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iPhone Two Years In

2010-07-21T01:41:09Z

Two years ago I wrote, "iPhone 3G One Week In". In that time I replaced the iPhone 3G with a 3GS, copy-paste and multitasking have been added to the newly renamed iOS, iPhone 4 has recently been released and Android has risen to be a viable competitor to iPhone --- a lot has happened. So I thought I'd go through the original post and see where we stand now.

A friend asked the following today, the reply was big enough I decided to post it:

So Wes, you've had your iPhone for a week now - what are your initial comments?

Pros / Cons?

Has it changed your life? Has the battery life been crappy for you? Talk time OK?

Its definitely the best phone I've had. Part of that is due to the tight integration with Mac OS X, which obviously very few companies were going to pull off. As a device its brilliant to use and full of functionality. I'm loving the apps and decent browser. The WiFi is really nice at home. The iPod part obviously works as well and better than any prior iPod.

Excellent Mac OS X support remains high on my phone requirements, although I can see the phone becoming less dependent on a host Mac in the future. The iPod app has improved a bit over time but it still truncates song titles.

The on screen keyboard is pretty much as described. You have to give it time to get the hang of it and you have to trust it. If you're typing a word that would be in the English dictionary you're best to keep on typing even if the word is way off. By the time you get to pressing space its usually selected the right word, which is selected automatically upon space. Two irritations with typing though. Its less likely to get shorter word right, particularly when there's multiple valid options. There's no way that I'm aware of to get a list of possibilities and choose the one you want. Of course being a small word means its not hard to fix and if you type it correctly in the first place then it isn't a problem at all. The other minor annoyance is when you get to the last word in a sentence that is mis-typed with a correct suggestion it appears the only way to accept it is to press space (and then delete the space) or grab a full stop.

So many words dedicated to the on screen keyboard. Nowadays the keyboard barely enters into a review. It works well and saves a heap of space.

I haven't missed MMS at all, especially with a decent email client built in that can talk to Gmail via IMAP and send photos to flickr that way.

MMS was added in iPhone OS 3.0 but my stance towards it hasn't really changed. I think I can count on one hand the number of MMS I've sent. Email remains far more useful to me.

I have missed Todo functionality. I have no idea why Apple have not got this syncing. The support is there in iSync and todos sync with my old phone (Nokia 6280) just fine. I'm hoping that its one of these things that will make it eventually. There's two reasons I miss todo, one to track things to be done, the other is for reminders for things that don't have a duration (which can be put in as calendar entries). There is no way to do reminders without a duration at the moment. Having said that the calendar functionality is comprehensive. It supports multiple calendars, full editing, meeting acceptance and basically anything you can do on the desktop.

Two years later and built-in Todo functionality is still missing and it still annoys me. Its part of the iCalendar standard and Mac OS X has full support in iCal and Mail. I continue to add 5 minute calendar entries with an alert to get around this limitation.

Another annoyance surrounds SMS. When on silent you only get a single vibration on new message, which is easily missed. My old phone did three, which was better. Also when you get an SMS my old phone would show an envelope on the black and white standby screen. With the iPhone you have to wake it up to see if you've got a message after the display goes back off.

The first of these problems has been addressed. iPhone will alert you of an unread SMS twice after the original alert, which certainly helps. However it seems this feature wasn't universally loved as an option to turn it off was added in the iPhone OS 3.0 update.

The AppStore is great, some of the apps are very well done. I'm really liking Byline, Twinkle, Exposure and MoPhoTo. I'm not much of a Facebook user but the Facebook app is very well done. It just the core parts of Facebook without all the crap. Of those five, three are free, one is free by ad-supported (with a pay for version available) and the other AU$12.99. I think that's a pretty good spread for some top quality apps. Some screenshots of these apps are scattered below.

The AppStore continues to be a great success and also a source of controversy from time-to-time. Notably I'm no longer using any of apps linked above aside from occasional use of Facebook. Perhaps not surprisingly the free Facebook app appears to have remained in the top 10 free apps on the AppStore since day one. Another thing to note is the $12.99 price tag of Byline. On launch day the price of apps was generally higher then they are now. The "race to the bottom" has driven prices down. For example Byline now sells for $5.99.

As for apps I'm now using, Tweetie, now the official Twitter app replaced Twinkle some time ago. The official Flickr app replaced both Exposure and MoPhoTo. I now use Reeder instead of Byline for reading RSS. Some other apps I'm now using are:

Accountr for expense tracking. Although I'm writing my own replacement for this one.
SimpleNote for synchronised plain text notes.
Flashlight for those times you need a torch.
TrailGuru for mapping walks and bike rides.
eBay for well... eBay.
tramTracker for tram scheduling and knowing when to get off.

Battery life is nothing brilliant as has been reported elsewhere. You'd probably want to change it every day. Today I watched a video podcast on the way to work, send a couple of SMSs during the day, added a calendar event, got a call from Steve, called the dentist, listened to music, read in Google Reader via the Byline app, read and updated Twitter via the Twinkle app and used the timer to cook dinner and its showing half battery. It was off the changer all last night too.

The battery life remains bad when compared to previous phones I've owned that could go the better part of the work week on one charge. However those phones saw a lot less use and were far less functional. For me the battery isn't an issue as I've come up with a work flow that keeps it charged. I have an iPhone dock at work that the phone remains on all day. That means through the week its always well charged and I generally only have to remember to charge it once over the weekend at home.

A complaint of the old one was that the ringer and message volume was very low and easily missed. [Its] plenty loud enough and its only on about three quarters. Speaking on the phone the volume is good, although I haven't tried extreme environments like a club.

With the speaker volume up fully I have been able to hold a conversation in a club although it certainly wasn't easy. This is definitely better than some of my previous phone such as the Sony Ericsson K700i which just wasn't worth answering a call with if in an even slightly noisy environment.

One of the best built-in apps on the whole phone is maps. Whenever you want to find something, or get the details for a business, get directions, just bring up Maps and it will sort it out. Its as good as, if not better than Google Maps on the desktop. It has the same three views too: Maps, Satellite and Hybrid. The location awareness is great and there's some basic uses of it in the apps so far, hopefully more creative uses come out. One interesting one is an app called Exposure that is a flickr client with a 'near me' function. It shows photos near your current location. Doing so at home brings ups photos of St Kilda Rd, the fountain in the gardens out the front (Pictured above).

Maps remains one of the most handy apps on the phone. The printed map book is a thing of the past (when in mobile coverage areas). Turn-by-turn driving directions are sorely missing from the directions feature but this gap has been filled well by third party apps such as TomTom.

Maybe I'm easily sold on such things but the UI is truly beautiful and being solely finger driven is revolutionary (on a phone). I'm a happy customer.

The iOS UI continues to be good looking and functional but I can't help feeling that its starting to show its age. In the same way that Aqua from Mac OS X has gradually been toned down, refined, and made more consistent and elegant I feel the iOS needs to start going the same way. The mix of colour and lack of consistency across even the built-in apps makes it feel a bit disorganised and toy like at times. For example Calculator and Notes apps vs. Mail and Safari. I believe this is called skeuomorphic design.

Touch driven phones are also now considered quite normal however with the exception of some Android phones I'm yet to see any other manufacturer provide anything more than a terrible experience. I mean an on-screen T9 keyboard, that's just stupid.

In the last two years Android has risen to be a serious iOS competitor. There is also Palm (now HP) WebOS but it just isn't getting the traction that Android is. Android has highlighted iOS's dependency on a desktop computer. The iOS first run experience is a screen telling you to plug it in so iTunes can do its thing. The more Internet focussed Google has taken a different approach where nearly everything can be done and synchronised over-the-air. In comparison Apple's approach seems dated. It will be interesting to see what comes of the now serious rivalry between Google and Apple. Personally I just can't bring myself to use a phone whose primary runtime environment is Java. So it'll be iOS for me for a while.

New Design

2010-07-12T14:00:00Z

Welcome to the all new WezM.net. I've been working on this new version on and off for the past 8 months, I hope you like it. The new site is more than just a new design. I've also migrated away from Wordpress to static HTML files, with content written in Markdown. That doesn't mean I have to manage everything by hand though. I use a Ruby tool, nanoc, to compile the content, ERB templates and SASS CSS into the site you see. Some of the benefits of this arrangement are:

Pages are fast to load, cache headers are set automatically.
No need for a database, cheap to host.
No need to keep up with Wordpress and PHP security vulnerabilities.
Content can be revision controlled (in Git).
I can easily write and preview posts in a real text editor, offline on the train.
I don't have to create a WordPress theme to get a custom design.

The new site supports many of the features of the old one, with one exception: comments. The new site has no built-in commenting. I considered adding comments via Disqus but their commenting form feels very heavy and there wasn't a mobile optimised version at the time I checked. In place of comments I have a direct email and Twitter link at the end of each post.

The aims for the new design were to provide more separation between the technical and personal posts that I write, whilst at the same time allowing them to co-exist on the same site. I also wanted a more minimal design with some attention to the typography used.

The design is also partially fluid in that it will adapt to most screens, however the width of the posts is capped at a maximum to prevent the line becoming long and difficult to read. The design also adapts to the smaller screen when viewed on a mobile device.

Installing Debian With gPXE and netboot.me

2010-03-10T15:16:17Z

WezM.net was down again this weekend. The cause this time was the the large storms in Melbourne flooding the office where the computer that hosts this site lives. The computer escaped the water but the network and Internet connection did not.

The office is located 60km from home so fixing problems like these have to wait until office hours, hence the extended downtime. This is the second time in an many weeks that I've run into this problem so I've decided to move WezM.net to my Mini ITX server, which is more accessible out of hours as its at home.

The ITX server flawlessly powered WezM.net from 2005 to 2007 with a personal best uptime of 407 days. I recently dug it up and had planned on running FreeBSD on it. However over the weekend I decided to take the easy way out and just go back Debian, which originally powered the server. Its a little better suited to this server due the wide availability of binary packages; compiling stuff is not fast on an 800Mhz Via C3. In case you're wondering why I'm bothering with self hosting its because I'm too stingy to pay for a VPS.

The ITX server lacks a CDROM drive and my previous attempts to boot from USB flash drives have failed. This makes installing new OSes a bit of a challenge. I decided to try out installing Debian via netboot.me. As the name suggests, netboot.me allows you to netboot a PC via the Internet. To do so you download and burn their bootable image to CD, floppy or USB drive. I didn't use any of these though as I already had a 8Mb (yes Mb) bootable CF card with gPXE installed on it. gPXE is an open source and enhanced network bootloader.

The installation involved the following steps:

Connecting the CF card to the server (via a CF to IDE adaptor) and booting from it.
Entering the gPXE prompt via Ctrl-b. At this point gPXE had configured the network interface with DHCP.
Boot the Debian installer with the chain command: chain http://netboot.me/2013

After that it downloads a kernel and initrd image and boots. All directly off the Internet. Brilliant!

git's Object Store Efficiency

2010-02-12T19:49:27Z

Hubert Feyrer posted, Musing about git's object store efficiency yesterday. In it he compared the apparent efficiency of git's object store to CVS's stacked patches. His methodology was to checkout all 963 versions of the NetBSD i386 GENERIC kernel configuration file and then sum up the space used. He comes to the following conclusion:

the git model requires about 37 times the space that CVS does

and:

that's not counting the overhead of 962 inodes and the related directory bookkeeping

He finishes off with an acknowledgement that git has data packing features:

I know that git offers some more efficient storage methods via "pack" files, but investigating those is left as an exercise to the reader.

I generally enjoy Hubert's posts but as a daily user of git this one didn't sit right with me. I thought I'd take up the aforementioned exercise.

I retrieved the GENERIC,v rcs file¹ and created a git repository².

I then ran a script³, which committed each revision of the file along with a single line commit message extracted from the rcs log.

The repository then weighed in at 22,352kb⁴ with 3,174 files and directories⁵. This is where git-gc comes in. From the man page, "git-gc - Cleanup unnecessary files and optimize the local repository". After running git gc⁶ the size of the repository was down to 1,068kb, 1.24 times the rcs file. The file and directory count also vastly smaller at 64.

So all in all git fares pretty well. Sure the repository is bigger than CVS and there's a few more files but its not in the order Hubert suggests and its a small price to pay for all the benefits git provides.

1. From ftp.netbsd.org.

mkdir git
cd git
git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/wmoore/Source/NetBSD i386 GENERIC/git/.git/

4. Repository sizes detemined via:

du -sk .

5. File and directory counts determined via:

find . | wc -l

git gc
Counting objects: 2871, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (1914/1914), done.
Writing objects: 100% (2871/2871), done.
Total 2871 (delta 951), reused 0 (delta 0)
Removing duplicate objects: 100% (256/256), done.

Testing performed on Mac OS X 10.6.2 with git 1.6.4.2

iPad and the Future of Computing

2010-02-07T21:50:06Z

The iPad is the console of computers — mmustapic

The iPad announcement last week created a cacophony of commentary ranging from, "Meh, its just a big iPod touch", to, "Wow, we're witnessing the future of computing". On announcement day I was firmly in the former camp. There appeared to be nothing new aside from the larger screen and a custom Apple SoC inside.

Since then I've read a lot of smart commentary on the iPad, which has swayed my opinion quite a bit.

Computing For Everyone Else

Rob Foster suggests its not the geeks that are excited about the iPad:

The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing.

But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else.

I'm a programmer, I write software both as a profession and a hobby. On my computer I frequently use compilers, interpreters, an IDE, advanced text editors, web servers, database servers and command line tools in addition to the more common web browsers, email client, music player, video player and chat client. The iPad feels weak to me because I clearly can't do a lot of those things on it. I am of course in a minority. For everyone else a computer that just works is all they ask. Your typical computer user shouldn't have to know about drivers, viruses, file permissions, software installers.

The Console of Computing

Think of it as a video game console where you download the games. Now extend that thinking to all the applications. — John Debs

I realized today that we think of the iPad as a computer, when it's really a console. No outcries about the Wii being closed — Cory Foy

There's a class of computers that has been operating like Apple's mobile platform for decades: video game consoles. The model of computing that Apple is using for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch is very similar to that of say Nintendo. Closed systems, software approval, single main task at a time, limited expandability, ease of use, hardware abstraction are all features of both consoles and Apple's mobile devices.

Steven Frank and Fraser Speirs suggest we're entering the future of computing with the iPad and I now think they may be right. The iPad and its successors will make computing a bit less general but a lot more approachable for the typical consumer.

All is not lost for us tinkerers though. Just like game consoles the iPad needs software too. And whilst the iPad is not self-hosting (yet) there's still a need for "real" computers and programmers to write the software.

A Dark Future?

Alex Payne is wary of the future that iPad style computing may bring:

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

He makes a good point. If every computer out there were an iPad style device, totally locked down and under the control of its parent company there would be little room for exploration. However that's never stopped people before, just look at the efforts of the iPhone jail-breaking teams or the ongoing efforts to conquer the Xbox 360. Not only that, there's the open source movement fuelled by a desire to make everything from hardware to software totally visible and free to modify.

The products of open source projects don't have a great reputation for having a fine attention to detail or remarkable ease of use but they exist. And just by existing they ensure that there will always be things for the budding tinkerers out there to explore, modify, extend and learn from.

Single Focus Computing

Much attention has been made of the fact that its only possible to run one app at a time. Many people seem to attributing this to a limitation of the processor used in the iPad or the iPhone OS itself. Both of these are of course totally wrong. The iPad, along with the iPhone and iPod touch are quite capable of running more that one process at a time. In fact that's how email gets sent and received in the background and how your music keeps playing when you're in the Facebook app. Milind Alvares attempts to clear up some of these misconceptions in, Understanding Multi-tasking on the iPad: What is it really?.

The iPad is promoting single focus computing. It does away with the memory requirements, power use, and task management that comes along with running more than one major app at a time. Just like hiding the underlying file layout simplifies things, so does this.

As the iPhone has shown us, there's very little actual need for more than one app running at a time. As long as the experience of switching between apps is fast and state preserving it often doesn't really matter if an app is stopped and started or just switched to. There are of some widely cited exceptions to this though: Chat clients and third party music players.

iPad doubters -- remember how iPhone didn't have COPY-PASTE for 2 years? Now compare THAT to multitasking! — Jevgeni Kabanov

The inability to run a chat client or third party music player in the background right now does not mean that it won't be added in the future. I'm sure Apple is well aware of these use cases, just like it proved to be well aware of the need for copy-and-paste on the iPhone.

There are solutions to both these problems that don't require full graphical apps to be run in parallel. The music player problem would be solved if the iPad SDK permitted a non-graphical background process to be left running. The OS could even impose strict limitations on the system resources that the process may use. In fact this is already possible in Mac OS X¹, so given iPhone OS's pedigree may already be present.

The chat client problem could be addressed in a similar fashion: A non-graphical background process with the added ability to send notifications. This is already possible with push notifications, however imagine they could be generated by the background app and perhaps also include standard user interface elements, much like third party apps in the Settings app. This way a new chat message could be displayed, with a field to allow a reply. Obviously these notifications would need to be less intrusive than they are now but it shows its possible.

Flash Must Die

RT @mashable: Apple's iPad: Will it Improve the Web? (Cashmore/CNN)- http://bit.ly/d1UgWF flash, like IE6, must die — Jevgeni Kabanov

From my geeky point of view Flash is a rash on the web and the quicker it just goes away the better. However I know there's a lot of people out there that are writing the iPad off due its lack of support for Flash. The thing is, if Apple sticks to its guns and doesn't include Flash on the iPad it can only help push the adoption of alternatives like the HTML5 canvas and video tags. Sure there's going to be some pain until that time but we'll all be better off at the end.

Clone git Repo on Non-Standard Port

2010-01-12T23:21:51Z

I use an SSH tunnel to access my computer at work from home. On occasion I want to clone a git repo that is on the remote server. To do so its necessary to specify the port, which doesn't work with the conventional clone syntax.

E.g. git clone hostname:path/to/repo. The solution is to be a little more specific:

git clone ssh://localhost:2222/~username/path/to/repo

Mt. Dandenong

2010-01-11T21:41:46Z

Last week while we were still on holidays Manda and I got a good deal on Wotif for a night at Linden Garden's Rainforest Retreat. We set off in the morning and had lunch at Cloudhill Restaurant and Gardens. After lunch we wandered around the many different areas of the garden. The hedges and geometric alignment of the gardens were very cool.

After that it was time to check-in at Linden Gardens. Google Maps gave us a dud route that sent us down a few interesting roads but we made it in the end. Our lodging for the night was "Sanctuary Tower", a three level mini-house with great views. After an in room massage we had a nice dinner at Wild Oak Restaurant just around the corner. The food was excellent and the servings very generous.

The accommodation was fantastic, right down to the graphic design of the web site and stationary. There were lots of inclusions and thoughtful extras. The one complaint was that the bedroom was quite light when trying to sleep given not all the windows had blinds.

In the morning we wandered around the gardens. The rainforest plans seem to have been planted some time ago and now it has that real rainforest feel. The paths in particular stood out as they were totally green with moss. After that it was time to go, it was a short but most enjoyable stay.

Photos of Cloudhill and Linden Gardens are on Flickr. Given the lovely weather we had I also took the opportunity to take bracketed shots to deal with the extreme range of light. I then merged them with the newly updated Bracketeer.

Sensation Melbourne 2009

2010-01-09T20:22:14Z

The end of 2009 saw Melbourne's second Sensation held at Etihad stadium. I was fortunate enough to attend for free again and was once again impressed by the spectacle of the show and tens of thousands of people in white. The crowd seemed smaller than last year but there were still more than enough people to give a good atmosphere.

A selection of photos from the night are on Flickr along with some movies on Vimeo.

Updated Applications

2010-01-08T20:17:24Z

Over a year ago in Update Expectations I noted three Mac applications that I had bought, which had seen little or no attention since their release. Today I noticed that one of these apps had seen a major new release. The application in question is AppZapper. The changelog on i use this notes the following:

Free for all 1.x customers!
Completely rewritten from the ground up for Snow Leopard
Faster, smarter, easier to use zapping
New 'Hit List' feature lets you browse and filter all of your apps
New 'My Apps' feature lets you store license info for purchased applications
Many overall improvements

This is great news. Although it would have been nice to see some evidence the application was still alive in the 3 years between updates.

Also worth noting is another app that I mentioned in the original post, Xtorrent has also seen some recent activity with the release of Xtorrent 2 in beta. I wonder if we'll ever see any of those amazing new features promised for Disco.

Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard

2009-09-18T18:02:43Z

Apple have touted Mac OS X Snow Leopard as having no new features. Whilst there are no new big ticket features there have been plenty of tweaks and refinements. One part that got this treatment was the font smoothing options in System Preferences. In Leopard this allowed you to enable font smoothing and choose between four different levels of smoothing. In Snow Leopard there's now only a single option to enable the smoothing.

The problem with this change is that is appears to default to the light option. As previously identified in, "Consolas on Mac Update", my preferred fixed width font Consolas doesn't look nice with the light smoothing and I prefer medium. Fortunately you can still choose the medium option by setting the preference directly via the defaults command in the Terminal:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

You will need to relaunch any running applications for the change to be picked up. You can do this either by quitting and relaunching or logging out and then back in again.

Before:

After: