Apple on Tony Andrew Meyer

Cards (iOS App)

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:41:58 +1200

Cards is one of the lesser quality Apple iOS apps (think MobileMe Gallery rather than Keynote). The premise is simple: you create a greeting card on your iOS device (just like you would in iPhoto) and through in-app purchasing you pay for it to be printed and sent (anywhere in the world) - unlike in iPhoto where you’d have to order many and they’d be sent to you to then send on. Aspects of the app are good - the templates are very customisable and generally nice, and it’s a pretty simple process to create a card. The pricing ($6.50 including postage) is extremely reasonable considering the cost of a decent (not customised) card elsewhere. However, there are considerable flaws: the purchasing is odd - it doesn’t use the standard in-app purchasing system (I can’t understand why not), so you’re prompted for more information than simply your App Store password; the App is bizarrely iPhone/iPod resolution only (nearly the same interface would work perfectly well on an iPad, where you’ve got access to all your high-quality photos via Photo Stream anyway); and the cards take forever to arrive. The latter is the most significant flaw, of course. In a few cases (e.g. “thank you” cards) it doesn’t matter how long the card takes to arrive; in most cases (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, …) timing is actually very important. We sent a card while visiting the Auckland Museum at the end of the school holidays, and it took over a week to arrive; one has apparently been sent to us (around the same time) and has yet to arrive. The “shipping notification” email arrives days before the card does, indicating that the problem isn’t in the printing, but in the delivery (presumably they are being printed in Australia and there’s some sort of international shipping delay causing issues). It’s likely that this is a problem specific to New Zealand (and perhaps isolated other countries). Unfortunately, that does mean that it’s less likely that it’ll be quickly fixed. We’ll probably try this again in a couple of weeks, and see if the speed has improved - if not, then the app is only useable in rare circumstances, which is unfortunate, because we’d likely otherwise use it quite frequently.

Displaying PDFs via the iPad

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:57:40 +1200

I used the iPad’s external screen output for the second time today (the first was trying out Chopper 2 with the TV as the screen and iPhone as controller) - this time not just as an experiment. I have a set of revision worksheets (all PDFs that I inherited many years ago - I might have Word documents somewhere, but I’m not sure where). Going over the questions in class, I can simply read the question out loud (but people don’t listen well enough and can’t ‘go back’ to it), or write it on the board (slow, handwriting code is problematic when you’ve got messy writing), but ideally it’s projected. The classroom does have a projector - in previous years I’ve hooked up my aging laptop and put the PDFs up to see. My hope was that I could use the iPad this year (since it’s meant to be replacing the laptop in most circumstances). The first problem is that I don’t have an application that shows PDFs that will use the external screen (e.g. iBooks ignores the external display). This is pretty annoying, and I hope it gets changed with an update in the near future. It’s not hard to imagine a business meeting where everyone has iPads and wanting to show a PDF that has been created (an advertisement, a manual, etc) to everyone at the meeting. Basically the only application I do have that will use the external display to show a document is Keynote. So the next step was creating a Keynote document with the same content as the PDFs. The next problem that arises is that I can’t copy the text from the PDFs on the iPad (not in iBooks, and not in Stanza, which is the only other PDF reader I have installed). I could see it perfectly well, but there was no way to extract the text. I hope this changes too. Just enabling select+copy in iBooks would be great. It’s not hard to imagine use cases here, either: select text, copy it, and tweet a quote from a document. (Ok, there are DRM issues with books, but just do something like leave out “select all” - even just enabling this for PDF would be ok). I resorted to using the laptop. I copied the PDF content to a PowerPoint (no Mac here to use OS X Keynote) document, and then (via Dropbox, since I don’t have a computer to sync with here) and opened it in (iOS) Keynote. The final steps, which did work, were very nice. I formatted the slides using Keynote (very simple, didn’t miss a mouse or keyboard at all), including inserting a few images via Safari. When the time came to use the slides, the projector accepted the iPad’s output without problems (although the position and location of the cable meant that the iPad was in an awkward location - buying the Keynote Remote application and using an iPhone/iPad Touch would have improved that). (For some reason, I couldn’t get the “laser pointer” functionality working at the time, although this has worked fine when I’ve tested before. I didn’t really need that). Overall, it’s a pretty good experience if you already have Keynote (or PowerPoint) material. It’s a pretty terrible experience if you have something else (e.g. code!) that you want to display. Thankfully, that can be addressed in software - even in third-party software.

Apple's Dog Food

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:26:53 +1200

The saying goes that you should eat your own dog food. It seems to me that Apple should be doing this with respect to their iOS (specifically iPad) applications. Unfortunately, it’s their apps that I have most to complain about.

Missing iPad versions

Firstly, why do they have applications that aren’t universal? (Or at least don’t have an iPad version)? I probably don’t have all of Apple’s apps, but three that I do have, and use, are stuck in the ugly 2x mode. I use Remote all the time. An iPad version would be great - basically the same as the small version, but all the controls could be on screen at once, rather than having to switch between “Control” mode and menu selection. The “Now Playing” screen could probably always be displayed, too. Texas Hold ’em: I don’t use this a lot, but it’s a reasonably good, simple, poker game. Basically nothing needs to be done to the interface, except add higher resolution graphics and flick the iPad bit. It would be much more playable at the higher resolution. I get the feeling this was written as a demo, but so little work would be required to update it. Mobile Me Gallery: ok, so Mobile Me is pretty much a joke at this point, apart from “Find My iThing”. Still, I do have some photos there, and there must be a few other people. While we are waiting for Mobile Me to turn into something worth using, why not update this app? There are plenty of good photo browsers that show how it can be done, and showing off photos is a great use of the app. Alternatively, build Mobile Me support into the Photos app.

Google Voice? Who really cares?

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:26:46 +1200

I really enjoy listening to Jason Calacanis when he’s on TWiT, and I think he generally makes a lot of sense (and considering his success, he clearly knows more than me). However, his anti-Apple rant (like so many others) is really off-base (I’m not the only one that thinks so).

There is no technical reason why the iTunes ecosystem shouldn’t allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player

The iTunes ecosystem does allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player (even more so now that music is DRM-free). You can build an application that uses the XML library description that iTunes creates to figure out where all the music/video is, and do what you like with it. The way I see it, there’s no reason that iTunes/Apple should be forced to support any MP3 player with their software. Apple clearly makes some money from the iTunes music/video sales, but it’s clearly not the main profit generator is the ecosystem - the high-margin iPods/iPhones are. Apple has spent a great deal of time and money building a store and an application to make the players more appealing. Why should any other player get to piggyback on the top of that? If (e.g.) Palm wants to create an online music store and develop an application that works with it and the Pre, then they should be able to (and I see no reason they can’t). I like iTunes more than other media applications I’ve used, but it’s certainly not perfect, and it shows that it started out as a music player and is now a great deal more. I love the iTunes Store, but Amazon completes with it (I can’t tell how well, since they won’t see to me in NZ) as does the Zune Store - which even offers a subscription model (no idea if this is available in NZ - it’s too Windows-centric for me). There’s absolutely room for someone (e.g. Palm) to build a better store (or interface with an existing one like Amazon) and built a better application. Do that, and build a better device, and you’ll get customers. Don’t expect that Apple should have to help you compete against them.

My 2GB, 4 day 0.0.1 iPhone update

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:24:26 +1200

A few days ago, Apple released version 3.0.1 of the iPhone OS, which addressed a pretty major SMS vulnerability. When Olyvia tried updating her 3GS to 3.0.1, something went wrong. The iPhone entered “Recovery Mode”, which means that it displays an image indicating that you need to connect it to iTunes, and you can’t do anything else (no phone calls, no iPod, no applications - absolutely nothing). Connecting the phone to iTunes prompted a message indicating that the phone needed to be recovered - doing so downloaded the 3.0.1 update, and then got stuck on the “Verifying Restore with Apple” step for a long time, until it would finally fail with error “3104”. This process could then be repeated, with the same results. What this meant in practice was that the phone was bricked as of last Friday. An update should never be able to brick a (legitimate, not jailbroken) phone! Even more, failing to verify a restore with Apple should never leave the phone in a broken state. I tried many thing to resolve this:

iTunes applications restricted to US store

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:27:57 +1200

What possible reason can developers (Apple?) have for restricting an application like Grocery IQ to the US store? I would have purchased this, but it’s not available in the NZ store. I can’t see any reason that it wouldn’t work just as well here. (I can understand that annoying legalities prevent applications like Puzzlotto being sold, but that’s a whole different story). This isn’t the only application like this I’ve come across, just the most recent one. It makes no sense at all.

Hardly news, but: Vodafone NZ sucks

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:54:48 +1200

They finally (hard to believe they waited this long) released their iPhone plans (the website is barely up at the moment - they own the second largest ISP in NZ, and can’t handle a bit of load!). I knew that the data would be expensive here, although I had a little hope when I saw the costs in Australia. This is much worse than I thought it would be, though. Are people really going to pay $250 per month?!? I guess so, but you’re excluding vast numbers of people that would be otherwise interested in this month. My guess is that the cost is indirectly Apple’s fault. At the WWDC keynote, Jobs pointed out that the cost around the world would be as low as (or lower than) the new US price - no doubt Apple enforces this in their contracts with the providers. Vodafone NZ doesn’t want to sell the phone for $199, but has to, so simply raises the contract price until they get what they want out of it anyway. This is twice as expensive as the US or even the complaining Canadians. And we have a reasonably decent 3G network, so the phone would have been useful here. The “250” plan costs $2,619 for 24 months. For that, you get the phone, 120 minutes, 600 txts, and 250MB of data a month. I’d pay that, but 120 minutes isn’t enough (we used about 200 minutes last month), and 600 txts are barely enough (580 last month). It’s the data that breaks the deal - 250MB is about 8MB a day. IOW, barely enough to check email and use the map occasionally. My Zabbix status page is about 3MB. I could check it twice a day. Ridiculous. The “500” plan costs $3719 for 24 months, and gives you the phone, 250 minutes, 600 txts, and 500MB of data a month (16MB a day). Perhaps enough data to use the phone as long as you were really careful and around accessible wifi a lot. But that’s a big jump in price. The “1GB” plan (I can’t believe that’s the largest!) costs a whopping $6349 for 24 months (3 and a third brand new iMacs!). 600 minutes, 600 txts, and 1GB of data (32MB a day). Too many minutes, and still not enough data, although it’d be useable. But $250 per month? There’s no way that I can justify spending that, even as a business expense (I would be using it to check the status of servers while out). A 2GB plan (paying the overage cost) costs $7069 for 24 months. 600 minutes, 600 txts, 2GB for $280 per month. The other option is to stick with our current plan and add a data pack. We currently get 60 minutes, 600 txts and also have three “best mates” (unlimited txts, pxts and calls) for $46/month. With the 200MB data plan added, the cost is $2950.75 for 24 months. That’s only just more expensive than the iPhone 250 plan, and would suit us much better (the best mates make all the difference). The difference between 8MB of data a day and 6.45MB of data a day is the difference between barely using the data and barely using the data. With the 1GB data plan added, the cost is $3430.75 for 24 months. Less than the iPhone 500 plan! Twice the data for less money! What are they thinking? More importantly, what are the suckers that sign up for this thinking? Sure you get 120 minutes with the iPhone plan, but we have three best mates that account for vastly more than 60 minutes of call time. Given that most of the calls and a large proportion of our txts are to those three people, we get better value for exactly the same usage for close to half the price. So: is it worth another $50 per month (and $1129 upfront) to have the iPhone? That’s a large chunk of money. It’s a great device, and we absolutely would use the GPS/mapping/data functionality that our iPod touch lacks. Lots of thinking in the next couple of days! A final note: the iPhone itself is $1129, the iPod Touch is $449. $680 for GPS, calls, txts, and (for lots more money) data while not connected to wifi. Pretty steep.