Archive for category apple
The iPad: Opinion Overload
iPad
Apple’s iPad was released yesterday to mixed reviews. A few quotables from the iPad site.
“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”
“The best way to experience the web, email, photos, videos and video. Hands down.”
If I had to rewrite the first Apple quote it would go like this:
“Our most advanced technology in a hot and evolutionary device at a lowish price for Apple products.”
Is the price unbelievable? Not really. Then again, I haven’t used it yet. Put another way, im not running out in 60 days to buy one because I think its ultra cheap not having played with it. The price point doesn’t seem to far off though. If it were $200 I buy one on release day.
iPad is essentially a bigger iPhone. This is actually a big deal because the iPhone was revolutionary but it was too small for certain tasks. Like typing up emails. I don’t really use it for longer emails than “OK” or “LOLZ.” I can tweet from it, but it thinks certain words I mispell on purpose are other words and its not fun changing them 3 times to the right word. Beyond that, its a fine device. The iPad has more screen and because of that I expect it will be easier to type on it.
I received a first generation iPhone from a friend for free. It works fine in every way save it doesn’t turn on or off as the power button is broken. It just goes in and out of standby. Works fine beyond that. I use it as a web/email/twitter/facebook/music/video podcast device. I have a few games on it but i rarely play them. Games on the iPhone are not that much fun. Then again, it might just be me. I LOVE the iPhone so much when I am home I just use that for surfing, twitter and facebook at home. If I want to type up a blog post I turn on a desktop/laptop but for mostly everything else its the iPhone all the way. Though its important to note that its great for consuming, not creating stuff. The iPad might be better for creating as it has a larger screen and can come with iWork. We will see.
When I first read the stream from Engadget on release day I was EXTREMELY underwhelmed. After all the hype and buzz about iTablet/iSlate this device couldn’t have lived up to the hype. And it seems with many people it really didn’t. But the trick is we haven’t used it yet. After the day was over, I woke up and relooked at the pictures I changed my tune a bit. It looks like a really cool device. I still have reservations about it though.
No multitasking. No console. Locked down. No native SD slot. These are pretty much my major complaints about iPhone. I can understand from a UI/UX perspective why you wouldn’t enable multitasking. Having 90% of the CPU for the current application is a very nice thing. The iPhone isn’t a speed demon. Howevever when only one thing is happening what performance you do get you get consistently. So if an app pushes the limits of 3D, RAM and CPU it will consistently work accross thousands of iPad 1.0 devices. If you enable multitasking this goes down. Stuff gets slower. Stuff may crash. The UI/UX suffers. On a such a little device this is a bigger problem than a beefy desktop computer. Plus, enabling a multitask switcher on a device with one button would suck. So I get why they may want to only enable one app at a time. I also understand why they want to lock it down. Similarish reasons, but you do get to make more on an app store with no other competitive channels to install software.
So the problems I have with iPad I have with iPhone yet I love my iPhone. So much so if it broke id get a new iPod touch. Its that cool. Will the iPad be something I get because I love my iPhone? I am not sure but I imagine not the 1.0 version. I like that the iPhone is so small I can put it in my pocket and put it on a window ledge next to the bed. Can’t do that with the iPad. Then again, its not meant to do that.
People thought the iPod and iPhone were a joke but they turned out well for Apple in the end. I believe the iPad is such a device but the market will tell. Not our opinions.
ITS SO SECRET THIS IS THE TITLE!
I am at calconnect this year. This year its being hosted at Apples Cupertino campus. I can’t really talk much about what we discuss at calconnect or anything about what anything I talked about with a iCal or iPhone developer because its all wrapped up in a calconnect NDA. Plus if I mentioned something beyond that I am here I might find a lawyerpalooza awaiting my inbox.
Anyways, its good to be back down in San Fran. I was here a bit ago for the last calconnect at Oracle. Its fun to travel but the last two weeks or so Francesca and I have been away in Montana. When I get home on Friday round 5pmish ill be in town until I can plan another trip. Which I did a few weeks ago and ill write about that sometime in the future.
I am pretty tired but I wanted to sign off with a note that I put up three new hank the squirrel comics.
Enjoy.
MASHTHISUIP!
Posted by jdodson in Uncategorized, apple, free software, humor, offhandstrangity, tech on September 22nd, 2009
Decided to blog on a few articles I read this morning. I dub this, premise and opinion.
The first premise brought to you by slashfilm: “Would You Be Sad If Rental Stores Vanished?”
I am going to answer this in two parts, literally and figuratively.
LITERALLY: If rental stores around the US vanished it would be a very cool thing. Stores just don’t melt into nothingness. In my mind I would think alien store abduction or a massive USA wide prank. Then again.. a really good prank. Maybe rental stores did it to advertise their online business. The kind of buzz it would generate would be amazing. Then again, if it was the alien thing, well I don’t know what would happen about that. Maybe we would take the space shuttle to Mars and nuke it or something. No I didn’t mean nuke the space shuttle at Mars, I meant nuke Mars by taking the space shuttle and dropping a bomb on it.
FIGURATIVELY: I think its somewhat sad to lose things I grew up with that I like. Like drive in movies. Then again, there is 99w in Oregon and the wife and I go there a few times a year to check out the double feature. I guess my answer, in a way, is that if there is something people like, it will exist in some form. Perhaps video rental stores will be a smaller thing, perhaps only in boutique store form but I don’t think they will vanish. As the Blockbuster and Hollywood discontinue more brick stores we can all buy cheap movies on clearance. I like that more than I like renting a DVD for $7 or whatever the insane price is now. Do technological shifts make me sad? Some. Like the shift to digital downloads instead of physical copies. They usually come with DRM and I really am not a fan. Oh well, maybe its in our consumer nature to only have things for four seconds and never expect to own anything. LEASE LEASE LEASE, CREDIT CREDIT CREDIT… right? right?
Bueller… Bueller..
“Linus thinks the Linux Kernel is Bloated” – Yeah it is and he says its unavoidable. Seriously though, everything seems bloated these days. Budgets & spending, Operating System Kernels and Jessica Simpson. The Mac OS I use for work is a cow or I guess a better analogy is that its a walrus. Its also a very pretty walrus. This pretty walrus needs 4 gigs of RAM to be adequately skippy when I develop software on it. I guess Vista requires quite a bit of horsepower too. You could surf the web on Windows 3.1 so if people want to use something less bloated you can always do that. Netscape 2 has your back on that one though(I am not sure maybe it was Netscape 1). Which means you couldn’t really do anything other than Craigslist on the machine. Then again, it is not bloated by today’s standards. Enjoy.
Clearly bloat isn’t the worst of problems, but it is one. Then again RAM is pretty cheap these days.
See the slashdot comments for somewhat interesting take on this. If you dare.
“Michael Jacksons last concert video is coming!“ I put it here as proof that I can write about things I won’t see or really care too much about. Then again I cared enough to say I was disinterested in it.
“Mario Kart The Movie“ This is pretty creative and funny. I like the part where Bowser eats mushrooms. Well done fellow geeks, well done.
“The Tooth Fairy” File this under “holy fucking shit” but The Rock is going to be playing The Tooth Fairy in a movie about the Tooth Fairy. Ill just let that one speak for itself.
“Guy Replaces Halflife 2 Sounds With His Own Voice” This is a clear example of how awesome it is to be alive in the greatest age of mankind. This is incredible, this guy totally captured how I spent my young life in the car with my parents. I would daydream of chasing the Terminator or whatever and make sound effects with my voice to myself in the car. Ahh the good old days. I wish this guy could get a award for this.
“NiN’s The Fragile is 10 Years Old!” Trent event said there is going to be a mega reissue in 2010. Nice. The Fragile is a great NiN double album. One of my fav NiN albums actually. Listening to it now to celebrate. I own it but you can stream it all online at last.fm. I recommend the following tacks: “Were in this together”(Possibly NiN’s most optimistic song to date), “Even Deeper,” “The Great Below,” “Where is Everybody?” “The Big Comedown,” “The Day The Whole World Went Away” and the rest of the album.
Free At Last!
So, yesterday I typed up a post on my thoughts about the iPhone. I typed it up for my friends, the people that read this blog. It was linked off a few sites(you can find them in the ping backs on the post). I was surprised it got attention at all, I hacked it out in 30 minutes.
Let me explain a few things about that post. Largely it was an opinion article. It was largely an experiential article. That is to say, I have experience with the iPhone and that experience has led me to an opinion. Its not wrong or right, it simply is my opinion. I don’t expect it to be yours so we have no disagreement here. Well you may, but I don’t care about that.
Also, I am not going to partake in any iPhone V the world flame war. It simply won’t happen. Why? This isn’t Slashdot and if it were, I would just watch the banter, I don’t partake in it. Even though I find the banter of Slashdot to be the majority of the fun 
Immediately after I posted it I wanted to post a follow up because I didn’t express in detail all my findings about the iPhone. At times, you need to decide what makes the cut and what doesn’t due to length considerations and time. I am not a professional blogger so I don’t have multiple hours to scrub my post to every last line.
One point I don’t think I made well is that I have only been using this little Verizon phone for a few days. This is important to note because I have been using the iPhone minus the phone for a year +. I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs to the iPhone, I didn’t buy the missing manual and I don’t go to iPhone user groups. If you can do something with it I missed, its because it wasn’t immediately intuitive or no one told me you could do it. Nothing malicious here, just lack of knowing. I don’t consider hacking or jailbreaking the iPhone to be a good solution to opening up the device.
I know Verizon locks down devices and I know they use DRM on their apps(well at least I think they do). Again, its not the DRM I care about, its the DRM getting in my way. My charge is, essentially all DRM gets in your way eventually.
And for all the Apple zealots, remember, I said the iPhone was incredible and it really is. Its changed the world of smartphones forever and that is a really great thing. Its just that, I am not going to flame with you about it.
The iPhone is Amazing! The iPhone is Horrible!
Posted by jdodson in apple, free software, tech on August 15th, 2009
** ADDITION: Please read this and understand this is an post about my opinion based on my experience. This isn’t the end of the world, I assure you its simply my opinion. END ADDITION **
The iPhone is an amazing product. At least, I think so. A few other people seem to agree with me. A year or so ago, a friend gave me a first generation iPhone he bought that was broken. It wouldn’t turn off or on. You could charge it fine, have it go into standby and use it in every way save it won’t turn off or on. Since thats not a big deal, I started using it minus the “phone.” I just use the “i” part and the “i” part is great. Ive heard bad things about the phone part. Can’t comment on that really, I just have an “i”.
I think the i is amazing. About two years ago I purchased Nokia N800. This Linux powered internet tablet plays music, surfs the web over wifi, supports email, flash in the browser, has a web cam, does Skype and more. It is a cool device but is has problems. Not only is it slow, its just not that easy to use. Crashes, laggy apps and over time it seemed like a chore to use. After my friend gave me his broken iPhone I realized you could take a handheld device and make it shine for certain uses the Nokia was bad at.
One other huge gripe of the N800 was how lame the web looked in its mini-firefox OR Opera browser. Fonts were small. Scrolling simply didn’t work on some pages(Amazon). The web sucked on the N800. The biggest thing the i got right was that it made the Safari mobile browser shine. Surfing the web on the i is a joy to use and I don’t surf the web at home on a regular computer these days at all. I use the i.
Another thing the i does well is email. I guess I should qualify, the i is good at reading email. Any kind of text entry on the i means you have to touch the screen on a fake keyboard. Essentially imagine typing on a glass window. It sucks. I like that my fingers hit a keyboard and they don’t immediately stop. Plus its hard to remain 100% accurate with no keys. I recently picked up a Verizon phone and it has a flip out touch pad keyboard. I am way more accurate on a flip out touch pad than the iBoard. Because of this, I enter little data in the i, I use it as a client primarily.
The i has a 2 mega pixel camera. Its not amazing, but cool to have when you don’t have a better one. It is better than nothing but the quality is sub crap. You need the lighting to be perfect, you can’t move your hand or the picture will smear. Don’t think about taking party pictures, it will look like the inside of a dark shoe box. But its a great thing to have and I have taken many pictures on it and some turned out great. Most don’t.
I would say that sums up what I think is awesome about the iPhone. Sure it has 20 billion apps but most of them suck I don’t find compelling enough to use or enjoy. I recently bought a game called Zenonia for $3 and its incredible, but I find that to the exception to the blase app rule. I use a twitter app all the time but I could just the use mobile web part and it wouldn’t be terrible. All told I don’t find the fact that they have a billion apps to be a big deal at all. A few others I use are just the web site re packaged into a app on the i that is native. Its kind of nicer in some cases but not a big deal, most sites have a mobile view anyway.
Lets get into the horrible parts about the i. These are so bad, I prob won’t buy one because of them. Understand to me a open platform is pretty important. I value a open platform over a “more sexy” platform any day. So far the parts of the platform I use the most have no need to be closed. However, the i and the Phone is one of the most closed down platforms I have used in my recent memory.
1) You can only copy music on it from iTunes and only one instance of iTunes at that. Seriously WTF is it 1984? I am as legit a user as it gets yet Apple won’t let me sync this crap from one iTunes instance to another. That is simply lame. I sync between multiple computers, this is essential to my workflow. – infinity for treating me like a criminal.
1.1) I don’t like iTunes, why force me to use it? I just want the i not the Tunes! This is not a joke, I really don’t care for it.
2) All apps on the App Store are DRM’d no matter what. This is simply silly. First off, 99% of my apps are free so I don’t get why they are wrapped in DRM. Second off DRM shouldn’t be mandatory, it should only be on apps where the app provider requests it. Seems odd to wrap everything in DRM if some developers might not want it in the first place. Why would they not want DRM on the app? Oh I don’t know, how about because every time I upgrade my i they don’t work? I have to go into my i and authenticate to the App Store in preferences and then manually open every app so it can see I am me. This is stupid and silly. I am not a criminal, please don’t treat me like one. I am now starting to wonder if I ever bought another iPhone or iPod touch, if the apps I bought would transfer? Note to Apple: NEVER MAKE YOUR CUSTOMER QUESTION THIS KIND OF THING! This reason alone is reason enough for me to discontinue paying for App Store apps. I don’t care about DRM until it gets in my way or scares me and the reality of DRM is just that.
3) No bluetooth support in ways I care about. I got a new Verizon phone for $80. This phone is in every way a more open device than my iPhone. One of the ways is that it enables me to transfer any file on it to any bluetooth device. I guess Verizon(or LG) should be sued for enabling piracy. I actually think that is quite unlikely to happen, but they might have happy customers because they can transfer pictures to each other on the fly with each other. I guess you can always TXT or email a picture on the i but it scales it down very small like and some people(AKA myself) I care about fidelity of sources(picture, audio).
4) Can’t plug SDHC cards into it. I see failure in two ways: 1) (The Paranoid View) Apple builds planned obsolescence in its devices by denying their expandability. 2) Somehow a SDHC reader will not work within the confines of a iPhone/iPod touch. 3) Something else that isn’t coming to me right now. The i I have has 8 gigs of flash on it. Id like to upgrade this. Oh, wait, too bad, can’t. Buy a new phone. Not only is this silly because you can avoid it by allowing SDHC cards, it seems a little un-green of Apple too. Then again, there may be some technical reason they don’t do this. Like technically when everyone upgrades iPhones they technically make more money.
5) AT&T only. HAHAHAHA no.
I recently got a Verizon phone for $80 that in many ways puts the i to shame. I still will keep around the i to surf the web and cehck email but that will be it for now. I have read in some places that a Android phone is coming to Verizon this year and saw some specs and screen shots and it looks very cool. Prob get one of those. I won’t be tied to Apple then. I hope Apple decides to open up its device more than it is. It would be good for its users and may add another to its paying fold. Namely myself.
Biting The Bullet, Breaking Teeth
Francesca and I decided to bite the bullet and pass out a DVD this year instead of a VCD. We created some really killer menus in iDVD and the quality is MUCH better than VCD. Plus the widescreen aspect ratio is kept and not strectched like the VCD.
Lookout for the high def videos coming soon!
Christmas Video
Posted by jdodson in apple, free software, tech on December 10th, 2008
Francesca and I put some time into our bi yearly Christmas video and I am rendering the videos now. In the past I edited the videos in Kino or Windows Movie Maker and then formatted them for VCD and distributed it to friends & family. Shockingly enough VCD’s play on most DVD players due to the popularity of VCD in Asia. I would rather put out a DVD but you can burn in two differing formats: DVD-R and DVD+R. I usually do DVD-R but that doesn’t play on every DVD player, they only play on some. Dunno is DVD+R is better but its a consumer fuck either way.
Seriously? Two competing consumer DVD formats? Fuck you whoever did that. So, for our video to play on most friends and families hardware we create a VCD. Upside? Cheap. Downside? Quality. Its noticable on a standard def TV but most people don’t seem to care. I do so as a long term storage format, VCD sucks. If you have a HDTV and some kind of upscaling DVD player or Bluray, its going to look craptastic as well.
*sigh*
I am toying with the notion of distributing a SVCD this year. It increases the quality to sub DVD but MUCH better than VCD. Francesca votes we should go VCD because we know it plays in 90% of the people’s players we send it to.
This year I am going to make a 720p HD copy of all the videos available for download if people care to watch at a higher resolution. As always they will play fine in VLC or Quicktime.
This year we created the videos in iMovie. iMovie is a good video editor and has all the stuff I need to do what I need to do. The only downside is that it doesn’t export to VCD format. So I export as a DV file and do the VCD/SVCD conversion on Linux. ffmpeg to the rescue really.
Tried Songbird
Tried songbird today. Not that impressed. Its like Rhytmbox but more confusing to use. Ill stick to iTunes on the mac for now.
Macbook Pro flies…. with 4 gigs of RAM!
Hi.
Second work week at the new job and its going well. Plenty to keep me busy with. Plenty to think about. Plenty of choices to sift through. Boredom won’t be on my radar for quite some time, if at all really. In the end id rather be nose to the razor busy with tasks than bored.
Recently I noted to the new company that this macbook pro was SLOW on 1G of memory. First time a full gig of memory wasn’t enough for a machine ive used. I think it must be the mac bloat or something. Ive used Ubuntu for years and gotten by fine with a gig or less. Regardless, having only one gig would cause the mac to swap much to disk and thereby make things VERY slow.
Ive found that mac may be a fine desktop OS but not in terms of desktop responsiveness in a low resource state(1 gig of ram it seems). The Linux kernel must kick the Mac OS kernels ass or something, perhaps Gnome as something to do with it as well but Linux can seem to get by on a lesser machine. Not to say this laptop is lesser, its a 2GHZ dual core machine and 1G should have this machine do circles around a jet. Needless to say, thats not the case. I guess its not totally surprising mac really seems to bling out the UI quite a bit. It just comes with the cost of needing more resources available. Compound that with the fact that I am a power user and virtualize a few instances at once and it might make more sense.
All that said I purchased 4 gigs of ram for this machine and it flies. Initial startup is slow but once everything is loaded its fast. One thing operating systems do to “fake out” that they booted ultra fast is get the window manager loaded and still boot up the rest of the OS. This basically makes the first minute or so of login slower than it should be. Id honestly prefer to login when everything is finished loading. I guess games need to be played with peoples minds about how fast an OS actually boots up so one OS doesn’t look bad. Linux is starting to do this more, so I guess since everyone is doing it….
So there you have it, for power use, Mac OS seems good around 4 gigs. Which is nut bag insane.
Pretty meet price.
**UPDATE** 4 gigs of RAM cost $89.
Setting Up New Workflow
I have been using a refined workflow for 4-5 years on Linux. Switching that over to MacOS is pretty intense. Its not that MacOS can’t be wrangled to do it. Its that MacOS can’t be easily wrangled to do it.
For instance. I use sshfs to edit files remotely on Linux. I had to install MacFUSE and then symlink sshfs so I could script mounting remote drives. I also have to setup reverse SSH tunnels to getting into a Ubuntu Hardy instance in Virtualbox because it doesn’t support network hostmode when the Mac is using its wireless card.
Ive also had to install a junkload of extra programs and the like and getting it setup the way id like has been taking quite a bit of time. Again, its not that MacOS can’t do this stuff, its that I have to relearn how it can do that.
I think largely, I prefer the GNU toolchain to BSD’s toolchain. Enough things are different to make it annoying. Thats why I am virtualizing Ubuntu. I can just use that as my dev sandbox and do other smaller bits on the MacOS BSD toolchain. There is one silver lining of sorts though. I was able to install fink on MacOS to get a apt-get package manager on it. It has a small assortment of packages, nothing like Ubuntu, but it got gpg & subversion installed with no problems.
Now to get used to the default trackpad having no right click…..