Lost In Logic

A lot has been said about the passing of Steve Jobs. The reason I am sad about his death is that Apple (under his leadership) was the first company to make technology products mainstream and fashionable. Gadget lovers like me had long been on the side-lines with their PDAs and gigantic smartphones but Steve Jobs changed all that – the iPod and iPhone made it normal to want to carry more than 15 songs around with you on the train, or to sit in a coffee shop browsing the web on your phone. The iPad is at long last a device which can be switched on instantly like an appliance, but can do almost anything you would desire to do on a full-sized laptop.

From the first Apple product I owned (the G3 slot loading iMac, released in 2001), to the  second (the first iPod – yes people laughed at me for wearing white headphones, and I still think the physical click-wheel device was the best of the classic iPods) to the iPad I purchased recently, they’ve all been accompanied by an enchanting Steve Jobs announcement. It will feel odd not seeing that again, and is something I will definitely miss.

RIP Steve.

I have been tempted by the iPad for a while now, it seemed to offer the power of a laptop without the inconvenience of a laptop. A long battery, yet always connected and always on. I knew full well about the downsides and I didn’t expect to be typing large documents on it, but for browsing the web, checking email and chatting on instant messenger it seemed perfect. So was it?

Not prefect, but very good

The iPad 2, despite considerably lower specs than my laptop on paper feels snappy and rarely do I have to wait for anything to happen. Unlike a laptop, there is no fan – so I feel comfortable leaving it on my bed, or on the carpet knowing I’m not to come back and find it with fans whirling while it melts. The device seems durable, whereas the iPod has a an easy-to-scratch surface, the iPad won’t get scratched under normal use.

Lack of apps

One thing I have found is the lack of iPad specific apps. It’s still quite a new platform, so I can forgive app developers slightly – but the big hitters such as Spotify and Audible still make you use the iPhone versions of the app, which only work in portrait mode and look pixelated. The keyboard layout is also different for iPhone apps, which is rather confusing. While I can type pretty fast on the iPad, the lack of any blogging software as good as Windows Live Writer means I still prefer to fire up my laptop to write anything substantial. An iPad version of Google Chrome would be nice, or at least a way to sync your Google Chrome bookmarks easily (it can be done now, but involves using a 3rd party service and isn’t worth the hassle in my opinion).

Quality not quantity

Having said all that, the apps that come with the iPad are of a very high quality. The Mail, Calendar and Contacts app are very impressive. I was surprised Apple didn’t include an alarm clock and weather app, seeing as there is one available for the iPhone but it’s not a big deal as 3rd party apps have filled the gap.

For casually browsing the web or responding to emails, iPad wins. Booking a holiday? Then I’ll want 30 tabs open at once, and the iPad isn’t good at context switching. Overall I am impressed, it really does fill the void between a smartphone and a laptop. Tablets won’t replace laptops in my opinion, but they will take on many of their roles relegating laptops to the more comprehensive tasks.

Highly recommended.

Please Microsoft, do the right thing!

So Windows 8 will be all things do all people, a tablet operating system to rival iOS and Android for consuming content, while at the same time a fully functional desktop operating system that we use to create content. Sounds great, right?

How can that be possible? Can you imagine the iPad having 10 hours of battery life if it had to run all the background processes (and crapware) that comes preinstalled on most PCs? Bloated AntiVirus software, scheduled disk clean-ups, random Adobe icons, it can be a bit unwieldy for a system that is suppose to be “always on” – the iPad will after all, receive notifications while in standby (and yes the 10 hours is actual usage, not standby). I can’t see Windows doing that, and even with specially tuned hardware all it takes is for someone to install a bit of rouge “classic” software (rather than software using the new JavaScript and probably Silverlight APIs) and that all gets thrown out the Window (sorry, bad pun).

So maybe Microsoft has taken the technology it developed for Windows 7’s “XP Mode” and made it so when you buy a tablet PC, the classic side of the system that can run all your old software is completely virtualised. This would mean the entire legacy system would be contained within a single process that could be paused to save battery.

When installed on a desktop, this extra layer probably wouldn’t be needed (Obviously games and other high-end software won’t run well in a virtualised environment) – but for a tablet I think it makes sense.

Obviously this is just pure speculation on my part, so lets hope all will be revealed at this year’s BUILD conference.

So it’s nearly 2 years since I got my iPhone 3GS, and I decided I wanted to change. Not because the old 3GS was feeling old – it still felt snappy and the battery lasted 2 days. What made me change was those ever-so-annoying “if you don’t have an iPhone” adverts. The thought of being associated with a brand that came across as self-obsessed and narcissistic had slowly been eating away at me, and when I read this story my decision was made.

Compared to iOS, Android has a very “home brewed” feeling to it. The interface is much more complex and far less intuitive. On the flip side however, that means everything is a lot more configurable. In this respect, Android reminds me of Windows Mobile and Symbian more so than it does iOS, I can schedule my work email to only push new items during work hours for example – something I missed from my Nokia, that the iPhone did not offer. The home screen is far superior to that of the iPhone, but it falls down on simple things: Renaming a folder was surprisingly difficult to work out, it turned out I needed to click and hold on the folder name in the folder’s popup. Dragging widgets is awkward as you can’t seem to have more than one floating at once, so rearranging them when the screen is full is impossible.

Unlocked Doors

While the software does have a “rough and ready” feel to it, this has benefits as there is virtually no vendor lock-in. I managed to stream music from my DLNA NAS box quite easily. Apple will let you do this, but only within their ecosystem. There is free satnav (although the phone doesn’t come with a carkit), voice input and a whole host of good quality apps available from the app store. One really useful feature is HTC Sense Online, which lets you locate your phone, make it ring, and lock it remotely – great when you think you may have lost it.

Battery Life

I am disappointed with the battery life. My iPhone (when new) would be at about 70% at 5:30pm when I left work, with average use. The Desire S was at about 40%. It is doing a lot more however, and just proves how little battery technology has improved in the last few years.

Part 2 of review to come soon.

I have recently been developing with PhoneGap, the cross platform development kit for mobile devices (essentially a browser window that lets you run HTML 5 web sites as an App)

I started off developing for iPhone and Android, using the packages provided by their download to get up and running. Great stuff. You write an app using HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS3 and then deploy to each device. The PhoneGap package contains a directory for each platform, with a number of files – the important one being phonegap.0.9.4.js.

So I developed the app on my Windows PC, copying the files across to my trusty Mac to deploy to iPhone. There are some subtle differences in the way Safari and Chrome render, so it was important to test across both devices. I kept coming across intermittent problems on the iPhone however, with the deviceready event not firing. What was going on?

phonegap.0.9.4.js

Due to the negligible amount of documentation available on PhoneGap’s site (Hey – I am used to having MSDN at my disposal!) I found myself digging through the sourcecode to work out how on earth I could do things. I noticed a lot of Android specific code, but no iPhone code. How odd. I then checked in my BlackBerry project folder and noticed the file was much bigger.

Yes, folks – the various phonegap.0.9.4.js files – despite having the same filename are totally different for each OS implementation. Not once in the many hours spent reading PhoneGap’s web site did I see anything that told me that. Turned out my iPhone problems were because I was deploying an Android version of PhoneGap to the iPhone. Having the same filename is confusing and they seem destined to get used in place of one and other. I suspect many others will have tried to deploy the wrong file to the wrong device.

I would really like to see the folks at PhoneGap have a more sensible naming convention. e.g.  phonegap_android.0.9.4.js? It would be apparent straight away the it was specific to that OS, and avoid what amounts to DLL hell issues for mobile apps.

Of course a file is a file, and I can rename it to whatever I like (and probably will) – but it’s nice not to have to (who renames jQuery?) and would certainly make learning the platform easier.

Audible UK have released an app for the iPhone. The best feature over the built in software is that it doesn’t rotate when you hold it sideways (I am certain this “feature” of the the iPhone exists solely for in-store demos, I find it very frustrating and wish it could be turned off).

Other features include the ability to download books over the Internet (but strangely, not 3G which would have been more useful), add bookmarks with notes, customise the length of time the rewind button goes back, a button-less interface for when in the car, and a sleep timer. Overall the user experience is much more suited to audiobooks than the default iPhone interface and I highly recommend it.

For those if you you haven’t discovered the joy of audiobooks, they are a great way to read while driving, doing household chores or just when your eyes feel too tired to read (I get that a lot since my job involves using a computer all day). If you like books then give them a try.

Now if only there was some kind of Kindle like device that would play audiobooks, but keep your place in sync between the audiobook and the eBook.