Ramblings Archives - Page 5 of 17

2011: A Year in Pictures

Continuing my trend of doing this every odd-numbered year, I’m taking a photo every day in 2011!

As always I can’t promise great art. But there’s usually some good stuff that comes out of the chaff. Right now I’m just happy that I’ve avoided taking a picture of my meals so far, though I’m sure I’ll resort to that any day now.

I’m putting one slight alteration on it this time around, geotagging each photo and plotting them on a map. Photos I take at home can only be seen on the map by my friends & family on Flickr for obvious privacy reasons, but I’ve got travel plans to a few places around the country this year and look forward to seeing the final product.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Kindle

I’ve ranted before on multiple occasions about my issues with the current state of the commercial ebook setup.

Then I got a Kindle for Christmas.

I haven’t quite done a 180, but after truly giving the Amazon ebook ecosystem a fair chance I’m more willing to highlight the positives of the experience.

Like Sarah, I feel like a bit of a library traitor in admitting all this. But, things I really like about my Kindle:

Portability. A Kindle is much lighter than most hardcover novels. It’s also much easier to read on the bus, where I often have to stand. I can read the Kindle with one hand, and keep myself upright with the other.
Cross-device sync. if I have a few minutes to kill while waiting in line, I read a few pages of a book on my phone. When I get back to the Kindle, it knows where I left off. if I need to do serious work with a book, I move to my PC. It all just works, pretty seamlessly. I wish the sync feature was more robust than a simple ‘furthest page read’ notion, and that I could sync non-Amazon content across devices in the same way. But it’s still very handy.
Note-taking & highlighting. For reading non-fiction, a Kindle is invaluable. I’ve never been one to scribble margin notes as I read, mostly because I know I’ll never go back and find them all later. But the Kindle puts all notes & highlights in a centralized, web-accessible location. For serious non-fiction this adds real utility to a book that paper copies simply can’t provide. It helps in fiction too. I find myself highlighting the quotes I really like, and now they’ll be much easier to track down in the future.

These are all things that move a book beyond paper. I think I may have been too hung up on the things that Amazon’s ebooks take away from a purchased print title – loanability to friends (Amazon’s new title loan feature is so crippled that it’s useless), library use (nonexistent), resale (nonexistent), etc. While those are still issues (in some cases major ones), I haven’t previously focused enough on the extra features Amazon adds to a purchased title.

I still adamantly refuse to pay more for an ebook title than the print version, and I’ll keep that stance until the issues I listed above are addressed. But I’m now ok with paying a price equal to the print title’s. I’m giving some features up, but also gaining others in exchange. Features which greatly enhance the way I consume text.

The issue of ebooks and libraries is a larger one, which I’m more and more pessimistic about, and a topic for another time (libraryrenewal.org did recently restore a bit of my hope). But as a reader, if not a librarian, I’ve learned to love the experience the Kindle provides. I guess the title of this post is a bit of a lie – I didn’t really stop worrying, but I now worry a little less.

Virgin’s Project – app overkill

Earlier this week, Virgin launched an interesting new project. It’s called, well, ‘Project’. Project is essentially an iPad-only magazine. The key word is only. I’d link you to an article in the magazine, but I can’t.

See, Project has no real web presence. They maintain a blog, but that blog’s content is entirely separate from the app’s articles. The only way to read those articles is via the iPad app ($2.99/issue). This restriction cuts to the heart of my ongoing concern with app culture. As I’ve said before, Apps lock up data and go against one of the central ideas and advantages of the open web â€“ the ability to link between pages.

Project could have the most fascinating articles in the world, and nobody would know. The Project app has no copy/paste option, no real export ability at all. The only included export feature (and I use that word loosely) is emailing a screenshot of one page of an article to someone. I’d be embarrassed to share info with anybody that way.

Without the ability to link articles, Project loses out on the magic Google juice. The only way to find text in the article is by random browsing through the pages. Nobody will ever just stumble across a Project article unless they were specifically looking for it in the first place.

I understand that Project wants to experiment with magazines in the emerging tablet world. And it admittedly has some nice features integrating video and slideshows into the pages (Jeff Bridges wanders around the cover and a couple of interior pages while you read (see screenshot), and the effect is not unlike a photograph from Harry Potter). But locking all the content inside an app is a huge misstep.

Why not go after the tablet market with an HTML5 webpage instead? I’m willing to bet that 90% or more of Project’s multimedia functionality could be replicated on the open web. The result would be cross-platform (other future tablets could read it too), and the content would be linkable and Googleable. Lock it behind a subscription wall if that’s the desired business model, whatever. But on the open web users could at least stumble on an abstract or summary. Just put it on the web somehow. I’m not saying Project’s content is particularly amazing, but with the existing model how would anybody even find out? It’s impossible to post a link to an article on my blog, twitter account, or anywhere else.

Or please, at least allow readers to copy and paste text snippets. If I ever wanted to quote a Project article, I’d have to transcribe the text word by word. In the year 2010, that’s insane.

Apps have their place, but locked-down magazines aren’t it. This kind of thing hurts the internet.

iPad apps

I nabbed an iPad a few weeks back. It was almost an impulse decision, but it’s an impulse I’m glad I gave in to.

Basically, I need a new laptop. I also don’t want to pay as much as a laptop costs. This is a fundamental problem in obtaining a laptop, yes?

The iPad made for a nice compromise on price point and functionality. I still don’t want to type anything longer than a few sentences on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. But for anything else I find myself using the iPad.

I don’t think the iPad qualifies as a mobile device. At least not in the same way that a smartphone does. I’m turning this over in my head a lot, and might elaborate on it at some later point.

I will now share my favorite iPad apps, a ritual I understand is customary upon obtaining a new piece of gadgetry:

Flickstackr – $1.99

I didn’t want to sync my massive photo library to the iPad, as it would quickly overswamp my 16gb of storage. This is a great workaround. The iPad’s native photo viewing interface is beautiful, and Flickrstackr does a good job of replicating it’s high points for my online photos.

BBC News – Free

One of innumerable news apps, this one lets me listen to live BBC news radio as I browse stories.

NY Times – Free (for now)

This is free for now, and has a great reading experience. Great enough that I’ll consider paying for it when the paywall goes up sometime next year (depending on price, of course).

Comics by Comixology – Free app, comics range from free-$2.99 each

This device feels like it’s made for viewing digital comics. Comixology has distribution deals with Marvel, DC, and a host of smaller publishers.

Instapaper – $4.99

I’m late to the party on this one, but Instapaper does a great job of collecting all the articles I want to read but don’t have time to parse immediately.

Air Display – $10

Pricey, but magical. This app lets the iPad function as a second monitor, so long as it’s on the same wifi network as the host computer. Not a flawless user experience, but when it works it’s a major productivity boost.

ABC Player – Free

ABC is the only major network with an iPad app. It (perhaps obviously) streams recent episodes of ABC’s shows. Works flawlessly.

Netflix – Free, requires Netflix subscription
It just works. Very very nice.

Angry Birds – $4.99
Don’t buy this. Your free time will thank me.

Bonus app that I want to like but it just costs way too much:
Wired – $3.99 per issue
Of all magazines, Wired seems like one that should be read on a tablet computer. Unfortunately the high price gets in the way. There’s no subscription option – a year would cost $47.88. I currently pay $12 for a year of print issues. Bring the price in line with the print, and I’m onboard.

Android’s App Inventor: Drag and Drop Programming

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

The ubiquitous book – anytime, anywhere

I recently finished reading Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, For The Win. I’m not crazy about the book itself (a topic for another time), but the reading experience was different, more fluid, and ultimately better than what I’m used to.

Thanks to publisher Tor’s generosity at ALA 2010 last month I have a copy of the book in hardcover. And thanks to Doctorow’s business model of giving away free ebook versions of his works I had the text in e format too. This is the first time I’ve read a book while having access to both e and print versions at the same time.

As much as I enjoy my Sony Reader, a print book is still my personal ideal for most of the novel reading I do. I use the Sony primarily for convenience, like when I don’t want to carry a large hardcover on the bus. But if I’m sitting on the couch I still prefer a standard print book experience. With access to both print and e versions I was able to jump back and forth between the two, using whichever provided a superior experience at the moment.

And actually I had 3 options – Hardcover, Sony Reader, and the Aldiko ebook reader app on my phone. (Doctorow provides his ebooks in a variety of DRM-free formats compatible with a large number of devices.) I read the hardcover on the couch, the Sony on the bus, and a few pages here and there on the phone whenever I had some waiting in line time. It was convenient, easy, and I got through the book much faster than I would have otherwise.

But now I’m spoiled! Doctorow’s ebook give-away model is pretty unique, not many other authors do it. I’m not going to buy a book in both print and e, and library ebook options are pretty anemic. The only way this would happen again is if I pull titles from Project Gutenberg. But I’m not much of a classics reader, and Gutenberg doesn’t have a lot from my to-read list.

While I don’t think it’ll ever happen, I’d love for a purchase of a print copy to come with a free ebook counterpart. I’d even pay a little extra for the option, and the bonus to researchers of having a searchable text to supplement the print could be a considerable advantage.

My favorite Android apps

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

Dumbphone: Using a US smartphone to navigate Europe with RMaps

After we got married (!) last month Melissa and I spent 10 days in Europe on our honeymoon. London, Paris, and Rome! It was an amazing trip, especially since neither of us had been to Europe at all before. But this post isn’t going to be our amazing trip’s slideshow. On the more technical side of things, I was fascinated at the idea of using our smartphones (we both have a Motorola Droid on Verizon) in Europe.

A little background: not all US cell phones work in Europe. I’ll avoid the nitpicky details and just say that in general AT&T or T-Mobile phones will work in Europe, but Verizon and other carriers won’t. While we could still open and use apps on our phones, anything that required a cell network connection would be dead.

This distressed my inner techie – I’ve become hopelessly addicted to navigating with my phone’s google maps, and google maps pulls the maps over a cell connection. I really wanted to use it to find our way around. The one thing that still worked on the Droid in Europe is the GPS – it can get your position in latitude/longitude. But with no data connection It has no maps to plot that point on! All that Google Maps would show me is a blue dot on a grey background. Not exactly handy for finding my way.

But with a little foresight and pre-planning, I set up my Droid to cache the maps locally before we left for Europe. This process was a bit of a pain, because it’s not well documented anywhere that I could find. Here’s a tutorial: Continue reading →

eBooks – Who’s doing it right?

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking (and writing) about eBooks, usually taking a pretty negative slant toward existing eBook publishers and vendors. DRM, distribution models, even publication timelines – much of it is a huge mess.

But I don’t want to seem too negative – I still think eBooks as a concept hold massive promise. It’s just many of the current implementations that’re flawed. So who’s doing it right? Here’s a handful of companies and products which I think are on the right track:

1. SpringerLink
Much of my thinking centers on the consumer publishing eBook panopoly – the Kindles, Nooks, and similar devices of the world. But there’s of course an academic side to things too. I have major beefs with a lot of the vendors and publishers who provide eBook packages to universities & colleges. Most of these are a topic for another post. But one thing I want to cover here: Many of them commit one of my pet peeve sins by making the books non-downloadable. They can’t be used on any kind of personal eReader device, or even viewed on a PC without an internet connection. But the SpringerLink collection that we subscribe to at UNC provides simple, clean, downloadable PDFs. There’s no password protection on the files, no DRM, no clunky web client we’re forced to use. They trust users to download a chapter and use it responsibly. As a result they’re the first eBook collection I search and show to students.

Sure, I wish SpringerLink had a more flexible format than PDF, but this is a step in the right direction. While other vendors like eBrary are rushing to finish off what will no doubt be limiting device-specific apps for their content, Springer lets readers choose how to consume their text.

2. Fictionwise
Fictionwise.com isn’t perfect, but they’re still my favorite eBook retailer. They sell a large portion of their titles DRM-free, which means they can be read on virtually any device or computer in perpetuity. There’s no license keys to maintain, no chance of a distributor retroactively taking back a sale. They also provide an archive of my purchases – I first bought a title from them in 2003, and I can re-download that book as much as I want today. I can even still get to the titles I purchased which they no longer sell. I wish their catalog of non-DRMed books would grow, especially among current bestsellers, but Fictionwise is still the only place I buy my eBooks from today.

(One caveat – Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise last year. I hope B&N lets FW keep its independence.)

3. Calibre
eBook file formats are far from standardized. There’s .epub, .lrf, .html, .mobi, .pdf… the alphabet soup goes on forever. And of course no one device or program supports them all. The situation is a head-scratcher, and that confusion costs consumers & students time and money. Once upon a time it was a nightmare trying to convert from one format to another. Then along came Calibre.

Think of it like itunes for eBooks. It converts from almost any format to any other format, provides sophisticated yet user-friendly metadata management, and even syncs files with eReader devices. As a bonus, it’s open source & free to download!
Calibre single-handedly increased my ability to read eBooks by roughly 100% (my very scientific measurement, yes), and decreased my frustration even more. It doesn’t work with files locked down via DRM, but that’s a fault of vendors and not Calibre.

4. Comics by Comixology
Technically this is about comics, not simple text, but either way it’s still eBooks of a different sort. Comics by Comixology (henceforth referred to as simply ‘Comixology’) is an iPhone app which sells downloadable comic books. Many of them are adapted from print versions, but optimized very well for the iPhone & iPod Touch’s smaller screen. Panels zoom in and out and flow together. And in a first for digital comics, Comixology even sells issues from many major print publishers like Marvel and Image.

The comics only function on the iDevices, of course, which is something that would usually bug me. But the user experience is so good that I’m willing to overlook it for now. And then comes what I like best about Comixology – the price. Most issues are either $.99 or $1.99, which frankly is what a comic book should cost in any form. Many print comics now cost $3.99, and then after that ripoff I have to find somewhere to store them. As a result, my comic buying in the last couple years has dropped way off.

So $.99 for something I don’t have to find storage space for is a very attractive alternative to me. Example: I recently wanted to read the newest Atomic Robo collection. Amazon charges $12.89 for the print version, down from an $18.95 list price. I picked up the whole thing on Comixology for $4.95, and had a great digital reading experience without taking up space on my living room shelves. Cost effectiveness trumps a lot for me. Many times publishers charge resellers like Amazon the same wholesale price for both print copies and eBooks. This baffles me to no end. Comixology and their content providers recognize how much cheaper digital distribution is, and adjusted their prices accordingly.

I consume comics differently than I consume books. Comics by Comixology (despite their awkward name) is smart enough to realize that I’m not alone in this, and found a way to make the restrictions I usually foam at the mouth over become a palatable choice.

(note: Comixology has multiple apps for the iPhone, and I’m talking about the one specifically called ‘Comics by Comixology’ here.)

Step into the social circle

I was googling around for something work-related this afternoon, and noticed some results it was finding on Flickr. After a quick double take, I realized it was finding a few photos from my Flickr contacts. Weird coincidence, right? That was my first thought. Then I looked closer, and noticed that Google is running a new beta feature called ‘social circle’: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

(OK, maybe it’s not so new – the Google Blog mentioned the feature’s launch last October. But it’s new to me!)

Essentially, Google knows who my friends are and now searches each friend’s personal web of content. The idea, I guess, is that results from my friends will be more relevant.

But then I thought to myself “Hey self, Google doesn’t own Flickr, Yahoo does! How do they know who my Flickr contacts are?”

After poking around, as best I can figure out their data mining goes something like this:

1. I have a google profile page (http://www.google.com/profiles/Chad.Haefele)

2. On that page, I have a link to my twitter account.

3. Google pulls in my twitter contact list, presumably via the Twitter API.

4. Google checks to see if any if anybody else with a google profile page listed a twitter account that matches someone I follow on twitter.

5. If it finds a match, Google takes a closer look at the matched person’s Google Profile page. Other sources from that person’s profile are added to my social circle search results. If they happened to list a Flickr account, photos from it show up in my search results whether or not I’m actually connected with them on Flickr.

At first I found this vaguely creepy, complete with brief paranoid visions of Google’s slimy tentacles reaching out across the web. But the more I think about it, the more I like it. Every bit of this data comes from a source that the creator specifically allowed to be public. It might be an order of thought removed from what most people consider when posting a link, but I think it’s still kosher. A conscious decision to make this info public was necessary. And I love seeing what simple things like APIs and RSS feeds can mash together.

Most importantly being able to search my social stuff like that in one place is extremely handy. More and more I find myself searching my own twitter contacts’ streams or my flickr contacts’ photos for things I need and opinions I trust or that one link I know I saw somewhere weeks ago and now want to go back to. By adding these search results to my standard daily googling, I get the same high utility from those results even if I wouldn’t have thought to search my social stream directly.

Every so often it hits me all over again: We live in a pretty amazing world. In a lot of ways, the internet still seems like magic to me.