Apple October 2013 Mac updates: excellent news for users

There were a lot of updates announced at Apple October 2013 event. New Mac hardware (ready to buy laptops and a promise for a monster Mac Pro in December), new tablets (iPad air and iPad mini + RD), and plenty of software updates.
While the hardware is what most of the media was waiting for, day-to-day Mac users would be more concerned about the new software.

1. OSX Mavericks is available for immediate download, and it is a free upgrade!
2. There is a new release of iWork (Pages, Keynote, Numbers), which is the first major upgrade in 4 years, and it is also a free upgrade! (Well, it’s a qualified free upgrade, I will explain later)
3. There are also new releases of iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, which is just as exciting for the large public. Since I only use iPhoto, and not a whole lot of it, I skip the enthusiasm about this upgrade. BTW, it’s also free.

Now, for the specifics:

OSX Mavericks

The fact that it is a free upgrade was a nice surprise

and it probably means that this O.S. will spread faster than its predecessors.

I have been using the beta version of OSX Mavericks for a few months, and so the initial excitement has faded away already. But there are some points worth mentioning that may be useful to help whoever needs to make a decision:

• Advanced technologies. I am a geek, and although there are shinier features in Mavericks, the advanced technologies have caught my fancy faster. What it amounts to is:
  • energy saving. Applications running in the background consume less energy, and your battery lasts longer;
  • Faster system with compressed memory. The traditional method for multi-tasking operating system swaps the memory of unused application to disk, and recovers it when the application is waken up. OSX Mavericks uses compressed memory to achieve the same goal (unused memory is compressed, instead of being sent to disk) and when the background application is back, it takes less time to resume operations. Even if the memory is swapped to disk, the reduced size of data to write and read will still improve performance.
  • Safari can detect the contents that you are not actively seeing, and saves memory by pausing them until they come center stage.
• Better support for multiple displays.
• iBooks for Mac! This is especially good for those books, like Markdown or Paperless, which should be used as reference while using them at the Mac.
• iCloud Keychain. This looks like a cheap alternative to 1Password or mSecure. At first sight, it doesn’t look as powerful or as easy to use as the apps already available. Interesting, but I keep 1Password for the time being.
• Finder uses tabs and tags. I am used to tabs, because I have been using Pathfinder for several years. Tabs are very useful and practical. Tags are also useful, but they require some discipline to use properly. Nonetheless, it’s a welcome enhancement.
• Notifications. This is a step towards unification of OSX and iOS. There is good and bad in it. I can see a tendency towards the update-everything-blindly that is also happening in iOS 7. When updates are available in Mavericks, you see an annoying notification saying “Updates available: Do you want to install the update or try later?” and there are two buttons: install and later. There is no option saying “more info” like it was in previous releases of the O.S. If you choose “install,” it will start in the background, without telling you what is it that it is installing. So, be careful with these notifications (or lack thereof).

As for the installation, you should know two things:
* You get the installer from the Mac Apple store, but once you have installed Mavericks, the installer disappears from your computer;
* the installer is 5.4 GB. If you need to install on more than one computer, you may not want to repeat the operation. Therefore, before installing, you should make a copy.

For more details on how to install Mavericks, you can resort to this article.

iWork

The good news is that you can get the new version working for you in the desktop, in your mobile device, and in the free web applications that come with iCloud. But …

Be warned! If you are not alone in the world, and even if you are but you are using more than one Apple device, you must know that the latest release of Pages/Keynote/Numbers is not compatible with the versions you are using now. Especially if you are using iCloud, be extra careful! Once you open a document with the newer version, you won’t be able to read it again with the old one.

Therefore, your upgrade must be planned carefully. If you update only one computer and keep using older versions in another machine, you won’t be able to share. Likewise, if you household counts several Macs, they won’t see your documents if they have not upgraded.

And upgrading is not that easy either. I mentioned that it is a free upgrade, but it is a conditional one. The new iWork apps will only work with OSX Mavericks. Once you install Mavericks, you can upgrade Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. If you stay with Mountain Lion, you are stuck with version 4.3, which can’t read documents created or modified with version 5.
So far, it’s quite clear if your iWork come from the Mac App Store (MAS). There is an interesting turn of events if you bought iWork with a disc before the Mac App Store started, as I did.

I have my main computer (Mac mini) still running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, and one laptop running Mavericks. When I checked the MAS for Pages, it told me, as usual, that I need to buy the application. Although it can detect that I have Pages installed, it still sees that I haven’t bough it from the MAS. Therefore, I know that there is a free upgrade, but I can’t get it.
However, when I did the same operation in the MAS under OSX Mavericks, it told me “upgrade.” No mention of purchasing. So, I upgraded Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, and I now have the new version available in my laptop.

Now here’s the interesting thing: as soon as I upgraded my laptop apps using Mavericks, when I opened the “purchases” page in my MAS under Mountain Lion, I got all three apps labeled “install.” Now my apps that I bough on disk have finally transitioned to the MAS. I still can’t upgrade them using Mountain Lion. If I try, a message tells me that these apps require OSX 10.9, but the MAS offers me the option of downloading the current version available for my operating system.

Summing up: a very rich upgrade from Apple. I will wait a few days (possibly weeks) before upgrading my main computer to OSX Mavericks, but the whole pack looks promising!

Seriously, Amazon, WTF?

Amazon, why the latest Ken Follett's book is priced wildly differently in US, UK, and Italy?

US

The prices alone are enough to drive people mad. $19.99 in the US for a Kindle edition, while the same edition in the UK cost £7.20 (= $11.6) and in Italy €10.02 (= $13.14). Both are already available in Europe, and yet to come in the US.

UK

ITA

I know that Amazon blames the publishers for these prices. But I can't help wondering why does Amazon, which is the most powerful book reseller, comply to such nonsense.

Ebooks: what Amazon, Google, and Apple can learn from O'Reilly

I have used Amazon for about 13 years. I have always been satisfied with its service and fairness.

That was until Amazon started offering electronic books.

As an early adopter of e-book readers, I was obviously interested to this kind of offering, although I could not take full advantage of the Kindle store because I don't live in the USA. A few years ago I bought an iPad, and since then my consumption of e-books has risen dramatically. I find ebooks especially convenient for technical titles, which are usually bulky and heavy on my back when I travel.

Recently, I bought a Kindle touch, which is 3 times lighter than my iPad, and my reading habits have shifted towards the Kindle considerably. There are a few titles that are best experienced on a larger screen, and thus my iPad is still actively used as a reader.

Also in the last months, Apple and Google have entered the e-book market. From my standpoint (as a non-US resident) the experience is a disaster. Compared to Amazon, both Google and Apple look like a bad joke. More on this later on.

Convenience

When it comes to convenience and ease of use, nothing beats Amazon. Browse the store or search for something, find what you want, read the excerpt, and if you like it, buy it. It will end up in the device you have chosen within seconds.

Also for contents that I bought elsewhere or for reading documents, the Kindle is fantastic. I can send contents to a Kindle in seconds either from my browser or from my laptop. I also use it in combination with Instapaper and a few services offered by third parties.

Durability

While Amazon wins hands down in terms of ease of use for your purchases, it has the limitation that the books bought on Amazon can only be consumed on devices or software created by Amazon. DRM protected books from Amazon can't be read in devices created by its competition, nor can they be converted to formats that are easier to search and analyze (things that often I need to do with technical books). The same limitation applies to Apple e-books, which are only available on Apple devices. Some can only be bought from Apple devices. Google does not even tell you which format your books are. They are only in Google cloud. Take it or leave it.

The winners in this category are the smaller publishers, O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmer. They both provide books in the most popular formats. They also send books directly to the cloud (either directly to my Kindle or to my Dropbox account). It is not as immediate as buying from Amazon, but the combination of multiple DRM-free formats and cloud storage makes these publishers the winners in matter of durability.

Fairness

Electronic books have not been popular for long. Until a few years ago, many technical titles were only available as hardcover of paperback editions. When e-books sales started being as profitable as the good old paper books, many titles that had been in the Amazon offering for years were also offered as ebooks. And here comes the trick. These books are listed by the year when the ebook was made available on Amazon, not by the uyear the book was first published. Thus I see SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide listed as published in 2011.

The same book, in O'reilly catalog is correctly listed as published in 2005.

If I didn't know better, I would be tempted to buy the Amazon book as a recent update of the book that has been in my shelves for 11 years (I bought the 1st edition in 2001). Fortunately, whenever I see an O'Reilly book on Amazon, I rush to the O'Reilly site to get the multiple format, DRM-free edition, and sometimes get a discount.

The list of unfair offering is not limited to these date tricks. The fact that makes me angry is the price of e-books that is often much higher than the hardcover edition. Amazon defends itself by saying that the price is imposed by the publisher and they are as much the victims of these overpriced goods as us poor customers. I call BS! Amazon has a dominant position as a bookseller and they can't tell the tale of the publishing houses bullying them into keeping high prices.

The winners of this category are again the small publishers. Books on paper are reasonably priced. e-books are, with few exceptions, much cheaper than the physical goods.

Annoyances

Probably the most annoying matter, where Apple and Google are the biggest offenders, is the store localization. A better name for this issue is store ghettoization. In the case of Apple, you can access a store only if you have a credit card for the country where the store is located. If you happen to have a bank account and a corresponding address in a different country, then you can enjoy some freedom. But, and it is a big BUT, it does not matter which language you speak: you will get the language of the store where you have a bank account. You live in Italy, with an Italian bank account, but want to speak English and buy items in English? Tough luck. No chance in hell. You just get the Italian site written in machine-translated Italian (I hope it's that. It would be too depressing to know that there are humans who have butchered the Italian language that in the Italian Apple store), and there will be an unpredictable mix of text in English and Italian, depending on which items are allowed to be sold in your disgraced country.

If it were only the language, I could cope. I could learn to bear it, like a bad smell. But the fact is that some items, for some unfathomable reasons, are not available to the non-US public. The free Movies app, for example, can't be used by Italians. And the same fate applies to the majority of books in English, which are not even listed in the store available to Italians.

Amazon is also guilty of some similar ghetto practices. There are titles that cost more if you live elsewhere.

Heard of the Kindle daily deal? A low-priced kindle book priced every day. Sounds like a dream:

Until you press "continue"

Google annoyances in this respect are even worse. There is a Google books store available in Italy, with about 100 official titles in English. The other countless books in English are not visible to me. Anyway, I have a Google account, and from time to time I check boos in Google, to see if there is some interesting offering. No way. The prices are always the same, cent by cent, of the other monopolistic booksellers in Italy.

Having an account should tell Google who I am, and what I like, right? It should tell it that I want my listings in English. It doesn't happen. It should tell it that I live in a country where Google sells books. Unfortunately, when I travel abroad, I see the Google books page in whichever language my IP tells Google I am located in, and I get a message informing me that Google Books is not available in my country. Which is not my country, damn you!

You know what, Amazon, Apple, Google? If readers want to buy a book and none of you makes it available for non-US residents, the only choice you leave them is to get a bootleg copy. Would they feel guilty if they have to get a pirated copy of a book that they can't get legally? My guess is "not even a tiny bit."

Summing up

I hope O'Reilly and similar publishers get a better foothold in the market, and erode the monopolistic advantage and ambition of Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Has Apple found the perfect way of forcing its customers to buy more hardware?

I have been a satisfied Apple user for six years. I bought my first MacBook in 2006 and an iPad in 2010.

Everything was going well. My Mac and iPad were doing exactly what I wanted, and my productivity was at its peak.

Every now and then, I saw announcements of new products, and I evaluated if I needed the new ones or not. I easily resisted the urge of buying an iPad 2. What I had was perfectly OK with me. My first generation iPad was doing everything I needed. True, the iPad2 is faster, lighter, and can take pictures, but it would not improve my work in any substantial way.

Then the iPad 3 was announced, and again I did not see any reason for upgrade. Retina display? Well, no. I don't need it. I could continue using my iPad, which was working very well. Or so I thought. Actually, I noticed that some apps that I was using almost on a daily basis (such as iBooks and Keynote) were slower than previously. I dismissed that as a symptom of developer misuse of resources, which would certainly be addressed and fixed, because millions of users must have had the same issue. I was wrong.

What I did not take into account is that almost all the apps would be updated for Retina display and for the iPad 3. How does this affect me? There is no separate apps for iPad first generation, second, and third. All of them get the same updates. So my hardware, which was perfectly efficient 2 years ago, is now dealing with apps that are more than twice in size and require much more CPU power. In short, with the same apps that I was using before, I was running slower and my free space was magically eaten up. I am not alone with this issue, but unfortunately there is nothing I can do, short of upgrading to the iPad with a retina display, which I don't need, but this seems to be the only way of doing what I was doing before at a reasonable speed.

What about the MacBook? I have two quite recent models, which do what I want, are very much powerful, efficient, and robust. In short, I thought I wouldn't need to upgrade for a while. However, Apple has just announced new MacBook models with Retina display, and it has started updating Mac apps with support for the new hardware.

What does it mean for me? I am looking at the software update list that has just arrived:

App	old size	new size
iPhoto	187 M	630 M
iMovie	418 M	1.08 G

So here we go again. If I want the new features in the application I use, I have to accept the bloated app with more than double size, and probably the same decrease in performance that I have already noted in my iPad. The choice is between giving in and eventually buy a new MacBook to use the updated apps, or skip the upgrades.

Apple, why do you want to alienate your current customers to please the new ones?

How the entertainment industry encourages piracy

I have always been respectful of rules and regulations. I respect the artists, and I am glad to provide them with a compensation for their work.

I buy movie DVDs, and music CDs.

And then I get angry.



More and more times it happens that, inserting a brand new DVD in the player, I am given a nasty advertising against illegal copies, warning me that piracy is a crime.

Why me? I am the one who bought this bloody DVD, am I not? So why are you inflicting this punishment on me, with this stupid advertising that my player can't skip?

I know why. Because you can't inflict that on the ones who are actually doing the illegal copying. And what's more annoying is the thought that the illegal copies don't have this advertising.

I, the one who have paid good money for this movie, can't watch the movie the way I want it. And you know what I need to do to watch the movie again without the additional pain? Why, rip it, of course! Once I convert the legal copy into an illegal one, I can do whatever I want with the movie.

Some other things that drive me mad? Go to a movie theater, pay 8 EUR, and you have to endure 25 solid minutes of advertising. Hey! The movie theater was supposed to be for the movies. Ads are for TV! No way. Nobody is listening. And the illegal copies are ads free ...

And then there is the prices. I bought DVDs ten years ago. They cost 15,000 lire, or about 7.5 EUR. That was in the period when few people had DVD players, so I suppose that they would sell much less than what they sell today. And what's the price today? Regular price is 16 EUR, for a movie just out of the theaters schedule. The top performers at the box office cost even 25 EUR. WTF?

It's really hard to stay honest. Piracy seems very appealing, and it's the entertaining industry that is pushing me in that direction.

Ebooks: let's not go the Al Gore's way

I have bought Al Gore's latest book, Our Choice, which is also available as an iTunes App.
The first impact is amazing. The visuals are great, and the look and feel is really pleasing.
However, after the first minutes of fiddling with this product of the ebook making postmodern way, I felt bitterly disappointed.

• First off, the app, without any warning whatsoever, either in the iTunes description or in the app itself, starts downloading extra data. The size of 52 MB mentioned in the description seemed big enough for a book, but I though that the better experience would justify it. Not so. The real size of the application after it finished downloading is 1 GB (ONE GIGABYTE!). And this for a book that preaches about avoiding waste!
• After seeing that, of course, I wanted to search the book for "waste". Only that there is no search function, which makes the ebook pretty much similar to an expensive book on paper.
• Except that it is not on paper, and the difference is clear when you leaf through the beautifully illustrated pages, and suddenly Al Gore's voice booms up from what looked like a picture but is a video. If I were reading next to someone who's sleeping, that would be a nasty surprise.
• No bookmarks, highlighting, word look-up, and all other facilities that users of modern book readers rightfully expect.

If I have to judge by this example, the future of ebooks should be wasteful and without searching facilities, meaning that it is intended for the readers to read it the way the author wants, not the way you want to use it. If it weren't for its loud obnoxious audio interruptions, this ebook could easily compare to medieval parchment books.
Summing up, do we want this example to be the future of ebooks? I don't think so.
Someone may say that within one generation we will have iPads with 1 TB of data, and so I am slowing down the progress of technology. It could be. My first computer had 20 MB of storage and that was 25 years ago. In the intervening years I have gone through the amazement of using a laptop with 200MB, then replaced by progressively bigger ones with 2, 16, 120, 260, and now 512GB. Storage for tablets is following a similar ascension. But even if my iPad had 1TB of storage instead of 16G, I would not want a "book" that starts talking or playing videos to me when I try to read quietly. If I wanted that, I could easily use the Kindle text-to-speech facility, or listen to an audio book.
BTW, the book makes a good job of explaining the problem, but then sucks at the conclusion ("be good, because God said so" or something along those lines), so I felt no regrets when I deleted it from my iPad to leave room for more deserving bytes.

A world of ebooks

I am a bibliophile, or, to say it in plain English, a book lover. I have been collecting books since I was in first grade. I read books at high speed, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I can squeeze useful information out of a book very quickly, and that's useful for my job, and for some of my hobbies. A curse, because when I travel one book is usually not enough to keep me busy for the whole travel, and I need to carry or buy more, with negative effects on the weight of my luggage and my on my back. Ten years ago I had a brief but intense experience with electronic books in a Palm hand held device. It didn't last long, though. The quality of ebooks and readers in that period was less than optimal, and I have left the matter rest for a while.
In the meantime, I kept collecting electronic books, mostly PDF editions of technical books that I keep in my laptop for quick reference. Reading them from cover to cover, though, is not a pleasant experience in a laptop. Ditto for reading fiction or essays. The laptop screen is not comfortable for such exercise.
Then, last year, I bough an ebook reader.
That changed the whole business. Reading ebooks became very similar to reading paper books. The size of the screen and the ability of increasing font size makes your reading a pleasure. As for my back and luggage problems, that's solved hands down. The weight of the device is the same, no matter if I carry one ebook or one hundred.
Suddenly, the dozen of ebooks that I had kept idle in my laptop sprang to life, and I was able to read them like a paper book, easily, comfortably, and with pleasure.
I started buying more ebooks, both of fiction and of technical matters. The latter are especially welcome. Whenever I travel to conferences, I am tempted to buy some useful book, and then I regret when it burdens my backpack during the trip home, and fights for room on my overcrowded book shelves. No more of this. Now, when I visit a book booth at a conference, I simply take note of the interesting titles, and then I buy the ebooks at the publisher's site directly. If there is no ebook, I can easily convince me that the book is not really needed.
A few months ago there was some new development. My ebook reader's screen was faulty. It was showing a few unwanted lines at the bottom and the top of the screen, making it difficult to read menus. No big deal. I sent it to the manufacturer, which replaced the screen for free. The only trouble was that the replacement took three months! During that period, I experienced reading ebooks (to which I was by then addicted) with my Android phone, using a wonderful application named Aldiko. The user friendliness of this app more than compensated for the smaller screen size, and I was able to read technical and fiction books with little problem. But I was missing the big screen. So the delay of the back shipment was partially responsible for the lowering of my defenses, when I entered an Apple store and I couldn't leave without a new iPad.
I felt guilty for a while, but the guilt disappeared in a matter of hours, when I loaded all my ebooks in the iPad, and saw what a difference a bigger and colorful screen does. Compared to the six inches of my ebook reader, the iPad is huge, and the reading is even easier and more pleasurable. I was hooked.
Since then, my personal library of ebooks has grown rapidly. I have bought 90 (yes, ninety) books from O'Reilly, including many that I had already bought on paper, and now I am giving away to friends and libraries.
I need to spend a few words of praise for O'Reilly. In the jungle of book publishing, O'Reilly is the best and more user friendly publisher available. The quality of its books is excellent, the choice of catalog vast and modern, the service impeccable. There are other publishers that offer comparable quality (e.g. the Pragmatic bookshelf or Manning) but not the same rich catalog, or a similarly vast catalog (e.g. Packt Publishing) but not the same quality.
If I have to note any negative points about O'Reilly, is that there is no wish list in their shop. So, for now, I am restricting my wishes to my list on Amazon.