Saying Goodbye to Siri?

Posted on January 27, 2012
Filed Under Commentary | Leave a Comment

Marco has up an interesting post about people abandoning Siri. Now I don’t use Siri much as I have an iPhone 4. My wife has an iPhone 4s though and I’ve played around with it a fair bit on her phone at home. I personally love it. I frequently get short messages (especially from my wife) while driving. If I could easily respond with Siri I’d be in heaven.

My one complaint – and this is just from my limited use – is that it’s not quite as easy to designate who to IM as it should be. But beyond that I have no complaints. It’d done everything I wanted from it. I probably have been lucky about the reliability issues though. I’ve heard quite a few people complain about that. Hopefully Apple can get the stability and scale of their servers working better soon. Of course the server problems strongly suggests that Siri is a victim of its own success. That is its main problem is that too many people are using it!

App Store and APIs

Posted on January 25, 2012
Filed Under Commentary | Leave a Comment

Michael Tsai notes apps are already being constrained by the app store limits. This is because some APIs only work if your application is in the app store. Right now that’s primarily iCloud but it’ll almost certainly increase in the future. I’ve been calling this as a problem for a  long time.  It wouldn’t be an issue were some of the app store limits not so egregious. Especially in terms of sending Apple Events.

PDFpen is getting around this issue by utilizing a helper app bought via the app store. That way the main application can get around API limits or sandbox limits while the helper app utilizes app store APIs like iCloud. It’s a kludgy hack and may stop working in the future if Apple puts further sandbox limits on what files an application can access. I suspect you’ll see more kludges like this in the future.

In the meantime I’d be careful about what applications you buy through the app store. If an application accesses many files independent of a standard file dialog then do not buy it from the app store. You’ll face grief in the future. When I got BBEdit I was careful to ensure I bought it direct instead of via the app store. The two versions are not the same. The app store version has reduced functionality and will probably have much more reduced functionality when the sandbox limits become more pronounced.

Reinstalling Lion

Posted on January 25, 2012
Filed Under System | Leave a Comment

So I reinstalled Lion for the first time. I was pretty nervous. However I’d uninstalled Logme In Hamachi and my bootup kept hanging around the time the airport was configured. (You can easily make OSX boot up in verbose mode to see where it was hanging)  At first I was worried it was a hardware issue but the system booted up fine off an external backup drive. I backed up my important data again. (I keep two full bootable disk backups I rotate between and two sets of time machine backups) So I booted off the recovery partition that Lion installs. It went off without a hitch other than the annoyance of redownloading Lion again.

Thus far everything works. The only annoyances were having to reinstall Xcode again and then reinstall all the various Python libraries I used.  (Primarily iPython and Appscript)  I was worried I’d have to reinstall more than that. But everything thus far went off without a snag. I didn’t even need to reinstall Parallels.

Leaving QuickBooks

Posted on January 23, 2012
Filed Under GrandTotal | Leave a Comment

QbMy salesperson had convinced me last year to start doing all my invoicing in QuickBooks. From day one I’d hated it.

Yes, it has some great features. Primarily you can associate a salesperson with each invoice and then generate a report each month list the breakdown of the invoices for that salesperson. It makes it easier to do commissions. There were some quirks. I couldn’t see how to make some items (like shipping) not apply towards commissions. So it was at best a better first step but you still had to export to Excel and do a lot of hand manipulation.

The biggest problem was that it’s UI was a royal pain. You couldn’t move items in the invoice around. That wouldn’t be a big problem except for how QuickBooks did subtotals. Once you had an item you couldn’t delete it. Which was a problem as our salesperson had added a lot of items I wanted to change. Surely it could keep the items to allow older invoices to stay coherent but not display them when creating new invoices. No go.


More >>>

Automator Scripts and Day One

Posted on January 19, 2012
Filed Under Day One | 2 Comments

Automator Day One

There’s a nice little discussion of Automator and Day One that seems pretty interesting. I actually had got a copy of Page One back in December when I realized how many things my kids had been doing that I didn’t have recorded. It used to be I didn’t care as I could just remember everything. Plus I was always out doing crazy sports like mountaineering, ice climbing, kayaking, climbing or just having weird adventures. When I was in my 20′s I thought that you could live in the past or live in the future. With young kids I discovered you are permanently sleep deprived and exhausted. The problem is that when you don’t get a good night’s sleep your brain doesn’t record your memories well. So a lot of memories are already lost.

I made a goal to first try and catch up on old stories from my 20′s and then the cute memories of my kids that I want to keep but haven’t written down.

The problem is January was supposed to be my slow month and it’s still been pretty busy. Lots of stress so I haven’t used Day One much. I really like the features. I also like how a few times a day it pops up a window forcing you to write something. I’m really glad someone has been doing some scripting with it although it does appear to be a bit of a hack. Hopefully I’ll chime in with my own scripts in the future.

Official Twitter Client: Second Thoughts

Posted on January 18, 2012
Filed Under Commentary | 1 Comment

When the revised iOS official Twitter client came out a couple of months back there was a lot of griping. Some of the gripes were quite valid. Too big of margins and so forth. Admittedly some of my initial complaints turned out to be false. I couldn’t find saved searches and trying to find how to search was a pain. The location of such features definitely was misplaced.

Despite those gripes I have to admit some of the new features have me wishing they were in the desktop version. Most significantly the ability to click on a tweet and see all the responses to just that particular tweet. What a great feature.

I’m still not quite sure how they are monitizing Twitter. Presumably by elevating certain trending topics for a fee. I have my doubts that’ll be enough. Some companies have managed to move from continual losses into strong profitability. (Think Amazon back in the 90′s) I’m not sure Twitter will. Like so many businesses in the Valley it seems not to have been created with profits in mind. But while I still have gripes here or there I am liking where they are taking the service.

Ring Profiles for iPhone

Posted on January 16, 2012
Filed Under iPhone | 1 Comment

There’s been some inexplicable kerfuffle over the iPhone mute button the past week. You’ve probably read most of the blogs and twitter feeds discussing this so I won’t bore you too much with the details. Basically some people (primarily Mac Break Weekly’s Andy Ihnatko) think the mute button should mute all sound including alarms and the like. Others prefer the current system where most but not all sound is blocked. (Primarily alarms set in Apple’s alarm app) If you want a fuller round up check out And Now All This‘s or Macdrifter’s discussion.

Now I mentioned in Drang’s comments there used to be a Cydia app for jailbroken phones that resolved all these concerns. AutoSilent gave you pretty tight control over what sounds were muted as well as being able to schedule profiles. Sadly it wasn’t updated for iOS5. There is, however, an alternative program that appears to do much the same thing: iSilent. There’s a nice YouTube video demonstrating it.

I have to admit it’s hard for me to get too excited by all this. I find the default method Apple supplies to fit my needs exactly. I do wish there was a quick way to set a lot of other settings. Which is why I’m a bit perplexed by the whole controversy. Of all the things wrong with iOS5 this is among the smallest of the problems IMO.

Voice TV

Posted on January 13, 2012
Filed Under Apple TV, Commentary | Leave a Comment

Slate has a new article up on voice controlled TV. The lead:

Companies like Apple want to replace the TV remote with voice recognition. There’s got to be a better way.

I’m sorry. Has Apple ever said a TV would be controlled by Siri? No. Lots of pundits have speculated this would be a great idea. But all the Jobs quote from the Isaacson book said is that he cracked it. There are plenty of reasons to not want voice control for TV or have it as an option.

Besides which this honestly isn’t even the main issue with revolutionizing TV. The main problem is that people want ala carte video on demand and the current business model is based upon paying for a bunch of channels in a group with most of the media paid for but not consumed. If you move from that to the ala carte model then the prices of individual shows have to go up beyond what most would be willing to pay.

If Apple’s cracked things it’s more by going with a cable-like subscription service for limited ala carte video. Something more like Netflix but having different groups of services you could purchase. Effectively pricing would be similar to cable but with ala carte offerings.

The question of interface is almost secondary.

Mobile Sites

Posted on January 12, 2012
Filed Under Commentary | Leave a Comment

I hate mobile sites. I absolutely hate them. Yes there are the occasional good one. But in general they suck. Their suckage really hasn’t changed much the past years. You’d think after all the complaints the folks running them would learn. I know you all know this so I shouldn’t even be writing a post on this. Today it just got to me enough that I couldn’t handle it anymore.

First links rarely work. Here’s what normally happens. I see an interesting link on Twitter while waiting at the bank and click on it. Instead of going to the link the person expects though I go to some wrong page because mobile links and regular links are so different. Typically I get sent to some random front page. I have no way to know where the page I wanted to go is. What’s so surprising is that really big companies that get at least some revenue from links do this. The Chicago Tribune and CBS both do this. Why, I don’t know. But it’s common.

Next up you can resize the images. The iPhone does a fantastic job letting you enlarge the text you want to see. There’s typically no reason to need a mobile site unless your design is fairly horrific. Yet instead sites like Slate put us on a mobile site that looks more like an iPhone app. However you can’t zoom in on images so you can’t enlarge graphs and see exactly what is being talked about. Why they do this, I don’t know. You’d think news sites of all places would recognize the importance of this.


More >>>

Problems with BBEdit

Posted on January 10, 2012
Filed Under BBEdit | 4 Comments

I’ve not talked about BBEdit for a while. Macdrifter had up a nice discussion of its pluses and minuses yesterday. A lot of what he discussed as the pluses I’ve talked about in the past — although some of the tools he uses are slightly different. He did mention something in his discussion of the negatives though that I thought was useful to touch upon. He writes:

AppleScript support in BBEdit is both the best and worst things. Almost every function of BBEdit can be accessed through AS. That seems to come at a price though. Unlike Textmate bundles or Sublime Text which can be written in any language, BBEdit is weighed down by AppleScript, which is not versatile or mature enough to do real work. AppleScript is awkward and poorly defined in comparison to other scripting languages. There are too many non-obvious limitations and options. I never know when I should “Tell text of front text window” or more generally “tell front text window”. These are apparently two different things that are only discovered through trial and error.

There’s a lot of AppleScript legacy with BBEdit and it’s likely to remain part of the application until Apple kills it off. I’d like to see BBEdit support additional scripting languages to work on documents.


More >>>

The iOS Multitasking Problem

Posted on January 5, 2012
Filed Under iPhone | Leave a Comment

John Gruber has up a post ranting on Apple Genius staff telling people to manual quit programs.

Emptying this list of applications is simply needless, mindless, busywork. It was absolutely never intended to be used this way and anyone who does this is just wasting their time.

On the one hand this is true. You shouldn’t treat iOS the way you do Android let alone Windows. That said the cause of this problem isn’t Genius employees being stupid.

The problem is with applications — primarily those using GPS — continuing to access the service when users don’t know what is going on. Naive users discover their battery draining like it was a 4G Android phone. Now Gruber understands this is the exception. But how do you communicate this to the typical naive users? You don’t know what programs they’ll be using. Trying to explain how to discover what application is the problem is a lost cause with most users. (Seriously if you’ve tried tech support with casual users you know what I mean)

So what’s left? Telling users with the problem to simply quit the programs regularly.


More >>>

Treadmill Desk

Posted on December 29, 2011
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

OK, this post from the iPhone Development blog about a treadmill desk is a great idea. I have a Bowflex treadclimber that has been seldom used of late which I’d love to purpose for this.

The basic idea is what to do when you are doing 10 – 12 hour days and constantly dealing with emergencies? I used to be a total gym nut. Before getting married I’d do an hour an a half at a climbing gym and then an other hour and a half with free weights and a stair climber each day. The first few years I was married I didn’t have time to climb but I still did an hour a day at the gym. However since I started my new business (which involved a lot of chocolate tasting) I didn’t have time to exercise. Every year I’d start anew and do great for a couple of months by going in the morning before work. Then inevitably there’d be reasons (typically involving calls to eastern time zones) that kept me from making it to the gym. Needless to say my current shape is much rounder than six years ago.

The scariest thing is that you wake up and suddenly six years have gone by and you still haven’t met your goal of getting back into shape. When you used to be in fantastic shape and now you get winded going up a long flight of stairs that’s pretty hard to take.


More >>>

Keep Looking →

Search

Try Amano Chocolate
First American Gold Medal Winner
at the
London Academy of Chocolate

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Archives

Blogroll

Admin