Isaac on the phone

The nice thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

The annoying thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

This has all obviously been discussed to death, and I don't have much more to contribute on that angle, so I'll leave it at that.

But one of the less-noticed aspects of iPhone v2 and the plethora of App Store toys is that the "springboard" home screen interface from the original iPhone isn't scaling very well. Sure, it worked great at first, when the phone just shipped with 11 applications on top and another 4 on the "dock", and it was still fine when the default list grew to 13 -- even then there were blank slots to fill in, so no problem there.

The main screen started to become problematic when the 1.1.3 release in January 2008 allowed you to turn Safari bookmarks into tappable pseudo-apps, and in turn allowed you to set up multiple "pages" of icons. That was fine as long as you just had a handful of screens to deal with, but -- especially now that you can add both bookmarks and actual applications -- it really doesn't scale well at all if you start to have dozens of apps to keep track of.

On the Mac, handling lots of applications is no problem. They're all kept together in your /Applications folder (aka C:\Program Files for the Windows folks), the ones you're most interested in can be linked to from the Dock (aka the Start Menu), and the system is generally very efficient at letting you sift through to what you want. Not so on the iPhone now.

If I'm on the first screen on my phone right now, and I want to open up Shakespeare, I have to flick through five screens to get to it. So what had been a single action before -- "tap on icon" -- is now a six stage process -- "flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, tap on icon" -- plus a much higher cognitive load, because, and here's the really fun part, things keep moving around, so you have to actually read through the intervening screens, just in case it changed.

The App Store application itself, as well as the link to it from iTunes back on the computer, has the ability to seek out & alert you to updated applications. Super. But when you download updates on the phone, it appears to create a second temporary copy of the app at the last screen, then either leaves it there at the end, or moves it back to the screen the original had been on.

If a screen ends up being asked to hold more than 16 apps, even temporarily, then things get out of whack. Let's say you're trying to reorganize an icon from screen 5 back to screen 3, but because screen 4 already has 16 icons, there's no room for the app we're moving to be stored there. "Who cares?," we ask, "it's not staying there anyway, right?" The phone cares, because you can't just go from screen 5 to screen 3 in one motion, you have to drag it over to the left, hover around the middle for a bit, then drag it over to the left again. In the interim, whatever you had at the lower-right corner of screen 4 gets bumped to the top-right corner of screen 5.

Okay, so you could get around that problem by leaving enough "holes" on the screen to keep that shuffling from happening. Fine. But it's already annoying enough as it is to have to go through 6 screens to find anything, padding it out will just mean even more screens to have to sift through. But it's worse than that, too, because if you download anything new, the phone will deposit the new icons on the leftmost screen with an empty slot to use, rather than the end of the list at the right. This approach seems reasonable and predictable, but if you can't remember what screens had free space, then this becomes unpredictable, and worse, it amplifies the problem of things seeming to jump around on you, especially as individual screens fill up.

On the other end of the equation, if having all these apps is more than you feel like dealing with and you just want to delete some, that's a cumbersome process also. The "fastest" way to do it is to hold down an icon until it wiggles, then tap the little (x) that gets superimposed over the icon to delete it from the phone. Fine. But next time you sync to iTunes, the application just gets copied back. Oops. Okay, so you can make a mental note to delete so & so from iTunes next time you're home, but then it's one more thing to remember. You hold your nose & use the Notes app, but then you have to go digging for the icon & flicking back to whatever screen it ended up on now, and by the time you get there, you probably forgot what it was you were supposed to be deleting. You could affix a sticky note to the phone to physically jot down a reminder, but isn't the whole point of productivity gadgets to steer you away from needing to keep track of little scraps of paper?

So that's three primary broken areas of the iPhone main screen that need attention: 

(3) removing things from the screen can be surprisingly cumbersome & unpredictable.

Aside from that, sure, it works great this way, rah rah Apple.

---

A way out is already available, of course.

What I'd like to see is for the app management to work something like the iTunes or Phone apps do, allowing you to browse in different ways, set a list of favorites, search, etc. 

iPhone phone keypad screen

So, for example, the bottom row of the Phone app gives you Favorites (obviously useful), Recents (useful again), Contacts (this would be the list of everything, useful again), Keypad (maybe "Search" could go here), and Voicemail (okay probably not useful). 

iPhone iTunes genres screen

Likewise, the bottom row of the iTunes app gives me Genres (corresponding to Categories as provided by the App Store, useful), Artists (probably not useful, unless you happen to be a big fan of certain software developers or companies), Albums (again, not as useful, though I could maybe see "App Suites" -- Microsoft Office-To-Go? Adobe CS-Portable? all the silly Jirbo games? -- organized in such a way), Videos (not useful), and More (possibly useful for allowing users to decide how they want to mix & match what they have quick access to). 

Another option I wouldn't mind seeing would be a reference to the popularity info available on the App Store itself. Already I've had a couple of situations where I came across an article or blog post praising some app or another, and so went to download it, only to realize I'd already downloaded a copy but hadn't tried it yet. Maybe a way to browse the installed apps by popularity (or category, or keyword, or capability such as geolocation or motion sensing) might not be a bad idea.

The iTunes app lets me sift through dozens of video files and hundreds of songs, in lots of different ways, some derived from metadata (album, genre, artist, etc), some by my own organization choices (playlist), no problem. The Contact component of the Phone app (which is now an app by itself, too) also provides an easy way to quickly browse through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of addresses, again breaking them down in useful categorizations that are fast & easy to sift through, no problem. 

An infant could figure out how to navigate through the data in these apps.

(No, really, it's true!)

But the iPhone itself, even with just a few dozen applications, is already getting too cumbersome to deal with. It isn't going to work at all if the number of installed apps keeps growing. 

And, to be clear, providing two interfaces into the same system is rarely a good idea; that isn't what I'm proposing. Whatever gets done here has to supercede or replace Springboard. Yes, that would mean abandoning something really simple that worked fantastically well for the first year, and arguably helped make the iPhone's reputation: "look Ma, see how easy this is?" But the status quo now is already getting too confusing, and the approach offered by the Phone and iTunes -- not to mention a growing number of third party apps like Facebook and the New York Times, which appear to be following a recommended set of interface guidelines -- provides a ready alternative that is already familiar & easy to understand. I say go with something very similar to that. 

Please Apple, provide us with a smarter way to manage iPhone app libraries.

The original Springboard, while suitable for the v1 iPhone, is no longer enough to grow with in the v2 world & beyond.

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iPhone App Store order

Seeing as today was the day of the much-heralded 3G iPhone launch -- such as it was -- some thoughts on it seem called for (currently, 33,947 times called for, it seems). (Addendum, 10 minutes later: now we're at 216,814 hits. So there you go, give me a moment and I'll try to get us to 216,815.)

A big part of the question for original iPhone owners has been whether it even makes sense to upgrade. The only hardware changes appear to be GPS, which the original phone can approximate by cell tower or wifi base station triangulation, and 3G data speeds, which also mean a higher monthly phone bill and shorter battery life. The other components -- CPU speed, storage capacity, camera, screen, etc -- all appears to be unchanged.

Graffiti on Scituate Harbor gazebo: "GOOD FORM"

The bigger change, which original iPhone users get for free, is the updated system software, and the new App Store. While this means long overdue improvements to the built in apps -- contact search, wireless push sync of mail, calendars, & contacts, scientific calculator mode, parental controls, and a whole lot more -- the flagship feature is the iPhone SDK that third parties can now use to develop using a toolkit both similar to and unique from the ones available for traditional computers. While some computers are starting to have built-in cameras, the rest of the iPhone hardware remains unique: few if any laptops or desktops have touch screen controls, motion sensors, or geographical self-awareness, not to mention the fact that it's, you know, a phone. There's a line of thinking that this represents the birth of a new generation of ubiquitous computing, an idea that has been on the drawing board for 20 years now, but still just gradually starting to come together.

So, now that the prelude is out of the way, how has the first 24 hours of life with iPhone 2.0 been? Some random observations.  

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I've been forwarded the following chain letter a few times recently (stripped of names & cleaned up the formatting for presentation, but otherwise intact as forwarded):

Nemo seagulls

Normally I don't do this but at $4.00 a gallon maybe it will help ...

Subject: Tips on pumping gas

I don't know what you guys are paying for gasoline ... but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $5.00 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money's worth for every gallon..

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose, CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.

Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening ... your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role. A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money.

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.

Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up. Most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

WHERE TO BUY USA GAS ...

Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us!

The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor. An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.

Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.

These companies import Middle Eastern oil:

Shell	205,742,000 barrels
Chevron/Texaco	144,332,000 barrels
Exxon/Mobil	130,082,000 barrels
Marathon/Speedway	117,740,000 barrels
Amoco	62,231,000 barrels

Citgo gas is from South America, from a Dictator who hates Americans. If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now over $120 a barrel)

Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:

Sunoco	0 barrels
Conoco	0 barrels
Sinclair	0 barrels
BP/Phillips	0 barrels
Hess	0 barrels
ARC0	0 barrels

All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do. Now don't wimp out at this point ... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I'm sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers !!!!!!! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

If it goes one level further, you guessed it ... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

All you have to do is send this to 10 people.

It's interesting, but I can't decide if it's hokum. There's enough jargon, detail, and calls to authority here to make it convincing -- "specific gravity", "internal floating roof", "All of this information is available from the Department of Energy", etc -- but not quite enough to convince me.

The Conoco bit, for example -- didn't they have some kind of deal with Iran? I guess not -- back in 1995 they considered it, but were blocked by Clinton, though apparently the company and the country have a long, sordid history together.

The logic seems a little shaky to me though, and the woolly thinking (sloppy punctuation, incongruously jumping from a swipe at Citgo / Hugo Chavez / Venezuela to out-of-nowhere math about aggregate import costs) has me thinking that this person may have a point, but not the whole picture. Can individual gas pumping tactics help you get more per tank? Maybe. Can collective purchasing decision & boycotts make a difference, even on a large scale? I tend to doubt it, but maybe. Do boycotts ever work? Sometimes they do (South Africa & apartheid being the best example I can think of), but often they don't (the sanctions / boycott of Cuba, Iran, & North Korea being examples of them not getting results even after decades of trying at a national scale).

Anyone with more economics tuits have a handle on whether this could work?

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Assinippi General Store

One of my favorite place names is Assinippi, which happens to be very close to where I grew up. It's an area in Massachusetts near where the towns of Hanover & Norwell border each other. The main landmarks are the Assinippi General Store at the corner of Rt 53 and Rt 123, nearby Jacob's Pond off 123, a thin strip of commercial development along Rt 53, and a small handful of residential side streets. Nearby is the Assinippi Industrial Park, a small industrial complex notable mainly (to me) for hosting the headquarters of Zildjian, a cymbal company with some famous customers

Assinippi is not one of the 301 towns & cities in Massachusetts, as recognized by the commonwealth, which puts it instead on the list of Archaic Community, District, Neighborhood, Section and Village Names. It isn't even big enough to have a Wikipedia page to call its own, though it does come up on the list of place names in New England of aboriginal origin, which notes that the name is a Wampanoag term meaning "rocks in water". So there.

Google Assinippi

You wouldn't necessarily learn any of this from a naive Google search though. In the first 100 results, I count three hits for things specifically about the area: a painting of the Jacobs family (presumably of the above-mentioned Jacobs Pond), and a review of the Assinippi General Store and a listing for the adjacent Assinippi General Store grocery department. 

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How hard can this be? Compare & contrast:

Literally:

3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Literally \Lit"er*al*ly\, adv.
1. According to the primary and natural import of words; not
figuratively; as, a man and his wife can not be literally
one flesh.
[1913 Webster]

So wild and ungovernable a poet can not be

     2. With close adherence to words; word by word.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

2 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Figurative \Fig"ur*a*tive\, a. [L. figurativus: cf. F.
     figuratif. See {Figurative}.]
     1. Representing by a figure, or by resemblance; typical;
        representative.
        [1913 Webster]

              This, they will say, was figurative, and served, by
              God's appointment, but for a time, to shadow out the
              true glory of a more divine sanctity. --Hooker.
        [1913 Webster]

     2. Used in a sense that is tropical, as a metaphor; not
        literal; -- applied to words and expressions.
        [1913 Webster]

     3. Abounding in figures of speech; flowery; florid; as, a
        highly figurative description.
        [1913 Webster]

     4. Relating to the representation of form or figure by
        drawing, carving, etc. See {Figure}, n., 2.
        [1913 Webster]

              They belonged to a nation dedicated to the
              figurative arts, and they wrote for a public
              familiar with painted form.           --J. A.
                                                    Symonds.
        [1913 Webster]

     {Figurative counterpoint} or {Figurative descant}. See under
        {Figurate}. -- {Fig"ur*a*tive*ly}, adv. --
        {Fig"ur*a*tive*ness}, n.
        [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  figuratively
       adv : in a figurative sense; "figuratively speaking,..." [ant: {literally}]

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VARIAVALVE QUICK VENT HEAT-TIMER

Human societies have always depended on having ready access to cheap, efficient means of transportation.

The Egyptians built their kingdoms along the Nile. The Greeks built their civilization among their islands. The Mesopotamians had the Tigris & Euphrates, the Indians had the Ganges, the Chinese had the Yangtze. Later, the Romans and Incas built vast empires laced together by paved roadways.

In America, the continent was [re-]populated first by ships & horses, then Conestoga wagons, then the locomotive, then automobiles and airplanes.

The topography of ordinary life is a reflection of this need to have access to transportation, balanced against other needs for agriculture, trade, industry, and so on.

From what I've seen of Germany, most of the old cities & towns are organized along roughly similar lines, with a dense cluster of homes & other structures, clearly demarcated from the surrounding countryside -- often by a literal wall. Of course, this probably has old medieval origins where the people would live together in town but farm in the fields, and occasionally would have to hide behind the walls as the town was besieged by some invading army or mob. But it also means that for ordinary life, the things you need are all within walking distance of home -- your job, the people you trade with, and so on.

Never Cry "Arp!"

Older American cities on the east coast started out along similar lines, but with less fear of invasion (after all, Native Americans tended not to have cannons & muskets) plus good roads and horses to get around with (not to mention the allure of an entire vast continent to stretch out across), they never really had the tight, walkable density that old European cities had.

And then, of course, the train came, and not long behind it, the car. If you look at how American cities are laid out, especially as you move west, and as you look at cities that had most or all of their growth in the 20th century, it's obvious just how much these places grew up with the assumption that the car would always be there, would always be cheap, and was strong enough to be the almost physical foundation of how society is built, lives, and works. 

(And, as if it needs to be said, nothing the next president can do is going to change any of this.)

Real estate sign out window

So -- and I'll probably break out this section into a post of its own later -- given the choice of where to live, where does it make sense to live now? The days of suburbia as the standard lifestyle for a large fraction of Americans seem to be numbered. The cities are getting nicer, but if you want things like good schools and low crime, the suburbs are seen to be the way to go, but how long will that assumption hold up? Can things really change as fast as the LA Times article suggests? I'm not betting against the possibility.

Assuming you can't pull up roots and move to New York, San Francisco, or heck London or Paris, then where would be a good place to live for the next 10, 25, 50 years? What criteria would a "nice", "smart" place to live be? Good access to public transit, preferably rail, but bus should work too (there's always biodiesel or electric trolleybus options). Being able to walk to things like jobs, schools, and supermarkets would be good. Access to a river would be nice -- just in case we get reduced back to Egyptian levels, though I'm not quite that pessimistic yet -- but I'm willing to assume that some kind of motorized means of transportation is going to be a permanent fixture of human society now, even if individual, personal motorized transportation may not always be taken for granted the way it has been for the past century. What else? For that matter, what kind of physical home makes sense? Should we all move in to Manhattan / Soviet style apartment complexes, or is a patch of lawn still an option? Is an oil heated home any better or worse than gas or electric? The time to plan seems to be now.

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Clouds over Allston

The effects of the rise in energy prices continues to unfold. 

Now people are wondering if we've hit Peak Travel, as the number of highway miles Americans drove in April 2008 was significantly down from April 2007, the first dip in over a decade, and the biggest dip by far in at least 20 years.

They don't know what's about to hit them

Meanwhile, Krugman does the math & makes a case that "high oil prices, by making shipping much more expensive, may reverse a significant amount of globalization". The crux of the argument, basically, is that China has ended up making everything because it's cheaper that way, but this depends on shipping in the raw materials and shipping out the finished goods; if transportation prices go up & stay up, then effectively that part of the cost takes a double-whammy and not just doubles, but triples: "That 10 percent rise in transport costs in effect reduces the payoff to China from producing the good by almost 30 percent." As a result, both  shipping & business travel can be expected to decline. 

Storm clouds, or mothership? You decide.

Thunderstorm blocking the view

After the thunderstorm

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Amanda Palmer with Boston Pops

This was fun. Amanda Palmer, the piano-playing half of The Dresden Dolls, did a show last night with The Boston Pops. As Keith Lockhart said in introducing the show, whether you came for the Pops or you came for Amanda, the show wasn't going to end up being what you expected. Reviews:

• Boston Herald
• Boston Globe (has a good video clip up, too)

Previews:

• Boston Herald
• Bostonist
• Roadrunner Records
• Dresden Dolls Diary
• Boston Globe
• Undercover.com.au