iPhone Tip: Tap the status bar to jump to the top of a Safari page

If you've ever tired of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling on your iPhone to get to the top of a long Web page in Safari, here's a handy shortcut: Tap the status bar to jump immediately to the page's top. (The status bar is the bar at the top of the screen.)

If you've ever tired of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling on your iPhone to get to the top of a long Web page in Safari, here's a handy shortcut: Tap the status bar to jump immediately to the page's top. (The status bar is the bar at the top of the screen.)

  • Jump to search field in Contacts on iPhone

    One of the new features in the iPhone 2.0 software is the ability to search your contacts (as well as an actual Contacts icon, instead of being forced to reach them from the phone section of the iPhone). The search field, however, is located at the top of the contact list, and is (strangely) not fixed in place. So if you scroll down, it scrolls off the top of the screen. To get it back, you can scroll up, of course, but that's time consuming. Instead, just tap the status bar (carrier, wireless strength, etc.), as you can do in Safari to jump to the top of a web page. This will take you to the top of your Contacts, bringing the search field back into view. I can't remember where I heard this one, though I think it was from a fellow Macworld writer during an iPhone 2.0 software conference call. Best as I can tell, though, it's not documented in the latest version of the iPhone user's manual (which is some 22 page...

  • ★ The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone

    Twitter and the iPhone seem, at a glance, a perfect match: bite-sized micro-content paired with the world’s best mobile web reader. But here’s the thing: there’s not yet a single good iPhone Twitter client. The main things I want in a Twitter interface on my iPhone, roughly in order: A readable, attractive list of tweets, with the ability to page back to previous tweets so I can catch up if I haven’t looked at Twitter in a while. A good text input field for posting, including a live character count and responsive typing speed. The ability to mark tweets as favorites. An easy way to create @username replies. A way to view a list of replies directed at me. There’s not a single available Twitter client for the iPhone that offers all of the above. And the single biggest problem is out of the hands of third-party developers: paging. The API only returns the 20 most recent tweets, and the optional parameter to request previous pages (20 tweets at a time) has been marked “Temporarily Disabled” for over six months. This means when you use a third-party Twitter client, you see the 20 most recent tweets in your stream, and that’s it. It’s a deal-breaking limitation for third-party clients, because when you read your stream via the Twitter.com web site, paging works just fine. It’s unclear what the rationale behind this API limitation is — I can find no public explanation for it from anyone at Twitter. If it’s to prevent API clients from overwhelming Twitter’s servers by paging back through the entire history of users’ timelines (say, for the purpose of building a database for a Twitter search engine), this could be solved by allowing paging, but limiting the results to the most recent N pages, where N is a relatively low number like 10. That would suffice for common case of someone wanting to catch up on the last few dozen tweets from the people they follow. This limitation isn’t just a problem for Twitter web clients. Unless Twitter re-opens this ability in the API, it’ll impose a serious limitation on the coming-soon-to-the-iTunes-App-Store native iPhone application Twitter clients as well. Given that third-party iPhone applications won’t run in the background, each time you launch such a client you’ll see the 20 most recent tweets and no more. Twitter.com You don’t need a “client” to use Twitter, of course. You can just use the regular Twitter.com web site, which renders fine in Mobile Safari. It’s not, however, optimized for display on the iPhone. At its default size, it’s far too small to be readable: You can use the double-tap trick to zoom in on the content column, but you sort of have to double-tap at just the right spot near the top to get the entire column (including icons) sized perfectly. Once you’re zoomed in it’s a pretty good iPhone Twitter display: it looks pretty good, includes user icons, and displays 20 tweets per page. It also includes “Newer” and “Older” buttons at the bottom of the list for paging. At the end of each tweet are two buttons: a star for marking favorites and an arrow for creating an @username reply. However, at just 18 × 18 px, these buttons are far too small to be usable on an iPhone’s touch screen. Apple, in the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Applications, recommends that controls have a tappable area at least 44 px high.1 (For example, the back/forward/etc. toolbar at the bottom of the screen in Mobile Safari is 44 pixels high.) In terms of area, an 18 × 18 px button is just 16 percent the size of a 44 × 44 px button. But what really kills the usability of these buttons in Mobile Safari is that you’re typically viewing them scaled down. Twitter.com’s tweet list, not including the user icons, is 470 px wide; the iPhone screen in portrait mode is just 320 px wide. When zoomed to the width pictured above, these buttons are just 10 or 11 px wide. You’ve got to zoom significantly to use these buttons on the iPhone. For posting, the Twitter.com interface is a disaster on the iPhone. It works, but the size is all wrong. When you tap in the field to begin writing, Mobile Safari zooms the view to a width that cuts off half the field. If you zoom back out to a scale where the entire field is visible, the text is ludicrously small. Worse, typing in the field is dreadfully slow. The JavaScript Twitter.com uses to display the live character count works just fine in a desktop browser, but it’s way too slow for the iPhone. Worse, you can’t even see the character count while typing because it’s off the screen if you’re zoomed in close enough to make the text in the field legible. In short, Twitter.com is a perfect example of a web page that renders and works correctly in Mobile Safari, but which provides a user experience far inferior to what could be done with an iPhone-optimized web site. It seems weird that sites like Facebook and Amazon, which do so much more than Twitter, have iPhone-optimized interfaces, but Twitter does not. m.Twitter.com Twitter also provides a “mobile web” interface — a web interface for phones with rudimentary browsers. It used to be that to access this interface, you used a different URL: m.twitter.com. That was good. A few weeks ago they changed this, however, and Twitter is now using user-agent sniffing to automatically serve the mobile web interface to Mobile Safari, even when you go to the regular twitter.com domain. This is bad. You can change which version you’re getting in the footer at the bottom of the page. (Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can try out the mobile interface by using Safari’s Develop menu to set your user agent to Mobile Safari.) This setting is remembered with a cookie, but it doesn’t take long for the cookie to be forgotten. With the old scheme, where the standard and mobile web interfaces were specified by different URLs, you could (and I did) bookmark both separately, for use in different situations. The key appeal of Twitter’s mobile web interface is that it is very fast to load. One obvious reason is that doesn’t display user icons. Another is that the entire page is almost self-contained — the CSS is inline, it doesn’t use any JavaScript, and the only image is the small Twitter logo. It also only loads 10 tweets at a time. There’s no need for zooming, and typographically the display is spot-on — perfect use of Helvetica for the iPhone. (Unless you rotate the screen to landscape: if you do, the font blows up to giant size and stays there even if you rotate back to portrait.) There’s no way to mark favorites or create @username replies. The editing interface for the mobile version stinks. Most obviously, the field is way too small: it’s just one line high and doesn’t even extend to the full width of the iPhone screen. Typing performance is good, but that’s because it doesn’t use JavaScript at all, which means it doesn’t provide a character count. It does stop you from typing any additional characters once you hit the 140 mark, though. (It’s just a text field with the maxlength attribute set to 140.) A notable omission from the mobile interface is a way to view your @yourname replies. In the standard web interface you just tap the Replies tab, and all the third-party Twitter web clients support this as well. The 10-tweet display is a bit limiting, but like the standard Twitter web interface, the mobile interface supports paging. Better to have just 10 tweets at a time but with paging than 20 tweets at a time and no paging (as with third-party clients). EDGE network performance ranges from “kind of slow” to “really damn slow”; when tending toward the latter, the difference in loading Twitter’s mobile interface and standard interface is dramatic. That’s why it stinks that it’s set with cookie rather than the URL: if you’re currently set to use the standard interface (because, say, you were on Wi-Fi) but now wish to use the mobile interface (because you’re now on EDGE), you have to wait for the entire standard web interface to load, scroll to the bottom, zoom in, and click “Mobile”. With the old way, (a) they were bookmarkable, and (b) you could keep them open in two separate tabs at the same time — making it easy to use the standard Twitter interface most of the time, while switching to the mobile web interface with just two quick taps for use on EDGE. Hahlo Dean Robinson’s Hahlo is my favorite third-party Twitter web client. If it weren’t for the no-paging limitation in the Twitter API, I’d use it as my primary iPhone interface to Twitter. My biggest complaint about Hahlo itself is that its initial screen is a list of menu items, not a list of tweets. Perhaps this seems like a ticky-tacky thing to complain about, but the main thing you want to see when loading Twitter are the tweets. Waiting for the page with the menu to load before you then wait for the page with the tweets to load is annoying. (There’s a workaround for this, though, which I’ll get to in a moment.) Plus, the menu commands are a bit oddly named: “My Timeline” is a list of your own tweets. Twitter’s own parlance for this is “Archive”. Hahlo’s second menu item, “My Friends Timeline”, is what you want: a list of the 20 most recent tweets from the people you follow. But because Hahlo is entirely Ajax-driven, the URL doesn’t change from http://hahlo.com/, which means you can’t bookmark the tweets page you see after tapping “My Friends Timeline” on the main menu. However, you can get a bookmarkable list of tweets from Hahlo by loading this URL: http://hahlo.com/friends_timeline. Most users will never realize this is possible, because there doesn’t seem to be a way to navigate to that URL from within the Hahlo UI. Once you do see Hahlo’s tweet list, it looks nice. Good size, good spacing, good use of Helvetica. It includes user icons and has reasonably-sized buttons for marking tweets as favorites and for creating replies and direct messages to the author of a tweet. Editing is where Hahlo is a Viking. Typing speed is acceptable — not great, but good enough — and the best of any Twitter web client with a live character count. In most other iPhone clients with a live character count, typing feels dreadfully sluggish. Hahlo’s character count is mostly accurate — which means it’s best-of-breed for iPhone Twitter web clients.2 iTweet Colby Palmer’s iTweet is very much comparable to Hahlo. The most notable difference is the reversed light-on-dark color scheme. (I like it.) Like Hahlo, it offers a very nice tweet display, replete with nicely-sized per-tweet buttons for marking favorites and creating replies. iTweet’s UI is more sensibly laid-out and named than Hahlo’s. At the top of the tweet list are three buttons: Menu, Refresh, and Post. (Hahlo uses the word Update instead of Post, which is ambiguous: Update could just as easily be used to mean Refresh, in the sense of “Update this list of tweets.” You shouldn’t have to press a button to figure out what it does.) iTweet’s editing field looks good. Appearance-wise, it’s my favorite of any client — the text is eminently readable, slightly bigger and bold. iTweet also provides a live character count, but unlike with Hahlo’s, iTweet’s JavaScript hooks result in terribly sluggish typing speed. It doesn’t even come close to keeping up with my two-thumb typing speed, which is rather slow to start with. It doesn’t lose keystrokes, but the UI feedback for each keystroke is delayed by a fraction of a second, completely ruining the feedback that makes the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard tolerable. PocketTweets Justin Williams and Bobby Andersen’s PocketTweets uses more gradients than any other iPhone Twitter client. The icons look good, as one might expected from Mr. Andersen, but the text is too small throughout the entire UI. PocketTweets correctly defaults to showing you a list of tweets rather than a menu, and like iTweet, offers buttons for marking favorites and replying. However, once you mark a tweet as a favorite, PocketTweets doesn’t seem to allow you to unmark it. Also, the vertical Favorite/Reply button layout is worse than the horizontal layout in Hahlo and iTweet — I find myself inadvertently invoking Reply when I mean to tap Favorite. Another annoyance is that PocketTweets doesn’t create links from @username instances in the text of a tweet. In other clients you can tap on @username to display a list of that user’s tweets — useful for picking up the context of a reply. PocketTweets’s editing UI is also too small; it feels unnecessarily cramped. Typing speed is acceptable (on part with Hahlo), and it provides a character count. Unlike Hahlo and iTweet, PocketTweets doesn’t enforce the 140-character limit in the field. With Hahlo and iTweet, once you hit the 140-character mark, you can’t enter additional characters in the field. PocketTweets lets you run long, trusting you to notice the greater-than-140 character count. I like this design — it allows you to finish your sentence and then go back and edit the message to get under the limit. Sort of like writing an article with a word count — you wouldn’t want your word processor to stop accepting input once you’ve reached the limit. One last, truly minor niggle: the name “PocketTweets” is too long to fit as a web clip name on the iPhone home screen. It gets truncated as “Pocke…eets”. PocketTweets pre-dates the iPhone web clip feature, but it goes to show that iPhone app names need to be short and sweet. Thincloud Last and least is [Thincloud], from New Leaders. For reading, Thincloud’s font is too small, the text wraps back underneath the user icon on long-ish tweets, and there’s no way to mark a tweet as a favorite or automate a reply. For posting, there’s no live character count or enforced limit — Thincloud will let you blow past the 140-character mark with nary a warning, and you won’t notice until you see your truncated tweet in the list. (On the other hand, it’s the JavaScript for the character counting that seems to slow the other clients down; typing speed in Thincloud’s editing field is the fastest of the bunch.) SMS Twitter was conceived from the outset as a service for mobile phone users, even those with ridiculous old-timey pre-2007 phones without web browsers, using SMS. Twitter’s 140-character limit on status updates is a result of the 160-character limit of SMS. For reading tweets, Twitter might work OK via SMS if you only follow a very small handful of relatively quiet friends. But if you follow even just a few dozen people, I can’t even imagine how annoying it would be to have an SMS alert jingle your phone every time someone updates. To post status updates via SMS, you associate you mobile phone number with your Twitter profile (on your Twitter.com account settings page), and then send messages to the short code 40404. Typing speed is excellent in the iPhone SMS app, but, of course, you don’t get a character count. One technical advantage to posting tweets via SMS is that it works well even with sketchy signal strength or when Twitter’s web servers are under duress. Via SMS, I was able to post live updates from the hall in Moscone West during the Macworld Expo keynote in January. (Given that Twitter’s web servers were mostly down during the keynote, however, it’s questionable whether anyone was able to read them until afterward.) So If ever there was a web app that could be — should be — better on the iPhone than on a desktop browser, Twitter is it. But it isn’t. Twitter.com is the best site for reading tweets, even though it’s not iPhone-optimized at all, simply because it allows for paging. But it’s the worst site for posting. Hahlo and PocketTweets are the best for posting, but because the Twitter API doesn’t allow for paging, no third-party client is good for reading. The result is completely unsatisfying. Using one Twitter client for reading and another for posting is like getting your sandwich at Burger King and your fries from McDonald’s — convenience is the whole point. In landscape mode, Mobile Safari’s toolbar shrinks to 32 pixels high — a reasonable compromise for an orientation where vertical screen space is at a premium. ↩ In every character counting feature I’ve tested on the iPhone, the count gets thrown off when you delete characters. Something seems broken regarding JavaScript keystroke event hooks in MobileSafari, at least with the Delete key. ↩

  • Delivery Status touch: obsessive package tracking on the move

    Filed under: Software, Cool tools, iPhone, iPod touchFor fans of the Delivery Status Dashboard widget (and we are), the wait is over: Delivery Status touch is now available in the App Store for all your mobile package-tracking needs. It replicates the functionality and outstanding design of the original widget, and author Mike Piontek has made getting those unwieldy tracking numbers into the iPhone/touch application as simple as can be. Using an email-based system which runs through Mike's servers, you can add tracking information to Delivery Status touch directly from the Delivery Status widget on your Dashboard. You can also sync a bookmarklet to Mobile Safari or -- especially handy for Windows users with no Dashboard widget -- turn your deliveries into individual bookmarks for syncing. You can, of course, type the numbers in manually if it should come to that. Once you've got some packages to track, tapping the left side of a delivery icon shows a second level of details. A subsequent tap offers links to the tracking page in Mobile Safari and a Maps link which shows the current location of your package. You can then map a route to the destination and get an idea how far your precious cargo has to travel, if you want. If there are multiple packages in your shipment, a small number appears in the icon which you can tap to view the other items. Like the widget, Delivery Status touch offers support for a wide array of shipping services. I think the only thing missing may be the Pony Express. Whether you're an eBay junkie anxiously waiting for your latest score or a corporate user tracking vital pieces of your infrastructure (or one of the rest of us somewhere in the middle), Delivery Status and Delivery Status touch make a winning combination. Delivery Status touch is available in the iTunes App Store for $1.99; this pricing is listed as "introductory" so you might want to get it before it becomes more expensive.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • NetNewsWire for iPhone

    I’ve been using Brent Simmons’s NetNewsWire for the Mac for just about as long as I’ve been publishing Daring Fireball. The iPhone version is one of the apps I’ve been most anticipating, ever since the iPhone shipped a year ago. It doesn’t disappoint, but it’s far from perfect. On the plus side, I’ve found it to be far superior to any web-based feed reading option for the iPhone. And, because its backed by your (free) NewsGator account, it syncs your subscriptions and read/unread status with the Mac version of NetNewsWire (as well as other NewsGator clients like FeedDemon for Windows). But synching has its downsides. The main one for me is that I have a lot of feed subscriptions in NetNewsWire — and most of them are things I have no interest in reading from my iPhone. What I’d prefer is to have the option of synching just a subset of my feed subscriptions through NewsGator — just the ones I’m interested in the most. My other complaint is the built-in web browser. In theory it’s a lot like Twitterrific’s — when you tap a link while reading a feed item, NetNewsWire displays the web page in a built-in browser, so that you don’t have to quit NetNewsWire to switch to Safari every time you follow a link from a feed. But unlike Twitterrific’s, NetNewsWire’s browser replaces the current item view, rather than appearing on top of it. When you go “back”, you go back to the list of feed items, not to the item you were reading. This makes it a pain to follow multiple links from the same feed item: tap link, read web page, back to the list, tap the same item again, tap the next link. Those complaints aside, in the week or so that I’ve been using it, NetNewsWire for the iPhone has proven to be very satisfying for “standing in line at the grocery store, wish I had something good to read for a minute or two” situations. And don’t miss the Clippings feature — tap the “+” button to add any item to your NewsGator “clippings”, which sync across clients just like your subscriptions do. A perfect feature for flagging items you want to come back to on your Mac.  â˜… 

  • Many Happy Returns: The State Of Tax Preparation On The Mac

    Apart from accounting professionals who make their living interpreting government economic legalese, I suspect tax season in the United States is the least favorite time of year for anyone required to ï¬?le, or – in the case of this year’s “rebateâ€? – anyone who wants to cash in on some government overspend. Using your Mac to prepare your taxes has always seemed like a hit-or-miss endeavor to me, either from a lack-of-choices perspective when it came to actual software or just compatibility problems when using purely online e-filers. Up until 2006, I still used tax software written for Windows when we weren't letting an accountant handle everything for us. There were just too many horror stories about differences in outcomes between on Macs & PCs when using the same program from a single vendor. This year I did the same and wanted to give last-minute filers an overview of their options for getting returns in on time using a Mac. On Your Mac Both H&R Block's TaxCut & Intuit's TurboTax are available for use on either G3+ & Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.4. (Tiger) or better (TaxCut actually supports OS X 10.3.9+). They both offer different packages depending on the type of tax-situation you are in (whether you are filing just Federal or both Federal+State) and Intuit provides two extra titles that are more tailored to users with investments, run a small business or manage rental properties (TaxCut Home & Business only runs on Windows). Both packages will require updates upon first launch, so be prepared for an initial delay in preparation. I prepared and filed my return with TurboTax Deluxe 2007 and did not purchase a copy of TaxCut just for this review, so I'm going to make a preemptive request to any TAB readers who have used TaxCut to definitely speak up in the comments with your experiences & opines. TurboTax begins by asking if there is data you would like to import from either previous returns or other programs, such as Quicken. I had it import our 2006 return and began my editing. They programmers definitely tweaked the user interface more than just a bit this year with the whole program feeling much more solid (save one experience you'll see in a bit). While I always choose to let the program interview me and provide guidance, at any point during the filing you can jump to the fields in on-screen versions of the printed forms if you feel that direct-entry would be faster/easier and then return to the prompting. TurboTax knew about this year's economic stimulus package and provided thorough information on how to handle the deduction of moving expenses. When you are finally done with entry, the error checking stage ensures that no mandatory fields go unfilled and points out inconsistencies between different parts of the return(s) that require attention & correction. It even gives you an idea of the likelihood of an audit based on what your return looks like as compared with Intuit's database of returns that have been audited by the government and information gathered from IRS sources. Once the Federal return is finished, the majority of the data is then used to populate your State return (if you are required to fill out a state return and have purchased a version that includes State filing). While my experience with the program was good it did crash on me three times when I tried to switch into manual-form-entry mode during the tail end of my Federal return. While that is a somewhat-scary experience – is the file corrupted? – I save & copy often and reverted back to a known, good version of the data file before continuing with data re-entry. E-filing is simple and quick and I'll be starting the program again daily to have it check on the status. TurboTax also provides the option to encrypt your data file with a password which I used even though I store it in a secure disk image. I have to admit not being thrilled with the security-question override to the password protection, but that may allay the fear of forgetfulness for some users. For TurboTax, you'll end up paying between $19.95 & $89.95 (many bargains are out there, tho) with e-filing being an additional charge of $17.95 per eFile for up to five Federal returns and $17.95 per eFile for up to three state returns (charges apply to downloaded product only). TaxCut charges $24.95 for just their Federal program and $44.95 for their Federal+State package. E-filing is a separate charge for either version, but they have bundled Federal+State & e-filing into one final option for $74.95. For either TaxCut or TurboTax, it is very important to remember to keep a copy of your old software and save a copy of your return as a PDF document! You cannot rely on newer versions either being available or reading older formats correctly and the government will not accept that as an excuse when attempting to retrieve information for an audit. Remember to store the PDF copies as either secure PDF documents (my version 4.1 of Preview.app allows for encryption) or store them in a secure disk image. Despite my attempt to go paperless, I will always print & securely file the paper copies of my tax returns. In Your Browser Both companies and a host of others also give you an option to file completely online; no client software to download. There is a helpful page at the Nebraska Department of Revenue site which lists may e-filers and their compatibility with various platforms, including which combinations of browsers and Macintosh operating systems they support. I used Safari 3.1 to start a return on the TaxCut online site and the TurboTax online site. When I began the TurboTax version I was struck by how close the look and feel mimicked the OS X native version. For example, here is a screen capture of the full Mac program on one of the initial screens: and here is the same stage in the online version: The online version also has the same smooth transition between interview stages and enables you to go back and forth between screens or save your return for later entry. Here is a sample of a similar page from TaxCut's online offering: While the TaxCut site seemed to cover the same elements in nearly the exact same stages, the Intuit web programmers did a much cleaner job making their web version feel like you are working in a native program. What Works Best For You A few friends have mentioned that TaxCut integrates better with OS X but failed to elaborate on how they were using the .Mac, iCal and iDisk support. Definitely drop a note in the comments if you have direct experience with that feature. TurboTax is almost a sure bet for you if you use other Intuit products/services. The fact that their program has improved so dramatically from 2006 to 2007 is also a good sign that Intuit is taking the Mac more seriously. If your needs do not justify the purchase of one of these programs or you just like to kick-it old school and paper-file, Nathan Vander Wilt has a pretty cool Numbers spreadsheet that includes the main F1040 form. As he points out in his post, the form “is “completeâ€? although there is a very simplified part of Schedule C that hooks in as well”. There are few forms for Excel floating around the Internets as well, but they all seem to require enabling Visual Basic macros which are – thankfully – missing from Excel 2007 for the Mac. As I've said more than once in this post, your feedback on Mac tax preparation software or using the Mac when preparing taxes online or offline would be most appreciated by me and – I suspect – many TAB readers. More voices usually end up helping to make better choices. Better hurry, though, April 15th is just about two weeks away!

  • The Kindle book reader: What were Amazon's marketers thinking?

    Technology marketers, repeat after me: Ugly products, awkward user experiences, and restricted content don't sell consumer electronics gadgets. One more time; I'm not sure it got through the first time.Now that we're all on the same page, can someone explain to me how Amazon’s Kindle Reader ever got released to the market when it has all three of the characteristics above that kill consumer gadgets?That was the mantra that was running through my head as I sat through Amazon's Kindle video. Strangely, the video spent maybe 20 seconds on the concept of reading a book electronically, and then proceeded to dive into all the wonderful features built into the device, like shopping at the Kindle store, pulling data over the cellular network, and looking up words in the dictionary. When a video advertising a e-book reader skips over the device's primary benefit, it's not a mark of marketing prowess.But the Kindle is even worse than its marketing video because its:Hardware design screams "Blackberry" instead of book. Books are about visually presenting long-form text and pictures. But the Kindle can only display about a paragraph of text at a time on its relatively small screen compared to other products in this category such as the Sony Reader. If this is an machine designed for reading, why is so much device real-estate dedicated to a keyboard, which is not used for ordinary reading? And the person who added a thumbwheel as a pointing device for Web pages needs to get off their Blackberry and into the real world -- even RIM figured out that they needed horizontal scrolling with the Blackberry Pearl. The strange choices made in the hardware design suggest that it was designed to be a wireless Amazon shopping device that happens to read books rather than the other way around.Unclear purpose hobbles its software. Since book reading software doesn't put a heavy strain on most software engineers (let's see -- we need forward page, previous page, table of contents....), you'd think Amazon would focus Kindle's software on providing access to the widest possible array of book content. But instead, Kindle software focuses on providing access only to a limited number of Amazon-blessed formats. Ironically, the Kindle won't even read many eBooks that Amazon already sells online because they are in PDF format, which the Kindle can't read. And eBooks that other Web sites sell will clearly be non-starters for this device. And worse, Amazon burdened the software with a lot of irrelevant functions such as Web browsing and email fetching that add cost and complexity while diluting the device's market position.Content restrictions pose future problems. Amazon has wrapped its content in digital rights management software that prohibits normal "first-sale" book usage like loaning, resale, and viewing on other devices. And what will happen when Sprint decides to upgrade the Whispernet (really garden-variety cellular EVDO) to a higher-performing network, just as AT&T did with its old TDMA network? Because there's no computer involved, Kindle owners will then be reduced to moving around Amazon-proprietary files via SD memory cards -- assuming they can still get these Amazon-proprietary books from from anyone -- or relegating their $400 device to paper-weight status.Price doesn't add up. The Kindle reader costs about the same as 20 hard-cover books from Amazon -- more than a year's worth of reading for most US adults -- but comes without any bundled content. And Amazon has snuck in some clever little fees into its service. Examples include a $0.99 to $1.99 monthly subscription fee for blogs, a $0.10 per attachment format conversion fee for emailed documents, and $9.99 to $14.99 monthly subscription fees for newspapers. The result: suddenly a low-cost hobby of reading books and magazines costs as much as an iPhone with an unlimited data subscription -- yet without the ability to make calls, get email, or play movies.Amazon's Kindle is a great example of technology being pushed at consumers without a clear idea of its market or value. In some other market -- perhaps in enterprise software -- an ugly product with an awkward user interface and restricted content might succeed. But with the broad and unforgiving consumer market, it doesn't have a chance. The only surprise here is that Amazon thinks that it does.Full disclosure: the author has no position in Amazon, but does have a long position in Apple Inc. at the time of writing. This blog also is an Amazon Associate, so we do receive a small commission on any purchases you might make through following Amazon links on this page.Technorati Tags: Amazon, Apple, eBooks, eReader, Kindle, Marketing, problem solving

  • ★ The iPhone 3G

    Pt. 1: Macro Let’s just say it up front: the iPhone is the greatest piece of consumer electronics that has ever been made. If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc. None of these features is quite what an imagination of the ’80s would have predicted. The TV, for example, is far from the imaginary “pocket TV” of my youth, which was rooted in the concept of broadcast TV channels. But it is a TV. In some ways it is worse; you cannot use an iPhone to, say, watch a live broadcast of a sporting event. In many ways, though, it is better; it stores content, including full-length major motion pictures, which you can watch whenever you want. A pocket full of movies was simply unimaginable 20 years ago. And it’s all in one easily pocketed gizmo. Each of these features is of course available in devices other than the iPhone. A checklist of the iPhone’s features is not, in and of itself, impressive. Some competing devices, in fact, offer all the same fundamental features of the iPhone. The difference is in the overall experience. (Even a $10 Nokia dumbphone, combined with today’s worldwide cellular and satellite phone network, can do the Star Trek-wireless voice communicator trick. That alone would be impressive compared to the brick-sized fabulously expensive cellular phones of the ’80s.) Everything Apple as a company has ever stood for, good and bad, was to get to the point where they could make this. It’s a computer you can take with you everywhere, so small you wouldn’t really even want it much smaller, even if it were possible. In software, Apple went back and rethought certain priorities with the iPhone compared to Mac OS X. On Mac OS X, scrolling prioritizes visual fidelity but can be painfully slow. (Not so much with today’s Mac hardware, but in the early days of Mac OS X, scrolling or resizing windows could be molasses slow. iPhone scrolling, on the other hand, is almost always fluid and perfectly responsive, but the content often doesn’t keep up. The checkerboard background in MobileSafari is the most obvious example of this. The illusion that your thumb or finger is actually moving the screen contents is astoundingly effective. Mac OS X values the visual over the feel; iPhone OS is vice versa, and I prefer it. In hardware, the radical reduction of physical buttons has proven to be genius. The iPhone not only eschews a keypad and keyboard, but also those green/red place-call/end-call buttons that you see on nearly every other phone in the world. The iPhone has just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and home. That seems just right. I’ve gotten satisfyingly proficient typing with the on-screen touch keyboard. My single biggest gripe is that my right thumb often hits the Return key when I’m trying to hit the space bar. In another five years, one of today’s iPhones will be no more than a sentimental curiosity, painfully slow both in terms of networking and computation. The iPhone has significant and obvious shortcomings. But it is an order of magnitude better than anything that came before it. Pt. 2: Micro I bought my original iPhone on day one. When the iPhone 3G arrived, I figured I could wait. In early August, one month after they went on sale, I upgraded. In a nut, the iPhone 3G is aptly named, in that it isn’t much more than the iPhone plus 3G. If they’d called it “iPhone 3G (and GPS)” the name alone would have completely described what was new, technically at least. The iPhone 3G uses the same CPU and has the same amount of RAM (128 MB) as the original. It is an iteration. If you’ve got an original EDGE iPhone, the only factor that really matters with regard to whether you’d be happy after upgrading is the quality of the 3G service where you live. I, apparently, am lucky. 3G service in center city Philadelphia, the surrounding suburbs, and at the New Jersey shore has been terrific. Even before the 2.1 OS update, I had few complaints about dropped calls, and network speed has far exceeded my expectations. Browsing with 3G on the iPhone generally feels just about as fast as browsing with Wi-Fi — the CPU often seems to be the limiting factor in MobileSafari’s rendering speed, not the network. In addition to the faster data speeds and higher-quality audio, 3G offers one additional advantage over EDGE: 3G can take an incoming phone call while simultaneously using the data network. I missed a surprising number of calls on my old iPhone while dicking around waiting for pages to load in Safari. The main problem I initially ran into with 3G networking was that it would occasionally get stuck. I’d try to load a web page, and the inside-the-location-field progress bar in MobileSafari would simply never get past the “h” in “http:”. In most cases, turning the iPhone completely off and back on would fix this. Even better: I have not seen this problem once since upgrading to the 2.1 OS. Tethering my 3G connection with NetShare — sadly, no-longer-available from the App Store — my MacBook Pro achieves download speeds of 700-900 kb/s, and upload speeds of 200-400 kb/s. Tethering with EDGE, I see download speeds of about 200 kb/s. Thus, for me, networking far exceeds Apple’s marketing claim of “double the speed”, and for that alone the upgrade price and slightly higher monthly plan are well worth it.1 (NetShare is simply remarkable, and deserves a full digression. After just one month of owning an iPhone 3G, the $10 I spent on NetShare is some of the best money I’ve ever spent. The multi-step process required to get it working, which you can only partially automate, is a hassle. If Apple can build a feature like this into the iPhone itself, it will be a smash hit feature, and, if it were something that only worked with Mac OS X, yet another impetus for iPhone/iPod users to switch from Windows. (My use of “can” is a reference to the challenge of getting phone carriers on board with it, not any technical hurdle.) The biggest limitation using NetShare is that because it’s a SOCKS proxy, it mostly only supports HTTP/HTTPS networking traffic. iChat can be configured to use a SOCKS proxy, but I’m aware of no way to get Apple Mail to use a SOCKS proxy for IMAP or SMTP, which means Mail doesn’t work using NetShare. But for web surfing, NetShare is a spectacular success. Yes, I’m aware that you can buy external Mac-compatible EVDO dinguses from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, but those are separate services that cost like $60 per month. With NetShare, I paid $10 one time and I can use it with my existing iPhone data plan without paying one additional cent. Performance is way better than the Wi-Fi service in most hotels.) The 3G’s ringer is louder. (I sometimes missed calls with my original iPhone because I didn’t hear or feel the phone ringing in my pocket.) The speakerphone sounds much better. As noted shortly after the 3G shipped, the color temperature of the display is different — warmer if you like it, yellower if you don’t. I prefer the original (cooler) temperature, but it’s only noticeable to me when compared side-by-side. Temperature aside, the screen seems identical to that of the original. Looking at the front face, the form factor is practically unchanged. The 3G is slightly wider overall, but since the display is the same size, there is now a small black border between the screen and the chrome, where previously the screen ran nearly chrome-to-chrome. The back is completely different, plastic instead of metal, and differently shaped. (I chose black, of course.) Aesthetically, I prefer the original iPhone case on all counts: shape, appearance, touch. The original iPhone is, to put it bluntly, sexier. I even liked the black plastic panel at the bottom of the original iPhone — it made it easy to tell which way the phone was oriented without looking at it, such as when pulling it from a pocket. From a practical standpoint, however, the all-shiny-plastic 3G has one significant and perhaps very valuable advantage: it is not slippery. There’s a tackiness to the iPhone 3G in hand. There is something to be said for the fact that the phone with the strongest brand in the world has no visible branding whatsoever on its front face. The home button on the 3G seems to require a more forceful push. The clickiness of my original iPhone’s home button is better. On the other hand, the clickiness of the 3G’s volume and sleep buttons is better. Apple sometimes seems to be the lone consumer electronics company that pays any attention at all to the tactile response of buttons. Battery life is the single biggest shortcoming. The simple truth is that the iPhone pushes the limits of what a device this size can do. Power consumption is perhaps Apple’s single-biggest engineering concern with the iPhone — both in software and hardware. Last year, when criticism of the original iPhone centered on the lack of 3G, Steve Jobs said it was about power. He was right. The iPhone 3G consumes power faster. However, the 2.1 OS update improved battery life dramatically. In particular, after upgrading to OS 2.1, the iPhone 3G does not seem to lose much power while idle. Part of it, too, is that because 3G is faster, you can do more in the same amount of time. So if you measure by time, yes, one hour of web browsing on EDGE will leave you with more battery life than one hour of browsing on 3G. But if you measure by the page, I think loading and reading, say, 15 web pages on 3G stands up just fine against loading the same 15 pages on EDGE. It just happens faster. Pt. 3: Coda “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” — Andy Warhol So too with the iPhone. A billionaire can buy homes, cars, clothes that the rest of us cannot afford. But he cannot buy a better phone, at any price, than the iPhone that you can have in your pocket today. Once you get used to 3G performance, you’ll agree with this tweet from Adam Lisagor: “They should change the symbol for EDGE to stink lines.” ↩

  • iPhone Tips: Safari

    Explore the Web broswer like an expert.   Jump to the Top Chances are that you've found yourself at the bottom of a very long web page, thinking that the only way to get back the address bar is to scroll, scroll, scroll your way to the top. Not so! Quickly jump to the top of any page simply by tapping the time.  read more

  • ★ Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3

    After a few weeks in the arms of Firefox 3 betas, I’ve returned to Safari as my daily browser. Unsurprisingly, it’s the interface that drove me back. But I’m not talking about cosmetic issues — or at least not only about cosmetic issues. The new default theme for Firefox theme looks pretty good, especially when you switch the toolbar icons to the small size. The Safari-style “GrApple” Firefox themes I linked to last month makes Firefox 3 look even better, albeit mostly by mimicking Safari. But cosmetic appeal is just the surface. Steve Jobs, in a 2003 New York Times magazine interview, said: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And that’s just it. Firefox 3’s shortcomings as a Mac app are behavioral, too. The main issues that drove me back to Safari: Background Window Appearance — Starting with Leopard, standard application windows follow a simple, consistent rule: the frontmost window of the current application gets a medium gray color while all other windows have a lighter, flatter look. The idea is that with several windows visible at once, giving the active one a darker look makes it easier to pick out visually. (One of the long-standing gripes regarding the late brushed metal theme — Christ, remember that ugly thing? — was that its windows barely changed appearance when switching from active to inactive.) Firefox 3 doesn’t do this. Its windows all have the darker “active” look even when in the background. And I believe that its theming mechanism does not allow for it. Text Editing Shortcuts — Firefox 3 still doesn’t support certain standard Mac text editing key bindings. For example, in a one-line text field, the Up and Down Arrow keys should move the insertion point to the beginning and end of the line, respectively. Drives me nuts. Dictionary — Firefox doesn’t support the system-wide dictionary. In Safari (and most other apps), you can hover the mouse over any word and use Command-Control-D (by default) to display the definition of that word right there in the current window. Services — Firefox doesn’t support the Services menu. Safari does, and I use this all the time for invoking text filters I’ve made using ThisService, and for sending the current text selection to LaunchBar as input. Tabs — Firefox 3 does let you drag to reorder tabs within a window, and drag tabs between windows, but it doesn’t let you drag a tab out of a window to create a new window with just that tab. Safari 3 does. Picky-picky, I know, but I use this feature in Safari every day to group related tabs together in their own window. Location Field — The new Firefox 3 location field, the so-called “AwesomeBar”, is too clever. When I click the mouse in the middle of a URL, I just want to place the insertion point. I don’t want to select the entire URL. If I wanted to select the entire URL, I’d double-click. Click to place, double-click to select — just like any other text field. Auto-completion in Firefox requires the use of the Down Arrow key to select something from the list of suggestions. In Safari you can just use Return to accept the first suggestion. It might just be habit, but it feels to me like Safari’s auto-completion works a little better. Also, in Firefox, during auto-completion, the Tab key acts like Down Arrow — it selects the next suggestion in the auto-completion list. In Safari Tab moves the focus to the Search field, as it should. In Firefox’s favor, its new location field does some very cool things that Safari does. For example, when matching what you’ve typed against the URLs in your bookmarks and history, it looks anywhere within the URLs, not just at the beginning as Safari does. This means you can type “foo” to match the URL “example.com/foo/”. You can’t do that in Safari. History — I like Safari’s hierarchical History menu. What Safari does is list the 20 most recently loaded URLs, followed by sub-menus for each of the last seven days. Firefox only lists the 10 most recent URLs in the History menu. You can get more done right from the menu in Safari, whereas in Firefox you’ve got to open the History window. Page Load Progress Indicator — Every time I dally with another browser, I immediately miss Safari’s in-location-field progress meter. Back in January 2003 when Apple released the first public beta of Safari 1.0, I described this feature as follows:1 Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it. Over time, the feature has not just grown on me, but I’ve come to appreciate the cleverness of its design. I was wrong, and whoever designed this for Safari was right. The truth is that page loading is the slowest and most unpleasant aspect of using a web browser. It’s important to know whether a page has finished loading yet, and so a browser’s progress indicator deserves a prominent spot. The best spot is nearly the location field, because that tends to be where your eyes are when a page starts loading. You can’t get any closer to the location field than being inside the location field itself. But, once a page has loaded, there’s no reason for a progress indicator to remain on screen. Firefox 3 has a small spinning progress indicator in the toolbar. It’s too subtle, and as a simple spinner, offers no indication as to how far along the page load has progress, only that it is still loading. Firefox does offer a proper progress bar in the status bar footer, but (a) it’s far, rather than close, to the location field in the toolbar; and (b) the status bar is optional — if you turn it off, the only progress indicator is the spinner. This one’s a total win for Safari. New Tab Shortcut — In Safari, Command-T always creates a new tab, even if a browser window isn’t frontmost; it does the Right Thing and creates a new tab in the frontmost browser window and brings that window forward. In Firefox, invoking Command-T just beeps if, say, the Downloads window is frontmost, or if there is no open browser window. Inline PDF Viewing — An obvious win for Safari. AppleScript Support — Firefox 3 has almost none. Safari’s is pretty good. Firefox 3 does have a lot going for it. Yes, it’s still in beta (b5 at this writing), but even in beta it is far better, at least Mac-wise, than Firefox 2. It also unquestionably offers certain advantages over Safari. For one thing, it does a far better job managing memory. The main reason I switched from Safari to Firefox in the first place was memory consumption on my PowerBook G4 — after just a few hours of my use, Safari 3 inevitably consumes at least 300 MB, often more, of private memory. In the same usage, Firefox 3 never seemed to use more than 90 MB, even after a few days. On a machine like my PowerBook with “just” 2 GB of RAM, Safari’s memory consumption was a system-wide performance bottleneck. There are few better ways to slow down Mac OS X than to force the system to start swapping. But last week I switched to a new MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM, so while Safari still uses significantly more memory than Firefox, it doesn’t lead to VM swapping on my MacBook Pro like it did on my PowerBook. I love Firefox’s auto-restoration of tabs and windows. Quit Firefox, relaunch it, and your previously-open tabs and windows are restored. Safari 3 has this feature, but makes you do it manually via the “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” command in the History menu. I’m sure most Safari users have no idea this feature even exists. At least as a preference, Safari should offer the ability to do this automatically. Another very cool history-related Firefox 3 feature: the History → Recently Closed Tabs sub-menu. If you accidentally close a tab in Safari, and that tab has been open for so long that you don’t know where it is in your history, it’s a pain to fish it out. With this Firefox feature, you get two histories: (1) the main, traditional one, which stores pages by when they were opened, and (2) a second one, which stores pages based on when they were closed. Both are useful. Firefox also has a shortcut (Shift-Command-T) for restoring the most recently closed tab — perfect for the common scenario of recovering from an accidental tab closure. Perhaps the biggest difference between Safari and Firefox is that Firefox offers an official, supported extension API. Safari supports “Internet plugins” for things like QuickTime and Flash, but offers no extension API for modifying to adding feature to the application itself. Thus, anyone who seeks to modify Safari must resort to unsupported input manager hacks for things like ad-blocking, fancier search, etc. With Firefox, plugins such as these are fully supported. It does seem to be the case that many Firefox 2 plugins don’t yet work with Firefox 3, but it’s a tremendous advantage for Firefox that this extension mechanisms exists. This is so big a part of Firefox that it’s arguably downright criminal that I’ve buried mention of it at the bottom of this review. But the one I want most, FlashBlock, doesn’t yet work with the latest Firefox 3 betas.2 Most of my reasons for preferring Safari to Firefox are Mac-specific details. Camino gets some of them right, but not all, and it’s missing the best thing about Firefox — the extensions. For users new to the Mac, who aren’t aware of these details, Firefox 3 might be as good or better than Safari in nearly every way. (For anyone more used to Windows than the Mac, the text editing behavior in Firefox might feel right rather than wrong, as it does to me.) In short, competition in the Mac web browser space is strong and getting stronger. Firefox isn’t just a great web browser, but it’s a pretty good Mac web browser, too. Nearly all my other complaints regarding that initial public release of Safari have since been rectified. Famously, Safari 1.0b1 didn’t support tabbed browser windows; Safari’s current tab support is my favorite of any browser. AppleScript support was non-existent; now it’s pretty good. Brushed metal windows are gone. And Safari’s location field auto-completion is much improved. ↩ Also excellent, perhaps even downright amazing, is the Web Developer extension. But it’s not something that’s generally applicable for daily browsing. I suspect there are many web developers who use Safari for regular browsing but Firefox for development, because of the Web Developer extension. ↩

  • Evernote = Ubiquitous Personal Memory

    Evernote, which was once a Windows-only, highly-complex clippings database, has re-invented itself with a new 3.0 beta release that combines a feature-smart client for OS X (& Windows) with creative and handy web & mobile functionality to ensure you never forget anything. I managed to wait in the beta line long enough to get an invite and wanted to share the first impressions of the program. The developers of Evernote seemed to have a single principle in mind when developing their new software/service: make it as easy and painless as possible to capture any bit of visual or textual information anywhere you happen to be at any time. From screen captures, to to-do lists, to quick notes via text or e-mail to impromptu captures from your cell phone camera, Evernote removes all barriers to memory. At its core, Evernote is just a simple, tagged database of images or text/HTML presented via the web and web service (unpublished and used only by Evernote). While you can perform many tasks in-browser, lets focus on some of the more interesting features of the Mac client. The Evernote Application As you can see from the screen capture, the Evernote main window provides a Mail-like interface to stored notes with collections (you store notes in “notebooks”) and smart-tags on the left (with an activity window in lieu of a status bar), note list on the top left with a “reading pane” on the bottom left. Single-clicking a note (or clicking on “New Note”) lets you edit or create a new note in the reading pane while a double-click opens a note in a new window. The editor is sparse, but provides enough functionality to enter basic information with minimal formatting. The entry above was generated by the Evernote bookmarklet which I placed in the bookmarks bar in Safari. After navigating to a web site, just click on the bookmark to have Evernote store a full HTML copy of that page. You can add tags to notes for searching or sorting and Evernote will generate metadata for your entries and will even attempt to OCR text it finds in pictures. Upon installation, you can customize three shortcut key-sequences that will then be available anywhere you happen to be in OS X. With them, you can take a partial or full screen capture and send it straight to the Evernote application, quick-paste any copied image or text right into Evernote or execute a search over your notes databases. The thumbnail view of the app would be much cooler if there were a “quick look”-type of feature, but the sorting options give it the “event”-like feel from iPhoto. Evernote will sync your local notebooks on startup and can be configured to sync every 5, 15, 30 & 60 minutes thereafter. Plus, there is the option to only enable manual synchronization, which is especially handy when you are in an area with limited Internet access/availability. Evernote Everywhere For Evernote to be successful, it must work well from any mobile platform. The Safari bookmarklet, Safari browser itself and Mobile Safari interfaces all put note taking & viewing right at your fingertips. Their e-mail feature works just like sending photos to Flickr or .Mac, and Evernote gives you the ability to generate a new “TO:” address with little effort (one button) in the event you accidentally disclosed it or the evil spammers finally iterate to it. Evernote Impressions The developers at Evernote did a great job making the application feel extremely Mac-like. The interface is well-designed, application preferences make sense and the integration with the system is narrowed to a small, targeted subset of specific and useful actions. I mailed a copy of a photo I took of a good bottle of wine my wife and I tried at Pair – a tasty (but $) local Seattle restaurant – in order to remember to try to find that particular vintage sometime in the future. I could have performed a similar task by syncing to iPhoto or e-mailing to Flickr or publishing to a .Mac gallery, but Evernote will allow me to easily store the information I find out about the winery, locations, price, etc right with the picture and will allow me to retrieve it anytime, anywhere or include it in search results when digging for wine options in the future. The bookmarklet is handy and is more of an augmentation to a service like Del.icio.us, but I made great use of it to note some collectables I wish to pre-order and can see many opportunities to use it to capture articles and information from interesting sites. Google Notebook provides some similar functionality, but lacks the feature-rich local client/sync (give them time, though, especially with Google Gears constantly adding functionality). It would be great if Evernote as a service published an API so you could do what you wanted (programmatically) with your data. They could also use a bit of social networking features and provide the ability to share notes with other Evernote users, allow for group notes collections/notebooks, send notes via Twitter or IM/SMS or provide RSS feeds of your stored information. While it doesn't pander to such mashupable “must have's”, there is no indication they are not planning support for such items in the future, and other sites seem to have some inside scoop that support for these enhancements are right around the corner. Giveaway Time! To share the joy of my newfound ubiquitous memory, I'm giving away 10 Evernote invitations to TAB readers. Just submit a comment before 2359 PST Saturday (April 5, 2008) and include your name/valid e-mail or @Twitter handle, if you have one (I'll DM you for a contact e-mail if you win). Winners will be chosen at random from valid entries and notified on Sunday (April 6, 2008). If you're also an Evernote beta user, don't let the entry-deluge sway you from tossing your opine in the comments. Your views and usage advice will be reaching more folks than ever!

The Comments Go Here

Software Releases