Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Simple Still Isn’t Easy

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Amazon decided to advertise its new Cloud Drive for music (Did I miss something? It’s a big network storage thing, right? Why is this so much more awesome than any other way of uploading my files somewhere?) by selling Lady Gaga’s new album for $0.99 today. That’s right, you can buy “Born This Way” for $0.99 at Amazon or for $15.99 at iTunes. No brainer, amirite?

Holy. Jee. Zus.

I bought the album on Amazon. The Amazon MP3 Downloader started up and told me it’s downloading the album…without filling in the bar that tells me how much it’s downloaded. I guess it downloaded one song, but on the very next song it said: “Download failed; retry download.”

Um. Okay. How do I do that?

There is no handy “Retry” button in the toolbar. There is no “Retry” menu option. I opened the Amazon MP3 Downloader help file and searched for “retry”: the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the help.

I have no idea why it’s not downloading my album. I don’t know where to go to retry or to restart this process. The choice in the toolbar is “Pause Download”, which I don’t want to do — I want it to finish the damn download.

On the next couple of songs, I’m getting the error message “Can’t connect. Check your Internet connection and retry download.” I know perfectly well my Internet connection is just fine. And I have downloaded music for Amazon before, so I have no idea: has something changed and I’ve forgotten to push some button? Are their servers getting slammed with purchases and the only available error messages blame me, the user, for their services faults?

I’m not a naive user of computers. I know plenty about how to use them. But how much energy do I want to invest in learning every single method of how to do things, especially when there are already incredibly intuitive ways that are standard on the Mac OS? That Amazon has chosen not to do this, has in fact made it hard for me, speaks volumes. They definitely have the book download process sussed out, but they have ways to go on building a media empire.

If I had given $16 to Apple, I would have my damn album already.

(In addition, it turned out that initially I had an old version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Um, okay. It asks me if I want to update and I say yes…and I get kicked over to an Amazon web page, where I need to click another button to download a whole ‘nother installer, which will then update my application. This is not how Mac applications do it, guys. You hit a button, and it all magically happens in the background. I don’t have to pay attention to web pages or get extra buttons. This has been a deeply frustrating experience.)

The Kindle device vs. the iPad

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Yes! I’m trolling for hits! It’s guaranteed linking!

Now that I’ve had my Kindle 3 for a month, I’ve had friends ask me which do I prefer: reading on the iPad or on the Kindle? And it’s really no contest: I much much much prefer reading on the iPad.

Yes, LCD display and all.

I am quite impressed with how the screen on the Kindle looks. E-ink is really good technology and it does look like a printed page. But I read all day on a computer screen anyhow, so reading a little bit more on one at night is not a big hassle. It doesn’t make my eyes any more tired than they already are. (Now, if I’m going to give up screens altogether, that would be one thing. But we’re not talking about doing that.)

The Kindle is also much lighter than the iPad (8.5 ounces vs. 1.5 or 1.6 pounds, depending on model). However, I tend to lie in bed with the iPad propped on my rib cage, so the weight really doesn’t bother me.

What the Kindle is better for (as far as I’m concerned):

  • Taking outside the house. Losing the Kindle would definitely suck, no question. But $139 vs. the cost of an iPad (which has WAY more data on it than the Kindle does)…yeah, no contest there. To be honest, though, the real cost of the Kindle is closer to $189, because I had to buy a cover with built-in light for it—that screen ain’t durable, and the Kindle screen is useless in anything less than bright light.
  • Small. It fits in my bag of holding purse. That’s convenient.

What the iPad is better for:

  • Everything else.

The UI on the Kindle sucks. Let me not hold back: it’s terrible. I understand that it’s gotten much better since the original Kindle, so my hat is off to you, Original Kindle owner, for plowing through. The page forward/page back buttons are annoying, but I’ve gotten used to them. Accidentally scrolling ahead 15 pages when I meant to scroll back? Yeah, that sucked the first time, and the second time made me scream (quietly). Scrolling through the list of books I have in there to find the book I want to read when I can’t remember the title or author? That’s nearly unforgivable.

But the teeny-tiny keys for entering text are annoying enough to get me to not use them. True story: Every time I’ve decided to buy a book for my Kindle, I

  1. put the Kindle down,
  2. pick the iPad up,
  3. go to Amazon,
  4. buy the book,
  5. put the iPad down,
  6. pick the Kindle back up.

Yeah. That’s going to convince me to use my Kindle for anything other than a convenience on the road.

Here’s what raised my blood pressure: organizing my book collection.

I buy all of my Kindle books from Amazon. I’m willing to bet folding money Amazon knows what genre these books are in. Maybe several genres, but I bet each book could be marked with just one genre when it gets downloaded.

Does Amazon do this? They do not.

But what does Amazon have? They have something called “Collections”, which are groupings of books I name and arrange (using those teeny-tiny keys on the teeny-tiny keyboard…yeesh). So, I spend a lot of time organizing my 200+ (that’s out of control) ebooks into these Collections on my Kindle device. And the Collections do not propagate to the other locations where I might read my Kindle books (ie, my iPhone and iPad).

In fact, there is no organizing AT ALL in the Kindle app. Nice. So if I carry my entire ebook collection around with me…it becomes a disaster to try to find anything.

(As for non-Amazon books…Apparently there is some way to upload non-Amazon books to the Kindle, but a)it’s not obvious and b)involves mailing something to the email address associated with my Kindle and c)costs me 10 cents per, or something. If I’m going to spend that much effort getting a book on to a reading device, I’ve got a better way. Yes, it’s drag-and-drop to iTunes for syncing with my iPad and iPhone for one-stop shopping.)

(And so you ask: Why do I buy the vast majority of my books from Amazon? Two reasons: a)they still have a bigger selection, although I’ve started searching the iBooks store first, and b)I have an Amazon points Visa card, meaning most of the books I’m buying at Amazon are therefore…free.)

Seriously, UI counts. Yes, it is Amazon’s problem if this annoys me, because iBooks doesn’t do that. My books get loaded into whatever device under whatever category I put them, so every single place I load that book, I can look for it by title, author, AND category. (Yes, I realize this is not technically a win for the iPad, just for iBooks, but this is a major way in which Kindle, whether on the Kindle or on my Kindle app for iPhone, just fails.)

Here’s another example: the way you move around the page on the Kindle is via a 4-sided rocker with a button in the center. It works pretty well if you have a nail long enough to center on one of the sides; not so well if you have a large clumsy finger that either hits the wrong side or the button in the center. You use the rocker to move down the list of options on the page. And you do have to move DOWN the entire page; you can’t go “around the horn” and go UP to go to the last entry on the page.

There might be reasons for that, but wow, would a simple UI change make it easier to navigate on a page with a long list of entries.

Here’s why the iPad is better:

  • My eyes don’t feel any more strained reading on that than on the Kindle. So stop telling me that they do, okay?
  • My hands don’t feel any more strained. Honest, I keep hearing about how heavy the iPad is, and I haven’t found it to be problem. I prop the iPad on my tummy. I turn pages. Then I’m done.
  • I don’t have to have a light on in the bedroom when I’m reading. This is nice for when Darin is asleep and I’m not.
  • Finding books on Amazon is easier via iPad than via the Kindle.
  • Paging forward and backward is easier (touchscreen kicks ass over teeny, terrible form-factor keyboard). My hands get tired whether using the touchscreen or the little buttons over the length of time I spend reading, so I haven’t noticed a winner there.
  • Moving within a book is easier.

I’ll get into the Kindle app vs the iBooks app another time. (Okay, okay, here’s one: you get a bigger chunk of the book when you get a sample from iBooks than you do from Amazon.) The divide between these two devices is rather stunning, however. I know devising a whole new device that allows you to read your books with e-ink must be tough but…suck it up and redo the software, boys. You haven’t nailed it yet.

Update: Just saw the Borders ebooks app for iPhone. Apparently they have something called “What I’m Reading” that propagates all the books you’re currently reading from device to device. Learn from this, Amazon.

Update 10/4/10: Adding Collections to my Kindle device has had an unexpected effect. I now only use the Kindle device, because otherwise I can’t find the book I’ve been reading. (Honestly, when all I can remember is “It’s a Regency involving a titled bloke written by a woman with a flowery sounding name” and 85 possible titles, I’m not going to download each one from the Archive to see if that’s it. My memory’s terrible these days, okay?)

This pretty much means I no longer read my Kindle books when I’m on the go and don’t have my Kindle device with me. FWIW.

So I broke out of jail…

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…and then broke right back in.

Every single Apple blog I follow announced triumphantly that the one-stop-shopping for jailbreaking iOS 4.0 had arrived. Visit the webpage via Mobile Safari, move the slider, jailbreaking occurs. It’s all safe and legal and yadda yadda. (You know, because Apple had been taking a real hard line on jailbreakers, what with their sternly worded PR releases and all.) And I keep reading about how jailbreaking is the best thing since sliced bread because there’s So! Much! You! Can! Do! once you’re freed from the horrible, horrible confines of software that just works and looks pretty to boot.

I have to say that many of the customizations I’ve seen screenshots of look, frankly, horrible. I’m not a big fan of the new backgrounds that you can do via iOS 4.0 (I immediately uploaded this background, via Marco, because for some stupid reason Apple doesn’t include a black background as one of its defaults). But then I read about an app that lets you do lots more stuff with your texting (and I’m a 14 year old girl around my iPhone, I am all about the texting), and one that lets you blacklist phone numbers you’re tired of hearing from. Different sounds to indicate who a text is from! That could be awesome.

So I did it. I pushed the slider.

The install crashed.

So I pushed it again. And again. Because the jailbreak kept crashing. I had to check a couple of webpages to find out what the hell was going on, and after about 30 tries and at least that many webpages the answer came back: restore the software on the iPhone, retry the jailbreak.

Restoring the iPhone meant recopying all the applications and media files I have on it, so that was an extra 45 minutes or something, after having wasted about an hour on it so far. But what the hell. I wanna get different sounds for my texts.

I redid the jailbreak and this time it worked very quickly and installed the Cydia app. Apparently Cydia was getting slammed yesterday with jailbreakers, so I’m not surprised at the app’s slow performance. (No, really—no snark there.) I downloaded iBlacklist and BiteSMS.

Holy crap. Here’s my take on it, people: thousands of app settings, poorly explained and organized, are not equivalent to quality.

I played with BiteSMS for, I dunno, twenty minutes? Within five I was on their website, going through their forums, trying to figure out why I couldn’t, you know, WRITE A TEXT to somebody. I had to go to Apple’s SMS app to send a friend a text. BiteSMS never let me know when she responded. (I certainly didn’t get the cute QuickReply popup I wanted to check out.)

Then I played with iBlacklist and said, Well, this would be the coolest thing in the world, except it’s hard to understand and I have to spend a lot of time on various websites trying to figure out how X, Y, and Z work.

After another hour of playing with a few things, I said, “Screw this,” I hooked my iPhone up to my Mac, and I pushed the Restore button in iTunes. Restoring once is a pain in the ass. Restoring twice cured me of a need to try jailbreaking again for the foreseeable future.

This is why I have an iPhone. I want to download an app and have it work. I spent more time on webpages yesterday trying to figure out how to get stuff to work than I have the entire time I’ve had my iPhone. I don’t want to download MobileTerminal and figure out how to SSH stuff to my phone.

Should Apple let you have different SMS tones? Yes. And when they do, it will work seamlessly, and not with twenty different settings I have to read up on. Should they allow you to blacklist? Ohmygodyes. (Like I’m supposed to believe Steve doesn’t have blacklisting on his phone. Please.) But if these Cydia apps had to compete in the App Store they’d lose, because their UI sucks and I have to do too much work to get them moving.

I think I’m a pretty typical user. Jailbreaking was just too much work. Thanks for all the effort, guys, and if that’s what you really need from your phone, have at it. I’m glad I have a phone that works right the first time.

And themes suck. I’m sorry, themes are just the ugliest thing in the world. Android can keep those.