Dukeville

Snow depth just now

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:52:00 -0800

Snow depth in Finland just now.

Getting a little bit tired already. We live in the purple area.

(this image makes sense only if viewed at winter of 2011 when we had over half a meter of that freaking white stuff)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Tanks on the freeway

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:34:12 -0800

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Dukeville has moved

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 12:28:53 -0800

As you can see, Dukeville looks a bit different than just couple of days ago.

I decided to move Dukeville from Squarespace to Posterous. The reason of the move wasn't Squarespace - it's a great service and I still warmly recommend it for bloggers all over the world. However, Posterous is a great site too. I especially like it's ease of use: you just email stuff to your blog's address and Posterous does all the dirty work. And Posterous is free. I had high hopes for Dukeville but because I hadn't enough time to write regularly, the usage of Dukeville didn't grow as much as I expected. Paying monthly charges for such a small site seemed futile so I decided to go with the free alternative.

Moving was extremely easy. I just gave Posterous Dukeville's information and in couple of minutes everything was in place. All the URL's stayed the same and even Google Analytics continued functioning without any disruption. If you use Dukeville's Feedburner-powered RSS feed, that stayed the same too. Excellent.

For visual interface, I chose one of the ready-made Posterous templates. They are not as sleek as in Squarespace's so Dukeville might seem a bit rough around the edges. I'll try to come up with a solution for that. Or just try to get used to this :)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Stuff worth reading

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:39:37 -0700

Tim Ferriss gives inside information on How Authors Make Money in book publishing and discusses the future of publishing.

Paul Carr tells how it feels like to Quit Twitter.

Michael Arrington reminds us about Skype Etiquette with things that are applicable to other IM clients too.

And oldie but still useful reminder of how a single person can erase traffic jams.

Alain de Botton's Early London Morning at Heathrow is a great piece of travel writing, especially for airplane fans.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Almost Full Moon

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:31:11 -0700

Almost full moon over Lake Roine.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Watch what you're sharing

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:52:20 -0700

Here's a little follow-up to my previous post about location sharing. The New York Times has an article about inadvertent location sharing reminding people how easy it is accidentally share your private information just by uploading photos.

The article links to I Can Stalk U, a website which shows how easy it is to get location data from posted pictures.

If you want to make sure you're not accidentally broadcasting your location via Twitter or Facebook:

On iPhone, go to Settings, General and Location Services. Turn off location service for Camera.
On Nokia devices, instructions depend on the model you are using. Usually they are at Camera settings: turn off "Show GPS Info".

I Can Stalk You website also has more instructions for various phone models.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Reading e-books: my experiences with iPad and Amazon Kindle

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:44:15 -0700

So this is the year e-books finally broke through to mainstream. Many great reading devices have been launched and Amazon has reported record sales of new electronic books.

I have been a happy owner of two e-book reading devices for three months now, so it's a time to sum up my experiences of electronic books and reading them. Last May I bought Amazon Kindle 2 and just few days after that I ended up buying an iPad. Both are great book reading devices and have transformed my reading habits trendemously.

My habit of reading books had significantly faded during last ten years as I spent most of my free time browsing through Internet. Now I often find myself opening up a good book instead of surfing through same boring webpages over and over again. Purchasing e-books is easy, so if I hear about an interesting book I can start reading almost immediately instead of writing down the details of the book for my next trip to bookshop or library.

Actual reading is also surprisingly pleasant experience. When reading paperbacks, you always end up folding and mangling the book to make it stay open. Hardbacks are difficult to read laying on your side as they have trouble staying in balance. Of course these are trivial hardships, but with an e-book reader you just concentrate on reading regardless of your position.

So, how do Kindle and iPad compare as reading devices?

The first thing you notice when grabbing to the devices is the weight. The iPad is somewhat heavier whereas the Kindle feels light even for its size. The weight difference is not that big though: iPad is still at 680g lighter than a thick hardcover book. Kindle weighs 290g and can be compared to a paperback.

The screen quality is good on both readers. The iPad has a traditional LCD display which emits light, so it's better when reading at evening. If it's totally dark, the display tends to be a little bit too bright even at the darkest setting so it's good to have some background lighting on.

Kindle likes light - more the merrier. Kindle's e-ink display looks like it's painted on top of the screen and looks great in bright light. The downside is that you really need a proper reading light if you're planning to read in evening. Kindle 2's screen is a bit of a grayish side but the new versions are promised to have a contrast that's comparable to paper. Because of the e-ink technology, the Kindle also has an exotic feature - every time the screen content changes, it first goes all black, clears and only after that new content appears. It only takes half a second, but you better get used to it as this happens every time you're turning the page.

iPad has somewhat better resolution than Kindle so the text looks less jagged when comparing the two. Looking at pictures, there is no competition - Kindle's grayscale display is not that suitable for graphics. When viewing graphics and PDF files, iPad is a clear winner with great picture quality and easy zooming. In a previous article I wrote about reading magazine PDFs on iPad.

Even though you can view PDF files on Kindle too, chances are that the scaled-down content is almost unreadable. Zooming in is very unpractical because of the e-ink display: every click of the zoom must go through the same fullscreen refresh as when turning pages, so you quickly learn to avoid zooming because of its tediousness. With books that are designed for Kindle there are no such problems - fonts are the right size and graphics work properly (with newspaper-like black & white quality).

Both devices allow different font sizes when reading books. On iPad, you can change the font too - on Kindle it requires hacking.

Software

When talking about e-book reading, it's necessary to understand the difference between hardware and software. With Kindle, everything is in one package - the Kindle hardware runs Kindle software and you mostly read Kindle format books on it.

On iPad things are a little bit different: you can have many different reading applications on single device. Apple's iBooks is the obvious choice for iPad, but you can also download free Kindle application which in effects turns the iPad into a Kindle - all the books you buy in the Kindle store can be downloaded to iPad's Kindle app too. You can keep same books in both devices and the devices even sync with each other - if you put the iPad away and continue reading on Kindle, you can jump to the same page you were reading on the other device. Kindle reading apps are available on most computers and handheld devices and they all sync with each other.

One device is missing though: there's no Kindle available for Nokia phones, which is a big shame. However, some Nokia phones run Mobipocket reader, which is able to view free e-books in mobi-format.

Apple's iBooks app is available for iPad and iPhone, and just as the Kindle app, it also synchronizes last read page across devices. Perhaps not so surprisingly, nowadays I tend to read books on my iPhone almost as much as on the iPad and the Kindle. It also means that those who are just considering e-books can just as well start reading with their current device and buy a "proper" e-book reader later.

Buying the books

Unfortunately, the book formats are not standard across devices. When buying books, you need to decide which format you're planning to get your books in. If you own a Kindle, the choice is obvious - your device reads AZW books bought from Amazon. On the iPad you can choose more freely - you can either buy ePub books from Apple's bookstore (and do your reading on iPad and iPhone) or buy AZW books from Amazon and use the Kindle app for reading.

The books you buy are DRM locked so they work only on your devices. With Kindle, all the books you've bought are archived in the Amazon website. You register with Amazon all the devices you own and after that you can upload your previously bought e-books to your devices. If you buy a new device, you just register it and after that you can send re-upload your books to the new reader.

With iBooks, authorization is done with your iTunes (App Store) account. When you buy books from Apple's bookstore, they are locked to your username. You can copy the books over to other devices but opening them requires giving the password. You can have books bought with multiple accounts on your iPad - for example, I have books both from U.S. and Finnish bookstores.

Either way, the e-books you buy are much more limited than the physical books. You can't lend them nor sell them to used bookstores. If Amazon or Apple some day decide to stop books business, you can't move your books into new devices - unless they decide to unlock your books or you crack the DRM protection (which is currently a crime).

This is one of biggest turnoffs for me with e-books. I'm a book lover and love owning physical books - we have lots of books all over our house. Digital books are great for quick consumption but lacking the actual object, I couldn't see myself moving to e-books only, especially as I can't be sure that the books I buy now are still usable in 10-20 years. Perhaps the idea of books is fading slowly away, just like mp3 killed the idea of record albums. I still have my vinyl and CD collection but I consume all new music one file at a time and don't buy albums anymore.

Another thing that will face big changes are the libraries. iPad and Kindle don't support book lending so I don't expect any big changes in libraries yet.

Reading books

Actual book reading is pretty straightforward on each device. On iPad, both readers look pretty much the same - text on plain background. There are some functionalities that you can bring up, such as highlights, text search and jumping to a selected location.

E-books don't have page numbers as such, because page sizes change depending on your device and font size. To help referencing locations in a book, Kindle has location numbers that stay the same from device to device. iBooks just reflows the book and shows fictional page numbers.

One of the functionalities I love in e-book readers is a dictionary. With just one click/press you can bring up a definition for a word which is not familiar to you. It's great for people like me whose first language is not English.

Changing the pages is easier on e-book reader - you just press a button (on Kindle) or touch the screen (on iPad). Browsing through books isn't yet as intuitive as with real books - you can jump to a location, search text and move quickly forward and back but flicking real paper is still more fun.

There are small great little features here and there: on iBooks I love the feature which tells me how many pages there are left on the chapter. That comes handy at night when you're almost ready to go to sleep and pondering whether to continue reading until the chapter ends.

Getting more books

Amazon and Apple's bookstore are not the only places where you can get books. Both devices support additional file formats that let you download free books found on the net.

But you really don't need to think about formats. Instead, I recommend getting Calibre, a free software that converts lots of different formats to your device. With it, you just convert everything into MOBI (Kindle's unlocked format) or EPUB (iPad's book format) and upload books to your reader.

Calibre is being developed actively so it's getting new features all the time. It does beautiful conversion job: for example, you can convert PDFs that might be almost unreadable on device's display into the reader's native format and have properly sized fonts and chapters and enjoy all the software features.

iPad has lots of additional ebook apps available in the app store. From there you can download interactive story books like Alice In Wonderland, freely available texts all the way from Bible and everything between.

A great place to get free books is Project Gutenberg, which archives old books with expired copyrights. There are lots of books in various languages and most can be downloaded directly in iPad or Kindle formats.

Conclusion

Which wins the comparison?

Kindle has nice e-ink display which is great in bright light. It's inexpensive, lightweight and easy to carry around. But remember that it's only ebook reader.

iPad has more features and applications. It has a great colour screen and superb UI. You can use it as a Kindle too. But it is a bit on a heavy side and you can't read books in bright daylight. And it's at four times as expensive as Kindle.

PS. I left out all the mentions of Kindle whispernet on purpose because my Kindle is CDMA version and hence cannot connect to net here in Finland. So I don't really have any experience with whipernet.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Perseids meteor shower peaks tonight

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:23 -0700

Don't forget to look up this evening. The annual Perseids meteor shower is underway and tonight you should easily be able to see meteors streaking across the sky.

Pomodoro technique

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:24:48 -0700

Some time ago I found a new time management technique which is easy enough to follow more than once and still gives an opportunity to get new nerd toys and applications to implement the technique.

It's called The Pomodoro Technique.

Here are instructions in nutshell: When you have work to do, pick a next task that needs to be done. Close email, IM and browser. Set your status as "do not disturb". Put your phone to silent. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Work for 25 minutes. Stop working and enjoy a break. Go check email, surf to Facebook, drink water, stretch, do whatever you want for 5 minutes. Repeat until lunch. Take a lunch break and start over.

Actual Pomodoro Technique is a bit more elegant than my version but it's essentially the same. Go read more about it.

25 minutes is just long enough to really get things done. On the other hand, it's short enough to win procrastination.

What about nerdy toys? Pomodoro is Italian and means a tomato. Originally you were supposed to measure the 25 minutes using tomato-shaped kitchen timer, but real Pomodoro afficianodos get themself elaborate and cool timers, or applications to their mobile devices.

I use Pomodoro Timer for iPhone. It's great, and ticks like a real timer :)

(Tomato image by Fastily)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Bad news for Google Wave

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:51:26 -0700

After a year, Google Wave will fade out. From The Official Google Blog:

[...] despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Google Wave was a great idea but unluckily it was too complicated and didn't attract wide enough usage to continue living as a product. There's a lesson to learn in here: you can create a great product, but if you don't make it obviously easy and fun to use, it will struggle.

Wave has many great innovations and I firmly believe that it will have a second coming - like Urs Hölzle wrote, not as a product, but as a direction of evolution in other products.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Tornado hits camping area in Finland - four injured

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:32:19 -0700

We have seen some exceptional weather in Finland this year. During January-February we had a record cold spell. Then we had the warmest July ever in the recorded history with a new all-time heat record (37,2 C). According to weather reports, heat wave continues well into August.

Today we had some unusual news again as there have been people injured by a tornado in Uurainen camping area in central Finland. We do have tornadoes every now and then in Finland but as the country is covered mostly by forest, there are usually no witnesses. Unluckily it wasn't so today.

I'll add links to more information as they become available.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Facebook likes and shares statistics

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:05:27 -0700

When I created this blog, I added Facebook Like buttons to each posting. It fun to see that people are actually reading and even liking the articles. What I was missing was statistics of likes going on throughout the site.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

The simple reason why the technological singularity will never become reality

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:47:05 -0700

Technological singularity is a point where evolution of technology become so fast that the whole world changes. Humans will be integrated to computers and everyone's consciousness will be connected to a worldwide network. As humans step to the next level of being, computers will take over the mundane everyday tasks and keep up the world (read more about Technological Singularity at Wikipedia).

However, my prediction is that it will never happen.

Privacy and copyright laws will never allow it.

Photo by maltman23, available under Creative Commons Sharealike licence

Permalink | Leave a comment »

The software that cures your insomnia

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:13:57 -0700

F.Lux makes you go to bed instead of staying up all night staring at the computer. Figuratively speaking of course. But at least it helps you with going to bed early enough.

Most probably your computer monitor is adjusted for daylight. The white parts of the screen (browser window, word processor background etc.) are the same colour as a piece of paper on a beautiful summer day. Problem is, that when it's 2 AM, you really shouldn't be watching things that look like sunny day. You need soothing yellow-hued lamp light instead.

This is where F.Lux helps. It calculates sunrise and sunset times for your location and when the sun sets, it gradually adjusts your monitor so that its colour temperature changes to same as lamp light. Next morning, after sunrise, it adjusts colours back to daylight mode.

I love innovative ideas and F.Lux is certainly one.

Using F.Lux is easy. You install the program, set up your location (some computers can even do it automagically) and tell what kind of lamps you are using. After that you can forget the program and keep on using your computer just like before. The best part is that it's available for Mac and Windows and Linux!

I installed F.Lux today and it works like advertised - my screen is now yellowish. Making me go to bed part hasn't been too successful yet though... it's 1.30 AM. D'oh! Got to continue testing.

F.Lux is free and can be downloaded at http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Social Web 3.0 doesn't arrive until it stops being boring

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:14:49 -0700

Browsed through Jean Dobey's presentation "Welcome to Social Web 3.0". It describes rather well the problems we're about to face when we are moving our relationships and interactions to social networks.

Consider Facebook: At first you connect to all your computer-literate friends and you don't need to pay too much attention to your audience. Perhaps your main worry is to separate work from private life, and that's not a particular problem as Facebook isn't used for work.

First time people start thinking about audiences in social networks is when they get a Facebook friend invite from their mother. There may be things you want to share with your friends, but not your parents. Then come neighbours, relatives, your kids, their friends, teachers and so on. Soon you find yourself trying to learn about Facebook groups and privacy controls.

Next thing, you start to notice that your work and private identities start mixing up. Linkedin connects to Twitter, you're using multiple Delicious accounts, most of your colleagues are using same private networks and you don't bother moving discussions from network to another.

Most of the social network tools contain quite powerful tools for categorizing people into audiences and do limited sharing. Google Latitude location sharing service has three levels of sharing location to friends: exact, city only or none. In Facebook, you can put people in multiple groups and decide with whom you want to share status updates, photos and so on. For example, you can have a group of people who don't mind reading naughty jokes or a group of people who are allowed to see your professional thoughts. And so on.

But there is a problem with that.

Setting up and managing groups and audiences is boring. When people are using social tools, they are mostly having fun and don't want to work with audience grouping. I started arranging my Google contacts into groups but gave up after an hour. I was forced to use Facebook groups when sharing photos but the groups have already deteriorated.

It's just like e-mail: you could set up nice system of email folders and sort everything neatly into proper places. Or set up a filtering system that does it as emails come in. Chances are you haven't done it.

The history is full of examples about lost possibilities in managing information. People save files to the desktop until the wallpaper is barely visible. Email stays in the inbox and when you need some piece of information, you just scroll around and try to spot that one message. Paper photographs stay in shoeboxes waiting for to be neatly arranged. Numerous garages and closets are full of stuff. Of course there are exceptions to the rule - some people enjoy organizing things. I think most don't.

One of the requirements for Social Web 3.0 will be an easy solution for privacy control. There are success stories: Gmail made email easier by giving lots of space and great search. Browsing an archive of 10000 digital photos is fun because they go automatically into folders according to the date and location (information that was set by the camera). Intranet document archives become suddenly useful after installation of a proper search engine.

So, what's the answer? Dobey's presentation didn't give it and neither do I. We are just learning to use social networks and doing first baby steps with connectivity. When looking back, I predict that the solution will be simple and something that exists already. It won't be boring and managing it doesn't require work.

And it's secure (but that's another story).

Permalink | Leave a comment »

This surprised me - Symbian is not dead yet

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:23:09 -0700

Here's something for people who love statistics.

I was browsing through the July statistics of Pinseri, my other blog, aimed at the Finnish audiences. The summer has been hot, people have been on vacation but still over 7000 users visited the site - mainly via Google search results. Out of these users, about one and a half percent visited using a mobile device, mainly Symbian (used mainly by Nokia devices), Android or iPhone.

I was surprised to find out that half of the visits were on the device using SymbianOS, and iPhone creating only an one third of the visits. Reading news and blogs might give you an impression that almost no-one surfs the web on their Symbian phone and it's all iPhone and Android nowadays.

Well, at least on Pinseri, that's not the case.

This screenshot from Google Analytics shows the mobile device market share on Pinseri in July 2010. The pie chart shows how 49% of the visits were from a Nokia (or another SymbianOS) device, iPhone being a second with 35%.

Of course, 110 users of one site is far too small a sample for any kind of scientific importance. Also, the users are geographically biased to Finland which also skews results.

Nevertheless, this serves as a good reminder for all those whose interests are towards mobile industry and who are saturated by iPhone and Android news coverage: don't forget Symbian users because there are plenty of them around.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

So I moved to digital magazines

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:40:19 -0700

Lately there have been some radical changes in the way I consume newspapers, magazines and books. One of the two magazines I am subscriber of, Tekniikan Maailma (generic technology magazine), is one of the latest subjects of change.

Tekniikan Maailma has an extensive searchable web archive of its articles for subscribers. That has been the main reason I've been a loyal subscriber instead of buying single issues from newsstands. Some time ago I became aware of two things that changed the way I'm reading TM.

When a new issue of TM is published, the majority of its articles are uploaded in PDF format to the web archive. Until recently, I used the archive only once in a while to make searches. Reading PDF articles from computer screen has always been a little bit uncomfortable so I still preferred reading the physical magazine in my easy chair.

After my good experiences with reading books and magazine apps on iPad, I decided to try out reading TM on it. Transferring the articles over to the pad proved to be quite easy using Dropbox. I downloaded the articles from the TM archive one by one and saved them to a Dropbox folder on my Mac. That made the files available on iPad and my other devices. On the iPad, I opened Goodreader application, which is able to take PDF files straight from Dropbox and show them properly scaled.

The article pages looked great on the iPad screen and I was pleasantly surprised with the reading experience. Magazine pages fit the iPad screen nicely and there was no need for zooming. Flipping through pages was fast and easy.

So the time came when I was on a sofa with the iPad and the newest copy of TM paper edition waiting in another room. The iPad won and I knew that the era of paper magazine was about to end.

Nowadays, when a new issue of TM becomes available, the publisher sends a marketing email to all subscribers. The email itself is of no interest to me, but before ending up in a trashcan, it serves as a reminder to go to the archive and save all the interesting articles for reading on the iPad. After that it is easy to bring up the magazine on iPad when I have some extra time for reading.

I haven't opened the paper magazine for a few months; instead I usually give the copies to my non-subscriber friends who still enjoy touching dead trees. I don't know whether this counts as a piracy :)

The reading experience is not yet perfect. Saving the articles one by one is rather tedious and I would like to have a PDF of whole magazine for easier downloading. The PDF file font size is just readable on iPad screen - any smaller and I'd need to zoom in and out while reading (which would kill the reading experience).

Perhaps in the future we will see a digital version of Tekniikan Maailma, in a same way that Wired and many other (mainly U.S.) magazines have. I'm pretty sure just about every magazine and newspaper publisher in Finland is preparing for autumn release of iPad.

Wired's iPad app is another pleasant reading experience - I have willingly read through the both available digital issues. It resembles the paper version of the magazine but is enhanced with improved navigation, videos and interactive elements.

What I find positive with the iPad Wired is that they haven't got carried away with the design and features. The main thing of the app still is the text content & images and the interactive elements are small add-ons that bounce up here and there but do not steal the show. It's possible to read through whole magazine never touching any interactivity or gimmick. And it's still easy to get immersed reading quality articles - just like in the old days with the paper version.

The electronic versions of magazines are still developing. Currently you can find many different concepts and ideas floating around - some replicate paper magazine experience, others take the whole reading experience in a new direction. Little by little, evolution happens: good ideas survive and bad ideas die away.

The whole concept of paper magazines suffered a big blow when reading on the Internet became easier. One of the great milestones, at least for me, was the development of blogs and blog aggregators. Having a collection of great articles available as soon as they were written made magazines more or less obsolete, as they by nature had content written a month or two ago.

Why would someone pay for outdated content?

That is still a very valid question and the main reason I subscribe only two magazines (another being Disney's Aku Ankka comic magazine) and rarely buy copies from the newsstand. There are two things that make the magazines still interesting to me: good reading experience and the high-quality content.

The experience of reading from the paper against reading from the computer screen has been superior for the long time. Small portable reading devices have changed that somewhat. Devices like iPad, Kindle and iPhone are so small that they can be kept nearby without clutter. They start immediately and have an user interface that is more suitable for reading than for working. And they are easy to put down (try switching your computer off - it's not that easy as there is always one more thing you need to finish).

Hardware is only half of the experience though. Evolution of reading applications has started to speed up - on part because of mobile applications that have started to evolve along web browser interfaces.

The digital versions of magazines is not the only thing that is evolving. RSS aggregators are also evolving from the email inbox metaphor. My current favourite aggregator on iPad is Reeder, which has simple but very polished interface, designed to be as out of the way as possible but still usable.

One of the most interesting new aggregators is Flipboard, released only a couple of days ago. What makes it special is a combination of highly social way of collecting the articles and an ambitious interface. Flipbard connects to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and collects links shared by friends. From these links it downloads the images and text excerpts and combines them into smooth magazine-like interface.

(Video: Flipboard presentation video from Youtube)

It's not difficult to be awed by Flipboard as it obviously is a peek into the next generation of Internet content. It is personalized, fresh and easy to read. However, after the awesomeness of the interface fades a little, Flipboard also shows it's weaknesses: the content tends to be rather repeating, with current hot topics dominating the interface and often even with same news coming up over again. Also, the nature of the app as an aggregator means that it can only fetch excerpts and headline images from websites - if you want to read deeper in the articles, you need to go to the source (the websites themselves). Flipboard tries to make it as easy as possible with page preloading and general speed of user interface, but actual reading (instead of just browsing) still requires constant clicking and backing up.

This is what still makes (good) magazines differ from the aggregated Internet content: you get a selection of content that is meant to be read leisurely and which has a selection of topics that bring something carefully chosen, new and even unexpected content for reading.

One of the downsides of the transfer to the digital is the digital content itself: once consumed, it is deleted and disappears forever. Or if saved, it most probably ends up in an obsolete mass media device in a format that becomes gradually unreadable.

When I was kid, I spent many great summer days in our grandparents' house attic reading old Tekniikan Maailma magazines from 60's and 70's. I'm pretty sure that my TM PDF's don't survive 10-20 years into the future. Maybe I shouldn't give away the paper copies after all.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

New HS.fi app brings the whole newspaper to iPhone

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:18:14 -0700

The new iPhone app for Helsingin Sanomat became available in the App Store just a few hours ago (search for HS.fi 2.0). Here are some my first impressions.

One of the finest features of this app is the mobile digital edition which contains all the content from the paper newspaper (available for subscribers of the web version of digital newspaper).

I have been a subscriber of digital + weekend paper edition (24-27 €/month depending on the billing period) for as long as I can remember but have been for few years debating with myself of ending the subscription altogether. The paper edition goes to recycling bin untouched almost always and I usually cannot be bothered to enter the web version of digital HS. The previous version of HS.fi app was nice and usable, but had somewhat limited content to my tastes and was quickly read.

Now that I have the whole newspaper available wherever I go, I look forward to filling the boring moments of my life with this new app. Immersing myself into a newspaper is still something I enjoy, even though it happens much more rarely nowadays.

The feature that will bring the most happiness to my life is that the app leaves out all the reader comments from the web version. :-)

There have been rumours of upcoming iPad version of the HS digital edition - I'll post a review as soon as I get my hands on of that version.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Magic Trackpad with a screen? Hmmm....

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:52:00 -0700

I wonder if these two news items might have something to do with each other:

Tiny Apple touchscreen shows up in Taiwan (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, July 9, 2010)

Apple Multi-Touch Appears Ready To Tickle The Desktop (Techcrunch, Jul 19, 2010)

An external bluetooth multitouch trackpad which also is a tiny screen. Imagine: it would change its functionality according to what you're doing. It could show buttons, scrollable lists, iPhone-like sliding switches and wheels or visibly track your finger movements. Like the Optimus Maximus keyboard but in the 21st century.

I would buy that.

But I'm afraid that touchscreen is too small for really magical touchpad (only 3x3 cm). Maybe in the future.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Less signal bars on iOS4.0.1, but they're much better

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:10:31 -0700

I guess almost everyone who has been following news about Apple's new iPhones have already heard about the antenna problems. Because the iPhone 4 antenna is located in the metal frame of the phone, you could cause a network connection to drop just by keeping your hand in the wrong place. On Friday, Apple promised to give free plastic cases to all iPhone 4 owners to keep fingers away from the metal.

At the same time, Apple released also an update to the iOS operating system. They claimed that there has been a bug that made the phone show too many bars on its signal display. That way, your phone would have been showing 4-5 bars even though really the signal strength was maybe 1-2 bars. The update fixed the signal bar display to show realistic number of bars (and hopefully made you understand that touching the antenna when there is only one bar makes your phone probably disconnect).

The update was sent to all devices, not just iPhone 4, so my one-year-old 3GS got also updated Thursday evening (even though there's nothing wrong with its antenna). And just as expected, I also got less signal bars than before.

But I was amused to see was that the actual bars had changed too. Before the update, when I got a weak signal (only one or two signal bars), the bars were pathetic little lines and barely visible. Now, after the update, the lower signal bars are much larger, as if they were telling me "don't worry, weak signal is not that bad, you can still make calls and browse the net just fine".

This is something that will surely divid people's opinions. Some will get angry and feel that they're treated like idiots: just adding pixels to images don't make signal any better. Some will think this as nice example of subtle UX design, dealing with people's impressions of quality and usability.

Seems that Nokia has known this for a long time, because on new devices all the signal bars are same length. :)

(yes, in case you wondered, the title should contain a smiley face in it)

Permalink | Leave a comment »