Jimtac.com

Week one of March has come and gone, with some interesting hiccups…

If you were a happy Windows 7 RC1 user, you are now an unhappy Windows 7 RC [occasional] user. I hope that if you do fall into this camp, that you have purchased a full license for your recently narcoleptic PC. I’m of course referring to the March 1st expiry of the release candidate of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which instead of simply refusing to work, MS was gracious enough to give you 2 hours to use the OS to try to back up your files and regress to your previous OS, or install the retail version of 7 [of course you can only actually upgrade to Win7 Ultimate Edition without doing some hacking of an install disk]. Unfortunately, if you are one of those people who actually used a copy of RC1 as a functional PC trying to use it as a “real” PC in order to try and break things, 2 hours at a time, may not be enough. But either way, it’s time to pony up or fall back.

The next bit of crazy is that PSN decided to crap all over itself this past week, and it turns out that it was a bit of math that tripped those guys up. On the bright side, if you would have just bought the PS3 Slim, then you would have been fine; on the down side, most PS3 owners [myself included] do not have the Slim. When this first happened, you would turn on your PS3, and it would tell you that is cannot connect to the PSN, and would not play most games, or network, or … Well it turns out that it’s not just that the PSN was inaccessible, it turns out that the internal clock of all the pre-Slim PS3′s thought that 2010 was a leap year, and added the extra day to February. Good job Sony, at least I can take solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who hasn’t bought a 2010 calendar yet. At least it didn’t affect me, since now I’m about 52 hours into Mass Effect 2, which has completely negated my use of any other gaming system [or any other media]… So sorry WoW, but I think you can live without me for a bit longer since you’ve sucked months, and not just days of real time from me so far.

Oh, and I REALLY want an Iron Man TV!!!

Though I wish it was that hotrod red, with the arc reactor as the logo in the centre [like my LG Scarlet]

There’s a lot of talk right now about the much rumoured mythical Apple tablet computer, and with all of this talk comes the rampant speculation. With random speculation people also come out saying that they have all kinds of “leaked information” from “an undisclosed Apple employee”. Well I don’t have any of that, but I do have my wish-list for what I want this device to be/do… Here goes:

1. A high quality remote desktop client. I want it to be able to smoothly control my Mac mini/MBP/PCs running VNC, even over back to my mac.

2. The keyboard should take advantage of the Apple patent filed which makes uses the whole hand for text input on touchscreens. I want it to bring up a small keyboard when one palm is on the screen, and a larger split keyboard when both hands are placed on the screen. I can’t stand not having a backlit screen when in a low-light environment, which is why I have one of my MBP’s as my couch computer, instead of one of my less pricey computers. A glowing OLED screen would solve it like my iPhone does.

3. I want it to have an iPhone-esque home button that when pressed once brings up the rear facing camera, once more the front facing camera. Aaaaaaand… when it’s held down for 3 seconds it launches the iPhone OS to run apps and the home button works like it does on the iPhone, until held down for 3 seconds again.

4. Total connectivity: USB, bluetooth, Wireless N, The MB Air’s remote drive, 3G SIM slot (not locked to a carrier), an SDXC slot, a dock connector for syncing/charging/using iPhone accessories [I said wish-list, not spec sheet]

5. A 10 hour battery…

6. An AMOLED screen.

7. The ability to control my AppleTV/Front Row by using their native interfaces while still watching content on them.

8. Essentially a 10.1″ MacBook Air with a touchscreen where the keyboard and trackpad are, minus the clamshell.

9. A 32/64GB SSD option

I know why I want one, and it’s the same reason that I wanted  a netbook, and an iPhone before that, and even a laptop before that. I want a device that will allow me to do all of the tasks that I want to do while mobile, but that I don’t need a massively powerful computer for. I have a desktop PC for my work-horse type things like video editing, or gaming. What I want is something that I can carry and not have to open up, set on a surface, angle the screen, position myself to type, and then get down to launching a browser and pulling up a website, when [like on my iPhone], I press a button, slide to unlock, open the browser and pull up the website. Sure, sure… I know, I know… It’s very much a “first-world problem” but hey, I live in the first-world, and anything that helps me maximize what little down time I have anymore, is something that I crave.

I use my iPhone for just about everything, but even with mobile safari being as amazing as it is, it’s just not the same experience as a larger screen… Plus, it can’t do flash… [fail]

Since my phone goes everywhere with me, and my computer does not, especially with the iPhone being “good enough” 75% of the time for most casual computing tasks, I have less of a NEED to buy this device, but if it hit’s a fair number of my wish-list, I’ll certainly buy one, and enjoy it.

Here’s hoping,

Tim

The 09/09/09 Apple announcement came and went, and it was a yawner.

New version of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS (3.1/3.1.1 respectively)

New revision of iTunes, tweaked to be a little cleaner.

Apple’s new way of getting people to buy full albums at a time. iTunes LP is basically a downloadable EnhancedCD from the late ’90s. Pictures, video, and links. OoooOOooo…

New revision of all the iPods, tweaking the capacity and prices. The only exception is with the new nano which now has a microphone, speaker, video camera, and an FM tuner.

And that was pretty much the announcement…

Oh, and Steve Jobs is back giving keynotes thanks to a new liver. Glad to see he’s doing well.

Palm announced the Pixi… No slide out keyboard (it’s allways out), and it’s about the same size as an iPhone. Personally I think it’s a better form factor, but no self respecting guy will call buy something called “pixi”.

One of the big, highly touted things about Apple’s “latest version” of OSX is that you get back between 6 and 15 Gigs of hard drive space. Having pre-ordered Snow Leopard from the Apple store online, I got mine the Monday after it was released to the public… Good job on THAT Apple… But one thing that the delay did do for me was that it gave me some food for thought when it came time to install.

While waiting for my disc to show up, I heard many tales about people gaining “tons” of extra free space, and I was pretty excited to hear that, though a bit skeptical as to how much. Then there were the reports that tempered my enthusiasm by saying that there is no real space reclaimed, but rather the change in Apple’s definition of Gigabyte from 1024MB to 1000MB is to be credited.

This “new way” is how HDD manufacturers have measured it for years, as opposed to the software industry. So up until now if you bought a 64GB HDD for instance, you would install it into your computer and would see it as a ~59.37GB drive; whereas NOW it would show up as 64GB (funny that) in macs running SL. This new math also means very little in terms of actually getting any space back since nothing is physically changing, it’s just like measuring monitor size in cm instead of inches; It’s the same monitor but the number you get in the end is 2.5x as big.

This “new math” means that your GB becomes smaller (so you’re getting more of them), but in turn that also means that your existing data takes up more of those smaller Gigs. The confusion really said to me that this was something that should have been more clearly outlined by Apple as to what was going to be happening with the calculation of drive space since that’s what sparked the claims that the space savings were essentially just a result of 1024>1000.

After hearing both sides, I decided to test the claims, and record the space in percentage, rather than in space used, just to make sure that the definition of GB wasn’t the only reason for the apparent space increase. On my new MBP I got back about 6% of total disk space, on the old MBP about 8%, on my MacBook it was only 3%. Where I’ve attributed that the big difference here is most likely that I’ve had tons of printer drivers, and other languages, plus there are various amounts of in-place OS upgrades adding extra crap, all of which are no longer in there after the install. I didn’t upgrade my intel mini because of the media server software I use not being SL compatible, and I haven’t updated my PPC minis because PPC support is gone with SL.

Ultimately Snow Leopard is smaller of an OS, and you really do get space back, so as far as the “old” GB to “new” GB change being the ONLY reason that you get more free space is just not the case. It DOES however mean that you need to remember that you have more little Gigs now, instead of almost as many big Gigs.

Wooooooo……

Edit: On an aside, I just tried to use one of my video editing apps to open an m2t file (recorded from my HD PVR), and when it supplanted my QT7 Pro and installed it as a separate app, it also removed my Quicktime MPEG2 codec that I purchased. I’m glad that I hang onto most things like that, (even though Apple is one of the few companies that I know who will allow you to re-download any software that you purchased from them online). Still a fail!

So it’s school time once again, which means that the kids in my house need to have their wireless access limited during certain hours. While going through the wireless clients list in my Airport Express config panel to get the mac addresses that I wanted to limit access to overnight, I noticed that one device popped up and it had a connection rate of only 12Mbps so I had to track it down. Before I could finish writing down the mac address, it disappeared. After a minute I realized that it was my iPhone popping up when the alarm went off, thereby connecting to the wifi when it woke up from standby.

Now I’ve heard all of the complaints online about the iPhone 3GS having slower wifi performance than the iPhone 3G, and to me it has felt that way, and certainly evidenced when I tried out the Speedtest.net app on my 3GS. Those tests showed that I was getting better download speeds on my cellular connection than over wifi at home. The thing that truly struck me as odd in these tests was that my upload speed was where it should have been over wifi, but I saw no obvious reason for this and my iPod Touch (1G) saw no similar degradation. Deciding to look into the connection rate a bit more, I decided to turn my 3GS on and watch the connection rate from power up through completion of the speed test.

At startup it showed the same 12Mbps that had initially caught my eye, but since I didn’t immediately, it moved up to 48 then 54Mbps after about 30 seconds. It remained at 54 until I opened Safari and opened up www.apple.com. While it was downloading the page, the connection rare dropped to 12Mbps, and returned to 54 as soon as it was completed.

Next I moved onto the speed test. This test turned out to be more telling than I had expected. When I ran the Speedtest.net app I saw the rate momentarily drop to 12Mbps, and back to good ol’ 54. When the test was running there was a quick decline from 54 to 12, and then to 1Mbps where it remained until the download portion of the test was completed. Once the upload portion began 54 became the name of the game. I thought that the 1Mbps had to be a fluke, so I ran the test 3 more times with the same results.

I have gone through the apple support documents, and the voodoo like user suggestions for fixing the speeds. I’ve reset the phone, then reset the network settings, then even restored EVERYTHING back to factory settings, but nothing has brought the connection speeds up to where they should be over wifi. I don’t know if it’s simply a bad wireless chip, or a software issue. Whatever the situation it is not a good one, and I hope it is one that is easily resolved.

The thing that I’ve been hearing recently from quite a few Apple haters and fanboys alike, which is the trend of getting on board with complaining about the iPod/iPhone and it’s closed system. It’s been extended to Apple’s corporate philosophy as well.

One thing that has been lobbied is that the iPod has destroyed innovation by using it’s market dominance to crush “smaller” alternatives. The biggest argument that I hear for this is that the DRM kept users locked into the iTunes/iPod integration, and because of which you COULDN’T go to any other device. To this I simply ask users to look at their music library, and determine what percentage of music is DRM’d and which is not. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of music is not, since most consumers will simply rip the CD’s that they have been collecting over the years, or as many younger consumers have been discovering, that there are multitudes of ways to find non-drm sources [of  sometimes questionable origin] for obtaining music on the internet.

My first foray into the whole MP3 player market was squarely in opposition to “caving” to Apple’s iPod, since I naturally have a distrust of all things popular/mainstream, and I instead chose the Toshiba GigaBeat for my first portable MP3 player, to which I found amazing sound quality, good battery life, and excellent display which showed the album art, and stored photographs in crisp detail, in fact I just gave it to my brother last year and it works to this day. I added to that with the Creative Zen Mini, a nice little flash player which also had great sound and had a fancy touch controls. Ultimately i broke down, and finally bought an iPod. Why, you may ask, since i already had two great players already? The answer is easy; it was the interface and the ecosystem that has grown around the iPod itself.

Two things became exceedingly clear to me when I was using my GigaBeat F20: One that I was amazed that I had gone that long without an MP3 player; and two, that It seemed as if no one at Toshiba [or pretty much any other company] had bothered to put the devices into the hands of a consumer to see if they could work the damn things. The design of the F20 was beautiful, and though light, it felt quite solid to hold, unfortunately the way you interact with it looked as if it was made by mentally challenged monkey. It had a cross-shaped soft-touch rubber control pad on the face which, while stupid in the fact that it was actually 5 buttons [left, right, up down, and center] was functional enough if you could figure out what the buttons had changed to based on the context of the screen that you were on. Then there were the side buttons… “Wait a tick. I thought you said that the buttons were on the face?” Actually I did, and on the side there were also the power button, select button, volume rocker, and the “A” button, [which I only NOW, while writing this, realized that it probably stood for "assignable", which was never explained in the voluminous documentation]. In the top of the unit there was the headphone jack, the Hold switch, and the a/c adaptor jack for charging. The bottom had the dock connector, the mini USB jack, and the battery hard reset switch. And then there’s the completely useless software in the form of Gigabeat Room, which could be used to manage music, and photos… If it worked half way decently. Oh, and it had it’s own similarly sized manual to the hardware [NOT a good sign]. And lastly, the support, I loved all of the Toshiba products that I’ve owned, I’ve been good to them, and they’ve been good to me, Until this one. I called up Toshiba Canada, and 3 different reps had no clue what it was, and one asked me if I imported it from Japan, because they don’t support Japanese products in Canada. When I got a call back from a “supervisor” I was told that the problems that I was having were solved with the next revision of the firmware, unfortunately, there were no immediate plans to make that firmware available to Canadian devices.

Now why did I go on for so long about that player, especially after saying how much I liked it? Because, as with all mobile phones that I’ve owned, it’s been degrees of frustration and hatred, where I just hated some less than others, so I went there. Not because I was satisfied with any of them. That is… Until I got my iPod w/ Photo (4G). Finally I got a device, where the design was clean, the interface was intuitive, AND consistent, and came with a decent program to manage my media. Power on the bottom, controls on the face, and a headphone jack, and hold switch on the top. Scroll right for down, left for up, and clearly defined buttons on the face, that always worked as expected. Instead of requiring two different media library managers like the F20, iTunes handled it all. At the time it was a bit more unwieldy than it is now, but it was still simple, and user friendly… Almost as if they had let people try it out before letting it loose on the world.

Finally in an incredibly long round-a-bout way, is my point. Why should Apple be REQUIRED to make their software interoperable with any [let alone all], other manufacturer’s devices, which all have their own proprietary methods of file management? Why should those companies not be held to the same standard as apple in UI/design/functionality? Windows Media Player, has made enormous strides [IMHO], but it’s still a poor substitute for a program that is designed to manage a device, as well as the media that you want to put on it. The most notable one that comes to mind, is the public spat over the Palm Pre syncing to iTunes masquerading as an actual iPod. While clever, there is no guarantee that it would work correctly forever, and god forbid that somehow Palm’s implementation of this hack inadvertently changes a system file on the Pre and renders it crippled, or “bricked”. The blame would at least initially, and during the most public phase of finger pointing, be squarely aimed at Apple for messing up Palm Pre phones. There are already companies that have excellent solutions to this problem. Mark/space’s Missing Sync for years has allowed me to use my Treo on my Mac, because Palm’s desktop software for the mac sucked [IMHO], and it even sync’ed my iTunes playlists to my Treo, [a functionality which is still there]. Then there’s DoubleTwist which sync’s pretty much everything, and has an iTunes style interface if that’s your kind of thing.

Part Two:
iPhones take away choice! Grrrrr!

The argument that I had my mobile phone & carrier choice decided for me because I’m a mac user, is frankly laughable. I had several Treos for years while I used macs, and they worked great with it [using Missing Sync], and I wouldn’t have changed to the iPhone, if it were not for the HUGE leap forward in usability in the iPhone. Previously I carried my iPod Touch, AND my Treo at all times, because the two complemented each other beautifully. The sound was fine, but the music and multimedia viewers were ridiculous, and was a great phone; while the iPod Touch was an amazing music player, WiFi browser, and picture viewer. Unfortunately this meant that I still had to carry around two [very pricey and relatively fragile] devices at all times, I even made decisions about which style of jacket to buy based on whether or not it had the requisite number of inside pockets.

So when the iPhone came out, I was in line for 8.5 hours to get the bloody thing!! And I really was working the whole time using my work assigned BlackBerry, kinda sad really. The moment that I finished syncing my iPhone with my computer, was not the moment that I realized that I was done with other phones, and anyone who knew me at the time remembered that I carried around THREE cellphones at the same time for almost a month, waiting for the one thing that I couldn’t live with to crop up and have me march the phone back, and cancel my new number, and contract. When it didn’t happen, I breathed a sigh of relief, and handed my 755p to my mother to use for the remainder of my contract.

Just because every smartphone on the market can’t sync and be managed by iTunes directly, doe not mean that the choice is gone.

Part Three:
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

Apple’s appstore, is variable in it’s standards, opaque in it’s rejection/acceptance policy, and some may say suspiciously set up to where one needs to be quite the fortune teller to determine what Apple is planning in order to not “duplicate upcoming functionality of the iPhone”, a.k.a “That’s a good idea, we should put that in the next release. Deny that app, since it’s too good an idea for us not to have come up with it first!”

In this… I agree. I don’t think that they should allow ALL apps into the store, since when your phone doesn’t work right, you don’t go to the website for the application, you assume it’s the phone not working right, plus if a piece of software isn’t working right, you go back to the store, not call the publisher. But… There should be CLEAR and OPEN guidelines as to what is, and is not allowable, and the same goes for the reasons for rejections.

Conclusion:
The least of all evils.

If there is a better phone FOR ME, and what I want to do with it, rather than just to make a statement, I will switch in a heartbeat. I did it from my Treo, and I’ll do it again with the iPhone. I’m always looking.

So my little sister’s iBook decided to go ahead and crack it’s screen at the first sign of resistance as she was opening the lid… Lame!!!

When it was bought late last year it was an apple refurb that was $400, which would do well for a 16yo who pretty much needed a word processor for school, and since the house is full of mac’s it worked out well enough. Since it was a refurb model, it definitely showed signs of use, including an ill-fitting lid, which was a bit of a concern, but since it worked… Whatever. We also got the extended warranty from best buy which was nearly the same cost as the computer itself, but if anything happened, we’d probably get a new MacBook in it’s place.

Now that it’s finally happened, and something has gone horribly wrong. Apple, and at the very least Best Buy had better come through on the promise that the hinge being loose would not be a problem and they would take care if any related problems… They had better fix/ replace it. If not I’ll be seriously pissed.

Here’s hoping!

Tim