Speeds and Feeds

(Sheesh, I've been busy lately. I had more spare time when I was employed!)

Ever since I got my iPhone 3G in late July, I've been keeping track of the things I like--and don't like--about it.

Since Apple is rumored to be releasing the next major iPhone firmware update today, I thought I'd run through the list now, and then see how the new firmware changes things. Many of these comments apply to the iPod touch as well.

The things I like are, generally, the same things everyone likes. The iPhone is feature-rich, well integrated, well supported by independent software developers, and fun to use.

The things I don't like are, generally, software features that ought to be present but just aren't.

Each time I discover another one of these missing features, I jot it down in my iPhone WTF list. WTF, of course, stands for "Where's the feature?"

Muting and sounds
For example: Where's the feature to mute the phone? You may point to the little toggle switch on the left side, but no, that just mutes the ringer and certain audio alerts, not the whole phone. On my old Palm Treo, the mute switch darn well muted everything, as if the switch disconnected the speaker wires themselves.

On the iPhone, there's no way to predict which sound sources will respect the mute switch. Calendar alerts do; alarms don't. These are good choices--I like knowing that the alarm function will still wake me up even if I mute the phone before going to sleep--but hardly intuitive.

Alarm volume is controlled by the ringer volume, but even the minimum ringer volume is still audible.

Application-generated sounds have a separate volume control. If you're not in the iPod application, which has a volume slider, I think the only way to adjust this control is to use the volume rocker switch while an application is making sounds. Sometimes, that's after the phone has already started to annoy the people around you.

Bottom line: I can't find a way to make the unit completely silent without going into multiple Settings panels and applications, and even that isn't completely effective because some applications (as exemplified by the otherwise valuable Phone Aid) will turn the volume back up when they run.

Alerts and Calendar app
While I'm on the subject of alerts: in the Calendar application, where's the function to set an alert for the exact time of an event? Sometimes I just want to beep myself at 10 a.m. to make a phone call, for example. I don't want to have to set the time for 10:05 a.m. and the alert for "5 minutes before." I love the fact that Calendar supports up to two alerts for the same event, but I wish I could set them to, say, 15 minutes and 0 minutes respectively. This problem could be solved by providing a "Custom" time choice for both of the alerts.

Apple's iPhone 3G

(Credit: Apple)

The Calendar app also has the worst user-interface design in the whole iPhone, I think. To select the date and time for an alarm, you spin three wheels apparently stolen from the game show The Price Is Right. The minutes wheel is so easy to spin that in going from :00 to :30, I commonly spin right past :30 and back to :00. Apple has developed many ways to select dates and times for other systems and applications; this is by far the worst.

The Calendar app does something else that's kind of silly. In the daily view, most events get two lines of text: the title and location. Displaying these two lines takes up about one hour of the day. For a shorter event--one scheduled for 30 minutes, say--the two lines get squeezed into one line in an attempt to maintain the orderly appearance of the schedule.

But come on, Apple! The lines on a sheet of paper are fixed. The lines on a computer display aren't. Stretch the lines apart so that every event gets the space it needs! Jeez, this isn't rocket science.

Similarly, a long event has plenty of room to display additional information, such as the notes associated with the event--but instead, the event ends up with two lines of text and a bunch of wasted blank space. Display the notes, and shrink the event if that helps to keep the whole day on the screen. I hate having to scroll the Day display just to show two events.

The Calendar app doesn't handle multiple-user event scheduling very well. Invitations received by the iPhone's Mail app aren't understood by the phone. I can go look at the message on my Mac and add the event to my calendar there, and eventually the event shows up on my iPhone, but that's not so good when I'm traveling. And even then, the event can't be edited on the iPhone--not at all, not even to change the times.

The Calendar app does something very nice: the icon on the iPhone's home screen shows the current day and date. So, where's the feature? Why don't all of Apple's apps do this sort of thing where appropriate? The Clock app icon always shows 10:15. The Weather app always shows sunny and 73 degrees. The Stocks app shows a random squiggle. Sure, updating all these icons would give the iPhone some extra work to do--so Apple should provide a "Live icon updates?" setting and have some rules about how often the updates should happen. I think the slight increase in overhead would usually be worth it.

... Read more

I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.

So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").

Samsung's Spinpoint M6 500GB mobile hard disk

(Credit: Samsung)

That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, there's a lot of free stuff there. I have a particular weakness for video podcasts about automobiles, such as VOD Cars and BMW's own video magazine, BMW-web.tv. Oh, and I've also lost some potential productivity to the Onion News Network video feed and the original Onion Radio News, which are also available through iTunes.

I hung tight through the 320GB generation of laptop hard disks, figuring that wasn't enough of a capacity improvement to justify the cost.

But shortly after Samsung started shipping the Spinpoint M6 model HM500LI, Montalvo Systems shut down, and I had other things to think about than upgrading my hard disk. I decided to wait for Hitachi or Western Digital to introduce a competing model, so I could make sure I was getting the best product when the time came.

Hitachi has a 500GB drive, but at 12.5mm thick, it won't fit in the MacBook Pro. Then Western Digital introduced the new Scorpio Blue, a 9.5mm drive with specifications pretty much identical to those of the Samsung drive. I was able to get a pretty good deal on the Samsung drive, so that's what I decided to go with.

I went through the same upgrade process I used last time, which I recommend to anyone upgrading a hard disk: back up the old disk to the new disk in an external enclosure before swapping in the new drive. With a Mac, it's easiest to do the backup by connecting both drives to another machine using the special feature called FireWire Target Disk Mode.

In this case, I only backed up the Mac partition this way, since Macs can't natively write to NTFS partitions; I used Windows to back itself up separately to a different drive.

After going through the usual grief involved in upgrading a MacBook Pro hard disk-- which I don't recommend to anyone who isn't very familiar with safe maintenance procedures for modern laptops-- everything just worked. The new drive is fast, silent, and huge, everything I love in a hard disk.

Well, all but one thing. The Boot Camp partition isn't so easy to migrate over. After booting from the new drive, I let the Boot Camp Assistant program create a new Boot Camp partition with an NTFS filesystem, then used Mike Bombich's NetRestore application to copy the old data to the new partition.

But although the copy proceeded normally and the new partition received all the files from the old one, it also received the old partition's size-- 20GB instead of the 32GB I had allocated for it. And it didn't come out bootable, nor would Parallels Workstation work with it, in spite of being configured to use the Boot Camp partition on the old drive.

I can't find anything online about migrating a Boot Camp partition when upgrading a hard disk. So let me ask all of you folks: does anyone know how to do this?

I'll post an update here when I get it figured out. In any event, I can always just wipe out the new partition and reinstall Windows...

Update: now solved! See my followup post: "Migrating and resizing a Boot Camp partition". Thanks to everyone who commented.

When Comcast announced last week that it was instituting a formal usage cap for residential customers--a total of 250 gigabytes of data transfer (uploading plus downloading), as described here--I didn't think much of it, except to be happy they finally defined a critical element of their service guarantee. The previous level of ambiguity was annoying and arguably unlawful, as I described here last October.

Few Comcast customers will ever consume that much bandwidth, and in fact it's probably several times what Comcast's network can provide to all users anyway. If a large fraction of Comcast's customer base is now encouraged to start sharing its own high-definition home movies on peer-to-peer file-sharing services, network congestion will impose a much lower limit.

But over the weekend I read some of the news coverage and blogger opinions of the cap, and I have to say that some of it is just astonishing. People are making claims and demands that violate the basic rules of mathematics and the laws of physics. It looked like a digital form of mass panic, like the sky was falling.

In this story, the falling acorn was represented by Karl Bode at Dslreports.com, whose article announcing the cap (here) was highly speculative but still reasonable.

Blogger Om Malik volunteered for the role of Chicken Little in calling the cap "the end of the Internet as we know it," assuming other carriers follow Comcast's lead.

But Malik's analysis is preposterous. The video-on-demand services Malik claims Comcast is trying to block... Read more

I wrote about Kindle when it was announced, and again when it arrived, but all of that was just warmup. Today I'll be providing a genuine review.

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

(Credit: Amazon.com)

I've had my Kindle for eight days now. I've bought eight books for it (well, seven plus a short story) and read three of them, installed over 90 other free ebooks, spent time browsing the Web, and... I actually read the manual. On the Kindle, naturally.

It's a good thing I ordered mine so quickly, Amazon's web page for Kindle says they're sold out and they don't even know when they'll get more.

I like it. I like it more than my Sony Reader, which I've blogged about several times as well (here, here, and here). Kindle's bigger and not quite as easy to hold, but it's a lot faster-- faster to start up, faster to sleep and wake, but most critically, faster to turn pages.

At its fastest, with simple text or RTF documents, the Sony gizmo is a little slower at page-turning than Kindle, but at its worst, the Reader is painfully slow-- several seconds for even mid-size PDF documents. Kindle doesn't support PDF files natively at all, but Amazon will convert them for you if you like. That's the theory, at least. I took a PDF file that I'd created for the Sony Reader-- with the same dimensions as the screen it shares with Kindle-- and emailed it to Amazon's conversion service. It still hasn't shown up. (HTML and TXT files I sent did show up, though.)

I've also established that some reviews (like this one from PC Magazine) were a little too quick to condemn Kindle based on misunderstandings. You don't have to pay Amazon to convert your PDF files (you can email them to @free.kindle.com for free email delivery; you then install the converted file via Kindle's USB interface).

Similarly, some reviewers have complained that it's impossible to buy Kindle books if you're not in the US (where Kindle can access Sprint's EV-DO wireless service). In fact, you can buy a Kindle book, then go to the "View Your Media Library" option in your Amazon "Your Account" page. Your new book will appear on the Downloads page, so you can download it and install it over USB... anywhere in the world.

You may be wondering why I bought so many Kindle books. One was a book I've read in hardcover, and I wanted to compare that experience with this one. Three just looked interesting, my usual reason for buying books. And the other four were just cheap! If you visit the Kindle Books page on Amazon and sort by "Price: Low to High" you'll see three books priced at just one penny each plus hundreds (maybe thousands-- Amazon won't show them all this way) for under a dollar.

Actually, many of those are just short stories, priced individually. But that's nice. It's the literary equivalent of selling individual tracks on the iTunes Music Store. Today we may take for granted that we can buy one track from almost any album in the world, but before digital music, we didn't have that much freedom. Amazon's Kindle service doesn't yet have the breadth of iTunes, but over time, it may get there.

The other big thing about Kindle is its free wireless Web browsing. I can't think of any way this is a good deal for Amazon, but it's a great deal for Kindle users. Kindle's Web browser is pretty weak by traditional standards. Amazon calls it "basic", but I think "weak" is more accurate. Still, it'll show you the text from any Web page, and medium-size images are generally understandable.

Dynamic content (Flash, Java, etc.) isn't supported at all due to limitations in Kindle's display technology. But if you're out and around with your Kindle and need to do a quick Google search, it'll get the job done.

I can already tell I'm going to have to write this in two parts, but let's see what else I can add here. Oh, some shortcomings:

The home page on Kindle is a flat list of all your books. If you have an SD card in there, you could have a hundred pages of books, too many for this approach.

Books don't open to the cover by default; they open to what someone defined as the first page of real content. But you may miss the author's preface or other key information. This was a poor choice on Amazon's part.

I deliberately filled up the on-board memory with a bunch of free Mobipocket-format ebooks, then tried to buy a book. The download failed. I deleted a couple of the free books to make room, but I couldn't retry the download from the Kindle. I had to log into my Amazon account from my Mac and retry from there.

As far as I can tell there's no way to print anything from a purchased ebook. Kindle has no printer interface, and a purchased Kindle book can't be opened in any software on a Mac or PC. That's a major pain. I have no intention of printing a whole downloaded book, but it'd be nice to be able to print a page here or there, especially from non-fiction books.

Similarly, it'd be nice to be able to read my Kindle books on my Mac where the screen is bigger and brighter. The Sony Reader comes with a Windows application that can do anything the Reader can do-- and more, such as searching and printing. Amazon needs to offer a similar application.

The power, USB, and earphone jacks, and the volume buttons, should not have been placed on the bottom edge. If there's a cable plugged into Kindle, you can't rest the gizmo on that edge on your lap or a table in front of you. Bad industrial design, I think.

But you know, the overall design-- likened by some wiseacre to the Pontiac Aztec-- no longer bothers me. I think someone at Lab126 (the Amazon subsidiary responsible for Kindle) was just trying too hard. Maybe the designer thought that "edgy" designs require, you know, sharp edges.

I could do without the weird shape; the Sony Reader is much nicer in that respect. But the shape no longer catches my attention. Instead, I just look forward to grabbing the thing and doing some reading before bed. Which is what I'm going to do now. I'll be back in a couple of days with Part 2 of this review.

Before I finish my review of the new Sony PRS-505 Reader (you should probably read part 1 first, here), I wanted to mention that Sony itself has a corporate blog, hosted by corporate-communications manager Rick Clancy.

Peter's new Sony PRS-505 Reader.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Clancy apparently has permission to stray slightly off-message, and a recent result of this permissive policy was a funny blog entry about an ill-conceived marketing slogan for the Reader: "Sexier than a librarian." Explaining the slogan, Clancy said:

Please be assured that this was a tongue and cheek effort on our part, playing off a certain stereotype or a fantasy, depending on how you look at it. With a little humor in mind, our aim was to draw attention to the style and the appeal of this unique device. The ad was never meant to be taken literally. In fact, I have a cousin who spent several years as a librarian, and I certainly would not want to make such an implication about her one way or the other.

Now that's comedy.

Anyway, I haven't spent as much time with my new Reader as I'd like-- too much other stuff going on-- but I figure I've waited long enough to complete this review. Today, I'll talk about the software aspects of the system... and leave one major topic for later.

The short summary is that the new Reader works pretty much like the old one except for a couple of significant improvements.

Like the PRS-500, the new model provides all the basic functions you need to read ebooks. You can view your collection sorted by title, author, or by the date each book was added to the Reader. For those of us with large collections of ebooks, the biggest improvement is that the PRS-505 supports named "Collections" of books stored on the Memory Stick Duo and Secure Digital flash-memory cards. The PRS-500 supported collections on its internal storage, but not on flash cards. This limitation was very annoying, since the flash cards are more likely to contain large book collections.

Unfortunately, collections can only be maintained through Sony's eBook Library application, which is only available for Windows. Books can be transferred directly to the Reader or its memory cards on any machine when the Reader is attached via USB, but only the Library software can associate books with a collection.

Also, collections are still just a one-level hierarchy. I can't have a "Fiction" collection with subdirectories for "Science Fiction," "Classics," and so on. Even with only about 400 titles in my Reader, I could really use a bit more flexibility in categorizing everything.

This wouldn't be a problem if the Reader was faster. Scrolling through a list of 100 books in a web browser to find a specific title wouldn't take more than a couple of seconds. On the PRS-505, like the PRS-500, turning the page in a Collection takes about 1.5 seconds, and you can only see ten at a time. You can't even go backwards from the first page to reach the last page, which would help significantly. (In these tables of contents, short titles end up displayed with larger fonts, which I find annoying. It makes it look like short-titled books are somehow more important than the others.)

In the "Books by Title" and "Books by Author" lists, there's a shortcut page for titles beginning with 0-9, ABC, DEF, and so on-- but there's no such page for Collections.

The real slowdowns kick in when you open up large files, especially PDFs. Bad PDF rendering was the PRS-500's biggest weakness, and I'm sorry to say it hasn't been improved at all in the PRS-505. Rendering large PDF files takes a long time, and most PDFs don't even look very good. In fact, PDFs meant to be printed on 8.5" x 11" paper (or A4 size, or anything larger) are often entirely illegible on the Reader.

The problem is that there's just no way to zoom in to a PDF page very far. The best you can do is switch the display into landscape mode and use the "Medium" zoom setting to put the width of the printed area across the screen. But that isn't good enough for many textbooks, product brochures, maps, etc.

In order to provide us both with a common point of reference, I did a quick Google search for textbooks in PDF format, and found one that is available free from the authors: the third edition of "A Heat Transfer Textbook" by John H. Lienhard IV and John H. Lienhard V.

Opening this book on the Reader only takes a few seconds, but the limitations in the Reader's PDF rendering are immediately apparent. Text on the copyright page, for example, can be displayed no larger than 0.050" in height (for capital letters) in portrait mode, or 0.080" in landscape mode. By way of comparison, the fine print on my latest AT&T cellphone contract was 0.095" in height, and the AT&T contract was darker and thus easier to read.

On page 289 of this textbook, there's a figure approximating the velocity function of a laminar-flow boundary layer. Capital letters in the caption for that figure are a mere 0.045" tall in landscape mode, or 0.035" tall in portrait mode. And in fact, some of the really thin characters, like the letter "i," disappear entirely, apparently falling between visible pixels. This textbook isn't even the worst case; I have other documents in which much of the text is entirely illegible regardless of viewing mode.

And once you get into them, these big PDF files are really slow to turn pages. Click the "page forward" button, and it takes 7 seconds to see page 290.

Okay, so we'll just have to accept that the PRS-505 still isn't very useful for many kinds of PDF documents. That being said, it works pretty well for pure text when the PDF file is properly optimized for the Reader. When I was experimenting with the PRS-500, I figured out that the perfect page size is a width of 3.57" and a height of 4.59" with a font size of 8 or 10 points. I prefer 10-point text, but younger eyes will need fewer page turns with 8-point text.

But the easiest format to deal with is RTF files, which can be made by almost any word processor these days. When I download books from Project Gutenberg, for example, I get RTF files whenever possible. RTF files are better than text files because the Reader scans for the title and author information in the document properties, making the tables of contents look better. Unfortunately, there seems to be one new issue with RTF files on the PRS-505.

Some RTF files now go through a "formatting" process the first time they're opened... and then again each time a new zoom level is selected. Not all of them do, and I don't see what causes it.

A large RTF file can take a long time to format. The Gutenberg version of the Complete Works of Shakespeare took seven minutes and 45 seconds to format before it could be viewed; changing the font size triggered another formatting. Oddly, changing from portrait to landscape didn't require reformatting, even though the actual font size on the Reader's display changes. Once a given font size was formatted, the Reader seemed to remember the formatting; re-opening the book was much faster, about nine seconds.

The PRS-505 also shares its predecessor's ability to play MP3 audio files and DRM-free AAC files too; the latter are most commonly produced by Apple's iTunes. (My advice is not to transcode MP3 files to AAC files, but if you rip CDs to your hard disk, the AAC choice will sound better than MP3s for any given bitrate. An AAC file at 256 kbps will sound indistinguishable from the original CD except on the very best audio gear.) But like the PRS-500, once you start music playing on your PRS-505 and switch over to read a book, you can't pause, rewind, or skip tracks without going back through the menus to the music controls. Personally, I just don't use this feature.

Sony's eBook Library software, which I use under Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro, is much like the older Connect Reader software. It allows the user to add, remove, and read books from the Reader and flash cards. It works pretty well, performing all of its functions much faster than the Reader itself. Copying files to or from the Reader can be a little slow, but that's because of USB throughput limits.

I'm not sure when Adobe and Sony will get Adobe's Digital Editions software running on the Reader, but I'm certainly looking forward to that. I'll review that separately when I can.

Anyway, I'm happy with the PRS-505. It's better than the PRS-500-- although not enough better to justify upgrading if yours still works. The one thing I haven't been able to test is whether the PRS-505 is more rugged than the older model. My PRS-500 display died under suspicious circumstances (suspiciously free of physical trauma, that is). I sure hope the PRS-505 doesn't.

As I said last week in my post about Apple's iPod announcements, I ordered a new 160GB iPod classic as soon as the Apple Store was back online.

It arrived today (Monday)--five days later, from Shanghai--with my custom engraving. I think that's pretty darn excellent.

The iPod packaging has gotten a lot smaller. A box the size of those that contained my first two iPods (a third-generation model, then a fourth-generation iPod when the third-gen model died) could probably hold about six of the new iPod classic packages. I saw the new iPod nano packaging at a local Apple Store this evening, and it's much smaller--and very cool, since it presents the iPod itself under ... Read more