Sky’s Blog

I have been reading ebooks for about 5 years now. Mostly I buy them from Fictionwise.com and most often I download their sci-fi short-story Nebula-award nominees series, which they publish once a year, for free. But, I’ve probably spent on the order of $200 on other books as well.

Oh, and I subscribe to Scientific American digital (monthly) and read it as a PDF on the screen rather than get all that paper that just piles up before I can get to it.

As in quantum-tunneling^[1] effects, you can get me past the initial resistance to an ebook if:

• The price of the ebook is 60% or less than the price of the physical book; or if
• I don’t want the physical book hanging around anyway after I’ve read it; or if
• It’s available in PDF so I can read it anywhere (though I do purchase prioprietary DRM formats frequently); or if
• It’s $9.99 even if I think I could find a paperback for slightly less somewhere else.

It is just so much easier to take an ebook with me and read it on my screen (or iPhone in the case of the Kindle^[2] and Fictionwise readers)!

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[1] I use quantum-tunneling as a metaphor all the time. Read about quantum-tunneling here in Wikipedia where it’s a difficult article to follow, but go the the paragraph that describes Shroedinger and has the little illustration of the “tunneling” particle (see above).

[2] There’s a Kindle book reader iPhone app that allows you to buy and download Kindle books from Amazon to read them on your iPhone. No reason this wouldn’t also work on the iPad, since they say 140,000 apps already run on it. (I wonder who took the time to test that assumption…) Fictionwise.com also has a reader available in the app store.

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About the WPtouch Mobile Plugin— I ran across this in the news sidebar on a blog I was editing this morning. It’s a WordPress plug-in (yes, it’s not actually a theme even though they refer to it that way sometimes) that converts a regular WP blog so that it reads nicely on a small/narrow screen (like that of an iPhone or iPodTouch). Using javascript (which does work on iPhones, unlike Flash) it lets you see first the titles of articles^[1], then you can click a triangle to expand and see the short description, and click a triangle again to read the entire article. I had one problem^[2] (so far) but I love what it does.

[If you’re reading this on an iPhone you’re already seeing how it works, if not you should feel free to pull out whatever your smartphone is and go to my blog home page to see how it works.]

When you visit a blog that has this plug-in enabled, if you’re on an iPhone (or some other smartphones) you’ll see a concise display of the most recent entries in the blog. It includes titles, dates, and categories only. [Illustration left.] My blog theme is white type against a black background, but the plug-in takes just the pertinent information and displays that using a substitute theme that looks fine on the iPhone screen.

Then… (continue reading…)

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Métro Paris, an iPhone app [see also the FastCompany article] to help us navigate the Paris subway has been beefed up to include heads-up^[1] displays that allow you to see pop-up displays of information about the buildings and businesses around you. You turn on the app and it shows you what your camera is seeing (vélos, motos, voitures moving along the street, and buildings) and rectangular squares pop up that tell you what the buildings and businesses are. In addition, you can get a big red arrow (like in SecondLife when you’ve teleported close to your destination but still have to fly to get there) that points you at a nearby Métro station that you can duck into to take the train to your destination. These augmented reality^[2] apps [see article on LA Times site] have been rumored to be on the way for quite some time. Apparently the heads-up portion was sneaked (snuck) into the app without Apple pretty much noticing that it was there. Thus the speculation about whether it‘ll be taken down. The photos/videos tell the story – take a look. [SEE VIDEO BELOW vids are in French - the demo is at Place de L’Opéra - I know it well.] (continue reading…)

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I am finding myself increasingly tempted to swipe my fingers across the screen of my new Macbook Pro!^[1]

I already use a touch screen iPhone all day long, so I’m used to swiping and tapping a lot.

And the touchpad “gestures” on the Macbook Pro^[2] allow me to work essentially the same way I work on the iPhone (tap instead of click; and two-finger tap instead of “right click”; and two-finger drag to scroll things in a window; and so forth). In fact, I have almost entirely stopped using the mouse (with scrollwheel) that I used to use on my previous computer in favor of gestures on the touchpad of the Macbook.

I couldn’t believe how intuitive they were. Each gesture totally makes sense in terms of what it does, finger positions, and direction of swipe. Kudos to Apple on this. It almost makes it worth the entire price of the upgrade just to get this one feature.

Punchline: But when I run my greasy fingers across the glossy Macbook screen it sure smudges things up.  LOL  Can’t wait for a full-size “tablet Macintosh” to come along!

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[1] I haven’t blogged about this new computer (which is only 2 weeks old) but my five-year-old Mac Powerbook just got too slow to be usable, given the load of software that I run on it, so having a computer that is roughly 5x faster is a real joy. I was beefing up the old Powerbook over and over again (doubled the RAM, tripled the disk size, got a new keyboard, and so forth) but it still couldn’t run fast enough most of the time and the CPU was clocking 100% useage at all times when I had my hands on it. So it eventually had to be replaced.

[2] And the other thing I like about the new Macbook Pro is the unibody aluminum construction. My old Powerbook flexes considerably when I carry it in one hand, and this new single-piece-of-aluminum construction does not flex at all, making it very much more solid! This is different from any other laptop computer I’ve ever owned.

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