T-Mobile introduced the first cell phone based on Google's Android operating system to much fanfare a few days ago. Although Android has some interesting features and much promise, I don't expect to see anyone holding the T-Mobile G1 in Sonoma County for a while, since T-Mobile is a fringe player with limited coverage up here (and certainly no connection anywhere nearby to its high speed 3G data network).

Android is a work in progress; comparisons to the iPhone are inevitable and at the moment Android comes up a bit short, but it's early to make any decisions. In this first iteration, Android is tied in very closely to Google's online mail, calendar and contact services, which are fully integrated and reportedly work smoothly. It's not as smooth for everyone else, since the integration is thin or nonexistent for other sources of mail and there is essentially no support for other calendar/contact programs.

In particular, businesses should be aware that there is no support for ActiveSync, the software that connects a mobile device to an Exchange Server. A Google Android phone is not currently a good choice for an office using Small Business Server. It's the same situation that an SBS user faces with a Blackberry - a solution for email can be cobbled together from forwarded messages and BCCs and the like, but it is clearly a kludge compared to the true integration provided by a Windows Mobile phone or an iPhone running ActiveSync. (It bears repeating that using an iPhone with ActiveSync causes it to suck battery power so fast it actually makes slurping noises.)

There's one other design decision for the T-Mobile device that has caused a fuss - instead of a standard headphone connector, they chose an oddball, mostly proprietary "ExtUSB" headphone connector that requires a weird dongle for every kind of headphone or earbud except the terrible earbuds that come with the phone. No one knows why but everybody hates it.

Somebody - Google or a third party - will likely make the financial arrangements with Microsoft and write an ActiveSync connector for Android, and the other carriers will be releasing their own Android devices with different hardware designs. We'll talk more about it then.

Labels: Apple, audio, Google, mail, mobile, phone, SBS

posted by bruceb at 9/29/2008 12:05:00 PM | permalink

Make a firm commitment not to be fooled into installing malware on your computer!

In this study, researchers created fake popup windows that should have been alarming, and put them in front of people at unexpected times. Most of the people clicked the OK button so quickly it was clear they didn't give it a moment's thought - they just wanted the dialog box to get out of the way as quickly as possible, with no thought to the consequences.

It's up to you to protect yourself. It doesn't matter what security software you're running - if you click OK, you have given the bad guys permission to kidnap your family and empty your bank accounts. Researchers find too many people who would click Yes in any window, even if it looks like the one on the right, with nothing more than a snort of annoyance at the distraction.

Vista adds "User Account Control" as a critical security feature. Before any significant change is allowed, Vista greys the screen, stops the change from occurring, and asks you if you want to allow it to happen. When a laboratory tried to research rootkits (the latest name for "bad programs that hide themselves on your computer," since "virus," "adware" and "spyware" weren't confusing enough), they had to disable User Account Control because the rootkits were stopped in their tracks by it.

If you're a Vista user, then, you have an important security tool built into the operating system, and it will protect you unless you click OK on the User Account Control window without thinking about it. Rootkits are the most dangerous kind of attack and Vista can stop them dead, regardless of your security software, but only if you say No.

And if you turn off User Account Control and complain about how oh so annoying boo hoo it is to have to click OK an extra time, I have little sympathy. Responsibility for your computer is in your hands.

Labels: computers, security, Vista

posted by bruceb at 9/25/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Here's a tip about Microsoft Outlook that I discovered by accident.

A common problem - you'd like to send an email to a friend with a number of photos attached. If you send the photos straight from the camera, the files are too large. Typical photos from a digital camera are 1.5-2.5Mb each, too big for an email attachment. Attach two or three or more and your message is likely not to be delivered, blocked by filters for oversized mail on your company mail server or your ISP's outgoing mail server or the recipient's incoming mail server or mail program.

There are many workarounds to resize the image for easy sharing. The photos can be shared online, or they can be resized by one of the many programs that can work with Outlook - Windows Live Photo Gallery and Photoshop Elements and many more.

There's another way to resize the attachments in Outlook and it's even easier. (If you don't use Outlook for mail, this isn't for you. Chat amongst yourselves for a few minutes.)

• Attach the photos to the outgoing message without any regard for their original size.
• Open the sidebar for "Attachment Options."
• Outlook 2003: button on the right of the attachment line.
• Outlook 2007: little arrow under the Message / Include buttons.
• Voila! An option to resize pictures automatically before the picture is sent. Pick a small/medium/large setting, push Send, and the message is on its way with reasonably sized attachments.

That's great stuff! Here's how those buttons look.

OUTLOOK 2003

OUTLOOK 2007

Labels: mail, Outlook, photos

posted by bruceb at 9/24/2008 01:08:00 AM | permalink

A few final thoughts about file formats for audio and video and how that affects a Vista Media Center Extender. This is the place where strong people are humbled and the whole project can be brought down with screams of frustration. I can only touch on a few of the myriad details.

There is a single overriding principle that you can put to use right away: make a conscious effort to avoid any file format that is locked up with any DRM (digital rights management, the schemes used with "licensed" content to prevent you from making full use of it), or that is even capable of a DRM layer. Don't buy songs from iTunes in Apple's proprietary AAC format, which can't be played in many places; instead, buy MP3 files from Amazon, which can be played absolutely everywhere. Set your audio software to rip CDs in MP3 format and throw away files in other formats from well-meaning friends. Here's a recent article that describe's one person's frustrating encounters with DRM-laden media files.

You can get a sense of how quickly this area gets ugly if you look into how many different formats there are for music, and how strongly people hold opinions about them. There are uncompressed formats that are more or less well supported (WAV, FLAC, OGG VORBIS), there are many competing formats for compressed audio (with and without DRM), and there are ways to compress MP3 files that result in terrible sound quality. I wrote some notes about music files here and I've worked hard to be sure that my library is 100% high-bitrate MP3s. If you have other formats in your music library (especially songs from the iTunes store), assume that you will have trouble playing them in Vista Media Center, much less an Extender in the living room.

Working with video is exponentially worse than audio. There is no accepted standard, no format that is a safe guarantee. Your camcorder will record files in a format that you likely didn't think about when you bought it and you have no way to be sure what will be required to play it on your own computer, much less in the living room. I'll throw out a few of the details that I ran into, but it's just a taste of what lies ahead.

There are several programs that rip DVDs to your hard drive in their native format, with all the files in the VIDEO_TS folder. Most of them will compress a dual-layer DVD into 4.7Gb, the size of a single-layer DVD. In this age of huge, cheap hard drives, it makes sense to create a library of entire DVDs on a big hard drive to have the best video quality when movies are played back, plus continued access to menus, special features, and chapters. Oddly, Vista Media Center won't display those DVDs ("folder is empty") until the registry is hacked per these instructions, at which point it displays a lovely DVD Gallery.

I put a 750Gb hard drive in my new Dell Inspiron and started ripping DVDs, using Nero Recode (and AnyDVD, which is required to unlock commercial DVDs). I brought the Vista Media Center DVD Gallery to life and looked at blank spaces where thumbnails ought to be until I manually found the cover art for each DVD online and copied the file as folder.jpg into the parent folder for each DVD. (J River Media Center will display a thumbnail for the DVDs if the folder.jpg file is in the VIDEO_TS folder, not the parent. Sigh.) I still think that's a good choice for assembling a movie collection that will be played back on a computer.

But then I got the Extender and - no DVDs! The Vista Media Center interface didn't have the DVD Gallery icon and the Extender claimed the folders were empty when I browsed to them. J River Media Center displayed the names but greyed them out as if they were inaccessible.

Much research ensued before I learned that Vista Media Center Extenders have been crippled so they cannot play DVDs in their native format under any conditions, presumably the result of a compromise to satisfy the dark lords in the movie studios. A separate DVD player is required in the living room to play a disc and there just isn't any way to stream a DVD from a computer through an Extender.

Converting movies is a science and a black art. A comparatively new format, H.264, is gaining acceptance as the "one true format," in Paul Thurrott's words, for high quality in a reasonable file size - roughly 1.5Gb for a two-hour movie. I had already found out that Nero's version of MPEG-4 (which is but isn't the same as H.264) has some funky proprietary issues, so I did more research and bought a copy of DVDFab to convert DVDs to a generic H.264 format, creating files with AVI extensions. I merrily proceeded down that path for a week or so, ripping movies right and left, before I realized that Vista Media Center Extenders can't play H.264 files either. Oh, I'm still not sure of the details of that - they don't play in the Vista Media Center interface or in the J River Media Center interface, but they sometimes play in the HP Videos section of the Extender, probably just to be malicious and mess with me. But clearly it isn't a universal format, at least not yet.

At the moment, I'm using DVDFab to rip DVDs to XVid format, which also results in files with AVI extensions because this wasn't confusing enough already. If you're trying this at home, these settings produce high-quality XVid videos that can be played on a Vista Media Center Extender: Mobile setting generic.avi.xvid.audiocopy; high quality encoding (2-pass); fixed bitrate 1200kbps; frame resolution roughly 768 x something.

Thanks for coming along with me into the living room! I'll return to your office now, where I belong. Good luck with your home theater!

Labels: audio, computers, DRM, video

posted by bruceb at 9/23/2008 12:11:00 AM | permalink

Running a Vista Media Center Extender in the living room requires a computer in the house running Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. Your home computer can send your photos and music to the living room without working very hard, so it's quite possible to use the same computer that you're using at your desk.

There is a caveat, though. The most important trick for a Vista Media Center Extender is delivering TV shows to the TV, and your home computer probably isn't ready to do that without an extra bit of hardware to plug in the Comcast cable and act as a TV tuner. Once the hardware is set up, the Vista Media Center software is easy to set up - it automatically identifies your cable provider and channel selection, downloads a program guide, and handles program recording.

There are inexpensive USB devices that add TV tuner functions and are reported to work quite well, but I got an ATI TV Wonder HD-650 for a hundred bucks to put inside the PC, since it seemed to have the fewest trouble reports. In this category, as with so many others, there are always reports of horrible problems on Amazon and the online forums, requiring an intuitive weighing to decide which ones can be discarded because you're luckier or smarter than those people.

When shows are recording and being streamed into the living room, the computer is working a bit harder, enough that it might slow down your work on the computer occasionally. I also wanted to set up the Media Center computer to do some time-consuming, processor-intensive jobs - converting DVDs into files that could be stored on the computer's hard drive and played on the Extender. My desktop computer gets restarted pretty regularly as a side effect of testing too much software, which would play havoc with recording a show and might interrupt somebody's experience in the living room.

That's why a lot of people set up a separate computer that is dedicated to doing the Media Center chores. It can be a home-built PC, if you want to save some money. I opted to buy a Dell Inspiron 530 with a lot of memory, since basic computers are so absurdly cheap. I got a good video card but that's optional - I don't plan to ever have it hooked up to a monitor. It's sitting off in the corner and my interaction with it is all done from my desk using Remote Desktop.

A new dedicated computer and the HP Extender gives me a rock solid foundation for more living room entertainment than I have time for. It looks and sounds fabulous.

One more part of the story before we're done - a few scary notes about audio and video formats tomorrow.

Labels: audio, computers, hardware, photos, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 9/22/2008 01:39:00 AM | permalink

HP has been creating devices for years to bring Windows Media Center to the living room. There are two new Vista Media Center Extenders being marketed under the "MediaSmart" name that have some very interesting features. The HP MediaSmart Connect is sitting in my living room doing exactly what I was hoping.

The previous living room occupant was HP's Z558 Digital Entertainment Center, a computer running Windows XP Media Center in a box with a full complement of inputs and outputs for audio and video. It was fairly quirky to set up - getting the display to fill the screen took long experimentation, for example, and it wasn't very good at finding media stored on a different computer. It worked for several years but it always ran hot, which eventually doomed it - the proprietary video card died once from overheating and was almost impossible to replace, and the fans have lately been getting louder and louder until they became an unbearable distraction.

There are several new Vista Extenders on the market which overlap in their primary purpose, to bring Vista Media Center to the TV from another computer in the home. HP has developed an HD TV with the MediaSmart technology built into the guts of the TV - an interesting idea that would make setup much more simple if you need a new TV, but it requires a firm belief that the technology running a Vista Media Center Extender will last as long as the TV. I don't know if I would make that bet.

The HP MediaSmart Connect stood out for me, though, when I read some favorable reviews. It's a small box, 8 1/2 inches square and less than two inches tall, and completely silent. It has the right outputs to connect to my TV and audio receiver - HDMI, component video, and analog and digital audio. It has built-in wireless networking but I have a network cable running to the living room so I never had to find out if the wireless connection would be jerky or slow, a frequent complaint. HP is reportedly going to lower the price in the next week, giving it a list price of $299 and a likely street price of $249. (Gadgets like this require exactly the same calculation as software: if you get the wrong thing, it doesn't matter if it was cheap; if you get the right thing, the price is almost irrelevant in the long run.)

The remote control bristles with buttons, since there are just too many functions for it to be simple, but at least the remote is sturdy and solid in the hand, which is not always true of the competitors.

The Vista Media Center experience is satisfying but it would be more or less the same with any Extender. What sets the MediaSmart Connector apart is the proprietary software added by HP.

HP has built an interface that includes seamless access to Vista Media Center in its entirety - but there's also an attractive, simple interface that provides access to photos, music and videos that runs completely apart from Vista Media Center. HP provides optional software to run on the home computers that delivers the photos, music and videos to the MediaSmart Connect. Browsing photos with Vista Media Center is quite nice, for example - thumbnails, the ability to browse by tag or folder name, etc. - but some people will prefer to browse the same photos with HP's software, shown at left. Both views are available at any time.

HP then gave its box one more ability that was important to me: the HP MediaSmart Connect is able to connect to other software running on a home computer in addition to the program supplied by HP. It can display lists of media from any standard UPNP or DLNA server.

That means the HP MediaConnect can display music, photos or video sent around the network by a wide variety of programs, including some of the ones I mentioned yesterday. In my case, that means it connected immediately to the UPNP server built into J River Media Center, the program I depend on to keep my embarrassingly large music library organized. I've spent hours sorting my music by genre and creating playlists and smartlists, and in just a few minutes, there were those playlists on the TV, ready to be played at the click of a button. I started playing one ("Audio -- Recently Imported -- Two Months -- shuffle") and wiped a tear from my eye, because I had never been able to go back and forth elegantly between Windows Media Center and J River Media Center before.

That probably isn't important to you. There are a hundred reasons why this works for me and might not work for you. Maybe you'd be frustrated that the experience is not troublefree - I can't see cover art for music albums, I've wrestled with video formats (that story comes later), and the interface is sometimes a little slow, for example. You might be fiercely interested in streaming high-definition video or 5.1 surround sound, which I can't tell you about because I don't care.

The good parts far outweigh any negatives in our living room. Vista Media Center has a tremendous program guide for live and recorded television that I can reach with a single click of a button. I can browse through thumbnails and start a slide show of last month's family photos. I can play my video and music collection. All of those things are handled by an interface that's easy to navigate from the couch with a single remote control. That's good stuff!

All of this requires a computer in the house doing the work, and some hard experience to discover which formats work and which don't work. I'll tell you more later about how I'm handling those things.

Labels: audio, hardware, network, photos, software, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 9/19/2008 12:59:00 AM | permalink

Since the market for living room computers never developed, Microsoft decided to focus on "extenders," a different way to deliver media to your television.

Huge numbers of people already have a computer in the house running Windows Vista Home Premium, holding photos and music. An "extender" is a small box for the living room that connects to the computer over a wireless or wired connection to display the photos on the television and play music on the living room speakers. If the computer is set up for it, the extender can also handle all the TV programming and record TV shows like a Tivo. It works exclusively with a remote control - no keyboard or mouse! - and looks great from across the room. Here are some cute animations from Microsoft about how it works.

Extenders are not a new concept, and Microsoft is not the only company offering products that work this way. Apple TV is a box that streams music and video from your computer's copy of iTunes to the living room, hemmed in by Apple's fairly restrictive selection of supported formats and features. There is a rich selection of third party software and hardware that will send streams out onto a home network - Twonky, Tversity, music devices from Roku Soundbridge and Sonos, and much more. Tivo supplies software to send photos and music to the Tivo in the living room. Do-it-yourselfers and gadget freaks and technical types are having a wonderful time squabbling about the pros and cons of various setups.

Microsoft gets more attention in the mainstream because the technology it has chosen is elegant and because, well, because it's Microsoft, I guess. Media Center Extenders are based on a simple concept. The small living room box connects to the computer over the home network and displays the Vista Media Center interface, exactly as if it was running directly on the computer. Under the hood is a specialized version of Remote Desktop, which many businesspeople use to connect to their office computers from home.

All the work is done on the computer, but the computer can stay in the room suited for it. Multiple extenders can be connected to the same computer, and the computer can be used normally while it's sending media to the other rooms. The physical connections to the television for audio and video can be difficult but mating the computer with the extender is pretty straightforward.

Some people already have this technology without knowing it, because an XBox 360 can be a Media Center Extender. Chances are the XBox 360 is already on the home network to get updates and play online, so the only setup involves a bit of fumbling to bring a new blade to life in the XBox dashboard, full of photos and music. Microsoft recently announced that the XBox 360 dashboard would be completely overhauled to make it look like Media Center.

In addition to the XBox 360, there was a first generation of extenders from Linksys and others for Windows XP Media Center Edition, but they were slow and cranky and became obsolete when Microsoft rewrote everything for Vista. A new generation of extenders are now being introduced with some attractive features.

I don't have an XBox 360 - noisy things that fail a lot. (If you're interested, a good article appeared a few days ago about the XBox 360's sad history of hardware problems.) Instead, I'll tell you tomorrow about HP's MediaSmart Connect, which is the best of the extenders on the market now.

Labels: Apple, audio, hardware, Microsoft, network, photos, software, video, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/18/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Your photos are on your computer.

Your music is on your computer.

It makes sense that computers should be able to record TV shows - it's kind of a computery thing to do, right?

It's probably occurred to you that it makes sense to store movies on a computer instead of buying them or getting them from Netflix.

Your new HD TV is basically a big computer monitor.

So why don't you have a computer in your living room?

You have no idea how many people have tried to figure that out. Microsoft introduced Windows XP Media Center edition, intended for living rooms, and no one cared, so it built an updated version of the Media Center interface into Vista, and still no one cared. (If you have Vista Home Premium, look around for "Windows Media Center" on the menu and start it up. Never seen it before, have you? The interface is designed to be seen from across the room. It's quite a nice design, just a little pointless on a desktop PC.)

There are lots of manufacturers making living room computers running Vista Media Center - Niveus, Avideus, Alienware, VelocityMicro, and many more. Many of them are very expensive and some of them are only sold through audio/video specialists, because it turns out that getting your media into the living room is frighteningly complicated.

Your needs are different than mine. Nobody will have the same setup, which is part of why this is so difficult. The best I can do is tell my story in the next couple of days and hope that it helps you think things through if you decide to go down this road.

For today, let me just give you a few of the considerations that make this so hard.

• Computers are noisy. A fan that's acceptable under your desk can quickly come to sound like a jet plane when you're watching television.
• Your living room doesn't have room for something that's shaped like a computer. The media center PCs have to be designed like a piece of audio equipment. That makes them too small to have adequate ventilation, so they run hot and need big fans, which gets back to the noise problem.
• Normal people find it virtually impossible to hook up a new television to cable and speakers, which is why Best Buy and the other retailers are getting deeply involved in sending installers to your home. A media center PC adds a new tangle of cables, each with its own quirks and requirements and possible incompatibilities - HDMI, component video, optical audio, S-video, and oh so many more. Your television connection might be analog cable or digital cable, it might require a converter box or a CableCard (a hellishly complex bit of equipment in its own right), it might be DirecTV, you might have an antenna for HD signals, and the setup will different for every one. Trust me - the Best Buy geek isn't going to set up your media center PC.
• You don't have a network cable running into your living room. Sure, all the new stuff claims to work over wireless connections but maybe you've noticed - wireless connections are not the most stable, troublefree items in our tech toolbox, are they?
• There are an endless number of proprietary formats and programs that will become barriers to making everything work. I'll touch on this more later. You'd like to think that someone could give you instructions for how to get a movie from the camcorder and see it in the living room but there is no guarantee that anything will work - and if it works today, it might not work tomorrow.

Pretty depressing, huh? There, there. I feel your pain. But I'm a survivor - I've got pictures running in a slide show, I've got music playing from my library, and I've got a lovely collection of movies to browse through, and it's all down in my living room where it belongs. It took some money and some persistence and things aren't perfect but it can be done! More to come.

Labels: audio, computers, Microsoft, photos, video, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/17/2008 01:35:00 AM | permalink

Two new sites have been added to the bruceb favorites page.

• The Big Money is a business web site created by the editors of Slate, intended to be an authoritative source of business news combined with interesting business blogs. It will be trying to stand out from the other big business sites - Forbes, CNN Money, and the rest. Here's a New York Times article about the new site. (Look under Finance / Markets on the favorites page.)
• SoundUnwound is an online music encyclopedia created by Amazon and IMDB, the huge movie database. SoundUnwound starts with a lot of information and links to Amazon for purchase information and reviews, but is also open for editing by users, similar to Wikipedia. The companies hope that a community will grow up to feed information into it and make it authoritative and complete. Since that has already happened on Wikipedia, which has extraordinarily complete information about music (and roughly everything else), it's hard to predict whether SoundUnwound will find its own niche. But it's interesting and nicely presented, and that counts, right? Here's some background information about SoundUnwound. (Look under Music / Artists on the favorites page.)

The bruceb favorites page is meant to include the most useful web sites, the ones that you're looking for most of the time. If you find dead links or if you find yourself at a site that's well known and has some general interest, I hope you'll let me know so I can keep the page up to date. Thanks for your loyalty and support!

Labels: audio, bruceb, business, Internet

posted by bruceb at 9/15/2008 12:35:00 PM | permalink

I was testing Speed.io, a new site for measuring the speed of an Internet connection and displaying it in a lovely way. (I've put in on the bruceb favorites page under Internet / Online Tools, joining an old favorite, Bandwidth Speed Test.)

The test results reminded me that Comcast's PowerBoost technology really does improve the online experience. DSL has nothing like it. Comcast boosts the speed of just about every connection to a new web page or file for the first thirty seconds or so. That's enough to load virtually any web page nearly instantly (or as close to it as the web server at the other end can supply the page). It's also enough for most downloads to come flying down in their entirety at super speed. Huge downloads will slow down after the first thirty seconds or so, back to the rated speed of the connection. It's not a special feature - Comcast has rolled this out nationwide to all of its customers for free.

The technology also fools most online tools for measuring speed, which typically upload and download files for less than thirty seconds. That's how you get reports like this one, showing that my connection runs at 21Mb download speed, 3.3Mb upload speed. I've got Comcast's business class service, which is remarkably fast - but not quite that fast.

Labels: broadband, Internet

posted by bruceb at 9/13/2008 02:36:00 PM | permalink

Here's a tip for getting around in Outlook: it's possible to switch between mail, contacts, and calendar using hotkeys on the keyboard instead of reaching for the mouse to click the navigation pane. Who knew?

Don't overlook an even better Outlook tip from a few months ago - opening multiple Outlook windows simultaneously.

Labels: mail, Outlook, software

posted by bruceb at 9/12/2008 03:24:00 PM | permalink

Apple reacted quickly to the reports that the latest iTunes update has caused some Windows systems to crash badly. Last night Apple posted another version of iTunes that rolls back the offending hardware driver to an older version. If your system is blue screening, all you have to do is uninstall iTunes, uninstall Apple Mobile Device Support, and then reinstall iTunes from last night's release.

That's absurd, of course. As one person commented:

"A kernel level device driver (like the USB driver that Apple installs rather than using the one built in to the OS) will always have the ability to take down the OS.

"This is true for any OS since a kernel level driver is the interface between the OS and hardware.

"That's why it requires Administrator level permission to install (it did), why it needs to be very well written and tested before it gets sent to users (it wasn't) and why the installer should notifiy users that a device driver is being installed (they weren't) and only be installed if absolutely needed to support new hardware (it wasn't)."

You might want to take my suggestion: uninstall iTunes, uninstall Apple Mobile Device Support, uninstall Apple Software Update, uninstall Quicktime, install J River Media Center for your iPod, and return your iPhone.

Incidentally, are you aware of what a disaster the new iPhone has been? iPhone users are screaming bloody murder about absurdly short battery life, dropped calls, AT&T's terrible coverage with its much-vaunted 3G network, and much more. New software was released for the iPhone last night but there is little confidence that it will actually fix the list of problems it purports to address. Apple promises that this update will deliver all of the following improvements, each one of which has been a source of anguish for iPhone users for the last couple of months:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
• Improved performance in text messaging
• Faster loading and searching of contacts
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

Labels: Apple, audio, mobile, phone, software, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/12/2008 10:43:00 AM | permalink

New slogan for Apple: iTunes ain't done till Windows won't run!

After its iPod conference this week - more of a non-event than usual for Apple - a new version of iTunes started to roll out to Windows users. For some people, it's causing crashes and even causing blue screens after it installs broken drivers without any disclosure or warning.

The problems don't affect everybody - like so many computer problems, these are likely to be caused by unfortunate conflicts with other programs if they're installed on the same computer. It's still being investigated but one writer suggests that any of these factors might cause the iTunes upgrade to crash the computer:

• Roxio disc burning software
• An HP USB printer
• Logitech software/hardware

This writer thoroughly investigated the 80Mb (!) download delivered by the iTunes installer and discovered that it was installing two hardware drivers, including one that has a long history of causing blue screens (fatal crashes) on Windows systems. Apple is also delivering the MobileMe software and a program set to automatically load the MobileMe software when your computer starts up, whether you're using the service or not. That's the service that was a disastrous failure for the first few weeks after it was released a couple of months ago, and is still barely limping along. It's irrelevant to most people.

Apple was roundly criticized a few months ago when it used its "software update" service to distribute its buggy and insecure browser, Safari, without adequately warning people. This time it's taking the approach of not giving any warning at all that this upgrade includes anything other than a facelift for iTunes and Quicktime.

If you use iTunes, you can't really avoid this update - about all you can do is hope for the best. Personally, I'm happy to stick to my longstanding conviction not to install any Apple software on my Windows machines. Apple has proven over and over that they write crappy software for Windows. Ed Bott comments:

"Nice marketing strategy: Tweak Microsoft for an operating system that crashes, then ship code that crashes Windows. Thank goodness I'm not a cynic or I'd think this was a deliberate marketing strategy."

Labels: Apple, audio, computers, mobile, software, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/11/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

Adobe is taking orders for its annual upgrade to Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, the photo and video programs for consumers. Over the years I've found it hard to know what to suggest to people for working with photos. Photoshop Elements 7 might be a perfect fit for you but don't take it casually - if you're not prepared to enter into a significant long-term relationship, then it will go unused.

Photoshop Elements has an organizer for browsing through photos that works fairly naturally. If you are obsessive and tag the photos (assign keywords or categories to each photo - "Mom," "Our house," "vacation," "Obama"), then it's easy to display just the photos that match certain tags. It takes some discipline to get in the habit of tagging photos, so many people use the organizer to do nothing more than look through thumbnails.

When it's time to edit photos or use them in projects, Photoshop Elements is tremendously powerful but frankly, it's almost as unintuitive as its older sibling, the full version of Adobe Photoshop. There are several different ways in the program to begin photo editing that expose or conceal various editing tools - "Quick Fix" and "Guided" in addition to a full-blown set of complex tools, plus different panes to begin different kinds of projects and ways to share photos. I used Photoshop Elements 6 to put together a photo book this summer; the result was glorious but "learning curve" doesn't begin to express how long I spent figuring out dozens of unintuitive quirks of the program.

The new version, Photoshop Elements 7, apparently does not change the interface significantly. Instead it adds an additional layer of complexity built around an upgraded set of online services, Photoshop.com. The new program insistently presents advertising about the service until you pony up fifty bucks for a year's subscription, guaranteeing a flow of income to Acrobat even if you decide not to buy next year's upgrade. There is a free connection to a limited set of online services but you can bet that there will be an unending series of advertisements and popups and blinking headlines about the joy of upgrading to the paid service.

The online service includes online storage for photos, syncing with the collection on your computer, making photos accessible from anywhere, which is nice. Photoshop.com also backs up your photos and gives you many options to share them, including connections to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. It does not reassure me that most of the online features are built around the "albums" that can be created in Photoshop Elements, since I've never used "albums" in the last five years of running the program consistently. Using an online service is similar to installing a new piece of software - it does nothing for you unless you understand it, learn its quirks, and use it regularly. The link to Photoshop.com might become a critical part of your relationship with your photos, but if you're not dedicated and diligent, it will be just one more bit of clutter in your technology landscape. If you're already feeling overloaded by the annoyances of computing in 2008, this won't help.

Photoshop Elements 6 has bugs (I've had to recover the "catalog" - the database that drives the program - from backups on numerous occasions after the program has crashed and the database has been corrupted), and its performance is glacially slow. So I'm disheartened by the online reports from people testing the beta releases of the new programs that performance is slow and the betas are unstable. Maybe they'll get better.

If you're just getting started with photo organizers and editors, install Microsoft's free program Windows Live Photo Gallery. The organizer for thumbnails is quite nice, there are simple tools for cropping and removing red eye and adjusting lighting, and you can easily upload a photo gallery for sharing online.

On the other hand, if you're a veteran or good with technology (i.e., young), Photoshop Elements 7 is still the leader and this is a lot of power for a hundred bucks. Put it to good use!

Labels: file_sharing, photos, software, web_services

posted by bruceb at 9/10/2008 04:19:00 PM | permalink

Windows Home Server deserves more recognition. It had a nasty bug that took too long to cure but that's over now and it's back to being the helpful tool that I described a year ago. It offers safe storage of your files and photos,  easy ways to share your photos and other files, and remote access to your computers from anywhere. The best devices - like the HP MediaSmart EX475 - are attractive and easy to set up.

One of the best tricks for Windows Home Server is the way it backs up computers on your home or small business network. Every night, WHS does a backup of each computer in a technically marvelous way that uses a very small amount of storage space. By default, it keeps 3 months of monthly backups, 3 weeks of weekly and 3 days of daily. That gives you a lot of power to recover a file that is accidentally deleted.

The real magic happens if a hard drive fails on one of the computers backed up by the Windows Home Server. This article explains how a marriage was saved by WHS when the blogger's wife had a laptop failure. Here's what he describes:

• A CD is provided with WHS (or downloaded from Microsoft) that can be used to start the computer after the bad hard drive is replaced with a brand new one.
• The software on the CD starts the networking on the failed computer and locates the Windows Home Server.
• The WHS identifies which computer is connecting (probably by the MAC address) and offers to restore the computer.
• The backup image is able to be copied to the computer very quickly, and the computer is immediately usable when the restore is finished - it is literally identical to its state at the time of the backup.

According to the blogger, his wife's laptop was operational 11 minutes after he gave the command to perform the restore.

That's just cool stuff. Vista Business has a similar process called "Complete PC Backup & Restore" but it can't be automated - almost no one knows it's there. Windows Home Server doesn't ask any questions or require any knowledge - it just does the right thing.

You might want a server for your home. We might talk about it for your small offices. There's some good technology here.

Labels: backup, hardware, Home_Server, remote

posted by bruceb at 9/08/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

I speculated a couple of days ago about a cheap device that might run Google's Chrome Internet browser - and here's the reality, right in front of us. Dell just formally introduced the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a 2.28 pound device with a 1024x600 8.9" screen, running a reduced version of Windows XP.

The Mini is $399. In the next few weeks Dell will make them available in more colors and put out a slightly cheaper variation running Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows.

Here's who will be buying it, from a Dell blog:

"Purpose-built to keep teens, tweens, travelers and 'Tweeters' connected, the Mini is optimized for that '30-minute connection' experience - blogging, surfing, e-mailing, chatting, viewing photos, videos and music - you get the idea."

Yeah, I get the idea - not me, is the idea. I'm old.

Labels: computers, mobile, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/06/2008 12:03:00 AM | permalink

Microsoft's Live Mesh service, now in beta testing, has the most promise of any of the online services. With an easy setup, you can make your files available on multiple computers, you can share files with other people, and you can access your computers remotely, all for free. At the moment it only works on Windows PCs but soon it will be possible to add Windows Mobile devices and Macs.

Let me take you through a simple setup to help you get started.

Your use of the Live Mesh service starts with your Windows Live ID, the free email address and password that Microsoft uses to set you up with its services. Here are the instructions to set up a Windows Live ID. Have your Windows Live ID in mind before you start, and make sure your Live ID account shows "United States," per my instructions.

Now go to the Live Mesh web site, www.mesh.com, and click on Sign In. Provide your Live ID credentials and accept the license agreement on the next screen.

You should be taken directly to the main Mesh screen, shown on the right.

Click on the "Add Device" button. You'll be adding the computer you're sitting at by installing a small piece of software. It will take 3-4 minutes to install the software. (It hasn't frozen. Wait for it.) When it's done, you'll have a distinctive new icon by the clock.

Now click on the "Live Desktop" icon on the main Mesh screen. You'll be looking at your "Live Desktop." It will have icons for files and folders but don't get confused - these folders are online, not on your computer.

Add a folder and give it a recognizable name - "My Synced Files," say. Now close the browser window! You're done with "Live Desktop" for now.

Minimize all your open programs so you can see your computer desktop. Within seconds, a shortcut named "My Synced Files" will appear on your desktop.

When you click on it, you'll be asked where that shortcut should lead. By default, Mesh offers to set up a new empty folder on your desktop with the same name. Take that choice for now. The folder on your desktop will quickly turn to a translucent blue. It's now part of the Mesh system.

It's just a folder. You can put any files you want into it. You can fill it with Word documents and open them and edit them just like any folder. It's just a folder.

But everything in it will be automatically copied to the online folder. Every change will be copied online. If you delete a file from My Synced Files on your desktop, it will be deleted from the online copy automatically. You don't have to do anything, it just happens.

So put some files and folders into "My Synced Files"! Don't go nuts. Put in 50 files, not 5,000. It works with 5,000 but you'll get impatient and think it's broken. Put in some folders full of files.

The reward comes when you sit down at a different computer.

If you have a second computer, go to the Mesh web site on the second computer and log in with the same Windows Live ID, then click "Add Device" to install the software. After it's installed, you should have the same shortcut on your desktop to set up "My Synced Files."

• If that shortcut doesn't show up automatically, then go back to the Mesh web site and click on Live Desktop. When you right-click on "My Synced Files" and click on "Change Sync Settings," you'll be able to change your second computer to sync "When files are added." You'll immediately have the same shortcut on your desktop to click on to establish that you want "My Synced Files" to appear on your second computer desktop. Within minutes, the "My Synced Files" folder on your second computer will be filled with all of the files that are on the first computer.

From now on, when you change a file in that folder on one computer, the changed file will be there on the other computer right away, automatically. The two computers will always be in sync.

Let's reiterate. Once this is set up, you will work with your files on your computer, in the folders on your desktop, just like before. You don't need to "upload" files to Live Desktop - just save them into "My Synced Files." In fact, normally you'll never visit Live Desktop from one of your own computers except to set up a new folder.

Try that to get started! It's only a taste but you'll be past the hard part. Here are just a few things to look into when you've gotten your bearings!

• You can add existing folders on your computer by right-clicking the folder name and clicking on "Add folder to your Live Mesh." I'm syncing my Internet Favorites folder on my desktop and laptop, for example.
• You can share a folder that's been made into a Mesh folder. It's easiest to do that from Live Desktop - open the folder in Live Desktop, then click on the bottom of the right hand column where it says "Members."
• The person you invite will get a nice email invitation. It will lead them through installing the software and giving them shared access to the Mesh folder. Remember, they need to have a Windows Live ID ready, and they need that email invitation to lead them to your folder.
• You can share a Mesh folder; you can't share subfolders inside the Mesh folder.
• You can log into www.mesh.com from another computer and see all the files in Live Desktop. You should be able to download them or open them at that new computer but I've seen some bugs in that process.
• More interesting - you can log into www.mesh.com from any computer, click on one of your computers, and click on "Connect." If the computer is turned on, you'll start a remote desktop session that allows you to control the remote computer as if you're sitting at it. This is very, very cool.

This is a beta service. Test it carefully, with backups of important data, but by all means test it! This is one of those times when you can gain new powers that you do not currently have. Enjoy!

Labels: file_sharing, Internet, Microsoft, remote, Vista, web_services, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/05/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

There are new Internet browsers available in the news - Microsoft made a beta release of Internet Explorer 8 available last week for testing, and Google caused a fuss when it released a beta version of Chrome today, possibly as a hasty response to Microsoft's release.

Google envisions a future where all of our work is done in an Internet browser. You'll work on online files using online applications, powered by rich web-based programming languages. The underlying operating system fades in importance in that world - it might be Windows but it doesn't have to be because it's not doing anything interesting. Imagine this pitch:

Now available at WalMart, the ChromePC 3000, powered by Google! It starts instantly, like any other appliance; it runs your online programs faster than any PC or Mac; it's almost invulnerable to viruses and malware. You can watch movies from Netflix, watch Internet TV, play streaming music, and watch YouTube videos; you can work on your documents stored in Google Docs or Acrobat.com, check your GMail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and you can edit your photos in Picasa or Adobe Photoshop Online. It's yours for $299!

That's pretty tempting! It might not matter that it's manufactured by an unknown Korean company and runs Ubuntu Linux, eh?

Now I just made that up with no regard for reality. But Microsoft is going nuts because it's increasingly easy to imagine some variation on that  - an emerging market that bypasses Windows. There are a lot of people who might be perfectly content to use a simple device that only runs an Internet browser although it's not going to be everyone's world; even if we use more online services and move files online, businesses will still use rich applications installed on Windows for a long time to come.

Google's vision is interesting. At the moment, the reality is something else. Google may have rushed its announcement of Chrome because it was embarrassed that after years of development its "new" features are not special at all - they're very, very similar to the features in Internet Explorer 8. The new features in either one are modest improvements at best - architectural changes to make the browers more crash-resistant, faster Java, better security, and a way to surf online without collecting any history (immediately and obviously dubbed "Porn Mode"). Neato! Not exactly riveting stuff.

Early reports suggest that Chrome is a work in progress, with some bugs, no support for add-ins, and an interface that is so stripped-down that I personally find it a bit odd. IE8 has some nice new ways to customize things and a few things moved around. I'm not sure I have time to test either one.

Let me return to something I said about Firefox when its new version was released. (This is addressed to the business users trying to get work done and the home users who don't want technical glitches. If you're a technically proficient computer user, go about your business with my best wishes.)

All of you have Internet Explorer 7 installed on your Windows computers. It is stable, full-featured, and secure.

Don't install duplicative software unnecessarily! You should not install a new Internet browser because a well-meaning friend tells you that it's cool, or a newspaper article speaks highly of it. You should install software if and only if you can articulate something that the new software will allow you to do that you cannot currently do. And you must be ready to take on the burden of giving the new software the care and attention it will require for security and stability.

Labels: Google, IE, Internet, Microsoft, software

posted by bruceb at 9/03/2008 01:24:00 AM | permalink

I've stopped using Office Live Workspace for now. It's a service with a lot of potential but a few areas that are rough around the edges. Although I encourage you to try OLW and the other new services, my sense is that most people won't be ready to change their traditional methods of saving and working on files until these services are seamless.

Office Live Workplace is Microsoft's free service for storing files online (primarily Office files - Word, Excel, Powerpoint - and Acrobat PDFs). There are two important reasons to use the service - the online files can be opened from any computer anywhere, and they can be shared easily. If you're collaborating on a document, everyone can work on a single copy of the file - no merging changes to files exchanged by email!On your primary computer, you can install a bit of software so the files can be opened directly from a toolbar or menu added to the Office programs. Here's more information about OLW.

I created a folder with fifty frequently-used Word files. When I browse to the folder online, each file can be previewed instantly or opened into Word with a click of a button. It's good stuff! I don't want to sound too discouraging.

But there's an annoyance. The files appear in a random order. It doesn't seem to be the order they were uploaded, or last modified, or anything else I can figure out, it's just a random shuffle. There are column headings for Name / Date modified / Size, so they can be sorted with a single click, but they're back in the same random order the next time I go back to the list.

That's more frustrating if you access the files directly from the Office programs. In Word 2007, a new option appears on the Quick Access menu in the upper left to "Open from Office Live." A flyout menu displays the folders stored online; clicking on a folder name opens a File Open window displaying the individual files. In that window, the files cannot be sorted - they appear in the same random order and the only way to locate one is to scroll down the list. It's just not practical for more than a handful of files.

There's a more significant problem, though. All too often I could not save a document back to OLW after I had edited it. If the Internet connection is broken while a document is open, OLW will throw up an error message about the file being "locked". The file has to be saved with a different name. It happened to me repeatedly, especially if my notebook went to sleep or into hibernation with an open document. I have multiple versions of the same document with slightly different names - exactly what OLW is supposed to avoid for evolving versions of documents. Here's an online forum where people are talking about that problem.

Those problems will likely be fixed. A more subtle problem is that files stored in OLW are not indexed and cannot be searched along with local files. (In fact, I don't see any way to search files in OLW at all.) I depend on Vista's search technology. I can imagine that it will be extended to the online files but I haven't seen any reference to that feature yet.

Live Mesh may absorb OLW, since it directly addresses some of those problems. I'll write some more about Live Mesh soon.

Labels: file_sharing, Microsoft, Office, search, web_services

posted by bruceb at 9/01/2008 12:18:00 PM | permalink