Aldoblog

Three Reasons to Not Change the Behavior of the iPhone Ring/Silent Switch

Alderete — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 08:16:00 +0000

Been a bit of a brouhaha recently about the behavior of the iPhone’s ring/silent switch, kicked off by an article in the New York Times. John Gruber, Andy Ihnatko, and Marco Arment have weighed in, and covered most of the ground for and against, but here’s three specific thoughts I haven’t read elsewhere:

The iPhone’s silent switch has behaved the way it does for 4½ years, and we’re only now having this conversation? Because some guy got a brand new iPhone and embarrassed himself at the symphony the same day? And people want to change the behavior because of one (well-publicized) incident of user error? Seriously?

There’s no better indication that the behavior should remain the same than the fact that we’re only now discussing it.
Flipping the ring/silent switch is a casual act. You can do it without looking at your phone. You can do it without even taking it out of your pocket. You can do it unintentionally, digging something out of that same pocket.

Setting an alarm is a deliberate act. I defy anyone to do it while their iPhone is still in their pocket. I defy anyone to do it accidentally. If you forget you have an alarm set after going through the process of setting it, and get embarrassed at the symphony, shame on you.
If you think the ring/silent switch should override an alarm you have set, causing it to not make sound, there’s an easy way to do that: don’t use the built-in Clock app. Many third-party alarm apps respect the ring/silent switch. I like Night Stand. It’s pretty, and when silent mode is enabled, it vibrates but doesn’t ring. Solve your problem for 99¢ and move on.

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On Sale at Audible: Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy

Alderete — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:29:52 +0000

Only for the next two days, and only for Audible.com members, but the deal is so good, I feel compelled to share this collection of three hard-edged science fiction novels, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. I really enjoyed all three novels, and hope the author will return to the Envoy universe and write more of Kovacs’s story.

All three novels, unabridged, 55+ hours of audiobook, for $25 — less than $9 per novel, under 50¢ per hour! (Even when the sale ends on June 14th, this bundle will still be a nice deal.)

Audiobook Builder 1.5

Alderete — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:42:10 +0000

My recommended solution for creating digital audiobooks from CDs, Audiobook Builder, has recently been updated, and comes with a new feature for renaming the chapters in an audiobook:

I don’t know that I’d want to use this on every book, but for those without interesting or meaningful chapter names (or if you’re just not as anal retentive as I am), this can be a nice time savings to make your chapter titles look neat and regular. This is especially useful if you’re creating a separate track for every chapter, and want to keep chapters in the right order. (I recommend a different approach, but it’s up to you.)

Other new features include additional metadata support, something that’s very welcome. All in all, a great update — and free to registered users!

Free download of Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Alderete — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:11:20 +0000

For a limited time, you can download a free audiobook of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden read by Mel Foster. This is the commercial version of the book, which retails for $23-33.

The unabridged audiobook is provided as MP3 files, which you can simply drag into iTunes, and then sync to your iPod or iPhone for listening. You can change their Media Kind to have iTunes treat them as audiobook tracks, or with a little more work, you can convert them to a single audiobook file.

Note: If you don’t already have one, you will need to create an account on Tantor Media’s site, which will sign you up for their newsletter where, among other things, you can learn about future free downloads.

“Just a Big iPod Touch”

Alderete — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:23:34 +0000

When the iPad debuted, the witticism was that it was “just a big iPod touch.” This week Motorola echoed this by saying it’s “like a giant iPhone.”

This is about as stupid as saying a swimming pool is like a giant bathtub.

I’ll be the first to suggest that two people in a bathtub can be a lot of fun, but you’re not going to play Marco Polo or do a swan dive into even the biggest McMansion whirlpool tub. Sometimes size does matter.

The 9.7" screen size of the iPad is not an accident, Apple did extensive testing to arrive at that size. Below that, you either have to make the user interface too small to use with normal fingers, or it really is just a big smartphone.

The 7" screens coming with the Samsung Galaxy and other would-be iPad competitors are only 45% of the size of the iPad’s 9.7" screen, and that makes a difference for most kinds of applications. Look at a side-by-side size comparison of a Galaxy to an iPad to get an idea of that difference. The 7" screens have a wide screen aspect ratio, which makes them great for watching widescreen movies, but that’s about the only use where they are equivalent to the iPad.

By the end of 2011, “Like a Giant iPhone” will be in the same class as CmdrTaco’s legendary “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” assessment of the original iPod.

Which iPod Should I Buy, 2010 Edition

Alderete — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:22:13 +0000

Two years in the making, or just two years late. At long last I’ve updated the article describing recommended devices for listening to audiobooks:

Which iPod Should I Buy for Listening to Audiobooks

Hopefully this will be useful to you during your holiday shopping! (And come back for my Recommended Audiobooks when you find a new toy under the tree for yourself, that’s getting a huge update soon.)

Sublime Sherlock

Alderete — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:23:06 +0000

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular and enduring characters in all of English literature. In addition to the 60 original stories and novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are dozens and dozens of additional takes on the Sherlock mythos by successful authors—among them Laurie R. King, Michael Chabon, Nicholas Meyer, and Carole Nelson Douglas—with further adventures, alternative perspectives, and interesting new interpretations. More than 200 movies and TV shows (with 75 different actors portraying Holmes), radio episodes, and so on. To write that Holmes is beloved by many is a serious understatement.

The vast majority of the presentations, across all media, preserve the Victorian setting of the original stories, or at most advance the setting and the age of the detective. This Fall brought something new, a thoroughly modernized Sherlock Holmes who texts, blogs, and hacks into other people’s computers. And even up against modern CSI techniques, he still makes those around him look dim with his brilliant observations, deductions, and leaps of logic. (Some police call him “Freak.” To his face.)

The creators recognized that what mattered were the characters of Holmes and Watson, and that they are as compelling in 21^st century London as they were a century earlier. The characters, setting, stories, and dialog are completely contemporary—while remaining faithful to the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, Holmes fanatics will find many small references to original stories, in dialog, plot lines, and character names.

I think this is the best new series on TV this year. The writing and actual mysteries are solid, with light touches of humor, much of it involving people thinking that two men who live and spend most of their time together must be a couple. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The actors, principals and supporting, are all excellent. The production values are very high, with great photography of London, and a creative way of showing Holmes’s thinking process via on-screen HUD-style text. This is a terrific show, and after very positive reviews and viewer numbers, more episodes are planned (sadly, not until Fall 2011).

Sherlock initially aired on the BBC this Summer, in three 90 minute episodes. The past three weekends it came to Masterpiece Mystery! on PBS. Check your listings for repeat airings, or view them in full at Sherlock on Masterpiece PBS. If you have an iPad, you can even view them in the PBS iPad app. And as of this weekend you can get Sherlock on Netflix. Joe Bob says check it out.

App Review: Audible Audiobook Player

Alderete — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:13:43 +0000

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.

My favorite source for audiobooks is Audible.com, an online service offering over 85,000 digital downloads of audiobooks and other spoken word content (more here). This summer Audible released the Audible audio player app, dedicated to playing Audible content and interacting with the Audible.com service directly, without requiring the use of a computer or iTunes. The app is free, but requires the use of an Audible.com account.

The short version of this review is, if you’re an Audible customer with an iOS device, getting this free app is a no-brainer. It’s intuitive and optimized for audiobooks, it plays in the background just like the built-in iPod app, it adds useful features not in the built-in iPod app, and its design is clean, simple, tasteful. I’ve used it exclusively for audiobooks for the last four months, and it’s a great replacement for the iPod app. I plan to continue using it indefinitely. I still use the iPod app for podcasts and non-Audible audiobooks, and regularly miss Audible app features.

The Audible app has three major functions:

Browse and search your Audible library.

In addition to book title, you can browse content by author and by recent activity (purchase, download, playback). Searches can be on author, title, narrator, or all three. If you have a lot of audiobooks, you will realize immediately how big an improvement this is over the built-in iPod app. I normally keep 30-40 titles on my iPhone, but I have more than 275 titles in my Audible library (I’ve been a customer for 7 years). The new ways to browse are a godsend.
Download titles to your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any iOS device).

The Audible app allows you to download audiobooks directly to your device, without needing to connect to your computer. (You do need to be connected to a Wi-Fi network, as virtually any audiobook will be greater than the 10 megabyte limit for 3G downloads.) Browse to an item, and tap the download button, it couldn’t be easier. This is a fantastic feature for people who have difficulty getting iTunes to sync the way they want it to, and it’s great for making last-minute decisions about what to listen to, without needing to break out your laptop.
Play your audiobooks.

The app features a slew of specialized navigation controls that are specific to longer, linear spoken word content, including a no-look mode for controlling playback while driving. Particularly useful features include a “skip back 30 seconds button” that is larger than in the iPod app, dedicated chapter navigation buttons, an integrated sleep timer, and the ability to create bookmarks at any point in a recording. Overall, audiobook playback is easier and more obvious than with the iPod app.

Other Features

The app additionally includes a number of smaller features worth noting. There is a news tab, with notes about upcoming releases, insider notes, author appearances, awards, and other audiobook news. A stats tab shows you various statistics about your listening habits, and even allows you to earn badges for specific behaviors, like binge listening, listening all night, and so on. You can bookmark specific spots in a recording and take notes on it, much like you can with the Bookmark app I reviewed previously. And there are various things you can email or post to Twitter or Facebook, if you want to share with others. Finally, the shop tab serves as a launch pad for switching to the Safari browser and accessing the mobile-optimized version of the Audible.com web site.

I won’t bore you with additional details; if you want to see more, Audible has written a very good user manual for the app, which you can download in PDF format. (This is more useful than built-in help, since if you don’t have an Audible.com account, you can’t really play with the app directly.) Don’t let the manual intimidate you; it is almost entirely unnecessary, because the app is so intuitive, differing from the iPod app only in ways that make sense for the purpose of the app.

Notes and Limitations

Content downloaded inside the Audible app is not added to your on-board iPod library, or synced back to iTunes, but is instead stored in the app’s data storage area. If you want the content in iTunes, you’ll have to download it separately, on your computer.
The app can play Audible content from your standard iTunes library, that you sync to your device as usual using iTunes, but it is treated as a slightly second class citizen, losing the ability to skip to built-in chapter marks. This doesn’t have to be a big deal, but it’s irritating. And when you combine this with the first issue, the two distinct libraries have the potential to create a collection management problem down the line.
In the four months I’ve used it, the app has crashed on me a few times, over multiple versions. But, it has never lost my place in a book or a download. Just restart the app, and continue where you were.
I’ve noticed issues with author names not always being properly grouped. For example, I found my Michael Connelly books in three groups, and my Lois McMaster Bujold titles in seven different groups. This looks like minor whitespace or spelling discrepancies in the Audible data. These are not problems with the app per se, but rather with the audiobook database and metadata on the Audible.com site. There were also occasional encoding issues on foreign names, e.g., Per Wahlöö & Maj Sjöwall, and this probably is an app issue.
Shopping in the store is a bit awkward, involving a swap out to Safari, where you browse a version of the web site optimized for mobile devices. (I suspect this is a limitation due to Apple’s terms for selling in the iTunes Store.) On the mobile version of the site, I can’t access the My Next Listen queue, which is where I personally store my “real” wish list. (The wish list, which is accessible, is where I keep my “maybe someday” list.) You can switch to the full site, and it’s usable in mobile Safari. Minor awkwardness aside, it is useful to be able to make purchases from your phone.

Summary

Version Reviewed: v1.3, released September 20th, 2010

If you are an Audible.com customer and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, get this app right now. You will end up loving it. It makes downloading and listening to your Audible content easier, even to the point of cutting your computer out of the loop.

Pluses:

Integrated, soup-to-nuts experience for Audible content.
Terrific controls and user interface for audiobooks.
News, stats and badges are fun.

Minuses:

Audible only.
Separation of app audiobooks library and standard iTunes library.
Minor glitches.

More Information:

Audible player in the App Store
Audible app web page
Audible mobile apps web page (for Blackberry & Android)

Editorial Note

The Audible app is free, but the Audible.com service is not. I pay for my Audible subscription myself. I have added affiliate links to products mentioned in this review, but only after writing the review. Affiliate relationships have not affected the content of this review in any way.

Free download of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Alderete — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:28:42 +0000

From now through Halloween, you can download a free audiobook of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein read by Simon Vance. Vance is an extraordinary narrator, winner of many awards, and certainly a Golden Voice. This is a high-quality production.

Five Bars at Home with the AT&T 3G MicroCell

Alderete — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:00:18 +0000

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.