It’s time to relax about multitasking

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Jeff

There was one thing I had intended to rant about last week that I just didn’t get to. Peo­ple need to chill the heck out about mul­ti­task­ing on the iPhone. I see com­ments every day either decry­ing Apple’s imple­men­ta­tion as not “real” mul­ti­task­ing, or help­less users ask­ing how to make sure back­ground tasks don’t grind them to a halt and kill their bat­tery. Both of which tell me that there’s still a HUGE mis­un­der­stand­ing out there about how mul­ti­task­ing in iOS 4 actu­ally works.

Let’s start with how it works on the desk­top, which is what most peo­ple con­sider “real” mul­ti­task­ing. This is more for­mally known as “pre­emp­tive” mul­ti­task­ing, in that the oper­at­ing sys­tem can pre­empt processes in favor of oth­ers to ensure that every­thing runs smoothly. Prior to the advent of mul­ti­core proces­sors, the CPU could still only do one thing at a time, so the oper­at­ing sys­tem had to decide which process got how many clock cycles. From the appli­ca­tion per­spec­tive, they just ran with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion for other appli­ca­tions, and could con­tinue ask­ing for as much CPU power as they could get even if they were not the fore­ground application.

As any­one who’s tried to rip a DVD or transcode a bunch of media can tell you, even with a rel­a­tively smart pre­emp­tive mul­ti­task­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem like mod­ern day Win­dows, Linux or OS/​X, back­ground tasks can still use so much horse­power that they slow your “active” task to a crawl. On a lap­top this is bad enough, but on a hand­held, this can be the dif­fer­ence between hav­ing a smart­phone and hav­ing a… rock. So clearly, a more sophis­ti­cated method was needed.

Or was it? The pre­emp­tive mul­ti­task­ing described above is essen­tially exactly how mul­ti­task­ing works on webOS. It is very sim­i­lar to how mul­ti­task­ing works on Android (which is a lit­tle bet­ter at man­ag­ing the resources of back­ground tasks, but not much). And peo­ple with webOS and Android devices — and yes, Win­dows Com­pact Embed­ded, for­merly known as Win­dows Mobile 6 — learn very quickly how to man­age their run­ning pro­grams and kill tasks that they don’t need run­ning in the back­ground. Very quickly, you get accli­mated to micro­manag­ing your phone, clear­ing mem­ory and clos­ing tasks and doing all sorts of dig­i­tal house­keep­ing that has noth­ing what­so­ever to do with what your phone is sup­posed to be actu­ally doing.

Apple wanted none of this. And for the first three iter­a­tions of the iPhone, they sim­ply didn’t pro­vide mul­ti­task­ing for third party appli­ca­tions. They sup­ported true pre­emp­tive mul­ti­task­ing for their own apps — iOS is built on the same core as OS/​X, so it’s always been capa­ble of it — but drew the line at apps that they could con­trol. For every­one else, it was one thing at a time.

Which hon­estly, didn’t work so bad. Some­thing I’ve noticed now that I have mul­ti­task­ing on my iPhone is that my atten­tion span is just as frag­mented as it is on my desk­top. Not being able to flit back and forth between apps with­out los­ing your place did enforce a cer­tain amount of focus. But anyway…

With iOS 4, Apple intro­duced their model of mobile mul­ti­task­ing. They didn’t invent mul­ti­task­ing, and no one is say­ing they did. But they did come up with a way to imple­ment mul­ti­task­ing that seems to avoid the prob­lems that desktop-​grade mul­ti­task­ing has on mobile devices. The prob­lem is that it’s also a lit­tle more nuanced, a lit­tle more com­plex, and a lot of peo­ple still haven’t fig­ured out what it’s actu­ally doing.

In iOS 4 when you dou­ble tap the Home but­ton, the screen slides up and you see a row of appli­ca­tion icons. THESE APPS ARE NOT ALL RUNNING AT THE SAME TIME. Depend­ing on the app, they could be doing one of three things.

For apps that haven’t been updated to take advan­tage of iOS 4, the icons in the task switch­ing area are exactly the same as the ones on the home screen. The app isn’t run­ning, then when you tap the icon, it starts up from zero. When you switch away from the app, it goes away, removed from mem­ory entirely until you call for it again. Need­less to say, these apps use absolutely no CPU or RAM when not in use, even when you see them in the task switch­ing area.

Apps that have been updated to sup­port iOS 4’s fast app switch­ing — but noth­ing else — behave a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. (To sup­port fast app switch­ing, all devel­op­ers have to do is recom­pile their app with the iOS 4 SDK. They don’t have to add a sin­gle line of code. So even­tu­ally, all but com­pletely aban­doned apps will sup­port this.) When you switch away from these apps, their process is sus­pended — using absolutely zero CPU — but they remain in mem­ory. This is the key rea­son even this most basic mul­ti­task­ing fea­ture isn’t sup­ported on the iPhone 3G with its ane­mic 128MB of RAM. On a 3GS with 256MB or an iPhone 4 with 512MB, lots of appli­ca­tions can hang out, sus­pended, with­out impact­ing the speed or bat­tery life of the device in any way. When you run the pro­gram again, either from the task switch­ing area or the home screen, the process is sim­ply unsus­pended and resumes exactly where it left off. On occa­sion, you will run so many apps that you start to run out of free mem­ory, in which case iOS will save a snap­shot of the process to stor­age and kill the process. It will take a lit­tle longer to resume the next time you run it because that process snap­shot has to be loaded into mem­ory from “disk”, but it’s still faster than start­ing the pro­gram from scratch.

There are six other dis­crete func­tions apps can call to do things in the back­ground. Sound can play in the back­ground, VOIP apps can lis­ten for an incom­ing call, GPS apps can keep tabs on your posi­tion, apps can con­tinue a spe­cific time-​consuming task like upload­ing a file, etc. In these cases, part of the pro­gram does con­tinue to run while this task is car­ried out, but there are two impor­tant things to remem­ber. When the app is done doing the thing it has a good rea­son to be doing in the back­ground, it sus­pends, just like apps that only sup­port fast app switch­ing, and the part of the app that remains run­ning in the back­ground is far smaller than the full application.

For exam­ple, when I’m lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora, I can switch away from it and let it play in the back­ground. When I’m doing this, the part of the app that streams the music is all that keeps run­ning. The rest of the app, the part with the user inter­face and menus and what­not, is sus­pended. It no longer takes up any CPU of its own. When I put a GPS app in the back­ground, it keeps track of my posi­tion and can even con­tinue to give me voice direc­tions, but the part of the app with the map no longer updates.

What does all this mean? It means that you don’t have to micro­man­age your device to pre­vent mul­ti­task­ing from killing your phone in iOS 4. Yes, you can man­u­ally “kill” an app, ter­mi­nat­ing the sus­pended process and remov­ing it from RAM by tap­ping and hold­ing on the icon in the switch­ing area and then tap­ping the red minus sign, but you should almost never, ever have to. I’ve done this once, to force a Twit­ter app to pull tweets in the “gap” between updates. For just about every­thing else, you can just trust the device to kill off processes itself when it needs the RAM. You don’t have to do it your­self. (And yes, every once in a while I’ll notice an app “hitch” for a sec­ond when I’m load­ing it, telling me that some­thing else just got purged from mem­ory. It’s only notice­able because I’m look­ing for it, and doesn’t impede my use of the device in any way.)

It also means that the peo­ple com­plain­ing that the iPhone doesn’t sup­port “real” mul­ti­task­ing need to take a deep breath and get over it. Apple’s imple­men­ta­tion of mul­ti­task­ing is a com­pro­mise, yes, but it’s a very ele­gant, effec­tive com­pro­mise that pro­vides the ben­e­fits of full desktop-​grade mul­ti­task­ing at a frac­tion of the resource cost. Smart­phones are much more pow­er­ful now than they were just a few years ago, but until we have orders of mag­ni­tude faster proces­sors and big­ger bat­ter­ies, Apple’s ver­sion of mul­ti­task­ing makes more sense than allow­ing any app to do what­ever they want.

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iPhone 4: The bars are a lie

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Jeff

There has been, well, some vig­or­ous dis­cus­sion this past week about the iPhone 4 and what those bas­tards at Apple have foisted upon us. Peo­ple are los­ing their freak­ing minds. Law­suits have been filed. Peo­ple are threat­en­ing to take their phones back. And, of course, peo­ple have emailed Steve Jobs directly, with results of vary­ing veracity.

Only, the thing is, it’s really not such a big deal. I know peo­ple are angry, and they have every right in the world to feel that way. And I know Apple has been unusu­ally tone-​deaf in how they’ve han­dled this sit­u­a­tion, but I also think they’re doing the right thing. So let’s take a step back, look at the sit­u­a­tion for what it really is and see how this all sorts out. (This would be a good place to take your happy pills if you need them.)

Design

The sin­gle most strik­ing fea­ture of the iPhone design, which you notice even before you see the ZOMG drool­wor­thy screen, is the stain­less steel band sand­wiched between the two plates of glass. This is not only the struc­tural sup­port for the phone, but also the antenna. The left side, from the head­phone jack around past the vol­ume but­tons, is the WiFi/​Bluetooth antenna, and the rest is the cel­lu­lar antenna. While this design choice sim­pli­fies and min­i­mizes the lay­out of the phone, it also means that you will, in the act of hold­ing the phone, alter the the recep­tion of the phone as you, who are essen­tially a bag of salt water as far as RF sig­nals are con­cerned, change the con­duc­tiv­ity of the antenna.

The result is what has become known as the “iPhone Death Grip.” If you hold the phone so that your skin bridges the tiny gap between the WiFi and cel­lu­lar anten­nas, you can watch in awe and/​or hor­ror as your sig­nal bars drop from five to one. This “design flaw” is what all this fuss is about.

Sig­nal atten­u­a­tion, by the numbers

Sure seems like a design flaw, right? To go from full sig­nal down to noth­ing just by touch­ing the phone? Touch­ing the phone in the exact same way you see Steve Jobs hold­ing it in just about every pic­ture of him and the iPhone 4 on the web?

Well, maybe, maybe not.

See, the truth is that five bars can be well removed from “full sig­nal,” and even that’s kind of a mis­nomer left over from ana­log phones that doesn’t mean much in a dig­i­tal world. Let’s look at the actual math for a minute. This won’t hurt a bit.

Click to read more the by creator of this chartRF sig­nals are mea­sured in neg­a­tive deci­bels. The best sig­nal you can get, stand­ing right next to the tower, is –51 dBm. The worst is –113, the point at which AT&T’s tow­ers just stop try­ing to talk to you. Now, you would think that the bars would be evenly dis­trib­uted over that 65 dBm range. But the prob­lem is that it’s a log­a­rith­mic scale. –100 dBm is ten times weaker than –90 dBm.

As a result, you see a “full” five bars all the way down to –90 dBM. Mean­ing as soon as you start los­ing bars at all, you’re not approach­ing the cliff, you’re already falling off.

This is already con­fus­ing, but it gets worse. When you touch the antenna, depend­ing on con­di­tions (mois­ture, etc.) you will cause the sig­nal to drop by 20 – 24 dB. If you’re in a strong “five bars” area, this will still leave you with more than 90, and thus still have “five” bars. If you’re sit­ting right around 90, drop­ping 24 dB can drop you all the way down to the cut off point, even though you started with “five” bars.

Pass­ing the bar

Only, even that isn’t really the case. Because as I men­tioned before, the whole con­cept of bars is a hold-​over from ana­log cell phones and doesn’t really make sense in a dig­i­tal world. With dig­i­tal cell phones, sig­nal is a binary con­di­tion. Either you have enough sig­nal to make the call, or you don’t. (It’s the same way with dig­i­tal TV over the air now. You either get a per­fect pic­ture or you get noth­ing, no more snow that kinda resem­bles your favorite show.) Numer­ous reports have shown that the iPhone 4 holds on to a call just fine all the way down to –111 dBm, and holds calls in places the iPhone 3GS would have dropped or not shown ser­vice at all.

Apple con­tends that the iPhone 4 has the best recep­tion yet of any iPhone, and even with the atten­u­a­tion prob­lem fac­tored in, this does in fact seem to be the case. Per­son­ally, I’ve lost a grand total of one call that I can blame defin­i­tively on the Death Grip. Granted, when I touched the antenna and dropped the sig­nal enough to drop the call, I was already in an under­ground park­ing garage. o_​O

Bump the Bumper

Apple raised eye­brows at WWDC when they announced the iPhone 4 by also announc­ing their first ever case for the iPhone, some­thing they’d pre­vi­ously left to third party com­pa­nies. The Bumper is a min­i­mal­ist case that only cov­ers the steel band around the iPhone, leav­ing the glass front and back mostly uncov­ered. Once reports of prob­lems with the antenna sur­faced, it didn’t take long for peo­ple to fig­ure out that 2 + 2 = Con­spir­acy Theory!

Obvi­ously, they say, Apple knew about this prob­lem, and that’s why they’re rip­ping us off to the tune of $30 for a band of rub­ber and plas­tic to cover up the prob­lem they knew they had! Those bastards!

Maybe, maybe not.

I’ll admit the Bumper is sus­pi­cious. And yes, it does seem to reduce, but not com­pletely elim­i­nate, the atten­u­a­tion. But a wise man once advised to never attribute to mal­ice what could be explained by sim­ple incom­pe­tence. And I can also see not only why Apple would have offered the Bumper with­out know­ing any­thing about the sig­nal issue, but how they never would have seen the sig­nal issue.

The Bumper is good for more than just antenna insu­la­tion. It also pro­vides a good deal of shock absorp­tion, some­thing at which steel and glass are noto­ri­ously bad. An iPhone 4 wear­ing a Bumper is much less likely to crack or shat­ter when dropped to a hard sur­face on the cor­ner than a naked iPhone. So Apple could have pro­vided it sim­ply because they knew the iPhone 4 might ben­e­fit from the extra protection.

As for them know­ing about the sig­nal issue, think about how this prob­lem man­i­fests and how Apple tested the phone. You don’t see it at all in strong sig­nal areas where even drop­ping the full 24 dB still leaves you with five bars. And within the Apple cam­pus at Cuper­tino, you can bet they have impec­ca­ble AT&T sig­nal. So on cam­pus, they’d never notice it.

Of course, they don’t just test it on cam­pus. In fact, we know at least one radio base­band engi­neer who, while test­ing the phone in a bar, had a lit­tle too much Ger­man beer and wound up with­out his pro­to­type iPhone 4. But we also know from that lit­tle escapade that when off of Apple’s cam­pus, the iPhone 4 was hid­den inside a spe­cially built case that made it look like a 3GS. And hold­ing it inside that case would have insu­lated the antenna, sim­i­lar to how the Bumper works, which means they wouldn’t have seen it there either.

In short, Apple’s test­ing method­ol­ogy seemed to guar­an­tee that they’d never the test the iPhone naked and in poor sig­nal at the same time. When they say they were “shocked” to dis­cover this prob­lem, I believe them. I really don’t think they tested it in all pos­si­ble conditions.

Don’t hold it that way

Appar­ently, Apple was caught so off guard by this con­tro­versy that they they stum­bled repeat­edly in deal­ing with it in pub­lic. The first time a user emailed Steve Jobs him­self about it, or at least the first (only?) one Jobs replied to, Jobs actu­ally told the guy not to hold it that way. This struck most peo­ple as flip­pant and dis­mis­sive, which is prob­a­bly why Apple quickly fol­lowed up with an offi­cial state­ment with more care­ful word­ing. BGR reported that Jobs also had a longer exchange with some­one else where he ended up telling the user to get over it, it’s just a phone. Apple claims this con­ver­sa­tion is a hoax, though BGR stands by their report­ing.

What we do know is that Apple’s offi­cial stance at the time of this writ­ing is that all phones have this issue to one degree or another, but that iOS4 has badly cal­i­brated sig­nal bars that don’t give peo­ple a real­is­tic idea of how likely they are to drop a call. This seems to be true, as peo­ple have been able to grip other phones from the Moto RAZR to the Google’s Nexus One in ways that cause sim­i­lar sig­nal drops, and the “hey, my bars are drop­ping like flies” effect is show­ing up on older iPhones that have been upgraded to iOS4. Apple is not recall­ing the phone or even offer­ing free Bumpers as a mat­ter of pol­icy. Instead, they’re going to address this with a soft­ware fix.

Can’t fix the sig­nal, so fix the bars

Wait a sec­ond. How can a soft­ware fix resolve a phys­i­cal design issue? Because, as with every­thing in this story, things are more com­plex than they seem.

The iPhone 4 han­dles sig­nal dif­fer­ently than other iPhones. Dif­fer­ently than other phones, as near as I can tell. Pre­vi­ously, iPhones tried to home in on the strongest sig­nal from a tower they could find. The prob­lem is that the tower they’re clos­est to – thereby pro­vid­ing the strongest sig­nal – might also be the most crowded. Or there might be more elec­tro­mag­netic inter­fer­ence in that area. So even though the sig­nal is stronger, your call qual­ity might actu­ally be worse.

The iPhone 4 seeks out the “best” sig­nal, not nec­es­sar­ily the strongest. It looks for clar­ity, lack of inter­fer­ence, low traf­fic on the tower. As a result, and keep­ing with dig­i­tal calling’s binary nature, you “do” have a sig­nal with the iPhone 4 more often than you “don’t” com­pared to older iPhones, even if the reported sig­nal strength is a lower number.

Apple is going to change the way the bars are dis­played so they fol­low AT&T’s guide­lines on how many bars to report for a given sig­nal strength. This seems to be another source for angry mis­un­der­stand­ing among the digerati, so pay attention.

Coun­ter­in­tu­itively, this change is going to show fewer bars than you had before for any but really strong sig­nals. Where you used to have four or five bars, you might now only see two. But, and this is impor­tant, those two bars are more “durable” and a more accu­rate indi­ca­tor of what kind of sig­nal you’ve actu­ally had all along. You never really had the kind of sig­nal strength you thought you did if you used to see five bars and now you see two after installing the patch. You always had “two bar” strength, you just didn’t know it. Every­one clear on that?

Let me sum up

So. Should you hold off on buy­ing an iPhone 4 because of this issue? If you already have one, should you take it back? That depends. Are you drop­ping calls? Are you drop­ping more calls than you did with your pre­vi­ous phone, iPhone or not? If not, then I wouldn’t worry about it. As men­tioned above, the iPhone 4’s antenna is actu­ally bet­ter than the 3GS at hold­ing on to a call at low sig­nal strength, so for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses the num­bers don’t matter.

Per­son­ally, my iPhone 4 per­forms at least as well as my iPhone 3G, and offers so many advan­tages besides, so I’d be a fool to take it back. Do I use a case? Some­times. Some­times not. I keep mine in a Grif­fin Élan Pass­port Wal­let when I’m on the go along with my driver’s license and debit card. But I take it out fre­quently to sync, use around the house, for use as a GPS and when typ­ing or watch­ing video in the Grif­fin Travel Stand (no, I’m not spon­sored by Grif­fin, but I wouldn’t turn them down; I like their prod­ucts). In or out of a case, I don’t notice the “prob­lem” much. It’s just not an issue. Put aside the hype and noise, and you might see the same.

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Thoughts on the iPhone 4

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Jeff

After stand­ing in line for a cou­ple hours very early Thurs­day morn­ing, I came home with a shiny new iPhone 4. The actual pur­chase and acti­va­tion process itself took about five min­utes and then I walked out of the mall with my shiny new phone and bumper case. Now that I’ve had some time to play with it, I’ve got a few observations.

Screen

The screen on this thing must be seen to be believed. I showed this to a friend Fri­day night and he thought the text looked pretty good, but when he got to the home screen and saw how clear the tiny, teensy icons inside fold­ers were, his jaw lit­er­ally dropped.

I’ve always been a typog­ra­phy snob, and this is the screen I’ve always wanted but never thought I’d see. It’s not just the pixel den­sity (which accord­ing to an actual reti­nal sci­en­tist, actu­ally does live up to the hype, even under a micro­scope), but what that pixel den­sity does in a user inter­face that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily assume every­thing is 72 dpi. But­tons, icons, wid­gets, every­thing is sharp and nat­ural. Pho­tos look bet­ter, too.

And oddly, I’ve seen apps that can sense when they’re on a retina dis­play and react accord­ingly. On my 3G, iBooks won’t let me select a font smaller than 12 points or so. On my iPhone 4, iBooks has two more smaller font set­tings below what was the min­i­mum on my 3G, because iBooks knows the device can han­dle it. It would have been worth the upgrade for this alone, but there’s more.

More­over, a dis­play this smooth chal­lenges con­ven­tional wis­dom about best prac­tices for read­ing on a screen. For years, we’ve been told not to use fonts designed for print (Hel­vetica, Times New Roman) in favor of “web fonts” like Ver­dana and Geor­gia. On the iPhone 4, this is again reversed. The pix­els are so dense, the curves so smooth, that the advan­tages of print-​optimized fonts reassert and I find I much pre­fer Hel­vetica (which looks “cleaner” than Tahoma/​Verdana) for most text and Times New Roman (which is denser, allow­ing more words per line, than Geor­gia) for iBooks.

Speed

The iPhone 4 is built on Apple’s A4, the same chip that pow­ers the iPad. Spec­u­la­tion is that the iPhone 4’s A4 isn’t run­ning at the full 1GHz that the iPad uses, prob­a­bly closer to 800MHz. It bench­marks just about halfway between the 3GS and the iPad. But what this means is that it is most def­i­nitely faster than the 3GS. Com­pared to my old 3G, it’s a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence entirely. Mul­ti­task­ing is quick and smooth (more on this later) and apps open just about instantly. I’ve yet to see any of the lag I was used to on my 3G when, say, tap­ping on the search bar in applications.

Build Qual­ity

The iPhone 4 feels really solid in the hand. Given what we saw of the phone’s innards first from Giz­modo and then more fully in iFixIt’s tear­down, this shouldn’t be a sur­prise. There’s not a cubic mil­lime­ter of empty space in this thing. The glass, which has been chem­i­cally treated to be as tough as sap­phire, is clear and solid. The solid steel antenna band (more on this and the “iPhone Death Grip” later) is adds even more rigid­ity and all the but­tons are firm and click with a deci­sive tac­tile feed­back. And of course, the indus­trial design is stun­ning. This is the phone Jony Ives always wanted to build, I’m sure.

Bat­tery Life

Part of the over­all den­sity of the phone is that the bat­tery is so much big­ger than on pre­vi­ous mod­els, and you can tell. With my 3G, I car­ried a Kens­ing­ton exter­nal bat­tery pack with me every­where I went, just in case. With the iPhone 4, I don’t. Even stream­ing Pan­dora in the back­ground, it sips power and I can type for hours with­out drop­ping more than 10%.

Blue­tooth Key­board Support

Typ­ing? Yes, typ­ing. Like the 3GS when updated to iOS 4, the iPhone 4 fully sup­ports Blue­tooth key­boards like my iGo Stow­away. In fact, it does so bet­ter than than the Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver I’d used under jail­break. Once paired, all you have to do is start typ­ing on the key­board in any editable field, and the text starts to flow. Con­versely, I had to re-​pair my key­board every time with the jail­break dri­ver. There is absolutely no lag no mat­ter how fast I type, and most of the key­board short­cuts you’re used to on Win­dows or the Mac work just fine. I can move the cur­sor with the arrow keys, select text with shift-​arrow, and use Control-​X/​C/​V to cut, copy and paste. This was the final nail in the cof­fin for my net­book. I now can do vir­tu­ally any­thing I need to do on my iPhone when I’m out and about. For the few things I can’t do (notably, save doc­u­ments from my cri­tique group from Yahoo Groups to my Drop­box), I can use Log­MeIn Igni­tion to remote into my desk­top and take care of it that way, then go back to what I was doing.

Spellcheck

And of course, for you writ­ers out there, iOS 4 now sup­ports spellcheck sys­tem wide. You’ll see a red dot­ted line under words the sys­tem doesn’t rec­og­nize, and just tap them to correct.

Mul­ti­task­ing

There seems to be a lot of dis­in­for­ma­tion and fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing out there about mul­ti­task­ing on the iPhone. Most of this seems to come from either jail­break users who were used to the way Back­grounder worked or peo­ple that came to the iPhone from other mul­ti­task­ing plat­forms like Win­dows Embed­ded Hand­held (for­merly known as Win­dows Mobile), webOS and Android. So let’s set some things straight.

You do NOT have to “close” your “run­ning” back­ground apps. I see a ton of con­fu­sion on this. Seri­ously, you don’t. I know on other sys­tems, even on the iPhone under Back­grounder you had to be really dili­gent about clos­ing things when you were done with them, but that’s the beauty of the Apple mul­ti­task­ing imple­men­ta­tion. Those apps you see when you dou­ble click the Home but­ton aren’t really run­ning. All that is, really, is a Most Recently Used list of short­cuts, the same as you have on your Win­dows Start menu. They are tak­ing up no resources unless they have a good rea­son to be doing some­thing in the back­ground, and even then, they’re doing just that and no more, not tak­ing up even as much mem­ory as the whole appli­ca­tion would when run­ning in the fore­ground. I’m not sure how I can make this any clearer. Com­pul­sively remov­ing apps from the mul­ti­task­ing tray is a total and com­plete waste of time. Yes, you can kill apps by tap­ping and hold­ing on them in the switch­ing tray and tap­ping the red minus sign, but I only do that when I need to force quit an indi­vid­ual app, that is delib­er­ately restart it from zero with­out saved state infor­ma­tion. This is exceed­ingly rare.

Another mul­ti­task­ing com­plaint I hear a lot is that this only works if devel­op­ers update their apps to sup­port it. First, any app you run will show up in the recently used app list, whether it’s been updated or not. So it’s just as easy to switch to an old app as a new one, the only dif­fer­ence being what hap­pens when you get there. Old apps will launch as though you just launched them fresh, new will pick up exactly where you left off. Also, you don’t have to launch them from the mul­ti­task­ing area to get this ben­e­fit. If you launch an app you’ve used recently from the home­screen, you’ll pick up where you left off the same way. Now what do devel­op­ers have to do to sup­port this magic new feature?

They have to recom­pile their app under the iOS 4 SDK. That’s it. They don’t have to change a sin­gle line of code. All they have to do is recom­pile, sub­mit the “update” to the App Store and their app will sup­port fast app switch­ing. Doesn’t seem like much to ask, and it’s actu­ally pretty much unavoid­able if they update their app ever again for any­thing. So you’re going to see apps updated a lot sooner than later. Even­tu­ally, every app that isn’t just aban­doned will be updated to sup­port mul­ti­task­ing in some way or another.

I’ve seen some peo­ple claim that they feel like they have to remove “run­ning” apps because they’re crowd­ing out the apps they use fre­quently. I can only assume these peo­ple haven’t actu­ally used said apps fre­quently, because that’s exactly how they’re sorted. The app to the far left is the last one you used. The one to the right of it is the next to last app you used, and so on. All you have to do if you want to bring an app back to the first screen of recently used apps is run it. So again, peo­ple accus­tomed to higher-​maintenance sys­tems are bring­ing old habits over and wast­ing time and energy (and get­ting frus­trated) doing things they sim­ply don’t have to do on the iPhone. “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that.”

iPhone Death Grip

Speak­ing of which, let’s talk about the iPhone Death Grip. This may be a moot point by the time I post this arti­cle, as Apple is rumored to be fast-​tracking iOS 4.01 to address this issue, but it was such a huge con­tro­versy at launch that even my mom knew about it, so again, let’s dis­pel some of the hoopla.

There is a prob­lem with degrad­ing sig­nal qual­ity if you meet a very spe­cific set of require­ments. In order to see this issue, you must:

  1. Have a sweaty hand or be in a high-​humidity area
  2. Have a weak cel­lu­lar signal
  3. Hold the phone in such a way as to bridge the gap between the Bluetooth/​WiFi/​GPS antenna (which runs up the left side of the phone through the vol­ume and mute but­tons) and the cel­lu­lar net­work antenna (which wraps around the bot­tom and up the other side of the phone)

So, if you hold the phone left-​handed in a moist palm where you have mar­ginal sig­nal, you can watch the sig­nal strength bars drop down to vir­tu­ally noth­ing. Oddly, in most cases this doesn’t seem to affect call qual­ity and may be more a dis­play bug than an actual sig­nal prob­lem, but it can hap­pen. To some peo­ple. In spe­cific sit­u­a­tions. Sometimes.

When asked about this via email, Steve Jobs replied, “Don’t hold the phone that way.” Apple fol­lowed up with a more detailed pub­lic state­ment acknowl­edg­ing the prob­lem and sug­gest­ing peo­ple who expe­ri­ence this fre­quently might want to invest in Apple’s Bumper case, which cov­ers the prob­lem area with plas­tic and rub­ber and pre­vents the issue entirely. They’re also work­ing on an update to iOS 4 to address the issue.

So, there’s a minor issue that the com­pany has already com­mit­ted to fix­ing and which can eas­ily be worked around by using pretty much any case or merely hold­ing the phone dif­fer­ently. Clearly, this was grounds for the world at large to go crazy. Cov­er­age of this hor­ri­ble design flaw even made local news across the coun­try, to the point where my mom, not a techie by any means, asked me if I had the problem.

Per­son­ally, I don’t. And I’m left handed. But I live in Den­ver, where the air is thin and dry. So most of the time, all the cri­te­ria to see this prob­lem aren’t met. I do have a Bumper, which I bought at the same time as the phone because I’d already seen, at 7am here in Den­ver, reports on the Twit­ter machine of the issue and wanted to be safe rather than sorry. While I almost never see the iPhone Death Grip issue when not using the Bumper, I’ve started using the Bumper more often any­way, mostly because it pre­vents the phone from slid­ing around on a table while I’m typing.

Con­clu­sion

The iPhone 4 is the finest mobile com­puter I’ve ever owned. Cou­pled with my Blue­tooth Stow­away, it’s every­thing I need in a mobile device and good enough to con­vince me to hold off to see if the next gen­er­a­tion iPad has a retina dis­play as well. Yes, there are a few things here and there I’d like to see tweaked (like how in many apps, the area where the on screen key­board would be is just blank while using the Blue­tooth key­board rather than dis­play­ing more text), but over­all this is every­thing I wanted. If you have an older iPhone, upgrade as soon as you can. You won’t regret it.

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We interrupt this blog for a reminder from a veteran

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Jeff

As many of you know, I am a vet­eran. I wore the uni­form of the United States Air Force for six years, and did so proudly. While I was not deployed to Iraq in the first Gulf War, I was active duty and I could have been. I joined up know­ing we were headed for a con­flict with Sad­dam and his, at the time, fourth largest army in the world. So every year on Memo­r­ial Day, I think about the oath I swore to pro­tect and defend the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States of Amer­ica, and how we’re all doing with that.

My dad and I agree on a lot of things, and we were equally vocif­er­ous in our oppo­si­tion of Bush 43 and his administration’s reck­less dis­re­gard of the Con­sti­tu­tion. But while I think the anti-​immigration sen­ti­ment that led to Arizona’s uncon­sti­tu­tional “papers, please” law is fun­da­men­tally unAmer­i­can, he thinks we need to get rid of all these “ille­gals” who are wreck­ing his coun­try. This morn­ing, he sent me this.

MEXICO IS ANGRY
This is very inter­est­ing and if Ari­zona can do it, why can’t the rest of Amer­ica ?
Three cheers for Ari­zona
The shoe is on the other foot and the Mex­i­cans from the State of Sonora, Mex­ico doesn’t like it. Can you believe the nerve of these peo­ple? It’s almost funny.
The State of Sonora is angry at the influx of Mex­i­cans into Mex­ico . Nine state leg­is­la­tors from the Mex­i­can State of Sonora trav­eled to Tuc­son to com­plain about Ari­zona ‘s new employer crack­down on ille­gals from Mex­ico .
It seems that many Mex­i­can ille­gals are return­ing to their home­towns and the offi­cials in the Sonora state gov­ern­ment are ticked off.
A del­e­ga­tion of nine state leg­is­la­tors from Sonora was in Tuc­son on Tues­day to state that Ari­zona ‘s new Employer Sanc­tions Law will have a dev­as­tat­ing effect on the Mex­i­can state.
At a news con­fer­ence, the leg­is­la­tors said that Sonora, — Arizona’s south­ern neighbor, — made up of mostly small towns, — cannot han­dle the demand for hous­ing, jobs and schools that it will face as Mex­i­can work­ers return to their home­towns from the USA with­out jobs or money.
The Ari­zona law, which took effect Jan. 1, pun­ishes Ari­zona employ­ers who know­ingly hire indi­vid­u­als with­out valid legal doc­u­ments to work in the United States .
Penal­ties include sus­pen­sion of, or loss of, their busi­ness license.
The Mex­i­can leg­is­la­tors are angry because their own cit­i­zens are return­ing to their home­towns, plac­ing a bur­den on THEIR state gov­ern­ment. ‘How can Ari­zona pass a law like this?’ asked Mex­i­can Rep Leti­cia Amparano-​Gamez, who rep­re­sents Nogales .
’There is not one per­son liv­ing in Sonora who does not have a friend or rel­a­tive work­ing in Ari­zona ‚’ she said, speak­ing in Span­ish. ‘Mex­ico is not pre­pared for this, for the tremen­dous prob­lems it will face as more and more Mex­i­cans work­ing in Ari­zona and who were send­ing money to their fam­i­lies return to their home-​towns in Sonora with­out jobs,’ she said. ‘We are one fam­ily, socially and eco­nom­i­cally,’ she said of the peo­ple of Sonora and Ari­zona .
New Immi­gra­tion Laws:
1 There will be no spe­cial bilin­gual pro­grams in the schools.
2 All bal­lots will be in this nation’s lan­guage..
3 All gov­ern­ment busi­ness will be con­ducted in our lan­guage.
4 Non-​residents will NOT have the right to vote no mat­ter how long they are here.
5 Non-​citizens will NEVER be able to hold polit­i­cal office
6 For­eign­ers will not be a bur­den to the tax­pay­ers. No wel­fare, no food stamps, no health care, or other gov­ern­ment assis­tance pro­grams. Any bur­den will be deported.
7 For­eign­ers can invest in this coun­try, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily min­i­mum wage.
8 If for­eign­ers come here and buy land… options will be restricted. Cer­tain parcels includ­ing water­front prop­erty are reserved for cit­i­zens nat­u­rally born into this coun­try.
9 For­eign­ers may have no protests; no demon­stra­tions, no wav­ing of a for­eign flag, no polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, no bad-​mouthing our pres­i­dent or his poli­cies. These will lead to depor­ta­tion.
10 If you do come to this coun­try ille­gally, you will be actively hunted and when caught, sent to jail until your depor­ta­tion can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.
Too strict ?
The above laws are cur­rent immi­gra­tion laws of MEXICO!

My reac­tion was, “Yeah? So?” I think it kind of proves my point. Amer­ica is sup­posed to be bet­ter than this. We were founded on the idea that this was THE place, the one place on Earth that any­one could come to for a bet­ter life. We were founded on immi­gra­tion. Even the “native” Amer­i­cans migrated here from Asia thou­sands of years ago. The United States of Amer­ica is sup­posed to have open, wel­com­ing bor­ders, so that those “hud­dling masses yearn­ing to breathe free” can get here and start anew. So telling me that Mexico’s immi­gra­tion laws are far stricter than our own tells me that we’re get­ting it right. The peo­ple com­plain­ing that the coun­try is being over­run by Lati­nos sound just like — and just as stu­pid and fun­da­men­tally unAmer­i­can as — the peo­ple who com­plained we were being over­run by the Ital­ians, or the Chi­nese, or the Irish.

Note the ref­er­ences to the “nation’s lan­guage” in the rules above. Amer­ica doesn’t have an offi­cial lan­guage. We don’t. Never have. There was a fierce debate almost 200 years ago whether the offi­cial lan­guage of the United States should be Eng­lish… or Ger­man, which was spo­ken in much of Penn­syl­va­nia, at the time the largest state. After a long drawn out fight, they agreed that Amer­ica wouldn’t rec­og­nize an offi­cial lan­guage at all. Eng­lish is by far the most com­mon, but peo­ple who insist that it’s “the” lan­guage of the United States don’t know their his­tory. We’re a melt­ing pot. We’re sup­posed to be. The fact that the ratio of white peo­ple to every­one else in Amer­ica is drop­ping is what is sup­posed to hap­pen. (For the record, I’m white.) Now the same peo­ple in Ari­zona are try­ing to pass a law stat­ing that peo­ple born in the United States aren’t cit­i­zens if they’re born to undoc­u­mented par­ents, a bla­tant vio­la­tion of the 14th amendment.

I carry a copy of the United States Con­sti­tu­tion on my iPhone, and refer to it from time to time as a reminder of what this nation is sup­posed to be about. That we’re sup­posed to be free from unrea­son­able search and seizure — which Arizona’s “papers, please” law con­tra­dicts — and we’re sup­posed to be ded­i­cated to mak­ing sure the first amendment’s free­dom of expres­sion and assem­bly is sacred.

Phil Plait, of the pop­u­lar blog Bad Astron­omy, gets this.

Today is Memo­r­ial Day in the United States, where we take time to remem­ber those who have died, and specif­i­cally those who have fought and died for the coun­try. In my opin­ion, they didn’t fight to pro­tect our coun­try, they fought to pro­tect the idea of our coun­try. The prin­ci­ples for which it stands, the ideas and ideals that give peo­ple the chance to reach their full poten­tial. That’s what Amer­ica is sup­posed to be about, and the frame­work that pro­vides that chance is the Constitution.

The issue Phil links to is about a Chris­t­ian high school stu­dent object­ing to an offi­cial school prayer at his grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony, because the kid knows his Con­sti­tu­tion and knows that reli­gion is sup­posed to be kept sep­a­rate from government-​sponsored orga­ni­za­tions like schools. It’s galling how often we for­get this, or choose to ignore it.

So today, in honor of the brave men and women who have given their lives to pro­tect and defend the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States, read over our Con­sti­tu­tion, or at least refa­mil­iar­ize your­self with the Bill of Rights, the first ten amend­ments. These are the found­ing prin­ci­ples of our Repub­lic, and they are not optional. This is what we fight for, and what so many have died to pro­tect. Respect their sacrifice.

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Torn between two ecosystems

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Jeff

Google impressed at last week’s I/​O con­fer­ence. They demoed Android 2.2, “Froyo”, which is already avail­able for Google’s own Nexus One phone. (It’s com­ing “soon” for carrier-​branded hand­sets like Verizon’s Droid Incred­i­ble and Sprint’s EVO.) They showed mSpot, a new ser­vice that does a lot of what LaLa.com did before Apple bought it and shut it down: allow peo­ple to upload their entire music libraries and then stream them to any Mac, Win­dows PC or Android hand­set. The bar, it is raised.

In par­tic­u­lar, Froyo is over twice as fast as the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Android (2.1, or “Éclair”), the webkit-​based browser — basi­cally Chrome-​lite — is faster still, and it sup­ports a fully func­tional imple­men­ta­tion of Adobe’s Flash 10.1, mean­ing it can dis­play all those web pages where Safari on the iPhone and iPad just show you that silly lit­tle blue Lego. Add to that the nearly stan­dard specs for this gen­er­a­tion of Android phones — 480x800 AMOLED screens, remov­able bat­ter­ies, 5MP or bet­ter cam­eras, with flashes, microSD card expan­sion — and the still expand­ing Android Mar­ket­place — where you can find office suites like Quick­Of­fice and Doc­u­ments To Go, EPUB ebook read­ers, Skype, and well, a func­tional equiv­a­lent to just about any­thing in the iTunes App Store — and we got our­selves a ball game!

A lot of peo­ple com­pare the iPhone to a phone like the HTC Incred­i­ble and just look at the hard­ware. But the game is really much big­ger than that. You’re not buy­ing a phone. You’re buy­ing into an ecosys­tem. It’s like mar­ry­ing into a fam­ily, and bears just as much fore­thought and cau­tion. You’re not just look­ing at an Android-​based smart­phone. To get the most out of it, you’re going to want to cou­ple it with all the other parts of the Google ecosys­tem. Gmail for your email and con­tacts. Google Cal­en­dar for your sched­ul­ing. Ama­zon and MSpot for your media. Google book­marks. Google Chrome as your desk­top browser. Google Reader for your RSS feds. I won’t sug­gest your switch from Twit­ter to Google Buzz for social net­work­ing, but it’s there.

Right now I’m about halfway sub­merged in the shiny, mul­ti­color Google lifestyle. I do use Gmail, Cal­en­dar, Reader. I’ve used Chrome as my default browser. I’ve kept my doc­u­ments in Google Docs. It wouldn’t be hard at all for me to walk into a Ver­i­zon store, plop down a cou­ple of Ben­jamins — and pay AT&T their Early Ter­mi­na­tion Fee, since I’ve only been with them just over a year — and walk out with an Incred­i­ble. (I’d have to wait to play with it until I got it home, though, since AMOLED screens are nearly use­less in sun­light. Hell, even vam­pires do bet­ter these days.) The Android, it calls. Plus, just look at this list of five rea­sons to be afraid of Apple. Why wouldn’t I want to go all in with a com­pany whose motto is “don’t be evil”?

But Apple. Ah, Apple. There’s a rea­son the apple fea­tures as the sym­bol of temp­ta­tion in every­thing from Gen­e­sis to Snow White. Mis­ter Jobs knows him some pretty when he sees it. iPhone own­ers have a more emo­tional, vis­ceral con­nec­tion to their phones than even other smart­phone own­ers. My iPhone 3G is damn near grafted to me, and the iPhone HD due out just two weeks is even more gorgeous.

Where Google preaches open and flex­i­ble, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, Apple tells us not to worry our pretty lit­tle heads, they’ll make every­thing all right. As long as you agree with His Steve­ness — and why wouldn’t you, he has impec­ca­ble taste — you’ll get every­thing you need.

And Apple, if they do as expected, is set to bring the ecosys­tem to play too. We — yes, that is a mouse in my pocket — expect Apple to announce more than just the new pretty iPhone HD at WWDC on June 7th. We expect them to announce that email, cal­en­dar and con­tacts sync­ing com­po­nents of MobileMe will be free to any iPhone user. We expect them to announced iTunes 10 with the new “iTunes Live” fea­ture to allow sync­ing your whole iTunes library to Apple’s new ginor­mous dat­a­cen­ter in North Car­olina, from whence you can stream it all to your iPhone HD (and maybe 3GS, but prob­a­bly not the older, RAM-​challenged orig­i­nal iPhone and 3G). Basi­cally, we expect them to at the very least match Google fea­ture for fea­ture. And maybe up the ante with Steve’s “one more thing.”

And it would just as easy for me to fall into the wel­com­ing sleek­ness of the Apple ecosys­tem. I already buy my music and movies from iTunes, so why not my books as well? iBooks will be built into iPhone OS4. I could move my cal­en­dar, con­tacts and email into MobileMe. My email address, jeff@kirv.in, already redi­rects to Gmail, so I’d just have the redi­rect point to MobileMe instead. Same with iTunes Live. My media col­lec­tion is in iTunes already, so this is a no-​brainer. And from there, I could switch to Safari as my desk­top browser so I can sync my book­marks, and even­tu­ally just buy a shiny 27” iMac as my new media cen­ter. And hey, at least Apple is the devil I know. Look at this list of five rea­sons to be afraid of Google.

But wait a minute. I’m sup­posed to be a Bud­dhist, also known as “the mid­dle way.” I’m bipo­lar. I’m a Gem­ini. I’m a gor­ram reg­is­tered Inde­pen­dent. Why can’t I have both?

This is, after all, the true strength of the cloud. And the cloud is big­ger than Google. It’s big­ger than Apple. I can keep my book­marks in Xmarks. I can buy my books from Google Edi­tions, which will sell ebooks sans DRM so they can be read any­where, on any­thing. I’ll keep buy­ing media from iTunes, because Apple’s just made it so darn easy, and at least the music is DRM-​free. I use Fire­fox as my desk­top browser, Thun­der­bird and Light­ning for email and sched­ul­ing. Seesmic for social net­work­ing, Ever­note for ran­dom data, Instapa­per for saved arti­cles, Drop­box for my files and man­u­scripts, Bing as my default search engine. And of course, a jail­bro­ken iPhone that has all the fea­tures of OS4 on OS 3.13, synced to Google for con­tacts, email and calendar.

This might not work for­ever. As the rivalry between Google and Apple heats up, they might not inter­op­er­ate — a fancy word for “play nice” — as well as they do today. I might be forced into MobileMe if I want to keep push syn­chro­niza­tion on my iPhone HD. But for as long as I can, I’m going to avoid going “all in” with any one com­pany. Because really, I’m afraid of them all.

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Microsoft out in the cold again

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Jeff

John Gru­ber has some inter­est­ing thoughts about the odd-​man-​out at Google’s I/​O con­fer­ence this week:

The big loser this week, though, was Microsoft. They’re sim­ply not even part of the game. RIM looms large, as Black­Ber­rys con­tinue to reign as the best-​selling smart­phones in the U.S. But Microsoft? They’ve got noth­ing. No inter­est­ing devices, weak sales, and a shrink­ing user base. Microsoft’s irrel­e­vance is taken for granted.

Google’s com­pet­i­tive focus on the iPhone at I/​O was intense and scathing. But it’s Microsoft’s lunch they’re eat­ing. Apple’s and RIM’s game is sell­ing the inte­grated whole — their own devices, run­ning their own soft­ware. Google is play­ing Microsoft’s game — licens­ing a plat­form to many device makers.

Dar­ing Fire­ball: Post-​I/​O Thoughts

This is the way I’ve seen the mobile mar­ket shak­ing out for quite some time now. Google’s Android fills pre­cisely the same niche that used to be filled by Win­dows Mobile, but it does so with New Hawt­ness that Microsoft just can’t seem to match. The Kin will never be the hit the Side­kick was, because the mar­ket is dif­fer­ent now and app-​based smart­phones are the norm, not the excep­tion. Yes, the Kin line is sup­posed to merge with Win­dows Phone 7 even­tu­ally, but by the time it does, Android 2.2, with all its speed and Flashy good­ness will be the norm, if not replaced by Android 2.3 or later. Microsoft is caught between a rock (okay, an Apple) and a hard place (a shiny, cheer­fully mul­ti­color hard place). They’ll never have the kind of mar­ket share needed to make their $8 – 15 mobile OS license busi­ness model pay off.

So the real ques­tion is this. Microsoft can see the writ­ing on the wall. They know mobile is the Next Big Thing, as big a shift in per­sonal com­put­ing as the advent of the GUI over com­mand line inter­faces. Not par­tic­i­pat­ing would be cor­po­rate sui­cide. But what they’re doing with Win­dows Phone 7 can’t pos­si­bly suc­ceed. Google gives Android away for free. They can’t beat free. So what do they do?

Microsoft’s only hope is to merge the Kin, Zune, Xbox Live and Win­dows Phone 7 into a sin­gle plat­form, and do it now. Release a kick-​ass smart­phone with Zune and Xbox inte­gra­tion and a ready to go app store this year, before the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son. And make it pretty. Oh, so pretty. They can’t com­pete with Google on price, so they have to com­pete with Apple on user expe­ri­ence and integration.

(Now might be a good time to sell those shares of MSFT you’re still hang­ing on to.)

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Maybe you should try not lying, then

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Jeff

Repub­li­can Con­gres­sional hope­ful Ari David is livid that Apple has rejected his iPhone app due to “defam­a­tory state­ments” about his com­pe­ti­tion, Demo­c­rat Henry Waxman.

As you can see not only are none of the state­ments defam­a­tory, they are all factual.

By deny­ing me this appli­ca­tion Apple is now mak­ing an in-​kind con­tri­bu­tion to Henry Wax­man by deny­ing his com­peti­tor a mod­ern tool for polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. They are sti­fling my right to free polit­i­cal speech and they are car­ry­ing water for the Obama administration.

Apple Denies Free Polit­i­cal Speech « Yes, But, However!

Let’s take a look at a few of these “fac­tual” state­ments, though.

HENRY WAXMAN…

SUPPORTED Cap & Trade leg­is­la­tion that would have brought us $7 a gal­lon gas and as Pres­i­dent Obama has stated would make elec­tric­ity rates “nec­es­sar­ily sky rocket.” (This one is well known con­sid­er­ing that Wax­man spon­sored the bill in the House and Pres­i­dent Obama is famous for mak­ing the state­ment about the need under his plan for “sky­rock­et­ing” elec­tric­ity rates).

Now, maybe I’m using a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of “fact” than Mis­ter David, but where the hell did that “$7 a gal­lon gas” thing come from? Is that a fact? No, it’s a pre­dic­tion, and an obvi­ously cyn­i­cal, worst-​case pre­dic­tion about one of the poten­tial side effects should Cap&Trade pass.

VOTED AGAINST mis­sile defense fund­ing, which jeop­ar­dized the US and Israel (Wax­man is famous for vot­ing against mis­sile defense pro­gram fund­ing going all the way back to 1983 when Rea­gan first pro­posed the SDI system).

SDI was a boon­dog­gle in the 1980s and it’s a boon­dog­gle today. Mis­sile defense has never been suc­cess­fully tested. So if it doesn’t work, how does defund­ing it “jeop­ar­dize” anyone?

Apple was right to reject this app, and politi­cians — on either side — need to get used to the idea that the same lies and half-​truths they get away with on TV won’t work in this mar­ket. Try telling the truth, Ari, and see how far you get.

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What to expect from the next iPhone

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Jeff

What we’ll see in this year’s iPhone, why we won’t seen an iPhone on Ver­i­zon until next year, and when to expect all the new Apple hotness.

We’ve got three weeks to go until Apple’s 2010 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence (WWDC). Start­ing June 7, we expect Apple to shift into a higher gear and… Well, that’s just the thing. There’s a lot of con­fu­sion out there about, what, exactly, we’re going to see. I don’t have a crys­tal ball. I don’t have seekrit sources deep inside Apple (seeds, if you will). But I do have the Chew­bacca Defense:

More impor­tantly, I have the inverse of the Chew­bacca Defense, Occam’s Razor. In short, given a num­ber of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions, the sim­plest is prob­a­bly true. And Apple isn’t as secre­tive as they think. They can’t hide their own past. We can divine a lot from what they’ve already done, extrap­o­late future behav­ior based on pre­vi­ous trends. So here’s what I’m sure we’re going to see, and when. Steve and com­pany might sur­prise me, but I doubt it.

First, the main event. In his open­ing keynote on June 7th, Steve is going to announce the next iPhone, the iPhone HD. It will fea­ture a 2VGA, 640×960 screen, come in 16, 32 and 64GB capac­i­ties, sport the same A4 CPU as the iPad, run iPhone OS 4, have 256MB of RAM and look iden­ti­cal to the pro­duc­tion test model Giz­modo “acquired.” It will most likely be avail­able two weeks later, on June 21 or 22.

How do I know this? Because it’s sim­ply the over­whelm­ingly most likely sce­nario. Look at the facts.

  • Apple has announced and released their new flag­ship iPhone in June every year, at WWDC.
  • They’ve stuck to an annual update/​release sched­ule for their other prod­ucts, par­tic­u­larly in the iPhone, iPod (and pre­sum­ably iPad) family.
  • The Giz­modo test unit is obvi­ously real, and John Gru­ber pointed out than the mark­ings on the back iden­ti­fied it as a late-​stage pro­duc­tion test, unlikely to change much, if at all, before full production.
  • The iPad comes in 16, 32 and 64MB capac­i­ties, and the Viet­namese tear­down of a test model nearly iden­ti­cal to the Giz­modo unit revealed an A4 and 256MB of RAM.
  • The iPad has 256MB of RAM, and was almost cer­tainly designed with OS4 in mind.

I sus­pect it will be called the iPhone HD because of the 4x res­o­lu­tion screen. We’ve seen mul­ti­ple sources reveal­ing the pixel dou­bled 640×960 res­o­lu­tion, the Giz­modo unit was obvi­ously of a much higher res­o­lu­tion than cur­rent iPhones. No, the screen isn’t 720 pix­els tall in land­scape, but I’m will­ing to bet it will be capa­ble of 720p HD video out. The screen will be extended view­ing angle LCD, the same as the iPad, as this is more likely than Apple switch­ing dis­play tech­nol­ogy to AMOLED.

Why will the iPhone HD have only 256MB of RAM? Because Apple clearly believes this is suf­fi­cient for the man­aged, lim­ited mul­ti­task­ing in OS4, or they would have put 512MB in the iPad. And in prac­tice, I have every con­fi­dence 256MB will be “enough for any­one.” Why? Because that’s what’s in the 3GS, and Backgrounder/​Proswitcher work pretty well on the 3GS. And Back­grounder uses “real,” Android/​WinMob-​style mul­ti­task­ing. Apple’s Pal­mOS Cobalt-​style mul­ti­task­ing is far more resource-​friendly, and I expect it to mul­ti­task as smoothly on 256MB as Android does on 512MB. And all things being equal, less RAM is cheaper to pro­duce, mean­ing more profit per phone. Apple likes profit.

I’ve heard rumors that the iPhone HD will be avail­able June 7, but I don’t buy it. Apple wouldn’t rush a deliv­ery date, no mat­ter what kind of press dif­fi­cul­ties they’ve had, and OS4, at the time of this writ­ing, sim­ply isn’t ready to burn onto pro­duc­tion devices and have them in stores in three weeks. It’s far more likely that they’ll announce on the 7th and release two weeks later, as they’ve done with other devices. I’m bet­ting the iPhone HD will go on sale on the 22nd, as Apple seems to like Tues­day launches. OS4 itself might be avail­able for pre­vi­ous iPhones on the 7th, if it’s ready.

I don’t think Steve’s keynote will be all about hard­ware, though. In con­junc­tion with the release of OS4, I expect Apple to release iTunes 10, with some impor­tant new fea­tures. The biggest new fea­ture will be the incor­po­ra­tion of LaLa’s tech­nol­ogy into iTunes Live, the abil­ity to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion to your iPhone from Apple’s shiny new dat­a­cen­ter in North Car­olina. And because they’ve got all that server capac­ity lying around, they’ll also throw in the basics of MobileMe – email, con­tacts and cal­en­dar sync, maybe iDrive for peo­ple who aren’t already using Drop­box – for free.

Why do I expect this? Again, it fits the pro­file of past behav­ior. Apple knows they need to step up their cloud efforts if they’re going to com­pete effec­tively with Google, and yes, Microsoft. A lit­tle over a year ago, I wrote about com­put­ing ecosys­tems, and that is crys­tal­liz­ing more than ever. Apple wants to keep its users locked into its ecosys­tem, and that means they need to pro­vide the same ser­vices as their com­pe­ti­tion. Google and Microsoft both offer email, cal­en­dar­ing and con­tacts man­age­ment for free. Apple can’t afford to keep charg­ing for the same. They’ve made these kinds of com­pet­i­tive moves before. The most recent was the intro­duc­tion of the iBook­store, a direct response to Amazon’s Kin­dle busi­ness. Jobs and com­pany aren’t stu­pid. They know they need to deliver. That said, I expect them to hold off some of the fea­tures cur­rently in MobileMe – Back To My Mac, Find My iPhone, etc. – for pay­ing sub­scribers. After all, this is Apple.

This fall, as usual, Apple will update their iPod line. Rolled into this will be the OS4 update for the iPad. Why? Because they’re also going to be updat­ing the iPod touch to OS4, and the iPad is more sim­i­lar to the iPod touch than it is to the iPhone. Makes sense that these would be related devel­op­ment tracks. Rumors sur­faced that the iPad might be due for a price drop sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal iPhone. I don’t buy this. I could see it if the iPad were a slow starter, a way to prime the mar­ket. But right now Apple is still hav­ing trou­ble mak­ing enough of them to meet demand. There’s absolutely no rea­son to drop the price. Ship­ping it with OS4 this fall will be all the extra shiny they need for an update.

Okay, you say, but what about the ele­phant in the room? The big red ele­phant, with the V on it? As we’ve recently dis­cov­ered, Apple’s exclu­siv­ity agree­ment with AT&T was ini­tially for an unheard of five years. That doesn’t end until 2012. Don’t wait for the end of the world though, because we’ll see a Ver­i­zon iPhone next sum­mer. Why then? Why not now? Because now doesn’t make sense. Verizon’s CDMA net­work is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the GSM net­works every iPhone cur­rently uses, both in the United States and abroad. Apple is still mak­ing so much money from AT&T’s iPhones that it’s sim­ply not worth it finan­cially for them to design, build, test and sup­port a dif­fer­ent model on a com­pletely dif­fer­ent cel­lu­lar protocol.

So why does this change next year? Because by next sum­mer, when the 2011 model iPhone is due to be announced, Ver­i­zon will have com­pleted their roll­out of their 4G net­work, based on the LTE pro­to­col. And who else is using LTE? AT&T, T-​Mobile and pretty much the rest of the world other than Sprint. So next sum­mer, when the time is right, Apple will announce the iPhone 4G – see why they didn’t use that moniker this year? – available on AT&T, Ver­i­zon and other LTE net­works worldwide.

So what do you think? Does the glove fit?

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Living in the cloud, but not the browser

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Jeff

I have an iPhone, a net­book and a multi-​monitor desk­top. And for most tasks, it really doesn’t mat­ter which one I use because can get to all the same data from all three.

I tried doing the web-​app thing. I really did. Given that my net­book is a pre-​Atom HP 2133 with a VIA CPU that I think is actu­ally pow­ered by ham­sters, I tried liv­ing in the browser, turn­ing Chrome into a poor man’s Google ChromeOS. I even went as far as to cre­ate “app” short­cuts for Google Cal­en­dar, Gmail, etc. so I could launch them directly from my taskbar. It just didn’t work. I didn’t fully grok why it didn’t work for me until I read Ben Ward’s trea­tise on what the “web” really means:

If you reach the point of build­ing a browser-​based appli­ca­tion that you depend on so many pro­pri­etary enhance­ments that your users can only access it using Google Chrome, I think you’ve picked the wrong plat­form. If you want to built the most amaz­ing user inter­face, you will need to use native plat­forms. A sin­gle vendor’s benev­o­lent cura­tion of their frame­work will always out­pace the col­lab­o­ra­tive, inter­op­er­a­ble devel­op­ments of the web, whether it’s locked in a stan­dards process or not. When they do a good job (like Apple have with Cocoa­Touch) their plat­form will suc­ceed. But the web will always be the canon­i­cal source of infor­ma­tion and rela­tion­ships. That’s what it was built for. Blog­ging at length about how much the device APIs suck won’t ever undo that, nor change the fact that turn­ing HTML in a rich appli­ca­tion dialect is still a very new idea.

So how does a Win­dows user (in my case, but you’ll see that most of the tools I out­line below are cross-​platform and should work just as well for Mac/​Linux peo­ple) use native desk­top apps to get the supe­rior user inter­face and still keep the “I’ll use what­ever com­puter I hap­pen to have on hand, thanks” free­dom of web apps? It’s actu­ally not all that hard. My pro­grams may reside on my var­i­ous com­put­ers, but my data, that lives in the cloud.

Files, you needs them

DropboxThe first key to the solu­tion is Drop­box. This is where all my dis­crete files live. All of my doc­u­ments, spread­sheets, images, and I’m think­ing about even music. For free, you get 2GB of stor­age on the web. Any file or folder you put in your spe­cial “My Drop­box” folder gets synced auto­mat­i­cally every time it is changed It’s pass­word pro­tected, and only stuff you delib­er­ately put in the “Pub­lic” folder is vis­i­ble to oth­ers unless you explic­itly share it with some­one, and then only they can see it.

What makes Drop­box bet­ter than Live Mesh, Box.net or any of the other cloud stor­age solu­tions out there? In short, it just works. You install the Drop­box client, it runs silently in the back­ground and syncs files to and from the cloud quickly and reli­ably. It only syncs the parts of files that have changed, so even sync­ing big files is quick and painless.

But what really makes Drop­box shine is how it inte­grates with other ser­vices. I keep all my writ­ing stuff in Drop­box in Word and Excel for­mats. Not only do I know these files will be there and up to date whether I’m on my desk­top or my net­book, but I also have the abil­ity to edit them in place with Doc­u­ments To Go (or Quick­Of­fice Con­nect) on my iPhone — and even­tu­ally, my iPad. I know any changes I make will be there and wait­ing for me the next time I access them in Microsoft Office on my Win­dows machines.

Bonus Advanced Geek­ery: Vista and Win­dows 7 sup­port hardlinks and junc­tions. These are sim­i­lar to short­cuts, but embed­ded deeper into the sys­tem. While a short­cut is a pointer to a file, to appli­ca­tions — like Drop­box — a hardlink is the file (junc­tions are to fold­ers what hardlinks are to files). So you can cre­ate hardlinks and junc­tions to files and fold­ers out­side your Drop­box folder and still have them sync to the cloud. See the icons with the chain­link over­lays in the screen­shot? Those are junc­tions. You can cre­ate these man­u­ally from the com­mand line or down­load this nifty free­ware to cre­ate them in Win­dows Explorer like you man­age all your other files. I have my doc­u­ments and pic­tures fold­ers linked this way, so most of the time I just inter­act with files in their “nor­mal” loca­tions and kind of for­get my Drop­box folder exists. (There is another, sim­pler way to do this, but it only allows sync­ing fold­ers to Drop­box, not indi­vid­ual files, so I pre­fer the first method.)

Drop­box is free if you need any­thing up to 2GB of stor­age. Upping that to 50GB is $9.99/month or $99.99/year, and 100GB is $19.99/month or $199.99/year.

As good as Drop­box is, it only pro­tects what you put in it. For every­thing else on my hard drive, I use Car­bonite. This is less cloud stor­age than cloud backup. Car­bonite backs up what­ever you tell it to, with no size limit, to a backup store in the cloud. Files are dou­ble AES encrypted, and even the admins at Car­bonite can’t tell what is in the files you back up. While all my doc­u­ments are safe in Drop­box if my home 1TB hard­drive should fail, my entire iTunes libarary — music, TV shows and movies that Apple won’t let me redown­load for free — are safe in Car­bonite. $54.95 for a year, and well worth the peace of mind.

There’s more to life than files

A lot of your data doesn’t exist as dis­crete files. You have email, cal­en­dar events, con­tacts, book­marks, pass­words and all kinds of other “stuff” to keep track of. And in most cases, you can use desk­top tools to access these while still keep­ing the data out on the inter­nets where you can get to it from anywhere.

The first tool for this is Google Chrome. I know I said above that I didn’t use web apps much, but Chrome has some pretty use­ful fea­tures in an of itself. (I should note here that just about all the cool fea­tures in Chrome can be repli­cated on Fire­fox by using exten­sions, but I’ve found that Fire­fox has an “exten­sion event hori­zon” beyond which the browser is too slow, bloated and crash-​prone to use. Chrome does what I want out of the box, and even though it sup­ports exten­sions too, I haven’t had to install any.) In par­tic­u­lar for our pur­poses here, it can sync book­marks and pass­words between com­put­ers. Set­ting this up is as sim­ple as click­ing the Tools menu, then Sync and sign­ing in with your Google account name. That takes care of book­marks and web passwords.

Next up, email and all that other “Out­look” stuff. I use Mozilla Thun­der­bird with a cou­ple of exten­sions. It’s slower than I’d like, but that could be a sign that I need to get a beefier CPU. (The single-​core AMD CPU on my desk­top dates back to 2005, and my net­book runs on a VIA proces­sor that’s a LOT slower than an Intel Atom.) Thun­der­bird itself is pretty easy to set up to sync with Gmail’s IMAP pro­to­col, which gives you two-​way sync for mes­sages and fold­ers. Add an exten­sion called Zin­dus, and you can sync your Google con­tacts as well.

Thunderbird w LightningBut where Thun­der­bird really shines is when you add an exten­sion called Light­ning. This Thun­der­bird exten­sion is the offi­cial suc­ces­sor to Mozilla’s stand­alone cal­en­dar app Sun­bird. It’s basi­cally Sun­bird inte­grated into Thun­der­bird. In addi­tion to the tabs you already have in Thun­der­bird for mail, you now have cal­en­dar and task tabs well, and a cal­en­dar side­bar off to the right of your main mes­sage pane. Get­ting this to sync with Google cal­en­dar is a lit­tle tricky, espe­cially if you have a lot of cal­en­dars to sync, but once it’s set up it works pretty well.

Given how much goes into get­ting Thunderbird/​Lightning set up and work­ing prop­erly, you want to use the free­ware MozBackup to back up your set­tings once you get it the way you like it. Put that back up file in your Drop­box, and then after you install Thun­der­bird on another PC, just “restore” and it will install all the exten­sions and con­fig­ure every­thing for you.

The last piece you need for total desktop/​cloud inte­gra­tion is Ever­note. I’ve talked at length about Ever­note before, so let’s just say it’s where every­thing that doesn’t fit any­where else goes. Data lives in the cloud, excel­lent client apps for Win­dows, Mac, iPhone, iPad.

Other… Stuff

Of course, there are other things you might need to do that are web-​oriented, but you’d rather use desk­top tools if you can.

For blog­ging, I use Win­dows Live Writer. Tech­ni­cally, I could just use Word 2007 on doc­u­ments in my Drop­box for this, but Writer is designed for blog­ging and is a bit eas­ier to work with, espe­cially when it comes to tag­ging posts, delayed pub­li­ca­tion dates — this arti­cle will post at 8am Moun­tain on a Mon­day morn­ing, at which time I will likely be out for a walk — and other metablog­ging stuff. I’ve only used it for Word­Press, but it seems to work really well for just about any blog.

SeesmicTwit­ter. Ah, Twit­ter. The sad thing about Twit­ter is that I used to use their web­site for read­ing and writ­ing tweets, but they’ve added so much JavaScript crap to it that I now pre­fer native Twit­ter clients to their web inter­face. There are sev­eral native Win­dows clients — not Adobe Air apps — for Twit­ter, and some of them, like Blu, are gor­geous exam­ples of what the Win­dows user inter­face is really capa­ble of. But for day to day twit­ter­ing — both tweet­ing and read­ing tweets — I pre­fer Seesmic for Win­dows. Again, this isn’t the Seesmic Air ver­sion, it’s the native Win­dows client. Not only does this give me the fancy schmancy Aero glass effects, but it’s lighter and faster than any­thing run­ning in a runtime.

For music, the options used to be a lot bet­ter than they are now. I used to use LaLa to upload my iTunes library and stream it from any­where, but Apple bought them and is shut­ting LaLa down. I used to use Sim­plify Music 2 to stream music directly from my desk­top over the net to any­where, but that is shut­ting down too. For now, the best I can do is Pan­dora. I paid the $36 a year for Pan­dora One, which gives me higher bitrate music, unlim­ited lis­ten­ing — ver­sus the 40 hours a month I prob­a­bly wouldn’t hit any­way — and most impor­tantly, no ads. I’ll prob­a­bly also install iTunes even­tu­ally on my wee net­book for library shar­ing, but there’s no rush. I’m kinda hol­ing that Apple will inte­grate LaLa’s stream­ing into the iTunes 10 they inevitably release along with the iPhone HD in June or the next gen­er­a­tion iPods this fall.

When In Doubt, Remote

Some­times, there is just no sub­sti­tute for going back to the “mothership” — my desk­top PC. While my data is as cloud-​based as I can get it and indi­vid­ual com­put­ers have been some­what abstracted out, some things, like man­ag­ing ebooks in Cal­i­bre or my iTunes library, have to be done on the desk­top. (Yes, I know I should be able to use Drop­box to man­age my Cal­i­bre library from mul­ti­ple loca­tions, but I have not been able to get this to work.) For this, I use two dif­fer­ent tools.

When I’m at home on my net­book, I just use Win­dows Remote Desk­top. It’s fast and allows me to use my net­book as though it was my desk­top. The expe­ri­ence is so fluid, in fact, that I use a dif­fer­ent color for Aero glass on my desk­top than I do on my net­book so I can tell at a glance which one I’m using.

When I’m on the go, I use Log­MeIn. This gives me the abil­ity to remote into my desk­top from any web-​enabled PC with­out pay­ing a monthly fee. When I get my iPad, I’ll go ahead and spring for the $30 to buy Log­MeIn Igni­tion, which will allow me to con­trol my desk­top via the XGA touch­screen of the iPad. When you con­sider how much of my data is auto­mat­i­cally and instantly repli­cated on all of my com­put­ing devices, this also over­comes many of the objec­tions to the iPad for not being a “real” com­puter. When I need a “real” PC, I can just remote into my desk­top from the iPad and fin­ish up what­ever I need to do, then go back to the iPad.

Posted in Organization, Technology | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Suddenly I see

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Jeff

I had just walked out into the sun­light after watch­ing “Iron Man 2”, which I thor­oughly enjoyed. I was still think­ing about the film, about heroes, about inspi­ra­tion, when I got into my car and turned on the radio. And I heard KT Tun­stall sing,

Sud­denly I see,

Why the hell it means so much to me.

Since com­ing out of my depres­sion, or at least break­ing out of the deep and start­ing back to the sur­face, I haven’t writ­ten much. I intended to write. I wanted to write, or at least I told myself I wanted to write. But some­thing was stop­ping me. I blamed it on my recent spate of injuries, which make it dif­fi­cult to sit for extended peri­ods — kids, pushups and crunches are your friends; you do not want to deal with pulled or strained core mus­cles — but that was just a con­ve­nient excuse. Some­thing else was stand­ing in the way.

When I decided to start writ­ing again — even if I didn’t actu­ally start writ­ing — it was with the inten­tion to forgo tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tion. I would write my books for myself, and post them to Ama­zon, Smash­words, etc. only to mark them as “done” and quit fid­dling with them so I’d be forced to move on to the next book. Any­one who has writ­ten I book will know what I mean. In the­ory, I didn’t intend any­one to actu­ally read them.

And I think that inten­tion is exactly why I’ve been — remained — stalled. Books aren’t paint­ings or sculp­ture. It’s not enough that they sim­ply exist. Books must be read. The expe­ri­ence needs to be trans­mit­ted to read­ers. (I’m look­ing at you, Salinger.) Fun­da­men­tally, I knew all along that writ­ing just to write was a point­less waste of time for me.

I write because I want to enter­tain on my worst days, and inspire on my best. In order to do that, I need read­ers. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to know who they are, or even how many of them there are, and I don’t need to make my liv­ing as an author. In some ways, I think intend­ing to make my liv­ing as an author was one of the worst things I ever did, putting too much pres­sure on the writ­ing and suck­ing all the joy out of it. But the books need to be read.

I don’t know what this means yet. Thank­fully, I don’t need a plan right away. I still have a lot of writ­ing — and rewrit­ing — to do before I get to that point. But I know I’m not just writ­ing for myself. I’m writ­ing for you. And I want you to be impressed, enter­tained, and yes, inspired by the sto­ries I create.

Posted in Personal, Writing | Tagged | 1 Comment