Sierra Kilo

It’s basically just a larger iPod Touch with available 3G cellular data internet.

The Breakdown
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The highs:
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• Larger screen, new UI enhancements
• Runs iPhone apps as well as native apps
• iBooks app that reads Amazon Kindle ebook format (among others)
• VoiceOver screen reader
• Split-screen mail app
• Enhanced calendar app
• Bluetooth for connecting with a wireless keyboard
• Month-to-month 3G cellular data plans (no contracts)

The lows:
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• Month-to-month 3G cellular data plans (no contracts)
• Subsidized price for a cellular contract would have been nice
• Better yet, iPhone tethering would have been even better
• Disappointing mail app
• No word on a unified mail inbox. Have several mail accounts? You’ll need to check each Inbox separately
• No mail rules
• No integration between mail and calendar (e.g. select a date from an email and create a calendar event from it)
• No camera (front-facing or back)
• No multitasking
• No configurable lock screen
• Large bezel on all sides

Summary
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I see this as being a device for people who plop down on the couch, browse the web and check their email. In other words, the $499 model (16GB WiFi only) is perfect for your wife.

The highs are definitely nice and well-suited for a device this size. The UI is familiar to those with an iPhone/iPod Touch and it can run the same applications. You can either keep the app’s original scale or zoom it to fill the screen. While it’s nice to have that app library available, it’s a stopgap until the iPad app library can take off.

The iBooks app and the inclusion of Amazon Kindle books in the iTunes music/video/app/book store basically kills the need for a stand-alone ebook reader device. Unless, that is, you do a ton of reading and prefer the passive e-paper display to reduce eye strain. Having VoiceOver read the book to you is also a great addition (if it is allowed).

Split-screen Mail is nice when reading through several items. The new Calendar looks great for organization-centered people. Unfortunately, they aren’t integrated like their sibling applications on the Mac are.

Connecting a wireless keyboard to the iPad over Bluetooth is PARAMOUNT to the device! That feature solves some of the input problems inherent in touch-screen devices. It also opens the way to having cases with built-in keyboards (like the HTC Advantage). I’d like to see wired keyboards, too, that connect to the dock port so that I don’t have to monitor battery life on a second item. Also, would it be too much to ask to put mouse support in there, too (wireless and wired)?

The month-to-month 3G cellular data plan is a double-edged sword. This form factor does well with an always-on internet connection. The problems are that it eats battery life, and it’s still tied to AT&T. Apple is still under a 3-year contract with AT&T to provide exclusive rights to iPhone sales. Once that is up this summer, I’d be willing to bet that there will be a new iPhone version that supports any carrier. When that happens, the iPad will probably come in Verizon flavor, too. That aside, a 3G subscription would help drive the initial prices of the device down. $829 for the high-end model could go for $499 with a 2-year data plan.

Even better than built-in 3G would be iPhone tethering. AT&T promised this, but STILL hasn’t delivered it. Tethering an iPad and an iPhone would propel sales of the WiFi-only iPad.

No camera? The iPod Nano has a VIDEO camera, yet the iPod Touch and the iPad don’t? Having a rear-facing camera for taking photos on such a large device is forgivable, but having a front-facing camera for video chats and photobooth trickery would be nice.

No multitasking is really disappointing. It’s understandable given the new Apple-built processor, but it keeps the device in the “bigger iPhone” category. They might as well call it the iPod Touch DX. If it had multitasking, it would nearly be a laptop replacement.

Having 9.7 inches of screen that displays nothing but a background image when the device is locked is ridiculous. Show me mail preview, upcoming calendar events, etc. And bring that to the iPhone, too.

There is also an inch-wide bezel around the screen. While I understand the design of that (for gripping the device without touching the screen), it makes it look like an LCD picture frame.

Me? I’ll wait to see how the second version works, just like I did with the iPhone. Of course, I haven’t played with the device, but first impressions are key with gadgets. I usually give a device three tries before actually taking the plunge.

Back in the days when Twitter and Facebook were fledgling social networking sites (2006-ish), I posted on my weblog more often. Like the way my brain sometimes works, it’s a mish-mash of all kinds of thoughts and ideas. Mostly games, gadgets, and other random thoughts. Well, recently I’ve been wanting more than 140 characters to express my thoughts, so I thought I’d throw a few of these thoughts back on here. This will probably be boring for most of you, but if you’re interested, sit back and enjoy the read.

First up is a thought spurred on from a friend’s Twitter post. He mentioned wanting a “cyborg communications tooth”. I think that is totally feasible with today’s technology and can’t understand why someone hasn’t done that yet. My daughter wears cochlear implants, so I’ve seen a few different hearing solutions. Bone Conduction is used in several applications such as SCUBA diving, construction, aviation, military, hearing aids, and even bluetooth hands-free devices. It basically converts sound into mechanical vibrations and sends them to your inner ear by conducting the sound over solid bone. It can also do vice-versa and send your speech to a microphone the same way. Ever notice how your own voice sounds different when you listen to a recording of yourself than it does in your head? Well, why can’t an implanted tooth do the same thing? Power requirements (batteries, charging, etc.) aside, the device components could surely fit into the form factor of a molar or two. Were it not for the batteries, Eleanor’s implant processors could fit on a disc the size of a stack of 3-4 quarters. I’d gladly trade a crown for a bluetooth.

Buy stock now. Apple sent out press invitations to an event on January 27th. The rumor is that they’re announcing a new device. Speculations are that it’ll be a tablet form-factor with a 10″ touch-screen, like a large iPhone (whose screen is 3.5″). The majority of the rumors are saying that it’ll fit in the market between a netbook and a smart phone. They’re saying the OS will be a scaled-up version of iPhone OSX, but not a full-blown version of Mac OSX. That’s very disappointing to me, if true. I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone: full-feature and some-feature. I can’t see having a mid-feature device that fits a niche in my computing needs desires. If, however, it was a full-featured OSX device, I would probably carry it around like a purse man-bag organizer! Here are my biggest problems with the idea, though: Typing full emails, weblog posts, or documents on my iPhone is like shaving with tweezers. Your goal is to spell a word, maybe write a sentence, but not a full paragraph. Touch-screen smart phones have catapulted the success of the microblog (Twitter/Facebook) due to that fact. I can type fast on a keyboard, enough to write this post (complete with HTML tags). I wouldn’t attempt to do this on my iPhone. If an Apple tablet makes writing something like this easy, then it’ll do well. Another rumor is that it will have Ink-based input. Mac OSX has had Ink-based input available for a while. If that’s built-in, it could go a long way toward easy input. I’ve always wanted an Apple Newton MessagePad (nearly bought one in High School with my meager funds), so a true tablet with a stylus piques my interest.

On the gaming front, I’ve been playing a ton of Modern Warfare 2 on XBox. It’s a mind-numbing, frustration release, much like those squeeze dolls where the eyes pop out. It has a fun leveling mechanic and different challenges for when simply eliminating other players gets boring. My favorite is the “Cruelty” challenge, where you have to kill a player, pick up his weapon, then kill him again with it. It sounds easy, but most of the other players are significantly better than me, so it’s pretty difficult. Plus, you can’t just track down individual players very easy, so finding them the second time is difficult. The challenge mechanic is one that I seem to enjoy in several games, including those on iPhone. I’ve recently looked into the OpenFeint framework for iPhone games. It’s supposed to be like XBox Live for the iPhone with friends, chat, and challenges. Sounds like very fun stuff. The problem with the iPhone platform is that it’s not very good at heavy processing, so things seem a bit slow at times.

4/5 Stars.

As a full-on action movie where you drink your Icee, eat your popcorn, watch stuff blow up, and have fun, it totally works. The writing is surprisingly good (although not very deep), and the acting is surprisingly better than expected. Good special effects, too.

As a G.I. Joe movie, it’s a bit disappointing. With the Star Trek movie, they had a good excuse for changing up the story. It’s easy to accept when you’re talking about time travel. With G.I. Joe, you have years of comics, cartoons, and toys that have laid down a story. Unfortunately, Hasbro chose to gear the movie more toward a new generation of sales instead of staying near the existing continuity.

The breakdown:
Pros:
- Breaker chewing gum = The best callback to existing continuity, especially for an owner of issues 1-91 of the Marvel comics (thank you, Larry Hama). Breaker was the closest to an existing character
- Scarlett was very well cast and written
- Snake Eyes kicked ass
- Storm Shadow was well cast

Cons:
- Scarlett was way too attracted to Ripcord and not enough to Snake Eyes
- Snake Eyes’ costume was a ridiculous mold
- The Arashakage backstory between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow was rewritten for no reason, yet left slightly vague should they revisit it in a sequel. Zartan really killed the Hard Master, not Storm Shadow.
- Duke was a Sergeant, not a Captain (NCOs, generally, have a better rapport with enlisted men, which is why Duke is a good leader)
- G.I.Joe and MARS/Cobra were way too well-funded
- Ripcord should have been Stalker, but it would have left Duke as a loner. In that case, it would have made more sense to replace Duke with Falcon, but he came much later in the story, not at the “Rise of Cobra”. I’d much rather have seen him as Short-Fuze, Zap, Grunt, or Clutch.

So, yeah, I’m a G.I. Joe nerd and most of my complaints come from ditching the historical continuity. It was still a good movie, and I’ll probably buy it. If there is a sequel, I hope they do a little patchwork to incorporate more of Larry Hama’s characters (Stalker, Clutch) and the old cartoon (Shipwreck, Gung Ho).

• merging code into the mainline. fixing mergeinfo issues. the kolaches at the corner store are tempting me. no @pepsi #throwback #
• working literally 6 projects concurrently right now. some are interconnected, others are in a holding pattern. 5 of them are high priority. #
• @alexalbrecht nice site. like how tweets and posts have almost equal billing in reply to alexalbrecht #
• Watching @alexalbrecht and @kevinrose @diggnation on 50in mac mini plex for quick lunch checking on dogs http://twitpic.com/6jnyq #
• Han Solo, P.I. is AWESOME! http://bit.ly/jDdAB #
• got Live’s Live album for upcoming coding frenzy at work…will add it to the other live stuff that keeps me in the zone #
• catching up on @diggnation, DLing podcasts, ripping a dvd for my Plex library. really need to get my harmony set up better #

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As you can see, the amount of new content on the site has been sparse. I’ve found that Twitter is my content publisher of choice lately. I don’t have as much time lately to put a thoughtful, well-written article together, but I can certainly find time to squeeze a nugget of information here and there into 140 characters. I thought about letting Twitter Tools post a daily digest of my tweets, but if you follow me here, it’s just as easy to follow my Twitter or FriendFeed (which aggregates all of my content into one site). That’s not to say I’m dropping the site, just letting you know where you can find more up-to-date information from me.

That said, here’s what I’ve been up to:

- Got a Mac Mini for the living room, hooked it up to the 50″ DLP, got a motion-activated webcam to tinker with, running Boxee and Plex (I’m favoring Plex more and more). Still haven’t set up Indigo or bought any Insteon devices yet…waiting to win the lottery…sheesh!

- Been playing a little Fallout 3 here and there, some Strategery, KDice, Galcon, and Pocket Tanks on the iPhone. Still searching for the ultimate RPG that can be played in small chunks of time.

- Read a few things about Mortal Online and love what I hear so far. The walled garden of WoW needs an open sandbox as a counterpart. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to play much past a Beta since I won’t have the time to invest. If it were available for XBox 360 or the Mac, though, I could probably find more time. PC games require me to be chained to my desk in the office.

- I planted a few things in my container garden, but nothing noteworthy yet. A rogue tree (a willow, I think) sprouted in one container, so I transplanted it to the yard and stuck some landscaping around it. It looks nice.

- Switched our version control system at work from Visual SourceSafe to Subversion and set up FinalBuilder to begin automating the build. I’m loving that so far, but it’s been consuming most of my time. It’s one of those investment things where you put a lot in it up front and get a huge return later.

- The kiddo has been consuming the majority of the free time that I have. She’s doing exceptionally well with her Cochlear Implants, hearing, understanding, and speaking. That’s another one of those investments that will have huge returns later.

- I’m trying to learn iPhone development whenever I can stand to dig into XCode. Visual Studio is just so easy for me to throw an application together. I just need to broaden my development base a little. I’ve got a couple of very cool apps in mind. If I can sell one for $.99 to 10,000 people, that’s nearly $7,000 in my pocket! Really want to get into that niche.

With Apple’s recent Mac Mini update, I was finally able to start my new media center setup. With 4GB RAM and a 320GB HDD, it has been able to handle whatever meager tasks I have given it. I set up the web server (Apache with PHP5) with a small web application I’ve been working on. Currently, I can interact with my Transmission BitTorrent client, alter my network settings, and view a live webcam stream (via EvoCam).

I set up a sensor in EvoCam to detect motion in one section that acts like an additional security system. If a “Motion-On” file exists in my Dropbox folder, it captures a snapshot. If a “Twitter-On” file exists, it sends a tweet to my home’s Twitter account with a link to the image. If a “Voice-On” file exists, it says “Motion Detected! The owner has been notified. If you are an unauthorized visitor, please leave immediately.” I need to tweak that script a little so that I can turn the options on/off via the web interface (maybe have the AppleScript read settings from a file updated through PHP?). I’d like to find some software to split my webcam video so that I can use the feed with multiple applications. Anybody know a good one?

I’ve been running the latest Boxee alpha version. I’m very disappointed with how Hulu has been trying to block Boxee users. I love the Hulu service and I am more than willing to sit through the same 15-30-second commercial breaks, but I want to do it through a full-screen 10-ft interface that doesn’t require a mouse for interaction. As far as Boxee goes, I’m not all that impressed. It’s a great way to view web video content, but its main focus is still on home media. It takes several steps to navigate to web video and the “home” screen is near-useless displaying recently-viewed videos, recently-added media, friend recommendations, and friend activity. The social aspect of Boxee is nice, but I usually watch videos so that I can turn my brain off and unless there was some kind of instant-messenger built-in that allowed me to chat while I was watching videos, I really don’t care what everybody else is watching. The iTunes integration works fine for music, but isn’t great for videos. Plus, since I have iTunes on my laptop set to sync my iPod and iPhone and you can’t share an iTunes library on multiple machines, it doesn’t make sense to keep videos in two places. If I could sync music from my laptop and videos from the Mac Mini onto the same device, I would do that. The latest alpha has been crashing Finder, which is very annoying, too.

I haven’t plunged into the home automation project yet. Indigo and an Insteon starter kit is like $400. While that would be very cool in the future, it’s unnecessary right now. I’d really like to set the outside lights on a schedule and hook up the webcam motion sensor to a light. Plus, I’d like to integrate it all with my web interface. Maybe someday.

I’ve found I could really use are a web browser with a 10-ft mouse-less interface. I use Firefox now and sync bookmarks, passwords, etc. with 5 computers using the XMarks extension. The problem with using it on my 50-inch DLP at 720p resolution is that the pages are not easily readable from 10-12 feet. I have to zoom the page, which can make them unreadable sometimes. I’m not sure about a good way to browse using a remote without moving from link to link. I think this might be my next research project. Surely there is some extension, userscript, or wrapper for Firefox to make it easier to use with a remote. Anybody know of something?

Ryan Dewberry, the developer of KDice, a multiplayer version of DiceWars, emailed me to announce that he ported a single-player version of KDice to the iPhone and will be submitting it to the App Store soon. I had previously expressed my interest for just this and it looks like Ryan will deliver! Here’s a screenshot of the game:

Courtland commented on that same post about a gamed called Strategery. I’ve been playing the free version for a little while now and it’s not bad. The mechanics (dice rolls) are visible to the player, but not visible enough and seem to disappear very quickly. Games like this are good for quick, dumbed-down strategy.

Now, who’s going to port XCom? What about Fallout?

UPDATE (04/15/2009): The KDice Trainer is now available for iPhone in the iTunes App Store.

I was playing Fallout 3 last night and realized that it kind of feels like a chore. I love the RPG mechanics and combat (especially the aimed shot feature), but the UI is horrible and the vistas are just so bleak! Oblivion was gorgeous. I would run around the landscape enjoying the virtual nature that surrounded me. I realize that Fallout is set in a post-apocalyptic future, but does everything have to be half-destroyed? The first half of “I Am Legend” shows New York becoming reclaimed by nature. In Fallout, I haven’t seen a plant YET! If you blame a nuclear explosion, there would be less buildings, more rubble. If you blame disuse, there would be less rubble, more buildings. The balance is just off. Everything is too dark and gray to be believable.

I also played Gears of War 2 a few days ago. This game suffers from the same bleakness. In this case, however, it’s a little more believable since an alien race destroyed everything. Surprisingly, though, there is more vegetation. I found myself actually hoping to see a battle taking place in the landscape, among the trees. That would feel so out-of-place in a Gears game, but could be very fun.

I think I totally called this. Maybe I was just way ahead of my time. I never got my setup working completely, though. It was all good in theory, but required too many pieces.

The remote is very cool. Hopefully Logitech will release a Harmony with a slide-out keyboard (and a mouse – think Gyration or Wiimote) one of these days.

So here are a few Macworld Apple rumors and what they mean to me:

• Mac Mini Update – Based on the scuttlebutt, there’s a very good chance that the Mac Mini line will be getting updated. Supposedly, it’ll match the aluminum lineup, possibly with some black plastic accents, and might look a little like the Time Capsule. This means a new purchase for me. With several projects lined up for this device, I’m really looking forward to this.
• MacBook Pro 17″ Update – With the recent “brick” updates to the MacBook and MBP 15″, updating the 17″ model was bound to happen sooner or later. This doesn’t mean much of anything to me since I just got more RAM, a new HDD, and updated to Leopard on my current MBP 17″. If the rumors are true about the non-removable battery, though, that could spell problems for future purchases. While I don’t have extra batteries, it’s nice to know that the system is somewhat modular in case something needs to be swapped easily.
• iLife/iWork 2009 Updates – Another version update for iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iEtc. After upgrading the HDD and OS, I reinstalled iLife 2007 from my original install disc. I’m pretty content with it and the 2008 update didn’t offer much for me. I’ll definitely look into upgrading iLife if it offers some good iPhoto features (like built-in Flickr uploading).
• iPhone Nano, iPhone OS Update – There was talk of a smaller 2G-only iPhone. It doesn’t matter to me since I already have a 3G, but if it’s offered as part of a pay-as-you-go plan or as an unlocked GSM/EDGE phone, Apple could do well. An iPhone OS update, however, would be nice. I’d love to have copy-and-paste, but most of all, I’d really like the unlock screen to show me more information. Namely, unread email counts for each account, upcoming appointments, tasks, missed calls, voicemails, text messages, and other app notifications (IMs, Tweets, etc). Seeing the time is great, but as a “smart” device, it requires too much user interaction to get to the meat! The Mac OS status bar is nice and succinct…why can’t the iPhone have something like that? Plug-in apps for the unlock screen would be great (looking at you, FuzzyClock and MagiCal).
• iMac Update, Cinema Display Update – Apple typically updates their lineup fairly regularly. Look for LED backlighting, etc. This doesn’t mean much to me, either. Don’t want an iMac and the Cinema Displays are too pricey. Plus, my Mac Mini will get an existing 50″ DLP hookup in the living room