« Posts tagged reviews

Ten Toes

May 1, 2012 / posted in Adult Problems, Uncategorized / No Comments

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I recently got into this whole barefoot running thing. The theory is, our caveman ancestors did a perfectly good job getting around without arch support, so why can’t we?

So far it’s pretty good. I’m running a couple of 10-minute miles during my lunch break most days, which is fun and relaxing. There’s a great little park behind my office with a couple of miles of trails and a couple of hills, so it’s definitely a fun time.

And the muscles in my feet are sore in places I didn’t know I had muscles. Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t know I had muscles in my feet at all.

Part of the conceit of barefoot running is that the muscles in our feet get out of tone because they aren’t involved in stabilizing our gait, thanks to fancy supportive shoes, leaving us open to foot injury. Makes sense since this story would be true if you told it about any other muscle group. The other part of the theory is that all these supports hide the physical cues our body would give us when we’re pushing it close to injury, meaning that injury suddenly comes on us, rather than small twinges inspiring us towards moderation a self-protection. This also makes sense.

If you buy the barefoot thing, then it’s also says that the cycle of a runner’s health, with more conventional footwear, is greater and greater investment in supportive shoes and orthotics and things like that, paired with more and more serious injury. Certainly this theory matches my past experience with running: great pain from plantar fasciitis and shin splints, followed by great investment in orthotics, followed by a small improvement, followed by even more pain.

But with my new barefoot shoes – Vibram Five Fingers that could hardly be more comfortable – I don’t have that pain. I’m running pain-free for the first time in 12 years. And I love it.

So that’s me and my wacky toe shoes. I love them. And now I’m even thinking of switching the rest of my shoes to minimal styles. We will see!








Five Days with Lion

July 25, 2011 / posted in Mac, Reviews, Uncategorized / No Comments

I’m a notorious late upgrader, but Mac OS X Lion caught my fancy back on Thursday; my new job doesn’t start ‘til the 28th, so it looked like either update now or update in December, the way new jobs tend to go. So I updated now. My first impression is: wow, but yikes. There’s a lot to love and a lot to be scared of.

What Kind of a Mac User Am I?

The thing about reviews of any sort is that, the closer the reviewer is to the kind of person you are, the more likely it is that the review will be relevant to you. Here’s who I am, so that you can decide if what I say is in any way useful, or if it’s just my usual claptrap. (ed. note — my bet’s on the latter!)

I’m the type of Mac user who writes Applescripts to get things done. I’m comfortable with the Terminal (or, what my lovely wife calls “that scary black screen”). I use a variety of Adobe products, and Office, and a bunch of Mac-specific tools (Things, OmniGraffle, MarsEdit) that you couldn’t pry me away from with a crowbar. I prefer to launch my apps with LaunchBar, although I used to be a Quicksilver user.

And I’ve been with the platform a long time. I remember OS9 and 8, yes, but I was a master of System 7, cut my teeth on System 6, and even worked on a Mac so old that it didn’t have an operating system number. Now I know my daemons and plists, but before I knew my Extensions and my DAs and that I had to use Font/DA Mover to move those around. I understand the concept behind a suitcase. I once considered getting a tattoo of Clarus. If this is you, you might find this review useful.

First, the Verdict

Definitely upgrade. Generally love it. Keep your eyes wide open, though: the big killer is the lack of Rosetta. If you need Rosetta, you need to stay on your existing OS.

Upgrading & the Mac App Store

The very first thing you experience when you upgrade to Lion is the upgrade process itself, and Lion’s is amazing. You just click on the Lion icon in the Mac App Store, the darned thing downloads — it didn’t take nearly as long as I feared, and I downloaded it on launch day, so I’d bet anyone with a cadle mobem or better would have it done by the end of dinner. The upgrade ran quickly and easily, and much sooner than I’d expected I was up and running in Lion.

Part of what made that up-and-running seem so fast is that Lion boots straight to the login screen, and only after you log in sends you to the ol’ blank gray screen with the spinning wait cursor that the OS shows during boot. I don’t know if boot overall is faster, but I sure felt better-served!

Does Lion Play Well With My 4-Year-Old MacBook Pro?

Yes, yes it does. I’ve got a MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (a MacBookPro3,1 for the geeks out there), and it’s noticeably snappier with Lion than it was with Snow Leopard. Leopard was itself snappier than Tiger, so I think Apple’s on a bit of a roll here. The speed increase is perhaps most visible in the Finder — which was rewritten in Cocoa, so should be a lot faster — but app opening and closing, and file opening and saving, are noticeably faster as well. Memory usage might have gone down a smidge as well, although I’m still happy that I have 6 gigs of RAM.

Lion’s Look

The first thing I noticed was the new square corners and tiny close-minimize-maximize chic lets. I have to say, those latter I think don’t look much good at all, but the squarer corners are a change that’s really grown on me. Replacing many Aqua-themed control widgets with flatter controls with fewer colors definitely makes the screen less-busy and easier-on-the-eyes. Some have speculated that it could be easier to miss controls with these looks, but I haven’t had that problem. Frankly, I think it looks slick.

Scrolling

The first part of this look that’s a noticeable change is the new scrollbars: no arrows, no handles; heck, there’s no scroll thumb in newer apps that take advantage of the latest controls. This is kind of shocking to look at, but, I have to admit, I can’t remember the last time I relied much on the scrollbar; I generally work with 30-60 page documents, and the traditional scrollbar just isn’t that much use there. Gestures have also been changed: you drag down with two fingers to scroll down, and up with two fingers to scroll up. It sounds stupid, but it’s just like the swipes you do on a smartphone. I never really used the gestures to scroll before, but now I do, and I love it. I don’t miss the old way at all.

Window Management

Another big change is window management. Since back in the early days of the Mac, you moved a window from the titlebar at the top and resized it from a special control at one corner. Now, you can resize from any edge. Honestly, having moved back and forth between Windows and the Mac, I never really thought resize-from-all-sides was a big advantage for Windows, and I don’t care now.

Lion offers true fullscreen windows — not just maximized, but occupying the sole layer in a given space, and with no menubar or other chrome. (The menu pops up if you mouse to the top of the screen.) This is great for apps, like Mail, which you manage mostly through buttons in the interface or through key commands, and for apps like OmniGraffle that you control through palettes. Be careful, though! If your app really, really isn’t written for full-screen — like, say, Chrome — then you can get it to full-screen without the button that gets you out of full-screen ever appearing!

Of course, window management isn’t just sizing and moving windows, it’s seeing where all your windows are. Lion replaces Exposé and Spaces with Mission Control, which seemed super-cool in the demos and so far has only disappointed. Honestly, this is the piece that I wish I didn’t have the most in the entire upgrade. The big problem for me is that I used to group windows by activity in each space — one for mail, one for notes, one for to-dos, and one for each project. That was easy in Leopard and Snow Leopard, because you could just hit F8 and see all your Spaces and drag windows from one to the next. Unfortunately, with Mission Control, you have a two-step process to move windows between Spaces: you need to first navigate to the starting space, then enter Mission Control from there, then drag the windows over. That’s twice as much work. Plus, everything’s in a straight line, instead of a grid, so you can’t move directly from, say, Space 1 to Space 4 like you used to be able to.

Worse, full-screen apps don’t play well with Mission Control. Full-screen apps each get their own space, but there’s no way to directly switch to that space — it’s not numbered. The only ways to get there are to go into Mission Control or to command-arrow over there.

Frankly, Mission Control has left me with this pattern of using Lion in which I move back and forth in my spaces, as if along a ribbon of film. It reminds me of the good ol’ System 4 Switcher days, back before even MultiFinder.

Mail, iCal, and Address Book

iCal and Address Book have been re-done in new skeuomorphic looks. Skeuomorphic is a word I learned reading about iCal and Address Book’s new looks, and it means “look like real things.” They sure do! Address Book’s new look is skin-deep only; it works about the same, but now it looks like a book, rather than Baby’s First User Interface Design Project. It’s a meh.

iCal’s redesign, despite it’s stupid leather look, is awesome. The year view now gives you a heat map of how busy your days are, so you can see when you have time and when you don’t; it’s brilliant for setting far-future events based on free time. The month and week views are the same as they were before, which isn’t bad since I used to live in my week view; but the day view is my new favorite. You get the usual view of your day, but, instead of a bunch of wasted space, there’s now an agenda view of the whole week right next to it. Definitely the best way to look at your schedule!

Mail is similarly brilliant. Everyone talks about the 3-pane view, which is nice, but, to me, the other details are better. One is that the three-view is really a two-view: there’s a button to toggle the folder list opened and closed, which is great since we all mostly spend time in our inbox and only refer elsewhere sometimes. Most of the time that list can be out of the way, but it’s still easily at-hand when you need it.

The other is the new threaded mail view. Basically, the right-hand reading pane looks like GMail’s, but prettier. Brilliant! Honestly, with Mail’s great new look and powerful rules, plus Mail Act-On’s flexible rules and filing commands, I can hardly imagine needing more from my mail client.

If you live in iCal and Mail, then the $29.95 update to Lion is worth it just for those two apps; you’d easily spend more on third-party apps of a similar caliber.

Other New Features

One thing I rather don’t like is the new dialogs the system pops when it needs an Administrator password for something: you used to be able to click on a disclosure triangle to see exactly who was asking for something, but no more. I liked that info, and, thanks to the disclosure triangle, I can’t see how it would’ve gotten in anybody’s ways.

User account icons are circular with a fairly prominent beveled edge. Just looks stupid!

The Guest account is gone, which I can’t see how that’s an improvement.

E-mail and Calendar account prefs are now in the Preferences, rather than in a given app. Potentially useful, if all your apps can eventually draw from this.

Autocorrect in spelling works like on the iPhone, with little pop-up suggestion boxes and autocorrect. I think I have to get used to this, but I’m not sure what the point is on a non-multitouch screen. A portent of the future?

I’ve had some trouble with the new DVD player. Hopefully, that’s more the DVD I tried than the software itself!

Did I mention no Rosetta? This is a Do Not Upgrade if you’re reliant on, say, Microsoft Office 2004.

My Verdict

I really need to get better used to the desktop- and window-management paradigms from Mission Control. I suspect they’re good at the end of the day, but I need to learn how to use them.

Mail is one of the best e-mail clients I’ve ever used.

With the exception of Mission Control, I’m not really bothered by anything, and overall my computer is definitely faster. Lion’s a good upgrade! At $29.95, it’s a no-brainer for pretty much any Intel Mac user.








Official Juniorbird.com Products of the Year

December 16, 2010 / posted in Reviews / Comments Off

I know that you’ve been waiting for some kind of guidance on what to get your friends for Christmas or Hanukkah this year. Here at Juniorbird.com, we’re always looking to improve the quality-of-life of our beloved readers. Part of this is letting you know about the finest items that our skilled operatives have bought and tested this year. For your holiday shopping convenience, please enjoy these products that we are confident will change your life.

Whiskey Glass

I’m a big Scotch fan; I enjoy a tipple on many a cooler evening, or a weekend afternoon in front of the TV. But a delicious single malt is pricey, so you want to get the most flavor for it and you also want to drink it at a very responsible rate. Your typical 8oz tumbler isn’t great for either of these: a solid ounce- to ounce-and-a-half pour doesn’t go far, and the straight-sided design doesn’t collect any of the luscious (depending on your point of view) smells.

So I got this scotch whiskey glass. It’s been a revelation! Every scotch tastes not only better, but different than with a tumbler. I can detect many more subtle variations, and the abrasive alcohol-y notes are minimized. Or, my mind tricks me into experiencing that way. I guess I’m a cheap placebo date!

Also, it’s helped those bottles of Scotch last longer, because it’s just not tempting to make a Mad Men-style healthy pour when you have an appropriately-sized glass. For instance, observe the difference when I pour in a pony — that’s about an ounce — of Scotch:

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Obviously, the big glass on the left is your standard tumbler, and on the right is the Scotch glass. You can barely guess that it’s the same amount! It’s much easier to sip and enjoy from that Scotch glass.

Epson Flatbed & Negative Scanner

If you shoot film, then this is the scanner for you. I wanted to scan in all of the black-and-white photos I’d shot and developed, since, you know, who looks at printed photos anymore? They’re no good for tagging on Facebook. Unfortunately, your typical highly-rated film scanner runs well over a thousand dollars.

This nifty flatbed isn’t too big — so it doesn’t take up enough room for your spouse to start complaining about how your hobby is taking over the house, or at least not past the caustic chemicals you’re using in the tub — and has an attachment for scanning negatives and slides. The included software is easy-to-use and takes great scans. Definitely my bridge between film and digital.

Kitchen TV

This is a funny recommendation, because, while we have this 9” under-counter TV in our kitchen, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. This is a replacement unit; our first one died a couple of weeks after arrival, and there’s a lot of reviews like that on the web. On the other hand, when it works, this is truly one of the best things ever. Courtney and I honestly fight to see who gets to do the dishes, just so we can watch our TV or DVDs on it.

I ran a long coax cable around a doorway from our Tivo so we can watch Tivoed shows on it too. (Pity that the remote doesn’t work from over in the kitchen — no skipping ads!) Having this TV really does change the experience of using the kitchen — cooking and cleaning are much more fun. Ya do have to watch out and actually pay attention while using sharp things and fire, but, if you have that kind of self-discipline, I highly recommend you buy a TV like this for your own kitchen!

Waterproof Camera

With the good-enough cameras that you find on most cell phones these days there’s not a heck of a lot of reason to own a point-and-shoot. Nonetheless, I’m recommending this one for one specific reason — it’s waterproof. Unlike your cell phone, you can take it to the pool, take it on the boat, and even take it to the beach and not have to worry about it getting stolen while you’re swimming — since it’ll be with you!

This little Panasonic takes some great photos. It’s easy-to-use and has a ton of settings, handy and quasi-artsy. Get this camera or one like it, and take it everywhere and have a good time. Heck, get the floating camera strap so you don’t need to worry about dropping it in the lake.

(Yes, it’s an older model — often you can save a bunch by getting a last-generation camera. For the past 4-5 years sensors and autofocus have been good enough that you don’t get a ton of benefit from getting the latest stuff — an older model is still great.)

If you’re still looking for some gifts, I highly recommend all four of these. Well, three of these four, and one more in the category of the one I described. Go to town this holiday season, get yourself a nice treat like one of these!








Things I Thought Would Be Simple By Now Include Personal Finance Programs

April 10, 2010 / posted in Mac, Reviews, Uncategorized / Comments Off

I need a personal finance program. You know, to track money on hand and budgets and stuff. I figured it’d be pretty easy, what with it being a major product category for something like a decade and a half now. Not so much; apparently I’m a demanding customer. Said demands — not letters-cut-out-of-magazines-pasted-into-message-sent-anonymously-style demands, just plain old consumer expectation-style demands — included:

  • I can enter transactions (you know, rather than just having them auto-downloaded for me)
  • Auto-reconcile download transactions from multiple banks and credit cards
  • Multiple separate budgets (you know, so that I can have one for me and one for the family)
  • View budgets on iPhone app
  • Enter transactions on iPhone app and sync to desktop
  • Runs on Mac

That’s all! That doesn’t seem like much to me. However, it’s been harder than I’d expected; nothing out there so far has made the grade. I’ve tried:

What about Quicken?

Quicken is the obvious answer, unfortunately there’s no matching iPhone app. From experience, I know that, if I don’t enter the transaction shortly after I make it, I’ll just end up with a pile of receipts and an out-of-date budget. Similarly, Moneydance and Moneywell both have iPhone apps coming but… not yet.

What about Mint?

I was happily using Mint for a few years, but it just didn’t match my life anymore. It didn’t have multiple budgets, which was an annoyance. But the killer is that I can’t enter transactions in it. We pay our rent with a check, since our landlord is just some lady who owns a few houses, and there are a few other people we pay with checks every month too; none of these fine people deposits checks promptly, so cash in our bank account can exceed cash actually available by thousands of dollars for a couple of weeks every month. This makes Mint’s picture of our finances pretty unenlightening.

So I tried the rest:

iBank

iBank has a great desktop program. It’s easy-to-use, good-looking, and is one of the few that lets you budget by more than just category. Unfortunately, the iPhone version doesn’t have budgets, and is designed in such a way as to suggest that they don’t really mean to include budgets. That’s a killer for me. However, if you want direct download from your bank, like Quicken offers, iBank is one of the few with this feature.

Cha-Ching

Cha-Ching actually does everything mentioned here! Feature-wise, it’s a clear winner. Otherwise, it doesn’t appear to be under active development anymore and so I just didn’t feel comfortable committing to it. It’s hard to put all your financial data in a program that won’t be updated to match future changes.

Money

Money was the early leader here, with all of the features… except it’s not very smart about auto-reconciling. If the transaction date in the download doesn’t match the date you entered it, Money doesn’t know to match it and Money offers no way to manually match downloaded transactions to existing ones. This is more frustrating than it seems, at least to me, since my bank and credit cards provide the posting date, rather than the date the transaction occurred, in downloads. The posting date is sometime between the same day and up to 5 or 6 days later, depending on the practices of the place you buy, I believe. Naturally, I entered transactions on the date they occurred. Having dozens of duplicated transactions because of this date disagreement was a killer to me. However, if that’s not a problem for you, then the budgeting here was as good as iBank.

Squirrel

Squirrel is almost perfect. The desktop version is actually rather lovely, although you’re limited to budgeting by category. But the iPhone version crashes every time I look at my budget. So there goes the whole budget thing.

iCompta

Same date problem as Money. Also, weird and French.

I’m not sure what’s next. Do I abandon the requirement for a budget on my iPhone and either accept Squirrel, with the promise of maybe future budget bug busting, or iBank, with no budget but the only support for Direct Download à la Quicken? Do I choose Quicken and give up on having “an app for that”? Do I wait to see if Moneywell and Moneydance have good iPhone apps? What do you think?








Baby’s First Oscar, Part 3

March 7, 2010 / posted in Reviews, Uncategorized / Comments Off

What is the chance that DJ L’il Bit would hit the post button twice in a row? Apparently 100%. Anyway she – who has a Master’s in Screen and TV writing from USC – says that every story comes in three acts anyway, so that makes this kind of appropriate, anyway. Hmmmm, maybe I should study story structure.

Anyway, now we’re on to the dancing bits. I’m not sure I go to the Academy Awards for the dancing.

All the girls said “oooo” for Bradley Cooper. Everyone alway says he’ll be the next big star. But he keeps getting upstaged.

Wow, all those documentaries look incredible. I should watch more documentaries.

Terrifying temporary DirecTV outage! But it’s back. Is this what it’s like to live in New York?

Further proof that the Snuggie’s cool. Thanks, Tyler Perry!

Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino: puttin all the anti-establishment wacky ones in one place at one time, huh? And announcing the foreign language films… You’re not fooling me, Academy.

Poor Argentine guy, trying to keep up in his second or third language.

I know Avatar’s the favorite to win, but that excerpt didn’t make me want to watch it. I am thoroughly bored by the concept of the movie.

Wow, to best actor now? Awesome.

Wow, Michelle Pfeiffer just warmed Jeff Bridges’s heart.

George Clooney’s girlfriend: jealous!

Nobody loves anybody the way Michelle loves Jeff, eh?

How did Jeremy Renner have a 20-year career? Did he start in utero? I need to follow his skin-care regimen.

I don’t know why Jeff wasn’t nominated or The Men Who Stare At Goats, he was tons of fun there. In fact, he played the guy who’s giving this speech right now.

Good insight from another guest here: Jeff Bridges and his wife have the same hair!

Apple is selling the heck out of the iPad here. Nobody in the room wants one. (I don’t think anyone in the room is in the target demo.) Apple fail: the iPhone autocorrect doesn’t know the name of the iPad.

Best Actress smackdown: Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren are sure winners. Who takes this one?

OH SURE, GABOUREY SIDIBE GETS OPRAH TO ANNOUNCE HER. Somebody has already won.

What is Sean Penn talking about? Didn’t somebody script this bit?

Again: if, a few years ago somebody told you that Sandra Bullock would even be nominated for an Oscar, you would’ve laughed. Awesome speech, too.

OK, really, there’ve been no women or African-Americans who’ve won the Academy Award? Moviemaking needs a Rooney Rule.

I just want to say to Kathryn Bigelow, I was the one guy who bought the K-19 DVD, I really liked that movie.

What was that shake of the head, James Cameron? Jealous? Oh, well you are now that your ex-wife just beat you for most everything, eh?

I had the lead in points there for a minute. Just a minute. Now my score defines the line where somebody says ” What’s the lowest score? Did anybody get less than [Wade’s score]?”

OK, now there are a lot of movies I should see… I wouldn’t bet on that though. Despite the fact that movies just aren’t that important to me, this Oscar party was more fun than I’d expected. The whole show was more watchable than I’d expected. And blogging the whole time allowed me to easily avoid interacting with most people and, now, cleaning up. I guess I should pitch in. Or, at least, not stand in the middle of the kitchen.