Kookaburra

Golden Age part 56734

Off to the footy - go tigers - with Ms 12. "how about you bring a book?"
" nah"

20 minutes later on train and boredom sets in. I fish out Kindle, turn on wireless and buy "dragon academy" for her on Amazon. 60 secs later and she's busy getting into the new book.

It's a golden age. But fear I won't see my Kindle for a while - still can read books on iPad instead.

To cap it off this blog post is from iPhone on the go.

iPad, eternal youth and the death of newspapers

After some contemplation my take on the iPad is that it's like a sportscar - nobody needs a sports car but I'd love one. I can't stomach the thought of sinking big dollars into one of Stuggart's finest (how is it that a design launched in 1963 can keep being 'refreshed' and maintaining its sense of eternal youth - I am a 1964 model and I'm well past looking youthful - I digress ... hmm new family motto, should it displace 'death before disco?") 

Back to the iPad - yes I will buy one, because I want one and thanks to the wisdom and smarts of Apple the price is very keen and affordable. (unlike their arrogance and stupidity in the late 80s when they insisted on selling a Mac for $7K against IBM branded PCs for $4.5K - they learnt that lesson when Windows 3.1 proved to be a game changer).

The iPad is not flawless and it won't do everything that everyone wants - what device does? But as a media viewer it delivers.

I've been an iPhone user for about 18 months now (on my second - the first one didn't swim). I was sceptical when I was issued one by my employer (I actually needed a bit of encouragement). Now I am hooked and would feel lost without it (new TomTom app helps a great deal with the not getting lost part - again not perfect but smarter than a Melways - our local street directory).

I do couchsurf using the iPhone on WiFi - to check my email, to get the backstory on characters or shows on TV, or pursue infoquests while also keeping one eye on TV. Rarely is there TV content which is sufficiently gripping to hold 100% of my attention - Top Gear and Blood in the Wire are two that do.

With an iPad I'd couchsurf more effectively on a much larger screen, so that alone is attractive.

I do like to think of myself as a rational consumer (who am I kidding - we're all hostage to our emotions) so to maintain that delusion I've set out below some costs of iPad vs traditional media.

Paper Media

The Age (Melbourne) - 7days/week - $416
The Australian Financial Review - 6 days/week - $899
Business Review Weekly - weekly - $235

Total cost per year = $1550

I'd be well informed but really would be drowning in paper and info (too much info on too many stories I don't necessarily need to know about).

Digital Media

iPad cost - ~A$600 861(Apple haven't published prices but this a guesstimate based on the 37% price difference between iPod Touch 64GB in US vs Australia)
BusinessSpectator.com.au - free
Wikipedia - free
Eureka Report $330
ISP 5GB Wireless data plan $40/month

Total cost per year (assuming iPad 3G life of 3 years) = $1100

Clearly this is biased to how I see the news and reflects my interest - your own comparison will be different. I prefer the smarts of Eureka Report than having to sort the signal from the noise using a traditional finance paper like the Australian Financial Review. We're not quite at the Information Agent stage but The Eureka Report provide a great service in boiling down to just the key info that independent investors are interested in.

In my view I will have a better, more current, interactive news and info experience via iPad than relying on paper.

I don't want The Age to fail - it is a venerable institution which still delivers quality journalism but their 'product' doesn't work for me, and I won't for the sake of tradition just subscribe.

The IPad is fully costed with mobile data access such as the one offered by Internode as a SIM for their recently launched MiFi. I won't need this as I will happily use my WiFi network at home (a cost I am already incurring) but for a daily commuter the data access makes sense. Now you can read on the train to/from work without the broadsheet shuffle (folding a broadsheet newspaper for efficient reading on the train will soon be a lost skill)

So there you have it - a rational argument for buying an iPad - for $305/year you can subscribe to The Age (Mon-Fri) to enjoy on the train/tram/bus to work. OR for ~$770/year (iPad with 3G over 3 years + $40/month mobile data plan) you can enjoy the entire World Wide Web (minus the bits that need Flash) on your daily commute. You may even manage to smite some of your email overload to boot. Yes the iPad combo is over twice the price of The Age but it's infinitely more useful and delivers more current content.

Game over for printed newspapers.  A win for the iPad concept - Apple will certainly be a leader in this space but expect to see some fast followers and innovators who will give Apple a run for their money. I just hope in this transition we don't lose quality journalism - the online publishing house behind Business Spectator and Eureka Report (and Crikey) are showing quality journalism can thrive online.

PS In my exuberance I neglected to choose the price of the 3G enabled model - now corrected.

Reading in the gaps

I bookmark and tag (via delicious.com) a lot of stuff I need to read later but struggle to find time and access to those articles when I have a gap in my schedule (that magic 15 mins waiting for my daughter to get changed after swimming - which often seems twice as long)

The answer is Instapaper- It's simple
1. Mark something to 'read later' with a bookmarklet
2. On iPhone load (free) Instapaper application & update over your network
3. Read - you don't need to be online once your documents are synched.

It's wonderful and it works. I've loaded up some of the great articles from Zenhabits.net for me to chew over when next I have a gap to fill.

You can also access the Instapaper.com service from a web browser and on a web-enabled phone. The iPhone gets the advantage of offline reading on the iPhone.

A smart way to find time to read - DailyLit

We live in a golden age where most of us have all we need (the basics) and indeed have access to more to more stuff than we really have time for. Indeed time is the only constant - we only have the same numbers of hours in a day that our ancestors had - though we're living longer and have extended our waking hours longer into the night (thank you electric lights and caffeine!)

It can still be a challenge to schedule time to read something other than blogs, email and web pages. Over the longer term will you really be thanking yourself for spending hours researching whether the Canon G10 is a better option for a travel camera than the Canon 50D (I'm hoping the G10 is the answer - lighter, cheaper - weakness appears to be in low light conditions but hey it's a fantastic performer compared to even the best film camera of 10 years ago). The time spent reading about the bits and pixels will not really add a lot to your life in the long term.

Conversely spending some time reading the 'classics' is likely to be much more rewarding. But how to make the time in your busy schedule?

Enter DailyLit - a service that delivers 'chunks' of good learning via email or RSS. So you can chip away at War and Peace (if you wish) page by page.

They're currently delivering me a Wikipedia tour of Wine - a bit each day I am sure will be more likely to be absorbed than one big deluge. (Oz and James wine adventure on Foxtel is helping too!)

I'm also getting a weekly Italian lesson from the BBC - see Italian Steps - I've not been so diligent in taking it on but at least the weekly email delivery is helping me remember my longer term goal of reinvigorating my conversational Italian.

Making the iPhone the universal capture tool

When I'm on the move I still need an effective way to capture information and task which I can then funnel into my chosen tools - MyLifeOrganized (MLO) is my one place for task management on my PC (Windows). For reference material I have an array of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools - Delicious, Google Notebook, Mindmaps in Mindjet and I'm just starting with Evernote.

My former phone - a Windows Mobile 6 - had a great interface for capturing into MLO and it was quite fast using stylus entry - not so good or safe to do while driving!

I'm still really getting started with iPhone and while I was without one I'd resorted to a small notebook to capture tasks for later transcription into MLO.  (It was a Moleskine Cahier A6 size which worked well when I had it on me)

Note2Self shows a lot of promise - it's an audio-recorder for the iPhone which makes is easy to capture 'notes' on the go as audio files which you can email to yourself (or someone else) for later processing. A lot safer when driving a car - just get into Note2Self, raise iPhone to ear, wait for phone to vibrate, speak your note and then put the phone down - done! It's now stored locally on iPhone and you can then choose to mail it to your usual mailaccount for later processing - I'll be happy just listening to them back off the phone when I'm in a position to process them.

For written notes and clippings Evernote looks like the answer. Capture anything via iPhone camera and then sync it into the cloud and your PC/Mac via their online service. The Evernote service will also extract the text from pictures (OCR) so you can search based on the words in pictures.

For Evernote to work well I need to get better closeup photos of clippings from newspapers, books etc. The iPhone camera doesn't focus very closely at all (maybe 20 cm) so I was thinking of carrying a small magnifying glass. But now the geniuses at Griffin have introduced Clarifi, a polycarbonate iPhone 3G case which includes a built-in Macro lens 

The usual rules still apply - to make this work I need to process the input and ensure I get a state of Inbox Zero.

Iphone - doesn't walk on water but remarkable anyway

Hello World - long time, no post

I was lucky to have an iphone - 'was' is the key. Alas it went for an unintended swim (don't ask) and it is no more.

Otherwise they seem incredibly robust as you can see from ArsTechnica's stress test. They managed to do everything imaginable to it and it only really failed the 'drop from a balcony', 'step on me' and 'make me swim' test. That screen seems incredibly scratch-proof. I hope I get a replacement soon. Going back to a 'normal' phone is a real shock.

I only had the iPhone 3G for three days before tragedy struck. I was getting more comfortable with it - thanks to some tips from Craig W and Peter M. Both of which were in the 'Finger Tips' guide, which, though slim, was still too long for my short attention span!

Tog of AskTog.com fame neatly dissected the iPhone user interface - I'm with Tog in having lumpy fingers and thus the iPhone being (at first glance) hard to use. The key is the press-drag-release sequence on the keys - it is is only the key you are on when you release that counts. So if you miss the right key you can slide to the right key and then release. A subtle but very clever touch.

That first experience with the iPhone is glorious - incredibly sharp vibrant colour screen.

And even the death throes of my iPhone were remarkable (but sad) - it slowly ebbed away in my hands. First the screen, then the pulsing of its body until all that was left was a small red glowing light in the top left. Then it too faded. It was rather like the death of a Terminator or the last moments of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Apple Envy - solved

As a reformed Mac user I have joined the hordes of Windows users with Apple envy :-) I have tricked out my Windows Mobile phone with PointUI - a skin that makes it iPhone like - bigger buttons more functions accessible without using stylus. I was a dedicated Quicksilver user on Mac (an excellent, free application launcher and more) - now experimenting with Enso from Humanized - as of 15 Jan 2008 it too is free (I think partly because the lead developers have been hired into the Mozilla Foundation) - a worthy fast launcher.

DVD playback on Windows?

OK it's been a while since I muttered anything ... so here's a start. I was rather shocked to discover that Windows XP does not include DVD playback! This has been a standard feature of Macs for as long as I can remember. (It arrived in Mac OS X 10.1 in 2001) Guess I have been taking my Mac for granted.

Realistically if you bought a Windows laptop with a DVD drive in it then I am sure it comes with the DVD codec (well it should).

Just shows how our expectations rise over time.

Memo to Bill G - Be careful what you say - we can all hear you now

On the launch of Vista, Bill Gates was interviewed several times and was quizzed each time in part about how Vista appears to be similar to Mac OS X in many respects (so it seems Apple's positioning as the innovator is working).

I don't particularly care which is better (they're both amazingly advanced from where we were 20 years ago; and at the same time not nearly advanced enough - the file/folder metaphor is archaic - give me deeply integrating tagging and retrieval).

I do care about the truth and business people acting with integrity. Bill Gates was either badly briefed, ill prepared or just prepared to make a bunch of false statements to the media. Here's just one example:

Daring Fireball:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates
Friday, 2 February 2007

In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so
publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new
security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security
guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come
out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user
interface-wise.


This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.

Gates’s claim about Mac OS X security is simply false. Flabbergastingly false.

Calendar cross-publishing concepts

In many ways information sharing has become easier with near ubiquitous email, web and broadband access. Each of which have been reduced in many ways to a commonly understood cohesive experience for most of us. There is potential for so much more but sadly the layers of complexity make it hard to fully embrace Internet 1.0 let alone what more is to come. Jon Udell of Microsoft demonstrates some of that complexity by trying to wire up different calendars together.

Jon Udell on Calendar cross-publishing concepts: A growing number of people will be keeping their work calendars in Microsoft Outlook and their family calendars elsewhere, say on Google. How can they cross-publish their work and family calendars? It's possible, but the conceptual hurdles are formidable. Here's what I found when I did the experiment.