Books on a Phone; Bye Bye, Stanza; Hello, Kobo!
PART I: BOOKS ON A PHONE
I use my iPhone heavily for reading books. It may sound strange and the general perception of straining your eyes may lead you to think of this as an unhealthy practice. However, on closer examination you would realise that text size on most phones’ eBook readers is scalable, which means that you can resize the font to any level you’re comfortable with. Another reason why people are shy to jump into this domain is because they believe that most phones’ screens are too small to practically read books. In fact, this isn’t the case at all! Most of today’s smartphones are perfect for reading. Think about it; when you’re reading a physical book, your window of attention doesn’t encapsulate the entire page. It doesn’t even cover half the page in most cases. The window of attention is just a tiny block covering four to six words sideways and two to three lines vertically. In this way, a phone’s screen is a very suitable medium to display Books. A third argument people pose against reading eBooks is the concept of the phone emitting harmful rays that damage the eyes. Well, scientific research has shown that this is just a cautionary tale and has no basis to prove its validity. Also, reading in dim light also doesn’t cause any damage to the eyes. Often, my parents tell me to switch on the lights when I’m using my phone in the dark. When I tell them that the light’s purpose is to bounce off non-luminescent objects so that our eyes can perceive them and that phone-screens produce their own light, they don’t seem convinced and remain worried 
.
Well, coming back to reading eBooks on one’s phone. If you’re somehow taken by the idea of switching your reading life over to the electronic world, but are inhibited from taking the next step because you don’t have an iPhone or a fancy Android phone, don’t worry! Before I had the iPhone, I had the Sony Ericsson K810i. This phone supports Java applications. There’s a PC application called TequilaCat, which allows you to convert text/doc/pdf files into mini Java apps. You can customise these JARs to the font size, font colour, screen colour and other formatting of your choice. It’s such a wonderful application that I have read at least five books on my K810i without any problems at all. TequilaCat books will work on most phones that support Java apps.
PART II: BYE BYE, STANZA
Last night, I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 5. In the process, I lost the untethered jailbreak that I’d been clinging on to since iOS 4.2.1. I didn’t have much to regret, however, since most of the jailbreak features I’d been using on 4.2.1 have now been covered by iOS 5, out of which, notifications is the most important.
However, one thing hit me like a punch to the jaw by Iron Mike: Stanza, my favourite eBook reader no longer worked. On launching, I got an unwelcoming Unhandled Exception popup, which kept reappearing every time I touched Continue. If you haven’t heard of Stanza, understand that it is a beauty of an app. In my opinion, iBooks, Apple’s own eBook reader is a feature-lacking skeuomorph that doesn’t do any justice to book-lovers. It may have a fancy page-turn effect for aesthetics, but what else does it have? The margins on iBooks are too wide and leave very little space for legible text. The page turn effect is irritating to initiate and is very distracting. Moreover, there is no option to turn it off. Stanza, on the other hand, allows to you to choose between a page turn effect, a slide effect (which is what I had used) and no effect at all. It lets you categorise books based on title and author. It allows you to edit book titles, modify author names and download book covers from within the app. Not only this, but it also lets you transfer your ePubs via iTunes file sharing. iBooks, however, relies on the clunky sync-through-iTunes method. It ties you down to one computer. It’s pre-historic and over-promoted. Stanza did everything to satisfy my reading needs. I was not at all prepared for the shock I would receive after the iOS 5 update.
Frantically, I Googled “Stanza iOS 5 Unhandled Exception” and started racing through forum posts to find some answer. Any little fix! There was none. I found out that the developer who created Stanza had been hired a while ago by Amazon – makers of the Kindle eBook reader. Now, Kindle already has an iPhone app and it could have been a conflict of interest situation for the developer to have continued working on Stanza. In effect, this means that Stanza may never recover. However, many forum users pointed out that there’s another app called BlueFire. Although this app isn’t as good as Stanza in terms of editing titles and changing their book-covers, it does the basic job, at least better than iBooks. However, I didn’t like BlueFire enough to make it my prime Reading app. The page sliding was clunky and uncomfortable, the menu was too distracting and the settings were not extensive enough. I needed something that would fill the gap between Bluefire and Stanza.
PART III: HELLO, KOBO!
Kobo. Kobo is an eBook reader made by Toronto based Kobo Inc. Kobo is an anagram of Book. Very pretty. Kobo, however isn’t nonsense. I had heard of the app before, but had never bothered to download it since I had Stanza to do my bidding. Last night, I reached out to this neglected child after the first born had abandoned me . Kobo has proved to be an exceptional eReader app. I must confess that it’s better looking than Stanza. It’s got a good choice of settings where I can change the font size and brightness. It lets me flip to night-mode (light text on a dark background) and a sepia background. In addition to that, you have a choice of four fonts. The text renders beautifully and the app hasn’t crashed (yet!) However, the thing that I like most about this app is the vertical scrolling ability! I can’t tell you how badly I wanted this. Every other eBook reader has a somehow inexplicable page-turn concept, where after finishing a block of text on the screen, you have to swipe horizontally to encounter another block. On a psychological level, this didn’t feel very satisfying and it fragmented my reading experience. I had previously read many books on my computer. There, the natural tendency for me was to scroll vertically. Why would I ever want to flip horizontally across unsatisfying chunks of text? The good people at Kobo somehow read my mind and their app lets you scroll vertically for the entirety of a whole chapter, after which, you touch the > button to go to the next chapter and start the process all over again.
One shortcoming I noticed in Kobo was the inability to search books. Yes. You can’t do a random search via text. You have to scroll through your book-list. You can’t sort by author and you most definitely can’t edit book-info and author-info. Downloading book covers is out of the question. However, as I have mentioned above, I was looking for something that filled the gap between BlueFire and Stanza. Had Kobo been as good as Stanza, it would’ve been number one since the beginning, as it scores better in the looks department. However, now that big brother is ill, little brother can have its moment in the sun. Let’s hope the developers see this as an opportunity and enhance the app. So, until the next big thing comes out, Kobo is my eBook app of choice, and it may even continue to be so because of its vertical scrolling feature.
If you have tried any of these apps or know about a better eBook app, please do share your experience. Also, do let me know what you feel about reading eBooks in general. Do you find reading eBooks emotionally satisfying? Or do you prefer the charm of flipping pages while sipping on a coffee, never worrying about running out of battery?
Because He Was There…
Because He Was There: My Video Tribute to Steve Jobs.
This video is a walk in time, showing each era’s contemporary products that could have stayed, had Apple not come up with something “insanely great”.
Because Steve was there, so many of today’s wonderful electronic devices and software applications came to be.
It’s hard to imagine what the world would have been like had he not been there.
Almost Iced Americano
I have access to ice-cubes at work. I use them to prepare Iced Americano (well, something resembling it, at least!), which makes a cool summer drink. I fill one cup till the top with ice cubes, and then pour on it one-and-a-half hot espresso shots taken from the coffee-machine (without diluting, as done with regular Americano). In about 30 seconds, the drink is ice-cold.
Google+: Not Falling Flat on its Face
Yes. As many people have observed and commented, Google+ lacks a solid differentiator that can drive people away from Facebook. The circles concept – although new – isn’t strong enough to make people abandon Facebook in favour of Google+. However, seeing the past few weeks’ trends, Google+ members are actively using the product.
Remember the time when Google Wave launched with an invite-based registration? The demand for invites was so much as to create a market for them on eBay, with invites selling for sky-high prices. After the crowd had joined in, though, everything fizzled out. People couldn’t understand how the product worked, or rather how they could make it work. The hype around Google+ is in many ways similar to that that was around Google Wave. The results, however, should be different this time.
First, we must not suppose that Google+’s immediate motive is to drive people away from Facebook. Rather, Google wants people to adopt their platform and stick around for a while. Facebook can be dealt with a little later. With such a perception, we can get a clearer understanding of why Google+ is not going to be as big a catastrophe as many are predicting it may be.
A big difference between Google Wave/Buzz and Google+ is that this time, people do understand how Google+ works. They are familiar with the platform. In my opinion, Google’s lazy copy-pasting from Facebook wasn’t a dumb move. It was a smart one. Had they designed a radically new interface just to be different from the Big-F, they might have been faced with a Wave-like scenario again. On parallel lines, Microsoft has been repetitively accused of copying the Macintosh’s interface into its Windows operating system. (Remember when New York Times’ David Pogue released a funny video laced with sarcasm that explained why Windows Vista did not steal ideas from Mac OS X?). Yet, people have readily embraced Windows, which is currently the market-leader in desktop operating systems. So, people have a basic idea of the surroundings and are not going to whine about the product’s usability. However, a familiar environment is not exactly an indicator of an application’s sustainability. Why, then are those people going to stick around and actually use Google+ for more than say, two weeks?
“Stagnation?”, you ask? “People need Change?”, you ask? “Is that all you could come up with?”, you ask? “Yes”, I reply. Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that Google+ will take the baton from an aging Facebook and run away miles ahead. Making such a prediction at this stage would be taking a shot in the dark. Judging by people’s Google+ posts, however, I can say that many members are actually finding the experience pleasant and that they are willing to stay. With one basic need satisfied (a familiar environment) another factor kicks in: a sparser and more comfortable community. Right now, most members of Google+ are apparently below 35. They’ve landed up there though invites from their actual friends. Not some distant-college-guy-they’ve-seen-twice-in-four-years or some-long-lost-uncle-who-lives-2000-miles-away-and-last-saw-you-when-you-were-a-baby. The current Google+ users are young and they’re away from their parents/uncles/aunts/grandparents. They’re in a comfy couch. In contrast, people on Facebook have so many friends they’re really not really friends with. They’re more acquaintances than friends (Yes; Circles let you differentiate between the two, but that point is not relevant at this nascent stage). In general, people have a stronger desire to share and express whenever they’re among familiar company as opposed to when they’re always on the podium, speaking out to a large, mostly unknown audience. At present, the Facebook community has a lesser sense of being closely-knit. Again, in general, people’s posts and comments get actively noticed more when those comments are posted in a relevant or in a smaller, more familiar world. A post by me will be certainly clicked-on, if not read, by people whom I regularly interact with. On Facebook, however, people currently just glance past their news-feeds. Most of the posts look like trash. They look like trash not because they are bad in quality, but because they have been posted in a lazy manner by people we don’t closely relate with. Most Facebook users would skip past a post about a unique method to brew a cup of coffee, if it is published as a broadcast (in the wild). If, however, it is published in a forum dedicated to coffee lovers, many more members would be curious-enough to read that post. An indicator of the prevalence of such a feeling is the success of smaller, more targeted social networks such as Ravelry – a community for knitters. So far, Google+ is in a stage where your public posts are not considered to be in the wild, since your audience consists of people you’re more familiar with. With that, we can establish that overcrowding on social networks may lead to stagnation. “But surely”, you may ask, “once the invite-based system ends, all the parents/grandparents/uncles/have-seen-your-face-once-befores are going to come flooding into my circles. What then?”. Well, that’s beside the point. By then, the sparser and more familiar community would have already sown the seeds of fixation to Google+. People would already have gotten into the zone by the time the oldies kick in. In my opinion, Google+ should delay its public-launch for a while and should continue with the invite-only system for longer. This will help maintain an aura of exclusivity for long enough to get people addicted to the product.
If Google+ maintains this position, we may soon see people maintaining two active profiles in parallel – one on Facebook and another on Google+. Of course, Google will have to come up with a differentiator to gain an edge in the long run. After a brief honeymoon period, Facebook will be a big threat. Possibly, we may also see a tennis match between both parties, where one will try to gain an upper hand by pulling a shinier rabbit out of its hat each time the other pulls out its own. A new and cool feature from Google+ that Facebook won’t be able to copy (patents, anyone?) may prove to be the latter’s coup de grâce. It is still early to predict whether Google+ will be able to gain a significant edge over Facebook once the former has run the distance; however, given the premise of sound strategy, it will certainly not pop out as soon as its critics are predicting that it will.
PART 1 OF SIGNAL RECEIVED ON 19 JUNE 2011 FROM THE PROXIMITY OF NGC 3329
>>>>BEGIN>>STREAM>>06222011001520>>REDIR>>TERM1>>HERMEVER_17_DESSEMBER_3037
To
The Recipient of this Message
Wednesday, 17 December 3037
Dear Recipient
If you have successfully received and deciphered this message, you may be surprised to know that it has been transmitted not just from very far away in space, but also from very far away in time. Although it is highly unlikely that it is 1901-1907 (Gregorian: 1894- 1900, Hijri: 1311-1317, Hebrew: 5654-5660, Indian Standard: 1816-1822) from your frame of reference, it is theoretically possible for it to be as early as this when you read our message (This is because electromagnetic wave transmission and reception was still in its infancy during this period).
As we compose this message, we are in the year 3037 or approximately 3041 on the Gregorian calendar, 2494 on the Islamic Hijri, 6801 on the Hebrew calendar and 2963 on the Indian Standard Calendar. If you have received this message in its entirety, you may refer to the index where we explain how to convert from our calendar to all those from your times.
To begin with, let us clear a most obvious doubt from your mind. You’re probably asking yourself, “This is a practical joke, is it not”? Well, depending on the era in which you have received our message, you’ll either easily digest the fact that this message is indeed real, or shall dismiss it as a prank played by your neighbour. You see, ever since humans started capturing electromagnetic signals from outer-space, they have on several occasions received some of very high intensities: signals that seem to have come from the most distant reaches of the observable-universe. In the early days of experiments on radio signal-detection, many people proposed that these signals might have been transmitted by intelligent alien life. Unfortunately, all recorded attempts to decipher those signals were unsuccessful. The fact, however, is that they are indeed signs of intelligent life, but not alien! These are signals that have been transmitted across temporal barriers; and you, the reader / listener / sensor are someone who has the privilege of consuming them. If you happen to live in anywhere from the 20th to the 25th century (our calendar), you may have a progressively harder time believing that this is not a prank. The reason for this is simple: If you exist in the earliest days of radio transmission, there is a very little chance that many people around you own equipment sophisticated enough to transmit such a message. If you’re from a more modern age (say 500 to 600 years from the time this message is written), you may think that your neighbour’s child is playing with his or her new toy. However, if you’re on or above the trough defined by the era when practical time-travel became understandable, you may be able to digest this fact more easily since you know it is possible to transmit electromagnetic waves on a retrograde curve. If it is just yesterday and you are but me reading this message, then congratulate yourself. Negative time-transmission of signals has been tested practically for the first time in history by you tomorrow! A graph showing the ease-of-belief of this message (on a scale of 0 to 10) is shown below. Since nobody in our recorded history has ever received such a message, the data used to create the graph is hypothetical. However, it strongly models several parallel, executed actions.
From 2221 onwards, it became increasingly easy to transmit high-power signals into the deepest reaches of the universe and to reflect those signals in near-totality by aiming them at large parabolic grau-fields (a distortion in the fabric of space). Also, from 2281 onwards, there was a sharp increase in knowledge about the practicality of time-travel; and in 2729, a solid treatise was published that discussed sending information back in time. Of course, from then onwards, it should have become much easier to believe in a message like this.
You may be wondering whether this could be a classic time-paradox, and that you’re holding in your hands/screens/extra-retinal screens a Letter that Nobody Wrote. To understand this situation, consider this: You find this message and decide to store it for posterity. Stored for posterity, indeed; it ends up in our hands eons later, and we decide to copy it word-for-word and transmit it back in time, when you find it again! The question that arises is who had written this message in the first place! Let us assure you that such a situation can never arise. Time-travel, you see, is like retracing a curve drawn on a plastic film with a very fine ball-point pen. No matter how hard you try, you can never retrace the exact path you initially drew. You always end up drawing multiple curves. So, should matter or information travel back in time, the path it is going to take will be ever so slightly different from the path it originally took to reach its present. This ensures that there is always a starting point and that no paradox occurs. It is entirely possible that the sequences of events that you have experienced as history are different from those that we have, and that your future doesn’t materialise to be the present that is ours. It is generally accepted that these timelines diverge, or flare out. They look a bit like this:
If you exist in the time period denoted by point P and the timeline that you’ve experienced throughout your lifetime is x (the black one), then travelling back in time may take you along a timeline called y (coloured red). Notice the divergence of y from x as we go further back in time. This means that the further you travel backward or forward in time, the more different will be the world where you’ll end up, from where your timeline’s history or future should have taken or will take you. Several other divergence points are illustrated. The point R further diverges from the timeline y into the timeline z. Also, travelling forward in time on the timeline x, it is possible to diverge at a point S into the timeline w (green). The most obvious outcome of this result is that if you choose to record this message and manage to preserve and popularise it enough by the year 3037, possibly nobody will compose it as an original thought and transmit it back in time.
Before going further, please be aware that this message has probably not been composed in the language you’re reading it in. Over the years, we have accumulated a vast repository of most ancient languages and have developed a sophisticated neural algorithm that can simultaneously translate a 10007 word message into 9767 languages in one second. We have encoded this message in all modern and ancient languages that we know. If your timeline doesn’t flare out much from ours, then you may be able to understand this message very easily. We know that the odds of existing in the perfect timeline, catching this signal at the perfect time and happening to decode it into the very language you understand are very low, but we have tried our best to transmit it in all languages and at very high intensities across very closely spaced temporal bands. Also, to ensure enough redundancy, we shall transmit at least 100007 copies of this message. This effectively means that the biggest gaps between the occurrences of this message’s signals will be close to 3 to 5 months at any time after the year 1907. If this message ends abruptly (which is highly possible), please keep trying. Given that you’ve managed to decode it once, you’re now better poised to receive and translate it again. Also, it should be quite obvious that you probably may not receive the fragments of this message in the correct sequence of transmission.
Premises stated; it is time to tell you who we are and why we are doing this. We are a team of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and historians working for a private organisation called Tydyätr. The organization was founded in 3017 solely to make time-travel practical and affordable. If we manage to transmit this message back in time, we will have covered the first milestone of our long journey: Transferring information retroactively. We live on a moitié of the Earth called Ferligt. Our moitié specializes in science, technology and the arts. The other moitié, which complements us by providing commercial and defensive services, is known as Karŷ. The government of the Earth functions from the border state of Ke<<SIGNAL<<INTERRUPTED<<TERMINATING<<STREAM<<06222011001755<<<<
(We’ll keep scanning for other signals)
Depth of Knowledge Vs Breadth of Knowledge
You can understand what the premise is by just reading the title of the post. So here’s an infographic showing which combination of knowledge-depth and knowledge-breadth is known as what (names imagined by me)!
The Daddy of the Mac
[UPDATE, 6/10/2011: Steve Jobs passed away on 5th October 2011]
The picture above in itself is iconic. It shows some of the most influential entrepreneurs of the internet age, dining with US President Barack Obama, toasting to the digital future that they’ve partly helped to shape. On the night of 17 February, 2011; Barack Obama, during a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, hosted a dinner for the country’s top tech CEOs. The guest-list included Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the iDude himself – Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs. These are the people who carry the internet-age’s torches in their hands, leading the pack from the front. This fact itself makes one want to print this photo and preserve it in a scrapbook. However, what this photograph is being increasingly noted for is something else. Seated to Obama’s left is a frail gentleman dressed in black shirt that seems a size too big for him. Although we can only see him from the back, his forearm looks like it could use pounds of flesh. If the media is to be believed, Apple CEO and co-founder Steven Paul Jobs may have as little as six weeks to live.
This is what you get on Google Suggest when you search for “Steve Jobs”
In January this year, Steve Jobs took a medical leave of absence to focus on his health. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, and has since undergone a liver transplant in 2009. A few days ago, The National Enquirer – a US tabloid that prints what to sane minds appears speculative nonsense – stated that Steve Jobs may only have six more weeks until he meets his maker. The Enquirer’s analysis was based on following Jobs around for an entire day, taking pictures of him and then handing them over to the two Doctors Gabe Mirkin and Samuel Jacobson to analyse and comment on. None of the doctors are oncologists or have met Steve Jobs personally [SOURCE]. Although most – including me – would be quick to dismiss the Enquirer’s report as trashy speculation; many people are genuinely worried that there could be a hint of truth in this report.
Steve Jobs is a man who has created magic partly with his two hands and mainly with his hundred billion brain-cells. He founded the company in 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The rest, as they say, is history. Under Jobs’ dictatorship leadership, Apple created products that weren’t just state-of-the-art, but were eons ahead of anything that people had ever seen. In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh – a computer like none other; a computer that cast the template for how a personal computer should be. After Jobs was fired in a boardroom coup in 1985, Apple entered a slump-age. They briefly made innovative products like the PowerBook, which set the standards for the design layout of the modern laptop; however they soon ran out of ideas and were termed a dying company. The company’s rise to profitability was seen soon after Jobs was re-hired in 1996. As soon as he became the CEO, he tightened the leash on the company and made sure that they products they made were top-notch and utterly desirable. Using sharp marketing, creative design and clever business strategy, Apple brought to us some of the toys that consist of many a kid’s and adults’ festival-dreams. The iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad are some of the objects that redefined how we use digital technology. All of this has been the handiwork of one man – Steve Jobs.
His charisma is incomparable. It is under his leadership that Apple has entered the Golden Age it is in. The man knows how to sell what he makes, and he does it well. Blame Apple all you want for being too secretive, too patent-hungry, too greedy and too restrictive. Tell Steve Jobs all you want that his cell phone doesn’t even have FM radio and can’t send files on Blutooth; but the truth is that you can’t stop drooling when a shiny iToy is dangled in front of your face. You want it, and you want it bad. The polish and refinement that is put into iProducts is what gives them the edge. Their fine attention to detail and an uncompromising attitude towards quality shows well in the gadgets they make. Who calls it an MP3-player? All portable music players are called iPods, whether they’re made by Apple or not. The iPhone was followed by the blackberry-touch, Android-based touch phones and Windows Phone 7 – based touch phones. The iPad was quickly followed by a worried Samsung with their Galaxy Tab. HP and Dell joined in the panic soon by making the Dreamscreen and the Streak. If Apple will make a car, they’ll redefine it, and everyone else will be quick to copy them. You can thank Steve Jobs for that.
Some would call me a (very devout) fanboy after reading the last paragraph. I’m not. The only Apple products I possess are an iPhone 3Gs and a now defunct iPod nano 4G. Like most people, I’ve cursed Apple for their restrictive policies, I’ve vented my frustration at the fact that I can’t do my own battery-removal, and at times, I’ve regretted the lack of FM in my cell phone. However, the last paragraph doesn’t lie. It tells the tale as it is. You’ll still drool when you see the new iPhone 5 if it launches this summer.
It’d be a sad and abrupt end to the Golden Age of Apple if the S-man passes away too soon. Again, like most people, I don’t believe in a single word the Enquirer has printed based on their long-distance diagnosis. They may have swayed the AAPL stock a bit, but that should be it. I hope Steve Jobs recovers soon and comes back to running the show at Apple for at least another ten years. After all, who would want to see a presidential toast to the digital future burn to a bitter-crisp?
