Skype for iPad as Business App of the Year? Puhleeze.
The folks over at IT Pro had their IT Pro Awards 2011 recently. They awarded a few different honours. Some innovative, others pretty predictable. I struggle to care that Microsoft won "Vendor of the Year"? What does that even mean? And if it's a category that Microsoft won, who else even had a chance of winning it? Oracle? IBM? HP? And those are 4 of the biggest anyways, so it's not like this award will create some new recognition or awareness of a vendor.
The only thing I think awards are useful for is if you understand why they are awarded. What did candidate A have that candidate B did not? The IT Pro awards appear to be a simple popularity contest. That is, random web site visitors had a set of candidates to choose from, and they chose for whatever reason. If the candidates were judged on criteria (e.g., originality, fitness for purpose, reliability, value for money) I would love to see how the winners (and losers) scored. But these awards are meaningless. There's no judging. Just popularity of clicks.
iPad with a Bluetooth Keyboard
I just got a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, and I have to say it makes the iPad much more functional as a laptop replacement. Its rather generically named the Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad
Here are some specific limitations.
- There are no keyboard shortcuts for doing things. For example, in mail there is no way to do new message (at least that Ive found). Likewise there is no way to send. I can start typing a persons name and I will get a list of possible completions. There is no way to say yes, thats the one, without touching the screen—even if there is only one possible completion.
- Things like Cmd-Tab ought to bring up the running apps, like double-tapping the home button does. Interestingly, double-tapping the home button on the bluetooth keyboard works the same as double-tapping the home button on the device. But, there is no keyboard based navigation (e.g., arrow keys dont do anything.)
- This keyboard has a magnifying glass key that jumps you to the search feature. I like that, but then I type a search term like word (to find wordpress) and Im back to no navigation. I can see wordpress in my search results but I have no way to get my cursor down from the searching box into the results and then hit enter to activate wordpress.
On the plus side, it acts very much like a real keyboard on a real workstation. For example, Ive just bought a US-layout keyboard and Ive hooked it up to my UK-localised iPad
Also on the plus side, iOS seems to realise that I have an external keyboard, so it doesnt take up half the screen with a visual one. I can bring up the visual keyboard on the screen if I want to (doesnt make much sense), but its smart in that regard.
The particular keyboard I got also comes with a case that turns into a stand. I like that stand quite a bit, because I have bought an after-market sleeve for my iPad. My sleeve (from TeckNet) is a fair bit thicker than the usual Apple cover (and it cost £10 instead of £60). The stand from the keyboard works well, though.
Im interested to see how well this will hold up on a train, where it is quite bumpy. Sitting on a table, its brilliant.
Apple accessibility gimmick on iPhone 4
High contrast settings
I'm not sure if this is a feature of the phone or the OS. Either way, Apple's attempt at "high contrast" or "white on black" is a complete joke. I find it dubious that it makes much easier to read. It's a silly trick from Graphics 101, trumped up like a feature.
If you turn on "white on black," they do a really stupid inversion of the palette. Sure, white becomes black, but purple becomes green, orange becomes blue, and all the other colors change, too.
In the settings page, you get white text on black background. In mail you get white text on a black background. OmniFocus looked pretty good. I played with it for a little while and thought "maybe I could get used to this." But then I discovered a few colossal screw-ups.
For example, I normally use one of their very dark backgrounds for my wallpaper. The phone is already smart enough to use white text in front of this background. When I activate "white on black," I get an inversion. The background becomes light and the text dark! That is, I have "black on white" when I asked for "white on black"!
Inverted home screen
And the screen inversion is complete. It is everywhere. Activate the camera and you see an inverted picture! Who on earth wants that!? And with the high-contrast turned on, you don't get what you see on the screen (thank goodness, in that sense). You get a normal picture captured by the phone. But I tried to capture a picture of my home screen, to attach to this blog post, and it actually captured the correct colors, not the inverted ones, when I did a screen capture. That surprised me.
I think the main reasons I am so bothered by this are:
- This does not change the contrast. According to the dictionary distributed with MacOS X, contrast is "the degree of difference between tones in a television picture, photograph, or other image". If you invert the picture, you haven't changed the degree of difference in the tones. Blue is no farther from orange than orange is from blue. If the screen or an application had poor contrast before, it still has poor contrast after inverting it. If they increased the tonal difference, that would be something else, but this is just a gimmick. Notice that you never see Apple display an example of their high contrast feature, except the settings screen itself. There's a good reason.
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View through an inverted camera
It is phenomenally idiotic to apply this inversion across every single app. I have no easy way to turn it on and off selectively. It's not like "push notifications" where I can say "this app: yes, that app: no." It's either on 100% all the time, or not on at all. I don't want to play games with inverted color, use FaceTime with inverted color, edit movies with inverted color, or half the stuff that the phone is capable of.
- They called this "accessibility," but I don't see how it actually makes anything more accessible. Sure, white text on a black background is often easier to read, but they don't ensure that you get white on black. As I showed, my text actually was white on black before I activated this feature, and then it became black on white.
With so many really well-done features, did Apple really need this stupid gimmick? Of all the phones in the world that support accessibility, the iPhone has some impressive claims (support for braille displays, reading out text, zoom, etc.). Did they need this to make their accessibility seem real?
I'm always looking for ways to get white on black, because it is easier on the eyes and easier to read. This was just a frustrating joke. I hope, in the future, it becomes an option that programmers can latch onto the way they do with push notifications. That is, they can signal to the OS "I'm an app capable of high contrast" or that they can ask the OS "has the user selected high contrast?" and then choose an appropriate palette.
Funny math, microwaves, and user interface
I've been contemplating the math that my microwave uses. It's kinda weird. If you forget that it works on time values instead of regular integers, you can get some surprising responses.
My microwave oven is digital, so I enter a set of numbers to indicate the cooking time. I'm not sure if all microwaves are like mine, but mine will accept integer values that are not logical clock values. I can enter, for example, 75, and it will run for 75 seconds. If you forget, for an instant, that you're dealing with clock values, the inputs and outputs (what you type and how long it runs) can seem pretty weird.
T-Mobile USB Broadband for Mac: Worst Mac App Evar
I'm in the UK for a couple weeks, so I got a T-Mobile GSM Broadband adapter. (This is the one from ZTE, by the way, apparently they offer several). Rather than hook into the OS in a nice, neat way, they include their own crapware that you have to install. Danger: If you install the software on Snow Leopard, it will ruin your OS and make your system unable to boot. Read on.