Weighing in on Electronic Book Readers

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There is a lot of hubbub on the internet lately about these document reader devices. Sony has one and now Amazaon is pushing its “Kindle” which also is supposed to do the trick. The idea behind them is to replace your books with an electronic device that displays as well as the printed page. So you can be sitting on your couch or in a coffee shop and read newspapers, blogs, books, or anything else that strikes your fancy. In principle, I think this is a great idea. However, I don’t think the existing products are there yet. Let me explain.
I like books. I like their heft. I like the texture of the paper under my fingers. I like rifling through a book with my thumb to find a particular passage. But when I read a book, I don’t just “read” it. For me it is a more interactive process. I put checks in margins, underline passages, dog ear pages, draw lines and arrows in the margin, and tear pages out of magazines. I even sometimes argue with the author in the margin. This is usually with non-fiction reading but I’ve been known to rant with fictional characters as well. That is right, I am a librarian’s worst nightmare.
When looking at these new readers I realized there are a few things that just have to be in place before it could be useful to me:

1. The display must be friendly to the eyes. Really!

Screen technology is improving every day. But if I am going to spend three hours reading a screen, it needs to be perfect. I saw the Sony reader in a store and it actually looked pretty nice. For 10 minutes. I don’t know how it would feel after hours.

2. Universal Access – PDF

I added the letters “PDF” during the edit of this story. Because I can think of no other way to pull this off. Any system that requires me to wait on Amazon, Apple, Sony or any other corporate gang is not going to cut it. Whether I am reading a 1903 legal decision or an article on recent changes to Applescript, I want it in my electronic reader. Furthermore, I’m not sure I like the idea of everything having to be text. With the PDF format, you can have unique formatting, styles, and pretty pictures to boot.
Using PDF’s would also help solve the problem of dicey book DRM. As it stands with Amazon’s reader, you pay $400 for the device, then $10 for a book, then $15 for a newspaper subscription. It is in a format that can only be read on that machine. Who is to say there will be anything that can read that file five years. On the other hand, I am looking forward to passing on my copy of Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” to my daughter when she graduates high school. It is well worn, well annotated, and DRM free. Good luck with that one Amazon.

3. Annotation Must Be Supported

Without annotation, I think this would be nothing more than a toy for me. Fun for reading fiction but useless for “work”. I am open to ideas on this annotation but doubt anything can beat my current analog system consisting of a few pencils. This technology exists on current tablet based computers but that is really not good enough. The pixelation is horrendous and clunky.

4. It Must Be User Friendly

I’ve promised myself I will no longer purchase consumer electronics that look like they were designed by a monkey. Call this my Apple bias but it is not. I just like things that work well and were designed with idea of accommodating me more than some manufacturing equipment in Taiwan. The Sony reader looks stylish enough but it falls apart when it comes to features. The Amazon Kindle just strikes me as ugly. It reminds me more of my old Atari 800 computer more than anything designed in the 21st century.
The things that I don’t need in a reader are a bunch of internet bolt on applications. No email or productivity applications. Wifi would be nice for obtaining content but I am not even convinced I would need a browser. At least not a browser in the traditional sense. I would prefer a simple way to wirelessly sync content and annotation.
As the technology gets smaller and cheaper we may find that the idea of a reader is simply a passing fancy. The 2007 equivalent of the personal jet pack. If anyone gets tablet computing right it could easily include these features with a few more. The advantage of a reader would, hopefully, be a lower price but with the increasing use of flash ram and better electronics, we may just leap frog the digital reader entirely and use tablet.
So there you have it. Could a device like this exist in the near future? Sure. Does it exist? No. So it looks like I will just have to continue abusing books. For now.

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Holy Toledo! Another GTD Application

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .
So I spent my $30 and licensed OmniFocus over the weekend. Of course today the MacSparky radar picked up yet another task management application brewing for the Mac, Things. This application takes a different spin on task management abandoning the more traditional field approach of OmniFocus for a Tag focussed indexing system. There is a very good screencast demonstrating it right here. I’m intrigued by this different approach and I will be following up with this application to see how people use it. That being said, I really like OmniFocus. It is the first task application I have ever used that really tames my crazy lists of tasks. Whether it is writing a trial brief or cleaning the fish pond, OmniFocus is my master.

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Deleting Forward on Mac Laptops

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One issue that baffled me when I first bought my MacBook Pro was the delete key. The delete key on the Mac laptops deletes backward as opposed to windows machines where it deletes forward. There is no forward delete button on Apple laptops. It took me a few weeks to figure out that if I hold the Function key and press delete, then it deletes forward. Apparently I was not the only person confused by this. Apple posted a small video on this issue right here.

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New Link – The Mac Attack

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For some time now I have been corresponding with my friend, Steve Stanger, over at the “Mac Attack” podcast. Steve is a Mac guru and has probably forgotten more about the nuts and bolts of these little machines than I’ll ever learn. Even more important, he is a very nice person and a pleasure to listen to. He has that rare ability to instruct without talking down to you. I am going to start making occasional contributions to Steve’s show. If you haven’t already, you should head over and subscribe.

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Leopard Renaming Tweak

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One of the little improvements in Leopard that hasn’t got much press but still makes me grin is renaming files with extensions. In Tiger when you hit enter to rename a file in the finder, the entire name was highlighted, including the extension. When renaming you were forced to go through the additional four keystrokes of the period and file extension. (i.e. “.pdf”) In Leopard the OS does not highlight the period and file type extension. It just highlights the name. This makes the process faster and prevents the problem that occurred when I would previously make a mistake on the extension and cause all sorts of problems when I went to access the file in the expected application.
This is not a huge feature but it sure is nice.

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Review – Inspiration 8

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You can hear this review on the MacReviewCast Episode 134. This week I thought I would take a look at an excellent software package my daughter has been using on her iMac, Inspiration 8 from Inspiration Software.

When school started this fall, my 6th grade daughter, Sam, came home bragging about this program she was using at school that sounded a lot like a kid friendly mindmap program.  Now I know you must be thinking, how could an 11 year old be excited about such a thing but, indeed, the kids are.  That is because the folks at Inspiration have figured out a way to make these tools fun and easy to work with.


Inspiration has both outline and diagram views that allow the kids to work in a linear or more free-form basis.  It is loaded with education friendly templates.  Nevermind the obligatory organization chart: This thing has important stuff like history reports and science projects.  The built in dictionary and thesauras even help them step up thier writing skills.

It helps you gather, sort, and analyze information and then organize it for presentation or report.  Man do I wish I learned those skills when I was 11.


The application is useful for planning and organizational skills, critical thinking, communicating clearly, and analytical skills.  If the kids have fun while they do it, they won’t have any idea just how much good it is doing them.  You’ve heard enough from me though.  I have a guest reviewer who wants to share her thoughts on the program.
Allow me to introduce Samantha Sparks
****Samantha
Hi, my name is Samantha and I am doing my review on a program called Inspiration 8.  It was released in February of this year. You can build diagrams, graphic organizers, and concept maps. You can add pictures and arrows. It features 65 templates to get you started. You can also add media. 
I found out about it at school when we had to do a family tree on it. It was pretty easy once you know about two of the main buttons. I recommend using rapid-fire which is a button for brainstorming. It is a lot faster. Overall the program is very easy to catch onto.
I use it still for school purposes. I just recently did a report that required a family tree. My Social Studies teacher gave us a handout of a template of the tree. I started and then realized that I could make it a lot easier and better on Inspiration. I have the ability to start it at school in lab and import my unfinished copy onto my thumb-drive. I can then just finish it at home. It makes it a lot easier. 
As I said before, it comes with a lot of templates already so I usually pick one of those. You can make bubbles different shapes, colors, and sizes. You can also insert hyperlinks. It can be on a mac or a PC. The program overall just is so easy and it makes  projects look quite nice. 
The one thing that I don’t quite like the fact that when insert a new bubble, the arrow automatically shows up with two points on each end. You can’t just set a setting  for the arrows and just apply it to them all. I have to manually highlight each arrow and change them. 
I would highly recommend this program to people who make diagrams or concept maps a lot. You can do something very similar to this on word but I think it is worth it to buy and use this one instead.
*****David
A license for Inspiration will cost $69.  I know that is pretty high but teaching my daughter the skills this program offers makes it a bargain in my book.

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Apple Mail Scripts 2.8

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As I continue to fumble my way through Applescript, I stumbled upon Apple’s own Mail script package that has several nice applications.
Apple explains them as follows:
– Add Addresses (Mail): Add addresses found in the selected messages (in the header fields “From”, “To”, “Cc”, and “Bcc”) to the Address Book. This is much more flexible than the “Add Sender to Address Book” available in Mail and provides a convenient way for creating mailing lists.
– Archive Messages (Mail): Move messages from the selected mailbox(es) to an archive mailbox or export them to standard mbox or plain text files for backup purposes or import into other applications. You can select to move all messages or only messages sent within or certain period as well filter messages based on their read and flagged status.
– Change SMTP Server (Mail): Switch between different already defined SMTP servers or define a new one. This is especially useful if you are using your computer in more than one location and have to switch servers for several accounts at once.
– Create Rule (Mail): Create a new rule based on the first of the selected messages. This saves you the trouble of copy/pasting address or other info between the message and the rule window and provides a much quicker way for setting up a rule with multiple criteria/actions.
– Remove Duplicates (Mail): Locate all duplicate messages found in the selected mailbox(es) and move them to a separate mailbox for easy removal (duplicate matching is based on the unique message header “Message-Id”).
– Schedule Delivery (Mail): Allows you to send individual messages at predefined times (this script uses iCal for scheduling message delivery).
– Many additional features.

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