Month: February 2009

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

more fun with MobileMe calendars

Okay, I thought I had everything straightened out, but it just seems that the combination of Outlook and the way I’m generating my “birthdays” calendar on the Mac is not happy. It seems like things go wrong on the MobileMe site after going from iCal, to MobileMe, to Outlook, and back to MobileMe. It’s that last part, after Outlook does whatever it does to the calendars and pushes it back to the web, where everything goes wonky. If there was a way to just push the calendar to Outlook, and not let Outlook push it back to MobileMe, then I’d be OK. I wouldn’t mind treating the calendar as read-only in Outlook. Oh well, I guess I’m going to have to de-sync the calendar on my PC for now. I’ll leave the contact sync going, since that seems to work fine.

more MobileMe syncing fun

So, following up on the problems I had yesterday, I did a bit more research and tried a few things. To make a long story short, I deleted my “birthdays” calendar in iCal and re-synced, and everything was OK. I added the birthday calendar back in, synced again, and things are still OK. The next test, which I’ll probably do tonight, will be to sync Outlook on my PC again, then sync *that* back to MobileMe, and see if the problem returns. Hopefully not.

There’s a heck of a lot of talk on this problem in the MobileMe calendar support forum at Apple. One other thing I did, which didn’t seem to help, was to mess with the time zone settings in MobileMe. I’m back to the Eastern time zone, at least in the account page, but my calendar is showing everything in Mountain time, for some reason. I’m hoping that one will clear itself up.

WonderCon and Comic-Con

I won’t be going to WonderCon this year, but it looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. Drats. Hopefully, I’ll be able to go next year.

Meanwhile, I am hoping to go to San Diego Comic-Con again this year. Hotel reservations open up on March 19, which is about a month later than last year. I’m not sure why. The hotel situation last year was crazy. I’m hoping things will be a little easier to deal with this year, due to the recession. Not that I’m in any way happy about that, but if nothing else good comes out of all this economic turmoil, maybe, at least, it’ll be a little easier to get a hotel room in San Diego! Honestly, if the hotel situation is out of control, and I can’t get a good room at a decent rate, I might have to skip San Diego. I’ve been going for more than ten years now, but if I have to miss it, oh well.

syncing

I’ve been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There’s a default calendar in Outlook called “Calendar” that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I’m hoping this is a one-time thing, and I’m not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I’m also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see “Loading Events”, and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here’s hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I’m thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I’m going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it’s possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

.Net books

The instructor for my NYU .NET class listed three books on his syllabus. Programming C#, by Jesse Liberty, is the main book for the class. CLR Via C# by Jeffrey Richter is an optional book, as is Programming .NET Components, by Juval Lowy.
I bought all three of these books the old-fashioned way: from Amazon, in dead tree form. I have an older edition of the Liberty book, but I don’t have any edition of the other two, and I think they’ll come in handy.
None of these books is available on the Kindle, by the way, though the Liberty book is available as a DRM-free e-book directly from O’Reilly. Of course, the e-book costs $40, while the hard copy from Amazon is only $31.50. Oh, and the Juval Lowy book is available through the limited Safari subscription I get through ACM, though I didn’t figure that out until I’d bought the hard copy.
I actually haven’t bought any computer books in a while, so I was due to plunk down some money and (hopefully) spend some time reading. The last time I remember buying anything was after VS 2005 and .NET 2.0 came out.

random stuff

I’m spending the weekend just hanging out in the apartment, trying to get over a cold that I probably caught last weekend at NYCC, or possibly from someone at work. I started a new class at NYU this week, Advanced .NET Programming. It looks like it should be an interesting class. I don’t get a chance to delve into the more advanced .NET stuff often. When I’m doing .NET stuff, it’s usually pretty straightforward ASP.NET work. It was a little hard to get through the first class, since I was fighting this cold, and I really just wanted to get home and get some sleep. I’m hoping I’ll feel better by next Thursday, so I can maybe be a little more engaged with the class and a little less preoccupied with just trying to stay awake!

Kindle magazines

A couple of related stories came up this week, and have got me thinking about magazines. I currently read Newsweek on my Kindle, and I noticed an article at the New York Times about how Newsweek is planning a makeover to concentrate more on opinion and less on hard news, and is hoping to attract a smaller, but more affluent, audience. I’m wondering how any of the changes described in the article will affect the Kindle version. They mention that they’re looking to raise the subscription price, but I don’t know if they’d do that on the Kindle version or just the paper version. I’m currently paying $1.50 per month, which is pretty cheap, but has got to be largely profit for them (no printing or mailing costs). They mention an increasing emphasis on photography, which won’t really translate to the Kindle, nor will any changes in layout. Hopefully, the articles will continue to be worth reading. I’m a little worried about the idea that they might go too far into the realm of opinion; I’m usually not that interested in reading other people’s political opinions. Right now, for instance, I skip anything in Newsweek with George Will’s name on it, or Anna Quindlen’s. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with either of them; I’m just not that interested.

There’s a passing mention in the NYT article that Newsweek will be getting a little closer in tone to magazines like The New Yorker. By a bit of coincidence, The New Yorker has just become available on the Kindle. It’s $3 a month, twice the cost of Newsweek. The description mentions that it will “usually” include all articles, fiction, and poetry from the magazine, but will only include a “selection” of cartoons, not all of them. I really think the cartoons could translate week to the Kindle, so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t include them all. They’re all just single-panel black and white illustrations, generally without any fancy grey tones or anything like that. I’m tempted to subscribe, regardless, except that I know I’ll fall behind in reading it pretty quickly. Maybe if Newsweek drops off in value for me, I’ll switch to The New Yorker.

Meanwhile, The Economist is still not available for the Kindle.

Kindle 2

The Kindle 2 looks to be pretty nice, but I don’t think I’ll be getting one. There isn’t enough nifty new stuff to offset the high price. And there are actually a few things I don’t like about it: the non-removable battery, the lack of an SD slot, and the fact that the cover is no longer included, and has to be bought separately. I can understand why they made these changes, but I’d just as soon stick with my Kindle 1.