Font settings on Kobo

Kobo is good stuff. I like, for instance, their "Mini" reader, pocket-sized.
I have their mainstream Touch model (two years old), and I like that too. Userfriendly, if a bit pokey with the touch sensitivity. It does not seem to have the font features I describe below, even after I figured out how to upgrade the OS.

I just looked at a video promoting the devices (via bookstore W.H. Smith here in UK), and found this tidbit: the readers let your fine-tune your fonts. Not only the size, but also the weight (thickness), and the sharpness (whatever exactly they mean by that).
I think this is excellent, and one of those things Amazon could learn from. Especially if, like it seems, these devices have stepless control of text size. Every ereader and -app should have that. But also the weight. Font weight is hugely influential on the readability of a font, and most fonts, in my estimation, which are made for paper, are too thin to be easily readable on e-ink pages, which despite higher resolution these days, are still cruder than paper and backlit screens.

Self-Published Title Hits No. 1 on Ebook Best-Seller List for First Time

Self-Published Title Hits No. 1 on Ebook Best-Seller List for First Time, article.

I think this is joyous and portentous news. It proves finally in hard numbers that while publishers may have their place, they are not a necessary ingredient to achieve not only success, but big success. In other words, their majority bite of the pie is optional, and their filtering mechanism, their judge function, is also optional.

Galaxy S4

There is no doubt that Samsung is sensing that their killer feature in the war with Apple is bigger screens: the new Galaxy S4 flagship phone is a biggun; a full 5-inch screen at the new redunkilus resolution 440PPI, giving it a full HD resolution, which will fascinate 12-year-olds with 30/20 vision, or people who regularly have loups strapped to their glasses.
They may have a point, it seems that apart from iOS's lack of multitasking, this screen-size conservatism is increasingly seen as a major weakness in their strategy.

Geekbeat says: On specs alone, this is the best mobile device on the market.

Like I've said before: a phone at around 5 inches is a great ereader, with a sharp screen like this. A Kindle is just a bit too large to be a pocket device, but this is not, and yet it's large enough to be very comfortable reading any simple text on. And with Android of course comes Kindle software for the ebooks and many apps like Instapaper for easy reading of web articles (you can send them from your computer and read them in reader-friendly formatting on the mobile device).

Really, unless you have a hankering for surfing more complex sites, or reading comics or formatted magazines, this kind of device goes a looong way in daily use on the run. (When you're on the run, it's a great thing to not have to close and unplug a laptop if the sherif unexpectedly pulls up outside the café.)

How to touch a Kindle PaperWhite

From The Kindle Chronicles, the best Kindle-centric podcast I know of.



You'd think this would be basic, but the thing is that the KF Paperwhite works differently than almost all other ereaders (including the Kindle Fire), a tap in the middle won't bring up the button interface, it will move you to the next page. To get the interface, you need to at the top of the screen.

Big Kindle Fire in UK now

The 9-inch Kindle Fire HD is now being sold in a few more countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan). The price in UK is very reasonable.

It is a very good tablet. And particularly it's good for listening to Kindle books, the text-to-speech is the best I've tried.
The downside is how Amazon has hobbled it regarding most Android apps. You can only easily get those generic and safe ones they have let into their own Android store, others take hassle to find and install, and many of them won't even work. I think that's a mistake on Amazon's part, like the ongoing decision to not let the monochrome Kindles read ePub books. I'm sure they like their walled prison, sorry, garden, but they would at least sell more tablets, to people who like to choose their apps freely. And I think if you have good stuff to sell and treat customers right, and Amazon does, then it's rarely a mistake to grant your customers freedom and trust.

MailBoxApp for iOS

TCGirl found this MailBoxApp. It looks very useful.
Though, working from home, I don't do much email from mobile devices. (I also don't like virtual keyboards much, being used to the speed of touch-typing. I'm not destined to set any records in speed typing, but over the years, just keeping to touch-typing, my speed improved to something decent. At least it's about as fast as I can think!     :-)  Taking the typing class in school was one of my smarter choices.

Chinese super-phablets

Just as I'm starting to get used to "phablet", it seems to go away, there are too many of them now and they are just "phones".
(I never did understand why though; the phone capability is the least of what these things can do, and they don't even do it well. I still sometimes accidentally call back on a voice mail when I just wanted to listen to it, and like all mobile phones the sound is poor, after all these years.)

The Chinese are coming in very strong now. Look at this monster.
Imagine seeing this video before the first iPhone came out. Pure Science Fiction.
It looks really good, both visually and interface-wise, and feature-wise.
(It's not a "cheap Chinese" phone either, it's $500 in China.)




Full HD resolution in a 5-inch phone, though? (440PPI) I think that watching HD video is only barely meaningful on my iPad 3, and that is what, four times bigger? I think that over 300PPI is getting into pretty theoretical territory.

"Paper has a great future"

[Thanks to Bert]

Updated: "Why I switched from iPhone to Android"

Why I switched from iPhone to Android, article by Andy Ihnatko, "Internationally beloved tech columnist"

People whom I know, respect, and even consider to be friends have dismissed large phone screens as a cheap marketing gimmick that targets gullible consumers in the showroom, and which doesn't offer any practical benefits.
Yikes. That's so incorrect, so far out of whack with reality as I experience it every day with the Samsung Galaxy S III, and with other flagship Android phones, that I can't even mount an argument against it. I can't think of anything to say other than "Nope. Wrong."

He has several other points, and there are more articles in his series, but I just had to reiterate this point again. Like with the grey screen before the Kindle PaperWhite came out, it's just one of these things which burn my hinterland like Dubya.

Update:
Shockingly, Apple "Evangelist" number one, Guy Kawasaki, has also changed to Android.

But not everybody is in love with bigger phones, not MacWorld for example.

Me, I'm reading interestedly, because I really like a phablet, but I find it harder to buy the TV shows I want on Android, and the article software I use on iPad is so far much poorer on Android, in formatting and such. (Although some of it has text-to-speech, which is disappointingly hard to find on iOS.)

"Finally, a Tablet Built Exclusively for Women"

Finally, a Tablet Built Exclusively for Women, article.

Oh dear...

Why not a car made for women? The windscreen could turn into one big mirror, so you could finalize your outfit while driving!

I don't think women have problems using a normal tablet. They can find the apps they want, and if they want a pink wallpaper, I'm sure they can find one themselves!     :-)

The iOS App Alphabet

The iOS App Alphabet, article.
Maybe celebrities with gajillions of followers see this kind of retweet action all the time, but for me it was shocking. Nothing I’ve ever produced in any medium over more than a decade as a professional writer has ever come close to garnering as much attention or response as this one tweet.

I post this for two reasons, a sweet and a sour. The sweet is that I like Joe's visual joke. Particularly that there were just 26 slots on the screen.

The sour is that the fact that this little joke got way more attention on Twitter than all of Joes prior work combined, tells us a bundle about Social Networks. Joe Kissell has written many books and articles, typically amongst the best and most readable tech writing you will find.

This is one of the too-many things I really need to get over. When "Web 2.0" appeared around a decade ago, I got a little excited: finally "everybody" would participate in the web, a true explosion of valuable communication!

Well, the explosion I got right, but the "valuable" part I have trouble with. Twitter and FaceBook are 98% mindless chatter, so superficial that it seems almost deliberate. And this is how many people, including many people I love and respect, spend the time they used to spend on TV. Maybe a step up, but do baby steps need to be this small?

I suspect though that hating the Social Web is a bit like hating a new window in a wall, because it shows a dirty and dingy street which you didn't care to walk on before. It's not the window's fault. (After the statement, that seems rather obvious. Maybe I'm not as smart as my mother thought.) (And maybe I should have used a Mirror metaphor, but I'm not mature enough yet to take that much responsibility.)

Apple’s Reality Distortion Field Relocates to Wall Street

Apple’s Reality Distortion Field Relocates to Wall Street, article.
Apple is the most profitable company, can’t make enough products to meet demand and is the most admired by its peers. Yet Wall Street and media fanatics are claiming Apple is doomed. The reality distortion field is in full effect.
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"Surge in iPad mini Popularity Shows Tablet Market is in Flux"

Surge in iPad mini Popularity Shows Tablet Market is in Flux, article.
As time, technology and display technology have evolved, it has been discovered by customers that a slightly smaller, lighter less expensive iPad mini can do the job most the time. Even Tim Cook showed up at the Shareholder meeting sporting an iPad mini.

I totally agree. I love the Mini, particular that it's half the weight. It's way more comfortable to use, and fits in many of my pockets.

At the same time of course, I also think that bigger tablets are much wanted and needed. But that's for different purposes, that's for content creation, and for reading content with complex layout and graphics. (And surely for many purposes we'll discover when we have those tablets, like usual.)

Big-phones are growing

Seven inches are just better than five. Unless you want to keep it in your pocket.

The big-phone market is expanding, in more than one way.

It struck me recently, why don't the tablets with 3G or 4G capability also have phone capability? That surely can't be that hard? Well, now two of them do, an Asus Fonepad and the new Galaxy Note 8.

For those of us who use a big phone or small tablet 98% for surfing, reading and video*, and 2% for phone calls, "phablets" are kewl. It's just silly to have to carry two devices and have two contracts and bills, when one device easily could do it all.


*Many would throw in gaming here too, but it's funny, games could never hold my attention. I have tried dozens of them over the years, but after max ten minutes I just lose interest. 

"It’s Not Email That’s Broken, It’s You”

It’s Not Email That’s Broken, It’s You, article.

Every time I hear in some ways of bulging in-boxes, I get confused. To me that’s…. I dunno, like getting groceries delivered and just letting it sit in the hall, week after week…

I get up in the morning (or “morning”), and I handle everything in my inbox. Sometimes I’m lucky, and it’s just ten minutes. More typically, I guess half an hour to an hour, but that includes work and personal items. Occasionally it’s heavy and takes a couple hours, but that’s rare.

Then several times a day I check mail, and empty it every time. With the rare exception of the very long mail from a friend which I send to my iPad via Instapaper, to read it in comfort.

And I don’t dream of going to sleep without an empty inbox.
There’s nothing difficult about it. It’s like brushing your teeth, you just do it.
Inboxes are not *meant* for long-term storage! For that you have to create another box, for things like information you *might* need later. I also recommend having one for read-and-handled mail, if your system doesn't have one. Don't delete old mail.

But it seems to be a universal problem that many people simply have problems handling communication. Many years ago I worked for some months in a modern religious organization. They pride themselves on having the most sophisticated management system in the world, with about 10 big volumes of collected articles on it. Some of it is very workable, like: one of the central tenets is that to get work done, you do it once, right away, and you finish it. You don’t look at it, make plans, start something, then put it back… etc. You do it and finish it. And you keep your inbox empty.
Despite this clear doctrine, many people in the organization can’t manage it. I remember an executive who was being investigated, and one of the findings of his failures was that they’d found letters in his inbox dating back months.
I don’t know how many it’s true of, but I’d hazard a majority. At least of those who aren’t lucky enough to have a job (“post” they call it) which gets very little communication.

I think one of the problems is that people don’t include answering email in the category of “work”. They think that they will do “their work” first and *then* they’ll do their email, if they get time! But your communications is one of the most important parts of your work, trust me. The majority of of big and costly mistakes in companies comes from messed-up communication.

I guess it also hinges on interest. I like my email. And also I really hate clutter, so a not-empty inbox just irritates me until it’s handled.

But: right now I’m learning how to use interdental toothbrushes. I don’t like it, because I find it difficult to get to the back teeth. But I have to learn it because otherwise my teeth will decay, this has been shown to me clearly. So I’m learning it. I think it’s the same with things like inboxes, you just apply a bit of will for a while, until it gets to be a habit.