4 posts tagged “reviews”
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.
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'm glad I'm not working at an Apple store for this. With the original iPhone, the store part of the transaction was about as simple as swipe a couple of bar codes, swipe the credit card, and off you go. On the launch day last year, a line that went out the door, down the corridor, then back up the side of the mall was processed in about 90 minutes, no chaos, no problem. (Or so I was told -- somehow I ended up being the only one that had the day off that day, so we went for ice cream instead. Yum, ice cream. Then Bijan called to ask if we had any iPhones left, and could I set one aside for him. Heh.) This time around, to prevent the revenue lost to iPhone unlocking, the activation had to happen in the store, or you can pay extra to avoid AT&T, but either way, Apple gets their money up front. Which is nice for Apple, but not so much for the customers today, not to mention their employees.
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I like the idea of push mail and push sync. Reliable synchronization of personal data has been tantalizingly close to "ready to go" for years now, but it still never quite works in practice. Part of the problem, as anyone that has to merge software patches would recognize, is that can be hard for a computer to know which of two versions of a piece of data it should go with. For example, if you add a friend's email to your mail client, aad their phone number on your cell phone, then what should happen they get re-synced? As far as .Mac sync seems to be concerned, the correct answer appears to be any one or more of "make one record with both the email address and the phone number fields", "make two completely overlapping, redundant records for your friend", "leave one record but make the fields repeat over and over and over and over", "randomly omit some of the data", or "update someone else entirely." Who says software has to be deterministic, right? The appeal of push sync, in part, is that it reduces the opportunity for this kind of error, by always keeping the devices coordinated right away, without letting changes pile up and lead to bigger problems later.Two problems with this are jumping out at me as a first gen iPhone owner: (1) this doesn't appear to help, and in fact may still be making worse, the existing redundancies in the data, and more importantly (2) this appears to force the iPhone to have a lot more chatter with the server than was happening before. For new 3G users this shouldn't be a big deal, because it's like a DSL modem: the data connection doesn't interfere with voice services on the line, and it's fast enough that these bursts of sync communication should happen more quickly. But with the original 2G phone and the EDGE data service, it's looks like a potential problem, because EDGE behaves like a traditional analog modem: you can't use voice and data services simultaneously, and the connection is so much slower than 3G/DSL/etc that the sync conversation with the server takes 10x longer than it would otherwise. As a result, since upgrading to iPhone 2.0 on Thursday, I'm getting far more complaints that "the call went straight to voice mail" than I ever was previously. This is frustrating, and the first tangible thing that starts to make upgrading to 3G hardware make sense, but for now I'm just turning push back off and dealing with it. (Weirdly, it seems like the push service may be cellular only -- even when a wifi connection was available, it seemed like the EDGE connection kept popping up and so blocking incoming calls. Is it true that MobileMe/.Mac sync push to the iPhone only happens over the phone wireless link?)
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So it's a nice day and all when 500 or 600 applications can simultaneously morph from vaporware to shipping product, but maybe some of these were maybe a little half-baked, hm? With the old phone software, I very rarely had any problems. (And if you ignore the bane that is data sync, there had been basically no problems with crashes and the like for around six months now.) But since the new software got installed, I've already had several hard lockups -- no response at all, had to force-reboot the phone -- and even had to restore it (which was fun because it got back stuff I don't care about, like the fact that it was only syncing the "For iPhone" playlist from iTunes, which I never would have been able to sort out again from scratch, but it blew away and couldn't recover my SMS history, call history, call favorites, web site login cookies, stored cities for the Weather app, stored stocks for the Stocks app, yadda yadda yadda).But the worst is all the app crashes now. While it's nice that each app sandboxes all its data so that, one might have assumed, problems with one app shouldn't harm any of the others, in practice it seems like many of the apps I've tried are unstable, and when one app crashes, I can't seem to get anything else to launch, even if it had been working previously. And this is right after a full restore, which is "iPod/iPhone Troubleshooting-ese" for "the problem persists after nuking the system software from orbit, so the cause has to be either the data or the hardware". In this case it's safe to assume that the problem is the data (read: "the new apps"), but it's frustrating not being able to go in and carefully zap the offending .plist file or cache folder that so often resolves similar problems with the old version of OSX.
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Also frustrating is that, it's already a full day since the App Store launch, and *none* of the apps seem to have any updates yet. Okay, sure, so it's just one day, and I'm sure the developers are all out swimming in their shiny new barrels of App Store Monopoly Money to celebrate, but come on, they have to take care of their early adopters if they want to sustain their new businesses, right? Supposedly, though I can't find documentation of this at the moment, one of the iPhone 1.x updates introduced the ability to gather statistics when an app crashes, and send that data back to Apple on the next sync, so that common failure modes could be profiled & patched. Is Apple capturing this data for third party apps too, and if so, is it getting shared back to the developers? Hopefully.)
- Compounding the last item, and maybe I'm just being thick here, but I don't see the best way to delete an app in the first place. Is there a way to delete from the phone, or do you have to delete it from iTunes and then have it disappear on the next sync?
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It's interesting, and possibly a big improvement, that an iPhone configured for push-sync of calendar & contact data no longer is able to sync this data with iTunes automaically when plugged in. This is good for me, because I have data going back to my first Palm Pilot in the late 90s, and it was starting to take way too long to sync everything to the phone; now that's no longer necessary. On the other hand, if the sync with iTunes just got so much more clever and fast than it used to be, then why did it start doing a big, glacially slow backup job every time I sync the phone? With the old one, it seemed like it would start the sync by backing up some key data (I'm not sure what, but it never took longer than 20 or 30 seconds or so), then dive in to the rest (which would be the bulk of the time required to finish a sync run). Now it's the other way around, and worse: it can spend an hour or more backup up the phoe (I can only assume it's making a new full copy of everything, everytime, rather than trying to just compare changes since the last backup), but then because the slow items have been removed from iTunes, the sync itself seems to finish within a couple of seconds after the backup. Two steps forward, ten steps back.
I'm ready for my bug fixes now, guys.
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:
So O'Reilly sent me a copy of "Facebook: The Missing Manual", and I keep meaning to post a review of it online.
It's a strange book for O'Reilly, who's traditional bread & butter is dense, laden books on arcane little Unix subsystems & programming languages. Of course, that has changed for them with the success of the "Missing Manuals" series, and with their traditional markets largely in decline, clearly they're looking to stake their territory in the new "web 2.0", "web apps not desktop apps" landscape.
But still, an entire book on Facebook?
I've always been a bit baffled by all the books on, say, using eBay. Obviously there's a market for this kind of thing, and I suppose that the best titles get beyond the basic mechanics of manipulating the site interface -- which is inevitably going to constantly evolve anyway -- and more on placing it within a context, putting the site to use as a tool for your life, etc. While I haven't actually read any of the many eBay books, still I like to imagine that the best of them would be written this way.
Disappointingly, this isn't how "Facebook: The Missing Manual" was written. As the table of contents hints, the bulk of the book is a simple mechanical walkthrough of how to use the site: set up an account, log in, navigate the different types of pages, etc. There are two major problems with this approach:
- If the site changes, the material quickly becomes outdated. In fact, Facebook already has changed since the book was published in January, and more radical changes are on the way. It's one thing to tie a book to a specific version of a traditional application -- a book on Apache 2 or Mac OS X Leopard or Perl 5.8 is pretty much going to directly apply to any instance of that version of the software. But web sites are contantly in flux, and the author doesn't get to assert "this book is for Facebook 2007" or "that book is for Wikipedia 2006". At best, the book can be written in an abstract, functional way, with lots of caveats that "this is all subject to change, but it worked as of the publication date." This book isn't really written that way.
- Most people, from high school kids to grandparents, don't seem to be having a whole lot of trouble in just diving in & actively using Facebook. As it should be. Like most sites, it's designed to be easy & intuitive to use, and while that's an elusive target for any piece of software to attain, it's not unreasonable to assume that if you're savvy enough to manipulate a mouse, a web browser, and Google, then the additional work required to also figure out Facebook just by using it isn't going to be difficult for most people. Moreover, when the site evolves, you have to figure it out this way anyhow, so even if you get the introductory lessons from a printed guide, you're still going to have to eventually learn by doing, the way the people that skip the guide are doing.
There could have been a way out of this. The book could have tried to place Facebook within the broader landscape of social networking sites, which actually would have been a pretty interesting book to read.
Just like AOL before it, Facebook can perhaps best be thought of as a "training wheels" version of the social web, with a "jack of all trades, master of none", "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to things. Facebook has a photos widget, which is convenient, but not as nice as Flickr. Facebook has status updates, but a lot of people prefer Twitter. Facebook has ways to post blog-like activity -- writing, posting links, etc -- but most people that want a blog use Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, Vox, etc.
The interesting things that set Facebook apart from these other sites are mainly (a) that it has all these things and more, and they more or less work, and (b) it has developed a critical mass of users that makes the site more interesting & useful than the tools themselves -- your mom may not be on Twitter, but she may well be on Facebook.
But it's not an either/or proposition -- there are no shortage of tools, both desktop and web apps, within & apart from Facebook itself, that allow FB to interoperate with these other sites & services, so that your Flickr photos show up on Facebook, your Facebook status updates show up on Twitter, etc. A book on this might have been more interesting, but maybe the title would have to change: "Facebook and the Social Web: The Missing Manual", or simply "Social Networking: The Missing Manual".
In any case, as a fairly tech-savvy guy, clearly I wasn't the target audience for this book. I let both my wife and my sister-in-law read it, as they're smart, but they aren't quite nerds like I am; they didn't see the point, either. "If you can't figure it out by using it, how would a book help you?" Indeed. I've considered giving the book to my mom, as she has made it clear that she doesn't quite understand her Facebook account, but I assume she wouldn't take the time to read a book on Facebook to begin with.
I'm sure there's an audience out there for the current edition of "Facebook: The Missing Manual", but it isn't among any of the people I know. They all either already have Facebook accounts, and so didn't need a book to get started, or they aren't interested in Facebook, and so wouldn't want to read a manual for it to begin with.
