Mike Puchol

Apple, please give the Magic Mouse new gestures

YMMV, but I’m very happy with Apple’s Magic Mouse – the absence of a scroll wheel or button is bliss, and the ergonomics, while not as good as some mice by Logitech, are quite good. What I do miss however is the third button, and having other commands via alternative gestures. TUAW even posted an article earlier calling the Magic Mouse a “dog”, in part, due to the lack of a middle button.

Thanks to ifixit.com, we can appreciate that the underside of the Magic Mouse sports a grid of 10 x 13 sensor pads from the logo towards the top of the mouse, and two final rows at the very top, one with 8 sensors and the other with 6:

This gives the mouse the potential to detect one or two fingers placed on it, and the individual motion of each finger, anywhere on the mouse’s usable surface. So, I propose the following gestures. To middle-click (third button), simply place two fingers on the mouse, and click with both at the same time, thus:

To open Exposé or Spaces, place the right finger on the mouse, and scroll up or down with the left finger:

It’s actually quite ergonomic, try it on your mouse, and if you like it, send the suggestion to Apple – if anyone finds a form specific to the Magic Mouse, let me know, otherwise the link points to iMac feedback (as it comes with one). And yes, the images above are taken from Apple’s page and badly photoshopped, my apologies!

Google GPS? Not so fast!

So Erick Schonfeld took a shot at the iPhone maps app, which uses Google Maps as its data source, and all other car-mount GPS manufacturers such as TomTom or Garmin, saying that Google should make Apple beg for maps navigation. I don’t agree with much of his post, here is why:

1. Real-time navigation availability depends on the type of license map data is served under, as I explained in a post a few months ago. The map data served by Google to Apple for use on the iPhone does not allow real-time, turn-by-turn navigation, thus, it is cheap and much less money flows from Apple to Google for it. This is explicitly referenced in the iPhone SDK’s licensing terms. Google must be paying a premium on the data it serves on the Android GPS app for this kind of use.
2. A real-time navigation system depends on constant availability of maps, which means online devices, such as an Android phone running Google’s app, must have perfect wireless coverage, in terms of both connectivity and bandwidth, and we know this is next to impossible. A comment on Erick’s post suggests Google caches map data when the route is created, which would be fine…if people followed the route perfectly. Many times, this is impossible for a number of reasons, such as bad routing, roadworks, or heavy traffic. All of these require re-routing, so Google, and any online system, would need to cache also every possible deviation and re-routing from the original path, which is impossible. There is a reason why TomTom’s iPhone app comes loaded with several hundred megabytes of map data.
3. The GPS chipset on mobile devices is not well-suited for high-rate position updates. This is evident if you use TomTom’s iPhone app, and is also evident as TomTom includes a separate GPS chipset in their iPhone car kit, for “…the most accurate positioning“. Since position update rate means battery consumption, and a phone has a ton of battery-consuming electronics on its own, the GPS typically provides less frequent updates than a dedicated GPS device.
4. Dedicated GPS units are best at taking you from A to B, re-routing you within a couple of seconds if you deviate, and showing you the location of speed traps safety cameras and other points of interest (POI). As you go up the price ladder, you are provided with additional functionality, such as voice commands, phone connectivity for hands-free audio and real-time traffic data. On this particular point, I totally agree with Matt Burns on his CrunchGear post, who says of GPS makers: “They are in the habit of producing 78 different versions of the same GPS. Each model steps you up $20 and adds another feature“. But I digress. With such a model, of charging for map updates, or for safety cameras, would they not also be charging for POI data if it was of any real use in vehicle navigation? Like updates to the “Restaurants” category? No, the issue here is that POIs are the least used feature in GPS navigators, and the makers know this. You may occasionally look for the nearest gas station, but that’s about it. If you want to eat something, you will ask around at your destination, or will have looked up options before the trip, but very very rarely do people go looking for stuff on their GPS devices. It’s true that Google makes it a lot easier to access this kind of information, and puts it right there on your face, but nothing will beat a dedicated service such as Yelp, or a dedicated app such as Bliquo (shameless plug for my good friend David Douek, who works there now, hope it helps your SEO at tiny bit!).
5. You can pick up a dedicated GPS unit for almost what you will spend on car mounts and cig-lighter adapter cables. They have faster routing, better planning capabilities, no need for wireless connectivity, and a much better audio output than any mobile phone.
6. You are supposed to be looking at the road while the GPS guides you by voice instructions, not at the GPS screen while it provides you with fancy data and/or graphics. Once you safely stop to look at the GPS, there are much better ways to present useful data, such as POIs, than Google’s interface. Many countries are looking into forcing GPS manufacturers into blanking the screen while the vehicle is moving in order to further prevent distractions to the driver.
7. TomTom, as an example, can add natural voice route requests to their higher-end units via software updates. Some already feature dictated destination input, but its use is clunky and not very useful right now – I bet we will see improvements soon. All it takes is the licensing of a proper speech-recognition engine. Google doesn’t have any major competitive advantage here, other than being the first to implement an (allegedly pending actual reviews) good functionality.
8. TomTom owns Tele Atlas, and Nokia owns NAVTEQ, which combined provide a huge chunk of the map data used by Google Maps. I love you Fake Steve, but you’re wrong on this one – GPS makers are fine, and they know it. Unless Google is planning on re-creating all the map data on their own of course, which is discussed extensively on this post by James Fee, but this would only mean Google would be free from other providers, not crush them.
9. Erick argues that “…the future of mobile apps are Web apps”. I think this is a huge over-simplification – the future of some mobile apps are apps that pull some or all of their data from the web. I regularly use an iPhone app that provides emergency response information on hazardous material (HazMat) incidents – I would be screwed if I had to depend on cellular coverage and a web service for this! We all saw how long Apple’s hard stance on iPhone web apps lasted, and the App Store just broke the 100.000 approved app barrier, so I rest my case.
10. Further from the GPS-centric topic, I’ll question wether Google really developed the Mail and Search functionalities of the iPhone – AFAIK, these are implementations of Mail and Spotlight respectively, can anyone confirm this one?

Wi-Fi Direct explained for those who think it is ad-hoc mode revisited

While it does contain most of the ad-hoc stack, the recently announced Wi-Fi Direct standard is actually an attempt to become more like Bluetooth. Ever since Wi-Fi was invented, ad-hoc mode allowed two or more adapters to form a peer-to-peer network without an access point (AP) running the show. In certain scenarios, there would be connectivity problems when adapters were not configured for automatic IP assignment in the auto-discovery range, or had static IPs setup. Saving these, the user would then have to make sure his operating system had enabled the appropriate sharing protocols so that meaningful things could happen, such as sending files from one machine to the other.

Ever since Bluetooth was invented, it provided a communications stack, and a protocol stack, which encompassed a growing number of profiles. An application only had to talk to the right profile in order to establish communication with another Bluetooth device supporting the same profile, for example, serial port, audio gateway or FTP. During device discovery, a Bluetooth device would query the other about its available profiles, and would then choose the right one as needed. As a practical and recent example, the iPhone initially supported the handset profile, which provides very rudimentary headset functionality and leaves out things like address book access. Over time, the iPhone has been upgraded with more profiles, some as complex as A2DP which allows highish-definition audio to be sent to stereo headphones or speakers. I say “highish” as it uses an audio bandwidth of 16kHz, way below the normal audio response of a set of headphones, leading to a noticeable decrease in quality. But I digress.

In my view, the press release was very badly worded, making it appear as a re-branding of old-time ad-hoc, when it really implies adding a number of protocol stacks and profiles to the standard ad-hoc mode. It is also an attempt to take Bluetooth head-on, with the argument that Wi-Fi is a gateway to a bigger number of services – Bluetooth DSL router, anyone? no? I rest my case. Having such a set of profiles would obviate the need to have Bluetooth chipsets on top of Wi-Fi, which are always an added cost and source of radio interference. We would then have to see how audio accessories cope with this, but then again, I’ve not seen many people carrying Bluetooth headsets around, while car kits can accommodate a Wi-Fi chipset thanks to their board space and bigger battery.

Hey everyone, faking a USB ID is not illegal, you know?

I read with interest the many articles being written around the USB-IF’s decision to give its blessing to Apple’s use of the USB vendor ID, and claim that Palm’s usage of Apple’s Vendor ID in the Pre violates its policy. Now let’s sit back for a minute, and consider what the USB-IF actually is.

The Implementer’s Forum, as it is know, is made up from various companies that helped develop the USB standard and its newer, faster derivatives. The USB-IF acts as a central clearinghouse that provides USB vendor IDs to manufacturers who wish to use USB ports in their products. Every vendor using USB is supposed to register on this forum and pay its fees, which then gives them the right to use the USB logo on their products, and an individual vendor ID, which combined with a product ID, identifies every device on a USB bus.

In theory, this is sweet and dandy, but in the real world, shit happens. Anyone who has played with hardware peripherals long enough will have seen at least once a device identified by Windows as something else – this happens when a vendor “clones” another vendor’s ID. Some can get away with using the other vendor’s ID and a random product ID, combined with a customized driver on CD. In fact, there are tons of products shipping today which bear the USB logo without paying any duties to the USB-IF, and thus, running with “pirated” IDs.

The only power the USB-IF has is self-regulation. If you want to bear their logo, you need to pay their royalty, and agree to abide to its policies, including non-cloning of vendor IDs. So let’s say Palm gets booted off the USB-IF. They just need to remove the USB logo from their product (if they bear it at all – check your iPhone as an example), and they’re home free. They are free to use Apple’s vendor ID as much as they want, and there is no legal recourse Apple or the USB-IF has. With so much legal power, don’t you think Apple would have sued Palm already if there were grounds for legal action? Rather, they engaged in a technical cat-and-mouse game involving iTunes updates to kill off the attacker.

Personally, I think Palm is in delusion. Making the Pre compatible with iTunes will not make it any more popular that it already is not. And Apple has every right to place technical blocks on the Pre, particularly if they miss-represent the vendor ID. Still, if I was Apple, I would have just ignored the issue. The Pre is not a threat to the iPhone, which is far superior in all aspects (apart from the non-removable battery).

Are there any security DVRs out there with Mac OS support?

It’s unreal – every single multiple-input dedicated DVR I am looking at for taking care of recording my home’s CCTV setup, only supports Windows. When network access is provider, it invariably involves loading an ActiveX control, which of course is not supported in OS X. Even more ridiculously, manufacturers such as AverDigi, a branch of AverMedia, claim to run “embedded Linux” as some sort of badge of honor!

Let me get this straight – you use embedded Linux so that you can serve Windows-only ActiveX-infested web interfaces? Far worse, many of them use weird codecs that come in their Windows-only install CDs, which means that you’ll have to go back to a Windows machine or a VM in order to use these things. Mobile support of course isn’t much better, with Windows Mobile devices supported, again, via ActiveX, and Symbian via Java applets.

I’ll keep searching, but my hopes are fading…

Peace and quiet returns to my Mac Pro

It was all due to a clogged up heat sink in the ATI X1900 card that sits inside my Mac Pro – since the idle fan was not pulling in an airflow, it slowly wound up to full speed, until it was full-on all the time. The build-up of dust was quickly cleared by a blast of compressed air…but this brought about an idea – why don’t idle video cards reverse the fan for a few seconds, say once a day, in order to blow back any dust build-up? This way, the heat sink radiator would be kept clean and efficient.

Camtasia for Mac OS, a nice but very limited beginning

I had been an avid user of Camtasia for Windows until 2006, when I switched to Mac, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read a TUAW post announcing that Techsmith were porting it to OS X. It has been a long-missed app on the Mac, with other contenders available, such as ScreenFlow, not as powerful.

Now, once Camtasia has been released, it looks like ScreenFlow doesn’t have much to fear – the Mac version is severely crippled compared to the Windows equivalent, by the looks of the comparison table available. These are some of the important features they left out:

• Only full-screen recording, you cannot record only a region of the screen – duh!
• Recording cannot be paused.
• No audio-only tracks, ScreenDraw, or markers.
• No captions.
• No audio enhancements or replace a portion of the audio track with silence.
• No production preview or batch production.
• No customization whatsoever of the Flash player controls, the start and end screens, or the about box.

This may seem offset by features like upload to YouTube or iTunes, but these are bland features as they both only take a couple of extra steps to do manually. Frankly, I will stick with ScreenFlow for the foreseeable future.

Growl notification script for Mac OS Mail

After I created a script to enable Growl notifications for Entourage, complete with subject, from and the first part of the email, I have adapted the script to work with Mail. The reason is that I have dumped Entourage – in fact, I have dumped Office and gone with Mail + iWork, now that Snow Leopard’s Mail supports Exchange.

Below are a couple of samples of the notifications shown from my script, which you can download here. Enjoy!

So where are the beautiful Mac OS weather station apps?

I got started with weather stations with a cheapo Huger WM-918, even though my interest in meteorology has been growing since a young age. It was fun to predict thunderstorm based on natural factors such as the behavior of ants and flies, or the flight patterns of certain birds – all of this, once you had been accustomed to the factors of a certain place, was remarkably accurate.

Back when I installed the Huger, I was mostly a Windows/Linux user, and the best application to connect the weather station to my PC and the internet was Virtual Weather Station by Ambient Weather. It was, although visually appealing, a resources hog, using an instruments library that caused the host PC to grind to a halt. If you were serious about running the software full-time, you needed a dedicated machine to handle the load. Maybe the resources issue has been solved by now, but the screenshots look exactly the same as back then.

Fast forward to today, and I’m the proud owner of a Davis Vantage Pro2 with an extra solar radiation sensor, which I installed on the roof last week. It’s an excellent weather station, with many options and accessories, which allows you to get -very- professional about weather without going into high-end stations that cost thousands.

I became a Mac ‘switcher’ in 2006 with a new MacBook Pro – since Apple made the change to Intel processors, I could run those Windows apps that were not available for OS X (such as electronic circuit design software) in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, while enjoying the stability, performance and yes – beauty – of Leopard.

Naturally, I started looking for Mac software that would allow me to monitor the Davis station and upload real-time data to the internet, and the results of the search were frankly disappointing. There simply are no beautiful Mac OS weather applications, at least, none that I could find.

Before reviewing the contenders, let me clarify the beautiful part. I believe in functional software, but I am also very maniacal about user interfaces and their visual appearance and function. A beautiful GUI shows that the developer put a lot of extra effort during development to make the user experience pleasing as well as functional. I myself have designed what I consider these days awful interfaces, but when I did, I tried my best to make them look good, particularly when compared to alternative options (and I was proud of the results, being completely self-taught on the subject).

My first major release was StumbVerter, with over 750.000 downloads since it was released in 2002. I paid particular attention to the toolbar, the layout of the app, and the icons representing WiFi signals. Then came TrunkSniffer, which was a commercial application (now freeware) used by amateurs as well as trunked network operators and intelligence agencies from various countries. In this case, I remember spending a lot of time making the knobs, dials and graphs look good – while the dialog windows look like complete crap to me when I look at them now.

At Whisher, we hired a specialized firm, Ergosign, to design the GUI and test the usability of the software – and I have to say that it’s one of the engineering areas where we achieved the best results, and I am most proud of. We could criticize many things on the client and service, but the GUI was always well designed, appealing, usable – and beautiful.

Let’s look at the weather software contenders, shall we? I will concentrate on visuals and usability, as they relate with Mac OS, rather than functionality – some apps even post weather data to Twitter, for example.

Davis WeatherLink [link]

It makes sense to start with the manufacturer of my new weather station. When you purchase one of the data logger options, you get a free copy of the WeatherLink application, which reads data from the logger and shows real-time conditions, history, and uploads data to the internet. Here is the app’s main screen:

Now, do I really need to explain what is wrong with this GUI? Standard fonts, child-drawn dials and bar graphs, and Windows 3.11 style icons, make for a very ugly thing to have to look at. On top of this, the Mac OS version is actually written in Java, which makes it sluggish. WeatherLink will freeze every now and then, requiring a restart. Basically, they transplanted the Windows app into Mac OS without paying the slightest attention to OS X GUI guidelines.

Weather Display [link]

Way more featured, but way more ugly than WeatherLink, comes Weather Display, which is a Windows application that has been transplated to Mac OS in some obscure way. The pain starts after installing the app:

That’s right – you get a folder in /Applications, not an application bundle with its corresponding icon. This is sometimes used by other apps, such as Microsoft Office or iWork, but they use descriptive text as the folder name, and show the app launch icons, not a confusing bundle of stuff. Once you open the folder, it gets worse (the screenshot shows only a handful of icons, there’s a ton – click for a full-size version):

In order to start the app, you need to click on the icon named WeatherD – strangely, not named like the parent folder, logic dictates it should be called WDisplay, for example.

Here is the Mac OS version in all its glory shame:

used to send emails to the Whisher developers with screenshots and big red WTF arrows pointing at the slight defects that sometimes happened in the GUI design – in this case, the screenshot would be overwhelmed by red arrows, so I will point at a few of the most blatant issues:

The interface on Windows looks somewhat better, but it is still a mess. They are asking for $70 for this software, and it seems like it is quite popular – it is actually loaded with very useful features. I may be too purist on this, but if I’m going to pay for an application, I want it to look good – unless it’s something where functionality is 100% more important versus looks (e.g. command-line wireless tools such as airodump-ng).

Below are some honorable mentions, honorable in the sense that while they are not as ugly as the two apps above, they are still not really that good-looking, but at least the developers made an effort at developing for Mac OS.

LightSoft Weather Center [link]

This is actually one of the best apps in terms of visuals and OS X guidelines compliance, but the gauges look very simplistic, and the multiple window arrangement makes usage a little awkward.

WeatherHawk

Sadly, it only works with WeatherHawk stations, but it’s by far the most visually appealing application, with a very nice wind gauge, simple to read graphs, and well-spaced (although a bit too wide) data fields. This app is made by AfterTen, who has WeatherTracker in the works, and by the looks of their other apps, it should be the best of the bunch.

There is one final application called wview, which is in reality a set of daemons that retrieve data from various weather station models, store it in an SQL database, and automatically generate HTML files with related graphics which are then uploaded to a web server. The default templates are ugly, but it’s up to the designer to make them as gorgeous as possible, so it’s at least possible to make it beautiful.

I’m actually brewing an idea after this post, but I have to put things into order before I post again giving more details.

Worrying – spam on TheFunded

So I was checking through the backlog of TheFunded RSS entries for interesting posts and reviews, and found – wait for it – spam! And not just one post, but six, all by different users by names like Felicia or Kassidy. Here is a screenshot of the spam posts in question (click for a full-size image) – the links to the actual posts return a 500 server error, and they have been removed from the live RSS feed – Google Reader still has them as of a few minutes ago:

This in itself wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, if TheFunded was your average vBulletin or phpBB-based forum, which are frequently infiltrated by spammers unless very draconian rules are applied.

And what are these rules? Most usually, things like posting restrictions for so many days, and in some cases, per-user vetting of new registrations – in essence, what TheFunded claims to be doing with its new members. Money quote from TheFunded membership application form:

Please fill out the form fields correctly. The application will be manually processed to ensure that you do not work in venture capital. Processing may take up to five days, though you will normally be approved in less than 48 hours.

and

Applications without a valid biography available online will be rejected. At a minimum, you must have a LinkedIn profile with reasonable number of connections in place or a bio on your corporate site.

To me, this can have only two explanations: TheFunded doesn’t really do proper checks of membership applications, or their server was attacked and posts inserted into their database.

We are on autopilot

In the first case, the problem would be shoddy management of applicants, which is worrying to those who contribute based on the premise of complete anonymity – if you write bad things about your investors, they are not going to be happy about it. TheFunded shields executives and founders’ comments about VCs and their funds. If random people can get into TheFunded, then VCs also can, violating the main premise on which TheFunded was built.

We got pwned

Equally as worrying, since a security issue that allows spam to be posted could also be exploited to access the database of members, and data that could link them to their real identity. In TheFunded’s favor, their FAQ explains how anonymity works, and it is actually very good as described, thus, no hack on the content server could reveal a true user’s identity, but still, a hack reveals weak points – we all know how Twitter had some of its confidential memos leaked a short while ago.

In either case, it would be good if TheFunded could explain what happened, and what have they done to fix the issue, other than delete the posts (and presumably also Felicia & Co.’s accounts!).