Category Review

Entries 19 Total

iPhone iPod Sleep Timer Found

Jul 2, ’07 8:40 PM

The iPod app in the iPhone does have a sleep timer, it turns out. It’s just that it’s so well hidden that I’d never have found it without clues from elsewhere.

To set an iPod sleep timer:

  1. Enter the Clock application
  2. Tap Timer in the bottom right-hand corner
  3. Set a time using the odometer thing
  4. In the ‘When Timer Ends’ menu, instead of an alarm sound, select ‘Sleep iPod’
  5. Tap Start.

I had looked in the timer section of the clock app before — on the iPod, sleep timers are also set through the Clock menu item — but because I hadn’t explored the alarm-tone picker, I hadn’t spotted the ‘Sleep iPod’ option. Silly me, thinking that a menu wouldn’t logically contain 23 options all meaning ‘make noise’ and one option meaning ‘stop making noise’.

Note that you cannot tell the iPod to start playing at a certain time. Though the Alarm function of the clock allows you to be awakened by any one of Apple’s canned ringtones, it won’t let you pick one of your own songs as the alarm sound.

Comments (46)

Tino's Review of the iPhone

Jun 30, ’07 11:56 AM

Overall: it’s pretty good. I find some of its features a bit awkward to use, but this may be entirely the result of it being a new interface that I’ve had only a few hours’ experience with. Time will tell.

Specifics:

Network: It works well with my home wireless network, even though it doesn’t broadcast the SSID and is encrypted. Everything seems to work reasonably well on the EDGE network, too, though I haven’t played with that as much. It’s slower than Wi-Fi, of course, but the things I’ve been reading like ‘excruciatingly slow’ are overstating things. YouTube works fine without Wi-Fi, though you have to wait a few seconds for the video to buffer.

One potential bug: when I’m on the phone, it doesn’t seem to see my Wi-Fi network. I mean, the network disappears and I cannot re-connect to it. I’m not sure if this happens consistently, but if it does, it’s a serious problem. When on the phone, you cannot do other network-y things unless you are also connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Headphone Jack: Apple, to its credit, uses a standard size headphone jack, though with more contacts to allow for stereo sound, a microphone, and a remote control. However, after deciding to go with a standard jack (which means that my old wired stereo phone headphones with microphones won’t work, because they use the tiny plugs that have heretofore been the standard), they decided to recess the jack into the case about 1.5mm, which means that none of my ordinary headphones will actually plug into the thing without an adapter that sticks out at least the height of the plug, or about a half inch. That is, the plastic housing of the plug body and the case of the iPhone get in each other’s way. This is insane. Presumably most headphone manufacturers will come out with models with slightly altered plugs that’ll fit in there with no adapter necessary, but for the time being this means using the naff, white, uncomfortable Apple headphones, or using an adapter. The only adapter available at this time is 3″ long and thus entirely ridiculous.

Mail: It’s not bad, but it’s a step backward for me. On my Treo 650, I’d been using Chatteremail, which has a real dog’s breakfast of a user interface and which crashes a lot, but which is unbelievably fantastic when it’s working properly. Apple’s iPhone mail application displays messages very nicely, but it doesn’t seem to allow the kind of control that you’d be used to on a desktop, or that Chatteremail provides. It also apparently does not do IMAP IDLE, which would seem like a glaring omission. IDLE is an IMAP command that allows a suitable e-mail client (like, say, Chatteremail) to work like Blackberry e-mail; when a message comes in, the client is notified of this and it makes a beeping noise, all within a couple seconds. Hey presto. The iPhone appears to only check for mail on a schedule, except for Yahoo Mail accounts, where it does ‘push’ email (presumably using IMAP IDLE, but I haven’t sniffed the network yet to see).

Switching between e-mail accounts is cumbersome — you have to back out to the top e-mail screen and then drill back down to messages in another account — but I am probably something of an edge case in the number of different e-mail accounts I use. You also can’t set different mail check intervals for different accounts, or different new-mail alert tones. You don’t seem to be able to set a ‘sleep’ time during which the phone won’t check for new mail. When you tap on the home-screen Mail icon, it takes you back to wherever you were in the mail app the last time you used it; which can be the Wrong Thing if you’re looking for a new message it’s telling you about. It’s up to the user to back out to the main mail screen and look for the account(s) with new messages.

Mailboxes are an all-or-nothing affair. Either you see all your IMAP mailboxes, or you see only your inbox. You can’t seem to tell it to hide certain ones.

The mail application needs serious work. It’s not a matter of besting the Blackberry; the e-mail on this thing is, in many important ways, nowhere near as good as the Blackberry. At this point, in some ways it’s a matter of catching up with the Treo.

And I appear to have found an actual bug. I was viewing a message in my inbox, and then viewed an attached PDF (as it would happen, this was the receipt for the iPhone). After this, when tapping on the inbox took me to that message, not the message list — until I tapped on a different mailbox, whereupon tapping on the inbox took me to the inbox list. I haven’t been able to reproduce this yet, so I’m probably wrong about the cause; but it’s possible for the thing to refuse to show you the inbox list.

Keyboard: Overall, surprisingly good. But see below.

Safari: This is undoubtedly the best web experience ever available on a pocket gadget. However, there are a number of real problems. If you use websites that you need to log into — and you probably do — you’ll soon find that this is a pain in the ass on the iPhone, because it doesn’t remember form contents like a desktop browser does. I can see why they made this decision; if the phone is stolen, that’s bad enough without the miscreants also having access to all my password-protected stuff online.

However, entering usernames and passwords on the iPhone’s keyboard is difficult. The keyboard is based around predictive text input; Apple expects you to make mistakes, which the phone will then correct by looking words up in its dictionary. For ordinary text input, this works shockingly well. But it obviously doesn’t work when you’re entering a password like ‘n9v705q%’. Or even a password like ‘password’. And, unlike on many mobile devices, there doesn’t appear to be a way to tell the thing to show you the password so that you can make sure you’ve entered it correctly.

You get to see the usernames you enter into login forms, but the text-correction still doesn’t work properly here. I use a lot of sites where your e-mail address doubles as the username, and the iPhone doesn’t appear to be smart enough to know that when I type ‘tino@t’ the next letters are, 100% of the time, ‘inotopia.com’. It does appear to have picked up on ‘tino’ — when I type ‘tinp’ it corrects it to ‘Tino’ — but it always capitalizes it, which can cause a problem with certain (broken) websites that are looking for ‘tino’ instead of ‘Tino’.

All of this is totally unnecessary; the phone should allow me to explicitly load a user dictionary of words and phrases that I use all the time (and, in fact, it should pick up on my e-mail address, which is in the address book, on its own), and add these to the auto-correction hopper. It should also store my web passwords and usernames in an encrypted form, and offer to autofill the forms upon my authentication to it using some method that’s easy to use in the iPhone’s UI. It’s particularly galling that the text-input system is optimized for writing fairly long streams of ordinary English text, rather than short bits of semi-gibberish; the semi-gibberish of usernames and passwords is probably going to make up the majority of what you type on a device like this. The problem hasn’t really come up in a big way before because most of the kinds of websites you need to log into are barely usable, if that, on most mobile devices. The iPhone’s strength in web browsing exposes its weakness in text input.

iPod: The ‘best iPod Apple’s ever created’ does not have a sleep timer, which really cramps my style. At night, I usually put on an audiobook and set a timer for 15 minutes. Looks like I’ll have to keep using my old iPod for this.

The iPod application also fails to take much advantage of the new interface opportunities available to it now that the input isn’t limited to a wheel and a button. The iPod has driven me nuts for a while now because you can only view tracks organized by artist, title, album, or genre, and by choice I rarely use any of those. In iTunes, I most often view songs according to the date they were added to the library, with the most recent on top. When I want to listen to a particular song, I search for its title.

The ‘best iPod Apple’s ever created’ can’t do any of these. You can’t search for anything; though with only 8GB of storage, this isn’t really that big a deal. But you also can’t jump around at will. If you’re listening to a Beatles song, for instance, you can jump to other songs on the same album pretty readily; but you can’t tap on ‘Beatles’ in the track description and jump to the Beatles list. Instead, you have to back out to a point where you can select the Artists list, and then scroll down to Beatles, just as you have had to do with all previous iPods. I’ve never liked this, but I’ve accepted it as a constraint dictated by the nature of the user interface. Now, though, the continuing existence of this annoyance is a result of either laziness, lack of time, or lack of imagination at Apple.

In the song list, you get only the song title — not the artist. As I am an aficionado of cover songs, this is particularly annoying. The album list shows the artist, so that I don’t confuse The Beatles’ Abbey Road with Abbey Road by Sha Na Na. So here, there’s definitely a way for the thing to show more than one line of information per item, but it doesn’t.

With the touch screen available, you should really be able to view your tracks in any way that makes sense to you; there’s no reason to be limited to the views that the older iPods used because of their simplistic UI.

Phone: Really good. This is a pretty simple application, so it has better be really good. Setting up Bluetooth headsets, switching between them and the wired headset and the regular phone and the speakerphone is easy and can actually be done while you’re on the phone. It is possible to use other features of the phone while on a call. Of course, Apple has told us as much, but what I mean is that in practice it is actually possible to do read your mail, connect other calls, play music (you can start iPod tracks playing while you’re on a call; it’s only audible to you), etc. without at all worrying that you’re going to hang up on someone. It may sound pretty fanboyish to compliment the way the thing switches between different audio sources, but this is something that most phones do unbelievably poorly.

Calculator: Inexplicably there are no keyclicks in the calculator app. This is a good example of the kind of problems to be expected with version 1.0 products.

iChat: Instant messaging doesn’t work very well on the iPhone. In fact, unless you jump through some serious hoops, it doesn’t happen at all: there’s no instant-messaging support built in. There’s not much excuse for this; plenty of lesser phones have had IM support for a long time, and Apple has encouraged the use of IM systems for years now with the inclusion of its excellent iChat software with OS X. I’m pretty sure that the lack of IM support is due to the need for some kind of proxy system to maintain a steady connection to the instant-messaging servers and to queue messages to and from the phone while it doesn’t have a network connection. This is a solved problem, though, and I wish that Apple would have got this running before the iPhone’s release. We should see some kind of usable IM support within the next week or so, and a native IM application before too long.

Third-Party Applications: None. This isn’t too surprising, as even if Apple did provide a way to get third-party applications onto the iPhone, there wouldn’t be many, or any, worth bothering with at the moment. Most of the iPhone-optimized web-based AJAX applications announced with many flourishes over the past couple of weeks don’t actually work that well with the iPhone, either. I’m of the belief that the prohibition on third-party apps is due to a lack of documentation from Apple; not just a lack of API documentation etc., but also a lack of documentation about how application user interfaces should work on the iPhone.

Overall Verdict: It needs a software update; there are at least a couple serious bugs I’ve found, and some really annoying missing features in the various applications. This isn’t surprising for something that was released to the public 18 hours ago. Other than that, the only serious problem is the stupid headphone jack issue, which should disappear once the headphone manufacturers make slight changes to the shape of their plugs. My main concern is that Apple will decide that there’s no need for a sleep timer, or arbitrary sorts, or the ability to jump around, in the iPod, that we’re better off without third-party apps, and that if we were Right-Thinking, we’d naturally conclude that we don’t need IMAP IDLE on regular e-mail accounts.

This is always the gamble when doing business with Apple, or with any other company based on control-freakery. Do their ideas coincide with yours? Much of Apple’s reputation for ease-of-use is actually based on limiting the user’s options; while OS X is pretty flexible due to its UNIX base, Windows is actually a lot more flexible and configurable on the surface. This ability to configure everything leads, of course, to the ability to misconfigure everything.

As the so-called competition for the iPhone is, on balance, much worse, Apple might be tempted to continue to outlaw flexibility on its phone. If they don’t — if they open the thing up a bit — they may well find themselves with a very, very large chunk of the mobile-phone market.

If they keep things closed for too long, on the other hand, they’ll likely find themselves selling a vastly superior product to a tiny minority of the popuation. If any company understands why not to do this, it should be Apple.

Comments (4)

The Complete New Yorker Update

Oct 4, ’06 12:39 PM

The New Yorker has updated its DVD archive version, which I complained about here. For $20, you can get a replacement DVD 1 (of the 8 DVD set), which includes an improved version of the application and issues of the magazine up through April 2006.

The new application is better; it is noticeably faster. I suspect that what they have changed is not in fact the application but the database, but I haven’t looked into it. If they have just changed the database, this would go some way toward excusing them for not distributing the update (minus new issues) to everyone who paid for the old, defective version. The database is over 500MB, and it’s not really practical to distribute it online.

The new issues — which, in any case, it is entirely fair to require people to pay for — look great, and everything’s wonderful. I cannot comment on the DVD-swapping speed, as I gave up on that idiocy some time ago and just copied everything onto a hard disk. They now sell a version of the archive already loaded onto a portable hard drive, and that’s probably the way to go. I’d want to know what their response would be when that disk inevitably fails, though, before I bought one. Do you get another copy of the data when the hardware dies?

So it’s an improvement, but there are still problems — and they still seem to stem from what you might call a lack of perspective.

The most annoying problem, for me, is that the application still takes over your whole screen. On the Macintosh, the application opens a giant window that can’t be resized or moved, and that covers everything except for the menu bar and the Dock. You can close the window, or you can minimize it: that’s it.

Now, I cannot figure out why they decided to do this. The only thing I can think of is that they didn’t think they could trust the users to make the window large on their own, so they’d make it large for them.

The thing is, I don’t have this problem, and their attempt to ‘solve’ it — I am being charitable in not just accusing them of being jerks — actually makes things worse for me.

I have a 30″ monitor, with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels: I can easily fit a New Yorker spread on the screen at full size with room to spare. But The New Yorker greedily takes up that room, and renders the pages larger than actual size, making some of the images — they’re scanned at a lower resolution than the text — look bad.

Here’s the magazine on the screen, with a recent (paper) issue of The New Yorker for comparison:

Nyer Screen Comparison

When I use The Complete New Yorker, half of my screen, or about $1000 worth, is a useless, featureless gray, for no discernible reason. It’s as if when you opened a paper magazine, it blotted out the rest of your living room until you were done reading it. This is The New Yorker damn it, you’re going to pay attention! Look at that cartoon of the dog talking to the bartender! Now really think about it! Focus, damn you!

I ascribe this to arrogance, but it’s probably just a failure on the part of the developers to think that some people have very large displays. (And it’s even worse if you have multiple displays, because you can’t reposition the window to take advantage of the space you have.)

The other screen-size problem I complained about last October is still there, too: while the viewer is too large, the search tool is too small, and there’s no way to make it any larger. The search tool is sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen, and if you have a larger screen than that, it’s still sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen. This significantly reduces its utility, because you can’t see as much at once.

Here’s a snapshot of my whole screen, with the search tool outlined in red:

Nyer Search Screen

That’s it. That’s the only possible size or position for the search tool. If you’re looking at a long list of articles, this means scrolling, even if there’s room to make the window twice as large. If you’re looking through a bunch of articles, and you want to have the search results and the articles visible, tough luck. You can’t do it on a computer with a 1024×768 display, so The New Yorker has seen to it that you can’t do it on any display.

Comments (1)

Victoria's Restaurant, Front Royal

Jul 18, ’06 1:56 PM

So today we decided to try Victoria’s Restaurant for lunch. This is a buffet place that opened earlier this year, and from the outside it’s hard to get an idea of what to expect.

The biggest problem — make that the second-biggest problem, actually — I noticed was that the place is lit with fourteen big sodium-vapor lamps, the kind of thing you might find at Costco or in a school gym. At lunchtime, the large south-facing windows let in enough light to keep things from being too grim, but I’d expect that at night the place has all the ambience of a warehouse.

There are plenty of good tables, though: in the planning, someone was involved who knew that people don’t like to sit in the middle of a sea of tables. A number of waist-height walls breaks the space up into smaller areas, making for a lot of corner tables.

The salad was good, though the croutons were a bit… not soggy exactly, but soft. They had one bowl of iceberg lettuce, and one of real lettuce, along with all the things you’d expect to find at your ordinary mainstream buffet restaurant.

The macaroni and cheese was conspicuously good, though a little heavy on the sauce. The mashed potatoes were good, but would have been better made with actual butter instead of spread. The green beans were great.

I’m afraid that I can’t give any opinions on the desserts, though. I was looking forward to dessert, as one of the things on offer was chocolate cake, an I am a connoisseur of chocolate cake.

I didn’t have any dessert because while eating I found this in the peas:

Half-A-Bug

Yep, that’s a bug. Or actually half a bug, which is in some ways even worse. This is the ‘biggest problem’ I hinted at above. Click on the picture to see it even larger.

Bugs wind up in agricultural products all the time, and I’m sure that had I actually eaten the thing nothing bad would have happened to me. The discovery of something like this tends to kill the appetite, though, and we left. Our money was… not cheerfully refunded, but there was no trouble made about it. We were told that the peas come in frozen, and that the bug must have been in the package because they’re just dumped into a pan and heated up. Interestingly, this contradicts what they said in this article:

With pride, Rodinos notes that nothing in the restaurant is shipped in; everything is made fresh daily.

“That is the difference between us and chains,” he says. “They have big boxes of dishes shipped in and frozen and thawed. We make everything right here every day. It is all made from scratch.”

…but then it would be hard to serve up gallons of fresh peas on a $6 all-you-can-eat buffet.

Had I been in charge of the place, I’d have refunded the money and given us a gift certificate to come back again on the house: the next time we’re casting about for somewhere to eat, Victoria’s could have been the place where we could eat free. Instead, it’s just going to be the place where we found the bug in the food.

Comments (1)

Serious iPod Video Bugs

Dec 9, ’05 12:25 PM

So I got a new iPod, the kind that plays video, a few weeks ago — it’s a business expense! — and I have discovered two serious problems with it.

I’ll first talk about one that just seems like mean-spiritedness on the part of Apple: the user now has fewer options for the clicker behavior.

I should explain: all iPods except the first generation have this capacitive detection thing that can tell where your finger is without any moving parts. This is more reliable (and cheaper) than an actual moving wheel, so that’s a good thing. What’s bad is that it doesn’t provide any feedback to the user about whether anything is happening. Hence the clicker. The iPod can be set to make a ‘click’ noise every so often while you’re finagling the scroll wheel.

On all capacitive iPods up to now, there have been five options: On, Off, Headphones, Speaker, and Both (i.e. Headphones and Speaker):

Photopod-Clicker

The ‘Headphones’ option is particularly useful for me when I’m playing iPod Solitaire in bed and don’t want to disturb Nicole.

With the march of progress into the Video iPod era, though, we get this:

Videopod-Clicker

(The views of both iPods will pop up bigger versions if you click on them.)

The clicker can now either be ‘On’ — which seems to be the same as ‘Both’ in the old idiom, or it can be ‘Off’. Nicole is not happy.

That’s a minor problem, though, compared to what the thing does if you watch a video, pause it, and then try to play an audiobook.

This really requires a video to properly illustrate the problem. Here‘s one, ironically enough in iPod Video format:

200512091013

(Here is a version of the movie in more prosaic QuickTime for those of you who can’t play the iPod Video version.)

Basically, if you try to play an audiobook after pausing a video, the iPod continues playing the audio from the video at about 1/10th speed after you hit ‘play’ for the audiobook. Over this, it plays the audio from the book, but in short bursts and with a lot of noise.

I have not exhaustively tested to see whether the video or the book’s encoding has anything to do with it, because Apple isn’t paying me to test their products.

I have never been able to get it to happen with an mp3 file, though, and I have never been able to get it to not happen with an audiobook — all of these are from Audible, in their .aa format — no matter which combination of audiobook and video I use.

The iPod caches things from the hard drive so it doesn’t have to keep the disk spinning all the time; if that disk was always running, the battery would last for about a half hour and the disk itself for about a week.

My guess is that there’s some conflict between the way the video player loads the cache and the way the audiobook player does it. Seeking the audiobook around (and thus forcing it to refresh the cache from the disk) doesn’t make the problem go away, though: there’s still a lot of noise in the audiobook track, and the video soundtrack keeps playing, slowly, underneath. (Or, possibly, there’s something wrong with just my iPod, though I doubt it.)

This, which is arguably the more serious problem, is actually less annoying. The video stuff is a new feature; there are new interactions between the software on the iPod, and these kinds of things creep in. I’m sure that Apple will fix this before long.

The clicker problem is far more annoying, because it’s not something that just crept in. At some point, someone made the decision that iPod users just had too much choice in how the clicker worked. The solution wasn’t to remove the preference item all together — if it had, the move might have been able to be (weakly) defended as simplifying the interface. No, the choices were just narrowed to ‘all’ or ‘nothing’.

For all I know, there’s some significant limitation of the new iPods that prevents them sending one signal to the clicker speaker and another to the headphones. In which case, my response is: why? Why on Earth? Why should a newer version of something do less than an older version?

I can excuse the lack of FireWire support on new iPods, I suppose, because a lot of computers don’t have FireWire ports and because USB 2 does the job just as well (the problem here isn’t with the iPod, but with the fact that Apple didn’t put USB 2 ports on their own computers until long after every other computer manufacturer in the world had been doing so for years: so my two-and-a-half-year-old PowerBook doesn’t have USB 2 ports despite being one of the more expensive laptops out there).

I suppose I can excuse the lack of a remote-control port on the top of the thing — which lack renders obsolete a lot of iPod accessories that people have invested their money in — because everything you used to be able to do through that port you can do through the dock connector, and better.

But to eliminate the clicker options? So I have a choice of going about making clicking noises, or not having any feedback for the scroll wheel? Weak.

Comments (5)

Ricky Gervais Podcast

Dec 6, ’05 3:20 PM

You should all listen to the new Ricky Gervais podcast. I laughed myself silly.

Comments (0)

Nerd TV Sucks

Nov 28, ’05 3:21 PM

So I just downloaded Nerd TV #10, where Bob Cringely interviews Dan Bricklin. Bricklin is a particularly interesting guy, and pretty articulate and normal compared to other computer-industry old-timers, so I was expecting something good.

200511281458

The reality? It’s useless. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and nothing I listen to for more than about three seconds sounds as bad as this. My home movies sound better than this. Nearly all public-access TV is (at least technically) better than this.

Apparently — this information is on Dan Bricklin’s weblog and seemingly nowhere else, certainly not on the Nerd TV site — Bricklin’s microphone failed, and all the audio is from the microphone on Cringeley’s shirt. That doesn’t explain why Cringely also sounds like crap, or why every episode of Nerd TV has sounded like it was recorded at the bottom of a well. It doesn’t explain why there’s even noise in the background of the record-it-once announcement at the beginning about the whole thing being supported by a grant from the CPB. It doesn’t explain why there’s been no noticeable improvement in the production quality after ten episodes.

If you went up to Boston solely or primarily for the purpose of recording an interview with someone, wouldn’t you check to see whether his microphone was working? Cringely wouldn’t, apparently. It is a shame that he is squandering his access to these people (and to the presumably free bandwidth available to him for distributing this stuff) with such poor production values.

See a 14-second clip here.

Comments (1)

The Complete New Yorker

Oct 7, ’05 6:39 PM

The Content

The first thing you notice about the new New Yorker archive collection, with every issue of the magazine up to February, 2005 on eight DVDs, is that the physical package was designed by an idiot, or a sadist.

It’s a folder, nine inches wide by twelve inches high; the DVDs are in a further fold-out section on the right, and a rather nice book on thick paper with ‘highlights’ from the magazine over the years is glued into the folder on the left.

If you think about that for a moment, you will understand why I say the designer was an idiot; if you try to read the book without having the whole assembly laid flat on a table, you have to deal with the DVD section– which is twelve inches by twenty-seven inches when unfolded, which it will quickly be if you’re not careful — flapping about. In short, it’s impossible to read the book without a table, or a third hand.

If the DVDs had been put on the left, though, and the book on the right, the open cover of the book could have been grasped along with the DVD section by the left hand, while the rest of the book could have been grasped with the right hand, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever read, say, a magazine.

This is a small thing, but as the utility of the whole product could have been improved immeasurably at absolutely no cost, it’s nevertheless an annoying thing

The second thing you notice about The Complete New Yorker is that in the accompanying book of highlights from the magazine (cf. above), of the book’s one hundred and twenty-two pages, six are devoted to articles about the war in Iraq, and three to the whole of World War II.

Or maybe four, if you count a Janet Flanner profile of Hitler in 1936.

The New Yorker‘s politics haven’t changed — to the extent that it has an editorial outlook at all, it’s always been left-wing, and about as left as it is today. Recently it does seem more bitter about its politics, but this is hardly something that is unique to the magazine.

It’s particularly a shame for the New Yorker, though, because its whole style is very much about being supercilious and aloof. The voice of the New Yorker is the voice of someone who is supremely confident that he knows better than everyone else. For a person with that outlook to even appear to be bitter is to be defeated.

The Technology

The Complete New Yorker comes to you on eight DVDs, packaged in the aforementioned terrible folder/book thing. The marked price is $100, so the fact that the DVDs are housed in a scratchy cardboard sleeve is a bit galling.

Overall, the technology of the collection isn’t really bad: by which I mean that it is merely very bad.

In the late 1990s, National Geographic put out a 31-CD set with their entire 110-year archive on it. The thing was an unbelievable dog, and effectively unusable. The scans were of such low resolution that you could barely, by squinting mightily, manage to read the text; printouts were totally illegible, and you could not copy and paste from within their proprietary interface.

I was worried about some of the same issues coming up with The Complete New Yorker. Nearly all of them are there, but improvements in computer technology have resulted in these things being merely annoying, rather than crippling — as long as you are patient.

The biggest problem is the speed. The indexes for authors, articles, etc. are stored in a SQLite database, and the magazines themselves are stored as DjVu files of about 10 MB each.

10 MB for a whole magazine, with the illustrations and photos looking good and even the smallest text readable, is amazing.

Despite the fact that the Complete New Yorker uses this fairly open and standard technology, though, you’ve got to use their custom application to read the files. They’re stored in some kind of ‘secure’ DjVu format.

And this is a problem, because the application you need to use to read the files is a dog. I timed the thing’s responsiveness on my Mac Mini with a 1.42 GHz G4 processor and 1GB of RAM:

  • From opening the application to seeing the splash screen: 19 seconds
  • From opening the application to actually being able to do anything: 57 seconds
  • Changing from one issue of the magazine to another, on the same DVD: five minutes and thirteen seconds

This means that, once you are reading a given issue, you are pretty well committed to that issue. If you are reading the October 4 issue and want to see something in the October 11 issue, you are going to have to go get a cup of coffee while you wait.

It could be worse, I suppose. The license statement is unusual:

Newyorker-License-1

Almost all commercial software licenses are mainly about threatening and insulting the customer. This one doesn’t give you any more rights than any other commercial software license I’ve ever seen, but at least it’s polite about it.

What’s less polite is that the installer insists on restarting the computer when it’s done — despite the fact that there isn’t anything installed that would require a restart. After the installation completes, but before you restart, the install DVD can’t be ejected because the system thinks there’s a file open on it. This is probably the whole reason for the restart.

Nyer Flipview

When you’re done restarting, the single most annoying thing about the application — even more annoying than the fact that the whole thing uses non-standard UI widgets — is that the window has two sizes: covering your entire screen, or minimized. If you’ve got a screen that’s larger than is needed to display the pages, The New Yorker helpfully takes over the remaining real estate in order to display pleasing gray borders. On my PowerBook, this means that when viewing a full spread, about 20% of the screen is simply wasted.

Far worse than that, though, is the search window.

Nyer Searcharchive

The search window is not customizable, not resizable, not able to be modified in any way. The ‘Article Abstract’ pane is always 756 pixels wide and 88 pixels high, no matter how long the abstract is. There is always room for fourteen search results, no less and no more. There are always over 140,000 pixels dedicated to the ‘Sources’ list, whether the user wants to use that list or not.

If you want to narrow your search down to a few specific years, departments, or authors, and then dedicate more screen space to the search results themselves, you are out of luck. Similarly, the search results cannot be sorted in any way. Generally they’ll come up in chronological order, but not always. Want them listed in chronological order? Too bad.

Oh, yeah, and it crashes a lot, too. And the program officially calls itself ‘toolbars’ for some reason that is entirely beyond me.

Picture 1

I suppose I should consider myself lucky I use a Macintosh, and not only for the usual reasons. Under Windows, the hideous and useless ‘Safedisc‘ system is used in an attempt to ‘secure’ the discs against copying: because otherwise the teen h/\x0rz would be all over trading 50 GB of smug cartoons and Hammacher Schlemmer ads.

A far more effective copy-protection system is embedded in the Windows version of the application itself. As soon as you run it, you see this:

Newyorker-Windowserror

If you click ‘continue’, the error message goes away, until you attempt to do anything else. I have not, as of yet, managed to get the Windows version of the program to display any actual New Yorker content at all.

This has got to deter copying quite a bit. Maybe people would like to give copies to their enemies, though: I have no idea. Those whom the gods would frustrate, they first make buy software for Windows.

Presumably it is possible to get the thing to run on Windows; it’s not really conceivable that they let it out the door without testing at least that much. My guess is that its SQLite engine and my version of the .NET Framework don’t get along. I don’t see why this should be my problem, though.

So the software is bad. I don’t know who developed the stuff, and I don’t know what kind of requirements were imposed on the developers. But I do know that there appears to have been a lot of effort put into things that don’t pay off. There are over a hundred little pictures and things embedded in that application, totaling almost 4 MB, that duplicate things that you get for free from the OS if you don’t need your application to look and behave in its own unique way.

printbutton mac-printbutton

On the left you see the Complete New Yorker print button. It’s a 28K TIFF, and someone had to create it for this application. (And they had to create another, slightly different one to be displayed while the button is pressed.)

On the right is the standard Macintosh print button, used everywhere else. It was created by professional button designers at Apple, and is present on every Macintosh. You just tell the system to display the print button, and whoomp there it is.

The thing is, you don’t want your application to behave differently from all others; the custom UI widgets are worse, not better, than the standard ones. Not only haven’t they had the same amount of attention and thought put into them (Apple can amortize its UI-design expenditures over a far larger number of sales), but the users aren’t used to them. If you use the standard widgets, you get to take advantage of everything the users have learned from using other applications.

And what’s more, you get to use your development resources to make things work properly, rather than to tweak the appearance of things. Had the New Yorker been able to tolerate their collection looking like a normal application, rather than a lifestyle accouterment, the lists would have been sortable, the windows resizable, and the whole thing easier to use — and they might have been able to work out at least some of the more debilitating bugs before shipping the product.

The information available in the Complete New Yorker is amazing: a history of the last eighty years in the life of the USA, as seen through the lens of snooty bourgeois pop culture. Many of the best writers in America, and in the world, contributed to this document, and even the advertising is interesting beyond all belief.

Unfortunately, the system you must use to view this document is terrible, and will be entirely useless far sooner than the collection itself will be.

Is it possible to do better? Yes, and very easily. The documents themselves are locked up, though, and thanks to the DMCA it’s a federal crime to reverse-engineer their ‘protection’ schemes for the purpose of getting better access to the information that you paid for.

There might be hope for the future. I have read, here and there, that the New Yorker plans to release a new disc each year, so as to keep the collection up-to-date. If they actually do this — I will be surprised — they’ll have a chance each year to update the application, and presumably to make it work better.

At $60, it’s still a reasonable buy as it is: the magazines are worth many times that. It’s really a pity about the application, though. I’m sure that, before long, someone will manage to reverse-engineer the content-protection scheme. Once the content isn’t so ‘protected’ from the people who’ve bought it, the collection will become much more valuable. By that time, though, the New Yorker will probably have remaindered half the run at $10, claiming that ‘piracy’ cut into their sales and vowing never to offer anything like this again.

Comments (7)

Westin Great Southern Hotel, Columbus, Ohio

Jun 26, ’05 10:54 PM

We recently passed through Columbus, Ohio, and we stayed at the Westin Great Southern Hotel there. On balance it is Not Recommended.

The Good:

  • Westins have very nice beds. Quite comfortable.
  • The air conditioning was more than adequate to the task, and quiet.
  • The building is old and interesting, and they have even gone to the trouble of putting together a little collection of historical photos in the lobby.

The Bad:

  • The room was comically small.
  • When we first came into the room, there was a mysterious yellow liquid in the bottom of the ice bucket.
  • One of the two showerheads was missing.
  • Guest parking is expensive.
  • There appears to be nowhere to buy newspapers etc. in the hotel
  • Bad breakfast
  • Bad lighting in the lobby
  • Absurd Internet access policies

The Westin Great Southern Hotel was built in the 1890s as the Great Southern Fireproof Hotel and Opera House. This fact leads directly to two of the problems with it, one really a quibble and the other quite important.

The lobby is today fitted with (I believe) a reproduction of the original chandelier. In keeping with the up-to-dateness (in 1897) and fireproof-ness of the whole building, the chandelier ran on electricity, not gas. The Westin people are to be applauded for maintaining this special feature of the building, but the truth is that the thing gives terrible light. Imagine 100 clear-glass (i.e. not frosted) light bulbs hanging about 30 feet off the floor and lighting a room that’s probably 100 feet square. In case you can’t imagine that, let me inform you that by today’s standards, it’s terrible light. It looks like the building was originally built with a glass roof on the lobby: this must have improved matters greatly. Today, the ceiling is composed of milky glass panels with what seem to be fluorescent tubes behind them. Unless you are the kind of person who hangs out in hotel lobbies all day, this isn’t a big problem: but it leads to a bad first impression as you come through the door.

The second, and major, problem that comes from the building’s age is the size of the ordinary guest rooms: they are absurdly small, smaller than you’d find in the cheapest motel out on the interstate. This is not uncommon with old hotels: back in the day, king-size beds were not common, and I get the distinct impression that hotel rooms were altogether more spartan than they are today. When you try to cram a television (in its giant armoire), a huge bed, an armchair, a desk, etc., etc. into a hundred-year-old room, you run out of space in a hurry.

This super-wide-angle panorama makes the room look much larger than it is:

Westin-Columbus

There’s not enough room between the (very shallow) desk and the bed to fit a chair in there; there’s nowhere to put your bags where you’re not going to trip over them. And the closet… well, the closet is just ridiculous:

Westin-Closet

The closet is so shallow that all you can do with it is hang a couple of things sideways, i.e. with the hangers turned so they are more or less parallel to the rod. Most of the space in there, though, is taken up with an ironing board, a luggage-rack that can’t be used in the room for a lack of space, and what I can only assume is a safe without a door:

Westin-Closet-2

What you’re supposed to do with an ironing board in this room, I don’t know: set it up in the corridor, perhaps. They may as well give you a javelin in case you wanted to practice throwing it in there.

So the room is too small. This is annoying, but I can’t really complain about it too much. The room was built over a hundred years ago, when people used it much differently from the way they do today (most of the rooms in the hotel originally didn’t have their own bathrooms, to begin with). Unless you tear out walls and turn every pair of rooms into a suite of two small rooms (which would be impractical), the options are: tear down the building or put up with the dimensions. On balance, I’m glad they left things alone.

The remaining problems, though, are entirely the result of Westin’s inattention to detail.

First, the mysterious liquid. After we’d been there a little while, I grabbed the ice bucket to participate in that great American hotel ritual, The Getting Of Ice. All American hotels, no matter how grand or how humble, provide unlimited free ice to guests: and I have never stayed in a hotel so fancy that the guest was not free to fetch his own ice from a machine stashed somewhere near the elevators. People will put up with hotels charging $2 for a local phone call, but a place that didn’t offer vast quantities of ice gratis would soon find itself out of business. Canadians scoff, but most of the United States is quite a hot place, and the business with the ice is one of the things that knits us together as a nation.

So there I am, humming ‘America The Beautiful’ to myself and thinking about Free Markets and Apple Pie, when I hear a sloshing noise from the bucket.

Upon inspection, it turned out that someone — possibly Osama himself — had left a few ounces of some yellow liquid in the bucket.

Westin-Ice-Bucket

Upon closer inspection, the liquid smelled faintly of whiskey, so it wasn’t too horrible. Note, however, the new ice-bucket condom that had been draped over the edge: someone on the Westin staff had ‘serviced’ the bucket without even checking to see whether someone had left, say, a turd in there.

A call to the front desk established that there were no other ice buckets in the hotel. Apparently they have n buckets, where n is the number of rooms in the place. Whatever. After a long and drawn-out process, it emerged that there actually was another ice bucket somewhere, and that it would be sent up. After about 35 minutes of what I presume was a frantic search through a vast pyramidal pile of assorted Hotel Equipment in the basement, a new ice bucket arrived along with vouchers for two free breakfasts. So far, so-so, I suppose. We got the ice (the new bucket was delivered empty for some reason, possibly so we wouldn’t miss out on the thrill of pushing the button on the ice machine for ourselves and succumb to the temptations of Socialism) and drifted off to sleep listening to the gentle sounds of melting.

Morning came, as morning will, and we once again found ourselves conscious. We were anxious to get out of that room, because it wasn’t really big enough for anything but sleeping and maybe a little ice-melting. I had set up my computer in the bathroom, partly because the counter in there was the largest flat surface available, and partly because the two free electrical outlets in there represented fully half of the free electrical outlets in the room.

Now, I’m a nut: I know this. I travel with my own power strip, because no hotel room has enough outlets for me. In addition to my computer, I carry three cameras, two cell phones, one Bluetooth headset, a wireless access point, a PDA, another computer, and an iPod, all of which have batteries, and all of which are products of the Connector Conspiracy inasmuch as each one requires a power adaptor that is fundamentally identical to all the others, but that produces a minutely different voltage and has a unique and strange connector on the end.

I can economize, if necessary: the iPod and one of the cell phones can be charged, in a pinch, by being connected to the Firewire and USB ports of my computer. When I’m spread out, though, I need at least ten AC outlets to power all my stuff. This room had four, two of them behind large or awkward pieces of furniture and the other two in the bathroom. There was no outlet, for instance, anywhere near the 16-inch-deep ‘desk’.

As I said, we were anxious to get out of there, so I hauled a couple armloads of electronics out of the bathroom in order to convert the room from a little tiled office and into a Place Of Ablution.

(The fact that there was no network jack in the bathroom wasn’t a problem, because the whole hotel is equipped with wireless Internet access. But that wasn’t an issue anyway, because I was using my Verizon BroadbandAccess card, because Westin charges you for network access on guest-room floors. It’s free in the lobby, so if you want to just wander in and suck up the bandwidth, that’s fine: but people who are paying the Westin $200 a night and up for lodging are not afforded the same convenience in their rooms. Interesting approach, that.)

Anyway, it was after unloading the computers that I discovered the business with the shower head. Westin has this whole ‘heavenly’ thing going on: the bed, which in contrast to most hotel beds is not horrible and uncomfortable, is the ‘Heavenly Bed’. The bath, similarly, is the ‘Heavenly Bath’. They even provide a ‘Heavenly Bath’ bathrobe — one, mind you, in a room with a king-size bed — as part of the deal.

Another part of the ‘Heavenly Bath’ thing, apparently, is that the rooms are fitted with not one but two shower heads. Unfortunately, in this room one of the shower heads was missing all together.

This wouldn’t really be a problem on its own. After all, I usually shower with only one shower head. Surely, you cry, I could manage to tough it out!

Well, I could have (and, as it happens, did), but this missing shower head was a bigger problem than that. It had just been broken off the stalk, leaving its water supply to dribble out at my feet. The resulting loss of pressure from the remaining shower head meant that I wound up doing a lot of gathering of water in cupped hands and then pouring it over myself.

Westin-Shower

Things break; I understand that. And I even understand how this particular shower head broke, because the remaining and presumably identical shower head was already cracked and on its way to failure, too. What I do not and will not understand is why this missing shower head was left to be discovered by me, a paying guest. The room had obviously been cleaned, and the bed made, before it was rented to me: why the hell had this missing shower head (and the problem with the ice bucket) not been discovered and fixed before I showed up? Just what am I paying for?

And all this is in a fairly expensive hotel, run under a brand that’s trying hard to be seen as the finest hotel chain in America that’s not gone in for the bath-butler school of false and useless ‘luxury’.

After rinsing off most of the soap, we headed down to for our free breakfasts. About that, let me say this: had I been paying for these breakfasts, I wouldn’t have. The food was bland, and served in a fairly gloomy room. There was a fairly long wait (considering the emptiness of the room, and the buffetness of the breakfast) to be seated, and then to get our coffee and juice. The orange juice was bitter and acidic because it was from concentrate, and the syrup for the pancakes was corn syrup with a tiny bit of maple syrup thrown in for ‘flavor’. That’s okay, though, I suppose, because the pancakes themselves were like little wood chips — after you scraped them out of the chafing dish.

Westin-Oj Westin-Syrup

These things are fine at the IHOP — or at least expected if not fine — but I expect better from a large hotel. I’m not sure, but I think they were charging in the neighborhood of $20 a head for this fantastic repast.

After ‘breakfast’, we got the car from the parking lot and left. While I’m on the topic of parking, it might be worth mentioning that the hotel charges $20 a night for parking, despite the fact that it’s flanked on two sides by fairly cheap parking lots. Lord knows what they charge you for ‘valet’ parking, i.e. some guy driving your car the 150 feet from the hotel’s entrance to their own parking lot. If you don’t take advantage of the ‘valet’ parking, though, it’s inconvenient, because though the parking lot is directly adjacent to the hotel, there is no entrance to the building on that side. The main entrance is on a busy street with limited space for cars; the side entrance, where you can easily leave a car while you go fetch your luggage, involves a long, narrow corridor with non-automatic doors and stairs. The very architecture of the place makes one feel less like a valued guest and more like a mark to be squeezed for money.

We complained about the shower head while checking out, and the clerk said that she’d see what she could do about compensating us for our trouble. It seemed, though, that this might be difficult because we’d booked the room through Expedia. When you do this, Expedia, not the hotel, actually charges your credit card, and I gather that it’s difficult for the hotel to do anything about adjusting your rate. In any case, you effectively get punished for booking your room that way.

American Express informs us that there have been no adjustments to our charges, so I suppose that Westin assumes that either we’re not worth having as customers, or that this is about the experience that one is to expect from the Westin Great Southern.

Total damages: $187.68 + $20 for parking = $207.68. A poor value.

Update:

Apparently the Westin people agree that it was a poor value, because they’ve decided to refund our money. This is unnecessarily complicated, though: see Nicole’s comment below.

Comments (2)