Jeremey's Weblog

Snow Leopard!

I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday, and it is fantastic. Noticeably snappier in every respect. The Exchange 2007 support is great, it took a while to initially sync all my mail (mass quantities), but after that it has been singing along. Address Book integration is nicely done, it doesn't try to merge, it keeps your accounts separated, but provides an All Contacts view. GAL search works too (and in mail compose).

Snow Leopard comes with 64-bit Java 6 out of the box, woohoo! I loathe Java, but as I'm working with it now, I am very grateful for the massive speed upgrade, and the JDK 6 support.

I installed MySQL 5.1 x86_64 and it runs perfectly. The PrefPane is 32-bit and requires an (automatic) relaunch of System Preferences, but that's no big deal, it is used infrequently.

*Everything* is faster. So far the only casualty is Checkpoint SecureClient, which I knew in advance.

Good stuff, Apple!

OH!! I also got back almost 15G of HD space! LOVE.

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apple, snow leopard

Me... On An Apple Poster!

I taught an Aperture workshop at the Memorial City Apple Store, and they made a poster for it, with my photo on it! Pretty fun.

iPhone 2.0, 2.0... Bad Apple

This is my second post on iPhone 2.0, because the first was after not having used it for much time.

So read the first post first, as this is the "yeah, but..." post.

Yeah, but...

It's buggy. REALLY buggy. And VERY slow after having been on for a while (a while meaning a couple of hours, since I have to recharge about twice a day if I actually use it for anything).

Slowness detailed:

• 5-10 seconds for contacts pane of phone to load
  
• scrolling contacts is jittery and sluggish
  
• clicking on the contacts search box, to type a name, results in a 5+ second delay while the keyboard loads (?!?)
  
• noticeable (multi-second) delays for the keyboard in all apps
  
• switching panes/tabs in many apps takes several seconds with no UI feedback that your "click" on the tab actually happened
  
• etc.
  

As mentioned, battery life is not just bad, it's atrocious. Most days I need to FULLY charge TWICE. And I'm not using it THAT much. The battery life is so bad that it really negates the benefit of all these cool apps... and since in every other way 2.0 is a significant usability downgrade, there really is nothing good to say about 2.0 on the whole. It sucks.

So back to the buggy part... my iPhone has spontaneously rebooted more times in the past 2 weeks than in the entire year of 1.0. Some apps work all the time, but most only launch some of the time. Super Monkey Ball launches maybe 50% of the time (it's the worst). No errors, no explanations, no diagnostics, nothing.

So the 2.0 UI is much slower than 1.0, to the point that all of the sweet usability is gone. Sweet finger scrolling? Nope... slow and jittery. Touch interface? Nope... takes so long to react that I end up thinking I flubbed it, and then it gets all my touch events at once. The applications are very cool, except using them drains the battery at an astonishing rate (and I'm not talking games here). Oh and they're only cool when they don't crash at launch. And then there are the reboots.

Since I write software for a living, and have for a long time, I know this software. This is software that just barely worked one time when they declared "ship it". This is software put out on a release date whether it's ready or not (and it's not, not even close). Bad Apple!

Of course, then there are the NDA issues for developers. Bad Apple!

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iphone, apple, bad

iPhone 2.0

So I got in on the "hey the 2.0 bundle is out early!!!" download-yer-own iPhone OS 2.0 upgrade thing on Thursday (which turned out to be a good thing b/c the 2.0 upgrade didn't go smoothly for most of the world yesterday). I love it. The big reason I love it: apps! Surprising, I know. The basic OS has some improvements, but the big deal is third party apps.

Of which I have 10 or so installed already... love Twitterrific and NetNewsWire... I use both on the desktop and the iPhone versions are excellent. Especially love synced RSS feeds. The Facebook app is nice, but missing some things. Exposure is awesome for Flickr users. Pay Fraser money! It's worth it.

But biggest of all: games. The games are fantastic... Super Monkey Ball, Chopper, and Cro-Mag Rally are all very, very fun and perfect for mobile gaming. Of course, we need multi-player Cro-Mag now. It's like a Wii remote... with the Wii and the TV embedded in it.

I was pretty surprised that playing a game as a caveman driving a cavecar was fun, but it was. The ridiculousness of that concept adds something to the fun, I think (suspension upgrades for a car made out of logs and nearly square stone wheels? nice).

The only problem with the games? Battery life. That may make me upgrade to the new hardware sooner than I expected. The new battery has maybe twice (?) the life of the 1st gen hardware... Super Monkey Ball is death to my battery.

Oh I almost forgot... a very close 2nd to games... Remote! Apple built a full-featured iTunes remote app (which is free). It works over Wi-Fi, you can browse your library, playlists, control Airtunes destination, etc. It's exactly what I was looking for a couple days ago on twitter.

I'm super happy with 2.0, and especially given that it's free! Now if only all the games were free... sigh... :)

P.S. screenshots are really cool... hold the home button and press the lock button once, voilá. Email to yourself. Post on blog. Eat, drink, and be merry.

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iphone, mobile, iphone 2.0

TUAW: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

I love the famous Mark Twain quote, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

TUAW seems to have forgotten that in a pretty pathetic post about the Japanese not wanting the iPhone. Or maybe they're just groping for traffic. Or maybe they're just parroting the news article without thinking about it.

The title of the article is "Survey: 91% of Japanese don't want an iPhone". Assuming that's true, that would be almost as many iPhones sold in Japan as sold in the US in its entire first year (roughly 11 million and 14 million, respectively). 95% of US Americans (snicker) didn't want an iPhone either.

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iphone, tuaw, statistics

Great Post on Why the iPhone is Game-changing

Here's a hint... it's not the feature list...

Smartphone makers- better wake up and smell the Applesauce from @jkendrick.

Though, I have to say, I'm about as geek as one gets in many ways, and I love my iPhone too... for the same reason. My "other" phones are broken in so many ways I can't count. They're frustrating. The iPhone is almost never frustrating.

Take GPS for example... I have three phones with GPS in them... however, the GPS apps are so poorly written that I couldn't figure out how to use them, and to get real benefit, you have to subscribe to yet another service from some company I've never heard of. So do I use the GPS? Nope, never. Will I use the GPS in the iPhone 3G? Almost certainly.

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iphone, usability

Pogue on "Blogger-Bashers"

Interesting post from David Pogue about the success rate of people bashing new Apple products.

[from @steverubel]

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apple, pogue, technology

Aperture 2 Mini-Review

So Aperture 2 (affectionally A2 from here on) is out, and it's pretty good. My initial impressions, subjective of course:

• Performance is much improved, especially once previews are rendered (or if you turn them off)
• Quick Preview mode is fabulous for edits
• To my eye, the RAW conversions look even better, and they were already my favorite of the RAW converters (tied with Capture One Pro). Keep in mind I haven't imported any of my old images and I can't upgrade my library until I buy A2, so this is based on new images shot around the house
• The new interface is nice, I prefer it (the tabbed interface on one side) to the two-side-panes interface of 1.x
• The new adjustment tools are excellent... the retouch tool has worked very well for me so far, the definition and vibrance controls are very welcome, and the new exposure brick is really nice
• Vignette tool! Hopefully it isn't broken like Lightroom's
• The straighten tool is much improved and much, much faster
• Publish to standalone .Mac web gallery is very nice
• Workflow is essentially the same with some incremental improvements... this is a good thing, workflow is the biggest reason I use Aperture (that and the RAW conversion quality)
• Background exporting!

Things that disappoint:

• No curves adjustment (come ON people... yes I know Aperture's quarter tone levels manipulate an S-curve... but sometimes I don't WANT an S-curve, I want a W-curve, or a C-curve, or just any bloody curve I want... Apple should not have shipped a major upgrade without curves, there is no excuse)
• No color-based B&W conversion (vs. channel-based)... sigh... to Photoshop I go, to Photoshop I go, hi-ho... etc.

Things I haven't tried:

• Tethered shooting... the demo/tutorial for this makes it look fabulous
• Searches... I hear they're faster
• Time Machine... not using it yet
• Vaults... I assume they are unchanged
• Importing my 1.5 library
• Actually publishing/exporting except to local folders
• Plugins like FlickrExport

Supposedly there's an image adjustment API/SDK now? Which could mean actual plugins? Which could mean curves or good noise reduction or what have you? That would rock. I haven't confirmed this yet.

All in all, it's a very good upgrade. It's a little weak for a 2.0 IMO, but that's because I'm really put off by the lack of curves. A2 is an incremental upgrade, it feels like a very nice 1.6 or a bit weak 2.0 to me, but maybe that feeling will change as I use it. Will I pay for it? Yep.

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aperture, apple, aperture 2, dam, workflow

Air Thoughts

The Air is exactly what I want in a laptop. I don't understand people who are complaining about it. OK, if you want a desktop-replacement laptop, guess what... this isn't it!

I almost never use my optical drive on my G4 Powerbook... the only times I've used it in the last year+ were times when I could easily have used Remote Disc.

I don't use wired networking on my laptop. I almost never use USB, so one port is sufficient for me.

My Powerbook already functions as an Air, only much slower, much bigger, and much heavier. Seems pretty obvious to me.

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apple, macbook air

Leopard Desktop Sharing

This is very cool. When browsing your network, you can just click on a Mac and click "Share Screen", and up it comes (with appropriate auth, of course). Looks like VNC to me... maybe the screen sharing client will talk to any VNC server?

In any case, here's my laptop inside my 30" desktop:

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apple, macosx, leopard