We are living in interesting times. I like to call them iTimes because we are surrounded by iThings: iPods, iTunes, iPhones, iMacs, iLife and other iStuff.
I hope to use this space to talk about our collective journeys and experiences in this internet age. Things are changing rapidly and it has been somewhat magical to watch the advancement of technology into so many aspects of our lives. Who could think of living life without the many gadgets that have become a part of who we are? I know that I feel naked if I find myself without my iPod or my Palm. My children can barely imagine a life without home computers (our first computer arrived shortly before our first child), microwave ovens, calculators or VCRs. Now that the internet is into its teenage years, I wonder what the next generation will be taking for granted. All of these things were just being invented as I was growing up, but have always existed as far as my kids are concerned.
March 30, 2009 - What’s Wrong with the iPod touch?
I just got an iPod touch from my sweetie as a birthday present and while it does a lot of things very well, in some ways it just doesn’t measure up to my ancient Palm m500. Here are the most glaring annoyances I have discovered after a little more than a week of use:
- Battery Life. My m500 could easily go a week or more between charges. The iPod touch needs to be plugged in every other day or so. This complaint may be somewhat unfair as the Palm has a 160x160 pixel grayscale LCD with only 16 shades and rarely needs the backlight. The iPod, by comparison, has a 480x320 pixel full colour display that requires some amount of backlighting all the time. Nevertheless, it is annoying to be constantly worried about running out of power.
- Application Integration. On the Palm, if I wanted to make an appointment to call somebody, I could go to the calendar, enter “Call ” at the appropriate time and enter the hot-key “/L” to look-up my address book and locate the correct contact and click Add. This would auto-magically copy the contact’s name and primary phone number into the appointment entry. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can find no such feature on the iPod. This strikes me as odd, because Apple did create the Newton over a decade ago that would recognize that if you entered “Lunch with John” that John was likely a person and might be in your address book and made connection for you–even asking you which John if it found more than one. The other reason this is odd is Apple’s done a wonderful job of integrating the iLife and iWork applications on the Mac desktop. Why does it not carry over to the iPod?
- Wireless Sharing. Every Palm ever made (as far as I know) has an infrared port and can transmit data wirelessly to other Palms in line of sight. Any two Palm users can swap electronic business cards along with other types of data with little effort and nary a cord. This was a ubiquitous feature and many games and other applications took advantage of the feature to provide enhanced capability. My better half and I often shared appointments and notes (such as shopping lists) easily this way. It seems that The OS 3.0 update due this summer will enable this functionality via Bluetooth, but will it be as pervasive throughout the interface as it was for Palm? I suspect it won’t.
- Documents on the Go. On my Palm, using the wonderful Documents To Go application from DataViz, I was able to create and edit text documents and spreadsheets, complete with styled text, on the road and bring them back to the desktop for further refinement. Now I recognize that it is not Apple’s fault that Documents To Go isn’t yet available for the iPhone and iPod touch (yes, I am on the waiting list), but I still miss it. I have looked for alternatives and I can only seem to find online (or cloud) tools that require you be on the internet to edit your documents. Now, that may be fine for an iPhone with its unlimited cell phone data plan and always connected nature, but with the iPod being limited to Wi-Fi and me living in a rural area with extremely limited hotspots, the usefulness of cloud computing is severely curtailed.
- Recurring Events. I have an event that takes place on the first Saturday of every month. I cannot set up this reoccurrence on the iPod touch. When I entered the next occurrence on the 4th of April and set the recurrence to monthly, the next occurrence is the 4th of May, which is not a Saturday. On the Palm, when you set the recurrence to monthly it asks whether you mean each 4th of the month or the first Saturday of each month.
Now these annoyances may not seem like a big deal and I really do like the iPod touch. It does a lot of things that I’ve never been able to do with a handheld device before and a lot of what it does it does very well. The problem is almost that Apple has such a history of under-promising and over-delivering that these little quibbles are become a disappointment rather than merely a footnote.
Now here’s hoping that iPhone OS 3.0 makes my life almost perfect once again.
DustyMac
November 5, 2008 - What's up with XPS?
In my IT day job, I have recently come across some people at our company asking for the XPS Viewer so they can make use of XPS documents that have been sent to them. I had to do some digging to figure out what XPS is and what to do about it. It turns out that XPS (XML Paper Specification) is a Microsoft-developed technology that is built in to Windows Vista and the .net 3.0 framework. The reason this technology exists, from what I can infer, is to try to kill Acrobat's popular PDF file format and make users more dependent on Microsoft Windows. Here is what Microsoft says about it:
“The XML Paper Specification itself is platform independent, openly published, and available royalty-free”
Sounds great, but it really is only platform independent if you think that Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003 together represent all platforms. This technology has been out for about a year and that's all that Microsoft supports so far. Now, to be honest, there are two different XPS viewers available for the Mac from third party developers, but they cost $100 - $140. Yeah, like I'm going to spend that just to read a document someone sent me. If you want me to read something, send it a format I can read for free, thanks.
In the PDF world, the viewers were always free and some of the content creation tools came at a price. PDF has been an open standard (ISO 32000-1:2008) since July 1, 2008. PDF is also the official standard for the US Patent and Trademark office and they offer free PDF creation tools for Windows users (Mac users have this capability built in to Mac OS X).
The only thing that XPS seems to offer that PDF doesn't is Digital Rights Management and we all know how popular that term is. Microsoft has a real not-invented-here syndrome and this is just the most recent evidence.
DustyMac
August 24, 2008 - To Converge or Not To Converge
The introduction of the iPhone 3G once again raises the issue of convergence and whether it is a good thing. This new phone from Apple is a highly converged device: bringing together most of the important features of a cell phone, iPod/media player, PDA, digital camera, internet communicator and GPS. Since it is, essentially, six devices rolled into one, why would anyone not want one? This is the question I have been wrestling with for more than a month now.
The iPhone is, without a doubt, a very drool-worthy device. It has just about everything I would want to be able to carry around in my pocket. The cell phone is best in class and has the most intuitive interface yet, for a phone. It makes three way-calling and voice mail easy enough for everyone and voice mail is better than ever thanks to Apple’s insistence on network improvements to enable visual voice mail. The media features are incredible as well, with the large, high resolution screen and fast CPU making video a delight to behold. I haven’t personally tested the audio, but my iPod experiences give me reason to believe to expect nothing but goodness.
I know a number of people that had already stopped carrying a PDA because their iPod already was capable of holding their address book and calendar, although they had to give up on-the-go data entry. The iPhone almost eliminates the usefulness of a Palm or similar device. I’m not sure whether there is any decent note-taking capability in the iPhone or provided by any of the applications available at the App Store, but many people don’t use those features much on a PDA anyway.
I can’t possibly count the number of times I have kicked myself because I forgot to bring my camera and I come across something begging to be capture and shared. Well the iPhone eliminates this problem. Not only do you always have a ready camera, but you can share your photo on the spot via e-mail or upload it to Flickr or Facebook (using AirMe). And you can geo-tag your photo to document its location too.
Internet everywhere at Wi-Fi or 3G speed with location awareness make the iPhone a personal navigator of the highest degree. It knows where you are at all times and with the assistance of Google’s vast web savvy, can find anything you are looking for within a reasonable radius of your immediate location.
So, now that I’ve given a summary of reasons why I should run out and get one, you’re probably wondering why I haven’t already. I know most of my friends can’t believe I’m not pulling one out at any opportunity that arises to show, once again, why “Apple rules and Microsoft drools.” The simplest reason is that, for me, the iPhone is too little, too late. Of the six devices that the iPhone is, I already have 4 and, although some of these devices are out-classed by the iPhone, others are not.
My cell phone has a horrible user interface and my even my fairly tech-savvy sweetheart finds it confusing at times. It has features beyond simple phone calls, but they are so cumbersome to use that I don’t bother. What it has going for it is that it is small, light, has great battery life, and I can lend it to my sweetie or our daughter when it makes sense and I don’t have to say goodbye to my iPod or PDA at the same time.
My iPod has a smaller screen than the iPhone but much more storage (80 GB). This is important to me since I have a large music collection and there are a few podcasts that I follow regularly. My musical taste is widely varied and the ability to switch from Mozart to Motörhead to Louis Armstrong to The Clash to The Bangles on a whim fills me with pure joy. Even if I limit myself to just my Favourite Songs playlist, I’d have to throw some away to fit it on the largest iPhone, and which songs to part with? I couldn't bear it!
I have an older Palm (an m500) that goes everywhere I go. It is almost as important for me to carry it as it is for me to get dressed in the morning. My memory is very good, but my recall is spotty at best. I can recall the license plate numbers for every car my parents had when I still lived at home almost 30 years ago and phone numbers that I haven’t used in many years (and no longer reach the same people), but if you ask me what I ate for dinner yesterday, I’ll have a hard time finding that bit of info in the grey matter. If I have to remember something, I record it in my Palm. If I have to do something in the future, I set an alarm. This device has helped my marriage (and the rest my life) to run much more smoothly as I appear to be much less of an idiot than I would otherwise.
I have a little Nikon digital camera that takes absolutely beautiful pictures. It is small & light and it’s biggest fault is that I often leave it at home and miss some great photo opportunities. The optics are very clear and the colour is great. The optical zoom and auto focus are quick and accurate. It has some trouble in low light, but show me a camera that doesn’t.
Add to all of this the requirement to add a $30 monthly data plan to my existing cell phone bill and you can see why I just can’t justify getting one of these lovely little gadgets. I think they are fabulous and they represent the current pinnacle of technology, but I won’t be getting one. For me, the individual pieces are better served by my existing collection of devices that I can carry (or not) in varying combinations and share with my family as needed. The money I save by not paying for a data plan will even pay for a decent GPS in a year.
DustyMac
April 28, 2008
Because of a potential project at work, I have been doing some research on wikis to see how they compare to Knowledge bases and whether they may be applicable to what we want to accomplish. The first thing that surprised me is how old the wiki phenomenon is. Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, which he called WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and published a web site using it in March of 1995. Wikipedia, which is probably the best known wiki, was created in 2001. Most of the top rated wiki software is open source and built on other open source technologies such as PHP and mySQL.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki is that it is easily maintained using only a web browser. Unlike Apple's Hypercard application which was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, creating links between pages is intuitive and almost completely automatic. A link is created simply by typing the target page's name in a particular fashion. You can even create the link first and the wiki software provides a simple mechanism to create the linked page. The exact syntax depends on the individual wiki's implementation. One of the simplest is Ward's original use of CamelCase.
In my travels I came across TiddlyWiki, which I think is the most clever, simple and elegant wiki implementation. It does not even require a web server, let alone a database. This wiki reduces the concept to the size of a single web page. Instead of a collection of linked web pages, a TiddlyWiki is a single page made up of individual "tiddlers" that can be shown, hidden and edited at will using only HTML, CSS and Javascript.
If you are the least bit curious about wikis and their potential, you really ought to try it out.
DustyMac
March 29, 2008
Yes, It's been a while since I wrote. There are two reasons for this:
- I was on vacation
- Nothing is going on in the tech world that has so inspired me to write about it (well, besides the release of Return to Dark Castle).
So I have decided to write about how I use smart playlists in iTunes to make my listening time more enjoyable and nearly automatic.
 iTunes' smart playlists are a feature that has gradually improved to the point that I wonder now how I ever lived without them. The screen shot to the left shows a subset of my current playlists. The addition of folders to organize your playlist has been wonderful as I can now hide away the playlists that I rarely use and not have to scroll through them (the iPod uses these folders the same way). One drawback of the way iTunes does playlists is that you cannot mix AND (all) and OR (any) conditions in a single playlist. You can, however make playlists dependent on each other and that allows you to work around the limitation. This is why I have the four Constructor Playlists you see in the list; they are used to build other playlists.
The first playlist I'll discuss is Exclusions. This playlist will hold all the stuff that I don't want to hear currently (like Christmas music the rest of the year). This then becomes a basis for the other constructors:
Each of the Unrecent playlists controls how frequently I hear songs of various ratings. This ensures that I hear songs I like a lot more often than song I like a little. The example above is for 5 Star Songs (My absolute favourites). The Main playlist then combines all of these playlists together along with new songs (which are characterized by the fact that they have not yet been rated):
This playlist is like my ultimate radio station. You've heard about the No Repeat Workday, right. Well this really is. I am guaranteed to hear only the songs I like and only as often as I like and all I have to do to change a song's playing frequency is to change its rating (which is easy as pie on the iPod).
The last playlist I'll discuss is one I use for controlling my Podcasts. The iPod is fabulous for listening to Podcasts, but I find locating podcasts to be a bit too much work for my lazy brain. My Podcasts playlist does all the hard word of thinking for me and presents all my unheard podcast in a logical order for easy consumption. Here it is:
Pretty simple, eh? The real key to this playlist is the sort order. If you look in the background, behind the Smart Playlist dialog, you'll see that the playlist is sorted by Release Date. In order to get this column to show up, go to View > View Options... in the menu to add or remove metadata columns. With this Sort order, the first podcast in the list is always the oldest unheard podcast. If I don't want to think, I'll just play the first entry in the list, which will disappear as soon as I finish listening to it. If I feel rebellious, I'll scroll down to find one that catches my fancy.
This is by no means an exhaustive discussion of the possibilities and I am certainly not the first one to write about this. In fact, this is based on an idea posted some time ago by another blogger who, I'm sorry to say, I'm too lazy to go looking for now. If it's you, let me know and I'll happily give you direct credit.
DustyMac
February 22, 2008
Having been a Mac user since 1986, one of the things that always excited me was the enthusiastic small developer community that rallied around this great machine. This spirit has somehow managed to weather the downtimes in the nineties when everyone was saying Apple was dead and the press couldn't seem to report on the company without preceding the company name with the dreaded doom-word, "beleaguered" as in, "Popularity of New OS 8 Mac Software Gives Beleaguered Apple a Best Seller." This is the spirit that has brought such wonderful Mac-only applications such as Delicious Library, BBEdit and Transmit to name but a few. I have been experiencing a return to the giddy early days of the Mac thanks to my recent discovery of Uli's Moose. This application is a wonderfully faithful recreation of the original Talking Moose that has been developed with the blessing of the original creator, Dr. Steven Halls. This ground-breaking software made hilarious use of Apple's advanced text-to-speech engine. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article:
From the historical perspective of technology evolution, the version 1 Talking Moose in 1986 was the first animated-face talking agent on a system-wide basis for a personal computer. Version 2 in 1987 was the first animated-face talking agent with lip synchronization to its speech. It became the seed idea for future talking agents, such as Clippy the paperclip on Microsoft Windows, and Prody Parrot from Creative Soundblaster.
The moose has been happily telling me what time it is and spouting bits of geeky wisdom since I installed him just a few days ago. I like him so much that I still have him set to talk as frequently as his settings will allow. Do yourself a favour and download it now.
DustyMac
P.S. For those of you who haven't switched yet, there is a version for Windows XP.
February 10, 2008
Some of my favourite places (in no particular order):
Even though I've been using iPods for a few years, it was my wife, who just recently got an iPod, who turned me on to Podcasts. Now I'm spending almost as much time listening to them as to my music! Since I am the family grammar nazi, Grammar Girl's podcast has become one of my favourites. My other faves come from the institution that makes me love being a Canadian: CBC Radio. CBC's Radio 3 is a bit of an oxymoron in that it really isn't on the radio at all unless you count Sunday nights when it takes over Radio 2's airwaves. The best way to consume radio 3 content is via their great podcasts full of new, mostly independent, music. Radio 1 has some great podcasts too, including Search Engine, which is helping to fight for fair copyright law in Canada, and Spark, which covers tech trends.
DustyMac
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