Help Me Choose an iPhone Case/Protector

I just got my first iPhone. Yes, I know I’m late to the party, but I didn’t need one, and it was too expensive. I was living in a village in the mountains, and as I work at home, I rarely had use for a cell phone. But I’ve moved to a larger town, and changed my personal situation, as it were, and it would be practical for me to have a good phone. Also, since the French ISP Free introduced an unlimited iPhone plan for €20 (only €16 for Internet customers, which I am), I decided to go for it.

While I’m not worried about scratching the screen, I am worried about dropping the phone, and I think I need either a simple case or silicon protector. I’ll be checking some local stores to see what they have, but in the meantime, I’d welcome any recommendations. Given where I live – a smallish city in the French Alps – there aren’t a lot of options. There are phone stores that have some cases, but the selection is very limited.

And, if you’re a vendor who makes iPhone cases, feel free to contact me (there’s an e-mail link in the sidebar to the right). I’d be happy to mention any cases I receive that I like.

Follow-up: So I ended up getting a Speck Candyshell, which I got cheap on Amazon.fr (€8). It is exactly what I wanted. It fits well, isn’t bulky, and looks like it offers excellent protection. I would have bought the Otterbox Commuter, but it is quite expensive here in France, and the company’s shipping prices from the US are outrageous.

SafariDAVClient Sucks Up RAM and Does Nothing Useful

It’s enough that Safari itself sometimes uses a huge amount of RAM, along with the WebProcess process, but another Safari-related process, SafariDAVClient is an even bigger memory hog. Currently, on my Mac mini which has 8 GB RAM, it is using 1.36 GB real memory. (Screenshot taken from a display provided by iStat Menus.) I have seen this process go well over 2 GB, yet it does nothing useful.

It is supposed to be used to sync bookmarks via iCloud, but in my case, the syncing doesn’t occur. I’ve tried turning off and on bookmark syncing to no avail, and have gotten to the point where I transfer my Safari bookmarks file from my Mac mini to my MacBook Air from time to time. It’s even worse with my iOS devices, as bookmarks simply won’t sync to them at all.

I guess I should simply turn off bookmark syncing, as it seems to be a total failure. Unless any of my readers have a trick to get it to work…

Update: Bad Tracks from iTunes Match: Who Do You Complain To?

A number of people have found that iTunes Match sometimes matches incorrect tracks; not that the songs are wrong, but that the versions might be wrong. This seems to happen especially with music that has been remastered. iTunes may match either an original or remastered track, and the user who matched the track may have tho one that iTunes doesn’t have. This can be a problem, if, say, you prefer an original album over a remastered version, or vice versa.

But I today I found, for the first time, a bad track coming from iTunes Match, one with an audible problem. It’s one of an excellent set of Bill Evans recordings, The Last Waltz, from the summer of 1980, just before his death, made at the Keystone Korner; the song is Your Story, While iTunes matched these tracks, I was listening to some of this music today, and found a bad track. There’s a gap of about a half-second at one point in the track. Looking at it with Rogue Amoeba’s Fission, you can clearly see the missing chunk of music:

If this happens, you’re basically screwed. Who can you complain to? Contact the iTunes Store? I doubt anything will happen. The only way to have a good copy of the track is to take your original and make sure it stays in your library; if you ever have to download it again, you’ll get the track with the gap. It’s worth noting that this track is not available on the iTunes Store. This makes me wonder exactly how they match such tracks; do they match them to tracks that other people have uploaded?

I don’t expect this will happen a lot, but the fact that it happens at all shows the weakness of this system. iTunes Match clearly needs an option for tracks that you don’t want matched, ones that you want uploaded, because the matched version may not be the same as yours.

Has anyone else found matched tracks that have similar problems?

(As an aside: if you like Bill Evans, there are two box sets of this run at the Keystone Korner, in San Francisco, between August 31 and September 8, 1980. The Last Waltz is music from the first sets, and Consecration has tracks from the second sets. Just a week before his death, Evans was playing some of his finest performances. These two box sets, together with Turn Out the Stars, recorded at the Village Vanguard in June, 1980, comprise 22 discs of astounding piano music.)

Update: my son came across a bad track today. It’s a match of Philip Glass’s Witchita Vortex Sutra, from the Minimal Piano Collection box set. There are clicks throughout the track, with one big dropout at 4:25:

Can Apple Make iBooks Match for Books?

TechCrunch is reporting that an upcoming Apple event, to be held in January, will focus on ebooks, and the company’s iBooks app. My first thought is that there’s not much they can do with iBooks to warrant a media event, with a presentation and announcement, but then I thought a bit more. What if Apple were going to unveil iBooks Match?

You’re probably familiar with iTunes Match. For $25, you can have iTunes match your music library, making your music available in the “cloud,” either matching tracks with music from the iTunes Store, or uploading those tracks that are not available in the latter. Why not do something similar with iBooks? I have literally thousands of dead-tree books, and some of them are big and unwieldy, and I would love to be able to read them on my iPad, rather than on paper. (In fact, I’ve been wanting to read Shelby Foote’s Civil War Trilogy for some time, but the books are humongous.)

iBooks Match could work like this. Using the camera built in to all recent and current Macs – or even iOS devices – the iBooks program either grabs a picture of the cover, or scans the bar code (the latter would be much easier, and this technology exists already, in the Delicious Library catalog software). It then searches the iTunes Store’s books section to find matches, and, if any are found, adds them to your library.

Of course, this is certainly unlikely, as book publishers are even more reticent to offer any such type of service than the record labels were to offer iTunes Match (though they did accept Apple’s offer, which I find surprising). But allowing users to transfer their print libraries to digital would be a big leap forward for ebooks in general, as most serious readers would have, instead of a handful of ebooks, hundreds of them, if not more.

The second possibility I see is a sort of paid lending library system. Personally, as agreeable as I find reading on my iPad, I don’t buy many ebooks, because the price, when compared to print books, is either very close, or more expensive. And this for books that I’ll read once, and never be able to do anything with (sell used, loan or give away). A paid lending library that gives you access to a certain number of books per month, for example, would solve this problem, and since you don’t actually “own” ebooks, wouldn’t change much for users. It would also guarantee a bigger revenue stream for publishers. (Amazon has free ebook loans for members of Amazon Prime, which offers free shipping, streaming videos, and a loan of one book per month. So why can’t Apple do better?)

No matter what, I find it interesting that ebooks are important enough to warrant an Apple event. Of course, this could also be a way of presenting a new iPad 3 with a retina display. While reading on the current iPad is acceptable, a retina display would make it much more comfortable.

Make Your Own Personal Dropbox With iCloud

iCloud has some interesting features, notably its ability to sync data and files across devices, be they Macs or iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod touches). However, I find Dropbox to be very practical for syncing files that I want to access on multiple Macs. I store a number of files that I need to access in a Dropbox folder, so I can have them, when I need them, on both my desktop Mac and laptop.

I came across a tip on the Mac.AppStorm website today, which explains a very simple way to create a personal drop box using iCloud. While Dropbox is free for 2 GB of storage, you get 5 GB with iCloud. Dropbox has many advantages, notably its integration with many iOS programs – as well as other platforms – but if you need more than 2 GB of storage, you have to pay $10 a month or more.

The secret to leveraging iCloud for this purpose is a “hidden” folder that stores your iCloud data, and that can, in essence, be used as a receptacle for files you want to share. This folder is found at ~/Library/Mobile Documents; for those unfamiliar with that type of path, in the Finder, hold down the Option key, click on the Go menu, and choose Library. (You won’t see the Library folder listed there if you don’t hold down the Option key.) Then go to the Mobile Documents folder in the Library folder.

If you have two Macs, you can see how this works immediately. Create a new folder inside this Mobile Documents folder, or copy a file to it. Check the same location on your other Mac, and, as long as you have network access, and the file’s not too big, you should see it there in a few seconds. It also seems to sync more quickly than Dropbox; perhaps the iCloud process polls for new files more frequently. (In the screenshot below, I created a folder called “iCloud;” the other folders are used by different applications that store data on iCloud.)

Since this folder contains other folders for applications you use that sync data using iCloud, it can be a bit messy. So create a new folder, call it something like My Dropbox, or My Shared Folder, or even just iCloud, to remind you were files are. Then, make an alias of that folder; press Command-L, or hold down the Shift and Option keys and drag it to a new location. You might want to put it on your Desktop, or in your Documents folder. Put it somewhere easy to access. Instead of creating an alias, you might want to simply put it in your Finder sidebar; press Command-T to do this.

You can now use this folder to store and sync files from one Mac to another. Basic iCloud accounts come with 5 GB of free storage, so if you just need to sync a few files, you won’t hit the limit easily. (Though this may depend on what kinds of files other applications sync to iCloud; this 5 GB also includes space used by your iCloud e-mail account; and if you back up iOS devices to iCloud, these backups use space as well.) If you’re a MobileMe member, Apple has given you an extra 20 GB through June 30, 2012, so you currently have 25 GB. If you like this idea, and need more storage, you can buy an additional 20 GB for $40 a year.

It’s worth noting that one problem with Dropbox is that, if you have folders shared by others in your Dropbox folder, they count against your quota. (I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case a while ago, but I’m currently sharing a couple of large folders with clients, and these are using up most of my 2 GB.) So using this iCloud folder can give you more space, if your running out of room in your Dropbox folder, and don’t want to pay more.

This trick works well for files you only need to sync between your own Macs. Unlike Dropbox, there is no web access to files, no way to share subfolders with others, and no Public folder, where you can give a friend a link to download a file that you’ve stored in your Dropbox folder. But it’s a good way to keep some basic files up to date on multiple Macs. (If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you can get a free account with 2 GB of storage.)

Note: A Macworld colleague pointed out that Apple says that using this folder in the manner described above may lead to data loss. I’d be careful, then, in putting your only copies of files there, unless you have a backup. I haven’t seen any issues with it, but I’ll follow it over time and see if anything unexpected occurs.

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A Harsh Attack on Steve Jobs, By Way of a Review (Not Mine) of His Biography

It is not often my wont to criticize what other journalists and bloggers write, but I came across a review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on the elitist New York Review of Books web site (the same one which, a couple of weeks ago, a conspiracy-theory fueled article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair). I’ve subscribed to the NYRB off and on over the years, but the type of attack articles they’ve taken to publishing pretty much ensures that I won’t do so again.

I read the Steve Jobs biography, which is certainly no surprise, since I write about Apple products. (If you haven’t read it yet, it’s about half-price on Amazon.com.) Fittingly, I read it on my iPad. I have to admit that I found it painful to read. I had long heard stories about Jobs’ mercurial personality, but reading it in such harsh detail was brutal and shocking. I think it’s fair to write about the biography, and about Jobs, and point out strengths and weaknesses in books, but the NRYB’s approach is to tell the entire story of a book in a “review,” which is especially problematic for a novel. Do you really want to know most of what happens in a novel before you read it? Over the years, I managed to avoid such reviews, unless I had already read the novels in question.

In this “review,” then, the author, Sue Halpern, tells the story of Steve Jobs. She is harshly critical of Jobs, and of Apple in general. Of Jobs himself, she says:

Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read.

I have to agree with part of the above. While I wouldn’t use some of the adjectives that Halpern uses, I did find the book painful to read, and ended up skipping over parts of it.

But where Ms. Halpern goes wrong is in blaming Apple for the woes of the world:

The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Ms. Halpern seems to think that Apple is, if not the only manufacturer of computers and cellphones, most likely the largest and most responsible for their impact. In fact, Apple’s market share for computers is in the single digits, and while iPhones sell well, Apple’s market share is slipping in that sector. (Apple actually only sells fewer than 5% of all cellphones in the world.)

It’s convenient to attack Apple as a poster child for the computer industry, as was common with Microsoft a decade ago. But it’s not hard to look up statistics to back up the claim quoted above, which is the final paragraph of Ms. Halpern’s review. I’ll accept her judgement of the book, but her knowledge of the computer and cellphone industry is seriously lacking. The New York Review of Books could use some fact-checkers to avoid such a blatant personally-motivated attack.

Apple Now Provides Incremental iTunes Updates via Software Update

There was an update to iTunes available for me this morning: iTunes 10.5.2. And while downloading the update, I noticed something for the first time: it was in incremental update. Instead of being the 100 MB or so download as it has been in the past – the size of a full program download from Apple’s iTunes web page – it was merely 16.6 MB.

I’m pretty sure this is new, at least for an iTunes update. Has anyone noticed this happening in the past for other updates?

Thoughts on Using Speech Recognition Software On a Mac

Way back in the late 1990s, I remember first trying speech recognition software. The first program I used was ViaVoice, by IBM. If my memory is correct, this was the first Mac program that allowed you to speak in phrases and sentences, as opposed to dictating each word one at a time. I used this software with Mac OS 9, probably on an LC 475, and the results were terrible. Given the speed of a computer like that, and the quality of speech recognition algorithms at the time, this was not surprising. While I did own a PC, which I needed for some of the work I did, I didn’t bother to buy Windows speech recognition software, the most popular of which at the time was called Dragon Dictate.

At that time, and in the following years, I did a lot of dictation. Working mostly as a freelance translator, I would dictate into a handheld dictaphone, and my wife would type and correct my translations at the same time. I would have loved to have been able to dictate directly into my Mac back then.

Over the years, I kept following the various speech recognition solutions offered for Mac. In the past few years, I have reviewed several of these programs for Macworld: my latest review of Dragon Dictate for Mac was in November of this year; my review of Dragon express, a “light” version of Dragon Dictate, appeared online today. And I recently wrote an overview of the different types of microphones available for speech recognition software.

I type relatively quickly, and using speech recognition software doesn’t so much save me time as make me more relaxed. As I write this article, I’m leaning back in my chair, my hands comfortably crossed on my stomach, and I’m dictating into a SpeechWare TableMike. This is a desktop microphone with an extendable boom which is, for me, the most comfortable microphone that I’ve used for speech recognition. First of all, I don’t need to wear anything on my head, and I don’t need any wires to connect me to my computer. The microphone sits on my desktop, I tilt the boom down in the direction of my mouth, and I can comfortably dictate with the microphone more than a foot away from me. This means I can easily choose to dictate anything at any time, without worrying about connecting a mic, positioning it correctly, or, if it’s wireless, turning it on and worrying about its battery.

Speech recognition software is not perfect. You will not get 100% recognition; there will be some mistakes, but the more you use this software the more it learns from the way you talk and the way you correct recognition errors. While speech recognition software isn’t for everyone—I wouldn’t want to talk all day, as it can be tiring—I find it very practical to be able to dictate some of the articles I write instead of typing. Unfortunately, speech recognition software is somewhat expensive (though the new Dragon Express, available from the Mac App Store, is only $50), and, while you can get good results with an average microphone, the best results require an investment. But if you write a lot, and you’d like to be more comfortable when you work, or if, simply, you don’t type very quickly, it’s worth looking into this software. Dragon Dictate for Mac is an excellent program that has made a lot of progress in the past couple of years, and one that can make a difference in the way you work.

Update: this is purely a coincidence, but it turns out that Nuance is running a 50% off sale on their products, including Dragon Dictate. I saw this about 12 hours after posting this article. Go to this web page to take advantage of the discount through December 11.