Archives for Mac & iPhone
Newsweek: “To help bridge the physical distance between father and daughters, Michelle recently bought two MacBook laptops, one for Barack and one for the kids, so they could have video chats over the Internet.”
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” —Steve Jobs
The latest episode of In Conversation is up. Cord and I discuss Macs, immigration and assimilation, internet illiteracy, and niche vs. mass appeal online.
Reading Steve Jobs. John Markoff ponders the scenario I’ve been predicting for a while: an Apple book reader. He sees it as a new multi-touch tablet device bigger than an iPod Touch. While that device may come, I think it would make sense to also have reader software on the iPhone and iPod.
How to Build a Paper Research Database. Great post I was pointed to from the 43f forums. Explains how Taylor Branch used an access database to take notes on and then sort hundred of sources for his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King. Branch did it in Access, and this article recommends Excel. I’m looking for something better. Bento doesn’t seem quite there yet.
Great deal: Buy a 32 GB iPod Touch from Amazon and get a free iPod Shuffle for the gym or to give away.
No choice but to get things done
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Self-imposed limitations
I’m not the first to note the challenge that modern computing presents to human concentration. Writing is a hard thing to do, and when you have to do it, easy things like email, feeds, and Facebook can tempt and paralyze you.
The name of the game is focus and a cottage industry of apps has sprouted around eliminating distractions. The poster-child for these is WriteRoom, which hides everything on your screen except a monochrome text-editor. Slate has called these programs “zenware,” while the New York Times took a more Western tack and called them “biblical.”
These programs work because they allow users to self-impose limitations in order to concentrate and get more done in less time. Internet-related distractions are not the only target. In large part these tools are a revolt against the tyranny of Word. That was the focus of the New York Times piece, which was inspired by the Steven Poole essay “Goodbye, cruel Word.” In it he explains how the Microsoft flagship long ago gave up the pretense that it was a tool for the art of writing. A good tool disappears in the act of creation. Word might once have been such a thing, but that’s certainly no longer the case. Poole, an author of two books and countless articles, writes:
Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped, combining utility and minimalist elegance with reliability. Sadly for me, although it wasn’t strictly necessary, after a few years and a colour Performa I “upgraded” to Word 98, and somehow the magic was gone. Yes, I turned off all the crappy lurid toolbars and tried to make the compositional space as simple as possible, but by this time Word was stuffed with all kinds of “features” that let you print a pie-chart on the back of a million envelopes or publish your cookery graphs to your “world wide web home-page”, and it already felt to me that Word was only grudgingly letting me write nothing but, you know, words. Trigger Happy got out of Word 98 and onto the streets, but not without routine crashes and the occasional catastrophic loss of a few finely honed paragraphs.
He goes on to say that he’s converted to WriteRoom and Scrivener, but not before giving us a tour of the tools that he’s loved the most. Apart from Word 5.1a, they include a Brother LW-20 electric typewriter with a 6-line LCD screen, and an ultraportable Psion 5. What he likes so much about WriteRoom and the rest, he says, is how much they imitate the single-minded purposefulness of those old tools.
Retro-computing
That brings me to the second theme in this story. One way to achieve zen word processing is to hide the fact that your modern computer is a modern computer. (Out there, no doubt, is someone who paid $1,800 for a MacBook Air only to then run WriteRoom on it.) It’s an attempt to travel back to a time before virtual tailfins. Another way to zen, however, is to simply use the tools from that era—the era in which word processing had been perfected.
Writer Paul Ford, has said that his weapon against distractions was installing WordPerfect for DOS on his computer—the original that WriteRoom emulates. As a result of switching to the mouse-less, crash-less WordPerfect he says, “My average daily word count has doubled, and my stock of fresh ideas seems to be replenishing.”
Another promoter of retro-computing is Andy Ihnatko who inspired me to look not just to old software, but to old hardware as well. He sings the praises of his NEC MobilePro 790, a Windows CE device he picked up for $10 at the MIT flea market. It doesn’t have the MacBook Air’s 1.6 GHz or good looks, but it matches its weight, comfortable keyboard, and more than serviceable screen. But when distraction-free writing is the goal, the latter matters more than the former.
The AlphaSmart Neo
I think I did Andy one better, though, or at least more retro. I discovered the AlphaSmart Neo, in part thanks to Paul Ford’s writings because the Neo is his companion to WordPerfect. What is the Neo? It’s a full keyboard with six-line LCD attached. That’s it. No distractions. It’s a thing of beauty.
At two pounds, I take it everywhere. I love my MacBook, but it kills my back, and for no good reason since most of the time I just want to write. Instant-on, and automatic save of every keystroke make it even more appealing. Some other retro advantages:
- At an all-day conference my three-hour battery isn’t much help and I have to be on the hunt for limited power outlets. (The NEC MobilePro wouldn’t fare much better.) The Neo’s frugal processor and simple screen, on the other hand, gets me 700 hours from 3 AA batteries. That’s about a year’s worth of normal use.
- The keyboard is amazing. It’s a real, honest-to-goodness keyboard with satisfying travel and quiet clickitiness. It really feels better than my Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, which is the same design as the Air’s. It also beats out the MobilePro’s slightly cramped keyboard.
- AlphaSmart was started by two former Apple engineers and it has overtones of the eMate 300. Like the eMate, the AlphaSmart was designed for the education market, and it shows in the build quality. If it’s tough enough for kindergardeners, it’s tough enough for me.
Most important, though, is that it keeps me focused. If I go to a coffee shop to get some work done, the only thing I can do with my Neo is write. There are no distractions. There isn’t even bold or italics (something I get around with Markdown). When writing is the only thing you can do, you get it done, and it remains an enjoyable activity because it’s not the thing that’s keeping you from Twitter.
At some point in our technological past we perfected word processing. Every feature since then seems to have subtracted from the experience. Do yourself a favor and look into some single-purpose, “underpowered,” and self-limiting tech.
You weren’t able to make it to Macworld this year? No problem. Audio and slides of all the presentations are available for free online. My weekend is shot.
Thoughts on the Macworld announcements
The MacBook Air looks great, but it doesn’t solve any problem I have. My life isn’t that mobile, so my MacBook is portable enough. No need to pay more and give up features for the weight reduction. But it’s still damn sexy.The big story out of Macworld to me, is the revamped Apple TV. I’ve been on the fence about getting one since it came out, but now it looks like it’s a no-brainer (especially with the price drop to $229). Before it was basically just a big iPod. You downloaded content on your Mac and then synced it. Now you can browse straight from your TV. That’s great in itself, but the killer feature is the podcasting support.
I watch and listen to podcasts more than I watch TV. I simply prefer the niche content to the generally bland greatest-common-denominator stuff on TV. I think most people would if they could easily access it and watch it on a big screen. Streaming video Podcast support on the Apple TV basically adds a hundred thousand new channels to your cable line-up. No doubt more producers will jump into video-podcasting because they now have a viable way to get into people’s living rooms.
Biggest disappointment: the iPhone update. Yeah, location detection is great, but come on, my notes still don’t sync to my Mac? Seriously? No to-dos on this putative “smartphone”? Please throw me a bone here.
Can a church get too popular?
The Washington Post had a long piece yesterday on the Apple Store phenomena and its possible decline.
Not 18 months ago, cultural essayists and architecture critics would wander into flagship Apple Stores around the world (SoHo! Fifth Avenue! Regent Street!) and go long and poetic about Apple’s revolution in hipster elegance, the clean lines, the retail frontier. And indeed, these are beautiful places, pluralistic to the point that you can use their bathroom, and check your e-mail on their display Macs, and be among friends you always dreamed of having, somewhere. It was a glimpse at a world where everyone is smart, and agreeably diverse, and able to spend lots of money. Now you have to brace yourself to walk into the Apple Store. The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?
Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?
Can you smother a store to death?
Very much worth a read if you’re a fanboy or interested in commercial culture. I love how the essayist, Hank Stuever, works in the Apple-as-religion meme:
The specialists and geniuses are in their black Apple T-shirts, wearing name tags (Adam, Matt, Luis and the endless supply of Ryans, and an occasional Jen).
And talkingrillyfast. Rillyrlyfst. Allfthem. Glare-eyed, too happy with themselves, like Jesus people holding up one finger on 1970s street corners. They know you aren’t One of Them, but they forgive you. Nothing expresses both virtue and contempt like forgiveness. That’s life in church. They know what Steve Jobs wants of them, and they live to serve.
Yojimbo rant
Bare Bones software recently released a new version of Yojimbo. It’s been described as having “[t]ons of new features and improvements[.]” That’s true and it’s really a great application, but I’m sad to see that what I think is a very needed feature is still missing. I’m talking about truly smart collections to take advantage of Yojimbo’s tagging power.
Apart from filetype folders (that are called “Smart Collections” in the app), Yojimbo lets users create two other kinds of file “collections.” The first type is a regular “collection,” which is basically just a folder into which you can drop any of your files. The second is a “tag collection.” These are akin to smart folders because they display any file tagged with the keywords you choose. Here’s what creating a new “tag collection” looks like:
The problem here is that you can only make collections that contain all tags you list. There is no way for you to get a collection with any of the tags you list. This almost makes the program useless to me.
As an academic research, I use Yojimbo to keep track of source material. One topic I study are spectrum commons. In my research I have turned up many articles relevant to my work that deal with commons, though not necessarily spectrum commons (i.e. land or water commons). I tag these with the keyword “commons.” I’ve also turned up relevant papers that are about spectrum but have nothing to do with commons, so I tag these “spectrum.” Now, you’d think that I’d be able to create a smart tag collection that would display everything tagged either “spectrum” or “commons,” or both “spectrum” and “commons,” but no dice.
Over a year ago I sent a feature request to Bare Bones and they replied saying that they were working on this. The issue was also brought up on the Yojimbo discussion list last November. It’s been ten months since the last time Bare Bones software updated Yojimbo, and the new 1.5 update is the first point upgrade in almost a year. Please, Bare Bones, throw me a bone.
In the current edition of This Week in Tech, Jerry Pournelle makes a prediction that I’ve made here several times before. Namely that the iPhone is perfectly positioned to be the book reader that finally catches on. Also noted was Amazon’s Kindle book reader, of which I hadn’t previously heard. (Price at $400? Ha!)
According to Buinessweek, Apple has studied the possibility of joining the FCC’s auction for 700 MHz wireless spectrum. That would make less sense for Apple than for Google.
The Miami Herald reports that a group of 25 Cuban migrants who came ashore yesterday night made their way to an Oakland Park Waffle House at around 11 p.m. from where they called police. I couldn’t think of a better entree to the bounty of this country. No word on whether they had a patty melt. Hat tip Baylen.
I really want to love Pages and use it over crappy Carbon-on-Rosetta Word, but until it has cross-referencing of footnotes it’s not a serious word processor.
Where an iPod is better than an iPhone
Here’s one thing that sucks about the iPhone. I listen to a lot of podcasts and other spoken word audio, and so I’m often trying to jump to a specific point in time in the recording. The iPod’s click-wheel interface is great for this, but the touchscreen slider blows. You can’t get fine grain using your meaty finger so it jumps minutes not seconds. So there.Steve Jobs oral history
Check out this oral history of Steve Jobs from the Computer History Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It’s basically an extended interview in which he talks about his biography, Apple’s origins, NeXT, Pixar, and much else. The neat thing is the interview was conducted on April 20, 1995 while Jobs was still in exile from Apple. Apple would buy NeXT a year later to use it as the core of Mac OS X and Jobs would return to eventually take over. Here’s one of his perspectives at the time:The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made–or any other product at Apple. They’ve just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It’s kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that’s what’s happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases.
Why no preloaded iPods?
Ever since the first days of the iTunes Music Store I’d always wondered why Apple didn’t see iPods preloaded with music. Why not sell a Beck iPod, say, with every track ever released on it and maybe his autograph etched on the back? When Apple came out with the U2 special edition iPod that included their music catalog in the price, it didn’t come preloaded, you had to use a coupon code to download the music.Well, today comes the answer that I can’t believe I hadn’t see before, because I’d look. iLounge reports that the settlement agreement Apple had with the Beatle’s Apple Music Co. over their trademark dispute included a clause that prohibited Apple from selling “physical media delivering prerecorded content[.]” This deal was struck before the iPod, so they never could have guessed its implications. In fact, the clause was probably just meant to cover CD sales.
Now that the two companies have resettled, you can bet you’ll see preloaded iPods. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Beatles iPod is the first.
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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