Joomla Projects:

Site migration: We’ve been at 1.5 since we started with Joomla in late 2007. Over time we have never had a substantial reason to justify migrating to a newer version. However, security updates for 1.5 will stop in September 2012. So we’re taking a hard look right now at what it will take to move our content to 2.5. We would appreciate any advice or help that folks are able to provide.

Zen Cart Issues and Projects:

Optimists walk-a-thon: The Michigan District Optimist Clubs have generously offered to team up with us to hold a walk-a-thon in early June 2012. People participate by signing up to walk, then raise pledges from people willing to sponsor them in the event.

We have added some features to our site in an effort to make it more ‘Convio’-like; for example, we added an email field to each product, which emails a participant when someone has given them a donation via the online store. (Every team or individual registrant has their own ‘sponsor me’ product.) That email tells them how to get in touch with their donor, and also gives them a total of funds raised to date.

However, we have been getting some transaction errors, and I’m not sure whether this is as a result of our recent upgrade to v1.5.0, my own hacking on the email notifications detailed above, or something different.

Bigger goal: We’d love it if purchasing one kind of product (like ‘register for this event’) could automatically create another product in a different category (like, ‘Sponsor so-and-so!), with certain default properties, but in an un-blessed state – every new registration would have to be reviewed and approved, of course.

Long-term projects:

Facebook integration: Over time, much of our Special Days ‘extended family’ has migrated from using our own website, to our Facebook page… to get information about camp, links to photo galleries and videos, and more. We are always looking for ways to more closely integrate the two sites.

Registration System: We’d like to create a registration site that parents can use to register their children for camp, and which staff members can use to apply to camp. Which framework we use isn’t as important as knowing that we can clearly codify certain business rules, have access to the data when & where we need it, and meet certain guidelines for data security. Ideally, such a system would be generic enough that it could be used for more than just this one camp, and shared with others. More on this in a separate, future post.

Site refresh: We can always use help and input on our branding, website layout, graphic design, stylesheet, moving to HTML 5… all that stuff that I’m nowhere near expert enough at to attempt on my own.

How you can help:

• Tell someone about this project! Odds are, you might know the perfect person who could help us with one or more of the items on this list.
• Get in touch! I am thom.brooks at gmail dot com. I am happy to answer questions about what we do, and clarify anything that wasn’t explained here.
• Request a tarball! I’d be happy to sanitize the code and create some dummy data that you can use to get this running on your own box, then suggest changes / fixes / improvements.
• Request a repo login! If you’re interested in making some contributions, I will set up a repository and you can start making commits.

We then went through training with a group called Divine Canines. Their slogan is, “Ordinary Dogs; Extraordinary Service.” This is a group of 100+ dogs and their human companions who visit about thirty different sites around Austin, including:

• Nursing homes
• Austin State Hospital
• Austin Children’s Shelter
• Helping Hands Home
• Ft. Hood
• ‘Barking Book Buddies’, a program where kids improve their literacy by reading books to the dogs.

It is a lot of fun, and everybody gets a lot out of the experience. But there is one big hitch.

In order to get funding, our volunteers need to log their hours, so we can generate reports to justify where those dollars are going (to training more volunteers, etc.)

Hardly anyone is using the system right now. The current volunteer hours logging system is functional, but is not very forgiving of bad input. The user experience is somewhat lacking.

To try and correct this, I created a subdomain where I could workshop a new system that was more intuitive and easier for our volunteers to use.

It makes use of these libraries and frameworks:

• CodeIgniter MVC framework – to make it more ‘app-like’ and help separate business / presentation logic.
• DataMapper ORM – mapping my schema’s entities/relationships from database tables to PHP classes.
• Tank Auth for CI – including transparently mapping less-secure password hashes to better encrypted ones, behind the scenes.
• jquery + jquery-ui datepicker to put in a pop-up calendar for picking dates:

  

Other features:

• The system already knows who their dog is (in a dropdown) so we avoid validation errors. (There is a dog named Q-Tip. Just guess how many ways there are to enter that into a database.) There is a ‘none’ selection because people sometimes volunteer to take pictures or do other tasks, but don’t bring their dog along for that event.

  

• A lat/lon js library and navigator.geolocation to ask their browser where they are and sort the list of volunteer sites by their distance away from them. (So if they log their hours on their smartphone, we can make the first item in the list be their current site.)



• Big ( – ) and ( + ) buttons to map inputs to drop-downs for mobile, so people can easily say how much time they spent volunteering, in 15 minute increments:

  

Stuff we need help with now:

• Some of the lat/lon javascript is broken, doesn’t work on all browsers, or only works the first time you use it. If it works, the A-Z button doesn’t re-sort the list alphabetically.
• The jquery-ui calendar is cool, but doesn’t quite work on mobile – need to find a workaround.
• Reporting of hours in different ways, filtering, criteria, etc. for the people who coordinate our volunteers and apply for grant funding.
• Methods for adding new volunteers and their dogs, editing their info, repasswording them, etc.

Bigger-picture stuff that we will also be looking for help with soon:

• I’m not a graphic designer. Neither was the previous person. Enough said.
• We’re hoping to get a graphics refresh as part of a branding overhaul being donated by one of our sponsors. Once that happens, we will need help ‘re-skinning’ our site with that new look and feel.
• The site could probably also use a big HTML 5 / CSS 3 overhaul.
• We need to get rid of Flash and find equivalent HTML 5-based animation / slide show tools.
• Along the same lines, we need to be more friendly to people on mobile / tablets.

How you can help:

• Tell someone about this project! Odds are, you might know the perfect person who could help us with one or more of the items on this list.
• Get in touch! I am thom.brooks at gmail dot com. I am happy to answer questions about what we do, and clarify anything that wasn’t explained here.
• Request a tarball! I’d be happy to sanitize the code and create some dummy data that you can use to get this running on your own box, then suggest changes / fixes / improvements.
• Request a repo login! If you’re interested in making some contributions, I will set up a repository and you can start making commits.

The restore process always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because it never remembers where I put my apps. I have a lot of apps. They’re organized into a lot of folders. When the initial ‘restore’ process finishes, but it hasn’t done the first sync, I notice that any of Apple’s default apps (and some random others) that I’d stored in folders, will preserve those folder names. They’re in little, impossible ‘folders of one’. At least they save me from having to retype their names.

Then the sync happens, and it loads everything else back on: apps, music, etc. And all of the apps are all over the place. (Oddly, after those single-app folders, it’s all the apps starting with ‘M’ and onward. )

I try and remember exactly how I had everything, and then I laboriously futz with the UI until I drag everything back into place. If I’m on iTunes, the process is slightly easier, but still fairly tedious. I feel like there must be a better, easier way to do this, but more importantly, I don’t feel like it should ever happen. If I put it in a folder, doesn’t that get backed up in some pref somewhere that ought to persist, even across restores? Is my iTunes library or my iPhone’s backup somehow corrupt? (It happens with the iPad too, like when I switched to the iPad 2.) So I suspect it’s a bug, or at least not as well written or intuitive as it could be.

I have enough apps that they don’t all show up when they’re not all in folders. I got started on the re-filing process tonight and got a good chunk done. But after I’ve put a bunch of them into folders, and even reduced the number of pages worth of apps, I’m never quite sure what magic has to happen before more of them will re-appear. I know they’re already on there; I can left-swipe from my home screen and search for them. But I can’t find them if I go looking. (Is it my next sync? Power off and on? I have no idea.)

An earnest wish: if I see an app in my search results, I’d sure love to be able to press and hold and get some kind of contextual menu that said, “Locate this app” to whisk me to its page. Because then I could put it back where it belonged – without having to keep searching for it, or without having to connect to my MacBook Pro and find it, possibly in ‘The Grey Realms’, which is the name I’ve just coined for those screens which are Beyond Page Eleven. (I have eight full pages of those, plus a few random stragglers.)

Any other kind of search result, you tap on it and there’s some default action: play that song, open that contact, etc. Launch that app. No, no, no, just show me where it is, dangit.

And then the crowning moment: I sync again, and it erases all of my hard work, like I never did anything in the first place. Everything is out of a folder again, thoughtfully alphabetized for me.

A small puff of steam comes out of both of my ears, cartoon-style. So I sit down and I write this, hoping that somewhere, someone who can solve this problem will read these words, and go snooping, and file bugs in radar and make life a little better for everyone who has experienced these symptoms.

And then I go sort my apps. Again.

“Do you think vets and vet techs actually remember animals they saw years ago, or is it all an act? I’m kinda leaning towards the latter.”

From http://twitter.com/ejacqui/status/46611283545567232

My sister, a vet, responds:

“Well, it depends.  For your average day practice client with a healthy pet that the vet sees once a year, no, they probably don’t remember you that well, although there are always some people with a great mind for names/faces who may.  If your pet has had any health problems that have you in more frequently or an interesting or frustrating condition, or if you have multiple pets who go to the same place or have been going there for years, while I may not remember every detail if I bump into you on the street somewhere, once I have the file in front of me and re-read it, it comes back.  Gotta love good medical records.

So, I don’t think it’s all an act all the time, but I mean, c’mon. Even if I don’t remember you that well, it’s just polite to pretend to, just like you would with someone you bumped into that you briefly knew a long time ago.  Just like your human physician does.

I mean, I’m not going to walk into a room and go “who the hell are you again?”

In most text editing windows on the Mac, the default behavior for the option-left arrow and option-right arrow keys is to skip a word at a time. It makes it easy to zoom around in your text without removing your hands from the keyboard.

However, Adobe InDesign does not support this behavior by default. Instead, these keys are used to increase and decrease kerning and tracking, which moves the words slightly apart or together. While I can see the utility of having these commands so close at hand, they’re not something my brain is willing to learn right now.

To fix:

1. Go to the Edit menu and select Keyboard Shortcuts…
2. Next, pick ‘Text and Tables’ from the ‘Product Area’ dropdown.
3. In the ‘Commands’ window, scroll down and find ‘Move to the left one word’.
4. At the bottom of the window, in ‘Context’, be sure you select ‘Text.’
5. Now, click in the ‘New Shortcut’ window and hold the option key on your keyboard while you press the left arrow key.
6. Click the ‘Assign’ button.

Notes:
• This program is not available within System Preferences’ Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. You need to modify it using this dialog box.
• If this is your first custom keyboard shortcut, InDesign will tell you that you cannot edit the Default set of Keyboard Shortcuts; would you like to create one, based on [Default]? Yes, of course you would. I named mine ‘Thom’s Prefs.’
• Remember to do the same thing for ‘Move to the right one word’ and assign the opt+right arrow shortcut to it.
• If you’re concerned about still having access to Increase/Decrease Kerning/Tracking, scroll up and look at those commands. InDesign has helpfully added the shift key modifier to the original command for you.
• (If you want to be really picky, look at the version of the commands that end with ‘x 5′ and consider changing their shortcut keys as well, to be consistent.)

It’s the little things that can make one’s day. (Thanks to Pepijn Bruienne for this tip.)

I went into this without having read one word about it. My wife told me, “our friends got us tickets, be at the theater at 7 pm.” All I knew was that it was a film about online relationships.

Bottom line: It’s worth seeing.

On the big screen? Not required, though seeing it with a theater full of people will make it a different experience for you.

Nutshell: It’s a documentary about a photographer in his early twenties in New York City (Nev Schulman, pronounced ‘Neev’). His brother Ariel and friend Henry, who appear in the film, are the filmmakers. Nev receives a painting in the mail, done by an eight year old girl named Abby. The painting is based on one of his photos (of two dancers), which was published in a newspaper.

Nev becomes pen pals with Abby, and she sends him more paintings based on his photos. At the same time, he’s also meeting her mom Angela, her nineteen year old sister Megan, and others in their circle of friends – largely through Facebook, emails, texts and phone calls.

Over the next nine months, the film follows Nev as he gets to know Abby, Angela, and Megan. He learns more about them, and gets into an online relationship with Megan. Nev learns that Megan is a talented singer and musician, and asks her to record covers of some songs for another film that he, Ari and Henry are working on. And that’s when things start to unravel.

Official Site: Rogue Pictures

Trailer:

I think that the trailer uses a somewhat scary scene and music out of context to make it seem like a murder mystery whodunit, and it’s really not that kind of film. But I was certainly on the edge of my seat in some key parts. (Read on!)

What I liked about the film:

• The filmmakers walk a fine line between making their film, and being in it. They also question their motivations in one key scene (in their rental car), which I really respected.
• Their use of Google Earth / Google Maps / Street View, as a way to establish locations and represent airline or car travel.
• The use of Facebook, but not just showing its interface – jumping off to show a collage of people’s portraits or relationships, etc.
• There is a scene at a horse barn which was done very tastefully, considering that it is very emotionally charged.
• The mind-blowing series of reveals, peeling back layer after layer of the onion – including the closing ‘Where are they now epilogue‘ titles.

What I didn’t like:

• I was concerned about the film displaying some people’s names and street addresses, because it inevitably leads to real-life situations – but by the end of the film I understood why and was less worried about it.
• A couple of the people in the film (minor characters) are severely mentally impaired. I think the filmmakers were very even-handed and respectful in their portrayal, but a couple of people in the audience reacted inappropriately. This might have been out of surprise (they are introduced at a critical turning point in the film) but it still bummed me out to hear.
• Some of the shots were a bit awkward, but I think that is a natural result of hand-held documentary filmmaking and the fact that you only get one take, because this was not scripted.

I have seen some people’s comments online, saying that they believe portions of the film to be made up. Personally, I am willing to believe that this is something that really happened, and treat it as such. Either way, the film is worth seeing!

However, for many apps, there is a counterpart ‘pro’ version of that app, which is intended for someone who has more specific expertise and wants more tools at their disposal. You might graduate up from iPhoto to Aperture, from iMovie to Final Cut Pro, and so forth.

Well, I would like a ‘Pro’ version of iTunes. Here’s my beef:

Apple has changed their mind. A lot.

I have been using iTunes since it came out. There have been ten major versions since it was released. Apple has changed the preferred file format, DRM has come and gone (for music anyway), and there have been some stupid default behaviors built into the software, which have changed over time.

My music library is huge.

Couple all of these changes with a VERY LARGE music library. Let’s presume it’s larger than 80 GB.

I don’t want my whole music library on my computer.

You don’t want to store all of that music on your laptop because it takes up so much space. Fortunately, iTunes lets you specify the location of your music library. So, you put it on an external drive. (In my case, a Gig-E NAS with RAID 5 protection.)

Hey, I didn’t ask you to slink back there

This introduces problem number one: If you don’t have that drive mounted, then iTunes will revert back to your /Users / yourusername / Music / iTunes/ folder. It doesn’t say, “Hey! I couldn’t find your library, want to pick one?” It just does what it thinks is right. Bad. You don’t realize the external volume wasn’t connected, you rip a few CDs, or buy some in the iTunes store, and now they’re in two places.

Fortunately, there’s a ‘Consolidate my music library’ command. Okay. So you do that. But there’s another issue.

What does (!) this mean – c’mon, you’re not even trying

While your external drive was disconnected, let’s say you tried to play a song that lives on it. You get a (!) indicator, letting you know that iTunes can’t find the song. You might also get a dialog box saying, “iTunes was unable to locate your music. Want to help us find it?”

That sounds helpful and all, until you look down the list of exclamation points. Pages and pages of them. And (to my knowlege), helping iTunes find that one song does not help it find any of the other songs, not even the ones in the same folder (from the same album.) Exactly how hard is it looking? Wouldn’t this be a semi-intelligent behavior for it to exhibit? (We hear stuff about low-level lookahead caching and predictive file reading. This is not a new idea; please try harder.)

So now you’re looking at a bunch of these exclamation points, wondering how you can get rid of them. You think, “I should sort out just the ones that it can’t find.” But you can’t click on the column header to ‘sort by Found Status’. So that’s out.

Automatically Add to iTunes

One way I have had some success with is by just re-adding the music to my iTunes library, by tricking the program into re-finding and re-sorting the music files.

There’s a newish feature called ‘Automatically add to iTunes.’ It’s a folder inside of your music library. You drop stuff into it, and it magically gets sorted into the right Artist / Album hierarchy. You might think, ‘if it can’t find the files, I’ll just drag them out of their proper place, and into this folder, and let it re-add them.’

(One word of advice: move the folders to another folder first, then drag them into the ‘Automatically Add to iTunes’ folder a few at a time. It prevents ugly loops from happening.) This works, to a degree, but takes a long time. Except there’s a bug with some files, and iTunes ends up chugging, and by the time you cancel, there are hundreds of occurrences of some or all of the tracks from a specific album (in my case, Aphex Twin) showing up. So keep an eye out.

Bad file naming conventions, and: too many choices is a bad thing

Ever rip a two disc set in the past? You may see some files labeled “01-19 Songname.mp3″ and other labeled “04 Trackname.mp3″, so they don’t sort right in the browser, even if they show up in the same album together. Maybe a different popular music program out there (like the one you used before iTunes existed?) does the disc-track thing when it names its files.

Yes, we get that it is Track 02. Give it a rest.

I think this next issue happened because there used to be a preference that let you say whether or not it would put the track number before the filename. Whatever the historical precedent, users will end up with this problem: a few files named, “02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 trackname 01.mp3″ That’s enough to go postal over. Are these not simple sanity checks?

What DO you do with a duplicate like Maria 01.mp3?

At some point, you’re doing to run into duplicate files. Whoever’s fault this is, yours or iTunes’ (probably both to some degree), it will get annoying. You know how Confucious supposedly said, “Man with two watches never knows what time it really is?” Well, let’s say you’re looking at your iTunes music library. You come across the Humpty Dance (and you’re wondering where you can get a hat like that) when you notice that it’s listed twice. You have two versions of it. Crap.

In fact, you’ve got a bunch of these duplicate tracks. Hey, neat: iTunes has a command in the File menu, ‘Display Duplicates’! Cool, what does it do? Well, it filters the list of songs to only show the tracks it thinks are, uh, duplicates of one another. But if you have two copies of a file, it shows you both of them. Wait a minute. Then what? To get rid of duplicates, you’d have to command-click every other file (or whatever) before hitting delete. Sounds like a huge PITA? Yes, it is.

I mean, let’s say you had three identical copies of a file, and when you picked, ‘Display Duplicates’, iTunes only showed you the second and third ones, and told you so. (e.g. “Original file not displayed. Fire at will!”) Then you could just pick any of the files you saw in that list and delete them, if you felt comfortable doing that. (And doesn’t this make more intuitive sense? What do you expect when you select ‘Display Duplicates’? You didn’t say, ‘Display Duplicates and the Originals They Duplicate’, did you?)

Back to your two Humpty Dance issue. You could right-click on the first one and say, “Show in Finder” (or Windows Explorer, whatever.) And you’re taken to your “Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Digital Underground/Sex Packets” folder, and sure enough, you see two files: 01 Humpty Dance.mp3, and 01 Humpty Dance 01.mp3. Now, wait a minute. Which one should you delete? Are they both exactly the same? Maybe one is newer. Maybe one has more correct information in it. Wouldn’t want to get rid of the wrong one, you know?

But, one might be better quality

This is a valid concern for some people. What if you’ve got multiple copies because you’ve re-ripped your CDs at a higher bit rate recently? Hmm, you could manually compare these attributes by going back into iTunes and hitting Cmd-J (or Ctrl-J) to see the View Options. Check off Bit Rate, Sample Rate, and (File) Size, to see if one file is of higher quality than the other.

But, one might have correct-er information

What if you’ve painstakingly gone through and tagged some of your files with proper metadata (artist, album, year, genre, etc)? You don’t want to delete all that hard work. Well, you could ‘Get Info’ about the first song, and click the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons to look at both of them and compare their metadata. Got it? Great!

Now, repeat these processes for 12,000 of your songs. Call me when you’re done.

Let’s look at some other ways you might solve this.

Just start over?

Some people just get so fed up with these issues that they will rip out their existing music library file (or, just move it to the backups folder) and let iTunes start afresh, using the ‘Automatically Add to iTunes’ trick I mentioned above. Sadly, this makes you lose a lot of your own metadata: song play counts, last played, your star ratings, your playlists, etc. Not advised, if you can help it.

Besides, this will not solve all of the problems – when you re-import files, you might see duplicates if you have more than one copy of a file. Especially if it’s got different metadata.

Music Fingerprinting Technology?

Even worse: let’s say you scroll down to the very bottom (the ‘dregs’) of your iTunes music library, where it lumps all of the files together. You have a bunch of 01 Untitled.mp3, 01 Untitled 01.mp3, etc files. How the heck do you do anything with those?

Well, have you heard of MusicBrainz? This is a software + (free) service, based on music ‘fingerprinting’ technology, where the program will ‘listen’ to (sample) your poorly-tagged, un- or mis-identified music files (that’s the Gourds covering Gin and Juice, not Dave Matthews, chief.) This process creates a unique hash, which is compared to a large database of such hashes; many hashes will map to the same song, perhaps due to different track lengths, bit rates, sampling, etc.

The server spits back metadata that it thinks is your song, plus a percentage of how certain it is of the match. You can set a threshold (say, above 85%) at which the program will automatically update the ID3 tags on your song. Once this is done, your music should have fully filled-out artist, album, year, genre, etc.

CD Hashing Technology

Well, guess what? Apple doesn’t use technology this cool. Why should they? (Smugly:) “If you were a good little consumer, you’d have bought it from us in the first place… and it would all be properly tagged already.”

Instead, Apple uses the GraceNote CDDB technology, which creates a hash from data found in Track 0 when ripping a CD, and uses that to look up the information about the album, and embed it into each of the tracks. Which is great, if you originally used iTunes to rip that CD, and if the info was in GraceNote in the first place. Not always the case.

Sadly, Mac music fingerprinting programs like iEatBrainz have fallen by the wayside (read the comments – “I’m not dead yet! Can we go for a walk?” “Shut up, you’re not fooling anyone”), and were slow and hard to use – note developer Jay Tuley’s comment, “This processing typically takes several seconds per song,”

The AppleScript Language, and API, suck

Worse, Apple does not give you direct access to manipulate the data in your own music Library. (Yes, there’s an XML file, but it’s one-way. It doesn’t get parsed, it just gets generated.) They make you use AppleScript, which is a sloppy, slow language that frustrates the crap out of a lot of people. And that’s how programs like iEatBrainz are forced to work. Apple will periodically change the API, or change the way the program reacts to certain commands, which also breaks programs like iEatBrainz.

“But,” you might say, “at least there’s something I can do to manipulate my music data! AppleScript!”

AppleScript Resources

At this point you may head over to a helpful site like Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. It is a great resource. I have grabbed many useful scripts from the site. But the average user is not going to want to go through this process, and these are third-party – use at your own risk. They do not (nor can they) solve all of the problems that come from using iTunes to manage your media, and as stated above, at your own risk – using these scripts may have unexpected consequences.

What about off-the-shelf programs?

I have purchased the ‘Gold’ version of TuneUp (for $29), a program that is supposed to clean up your music library. It’s also available in a subscription model of $19 per year, but I figured I’d run into the problem more than once so I went for it. Big mistake.

What I can tell you about the TuneUp experience: It did okay at identifying a number of tracks. But it didn’t eliminate any duplicate files, and tried to do way too much other stuff. It wasn’t just happy with trying to clean up my library; it always wanted to launch its companion app at the same time as iTunes, steal precious screen real estate from the iTunes window, tell me all this biographical info about the band I’m listening to (“Tuniverse”), and if they’re playing a concert soon, link YouTube videos, yadda. It chugged my machine, slowed iTunes way down, launched itself when I didn’t ask it to, and was generally obnoxious, so I disabled it.

Another program I’d check out is TidySongs, an Adobe AIR app (eww) which costs $39. This does have the ability to get rid of duplicate files. I haven’t used it yet, but plan on doing so soon.

So everyone has been up in arms for the last month or three about what Apple will announce today (Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2010.) The big rumor is that it’s a tablet. At this point enough people are saying it that I feel reasonable about having hope that’s what it’ll be.

What do I want to do with a tablet?

OmniGraffle comes to mind, except with more natural gestures and ways to draw things, mindmap, etc. I’d love to be able to use it as not only a way to annotate, paint, freeform doodle etc. but also as a way to quickly make some polished looking Graffle-type drawings. Pertinent to what I do is the ability to make signal flow diagrams between A/V components. That would be awesome.

Besides the usual — web surfing, book reading, movie watching, etc.

What technology or features do I hope it’ll have?

As much as I’m getting used to the software keyboard on the iPhone, I could live with a soft keyboard when I didn’t have any other options, but would greatly prefer using a USB or bluetooth keyboard. So I hope that’s possible.

If I had to wish for ‘innovative new ways of interacting’ with the thing, I would look at the proximity sensors Apple just got a patent for. If you could flick your hand through the air above the ‘page’ of an eBook, or to scroll down a pdf file, I think that’d be pretty cool. I can imagine a whole bunch of other gestures that could be used to navigate documents, and with more resolution and real estate, it probably makes it easier to do more technical stuff like rotate things, etc.

I was a fan of the handwriting recognition in the Newton. I’d love to see that come back but be even better. Maybe even learn my chicken scratch penmanship. Voice recognition would be nice but Apple’s got nothing on Dragon and they know it. They’d have to do a lot of improving before I would be interested in voice commands.

I’d like it to have two cameras, as some have mentioned. One to look at me and one to look at other things. But if I had to choose one, it’d be the one to look at me so I could videoconference. Worst case, I could always flip it over if I wanted to snap a photo of something. It couldn’t be any harder than trying to take a self-portrait with the default Camera.app on the iPhone…

I’d like it to have an accessible Disk Mode, though I’m not holding my breath.

Multitasking would be nice, the ability to switch between app windows, minimize and maximize them, etc.

I’d like to see the main menu page’s real estate used wisely, and perhaps give users some sort of ‘nested folders’ metaphor…

Flash would be lovely but I 100% doubt that’d happen. Until the web evolves to embrace other more open standards, face it, that’s what we’ve got right now.

Is it worth it?

I am a big fan of innovative technologies. I have had Apple stuff since I was six years old, starting with an Apple ][e with Robot Odyssey and later a Mac LC with Color MacCheese. So I’ll be the first to admit I’m biased. It’s what I like and what I know.

My prediction is, as long as the device is $1000 or less, I’ll feel that it’d be worth getting one.

However, owning another device that would require its own data subscription strikes me as ugh. My work phone supports tethering and I can hook my laptop up to it and surf the web. Case closed. I still cannot tether my laptop to my iPhone. I’d want to be able do this same thing with a tablet. I’ve got my phone on me most of the time anyway. So I’m torn as to whether I’d want to get yet another monthly subscription to support another device with a cell modem built in.

My Concerns

Apple has been growing steadily across the board: Music, movies, apps. All DRM’d, licensed content bottlenecked through the iTunes store. Now the rumors are that they’d be adding books, magazines, newspapers, etc. So, even more stuff that’d be locked down, non-portable, DRM’d. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

If this is just a device that is a ‘bigger iPhone’ rather than a ‘smaller MacBook’ then you are starting from a different set of expectations. I guess I’m wondering how easy it will be to collaborate – not just with others, but between your own devices. My thinking is that Apple will say, ‘you have iDisk! Look to the cloud!’ etc. and push that as the way to move stuff around.

Recently, I had an even more fortunate thing happen.

Maybe a month before my applecare (three year) warranty was up, I grabbed my MBP and took it over to the couch. I’m sitting there surfing and all of a sudden, zewwwwwp. No warning, it just died. Thankfully I wasn’t in the middle of anything huge, just surfing. I go plug it in and turn it back on and I get this ‘service battery’ warning.

So I call Apple and I ask what’s going on. The Level 1 guy asks his “are you actually an idiot” questions, decides I’m not and escalates my call.

The Level 2 guy asks me to submit a System Profiler report to Apple which gathers data for diagnostics.

During the course of the call, the ‘service battery’ thing goes away before the report is submitted. (Like a frog that will only sing, “Hello, my baby…” when nobody is watching.)

So, the Level 2 tech cannot see that the ‘service battery’ warning was active. (However, they can read my system logs and see that the #$$% thing crashed.) He has me reset the SMC, which is a power manager chip on the motherboard. He also has me power-condition the battery, e.g. charge the battery fully, run the machine on battery until fully drained, and then recharge it again. I figure, these are good things to try, and we’ll see if it happens again.

A few DAYS before Applecare is going to expire I see the stupid message again. I don’t mess around; I resubmit the error report right away before it decides to leave again. But I’m busy and can’t call Apple right then. Or it’s too late at night, or something.

With about two days to spare, I decide I have to get this done before my coverage runs out. I submit another System Profiler report. I call, and get escalated again. This time the Level 2 guy sees the new report, with the error message, and compares it to the one from a month ago. He says, “Wow, it shouldn’t be draining the max capacity of your battery this quickly. So we’ll take these steps:

1. We’ll send you a new battery. Send your old one back to us in the same box, return label underneath, etc.
2. We’ll send you an empty box. Send your laptop to this place nearby for diagnostics (Austin to Houston, overnight shipping) and we’ll see if something is wrong. Doesn’t matter if it goes beyond the warranty period.
3. If you keep having problems that are related to this issue, you can keep calling about it and we’ll support it.”

I backed up the machine (to Time Machine and with SuperDuper), and sent the machine in on a Wednesday. They got it Thursday, turned it around the same day and it came back on Friday morning. Oops; I had gone out of town for the weekend. I had no idea it’d be that fast. So I got it the following Monday.

Even more amazing is what I saw when I opened the box:

• They replaced the motherboard (apparently it was a component soldered on which was malfunctioning and causing it to drain the battery, so they just swap the whole thing)…
• They also replaced the whole bottom case and listed “cosmetic damages” as the reason — when I was biking to work on snow/ice in Chicago maybe a year and a half ago or more, I had flipped over. My MBP was in its protective “MacTruck” secret-agent briefcase, so the corner got dinged instead of killing the laptop. It worked just fine, but DVI cables didn’t go in more than 95% of the way. Whatever. Fixed…
• Even more exciting: they replaced the keyboard! I’ve typed so much on this keyboard, particularly with the keys you use to navigate through PINE (text based email via Terminal) that I had worn through many of the keys’ letters and parts of the palmrests. All replaced.

Therefore: Apple == phenomenal customer support. I am so happy about this.

This is what we know:

• Problem exists beyond our demarc (TNI), meaning it’s not the wiring in our house. You can plug a phone into their box on the outside wall of our house and hear the static or fast-busy or whatever it’s doing at the moment, provided it’s raining.
• Lots of aerial lines in our neighborhood (as opposed to buried).
• Technician who was already out here estimates four or five splice points between our house and the nearest cross box. In other words, those are the places where it’s likely to be having the problem.
• To fix the problem, a technician would probably have to cut in a new pair. However, they’d also want to do this while it’s raining, to make sure they don’t pick a different, equally bad pair instead.
• What this all means is, the problem has probably persisted because who wants to go climb four or five different poles in the rain to hunt down this issue? I know I sure wouldn’t want to.

Trying to use the AT&T automated trouble-reporting service is also very frustrating. Here are some reasons why:

• You’ve already told the main system that answered the phone what line you’re calling with trouble on. But once you’re connected to the actual ‘home phone line repair center’ you have to do it again, because these are two different systems that aren’t smart enough to talk to one another.
• Once you get to the part where you’re asked, “Does this affect the data portion of your line, or the voice portion?” you don’t have an option 3 for, “Both.” Even though earlier, you’re given the choice to tell them that multiple systems are affected by the problem you’re having.
• There is an eleven hour window in which the technician might show up, and of course not until Monday (though a tech I spoke with said he’d be out working on Sunday.) This pretty much can sink one’s whole day.
• There is no way to use the automated system to say, “We only have this problem when it’s raining.” If the lines have dried up by Monday, this will waste a technician’s visit for no good reason.
• Speaking to a human rep is just as useless. All they can do for you is close out the ticket, or leave it in place for the time / date when you know that the problem won’t manifest itself. They have no way to escalate the case, or at least they claim not to.

I cancelled the visit scheduled for next week, and I think we should strongly consider cancelling our service. As horrible as Time Warner cable is supposed to be, I have far more faith in that technology’s ability to carry the bits and stay online than I do with DSL… even if the company itself is reputed to be just as bad, or worse.

One other option would be to consider AT&T’s ‘U-verse’ service. Our friend has it and has reported ridiculously fast bandwidth speeds. However:

• You have to be within 2600 feet (as wired, not as the crow flies) from the nearest cross-box with a fiber termination;
• Maximum possible distance where it could work is 3300 feet;
• We live between 0.6 and 0.7 miles from the nearest crossbox, which is 3168 – 3696 feet… not likely to work. (The “is it available in my area?” system says no.)

Suck.