It took a while, but Friday afternoon I finally got an invite to use Google’s App Inventor program. What is App Inventor? It’s Google’s attempt to simplify building apps for Android devices. Apps are built using a drag and drop interface, and reflected instantly on a connected Android device.

I was skeptical about the system’s ability to produce apps of any real functionality, but I was happy to be proven mostly wrong. Building a well-structured UI is admittedly almost impossible, with only basic layout and design tools available. But the app inventor does provide easy access to surprisingly complex elements of the Android functionality. The GPS, barcode scanner, camera, speech recognition, and accelerometer are among the tools easily usable via drag and drop. After placing buttons and labels to design the UI, a separate drag and drop interface is used to establish how those elements interact with each other. A series of blocks click into each other, with a bit of typing to provide some details.

It’s a nice system, and my skepticism about App Inventor’s potential beyond the toy level was quickly overcome. I ran through the first tutorial app (touch the picture of a cat and it meows! This didn’t help my skepticism…) in a few minutes. Less than an hour later I’d built an app to search the UNC catalog via an ISBN barcode scan. It relies heavily on our existing catalog webapp to do the actual search, but still! I mastered using the barcode scanner for apps in less than an hour. My previous attempt at Android programming (in Java, before App Inventor existed) took me four hours to build an app that simply displays an image. And that simple task drew on every single bit of programming know-how I could dredge up from my undergrad days.

The barrier to entry for using App Inventor is almost absurdly low. My slight background in programming did help, and I would have taken a bit longer if I wasn’t familiar with things like variables and function returns. But the point of App Inventor is that I wasn’t required to know those things in advance. I could have picked it up in a little extra time. This kind of setup seems perfect for intro-level computer science courses, teaching basic programming concepts while retaining the satisfaction of seeing a fully functional app at the end. Google definitely realizes this and is targeting educators as potential users.

App Inventor is clearly still a beta product, with some notable limitations. Apps built in App Inventor can’t be distributed in the Android Market. The install files need to be manually distributed to phones. There’s also no resulting Java source code to tweak for more advanced purposes. And disappointingly, using APIs beyond a prescribed few (Twitter, Amazon, etc) involves more complicated Python coding. There’s also some strange odds and ends, like not being able to change the app’s icon.

I’m not under any illusions that App Inventor apps will someday replace Java-coded apps. But it got me excited about programming in a way I haven’t been in years. That’s gotta count for something.

If you’d like to try the barcode scanner app I built and see what App Inventor is capable of, here’s the installable apk file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/905114/UNC_Catalog.apk

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I’ve had my Motorola Droid long enough now to feel like I’ve always owned one. Those dark pre-smartphone days of last October seem hazy as they retreat into the past. I listed my favorite Android apps in my early days of ownership, but that list has changed a bit over time. And while I have a lot of apps installed, not all of them get used every day. Here’s the dozen or so android apps I currently use most often:

Setting Profiles
This is magic. Based on criteria like my location, presence of a wifi access point or time of day, Setting Profiles changes settings on my phone. For example: When my phone sees the wifi signal at work it turns the ringer off automatically. When I plug it into the car dock Bluetooth turns on. It’s a bit complicated to set up, but works perfectly. $3.95

CardioTrainer
Tracks my exercise via GPS. I use it to chart my times when I ride my bike home from work. I even used it to track a bike tour we took in Paris, and had a great time examining the route on a map afterward. Google’s My Tracks app performs a similar function, but focuses on just collecting raw data. CardioTrainer is tweaked specifically toward fitness tasks and provides some low-level analysis. Free.

Drop7
I don’t play nearly as many games on the Droid as I did on my iPod Touch. Why that might be is a topic for another time. But when Drop7, my favorite iPod Touch game, launched an Android version I bought it sight unseen. $2.99

Foursquare & Gowalla
I like Gowalla better than Foursquare, but find myself checking in places with both for different reasons. Gowalla is more fun, but Foursquare has those tantalizing freebie specials. Gowalla’s Android app is also much prettier than the Foursquare counterpart. Free

Listen
Google’s excellent podcast client hasn’t changed much lately, but still works very well. Integration with Google Reader is handy. Free

Mototorch LED
This home screen widget turns the phone’s camera flash on for use as a flashlight. Comes in handy more often than you’d expect. Free

picplz
Foursquare + twitter + camera = picplz. This app takes a picture, then checks you in at a foursquare venue. I have an archive of pictures associated with the actual places I took them – both in GPS and foursquare venue form. The picture can also be posted to twitter. It’s like twitpic, but with better geodata. Free

PRO Paint Camera
The stock Android 2.1 camera app is awful. Focus and flash options are hidden away and hard to get to. Thankfully there’s Pro Paint Camera with a much better UI. I replaced the stock camera app and never looked back. Free

Quick Settings
Does what it says. Hold down the Droid’s search button and a menu of various options pops up. Volume, brightness, wifi, bluetooth, etc. Quick Settings puts all the toggles in one place. Free

RockPlayer
If you’ve ever wanted to play a video file that’s in a format the Droid doesn’t natively support, RockPlayer does the job. Still in Beta, not yet available in the Android Market. Free (beta)

Touchdown
Android 2.1′s built in Exchange support is pretty useless – I couldn’t get it to see any folders other than my Inbox, Sent, and Trash. 3rd party to the rescue! (sensing a theme yet?) Touchdown does a much better job, though at a fairly steep price. The UI could use some work, but functionality is rock solid. Now that we’re an Exchange shop at work this is completely indispensable for me. $30

Twidroyd / Twitter (official)
I go back and forth on which of these two Twitter clients I like better. Twitter’s official client has an amazing UI and integrates twitter messaging into the phone’s contacts list, but Twidroyd has some extra functionality like the LED alert for new replies that I’ve come to rely on. I keep both installed and use whichever matches my needs at the moment. Free

Google Voice
Verizon wants to charge me $3 per month for visual voicemail access. Google Voice gives it to me for free. That’s a no-brainer. I don’t use the SMS or calling features, but might switch to them someday. Free

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A couple notes on where I’ll be at ALA 2010 this week:

First, I’m presenting on ALCTS’ Mobile Catalog Interfaces panel:
Saturday 6/26/10 10:30 am-12:00 noon
HILTON WASHINGTON, Columbia 5

I’ll be going over our mobile catalog interface, a bit about the design process, pointing out some new features, and hoping for great questions.

Second, I’m co-chair of LITA’s Distance Learning Interest Group. We’re co-sponsoring a program with ACRL’s Distance Learning Section:
Open Access: A Conversation
Saturday, 6/26/10 1:30 to 3:30 pm
Washington Convention Center
Room WCC-144A-C

Third, for the DLIG annual meeting we’re trying something a little different. Instead of having a giant room reserved for a standard roundtable discussion for a block of time, we’ve reserved some space in the Networking Uncommons: http://annual.ala.org/2010/index.php?title=Networking_Uncommons
Networking Uncommons space
Sunday, 6/27 9:30-10AM

The Uncommons is a space on level 1, concourse A, near the exhibits. There’s tables, a projector, and plenty of power strips. We have no specific agenda. Just show up, hang out, and mingle! It’ll be morning, so feel free to view it as a warmup for the day – bring coffee and ideas. We have the 9:30-10AM Uncommons slot on Sunday the 27th.

Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to meet up during the conference, the best way to get ahold of me is a message on twitter. I’ll be around from Friday – Sunday, leaving Monday morning and trying not to melt.

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Last night I pushed out the first major update to the Mobile Site Generator. There’s one big new feature: It can now pull in content to a page from an RSS feed! This feature assumes your web server is running php with cURL enabled. If you don’t know whether your server meets these requirements, there’s one easy way to find out: Try it out

I consider this feature to be pretty experimental, so I’d love any feedback on how well it works and whether I’ve explained what it does well.

Note that this isn’t a feature you have to use. If you want, you can keep using the generator and pretend it doesn’t exist. I also recommend not using it more than once in your generated mobile site – pulling in multiple RSS feeds can slow down the page dramatically. I hope to build in some ways around this problem in the future.

I’ve been thrilled to see the response to the generator! I’m glad that people are finding it useful. If you’ve launched a site and used the generator at some point along the way, please let me know about it. I’d love to build a practical showcase of what this thing can do.

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I’m really excited to launch a side project this morning that I’ve been working on for a while:

Mobile Site Generator

After filling out a form with page titles and few other bits of info, the generator spits out a fully functional mobile site (tested on iPhones, iTouches, and Android devices) ready for uploading to your server as an HTML file!

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about how we made the UNC Libraries’ mobile website. When I start to talk about the iUI framework we used, I see a lot of eyes glaze over. But it’s really easy! I’m not an expert coder, honest, and I made it work. Anyone who has basic familiarity with web development and a little time on their hands to puzzle out a few details can use iUI.

But while I’ve seen a lot of talk about mobile sites for libraries, I don’t see nearly as many actually implementing them. I think a lot of librarians are intimidated. But IUI’s code is actually so simple that I was able to automate its creation! The Mobile Site Generator will hopefully help people over the first hurdle: it creates a framework for a mobile site that you can then tweak & customize to you heart’s content.

As you’ll no doubt see immediately after clicking the link above, the MSG (gee, what a great acronym I picked!) has an interface that’s… shall we say less than ideal I plan on making it prettier with time, but I wanted to get it functional and online in time to point it out in some presentations I’m giving in the near future.

There’s more information on what the generator does over on the MSG page. I welcome your comments and suggestions! You can leave comments here, on the MSG page itself, or just e-mail me.

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Apple loves to tout their 100,000+ iPhone apps. Android recently topped a respectable 20,000. These are both impressive numbers, but how often do we really need an app instead of the good old-fashioned web?

Apps lock up data and go against one of the central ideas and advantages of the open web – the ability to link between pages.

A user recently asked if our mobile app could add links to Worldcat items from our own mobile catalog items. I didn’t know the answer, but thought it sounded like a worthwhile addition if possible. I remembered seeing a Worldcat mobile interface a while back, and went looking for it once again. I found that Worldcat recently moved from a mobile website version to a mobile app version.

A mobile website is pretty self-explanitory. It’s a website formatted for a mobile screen that you load in a browser. It’s part of the web as a whole. A mobile app is more like any application on a computer – you launch it, do what you need to, then close it down. But mobile apps as they exist today are largely walled gardens, and don’t share data with each other easily (if at all). So while Worldcat has all their records very nicely displayed in this app, it’s impossible for our local catalog to link to them from the browser*.

Worldcat’s regular (non-mobile) site is very linkable. If I want to link you to The Mysterious Benedict Society’s record, I just have to give you this to click on. That’ll still work in a mobile browser of course, but the resulting page is clunky to view on a smaller screen. When OCLC has obviously gone to a lot of effort to get their data into a mobile format, it just seems a shame to ultimately lock it away from other developers inside an app.

And believe me, a native app for a phone takes a lot of effort. I originally tried to write one for the UNC catalog, but the fact that I’m not much of an Objective C programmer reared its ugly head and I had to abandon the effort. The return on the massive investment of my time and effort it would have taken to code an app just didn’t make sense. And a library catalog app wouldn’t even have any extra functionality over the mobile website catalog I ended up with. Our mobile site works on almost any modern smartphone, but if I’d somehow managed to bang out an iPhone app that app would work exclusively on iPhones. I’d have to start from scratch again to get the catalog working on an Android or Palm phone, and what about the countless phones that don’t run apps at all? They’d be left out in the cold.

On the flip side, Apps certainly do have their time and place. They have greater access to the phone’s hardware than a browser, and can use things like the phone’s camera in ways that a mobile website currently can’t. But unless a hardware ability is central to an app’s purpose for being, I’d be hard-pressed to justify developing a full app instead of a mobile website. And now that many mobile browsers can access the phone’s GPS information, a webapp can actually do some basics of what were formerly hardware tasks. For example: I’ve become minorly hooked on the location-based service Gowalla lately, and Gowalla has no Android app – just a mobile website that can use the phone’s GPS to find where I am. It works really well. Full apps are also useful for offline tasks, since they allow caching of data & tools locally for use when there’s no connection to the web.

And apps do have an undeniable coolness factor. It’s a lot more impressive to say “Download our app in iTunes” than to give someone a URL to a mobile site.

But our library catalog & website don’t need a camera, and the very nature of a catalog is searching for information online – nothing can be stored locally in a way that makes any sense. Having a deliverable end product also wins out over the coolness factor with me, especially since I never could have completed the ‘cooler’ project in the first place

For the current state of the mobile web, I don’t think a mobile app’s advantages are enough for libraries. It’s important to get our information into as many of our users’ mobile devices as we can, and as quickly as possible. An app might come later; if the publishing world ever permits libraries to loan eBooks in a usable fashion, then sure a library eReader app would make sense to develop. But for now, when most of our mobile work is repackaging web data we already have into a new format, a mobile website is the way to go. It’s quicker to develop, works on more devices, preserves linkability, exposes our mobile pages for other developers to build on, and maintains the core functionality we’ve spent so much time developing for our non-mobile websites along the way.

(*As a side note, I did eventually dig up Worldcat’s old mobile web catalog. It still exists! But it doesn’t support direct linking either. This is another thing I’ve run into repeatedly – another argument/rant/post for another time.)

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Now that the Droid has been out for over a month this review might be a little questionably useful for early adopters, but I’m going to go ahead and write it anyway

In short, I like the Droid a lot. It’s the first smartphone I’ve ever owned (after 2 years of living on an iPod Touch mostly happily), and lives up my expectations.

Fake Q&A with myself:

How is the Droid as a plain old phone?
Call quality is excellent, better than any other phone I’ve ever owned. It also gets a stronger signal than my previous phone (an env2) did in a lot of places. Granted I don’t make a lot of phone calls, but in over a month of use I don’t think I’ve dropped a call once.

How’s the battery life?
In a word: OK. In a day of average use I drain the battery to about 15%. For me, ‘average use’ means maybe 10-15 minutes of actual phone calls, and the rest of my use is on the data side. Browsing the web, using apps, maybe a bit of GPS navigation, etc. But for a real power user who wants to rely on more battery-intensive tasks like GPS for all day use, the Droid’s battery simply won’t cut it. Invest in a car charger and a docking cradle for your desk. I have both of those, and have managed to get myself into a routine of charging the Droid whenever I’m not using it.
Incidentally, I love that the Droid uses a standard mini USB plug for charging. This is the first time in my life that I haven’t had to buy all new chargers when upgrading a phone.

How’s the screen?
It’s a thing of beauty. I never thought my iPod Touch screen was anything to sneeze at, but it looks downright blurry next to the Droid. I can read much smaller font sizes on the Droid than I ever could on the iTouch.

How’re the apps?
I’ve found an app for almost everything I want to do on the phone. See this post for some of my favorites. My favorite thing about the Android app store is that I can get a refund on any app for 24 hours after purchase. So trying out new things is very easy & risk free.

How’s the physical keyboard?
The buttons are closer together than is ideal, but I got used to it quickly. I have tiny fingers, so others might not like it as much as I do. I should also note that I’m the only Droid user I’ve heard of who uses the physical keyboard whenever possible – everyone else I know prefers the on screen one. The on screen keyboard is fine, I just find I can type faster on the physical option.

How’s the browser?
Mostly good. It does some strange things with auto-formatting text for a mobile screen. This is usually helpful, but sometimes screws things up a bit. Much fuss has been made over the Droid browser’s lack of multitouch. I don’t really miss it as much as I thought I might – double tapping to zoom in works just fine.

Alright buddy, this is a glowing review so far. What don’t you like about the Droid?
There are definite shortcomings. The camera is one of them. It’s supposedly a 5 megapixel camera, but I would never guess that from the results. Any photo not taken in very bright lighting is grainy. The autofocus works well, but the interface for changing focus options is terrible and difficult to get to quickly. The camera has a LED flash, but it’s pretty useless for taking pictures. I get far more use of the LED as a flashlight than an actual camera flash.

Media syncing is entirely user-unfriendly. I’ve been spoiled by using iTunes to get music onto the iPod Touch, and miss it dearly. I’ve found some third party solutions to sync music & video onto the Droid, but none work well enough that I want to endorse them here. Google needs some native software for this, and pronto.

Media playback is kind of mediocre. Again, spoiled by iPods. It works, but the interface isn’t nearly as well thought out as Apple’s.

There’s no bluetooth voice dialing. A small thing, yes, but also something that has no excuse for being left out. My last three phones all had it, and not having this feature makes it technically illegal to make a call while I’m driving in North Carolina – even with a headset.

Let’s counteract that with some good: What are your favorite things about the Droid?
Running apps in the background is amazingly useful – far more than I expected it to be. Swapping between different apps on the Droid is far faster and more convenient than on iDevices.

The GPS driving navigation feels like it fell out of a time machine from 10 years in the future. Melissa and I were in DC recently to see a Swell Season concert. I spoke into my phone: “Navigate to the Swell Season concert in Washington, DC”, and it knew where I wanted to go! Behind the scenes it used the web to figure out the venue of the concert and direct us straight to the front door. It also pulls in live traffic speed info, which more than once has let me plot a detour around upcoming traffic jams.

Full integration with Google Voice is extremely promising, and I’m inches away from converting over to a GV phone number for daily use.

I really love that apps can play nicely with the browser. For example, I installed a great app called GeoBeagle to use for Geocaching. When I click on a link to a cache on Geocaching.com, an option pops up – would I like to load this link in the browser, or save the cache it points at into GeoBeagle? Similarly, clicking on a podcast feed asks me if I’d like to subscribe to that podcast in Google Listen.

Widgets on the home screen are extremely handy & useful. I can control music playback, check the weather, change screen brightness, toggle wi-fi, turn on the LED as a flashlight and more without launching any apps or going into any settings menus.

Summary?
The Droid is a great smartphone. I’m very happy with it and it fits into my daily information needs very well.

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This Wall Street Journal article touched many nerves for me: Publishers hold back e-books.

So hold on, I’m going to get a bit ranty and this’ll probably be a long post

Summary: Two major publishers have decided that they’re going to hold back e-book versions of their titles for months after the hardback release.

From the article, here’s their justification:

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

A much better (and more profitable) course of action would be to simply embrace the e-book world and figure out how to adapt to this new ecosystem. Change is coming, and burying their heads in the sand isn’t how publishers will survive.

Some publishers try to make the argument that people have had the choice to buy a hardback immediately or wait for the cheap paperback for decades. And surely placing an e-book release between those two options just extends this model, right? They have this nonsensical vision that people with e-book readers will run out and buy hardbacks instead when their e-books are taken away. This could not be more wrong. Here’s what’s going to happen instead:

Meet Consumer Bob. Consumer Bob invested a lot of money in a Kindle. He obviously bought the device because he wants to read books on it, right? So Bob hears about a new book on TV and thinks he’d like to read it. Bob can’t find that book for his Kindle. At this point, Bob will do one of two things:

A)If Bob’s tech-savvy he’ll pirate the e-book he wants. Publisher gets no money.
B)If Bob isn’t tech-savvy he’ll buy another e-book to read, and probably forget the first book ever existed. Possibly a different publisher gets money.

Bob spent $250+ on his Kindle, and you better believe he wants to get use out of it. After plunking down that chunk of change, buying a paper book can feel a bit like wasting money. As a Sony Reader owner, I feel this sometimes myself. But Bob is also used to instant gratification and instant delivery of e-books, and doesn’t want to wait for the print version to arrive by mail or a trip to the store. Bob likely isn’t going to change his habits.

But let’s go back and look at part of that article quote again:

“…we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

What? Consumers are finding something new they want, and your response is to deny it to them? How does that make any kind of business sense? With that attitude you deserve to hemorrhage money.

Another article quote:

“Even as the retail price of many new hardcover novels creeps above $27, Amazon and Barnes & Noble boast many new best sellers for only $9.99 in the e-book format.

Increasingly, publishers have come to fear that the bargain prices will lead consumers to conclude that books are worth only $10, or less, upsetting the pricing model that has survived for decades.”

You know what? They’re right. A DRM-locked e-book simply isn’t worth $27. It’s barely even worth $10. I’m not going to pay the same amount for an e-book that a paper copy would cost me, when I can actually do LESS with that e-copy than the print: I can’t loan it, resell it, or donate it. So I will never ever pay full price, or near full price, for a DRM-locked e-book. Ever. And anybody who does hasn’t thought things through. I’d only consider buying DRM books with a massive (something like 75% or more) discount over the print version, unless the e-version has some other equally massive advantage.

But publishers even shoot themselves in the foot when they stumble on an e-gold mine. Stephen King’s new book, Under The Dome, is over 1000 pages. I don’t want to lug that back-breaking monster around with me, especially on the bus. I want to have it on my phone or e-book reader. This is a case where an e-book has clear convenience advantages over a print version, maybe even enough to overlook DRM issues. I was planning on buying it.

But King’s publisher, Scribner, has decided to shoot the e-book in the head. And not once, but twice. First the e-version won’t be available until 12/24, a full six weeks after the print version was released. Second, they’re charging wholesale prices for the e-book to distributors (like Amazon and B&N) of $35.

My moral outrage from their pricing issues aside (there’s no way they’ll ever convince me that it costs the same to print and ship an e-book as a print book), I REALLY don’t want the massive print version. No matter how discounted it is. So I’m left with just one option to acquire the book legally: Buy Under The Dome as an e-book on 12/24. This is the exact same end result as if the book was released the same day as the print version, 11/10. All Scribner has done is provided me with 6 weeks to forget that I want the book. 6 weeks to find something else to read, or maybe run across negative reviews and decide I don’t want the book after all. A thousand things could make me change my mind about buying the book. Forcing me to wait gains them nothing, and only introduces unnecessary risks into the question of whether or not they’ll get money from me.

And meanwhile I hate to break it to them, but despite Scribner’s best efforts Under The Dome is available as an eBook right now. It’s been pirated, of course. A quick search of the web shows a pirated version, likely scanned in by a large cooperative group, freely available all over the web (and with no DRM!). So Scribner has created an ecosystem where piracy is literally the only option for potential customers who would otherwise line up to give them money, AND that piracy delivers what’s actually a superior product with no DRM. King is a high profile writer with die-hard fans who want his book immediately, not six weeks from now. What are they going to do?

The sad thing is that Scribner will likely use this piracy situation as supposed evidence of how the e-book system doesn’t work and is killing the publishing industry. And they’ll never even see through their own fear, uncertainty, and doubt to realize that the root causes live in their own backyard.

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Back in June I picked up a Sony e-book reader when Borders had a sale too good to pass up. It ended up being about half the price of a Kindle (at the time – the Kindle is a bit cheaper now). I don’t regret the purchase one bit! I’ve had a bunch of hands-on experience with a Kindle 2 at work lately, and in many ways I think the PRS-505 outdoes the Kindle.

Screen contrast is comparable to the Kindle, if not slightly better. The 505 supports many more formats than the Kindle, including the one most popular to me – epub. Epub has been growing in popularity lately for authors who like to give away their work (or samples of their work) online. So there’s plenty of free content out there for me to read! It’s an open standard too, which is a nice bonus. The Kindle 2 can read epub files after a conversion, but in my experience that conversion is imperfect and introduces a number of formatting errors to the text. The 505 also reads PDFs without any conversion, which is a MAJOR boon for any researcher who finds themself awash in a pile of journal articles from library databases.

Of course, the 505 lacks one major feature of the Kindle: wireless web and book store access. The 505 requires a USB connection to a computer or memory card to add new books. I don’t miss the wireless connection though – if anything the lack of distraction helps me focus on actually reading! And considering that I saved so much money over a Kindle, I don’t mind the absence one bit.

The 505 is missing one feature that I dearly wish it had – built-in search. I can’t search through the text of a book on the 505 for some reason, which to me is a primary advantage of having text in electronic format to begin with. I can search in a book via Sony’s desktop software, then bookmark a location to load up on the reader, but that doesn’t help me when I don’t have access to a desktop PC. However, this lack bugs me less than I thought it would. In 6 weeks of frequent use, only once have I wished I could search for something. I guess the lack of this feature is because the 505 lacks the keyboard of the Kindle 2. But I still think some sort of text entry via a toggle button would have been better than none at all. Incidently Sony’s newer model, the PRS-700, adds search via a touch-screen keyboard. But I saw a 700 in a store recently, and wasn’t impressed at all. Adding a touchscreen overlay to the display makes it appear muddled and blurry.

And both readers are hobbled by official book stores which only sell books locked down with DRM. I say this a lot, but: I won’t buy any books from Amazon or Sony’s stores until I know that I can at the very least loan them to friends or donate them to a good cause when I’m done reading. Both stores’ prices are currently far too high, often equivalent to or nonsensically more than the print version, to justify the tradeoff of losing those ‘features’ of a book.

And there’s one final, less concrete reason I prefer the 505 over a Kindle 2 – the 505 doesn’t feel like it’ll fall apart in my hands. It’s made of metal, and feels much more solidly built than the plasticy Kindle. I actually dropped the 505 once, pretty severely. I had to snap the power button back on, but otherwise there was absolutely no sign of injury. I’m very confident that a similar fall would have killed off a Kindle 2.

Incidentally, check out Calibre! It’s a great piece of software designed to manage eBook collections on a reader. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

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I’ve been much quieter here than I intended to be lately, and hope to revitalize my posting routine in the near future. But first, I have news!

News!

Melissa and I are engaged!

I picked out a ring about 2-3 weeks ago, and had to wait for the setting to come in. I picked it up yesterday and decided I’d better make use of it before I hid it so well that I forgot where I put it

A little while back, Melissa and I built a mini cocktail arcade table out of an Ikea table and an old laptop. She loves it, perhaps even more than I do. Ms. Pac-Man is her favorite game ever, since she was a little kid. I decided to leverage these facts, and modified the game a bit. After the second level of Ms. Pac-Man, there’s a small little animated cut scene that plays. Here’s a low quality youtube version of it that someone recorded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZysHkdC6U

I turned it into this (sorry, there’s no sound in this video):

She saw it, was confused, said "what?", turned around, and there I was with the ring!

Oh, and she also said yes

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world today!

More details, for those who have asked me how I did the alteration:
(more…)

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