Category Archives: musings

Status: Away

I’m in Arizona visiting family, which is why I haven’t posted anything here recently. We’re doing the tourist thing and visited the Grand Canyon, the red rocks of Sedona, and Montezuma Castle. I’ve only passed through Phoenix before on connecting flights and this is my first time actually spending time in Arizona and it’s been a great trip so far.

I’ve posted some pictures using Instagram – you can see my Instagram gallery in the sidebar on the right or follow me on Instagram using the iPhone app (my user name is marianne). Chris and I plan to record a podcast episode when I get back home this week and I hope to get back into my routine more quickly than I did following the trips I took earlier this year. Next up on my review list are the Capta, as mentioned in my Dodocase review, and the Just Mobile Xtand Go for the iPhone 4/4S. The Capta is a stand/tripod mount accessory for smartphones that was provided to me courtesy of BiteMyApple.co and the Xtand Go is an in-car mount for the iPhone, provided courtesy of Just Mobile.

Walking while working: my treadmill desk set-up

I first heard of treadmill desks a few years ago through a feature segment on a news program and was immediately intrigued by the idea. I was, and have always been, concerned about my health (and waistline) as I get older and worried about the sedentary nature of my job – spending a lot of time sitting at a computer (gym membership and volleyball leagues notwithstanding) does nothing to help me keep my girlish figure. This, combined with the fact that I love french fries, made me determined to get a treadmill desk at some point in the future.

Fast-forward several years to the present when I now have a job where a treadmill desk would be ideal since I work from home and though I love my Aeron chair, I finally had the time and resources to put together my ideal treadmill desk set-up. Read on for the details about the design process and my now-complete set-up.

Inconceivable!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

That is probably my favorite quote from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride. It came to mind as I read recent news about AT&T’s policy changes regarding its “unlimited” data plan. I put “unlimited” in quotation marks here since it sounds like AT&T no longer knows what this word means and has decided to make up its own definition for it.

• AT&T used to offer an unlimited data plan for $30/month (this plan was available, most notably, for those who purchased the original iPhone in 2007).
• AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans for any phone in June 2010 though those who already had this plan could keep it. However, if anyone left the plan, there was no going back.
• AT&T starts throttling (intentionally slowing the connection speed) of those on unlimited data plans who are in the top 5% of data users in some areas. These areas are not defined for users and the top 5% metric varies from area to area, with no way for users to find out in advance what could get them into the top 5% and subject to throttling.
• AT&T announces that they’ve done away with the “top 5% of users” criteria and are now beginning throttling for all users on unlimited data plans who go above 3GB of data transfer in a billing period.

You know, I get that AT&T’s network may no longer be able to handle its customers data needs and it needs to take steps to manage this before even more customers are negatively affected. But I think they’re going about this in the wrong way entirely.

AT&T: Just do away with the unlimited data plan if you’re not going to honor it anymore. It makes no sense to even keep calling it unlimited it if it no longer is. Migrate current unlimited data plan users to the 3GB plan (and allowing them to leave if they choose to instead) and deep-six the unlimited plan altogether. This would be a more appropriate and honest way to handle this situation instead of trying to redefine what “unlimited” means and dealing with the negative PR as a result.

Upsell me

Upselling is a sales technique whereby a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale.

Wikipedia

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen that I’m visiting my mother in Los Angeles and went with her to an AT&T store to upgrade her ancient Samsung flip phone to a shiny new iPhone 4S. The experience was a little exciting for my mom but it was marred by the upselling we were subjected to during the process.

(Though AT&T is not my favorite, my mom is relatively happy with them and had no desire to change carriers while upgrading to an iPhone.)

When we arrived, we were greeted by a chipper girl with an iPad in an open, messenger-style case that was slung over her shoulder. She used it to take down my mom’s name to check her in, telling us that someone would help us in a few minutes.

Rosa*, a woman who appeared to be in her early 20′s with long brown hair and enough make-up to be a Kardashian, came to assist us a few minutes later. We told her what we wanted to do and she took us through the process of upgrading my mom’s line, transferring her contacts from her old phone and explaining everything fairly painlessly. Though she was proficient at these tasks, there were times that I wanted to throttle her with my bare hands.^

As we were going through the upgrade process, my mom mentioned something about a friend having an iPad as she noticed the iPad display against a nearby wall. Rosa paused and took that as an opportunity to show my mom a brand new iPad in a sealed box and tell her about its features.

My mom went along until she heard the price tag (she was already balking about the $20 data plan she needed to add for the iPhone) and declined.

Next, when my mom was handed her shiny new iPhone, she noticed that the screen picked up fingerprints very easily and said so aloud. This launched Rosa into an introduction to some anti-glare screen protectors they sold as well as the new warranty program AT&T now offers that covers accidental damage. I think this is the point when I started to feel the urge to cause someone, namely a young woman with what appeared to be an entire bottle of mascara applied to her eyelashes, some pain.

Not having learned her lesson from my mom’s reaction to the price of the iPad, she explained the warranty in depth. When she got to the price ($9.99 per month), my mom hesitated and looked at me. I half-expected her to voice her frustration at being offered so many extra things to buy at that point, but Rosa’s spiel was better than I thought (that devious wench!) and she asked me if she should buy it. I told her no.

Rosa was not to be deterred, though. When were were almost done and ready to hand over a credit card to finalize everything, she whipped out another goodie. The Jawbone Jambox, a portable Bluetooth speaker. And this is the point when, I’m ashamed to say, my own ears perked up.

A Jawbone Jambox? Hmmm. I’d been eyeing one of those for myself since I’d seen some very good reviews about it when it was released. I like to listen to music when I wash the dishes and clean and normally use a pair of headphones with my iPhone to accomplish this. However, headphones blocking my ears usually leads to my husband scaring the bejesus out of me (complete with high-pitched girl screams) when I don’t hear him enter the room. He always finds this funny. I never do. A Jambox would be helpful to avoid those situations.

Rosa gave us a little demo of the speaker using a smartphone connected via Bluetooth. And it sounded pretty good, matching the impressions I’d seen in the reviews I’d read.

Rosa then said the magic words: “If you’d like to buy this today, we could offer you a deal.”

I looked at her, my eyes narrowed and my entire expression intended to convey suspicion and doubt in an attempt to dare her to give me a deal I couldn’t refuse.

Fear, loathing and Dragon Express

Click on that screenshot. Go ahead. It won’t bite. In case you’re not brave enough, it’s a Yahoo search of gibberish in Safari. Which opened by itself on my beloved iMac with no input from me.

 Now click on this next one. That’s a new email message filled with gibberish in the body. Mail opened all by itself and created this beauty all by itself without my input.

And these weren’t one-time events. I saw several new email messages create themselves and random Google and Yahoo searches execute – all without any input from me whatsoever – for several days in a row in late January. What the hell was causing this? I was not taking any prescription meds or recreational drugs that would cause such hallucinations. And Macs don’t get viruses, right? Or had I somehow found a brand new one all by my little self?

Love and an 11-inch MacBook Air

While at CES, I was incredibly lucky and won a new 11-inch MacBook Air at a NetShelter event on my last night there. Upon entering the party, we were asked to throw a business card into a bowl and I happily obliged. And then I immediately forgot about the drawing as soon as I got inside the nightclub and located the open bar where there was a bartender who was willing to give me as many on-the-rocks margaritas as I wanted.

After I had managed to make several of those fantastic margaritas disappear, the party was paused for the drawing I had forgotten all about. The first prize given away was an unlocked Samsung smartphone and the second prize was a Sony Vaio. When my name was called for the MacBook Air, I raised my arms in Rocky-victory style and screamed. And I did a little happy dance, which approximated Kermit the Frog’s frantic arm-waving stage exiting maneuver on the Muppet Show, on my way to pick up my prize. I’m pretty sure I made an ass of myself. I blame the margaritas.

A defective iPhone 4S and a trip to the Genius Bar

I got a warranty replacement for my iPhone 4S on New Year’s Eve. My original iPhone 4S had been acting wonkier and wonkier over time, rebooting itself occasionally for no apparent reason, freezing during phone calls, emitting a buzzing/rattling noise in the earpiece speaker during calls and other nefarious actions. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a volume problem that started a few weeks ago. I noticed that the volume would change by itself when I wasn’t even touching the phone (and there was no case on it to put pressure on the buttons) and I could watch the on-screen volume indicator dwindle down to zero or up to the maximum level without any input from me.

The first time this happened, I shrugged it off since I was holding the phone and figured I might have bumped the volume button or something. But then it happened more and more often. I concluded that my iPhone was either possessed or broken. Or it was trying in a very roundabout way to say that I talked to myself too much and silence was really the way to go, you crazy lady, you.

Regardless of my thoughts about the cause of the problem, I had a little WTFBBQ moment, punctuated by several, if not all, of the words on George Carlin’s list, each time it happened. This had to stop.

Investigating a little further, I realized that I could reproduce the problem myself simply by wiggling the volume buttons a little. Even though I never fully pressed them, the volume indicator would appear on the screen and keep adjusting long after I stopped touching the buttons. This made me believe that it was a hardware issue and so I made a genius bar appointment late last week. I was starting to miss alerts since my iPhone made itself silent regularly without my knowledge.

(A little googling revealed this thread in the Apple Support forum but there were no panic.plst entries in my iPhone’s diagnostic logs.)

The Apple store was absolutely crazy when I went in and the Genius Bar was running a little behind. When a genius finally appeared to help me out, I described my problem and wiggled the volume buttons  for him (why does that sound so wrong?) to reproduce at least one aspect of the problem. He took my iPhone from me and said he needed to take it into the back to “open it up” and see if he could fix it.

What? Open it up and fix it? Huh. I didn’t know they were doing repairs like this in the store but I shrugged and let him take it to the back room and troubleshoot away. I instantly felt naked without my iPhone as soon as he was out of sight.

I actually think he whisked it away more to inspect my iPhone to verify it hadn’t been dropped, abused, or doused in water before moving forward to find a resolution. He was gone for about 5 minutes before making his way through the crowded store back to me. He said he didn’t think he could fix it and was going to try to authorize a replacement for me. He asked me if I’d tried restoring it and I told a lie here – I said that I had but it hadn’t worked. He said that sometimes a DFU restore could help but since I was pretty sure this was a hardware problem, I didn’t want to drag out the troubleshooting procedure unnecessarily by endorsing that troubleshooting step. Plus, restoring an iPhone as a new device and getting it set up the way I need it, apps and all, is a bitch.

He left me again and went behind the genius bar to document my case and, I assume, to get authorization for the exchange. He came back a few minutes later and handed me a shiny new (most likely refurbished, of course) iPhone 4S. I was a little worried that he might not have given me a 64GB model and I wanted to double-check before I left the store. So, I started it up and went through the iCloud screens to restore from a back-up I’d made just before I’d left for the mall. That took a few minutes and I was finally able to go to the home screen to get to the Settings app to check the phone’s capacity. It was indeed a 64GB model. Phew. Paranoia effectively banished.

I have noticed that this iPhone feels a little tighter in that the buttons have less play than the first one. Also, that buzz/rattle noise during phone calls is gone, thank goodness and this one isn’t haunted or trying to send me not-so-subtle messages about my mental stability or lack thereof.

Of course, I realized after I left the store that I hadn’t prompted the genius to delete everything off my original iPhone 4S right then and there. It was passcode locked and I hadn’t told him what it was so I wasn’t too worried but I later went online to iCloud and used the Find My iPhone feature to prompt a remote wipe of it. Dang, that’s one handy service. Thanks, Apple!

I installed the second set of my SGP Steinheil EX Ultra Fine protector set earlier this week and my new iPhone is now just like my old one. Except not wonky and broken. Super sweet.

How soon we forget (a fangirl confession)

A few days ago,  I noticed that a teammate in my volleyball league had a shiny new Windows Phone (I think it was an HTC Radar). I asked her how she liked it and she frowned, complaining that she couldn’t set custom text message tones for individual contacts.

I laughed in response and said, “What? Really? That’s silly. ”

“Yeah,” she replied, “I was finally just able to set custom ringtones after the last software update but still can’t change text tones. This phone is the suck.”

I’m a little ashamed of my reaction here since the ability to set custom text tones just became possible in iOS 5. Which means that as an iPhone user for more than four years now, I have only been able to set a custom default text tone or specific tones for individual contacts for a little over 2 months (since the gold master release of iOS 5 in October), a small change which has thrilled me to no end.

Why was I so quick to ridicule her Windows Phone for a limitation I experienced with the iPhone myself (jailbreaking aside) for more than 4 years?

Oh, well. At least I’m earning my iPhone fangirl stripes. Is there a Game Center achievement for that? XP points? Anything?

Dear Apple: Please fix the Reminders app

Dear Apple,

Hi there. It’s me again. I am enjoying my iPhone 4S immensely (even though pre-ordering one was a right pain in my ass). I think Siri is great and I use it all the time to draft text messages and create calendar events and reminders. It’s definitely a feature you can call “magical” all you want, in my book. But that new Reminders app… that could use a few changes, please.

First and foremost, why aren’t my lists in Reminders sortable? I have to admit that I’m pretty stumped you guys overlooked this basic feature in an app that’s mean to store tasks. Sure, there’s that Date tab at the top but this only shows me tasks scheduled I have for today (and subsequent individual days if I flip through them sequentially). But I want to see my entire list sorted by due date. Some of my tasks are several months in the future, you know, and swiping through page by page is a horrible way to get to them. Maybe make it how the default Completed list displays items? See? You already know how to do this one!

Adding on to that, I’d love to be able to set a priority for my tasks as well. So if I have a number of tasks due on a certain date (and you let me sort them) I can view the most important ones at the top of the list. You get how that makes sense, right? Not all tasks are created equal, even if they are due on the same day.

Also, I’m not perfect (clearly!). I don’t complete tasks on the scheduled date sometimes often. Time escapes me every now and then. I get sucked into a good book. I play way too much Fruit Ninja or Jetpack Joyride. Or I give in to the old puppy dog eyes routine and take Jake out on one more walk because the weather is so nice. And then stuff doesn’t get done as planned. How about some help with that? Like some options for repeating alarms for tasks with due dates? And a little visual reminder that turns the text red or something? These additional cues don’t need to “surprise and delight” me with any particular slickness or anything. They just need to be there and work, please.

I know you can fix Reminders, Apple. I want Reminders to be my default to do app now that it’s integrated via iCloud with iCal on my Mac. There are a ton of other excellent to do apps in the App Store that have all of these features. Not that I want you to copy them, but at least catch up to them in terms of features, please?

Sincerely,

Marianne Schultz

P.S. Thanks for listening to me about the whole voice command feature thing. Again, Siri is really cool.

iPhone 4S camera tips and tricks

Last week I created a list of iOS 5 and iPhone 4S tips and tricks, mostly focused on Siri, iMessage and the new Reminders app. Since my iPhone 4S is pretty much my primary camera for nearly every occasion (I rarely break out my Nikon D40 DSLR except to take product shots for reviews) and this may be the case for many of you as well, I thought I’d post some camera-specific tips and tricks this week.

First, however, if you’re not convinced that the 8-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4S is a large improvement over previous iPhone models, check out these neat comparisons shots compiled by app developer Tap Tap Tap.

Now for the tips:

Tap to lock focus and exposure

As with previous versions of iOS on iPhones with auto-focusing lenses (iPhone 3GS and later), you can tap anywhere on the screen to lock the focus on a specific part of the scene you want to capture.  In iOS 5, tapping also locks in the exposure level based on this location as well. This is particularly helpful when lighting is uneven in the scene you’re capturing.

Some people have had problems with the autofocus function while recording video, as noted by this Macworld article. This is something that Apple could address with a firmware update. If you’re having this problem, you should submit feedback to Apple so they can understand how widespread it is.

Capture images using the volume button or headphone remote

Apple finally lets you use the volume up button to activate the shutter (which is a little ironic since they booted my favorite photography app, Camera+, out of the App Store last year for doing the very same thing).  Note that only the volume up button works for this; pressing the volume down button does nothing.

If you’re using the headphones that came in the box with the iPhone 4S or 3rd-party headphones that offer a similar remote control, you can also use that to trigger the shutter to capture images.

Easily access the last image captured from the viewfinder

(Thanks to Steve for the reminder about this one.) This is a nice little shortcut to get to see the last picture taken. In the Camera’s live viewfinder view, just swipe from left to right and you’ll be taken to the last picture captured. Swiping from right to left will take you back to the viewfinder.

Note that you can go further back in the camera roll by swiping some more and instead of swiping repeatedly to get back to the viewfinder, you can just tap once to bring up some navigation buttons that include a shortcut to the Camera’s viewfinder in the bottom left corner.

Enable the viewfinder grid

One feature I’ve always liked in Camera+ is its grid overlay in the viewfinder to help you line up shots evenly, and this has now come to the iPhone’s own Camera app. You can enable this feature by tapping on the Options button while in the viewfinder and switching the Grid option to On.

Pinch to zoom

In previous versions of iOS, a zoom slider popped up whenever you tapped anywhere in the viewfinder and you could manipulate this slider to adjust the zoom level. That zoom slider doesn’t show up when you tap on the screen anymore – instead you need to use the same 2-finger pinch motion that you use when zooming in on images in Safari and other apps to reveal it.

Double-click the home button to open the camera from the lock screen

This is my favorite new shortcut. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed a great photo opportunity because it took too long to get to the Camera app. Now, all you need to do is double-click the home button when the iPhone is locked and a camera button will appear next to the unlock slider. Tapping on this will open up the Camera app right away.

This works even if your iPhone is locked with a passcode. However, Apple was clever enough to disable the ability to swipe backward to see the last picture captured – it will show a message that the iPhone is locked and needs to be unlocked before these can be viewed, so your camera roll can’t be snooped even with this shortcut, thankfully.