iPhone app review -- check Gizmodo's nifty fifty

Every iPhone user should pay a visit to Gizmodo's iPhone apps directory. It's the best way to find apps you've been missing -- because Apple's site is a pretty useless guide to the enormous app world.

Most of them I use or are familiar with. The ones I'd recommend that they omitted include*:

• Byline (client for Google Reader): It had quality issues for a while, I wonder if they lost a very key developer. Lately it's been improving.
• Twitterific: good client, good company
• i41CX+: HP 41C emulator (note there's an $8 version now with fewer features)
• Flashlight (free): The app I have is just called "Light" but I don't think it's sold any longer. It works fine. This is the closest equivalent I saw.
• Dual Level: good for hanging things

When I did this review, incidentally, I was surprised to discover that several apps I bought a while ago have been updated in ways that make them far less useful -- often associated with ways to add revenue (inline ads, add-on fees for things that were formerly available). Yech. (Worst offender: Night Stand)

* URLs are app store links. You get them by right clicking on the App name in the top left of the App description. I've idly wondered how to get these, so I played around a bit.

Snow Leopard: Check support for your printer, scanner and multifunction device

It took me a bit of searching to find thisApple kb article:

Mac OS X v10.6: Printer and scanner software

... Brother MFC-7820N CUPS 1.40 P S F...

So it appears that my four year old workhorse multifunction network printer/scanner/fax machine is still somewhat supported. Note the CUPS drivers won't include Brother's ugly Control Center utility, so the push button "scan to machine" function probably won't work.I can live without that however.

I'm skeptical though. The same list shows the HP 1012 as "CUPS" supported -- and that printer did NOT work with 10.5 (the CUPS drivers exist but don't work).

I'll feel better when either Brother's 7820 site says something about 10.6 drivers, or I find real world reports of success. There's some room for optimism since Brother delivered a (documentation free) firmware update for this device as recently as last month.

Four years is an impressive support lifetime for a modern consumer device. It's one of the reason I buy Brother devices rather than from Canon (horrible device drivers) or HP (horrible drivers, lousy support).

So for now I'll hold off on my new iMac purchase until I get some clarity on support for the 7820N. I don't want to repeat my experience with the 10.5 and the HP 1012.

Update: I found some mixed user reports, but overall not bad. Supposedly scan center still works?!

Blogger's new editor -- incredibly, it still sucks

Blogger has taken their fancy rich text editor out of beta. I'm using it now.

Try this

1. In Settings choose the new editor
2. Open an article written and posted using the old editor.

Yeah, that's right, the paragraph breaks are gone. Everything runs together. Heaven help you if you try to edit, depending on your browser/OS combination the results are going to be a mess of missing and doubled line line feeds.

Google is a frustrating mixture of brilliant innovation and flat out incompetence.

I blame it on Marissa Mayer's peculiar hiring practices. Great software needs a genius or two, but it also needs regular smart people who are driven to get things done right. Google has lots of the former, but way too few of the latter.

Update 9/4/09: Note that if you open some posts, the paragraph spacing may seem fine. Try editing and saving them. It will look fine at first, but the output will have no paragraph breaks. This is just so wrong.

Changing practice: GV message rather than BB email

I've been ruined by the iPhone -- touching my wife's Cr*pBerry Pearl makes my fingers burn. I'm counting down to the end of the contract.

Until she gets her iPhone though, we have to live with the Pearl. Today we came up with a significant improvement.

She used to try to use the BB to send me email messages, but it was a painful process. I gave it some thought, and realized that there was no longer any need to use the BB to message me.

Instead we assigned my Google Voice number to quick dial. She leaves a quick voice message, GV transcribes it, and it shows up in my email. Voice apps love her voice; the transcriptions are nearly perfect. Faster, better, cheaper. We'll probably keep doing it even when she's on an iPhone.

For good measure I setup an Gmail filter rule so my GV transcribed messages now get forwarded to work email as well -- so I get them very quickly.

I love Google Voice. It's saving me about $1000 a year in calls to Canada (money taken from AT&T's pocket) and I'm constantly finding new ways to use it to make our lives better.

No wonder Apple's fear of Google has turned them to the Dark Side.

Google has an app status dashboard

I had no idea this page existed. It was referenced in a blog post on today's Gmail outage: Apps Status Dashboard.

There's an RSS feed as well, I've subscribed to it.

Funny thing -- the dashboard doesn't work with Google Chrome. In IE 8 if you click on an icon you get details on the event. In Chrome they're not clickable.

 

Update 9/2/09: Well, today it works fine in Chrome. I retried after a reader said it worked fine. Probably a random minor Chrome buglet.

Aperture's unsupported image message - a false alarm but a real problem

(see Updates. I've left this post roughly as it unfolded, but this wasn't an Aperture bug.)

The latest incarnation of an old Aperture bug is particularly nasty.

You get a project where only outlines of images can be seen. Click on them and you get a red square with white text saying "unsupported image format'. Restart doesn't fix this, there's no known fix. It's what you get with unsupported RAW images, but it occurs with old RAW images.

Here's one threat on the topic: Apple - Support - Discussions - Unsupported Image Format ...

There's a new release of Aperture, but no news if it has a fix. It's too big for me to download over a lousy hotel connection.

Aperture is a pro project. You can imagine how happy Aperture pro users must be to lose their work this way.

Update: The "unsupported image format" error is a red herring. I experimented with dragging the project out of Aperture, then inspecting the contents (right click, open package). It contains metadata, but no images. The images appear to have been lost by Aperture, leaving only misleading metadata. I suspect there's an image loss bug that can be triggered by moving images between projects contained in different folders.

Update 2: I'm going to run the consistency check described in Apple's Aperture troubleshooting page. I'd moved this Library from another machine, and I think that's an unsupported action. I see now I have 'read only' permissions for the Package -- I'm surprised it works at all. I have changed Package Permissions to read/write. I'm going to save a copy before I do this however.

Update 3: After I changed package permissions I ran the consistency check (Command-opt click on Aperture, hold cmd-opt until get dialog) to fix other permissions. That concluded without a message. I then restarted Aperture and this time ran the database repair. That found the images that had vanished earlier and restored the project with correct values.

So this problem began with my copying a library to a new machine, which is not entirely kosher. Then I failed to check permissions on the library/package. That meant Aperture could do some things, but other things would fail (no permissions). This particularly impacted copies on folders -- so when I tried to copy images into a project in a certain folder only some of the data was copied -- the pictures were orphaned. (This is arguably a bug, Aperture should detect the copy failure.)

The unsupported image message was a red herring.

Google Reader messes up the shared tag feed - includes items shared by those I follow

Something odd his happening with my Google Reader - "MacOSX" shared posts. I'm seeing posts I know I didn't share - including posts I've not yet read!

They are OS X related and they're mostly interesting. So is it due to some corruption with the (increasingly buggy) Byline iPhone app I use? Some mixture of what I share and what those I follow share? Google Reader bugs?

Weird. I'll have to track this ...

Update: I think it's a Google issue. The items showing in the public feed don't match what GR shows in its shared items list.

Update 2: My tag-specific shared item feed obtained from my "manage subscriptions" "folder and tag" list includes not only my shared items, but also items from blogs I follow that have been independently shared by people I follow! This is interesting, but, Google, so very, very wrong. Please don't make me explain why this is wrong, just think about it for a moment.