Tag Archives: Apps

Confusing Worthless Passbook

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Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.

So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.

It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.

When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?

So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Horizon Met

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My horoscope suggested that I try to include a regular new thing in my life, and that now is the perfect opportunity to not only begin, but to make it a habit. So I immediately thought about the things that I always wanted to try to include as a regular practice in my life but never really got it to stick.

That thing is meditation. I’ve read a lot of articles on it, it comes up over and over in Buddhist and Zen texts, and I’ve even gone so far as to get applications that help support it. The articles read a lot like the Chinese websites do about their tea, all about the benefits and nothing to point at any detractors. Much like tea, there is little that exists that could harm me. In fact, meditation contains nothing at all that could harm me beyond perhaps being eaten by some sort of apex predator while I’m meditating. The only downside that I can see to drinking tea is frequent bathroom visits. A lot of the sites I’ve seen and articles I’ve read approach meditation from various angles. Some approach it from a spiritual side, here you have the line that I think I remember Deepak Chopra saying about it, that what lies between thoughts is the thinker and if you stop thinking you can exist all by yourself. There are other articles that I’ve read, books too, that go on at length regarding the neurochemistry of meditation. That neurons that fire together wire together, and that meditation can actually increase the speed of cognition. For that I have no proof and it smells like a placebo, however it’s tea all over again. Even if the claims are bunkum, it’s not like I’m going to harm myself at all so if there is nothing to lose, perhaps anything gained is what I was always after from the beginning. I also remember reading a LifeHacker article regarding daydreaming and how if you just stop trying to drive your mind to unravel a question that sometimes the answer comes ready-packaged and drops into your lap if you back off the whip and let the mind work on it’s own. Do I believe any of this? I am skeptical however over my life and over the times I’ve tried to meditate I have to say that something is indeed there.

So earlier today I took a break from work. I plugged in my iPhone earbuds, set the volume low and ran one of the apps that I recently acquired, it’s called Naturespace. It had 109 reviews in the Apple App Store and the overall rating was almost five out of five stars. Since the app was free I tried it, loaded up one of the sample tracks and sat back in my chair. At work there is a problem, if you sit with your eyes closed, even if you are not pursuing a nap it looks nearly indistinguishable from actually sleeping on the job. I found meditating with my eyes open to be very difficult, but not impossible. The natural sounds helped mask the office noises that surround me in my workaday world and I had a bit of time to myself and thankfully nobody walked in on me and felt at-odds about seeing me sitting attentively in my chair with my eyes closed. One thing I did do was join my hands near my face and steeple my index fingers and rest them lightly against my philtrum, which I’ve heard referred to as a fairy-saddle. The book I read about the neurochemistry of Buddhism went on at length about the existence of an accupressure point right in this spot that supposedly activates the parasympathetic wing of the central nervous system. The parasympathetic slows and relaxes everything and it seemed to be a great way to help push myself along the path to entering a meditative state of consciousness.

My skills for this are picked up like trivia from lots of different places, when I’m bored I tend to graze on information on the Internet and I find myself reading lots of different things so the way I begin is to sit comfortably, make sure I don’t sense any ‘biological imperatives’ coming from my body and then I really should close my eyes to quiet the visual field. The natural sounds help bring on relaxation which I always think of as the foyer or antechamber to a true meditative state. The constant light touch against the philtrum may or may not be anything useful but earlier this morning I found that if I concentrate on my breathing and make it very natural and regular that I can figuratively imagine my mind as a surface of water. As I come down from the natural jitter and jump of being “online at work” I imagine the surface of water that is my mind getting more and more calm as time goes on. There is definitely some kickback as random things pop up out of nowhere and break the surface of the water image in my imagination. As I sat there I actually slipped into a meditative state and it felt ineffably wonderful. Thankfully I had a timer set on my iPhone that would send an alarm after 15 minutes so when I heard it I had to stop what I was doing and get back to work.

Now the only question is, where do I fit this into my life? Do I only spend about seven minutes in this state twice a day or do I devote an hour a day to it and give up something else? I have to admit that the experience was something incredibly positive and rewarding and was so inherently wonderful that I find myself craving to get back to that state. Then I start to wonder if it’s better to fix such a thing at a specific time or is it better to simply assert that I will intend to devote an hour to it and then find the time each day to fit it in. There may be a higher chance of me actually integrating the practice into my life if I give myself a small bit of flexibility without letting myself be totally floppy with timing. If I have no discipline for it I’ll never do it. Like a lot of things in my life, only time will tell. I’ll blog as I progress, which might inspire others to try what I am attempting.

New Blogging Tool

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I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.

The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.

I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.

I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.

The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.

Picky picky

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What arrived in campus mail today was a marvelous surprise. It was my reimbursement request, sent back to me by the central bureaucracy that not only was my request rejected because it lacked a business purpose but also that my reimbursement would not include the sales tax that I paid. =Insert rude gesture here= 🙂

Really, the sales tax comes down to $2.22 but like many things, it isn’t about the money as so much as it’s about the principles behind it. I can’t buy iTunes Cards or iPad Apps directly with my University Procurement Card, so I’m stuck, so the only way to move forward is to fund it privately and request reimbursement. This was something I was fine with, it helps everyone get along and business can continue without interruption. That was, until I discovered that getting said reimbursement is an uphill battle and that I won’t get a fair shake because there is a policy that people can hide behind when convenient.

So, knowing the rules of the ‘game’ now, between me and my employer, I elect to withdraw my initial “helping out” because it is plainly not equitable. I pay money on behalf of this institution and I don’t get a fair and proper reimbursement. I don’t blame this place for the failure, I blame myself. I was dumb enough to volunteer my resources to further the efforts of this institution and that was a mistake. So, a few moments ago I logged into my work-based iTunes account and removed the reference to my credit card. Since there are no funds attached to the account and no credit card, future App purchases are effectively dead until WMU decides on how it’s going to proceed on its own.

And that’s kind of the core of this blog post. How can an institution like this cope with the 21st Century. At first it was just a quaint little nothing, a bird on a radar screen – the iTunes App Store. Ever since Apple pursued this strategy further with OS X 10.6.6 and introducing the App Store to the Desktop, now we have something. Plus these devices are not simply going to go away. iPads are not a fad that is going to just fade away like Bell Bottoms, they’re here to stay and finding ways to integrate them into our “enterprise” existence has led us all to a knotwork of difficulty. The professional instrumentation that exists lacks elegance, to put it mildly.

It’s not my job any more to fret and wring my hands and get all bent out of shape that this place screwed me once again. I’m not angry. I see it as an education. Now I know through a real object lesson what happens when I do something like this, and what have I learned? I’m never going to do this, or anything else like this, ever again. Once bitten, twice shy mostly. My biggest fault is electing to forget about all the times when this place has failed me or let me down or in this case, lead to a wee bit of financial loss. In a way it’s good that I suffered financial harm during this entire endeavor, perhaps that will be enough to keep the memory alive so when I face something like this in the future I can fail to offer anything beyond what is strictly a business option. Reimbursements? Nah, never again, thanks.

Now I await with bated breath to see how this institution copes.

Apple iPad

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Scott and I got in line early Saturday morning at Best Buy in Kalamazoo to be the first to get the new Apple iPad. I bought the 16GB model, Scott bought the 32GB model. We waited from 3:30am to 10:30am, for the line to queue up, and for the shop to open. There were about 30 of us when the doors finally opened and nobody was sure how many iPads Best Buy got in their shipment. The common consensus was a box of 16, 1 for display, 15 for sale. At 10am the manager at Best Buy came out with a pile of differently colored papers and asked everyone in line which model they would like. The pile of paper was more than 15, it looked like a significant pile of paper. Apple shipped our Best Buy a box of 50! Both Scott and I bought our iPads and we also bought the case-enclosure for the devices to protect them.

We rushed home, I unboxed my iPad and was surprised at how simple and uncomplicated the container was. The iPad was sitting atop a charging cable and it’s little mini power ‘bricklet’ and that was it. The documentation was just a pamphlet with advisories for not exposing it to water, so on and so forth. I pressed the button and my iPad displayed a simple graphic, iTunes icon with an arrow coming from the 30-pin connector – simple message: Connect me to iTunes. I went upstairs, plugged it in and in maybe 2 minutes had the device registered, all I needed was my Apple Store ID and Password. The device came fully charged, no need to let it sleep and charge to 100%, that was a very nice touch.

I couldn’t resist playing with it. Of course I blunder forward without reading any manuals or ‘looking stuff up online’, I have a general idea of how the device was supposed to work, the general logical progression that one would expect. I was bolstered by my experiences with my First Generation iPod Touch and Scott’s iPhone 3G. Getting started with the iPad was an absolute pleasure. I had two major things that I needed to try, the first was to see if I could display comic book pages on the device because for me that is the iPad’s Killer App. The second was to check out iBooks and see if Apple honored their rumored commitment to Project Gutenberg. I quickly downloaded the Marvel App, the iBooks app, and ComicPad, which was a free app for reading comic book files.

The device itself is a masterwork in design. Everything is where it is and makes sense. The system interface and responsiveness is exactly what I imagined it to be. The ‘Pro’ column is rich and varied and this device is definitely worth the $499.00 pricetag. The ‘Cons’ were few and far between and were mostly due to me not reading the manuals and blundering along. I will state it clearly and upfront that this device is EXACTLY what I imagined and it has performed PERFECTLY. When I complain, it has nothing at all to do with the hardware of my iPad or the iPhone OS 3.2 Operating System, they are excellent.

Here are my issues:

  • iBooks, finding Project Gutenberg files was annoying. I had to SEARCH for ‘project gutenberg’ in order to find the library. PG needs to be featured more prominently in the iBooks store, Apple.
  • ComicPad, This is a version 1.0 App so I give it a pass about this gripe, but adding files was a pain (totally impossible for John Doe Averageuser) and of the files I added, some were CBR, but really CBZ. Even renaming the file extensions only partially worked and adding comic book files was an adventure in hunt-and-peck and did-it-take.
  • Photos, once I tore open the CBZ files and took out their jpg guts, adding them to the Photos app in my iPad was only partially successful, sorting the images was a headache. Dragging all my photos from my Macs HD into iPhoto and establishing the sort there fixed my gripe.
  • The Marvel App, Random selection and Tasters-Choice approach is ANNOYING. I love Fantastic Four, and I’d buy a series pass for it if I could, but all you have is stuff from 1997? GET ON WITH IT!
  • iPhone/iPod Touch Apps are easy to install and use in the iPad, but their lack of understanding when it comes to the bigger screen real-estate is worth a gripe, there is a button you can use to zoom the app to fill the screen, but the resolution in the App doesn’t get re-rendered, so it looks blocky and tacky. It’s a new device, Apps are trying to catch up, and at least there is a way to access the classic apps, which makes this gripe rather an aesthetic one than a real honest one.

Surprises:

  • The weight of my iPad and it’s shape make it very easy to carry around. It’s between a trade paperback and a hardcover book. Since I have no problems carrying books, carrying my iPad, as an issue, isn’t even on the map.
  • The iBooks system, once you learn it, is wonderful. It keeps your last position in each book – that’s a feature that even real physical books suck at, but the iBooks brings it off with aplomb.
  • The Marvel App, The display makes their comic books pop, the saturated colors, the beauty the detail, it was absolute candy for the eyes. Reading Comics with Marvel App is a pleasure.
  • Battery Life is surprisingly good. Last night, after a whole day of hard use I was down to 32% battery! This is delightful. Many people are complaining that iPad’s won’t charge unless they are plugged into a very-high-voltage USB port. I don’t find this a problem, it came with it’s preferred charging equipment.
  • Wow Factor: When people see me using my iPad, they stop and ask for a demonstration. This is both gratifying and a little annoying. Once this device becomes widely available then people will likely get one of their own.
  • StreamToMe App – After playing with my iPad for a while it struck me that I could only browse videos that I had either stored on the device or found using Netflix or YouTube. I have a pseudo-media-server running off my little Mac Mini at home, essentially a giant ‘Pig’ drive loaded with videos. How can I access those using my Wifi, quickly without having to futz around with copying files and possibly running out of space on my iPad? A brief browse of the App Store and I found StreamToMe, which was on sale for $2.99, it came with a free server-side bit of software that I run on my Mac Mini. I tell the server what folders I want to share over Wifi, and it sits quietly in my menubar minding it’s own business. I start the app on my iPad and I can browse Runner with wild abandon, browsing file folders and opening any video – no matter the video type. I can’t express how much of an EPIC WIN this is, the ability to store my library of videos and movies on cheap storage and not have to occupy my iPad’s limited 16GB storage space. All for $2.99.
  • Dragon Dictate for iPad – I haven’t found much use for it yet, but so far it’s neat to play with. I can start Dragon Dictate (free, wow, really? Yes!) I can sit back, hit the record button and talk at my iPad. When I’m done I touch the screen again and it captures my words and makes them into text with 95% or better accuracy! Totally bowled over!

Overall, my experience with my Apple iPad has been just as advertised, it’s magical. It performs wonderfully and I have absolutely no buyers remorse. I strongly recommend that anyone who is looking for an entry-level computer device give this iPad a serious look, it’s that good.