Colin Charles Agenda

I live in the “rest of the world”. I do not reside in the USA. Why is it I cannot get content that I’m willing to pay for?

As a preamble to this, you might want to read an article in The Economist: Cupertino’s cold warriors: What has Apple got against eastern Europe?.

The iTunes store is a major pain point. I can buy Apple hardware in Malaysia, be it iPhone’s, iPod’s, Macs, and more. But when I visit the iTunes store, I can only purchase apps for the iPhone (the iPad store opened recently). Why can’t I purchase music/movies, legally? So you’ll say why not visit Amazon’s MP3 store. Bam, I can’t make a purchase there either.

The iPad’s come with iBooks. Its a fabulous book reading application. I cannot purchase books from the iBook store, but I can purchase ePub formatted books, say, from O’Reilly’s Safari bookstore. What about the Kindle – its available in quite many locations, but only where AT&T is present – so some rather “odd” countries show up in the availability lists. Why can’t I purchase books, legally?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to audible. Audiobooks mean I don’t have to take a trip out to the bookstore. Chances are, I might get audiobooks cheaper than the dead-tree versions available in Malaysia. Today I got an email from Audible, telling me there’s a book I might be interested in. True enough, I was interested in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. Who couldn’t be, after listening to the most amazing The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal?

Of course, I get greeted with the magical message:

That basically reads:

We’re sorry. Due to publishing rights restrictions, we are not authorized to sell this item in the country where you live.

Sorry David Kirkpatrick, I tried to give you some money, but apparently, you’ve decided to shaft the rest of the world.

Sadly, this situation is not much different in a first world country like Australia. Sure you get the iTunes Music Store (you are paying a premium, in comparison to exchange rates), and eventually the iPad becomes available for sale, but its always behind the US. So its not an isolated third-world 1Malaysia problem. Of course not – Singaporeans still suffer from the lack of the iTunes Music Store, and they’ve been a first world, industrialised nation, since 1996.

When will American content sellers realise that the Internet lacks boundaries?

When will they realise that limiting based on geolocation (Android marketplace) or credit cards (iTunes store) is so 20th century? Incidentally, there’s a petition out there for Google: Enable paid apps for all countries on the Android Market!. Its okay Google, you’re not the only retarded one here – the BlackBerry AppWorld is no better; PayPal is available in Malaysia, but you can’t buy apps either.

You push globalisation to the core, yet you refuse to embrace it.

Give us the content that we want to pay for. It doesn’t matter where we are located. Really.

I rebooted my MacBook Pro today, because I wanted to try out Safari 5. The short version of all this is: I came off quite impressed. DNS prefetching, the Web Inspector, and Safari Reader (strips ads/formatting) are killer features.

First up, its fast. DNS prefetching makes a difference if you browse the web like I do – I have a folder of bookmarks called “Daily”, and in there it has sites like Techcrunch, Techmeme, Hacker News, Slashdot, and a few news sites. You can imagine I’m usually loading up links elsewhere, and if an article is too lengthy, I usually just use the Read Later widget and send it to Instapaper.

There is now a free Safari Developer Program (as opposed to the US$99 paid iPhone or Mac developer programs). It allows you to sign your extension (beyond that, I don’t see the value – guess why its free?). There is supposed to be an Extension Gallery, but I guess this will be around in due time.

As someone that frequently uses the Web Developer extension in Firefox, I have to say I’m quite impressed with the Web Inspector that comes built in with Safari 5. Its more visual. Timelines, Resources, looking at HTML5 storage containers (local databases), and more is quite useful.

I mentioned that I like using Instapaper above. What is its killer feature? Scraping text from a page, images if need be, and giving you a clean reading interface. Safari comes with Safari Reader, which is very Instapaper like. The blog you read has got ads, but a fairly simplistic (aka boring) design. With Reader? Articles look a whole lot better – I can tell I’ll be using this feature a lot. Its not just about the fact that it strips ads – its a much cleaner, interesting interface. I wonder if it’ll catch on?

Before Safari Reader

Using Safari Reader

Memory usage seems to be better than Firefox 3.6.3, with multiple tabs open. I know the Firefox team are hard at work to make magic happen here, but Safari seems to have the edge at the moment. I haven’t used Chrome enough to know if it compares.

What do I miss? My Firefox add-ons. Here’s to the Safari Extension Gallery growing to become like addons.mozilla.org. Give Safari 5 a twirl, you probably won’t be disappointed. And if you’re into reading about every whizz-bang feature, go check out the feature list.

I’m amazed that Helvetica, a rather beautiful font, costs USD$741. I know fonts take a lot of time to make, and generally cost a lot of money (a conversation I had with Keith Packard sometime in 2004 cemented this into my head). Recently, I read in Monocle about Japanese font-maker Morisawa and figured that fonts are truly, really expensive.

Apple ships Helvetica. But as a “dfont” package. Good thing there’s a utility called DfontSplitter (Windows and MacOSX only). It allows you to extract the font as a TTF. But legally, you might not be able to use it for Web Embedding either.

Today, I discovered Cufón (source). Its a simple web utility – upload the font, and it generates the font in a format, and then there’s a little rendering engine that pops out in JavaScript for your usage. Very handy. Now websites can have embedded fonts, and things start looking the way you designed them to look.

As an aside, I used to generate favicon’s using an image editor. Nowadays, it seems like you might as well just move to the web – one less use for desktop software – use the favicon.ico Generator.

I went to get Flashblock installed in my browser after a hiatus, and saw something interesting:

That’s the add-ons page telling me that you can now make a small donation to the developer of the plugin so they can continue development on it. There’s a suggested amount (in this case $5), and when you do click on Contribute, you’re given options: one-time suggested donation, any price you’d like to give, or a recurring monthly contribution. All this is fulfilled quite simply via Paypal. I actually know of one of the developers of Flashblock – a Malaysian developer, Philip Chee.

I find Flashblock useful. Donating definitely makes sense. Then I immediately thought of WOT – Web of Trust. I use the service on a daily basis. Would a donation of $10 to WoT make sense? Absolutely. It makes the web safer for me to browse. It adds that added layer of security before I go ahead and click on a link.

Do you donate to the add-ons that you use the most? Did you even know you could donate to add-ons for Firefox? I would totally appreciate some comments on this.

Disclosure: I have a professional interest in Web of Trust.

Over a year ago, I found out about Wikitravel Press from Jani Patokallio, at BarCampKL 2009. I was pretty excited since it was based on the open content Wikitravel, it was printed on demand, and it was updated on a regular basis. Imagine getting accurate travel guides when you were going somewhere (as opposed to a dated Lonely Planet guidebook)?

When I was young, I used to pore through a set of encyclopaedias from Grolier, that my late grandfather had purchased sometime in the ’60’s. These were wrongly disposed off, during a move, and the last time I encountered a traditional encyclopaedia, was a few months ago, albeit a digital version. For me, Wikipedia won.

Naturally, I’m excited to see that you can now get Wikipedia entries, printed in book-form now. PediaPress now offers custom books to all users. Check out the book creator on Wikipedia.

It got me thinking. Would we eventually see textbooks being printed out from Wikipedia? I took a look at some of the pre-prepared books, and found one for College Mathematics: Algebra. Its over 400 pages of dense mathematical content; about the typical size of a math textbook. Coursework preparation will be more open, and quality will be crowd-sourced.

More interesting for me, and other developers using MediaWiki? The tools for creating your own press are available at the PediaPress Open Source Repository. Therein lies a Python library for parsing the MediaWiki articles (mwlib), another library for writing the PDF documents from MediaWiki articles (mwlib.rl), and a bunch of extensions to collect MediaWiki articles and output them to PDF, XML, or even OpenDocument format (ODF).

What does that mean? If you’re using MediaWiki to create documentation, you can quite likely create a printed manual pretty darn easily. No mucking around with writing documentation in DocBook XML… you can use the friendly MediaWiki markup and syntax.

I was initially unsure if I would like to buy an iPad when asked many a time, and my usual response was “let’s see it first”. Then I saw it. It didn’t take a couple of minutes of playing with it, and looking at it, that I decided that I must get it. A week later, the Apple Store still gets queues in the morning (when I went there was no queue – a pre-requisite for me even entering the store), and they’re all out of 16GB models. In fact, the 32GB models are hard to come by. So I got a 64GB model – oops! Here are my early-experience notes:

1. I like the form factor. Its a bit heavy (try holding it on left hand, typing with right hand for long periods of time). Brushed aluminium on the back, and it seems like my MacBook Pro – I doubt its going to get scratched easily. The screen is like an iPhone/iPod Touch’s, and it smudges similarly – not too badly. I doubt its going to scratch easily, which is probably why Apple can’t be bothered with screen protectors.
2. Speed. The A4 processor is totally amazing! Scrolling is easy, changing from an app to another is snappy, I’m totally amazed.
3. The battery life is totally amazing. A4 processors in an iPhone in the future might help. But I also think there’s a huge battery here. One thing to remember – there’s a special 10W USB Power Adapter to charge the iPad. So even when you grab the Apple World Travel Kit, you don’t get a compatible adapter. The standard iPod/iPhone one only outputs 0.15A of power, while the iPad one gives it 0.45A. They may even be the same size, but they’re not the same. In fact, when you pick up 3rd party power adapters that have USB chargers… you’ll find its not rated high enough for the iPad.
4. Activation process is interesting. The device will not work until you connect it to your computer. It has to be running iTunes 9.1 (so I had to reboot my laptop to get this going). It was simple. Of course I have a Malaysian iTunes account, and for this to work, I needed a US iTunes account. No iPad Apps unless you have a US account. No credit card that has a US-based start, so I can’t buy apps yet. I consider this to be a major fail and think Apple should stop limiting folk to regions – its retarded. I’ll have to go buy lots of gift cards soon…
5. Typing on the touch screen is surprisingly easy. Portrait mode – check. Landscape mode – check.
6. I don’t know what the WiFi troubles are all about (just yet). I am currently travelling and using an Airport Express. I hope when I get back home, it “just works” with my current access points.
7. iBook only gets installed the first time you connect to the AppStore. Winnie the Pooh is the story of choice – why? The interface reminds me very much of Delicious Library. The management of this is via iTunes.
8. Standard iPhone apps work. They don’t necessarily look pretty – sitting in the middle and all that. People are going to want to get their apps working on this platform, fast.
9. It has a pretty good speaker. It comes with no headphones, so if you don’t want to be annoying, spend USD$29 and get yourself a pair from Apple.
10. The screen has an interesting wallpaper. It looks like the iPad had been scratched. Tsk tsk.
11. I bought a dock. The keyboard dock isn’t available for sale yet. But it can already work with a Bluetooth keyboard. I’m excited to try this working, so I can type fast on my iPad.
12. The guy at the Apple Store told me he returned his Apple-made iPad case. To make matters worse, the store was out of stock. So I bought an Incase one. With a zip (the other one had a retarded design). I have no complaints here.
13. Watching YouTube videos are nice. I highly recommend giving it a try. In fact, watching videos are quite pleasant on this large screen. Its about the size you get in an airplane…
14. The accelerometer is very active. There exists a screen rotation lock – totally useful when you’re lying in bed and reading.
15. I tried out the Maps application. Interesting. There should be a digital compass. No assisted-GPS or using the nearest cell to find you, but I tried to find my location and it was pretty accurate just based on what must have been the IP address. I’m not complaining. Maps would be good for this kind of device, and my model does not have an A-GPS, but I don’t really think I’ll be needing it.
16. This is not a netbook replacement. You just can’t access your media that easily. In fact, iTunes is such a horrendous way to manage all this. I’d have preferred if I could drag & drop things onto my iPad. Not all media will get on your iPad easily, quite naturally. Mac users are probably used to Perian, but such an application does not exist for the iPhone/iPad. I presume converting lots of media to a format that is capable for the iPad/iPhone.

Applications

1. I’ve had an iPod Touch for years (I bought the first generation when it was announced, from the same Apple Store in San Francisco that I got this iPad years ago). I’ve never downloaded this many apps, or felt like paying for stuff, until owning the iPad. Colour me impressed.
2. iPad apps cost a lot of money. NetNewsWire which might be free on the Mac desktop, come free on the iPhone, unless you get the Premium edition for $4.99, costs a mere $9.99 on the iPad! Instapaper has a free version for the iPhone, a Pro version for $4.99, and on the iPad it costs the same. Time charges you for every issue you buy – why? I’d rather read the dead tree edition at airports.
3. The Bloomberg application (which I use on Symbian S60, BlackBerry, iPod Touch, and now iPad) is truly a thing of beauty. If you’re a finance geek, love the stock markets, and spend some time on it, you’ll want an iPad just for it. Charts, etc. are totally amazing at that size. And the touch interface is totally rocking.
4. I am a bit disappointed that the Remote iPhone app from Apple to control Keynote does not work as an iPad native app. I would love to use my iPad as a clicker, compared to my iPod touch. Why? I can see my speaker notes, etc. on a larger screen. It becomes totally useful. Remember, I don’t want to give a presentation on my iPad – I still want to use my laptop; I just want to be able to walk around and use the iPad as a large clicker and see things on my screen. I have yet to purchase Pages or Keynote yet, I wonder if I’ll ever purchase Numbers? All $9.99 a pop.
5. I played around with Adobe Ideas. Nice.
6. Evernote is a must have application. It “just works”. I think its much better than the Notes application that Apple bundles.
7. Don’t bother buying an iPad without an iTunes account. You’ll want to be buying apps to make it useful/interesting.
8. Its funny they did not embed a PDF reader. You have to download (mostly buy) one.
9. Having two copies of apps is stupid. For example, I have Wikipanion for iPad and Wikipanion for iPhone/iPod Touch. One is the regular, nice size, and one is about half the size (aka iPhone size).

Games? I’m the last to judge. I don’t play games. ‘Nuff said.

Developers? Go get your app in there during the land rush grab. I wonder if these premium prices on apps will last, or if its just a fad. Are people willing to spend a lot more on apps here? The iPhone AppStore is basically killed by $0.99-1.99 apps. Its hard to break out of those price points unless you’re uniquely providing value. On the iPad? For the near future, you can do whatever it is you want, and people are bound to play with it as the initial hype is there. Once it becomes more commonplace, I expect apps to get cheaper, and more free apps to become more high quality.

What will I use it for? So far, I’m browsing lots of stuff in Safari. I’m writing notes in Evernote. I’m checking out a lot of apps (Marvel is neat, some news apps, Twitter apps, etc.). The Bloomberg application just rocks. I’ve not seen much of this “just work” with the cloud – I can imagine Apple is working on this. Maybe I’ll finally purchase a .Mac account. Copy/Paste isn’t as seamless, in my opinion. Multitasking would make it a whole lot more useful – but then again, me switching apps at the moment is almost instantaneous, so it already feels like I’m multitasking.

Will I get the 3G version? Nope. First off, this whole micro-SIM will be a big issue for me (no provider in Malaysia supports it). Next, where do I use this – probably mostly at home, in a hotel room, or on a plane. What about a cafe? Well, I’ll carry around my portable 3G WiFi device and all will be well. What if you’re on a train/bus? The 3G connection will probably be unreliable as the cells switch, I would get pretty annoyed with connection drops. Besides, I don’t use data when roaming, so another minus for the 3G edition.

What’s missing? I’d like to grab the Camera Connector. Maybe someone will make a 3rd party GPS. Could be useful for mapping nuts, especially since it won’t be an A-GPS. I’m still contemplating spending USD$29 on the dock connector to VGA adapter. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a presentation using my iPad. I’d much rather use the Keynote Remote… if they make an iPad version.

Is this replacing my Sony Reader PRS-505? I’m not sure. One’s e-ink. One isn’t. I haven’t read on the iPad long enough to know if its going to annoy me or not (in iBooks, that is). Reading in Safari is very comfortable.