Music to my ears ~

Enter this in the Mac terminal.app:

say -v cello d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d droid

D R O I D

Text wraping is available on a per document basis via TextWrangler > View > Text Display > Soft Wrap Text. The soft means that it won’t add line breaks into your code, it will just display lines so they don’t go off the screen. By default though, the wrapping will only expand to the page guide, or where the white ends and the gray begins, then go to the next line, it seems.

Changing the text wrapping globally is possible via TextWrangler > Preferences > Editor Defaults. On the right, there is a checkbox with Soft wrap text a few options. My preference is Window width since full screen editing is awesome.

Happy wrapping.

Then you can go to Tools > Crop or hit Command + K to crop what was selected.

That’s all there is to cropping in Preview on a Mac.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Yes, Steve made a ridiculously successful company, made products that I and millions of others adore, and indeed, made an industry and generation better. He did all of things. In high school, I learned making memories is far more important than making money. It was more than that, but in Macroeconomics, that’s the single most important thing I learned in that class and probably in my junior year of high school.

Over a year ago, I saw the commencement speech. In that speech, there are ideas and words that resonate with me just as much as everything else has he done. But these things are things of solely his own creation.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

These are his raw uncommercialized words. These are words supercharged by nothing but his own meaning instilled into them. This is what he tried to do and what he did. That is what he lived by and that is what he is inspiring others to do. Steve knew he was not going to be here forever. Steve knew what he words meant.

Words like these, and those before, have changed me too, that trying something and succeeding is in no part dictated by the past and established procedures.

Yesterday, I ranted and today, if you call this mourning, then that’s what I’m doing today. Tomorrow, I’ll be the same as I was yesterday, but with the knowledge that a legendary creator has passed away and joined the stars.

I will recount, painfully, each of the things I wanted to happen, briefly and instead what took its place. Here we go.

No More 3GS

Oh, you know that incredibly old and lame phone? It sucks. And it’s still here. Why would anyone want a chrome-back phone? Because it’s free? People care about purchase price? That’s insane.

It’s kind of funny that there are to S phones in the lineup now. Maybe S is for space, as in a space between the important things in life, I mean, product releases.

Metal back

It’s the same design. Actually, I don’t mind. I honestly love the current design because it is the monolith. In fact, with Siri today and the HAL-jokes, we’re getting even closer to 2001.

Oh. What year is it again?

Larger screen

Since Apple kept the 3GS, I don’t know what the plan is. It stopped making sense. They could have eliminated the entire version of future-forward looking apps for developers by removing the 3GS from the line up.

Maybe next time then.

Battery life

Finally, a score. The battery life in the iPhone 4S is slightly better than the iPhone 4. How much better? I think talk time has increased an hour. Who talks on their phones? Still, an increase is an increase and and anything is better than nothing.

Prepaid options

Just because Tim Cook alludes to something in a one-off interview doesn’t mean anything is going to happen. Actually, that’s not quite true. Tim addressed the buying price of the iPhone 4S by making older models really cheap. It’s easy to gather $99 for an iPhone 4. That’s easy.

It’s the plan price. Apple didn’t address that problem this time around but it should happen, one of these years.

However, Apple is going to get Sprint into the action. Virgin Mobile lives on Sprint. They have made the iPhone 4 compatible with Sprint too, so it appears that the iPhone 4 is now also a world phone.

The Result

It was underwhelming. Since the iPhone 4S was introduced along side dulled products such as the iPod touch white and the iPod nano huge button versions, it seems to fit. How do you go through an eleven month cycle, and magically add another four, and come out with a non-significant version? Well, I wouldn’t know what to do either.

This raises questions though. The iPad 3 is probably going to be the next big mobile device, the MacBook Pro probably will be the next updated consumer computer, and there is iOS 6 waiting in the wings. The question is: what will these be like? The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S are relatively lame products, and the iPod touch 4G/5 is probably worse since it didn’t even get a new processor.

No More 3GS

That model needs to go. I’m sick of seeing people buy a two year old phone thinking that because it’s an iPhone, it’s all that and a bag of chips. The 3GS in my opinion was a stop gap measure to give Apple time to finish designing the iPhone and the watch the Android market. The iPhone 4 was designed with its own chip, but it wasn’t ready. Until the A4, Apple was using regular ARM Cortex chips. Yes, there was a speed bump, but the original chip in the first generation iPhone was underclocked anyway, and the 3GS’ chip was too. That sounds very stop gap to me. It’s old and there is no reason to keep it around.

The 3GS is going to slide right off the deep end.

Metal back

If anyone asks me, I love the glass front and back of the iPhone 4. It’s absolutely the most beautiful phone I’ve ever seen. It’s monolithic. But glass breaks. I’ve been at University for four weeks. In that time, three of my friends have destroyed the rear glass on their iPhone 4s. Beauty is something to achieve, but integrity and strength might be more important factors.

So maybe you can’t have a glass back. How about a smooth aluminum back like the surface of a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? Nothing shiny either. Something with a matte finish, and maybe a nice glass Apple logo in the middle. Maybe a teardrop design is a possibility. In fact, I had to check a friend’s iPod touch to make sure it wasn’t already teardrop, because I thought for sure that it was.

Larger screen

I have a 3.2-inch touchscreen right now on my phone. It’s too small to type well on with its virtual keyboard. The iPod touch I had last year was better. I could type on that accurately and pretty fast. My dad recently purchased a 4” touchscreen phone and I tried to type on it. The amount of effort was lower than on any device I’ve ever used. It’s really a fantastic size for typing. Granted, it was only a few moments.

The problem, everyone says, it the rentia display. The current iPhone 4 has a 3.5” display with a 960 by 640 display at 326ppi. If the display grew to 4-inches, things change a little. According to my calculations: sqrt( 960^2 + 640^2 ) / 4 = 288.44 ppi The iPhone 4 rentia display was touted as such because at a foot away, it would be hard or nearly impossibly to see the pixels. If the next iPhone has a larger screen, I’m betting people will hold it a little farther away and perhaps then 288 would be acceptable. Though a 12% drop in density may be too much.

Is an 8% a better drop? Well, doing some clever algebra, you can figure a 3.8-inch screen will easily get to the 300ppi mark. That could be fair.

Oh, and for the record, it would not make sense to use a regular non-rentia display screen for a low end iPhone. Why? Because the 3GS needs to go, it already meets that criteria, and the iPod touch already has a cheaper version of the iPhone 4 rentia display, without all that extra glass coating. Instead of downgrading the iPhone 4 to make it cheaper, make the iPod touch more expensive.

Actually, this matters less than everything else.

Battery life

Oh, battery life. In the old days, back when I was in high school, this wouldn’t have mattered. The day was short and I could get through the day easily on my current phone with a 60% charge. I was always in quality Wifi range and half way decent cell phone coverage.

Now, at college, I’m not so lucky. The Wifi networks are spread across campus, indeed, but the coverage and quality is sparse. There might be a signal, but it’s weak so the phone has to reconnect frequently and search all the time. My carrier may not provide the best coverage, so the radio has to search all the time, but this is a smaller problem than the Wifi battery life drain.

Prepaid options

I can’t afford a monthly fee of $70 to use my phone. I can manage anything nearby $40. I suspect that would include a lot of people. I’m sure Apple loves its top cut from the absurd pricing AT&T and Verizon places on top of the iPhone currently. Apple could profit just as well if they made cheaper iPhones that I would be very likely to repurchase again in a year, rather than in two years.

I want an iPhone among all other phones, but I can’t get one because I’m poor? Actually, Tim Cook apparently said something about prepaid markets once.

Apple was working hard to “figure out” the prepaid market and that Apple didn’t want its products to be “just for the rich,” but “for everyone”; he also stated that Apple “understood price is big factor in the prepaid market”

I don’t know of anything that’s better than the offering from Virgin Mobile and its parent, Sprint. Currently, it’s $35/month for unlimited data, texting, and 300 minutes. That’s insane, right? Well, aside from being limited to just about five smartphones, it’s insane. On Friday, Virgin Mobile revealed their hand for the remaining fall season: two new phones. However, Virgin Mobile stated earlier this year that they were going to begin throttling on the network. That was changed from now to sometime in 2012. Why? Perhaps Virgin Mobile anticipated the iPhone going prepaid previously but since it was so late this time around, they changed their minds. Or their deal fell through.

If not Virgin Mobile, then what other choice is there? GoPhone seems unlikely as the brand is not setup to handle actual smartphones. I hear T-Mobile has a prepaid offering, but they aren’t getting the iPhone.

If needing to skimp on updates is a requirement for a reasonably priced unsubsidized iPhone that could hit a prepaid carrier, I’ll live with that. An iPhone 4, an iPod touch 4G is better than the phone I have right now.

And one more thing…

After tasting the Apple juice in both the form factors of a mobile device and a main system, I’ve realized the point. To do things that you need to do, and then get done, and finally, get back to what you’re really supposed to be doing. Sure, the iPod and iPhone are labeled as gaming devices, but that’s the point. They’re good at gaming because they’re already good at a lot of other things. The next frontier that the iPhone needs to conquer, for me, and probably for a lot of others, is that prepaid or low monthly cost market.

So, Apple. Let’s talk iPhone.

TextWrangler is setup by default to use tabs. Overriding is a little obscure. Go to TextWrangler > Preferences > Editor Defaults. Once there, tick the Auto-expand tabs checkbox and you can specify the number of spaces per tab-key in the Default font selector below.

Happy tabbing!

• Cmd+N – Starts a new message
• Cmd+Control+N – Starts a new note (like a self-email)
• Cmd+R – Replies to a highlighted message
• Cmd+Shift+D – Sends a message
• Cmd+Shift+N – Refreshes the inboxes
• delete – Removes the message from the inbox (but leaves it in All Mail)

These shortcuts aren’t hard to find but unlike Windows, there are more functional keys on the Mac. This means there are more combinations and shortcuts than I would’ve expected. There are of course numerous other shortcuts but they’re a little hard to find in a single location.

I had choices: find a computer, use my computer, use the browser on my phone or just ask someone. Going in order, finding a computer is easy since there’s a lab in Coffman but I didn’t need to check in just for that. Using my laptop wasn’t an option because I didn’t bring it to Welcome Week. I figured I’d be, you know, busy. Asking someone? No way.

Using the browser on my phone was the solution. My epiphany came from this moment. I attempted to look up my bus schedule. Here’s how it went down.

1. Make two swipes to slide the unlock bar on the lockscreen; the first one didn’t register right.
2. On the Audible control screen (where the scrobbler, pause, play, fast forward and so on are), hit home key
3. On the homescreen, hit the tiny browser icon in the lower right corner
4. Wait for it to launch
5. Tap into the address bar, wait for the keyboard to come back up
6. Very slowly and deliberately type metrotransit.org, make a few mistakes, retype and so on
7. Wait patiently for the slow Wifi-G speeds to deliver my page
8. Tap the Trip Planner, target the text fields, type the proper addresses
9. Attempt to scroll down the page
10. Read the schedule information
11. Sigh, because it took forever to do all this

Really, it’s not so many steps. But that’s when you don’t feel the bad stutters for transitions, the slow keyboard input and annoying short interface freezes. These things add up.

I wanted to write about this on Wednesday. I realized why people like these Apple products so much. In the basement at Coffman, I realized I wanted to reach for my MacBook Air and write. Just write. I wanted to reach for my phone and just look up that transit schedule, get it done and get back to listening to my audio book.

Android works well. I love using it and it’s just fine. But you know that moment when you’re doing something you enjoy and the next moment you need to actually get something done? I had that moment and I felt like my phone was getting in the way. So it’s a small epiphany. The way I would use the iPhone is probably the way Microsoft intends with their system, get in, get out, and get back to life (or a completely fictional futuristic science fiction audio book). The phone shouldn’t, at the very least, get in the way of doing something on the phone. Android is simple; there isn’t an endless amount of configuration, there is no secret about:config in Android that allows me to tweak everything. I don’t need that either. I just need the speed to get things done.

Get back to life.

The Windows behavior is simple: you switch through all open Windows, even if they are the same application. However, on the Mac, Command + Tab does something similar but different enough to be unexpected and initially annoying. It switches between applications. For example, if you have two Safari windows open along with Mail, Command + Tab will switch between Safari and Mail, but with only one window of Safari. Windows would cycle would through all of those windows.

So what’s the deal? My fingers need to migrate. There is an elegant solution. Command + Tilde. What does that do? Does it cycle through all Windows? No. Does it cycle through application windows? Yes!

It’s a simple thing. I thought at first that Lion made this change. I used Leopard and Snow Leopard and I’m sure I never had this Command + Tab identity crisis. Luckily, I’m adjusting well and I will survive.