Category Archives: Computers/Apple

Will we ever find out what happened to Flip Video?

May 8, 2011 By in Computers/Apple, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Cisco Killed The Flip Cam A Day Before It Was Going To Get A Cool New Live Broadcast Feature.” Which is pretty frustrating: why kill the unit right before a major upgrade that’s presumably all sunk costs? The WSJ has one possible answer in “After Cisco Sacrifices His Baby to the Gods of Wall Street, Flip Founder Jon Kaplan Speaks!“, where Kara Swisher says that axing Flip was an “effort to assure Wall Street that it was no longer serious about its wacky foray into the consumer market.” But does it have to be so public? So symbolic?

And it is symbolic: Arik Hesseldahl points out that Cisco lumps the revenue from Flip into an “other” category on its financial statements. He then goes on: “This ‘other revenue’ totaled $2.6 billion in Cisco’s fiscal 2010, up from $1.6 billion in fiscal 2009. The biggest single factor for that billion-dollar boost was $317 million in Flip camera sales. You read that right: Cisco just shut down a business that brought in $317 million in sales in its last fiscal year.”

He says, “Make no mistake, the Flip was and is a culturally significant product.” It was, and, as regular readers know, I almost never write about consumer gadgets because most of the time there’s no point and people who write about them are just wasting their breath. But the Flip was fun in that shocking, surprising way that the original iPods were. Gadgets rarely have that effect—they’re as rare, or maybe rarer, as a book that really speaks to me. But a book is forever while gadgets come and go.

I think it’s the pointlessness of closing Flip that annoys me so much. They made a fun product that a corporate leviathan is killing just because it can. Unfortunately, posts like this one aren’t likely to have much of an effect. There’s a Facebook page devoted to saving Flip, but it only has 407 members as of this writing, and, in Cisco terms, that’s indistinguishable from zero.

Still, David Pogue’s post “The Tragic Death of the Flip” has 13 pages of comments, most from people with the same reaction I did. Killing a beloved product is counterproductive, considering how hard it is to develop and sell a beloved product, and I still wonder why Cisco axed instead of sold the company. A hundred million dollars is presumably better than zero. But I’m not sure we’ll ever find out.

EDIT: Some feedback points out that still-video hybrid cameras like Panasonic’s will likely take over Flip’s market. Could be, but I think the two serve different people. Those Panasonic cameras are a lot more expensive and in key ways less fun to use. I have a Canon camera for pictures and while it’s great for what it is, Flips are more approachable and more portable.

Scrivener or Devonthink Pro, with a side of James Joyce’s Ulysses

November 12, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Tools Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

James Fallows’ post about the writing program Scrivener “suggests broader truths about the ways computers help and hinder the way we think.” He’s right, although I’ve used Scrivener and didn’t love it enough to switch: for anything beyond blog posts I mostly use a combination of Microsoft Word and Mellel, a word processor that is very fast and stable but can’t track changes. This, for me, is not merely bad: I can’t use Mellel beyond first drafts.

The other problem with Mellel isn’t related to the program itself, but to the release cycle. It’s discouraging when a forum post from the developer says, “Yes, we have been slacking off. The pace of development of Mellel – that is, the number of new releases – have dropped significantly over the last three years.” That’s another way of saying, “We’re not really working on it.”

Word, in turn, gets used for any documents I have to share with others (since they already have Word).

Fallows describes how Scrivener offers “a ‘project’ organization system that makes it easy to amass many notes, files, quotes, research documents, etc related to the essay or article or book you’re writing.” I primarily use Devonthink Pro (DTP) for this kind of purpose, and it connects whatever ideas I have to other quotes, ideas, and the like. The “artificial intelligence” engine is surprisingly useful at making connections that I didn’t realize I had. Obviously I could use DTP with Scrivener, but the use of DTP makes the marginal value of Scrivener somewhat lower.

Scrivener 2.0, however, is intriguing; these videos demonstrate its power. More on that later, as I’d like to follow-up on the idea that computers can “help and hinder the way we work.” Scrivener enables one to rearrange large chunks of materials easily, which is how a lot of writers work in the off-line world. For example, I’ve been reading Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses for a seminar paper and came across this description of Joyce’s process in A. Walton Litz’s “The Design of Ulysses:”

[Joyce] did not write Ulysses straight through, following the final order the episodes. First it was necessary to determine the design of the novel, to visualize its characters and the course of the action, and this entailed putting scattered portions on paper in order to clarify them. Then, like the mosaic worker, Joyce collected and sorted material to fit the design. Finally, the fragments were placed in their proper positions through a process of rough drafts and revisions.

The “design” and the ability to “visualize its characters and the course of the action” corresponds roughly to Scrivener’s idea pane. The “scattered portions on paper” come next so they can be rearranged, “collected” and “sorted.” There’s nothing wrong with using pieces of paper, of course—it worked for Joyce!—but I wonder what the great novelist would think of working digitally.

Joyce used notecards, and Litz liked the mosaic-worker analogy so much that he uses it again a few pages later:

It was the function of the note-sheets to assure that patterns and relationships already visualized by Joyce reached their fore-ordained positions in the text. Like the mosaic worker, he was continuously sorting and re-grouping his raw materials, assigned each fragment to its proper place in the general design. The mechanical nature of this process emphasizes the mechanical nature of those ordering principles which give Ulysses its superficial unity [. . . ]

I used to write more like this and now I write less like this: it is often my goal to ensure that each chapter follows inexorably from the preceding chapter. The narrative threads and the desires of each character should force the novel in a particular direction. If I can rearrange the chapters relatively easily, then I feel like I’ve done something wrong. I still want “patterns and relationships” to reach conclusions, but I don’t want those conclusions “fore-ordained:” I want them to arise organically, and for them to be inevitable yet surprising. This is a difficult trick to pull off, but it means that the serial nature of the writing I do is probably less likely to be helped by the structure of Scrivener than the writing some others might do.

In the essay after Litz’s, Anthony Cronin’s “The Advent of Bloom” begins with the structure of Ulysses: “[. . .] if Ulysses can be said to have a plot, its plot is formless and does not give form to the book – it is not shaped to produce a series of dramatic sensations for purposes aesthetic or otherwise; it has no conclusion in event, only a termination in time [. . .]” If a plot “does not give form to the book,” then something must; for some writers, Scrivener might organize it and help find a way to present formlessness. The program helps one create a mosaic, but I’m not trying to create a mosaic in my work, at least right now: I’m trying to create a linear plot. So I don’t think the program will help me as much as it could.

Nonfiction books, on the other hand, might be much better with Scrivener: in my papers, I move material around much more frequently than I do in fiction. Since I haven’t written any nonfiction books, however, I can’t comment as much on those.

I suspect that large, high-resolution monitors enable programs like Scrivener: at 24″ or larger, one can have a broad enough swatch of material open to really make a (computer) desktop feel like a (physical) desktop. You can layout and rearrange items much more easily. The new 27″ iMacs in particular are appealing for this purpose, and one can now find 27″ external monitors from Dell, Apple, and others. As desktops become more like desktops, being able to visualize large amounts of information at once makes tools like Scrivener more useful.

At the moment, I’m about 80K words into a novel that I think will end up in the neighborhood of 100K – 110K words, which is a bit long for a first published work but not impossibly long. Using a 24″ iMac, I can easily have two pages of text open at a time, which is very convenient. That’s what I use for my “notes” section (miscellaneous stuff I want to remember but can’t immediately add to the main narrative) and my main window, which has the novel progressing from Chapter 1 to “### END ###.” On my second monitor, a 20″ cheapie Dell, I have an outline and character list open.

Some of those functions could be taken over by Scrivener, based on what I’ve seen in the videos. For my next novel—if there is another in the immediate future; I need to devote more time to academic writing—I’d be willing to try Scrivener long enough to know if version 2.0 is a good fit. For this one, however, the thought of changing tools in the middle of the process would be too disruptive. There’s no reason, after all, that I can’t use both Scrivener and Devonthink Pro.

Scrivener or Devonthink Pro, with a side of James Joyce's Ulysses

November 12, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Tools Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

James Fallows’ post about the writing program Scrivener “suggests broader truths about the ways computers help and hinder the way we think.” He’s right, although I’ve used Scrivener and didn’t love it enough to switch: for anything beyond blog posts I mostly use a combination of Microsoft Word and Mellel, a word processor that is very fast and stable but can’t track changes. This, for me, is not merely bad: I can’t use Mellel beyond first drafts.

The other problem with Mellel isn’t related to the program itself, but to the release cycle. It’s discouraging when a forum post from the developer says, “Yes, we have been slacking off. The pace of development of Mellel – that is, the number of new releases – have dropped significantly over the last three years.” That’s another way of saying, “We’re not really working on it.”

Word, in turn, gets used for any documents I have to share with others (since they already have Word).

Fallows describes how Scrivener offers “a ‘project’ organization system that makes it easy to amass many notes, files, quotes, research documents, etc related to the essay or article or book you’re writing.” I primarily use Devonthink Pro (DTP) for this kind of purpose, and it connects whatever ideas I have to other quotes, ideas, and the like. The “artificial intelligence” engine is surprisingly useful at making connections that I didn’t realize I had. Obviously I could use DTP with Scrivener, but the use of DTP makes the marginal value of Scrivener somewhat lower.

Scrivener 2.0, however, is intriguing; these videos demonstrate its power. More on that later, as I’d like to follow-up on the idea that computers can “help and hinder the way we work.” Scrivener enables one to rearrange large chunks of materials easily, which is how a lot of writers work in the off-line world. For example, I’ve been reading Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses for a seminar paper and came across this description of Joyce’s process in A. Walton Litz’s “The Design of Ulysses:”

[Joyce] did not write Ulysses straight through, following the final order the episodes. First it was necessary to determine the design of the novel, to visualize its characters and the course of the action, and this entailed putting scattered portions on paper in order to clarify them. Then, like the mosaic worker, Joyce collected and sorted material to fit the design. Finally, the fragments were placed in their proper positions through a process of rough drafts and revisions.

The “design” and the ability to “visualize its characters and the course of the action” corresponds roughly to Scrivener’s idea pane. The “scattered portions on paper” come next so they can be rearranged, “collected” and “sorted.” There’s nothing wrong with using pieces of paper, of course—it worked for Joyce!—but I wonder what the great novelist would think of working digitally.

Joyce used notecards, and Litz liked the mosaic-worker analogy so much that he uses it again a few pages later:

It was the function of the note-sheets to assure that patterns and relationships already visualized by Joyce reached their fore-ordained positions in the text. Like the mosaic worker, he was continuously sorting and re-grouping his raw materials, assigned each fragment to its proper place in the general design. The mechanical nature of this process emphasizes the mechanical nature of those ordering principles which give Ulysses its superficial unity [. . . ]

I used to write more like this and now I write less like this: it is often my goal to ensure that each chapter follows inexorably from the preceding chapter. The narrative threads and the desires of each character should force the novel in a particular direction. If I can rearrange the chapters relatively easily, then I feel like I’ve done something wrong. I still want “patterns and relationships” to reach conclusions, but I don’t want those conclusions “fore-ordained:” I want them to arise organically, and for them to be inevitable yet surprising. This is a difficult trick to pull off, but it means that the serial nature of the writing I do is probably less likely to be helped by the structure of Scrivener than the writing some others might do.

In the essay after Litz’s, Anthony Cronin’s “The Advent of Bloom” begins with the structure of Ulysses: “[. . .] if Ulysses can be said to have a plot, its plot is formless and does not give form to the book – it is not shaped to produce a series of dramatic sensations for purposes aesthetic or otherwise; it has no conclusion in event, only a termination in time [. . .]” If a plot “does not give form to the book,” then something must; for some writers, Scrivener might organize it and help find a way to present formlessness. The program helps one create a mosaic, but I’m not trying to create a mosaic in my work, at least right now: I’m trying to create a linear plot. So I don’t think the program will help me as much as it could.

Nonfiction books, on the other hand, might be much better with Scrivener: in my papers, I move material around much more frequently than I do in fiction. Since I haven’t written any nonfiction books, however, I can’t comment as much on those.

I suspect that large, high-resolution monitors enable programs like Scrivener: at 24″ or larger, one can have a broad enough swatch of material open to really make a (computer) desktop feel like a (physical) desktop. You can layout and rearrange items much more easily. The new 27″ iMacs in particular are appealing for this purpose, and one can now find 27″ external monitors from Dell, Apple, and others. As desktops become more like desktops, being able to visualize large amounts of information at once makes tools like Scrivener more useful.

At the moment, I’m about 80K words into a novel that I think will end up in the neighborhood of 100K – 110K words, which is a bit long for a first published work but not impossibly long. Using a 24″ iMac, I can easily have two pages of text open at a time, which is very convenient. That’s what I use for my “notes” section (miscellaneous stuff I want to remember but can’t immediately add to the main narrative) and my main window, which has the novel progressing from Chapter 1 to “### END ###.” On my second monitor, a 20″ cheapie Dell, I have an outline and character list open.

Some of those functions could be taken over by Scrivener, based on what I’ve seen in the videos. For my next novel—if there is another in the immediate future; I need to devote more time to academic writing—I’d be willing to try Scrivener long enough to know if version 2.0 is a good fit. For this one, however, the thought of changing tools in the middle of the process would be too disruptive. There’s no reason, after all, that I can’t use both Scrivener and Devonthink Pro.

How to buy a Mac

November 1, 2010 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Apple updates their computers every nine to fifteen months or so. If you buy at the beginning of the “product cycle,” you usually get really good bang for their buck: fast components for reasonably prices. Toward the end of the product cycle, deals aren’t as good.

People often ask for advice about whether they should buy that MacBook or iMac; this is especially common on the Ars Technica Mac Board, and I’ve realized that there’s a relatively simply algorithm to determine whether you should buy now or wait. One person, “masonk,” made this handy flow chart, which is explained in words below:

The standard advice:

If you don’t have a working, usable computer and need one, buy it.

Check the Mac Rumor’s Buyers Guide. Has the computer been updated within the last six months? If so, buy it: an upgrade in the near future is unlikely.

If not, are we within six weeks of the World Wide Developer Conference, MacWorld (or whatever January event might replace it), or a “special media event?” Can you wait the six weeks—that is, do you have a computer that’s still usable? If so, wait, as there’s a good chance of product updates.

If we’re not within six weeks of a major event, buy it anyway, as you don’t know when an update might appear.

Thoughts on the new version of Word for OS X: 2011

October 31, 2010 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Microsoft just released Office for OS X 2011, and I’ve been using it for the last day. The upgrade is notable for three reasons:

1) Word 2011 is much, much faster than Word 2008. Vastly faster. Did I mention it was faster? Word opens files faster, becomes responsive faster, and randomly hangs less often. Scrolling is much smoother, especially on a 75,000-word novel. I don’t know what Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit did to achieve this, but kudos to them.

2) The “Elements” toolbar at the top of the screen is still there:

I can’t find a way to get rid of it. This is irritating because vertical space is at a premium relative to horizontal space on modern, widescreen monitors. My 24″ iMac has just enough space to fit two full pages side-by-side. Edit: Someone just sent me an e-mail saying that one can turn off this part of the “ribbon” in the ribbon preferences menu. Great news! There’

3) There’s now a Mellel-like full-screen view:

This is pretty nice. I haven’t found a hot key for full-screen view, although I think there should be a way to assign one, if I can find it. But the full-screen view is much slower than the normal views (three steps forward, one step back…). If I click into a file on my second monitor, the full-screen view goes (glacially) away.

No word (haha!) yet on whether the new version is as crash-prone as previous versions. Word crashes on me at least every couple weeks, usually in ways that are frustratingly random and not reproducible. Find/replace is an egregious cause of crashes.

I’m likely to keep using Mellel for first drafts and stuff that I primarily work on alone and Word for grant writing and stuff I’m likely to share.

Computers and network effects: Why your computer is “slow”

September 30, 2010 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

“Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds” is half-right. Here’s the part that’s right:

[…] it remains obvious that computers come in just two speeds: slow and fast. A slow computer is one which cannot keep up with the operator’s actions in real time, and forces the hapless human to wait. A fast computer is one which can, and does not.

Today’s personal computers (with a few possible exceptions) are only available in the “slow” speed grade.

So far so good: I wish I didn’t have to wait as long as I do for Word to open documents or load or for OS X to become responsive after reboot. But then there’s the reason offered as to why computers feel subjectively slower in many respects than they did:

The GUI of my 4MHz Symbolics 3620 lisp machine is more responsive on average than that of my 3GHz office PC. The former boots (into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created) faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell.

This implies that the world is filled with “bloat.” But such an argument reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. He says:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

Exactly. And he goes on to quote Jamie Zawinski saying, “Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it’s full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful.”

That’s correct; Stanislav’s 4MHz Symbolics 3620 lisp machine was/is no doubt a nice computer. But modern, ultra-responsive computers don’t exist not because people like bloat—they don’t exist because people in the aggregate choose trade-offs that favor a very wide diversity of uses. People don’t want to make the trade-offs that fast responsiveness implies in sufficient numbers for there to be a market for such a computer.

Nothing is stopping someone from making a stripped-down version of, say, Linux that will boot “into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell.” But most people evidently prefer the features that modern OSes and programs offer. Or, rather, they prefer that modern OSes support THEIR pet feature and make everything as easy to accomplish as possible at the expense of speed. If you take out their favorite feature… well, then you can keep your superfast response time and they’ll stick with Windows.

To his credit, Stanislav responded to a version of what I wrote above, noting some of the possible technical deficiencies of Linux:

If you think that a static-language-kernel abomination like Linux (or any other UNIX clone) could be turned into a civilized programming environment, you are gravely mistaken.

That may be true: my programming skill and knowledge end around simple scripting and CS 102. But whatever the weaknesses of Linux, OS X, and Windows, taken together they represent uncounted hours of programming and debugging time and effort. For those of you who haven’t tried it, I can only say that programming is an enormous challenge. To try and replicate all that modern OSes offer would be hard—and probably effectively impossible. If Stanislav wants to do it, though, I’d be his first cheerleader—but the history of computing is also rife with massive rewrites of existing software and paradigms that fail. See, for example, GNU/Hurd for a classic example. It’s been in development since 1990. Did it fail for technical or social reasons? I have no idea, but the history of new operating systems, however technically advanced, is not a happy one.

Stanislav goes on to say:

And if only the bloat and waste consisted of actual features that someone truly wants to use.

The problem is that one man’s feature is another’s bloat, and vice-versa, which Joel Spolsky points out, and that’s why the computer experience looks like it does today: because people hate bloat, unless it’s their bloat, in which case they’ll tolerate it.

He links to a cool post on regulated utilities as seen in New York (go read it). But I don’t think the power grid metaphor is a good one because transmission lines do one thing: move electricity. Computers can be programmed to do effectively anything, and, because users’ needs vary so much, so does the software. You don’t have to build everything from APIs to photo manipulation utilities to web browsers on top of power lines.

Note the last line of Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of heterogeneous engineering, which is linked to in Stanislav’s “About” page:

Symbolics is a classic example of a company failing at heterogeneous engineering. Focusing exclusively on the technical aspects of engineering led to great technical innovation. However, Symbolics did not successfully engineer its environment, custormers [sic], competitors and the market. This made the company unable to achieve long term success.

That kind of thinking sounds, to me, like the kind of thinking that leads one to lament how “slow” modern computers are. They are—from one perspective. From another, they enable things that the Lisp machine didn’t have (like, say, YouTube).

However, I’m a random armchair quarterback, and code talks while BS walks. If you think you can produce an OS that people want to use, write it. But when it doesn’t support X, where “X” is whatever they want, don’t be surprised when those people don’t use it. Metcalfe’s Law is strong in computing, and there is a massive amount of computing history devoted to the rewrite syndrome; for another example, see Dreaming in Code, a book that describes how an ostensibly simple task became an engineering monster.

Steve Jobs’ prescient comment

May 29, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”

(Emphasis added.)

—That’s from a 1996 interview with Jobs, and he was completely right: little of interest happened to the desktop interface virtually everyone uses until around 2003 or 2004, when OS X 10.3 was released. The first major useful change in desktops that I recall during the period was Spotlight in OS X 10.4, which was, not coincidentally, around the time I got a PowerBook.

Writing space: 2010

May 2, 2010 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

About three years ago I posted a picture of my then-writing space. Now, this Hacker News post inspires me to do the same:

The setup: a 24″ iMac with a 20″ Dell monitor to the side. The most important parts of the desk are the Humanscale keyboard tray mounted underneath a Maxon 1000 Series. The keyboard: a Kinesis Advantage.

Charlie Stross on the Real Reason Steve Jobs hates flash (and how lives change)

April 30, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Links, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Charlie Stross has a typically fascinating post about the real reason Steve Jobs hates flash. The title is deceptive: the post is really about the future of the computing industry, which is to say, the future of our day-to-day lives.

If you read tech blogs, you’ve read a million people in the echo chamber repeating the same things to one another over and over again. Some of that stuff is probably right, but even if Stross is wrong, he’s at least pulling his head more than six inches off the ground, looking around, and saying “what are we going to do when we hit those mountains up ahead?”

And I don’t even own an iPad, or have much desire to be in the cloud for the sake of being in the cloud. But the argument about the importance of always-on networking is a strong one, even if, to me, it also points to the points to the greater importance of being able to disconnect distraction.

In the meantime, however, I’m going back to the story that I’m working on. Stories have the advantage that they’ll probably always be popular, even if the medium through which one experiences them changes. Consequently, I’m turning Mac Freedom on and Internet access off.

Kindle land, with requisite ruminations on the iPad

April 13, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Culture, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

EDIT: See this comment on my long-term analysis of this generation of Kindle.

James Fallows says that in order to avoid becoming a Kindle bore, you should “Just shut up when tempted to say or write anything about it. Otherwise you’ll be driving people crazy with your enthusing about how useful and convenient it is, and what its potential might be, and how many elegant decisions are evident in its conception and design.” I’m going to violate that right now by enumerating the number of things the Kindle does right and huge, giant thing it does wrong. If this makes me a bore, proceed to the next post.

Things done right: The screen is very, very nice, as is the tactile feel of the device itself. Although notes aren’t as satisfying to write as they are in paper, they work reasonably well and are easily aggregated. Using the “search” feature allows effectively infinite, immediate concordances in realtime. Shopping in the Kindle store is easy, although I think I’ve only bought two books from it because of the DRM.

The most useful thing about the Kindle for me isn’t actually reading books bought from Amazon—I’m reluctant to spend much money on them, knowing there’s a decent chance that in five years I’ll have a different device or won’t be able to transfer the books I buy now. Rather, Marco Arment’s Instapaper makes the Kindle insanely useful. If I find a longish article online, I hit the “Read Later” bookmarklet in Firefox. About once a week, I log into Instapaper and download all those articles on my Kindle. Bingo: I don’t have to keep printing and losing papers and I still get to read everything I want to read.

Things done wrong: The big-time, number one problem with the Kindle is its terrible software for organizing and managing documents. Actually, scratch that: it doesn’t really have software for managing documents.

The Kindle shows up as a generic USB device on OS X. Want to load it with .pdfs? Be prepared to drag them into a folder labeled “documents.” This process reminds me of .mp3 players… before the iPod. This doesn’t bode well for Amazon, especially now that the iPad is out.

The closest third-party app I’ve found so far is Calibre, which is clunky and doesn’t work that well, especially out-of-the-box. It won’t automatically sync to my Kindle at the moment for reasons not abundantly clear to me; it doesn’t have built-in optical character recognition (OCR) for .pdfs; it doesn’t automatically copy things bought off my Kindle to the computer. The list goes on. The difficulty of writing really good, really intuitive software like iTunes is really, really high.

I’m reminded of this post comparing Tumblr and Posterous, which compares those two “reblogging” tools. The basic point: design counts more than technology. At the moment, the Kindle’s technology is impressive. The physical hardware isn’t bad, although the screen should be bigger: there isn’t enough space before I have to scroll. But until iTunes for the Kindle comes along and whisks the searching and sorting problems away, the Kindle is effectively crippled by software.

I’m sure the omission of iTunes-for-the-Kindle is intentional on Amazon’s part: what they really want you to do is pay them money every time you buy a book or convert a .pdf. That’s okay but seems penny-wise and pound-foolish; think of Scott Adams’ complaint about bad user interfaces. At the end he asks, “What is your biggest interface peeve?” I now have one.

In other news, Apple released the iPad not long ago, which virtually every media outlet on the planet has covered. Megan McArdle says of it:

I’m still unsure how the iPad gets around the core problem: it doesn’t replace anything. Buying an iPhone let me take my phone, my camera, and my iPod out of the briefcase. Buying a Kindle let me remove a newspaper, several books, and some documents I have on PDF.

You can see similar comments here.

But if the iPad software is sufficiently better than the Kindle, users might end up chiefly with it.
One should read this article from Paul Buchheit’s blog, in which he notes the three reasons why the original iPod succeeded where others didn’t. It was:

1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong).

Emphasis added. The weird thing is that Amazon is getting this wrong right now. Syncing the Kindle to my computer is cumbersome; there isn’t a good program for organizing my books and .pdfs. Charlie Stross writes about why he, a self-described UNIX bigot, uses a couple of Macs, instead of cheaper Linux boxes:

The reason I choose to pay through the nose for my computers is very simple: unlike just about every other manufacturer in the business, Apple appreciate the importance of good industrial design.

(Note: he’s British, which explains the “Apple appreciate” rather than “Apple appreciates.” The Brits think of corporations as plural, we think of them as singular. What would Steven Pinker say?)

I would also add that Apple has fewer and different hassles than running Linux boxes, which I say as someone who had periodic problems with audio drivers and other things in the ~2001 – 2003 range before I gave up. But the Kindle’s hassles are reminiscent of a product that should be better than it is. I’ve drifted somewhat from the main point regarding the Kindle, but the device is one of these “close, but still wrong” items that is somewhat frustrating, much like Linux, the last Volvo I drove, the Ikea desks I’ve seen, and chairs that unsuccessfully mimic the Aeron.

The Kindle is very, very good for English majors who get assigned a lot of pre-1923 fiction (which they can get free online) or for people who like reading from that era and do so voluminously. For the rest of us, it lacks, especially in the nonfiction department, where it’s hard to skip from section to section quickly.

Reading fiction on it is a substantially better experience because I seldom skip long sections in novels—it’s pretty hard to decide an entire chapter should be skipped, since that chapter will usually contribute something important to the story (and, if it doesn’t, the novel isn’t very good). In addition, novels are relatively unlikely to have research citations, which are sometimes important in evaluating nonfiction, especially if that nonfiction makes extensive or dubious claims. Right now, the small amount of nonfiction I’ve got doesn’t come with footnote hyperlinks. It shouldn’t be all that hard to create a style named, say, footnote with an automated number linking it to a later number so that one can jump freely back and forth between them. But that’s rare in the books I’ve read.

Amazon has released a kindle Software Development Kit (SDK), which might improve some of its current problems. But until it solves the “organizing home” problem that iTunes does so well, it’s not going to be a tremendously useful device for me and many other heavy readers who need some way of getting articles to and from the device. That’s a huge missing feature that Instapaper (somewhat) solves, but not well enough. The Kindle is an “almost” device, like many of the “almost” mp3 players before the iPod. But I don’t think almost is enough.