But Clearly Steve Jobs Is Just An Asshole

So remember when teh Steve said that a large part of the reason they weren’t allowing Flash on their mobile platform was that it didn’t work well and had a terrible user experience? In fact, he said exactly this:

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

I know, I know, he was clearly just using this as an excuse. The real reason Apple blocked Adobe Flash had nothing to do with performance, or security, or battery life, or any other “user experience” factor. It was all about protecting the App Store. I mean, Adobe promised that “the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.” And, at last, we have the PROOF we’ve been waiting for, because Adobe has now finally shipped Flash on a mobile platform and people in the “real world” are starting to test it and report back on how it works. And you can too, as long as you:

1. Have a brand new DROID 2, or any other Android phone that has actually been allowed to upgrade to Android 2.2 (and you were picked by your carrier to get the OTA update)
2. Don’t have a Motorola original DROID, since they did not allow Flash 10.1 with their initial Froyo update. (But seriously, who has one of those ancient phones from last November anymore?)
3. Actually go through the trouble of getting the Flash Player app from the Android Marketplace (which, of course, requires a device with access to the Android Marketplace, and not all do have access).

You can now experience it yourself in your own hand. So, Steve, prepare to find out how wrong you were. Flash, baby, flash! Web video in all its glory here you come! Now we will know “how it will perform” and Steve can suck it!

Yeah! Now that’s an awesome user experience. Flash on Mobile is finally here. Now the world will be able to evaluate for themselves the real motives behind Apple’s decision to disallow Adobe’s Flash Player on their mobile products.

Or maybe not so much…

I like you guys, Adobe. Really, I do. That product evangelist guy you have is awesome and funny (and he can kick really high). I use your Creative Suite products in my work every single day. But seriously… How do you think that’s going to work out for you there, Adobe? I’m just not seeing the must-have feature that the Android fanboys all predicted while salivating over the inevitable doom of iOS. Are you? Really?

Paypal Is the Worst Company In the World?

So, John Cole has been having a long and seemingly intractable problem with PayPal, which lead him to recently declare that Paypal Is the Worst Comany In the World. While I’m not so sure about them being the worst (certainly there would be a few other deserving companies in the running for that title, like Haliburton, the entire oil industry, most of the insurance industry, and probably a large portion of our food production industry), they are absolutely far from what any rational outside observer would consider “good”.

So, in addition to helping John Google bomb them, I thought I’d take a minute to investigate other reports of problems with PayPal from around the interwebs. It didn’t take long to find literally thousands of horror stories from other customers (both sellers and “regular people”) who have had tons of issues with PayPal over the exact same thing as what John Cole is experiencing. Now some of these sites have to be viewed with skepticism, because the people operating them are trying to sell you a different semi-competing service (a merchant credit card system account). But plenty are not.

There have actually been multiple lawsuits over this exact issue, but PayPal (and parent Ebay) has always just settled them rather than address their terrible practices. It also isn’t anything new. Here is an article from PC World from 2002 citing many of the exact same practices that people are complaining about today. It looks to me like it is just part of their regular business model. They freeze your account, take your money, and do with it what they please. They certainly can at least use it to generate additional income while they sit on it.

In the end, this appears to be the only answer: PayPal is NOT a bank. They are beholden to no one. Do not trust them with your money, and certainly don’t maintain a balance that they have access to if you need to use them.

UPDATE: Another day, another automatically generated response letter from PayPal. Things like this actually make the “customer service” I got from MetLife seem pretty good by comparison. And that’s just sad.

Earl Coming To Downeast Maine?

Probably not, but maybe. Most of the models for Hurricane Earl show it curving and sliding up the east coast of the US before crashing into Nova Scotia at Category 1 strength, and this is probably the most likely course. However, the HWRF model actually currently has Hurricane Earl taking a decidedly more easterly path, and has it hitting pretty much dead on with Mount Desert Island (the purple line in the map below).

Current Hurricane Earl Tracking Map

Still, according to the NWS in Caribou, it probably isn’t too much of a threat:

Long term /Thursday night through Monday/…
primary feature this at beginning of period is Hurricane Earl expected to be near Cape Hatteras. Consensus track is to move Earl northeast passing southeast of Nova Scotia Saturday morning. This will put coastal waters and southern portion of forecast area on northwest edge of system Friday night. A strong upper level trough is moving across the Great Lakes towards New England as Earl moves northeastward from Carolinas late Friday. The strength and timing of this trough will determine the track of Earl. For now will assume consensus model track.

Assuming that Earl takes this “consensus track” (which is effectively where all the other colored lines point on the map above), we will quite likely see some dangerous surf (no going to Thunder Hole this year, please people) and we will probably get some heavy rain, but not much else. There are apparently other conditions which will help to hold down the storm surge and minimize coastal flooding. Plus, forecasting this far out is certainly much more of an art than a science. According to the National Weather Service from yesterday, the “average error” for this far out is a 200-300 mile radius. It has probably firmed up somewhat over the last 24 hours, but not by enough to be sure of anything.

Still… That one purple line pointing directly at us is a bit disconcerting. Of course, it would be even more disconcerting to be on the Carolina, Virginia, Jersey, or Maryland shore. Even though it is still predicted to stay offshore, it is still forecasted to be a big, powerful Category 3 storm just right off the coast. And it could, of course, zig-zag at the last moment with little warning.

Hurricane Earl 5 Day Forecast Map

SageTV Is Installed Fully, Licensed, and Working

Over the past couple of days I got the SageTV install finished. I’m really quite pleased with the results.

The playback and recording system has continued to be flawless, and really, that is the most important feature of any DVR application. This single benefit of SageTV far outweighs any other (by comparison) small sin they commit. I’m very pleased with many of the extra features Sage offers over BeyondTV. For one small example, I now have two “levels” of “skip ahead” support with my remote control. The “normal” 25 sec skip ahead/7 second skip back is assigned to the normal FF/RW keys. However, my remote actually also has Track FW/RW keys too, and I was able to assign 2:30 skip ahead and back to those keys. Works great for those times when you really need to jump through a file.

SageTV also performs dramatically better than BeyondTV in almost every single case. Menus are much “snappier”, the application itself launches quicker, and video playback startup is improved (even with my HD-PVR and external tuning). I really like the Weather support, and I was able to use a few very nice plugins to accomplish many of my goals (though I’ve been trying to keep this to a relative minimum). Oh, and did I mention that it fully supports Mac OSX and Linux? Yeah. I have a SageTV “server” running on Windows in my basement that does all of the recordings, but I can use SageTV Client to access this system on both my Windows-based HTPC, and my Macbook wirelessly over the WLAN. That is really A Big Deal (and one that opens serious possibilities for the future).

And, with a little work I was able to reprogram most of my annoyances with the navigation and keyboard shortcuts. For example, I was able to easily reassign the function of the ESC key to something more useful (I used the “browser-style” back command), and once I got my Firefly Remote Control set up via Girder, the system is smooth and easy to navigate in most cases.

Unfortunately, I have found a few limitations of the system…

Even with the fixed ESC key, Navigation is sometimes confusing and odd. A perfect example is Exiting the application. Normally in “regular” SageTV when you want to “exit” the program, you want it to close but to continue recording as scheduled (minimizing it to the tray). You accomplish this by putting it in “Standby” in SageTV’s parlance.  On the main menu, it presents both choices under a heading labeled Exit. 

The Exit section of SageTV 7's Menu System. What good is this right after launching the application?

However, when using the SageTV Client, which doesn’t need to stay resident at all because it isn’t doing any recordings, you don’t need that feature (or I don’t, I’m sure some people do). I want to always Exit when using the Client, and always Standby when using the “server”. You can set this “preference” for the Keyboard and Remote Control commands, but there is no way to set it for the Menu System. The Menu system always shows and forces you to choose between these two options. Worse, when you sleep the system via the Menu Command and then wake it back up? Sage remembers the “current page” of the Menu System whenever you Standby. When you’ve used the Exit>Standby command last, it pops open in that same spot, showing only the Exit command! What use is this? If I just went through the trouble of “waking it up” wouldn’t you assume that I’d want to, you know, use it and kick me back to the main menu? Not only that, but a novice user that walks up and hits the TV button on the remote, isn’t going to know to press the left arrow button intuitively because there is no other indication that there is anything other than Exit commands available.

Also, keyboard support is just clunky throughout. It seems that you can’t have a keyboard shortcut apply only during playback. All shortcuts are defined globally (throughout the system no matter where you are), and ALL keyboard entry is treated essentially as a “shortcut”. One impact of this is the fact that you really must use Control+Key for playback shortcuts, which I complained about before. You can’t just use a single keypress because, while you won’t type “A” or “D” or “+” or “>” during regular playback situations, you might need to type those characters elsewhere in the application. So, if you assign a special function to the A key, for example, then it will no longer type an “A” character for you in SageTV. Ever. This seems like a silly limitation, and is almost certainly due to the design of the keyboard, remote control, “SageTV command” infrastructure. I must admit, this infrastructure makes the keyboard, command, and remote control system is incredibly flexible and easy to customize, but it also imparts some clunkiness and limitations.

This seems to be the common theme in the choices SageTV made when designing the system. It is a simple choice, and a common choice: flexibility over polish, function over form. I am by-no-means a UI design zealot, and I love flexible, tweakable systems (I have a Linux box running next to me as I type this), but I think there is a thin line. SageTV is slightly over that line in some places where they really don’t need to be. It would just take more work, and more focus on the UI. They would have to hire someone who knows user interface design, and who isn’t invested in the “SageTV way”. And, of course, they would probably have to rumple a couple feathers in the community.

It reminds me a lot of the difference between iOS and Android. SageTV is very Android. I would never even begin to claim that BeyondTV had an iOS level of polish, but it was certainly further down that road than SageTV. For me, on a phone, that is a dealbreaker (for now), though I long for some of the Android flexibility goodness. For a TV DVR Application, it is really a close call, and a similar problem. But in this case, given the options available, SageTV is a very good fit in most ways. I would just prefer a little more polish in a few places, and I’d be willing to give up a little flexibility to get it.

I did encounter a LOT of trouble trying to import my old recordings from BeyondTV into SageTV. I found a tutorial in the Sage forums, but it was not as simple as I’d hoped. And, once I did go through all the steps, I got an error processing the XML data in the WebUI that I couldn’t find referenced elsewhere (and never got past). I suspect that this may have been because I wasn’t careful about which recordings I wanted imported, and didn’t go carefully, but that can hardly be blamed… I just wanted them all imported, so when exporting them from the difficult-to-find and use BTV-Negociator_5.13b I just selected all and exported the whole thing. I think there may have been some “broken” recordings in there that BeyondTV never properly deleted before, and these were causing the error. I don’t know for sure though, because after an hour of struggling and then an extemely vague error message…

I just gave up and just imported those recordings into J River Media Center instead. It took a while to manually tag them enough to bring them up to snuff, but it is done now. I’m still pretty certain that I’m going to switch over to use J River Media Center for most of my video viewing anyway, once I can get it to recognize the Metadata from the new SageTV recordings. Then I can just set it up to do it’s auto-import magic and the files will flow directly into MC from Sage. I’d really prefer to have MC handle all of my DVR recordings, but it is just missing too many “television-related” features to really even qualify as a candidate right now. To qualify, I need it to support: “client” live TV viewing fed by a remote server, full multiple tuner support, built-in external tuner support for a digital cable box via IR Blaster, and officially supported program guide data. It needs to be at least as easy to set up and maintain as SageTV.

In the end, I’m extremely pleased. SageTV is an incredible, powerful application. And, with version 7, it is finally polished enough to use pretty much out of the box as a set-top-box replacement system. It isn’t perfect, but it is best-in-class in my opinion.

The Colors of the Real World Only Seem Really Real When You Viddy Them On the Screen

I’ve long been having issues with BeyondTV (my DVR application of choice up until now). It hasn’t been updated in ages, since SnapStream apparently decided to cede the market to Microsoft and concentrate on their enterprise products. Since taking the plunge and upgrading all of my systems to Windows 7 64-bit (back in the RC days), I’ve had issues with the BeyondTV Link application, and with the reliability of recordings. And lately, I’ve been having issues with my Hauppauge HD-PVR, which up-till-now has been rock solid (unlike the seemingly painful experiences of others out there). So I’ve decided to make a switch…