My ongoing issues with MSFT Vista

I hate Vista.

Hate it. Since I have had my Lenovo ThinkPad with Vista my productivity has plummeted. By far this has been the most painful and worst computer owning experience of my lifetime. And I have owned a lot of computers in my time, run a ton of different versions of OSes and I’ve had some seriously bad machines in the past.

What makes this especially painful is that technically my laptop should not be bad, in fact it should be a near dream machine. A very high resolution tablet screen (1400 x 1050), the fantastic keyboard and trackpoint of Thinkpads (more on why I love the trackpoint later). I have 3GB of ram, a dual core Intel chip (not the fastest model but for my uses - mostly web browsing, iTunes, and light other apps should be more than plenty), and a 120GB HD. All in a form factor that weighs just a bit more than 5lbs and has a 9 cell battery that should give it 6+ hours of use.

But since I waste between 10 minutes to upwards of 1 hour whenever I try to wake the computer from sleep and resume my work, I don’t count this has a very useful computer.

It manages to blue screen itself while theoretically “sleeping”.

The wifi is unreliable after waking from sleep, not infrequently failing to detect even strong signals. (but yet reporting itself has functional so Vista just insists that it is seeing only weak signals)

At least every third time or so I wake my laptop from sleep it decides that my screen resolution is much lower and resets itself to a lower resolution, someimtes it does this after I login, often then quickly detecting the problem and reseting itself to the right resolution (but leaving my windows resized as a result). Occasionally it flubs things before I can even enter my fingerprint or password and I then have to try to reset the resolution - which can be tricky at times as it sometimes insists on a spinning cursor while I try to click on the “okay” button to confirm the resolution change.

I have reset my power management settings frequently. I set them how I want them (wifi when plugged in at maximum performance for example) yet a few weeks later they will have reset themselves to different settings without my intervention. Very very frustrating as then my laptop has started to seemingly randomly (and rather quickly) turn off my wifi card by itself.

I have given up on running Outlook on this computer as when I try to do anything in Outlook (latest version, fully patched) more times than not it just freezes and every step is complicated (all I would likely want to do is update my large contacts files which are still in Outlook) but even that seems impossible yet increasingly critical.

Shadow Backup means that overtime my disk has been filling up rapidly yet I can’t configure it to only autobackup the portions of my disk I would care deeply about restoring, and perhaps not to backup portions I would not care in the least about (my frequently changing firefox cache for example, or my also frequently changing iTunes directories for at least my podcast subscriptions which I typically delete after listening)

From a general UI perspective more times than not, generally at least once a day (sometimes many many more times than that) Vista just freezes, spinning my cursor and being generally annoying. And this is on a computer, I remind you, with 3gb of ram and a dual core processor. I’m sure if my laptop had a dedicated video card it might function slightly better, but that’s not an option and I (foolishly I guess) figured that Microsoft and Lenovo would have made sure that the drivers for ThinkPads worked flawlessly - and that the video drivers for Intel graphics would work well as well.

But I guess I was quite wrong about that.

Why I love the trackpoint and hate mice or touchpads

I am a touch typist. On a computer that can keep up with me (which I foolishly figured should be all modern computers but that’s not the case) I type close to 100 wpm or faster. More crucially I do that without ever looking at the keyboard, my hands just know where the keys are and I can type without looking, my eye remains focused on the screen or on materials I am working with, not on the keyboard or what my hands are doing.

With a trackpoint (that little nub that on ThinkPads is located on the keyboard between the G H B & N keys I can navigate and move my cursor all around the screen without moving my hands. All I need to do is shift my (right) first finger a bit to the left and with a bit of pressure can move the cursor anywhere I want it and I use my thumb to select the left or right buttons (I use the right mouse button features extensively)

In contrast to use a trackpad (such as is found on all MacBooks) I would have to physically move my hand, shifting considerably my focus from what I am doing, moving my hands and arms physically and breaking the rhythm of what I am doing (just now I used the mouse to correct the spelling of rhythm and could do so with almost no break in my typing, just a moment of attention to which suggestion was correct and a bit of pressure to move the cursor back to the right location). I do it without even thinking about it, it is just a natural motion incorporated into how I work today.

And even to use a physical mouse, such as the Mighty Mouse I have on my iMac desktop I have to move my hands off the keyboard and on the mouse. Then I am still usually very very frustrated by the significant efforts often needed. For whatever reason I find myself frequently having to physically pick up the mouse and move it up then pull back down and repeat to get the cursor and items on the screen where I need them. In contrast with a trackpoint I can just apply continual pressure and the cursor keeps moving in any given direction (ideal for scrolling through long lists, though a scroll wheel can be useful for that as well but sometimes a scroll wheel is not sufficient for a given task). Perhaps there are settings I could adjust that would make the mouse a bit more function for me (as it is I try to avoid it as much as possible) but that would not avoid the primary issue.

To use a mouse or a touchpad you have to move your hand from the keyboard.

There is not getting around that fact. The trackpoint is the only mouse alternative (at least that I’ve ever seen) which allows you to use it without needing to lift your arms or move them from the keyboard. In turn this means I can position my hands comfortably and leave them there even as I type extended amounts of text without pain (this blog post for example has been typed without my needing to move my hands at all).

If you are not (as perhaps most people are not) a touch typist this may not seem all that important. And if you don’t write 1000’s of words nearly every day (and I need to only keep on writing ever increasing amounts) then you might not see what a big deal this is, but I am a touch typist and I do probably average well north of 5000 words a day (often far more).

And in the next few weeks and months that will only increase as I have to write actively online to market myself and my new ad network, and as I write emails to follow up from the 100’s of people I have met in the past few weeks and who are in many cases prospective publishers, advertisers, investors or others with whom I may need to be in ongoing and active communication (press, potential employees and partners etc).

I am an old NeXT user, I would love to have a great Mac laptop. But the touchpad is seriously a dealbreaker for me it requires a very significant reduction in my workflow and productivity. And further my other issues are that the form factor I most like (the MacBook Air) has a lower resolution screen than my current laptop (lower res means less content on the screen, thus more scrolling, so more use of the touchpad and even lower productivity. I read 1000’s of words of content every day - 100’s of emails, blog posts, twitters and more. Plus the hard drive is smaller than my current one so incapable of holding my media library (and the cost for the SSD version is quite high and the disk space even lower). Thus I would need to use an external drive to hold my media library but with only one USB port I would also need to use a USB hub if I wanted to have my media library and my iPhone/iPod connected at the same time (i.e. so I could sync it). That means a bunch of devices I would have to carry with me, reducing the value of the thin form factor and light weight.

And the larger MacBook or MacBook Pro which are available in resolutions that are nearly as high as my current machine or in fact higher (on the largest versions of the MacBook Pro) are heavy (nearly 7lbs for the 17″), physically large, and do not have great battery life (less then 4 hrs by far). Though I would appreciate the screen resolution, I would not appreciate the lack of the trackpoint, and with a larger screen would be even more need to use the mouse. (and I am also not a huge fan of the single button, even knowing the multifinger tricks to get the right mouse button functions - I use that menu on a very very frequent basis perhaps 100 or more times in a day in many cases).

And though the keyboard on the pro does have the sexy illumination feature (though as a touch typist that isn’t so critical) it is not, in my opinion, a comfortable a keyboard to type on as the ThinkPad keyboards which I think are some of the best ever made in the world, at least for laptops. I type fast and quite accurately on ThinkPad keyboards (which I’ve been using for nearly 6+ years now).

Evaluating a new laptop vs refreshing old - MacBook Air vs ThinkPad X60

If you have been reading my blog for a while you may know that I have a ThinkPad X60 as my current laptop and that I have been seriously unhappy with the laptop and Vista (as well as Office 2007 and related software). At the recent SXSW conference where I mostly went without using my laptop at all (as a bit of an experiment in being highly mobile and not carrying a bag at all) when I did try to use my laptop I was seriously frustrated - in one instance it almost literally took 15+ minutes of work before I was able to actually start doing anything - and I had to shut down 5 minutes later.

While at SXSW I was also emailed an opportunity to purchase a friend of a friend’s MacBook Air - he’s decided to buy the MacBook Pro instead. Buying it from him would save me sales tax and would include the external superdrive. But it is the lower end, 80GB edition. And there are more than a few things I would have to add to the system package (AppleCare more crucially).

So in this post I am going to look at the pros and cons of my current options - and most likely won’t reach a clear conclusion. Please add a comment if you have solutions to any of my issues/concerns or if you have suggestions for alternatives I should be considering.

First note, my laptop is an extension of me - I’ve had a laptop as my primary computer since about 1994. Historically I kept most of my machines until they almost literally fell apart - driving them hard though I also have tended to buy very close to the peak at the time I could buy (not as ‘full desktop replacement” but as best weight-to-performance-to-battery-life. So each time I’ve replaced my laptop I have spent up to about $3000 - that said, I don’t really have the spare money to buy a new computer at the moment - but then neither can I afford to be unproductive or to continue to have serious issues on a daily basis.

My use of a laptop

• heavy and frequent web browsing and research. I am “online” for many hours every day, much of which is spent with many tabs open in my browser (typically Firefox) in which I am researching, writing, and monitoring
• syncing my iPhone. Most critically with my full contacts database which is, in turn, also synced up to Plaxo. Slightly less critically (since I rarely use Outlook these days) syncing my iPhone with my calendar (this is an area I hope to improve). And I do sync about 6gbs+ of music and the occasional tv episode or short film to my iPhone for later viewing. Most crucially this must include my most recent podcast subscriptions
• syncing my iPod, especially when traveling. I have 100gb+ of my music (and a few tv shows I’ve bought) on an external HD, I have about 30gb of podcasts on my local disk, I synch about 30gb of my library to my 30gb iPod Video (3gb of new content such as recent podcasts, 16+gb of content I haven’t played recently, and a careful collection of my favorite content I want to have with me)
• preparing and giving presentations. I speak at conferences, I pitch to investors, advertisers and partners. While I don’t love PowerPoint, I do have to present on a regular and increasingly frequent basis. I do not, however, do much in my presentations which couldn’t easily be done with Keynote (perhaps even could be done better)
• manage my digital photos. I don’t take enough digital photos (or videos) but I am trying to increase the frequency with which I take photos - and I have a growing collection of photos I’ve taken. I don’t yet have a Flickr Pro account (probably should do that soon) but even with one, I would still want to retain the full resolution, local copies of every photo I’ve ever taken (perhaps stored on an external drive but everything - or at least the stuff that is good enough I might use it - should be at my fingertips at any time
• manage my contacts. I have something close to 6000 contacts in multiple Outlook contacts files. While this is far too many and many are generated contacts from the testing of various systems (which analyzed my email traffic looking for people I should have as a contact) I really do know a ton of people. My contacts data about them is one of my most precious resources, in many cases complete with photo, bio, notes on when/how we met etc - and in many cases updated via sync with Plaxo (and in some cases LinkedIn as well)
• manage my email archives and search them. I currently have email going back at least to 2005 and I think with archives back to 2000 on my current laptop (in a collection of Outlook files). Like my contacts data, my email archives are key data for me - data about when I met someone, what our past interactions have been on etc. Overtime I am slowly weeding and culling my archives of the cruft (old mailing lists, commercial solicitations, spam, updates from various websites etc) but even with that process done (which it is far, far from being so) my email past holds much of my memory.
• keep up with my current email. I mostly use gmail these days, and almost entirely viw the web or my iPhone. I have multiple gmail addresses I watch (my personal address and various emails aliased or forwarded to it, and my professional email address given to only a very few people at the moment but those numbers will rapidly increase) For this as present I use Thunderbird as Outlook is far, far too flaky for me to rely on it
• Read PDFs. Mostly as part of my ongoing research and product development, I end up with a lot of PDF files to download and read. With more arriving every day. My preference these days is to “print to PDF” rather than to paper for about the past 2+ years I have almost gone without printing anything - just occasionally a travel document or contract needing a physical signature. On my ThinkPad I have a useful but not great “print to PDF” application, Macs have this feature built into the OS.
• MindMapping and notetaking. Historically I have used MindManager a great deal (but almost not at all for the past year+). More and more I have just taken notes down in simple text files when offline or when online in various applications (including as draft posts for this blog). This is far from ideal, especially as my needs will be growing exponentially in coming weeks and months. Whether I stay on Vista or migrate to a Mac laptop, I will need to get a great note taking, brainstorming, and task management/project management tool or tools.
• Offline HTML writing. I occasionally blog for other sites than this blog, when I do that I tend to write my posts in an offline HTML editor and then send the editor an HTML file instead of retyping the post or trying to compose the post online (since many conferences where I might be writing from have poor to non-existent and flaky internet access even for the press). Currently I use Microsoft Expression for this, though mostly out of inertia and from having a full copy (actually multiple copies) given to me by Microsoft at various conferences I have attended over the past few years.
• Very rarely but likely to increase spreadsheet analysis. I can crunch numbers with the best of them, but I’ve never been a spreadsheet junky. My tools of choice start with text and flow out from there - but as I grow my company I will have to make more and more use of spreadsheets over time. And likely web based alternatives won’t fully do everything (currently at least) which I need to do, though for basic collaborative tasks they are great). At least once a quarter, if not more often, I will, however have to present numbers to my board (currently small but as we close our first round of funding likely to grow). On my ThinkPad I have Microsoft Office, on a Mac I’d likely start with iWork Numbers (which I already have on my iMac) and will only buy Excel if I truly need it.
• and that is about it really. I don’t have games installed on this ThinkPad (just the basics which come with Vista but haven’t used them in years). I have other software installed but almost never run it (Visual Studio for example). Running at boot I have Skype and Google Chat - but actually rarely use either (and for that matter they are both available for the Mac as well). I have Microsoft OneNote (my laptop is a tablet) but I actually almost never use the tablet functionality - silly I know and a bit of a shame, but also very much the truth. I kinda wish I did use it more often, but in actuality I don’t (and apparently I’m far from alone). I also almost never use video playback on my ThinkPad - I think mostly because the experience even with a local file is quite poor. Instead I watch any videos (including video podcasts) on my iPhone or on my iMac desktop - which is also the machine I’ll use mostly when I buy any video content or when I test/use a service like Joost or Hulu.com or another video service.

So with all that said, how can I decide between my various options.

Scenario One - keep ThinkPad but try refresh/reinstallations

At SXSW I spoke with friends who work for Microsoft. One suggestion was that the OEM installation of Vista, especially on ThinkPads unfortunately, is not very clean or well functioning. His suggestion was to get a full install disk of Vista and do a complete wipe and reinstall everything from scratch.

This would require I backed up all my data. That I made a very complete list of all of the software I have installed (antivirus software, firefox, thunderbird, MSFT Office 2007, MindManager, etc) and made sure I had all the relevant license keys for each product as well as the current installer (or at least how to get the latest versions - or in some cases the versions for which I have a license). Then I would have to reformat my disk completely (likely wiping the IBM special partition as well) and reinstall Vista. Then install MSFT Office 2007, FireFox, Microsoft Expression, Thunderbird, anti-virus software, Skype, Google Pack, some of the key pieces of IBM software (password manager using my fingerprint scanner perhaps, power management software etc) and then migrate back my key data (iTunes, Outlook files, recourses/research, writings, photos etc.

All in all that would likely require 1 to 2 full days between the full backups, reformats and very significant post-installation patching efforts.

But as a result I also quite likely have a much cleaner installation, less cruft, likely a much better performing laptop, and might take the opportunity to structure the laptop to also dual boot with a linux installation (Ubuntu?). If I can use the full license to Vista Microsoft gave me a while back the cost for this would be minimal - but the time and effort could be considerable. And almost certainly there would be one or more issues around licenses with something I want to install.

Scenario Two - I buy the MacBook Air (used) from a friend of a friend 

This would cost me about $1800 for a MacBook Air + external superdrive. On top of that I would probably buy additional AppleCare (another $250 or so) so as to have support into the future.

It would have to be shipped from the east coast to here on the west coast - or I might pick it up in person on my next trip to the east coast in a few weeks.

To make the MacBook Air functional for me I would have to install an office suite (iWork? - which I do have a copy of for my iMac have to check on the licensing for whether I can also use that on a laptop). I would likely buy a small bit of software to help migrate my data from Outlook to formats importable into the Mac built-in applications (though I’m not sure if I want to use those apps or not - haven’t ever used them so don’t fully know if I would like them or not).

I would then have to migrate my iTunes library (always painful) and connect an external drive with my music library to the Air, probably connect via a USB Hub so I can also connect my iPhone and/or my iPod. For the iPhone I owuld have to do this AFTER contacts have been synced and I would have to set up the new connections for data for the iPhone (not sure if I also have to reformat it to work smoothly with  the Mac).

If my iTunes data import works smoothly I should have everything set up, but it not I’ll have to spend a lot of time getting iTunes set up for my use (rebuilding smart playlists etc) and I may lose a lot of key data such as timestamps of when I added data to iTunes, playcounts of files, ratings of songs, podcast subscriptions.

Likely I’ll also need to replace my current, 120gb external portable drive with a much larger but still very small external drive. Ideally at least 300+gb but very lightweight. I’d expect the cost for that will be at least $100, likely closer to $150 but I’d be happy to find that’s high. In setting up my podcast subscriptions as well as my subscriptions to tv shows via iTunes I’ll have to decide where those files come from and are stored (ideally I can do this is in a way usable via my iMac as well - but that might be tricky and some files likely should be local to the Air so I can use them when not online)

Very likely I’ll also have to spend $99 a year to get a .mac account so I can use the “back to my mac” feature to reach my desktop iMac and perhaps use the .mac account to do some data synching (though Plaxo may be sufficient for much of what I actually need done.

I’ll also then need to install a variety of useful Mac software - Skitch for example is a big draw for moving to the Mac laptop, a tool I’d expect to use fairly frequently. I knwo there are dozens of other applications which friends would suggest I use and which I would test out and decide amongst over time - apps for productivity, apps for business/brainstorming/notetaking etc. All told I would like spend a fair chunk of change on new software for the Mac laptop - whether I get an Air or another model. But, for the most part, these would also be tools which pretty clearly would be helping me get more done and be more effienct.

In the case of the Air however I almost certainly won’t install VM Fusion or Parallels as there likely simply isn’t the diskspace to use either effectively. In my current home network configuration this means that I have to give up entirely on using my current printer (for which there are not OSX or Linux drivers). So though I don’t print a lot, likely I’ll have to also plan on investing in a new printer.

Scenario Three - another model of a Mac portable 

I do like the Air’s multi-touch trackpad, I can see myself using gestures frequently. So that rules out (for now) the lower end MacBooks or a used/refurbished MacBook Pro. But I would have to give the other MacBook Pro models serious consideration. The 15″ laptop has nearly the same resolution as my current ThinkPad (one of my major concerns with the MacBook Air is that the resolution there is lower than on my ThinkPad - and my ThinkPad’s resolution isn’t high enough for me - I really like be able to have a lot of information on the screen at once. That said the clarity of the Air’s screen is fantastic and the performance of the graphics is better than my ThinkPad so video etc likely will look much better (be playable in fact).

A 15″ MacBook also weighs around the same as my ThinkPad does with the extended life batteries which I have. However the battery life is a bit lower (3 hours or is what I’ve heard but I’ll be checking with people on that). But overall it would be a great machine and would cost not a lot more than the MacBook Air (less perhaps if I can get a discount from a friend who works at Apple which is a serious possibility).

Scenario Four - another model of PC laptop - running Vista 

Least likely, as there are aren’t many other models I might want to buy but this is a consideration.

MacWorld - covering for CenterNetworks

I will be covering MacWorld for CenterNetworks. Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to get my press credentials in time to get into the keynote (I may give it a shot early in the morning if I’m up and moving but I’ve been told it is unlikely).

With a press pass my experience of the conference likely will be a bit different than it was in years past when I was “just” there with an exhibit badge. A further difference will be that this year I have a bunch of friends who are working for companies who are exhibiting (in a few cases companies which they own and founded), I also have a large group of friends who are attending MacWorld and also going to the many related parties and events occurring around town all week. So this should be a different yet also fun way to experience the conference.

I am debating whether to bring my laptop or my XO laptop to cover the show. I don’t have a Mac portable - so either machine will almost certainly stand out. From a purely practical standpoint there are some arguments for the ThinkPad - but from a pure fun and engagement with others standpoint the XO wins heads down - I have yet to bring it out somewhere without drawing a crowd of people - most of whom ask where they can buy their own. I suspect even at MacWorld a similar reaction will be found (unless of course as I suspect Apple has a few amazing laptops of their own to reveal…)

So tune in tomorrow for my posts throughout the day and all week long - and follow me via twitter if you want the live as it happens coverage. (such as it is)

More Vista and Microsoft Outlook 2007 problems

I am beginning to think that Vista and Microsoft in general is going backwards. My current Vista Tablet (a Lenovo Thinkpad X60), which is a dual core intel laptop with 1GB ram, 1GM “memoryboost SD Card”, a 1400×1050 resolution tablet screen, and lots of other bells and whistles (fast, large hd, wifi, bluetooth etc) is by far the slowest and worst laptop I have owned in at least a decade or more - and from a lost productivity standpoint probably ever.

And I have owned a lot of laptops, almost all of which were for their time close to the top of the line. My first being a great Compaq laptop in 1993.

I spent most of the last two weeks getting various hardware faults fixed on my laptop - a broken screen, bad daughter cards and then this week an entirely new systemboard.

At the moment, however, all the hardware faults should have been solved.

However here are my symptoms so you can see what I mean when I say this is the worst OS/laptop combination I have ever used.

1. Startup takes 4-5 minutes. From turning the computer on to having everything booted and working, it routinely takes as long as 5 minutes or more (and not infrequently something about the process fails - not always with notifications either)

2. “sleep” mode is totally and utterly useless and also takes 4-5 minutes to engage IF it works at all.  In theory closing my laptop’s screen or selecting the sleep option on the windows menu should engage “sleep” mode. However more than 1/2 the time this totally fails - and most of the time it takes 4-5 minutes from when I close the screen to when the sleep light is on and everything is in powered down mode. Just this afternoon it utterly failed to engage sleep mode at all - instead leaving me in a mode from which my only option was to power down and reboot.

3. waking from sleep mode takes 3-4 minutes or more - and more often than not upon waking up devices such as my wifi stop functioning.

4. Shutdown more often than not causes faults - I’ve crashed windows explorer while shutting down. Not uncommonly it takes a good 4-5 minutes to shutdown the laptop.

And not this afternoon here are my problems with Outlook 2007. In theory this version of Outlook can handle large mail archives and should be smooth and richly functional.

I have about 2GB of mail in my main mailbox in Outlook (much more in archives but don’t have those even on this machine). In my main contacts addressbook I have about 1100 contacts at the moment (I have about 6000 in total in other contacts folders).

This afternoon I have been entering in contacts from business cards I collected at recent events.

I am running the Plaxo plug-in for Outlook (and a few others)

When I open up a new contact the window is initially unfilled in and takes a good 30 seconds or so to be editable.

While I am entering text, more often than not the cursor starts to spin and my text may or may not ever get entered and it never shows up as I type, it usually is a few seconds delayed (this as I am entering notes into the notes field - when I met someone, their bio from their websites etc)

When I go to enter a phone number I am unable usually to even select the phone number field, but instead have to wait for the cursor to again spin and only then am I able to enter a phone number.

What’s more, when I go to the main outlook window and try to search for a contact I JUST ENTERED - I get back a result that there is no contact with that name!

This type of response as well as user experience is totally unacceptable from a modern piece of software. Indexes should be updated as I entered a new contact - but even if they are not, the time a modern dual core system should take to search a mere 1100 contacts (or in my case if they have to search all my contacts folders about 6000) really should be microseconds. In no case should I get a response that there is no contact with that name when I have just entered one!

Sigh.

I do like Outlook’s contact forms generally speaking - I can finally easily include photos, long form bios etc -though I’d like a lot of changes to the overall fields (for one “IM” is a useless field - I need to be able to note WHICH IM SYSTEM someone has) and today I really should be able to track multiple related websites for most people (blogs and company websites for example)

But if this level of non-performance keeps up I am going to utterly give up on Microsoft (and if you want to buy a really nice tablet - to say run Ubuntu on - contact me, I probably will sell this and get a Mac)

Yellow and Green - color blindness and UI design

I am partially colorblind. In college I briefly worked for an eye researcher and took what was then the most accurate colorblindness test in the world. My color blindness is about as minor as possible to still deem me as having colorblindness, but it is very real.

In my case, there is a band of “orange” which appears undifferentiated to my eyes, but which a person with normal color sight would perceive as having variation.

The impact, however, of this very seemingly trivial difference in my eyesight, is that in general there are many yellows and light, yellowy greens which I do not perceive as different.

Take any Mac window. You know those three buttons on the top left side of the screen? I see a red button and then two yellowish buttons. Looking quickly, I can’t tell which is yellow and which is green (I only think that one is green because people have told me).

Or look at the LED’s on an iPod Shuffle (at least on the first generation) there too apparently, I’ve been told, the LED will show yellow for one signal and green for another - but I do not perceive this difference at all.

On the web almost all flash (or javascript) games which involve matching colors end up using yellow and green in a way that make it impossible, literally impossible, for me to play these games with any degree of success.

Windows is by no means exempt here either, in the midst of my troubleshooting my tablet issues today (tablet stopped working as a tablet, system is running insanely slow - 5-6 minutes to boot up, 3-4 minutes to wake from sleep, 10+ minutes sometimes to shut down, 3-5 minutes to sleep) I am running Diskkeeper to defragment my hard drive. Nice, except it too uses yellow and green to show certain different types of files on the system - I literally cannot see which is which.

It is important to realize that this is not a case of I see something as “yellow” which you would call “green”, rather it is that I see both of these shades as the same - I can’t see that there is any difference between them at all - especially when quickly glancing at them (as in playing a game). Intellectually I know there is a difference (say between the buttons on a Mac Window), but my eyes do not show me that difference.

Years ago this is why I never played many computer games and almost never played team online games such as Doom, Battletech, etc. I usually could not perceive the signals they used to show friend or foe. Or in the case of many of the games with puzzles, often they included an aspect which relied on color differences which I could not see. In the case of the first person shooter this lack of differentiation meant that my reactions were much slower, I would have to look for other signals as to “friend or foe” or for targeting etc.

So though I love games, love design, and spent the majority of my time in front of computer screens my colorblindness means that I have not been able to enjoy many of the even very simple pleasures, let along complex ones such as World of Warcraft, which many others enjoy.

I am also not alone with this, figures differ a bit and do have some racial/geographic differences, but something like 10% of the population (more men than women since it is at least in part tied to the same chromosomes as gender) are color blind. Some yellow/green like myself and others red/blue. A few do not see color at all, but I most, like myself, see color, just not all the same variations as someone with normal sight.

I will try to find illustrations and examples, but if you read this post and are involved in UI design - on the web, on desktops, or for that matter in any game console or other consumer product, TEST YOUR UI with people who have color blindness. There are many colors you can choose from - select ones which very rarely have perception problems. Also, whenever possible use MULTIPLE signals to show difference, rather than only using color (as in the case of the mac buttons without a mouseover action), do something like those buttons do on mouse over - show symbols on them as well. But realize that even then people such as myself literally cannot act on an instruction such as “click on the yellow button”. Make sure you say something like “click on the middle, yellow button with the minus sign”

And if you work for Apple or Microsoft - can you please change your defaults.

Syncing iPod on Two Computers

[this is a shortened version of my original post, that post was lost while trying to post it]

I can sync my iPod to BOTH my Vista laptop and my old XP laptop (which is now a Parallel’s virtual machine on my mac desktop).

How did I do this?

Bonus Tip: If you have playlists which depend on DATE ADDED, do a select all on the tracks in that playlist, then right click, select “get info” and add label to the Grouping ID3 tag. Then rewrite those smartplaylists to work on the Grouping ID3 tag instead of date added (assuming that you are say tracking all the music you added in 2005, not something like “music I added this past week)

Step 1. Copy files from the old computer to the new system. In my case 3/4 of my 120+ GB library was already on an external drive (so it was just a matter of getting the drive letter the same on my Vista system), but the other files I had to move over. Note: Vista does not allow you to create C:Documents and Settings which was the root of the path to user folders on XP, instead you have to use C:/Users/username/Music.

Then select Export Library inside of iTunes. Save this XML file and copy it to the new computer as well (I put it on my external drive).

Step 2.  On the new computer navigate to the iTunes folder.

Rename the file “iTunes Music Library.xml” (I add the date to the file name).

Copy the .itl file (if you want to recover). [if extensions are not showing, change that view option for this folder, will make life easier for you]

Open the .itl file with wordpad (NOT Word). It is a binary file. Select all the contents (control^a) and then delete them. Save the file (you should now have a 0 byte .itl file).

Copy the exported XML file from your old computer to the iTunes directory, rename it to “iTunes Music Library.xml”.

Open it in WordPad (again NOT Word).

Now come the tricky, detail orientated bit. Look for the file paths which point to your old file locations. Search and replace them with the new path. Make sure you get this exactly right - no extra spaces, no missing /, nothing mispelled.

Note, all the above assumes your new computer’s iTunes is a fresh, unused installation - i.e. you don’t already have any content on the new machine. If you do, you will have to first export that data and instead of copying one file with the other, you will have to combine them - which is a much trickier task - not impossible, just tricky as the file has two main sections - individual track details and playlist details and you have to merge them. I have not tested this and I suspect in some cases you might also have to watch for overlapping “unique” ID’s for tracks.

Step 3.  With all external drives attached and with the correct drive letters, open up iTunes. It will complain that the .itl file is corrupt and will rebuild it. When this completes (may take some time on a large collection), you will have iTunes with all of your old playlists, play counts, and ratings in place.

Note: this does overwrite the “Date Added” field with the time you do this import. This means that as I noted above, any playlists which depended on the date added field may now be broken.  Your tracks, however, will be in the same order as before (I kept my in date added descending order usually). If you do the trick I noted, you should have the same functionality as before.

The result is you can plug in your iPod and it will sync with your new computer without a whisper of a complaint. You will, however, have to activate your new computer with the iTunes music store before syncing any protected conten (or playing it).

I have not tested this extensively. I assume that over time if the two installations of iTunes change, each time you plug in your iPod it will “sync” with the current machine’s iTunes, but will not add files it holds not present on that machine (i.e. a podcast I download on one machine) and I’m not sure how changes to play/skip counts will be tracked.

I am also working with two Windows machines - not sure if the same solution would work across Mac & PC (since the underlying file system of the iPod might be different).

Simple features missing from iTunes

I use itunes - abuse it is perhaps the more accurate description.

But there are some really simple features MISSING from iTunes. Features which have been missing in every version of iTunes and which I have utterly no clue as to why they have not been added and why these bugs (for I think these really are bugs) have not been corrects.

Feature One: Those helpful “!” symbols showing tracks which have problems, usually meaning iTunes can’t find the file, but iTunes DOES NOT LET YOU SORT BY THAT COLUMN. Absolutely unforgivably obnoxious and beyond annoying. Every other column allows for some type of sorting (though in many cases very poorly) but this first and vital column does not.

Feature Two: There is no way to display in the main screen WHERE YOUR FILES ARE. This means, no way to SORT BY WHERE THE FILES ACTUALLY ARE. i.e. “sort and then find all the tracks which are on your external drive”. Perhaps this is a mac vs. pc thing, but I REALLY want a way to find all the tracks which are on my f: drive (and not my main internal c: drive).

Feature Three: if iTunes loses track of your files (say that f: drive is not connected), iTunes then cannot recover if you plug in the missing drive, you have to correct the files, by hand, selecting “get info” on each track with a missing file (which is then usually found without a problem).

Note: sometimes closing iTunes and restarting it will fix this problem, but that is beyond clunky

Feature Four: There is no, at least that I have found, way to export all of your play history, playlists, and ratings so you can, for example, import that data into another installation of iTunes on, for example, your new laptop. You can, of course, move those files (see above use of external hard drive), but will have to recreate your playlists - and more vitally - your play histories, skip history, ratings, history of which podcasts you have already downloaded etc.

I really need a solution to this last missing feature. Currently I have THREE installations of iTunes. One on my mac (mostly totally unused, though I do subscribe to a few video podcasts there which I don’t much care about). One on my new, Windows Vista laptop (truly unused at the moment for the most part). And my “real” installation on a Parallels  installation of my old Windows XP laptop (the hardware for which is now dead). This real installation links to an external 120GB HD which holds most of my actual media collection, this is also where my real podcast subscriptions live (both iTunes and via an external podcatcher), and this is what I use currently to sync my iPods.

I use a variety of really complex smartplaylists to accomplish my syncing with iPods. Since my collection of media is some 15500+ tracks and nearly 130GBs in size (and actually more like 200+ GB’s, I have a lot of media that instance of iTunes doesn’t yet know about), I could never sync it fully to one iPod. Instead I have various smart playlists which I sync - almost all of which are done in a two step process. First I have a playlist which takes some cut of the whole collection (a large collection I added all on one day for example). Then I have a second playlist which selects from that first playlist all the unplayed tracks, up to some fixed size (say 3 GB’s).

My actual system is more complex - I have playlists for everything which is unplayed, for new & unplayed (limited to a manageable size), playlists for songs which have been played but not yet rated, playlists for songs over a certainly file size (for management purposes), playlists of all the tracks with a given rating, a playlist which combines all the various types of media iTunes manages (so I can, in fact, see at a glance my true “full library”).

Actually that is a my Feature Five: Why oh why did the more recent versions of iTunes remove a working view that shows you ALL of your content in one view. By working view I mean a non-playlist view, where if you delete a track it is removed from your library, not just that playlist. For that matter, I do not understand why when you delete a podcast you are prompted if you want to also delete that file, but you do not (at least I don’t) get this prompt on deleting other tracks from iTunes.

I really want to be able to have a single view where I can find all of my tracks which I have rated 1 star, select them all, and delete them - and have it REALLY HAPPEN. Not just have them deleted from some playlist.

Feature Six: while I like seeing the long descriptions of podcasts on my iPod, WHY CAN’T I RATE PODCASTS ON MY iPOD!!! It seems the assumption is that you would have no reason to want to rate podcasts. But that is emphatically not the case. I have many podcast subscriptions which I routinely want to save select tracks from, the best solution for this is to make it possible for me to rank them when I am listening, so when I resync I can easily find the tracks I really liked.

Feature Seven: Why can’t I get a full list of all of the episodes of a podcast (even I have previously downloaded them and deleted them so I can re-request them if I decide at a later date that I want them. And related to this, I have often had iTunes fail to fully download a podcast - when this happens there is NO simple solution. I have to go by hand to that website (side note - impossible to cut & paste from iTunes to make this task feasible) and find the track which failed and download it by hand - and then if I’m really lucky figure out a way to get iTunes to put it where it should be.

Feature Eight: Perhaps other people use their iPods and iTunes differently than I, but the fact that ALL PODCAST SUBSCRIPTIONS have the “DO NOT SHUFFLE” option selected for them - and that there is NO way to change this default setting is really, really really annoying. I WANT TO SHUFFLE my podcasts. But more to the point, I have in the past wanted to put podcasts on my iPod shuffle something which has not been possible with tracks with this “feature” selected.

And I could go on. I use iTunes and do like my iPod (though I really wish the battery life was better - mine sucks the battery dry far far too quickly). But I am also constantly annoyed by iTunes.

iPhone is priced well

Across the blogosphere and the major media leading up the launch of the iPhone there has been an ongoing discussion about whether or not Steve Jobs has overreached, about whether the iPhone will be as successful as they have projected. In almost all places I’m reading about people complaining about the price - and assuming that noone will buy a $500-600 phone, at least not in mass numbers - that the only way to get to the 10M phone target Apple has set for themselves will be massive discounting and/or cheaper models.

However I disagree.

I think they will indeed sell 10M and could in fact (if they can make and ship them) sell more.

One reason I believe this may be the case is that what many people are missing from the overall analysis about the iPhone and phone prices is that for many years now we have been significantly decreasing how much many of us (and our businesses) spend on communications.

Not all that long ago I shopped for various long distance calling plans, worried about how many minutes I was using on my cell phone and otherwise had highly variable land line and cell phone bills. However for a few years now, with the exception of a few spikes when I did highly unusual usage (data plans overseas, 1000’s of sms messages) my total monthly communications costs have been very stable for a long time. And if it were not for DSL I probably would not have a land line at all (I so rarely use it I don’t actually know my home number anymore).

I doubt that I am alone.

Businesses likewise have many options today for managing their telecommunications costs - VOIP systems which allow them to route much of their traffic via broadband pipes - which are usually paid for on a fixed monthly basis vs. a usage metered model, Skype and other similar tools which allow VOIP to be extended to non-internal users etc.

Yes, I have to decide if I want to spend the fixed investment on getting an iPhone (I’ll almost certainly get one relatively soon - for me it is a direct business expense since I’m building mobile web applications) but I have to also keep in mind that my total communications spending has been going down.

Plus when you factor in the default preference to wifi vs. EDGE on the iPhone (something many people who are complaining bout EDGE speeds are missing) I have to seriously consider that the iPhone may even more so than my current “smartphone” allow me to go without a laptop ever more often. For me that is by itself worth a great deal (and my back will thank me as well).

The wifi default has some other really interesting possibilities - for one, it raising the prospect of finally being able to use smartphone network features while using the phone to make a phone call - i.e. looking up something in my email while I am on the phone with someone (something today I cannot do, yet as I move most of my data to the web, something I need to do quite frequently).

The only major item missing, as best I can tell, from the iPhone which would make it nearly perfect (for me at least) would be an sd (or mini-sd) card reader built into the phone. That would allow me to utilize the wifi connection to upload photos from my camera - plus allow me options to expand the storage capabilities beyond the built-in capacities. However it would also very likely have a cost in terms of power - and from a design perspective would require additional openings.

I also have not yet read whether or not the batteries will be easy to swap - I have often purchased more than one battery for past phones to allow me to swap in a new battery as needed to keep going when I have not been able to recharge during the day.

But small quibbles about what should be a really great new device for consumers.

Getting back to price. I think that what many people are missing is that it can be a very good thing for an overall market to move a price point UP. This happens when you shift expectations - and when you are selling more than “just” something that people have almost considered a commodity. Cell phones for all of their massive variety today, have by means of the pervasive “free phones” been defined by many as a commodity, as interchangeable. Not all that different from “coffee” in the pre-Starbucks world.

The point, however, that Starbucks realized - and which so many people and detractors did not, is that people will pay more for better overall experiences. Contrast any Starbucks, anywhere in the world, with a Dunkin’ Donuts (which for years claimed to have the most popular coffee in the country so not a random comparison). See the difference? Even at Starbuck’s smallest stores there is a unity of look and message being sent by the design of the spaces - one which in their larger stores extends to a message of “here is a space to spend time in, to sit down, relax, work, converse”. In contrast most fast food/chain stores have an industrial look and feel - very little fabric or organic (woods etc) materials, instead lots of metals and plastics are more typical. Plain glasses, little art on the walls etc.

In a similar vein, think about how phones are sold today and how communications in general is marketed pre-iPhone. A few vendors who focus on the form & extra features, but a lot more who focus on the lowest common denominator - lowest price etc.

In contrast the iPhone is offering (and marketing) a richer and more expensive product. But not a product inherently designed to be super-exclusive or ultra-rare (and thus pricey mostly for the sake of being pricey) but one that is marketed as a mass, popular product - which happens to also be priced at a high (relative to current mass alternatives) price.

How to deauthorize a dead computer for iTunes

Or yet another in the set of things you may need to do when your laptop gives up the digital ghost.

Apple does not hide the information on how to do this, but neither do they make it all that obvious to find. Here is the direct link to their support page on deauthorization.

In essence - on a machine with iTunes, go to the iTunes store, login with your account (note, if you are using a friend’s computer be sure to log out of their account first), select the “view account” option, then there will be an option to “deauthorize all” - select this and ALL of your authorized computers will be deauthorized.

This means that if you have to take this route, you will need to then RE-authorize each of your other machines.

A better solution - if you have the chance before your computer dies (or you recycle it/sell it/give it away) be sure to open up iTunes on that machine, connected to the Internet, and deauthorize JUST that machine.

Using Parallels to backup your laptop

As my posts of this past weekend describe, this weekend my laptop of many years started crashing on a regular and ongoing basis. From this modern day catastrophe, however, besides a great new laptop that is on its way to me, I learned how to use Parallels to backup your laptop - something I should have done months ago when I first purchased Parallels.

In the recently released version of Parallels there is a fantastic program called the “Transporter“. What this program allows you to do is to create a virtual image of an existing system.

To do this the “transporter agent” has to be installed on that target computer (a process that you should do before, not after as in my case, the system starts to crash. Once installed you can run the transporter program either on the target computer (creating an image on an attached disk or network location) or you can run it on another machine with the transporter software installed.

In my case I installed the agent on my laptop and ran it, then ran the transporter program on my iMac. It took over night, but the program created a virtual drive image of the then current state of my laptop.

All I then had to do was to boot up the virtual image and my laptop was now running inside of my iMac.

However, there is one further detail that has to be noted. When you do this with a Microsoft system (as my laptop was - it ran Windows XP sp 2) you will be prompted to activate Windows again as the hardware configuration will have changed considerably.

IF you will be running BOTH the laptop and the virtual image - you will most likely have to purchase a separate license of Windows for the virtual image (unless you have a site license already). In my case since my laptop is now most likely on its way to be recycled (or if not recycled then perhaps repurposed into a linux box if the system level hardware issues can be fixed) I was able to call Microsoft via their activation line and after talking with the support person obtain a new key for my new installation (tied to my old key). As I am now in essence running only the one instance on indeed new hardware this worked for me. Your results, however, may vary.

However license issues aside, I would highly recommend thinking about using Parallels as a backup method, especially suited for multi-platform homes or businesses. By transforming my laptop image into a virtual machine I have complete and total access to everything that was on my laptop from within my iMac desktop. Not just to the data (which I had already mostly synced) but to all of my applications, cached data, tools and customizations.

One of my first acts on getting my new laptop will be to look at how to incorporate Parallels into that new system in some capacity - I’m then going to look at whether it is possible to use the transporter to do some form of modern incremental backups. If it is then there may be many ways to automate this process - and to ensure that my laptop, probably while it charges overnight may also be being backed up into a potentially live and working system available on my home network.