Kvetch kvetch, iPhone 5S oddities

[Sorry, bitter post.]

I just got my iPhone 5S. My really nice UPS man even came around twice to make sure I got it today!

And that's in vain, because it only takes "nano SIM" cards. Come on, Apple, that's ridiculous. You couldn't find the two milimeters more to make it so everybody didnt have to get a new card... again! What will iPhone 6 take? Nano-super-mini cards?

And worse, the thing doesn't even work at all without that card. All my Android devices can at least do that, meaning no phone calls, but wifi and everything else works. So I can use my Galaxy Note as an ereader without paying one more monthly fee. Again: Come on, Apple, you can do better.

Yes, I have written about this on Apple's feedback line. (I really hope they read those and consider them.)

Update 22 Oct: it gets better: even the new iPad Air uses a Nano SIM card! You would think that on an iPad they could find a milimeter more.

Undisturbed reading, app proposal

I forget if I ever wrote about an idea I brought up during my interview in The Kindle Chronicles.

For people who like to read, and read on a Kindle Fire, or iPad or other tablet, and find it hard to concentrate when email and Plants Vs Zombies becon just a tap away, one migh make software which could set a "Concentrate Time".

For example, one might set it so that during the next hour, it would be impossible to get out of the reading app and do anything else.

It would surely be wise to make an emergency escape hatch (such as when one feels that either one gets to topple pigs' houses, or it's back to heroin). It could be a minute's wait until one could get out. Or it could be a little task to be executed before being allowed. Just something which would introduce a bit of a barrier, so our mental enertia would help us stay in our reading session.

I think it would be easier to do on Android, since on iPad, for better and worse, it's near impossible to do anything with an app which affects the system or other apps. It's good for the system's health, but bad for flexibility. (When recording a ringtone on my iPhone, the app can't get it to the right place to be used by the phone, I have to plug it in to a computer with iTunes to do the right steps to do that. This is called "sandboxing", each app has its own little protected playground.) So I guess Apple would have to make this function if it is to appear on the iPad. And I doubt they will, because the iPad is not basically a reading machine.

A note on the 2013 Kindle Paperwhite

I got my 2013 Paperwhite.
Should you upgrade?

We don't know if the software changes will come to the earlier model or not, so I won't comment on them.
But the page is whiter... very slightly. Barely noticable. The same is true of sharpness, contrast, page flipping speed...
The most noticable change for me is the brighter and more even front light. The unevenness did bother me a little before.

The slider for quick moving through the book is fantastic. I wonder why this is the first time it's appeared on an e-ink model? Have they been too slow? And the fact that it happens in a small window so you always have your present page anchored outside it is genius.

Altogether, if the 2012 model works fine for you, don't bother. If you don't have any ereader, this is a good time to get one. The Paperwhite is good for undisturbed long reading. (If you like shorter reading, and games and email, a tablet might be the ticket.) If you like the first one, and you like to always have the best, go for it.

Free pulp novels

Over a thousand free pulp era books as ebooks.

That Samsung smart-watch (Galaxy Gear)

OK, so the first serious smartwatch is here.
It is getting very mixed reviews. Some say the interface is really good, but the design and heft are much reviled.
In any case, it's a start, and I guess further developments and model are inevitable.



Given though that the screen necessarily is even smaller than that on a normal cell phone, I don't expect to get much reading done on watches ever!  


It has been said that the ad ows a lot to an older Apple commercial:



... But I don't know. Like David Pogue said; you can't keep a good idea down. It's OK to fight for your copyright to the exact details of your work, but if broader ideas get tied up one by one, creativity will stall over time.

The New World of Abundance

Open letter to Len Edgerly (Kindle Chronicles):


I feel your, uhm, pain regarding having fifty books waiting on the Kindle, and yet looking at new book sources.

I think we need to change our mind-set. From the old Scarcity mindset, where a book was something rare and precious which had to be guarded and savored.

... To the new mindset of Abundance, where the world presents within easy reach and cheaply ten thousand times as many books as we could possibly read in a lifetime.

It’s a new world, where there should be no shame in “owning” 7,000 ebooks which may or may not ever be read, or in reading 40% of one, and 8% of another.

Warm regards, Eolake

Siri's voice actor

It's unbelievable how mainstream Apple products have become. The voice actress for Siri (the original, not even the present one, apparently), interviewed by CNN!!?

All you can read for ten bucks per month (updated)

So finally the "Netflix" model is appearing for real in the ebooks arena.
One which seems really promising is Oyster Books.

So far it's only per invitation, so if you're interested, write your address in now, and wait. My invite came a few weeks after I signed on.

Unfortunately it's only US so far. So if really interested and not in the US, you have to use a trusting US friend's credit card and address. (Or one of those service which provide such. I haven't tried them.)

Their app is on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. And supposedly Android too at some point in the future. They say they don't have any specific plans for it, but I think it would be pretty silly to ignore half of the market.

I think this is a pretty amazing development. I'm very curious how they make it make any profit, given that most publishers don't tend to let their books go for a pittance.
But they have a good selection: over 100,000 books, and not only old out-of-copyright books. I have started re-reading Zen And The Art of Mortorcycle Maintenance, which I had intended for a while to do.
(OK, I admit I don't know how many modern and significant books they have, I've only looked enough that it may just be a dozen.)

The iPhone app seems nice so far. A selection of fonts and background colors.

What does this mean for ebook publishing? Will it boost readership and business, or will it take the bread from the starving mouths of poor authors? I have no idea. Except it feels like a good thing, definitely for readers, and what's good for readers tend to be good for authors too.


===
As a member, I have one invitation left. First come, first served. 

Pad/phones as camera remote controls

Here's a relatively new game: Pad/phones as camera remote controls.

I made this self portrait holding the camera in my left hand, and controlling it with my right hand on the iPad (out of frame, mounted on a floor stand). (I had to use a 2-second self-timer, to get time to get my right arm down.)
I am in my favorite reading spot, propped up on my space foam bed, with the iPad hands-free. Damn relaxing.

This is of course just the merest beginning, there are many vistas of use, for example shooting birds without spooking them, and so on.

Sony RX100M2. Edited in Photoshop to make it sepia and give the background more blur (and darkening it). Click for big pic.

Sony's iOS app "Playmemories" is quite limited yet. You have no control over, well basically anything on the camera, except the zoom. It would be great if you could, for example, touch the screen to focus there, and of course control aperture/shutter speed, ISO... It may come.

iPad five rumors, case (updated)

It seems the iPad 5 will be slimmer, smaller, and lighter (over 50 grams lighter, and that's only the back cover!).  I like that. I'd hoped it, but it barely seemed possible.
I also like the darker color (probably "Space Grey" like the iPhone 5S).

If you have no interest, just listen to her voice. Such a nice voice.




The 5 will also surely be faster than the 4. Which is faster than the iPad 3 I have. So, just one more good feature, and I'm surely going to get one.

One problem: the thinness leaves hardly any space for the camera, which makes the sensor smaller, which hurts the quality a lot. The iPad 5 will be roughly as thin as the iPad Mini. That is amazing, but look at how it has hurt the image quality of the camera in the iPad Mini.
I think Apple's usual hardcore minimalism is to blame for them not making a bump on the back to fit a bigger camera. Considering what a great camera they have in the iPhone 5S, imagine what a fantastic one they could make with, say, 50% more space! Then the ipad could truly be a multi-media production machine, for journalism for example. You could write an interview on it, and photograph and video your subjects with the same machine, for easy insertion into your story!

Readability

Many, many designers (who "tend to have excellent eyesight" as usability guru Jakob Nielsen says) need to wise up about readability. For example, in my judgment, most web sites have too small text. I have to set up the default size quite a bit in my browsers (incredibly, you still can't change that in Safari on iPad), and even then I often have to enlarge it further on individual sites. And with glasses, my eyesight is not all that bad, probably average. 

Readability of course also includes contrast. See for example this example from iOS 7 on my iPad: 

See the word "downloading" on the right? Nope, me neither, well hardly. 

A similar issue: I have set the text to Bold in Settings, but the icons in iOS 7 are still very small, very low contrast, and very thin-stroked. That's the thing with Apple, mostly they do great, but sometimes they will really let form get the upper hand on function. 

Fortunately, sometimes they fix it later. The last version of iTunes (app on Mac/Windows) had all-grey, low contrast buttons and text, but with the present version it's back to being well visible, colors and better contrast and so on. 

I admit these are not easy things to balance. I've built many web sites, and when designing apps and web sites, one has to account for the whole spectrum of eyesight levels, and often a big spectrum of screen sizes and qualities too. So if you want to keep readability on the big majority of all that, you are very, very restricted as a designer, and I can see how that is frustrating, all your education and inventiveness gone down the sink, or a lot of it anyway. 

New Kindle Fires

Amazon today announces new Kindle Fires. Sharper screens, faster processors, and best of all: much lighter than last year's models. The new 7-inch model is only 300 grams (10.5 oz), like the iPad Mini. This is a big factor in usability.

And a model similar to the previous 7-inc HD model is now selling for $139. That is really amazing. It's only a few years ago that the first stoneage Kindle with black-and-grey screen was $400!

In a move I had not expected, given Amazon's tendency to keep the functionality of the Kindle Fires pretty much to buying Amazon content, they briefly mention that the new KFs have a "built-in OfficeSuite". Huh? Let's hope this signals an opening up of the capabilities of these tablets, which after all can do anything a regular Android tablet can do, except where Amazon has blocked it.

There's also a new support system which may seem a bit spooky to some. Press the "Mayday" button and a live person in video pops up, and can control your tablet! He/she can't see you though. But it's cool, and we'll see if Amazon can keep up with their ambition that all such requests shall be answered within 15 seconds. Very ambitious scheme.

I'm just a little disappointed that even after two years, here in the UK we still don't have any free videos with our prime membership like they do in the US. What is the big hurdle there? It's not like all videos are free, you just need a few thousands which don't suck too hard, and a few recent ones.

A way around the wallpaper-sizing issue on iPad

This is not the first time Apple has let oddities in an OS regarding wallpaper. (In OS X, for many years, you couldn't use a portrait-oriented image if it was taller than the screen, it would show up cropped. You just couldn't scale it down. This was finally fixed a couple of years ago.)
This fix unfortunately demands a bit of knowledge of an image-editing app. But I made big images of a pleasant, low-contrast pattern, and put the desired image in the middle of it. This will let the essential part of the image show up in full on the iPad.
They are bigger than Blogger lets me post (max 1600px), but you can get four of them I have made, here.)

It's important that the bigger image is roughly square, since iOS wants both dimensions to fit within the screen.

It actually was like this in early versions of iOS, then it was fixed in iOS 5 or 6, and I was so happy.

The pattern is one I made myself with a pattern/texture plugin for photoshop, in the early days of OS X. It was called Terrazo from Xaostools and was wonderful. It made repeating and tiling patterns based on any graphic, and the ways you could repeat them were manyfold. I don't think it works anymore. I really wish I knew of a similar app/plugin.

iOS feedback (usability flaws in iOS 7)

I've just sent this to Apple feedback:

I generally like iOS 7, but:

For example, windows of folders only show 9 icons until you scroll (and there’s only a microscopic hint that you *can* scroll. Not a scroll bar or an arrow, just the three tiny dots at the bottom). There’s lots of space between icons and lots of space outside the window, but you can’t change any of it!
That's sinful wast of space. There could easily be at least twice as many icons in a window.
Perhaps the iPad version was behind, and this is partly just a port of the iPhone interface (there are exactly nine icons in those windows on the phone). I noticed that all the previews we saw were shown on iPhones, not iPads. I guess that'd be a good sign, because then it's likely it was not on purpose and will be fixed soon.

And how about a Special Mode for advanced users where you *can* change the size of windows, maybe even icons too? Maybe have two windows open at once? Maybe even two apps?  Imagine the uproar if you couldn't do those things on the Mac. The iPad is the Post-PC device, isn't it? It shouldn't have such tight limits on its capabilities.

Also in menu windows, if you can scroll (if there is more content than is seen), it *should be clearly indicated*. There still is none, except if you somehow figure out maybe you can scroll and try it, there's an aneamic tiny line on the right which moves when you move your finger. I'll bet many don't even notice it, and it disappears when you no longer scroll. Why?

I heard Jon Ive says that now people know how to use a touch-interface, it has freed the designers tremendously from having to show how to do stuff (like indicate what's a button and what's not). Well, there's truth in there, but I recommend having a talk with Jakob Nielsen. There are still millions of users who are insecure about touch interfaces, and billions more who haven't even used one yet.

Why does iOS now refuse to set a desktop image at the size I prefer? It blows it up until it's all blurry and only the center of the image is shown. It is *not necessary* that all the screen is covered at all times. In fact, I like it when there's space outside the image for icons.

Oh, and regarding the new idea with very thin, very small, and very light-colored text and buttons... It's aesthetic, but I wonder if your beta test group contains anybody over the age of 45? It's a bit overdone, is what I'm saying. Some of it is nigh invisible, like the buttons in Safari. (Oh, just found a tip to make the very thin font bold.)

I'm sorry, don't mean to sound bitter, in general, iOS is way better than the alternatives. But interface irritants really rub me the wrong way.

 -----
Look at this: There could easily be space for many more icons, making scrolling unnecessary in many cases. You know that many people will quickly have 100+ apps in one folder, that'll make for a lot of scrolling.

Otherwise I generally like the new interface.

(This was one of the lucky images where just the center enough, and sharp enough, to function well as wallpaper. (Of course it's Isabella from Phineas And Ferb.))

Get your Pocket articles read out loud with Reedeo

Finally, a good text-to-speech app for iOS!
(Now, the main things missing is text-to-speech in the iPad Kindle app. (And a 5.2-inch iPhone* and a 13-inch iPad, but that's a horse of another hue.))

Reedeo will read aloud, well, article from the popular article-collector app, Pocket (formerly Read It Later). It works very simply, and well. And it's just two bucks.

(On Android by the way, it's unnecessary, because the Android Pocket app already has text-to-speech.)


*I have just written a letter to Apple about this issue (on their feedback page). I told them as truth is, that I can't see myself buying any new iPhones if the screen is smaller than 5 inches. It's a huge usability difference.

By the way, I think Samsung it it just right with the 5.2-inch screen on the first Galaxy Note. I also have an HTC One with a 4.8 screen. You'd think that would be almost the same, but the 5.2 screen has far better readability.