confessions of a serial hobbyist

So I haven’t been writing a lot of mobile development here, as I have generally tried to keep my personal opinions and work-related interests atleast slightly separated, I want to make a few comments on Android, after working with it as a developer for a few days. There will probably be atleast a few technical bits in here…if you’re bored, well, deal.

To start with, Android is a bit…over-engineered. It’s a problem I’ve seen a lot of in the past, whenever Java developers would try to get into J2ME for example. They take their academic lessons on proper system design and object object oriented programming and then go on to large, memory intensive, and overly complex mobile applications. And this is my first impression of Android. It’s large, and overly complex. The class listings are huge, and the steps to get things done, while nice in design theory, are numerous.
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Apple recently announced it’s new iLife ‘08 Digital Lifestyle application suite. Most of the apps got some nice new features, but iMovie was selected to be completely replaced with an entirely different application (albeit still named iMovie).

And in doing so, it was made easy for people who don’t enjoy video editing, and made useless to those that do…

First off, we’ll look at a before and after:

Before (iLife ‘06 / iMovie HD):

After (iLife ‘08 / iMovie ‘08):

The first thing to notice about iMovie ‘06 is that it includes a LARGE viewer of my 1080i footage (filmed as 1080p24…I love my Canon HV20) to show more detail. In iMovie ‘08 I have a much smaller view, and have to view fullscreen to get much detail.

In iMovie ‘06, on the right is your bins of footage. These are clips imported for THIS PROJECT, because frankly if I’m editing a small movie I only want clips for that movie, not footage I shot three years ago for something else. iMovie ‘08 takes up the majority of the screen filling the bottom half with a selection of every clip you’ve ever shot (though to be fair, it does let you narrow it down, and lists by clip). You can argue yourself as to whether or not it’s more powerful, or just more information you likely don’t want/need. iMovie ‘06 shows one picture per clip, while iMovie ‘08 can either show one per clip, or one per every .5, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 30 seconds of a clip. In iMovie ‘06 if you want to add a clip to your project, you drag it down to the timeline, and then trim. In iMovie ‘08 you select within the clips clicking and dragging (each clip is like its own mini-timeline) and then add that selection to your movie.

iMovie ‘06 gives you the option of per-clip views of your movie flow, or a more standard timeline (seen in my screenshot). In timeline view you can see your clips lengths, edit them based on time, and also align footage and audio down to the frame in order to line things up nicely. You have timecode based support for fading in / out audio, switching effects, etc. In iMovie ‘08 you have some videos you added on the top (this and the clips list can be swapped), and you can throw in a song or sound effect by just dragging the file the clip you want it to play during. iMovie ‘06 shows your audio via a nice waveform, allowing you to look for spikes in the audio and other features of the audio for betting syncing of audio and video. iMovie ‘08 gives you a green line to say there’s audio there. I haven’t found a way to do much more with footage or audio in iMovie ‘08.

I really liked iMovie HD, because I saw it as a near complete (albeit low-weight and low-priced) video editing solution. I could see using it to edit small videos and even short movies without much worry, because it was basically Final Cut Express-Express, a more light weight version of their more professional products. iMovie ‘08 on the other hand is designed for people who want to take some movies, throw them together, and spit out the results. Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly a market for that, but it’s not me.

One place where iMovie ‘08 does a nice job over iMovie ‘06 is the sharing options, as it allows you to easily export to multiple files (with simple options such as mobile phone, iPhone, small, large, DVD, etc). In iMovie ‘06 I’d have to do each export separately, one at a time. Being able to select multiple export targets at once means I can tell it to export, and get some sleep for the night while it churns out a bunch of highly encoded h.264 files.

I honestly think iMovie ‘08 does a better job of fitting the iLife target audience better than iMovie ‘06 did, it just bothers me because I’m not strictly in that target audience. I’m more apt to enjoy Aperture over iPhoto, and Final Cut over the new iMovie (neither of which I own yet). I already use Logic, not Garage Band, when recording audio. It’s a bonus to the consumer, and a strike against the prosumer on this one…

I’ll say one good thing - it doesn’t overwrite iMovie HD when you install iLife ‘08, and if you’ve registered your copy of iLife ‘08, Apple allows you to download iMovie HD for free. Obviously other people are seeing the same frustrations I am.

In closing I’d like to thank my son for volunteering the footage of his first steps used in those screenshots - yes he really is that adorable in real life.

So apparently I was tagged in this a couple of weeks ago by Jonathan Greene at atmaspheric | endeavors. But things having been crazy with work and all I missed it, but to follow on I’ll see about what I have…

I’m currently switching between two devices, the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95. I have a few others phones (N80, N75, about 30 others…) but I don’t use them much so they don’t count.

Let’s start with the iPhone because it’s the least interesting in terms of what’s on there. I use the iPhone primarily as my iPod, a web tablet (it is in my opinion superior to say the Nokia 770/N800, despite lacking flash support), for email, and sometimes I even use it as a phone. I do have a little bit of extra software installed:

1. Mobile Terminal - The quite nice (though a pain to install) terminal emulator for the iPhone. I actually end up using it more than one might expect… Unfortunately it doesn’t fully support ANSI escape sequences and what-not so it’s not 100% usable as a unix terminal yet.
2. SSH - what I use the Mobile Terminal for. I frequently SSH into my machines at home etc. to check on things (and once popped on IRC just because I could, though it didn’t work so well…see above comment about ANSI escape sequences).

That’s it - afterall what else is there for the iPhone? Even these required me to spend most of a morning running shady applications to break into my own device. However, having a usable terminal on my phone is such a godsend that it has me thinking of picking up a Nokia E61i - the qwerty on the iPhone is probably the biggest reason I like using it for email etc. over my N95.

Then there’s my N95… I use it often as my phone, and for a slightly larger number of apps - some officially released and some not.

1. Snakes - Yeah I know, it comes on the phone, but for some reason I still have a blast playing it (and replaying it, as I start from scratch every time there’s a firmware update).
2. Podcasting - The s60 podcasting app. Sure I have my iPhone to listen to my podcasts, watch my vidcasts, and generally handle all my media, but I feel it’s my right, nay my DUTY to download as many of those podcasts onto my n95 as I can (especially over EDGE…I’m paying for unlimited data, I should use it). The n95 has the one big win over the iPhone for podcasting - I can actually check for and download new episodes as I’m on the road, and can frequently start downloading an episode as I walk to lunch, and have it downloaded for listening as I eat.
3. Nokia Sports Tracker - I’m an engineer, which almost automatically means I’m out of shape. And so I’ve been using this (along with the GPS built in to the N95) to keep an idea of how much I’m walking…trying to keep up around 2 miles a day atleast.
4. Widsets - I primarily use this for the Jaiku widset. Unfortunately I’m not special enough to get in on the Jaiku mobile beta, and as such have been stuck with the older Jaiku mobile client. It works ok for making a post, and the automatic location updating (based on cell tower information apparently) is great - but being unable to read comments or read more than the last post of other people makes it useless…
5. Mobile Search - as I often do most of my emailing on the device it’s important to be able to search through things. Sure I use my iPhone more than the n95 for emailing (even soft-qwerty beats out t9 when it comes to typing) but since I use IMAP for email, I keep it synced both places. Hint to Nokia by the way - support saving sent emails to a IMAP Sent folder! Currently I have to CC myself, and then have my computer run a rule on incoming email that if it’s from me, move it to the IMAP Sent folder (so it’s saved on the iPhone and my laptop as well).
6. Nokia Maps - I haven’t used it too much, but when I have, it’s come in EXTREMELY handy. This is especially true with the latest firmware where it gets GPS locks a lot faster. And as I’ll be doing a bit more traveling in the coming months, I’m sure I’ll be using it even more.
7. K-Rally - A fun little racing game that took me a while to get into, but then quickly had me hooked. One of the highest quality mobile games I’ve played…and having worked in mobile games for years that MAYBE says something?
8. loopt - Loopt is a mobile-phone based social networking community app. I’ll note RIGHT NOW that this isn’t actually available for S60, or for most phones really - it’s a new service that’s being rolled out a carrier at a time, and the only reason I have it is that loopt happens to be one of my company’s clients. I figured if I’m working on their product, I should be using it - and if I’m going to use it I had to make it work on the phone I use.

So there we have it, most of the apps I use on my Nokia with any kind of regularness (I’m fully aware, thanks to the spell checking built into Safari, that that’s not a word). One thing I noticed as I typed this out - most of those are Nokia apps! I’m not sure if this is a good sign or not… I had previously used QuickOffice for writing up notes, but typing anything serious with t9 was just too painful so I stopped - this may be something I start using again if/when I break down and get an e61i (or e90). I should also note that there are some other things installed on my n95 (generally my company’s own products) but as they’re unannounced, they’ll remain so here - plus I’ll probably have to push them in a new blog post at some point in the future.

This is something that I noticed but wasn’t sure if I wanted to bother writing anything about, but I figure why not…

If you get a chance to see the movie, take a note of something:
Almost every single cell phone you’ll see is a Nokia. In fact, they make a point to SHOW the Nokia emblem in a number of shots. The bad guys? Nokia N90s (or were they N93s?). The “good guy” (Justin Long)? A Nokia E62. Then running down the street they “borrowed” a phone from a guy on the street to make a call…a Nokia 9300 (maybe 9300i, I don’t know the communicators well enough). Even McClane’s daughter was shown using an S60 phone (saw the screen - looked like the S60 standby screen atleast…maybe just an S40?).

Then there’s the other lacking tech devices - I didn’t notice a lot of obviously placed Apple products. Apple is notorious for having their computers/laptops in just about every movie in Hollywood. And yet in this movie I saw little to no Apple, and a whole lot of Nokias.

Is this the beginning of Nokia actually trying to get marketting in the US, or is this just a case of the movie makers wanting phones that look “geeky” or “techy” or something…not too sure.

Regardless, see the movie, it was fantastic.

–

Also of note - a Nokia N93 (I believe) made an appearance in Transformers as well…

So as I use the iPhone more and more I’m running in to things it can’t do, that frankly I never thought about - things that should just be there that you shouldn’t need a bullet-point in a feature list to have…

1. The ability to save and download files. I mean come on, really Apple? This “breakthrough internet device” can’t save an attachment from an email or download a file from the web? I almost want to hope that I’m just being stupid and missing this…but I’m not seeing it anywhere. Even if they didn’t want to give access to any kind of filesystem on the iPhone (which they apparently don’t) a “Save to iDisk” feature would be cool (you hear that Apple? it’s the sound of cross-promoting your own services).
2. The ability to upload files via the web. Similar to above, Apple seems bent on having your email be the only file storage available to the iPhone. The only ways to get files on and off your iPhone are via attachments.
3. The ability to send files to my laptop from my phone via bluetooth. Often I’ll be out and about with no net access on my laptop. Since I get my email delivered to my phone, I could just grab the attachment and send it on to my laptop via bluetooth and go about whatever I need to do.
4. Music player controls without having to take the phone out of my pocket. Sure there are SOME controls you can access - a single click on the mic will pause/resume play, and a double click on the mic will skip to the next track, but what if I want to replay the song I was just listening to? And volume controls are manageable keeping the phone in my pocket, but still requires me to reach down into my pocket and find the volume rocker to press. A few more controls on the headphones/mic would have been great here especially since there’s no controls on the iPhone itself - a purely touchscreen device doesn’t lend itself well to touch-only use…

Lastly, I wish I could say that web browser stability is something I took for granted, but that’s something that seems to be buggy and crash-ridden on every mobile platform I’ve tried. Seriously why is it so hard to make a web browser that just doesn’t crash? And I mean on some of Apple’s own pages. I log in to .mac and after logging in there’s a decent chance the browser crashes / restarts (and takes down the iPod app with it if I’m listening to music). And don’t give me the excuse of web browsers being horridly complex pieces of software - I write software for mobile platforms for a living. I know what’s involved and regardless of complexity, stability should be the top priority.

I’m sure there will be more little things that pop up, but I just wanted to note these as I thought them up. Let’s face it - the iPhone is a fantastic little device, but it’s SO very far from perfect. Hopefully software updates will help.