But, usually, They Just Work™.

However, I've encountered a bizarre problem with one of my MacBook Pros. (Oddly enough, with the office unit, which I keep pretty pristine. I run all the weird experimental stuff on the unit at home.)

Safari doesn't work on Wi-Fi.

Firefox and Chrome work fine. But Safari just displays blank pages with "You aren't connected to the Internet."

I thought it might be a weird setting on GT's routers, so I brought it home tonight. Plain-vanilla Belkin router with WEP security. Same problem. The Network settings in System Preferences are identical to my home Mac, which works fine.

And Safari runs fine with the Ethernet cable connected, so it's only with Wi-Fi.

I deleted and reinstalled the latest version of Safari from Apple's Web site. Then, in frustration, I handed it off to my tech support staff, who reinstalled Snow Leopard and all the latest updates.

Safari doesn't work on Wi-Fi.

Neither do most other network applications, but not all: Evernote and Tweetie both fail. Mail.app fails, but Thunderbird works fine. System Update fails, but Network Diagnostics shows six green balls and "Your connection appears to be working."

This laptop has certainly worked with Wi-Fi in the past — I travel with it — but I don't remember the last time it worked, or anything I've done that could make it fail.

I have absolutely no idea what to do. I stay pretty up to date on this stuff, and it's stumped me, plus two employees who I pay to stay up on this this stuff. Any suggestions?

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.)

What really strikes me about the iPad is how "Apple" it is... in the sense of Apple's product introduction strategy for the last several years. Define a minimum feature set to delight a particular constituency, sweat all the details to serve their immediate needs, ruthlessly leave out features near and dear to the twitterati, and leave plenty of room for upgrades later.

(I mean, look at your iPhone. Do you remember how many limitations the very first iPhone had, less than three years ago? Heck, I didn't buy one until the App Store came online... do you remember that wasn't until a year after launch? And global search and cut-and-paste, to name just two features I use daily, didn't arrive until version 3.0 of the OS.)

This is iPad 1.0. We'll see a lot of changes over the next couple of years. (And, yeah, I'll feel like a chump for being an early adopter, but c'est la vie.)

That being said, my thoughts on a few specific perceived deficiencies:

1. No stylus. I predicted this last week. Give him credit for consistency... Steve Jobs has clearly decided that multi-touch and on-screen keyboards are the future, and he's sticking to his guns. I happen to disagree, and wish there had been a stylus option, but he's the CEO, not me. I'm going to optimistically treat this as a third-party opportunity, and wait for someone to bundle a capacitive stylus with an app similar to OneNote.

 

2. No camera. I have to admit, this one surprised me. I was really expecting a front-facing camera for video iChat. I can think of a couple of reasons why it didn't happen. The prosaic one would be that AT&T told Jobs that their wireless network would keel over and die if millions of people started using videoconferencing in 2Q10... but, if that were the case, it could have been limited to Wi-Fi only.

   I'm going to take a more Jobsian view. Whatever device you have with a front-facing camera—be it a MacBook, or one of the Nokias, or an Android device—you never quite make eye contact with the other party. And this is the sort of detail that drives Jobs mad.

   Check out this Apple patent. Conventional wisdom is that the iPad will get a video camera in a future hardware iteration. I'm claiming otherwise. I now believe that you won't see a version of iPad with a separate front-facing camera... we'll have to wait until the technology matures enough that you can look straight into the screen.

   At which point, we won't be able to imagine doing it any other way. Very Apple.

 

3. Connectivity. I think Apple did exactly the right thing by offering a Wi-Fi only version and a 3G-plus-WiFi version... and the price points aren't bad. People in the U.S. can complain about being limited to the AT&T network all they want, but we have no idea how much money AT&T put on the table to maintain exclusivity!

   For me, since I already have an iPhone with 3G, I'm hoping for some sort of tethering between them. If not... I think you could make a compelling argument for buying the WiFi-only version and a Verizon MiFi. I think that's what I'm going to do.

 

4. Charging. Sigh. This was just wishful thinking on my part. I thoroughly understand Apple's need to control the proprietary 30-pin dock for synching and docking and hardware accessories. But I was hoping that they'd have put in a mini-USB jack with only the power pins connected... so, if you're out somewhere and your battery is dying, you can use a standard charger to get some juice. Mini-USB chargers and cables are ubiquitous, because they're used in Blackberrys, and cameras, and Bluetooth headsets, and even my Harmony remote control. This would have been nice, but I didn't really expect it.

 

5. Micro-SIM. This was my only real "WTF" moment of the announcement. So you create an unlocked 3G device, which will clearly ship globally sometime this year, and instead of the bog-standard SIM card that's been around since rocks were soft, you go with some funky new "standard" that no one else has adopted yet? You can't tell me there's not room for a standard SIM card in a device this size! I don't get it. Apple is all about driving adoption of next-generation standards—from 3.5 inch floppy drives to FireWire to USB—but this just strikes me as dumb. Somebody please explain?

 

Anyhow, those are some of my initial reactions to the criticism. (Which I think will eventually look a lot like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.")

I already read a lot of books on my iPhone, and this will clearly be a better solution for that... meaning I was right not to jump into the Kindle/Nook fray.

A lot of my evening Internet consumption will fit nicely on my iPad, and I can always walk across the room to my laptop if I need to compose an email of more than a couple of lines.

I'm actively looking forward to walking into presentations with this and a VGA cable (although someone sorely needs to make a thinner VGA cable, or it will be bulkier than the iPad!).

I'm not going to give up my laptop or my iPhone, but I think there's room in between. In two months, we'll see if anyone agrees with me.

Of course, this being Apple, nay-sayers abound. They seem to come from two different directions.

1. Since tablet computers have been around forever and have been resounding market failures, why should this one be different?

   (Disclaimer: I invested in a company that made software for Tablet PCs in the late 1990s. It was a technological triumph but, as alluded to above, it was a resounding market failure.)
   

2. Apple already has a tablet computer—it's called an iPhone/iPod touch—and it already has a small portable full-featured computer—it's called a MacBook. So where is there room for a "middle product" without cannibalizing existing sales?

 

Lots of good points being made in those links. But I can answer Joe Wilcox's challenge: "What would you use an Apple tablet, or any other, for...that you can't do on an iPhone or laptop?"

For me, it's easy: Take notes in meetings.

Dilbertian arguments about meeting productivity aside, I live in meetings... sometimes eight or ten in a day. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes around a table with a dozen other people. But there are two things I can't do in those meetings:

1. Unfold a laptop, no matter how small or sexy. Because once you have a laptop on the table, you have literally erected a wall between you and whoever you're meeting with.
2. Hold up my iPhone and focus on typing in that teeny-tiny screen. (Holding the iPhone down in my lap and not-so-discreetly reading email is a faux pas, but happens anyhow. But scrolling and reading doesn't take the same level of focus as typing.)

 

So in this year 2010, when we're supposed to be orbiting Jupiter, I'm still taking notes with a pen in a Moleskine notebook. Then I ignore them.

What I want to be able to do is take notes on an electronic device that automatically syncs them with something in the cloud (PBworks, or a Google doc, or something). Then when I get back to my desk, I can edit those notes, forward them to co-workers, add tasks to a timeline, or generally do anything productive with them without trying to read my own handwriting and re-type the contents. And I want to do it with Apple's signature UX and polished UI.

Oddly enough, I used to use a device that gave a vision of how this could be possible... and Apple manufactured it in 1993. It was the Newton.



I won't go into my impassioned defense of the Newton here—once your product has been skewered by Doonesbury, it's pretty much all over. And, really, the product didn't hit its stride until the release of the Newton 2100, only months before Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed the project because of its guilt-by-association with John Sculley. (The 2100 had an 8x faster CPU, which finally let the handwriting-recognition algorithms keep up.) But I could do something with my Newton 2100 that I couldn't do with a whole series of Graffiti-based Palm PDAs, or a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet, or my iPhone: I could take notes in meetings.

Real-time, as fast as I could write, in outlines that I could rearrange and organize and search while still in the meeting. Because Internet connectivity was still primitive, and wireless basically nonexistent, I had to dock the Newton with my desktop and transfer the notes over a cable... but the core note-taking functionality was there. Transmitting the bits differently would have been a trivial improvement, had the product survived.

And because the Newton stayed horizontal on the tabletop or tilted in my left hand, I could maintain easy eye contact with other people in the room, glancing down at the screen precisely as I do with my Moleskine notebook... a completely different interaction than occasionally peering at them over the lid of a laptop computer.

Apple still doesn't make anything that can do this. Neither does anyone else.

And I fear that, after January 26th, Apple still won't make anything that can do this. Because all of the sexy applications—watching movies, and editing photos, and reading graphically-rich ebooks—can be done with what Steve Jobs calls "the best pointing device in the world... our fingers."

You can't take notes that way. Even with some sort of exotic haptic feedback, typing on a tablet means focusing on the tabletop, not whoever you're meeting with. And fingerpainting lettershape is technically impressive, but slow, slow, slow... requiring you to move the whole hand, not just twitch the point of a pen. And although I know someone who can type 80 words per minute on his Twiddler handheld input device, I suspect the very steep learning curve will keep it out of the mainstream (therefore, out of Apple's product line).

Rapid eyes-up input requires a stylus... either with sophisticated handwriting recognition or with something like Graffiti. And with all the exotic possibilities being hyped for the Apple tablet, no one is mentioning a stylus.

Because Steve Jobs hates the stylus, because it reminds him of the Newton.

Which means we still won't be able to exploit what should the the killer app of a thin, powerful, touch-screen device, nearly two decades after the Newton was released.

Which is a damned shame.

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

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.

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

I don't claim any special insight or wisdom here, but having spent more than the purchase price of my iPhone in the iTunes Apps Store over the last five months, this is what works for me.

First off, my first Home screen. (Which, in case you didn't know it, is now easily accessible from any of the nine possible Home screens... press the "Home" button once to get to the grid of applications, then press it again to go to the first screen on the grid. So this is where you should put the stuff you use most often.)

Apple standard

Seven of my "first Home" applications, plus two on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, are Apple standard: Text, Photos, Maps, Camera, Phone, Clock, Settings, Email, and Safari. Enough said about those.

Ten more of the standard apps didn't make the cut, and they're relegated to another screen: iPod, iTunes, App Store, Stocks, Contacts, YouTube, Notes, Weather, Calendar, and Calculator.

The first four of those I use only rarely; your mileage may vary. Contacts usually gets launched from the Phone application, and YouTube usually gets launched from within Safari, so they don't get top billing. The last four have been replaced by more capable third-party apps (see below).

Free Apps

• Google Mobile App — if you haven't tried it yet, you don't know what you're missing. Ought to be burned into every iPhone's ROM.
• GTLogin — only relevant if you're on the Georgia Tech campus. If you're on campus, and haven't downloaded GTlogin, make that your next step.
• WeatherBug — way more detail than Apple's (admittedly pretty) app. Now uses the GPS to know your current location!
• Zenbe — One of a zillion to-do list managers. This one is simple, free, and syncs nicely with the Web client.
• Evernote — I can't understand how this app can be free. A vastly more powerful replacement for the Notes app, but this can include photos, voice recordings, etc. Automatic OCR of photographs is incredibly cool; I suspect some low-wage English-speakers in India or China are chained to their workstations to type whatever they read in your photos, but I honestly don't know. Synchronizes with an equally powerful client on your Mac or PC (or on the Web). A recent release permits local storage, so that you can access favorite notes offline. I don't think I scratch the surface of Evernote, but it's wonderful.
• Quotations — Alright, I'm biased, because I wrote this one. It's a Web app, not a standalone App Store app, but I like it. It's free! Try it at http://tr.im/ipquote!

Commercial Apps

• Twittelator Pro — There are at least half a dozen Twitter clients for the iPhone; I've paid for at least four of them. I like the feature set of Twittelator Pro, it's fast, it's stable, and the developer added two features because I asked nicely. Instant brand loyalty! Well worth five bucks.
• PCalc — Sorry, but my brain only works in RPN. Comes from being a Georgia Tech student in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I've downloaded at least five RPN calculators for the iPhone, have paid for a couple, and I keep coming back to PCalc. (I've used PCalc on my Mac for years. I was so confident in James Thomson's abilities that I actually paid $10 for PCalc on July 10th, even though I didn't get my iPhone 3G until the next day! Yes, I paid for software that I couldn't install or run. It's that good.)
• SplashID — I use a new randomly-generated password for every Website that I visit. So I need a secure place to keep them. I have paid for both 1Password and SplashID. Both have their good points. At the moment, the $10 SplashID retains its slot on my first Home page, while 1Password is on the second page. Take that for what it's worth.
• Favorites — A simple $2 application that lets you store 4, 9, or 16 photographs, then associate phone, SMS, and email addresses with each. A single tap connects you; a double-tap lets you choose your connection. This should have been built into the iPhone OS.
• SaiSuke — I have my entire life loaded into multiple Google Calendars. Before SaiSuke was released, I had a complicated sync path (Google Calendar to Spanning Sync to iCal to Mobile Me to iPhone); any failures along the way would cause my iPhone to have out-of-date information. Since those "failures" included simple things like my Mac being turned off or asleep, this wasn't reliable. Now, SaiSuke is a native iPhone app that is a Google Calendar client! One wireless connection, one button press, and items created on my laptop and items created on my iPhone are in sync. I expect Apple to eventually duplicate this functionality, but for now, SaiSuke is well worth $10.

eBook Readers

I have found myself reading a lot of eBooks on my iPhone. I have four readers installed:

• Stanza
• eReader
• BookZ
• BookshelfLT

All four have advantages and disadvantages. Stanza has the most responsive developer. eReader is the only choice for encrypted books from eReader.com and Fictionwise.com. I could probably survive with just those two. BookZ has some nicer control options, and BookshelfLT integrates best with the Baen online library.

Other Goodies

Other apps that are too good to ignore, but who didn't fit into my first Home screen—in alphabetical order:

• AcidSolitaire
• Bloomberg
• CastCatcher
• CubicMan
• Dynolicious
• FiveDice
• Flixster
• Google Earth
• GoSky Watch
• i.TV
• Infopedia
• Instapaper
• Loopt
• MotionX Poker
• Pandora
• Q Contacts
• ShoZu
• SmugShot
• SonicLighter
• SplashShopper
• Thereminator
• YPmobile (although, honestly, Google Mobile probably replaces this now)

Most of these are cheap or free.

So, that's my list. What's yours?

July 2009 Update

Six months later, I've made a few changes.

Georgia Tech has improved its GTwireless login (letting you have the option of logging in a device only once every fifteen days), and the students responsible for GTLogin have apparently moved on to other things.

Stanza can now read encrypted eReader files, so I don't need the standalone eReader app anymore.

I am now using Tweetie instead of Twittelator Pro (although both apps are very good, as is BirdFeed... you really can't go wrong with any of them).

As suggested by Richard Evans in comments, I'm now using The Weather Channel app instead of WeatherBug.

Although I remain a huge fan of PCalc, the folks at Infinity Softworks have pushed it off of my home screen with FastFigures.

And, of course, the big change is that Google Calendars can now sync with the native iPhone Calendar using ActiveSync; this makes SaiSuke unnecessary.

I wonder what will happen in the next six months?

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.

My three-week-old laptop woke up dead today. I Googled the symptoms on another computer, performed some tests, and convinced myself it was a hardware problem.

(It's almost never a hardware problem. According to Pournelle's Law, it's usually a cable. If it's not a cable, it's something you did to the software. Bugs, viruses, and hardware problems are way down on the list of likely culprits.)

A hardware problem meant calling AppleCare, or visiting an Apple Store in person. I don't think Genius Bars replace logic boards, but I figured it was better to hand my laptop to an Apple employee than to rely on UPS/Airborne/whatever, since our building has had problems with package delivery in the past.

I called the Apple Store at Lenox around 10:30 am. Their first Genius Bar appointment was 7:00 pm tomorrow. When I sounded disappointed, the woman who answered the phone volunteered to check the Perimeter store, and found a 3:45 appointment today. First example of excellent customer service: she didn't have to do that, but it made my life better.

I got to the Perimeter store a little early. Friendly T-shirted employee greeted me, sent me to the Genius Bar maitre d', he explained they were running right on time, and asked me to wait until 3:45. At 3:45, he came over and introduced me to Brendan behind the counter.

I had had a few minutes to think over what I'd say to Brendan, so I dove in:

Laptop wouldn't boot this morning, wouldn't pass POST, got three long beeps. Googled that, and it means bad RAM. Popped the case, started swapping RAM modules. It runs fine with the bottom slot empty and either module in the top slot. It fails POST with either module in the bottom slot. Sounds like a logic board problem to me. I figure it's gotta go back?

That took thirty seconds. Brendan's immediate reaction was: "Hmm. It shouldn't do that. We can send it back... but is this a custom build-to-order? If not, we can see if we have a laptop like this one in stock." No dithering, no "let me go check with my manager," no "expediting fee," just trying to figure out the best thing to do for me.

Wow. This is really above and beyond the call of duty, and I didn't expect it.

Turns out they had an identical unit in stock (one argument against buying BTO). He hauled it out, broke the seals, popped out the factory hard disk (which required removing only one screw!), popped in my non-standard Samsung 500 GB, closed it back up, and handed it to me. He spent more time doing the paperwork than the hard disk swap.

I was out the door smiling at 4:06 pm. Elapsed time, 21 minutes.

I don't think you can do that with a Dell.

Let's do the math. At 3:47 pm, there were two machines in Apple's store. One was broken, the other one was going to get sold to someone else for full retail. Apple was obligated to fix my broken one under warranty, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask me to ship it back to a repair depot, leaving me without a laptop over the weekend (at least). And I'd likely have had to drive out to Perimeter again to pick up the repaired unit sometime next week; that's most of an hour round-trip. But my time and inconvenience are not a tangible cost for them. This approach would leave them with the untouched new machine on the shelf, ready to be sold for $2499.

But Brendan instantly decided to swap machines with me. I walked out with the new one, and Apple gets my old one back. They'll repair it and sell it as a refurbished unit online for (I suspect) $2299. So, choosing to delight me as a customer incurred a real cost for them of $200.

Is Apple hardware overpriced? What's your time worth?

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

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...

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!