Steve Jobs, funnyman

Siri's new voice.

iOS's Siri voice is new in iOS 7 (upcoming). Sounds good to me. I hope this forecasts a good text-to-speech function in iOS devices, hopefully easily available to app developers. My eyes seem to be stressed (start to itch/burn a couple times a day), perhaps from years of computer use, and I've come to love audiobooks, and the excellent text-to-speech in the Kindle Fire HD. (It was the only reason I bought the KFHD, but it has easily been worth it for me.)

Marvin reader app for iOS

Marvin, a new ereader app for iOS is very interesting.

See, here we have the typical problem. Marvin, of course, like other independent app, can't read books with DRM, meaning all the wonderful books I have bought from Kindle and Kobo can't be used with this wonderful app. What a waste, just because of paranoia!

Marvin lets you select between a gazillion different colors for text and background. I don't see who wants iridescent green on bright orange, but fortunately also has many variations of nice off-whites for the background and very dark blue or brown for the text, or vice versa. Things like this shames the Kindle and eBook apps, with their over-simplistic interfaces, apparently designed to not confuse three-year-olds. 

Besides this and many other nice options for layout, it also is the only reader I know of besides Kindle which can provide you with an Overview of a book and its characters. For better and for worse, this does not have to be made for a book, the app does it automatically.

It also has friendly relationships with Dropbox, Wikipedia, and other good things on the Net.

I'm almost surprised it does not have text-to-speech. The iPad's own voice is only connected to disability and therefore not great, and I only know a couple of apps for iOS with text-to-speech, and only one is an ereader app, and none of them are cause for any celebrations. I'd guess it's hard to make and expensive to acquire. But: they manage on Android, my Instapaper app InstaFetch has a wonderful text-to-speech capability. (And of course the reader on Kindle Fire HD is fantastic, I use it continually, in rare cases I even prefer it an actual audiobook!)

iPhone it is

OK, I've given up and gone back to my iPhone. Android's foibles just kept catching in my craw. Ugh.
A typical one: Apparently there is no way to turn off the HTC One! Normally when you hold down the sleep button, Off is an option. But no, the only one is restart. And nowhere in the limited settings HTC has on this thing did I find any way to turn it off.

In the past year or two, some Android and PC laptop makers have caught up with Apple in making beautiful hardware. It's probably harder to make usable software, so I'm not holding my breath.

Update: Thanks to Craniac:

I got it to work now, shutting it down. The difference was I hadn't unlocked the screen! (I'm not sure why you can reboot it, but not shut it down, without unlocking it.)

On other devices I have, it's very clear when the screen is locked, on the HTC One, it's just a small lock icon in the bottom row along with the other icons there.

About cheap subscriptions

I think there's a facet of the digital-publication revolution which few publishers have really realized yet: the power of cheap subscriptions.

Sure, everybody knows that cheaper brings more sales. But is it enough to make up for the lower price though? Well, the thing is in digital, the floor is the floor, since additional sales do not come with additional expenses in printing, distribution, etc.

There is a handful of subscriptions (photo mags, magazines for artists, money publications...) which I keep around despite the fact that I rarely have the time to read them. I do so because I just like them, I like having them if I ever feel like reading them, and because the price is low enough that it doesn't bother me.

Obviously that will vary from person to person and from time to time. For me at the moment, if a subscription is $20 per month, it better deliver and I better take advantage of it, otherwise it's ouddi. But if it's only $5 per month, I may just keep it around indefinitely.

I think this can be a gold mine for publishers.
A good way of doing it without feeling you're giving away the farm is to do it with bulk rebates. Say a monthly subscription is $20. Some will then make  the quarterly $50 or even $55. I say: make it $40, or even $35! And the yearly may be under $100, that's a big savings.  This will be a very attractive offer, and will make you a mint in loyal subscribers.

Office Arrives on iPhone — Too Little, Too Late?

Office Arrives on iPhone — Too Little, Too Late?, article.  And here.
Microsoft Office is finally available for iOS, but prepare for disappointment. It's only for the iPhone, and the app requires an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $60 a year. In addition to those limitations, the apps are bare bones, lacking many seemingly basic features: you can't undo actions or change fonts in Word, nor can you add slides or create new documents in PowerPoint.

I'm sorry, those limitations are so ridiculous that calling this "Office" (and charging 60 bucks a year for it) is indefensible. There are already apps which are much better, way cheaper, and run on iPad. (Office documents on a 4-inch phone, gimme a break.)

Apple: We have 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market

Apple: We have 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, article.
Most estimates had placed Apple’s U.S. ebook market share at around 10 percent, with Amazon’s Kindle at 50 to 60 percent and Barnes & Noble’s Nook at 25 percent. But Moerer said the iBookstore’s market share was 20 percent in the first few months after the iBookstore’s launch, Publishers Weekly reports,  and is about 20 percent now.

If true, this is quite the surprise to me and I'm sure most other commentators. Amazon's bookstore is much larger and seems more relevant, and true to Amazon's goal, it is indeed very handy for me that I can read my Kindle books on virtually any screen device I own. This can't be said for Apple's iBooks. Hell, it won't be until the next OS upgrade that you even can read iBooks books on Apple's own Mac, three and a half years after the first iPad! A failure of grand proportions.

The iBooks store, apart from initiating software which makes sophisticated enhanced text books (which can only be sold via iBooks!) does not seem to most of us to have been doing anything much, or gotten much attention, it's just been sitting there like a wallflower at a school dance.
If the 20% number is true, I will guess this is simply due to the great popularity of the iPad, and a lot of those customers using the iBooks store by default, perhaps not even being aware that there are plenty other book reading apps for the iPad. Beyond the Kindle app, there is the Nook app and the Kobo app, and a plethora of independent apps.

Normally I like it when Apple succeeds, but they are not the underdog anymore, and the fact is that despite them using "the standard format" ePub, due to DRM and lack of apps on other platforms, their books are much more locked down than Amazon's Kindle books are. This is stupid. Apple did a very smart thing when the other executives convinced Jobs, who was adamantly against it, to make iPod and iTunes work with Windows. They should remember this.

Of course the only right thing for society is to make books DRM-free, so there is no big literacy disaster if Apple or Amazon goes down one day.

Apple, power savings, and iOS 7 goodies

(See keynote below.) Apple is doing a lot of work in hardware, in the OS, and in apps to reduce power usage. And I must say I'm pretty impressed. For example if you keep a little eye on what your machine is doing (via for example the Activity Monitor utility/app), you will often discover that some app or apps, very often web browsers, are sitting in the background, not even being used, and just draining the power, completely uselessly.

So one of Apple's really intelligent inventions in upcoming OS "Mavericks" (they've given up on big cats) is that if an app is using a lot of CPU power, and you cover the app with another app (you don't even have to put it in the background), CPU usage immediately drops! Hurrah!!
There are also developments in more effective memory usage.

Frankly things like this are desperately needed. I have what was the top of the line Mac Pro four years ago, and I bought it with oodles and oodles of RAM, and yet it is often slowing down, stalling, or running up against memory walls.

----
Oh, by the way, one of the cool things coming up in iOS 7: multitasking for all apps, not just a select few. They are carefully managed still so as not to drain the handheld device's limited resources, but it should improve things. For example I've noticed that only a couple of Apple's own apps are currently allowed to download anything while in the background, other apps are stopped doing it after ten seconds or so of being put in the background.

There's also a new control panel which I really like: you just slide up from the bottom, and it's there, and includes loudness, brightness, airplane mode, and a few more things.  Here it is:

... I'm a bit more doubtful about the translucency which dominates iOS 7... but we'll see how it goes. Maybe it does add a bit of color and feeling of context, without distracting.

Apple keynote, iOS 7 and hardware

Update: photo of the upcoming Mac Pro. Click to enlarge. Damn, that's hot, I get technolust. 
====

Apple has just finished the keynote for the 2013 Developers' Conference. I really liked it, it actually rekindled my enthusiasm for Apple products, which had been flattening out a little.

A MacBook Air 13" with 12 hours battery life (apparently not with Retina Display?). a beautiful and exciting new iOS. (Finally after all these years getting rid of those photograpic icons. They are not icons, folks, they are photos.) Preview of the upcoming Mac Pro. Like I predicted, they went overboard with radical design and compactness! (It's only ten inches tall.) But the specs sound amazing. I just hope it is quiet! Please! (The colossal step down in noise from the G5 to Intel Macs was a lifesaver for me, seriously. I hope they have not endangered that by the compactness of the next Mac Pro.)

... But then I may go for another kind of machine next time. An iMac or laptop easily handles normal "pro" stuff these days, the Mac Pro is for people who edit cinema movies and such stuff.

I'm guessing sales of current Mac Pros are already in the toilet, since they release such a dramatic preview.

... Aha, they are doing something about cooling. Cool.
Weeeeell, they said this too about the PowerMac G5, and that thing was not quiet, lemme tell you. Fingers crossed.

The Last Bookshop

This short-film is very well made, and funny. And I can't deny feeling sorry that book stores are closing. I also miss LP cover art.

But still: it's the content which matter, not the book. If you take out the content from paper books, all you have is dead trees.

And the content is not about to die. On the contrary, ebooks and ereaders are already making stories and dissertations much cheaper and much more widely available in all the countries of the world. Surely nobody is against that, even if they are nostalgic for the smell of slightly mouldy paper?

The Last Bookshop home. 

Android, oh dear...

Maybe it was a mistake to get an Android phone. But the HTC One got so much praise, and so has the lastest versions of the OS! So I thought that it was Good Now, like the supposed experts said.

I hardly know where to start, it seems almost everything I try to do is awkward or buggy or just doesn't work.

• I bought two movies. They won't play. Two contacts with support have not helped. 
• I side-loaded some of my own ripped videos. I had to try three different video apps before I found one which would play not only the sound, but the picture as well. (Good old VLC Player worked, though it's in Beta here). 
• I can't find a setting to use the phone as a disk when connected by USB, so I have to use the HTC sync software. It's very buggy and freezes all the time. 
• The app started with automatically trying to import all my music, which would have used up virtually all the space. I had to find that setting and turn it off. (Why not ask first?) 
• I have installed correct ringtone files in the Ringtones folder. They play fine when I click on them, but the Ringtones Setting can't see them! (Help videos I've seen says it should.) Rebooting didn't help. 
• I have tried shortening the ringtone files' names, but now I can't find the folder in the HTC sync app...

And it is typically like that. On all my devices (I have at least 5 Android devices). I don't understand how people can stand it. 

Part of the reason I have them at all is Apple's stupid resistance towards bigger phones. I hope they get over that soon, so I can get a 5-inch phone/ereader which just works.

Update:
I solved the Ringtone deal. I was told that .m4r is the right appendix for ringtones, and my ringtones were indeed like that, so that was hunky-dory.
But then I noticed that for some reason there were already two custom ringtones in the Ringtones folder (the regular ones are of course hidden elsewhere), and those had the extension .ogg for some reason. So I tried to change the extension of mine to that, and that made it work. Geez. If .m4r is standard, why doesn't the HTC One recognize them? 

HTC One

I've changed from iPhone 4S to HTC One, an Android phone.

It's more beautiful than the iPhone (who'd have thunked that?), and the bigger screen is a current-day necessity. It's a good pocket ereader. The hardware is state of the art, just lovely.*

I must say though, I don't quite understand the enthusiasm with which some people, like Apple connoisseurs Andy Ihnatko and Guy Kawasaki, have taken to Android. They quote many reasons, but they all seem trivial to me. As an OS it still feels a little awkward and buggy to me. (And confusing: not two devices work the same.) A typical example: in the notifications list, two notifications from the very first time I opened it are stuck. They do not disappear like the others when I clear the list.
Another example: I googled for the "best podcast app for Android", and got the clear candidate. But it's not very good. The buttons are too small, and the time line hardly visible.
(Not that the iOS podcast apps are great. It's odd, you'd think that would be an easy interface to make, but instead Apple's own app, for example, has the whole middle of the screen, over 70%, doing nothing, and has the controls crammed together, too small, at the top and the bottom. Just brain-dead decisions. But that's not normal, on the whole I have much more fun with iOS apps.)


*OK, it is more than state of the art, it's overkill. Who has eyes resolving four hundred and seventy pixels per inch?! I can just barely tell the difference between 200 and 300. 

The "book" is either dying or flourishing!

Australian publishers say the book is not dead, it is being redefined by new technology, article.
So while the printed page may be less popular than in previous times, publishers are confident that reading will remain a mainstream pleasure - so long as readers keep adapting their definition of the word 'book'.

And thereby hangs a tale.
If a book is by definition on paper, then the Book is in trouble. Paperbook stores are closing in droves. But if it includes ebooks, then we may be on the verge of the Golden Age for books.

I have been chastised by helpful and enthusiastic readers that an ebook is not a book, because a book is a bound bundle of paper sheets.
And indeed from the dictionary it seems this is so.

But what's a book lover to do? My feelings tell me that Two Cities is a book, no matter if I read it in a "book" or on my Kindle, or iPad, or my phone.
A writer says he is writing a "book", and he is not talking about the bound paper, he is talking about the conceptual content.
And people all over the world is talking about books they have read, even though many of those books may never have seen bound paper.

So I think at some point, like has happened with the majority of words, the dictionaries will have to include this new definition of "book".
How you define it precisely is tricky, and for more orderly heads than mine.

My Writing Spot updated

My Writing Spot updated. Online/tablet writing app updated, posted on my other blog.

"FindTheBest"

A new ereader comparison site: FindTheBest.
I haven't tested it seriously, but it seems to be advanced.
The webmaster informs me:
...we have one feature that really helps users make quick, informed decisions and that is our Smart Rating. The Smart Rating is determined by using the weighted average of 4 different well-respected expert reviews. Therefore, even if a user sorts and filters by screen size and price, they will still always be able to see how that e-Reader stacks up to the other ones.

With that and ReaderRocket.com we now have at least two such dedicated sites, I think that is indicative of how serious and solid the ereader now is becoming in our culture.
How long before it'll be the default choice, over paper books, at least in the US? Can't be long, maybe less than five years.

Other English-speaking countries are a couple of years behind, simply because Amazon (having the break-through product, Kindle) works in the US first. And the rest of the planet has the additional hurdle that they can't generally just use the existing e-published ebooks, they have to get their own publishers to publish ebooks in their own language, a process I bet can easily add 3-5 years to the whole thing.
In other words, if viewed globally, I think roughly a decade before ereaders are dominant.