iPhone audio recording: Plum Record, Audio Recorder, others?

Eons ago I used to record conversations on my third generation iPod (not to be confused with iPhone 3G. I can't recall if I was able to transfer the audio files to the desktop.

It worked quite well -- until Apple obsoleted the hardware connection!

It finally occurred to me that I could do that again. The Monster adapter I bought for my BOSE headphones works just fine as a standalone microphone - I just have to unplug it if I want to hear playback without headphones. (I wouldn't mind finding a direct cable connector for analog to analog transfer though. I don't need stereo recording ... yet ....)

Plum Record will record files that can be transferred to the OS X desktop and translated there. Audio Recorder transfers by email but uses native iPhone audio formats (.caf, uncompressed). (Yes, we all want access to that damned USB cable.)

The Audio Recorder FAQ says the iPhone will work with a standard mini-jack mike.

I purchased Voice Recorder a while back but took it off my phone. I'll have to see if they offer any audio-transfer options.

One reason we don't see gSync for the iPhone

We all want Blackberry-like Google Sync to Google Calendar.

Here's one reason why we're waiting ...

A touch of Cocoa: inside the iPhone SDK: Page 2

... Apple also provides access to some system-wide data in the form of the address book, with both model and view classes exposed to developers. The equivalent classes for the calendar data, which only recently appeared in the desktop OS, are missing from the iPhone. Here's hoping we don't have to wait for 3.0 for them to appear...

Since Google Sync would be competing with MobileMe there may be other obstacles to App Store distribution, but first we need an iPhone API for Calendar.app.

See also SyncML.

Nuevasync - detailed configuration

Nuevasync is too raw for me to risk my data there, but once it's fully vetted and commercial I may pay for it.

It emulates an exchange server for the Palm, and syncs to gCal and gContacts.

A user has written a thorough configuration review:

Nuevasync: Over the Air Syncing of Calendar and Contacts for your iPhone or iPod Touch | The iLife

... The first thing you really want to do is sync your current data back to Google. Open up iTunes, plug in your iPhone (or iPod touch) and click on your device and go to the “info tab” and check the sync contacts (make sure you say “Google Contacts” and enter your account info!) and sync calendar tab....

Don't miss the above in the setup.

When you sync an iPhone to Exchange Server, you lose all the data on the phone -- unless it's moved to MobileMe or, through the back door, the the Exchange server source. Fun, eh?

Palm to iPhone - the update

A few weeks ago I wrote a summary of my Palm to iPhone conversion.

Time for an update.

This is really a Geek Odyssey, though, as I mentioned before, Missing Sync for iPhone would probably help.

I won't repeat all the extensive links in my earlier post, please go there to get the details. I've even updated that older post with a link to today's Appigo Notebook/ToodleDo migration.

You can see the current state my "iPhone as PDA' above. Those bottom four links should look familiar. They're a close match to the classic four iPhone buttons: Calendar/Date Book, Contacts/Address Book, Tasks/Todo and Memo/Note.

On my Palm I'd substituted a 'digital ink' app for the Note, I used that to scrawl quick notes. On my iPhone the equivalent is Jott. It captures audio snippets which are then transcribed. In some ways better than being able to scrawl an "ink" note, in other ways not as good.

The Calendar and Contacts are Apple apps. They sync with OS X iCal and Address Book. I wish instead they would sync directly with Google Calendar and Contacts. For now I sync my desktop data to Google using Spanning Sync.

Appigo makes both Todo.app and Notebook.app (to the right above the main four). Both sync with Toodledo. I wish Google would buy Toodledo and take that over too. The Appigo products are great. Toodledo tasks are spartan but good enough, Toodledo Notes need a lot of work.

The rest of my primary screen consists only of apps I use ALL the time (oops! Looks like Maps got bumped off. It should be there). Other screens are split info games (a real strength of the iPhone), lesser used apps, etc.

The Appigo apps make the iPhone a better competitor to the 1994 Palm III, but in terms of usability and PDA value the Palm III is still a clear winner. The iPhone is only competitive when you start to do geeky and barely possible things with Google Calendar and the like. Of course the iPhone can do far more things than the Palm III could, not the least of which are Safari, Mail.app and Map.

One more thing. The Palm III had global search. So you could search tasks, notes, address book, etc with one tap. Slow, but global. There's nothing like that for the iPhone. Appigo Task and Note search is very fast but limited to those apps. Calendar has NO search, and Contacts has a feeble search against name alone.

iPhone 2.1 - now with more crashes

The 2.1 update didn't directly fix the miserable "unknown application 0xE800002E" error, but it made a repair possible (see link).

So I'm not ungrateful.

Still, my iPhone is crashier now that it was before the fix. Apple's own Mail.app is particularly unstable.

I'm following the old Windows 98/Mac Classic practice of rebooting after every crash, and, if I can get in the habit, I'd like to reboot every night. If I crash and don't reboot more cashes come. I suspect iPhone apps run pretty close to the kernel.

Apple still has miles to go to get to their baseline vision, but in the meantime the App Store provides some comfort.

Jott Express requires Adobe AIR. That's bad.

Jott Express doesn't say whether it's an OS X or XP app.

That's because it's neither; it's an Adobe AIR app.

Of course that means installing Adobe AIR on OS X*.

I've installed a few Adobe apps on OS X. Near as I can tell, Adobe is determined to destroy Apple. Adobe's installers routinely screw up OS X permissions, scatter files in illegal place, and generally act like drunken football hooligans.

Jott Express is also supposed to sync directly with an iPhone/iTouch. That's really piling the risk on.

I ain't installing AIR until I read some trusted source who's had a really good experience. I'd sooner invite Hell's Angels to dinner than Adobe products to my OS X box.

* In terms of cross-platform portable virtual environments there aren't a lot of great choices. Desktop Java is walking dead, Silverlight is from Microsoft, and ... well ... I think that's it.

Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!)

Why doesn't Toodledo have a $#!#$!$ blog? [Update: A reader gave me the address. It's new, but it exists.]

Can they please join the century of the fruitbat?

I had to visit their web site to learn they've done something that's extremely important to me, one of their paying customers:

Toodledo :: Import To-Do List

This will read in a CSV (comma separated values) file and add the notes to your Toodledo Notebook.

You can use this to import memos from Palm Desktop.

This is what I've been waiting for.

Now I can migrate all my old Palm and Outlook Memos/Notes to Toodledo, and then from Toodledo to Appigo's Notebook.app.

Oh happy day.

Now about that Toodledo blog ...

Incidentally, since I use the double push feature to get to the phone, the "permanent" four column row of my iPhone is now a close match to my old Palm devices. From left to right: Calendar (apple), Contacts (apple), Todo (Appigo) and VoiceRecord (quick notes). I'm probably going to switch VoiceRecord to Jott. Appigo Notebook will be on a secondary screen, as a search resource.

Update: They do have a blog, see comments. Now I have to figure out why I couldn't find it!

I'm still figuring out the best way to manage the memo migration. I couldn't find any help screens from toodledo.

The export file uses this structure:

"TITLE","FOLDER","ADDED","MODIFIED","NOTE"
"Create a New Notebook","Tips & Tricks","2008-09-12","2008-09-12","...."

So that might work for import too. At the moment this data lives in 3 places, each with its own complications:

1. Outlook: best export, but Outlook Memos do not have Titles. So I'd have to parse out the first line of each memo to create a title. I might be able to do that in Access.
2. Palm Desktop: the export is weird. Just weird. I must be missing something - it doesn't look like it could be reasonably imported. Everything is together.
3. Palm handheld: I could probably install Palm desktop on our ancient iBook and sync there to the old Mac Palm Desktop, which was a descendant of a Claris product. It has great notes and export.
   
4. Carriage returns: In every case Memos have embedded carriage returns (paragraphs). CSV import will eliminate those.

So there won't be any great solutions, just less bad ones.

Update 9/29/08: Every year I tell my students that everything I know about applied health informatics I learned from my Palm. My Notes export experience was no exception. In this one case I'm not sure it would even help to buy Missing Sync for iPhone!

I tried several routes to get my Palm Notes into Toodledo. Only one worked, albeit a bit oddly. Here they are:

1. Palm Desktop/PC: I sync'd the Tungsten E|2 to Palm Desktop PC, then tried the CSV export. The result looked odd, and Toodledo's notebook import couldn't manage it at all. Just gibberish.
2. Outlook: Outlook export is pretty good, but Outlook Notes/Memos are very barebones. They don't have a separate title field, the first row of a Note is the title. So you can't export a title field.
3. Palm Desktop/OS X: This is little change from Claris Organizer, so I'll call it "Organizer". In Organizer tasks, calendar items and contacts are linked to memos. Standalone memos are called 'desktop memos'. The export tool does a good job exporting memos in a tab delimited file. Oddly enough, you can't really export ANYTHING else! So you can export tasks, but they will be missing their related Memo. (This, by the way, is why I like FileMaker Bento. I don't think anyone but me gets why that little app matters. But that's another story.)

So I installed the latest version of Palm Desktop/Organizer on my old G3 10.3.9 iBook and exported the Notes as tab delimited. I then imported them into FileMaker Pro 8.

At this point, interestingly, the notes still have embedded carriage returns (PC character set I think).

I then exported from FM Pro as CSV. I first tried UTF-16 encoding but that was gibberish to Toodledo so I tried Macintosh characters. The import worked and the carriage returns were transformed in '|' characters.

So it worked, in the end -- though I did lose the paragraphs.

I'm hoping I made a simple mistake early on, because I don't think any non-geek would ever get this working.

For these kinds of Palm migration problems I normally recommend OS X users buy Missing Sync for Palm (Palm migration is bundled with Missing Sync for iPhone too), but I don't know what the export capabilities of the Missing Sync Notebook are. I looked at the export from their Blackberry Missing Sync Notebook and it wouldn't work at all.

Incidentally, exporting Notes to Evernote was only marginally better.

In the end, notes were harder than anything else. I'd never have guessed.

PS. the Toodledo interface for Notes is only slighly better than nothing at all. On the other hand, Appigo Notebook is very nice and the search is fast.

OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox

Even after five updates it's not clear that 10.5.5 is a better OS for my iMac G5 than 10.4.11. Leopard is probably optimized for the Intel machines, and I suspect the security measures (memory address changes) have their price.

The biggest problem now is it's slow. In particular Firefox routinely pegs the CPU (activity monitor) on 10.5 whereas it didn't on 10.4. The type lag is very annoying. In general it feels about 10% slower for most of what I do.

So if you have a PPC machine on 10.4.11 you might want to wait until you buy a new machine to switch.

Update 9/27/08: I find a few other people noticing this. Some are disabling the memory cache. I'll try the new google toolbar and look for other extensions to remove.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application: "In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

* LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
* Permissions - apps cannot be updated
* Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
* The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.

Digital radio - Apple style

Well, that was certainly stealthy.

Suddenly digital radio is upon us - quite unexpectedly.

My first awakening was the excellent Minnnesota Public Radio app for the iPhone -- a joint venture between MPR and CodeMorphic - a Twin Cities Mac dev shop (interesting projects!).

So now I can play digital radio in my car while I drive to work -- through my iPhone. (Yeah, it won't work as well as it does at home, but don't you think Sirius/XM worry about this?)

That reminded me that M has been asking for a radio for the kitchen. There are some excellent radios still on the market, and we'll probably get one, but we also have a pretty nice iTunes/AirTunes/iPhone Remote setup already in place. Didn't iTunes used to play streaming radio?

Turns out they still do, iPhone Remote will find the stations in my playlist, and the choices and quality are better than I remember. Consider CBC Jazz ...

CBC Radio 2 Blog - Tech Q's?: How To Listen To The New R2 New Internet Channels

... Peter kindly walks us through how to listen to R2's new internet radio channels, which include classical, Canadian composers, Canadian songwriters, and jazz.

Over to Dr. Peter:

'Audio on the internet used to be a minor miracle . . . but a really lousy sounding one. Especially for music! Often it still does sound bad. But not when it's coming from CBC Radio 2.

Today we launched our new new Internet Radio Channels and we're pretty proud of the sound quality...

So we've created some 'How to' files to help you make your way.

* How to Listen to CBC Radio 2's New Online Channels
* How to Connect Your Computer to Your Audio System...

The 192kbps Jazz stream sounds as good as my 192 kbps encoded Jazz tunes. In other words, good enough for my ears. There's even a Big Band station I'll try out on my mother.

There's even a "staff picks" list in iTunes now -- new each month.

So now Apple rules digital radio.

Anyone noticing?

Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

As if English weren't bad enough, my less unpopular blogs now feature a translation widget. If you try it you can see me in, say, Chinese.

The widget uses Google's statistically based machine translation. It was pretty easy to install and the translation is very quick. Give it a try; ignore the eerie Twilight Zone background music you might imagine.

Yes, more future shock. Not to worry, the translations are probably pretty bad. I suspect to get good results from machine translation you have to use a translation-optimized version of your native language with simple grammar, no homographs, longer words, no abbreviations, less jargon, etc.

I was provoked to experiment when reading of new Google Translator Languages such as "Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian ...Vietnamese". Each can translate to the other, but I read that English is always an intermediary. A double translation is going to be pretty funny, but not terribly useful.

The first part of the embedding process is to go to translate.google.com and visit the tools page. That's where you pick up your JavaScript.

Then go to Blogger Layout and, from the Basic menu, choose the HTML/Javascript widget. Past in your JavaScript and then arrange the widget on you blog template.

I wonder if I'm better in Danish.

iPhone app for listening to Minnesota Public Radio

Apple will never install an FM tuner into the iPhone/iTouch/iPod, so MPR has introduced a streaming iPhone app for them alone ...

MPR: About Us: Mobile Services

... Listen to MPR on your iPhone and iPod Touch with the MPR Radio iPhone application. The Current, Classical MPR, and MPR News are all available to stream on your iPhone or iPod Touch when you install the free MPR Radio application from the iTunes App Store...

Funny to spend all those CPU cycles to do something that was once so very cheap. Digital radio, of a sort.

PS. There's a cute preview of their iPhone oriented news service. Sooner or later mmprnews.publicradio.org/iphone will go live.

It will be interesting to compare the quality of classical MPR to, say, Sirius or XM.

Spaces, expose and custom mouse buttons - sweet

Until now 10.5 hasn't really done anything for me. Yeah, I can now share the shared folder, and that's good -- but, on the other hand, Leopard remote desktop is a toy.

Spaces, though, they're nicer than I thought. For example:

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Drag and drop between Spaces

... If you have two applications in two separate spaces (e.g iPhoto and Keynote), and you would like to drag an item from the first application to drop in the second application, here are two easy ways to do just that.

First, you can drag the item (file, photo, etc..), press F8 and then select the other space, then drop the item into the other application. Or you can drag the file, press Command-Tab, and then drop the dragged icon on the other application. You will then be switched automatically to the other space to drop your stuff, just like in Tiger.

But it gets better. My Microsoft Mouse has four buttons and a clickable scroll wheel. I mapped button 3 Expose - desktop, button 4 to Spaces, and the wheel to Expose - all windows. (To do this I set button 4 to "Mac OS controlled", then in Spaces Preferences set button 4 to show Spaces).

Now, if I'm working on something, I can click button 4, then I can drag windows between spaces (nice). I can also use the expose buttons within any spaces window I click on.

I have 4 spaces now and will probably scale up. You can assign an app to a space, and I might do that for the Finder, but in general I prefer to organize by task. That's why I'm de-emphasizing tabbed browser use -- I prefer to use windows and Spaces to organize my work.

Google Reader now has tagged streams

Google reader shared feeds now inherit the tag of the folder(s) they are assigned to in Google Reader. You can see them in the post footer when you view a post within Reader, and if you click on them you get a filtered version of the shared post list:

For example:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

shows only posts from my "SciTech" tagged feeds, or posts to which that tag has been manually added during Sharing.

The above link requires a Google reader account. For heck of it I tried:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06457543619879090746%2Flabel%2FSciTech

but today that gives "permission denied". Likewise I wasn't able to discover a feed for this stream; the feed associated with the filtered page is the general shared item feed.

Still, it's progress. Soon I might be able to share my sci and tech posts without sharing my (very Dem) political posts.

Making your Google custom search the IE and Firefox defaults

I love my Google custom searches, I’ve made a subset of them the “start” page I use on all browsers and platforms.

My favorite search engine includes Google, but I’ve added biases including

1. everything linked to from links in my Google Reader exported OPML file
2. my Gordon’s Tech/Notes extended memory [1]
3. my legacy web pages
4. everything I like and add via my toolbar embedded Google Marker

Why do I love this search?

Say you search on “In our Time" and “Social Contract” in standard Google. Today you go to the evil iPlayer oriented BBC site, the streaming-centric site that never mentions podcasts. With my custom search engine I go instead to the virtuous original site.

My biased Google is flat out better than straight Google. For me, anyway.

It’s annoying to have to go to my special page to run it though. I’d like to replace my browser search in Firefox and IE with the Google-Gordon search. In the old days that was easy – just run a search, extract the URL, add a wild card, and paste it into the browser like so:

• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search to something like
• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w (Windows Live Toolbar syntax)

Now it’s harder, but not terribly harder. It’s just terribly hard to find out how to do it.

For Internet Explorer 7 it’s very easy. From the search drop down choose “find more providers” and follow the simple directions to “create your own”:

So I just pasted in:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search

and it works:

You can also create a Google Toolbar 5 custom button and in Windows Live toolbar search you just enter this URL:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w

I don’t know how to create a custom search to over-ride the Firefox default search, but, and this was surprisingly hard to find, it’s not hard to create a custom Google/Firefox toolbar button:

The Google Toolbar's Custom Buttons feature makes it possible for you to create buttons and share them with other Google Toolbar users via our Custom Buttons download page at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery
To create a search button for your favorite site, please follow the instructions below:
1. Open Mozilla Firefox and visit the search page for which you'd like to create a custom button.
2. Place your cursor inside a search box on that site and right-click your mouse to view the context menu.
3. Select "Generate Custom Search" and click "Add."

Holy cow. These bizarre directions actually work. I added my button and made it my new default. A couple of caveats:

1. The directions are all for XP. It does work in Firefox 3/OS X, but some of the directions don't apply (ex: where xml is stored)
   
2. This wouldn't work from the Gadget form on my search page, I had to go the google hosted page directly.
3. To get the XML, so you can host the button, you use Google FirefoxToolbar:Manage:Select Button:Edit:Advanced Edit.
   

I put my search button XML file on one of my personal sites. This link is supposed to add it to a Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.faughnan.com/gordon_google.xml

Buttons can be submitted it to the Google Button Gallery, but I don't have delusions of grandeur.

[1] Damnit Blogger, give me backlinks! BTW, I remember when “extended memory” had a different meaning, as in “QEMM”.

Google Contacts is now a standalone page

I'd not realized that Google contacts was actually a standalone web page rendered within Gmail. In retrospect that explains why it seems so different from the rest of Gmail, and why Gmail integration is incomplete.

Personally I don't like Google's contact manager -- I preferred the prior approach. Still, it really does make sense for Google to have Contacts as a distinct service. They're used for more than email.

Here's how to see your contacts in their own page. This would look particularly good in chrome-less Chrome:

Google Contacts

Google has recently updated the stand-alone contacts page by adding a logo and a more prominent search box. Unfortunately, the URL is not user-friendly: http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager.