Tag: Apple

Apple product launch announcements aren’t the must-watch events they once were for me. I’ve scaled back my purchasing of new electronic toys to a much slower pace.[1] No more new Mac to replace a perfectly good one every 12–18 months. I keep my phones well past the two years I’m obligated to keep them without having to pay to upgrade.

Mostly this is because the pace of technology has changed, at least for now. Those big leaps in design, function, and software we saw in the ‘00s has slowed way down. There just isn’t as huge of a difference in a 2016 Mac and your 2011 Mac as there was between that ’11 Mac and an ’07 one. Plus, as we spend more-and-more time on the web, as long as you have a modern browser and a decent Internet connection, you can do about everything you need to do just fine.

I did pay attention to most of yesterday’s Apple event, though. It’s been over a year since the rumors started circulating that Apple wanted to eliminate the 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone. Sure enough, they did it, moving folks who buy the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus to using either a lightning cable or Bluetooth to connect their headphones.

The gnashing of teeth had been around almost as long as the rumors of the elimination of the 3.5mm connection. Once that change became reality, the complaints just got louder.

In general, I don’t care about the change. Philosophically, I’m down with the move. We do need to move toward easier, more accurate wireless connections with greater range for our mobile devices. Bluetooth kind of sucks, but nothing has forced either that protocol, or any competing one, to improve enough to make most people want to use it.[2] Maybe this is the first step in making that happen.

However, Apple’s language in promoting this switch was pretty much garbage. “Courage” was the word Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller used when explaining why Apple decided to scrap the legacy connector. Which is straight up bullshit. If you strip out that horrible choice of word and go with the rest of Apple’s argument, I can get onboard with them. They are constantly struggling to squeeze more-and-more technology into their phone case. Yanking out a single-use connector that will allow them to include a better camera, more battery, or the next technological advance is a reasonable argument. The transition might be difficult, but I can understand that reasoning.

But saying it’s “courageous”? You lost me there.

The other thing I thought of while watching the presentation was how long the 3.5mm plug has been around. I’ve owned a few pairs of headphones with ¼” ends over the years. But the overwhelming majority of audio cables I’ve used in my life have been the venerable 3.5mm one. My first transistor radio used a single earphone that connected with a 3.5mm plug. I connected tape recorders to other devices with a 3.5mm cord.[3] Walkmen and Diskmen. Vehicles had 3.5mm AUX inputs to connect portable devices. Computers sent their audio out via a 3.5mm jack. And, obviously, every Apple device I’ve owned so far has exported sound via a 3.5mm connecting point.

The standard has traveled from the analog to the digital age without missing a beat, which is pretty remarkable. Odds are the cables you used to connect your VCR to your TV in 1985, or your computer to your printer in 1995, no longer work on modern devices. But the dozens of audio cords with 3.5mm connectors on each end that are knotted on my shelf of random tech gear still have hundreds of uses in them.

I’m pleased that we’re taking another step toward getting rid of cables. But that 3.5mm standard has served me well, and will continue to a little while longer.

I’ve been (almost) exclusively on the iPad + keyboard combo for nearly two weeks now. How’s it going? I’m glad you asked.

A couple years back, in the midst of the nine or ten month netbook craze, I picked up a cheap MSI netbook. I tried to use it for work, but it was just too damn small. The keyboard was cramped and applications written for screens that were at least 12″ were nightmares to use on the 9″ screen. The screen was dim and, despite its size, was also heavier than the keyboard and was prone to tipping over. After a few months of struggling with its limitations, I sold it and went back to using a full-sized laptop.

That experience was in the back of my mind as I began this experiment. Sure, the iPad can do a lot of great things, but would its limitations prevent me from using it full-time?

At least so far, the answer is no. And I believe the big difference is how iOS applications are built to take advantage of the device’s screen.

On the netbook, there was never enough real estate. I was always squinting, struggling to resize windows so I could get all the information I needed. And while I feel I’m pretty adaptive to different keyboards, the keys on it were so crowded and so small that I could never get comfortable with it. Perhaps that’s the key word in what I was looking for: comfort. Can I see what I need to see? Can my fingers do what comes naturally on a keyboard or are they getting tied up and slowing me down?

On the iPad vision isn’t a problem. Text is bigger, bolder, and brighter than on the netbook. Applications are designed to fill every pixel of screen space, and thus are perfectly proportioned for easy readability. The keyboard on my Zaggfolio isn’t full-sized, but it is big enough that my fingers have room to move. Unlike the netbook, there is space between the keys, so even if you don’t hit a key squarely, you still have a margin for error.

For fun stuff, there are plenty of ways to get things done on the iPad. My concern was could I do the tasks necessary to file a story.
As with the Mac, I’m a bit of a text editor whore on the iPad. I have a folder full of text apps, and honestly, I don’t have a favorite yet. Some are better for when I write for the blog, in which I use a language called Markdown. Others are better for writing that doesn’t need to be converted to HTML, and I’ll probably use those more when I use the iPad for work. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a blessing or a curse. I have many options for different needs. But there also isn’t one, go-to app that does everything I want. But for $1-5 an app, it doesn’t break the bank to experiment.

It’s taken some work, but I’ve moved the spreadsheets I used for stats on the Mac over to Numbers for iOS. This is where we run into the one area I’m concerned about when it comes time to cover an event on the iPad. On the Mac, I can tile windows, having a spreadsheet underneath two text windows while I put together my box score and story. That’s not possible in iOS. It’s going to take some adjustment to get used to that, and I imagine there will come a night when I’m pushing deadline and get frustrated by constantly having to switch between applications.

Which brings up the iPad’s biggest shortcoming. While iOS supports ‘multitasking’, it does so in a clunky manner that can best be described as quasi-multitasking. Or half-assed multitasking, maybe. Other mobile operating systems have come up with better ways to flip between apps you’re using, so I can hope that the engineers at Apple are working on something for the next major release of iOS. I can work with the current method but I would love something that was faster, easier, and more intuitive. Adding support for the Command-Tab shortcut from the Mac OS would be ideal.

Another area where iOS needs work is on how it supports external keyboards. It’s great that you can connet to any Bluetooth keyboard and get to work. But not all the shortcuts from the Mac OS will work in iOS. For someone like me that uses a lot of shortcuts, that slows me down as I hunt for the manual way to recreate what I used to do with a couple keystrokes. I would expect that keyboard support will get more robust as iOS evolves, but I also imagine some things that we’re used to on a Mac will never work on iOS.

That’s the great lesson from all of this. Any time you switch computer devices, you’re going to have to make adjustments. Whether you’re switching from a desktop to laptop, Vista to Windows 7, PC to Mac, etc., you’re going to have to learn some new tricks. That’s even more pronounced on the iPad. It will take patience and a lot of trial-and-error to get a new system that you are comfortable with.

For my needs, the iPad works as a MacBook replacement. I can still store gigabytes of data on the family computer and just take what is essential on my iPad. I can create text files, post to my blog, peruse newsfeeds, read and respond to email, and browse the web as I’ve done on the Mac for years. Adding an external keyboard makes all of this so much easier, adding some of the utility of a traditional laptop. While I have run into some difficulties, none of them have prevented me from doing what I want and need to do. And I’ve tried to remind myself that there are trade-offs in this experiment. I’m giving up some functions I was used to but gaining things like extreme portability, insane battery life, lower replacement cost, and a whole new area of use.

After several weeks of use I’m comfortable having only an iPad for my main computing device. Friday night I covered a softball game and had no trouble filing my story afterwards. I hope the process is as smooth in the fall when I go back to using my spreadsheets to build football box scores.

I even had a reverse confusion moment when helping my wife on her MacBook. I was trying to launch an application, and rather than use the trackpad to click on the app’s icon, I reached up and tapped the screen. I did it three times before I realized why it wasn’t responding. It seems as though the muscle memory changes are sticking.

The next time you are in the market for a computer, I can recommend the iPad to just about anyone who doesn’t have to do intense photo editing, design, or video editing. Park your old computer on a desk with an external hard drive to hold all your music, movies, and pictures and then turn it over to the kids for hours of Monkeyquest and Club Penguin fun. Get yourself an iPad and an external keyboard and you’ll never look back.

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After a couple of days of preparation, today I begin my latest technology experiment: can I survive with just an iPad?

I’m often struck by the silliness of me switching back-and-forth betwen the iPad and the MacBook Air throughout the day. I always held on to the Air, though, because it seemed necessary for longer writing and for work assignments. After reading a couple articles, though, and doing some more research on my own, I decided to make a few purchases and see if I really could put the Air away.

The first purchase was a Zaggfolio iPad keyboard case. The biggest issue for me with the iPad is the keyboard. I can do some simple typing with it. But if I want speed, accuracy, and the ability to type for extended periods, I needed a real keyboard. While there are a number of iPad keyboards out there, this one consistently gets the best reviews.

I also added a few apps to help recreate what I do on the Air. Numbers for spreadsheets, which are essential for me when I’m attempting to do stats quickly for football and basketball. Textexpander Touch to help with bulk text I need to repeat often. Blogsy as an iOS MarsEdit replacement. I’m sure I’ll add a few more as the experiment continues.

There are a few things that I will not do on the iPad. I will not edit photos. That will still be done on the Air. Same with downloading and managing music. The Air will be running in the office, connected to a monitor, mostly as a print server and for the girls’ computer needs. But I will not constantly be picking it up to bash out a blog post or return a lengthy email. And while I’m not covering any sports right now, I will do some test runs to see if I can still do all the things I need to do once I am in the field again.

So that’s my new project. I’ll report back in a week or so to update you on my progress.

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I don’t spend a lot of time playing games on my iPad or iPhone. I’ll buy a handful each year and maybe get really interested in a couple of them. It’s rare that a game captures my imagination for more than a couple days.

But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games’ Kingdom Rush. I bought it despite several Internet warnings that it was hopelessly addictive. I can report, after three weeks or nearly constant play, that is absolutely true. If you buy this game, you will get hooked.

What’s so great about it? At first glance, it’s just another Tower Defense game; i.e. you face waves of attackers that you must arrange defensive forces against. Kingdom Rush comes with the twist of being set in a medieval/fantasy environment. It’s basically a D&D spin on classic TD games. You fight off orcs, goblins, trolls, gargoyles, spiders, and other assorted magical creatures.

Your defenses are a combination of infantry, artillery, magicians, and archers. Using your initial budget, you set up your defenses, summon the attackers, and start earning more gold to buy additional structures and upgrade your original ones. As long as you keep killing the attacking forces, you keep earning exciting new ways to destroy them.

It’s a pretty basic concept and, honestly, I never understood why this type of game is so addictive. And then I played Kingdom Rush. There’s something about those rolling waves of attackers, those brief moments of rest, and the ability to see your weak points and correct them during the game that sucks you in. Also, you get a bit of a rush from dropping a Rain of Fire spell on a swarm of attacking monsters. Just when you think you have it set up the way you want, a zombie slips through, you die, and you think, “OK, one more game.” Two hours later you’re still doing that.

That’s been me for the past three weeks.

There is also the clever combination of strategy and tactics, neither particularly heavy, that makes the game difficult to ‘solve’. The game gets tougher as your skills improve. It never gets boring because there is always something new popping up. There are 12 basic levels that can be played at two different difficulty settings. Solve those and two bonus levels pop up. In addition, there are a pair of one-off scenarios at each level.

Put it all together and there are weeks of fun packed into this game. Oh, and the 99 cent price tag makes it a terrific bargain.

Thus, I highly recommend Kingdom Rush. But be warned: once you start playing, you may find it difficult to stop.

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You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams,¹ it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people out there doing the exact same thing. I admire those who can find something to focus their writing each day. And I’ll let them do it.

So I shut the Mac Daddy site down awhile back.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have the urge to write about Apple-related stuff. And just because I only have a personal blog doesn’t mean I can’t share those thoughts here, right?

Thus, coming soon will be the first of my occasional reviews of iOS apps. I’ve been obsessed by a fun little game over the past couple weeks. So keep an eye out for that in the next day or so.

But, while I have your attention, a few thoughts on the surprise announcement last week of the next iteration of the Macintosh operating system, Mountain Lion.

Like many people, when the news first broke Thursday morning, I thought it was some kind of joke. After all, when Apple wants to surprise the world, they have a big event. They don’t talk to a select group of journalists and writers and let word trickle out. But, as they said, they’re doing things differently now.

After reading a number of the insider scoops, I’m left with a single impression: the operating system wars really are over, at least on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and the PC manufacturing community are far more interested in what’s happening in the portable device space. Desktop/laptop computers are still important and won’t disappear any time soon. But OS X and Windows are so advanced and the payoff for pushing them further is so little that all sides will scale things back dramatically there.

What makes that apparent to me is Apple’s announcement that they will now be doing annual updates to OS X, as they’ve done with iOS since its introduction. No more massive rewrites. No more starting from scratch. No more 18-24 month cycles that bring dramatic changes to the core OS. Every year they’re going to tweak some things, upgrade the security features another notch, refine some of the differences between OS X and iOS, and ship an update.

Along with the end of the massive update, we will also never again see a $129 price tag on the update. At least from Apple. The last two updates have both been in the $20 range. I expect that to remain the case. As iPhones and iPads have become the biggest components of Apple’s business, gone is the need to turn desktop OS upgrades into money makers. It’s better to keep the growing installed base on the latest iteration for a modest upgrade fee than try to goose revenues every couple of years with a major release.

And while it’s obvious Apple² is pushing their desktop and mobile operating systems closer together, I think this is a clear sign that while they may share more common elements over time, they will always remain distinct. The annual updates will keep the desktop side of the business as fresh as the mobile side, from a software standpoint, and make the overall experience even more similar. But running the same apps on your MacBook Air and your iPad is not happening any time soon.

Finally, you can’t help but look at this announcement and how it was handled and speculate on the changes in the company since Steve Jobs’ death. Maybe he signed off on this and it’s been in the works for a year or more. But it’s a very good sign for the Tim Cook era at how the company is moving forward. Execution is always the hardest part of any business plan, but so far it looks like Apple will not miss a beat in the new era.

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This is a terrific article on several levels. It examines some of the inside story of the development of the iPhone. It points out fundamental demographic advantages that China has over the U.S. And it gets into the potential moral delimma Apple, and other successful US technology companies, has when balancing profitability, share owner value, and the needs of the American worker.

Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below I shall share with you my thoughts on the latest “scandal” to plague the fine Americans at Apple, Inc.

A couple friends asked me, rather mockingly I might add, how I felt about the revelation last week that the iPhone is apparently cacheing information on your location and storing it both on the phone and in your regular backups. While there was no evidence that the information was being sent to Apple, or anyone else for that matter, plenty of people either freaked out or used this as a chance to mess with Fanboys like me, hoping to shake our confidence.

I was not terribly concerned.

Maybe I’m naive, but I figure if you have any electronic device that is capable of showing your location, that information is stored somewhere and can be accessed by people with the right knowledge. That the iPhone, every Android phone, and apparently Windows 7 phones (in a different manner) track and store this information was not a surprise to me. In fact, it made perfect sense for many reasons. ¹

I understand how some people are creeped out by this. But if this is a problem for you, you probably should never own or use a cell phone. As soon as you connect to the network, which happens the moment you power on an activated phone, your location is revealed. If you stay awake at night worrying about Big Business and/or Big Government tracking your movements, you might want to pull the plug on every part of your digital life. They know what we watch on TV, what we download, the websites we access, and so on. At least they can quickly grab all that information if they want it. It also means no more Gmail, since Google scans every email you send and receive to optimize the ads they send your way. No more Facebook or Twitter, which can record where you are when you post. No more networked games, Amazon Wish Lists, iTunes accounts, PayPal accounts and on and on.

I wondered if all the people throwing a fit about this realized how much information about their lives they had already shared on their own. Or, as Mike Lee put it on Twitter:

“So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare.”

Exactly!

We willingly give up so much information that it seems odd to get upset about something like this. But it is easier to think that Apple or Google or Microsoft or the government is taking something from us than think of all the things we are willingly giving away.

We live in the age of socialized information. Everything is shared by default and opting out has become a routine activity performed each time we decide the cool, new social networking platform isn’t so cool anymore. It is important to monitor how and when information about you is shared. When outside agents are genuinely taking advantage of our personal data, we must demand that they respect our privacy. But we must also recognize that the price for taking part in our techno-social culture is that we must cede some access to our information. It’s a fine line, and one that must be monitored constantly.

Apple responded this morning with a lengthy release that should put most fears to rest. The shut down of the Sony PlayStation Network last week because of an attack that compromised user data is a reminder that we should be more concerned with how companies are securing our data than what data they are collecting in the first place.

As promised, some thoughts on whether should buy an iPad or perhaps something else.

To quickly recap my initial thoughts about the iPad from a year ago, I thought the iPad was super cool and immediately set aside some money to get one when they were announced. After that initial interest waned, though, I reconsidered and evaluated the tech products I already owned and what I couldn’t already do with them. With a laptop on my desk (and lap) and an iPhone in my pocket, I had most of the things the iPad brings to the table covered. The one thing that was left was reading e-books. Thus, I bought a Kindle. ¹

When the iPads hit the stores, I went and played with them a little. Holding one confirmed my opinion: they are super cool. But I still didn’t understand where it fit into my tech life.

And that’s what I tell people who ask me about whether they should get an iPad or not: carefully examine where it will fit into your life. If you have a decent laptop and a smartphone, it’s tough to justify owning an iPad as well. If, however, you only have a desktop computer, or have a work laptop that you can’t use for personal web browsing, emailing, etc. and you have a generic cell phone, then I think the iPad is a reasonable purchase.

Also consider what you want to do with it. Another big problem for me about the iPad is that I want to have a portable writing device. The iPad, in its base form, is not made to crank out thousands of words at a time. Sure, some people say that you can spend a lot of time on the virtual keyboard, but based on my experience with the iPhone’s keyboard, I don’t see the iPad as a device I could use to write lengthy blog posts, use for covering games, etc. And the idea of adding a Bluetooth keyboard to it seems silly to me. You might as well go for a full-powered laptop if you’re going to carry around an iPad and a keyboard.

Which brings me to something else I’ve been meaning to write about for months. Despite having a perfectly good laptop already², I fell in love with the new MacBook Airs when they were announced in October. Thus I did something I’ve never done before: I pre-ordered a first generation Apple product. Of all the money I’ve spent at the Apple Store over the past decade, this might be my finest purchase.

Let’s get the stats out of the way: I purchased a 13” model with the 128 GB solid state hard drive and 4 GB of RAM. I considered the 11” model, but based on my experience using a netbook briefly last year, I knew my old man eyes couldn’t handle a screen that small.

This is a great freaking computer. I can work comfortably on the 13″ screen, although here at home I generally keep it hooked up to an external monitor. The battery life is insane. I’ve yet to run it down where the old MacBook Pro burned through a charge pretty quickly. Despite having a slower processor, this thing is certainly faster than the old Pro model thanks to the solid state drive. Most of you probably have no idea what a solid state drive is. Basically the Air is using flash memory to store all your data. Instead of a mechanical hard drive with moving parts, there is just a big stick of flash memory. This makes everything about this computer super fast.

But this biggest thing is the size. The Air is insanely light. It almost feels like it’s not a real computer, but maybe a case where all the parts have been removed. Carry it around the house or throw it in a bag and the weight barely registers. S’s 13″ MacBook, which is in many ways a very light computer, feels heavy compared to the Air.

My only real concern in going to the Air was the small storage space. My old Pro had a 200 GB hard drive. While I was not close to filling that up, I do like to keep around 25% of my hard drive free. Going to the 128 GB Air seemed like a challenge at first. But I conquered that problem in two ways. First, I separated my iPhoto collection into two libraries and store all my old pictures on an external drive. They’re right there if I need them, but I also removed about 25 GB of data. Second, I undertook a major reevaluation of what I kept in iTunes. I prune my iTunes library often, but still had around 5200 songs and a few movies and TV shows in there, good for about 25 GB in total. I went through, song-by-song and made some hard decisions, deleting some stuff I had kept for years and eventually shaved off another 6 GB or so of space.³

So that’s roughly 30 GB of space I reclaimed. As I write this I’m about even in usage and free space: both checking in at 56 GB and change. I didn’t need to make those changes; I would still have had plenty of room if I had included all of those photos and songs. But in the spirit of a leaner machine, it seemed like a good time to put the data on a diet as well, and only keep the files I absolutely had to have.

The iTunes pruning offered the added bonus of improving my listening experience. While most of my time listening to music is through a series of smart playlists that are designed to constantly plumb the depths of my library and bring forward songs I haven’t heard in ages, I had a lot of chaf in there. Filtering out the songs I wasn’t really interested in hearing has brought back some of the wow factor iTunes had lost, or at least mine had lost, in recent years. I’m hearing the songs I really want to hear and not having to skip over songs I kept just in case I wanted to hear them.

As I said, this is a fantastic computer. And it’s where things are heading. A year from now, I would imagine most Apple laptops will have solid state drives and hold more batteries than anything else inside. There will still be build-to-order options for high end displays and larger mechanical drives. But soon the entire line will look more like the MacBook Air than they do today.

To sum up: buy an iPad if there is a clear space for it in your digital lifestyle. If you already have a laptop and a smartphone, skip it. Or try to win one in a contest so you don’t pay for it. And if you’re looking for a new laptop, take a long, hard look at the MacBook Airs.