iPad mini first thoughts

I’ve had the new iPad mini for about a day, and have been trying to use it whenever practical (I got the WiFi model so I can’t use it in the car).

My main impression continues to be: it is very light. Partly that’s because I’ve sort of been trained to know how heavy an iPad is: 1.46 pounds (662 g) for my current 3rd generation device. My mini is 0.68 pound (308 g). Somehow it feels almost the same as the iPhone 5, which is 3.95 ounces (112 grams). I’m not sure how to explain that, other than the iPhone 5 always feels really light too, and they must be about the same density. Light is good, and I can’t wait to use it on the subway (the iPad has always been a little tricky to hold while standing and holding on to a rail).

The other thing that is the same is pixel size. It’s true that the iPhone 5 has a retina display and the mini doesn’t. But the mini has exactly the same pixel density as the original iPhone, and the recent iPhones really have the same pixels in terms of layout (the pixels are just capable of better detail).

So buttons, text, any screen element you need to interact with is the same size (in millimetres) on iPad mini and on any iPhone. The basic pixels are the same size, you just have more of them.

By contrast, the iPad (3rd or 4th generation) is blown up slightly, as well as having better pixels.

What this means is that text isn’t as crisp as the iPad retina display, but it does seem better than the iPad 2 (it is smaller but harder to make out the pixels).

I think less expensive and lighter are going to make this the device to recommend to most people. I’m still waiting to see how it works on the commute to have a final judgement for myself. I do think Apple has another winner.

Reviews: Debugging and Write Portable Code

Two books I bought recently were ones I expected to be easy going. They were, but I think they were still worthwhile.

Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J Agans is about, well, debugging. Anything, not just software. It’s full of war stories from many domains (including cars, houses, and Sesame Street). The rules are how to logically approach problem solving, and make sure the problem is actually solved (rule 9). Most of it is common sense, but it doesn’t hurt to see it distilled. And based on the war stories, it’s easy to get wrong. Of potential use to non-developers: there’s a chapter on applying the 9 rules from the Help Desk, when you can't observe directly.

Interestingly, one of his war stories was kind of mentioned in...





Write Portable Code by Brian Hook. I’d had some dealings with Brian when I was at GameHouse, so I knew he knew his stuff. This book too was largely review (I’ve had to deal with getting code to run on different processors and compilers), but again it’s nice to have things spelled out sometimes. And I’d never heard of compile-time asserts or #pragma STDC before. Some of it’s a bit dated (version control in particular — and it must have been written right before the Mac Intel transition), but much of it is stuff you’d still have to deal with when moving between Mac and Windows — or even Mac and iOS. (Scalability is one aspect of portability.)

High-Bandwidth Sneakernet

I love the plan to deal with the huge amounts of data expected from a proposed black hole imaging project. Each station will create about 22 terabytes of raw data per day. “No imaginable link from remote mountaintops permits live telemetry of such a torrent. Astronomers will physically pull eight-pack cartridges of disk drives from the data recorders. ‘We’ll mail them,’ says Doelman. ‘You can’t beat the bandwidth of a 747 packed with hard drives.’”

iPad Data Gotcha

Just spent way too much time on the phone with AT&T. I haven’t completely resolved problems I was having with cellular access for my iPad, but I can give a warning: be 100% sure your email address is correct.

If it’s not, you won’t be able to log in again (since it’s your account name). And you won’t be able to retrieve a lost password, even with the web form that asks for IMEI and ICCID, because it’s sent to the wrong address. Nor can AT&T change it for you. And you won’t be able to stop automatic billing.

The whole idea of having plans that purport to be by the month, but expire, seems pretty lame, and is ultimately responsible for my problems. But that’s perhaps the topic of another post.

Apple Recycling Redux

I decided to upgrade my iPad to a model with 3G wireless (so I could access maps in the car if need be), so I was once again able to avail myself of the Apple Recycling Program. This time, I shipped off a Radius color pivoting monitor and another Power computer, both probably dating from 1998. Total shipping weight: 92 pounds. Shipping weight of the iPad: 3.3 pounds (about 1/28 as much).

So if you’re on the fence about getting an iPad, think about it as a great way to clean out your closet!

Apple Recycling Program

One of the cool things about getting an iPad was that it qualified me for Apple Recycling. I can get rid of two computers, monitors, or printers in a responsible fashion.

I went with some of the biggest and heaviest stuff, which has long been out of service (the computer was one we used on King of Dragon Pass, released in 1999, and the printer was introduced in 1993).

So by buying 2622 cc worth of tablet (by box size), I get rid of 222400 cc worth of obsolete hardware. For free (Apple pays shipping)! Not a bad deal.

iPad Case

Whenever I get a new portable device, it seems like I have to get a new case.*

I just got an iPad, and while I suspect it will be pretty rugged, putting it in my laptop case seemed like overkill — it rattles around.

After a little online research, I decided on the “iPad Suede Sleeve” from CaseCrown.

And then I didn’t buy it, because their stupid web site makes you register. Hello CaseCrown! I want to buy one item for my one device. Just let me buy the damn thing!

However, I wasn’t able to find another case that I liked any better, so I finally bit the bullet and bought it. Sight unseen, but $20 with free shipping seemed like a good deal.

The case came promptly. It fits pretty well (it could be a little smaller) and seems well made. The sides are padded, though I imagine if I ever drop it, the corners will be what hits. There’s a side pouch, which ought to hold the charger or a paperback book.

I have used it once so far, and wonder if I made a minor mistake in not getting the similar CaseCrown Protective Sleeve, which has a strap. After 5 minutes of walking with the case in my hand, it started to feel heavy. On the other hand, a strap for such a small device seems a bit silly, and this case is small enough to toss in a backpack.

Obviously choice of case is a personal matter, but I recommend this one.

* The only exception has been my iPhone. It fits in my pocket so well that I don’t want to bulk it up with a case.

Weren’t those my pixels?

As you can see at Microsoft’s Mac blog, Word 2011 will have (counting the menu bar) 8 horizontal strips of controls.

I love portrait displays, and have one, but I often use my laptop without one. And the laptop screen is wide, not tall. This seems like a terrible use of space, when they should be figuring out how to get more of my content visible without scrolling.

They say you gain vertical space compared to Office 2008, so maybe it’s a good thing I haven’t installed that yet!

I’m not even going to discuss visual clutter or whether you can find things — the ribbon may indeed make Word’s vast number of features more approachable.

For contrast, Pages has 5 strips of controls (menu bar, toolbar, format bar, ruler, and stuff at the bottom), and one of those is shared with the horizontal scroll bar so it doesn’t steal vertical space. Yes, there are palettes, but they use space on the side and don’t steal content area from typical documents.

Switching Email

I just took a couple of steps in the email world: I switched both my server and client.

I blame Apple. They announced iPad, and I’m making sure I’ll be able to fully use it.

For various reasons, I have multiple email accounts. Until now, I’ve been reading some with Apple Mail on my Mac, and also on my iPhone. The accounts are set up to use IMAP, which means mail is on the server (or if you will, the cloud). I can get it anywhere.

But for my oldest accounts, I’d used Eudora as my client, and Eudora Internet Mail Server for the actual server I ran. And I’d set things up with the POP protocol (which is essentially client-centric). This meant that I needed a master device that sucked the messages off the server. I couldn’t retrieve mail from my iPhone, because my laptop was the master owner. And EIMS didn’t support SSL anyway. EIMS also supports IMAP to the standard, and Apple Mail is apparently buggy, and doesn’t play well with EIMS.

I thought about buying a mini with Snow Leopard Server and running mail off it. That would give me the cloud and the security. But it costs $1000. I might have been able to add SSL on top of EIMS, but I’d still be dealing with the mismatch between it and my IMAP client.

What I ended up doing was using Google Apps Standard Edition. I don’t care about the actual apps (Calendar, Chat, Docs), but they do provide what is essentially Gmail for your domain. In my case, domains (since my wife and I get mail at three different domains). Although they push for the Premier Edition ($50/year/user), the free Standard Edition provides domain aliases (so we can handle our three domains via the same site) and nicknames (so I can have app-specific addresses).

Basic setup was easy. I had to prove I owned my domain, which I could do by putting a file on my server. The domain aliases were a bit trickier — Google checks for “domain.com/file” but I’d set up Apache so it was actually at “www.domain.com/file”. There was no error message — and since it’s free, support is only via a forum (which I still haven’t gotten an answer from). But I eventually figured out what was going on. But then, one of the domains took, but the other did not. (After several hours, it finally did.)

Google provides a way to test things, so I created an account on my iPhone and made sure I could send and receive via IMAP.

I don’t do my own DNS so I had to contact my ISP. They threw the switch, and things pretty quickly were working!

While I get no spam on my Gmail account, I get a fair amount to my older addresses (the fact that it’s multiple addresses probably works against me). Google has so far filtered all of this about as well as SpamSieve did on the client side — I get a bunch that’s not blocked by the server, and (being paranoid) go through it for false positives on occasion. (I have gotten two false positives in almost a week.)

On the client side, I had to learn Gmail’s idiosyncratic approach to IMAP. You will need to enable the advanced IMAP controls via Gmail Labs, and expose the labels. Then the important thing, if you want things to look more or less like IMAP, is to ensure that any message has only one label. I had originally used the tagging model, and assigned labels liberally. After all, Google wasn’t duplicating a message in the In folder and the Developer folder. But IMAP (at least as implemented in the Apple client), does.

Luckily, it’s easy to set up your filters so that an incoming message that’s filtered skips the inbox. At this point, the IMAP client can move things between folders, and the right thing happens. Well, you’ll probably want to read Google’s documentation on how to set up for IMAP, since some of the system folders should be set up in a less intuitive way.

So far I’m pretty happy with this. As far as I can tell, it’s been totally transparent — I still get and send email with the same addresses. I can get mail via IMAP or the Web-based Gmail interface. And I’ll no longer need to administer my own server (as easy as that was with EIMS).

A Pun Generator

Back in the 1980s, my grandfather kept asking me when I was going to go for my PhD. I never did (and probably never will), but at the time I thought I might, and figured that my thesis would have something to do with puns. After all, lots of artificial intelligence research was involved with disambiguation. Why not turn that on its end, and revel in ambiguity!

It turns out that a team at the University of Aberdeen have created the Joking Computer. It basically creates puns: “Q: What kind of tree is nauseated? A: A sick-amore.”

So I’d probably need a new thesis…

Improved UK Plug

Clever folding design — looks a lot more appropriate to have in your laptop bag!

A Retro Future?

I guess each generation is going to use technology differently, but it seems odd that my granddaughters prefer using MySpace to contact people, rather than e-mail *. This means they can only contact people who are on MySpace — for example, excluding me. It reminds me of the old days, when my editor set me up with an MCI Mail account so I could contact him. And most of my contacts were on CompuServe. It was a huge day when the services finally started sending e-mail to each other (and even longer before everyone got standardized into the name@domain addresses).

I hope we don’t go back to the old days!

* My granddaughters do use SMS, but due to its cost structure, text messages aren’t really a universal medium.

There’s a twist

Even though I’m happy enough with iTunes, I wanted to check out doubleTwist. But they have a huge barrier to entry: when you launch the application on your computer, you need to create an account.

That almost made me quit right there, but I decided to check out the fine print, as per the links in the dialog.

Oops, they made the whole thing the check box! When you click the blue text, it doesn’t show you the Privacy Policy, it activates the check.

And when I want to the web site to post a question about this, they wanted me to register first.

So much for doubleTwist. I’m not giving someone my e-mail without knowing more.

Addendum: Apparently Help > Contact Support uses regular e-mail, so there is at least a standard way to contact them.

Opt out of Omniture Tracking

Omniture is a major web tracking company, which is being bought by Adobe. They use the domain “2o7.net” which some people consider pretty sneaky (in particular, because in this font it looks a lot like “207.net” — they use two-oh-seven but it looks like two-zero-seven). If you don’t like the idea of being tracked, follow the link at the end of their Privacy page to set a cookie.

Jukebox in the Sky

For as long as I recall, RealNetworks has called its Rhapsody service a “jukebox in the sky.” These days it’s probably trendy to say it’s your music library in the cloud. The idea is that you pay a monthly fee, and have access to any music you want, wherever you go.

Now that there’s Rhapsody for iPhone, this is finally coming true.

Since I have a Rhapsody account from work, I downloaded the app as soon as it was available, and tried using it to replace the iPod feature of my iPhone 3GS. Searching was straightforward, so I queued up a bunch of music and headed towards the bus stop. That meant I was leaving WiFi for a 3G signal and the song stopped and restarted. And stopped and didn’t restart. Then Rhapsody crashed.

But later attempts worked totally fine. There was one momentary pause, but then the music resumed. And I was able to search and queue up more music while on the bus.

There are still some issues with the software. Rhapsody gave me a “My Music” list that is not my music at all (maybe new accounts don’t get saddled with this). Queuing music is awkward (be sure to press rather than tap if want to actually queue — which I always do — rather than play instantly). And Rhapsody can’t access some hardware features (like the extremely important pause button on the remote) or play in the background.

Is the jukebox in the sky worth $13/month (plus tax), given you’re renting music and have nothing if you end the subscription? I certainly think it’s more worthwhile now that you’re not tethered to a computer, or have to pre-load a crappy player like a Sansa. A touch device with no remote is a pretty crappy player too, though it makes a big difference to be able to manage things on the fly. And it was very cool to pick a song I’d never heard and immediately get to listen to it.

So I think it’s finally worth trying — you can get a 14 day free trial, and the iPhone app is free.

Snow Leopard Notes

I’ve been using Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) since official release. See John Siracusa for a very thorough and technical review. I just want to post a few random notes.

I forgot to be scientific about measuring the disk space savings, but I think I got 5 GB back (and I had never installed all the printer drivers). That’s a pretty valuable upgrade right there!

While people have noted it’s a plus that you can now show the date in the menu bar, in fact you don’t get to choose the date format, so it’s not very useful.

It’s pretty cool that Cisco VPN is now built in — the client from Cisco was pretty unreliable. Unfortunately, we use a shared secret that’s only distributed via a .pcf file, in encrypted form. Luckily, there’s a security hole and it’s possible to retrieve the plaintext password. Armed with this, I can use the Snow Leopard client.

I haven’t seen mention of a change in Time Machine: if you back up to a Time Capsule, you’re no longer saving to the top level of the volume but rather using your own account. (The screen shot shows the new approach above the old.) This should make things a little more secure, but it also means your old backup is ignored, and things start from scratch. (I couldn’t really verify Apple’s claims that the initial backup is a lot faster — it still seemed awfully slow over USB Ethernet.) On the other hand, I had to restart the initial backup since I didn’t have enough space for an entire new backup. Once I freed up space, the initial scan was pretty much instant.

So far, most of my software has been compatible (including those I wrote: Addressix and Opal). I was using an older version of Parallels Desktop, which for some reason was not moved to an “Incompatible” folder but won’t launch (with a message that it’s incompatible). I think I’ll be switching to VMWare Fusion.

While there are some features that I appreciate (minimizing windows to the application icon instead of cluttering the Dock), for the most part it’s the same Mac, slightly improved.

Except as a development machine. The new version of Xcode offers some significant improvements for developers, ranging from better Subversion support to new compilers. I’m still in the process of using clang and the updated Instruments to track down subtle issues.

At the same time, one of the most annoying bugs is in the new developer tools: we can no longer use distcc to compile on 8 different machines simultaneously. Apple is aware of the problem.

As a user, it’s not a whizzy update, but I think still worth it. As a developer, I’m really happy to be using the new tools. I’m also hoping that this becomes the new baseline — it would be great to develop for 10.6+ rather than 10.4+.

Take Back the Beep

David Pogue writes of the nuisance voice mail prompts the cell phone companies have inflicted on us in order to increase airtime usage. I run into it most often calling my wife, who has a Sprint phone. Luckily they have posted how to disable the prompt I hear, thanks to Pogue’s campaign:

“To turn off caller instructions aka "TAKE BACK THE BEEP"

“Dial into your voicemail accout (sic), select 3 for personal options, select 2 for greetings, select 1 for main greeting, select 3 for add or remove caller instructions, then press 2 for do not play instructions.”

(Of note: Apple wouldn’t let AT&T inflict this on iPhone accounts.)

Pogue now has a followup to his first column.

Less Flash!

I’d been using Click to Flash for some time, but didn’t realize there has been a lot of improvement (I think I had version 1.0, and it’s now up to 1.4.2).

Click To Flash is a simple plug-in for Safari that handles all Flash content — by not playing it until you click. This means you can visit web sites without running a handful of programs masquerading as ads. The problem is that many (if not most) Flash apps are extremely greedy in their use of the processor. This means the computer heats up, which means the fan runs louder. In fact, Elise’s machine appears to heat up to the point that it abruptly shuts down to prevent damage. And if you’re running on batteries, you run down the charge faster. Click To Flash simply shows the word “Flash” instead of running the app.

But what if you want to actually play a Flash game? That’s where the “Click to” comes in. Click on the blocked Flash content and it loads and runs.

Like I said, I had an older version that was functional, but doesn’t offer the ease of use for white listing sites, or a number of tweaks (such as using H.264 video on YouTube). I don’t know how I missed the update. You shouldn’t.

Mouse Repair

I had an Apple Mighty Mouse whose scroll ball stopped working in one direction — I could scroll down but not up (or the other way around, can’t recall). I happened to have a spare, and used it for a fair while. But then it stopped working in one direction!

Desperate, I decided to push the scroll ball button (which I never use). When I did so, I could scroll both directions. I got out the old mouse and did the same, and it too now works. It happens to have a shorter cable, which I preferred, so I’m now back in operation.

iPhone Release Swamps Yahoo?

Apparently there were some problems with AT&T activation when the iPhone 3G S went on sale today. (It took about half an hour to complete when I did mine.) But what I haven’t heard anything about is that apparently the Stocks and Weather applications don’t work — I haven’t done a big survey, but two other people (who didn’t upgrade) were unable to access them. And I couldn’t on either the new or old iPhone. What both have in common is that they connect to Yahoo:

I managed to connect once, but now it’s failing again.