A Peculiar Call Forwarding iOS 5 Bug?

Yesterday I experienced something very odd. I received an email from someone who said they weren’t able to call me. What they only ended up getting was an automated message saying: “there was an authorization error,” and then they got disconnected. Since I have never heard of that problem — or even had anyone complain about it — I picked up my iPhone 4 to further investigate.

I proceeded with checking out the status bar, and low and behold, call forward appeared to be turned on. The odd thing is I am certain I never explicitly turned that on. Everything had been working fine a few hours prior to that email I received. I tried turning off call forwarding, and then rebooted my iPhone. To my surprise, call forwarding was turned on yet again! I logged into my mobile carrier account to make sure nothing funky was going on, although everything seemed perfectly normal there.

After turning off call forwarding two times, the problem went away — or so I thought. Everything worked fine until this evening, where call forwarding decided to turn itself off again. I’m currently running iOS 5.0.1, and have never had this happen before. Since this is a bit of an oddball issue — coupled with the fact that I haven’t come across anyone else complain about this — I’m wondering if there’s something just on my carrier’s side that may be causing the problem.

If anyone else has had first hand experience with this — or knows someone who has — I’d love to hear about it.

Update on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 1:04 PM by Alex Knight

So I found out that the agent who updated my phone plan somehow managed to turn on call forwarding on one of my lines. It took several reps to figure out what was going on, but I’m glad its resolved and not an iOS bug.

Why Google TV is Failing

When I first heard that Google was going to be releasing a product called Google TV, I was extremely unnerved. The set-top box market was, and is, not doing well. Thus far, not a single person has been able to crack the TV market with something truly revolutionary.

Other than offering a terrible user interface and experience, Google is faced with more problems. Peoples living rooms are already cluttered with various set-top boxes. Be it a PVR provided by their cable company, a TiVo or even Apple TV. For Google TV to succeed, they needed to get a few key important ingredients right.

• It must have a fluid, easy-to-use interface
• They must have good content deals in place
• Netflix should be an app that is pre-installed
• The design of the hardware has to be compact, and elegant.

Google has partners to develop the hardware. One example is Logitech, who is now regretting being involved with the Google TV project.

Logitech’s CEO, Guerrino De Luca:

To make the long story short, we thought we had invented [sliced] bread and we just made them. [We made a commitment to] just build a lot because we expected everybody to line up for Christmas and buy these boxes [at] $300 […] that was a big mistake.

Indeed a massive mistake that cost them 100 million dollars. I seriously question a companies management who decided this would be a great idea to peruse in the first place. At best, it was a gamble from the beginning. The pitfalls seemed obvious as well, being that Google TV, like many of their products, was an unfinished beta. You simply can’t make bets on an unfinished product.

For sake of argument though, in an alternative reality where Google TV was a more polished product, had the content and hardware been there, I’m not convinced even Logitech would have sold a ton of these devices. Google’s problem strikes me as simply a brand problem. Historically speaking, they have always released unfinished, half-baked products that had a ‘beta’ label affixed to it for years on end. The average consumer makes purchases based on emotional decisions. “What can do this product do for me? And how is it going to make my life better?” Taking Apple TV as an example — a far from perfect device and a ‘hobby’ product for Apple — sales have been good, but not nearly as good as the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone or iPad. That being said, people seem to love their Apple TVs. It comes pre-loaded with the Netflix app, and what content you can’t get from Netflix, you can probably rent or buy on iTunes.

Apple TV’s hardware is exquisitely designed and leaves but the smallest footprint in your home theatre. While the small footprint of the device itself is a huge benefit, if not a big selling point, what really helps is the brand attached to the product — that being Apple itself. For Google to sell a lot of Google TVs, they need to go even beyond just designing a great product. What Google needs to do, is something that can’t be fixed overnight. Building a brand that people trust — if not love — takes a certain kind of company culture, and of course time.

I don’t have confidence that this is going to get better any time soon, given that Google is a company whose primary avenue of revenue is pay-per-click advertising. To give credit where credit is due, it’s good to see the company focusing on better and more consistent design across their services (including Android OS). They have a long road to go though before they can really turn their brand around to something people truly trust, and love (for the masses) Will that ever happen? I don’t have the answer to that, so I’ll be watching and waiting like everyone else.

Restoring My iPhone 4 from iCloud

It was with some trepidation that I’d been hesitant to test restoring my iPhone from an iCloud backup. I wasn’t able to find any details on what exactly gets backed up, however, I didn’t want to just assume that all data would get backed up, including my SMS messages (although those are less important).

I decided to take the plunge today, just for the hell of it to see what would happen. I’m pleased to say that the restoration process went extremely smoothly. More so than what I had initially anticipated. To start the process, here’s what I did:

• Settings > General > Reset
• Erase All Content and Settings

After the phone was wiped and restarted, I was prompted with the new setup process. I entered my iCloud login credentials, and chose the option to restore from my iCloud backup. The most recent backup I could restore from happened to be from earlier this morning, so I selected that and waited patiently.

The restoration process is actually two big steps. First, your settings (including SMS, email etc) are restored. After this is completed, you get a modal dialog informing you that all of your apps and data will be restored.

The entire process took about 30 minutes for me over a less than spectacular WiFi connection, however your mileage may very depending on how many apps need to be re-downloaded again.

---

Oddball bug: Before I restored my iPhone, I had turned on the option in Settings > General > Accessibility to use the LED flash for alerts, however that never worked for me. For some reason, after restoring from a backup, this started working immediately. I don’t really know why the restore fixed the LED flash alerts, but that was my experience. On another note, now that the flash alerts issue is fixed, I turned it off after realizing that this is really annoying.

On Third Party Mail Clients for iOS

On this whole third party mail client thing for iOS, as much as the guys working on Sparrow would pour lots of love into designing a companion to their OS X mail client for iOS, we still are faced with one road block — and it’s a major one — there’s still no provision for setting a preferred default mail client in iOS.

Let’s say I’m on my iPhone and I pull up a contact and decide to email that person. Right now, what would happen is a blank email sheet would open using Mail.app. With a third party email client, that same process would still launch Mail.app app on your iPhone. So what exactly is the point of developing another mail client for iOS?

I love Mail.app, and there’s little that I can think of that could be added now that would make it a better experience for me, especially since iOS 5. One feature that Sparrow has over Mail in OS X, is that you can connect it with your Facebook account. Doing this will make it so that any time someone emails you, who also happens to be a friend on Facebook, would have their profile picture show up. That’s probably not a big deal for a lot of people, but it’s kind of a nice touch if you’re a Facebook user. I can really live without this though, so it’s not a deal breaker for me.

I really welcome more choice, and it’s great that Apple is approving apps like Google’s new Gmail app for iOS (even though it’s junkie). Until there’s a way to set your preferred mail client in iOS, I can’t see myself making a permanent switch to anything else.

---

If you want a teaser of what Sparrow’s iOS app will look like, head on over to their site for a sneak peak.

User Experience Issues with iOS's App Store App

Not long ago, iOS 4.3.3 gave us the ability to easily re-download past app purchases directly on our iPhones and iPads. While I’ve long clamoured for this ability, as it has existed on Android for quite a while, I was just happy to finally get this.

Here’s the issue though: from a user experience perspective, it has a ton of issues — problems that simply should not exist, and certainly not something we would come to expect from Apple’s design and development teams.

If you open the App Store app on your iPhone for example, you can tap on ‘Updates’ and then tap ‘Purchased’ to get at your previous app purchases. You have two options here: either show ‘All’ or ‘Not On This Phone.’ The problem with using this feature is not the pure convenience factor of being able to easily download past purchases again. The issue is this particular web view is extremely slow and not very responsive.

Here’s a typical flow many will take:

1. Tap on ‘Not On This Phone.’

1. Start browsing by scrolling through your list of app purchases.

2. Find an app you forgot that you purchased, and tap the cloud icon to start downloading it to your iOS device.

3. The download starts by booting you out of the App Store app and to your next available home screen. You wait patiently for the app to finish downloading and install.

4. You go back to the App Store (either by taping on the icon or multi task and fast switch).

At this point, you run into a huge colossally stupid problem. Instead of remembering your scroll position in the web view, you are taken straight to the very top of the list!

Not only does this waste a huge amount of time — forcing the user to keep scrolling until they find where they were, but the problem is compounded by the fact that the scrolling performance is herky-jerky (tested on my 16GB iPhone 4 with a clean install of iOS 5).

I really would like to see Apple fix these two problems, sooner rather than later.

Dealing with iCloud Accounts and Photo Stream Issues

After my initial excitement subsided, I decided that I didn’t want to use the same Apple ID that I use for App Store purchases with my iCloud account. In iOS 5, you can go into Settings.app and sign out and delete an iCloud account and it’s respective data set if you so wish.

Here’s how to do it:

I had a lingering Mobile Me account that wasn’t being used as well, so I instead decided to convert that and use it as my iCloud account. Even though I don’t use the email service, I really wanted the ability to have iCloud store my notes (from Notes.app). The problem after deleting my existing iCloud account and adding the newly converted Mobile Me account, was I ended up with a duplicate “Photo Stream” in Photos.app. You would think you would be able to access those photos via the icloud.com web app, however I had no such luck. You can however delete photos through the latest iPhoto (9.2 or newer), but you can’t outright delete the entire Photo Stream itself.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to delete Photo Stream from the Photos app itself, so what I ended up doing to fix the problem was simply to turn off Photo Stream and re-enable it. That pretty much fixes this issue for me, however it’s too bad that iCloud doesn’t backup video content as well.

iOS 5 Bugs

On Wednesday morning, I happily connected my iPhone 4 to my MacBook Pro via the USB cable, for the very last time. I fired up iTunes and clicked “Check for Updates’ at 10am PST, hoping that I would be able to successfully download iOS 5.

After a bit if waiting, I was able to grab the update at a reasonable download speed. In fact, the update went much faster than I initially anticipated. Remembering how popular major iOS updates tend to be, I expected the download to slow to a crawl, as Apple’s servers surely would have been taxed. I guess that billion dollar data centre in North Carolina is completely prepared to handle millions of simultaneous database connections in a short period of time. Certainly I was impressed at this point.

I decided to do a clean install of iOS 5, instead of doing a more typical restore from backup. My policy with major iOS updates is to always perform a clean install, and then install the apps that I need, one at a time.

While I love iOS 5 as a whole — I do think this is a substantial and great update — yet it’s not without some pretty glaring issues that I think are unacceptable. I’ll preface this rant with the fact that I do know these issues will probably get plugged soon.

Safari

I was testing out the new private browsing mode, and had tried switching back and forth between privacy modes. At some point when I closed Safari and tried to re-open it, Safari.app crashed. I then decided to force close the app and then reboot my iPhone, however this didn’t make a difference. How odd. To get Safari working again, I had to into Settings > General > Reset and reset my networking settings back to factory defaults. I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue again, but it’s pretty strange that was my first experience with iOS 5.

Music

With iOS 5, iPod.app has been separated into two separate apps, (as they should be) music and now video are their own apps. I decided to wirelessly sync some Podcasts to my iPhone to test things out. I created my own custom playlist and added all unplayed Podcasts to it. After I finished listening, I wanted to delete the playlist. After tapping ‘Edit’ to delete my playlist, Music.app instantly force quit. How lovely!

I’m sure I’ll run into a few other bugs, however I’m quite surprised that these issues snuck their way into the GM build of iOS 5. Here’s hoping the next build fixes a few lingering issues.

If any ZD readers have encountered any other bugs that you want to share, please share your findings and email me, as I’d love to start building a list of issues people are having.

The Case for a Larger iPhone Display

The way I see it, the iPhone 4, 14 months after its release is still the best smartphone on the market, as far as overall design is concerned. It’s incredibly hard to imagine how Apple could drastically improve on its current design in any meaningful way. The requisite improvements are always expected from us — year-over-year — such as updated cameras, CPU/GPU and memory.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve also played around in great length with various Android phones. All with different configurations (i.e. CPU, display types/sizes and OS versions). Many Android phones have reached high into the stratosphere with comically large displays, upwards of 4.5 inches, which is purely absurd. At first it sounds like a great idea, why not a larger display for watching movies and reading? Until you use some of these devices, you can’t imagine how awkward they are to use.

Here’s a short list:

• They don’t fit in your front jean pocket properly (or not at all).
• Your hand can get fatigued from having to reach much farther to the edge of the screen, just to make a swipe gesture (my thumb hurts from using a 4.5 inch display).

Where I’m going with this is I don’t think the next iPhone needs to change its display size all that much. I don’t believe Apple would ever design a phone with anything larger than a 4 inch display. If either Tim Cook or Steve Jobs can’t walk out onto the stage at WWDC and pull out the latest iPhone from their front jean pocket, then they have failed.

I do think there is a slight room for improvement over the current display we have in the iPhone 4. Not in terms of resolution, but physical size. I don’t believe Apple needs to compete with other smartphones in the size area, as clearly the standard iPhone 4 has not seen any sales impact from these much larger Android devices. This is not to say that they can’t make the current 3.5 inch display slightly larger than what it currently is.

Without sacrificing much in the way of their current 326 PPI display, I think they could push this thing up to 4.0 inches without annoying users. Beyond 4 inches though is treacherous territory that Apple probably doesn’t want to venture into. There’s a reason why the iPad has a 9.7 inch display, and it’s because it’s not only a comfortable size for reading, but it provides a big enough contrast to the iPhone 4.

An Interview with Harry Marks

I was fortunate enough to recently speak with Harry Marks, author of curiousrat.com — a technology weblog.

We discussed topics relating to writing, in addition to many geeky things about Apple, how he uses technology in his day-to-day life and what his productivity workflow looks like.

I interviewed Harry via email, and he had this to say:

ALEX KNIGHT: I’ve been reading your weblog, curiousrat.com for a while now, in which you write about — but not exclusively, Apple and related technologies. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how the site came to be?

HARRY MARKS: I’m but a simple twenty-something from New Jersey with a passion for technology. For my day job, I’m a web marketing developer for a big law firm, but on the side I own and operate CuriousRat.com.

Curious Rat came out of frustration with the quality of tech blogs out there today. Many writers out there (and if you read my site, you’ll see a lot of repeat offenders) write for pageviews, or comments, or because they really are just that stupid.

I started Curious Rat as an antithesis to the noise and incompetence being expressed on the mainstream sites. The tone and design of CuriousRat.com were inspired by the subtlety of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and the expletive-riddled rants of the Angry Mac Bastards, and after about a year, I really found my voice and my…”je ne sais quoi”.

ALEX: I know what you mean when you talk about finding your “voice.” I think that’s something all writers struggle with at some point in their career, and it’s certainly something that frustrated me for the first 12 months of writing.

So it’s clear that you write a lot about Apple and are a Mac user. How long have you been using a Mac and what brought you to the platform? Can you tell me a little about your setup over the years and what your current rig is?

HARRY: I was a Mac user in the mid ’90s - my parents had a Power Mac (can’t remember the model number) running System 7. I remember OS 7 was a very buggy OS, so it soured them on the whole Mac platform for 7-8 years. During that time, we  had Gateways, Dells and HPs and they served their purposes, but we didn’t terribly enjoy using them.

Then, when I graduated high school and was headed into college in 2003, I saw how much progress Apple had made during those years and asked my parents for a 15-inch PowerBook G4. It came with a free iPod (the one with four buttons on the top) and from then on I was hooked.

OS X was lightyears ahead of what I had been using on PCs (and still is, honestly), so I’ve clung to it for the past eight years. I don’t plan on jumping ship anytime soon.

ALEX: I can relate. I remember using those horrible candy coloured G3 iMac’s when they first came out, which I believe was 1998. I was using them in graphic arts class and they had shipped with OS 8.1, which was horrid. I think we sometimes become complacent and forget just how unreliable operating systems were pre-OS 10.1 days.

So what does your current Mac setup look like and have you jumped onto the Lion bandwagon yet? If so, how are things going so far and can you talk a little about your favourite apps and how they fit into your current workflow?

HARRY: I never owned a G3 iMac, but I loved the colours — everything else was so boring! But you’re right, things didn’t get good until OS 9.

My current Mac is a 2008 15-inch pre-unibody MacBook Pro. I have installed Lion and, while it’s a little laggy in some spots, it’s really great. I have an iPhone 4 and an iPad as my mobile arsenal. When they’re docked on my desk, the iPhone runs Night Stand HD and the iPad runs Weather+, providing me with a “Batcave-esque” desktop setup.

My next Mac, once the MBP runs its course, will be an 11-inch MacBook Air. I don’t need much to get my writing done and I love the portability of the iPad, so definitely want the same thing in a laptop.

For podcasting, I’ve been using a Blue Snowball mic that sits on a tripod on my desk.

Lion’s been great so far - Versions and auto-save have been godsends. However, I’m getting extremely frustrated at Safari’s penchant for auto-reloading tabs after a certain amount of time has passed. I’m using “natural” scrolling without any problems and I’ve even gotten my work PC to scroll the same way.

As for my favorite apps, the new Mail.app is fantastic. It’s slick, the conversation view for message threads is beautiful and it fixes a lot of the problems the old version had. I don’t really use iCal, but I friggin’ love Fantastical. It’s light and only a key-command away and truly looks like it was designed to make me more productive.

Alfred is my dedicated application launcher, and while I’m probably not using it to its full potential, its existence means I can keep my dock relatively sparse.

Twitterrific is my default Twitter app, as I swore off using any of the official Twitter apps on the desktop and iOS, due to the company’s horrible treatment of third party developers. It’s simple and clean - I love it.

For writing blog posts and articles, I use TextMate with a built-in Markdown bundle. Quick notes are taken in Brett Terpstra’s awesome nvALT and Evernote is used as a poor man’s Yojimbo to store links and other random ideas for Curious Rat pieces. Finally, the piece de resistance I couldn’t get by without is TextExpander. Composing quick CR articles with “Via [link]” followed by a blockquote would be a lot more tedious without it.

Seriously, anyone who owns a Mac should download TextExpander and really get it into his/her workflow. It’s a lifesaver (and much better on the RSI).

ALEX: Lion’s been great for me too overall. Like you though, I have noticed some performance issues with some of the window animation/transitions. I’m sure things will work themselves out with a point release soon though.

I can tell that you and I employ similar hardware/software setups, and it seems that this is the case with a lot of other Mac geeks out there as well. With regards to your future MacBook Air purchase, I think I may end up going that route as well. My only gripe with the Air so far is the limitation on how much ram you can have. I’m hoping that the next iteration of MacBook Pros will use the Air’s wedge shape so I can have my dream config: a 15” MacBook Air with 8GB of ram.

Your software picks are intriguing, and on the Twitterific front, I agree that it’s great supporting third party developers (after all, where would we be without them?). There’s something about the way it handles font rendering though that kind of bugged me. My understanding is that you can customize one of the theme plist files to change the look to make it more appealing. I should probably give it another go, especially now that Tweetmarker support was added.

Delving more into Lion, what are your thoughts on the new gestures it supports? Do you still use a Mouse, Apple brand or otherwise with your MacBook Pro? Or have you tried switching full time to the Magic Trackpad yet? It seems like we’re in a transitional phase with Apple’s desktop OS — in that there appears to be a very obvious path with where they want to take it in the next couple years. Since we have just barely scratched the surface of the iOS’ification (yes, that word again) of OS X, what are your thoughts on desktop computing — here and now in 2011?

HARRY: I use the trackpad on my MacBook Pro. I tried using an external mouse, but I kept gravitating back to the trackpad. I love the gestures — I constantly use the three-finger swipe up for Mission Control, two-finger swipes for navigating my history in Safari and even the pinch-to-zoom gesture on occasion.

It’s obvious Apple has a distinct plan for desktop computing in the future. I think we’re a ways away from full-on touch-based laptops and desktops, but we’ll definitely be seeing more gestures and iOS-esque features cross over.

The focus on computing has shifted toward devices like the iPad and MacBook Air. Lighter, faster, always-on — these are what users want from their devices and judging by how iPads and MacBook Airs are selling, buyers are already proving that. I wouldn’t be surprised if all MacBooks in the lineup look like the Air by this time next year, with an SSD and a really thin frame.

I also think we’re going to see a lot more interaction between OS X and iOS — stuff like your iPhone knowing when it’s in the vicinity of your Mac and transferring all push notifications to a Growl-like system there. Or perhaps we’ll see a feature like Seamless that automatically fades the song currently playing in the iPod app to your desktop speakers when it gets within WiFi range of your home. iOS 5 and Lion are about honing their respective mobile and desktop experiences. From this point forward, I think we’re going to see them grow closer and more interconnected. After all, it’s all about the ecosystem.

ALEX: So speaking of mobile computing, tell me about your iPad. What are your must have apps, and how have they changed the way you do things on a day-to-day basis? Can you share with us what your current homescreen looks like, and what your organizational criteria is for apps?

HARRY: It’s an original 16GB iPad — nothing special. I didn’t see the need/have the money to upgrade to an iPad 2, so I’ve been rocking ol’ faithful for a little over a year.

My homescreen has one folder full of reading apps (iBooks, Nook, Kindle, Flipboard, etc…), while everything else is there with the intent of being easily accessible. The apps I use most are in my dock: Elements 2, Mercury Browser Pro, Mail, Twitterrific, TaskPaper and Reeder. When I write articles on my iPad, I use a combination of Elements and Mercury Browser Pro for composition and research, respectively.

The other big apps I use are the Squarespace app for insights into how well the site is performing (I’m a bit of an egomaniac that way) and Instapaper. I keep Instapaper outside the Reading folder so it’s always accessible in one tap.

My homescreen criteria is simple — what do I need to see on a daily basis? For example, my daily to do list is kept in TaskPaper, as it’s the simplest way for me to keep a running tally of my daily action items. For the information I need to retain longer, such as wines I’d like to try and articles to write about for Curious Rat, I turn to Evernote. Those two are used constantly, so they’re right there when I unlock the device.

Harry’s iPad homescreen:

You can read Harry Mark’s weblog over at curiousrat.com and follow him on Twitter at @HarryCMarks. I also recommend checking out inThirty, a great technology Podcast co-hosted by Harry, now on iTunes.

Capacitive Touch Buttons Must Die

Back in July, Jon Bell wrote an excellent piece on why capacitive touch buttons are generally a bad idea — I tend to agree with his statements on this as well.

I recently wrote about my experience with Android in exhaustive detail, and I had similar frustrations with the capacitive touch buttons on that Nexus S. This is a serious problem with these devices, and the problem is only compounded by the non-standard placement of these buttons on various Android devices.

I no longer have that Nexus S, and have upgraded to a Samsung Infuse 4G. Bizarrely, Samsung chose to switch around some of the buttons, so they’re in a different order than on the Nexus S. It’s not just Android devices that have this problem though. Samsung seems to really like these capacitive touch buttons — so much in fact that they have decided to use them on other major consumer appliances like their line of LCD TVs.

This week I picked up a Samsung 550, a 40” LED backlit LCD TV. It’s a great TV with excellent picture and build quality, except for one major usability issue. Yes, you guessed correctly — capacitive touch buttons. Apparently these don’t just irritate geeks like me, but seemingly normal people like my girlfriend as well. Well, to be fair, my girlfriend is a big geek — perhaps not nearly as geeky as I am though.

The TV is unboxed and setup in the living room, so both of us were really excited to turn it on and play some games and watch movies on Netflix streaming. The first thing I noticed was my girlfriend fiddling around trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing on. She then realized after closely examining the bottom right of the panel that there were capacitive touch buttons. The panel is black, and so these buttons were almost impossible to see in even reasonable lighting. This mean fumbling around trying to figure out which button was the power button. Our living room has excellent ambient lighting at night, which is perfect for watching movies. At this point, we had to turn on all the lights in the room to simply turn the TV on. The sad part is that even with bright lighting, you still have to look carefully at what buttons to touch. All in all, this was a terrible user experience which also sparked a conversation between us about physical vs capacitive touch buttons.

Since the TV does ship with a remote, this will be less of an issue since you are more than likely to interact with that, rather than walk up to your TV. Going back to Android and other smartphones that have capacitive touch buttons, since you spend spend so much of your time holding these devices and interacting with them, these problems are infuriatingly obvious.

There’s a reason why the iPhone still has a single physical home button. The tactile feel and simplicity of a single button means there’s no room for confusion by the user. Some speculate whether or not Apple will ditch the physical home button in a future iPhone, however I think this is shortsighted. If anything, Apple is more than likely to make that button even higher quality than it is right now on the iPhone 4.

My iPhone to Mac Writing Workflow

Inspiration for topics that I want to write about usually come from an article I’ve read on someone else’s weblog, or perhaps a news source. A secondary factor may be Twitter, which seems odd, but it works.

Sometimes an idea sparks and I like to start gathering my thoughts together on my iPhone. It usually starts with composing a tweet in Birdhouse, but then turns into something too long to keep under 140 characters.

So I proceed with trying to break it up into two tweets. Still too long? Break it up into three tweets. Okay this is getting stupid now, time for a proper blog post.

If I had written everything in Birdhouse, I use the email list feature to bulk send everything to Simplenote via a special email address. Simplenote parses the email instantly and makes it available by the time I open the iOS app. Since I pay for a Simplenote premium account, I have it also set to sync with my Dropbox account. If I wanted, I can then open up the corresponding text file using whatever text editor I want on my MacBook Pro.

Speaking of text editors, I upgraded to Lion on release day and I’ve just been using TextEdit for writing. Since I use Markdown as my formatting choice, I use Brett Terpstra’s Marked, which is a great app for previewing Markdown formatting from any text editor.

So that’s my current writing workflow. This works well for me, and perhaps it may for you as well.

iOS App Store Niggles

Since I’m not (yet) party of the iOS developer program, I haven’t had a chance to play around with the iOS 5 betas. I have yet to see anyone leak the following two items that I hope are fixed.

1. Don’t boot the user out of the App Store when downloading apps.

2. Remember scroll positions when viewing past purchases. I know this is a webview, but there has to be a way to do this. I’m grateful that Apple flipped a switch that allows users to go through their purchase history, however it’s not entirely useful if it can’t remember the position where I am. Too many times I’ve scrolled through a long list, tapped on an app, then gone back a page to be pushed to the very top. This is extremely frustrating and doesn’t really encourage me — as the user — to continue to use this feature.

The Current State of Android from an iOS Users Perspective

Staying informed about both past and current technology is not only a point of interest of mine, but it’s incumbent upon me to do so, considering the field of work I’m in.

If you have been reading Zero Distraction for a while, you know this weblog has a strong emphasis on iOS and Mac related nerdery. That being said, I decided to expand my experience this week and procure an Android device to undergo an experiment. My criteria for choosing a device among the plethora of Android devices was two fold — the hardware had to be very modern, and the software had to be the latest, pure Google experience. This criteria made my decision quite a lot easier, as I was able to eliminate all current handsets available to me with the exception of the Samsung Nexus S.

The Nexus S ships with the latest version of Gingerbread and does not contain any custom software sitting on top of the Android operating system. To clarify, you won’t be finding any fancy custom UIs or vendor specific craplets that you can’t remove (Oh hi HTC). If I am going to spend a considerable amount of time with an Android device, I may as well experience what Google believes is the definitive user experience.

Before I embark on this discussion, I want to disclose a few very important key points.

1. I have a been a long-time iOS device user. Starting with the iPhone 3G, GS, and most recently the iPhone 4.

2. My primary platform of choice is still iOS and OS X for what I do daily.

3. This review encompasses my experiences with Android, over a 7 day period of using the Nexus S as my sole mobile device.

My primary goal within first days use was to acclimatize myself with the environment that was given — before going crazy with installing third party apps. One point of contention for me from all literature I’ve read about Android, is the sub-par battery life many users get. I’m aware that not all Android devices are considered equal of course, however I wanted to make sure I didn’t install badly made third-party apps that could potentially cause undue drain on the Nexus S’s battery. I wanted my analysis of Android to be thorough, but not unfair. The last thing I want to do is cite something awful as far as the user experience was concerned, just because of some rogue app gone awol.

Now that we have cleared the air with the boring stuff, let’s dive right in.

Initial Setup Experience

From the moment I turned on my Nexus S, I was greeted with a setup screen. I was asked if I had an existing Google account, or if not I could set one up straight from this screen.

Since I have multiple Google Apps accounts, I entered in my primary email address and password and was politely told that the phone with begin pushing down my email, contacts and calendars. It also explained to me that it would continually backup my devices settings — which includes all app data and apps that have been downloaded from the Android Marketplace. This is all fantastic and a far greater out-of-box setup experience than what I’ve been accustomed to with any iPhone. This of course will be a problem solved by Apple when they launch iCloud later this fall.

After setup had completed and I was fully booted into the primary homescreen, I noticed a nice subtle notification showing in the status bar at the top of the display. After pulling down on the UI, I was greeted with a drawer which told me there was a minor OS update. This update would bring me from the shipped Gingerbread version, 2.3, to 2.3.4. The update didn’t take long for me since I had already connected to my home 802.11n WiFi network.

User Interface and general design conventions

Android and iOS from a pure UI perspective are far more similar to each other than say, Windows Phone 7’s live tile based approach. Although both Android and iOS share similar a similar app grid layout, there’s quite a lot to talk about when it comes to differences. Clearly Google and Apple have very different approaches, and what one may consider superior is clearly up for debate.

The Nexus S does not present you with a messy grid of icons on your primary home screen. Instead, what you get is a permanent search widget at the very top of your screen with quick access to the phone, browser app and app launcher. You are also presented with a lively animated background, which Google calls “live wallpapers.” All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the stock layout and it’s something I prefer over what I’ve been accustomed to for so many years on iOS.

What’s with the icons?

The context sensitive menu icons that we currently have as of 2.3.4 are really ugly. I don’t mind the monochrome look so much as the low-grade style of the icons. While inside any app, try pressing the menu button and you will see what I mean. It’s odd that there seems to be a consistency problem with the quality of icons in the OS as well. While some of Google’s own app icons look decent enough, others are simply terrible. I’d love to see Ice Cream Sandwich address the overall UI consistency issues — it’s badly needed among many other things.

App switching:

On iOS, switching between running apps involves double clicking a physical button. This brings up the task switching at the bottom of the screen - which happens to look similar to the dock in OS X. Although I appreciate the fast app switching that Apple gave us in iOS 4, I find it a bit of a chore to double click a physical button on a frequent basis. There are far too many opportunities where I don’t double click correctly and end up closing out an app instead of bringing up the task switcher.

On Android, things are a bit easier — especially on the Nexus S device with it’s touch based buttons located at the bottom of the display. Holding down the home button on my Nexus S for a second brings up the “Recent” apps menu. The menu contains recent running apps that I have accessed, so switching to another one takes one tap. If I’m in a situation where I’m already in an app, I can tap on the touch based “back” button which instantly switches me to the last app I was in — which also happens to be the same state where I left off. These are aspects of multi-tasking in Android that I love, which I believe are actually a better way of handling things than what we have in iOS.

The little things that count:

On a cold boot of my Nexus S, once the homescreen started loading a noticed a peculiar message in the notification status bar — it read “Preparing USB Storage.” Why on earth did Google feel compelled to display this message to the user? It’s little things like this that make it clear Google is far more engineering driven than user experience driven. It’s without a doubt that Google has people in charge of user experience, but I get the sense that these clearly intelligent people are engineers themselves with little sense for what works best for the user. Love it or hate it, but I just don’t agree with some of the decisions they made.

The buck doesn’t stop at here either, as I experience several other glaring issues. I had installed a third-party Pinboard client called “Pindroid”. On June 21st, Pinboard’s API was purposefully taken down due to one or more of their servers being confiscated by the FBI at their data centre (not something that was Pinboard’s fault at all).

I was in the middle of using Pindroid when the API went offline, and I was greeted with a lovely java error. Something relating to the API not being accessible, and then the app crashed. I’ll cut Android some slack here as it may not necessarily be the operating systems fault if a third-party app can’t handle API calls properly. Ultimately this app should never have crashed because of an API issue. What should have happened is it should have displayed a friendly message about the service being offline, and then it should have gracefully gone into offline mode.

I should note that I experienced something similar yesterday as well with Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt Dropbox based GTD app. A similar java error was reported, and it may have had something to do with an API issue on Dropbox’s side. I’m actually wondering now if this is a more common problem on Android with apps that need to make API calls to third-party services. If someone can set me straight on this, please email me and let me know.

Lastly, one really interesting thing that I believe Android handles better than iOS is how apps integrate with each other. Currently as it stands on iOS, if you wanted to send a link from mobile Safari to Twitter or Facebook, you would need to copy the link and then open the app and paste it in. That, or go through a very clumsy process of installing some custom bookmarklet.

On Android, all you need to do is select a “Send To” option from the contextual menu of the browser. If you have Facebook or Twitter installed, you can send links straight to the app. This sharing feature works in other built-in apps as well such as the photo Gallery app.

Taking screenshots:

On an iOS device, taking a screenshot is as simple as holding down both the standby and home button for a a brief second or two. The picture is saved to your camera roll as a high quality PNG. On Android, there’s no way to take screenshots, unless of course you feel like downloading the Android SDK. I plan on exploring this since I do want the capability, but it’s frustrating that this isn’t just baked right into the OS. I recall an episode of “This Week in Google,” a Podcast by Leo Laporte where I think Gina Trapani also complained about this. If memory serves me right, this episode was last year some time, but I don’t recall the exact episode number. So here we are in 2011 with Gingerbread 2.3.4 and this still isn’t a native feature.

How the Apps Feel

Many of the built-in Google Apps, including the Youtube app work better than their iOS counterparts. In particular, the Youtube app is definitely a lot more up-to-date and simpler to use than the iOS version. Although I could go over every single app included in Gingerbread, I’m going to go over the most important ones.

Email, Calendar and Contacts:

The native Gmail app works wonderfully well and reproduces the Gmail web experience exceptionally well. Since all of my many email accounts are hosted Google Apps for Business accounts, everything fit really well. Push email, as well as Calendar and Contacts worked as they should.

Peculiarly though, Google ships two email clients with Gingerbread. In additional to the native Gmail client, you also have “Email.” This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Instead of having two separate email clients for all POP/IMAP/Exchange accounts that are non-Gmail, why not just make a single email client to handle it all? Why does Google think it’s a good idea for their users to have to deal with this configuration? What’s more perplexing is that the email client lacks support for MD5-5 challenge-response authentication. Perhaps while not the most common way of authentication, it’s a pretty standard feature that I have always seen included in an email client. My work email uses MD-5 for authentication, so this meant I was unable to setup that account. What Google needs to do is unify these two apps and just have one native, beautifully designed email client with a unified inbox. Please Google, don’t let your users sort out these problems for themselves and deal with the setup headaches.

There isn’t very much exciting to share about the Contacts app, other than it’s nice that it seems to match people who you have as a friend on Facebook (if you have the official Facebook app installed), who also happen to be a contact. One peculiar thing that I haven’t been able to get used to, is that I can’t use swipe gestures to delete contacts. Coming from iOS, being able to quickly swipe right to delete a contact is incredibly quick and painless. On Android, I have to use contextual menus and then tap a “Delete” button. This really bugs me, and this is not a problem specific to the Contacts app, but more of an over all draw back of Android’s user interface design.

The Calendar app is pretty simple, offering everything one would need to quickly and easily create, and look at new events. Creating a new event is as quick as long-pressing on a time slot in any view, and then selecting “New event.” iOS users used to the default Calendar app who find it lacking, would probably like the addition of a “Today” view — in addition to the typical day, week, month options. There’s also a built-in “Agenda” view, where you can create and look at tasks that you need to complete. Naturally, all of this data syncs effortlessly with any Gmail/Google Apps account.

Browser:

Like mobile Safari on iOS, Google’s own web browser is based off an iteration of the open source Webkit project. Unfortunately for Android users, you don’t get nearly the same kind of experience. Pure browsing performance aside, I found the pinch-to-zoom capabilities horrendously under performing. On iOS I’m used to a butter-smooth ping-to-zoom experience, with no discernible lag. On Gingerbread, the stock browser does this really poorly. One other feature I miss from iOS is that I can’t go to a webpage and use “Add to Homescreen” option — which happens to turn that webpage into it’s own app on your homescreen. The cool thing about this is for apps that support full-screen mode, Safari will hide its tab bar and address bar from sight. As far as I can tell, this is currently missing from Android, and I really expected more here.

Maps:

Without a doubt, one of my favourite Google apps that ships with Gingerbread is the Maps app. It destroys the current version that ships with iOS, simply for the fact that it includes turn-by-turn navigation. An added bonus though is that because this is a pure Google OS, the Maps app is updated on a very frequent basis — compare and contrast that with iOS, which is restricted to updates based on when Apple is ready to ship an OS update.

Talk:

I love GTalk. I use an app on my iPhone called “Verbs” which supports the GTalk protocol. On Android, the built-in GTalk app pushes new notifications to you 24/7, even if you haven’t logged in recently. This is incredibly useful if you use IM a lot with your friends and family like I do.

Messaging:

One would think that there isn’t anything about SMS that’s interesting. While that holds true, one thing I particularly like about the Messaging app on Android is how you can single tap a contacts avatar, and a floating contextual buttons fade in. From here, you can do things like call that person, send them a SMS, chat with them on GTalk, or other functions depending on what third party apps you have installed.

The only bizarre thing I fault the Messaging app for, is that it isn’t smart about turning, what’s obviously an address, into a link that takes you straight to the Maps app.

Camera:

The camera app is terrible. Not only is the interface cluttered with a bunch of unclear options, the camera app itself takes considerably longer to load than on an iPhone 4. By the time the app fully loads, that precious moment that you wanted to capture is lost forever.

Gallery:

Like the photos app in iOS on the iPad, in the Gallery app on Android, you can pinch to expand the camera roll. Other than that, you can easily upload your photos directly from the app to third party services.

Books:

I haven’t explored the selection of available books yet, however as far as the app is concerned, it gives everything I would expect out of an eBook reader — font preferences, justification, line height and day/night modes. Type face selections are limited to just Droid Sans, Droid Serif, Vollkorn and Sorts Mill Goudy.

One really cool thing that I like is how many apps contain their own widgets. These widgets can be pinned to any home screen, and depending on the widget, can provide really useful information. For example, I can add a weather widget or Google News widget straight to my main homescreen. I haven’t been monitoring how much extra memory or batter life these widgets consume, but I’m sure there will be some sort of impact on battery life with these. You simply just can’t get something for nothing, so this is a warning that your mileage may vary.

Weather and News:

The weather app comes with a new component as well, powered by Google News of course. The stock weather app provides automatic updates based on your geo-location, as well as more detailed reports then the stock iOS weather app. This is already a winner in my eyes over what we have in iOS.

Managing music and Podcasts.

The built-in music app that currently ships with Gingerbread is pretty lacklustre. The UI is unpolished and there appeared to be no way to download music or even podcasts over-the-air. On iOS, there is no over-the-air syncing for Podcasts, however at least you can still download new episodes through the iTunes app and have them show up in the iPod app. This didn’t appear to be the case on Android, and of course the official documentation supplied by Google is not nearly as well written as what I have come to expect from Apple.

After fiddling around with the music app, I launched the Marketplace app on my Nexus S and downloaded Doubletwist with the AirSync $5 add-on. I had already heard about Doubletwist before I had even procured my Android phone, and it seemed to have been getting rave reviews. Doubletwist’s UI definitely seems to set the bar far higher than any other app that ships from Google. The app allowed me to easily transfer music from my MacBook Pro via WiFi — automatically after I had installed the free Mac app.

The only issue I found with Doubletwist is the Podcast syncing feature — or lack there of. If you read the ad copy on the Marketplace for AirSync, it states you can search, subscribe to and sync Podcasts using the free Mac app over WiFi. Once I had installed the app though, I was disappointed to find out that subscribing to Podcasts was not a feature that was yet available in the Mac version. I’m not one to typically get upset over software, however everything had led me to believe this was a feature in the software, which is why I bought the AirSync add-on in the first place. If there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s misleading customers and promising features in a product when they don’t actually exist.

I decided to cool down a bit and peruse Doubletwists’s Getsatisfaction forums to see who else had been complaining about this. Sure enough I found a thread dating back to 2010 where the company had made a promise to bring the Podcast subscribing feature to the Mac app “soon.” I haven’t see any updates recently regarding the status of this feature, so I’ll consider it vapourware for now. I also gave Doubletwist a chance to address my concerns by reaching out to their email support address. As of the publish date of this article, it’s been five days and I have yet to hear from anyone.

The Marketplace

The first few days with my Nexus S was pretty easy. Figuring out where everything was didn’t take long at all, so I decided to peruse Google’s Marketplace, which is their own app store.

Saying there’s a shortage of apps to choose from in the Android Marketplace in comparison to Apple’s App Store, is like saying there’s a shortage of oxygen going around — in other words, highly unlikely.

My initial reaction after spending 30 minutes in the Marketplace was, “Where are all the killer apps?” Since apps are categories in a similar fashion to how Apple does things I browsed through all of the categories that I was interested in — books, music, productivity, and tools. My first goal was to see if I could find ports of my must-have apps that I grew accustomed to on my iPhone.

Here’s a list of what I found:

• Foursquare
• IMDB
• Dropbox
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Twitter (lacks multiple account support)
• 1Password
• ReadItLater (I’m more of an Instapaper fan, but this official app is far more polished than any third-party Instapaper client).
• Instacast

My other favourite apps did not have official ports, however, through their respective APIs I was able to find some pretty decent third party versions.

Here’s a list of those third-party apps:

• Readinggo (An Instapaper client, being developed at a fastidious pace)
• Pinboard (Not an official Pinboard app, but still pretty good).
• Epistle (As far as I know, the only nice Dropbox-based notes app)

The organizational layout of the Marketplace has many similarities with Apple’s App Store. You can find apps organized in all the relevant categories, and each category will present the typical top paid and top free apps. Like Apple’s app store, there may be some great apps on Android, but the app discovery process is even worse. Some good apps that I have found where only discovered after doing some Google searching, and not through the Marketplace itself. Finding great apps is incredibly important, but if your users can’t easily find the best ones, you’re not doing them any favours.

Observations when downloading apps:

I had a quick look through some of the most popular available apps in the Marketplace and noticed some very interesting things. Many games for Android currently ask you to check your device to see what version of Open GL it ships with. The reason for this is to ensure your device meets the games minimum technical requirements so that you have a good experience playing it. While I understand the rationale for asking this — due to the plethora of Android devices with different hardware capabilities — I’m reminded of my past user experiences with having to check PC requirements on the boxes of PC games. Users simply shouldn’t have to even think about these kinds of things. Thus we see the major platform paradigms between iOS and Android. There’s something to be said with just buying a game through an the App Store on iOS and just having it work reliably. Apple keeps a highly curated App Store, vetting everything that comes through it. This is the exact polar opposite of how Google manages things, which for better or worse seems to be what they plan on sticking with for the foreseeable future.

There are many Android fans that will not care about checking requirements before downloading an app from the Marketplace, and of course I know those very same people are going to email me telling me it isn’t a big deal. I’m merely trying to make a point about my experience, what I’ve come to expect from a modern smartphone operating system and the platform on which the software itself runs on.

Your mileage may vary, and my preference still leans towards the way things are done on iOS. Factoring in the limitations of Apple’s App Store approval process, I still believe for the average person that iOS lends itself to a far more stable and friendly environment.

The Nexus S Hardware

The initial unboxing of the Nexus S went well. Upon examination of the packaging, I found the quality and layout of how everything was put together top-notch — if not on par with what you experience with the iPhone 4.

Holding the Nexus S in my right hand felt very comfortable. At first glance I didn’t really notice the subtly curved display, even though I knew it was in fact there. The device was light enough hat it didn’t feel uncomfortable while holding it in one hand.

Build quality:

Overall the Nexus S feels fairly well built, however when you put it next to an iPhone and compare the differences — well it just isn’t even the same league, nay universe. The major difference between the Nexus S and iPhone 4 is that one is made with mostly plastic, and the other aluminium and glass. There is a discernible weight difference between the devices, and it’s a preference whether or not you prefer the lighter, but less durable Nexus S. One thing I’ll say though is that the plastic does feel solid enough. When I squeeze the phone slightly in the palm of my hand, it doesn’t feel like it’s about to collapse under its own weight. That’s saying something isn’t it?

Placement of hardware/software buttons and jacks:

On the left-hand side of the phone, you are presented with volume buttons. Over the course of time I have used my Nexus S, I have accidentally pressed these buttons far too many times. It seems that if Samsung simply moved these buttons closer to the top of the phone, they could have avoided this problem. I’ll note that this is actually a hugely annoying issue for me — something that I never have on my iPhone 4.

On the right-hand side you are presented with the standby/power switch. This is where I start to question Samsung’s design choices. Placing the standby/power button on the right side of the phone lends itself to accidentally locking the screen — locking itself unintentionally far too often.

The headphone jack can be found at the very bottom of the phone, adjacent to the micro USB jack. I have no grips with the placement of the headphone jack, since the phone can easily fit in my back pocket upside down or right-side up.

One complaint that consistently seems to rear its ugly head is the non-standard placement of the hardware/software buttons on Android devices. It seems like every OEM wants to make their own decisions on what they feel best is to include — causing confusion for users who have to get used to different button layouts if they use another Android phone, or buy a new one. The Nexus S does not have any context sensitive hardware buttons. Instead, Samsung opted for capacitive touch-based buttons. At the bottom of the display, you will find four touch buttons — back, menu, search and home. I have no issues with any of these buttons, and even though I’m coming from a single home button iPhone 4, these four touch based buttons worked acceptably well.

The display:

The most immediate thing I noticed about the Super AMOLED display was how excellent it was at getting dark colours properly. While the colour reproduction was excellent, the ppi (pixels-per-inch) that you get are just 235 ppi, which while not entirely bad, is still a far cry from the iPhone 4’s Retina display (which is closer to the 300 ppi mark). I’ve obviously been spoiled by the iPhone 4’s display, since I’ve tried very hard and can’t seem to notice any pixels on screen while even holding the phone 6 inches away from my eyes. By no means does the Nexus S have a bad display. Quite the contrary in fact, since I would consider it the second best display on any smartphone right next to the iPhone 4. It’s 235 ppi provides a far noticeable improvement in terms of pixel rendering over the iPhone 3GS.

Battery life:

On a full charge overnight, I unplug my Nexus S around 6:30am. Before I leave the house, which is typically around 7:45am, I check email, Facebook, Twitter and occasionally read an article in my Instapaper or Read It Later queue.

My work day starts at 9am, and I have a 40 minute commute to the office. While on the subway, I typically take advantage of the extra time I have to do some reading. This is typically in Read It Later, as there aren’t any great third-party Instapaper clients on Android as of this writing. I can say with certainty that my phone has been able to last me an entire work day. By around 7:30pm, I typically get a warning I have less than 15% battery life and that I should plugin my phone. I checked the built in battery monitor that is built-in to Android, and other than the display and OS itself, it appears I’m draining the battery when spending time with Read It Later open for extended periods of time. I have yet to test listening to music or Podcasts on the device, but overall I expected far worse battery life judging by all of the negative things I hear.

Just as a comparison though, my iPhone 4 still has far superior battery life. I can go an entire work day of browsing the web, checking Facebook and Twitter often, as well as listening to Podcasts for hours — all while having more than 20% battery life by 8pm.

I don’t necessarily blame the Android OS itself, or Samsung’s batteries, however I’d have to say a major contributing factor to battery drain is the Super AMOLED display. I found that the battery monitor was telling me on a consistent basis that the display takes around 42 percent of the battery.

While the Nexus S is not without its faults, I’ll go as far to say that it’s by far the best Android device you can get right now. If Samsung could simply move the placement of the volume buttons closer to the very top of the phone, as well as move the standby button on top, that would solve my two main gripes with this device.

Weighing the pros and cons of these platforms

There are a lot of things to like about Android, and I feel looking back on the last week that I could have written a far more scathing review of the platform. While there is still a ton of work Google needs to do to polish the OS itself, I still think it’s an interesting choice.

Come September, iCloud and iOS 5 will be unleashed to the public. Both iCloud and iOS 5 should resolve a lot of the irritating short comings that have been long overdue for iOS. It seems that iOS as an operating system and platform has finally grown out of its infant stages. Anyone who thinks Apple is late to the game on the cloud services front isn’t wrong, however it’s imperative to be reminded of how the company historically operates. Apple has rarely ever been first to market with any new ground breaking feature, in fact we can look at something as recent as the iPad as an example of this. The iPad is already in its second generation after just two years, however one can look back at the repeated failures of Microsoft’s tablet ventures to compare and contrast Apple’s approach to product releases.

Many of Microsoft’s OEM partners embraced the tablet and released product after product, after product — none ever reaching critical mass among consumers or enterprise markets. Apple has consistently watched trends over and over, and if they feel they want to take a stab at something, they will take their time coming up with a highly polished and viable solution. Apple’s primary focus has, and always will be the user experience — making people feel emotionally attached to that piece of hardware and software. This is where Google diverges heavily from Apple’s methodologies.

While Apple is highly focused on the perfect culmination of beautiful hardware and software, Google is more engineering driven. Google’s heavily focused engineering culture rears its head in all of their products. I don’t know if this will change, but as far as Android is concerned, it’s incumbent upon Google to pour all of their resources into the design and usability of the platform.

While the overarching ideology of Android as a platform is good — i.e., the incredible choice to install un-approved apps not on the Marketplace, the ability to heavily customize, OS and app updates and device restoration all done over-the-air — from an iOS users point of view, living with Android on a daily basis is still a bit of a chore. The lack of pixel perfect, highly polished top grade apps are incredibly lacking. What few gems I discovered, are ones that already appear to be available and have reached critical mass on iOS.

If you’re paying attention to what’s going on with Android, you can clearly see that Google is iterating the OS at a fastidious pace. While perhaps not nearly on par with the polish of every pixel perfect detail that Apple aspires to with iOS, I’ll be keeping a close eye on Android from now on. I feel that I’ve been humbled, now that I have an opportunity to use an Android device on a daily basis — acclimatizing myself to the nuances of its environment. As an iOS user, I will remain cautiously optimistic for Android’s future.

iPhone 4 and iOS Woes

I consider myself an early adopter when it comes to testing the latest software and hardware. For better or worse, this can sometimes be a terrible thing. Adopting the latest technology doesn’t come without its own pitfalls such as buggy software.

Every time Apple release a new iOS update, I tend to jump on board the moment it’s released. Luckily, Apple has pretty stringent quality assurance, so very rarely do we ever get bugs that severely impact our experience with our devices.

With the recent release of iOS 4.3.3, I’ve noticed my iPhone 4 has been feeling relatively sluggish. Opening and closing apps hasn’t been as snappy as it could be. Initially I didn’t want to blame 4.3.3 as the sole cause, so I decided to wipe my phone and start from a clean slate. Instead of restoring my phone from a backup, I went through a factory restore and installed my favourite apps — one at a time.

I no longer install hundreds of apps anymore, so I try to keep only the most essential frequently used apps on my phones. Last time I checked, I don’t think I had more than 33 third party apps installed.

After installing all of my third party apps one at a time, again I had the same feeling of sluggishness. I haven’t been able to pin point if it’s just the amount of apps I have, or if there is a specific one that is being a complete dick. I’ve been tempted to just run my iPhone 4 vanilla — sans any third party apps for a few days to see how it feels.

I’d like to do a more in-depth test before I draw any conclusions, since I don’t want to put the blame on iOS 4.3.3 just yet.

If any readers of Zero Distraction would like to share your experiences with the latest iOS update, let me know at comments@zerodistraction.com.

Over the air updates with iOS

With the original introduction of FaceTime, there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of vitriol over the fact that Apple wasn’t supporting video calls over 3G. Of course there were other third party solutions at the time, like Fring which did support video over 3G.

More recently though, we now have Skype with video calling available over 3G. While I haven’t personally tested it myself, from what I hear it’s still not as good as FaceTime over FaceTime. How could it be though, regardless of how Apple’s and Skype’s protocols differ, the bottom line is that we’re dealing with a much bigger pipe on WiFi, which means video call quality is going to be inherently better.

Naturally as is with all things Apple does, they iterate and iterate slowly - each time ensuring maximum polish and minimum features. Apple knows clear well that doing good quality reliable video calling can’t be done right now over the current 3G networks we have in North America. It’s far more reasonable that we’ll see FaceTime support in the future perhaps once 4G networks have been fully rolled out and become the norm.

Over the air operating system updates for iOS — something geeks and power users like myself, and people who read this weblog, have been wanting this for considerable time. Many of us are proponents of reducing the dependency we have on being tethered to our computers via cable just to do OS updates, not to mention performing other syncing duties.

The inherent issues with OTA updates that Apple must considering should be the following:

• Huge OS updates in the hundreds of megabytes could take all day to download over 3G.

• Factoring in monthly bandwidth caps, downloading a 300MB + OS update is a concern for people with 512MB per month data caps (At least in Canada that’s an issue with Rogers Wireless).

• The overall general user experience of downloading a major update could be poor, due to the fact that if you’re in an area with spotty 3G service, the download will be painfully slow or may even stall.

So let’s imagine you’re in an area with relatively good 3G speeds. You get a notification on your phone that a new OS update is being pushed to your device. You start driving or walking around town and hit a dead zone, or perhaps an area with no 3G service. At this point, your phone may fall back to the much slower EDGE network. At that point, it could take days for the latest iOS update to fully download, unless of course you hit a WiFi network at some point.

With the upcoming iOS 5 release, I’m not sure if OTA OS updates is something Apple is aiming for over 3G, however, it’s more feasible that they could just support it over WiFi only. This would be a great stop gap measure until the proliferation of tested and reliable 4G networks come into play.

Macrumors late yesterday chimed in on some OTA rumours for iOS 5:

Multiple sources say the new feature will debut in iOS 5, meaning iOS 5 will not come over-the-air but following point updates to it will. Just like tethering in iOS 3, Apple has the technology but cannot just unleash it everywhere. Apple and Verizon Wireless are said to have been in talks over these wireless software updates since early this year.

If this is at all true, that’s great, as if Apple can solve the first major hurdle — not having their users penalized by their puny data caps — that would make OTA updates far more palatable.

The Apple TV which is based on iOS 4 offers “over the air” updates with no iTunes syncing required. The Apple TV, however, stores little customer data so backups are not as critical as with iPhone and iPad devices.

This is the next major hurdle. It’s one thing when something like the Apple TV doesn’t store much user data, but when you have 16,32, and 64GB iPhones and iPads with tons of apps, it’s a whole other story. I don’t know what Apple’s solution will be to do this, but I imagine the “mythical” data center they built must have something to do with it.

Ruminations on iOS 5

It occurred to me today that many us that own iPhones and iPads have many apps installed on our devices, in addition to the stock ones provided to us by Apple. As we swipe from home screen to home screen, each littered with those distinctly recognizable icons, the “dock” (the area of apps at the bottom, although dock is an unofficial name I think) remains fixed.

One of things I love to do on a regular basis is reorganize my apps on each home screen. I prioritize them in the order of most frequently used. One issue that has always bothered me frame day one though is the inflexibility we have at customizing the fixed dock. The apps there always stay the same, no matter if you have just two different home screens or 12. This definitely is annoying to me and I think we can do better.

With iOS 5 on the horizon, there’s no doubt it will be a major update. The areas of focus for Apple must be the major pain points they think users may have with it. Perhaps notifications will get their much heralded overhaul which would be nice.

One thing I would love to see is the ability to specify different docks per home screen. Let’s say home screen #1 is for work related tasks and home screen #2 is purely for writing tasks. When I swipe to the second home screen, I could see a different dock at the bottom with a different set of 4 apps along the bottom specifically tailored for that task. This is not something I foresee Apple doing, as it seems like something that would be beyond what they might consider simple and minimalistic for most novice users. It would be a dream come true for me as a power user though. I know I’m probably dreaming, but if this was something we could actually customize, it would be amazing.

Speaking of iOS 5, other than a revamp of the notification system, I haven’t really heard of any other major gripes people have had with iOS. I’m even wondering just how far they can take these improvements (though I’m sure we’ll all be pleasantly surprised). I don’t see a change in the current standard grid layout for apps on a home screen, so I imagine other refinements would be made in the stock system apps. An overhaul to the core bundled apps like calendar, mail, and contacts could definitely be realistic. A complete overhaul of the search bar would be great as well. Opening up the API to allow third party apps to have their data indexed and searchable would be fantastic. In addition to that, maybe Apple will figure out a slick way of making the search function more obvious to users. It seems like it could be an integral feature for iOS 5 and I can’t imagine they won’t do something with it.

Location data courtesy of Apple

Its been another day where the media has totally overblown the recent discovery that iPhones record and store location data (woah big surprise there). Evidently when you connect your iPhone to iTunes and sync, once a backup is made there is a database file that contains a record of all location data, i.e. all places you have visited.

In a nutshell, this isn’t really a security issue in that bad people that wish you harm can really exploit this data (well as far as we know). At worst, the file which is stored in your user directory can be read locally.

The thing that amazes me is that this issue is more of a non-issue. The media decided to jump on this discovery because it made a great case for a link-baity headline. Okay fine, you’re a big new outlet and need page views and people to click on your ads. I get that and that in and of itself isn’t necessarily big issue for me. What drives me absolutely crazy though is when these things are completely sensationalized.

I spent the better part of this morning monitoring the overall reaction people had on Twitter to this, and it seems that many (at least most geeks) are simply not concerned by this issue. I am however interested in knowing why Apple even needs to store that data in your iPhone backup though. It’s well known that carriers can and do already triangulate your position at any given time by using cell towers. Presumably this data is secured in their own systems, so it does seem redundant that this information needs to remain, especially in a local backup.

Lastly in fairness to Apple, I had a look into iPhone Tracker, the open source utility available on Github by Pete Warden. This allows you to read the database file that contains this location data plotted on a map. The location data does not seem to disclose exact coordinates, which is to be expected. So I’m in no fear of some stalker finding out the exact house where I live in, even if they had access to this data.

I imagine Apple’s PR machine will be in full force at some point to quell the fears of the masses. Bottom line, I don’t really care about this and I don’t think anybody else should.

Fluxmmoxed by iTunes

I would think most Mac geeks (presumably people reading this weblog) already know how frustrating iTunes is to use. It’s one of those pieces of software in OS X that seems to be coated with thick veneer of UI, but has the underpinnings of a beat up old 1973 Ford Pinto.

You would also think by now Apple would have their shit together and would have released a version of iTunes that is — dare I say — pleasant to use. Not only is iTunes still one the slowest bundled Mac apps but it still seems to do some truly perplexing things when it comes to device syncing.

Recently I decided to try and remove most of my dependence on iTunes for syncing content to and from my iPhone. I decided that I could install and remove apps solely on my iPhone as I didn’t see a point in keeping local copies of my apps in my library. The only thing that I really ever need iTunes to do is update my iPhone when there is a new version of iOS available (which I also wish was done OTA). Since I don’t sync contacts, calendars, email, bookmarks, photos, or podcasts I figured I’d be fine to stop syncing apps. This seems easier said than done. Upon unchecking the option to sync apps, I discovered that iTunes would also delete all apps that currently reside on my iPhone. I did some searching but didn’t find a way around this limitation so I decided to bite the bullet and do it.

I was looking at my iPhone which now had zero apps, so of course I spent some considerable time just going to the App Store and installing them directly from there. I was super happy for a while that I was able to remove almost all of my dependence on iTunes for syncing. Unfortunately, this brief period of joy was severed in a very unpleasant way when I decided to use iTunes to sync a custom ringtone to my iPhone.

What happened next was something I really never want to see happen again, either to myself and hopefully to anybody else trying to do this. iTunes decided it would be a great idea to transfer all of my “purchases” back to my library. I didn’t have a say in this, even though I had NOT checked the option to sync apps.

In the end, I ended up going full circle with a copy of my apps located in my iTunes library again. Definitely not a pleasant experience.

So what can be done to improve the overall user experience with iTunes? For starters, why doesn’t iTunes just display a list of already purchased apps (just like the Mac App Store) and give me an option to quickly install them again? In fact, you could take it a step further and just prompt the user if they would want to install all of their previously installed apps again.

Your iTunes ID allows Apple to track what purchases you have made, so it stands to reason that it would not be difficult to keep a snapshot of what apps are currently installed on your phone. This would make things super easy if you wanted to restore the state of your device without having to be tethered to your Mac via an ungainly USB cable.

Mobile sites served to iOS

Two interesting things I’ve discovered today. Both the mobile Facebook and Flickr sites you get served in iOS are faster and more reliable than their iPhone counter parts.

How sad is that? Also, this doesn’t look entirely well for the people working on their native iOS counterparts. I’ve been frustrated time and time again with both Facebook’s and Flickr’s iOS apps that I’ve given up on them entirely.

All I do now is open Safari and visit Facebook and Flickr and choose “Add to Homescreen” and I’m done. If you’re not already doing so, give it a try and see if you like the experience.

Handoff and Pastebot app love

One of the greatest things about being a geek is that we tend to search for the most creative tools to do a particular job. One thing that I’ve wanted to figure out is the quickest way to send a link from my Mac to my iPhone and vice versa.

For what I do, the best workflow I have found consists of using two different iPhone apps, namely Handoff and Pastebot. These are two really great iOS apps that do different things which I’ll elaborate on.

Handoff is a great app that allows you to receive push notifications directly to your iPhone when you have sent a link to it using a simple bookmarklet in your browser. The webservice is free, and as long as you purchase the iPhone app you can instantly send a URL directly to your iPhone. On many occasions, I have found this to be incredibly useful.

Pastebot is a great solution if you want a way to access your iPhone’s clipboard. Anytime a URL or any bit of text is copied, it will end up in Pastebot so you can look it up later. The usefulness of this is also extended by Tapbots helpful OS X utility which can receive notifications from the iPhone app as well.

If I’m in a situation where I also want to send a snippet of text or URL back to my Mac, I simply open Pastebot and send it directly to my Mac from there. By using both Handoff and Pastebot, I can accomplish so much without a lot of friction. If you aren’t using either of these apps, then shame on you for missing out on the fun.