jerakeen.org

created 05 October 2009 in links tagged apple, competition, palm and sync.

Craig Hunter tries to complain about Palm’s approach to music sync.

You see, Palm doesn’t need the iTunes app to sync the Pre. [..] They can sync the Pre to a customer’s iTunes music library with a public, open, and documented approach that has been used by third-party developers and device makers for years. This capability was created by none other than Apple itself

I don’t think this is true. I can find no documentation of the iTunes music library format. It’s mentioned in a KB article, yes, but only alongside other iLife applications. It’s a way for Apple to decouple their iLife apps and have, say, iPhoto play music while doing slideshows.

He’s really saying “don’t use this unsupported made-up API, use THIS unsupported made-up API that happens to have been more reliable in the past”. But presenting it like it’s the Proper Way of doing things is deceptive.

http://hunter.pairsite.com/blogs/20091004/

created 29 September 2009 in links tagged apple, itunes and music.

Oooh:

the new folder structure comes with this other new folder, Automatically Add to iTunes. It’s a folder with a pre-configured folder action, such that any media file you drop in there will be instantly added to iTunes

Actually using this feature would entail quite a radical change to the way I manage music in my house. But maybe itunes 9 and its sharing features justify this change..

http://blog.benward.me/post/199805624

created 08 September 2009 in notes tagged apple, creatorcodes and macos.

Thus, an application in Snow Leopard cannot use a creator code attached to a document to bind that document to itself.

Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

Well, as far as I’m concerned, good. I don’t think I’ve opened a document by double-clicking on it in years - the unpredictability of ‘which of the 4 text editors I have installed is going to open this time?’ has led me to stick a TextMate icon in my Finder toolbar, and I open all text files by dragging them to that icon. Likewise, I have an Acorn icon there I drag images to. For other file types, I tend to drag them to the Dock. Why on earth would I want the preferred text/image editor of whoever originally wrote this file to affect what application I use to edit it?

Now I might be able to cure myself of the habit, and go back to trusting my computer to open files in the apps that I actually use.

created 31 July 2009 in links tagged apple, hate and iphone.

stevenf, unlike me, is prepared to take the pain of using something that isn’t the iPhone, simply because of the situation with the store.

after an entire year of continuous bad decisions that are hostile to developers and consumers alike, we’ve moved on from “working out the kinks” to good old-fashioned getting fucked

He’s moving to the Palm Pre. That’s not even an option in the UK yet, and even once they appear, I won’t be able to get an unlocked one.

Here’s a thought - none of the angry screeds I’m reading are because someone wants background apps, or a hardware keyboard, or any of the stuff that people seem to think we’re missing. They’re angry at the store.

http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/152606616/important-note-r...

created 29 July 2009 in notes tagged android, apple, hate, iphone and phone.

I don’t have a personal beef against Apple or the iPhone - I’ve never wanted to tether my computer to my phone, I can’t get a Google Voice account (Google maintain an air of smug US-centricity sometimes that Apple can’t match), and I’ve never tried to ship an app with an open webkit in it. But the reflected rage about the whole thing has me all annoyed/uncomfortable/fearful in advance.

So I’m casting around for replacements. And basically, this means Android, as it seems to suck less than everything else. Indeed, if the iPhone didn’t exist, Android phones would be easily the best phones out there for me. Maybe the Pre/WebOS would be better. But it’s not available in the UK yet, so it’s pretty much moot.

I’m trying to like Android.

I have to write down why Android annoys me. I’d really like a go at using a Hero (I’m using a G1 dev phone running cupcake here) before committing, so this is a random set of half-formed thoughts.

• It’s slow. Again, probably the hardware. But the G1 is slow compared to the iPhone (original and 3G, let alone the 3GS).

• I can’t listen to music on it. It won’t sync with iTunes (solvable), it doesn’t have a headphone socket (solvable), the music app is lousy (probably solvable), and I only have a 2 gig micro-SD card, so it doesn’t all fit (solvable). All solvable, all annoying.

• Many fewer apps. The store is smaller, and the apps that are on it tend to be worse than the ones on the Apple store. It’s hard to find reviews of them. They don’t come with screen shots. There are already some apps that require cupcake, some that don’t work on cupcake, some that just crash on startup, etc.

• The browser just isn’t up to the standard of the iPhone’s. The Mail app is awful. The web browser seems to sometimes open new windows, and sometimes reuse existing windows when following links.

• The on-screen keyboard is sluggish. This is the same speed problem as above, but whereas elsewhere it’s mostly just cosmetic annoyance, here it’s causing me serious difficulty - lots of typing errors unless I slow right down.

• I’m trying to port Flame to it - Flame is my normal ‘just real enough that you have to learn the platform’ app that I port to new things I’m playing with. But the emulator behaves differently from the real device, I’m not confident that any other real device running Android would behave the same, so I’d have to test everywhere. And anyway, the device seems to have a major bug around multicast that makes Flame impossible.

Any one of these I could deal with no problem. Probably more. It’s just the combination of all of them that wears you down. And then there’s all the standard little things that come with being a citizen of a second-class platform.

A tiny example - diveintomark.org has an iphone-optimized mobile view - I believe it’s a wordpress standard, I might have seen it in a few places. But he serves the normal page to the android web browser. It’s not a big deal, but a thousand things like that is like using linux in a world of windows people again. No-one bothers with the little stuff. Stuff works on the iPhone because everyone tests on the iPhone. It would work on Android if anyone bothered.

Linux vs Windows/MacOS, all over again. You gain Freedom by using an open platform, making life worse for yourself in a thousand tiny ways, any one of which can easily be dismissed, so they are. But it’s still worse.

created 19 June 2009 in photos tagged apple, flickr, iphone and wallpaper.

On the left, we have Flickr’s mobile site, showing ‘interesting’ photos. On the right, we have Apple’s default wallpaper folder, showing the insipid default wallpaper images.

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/3640209891

created 17 June 2009 in links tagged apple, http, iphone and push.

iiinteresting, a hosted iPhone push service. might solve the scaling things I was worried about..

http://www.httpush.com/

created 05 May 2009 in links tagged antitrust, apple and google.

The two companies increasingly compete in the cellphone and operating systems markets

Google and Apple compete in a variety of other areas. Apple makes the Safari Web browser while Google makes the competing Chrome. Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTube are increasingly competing as venues for distribution of music and videos.

Seriously. No-one cares about competing in the web browser market any more. Google only have a web browser because they want more people on the web. Not to mention the fact that both those browsers are webkit based..

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/technology/companies/05...

created 17 March 2009 in stream tagged apple and macbook.

New twitter: Getting upset by the number of times the Macbook is locking up solid recently. IT'S NEW. IT SHOULD WORK. Apple eh?

http://twitter.com/jerakeen/statuses/1341845923

created 24 November 2008 in notes tagged apple, cheating, defaultpng, iphone and startup.

Trivial. But interesting to me - Addressbook.app no longer cheats with it’s startup image - it now uses a static default.png like everyone else. It also seems a lot readier to quit when you run something else, whereas it used to stay resident. This makes me happy. It starts very quickly, and it’s nice to pretend there’s a level playing field.

Notes and Maps still cheat with their startup images, though.

created 15 October 2008 in notes tagged apple, hardware and macbook.

The video everyone is watching, apparently. Also, there are lasers! But I like the little QR code machined into the inside of the body. Awwwww.

http://www.apple.com/macbook/#designvideo

created 13 October 2008 in links tagged apple, email, mail.app, signature and software.

Mail.app signatures are .webarchive files in your Library folder. You can create arbitrarily complex ones by making your own webarchives from custom HTML using Safari, and putting them there. Complicated, but nice that it’s possible.

http://allforces.com/2006/04/14/css-signatures/

created 10 October 2008 in links tagged apple, failure, hardware, hardwarefailure and replacement.

Hey, this is the MBP hardware I have. Wonder if this is the source of my display problems..

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377

created 04 October 2008 in notes tagged apple, cheating, contacts, iphone, map and start.

Apps on the iPhone can ship a ‘default.png’ in their bundle. When you start the app, it’ll first show this image, then load the rest of the app. The idea is, you can ship a picture of the start state of your app, and it’ll appear to have started very quickly. This is why some apps are unresponsive just after they start - they’re not actually started, you’re just looking at a picture. Other apps misuse this feature to display a splash screen. Urgh, splash screens.

Anyway, I digress. I have noticed that both the Contacts and Maps applications can change their default.png files. On start they both show you the state of the application as it was when you last saw it, rather than a simple default start image (most apps that I’ve seen ship an image of their basic layout, with the content removed, so it looks like the content loads a second after the app).

This is easiest to see in the Maps application. Search for a business, then touch the blue chevron to see details of that business. Quit Maps back to the home screen, and run something else (unlike 3rd party apps, Maps will stay running till forced out by some other app). Run Maps again. It will start up with the same view, but be briefly unresponsive till the app proper has started up. You may see the small map in the top-left redraw.

It’s a lot harder to get Contacts.app to do this, but the effects are far more obvious. The best way is to change the contents of your address list without using the application - sync in a new contact, or remove a contact. The first time you run the app, you’ll see the old list for a moment, then the new list. I first noticed this when I synced my iPod touch to another computer, changing all the contacts. Running address book showed me the old list of contacts for a second, then switched completely to the new list.

3rd party apps can’t do this - altering bundle files will change the app, and break the signing. Another thing that Apple apps can do and 3rd party apps can’t (though not all Apple apps to it. The Clock app is a perfect example of how I’d expect apps to start up). It’s subtle, but it means that Apple apps will appear to start faster, and record state better, than my apps. It a level playing field too much to ask for?

Update, 13th October: I was rude about splash screens. Craig points out that he doesn’t have anything better he could possibly display at startup. Anything that looks like the app running will just feel like an unresponsive start state, and will be wrong anyway. A blank screen is just entirely wrong. Splash screens might be the best of a bad lot.

created 01 October 2008 in links tagged apple, development, iphone and nda.

the NDA, tis gone. Yay happy face. But only for ‘released’ software. Less happy face. Wait, what does that even mean? Released Apple software (firmware versions)? My software? I can only join the mailing lists after I ship an app?

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/

created 01 October 2008 in notes tagged apple, fail, itunes and music.

Fail.

created 21 August 2008 in links tagged apple, calendar, ical and subscription.

For future reference, the Apple support ticket that explains that I can’t sync subscribed calendars up to me.com, thus making it totally useless.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1213

created 18 August 2008 in notes tagged apple, byline, iphone, offline, rss, software, twitter and twitterrific.

I should write up ‘things learned from taking only an iPhone to the middle of nowhere where there’s no internet access‘. One of those things was, I really want a ‘that worked’ for updating my twitter status using Twitterrific. And anything else that does a write over the network.

Avoid notifying users of success.

If a read operation fails, meh. But if I just wrote a twitter update, and it doesn’t go through, I want to know. Twitter might fail, the app might fail, the connection might fail. I want success notification, rather than 1 minute of waiting for a failure message that might not arrive. THIS IS NOT A NORMAL SITUATION. But nevertheless. Maybe the rule should be ‘avoid notifying users of success where success is expected‘.

Another useful app - Byline is great when there’s wobbly bandwidth - usable even when the only connection is a spotty non-edge GSM link. Admittedly, you have to just put the phone down somewhere with a connection for 10 minutes while it slurps. But things stay slurped. It’ll pull the associated images of RSS items too, so I can look at my Flickr feeds easily.

It’s got disadvantages - you have to switch to Google Reader to read your feeds for a start. In the absence of a local Mac GUI client to rival NetNewsWire, this is painful (Fluid helps). And Byline doesn’t do ‘folders’ (tags? what does google reader call them? I’m new to this), so you just get a big flat list of unread items, which could be annoying if you subscribe to lots of feeds. I’ve recently gone through a grand purge of all my feeds and mailing lists, so my traffic levels are pretty controllable.

Except that my Economist subscription feeds did their weekly ‘the magazine shipped’ thing, and dumped 90 unread items in the list. And these are unread items that are interesting and might need reading. Unlike with the iPhone NNW client, I can’t selectively drop subscriptions from being visible on the phone - it’s all or nothing here, and Byline loads only 25 (I think) entries at a time for off-line reading. The Economist provides only a partial feed, so I had to sit where there was bandwidth and go through them in batches, ‘starring’ the ones that looked interesting then hitting ‘fetch more’ and waiting. Once I’d done this, and it didn’t take too long, the experience was great - I had the full content of the Economist articles synched locally for convenient reading (and the Economist has a nice one-narrow-column layout that lends itself well to iPhone reading).

created 13 August 2008 in photos tagged apple, hardware, macbookpro and screen and is geotagged

I make that about 6 days out of warranty before it broke, then.

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/2758986249

created 07 August 2008 in links tagged apple, beta, distribution and iphone.

Simple (ish) guide to distributing ad-hoc iPhone applications.

http://furbo.org/2008/08/06/beta-testing-on-iphone-20/

created 05 August 2008 in notes tagged apple, iphone, store and updates.

Is it just me, or are the updates offered by the iTunes store completely crazy? Every day I get a new crazy random set of the same apps, often with multiple updates offered for each of them. The app store application on the phone tends to offer different updates. I still can’t see release notes in iTunes, though I see them on the phone. Gah.

http://jerakeen.org/files/images/Application%20updates.png

created 05 August 2008 in notes tagged apple, fonts, iphone and notes.

A curiosity of the notes application - it’s got a really ugly font. But it can be forced into a less ugly one on a per-note basis using an international keyboard. I assume the Market Felt font isn’t Unicode-complete, because if you insert a single (for example) Korean character into the note it’ll change its font to something more sensible that includes that glyph. And it won’t change it back if you remove the character.

This isn’t exactly convenient, and isn’t a system-wide setting. But I only have one or two notes on the phone, and I’m not willing to jailbreak it just to change the font. So I like my workaround.

created 01 August 2008 in notes tagged apple, caldav, calendar, iphone and sync.

Even if my main calendar is a synced CALDAV calendar, I can’t put things into it from the iPhone. Creating new calendar entries creates a new calendar on the local machine on the next sync, with the entry in it. To make things worse, this new calendar isn’t synced by default, so the entry disappears from the phone, where I added it. So the feature is useless to me - I like being able to create calendar entries on the phone.

created 29 July 2008 in notes tagged apple, interface and iphone.

On the iPhone home screen:

There’s a trick to replacing the 4 persistent apps in the Dock at the bottom: you cannot drag into the Dock to bump them out of the way; instead you must drag something out of the Dock to make room first, and then you can drag an app into the free space

..in comparison to the black ‘tab bar’ navigation widgets with the ‘edit’ mode buttons, which you can’t drag icons out of, but dropping new icons on overwrites whatever you dropped them on. Yay consistency.

http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/07/11/iphone-apps-firs...

created 25 July 2008 in notes tagged apple, backup, fonts and software.

Not that anyone cares about Backup.app any more. But I was noodling with it this morning, and it turns out to use a smaller font in its menus than every other app on my system.

Huh?

created 23 July 2008 in notes tagged apple.

Interesting reading. Also includes the best explanation I’ve heard as to why the iPod touch isn’t recognised as a subscription, and thus why the upgrades cost money.

Apple probably treats the iPod Touch differently because to treat it as a subscription product, the company might have to separate and announce iPod Touch unit sales numbers, and it does not want to provide that kind of information to its competitors

http://macjournals.com/news/iPhonerevenues.html

created 17 July 2008 in notes tagged apple, hardware and keyboard.

Recently, thanks to the useful Matt Patterson (Matt, have I paid you yet?) I acquired an Apple Wireless Keyboard.

We’d just moved to a new office, thus a new desk, and for the first time in ages I found myself uncomfortable when typing. For years now I’ve worked directly on the laptop screen and keyboard, resisting the urge to hang external keyboards and screens off it. It’s a laptop, it moves around, and I’ve always preferred to have the same environment everywhere, rather than having one screen/keyboard at work, and something different at home.

Also, I’ve always hated external keyboards. After typing on nothing but laptops for five years, I’ve become used to tiny amounts of key travel and no clickiness. I’ve lost the ability to press a real keyboard key all the way down, so my typing goes completely broken as soon as I try one.

The back pain dictated a change in this policy. So now the laptop sits on a pile of books, to elevate it to a sensible height, and the keyboard sits under it. Getting the Apple keyboard solved both my problems. It’s a disconnected Macbook keyboard - exactly the same layout as my real keyboard, so I don’t get upsetting layout changes, and the keys are laptop keys, so are easy to push and don’t travel very far. It’s the same width as my normal keyboard. Also, no wires. This is great in the same way that a wireless mouse is great.

The biggest surprise has been the new F-key positions. The volume controls have moved from F3/4/5 to F10/11/12, leaving space for Exposé keys, and naturally the backlight keys are missing. I thought this would annoy me, but actually the volume keys are now in much better places, and I get annoyed at the real laptop keyboard. I can find the volume keys without looking down now, by moving to the top-right of the keyboard, in the same way that I’ve always been able to get at the screen brightness keys by moving to the top-left. I don’t use the media control keys, though. I have Synergy for that.

Recently it’s going a little soggy, and I suspect battery failure. And the ‘down’ key needs pressing straight down to work, whereas I turn out to have been pressing the bottom edge of the key on the Macbook Pro. But these are trivial. I like it.

created 07 July 2008 in notes tagged apple, corelocation, herejustnow and software.

A herejustnow iPhone app. I’m having to learn Objective-C to do this, which I can just about put up with. CoreLocation turns out to be quite easy to use, too. Now all I need is the ability to install the thing on a Real iPhone.

created 20 June 2008 in notes tagged apple, hardware and keyboard.

It’s a keyboard firmware update. Why does this require a restart of my computer?

created 10 June 2008 in blog tagged apple, hardware and iphone.

I guess I may as well write down my few thoughts on this iPhone thing.

On O2’s offer to existing customers

To thank you for being an iPhone fan, we’re offering you an early upgrade to the brand new version when it launches on 11th July 2008. You won’t have to wait until the end of your existing contract, all you’ll need to do is agree to a new 18-month minimum term contract

Is that an additional 18 months on top of my contract now, or merely a reset of the run to 18 months from now? Because if it’s the latter, I want mine now.

An aside. When trying to tell O2 where I live, I get the exciting error [House Number must be numeric]. Um. No. Because mine isn’t. Idiots.

Interestingly, the page about the iPhone upgrade makes mention of O2’s «new iPhone Pay & Go SIM cards». Hmmm, interesting. Though if I can get me an iPhone 3G cheaply I’ll probably end up just jailbreaking it instead. Or if the iPhone 3G isn’t jailbreakable, and you can’t buy old ones any more, I wonder if it’ll have disgusting amounts of resale value…

On 3G

Let’s (almost) gloss over the actual ‘3G’ feature here. The standard Steve approach was used - ‘3G simply isn’t necessary, EDGE is fine!’. Until the iPhone has 3G, at which point it’s ‘Look how much better 3G is!’. I have the iPhone 1, and I find EDGE just fine. My total web page download time is already faster than it was on the 3G phone I used to have, because my web browser doesn’t take 20 seconds to load. 3G will be nice. But meh.

On Pricing

Gruber has a bit on the new pricing structure, and this is the interesting bit for me. What I read here is that ‘subverting the old phone industry business model’ didn’t work. So they’ll do the same thing everyone else does instead and just sell subsidised phones through carriers. So much for changing the world. But this implies that they’ll do the other thing everyone else does, and sell unlocked versions of their phones for more money. If they’re no longer getting a cut of the carrier revenues, why would they care any more?

Oh, and Gizmodo relays the interesting point that, sans monthy revenue to book against the iPhone, Apple may start charging for feature upgrades on SOX grounds. Except that the Apple TV gets free upgrades. The ongoing revenue thing is just an accounting ‘profit from this thing is amortized over 18 months’ device, no?

created 25 January 2008 in links tagged apple, hig and leopard.

Updated HIG for leopard. Via dfll

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/C...

created 21 January 2008 in blog tagged apple, development, iphone, ipod, sdk and touch.

The ‘state of the art’ for iPhone apps is a single URL, serving a static page with lots of JavaScript and Ajax. Clicking (touching, whatever) things loads in fragments and changes the page. IUI works like this, Hahlo works like this, the Facebook app works like this (hence IUI‘s behaviour).

To preserve state, normal usage is to use the URL fragment to add bookmarkability and history. And sometimes, this actually works. But given that the point is to pretend to be a native iPhone application, it’s wrong. You should be storing state in cookies.

Justification: Native iPhone apps act like you never quit them. Even if they get closed by the system at some point, they’ll come back to the state you left them in. Bookmarking a rich web application should act the same - I want to bookmark the application, and have it open in the state that I left it, not the state that I bookmarked it in. So you should update the ‘current state’ in a local cookie every time to navigate somewhere, and respect that state when you next visit the application. Combine this with the 1.1.3 firmware’s webclips thing and you can almost pretend to be native.

Which is why I expect the much-anticipated iPhone SDK to be nothing more than ‘local web applications’. Give developers a little bit of local storage (you know, like webkit just got), a way of promoting a bookmark to the home screen (we have that one now) and a way of storing some HTML and JS on the phone, and Jobs can claim he’s given us an SDK. And he’ll be right.

Me? I’d be happy with that. It solves all the sandboxing, security, ‘bring down the network’, etc problems. And it will keep people from jailbreaking the phone trivially. The only alternative I can see is installation of signed apps only, with the iTunes Media Store as the single point of installation. Which would suck more. But there will be howls of outrage.

created 21 January 2008 in blog tagged apple, hardware, macbook, macbookair and macbookpro.

This really doesn’t deserve a blog entry. I try to keep them ‘serious’. But what the hell.

I see many complaints by Macbook Pro owners about the Macbook Air, and how it’s not right for them. But when I was choosing a laptop, I was choosing between a Macbook Pro and something that was smaller, lighter, and not as powerful, but that was still a full-featured computer - the Macbook. And I chose the Pro.

The choice between the Pro and the Air is the same choice, except that it’s slightly harder, becuase the Air is even lighter. But I’d still choose the Pro. It’s not aimed at people who have already chosen the big heavy laptop over the lighter one.

created 06 November 2007 in links tagged agodnonotagain, apple and tablet.

here we go again.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49293967,00.htm

created 15 August 2007 in photos tagged apple and ilife.

iLife ‘08 Upgrade

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/1129397408

created 08 August 2007 in links tagged apple, ilife and upgrade.

Just got a Macbook Pro. Didn’t come with iLife ‘08, but because it’s recent, I get a cheap upgrade. Bookmarking for reference - not sure if I’ll go for it.

http://www.apple.com/uk/ilife/uptodate/

created 08 August 2007 in links tagged apple, iwork and software.

Download trial of iWork ‘08. Can’t find out how to actually get here by following links, so ta to mattb for linkage.

http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/

created 30 December 2006 in links tagged apple, pair and remote.

very important thing to do when you can’t work out why pausing the DVD player starts music playing on the other side of the room.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302545

created 08 August 2006 in links tagged apple, caldav and opensouce.

Big-ass heap of open-source stuff. The CalDav server in particular looks interesting.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-dev/2006/Aug/msg00...

created 01 June 2006 in links tagged apple.

via blech, thanks. Ever since I got the Dell, I’ve been fighting the guilt of leaving the Apple fold. It’s nice to know someone else has done so too.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/30/bye-apple

created 24 May 2006 in links tagged apple, hardware and printer.

via ChrisDodo, a useful-looking list. Not that I print a lot. But I really like my Airport Express.

http://www.ifelix.co.uk/tech/1013.html

created 16 May 2006 in links tagged apple, comparison and macbook.

A scary comparison chart of all the models of MacBooks and MacBookPros. Not that I want one. First-gen apple hardware scares me.

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/comparison_chart...

created 24 October 2005 in links tagged apple, dpi, powerbook and screen.

new powerbook screen comparison

http://media.99mac.se/powerbook_hd/

created 19 October 2005 in links tagged apple, hardware, mac and update.

For personal reference, this site tracks when apple hardware was last updated and gives buying advice based on likely update times.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

created 05 September 2005 in links tagged apple, beep and post.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58442