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1 February, 2011

Apple to Ban Kindle from iOS Platform? UPDATE: New In-App Subscriptions Not So Popular

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This would be a monumental mistake, if true. They’ve already done it with the Sony reader, and they are having constant fights with other iOS content providers because the Boys of Cupertino want to control the money flow of their customers.

I’ve had multiple readers on my iPad since day one for a reason: iBooks sucks.  Not a little, a lot. We’re talking Jupiter-sized amounts of suck. The availability of books is absolute crap and most of it is very limited in scope, compared to Amazon, and the only place it has a slight lead over Kindle is that it gives you page count, instead of section counts — more useful for using the material in an academic piece.

This sort of locked-down nonsense that makes non-Apple users rail (rightfully) against the Mac platform. I’ve no problem with them restricting certain apps that might be harmful to the stability of the iOS devices (although I’d like the choice, anyway, just warn me the software or content is dangerous), but limiting the functionality of my machine (I bought it; it’s not mine to do with as a please) is a no-go in my book.

UPDATE: Publishers in Europe had, at the launch of the device, pushed Apple to let them do in-app subscriptions, but the Wizards of Cupertino wouldn’t let them…so they redirected the buying of books, magazines, and other downloaded content to their websites. (Case in point: Amazon with their Kindle for iPad/iPhone/Mac app.) Now that the Apple moneymen have realized how much they have to gain, the company is threatening to ban apps that do not do in-app subscriptions that allow them to take a 30% cut.

Simply put, Apple is trying to think like a retailer for the content outside providers are giving the end users. While some agree (often reflexively) with Apple, the “betrayed” publishers in Europe seem to suggest that just having access to their content without Cupertino mafiosi changing a cut aids the sale of the devices, and aids Apple in the end. “By promoting these apps, they promoted the device. Publishers in fact helped to make the iPad successful on the market.” I tend to agree with them on this last point.

More problematic to me than the 30% “road tax” that Apple is trying to slap everyone with, is the issue that iBooks and iTunes often do not have the breadth of product that, for instance, Amazon does. Cupertino also adheres to an outmoded idea of what cost for electronic material should be; the lack of printing costs, shipping costs, and the general “info should be free” attitude of the internet generation means that success of the iOS devices will increasingly require lower prices on content. Amazon, Google and the Android tablet market get this; Apple would be wise to hop on board.

(There may be a way Amazon and others could get around the in-app issue by allowing users to choose to go to their website or to pay Apple’s tax… More here.)

 

25 January, 2011

SanDisk 64GB SDXC Card

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Life Unconstructed, Technology | Tags: , |
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I just picked up one of these cards to act as a media drive for the MacBook Air.  I have a lot of media — mostly pictures — that I did not want on the SSD, as it’s only 128GB. While I was in no risk of running out of space on the drive, I wanted to effectively add another 50% to the storage on the machine, and the SD Card only sticks out only a wee bit, so it’s no trouble to leave it in the machine while I bang about town.

It’s advertised as having a 15MB/sec transfer rate, but I’m not seeing that — depending on what it’s moving, it’s between 8-10MB/sec. Downloading from it is faster, however, than adding to it. For small files, it’s pretty much instantaneous. For moving a gig or two of files, more like a 10 minute process.

You’ll have to swap it out, if you are loading files from a camera’s SD card, unless you load the pics through a USB cable from the camera, but it seems to work well. I haven’t tried, yet, to see if iPhoto and iTunes will store to it, but since I keep most of the photos out of the former program, it’s not normally an issue.

It’s a good, cheap solution for adding memory to the MacBook Air without resorting to a big USB memory stick.

 

25 January, 2011

The iPad Just Became a Useable Business/Overall Device

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Thanks not to Apple, which dropped the ball badly on AirPrint, but Google.  The new Google Cloud Print feature lets you set up your printer from your desktop or laptop (has to be a Windows machine for now, but they’re promising OSX support soonish), then you can print emails and attachments direct to your home printer, even if you’re not on your own network.

For printing Pages and other material, I emailed myself at the GMail account and printed the attachment. No issues. I haven’t tried websites, etc. but even if it doesn’t do that, it still just made the iPad a useable “laptop” to my mind.

 

20 January, 2011

Yeah, It’s Planned Obsolescence; No, It’s Not Some Grand Conspiracy

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iFixIt CEO Kyle Wiens is suggesting that Apple is guilty of planned obsolescence in their machines. Gasp!  What!?! Well, no fooling; every manufacturer of goods plans for their stuff to break, be it cars, washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, or home electronics.  With the R&D cycle pushing new machines out the door every year or two for a cell phone, television, or disk player; 2-3 years for a major upgrade to a computer line, and 5 or so years for a car, it’s no surprise said manufacturers don’t want you hanging onto your old machines for much longer that that projected lifetime.

I’ve hung on to most of my vehicles past their warranty period (usually 3, 5, or 6 years) because they’re bloody expensive and increased safety regulations and other added costs make buying a new car more expensive every time you look at a new(ish) car.  For computers, I have a tendency to trade them out every three years of so to keep up with new interface technologies (USB 2 now 3, Blu-Ray or DVD instead of CD, etc.)  Usually, for that reason, I buy cheap on computers…which has led to problems with machines burning their motherboards after a year or two of heavy use (my Toshiba in 6 months, the HP tablet in 18 months.  Dells, however, I’ve had great luck with; I’ve never had a Dell die on me, I usually outgrew them.)

So it’s no surprise Apple wants you to buy a new MacBook every two or three years.  You iPad will be behind the times in three months when iPad 2 adds more processing power, memory, and cameras. There’s rumored to be an HDMI out and an SD Card reader (if the software to do it is there, I suspect you won’t be left behind there if you have the camera interface for SD cards.)  But really, until the battery life has collapsed at about 1000 charge cycles (say 2.5 to three years), there’s no reason to worry about it.  If you want to trade out the battery, it’ll be possible (they can sometimes do it for you right at the Apple Store is my understanding.

Wiens real problem is you can’t easily work on the Apple devices yourself — trade the SSD drive for a bigger one, since it’s part of the motherboard, can’t easily replace the battery or RAM.  If you need to tinker, and some do, don’t buy Apple.  And by the way, that screw they’re showing in the picture is not proprietary to Apple; it’s a f@#king TORX screw.  Not common, but still there are readily available screwdrivers for it. I’ve worked on my own computers, I’ve worked as a computer tech…most of the time it’s a good idea to leave the machine’s guts alone unless you have to change something out.

(The Tinkerer is a common subspecies of user of any technology that can’t leave things alone, often “improving” them to the point of being wholly unusable. [Ex. The front yard mechanic whose 1966 Mustang hasn’t moved under it’s own power ever and is rusting out under a tarp, or the home gunsmith that has to put that new spring and buffer into their 1911, then won’t switch back when the pistol jams like they’re trying to cycle rocks in it.]  Some people know what they’re doing…most don’t. You could say Apple’s saving curious users from themselves.)

 

13 January, 2011

Thank Goodness for the All-Night Walmart

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Just your average evening — I’m working on the laptop, wife’s on the desktop doing her thing.  I suddenly get asked if I’m online.  I am.  She’s not.  So she cycles the router.  Now neither of us is able to get internet access, but we can get the router and see each other.  Call Comcast and have them reset the router after I’ve cycled it a few times.  No joy.  I dig out the old Dell laptop, because the MacBook Air doesn’t have an ethernet cable connection (first real complaint about it!)  Modem’s working fine, cable’s fine.

So, new router needed — not bad since the old one was seven year old (a Linksys.)  Unfortunately, it’s 10pm and all the electronics stores are closed…but there is an all-night Walmart a mile or so from here.  A quick zip out and their electronics department even has a couple of guys working the place.  I settle on a Cisco E2000 router that will handle B, G, and N and has the 5GHz option.

So now I’m ready for trouble…this is going too well.  Get home and after wrestling with the usual collection of power cables, it’s ready.  CD into the Dell, since it’s up and running, and two minutes later the laptop’s online and the router is named and passworded to match the old router so we don’t have to muck with our settings.  The printer is a bit finicky but finally comes online.  The Mac finds it and runs, no problems.  The iPad finds it and runs, no problem.  The hot-shit desktop gives me a few hiccups — mostly due to the wireless key not picking up the signal so well.  Quick shift of the router’s position and it’s solved.  Time from start to finish:  1 hour.

Thank goodness for the all-night Walmart.

 

1 January, 2011

Quick Review: ClamXav for Mac

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Yeah, yeah, yeah…”Macs don’t get viruses…”  Nevertheless, as Apple gains market share in the computer world, then hackers have more interest — as with legitimate software writers — in making product for OSX.  Even if that doesn’t happen, you can still pass along virii and malware in emails you received from other users.

With that in mind, I downloaded the freeware ClamXav antivirus for my new Macbook Air.  The software is fairly light — just under 17mb on my hard drive — and loaded without issue.  I ran a full scan of the hard drive and found two phishing programs in the Thunderbird trash files (even though I had deleted Thunderbird — you have to go into the library folder of your user files and delete Thunderbird and Mozilla files by hand…or use AppZapper.)

The scan took about 30 minutes for roughly 70GB on the hard drive and during that time it hammered the processor — the fan was on the highest it’s been since I’ve had the machine, the back of the laptop got warm (not dangerously so, but warm enough) and it drained a third of the battery in that time.  It can be set to scan incoming emails, etc.

But it found those viruses Mac doesn’t get.

 

27 December, 2010

Dell Finally Gets With the Program

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Engadget has revealed that Dell has finally made it’s slick Adamo 13 better and cheaper.  This was the main contender to the Macbook Air for me in the ultraportable field, when I was looking for a new laptop, but six months ago, the Adamo was a pretty but sluggish and overpriced rip-off:  $2000 bought you a slow processor, 2GB of RAM, and a tiny SSD.  Now they’ve bumped the processor to 2.1GHz Dual Core processor with 4GB and 128GB on the SSD.  It’s also got similar screen resolution, Wifi and Bluetooth capability, and only really takes a hit on the battery, where it’s averaging 5 hours for a charge, rather than the seven for the Air.  At least the Dell has one thing the Air doesn’t: a backlight keyboard — something the Macbook Air had in its last iteration.

So if you aren’t thrilled with the cult-like Mac fans, the strangely controlling attitude of Apple, and/or want to stick with the very-stable and (I think) easy to use Windows 7, this might be your Macbook killer.  If the Adamo 13 had been out in this configuration at this price a few months back, I’d be typing on another Dell.

 

25 December, 2010

Happiness is Being Able to Access Old File Formats!

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Since I’ve swapped over to a Mac there’s been only one thing keeping me from truly enjoying the new computer — the lack of support for WordPerfect.  While the venerable old word processing program is completely overshadowed by Word — which with the 2007 version and later has finally caught up to the functionality of mid and late-1990s WordPerfect — it’s still a go-to program for a lot of writers I know (and strangely is a standard for legal briefs.)  WordPerfect allowed for fast and easy formatting of documents, especially once you could customize the button bars to do all of the most common tasks in your documents.  It handled graphics and table integration much better than Word until the latest iterations, and on par with Pages.

There are a few options for accessing your old .wpd format files on the OSX machines — there’s OpenOffice, an open source legacy program that is fine enough, save for not reading WordPerfect graphics in a file, and the whole re-formatting your layout it tends to do.  Oh…and on a Mac it’s bloatware — 425mb on my Air.  But it’s free…

You can jump through hoops trying to either run it packaged in WineBottle — essentially an emulator, of sorts; or you can set up virtual machines or get emulators to run an older version of the Mac OS on your machine.  I tried a bunch of these options and none worked well.

Then there’s AbiWord, another bit of freeware that takes up 38mb on the Macbook, runs .wpd files with the correct formatting but not — once again — the graphics.  Did I mention it was free?  And that it’s not a bloated pig of a program?  Well, it’s free and not a bloated pig of a program.  It also lets you set up button bars a la WordPerfect.

There’s over a decade of files I have languishing on an external hard drive waiting to be accessed, and now I can.  Merry Christmas to me!

 

27 November, 2010

Quick Review: iOS 4.2 for iPad

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I’ve had the new OS on the iPad for about a week, so it’s time for a quick review:  the upload went smoothly enough, but the installation kludged up at the synching of the files, requiring me to unplug the iPad from the computer and restart the later.  The iPad, meanwhile, figured out it could go ahead and fire up.  The installation takes a while — don’t worry about the iPad seeming to just sit there near the end of the loading bar for about 5 minutes.  From what I can tell on the various bulletin boards around the net, it’s normal.  There are some issues with iTunes deleting your music library reported; I didn’t have this problem.

The upgrade seems to have improved performance across the board.  The device is running faste r and smoother than I anticipated with one exception to the rule: Mail.  I have a gmail and two Comcast accounts the iPad taps and this seems to confuse the hell out of it if i get a fair amount of mail on any of the accounts.  The unified inbox is nice.

Multitasking:  it works.  Well.  I’ve had Safari and mail open pretty much constantly, but have also had various programs up and running at the same time, including GT Racing.  No slow downs.  For the gamer crowd out there, the PDF Reader, Pages, and Diceshaker programs, when open together let you swap back and forth between them very quickly: double tap the home button, tap the icon of the program you want and you swap back and forth speedily.  This was the improvement that made the iPad the perfect GM tool.

The downside — it does draw more battery power.  The one niggling complaint: you can’t just close out the app; you have to go to the home screen (one tap on the button), then double tap to get the multitasking bar up so you can shut down the app you were just in.  There might be another way and I haven’t stumbled on it, yet.

Air Print:  Disappointed! No, you can’t print to any printer not “Airprint enabled”, which means shitty HP products.  They’re supposed to be bringing more printers online, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up if you run anything not HP.

Folders:  In iTunes drag the app icons together to form folders based on “Entertainment: or what have you.  I like the ability to clean up my screen and group items, like games, together.  It just means you don’t get to do the cool swipe between home screens as much to impress your friends and people ogling the iPad.

Battery life:  multitasking draws off a few hours of run time on the iPad.  Not unexpected, but if you’re on a long international flight, you might want to invest in that Kensignton iPad battery/cover thingee I’ve seen on eBay — it’s supposed to add another 5 hours and a pound or so to the weight.  I’m just making sure that for long trips I’ve only got one program at a time up and running.

Overall, this was a serious improvement on the iPad, but if I’m anything to go by, Mail needs a serious update to run smoother.  I can’t wait to see the iPad2 come spring…

 

26 November, 2010

Two Weeks In: Macbook Air 13″

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I’ve got to say, when I first started playing with the Macbook Air, I wasn’t certain I was going to be too thrilled.  I love the size, weight, and the marathon battery life…but I’m not as enamored of the graphic interface as I am Windows 7.  I can’t get my favorite word processor suite (WordPerfect) for Mac, but I can use Open Office 3 to open the old .wpd files.  I’ve been using Pages, which has some very nice features, but I miss being able to configure a button bar in my word processor so I could shortcut everything as I want it.

I’m not a fan of Apple’s lock-it-down mentality, between iTunes trying to take over everything (and not talking to my iPad from time to time) and iPhoto — I can see where this OS is very popular with people who don’t want to delve into how the computer works, what its doing, or where its putting files.  That aside…

I love this bloody thing!  So far, the fan has kicked on twice since I’ve had it:  once was during an upload for Acrobat Pro 9.  The other, not surprisingly, was while running Flash video.  (Yes, Flash eats battery life [supposedly knocking almost a third your battery time on the Air] and processing cycles — even on my Dell!)  The computer is fast enough for most things I do, and I’ve only gotten the beach ball of doom twice — during the iTunes/iPad snafu last week and Acrobat load.  The screen is bright, crisp, and I have used it outside in full sunlight without issue.  It runs cool, and usually noiselessly thanks to the SSD hard drive.  I got around the lack of an optical drive with the external SuperDrive, I’m using a USB thumbdrive for media I don’t want to clog the 128GB SSD with, and I really appreciate the 12-14 second boot time from off to up and running.

As an aside, I have left Flash off of the machine (it doesn’t ship with it; you have to download it), and instead use this workaround when I want to watch Flash video:  I boot up Google Chrome (it has a Flash extension) and watch the clip in question.  I then shut down Chrome, killing the Flash process, and getting back my processing and memory cycles.

So the verdict after 2 weeks with the Macbook Air 13″:  It’s a damned good laptop that looks fantastic and works very very well.  Is it worth the $1300 or so the girlfriend paid for it?

Yes.

 

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