I had the luxury/annoyance (depends on how you look at it ) of having to sit at home all day, being forced to wait for some plumbers who never came. But, today was also the day when Google Chrome was released. So, not only did I go through their comic book, but I also learned about the webcast and watched it. And downloaded the thing itself and played with it too.

Marketing

I like the “comic book + webcast” approach. I don’t think their webcast was intended for a lot of distribution beyond the press, and some questions asked were outright silly (I don’t think mentioning Tor browsing at this stage was very relevant), but it showcased the browser very nicely. It surely didn’t have the reality distortion and hype aspects of what Steve Jobs does with Apple (the next Apple event is Tuesday Sep 9 btw), but it made it clear that the browser is about speed (new V8 JavaScript virtual machine), stability (multiprocess approach), security (checking URL-s against blacklists and sandboxing) and new UI (there is very little, er, chrome). It had a lovely homebrew feel to it, with the big teleprompter visible to the viewers, and Lars Bak going “errr… so what else is there to say?”, but it was all for good.

User interface

A lot has been said about the UI already and I won’t do a comprehensive review. There are a lot of tidbits to be worked out. Here are just a few random observations that are interesting to me.

The first impression is very good. It feels very stable and pretty snappy. The pages that I regularly visit render very well.

The Options dialog is a mess. Upon installation, Chrome picked a language for the UI which I do not want. I had non-English regional settings in Windows, but I want apps to be in English. It took a while to figure out that to change it, you need to “Options”, go to “Minor Tweaks” tab and click “Change font and language settings”. I don’t think that the UI language is a “Minor Tweak”; for me, it is a pretty big deal. So in general the Options of Chrome feel very Internet-Explorer-esque in the worst sense of the word, meaning that tabs are arbitrary, the options don’t make sense and it is hard to find anything. One more bad thing about the Options: it shows me the passwords I have stored, but what if I have said “Never remember passwords for this site”, and later want to reverse the decision? There’s no place for this in Options. So, in general, dear Google, please rework the whole Options part of Chrome.

I like the “Omnibar”. This is the first browser in a very long time that does not have separate search and address bars. It just has one bar, and I think that’s the way it should be. It started with Firefox 3’s “awesomebar”, that can do quickfiltering based not only on URL-s, but recently visited sites’ titles, which is already awesome. But Chrome keeps pushing it and builds up history based on what you visit and can then filter from there. I like. I’m not a very good bookmarks maintainer, but often I want to go back to sites that I’ve been to before. So I think this Omnibar approach is great to me, and in general, confuses people less. Novices are known to be confusing the two boxes. I shouldn’t have to pick.

Someone in the webcast asked about snapping tabs “in” and “out” of separate windows. This works well, but there is a trick. It is easy to drag tabs out — just grab the tab and drag it away and lo and behold, you got a new window with one tab in it. But if you want to get the same tab back to the other tabs, you can’t just drag the window title back to the tabs — you need to grab the solitary tab itself from the new window and drag it back. A bit confusing, but works fine once you figure it out.

There’s a lot of nuance work put into the UI. For example, there is a dynamic mini-status-bar in the bottom right, and when you hover over a link, it displays the destination URL. Nice.

Notice, though, that if you move your cursor to the bottom left of the window to hover over something that is covered by the status bar, the status bar notices this and shifts itself out of the way below the content window. Cute.

I’m currently in the process of setting up my new life in New York City. (I’m going to work here now for a while… more on the work stuff some other time.) I found a decent apartment that came without anything in it, aside from the very nicely furnished new kitchen. And as I didn’t own any furniture before in the US, I’ve been buying stuff from IKEA to furnish my place, which set off a stream of several loosely connected thoughts.

One thought that I had is that going to IKEA feels a whole lot like going to an Apple store. Not only the actual retail store, but also looking at their printed catalog. Both IKEA and Apple meet my “smart writing” criterion. Well, that’s actually not entirely true for IKEA: towards the end of their catalog, there are a few exclamation marks, and there is a big one right on their US site homepage. But still, the typography is good, the color scheme is a fairly quiet pastel, and the whole experience is better than most of others that I am these days exposed to. The only bad thing in their catalog is that on some pages, there’s white print on white background that’s impossible to read. The layout person was asleep when doing those pages or something.

So, the experience of IKEA and Apple is so similar in one way, and yet sometimes they are seen at completely opposite ends of the market. Nobody argues that Apple is the high end, and yet some fancypants people dismiss IKEA as throwaway stuff and brag about how they buy “quality” furniture that will last a lifetime. As if the price of something is indicative of its quality or real value. I guess it goes down to the theme of “your stuff shows who you are”. Lovely consumerism and conspicuous consumption.

Well, I happen to believe that furniture, as well as most other stuff, SHOULD be “throwaway”. I should be able to throw away what I own and replace it with something new if my preference has changed. I don’t want to keep old expensive stuff around. Stuff is ephemeral anyway. The only things of true value are in my heart and head, and maybe in my backpack where I carry my computer. The rest, well, comes and goes, and there’s no real reason to get antsy if, say, you wreck your car or something gets stolen. Just hope you had it insured. And this realization about ephemeral stuff makes life so much easier. There are so few things that are actually worth worrying about. The rest just comes and goes. But at the same time, I do care about my trash footprint and I don’t just want to throw my stuff to the street. I want help taking care of it.

So, going back to that IKEA story. I think there’s an opportunity here for both them and other companies that are selling me stuff, that goes back to my other favorite theme, “maintenance / upkeep / lifecycle”. At the end of the day, the best-performing companies will be those who realize that the real value to customer from transacting with them does not only come at the point of sale, where everything is focused these days, but it comes helping the customer through the whole lifecycle of the product. The objective of any right-minded retail company these days is to get you to their store to buy stuff. This is the culmination of all their work and this is where money and profits are made. What happens to either you or the stuff you bought later is no longer their business or worry.

The latter is no longer true, though, with electronics and other hazardous materials (car tires) takeback regulations. In many cases, if you buy new electronics or tires, the store has to take back your old stuff. I think there’s a lot of potential here for other businesses, such as IKEA in the furniture domain. Suppose that after three years, my work takes me from NYC to, say, San Francisco. The thing to do these days is to disassemble your furniture and put it in a moving truck. Well, what happens if I just don’t like the old stuff any more and would rather buy new stuff? A lot of the IKEA furniture is so cheap that economically this is a very viable option. So they could offer me a takeback service whereby they just come to my old place and take away my old furniture, and I know that it gets recycled responsibly. And they could give me something like 10% of the furniture’s original value as credit towards future purchases from them. This increases their turnover, as I now buy twice from them, and this decreases my hassle, as I don’t have to move my stuff around anymore. And the planet is happier because my old furniture gets responsibly recycled and I don’t have to get as big of a moving truck and won’t produce as much CO2 driving across the continent as I would otherwise.

The third story is about how I ended up going to IKEA in the first place. That is because IKEA is European Even though I live in America, I consider myself an European. And at this day and age, it’s easy in practice, as you can get news, food and other things that you care about anywhere from any corner of the world. I had gone to IKEA before with someone to buy stuff from another place we had in Europe. So as I was walking down the isles of the Brooklyn IKEA store, I had kind of a déjà vu experience. In a way, IKEA is the McDonald’s of furniture for me, as you know what you are getting in any corner of the world, and you can trust it, instead of being forced to go through unfamiliar brands and experiences over and over again.

UPDATE: one interesting parallel about how little IKEA stuff cost to me is that I also bought a used Aeron. (Why? Because I spend too much time sitting behind the desk at home to go with anything less that would give me back trouble as has happened before.) And the rest of my apartment contents, combined, cost less that a used Aeron.

Last week, I had a strange incident with my iPhone that made me suspicious of how stable it really is. I don’t mind applications crashing or occasional glitches, but the core and phone parts must be rock solid.

Anyway, here’s what happened. I was walking about in sunlight, checking e-mail extensively and also taking pictures with my camera. At one moment, the screen simply went blank. Black. Nada. Nothing. I tried pressing and holding the home and power buttons, but nothing worked. The phone was bricked. And me possibly having to receive important phone calls certainly didn’t help. No matter what I tried (short of banging the phone on concrete) didn’t evoke a tiniest sign of life.

Everything magically came back, though, when I plugged the phone into my computer later that night. The screen came back to life as if nothing had happened, and the phone has been fine ever since. But this incident made me feel uneasy about the true stability of iPhone.

I’ve been calling various banks, mobile companies, insurance agencies and other businesses that I’m a customer of. Here’s one thing that I don’t understand: all of them have an IVR before you actually reach a person. Which is fine. So you call the number and you have to key in or say things about yourself to a woman robot (why is it always a woman robot? I haven’t heard a man robot yet) before they put you through to an actual person.

But: why do those woman robots have such crappy voice quality? It’s extremely bad. She’s like talking through three pillows or something, and I can very barely understand what she is saying even though I’m in a quiet room and have a good device (Skype or iPhone) myself. Sounds like it’s sampled at like 4 KHz or something else low-frequency and there just aren’t high frequencies. Yes, I know that a lot of it is simply due to the phone system not being able to put through HiFi voice (phone network is limited to 300-3000 Hz or something like that). But in the 21st century, it doesn’t have to be that way.

I wonder what it will take for major businesses to upgrade their woman robots sitting in their IVR systems to a decent quality that goes to the high end of what current phone systems can provide? Or better yet, split the voice experience into “hi-fi” and “lo-fi”? I know that you need to always have backwards compatibility with legacy phones, but if you can detect that the remote caller is on some HiFi capable network, like Skype or some mobile equivalent that I’m sure will be invented and pushed by mobile companies soon, then you can provide a voice experience that’s actually enjoyable, instead of forcing your customers to talk to a robot woman who sits behind three pillows.

Just noticed this in the RSS for my Facebook friend updates. These posts came right after one another and these are three completely unrelated people that probably don’t know each other at all. Yet I know all of them and keep seeing this iPhone nerdness. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad.

I downloaded iPhone 2.0 software the day it came out, and I’ve been using it for a week now. And yesterday I finally got the iPhone 3G as well. Although the online widget said there aren’t any 16GB models in Pittsburgh (because that’s what I wanted), I just walked in the store and got one anyway. No line, no fuss, no problems, 5 minutes in and out. And I had to activate it in the store as well.

Here are some random ideas. Many of them apply to the 2.0 software, not just the 3G hardware.

• The color temperature has definitely changed. I’m not sure I like it, but I can’t change it either. My iPhone wallpaper is black-and-white, and with the new 3G hardware, it has some weird yellowish tint to it. I’d definitely want some sort of advanced preference for is.
• The new hardware is a bit wider, meaning an increased bezel between screen and the software edge. Many people say it’s a bad thing because bigger is worse, but I actually like it because in the old hardware, it was kind of hard to type characters like Q on the keyboard that were “too close” to the edge, especially if your device has some sort of sleeve so there is a ridge. Now there is enough space to tap on any part of the screen, including the edges.
• Most of the settings were nicely restored from backup of the old iPhone, but one exception was e-mail configuration. I have three custom IMAP/SMTP servers, and while inbound IMAP worked fine, outbound SMTP configuration was broken. There is in mail settings a place where you can select outgoing IMAP servers for each account, but it’s ugly and I don’t really understand it.

Here’s the screen I mean. (Which among other things shows nice screencapture capability of the 2.0 software, just click Home and then Sleep buttons.) First of all, there’s no way to rename the SMTP servers, so if you have several accounts against the same server (very often the case for Gmail), they appear the same. Secondly, I don’t understand how the Primary server is determined, and what do the On and Off settings really do. And you can delete some of these servers, but not others.

In the end, the only way I could make my email accounts work again on the iPhone was to fully remove the accounts and then add them again from scratch, because at adding time, you just specify the IMAP and SMTP servers you want, and everything works again. (I don’t use mail account syncing from Mail in OS X because I don’t use Mail as my e-mail client.)

• Super Monkey Ball is a scam and a waste of money. The controls are unusable and it does not save progress, so you have to start from scratch every time. They better release an update soon which fixes at least the saving part, if not the controls too.
• GPS works nicely for walking. It does not work so well when in a car or bus, because it needs line of sight with the satellites, which kinda sometimes works when you sit near a window, but not really. But I use it for walking in unknown places, which is really nice in conjunction with Google Maps and address finding and all that jazz. No nonsense, just works and takes you to places.
• The 3G network is nice and fast and a cool escape from the EDGE slowness.

Flickr Downloadr is one of my little fun side projects. It was originally a throwaway code kind of thing, but I’m glad some people have actually find it useful. I plan to keep it up and maintain in its current state, as its pretty stable.

There was an annoying bug there where sometimes it would tell you something about “missing originalsecret” instead of downloading images. I think that this happenened if either of the following is true:

• the user posting the images does not have a Flickr Pro account
• the user posting the images has disabled downloading original images

I now published a new version that just downloads smaller images if the originals are not available. Get it at the wiki page.

Dear consumer electronics manufacturers:

can you please stop putting stupid annoying blue LED-s into every god damn product that you make?

Right now I have sitting on my desk:

• AT&T 3G card for my laptop
• USB hub
• 2 USB thumb drives
• an Iomega external hard drive

All of them have a blue LED that keeps blinking when the thing is turned on. And I like to work in a darkened room and at nights. Which means that if I left all these things turned on, there would be a whole lot of blinking going on and it would be even more annoying than it is in daylight.

But being such a blink-antagonist, I have gone to great lengths to eliminate this blinking. Some stuff like the hard drive I can position strategically behind my laptop so that I don’t see the led. Some others like the USB hub I can turn upside down so that the LED is facing the table surface and not me. And so on. But I think this is stupid.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have built some electronics myself too. LED-s are really great… as debugging devices. When you test a circuit, it is really great to stick a LED there and observe little electrons merrily passing through and making the LED blink like there’s no tomorrow. It gives you this special warm fuzzy feeling. BUT: we’re talking consumer electronics here, not your goddamn first prototype, eh? These LED-s are maybe cool for some other kind of people who think that having blinking stuff all over the place is really cool and high-tech.

Well, I’m beyond that. I can tell if my stuff is working without the LED-s. For example, most of the devices that I listed above are often connected to this thing that is called THE COMPUTER and that these things called, you know, graphical interfaces that can tell the user anything you need to tell about the device. For example, the AT&T 3G card has a very nice coverage meter in software. I imagine if the seven coverage bars were instead seven blue LED-s on the device… and I close my eyes in horror. It’s too terrible of a thought. And I’m thankful it never happened.

Apple is one company who understands that blinking LED-s are annoying. They don’t have any blinking LED-s, especially not blue ones. Well, on their laptops in sleep mode they have this white LED that actually IS kind of annoying if you are in a dark hotel room and this thing is to your face on the desk… but it’s smooth and not blinking and not blue.

Now, there is one LED that I sometimes miss on my MBP: the hard disk activity one. Often, the computer just sits around and I’d like to know if it’s actually busy with the hard drive, loading up something, or did it just ignore my click. But again, I can get much richer feedback in the software, and out of the two evils (having a LED which is useful 10% of time and annoying 90%, vs having no LED and thus less information), I pick the lesser evil of having no LED and if I really need to have HDD activity info, I have all these wonderful programs smartly put inside the computer for exactly this purpose, that I can open and close at will, instead of having the LED to my face all the time.

So, again, dear manufacturers: please, no more blue LED-s, kthxbai? Ok, well, now I found this post. Maybe these LED-s are part of a conspiracy to keep us all awake. Sounds kinda neat, but no thanks.

I figured I need a 3G/mobile data connection for my MacBok Pro, so I got the card that AT&T offers. As an aside, the terms said “free after rebate”, but free in America doesn’t mean free — it means that you send in the rebate and then after a while you get some AT&T promotional card or something that you can use on future AT&T stuff. So it’s kind of like prepayment for future purchases while meanwhile giving them an interest-free loan. The wonders of business…

So anyway, back to the card. Getting it to work under Mac OS X needs some work, but not too much, once you know where to look. First, as the instructions say, you need to go to this site and download and install the software which is standard Mac OS X application. What you don’t find anywhere, though, is what you do after that. You start the software, but nothing happens and you can’t connect.

Googling helps. Turns out you have to put some settings into the software’s preferences. I found many forum threads such as this one. Turns out you have to configure the thing in Preferences like this.

Password may or may not be necessary. After you do this, it connects and works fine. And 3G is mighty fast, yay! I’m already looking forward to next Friday and the new 3G iPhone

I seem to have some incompatibility with new hip’n’cool headsets. Previously there was the Freetalk affair. Which ended fine, btw — I shipped it back and got most of my money back (minus some restocking fee or whatever). No harm done. Try again some other time.

But now, I thought I’d give the new Jawbone a try.

It started out very well. The packaging is super super nice. As good as Apple I’d say. Typical problem with consumer electronics is that they’re packaged in some sort of plastics that is welded together and you have to somehow cut and tear it open and almost kill yourself in the process, cutting yourself to pieces and spilling blood all over the place. Not a good way to start the product relation. Not so with Jawbone, though. Their packaging is high-quality plastic that you can keep around, and the documentation is also very nice.

But, but, but… I connected it to my Mac as a Bluetooth headset. And the sound quality was simply crap. I don’t know if it’s something that I did, but I have a very low tolerance for things not working out of the box and don’t think that I should debug them extensively. Either they work for me or they don’t. Jawbone didn’t.