My Twitter username is ffg, because I signed up for the service pretty early on, way back when it possible to get a 3-letter username. I like to use ffg as a username everywhere, because it’s nice and short to type and because it has no phonetic pronunciation (see also: xkcd)
A long time ago, I subscribed to an RSS feed in Mail to the Twitter search feed for the string “ffg”. I now believe this to have been a mistake.
The problem is that SMS-damaged morons use “ffg” to mean “following” — this is by no means an atypical tweet:
And yeah, get off my lawn.
Little Fishies In Morning Light
I liked the way the light looked, streaming through a side window and into the aquarium.
Download Video:
Works with most devices: “MP4”
Works with neckbeards: “OGG”
Obligatory geeky details follow:
Video was shot on an iPhone 4, and edited in iMovie for iPhone. Soundtrack is Whirling Of Spirits by Balil.
I converted and downsized the video for h.264 platforms in Handbrake, and converted to Ogg for Firefox with ffmpeg2theora. I’m using the Video For Everybody to serve things with the HTML5 video tag. Flash fallback is untested, because I can’t be bothered.
Oh yeah, the oranda is Curly, the shubunkin is Chet.
Writing entries without an HTML5 aware version of Tidy is painful. Suggestions welcome.
Seems Like A Photo Moment Worth Commemorating
It took 5½ years to get there, but I think this is a nice time to look back on the photos I’ve posted to Flickr over time.
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This is fifth in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.
As it stands now, Apple launched their iBook reader and the iBooks store simultaneously with the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle reader app showed up a few days later, as did more specialized readers like GoodReader, InstapaperPro, Marvel Comics, and Zinio.
I’ll concentrate on iBooks, since that’s the experience Apple is leading with. The first release is actually pretty functional, at least for reading fiction and light nonfiction. I don’t really know how it stands up as a reader for technical documents or more specialized fare. My first iBooks purchase was William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which seemed somehow appropriate — it struck a good balance by being a book I’m pretty familiar with, but at the same time it had prabably been 20 years since I’d last read it.
As you would expect, there’s a lot of polish in the iBooks interface for common tasks like navigating within books, setting bookmarks, and searching. The controls are evident and discoverable, without the “747 cockpit” too-many-widgets problems of a lot of other reading tools. The “real book” accents (like the visual page illusion and the fake inside-cover you see when reading a page) are visually appealing without being overdone.
Despite the cries of “lock in” predictably hurled at Apple from the usual corners, it’s pretty trivial to get books for iBooks from sources other than the iBookstore. Just as iTunes and the iPod family support MP3 files from wherever you buy/find/borrow/steal/convert them, any book you can get into an unencumbered ePub file will be cheerfully synced by iTunes once you’ve added it to your library. It’s pretty simple to run pretty much any non-DRMed book in the most common formats through a tool like Calibre or Stanza Desktop to create an .epub file that’s readable in iBooks. As with MP3 files you find on the web, you can make the resulting book as nice as you want, provided you’re willing to put a little effort into metadata grooming.
There is a lot of backlight control in the iBooks application. It’s very easy to make the screen equally readable in a brightly-lit room or in a completely dark one.
I may have read on a spec sheet once that the iPad gets less battery life than a Kindle between charges, but I’ve yet to run my battery all the way down in a single day doing anything on the device, even performing far more CPU-intensive tasks than book reading, so, um, I haven’t found cause to care.
The biggest problem I’ve noticed, at least with reading, is the the insistence on full justification without hyphenation. It simply makes text harder to read. I can understand that good hyphenation is nontrivial to support, but until we get it couldn’t we at least have the option to display text ragged-right?
Despite all the scare stories from E-Ink partisans about how reading on a backlit screen would make our eyes bleed (conveniently neglecting that most office workers spend several hours a day reading on, um, backlit screens), the real visibility problem I’ve hit with the iPad is reflective glare off the shiny screen when reading in direct sunlight. Like the iPhone screen before it, the iPad screen is pretty much a mirror, so don’t expect to get a lot of beach reading done unless you take an umbrella.
The iPad weighs a lot more than the “pure” e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc.) If you do a lot of reading in bed, you may find yourself switching the iPad from hand-to-hand a fair bit as your wrists become fatigued.
A friend linked the transcript of a speech by Steven Berlin Johnson where he expressed concern and disappointment that he was unable to copy text from Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man”:
But there are worse things than paywalls. Take a look at this screen. This, as you all probably know, is Apple’s new iBook application for the iPad. What I’ve done here is shown you what happens when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options “Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in question is Penguin’s edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.
The important bit in
that paragraph are the words “Penguin’s edition.” I haven’t
downloaded “Penguin’s edition” of the Descent of Man
because it’s $12.99 and the Project Gutenberg
edition, which is returned by the same search query in iBooks,
is free. What I can confirm is that I am able to highlight and copy
text from the exact same passage in the Project Gutenberg edition
of the book.
I am not arguing that a publisher flipping the “copy inhibit” bit in an eBook isn’t lame — it is. What I am pointing out is that the symptom pointed out by Johnson is under the control of the eBook publisher. It isn’t an Apple mandate, and it’s not some inherent failure of the iBooks platform (nor an Insidious Apple Plot To Lock Up Culture.)
Next up: some nice native apps.
This is fourth in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12. I originally planned to post this last Friday, but, um, whatevs…
The iPad’s built-in applications are a bit of a mixed bag. A few of them benefit massively from the increased screen real estate and speed (Safari, Mail, Maps), but don’t really add a lot of functionlity over their iPhone equivalents. In a lot of cases it begins to feel like the applications are just being allowed to exist at the sizes they always wanted to be, if that makes sense. Others (e.g. Notes) feel like a bit of a missed opportunity.
Safari is, in many ways, the most important application on the iPad. Just by being a fast as hell browser you hold in your hands and interact with gesturally, it may be all some folks need to justify the iPad. As I mentioned in a previous post, it handily whips Chrome and Firefox on an Ubuntu netbook, both in page rendering speed and pure joy of use — desktop browsers on small screens are seriously compromised applications, being designed, really, for a very different form factor. There are some small but notable improvements over the iPhone’s Mobile Safari as well. The most immediately noticeable is that videos (both native mpeg4 and embedded YouTube, at least… not yet sure about other h.264-friendly sites yet) are displayed inline, instead of forcing a trip to the video player. There’s also an (optional) bookmarks bar. I even have some of my favorite bookmarklets (or at least the ones that make sense there, like Readability and TBuzz) there. It doesn’t do Flash, but if you care about that you’re probably not reading this post.
It’s hard to tell if Mail on iPad is rewritten from scratch or if only the interface has been redone. Like Mail on the iPhone, it lacks a unified Inbox, but switching between accounts is so fast I don’t really mind. It’s pretty easy to plow through emails on the device. You’re not going to type epics on the onscreen keyboard, but reading emails is almost unreasonably pleasant.
Worthy of note is the iPod application. Aside from the
not really portable thing, it’s easily the most visually
yummy presentation I’ve ever seen in a music playing
application. The screen size allows displaying CD inserts at full
size (assuming you’ve embedded suitably large cover art in
your metadata), and it’s really striking with a pretty album
cover. The onscreen widgets are all consciously finger sized,
including the volume slider. It’s all very tactile.
The Maps application is functionally pretty much identical to the iPhone version, but being bigger makes it prettier. That’s pretty much enough for now.
Notepad is pretty pointless. The only difference is the larger screen size. It brings nothing new in terms of syncing or easy exporting of notes. Meh. Even something as simple as being able to use Bluetooth file sending would help matters. It still insists on Marker Felt.
The Photo viewing app is gorgeous, but it’s not the
easiest thing in the world to find the one photo you’re
looking for among thousands. For some unfathomable reason, it
doesn’t support iPhoto keywords. As an adjunct, you can turn
the iPad into a really expensive digital photo frame from the lock
screen. It’s also got that “cool to demo, but kind
useless”-feature of being able to click on an album and
pinch-zoom on a bunch of pics at once. It’s worth noting that
the first time you sync photos from your computer to the iPad,
it’ll spend hours “optimizing” them. This is
irritating when you have a new gadget you just want to play around
with. I recommend aborting the process and deferring it until
overnight.
The iTunes Store and the App Store are pretty much exactly what you’d expect, nothing more, nothing less. The YouTube app is presentable, and pulls off the admirable trick of allowing you access to the worst comments on the Internet without shoving your face in them.
I suppose I could treat iBooks as a built-in application, seeing as how you’re prompted to download it from the App Store the first time you go there, but I suppose it’ll get a separate post all its own anyway.
This is third in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.
There were a lot of fanciful hardware designs being bandied about by people before the launch of the iPad. There were things that had all sorts of ports, buttons, and frippery, obviously coming from people how haven’t been paying attention to the ruthlessly minimal designs coming from Apple for years.
I didn’t really pay any attention to them, because I knew that externally, anything they shipped would be a moderately sized piece of aluminum and glass wrapped around some very understated functional engineering. It would be something with no fans, no battery covers, and the bare minimum of external controls and ports.
In retrospect, the
idea of scaling up the iPhone/iPod touch form was the most logical
thing they could have done. This device isn’t being aimed at
the neckbeards on Engadget whipping out their spec sheets and
measuring units, it’s a device aimed quite specifically at
the tens of millions of people whose first experience with Apple
was the iPod and/or iPhone. The end result is a device that has a
very small number of external controls and interfaces that will
feel completely familiar to lots of people. It’s the gadget
equivalent of printing “Don’t Panic” across the
front in large,
friendly letters. It so happens that the chosen form factor is
very comfortable for sitting on a couch or an easy chair. There was
some grousing that they went with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of
16:9, but 4:3 makes a lot more sense if you expect that the device
is going to spend as much time oriented vertically as
horizontally.
After a week of carrying an iPad around in various contexts, I’m very pleased with the form factor. It is a very comfortable thing to carry. The weight, which is somewhat greater than I’d expected, gives the thing a reassuring feeling of solidity. I know, intellectually, that a great part of the weight is the fairly massive battery assembly, but it really gives the impression of being a solid block of aluminum in the hand. As you would expect from an Apple device, the whole thing feels very constructed: there arent any gaps or seams, and there is no “flex” when you grasp the opposite corners in your hands and apply slight twisting pressure. The weight isn’t all good, though. When reading in bed, it’s definitely noticeable if you’re trying to hold the device in one hand. One and a half pounds may not sound like much, but when you’re lying on your back supporting it at eye level, it’s quite noticeably heavier than you’d probably like.
As I stated earlier, it never warms to the touch, even when playing video. There’s some serious hardware witchcraft in this little slab.
All of my performance remarks are subjective. I have an iPhone 3G, and the iPad is dramatically faster in all aspects than the phone. Switching between screens on the Springboard has no delay at all. As stated earlier, the browser is desktop-fast. I don’t know how much of this can be ascribed to the A4 chip, the video hardware, or low-level OS tweaks, but the performance is really quite remarkable.
The multitouch screen is very responsive, of course. I’ll come back to this in a later post, but the iPhoneOS UI really comes into its own when paired with an extra large control surface. There are all sorts of interface niceties that work better on the iPad than on the iPhone, simply because there’s so much more screen and control surface area to work with. The battery life and charging experience is worth a whole post on its own. Suffice to say, being able to get 10+ hours on a charge, even under intensive use, is a huge win.
One minor complaint I have about the form factor is, since the device is perfectly happy to work in any of the 4 possible orientations, it’s very easy to lose track of where the external controls are. I often find myself reaching for the rotation lock or volume controls, only to find they’re on a different edge of the iPad than I thought.
Next up: the included software.
This is first in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.
I got the 32GB WiFi model.
I tried to resist, honestly. Come on, laugh at the early adopter.
The itch became unbearable the weekend following the big launch. I started calling the local Apple stores (there are 4 in the Greater Detroit area) and all of them were completely sold out on Sunday (4/11). I called again at lunchtime the following Monday, and the Troy store (~10 minutes from the office) had the 32 and 64 GB models.
I had quite a few people ask me how I liked it when I first bought it, and I pretty much said exactly the same thing to everyone: I’ve only used it a few hours; ask me again after I’ve used it for a week.
So it’s been a week, and I figured that this was as good an opportunity as any to brush the cobwebs off my poor, neglected weblog. My plan as of now is to break this into a series of smaller posts that will run 1-2 per day until I’m tired of hearing myself blab. I’m projecting about a half-dozen moderate length posts, as of now.
I’m not claiming I have any unique insights, but I’ll offer the perspective of someone who already owns a bucketload of Apple gear and a netbook. Since one of the big debates among the dorkerati was whether the iPad is more or less useful than a netbook, I’ll talk about things from that direction, too.
This is second in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.
One mistake the Slashdot/Engadget/Digg crowds always make is assuming that their harware use cases are universal: “It won’t play my 2 terabytes of Ogg Vorbis files stored on an NFS server. I can’t self-host the entire GNU toolchain, therefore it’s useless…” I will try to avoid that here.
I’ve written in this space before about our Acer Aspire netbook. It’s basically the third computer in the house — where I use my desktop (a G5 tower) and my office laptop (a 13-inch MacBook) as machines to “get things done”, the Ubuntu-based netbook has pretty much functioned for a small set of tasks:
I will now say, that for the way that I have used a netbook, the iPad is in most respects a (much) superior platform.
The iPad is far more
usably portable than a netbook. It gets far better battery
life (10+ hours vs. 3), is absolutely cool to the touch (the
netbook gets very warm in the lap), occupies less space
(no pop up screen) in use, and has no fans.It’s true that the iPad is currently more expensive than most netbook-class machines, but not unreasonably so.
Congratulations and all the love in the world for my parents, Roberta and Charles Walker, who were married 50 years ago today in Detroit.
The netbook business is an odd one, really. As a product category, it’s easy enough to describe: take a notebook computer, and start taking things out until you end up with something really small and really cheap. Optical drive? As long as you assume the consumer already has a full desktop or laptop somewhere with a CD/DVD drive, you don’t need one. Full sized keyboard? Too big, give them something smaller. Top of the line CPU? Don’t need it for basic web surfing and light editing. Tons of storage? This is an appliance, you don’t need it to hold all of the user’s media.
As a business, though, it turns out it’s pretty dicey. It’s just not possible to make much money on a $300 computer, no matter who you are. Some companies have done the math and decided that it doesn’t make sense for them to be in the business. To be honest, though, the business model doesn’t matter much to me — that’s up to computer companies to figure out, not me.
I bought Tammie a little Acer Aspire for her birthday last year. Of course, I probably use it more than she does. It arrived with Windows XP installed, and I’m pretty sure I had the hard drive reformatted within a half hour of unboxing. Yeah, I’m one of them.
I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and it was OK. The machine was OK for running Firefox, but I had recurring issues: sometimes, the WiFi would just stop working for no reason, for example.
I’m happy to say the new Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu drastically improves the overall feel of the machine. Everything feels a little snappier, it connects to the household wireless with much less hassle, and after I copied a few fonts from one of my Macs things even look pretty good in the browser. I installed an early access release of Chrome and the performance is very usable on all the sites I visit regularly, even Javascript-heavy sites like Google Wave.
Overall, though, the netbook is still a toy; something to check the IMDb or Wikipedia on while sitting on the couch. It’s a nicer toy than it was last week, though.
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