Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Snow Leopard: The First 72 Hours

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 31, 2009 at 1:45 pm

OS X Snow LeopardThis isn’t a review of Apple’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard–here are a bunch of those–but rather just some notes on my first three days with it. (I showed up at my local Apple Store at 10am on Friday to buy it, and was on the way back to my car at 10:01–sure beats waking up at 3am to buy an iPhone.)

Herewith, random musings:

Installation on my MacBook Pro went well. It took 38 minutes (less than Apple’s 45-minute estimate) and required virtually no input from me.  Snow Leopard reported almost 11GB more free disk space than Leopard did, which got me all giddy. I’ve since learned that Snow Leopard, like hard-disk manufacturers, defines 1KB as 1,000 bytes rather than 1024, and some of the reclaimed space is therefore imaginary.

I’m still getting a sense of its speed. It’s always dangerous to read vendor claims about performance increases–unless you’re a really skeptical sort, being told that an OS is zippier may have a placebo effect. Overall, this MacBook was pleasingly speedy under Leopard, and is pleasingly speedy under Snow Leopard. The one place where I know I see a performance increase is one that’s important to me, but one which Apple makes no claims about in its discussion of speed improvement: Spotlight searches, which were sometimes quite slow in Leopard, are reliably quick now.

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Can You Trust Wikipedia?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 31, 2009 at 10:05 am

Wired has an interesting story about Wikitrust, a new technology that will color-code material in Wikipedia in an attempt to indicate how trustworthy its author is. It’s an intriguing solution to a real problem, although like all articles on Wikipedia accuracy, Wired’s piece makes a reflexive-but-misguided reference to Encyclopaedia Britannica being the paragon of reference-work trustiness. (Which it isn’t–or at least wasn’t when my father reviewed it back in the 1970s and found some jaw-dropping errors.)

Anyhow, I feel a T-Poll coming on…

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The T-Grid: Mickey Mouse vs. Spider-Man

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 31, 2009 at 9:22 am

It’s not the biggest media merger ever, but it may be the most intriguing one: The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. Which means that Mickey Mouse, Goofy, the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Pinocchio, the X-Men, Gus and Jaq-Jaq, Kermit the Frog, Captain America, the Little Mermaid, Ghost Rider, Buzz Lightyear, the Dazzler, Dr. Strange, Hannah Montana, all 101 Dalmatians, and both Donald and Howard Duck will work for the same company.

I’m reporting on this here mainly because it seems like a safe bet that Disney is putting down its four bil in part because of the potential it sees for Marvel characters in digital form: in games, on the Web, via digital distribution of movies, on mobile devices, and more. But I’m also covering this because I felt like doing a T-Grid. After the jump, a quick comparison of two legendary characters who will surely meet before too much time has passed.

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Building a Kindle Killer. Or Several of Them

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 3:46 pm

Sony vs. KindleSlates Farhad Manjoo has a good story up about how Sony in particular and e-reader makers in general can build an e-book device that’s better and more popular than Amazon’s Kindle. One graf that left me mentally applauding:

I’d counsel Amazon’s competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they’d be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he’s got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I’d prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with most online music—but many in the publishing industry would never go for that.) Kindle’s rivals could also get together to create a huge, single ePub bookstore. Publishers would have a big incentive to feed this store with all their books—if they provide books only to Amazon, they’d be helping to create a monopolist in their industry, and that’s never good for business.

Manjoo says he hopes that Sony and/or other players provide Amazon.com with intense competition. So do I, for the same reason–I don ‘t want Amazon or Google or anyone else to dominate electronic books any more than I’d have been happy if Random House (say) had cornered the market on dead-tree tomes. Right now, Sony seems like the best hope for a strong Amazon alternative (Plastic Logic is a fairly promising dark horse). The upcoming Sony Reader Daily Edition leaves me cautiously optimistic, but I’d love to see more companies leap into the action…

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In Case of Emergency, Should the White House Control the Internet?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 11:38 am

Obama shuts off InternetCnet’s Declan McCullagh has a good story up on a Senate Bill sponsored by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) which would give the White House the power to disconnect private computers from the Internet in the case of a cyberemergency. McCullagh says that the bill, a revised version of one floated last spring, remains troubling to Internet and telecommunications companies and civil liberties groups, who say the the new version remains vague about the powers it grants.

Let’s take a T-Poll on it–and just to remove politics from the issue (and despite my silly piece of art), let’s make this question about a fictional President of the United States of unspecified political party, not the guy who happens to be there right this very minute…

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More Mac Tablet Scuttlebutt

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 9:03 am

Apple TabletA couple of weeks ago, a “photo” of a tablet apparently running full-blown OS X rather than iPhone OS hit the Web. Now Gizmodo is quoting a supposedly reliable source as saying a Mac Tablet was spotted in a factory in China:

This source claims that the two touchscreen prototypes—made of aluminum, but on the shape of big iPhones—were in a factory in Shenzuen, China. One of them “was running Mac OS X 10.5.” When I asked, the source didn’t know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but “it’s not FoxConn.”

We’re still far, far from having compelling evidence that Apple will ever ship a Mac tablet–it’s still much more of an imaginary product than the giant iPod Touch tablet, and that remains a fuzzy rumor. But if Apple ever does sell a Mac in tablet form, I’ll be curious to see how it deals with the whole question of QWERTY input. I’ve never seen a computer running a traditional computer OS that’s figured out how to dispense with plastic keys…

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Facebook 3.0 for iPhone is Here

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 8:40 am

Apple has approved Joe Hewitt’s Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone, and it’s now available in the App Store. Among the numerous new features: It’s got support for Events and video uploads, lets you “like” items, has a newsfeed that looks more like the one Facebook gives you in your browser, and sports numerous little interface tweaks. It also offers landscape mode in most areas, a feature that wasn’t supposed to show up until the next version.

The app isn’t perfect–it doesn’t let you view Groups as far as I can tell, and there are places where I found the user interface a little confusing (although I have that problem with Facebook in general–hey, maybe it’s me). And so far, I haven’t been able to get one of the most interesting new features–the ability to phone or SMS friends–to work. Overall, though, it’s among the most impressive and feature-rich iPhone applications to date, with an interface that intelligently melds an iPhone sensibility with Facebook’s own feel.

If you give it a whirl, let us know what you think…

Facebook

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Yelp Adds Augmented Reality

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 7:54 am

Yelp LogoAugmented reality–the process of overlaying computer-generated information and imagery on live video–is as good a candidate as any for tech buzzword du jour, and it’s come to the iPhone. As Robert Scoble discovered, the new version of the Yelp application contains an Easter Egg: Shake your iPhone 3GS three times (hard!) and it unlocks a new feature called Monocle.

Moncole uses the 3GS’s camera and compass to let you point the phone at a locale and see Yelp listings for nearby businesses bobbing along on top:

Yelp Monocole View

It’s a neat effect, although I’m not sure if it offers any real advantage over a more traditional map view–the Yelp listings are small enough that they’re tough to tap with your finger, and they don’t make clear where the establishment in question is. And as you can see, some of them even get covered up.

As ReadWriteWeb has reported, other existing iPhone apps are adding augmented reality, too. It’s a cool idea even if the first killer app hasn’t arrived, and you gotta think we’ll see increasingly sophisticated use of it. Me, I want to be able to aim my camera at a person I don’t quite recognize and be reminded who they are…

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