As luck would have it, the guys at Java Code Geeks wrote about using Oracle/Sun Microsystem’s Virtual Box, which I have extolled in the past. So, I’m going to follow their tutorial, download the live CD, and have a go. If it’s really all that great, maybe I’ll even try my hand at developing an app for that platform, perhaps as a warmup to writing an iPhone/iPad app, who knows?

Instead of simply waiting patiently (or impatiently, as the case may be), I’ve been avidly reading every review I could find, and trying out iPad-optimized web pages, including the iPad site from National Public Radio. NPR says it is best to view their iPad site in Google’s Chrome browser, since it isn’t optimized for other browsers. Hmmm. I wonder why Chrome, and not Apple’s Safari? Maybe Chrome is more like the iPad version of Safari than Safari itself is?

As a member of the Apple Developers Program, I’ve also downloaded the beta version of the iPhone SDK (Software Developers Kit) that includes an iPad simulator, but must confess I haven’t yet found time to fire it up. It would be different if I actually had a real application I wanted to develop, but so far I’m still trying to learn the development how-to. Thanks to some comments on a technical article about iPad app development, I may have an easier time of that now that I’ve found Corona Simulator, an alternate SDK that seems to be much more straightforward to use than Apple’s Xcode alone.

So, even without a chance of getting our own iPad, we’re considering driving up to Austin tomorrow to see if maybe we can touch one anyway. Maybe that will get me excited enough to finish the Corona tutorials and start working on my own apps, who knows?

Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

First, there is the screen itself. It is not paper-white at all. The contrast is rather poor, and text is not as sharp-edged as I’d like. Not having a backlight, while saving battery consumption, does mean it’s necessary to have a light source handy to read productively. My caveats don’t extend to the point of complete disgruntlement, though. While the screen on my iPhone is backlit and high contrast/resolution, its smaller size makes it much more difficult to read for more than a few minutes. Since one reason I want an eReader is for grad school textbooks, that makes a difference. However, although I can list a number of caveats, my reaction was not nearly as negative as that described by Nicholson Baker in his The New Yorker review. However, even Baker says in his final paragraphs that once he started reading, “Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos promised it would.” However, one feature that leaves me completely unimpressed is the built-in Web browser. I’m not sure if it’s Sprint’s 3G network or the browser software or the Kindle’s hardware, but for some reason opening a page on the Kindle is excruciatingly slow, and unless the page has a very clean design and a well-functioning style sheet, the results can be unreadable. I find that even though Web links normally provide very useful extensions to many documents, on the Kindle they are just too much trouble to be worth the time and effort required to use them.

Kindle for School

Last term I bought several textbooks in ebook editions, and found it quite a hard slog to get through them on the iPhone. For the Fall semester I’ve already purchased a couple of required texts in Kindle format, and I’m much more confident that I will be able to read them more productively than I could on the iPhone. For one thing, the Kindle for iPhone app doesn’t have a way to highlight or mark text selections, a time-honored study technique used by students for countless years. The Kindle DX does allow highlighting, and automatically adds marked selections to a file called “My Clippings.txt”, which can be downloaded to a computer using the USB cable. As a plain text file, these notes can then be organized in any way one chooses. On the Kindle itself “highlighting” consists of a light grey underlining that is not very conspicuous, but not invisible either.

Kindle Resources

Speaking of Kindle for iPhone, since Amazon’s acquisition of the company who make the highly-regarded Stanza ebook reader software, the latest version of this app shows many improvements obviously imported from that excellent application. Stanza itself comes in a desktop version as well as for iPhone OS, which has a feature I just found out about. Possibly new since the Amazon acquisition, it is now possible to save books readable by Stanza Desktop in Kindle’s .azw format. In particular, I’ve found that .epub format ebooks, available from many publishers including O’Reilly and Associates, Baen Books, and the public domain resource, Project Gutenberg, are very easy to use on the Kindle. Just open them in Stanza Desktop, select File-Export Book As-Amazon Kindle and copy the resulting file into the Kindle’s “document” folder when it is connected to the computer with its USB cable. Or, email it to the Kindle using your personal [yourname]@kindle.com address. Before sending documents to the Kindle via email, though, you have to register the email address you want to send it from in your Amazon “Manage my Kindle” account. Using this address costs US$0.10 per document, but will send it directly to the device over the Whispernet Sprint cellular network. There is also a free email address, [yourname]@free.kindle.com, but there is not much point in using that for this purpose since you have to then copy the document from your computer to the Kindle, and if you already have it on your computer in the appropriate format, why send it through Amazon’s system?

The Whispernet cellular network does add a special filip to the Kindle. Buying books on the Kindle and having them delivered directly to it within minutes is possibly the most compelling reason to buy this eReader instead of others on the market at this moment. Amazon’s Kindle Store has an enormous selection of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs available, of course, and the hardest thing about it is to avoid blowing the budget filling up the Kindle with the enticing commercial offerings. But finding a lot of sources of free ebooks has saved my finances. One list of sites offering free ebooks is in The Kindle 2 Cookbook: How To Do Everything the Manual Doesn’t Tell You, which has a lot of other very useful information, too.

This ought to give you a taste of why I’m happy with my new Kindle DX. Will I still be as thrilled with it if Apple announces a competing product next month? Maybe not, but in the meantime I gotta go now… so much to read, so little time!

The good news about the Barnes & Noble announcement is that they plan to make their ebooks available on many platforms. Here’s what the company president had to say about that:

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com.

But in spite of all these factors, I’ve still bought one. Why?

The fact is, I’m impatient. I’ve long seen the benefits of digital media. Indeed, I’ve even published books electronically myself. A decade ago, I owned a PalmOS device (a Handspring) on which I read a number of ebooks as well as kept track of appointments, played games, and so on. That device finally failed, and I didn’t replace it, so all the content I’d bought for it, while still in my computer’s archive folder, is essentially lost. Still, I did enjoy the handheld experience, and know I’ll use any ebook reader I finally acquire. There’s the practical issue of portability, too. My husband and I live in our motorhome nearly half the year, and there is just not enough room to carry all the books I’d like to have available in there.

But what about that iPhone I’ve written about so often? I’ve even written about the Kindle for iPhone app on this blog and I use it still. But as much as I love my iPhone, it is the case that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be (which never was that great), and these days I simply cannot read for long or as well on even as good a screen as the iPhone’s simply because of its small size. I find that although I have read entire books on it, I don’t retain as much sense from them as I want to. Also, the iPhone app doesn’t let me highlight blocks of text to refer to later. Yes, I can create bookmarks, but that’s not quite the same. Since I have bought some of my textbooks for grad school as ebooks, these are critical shortcomings.

In short, the Kindle for iPhone app is a stopgap. I had hoped Apple would announce a tablet computer or ebook reader this summer, and if they had I would have held off a while longer, but they haven’t. Oh, if they do eventually come out with a new gadget, especially if they make a deal with Amazon to allow Kindle-formatted ebooks to work on it, I will cheerfully throw my Kindle up on eBay and jump on the killer iBook. But until that day, Amazon is getting my somewhat grudging allegiance and money.

The problem I was trying to correct is that the video card emulator in VirtualBox 1.5 was not up to handling a high-end graphics task like video editing. Version 3 does a much better job, especially after I read the User Manual (gasp!) and followed the suggestion there to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a package of device drivers and applications designed to optimize the guest operating system’s performance. It did indeed do that. Before installing these Guest Additions, I was unable to resize the window where Windows 7 beta was running, and when I clicked the cursor inside that window it was “captured” by the VirtualBox application until I tapped the “Host key” to release it. With Guest Additions installed, I can stretch the display window as large or small as I want it, and the cursor moves smoothly from one OS to the other without requiring a keystroke to release it.

There are a few other enhancements as well, including shared folders, which allow access to any designated folder on the host system, time synchronization between host and guest systems, and of course better graphics support.

So, with all that, does vReveal run? Yes! So, I will be testing it using some videos I’m shooting on my new iPhone 3GS, and will have some before and after examples here soon. It still might not work, because even though the application did open, when I tried to look at a sample video I got an error saying it could not find a compatible GPU (Graphic Processor Unit). Even though the iMac has an nVidia GeForce GT 130 on board, the Windows 7 installation may not be able to take advantage of it if the correct drivers are not available. Cross your fingers!

vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.

So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget:

I even tried pulling it up on my iPhone with the WiFi turned off, in case it was something that got into the router. Same symptoms. So I wrote back and the techs put a customer support rep on it. By this time, though, I had decided to start up one of the virtual machines I have on this computer, in this case WindowsXP running on Parallels. Being Windows, I keep an anti-virus program updated on that, even though it’s only a virtual machine, and being too cheap to actually pay for software to run on an Operating System I only boot up once in a blue moon, I use AVG Free. Good stuff, that. As soon as I tried to open the blog, up popped a window announcing that it had detected an infected file on the page.

I logged back into the webhost’s support page to close the ticket, and discovered their rep had also seen a javascript file that was the problem, but didn’t take the time to discover which of many I’d installed in that blog was the culprit. However, AVG Free had already told me the URI of the site that was doing bad things, and I was able to find the link with my blog theme editor. I deleted both lines of code that pointed to the offending site, restarted the blog, and there it was, as good as new.

I never thought I’d see the day when an application on Windows saved me from malware, instead of exposing me to it!

A mentioned here earlier, my new iPhone 3GS was activated with only minor problems. Now we have another data point to add to the history. My husband’s new iPhone arrived yesterday, days earlier than promised by AT&T, thank you very much! So, I set about putting to work the lessons learned when establishing service to mine.

Everything went very smoothly, and since I did not follow the on-screen instructions to wait (infinitely) for activation to happen magically, but simply switched out the SIM cards from his old phone to the new one, Phil was up and running in less than 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install the 3.0 OS on his old iPhone, then back up his data and restore it to the new phone. That sounds wonderful, and it is, but we have encountered one snag.

When he decided to call me from his new phone, to make sure everything was working as designed, my phone rang, but we could not hear one another. Very odd. We tried texting, and that worked, and Phil tried calling AT&T’s directory service, which also worked. The voice recognition at the other end apparently heard his request clearly, and he could hear the prompts. I did the same with my phone, with similar success. (It was late at night by this time, so we didn’t try calling a friend to try it out.) I tried calling his phone again, and this time he could hear me, but I still could not hear him. We repeated this experiment several times with the same results. So I am not sure what is going on, but will be calling AT&T or Apple this morning if the phone still isn’t working properly. And yes, we checked to make sure neither of us had tapped the Mute button.

In the meantime, I should mention that in order to use my old iPhone as an iPod Touch (without signing up for yet another phone plan), I had to jailbreak it. This was a new experience for me, but after some heart-in-mouth moments waiting for the EPROMs to be flashed, everything come out just fine. I will not be doing this with our new 3GS phones, but since otherwise the old devices would be useless, and we did fulfill the phone company’s 2-year contract, I see no reason not to do it on them. That will give me a platform for on-machine testing of the applications I’m planning (yes, I’m getting on that bandwagon along with tens of thousands of others), and a machine to use for demos once the apps are published and we start flogging them at shows and conferences. So stay tuned for some deep development geekery as I get into programming mode.

Update
On a hunch, I suggested Phil turn his phone off and on again, then try calling me. That did the trick! We could both hear each other just fine. Activation complete.