iPod GPS video radio camera phone with wireless HMD earbud with mic

It's not exactly the most elegant name, but the device it would be would kick ass.

Everybody is getting all excited about whether the next iPod is gonna be video or phone. I, however, would like to take a moment to jump a half a dozen or so steps ahead and give you where I wanna see the iPod heading.

iPod phone
Starting with the obvious... pretty much everyone who has an iPod also has a phone nearby. Let's combine these two things into one and reduce our carried gadgets by one.

iPod video
And of course here's what Apple seems to also be gearing up for with the support of video in iTunes. What this needs is a bigger screen - perhaps the entire side of an iPod doubling as a touch-sensitive control - to make viewing things on an iPod anything useful.

iPod wireless HMD
However, I think any such screen would largely be too small for anything good, so a head-mounted display would be much more useful. However, such a display would have to be less bulky than those currently available as of this writing. Ideally, something as light as sunglasses would rock. Wireless, of course.

iPod radio
This seems like such a no-brainer. Stick AM/FM in there and make it possible to use XM or Sirius too. Then we'd really be rolling.

iPod camera
With all the video capability, it only seems natural. Together with the phone (and the corresponding internet connection), this would lead to video chat and its use as a video camera. Oh, and it would work as a regular old camera too (as well as a cosmetic mirror).

iPod GPS
With GPS support, your iPod will keep track of where you're going and where you've been. Each photo and video you take will be linked to its geographic coordinates. And naturally with the wireless HMD you'll be able to easily check maps and such.

Wireless earbuds
This should just be standard. Don't forget the mic for phone use.

Voice navigation and recording
As wonderful as the click wheel is, I hate it. The only thing I don't like about my iPod is that I'm always winding through lists. I just wanna be able to say: "Play, artist, Caetano Veloso" to start listening to Caetano. Digging through menus just sucks. Naturally you should be able to record with this as well.

iPod Blackberry
Blackberries suck. Crappy navigation, way too much clicking, annoying scroll wheels. Stick all the functionality into my iPod with voice navigation, voice dictation, and a virtual keyboard for when noise is inappropriate and we'd be talking.

So how would all this work? You'd just stick the iPod in the bag and put your earbuds and the HMD glasses on. Then you'd just tell the iPod what you wanted to do. This would truly be a great device. I think the only way to improve on this would be to implant it right into my head.

Get Anywhere Wi-Fi on your PowerBook

As the New York Times is reporting, Verizon currently does (and Sprint soon will) offer a service that lets you get what can be a broadband connection from anywhere. I say "what can be" because it's only in certain areas, such as some major metro areas and a scattering of other places, although the coverage is expanding. When you can get the broadband network, you get connected to a slower network that is probably something like ISDN speeds.

It's $80 a month and since you can only do one computer at a time, it's a pricey alternative to your home broadband with AirPort, although the added benefit of getting to get online wherever is quite nice. (I'll also wager that there's some way to share a single connection with multiple computers via a computer-to-computer wireless network, although a brief Google search turned up nothing useful.)

Mac OS X isn't directly supported, but EVDOInfo.com will give you all the info you need about how to set it up on a Mac. (Just go to the homepage and search for "OS X." There's be several things there that'll be useful.)

Mac OS X 10.4.1 Suggestions: In-Program File Organization

Address Book, iPhoto, iTunes, and Mail all have a similar organizational interface. In the left-most pane of the window, they each display all of the groupings of the individual items. In the right-most pane, they each display all of the individual items within a selected grouping. And now, with Tiger, they now all have "smart" capability.

For the purpose of these suggestions, "smart groupings" will refer to Smart Groups, Smart Albums, Smart Playlists, and Smart Mailboxes respectively from Address Book, iPhoto, iTunes, and Mail.

Allow folders
Could it get more basic than that? iPhoto and Mail have got this nailed, but Address Book and iTunes are lacking. It's just a massive pain in the butt to have long lists of smart groupings to have to wade through. Apple's gotten the clue over the course of iPhoto and Mail's existence that this needs to be done, now it's time for Address Book and iTunes to get the same treatment.

Allow smart and non-smart groupings to be organized within the same hierarchical structure.
As is, in the apps where folders are allowed, smart groupings always come before non-smart groupings. In Mail, smart and non-smart items can't even share the same folder.

This needs to be revamped. I should be able to put smart and non-smart items together in the same place. Moreover, I should be able to order them as I want. iPhoto lets you order things manually, but only within smart and non-smart sub-groupings within a folder.

Here's how it should work. There are three basic components: non-smart groupings, smart groupings, and folders.

Let's start with folders. iPhoto's handling of folders is how they all should do it. That is to say, clicking on a folder should display all the contents contained therein. Folders should maintain a count of all items contained therein. If you want a more specific grouping, you've got to open the folder and click on that grouping.

As in both iPhoto and Mail, folders should have the dual functionality of containing groupings but also standing as a grouping in and of themselves. In Mail, for instance, this is done by placing both a folder (X) and an .mbox mailbox (X.mbox) in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/. Such a simple solution would work equally well in other apps. However, this functionality is limited to non-smart groupings in both Mail and iPhoto, and rightly so; if the folders are to display all hierarchically lower groupings, this would make the rules of the smart folder meaningless. Thus, when another grouping is dragged onto a smart grouping, the two groupings should be placed inside a new folder, with both the new folder and the original smart grouping having the name of the original smart grouping.

Within the groupings, I think there should be two means of ordering them. iPhoto currently does it manually, while Address Book, iTunes, and Mail all do it alphabetically. I think you should be able to toggle between the two, and manual settings should always be remembered even when using alphabetical.

Make the implementation of Trash consistent
Currently, only iPhoto and Mail have a Trash grouping in the left-most groupings pane. iPhoto displays Trash at the bottom of the list, while Mail displays Trash (and Junk) at the above smart groupings. Trash (and Junk, in the case of Mail) should always be at the bottom of the list. Address Book and iTunes don't have any Trash grouping at all, but I see no reason why they shouldn't.

Relatedly, all of these apps should have the same preferences as Mail does regarding Trash, which lets you (1) determine whether deleted items will be put into Trash at all and (2) how long before items in the Trash will be deleted.

Positive Experience of a Beijing Macintosh Users Group Experience

A Beimac user recently related his positive experience with Apple in Asia. I have to second that with a tale of my own.

When I was in Beijing last summer from May to August, my PowerBook G4 bit the dust. I don't remember what it was exactly, but it wasn't starting at all. I think there were other things like a broken rim and a broken key too. I first took it up to the Mac store in Haidian, who had been helpful for me before and recognized me when I got there. They had a quick look at it but shortly realized that there was nothing they could do. (They did use this neat little rag they had that was great for cleaning off screens though.)

They sent me across town to the Apple fix it place. This was actually the hardest part of the whole process: finding the fix-it place. It was on some floor of some random building that no taxi drivers seemed to know about. Anyway, I eventually found it. I passed off my computer to them. They had no problem accepting my warrantee (I had problems years before in Spain, Brazil, and Germany with the foreign repair centers accepting my U.S. warranty. Apple finally seems to have remedied the issue.)

It took them a week to get my computer back to me, but only because they had to order the part (something expensive) from Shanghai, leaving another satisfied customer.

And just for the record, I love the U.S. service too. They always say like 3-5 days or whatever but I don't think my repairs have ever even taken 3. People rave about Apple's products, but let's not forget their awesome customer service.

iPod My Photo ($20)

So tell me this isn't cool. Take any photo you've got, send it to these guys at iPod My Photo, they'll smack it down with PhotoShop and before you know it you've got your own iPod marketing campaign style pic. Utterly useless but absolutely cool.

Address Book 4.0.1 Review and Suggestions

With a new version of Address Book out, I've decided to take a look to see if Apple has paid attention to any of my suggestions (as it's patently obvious that everyone from Steve Jobs on down at the Co. read my blog religiously). I'm gonna start with a look back at some of my suggestions for Address Book 3.1.2.

First, let's start out with the places in which Apple gets full credit: the suggestions I made that have been fulfilled:

Fix the undo function
Currently when you are working within a card and you hit undo it takes the card back to the state it was in before you started editing it at all. This is a huge pain in the butt when you just entered a bunch of data but you accidentally deleted one thing and just want to undo the last thing. This seems more like a bug that needs repair than a request for a feature, as it's just so obviously stupid.

Allow multiple URLs on each card
It seems very strange that the number of URLs is limited to just one. Both people and companies often have several related websites, so it seems patently strange to limit this to just one item.

Make it faster
Whatever was done to make iPhoto a helluva lot speedier needs to be done to Address Book. The spinning ball pops up quite often.

Next we've got the places where Apple gets partial credit.

Make a checkbox for old items
Let's say a friend changes his email. If you delete his old email from Address Book, Mail will no longer connect saved emails from his old email with his Address Book entry. For this reason, there should be a check box that lets you designate an email (IM name, address, phone number) as no longer in use. An item so designated should not appear as an option in Mail and other programs that call on data stored in Address Book. It should be visible in Address Book only in edit mode.

Apple sort of does this only with My Card and only when exporting as a vCard when info in My Card has been made private as per these instructions from Address Book help:

Making some information on your address card private
You can select which information on your card you want to share with your contacts when you send them your vCard. For example, you can share just your work information, and keep your home information private.

1. Open Address Book > Preferences and click vCard.
2. Select Enable Private 'Me' Card and close the preferences window.
3. Select your card in the Name column and click Edit.
4. Select only the checkboxes next to the information you want to share.

In the vCard preferences pane, select "Export Notes in vCards" to send the contents of the Note field. By default this option is not selected, and the contents of the Note field are not sent.

If another application won't accept vCards in the default 3.0 format, try changing the format to 2.1 in the vCard preferences pane, and send it again.

This, however, still does absolutely nothing for deprecating old addresses and such from other contacts. They barely deserve credit at all on this one.

Some kind of system for linking a contact to related data and files
The most obvious candidates for this are emails and iCal entries in which the person is linked, as well as photos in iPhoto, iChat saved chat files, iTunes songs or playlists, etc. This could by splitting the data pane and essentially having a Tiger Spotlight-like search displaying emails, iCal entries, chats and so forth in the bottom part. There should also be a way to link related files, such as PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, etc., that would show up in the same place. And it would be great if any file with this person's name in it could be included. This would make Address Book the one-stop needed to find anything related to a single given contact.

The reason they get partial here has nothing to do with Address Book and everything to do with Spotlight, which can basically do this by searching for the name, email, etc., across the computer. The next step is to integrate this right into Address Book so there's essentially a Spotlight window tied to each card that searches for all the contact info therein, including the name (and various permutations), the emails, the website, etc., of the contact.

Add birthdays and other dates to the calendar
While rumor has it birthdays are to be added in Tiger, let's not forget anniversaries and the other dates that can be added. There should be a checkbox next to each date to specify whether or not it should be included in iCal.

Birthdays should be started on the year that the person is born. In the section that allows other dates, "Died" or something similar should be a default date, and birthdays should optionally stop after this. The preference could be something like "Do not list birthdays of people who have already passed away."

True to the rumor, Apple took care of birthdays for us, but the other dates remain in Address Book limbo.

Allow easy changing of contact photos
The photo switching implementation in iChat seems perfectly suited for this. It would store any image that was associated with the user, including pics that the owner used as well as pics included in an imported vCard or sent from the contact via iChat.

Double clicking on an image in Address Book now lets you copy, paste, etc., the photo. However a simple selection mechanism is still lacking.

Fix the bug when you type over an autofill
When you are typing in a field, say a relationship field, and you type in "Bill" when you already have a relation in a relationship field that starts with "Bill", Address Book will insert the rest of the email in front of what you're typing, letting you use it if it's what you're about to type, or, if there are multiple relations that start with "Bill", it will give you a pulldown menu to pick the one you want. This is great. The problem is that if the thing is not the one you want your typing will often get screwed up. A few letters will get switched out of the order you type them in as the computer thinks about the autofill. This needs to be remedied.

Apple seems to have remedied this by getting rid of autofill. This is a disappointing solution.

And finally we turn to the unfortunate places where Apple completely dropped the ball by not listening to me and gets no credit at all:

Allow nested groups
This could be implemented just like the mail folders in Mail. You could have a "Work" group with people like the secretary who may not fit anywhere else and subgroups like "Marketing" and "Sales."

Smart copying of addresses
There seems to be no way short of copying an entire card to copy all the elements of an address without doing it one at a time. When selecting the address type, there should be an element "Copy address." Then if you paste it into another document it should come out as a multi-line address. If you paste it into any address field in Address Book, it will replace whatever was there before with the entire address that was copied.

Automatic country selection
Instead of requiring that the country be selected from the "Change Address Format" submenu in the address type pull-down menus, the format should change automatically based on whatever is listed in the country field.

Allow reorganization of items
As is, things are just listed in the order you enter them. This is a pain, for instance, as Mail by default simply selects the first email of a contact. You can work around this by reordering things by cut and paste, but this is a huge pain. They should be sortable by 1) alphabetical category order, 2) alphabetical data order, 3) user-selected category order, 4) manually, or 5) most recent use.

Allow more space in date fields
Currently items are cut off with certain date formats. Using my custom date format, for example, dates read something like "1939 May 06 (", which should be followed by the day of the week and the end parenthesis.

Allow more subdivisions for organizations
Currently all there is "Company" and "Department." It would be much more useful with big organizations if it were "Organization," "Subdivision 1," "Subdivision 2," etc., with the same green + sign used to add additional entries to other places.

Store contact photos in an iPhoto album
As is, there's no way to edit a photo once it is in the card and they are stored in some strange format. Address Book should take the easy route and store them in some format that can be accessed via iPhoto.

Automatic relational linking
If V is listed as A's son, daughter, or child in A's card, then A should automatically be listed as V's parent on V's card instead of having to do everything separately in each card. There should be a range of automatic pairs: father/mother-child, son/daughter/child-parent, friend-friend, partner-partner, spouse-spouse, etc. There should also be a way for the user to create new automatic pairs. For instance, at my school the upperclassmen can mentor lowerclassmen, creating a mentor-mentee pair.

Add an extension field to telephone numbers
As is, extensions must be included as part of the number. While this is a reasonable work around, it would be preferable if it were a completely separate field.

Calculations related to dates
Next to birthdays, Address Book should calculate the current age. (24 years old)

In a contact with both a birthday and a date of death:

• Next to birthdays, Address Book should calculate the would-be age (Would be 24 years old)
• Next to date of death, Address Book should calculate age at death and how long ago the death was (1 year ago at age 23)

Next to other dates, Address Book should calculate how many years ago it was (24 years ago).

Address Book should calculate the age for easy reference. If there is a "Died" date, iCal should calculate next to that the age at death and next to the birthday "Would be X years old" or something similar.

Allow partial dates
You should be able to add 1) a year only, 2) a year and a month only, 3) a month only, or 4) a month and a date only. In the case of the 1)-3), they should not be placed in iCal. In the case of the 4), it should be placed in iCal with no start or ending date (the user may add one if so desired). In the case of 1) and 2), iCal should make calculations as normal, using the first of the relevant year or month as the base date.

Edit default pull-down menus
The pull-down menus for type of phone number, email, etc., should be customizable instead of each time having to add a new custom item. Instead of just "Custom..." there should also be an "Edit menu..." option.

And now finally I'll turn to my brand new suggestions:

Bring back the autofill function
If my theory is correct, removing this was a cop-out to get rid of a bug. This should be brought back.

Use the country in the address to automatically set other items
The first obvious thing to set using the country of the address is the address format, as I've mentioned before. But this should also be used to set the country code and format for telephone numbers.

Allow customizable country-based telephone numbers
Following with the above suggestion, I should be able to set exactly how I want telephone numbers to appear. For instance, in the U.S. I would be able to choose whether it's 202 456 1111, (202) 456-1111, +1 (202) 456-1111, or whatever, rather than just having a single global format and then custom formats when the numbers don't fit.

Add Skype to the list of default IM services
Skype is getting more and more popular. It's time to add it to the list.

Allow customization of the list of IM services
And while we're at it, users should be able to put whatever they want in these services. And, again, default pull down menus should be editable.

Fix the bug of rendering cards with a lot of data in Card Only view
When you put Address Book in Card Only view and then use the Previous card and Next card arrows at the bottom to go through the cards, very long cards will screw up the view. When this happens, any future cards you scroll through don't render properly. This can be fixed by closing the window and then selecting Address Book from the Window menu. This is an annoying bug and just needs to be fixed.

Apple and Intel

The news is smeared all over the Macosphere, so I'm not going to repeat it here.

I would like to mention my reaction to this all. I'm left with a big fat "So what?" I still get OS X. I still get my PowerBook. I still get my iPod, AirPort, iTunes, and on and on. So what do I really care about what's going on inside of my Apple? Good old Steve has kept me satisfied thus far with the products he oversees and I've got little reason to think that that has changed. So if Steve thinks my Mac'll be better with Intel inside, then so be it.

Although I do have to say that it's gonna be real annoying if I can't play my favorite time-wasting game, Strategic Conquest, because there won't be any more Classic support.

Citrix How-To: Connect Even When Your IT Department Says "Mac Not Supported"

Before I dive in, let me mention briefly what the heck Citrix is. It's basically a program that lets you run a remote copy of Windows on your company's server right from your remote computer, whether on a Windows or a Mac OS. Windows boots up remotely on the server, and you can run it right from your computer. On a Mac, it ends up looking like Virtual PC, with a Windows window open within an OS X window. Even more happily, it's not as annoyingly slow as every version of Virtual PC seems to be. To boot, you get access to your email, docs, and whatever else is saved on the company's servers.

Anyway, if you've had a recent gander at that other blog of mine, you'll note the joy I have working with the IT department of my firm. In all seriousness, they are usually efficient and take care of whatever I need quickly.

Mac support for Citrix, however, seems to be just too much to ask.

However, I, the knowledgeable virtuoso I am, have discovered the secret to using your Mac with Macphobic Citrix. Below you will find the complex and arcane formulas required to produce such results. Be wary, though. You may not be able to master the complex intricacies of the highly technical process.

1. Go to the Citrix OS X downloads page and download the OS X client version. Or just click here.
2. Follow all your normal instructions to log on to Citrix.

Painful, wasn't it? WIth such complexity, one can hardly wonder why certain IT departments refuse to support Mac.

There is one caveat: Citrix requires you to use Internet Explorer to log in (at least the way my firm does it), although Firefox works fine too. I gave Safari a whirl but it didn't work.

Finder Suggestion: Skip Uncopyable Files Instead of Stopping Copy Operation

If you've ever tried to copy massive amounts of files only to have the copying stopped when the Finder stumbles across some kind of uncopyable file, as I recently have, you know how annoying this can be.

Here's how I suggest the process should go: While copying, when the Finder comes across a file it cannot copy for whatever reason, it generates a running list stating (1) that files name, (2) the path to that file, and (3) the reason it could not be copied. The user should be able to save this list as text at the end of the process, if desired. When one of these uncopyable files is hit, the Finder skips it (after it's been added to the list) and continues on with all other files. Thus, at the end, you can take care of things as necessary.

Journey into Tiger

Yes, I do realize I'm a bit behind in making this jump. While I do often like to wait a bit before upgrading to a new Mac system (I think OS X was out for about a year before I finally took the plunge), this time it was more about logistics.

I was in China until May 22. Since I didn't feel like having it shipped there, I waited until I got home. But because I was in China and didn't have access to a decent internet connection, I didn't notice that Amazon was sending me emails saying that my payment failed (the card I had saved on Amazon expired), so I wasn't able to even order it until I got home. It came a few days later.

Then the fun began. My computer continued to be quite a pain in the butt. I was having trouble opening apps and everything was so slow as to be frustratingly painful.

I knew it was time to make a back-up. Doing that, however, proved to be another pain in the butt. Tiger still hasn't fixed the really freaking annoying bug that when there's a single file that can't be copied - for whatever reason - it stops the entire copy operation at that file. It would be so much better if it just kept a list of files while you were doing it. I ended up deleting the errant files (which included Address Book files that made me lose my Address Book groups for some reason, which apparently are not exported when Address Book contacts are).

After backing up my user folders, I tried to install Tiger. I tried to archive and install. It didn't work. For some reason, it just stopped in the middle of the process, with an explanation of something as vague as "The process could not be complete" (or something like that - in my frustration I didn't bother to take detailed notes). I tried the other kind of install processes to no avail.

So then I moved onto erase and install. This worked. However, there's no way to import an OS X 10.3.9 user into OS X 10.4.1. You can import from another computer and you can import from another partition, but you can't import from a back up on an external hard drive. Why that is, I have no idea, but thus it was.

So I took a chance. I tried to just copy and paste the user data into my user folder and hoped that OS X would handle it. Nope, that wasn't gonna happen. After doing this, Tiger wouldn't even start up. There was a blue screen of death involved in there somewhere.

So I reinstalled 10.3.x and updated everything to 10.3.9. I then put all my files back onto this fresh 10.3.9 copy. Then I upgraded to Tiger. Finally, it was up and running.

I'll spare you my thoughts on Tiger for now, until I have a bit more time to check it out (and since so much as been said I don't feel like being repetitive).