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Thoughts on the iPad

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad yesterday, my first thoughts were "Ooooh! Shiny! I want one!"

Then I read the orgy of criticism that washed over the blogosphere last night about all the device's perceived failings and, on mature and considered reflection...

I still want one.

(Maybe two, so I don't have to fight with my wife over it.) [Read more...]

Why a Tablet?

The Apple faithful are all a-twitter about the possibility of Apple introducing a tablet computer at the end of this month. [Read more...]

Augmented Reality at Georgia Tech

Interesting article on Augmented Reality research at Georgia Tech here. One of the linked videos demonstrates a Virtual Pet application on a current generation iPhone. The iPhone overlays an animated image of a dog on realtime video input from the iPhone's camera. The result is a pet that appears to reside in the real world in front of you.

One of the reasons I love what I do... getting to hang out with cool guys like Blair McIntyre!

Wanted: Macintosh Archaeologist

Here's the situation. I have about three cubic meters of obsolete computers, peripherals, and other electronic crap sitting in storage. A couple of ancient Macs (including a pair of PowerBook 2400c "netbooks"). Miscellaneous printers and scanners. Disk drives. A fax machine. At least one stereo system. A handful of Handspring/Palm Treos. Probably a dozen wireless phones. Other stuff. And cables. Bozhe moi, the cables. I could tie down King Kong with the cables. Mostly pre-USB... Apple ADB, and power cables, and SCSI cables as thick as your thumb.
 
Most of this stuff worked when I put it into storage a couple of years ago. (A couple of the Treos have display problems.) It offends my soul to just take it all into an electronics recycling place. But I certainly don't have time to do anything else with it.
 
So... I need an archaeologist to (1) take it all away, (2) sort through it and figure out what's what, and (3) post it all on eBay. You keep half of the net proceeds after shipping; I get half.
 
This would be a great task for a slightly-geeky high school student wanting some cash... or for anyone in the tech business between jobs right now. It'd be nice if you knew something about Macs in the 1990s to make the writeups easier, but if you don't, Google knows everything.
 
Any interest? Email me.

Favorite iPhone Apps

Okay, Mike Schinkel has been assimilated. Good work, all!

I sent him a list of "must-have" iPhone applications, he tweeted about it, and now people are asking what's on my list.
[Read more...]

Do the Right Thing

I had a hardware problem with my MacBook Pro today. Apple delivered a model of stellar customer service. I figured the least I could do in return was write about it.
[Read more...]

Traffic

The effect of having your iPhone Web app listed on Apple's directory: http://tinyurl.com/6s8nyr

Mac OS X Time Machine advice

Apple's Time Machine has saved my bacon a couple of times.  It's not the only backup strategy I use (I'm trying to store more in the cloud), but it's a darned useful one.

When switching to my new MacBook Pro, syncing up with my ten months of old Time Machine backups got hopelessly confused.  And I had wanted to repartition that external disk anyhow.  So... reformat, and restart Time Machine aimed at an empty disk.

Took forever.

The first 30 gigabytes took over 48 hours to transfer... at the princely data rate of 1.4 megabytes/sec.    And this is over a FireWire 800 cable!  I think a decent DSP can do that rate over a barbed wire fence.

I finally figured out that, even with 4 gigs of RAM, the system was overloaded with other processes (apparently Safari, Java, SpanningSync, and TweetDeck were particularly greedy) and was swapping virtual memory in and out like crazy.  I rebooted, logged in, held down the Shift key to disable startup processes, and left it alone.  The trick is letting Time Machine do its thing unimpeded.

The remaining 170 gigabytes transferred in 2 hours... a much more reasonable 188 megabits per second.  From Activity Monitor, three processes -- Finder, backupd, and mds -- took up essentially all of the CPU time, so refraining from running other programs probably helped.  Page outs and swaps never budged from zero.

If you're frustrated by an agonizingly slow Time Machine initial backup, try it this way.  When you're done, reboot normally, and subsequent incremental backups are speedy indeed. Hope this is useful to somebody...

What if Apple built an alarm clock?

So I'm in a hotel room this morning, planning to sleep late, and I was awakened by the hotel room alarm clock at 7:00 am.  It was dark.  I hadn't set it the night before, so I had no clue as to where the buttons and switches were positioned.  I hammered on the top, I slid switches on the side, I seriously contemplated just smashing the damned thing against the wall, and it finally shut up... but it's a helluva way to awaken.  Then I had to turn on the light to figure out how to actually shut it off rather than just snooze it to come back and torment me in nine minutes.

I've hated alarm clock user interfaces for years.  I don't know why they're so uniformly bad.

I have bought a dozen alarm clocks in pursuit of a decent one.  I currently have an RCA RP3270 at home which is adequate, and certainly better than this hotel room POS, but still frustrating.

What if Apple built an alarm clock?  (I'm assuming that you wouldn't use a multi-touch display for cost reasons; otherwise, just use a stripped-down iPod Touch with an AC plug and no battery.)  

Jonathan Ive could make it a test project for new hires.  Design an alarm clock as if the human being on the other end mattered.  Radio-synchronized to the atomic clock in Boulder; it'd be intentionally hard to override the synched time.  You'd have an intelligent alarm-setting screen that made it obvious if you were setting the alarm for 7:00 am or 7:00 pm... not just a small dot in a random corner of the LED display.  You'd have an iPod scroll wheel on the top that let you move the time forward and backwards easily and intuitively.  Once things were set, you'd have gently glowing buttons on the top... yellow for "snooze" and red for "OK, I'm up now."  An iPhone charging dock, since you need to charge iPhones every night... and you could use the iPod functions to set your wake-up music.  And so forth.  

And it would cost $99.  And, you know what?  It would be worth it!

iPhone Typos

The key to typing quickly on the iPhone is to trust the autocorrect. I'm faster on this slab of glass than I was on my beloved Treo keyboard.

But sometimes the autocorrect guesses wrong. Unless I get involved in the Christmas tree business, I'm unlikely to ever type the word 'fir.'. But I type 'for' all the time.

And I can't imagine ever needing to type 'incest,' but the iPhone picks that over 'invest.'

I wish there were a way to edit the dictionary.