Mac Me Up

iPod touch as PDA: milestone

2009-06-28T19:53:00.001+09:30

This will be of little interest to anyone, other than as a signal that my iPod touch-as-PDA experiment is really working out: I've actually deleted almost all of the music I had been carrying on my iPod touch because I was running out of space for more important things. That is, I no longer really consider it an iPod, or, at least, I don't consider music storage to be its primary function. My entire music collection has nudged over 22G, and with a mere 32G available on the iPod touch, I had been finding it a squeeze to allocate the remaining 10G as I wanted. I have almost 50 applications installed now (many of which are frivolous, but some of which are essential). Between those and my new-found addiction to downloading television episodes from the iTunes Store (just finished season two of The Wire), something had to give. It was the music. The iPod touch is less like a music player and more like a hand-held computer for me.

We have the technology

2009-06-09T10:05:00.001+09:30

Just scrolling the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page, and I'm stopped in my tracks by the first section on Finder:

[When attempting to eject an external disk,] improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Wow—you mean we have the technology for that now? Outstanding.

Now, without the sarcasm, I can't believe this qualifies for front page news on Snow Leopard. Mac OS X's error dialogs are regularly woeful, and this kind of sloppy user interface design (telling the user that something is preventing a disk from being removed, but not telling them what) should have been corrected years ago. It's neither an "enhancement", nor a "refinement", it's an "embarrassingly basic user interface deficiency that should have been fixed by now".

Installing a new font

2009-05-22T21:01:00.001+09:30

I had recently read a post entitled “Top 10 Programming Fonts”, via Daring Fireball. I figured I would try out the number one font, Inconsolata, for Java editing in Eclipse. Instant problem: I had never installed a new font in OS X before, and had no idea how.

I hit the Quicksilver hotkey and typed ‘font’—the first match was Font Book, and that looked promising. I downloaded Inconsolata in Open Type format, selected File > Add Fonts... in Font Book, and pointed the dialog at the downloaded Open Type file. Done.

By default, the font is installed for the current user only, but there's a preference to allow installing a new system-wide font. Back over in Eclipse, Inconsolata now shows up in the font selection dialog. I'm currently trying it out. Initial impression: looks nice.

Time Machine broken again

2009-04-10T08:28:00.001+09:30

My latest Time Machine saga apparently started 12 days ago, though I wasn't aware of it until yesterday, when a helpful dialog popped up to tell me that a Time Machine backup of my MacBook Pro hadn't occurred in 11 days. Outstanding.

When I got home last night, I figured I would manually start a backup and let it run for as long as it took. Being the expert in Time Machine failure that I am, I knew that interrupting backups by putting the machine to sleep seems to confuse the whole process, and maybe I just hadn't had the machine awake enough within WiFi range of the Time Capsule recently. I started the backup, and we sat through a whole lot of "preparing". In fact, so much preparing that I fired up the Console about an hour later:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

"Well, we don't want to rush the index," I thought. "If the index is not ready, I can wait." At about the two hour mark, I set the energy saver preferences to keep the machine awake all night, and went to bed.

Almost 12 hours later, the console was reading:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

At that point I had to go to work, so I shut down yet another backup and took off. It's Friday now, so I guess plan B is to start another backup when I get home this afternoon, which can potentially run for about 60 hours before I need to interrupt it again.

My take on the issue is this: if your backup software needs more than 12 hours to decide what it needs to backup from a 160G disk, then your backup software is broken. It's a testament to the level of Mac Fanboy status I have achieved that I even persevere with Time Machine. The old Unix Me would have deleted this junk months ago.

iTunes: a laugh a minute

2009-03-12T20:53:00.001+10:30

When I download something from the iTunes Store, iTunes periodically offers to backup all my purchases. Just got the offer now, and I figured, "Sure—I have a terabyte of portable disk sitting on top of my Mac Pro. Why not?" Then I get this:

Oh iTunes, you're so funny. Backup to CDs or DVDs? What century is it?

Time Capsule user interface annoyances

2009-03-10T21:59:00.001+10:30

I just got home to find my Time Capsule's status LED flashing yellow. This is a story of two problems with the Time Capsule user interface.

If I read the Time Capsule manual at all, it was many months ago. I can't remember what ‘flashing yellow LED’ means, but given that it spends 99% of its time solid green, I figure green = good, and yellow = bad. I've been an Apple user for some four years now, so I'm with the program. Troubled by the LED's flashing yellowness, I fired up AirPort Utility. There was, in fact, no problem at all—there just happened to be a firmware update available. Firmware updated, Time Capsule reset, and the LED is now a comforting solid green. This strikes me as an awful way to signal the availability of new firmware. Surely this could be integrated into the system-wide Software Update facility.

In any case, the hilarity did not end there. Time Machine was running a backup during the update, but the Time Capsule apparently made no attempt to terminate that gracefully. While the Time Capsule rebooted after the update, Time Machine displayed an error dialog, and the backup failed. For a piece of hardware that's sold specifically to work with a piece of software, this complete lack of integration is disappointing.

Amazon brings Kindle to iPhone, just not to Australia

2009-03-04T22:00:00.001+10:30

This sounds cool. Naturally, this is the reality:

Safari 4 Beta: second impressions

2009-03-02T10:47:00.001+10:30

A few days ago, I posted my first impressions on the Safari 4 Beta. My second impressions fall into two groups: user interface and speed.

The most striking UI change is the re-worked tabs. Other authors have posted in defense of the new tabs, and I understand that the main argument is that the tabs in Safari 4 Beta better represent the document hierarchy. The tabs-in-title-bar supposedly represent something more like docked sibling windows. For example, Manton Reece writes:

The Safari 4 tabs are conceptually the right way to go. It's not "tabs" at all. Instead, think of it as an efficient way to dock multiple windows together.

I'm not sure if I'm buying the premise that there needs to be a one-to-one correspondence between web pages and entire windows. The old tabs caused me no confusion. I agree with Reece that if this represents Apple bringing system-provided tabs to applications, then that's great. I just wouldn't do it like this. Let me add my own list to the numerous gripes detailed elsewhere:

Tabs in the title bar give a window a very cluttered look.
The first question I had was "Well, where do you grab to move the window?" It turns out that if you grab the tab-dragging affordance on the right, it moves the tab, not the window. If you grab the tab close button, nothing happens on drag. You have to pick a spot between these two icons on each tab.
The tab with focus is wider than the tabs without—which is fine, but the unfocused tabs are now so narrow that often there's no space for any useful excerpt of the page title: about six characters and ellipsis.
The tabs move when cycled. In Safari 3, the leftmost tab was fixed, and cycling right eventually moved into the non-visible tabs. In Safari 4 Beta, the whole row of tabs shuffles left or right to move the focused tab into visibility. I can't decide whether this is better or worse, but coming from the old behaviour, it's at least disorienting.

Beyond tabs, I have two small UI criticisms. The loss of the progress-meter-in-address-textfield (the blue background that moved across the address textfield as the page loaded) is remarkably annoying. Evidently I used it subconsciously way more than I ever realised, as now I find its absence incredibly frustrating. Moving the reload button from the far left (and outside) of the address textfield to the far right (an inside) seems arbitrary and, again, is incredibly annoying.

On the upside: it feels fast. Ars Technica has taken a brief look at it, and, while noting that it might not be as fast as Apple claims, that it does, indeed, seem faster, and features better resource management.

Mac Pro DVD drives are easily replaced

2009-02-28T11:39:00.001+10:30

Since purchase, the single DVD drive in my Mac Pro has been, well, broken. After disc insertion, it almost always makes a horrible grinding noise—not the loud spin-up-style noise, but a low, rumbling noise that sounds quite literally like it's going to shake itself off its mount. I'm fairly sure it's been reported elsewhere. It's taken me over a year to do anything about it, due to a combination of factors:

I actually use the drive pretty rarely. Almost all software I buy these days is downloaded. DVDs as storage media are going the way of the CD: 4GB isn't the vast expanse of space it used to be, and, frankly, optical media are pretty fragile. (And the failure modes of DVDs seem to be catastrophic: what's with a couple of scratches making an entire disc unreadable?) At $A 176 for a 1TB USB disk, I can't see myself buying too many stacks of blank DVDs in the future.
It usually works. Often, it will spin the disc up, growl once or twice, then settle down. Other times, it won't read known-good discs at all. And very occasionally, I am pretty sure it has damaged some discs.
Despite having purchased the 3 year Apple Care option, presumably entitling me to a free replacement for the faulty drive, powering down the Mac Pro and sending it into a store (for what would presumably be a minimum of a week) would cost me more in time and energy than replacing the drive myself, at my own expense.

I had a spare LG DVD writer just lying around, so I grabbed a screwdriver, and a copy of the Mac Pro User Manual, and set off. It's about a 10 minute job, almost completely described by the manual—you do need to prise the faceplate off the front of the drawer if it's a drive intended for a PC-style case. (Otherwise the front of the drawer won't physically fit through the auto-opening slot door on the Mac Pro's case.) If you're into this kind of thing (industrial design, and computer design in particular), the internals of the Mac Pro are spectacular. Why can't other companies design cases like this?

Safari 4 Beta: first impressions

2009-02-26T10:52:00.001+10:30

After reading about it all over the web, I just downloaded the Safari 4 Beta. Here are my first impressions:

The installer required a restart of the machine. Let me just repeat that using some different words: I had to reboot my machine at the end of the install. If there was a warning about this requirement, I missed it.
Safari 4 Beta is installed over the existing Safari 3. I don't know if Safari 3 is archived somewhere so that it can be restored if I uninstall Safari 4 Beta, but, again, if there was a warning about this, I missed it. If I find the beta to be buggy or unstable, it's not at all inconceivable that I might want to uninstall it and revert to Safari 3 while waiting for the non-beta release. I sure hope this is automated by the uninstaller.
The progress-meter-in-address-textfield, which I originally hated, but grew to love, has disappeared. There's now a spinning wheel at the far right of the textfield, which obviously conveys no information about the state of completion of a page load.
On first load, I am presented with a very nice looking matrix of ‘Top Sites’, though I don't know where these are coming from. I assume it's from my own history. GMail's front page is depicted twice. Four of the twelve slots are blank, which is surprising, as I am sure there are more than eight URLs in my history. Oh—hang on, there are references to pages (though one is just recent, a page I have visited all of once), but four of them have no thumbnail image.
There has been some commentary on the new placement of tabs. With the caveat that all I've done so far is open the application, my first response is that it's not a look that I like. I'll reserve judgement until I use them.
Develop > Show Web Inspector now appears as a pane in the lower portion of the window, rather than as a separate window. I think I like this.
There are some interesting demos of new CSS features about. Presumably no other browser will support these, and hence they will be useless, for about a decade.

If I keep it around, I will post some second impressions later.

iTunes Store: is this really the best you can do?

2009-01-26T22:16:00.001+10:30

I've written before about Apple's habit of providing obscure, meaningless, and hence almost completely unhelpful error dialogs. Here's another one:

Needless to say, my connection to the network was active, and I did try again. Three times. No joy.

Ten minutes later, I was able to resume the download. iTunes just pretended nothing had happened. I'm thinking of starting a gallery of Useless Apple Error Dialogs.

Sync conflict bingo

2009-01-01T17:06:00.001+10:30

Here's a dialog that popped up this afternoon:

While having the length of the data in question is undeniably handy, even better would have been the data itself, or perhaps an excerpt. I don't think I'm alone in not being able to make much of a GUID, a modification date, and a length. In the end, I went with the 978 bytes of data, given that the alternative was nothing.

Disconnecting a USB device shouldn't cause wake from sleep

2008-12-30T08:11:00.001+10:30

I find this scenario annoying:

Connect an iPod to a Mac. Sync.
Hit the Eject icon for the iPod in iTunes.
Leave the iPod physically connected to the Mac—it needs a charge.
Put the Mac to sleep. Wait.
Disconnect the iPod.

What happens next? The Mac wakes from sleep. Because I disconnected an ejected iPod. I cannot think of a use case for that behaviour.

Time Machine: this cannot be good

2008-12-17T20:40:00.001+10:30

Today on my Mac Pro, I got these:

Awesome! Time Machine: I give up.

OmniFocus for iPhone (and iPod touch) Review

2008-11-22T13:40:00.001+10:30

I've been using The Omni Group's OmniFocus on the desktop since it was in beta testing. I like it. For a to-do list manager, it's a complex application, but that's what I like about it. Some people can get by with a handful of linear lists, and that's great for them, but I can't—I need a more hierarchical structure. I like the metadata that OmniFocus can attach to a task, and in particular I like the idea of ‘contexts’—a concept borrowed from David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. (I'm not a die-hard GTD fanboy, though I've read the book and many of his suggestions work for me.)

Omni released OmniFocus for iPhone (which also runs on the iPod touch) soon after the App Store opened. At the time, though, it required using a pre-release version of the desktop application to enable syncing of tasks between the two. I wasn't keen on letting beta software loose on my fairly substantial OmniFocus database, and given that syncing was pretty much the killer feature for the mobile version, I held out until just a few weeks ago when Omni released OmniFocus 1.5 for the desktop. By then, the iPhone/iPod version was up to 1.1, and I bought it.

I was initially quite impressed. It was a good looking application, with none of the immediately obvious complexity of the desktop version. Although I had the benefit of many months of getting used to OmniFocus's approach, the mobile version seemed intuitive. After a bit more use, I would say it has a really good subset of the features of the desktop application. Obviously there are limitations—as far as I can tell, for example, you can't make a recurring task on the mobile version—but Omni seems to have pared down to pretty much the right features. Walking around with basically my entire database in my pocket sure beats having to remember to print out lists of errands before I leave the house.

OmniFocus for iPhone has bugs.

Within 24 hours, I had trouble with syncing—where by ‘trouble’ I mean that the iPod apparently couldn't sync with the data stored on MobileMe. It was terminal: I had to wipe the database stored on my iDisk, and start again from scratch on the iPod side. I sent in a bug report, and the Omni respondent was helpful enough, but could suggest little more than trying what I had already done. I moved to local WiFi syncing (which, in my opinion, is significantly less cool than being able to sync tasks over the wider Internet when you're out and about), and this worked for a further 24 hours before it failed in the same way. Having said all of that, I re-started syncing over MobileMe, and it has been working without issue since those first two hiccups. Further, I have literally just today updated to OmniFocus for iPhone 1.1.3, which claims that “OmniFocus is now able to repair disconnected root transactions (rather than simply reporting ‘no root can reach all tail transactions’)”, so maybe it's completely fixed.
Just this morning, I entered a task into the Inbox. On saving, the screen blanked, though the bottom row of buttons were still displayed. So I hit the Home button, and the application crashed and terminated. On restarting, the entered task was present in the Inbox. Again, this has only happened once. Something like this was mentioned in the 1.1.1 update release notes. I thought I had installed that update, though I'm not completely sure. I'll give Omni the benefit of the doubt, and assume I didn't. After updating to 1.1.3 just now, I hope I won't see this again.

The problem with bugs like these is that they're really difficult to reproduce. Without updating the mobile version, for example, the syncing bug happened twice, then just stopped happening. While that makes it hard for developers to track down and fix the bug, it also makes it utterly demoralizing for customers reporting them. I bothered, but many wouldn't. I doubt I provided any useful information, other than an instance of it occurring. The response from Omni was next to useless (it couldn't be anything else), and everyone involved presumably feels pretty unhappy about it. I did. I think Omni has to answer for this kind of thing. By most accounts, syncing is a hard problem. But that doesn't justify having a go at it, and then releasing what you've done. Surely the syncing issue came up in their internal testing—it happened to me twice in 48 hours.

I think Omni make great applications. As well as OmniFocus, I own OmniGraffle. I think OmniFocus for iPhone has a lot of potential, but it feels like it was released in a rush. Omni has just released the fourth bug-fix update, and who knows whether that's killed all the major ones. At just under $A 24, I don't think this is acceptable. Surely Omni has the customer loyalty to delay a release like this until things are reasonably stable. In fact, the rushed feel of the release of the mobile version is in complete contrast to the desktop version, which stayed in beta for months on end before its 1.0 release. The very customer loyalty that allows them to prolong a development cycle like that is precisely what gets eroded by rushing a buggy product out the door.

Why is Apple Mail thrashing my CPU?

2008-11-02T14:43:00.001+10:30

Earlier today, Apple Mail started doing this:

And yet it's essentially idle—the Activity window shows Mail doing absolutely nothing. Mail still responds, and if I quit it and restart, it works fine for about half an hour. And then it starts again with the thrashing. I have no idea what it's doing. It looks like I'm not the only one.

Parallels Desktop crashed my Mac Pro

2008-10-21T20:16:00.001+10:30

I'll qualify the title shortly, but first let me recap. I've given Parallels Desktop a pretty decent chance. Only recently I wrote that I thought it had improved dramatically in the latest build. I've recommended it to friends, and they've purchased and installed it.

Yesterday, I was running Windows XP on a Parallels virtual machine on my quad-core Mac Pro, which has 4GB of RAM. It was smooth enough. I may have had as many as 20 other applications open (I generally just never quit applications—with 8 cores and 4 GB, why would I?), and then I logged my wife in as a second user. Then I launched a different Windows XP virtual machine in another instance of Parallels. As if that wasn't enough, she then launched some monolithic Java application inside that—and that's when it happened. According to Activity Monitor, the CPUs were doing essentially nothing, yet the whole user interface locked up. I couldn't even get Finder's Force Quit dialog up to kill Parallels. Finally, the disks stopped, and the mouse froze, and it was all over bar the power-cycling.

So while the title is true, I did happen to be punishing the machine a little at the time. I imagine it was a memory issue in the end. But, locking up to the point of requiring a power-cycle is a really poor failure mode. I think I'm over Parallels Desktop. I'm going to check out VMWare Fusion.

Time Machine: still failing

2008-10-17T12:11:00.001+10:30

The highest-traffic page on Mac Me Up (with a hit count four times its closest rival) is “Time Machine: Backup failed with error: 11”, which I wrote just over nine months ago. In the interim, I bought a Time Capsule, and things have been going fairly smoothly. Until yesterday. A Time Machine backup failed on the Mac Pro, and I ran into my old friend Error 11.

The symptoms this time were different to those I reported in January. backupd seemed to be complaining about an inability to move a single file: a preference list in ~/Library/Preferences. (Being unable to copy a single file, of course the entire backup failed. How robust.) I don't have the log handy to cut and paste, but that's not a big deal since the log adds essentially no useful information whatsoever, and certainly nothing resembling a cause for the copy failure. Just our old friend, Error 11.

I deleted the file (it was for a trial version of an Aperture plug-in), and then Time Machine complained about another one in the same directory. I moved the directory onto Time Machine's ignore list, and the backup completed fine. I'm not buying the idea that this is a disk failure or pre-failure. There is no other evidence of disk trouble. There is no SATA-subsystem logging of read or write errors. System Profiler lists the S.M.A.R.T. status as "Verified". Before I deleted it, I opened and viewed the file.

Time Machine needs to be fixed.

iPod touch Mail Inbox out of sync

2008-10-03T13:57:00.001+09:30

I read my mail via IMAP: all my mail sits on my mail server, and I use a range of clients over a handful of different devices to read it.

Mail on a Mac Pro
Mail on a MacBook Pro
Mail on an iPod touch
Mutt via a terminal into my FreeBSD box
SquirrelMail via a browser.

Today, I've been using the first three of those at various times throughout the morning. I've noticed that Apple Mail on a Mac takes its time between marking a message for deletion on the IMAP server (at which point it's still recoverable), and actually having the server flush the deleted message (after which it's gone). Actually, that's slightly unfair, as even Mutt will wait indefinitely between those two actions—a message marked deleted by Mutt will sit there forever until you tell Mutt to purge them. There are two differences between Mutt and Mail here, though. Firstly, there's a visual indication in Mutt that the message is only marked for deletion (that is, it's still sitting there, just with a ‘D’ next to it), and secondly, there's a way to purge them (quitting Mutt or changing mailboxes will result in a prompt to purge). There are neither of these in Mail. When I delete a message in Mail, I can no longer see it (without changing to the Deleted Messages mailbox). (And since I can no longer see it, there's also no option to purge it.) But I can fire up Mutt at this point, and the messages are still there, marked as deleted.

Today, I guess I just happened upon the right combination of reading mail with too many mail readers, and making changes on all of them. Mail on my iPod touch was showing more than 50 unread messages in my Inbox (and they were all there, marked unread, and readable). Mail on the two Macs was showing what I expected: 5 messages, all read. (The other 45 or more had been deleted or moved to other mailboxes via filtering rules.) No matter how many times I synced Mail on the iPod touch, the views of my Inbox wouldn't reconcile. I tried disabling and then enabling the account on the iPod, but this didn't help. Finally, I fired up Mutt, viewed my Inbox, quit Mutt and answered ‘y’ to the prompt about purging deleted messages. On its next sync, the iPod touch displayed the same view of the Inbox as the two Macs. This was easy enough for me, but I don't know what people who don't have easy access to Mutt are supposed to do in this situation.

Dear iTunes Store, You Lose!

2008-09-22T22:45:00.001+09:30

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant released the fifth season of their hilarious podcast a few days ago. For over two days now, Australia's iTunes Store has been reporting the item as unavailable: ‘This item is being modified. Please try again later.’ Keen to hear it, I actually dug out the login for my old Audible account and purchased it from there. I gave up on Audible a while ago now, but I'm not going to sit around waiting for the iTunes Store to sort itself out. Bad luck, iTunes Store—missed sale.

Parallels Desktop Build 5608

2008-09-16T19:28:00.001+09:30

Until 10 minutes ago, I was running Parallels Desktop Build 5584. I use Parallels so infrequently that problems with it tend to go unnoticed, and unmentioned here. I had, however, been noticing an annoying tendency for 5584 to hog the Mac's user interface. Let me be quite specific: it wasn't (as far as I could tell) a CPU issue—Activity Monitor reported quite modest CPU usage throughout. It seemed to be a pure UI issue. For example, on starting up a Windows XP virtual machine, two things were immediately noticeable: firstly, the five second Windows startup sound played staccato over about 10–20 seconds; and secondly, Command-Tab switching was on about a 10 second delay. That is, I could press and hold Command-Tab (in OS X, not Windows), and expect the application selection overlay to appear about 10 seconds later. Once the VM was up and running, things tended to settle down. But, again, it didn't seem to be a CPU issue—I have more than a few cores to spare on this Mac Pro most of the time.

Anyway, apparently I missed Build 5600, but I found 5608. The "Check for Updates..." feature in the Help menu only seems to work manually. I have it set to check every seven days, but Parallels Desktop never told me there were updates until I checked manually. I tried upgrading within the application, but it failed. Twice. It certainly seemed to be downloading the 88M disk image (twice), but it left a faulty image (weighing in at a mere 16K) on the desktop. Twice. So I downloaded the disk image of the same name from their website. There's no indication on the website (nor within the application) that this is the way to upgrade an existing install (and maybe it's not), but it seems to be working so far. Startup was smooth, the UI was not hogged. I like Parallels Desktop, but they make it a hard app to love.

Why is the mobile YouTube app so slow?

2008-09-01T10:45:00.001+09:30

(As an aside, I'll use the term ‘mobile’ in place of ‘iPhone and iPod touch’. Seems reasonable.)

The built-in YouTube application on my iPod touch seems inexplicably slow. Sure, it's loading the videos over WiFi, but so is my MacBook Pro. And decreasing the distance to the base station doesn't help—it's dog-slow if I sit the iPod on top of the Time Machine. Videos seem to load over several multiples of their duration. A two minute video takes five minutes or more to fully download. What's the issue here? Encoding formats and a slower processor on the mobile device? (That is, is it decoding on-the-fly during download, and is the decoding incredibly CPU-intensive?) I just don't think WiFi is the rate-limiting step here.

iPod touch as PDA: two week review

2008-08-29T12:27:00.001+09:30

Two weeks ago, I bought an iPod touch with the intention of using it as a PDA. On the whole, it's working out well so far. Here are some observations:

WiFi works well. Silently joining known networks is the right way to do it—the Palm TX was always obsessed with telling me what it was doing. Having said that, and despite Internode's pretty decent-looking coverage list, I've found WiFi reception in Adelaide to be somewhat sporadic. Presumably the range from any of those locations is limited. Despite a hotspot listed at 33 King William Street, for example, I can tell you that reception just over the street outside the National Australia Bank Building, at 28 King William Street, is feeble. There's no denying that it would be nice to have the additional 3G coverage of the iPhone.
I'm still not quite sure what to conclude about battery life. It's clearly modest at best, and watching video gives it a real hammering. I think even in the absence of any significant video habit, I would still want to be charging it daily. Not surprisingly, audio is nowhere near as taxing, and the display can be turned off while using it as a conventional iPod.
The Calendar and Contacts applications are significantly better than their Palm TX equivalents. (There's no real surprise there—the TX is a 3-year-old device.) I can't really fault them. They both do what they're supposed to do. Syncing via MobileMe works in both directions.
Mobile Safari is pretty much the gold standard of mobile browsers at the moment. It's that good.
The Mail client is a let-down. It feels like a decent version 0.5 of some kind of much better mail client. There are just too many basic features either done incorrectly, or lacking altogether, to call it anything other than rudimentary:
- It top-posts on replies. This is a completely inexcusable, Outlook Express-level misfeature.
- There's no mechanism for selecting a block of text, and hence...
- There's no way to delete large chunks of text other than sitting there with a finger on the delete key for minutes at a time.
These problems combined mean it takes quite some effort to not look like a moron when replying to email. Additionally, it would be good to be able to either unsubscribe from, or at least ‘forget the contents of’ nominated IMAP mail folders. I have some folders into which I directly pipe mailing list subscriptions, for example. While I delete a lot of the individual messages, I also save hundreds of them. As far as I can tell, if I open one of these folders using the iPod's mail client, I'm going to start accumulating copies of these saved messages on the iPod, even if I don't download more than the default first 50. I could be wrong here—I need to look into it further.

The interim verdict is this: the iPod touch seems to be quite feasible as a PDA.

iCal events and time zones

2008-08-28T10:11:00.001+09:30

I was in Melbourne last weekend. I had entered an event in iCal for the flight home while I was still in Adelaide, and I had not enabled time zone support in iCal. Of course, on arriving in Melbourne, the first thing I did was to update the system time zone to reflect local time—and consequently the departure time of my return flight was pushed back half an hour. I noticed this when I was looking at a hard copy of the flight details with about two hours to spare. I made the flight. And I've enabled time zone support in iCal.

iPod touch as PDA

2008-08-19T21:29:00.001+09:30

As I've described elsewhere, I've been a Palm fan since the Palm IIIx was state of the art. Via the Zire 71, I've had a Palm TX for just over a couple of years. The Missing Sync has made the TX a viable PDA for an OS X desktop, but it's looking a bit tired.

The release of the iPhone 3G in Australia has been an enormous let-down. While I really like the idea of owning an iPhone, and while I've proven myself willing to be reamed by Apple, I'm just not ready to be dual-reamed by both Apple and, say, Telstra. 3G data plans in Australia are nothing short of utterly ridiculous. Several people suggested to me that I look at the iPod touch instead. This was an idea that, initially, I didn't take seriously, mostly because one of those people was Stephen White, and I hate it when Steve's right. In any case, last weekend I did the customary amount of pre-gadget-purchase research on the issue (none), and went out and bought an iPod touch.

It's a nice looking device. The screen is large. At 480×320 pixels, it apparently has the same count as the Palm TX, though that's where the similarity ends. For one thing, the pitch on the iPod is smaller, squeezing them into about half an inch less real estate. The display is brighter, the colour is better. Every thing you've heard about the screen on the iPhone and the iPod touch is true. Many applications (though not all) can be viewed in both portrait and landscape mode, and switching between them is a simple matter of turning the device itself. (A notable exception, as far as I can tell, is the Mail application. I'd really like to be able to read mail in landscape mode.)

Coming from a stylus-based touch screen, the iPod's direct-touch interface is interesting. To be honest, I was skeptical—I assumed it would be hopeless, way too easy to fat-finger everything. Of course, it's not. It works very well. The hot point of a given touch is just the centre of your fat finger. The device seems to get it right pretty much all of the time. Typing is tedious (though, again, significantly more accurate than I thought it would be), but I think the ‘virtual-keyboard vs hardware-keyboard’ debate is largely moot—typing on any miniature keyboard is excruciating.

I am yet to put it through any normal day's use, but as far as I can see, reports of poor battery life seem to be well-founded. I can't see it getting through more than a day of even medium-level use. It will need a recharge at least daily.

Connectivity is via USB cable and WiFi, there's no Bluetooth. I must admit, I really liked cable-less syncing of the Palm TX, but I just can't put the lack of Bluetooth in deal-breaker territory. A proportion of syncing (contacts, calendars and mail) can be done over WiFi anyway, assuming there's a MobileMe subscription. Frankly, that's good enough for me. I'm just pleased to be putting the overpriced fee to some additional use.

I have made some tentative visits to the iTunes App Store. There seems to be a lot of junk. I downloaded Apple's Remote app, and it is as neat as people keep exclaiming. Beyond that, there's a slew of the kind of standard rubbish you see for every mobile platform (for the love of god, who's out there converting all those units?). I used the Palm TX for three main tasks, and I think the iPod touch is going to cover most of it:

Diary. The built-in Calendar app, syncing seamlessly with iCal, far surpasses the Palm.
Contacts. Again, the built-in Contacts app, syncing seamlessly with Address Book, has this covered.
Password storage. We start to hit a rough spot here. I was using a free product called Keyring on the TX. I have no doubt there is a password storage application already available for the iPod, probably several. But it's going to need a partner on the desktop, because I'm not going to type all the information in by hand more than once again. Further, I've got some additional passwords stored in Yojimbo, so ideally I want an iPod version of that (not happening in the near future), or at least something that can share Yojimbo's password data. For now, I'm just going to move from Keyring to Yojimbo on the desktop.

Finally, I very much want to check out OmniFocus for iPhone, as I make extensive use of OmniFocus on the desktop. Obviously the idea is to have the application on the iPod sync with the desktop database, but “Sync requires OmniFocus 1.1, currently pre-release...”. I did enough beta-testing for Omni Group during the OmniFocus open beta. I just don't have a good feeling about letting a pre-release 1.1 loose on my (fairly large) OmniFocus database. So I plan to sit this one out until the real 1.1 release.