Just a Minute

I bought a new iMac Retina 5K. (amazing display!) So Shelley gets my previous four year old iMac. (Replacing her even more ancient iMac.) Personally I prefer to set up new machines from scratch rather than migrate potential junk and problems from the old machine. But for Shelley I knew that would be a big hassle so I used Apple's Migration Assistant.

Shelley was out for the afternoon so I started the migration. It's simple to use, you start it up on both machines and indicate which is the source and which is the destination.

The estimated time remaining went up and down, but was around 4 hours. That seemed relatively accurate since after about 4 hours it said it had a minute left. That was good timing since Shelley had just arrived home.

But an hour later it still said it had a minute left. Crap! I started searching on the web and found lots of other people with the same problem. It's been an issue for years, but I didn't find any official response from Apple. For some people it seemed if they left it long enough it would eventually finish. But other people waited e.g. 24 hours and it still didn't finish. I could abort it at any time and leave Shelley with the old computer, but she was ok with waiting overnight.

I could tell it was still doing something because our internal network was slow. In fact, the first clue that it might have finished was that the network suddenly got a lot faster. It ended up taking about another 4 hours for that "last minute". It reminded me of the 90-90 rule in software development that "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

I understand that estimating completion times is difficult, and progress indicators are infamous for stalling at the end. But "a minute" is several orders of magnitude different from 4 hours. Surely Apple could do better, maybe obsess over the migration experience as well as the un-boxing experience.

If they really can't improve the time estimation, then give some visibility to the process. For example, show a list of "things" to be copied and check them off. Sticking at one minute remaining looks like it's hung up and I suspect a lot of people cause additional problems because they kill the process and then tried to recover from a half copied machine.

Other than this hiccup the migration seems to have been successful. But instead of being the hero for giving Shelley a newer, bigger, faster computer, I ended being the indirect cause of "breaking" her Microsoft Office. It needed the product key to reactivate it on the new computer and that seems to be long gone. The key would have been on the physical package which probably got thrown out sometime over the years. And worse, Microsoft now wants you to pay a monthly fee to use Office, rather than just a one time purchase. On top of which, they haven't updated Office for Mac since 2011. Sigh. Home tech support can be a thankless job!

PS. With Migration Assistant you have a choice of copying from the old machine, or copying from a Time Machine backup. I chose to copy from the old machine just in case the backup didn't include everything. Some of what I found on the web seems to indicate that copying from a Time Machine backup doesn't have the same problem.

Farewell to Steve

I sat down with my iPad last night to catch up on my blog reading and the first thing I saw was about Steve having died. We knew it was probable, but it was still a shock. When someone is so much larger than life, you don't want to believe they are bound by the same physical laws as the rest of us.

Apple started in 1977, at a time when I was becoming increasingly absorbed by computers. My first job (only job really, other than Axon) was at a local computer store. In the service department I repaired countless Apple II's. I remember when we first saw the Lisa, and then the Mac. It's hard to communicate what a revolution it was. Nowadays the world is filled with similar amazing gadgets, but not back then.

What a long way Apple has come, and a bumpy road at times. As an entrepreneur myself at that point, I remember my shock at Steve getting kicked out of his own company. Apple struggled and Microsoft grew to dominate. Back then we could not have imagined Apple ending up bigger than Microsoft. (Any more than we imagined Microsoft overtaking IBM.) And the idea that Apple would become the most valuable company in the world would have seemed like total fantasy. Steve returning to Apple and leading it to world domination still seems like a fairy tale.

Steve's abilities as a showman and salesman were alien to a geek like me. To me, what set him apart was his focus on design and user experience. Obviously, he didn't personally do all the design work. But I have to think he played a huge part in gathering and guiding his team, and shaping their culture and priorities. I can't help but wonder how things will change at Apple with Steve gone. In the short term, they will, no doubt, continue on much the same path. But in the long run, I wonder. (Just as I wonder how Axon will change when I'm not there. Not necessarily for the worse, but inevitably different.)

I don't agree with everything that Steve and Apple have done. Their closed, controlled, curated (and taxed) world is not my ideal, but it's hard to argue with what they have achieved. Apple's financial accomplishments are impressive. Even more impressive, is that they have one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings. What other company has grown so large, and yet still pleased so many people?

All in all, his life was an insanely great story.

We'll miss you Steve.

Are ten apps all you need?

Ten apps is all I need - (37signals)

I disagree. I regularly use a bunch of non-Apple apps e.g. offline Wikipedia, iBird, oMaps, Topo Maps, Evernote, MobileRSS, BlogPress, TripIt, Photoshop Express, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, SmartGo. *

I agree no one needs hundreds of thousands of apps. But you need a large selection in order to find the ones you want - you need the long tail. It's the same problem when you try to reduce the number of features in software. Sure, no one person uses all the features, but different people use different features.

The popularity of the platform draws the developers that you need to get the apps you want.

One of the big things that would stop me from using another phone or tablet (e.g. Android) would be the availability of the apps that I want.

PS. I'd also disagree with listing the Weather app as one that Apple "nailed".  It's very basic and I don't find it very useful. I believe it's getting updated in IOS 5.

* A number of these I use because they work offline. Outside Canada, or even out of town, I don't have constant connectivity.

What Can't the iPad Do?

The girl next to me on the bus had an iPad, so I asked her how she liked it. I expected the usual "it's great", but instead I got "I don't" I asked her why and she said there was too much stuff it couldn't do. I didn't get a chance to dig deeper.

Someone else I know bought an iPad and immediately got someone to jailbreak it for them. Why? Because there's too much stuff it can't do otherwise. When I asked for examples they couldn't really give me any. This is a non-technical person, it's not that they wanted to do anything special.

Obviously, there are things that an iPad is not ideal for. And there are things that an iPad can't do. But there are a huge number of apps and for most people, I just can't see what it "can't" do. All most people do is email and Internet anyway.

It can't run big programs like Photoshop, but most people don't need that. You can't run Microsoft Office, but you can get word processing and spreadsheets.

The touchscreen keyboard is not great for typing a lot, but most people don't type a lot. And if you really need it you can use a Bluetooth keyboard. Most people are happy typing on their cellphone! (I manage to type quite long blog posts only iPhone.)

I would guess one of the reasons for this idea is that people get overinflated expectations from all the hype. And when it doesn't (can't) live up to them, they have to blame it on something.

Which is where the critics come in. People don't remember the specific criticisms like the lack of multi-tasking or cameras or memory cards. All they remember is that "there's stuff it can't do".

And there's always the most common reason people say you can't do something - simply because they don't know how to do it. We get that all the time with our software. You ask people how they like the software and they say it's ok but they really wish it could do xyz. Half the time it already can, they just didn't know it.

iPhone Undo/Redo

I've was getting ready to write a blog post asking why the iPhone doesn't have undo/redo. Selecting text is tricky and it's easy to delete more than you wanted and then have no way to get it back. But when I did a quick search before writing the post, I found it does have it!

If you shake your iPhone you get an undo/redo popup. It appears you can even undo multiple steps, at least in the Notes app.

I'm surprised I didn't run across some mention of this before now. I'm not surprised I didn't discover it on my own. I don't tend to stop and shake my phone in the middle of typing! Maybe the idea is that you get so frustrated you shake your phone?

Honestly, I think this is poor design. First, it's not discoverable. And when people, even experienced ones, don't discover a feature they're probably going to assume it doesn't exist. Second, when I'm typing I generally hold the phone steady in my left hand and type with my right. Shaking is not a natural action, it's like having to take your hands off the keyboard.

Wouldn't it make sense to put an undo key on the keyboard? It could be on the secondary punctuation layout. At least then it would be discoverable. You could still keep the shake interface - presumably someone at Apple thinks it's great.

Time Capsules

I use an Apple Time Capsule for my home wireless router and backup storage.

Time Capsules have a bad reputation for dying and I've had mine for quite a few years so I was a little nervous about it. If it died I wouldn't have a backup of my iMac. Which would be ok unless it happened to die at the same time. This seems unlikely, but it's surprising how often you do get simultaneous failures. For example, a power surge due to lightning. I can also keep the external drive at work so I have an offsite backup in case the house burns down.

I had a 500gb external drive that I'd used for backups, but it's not big enough to do a complete backup of my 1tb iMac. So I went and bought a Lacie 2tb external drive and used SuperDuper to make a backup. I used the free version, but I'll probably get the paid version so I can update the backup without redoing it.

Then I decided I should also backup my MacBook and my MacMini. I didn't have much critical stuff on them, but a backup would save hassle if I needed to restore. But SuperDuper takes over the whole drive so how could I backup additional machines? The answer seemed to be to partition the drive, but I didn't want to have to redo my iMac backup (600gb takes a while to backup, even with Firewire 800). I searched on the web and found various complicated ways to resize partitions. Finally, I found that with recent OS X you can resize right from the Disk Utility. All the complicated instructions were for older versions of OS X.

The "funny" part of this story is that a few days later I went to use wireless and it wasn't working. I went and checked on the Time Capsule and it was turned off. Strange, because I leave it running all the time. I turned it on and about 10 seconds later it turned itself back off.

My computer was still fine, so I didn't actually need the external backup, but I was glad to have it nonetheless.

I phoned the local Apple dealer (Neural Net). The receptionist wanted me to bring it in and they would look at it in the next few days. I didn't want to be without internet for days so she let me speak to the technician. When I described the symptoms he said the power supply had died. But Apple doesn't let them repair them and doesn't supply any parts. Apple has been promoting their environmentally friendly products, but no matter how they're built, a non-repairable "disposable" product isn't very environmentally friendly.

I would have preferred to give Neural Net the business but they didn't have any Time Capsules in stock so I picked up a 2tb Time Capsule from Future Shop. 10 minutes after opening the box I was back up and running. (Although the initial Time Machine backups took considerably longer.)

One nice thing is that Time Machine backups seem to be a lot less intrusive. Before, when Time Machine kicked in it would really bog down my machine. If I was trying to work I'd often stop it. But now I don't even notice when it runs. I'm not sure how a new external device would change the load on my computer, but it's nice anyway.

My old Time Capsule ran quite hot, even when it wasn't doing anything. I was hoping the new ones would be better, but it seems much the same. I haven't measured it, but I assume heat means power consumption. I'm not sure why it can't go into a low power mode when it's not active. The other reason they run hot is that they have no ventilation or heat sink. Apparently there is an internal fan but all it does is stir the air around inside a small sealed box. You'd think they could come up with some better heat management without compromising their design. I would guess the heat is one of the big reasons they have a reputation for dying. Electronic components tend to have a shorter life at higher temperatures.

Rather than throwing out the old Time Capsule, I passed it on to one of the guys at work that tinkers with hardware. I thought he could at least extract the 1tb drive. But he managed to repair the power supply and is using the whole unit. I guess the hardest part was getting the case open! I'm glad it was saved from the landfill for a while longer.

Now that I have a bigger drive I thought I might as well backup Shelley's Windows machine as well. I have it set up with Mozy for on-line backups but just with the free 2gb account so I'm only backing up selected things. I'd seen Mozy will now backup to external drives so I thought I'd set this up. Unfortunately, it only backs up to directly attached drives (i.e. internal or USB) not to network drives. I'm not sure what the logic is behind that choice. I could use different software, but I think what I'll do (I haven't got round to it yet) is to use the old 500gb external drive.

iPhone Multi-tasking

A lot of people made a big thing about how the iPhone didn't have multi-tasking. But personally, I never saw any of the reasons as very compelling. Given limited cpu power and memory and a tiny screen, it made perfect sense to single task.

Sure, there are probably a few reasonable uses of multi-tasking. But there are way more potential abuses.

I look at my Windows machine, which is continually thrashing away when I'm not doing anything. Every piece of software I install wants to run stuff in the background. Just to check for updates once a week they want to have a process running constantly. That's not a benefit, that's abuse.

Two days after I installed iOS 4 with its long awaited multi-tasking, I went to use my iPhone in the morning and the battery was totally dead - it wouldn't even turn on. It had plenty of power the evening before. I can't be 100% sure of the culprit, but I assume it must have been some application left running by the new multi-tasking. I suspect it was a mapping app that I'd been playing with, probably running the GPS constantly or something like that.

On the other hand, according to Apple, most apps do not actually run in the background, they just get suspended and resumed. If that's really true in all cases, then I'm not sure what drained my battery overnight.

So now I find myself regularly "killing" all the active apps because I'm paranoid about this kind of scenario. Great, a "feature" has imposed a large manual overhead on me.

Hopefully the situation will improve once apps are updated to work better with the multi-tasking. But there will always be poorly behaving apps.

What I find strange is that Apple went from not allowing multi-tasking, to making it the default, with no way to switch it off. It seems like an option that you had to explicitly turn on (or at least some way to disable it) would have still silenced the critics, but wouldn't have imposed the cost on those of us that didn't want it.

iPod Shuffle Won't Shuffle

I had an older model iPod Shuffle that I used for running. It started to get flaky and eventually died totally.

So I bought a new model, smaller and sleeker, and more memory.

But ... I listen to podcasts when I'm running, not music, and the new iPod Shuffle won't shuffle podcasts.

Even if it would sort by date I could live with it. But it sorts by source, and I don't want to listen to all the podcasts from one source all in a row.

And although I like the controls on the headphone wire, you have to double click to skip tracks and it is a frustratingly slow process to skip all the podcasts from one source just to get to the next source. Good luck if you want to find a particular podcast.

I started doing some research and I read that you could skip between playlists. Ok, I'll put each podcast source in a playlist and then I can skip through them. Except you can only put music in playlists, not podcasts, despite the fact that they're all just mp3 files.

Ok, I'll just move my podcasts over into my music section so I can put them in playlists. Except you can't. For some reason, iTunes goes to great lengths to prevent this. Even if you remove the file from iTunes and then try to import into the music section, it's too "smart" and puts them back in the podcast section. There are various work-arounds but I don't want to have to do this every time I get new podcasts.

Why stop you from shuffling podcasts? Sure, not everyone will want to shuffle, but that's no different than music. After all, the one and only control on the body of this iPod is whether to shuffle or not!

Why stop you from putting podcasts into playlists? Again, I can't think of any reason for blocking this.

It's probably a similar issue as with the K7 flaw - going overboard in trying to keep people on the correct path, refusing to accept that your (the designer's) idea of the "correct" path isn't necessarily the same as your users.

Judging from all the stuff on the web about this, it obviously annoys a lot of people. Come on Apple - listen to your users!

Continuous Obsolescence

I see my 13" MacBook has already been replaced by a new model.

It's been moved to the "Pro" label, gained its Firewire connector back, and now has an SD slot (which I'd like for downloading photos).

Apple seems to be coming out with new models faster than ever. The model I have was only out for 7 months before being replaced! Most software doesn't get upgraded that quickly, let alone hardware.

I like the rapid improvement, but I hate the resulting feeling of being left behind! Too bad we can't get automatic updates like software :-)

Apple Makes a Billion

Apple recently past a billion applications downloaded from their App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch. That's in roughly nine months.

Lots of those apps are free or only a few dollars. Lots are games. Lots probably only get used a few times and then forgotten.

But a billion of anything is pretty impressive.