New free, online book “Generating PDFs with FPDF and TCPDF”

It’s here:

http://basepath.com/PDFbook

Now an Acer Chromebook for $199

Just learned about this one:

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=chromebook_acer_c710

Not quite as light as the Samsung I have, somewhat less battery life, maybe a bit more cheaply made (according to a review I read). Seems to be in-stock.

Review is here:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/26/acer-c7-chromebook-review/

Update on the Chromebook

Now that I've had it for most of a month, I can say that it completely replaces my MacBook Air for what I mostly used the Air for: Casual use at the breakfast table or in my reading chair. The two are usually next to each other, and I generally reach for the Chromebook. Can't use it for photo post-processing, software development, or writing a novel (because I use the Mac app Scrivener), but it's perfectly suited for most everything else.

The Chromebook is fast, the screen, keyboard, and touchpad are excellent, and it's never crashed. It's Claire's preferred computer, and Gillian likes it, too.

Advantages of a Chromebook over an iPad

I'll add to this as I think of things.

[Updated 31-Oct-2012]

1. Less than half the price.
2. Real keyboard.
3. Uses a mouse/touchpad.
4. Can upload files to a website (disabled on an iPad).
5. Flash.
6. Can access USB drives.
7. Runs Chrome browser instead of Safari.
8. Screen at comfortable viewing angle.
9. SD-card socket builtin.
10. Better speakers and much louder sound.
11. Large pages load (boston.com/bigpicture won't load on my iPad)

(Of course, an iPad has numerous advantages of its own.)

Details on Chromebook's non-browser OS features

[This was originally written as a review on Amazon, where it's now posted. I just got my Chomebook today, two days earlier than Amazon estimated. It's now sold out everywhere. A big hit, at least initially.]

Others have commented about the new Chromebook hardware, and the browser is well-known already (it operates identically on the Chromebook), so I'll comment about the OS features outside of the browser, about which very little information is available. Bear in mind that Google updates the OS frequently, so anything I say is subject to change at any time.

There's a new app called Files that's a file manager, analogous to Windows Explorer or the Finder. It always shows two drives: Downloads, on the local file system, and Google Drive. You can copy between them, make folders, rename files, etc.

If you mount an SD card or USB drive, you can perform the same operations with those drives, too. I was able to mount a Mac-formatted (HFS) drive, but not write to it. When I tried, I got an error message AND the OS got into a state where it would refuse to copy anything, even if the HFS drive wasn't involved. Rebooting cleared this up.

You can't access networked drives (shares) at all.

If you have a Google Docs file on a local drive, including the built-in drive, you can open it with Google Docs to work on it, but it seems that there's no way to create such a file from the app. You have to get it there by copying it from Google Drive. This use of a local file is completely different from the new offline capability that the Google Docs apps have. That gives them access to a local cache of the online files, unrelated to the files you see with the Files app. My advice is that if you want to work with those apps offline, do it the official way.

Other notes:

My bluetooth mouse, which I prefer to the touchpad, worked perfectly.

The Chromebook looks very much like my Macbook Air. Same size, same weight, similar appearance. The Air is more refined, and it also costs more than four time as much.

I got the Chromebook because when I'm not on my main computers (an iMac or a Windows box) I spend all my time in Chrome. The Chromebook is perfect for this, as others have noted. I was using an Air for this purpose, which it's great at, of course, but so is the Chromebook.

When I take photos, I shoot raw. You can copy raw files from a card to another device with the Chromebook, for in-the-field backup, but you can't view the raw files (that is, you can't view the JPEG preview that's inside them). You can on Windows, MacOS, or an iPad. In this respect, an iPad is a more complete field computer for a photographer who wants backup and a little viewing, but, unlike the Chromebook, you can't attach an external drive, and an iPad only has so much internal memory. It works for me while I'm on vacation, but it wouldn't work for a pro. Not enough space.

You can certainly upload a raw to Picasa Web and view it there, but this is impractical for the bulk of the images you'll shoot in the field.

The above viewing issue applies only to raws. JPEGs work fine. If I do take my Chromebook on vacation as my only computer, I'll probably deal with the viewing limitation by shooting JPEG+raw.

As an experiment, I wrote a text editor as a packaged app, which means it loads locally in Chrome and has full access to local files. It worked fine on the Chromebook, as I would expect. However, it seems that it is tossed out on a reboot, so you have to load it from an external disk each time you boot. As packaged apps are very new and still experimental, this is obviously a temporary issue. I noticed that there's a way to pin the app icon to the launchbar, which is nice. Pinning doesn't keep it from being tossed out.

The Chromebook needs work, but I give it five stars anyway. The Google people are smart and hard-working, so I expect things will get better rapidly, especially as the new Chromebook seems to be a smash hit.

New Chromebook is only $249

Just introduced today:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/

Seems to be about as small and light as my MacBook Air, at 1/4 the price (1/2 of the price of an iPad). Since the only app I run on the Air when I'm traveling, reading the news at breakfast, or relaxing in my favorite chair in the evening is a browser (Chrome), will this new Chromebook work as well?

We shall see. I ordered one, and it should arrive in early November.

New iPads have made my old iPad worse

I don't mean that they make it seem worse because the new ones are faster, have a better screen, and additional features (e.g., a camera). I mean actually worse. There are two reasons why:

1. New versions of iOS and apps are larger and slower, because they have more features and because they are developed for faster iPads, which means less pressure to optimize performance on the original iPad. In many cases, new apps aren't even tested on the original iPad.

2. Parts of iOS (e.g., WebKit, which is used to show websites) and apps crash because they don't handle memory properly, which is especially difficult to do in Objective C, the language used to write apps. (And, I assume, iOS, too.) More memory makes these bugs less likely to cause a crash. Again, in many cases apps are not even tested on an original iPad and, if they are, it's only a quick test. Most bugs are found during development, and it's unlikely that developers use an original iPad.

So, my iPad, bought on launch day in April, 2010, has gotten steadily less usable over the 2+ years I've had it, to the point that I now use it only rarely, and mostly as a Kindle. I used to sit in my favorite chair at night and read web articles on my iPad. Apps (including Safari) crash so often now that I use a MacBook Air instead, which doesn't crash.

I'm not going to upgrade my iPad, either. Why give Apple another $600 when the previous $600 bought a product that only worked well for about a year? The Kindle app doesn't crash, I can live with the crashes when I'm checking web sites or email while traveling, and at home I have other alternatives.

I think Android-based tablets are likely to be more reliable, because Java, the language used to write them, is better suited to writing reliable software than is Objective C. I'm not about to buy an Android tablet, either, and, if I do, it will be new, so my theory as to why my iPad has deteriorated won't get tested. (We have the original Kindle Fire, but I don't personally use it much, so I can't say how reliable it is.)

I'm sure I'm right, however. Reliability is the most important quality that software must have, and the iPad doesn't have it.

Is this really making a browser easier to use?

I've discovered two computer environments targeted for seniors that can be installed on an existing computer: Eldy, which I mentioned in a previous post, and PointerWare, which I'll use as an example here. Both try to make a computer easy to use by greatly simplifying the interface, limiting functionality, and providing large buttons. There's nothing about them that's specific to seniors that I can see; they're really designed for novices of any age.

Here's the PointerWare opening screen:

The problem that this opening screen solves, I guess, is that a novice has trouble finding the four apps he or she wants to use, as well as the off button. Every computer system that such a person might use, whether MacOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, or Android, has an opening screen with big buttons (icons) on it, so this is a problem that doesn't exist. I assume the real reason for the screen is that PointerWare has to start somewhere, so its designers figured they ought to have an opening screen with large buttons.

But, every novice computer user I've met spends 90% or more of his or her time in a browser. I know a few for which it's 100%. Some of them don't know what a browser is; they think it's the computer. Clearly the PointerWare opening screen should be the browser.

Speaking of the browser, here it is opened to Yahoo:

The part of the Yahoo page that's visible has about 80 things to click on, some of which are very small. That's the web, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Yes, there are web pages that are simpler, but any user, senior or otherwise, wants to go to wherever his or her interests lead, not to a severely limited set of pages. Indeed, for the seniors I've talked to, access to the web is one of the two reasons why they want to use a computer at all. The other is email, but, if one learns how to use a web page, one can do email that way, too. So this leaves only one purpose for a computer: to access the web.

Given that a user has to learn how to navigate a web page, what's the benefit of having those giant buttons in the frame (HOME, Go Back, Save Site, etc.)? In fact, if they were smaller, the actual web page could be bigger, which would be helpful.

Here's the Yahoo page in Google Chrome, the browser I use:

Really, is Chrome any harder to use? The back, forward, and refresh buttons are small, but no smaller than what one finds on the Yahoo page itself. Instead of Up and Down buttons, there's the normal MacOS scrollbar, but, in my experience, users use the mouse wheel for scrolling anyway.

So, my thinking is that the PointerWare browser is solving a problem that doesn't exist.

PointerWare also suffers from the same problem as Eldy: If you type in a bad URL, you get a Windows alert that users associate with something being wrong:

When the user clicks the OK button, the alert goes away, leaving the blank window. The user has to figure out that the way to "check the name and try again" is to click the Go Back button. As I showed in my previous post, Chrome's error message for an invalid URL is much better.

My conclusion is that for what novice users do between 90% and 100% of the time--browsing the web--Eldy and PointerWare actually are worse than a regular browser.

Maybe their value is in what the other three buttons on the home screen do: Photos, Games, and Mail?  I doubt it. There are plenty of very easy-to-use games that run in a browser, most of which are much better than what's built into PointerWare. The Photos app seems to be limited to collecting photos attached to emails that were read with their email app, with no way to load photos from a camera or phone. The Mail app is for PointerWare email addresses only, but, given that the user has to deal with a huge variety of web pages anyway, there's no reason why Google or Yahoo mail can't be used, and they have the advantage of being accessible from outside of PointerWare.

There is an app for writing little memos, but there are web apps that run in a browser for that, too.

It seems to me that Eldy and PointerWare do not provide any usability advantages over a conventional computer that's appropriately set up, and in some ways make usability much worse.

What they do is provide a collection of commonly-used features already arranged in an easy-to-navigate environment. This could be done with web apps, but a novice obviously can't do it, and it's too much to ask a friend or family member to do it, assuming he or she even knows how and is capable of doing it well.

What I think works is a totally locked-down environment (no way for the underlying OS to show itself) running a browser most of the time, with a collection of easy-to-use apps already installed or readily installable.

There are three systems I know of that meet that description: iOS or Android running on a tablet, or a Chromebook running Chrome OS. (I haven't looked into Windows 8 yet.) I'll talk about those possibilities in a future post.

Eldy so-called easy-to-use UI is a failure

I was checking out an app called Eldy today that's supposed to make computers easier to use for the elderly. It has the obvious things: big buttons, fewer options, uncluttered window.

But it fails because its designers don't understand the main reason computers are hard to use: They communicate to users in ways that users don't understand. For example, here's what you get if you type a nonexistent URL into the Eldy browser:

Here's what Google Chrome, not specially designed for novice users, gives you if you type in the wrong URL:

Here's a guideline I'd propose for UI designers who want to make their app usable by novices: Never say anything to the user that the user doesn't understand. That means that 100% of all error messages and user queries have to be caught and either handled (the best choice) or rephrased. If you can't do that, don't bother. Your UI is going to be a failure.

Clint Eastwood at the Republican Convention

Of course, I have nothing but contempt for the politicians who spoke at the Republican convention. I give a pass to speakers who aren't politicians, like Ann Romney, who gave a great speech, even if her story about her husband's struggle to start Bain Capital is fictitious. (In fact, Bill Bain promised him that if it didn't work out he could have his old job at Bain & Co. back, with missed raises, and a face-saving cover story, too. Wish I had a deal like that when I started my companies.)

HOWEVER, am I the only one who liked Clint Eastwood's speech? It was funny! He had an invisible Obama talking dirty! Saying "go fuck yourself" to Dirty Harry on stage with 20 million people listening! Telling the Man With No Name to shut up! Eastwood might have even said that the troops in Afghanistan should come home tomorrow, which I agree with, or perhaps he was being sarcastic. Anyway, did any of my friends like this speech as much as I did?