely before I could proceed, the other asked me to open disk utility and do some sort of GFI Journaling thing or something that I can't remember and could barely decipher. It took quite a bit of noodling with the installer to figure out where Disk Utility was and in a buried advanced menu was the option I needed. Why didn't the installer just do it for me with a quick one-button click? I've had Microsoft Windows installs go smoother than my macbook install of Leopard.
• Spotlight is super speedy now, to the point where it works as fast as Quicksilver used to for application launching. I say "used to" because Quicksilver lost its index of my system after upgrading and couldn't seem to launch very basic apps I use dozens of times each day. I ended up breaking down and uninstalling it today, converting over to Spotlight instead.
• Things seem a little faster and a little more stable (less beachballs, for sure).
• Time Machine is a godsend. I've been waiting for a transparent backup system with easy retrieval for the past ten years, ever since I worked in a place with nightly full backups saved for months on end (but even then, retrieval was a pain). I rarely have hard drives crash, but I accidentally trash or tweak Photoshop, Textmate, Excel, and Word files all the time. Getting a copy from a day, a week, or a month previous has already saved me once since I installed Leopard and I suspect it'll be the kind of thing I use for fetching previous versions of mockups and writing drafts often. I really hope they return the network storage feature, since I could easily hook a usb drive to my airport extreme and just have my computers backup to that.
• The downside of Time Machine is that I have noticed a couple beachballs and my second hard drive spin up around the top of the hour. I figure it's probably Time Machine since my second hard drive is entirely dedicated to that, and it's only about 20 seconds of unexplained lock-up, but it's still annoying when you're in the middle of something and you have to wait for it to finish whatever it is doing.
• Firefox is my browser of choice and seems to take forever to launch. I usually leave it open all day, but it seems to take about a minute to launch on my 4-processor machine. Safari pops up in just a couple seconds, so I'll either prune my extensions and hope for a quicker firefox, or move over to Safari when I'm in a hurry and just want to look something up real quick.
• Screen sharing in iChat is freaking awesome. I'd finally have no qualms about buying my dad a mac now, since I could give him tech support whenever he needed by just popping in and fixing things over iChat. I also like the new Keynote iChat sharing as that might be a great way to practice my talks for upcoming conferences.

Overall, Leopard looks like a welcome upgrade and I can't wait to see what application authors do with the new animation capabilities.

Crap I love: Signal turns your iPhone into a really nice remote control

I've been hoping that someone was working on using the iPhone browser as a media controller and when I saw Signal, I decided to give it a try.

It works like this: you install the app and it runs an internal webserver that you connect to using safari on the iPhone. Whatever is running in iTunes on your computer shows up on the phone exactly as if it was in the iPod mode (with album art, controls, etc). So if you have an airport express hooked up to a stereo, you point your iTunes at the speakers and start playing some music, then walk away from your computer.

Once you pull up Signal in your phone, you can control your entire iTunes library remotely. You can pick playlists, set them to shuffle, change to specific songs, try different genres, even pull up podcasts and video. The interface on the iPhone is really what sells it -- it looks and functions exactly like a real iPhone app, but it's all in safari. It's really quite amazing and turns the phone into a whole house audio remote for me.

Testing out .Mac, iMovie '08, and the Panasonic AVCHD

I used PCs on a daily basis for about ten years, but over the last three or four years I've become a full-fledged Apple fanboy convert. I buy a new mac about once a year or so and have tried out pretty much every product they've released over the last few years. So when Steve Jobs debuted iLife '08 and mentioned iMovie worked with the new AVCHD format available in $700 Panasonic cameras, I bought one to give it a go.

Today I put all this new software and hardware to the test. I carried the video camera around and shot a few things during a visit to the Oregon Garden. I came home, imported all the clips into iMovie, arranged a few and threw a song on top of it. Finally, I uploaded it to my "Web Gallery".

Here is the resulting 3 minute movie

Quick review of each aspect

Panasonic HDC-SD1 Camera

This is a great camcorder. I've had and used a couple mini-DV camcorders over the last few years and this was easier to use and packed with more features than I was used to. My favorite thing is that it writes all video to a special 4Gb SD card (most card readers can't understand it, so I just use the included USB cables with the camera). What is great about ditching tapes and simply using a memory card is the unit is much lighter than a camcorder that uses tapes, and if you're reviewing ten previous recorded clips, say clip 1, and you hit the record button, it'll start recording clip 11 in the right place (no more fast forwarding or taping over previous video).

It charges fairly fast and video looks fantastic on my 46" 1080p LCD. I can't believe a little $750 camcorder can do such nice high def stuff. About the only downside I've found in use is the microphone which is about what you'd expect (only works well if someone's standing directly in front of it speaking) and if I really wanted to film a nice movie I'd need some external microphones.

So far in two weeks of using this, I'm finding that since I don't have to fumble for tapes or worry if I'm taping over something, and since it's small and light, I use this much more than my previous camcorders.

iMovie '08

iMovie is completely different in the new iLife suite. David Pogue has written a scathing review because they changed everything compared to the old version and actually removed some functionality, but I followed the use-case presented by Jobs in the last Apple demo: I recorded some clips about a trip and assembled them really quickly in the editor. Compared with iMovie '06, I'd say the new version is much easier and faster to make short videos. I used the previous version on a handful of occasions and found myself using the help files more than the iMovie tools themselves. With iMovie '08, the things Steve Jobs did in his demo pretty much covers the entire application. I edited my movie in about 20 minutes total, which is at least twice as fast as me doing the same thing in the old version. The "skimming" feature where you mouse over clips is incredible and really handy for testing out sections of clips you want to cut.

.Mac and the Web Gallery

I've never been much of a fan or user of the .Mac service. I only had to pay for it once when coworkers used to share some tools and I let my membership lapse until today. So far it seems like a nice backup space to keep 10Gb of files but mostly I wanted it for the tight integration with iMovie. I have to say it's really, really easy to upload something to your .Mac webspace by simply clicking a menu item and telling iMovie to do its magic. Time will tell if it's worth keeping for more than a year but so far I really like the photo galleries and movie player pages.

A smarter audio manager

Here's what I typically do in the course of a day.

• Start iTunes, play some new songs while I code, read email, and surf the web


• About every 15min or so, I run across a youtube video, mp3 link, or vimeo post that I want to watch, so I...


• pause iTunes, let the video/music play in my browser, then return back to what I was doing

Here's the rub: anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours later, I'll realize I've been sitting in a room wearing headphones with nothing coming out of them. I don't mind it, but I do wish I could have an app that could manage iTunes automatically for me.

This is my wish: I start playing iTunes music, surf along while some magical app watches my sound output. When something else sends output to the soundcard (I'd have to disable iChat message alerts), hit pause in iTunes for me, then when the soundcard is clear, push play on iTunes automatically (maybe with a bit of cross-fading to bring it up smoothly).

Is this impossible? I think I've seen something like this before -- it doesn't seem like it'd be impossible for a computer to manage for me.

Canceling tmobile

Getting an iPhone meant I'd be leaving tmobile after four years of service, and I re-upped my contract last year for a blackberry pearl, so unfortunately that also meant I'd get hit with a $200 contract charge. Today I called to cancel and I knew it might be painful so I decided to record it. The total call was 12 minutes long, about half of that spent with a retention specialist. The best part of the call was both the first support rep and the retention guy saying "you got an iPhone! how is it?" and sounding genuinely interested.

Here's the part of the recording where the retention guy comes on (he starts with a bit of iPhone FUD, then gives offers):

[mp3]http://images.metafilter.com/iphone.mp3[/mp3]

He gives me the following offers:

• $299 for a Tmobile Wing ("more compatible, more features than the iPhone")


• 1 month of free service


• transfer phone to someone else


• monthly service reduced from $59/mo to $20/mo

24 hours with the iPhone: my dream mini computer

After my initial problems, I got a new iPhone from my nearby Apple store and spent several hours using it. My first reaction is that it's very good, meeting the almost impossible expectations I had for it. Photos are fun and look great, movies are nice and will work great on planes, and the iPod functionality looks good.

The thing that really knocked my socks off was Safari.

I do almost everything in a web app, and even with my blackberry pearl I was stuck with a crippled browser that could only use about half the apps I need. It was a breakthrough over my last device (which was painful for more than 1 or 2 web page views) but I never thought having a full copy of safari on a phone would be so liberating (especially since I only use firefox on my mac).

I have a set of tasks I normally do to keep up on all the workings of metafilter, but I used to only be able to check email and read the front pages of my sites on the pearl. Typically that was the bare minimum and I would wait until I got to a desktop to finish the rest of my work. Last night while catching up on some fluffy TV, I used my iphone for about two hours and it was pretty close to what I do with a laptop. I could check the sites, use all my admin tools. Ajax effects worked throughout and I could finally check my bank balance from my phone (my bank's site requires javascript and locked out my last 2 phones).

Usually before I go to bed, I have to sweep through half a dozen sites and apps to make sure everything is on the up and up. I learned that I could do everything on the iPhone, and I could do it from anywhere on earth. This is going to be great for airports and other places where I used to feel bored, trapped, and in dire need of internet access.

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop. Once I get more used to two-thumb typing, the last limitations that keep it from feeling like a real computer will be gone.

Some lingering iPhone questions I haven't heard answered anywhere...

So I'm thinking about getting an iPhone, but a few potential dealstoppers keep coming up and I haven't seen much info on it even though it's coming out in less than two weeks. Maybe some of you readers can help.

1. Is there an airplane mode where phone functionality is shut off? The one place I find myself watching tv/movies on my iPod is on planes. Given the simple interface, so far I haven't seen or heard that there are preferences menus that'd let you easily shut off your wireless phone functionality and just use the device as an audio/video player inside aircraft where phones are prohibited. Most smartphone/PDAs have this option.
2. My existing iPod dock on my computer and the car charger/adapter I already have will work fine, right? When it was first announced, I believe Jobs said the iPod connector on the bottom was standard, but I've heard about companies making iPhone adapters for cars and I'm sort of unclear if I just simply use my existing Belkin iPod charger in the car (which also has audio out that I wire into my car stereo). I hope it all works.
3. The interfaces all look fantastic, but is the music player going to be something I can use by feel? Currently I use an iPod in my car and I place it on a mount right next to my steering wheel. I barely have to take a finger off the wheel to change songs and I barely have to glance at the iPod to do it, letting me keep my eyes on the road. Given the iPhone interface, will I be able to change songs by simply clicking on the right side of the screen? Or am I going to be required to use CoverFlow at 65mph?
4. Has AT&T announced their data plans for it? I can't believe it's less than two weeks away and no one seems to know if it'll be $40 a month or $50 or $60 or more for unlimited data and a few hundred monthly minutes. They really do seem to be rushing this to market if they're not openly sharing the plan pricing in advance.
5. I've heard that every AT&T Wireless store in the US should get about 20 phones to sell on the first day, but I'm still concerned about availability. How is the 4Gb/8Gb split going to be in their inventory? 50-50%? Is the 6pm launch really going to happen? Should I line up in the afternoon? Can I get all my credit check/plan forms filled out before 6pm so I can just have the phone and leave the store at 6:01PM?
6. Is there going to be a "turn off CSS" option in Safari for the iPhone? Sideways scrolling blows and I'm not going to use safari much if I have to point and drag all over the screen to read anything. I actually like my Blackberry Pearl's browser because it ignores CSS and displays text versions of sites that are easy to read and navigate quickly. (also, I hope there's a Gmail app coming soon for the iPhone, I'm not even going to use the default email client)

Apple Rumor: Multitouch Everywhere!

I'm pointing to SBJ's post about multitouch Apple rumors because I really want this to be true.

Multitouch is amazing. When I got to see Jeff Han demo it at Etech last year, everyone was blown away, but it feels like it's a couple years off, right? If Apple could release it in 2007, they'd get to leapfrog the entire industry and be way ahead for a long time.

I've been waiting for a new iSight-equipped LCD display for six months and I've wondered why they didn't release one ages ago, but if multitouch sensitive displays are on the way the long delay makes sense. Even cooler is imagining multitouch apps like iPhoto (imagine being able to throw photos around your desktop and sort them all with your fingers), Garageband, and iMovie (I could save a lot of time if I could manipulate the timelines by touch).

The multitouch rumor would also explain the previous rumors about 50" monitors coming from Apple. A 50" monitor seems insane to have on your desk, but if you watch Jeff Han's demos, you can see why size matters for manipulating screen details with both hands.

The Nike iPod System

This week I'm running again after a nearly two year hiatus. What finally motivated me to get off the couch and start running was the Nike+ system. I've written my own exercise tracking apps in the past and it required that I manually enter details about each run, then I would write my own visualization apps. After I saw how the Nike iPod thing records and uploads your data with no intervention needed and then spits out nice graphs with goals and group activities, I knew I had to try it. When Nike finally came out with some stability shoes for fat guys like me (the Air Equalon, which I can't link to in their Flash interface), I pulled the trigger and got the whole setup.

I took my first jog today and it worked great. I like that you can run for a set time, a set distance, or to burn a set number of calories. I also like that your iPod tells you when you're half done and counts down the minutes as you get close to your goal. I noticed the system reminded me at the same intervals I would have checked my watch myself, so it works really well.

The kicker on the whole Nike+ thing was something I've never seen online before: Hatphones. It's a flexible beanie with embedded headphones and a pocket for a iPod nano complete with a nano wheel cut-out. It's perfect for winter here in Oregon and I don't have to have wires running down my shirts. I must admit it's a bit weird to push on your head when you want to change songs, but otherwise it's a clever little package.

I'll post an update in a few months after I've used this a while to track my running progress. My hope is to get back up to running 15-20 miles a week and doing 5k and 10k runs for fun. If anyone knows of a nike+ widget I could run on my site to show miles/runs, leave a link in the comments -- one of the best motivations to exercise or lose weight is good old public shaming.

Apple is the new NASA

When I was a kid, the future was filled with optimism. The year 2000 was 10-20 years away and it was this magical goal we were working towards. I was obsessed with astronauts, especially those in NASA that got to ride in the space shuttle. While I never made it to spacecamp, I envied the kids that did.

Then the shuttle blew up, the year 2000 passed without flying cars, and 9/11 sparked another world war. Leaders talked about the past, not the future. Optimism was dead.

I never stopped looking for that optimistic future. It's something every tech nerd craves and I think that's why we got into the technology field to start with: to make the world better. Anyway, today I realized why I transformed from longtime skeptic of Apple computer to total fanboy in the past three years.

Apple creates technology that makes things better. Portable music, wireless networking, laptops, photos on your digital camera, video on your camcorder, movies on your TV, and now the dreaded cellphone. These are all things that have been a hassle for some time.

I don't know a single person that likes the phone they have. Everyone feels like a victim of both their phone plan and their phone hardware. Cellphones seem to be one of those things that barely works given all the drawbacks. The iPhone isn't just a new gadget. It looks like something that will transform the way we think about cellphones.

Today I realized the feeling of optimism that I held dear when I was a kid -- that everything was going to work out and be better for everyone when I got older -- isn't captured by the folks at NASA anymore. It's the people at Apple that provide that.