Category Archives: Wireless

Location, Location, Location!

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People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.

Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.

Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.

So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.

So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

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Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

  • The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
  • The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
  • The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
  • Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
  • Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
  • Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
  • The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
  • You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
  • Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

  • The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
  • The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
  • While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
  • The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
  • Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
  • The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
  • The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

  • The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
  • The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
  • The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
  • While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.

Next Innovation Frontier

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I have identified the next innovation frontier! Multiple device presence synchronization.

Every innovation is born out of a tangle of issues that represent a problem. For this particular point, my problem is a maddening one. I have several streams of information that I regularly check on:

  1. Twitter
  2. Facebook
  3. Google Reader/RSS Aggregator
  4. FourSquare
  5. GetGlue
  6. Email

I use different access devices during my day depending on the setting and activity level present in that environment. I use my iMac while I’m active at work, I use my iPhone and iPad mixed when I’m traveling as a passenger. I use my iPhone while waiting for long durations in queues and I’ll eat private meals with either my iPhone or iPad running. My problem is one of annoyance and the possibility that I’ve missed information. When I move forward in any of these information streams on one device it can be a challenge to update all the other devices with “my bookmark” in each stream. If I’m catching up on tweets on my iPhone and I get to work, I want to switch my attention away from my iPhone and towards my iMac. What I want is for my last seen tweet to be updated on each device when I start it’s attendant application. The same goes for my Google Reader RSS Aggregator. I read news items while riding the bus from home to work and when I arrive at work I want to pick up on my iMac where I left off on my iPhone.

There are several applications that I use that have ways to address my needs, but they aren’t wholly reliable. Twitter has a “favorite” system that could be used for this, but that’s expecting one bit of the system (a square peg) to be pounded into shape to work as a solution for something else (a round hole). And Google Reader has a built-in capacity to do some of what I wish, but nobody has written the code to facilitate that requirement yet.

How could something like this best work? As with many other things the answer I believe lies in abstraction. The most convenient form of abstraction would be to have every client I use understand how to interface with Dropbox. Each app can connect to Dropbox and in the root folder of my Dropbox it can use file time and date stamps to determine when the latest updates were sent to my Dropbox, and the files themselves contain the positional information that I need to share between many systems. When I read tweets, the latest tweet that I’ve seen has its date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. When I’m browsing Google Reader articles, the last-seen-article has it’s date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. So on and so forth. Everything is transparent, the files are easily accessible from Dropbox and because the network is ubiquitous, I have no problems accessing Dropbox from wherever I am. Even if I didn’t have the network all the time, the syncing and updating functions of Dropbox would eventually guarantee that my position updates are always up in the cloud.

With this solution I could start reading tweets on one device, put it to sleep and continue reading on another device. I think this will become more and more relevant as time goes on and people start using multiple devices, computers, tablets, and handhelds. The only real challenge is encouraging every app vendor and system writer to hop on board with this idea.

Tech'now'ledgy Expo

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I attended for a little while the Tech’now’logy Expo that TotalTech puts on every year. In attendance was my friend Matt Merrill with CDW-G and Chris Doemel with Apple.

They are pretty much two out of maybe a handful of vendors that I do not want to pitch into a swirling abyssal vortex. The expo itself was a little lean on actual vendors, but HP and Dell were there, and my CDW-G vendor was flogging Lenovo pretty hard. I hadn’t the heart to really bust down Lenovo despite it being a cross between an IBM Stink-Pad and Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap. I can’t really get down on Lenovo too harshly, at least there wasn’t a Lexmark pusher there! Lexmark gets pitched into that aforementioned vortex.

Apple was pleasant as usual. I really love the company, and AppleCare itself can’t be beat, but my previous run-ins with Apple Sales has left me feeling a little quixotic. They aren’t as hold-your-hand as the rest of Apple is, but they are attentive and the reflected glory from the mothership in Cupertino does them a lot of good, but while I’m seeking out the ARD Development Team for body-breaking hugs, the sales team has always left me feeling rather tepid. They respond very positively when you tell them you’re sending clients their way, but everything else isn’t really that exciting for them, which I totally understand, but it is a little surprising that sales isn’t as rabid as the rest of them are.

Something that is coming up is iOS management. I’ve got a new systems contact at Apple, a fellow by the name of David Seebaldt. Should be interesting to see what he is going to recommend for us. Currently we’ve got 6 iPads in play and 3 iPhones. I fully expect that level to rise with time. I think one of my first queries will be why iPhone, and no other iOS device displays a single-Library preference. iPod Touches, iPod Nanos, and even iPads can touch as many iTunes Libraries as they like, but iPhones? One central library, the first one they see, and that’s it. It’s as if the iPhone imprints on the first Library it sees and that’s it for life. Odd.

I certainly hope that they get more foot traffic, because the lunch-time period wasn’t so rah-rah-rah.

Historical

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Operation Historic Moment has come and gone. The big news, now that the cat is out of the bag and rubbing up against your leg is that WMU received the biggest cash gift in our state, ever. The total is $100 Million dollars. This unthinkably large gift is a godsend, but alas is just the start of what is needed to start training real Doctors. I was centrally involved with a group of coworkers to design this project and bring it off successfully. My role was to address the technology we’d need to make all of this work properly. There were ups and downs and I learned a surprising amount from the experience that I will detail here.

The project had quite a number of technical components to it. Technology served a role at nearly each step of the process and many of the tools that were used made everything faster, better, and easier. The old aphorism that “proper organization will set you free” couldn’t ring any louder for us all than it did for all of our meetings to arrange this entire project. For me it started with tools that before this event I could have only dreamed for in Sci-fi. Specifically I speak of my iPad. My iPad was the perfect device. It was a communications hub, everything from email, my blog, to Twitter and Facebook were available to me whenever I needed them. The single app on the iPad that really helped the most was iThoughts HD. For each meeting we had, and there were many, I used this app to take dynamic notes and record the minutes of the meetings in a beautiful and straightforward fashion that I could then email to our management and show them our progress on the project. All they had to do was sit back and watch as we progressed. It was a delight to use and by suppressing an endless trail of scribbled and crossed out paperwork made what we accomplished in our meetings very easy on the eyes to read.
We had laid out our design from the very start. The first was a series of mystery QR codes that were distributed throughout town. Supermarkets, Delis, and popular hotspots throughout Kalamazoo were dressed up in these QR coded pages. The QR codes loaded a series of photos that lead to hints for anyone together enough to know what a QR was and to scan it. If I could do this part over I would have encoded all the URL’s for the photos using bit.ly so I could track their clickthrough rates and measure if anyone actually scanned any of these codes or if they are, as I feared, a flash in the pan. Thankfully the QR part of the project was free to implement and the only expense were the staff running around town posting these up all over.

The next big thing was the “Livestream” on the Internet. We had contacted a company and the original design was utterly fantastic. They would haul their own data over satellite service to their home office in Detroit and all we would have to do is cope with our network struggling under the strain of all the consumers pulling the live feed down from our vendor. For weeks we had this planned to the last item and then an unforeseen change of venue forced us to scrap the use of a satellite for data transmission. Suddenly we had to rely on our own network for both the upstream and downstream service. Several things from that point exploded in our faces, specifically a product from Cisco Services called CleanAccess was a problem. With the help of the venues IT manager we were able to get both the dry run and the main production signal off the ground and working properly. As some people have noticed, at showtime we suffered a rather embarrassing network failure at Western. Right now all we have are several competing theories, but they all describe the same problem – our event was so popular that our own network couldn’t cope. Personally I was beyond dismay, beyond embarrassment. I was logged into the Bernhard Center countdown clock hardware trying to display the livestream to everyone assembled there and the melted-down network wasn’t going to have any of it. As I sat there, thinking about all the upset people assembled for nothing in the Bernhard Center my mind raced with ways that I could have possibly addressed the situation. Some things did come immediately to mind and most of them involved not using any indigenous technology and relying instead on other Internet providers to ensure that things worked as designed. Like all other instances where something bad happens and you wish you could go backwards in time to fix it, there is no rescuing that mistake – only learning from it. I can’t say that I have much faith in our indigenous network provider, as it collapsed like a house of cards when our event started. I was afraid of network saturation and whatever the real cause was, I’d bet some real money that link saturation was at least a player in the drama. It stings when I have to admit that our successes are more dependent on non-indigenous resources than indigenous ones. It’s not that we actively selected against the indigenous systems, it’s just they never really even came up in our thoughts. I’m happy that much of what we attempted did work and upset that the one singular thing that we allowed to be handled indigenously was so embarrassingly fumbled. The only saving grace at the end is the notion that our message was so popular that it disabled a system designed to resist such things. The Internet really was never designed to resist popularity, only nuclear attack.

We also were responsible for the “Mystery Box” in Bernhard Center. This was a tease for the Countdown Clock Display that later on was constructed in the Mystery Boxes place. Our intent wasn’t to anger people by it’s placement, only to engage them and get them wondering what Western was up to. The clocks themselves were quite impressive and even still I’m amazed that we pulled it off as easily as we did. The clocks, all the guts, and the entire design came together so wonderfully that I still sit back and marvel at how it all played out. This build was rather involved for me and because of that fact, it was the place where most of my “little lessons” cluster. The displays themselves were investments, they cost a bit of money but we’re going to use the tarnation out of them and get every red cents worth out of them. The guts were repurposed technology from our own department and didn’t cost anything. Amongst the lessons I learned, when trying to force Firefox into a Kiosk you have to turn off updates, make sure screensavers and energy-saving features never get activated and to turn off Bluetooth. Because of the design we had to use two independent systems for the two displays, and this in itself created a rather embarrassing and inexplicable oddity to pop up. The two displays were almost perpetually out of time sync with one another. I really can’t explain it, both machines were in the same general space, there is nothing wrong with where they are, yet one machine counted time differently than the other. I have some theories that have to do with processor load and video processing issues and that is the only way I can explain it. The only other solution is that we had a temporal anomaly in the Bernhard Center. I’d expect a gaggle of dead students if we had a spatial anomaly, so it almost has to be my first theory that’s right. Anyhow, each night I would remote into the clocks and resync them. At worst they were about a minute off of each other but sync’ed well at night. The other lesson I learned was that WiFi is useful for many things, but you should never depend upon it. Drawing a network to the location was impossible but I do know what I would do differently next time. Next time I would acquire two free nearby wired network ports and I would set two 802.11N wifi access points on those lines and one machine per access point would be the rule, and the access points would have nothing at all to do with Tsunami, the default Western wifi SSID. Of course this would be a gross violation of network design and probably upset the indigenous service providers, but in some ways I can defend that approach because it would have likely not failed me. Alternatively I was considering acquiring two Verizon EVDO USB Network cards and using those as a wholly independent network sources for my display equipment.

Beyond the livestream and the clocks, the other bits of technology that we used were more bent towards helping us keep coordinated and organized. We made rather good use, even though it’s development was very late in the game, of WordPress.com itself. About 80% of the way through our project I started investigating WordPress.com’s P2 theme. The minute I started to play around with it I fell in love. P2 was perfect for so many things that were on my mind, a way to solve many workplace problems and the fact that WordPress.com was free, easy, so wonderfully supported, and quite robust was all just sauce for this goose. I created a private blog, added the P2 theme to it and rolled it out to everyone on our team. Of course since the blog came online about 80% too late, only a small amount of real work ended up being done with it, however even still, it served as a proof of concept and both P2 and WordPress.com have continuously proven to me just how good they are as a collaboration and communications platform, absolutely worthy of a “Bravo!”. The other system we used was more for coordination and that was GroupMe. I created a GroupMe account and group and populated it with my teammates who had SMS-capable cellular telephones, which was nearly all of them. GroupMe worked very well, and the only hesitation I have for really raving about them comes down to a misfired politeness feature in their core product. If you add a group of people to your GroupMe group and start using the product and some people don’t respond or actively join GroupMe declares that they aren’t in the group any longer out of politeness. Well, you can’t add them back in afterwards no matter how hard you try and some people aren’t supposed to reply, they are just supposed to witness and obtain an survey of the action, especially some in management. The GroupMe service would be better if there was a way to defeat the “politeness” feature and establish a hard-and-fast fixed group to receive text messages irrespective of whether they do or do not reply to any of those messages.
Now that the entire project is over, we are riding high on a wave of a job well done and looking at what failed and what we could have done to address those failures. Every mistake carries within it the seeds needed to avoid them in the future. We pulled off a massive and multifaceted campaign with six primary sectors and each one had fantastic leadership and an utterly delightful minimum of process-clogging bullshit. What lead to our successes? Empowerment, a lack of micromanagement, and utterly shocking levels of interdepartmental cooperation. Almost at every turn when we were afraid we would run into an intractable opponent we discovered to our dazzled chagrin that at each step we could find no enemies laying in wait for us with bear-traps, all we had were instant converts and cheerleaders. I’ve thanked our team many times in the past and once in a previous metablog post about the Western Express engagement platform, but there are some  other people who bear thanking now that I have a place to publicly do so:

  • Our own “Sensational Seven,” which I was a part. If people work this well together for other projects, beware. 🙂
  • Our Gold People. They remain anonymous but they know who they are and one or two may read this. Nothing like the magic of a mystery figure to goose a campaign right where it counts.
  • John Stanford at the College of Health and Human Services at WMU. Thank you for on-the-spot help and use of your Category 6 cabling.
  • Bernhard Center Management were stellar for this entire campaign. Kept what secrets you had to, asked no awkward questions, and went above and beyond with material and resource support. Knowing we had the staff of the Bernhard Center was absolutely instrumental in our Countdown Clocks working as well as they did.
  • All the Building Coordinators, especially CHHS and Fetzer Center, for being so wonderfully understanding and willing to facilitate our project.
  • Everyone else, I’m sure I’ve left someone out of this list, but if you were ‘in on it’ even if only a little bit, I thank you here and now.

What’s next? Well, it’s a great start for the Medical School, but in no way are we finished. The need is still very strong and this incredible gift is such a great start. There are more surprises yet to come and more engaging things that the University will see from us here in Development and Alumni Relations. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish. As I told the powers that be when they took the reins back in October 2010, “All you need to do is press the Big Red Button.”

Zoom Zoom. 🙂

iPhone App Review

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In an earlier post I wrote about how I promised you all an iPhone App review, so without further waiting, here it is. In this review I will be skipping any apps that also appear on my iPad, as I’ve pretty much exhaustively covered those apps, unless the iPhone brings a fresh perspective that I didn’t have with my iPad. Just so that everyone is on the same page, my iPad is a 16GB Wifi only model, and the first generation. My iPhone is also a 16GB model and linked to Verizon, it’s fourth generation. On with the show…

iPhone 4 App Review

  1. Evernote – The recently updated Evernote app is without a doubt one of the single most awesome and compelling apps on my iPhone. The new interface works so much better than the previous iteration of the app on the iPhone device. I am patiently waiting for this kind of refreshing redesign to happen for the Evernote for iPad app as well. Every time I open Evernote, I can’t help but think back to struggling with the very same app on my old Blackberry. The difference? Night and Day.
  2. Photography Group
    1. Camera – The baked in Camera app for the iPhone 4 comes with the device. The controls are very easy and it was a definite pleasure to see that the app does stills and video, and can be configured for either camera, the front-facing or rear-facing.
    2. Camera+ – This app borrows a lot of structure from the plain Camera app. It has a different zoom feature, timed shutter, burst mode, advanced flash handling and a pretty neat focus-fixing gesture system which I’ve yet to really get into. The app also has it’s own “Camera Roll” beyond the plain system one, and this allows you to edit the photos, crop them and apply some pretty cool filters. You can of course export any photos you take from the apps “Camera Roll” to the system “Camera Roll”, so it’s quite handy.
    3. Panorama – I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with this one, it was free, eventually I’ll get to trying it out.
    4. Instagram – The collision of social media and photography! This app is great. You can configure Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, and FourSquare all from the app itself. Take a picture, apply one of its old-timey filters if you want, and then send the photo at once to all the services or specific ones you choose. So far very happy with it.
    5. FoodSpotting – This is more niche than Instagram. It works a lot like Instagram but it’s for food in restaurants. You take a picture and you can share it. The only gripe I have about FoodSpotting is the setup for the social services aren’t very clear, it’s nothing like any other app I’ve used and I kept on hitting my head against a mysterious login box until I realized I had to put in my FoodSpotting.com username and password. Oops. Once it’s off the ground, it’s very handy.
  3. Utilities Group –
    1. Clock – The clock app is one of those baked-in apps that come with the device. I almost never review the baked in apps, except for this one case. There appears to be a gremlin that still lives in this app. I have a handful of alarms, and whether the alarm is on or off doesn’t matter. So far it doesn’t suffer from the previous problem of “alarm doesn’t fire”, but it’s odd in that alarms fire even if they are “Off”. I think this app is still a work-in-progress for Apple’s iOS team to work on.
    2. Voice Memos – This app still has a use for really long audio recordings. It’s lost a fair amount of power when Evernote redid their app and added audio recording – so you could technically audio-record right into your Evernote system. I suppose you could use this app and then email the audio into Evernote later, perhaps it’s six and one half-dozen kind of thing.
  4. Facebook – The Facebook app is odd. It’s there for the iPhone but not the iPad. I’ll never understand that. The app works well enough, it’s pretty straightforward and if you have a facebook account, you should get it. I don’t know many people who don’t have a facebook account any longer.
  5. Social Group
    1. Glympse – I wrote about Glympse when I had it on my iPad. The system really shines when you have a 3G network connection or if you insist on running it on the iPad, to have a 3G-to-Wifi bridge as you are mobile. I used Glympse with my mother and she loved it. She thought it was really neat. You send a “glympse” to an email addressee and they get a link they can click on and see your position, speed, and path in real-time. The only part of this app that irks me is the expiration to “glympses”. I would prefer to hand my mother a link that would always work if I was running “Glympse” on my iPhone, she would know where I am whenever she liked. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? Come on.
    2. Bump – I got this free app to share some pictures that Scott had on his iPhone. Bump works well when the datasets are small. If you want to share a LOT of data, like a bunch of pictures in a Camera Roll on the device, prepare for disappointment. Bump really didn’t work out for me. Another app, which I reviewed on my iPad, called Transfer works much better for moving big data sets between iOS devices.
  6. Travel Group –
    1. Trapster – Before the price of fuel went to obnoxiously high levels I used to have a relatively leaded foot when it came to driving. I regularly find myself pushing 76 in a 70 zone and I’ve been caught “Not Paying Full Attention” to speed zones in the past. This app allows you to share socially the presence of speed traps and other road hazards. Since I keep my speed now pretty much below 60MPH to save on gas costs most of the reason to use this app have gone out the window, but I keep it around, it’ll likely be really helpful on long-duration trips.
    2. StreetPilot – Garmin’s Nuvi interface designed for iOS. I can enter in an address or do a Google Location search and have yet to find something it can’t route me to. This app has vocal turn-by-turn directions and is as “helpful” as a Nuvi. One of the nicest things is that the maps will never go out of date as it downloads map data from Garmin automatically. When I start this app my mind goes back to the Sprint Navigation app on my Blackberry, powered by Telenav. This app, StreetPilot, blows that old Telenav application out of the water. Again it’s night and day. I would never use the Telenav junk because it never worked. So far StreetPilot has not let me down once. Again it’s because an iPhone is a supremely more advanced and better-equipped phone than the Blackberry could ever dream of being.
    3. TripIt – Making big trips, with airplanes and hotels usually is handled somewhat well using Evernote, but not any longer. TripIt is a free app and free web service that enables you to organize all your travel details through one very well designed app. What really blows my mind is the web service provides you with an email address that you can forward your confirmation emails to and the service will automatically extract the details from what you forwarded and populate your trip for you. Incredibly handy. The fact that it’s free blows my mind.
  7. 1Password – I have this app on my iPad, my iPhone and every Mac I own. Without a doubt the single BEST purchase and BEST investment I ever made, beyond buying into the Apple Digital Lifestyle. What makes it shine? Sync with Dropbox. Everything is the same on every device. Everyone should buy apps from 1Password, then use the app to change each site they have an account on with the random generator in 1Password and control them all from that suite of apps. When one site suffers a security breakdown, your loss is microscopic. You lost 1 of thousands of 16 digit random passwords. This app is worth its weight in GOLD. I’m so happy my mother pushed me towards it!
  8. Business Group
    1. DraftPad – If ever you needed just a quick place to jot down some text, this app does a pretty good job. It’s free, it’s very simple to use, and does one thing, taking quick temporary notes, very well.
    2. CamCard – I downloaded the Lite version of this app. It enables your phone to take a picture of a business card and then it scans in the details, does OCR, and populates your Contact List with the details from the card. Very useful. I got the Lite version because I almost never get business cards but when I do, it’s nice to have this as an option.
  9. Scanners Group
    1. Qrafter – This app from Kerem Erkan is free on the App Store and is the BEST QR Code scanner I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s professional, free, and the way it scans, presents the contents of the scan and all the extended features that it can pick up from a QR code is wonderful! There are a few other QR scanners and they are okay, but this one is the top of my list without a doubt!
    2. QR Creator – Kerem Erkan, on his website, also has a QR creator page which has a special mobile rendering on iPhone devices. I browsed to it in Mobile Safari and then made an app-icon-bookmark. You can create custom QR codes and save them to your Camera Roll and print them using AirPrint or send them to someone else via email or even Evernote or Dropbox! Quite nice.
    3. PriceCheck – This app from Amazon.com is a great way to check on local stores profiteering. Just grab an object from the shelf, open this app, scan the bar code with the camera and Amazon will spit out it’s best prices for that item. I’ve yet to use it for more than simply checking on things to see how the scanner worked, but it does work. I’m pretty sure you can one-click order through the App if you set it up with your Amazon login information. That would be too-funny. Especially for Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Low prices my ass. 🙂
    4. RedLaser – This works a lot like PriceCheck but isn’t tied to Amazon.com. I have used this app and it’s saved both of us some money and aggravation. There is a scented candle that Scott really likes in the bathroom and it’s a big one, the price tag from BB&B was $22 bucks. He wanted another candle just like it for the bathroom but couldn’t remember what it was called or who made it. While I was in the bathroom I fished it out of the garbage and scanned it using RedLaser. Not only did it find the right make and scent but also found it online for HALF THE PRICE. I then tapped the option button in RedLaser and right there was “email this info” option, I sent it to Scott and minutes later he was thanking me. Don’t thank me, thank that app! 🙂
    5. Color ID – I have what I regard as accurate color vision. Scott on the other hand can from time to time run into trouble identifying colors. This free app is cute, you start it, point the camera at an object and press the shutter button. The phone will calculate the color, give you its “creative name”, its hex code for inclusion on websites, and it will read the color off via voice from the speaker. I spent half an hour identifying all the colors in my bathroom. For anyone challenged with color blindness, this app is a godsend. The only oddity with the app is that it doesn’t like being sent to the background. Once you put it in the background and then call it up again the scanning part doesn’t work. You have to quit the app and restart it. Even with this oddity it’s still quite useful.
  10. GroceryIQ – This app is sort of a scanner, sort of a listmaker, but it floats outside of other groups because it’s different. I like using this app more than ShopShop because the way it’s designed fits better with trips to the supermarket. I love it’s listmaking and check off features. The scanner is quite dumb, and while you can scan an item and put it on the list, it’s just as easy to type it in by hand.

So that’s that. Those are the apps on my iPhone that differ from my iPad apps. It’s nowhere near the exhaustive list of all the apps I have, but these are the ones I felt warranted the most discussion and I think other people would benefit from using. I’m open to reviewing other apps, if you are an app developer please feel free to drop me a line or make a comment and I’ll check out your app and give you my honest opinion or even a review. If you find something in my reviews that helps you, please comment and let me know!

iPad 2

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I caught up with Apple’s announcement of the iPad 2 after I got back from Comixlunch with Scott. It appears at least to me to be an evolutionary enhancement to the original iPad device. The A5 dual-core processor is a very good improvement and the cameras are certainly quite nice to have. In many ways it’s as if the iPhone 4 design team and the original iPad design team had a kegger and came out with a really great new design. It seems to be a forward-thinking blend of the two reference devices.

Along with the actual meat of the matter, the silly stuff is also front and center. People moaning and carrying on about “does it come in white?” will be happy. When I fielded some questions about the iPad 2 today one of my coworkers remarked on the devices lighter weight and thinner presentation than the original device. In response I laughingly referred to the original iPad as being made of neutronium and wondering over how we all coped with the agony of the first iPad. I see this next device to be an evolutionary step up from the original iPad. It’s not revolutionary, to do that would require a wholly new form-factor, a new design, a new OS, new everything. If it isn’t that, then it’s evolutionary. It’s impressively better, but it’s still an evolved form of the original device.

So, for those people who are seeking my advice about buying an iPad, here’s the skinny:

  • If the pricetag is the most important thing for you, then go for the now deprecated original iPad. Apple knocked $100 dollars off the price of the device and now it’s really quite compelling.
  • I would seriously avoid buying any refurbished device. I’m quite bearish on refurbished devices. If you can find the extra $50, you really owe it to yourself to get a factory-fresh model and not some repaired victim.
  • If money isn’t an issue then I strongly recommend buying the iPad 2. The speed, the cameras, the new software and the 1080p via cable is quite compelling.
  • If you already have an iPad and it’s working for you, I don’t see any reason to dump your current device and buy a new one. The only caveat to that is if you are planning on gifting your device to someone else, then feel free to buy the new iPad 2. The new iPad itself doesn’t have enough “Killer Features” to warrant the dropping of iPad 1 and rushing out to the Apple Store for iPad 2.

I forecast that the iPhone 5 will be even less of an evolutionary leap. What more could the device do? Get thinner? Transparency? What new technology could possibly be stuffed into the device to make everyone get all hot and bothered for it? Apple is running out of room to innovate. Saying that, I could be surprised, but it would take a lot to really get me to look at my current iPhone 4 with anything less than utter adoration.

Verizon, please don't be like Sprint. Please.

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My VP asked if I had included the iPhone Hotspot feature on his device and I discovered that when I had the order set up that it fell through the cracks. So the task was clear, have Verizon turn the feature on. This should have been a shrug, a flick of a switch, and blam, all set.

No.

I emailed my Verizon rep and in the subject put down the person, the line, and then in the message, would they please turn on the hotspot. My iPhone was configured to put a signature at the bottom of the email, Andy McHugh – 269-216-4597. So I sent the email to my rep at Verizon thinking that was that.

No.

What I saw was a CC’ed message from Verizon with a number I didn’t recognize. But then again, I didn’t really look at it too deeply because I remember from Sprint that my Blackberry had a “Real Number” and a “Bullshit Number” and I thought at least on a cursory glance that this iPhone had the same deal. A “Real Number” and some “Bullshit Number” that only means something to Verizon. I didn’t give it any thought at all.

Then I got a message from Verizon Government Care, “Uh, Mr. McHugh, we, uh, we can’t do anything with 269-216-4597, it’s not ours.” Yes, you are right. That’s my GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER! Durrr. So I replied “Dear Sonia, please LOOK AT THE SUBJECT.” and then reiterated my request with the name and the right phone number.

So, is it Verizon’s fault for misunderstanding my original message? Is it my fault for having a rather humdrum signature on my emails? Bygones. There is more than enough blame to go around and it wasn’t like there was anything really life-threatening on the line. I have learned a lesson though, it pays to be really REALLY demonstrative and clear and repetitive with Verizon. It’s not that they can’t do the things I ask of them, it’s just GIGO is apparently a very shallow target.

Huuuurrrr. I started to have Sprint-related flashbacks, that’s never good. 🙂

Comic Tent Flapping

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I’ve signed up for The Weather Channel’s “Notify” service. This is supposed to alert me when there is a meteorological emergency and I use it mostly for thunderstorms as power outages can cause havoc with my systems at work.

Mostly the service runs great, and always alerts me when there is some sort of emergency. The problem is that it alerts me too well. In alert management I believe it’s called tent flapping. The alert spawns a thick group of alerting emails and phone calls. Each alert throws off two calls, and about four emails. It’s always comic when there is an alert as every device I own beeps, vibrates, or rings.

At least I can’t say that I wasn’t alerted. 🙂

iPhone 4 on Verizon – Delightful!

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While re-reading my old Blackberry / iPhone / Droid post (which is my #1 most viewed page!) I started to chuckle at my May 10th 2010 self versus my February 16th, 2011 self. What has my experience been now that I’ve had my iPhone for a fair bit?

I am in love with this device.

Now I can fall pretty hard for a pretty face, especially when it comes to a new gadget. I categorize myself as a “use it all” kind of iPhone user, the curious geek who refuses to stop fiddling with a device until I have it just so. I don’t go as far as the GPL/FSF folks who want to take a phone and turn it into an Adirondack chair, but I do take my gadgets for pretty intense rides.

So what do I think now? Blackberry is dead. I rescued all the data I cared for out of my old Blackberry device, I wiped it clean and I removed the battery. I haven’t even looked back or even thought of it since then. I imagine in my mind’s eye, a giant crematorium where I open the giant door and start pitchforking all the useless memories and upset feelings and anger and close the door to watch it all burn to ash. I used to fantasize about annihilating my Blackberry. Now that I have my Verizon iPhone 4, I don’t really care to go back there anymore. I don’t care for Blackberry Enterprise Server, or RIM, or any of the other silly things that having a phone with a network endpoint in Canada means.

As I look out now, I respect Droid for its user base and how well it’s progressed. I’m still quite critical that certain manufacturers are keeping their customers from upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the Droid operating system in order to squeeze as much money as they can from them. I can appreciate the Droid, but I don’t espouse it’s use or recommend it to anyone I know. Most people aren’t seeking my recommendations when it comes to mobile device operating systems anyways. One small problem I have with Droid is the kill-switch that Google maintains on the devices apps and the laissez-faire style with which the Droid App Store is policed. It’s too wild and too uncontrolled for my tastes and I don’t think exposing people who aren’t interested in the hows and the whys is a very wise move. These people get it in their head to download something hazardous like a trojan horse and then the show is over.

How about the iPhone? It’s amazing. The devices display, the two cameras, all the apps! It’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many things I can do now, now that I am using a real network with a real device. I can browse the web the way I want to, not the way that my old Blackberry forced me to do. I can read my emails, including HTML emails with ease and pleasure. The network is snappy, nice and quick and about the same speed as Sprint when Sprint was in its heyday. Those days are done, by the way. This device, this iPhone does everything that Apple promises and does it exceptionally well. Everything from fit, finish, to overall quality is as I expect from Apple, beyond my wildest expectations. Of course, every cute puffy cloud does have it’s darker sides as well. There are only a few of those, and mostly it comes down to ringtones, using the iPhone on multiple machines, but beyond that, which none of them are show stoppers. Instead of wanting to throttle the Blackberry devs to death with my bare hands I just want to tousle the hair of the Apple devs who baked these oddities into their device.

Soon I will write a review sheet about all the apps I’ve gotten for my iPhone. Instead of duplicating all the apps that I reviewed already for my iPad (as there is a huge overlap) I’ll only review those apps that are unique to my iPhone and why I chose them. That’s coming up soon, keep an eye out for it if you like my reviews.