leŭksman

Hey there my San Francisco buddies, and farther-away buddies who might be willing to pay shipping!

It’s laptop shuffle time at the Vibber house… I’m replacing my MacBook Air as my mobile & webdev machine and am looking for a good home for it… For just US$1150, you can become this ultra-thin laptop’s sponsor. All it needs is a place to plug in and a good meal of electrons every day, and it’ll be your best travel buddy!

I’ve used the box for MediaWiki and StatusNet development, general web surfing, and a little light gaming. Memory and disk performance are a bit tight for a really hardcore workstation (I wouldn’t use it as a mobile video editing studio, that’s for sure!) but it’s perfect for mobile webdev/notes/surfing/skyping and beats the pants off any netbook I’ve tried.

This machine has been to such exotic locales as:

• San Francisco!
• Orlando!
• Paris!
• Montreal!
• Los Angeles!
• Seattle!
• Berlin!

Purchased from Apple as a refurb in September 2009 with 1 year “like new” warranty — it’s still eligible for purchase of a 2-year AppleCare warranty extension, if that sort of thing floats your boat. Apple still lists this model (full specs) at the refurb price of $1349 that I paid; specs are about the same as the current $1499 base-model MacBook Air but with the 128GB SSD drive.

Machine shipped with Mac OS X 10.5 and a 10.6 install disc; I’ve wiped the drive and put on a fresh install of 10.6. Accessories included: 45W power brick, US 2-prong plug and 3-prong plug w/ extension cord; USB ethernet adapter. Note that VGA and DVI adapters are not included; like other current Apple models it has a native Mini DisplayPort connector and needs an adapter for pretty much any external monitor.

Why I’d recommend it: compared to a netbook, the Air is much more powerful and has a keyboard that won’t hurt your hands. Compared to an iPad, the Air actually can run arbitrary programs and be used for software development. Compared to other full-size laptops, it’s delightfully thin and light, which your shoulders and back will appreciate if you need to travel regularly or cart it to the office on public transit.

Why I’m replacing it: I’ve picked up a MacBook Pro 13″ (same form factor & screen size, but 1kg heavier) primarily for the huge increases in battery life in the last couple product generations. I prefer the lighter weight, but I have a lot of long-distance travel this year and a battery that can actually last me through a cross-country flight or a full day of conferencing is going to serve me better right now… I just have to be really hardcore about keeping extra crap out of my bag!

The good: thin, light, and beautiful! At just 3 pounds, this thing is a joy to carry around when traveling; it really does make a difference to my back. CPU/gfx performance are decent enough for light webdev and a little gaming.

The bad: SSD disk performance is relatively sluggish, which may be painful if you do a lot of compiling. Running heavy CPU for a while can lead to the machine slowing itself down to stay cool. Battery life is similar to the previous generation of MacBooks (theoretically 4-5 hours; I get 2-3 hours of real usage).

The annoying: 2GB RAM is adequate for most needs but cannot be upgraded; folks working with virtual machines will find this awkward. Single USB port can be overly confining when traveling, especially if you need to use the USB ethernet dongle at the same time as anything else. No built-in CD/DVD drive may be a problem for some uses (remote disc is supported if you have another Windows or Mac machine with a CD drive, but has limitations. External USB drives will work, but be warned that Apple’s $99 Air-branded external drive does not work with USB hubs — it must be plugged directly into the Air’s single USB port, leaving you unable to use a USB keyboard, mouse, hard drive, Ethernet adaptor, or iPod.)

If interested, drop me a line. If there’s no excitement it’ll end up on eBay.

Today’s personal computers basically run two distinct operating systems: the native host OS (Windows/Mac/Linux or iPhone/Android/etc) and the web.

Web apps have solved all kinds of problems that are still poorly handled by most native systems: apps automatically update every time you use them, they manage their own library dependencies, there’s a security sandbox that lets you run pretty much anything without concern that it’s going to eat your system (unless your browser is buggy!)

Let’s face it: most of us probably spend a lot of our time in the web, and even if they’re not doing everything that’s where a lot of action is. Some folks have used this as a sort of excuse for the extreme control some platforms exercise over software publishers – “don’t like the rules? Make a web app, you can do anything!” 

But web apps are still much more limited in some areas. Access to hardware is rare (cameras, audio recording, scanners, attached storage). Communication between apps is greatly complicated by that sandbox, and shared data on the host machine like contact lists and photo archives may be completely inaccessible without a host-specific shim. (Most impressive thing I’ve seen is a bank web site that did deposit via scanned check image, using a signed Java applet to hook into native scanner support. It only worked on Windows, alas.) Background processing is very limited, and most web apps give up on directly notifying you of new activity and just send you email, hoping you’ve got something else that’ll tell you there’s new mail.

There’s a lot of great activity going on in and around HTML5 these days that’s getting better graphics support, faster code execution, etc. But the things that really bring the web native are going to be about access to shared hardware and data resources.

Some good things have been coming in such as touch and orientation events in Mobile Safari, but there’s a long way to go. My pet peeve: I find it pretty surprising that HTML file upload controls don’t trigger something useful like the camera roll on the iPhone/iPad or the Android browser. I can’t believe nobody has thought of this, so I’ll assume for now that the various browser folks just ain’t gotten to it yet… Anybody feel like starting on patches for Android’s Browser and the mobile branch of Firefox?

So while fiddling around with the iPad I picked up for testing, I thought “hey self, this would be a great platform for an exploration/adventure game like the classic 1993 CD-ROM game Myst!”

To my great pleasure, i discovered that Cyan released a iPhone/iPod Touch version of the original Myst last year, which also runs quite nicely on the newer iPad.

The game features a richly detailed CG-rendered environment (all pre-rendered graphics thanks to 1993′s paltry CPU horsepower), where you wander around trying to piece together the history of a family power struggle that has trapped the denizens of a world where writing can literally create new universes.

Back in the 90s, the graphics, videos, and music filled an entire CD to the brim; the iPhone version weighs in at a similar 540 megabytes or so, which by today’s standards is a reasonable download.

The still graphics have been slightly rescaled from the Mac SE-friendly 512×384 or so down to 480×320, but appear to be from true color originals rather than the dithered 256-color versions of yore. Some screens have been further zoomed in to make small touch targets more accessible, but I still find it a bit awkward on an iPhone.

In pixel-doubled mode on the iPad, everything looks great and navigating by touch is a joy; the cleaner true color images outweigh the slight resolution loss for me, and it’s just the right size to go pushing things on.

My one big wish might be for an integrated note-taking feature. (Some of the later games in the series actually added a screen-shot feature, presented in-game as a camera!) On a 1990s desktop computer I could easily keep my notes on paper, but a portable tablet cries out for taking the notes on the tablet too, so they’re with me whenever I feel like poking at the game for a few minutes. Fortunately the game is great about saving and restoring state automatically, and starts up in just a couple seconds, so switching between the game and Notes or Photos isn’t too unpleasant. (Better multitasking on the system could help here too by keeping state live while you’re away in your notes.)

I would really love to see Myst’s sequels brought to tablets like the iPad natively; the higher-resolution graphics in Riven would look *fantastic*, and the iPad should have enough horsepower to handle the fancier video and panoramic effects in Mysts III and IV. I still need to finish IV and play V though…

Probably the biggest obstacle to the later games is storage space. Pre-rendering graphics from every possible view position and direction let them have visuals years ahead of their time, but at a huge cost in disk space. Riven should be tractable, but full downloads could run many gigabytes for the later games, which spanned multiple DVDs!

Summary:

• Game:Myst for iPhone
• Genre: graphical adventure/exploration/puzzle
• Platform: iPhone OS (low resolution)
• Cost: $4.99
• Awesome factor: pretty awesome
• Nostalgia factor: pretty big but not overwhelming the awesome
• Recommend? yes!

Note: typing html tags manually on the iPad keyboard is pretty awful, as letters, slash, and angle brackets are all on different screens. I’d really appreciate working rich text editing in Mobile Safari!

Good news 1: AT&T is exchanging their ‘unlimited’ $30/month iPhone data plan for a $15 200 MB/month and $25 2GB/month plan, with relatively sane overage handling.

This is good because AT&T’s been blaming a lot of its woes on out-of-control data usage by iPhone users exceeding their network capacity in the most crowded markets. If they’re actually charging based on usage, the incentive structure changes from them wanting to minimize our data usage [pushing costs down] to wanting to make it as attractive as possible to actually use the network [pushing revenue up, rewarding infrastructure buildout].

That means AT&T is more likely to give people things they want, and I can’t say a bad thing about that.

Good news 2: AT&T will finally start offering iPhone tethering (11 months behind schedule) for an extra $20/month on top of the 2 GB/month plan.

Adding tethering is a must for AT&T as the US exclusive iPhone carrier to compete with Android phones, which can already tether on any network without jailbreaking and will soon have the feature officially in the OS.

These exclusive carrier agreements are horrible for consumers; it took this long for a competing phone to catch up enough to actually push AT&T into action. If we’d instead had an open phone market, so you could buy any phone and use it on any network, we’d have had somebody offering official consumer-friendly tethering the second the iPhone 3Gs was announced.

Bad news: That $20/month doesn’t actually get you anything real — you have the same 2 GB limit that you’re already paying for, but you’re more likely to reach or exceed the limit. If the issue is data limits, why do I need to pay extra to NOT get a bigger limit? This is particularly silly if customers can tether for free on any other network, or on the same network with any other phone, or on the same network with the same phone if they jailbreak the software. Hello?

But let’s give AT&T props for baby steps — they’ve already been offering similar smartphone tethering plans that don’t add anything to your data caps for their other smartphones, so that’s what they know.

What it probably does for me is to make me feel less guilty about considering getting the poorly-advertised unlimited international smartphone data plan ‘without tethering’ and then using tethering anyway on my Android-based Nexus One. It’s enough money that I’d feel like I’m paying for my US tethering during the months that I don’t have any international travel.

I’ve been an iPhone user for two years, on both the original Edge-only model and the much snappier iPhone 3Gs that came out last year. This has mostly been a great experience, but there are a few things that bug the heck out of me and I’ve been looking around to see what’s on the other side of the fence.

I also need to be able to make and test software for Android phones, so when I saw there was an AT&T-compatible version available it was easy to talk myself into picking up Google’s officially-branded Nexus One, made by HTC.

After a couple of weeks of using it off and on, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I like, what I don’t like, and what I’m looking forward to in the future. Unfortunately, it’s a mixed bag; I’m still recommending the iPhone to family and friends unless I know they need/want the geek-friendly features.

Some of my initial impressions of high and low points…

The good

The Nexus One’s high-resolution screen makes for visibly sharper text, and the dark blacks and bright colors make a good first impression. The next-generation iPhone is rumored to match or beat this, but isn’t yet solid.

For the geeks: Android allows you to install applications without hoping that a single company (who may be a competitor) approves them for distribution. This is kind of nice, and means I can actually use the phone for what I bought it for without having to subvert the operating system. Within an hour of opening the box, I’d installed a third-party app that enabled basic tethering (using the phone’s 3g connection to provide internet for a computer). iPhone has this feature, but AT&T disables it and Apple doesn’t allow distribution of 3rd-party apps that re-enable it.

Third-party apps on Android can also run in the background, which is great for running, say, internet radio (Pandora!). This will eventually come to the iPhone with OS 4.0, but it’s not there yet.

I’m a bit undecided on the Android “hardware buttons”: back, menu, home, and search (versus the iPhone’s single home button). While I think they make the interface more complicated, they do free up screen space that on the iPhone tends to be used for toolbars and navigation.

The combination of better multitasking and a system-wide ‘back’ navigation key does enable something very nice, though. A lot of iPhone apps have ended up implementing their own mini-web browsers so you can read links while the app can still run, downloading your RSS feeds or updating your Facetweets. This fragments your browser history, caches, bookmarks, settings, etc… Android apps just send you over to the regular Browser application, and you can pop back by hitting ‘back’.

The bad

The two biggest drags on the Nexus One are performance and display quality. Everything feels sluggish; simple actions like scrolling through a list or web page are visibly jerky (see slo-mo comparison video) and just can’t keep up with your finger. On a device with twice the processor speed and four times the RAM of the 2007 iPhone this is unforgivably bad, and it makes everything feel slow and unresponsive.

Updating to the new Android 2.2 (“Fro-yo” release) is rumored to improve responsiveness; it’s still slow in the SDK emulator, but when it comes in through the standard update channel I’ll poke around at it on the real phone.

The otherwise-lovely screen is illegible in bright sunlight — whereas the iPhone is just fine in my experience — and suffers from bad color banding visible on photos and gradients. It’s kinda like jumping back to 1994, when we didn’t have enough video RAM to run 24-bit color beyond 640×480. Seriously, guys?

Another huge annoyance is the way storage is split up: you can upgrade general storage from the default 4GB by swapping out a micro-SD card, but the operating system and all applications have to squeeze into a paltry 512MB. I have individual games larger than that on my iPhone! The latest OS upgrade is supposed to add the ability to install apps onto the SD card, so this may become less of an issue in the future.

I’ve also found myself hitting the ‘hardware keys’ by accident while typing. They’re flush with the touchscreen, with “menu” and “home” placed smack under the on-screen spacebar. It’s pretty common for me to accidentally go back to the home screen twice while composing a comment to post on identi.ca. Ouch!

More generally, I’ve been pretty frustrated with some of the built-in apps. Android’s Clock app doesn’t include a timer countdown, which is the thing I use most frequently on the iPhone’s Clock — cooking, laundry, stretch breaks, time to go pick up the sushi order… Another top app for me is Notes, which holds a lot of grocery lists. For both of these I was able to find rough equivalents in the Market as third-party apps, but the search interface is pretty poor, and I’m still not sure I like the apps I’ve ended up with.

The rest

For the most part, the iPhone and Android platforms are pretty similar from a user’s perspective. I still think the iPhone provides a better overall user experience, but Android’s moving fast too, and has a leg up in some areas.

If availability of particular features or applications is a make-or-break, then pick the one that does what you need — overall app (and game) selection seems better on iPhone, but some features just aren’t there. If you’ve got a strong ideological position that centralized control over what you can do with a device you own is A Very Bad Thing, you’ll be happier with the N1 but will have to put up with some annoyances.

Or if you’re a supernerd like me, well you know you’re just going to buy both.

Disclaimer: I know the author personally, which may mean I’m biased in favor of awesomeness.

Just finished up Feed, the first volume of Mira Grant’s epic zombie trilogy Newsflesh. If the words “epic zombie trilogy” put you off, you would do well to take a second look — this isn’t a horror hack-n-slash as much as it is a science-fiction political thriller, set in a near-future world transformed by 25 years of dealing with an infection that kills in minutes, then keeps the bodies moving to attack the living…

I grew up reading the science fiction classics: Asimov, Heinlein, Farmer, Niven, McAffrey… What always kept me reading late at night, eyes wide open, was their ability to craft a detailed world, working out the consequences of the big What If, and then tell a great story in it. Grant doesn’t disappoint; her post-Rising world is rich, weaving a gripping story from the societal consequences of a planet that has become quite legitimately paranoid.

Everything from home life to politics to the news and social interaction has been affected… after all, how wouldn’t a world where the dead attack the living be different? Where school safety is about keeping the children from gnawing each others’ faces off? Where it’s illegal to go outside the city without a weapon, or to come back in without uploading your blood test results to the CDC?

Most people stray from their homes as little as possible; online social networks have replaced most “in the flesh” socialization. Blogging, journalism, and reality television have merged as thrill-seekers risk their lives going outside to get the stories… or if they’re unlucky, to become them.

We dive into this world through the eyes of sibling internet journalists Georgia and Shaun Mason. Embedded with Senator Peter Ryman’s 2040 presidential campaign team on a dangerously old-fashioned nationwide tour, what could the Masons possibly uncover that’s more horrifying than the world they already live in?

Pick up a copy of Feed and you’ll find out… if you dare!

You may also enjoy…

If urban fantasy detective mysteries are more your speed, give the October Daye series a try, penned under Grant’s mundane name of Seanan McGuire.

Born to a Fey mother and human father, changeling Toby Daye always seems to end up getting the short end of both sticks. A former private detective trying to lay low after a particularly unpleasant magical transformation, she finds herself drawn back into the tricky — and deadly — games of Fairie politics in San Francisco, where murder spans two worlds…

A year ago today, I got married to an awesome lady who loves and accepts me, who’s been my amazing partner through all the good times and bad in the last three years. Marti, you rock!

Man, I’ve been neglecting my regular blog lately.

Coming soon: MOBILE MADNESS!

• Heads-up on StatusNet’s upcoming desktop and mobile clients
• iPad review
• Nexus One / Android 2.1 review
• Where’s that damn roaming plan, anyway?

Ok, now this is just confusing:

By now, most of you have probably seen or heard about Apple iPhone SDK 4.0 and a little hidden gem in their freshly minted 4.0 Terms of Services, notably 3.3.1:

“Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.”

It’s clear that products like Titanium, Unity3D, Ansca, MonoTouch and others are now a bit in question for iPhone 4.0+ with this language. We’re all trying to get our heads around what this means and trying to reach out to Apple to get clarification.

I called up Apple to ask for details about how this affects Appcelerator & Unity3d as particular examples that I’d been planning to use for games and utilities, and whether I can get a refund for my program fees if I were to not accept the updated agreement.

The rep was very pleasant and polite and took my information to escalate the question; the CSRs of course don’t have immediate answers for this. I was told someone should get back to me within 24 hours.

If y’all also call, please above all be polite — customer service reps are real people too, and they didn’t write the agreement! Be polite, accept being on hold gracefully, let them know how this would affect your future development plans, and be specific about what questions you’re asking and what answers you need.

Ever notice that HTTP status codes and North American telephone area codes both have three digits?

Click to zoom!