Tag: Technology

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The wait ends (for my iPad 2)

On Tuesday, while reading my morning news and Twitter feeds, Andy Ihnatko tweeted that he heard reports that Apple Stores were receiving a bunch of iPad 2s. Given my luck getting an iPhone 4 the day after release waiting in a relatively short line, I decided to give it a try. I arrived at the Fashion Valley Apple Store around 8:25 am to see a line and took that as a good sign. When I got to the end of the line, 2 Apple Store employees asked which iPad 2 I wanted and when I said the 32 GB Black WiFi one, one of the employees pulled out a stack of cards and handed me one with the model number written on it. Very cool, I was going to get an iPad 2 without more waiting! At about 9:05 am, I went instead, paid the Apple tax and left with my brand new iPad 2. I already had a smart cover, so I was all set.

Now that I have an iPad 2, was it worth it? You’ll have to wait for my “review” (my reviews are pretty quick and not as in-depth as the well paid tech journalists).

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Review: Netflix for iPad

The other day my wife came home and asked about Netflix streaming as someone mentioned to her that she used her Wii to stream. I said that we could give it a try as it is only $8 per month. I signed up for the free trial and started playing with the iPad app to setup my instant queue and see how well it streamed.

The iPad app works, but really is an unpolished app. Within a few minutes of using it, I became frustrated with it. First off, when I tapped on an item, it didn’t highlight as most iOS apps do; this is likely due to laziness as iOS provides a way to highlight an entire row and the app uses two columns so it separates the row and highlighting part of a row would have required extra work. Next the app was slow when I tapped on a selection so I wound up tapping more than once. This caused problems as it kept starting to play a selection as the second tap was queued up.

My problems didn’t stop there; after a selection plays and you go back to the home screen, your location in the list is lost. So if I scrolled through the selections, found one, tapped it to view more, but accidentally tapped twice and it started played, when I cancelled out of it, my position was lost. This made the experience quite annoying.

When you scroll through the list, the last row said “Load More Titles”. This is another aspect of what I consider poor programming or laziness. The more polished apps automatically start loading once the last row is displayed. It is actually quite easy to implement and saves the user a tap.

The app suffers from rotation issues as it gets quite confused and doesn’t resize the list at times when you rotate the display. Further showing lack of polish is when I went to switch apps and showed the bottom bar, the main loading page came back up. Strange behavior for an app.

Pros

  • Convenient way to add items to instant queue.
  • Reasonable playback quality

Cons

  • Unpolished application that suffers from some serious usability issues.
  • Bugs cause some strange behaviors when rotating and switching apps.

    • Summary
    While it is great to see that Netflix has come up with an iPad app, I would have expected more from a well recognized brand name. My view is that they either used inexperienced in-house developers or outsourced it to a company that needs some work on developing quality products. I hope that they continue to update the app and address some of the issues I’ve noticed.

    The app is still usable to add items to the instant queue, but the process could be a bit cleaner.

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    The wait begins (for my iPad 2)

    Like many tech geeks, I plan on getting an iPad 2. It isn’t necessary for me to get one, but the increased speed, slightly reduced size, and smart cover just make it too cool not to get. I really don’t have time to stand in long lines to get one (I did stand in a few hour line for my iPhone 4), so I figured I’d try to get one today.

    I called a few local stores and of course, got nothing. When I was talking to my wife and I mentioned that there were 18 combinations, she suggested I just order it online to get what I wanted. That makes a lot of sense and I should have done it yesterday to get in line with the 2-3 week wait. Since I waited a day, I’m now at 3-4 weeks. Wow, that seems like an eternity in tech years!

    I’m going to call Wal-Mart on Monday and see if they got anything in, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve also been told that the Apple Store gets shipments everyday so I might try there later in the week. If I happen to score one early, then I can simply cancel my order. Why didn’t I order first thing Friday morning and then cancel my order if I managed to get one? I did this with the iPhone 4, so what was I thinking? Maybe I was just overly optimistic about getting one.

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    Paying for High School Sports

    In today’s local paper, there was an article about how over 800 local teachers were receiving pink slips and could potentially be let go if the school district can’t figure out how to find extra money to pay for them. Several months ago, there was some uproar about students paying for extra curricular activities including sports. Apparently there is a California state law that guarantees all students a free education and this includes sports.

    So, we as taxpayers can’t ask athletes to pay for anything including uniforms, insurance, transportation fees, etc. To me, this doesn’t seem like it is in the spirit of the law; the state is trying to provide students a base education to succeed. Instead of cutting teachers and classes, wouldn’t it make sense to completely cut sports and let athletes find a way to pay for them?

    I understand that sports are the main focus of some high school students, but shouldn’t academics be key? The law is supposed to give equal access to all students regardless of ability to pay. I’d like to see the law amended to exclude non-essentials activities and get athletes to pay their own way; I suspect that most students can afford them, just maybe don’t want to afford them. How many of them have cell phones (monthly fees add up)? How many waste money on Starbucks? How many have iPods?

    Let’s get our priorities right and put education first and get rid of this misuse of education funding.

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    Paperless 2.0 Released

    As my loyal readers know, I sold ReceiptWallet to Mariner Software about 2 years ago and they renamed it Paperless. Yesterday, Mariner released Paperless 2.0. I couldn’t keep away from the product that I started over 4 years ago, so I’ve been helping out with this release. This release is, in my very biased opinion, a killer upgrade. It has so many features in it, that the list on Mariner’s website doesn’t it to justice!

    One thing that people ask me is “how should I setup my libraries in Paperless?”. That’s a question I have never been able to really answer and with 2.0, the question is even harder to answer. There are so many ways to customize a library that it is a solution for everyone, no matter how you want to stay organized.

    If you’re a Mac user, I’d definitely recommend checking about Paperless 2.0 and giving it a whirl. For people that haven’t started storing documents electronically, there is no better time to start then now just as the tax season starts. I was talking to my tax guy today and was able to quickly pull up all documents I needed with just a few clicks.

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    Importing video into EyeTV

    I use an Elgato EyeTV for my media center and it works quite well. My 3.5 year old son knows how to use it to watch his shows, so when my mom burned a DVD for him, I had to figure out how to get the video into the EyeTV to make it as easy as possible for him to watch it. As quality wasn’t really my concern, I looked for any and every available option for how to import it even if it required transcoding.

    After reading a post on the EyeTV forum, I started to look for a way to convert an H.264 encoded file into an MPEG Transport Stream. I generated the H.264 encoded file using Handbrake. After a bunch of futzing (hours), I found an option in VLC that transcodes the video into an MPEG TS. I did not check the Transcode video and Transcode audio check boxes, selected MPEG TS and it quickly spit out a file that the EyeTV could read. The forum post said to hold down the command key while selecting Open QuickTime movie, and then basically treat the stream as an input and record. While it records in real time, I patiently waited and the video encoded. (Yes, the quality went down a little bit, but my son doesn’t care.)

    While this process worked perfectly for what I wanted, it seems far too complex to just import video. I can understand that El Gato is a small company and doesn’t want to make EyeTV into a generalized media center; however, it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to handle other media types.

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    Running with an iPhone

    A few weeks ago I started listening to audiobooks again and became very engrossed in a James Patterson book. I was running with an iPod Nano and walked the dog with my iPhone as well as had my iPhone with me while driving. In order to keep my position in the book, I had to sync the Nano after my run, then sync my iPhone and then before my run, sync the iPhone and then the Nano. This got old real fast (a few days).

    I had been eyeing the Fisica Fitness Sensor Key for my iPhone to hook up my heart rate monitor for use with RunKeeper Pro. I couldn’t resist as eliminating my iPod Nano from the equation would make my life easier. I received the Sensor Key about 10 days ago and did my first run the next day. RunKeeper Pro is a decent app that handles everything my Garmin ForeRunner 405 did and more.

    I thought that the weight of the iPhone 4 on my arm would be a problem (I also bought the case that Wahoo Fitness sold), but it isn’t that bad. The Sensor Key does exactly what it is advertised to do; it connects Ant+ devices to the iPhone. RunKeeper Pro integrates the heart rate monitor fairly well, but displays the current heart rate in a very small part of the display (almost unreadable). The iPhone is a bit unreadable in bright sun, but the large display is nice.

    After a few runs with the iPhone, I can’t see going back to my iPod Nano and Garmin ForeRunner 405. One of the best features that just came to light today was when I was happily running and the narrator of the book’s voice started fading and the phone rang! I was quite surprised, but saw that it was my boss (technically my boss’s boss) calling, so I slowed to a walk and answered the call. I don’t get many phone calls, so being able to get a call when I take a midday run is a great feature of using the iPhone for running.

    If I had been running with my iPhone last month, I would have been able to take a picture of the guy who had put a rope around his Christmas tree and dragged it behind him to take it to the recycling place instead of putting it on the roof of his Ford Explorer!

    I’d like for RunKeeper Pro to add the ability to bulk export the files and then this combination would be perfect.

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    Mystery of poor iPad battery life

    Last week I started noticing that my iPad would go from 100% to about 10% battery life in one day with very minimal usage. This had me confused, so I decided to try 2 things to see if I could get the battery life back up. Unfortunately I tried both things in conjunction, so I’m not sure which one of the two made a huge difference. The first is I restarted the iPad. This sounds like a no-brainer, but I usually don’t reset my devices. I noticed that I couldn’t complete a call on my iPhone the other day, so I restarted it and it felt a lot more responsive; so I gave the iPad a restart to see if it would help.

    The second thing I did, which is kind of a “duh” is I turned off push notification, removed 1 email account, and switched to checking data every 30 minutes. The push notification system keeps a connection constantly open with Apple’s server so that if a notification comes in, it can be sent down the already open pipe. This, of course, takes power to maintain this connection. However, I leave push on for my iPhone and I don’t see a huge drop in battery life. There are, of course, many differences such as the size of the battery and I charge my iPhone every night.

    Well, my battery life is back up to several days of light usage and turning off push notification isn’t a huge deal on the iPhone. I’m not sure if the reset or the push notification was the problem. If you start see declining battery life on your iPad try one or both of these tips; it might just help.

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    An exercise in frustration

    When I was training for the 2 marathons I ran, I listened to audiobooks to pass the time as training runs could last for hours (it takes awhile to run 20+ miles on the long runs). I bought a number of books from Audible.com. Once I stopped training, I couldn’t justify the monthly cost for audible, so I switched to listening to podcasts on my runs. The other day, my dad showed me how he checked out an audio book from the library to listen on his iPod Touch. It looked promising, so when I got home, I went to the San Diego Public Library Web site and browsed to the eCollections link. I found a book that said it could be played on the iPod, so I checked it out and installed the OverDrive software on my iPhone.

    Safari.png

    Unfortunately that’s where the easy part ended. After a bunch of frustrating tries and re-reading the help information, I realized that the OverDrive software only played MP3 files. Well, I can use iTunes on my iPhone to do that, so what good was the software? There is a button on there labeled “Add Website” which implies it would make it easier to download directly on the device. I tapped on it and it launched Safari on the iPhone. Lovely. After more searching and reading reviews about the software, I came to the conclusion that the software was almost useless. I would have expected that I could enter my library card number and PIN, browse for books on the device and listen to any available audiobook. That’s not what happens; the OverDrive folks didn’t implement a WMA player that handles the DRM used on the books, so it would only play unprotected MP3 files.

    I almost gave up on the concept of listening to checked out audiobooks on my iPod that I use for running or iPhone when I decided to install the OverDrive software in Windows 7 in VMWare (remember I’m a Mac user). The software offers an option to transfer the audiobook to an iPod. Hmmm…my iPod is Mac formatted and the documentation said it had to be Windows formatted. I didn’t want to do this and dug into my box of cables and stuff and found an old iPod Nano. I plugged it in, grabbed iTunes for Windows, reformatted the iPod and started the process to transfer the audiobooks to the iPod.

    I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of what is going on, but using the software in the manner it was intended, I was able to transfer unprotected audiobooks to my iPod and iPhone. Wow, this is a huge hole that isn’t the same as the analog hole. Either this is a significant oversight or a deliberate choice that the audiobook publishers have decided to accept.

    The process of checking out these audiobooks was quite painful despite reading all the FAQs and me being a software engineer. My dad figured it out much faster than I did, so maybe I over analyzed it or my dad wasn’t as discriminating in his choice of books. Our library offers 100 audiobooks in MP3 format which I could have used with much less frustration while it offers 1784 books in WMA format (most of it protected so that it expires after the lending period). I’m not sure how OverDrive has convinced over 13,000 libraries to adopt their system, but the system is almost unusable.

    Has anyone found the process of checking out audiobooks easy? It’s almost worth buying them from Audible.com to avoid the dealing with this.

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    Should I switch?

    Now that the iPhone is coming to Verizon, I will have to make a decision about sticking with AT&T or moving to Verizon. As I still have an existing plan with Sprint that my wife uses, I don’t have to make this decision until this summer (the ETF on my Sprint lines will be a total of $100 which I’ll gladly pay to combine my lines once again). In June, like many others, I’ll be 1 year into my 2 year AT&T contract putting the ETF at something over $250 which is a bit steep, but I have to consider will I get better service? There is a lot of speculation that lots of people will jump to Verizon and there are others that say that there won’t be a mass exodus. At this point, I have no idea what all the unhappy AT&T customers will do.

    There are a number of pros to sticking with AT&T. First off, I won’t have to pay an ETF to leave. Second, while being able to do voice and data at the same time isn’t something I do all that often, having that ability is nice. This is something that Verizon can’t  do and with the mobile hotspot feature available on the Verizon iPhone, one has to question its utility if you lose data connectivity when talking on a phone (I find that if I’m in a hotel or at an airport, I use my MiFi and am talking on the phone at the same time, something that the hotspot feature won’t be useful). Third, the speculation is that an iPhone 5 will come out this summer. I don’t think that this phone will immediately be available on Verizon which has seemed to always plague CDMA carriers for as long as I can remember (it took forever to get Bluetooth on a CDMA phone). If I stick with AT&T and an iPhone comes out, I can just renew my contract, pay for the new phone and go on my merry way. If I went with Verizon then who knows when I’d get the next iPhone.

    The cons of AT&T? Well, so far, I’ve only had two experiences where the iPhone failed me. The first happened to be the first day I got the iPhone where I couldn’t get data coverage in the San Diego airport. The second was when I was in San Francisco; I was unable to get data there as well. Many people that fault the iPhone are in the most populous large cities, New York and San Francisco. Others have pointed out that the big problem is the time it takes to get cell sites live in these cities; we’re talking years, so AT&T is finally getting new sites up that they planned back when the iPhone started getting popular. The assumption is that Verizon has seen this and been planning their network. Other than those 2 times, I’ve been relatively pleased with AT&T. Coverage is fine everywhere I go and is a bit superior to the coverage I had on Sprint.

    Why would I goto Verizon? Cost would be one factor, but the plans are quite comparable between AT&T and Verizon. However, at this time Verizon hasn’t announced if they’ll keep the unlimited smartphone plan for the iPhone; I have the 2 GB plan on AT&T. I use maybe a few hundred MB of data a month, so the cap isn’t an issue. Better coverage? In 7 months, I’ve had basically 1 day of problems. Is that reason enough to jump ship? I don’t think so.

    Now that I’ve written this article and laid out my points, I’ve convinced myself to sit tight and do nothing. I’ll revisit this in the summer when I have to switch my wife, but unless something major happens, I’m going to move my wife’s line to AT&T.