I found a useful script though that adds an update all feature to easy_install. I’ve tested it out and it seems to work fine. If you’re like me you update the libraries you uses frequently but forget to update the less frequently used ones. This really solves that problem.

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I still have an old iPhone4. Which I find ideal except for those annoying proximity sensor issues. i.e. it keeps going to mute or speaker when I am on the phone without a bluetooth headset. However the nicest thing is that I can typically do everything one handed which can be crucial when you are busy doing a bunch of things or walking down a hallway holding something.

Some are suggesting that it might just house extra space on top and move to a longer size. I have a feeling developers wouldn’t appreciate that. So I’m a bit skeptical. Although Apple has a history of doing things developers don’t care for. (Witness iCloud and sandboxing)  

All I want though is to have the existing size as an option. I’d even part with LTE in preference to the current size. I have LTE on my iPad and frankly it’s unreliable in many locations. Even Verizon doesn’t have as much of it as you’d think from all the hype. Plus on a phone I’m willing to wait an extra second or two for the web page to load. It’s not that big a deal – no where near as big a deal as having a working Siri or the like. (Siri is still pretty unreliable)

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First I find myself using the bluetooth keyboard much less than I expected. I like it, but I’m not sure the combination keyboard and case was worth it. I find myself wishing I just had one of those apple cases that cover the front at various times. That said though the keyboard situation, whether virtual or actual, is much worse than I thought. It’s not just that most apps don’t think through keyboard shortcuts or more importantly moving fields.Yes it’s annoying to have to frequently be touching the screen just to get to the right field. But that’s not the biggest problem. What annoys me is actually trying to edit on the iPad.

First off while there frequently is undo there is rarely redo. So if you undo too many times you are screwed. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if most applications did blocks of “action” the way that most Mac applications do. When I was writing in mail and undo I found myself being unable to guess exactly what would be undone. Once again not a problem except for the lack of a redo. The combination of dealing with lost text due to the undo command combined with the frustration at cursor moving or selection has made me never want to use an iPad for serious editing again.

I’ll still do simple email and simple text. For instance since there’s no MarsEdit for the iPad I used the WordPress app. A few of my posts were actually composed on the iPad. I’d never want to try and do one of my more complex posts though. Likewise cutting and pasting is frustrating. So much text in applications can’t be copied. Moving between windows is frustrating. (Reminds me of when I was a kid and the MultiFinder first came out to replace the Switcher - the iPad in many ways is like the Mac circa 1985)

I totally get why an iPad is enough for most people. It’s enough for my wife. But most of the reasons for why I never got one hold. It’s just not powerful enough. What’s different is that there truly are some great apps that utilize it in great ways. Flipboard, Twitter, ShowYou and more are all a joy to use. I wish the Mac took more from the iPad in many ways. I’m surprised more iPad apps haven’t made their way back to the Mac. 

For educational materials nothing comes close. The iPad is fantastic for my kids. There truly are some great apps. I find iBooks crazy good. I just downloaded for free Yellow Submarine which is a book based upon the old Beatles movie. Not my thing and a bit too many LSD references but my kids loved it. A book with animation and more within it. And for me I really a couple of Sanderson novels in it and loved the experience.

It’s just that editing is really, really rough.

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This happens a lot with me – while Apple’s laptops  are vastly better than Windows ones I’ve used I still have some issues with networking and windows when awaking my laptop if I sleep plugged into everything at work. Internet Sharing always screws up. But that’s a bit expected. (You go to sleep on Ethernet sharing on Wi-Fe and wake using Wi-Fi — what happens to sharing?)  More annoying are old servers from one network still showing up and servers on the new network not showing up. The lost window only happens occasionally and primarily in Carbon apps. (I think Cocoa checks for this problem and resolves it) 

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1. Keyboard support is haphazard. It’s nice to use a keyboard if you are doing a lot of typing. But applications don’t (yet) do a good job with keyboard shortcuts or even supporting tabbing between fields intelligently. Coming from OSX it was frustrating to have to keep touching the screen just to get in the right field. I also think a lot of developers don’t bother testing their apps with a keyboard. Come on – get a cheap bluetooth keyboard and see what works. 

2. It really is a joy for media consumption. After using it a bit I got what all the fuss was about. However a lot of these apps honestly could be ported to OSX easily without much problem. (And in some cases have been) My favorites was plugging my Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds into Flipboard. I still prefer the dedicated Twitter app (which I think makes fantastic use of the iPad) but I know others who prefer Flipboard for everything. I also really liked ShowYou which scans Facebook and Twitter to see videos it can play. I’m not a big Facebook person but my wife really liked it for that. Movies work great.

3. There are some surprising omissions of iPhone ports. While iPhone apps look surprisingly good I was surprised that many apps hadn’t bothered with iPad ports.

4. I wish there was a better way to get video on without using Dropbox or syncing iTunes. I don’t like video on my laptop as I have limited space but often do want it on the iPad. There’s not a good way of doing this that I saw.

5. Apple’s Remote app for the Apple TV was surprisingly disappointing on the iPad. No list view – just icons. Still no grouping by genre, category or group. With the added space I think there’s a ton they could have done and it’s a bit surprising they didn’t do more.

6. iBooks is great. It’s a major disappointment that they don’t have it for OSX when Kindle has an app. (Admittedly the Kindle app for the Mac is a bit disappointing though)  Using both the Kindle app and the iBook app I prefer the iBook one. However the Kindle does have that cross platform appeal. You can find a surprising number of free ebooks if you look around although often the formatting is pretty horrendous. (Particularly bad with poetry where formatting makes a big difference)  I have to admit that despite the problem of not being able to take an iPad into the tub after a long day or hard workout I’ll probably be buying more ebooks than paper. It does a nice job with PDF books too. (I had a few philosophy books in PDF – some I put in iBooks and some in DropBox)

7. DropBox really is a necessity for this device. iCloud just isn’t there yet in usability or design. I never used DropBox much with my laptop. I use it constantly with the iPad.

8. Fieldrunners is great on the iPad. I’ve not played it in a long time but have been playing it a lot. 

9. It’s much lighter than I imagined.

10. I now find Evernote, which I rarely used, quite valuable. It’s great for random notes. I came close to getting Circus Ponies Notebook which is my note taking app of choice for long notes on OSX. However it had really mixed reviews at best on the iPad – usually complaining about complexity. It’s hard to justify $30 for something I may not like. Anyone like it? There is a great drawing note taking app that syncs with Evernote that I use a lot though.

11. I know Steve Job hates styluses but I got a cheap one at Staples and it is great for notes. I really, really wish iOS 6 comes with a stylus API to support pressure sensitive styluses. The iPad is heads and shoulders above a Mac with a graphics pad like the Bamboo. However using drawing speed to emulate pressure really sucks.

12. Verizon LTE isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I got LTE a few times. In downtown San Deigo. In parts of LA. And in parts of Las Vegas. It was great when it works. However the iPad prefers one bar LTE to three bars 3G which is a problem. (Since you can’t jailbreak the iPad 3 and add SBSettings to turn these sorts of things on and off quickly)  I also found that my AT&T coverage was better pretty much the entire drive from Utah through California. The area where our hotel in San Diego was we couldn’t get proper Verizon coverage at all. It’d show we were connected but nothing would work. Since only a few areas have LTE but AT&T 3G is considerably faster than Verizon 3G I think AT&T might actually be better for many people. (I can’t speak for San Francisco, New York or Florida where I know AT&T sucks – I haven’t tried it there)  For here in Utah it’s pretty good though and very fast. It’s just that from the media you think AT&T was slaughtered by Verizon whereas I found AT&T actually much better for travel. I frequently had no Verizon coverage and fairly good AT&T coverage as I drove I-15. I’m driving to Seattle this weekend and we’ll see how things go on that drive.

13. Outside during the day it really, really shows fingerprints badly. Yuck. However it is better visible than I was expecting outside at noon.

14. Moreso than the iPhone I really wish I could jailbreak this.

15. This is the perfect Netflix device. Too bad Netflix’s selection kind of sucks. I know people gripe about the music player on it but I found myself preferring that UI to the current iTunes one a great deal.

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I think the praises of PathFinder have been spouted many times. It has lots of things people like. A shelf where you can “rest” a drag on the way to some place else. A split window browser for quick copying of files. A terminal pane for fast shell access. Tabs, if you’re into that thing in a file browser. (I doubt I’d use it) File filtering, which I do like a lot.

The big upgrade this cycle is support for OpenMeta. Some have been questioning how long OpenMeta is for this world. While meta tagging files hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise I still find it useful. If you don’t mind a short digression on meta-tags allow me to discuss their problems.

It seems to me there are three problems with tags. One is their ubiquity. The Finder doesn’t show them so you don’t use them. Alternative Finders like Yep, Leap or now PathFinder allow you more access to the tags for both searching, viewing and opening files. For Open dialogs Default Folder X supports them. The second problem is the pain and difficulty of tagging files. Even with various alt-Finder’s help you still have to tag your files. Scripts based upon the containing folders or file names help. Honestly though you really want some intelligent agent to tag things for you which requires summarization technology and perhaps bayesian inference (like a spam filter). The fuzzy guessing of baysian or similar technology (say inner products in a multidimensional search space, which I’ve done before) can help but at best still ends up with more false positives and false negatives than we want. Plus you have to deal with getting content out of files. Not to mention that there is no solution along these lines that I know of. (Had I the time I’d write one, but there you go…)

In practice I find I do great with tagging for several months. Then comes that insanely busy month where you can’t justify the time. Suddenly your system is broken. It’s very easy to give up right there and then.

The third problem though really is that you want metadata that’s not free form tags but something more akin to the database view we see in iTunes. It’s interesting that Windows has long offered this for images, music files and the like in Windows Explorer. It’s perhaps understandable that the Finder never received this. (Although I still remain convinced that Apple’s ultimate replacement of the Finder once iCloud is reliable will rely of search and meta-data of some sort)

Given the nature of PathFinder I’m thus kind of surprised that it really doesn’t offer much for Open-Meta tags beyond what most existing tagging programs or what Yep or Leap offer. That is it doesn’t try to leverage Open Meta for more sorts of tags where you have a field and content where content is a few types. Once again think iTunes. While I doubt many would use Path Finder to peruse the iTunes directory (although it does have a shortcut standard to do so) having access to standard file meta data would be nice. Say all that info on many graphics files, music files and so forth like Windows does. Not to mention letting you create your own. For that matter if you look at all the fields in Spotlight there are quite a few. Why doesn’t PathFinder display some of those? (I recognize  you wouldn’t want that for a default view due to speed issues – but what about custom views?)

Probably I’m asking too much. I’m just happy PathFinder embraced OpenMeta. It’s a big tick moving me towards perhaps buying it. It just feels still that metadata is just there for a Get Info like pane telling you about a file. It could be so much more…

Speaking of Spotlight, arguably one of the most poorly leveraged aspects of OSX UI-wise, I’m both happy and a bit disappointed in PathFinder’s search support. On the one hand it removes a lot of the annoying UI the Finder has. If you do a lot of searching you’ll enjoy PathFinder’s search window a great deal more. However inexplicably it lacks one of the more powerful (and less known) features of Spotlight in the Finder: sub searches. In the Finder if you option-click on a + in the search pane it turns to three dots and you can construct a subquery. Each subquery can be an and or a or (displayed as “any” or “all”) Needless to say this is extremely useful – especially when doing saved searches.

Now I’ve tried to figure out how to do subqueries like this in PathFinder. Perhaps I’m just missing it. (Please chime in over in the comments if I am) I just can’t see how to do it. Certainly option-click doesn’t do anything. This means that while PathFinder is fine for simple searches it isn’t the power-user Spotlight search tool many have been longing for. (Once again, had I time…)

I should add one fantastic feature of PathFinder’s ridiculously powerful get info window is that it will show all the Spotlight metadata for a file. If you are doing complex saved searches this can be invaluable and save a lot of work from the terminal.

One of my favorite features of PathFinder ends up being a list of recent items. Not just recent documents but more importantly recent network connections. If you are on a laptop moving between networks this is a fantastic timeshare. Lion is better about accessing Windows shares than previous versions of OSX but especially on laptops waking from sleep Window shares frequently don’t show up in the Finder. They are accessible – and if you can remember the IP address you can easily log in from the Finder by typing something like smb://192.168.1.119. If you can remember and if the computer doesn’t have a dynamic IP address that has changed since you last figured it out. I actually had a small script using nmap to figure out the IP addresses for many systems on the two main networks I access. However by and large the PathFinder method is vastly superior. I’m sure it won’t always work – but nmap is always there and handy.

It also has git support. It’s really not enough to replace a dedicated git client or (frankly) just hitting the terminal – which is of course easy in PathFinder too. However it’s probably enough for casual use.

I’ve only been playing with PathFinder a short time. I’m not going to rush into a purchase. But I have to admit I am impressed. If only it had those two features I complained about…

About the one major complaint one can make is that it really is a kitchen sink sort of app. That is it takes the basic UI of the Finder, adds in features from a few utilities (or the original NeXT browser) and then throws up lots of panes, windows and other sort of things to access data. However it really doesn’t make any of this smooth or really revolutionize the UI. In some ways that’s very pragmatic. In other ways one does sometimes wish someone would simply rethink file management. While Yep and Leap have big limitations I’ll give them credit for trying something new.

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When our salesperson left the company I decided to switch back to Grand Total which by then had been upgraded to a new version. From my perspective the biggest pluses of the new version was a completely new database format and the ability to write custom reports with HTML and Javascript from within the invoicing program. The new database format in particular was pretty much done in a more appropriate relational database way. While I’ve not yet done a lot of custom reporting with it the ability to create plugins and reports accessing all parts of the database via Javascript is fantastic. (You can also do this via Python from outside the program if you wanted)

One thing that really makes me appreciate a program is how responsive the programmer is. Unfortunately some programs have lost their development team but the purchaser has no way of knowing this. This can lead to bugs going years without being fixed. (Quickeys I’m looking at you) Fortunately the developer of Grand Total is one of the good ones, reminding me of BBEdit in some ways. For instance earlier this week I found a major bug in the program. I quickly got a response and an email with a new build. From my experience with the earlier version of the program the developer is pretty good about answering odd more technical questions as well. Very few programs have that. That sort of technical support is a huge plus if you are thinking of buying a program.

I should probably mention why I went with Grand Total rather than one of the other applications like Billings. I’ve tried out most of them. Many are just oriented around a workflow I don’t use – time based billing. While Grand Total supports time based billings (and has a nice sister product for calculating them) most other programs didn’t work well with wholesaling fixed products. It often wasn’t that they couldn’t do it – just that their workflow optimization clearly was somewhere else. There were then other small details that I didn’t like. I think for the price Grand Total does the nicest job getting out good invoices and keeping track of payments.

Let me lay out a few of the negatives I’ve encountered thus far.

First there is a nice layout manager for customizing invoices. However if you try to do anything complex you’ll become frustrated quickly. Unlike Quickbooks there’s no box or line tool. You don’t have “snap too” indicators showing when two elements are lined up or when you are centering something. If you try anything overly complex what you have to do is design your invoice in a program like Numbers or Illustrator, export it as a PDF and then import it into Grand Total where you add in the fields. That’s not as big a negative as you might imagine. Using a dedicated program which have all those bells and whistles for careful alignment ends up being better. I did all mine in Numbers and just imported the PDF without any trouble.

If you are the type that merely modifies existing layouts then this won’t be a big issue. They offer a large number of different invoice template you can download from within the program without much problem.

An other limit is that the program really doesn’t do a good job calculating commissions for salespeople. I’m putting together work arounds for this and will probably blog about it over the coming weeks.

Overall I’m quite happy thus far. I do wish there was a multiuser version. I don’t need a lot. Just someway for my salespeople to be able to enter data while someone else ships what is on this invoice. I’m trying to think up some work arounds but right now I just have it installed on a single computer so it’s not an issue. If we grow though that will become more of a problem. (Of course Quickbooks while it was multiuser often was flakey)

One surprising aspect to the program is that there is not an App Store version available. I can understand that somewhat. And honestly I’ve come around to preferring to buy outside the App Store when possible. But it would open the program up to a much wider audience were it available. You can download it to try out and I’d advise doing that to see if it will meet your needs.

I’ll almost certainly be doing various posts the next few months on custom reports and other tricks to using it.

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