DVDxR/blog

I’m not sure how one company can manage to spin me on an emotional roller coaster, but Apple really seems adept at it. First today they announce iTunes 9 and the ability to arrange apps on the iPhone and the Touch. FINALLY!! WOOHOO! Queue the fireworks and ticker-tape. Then they announce the new Nano. Now, I have a 2nd Gen nano and really love it. I think it is probably the best iPod out there. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my 2nd gen Touch and am addicted to my iPhone, but the Nano form factor and feature set make it, IMHO, the best portable digital music player out there. And with the exception of it’s fat phase (3rd gen, wtf where the thinking?!) it’s evolved quite nicely. So the announce the new features, camera (vid only, why?), pedometer, etc. Then the kick in the nuts. It’s getting an FM radio tuner!

WHY THE HELL CAN’T I HAVE THAT IN MY FUCKING FLAGSHIP iPHONE 3Gs!??!?

The FM tuner in my Zune was one of my favorite features of the device. There are times that I do want to listen to a local FM station for a morning show or a just because I really like their play-lists. The truly annoying bit about this is that we know the iPhone contains the hardware already! The Broadcom BCM4325 chip it uses for WiFi and Bluetooth contains an FM tuner.  All they have to do is TURN IT ON.

Oh, and to give it just that extra twist to the nutz, it can pause and buffer FM as well.  Something the Zune really needed the ability to do.  Hopefully with the prospect of revenue from iTunes tagging (yea, it does that too) they will enable it in a future update.  Grrrrrr…

A thought occurred to me the other day.  Who really, in their job, needs a word processor?  Most of my users just use it to make documents and shove them on a file share to be forgotten.  These docs almost always contain information that, really, would be better stored in either an online document system or via email.  Think of it this way: You wake up in an alternate universe.  This universe is just like ours except for one tiny difference: The word processor, for whatever reason, was never invented.  Instead, for formal documents they use a….typewriter.  Really.  Or a typesetter for big stuff.  Anyway, you go to work and look at your alternate universe desk.  Now ask yourself, would that desk contain a typewriter?

I’ll bet your answer would be no (nostalgia “old school!” answers don’t count).  More than likely you would use email or use an online knowledge base or document system.  What got me thinking about this was Google Wave and the thought of integrating everything into a hybrid, web based communication system.   Foget document types, concentrate more on document content.  You enter it, drop it into an search indexed public or private folder. Want to email it, click email and email headers appear.  Sending it internal, it just links to the document in the folder instead of generating 5000000000 copies of it, since you, of course, hit reply-to-all.

OK, ramble over

I’m not going to lie about it: I’ve always been an IE guy. I switched from Netscape back when IE 4 came out and never really looked back. Sure, I’ve tried others but never really saw enough to make me want to switch. When IE 7 was released with tabs (finally!) I thought I’d never stray.

Then came Vista. Again, I’m not going to lie: IE 7 under Vista blows. The crashes are annoying enough (at least twice a day) but the pauses! The pauses are driving me insane! It’ll just sit there, spinning it’s wheels for no apparent reason for up to a minute at a time. I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been patient. I started using Vista at home when it was RTM back in November of 2006 (several months before it’s early 2007 public debut.) I suffered through the nVidia driver blues and the bizarre software incompatibilities. I even put up with the UAC. Well, for about two days but hey, that’s a long time! I’ve even resigned myself to work around the file copy issues until they can fix them (robocopy to the rescue!) I tried every fix out there for the IE issues, but even with a clean install on a 4-core opteron (2x dual core) workstation with 3 gigs of RAM and a kick ass video card, it still took coffee breaks on nearly every page load, new tab, or refresh. Did my damn browser join a union?!

It’s been over a year now, and still IE 7 freezes up and, well, I’ve had it. On a lark I installed Safari and I have to say, I really like it. To understand why, we have to go back to the release of IE 4. Before IE 4 I used Netscape, and before that Mosaic. Back then Netscape made what I believe was a fatal move: they started to bloat their browser into what would become Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t a web browser anymore. It was a news reader, an email client, a webpage editor, it sliced, it diced, and it did it all rather poorly. At the same time, IE was, for the most part, going the other way and staying focused on being a web browser. That was the reason I moved to IE then and it is the reason I’m moving to Safari now. Safari doesn’t try to be what it’s not. It’s a browser, plain, simple, and fast. Most important it does what IE 7 can’t: it performs well under Vista.

So Microsoft has not only managed to drive me crazy with what is quickly turning into Windows ME 2.0, they have driven me into the arms of another browser. Microsoft should count themselves lucky that I can’t (legally) go out and install OS X on any old PC, or it’s quite possible IE wouldn’t be the only MS technology I’d be breaking up with right now…

Cranky Geek John C. Dvorak has [finally] joined Twitter.  Is this a sign of the end times or another sign of Twitter’s growing popularity?

You can follow him at http://twitter.com//therealdvorak

…to be posting about my cool new Nokia N95 that arrived Friday.  Hoped.  Unfortunately FexEx had other ideas. Seems that the phone came Signature Required on their ground service.  Since their ground service packages don’t go “back to station” I couldn’t run by afterwork and pick it up.  So my new phone is spending it’s weekend in the back of parked FedEx Ground truck, and I’m cranky. 

This is all Scoble’s fault. His cool Qik videos pushed me over the edge in buying the N95.  The specs on the phone are insane, and the software available for it just make it an unbelievable device.  Guess I’ll post more about it on Monday.  Either that or I’ll be on the news as the insane guy chasing a FedEx truck! In the mean time check out Qik.com at www.qik.com