A few people have asked what my reference to the 1960s was all about in my last post.
It is nothing revolutionary, just based on my observations of 1960s meetings from watching Mad Men.
Which means: the 1960s involved a lot of Scotch during meetings, which seems like a pretty nice addition to most meetings.
Last week Randy Murray posted about keeping your iPad tucked away during meetings — saying:
Clients respond when you do two things: really listen to them AND show that you value what they say. Keep any distractions, including your laptop or beloved iPad off the table and make your notes with a pen and paper.
I disagreed then and still disagree now. The iPad is the best thing to ever happen to meetings and here’s why.
In college my Aunt told me a story of how she runs a meeting (circa 2001), she said that she has two phrases to start a meeting: ‘set phasers to stun’ and ‘shields down’. ‘Set phasers to stun’ means that you need to turn your phones to vibrate. ‘Shields down’ means that you need to lower your laptop screens, if not close the lid completely. Being a huge Star Trek fan I couldn’t help but love this terminology, but I asked why she wouldn’t allow the use of a laptop in the meeting.
The response I got is the same response you are likely to get from any person: it is simply too hard to tell if a person using a laptop in a meeting is actually paying attention to what is going on in the meeting. The second problem with the laptop screen is what I call the “tall centerpiece conundrum”. Have you ever gone to a fancy dinner, say at a wedding, and there is a beautiful tall floral arrangement for the centerpiece at the round table? If you have ever experienced this, then you know that it is impossible to see people across the table from you and as a result impossible to carry on a conversation with those people.
This same centerpiece conundrum happens in meetings where there are a lot of laptops open. There is an artificial barrier between you and everyone else because of those damned laptop screens.
The iPad changes all of this, it can sit slightly angled on the table and not be a a barrier to anyone, or even completely flat on the table mimicking a notepad. Further, because the screen is not staring you in the face, participants get a more open sense about how you are using it — that is people can see what you are doing on it. This is crucial to making the other meeting attendees feel like you are actually paying attention.
Hand written meeting notes suck. They really suck. Digital meeting recordings suck more. Here’s why: neither is searchable without having to read/listen to most of the entire meeting. I can jot a few notes down in Simplenote and search the entire document for one word and in a fraction of a second find it. I can do that on my phone/iPad/computer — to do the same with written notes or recordings you would need to transcribe that information back to the computer — wasting time. I am all for not wasting time. ((One could argue that digital pens that will record the documents back to the computer solves this issue. Though if you argued that I would have to say you are still wrong. In my experience with such devices they are usually far more hassle than they are worth.))
When I use an iPad to take my meeting notes, upon leaving the meeting I can forget all about having to deal with those meetings notes. They will always be there when I need them, plain and simple. Forget about it.
For me there are four key areas that I need to track in each meeting:
Let’s say I walked into the meeting with some paper — all of this information would be organized in some fashion on the paper — later it would all need to be put into trusted systems (OmniFocus, Calendar, Yojimbo, etc.). What a waste of time, here is how I do it:
Yes, there are still people who track most of that stuff on paper, but those people are in the minority at this point in the business world. Even some of the most tech adverse people I know wouldn’t dream of using a paper calendar to track meeting times.
My entire meeting setup seeks to do one thing: let me move on to the next task the second the meeting is over. I don’t like meetings, I think they waste time, so when a meeting is over I want it to really be over.
No matter how hard I try to prepare for a meeting I always am missing one piece of information somewhere along the line. Luckily I can usually grab just about anything I may be missing with the help of one of these apps:
If I can’t find the information from the first four apps then I can use the last two to pull up my MacBook Airs screen or our Servers screen to find what I need. I can do this very quickly no matter where I am and this has proven invaluable and impresses my clients on a consistent basis.
Before the iPad I would drag along my MacBook Pro and use it to look up this same information, but in a much more distracting manner. You can get by without the iPad in a meeting — but using the iPad sure is a hell of a lot easier.
The last thing that I always face is the need to sketch or doodle something during the meeting. Be it a site plan, or visually showing someone the layout of anything — doodles always come in handy. I use a mix of four ((I am also currently trying Notes Plus.)) different apps for doodling:
Each of these is a bit different and so here is how I use them:
You know the people you are meeting with better than I — you also know yourself best. Don’t use an iPad because I say it is the best, likewise don’t not use an iPad because others think it ruins meetings. Do what is best for you.
Surprisingly I got quite a few emails about my quip I made the other day when linking to some rumors that the iPad 2 will have both front and back cameras:
The Samsung Galaxy Tab has a rear facing camera and I felt like a complete idiot holding that thing up to take a picture. I can’t imagine how stupid iPad users would look taking a “snapshot” with their iPad. Hell, the iPad would look bigger than most dSLRs when you use it to take a picture.
A lot of people emailed in agreeing with me that people would look pretty damned stupid trying to take a picture with their iPads. Just as many people emailed in to tell me that they see a rear camera as essential for FaceTime use. I can concede that point, indeed the rear camera is useful when you are talking on FaceTime — this way you can use the rear camera to show people things other than your face.
I also think that Apple has a good reason to make FaceTime the same experience on the iPad as it is on the iPhone given what Phil Schiller said at the Verizon iPhone launch:
We want the experience to be the same for every iPhone user. So there are no special Verizon Apps preinstalled[…]
Now that is from iPhone to iPhone, but I am beginning to think that Apple wants a consistent experience across all of their platforms. ((Explains the Mac App Store))
Today though MacStories reports that the rear camera on the iPad will only be 1MP is resolution.
Further they doubt that Apple would put such a low resolution camera in the iPad, as Frederico Viticci for MacStories puts it:
A 1-megapixel camera on the iPad 2 would be significantly lower than the one found on the iPhone 4; we also have some doubts on the actual photo quality that would result from such a camera lens, which will have to display pictures on a 10-inch screen.
Indeed, a still picture camera of just 1MP would suck at taking pictures. I would guess that the only way you get a decent still picture is if you are taking a landscape in the middle of the day. But I just don’t see Apple allowing use of a rear camera for anything other than FaceTime and video. Also remember that 1MP would likely look just fine in FaceTime videos as the iPad screen is 1024×768, which equates to 0.79MP if you translate the resolution. ((The iPhone 4 front facing camera is only 0.3MP for comparison.))
Here’s why I don’t think Apple is concerned about you taking pictures with the rear camera on the iPad:
I may be wrong about whether the iPad will get a rear camera, but I highly doubt I am wrong about any of the above listed reasons why such a rear camera would be of little value outside of FaceTime.
As part of the OmniFocus giveaway I asked that entrants write in with ideas about what they want to see more of on the site. More than a few people expressed concerns that I should not bend to the will of readers and I should do my “own thing”.
Reader Bas Hintemann wrote in to say:
I don’t think the writer / curator of a weblog needs to ask his audience what to do more, or what to do less: the author is what makes the weblog great. He posts what he has on his mind, what is bothering him, what is making him tick.
I agree with this completely and my goal with the survey was never to change anything on the site. The goal was to see how my readers interests align with my own interests.
I think we line up pretty well from what I can gather, here is the full break down of the results:
This graph is pretty meaningless without the key, but what it tells me is that there are three types of posts that people really like (in order of most votes):
There are some other little surprises that I learned:
What I can say is that I am right there with all of you on everything but the interviews. I am not big on interviewing and quite honestly it is very time consuming to get them lined up and then to actually perform them. There are many other great sites that already have some good interview series happening so I will defer to them on that one.
There are a couple of neat interview type things I am working on outside of the iPad Life stuff, but that is a still a ways off in the future and not as involved as some of the suggestions that were emailed in.
More reviews and specifically more software reviews was the most requested thing. I am not surprised by this given how many reads each review gets. I am always working on more reviews, but I want to point out a few things to help put in perspective why reviews are not a frequently featured thing:
Perspectives are what I love writing the most — sharing my ideas and getting feedback from all of you is amazing. Expect to see a steady stream of those.
I really didn’t know so many of you wanted to know about my workflow and sharing my workflow actually helps to improve my workflow. Expect to see more of these, but I am going to take some time to carefully craft these so that they are interesting and informative.
This will also be a part of reviews that I am writing on some of the older software I use. Think of it more like a hybrid review-workflow type post. Thanks for the great suggestions!
Before I end this I want to share with you the best contest entry email I received and award this reader a platinum level reader account. ((Which is a title only award.))
Reader Dev Benegal writes:
Perspectives for our minds.
Reviews, perhaps the best.
Occasionally, rants which needn’t be kind.
Thanks for that awesome email.
Since posting about interleaved email replies, I have gotten a good amount of emails from people asking if I could share some more email tips and tricks to help them out. So why not throw a few more out there for people. Today’s tip is about two Mail.app plugins that I leverage from Indev Software called MailTags and Mail Act-On.
I can’t remember when I started using these plugins, but it had to be sometime in 2007-ish. I believe that I found them from the once epic Hawk Wings blog. ((It is still a great site, but rarely updated.))
MailTags plays a very small role in this tip, but it is an important one. This tip is all about eliminating the mouse and I bet more than a few of you will like this. I currently have six active email accounts in Mail and each account is IMAP and shares a similar folder hierarchy. Each account has at least two folders in it: Archive and Follow-Up.
I practice inbox zero so once I read an email I want it to go to one of these two folders 99% of the time. For a while now I was just using Mail Act-On keyboard shortcuts to file a message away — then I realized there was a better way.
Mail now files my emails for me once I respond to them and can put them in either folder depending on where they should be.
This is actually not complicated to set up, it is only a bit tedious if you use a ton of email accounts and a filing system with more than one folder, like mine.
You will want to play with this and test it a bit. Please don’t think you need to set the MailTag keyword to the email you want moved, you set that on the email that you are sending and the action happens on the email you are responding to.
The rules go in order from top to bottom. That means put the most used email accounts towards the top of the list to speed everything up. Which means that, yes, this slows down the sending process a bit as your computer must run all these rules.
If you only use one email account, then you need not worry about the ‘From’ condition and just apply this to every email message instead.
Also: these rules only work when done in Mail.app, so your iPhone and iPad won’t be auto-filing just yet.
You can do a lot more with these Outbox rules and I will be talking a bit more about that soon. If you are still a bit confused about this, the developer has a great video tutorial on his site which can be found here.
It doesn’t take long to file away emails with Mail Act-On keyboard triggers, or even using just your mouse. So the question is: why should you set this up? The answer is two fold:
You never know unless you try and both of these plugins have a generous 30 day trial period so there really is no harm in giving this a go. Good luck!
[This part of an ongoing series on dealing with email, to see more posts look here.]
I get so very tired of analysts, pundits and bloggers assigning an arbitrary dollar value to Facebook and other privately held companies and declaring that amount is what the company is “worth”. I have no problems with valuation, but I do have a problem with equating a perceived valuation as the market value of a company — more often referred to by the arbitrary and irrelevant term: worth.
Facebook is worth $50 bazillion.
Groupon is worth $15 billion.
These two companies and every other company in the world is only worth one amount: what a buyer is willing to pay for it. We know how much publicly traded companies are ‘worth’ because they are traded on an open market, a market where buyers and sellers determine how much the company truly is worth in 15 minute delayed intervals. ((At least according to the Stocks app on my iPhone. How they trade 15 minutes in the past is beyond me.))
When a company such as Facebook is assign a dollar value, it is done so by a group of private investors giving it that value based on some confidential data they are shown by the company. There is a lot of implied value and value wrapped up in the fact that the company is not publicly traded. ((The I got there first mentality.)) These values are never market value because: a) the open market is not able to determine what that price is; b) the company being valued is not subject to the same reporting standards as a public traded company is (thanks SEC). ((You can’t accurately assign value to something when you have no idea if the numbers being reported are accurate.))
Let’s look at valuation in terms of homes because you can easily see the difference.
If you bought a house in 2006 for $1 million dollars, is it worth $1 million today?
Most likely not, we are in a terrible recession and in fact you can’t base current value off of past sales. When you get a real estate license one of the first lessons you are taught is that you need to compare homes sold within the last 6 months — markets fluctuate too much otherwise.
Most home owners will tell you that there is a difference between: market value, assessed value and appraised value. I won’t go into each calculation, but suffice to say:
So what happens if market value is less than appraised value — well this is when you go “under water” on your home. Essentially you owe more money on your loan for the house, then you could get if you were to sell the home right now.
All privately held companies can only be given appraised values and not given market values, unless they are made publicly available for sale. This is a bit trickier with businesses because they are (ideally) profit earning entities — better to compare them to commercial real estate, but that is a topic for another time. ((Perhaps when you can’t sleep.)) What I am trying to say is that private investors do their best job to assign an appraised value to companies so that they know if they are getting a good deal on their investment. What these investors cannot, and will not, do is predict market value. They internally estimate what they think fair market value is, but that is as close as they get.
They lose out if they give out their market value estimations. If Facebook knows that private venture firms believe their market value to be X, then they know exactly how much investors are willing to invest and at what return.
In other words if you want to buy Steve’s computer from him and you know that he thinks it is worth $500, but is asking $1000 for it — well you have the upper hand in the negotiation because you know what the minimum he is willing to take for the computer. The opposite is true as well, if Steve knows you have $1200 to spend on a computer, then he knows he what you can afford to pay and will adjust his price based on that information. These same principles apply to the valuation of companies for private investing.
Bottom line: these numbers purporting that Facebook is worth $50 billion is a total load of crap. They perhaps are appraised at that value by one set of investors, but they are hardly worth that much at market value. ((They may even be worth more, who knows.))
The better question, or perhaps the bigger question with Facebook is: why the hell do they need all this money?
The only possible reason I can think of: they aren’t making money.
A company that isn’t making money and only taking on debt is worth only one thing to me: $0.
I am not one of those venture capital naysayers — there are plenty of great reasons to seek venture capital so that you can get your company going. What I am against is pretending that popularity and profit are equals.
I have no way of knowing if Facebook is profitable — my guess is that it is at the very least a break-even business right now — what concerns me is what they need the cash for. Are they trying to buy talent? What are they building that they need that much money?
Doesn’t matter anyways, this was just my long winded way of telling you that “worth” and “valuation” are two entirely different terms — ones that cannot and should not be used interchangeably.
Before I announce the winner I wanted to thank everyone who entered the contest. Your feedback is invaluable and very much appreciated. I will be writing a post later this week (hopefully) talking a bit about the feedback I received, but until then let’s get to the goods.
The winner of the OmniFocus giveaway is:
Duncan you will be getting an email shortly with the code for your free copy of OmniFocus. Thanks to everyone who entered!
Now that I have been using interleaved responses for a bit longer I thought I would share some general tips and tricks that I have learned to help speed along your replies.
I also find that when you reply to someone and add a new person in on the email — interleaved replies works magic with bringing them up to speed. Instead of forcing them to read all the irrelevant crap in the original email (the ‘hey how are you’ stuff) they just get the questions and answers that they need to see — all in a logical order.
Lastly if you have made it this far heed the words of Jocelyn K. Glei, writing for The 99 Percent:
If you don’t have anything substantive and/or actionable to say, don’t send the email. Refraining from sending the one-word “Thanks!” email is tough, because it can feel ungrateful. But at this juncture, we’re all probably more grateful for one less email.
Be sure to check out that entire post for some more good tips.
[This part of an ongoing series on dealing with email, to see more posts look here.]
Sometimes you just want to play a game, so do I. Here are some of my favorite iOS games.
I game far more often on my iPad than I do my iPhone and I have no reason why. I can tell you that Angry Birds and Flight Control are my two favorites though.
Please let me know if you have any problems with the RSS feed over the next few days, specifically if you click to view an item and get a 404 error. I installed a new plugin that enhances a few things, but I have had trouble with it in the past (though I seem to have it working this time around).
Thanks
To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private.
That statement sums up very nicely the precise reason the ‘older generation’ doesn’t understand why today’s youth likes social networking (be it Twitter, Facebook or others).
Schneier continues:
But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations–your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.
Schneier summarizes one of the larger reasons I don’t use Facebook and in fact despise the service. It is also the reason that I don’t trust Google with my email. With both companies I don’t get the sense that I am truly in control of anything.
I like Twitter, but there is little to no privacy — unless I lock my account or I send a direct message. I have no problem with that because I have no expectation that I can control the privacy levels of the service. With Facebook they ‘give’ users control over what they share, but at the same time allow app developers to capture sensitive data like your phone number and home address.
Perhaps MG Siegler sums up why I don’t mind the lack of privacy on Twitter best:
It’s like having a conversation in a crowded room where anyone at anytime can stop and listen to you if they want. Why would they want to? I don’t know. Why does anyone want to follow anyone else on Twitter?
If I think about it in that sense then, yeah, I have no problem with Twitter. If you assume everything you say on Twitter (outside of DMs) is being said in a crowded room then you have your privacy standard. Don’t say anything you don’t want others to over hear you saying.
The privacy expectation is different on Facebook — it’s more like you are in a room with just your ‘friends’ and occasionally, without you knowing, Zuckerberg swings by and opens the doors and windows to that room so others can stop in.
Perhaps you thought that the last giveaway would really be the last one, fortunately for you I care. Last month I contacted The Omni Group and asked if they would be willing to help me give one of my great readers a copy of OmniFocus — well it is official I have one OmniFocus license to giveaway.
If you are a regular reader then you should know that I love OmniFocus and think it is hands down the best task management program you can get on any platform. You can read some stuff I have written about OmniFocus here, here, here and here. Here’s some stuff others have written.
Entry is different this time around (it was a bit tedious for me last time).
All you need to do is email me and tell me what you want to see more of on this site (e.g. Reviews, Perspectives, Rants, Raves, etc.):
comments@brooksreview.net
All I ask is that you be honest and keep it short.
I will pick one winner at random on Wednesday 19th of January 2011. Be sure to enter before then.
One last thing, the drawing is random no matter how many entrants there are. Please don’t enter if you already have a copy, this way others can enjoy what we already do.
As always: spread the word, but never SPAM others.
For three years I have been using a first generation PowerPC Mac mini as my home media center — for those three years it has sat faithfully attached to different TVs and different external HDs. For three years it has broadcast HD quality ((Not 720p, but very high resolution.)) video on our TV in the living room. I would sound like your ideal candidate for the first generation Apple TV ((True I wanted one.)) but I never saw how it would be better than my Mac mini.
As I read reviews of the original Apple TV I got the distinct impression that it was OK, but not great and certainly a tad over priced for what it was. My Mac mini just worked and so in an extraordinary show of restraint, I just let things be. I have that old ass Mac mini hooked up to a 55” LCD TV via VGA and guess what? It still works.
True, it can’t play any of the 720p videos you find online and it dies if you try to play a Flash video, but you give it a nice h.264 encoded AVI and a little VLC love and everything is works swimmingly.
Then Apple released the Apple TV 2 and damn is it sexy looking. Oh, that price is very nice too.
When I unboxed the Apple TV I had huge hopes that it would allow me to get rid of the Mac mini under our TV — I thought perhaps I could just stream the media from the Mac mini to the Apple TV.
Can this Apple TV replace a 5+ year old PowerPC Mac?
Not knowing if I would want to keep the Apple TV or not I plopped it beside my Mac mini and hooked it up. I immediately ran into a bunch of problems with this setup:
Our TV is mounted to the wall above our fireplace, below it sits the Apple TV on the mantle — all told it is about 4’-8” high. Which is great — except when you sit down and try to get the remote to work. In fact the only way to have the Apple TV within 3’ ((Restricted by the length of Apple’s HDMI cable.)) is to place it on the mantle, or let it dangle in front of the fireplace. So getting the infrared remote to work properly while one is comfortably seated on the couch means pushing the Apple TV all the way to the edge of the mantle. This works well enough, but hardly looks good. I now see why so many people wanted an RF or Bluetooth based remote, the Apple TV could certainly use one.
I run an Airport Extreme that is a few years old, but works just fine. ((I have the 802.11n model, but not the one that allows you to dual broadcast the 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, nor can I have the guest network.)) The optimal placement in our home for the Airport is below the TV, giving us the best possible WiFi coverage. ((More importantly excellent coverage at my home desk.)) The Apple TV though sits 18” away from the router — meaning I get pretty crappy WiFi reception with it. ((You actually do need some distance between the router and the receiving device.)) I dug out a 30’ ethernet cable (the only one we have) and hooked up the Apple TV so that I could get proper internet 18” away from the router. ((This looks absurd, given that the coil from the cable is bigger in size than that of the Apple TV.))
Entering passwords and usernames is more painful than a paper cut beneath your finger nail. I have yet to see a device that doesn’t have a keyboard come up with a good way to enter text. ((Thanks for all the suggestions that I use the Remote.app for iOS. I am aware of it, but excluded it from this review as I assume not everyone has iOS to use this.))
Home Sharing is a piece of cake — Apple got that one right.
Overall the greatest friction point of setup for most users is going to be entering passwords — there needs to be a better/faster way to enter text on the Apple TV. I would suggest that Apple make the setup process so that once you get the WiFi password in you can grab your MobileMe settings from your Mac via home sharing. Heck they could even add a preference pane in iTunes to allow you to input all your other usernames and passwords (e.g. Flickr, NetFlix). Making the setup process a hell of a lot quicker.
Further how sweet would it be if you could build an Apple TV rental queue on your Mac, so when you get home all your movies are ready to be watched.
I have rented two movies from iTunes since I got the Apple TV.
It took me about 5 minutes to rent the damned movie. The problem: credit card security. The Apple TV kept asking me for the credit cards’ security code — I had to enter it 5 times before it took. I don’t know why and I assume this was a one time problem, but even still it was a frustrating experience.
Once the movie was rented I had to “find” it before I could watch it — I thought it was odd that there was no option to watch the movie right away. Even so, once I found the movie on the home screen it started playing fast — actually damn fast. I was very surprised by this. Even more the quality was much higher resolution than I expected and than I am used to with the Mac mini.
We watched the entire movie with out a jitter or pause in the video, everything went flawlessly. Aside from the purchasing hoopla we had a great time renting the movie. Looking back I am even more surprised that with a standard Comcast cable connection in a multi-unit building I was able to stream an HD movie within seconds of buying it and having never experienced a jitter in the video. That may be worth the $99 for the device right there — also there were no teenagers on my couch with beeping a blinking cell phones, so put that in the pluses column.
A couple of nights later we decided to rent another movie — this time we were greeted with a message telling us that the movie would be ready to play in 1 hour and 40 minutes. This shocked us both, but apparently a lot of people see this bug and the solution is to just turn off “Send data to Apple”. Odd, but it fixed the problem and again we had no problems after that. I will say though that it took me about 15 minutes to get this problem fixed and as my wife reminded me: “We could be 15 minutes into the movie by now.”
We rented two movies and had errors with the device each time, if I wasn’t a techie I would have serious reservations about the device at this point. I don’t say this to be dramatic, but each time it would have been a tad cheaper and almost as fast to drive to the nearest RedBox to rent a DVD. ((Though to be honest I don’t know if our DVD player even works and I doubt it is connected to the TV.)) I don’t rent DVDs, I don’t go to the Movies — so for me to really like the Apple TV it needs to stay out of my way.
All told I have no doubt that each time you rent a movie the experience gets better and better, but realistically how many movies/TV shows will you be renting? The content is just too limited to make this a device that most are going to use daily for renting of movies and shows. Even if you rented all the time, how long could you afford to do that for?
After we finished with the movie we decided to see what kind of entertainment we could scare up on YouTube. I used to be on YouTube a lot, but I hadn’t watched many videos from YouTube in sometime. We went through various videos in the ‘Top Played’ and ‘Top Rated’ categories. Aside from the varying video quality, we consistently ran into two problems: jittery and slow streaming.
If you have ever watched YouTube on your computer then you know what I am talking about. Finding and discovering videos is a cinch, but oddly enough the actual playing of the videos is pretty terrible. I am guessing YouTube is to blame for this given that we watched a 90+ minute movie without a problem, yet a 40 second cellphone quality video required 20 seconds of buffering and two pauses in the video. Either way it is unacceptable from a company of Google’s size and abilities.
YouTube has problems and I remarked several times that I wished the Apple TV had Vimeo support rather than YouTube support — not only does Vimeo have better playback, but the quality of the content is far superior. If you visit YouTube on the Mac and use the Flash player you will find the same experience on the Apple TV, you just won’t hear fan noise at the Apple TV.
I don’t keep any videos on either of these services, but I do have a ton of pictures on them. Overall the experience is very good, the pictures loaded up in high resolution and pretty quickly. The slide show feature, set to a playlist makes for a nice back drop when you have guests over.
I don’t know how practical tying in these services are for home use, but I can imagine that if you go to a friends house it would be a great way to show pictures of a recent trip. Certainly provides a better way than burning a DVD or bringing a slide projector in would. Assuming that you don’t go crazy trying to type in your username.
Then of course the problem that you run into is that not everyone has an Apple TV…
Most remotes face one or all of these problems: too big, too small, too many buttons, poor button placement, confusing buttons, ugly, or heavy. By now you have most likely seen the Apple remote’s svelte look. It is beautiful to look at and feels excellent in your hand.
This remote truly is the perfect size.
Then you start to use it and you begin to realize that it has exactly the right amount of buttons on it. Using this remote you get the sense that the guys who made the remote spent extensive time using and refining the remote. Thought and care was put into the design of this relatively simple looking remote. I know this because when I use this remote (a remote I had never used before mind you) I never once had to look down to see which button was which.
The Apple TV remote, aside from the lack of RF or Bluetooth, is the best damned remote I have ever held. This remote may even be the best feature of the Apple TV.
As I said in the introduction, I have been using a Mac mini as my media controller for at least the past three years (I think it has even been close to four years now). The Mac mini that is connected is slow, it spends its life with Transmission, VLC, iTunes and Dropbox running. Yes I download BitTorrent files with it — though I will not comment on which kind of BitTorrent files.
I have Transmission setup to start downloading any Torrent files placed in a Torrents folder inside Dropbox. Back on my Air if I download any BitTorrent files they are automatically moved to that folder in Dropbox. Basically my MacBook Air can trigger the Mac mini to start downloads in Transmission. I have a 1 terabyte drive connected to the mini and over 200 GB of videos on it to watch.
Unless my wife and I are out of town, not a day goes by that we don’t use the Mac mini to watch something. My sincere hope was that the Apple TV would allow me to tuck away the Mac mini in some far off corner of our house and use just the Apple TV to watch all the same types of media. ((Because: a) the Mac mini is too big for where it sits. b) It has no remotes, meaning I use TouchPad on my iPhone to control the mouse on it.)) Sadly though, that cannot happen just yet.
I never intended on the Apple TV being able to replicate all the content I get from the mini, but I did hope that I could use iTunes to just stream everything else. Unfortunately that would mean converting every video with Handbrake. This would be fine if I had an Intel Mac mini, but I have an old PowerPC model — to convert say an hour long HD TV show it would take at least an hour or more. Meaning I would not get to watch many videos, instead I would constantly be waiting for the next one to convert on the Mac mini.
For now the Apple TV is just another device hooked up to the the TV — albeit a damn pretty device. My guess is that the Mac mini still handles a lot of the shorter, constant content that we watch and the Apple TV gets moved to a movie watching device.
Apple has put together a large selection of movies, but there is not a large selection of quality classics, nor is there a large selection of movies that I haven’t already seen. ((Those movies that fall into the category of see once and not again.)) The amount of quality movies is rather disappointing and took my right to the Netflix page to sign up.
Unless you have a kid — there seems to be plenty of great content for them to watch.
I am truly disappointed in the lack of content. Apple needs to get some of the new movies on the device faster than they normally come out — why do we have to wait for movies to leave the theater before we can rent them with Apple TV? At least let use watch them the moment they leave the theaters.
TV Show content is really abysmal, only a hand full of TV shows are available to watch. This is the one spot that TV networks could have really made a great fortune as I know my wife will gladly pay to rent a show if she missed it. The networks really need to pull their heads out of their asses on this one.
I didn’t have a Netflix account when I got the Apple TV, but I decided that in order to properly review this device I needed to get one. Luckily there is a 31 day free trial that you can get and that works just fine with the Apple TV. ((Honestly I would be surprised if I cancel my account at this point, great service.)) In the last section I complained about the lack of quality content, with Netflix my only compliant is that there is so much quality content I have a hard time choosing what to watch.
If you have an Apple TV and you don’t have a Netflix account, you are missing out on the best part of the Apple TV. Hands down the Netflix support is phenomenal.
In actual use finding stuff to watch on Netflix is on par with what you would expect for the Apple TV. If you know what you want search works well and if you don’t know what you want browsing will flood you with great options. Most all of my favorite TV shows are available (Even the British Top Gear) and there are loads of great movie options. I can tell you right now, Netflix on the Apple TV is where it is at.
The playback of Netflix is not on par with Apple level playback. Netflix takes longer to load and doesn’t look as crisp as the stuff I rented from Apple. I didn’t time anything, but my gut response is that Netflix quality and speed is about 90% that of Apples. Which is still phenomenal and better than what I get on the Mac mini.
During playback I noticed a 1-2 second pause in video and audio once for every 22 minute episode that we watched. This is not terrible, but again this didn’t happen with Apple. One annoying this about the pause is that the video takes right off from where it paused, meaning that it takes you a bit to think about what had been happening before the pause started. It would be great if when a video pauses Apple would rewind the video by 2 seconds so that you really don’t miss a thing.
Overall though the Netflix integration alone makes the Apple TV worth it, couple that with the remote and you are getting a bargain in my book.
One thing I heard when I announced that I got an Apple TV was that AirPlay was going to blow my mind. For the first week I had the Apple TV I forgot to test AirPlay — oops. When I finally got back from Miami I had media on my iPhone and iPad and decided to shoot some video to the Apple TV using my iPad. My network is setup so that it is 802.11n only in the 2.4GHz (I wish the iPhone supported the 5GHz signal), I wanted to note this because I don’t know what the experience is like on slower networks.
I started playing a movie on my iPad and hit the button to AirPlay — the video didn’t start instantly, but it started up very quickly on the Apple TV. From that point on there were not jitters and not a single lag that I could see. The quality was restricted (I assume) by the low quality file that I use on my iPad (remember it is only 1024×768).
I can’t say that I see myself using this feature very often (if ever), but I could see a friend “bringing” over a movie to watch at my place using their iPhone/iPad. That would be pretty neat. I wasn’t blown away by this at the time, but thinking back at the zero configuration I needed to do for this does impress me a good bit.
I don’t watch many podcasts, but there are a few video podcasts that I truly enjoy. ((Beautiful Places HD and Chase Jarvis RAW.)) Podcast viewing on the Apple TV works in much the same way as renting a show does — with the one exception that the podcasts are free. They load quickly and in high resolution (unless they are not available in high resolutions), you can even mark podcasts as a favorite to track the episodes that you have viewed.
One thing that is missing: integration with my iTunes. I would love for the Apple TV to see that I am signed into iTunes and to check for the podcasts that I subscribe to on my Mac — showing me what I have watched on there already. It seems like there is a syncing solution missing here, one that could really make the podcast viewing experience great.
There isn’t much else to say about podcasts on the Apple TV — if you like podcasts and you want them on your TV then that is what you get. If you don’t like podcasts then luckily for you the option is tucked away in the ‘Internet’ menu below Netflix and others.
The Apple TV won’t be replacing my trusty Mac mini at any point in the near future, but it certainly is pretty cool. For $99 you get a tiny little black box that you would be hard pressed to say is anything but worth the money. There are certainly cheaper places to get a lot of the same content, but not a single other place to get as good of an experience and as quickly as you can with the Apple TV.
Which is more readable and understandable:
Q: How old are you?
A: 28.
or
A: 28.
Q: How old are you?
We read from top to bottom on computers, which leads most people to say it is more helpful to read the question first, then to see the answer first. This is all rather logical — we need the context before the content. Saying ‘28’ could mean far too many things, but by knowing that the 28 is referring to an age gives us the needed context to properly comprehend the answer. Except, apparently, when we deal with email. The typical emailed response looks like this:
In this sequence neither person can easily look back at the email and find what was being replied too. There is loads of confusion with this email. That type of response is called ‘Top Posting’ and it is the most common type of email response you will get and it is the type that you are most likely doing. How often do you end up having to read the entire chain of emails before you figure out what in the hell someone is answering? I find that it is a constant problem.
Top Posting as defined by Wikipedia:
In top-posting style, the original message is included verbatim, with the reply above it. It is sometimes referred to by the term TOFU, an acronym for “Text Over, Fullquote Under”
Recently I found this plugin for Apple’s Mail.app that forces the email client to create ‘Bottom Posted’ responses. Bottom posting in its raw form looks like this:
This method is much easier to read for most people, since we are used to seeing the question first, followed by the response. Even with how short this email is, there still can be a lot of confusion. Many people on Twitter can’t fathom why I would switch to this method — everyone does top posting, why be different?
Well I actually am not trying to be different. I want to copy several of people that I really like, two of which are: Shawn Blanc and John Gruber. Usually when you get a response from either of these people you are going to get a bottom posted reply, but it will not look like the bottom posting you see above. Typically these two use a bottom posting method that is more accurately referred to as: Interleaved Posting. Interleaved posting is the style that I have actually switched to, while keeping some emails Top Posted if the situation doesn’t warrant interleaving. I think most people lump interleaving and bottom posting as one in the same, either way it doesn’t matter much to me what the correct terminology is.
John Gruber says on the subject:
Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.
It is a short read, so jump over and read what he has to say on the matter, then come back. Now, if I was actually to respond to the above email example I would do this:
Which is more helpful: top posting, or interleaved posting?
These are extremely short examples, but imagine you got an email that contained multiple things you wanted to respond to — interleaved posting becomes far more efficient than top posting:
This is much more efficient than stacking three answers at the top of the email and leaving the recipient to wonder which answer goes with which question. I have been doing this for less that a week now, but I can say that I have yet to see one person complain, or be confused by this. ((Nor has a single person commented to me about this different style: good or bad.))
If you don’t take the time to edit down what you are replying to, then yes, top posting is the best method. For those of us that want to cut out extraneous emails from our day: why wouldn’t you take the extra bit of time to answer the email properly? Better yet, why wouldn’t you spend an extra 30 seconds and put effort into better email responses? The argument I hear from most people is that they don’t have the time to do this — to which I often wonder if they aren’t just lazy.
Daniel R. Tobais on the matter:
This set of characteristics leads naturally toward a preference for the traditional Internet (geek/academic/Usenet) style of using carefully trimmed quotes followed by the reply. This allows point-by-point inline rebuttals, minimizes bandwidth use, is a format well-suited for digesting and archiving, and minimizes the ability of various mail programs to mangle an entire thread.
Well said. I don’t care much how you reply to me, but I do care what all of my outgoing emails look like. Lastly, if you reply top posted to me I won’t think twice about it. If you reply interleaved to me: you bet your ass I will look at who sent me that email.
[Updated: 1-13-11 at 9:36 AM]
Here are some links to get going in Outlook and Gmail.
[Updated: 1-14-11 at 10:32 AM]
Here is one for CLI mail agent users.
[This part of an ongoing series on dealing with email, to see more posts look here.]
Since 2007 AT&T has held one massive competitive advantage over their biggest rival Verizon: the iPhone. Nothing else mattered, if you wanted the hottest phone the market has ever seen in the U.S. then you needed to be on AT&T. Verizon had nothing to compete with it and even now the Android phones are only just starting to keep up.
Now though for the first time we essentially have two different iPhones: Verizon’s and AT&T’s.
I fully expect many people to argue with me on this, but there are only two reasons to choose the Verizon iPhone over AT&T:
In the coming months there is going to be a lot of advertising from Verizon showing off how great their iPhone is because you can create a mobile hot spot with it. Likewise AT&T will start promoting the fact that you can do data and voice simultaneously on their iPhone.
So naturally one would think that you should choose the Verizon iPhone, because after all how often do you really use data while you talk on the phone?
Well you are wrong to choose Verizon just to get the mobile hot spot. The reason being: AT&T can add a mobile hot spot feature, Verizon on the other hand can’t magically make their network so that it can do voice and data at the same time.
My bet: come June AT&T has the competitive advantage once again. (Meaning they get the mobile hot spot and still allow simultaneous data and voice transmissions.)
One more thing about June. Say you buy the Verizon iPhone on 2.10.11 when it comes out — what do you do if the iPhone 5 is launched in June? Pay a penalty to upgrade or wait another 1.5 years to get the latest iPhone?
Patient Verizon diehards finally got what they wanted, an iPhone. AT&T users may also get what they want: less network congestion. Likely patient AT&T users will also get the same features as Verizon iPhone owners in just a few short months (rather than waiting 3+ years).
Basically AT&T users will get the mobile hotspot.
I wanted to try out a new calendar program called “Caliander” and when I visited their site just now I saw this:
I thought that was a rather clever way of circumventing a major Mac App Store flaw.
What happens when a user base that has been begging a developer everyday since they shipped version 1.0 for a version 2.0 release finally gets the 2.0 version? Well, there is a lot of rejoicing followed by a general feeling of being let down. At least that is how it has played out for Twitter for Mac (aka Tweetie 2.0).
In this review the only time you will see me write ‘HIG’ is in this sentence.
When I did my Tweetie competitor round up a while back I found that a lot of new Twitter clients are providing access to the ‘streaming API’, giving you a ‘real-time’ Twitter feed. Now instead of checking every 10 minutes you get tweets as they are sent out. In theory this sounds great, but when I tested most other apps I hated it.
I still dislike it. I like to read all tweets that come through my feed and Twitter for Mac’s real-time streaming of tweets means that I am constantly reading tweets — real-time tweets are very distracting. I much preferred checking only 5-6 times and hour, not 30-40 times to read 1 or 2 tweets at a time. (On another note turn off that auto scroll to the top crap [there’s an option for it] — that is a massive place loser.)
For me I have found that the best way to work with Tweetie 2 is to leave the window closed while you work and check on our own schedule. This is the complete opposite of how I worked with Tweetie 1, but I asked for Tweetie 2 ((A lot.)) so this is a minor thing to complain about. ((I have plenty of other complaints.))
By now I am sure that a good many of your have heard that Twitter for Mac has a ‘super secret’ preference pane that you can enable if you bought into the MacHiest Bundle. ((Said bundle promised buyers an advance copy of Tweetie 2.0.)) To be honest I would still be using Tweetie 1 if it was not for this menu.
You can see the menu options here:
You can see the options that I have checked. For me the critical option is ‘ESC closes compose windows’. The option that I would hate to not have is: Type Anywhere. Type anywhere is a great feature for Tweetie to implement.
Much has been made about the difficulty that people have when they need to move the window. There is no title bar on the app, so grabbing the window at the top won’t work. You need to click the black areas along the left side — but only in the black areas that don’t have actionable click zones. ((Spots that do stuff when you click them.))
[Updated: 1/11/11 at 9:06 AM] Actually even clicking on the buttons on the black sidebar (as long as you hold the click) will allow you to move the window — nice touch.
Is this annoying? Yes.
Do you get over it after 5 minutes? Yep.
I guess my question is this: how often are you moving this window? I find a place that I like it and there is stays. If you are someone that constantly moves stuff around I am sure that you would get used to it after a bit. Either way this issue has been way over blown.
I have a love-hate relationship with the direct message implementation on Twitter for Mac. On the one hand I love that it has auto completion for usernames when you start a new DM, and that it asks specifically if you want a new DM or Public Reply — that is always good.
What I hate is two fold:
These aren’t deal breakers, but they certainly annoy the crap out of me.
Tweetie used to auto check for new search results — one of the better features of the app. Twitter for Mac doesn’t do jack to check for new results until you click on the saved search. Guess what Twitter? I save searches because — wait for it — I want to revisit them to see what new results are there. Foreign concept I am sure.
I just can’t fathom why you wouldn’t update saved searches, even hourly would be great.
You know what sucks? The dock indicators that Mac 10.6 uses on the 3D dock that runs along the bottom. You know what the new tweet indicators in Twitter for Mac look like? Yeah, they are not so great.
Perhaps it is my advanced age, but they are very difficult to notice. I keep wanting them to be brighter and just pop a little more. Especially for the Twitter account that is not active (if you use more than one account you know what I mean).
I get adding auto shortening using Twitter’s super short t.co URLs. What I don’t get is shortening my already short URLs (like TBR.mx and d.pr), that kind of stuff is just lame. ((I call on Ian Hines to elaborate on this.))
I must have complained a lot about wanting Tweetie 2.0 because I have never gotten so many app recommendations from people before (thanks BTW). I feel pretty confident in saying that I have tried most all Twitter apps available for the Mac. And even with the annoyances that Twitter for Mac brings there are a few things that you just can’t argue with:
Take it from a guy who has spent a lot of time with other Twitter clients: Twitter for Mac may have annoyances, but they are minor in comparison to what the others apps are missing.
Thursday night I was frantically looking for my USB restore drive for my MacBook Air — my wife in the other room was rushing to get ready for dinner with some friends. The next thing I hear from my wife is:
Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!
I rushed into the room after asking what was going on and getting no response. Her iPhone 4 had just gone for a wee little swim. Oh God indeed. I quickly dried the phone off with a paper towel and tried to get it to force off (the screen wasn’t working and I had no way to tell if it was on or off). Next I popped the SIM card out and the tray, filled a Ziploc bag with uncooked rice and buried the phone in the rice.
We left the phone like that while we went to dinner, when we came back the camera flash LED was stuck on and nothing else on the phone worked. Again I tried to force the phone off and got nothing. Back into the rice it went.
Fast forward to the next morning: I checked the phone and it was working, but there was visible condensation in the camera lens. The screen was functional and the touch based input was working well. I powered off the phone, cleaned rice out of the open ports. Scavenged up some old silica gel packets that I keep in my camera bags ((Great way to store your camera gear BTW.)) and I wrapped the silica gel packets against the phone with a paper towel. Again I put the entire thing back in some rice.
Friday night, about 24 hours after the phone was gasping for air while drowning in a pool of water, we pulled out the phone. We put in the SIM card and powered it up. 10% battery life left, but no side effects that we could see. Cool.
That night when we both went to bed and the iPhone started to act up. The screen wouldn’t stay on and started flickering. Not good. I took a look at it and noticed the the WiFi radio read in Settings as “Not Available”. Ugh.
We turned off the phone and put it back in rice for the night. The next morning the screen worked fine, but still no WiFi. Again on Saturday night the screen started to act up, but Sunday morning everything was fine again. I didn’t think much of it, figuring it was just the last bits of water drying out.
Then Sunday night it started to act up again, but you could always get the lock screen to display. Upon unlocking the device the screen would go black. Hmmm, seemed to me like it might be the light sensor acting up. We went into a bright room and unlocked the phone and the screen worked fine. I had my wife turn off the auto-backlight adjustments and the black screen and flickering issues ceased.
Her iPhone is anything but perfect after taking that swim, but so far the only things not functioning are the WiFi and the light sensor. All in all that is not the worst outcome we could have had. Rice: never dry a gadget without it.
Apple emailed users to inform them of iWork.com updates. You can see the email here:
The storage bit is great, but too little too late. The Keynote playback though looks like a great way to quickly get a Keynote file to playback on your iPad for presentations. Better than iTunes syncing for sure.
[Updated: 1/10/11 at 8:48 AM]
MacStories has some lovely screenshots.
The Internet consensus is that your blog’s design should represent your personality and voice. Perhaps Shawn Blanc describes this notion best:
First of all, when you read someone’s site you are imagining their voice. Not only is that voice influenced by the style of their writing, but also by the design of the site itself. Drastically changing the colors and fonts of a site can have serious impact on the reader’s pre-established and familiar voice of your site.
When I first started this site the body text was set in Georgia, a serif font, and I used Helvetica and Verdana in other spots, both sans-serif. Since that time I have moved to sans-serif and one single font across the entire site, save the logo. I have also changed the site logo, but the look and feel of the site has stayed pretty close to what it was on day one. Some readers were a bit bothered when I moved away from Georgia, but most of those complaints have trailed off since I made the switch.
It was important for me to make that change because by and large I am not a serif font type of guy. Most everything I do revolves around great sans-serif fonts and I wanted TBR to reflect that aspect of my personality — I wanted to stay true to who I am. I chose Georgia originally because I found it to be more readable that other options and I didn’t want TBR to be another site set in Helvetica. FF Meta WebPro came about after playing around with the font I found it to be just as comfortable for long reading and damned nice looking to boot.
The other day John Gruber posted a link to a site that would not only allow you to change the color scheme and layout of his site, but also allow you to create a custom CSS file for any other site. I was a bit surprised he posted this to be honest with you — then listening to the latest episode of The Talk Show he and Dan Benjamin spoke about site design and what it conveys to them.
It would seem that everyone has a relationship with the way a writers site is designed — be it dark text on light backgrounds or light text on dark backgrounds. We get emotionally attached to these bits and channel that design while we read the articles. A site’s design helps to convey the message of the written words.
This is great, but what about people who never read the articles on the actual sites?
I am about to say something and I really don’t want it to be construed the wrong way because I love Instapaper with a passion. What I fear though, is that perhaps Instapaper, Reeder, Safari Reader, Readability, NetNewsWire, Google Reader, Flipboard, and any other app that allows you to read a site without seeing the actual site are starting to chip away at the personalities each site offers.
They are making the web a bit bland.
I am going to talk about Instapaper, solely because it is such a fantastic service that I use daily, I worry that it may be changing the way I ‘hear’ my favorite writers. Let’s go back to Daring Fireball and John Gruber for a bit, he has his site set to display a lovely dark gray background with light text over it, in a small sans-serif font face. However, when I read a post by John Gruber I am likely reading it in Instapaper with a white background and larger dark gray serif text (unless it is night time then reverse the colors — thanks for that by the way Marco), this is a stark contrast to the personality Gruber (and others) has decided to convey with their design.
Does taking the personality of the site’s design out of the equation make the material better or worse?
I never thought this mattered, but now I am starting to think that you lose something when you don’t read the content in the environment it was intended to be read in. I am not saying we should all abandon Instapaper and other services like it, but I am saying that we need to make sure we know what the sites we read actually look like.
I am not trying to pick a fight on some pedantic point — this stuff should matter. Imagine taking all of Apple’s stuff and selling it in a generic, bland, electronics store. Actually it looks like this, compared to this. ((And that isn’t even the best picture one can find of an Apple Store, but probably the best one you can find of Apple in Best Buy.))
Sure the computers and writing are still great when they are out of their element, but it’s just not the same. Going to the Apple section of Best Buy is hardly as compelling as going to the Apple Store. I would spend an extra $20 is gas to buy a new Mac from an Apple Store over buying it in Best Buy.
I have been thinking a lot about what that means for my love affair with Instapaper. Moving forward I am going to try and read most all content on the actual site it was written on, under the following conditions:
Basically I am going to read 100% of stuff in its native context when I do so on my Mac, and only read long form stuff in its native context on the iPad (the short stuff will remain in Instapaper).
My goal, or my hope, is that I get a better sense of who the writer is by doing this. I tested this out with Daring Fireball and Shawn Blanc’s site over the past few days (luckily both have been posting a lot lately). I wanted to see if I got a different feel from the same article if I first read it in Instapaper, then read it on their site and vice versa.
What I found is that both sites felt vastly different when read in Instapaper and not on the actual site. Perhaps this is in part due to the natural flaws in the experiment (meaning I was aware of the experiment), but I did not expect such a difference. After all I have been reading Shawn and John for a very long time and thought that I knew what they “sounded” like without needing to see their site.
Wouldn’t it be neat if Instapaper saved the site color and font information. Basically if in addition to pulling down the article text it also checked to see if the font was dark on light or light on dark and whether the site used serif or sans-serif on the body text? I think that would be a great comprise to helping readers maintain a semblance of the authors ‘voice’.
Just stop and think the next time you decide to read your favorite authors in a bland sterile environment.
