Welcome to infinite expanse, the web site of Jim Benton.

Yesterday was a good day

51 days ago

Morning, 10AM, three cyclists arrive in my alley as arranged. I’d hoped for twice as many but I guess there was sleeping to be done somewhere.

We rode Diversey to the lake front, a much smoother route than last week’s North Ave. The weather was warm and suited us fine. Part of the path was windy, but not enough to overpower the mornings’s enthusiasm. It was a brisk ride without any real stopping, and we reached 51st street in about an hour.

Hyde Park is a nice area. We took a break on the steps above where the Manhattan Project started the first sustained fission reaction sixty-odd years ago. We talked about the atomic age, and what it would be like to help build a machine that took the lives of millions. A meandering ride took us to breakfast at a Greek diner and a followup surprise gelato.

Riding back was windier once we left the lakefront at Roosevelt and wandered around the loop toward Milwaukee. I was tired but happy as I arrived home.

In the evening I sat with friends, listening to the sounds outside. Sirens mixed with voices and invited themselves in through an open window. The splashing of cars through puddles was the only clue it was raining. We watched Lost in Translation, a fitting film for the weather.

I need to find a destination for next week’s ride. Maybe south again?

Apple, why can't we just be friends?

280 days ago

I’ve been using the fancy iPhone for about a month now, and at this point I think I can make some knowledgeable observations. Please prepare yourself, as a conclusion may be drawn near or shortly following the end of this article.

Like the iPods that came before it, the iPhone is a device defined by it’s simplicity- minimal controls, clean interface, and most strikingly for a cell phone, very little extraneous crap (with Firmware 1.1.1 this has somewhat changed; that issue is addressed below). One of my favorite things about the iPhone is how it doesn’t have a T-Mobile or Verizon or AT&T button smack in the middle of its controls. That most wireless phones can sacrifice an entire key to unwanted corporate tie-ins and garbage stores is, perhaps, the strongest evidence that we really do need fewer buttons in phone interfaces.

But minimizing the interface does have a price: flexibility of use1. Building a device that could be considered elegant (and I believe the Phone qualifies) requires the ability to say no to unnecessary features. On the iPhone this means you can’t copy and paste text. Or send text messages to more than one recipient. And multiple inboxes (the only area of MobileMail I imagine anyone actually uses) are many more taps apart than they ought to be. But none of these are show stoppers, at least when seen in the same light as the iPhone’s browser, contact management, and overall interface.

The strange thing about Apple’s devices is their greatest weaknesses and are almost always due to design decisions made for reasons other than usability. These are the things that drive users mad- and usually for a good reason.

With my previous iPod I only had one issue I would categorize as ‘user-unfriendly2‘: the read-only nature of it’s music storage. If you’ve ever had the time to poke around on an iPod, you’ll discover that unlike the iTunes Music folder in a user’s home folder, the audio files on an iPod disk are arranged in a bizarre manner– renamed to ‘AEE48549DDF9945DFDF45Q223132.m4a3‘ and randomly strewn throughout directories named similarly. Why this was done is fairly obvious- it was to prevent users from removing the files easily from their iPods. Over the course of using that iPod, various software solutions to allow copying music off an iPod were released. Many of these were disabled by iTunes updates, updated to avert the iTunes patch, and then disabled by Apple again. Or the sites distributing the software were taken down by Apple. Eventually, the company seemed to have given up as there are currently many current programs that can preform this utility4.

I consider that situation a strike against Apple. They spent a lot of time and effort designing a system that would make it harder for a user to use the device. I would not consider this a good investment from any standpoint, technological, financial, or ethical.

Since the iPhone (and now the iPod touch) runs on a new OS X derived OS and a new suite of applications, everything has been designed by Apple with knowledge of what did and what didn’t work on the previously released iPod models. Unfortunately, the lessons learned seemed to be that users need to have less control over their devices and data.

Here is a list of things I cannot do on the iPhone due to design decisions made by Apple:

  • Set any audio file as a ringtone
  • Easily copy music off the iPhone
  • Add music to the iPhone using any computer other than the one it syncs with (syncing with multiple computers is really, really broken)
  • Send instant messages (it’s an internet device, remember?)
  • Use the iPhone in disk mode
  • Use a standard set of headphones with the iPhone

Regardless of the ancestral cause of these issues, to the user they seem to be and very much are cases of poor design. These are the kind of things a Microsoft device would get ridiculed for. Any time a company uses its efforts against its customers should be a cause for concern. It’s too bad Apple’s buddies in the recording industry didn’t clue them in on this, although for that to happen they’d have to recognize it themselves.

I’ve been getting asked a lot if iPhones are ‘worth it’. Each time I’m asked, it takes a little longer to answer. My response for the last week has been “I’m not sure.”

1 Please see exhibit A, the external-volume-control-less iPod Touch.

2 Or perhaps ‘consumer-unfriendly’ would be more with the times?

3 This isn’t an actual file name from any system, but it’s close enough to illustrate the point.

4 Although with the newest round of iPods, Apple started scrambling the music database file on the Pods, making it harder to use the devices with third party music software such as Amarok, a replacement for iTunes that runs on Linux. This has since been worked around by the open-source community.

Some quick unordered thoughts on this thing they call the iPhone

299 days ago

  1. It’s small, light, and fun to use
  2. EDGE is slow, but OK for your basic web. Maps over it are a bit rough, and I think YouTube gets super-compressed to the point of not being worth watching. 802.11 is great though.
  3. The Official Ringtone Policy is a load of crap. Sadly, many will fall for it1.
  4. Multi-touch is cool, but the screen is a bit small for it at times. I tend to inadvertently bump the screen, sending the map bouncing around.
  5. The CPU is pokey. It’s amazing that OS X is running on this thing, but Safari is S L O W compared to the desktop version. JavaScript animations are not happening. That being said, it runs the crazy JavaScript I’ve been working on at work perfectly.
  6. When scrolling around in Safari, I see a lot of the checkered not-rendered-yet areas.
  7. You can zoom in to close in Google Maps and see “image not available” squares. Why zoom isn’t limited to available imagery I don’t know.
  8. Double-tapping in Safari to zoom to a text column works surprisingly well on most sites. I find I like to read text in the vertical orientation a bit more- the type is smaller, but there is less scrolling.
  9. Speaking of, one must be careful when scrolling in Safari. I have some trouble keeping the text centered once I’ve double-tap zoomed in.
  10. Where Is The To-Do List. A-hem.

1 I was going to write this rant about it, but Mr. Gruber beat me to it. So go read his article.

Thoughts index