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Please do not reply to this email?

Oct 8

Posted by bbqiguana in Technology | No Comments

I hate that phrase. Every time I see it, my first instinct is to add the sender to my spam blocker.

Email is a two-way form of communication. Like a conversation, where everyone can talk as long as they like. But when your email includes that phrase, you’re essentially blocking out my side of the conversation.

In essense, you’re filibustering the conversation. You’re bullying me into hearing what you have to say, while demonstrating no intent to hear what I have to say in return.

Yes, email can be a very good delivery-system for announcements, special offers, etc. But if you’re going to send the email, you need to have a valid return address and someone there who will read and reply to any responses. That little different will win you lifelong supporters, customers, etc.

Lonely Planet’s bad iPad app

Jun 2

Posted by admin in Software, Technology | No Comments

As a traveler and language learner, I am particularly fond on Lonely Planet’s phrasebooks and I find many of their other travel-related materials useful as well. I follow @lonelyplanet on Twitter, and in general have a pretty good opinion about them.

So it should come as no surprise that when looking for iPad apps, I search on their name, hoping to find some can’t-live-without killer iPad app for world travelers. What I found was 1000 Ultimate Experiences — a complete cop-out of an app, and rightly rated 1.5 stars (out of five) on the app store.

Now, yesterday I see their bogus free offer for their app. It’s clearly in hopes of getting people to rate the app higher, so they can make money from it on the app store. Personally, I find this completely offensive.

Rather than looking at their low rating and learning from the mistakes of their horrible app, Lonely Planet is trying to change perceptions and create a false sense that their offering is much better than it really is.

So Loneyly Planet, I hope you’re reading this, because I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to hear about your app.

  • First and foremost, it lacks content. It’s a graphics-heavy presentation of what is essentially just a bullet list of information. FAIL.
  • Second, for all of those graphics and animation, the app is not at all interactive. If you’re going to give me something as basic as a list of things to do and see, at least give me a checkbox for the ones I’ve done and for those I want to do.
  • It’s not searchable. WHAT!? You give me a giant (disorganized!) 1,000 things to do and see in the world, and fail to give me any tool to break them down by geographic location? Another epic FAIL.
  • Too much waiting. I hate any animations that leave me waiting before I can click/touch/tap and do the work I wanted to do when I opened your app.

The bottom line is that Lonely Planet’s app demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand what the iPad is and how it is used. That’s called a mistake, and it’s something that can be overcome. They also fail to recognized their audience, which is a bigger mistake but also able to be overcome.

But failing to learn from mistakes — or worse, trying to repaint history as if they weren’t mistakes at all — that’s much harder to forgive. It puts a stain on the Lonely Planet name as a whole, and makes me far less likely to buy the hundreds of dollars worth of LP products that I buy… and much less likely to recommend them on my web site.

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Blogging on the road with an iPad

May 27

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

Last weekend I planned a three-day weekend trip to the west coast, and for the first time, I didn’t write and schedule blog posts in advance. I made the decision to write my daily blog entries for Fluent Every Year from the road, on my iPad.

There were a few daunting parameters to this experiment. It meant accepting the iPad’s onscreen keyboard as my only input device, and it also meant depending on WiFi access to be available, since I do not have a 3G version.

The first thing I found was that WiFi is not as ubiquitous as I like to believe. I stayed in a different hotel each night, and only one actually made WiFi available in the room. The other two offered wired internet service in the room, and one had wireless available only in the lobby, and only for a daily rate of $13.

I learned that one simply can not expect to use their iPad everywhere they go, even if the hotel promises internet access. If you expect to have a reliable connection, you’ll need to pack an access point, or else expect to be hunting around for a coffee shop.

For sake of convenience I decided to write my blog posts in the hotel using the Notes app, and then find a coffee shop with internet access and just copy-paste the content into WordPress. That was fine for the most part, but there was another problem which wasn’t so easily worked around: the keyboard.

Any significant amount of typing becomes a terrible burden with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. It’s horrible even for short messages on Twitter… but for a blog post which typically lands between 600-1000 words, it’s terrible. Painful. Completely unrealistic.

Even worse, the keystroke combinations required to form HTML tags on an iPad are rage-inducing. To make a link, press [123], then [#+=], then <, then [ABC], then a href, then [#+=], then ", then hopefully you’re pasting the URL, then ", then [123], then [#+=], and >, and now you’ve opened the tag…. you still have to close it later.

When I returned home, the first thing I did was test it out with my bluetooth aluminum keyboard, which works like a charm. Next time I travel out of town, I’ll pack the wireless keyboard with the iPad. I expect that will be far more acceptable — especially with HTML!

I’m also going to look around at MicroCenter and/or Best Buy and see if I can manage to find a small wireless access point which doesn’t require a bunch of cables and a big power brick. It would be nice to know I can rely on internet service at the hotel.

However, it should be noted that the small, lightweight iPad is not a bother to carry to a coffee shop. In a situation like mine, I could easily type up my blog post in Notes using a keyboard, and then carry the iPad to a coffee shop and paste it into WordPress. Unlike a larger, heavier laptop with a short battery life and big power cord, carrying the iPad is like carrying a small book or magazine.

And that highlights one enormous advantage for the iPad — it’s size. My flight was much more enjoyable than they have typically been in the past, because I was able to watch movies comfortably on my flight with a very viewable 10-inch screen. In stark contrast, the guy next to me on my flight out was squinting at a movie on his iPhone, and the guy next to me on the flight back was cramped and precariously bending his arms to operate his laptop in the tight conditions of economy seating.

Furthermore, the ability to carry several movies, dozens of books, access to the internet, and a usable (if frustrating) blogging tool all in such a small package is a huge win for a traveler. And for the majority of people, the keyboard shouldn’t be a big deal, since there aren’t a ton of people writing long blog posts on a daily basis.

But even for me, I think packing my bluetooth keyboard along with my iPad is still a huge improvement over carrying a laptop, so in spite of my two severe complaints, I’m still convinced that this is a revolutionary device.

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My new iPad

Apr 3

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

This morning there were people lined up around the Apple store, standing in the rain as they waited to be the first to own an iPad. The store opened at 10:00. I went at 12:30. No wait, no line. I walked out at 12:35 with my new iPad.

I didn’t expect to like it so much!

The first thing that’s immediately clear is that it’s not just a big iPod. Its more. The iPad is big enough to read on. It’s completely useable as a web browser, e-Book reader, video player, etc.

Even with the small handful of apps available today at release, I am already impressed. The news apps are fantastic. The weatherbug app is awesome. Kayak is killer. So far, I’ve only downloaded free apps, but most of them are exciting to see and use. The potential for this device is huge.

The built-in apps are updated, too. The music player looks a bit more like iTunes now. The contact book looks like an actual contact book. The photos app has lots of cool new features, including allowing the device to act as a digital picture frame. And I’ve never had so much fun playing with Google maps as I had today.

After playing with it all day (battery life also rocks), I have just two complaints. First, typing with the on-screen keyboard is painful; it would probably be fine for on-the-go use, but anyone making extended use of the iPad is going to want the accessory keyboard. And second, it runs apps designed for iPhone/iPod, but they run small and are a pain to use; though I imagine that over time, most apps will be updated to work on the iPad and this will be less of an issue.

I’m convinced this is the future of computing for many people. Apple has redefined the computing paradigm with the iPad. And thanks to the iTunes Store and App Store, it will be extremely difficult for any competing product to pose a challenge.

I’m also convinced that this will be a Kindle-killer. Or, perhaps more accurately, that Amazon will have to put some serious new features into the Kindle, and lower the price, if they hope to survive in an iPad world.

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MacOS X error 0×80020022 trying to burn DVDs

Feb 20

Posted by admin in Software, Technology | 4 Comments

After being tremendously frustrated with my iMac failing to burn DVDs, and stressing myself out over what media might be supported, I’ve hit upon the solution to my problem: unicode characters.

I wanted to burn a DVD containing AVIs of Russian video, and I had given the Burn Folder a Russian name. Every time I tried to burn, I was greeted with error 0×80020022, and the media was immediately ejected.

Remembering the days of CD-R media and the compatibility hassles I once experienced, my first thought was to go buy a different brand of DVD media. But I experienced the error with the new media as well.

After stumbling onto a Mac support forum in which users blindly suggested that renaming a file had fixed the problem, I realized that I was probably trying to use forbidden characters in the volume name. Spelling my Russian words out in a Latin alphabet did the trick, and I am now burning the files.

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Ten tips about something I know nothing about

Dec 10

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

I can’t help noticing that the majority of blog posts these days are lists of advice about things that are either common sense or utter bullshit.

The best ones, though, are those that propose a list of ten must do strategies for using an unproven technology in an undocumented business sector in relation to a prediction of things that haven’t even happened yet.

For example:

  • Top 10 priorities for online marketing in 2010
  • Eight things you must do in order to succeed on Twitter
  • 12 ways to be the better than everyone else, even the millions of other people who will also read this article
  • 9 surefire ways to know that I’m a full-of-shit author and not an SEO expert
  • The 8 keys to showing others that I’ve never actually done the thing I’m writing about

There’s an old saying that goes “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” Obviously, that phrase was coined before the internet came along and made experts out of everyone.

App Approval

Dec 9

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

I see a lot of complaints from developers about Apple’s app approval process. But here’s the thing: If developers aren’t complaining about app approval, it means someone, somewhere, is not doing their job right. If apps went out the way developers wanted them to, they’d have ugly interfaces, poor memory management, and no error checking whatsoever.

Personally, I like Apple’s app approval process. And I like the fact that it’s rigid and painful. In fact, I don’t think it’s rigid enough. I’d like to see them make it even harder to put apps like “iFart” online.

But, like it or not, iFart isn’t going to cause a system crash when you receive a phone call while using it. And that’s what’s important. The iPhone isn’t just a handheld computing platform…. it’s also a phone. And that means it has to work. It can’t be crashing all the time. And Apple’s process helps make that a reality.

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Barnes and Noble "Nook"

Oct 21

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble released their new e-book reader called the nook, billing it as “the world’s most advanced e-book reader”. I don’t think “nook” is a very catchy name, in spite of rhyming with book… but that’s another story.

I’ve made no secret in the past about my dislike, even distrust, of eBook readers. Especially the Kindle, which I vow to never own after their 1984 debacle.

As I’ve discussed the subject with friends and colleagues, my opinion has refined quite a bit, and my basic points come down to:

  1. The price of a book reflected heavy publishing costs, including equipment, materials, labor, and distribution… none of which apply to eBooks, making them rather expensive in comparison.
  2. Real books can be shared with friends, given away, or re-sold, but while the format of data makes doing this even easier, the licensing applied to eBooks prohibits doing so.
  3. Real books don’t stop working when a battery dies.
  4. Dropping a book in a puddle, losing it while on the bus, are misfortunes that only cost a few dollars to correct, a far smaller amount than the cost of even the cheapest ebook reader.
  5. Dropping a book on the floor, or accidentally sitting on it does nothing to reduce your ability to read it later… and in fact, people often use books to hold things up, to sit on, to stand on, etc.
  6. None of the books I would most desire to replace are available as ebooks. I enjoy turning the pages of a novel, but I’d love to be able to carry around dozens or hundreds of reference books without breaking my back.
  7. By that same measure, most students would also love to stop breaking their backs with textbooks, but no ebook reader yet has solved the problems of universal page numbers or of jotting notes in the margins.
  8. And finally, they take away all those expected advantages of real books without giving any significant new adantages in return.

While the Nook offers many advantages over the Kindle, including built-in WiFi, direct loading and reading of PDFs, replacable batteries, and synchronized annotations, it only overcomes one of my stated hurdles, and only to a limited extent. Nook allows you “loan to a friend”, but it does not allow you to “give” to a friend. Nor does it allow you to re-sell to anyone.

As far as I can tell, all Barnes and Noble did was add a touch-sensitive LCD screen to the bottom of a Kindle, and add a half-baked book loaning mechanism. That may be enough to lure in people who want a Kindle but were scared off by the 1984 debacle… but I don’t believe it’s going to be enough to coax any book converts.

So what would it take to convert me — and lots of others like me — to ebooks? Pressure publishers to make searchable ebook versions of reference materials.

Working 9-to-5 in information technology, I have acquired a large library of reference books on programming languages, APIs, systems, data formats, and so on. If I could carry all of those (dozens of books) to work with me on a small device, I’d jump on the opportunity, but none of those materials are available in ebook format.

And when I’m not at work, my two most time-consuming activities are photography and language study. Admittedly, it will be a long time before photographic quality is available on ebook readers, but current readers are already capable of displaying language lessons… and most even support MP3 playback for the accompanying audio materials. I have an entire bookshelf at home dedicated to beginner, intermediate, and advanced books and CDs for Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, French, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, which I would happily trade for even a mostly disfunctional e-reader if I could, but unfortunately, those materials are simply not available in any other format at present.

For companies with the leverage of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, it should be a no-brainer to lean on those publishers. Today, all books are written in an electronic format to begin with. Why should it be so hard to simply run that original through some converter and do a little bit of editing, and produce the single most useful argument for a higher-profit, lower-overhead version of their product?

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The Apple tablet computer

Oct 7

Posted by admin in Technology | No Comments

MacBook Touch Mockup

MacBook Touch Mockup

The rumor mill has been flying for a while, and I think enough has been confirmed for us to say confidently that Apple is definitely going to release a tablet computer in the beginning of 2010. At this point, I believe we can safely say that computer will have a 10-inch electrostatic touch sensitive screen (like the iPhone), and it will most likely have a HSPDA connection to AT&T.

The part that’s unclear, though, is… well… everything else about it.

But here’s my theory:

The MacBook Air was an incredibly cool new addition to Apple’s laptop lineup, but it was really mostly a sales dud by most measures… and I think the only reason for that was that the price was too high. But I believe the Air was merely an interim product — a way to begin recovering some of the costs associated with designing a completely disconnected, paper-thin computer.

Think about it: if you take a paper-thin tablet computer, lose the touch-screen, and add a keyboard… what are you left with, if not a MacBook air?

So what, then, do I expect to see? I think the iTablet (or whatever they choose to call it) will be exactly that: a MacBook Air, sans keyboard. I believe it will fit into a manilla envelope the way the Air does… and I believe that alone will be enough to distinguish it from all the other tablet computer offerings we’ve seen so far. A 10-inch tablet that fits in an envelope is exactly what every traveler on earth wants.

But that’s not enough. OS X has had some excellent handwriting recognition software for quite a while, but it will be better if I don’t need a tablet to enter it. Such features make this an easy Kindle killer. And in fact, if you include a stylus and allow me to write directly on the screen, you might as well go that extra step allow me to use my new iTablet as the world’s best ever replacement for a Wacom tablet.

And if the rumors I’ve heard about it pairing magically with the iMac as a second screen are true, well, how could you not think it’s worth that $799-999 rumored price?

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Microsoft still doesn't get it

Jun 2

Posted by admin in Technology | 1 Comment

I wonder if Microsoft will ever learn. Probably not.

These guys have a history of never doing anything new. They see what others are doing, and they try to recreate it. They overload their copy with tons of extra features, and then they claim theirs is the best.

They’re too close to the technology. The brains at Microsoft design things that other brains can operate — devices laden with options and features, designed for power users, as if everyone in the world were a power user.

Microsoft saw the MacOS and gave us Windows. Microsoft saw WordPerfect and gave us Word. Microsoft saw AppleWorks and gave us Excel. Microsoft saw Netscape and gave us Internet Explorer.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Windows, Excel, Word, and IE are all successful products. Yes, but they’re all worse than the products they copied. Microsoft’s success on these products was built on the strength of their market share, not on the quality of the products. Those products succeeded by brute force marketing tactics, not by innovation.

You don’t believe me? Microsoft saw the iPod, and gave us the Zune. Oops. Microsoft saw the Playstation and gave us the XBox. Oops. Granted, in the case of the XBox, their R&D team added value in the followup: the XBox 360 actually innovated.

But now Microsoft sees the Wii… and in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ve decided to try to kill it with brute force. Just have a look at what Microsoft has planned for their next game box.

No controllers? Body recognition? Perhaps the marketing guys who made that video never considered that a fat guy can’t jump like a skinny kid. If fat guys and skinny kids and nerds and athletes and cripples could all do the same things, they would be out there in the real world competing at them.

The reason kung-fu games are popular is because they give fat guys and skinny kids a way of being the badass that they’ll never get to be in real life. It doesn’t matter what your genes are — as long as you have the capacity to press buttons with your hands or feet or whatever, you can become a martial arts master, or ride a snowboard, or drive a Ferrari, or kill terrorists. No exercise or special diet necessary.

Hey, Microsoft! Go ahead and release your “Wii killer”. You’ll learn a really valuable lesson. Or, more likely, you won’t learn a thing. You never have.

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