Last Friday, I stopped by the Palo Alto Apple store during my lunch hour for the iPhone 4s launch. I guess everyone else must have ordered the iPhone online because the line out the door was surprisingly short. It reached just barely past the corner.

The drink cart and loaner umbrellas kept everyone cool under the mid-day sun:

Post-it notes with personal messages in memory of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs covering the front window of the store:

So, I’ve been skipping iPhone generations: iPhone to iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4s. The leap from iPhone to iPhone 3GS was tremendous in that I could browse the internet while away from a Wi-Fi connection, provided that AT&T cooperated. The move from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4s feels more evolutionary than revolutionary.

What I Like

64 GB. I found the 32 GB to be too confining. Glad Apple bumped up the optional storage. Definitely worth paying for.

Retina Display. I’ve already seen the retina display on other people’s iPhone 4. Something nice to have, but not completely essential.

Siri. I can see how some people may find Siri to be conceptually useful. For the first few days, Siri was giving me the cold shoulder. I heard so many excuses–one after another–about Siri not being able to reach the network. I guess that Siri was not prepared to talk to a million people all at once.

Despite the marketing of Siri as an intelligent personal assistant that understands natural language, I haven’t had too much success getting it to do what I want. It takes some effort to get it to follow instructions correctly.

Too quite a few iterations to get the phrasing just right. Also, had to add Costco to my directory in order for Reminders to recognize the name / location. Siri only understands Costco if I enunciate. When I pronounce it as Cosco instead of Costco (with a strong T sound), Siri gets confused.

What I Don’t Like

Network. If your iPhone 3GS has a poor connection to the network, don’t expect the iPhone 4s to perform any miracles. The AT&T dead zones afflict the iPhone 4s just as harshly as the iPhone 3GS.

Settings. Lost all my This American Life settings when I switched to the iPhone 4s. On the 3GS, I had marked all the radio shows I had listened to. Now, I’m back to step 1 again.

First, the good news. When I visited China, all the hotels i stayed in had in-room broadband internet access. Now, the bad news. Unfortunately, only the hotel in Nanjing had in-room wireless internet access. For the rest, online access came in the form of an ethernet cable. If I was lugging around a MacBook Pro, I would have been set. Instead, I was trying to travel light with only an iPhone and iPad, both without ethernet ports. So, I was left trying to find free wireless access points wherever I could find them, which usually meant hotel lobbies. I was able to find a wireless access point in most hotel lobbies, but there were a few that just left me completely off-line. Next time I travel outside the United States, I’ll bring along my Apple Airport Express so I can have my own in-room wireless internet access. I won’t make this mistake again.

I just spent 24 hours with the “magical and revolutionary” iPad. What’s so magical and revolutionary about the iPad? First, start with the battery life. Absolutely amazing! The iPad is still going strong 24 hours after its last charge. After a full day of browsing the Internet, watching videos, and running apps, the battery is still 37% full. If I used the iPhone under similar conditions, I would have hit the 20% remaining battery warning message a long time ago.

Now, the best way to describe the initial iPad experience is to compare it to the HDTV transition a couple years ago. After purchasing an HDTV, you probably searched for HD programming from over-the-air, cable or satellite sources because an HDTV without HD programming provides an unsatisfactory experience. The same goes for the iPad. Sure, the iPad can run iPhone / iPod Touch apps, but viewing the app in a quarter of the iPad screen feels so limiting. Even if you upscale the iPhone app to fill the entire iPad screen by tapping the 2x button, it just appears underwhelming. All the images and text are seriously pixelated. I understand why you cannot upscale graphics, but how come the iPad has to display the text all pixelated as well? That’s not magical!

So, I headed off to the iTunes Store to find iPad apps. Maybe it’s still early because only a handful of my existing apps had an iPad version. For those iPhone developers stuck behind a long list competing apps, here’s your chance to leapfrog the competition because all these iPad owners are looking for new apps. I was also searching for some children’s picture books. I found nothing in iBooks. I was surprised by the limited selection. Instead, I picked up the iReading HD app, which features Chinese / English versions of four children’s stories. Now, if I can only have an ePub version of all the books currently sitting on my bookshelf, that will really be the iPad indispensable.

Today, a co-worker asked if I could open .pages document. Of course, I thought. Send me the document. After all. I have iWork installed on my MacBook Pro.

See. Even though we have just entered 2010, the latest version of iWork is iWork ’09. And, my version is iWork ’08. Surely, a version of iWork that was released the year before the current version can open all .pages documents.

Nope. In the perfect world, I could use an older version of Pages to open a .pages document created by a newer version of Pages. Granted, everything might not look perfect, but at least I will have some access to the content. Sort of like the way that users running Lynx can still access the Internet. Sure, you can’t waste time watching YouTube videos or playing Desktop Tower Defense, but you can read articles on the New York Times.

Yeah, it’s not a pretty sight, but at least it works. So, for a product with such low market share, how can IWork afford not to be minimally compatible between versions. I’ll take a stripped down text only viewable copy over not being able to access the document entirely. The only way around this mess is to install a 30 Day Free Trial of iWork ’09. Not going to buy it though since I’m sure iWork ’10 version is just around the corner.

My PowerBook G4 is on an unlucky streak. A few months ago, it developed a bulging battery problem. Since I always leave the PowerBook plugged in, I did not immediately notice the defective battery. What caught my attention was my sudden inability to close the PowerBook lid. After a bit of head scratching, I flipped the PowerBook over and discovered that the battery was bulging outwards such that it was pushing the keyboard upwards. Fortunately, a kind genius provided me with a complimentary battery. Since the PowerBook is the back-up computer, I left it in the computer bag after I returned home.

So, a few weeks ago, I needed to retrieve a file on the PowerBook. Unfortunately, whatever residual charge that existed on the new battery had vanished into the ether. I grabbed the power adapter and plugged it in. And, nothing happened. No glorious amber halo around the DC connector. Nada. Well, I was not expecting that.

No problem. I search around at work but discover that everyone has already upgraded to the new MacBook Pros with the MagSafe Power Adapter. That doesn’t help. So, the PowerBook sits in the computer bag some more until a friend shows up at my front door with the old style power adapter. Insert prongs into the wall. Insert DC connector into the PowerBook. The amber halo emerges telling me that the PowerBook still works, but the power adapter does not.

With that question answered, I look for a replacement power adapter. I am not thrilled by the $79.00 price at the Apple Store, nor its average 2-star rating. How does a power adapter go bad? There aren’t a lot of moving parts.

For no apparent reason, I switch the removable prongs between the good power adapter and bad power adapter and discover that my power adapter now works. Double mystery!! How does a prong go bad?

After some searching, I find a replacement prong lying around. I switch out the prong and the power adapter is fully functional again. Miracle! Fixed it all with existing extra parts on hand. I still do not understand how the removable prongs could go bad. I just stumbled on the solution through sheer dumb luck.

I finally came across an application that does not play well with Snow Leopard. The ScanSnap Manager application that came with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M can crash under certain circumstances. For example, if I scan a document and select the Scan to Folder option, I will consistently see this unpleasant message:

Fujitsu has a patch of sorts that disables the ScanSnap Manager and routes the scanned document to Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader if installed. I had installed the patch, but thought that Acrobat slowed down my workflow. So, I uninstalled the patch and tested ScanSnap Manager some more. My preferred solution is to select Scan to Print, then Save as PDF, which then prompts me for a filename. Better than the overhead of launching a separate application just to save a scanned file.

Because Snow Leopard does not install Rosetta by default, I’ve decided to abandon the last of my PowerPC applications: QuicKeys 2.1.1.

I’ve been a fan of BBEdit for a long time. At first, I relied heavily on QuicKeys to handle a lot of my keystroke automation within BBEdit:

1. Add pre-defined text / templates.
2. Insert HTML tags.
3. Run AppleScripts.

However, I’ve encountered various compatibility issues with QuicKeys over time as I upgraded to newer versions of Mac OS X or BBEdit. Instead of waiting around for a fix, I’ve slowly migrated many of my QuicKeys functions over to BBEdit. After I installed Snow Leopard, I finally pulled the last automated function away from QuicKeys.

Adding Predefined Text or a Template. If you have to enter the same text repetitively in multiple documents, create a clipping. To do this, select the text pattern and save it as a clipping. In BBEdit, select © > Save Selection as Clipping… For some reason, the Clippings menu looks like an inverted copyright sign. Then, select Window > Palettes > Clippings. This summons the Clippings window where you can highlight your clippings and assign a hot key to them via the Set Key button.

Inserting HTML Tags. While you can use the above method to insert HTML code, the better method is to take advantage of BBEdit’s built-in hot key (or menu key) functions. Select BBEdit > Preferences to summon the BBEdit Preferences window. Select Menus from the left-hand column of the BBEdit Preferences window. In the right-hand column, expand Markup by clicking on the arrow to its left so that it points downward. If you find the HTML tag that you want from the sub-menus, select it and click on the Set Key button to assign a hot key. This method works better than just inserting the HTML tags as text because it inserts the opening and closing tags in the right place.

Run AppleScripts. The last remaining function that I had assigned to QuicKeys was to run an AppleScript that handled capitalization. Yes, BBEdit has a Change Case function, but it did not work exactly like I wanted. If I asked BBEdit to Capitalize Words, I end up with something like this:

A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream

However, I prefer not to capitalize certain words, such as “in” and “the,” at least from the above text string. I have a bunch of other words that I do not ordinarily capitalize as well, such as “of”, “a” and “an.” While I love the Text Factory function, which is an easy way to run successive search and replace patterns, I can only run a Text Factory across an entire file and not an individual text selection. Hence, I created an AppleScript to handle this, which I had assigned to a QuicKeys hot key. Turns out that moving my existing script over to BBEdit was easier than I could imagine. I just had to drag the script to ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Scripts/. The script then magically appeared in the Script menu (which looks like a curled document). To assign a hot key to this script, select Window > Palettes > Scripts. Select your script and click on the Set Key button to assign a keystroke.

I rarely listen to the radio. When I do, I almost listen exclusively to KQED, which is not the best source for hearing new or old Chinese music. So, I pretty much depend on the Genius Just For You feature in iTunes to discover new music. iTunes seems to handle English artists and songs quite well; however, it experiences difficulties when dealing with Chinese artists and songs.

If I search through my own music for 王菲, iTunes will only return the songs by 王菲. If I search through the iTunes Store for 王菲, iTunes will return the songs by 王菲 as well as the ones by Faye Wong. Curiously, iTunes will return the songs from Zhi Mi Bu Hui from the artist Faye Wong, but not the ones from Wang Fei. So, when iTunes recommends Chinese songs, I have to make sure that I don’t already have their recommendation in my collection. And, this double-checking is not a straight forward process because I have to search through all permutations of a song’s or artist’s name: English, Pinyin, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Ugh…

The other issue that troubles me is that some song titles are obviously incorrect, like 桃花开, which was inartfully translated to Peach Bloddom Come Out. If this was Wikipedia, some of these errors would already be corrected.

My 60 day free trial of MobileMe will be expiring at the end of this month. MobileMe has worked well enough during the trial period, so I purchased a one year subscription last week. For me, the most important feature was the calendar synchronization. Secondly, I needed the ability to track lost iPhones and remotely wipe out data. So, I ordered MobileMe from Amazon last week for $69.99. For whatever reason, the price is higher this week. Here’s the confusing part. Amazon is currently selling MobileMe [OLD VERSION] for $75.00 and MobileMe Individual (Updated 2009 Version) for $95.00.

In reality, the only difference between the two products is that the $75.00 version is fulfilled by Amazon and the $95.00 is sold by Amazon. The OLD VERSION and UPDATED 2009 VERSION labels are meaningless because MobileMe is not a physical product. The MobileMe box contains a sheet of Apple stickers and a pamphlet with an activation code. No CD/DVD. You enter the activation code from either “version” and you get the same MobileMe.

I switched to a MacBook Pro 17 inch 2.8GHz back in June when the older MacBook Pro suffered the infamous black screen of death. During the file transfer, I basically allowed Migration Assistant to do its thing on auto-pilot. I did encounter some errors during the process, but never bothered deciphering the error log since all my files apparently made the jump.

I think I know what went wrong. I had some symbolic links (ln -s) set up on the older MacBook Pro. Migration Assistant doesn’t play well with symbolic links and didn’t re-create them on the new computer. So, while using Filemaker to output some data files, my script choked because the output path that relied on symbolic links was invalid. The other thing I discovered is that Make Alias, which works the same as a symbolic link in the point-and-click world, really isn’t exactly the same. Filemaker didn’t like paths that contain a Make Alias folder. When I recreated the symbolic link, the problems disappeared.