Unlike the rest of the internet which prefers ‘reviews’ of items based on their flash factor and the impression ‘journalists’ got of them by playing with them for a week, I am a bit old-fashioned and appreciate comments which stem from continues usage of things. And thus comes a second look at my Motorola Motofone F3 after having used it for a year.
Points that come to mind are:
- Unsurprisingly the phone didn’t gain any features in the year. It remains a very simple and limited device.
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I found the voice quality of phone calls good enough. In fact, it usually seemed better than on the phones of other people I used.
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Battery life started at a bit above a week when the phone was new and dropped a bit below a week after a while just to go back to a bit above a week recently. Those times are for use in Göttingen which probably means little to no excitement for the phone in terms of contacting new base stations. Something like a weekend trip to Berlin with a train ride and above-average usage of the phone didn’t really seem to make a difference to the battery life. Being in South Africa, with more moving around and – I suppose – weaker network coverage, drained the battery much more quickly, within four or five days, though.
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It’s annoying that the phone loses the date and time when the battery runs out or is removed.
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The loss of date and time is even more of a practical problem as dropping the phone on a hard floor usually means that it will open and the battery will come out.
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I never wrap the phone and just throw it in the backpack, yet it is essentially unscratched after a year of that. Pockets were shared with coins and keys as well to no detrimental effect.
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I am still not sure about what happens when the memory for received SMS messages (10) is full. The manual seems to claim the oldest message is deleted to make space for the newest one, but my impression is that an envelope symbol appears at the top of the screen and no new messages are received until you delete some of the old ones. Not that great, IMO, particularly as deleting a message is rather laborious unless you do it right after having read it.
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The first major annoyance with the device is its sluggishness. If the phone reacted to my keypresses a bit more promptly the experience would be significantly better.
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The second major annoyance is the keyboard. It’s feel is actually all right. But when pressing keys quickly – say when having to hit the ‘7’ key four times to ‘type’ an ‘S’ in a SMS – frequently one of the presses doesn’t register. I keep having the impression that this isn’t a hardware problem (the ‘feel’ of having pressed the key is OK) but rather another aspect of the software being sub-par and failing to keep up with my tremendous finger moving speed.
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Another slightly annoying quirkiness is what happens when you press and hold keys while entering things. Not only is this required to get a ‘+’ sign, but the original letter will appear when you press the key, the ‘cursor’ will move forward to the next position and then, after a second of holding or so, the character to the left of the cursor will change to the desired symbol. This still irritates me every single time as the advancing of the cursor always suggests to me that input has finished (and that I accidentally slipped off the key), and thus I’ll release the key too early, delete the wrong letter and try again. – Needlessly.
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The phone’s alarm is loud and works well.
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The phone’s ringing is too quiet and the vibrating is too weak. Not that I receive many calls but I miss a good percentage of them. Particularly as I prefer to use the vibrating only to avoid the chance of forgetting to turn the noise off. Even when having the phone in a pocket, I often don’t notice the vibration.
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The phone comes with a single socket for the charger. Apparently a headset can be used with it. Unfortunately that’s not a USB socket so the phone can’t be charged that way.
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A little plastic thing must have broken off inside the phone at some stage. This has no detrimental effects so far – except that shaking the phone now makes a little rattling noise.
In total I think the phone is holding up well. The interaction is tolerable but could be better in a few places, the durability seems quite amazing.
It may be interesting to add two more remarks. The first is that pretty much every single person who saw the phone really liked it at first sight. It’s simple, it’s sleek, it’s no-nonsense. Of course I enjoy pointing out the lack of features to them and some people turn out to be quite feature addicted once they hear that. But still, from the looks people are generally impressed.
And then there’s the obligatory iPhone comparison. As I pointed out the iPhone is not for me. The technology may be interesting but the toy is expensive, bound to break in my hands (as all other Apple products do), and I don’t actually need a mobile phone, so its price along with the hefty subscription fees completely rule it out: I computed my mobile telephony expenses and in the past year I spent around €50. That’s for the whole year, including the cost of the phone and calls in South Africa. With an iPhone people would have to spend that yearly total every month just for the phone contract. And they’d probably not use the phone at all in South Africa because they couldn’t just put in a local SIM card for €2 and would be submitted to the rip-off known as roaming fees instead.
In addition, with a cheap phone like that, I could just leave it in my bag at the beach while going for a swim. Even if it had been stolen it wouldn’t have been a big deal…
[Buy at amazon .com,
.uk,
.de]
1:12
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Germany’s car industry is huge and known world-wide. They suck in bazillions of engineers and Euros to create vehicles with more horsepowers, little gadgety motors in them and kilograms of resources used to build them. Every year they ‘improve’ their vehicles by shaving off a hundredth of a second from the time a skilled driver needs to accelerate to 100km/h and they also manage to push the top speed of their most strongly motorised vehicles higher and higher.
Some of their ‘research’ may actually bring improvements, like reducing road death-toll (around ten per day in Germany) by making their vehicles safer. But mostly the advances made seem to be cosmetic and to be aimed at making the vehicles more ‘appealing’ instead of more useful. After all, nobody is interested in a car that’s efficient and low-maintenance. Too unsexy. Of course – in the twisted sense of capitalism where receiving cash is taken as ‘being right’ – nobody would want to buy reasonable car. It’s all about the experience
– rather than getting from place to place.
As things are in such moronic industries (at least the auto-makers deserve the term ‘industry’, unlike their colleagues from the ‘services sector), they also prefer to use a lot of their customers’ money and waste it on advertising. The result are gazillions of carefully designed brochures which can look very pretty. Nice or bland photos, mingled with marketing gibberish all printed on nice papers – heavy, shiny, or both – with interesting formats, use of materials and so on. Good fun for the people making the brochures, I guess. And of course the ‘brand identity’ is so important that everything is kept in the same style with colours and fonts matching throughout campaigns so you immediately think of the right vehicle when seeing just an aspect of this – Pavlovian drooling if you want.
And then they get some moron to send out their stuff with a cover letter that exhibits all the class Arial and Times can carry. WTF? If they want to transform a transport problem into one of ‘style’, they better do that properly.
18:24
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It looks like Apple didn’t just change their registered name or whatever last year, they also made an effort to copy that change over to as many places as possible. For example to the header of XML format property list files. Old ones will read like this:
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
while current ones read like this:
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
It doesn’t look like this difference is of any practical relevance as both the old and new style properly lists work just fine on my Mac. But seeing the difference made me wonder whether it’s like this ‘by design’ or because Apple parse the files sloppily. If what’s up there in XML files really serves as an identifier, it shouldn’t change or Apple would have to ‘register’ the same format under two names. Which’d seem a bit sloppy.
Would a strict parser bark on this? Unfortunately I couldn’t find a clear answer to that question with a bit of googling. As far as I understand the space between the first ‘//’ and the second ‘//’ is used for the name of the format’s owner. Is that the current owner or rather the owner at the time the format was specified?
On the upside: 9 bytes saved per file! OMG! LOL!
18:59
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… at least I hope that the endless days of grey rainy misery are over now and we’ll keep having sunshine and warmth. Anyway, off we were for a nice barbecque with beef (the making-you-drool nice kind), lamb (marinaded a bit too garlicy) and Göttingens’ finest sausages.
Plus a bit of salad even because – despite my otherwise Fleisch ist mein Gemüse
attitude, I like that as well.
And as an ‘exotic’ dessert there were even marshmallows.
Sickeningly good, I say. Apparently the pack we had was made in Belgium and they had serious problems spelling short and long German words correctly. Uh, and they considered § an appropriate replacement for ß. I think, for a change, we can file that as human rather than technological failure.
12:07
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Unless you own stock in them it’s hard to like the large energy companies. Mainly because it’s simply in their best interest to get people to use more energy and to try getting away with as many emissions (be it carbon dioxide, radiation or simple old pollution). As long as they belive in money and our state does as well, it’s hard to blame them, they’re just making the best of it, right?
So it’s surprising to see a huge energy company make ads on saving energy. It seems they feel a big need to work on their reputation. But, hey, they managed to put the emphasis there on the point that using less energy will save you money. Sure, it does and it won’t hurt if people save energy because of that. But somehow that seems to be missing the point.
This ad just struck me as particularly moronic. And it’s been up there for me to see several times a day for at least a fortnight…
2:05
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Text editors may be the software which bring up the most ‘religious’ arguments in computer users. Once people start caring about text editors at all, they start having very specific ideas about what they need. And we end up with text editors that can do very little as well as text editors that can do everything – and that includes making coffee – with very little in between.
My big problem is that I’m not an emacs person. Yeah that thing is powerful and will probably give all the modifier keys you have a good workout. But I never wanted to deeply learn a text editor, I just wanted to type stuff. I’m not usually fussy when it comes to this and I am perfectly capable of typing an e-mail in Apple’s Mail or a simple text in TextEdit. I won’t need any fancypants features for doing that, so those applications will do. In uncomfortable situations and simple edits I can even deal with pico or vi in the terminal. The latter may be the most user-hostile piece of software ever because it has no quit button but once someone explains you how its two modes work and how to save files and quit, it does the job just fine.
While I haven’t used computers long enough to consider manual work with magnets on metal platters or punching holes text editing, I once had to use edlin on MS-DOS. Which probably was the most horrific text editing experience I ever had.
At some stage, of course, you realise that simple editors may be nice but when you do something like write TeX, HTML or programming languages, a slightly more powerful editor is helpful. First and foremost syntax highlighting helps – and has been around for a long time (on the Mac even with bold face and IIRC non-monospaced fonts in applications like Think Pascal). In a next step there’s highlighting of brackets while you are typing to see whether you balanced things correctly. And, finally, an editor can know more about the language you are typing in and it can offer commands to insert commonly used structures for your convenience. Soon after that people will want to start customising those commands because everybody has a different understanding of ‘commonly used’.
Although I have been a user of the rather extensible Alpha editor on the classic Mac, I never grew quite comfortable with the vast customisability and extensibility. And when switching to OS X I settled for using TeXShop instead. Apple’s developer tools come with their own editor that wasn’t brilliant but did the job (and had a convenient ‘compile’ button right there…) and I can’t even remember what I used for HTML editing right after switching to OS X.
As time went on I stuck to TeXShop – learning to love its lack of progress as well as bugs – but discovered SubEthaEdit (né Hydra) and was rather happy with that (all the Cocoa goodness + command line tool + syntax highlighting + change highlighting + document sharing). Then Coda came along and I started to use that for remote file editing because it’s nice for that and has quite good autocompletion (but with its huge windows and lack of Mac support or command line tool isn’t that great for local editing). Which means that I ended up being a bit screwed because there are just too many text editors on my system – each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses – which I find confusing.
After seeing TextMate’s creator Allan Odgaard speak about TextMate on the C4 video, I at least wanted to know what the fuss is about and thought I’d try TextMate as an editor. From a distance I suspected that TextMate is ‘too emacsish’ to please me. Too many options, too well hidden, too powerful for little Sven. And too much DIY required to get things working ‘just right’.
The suspicion turned out to be essentially right. I don’t think TextMate is a particularly good Mac citizen. Not just because it doesn’t display Finder labels in its file listings (Coda doesn’t do that either, what’s wrong with those text editor makers?), but mainly because it is very keyboard focused. In fact so keyboard focused that I found it rather hard to even find the commands it had. Which to me is a bit like subverting the whole idea of discoverability that gave us graphical user interfaces to begin with.
In my initial struggle several people pointed me to the somewhat amusing – and to the non-initiated non-self-descriptive – ‘Select Bundle Item…’ command. It lets you search through all the commands provided to TextMate by plugins (in a way that’s a bit better than that provided by X.5’s Help Menu). That may be brilliant for long term users but it was rather useless for novices like myself as I didn’t know which commands existed and how they were named. And that menu item is the top-most-, most important-one in the ‘Bundles’ menu (what a name?!).
I also failed to understand why, when editing a TeX document, for example, I always had to navigate into a submenu – of either the ‘Bundles’ menu or a submenu of a menu that appears when clicking a tiny button (about a third as important as setting the ‘Tab Size’ if size is anything to go by) at the bottom of the editor window – just to use a command directly relevant to the mode I am currently working in. For such an essential action this seems overly complicated and inforced the ‘emacsish’ and ‘too keyboard-focused’ impression I had.
I didn’t take notes, so I’m sure I missed a few more points which I sighed about while trying to use the editor, but a few of them stuck anyway: Be it that using italic styling in small font sizes generally is a bad idea if you like things to remain legible. Be it because I thought that the syntax highlighting was a bit slow at times. Be it the inability to mark my changes in a file, the lack of split views, the inability to drag tabs out of a window (or simply the skill to hide those abilities from me). The separate window for the find feature drove me nuts as well as I got addicted to ISIM crack many years ago and Coda luckily went with a similar idea. At the end of the day there are too many things I didn’t like in the editor.
But in a way that’s a shame because TextMate comes with a number of very cool and useful features. While I don’t really approve of it, the customisation certainly is one of them. Particularly because it is reasonably easy to add your own commands to those already defined by the application and its plugins – even I could do it. Neither the process nor result were particularly pretty but it did the job.
Then, the code folding is certainly a nice thing to have. I don’t think I would use it frequently but sometimes it’s very handy. The same holds for the editor’s ability to keep a clipboard history for you. The lack of speed in syntax highlighting I perceived certainly came with the advantage of giving good results. A particularly good use of that is the highlighting of wrong quote usage in LaTeX mode:
Nanny-text editor, perhaps, but useful nonetheless and quite precise as well. The next thing worth mentioning is autocompletion which has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve. One is mapping the autocompletion keystroke to the escape key (rather than option-escape or F5, the two usual combinations which are pretty inconvenient on a laptop keyboard). While not as fancy as Coda’s autocompletions which pop up in a menu, TextMate just cycles through the available options and provides the shift-escape key combination for cycling backwards. In practice I found or at least perceived this as faster and more convenient than using a menu. The autocompletion seems to work based on the context you are in and it worked quite well for me as long as I wanted to complete terms without a hyphen or so in them.
But there are also more advanced things which I’d call ‘completions’ in some sense. At a basic level, typing something like a { will automatically insert a } for you. Many editors do that these days which is sometimes great and at other times infuriating. But TextMate has some extra smarts up its sleeves. For example when starting to write a CSS selector and hitting return after that { after which the matching } was automatically inserted, TextMate does just the right thing™, by moving the closing } two lines down and putting the cursor in an indented position in the blank line in the middle. Excellent:
Along with that it’s worth mentioning that many of the TextMate modes also come with commands to just re-style a document. Meaning that if you receive (or wrote!) a shoddy CSS or TeX file which is hard to read, using a single command can improve the situation dramatically.
Another neat feature is the ability to insert something you type several times for a single keystroke. That’s useful when typing LaTeX environments, for example. You’ll type ‘begin’ and then the tab key and TextMate will convert it into a pair of \begin{} and \end{} commands with the genius being that you can then type the environment’s name and it will appear inside both brackets simultaneously.
Speaking about TeX, TextMate also comes with a very interesting (but not particularly practical) way of running TeX: Rather than displaying the full ugly TeX log output to you, the LaTeX Mode makes the brave attempt of parsing the output and filtering out the relevant information. The implementation isn’t perfect, but it illustrates that TeX output doesn’t need to be ugly and hard to read and that the front end you are using can try to get just the relevant information to you. [Compare with the dedicated TeX front end TeXShop for which people have to hack things to get semi-ugly output.]
Despite those features, I am left with the feeling that TextMate just isn’t made for people like myself but more for people who only dislike emacs because it runs in a terminal window rather than disliking it more profoundly.
So I’ll just sit back and hope that the editors I am using will improve over time and pick up a few of the neat tricks. So, hello Coding Monkeys, what about some of these niceties? And hello Panic people, what about giving the monkeys some bananas to make sure you’ll get their improvements as well? KTHXBYE.
[Waiting for people to tell me that emacs did all this and more since ca 1789 already…]
8:52
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It looks like the iMac turned ten yesterday. Back in 1998 it was hard to grasp this. It seemed like, yay, Apple got the internet a bit more quickly than other computer people and made an entry-level computer with built-in ethernet and modem (to be fair, at least the PowerMacs shipped with Ethernet and the Performas shipped with a modem at the time). And it was a cute machine, looking all bubbly, and colourful, and tiny. With the small size allegedly being achieved by arranging the innards of a PowerBook around a screen. Perhaps that was expensive at the time, perhaps it wasn’t after they made hundreds of thousands of them, who knows. It certainly looked good and amazing in the Uh, nice, screen – now where’s the computer?
way that people never seem to unlearn. And while it perhaps wasn’t the most powerful machine on earth back then, it certainly left an impression of being powerful enough for the tasks most people would want to use it for.
While I never had an iMac myself (or perhaps because I never had one?), I always liked the machines. Reducing the nuisance of having a computer to the basics, not tormenting people with all the cables that can get into the way, and swiping away any ‘buts’ about expansion that distractors may have, the machines stuck to those simple principles all the way through. The original iMac’s design probably needed until the slot loading drives came to be really good – and the technological bits like built-in FireWire, wireless networking and a reasonable optical drive only became standard later on as well.
Give or take a flowerpower or dalmation version, the design made it through the years and was eventually replaced by the white ‘desk lamp’ G4 iMac. Uh, a flat screen! And shown off with rather nice (though apparently not always completely firm) mechanics while the computer itself was hidden in an improbably tiny dome at the bottom. I am not sure this design ages as well, but I keep thinking it’s rather cool.
Finally the G5 iMac came. And for me its design is for iMacs what the Titanium Powerbook’s design was for laptops. It looks slim and authoriative at the same time. It’s simple – yet it is rather powerful. And – unlike its predecessor – it has no problem scaling to various screen sizes.
The latest revisions of Intel iMacs changed the casing to be less angular and thinner to the sides. Just like the MacBook Air that makes the machines looks thinner and smoother. But to me that’s just unnecessary and it reduces the machine’s coolness to me. Luckily the machine still looks quite good as it is and you won’t see the thinness when looking at it from the front anyway.
Let’s hope the iMac is good for many more years. Its idea of making the computer invisible is brilliant. It’ll just be hard to significantly improve the design now. Simply because there’s not much left to remove. At least if you want to keep the screen, that is…
[Postcards by a local Mac dealer for their anniversary shortly after the iMac had been introduced. I always loved that idea.]
23:13
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