The Other Man's Opinion!

I am enjoying my iPhone – at this particular point in my life for some reason having the ease of use and the overall hardware and software support seems quite nice. I can appreciate some of the technical nicities of the Android family, but here is one case that I think Apple did it right. At this point the only thing that the Android Family – Android, Droid, Nexus, offer in common is the operating system. Each of the phones has a slightly different form factor and since I haven’t actually had a nexus in hand, would guess that since it is made by HTC it has at least one non-standard plug. .

Since the iPhone and the iPod Touch are virtually identical in form factor – hardware designed to work with them is pretty universal and thus with that large a market – readily available in many shapes, sizes and colors.  In the past I have critisized Apple for the limitations, in this case I have to openly admit that it works and have found that I am able to get what I need quickly and reasonably.

I have been using the iPhone as a book reader and as my alarm clock – a quick app and a small set of speakers on my bedstand and my reader quickly turns into a clock radio. I read in bed (love the backlit screen – doesn’t bother anyone when I  read) and when I finish reading at night I put the iPhone in the speakers, which charge it up and also let it wake me the next morning.

Have been playing with my new toy (I am apt to do that:)). Downloaded a couple of free apps that I have found useful.

The first one was Remote – this app allows me to run the iTunes site on my PC from my iPhone (having to use the small i capital next letter will drive me crazy for a while – thought I got a way from that with dBase) , but I digress. Remote allows me to set up playlists and songs in iTunes and then lets me run the playback from anywhere on the internal Wi-Fi network.

The second is the Zillow app – was recently in an area where we were looking at properties – would have been nice to have the Zillow app along with so that we could see the houses that they have listed and the virtual tours that are included.  Would have helped looking at some and would have quickly eliminated others as well as letting us know what else might be of interest in the neighborhood. I am saying this with the limitation of not having tried this yet in a live environment, but coupling the recent experience with the information that I see in the app, I  do think it will work fine. (I don’t always agree with Zillow’s evalutaions – but where they are displaying the house’s listing price they seem to be correct).

I do believe that I will be using the iPhone as a tool more than my older Windows Mobile phone (HTC Tilt) - primarily do to the interface – it makes it easy to do the thing you want as quickly as possible with out fumbling with a stylus.

More to come!

Well 2009 has come and gone and for many of us – good riddance! Technology wise we had some pros and cons, but the impact on the economy and the number of people that are either unemployed or under employed in the technology areas is much greater than we would ever have wanted to see.

We are looking forward to a new year with 2010 and the changes that it brings – may they be everything we hope for.

I have already blogged about my new iPhone which is a distinct change in technology for me. I have just picked up a copy of UBUNTU 9.10 to review, a copy of the beta Office 2010, and am working with several other new toys and software that I will discuss in the weeks to come.

To all – the best of years – the best of decades – and the best of life!

John McHugh

After years of using a variety of different smart phones (most recently the AT&T Tilt) I have moved to an iPhone. I resisted for quite a while for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is a very closed system both hardware and software wise. I picked up the phone yesterday as this was the first day that my contract allowed me to move to phone for an outrageous price and not an egregious one.

I have the iPhone 3GS 32 GB model. I openly admit that I have underestimated the interface. I am very happy with the way it works and the apps that came with it and the few that I have downloaded so far seem to do exactly what I expect them to do and they do it very well.

My reservations had a bit of reinforcement this morning when I went to install the Skype app for the iPhone and found that it had been pulled from the app store. All of a sudden we are faced with a missing piece of software from the place where you are supposed to download all apps for your phone or face the wrath of Apple/AT&T. I also had a jolt when I went to get the phone to find out that there is no insurance available from AT&T – Best Buy has a plan that runs $15 per month (this price is specifically for the iPhone and is the only phone that cost more than $10 including the Droids) and this does not cover theft or loss. I felt compelled to get the 32GB since there is no means of adding memory – a micro card slot would have been nice (the Droids seem to think so).

I am reserving judgement on the non-replaceable battery in the iPhone – I have picked up a small rechargeable black box that will recharge the phone or extend its life while on planes etc. so I will see if this takes the place of the spare batteries that I carried for other phones.

I will be looking over a number of apps for the phone and seeing which make sense for me. I am not much of a game player so many of the 100,000 apps available will go untouched – I will report on those that I like – one that hit home quickly was Fluent News – this is a compilation of news ala Google but it seems to be deeper and much easier to get to the news than Google. I am also a Big Oven recipe user and there is an app for that, however, I am awaiting the extension that has the shopping cart.

Revisiting my previous post on Linux, I picked up a bootable disk that had 4 version of Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mythubuntu with each of the the versions having a different GUI. So in one fell swoop, you get a chance to check out Gnome, KDE, and XFCE.

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• Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (Alpha 4) Overview Screenshots (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)

I was just out on Facebook and one of the posts asked whether we supported healthcare reforms. This is interesting because it only asked one side of the question and that is whether we support healthcare reform which most of us do, or what’s being proposed.

In the title I compare healthcare and the netbook. I think I see a little bit of this in our present situation. The current group of notebooks had gotten to the place where there were big bulky and loaded with features and software that a lot of people would never use but you had to pay for it anyway so they weren’t as affordable as a basic package could be. So we designed the netbook. It is small, light, easy to carry, easy to understand, affordable for just about everyone, available from anywhere and is as close to a computer Volkswagen as anything we ever seen. This is sort of the people’s computer. It has enough function, enough power, enough screen, and is capable of doing the overwhelming majority of what people want to do on a day-to-day basis.

Basic healthcare should be a little like that. We shouldn’t have to worry about it while switching jobs, or if we’ve an existing condition, or if we are moving to a new state, etc. The costs for a procedure should be the same regardless of how we’re paying for it, not something negotiated or dictated by an insurance company or government entity. It should be a fair price that we all understand and covers the cost and compensation fairly. Yes there are these and other items that need to be addressed as our society changes from one that has most health care insurance provided by employers and has created holes for those who are between jobs. Fixing the problems does not require swatting flies with a sledgehammer, it may be more difficult to actually work this out correctly but it is what’s necessary.

Many of the things that have driven up the cost of healthcare such as lack of tort reform, lack of competition across state lines, and very high costs for many of the drugs we use are not being addressed by current proposals. So while we wait for reform we are in the process of building a bigger bureaucracy that in itself will cost more, doing nothing to reduce the cost of healthcare, and in many ways just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There will be things that go beyond the scope of basic health care. Things like organ transplants and other major procedures. These can be dealt with through some kind of catastrophic coverage and be outside the basic coverage system. Just as the gaming notebook that costs an order of magnitude more than a netbook covers a special need that a small group requires, we don’t make everyone buy a gaming computer in case they want to play a game someday.

Going back to my comparison between the netbook and healthcare reform it would seem that we should be able to come up with a system that is somewhat inexpensive, provides most of our basic healthcare needs, and is available on a general basis. I think we can do this without several thousands of pages of regulation coming through Congress. I am a firm believer that any bill that is so complicated that a high school graduate can’t read and understand what is in it, is not a bill that we that we should ever consider.

Current proposals are just that. They are so big and so complicated that the people who represent us and who have to vote on these proposals have indicated (and this is from both sides) that they have not really had a chance to read them or understand them but they are hot to trot to pass them or shoot them down.

Until we can come up with a healthcare system proposal that is as functional as a netbook then I think we need to keep working on it. In the meantime we have the netbook and a flawed but reasonably functioning healthcare system.

I had need recently to utilize Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software. Speech recognition software has come a long way and now appears to be a viable tool. I was pleasantly surprised with the degree of accuracy available using this tool,

I have used it to create several emails, documents, and blog entries and have been able to do this relatively efficiently. The product trained quickly using my voice and analyzing documents and emails to understand the form of my writing and my vocabulary.

It was pretty accurate to begin with and gets better as I use it, This does not mean that  I don’t occasionally get sloppy and not enunciate, which will produce the occasional odd entry. These can be easily cleared with a quick “scratch that” command which deletes the last string that you entered.

You have excellent control within certain environments such as word processing and browsing/searching the web. Unknown programs work with a hybrid of keyboard, mouse and voice and using the scripting function you can create new commands. We are not at the point of going strictly to voice with our systems but we can realize some definite gains from the use of speech software in controlling them, especially in the area of capturing large quantities of text.

One failing of the speech recognition software is that if you are using it in a very noisy environment, especially one where there is a significant amount of speech in the background,  It will occasionally pick up stray sounds and place stray text in your document. This is definitely a product of the type of microphone that you are using. The more directional your mic, the less interference you get from extraneous sounds.

Sin is ce I am going to be giving this product a workout over the next few weeks I will keep you up-to-date on the progress that it makes in staying with my needs both in control and in document creation. It will be interesting to see how much I grow to use it over more standard input devices and how much it really can take over for the keyboard and mouse.

I have always had a pretty good projector available for doing presentations and that was way it was utilized. At the same time I occassionally viewed videos from the web on my laptop or desktop, but never quite put the two together. Recently there was a battle between my television provider and one of the local channels. This created a problem with viewing two of only a few shows that I watch on TV, so we decided to try out the projector for watching video on the web. Since I had a place to mount it I got a large screen and we set out to see “Lost” in almost life size. A 100 inch screen is fantastic! We then started using the watch online version of NetFlix and that works out nicely as well.

You have to dim the room significantly (this will vary with the power of the projector – ours was selected for portability so it isn’t quite as bright as some of the larger units) more than you would for watching on a screen, but we brought down one of the  reading lamps for reading or working on a laptop while watching.  Additionally we have found that this works well for the few times that you need a really big monitor to work on something – especially if you are collaborating. The resolution is more than sufficient to provide a working view and the size is awesome.

The projector I have, did not come with an HDMI imput, but it does have a DVI – found an adapter at a local electronics store and a fifteen foot hdmi cable and I now hook up my Blu-Ray disk player to the projector as well for group movie night.

Don’t do a lot of gaming, but I could see how this setup would be interesting in that environment.

This also made it clear to me that a computer as part of the home entertainment system is now becoming more than just an interesting add-on – it now gets used much more than the DVD player and if we didn’t already have a dedicated DVR I would probably use it to record as well. Not quite ready to replace all of my equipment and reset, but when I do, I will definitely consider how this fits into the overall setup and integrate it into the sysem.

So if you have a projector sitting around most of the time that you don’t use, give it a try – you might be amazed. Andyou might want to see where the computer plugs into the entertainment system (P.S. there are devices for wi-fi-ing your video and audio from your computer into the entertainement system).

For those of you unfamiliar with Mind Mapping, it is a something with which you should familiarize yourself. I find it especially useful for non-linear thinkers – the kind of person that writes a paper and then goes back and creates the outline. With mind-mapping you don’t have to think about the order of the content, you  can brainstorm and record the concepts as they come to you and then freely add notations and  assemble them into the longer piece by pushing and pulling the topics into the most logical order. You can also put down a major concept and free-flow your ideas into it as sub-topics – and drill down further under the subtopics, until you have the complete thought recorded.

It is also good for planning projects and personal items such as parties and get-togethers. Since it is an excellent brain-storming tool, it is a good tool for design sessions. Some of the software tools allow for the capture of documents and graphics attached to a node on the map, so design becomes something akin to the process I described above for writing a paper. You put the various pieces in place and then assemble them into the logical whole.

Tools for Mind-Mapping range in cost and complexity from FreeMind (a free open-source product) which is a pretty good little tool but does not have all of the glitz or power of a product like MindManager from MindJet that will set you back several hundred dollars. There are several others but I have used these two depending on the circumstances. MindManager offers a great deal of integration into other products and an extremely good interface and library of symbols. Freemind is available to all and in a group setting where you may want to do a joint session, and everyone does not have access to the same tool – this provides a common ground to work through the session.

From experience I have seen the tool used to quickly assemble documentation for a software project that would have taken 4 to 5 times longer working without the tool. I have found it can make many areas of my work more efficient since it appears that my mind works in sync with the process better than the more traditional linear outline process.

Several conversations I have had regarding Amazon’s remote deleting of a book from peoples Kindles indicate that there are a number of people who are questioning hardware e-Book readers especially the Kindles. Looking at this situation there are several aspects that should arouse the curiostity. First of all – Amazon selling an unlicensed book – OK – mistake made – however, unless the demands of the person who had the copyright on the material were egregious, Amazon should have paid the fees (even if it meant taking an overall loss) and let things be. If the situation were untenable then Amazon should have pulled the books – sent refunds to the persons who purchased the book and request that they delete the book from their readers. As it is they only deleted the book from those that were connected at the time the did the deletion. One person likened Amazon’s actions to the police finding a stolen auto in your driveway and impounding it. I equate it to a bookstore owner who realizing he sold you a book he shouldn’t have, breaks into your house, retrieves the book and leaves a check for a refund.

So, by demonstrating remote control of the device they have angered those that had there devices manipulated, brought into question the security of the device (if I owned one there is no way that I would put confidential material on it that can be accessed from the outside) and indicated to the world that there is a window into the device that may be exploited. And this may extend into the Kindle interface for the iPhone and iPod.

I have some roots in the publishing world and we foresaw many of the problems of the printed page – especially newspapers and magazines. In many cases their subscription rates did not cover the actual production and delivering of the materials – advertising picked up the slack, so there was a balance between circulation and the rates for advertising that always being taken into consideration. With some of the advertising going to the internet and the loss of advertising due to the present downturn, especially real estate and automotive ads, the publications really started to hurt. Moving to an electronic form of delivery was inevitable. The Kindle was one of the means to that end. As a news source you could keep your editorial and reporting staff and deliver the news to a device that could be updated as necessary – you could set up a series of charges for various updates and types of news that you provided. Done properly this could prevent the loss of many of the news sources we have.

The Kindle would work fine for this but is too expensive to be just a newspaper reader – the cost alone is signficantly more than subscribing to a newspaper for a couple of years. So we  look at its primary use for now, putting books on it This helps to rationalize the cost but there are no savings on buying books for the Kindle – you pay the same as the printed books – even though there are no printing and delivery costs. I am not sure that I buy their argument that these are insignificant in the cost of a book.

So then we come to what I feel would have been the product’s best argument for existence – providing a paperless environment. Getting things that would normally be read on paper delivered in a format or converted to a format that would be readable on the Kindle – white papers, essays, reports, etc. – the possibilities are staggering. However, we now have to consider that someone from the outside has access to that material – would we put business or even personally confidential material on the device – I don’t think so – so we are reduced to a fancy book and newspaper reader that will have a reasonable following but will never reach its potential until security is increased and we are assured through word and deed that the information on the device is as least as sacrosanct as the material on our notebook computers.

P.S. – they also need color – the comics are better in color  :)