Aldoblog

AT&T is the exclusive wireless provider for the Apple iPhone here in the United States, and has at least partially earned a reputation for providing poor wireless phone coverage. In my own travels, I’ve had great reception in Portland, Austin, Palm Springs, and Chicago, among other places, four or five bars, consistently. I don’t recall ever having poor 3G reception anywhere — except here in my home city of San Francisco.

Now, San Francisco presents some unique challenges, such has high-rises and famously steep hills. But solving those reasonably straightforward RF challenges is what AT&T gets paid the big bucks to do. After almost four years there has been some improvement, but reception is still a major issue, with some parts of SF being almost completely dead zones. (I believe this has more to do with the tinfoil hat crowd than AT&T’s lack of effort and investment, but that’s a post for another day.)

AT&T reception in our house, while not awful, has been spotty, and seems oddly worse since we gave up our land line in January. It has definitely been an issue, with dropped and “one-way” (you can hear someone but they can’t hear you, or vice versa) calls being a regular occurrence.

AT&T has a solution for that problem. It’s called the AT&T 3G MicroCell, which puts a mini cell phone tower called a “femtocell” in your house, and no less a personage than the NYTimes has written about it. Their first article, Bringing You a Signal You’re Already Paying For, is a bit snarky, but does a good job of covering the details of the technology, and why you might want it. Their second article, Dead Zone Doldrums Test Skills of iPhone Customers, is more pragmatic, focused on usable ways to improve your reception, including the MicroCell.

Ultimately, finding a usable solution is more productive than pointing fingers. While the 3G MicroCell does cost $150, there are no monthly fees, and I can attest to getting at least three, and mostly five bars everywhere in my ~1400 square foot house. The MicroCell hands off smoothly to a standard AT&T tower when I move to my back deck, where reception was already excellent. Call quality has been excellent. Once set up, there is nothing to do. It Just Works.

There were two tricks to getting the MicroCell working. The first was actually getting one. They are not yet available for ordering online, at least not in San Francisco. But, after reading a tweet that AT&T Wireless retail stores were selling them in Santa Rosa, I stopped by a store in downtown San Francisco. Yes, they had them in stock, and so did the second store I visited. So, if you want a MicroCell today, you may need to visit your nearest AT&T Wireless store. For me, this was only 10 minutes out of my way, not a big deal.

My second issue was activating the MicroCell. It needs to have a reliable two-way connection to the Internet. For you to receive calls, the AT&T network needs to be able to reach the MicroCell, that is, connect from the Internet to inside your home network. This is something that a good firewall will normally prevent. I assume that the MicroCell uses UPnP or NAT-PMP to attempt to automatically open appropriate holes for itself, but my decidedly non-standard firewall software and even more unusual hardware don’t support either. So, I had to put the MicroCell outside the firewall, which is easy enough if you have a simple home network…and a pain in the ass if you have a fully wired house. For most people, this won’t be an issue, but I would appreciate a way to manually configure my MicroCell, or at least the technical information to open the right holes. Currently AT&T wants the 3G MicroCell to be a black box that requires no direct configuration by the customer.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with the 3G MicroCell. It’s set up, it works as advertised, and I didn’t need to wait for AT&T to put a new cell tower nearer my house, or for Apple to launch a Verizon iPhone.

This chart makes it ridiculously easy to understand:

Any questions?

Audiobook Builder, my recommended solution for creating audiobooks from CDs, is on sale for 50% off ($5), for one day only. The sale ends at the end of the day, February 11th, at midnight Eastern Time.

I consider Audiobook Builder a bargain at its full price of $10. At $5, it’s a steal. Go get it! (Audiobook Builder is for Mac OS X only.)

I just watched the full video from yesterday’s introduction of the Apple iPad, and had a few thoughts.

1. If you have seen other Apple product introductions, the format is familiar, and they are never less than well executed. Of the intros I’ve seen, nothing has come close to the introduction of the iPhone. (I saw the original Mac intro years too late to fully appreciate its true impact.) But what the introduction of the iPad may have lacked in shock and awe, it made up for in the completeness of the story. The iPhone was on stage by itself, just the software that came on the phone. The iPad arrives with an entire ecosystem, of new and existing applications, third party developers, accessories, etc.

   People who were expecting to get the stomach drop of excitement that the iPhone intro produced (at least in me) were certainly disappointed. But that’s misplaced, the iPad is a far more advanced product and story than the iPhone was when introduced. It’s like the difference between the excitement of crushing hard on someone new, versus the comfort and trust and love that comes after many years of marriage. One’s more exciting, but the other is richer and more fulfilling.

2. Another disappointment, or fear, that people have expressed is the lack of “openness” or “freedom.” I’ve got a different word for that concept: “complexity.” You can call that spin if you like, but I’ve spent 20+ years showing people how to use computers, and they’ve never been easy to use. Even today, 25 years after the concept of clicking and double-clicking hit the mass market, I see people confuse the two, and that is the most trivial of examples. It’s easy to come up with dozens more serious.

   What Apple is doing, first with the iPhone and now with the iPad, is offering a new model for computing, one that allows more direct interaction with objects on the screen, while at the same time simplifying away huge amounts of complexity, things that most people will never care about.

   Those of us who are “computer sophisticates” think those things are important, but when the iPad arrives, and normal people love them, and rave about the user interface, and buy them by the millions, we’ll see what’s really important, and it’s not the “freedom” to fuck around in the file system, or the “openness” to go out onto the Wild Internet and download and install random software.

   Try this exercise: every time you hear an expert say the iPad isn’t open, change “open” to “complicated.” Every time they write the iPad is “locked down” subsitute “simplified.” When the gurus get detailed about “important” three letter acronyms or random tech talk, hear “blah blah blah,” because that’s all it matters.

   Gruber put it best, it’s the arrival of the automatic transmission for computers. Those of us who are enthusiasts and experts will have access to manual transmissions for decades — regular computers are not going away. But for those folks who only care about getting to their destination, it just got a lot easier.

   Update: Here are some terrific articles that tackle this topic in depth, and in different, complementary ways:

   • “Future Shock” by Frasier Speirs suggests that existing computer experts are suffering from future shock.
   • “The iPad Is For Everyone But Us” by Mike Rundle argues that “Most people who … are now writing about the iPad are misunderstanding its intended audience because they’re not in it.”
   • “On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing” by Rob Foster illustrates the reaction normal people are having to the iPad.
   • “iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up” by Joel Johnson calls the whiners out on the bogus parts of their arguments, and suggests they compete with Apple, instead of just complaining.

3. If you want to really understand this, and get an idea of just how much Apple is leading by example, watch the segment where Phil Schiller demonstrates the iPad versions of the iWork suite (a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool). Apple has completely re-thought the way that you interact with these tools, and except for the on screen virtual keyboard, it surpasses the desktop experience in every way. Really quite extraordinary, it was here that I got genuinely excited about what is new in the iPad, and what it means. A small taste of The Future.

4. Scott Forstall offered developers a big incentive to build apps specifically for the iPad: separate, prominent placement in the iPad App Store. The phrase “a new gold rush” was used. Is that sound in the distance the clatter of Android and web OS and Blackberry phones being dropped by developers? Maybe not, but Apple is certainly building tremendous momentum for their platform. Competitors will not be catching up for years.

At $500, the iPad will be $100 cheaper than the original iPhone I lined up to buy. I may not line up for an iPad, but I’ll certainly be buying one. Yes, the 2nd generation will be even better. That’s always true. So what. I don’t think the iPad is the grand slam home run I wrote that the iPhone was, but it’s most definitely a hit that will score runs. I want one.

If you search the App Store for “audiobook” you turn up hundreds of results, most of which are crap. (More on that in a future post.) Separating the wheat from the chaff can be a challenge. Aldo on Audiobooks will only bother to review worthwhile apps.

In my review of the Bookmark iPhone app, I noted that for the long tracks of an audiobook, the standard controls of the iPod app, optimized for 3 minute music tracks, can be frustrating. Bookmark is one solution to this issue. Another comes in the form of self-contained audiobook apps from Recorded Books.

These audiobook apps are found in the App Store section of iTunes, rather than in the Audiobooks section. You are buying not merely the audio portion of the audiobook, but also an app that will play it back. Indeed, you can only play the audiobook from its dedicated app; you cannot use the iPod app, or Bookmark, etc.

These apps are the iPhone equivalent of the Playaway format: player and book baked into a single device. The idea is to make an audiobook as easy to use as a regular book — a single (physical, for the Playaway) object that you pick up and take with you, no other items needed. The self-contained audiobook app makes the experience of buying an audiobook, getting it onto your iPhone, and playing it simple and straightforward. In theory.

Read the rest of this entry (1,869 words) »

If you search the App Store for “audiobook” you turn up hundreds of results, most of which are crap. (More on that in a future post.) Separating the wheat from the chaff can be a challenge. Aldo on Audiobooks will only bother to review worthwhile apps.

Bookmark is an alternative audio player dedicated to audiobooks, based on the insight that the iPod is great for music, but not very well-suited to audiobooks. Bookmark was designed around the central concept that, when listening to a long audiobook, you want different controls for moving around in the much longer tracks, and tools for marking positions in the recording that go beyond just saving where you left off. If you’ve ever listened to a long audiobook track on an iPod, and especially if you’ve ever thought “I want to go back and hear that part again,” you know what this is all about.

Using Bookmark is simple. Start the app, choose a book from the list of titles (Bookmark filters out everything but audiobooks), and press play. In this regard, Bookmark is much like the built-in iPod app. The basics of playback are pretty obvious, with standard controls for play/pause, volume control, and track progress.

Read the rest of this entry (1,515 words) »

Researching the answer to a reader question, I came across the following article in Apple’s Knowledgebase, and it’s so generally useful, I thought I mention it:

It covers the most basic information about how to sync audio from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone, but that’s often the best place to start when you have sync problems. For more advanced syncing settings specific to audiobooks, see my article Managing audiobooks on a small-capacity iPod.

Just a quick note to mention that Audiobook Builder, my preferred solution for creating audiobooks on Mac OS X, was recently updated to version 1.1. The improvements include:

• Longer audiobook parts, 18 hours instead of the prior 12 hour limit.
• New options for where to break an audiobook into parts; for me, this means no more chapters split across separate parts.
• A number of new build options that allow you to change the settings right before you build the audiobook.
  

There’s other changes and fixes. A nice (free) update to an already very good audiobook tool.

Barnes & Noble is giving away nine free audiobooks. Most of the selections are short stories, but Tom Sawyer is the full length novel. All are offered in MP3 format, which should be playable on any device. (With iTunes 8 you can change the media type to Audiobook to make tracks in any format behave like “true” audiobooks.)

Best-selling, critically acclaimed, and classic authors and stories are represented. The Louis L’Amour story is dramatized (think old time radio), the rest are performed by professional narrators. These are quality products, and a short but complete story in audio format is a great way to try audiobooks, if you’ve never given them a shot before.

Here’s the complete list of what’s available:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Merrano of the Dry Country by Louis L’Amour
• “Ysrael,” an unabridged story from Drown by Junot Diaz
• “Truth or Dare,” an unabridged story from The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg
• “Fathers,” an unabridged story from The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• “Great Day,” an unabridged story from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
• “Best New Horror” by Joe Hill, a story from the collection 20th Century Ghosts
• “Super Goat Man,” an unabridged story from Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem
• “The Babysitter’s Code,” from the collection Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

The process for downloading them is a little painful, you have to add each one to your shopping cart, and then check out. The check out process requires you to fill in payment information, even though the purchase is free. (I imagine that’s the trade: you create an account with us, and we’ll give you something for free.) After you check out, you’ll receive an email with download instructions, which includes requiring you to install the Overdrive Media Console, a tool to download and manage your electronic purchases from B&N (Amazon has a similar tool), and then going back to the Barnes & Noble site to download the link files, and then opening the link files in Media Console to actually download the tracks. Then if you want them in iTunes, that’s another step. All in all, it’s nowhere near as easy as the iTunes Store, or Audible, or even Amazon. But did I mention the audiobooks are free?

The offer ends on May 16th (at 3am Eastern; call it the 15th for most people), so get there soon.

After posting my explanation of Nearly Perfect Audiobooks, I got feedback from a number of readers who preferred to have their audiobooks in lots of short, 1-3 minute tracks. I find many tracks to be incredibly annoying when organizing and managing my books, especially when manually creating a “Listen Now” playlist to compliment the smart playlists I describe in Managing Audiobooks on a Small Capacity iPod or iPhone. The approach I take for my own audiobooks is to condense the books into as few tracks as possible, the exact opposite of the lots of tiny tracks approach.

So why would someone prefer lots of tiny tracks? The common thread seemed to be wanting to have the ability to skip backwards in the book just a couple minutes, if they missed something, got interrupted, or otherwise needed to re-listen to what they had just heard. The easiest way to do this is the iPod’s most obvious track navigation technique, click the Back button once to skip backwards to the beginning of the current track, or click twice to go back to the previous track. While smaller tracks make that reasonable, the hour+ tracks that come out of my audiobook import process make that technique painful. Hence a preference for shorter tracks.

But! The iPod provides at least two other easy-to-use techniques for going backwards in your audiobook, and once mastered, they are at least as useful as the basic clicking, eliminating the need to click backwards through short tracks to re-listen to the last few minutes. And they work best on the long tracks I prefer. Everybody wins!