iPhone App Review: Aardvark Mobile

Aardvark Mobile is an iPhone app version of the Aardvark social networking project.

The idea behind Aardvark is that you might not be able to find everything you want to know on Google. With Aardvark you can ask a tagged question and it will be referred to another member of the Aardvark community that has tagged themselves as knowledgeable in the subjects that relate to your question.

In this reviewing this app, it has been difficult for me to distinguish clearly between the my impressions of the Aardvark service and the application itself. Therefore, I have included both.

On the face of it, Aardvark provides a pretty good service. The idea that you might be able to access human being specific local knowledge via the Internet is beguiling. In practice, however, I have had mixed results.

The first question I asked was whether or not there are many users in Cape Town, my home town. That question has remained unanswered since October 2009, which gives one the impression of screaming into the void.

Other test questions that I have asked received a better response. I got many helpful answers to the question of where one can fine a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi in my city.

On the other hand, more specific questions are often answered from a position of complete ignorance by other users. For example, I posed a question that was tagged with gardening and Cape Town about the bioluminescence of our local earthworms. Many Cape Town gardeners have encountered this phenomenon and information about it can easily be located using Google. From Aardvark I received two responses that openly mocked the question, and one confirmation that the phenomenon exists.

It may seem petty to bring this up but such a question is a good test of the knowledge that is available through the system. Either you know about glowing earthworms, or you don't. In this instance, two thirds of my answers came from users who obviously had no idea about the subject under discussion but decided to offer their two cents worth anyway. From this we must deduce that, either through defects in the tagging system or in the way in which questions are distributed to other users, the information received from Aardvark is unreliable at best.

I also found that, when answering questions, many of the original posters would follow on with a more detailed question, or questions about the answer I provided. It feels a bit like one is deluged with iPhone notification spam from Aardvark whenever you do anything. For busy people, this might not be ideal.

The app itself doesn't impress either. The opening screen lists all questions that you have asked or answered. The order, however, is confusing. Questions always seem to be listed in the order that they were posed, whereas ordering them by most recent activity seems more logical to me.

This is especially true considering the fact that Aardvark Mobile uses iPhone notifications to let you know when a question has been answered. This means that you have to unlock your phone, open Aardvark Mobile, and then hunt for the question that was referenced in the notification before opening it and seeing what was said.

Aardvark Mobile also provides a feature that allows you to delete old conversations from the list. This doesn't work properly. I found that I had to delete conversations twice before they disappeared.

The answering mechanism works quite well, and Aardvark also provides an interface to Facebook, which could be quite interesting. On the whole, though, my impressions were not favourable and I would not recommend this one unless you have a lot of time, and patience.

Aardvark Mobile gets two stars. One because that is the minimum rating, and another because the idea is interesting, even if the implementation is shoddy and the other users are irritating.

Christmas mail

The current year is nearing an end. Down here in the Southern Hemisphere where we are accustomed to long summer days of doing nothing from mid-December until well into January. Right now everybody is sending out their Christmas E-mails so that they reach their customers and suppliers before the businesses close for the break.

It is well known that Apple's Mail.app program includes a very nice collection of stationery that can be used when sending out greetings for many events. However, the stationery that is installed with Mail.app doesn't include anything with a Christmas feel.

Wouldn't it be nice to correct this for free? Well Ho! Ho! Ho! You can!

Googling around, I found two free Mail.app Christmas resources that were useful.

The first is Xmas Mail Stationery 1.0.2, which is really nice, but a devil to install. This is because the stationery file doesn't come packaged with a script. You need to place it into the correct folder location on your Mac. The instructions are clear but they warn that you might have to create some of the folders yourself. When they say that, they mean that you will be creating a heck of a lot of folders. Nevertheless, it isn't too taxing and is well worth the effort.

Xmas Mail Stationery 1.0.2 comprises a single layout that you will find in the custom section of your Mail.app stationery browser after you have created all of the folders and then quit and restarted Mail.app. There are three photo place-holders at the top and a very festive red background. Screen shots are available at the link I gave above. I've just used this stationery for the Aequitas Computer Systems holiday season message, and I am very happy with how it turned out.

Once you have this stationery, you might want some cool Christmas images to use in the photo place-holders. Have a look at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. They have some great stuff for you to use!

The second batch of free Christmas stationery that I found contains a large number of different layouts. It is also very neatly packaged and is installed by means of a simple script. It is the Christmas Mail Stationery from iPresentee.com. They also do similar packs for Easter, St Valentine's Day and Halloween.

I found the iPresentee stationery to be much simpler and less wildly Christmas than than the first product I tried. Some people won't like this, and I didn't feel that any layout was suitable for use as a corporate holiday greeting. However, the subtlety of these stationery layouts really does appeal to me for personal greetings. Because I celebrate a secular Christmas, I don't want my messages overwhelmed with too much symbolism. The subtlety and nuance of this stationery pack makes it perfect for the messages that I want to send to my nearest, and dearest.

Happy Holidays to you all, and I hope that this post is useful to you as you communicate with your nearest and dearest this season. Be safe, be merry and have a great time!

Google Chrome for OS X in beta, and it is fast!

As detailed here, Google Chrome has finally been released for the OS X platform as a beta.

I've been waiting a long time to dislike this browser, based on the assumption that Apple's own Safari must be more appropriate for the platform, and because of the hype that has bled over from the PC community. This is really the default position of Apple fan boys - that non-Apple products should be approached with the deepest suspicion, and I am unapologetic about numbering myself among the fan boys.

In the case of Google Chrome, I believe that this position was horribly wrong. Google Chrome is, in fact, so good that it took under an hour for me to set it as my default browser.

Can Web browsers really be so different? Well, Firefox and Safari most certainly are. Safari has always been my preferred choice because of the thumb-nailed startup page, cover flow history navigation and speed. Chrome also has the thumb-nails, but not as the default startup page. You need to set this yourself. This history navigation is far more mundane than Safari's cover flow feature. You basically get a list of sites displayed vertically on the page without previews. Chrome also differs in that it doesn't have a separate search bar like Firefox and Safari. Whether you are typing a search term or a URL, you put it right into the address bar.

Overall, Chrome looks really pretty and works well. I found that I could adapt to the small differences very quickly.

The big differences relate to speed.

As soon as I started trying Chrome out, I noticed that the browser seemed faster, and was tangibly smoother than Safari. Undoubtedly, some of this is related to perception. Chrome's user feedback is subtle, yet effective and this can have an impact on perceived performance. For this reason, I decided to do some benchmarking. The results were surprising!

For the benchmark, I used Futuremark's Peacekeeper. This basically tests the rendering performance of your browser in a variety of different ways. Here are the results:

Clearly, both Chrome and Safari leave Firefox in the dirt, but I was really surprised by the fact that Safari outperformed Chrome since my perception was quite the opposite.

Like all benchmarks, the final chart often doesn't tell the true story. Let us compare the detailed results for Chrome and Safari.

The "Complex graphics" section of this test relates to new HTML features that are not supported by all browsers. For this reason, they are excluded from the final test results, according to the documentation provided on the Peacekeeper site. Although this would close the gap between Chrome and Safari, my performance impressions were not based on complex graphics, so there must be some other significant difference.

The library of test results provided by Futuremark also highlight something else interesting. Chrome's performance is much more dependent on processor architecture than Safari's. Inspecting the following chart shows that Chrome is actually faster on some processors and slower on others. It could be that Safari beat Chrome on my machine because of my processor.

Chrome might therefore not be the best choice for all platforms but, on Intel Macs, it should always be competitive. Once again, however, processor differences should not have come into play in my perceptions of Chrome's performance because all tests were done on the same platform.

The answer probably lies in the way that Chrome handles threading. With Firefox and Safari, the browser runs as one program no matter how many tabs are opened. With Chrome, each tab runs as its own thread - almost like a separate program. This means that the execution of any Javascript on the page could be better managed and could explain the smoothness of operation and high performance that I noticed when browsing Javascript-heavy pages like Facebook and Google Reader.

There is also one other contributing factor: Chrome is really "light". By this I mean that it uses very few system resources compared to the other browsers under test. On my machine, the real numbers that from Activity Monitor for each browser displaying the Google home page from a clean start are shown below. All browsers were tested with plug-ins disabled, and signed into a Google account.

Safari:  9 threads, 70.9 Mb real memory, 216.6 Mb virtual memory

Chrome:  15 threads, 56.1 Mb real memory, 71.7 Mb virtual memory

Firefox:  14 threads, 62.5 Mb real memory, 41.4 Mb virtual memory

While Firefox, the slowest of the browsers, also has the smallest memory footprint, Chrome has a much smaller footprint than Safari, therefore requiring less system overhead to keep it running.

I believe that Chrome performs better in real terms, and not just in terms of rendering, because it has a superior threading model to other browsers, and also because it has a smaller memory footprint. I haven't tested Chrome with large numbers of tabs yet and it will be interesting to see if it scales well. For now, however, I am very happy because it appears that I am free of the stuttering Javascript execution that has bothered me since upgrading to the release version of Safari 4, but I will be standing by to update this post if Chrome shows any problems under sustained use.

No matter what the figures say, the measure of software is how it feels when we use it. To me, Chrome feels light and fast. It is responsive, pretty and fast. When you live in your browser, as I do, this makes the world of difference. Chrome has been a revelation, and I would suggest that everyone gives it a try.

iPhone App Review: ShopShop

Some iPhone apps are so natural to use that, after a few months, one forgets that they weren't shipped by Apple themselves with the phone. ShopShop, by Nikolaj Schumacher is one of those. I use it without thinking, and I use it virtually every day. Now I will have to explain why.

When you are in a shop, you want a shopping list that is clear and readable. If it is electronic, you might want to be able to check items off with ease as you find them and, because shop layouts can be complex, you might want to be able to re-order items easily. As you can see from the screenshot to the left of this text, ShopShop has all of this.

Items with a red line through them have been found. You can mark them as found very simply by tapping them. If you make a mistake you can get rid of the red line by tapping an item again.

The grey "list" icons to the right of each item are grab-handles (as it were) that allow you to re-order your list in a way that is intuitive and matches the iPhone interface conventions.

As you can see, the interface is attractive and functional, but more is yet to come. ShopShop has a number of useful features hiding behind those very few buttons.

A very powerful feature is the one that allows multiple shopping lists. This is great for days when you need to visit different shops, or to separate your personal and business-related shopping. You can scroll between lists with a sideways flick and you can select a different background colour for each list from a delightful palette of colours reminiscent of "post-it" notes.

When you add items to a shopping list, ShopShop will remember them in its internal database so that, when you need to add items to your list again, they will be selectable from a list that is pared down to likely options as you type. This feature is illustrated in our second screenshot.

If, at the end of your shopping excursion, you have not been able to purchase all of the items on your list, you can easily remove the checked off items and use those that remain as the basis for your next list. You can also E-mail your shopping lists from right within the ShopShop application.

I've been using this application for over a year and I love it. ShopShop has got exactly the right blend of functionality and simplicity that makes a mobile application really great. Another fantastic thing is that all of this is free. ShopShop costs nothing and carries no advertising. I've given it a 5-star vote in the App store, and would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone.

iPhone App Review: iDontSmoke

There are a large number of anti-smoking applications in the iTunes App Store. The one that really caught my eye was iDontSmoke by Ciderware. Applications that count how many cigarettes you have not smoked since quitting are very common. iDontSmoke extended this idea very well and was more than just a cigarette counter. Upsettingly, it seems that this app is no longer available in any of the app stores, although the Web site is still alive and well.

So, what are you missing out on?

Using a system of customizable goals, iDontSmoke allowed you to monitor your progress in giving up smoking in terms that you could relate to directly. It was possible to set up goals that were time, quantity or money based. For example, you could monitor your progress towards the goal of all nicotine having left your body in two days. Another goal could be saving enough money to buy a new MacBook, or simply not smoking 1ooo cigarettes.

The main display showed the number of cigarettes not smoked since quitting, the time without smoking, money saved, and your progress towards your next goal. Below this there was a counter showing the calculated number of smoking related deaths in the world since you quit, and health information about the hazards of tobacco.

I really hope that this application comes back at some point. It included all of the features that I would have wanted in an app that helps me quit smoking, but implemented in an innovative way that I had not considered when I was pondering the creation of just such a program. I have E-mailed the creators and will update this post when I hear from them.

Did iDontSmoke help me give up smoking? Well, no. However, it was the most richly informative of all similar applications that I tried and I can hardly blame the writers of the application for my own lack of willpower! I will be keeping this one around for my next attempt, and I would give it a full five stars out of five.

iTunes: Convert Podcasts to Music

George Hrab, in his Geologic Podcast, recently released a track through the mechanism of his podcast. Converting this to a music file in my iTunes was not an obvious process.

This problem is also discussed here, and a solution is given. I found a slightly different mechanism that worked for me.

After upgrading to iTunes 8 (currently 8.0.2), I found a menu item entitled Create AAC version when I right clicked on the item. Sure enough, selecting this menu option creates an AAC media file in the iTunes music category. Problem solved!

You should, however, be aware of the fact that there can be a loss of quality when you convert an iTunes track from one compressed format to another. There is more about this problem here. I didn't notice any sound degradation, but the podcasted MP3 format was not exceptional to start with.

iTunes Sound Quality

Well gee! The blog didn't quite turn out as I had intended.

Nevertheless, here are some tips on getting good sound quality from iTunes.

All of my results were obtained using an early 2007 MacBook (black), with the headphone jack feeding a set of Creative SBS 580 speakers. I am only using the main left and right speakers, as well as the subwoofer. This is because the headphone jack of the MacBook only produces a stereo signal, if you are using a standard 3.5mm jack connection. I believe that the same socket also provides an Dolby 5.1 optical output but, since I have never found the connecter to take advantage of this, I've never tested it.

For about a year, I've been using the Sound Enhancer, with Sound Check and the Equalizer turned off, as follows:

On an Apple machine, you can access this screen by pressing the Apple-comma key combination when you are in iTunes.

As it turns out, this was pretty stupid. The Sound Enhancer feature could very well improve things if you have really bad speakers but it can actually result in a degradation of "Fi", as it were, if your speakers are even slightly decent. You can read more about the technical details of what it does here, here and here. As you can see, it's not really suitable for serious listening.

Casting around a bit on the Internet, I came up with the following, much improved, audio settings:

First, I turned on the Equalizer. To do this, select the iTunes Window menu and then choose Equalizer.

I have set my iTunes to use the Rock preset in the equaliser*. Most of the music that I listen to is rock, my second most frequent choice is classical. The Classical preset is so similar to the Rock one that I am content to leave it on these settings permanently.

You can also assign equaliser presets to specific songs by applying a setting to the Options tab of each song. I haven't bothered with this just yet.

On my main iTunes Preferences screen, I've made the following changes:

As you can see, I've turned off Sound Enhancer and turned on Sound Check.

Apple gives a very good description of Sound Check here. Basically, this feature "normalises" the playback volume of your music files. This means that you will not have to keep adjusting the volume of your music because some songs are louder than others.

I find that Sound Check works very well for rock. I haven't tried it out with classical music yet, where it could be a problem because some movements in classical pieces are supposed to be softer than others. It should be simple to turn it off if I want to do any serious classical listening.

The result of these changes is a spectacular improvement in sound from my MacBook. I'll update this story with my findings after I have lived with the new settings for a while.

*: I'm South African, and we use proper English, so the feature is called Equalizer, but it is an example of an equaliser.