Jeremey's Weblog

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.

Technorati Tags:
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.

Technorati Tags:
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

Leopard: Better In Every Way

Now that the irritating upgrade issues and concomitant Internet outage are over, Leopard is a truly beautiful thing. It is better in every way I can think of, and a lot of ways I wouldn't have thought of (e.g. the new active vs. inactive window UI decorations). The new features that I've used so far actually add a lot of value (Quick Look, Spaces, Cover Flow). The amazing thing is that the whole system is noticeably faster, everything is very snappy. More later, but I thought I'd say something more positive after the upgrade story.

My Leopard Upgrade: Tale of Woe

My last 12 hours has been Internet and OS Hell. Comcast blew a gasket last night and our service was down for 12+ hours. In the meantime, I tried to upgrade to Leopard. The upgrade was flawless, except for two little tiny things, which caused the whole experience to be very painful.

At least one of them is Apple's fault, the second is arguable. Anyway, here goes...

The tale begins last night, at the mall, which closes at 9, but the Apple store remained open until 10, per their Leopard release party plans. We had other commitments, so I arrive at the mall at 9:50 or so. Doors are locked. WTF? A security guard comes to the door to let someone else out and asks if I'm an Apple employee, I say no, I'm a customer, and he says the mall is closed. I say the store is open. He says the mall is closed. It so happens that at that moment, I'm on the phone with an Apple employee in the store, to ask them to come open the door, and finally the guard decides not to be an a-hole and lets me in.

I buy Leopard and I get a t-shirt and I leave.

We get home... no Internet. I call the old Roadrunner tier-3 tech support number (I have a commercial account), it's not the same anymore, it goes directly to hold, no idea if anyone will answer. OK, fine, I call 1-800-COMCAST... on hold, for 45 minutes. Finally I get someone... I tell them the situation, they give me the commercial support number (yay). I call... after 4 levels of menus, I get connected to a human. There's an outage. No ETA. Great.

In the meantime, I clean up my HD and pop the Leopard DVD in. I click install. It restarts and the installer comes up... great. Something is working. I click continue and it gives me a list of drives to choose from for the install. My main drive isn't listed. WTF!

OK, possible problems... I have 2 internal drives... no idea why it only sees one, the one that I don't boot from. But if I remove that one, it should see the other one, it would have to, right? Let's try it... nope. Doesn't see it. OK, disconnect both external drives, the printer, the abacus, the kitchen sink, etc. Restart... still doesn't see it!

Curse you, Leopard scum!!

Find Leopard box, dig out manual, look up support number... ready to call. Oh, wait... it finally sees it! But it's grayed out. This is weird... now it's not grayed out... it's there... I can click it... I'm saaaved!

Apparently, it was trying to calculate how much more space it would consume on my drive. You know what? I just don't give a crap. If you must waste time calculating that, could you please do something like TELL ME? So I don't disassemble my entire computer to see what the hell is making you be so stupid?

Oy. OK, Leopard installs, it's pretty quick, painless, etc. Restart. Apple logo. Blue screen. Blue screen. Blue screen. Oh, look, here's my mouse pointer. Blue screen. Time passes. Blue screen.

Curse you, Leopard scum!!

Call Apple support. "Greater than 15 minute wait time." Lovely. While on hold, dig out iPhone, to google this problem. Oh, wait, Internet still down.

Curse you, Comcast scum!!

Of course, my Wi-Fi is up, just the next hop isn't, so my phone doesn't know its efforts are futile... OK, disable Wi-Fi on the phone... now google...

Yep. Other people have this too. Apple doesn't know WTF the problem is. Nice. Ah... some light... it's APE extensions... Leopard can't finish booting because of APE extensions?!

Curse you, Unsanity scum!!

OK, I dunno whose fault it is, really, I'm just cursing everyone at this point. :)

Macfixit has instructions to fix. Single-user mode. rm -rf. Done. Reboot.

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

Leopard is gorgeous. Fast. Spaces is AWESOME. I love it.

...and... the 40D is supported! Woohoo! ROCK.

OK, I'm done.

Speaking of Aperture...

I gave an Aperture workshop at the Memorial City Apple Store last Saturday, focused on using Aperture as the core of your workflow. It wasn't very well attended (you never know with in-store kinds of things), but it was great to have the opportunity to do it and learn from the experience. Now to refine it and figure out ways to remember to say everything (Aperture is such an amazing piece of software, it's easy to forget important cool stuff when teaching it).

Ironic that I'm simultaneously getting fed up with Apple over the lack of 40D support. :) All I gotta say is it better be in Leopard next week!!

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aperture, apple, photography