kzeise.com | Kai Mo's Musings on Software, Copyrights, and other stuff

iOS 6.0

29. September 2012 · Categories: Apple, Software

This is the first update of iOS that has downsides to it, namely the new maps app, but it also has a few really nice new features.

Maps

This will take some time until the data is even remotely a match for what Google provides. Search works badly, it does not find most businesses that you would expect unless you know the exact name, and when it finds some options, it points you 50 km away, where Google finds a couple of options within 5 km. Until now I never realised how closely mapping is related to search, and I can only hope that Apple will improve on that quickly.

I miss the terrain view, and the coverage of satellite images still has some way to go to cover all parts of Germany. They are also of a lower quality than those from Google, often having unnatural colours or showing cloud cover. Fortunately, Google Maps works reasonably well even in Safari, so there is a fall back when Apple is letting me down again.

I like the vector display mostly, it is a clear display, but the vectors are often too straight. It would look much better if the roads were modelled as spline curves. What I really miss is any indication of built up areas, this is important for driving, to know when you have to slow down, and it just gives a much better sense of location.

Routing integration could be better. If you have Navigon on the unit, you can only use it with some extra screen tabs, as a “public transport” provider, unfortunately it cannot be set as your default instead of the built in navigation.

When I checked the turn by turn navigation, it was reasonably efficient in the data transfer department, needing 500 KByte of cellular data for a 2 hour trip over 200km. I believe it could do a better job of displaying traffic problems, and I really missed the ability to easily get updates on alternative routes, but otherwise it already works remarkably well.

Single App Mode

Single App Mode is a great addition when you want to pass the unit to someone else to play with. While active, in-app purchases are disabled. The retries when trying to evade the sand box are time limited, with a maximum of 3 minutes. This would mean that you can break out after 20 days, which sounds like a reasonable compromise.

Bluetooth 4.0

This is a great addition, as it can be used without any extra license fees, and so would enable almost all NFC scenarios given its low power nature. It is also a way for lot of accessories to drop hacks like using the audio port to use the smartphone or iPad as their controller, now that the cost to add Bluetooth has fallen below 2$. One of these chips is the nRF8001 by Nordic Semiconductor.

The hardware is on the 4S, 5, the new iPod Touch (5th gen) and the new iPad, as well as the newest Macs. That is easily enough support to start using it.

Small Stuff

My favorite little improvement is that you can now update apps without being dumped out of the update page. There are also a lot of other small refinements to make your life easier, but unfortunately the camera connection kit still does not play nice with the Fuji X100. The German keyboard now has a variant with umlauts, but it is too tight to be usable on the iPhone, and I am afraid that using it will get me into trouble with my muscle memory.

Upgrade or not

The question whether to upgrade really comes down to your reliance on Maps. I was surprised when my mother asked me whether she should be holding off of upgrading because of it, and it shows how utterly important maps are to a mobile device. Currently Apple is far off from having good enough data in many parts of Europe. Satellite images are very often not available or of a too limited quality, the point of interest database is smaller, and it seems you can only find them as long as you know their official names, not by what they offer. Fortunately you can still access Google Maps via the browser, but it is more hassle to use than the old app, and you loose the ability to place pins on the map.

The Keeper iPhone

24. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

With the new iPhone I get the feeling that we are nearing the good enough stage for iOS. Unlike previous phones, there was not one feature limited to the 5, essentially everything will be available to an owner of the 4S as well.

The user facing improvements are small, and they make the phone come close to perfection:

the screen now has better colors, and will roughly match the new iPad
it is larger, but now has clearly reached the limits of what can be comfortably reached with one hand,
It has a somewhat better camera, but they are not showcasing the improved low light performance, which would be its main benefit. And the 4S already had a camera that would almost always pick the right color balance.
They give prominent placement to their new AirPods, and do not include them with the older iPhones, even though the much cheaper iPod Nano does get them.
There was no new app that would showcase what amazing new things you can do with all the extra processing power of the phone

Together this means that the phone is now finally close to good enough, and especially with the transition to a new dock connector I believe that people will now buy their next iPhone expecting to keep them for an extra year or two before they feel compelled to upgrade.

The one area where the phone could be better is in a more regular support of LTE. This will be important for the future as carriers will over time remove support for plain GSM and replace it with LTE. So the decision whether to buy the iPhone 5 will come down on whether it supports the LTE frequencies important to you. For the US it is a resounding yes, for Europe it is pretty much a no given the lack of 800 and 2600 MHz support. Especially the lack of the 800 MHz band is annoying, as it is most widely deployed where there is no 3G yet.

I expect the adoption of the 5 to be excellent in the U.S., as under the guise of family plans there is a strong price war brewing. The smartphone rate of $35 on family plans are just $840 over two years, of which 40+% would go to Apple in the form of a device subsidy, and people will want to take carriers up on the subsidy as the lack of cheaper, non-subsidized options means that you are simply throwing money away by not upgrading.

The situation in Europe is different, as the carriers offer equivalent plans without device subsidy for up to 25€ per month less, removing the subsidy inducement. This means Europe will be an interesting test case to see whether the iPhone is really good enough, with its economic troubles, the lack of carriers effectively subsidizing the iPhone, and one common standard making it easy to use your handset with the competition after your main contract has expired.

Using The Retina MacBook

12. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

I finally received my Retina MacBook, and it was worth the extremely long wait (I ordered the first week after it came out). My previous unit was a 17″ anti-gloss, so I was quite apprehensive how the screen would turn out. I needn’t have worried, the screen is absolutely amazing, the best computer screen I have ever used. Combined with the rather beefy hardware powering it, it makes for the best computer you can buy today.

The Screen

The screen brings back from the iPad / iPhone all the good stuff:

It has very stable colours from all angles, something I have waited to come back to notebooks ever since Lenovo stopped using IPS panels on the Thinkpad. Especially for colour work this is indispensable, as with other notebook displays even a small change in head position could change colours.
The resolution brings a quite noticeable improvement, both in the sharpness of the text and the detail you can see in photos.
It has a LED backlight, so there is no warmup time until the display shows good colours
The screen already has pretty good colours from factory calibration. My old MacBook was miles off, by more than 1000 K, while this one looks pretty close (It does not recognise my calorimeter anymore, so I had no chance to measure it yet)

As for working with it, the reduced glare really makes enough difference so that the screen can outshine the reflections, and they are not noticeable in my indoor use.

I use the screen at the scaled 1920×1200 resolution, and it works surprisingly well. The anti-aliasing used by Mac OS X ensures that the text remains pretty sharp even when scaled. Some software like Microsoft Office is not yet optimised for the display, and while they look horrible in native resolution, the scaled resolution makes them bearable. For work, I still have a virtual machine running under Windows XP, and even there the fonts look almost as good as on the 17″, after I increased the contrast used by ClearType.

But as good as the screen is, it is still only halfway there. Small fonts are much more readable than on the 17″, but they still loose visibly in detail. At the same physical size, they already look better on the iPhone. I would love to see another doubling in pixel density, the “Reality Display”.

Audio

The speakers are remarkable good for their small size, but there is one area where the Retina is not matching the quality of the rest of the system: the audio connector. I typically use headphones with my computer, and the ones I have are pretty loud. So I use them at the lowest loudness, and when playing music I can hear some white noise. Even though it has low volume, it is pretty present, something which I have not experienced with any iPhone or iPad, not even with my old desktop computer.

One issue which iOS shares is that starting / stopping music is not perfect, and produces small, but audible clicks.

Performance

The Retina is very snappy, especially the SSD makes a huge difference. This is very pronounced when running a virtual machine, where the file system is pretty fragmented, with a filesystem inside a container, which has snapshots all over the place. Some tasks where it used to take 15+ seconds to prime the cache are now done in less than a second, very impressive.

On the other hand for rather CPU bound tasks the improvements are not that much, especially if they use mostly integer calculations and cannot make much use of parallel execution. There I have seen as little improvement as a 50% speed increase.

Unfortunately Safari could be smoother when scrolling content. It would really help if it could transfer more of the rendering to the GPU, rendering the different HTML regions into bitmaps which are then composed on the GPU to provide smooth scrolling.

The Upgrade

As my first switch between Macs, I was positively surprised how painless the process was. Create a new admin account not matching anything on your old system, log in and use the migration assistant to restore from a Time Machine backup. Fire up Aperture to reconnect you photos, and re-authenticate all your software (if you can find all the credentials, that is), and you are done. Compared to my previous Windows updates an absolutely painless process.

The Package

Easily two pounds lighter than the 17″, it has lightened my backpack noticeably. But as I only use it on some kind of table, it does not really matter, I do not carry it for hours on end. Here the reduced height of the unit is more useful, it makes typing subtly more comfortable. Another difference to the 17″ are the rubber feet. Unlike the 17″, the Retina moves much more easily on my table, so much so that I often unintentionally move it a bit, but it fortunately just have enough grip that nothing moves while typing.

Heat

Another problem is that the unit can become quite hot if used heavily. At the moment there is nothing you can do apart from forcing the integrated graphics using gfxCardStatus. This could be much better if Apple were to use the programmable thermal design power feature of the CPU. Then you could tell it to use a reduced thermal budget when you want to keep the unit cooler and quieter.

Will the Kindle Fire put pressure on the iPad?

06. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

With their well specced new tablets, Amazon has unveiled the best alternative to the iPad yet. It is significantly cheaper, with up to $500 savings for the 4G variant with the base plan, but it really looks like a content consumption device, with a significantly worse software offering. Amazon has not even revealed in fine print the base OS, nor can it display ePub natively. So it will maybe cause Apple to slightly cheapen the iPad ( likely by doubling memory at the same price points), but a $249 iPad mini should be safe.

Also Amazon is saving money by reducing the size of its offerings compared to the iPad. As seen in the table, Apple's offerings are a good deal bigger, mainly thanks to their 4:3 ratio which helps a lot when having to edit something.

Has Nokia Still a Chance?

06. September 2012 · Categories: General

Nokia has recently presented two new phones in their Lumia series, and one wonders if they still have a chance to fight back against the rising tide of Android and iOS. The software is now finally competitive against the other two, covers the basics well, but nothing outstanding. So they need something else to get people to switch, and I believe they have it in their PureView camera technology. Assuming Apple does not catch up next week, it is miles better than the competition for indoors photos. Since photos/videos are now one of the main uses for your phone, and low light performance is currently clearly not good enough, it is probably the best chance they have for wooing people into their camp.

Update: It did not help that they did not use their camera to demonstrate image stabilization in their spots, since it sows doubts on the validity of the quite amazing actual photos they posted. And while they never claimed to use smartphone footage to demonstrate IS, it was clearly implied. Shame on them.

The new iPhone

04. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

After the announcements for the Apple event next week have been sent out, I am now convinced that the next iPhone will be called the iPhone 5. There are two reasons for it:

The invitation has a shadow with a 5
Apple will likely want to continue to sell this model after its successor has been introduced, and it is never a good move to sell old stuff with a name that evokes dated, like iPhone model late 2012 would in 2014

The rumors of dropping the number came from the new iPad, but the situation there is different. If we assume that an iPad mini is coming, it will take over the budget role in the lineup. And with its introduction, the iPad 2 will no longer have a role, and will be discontinued to simplify the line up.

Apple almost never does price competition with older models. It makes the positioning more difficult than needed, and the iPhone is the exception because there not enough room to meaningfully differentiate the screen size of the phone without severely limiting its usefulness.

Touchscreen Balkanisation

27. August 2012 · Categories: Apple, Copyright

With the jury handing Apple a huge win against Samsung (Florian Müller has a good overview), I feel conflicted in my reaction. On the one hand I welcome it as Samsung has been quite willful in copying the iPhone almost verbatim, and they have definitely crossed the line of decency here, on the other hand the asserted patents are uncomfortably close to core touch screen functionality: the over scroll bounce patent, tap to zoom, pinch to zoom. If you remember that Apple also has patents about gesture detection heuristic and inertial scrolling on the books, then this amounts to a monopoly for still another 15 years on very essential user interface paradigms for touch screens.

These are important breakthroughs, but the problem is the balkanization of user interfaces this would bring. While the vendors would love the extra lock in, it is not good for society to have every touch screen device use its own touch vocabulary. The conventions were pretty much in the air when the iPhone debuted (see this brilliant TED talk), and their core (that is everything using at most two fingers, plus the four finger swipe) should be available to everyone. Otherwise we get what the situation with cars was 100 years ago. Can you imagine not finding the accelerator or the brake pedal? That used to be quite normal, and this is not a situation I want to see for touch screen interfaces. They will be just too pervasive that it can be acceptable to have to relearn them between devices.

After all, patents are not a god given right, but a creation of men to encourage extra research and development. They were created because for society the benefit of extra innovation is higher than the licenses one would have to pay to the inventors, and the slower spread of the invention because of extra costs. But I honestly do not think that this should entitle Apple to a payment in the hundreds of billion dollars, as they believe is their due. They demand 30$ per unit, we can expect 7.5 replacements in the next 15 years per consumer, and have half a billion users likely growing to 2 billion people.

Apple has already been richly rewarded, while being quite stingy with the actual inventors behind these patents, none of them even remotely getting anything close to what Tim Cook is making. So the appropriate way to deal with it would be to give Apple say 10 million dollar per patent in compensation, and then put these into the public domain. After all these inventions would likely have been discovered independently by now.

The Art of Saving

05. August 2012 · Categories: Apple, Software

When Lloyd Chambers noticed the rather peculiar way the Save As command in Mountain Lion works, it got me thinking about how saving files should really work. During normal operation you want to never notice saving. The document should be just there when you need it, with the content you expect to see. So documents should be saved automatically, and they should preferably even get a good name automatically.

Once you have your file, it will need to support a few typical use cases:

You modify the content, and want the latest version kept around
You want to compare with a previous version to review or undo some changes
You want a specific version of the file to stick around, typically a version that you have shared with someone
You want to use an existing document with similar content as the basis to create a new document

If we look at the current implementation in OS X, we see that it is well suited to only the first two requirements, but the last two are not really supported. You essentially get a cop out in the form of the Duplicate command. But what would a better implementation look like?

To deal with use case 3, we should get the following commands to support us:

Save Named Version will save a version which you can give a name. The OS guarantees that it will never delete this version on its own.
Export Version allows you to select a version and create a new file from it. This would basically subsume the standard export dialog by adding the native file format as an export option. The important feature here is that the exported version will have all history removed from it.
Clean Up Versions would allow you to scrub old versions hanging around, especially the named versions. With storage prices so cheap nowadays, this would not be used very often, but it would give peace of mind.

And for the last use case, we should be able to express our intent directly as a file command:

New from current Document will duplicate the document, remove its history, and treat it as an unnamed document from now on, maybe with the copy of name used as the default save name. The old document will stay around in its own window.
New from Document Changes will do the same, but also restore all changes made to the original document since it was opened. This supports people who start typing before deciding that they wanted to have a new document.

This way documents would finally behave as one unit, making the cognitive task for users a lot easier. The old save as command only makes sense as long as you understand that each document has two instances, one on disk and one in memory, and that changes done in memory are only copied to disk when you explicitly save. But if you treat the memory only as a cache of the file on disk, one layer of complexity disappears, and working with files become a lot more logical. No wonder that Apple wants to get away from this, because it makes using the computer unnecessarily complicated.

But this goal requires that your documents behave consistently no matter where they are stored. The fact that versions are only supported for local files on HFS+ volumes is a usability disaster, because now versions are making life even more complicated than before. You need to learn one model for local files, and a completely different one for remote files. This is a recipe for mistakes. So unfortunately this new approach is an all or nothing proposition: Have it implemented on all supported file systems, or nowhere. As the absolute minimum implement a local versions storage for all files opened on network drives, and keep them around for a month, so that we can rely on the versions being there when we need them.

New Compact from Sony

30. July 2012 · Categories: Photos

Sony has released a new compact camera, the RX 100. Impressions are at the Verge, and dpreview. It looks like a great camera, with a fast lens, fast shot times, and relative good low light performance in a very small and light package. Its sensor is roughly a third of the size of a DX camera like the Nikon D3200, 3 to 5 times larger than typical compacts and 9 times larger than an iPhone. But because the lens has such a large aperture, it should have low light performance at the wide end a bit better than the D3200 with a 1/3.5 kit lens.

The main competition would be the Fujifilm X100, with even better low light performance, but at almost twice the weight. And it will be difficult to decide between the two, between lower weight, extra zoom range, and fast shot speeds on the one hand, and better low light performance / shallower depth of field and the brilliant hybrid viewfinder on the other hand.

It definitely has the ingredients to become a very popular camera.

Talent Acquisitions and Abandonware

21. July 2012 · Categories: Software

With Sparrow sold to Google, and the authors effectively abandoning the product, people are getting upset about it. Matt Gemell has a good overview of the reactions. Personally I always feel sad when great products disappear, but unfortunately that is live. It would be great if authors cared enough about products to find great stewards to take over their software, but that seems to almost never work. I cannot really blame the authors either: It is hard to find such people, as they could be successful doing other great stuff, and those you can find tend not to be able to pay you even remotely what other suitors are willing to offer.

I believe Marco Arment nailed it when he encourages people to help making the products you care about financially successful. After all most indies love their independence, and that will sway many not to go the big company route.

What leaves a bad taste about the sale though is that Sparrow, just as Sofa when they were acquired by Facebook, ran a sale of their software knowing full well that it has become abandonware, but without telling anyone. It leaves the impression of trying to grab as much money as they can. The honorable thing would have been to have a money back offer for all licenses purchased in the last half year.