iPad Review

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 | Opinion | No Comments

I’ve had the iPad for almost a month now, and I’m still loving it. Its not any one thing it does that makes it so great, its a million little thing. The big screen makes everything easier to use. Browsing the web is so much better. Reading email is wonderful- especially in landscape mode with emails on the left and a message on the right. Using apps that were made for the iPad helps make the apps better: Twitteriffic, IMDB, MLB At Bat (AMAZING for a baseball fan like me), NetNewsWire, and Flight Control, among others. And everything is really fast- on top of everything else that makes the device.

But of course its not perfect. Even though its running iOS 3.2, its really a 1.0 version for the platform. I expect 4.1 to be much better. One thing I hope they improve is file sharing between devices. Its very clunky to transfer files and keep them up to day. I’d love to see better integration with at least MobileMe for transferring files. MacObserver has a good article about the less than stellar iPad file sharing.

I think that will be fixed in time though.

In Defense of Comments

Monday, June 28th, 2010 | Opinion | No Comments

About two weeks ago, part of the online tech community erupted in a debate about comments. The most well known site that does not have them is Daring Fireball. There was a site back in January called DaringFireballWithComments.net, but that was taken down since it stole all of John Gruber’s writing. Others joined in the hate against comments. I’m here to defend them.

In this defense, I’m going to reference three articles:

• John’s “I’ll Tell You What’s Fair” (scroll to the end)
• Derek Powazek’s “Your right to comment ends at my front door”
• Marco Arment’s “Comments”

First off, I must address Derek’s title as a baseline for my argument (John makes similar statements in his article). Of course anybody who hosts their own website can decide whether or not they want to allow comments, and if so how much commenting they allow. I am not assuming I have a “right” to comment on anybody’s articles on their website. That’s a stupid argument, and its a strawman from those arguing against comments. I am not arguing that anybody must allow comments, I’m arguing that as a good internet citizen, they should allow comments.

Now with that out of the way, let’s get into the meat of the debate. John writes

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”?

This is one of the main arguments those who hate comments trot out. “I’ll write here, you write there.” Okay, but then he describes Daring Fireball as a “conversationalist” website. Well, conversations have two sides. In this case, one is the writer, the other is the reader. The best part of the internet, is that with comments, the reader can have a voice. They can offer feedback- and that feedback can be seen.

That last part is the key. Emailing the writer makes the counter-argument hidden. Writing a response on another blog makes it near hidden, because most readers don’t have the notoriety of John. None of the other readers is likely to see that response. And while there are many bad commenters out there, there are also many commenters who can make coherent arguments against a position. Shutting them out kills the conversation, and the community loses in the end.

Marco disagrees:

I also disagree with the widespread notion that comments are “discussion”, or that they form a “community”. Discussion and communities require mechanics such as listening and following up that are rarely present in comments.

As does John:

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.

Sure sometimes they aren’t conversation. I’m not arguing there aren’t bad commenters. But those commenters can be handled. Methods such as no anonymous posting, verified email addresses, and yes, banning bad commenters. The thing is when people see what others are getting away with, they push the bounds further. And further. But when they see others getting punished for bad comments, they stop. And they behave.

I think Derek has it right here:

I may enable comments again someday. But what I really want to do is fundamentally redesign the commenting experience. Most comment systems are practically designed to create stupidity. I know there’s a better way. But that’s another post.

Certainly there are systems that are horrible at maintain the level of discourse internet society should expect. And he is right, its not an on or off question. But I think there shouldn’t be an off. Especially when he says things like this:

But I’ve seen incredible communities form in the confines of comment forms. I’ve seen funny, helpful, informative, intimate, amazing conversations. I’ve seen groups of people come together using the crudest of tools to form intense personal bonds. I’ve seen it literally change lives for the better.

And as John Siracusa as remarked

Not a day goes by where I don’t read a comment that’s at least as interesting, entertaining, or insightful as the text it’s attached to.”

And I find the same thing. I skip over the rif-raf and find interesting points and arguments. I find back and forth debate and see both sides. The idea of allowing comments is not about shouting a point, its about expressing it, and possible convincing somebody to see a different point of view. That’s the beauty of debate. If hones arguments and builds better ones.

Finally, I’ll end with this: those who do not allow comments make it appear they do not want that debate. They want their experience free of people questioning them. John has said it doesn’t fit in with his experience. I think that says a lot about his arguments. Of course, even if they don’t mind the debate, not having comments proves they would rather not deal with it. And that’s not good for the internet.

Excellent Argument to Open Up the iPhone

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 | Opinion | No Comments

Jason Snell has an excellent article called “Time for Apple to open up the iPhone” where he makes a good case to for Apple to allow unapproved apps on the iPhone. He argues quite well that Apple’s reputation is being harmed without any good benefits.

He thinks Apple should do what Andriod does, and have a deep hidden setting to allow unsigned apps, with a giant warning. Most customers would never know, but they ones who did would be aware of the (very small) risks.

Read the whole thing, its good.

Google Picasa – Failure of Design and Support

Monday, April 12th, 2010 | Opinion | No Comments

As part of my day job, I investigate applications for faculty to use. Some were interested in Google Picasa. It seems like a nice alternative to iPhoto, especially as it links nicely to Google’s Web Albums.

However, that last part we could  not get to work. The application would not sign in to Google’s services. As with anything internet related, I suspected our proxy/firewall. As required by law, we implement a filtering package here to prevent inappropriate content from being viewed.

I first used an IP to bypass the filter- used to check out blocked sites for whitelisting and verifying problems with the proxy. Picasa worked fine without the proxy in between. I used Wireshark to run a packet capture, and verified that Picasa was attempted to connect directly to Google’s servers instead of going through the proxy.

So I proceeded to see if I could find out way. I located a post on their help forums talking about the issue: from January 2009! I could not believe that this has been around for over a year. And their help is a joke. They have forums and a few FAQs for helps. But no way to report bugs or even contact their support.

This is why I am really souring on Google. Their services and applications are pretty cool, but if anybody has a problem, good lucky getting it solved. This happened with the Nexus One earlier this year too- there was no way to call or get help for the phone.

I am still amazed that an application can be written in 2010 without using the proper APIs to use the system proxy settings. Especially from a web centric company like Google. To me that speaks of bad planning and design. And the set up of the support website just further hurts the whole experience.

FINALLY! Multitasking comes to the iPhone!

Thursday, April 8th, 2010 | Opinion | No Comments

Apple has finally added multitasking, and so much more, to the iPhone OS. Ars Technica reports all the details. The highlights:

- Multitasking using the home button. While I was wrong about only one app being allowed, I was right about the home button being the primary interface. This sounds fantastic. Audio apps can even use the previously iPod only pop up controls. There are only ways for apps to “run” in the background. For location based apps, they can be woken up when positions change. For games, they can “pause” and be idle.

- Folders on the home screen. Another welcome addition. Instead of managing pages upon pages of unorganized apps, they can be put inside a folder. I can already see this for less used apps and games.

- Unified inbox in Mail. Yet another FINALLY. It will make it so much easier to manage more than one account.

Some of the other things are interesting too. Game Center will be great for game developers- a kid of XBox Live system. iAd will be wonderful as adding advertising can be a pain. And the enterprise features are awesome- especially the remote installing of apps.

A good update. I was hoping for some sort of printing option though. Maybe that will come later.

One final note- if you install the 4.0 release on an iPhone, MobileMe’s tracking system will not work. I don’t know why, but it won’t. Hopefully that will be fixed for beta 2.

Great Reason to Run SMART Utility: Gruber HD Failure

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 | Opinion, SMART Utility | No Comments

John Gruber, of DaringFireball fame, just had his HD fail. He noticed it because everything was running very slow. He ran DiskWarrior which recovered his data but alerted him to a problem. SMART Utilility would most likely have alerted him to this issue a lot sooner. He was lucky because he also had a SuperDuper backup as well as a DropBox backup.

He makes a lot of good recommenations, and I encourage you to read the full story, but this is my favorite part:

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

A hard drive failure can happen to anybody. Be prepared when it does, and be alerted before it does. That’s why I made SMART Utility.

Rumor: iPhone OS 4.0 to Add Third Party Multitasking

Thursday, March 11th, 2010 | Opinion | 1 Comment

According to AppleInsider, Apple is adding the ability for third parties to multitasking. They say no details are available, but its a “full-on” solution.

This is very exciting, as it will fix the biggest flaw of the OS right now. As AI points out, its not a technical problem, as many Apple apps (iPod, Messages, etc) run fine in the background. Its a political problem. The current arguments for it (battery and resource usage) are red-herrings, because they both apply to the Apple apps as well- and the decision to use them are up to the user.

I’m very interested in seeing how Apple manages this. I expect the home button to be the primary means of interacting, with only one third party app allowed to run. There will also be a requirement to have a menu bar icon to alert the user that there is an extra app being run.

Regardless of how its done, this is great news for the platform. Once less reason to use the Andriod platform. The next thing to change: unsigned apps.

Update: Apple Gives in to Rogue Amoeba

Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | Opinion | No Comments

In an update to this post I made a view days ago (where Apple rejected their already approved app because it used images of Apple computers), Apple has reversed course and now will allow the app. Apple, via Phil Schiller (Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing), has stated that they are changing their policies regarding trademarked images.

Its good to see them backpedal because it was a horrible decision in the first place. It was covered far and wide, and was very bad PR for Apple. On top of that, it hurt the UI of the app- something Apple is supposed to be know for.

However, RA is not jumping back into iPhone development:

The problems of the App Store go well beyond our own relatively minor case. We pushed this update to Airfoil Speakers Touch out because we wanted to restore functionality we had to take away from our users. We’re happy to be able to do that.

That said, the App Store and iPhone platform still have myriad problems, detailed in many places. Among other issues, the potential remains for months of effort to be wasted as an app sits in limbo, or is never even released. As well, the long lead times needed before updates reach users are still in place.

At this time, we don’t believe it makes good business sense for us to commit much in the way of resources to the iPhone. We’ll make sure our existing applications continue to function, of course, but that’s all we have planned for now.

I have to agree. There still are many problems with the App Store, none of which is fixed by this decision. Slow review process, unknown risk as to whether an app will be approved, inconsistant reviewing- these all still exist. And they still don’t see the problem:

Schiller does manage to admit that Apple has made mistakes. Sadly, he doesn’t say it loudly enough. In a Social Networking era when transparency is not only beneficial to a company but almost essential to maintaining a happy customer base, Apple still can’t manage genuine “openness” where it most counts. I’m sure Misters Jobs and Schiller grudgingly decided this interview was a necessary (if bitter-tasting) step in damage-control. But it’s dripping with convoluted and downright unfriendly corporate-speak.

And its not just openness- though that will help tremendously. Its even having a process in the first place. There really needs a second way to get apps on the phone. Apple can still have its App Store with visibility and ease of use (for buying and selling). But for those apps that Apple doesn’t like but users do, iTunes should allow installing any .ipa files.

App Store Full of Buggy Apps

Friday, November 20th, 2009 | Opinion | No Comments

Paul Graham makes a very interesting point in his article about the reasons the App Store is failing:

By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App Store tends to be an old and buggy one. One developer wrote:

I believe that they think their approval process helps users by ensuring quality. In reality, bugs like ours get through all the time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved, leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don’t work. Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes.

I had not considered that because Apple takes so long to approve updates, that most apps in the App Store are very buggy since no updates can be approved. Whereas on the Mac, an update can be pushed right away to fix a bug, the APp Store takes an unknown amount of time. So the tendency to roll as many fixes and changes into one update is overwhelmingly strong, because who wants to wait 3 months for 6 updates, and instead to 1 update every 3 months.

Just another reason the approval process is broken.

Another iPhone Developer Quits

Friday, November 13th, 2009 | Opinion | 1 Comment

Rogue Amoeba has announced they are also leaving iPhone development. In their case, they tried to submit a bug fix release, but Apple complained about them “using Apple’s image” in their app. First off, I don’t understand why Apple wouldn’t want them to use the images. I mean, that provides UI and image consistency across apps and devices. Second, they got the images from APPLE PROVIDED SOURCES. I just don’t understand this.

The situation is getting more dire everyday. I thought this would be a weekly thing, and now its happening daily.