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November 5, 2010

Office 2011 and the Ways in Which Outlook Sucks

I call this: mac,tech — Posted by KP @ 4:21 pm

This week I purchased Office 2011 for Mac. I had been wavering on whether I really wanted it, but I’ve been using Word and Excel a lot more than Pages and Numbers recently, for compatibility purposes, and figured for that reason alone I probably deserved the latest and greatest.

I was also very excited to try Outlook. I had used Entourage, which was “the Mac version of Outlook” for many years, and loved it up until the point that it started to fall behind in compatibility with more recent advancements in PIM standards. When I had Palm devices which had to be plugged into a computer to sync, Entourage worked reasonably well. But these days everything is on the cloud. I use both MobileMe and Google Apps, and for several years I have expected that when I make a change on my desktop, in a web app, or on my phone, it will be synced everywhere instantly.

Entourage was not really caught up to this trend, but to be fair, 2008 was the last major release, and a lot has changed since then in the mobile computing world. It was unfortunate that Microsoft didn’t see fit to fully get with the times, but that’s what makes people buy the next edition, right? It seemed fair enough.

The fact that in Office 2011, MS has ditched Entourage and started calling its email client Outlook was seen as a sign by many in the Mac community that we would be treated more like equals, with a greater interoperability between our apps and their Windows counterparts.

I really am not too much of a heavy user of Word and Excel, and far prefer Keynote and won’t even touch Powerpoint, but so far all those apps seem fine to me. I’m happy about all the changes I’ve observed thus far.

Outlook, however, is a huge disappointment.

Calendar BS

First of all, let me get this out of the way. If you’re not an Exchange user (which if you’re an average stage manager at a place that’s someplace other than the Guthrie, you’re probably not), there is no way to sync Outlook’s calendar to anything. That’s right: anything. And they know this, and put it in a box with a $199 price tag, and sold it. I guess it’s sort of like a wall calendar or something. You’re supposed to write stuff on it, and when you want to know what’s on your calendar, you go back to the same place and look at it. While that has a lovely 19th century charm, I don’t think it’s what people were expecting from an app like Outlook in 2011.

Microsoft has stated that the sync features for the calendar were not performing up to standards, so they released without it, and will patch it later. How much later, nobody is willing to say. Also, what they’re talking about is Apple’s sync services, which means syncing with iCal, not with any other devices or cloud servers. So your calendar syncs with iCal and iCal syncs with other stuff. Currently the Address Book has this feature, and it’s not as much of a disaster as it sounds like, but it seems like asking for trouble to me.

There has been no mention of CalDAV support (primarily useful for Google calendars, which everybody and their mother who’s not on Exchange uses to share calendars). Entourage had Sync Services support, but not CalDAV, so there’s a history there of ignoring this very popular standard. I’m not actually sure what would happen with Sync Services, if my iCal is syncing with my Google Calendars and Outlook is syncing with iCal — will all my calendars appear properly and be fully functional, even though they’re not native to iCal? I have no idea, and if they don’t I will have a shitfit.

It should also be noted that Exchange users are also up in arms because Outlook discontinued support for Exchange 2003. I don’t know much about this, but I guess it’s hard on a lot of smaller businesses that can’t afford to upgrade all their systems just to accommodate some Mac users.

Other BS

So I thought, “OK, the calendar is useless, but it might be interesting to try using Outlook just as a mail / contacts client in the meantime.” In some ways this has been fine, although it feels a little more rickety in sucky-internet situations common on the road. I’m never quite sure where my emails will go if I lose connection in the middle of a process.

However, many of my attempts to set up and use email have been thwarted by pretty obvious bugs (which have been confirmed by users of the MacBU’s forums). BTW the best thing about the Office for Mac forums is that the fancy log-in form is incompatible with Safari. I don’t have independent confirmation of that, but I had to use Chrome.

Anyway, let us examine some bugs:

  • Say you have an app that wants to create an email. Generally you hit “send email” and it opens your default email client, creates a new message, and populates it in some way with your data as appropriate. For instance, I write my show reports in a FileMaker database, and when I’m done I hit the email button and it generates a mailing list and creates a mail message to that list with an appropriate subject line, and a plain-text version of the report, and attaches a PDF of the full report. The first time I tried this with Outlook as the default client, it failed. It brought Outlook to the foreground, and then nothing happened. Five seconds of Googling identified this as a common bug. Apparently it can’t handle requests from other apps to create mail. So, back to using Apple’s Mail.app as my default client.
  • I tried to reply to an email and it wouldn’t copy the body of the original email into my reply, just the headers. It’s only happened with one message so far, but I couldn’t figure out why. Mail.app had no problem with it.
  • Outlook happily imported my messages from Mail. I keep my old emails in local folders, organized by year. I was pleased the import went so well, until I discovered all the messages were duplicated. So I went back to Mail, used a script to make sure all dupes were eliminated, and then tried again. Same thing. FAIL.
  • To avoid this duplicate problem, I tried to save all my yearly folders, and then import them one at a time in mbox format. Saving them was no problem, nor was finding the Outlook option for “Import messages from an MBOX-format text file.” It seemed like everything would be grand. Except when you go to select the file you want, it won’t let you select a .mbox file! It’s greyed out! Some folks online have solved this by importing into Outlook for Windows, and then creating an Outlook-native file and importing it. But not all of us have access to a Windows Office install.

I would like to point out that the last situation is a great example of how epic the fail is here. People might say, essentially, “it’s a feature, not a bug” and suggest that maybe there’s something wrong with the way Apple has implemented the mbox standard, and that’s why Outlook can’t read it. Well then how do you explain that Outlook for Windows could open those mbox files? The only explanation is that Outlook 2011 is just not as good as the Windows app of the same name.

Given that Office is the undisputed king of “productivity” software, which basically means “stuff people need constantly throughout the day to do their jobs,” it seems to me that these kind of flaws are things that people need to be working in hours or days, as opposed to weeks or months, but I fear that it may be the latter. With this kind of uncertainty, I don’t recommend that anybody switch to Outlook right now.


October 28, 2010

Wireless Priorities

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 5:52 pm

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

For many years I’ve been a member of Howard Forums, where totally dorky people go to talk about cell phones. I’ve been a member since 2003, at which time I was struggling with a T68i on AT&T, and about to switch to Verizon when cell number portability was introduced.

Even back then, one of my primary concerns was tethering. The T68i was one of the first phones that could tether, via bluetooth or infrared (remember infrared?). At the time I wasn’t as concerned with tethering my laptop as I was with tethering my PDA (remember PDAs?). Back in the day, smartphones were either clunky, poor in features, or both. If you wanted a really good PDA you had to get its internet from the outside. So it was a big deal that the T68i could tether pretty easily (easily being a very relative term). Verizon, of course, didn’t want anybody tethering, sharing, communicating or anything else, because they hadn’t figured out how to monetize it, so their phones did nothing. Except make calls, which was something AT&T’s phones couldn’t do, at least not in NYC. People make fun of AT&T in NYC now, but in truth what we have now is a huge step up from when you could press your head against a window and still not be able to get a call out.

A brief aside: on the plane to California I finished listening to one of my favorite podcasts: Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History (iTunes link), and his 4-part series on the Eastern Front of WWII. In it he remarks that the battle between Germany and Russia (or more specifically between Hitler and Stalin) was not a good-guy-vs.-bad-guy fight, but bad-guy-vs.-bad-guy. As I was about to contrast the policies of AT&T and Verizon above, I was initially going to say matter-of-factly that Verizon locked down their phones because they’re evil, which in that context seemed to imply that AT&T was or is not. This is not the case. They are both evil, just in different ways at different times. Being a Verizon or AT&T customer does not put you on the right or wrong side of a battle. Like the Russian and German civilians, you will be screwed no matter which side you’re on or who is dominating the other at the moment. So never take my bashing of one carrier as an endorsement of the other.

Anyway, I don’t read HoFo nearly as much as I used to, since I have been a smartphone user since 2005, and there are generally better forums for specific smartphones, rather than having to delve into the particulars of hacking your phone to work with your PDA. As an iPhone user in particular, there are much more focused places I can get my tips and user support. HoFo is a great resource for talking about phones and phone networks, but I generally only check it these days if I’m having an AT&T issue that isn’t directly related to the iPhone.

Because of this inactivity, I hadn’t updated my profile in years. HoFo has some nice profile sections that allow you to add information specific to the topics discussed, such as what phones you own or have owned, and what’s important to you.

This is what my profile looked like when I found it:
I think the most important phone feature is:
reliable reception

I think the second most important phone feature is:
fast data

I think the third most important phone feature is:
lots of software choices

Is this the answer of an iPhone user? Fast data, yes. HSDPA is far faster in theory than Verizon’s EVDO could ever be. Software choices, well yes, there’s an app for everything. But my #1 priority was reliable reception. At the time I updated this, I’m sure I was a Verizon user. That just struck me as really odd and strangely hypocritical. Not that there’s anything wrong with changing one’s priorities, but it’s interesting how a phone can suddenly make the most important priority a non-issue.

So I updated my profile, since it was embarrassing that I was an iPhone user and said that on my profile, and also since it’s obviously no longer true for me. So I thought about it for a few minutes and decided on:
I think the most important phone feature is:
easy sharing of data between cloud and desktop

I think the second most important phone feature is:
fast data

I think the third most important phone feature is:
reception (mostly for data)

You know what else is really interesting? No mention of tethering in either case. What is up with that? Is it because those other things like reception and bandwidth are requirements for tethering? I suppose tethering isn’t actually a “phone feature” as much as it is a carrier decision. Most advanced phones support tethering from the manufacturer, whether the carrier chooses to enable it or not is something else entirely. In fact if it wasn’t for tethering, I wouldn’t be writing this post, cause the Hilton wants $10/night for internet. Thanks to tethering, I blog on.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to get this unexpected snapshot of my changing beliefs about mobile computing, and how the industry has changed consumer expectations in recent years.


September 24, 2010

Classic Printer Error Message

I call this: computers,tech — Posted by KP @ 9:46 pm

I’m trying to print the damn wallet cards. My printer is not cooperating. I just need to share this.

So there’s been an error. Or maybe not. Maybe the printer is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing, which is printing. But if there’s an error, you should fix the error.

Thanks.

I hate printers. Have I mentioned that? I don’t think I blog much about printers. Because I hate them. I think the reason my process is so paperless is because it allows me to avoid printers as much as possible. So there you go. The majority of the reason for the existence of this very site is because printers suck. So when you’re like, “wow, this is a really useful site!” you can thank a printer.


Small Site Addition – Evernote Site Memory

I call this: tech,web — Posted by KP @ 8:47 pm

You’re going to see a little green elephant button at the bottom of this post — actually at the bottom of every post. That’s Evernote’s new Site Memory feature.

I’ve gotten a bit hooked on Evernote recently. In brief, it’s a cloud-based app that you can use to store text and other files in a searchable, organized format so you always have access to your stuff. For more about it, see my first impressions post. I’m going to do a longer post about use cases and later impressions, but I want to wait until I’ve had time to use it through a rehearsal process. I’ll give you a hint though: so far it’s been very useful at keeping myself organized, and giving Meaghan (my ASM) a way to keep up with my preproduction work at her leisure, while halfway across the country.

Site Memory is a new feature they just introduced, I think last week. Basically you click the elephant and it automatically clips the post content into a nice format to import into the user’s Evernote account, and lets them assign it to a notebook and set tags and add a comment to it. It also allows the website owner to have a little control over the format and content of the clipping, although I’m not doing anything too fancy with that. I just like being an early adopter of things I find cool.

For reading some sites, using Site Memory might not be much more of an improvement over the default Evernote browser plugin, but for blogs it seems handy because it can clip an individual post with one click. It’s also interesting to note that while the browser plugin requires you to be using a computer with Evernote installed, the Site Memory button works over the web, so you can use it from any computer. And if you don’t use Evernote, you can get started by clicking that button. It’s free!


September 7, 2010

Victory!

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 1:22 am

If you’ve been following the heartwarming friendship between my broken Visor Deluxe and my iPhone 4, you will be happy to learn that I have just won an auction for a working Visor Deluxe.

They both look very happy.

As you can see, the Visor I have won is blue. I won’t just be swapping out the blue shell for the orange one. That’s besides the point. I have never in my life broken an electronic device through clumsiness besides this one, and I have felt bad about it for ten years. I am going to make that right, and repair it.

And all for less than $8 including shipping!


September 5, 2010

Let Me Tell Ye: Windows 7 Upgrade

I call this: computers,mac,pc,tech — Posted by KP @ 11:20 pm

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Let Me Tell Ye” post, so just a reminder / warning that in addition to some useful computer tips, you’re going to get some snark.

I’ve been using Windows XP since late 2001, shortly before I switched to Mac (basically WindowsME was what made me switch, and by the time XP came out, my mind was made up, but I bought it just to get me through the last couple months before I could afford a Mac). Since then I’ve always had an install of Windows on my Mac, which until this week has always been XP. I also have a gaming rig, which also runs XP. I recently hit a point where I felt that Windows 7 had been around long enough that I trust it will be compatible with my games and peripherals, and will provide better performance with modern hardware (such as my 4GB of RAM). Over the summer it made it to the top of my short list of things to buy when I get a little money.

As part of preproduction for my upcoming tour, I’ve been focusing on Windows a little more than usual because I have a PC-using assistant. So I thought it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to buy Windows 7 now, so that if we ever need to do something Windows-based, there won’t be a chance of it not working because I’m using an obsolete OS.

So let me tell ye, without further ado, my experience installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, over an install of XP. I wrote this throughout the process:

Background

So here’s what I’m working with:

  • mid-2010 15″ 2.66GHz i7 MacBook Pro
  • 4GB RAM
  • Mac partition with Snow Leopard 10.6.4
  • Windows partition with XP SP3 32-bit
  • Windows 7 upgrade disk (which comes with 32-bit and 64-bit install disks, I will be attempting 64-bit)

The Begininng

I made sure I had the latest Boot Camp update (3.1) for Windows 32 bit, which gets run on XP before the update. Honestly I’ve never been quite clear how Boot Camp works, but I know it’s necessary for driver support, so I need to make sure that’s done first, and everything I’ve read says this is necessary before installing Windows 7 in Boot Camp.

Step 1: Open the Box

When I had recovered from the optical spectacular that is the hologrammed install disc, I found a loose piece of paper in the box making it sound like if I’m going from XP to Win 7 my life is going to be miserable. So I grabbed one of my spare hard drives, reformatted as NTFS, and got ready for an ordeal.

The instructions sent me to a website to download a helper. I carefully typed in the address (in IE, cause I figured they’d do something stupid like make that important). But because I was using IE, it didn’t send me to the page because I didn’t put “http://”. Sorry. I must have been looking for that other internet, so it’s a good thing you sent me to Windows Live Search instead, where the only result happened to be the page I was looking for.

The first instruction cautions me that when I start the installation I need to select the “custom” option if installing from XP. Well, I know the OS is old. To me it feels like just yesterday because I switched to Mac just a few months after it came out. But let’s not pretend that the only OS in between didn’t suck. Plenty of smart people, and lucky ones who didn’t need to buy new computers, skipped over Vista. So stop acting like those of us still on XP are some kind of technology-shunning aberrations. Thanks.

So it checked that my computer is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. Then I was instructed to download the optimistically-named Windows Easy Transfer. Now this “easy” transfer doesn’t actually transfer all your stuff intact, it takes your files, but you need to reinstall your programs. That seems like a pretty smart idea when changing OSes anyway, but I’d call it more like, “We’ll Kinda Help You Transfer.” Like if a friend offers to help you move and all they do is hold the door open for you while you carry the stuff out, and then leave you at the door to your new place with a list to help you remember all the stuff you have to unpack.

While Windows analyzed my computer for ease of transfer, I heard my Mac reboot. Apparently spontaneously and unintentionally, because when I restarted it said the bit about “Windows has recovered from a serious error,” and actually used the word “blue screen” somewhere in there. I wish I had been looking, it would have been a great photo op.

With this comforting sign before I’ve even begun my major upgrade, I started over with the “Easy Transfer” program. That time, it alleged it was able to back up all my files. Then while doing absolutely nothing, my computer initiated a shutdown. It wasn’t a blue screen or anything, just a very calm “windows is shutting down now,” like any other shutdown, except that I hadn’t asked for it. Now I’m hoping that this install will wipe everything, cause obviously it’s F’ed up.

Side note: Dropbox is being real slow. I wonder if Evernote might actually be faster for transferring single large files. I’ve been researching and downloading the files I need from my other computers and then just putting them in my DropBox so I can get them from the machine I’m updating.

So finally I put in my install disc. Because I’m going from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit one, I have to boot directly from the CD, it can’t be done with the OS loaded. Check out this futuristic loading screen. I’m so excited to be computing in the 21st century!

Of course the progress bar has no bearing on actual progress and freezes at 100% for an uncomfortable period of time. Maybe I should just play a game of Civ 4 or something while I wait so I’m not tempted to mess with it. I’m not kidding, that’s what I’m doing. Let’s see how many millennia I can get through while it loads files.

…I started in 10,000BC, by the year 435AD I gave up.

I came to discover through more googling that apparently while you can upgrade from XP to 7, on a Mac it’s not so easy. Something about how it boots off the CD, and the differences in how Macs and PCs boot. The only path seemed to be to do a clean install. Which is more or less what it was going to end up being anyway, as I understood it, so I didn’t find that to be a problem. Back to the same “loading files” screen… This time I got beyond it. There were even some greater-than-1-bit graphics.

Finally the whole thing installs beautifully. Then I go to put in my product key and it says it’s invalid. I come to find out that you can’t do a clean install from the upgrade disk, despite the fact I had read that you could. It doesn’t bother to ask you for a valid XP product key or install disk. So now I’m back to square one of reformatting and installing XP (which also means an upgrade to SP3 and all other updates since then) before I’m ready to try the upgrade to 7 again.

Total elapsed time so far: 3 hours.

5 hours in, I am now back where I started. I got interrupted when The ’70s called, asking for its progress bar back. I said it was still frozen on my screen and I’d return it when I got it unstuck. I even tried using the 32-bit install disc, thinking that would be an OK solution temporarily until I can figure out how to fix this. But that still told me it needed to boot from the disc, and still froze in the same place.

I googled some more, and found that getting stuck on “Windows is loading files” is very common, for Mac users and regular PC users alike. One lucky fellow I read about said he found the solution to his problem in that after randomly restarting about 10 times, all of them resulting in the process freezing at “loading files,” he was rebooting again, giving up and trying to boot in OS X and suddenly it worked. Mine had only failed about 3 times, so I decided this ridiculous “solution” was worth trying. And on the fourth time, suddenly it loaded fine. So far so good. Back in the 21st century.

If I EVER have to go through this process again I will not be happy. I would just like to point out that this is one of those situations where legitimate users get punished. I can only imagine how many people have installed pirated copies and had none of these troubles because they could have done the clean install and avoided the incompatibilities with XP.

6 hours and counting — it accepted my product key and I’m using the OS. Haven’t installed Boot Camp drivers yet, but it’s run its first software updates.

Boot Camp installed, so I can now see it in full resolution. This is the ugliest OS I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it’s supposed to be. When I start tinkering with settings I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Right, Microsoft?

Well I found the personalization settings. Yeah it does get a little more attractive with all the Aero effects turned on.

The default wallpaper is hideous. I’ve always thought Microsoft was pretty good about that in the past. I don’t like any of the built-in wallpapers. I decided to start with an orange theme, and found a wallpaper I liked online. I’m not sure I like it, but I would have died of boredom with the default theme on. My buttons still turn blue when I mouse over them, and I don’t see a way to change that.

Overall performance seems good. I like that I finally have an OS for gaming that can see all my RAM. I haven’t done a lot of gaming yet, but what I have done feels very good. Sorry, I don’t have any before-and-after FPS comparisons.

So to summarize, if you run into this problem that a lot of people face with the install freezing at “loading files,” the highly sophisticated solution is to just keep doing it over and over and one time it might work. Which, incidentally, is also the definition of insanity.

Parallels

After getting everything up and running in Boot Camp, I checked it in Parallels. I had to go through a bit of a reinstall, but Parallels handled that pretty well. There was a point where Windows tried to do a repair on itself and failed, but I used the tried-and-true method of “just try it again” and it worked. I wasn’t given any grief about activation. With virtualization you can have problems because the OS sees your machine as having different hardware in Boot Camp and Parallels, and thinks you’re a filthy pirate trying to install it on two different computers. I actually don’t know how they check it, but I’ve never had it reject me since 2007, when I had to call a number and explain to them what I was doing. The nice woman I spoke to in India cleared it without giving me any argument, so it wasn’t a terrible experience. I’m just amazed that as many times as I’ve messed around with that install, it’s never happened again.

Performance in Parallels is something I’ve been struggling with for quite a while. I had finally gotten it to a level I was happy with, which involved devoting less than half my RAM to the virtual machine. Unfortunately Windows 7 requires 2GB of RAM, so I have not tried giving it less than that. I’m still experimenting. I really would like 8GB of RAM, but it’s still pretty expensive.

I wish the install hadn’t sent me on a wild goose chase, but when it was all done, I was able to get the OS I wanted installed, and so far I like it. Of course I won’t really be spending much time in it, but I like what I see so far.


September 4, 2010

Cross-Platform Stage Management

I call this: mac,On the Road Again,pc,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:16 pm


This tour is going to be something of an experiment, and an opportunity for new stage management technical discoveries, as I have an ASM who uses Windows — I know!

Contrary to popular belief, I will actually choose ASMs who use Windows. And the people I most often assist use Windows, so I’m used to the cross-platform thing, although it’s been a while since I’ve been the PSM in that case and had to decide what software to use for the show. So I had no reservations about Meaghan not being a Mac user. I knew she was a PC user when we worked together two years ago, but I couldn’t remember if she had since switched, and I didn’t ask until this week when I was trying to nail down what software I’m going to use for the tour. Well she has a PC, but she assures me she has an iPhone, which is comforting somehow, and is an advantage I never had with Nick and his cursed-trackball Blackberry.

In day-to-day life I don’t find the OS to make that much of a difference. There were a couple events over the course of two years on tour where I remember saying to Nick, “thank God you have a Mac, or we’d be screwed!” but those were situations where we were already screwed and managed to avoid further screwing. Which is good. But those situations are rare, and if you are lucky enough not to be screwed in the first place, then you have nothing to worry about. The big one I remember was when my computer just up-and-died one day, an hour before the show. I was able to install all the software I needed on Nick’s and carry on. It was great, but in reality if that happened again, especially in the more cloud-based world we have now two years later, most things would be fine on a PC, and if I really needed a Mac, there will be like 15 more of them on tour and I could borrow somebody else’s to get what I need converted into PC-friendly form. But those kind of contingency plans will be part of the decisions I make when setting up our digital world.

The first of which is that there needs to be a backup of all our critical files on a drive formatted for FAT32. My backup drive, which uses Time Machine, is formatted for HFS+, which is the format required for Mac-bootable drives. I think I may keep all our files and installers on an 8GB thumb drive that I just purchased. Our show files are on DropBox so we both have access to them, so that’s a pretty good backup right there, but it might be smart to have an offline copy as well. I’ll probably keep that backed up every day or two.

I also have Windows running on my Mac (both natively, and alongside Mac OS using Parallels), which might come in handy if we need to share something in a Windows-only way. I was still using XP for compatibility with older games, and out of cheapness, but when I had the money, wanted to buy Windows 7. I would hate to find us in a situation where we can’t share something because I was still on XP, so I started to think of it as a business necessity to invest in the upgrade at this point. So I just installed Windows 7, and it seems to run well on my machine so far. Maybe this whole collaboration will help me to educate myself on changes in the Windows world that I’ve glossed over since I switched to Mac in 2002. That would be helpful, cause I sell myself as a computer geek stage manager, and if you sat me down in front of a machine with Vista or Windows 7 I don’t think I’d be much of a geek, and at this point it’s starting to feel like false advertising.

Meaghan and I are now pretty much caught up as far as being set up with all the software we’ll be using. Here’s what we’ve got:

  • FileMaker Most of the actual paperwork for the show will go in my database. Thankfully FileMaker is cross-platform, so we should have no problem with that. When at work, we will work off the master copy served from my computer, but I have recently added a feature to upload a copy of it to DropBox, so if she needs to reference the information inside when away from the theatre it will be in the cloud. Plus we could both access it from our iPhones if we wanted. If she was going to do some homework of her own, she would have a copy to work in, as long as I know not to be making changes at the same time on my copy, and to make the Dropbox file the master after she’s done. Nick and I sent the file back and forth over email sometimes, but this way should be a little cleaner.
  • DropBox This summer I started using DropBox as an alternative to MobileMe’s iDisk. The main difference between the two is that DropBox works. It works well enough that I could put my folder for each show on my DropBox and trust it not to get corrupted or out of sync. After three shows using that method, I’m now taking it a step further: I’m sharing that folder with Meaghan, so we will both be able to work off the same files.
  • Evernote For more on Evernote, you can see my first impressions post. I’m storing a bunch of stuff on Evernote, everything from the show logos to essential emails from office staff, to my shopping list for Staples. Meaghan can then check it to see all the information I have, and when we’re actually working she can add notes to my notebook for the tour with information and paperwork that she generates. I’m hoping between this and DropBox, we’ll never have to worry about me forgetting to pass on a file to her.
  • Microsoft Office Obviously. I don’t create all that many Office files, but it’s always necessary at some point. Our script will be the biggest one, and changes will be tracked throughout the rehearsal process.
  • Skype It may come in handy from time-to-time, but what I really intend to use it for is to teach the database before we start rehearsal. Meaghan only arrives in New York the day before we start, so using screen sharing will have to do.

In addition to getting us set up for rehearsal, I’ve been trying to make Windows a little more hospitable for my own use. The problem I have when gaming is that I become completely useless for anything else, because in order to access, well, anything, I have to reboot into OSX. The use of all these cloud-based, cross-platform tools has made it much easier to spend hours and hours in Windows without being prevented from doing anything else. The one major element I’m missing is OmniFocus, which is cloud-based, but only compatible with Mac and iPhone. However, the act of creating or checking off a task is so quick and simple that doing it on my phone is almost as fast as doing it on the desktop. Overall I’m excited to play with some new ways to organize.


August 31, 2010

A Heartwarming Tale of Friendship

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 8:29 pm


I’m not quite sure what this is yet, but I think I may have found my calling on the internet. I’ve been wanting to do a little thing about my Visor Deluxe, which has been broken for the last 10 years. I dragged it out, took it apart, tried to understand how a digitizer works and why the hell a little broken glass would make it completely inoperable, and then put it back together.

But a little friendship was struck up on my desk, which took me by surprise. The Visor and the iPhone 4, I think they kind of like each other. And I think they might talk to each other from time to time about the latest gadget news. And I’ll just sit around and take pictures of them while they do.

There’s only one problem, which is that the Visor can’t really say much because the digitizer doesn’t work. So I decided to explore how much people are asking to part with 10-year-old PDA technology. So far I’ve found one promising auction, for $3, for a working Visor Deluxe. But that’s not the point, I just want the screen assembly.

This was my first PDA and it’s bothered me for 10 years that I broke it. Which is why I’ve been keeping a broken PDA around for 10 years. I don’t have much money to spend on it, but if I can find a working digitizer, preferably the entire screen assembly, for a few bucks it will see much use!


August 30, 2010

iPhone 4 Review

I call this: phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 1:49 pm

Last week, while getting out of Dodge an hour after closing Hairspray, I took a detour to Radio Shack and bought an iPhone 4. I know. I said I wouldn’t.

For the entire history of my posts on the iPhone 4, I have created a new tag, because I keep having to link them. So go there and read them if you want the whole history of my saga, and my changing thoughts about the phone from pre-announcement to today.

First, The Saga

What you need to know to understand the story is that on preorder day, way back in June, while waiting for Apple’s servers to work, I read online that Radio Shack was offering a very good trade-in deal for older iPhones in good condition. So instead of preordering from Apple, I raced down to the local Radio Shack just before preorders started. There were a couple guys in front of me. There I met Brian, the manager, who I was later to learn was the brother of one of our sound guys at the theatre, Justin. Brian was beset with a half-dozen people wanting to buy the phone, but of course like every other store in the country, couldn’t get through to AT&T’s servers. Eventually I had to leave to go to work, but I got my name put on a list. Later in the day I talked to Brian and found out that even had the computers worked, that store was only assigned one phone, so it wouldn’t have gone to me anyway. So I pretty much gave up any hopes of getting one on release day, since the Radio Shack trade-in deal was too good to pass up.

Time went by, and of course the phone turned out to have its own problems, so I decided maybe it was for the best. Over the course of the summer, Justin would give me occasional updates, the bottom line of which was that it was still impossible to get an iPhone at Radio Shack. By this point I didn’t really want one anyway. I liked the idea of not being tied into a new contract if the phone ever came out on Verizon (I don’t think it would be this year, but next year seems reasonable). And plus I was broke!

Cut to the very end of the summer — an hour-and-a-half before the end of the summer. I’m minding my business, calling Hairspray, my trusty 3GS on the desk next to me. Towards the end of act I, Justin gets on headset and says, “Hey my brother’s store got a 32GB [iPhone].” I was like, “Are you serious?” I mean really, I was leaving town right after the show.

But you know, what could I do? I waited literally all summer, and at intermission of the final performance, when I’m about to get in a car and go away, suddenly the phone is there. It was obviously fate. And by this point I’ve gotten a general picture of the situation, and have become convinced that the sky is not falling over the antenna issue, certainly not when the phone is in a case.

At intermission I ran out the booth door to the sound console to be like, “WTF!?” Justin was already dialing Brian. I wanted to confirm exactly how cheap the phone would be with the trade-in. He estimated $60. In the end it ended up being more like $80, but the point is, it was double-digit numbers for a brand-new $700 phone, that’s like, the best phone in the world. No I didn’t have $80 to spare, but I’m already in debt, so what’s another $80, and now I have a brand new iPhone! It’s got a retina display, man!

I said I’d be there right after the show finished. During the second act I backed up my 3GS, and figured out how to wipe the memory. So after turning in my old phone (which was a 32GB 3GS in excellent condition, which was worth $230), I took home a shiny new iPhone 4.

When I tried to preorder back in June, Justin was like, “You met my friend Karen, you should check out her blog!” and Brian has been a reader since then. Part of the terms of the sale was that I give him a shout-out, so here it is. Thanks, Brian! I love the phone!

Now the Phone

Bottom line: the phone is great. And try as I might, I can’t get it to do the antenna thing. That’s not to say it’s fixed, it’s entirely possible I’ve been in areas with good enough coverage that it doesn’t matter. I haven’t been in any 1-2 bar areas since then, and I never talk on the phone, so judging it by dropped calls doesn’t helped much. I think I’ve made two calls since I got it. The first was to my dad, and he said it sounded remarkably clear. So take that for what it’s worth, I can’t get it to do it. I put my palm or my finger on the spot, and I see no corresponding reduction in bars.

I’m going to just fly through this review. Here’s the deal: it’s an iPhone. If you have an iPhone, it’s the same as your old one, only better. If you don’t have an iPhone, and you want one, get it. Almost everything about it is the same as a 3GS running iOS 4. If you have a 3G or God forbid a 2G, you will see a huge improvement in performance, and in the corresponding features that get enabled in iOS4 with improved hardware. Run, don’t walk, if you have a 3G or 2G. If you have a 3GS, here’s what you’ll notice:

  • Retina Display Oh. My. God. It’s amazing. If you’ve been living under a rock, the point of the retina display is that the pixel density is denser than the human eye can perceive, thus you don’t see any pixels, you just see a gorgeous expanse of color that doesn’t look like a screen, it’s like… magic! I don’t know what it looks like, because I’ve never seen anything like it before. My brain can’t compute that it’s a screen, because it has no pixels. It’s one of those Star-Trek-in-real-life moments. It’s like liquid or something. All I know is I’m always compelled to lick it. It just looks like it should be edible. Before I had an iPhone 4 I was getting a little frustrated seeing all my favorite apps had updates, and the changes were always “support for retina display.” I know how important that is to update for devices with better resolutions, but since it wasn’t an update I benefitted from, I was getting a little sick of it. Now I’m all pissed off at the several apps on my home screen that still have low-res icons! Get with it, guys!

    The biggest thing I can say about the retina display, is that I have always liked computer pinball. I like real pinball too, but I can’t own a pinball machine for a variety of reasons, and seldom find myself in an arcade that has any. So I deal with the computer version. Most of which suck, because you need a really good screen to actually be able to see the whole field and track the ball. And I’m talking about desktop games sucking. A pinball game was out for the iPad, which I suspected might be OK, but I don’t have an iPad so that doesn’t help. On a whim I bought Pinball HD 4 iPhone, which is 99 cents. And it works! I mean everything is tiny, but you can see it. Click on this picture to see it at full resolution, but it doesn’t really do it justice. Imagine that shrunk down to phone size, with no visible pixels. And it’s actually playable! There’s also a zoom view that follows the ball and provides a lower angle close-up look at the field (which is gorgeous), but I prefer to see the big picture. Anyway: retina display: awesome!

  • Camera That’s a 5MP camera with a flash, which is a big upgrade. I first got a chance to really use it yesterday when writing my article about what I pack for the road. All those pictures were taken with the new phone. Almost all of them (except the one of the toiletries bag) were taken without flash in a relatively dark room. The flash didn’t work great for closeups of small objects like this, which would be true of any flash. I was impressed at how good the pictures were without the flash. You may notice that everything is very saturated. Maybe too saturated, but I like it. I’m not much of a photography nerd. A couple of the pictures had some weird pink/purple noise in the upper-left corner. I cropped it on at least one of them, but you can kind of see it in the picture of my hat. I haven’t done much investigation of that, as I didn’t realize it until I viewed the photos on my desktop. I did have my pink lava lamp on at the time, the glow of which you can see a bit on a couple items, but the noise looks like noise, not like something that was actually there. It also could be that my finger was too close to the lens, which I have a tendency to do. I’ll keep an eye out for it in the future. But in general, I’m really happy with the new camera so far.
  • Front-facing cameraThe other big camera news was the addition of the front-facing camera. Unless they add compatibility with iChat, I think I’ll get very little use out of this. I only know of one other person with an iPhone 4, and believe it or not I’m often not surrounded by wifi. What I’m most excited about is being able to use it as a mirror, or to take self-portraits, because I’ve never been good at holding a camera at arm’s length and trying to frame me and some other person properly. Right now Face Time is very limited, but I guess if you’ve got a friend with another iPhone 4 and wifi access, you could do some cool stuff. I read a post from a guy who works in IT who used it to show the wiring in his server room to a colleague to help troubleshoot something. That’s a use case that gets me more excited than showing grandpa baby’s first steps, or whatever Apple’s been advertising.

  • Hardware I for one love the boxy design of the iPhone 4. I find it easier to grip because the sides are wider. And overall it’s actually thinner than the old design. One thing that struck me right away is that it’s noticeably heavier than the 3G/3GS, because it has glass on both sides. It’s a bit more to lug around, but the advantage I see to that is that it’s got more weight pulling it down into your hand, rather than being light and fluffy and getting knocked around.

    The morning after I purchased my phone I set out to pick my free case. I hadn’t been following exactly what the program entailed, because I wasn’t actually intending to buy an iPhone 4. The way it works is that you download this app to your phone, and it presents you with the selection of cases to choose from and an estimate of when they will ship. Each case offers a very brief (too brief I’d say) description, and a few photos, which are sometimes blurry. It’s very hard to choose a case without seeing it in person, so I felt kind of lost. I also hated that every case offered is black or clear. I understand they have to mass-produce them, and free is free, but I would never choose to buy a black case, and clear is just boring. Just a personal preference. So I went to YouTube to see some case reviews of the few I had narrowed it down to, to see what people are saying and get a better feel for each case’s design by seeing it in motion.

    I narrowed it down to the Griffin Motif or the Griffin Reveal Etch. I was also considering the Apple bumper, but I saw a comparison review which showed that the port openings are very small, and I was concerned about third-party headphone and dock connector issues. In the end I went with the Reveal Etch. My logic came down to the fact that I wanted something that wouldn’t add much bulk to the phone. I don’t like the plain black border around it, because black is boring and black rubber is just ugly, and I like the design of the metal edge on the iPhone 4 and wanted to be able to see it. For this reason, I was considering the Motif, because it’s transparent. However, my other consideration was that the Etch almost entirely conceals which model of phone it is (you’d only know if you saw the camera flash on the back), and at this point I think the iPhone 4 is still too much of a target for thieves. I would feel much more comfortable using the phone in public with the Etch, and I believe that a phone is only as good as how easy it is to access information off it. If you choose not to use it because it’s too conspicuous, then it’s not serving any purpose by staying in your pocket. At that point it becomes less useful than writing things on a scrap of paper. So I went the conservative route with the Etch. Also because the Motif is very close to the style of case I had before in terms of size and materials. I think that will be my ultimate preference, and when the time comes that I really want a case like that, I will want a better one in a different color. So I decided to go a little out of my comfort zone with the free case, because if I don’t like it I’d want to buy one that’s not available for free anyway. They say the case won’t ship for 2-4 weeks, but maybe I’ll get lucky.
    So far I’ve been carrying the phone around naked — the phone is naked, not me — but I don’t have a job so I haven’t been leaving the house as much. For me a case doesn’t appear to be necessary to fix the antenna problem, so it’s just about protection. I try to very gently lay it on the table so as not to scratch the rear glass.

  • Gyroscope In addition to the accelerometer and the compass, the new phone has an internal gyroscope, which allows for more precise movement tracking. Mostly this is for games, but I think it could result in better augmented reality apps (that’s when you point the phone at something — usually as if you were taking a picture — and it superimposes stuff over it, like the direction of nearby stores, or the constellations in the sky). I haven’t seen many non-game apps supporting this feature yet. All the accelerometer-based games I own are old and not updated, cause I stopped buying them when I decided that accelerometer gaming doesn’t really work that well. I haven’t purchased anything new to try it out yet. I guess that makes me a luddite, cause I believe that first-person shooters should be played with a mouse and a keyboard, not with your fingers touching invisible joysticks and buttons, and blocking your view of the screen. If the gyroscope can fix the performance of the FPS genre, I’d be willing to try it, but I’m going to give it some time to see what game is most worth buying — I am accepting recommendations in the comments. I spent $10 on Super Monkey Ball the day the app store launched, so I could be all “Look! When you tilt the screen the ball moves!” I’m not doing the early adopter thing this time. Also, accelerometer games are unplayable on the subway!
  • iMovie I haven’t purchased iMovie for iPhone, but I’ll mention it cause it’s basically the other new iPhone-4-only feature you get. I like to put a little more work into my movies that would involve things not self-contained on my phone. But I haven’t tried it, so what do I know?

In Conclusion

Don’t have an iPhone: BUY IT
Have an iPhone 2G or 3G: BUY IT
Have a 3GS: It’s an improvement. The Radio Shack method makes it worthwhile financially.  If you have the money to spare, you’ll enjoy the new features, but if you want to save money or hold off renewing your AT&T contract, you can live without it.
I’m very happy that the opportunity came for me to upgrade on the cheap. AT&T has raised their ETF so high that I have basically no hope of escape unless I win the lottery or get a Broadway show, but you can’t make important decisions in your life that hinge on the existence of a Verizon iPhone. Certainly not in the next two years.


August 26, 2010

Things I’m Trying Out: Evernote

I call this: computers,mac,phones,tech — Posted by KP @ 9:52 pm

There are a number of products I’ve been using lately that I haven’t taken the time to talk about. Partially because I don’t feel like I’ve used them enough to have a complete opinion yet. But I thought it might be helpful to call attention to them anyway.

Evernote

I am like the last person to the Evernote party, I admit that. My awareness of Evernote comes mostly from my use of OmniFocus (also see my tips page on it). Evernote is often mentioned in the same breath as a competing product, when folks discuss what tools they use to stay organized, which is a topic you can imagine I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about, since it’s like, my entire job description. And I run a website about it, too.

OmniFocus is a very powerful task manager, based on the Getting Things Done (GTD) system. It’s all about projects, due dates, and contexts. Basically all the tasks you put into it become rigidly structured based on when they can be begun, when they need to be completed, and where or in what order they can be worked on. I wasn’t quite sure what Evernote was, except that some people used it instead of OmniFocus, and that it was marketed more as a place to hold all your random information, not just your tasks.

I don’t even remember what exactly got me to finally try Evernote. Maybe one of the many Lifehacker articles that ask what people use to manage their life, where it’s usually the winner far above OmniFocus, (which is Mac-only and $80, and thus at an extreme disadvantage). The nice thing about Evernote is that the basic version is free, so I figured I had nothing to lose by educating myself about this product that obviously a lot of people like.

The first thing I noted is that Evernote really is not a direct competitor with OmniFocus. Obviously for some people it serves the same purpose, when the question is “how do you keep track of your tasks?” But Person A might say “Evernote,” Person B might say “OmniFocus,” and Person C might say “I write it on my hand with a Sharpie,” and the methods would be about as similar.

Evernote doesn’t try so hard to be organized. It’s not about tasks, it’s about stuff. Maybe the stuff is tasks sometimes. You could have a single entry containing a picture, some writing, some tasks and an audio file. It doesn’t really matter. You just put your stuff in a note, assign it to a notebook (which could roughly represent a project, or a context, or anything you want), and give it any number of tags that might make it more helpful for you to find it. OmniFocus teaches (maybe forces) you to use the GTD method. Evernote is more of a blank slate for however you want to use it.

So that sums up the basic idea — you put stuff in it, you give it some basic categories so you can find it later. The strength of Evernote comes from a couple places: cloud storage and cross-platform compatibility.

The Cloud

All your notes are stored on Evernote’s servers (unless you want them to be only stored locally). While there, some fun stuff is done to them. Images are scanned for text, and if text is recognized, it will come up when you search for it. So you can take a picture of a sign, a business card, or anything else with text, and when you do a search that picture will come up. For premium subscribers, you can also store scanned PDFs and search them too.

The best thing about cloud storage, combined with the fact that Evernote is available on many platforms, is that you can get to your stuff from pretty much anywhere: on your computer, on Mac or Windows, on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm devices, or from any computer using a web browser — no need to have Evernote installed at all. In addition to using it on my Mac and iPhone, I also have it installed on my gaming PC, and on my Windows installation on my Mac, so I can access and create information when I’m booted into Windows. It’s helpful to have a cloud-based, cross-platform repository for pretty much everything.

A frequent situation for me on the road:

  • I get a few hours of peace and leisure time, so I boot into Boot Camp and fire up a game.
  • *ding* an email comes in on my phone. It requires a response, and the information I need is on my OS X partition, where everything other than games lives.
  • FML. I was just trying to have a little fun!
  • Now I have to decide whether I can ignore the email for a while, or if I need to stop gaming, reboot into Mac, get the info, return the email, and then either reboot into Windows so I can continue gaming, or just give up trying to enjoy myself.

There may still be situations where that’s necessary, but the use of a combination of Evernote and Dropbox to manage my work stuff could make those occasions less common.

Sharing

Evernote has some very basic sharing and collaboration abilities. You can share your notebooks either with the whole world or with specific people you invite (kind of like how Google Docs works), but the best part is that you don’t even need to ask the other person to start an Evernote account. This alone makes it much easier to bring others on board with your collaboration tools if they don’t need to sign up for something they’re not sure they need. Unfortunately right now you can only view shared notebooks on the web, not in the native clients, but that feature sounds like it’s high on the list for future upgrades. I imagine a use case where I put notes for my show in a notebook and can share a link with my ASM, who can join Evernote for free if they want, and use the app on any platform, or just use the web interface if they want. Also, in situations like at the Guthrie where the stage management intern is using a company computer and may not be able to install third-party software, everything can be accessed in the browser.

Related Products

If I had a premium account I could literally store anything. The free account only stores text, images, audio files and PDFs, but for now that seems fine for me. I use 1Password for most wallet-type duties, for sensitive information and logins, which is not cross-platform, but I can access it on my phone when using Windows (actually a Windows client is in beta, but it’s going to require a separate purchase from the Mac version, which is a very different philosophy from Evernote’s which wants you to have access to your data from any device).

Encryption

The biggest disappointment I have with Evernote is that it’s not secure — you can’t encrypt a note or a notebook. You can hide a piece of text within a note, but I have also heard some complaints that that’s not always secure. I already use Macjournal, which is sort of a similar idea, but without all the cool cloud features. It does have very flexible encryption features, which makes it great as an actual journal, where you wouldn’t want your most private thoughts coming up in a search for something work-related. I wouldn’t use Evernote for anything that I didn’t mind sharing with the whole world. But even though I will have to continue using other apps that do parts of what Evernote does, I have found in several weeks of use that Evernote fills a niche that is useful to me in ways those other apps are not.

iPhone Client

The iPhone client is also great for snapping a picture or taking an audio recording quickly and knowing it will be ready to be categorized on my desktop. As a side note, the Mac desktop client has a simple iSight feature, so you can hold something up in front of your computer to take a quick picture of it. There doesn’t appear to be a built-in desktop audio recording feature though, which seems like an obvious oversight.

The iPhone version can’t edit notes which have rich text or multimedia parts to them. It’s pretty annoying — and the definition of “rich text” covers almost everything, including checkboxes and lists. There’s a workaround where it creates a duplicate plain-text note that you can edit (and then presumably cut-and-paste into your original note on the desktop), or to append new text to the end of a note, but that’s pretty lame. I hope that will be improved soon.

Tasks

And getting back to tasks, the “task” feature, such as it is, is that you can put a checkbox among your text, using a pretty simple shift-command-T keystroke. Then you’ve got a checkbox, which you can check or uncheck. What you do with it is up to you, there isn’t any fancy functionality behind it. But that’s actually what I need sometimes. The first thing I did with that feature is create a list of my cast. When I’m checking that everyone is present, I don’t need a task manager, I just need a simple checklist that I can check and uncheck at will. I also find it easier for grocery shopping. For simple lists, putting it in OmniFocus sometimes just gets in the way. Then I have entries like “celery” carrying the same importance as “reformat calling script,” and it’s just too much work for a damn vegetable! Apparently the Evernote folks are considering making the task features more complex, but I’m happy with it just the way it is. Well actually I really wish it had a “check all” and “uncheck all” feature, or if it does, I haven’t found it yet.
UPDATE: strangely, it exists in Windows but not on the Mac. Grrr.

Podcast

As I’ve been trying to get accustomed to what I can do with Evernote, I’ve also been listening to their podcast, which is very entertaining and informative. It looks like they’ve been doing about one per month, but I’m still working my way through old episodes.

Premium Subscription

As I’ve indicated, there is a premium subscription which provides more features. The most significant is that it lifts the 40MB limit on how much stuff you can upload in a month (your total storage is unlimited, but you can only get it there 40MB per month without paying). Premium subscribers can upload 500MB per month.

As I said, premium users can upload any file type. The iPhone client does not store all notes for offline viewing for free users. You can mark a note a favorite to get it offline, but premium subscribers can access all notes offline automatically, once they’ve synced. That’s a decent workaround to help the free people, but given the number of hours per day that New Yorkers spend underground, offline access is a big deal to me, at least until they get data service in the subway stations.

Only premium subscribers can upload scanned PDFs (i.e. where the pages are images, not text) and the Evernote text recognition will make the text searchable. Also the ads in the desktop version are disabled for subscribers. This may seem like a minor cosmetic detail, but when my window is very small in the corner of my screen, the ad takes up a huge portion of the sidebar, which along with the needlessly big “Activity” window, makes it hard to see all my notebooks, much less tags and the other things there.

The subscription is $5 per month or $45 per year. I think it’s a fair price, but it’s also a lot of money compared to other apps. Even OmniFocus, which is very expensive at $80, goes longer between paid updates. I bought OmniFocus 16 months ago, and haven’t had to pay again. That’s exactly how much it would cost for a $5/mo. subscription to Evernote. It’s hard to do a direct comparison of the two business models, but the point is that a premium subscription to Evernote would be like owning another OmniFocus. As much as I like the premium features, I can’t justify the cost quite yet. If I had the money I would pay for it, but the free version is good enough for me. I should mention, though, it’s easy enough to find $5 each month. Bringing a lunch from home instead of eating out one day a month would cover it. I think once I reach a situation in which I really could use the premium features, I will subscribe.

Also, a very great thing the devs have done is that you can become premium for a month or more and then stop paying, and you don’t lose anything you already had. So if you need to upload a bunch of stuff for a while (like a complicated project at work, or you’re on vacation or something), you can subscribe and then bump back to the free version later. So there’s really nothing to lose by being selective about when you need more features and when you don’t, and it’s not like once you subscribe you’re stuck continuing to pay forever or else you lose functionality. I have a feeling I will subscribe when I get into production for the tour next month.

Comments

Do you use Evernote? Drop a note in the comments. I’d love to hear about what other people think of it, and what you’re using it for.


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