iPhone Missing Features, Hardware, and Software

Most of the problems and lacking features with the iPhone can be entirely solved with software. Except for a real keyboard, there isn't much that I really miss when it comes to the iPhone hardware. The question is: as Apple fixes their software and adds new features, will new versions of the software run on old iPhones after new models come out?

This is how it is with Mac OS X. Doing the same for a phone would be quite a shift in the industry, and if one company can do it, it will have to be Apple. But will they have the guts to make a move that can hurt their sales of new iPhones models in the short term to make their platform stronger?

Use Google Docs to Publish to WordPress

I never really liked the UI provided by WordPress to enter blog posts. Version 2 added an HTML editor, but there is still no auto-save and no way to insert an image in one-step*.

So I set myself to try Google Docs as a blogging tool. Under the publish tab, you will find a Post to blog button. The first time you use it, you will be asked to enter some straightforward information about your blog. You will need to select what API you want to use (Blogger, MetaWeblog, or MovableType). WordPress supports all these API, and the UI suggests MovableType as the most feature-rich. So at first, this is the one I selected. If you do the same and then notice that titles are not getting through, just switch MetaWeblog. I have seen other people report the same issue; using the MetaWeblog API just seems to do the trick.

After you post to your blog from Google Docs, the post will show right away as published in the WordPress administration UI, but it won't show up until a few hours later on your blog. Others have seen the same problem, and some are saying this is related to an issue with timezones.

This is real the only issue I encountered when using Google Docs to publish to WordPress. Some will even consider this a feature: "after you sent a post you still have a few hours to fix any issue with the blog before it becomes visible to the world; isn't that great?!"

* While editing a post, I would like to be able to quickly add an image that I have on my hard drive. This should be a one-step operation: select the picture and you are done, instead of upload the picture somewhere, and then insert the picture by URL.

From WMA to MP3 on a Mac

I recently needed to convert a WMA file into the MP3 format. In case you're wondering, WMA stands for Windows Media Audio, which is both an audio file format and a set codecs developed by Microsoft. I could have used Zamzar, a free online file conversion service, but I figured that since I have a Mac, and because the Mac is strong on multimedia (isn't it?), this would be done in a breeze.

First, I thought that I would be able to drag & drop that WMA file on iTunes, and that iTunes would just ask me if I want to import the file in the AAC or MP3 format. Wrong: iTunes just won't import a WMA file. Alright, then let's load QuickTime, the Mac multimedia hub. QuickTime can convert between media formats, but for that privilege, Apple wants you to pay $30 and get what they call QuickTime Pro. I am buying a $4,000 machine which comes preloaded with a bunch of software that I don't need (such as GarageBand), but Apple wants $30 more, now when I want to do something useful? I still can't swallow that.

You would think that you can open a WMA file with QuickTime Pro, wouldn't you? No! For this you need to download the Windows Media Components for QuickTime, which luckily is provided for free by Microsoft.

Now you can open and play that WMA file in QuickTime Pro. You would think you can export it to MP3, wouldn't you? Well sorry, again: no! That one was very surprising to me. I find it hard to believe that QuickTime Pro can't convert an audio file to the MP3 format out of the box. I am still wondering if I missed something. Here is your workaround: download LAME Component for QuickTime and you will be able to export to MP3.

Finally! Next time, I'm using Zamzar.

DownloadSquad, Unubscribing

Today I unsubscribed to Download Squad. I have been a long time reader, and liked the blog for its broad coverage of the latest tech news. Lately I found Download Squad to lack accuracy and diligence in the way it report news, compared to, say, TechCrunch.

The tip-off point was this post about a Yahoo! Widget that shows you the cheapest gas station in your area. The post also gives the "10 highest prices in the country" by state. Now I would expect this to be based on price average for each state. You can see a screenshot of that list on the right. Wouldn't you expect California to be in that list? A quick check on GasBuddy shows that California is in 3rd position right now, just after Hawaii and Alaska. That may vary with time, but I definitely expect California to be in the top-10 at any time.

Am I too hard on Download Squad, or do you also consider that a blog which is in the top-100 blogs according to Technorati should be held to higher standards?

Folders with spaces buggy in Google Reader

Update Nov 1, 2007 - This issue has now fixed by the Google Reader team. Thank you guys!

Don't use spaces in the name of your folders in Google Reader. If you do, those folders will always show up as empty in the mobile version of Google Reader. It's one of those bugs which is easy to get around to once you know about it.

And on the topic of Google Reader folders, have you noticed how those are called tags in the mobile interface? Gmail calls those labels. Google seems utterly confused and doesn't know of something should be called a folder, a tag, or a label. Google, let me tell you, for everyone out there:

• Those are called tags if an item can be associated with more than one tag. Because in real life, you can put multiple tags on an item.
  
• Those are called folders if an item can be in at most one folder. Because in real life, you can't file a document in more than one folder at a time (if you don't take hierarchies into account).

Better Action Items: Delegate to Yourself

A few days a ago, I blogged about the importance of describing your action items so the description contains enough information for you to just do it.

Ethan wrote a guest entry for 43 Folders where he gives a practical tip on how to do just that: Write your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

• This will get you closer to having action items you can start doing without having to first think about what and how. I see a connection here with literate programming. Maybe we could call this literate doing?
  
• After you lay out your action items this way, you might discover that it actually isn't that hard to delegate some of your tasks. This takes you on the path of becoming better at delegating, an area where there is room for improvement for many of us.
  

The 5 Things the iPhone Can't Do

When switching from a Nokia E62 to an iPhone, I have been first struck by how elegant the iPhone is. Then I've been hit by all the things that I was doing on the Nokia and that I couldn't do anymore with the iPhone.

To make it short, I'll just go through the top 5 things I can't do anymore on the iPhone:

1. Make phone calls - When at home, I used to make almost all my calls with my cell phone. The Nokia E62 as well as its predecessor worked like a charm, also on the AT&T network. With the iPhone, calls are often breaking up and the iPhone occasionally tells me that my calls can't me made in the first place. So now I avoid making calls on the iPhone from home.
   
2. Use the great Gmail Mobile application (there is a Java as well as a native Symbian version). It is super-fast, both using very little bandwidth, but also making easy to navigate through email thanks to a number of keyboard shortcuts.
3. Get an Internet connection from my laptop through Bluetooth/GPRS. This wasn't very fast, but it was super-convenient (think: at the airport or during that meeting at a company that doesn't have open Internet connections).
4. Transfer media to the phone wirelessly. I was doing that through Bluetooth. The iPhone has Bluetooth; it has WiFi; but you need to connect it with a cable to your laptop to transfer files.
5. Download podcasts directly from the phone. Nokia even provides an application for you to do that: Nokia Podcasting. With the iPhone, I need to download podcasts from my laptop, connect the phone to the laptop with a cable, and then transfer the podcasts through iTunes.

Mac OS X, Still Crashing

The last firmware update didn't help. My Mac is still crashing.

And this last crash was pretty annoying. I not only lost about 10 minutes, the usual time it takes to reboot the OS and restart all the applications I am using, but this crash also caused a database corruption which then took me more than an hour to fix.

Here all the crashes I had since July 2007:

• July 21, 2007
• August 9, 2007
• August 20, 2007
• October 21, 2007

This is about one crash a month. When I am asked what I think about Macs by people who are using Windows and maybe considering to switch, I have to tell them I cannot recommend Macs because of poor stability. And really this is too bad, because other than that, I am quite satisfied with the OS and hardware.

New Parallels, Still Using CPU When Idle

We now have a new version of Parallels (released September 11, 2007). The list of improvements includes "Superior Performance and Lower Overhead", so I expected that this new version of Parallels wouldn't use 7% of my CPU when all the applications it runs are just idle. But unfortunately that didn't change. Am I doing something wrong? Somehow I have a hard time accepting Parallels just needs to use close to 10% of the CPU cycles when none of the applications executed by Parallels take a significant amount of CPU.

IntelliJ Plugins

JetBrain released IntelliJ 7. I upgraded, and in the process had to reinstall some of the plugins I have been using in the past. Here are the plugins that I find the most useful:

• Auto-Format Text - Adds to IntelliJ the ability to reformat text. This is particularly useful when editing Javadoc comments or files with free text paragraphs (like text files or XML document). (Sorry for the shameless plug: I wrote this one years ago, and still find it very useful.)
• DragNDrop - This plugin will allow a user to drag and drop files into the main pane of IntelliJ.
• Axis TCP Monitor - Monitor your HTTP connections and check exactly what is going through the wire.
• TabSwitch - Lets you switch between buffers with ctrl-tab, in the same way you would switch between applications with alt-tab.

Basura and Bazarder

I was hopping to find a connection between the Spanish basura for trash and the French bazarder slang for throwing away.

Nice try. But unfortunately basura comes from the Latin versura for to sweep while bazarder of course comes from bazar, which in Persian means public market.

Setting up the Oracle listener for HTTP, WebDAV, and FTP

Oracle provides a facility for the data you have in your database to be exposed as XML documents that you can access through simple URLs. For this facility to be enabled, the first thing you will need to do is to setup the Oracle listener. Edit your C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\db_1\NETWORK\ADMIN\listener.ora (or equivalent on your system) and setup the listener to look as the follows. Note that nanjing.local is my host name; change this as appropriate.

LISTENER =
(DESCRIPTION_LIST =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC1))
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = nanjing.local)(PORT = 1521))
)
(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)
(HOST=nanjing.local)(PORT=8889))
(Presentation=HTTP)(Session=RAW))
(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)
(HOST=nanjing.local)(PORT=2100))
(Presentation=FTP)(Session=RAW))
)

Now you should be able to access http://localhost:8889/ with your web browser and with WebDAV. Stay tuned for more you can do from this URL.

Personal Blogs vs. Facebook

There is this category of blogs out there, that are not about a specific topic, that are not there to promote something, or to talk about anything in particular. I call those personal blogs. Not in the sense that they contain information that shouldn't be made public, on the contrary, but because the only cohesive factor is that the particular authors consider what they write to be important to them, and worth sharing. Those are blogs that won't be read by many people (unless the author is well known). In fact, this very blog is what I consider to be a personal blog.

Many of the people I work with and many of my friends have a personal blog. I read those blogs, and some do read mine. I think of personal blogs as competing with Facebook, and such, but with more openness, because what you post is visible not only to "your friends", but to whoever is interested in that subjects and finds it through Google or otherwise.

That openness is important to me. Yes, you can post something on Facebook for your 50 friends to see. Can you consider what you share with 50 friends to be private? I wouldn't. So you might as well share it with whoever is interested, through a public blog. There is much value in doing so for others, who can read something that would otherwise have been visible only to your "friends", locked behind the Facebook walled garden. And there is much value to you as well: more people will be able to discover and read what you wrote, and you might even get from time to time some great feedback (like in this case) from people who you completely didn't know. Go blogs!

The iPhone PDF Viewer

Not much has been said about the PDF viewer on the iPhone. Most of the time, it is treated as just a bullet point in a feature list: "oh yes, and you can also view PDF attached to emails".

This is too bad because the PDF viewer is one of the best features of the phone. I have been using multiple PDF viewers running on S60 (the Nokia platform based on Symbian), including one from Adobe. None of those comes close to the iPhone PDF viewer. My only beef with it is that you can't save PDF files on the phone for off-line viewing. Why Apple doesn't make it easy for us to read those PDF we received earlier while on a plane?

Merlin Mann, Email, Scarcity, and Text Messaging

Merlin nailed it when during a talk at IDEO he said that the problem with email was one of scarcity, or rather lack thereof. It is so easy to CC Jane and Mark on the email you are sending to John, that many of you just do.

Merlin plays with the idea of artificially introducing scarcity in the system. Text messaging (SMS) in a way adds scarcity to messaging, especially when compared to IM or email. This is at the same time a strength and a weakness:

• A weakness first because text messaging is entirely controlled by carriers, it is both expensive and very limited compared to other forms of messaging (namely email).
• But it is a strength because of the sheer fact that sending (and sometimes also receiving) a text message costs money. This means you are not receiving that many text messages. And when you receive one, it does capture your attention, much more so than, say, an email. This means a lot in a world where attention itself is a scarce commodity.

TeaShark: Competition to Opera Mini is on the Way

Every new version of Opera Mini blows me away. I used version 3 for a while. For the first time, at least compared to all the other browsers I have seen before on Nokia phones, it made browsing web site reasonably usable. With version 4 (now in beta), you get "real web" rendering: Opera Mini doesn't need to change the layout of the pages to fit on your screen. You can see the web page as they were intended to be seen.

Now there is a new company in town, TeaShark, that built what looks like a clone of Opera Mini. Impressive! It is great to see new product that promise to bring an iPhone-like browsing experience to a wide range of phone. Some of us already spend more time on our phone browsing than calling. Will this trend go mainstream?

Comments feed on Blogger

For sure I wouldn't want to miss any comment on this blog. I would also like to be able to respond as quickly as possible. As a blog author or frequent reader, you would like to subscribe to a feed that contains all the comments.

But where is that feed for Blogger? I have "Blog Comment Feed" set to full in the Blogger preferences, but still no link to the comments feed is included in the web page (neither in the body with an anchor or the head with a link). Maybe this is a issue with the template I am using? Looking around at other blogs on Blogger, I figured the URL to the comments feed is:

http://avernet.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

Context in GTD, and Why it is Broken

Context is an important concept in GTD. You are expected to assign a context to each next action. The context you are in the subset of your next actions you can do at that point. In principle it is good way to filter out the tasks that anyway you can't do right now because of your context. The problem is that knowledge workers end up with a first "at computer" context, and a second "errands" context, with most of the important next actions falling in the first context. That doesn't help much.

Since you can't really filter by context, each time you pick a next action you are expected to go through all your next actions. Of course, you not doing that, because that doesn't make sense. Or maybe you do it once a day, and then keep a mental picture of the next actions you are planning to do during the day. But aren't you using GTD to avoid keeping a list of next actions in your head? And in the end, it seems that this is precisely what GTD forces you to do.

What you are missing is capturing when you are planning to do a next action. This isn't about scheduling tasks; it is about capturing if you are roughly planning to do this next action today, this week, or later. Every day, make sure to reevaluate the today list, and every week the this week list. (Those 3 categories work well for me, but feel free to adapt this to your own needs.)

If you are using a GTD software, like OmniFocus, and if like me you find that using the context field in a traditional way is pointless, just define a today context, a this week context, and a later context.

Changes to eXist's conf.xml

I am doing quite a bit of testing those days using eXist's latest code, fresh out of Subversion. There are two changes to the default conf.xml that I find useful:

• Increase the size limit for XML fragments created by eXist. The value is a number of nodes, and the default is 10000 which I find to be way to low. Instead of trying to set a higher limit, I set it to be "unlimited". Of course unlimited means limited by the size of you heap.
  
  <watchdog limit="-1" timeout="-1">
  
  
• Enable query rewrite. When doing so, eXist will be able to use the qname indexes declared in collection.xconf (for instance: <create qname="name" type="xs:string">).
  
  <xquery enable-java-binding="no" enable-query-rewriting="yes" backwardCompatible="no">
  

The iPhone and the Cow

Is it ethical (or even legal) for Apple to brick your unlocked iPhone when you install the latest iPhone firmware update? Leo Laporte made a great argument that it isn't, using the cow analogy. Vincent Ferrari of the Apple Phone Show replied saying the analogy is flawed, and changed it around to show that what Apple did is perfectly legitimate. Now before I continue, you might want to check their arguments:

• Leo's iPhone is a cow
• Vincent's but...

I agree with Vincent: Leo's analogy is not completely accurate. But Vincent doesn't go all the way t0 the logical conclusion that should come out of his analogy.

So, you bought a cow from Apple, agreeing that each month you will also feed the cow some special food approved by Apple. Then at some point you decide to buy cow food from another provider, because that other food has some benefits to you. You own the cow; it is your right to feed whatever food you want to the cow. Until this point everyone agrees, and everything is good. Now Apple comes up with a special free shot that will make your cow produce more milk. You decide to give that shot to the cow, then cow dies. Apple says: too bad, you shouldn't have given non-Apple-approved food to the cow in the first place.

Who is responsible for the death of the cow? Granted, Apple is not entirely responsible, because you knew that there was risk of the cow dying when you gave that shot, and you still decided to go ahead.

To me the question is one of intent: did Apple purposely design the shot so it would kill cows fed with food that wasn't approved by Apple? If it was possible for Apple to take some simple steps to ensure that the shot isn't deadly to cows fed with food not approved by Apple, did Apple avoid taking those steps? If the answer is the answer is yes to any of those question, then what Apple did is not ethical, and maybe even illegal.

iPhone: Not convinced by that keyboard yet

I switched to an iPhone just over 3 weeks ago. My previous phone was a Nokia E62. I would have a lot of good and bad things to say about that Nokia, but for sure one of the good things was its full QWERTY keyboard. I didn't get a chance to compare it to one of those Blackberry keyboards, but it is for sure more comfortable to me than the Treo keyboards: the keys are larger and the keyboard itself is wider.

I wasn't sure what to expect when switching to the iPhone. Some predicted the iPhone keyboard would be a lemon, while others found it much better than the Treo keyboard. I will have to agree with the usability study done by User Centric: if you are used to the real QWERTY keyboard on your current phone, be ready for a big disappointment when you switch to the iPhone.

The correction algorithm is nice; very much so. But you will come to hate it if like me you occasionally write in a language other than English. And considering how multicultural the U.S. is, I assume I must not be the only one having a problem with this. This in one major deficiency of the iPhone. At the very least Apple should have provided a quick way to disable the correction algorithm.

And then, even when writing in English, I am much slower on the iPhone than I used to be on the Nokia E62. I was frequently writing a few paragraphs worth of text on the E62. Doing the same on the iPhone would be a waste of time, and I rarely write more than a couple of sentences on the iPhone.

This is too bad, as the ability to capture text is IMHO one important feature of a mobile device. Maybe we all need, in addition to our iPhone, to have a Hipster PDA!