Free GPS for the iPhone and Android

I have no idea why I haven't seen this in reviews, press etc, but there is a totally free GPS for the iPhone and Android called Waze. They call it a "Social GPS" which means that its learning from all the users streets, direction of traffic, speed of traffic etc from the users, but in the US it has a good map to start. It speaks directions (even in the background on devices that support it), does the routing. You can flag traffic areas for other people to know about, report speed traps etc. So its a decent GPS with a social feature. I've been using it for a week and its good. 

Some notes: 

1) When in the foreground it eats a lot of battery updating maps etc. In the background it doesnt consume much

2) Whether you're routing or not if you run the app and quit it it keeps running and learning streets etc. They should have an option whether you want this to run this way or not. They do have some logic in there to shut it down if you're not moving for some period of time. I dont know if thats apple's task manager killing it or if its doing it itself, but either way I think the default setting should be to not run when you exit unless you're routing. Fortunately you can kill the process if you want: Double click to bring up the task switcher, hold your finger on the app you want to kill and press the x.

3) You earn points for driving new roads, miles driven, reporting incidents etc. Something to track for the daily commute.

I haven't tried any of the paid apps, but to me this is a decent enough GPS to travel with and the price is right :)

MobileMe Beta - Skip it

Apple recently came out with an improved MobileMe Calendar in beta. I gave it a shot and it still falls short. The motivation for even trying it was that only one of my Google Apps calendars was getting sync'd to my iPad and iPhone so I was missing my other calendars (I split out my home from my work calendars etc). The problem with MobileMe calendar is that it requires iCal which just plain stinks and has all sorts of notification and scheduling issues I wrote about previously. The issue with MobileMe service is that you can't export it to other services like Google Calendar -- although this is a Google calendar issue since they don't have the true concept of adding a WebDav account into Google calendar. 

After failing with MobileMe Beta, and after suffering through their crazy sync lags with no indication of whats going on etc, I searched around for a better solution and found a help page at google showing how to sync you other google calendars with my mobile devices. I tried that and it works great.

Now just use Fluid to make it an app for your desktop and you can keep ignoring iCal and have everything you need. It also handles Outlook invites well.

Apple's forgotten media

Sometimes Apple adds support for certain media types and then forgets about them. Audiobooks are an example of this. Looking in my iTunes library I have 162 items representing 28.6 days of listening amounting to 12.73GB (all mostly from Audible on the point system plan that saves a ton of money, the iTunes store can't compete price-wise in this category). Unlike Podcasts and Videos there is no "sync all unplayed books" option. When picking audiobooks to sync to your device you get the "all" or "selected audiobooks" option. The selected audiobooks option doesn't scale to handle a library of the size I have and you end up scrolling forever through an oddly sorted list. The reality is unless the guys close to the technology have a passion for the things you care about your particular tastes may get ignored.

The workaround for now is to make and sync a smart playlist with Media kind is Audiobook and Plays count of 0 (or for me an empty rating since I rate all my media and I can directly control rating while playcount can be quirky).

Hey Steve, will you start listening to audiobooks so people will pay attention to the interface?

Cloud vs Desktop

Very apropos to where I work, the discussion about phones has turned into one of cloud vs desktop. This is what it ultimately came down to to me and in today's world, cloud doesn't win when it comes to multimedia. Sure, a lot of the time you have good (well, with AT&T reasonable) access to the network most of the time and could stream music, view pictures/videos etc. But there are times when you don't have access like when you're on an airplane. Plus there's still the performance of accessing those large files remotely and more recently the move to cap bandwidth. I believe the cloud makes a lot of sense for many applications and solutions but I also believe you need an offline model that can handle local performance needs and the times when the cloud is momentarily disrupted. While the droid type phones don't implement a pure cloud model, their lack of multimedia management and desktop support shows a real lack of understanding of the times when cloud versus local make sense. 

Anyway, if you're following along you've realized I came to a conclusion that the iPhone is currently the only phone that fits my needs despite wishful thinking there was another choice (and that it would be on Verizon if there was one). If you know me, you'll know once I reach a conclusion i'm quick to move, so it should come to no surprise that i'm now an iPhone 4 (32G) owner. 

The buying experience was great for me. I bought it today (6-25) after yesterday's launch. Yesterday it was a total mob scene from what i've heard and the longest lines for any of the iPhones. Today I called over to the business unit (my company having purchased a lot of macs from them) and, despite the fact that they had officially sold out, they put a phone aside for me (evidently there's some secret inventory they can pull on in a pinch...). I walked over and had 2 people work with me through the buying process which took all of 10 minutes including activation and walked out with a working phone. Apples business unit and support for Macs in the business world needs some help, but I was impressed with the experience.

The desktop won this war. I wonder if Google or whatever new phone OS vendor appears in the future will figure out that cloud alone is not sufficient and will wage a better battle when its time for me to do my next upgrade?

Meanwhile, the iPhone 4 is to the iPhone 3G as a Ferrari is to a Yugo (yes i've spent time in both so I understand what i'm saying!)

AT&T and new data plans

At first I was pretty upset about the new AT&T data plans thinking it was going to really cost me a lot more, but my current unlimited data plan is $30. The new data plans are $25 for 2GB/month and $15 for 200MB/month. AT&T reports 98% of people are <200MB/month. I went back over the last 2 years of bills and there was only 1 month where I crossed over 200MB (hit 300MB that month). Looks like if you cross over you can buy another 200MB for $15 which would put you up to the cost of the current plan. So it doesn't look to me like this move will cost me more, in fact i'd go for the 200MB plan and save $15/month most months. But, of course, thats only if I stick with AT&T when my contract comes up on 7/11. We'll see.

The wrong response and a correction

While I was away recently I got a letter from Terminix (pest control) with the text below:

Regardless of what you may think of the economy etc this is the wrong thing to do for your customers. If the times are bad, they're bad for your customers too, don't make it worse for them.

So naturally I called them to cancel my account. I was paying $110 3 times a year with the proposed hike to $114 3 times a year. After a chat about the right way to treat customers i'm now on the $98 3 times a year plan. Yes, rather than making an extra $12 from a customer this year, they managed to anger a customer and have instead lost $36 per year from the customer. Sometimes doing nothing is better.

We can only change bad behaviors like this by making the right decisions as consumers.

Multitasking

This article on multitasking, basically texting etc while driving reminded me of a tool I wrote a while back while bored on a long flight. The tool analyzes the sent mailbox and tells me how many were sent from the iPhone versus a mac. This is what it says for my current gig:

Emails Sent: 9,241
iPhone Emails: 703 (7.61%)

I wouldn't want to say where I was when I sent those 700+ emails from the iPhone...

The code:

Keeping up with news

I mentioned recently that I use Google reader to read my RSS feeds. The hard part is keeping up with them all and looking for the interesting items. Google has a nice option to share items. You can subscribe to someone's shared items and, if you have similar tastes, let that other person do some filtering for you. When I run into items I find interesting I tag/share them. That feed is here. I've also added to my blog page (if you read without a RSS reader). I'm not a great filter since i'm intermittent with keeping up on technology news, but feel free to use me as a filter.

Disqus

Switching over to Disqus for comment system for the blog. Let me know
(those few that comment!) if it bugs you.

Call blocking

I have to say that i'm having a blast with Google Voice. No more
spammers and once I identify them from the "missed calls" log (since
no phones ring if they're not in my address book) I can block them so
they get the tone of disconnect. Love it, sweet sweet revenge on the
spammers.

Mint and Intuit

I wrote a while back on my blog why I chose Mint.com over Quicken
Online and I guess Intuit is paying attention. I'm glad to see them
recognizing this and picking up the cool team at Mint.

For the record, Quicken for the Mac STILL has not been updated and
since they don't have an Intel version wont even run on Snow Leopard.
I say fire the group and get some startup to start over, it will be
cheaper and better. Look at Mint.

Banks and Scanners

If you've been following my blog you know that I love my scanner
(although with Snow Leopard its somewhat crippled). The banks are onto
this whole scanning thing.

Bank of America switched over to allowing you to feed the checks
directly into the ATM without a deposit slip or envelope. The scanning
works pretty good. One problem, I have to press about 4 buttons per
check. It takes me 10x as long to deposit a batch of checks as it used
to. Sure, you used new cool technology, but you just wasted more of my
time. Give me back the old machine or let me bulk feed my deposit
checks. Technology gone wrong.

USAA on the other hand has taken a different approach. I guess they're
forced to be creative having branches only in Texas. Anyway, you get
checks to deposit, scan them or snap pictures with your iphone. Upload
them to USAA and then shred them. Seems crazy but the system works
great. No need to leave my house, nothing to mail, cost efficient. The
first time or two it takes some fiddling to know what they need in
terms of an image but once you get it its a breeze. Its the future.

Banks Stink

Banks just stink these days. While we're now saving them money by
using ATMs, they charge you fees up to $3 per transaction if you use
someone elses ATM. Meanwhile you're saving them money for a teller etc.

I was moving out of Citizens bank recently due to their crazy fee
structure. I asked them how to close my account. They said take all
the money out (get it to zero) and they'd auto-close after 7 days. I
proceeded to get the balance to zero. A few days later my silly
insurance company took out an automatic payment for $10.35, so I went
negative by that amount. I saw it quickly and immediately transferred
$10.35 back in. I figured I was set. Meanwhile Citizens charged me $39
for going negative and sent me snail mail over labor day weekend). I
was away and when I got back I was swamped so I didnt look at anything
for essentially 2 weeks. Since I remained negative (by the $39) for
more than a few days they charged me another $35. Then since more days
passed, another $35. They never called, and they were assessing fees
on their fees. They refused to credit me back any of the $109 when I
finally addressed it. I paid the money and filed a complaint with the
Better Business Bureau. That bank should not be in business.

I have a real issue with banks that want you to keep your money with
them but then they slowly drain your accounts with their fees. What a
scam.

Google Voice Rocks

I got a free Grand Dialer account early on when it came out. I never made much use of it though. Then it was bought by Google and still it sat unused for a long time. This week, though, I had a thought. 

A while back I wrote about home phones and cell phones. To summarize, even if I could cancel my landline and move the number to google (you currently cant do this) I need to keep a home phone connection for:

a) Our home business uses that number and its been known for 10+ years and its in publications etc

b) We have an ADT system and it needs to dial out

c) 911 is better with a landline

The problem, though, is that with 10+ years at the same number and as a landline we get spammers calling constantly. The result is that we never answer the phone and our voice mailbox fills up. Sometimes its important stuff but because of the fear of the spammers (yes, i've put the number on all the do not call lists I can find) we delay in getting back to people and we can't really be reached through that number.

So what was my Google voice thought? Forward my home number to my google voice number. From there use google voice to manage the traffic. You can upload your address book (new after the google acquisition) including the groups. Then on a per-group basis set the desired behavior. 

So here's my setup:

1) Home phone always forwards to google voice

2) We have 3 cell phones, one for me, one for the wife, and one for the barn

3) Depending on the address book group a person falls in it will ring 1, 2 or 3 of those phone numbers. 

4) Also depending on the group the person falls in it may prompt them for their name first so we can decide if we want the call (they hear ringing until we accept)

5) If they're in no groups, no phones ring. They get to leave a voicemail if they want (spammers dont, but if they did google has some answers for that)

6) If someone like my dad calls, all 3 phones ring, if someone picks it up and its for the other person you can transfer to the other cell phone with a google voice command. 

7) Voice mails come in email with (weak) transcriptions. You can listen to them from your email (even on the iPhone!) and you can forward them to each other. You can also manage them in the order you want to -- no more wading through 17 useless voice mails to get to the one you want. (the transcriptions are amusing though)

I turned all this on a couple days ago and its magic. We've received NO unwanted calls and we're now easier for people to reach. Call one number (our home #) and you'll reach who we want you to reach.

I'm not sure this is the use case Google Voice envisioned, a family google voice line, but as I did with my email, i'm using Google as an advanced spam filter and they're great at it.

I think about people with multiple houses that they travel between and think how this can solve their problems too. Forward those land lines to google and then use it to route to where you want when you want. With remote management through google you have total control.

Next steps? Perhaps change my cell # and route everyone to my google voice number or my home number. I'm getting a lot of spammers on the cell phone now. Problem with handing out the google voice number is that you start being really tied to google voice versus the solution it provides. Handing out the home number though could get messy if google voice ever went away. I'll ponder that a while before I change my cell #. 

My guess is that i'll just change it and hand out a google voice #, I like living on the edge :)

Quicken delayed -- again

Time to fire the team working on this one. Quicken is now slipped to February 2010. This is the ONLY non-Intel app I have. Since snow leopard will beat their release their app wont even run on the latest version of Apples OSX. They say they haven't given up on the Mac market but their actions say otherwise. 

How many engineering teams can slip that much and survive?

Someone, please make a decent finance app for OSX and put these jokers out of the mac market permanently!

iPhoto and Face and Place Recognition

With the latest iPhoto update Apple added two key new features: faces and places. In faces, iPhoto does a decent job of recognizing faces in pictures and then tries to match the patterns to find the people. You give it a few hints and it tries to find more of the same person. For years i've used keywords to identify key people so I can find pictures, say, with myself, my daughter and my wife in them. With faces in theory this is made more automatic. 

My experience though has been a little different. It did force me to tag more pictures and put some structure around the naming of pictures. The actual face similarity piece is about 50/50 in my experience. An odd side benefit I found is that I enjoyed the process and we actually had fun with the program guessing a completely wrong person for a given face. How could my friends face match my sister? Combine that with an OCD tendency and you can entertain yourself for hours matching faces and names. But in the long haul, given the lack of accuracy I don't think the addition added much value and you can't rely on it.

With Places, Apple goes through a lot of trouble to point out GPS camera support and that certainly works with the poor pictures that the iPhone takes. But if you go and stroll through Best Buy, the now defunct Circuit City, or Wal-Mart, how many GPS enabled cameras do you find on the shelves? Zero. None. So is this feature solely aimed at the poor pictures taken on camera phones? If so i'd argue that Apple and iPhoto isn't the place to store them but something more online, more accessible since these cheap shots have limited use and quality.

You can, after import, add location information to your pictures, and again thats another time sink for OCD people and it provides little long term photo management value.

Would I buy the update again knowing what I know now? Probably, I love iPhoto and want to have the latest updates. But if you're buying it for new features, think again.

Off topic - Disney

I don't usually write about non-technical things on this blog but
having just gotten off the phone with Disney Dining Reservations I
can't resist. The reservation agent was extremely helpful and the
process was as efficient as a human could have been. But my point was
I had to speak to someone. Now all the guide books etc recommend
booking dining spots for your stay in disney and doing that as far in
advance as disney allows so you can get into the places you want. We
like to eat and i'm a planner so we mapped it all out where/when then
I needed to book the 12 reservations. They have NO ONLINE SYSTEM.
Thats NUTS. Can you imagine the volume of calls, duration of calls and
human mistakes they're experiencing with a manual dining booking
system? This should not be a complex technical problem and they have
piles of "Imagineers" on staff. What are they thinking?

And yes, we're off to Disney in April. We promised the kid when she
was 5 we'd take her back when she was 10 (5 year decompression cycle).
With that booking experience complete all we have to do is turn up.

Quicken Online & Mint

Quicken Online's recent failing for me led me to go off looking for other solutions. I started looking for a desktop app to replace the ancient Quicken 2005 I have installed. After some searching and trials I found a lot of pretty poor apps that were either free or shareware. 

Eventually I found iBank which is trying to be the replacement for Quicken on the Mac. Its not free and one thing that really bugs me in app trials is where they limit you based on content versus time, especially when the content has no online effect. For example, I can see Evernote limiting you on content as they're paying for the space online to cover your free capacity. But with iBank all the data is local, there's no reason to limit the number of transactions. Just limit my trial period so I can really try the product. With the demo version they limit you to 75 transactions in a single account. I suppose for many that will be a sufficient trial, but my test was to load in 3 months worth of real data for all my accounts and see how it does. I hit the limit and couldnt do the test. Sure I could pay and then use the 30 day money back guarantee but thats a pain. Anyway, thats no way to do demos, give them the full product and then limit by time or online (i.e. stuff that costs the developer money) capacity ONLY. 

So now you're probably wondering, ok so its a lousy demo but how was the product otherwise? Its a decent desktop money management application. But in using it I came to a couple realizations:

1) Whether its online or offline you still have to categorize your downloaded transactions and fix payee names. None of the solutions out there get this right for you. And even though you can remember a classification to automatically rename VendorX or categorize it on import that generally doesnt work with real and electronic check payments as they all come in as "Check" and "Uncategorized". This means you have to do some data entry (even if its just drop downs). This means all services collect some data from you that has some value for you. Mint, Quicken Online and the offline apps. That means its harder to use more than one and it means its harder to jump between them.

2) With local financial management apps you have to find a place to save your data thats secure, back it up, etc. With the online apps you either trust them or not.

 

3) With the local apps you're limited in how fast they update the application and roll it out whereas the online ones evolve much more quickly. 

The above led me to back to the online side, I tried Mint.com again and found they had fixed my Citizens bank support. This means I really got to try Mint for the first time. 

Mint has some nice features like the automatic alerts, and even the "ways to save" area I found interesting and potentially useful (although their data was skewed). The interface was nice and clean. The had a nice investment section which Quicken Online doesnt have. They seemed to have some issues connecting to some of my financial institutions and I got intermittent results there.

Along the way having used Quicken Online for a few months and now using Mint I noticed one glaring difference. Quicken Online lets you enter transactions yourself, Mint doesnt. This means if you're trying to use one of these services as an electronic checkbook to know what your balance is etc, only Quicken Online meets that need (assuming it doesnt lose your transactions). 

I went back to Quicken Online and found they had, at least for now, fixed the lost transaction bug and my balances were correct once more so i'm back to using Quicken Online.

I think the local financial management apps are doomed and the competition by Mint and Quicken Online and others (I did look at Wesabe but wasnt interested in its approach) will be interesting. There are a few core use cases and features that must be there and be reliable for the service to win. Neither Mint nor Quicken Online has the perfect set yet. Quicken needs more reliability and investments (eating into their desktop products which is probably why it isnt there). Mint needs more reliability and the ability to enter your own transactions. 

Quicken Again (and Happy New Year)

Hi folks, Happy New Year.

Now onto my rant:

A while back I mentioned that Quicken would finally be the last product to update for the Intel macs and the target date was the fall of 2008. Now it seems they've pushed that out to the Summer of 2009. This just adds fuel to the fire. Not only are they the last to update, but they can't hit their own dates. They've proven not to care about the Mac market. I think its time for the mac market to speak back by not buying the product when (IF) it comes out.

I also mentioned that I moved to Quicken online and so far so good. Well it turns out that along with some annoying security issues related to my bank and some unsupported banks, they also miss account transactions which falsely makes you think you're about to go into overdraft. This is what they have to say on the matter:

"Some Quicken Online customers may find that some Account Activity transactions are missing. We have identified the issue and are working on a release to resolve this soon"

I ask you, what good is an online financial tracking service that misses random transactions? None at all, its useless. In this case 99% isn't good enough. I hope the Quicken people are paying attention. 

Perhaps Intuit should stick to Quickbooks and drop its personal finance stuff altogether. They seem to have their act more together there (yes, I use quickbooks 2009 on the mac for a business).

Rob

Google/SaaS

Recently I had the opportunity for some business related reasons as well as for some personal related reasons to try to collaborate on some word processing and spreadsheet documents. I figured this was a good opportunity to try the whole Software as a Service (SaaS) model and started using the Google Docs. 

I found the word processor easy to use but with Safari it had some odd behaviors at times in rendering the page and some basic copy/paste operations. Generally it worked and I liked the auto-save and accessible anywhere model. As you'd expect the word processor is severely stripped down from a MS Word or Apple Pages but for basic documents its ok. 

For the spreadsheet I was surprised at how well it worked given the more advanced problems you run into with rows and columns, formula and spreadsheet tabs. To do things like graphing you need to get plug-ins and I didn't have a good experience with that. I was was just looking to do a basic line graph over time and it was a real pain. But again for basic spreadsheet functions it worked well and again I could get at  it anywhere.

Along the way I also found a nice hack in that if you import a protected Excel spreadsheet into Google Docs it essentially unprotects it for you and you can re-export as Excel. I think Microsoft should rename that "Protect from idiots" since there are so many ways to remove spreadsheet protection.

 

After I had some content I tried to collaborate with others and thats where SaaS failed for me. I ran into a number of issues:

1) Just accessing the document as I sent the share invite seemed to be a problem for ALL of the people I tried to share with. The interface is simple, pick a document, choose share and then enter an email address or addresses. People get an invite with a link etc. Clinking the link lets them see the document (in the case of spreadsheets at least not all of the document) but they can't edit. 

2) To edit/collaborate they need a google account. Despite what Google thinks, not everyone has (or wants) a google account. I can understand why they needed to link the docs in somewhere but this is asking people to create a new identity etc and adds a barrier to them using it.

3) For those that got past the two above there were problems with the interface oddities, understanding the new applications and as we tried to collaborate we found the tools weak in the areas of comments, suggested changes, side by side versions etc. Ultimately we gave up. 

So to me the current SaaS offering from google with Google Docs is appropriate for single user document editing when you need access anywhere and assuming you have a google ID and are willing to learn new tools. If you need to collaborate i'd look elsewhere. 

With the personal need I fell back to the tried and true method of email Excel spreadsheets around. For the business related need i'm currently using DropBox. More to come on that experience.