CRbus

In my previous post, I mentioned I was working on an app for the iPhone. It's done and here it is. It's called CRbus and is an iPhone optimized view of the Cedar Rapids public transit schedule.

The app took about an hour from start to finish thanks to the great iUI framework. The data in the app took much, much longer. At the start I wrote a quick Perl script to take pasted data from the official PDFs and package it for inclusion in the app. That worked fine, other than there were a bunch of special cases in the data that I didn't want to spend the time handling in my code. I didn't think this would be a big deal, and it wasn't, until I got to those special cases and found I need a lot of hand tweaking of my data (boo). That's all done and the app is ready for use.

If you want to give this a try, you don't have to have an iPhone. Firefox and Safari will run it fine. Just hit the CRbus URL and then drag your window into the shape of an iPhone (hint: tall rectangle) to get the experience. You start with a list of routes. Follow a route to get a list of stops. Follow a stop to get the times. You can follow the bread crumb arrows at the top back up the tree.

This is just a bare bones version of what the app could be. Obvious features would include Google Maps and Transit integration, syncing with the clock in the iPhone, and even (currently disabled) next/previous stop jumps that you'll see at the bottom of the pages. We'll see if I ever get motivated to add any of those :)

Hello World - iPhone Style

I'm excited about mobile development again. I'm eagerly awaiting the iPhone SDK and while I wait, I figured I'd at least try some iPhone development in its current, web development, form.

I'll post about what I made in a future post. For now, I just wanted to link to some of the things that got me going.

Apple has some great developer resources, including the iPhone Dev Center. I'm not sure why they hide them all behind a login curtain, but they do. Once you create (or buy) an ADC login, you can access 2 hours worth of videos about iPhone development. The videos range from UI elements to how to simplify your app for smaller form factors. Even if you have no interest in Apple and the iPhone, you might enjoy the usability aspects of the talks. Most of the concepts apply to Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and other mobile development. If you watch and it all seems like common sense to you, good, you are better off than most developers that build UIs.

If you're ready to start building right away, look no further than iUI. iUI is a great framework to build web based apps that look native to the iPhone. Within an hour, I was able to build a great looking, highly functional, app using iUI. I tweaked the included CSS a bit to include some further button samples I found at the iPhone Dev Center. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt for his work on iUI.

Finally, if you want to follow some discussion and get some links to other apps people have built for the iPhone, head over to the iPhoneWebDev Google Group.

Tick tock on the SDK clock.

Snob Check

It was filler there, and it will be filler here, but I figured it would be fun to comment on the recent TUAW post that tackles the thought that Mac users are snobs.

I'll list the characterization and how it applies to me.

• to be perfectionists --- I have an eye for detail but I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist (close)


• to use notebooks --- Yes, I'm typing this post on one now


• to use teeth whitening products --- nope, never, but I could probably use it


• to drive station wagons --- my parents had a family truckster when I was a kid, but I drive an SUV


• to pay for downloaded music --- yes, hundreds of dollars a year


• to go to Starbucks --- I'm not a coffee drinker, but I'll have a hot chocolate or something if my wife wants to go. I've probably been to Starbucks 5 times in my life.


• care about "green" products and the environment --- absolutely, in fact, I participate in a green blog


• to own a hybrid car --- not yet, but I would


• and last but not least ... to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year --- I'm probably close these days. I used to buy more than 5 a year, as I was a bit of an adidas freak

Am I a snob? Eh, I like to think of myself more as a self-deprecating elitist.

Learn a bit about how to give and take

This is the MacBook Air post. This won't be as funny or as provocative as Wil Shipley's MacBook Air post, but you might like it anyway,

If you've seen the commercial for the MacBook Air (who hasn't?), you might recognize the title for this post. Apple takes such care in their marketing that they even managed to find a cool song with lyrics that fit perfectly with what the MacBook Air is trying to achieve. You know, "new soul", "strange world", "give and take", "felt the joy and the fear". Some would say that the only relevant lyric in the song is "making every possible mistake". So let's take a look at those mistakes.

• Sealed Battery - Yes, some folks carry around spare batteries and swap them during the day. I'm not one of those folks, and I don't know anyone who is. The only time I need to swap a battery is when it starts to hold less juice than a Florida orange. I buy a new one, swap it, and the old one pretty much sits around hoping the new battery will die and it can live life again. The battery costs $129 (same as the MacBook battery I just bought) and can be replaced with nothing more than a screwdriver. Sounds like this is more accessible than headlights on modern cars. Save weight and space on a battery latch daily, but require a screwdriver once every 1 or 2 years. Sounds like perfect give and take to me.


• Too thin - Have the people that toss this complaint out ever been on an airplane? Are they the ones with dual rolling carry-ons? I like to travel light. A messenger bag is all that goes with me on the plane unless it is a really short trip and I don't want to check a bag. A nice thin laptop would be fantastic for me.
  Thin means less material. Apple used aluminum rather than plastic for durability. I think aluminum weighs more than plastic, right? (my material engineer friends will certainly tear me up in the comments if not). So Apple kept the screen and keyboard full size, used heavy construction materials, and still kept the weight at 3 pounds. My MacBook weighs 5 pounds. My work Dell weighs over 7. You can absolutely feel 2 pounds when you're travelling all day.


• 1 USB Port - Who would use an Air? I'm guessing students, travelers, sales people, anyone on the go. How many USB ports do you use on the go? I use none. 1 USB still lets you plug in a thumb drive or a mouse. Any more than that and you can have a mini hub in your bag that you must be carrying to hold all of those USB devices you want to plug-in. I'm also wondering if the 1 USB port is a hardware limitation. We know that the external optical drive requires additional power from the USB port to run it. If they put more than 1 USB port on, they wouldn't know which port you'd plug the drive into, which might drive larger power supply requirements, which drives the whole product larger and heavier. The MacBook has 2 USB ports. I can't recall a time when I've ever used them both at once.


• No optical drive - I already covered this one in another post. If you want an optical drive and removable battery, buy a MacBook.


• Slow harddrive - This one gave me pause, but the Air is intended to be a secondary machine. Do the heavy lifting on your main box. The slower harddrive drove smaller size and weight, but it might have also been a cost saving issue. If the Air uses the same drive as iPods, they're saving a buck or more per drive, which translates to 10 bucks or more for you buying it at a price that people already think is too expensive.


• Price - If $1800 is too much, how much should it cost? For a real rough comparison, let's start with an $1100 MacBook and make it into an Air. Start by doubling the RAM as the Air comes with 2GB. Let's say $50 for that. Lighted keyboard, another $50. LED backlight, another $50. Tight design, $100. Weight savings, $100. No optical -$50. Even smaller power supply $50. Multi-touch trackpad - $50. Aluminum construction - $50. Slower processor - $50. First gen - $100. I gave it $100 for the first gen because today's MacBooks give you a hell of a lot more than the first gen for the same price, so we're comparing a new product vs. an established one. Do the math and that comes to about $1600. Would anyone that wouldn't buy one at $1800 buy one at $1600?

It's obvious I'm a fan of the Air. I think it has a place. It won't be a huge seller, but that doesn't make it a bad product, or a bad investment for Apple.

It's not all good. I do think they made some mistakes. Firewire for one. Give it one FW port. Battery life needs to be better too. Could it be that the battery was limited to meet the aggressive size and weight goals? For as much as they seem to want this thing to be used on the go, it should beat the battery life of the MacBook. Finally, the video out options. Another connector Apple? Really? I've got a drawer full of adapters for the iBook and MacBook that already aren't compatible. If I ever did buy an Air, I wouldn't be happy having even more dongles.

Receipt for a Donut

As Mitch Hedberg used to say, "I don't need a receipt for a donut. I give you money and you give me the donut, end of transaction." This is so true, until you're traveling on business. Then you need a receipt for every last donut, steak, copy expense, and shuttle ride.

If you're anything like me, you get credit card offers in your mailbox daily. I have no need or want for another credit card. I'd change my tune in a heartbeat if a credit card company could solve my receipt problem. I don't want receipts, ever. I want a record of my purchase, sure, but I don't want that record to be a 2x6" piece of weak paper with survey offers printed on the bottom. What I want is Visa or Mastercard to build a transaction culture that allows merchants to email me PDFs or XML of my purchase information.

Do you realize how easy this would make filling out your expense report for business travel? Everyone hates expense reports. We only fill them out because if we don't, we don't get our money back. I can't stand tracking 4 days worth of crumpled paper so I can manually transfer the data to an Excel spreadsheet. I always lose one, they're hard to read, and they're just wasteful.

The Life Takes Visa commercials love to show people flowing through a shop, swiping cards and getting on with things. But you never see a receipt in those commercials. Maybe they've already built this magical receipt email system and forgot to tell us. The technicals have to be simple. They have an account number that is tied to my name, physical address, and many times, my email address. Get some nice business to business web services going and the data can flow to me. This won't be free to build, but you can build it with the money you save on receipt paper and wasted sales while the minimum wage cashier pounds on the jammed printer.

BTW, this isn't my first set of thoughts on receipts. I've complained about them before.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some retailers are already jumping on this. Apple retail stores have "line busting" handheld computers that allow you to buy equipment right on the store floor. They'll then email your receipt to the account in your Apple ID. This is slick, but I'd still like something that applies across all merchants.

The Private Button

The revolution is being televised, well, at least uploaded. Between the Eye-Fi card and its ability to auto-upload to Flickr and Facebook, and cameras from Casio and others with built-in YouTube modes, it has become easy, too easy to float your life on the web.

We've already seen that just about anything you put on the web can and will be made public. It doesn't really matter if you've tagged it private. The only real way to keep things private is to not put them on the web in the first place. So...how long before every new camera you buy has a big private button that you push when you just captured something that you don't want the world to see?

Check-in Challenges

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Florida. As usual, we flew United Airlines. Our checkin process was a little interesting. It sounds like something you'd read on The Daily WTF. For starters United could use a UI overhaul on their automated kiosks. First off, you're given the option of employee/companion travel. I think that's for employees and companions of employees, but it isn't really clear. Second, you're given 4 options to identify yourself, the most common being a credit card swipe. Unfortunately the picture really doesn't convey that message and you have to read pretty close to know which option to pick. Other airlines just have you swipe your card (or passport) from the start.

It was also pretty funny to hear the guy next to me arguing with the United employee about how he didn't need to swipe his card because he'd already paid for the flight. It took them a few minutes to convince him the credit card was for identification only. Call me crazy, but couldn't they use the drivers license that they require as identification to start the identification process? It must be easier to read a credit card than 50 states worth of different data formats.

So, I swipe my credit card and it pops up my wife's name. No problem, we'll just check her in first. We're told that the FAA may delay our flight and we should look for alternates if possible. Ok, look for alternates then. It tells us none are available almost immediately. Why even bother to tell us to try alternates if it knows there are none?

We finish checking in my wife and I slide the card again expecting my info to pop-up. No, it's her again. Please note that the card I've swiped both times is the one with my name on it. Obviously the number is the same, but I'm pretty sure my name is encoded on the card as well because it shows up on the receipt at restaurants. Is this a common problem? Do related people not check-in to the same flight often? Being skilled in tricking crappy software (I write plenty of it myself), I pull out a different credit card which thankfully produces my name for check-in.

So now we are both checked in and waiting for the tags to print for the checked baggage. Why don't these print from the same kiosk? The helpful lady behind the counter asks us if we checked bags. We reply yes. She asks if we pushed the button saying we were checking bags. We reply yes. She tells us nothing is printing so we must not have. Well we did and we were sure we did and we went back and forth a couple of times. Eventually she decides the printer isn't working, but why did she have to even argue with us? If we had screwed up and forgot to tell the computer about our bag, there's nothing we can do at this point anyway, so she should just go about doing what needs done to make things right. That's what I hate about the automated kiosks. We've traded 5 knowledgeable ticket agents for 4 kiosks, 2 goofball agents that appear to be skilled in little more than sticker folding, and a knowledgeable agent that comes and cleans up when the goofballs don't know what to do. Questions like can you change our seats so my wife and I can sit together? stump the goofballs and require the roving expert. Before the kiosks, the ticket agent would just sit you next to the people you were checking in with. Hmm, progress.

Don't get me wrong. I love the kiosks when they work. If you aren't checking a bag and you aren't traveling with anyone, the kiosks are a breeze. When you need to change anything the kiosks just aren't up to the task yet.

Hey United, simplify please.

Nits List - iTunes Edition

I love iTunes, usually. It's a great app and one that is always open in my dock. It does have its issues. Most of them are minor. Here's my nit list:

• iPod syncing isn't as good as it could be. It needs the same interface you get when building smart playlists. For example, I might want to sync the 3 newest unwatched episodes of some shows, but the 3 oldest unwatched shows of others if I'm catching up on a season. I could do this by generating the playlists first and then syncing those, but why should I clutter my library with playlists only meant for the mobile device? Update: Ehh, maybe I just talked myself out of this one. I could just make an iPod sync lists folder to hide all of the playlist mucking.


• You should be able to drag a TV Show directly into the TV Shows library source. As it is, you have to add it to movies and then go set the type to TV Show. Yuck.


• Music videos are a video type, but they aren't a type in the library. Movies and TV Shows are, why not Music Videos?


• The iTunes store needs a wishlist in the store so it can follow me across the computers I log into.


• iTunes needs a "look again goofball" function for when it forgets where half of you library lives, even though the place it thinks the files live is the very place that they are. If anyone has a script to auto-fix (not auto-delete) the !'d tracks, let me know.


• The albums list on iPods needs to have a threshold applied. 1 track off of an album is not an album! I have a couple hundred actual albums loaded in my library. Unfortunately, I'll have many times that amount in the Albums list when browsing the iPod. This forces me to flood my playlists with playlists that are the real albums in my library.


• Building on the last one, they finally added folders to the library list. This makes it nicer to organize the albums in my playlists, but my iPod doesn't respect the folders, so it is of little use to me as most of my listening is on the iPod.


• I want to remove an item from my library within a playlist. At the least, give me a "Show in Library" right next to the "Show in Finder".


• Don't stop background syncs because a dialog has been popped up. I don't know if this is still an issue, but many times I've cursed at the not-updating podcasts on the Apple TV only to go find some message box in iTunes that had halted all downloads and syncing. I shouldn't have to check-in with iTunes every day to keep the related systems running.

Edit: Jason reminded me of the one that irks me the most (message boxes stop syncing). I have added it.

Spread the Sync

This is not a MacBook Air post. Trust me, you'd know if it was. That said, one of the complaints I've read about the MacBook Air is that the 80GB harddrive is too small. One reason folks think it is too small is that today's iTunes libraries would suck up at least half of that. You know what? They're right...if that's your main machine and keeper of your iTunes library.

Me, I wouldn't consider a MacBook Air a primary machine, but this isn't a MacBook Air post :) The meat of this is that the MacBook Air and every other secondary machine could make due with an 80GB drive just fine if iTunes had a new feature. Well, not a new feature, a feature that's been around since 2001. The feature I'm talking about is the ability to sync a subset of your iTunes library to a device, usually an iPod. I want my MacBook to act like an iPod to my main iTunes library. I want to use Smart Playlists to keep it popping with fresh content. I want my ratings, last played times, and playcounts to sync back to my main library. I want new content that shows up in iTunes on the MacBook to sync back to my main library.

With this feature, I can take 20GB of content on the go, and still have full access to all of my content using shared libraries when I'm back on my home network. The MacBook can wireless sync and I don't even have to know it happened. It would be great!

.Moonlit Snowflakes

I have posted a new iMix called .Moonlit Snowflakes.

I'd describe the music as quiet, pingy, elegant, and emotional. iTunes is stupid and can't manage to make a complete iMix using songs that you didn't buy from the iTunes Store, even though those songs are available on the iTunes Store. Therefore, the link to the iMix won't give you all of the songs. Here is the playlist as I intended it.

1. Lemongrass - Polar Nights


2. Boards of Canada - A Moment of Clarity


3. UNKLE - Twilight


4. Milosh - Push


5. Booka Shade - Lost High


6. Circlesquare - Fight Sounds Pt. 2d


7. BT - Good Morning Kaia


8. Underworld - To Heal


9. Lemongrass - Eclipse of the Sun


10. Trentemoller - Miss You


11. Underworld - Good Morning Cockerel


12. Chicane - Arizona, Pt. 1

Let me know if you like it or let me know if you hate it.

Previous iMixes
.Sunrise Skyline, .Dust and Rain, and .Slushy Streets.

Netflix Stats and iTunes Rentals

For years I've wanted to know some basic stats about my Netflix usage. How many movies am I churning through each month? How many movies have I watched total? How many movies have I watched in the best month? How many in the worst month? Netflix doesn't give you these stats directly, but you can get your full rental history and figure it out yourself. Shove the data through a Perl script and let Numbers draw some pretty pictures.

If you can't tell from the graphics, min month is 3. Max month is 16 (wow). Average is nearly 10 movies a month. In the 7 years I have been a Netflix customer, I have watched 831 movies (again wow). I guess my DVD player has earned its keep. I always figured we were going through 6-7 movies a month. That appears to have been true early on, but certainly not overall.

Other interesting items:

• We watched a lot of movies in 2005 and 2006.


• May seems to be a bad month for movies. I'm hoping this means that sprint was in the air and I was out on my bicycle, rather than watching movies.


• November looks like a great movie month. I guess that makes sense. The weather is cold and there are holidays and late year vacations for movie watching. Most of the summer blockbusters are out by then too, so there's lots to choose from.


• We rarely have two slow months back to back. This could be a product of shipping windows, or just catching up.

I was finally motivated to do this based on the rumored iTunes rentals coming at next week's MacWorld. From my prediction post, I stated $2.99 for 48 hours. If the rumored $3.99 for 24 hours comes true, Apple isn't going to see much of my movie rental money. With tax, Netflix is getting ~$17 a month. If I'm watching ~10 movies per month, I'm at $1.70 a movie and that's me watching when I want and returning it when I want. I'll have movies that are out of the mailbox and back in within 2 hours. Others will sit around for a week before they get watched. I really enjoy that. Assuming the movies from Apple won't be streaming, it will take an hour or hours to download the movie before you can watch it. If it then expires 24 hours after downloading, that would suck. It would be like those impotence commercials on TV. Once you pop that pill, the clock starts ticking.

Worse yet is the cost. $4 is pretty steep. That's as much as the local brick and mortars charge, at least I think so. I haven't been in a rental shop in over 7 years. You wouldn't have to spend time and money to drive to the store, but if the quality is sub-DVD Apple won't hear the end of the complaining. For me, the $4 doesn't match up well with the $1.70 I'm paying Netflix. I can see paying to watch something I just have to see now, or something that is stuck on Very Long Wait with Netflix, but overall, I can find something to watch while I wait a couple of days for a movie to arrive. Obviously the economics change if Netflix raises their price or my monthly totals go down. Luckily I know have the tools to help me track that! :)

I'm very interested in iTunes movie rentals. I have an Apple TV and love it. I watch a lot of movies, and I have a broadband connection. If iTunes and Apple TV are the vehicles for the content, Apple is well on their way to a winning product. Cost and quality will be the kickers for me. There are so many pricing options that I don't want to state a flat dollar amount, but to me $4 for 24 hours would be disappointing. Quality must also be near-DVD.

I think I'll go watch a movie now.

Cue It

A big thanks to Matt for leaving a comment on my old Chaptify post. To answer Matt's question, yes I did spend some time working on some code to convert .cue files to ChapterTool input. However, it isn't anything I'm all that proud of, at least not yet. This might make me dust it off and work some more.

Until then, check out Matt's online utility to do the .cue->XML conversion. I threw some .cue files at it and it seems to work well.

5 of the Now

• Silversun Pickups - Lazy Eye
  I keep a "next 5otn" list going at all times and post when I get up to 5. Sometimes I have more than 5 and hold one over for the next post. Lazy Eye was waiting patiently for awhile and funny enough, I heard it play while out shopping on Saturday. Apparently these guys are more popular than I thought. I can't decide if I like the original or the Jason Bentley Remix better. You can also check the iTunes Live Session version.


• Gui Boratto - Terminal
  Gui Boratto has really been tearing it up for me lately. He's only made it into one previous 5otn, but I've been digging plenty of his other stuff. You can buy this from Beatport, but I can't seem to make a link at the moment.


• Chromeo - Bonafied Lovin' (Jori Hulkkonen Remix)
  The original is so cheesy and so awesome. Jori really flips the vibe in the remix. It's a little darker and for that reason I hated the "ohh ohh ohh o"s in the mix. I've since listened to the track over a dozen times and I'm fine with it :) [Myspace] [Video on YouTube]


• Gui Boratto - Beautiful Life
  Just some more Gui Boratto that hooked me


• Sia - The Girl You Lost to Cocaine
  You're probably used to tracks in my 5otn being being 6 minutes or longer. Well this one isn't even 3 minutes long, so be sure to listen to it three times in a row. You may know Sia from Zero 7's Destiny. This one is a lot more fun and you gotta dig that voice. You should also go read her myspace profile. The YouTube embed is a live performance of the track.
  

Bonus - Hustler from Simian Mobile Disco was in a previous 5otn. You can get the Skatebard Remix for free from RCRD LBL.

Did I put enough links in this post?

I made good use of the recent iTunes gift card deal at Best Buy and I'm feeling generous so I'm again gifting one of these tracks to the person that leaves the comment I like best. A buck is up for grabs. Fight it out!

No, I Don't See

The bad pun title is the kick-off for the we don't need no stinkin' optical drives post.

I considered putting this in my original Macworld Predictions post, but since Thaddeus asked, I'm going to answer.

Do you think we're to the point where people don't care at all about physical discs? What about reinstalls?

No, I don't think we're to that point, at least not generally. However, an ultraportable laptop is not the machine that the average user buys. Usually ultraportable laptops are sold at a premium. Joe User would rather have more memory and a bigger screen to go along with a cheaper price. They're more likely to buy the machine in the Best Buy ad, than seek out a Japanese import. So, I don't think optical drives are necessary in ultraportable machines.

I think optical drives are still essential for any computer other than an ultraportable, but even that is fading. People still want to rip music from their CDs. People still want to install software they buy off the shelf. People want to feel safe that they can pop in any CDROM someone gives them.
Ultraportables on the other hand are for folks that are using them as second machines. These are power portables. Size must be a minimum. Weight is not allowed. Durability keeps you working when you're travelling. Heck, even a $50 savings for not including the optical drive is welcome on machines that hover around $2000.

Further blows against optical drives come with most software being available for purchase, download, and installation over the web. CD drives were replacements for the old floppy drives. These were needed to boot the machine. Many OSes support booting from flash drives and certainly from externally connected drives. OS loading is a concern, but not a deal killer. For the folks that assume they'll be stranded with a computer that won't connect to the projector and would need to burn their presentation to CD, I say spend $10 for a flash drive that fits on your keychain. That will be faster and cheaper than carrying around blank CDRs for doomsday. For me personally, I've only used my optical drive in my MacBook to install Leopard and to watch DVDs while travelling.

If and when Apple releases an ultraportable notebook without an optical drive, I think they'll ship an external drive with it. At worst, they'll offer one for purchase for $79.

My final advice, mainly for the folks that say Apple would be stupid to not include an optical drive, is that if you think you need an optical drive, buy a computer that includes one. You won't see Apple dropping them from MacBooks and MacBook Pros anytime soon, at least not at 13, 15, and 17" sizes.

Kindle and O'Reilly

The Amazon Kindle is very interesting to me. I'm probably not a big enough reader to have one for home, but I would like one for work. Having technical documentation on a nice eBook reader is attractive to me for many reasons.

• Portable, flowing screen. In other words, I can stick it on my desk wherever I need it to be, just like I do with a reference book, but without needing a stapler to hold the pages down. Sure, I could have another monitor just for reference text, but I don't always need reference text at a quick glance and there are just interactions with book-like info that you can't do easily with a monitor. You can't easily hold your finger on an API reference that you want to refer back to. You can't lay handwritten notes right up next to things on a page. You can't take that screen with you to the couch, on the bus, or the bathroom for that matter.


• Space - I don't know about you, but my cube is small and packed. 20 linear feet of books doesn't help things.


• Searching - How's that go? You can't grep dead trees. Exactly.


• Available offline - Accessing documentation online is great until your connection goes down or their connection goes down.

I'm a big O'Reilly fan. The picture to the right is the portion of my personal collection that isn't currently at work. The problem is that O'Reilly content isn't directly available on the Kindle. I was delighted to find that Tim O'Reilly himself posted some comments about why...

We aren't currently planning to offer books for sale directly on the kindle, but that could change if the device really takes off.
We really aren't interested in producing books in more and more formats. There's a real maintenance nightmare, as you have to update across the set every time you make a change.
Even supporting HTML and PDF/print is a hassle. So we'll add kindle when we know there's a significant market for it.

and...

Why no O'Reilly books on the kindle? Well, Amazon has chosen to use a proprietary format, with a conversion cost of a couple of hundred dollars per title to that format. Multiply that by 500+ O'Reilly books, and it would cost us $100,000 to have a strong presence on that new, unproven platform.

I guess I can buy that. There are further comments in the thread where it seems Tim (and O'Reilly readers) would be happy with PDF support that wasn't experimental as Amazon currently classifies it.

PDF support is important because O'Reilly currently offers many of their titles as PDF downloads for purchase, even by chapter. I found a sample chapter in PDF and it looks good, but then again, I don't have a Kindle either :)

The problem with good PDF support is that it bypasses Amazon's revenue model. They could help that with store relationships with sites like ORA's Safari. Tim mentions that too...

We'd also love to experiment with models in which people who are Safari subscribers could access that content on the kindle. We'd be very eager to have a reseller relationship with Amazon, such that they resell safari subscriptions on the kindle.

I guess I'll wait to see how things develop over the next few months. Books won't die, but I wouldn't mind burying a few reference titles in an eBook.

Macworld 2008 Predictions

What's an Apple fan to do while waiting for Macworld Expo to arrive? Post their predictions of course, just like I did for WWDC.

• No tablet - I still don't see this happening.


• The heavily rumored ultraportable is just the return of the 12" PowerBook as a MacBook Pro. The 12" PowerBook is/was loved by those that have/had them. I'm really surprised we haven't seen it return already. I imagine they were waiting for a case redesign, which I do expect for the MacBook Pro. The existing MacBooks won't change much at all. I think a Blu-ray drive will be an option for them.


• The 12" MacBook Pro will not have an optical drive (but the other ones still will). This isn't the machine that you use to rip CDs and you'll just have to deal with not watching DVDs, unless you rip them or use the external drive. Treat yourself and buy a fresh movie over Wi-Fi while you wait for your plane to board.


• iTunes movie rentals. I'll guess $2.99 for 48 hours, but I would like to see a model similar to Netflix, without waiting for the post office. Pay $19 a month and have 3 movies out at any time. Return one and you get to download and watch something else. How cool would it be if Apple built in BitTorrent tech to save their bandwidth bill?


• New Cinema displays, hopefully at more competitive prices.


• We'll get iPhone SDK details and see demos of some apps in progress from some big names, although I can't really think of who.


• 16 GB iPhone at $499 pricepoint. No change in price on existing models


• Apple TV software update - I love my Apple TV but folks don't seem like they'll be happy until it dies a painful death. Apple is certainly going to give it one more wave of software at least. I doubt the hardware will change, even though I would like to see my Mac nano dream come true.


• Steve will tell us all about Leopard being the best OS X ever. Vista is flopping and folks are switching.

Those are my predictions. Feel free to mock me when I'm wrong.

Albums of the Year: 2007

• LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver


• Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City


• Aesop Rock - All Day: Nike+ Original Run


• Underworld - Oblivion With Bells


• The Chemical Brothers - We Are the Night


• UNKLE - War Stories

Not much to say other than these albums were the ones that got repeated, consistent play throughout the year. Some discs spent months in the truck CD changer before ever making it inside the house for an iPod rip. iTunes, Beatport, and Amazon now let me buy plenty of individual tracks, but I still have massive respect for the album. To create an inspired and varied, yet cohesive, body of work will always be an amazing feat. Long live the album.

What were your favorite albums of the year?

Sexy Sub

Leave it to my mother. I tend to think she over-decorates. Here's a good example. It's the holiday season, so we have to make the subwoofer look festive, right?



It looks like a garter. We have women's clothing decorating the home theater. What's next, a flat screen mini-skirt?



How about a loudspeaker bra?



Do you find this as ridiculous as I do?

I'm Jimmy From the Blog Next Door

Just a quick pointer for those of you with Blogger blogs that you can turn on OpenID commenting.

I wasn't aware of OpenID [wikipedia] when I wrote my earlier comment post, but it sure seems like it provides the follow you identity that I want.

The Big Book

I know some readers of this blog are actively seeking better and bigger storage solutions. After a long search, I decided to go with the Western Digital My Book 1TB Studio Edition. This is the mini-review.

Design - This is a great looking drive. It was even smaller than I expected it to be. To give you some perspective, I photographed it next to an iPod.



I've also found that you can stick this between the iMac foot and screen. You don't lose any desk space this way, but it looks a little silly and puts the light in a place that is distracting. I still have it there, but I plan to move it to a shelf up behind the computer soon.



The Studio edition is formatted for Macs, and they did a decent job matching the silver of Macs. It isn't exactly the color of the latest iMacs, but it is really close and you really can't tell unless you shine some direct light. I'm also happy that the power supply is a small wall wart. Some folks don't like wall warts, but I hate the inline bricks even more. It's really hard to hide wires when there's a box of animal crackers in the middle of the wire.

Noise - The drive is fairly quiet. You can hear the tick tick of the drive head searches, but only when it is quiet. I have not heard a fan spin up loudly like some other external drives.

Software - If you're like me, you don't want software to run a hard drive. The drive came with a "button controller" for OS X that is supposed to control the fuel gauge light on the front of the drive. I installed it, or at least I think I did. It gave me no indication that it worked or not. I never saw the drive light behave any different in a week of use, so I uninstalled the driver.

Drive light - You'll love this or hate it. The light slowly pulses when the drive is asleep. It marquees Knight Rider style when the drive is being accessed. I wish I could turn the light off completely.



Interfaces - I'm using FW800 (remember kids, USB drives burn processor, FW doesn't). It seems fast, but I didn't benchmark it. It cranked across nearly 500GB in the first Time Machine backup.

Power - The drive has a feature where it will turn off completely when the computer is off. Folks tell me this is pretty common, but I've not had this on previous external drives. My Kill A Watt says the drive has used less than a KWH in 8 days of use and that includes a few days of Time Machine activity.