I had it all planned out. I was going to give you a thousand word piece on the history of canned pie filling, from its invention by DuPont during the Great War to the special fillings of peace exchanged this year aboard the International Space Station.
Two problems. The first is that Wikipedia doesn't have an article on canned pie filling for me to crib from. Look for yourself. The closest I got was this. Words fail me.
The second problem is that I had pies of my own to make.
I didn't stand in line to buy the original iPhone. I waited until there was a decent software unlock before I bought one. In the six years since, I think I have used my phone as a timer more frequently than I have used it as a phone. I love it. For all its foibles, Siri just sweetened the deal. The summer of iOS 6 was the summer of my content as Siri timed all my barbequeues. I hoped iOS 7 would erase my top problem with iOS.
I had my iPhone on me when my daughter was born. I pressed a few buttons from the delivery room and I set up a three-way cellular call for the first time in my life. It was easy. Both sets of new grandparents would hear the news at the same time. The marvel of that call, however great, was overshadowed by the joy of parenthood. I haven't set up a three-way call since.
As we fast forward from the original iPhone -- before iOS even had a name -- to the majesty of today's LTE enabled fingerprint reading speech recognizing 64 bit iPhone 5s, one feature key to me got left on pause. the iPhone has one timer.
i'm using a Cook's Illustrated apple pie recipie this year. This one features apples in a pile more prominent than the one in Christopher Kimball's throat. The recipie is great but it features a series of time line gymnatics that only a Time Lord could love. Step four -- fool around with apples then preheat oven to 425. Step five -- spend an hour rolling, chilling, and filling crusts. I don't know how long it takes to preheat an oven with contributions from viewers like you, but my ordinary GE oven gets the job done in a few minutes.
I somehow wound up trying to time three things at once. A chill step on my phone, a second chill step on the timer built into the oven, and a third thing I thought I would do on my phone. "Siri, set another timer for thirty minutes." "your timer is already running. Would you like to change it?" "Siri, do you mean to tell me that you can understand my voice but you can't keep track of two times?" "I'm sorry. I can't answer that."
I understand that free meals at work is the default mode for many folks in the Bay Area. Most of the rest of us use fire in our houses to cook food. More people cook food in a day than use Facebook. I use my phone in the kitchen constantly to check recipie details or to time steps. With Siri, I can do much of it without grabbing my phone and then re-washing my hands. it's awesome.
Apple, could you please do for multiple timers what you did for multi-way calls? Thanks.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
board
I wrote last month about an Arduino program for emulating a BMW CD changer. That program has been working well for me but the actual Arduino connection has been a mess. I kept a loose Arduino rattling around in my trunk with little jumper wires connecting it to the IBUS and audio connectors in the trunk.
I found Fritzing while searching for a better answer. Fritzing is a combination tool and service. As a software tool, Fritzing is to Eagle what the Arduino IDE is to Emacs. As a service bureau, Fritzing is to PCBexpress what iPhoto is to Kinkos. I mean these as kind comparisons for all involved. I actually like Arduino, Emacs, PCBexpress, iPhoto, and now Fritzing.
Fritzing is a graphical tool for building circuits with a handy button that sends the entire assembly back to Fritzing HQ for manufacture. The key Fritzing hook is that it has three views of the circuit you build. The novel view is a breadboard view. You can wire up a device on a virtual breadboard that corresponds, perhaps, to an actual breadboard sitting in front of you. That view can switch to a traditional schematic view and a PCB layout view. I used it in exactly this way to copy my simple IBUS adapter from breadboard and Arduino into the breadboard view and then into a board designed to be an Arduino shield. The entire exercise took minutes, in part because Fritzing has a reasonable set of default libraries built to suit a modern maker.
I submitted my order on October 31. Fritzing told me the batch would run on November 5 and that the board would ship on November 11. It actually shipped on the 13th and it arrived by post yesterday. The cost for one copy of the board and shipping was 33.10 Euro.
I populated the board this morning and put it back in the car. It works fine. The board is mostly headers and has only two components -- a pull-up resistor and a BSS138 MOSFET. The rest is pins for the Arduino, the car data and audio connectors, stereo jack, and aux power for a bluetooth A2DP dongle.
I scavenged the MOSFET and the resistor from the Sparkfun bi-directional level shifter board I had been using. This is an expensive way to buy transistors, but not much worse than other ways to get them in quantity one.
I'm a happy customer. I think I'll try Fritzing to build a home automation board for my Haiku fan.
I found Fritzing while searching for a better answer. Fritzing is a combination tool and service. As a software tool, Fritzing is to Eagle what the Arduino IDE is to Emacs. As a service bureau, Fritzing is to PCBexpress what iPhoto is to Kinkos. I mean these as kind comparisons for all involved. I actually like Arduino, Emacs, PCBexpress, iPhoto, and now Fritzing.
Fritzing is a graphical tool for building circuits with a handy button that sends the entire assembly back to Fritzing HQ for manufacture. The key Fritzing hook is that it has three views of the circuit you build. The novel view is a breadboard view. You can wire up a device on a virtual breadboard that corresponds, perhaps, to an actual breadboard sitting in front of you. That view can switch to a traditional schematic view and a PCB layout view. I used it in exactly this way to copy my simple IBUS adapter from breadboard and Arduino into the breadboard view and then into a board designed to be an Arduino shield. The entire exercise took minutes, in part because Fritzing has a reasonable set of default libraries built to suit a modern maker.
I submitted my order on October 31. Fritzing told me the batch would run on November 5 and that the board would ship on November 11. It actually shipped on the 13th and it arrived by post yesterday. The cost for one copy of the board and shipping was 33.10 Euro.
I populated the board this morning and put it back in the car. It works fine. The board is mostly headers and has only two components -- a pull-up resistor and a BSS138 MOSFET. The rest is pins for the Arduino, the car data and audio connectors, stereo jack, and aux power for a bluetooth A2DP dongle.
I scavenged the MOSFET and the resistor from the Sparkfun bi-directional level shifter board I had been using. This is an expensive way to buy transistors, but not much worse than other ways to get them in quantity one.
I'm a happy customer. I think I'll try Fritzing to build a home automation board for my Haiku fan.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
gently
I complained too loudly in the last installment about the difficulty of mashing up web audio in static pages. Ian Gilman got me back on track with the simple Rdio player hosted on his site. That page uses the Rdio API without unwelcome branding. It also works in Safari and Mobile Safari without Flash!
Ian has got another project, Fathom, that I haven't really looked at. I did notice that he has a link to still another project, Anthm, on his blog. You'll simply have to forgive these hipsters their vowel blindness.
Anthm has since been renamed Jukio. A fitting vowel penance.
In Douglas Adams' post-Hitchhiker's novel 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency', Fathom is the name of Michael Wenton-Weakes' loss-making magazine. Good name for a startup project. Anthem also appears in Dirk as a fabulous new form of spreadsheet software that converts ledgers to music. This modern version of Anthem hopefully does just the opposite. Are Fathom and Anthm secretly related? Stay tuned for next week's installment of 'Least Interesting Internet Conspiracy Theory'.
I tried copying Ian's simple app into my Google Drive storage and using my OAUTH 1.0 developer credential. No dice. The default credentials handed out by Rdio don't allow use of this Flashless API.
I complained that API users would resort to hosting to protect a secret key needed for accessing the API. That's true for Grooveshark, but not for Rdio. Rdio application keys do come with some limits (10 requests per second, 15000 per day) and several web apps leave the necessary client app credential embedded directly in the page they furnish to end users. This is the intended design, but this is not smart. It takes only one mean spirited soul to consume the entire resource grant that you got from Rdio.
I requested access to the beta program for the flashless API and I got a credential, from Ian, less than a day later. Thanks, Rdio! It took me about an hour to port an existing HTML5 audio web app to the Rdio interface. I was able to turn around and have the whole app running out of Google Drive moments later. This porting is unnecessary for my own use, but essential for sharing the app.
I promised to not make any public comments about the beta API and I can comply happily. I like it just fine, but I'm not done complaining about the authentication.
I take no position on the merits of OAUTH, Rdio's choice, as an authentication protocol. If you want to be on the right side of history, you should probably get on board with same sex marriage, the end of capital punishment, the metric system, Major Leauge Soccer and Dippin Dots. You would probably also be on the right side of history if you said that the OAUTH protocol schemes, like most protocols built on Earth, are irretrievably broken. That's not my problem.
My problem with the authentication is that the supporting machinery is far out of scale for a system that protects essentially no secrets or valuable treasures. A Rdio membership that lets you listen to as much as you want on an iPad costs $9.99 per month. If I listen for four hours a day and an average track lasts three minutes, then a track play is worth about four tenths of a cent. I don't know if this is a fair price for music or not. I do think that it's close to that long-ago ideal for nuclear electric power -- too cheap to meter. Why do I need an API key at all?
I don't need access to your Rdio playlists or account information to let you check out a little mashup that plays Flaming Lips' 'Fight Test' and Cat Stevens' 'Father and Son' back to back. I don't need to know who you are. I don't need to know if you're paid up with all the right people. I just need a way to give you an indirect pointer to some tunes that you can decide to pay for or not. I don't need you to get my mashup from my site. I would be happy for you to get my wares as Free Software capable of working out of the box with nothing but your existing streaming account.
Some writers favor 'one' over 'you'. Here's the rule at reograph: if a piece of prescriptive guidance is intended for a reasonable person, then we use 'you'. You should eat leafy green vegetables, drink lots of water, and read reograph. If guidance is for an unreasonable person, then we use 'one'. If one must set off in one's hovercraft, then one simply must! The guidance for 'you' at reograph is often actually meant for me. If you are looking for a shareable audio service, try to find one that will let you use the service without requiring a separate, discretionary API credential grant.
I haven't found this perfect service yet. I'm picking on Rdio an awful lot but they are as close to right as I can find. They seem to have the first system worth programming at all. If you unspooled an entire Maxell XLII-S CrO2 cassette tape, it wouldn't be long enough to reach from Rdio back to their next most programmable competitor.
Much of what Rdio lacks is beyond their API to provide. Their terms of service specifically forbid you, as a developer, from building a web page that lets a user arrange a slide show with music. Connecting the 'The Wizard of Oz' with 'The Dark Side of the Moon' is right out. That would be tricky anyway. Netflix dropped Wizard and seem to have discontinued their API for all but those able to fill shipping containers with cheap set top boxes and related Christmas cheer. I bet the guys at Rdio HQ find the terms imposed on them by Big Media as silly as I find the 'no slideshow' rule.
Before I get a lot of helpful comments highlighting my total ignorance of the fine points of copyright mining -- derivitave works, mechanical rights, and so on -- I thought I'd bring up the case of CleanFlicks. CleanFlicks bought commercial DVDs and produced edited copies that carefully trimmed sex and foul language away from violent movies. That's copyright no-no.
Rival firm ClearPlay runs a similar racket but they keep their play in-bounds. ClearPlay doesn't distribute movies. They distribute patch files for movies that consenting adults can apply the privacy of their own homes. ClearPlay's edit list appears comprehensive for this summer's 'Man of Steel'. It mutes all fifteen profanities while leaving the rest of the violent masterpiece almost untouched. ClearPlay's 'Lawrence of Arabia' Lawrence is merely flamboyant. I looked for ClearPlay versions of 'Brokeback Mountain'. I got no results except a quote at the bottom 'I find your lack of faith disturbing -- Darth Vader'. Brokeback won the Academy Award for best director. I searched for 'Baraka' and I got the quote 'You must unlearn what you have learned -- Yoda'. I believe that enough searches for troublesome films on their site could reveal the entire hidden George Lucas plan to draw you back to Christ. ClearPlay's site preserves the Vader quote above but their edit list for Star Wars elides the accompanying throttling. I have no idea if Han shoots first in their version.
If ClearPlay can do this, then is a web page that mashes up a song and a picture really such a threat to Western civilization? Is it about 'irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression' -- the argument made against CleanFlicks -- or is it about money?
I also complained recently about the Blogsy blogger app for iOS. It spammed an earlier post of mine with a useless 'Posted with Blogsy' footer. Blogsy can be brought to heel and the footer removed. Irritating but reversible. I think I understand the confusion. Apple has inserted a footer in iOS email for six years. The difference is that the Apple footer is offered to recipients as a kind of apology -- meaning 'the above message is short, composed while driving, and full of hilarious auto-correct substitutions'. I recall that BlackBerries offer a similar apology by default. Blogsy doesn't really have that much to apologize for and so the footer is unnecessary.
Ian has got another project, Fathom, that I haven't really looked at. I did notice that he has a link to still another project, Anthm, on his blog. You'll simply have to forgive these hipsters their vowel blindness.
Anthm has since been renamed Jukio. A fitting vowel penance.
In Douglas Adams' post-Hitchhiker's novel 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency', Fathom is the name of Michael Wenton-Weakes' loss-making magazine. Good name for a startup project. Anthem also appears in Dirk as a fabulous new form of spreadsheet software that converts ledgers to music. This modern version of Anthem hopefully does just the opposite. Are Fathom and Anthm secretly related? Stay tuned for next week's installment of 'Least Interesting Internet Conspiracy Theory'.
I tried copying Ian's simple app into my Google Drive storage and using my OAUTH 1.0 developer credential. No dice. The default credentials handed out by Rdio don't allow use of this Flashless API.
I complained that API users would resort to hosting to protect a secret key needed for accessing the API. That's true for Grooveshark, but not for Rdio. Rdio application keys do come with some limits (10 requests per second, 15000 per day) and several web apps leave the necessary client app credential embedded directly in the page they furnish to end users. This is the intended design, but this is not smart. It takes only one mean spirited soul to consume the entire resource grant that you got from Rdio.
I requested access to the beta program for the flashless API and I got a credential, from Ian, less than a day later. Thanks, Rdio! It took me about an hour to port an existing HTML5 audio web app to the Rdio interface. I was able to turn around and have the whole app running out of Google Drive moments later. This porting is unnecessary for my own use, but essential for sharing the app.
I promised to not make any public comments about the beta API and I can comply happily. I like it just fine, but I'm not done complaining about the authentication.
I take no position on the merits of OAUTH, Rdio's choice, as an authentication protocol. If you want to be on the right side of history, you should probably get on board with same sex marriage, the end of capital punishment, the metric system, Major Leauge Soccer and Dippin Dots. You would probably also be on the right side of history if you said that the OAUTH protocol schemes, like most protocols built on Earth, are irretrievably broken. That's not my problem.
My problem with the authentication is that the supporting machinery is far out of scale for a system that protects essentially no secrets or valuable treasures. A Rdio membership that lets you listen to as much as you want on an iPad costs $9.99 per month. If I listen for four hours a day and an average track lasts three minutes, then a track play is worth about four tenths of a cent. I don't know if this is a fair price for music or not. I do think that it's close to that long-ago ideal for nuclear electric power -- too cheap to meter. Why do I need an API key at all?
I don't need access to your Rdio playlists or account information to let you check out a little mashup that plays Flaming Lips' 'Fight Test' and Cat Stevens' 'Father and Son' back to back. I don't need to know who you are. I don't need to know if you're paid up with all the right people. I just need a way to give you an indirect pointer to some tunes that you can decide to pay for or not. I don't need you to get my mashup from my site. I would be happy for you to get my wares as Free Software capable of working out of the box with nothing but your existing streaming account.
Some writers favor 'one' over 'you'. Here's the rule at reograph: if a piece of prescriptive guidance is intended for a reasonable person, then we use 'you'. You should eat leafy green vegetables, drink lots of water, and read reograph. If guidance is for an unreasonable person, then we use 'one'. If one must set off in one's hovercraft, then one simply must! The guidance for 'you' at reograph is often actually meant for me. If you are looking for a shareable audio service, try to find one that will let you use the service without requiring a separate, discretionary API credential grant.
I haven't found this perfect service yet. I'm picking on Rdio an awful lot but they are as close to right as I can find. They seem to have the first system worth programming at all. If you unspooled an entire Maxell XLII-S CrO2 cassette tape, it wouldn't be long enough to reach from Rdio back to their next most programmable competitor.
Much of what Rdio lacks is beyond their API to provide. Their terms of service specifically forbid you, as a developer, from building a web page that lets a user arrange a slide show with music. Connecting the 'The Wizard of Oz' with 'The Dark Side of the Moon' is right out. That would be tricky anyway. Netflix dropped Wizard and seem to have discontinued their API for all but those able to fill shipping containers with cheap set top boxes and related Christmas cheer. I bet the guys at Rdio HQ find the terms imposed on them by Big Media as silly as I find the 'no slideshow' rule.
Before I get a lot of helpful comments highlighting my total ignorance of the fine points of copyright mining -- derivitave works, mechanical rights, and so on -- I thought I'd bring up the case of CleanFlicks. CleanFlicks bought commercial DVDs and produced edited copies that carefully trimmed sex and foul language away from violent movies. That's copyright no-no.
Rival firm ClearPlay runs a similar racket but they keep their play in-bounds. ClearPlay doesn't distribute movies. They distribute patch files for movies that consenting adults can apply the privacy of their own homes. ClearPlay's edit list appears comprehensive for this summer's 'Man of Steel'. It mutes all fifteen profanities while leaving the rest of the violent masterpiece almost untouched. ClearPlay's 'Lawrence of Arabia' Lawrence is merely flamboyant. I looked for ClearPlay versions of 'Brokeback Mountain'. I got no results except a quote at the bottom 'I find your lack of faith disturbing -- Darth Vader'. Brokeback won the Academy Award for best director. I searched for 'Baraka' and I got the quote 'You must unlearn what you have learned -- Yoda'. I believe that enough searches for troublesome films on their site could reveal the entire hidden George Lucas plan to draw you back to Christ. ClearPlay's site preserves the Vader quote above but their edit list for Star Wars elides the accompanying throttling. I have no idea if Han shoots first in their version.
If ClearPlay can do this, then is a web page that mashes up a song and a picture really such a threat to Western civilization? Is it about 'irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression' -- the argument made against CleanFlicks -- or is it about money?
I also complained recently about the Blogsy blogger app for iOS. It spammed an earlier post of mine with a useless 'Posted with Blogsy' footer. Blogsy can be brought to heel and the footer removed. Irritating but reversible. I think I understand the confusion. Apple has inserted a footer in iOS email for six years. The difference is that the Apple footer is offered to recipients as a kind of apology -- meaning 'the above message is short, composed while driving, and full of hilarious auto-correct substitutions'. I recall that BlackBerries offer a similar apology by default. Blogsy doesn't really have that much to apologize for and so the footer is unnecessary.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
audio
In our last installment, I wondered why software developers collectively allow iPad web applications to stink. I think the reasons are mostly non-technical.
Last time, I tried and failed to use Google Drive to host some static content. Unsurprisingly, the culprit was a web page that worked poorly on the iPad. I eventually got Drive hosting static content by finding the 'Desktop' view. Even then, I had to click through a "The browser you're using may not support all the features of the desktop version of Google Drive" to get there. The Google Drive hosting hack is one step more complicated than sharing a folder. You also have to open your HTML page in Google Docs and press 'Preview' to get an URL. That step does not work on the iPad no matter the browser mode.
I hauled out a laptop and repeated the process. I got the URL. I opened it in the iPad. Success.
The app that I'd like to share with you is the HTML5 audio player I built this summer for a memorial service. The player is a straight client-side web app. It runs fine out of Google Drive. Here's the lin....
Oh. Never mind. I'll go to jail if I share the link with you. You're not allowed to have my music. I can't afford to license a hundred tracks of commercial music for a free web app. I can't replace ten playlists with a random collection of Creative Commons tracks and have a memorial that is representative of my friend's actual tastes and habits.
No problem. Ads for 'All Access' audio from Google Play, a streaming subscription service, are in heavy rotation on the blog now. They say it works on every device. You and I can both subscribe and I'll fish out the URLs for these playlists and put them into the web pag....
Oh. Google Play may work on a lot of devices and in the browser, but not in the browser on all those devices. I tried to open play.google.com on my iPad and I got nothing but an empty page and the message 'database error: Error: SecurityError: DOM Exception 18'. Too bad. It worked in Safari in 2011 when Sharon Vaknin wrote about it for CNET. It wouldn't have helped me then. Google didn't offer an all-you-can-eat service that would allow me to build a player for the music pooled in a subscription we share.
No problem. Google's just the latest entrant in the subscription music biz. One of the others will have done this properly. I'll try iTunes Rad... No I won't. That would never work. Who am I fooling? I'll try Spotify. Hmm. Spotify seems to use flash on my laptop. On the iPad browser, spotify.com offers only account maintenance functions. I'll try Rdio. Rdio redirects to the App Store in the iPad browser. No, thanks. If Google can't play me some subscriptions tunes with HTML5, then they can at least let me search for an HTML5 audio subscription app.
Hmm. forte.fm. That plays audio in the browser on the iPad. forte.fm is actually an HTML5 Rdio client built for the app-poor BlackBerry BB10 environment. It works on the iPad. It looks good! It almost works! It seems to play only track previews on iPad. I haven't had time to diagnose this strange behavior.
So Rdio works in iPad's Safari except when we get it from Rdio's official web site. I can deal with that. I'll just do the same trick in my web pag... Oh. forte.fm violates the Rdio API terms of service, which require that 'Your application will at all times display and promote the ability to subscribe to the Rdio Service, including, without limitation, making available and displaying promotions of Rdio’s subscription tiers, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, will at all times make available ecommerce opportunities (including Rdio subscription tier offers and Rdio a-la-carte download offers) for free trial users and registered users listening to 30 second clips of music recordings.'
I don't want to clutter a web page with a bunch of Rdio branding. I'd be grateful to them for serving the streaming tunes but my premise is that this would work only because the end user of the web page was already paying Rdio for access to those tunes.
The branding issue is actually the smallest problem with using Rdio this way. The bigger problem is that their API requires a key. If I get an API key, I'd have to keep it secret from you. That's right. If I want to deliver a web page that presents you a selection of the music you already pay for, then I need to keep a secret from you to do it. I can't give you a client-only app and keep a secret from you. Rdio didn't invent this ridiculous model. They just didn't think hard enough before adopting it.
On to Grooveshark. Their HTML5 player works on the iPad. I'll just check their API developer term...
Oh. Same problems as Rdio. Never mind.
Most developers resort to some form of web hosting to square this secret circle. They spin up a lot of very complicated machinery to bring up a web server that runs PHP for no better purpose than to hide this API key from you. This is crazy and wasteful. Google actually show us the way here. AdSense works. AdSense uses an opaque identifier just like all these API keys. I get to share it with you.
I didn't really believe in the browser until I saw Google Maps. It wasn't just the best web page I had ever seen -- it was one of the best programs I had ever used. It delivered a smoother interface to the actual world than most games provide for their imaginary worlds. It didn't just embarrass many other mapping solutions, it embarrassed data visualization tools across domains. The easy, and easily available, API is a cherry on top. The simplest example from the developer site is really simple. You can try it yourself without credentials.
I keep believing in the browser. Surprisingly, Google Maps still embarrasses other data tools -- including much newer music offerings from Google themselves and from others.
Now we have two non-technical reasons that web apps lag: hosting and copyrighted assets. We'll visit more in the next installment.
Last time, I tried and failed to use Google Drive to host some static content. Unsurprisingly, the culprit was a web page that worked poorly on the iPad. I eventually got Drive hosting static content by finding the 'Desktop' view. Even then, I had to click through a "The browser you're using may not support all the features of the desktop version of Google Drive" to get there. The Google Drive hosting hack is one step more complicated than sharing a folder. You also have to open your HTML page in Google Docs and press 'Preview' to get an URL. That step does not work on the iPad no matter the browser mode.
I hauled out a laptop and repeated the process. I got the URL. I opened it in the iPad. Success.
The app that I'd like to share with you is the HTML5 audio player I built this summer for a memorial service. The player is a straight client-side web app. It runs fine out of Google Drive. Here's the lin....
Oh. Never mind. I'll go to jail if I share the link with you. You're not allowed to have my music. I can't afford to license a hundred tracks of commercial music for a free web app. I can't replace ten playlists with a random collection of Creative Commons tracks and have a memorial that is representative of my friend's actual tastes and habits.
No problem. Ads for 'All Access' audio from Google Play, a streaming subscription service, are in heavy rotation on the blog now. They say it works on every device. You and I can both subscribe and I'll fish out the URLs for these playlists and put them into the web pag....
Oh. Google Play may work on a lot of devices and in the browser, but not in the browser on all those devices. I tried to open play.google.com on my iPad and I got nothing but an empty page and the message 'database error: Error: SecurityError: DOM Exception 18'. Too bad. It worked in Safari in 2011 when Sharon Vaknin wrote about it for CNET. It wouldn't have helped me then. Google didn't offer an all-you-can-eat service that would allow me to build a player for the music pooled in a subscription we share.
No problem. Google's just the latest entrant in the subscription music biz. One of the others will have done this properly. I'll try iTunes Rad... No I won't. That would never work. Who am I fooling? I'll try Spotify. Hmm. Spotify seems to use flash on my laptop. On the iPad browser, spotify.com offers only account maintenance functions. I'll try Rdio. Rdio redirects to the App Store in the iPad browser. No, thanks. If Google can't play me some subscriptions tunes with HTML5, then they can at least let me search for an HTML5 audio subscription app.
Hmm. forte.fm. That plays audio in the browser on the iPad. forte.fm is actually an HTML5 Rdio client built for the app-poor BlackBerry BB10 environment. It works on the iPad. It looks good! It almost works! It seems to play only track previews on iPad. I haven't had time to diagnose this strange behavior.
So Rdio works in iPad's Safari except when we get it from Rdio's official web site. I can deal with that. I'll just do the same trick in my web pag... Oh. forte.fm violates the Rdio API terms of service, which require that 'Your application will at all times display and promote the ability to subscribe to the Rdio Service, including, without limitation, making available and displaying promotions of Rdio’s subscription tiers, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, will at all times make available ecommerce opportunities (including Rdio subscription tier offers and Rdio a-la-carte download offers) for free trial users and registered users listening to 30 second clips of music recordings.'
I don't want to clutter a web page with a bunch of Rdio branding. I'd be grateful to them for serving the streaming tunes but my premise is that this would work only because the end user of the web page was already paying Rdio for access to those tunes.
The branding issue is actually the smallest problem with using Rdio this way. The bigger problem is that their API requires a key. If I get an API key, I'd have to keep it secret from you. That's right. If I want to deliver a web page that presents you a selection of the music you already pay for, then I need to keep a secret from you to do it. I can't give you a client-only app and keep a secret from you. Rdio didn't invent this ridiculous model. They just didn't think hard enough before adopting it.
On to Grooveshark. Their HTML5 player works on the iPad. I'll just check their API developer term...
Oh. Same problems as Rdio. Never mind.
Most developers resort to some form of web hosting to square this secret circle. They spin up a lot of very complicated machinery to bring up a web server that runs PHP for no better purpose than to hide this API key from you. This is crazy and wasteful. Google actually show us the way here. AdSense works. AdSense uses an opaque identifier just like all these API keys. I get to share it with you.
I didn't really believe in the browser until I saw Google Maps. It wasn't just the best web page I had ever seen -- it was one of the best programs I had ever used. It delivered a smoother interface to the actual world than most games provide for their imaginary worlds. It didn't just embarrass many other mapping solutions, it embarrassed data visualization tools across domains. The easy, and easily available, API is a cherry on top. The simplest example from the developer site is really simple. You can try it yourself without credentials.
I keep believing in the browser. Surprisingly, Google Maps still embarrasses other data tools -- including much newer music offerings from Google themselves and from others.
Now we have two non-technical reasons that web apps lag: hosting and copyrighted assets. We'll visit more in the next installment.
Monday, November 18, 2013
entitlement
I complain about blogger a lot for a guy who pays nothing for the service. I know that. The main thing about it that gets at me isn't really Blogger's fault. It's that the web page works poorly on the iPad. George W. Bush was fond of the phrase 'soft bigotry of low expectations'. Blogger didn't set out to make a web page that worked poorly. I guess they just lost sight of the fact that the web can be really good and let their preconceptions be their default.
John Gruber is one of many luminaries who enable this bigotry. I have blogged before about this post of his. I think my real objection is to his claim "Today, in 2013, even the best-crafted mobile web apps come nowhere near the quality of experience of the best native apps". The claim bothers me but I can't really disagree. I know the many technical limits of 2013-era web apps. My problem with Gruber's line is the leap many make by asserting that the technical limits of the browser are the same limits that separate the best web apps from the best native apps. This is not the case.
One non-technical problem with web apps is that it's difficult to charge money for the app. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that web apps have to come from somewhere.
I know many folks who have built a forge in their backyard, or at least dream of it. I know nobody who wants to do their own colonoscopy. The intrinsic joys of running an SMTP server seem closer to the colonoscopy and the joy of running a public facing web server is headed in the same direction.
I don't really want to run a web server. I don't want to maintain an SQL database or apply software updates or even deal with the e-commerce site of a web hosting provider. I don't even really want to hassle with the domain name system. If I just give Apple their $99 and send my apps their way, then I don't have to do any of that.
What I do want to do is write Javascript. I love it. I love the browser. The combination feels to me like the ultimate victory of the LISP machine. Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, and others have all actually done a lot for the world by rowing in more or less the same direction with this technology. As large as their differences have seemed, I think they are all more interoperable than were the LISP or UNIX machines and dialects of the '80s.
I have written apps with Cordova. I admire that project but I don't think of it as a cross-platform development tool. I think of it as a tenacious effort to keep the Javascript/DOM platform relevant. I admired Palm's WebOS more. I already feel sad about the pending failure of FirefoxOS. I like the web, I think it's important, but I love a good browser.
I wrote previously about developing and deploying an HTML5 web audio app using Kiosk Pro on iOS.
I would like to share that serverless app with you but the the logistics are frustrating. Blogger won't host the files. Dropbox won't serve up a web app. I found a LifeHacker post from last year about serving web apps out of Google Drive. I uploaded a simple web app I built for my kids to my Google Drive account. The Google Drive iOS app doesn't seem to let me make a folder public. Google themselves provide some notes on this topic, though their notes do not work on iOS. They work a little better whenever you can find a link that lets you opt-out of 'mobile view'.
I'll keep trying. If I can figure out a way to anonymously serve a couple of files for less than the cost of my lifetime AdSense earnings to date (about seven dollars) then I'll share some web apps.
I wrote this post in 'blogsy' for iOS on my iPad. Five bucks. It's better than the free Blogger app. It supports hyperlinks -- a critical feature that somehow didn't fit the Blogger app view of the world. I think it's better also than the Blogger web interface. I think the blogsy people just cared more. I'm about to publish but I have some trepidation. Blogsy looks like it may attach 'Posted with Blogsy' to the bottom of the post. It's a waste of five dollars if that is the case.
John Gruber is one of many luminaries who enable this bigotry. I have blogged before about this post of his. I think my real objection is to his claim "Today, in 2013, even the best-crafted mobile web apps come nowhere near the quality of experience of the best native apps". The claim bothers me but I can't really disagree. I know the many technical limits of 2013-era web apps. My problem with Gruber's line is the leap many make by asserting that the technical limits of the browser are the same limits that separate the best web apps from the best native apps. This is not the case.
One non-technical problem with web apps is that it's difficult to charge money for the app. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that web apps have to come from somewhere.
I know many folks who have built a forge in their backyard, or at least dream of it. I know nobody who wants to do their own colonoscopy. The intrinsic joys of running an SMTP server seem closer to the colonoscopy and the joy of running a public facing web server is headed in the same direction.
I don't really want to run a web server. I don't want to maintain an SQL database or apply software updates or even deal with the e-commerce site of a web hosting provider. I don't even really want to hassle with the domain name system. If I just give Apple their $99 and send my apps their way, then I don't have to do any of that.
What I do want to do is write Javascript. I love it. I love the browser. The combination feels to me like the ultimate victory of the LISP machine. Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, and others have all actually done a lot for the world by rowing in more or less the same direction with this technology. As large as their differences have seemed, I think they are all more interoperable than were the LISP or UNIX machines and dialects of the '80s.
I have written apps with Cordova. I admire that project but I don't think of it as a cross-platform development tool. I think of it as a tenacious effort to keep the Javascript/DOM platform relevant. I admired Palm's WebOS more. I already feel sad about the pending failure of FirefoxOS. I like the web, I think it's important, but I love a good browser.
I wrote previously about developing and deploying an HTML5 web audio app using Kiosk Pro on iOS.
I would like to share that serverless app with you but the the logistics are frustrating. Blogger won't host the files. Dropbox won't serve up a web app. I found a LifeHacker post from last year about serving web apps out of Google Drive. I uploaded a simple web app I built for my kids to my Google Drive account. The Google Drive iOS app doesn't seem to let me make a folder public. Google themselves provide some notes on this topic, though their notes do not work on iOS. They work a little better whenever you can find a link that lets you opt-out of 'mobile view'.
I'll keep trying. If I can figure out a way to anonymously serve a couple of files for less than the cost of my lifetime AdSense earnings to date (about seven dollars) then I'll share some web apps.
I wrote this post in 'blogsy' for iOS on my iPad. Five bucks. It's better than the free Blogger app. It supports hyperlinks -- a critical feature that somehow didn't fit the Blogger app view of the world. I think it's better also than the Blogger web interface. I think the blogsy people just cared more. I'm about to publish but I have some trepidation. Blogsy looks like it may attach 'Posted with Blogsy' to the bottom of the post. It's a waste of five dollars if that is the case.
Posted with BlogsySaturday, November 16, 2013
haiku part II
(This is part two of a three part review. Blogger has reorderd them. They now appear to run two, three, one)
The fan is dead! Long live the fan!
The fan is dead! Long live the fan!
Last week saw the execution of my old Honeywell ceiling fan. The crime? Conspiring with a known bad in-wall control unit. Sending secret radio messages. Total dereliction of duty.
I chortled in my joy as I surfed, now in the dark, for a replacement fan. I scanned the entire collection at Vintage Fans. I ran through the entire online collection of Hunter fans. That site actually generates new fan combinations randomly as you ask for each page. I found sizeable collections of fan porn in the pages of Pinterest and Houzz. In all, I put together a list of about 25 fans and passed it on to my wife.
I expected her to quickly ratify my top choice -- the Hunter Hotel Original with Adaptair. I thought I would pair it with a set of custom fan blades in maple from C&R Woodcrafters. It was going to be great. I'd be able to believe I was cool in summer. The fan would work well and look good. No stinking digital controls.
My wife got back to me in a flash. She said "I was imagining something more awesome." That knocked me out of balance, like a fan that has thrown a blade. I had no backup plan so I googled "awesome ceiling fan" and used image search. I discounted novelty fans and props left over from Terry Gilliam movies. I found the answer on the first page. The 'Haiku' by Big Ass Fans.
I also found Virginia H. S********, Air Force Civilian. She has no part in this story except that the Google image search results for fans turned up a cute snap of her cat, Tabbie, staring at the ceiling fan while tugging on her badge for work. Her badge is readable in the photo. Tabbie looks like a cat caught in the act. I wonder who he really works for.
Back to fans. I hated the old fan from the first day I bought the house. I was having a fight with it only minutes after closing when I was interrupted by a knock. The knock was from my new tenant. He had just returned home from a backpacking trip to Paraguay. I had never met the man. This stranger announced that he had lost his keys in Paraguay and asked me for mine. I didn't know if his story was authentic but I was sure that his stink was. I gave him my key to the basement apartment.
He returned my key in the little paper bag from the hardware store that had held the copies he had made. It said 'Qty 3'. He came up about an hour later to tell me that his Ukranian girlfreind would be arriving imminently and moving in. I said I already knew. When he asked how, I told him that I knew he had made three copies of the key. He said "Huh. Have to practice better information management in this town." Virginia should take this advice to heart.
Really back to fans this time. Haiku by Big Ass Fans. I remember a years-ago BAF ad. Got a Big Ass Room? Get a Big Ass Fan. The have brought the line down to medium ass rooms by licensing a novel, modern fan design from a Kiwi and marketing it under their brand.
The Haiku fan is the more awsome that my wife was looking for.
The old Honeywell unit was a five bladed fan that spanned about 54 inches. The Haiku spans 60 with three blades. The blades look purposefully aerodynamic. Mine are molded bamboo. I wondered immediately why I couldn't think of an Eames piece in bamboo. Maybe Nixon visited China too late for them. The humble downrod is clad in sleek fairings. The mount was utter simplicity. Everything about the fan is beautiful.
Blogger's iPad app still doesn't allow me to insert hyperlinks in posts. It turns out that hyperlinks, not W3C browser-based DRM protected video, are the defining feature of the web. If you revived Vannevar Bush to show him the Blogger app, he would be completely blown away... by the lack of hypertext. I have to circle back to the web interface after writing these posts to touch them up with actual hyperlinks. I'll try preparing the next installment in a different environment. Maybe wordpress. Maybe a typewriter. Maybe a typewriter emulator app for Chrome running on a Google Pixel. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
haiku part III
A Haiku fan now reigns over my living room where a Honeywell fan once spun. I like the fan.
There are some brighter spots and darker spots in the experience. One dark spot is the lack of a built-in lamp. Big Ass Fans offer a light kit as a partial remedy. The kit is $95. That's cheap only compared to the $825 base price for the Haiku.
Darker a spot than the lack of light is the light itself. The fixture installs pretty easily over the hub of the fan. It connects to the main fan circuit board with a short cable. The lit portion is about six inches across and studded with a ring of about twenty LEDs surface mounted on a printed circuit board. The fixture is surrounded by an attractive metal heatsink casting which adds several extra inches to the overall diameter of the fixture.
The ring of LEDs is covered with a choice of either a frosted white lens or a dark smoke lens. The white lens filters little enough light that it is still easy to get an unpleasant eyeful of LED. The lens does take what would be twenty sharp spot beams and blends them into a uniformly dim and harsh light. It would take a naked forty watt bulb hanging from the ceiling to achieve the same effect. Kudos to Big Ass Fans for managing that with such efficiency.
The remote is another sore point. Credit card sized remotes were pretty cool in 1993 when the Macintosh TV came out. They were still a bit cool in the late nineties when Bose bundled them with Wave Radios. In 2013 they are just cheap and nasty. You can buy essentially the same remote from dozens of alibaba vendors for a couple of dollars. The remote battery tray interchanges with the cheap remote included with my kids' color-change novelty lightbulb ($5.97).
The fan side of the remote is not so bad. Blue LEDs illuminate for a short time to indicate what fan speed is now active. this is especially helpful when you want to be sure the unit is off, not just very very slow. It also beats pull chain systems that cycle back from high to off. That would be a real pain with the Haiku's seven speeds.
Worse than the cheap remote is the cheaper wall bracket for the remote. The bracket looks like some type of one time use medical thing. Maybe it started life as a complimentary floss cutter to be given out twice yearly by dentists. The sharp edges on the inexpensive part could manage that well.
Hunter remotes frequently hang on a hidden bracket that allows the remote to be used as a wall control when docked. The Haiku fan bracket covers at least five of the ten remote buttons. The light controls are completely obscured.
Big Ass Fan's answer to this criticism might be to point to the available wall control unit. That unit adds an additional $175 to the fan price. Worse, it dumps me back where I started with Honeywell -- a hard-wired unit that collaborates secretly with a fan over an RF link. No thank you.
Neither of these stories provides any good options for integration into a home automation system, unless the RF module supports an open standard and bi-directional communication.
I watched the online installation video for the RF module. The fan does not ship with the RF receiver. The small receiver board ships together with the wall unit. I imagine that this is for regulatory reasons as much as cost. It is a tiny board that plugs into the main fan board with a single row pin header with few pins. Maybe another module could install there. Maybe a wifi module. Maybe an Arduino. If Nest can solve the user interface challenge of configuring a wifi smoke detector on your ceiling, then it must be possible for a ceiling fan.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
haiku
seasons turn slowly /
honeywell fan slower still /
leaves and fan come down
I live in an old house without central air conditioning. Just before I bought it, the house was subject to a thoughtful remodeling undone only by poor judgement and shoddy workmanship. The house gained all of the bulk and ugliness of central air conditioning with almost none of the benefit. The previous owners installed a useless central fan with ducted registers throughout the house. I suspect that it would all have to go in order to properly install a central air system.
I prefer to pretend that it is not hot. In winter, we heat with cast iron radiators and a hot water boiler. We love them. I support my summer comfort fantasy with a variety of window and portable air conditioners and ceiling fans.
The previous owners took the no-AC dividend -- probably ten thousand dollars -- and plowed a hundred dollars of it directly into one of the worst ceiling fans that they could buy. That fan hung in my living room until last week. I had hoped it would be difficult to buy a fan that bad by accident but these appear to be the new default.
The fan was tied to an Honeywell branded in-wall combination light and thermostatic fan control. It had five buttons for fan control, a thermostat slider for automatic operation, and a single button to control the fan light. The thermostat never did anything but turn the fan on at unwelcome moments. The light switch was the real problem. It was never easy to operate. Near the end of its life, the rubbery button required more than 50 pounds of force for the unit to register a press. That's 1% of the thrust produced by the Garrett (now Honeywell) ATF3 turbofan. The wall switch had none of the familiar roundness of Honeywell's most beloved products.
 |
| Honeywell products (above: HFT7000) should be round Photo courtesy Honeywell |
I finally ripped this control out of the wall and I expected to install a SmartHome FanLinc Insteon controller in the fan canopy. When I got the control out of the wall, I saw many fewer wires than I expected. I took the fan apart and found out why. The in-wall control is really an RF control that matches a large honeywell fan/light control mounted in the motor housing of the fan. The fan does not want to be controlled by anything but its module. I didn't want to map out the tangle of wires to adapt another control to this motor.
All gone. Fan, module, control, everything. Gone.
This scheme of hard-wired controller and proprietary RF protocol is depressingly common. My module is labelled Honeywell, but similar units are labelled Hunter, Westinghouse, Hampton Bay, Litex, or Craftmade. I wouldn't buy any of them. I have other variations on this theme throughout the house.
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| Wireless fan control by Hunter Photo courtesy Hunter |
I give the nod to Hunter for the ease with which neighbors can turn on your fan. Ever left for vacation and wondered if you remembered to shut the fan off? No problem with Hunter. Your neighbors need try only sixteen DIP switch combinations before they shut the fan for you.
I've put up with flakey home automation devices for many, many years. Even the worst of the bad X10 devices was more reliable than these fan units.
I would like my excellent Nest thermostat to control my fans. Nest has expanded their lineup recently with the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector. Maybe Nest can expand their ceiling-based lineup with a few spinning blades and make a great fan. I think there is room in the market for it. There is certainly room in my house for it.
Monday, November 4, 2013
plan
It was chilly today. I threw on a fleece vest that I hadn't worn in a while. Huh. What's that bulge in the pocket? Oh. A roll of duct tape. I had to go through a Secret-Service-type checkpoint the last time I wore the vest. Same bulge.
It had been at a children's Halloween party downtown. The burly dude at the magnetometer said "Sir, what is your plan for this duct tape?" This was the best question anyone has asked me since. My plan was to use it to patch my daughter's home made foam rubber pumpkin costume. They didn't completely like that answer. I said "I'm a man. I fix things with duct tape."
With that restatement of the obvious, all was fine.
All security questions should be asked this way -- not "What is this?", not "What is this for?". I'm sure this prompt is rooted in some delicate and beautiful point of criminal psychology that I don't understand.
I think this question should be deployed in realms beyond security. Imagine what life could be like if the Radio Shack clerk was required to ask you this. I would have a much less serious ewaste problem if I had to articulate, aloud, a reasonable plan for a gadget.
Him: Sir, what is your plan for this $35 power supply?
Me: I will use it as a replacement for a lost power supply for a camera worth $15.
Him: Sir, step away from the counter.
That dialogue would have saved me $35 but it's probably too intrusive for the American people. I'm sure the $35 adapter would be closer to $100 if we had to send all the clerks to elite training schools.
I think we could get most of the benefit from this just by getting people to answer the prompt without a burly armed dude and consequences that would go down in our permanent record. Brian Wansink banged out a pretty great book "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think". It's the kind of book that you'll later recall was by Malcom Gladwell.
Wansink writes:
... Over coffee, a new friend commented that he'd lost 30 pounds within the past year. When I asked him how, he explained he didn't stop eating potato chips, pizza, or ice cream. He ate anything he wanted, but if he had a craving when he wasn't hungry he'd say -- out loud -- "I'm not hungry but I'm going to eat this anyway."
Having to make that declaration -- out loud -- would often be enough to prevent him from mindlessly indulging ...
I could lose thirty pounds of gadgets in a year if I used the same trick at the point of purchase. I think I'll try. Worry not, dear readers. That still leaves about a hundred pounds a year for me to write about.
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