Here’s my personal wish list:

1. More buttons. The iPhone is very elegant and sleek and so forth; but it really needs about two more physical buttons. The slide-the-thing-on-the-screen thing to unlock it is very zippy, but it’s difficult to do with one hand; and the fact that the UI navigation is structured almost entirely as a tree means that you’ve got to keep returning to the main menu to do things. It would be nice to have a couple physical buttons that could be programmed for quick access to certain functions, and that could be used in some combination as an unlock sequence.

I doubt we’ll see this.

2. Better-differentiated icons. I use this thing every day, right? Many times. And I still find myself searching for the calendar icon, or the clock icon, or whatever. All the icons are the same shape, which makes them harder to tell apart without actively looking at every one of them.

3. Non-SMS IM capability. The iPhone has a great interface for SMS, ripped right from iChat on the Mac. But SMSes are slow, and they’re ruinously expensive. SMSes are charged by the message, not the byte, but a couple weeks ago I saw an analysis that concluded that SMS data costs £374.49 — about $750 — per megabyte, or about 3.3 US cents to send:

To send this post, to this point, would cost about $1.37. And in many cases it would actually cost more like $2.74, because both the sender and the recipient pay. This is nuts.

Proper IM capability would require something on the other end, not just something on the phone, though: mobile phones go in and out of coverage, and keeping the radio going all the time to keep a normal network connection alive would kill the batteries in short order. It’s a solved problem, though, and it needs to be solved on the iPhone. This is the kind of thing that should come with the iPhone (IM networks are more valuable the more people are on them), but even if it doesn’t I’m sure we’ll see something from a third-party developer pretty quickly.

4. Video recording. Criminey, it’s not that hard. I don’t want to make feature films with the thing, but once in a while you come across something that you can’t really record with a still photo. Most lesser phones already do this.

5. Video conferencing. The original AT&T Picturephone was a failure, and everyone thought that this was because it cost a fortune and didn’t work very well. Then, early videoconferencing was a failure aside from some specific applications, and everyone thought that this was a failure because it cost a small fortune and required a lot of fiddling to get it to work well. Now, video conferencing is cheap and fairly easy, and people still by and large don’t do it, and the thought is that this is because people don’t like being seen on the screen when they’re talking to someone.

I’m set up to do video conferencing pretty well here at Tino Manor, but I don’t do it all that often because I find that the video does not add much to the whole experience. If I’m talking to someone on the phone, or, better yet, if I’m IMing with them, I can do other things at the same time. When I’m on camera, 100% of my attention has to be devoted to what’s going on there. Once in a while, this might be useful; usually, it’s not.

Video conferencing on a mobile phone, on the other hand, is pretty intriguing. The appeal here isn’t that someone would be able to see me while we’re talking, but that they’d be able to see what’s around me. It’s less video conferencing and more the ability to transmit live video from wherever I happen to be. I think that that would find a lot of takers. And once you have the video recording capability, you get it for free (so to speak) if you have bandwidth enough to fit the video in.

6. Call recording. And sound recording generally. Presumably, you can’t record calls with the iPhone — or with most phones — because doing so is illegal in some places without the consent of both parties. This is ridiculous, but that shouldn’t be too surprising. But: it’s got a microphone; it’s got memory. Why can’t I record ambient sounds, i.e. use it as a memo recorder? No idea. This is another thing that you get essentially for free.

7. Voice-mail archiving. Voice-mail messages on the iPhone are stored as .amr files in the filesystem. If you have a jailbroken phone, you can copy them right off there and play the files with Quicktime Player. Why the hell does iTunes not suck all the VMs off the phone every time you sync it? There doesn’t seem to be any official way to get the messages off there. This is nuts.

8. Memory card slot. Another thing that I don’t think we’re getting. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage, which is the most you could get when I bought it. I’m constantly running up against that limit, because I’ve got a lot of Podcasts on there, and music, and video, and pictures.

Right now, Amazon sells an 8GB SDHC card for $32. There probably isn’t room for an full-sized SD card in the iPhone, but there’s room for an electrically-identical micro-SD card that would allow me to double the capacity of the thing. iPods don’t have expandable storage because there’s a wide range of iPods available: if you need a lot of storage, you can always get a 160 GB model. This isn’t the case with the iPhone, which will probably top out at 32 GB on Monday.

I don’t really need to carry all that much data around with me; the problem is that I don’t want to have to decide which small subset of data I want to carry around. I have no real need for more than 8 GB of data in my pocket (is that a gigabyte in your pocket, or are… ahh, forget it), but I want to invest as nearly as possible zero time in setting up playlists, rules, etc., etc. to fit things into the iPhone.

I suppose the best way to put it is that I want enough headroom to not have to think about this.

9. Better iPod interface. At its introduction, Steve Jobs touted the iPhone as ‘the best iPod we’ve ever made’. This it is not. Say you’re playing a track from a playlist, and you want to hear other songs from that artist, or that album. You can’t jump right to these things; you have to back yourself out to the Album or Artist listing, and then drill back down. There’s no reason for this.

Worse, say you’re listening to a 30-podcast and you want to skip the minute or two of useless front matter and theme music that a lot of people stick on the front of such things. Good luck: the iPhone’s track position slider doesn’t do this very well (the resolution is too low, limited perhaps by the size of your finger). Fast-forwarding by continually pressing on the FF/track-advance button is risky, because if the iPhone thinks that you’ve let go for an instant, it interprets the next instant as a new touch on the button, and advances you to the next track.

It would be nice to see an iPod-style scroll wheel on the screen for things like this, or a more reliable way to immediately speed up the playback of the current track — such as is currently available in Quicktime Player.

10. A better web browser. Mobile Safari is really the first phone-browser worth criticizing, but it still stinks. It’s slow, it purges pages from its memory too readily, it has no way to open links in a new window (which is important because the fact that it’s slow and doesn’t cache well means that there’s a big cost to hitting that ‘back’ button), and it doesn’t do Flash.

Now, I hate Flash. I loathe it. The world would be far better off without it. But you go to war with the web you have, and the simple truth is that there are a lot of people out there who persist in developing their corporate websites with Flash. If you want to find, say, the nearest Burger King, or the ingredients of a Whopper, or anything else along those lines with an iPhone, you are out of luck: the BK website is implemented entirely in Flash. And it’s not the only one.

People have complained about the lack of Flash support from the beginning. The iPhone is, at its heart, a very feeble and ill-equipped computer, and bad Flash movies will sometimes give my old MacBook Pro fits, so I can understand why Apple decided to not support Flash. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter: there are too many idiots out there producing websites that are entirely dependent on Flash to just write it off.

11. Better predictive text. The iPhone keyboard is a marvelous thing. When writing an e-mail, I can just stab away at that thing and usually compose a perfect, typo-free message thanks to the iPhone’s text-prediction and -correction software. The problem is that there’s no way to explicitly add words and phrases to the iPhone’s dictionary.

When I type ‘tino@t’ the next letters are always ‘inotopia.com’. One hundred percent of the time. But as soon as I enter the @, the iPhone recognizes that this is not an ordinary word and it stops attempting to correct what I’m typing. When this happens, you immediately learn just how much of the iPhone keyboard’s usability — like 90% — is due to the software.

There are a whole bunch of things like this that I find myself correcting over and over and over but that the iPhone does not learn. WordPerfect had the idea of user dictionaries in the 1980s; the iPhone should have them now.

12. Password storage. I understand why Apple has the iPhone set to not store passwords; if the thing is stolen, you don’t want the thief to be able to access your bank account. But the nature of the touch-screen keyboard, and the dependence on software correction, means that typing in gibberish or semi-gibberish passwords is very painful. I’m not sure what the best solution for this is, but there needs to be one.

13. Sleep times. I charge my phone up next to my bed, so if someone decides to call me at 6:30 in the morning I don’t have to race downstairs. I assume that anyone calling me at 6:30 a.m. has some kind of emergency on their hands, and needs my help. They had better have.

This means that the last thing I have to do every day is go into the iPhone’s settings app and turn off the ‘new mail’ noise. I filter spam before it makes it to the iPhone, but I’ll still typically get a couple messages overnight. I do not want the phone to attempt to alert me to the existence of these messages while I’m sleeping. There’s no way to tell the iPhone to automatically turn off certain kinds of alerts between (say) 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

14. Volume. When I’m not sleeping, the iPhone has to be louder. I take care to put my iPhone in its sleeve-case upside-down, so the tiny speaker is facing out; I then take care to put the whole thing in my pocket so that the speaker is facing up. I have constructed my own ringtone that’s very distinctive and as loud as I can get it. Hearing tests indicate that there’s nothing wrong with my ears. I still miss the ring about 1/3 of the time, and only know the phone is ringing because of the (weak) vibration. If the vibration gets turned off (which happens inadvertently sometimes because I’m constantly screwing with those settings, see #13 above), I typically miss about half of my calls.

15. Bluetooth improvements. Or maybe not Bluetooth, since the iPhone has 802.11 wireless networking. The basic point is that I should not have to plug the phone in to my computer to sync my address book, calendar, etc. Movies and music involve moving a lot of data and can reasonably be a plug-in-only kind of thing; phone-related microdata can easily be updated on a schedule whenever I’m in range.

There is some informed speculation that Apple will be revamping their .Mac service to make it less .Bad, and that the new iPhone may be capable of syncing events, contacts, etc. over the network from anywhere this way. That would be nice.

16. A better camera. The iPhone camera stinks. It doesn’t stink worse than most cell-phone cameras stink, and in certain circumstances it is possible to take a decent picture with the thing.

But even in this reduced and enhanced-by-iPhoto version, the contrast range is lousy, there’s a green cast, and everything looks like it’s photographed through a layer of gauze. The light sensitivity is also terrible, which is a real problem when trying to e.g. take pictures of friends in bars.

Maybe there is a hard limit to the quality of photo one can get out of such a small camera; certainly the optics are going to have to be optimized for size rather than quality. I don’t know much about camera design. One thing that I know would help would be to offer one or both of the volume buttons as a shutter trip when the phone is in camera mode. As it is, you have to press and release a button on the screen to take a picture, which is a real problem. You’ve got to hold the phone facing your subject and then press on the side opposite the lens. There’s a reason that no actual cameras are designed this way; doing this means that you can’t hold the phone solidly, and that you tend to pivot the thing right at the moment of taking the picture. Some of the gauze-filter effect is probably due to this UI-induced tendency to move the camera at the moment of exposure.

I haven’t said anything here about GPS, which a lot of people are eagerly anticipating. I’m not sure that it would be all that useful. GPS tends to use a lot of battery juice, and it takes a while for the receiver to get an initial fix. It doesn’t work if you don’t have a decent view of the sky.

The iPhone’s current where-am-i feature currently gets my location to somewhere within a circle with a radius of about a mile. It would do better if I were not in the boonies right now.

This seems like it’s generally enough, unless you are somewhere where there are no street signs. If you’re somewhere where there are no street signs, you’re probably in the woods or in the air or on the water and should be using a real GPS anyway. Where I most need a GPS in my phone is when I’m in the mall, or at Home Depot, and not only would it not work in either of those places, until the malls, Home Depots, grocery stores, etc. get hooked up with Google to deliver micro-map overlays of their floor plans it wouldn’t be useful anyhow.

Text-encodings are the bane of my life, so I have a tiny bit of sympathy for whoever produces this thing. Only a very tiny bit, though, because after all I am paying for this (or would be if I were not in the free-trial period, anyway).

The problem arises from the fact that the modern digital computer, and the Internet, and E-Mail and most of this stuff are all American inventions. A lot of people in the U.S. speak Spanish these days, but in the computer-science departments where they design this kind of thing, everyone speaks English. And English is almost unique among European languages in that it does not use diacritic marks.

In a way, this is unfortunate, because there are a a lot of sounds in English that do not map well to the Latin alphabet. But that’s the way it is, and it’s made life easier for printers for hundreds of years. You can express the entire universe of thought in English with just fifty-two characters:

Continental Europe is not as efficient, and thus they require all of those, and also:

as well as many others. When computers capable of dealing with text were first built, the cost of things was such that they didn’t even use lowercase letters. If your character set is limited to 26 characters and a few punctuation symbols, you can fit a single character into five bits — which is important when every bit of memory costs a few bucks.

For a long time, the most common encoding for text was called ASCII. ASCII is an 8-bit character set, which means that eight bits of memory are used to store every character. Some of these are:

and so on. Lowercase letters are the same, except the second bit is 1 instead of 0:

So pressing the shift key on an old terminal or teletype just caused that second bit to be set to 1. To convert an ASCII string from uppercase to lowercase or vice-versa you don’t have to worry about what the characters actually are; you just have to set the second bit appropriately. This is particularly important when you are doing a search. To the computer, the strings ‘TiNoToPiA’ and ‘Tinotopia’ are entirely different. To do a search that’ll find either one, you just look for that string of bits, while ignoring the state of the second bit of every character. Thus the computer, which is just a collection of electricity, can see that ‘B’ and ‘b’ represent the same thing as easily as you can.

You’ll also note that because A comes before B, and because Z comes before a, you can sort a list by the binary values (which is fast), and get an alphabetized list with all the capitalized stuff on top. Most computers these days go to great lengths to ignore capitalization when sorting, like this view from the Mac Finder:

The very same thing viewed in the terminal shows the clever idea from 1963 still at work inside the modern computer:

Classically, ASCII only used seven bits. In the character examples above, you will note that the first bit is always 0, because these characters all fit into seven-bit ASCII. If you’re reading this on a computer, and you’re using a standard American keyboard, look down at it. Every character printed on the top of all of the 47 keys in the main part of the keyboard fits into seven-bit ASCII. Since each key can generate two characters depending on whether the shift key is pressed or not, that’s 94 characters.

The space bar generates another character, and all of the letter keys and a few others ([, ], ^, _, ?, and @) can generate another ASCII character as well: these are called control characters, most of which are not visible to you. You can see a Tab character, but you can’t see a ‘End of Transmission’ or ‘Bell’. The ‘Bell’ character (^G) used to make a bell on the terminal ring whenever it was ‘displayed’ (these days, in most situations, it’ll make the computer beep).

Anyway, all of this fits into 7 bits, which can store 2⁷, or 128, possible values. This is all you need to express things in English.

Obviously, this will cause problems if you are trying to write in Spanish, or French, or German, or any of a whole bunch of other languages that require diacritics. Most European languages are written with the Latin alphabet, but all of them but English (and, with the exception of a few umlauts on imported words, Dutch) require diacritics.

Missing diacritics can in some cases completely alter the meaning of a word. In French, for instance, pâté means, well, pâté, as in pâté de foie gras. Pâte, on the other hand — without the acute accent on the e — is pronounced differently (’pot’, more or less), and means ‘pasta’ or ‘dough’.

So diacritics are important. In comes ISO-8859-1 to the rescue. This is another character set, but the first 128 characters are exactly the same as ASCII. In ISO-8859-1, the first bit — 0 for all ASCII characters — is 1, which means that the number of possible values is doubled. The additional 128 characters are used for things like all those vowels with their jaunty continental hats, the ß the Germans use for ss in now bafflingly specific situations, the ¿ used in Spanish to warn you that a question is coming so you’d better pay attention, etc., etc.

Among these characters is the humble ñ, which has the binary value 1110001 — 241 in decimal. ‘¿’ is 191, so there’s no possibility that there’s a conflict there.

To avoid as much breakage as possible, most (all?) modern text-encoding schemes take ISO-8859-1 (which, remember, incorporates the old ASCII) as their first 255 characters. So if you take an ASCII string, or an ISO-8859-1 string, and you just bash it into any other encoding, the same shapes should be displayed.

So I conclude (possibly erroneously) that I’m seeing a ¿ not because there’s a 10111111 in the Kindle Washington Post somewhere, but because there’s a 1110001 (ñ), but that the Kindle Washington Post is either saying ‘Hello, I’m a 7-bit ASCII string’, or because the Post is saying ‘Hello, I’m not telling what text-encoding I use’ and the Kindle is defaulting to 7-bit ASCII for some unfathomable reason.

Further, if I’m correct, the Kindle uses ¿ to indicate an unknown character, which is another bad idea because of course ¿ is a perfectly valid character. There’s a character just for saying ‘I can’t display this character’, and it’s this: � — U+FFFD, the Unicode Replacement Character. Or you might see this: 󠄀 — that’s actually ‘Variation Selector 17′, but I’m pretty sure that it’ll be displayed as ‘I can’t display this character’ on pretty much anything.

So: text-encoding gremlins 0, Kindle Washington Post: 0.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’ve been complaining for years that online newspapers suck because they almost totally fail to take advantage of one of the newspapers’ best skills — selling stories by placement. And I’ve been pointing out that the Kindle is good for one thing only — reading single, long pieces of text. And still I’m shocked at how bad the Kindle version of the Post is.

This morning’s paper Washington Post has eight different sizes of headline on the front page. The front page of the Post’s website right now has three.

The Kindle version has one headline size.

What’s more, the Post’s liberal use of label heads means that a lot of the Kindle headlines are almost totally useless. A label head is a headline that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a complete sentence. In traditional newspaper headlines, you leave out articles, forms of be, etc., etc. and wind up with something that’s extremely pithy but that still tells the story that it sits atop. ‘Elvis Dead’ would be a good example, or, to use an example from this morning’s Post, ‘Bush’s Budget Projects Deficits’.

Label heads, on the other hand, are just that: labels. They don’t tell a story, and they don’t have even an implied, invisible verb. From this morning’s Post, we get:

• Two Races, One Big Day
• A Rich Market For Russian Icons
• In China, Pulled by Opposing Tides

Those last two are iffy: you could say that they mean ‘[There Is] A Rich Market For Russian Icons’ and ‘[People] In China [are] Pulled by Opposing Tides’, but both of those would be terrible headlines.

The Post uses two-deck headlines a lot, though: a label head on top and a quite prolix (for a headline) thing underneath, usually set in italics. Whoever they have writing headlines at the Post is doing a pretty good job — not as good as at the New York Times, which generally has excellent headlines, but pretty good nevertheless — but those headlines can’t be repurposed for other media without being rewritten completely.

For the Kindle version, of course, they don’t rewrite them. Except for a very few stories from the front page, they don’t include the subheads. Here’s the front of the Washington Post as seen on the Kindle:

Here’s the same thing as seen on paper. Click on any of these pictures for a bigger version:

I’ve gone to the trouble of photographing the entire A section of today’s Post (Virginia Boonies Edition), and the whole of the Kindle article list for the same section. There are a number of outright differences — stories which are present in one version that are totally missing from the other. Some of this might be explained by the fact that the version of the Post that you get out here in the hinterland is put to bed at about 10 p.m. the night before.

The Kindle:

Note particularly the headline ‘DC Region Finds Much To Bemoan Or Cheer In Plan’. In the paper version, this story is directly under ‘Bush’s Budget Projects Deficits’. It’s still a bad headline, but the placement of the story (and the fact that you can glance at the lead in the paper version) makes it clear that this story is about the budget plan. On the Kindle, it’s just an unbelievably bad headline.

‘Nation in brief’ is supposed to be skimmed; the paper version has four sub-headlines. You can’t do this with the Kindle. The other main thing on page 2 is the Dana Millbank column. The fact that this is the Dana Millbank column is much more salient than the label head ‘The Mouths That Run Against McCain’ — but the Kindle reader doesn’t get that information without poking into the story itself.

One thing that might help is the inclusion of word counts. There’s a word count on the top of every story, but these aren’t in what the Kindle calls the ‘Articles List’. So ‘Top Romney Flip-Flops’, at 469 words, looks exactly the same as ‘8 Questions Super Tuesday Could Answer’, at 1694 words and filling an entire page in the paper version.

Et cetera et cetera. The center spread of today’s A section is a magnificent infographic, which of course is entirely missing from the Kindle version. There’s no way you could get that thing into the Kindle, which just reinforces my point that newspapers are uniquely ill-suited to use on the Kindle. The Post has one advantage that TV, the web, radio, and Time magazine don’t have: they have a space that’s 24 by 22 — 528 square inches — to do things like this. The monitor on my computer is the largest one you can currently buy, and costs about $2,000. It’s 25 by 15.75, or 393 square inches. And that’s before you take into account the fact that even newsprint can display information at a much higher resolution than current computer monitors.

You can see the paper version below, on pages 10 and 11. The Post’s website has a Flash version:

This appears to have all the same information as the paper version, but it’s been repurposed by taking advantage of the strengths of the medium, just as the paper version takes advantage of the strengths of that particular medium.

And the Post on paper, which benefits from a logical medium that’s suited to its physical medium:

Leaving aside the laziness and contempt that characterizes much news writing, the newspapers’ biggest disadvantage is their physical medium: paper is expensive and heavy, and its process requires that the most recent news I get in my Post is from 10 p.m. last night.

But paper is the newspapers’ biggest advantage, too. All that paper to view at one time, and a finely-honed system for using it, makes the newspaper the easiest to use news medium, both for the newspaper people and for the readers. The problem is that a display of this size is expensive and unwieldy — hell, paper of this size if expensive and unwieldy — so any gizmos that replace physical newspapers are either going to be stationary, or they’re going to be smaller. Unfortunately, their strategy (such as it is) probably involves nothing more than dumping their websites into some new-and-improved device, in the process throwing away hundreds of years of UI refinement.

Here’s the interface for telling iTunes which videos I want copied to my iPhone:

There are always 357 x 88 (or 31,416) pixels available for the list of movies, regardless of how big the screen is. There are well over a million pixels available there that iTunes will not use. If the current single-column list would just extend downward, I could see 40 titles at once in that space. As it is: I see four.

Radar’s Nat Torkington has a smart take on this. (He’s away on vacation, so I’ll quote him.) “Success breeds risk of failure,” he writes. “Some alpha geeks are turning away from Macs. Not all, but some. The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.”

I’ve read a lot about how Apple hardware — particularly Apple hardware from early in the production run — is ‘flaky’ but to be honest I’ve never seen this myself. The semi-usable Apple hardware in my possession right now — that is, leaving out Newtons, anything with a 680×0 processor, etc., all works just fine, despite most of it having been bought on the first day it was available. The products and their problems, if any:

1. day-one 17-inch Powerbook G4. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Dented from being dropped by TSA. Otherwise: no problems.
2. day-one Mac Mini. No problems.
3. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #1. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Original battery replaced by Apple as part of recall. Otherwise: no problems.
4. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #2. Original power brick frayed at connector end, stopped working, replaced under warranty by Apple. Hard drive stopped working after computer was dropped onto marble floor. Keyboard stopped working after coffee was spilled into it. Disk & keyboard replaced by Tino. Corner dented from drop. Nicole is hard on computers. Otherwise: no problem.
5. MacBook Pro backup battery: stopped taking a charge at about 8 months of age. Replaced under warranty by Apple.
6. Mac Mini #2: no problems.
7. Mac Pro: no problems.
8. Apple 30″ display: no problems.
9. Apple iSight #1: no problems. Image quality kind of sucks, but that’s a design problem.
10. Apple iSight #2: ditto.
11. Apple TV: no problems.
12. 2nd-generation iPod: disk died. Bought new one. Intended to replace disk but never did.
13. 3rd-generation iPod: no problems.
14. iPod Video: no problems.
15. 1st-generation iPod Nano: died several times, replaced under warranty. I think the thing was getting wet. After long enough, it died while not under warranty. So: dead.
16. 2nd-generation iPod Nano: working fine.
17. day-one iPhone #1: no problems. Headphones suck. Fact that you can’t use regular headphones with it because of the stupid recessed jack sucks. iPod interface is too tree- rather than matrix-oriented, which sucks.
18. day-one iPhone #2: ditto, except the iPod interface thing doesn’t bother Nicole as much as it bothers me.
19. Airport Express: no problems.
20. Airport Extreme: works fine: in fact better than any other wireless access point I’ve ever used. It’s annoying that it needs to reboot to implement any change.
21. Apple wireless keyboard #1: full of hair and crumbs because of shortsighted design.
22. Apple wireless keyboard #2: ditto
23. Wireless mighty mouse #1: fine
24. Wireless mighty mouse #2: scroll ball action now too unpredictable to use without frustration, right-click function doesn’t work predictably.

From this, I can conclude that Apple needs to work on their laptop power connectors, and that the first-generation MagSafe connectors weren’t up to snuff. Also, the first-generation iPod Nano was prone to damage from getting wet; the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball can’t be cleaned effectively; and the Mighty Mouse’s virtual second button is too clever by half. Also also: don’t drop thing containing hard drives. Also also also: the iPhone iPod app needs work which it probably won’t get.

Does this constitute ‘flaky hardware’? I don’t think so. It’s hard to compare this to the non-Apple computers I’ve had, because nearly all of those I built myself, and not always from the very best parts available.

Before we went in the Mac direction Nicole and I used Toshiba Porteges; these were pretty expensive, certainly on a par with what Apple charges for laptops. And they were in and out of the shop so often that we seriously considered dropping another $2000 on a spare just for when one of our primary laptops was being repaired. They were so bad that we wouldn’t have used them at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was an independent repair shop nearby that stocked parts for the things, and was inclined to conclude that nearly anything was covered by the extended warranty.

I never read anything about Porteges being flaky, though, and I think that this was because you can’t buy a Portege in a retail store. Or you couldn’t when we were using them, anyway. Toshiba sold them only through their ‘business’ channel, which effectively meant you had to mail-order them. Cheaper, beefier Toshiba computers were sold at CompUSA. Porteges were sold to the corporate market; the assumption was that an IT department would buy them by the crate and pass them out to employees.

Apple products, though, are overwhelmingly purchased and maintained individually by the people who use them. When a PC laptop goes bad, there’s probably about a 50% chance that the entire solution to this is going to be to call the corporate IT department, who will come swap the thing out for a new one. When an Apple laptop goes bad, there’s probably a better than 90% chance that the person sitting at the keyboard will be entirely in charge of solving the problem.

So I don’t think that there’s a ‘flaky hardware’ problem, though Apple may have a perception issue to manage.

What were the other complaints? “Many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now” and “the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot”.

The Genius Bars definitely seem to be too crowded, but you can make an appointment from home up to 24 hours in advance — so I’m not sure how this makes them ‘impossible to use’. You know whose Genius Bars are really impossible to use? Everyone else’s, because they don’t do this. Instead you spend hours on the phone to Bangalore, listening to someone read from a script. Apple FTW.

And ‘the base apps aren’t perfect’. I’m not sure what this means, but I suppose it must mean that iCal, Mail, Safari, and the Finder, at least, are imperfect. I’ll agree here: they’re definitely not perfect. What I don’t understand is how this is some kind of disadvantage — an impediment to Apple continuing to ‘get away with it’ where ‘it’ is presumably something along the lines of ‘pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes’. It might be a problem if there were some competition that did provide ‘perfect’ ‘base apps’. When the comparison is between Mail and Outlook Express, though (or even Mail and Thunderbird), Mail looks pretty good. There’s nothing really wrong with Outlook Express, but there’s even less wrong with Mail. Et cetera.

This has all been about the specific assertions, but remember that those were just offered as explanation for the main point: that ‘alpha geeks’ are ‘turning away from Macs’. Which is even sillier. And turning to what, pray tell? Linux? Windows? Presumably the ones who are upset with the inability to elbow their way in at the Genius Bar are turning to Linux because appointments at the Linux Store are so much easier to get. And the alpha geeks who are dissatisfied with Apple’s ‘base apps’ are moving to Windows — because on Windows, everything runs like a top.

WTF? I mean: WTF?! I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing, because it just doesn’t make sense.

An Alpha Geek might ‘move away from Macs’ because, as of today, there are only three Mac laptops available, and all of them are too big and heavy and lack serial ports. An Alpha Geek might decide that Apple’s proprietary systems bother him philosophically. An Alpha Geek might need drivers for some exotic piece of hardware, and it’s easier to switch to either Linux or Windows than to write his own for OS X. These are valid criticisms that can be made of Apple and Apple’s products. But saying that the problem is that the Genius Bar is too crowded, or that Address Book isn’t up to snuff, is ridiculous.

When Muslim women are sent to shelters that serve the general population, they are often exposed to lifestyles that challenge their faith, such as drinking, abusing drugs, eating pork and undressing or bathing in front of others [...]

This seems kind of interesting. I’m pretty sure that all homeless shelters ban drugs and alcohol, not just on ideological grounds but in the interest of keeping order. And most Americans — particularly women — aren’t exactly bullish on the ides of undressing and bathing in front of others.

And as far as pork goes: why haven’t we heard anything about homeless Jews having problems with pork served in homeless shelters? Jews in the U.S. tend to be rather under-represented among the down-and-out, but I’m sure that there are more than a few homeless Jews, and that some of those are observant at least to the point of not eating pork. Interesting that the Post has never felt the need to run a story on the front of the Metro section about that.

The real gem, though, comes from one Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Stoops said most shelters are privately run. The largest shelter organization is Catholic Charities, he said, followed by the Salvation Army and the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions. Traditionally, Stoops said, many Christian-oriented shelters — he called Catholic Charities an exception — have offered clients “soup, soap, sleep and salvation.” Stoops added: “I’ve always found that to be offensive. Shelters in this country need to get with this century.”

Well, then, maybe you should RUN YOUR OWN GODDAMNED SHELTERS instead of being ‘offended’ by the nature of the help that other people provide.

Some Islamic leaders have begun to raise money to establish more shelters that cater to the Islamic community. There are now just two serving the Washington-Baltimore area, according to local mosque leaders. The leaders said they were unaware of any in Northern Virginia.

I wonder whether Mr. Stoops is offended by these shelters. Conspicuously unanswered by the Post is the question of whether these shelters will admit non-Muslim women, and, if they do, whether they require residents’ adherence to Islamic principles.

This story from The Muslim Link suggests that the al-Mumtahinah shelter in Baltimore, at least, does discriminate on the basis of religion:

The center will be monitored by a “house mother” to ensure religious obligations are met, and to encourage the cleanliness of individual living spaces.

Emphasis added. That kind of seems like an important point, doesn’t it? I mean, the story complains, in its first paragraph, about Christian-run shelters ‘hold[ing] prayer meetings or services at odds with [the Muslim women's] own religious beliefs’. Do the Muslim shelters hold prayer meetings which would be at odds with the religious beliefs of Christians? Are Christians even eligible for admittance? Are Jews?

If Muslims want to run homeless shelters that are only open to Muslims, I don’t have a problem with that. If the Salvation Army wants to make Bible-study classes and prayers a condition of staying in their shelters (which, according to the Post’s story, they don’t), I also don’t have a problem with that.

But it does seem like a failure of the Post to write a story about how hard it is for Muslim women to be homeless because most homeless shelters are run by Christian organizations, without even touching on the question of whether the Muslim-run shelters are open to all. It’s probably safe to assume that these shelters are in fact not open to non-Muslims, because if they were, the Post would certainly have trumpeted that fact.

So it is possible to get information out of Washington Post articles, but only if you inspect them as you would have done Pravda in 1965.

Now, I understand that a public restroom isn’t going to be as clean as my bathroom at home. It can’t be; too many people use the thing.

But I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to expect that the public restroom will be in at least as good a state of repair as my bathroom at home. At Baja Fresh — and I don’t really mean to single them out; I just happened to notice that the place was a disaster — we find:

1. The toilet paper holder is hanging from only one screw, and cracked and broken tiles are peeking out from behind it
2. The bottom of the mirror has been de-silvered from water getting trapped under the hanger
3. The electrical outlet is cracked and loose — and the GFI capabilities probably no longer work, because the ‘reset’ button has been jammed in there, and broken
4. The light switch is caked with filth
5. There’s some kind of air-freshener holder whatsit on the wall, with nothing in it; and there are obvious scars on the wall from where similar things had been installed and removed over the years
6. The grout in the wall tiles was white — except where it neared the floor, where a lack of cleaning had left it black. Not dingy: black. Dingy grout you can find near the sink.
7. The sink is pulling away from the wall; the space thus created between the wall and sink has been filled with more and more grout, which is of course filthy.

Most of this isn’t really that big a deal. I didn’t need an electrical outlet in there, and the light was already on, for instance. What’s unsettling is what it says about their attention to detail, and the pride that the employees, owners, and management of the place seem to take (or rather that they seem not to take) in the operation.

It’s particularly interesting in that Baja Fresh is a conspicuously clean place; the cleanliness is part of their brand image, as they try to project an aura of freshness about the whole restaurant. The orders to keep the place clean and ‘fresh’ looking don’t extend to the men’s room, though, and so it undermines a lot of what they’re trying to do, and leads me to wonder whether they might someday also be tempted to take shortcuts with the food.

That is all.

With the Kindle, though, and the ability to look up words just by pushing a button, I find myself doing it a lot more often. Last night, for instance, I came across the word uxoriousness. Now, I know that uxor means wife — my knowledge of Latin and French is why I don’t need a dictionary — but just because you know the root doesn’t mean that you are familiar with all the connotations in English. Wifeousness? The context — this was in Martin Amis’ The Information — was that ‘uxoriousness’ was being held up by one of the characters as a virtue.

The dictionary has uxorious as ‘excessively fond of or submissive to a wife’. So his consideration that being ‘excessively’ fond of his wife is a virtue is an important clue to the nature of his character. Kindle dictionary FTW!

So. Great. It would be nice to just be able to press Alt-L while on a line to look up the words rather than having to navigate through another menu, but as my finger is on the scroll wheel anyway, what the heck.

However, the dictionary that comes with the Kindle is, like many dictionaries, sorely lacking. I cannot think of any specific examples at the moment, but about half of the words I’ve attempted to look up haven’t been there. I have a large vocabulary, and so the words I’m going to attempt to look up are going to tend to all be fairly obscure or archaic ones; but then you’d think that in assembling a dictionary for such a purpose, you’d take that into account. You wouldn’t include a definition for dog, for instance, or cat, using that space instead for the kinds of words that people who spend $400 on a reading device are more likely to be unfamiliar with.

Ay, there’s the rub: the dictionary wasn’t compiled for this purpose. It’s just a regular dictionary, with its composition not taking into account its intended use or audience.

It would be nice to see a dictionary for the Kindle — you can add your own, which the system will use when doing these lookups — that combined a standard dictionary-for-the-educated, the Urban Dictionary, a sci-fi dictionary, a Gazetteer, etc., etc., etc.

To the best of my knowledge, though, all these e-book dictionaries are just regular dictionaries with only the format, and not the content, adapted.

DRM’d Books

First, I need to point out that I’m not too worried about Amazon’s DRM’d Kindle books; DRM is a pointless exercise, for reasons that Cory Doctorow explains here. In short, he says:

Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD’s owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.

Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can’t decrypt the DVD, you can’t watch it. If you can’t watch it, you won’t buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film’s creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.

This is a fool’s errand. Because the DVD player has the key, it’s always possible that it can be extracted by academics, hardened hackers — or just kids who are in it for the glory.

The argument in greater detail is available here.

I expect the Kindle DRM to be broken within six weeks, at the longest, but I think I will wait until then before spending any serious money on their locked-up books. It’s not that I have something in mind that would be specifically thwarted by DRM; it’s just that the whole notion makes me uneasy. DRM ties my data — data that I am properly licensed to use — to a specific device or piece of software. When that device or piece of software fails, I effectively lose my license to use the data: and that’s nuts.

And DRM is artificially restrictive, too. The goal is to keep me from being able to redistribute the data to someone else, which is, I suppose, fine.

Note that my assessment that this is ‘fine’ is based in large part on the fact that Amazon is willing to sell this data at about a 60% discount over what they charge for the same data on paper. This is quite different from, say, the iTunes Music Store approach, where DRM’d Pixies albums actually cost $0.02 more than you’ll pay Amazon for the same data, uncompressed and un-DRM’d, on physical CDs.

It’s also based on the fact that the author and publisher need to be paid for their work, and that this isn’t going to happen if everyone redistributes the stuff for free. The argument you often see for music — that artists should make money by playing concerts rather than by selling records (which is how most recording artists make money now anyway) — doesn’t hold water in the case of books.

But there are all kinds of things I want to to do data that doesn’t involve ripping off the author or artist but that I still can’t do in a DRM regime.

For instance, I don’t have a DVD player hooked up to my TV. This is mainly because DVDs are annoying; not only do you have to keep track of the things, and make sure they don’t get scratched, and sit through the insulting copyright threats, and then screw around with their badly-designed menus using badly-designed remote controls, but also because, for reasons I’m not sure about, the average useful life of a DVD player around here is about nine months. This has been true both of cheap and expensive DVD players; so I’m done with ‘em.

I have an Apple TV hooked up to my TV, so when I get a DVD I rip it and watch it on there. Some DVDs and DVD sets are particularly hard to use as directed, and a pain in the ass to rip, so I just download them. In particular here, I’m thinking about the Monty Python box set and the recent Simpsons DVDs; they have multiple titles per disc, and particularly annoying and time-wasting menus. I own these DVDs, but I never watch them because even after paying for them it’s easier to download the content separately because this way I can watch them the way I want to watch them.

So how does this relate to machine-readable books?

Last night I read the Kindle-store sample of Steve Martin’s autobiography, and I was struck by just how clearly his voice came through in the text, and how the same voice was readily apparent in his movie scripts. With enough Steve-Martin source material and futzing around with Perl, this voice could probably be quantified and I could build a Steve Martin robot. Or at least a Steve Martin detector. That sounds silly, but it would be interesting to build such a thing and run scripts through it, seeing whether it could differentiate between bits that were written by Martin himself and bits that were reworked by lesser writers.

That would be kind of neat, and entirely within my legal rights. Neither Steve Martin nor his publishers lose any money if I build a Steve Martin detector; I’m just not allowed to redistribute the book myself. But DRM makes this use — a use that makes Martin’s book more valuable to me — impossible or at least more difficult than it needs to be.

I realize that most people are not quite like me, though, and have neither the resources, skills, time, or inclination to build a Steve Martin detector. And I couldn’t easily do textual analysis on the non-DRM’d paper book, either.

Amazon sells the DRM’d versions of books at a substantial discount. In practice I think that Amazon is subsidizing these sales, but it seems to make a good bargain. Amazon and the publishers have lower costs because they do not have to manufacture, warehouse, and move around anything physical; but they have higher costs in that relatively few people will copy and redistribute physical books.

I, on the other hand, have greater benefit from the purchase because I can get the book delivered instantly, and I don’t have to have storage space on the shelf for it; but I have less benefit because I can’t resell the book or lend it out. And I had to spend $400 to enter into the whole ecosystem in the first place.

The idiotic thing to do would be to say that Amazon’s higher costs and my increased benefit exactly balance out my decreased benefit and their lower costs, and sell the e-book at the same price as the physical one. I don’t think this is true, and in any case the market doesn’t think it’s true; people won’t buy e-books at those prices.

At 60% off, though, I feel like Amazon is splitting the difference with me. Is the gross profit on a $10 e-book greater than the profit on a $25 physical book? Almost certainly. The manufacturing of physical books — leaving out paying the author and editor and the shareholders of the publishing company and the PR people and all that, but just counting printing and binding the thing — is a surprisingly expensive undertaking, accounting for the vast majority of the cost of the book.

So I’m getting less, but I’m paying less, too. I still don’t like DRM’d data, but it’s less insulting than the approach the record and movie companies take, which is that DRM’d data is better for me than non-DRM’d data. I believe the Texas way to express the feeling is ‘Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.’

The Future Of Publishing

One commenter on the earlier post brought up the easy terms under which anyone can publish their own work and have it sold by Amazon on the Kindle store. I am looking forward to seeing what this produces, as some of the self-published books out there are pretty interesting if only for their eccentricity. On this very website, I have the complete text of one such: One-Sixth Of The World’s Surface, a self-published account of travels in the Soviet Union in 1931.

However, I also expected cheap and easy online distribution of music to bring on a new Golden Age Of Pop; there are no longer any gatekeepers with faulty assumptions to keep the market from making its decisions. This has not happened, largely because while the faulty filters of the record companies can no longer present an obstacle, no other filters have arisen to replace them. Satellite-programmed radio and the Road-Rules-ization of MTV seem to have killed off those venues as means of discovering new music, and people complain about Media Consolidation. However, it’s cheap and easy for anyone to set up what amounts to their own radio station these days either as a podcast or as an audio stream, chock-a-block with podsafe music. This hasn’t happened.

Why? I don’t know. Too many of the talented bands are still signing recording contracts with the major labels, I suppose. The only way I’ve discovered new music in the last few years is through TV ads and some random ‘mix tapes’ that people upload to The Pirate Bay — but because the TPB ‘mix tapes’ are of necessity pirated music, there’s a lack of continuity and comment. If it worked well, the guys who assemble these compilations would be, functionally, the equivalent of the program directors of really cool radio stations. As it is, they have to operate from the shadows, and everyone loses.

But. Publishing. I said before that the publishing houses are spectacularly inept at their gatekeeping function. Think of the giant sections of ‘Bargain Books’ near the cash registers in every Barnes & Noble. Every one of these books (almost: B&N prints up public-domain texts specifically for this section, too) represents failure on the part of their publishers. The publishers paid an advance to the author and paid the printers to manufacture the books. The books didn’t sell, and so are now remaindered.

They’re remaindered pretty quickly these days, too, thanks to the way unsold inventory is taxed; the publishers can’t profitably just rent a giant cheap warehouse somewhere, and sell the books as they are demanded. So one of their goals is to publish books for which they can predict a strong and immediate demand.

This is very, very difficult. One — and possibly the only — good way of being sure that a book will sell well is to print the words ‘by Tom Clancy’ on the cover. Or ‘by Stephen King’. Or ‘by John Grisham’. Or something similar. These books are profitable.

The trouble is that they’re not profitable for the publishers. What do publishers do? Edit, Manufacture, and Promote. When Tom Clancy walks into the Putnam’s offices, he’s going to drive as hard a bargain as he likes. If he wanted to, he can hire his own editor (for all I know, he’s already done this). His books don’t really need promotion other than a notice to the public that a new Tom Clancy book is available.

There’s no risk in publishing a Tom Clancy novel; all the publishers do for Clancy is arrange for the manufacture and distribution of his books — and I’m sure that they get only enough margin to allow them to not lose too much money on the deal.

The movie business is in a similar situation. Sure, putting Tom Hanks’ name on the poster will guarantee you’ll sell a whole lot of tickets; but Tom Hanks gets paid so much that all those tickets make very little for the producers. (This is why movies with Tom Hanks in them these days generally are Produced By Tom Hanks.) The blockbuster is a terrible bargain for the publisher, no matter what the medium.

The money comes from the mid-list and the unexpected runaway first-novel. The ideal situation, for a publisher, is to sign up an unknown author on favorable terms, and then to have that author’s book picked for the Oprah Book Club. This does not happen very often.

So what’s going to happen? Presumably, some of these unknown novelists will choose to not take the small advance from the publishers and will instead self-publish as a Kindle book on Amazon. Some of these novels will be very good.

But they’ll be lost among all the trash, the modern-day equivalents of One-Sixth Of The World’s Surface, things that make reasonably good websites — the vanity-publishing business has got to have taken a big hit from the rise of the web — but not very good books. Where’s the filter? I’m not going to read the first chapter of all of these things to figure out which ones are good and which ones are yet another internal monologue of a lower-middle-class college girl insecure about her looks and position in society.

As self-publishing rises in volume and diminishes in stigma, the imprimatur of a publishing house will count for more and more. It could be that self-publishing (or its effective equivalent, anyway) is just what the publishers need.

Network Capabilites

I only touched on this in the earlier post, and I think that that was a mistake. As an e-book reader, the Kindle doesn’t have any serious flaws that are not purely the result of the state of the available technology (That is: an e-book reader needs a bigger, higher-contrast, higher-resolution, color-capable screen before it’s no-excuses mainstream acceptance. These don’t exist as production models yet).

The most important thing about the Kindle, by far, is that it has a self-contained Internet connection that is totally transparent to the user. By ‘totally transparent’, I mean totally. Setting up EVDO on my Macbook Pro is pretty easy: it only involves plugging in the EVDO gadget and paying a monthly bill. That’s all. Apple has made this very simple by including all the necessary software in the base OS install.

But it’s not totally transparent; I still have to buy the EVDO thingummy and plug it in; it’s a capability that I add to the computer, and that I pay for when the bill comes every month. It’s easy, but not invisible, and software cannot be written that counts on that network connection always being there the way that software for, say, the iPhone can generally assume that there’s a network connection. The iPhone’s whole purpose is as a communications device, though, and it comes with a monthly bill.

The Kindle’s network connection is totally invisible, and peripheral to the device’s main purpose. The device itself is a bit more expensive than it would otherwise be, and it’s tied into a service that tries to produce an ongoing revenue stream, and it’s produced by a company with very deep pockets. But I think it has huge potential for the future of gadgets; until now, using a gadget that did anything at all over the Internet required that you already have a home network. It’s easy to forget this at Tino Manor, but most people don’t have a home network.

Imagine what this makes possible:

• A camera sold by Flickr (or someone similar; an online photo service in any case) that automatically uploads all of your photos to the website immediately. To make them public, you just press a button on the back of the camera. Press another button on the camera, and a printed copy shows up in the mail. My dad cannot figure out how to use his computer, and so his digital camera largely gathers dust. Pushing buttons on a specialized device, though, he can do.

• A computer that’s accessible for remote administration no matter the state of the network it’s plugged into. This would help me out a lot when my dad does poke at the computer and screws something up. This would be something like Back To My Mac, but because the manufacturer could control the network, it would actually work.

• Tivo. Currently, if you have your TiVo hooked up right, you can program it remotely. Hooking the thing up right is a pain in the ass for most people, so this is a marginal feature. With self-contained EVDO, though, every single TiVo in the world would do this.

• HVAC. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to set your thermostat remotely, or to be able to program different behaviors for different times without fiddling around in the ill-lit hallway with those tiny buttons? You can, for about $600 and a lot of screwing around. Or Carrier could start to build a self-contained network connection into their furnaces: as an added benefit, it would alert them when something was wrong with the system, so they could send out a repairman. You’d probably be able to save enough in heating and cooling costs to pay for any increased cost.

There are a million other possibilities. The important distinction is that these connections would be an integral part of the device rather than an added and optional service. There would be nothing to manage, and no bills to pay: the bills would be paid by the manufacturer, as part of the cost of producing the product in the first place. Since most devices would use the network connection only sporadically, and would transmit only very small amounts of data (EVDO is lousy for upstream traffic; you couldn’t stream your TiVo’s content over such a connection, for instance), the cost would be minimal. We tend to think of wide-area connectivity as something that’s added on, and that has to be managed by the user. If that’s not the case — and the Kindle shows that it doesn’t need to be — there are a lot of new possibilities.