Cloze

Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.

iTunes Wish List!

Apple is missing the Titanic of Cash as it sails on by them, seeking out that iceberg in the North Atlantic. It’s been weeks since I’ve looked at my iTunes Wish List and I just went back to add more tracks that I caught with Shazam, an app on the iPhone that you can use to listen to music and then tag it on your phone so you can remember the details later on.

So much is being missed! This whole thing hurts my head. I’ve got $300 in music that is languishing in my iTunes Wish List and there is no way for me to share it with anyone else. The list is a dead duck. What good is it that I can edit the list and buy things from it if I can’t hand a link out to family and friends? It seems so stupid that I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Apple has all the pieces arranged on the chess board to make a holiday killing but they are playing dead on the whole subject! iTunes, which handles music and it’s store quite deftly (I think), iCloud which enables every connected iOS device to get music all at the same time. It’s like a perfect moneymaking storm! Here’s how I imagine it could go:

  1. Someone (like me) uses iTunes or Shazam and starts to flesh out their iTunes Wish List. This information is stored at Apple, so there isn’t any reason why it can’t be used in other ways to help sell music. Just think of the shameless cross-functional promotion that Shazam could roll out in their iOS app! If you hear music you really love, set Shazam to listen to it, then add it to your iTunes wish list!
  2. On November 1st of the year (date pulled from thin air) Apple emails the primary account holders email address (which is what the Apple ID is formed on) a very friendly email that says something like “For the holidays, we thought you might like a link to your iTunes Wish List. Here’s the link: http://itunes.apple.com/wishlist/634323421232100” Happy Holidays from Apple! Unbidden you get a handy link you can then embed in a tweet, a Google Plus status, a Facebook status, a WordPress Blog Page, or even cross-promote using the Amazon Universal Wish List site. There are so many ways to share links it’s disgusting.
  3. People go to the site and put checkmarks next to the albums or the tracks that they’d like to buy for that person as a gift. Lets say you want to get someone $30 worth of music, but you don’t know what music they’d really love, why not just go to their iTunes wish list? It boggles my mind! As people make checkmarks the total builds and they can cash out using a credit card, paypal, or whatever. The next screen gives the purchaser a great option “Deliver Now” vs. “Deliver on a Date”. If they use the first option then Apple can send a gift receipt immediately, otherwise Apple defers the purchase until the date and time specified.
  4. Apple can then leverage iCloud and so the receiver of the gift watches on the date and time that the gift giver indicated when all their purchased music either becomes available for download or starts automatically downloading over iCloud! At least the person can get a gift receipt letting them know that they have music that they can download on iTunes after they login to their Apple ID.
  5. As people buy tracks and albums from this website Apple can arrange their site like Amazon does to give the recipient a choice to “spoil the surprise” by listing what has been purchased or “decline to spoil the surprise” by either locking the wish list down or hiding tracks that are “in play” for giving.
  6. This would be a great way to avoid collisions when it comes to gift giving. When someone buys an album through iTunes as a gift for someone else that line item is dropped from the wish list website link so that nobody else can buy the music and effectively buy-a-gift-twice.

This entire idea is great for everyone! Music labels love it, it’s selling music. Music artists love it, it’s selling music. Apple loves it, it’s selling music! Gift givers really love it because they can go to a one-stop-shop, plunk down exactly how much they want to get for their loved ones and it’s all taken care of! Gift recipients love it because they get a clear demonstration on how cool iCloud can be when they see a flurry of gift receipts coming from Apple over email and then iCloud chats up the iOS devices connected and all that music starts to load into the device!

Marketing? Jesus Christ on a pogostick! This stuff writes itself! You could put a little animated iCloud character in a Santa outfit! Apple could try to market itself as one of Santa’s favorite elf! If the iCloud symbol is too abstract you could put a animated musical symbol in a box with a bow and show it off that way! The television spots encouraging people to flesh out their iTunes Wish List would be an utter gold mine for Apple, for the Labels, the Artists, to say nothing of making life easier for the rest of us!

And just to state the obvious if Apple ever reads any of this, I want you to have all of this blog post to use as your own. This entire post is copylefted, I don’t give a damn what anyone does with anything I write. Want to make money? Please bring this to life!

All that music is just languishing on my dead-end iTunes Wish List. Duh Apple, DUH!

iPad Apps Series

Over the next few blog posts I will be listing about ten iOS Apps that I find worthy to be on my iPad. I’ve written about my iPad before, how the device has changed my life and it appears from what I can see in the incoming Google Searches that hit this blog, that people might find some of these interesting. One short note to add however, I will not be including the apps that come with iOS 4.2.1 by default, since we all have those and can appreciate them. Since iBooks is pushed when you first touch the App store, that too will be left off the list, as everyone should already have looked into it to see if it fits their needs.

So, without further ado, here’s the first ten:

  1. Evernote – The app has a crashing problem and a display glitch. That being said, having your Evernote library handy even off-network is worth it’s weight in gold.
  2. Wx – Excellent short-and-sweet weather app. NWS is changing some key XML files which might break the app, but maybe the author will cope in time.
  3. Flipboard – The ultimate browser for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. It received a huge shot of adrenaline in the arm recently, but the biggest feature, multiple accounts for everything, is very much overdue.
  4. WordPress – The WordPress App. It’s an okay way to blog and it works natively with the WordPress interface. I’m never quite sure whether my blog posts get in properly or not and I’m always wary that the entire app could crash at any moment. It hasn’t done so yet, but I definitely get the sense that failure is just over the next river bend.
  5. Reeder – My Go-To App for browsing Google Reader RSS feeds. It is very clean and very slick, with shortcuts for Instapaper and Twitter/Facebook. The only thing I would like to see with this app is a “Clip to Evernote” feature. Perhaps it’s coming.
  6. Instapaper – Buy this app, enjoy the service. Nothing brings on the Instapaper love more than sitting at work at 5pm, knowing you have to go, seeing a flurry of unread tabs in Safari and with a few clicks, saving each page to Instapaper, saving it for later… very useful indeed.
  7. Wikipanion+ – Great app to query Wikipedia and keep page details offline when you can’t reach the network. Some people get bent out of shape when they discover that the information in Wikipedia isn’t curated by some scholar. I think they are spending too much time with very nit-picky academics. Sometimes Wikipedia is “Good Enough”
  8. Twitter – The home Twitter client is probably the best of all the Twitter apps out there. I can’t quite make up my mind between Twitteriffic or Twitter. Currently Twitter is on the home screen and Twitteriffic is stuck in a folder.
  9. Friendly – I bought this Facebook app when it was paid and I’ve found it steadily getting better with time. It might as well just be picked up by Facebook as their official iPad app. I don’t think that will happen until Facebook realizes that the iPad is just as useful as a computer or an iPhone to access its services.
  10. GetGlue – At first I thought this app was going to be another lame Foursquare ripoff, but the ability to check in to shows, movies, wine, or a host of other topics really works surprisingly well. The first thing I noticed about GetGlue was that it socialized popular media. You could see who watches Primeval for example and develop new social contacts based on that kind of lead-in.

Picky picky

What arrived in campus mail today was a marvelous surprise. It was my reimbursement request, sent back to me by the central bureaucracy that not only was my request rejected because it lacked a business purpose but also that my reimbursement would not include the sales tax that I paid. =Insert rude gesture here= 🙂

Really, the sales tax comes down to $2.22 but like many things, it isn’t about the money as so much as it’s about the principles behind it. I can’t buy iTunes Cards or iPad Apps directly with my University Procurement Card, so I’m stuck, so the only way to move forward is to fund it privately and request reimbursement. This was something I was fine with, it helps everyone get along and business can continue without interruption. That was, until I discovered that getting said reimbursement is an uphill battle and that I won’t get a fair shake because there is a policy that people can hide behind when convenient.

So, knowing the rules of the ‘game’ now, between me and my employer, I elect to withdraw my initial “helping out” because it is plainly not equitable. I pay money on behalf of this institution and I don’t get a fair and proper reimbursement. I don’t blame this place for the failure, I blame myself. I was dumb enough to volunteer my resources to further the efforts of this institution and that was a mistake. So, a few moments ago I logged into my work-based iTunes account and removed the reference to my credit card. Since there are no funds attached to the account and no credit card, future App purchases are effectively dead until WMU decides on how it’s going to proceed on its own.

And that’s kind of the core of this blog post. How can an institution like this cope with the 21st Century. At first it was just a quaint little nothing, a bird on a radar screen – the iTunes App Store. Ever since Apple pursued this strategy further with OS X 10.6.6 and introducing the App Store to the Desktop, now we have something. Plus these devices are not simply going to go away. iPads are not a fad that is going to just fade away like Bell Bottoms, they’re here to stay and finding ways to integrate them into our “enterprise” existence has led us all to a knotwork of difficulty. The professional instrumentation that exists lacks elegance, to put it mildly.

It’s not my job any more to fret and wring my hands and get all bent out of shape that this place screwed me once again. I’m not angry. I see it as an education. Now I know through a real object lesson what happens when I do something like this, and what have I learned? I’m never going to do this, or anything else like this, ever again. Once bitten, twice shy mostly. My biggest fault is electing to forget about all the times when this place has failed me or let me down or in this case, lead to a wee bit of financial loss. In a way it’s good that I suffered financial harm during this entire endeavor, perhaps that will be enough to keep the memory alive so when I face something like this in the future I can fail to offer anything beyond what is strictly a business option. Reimbursements? Nah, never again, thanks.

Now I await with bated breath to see how this institution copes.

Verizon iPhone 4

Everyone is weighing in on a device that hasn’t been released yet, and everyone already has formed opinions based on rumors and suppositions. Since this is the way it is going, I’ll just toss my unrequested three-cents in with the rest of the noise and babble.

Key Differences between AT&T and Verizon on the iPhone 4:

  1. No 4G Service – Who cares to have broadband speeds in your pocket? Eventually there is a good-enough-speed that people reach, with 3G and WiFi pretty much available everywhere this claim is only going to make the really geeky miffed. If you need such speeds in your pocket, what exactly are you doing IN YOUR POCKET? At some point extra speed only benefits BitTorrent users. The only exception to this is media streaming, but frankly my dear, if you are sitting back and enjoying a movie, chances are you are doing so in the comfort of some place that has WiFi. Just like FaceTime Chat…
  2. iPhone 4 Antennagate – CDMA doesn’t have the same antenna as a GSM phone has, so physical attenuation isn’t a problem. The Verizon phone won’t have the grip-of-death, while the AT&T phone will.
  3. CDMA-GSM Simultaneous Data and Voice – I have to admit to living without this as such a thing is by the design of CDMA very unlikely if not impossible to bring off. I’ve never needed both data and voice services at the same time. My logic is that people smush the phone against their face to talk, they aren’t going to smush-tap-tap-smush-tap. The fact that AT&T can do this is pretty much a cute empty little extra. People who have been using CDMA won’t notice at all.
  4. Network Size – AT&T has done NOTHING to address signal quality in key markets that I find important. Really it comes down to Kalamazoo. AT&T bought out Centennial, along with all their 3G towers in the area. The fact that AT&T hasn’t enabled those towers speaks volumes to me. They don’t care. They claim that their network reaches 97% of Americans, and it does, some are graced with 3G service like the people in Grand Rapids or Chicago, while the rest of us have to contend with their EDGE network. So, what about Verizon? They’ve got a giant network and they have 3G in Kalamazoo. I live in Kalamazoo, it is an important market. I would argue that Kalamazoo is more important than Grand Rapids. So, when it comes to 3G network traffic, who wins? Verizon.
  5. Finally, It’s AT&T PEOPLE! – AT&T, which lets face it is just a shelled out mask that Cingular wears to ritzy dinner parties (yes, it wears another’s tanned hide) is still CINGULAR. Just because it’s wearing AT&T’s dead face and animating it doesn’t mean that it’s somehow got a new soul. Both Cingular and AT&T were as I regard them, abhorrent companies. Cingular for their lameness before trapping and gutting AT&T, and AT&T for being inherently EVIL. Many people don’t recall, and it’s understandable, that AT&T used to be Ma Bell. The giant monster company that abused it’s customers, ran a monopoly, and retarded real technological innovation for decades! This is less of an argument based in reality as it is a name-game since Verizon also was a shard of Ma Bell’s evil empire. It’s not that somehow Verizon is good, of course they aren’t, they are just as evil as AT&T is, but AT&T is stupid and evil. Verizon is clever and evil. It’s a very fine difference.
  6. Waiting around for iPhone 5 – Great, so Verizon is going to get iPhone 4, but Consumer Reports goes on at length about how they are going to wait until iPhone 5 before they’ll look at it again. What exactly are people waiting for? Isn’t the iPhone 4 “Good Enough”? What can Apple do to make the iPhone 5 compelling enough for everyone to suddenly acquire buyers remorse regarding the iPhone 4? They could make the device thinner, perhaps make it transparent, change the shape perhaps but in every other instance the iPhone 4 can be field-upgraded to whatever iOS revision is coming down the pike unless Apple is serious about enabling things like BitTorrent on the iPhone. For this class of device, how much can change? Is it enough to continue to suffer with AT&T? In my case, is it enough to continue to suffer with Sprint? My answer is no. I don’t care what is or is not coming out in June or July. I’ve been waiting for the iPhone 4, without the grip-of-death, on a competent 3G network FOR A VERY LONG TIME. Who cares if you are locked into an iPhone4 for two years? It’s not like an immense base of other iPhone 4’s out there are suddenly going to just vanish. Just because there is something new doesn’t mean it’s needful. Sometimes what you need is right in your hand all along, or in this case, in the traveling roadshow that is Verizon.

For me, this entire release of a CDMA iPhone is mana from heaven. I’m willing to give up data+voice simultaneously for fewer dropped calls (in AT&T’s case) and way fewer impossible-to-make calls (in Sprint’s case). My professional recommendation is that the Verizon iPhone 4 is exactly what people need and they should pounce on it immediately. If you are beyond your ETF-barrier on your contract with AT&T or Sprint, you owe it to yourself to leave them behind and hop on. Even if a few months down the line iPhone 5 comes out, it’s not going to be revolutionary, it’ll be evolutionary. The same way the iPad 2 is not going to make me love my iPad 1 any less. A device is still a device and if it works well, isn’t that enough?

Shuffle thy mortal coil

Everything is done, for the Apple Digital Lifestyle project for our soon-to-retire management person. Getting to this point was a challenge only in terms of getting the data off of the old computer. The old machine was a Dell Dimension desktop loaded with Windows XP. I got the machine running and everything was fine, as far as Windows XP can be fine and I inserted my Knoppix DVD into the disk drive and rebooted. Then began the hurdles, the system was configured to boot first to the HD, not to the DVD, so I changed that and rebooted, the disk wouldn’t read and the system booted to the HD anyways, up comes Windows XP. Turns out, this computer is so old that it doesn’t have DVD, just a plain CD-ROM drive that I errantly mistook for a DVD drive. So I swapped out the Knoppix DVD and traded it for a Knoppix CD, rebooted and finally was up and running in Knoppix. I mounted the volume where the user files lived and used the tar utility to copy them over the network to my iMac on my desk. Once that was done I switched Knoppix out for DBAN, a popular hard drive erasing utility and booted into that, set it to chew away using DoD short wipe and proceeded to unpack the tar file I had copied over. I had unpacked the users data, trimmed out the meaningless Windows junk and ended up with about 800MB of user data in the end, mostly music and pictures and a few documents peppered in. I made a new ‘tar’ file and then copied that over to the new iMac using my handy-dandy USB file transmission cable. I had utterly blanked on the fact that both my iMac and the new iMac had fancy FireWire 800 capability, and only now that I reflect upon it do I feel rather silly in forgetting FireWire.

Once the data was over, I moved all the documents where they needed to be and then I thought about how I would manage the music and pictures. First was the pictures, I opened iPhoto ’09 (which came with the iMac!) and clicked on File, Import, pointed it to the directory that held the mishmash of user data and in about 45 seconds (I couldn’t help but time it) all the user pictures were now in iPhoto. I did the same thing with iTunes for the music and that took a whole 30 seconds. I then threw all the rescued remains in the trash (because they were now in iPhoto and iTunes) and then rescued bookmarks, that took a whole 10 seconds and into Safari it went. Cleaned everything up, installed the ‘Free’ HP All-in-one, and that took 2 minutes to unpack and 30 seconds to set up, I had a test print a minute later. Packed it all up, walked it to the manager’s office and he’s all set to enjoy.

What will he enjoy? His big thing is email and using iChat Video Chat. That’s the biggest selling point I think for this entire adventure. He can see his daughter and her budding family, full audio/video Mac goodness for as long as he likes to do so. I suggested that he could even set up a link in the morning and have a virtual “magic mirror” run all day long so they could spend time close to their loved ones without the expense or trouble of traveling.

After this entire adventure it struck me that I effectively ran an entire micro-sized Apple Store from inside my head. I had a Genius Bar (my office), I was the Genius (don’t have a fancy apple shirt, tho) and I got the user interested, sold, migrated, and trained – just like in an Apple Store. If Apple ever were to establish a store in Kalamazoo I would definitely moonlight there, without a doubt. The last time I did enter an Apple Store was with my Father in Syracuse a few months ago, the salespeople approached and I was busy pointing out a 21″ iMac to my Dad and as the sales guy approached he heard me actually running through his script. He chuckled and smiled and stood behind me. That’s why Apple succeeds, because they impress people like me and we become evangelists. Walking around, free Apple advertising and when someone comes up and asks, we show them all the wonderful fun they could have and then they go and buy into the dream as well, the cycle continues.

Comic Con Day 3 – iPad is Disabled

Just exited the Family Guy panel on Day 3 of San Diego Comic Con and after it was done I opened up my Apple iPad and to my chagrin it said “This iPad is Disabled, please try again in 4 minutes” and my Bluetooth was active. I immediately thought that someone was being hacky and clever with my open Bluetooth stack being a security risk. I left Ballroom 20 with concern that somehow my iPad had been broken into and was now for some reason vulnerable. As I walked along, trying to reset the iPad and turn it on and off to no effect I waited and eventually the device was unlocked. I opened up Google on my POS Blackberry and looked up the phrase, “iPad is Disabled”.

This is where my chagrin was firmly planted. I also brought with me my Apple Wireless Keyboard today, and didn’t think anything about it. While I’m traveling I have my iPad in secure mode with a passcode. Apparently somehow my Apple Wireless Keyboard turned on (probably a nudge) and then it started to feed my iPad guesses to the unlock code. With enough wrong guesses the iPad started to limit access. I’m thankful that I caught it when I did, after 10 wrong guesses my iPad deletes all the content within it.

Apparently my handy Apple Wireless Keyboard has a very touchy power button so now when I travel I’m just going to pull it’s batteries out. A part of me wishes it wasn’t that hard to screw everything up, and another part of me is embarrassed that I even let it happen.

If you are traveling with an iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard, check your batteries!

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 5

The final line on the first page, quite a few applications have shuffled about, and the remaining reviews will be a straight shot through the rest of the pages. Here’s the last line on my iPad:

  • Pandora – Quite possibly the greatest background filler to a game of Scrabble that I could imagine. Plugged in (preserving batteries) you can set it to create whatever atmosphere you wish for whatever may be going on. Mozart or Mahler for Scrabble, great choice. The App itself is great, as all apps are that work the way you imagine they should.
  • Wikipanion – This app gives you a custom interface to Wikipedia. It’s truthiness aside, I find Wikipedia ‘good enough’ for basic information and I absolutely love the ability to save Wikipedia articles for later viewing.
  • StreamToMe – Best $2.99 I’ve spent in the App Store for my iPad. This application and it’s free server software for my Mac gives me the ability to stream video and music content from my Mac Mini connected to a data pig. Instead of having to store all the media on my iPad, I can stream it over my wifi network at home, works like a charm.
  • Settings – The go to place for pretty much all system level adjustments, from Wallpapers to accessing VPN services. On the front page so I don’t have to go a-hunting for it elsewhere. Both my iPod Touch and my iPad have the Settings icon on the first page. Couldn’t imagine it anywhere else.

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 3

Continued from my previous post, these are the apps on my iPad home screen, line by line:

  • WordPress – The best way to write this review is to actually use the app, which I am doing now. The landscape orientation keyboard does take a little bit to get used to but it is easy to type on. The only variance I can see between the web-based WordPress interface and the WordPress app is the apparent lack of formatting controls, in the app it’s down to raw HTML markup if you wish to prettify your text. There is also a lack of proofreading tools for the app, but I expect the app will grow up to include them. The iPad does a very good job at keeping my spelling in check as it uses the system spellchecker to do the heavy lifting. I have my iPad playing classical music in the iPod app while I type this, all I lack is a latte. 🙂 One thing that I have sensed with the WordPress app that may be a bug is that spellchecker doesn’t properly replace text if you select the proper spelling. Just a slight oddity is all.
  • USA Today – The USA Today app is a early morning must read for me. There is something very satisfying about waking up my iPad, tapping on the USA Today and being able to swipe through the days news and proceed through the sections of the newspaper as if I had it in my lap. This app only failed epically once, I had the display rotation locked, then turned it unlocked the rotation, exited, and then tried to reenter. The app would not properly start, I had yo remove the app and download it again, which was an annoyance. It hasn’t failed again since, so maybe it was a fluke. This app, when it gets the crossword and sudoku games will grow up into it’s own, and I can definitely see it taking flu advantage of the iAd system that Apple released in the iPhone 4.0 software update release.
  • iPod – The iPod functions just like you would expect it to, except that it doesn’t appear to have cover flow capability, which is odd. The function is solid and is the one app that can take full advantage of the background audio capabilities that already exist in the classic iPod Touch feature set.
  • Epicurious – This app is a kitchen blessing. You can search their vast recipe collection and construct a shopping list and email it or keep it in your iPad. I don’t see many people wandering the supermarkets with their iPads open, but that may change as the iPad saturates more of the market.

Stay tuned for my next post, Page 1 Line 4!

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 2

Part 3 of my Apple iPad App Review, what I have on Page 1 Line 2 continued:

  • Netflix – The Netflix app is free and provides access to the streaming content of the Watch Instantly system present in a basic Netflix account. The application works well, it has yet to crash, but I did run into a usability headache early on while trying it out. With all video on the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad the native presentation of the video appears with slight letterboxing, depending on how you orient the device while you watch it. There is, in almost every video application a button control to remove the letterboxing and expand the video to use the maximum amount of screen real estate. While using the Netflix app, early on, I mistook the exit button for the letterbox-resize button so every time I would start a movie and try to maximize it, I was actually asking Netflix to go back to the previous video selection screen. I became quite irate at the Netflix app for what I perceived as a epic failure until I realized that I was pressing the wrong control. Now that I know where to expect the control to remove letterboxing, the app behaves as it was designed to, and I’m quite happy with it. The movie quality is at best 720P but that is perfectly acceptable to be able to hold it in your hands or against your legs while you watch. I predict that this, and any front-facing camera adjustment to the iPhone/iPad will melt down any 3G network in a red-hot minute.
  • TweetDeck – A true Love-It/Hate-It app if there ever was one, the TweetDeck app on the iPad is acceptable, it’s worth the cost, which is to say free. In the portrait orientation it wastes a fantastic amount of screen real estate meaninglessly, but at least it doesn’t crash with wild abandon as it does on the iPhone. The biggest gripe I have about TweetDeck, both the iPod Touch version, the iPad version, and the Adobe AIR version is the impossible-to-reconfigure font and font size in twitter text on the display. This app is ripe for relocation and/or removal.
  • Videos – The factory included Videos app is a delight to use, much like the other factory included apps. The folding metaphor when you select videos is very visually appealing and the video itself is crisp and beautiful and all the controls work as you would expect them to. The first video I played on my iPad was Airplane!, it’s how I inaugurate all my Apple devices. Funniest movie of all time, meet best device of all time. 🙂
  • YouTube – I’ve just touched on the YouTube app only sparingly. I suppose other people get a kick out of watching inane people doing inane things. I haven’t posted a video on YouTube and I guess I’m too old to ‘get it’. This app will likely be relocated, as factory apps can’t be deleted from the device. YouTube works for Google, it works for a lot of people, but I don’t really care that much for it. Technically however, it does work well, much like the other video apps on the iPad, and it hasn’t crashed on me so I don’t have anything negative to share.

Next, Page 1 Line 3…