A very particular set of skills ... acquired over a very long career ...
Can I just say how much I (still) love Fake Steve Jobs?
Comments closedGreenpeace, as I live and breathe, by Grabthar’s hammer, by the sons of Warvan, I shall see your offices and ships destroyed. I shall see you crushed and driven before me. I shall hear the cries and lamentations of your women.
David Berlind: Based on an off-hand comment Steve Jobs made at the iPhone U.K. intro, I predict the next iPhone — you know, the phone designed to be different from all the other crappy phones out there — will add all that stuff that the other phones have.
The Macalope: Dude. Are you even paying a little attention?
(Oh, and as far as I can tell the site Berlind quoted got the quote wrong. They have Jobs saying “You can expect a 3G iPhone later next year”, but the quote I saw elsewhere — sorry, can’t find it right now — was more like “You should not expect a 3G iPhone before late next year”, which makes more sense.)
(Oh, and of course Apple’s going to have a 3G iPhone out sometime next year. Duh. Wake me up when the 3G EDGE network comes to town, and then we’ll talk.)
Comments closedI was seriously considering an iPod touch to replace both my current iPod and my Palm TX, until Apple somewhat arbitrarily decided not to permit editing calendar events on the iPod (although you can add and edit contacts … huh?). So now I’m not so sure.
Would it be completely absurd to purchase a refurbished iPhone for only $50 more than the “equivalent” 8GB iPod touch, and thereby get all the extra applications? Not just full-featured calendar, but weather, stock quotes, Google maps, etc. (Plus emergency 911!)
Is that worth $50? Maybe… I’d have to activate it and then cancel the AT&T service, but that seems pretty well documented. Many commenters mocked people who wanted to do this with their $600 iPhone, but for $349 it seems more reasonable. (Plus I’d have something to develop applications for… yeah, right. That’s what I said about the last three Palms I bought, too.)
Bonus notes from perusing the online features guide:
“[To] quickly type a period and space: Double-tap the space bar.” Cool! Does the iPhone do this too?
“[To] enter a pause in a [phone] number: Tap [some symbol], then tap Pause.
Pauses are sometimes required by phone systems—before an extension or password, for example. Each pause lasts 2 seconds. You may need to enter more than one.”
They took editable contacts out of the iPod touch, and left this in? Hello, McFly?
Silver is the new white: With the new iPod classic coming in Black and Silver, it looks like the only remaining iconic white product in Apple’s lineup is the MacBook (unless you count accessories like the AirPort Express or Extreme).
Is there anything more ridiculous than the early iPhone adopters whining about how Apple is being disloyal to them with the $200 price cut? What is this, high school? Was Apple supposed to not cut their prices, to show how much they care? What do they think all this whining is going to get them, anyway?
Oh, OK. Huh. Hey, Beelzebub, send me up another iced tea, please. (I wonder if that will work elsewhere. “Hey, Mr. Honda, I bought this Accord a couple months ago, and now you’ve knocked $5000 off the price? I want my five large back!”)
So here we have what appears at first glance to be another entry in the “put iPhone in the headline and get unwarranted attention” sweepstakes:
iPhone Users Find Texting is 2x Slower Than on QWERTY Phones
but which turns out in fact to be more like the “write an egregiously misleading headline and get attention” technique.
Clicking through to the actual release reveals that if you take some frequent text messagers accustomed to physical numeric or QWERTY keypads and have them send six — six! — text messages on the iPhone — well, gosh, it takes them twice as long to do that as on their own phones … which they’re already used to.
(Apparently rubbing the iPhone on your head doesn’t cure baldness in half an hour, either.)
To their credit, they acknowledge this issue, sort of:
We were aware that participants’ prior familiarity with their own phones meant that there would likely be a learning curve associated with text messaging on the iPhone … Although participants were given one minute to familiarize themselves with the iPhone’s touch keyboard, their texting abilities on the iPhone were still at the novice level. [Emphasis supplied.]
So, apparently, they didn’t give the users any kind of advice on how to adapt themselves to the iPhone — the sort of thing any reasonably intelligent new user might do. Such as, oh, I don’t know, watch a video showing how it works?
Nor did they do the obvious followup and see how the users did after a couple of days using the iPhone — since it’s been widely reported that performance improves once the user adapts to the iPhone’s predictive key entry. Wouldn’t a usability research firm be interested in that information as well? Or would it just be satisfied to get a quick result likely to draw attention to itself, and send out a press release?
No, it couldn’t be that. What was I thinking?
Comments closedSo now Bandwagon and DreamHost are co-operating on a promotion: DreamHost members get a year of Bandwagon, and vice versa.
Well, I haven’t had a chance to set up my Bandwagon account yet — and, as has been pointed out, it may not be an optimal solution for large iTunes collections — but I’m a DreamHost subscriber, and my renewal date is coming up in a couple of months, so here goes. Now all three of you who read my blog will have something to chew on for another five months. (Hey, I couldn’t keep up with the blog when I wasn’t working full-time — what makes you think I’ll do any better now?)
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Bandwagon launches tomorrow; it purports to back up your entire iTunes library over the Internet to their servers (or alternatively to your Amazon S3 box) for a flat rate. Updates occur automatically in the background. Sounds like a good idea, if they can pull it off. (Mac only at the moment, apparently.)
Disclaimer: This post is earning me, like others, a free one-year subscription.
4 CommentsApparently I’m not the only one:
I went to www.brenthaven.com and what do I see but their featured laptop bag, the MacBook Slim. The name evoked compactness, and the picture appeared to be a clone of my Pro File 12, so I mustered up the will to spend $100 on a bag, and ordered one.
It came Friday, and it is beautiful, and well constructed. And I sent it back Saturday morning. The thing is huge. Great for frequent travelers who keep their office in their bag, not so great for me, who slips his laptop into its case every morning and every evening and needs only enough extra storage for an iPod.
Virtually the same thing here. I had a Pro File 12 for my PowerBook G4 12″ that I loved; I went back to Brenthaven, saw the MacBook Slim, assumed it was the same thing, and bought it just before a week-long cross-country trip.
And … it is huge. It has a “removable” padded sleeve, but in practice you wouldn’t want to use it as a lightweight sleeve, because (a) it’s Velcroed in there pretty good; (b) it doesn’t have much of a carrying handle; and (c) it’s really too big for the MacBook — I would guess it was a standard Brenthaven part that was the smallest one big enough to hold the MacBook, and then they built the rest of the case around it.
For that cross-country trip, it was decent — at least in the airplane; lugging it from the hotel to the convention center and back again was feasible but not much fun. But for going back and forth to work, it’s overkill. I guess I could have tried to return it, even after using it for a week, but that didn’t seem right to me, and by the time I got really unhappy with it my return period was long since past.
So what I ended up doing was buying a Pro File 15 from the same place I’d bought the Pro File 12 — and for virtually the same clearance price. The Pro File 15 is a little too tall for the MacBook but otherwise works fine, and is much lighter weight to boot.
Comments closedItem on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Apple Genius says: Moo’ing normal.
Same item as quoted on Powerpage: Apple: It’s Normal for MacBooks to Moo.
Now I’m not a professional journalist, but even I can tell the difference between one offhand comment by one employee at one Apple store, and an official position by Apple the corporation.
Also omitted from the quote on Powerpage: the part where the TUAW writer then called AppleCare and is having his MacBook repaired under warranty. (Of course, the Apple Genius should have handled this…)
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take Jason O’Grady seriously. How he ends up writing for ZDNet is beyond me.
(By the way, my new black MacBook does not moo.)
Comments closedIn response to a challenge in the Mac forum at Ars Technica, I’ve banged out a quick service that adds “Search With Wikipedia” to your Services menu (right below “Search With Google”). It’s called PyWikit because (a) somebody suggested “Wikit” for the name and (b) I wrote it in Python, using PyObjC. To use it, download it and move it to your ~/Library/Services folder. At the moment you will probably have to log out and log in again to update your Services menu. If I get motivated I’ll build an installer, someday. (Unlikely since I’ve only spent about an hour on this, most of which was taken up building a universal binary for PyObjC. While it is true that PyObjC rocks, its universalness is still a little, uh, rocky.)
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