I just don’t really care enough I guess in day to day life? Or maybe I’m not the right target market for apps on an iPhone? But if I’m not, then who is? I’m the guy who buys multiple phones a year and makes mobile products for a living so if I’m not fitting into the target demographic does anybody?

And then I think back to using my N95. I did use it for a few things I don’t use my iPhone for. It was (and is again) my main camera for taking pictures of daily life. And I had a few really cool apps on it that I quickly stopped using after a few days.

No matter what phone I really only fall back to the same few actual uses…I use the web browser a LOT (numerous times a day)…I use the email client occassionally (maybe once or twice a day)…I use the SMS client a lot…and I once in a while actually make a phone call or look up a contact…and I once in a while will look up directions to figure out just how lost I managed to get. That’s about it. That’s 99% of the usage of my phone. And while potentially very cool, anything that falls outside of that usage will be played with briefly and then forgotten. It’s the fact that if it’s not a daily need it likely doesn’t matter.

Developers (myself included) really want users to care so they can sell their products, and operators or device makers (depending in the case) really want users to care so they can get their cut. The problem is that people don’t need at least 90% of the crap being released on a daily basis, so why should they care? What would they care about long term and not just for a few days before forgetting all about some cool app they tried?

I don’t know I’m just ranting…and now I’m done.

And yes I fully enjoy the irony that is my rant on not caring about/using apps on phones was written in the WordPress app on my iPhone.

Or let’s be honest, it will probably just lead to more random posts out of boredom.

But overall the app seems to work well, and let’s me throw a post together rather quickly. The listing of posts is easy to scroll through and while I know a lot of people still aren’t fans of the touch only keyboard I find the lack of effort required to press the keys makes me able to type much faster than most people expect. The ease of adding a picture, or even an iPhone screen grab (taken by pressing the power and home buttons at the same time, added to your camera roll) is nice. Unfortunately you have no real way of doing much other than having it added to the bottom of the post. I’m assuming either I’ll keep having to “finish” the posts on my laptop, edit the HTML on the iPhone (complicated by the lack of copy and paste), or just be happy enough with the photos at the bottom.

As someone who’s worked in games for as long as I have, this is terribly late in the game to get one, but c’est la vie. I finally picked it up for Rock Band, mostly so friends and I could play online together. Note that as of yet I’m like $600 in the hole between the 360 and Rock Back and we haven’t played a single game online yet…but still, the justification stands. And really Rock Band is the only game I’ve bought for the 360, any other games showing up as played by me are games I’ve borrowed from friends.

And speaking of, I did shove my gamer card on the side-bar there…mostly for me to keep track of (really, who comes to this site but spam bots and google bots). I have to say the community aspects like this that Microsoft rolled out for Xbox Live are amazing. It’s simple ideas like Achievements and Gamer Points that take players and make them WANT to play more different games on their system in order to get more of these imaginary useless numbers. And more games sold is more money in Microsoft’s pocket - good for them.

Lastly, it’s a bit odd because I’ve had a hi-def TV for some months now, but this is the first real hi-def signal going in there (sure I have a DVD player that upconverts to 1080i, but that doesn’t count, it’s a standard def signal being upressed, very different). Some things look amazingly better, some things I can’t really tell. However the lack of jaggies and pixelated images (yes Wii, I’m looking at you) is refreshing.

So Thursday I had a 1pm flight to catch. I needed to finish a load of laundry, get dog food, take the dog to the kennel, get my laptop/n95/n800/iphone loaded up with everything I’d need / want for the trip, and finish packing in time to catch a taxi to the airport.

Only one of those things I didn’t have to do, thanks to Leopard, and most importantly a single feature: Back to my Mac. Yes, I’ll admit, I’m one of the moronspeople that have a .Mac subscription.

So as I began trying to copy files around I realized, I don’t have to. I just need to not turn off my Mac Mini (I generally turn off the computer when going out of town for more than a few days at a time). And just like that, I decided there was a movie on my home computer (which has the mirrored firewire drives, i.e. all my movie/music storage). And just like that, on my finder sidebar, was the link to my home computer, some 1400 miles away. So a few clicks later, and the movie is copying to the laptop, and tonight I can watch my movie.

Now this is a minor thing, wanting to watch a movie. But what if it was something more important…like me not remembering what bills were paid? So I busted up the screen sharing, opened the spreadsheet, saw there were 2 bills that needed to be paid. So they’re paid, and I’m not incurring any late fees. Again, a minor thing.

But the convenience of not having had to worry about what files I may or may not need at a time when I’m already stressed and rushed? Priceless…

Honestly of all of the updates in the new firmware, there are three I actually care about:

1. Demand Paging
2. New Music Player/Podcasting functionality
3. Camera Improvements

Demand Paging
So what is this now? It’s some fancy memory management changes that deal with only loading portions of executables into usable system ram as necessary versus taking the time to load entire binaries blah blah blah. Yeah I could do some more research and get all technical into it (which to be fair I may enjoy reading up on) but it’d probably be boring to most. What it really means is the N95 is no longer throwing up out of memory errors every 10 minutes while I try to do silly things like oh, use the features of the phone. Mobile web browsing is oddly important to me. I’m not sure why, but it is. And for some reason I’m dumb enough to want to load the huge pc versions of websites. Hey this thing has a real browser, why not right? So I load pages up and they display great, until about half the data is downloaded and horrible memory errors start popping up, simultaneously filling the browser screen with empty boxes and helpfully closing the music player that was in the background keeping my going on whatever mp3 or podcast (more on this below) I was listening to at the time to free up more memory that the device already decided it didn’t have enough of. And so the super powerful flash supporting web browser was practically useless for any websites that might actually have flash because those same sites are going to be pushing this phone past its old memory limits and into memory-error-land before the damned intro animation I’m just trying to skip finishes loading. Do I sound bitter? Really I’m not. And so here comes Nokia with their new Demand Paging technology (or maybe more apropos here comes Symbian as it sounds more of a kernel-level function than something Nokia’s S60 interface would involve, but I digress). And hey look, things load faster (because it’s loading less parts of them). And hey look, all of my other applications don’t close down when I decide to do something on this multitasking device that previously could only really multitask if both of those tasks involved doing the same thing in the same application at the same time. The test site for me for a while was the PC version of the amazon.com webpages - image heavy, and the N95 now loads it up without hesitation, and more importantly, without shutting down the music player in the background. Side note, current running apps on the N95: Contacts, Messaging, Log, Search, Jaiku, Music Player, and Podcasting. At the same time.

Music Player / Podcasting Integration
Yes I’m a dork. I listen to podcasts. I subscribe to podcasts. Atleast I don’t make my own…so I’m only 90% of the way to dorkland…gimme some more time and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. But so as mentioned above one of my huge annoyances would be listening to podcasts and then being stupid enough to try to do something else which the N95 deemed too memory intensive thereby shutting down the music player that was playing said podcast. Why was this annoying? Because it couldn’t keep track of where I was! Seriously, when listening to something that’s 30-60 minutes long, do you really want to have to stop to check where on the timeline you are every few minutes, just in case something happens to push memory over the limits and losing it, just so you can restart the music player and manually scan back to where you are? But finally, at long last, Nokia has fixed this problem in the podcasting app, and the world can rejoice. Sort of. If you go through Music Player, and from there pick podcasts, and from there play it, it picks up where you left off perfectly. I’ve heard if you just find the file and try to play it it won’t, but hey I’ll compromise here. And really that’s all there is to it. The sheer fact that it keeps track of where I am in podcasts makes this actually usable as a device on which to listen to podcasts. Funny that.

Camera Improvements
Not so much to say here. Really everything’s just faster. And it’s a good thing. In a quick test it was about 5 seconds to be able to take a picture, and about 1 second to take. That’s a HUGE improvement over what it was, and further helps this be my portable point-n-shoot camera. Again, not a huge writeup of what it means, other than that when my kid’s doing something cute, I no longer have to pull the camera out, hide it behind my back for 10 seconds, whip it out and hope he’s still being cute after another 3-5 seconds before the photo is actually taken. And for you non-parents, hiding behind the back is because as soon as he sees it, well kids tend to either fear the camera, or like mine, pose. And while posing is adorable, it’s not the photo I want taken generally.

So there you have it…the N95 gets a new firmware, and becomes that much more useful…which for a device as expensive as it is, Thank God.

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.


In Android, everything is broken up in to Activities. Not each application, each SCREEN. The running assumption is so that entire screens worth of code and data can be unloaded as necessary. It sounds good from a code standpoint, cleaner code and all. But it means the overall application size grows…the codebase size grows…the build times grow…etc. Maybe this is just my personal preferences shining through, but for mobile I prefer small tight codebases. I’ll just assume this comes from my background in games.

There are a lot of interfaces to implement, and a lot of asynchronous calls to wait for. The screen (err, Activity) switching design means you can’t just say hey now I’m drawing this, you have to request for the system to jump to another activity. There are these great XML-based UI layouts, which are completely useless if you also want to target any other platform.

In fact, I think my biggest concern with Android’s design is that it’s different enough, that porting to/from it, becomes more difficult. Which means either there are great costs involved, or more likely people just don’t use any of the usefulness of Android, and instead it gets used as a simple shell with everyone using their own custom APIs and libraries. And this leads to every application acting and looking different, which then throws out the point of having this complex overly-designed API in the first place. It can’t even be entirely blamed on APIs, because in general software developers want their application to look like their applications on every platform, and want it to look the same.

So there it is, my initial thoughts on Android as a developers’ platform. There’s still some more playing around and learning to do, so my opinions may or may not change over time. It’s a bit too early to say obviously, so maybe I’ll reprise this in the future.

Any thoughts? Is this kind of thing interesting? Should I get into the real technicalities or just leave it kind of overview-ish? Does anyone care?

Fastforward to last Friday when I decide to pick things up, and start off by going through comments…
7834 comments in moderation…WHAT?!?!?

So I start going through (I have about 2500 left to sift through still)…of those 7800+ comments I’ve found about 5 real comments in there and a WHOLE lot of spam. And it makes me sad to think that people are actually taking time to read something I’ve written, and taking time to comment on it, and I never reply any noone ever sees it because it’s buried amongst ads for sketchy loan officers and street corner pharmacists. So I’m trudging through, I’m trying to set things up better so that comments will actually get through and spam will be thrown aside, and hopefully this will encourage me to get writing more.

There almost might start to be a slightly businessy side to future posts, as I currently run a small business (of which I don’t think I’ve ever named or linked in this blog…and will probably keep it that way) and it’s just one of the things often on my mind. It’s a hobby, as well as my job, so it fits…and if one of the maybe 5 people who occassionally read this blog disagree, so be it.

Well iLife/iWork ‘07 never happened, and some months later the ’08s were released (albeit still in 2007) and the SAME DAY I ran to the store to get the upgrades. I mean I couldn’t put off having my entire life somehow magically changed by a few software upgrades, could I?

And so I got them, installed them, and began to play…
And here I am a few weeks later realizing how rarely I actually use ANY of that software…as in almost never…so why did I care so much? It’s something I go through often - something new, or cool, or sexy is released, and I want to need it so much that I convince myself that SURELY it will fill in some void and make me more productive…and so I get that thing…and nothing happens.

Pages is an improvement, and if I actually ever had to write a document I’m sure it would come in EXTREMELY handy. I like the improved UI and the ease of access to various formatting options via the context-sensitive toolbar. I love Keynote, but as of yet I’ve only had one time when I ever needed to make a presentation. Numbers…now there’s something. I had been looking forward to a new spreadsheet application to ditch NeoOffice and have a nice native application. So of course the first thing I did was convert the ONE spreadsheet I ever use (a list of our bills, debts, due dates, etc.) from the OpenOffice format to XLS, to import into numbers, and convert to a .numbers bundle. And now what? I don’t make spreadsheets all that often. I mean sure I could do all kinds of exciting…math…but that’s nothing I need in day-to-day use. Hell, long before the spreadsheet version of our bill tracking I just kept a tab-delimited plain text file, and it worked GREAT for me. So here I am, with a $99 “office bundle” that will be used maybe once a month (when in a single day I both update the bill spreadsheet for the new months due dates, and in that same sitting pay all the bills and mark them paid…). And yes I paid $99 for the family edition because for some reason ever since switching to a Mac I’ve been on a kick to be legit and pay for everything honestly…weird, I know.

And then there’s iLife. I’ve already posted about iMovie ‘08 and how it’s just not for me (not saying it’s bad…it’s just not for me). iPhoto is what my wife and I use for all of our photo management. Once I got past the annoyance of fixing the failed attempt to auto-separate all of our photos into events upon upgrading (a single day’s shots could somehow end up spread across 3 different events, while I had another single event that had photos from 5 MONTHS in there?) I realized that it changed nothing. I already had everything split up nicely - I used folders (or were they called albums, I don’t remember). And so now all I did was recreate each of the “old” folders, with “new” events, and instead of clicking on a folder on the left, I click on an event on the right. Revolutionary! iDVD is decent enough I guess…I’ve only ever made one DVD with it (a photo slideshow from my wedding for the wife) but it’s there if/when I need it, and I’m sure I will eventually. It does what I need it to - lets me throw some images together to make menus, and lets me throw some video to be played from the menus.

iWeb is another of the apps I’m not too sure about. I WANT to like it. I’ve even tried re-creating this blog in iWeb just to see how I like it. It’s terrible. If you don’t fit their templates perfectly you end up with something that’s just ugly and a pain to use. For example, if I didn’t WANT a photo at the header of each blog post, either I’d have a big empty space, or I’d have to go through and edit the page view of each blog post individually to make sure the next/previous links weren’t ending up somewhere in the middle of the text. Which makes me wonder - why is every post saved out separately? I get when exporting they all become .html because it’s for “simple” sites which can’t assume PHP or whatever, but why do they generate separately as I post (if I edit one’s layout I’ve had to go back and edit the rest of them by hand also)? And why can’t I get any of the positioning right (fixed-positioning etc.)? I’m sure it’s just iWeb layout stuff that I could learn…but something is VERY wrong if I find it easier to write the HTML than I do to drag stuff around when it comes to getting a decent and consistent looking website. All that being said, I continue to play with it here and there…maybe I’m just secretly hoping that it will click one day and all make sense…

And lastly in iLife is GarageBand. A decent enough editor that I’ve long since replaced with Logic Express and not looked back. The inability to export composed tracks to midi is all it took…

So there we have it, the utter realization that after nearly a year of waiting, and $200 spent, I’m not really much better off than I was before…because I just bought the hype, and bought a bunch of software I’ll rarely ever use…

and I’ll do it again next year

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 I went to look at what it takes to setup iWeb ‘08 to publish to a personal domain, and am either frustrated, or just annoyed at how the support was implemented. You can’t have it upload to your current website. You can’t setup an FTP to upload to. What can you do?

Well, you click on the handy “Set Up Personal Domain” option in the File menu of iWeb, and it takes you to .Mac. You enter your domain, and all is well so far (though why do I need .Mac to publish to my personal domain?). Well the answer’s obvious - because they don’t want you uploading to your server - they want you to pay to use theirs! Even worse, once you punch in your domain, this is what you see:



Now that makes perfect sense to me…I get the concept of A records, and CNAME records and what not…but is that really Apple’s target market for iWeb users? People who have setup BIND or other DNS servers in the past? Aren’t the same people who know what a CNAME is, the same people who would likely have their own hosting already?

And this doesn’t even bring up the fact that if you have a DNS server that you can edit to set up a CNAME record, don’t you probably already have a web server you can use?

I’m sorry…but Apple, you failed on this one…