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geekery

Ebooks and Ereaders

How to sideload a mobi file to Kindle on an Android device

When Victory of the Hawk dropped in April, a friend of mine in Kentucky won the draw I did for the entire trilogy. Which was all YAY! So I set her up with EPUB copies of the three novels, and also told her that if she wanted to read them on a Kindle device or app, I could convert them to MOBI as well.

However, we ran into a snag. Linda told me that she was having trouble getting the MOBI files into the Kindle app on her device–which in this case was a Samsung Galaxy Android tablet. Since I happen to have one of those as well (i.e., the Samsung Galaxy Nook), and since I am after all a QA Engineer in the day job, I decided to see if I could repro her problem.

(This is kind of long, so details behind the fold!)

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Who does dev work on iOS out there?

For any of you developer types who have to work with iOS, I have a question for you!

Namely: Apple has this new system that asks sites to use appstore.com links if they want to direct people to the App Store for a company or app. So for example, we have http://appstore.com/bigfish which takes you to all the stuff in the iOS app store by Big Fish Games.

My question is this: what if you’re not on the US app store on your device? According to this article on the Apple Developer site, in theory what’s supposed to happen is that you get redirected to the app store for your country. But what I don’t know is whether this is actually the case, and what sort of magic Apple might be doing to actually make that determination.

On one of our test devices at work, I just tried to set its app store to German, but found that I still went to a list of English apps if I hit that link in Safari. I don’t know if appstore.com is doing some form of geoIP checking or what.

Anybody able to enlighten me one way or another?

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And now, a rebuttal to my own rebuttal

There’s a reason “Go to not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes” is one of my favorite Tolkien quotes. Funny story: somebody once asked my belovedest Dara, re: that quote, “Is that true?” Dara immediately unthinkingly replied, “Well, yes and no–” And then caught herself, facepalmed, and swore, “DAMMIT!”

Case in point, I’m about to give you a rebuttal to my own rebuttal, in which I just talked about why tech companies drop support for older software. That post was with my QA Engineer hat on. Now I’m going to talk about the same question, but this time with my user hat on!

Because yeah, boy howdy, it’s annoying when a tech company decides to stop supporting a thing you’ve been quite happily using for years. Or, when they decide that the way a program works has somehow stopped being okay, and they completely change it up on the next version and expect you to cope.

Example: you’ll notice I mentioned at the end of that last post that they’ll pry Mac Word 2008 out of my cold, dead fingers. Why? Because I loathe the ribbon on the newer versions of Office, and Mac Office 2008 was the last version that didn’t have the ribbon. I hate that thing because it’s visually cluttered. It’s confusing. And Word was already stupidly complicated even after they slapped the ribbon on there, and making everybody have to figure out all the various brand new ways they had to now do the same things.

Example: Google deciding to get rid of Google Reader. Y’all may remember I was QUITE displeased about that. That’s part and parcel of a bigger, broader push by the tech companies away from using RSS in general–I was annoyed, too, when Apple decided to drop RSS support from OS X. That cost me the ability to easily keep up with Livejournal and Dreamwidth, and specifically, friends-locked posts on those sites. But the tech giants at large appear to have decided RSS sucks, whereas down here on the ground where the users are, we’re all still going “BUT BUT BUT we’re USING THAT”.

Example: Every single goddamn time Facebook changes something, for no apparent reason. I find it PARTICULARLY annoying that my News feed on Facebook keeps reverting back to Top Stories, no matter how many times I click on Most Recent. But they’re bound and determined to make people use Top Stories, and I’ve heard rumblings Twitter wants to do something similar, too. No matter how many users go “NO, NO, NO GODDAMMIT, we don’t want that!”

Example: Web browsers deciding you don’t really need a menu. NO. Every single time I do a fresh install of Internet Explorer, y’know the first thing I do? TURN THE MENU BACK ON. Because honestly, I can spare the narrow bar of space at the top of the screen that a menu occupies, I REALLY CAN, honest. Having it there and visible at all times is way less annoying than having to remember to hit the Alt key every time I want to do something.

And don’t think you’re off the hook either, Chrome. I’m not amused with you stuffing all the menu commands over onto that tiny icon over on the right. There’s no web page I visit on a daily basis, either in my day job or in my personal browsing, that has so much vital screen space that I can’t spare any for a menu I can easily find on a regular basis. On a mobile device, sure, it’s justified to hide the menu where the screen real estate actually matters. But on a desktop monitor, really, HONEST, we have enough space.

Example: Windows 8 not being consistent in its treatment of the classical Windows interface versus the new one. There are REASONS Microsoft is moving back towards that classical interface for Windows 10. Reasons involving enough users yelling, “No, dammit, WE WERE USING THAT.”

But when push comes to shove, what can you as a user do about examples like this?

Best thing I can suggest is, tell the companies in question. Send in customer feedback and tell them what things don’t work for you and why–though as I pointed out in the previous post, remember, the people that make these products are just people doing jobs, and they’re not out to make your life deliberately difficult.

Another thing you can do is to participate in usability testing. This is when companies have open testing sessions for people to come in and play around with new things, and offer feedback on what the experience of using them is like. This is different from my job, which is quality assurance. I come at it from the standpoint of engineering and making sure the thing works. Usability testing comes at it from the standpoint of the end user.

Yesterday, for example, we had a usability testing session here at Big Fish, and one of my teammates went to observe the process. He told me this morning that he found it humbling. An engineering team knows a product backwards and forwards. But when we see people who aren’t engineers having trouble with our babies, it’s a valuable and necessary reality check.

If you’re an author, of course you want people to like your books. You want them to leave you good reviews and come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment. Same deal with software. An engineering team wants the users to have a good experience using the software they create. But that team needs to hear from the users what the actual experience is.

I Fight For the Users

I Fight For the Users

And hey, you can tell the Internet, too. Because yeah, a good rant IS cathartic. For us techies, too!

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On why tech companies drop support for older software

A fellow Carina author has a blog post up today expressing her frustration over technology companies forcing people to upgrade even if they don’t want to–brought on in no small part by Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP. If you’re in tech, it’s worth a read, just as a reminder that a lot of end users of your product are NOT going to approach that product with the same mindset that you will.

But I did want to talk about one thing Janis has to say in that post, which is on the question of why Microsoft dropped support for XP.

Sure, software companies want to make money. They’re companies, after all. And in order to keep making money, they do have to keep developing new things. But any given team at any given software company has only so many people available to do that work. Developers have to write the code that actually creates the thing. The QA team has to test it. And this includes not only getting that thing finished and ready to sell, but also keeping track of any reported bugs, and releasing fixes for those as necessary.

The team I’m on at Big Fish, for example, is in charge of features on our web site. I’m a QA tester. What that means for my job is that if we change any given thing on the web site, I have to load up the appropriate page in web browsers and make sure that that change behaves the way we want it to. But it’s not as easy a question as “I just load it up in a browser and look at it once and say whether or not it works”.

Because there are a LOT of browsers in active use. Internet Explorer–MULTIPLE versions of IE, in fact. Firefox, on both the PC and Mac. Chrome, also both on the PC and Mac. Safari on the Mac. AND Safari on iPhones and iPads, multiple versions thereof (we’ve got iPads in our device locker that run iOS 6, iOS 7, AND iOS 8). Chrome and Firefox on Android devices as well.

I have to look at changes in all of those browsers. And that’s just one change on one web page. My job gets progressively more complicated the more complicated a change I have to look at.

This is called a test matrix.

When I first started working at Big Fish, our test matrix involved IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. But as I’ve continued my job there, the versions of IE we’ve needed to focus on have changed. IE’s most recent version is IE 11. And if I had to worry about every single version of IE that’s still in use out in the wild, that by itself would mean six different versions of IE I’d have to test on. And I STILL have to also care about Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, on the Mac and all those iDevices and Android devices too.

It’s not possible to test when your test matrix starts getting that big. I do still have to sleep and eat sometimes, you know. Not to mention write.

Now, imagine I have to test an operating system, not just one change on one web page. Then my job gets even MORE complicated–because there are a LOT of things that go into making an operating system. And it takes way, way more staff power to develop and test something that complex.

Nevertheless, the team that makes an operating system still has to also care about its test matrix. Only in their case, they have to think about things like “how many different types of computers do we have to load this operating system on?” That includes both desktop machines and laptops. And in the case of Windows 8, they had to think about making it work on tablets, too.

And if that operating system team is spending most of its time working on making the next version of that operating system, they’re going to have only so much time available to spend on supporting older versions of that operating system. Because again, those people have to also sleep and eat!

If Microsoft was to continue supporting XP, they would need to keep enough people around whose job it would be to focus on that. They’d also need to keep machines around that’d be old enough to run XP. Microsoft hires a LOT of people, and they occupy a whole heckuva lot of space in Redmond. But even their resources are finite, at the end of the day. It’s easy to dismiss their decision to drop XP support as a question of simple greed–and again, see previous commentary; yes, Microsoft wants to make money, just like any other company on the planet. Eventually, though, they’re going to have to decide that it’s just not worth it to keep that support active, when their available people and resources can be more effectively spent on something else.

But next time you want to rant about why any given software company is making you upgrade a thing you’re used to using a certain way, I ask that you also take a moment to remember that the team that actually made that thing aren’t out to personally make your life difficult. Promise! We just want to do our job just like anybody else, and have time at the end of the day to come home and have lives.

In closing, two final notes:

One, Bill Gates hasn’t worked for Microsoft for years. So if you want to rant about any current activities of theirs, they’re not Gates’ fault anymore.

And two, I AM a raving technophile and love me some shiny upgrades. But they’re going to pry Mac Word 2008 out of my cold dead fingers. 😉

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Attention, fellow Android-inclined geeks

Has anyone successfully set up an SD card to have an Android install on it?

What I want to do: use my 32GB SD card to have vanilla Android on it so that I can dual boot my Nook HD between the Nook’s proprietary launcher and vanilla Android*. I do not actually want to root the Nook–I just want vanilla Android available to me so I can switch back and forth and see which I like better.

(The main reason I don’t want to root the Nook right now is that it’s still under warranty, and rooting it will violate that warranty.)

I’ve done a bunch of googling, but the various interesting links I’m finding, while interesting, seem like they’re geared towards actually rooting the device. I’m also seeing a bunch of references to just buying images of Android you can plunk onto an SD card. But while that does sound convenient, screw that, I’ve got the tech chops to do an install myself. I just need to know the proper steps.

Anybody done this? If you have, can you point me at any notable links of interest on how to do it?

* For values of ‘vanilla Android’ meaning ‘I’m open to icecreamsandwich or kitkat or whatever works’. The Nook HD ships with what appears to be a B&N-hacked version of cyanogenmod’s hummingbird build, so I’m fine with looking at that, too.

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Initial impressions of Yosemite

Yosemite, OS X 10.10, finally dropped, so I’ve gone ahead and updated my laptop Aroree with it. So far my initial impressions of it are favorable. They’ve changed the overall design of it somewhat to make it better fit with the look of iOS 7 and iOS 8, which doesn’t surprise me. And performance-wise, my laptop now seems zippier, and I’m all for that.

iTunes

As part of this update, I also pulled down iTunes 12, and I’ve got to admit that that’s the thing that made me go ‘buh?’ first–not because of the changed layout of the program per se, but because now there’s a red icon for iTunes on the dock. Which is a distinct change from the years of blue iTunes icons we’ve had, and I’m not sure I approve of changing the color like that. I keep thinking something’s gone wrong every time I look at the dock and see that red icon there–or otherwise that something needs my attention, since “red circle” in Apple’s visual language has for so long meant “there’s a notification here that needs you to do something”.

Inside iTunes itself though I think I’m good with the new layout. It’s a bit less cluttered, and while I’m going to have to get used to changing icons on the toolbar along the top to see what I want to see, that’s not difficult. It’s similar to clicking things on my web browser, so that’s all good. And I particularly like the prettier layout for podcasts. Still to determine: how well this flavor of iTunes keeps things synced with my phone, particularly the recurring issue I’ve had with iTunes periodically deciding to duplicate some of my podcast feeds for no apparent reason.

Handoff

It’s pretty neat that I can message Dara via the Messages app on the computer and have it ping her on her phone. For that matter, the same conversation shows up on my phone and iPad, too. I haven’t tried to use the computer to make a call yet, but I think it’s pretty neat that that’s doable too.

I’m also going to want to try composing mail on the computer and seeing if I can pick it up again one of the devices, or vice versa. I don’t know how often I’ll use that feature, but it’ll be neat to try it out.

Mail

And speaking of mail, no huge functionality changes here as near as I can tell, other than Handoff. I’m seeing that a prior behavior that was irritating me still happens, but Dara’s theory is that this behavior is actually on purpose.

Specifically, it’s a behavior wherein if you have multiple mailboxes, let’s say A and B… and you get mail at Mailbox A but then move it over into Mailbox B, but then try to reply to the mail… it automatically defaults to replying from your B address. This is fine except when I’m trying to answer mail that goes to mailing lists. I keep forgetting which address I’m pointing at, and keep having to resend mailing list mail. Since this behavior has persisted through Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and now Yosemite, I’m clearly just going to have to make some tweaks to how I organize my mail.

I’m having to finally pull a lot of mail off my Gmail account anyway, since I’ve gotten tired of Mail.app choking when dealing with my Gmail accounts. I’ve seen ongoing problems with Mail refusing to download new mail from Gmail if I have a number of messages above a certain threshold. So before I updated to Yosemite, I’d already pulled a lot of mail off my Gmail accounts to try to reduce the amount of data that the program had to deal with. Thus, I don’t know if the problem persists in Yosemite or not. I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Printing

I do note with pleasure though that another long-standing bug does appear to have gotten fixed with printing of certain PDFs. One of our local utilities that we pay was doing something with its PDFs every time I tried to download the monthly bills, something that caused the files to get garbled whenever I tried to print them. So I’d have to mail them to Dara to let HER print them, since she was still on Snow Leopard for the longest time. Once she upgraded to Mavericks, though, the problem happened on her box too.

Now though, with Yosemite, the problem seems to have finally gone away. So I can print these bills again. Yay!

Weird computer name problems

I did see a new weird thing happen, though. My computer was mysteriously renaming itself from Aroree to Aroree-2, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m apparently not the only person who was having this problem, according to my searches.

Renaming the box back to Aroree didn’t help, since the name would revert after a few minutes. What I finally had to do to fix this was to reboot into Repair mode, do a Disk Utility disk repair, and then reboot back into the OS. After having done that, the name change back to Aroree appears to have finally stuck. But any of y’all out there who’ve updated to Yosemite, you might keep an eye out for this.

iCloud Drive

I have this finally available, yay! Another thing I haven’t yet tried anything with, but it’s nice to see it there. It finally makes Pages potentially actually useful to me. And the reasons I care about this are a) Pages doesn’t talk to Dropbox, and b) as an iPad app, Pages has a somewhat friendlier experience than what I’m currently using to write on my iPad, which is DocsToGo.

For my next full book, I may try to use Pages instead of Word + DocsToGo, and see how that goes. I’ll report on that as it happens!

That’s everything I can think of to comment on right now. How about the rest of you out there? Who’s installed Yosemite and what do you think of it?

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Initial impressions of iOS 8

I installed iOS 8 on both of my iThings this week, so here’s a quick roundup of things I’ve noticed so far. In general, iOS 8 looks a LOT like iOS 7, and the stuff that interests me the most won’t really kick into play until Yosemite drops and I can update my Mac. But that said, there are some points of interest.

The Good:

The new Health app has a tab in it where you can fill in medical data about yourself that might be critical in an emergency–allergies, important conditions of note, meds you’re on, that kind of thing. This strikes me as super-helpful, and certainly in both my and Dara’s case, there are important things that medical personnel might need to know if we’re in an emergency situation. This data is accessible from the phone’s emergency screen, the same screen from which you can dial 911. Excellent idea, Apple.

I am pleased to note that not only have the recurring Smart Playlists bugs that have plagued me through the last several iOS releases not returned this time, but a few other bugs new to iOS 7 appear to have been fixed as well. Notably, I’m not seeing weirdly missing album art anymore. And I don’t have to restart the Music app after syncing now to un-stick the Not Recently Played smartlist as I play stuff on it. AND, they fixed the bug where my Not Recently Played playlist wasn’t showing me brand new stuff. So now that playlist is behaving like I originally expected it to. Good.

Playlists in the Music app are now showing a count of songs and a run time in minutes. This is helpful to have, particularly for my smart playlists like Not Recently Played, where I can see at a glance how big the playlist currently is.

The bug with setting wallpapers appears to have been fixed–this bug being the one wherein you were unable to actually zoom a photo to the size you wanted when setting a wallpaper. This was annoying and I’m glad it’s fixed. Let’s hope it stays that way as this rev of the OS gets minor updates.

On my iPhone, battery life seems like it’s better. I haven’t burned through the battery nearly as fast the last couple of days, even if I play music through a good chunk of the day.

The Not Bad Per Se But Not of Interest to Me:

Two things got added that I immediately turned off when I discovered them.

One is predictive text, where they show you example possible words in a bar above the keyboard as you type to try to anticipate what you’re actually about to say. I found this visually distracting. Fortunately it was easy to turn off in Settings > General > Keyboards > Predictive.

The other is that in the app switcher that they put in with iOS 7, when you double-tap the Home button, they’ve added a list of your recently accessed Contacts. I found this visually distracting as well, and turned that off too. You can find the setting in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Show in App Switcher.

The Bad:

I’ve had apps hang unexpectedly a couple of times since the upgrade, requiring me to kill them in the App Switcher. This isn’t happening often, but it IS new behavior, and it’ll be something I’ll have to keep an eye on. The apps I’ve noticed this on so far have been Plants Vs. Zombies 2 and Friendly+, my Facebook app. I don’t know if this is a fault of the OS or of the apps not quite having been updated correctly for the new OS, though.

The Stuff I’m Still Investigating:

Apple’s handling of podcasts has been a mess in the last couple of revs of iOS, ever since they split podcasts out of the main Music app and off into their own Podcasts app. I’ve had recurring issues with certain podcasts duplicating themselves in my listing, and podcasts I’ve listened to still showing up in my list even though they’re supposed to have been deleted.

Still investigating whether handling of this has improved. A new version of the Podcasts app just dropped last night.

The Stuff I Will Play With More When Yosemite Drops:

You’re supposed to be able to share files across iCloud now, and have an accessible drive to put them on, similar to Dropbox, Google, OneDrive, and other such services. It’s about damn time Apple implemented that, and I’ll look forward to checking it out–since it’ll make Pages finally actually useful to me. Pages doesn’t talk to Dropbox, which has been a source of frustration to me.

Continuity will be interesting as well–the ability to answer messages across devices, such as answering a phone call on the Mac. Or starting a mail on the phone and picking it up again on the computer when I get home.

Should You Install It?:

If you have a recent device like an iPhone 5 or one of the newer iPads, yes, go for it. So far this seems like it’s a better than average iOS update.

However, if you have an iPhone 4S, you should read this. According to that article, the 4S suffers noticeable performance hits with iOS 8 on it.