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iPhone 3.0 Hits and Misses

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Today was day 2 of major announcements in technology, Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Preview (video of full announcement should be up on that link soon).  For me, the past two days have been quite busy on multiple fronts with all the announcements being just one of them.  When days like this occur I end up finding interesting sites and leaving browser tabs open until my computer starts to scream “no more!”.  So I’m hitting things in reverse and posting some thoughts on the Apple announcements before I post my thoughts on yesterday’s Cisco announcement (then I can close some of my browser tabs).

First, if you don’t want to sit through the video of the Apple Preview, check out the archive of live comments from engadget (scroll to the bottom on work up) or Don MacAksill’s live twittering.

Second, I have to classify myself as a business-geek users of my iPhone and my comments will flow from this classification.  I use it primarily for business items like monitoring exchange email, moving between meetings in my exchange calendar, and doing more calls that I care to admit in a day.  But I love it for the fact that I can all my geek stuff on it as well because it is an application platform (much like my old Palm Treo was).  Using applications like a Twitter client, WordPress client,  Webex client, Netflix client, and others social networking clients allow me to interact will all the web services I want or need.  And then all the photo applications to allow me to extend my photography addiction to the phone.  All that being said, it’s the business side of stuff that really drives my use (not to mention pays the bills for the iPhone).

So, here is a list of the major pains that I was hoping would be fixed in 3.0:

  • The ability to click on a phone number in emails and outlook calendar invites to dial a number!  Since copy/paste has never been available, I always expected at least this feature, especially considering my blackberry could do this…
  • Landscape mode in email and all apps I need to type in.  I have fat fingers, the portrait mode keys on the iPhone are small.  And the spell correction can be annoying with the combination of both.  (Fixed)
  • Fix the lag with larger Contact databases.  There are times when opening or working with my contacts just hangs.  When 2.0 was released I heard that it was because the system wasn’t designed for large contacts lists.  I work in sales, I have thousands of contacts in my phone and I never know which ones I may need.
  • Fix the contact search feature.  This scrolling to find someone is such a waste of time.  The search feature works much better because after typing 3 characters I usually see the person I’m looking for (see previous bullet item).  But the search area scrolls off the screen.  Allow me to lock it to the screen so it is my default view.  My Treo excelled at this.
  • Tethering:  there are still times when I need to have my laptop connected to the internet to accomplish something while I’m out and mobile (though less frequently now that the WebEx client is available), give me this safety net.

So, from what I can tell…25% of what I want is in 3.0.

Here are the other items I think are important from this release:

  • Copy/Paste.  I don’t buy the excuse of “security was an issue” as to why it took so long to have this.  This has always been a black eye on the iPhone.  BTW:  I still want clickable phone numbers in calendar invites…and I want it to auto dial the passcode for conference lines (since I’m asking).
  • Landscape mode (as mentioned above)
  • universal search.  But what would be nice is if you could build search filters that could be linked to a button on the spotlight home screen.  Maybe I want to search just contacts and calendars when I type something in to cut the huge list of results.  Would be nice if I could just have a customized filter button below my search window..type the text and then my custom filter button to see my results.
  • Voice Memos:  this is nice, but will need to see how this is different from other voice recording apps currently available (Jott, Evernote).  Now this is where Apple needs to be careful not ot add built in apps that will alienate their app developers.

I should be interesting to see how app developers use the new APIs and features..I can already see some interesting things coming with the peer to peer capability.  Can’t wait for the free upgrade.

Wanted: Voting Machine by Apple

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Tuesday was the primary election here in California. Luckily, my polling place is litterally two blocks from my house in a neighbor’s garage. On Tuesday morning, as I waited in a line of 3 people at 7am for the wonderful folks who run the polling station to figure out how to turn on the optical scanning machine, I realized what could be the greatest risk to our Democracy.

Technology and electronic voting machines.

If you were to take a survey of the age of the people who volunteer their time to run most of the election polling places in America, the vast majority of them would fall into the category of senior citizen. This, in its own right, is not a bad thing. But, think back to the challenges that most of the senior citizens you know have with setting the clock on their VCRs. And that’s not even taking into account much more recent and sophisticated home electronics like the latest TVs or DVRs.

And yet, once we start rolling out electronic voting machines, these will be the same people who will have to run them. In general, I feel confident in saying that the technology industry as a whole doesn’t have the best track record for making things easy to use. So, even thought I have not ever seen nor worked with any electronic voting machine, I feel that we (the technology industry, voting machine manufacturers, society in general) may be setting up our democracy for a huge failure.

One of the common statements in high tech revolves around describing what you do for a living: “Describe it so that your mother would understand it.” So, on a similar note, our future electronic voting machines need to be designed such that our mothers (and fathers) could not only cast a vote on it, but also set them up and deal with any production issues that may arise.

This is why I think Apple should make a voting machine. The common statement from nearly ever modern day Mac owner is “it just works”. If Apple can do that for something as sophisticated and mutli-purpose as a modern day computer, image what they could do with a single purpose voting machine!

An Apple voting machine combined with an open source voting software would be a stellar combination.

Which brings up an interesting point. Are there any open source voting software solutions? We never hear about this topic in the media. We only hear about which states have decertified which voting machines or which voting machine was recently deemed ‘hackable’.

Interestingly, after a quick search, I came across the Open Voting Consortium (which I had never heard of before). They describe themselves as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of trustable and open voting systems for use in public elections. The interesting thing to note is that they don’t seem to be developing an open source voting system. Neither does VoteTrustUSA nor their parent organization Verified Voting Foundation.

In the true sense of democracy, we should have our voting systems be completely transparent. So that anyone who was interested could look in and see how it worked, including independent experts.

I’m shocked that there doesn’t appear to be a true open source voting software initiative yet. But then again, I’m sure Apple isn’t working on their own voting machine either. Probably for the same reasons…just not enough money to be made by making either of these two items in the fashion that has our society’s best interests at heart.

Welcome Back Old Friend

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It’s been a long ten years, and oh how you have grown…

A few days ago, I welcomed back into my life the Mac. It was time for a laptop upgrade (what does it say when you have worn half the lettering off your keyboard?) and I was ready for a change. Like most, I wasn’t that excited about a laptop with Vista on it. And my existing laptop–an IBM ThinkPad which I absolutely admire–was starting to show it’s processor age as well as strange OS level behavior (like at times it wouldn’t be able to resolve DNS names which essentially made it useless online…after hours of trying to fix that, I finally just gave up and rebooted it when it occurred!). It was time to make a change for the better…for the betterment of my productivity. I bought a new PowerBook Pro.

Since I had it customized (maxed out the memory and added the larger/faster hard drive), I had to wait a few weeks for the computer to arrive. That wouldn’t have been so hard if it wasn’t for the fact that the software I ordered with the Mac (Parallels and MS Office) kept arriving at my door in separate boxes. Finally, I got an email saying that my new laptop had left the factory. Like a kid waiting for Christmas Eve, I kept checking back to the FedEx tracking website to keep tabs on my Mac. There is something perverse about watching the delivery progress of something built half way around the world:


Then, the same day I’m to leave for a business trip, I see that my Mac has been loaded on the truck. Oh, the pressure! I don’t have to leave for the airport until Noon, if the laptop arrives at 10am, do I have time to get it functional so I can take it on my trip? I sure was going to try!

So after about an hour and half (I had a half hour interuption to deal with a work issue), I had the Mac booted up for the first time, configured, installed my needed software, and connected to my mail account to start syncing my mail. I don’t think I would have been able to do that with a PC. In the end, I wanted time to get re-aquanted with my old friend (my first laptop was a PowerBook 510 which I bought 12 years ago and replaced 10 years ago). And what better time than on a 4 hour plane ride? So I ended up packing up both laptops and headed off to the airport. So, seven hours after it left FedEx’s Oakland facility, the MacBook Pro was back within sight of it’s arrival point.

I brought the ThinkPad along as a backup and to transfer over my work documents. That night at my hotel, I set up a peer to peer wireless network between the two machines, connected the Mac to my shared documents folder on the ThinkPad, and copied over all my files in an hour. I have tried many times to get a peer to peer wireless network to work between two Windows laptops and was never successful. Worked first time with the Mac.

I plan on documenting my experiences transition from the PC back to the Mac over the course of the next few weeks. And I’ll start off by stating a few of my first impressions:

  • Apple definitely has the entire user experience down! From unpacking the laptop from it’s briefcase like box, to the bare essentials presented to you when you remove the styrofoam. The laptop itself even came in a nice protective sleeve. It is quite an experience.
  • The small usability things that Apple focuses on do make a huge difference. Something as simple as a well designed power supply seems so trivial, until you have one. I was expecting to have to buy a second power supply–I have 5 for my ThinkPad and they are strategically placed around my entire house–but the design with the unfolding prongs which can be replaced with a longer power cable is ideal. I leave the power cable plugged in at my desk at home, and just take the brick and the unfolding prongs on the road.
  • The lack of the Intel Inside sticker was something that I completely overlook until I saw this article today.
  • The fact that the machine comes out of sleep mode in under 5 seconds is amazing. I was getting jealous stares from other windows users on the plane tonight as I opened the laptop and started typing within 5 seconds! It’s shocking how much time you loose waiting for the windows machines to come back to life. I does take longer for the Mac to go to sleep, about 20 seconds. I think that is due to the 4 Gigs of RAM in my machine that have to be written to disk (I used a 2 Gig model that did go to sleep faster). Regardless, this is still about half the time or less that it took my Windows XP machine to go to sleep…and about 20-30x faster than waking an XP machine up!
  • So far, I have not encountered any issues with any of my documents from the PC. Since I have office installed (needed that so I could connect to my companies exchange server for email), all the docs that I have needed opened right up. I’ll be watching this closely over the next few days.
  • It has taken a few extra moments here and there to figure out how to do something that was second nature to me on a PC…like right clicking on a mis-spelled word to fix it! But, after a few seconds of experimenting with the FN, CTRL, and OPTION keys on the keyboard, I figured out the right combination to replace the right click action on the PC. There are a few things that I already think will take me time to get used to, like the lack of a dedicated page up, page down, and backspace key.

All in all, I’m glad I spent the extra money and moved back to a Mac. Cool factor aside, I can tell already that I am able to be more productive with this machine. The learning curve isn’t that great. And I doubt my previous experience has much to do with that since a lot has changed in the past 10 years. I’ll continue documenting my experiences here on the blog over the next few weeks.

I used to roll my eyes back a bit when I heard other people say it, but it’s true.. the Mac OS just works. What a novel thought!