woo, tangent

If you wondered why I was getting all high-and-mighty about the iPhone, and Apple’s overarching control over software on it thanks to the App Store system in particular, then this story really explains it. This guy developed an application that lets you stream podcasts straight to your iPhone, instead of having to download them via iTunes and sync them across beforehand, but Apple has refused to allow it on the App Store.

The stated reason is that it “duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes”, but beyond the fact that both are ways you could play podcasts on an iPhone, there’s no similarity at all. It’s much more likely that Apple objected to the idea of getting audio content on the iPhone without having to go through iTunes, and preferably through the podcast directory on the iTunes Store.

Anyone want to take bets as to whether we’ll ever see an Amazon MP3 Store app for the iPhone?

Saturday was another clear night, so I took the telescope out in search of one of the brigtest galaxies in the southern skies, the Sculptor Galaxy. Unfortunately, like my earlier experience with Centaurus A, I didn’t end up spotting it; I got it lined up as far as I could tell, star-hopping along in the finderscope based on nearby stars, but I couldn’t actually see it in the end.

I know how to find it now at least, so when I do get out in to some nice dark skies, I should have no trouble tracking it down.

The weather is back to shitty today, but last night, barring the odd cloud, it was actually clear, so I got a chance to put my new eyepieces through their paces. The moon was the main target — a big bright gibbous moon, with lots of craters jumping out along the terminator — and it looked sensational in both the Nagler and the Stratus. The Nagler gave very impressive views, with the extra maginification bringing out more detail while the wide field kept the entire moon in view. Taking in the whole moon at once was more comfortable with the Stratus, though, thanks to its lower magnification and larger true field of view, and it still showed plenty of detail as well.

The problem with having the moon high in the sky is that it light blots out views of faint objects, but I still tried the Nagler on Omega Centauri, a massive globular cluster, and on the Lagoon Nebula quickly with the UHC filter. I’ll have to wait for a clear, moonless night to really see what it do, though.

For a laugh, I threw one of my older eyepieces in while looking at the moon, and the difference was chalk and cheese — the bundled eyepieces aren’t terrible, but they’re definitely not as sharp and have less contrast, and the higher magnification pieces are nowhere near as nice to use thanks to their narrow fields of view. The fancy-pants glass is definitely worth it.

I have to apologise for the rain — buying new astronomy gear always brings bad weather, to ruin any plans of using it straight away, and the clouds started rolling over as soon as I was on my way home from the shop yesterday. I picked up a 13mm Tele Vue Nagler eyepiece which, along with the 21mm Orion Stratus eyepiece Kat got me for my birthday, should replace all of the cheap, basic eyepieces that came with the telescope.

The 21mm Stratus is a great low-power eyepiece for large nebulas and star clusters, while the medium-power 13mm Nagler is more for the smaller faint fuzzy things and the planets. The bundled eyepieces have an apparent field of view of about 50 degrees, and don’t perform well at the edges, but the Stratus as a 68 degree field and is sharp right to the edge, and the Nagler is 82 and should be just as sharp. The extra field of view will make observing much easier, since I won’t have to readjust the telescope so often to track the sky’s movement, especially at high magnification, which is a must for the planets. High magnification can help with small, faint things like galaxies, too, since it boosts contrast.

Of course, the bad weather curse has kept my Nagler inside since its purchase, but I’ve used the Stratus a couple of times, and it’s awesome — having a quality eyepiece really makes all the difference. With the UHC-E filter fitted, I got some great views of the Lagoon Nebula, and even though it’s not meant for planetary work, Jupiter was amazingly sharp. I’m very well set up now, so roll on the warm, clear spring nights!

I finished Braid last night and man, what an ending. The whole game has this bizarre, surreal charm, but it’s really intensified in the finale, and it’s only in the epilogue that you get the first clues as to the story’s true meaning. It feels like I’ve just lived through a David Lynch film, and I’ve been going over the whole thing in my mind repeatedly since I finished it, slowly making sense of all the pieces with the help of some observations made online by other players. Short of Jonathan Blow coming out and saying exactly what the game is about I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I doubt that’ll happen, and with good reason — people are going to be discussing the meaning of this game for a very long time.

Again, an awesome game — if there’s any way you can be playing this right now, make it happen! There’s no word yet as to how far away the PC port is, but I’m sure I’ll mention it when it arrives.

I am, in theory, playing Metroid Prime 3 at the moment. It’s not as super-great as the first Metroid Prime, but it’s still a great game, which I’d have finished back when I got it if not for the fact that Super Mario Galaxy came out a week later. Now, with GTA IV in the bag, I’ve come back to it, but last night when I should have been playing it, I got totally distracted by the new awesomeness on XBLA.

Geometry Wars 2 is a no-brainer, really — it takes the simple and super-fun gameplay of the original and remixes it in to six different game modes, all of which are a lot of fun. The evil beauty of it is the way it encourages score-chasing among friends. The mode selection screen has mini friends scoreboards next to each game mode, so you can see at a glance when someone has usurped that high-score you worked so hard on. Even worse, as you play, the next closest high score is displayed in the top right, so unless you’re at the top of your leaderboard you’ll always have your target score staring you in the face.

Braid is something entirely different. It’s a 2D platformer, but its emphasis is on puzzle-solving using time travel. Like Portal, it establishes a fairly simple set of mechanics, and then explores them for all they’re worth, putting your brain through a loop in the process. The artwork is gorgeous, with beautifully detailed hand-drawn levels and characters, and the music is impressive as well.

If you have a 360, get the demo of Braid right now. The rest of you, check out the PC version when it comes out later this year. Like Portal last year, I think this has real potential to be one of the true highlights of gaming this year.

I got my UHC filter on the weekend, but I also picked up two more things: a laser collimator, which is used to align all of the optics in the telescope (they slowly drift out of whack, or more quickly if you’re not careful with it), and a pair of binoculars. Binoculars might seem a bit redundant, but they’re actually really handy — because they’re low magnification (7X, compared to a low of 46X in the telescope at the moment), you can take in a lot of sky at once, which makes them handy for spotting objects before hunting them down in the telescope.

They’re also perfect for taking a quick look at something, without having to drag the telescope outside. You might not think you’d be able to see much, but the moon looks great, you can spot the moons of Jupiter, open clusters, and the brigher globular clusters too, even if the latter just look like fuzzy smudges.

Unfortunately, the weather has been crap, so I haven’t really had a chance to play much — I tried the UHC filter briefly and was able to spot the Triffid Nebula for the first time, and I’ve checked a few things in the binoculars, but I’m yet to have a good play with either yet. Bring on the clear skies!

As fun as looking at the planets is, I’ve started looking more at deep sky objects recently, ignoring the fact that my light polluted skies limit what I’ll be able to see and just diving in regardless. I’m starting, as most amateurs do, with the Messier objects, one of the earliest catalogues of deep sky objects, dating back to the late 1700s. Messier had no interest in these deep sky objects — the telescopes of the day could barely make them out anyway, so no-one had any idea what they were — but he had a keen interest in comets, so his catalogue was primarily meant as a list of faint, fuzzy things that were known not to be comets. The beauty of the Messier catalogue is that it’s all within reach of a decent amateur telescope, since even a telescope like mine is larger and far better made than anything Messier had access to.

I’ve spotted quite a few star clusters — open clusters like M6 and M7, and globular clusters like M4 — but the most impressive thing I’ve seen so far, is M8, the Lagoon Nebula. With my skies it doesn’t look anything like the photos of course, but the brightest areas are definitely visible.

To help with the nebulas, I’m heading to Bintel tomorrow to pick up a UHC filter. These filters block all incoming light, save for a few narrow bands around specific emission lines for things like hydrogen and oxygen, so instead of getting a faint nebula image drowned in background glow, you get a faint nebula image jumping out of an inky-black background. Can’t wait to see how it’ll go!

I was going to rant about Apple’s assault on interoperability and software freedom with the iPhone here, but as it turns out, PC Authority were happy to pay me to rant over on their site instead, and I was happy to sell out. If you want to know what I really think about the iPhone, then, you’ll have to head here.

So, last week a bunch of us at the office got work-supplied iPhones. I wouldn’t have bought one myself, since I’m still very happy with my current phone, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to check it out, so I’ve been using it for the last week. Overall, I have to say it’s quite an impressive device, but it’s not for me. Most of that is due to software freedom issues, which I’ll discuss in a follow-up. For now, though, I want to talk about it as most people will see it: as a consumer device for the iPod set.

Physically, it’s a nice device — a little wide perhaps, but still easily pocketable for me, due to being both thin and rounded. The plastic back is pretty scratch resistant, and the glass front is extremely so. The headphone socket is a standard 3.5mm affair (apparently the first-gen iPhone had a recessed socket that caused problems with various headphones/cables), and there’s a dedicated volume rocker on the side, which is something that iPods have traditionally lacked. My only major complaint is that, when holding it one-handed, trying to hit the home button on the bottom is either uncomfortable, or requires holding the device in a fairly unsafe manner, one of those minor gripes that ceases being minor the first time you drop it.

Software-wise, there’s a lot to like. The touch interface is generally pretty good, and it’s always pretty easy to find your way around. I’ve seen people struggle with the on-screen keyboard, but I personally haven’t had much trouble with it, and found that its auto-correcting features generally work well. Browsing with Mobile Safari is excellent: it renders pages well, it’s generally quite responsive, the touch-based controls for zooming and scrolling are great, and the UI is perfectly minimal, knowing when to get out of the way to maximise the usable screen space. The SMS interface is also excellent with it’s conversation-based view, something I hope other makers are paying attention to. As you’d expect, it generally works well as an iPod as well, though I didn’t find the iPod interface as intuitive as that seen on the wheel-based models.

Some other features aren’t as well developed, though. MMS is totally missing, leaving email as the only option for sending images around. Bluetooth is uselsss outside of handsfree devices, so you can’t use it to transfer pictures to a PC or other phone. There’s a built-in GPS unit, but the GPS software is a pain, since it’s just Google Maps, so it’s constantly fetching data as you move, and it doesn’t have turn-by-turn voice navigation, a must-have while driving.

Customisation is also severely lacking. You can change the alert tones used for various events, but most of them (SMS, email, etc.) don’t allow custom sounds at all. The alarm clock and ringer to support custom tones, but the only official way to make a custom tone is to buy the song from the iTunes Store, and then edit it in iTunes, for an extra charge, in to a ringtone, and in Australia, you can’t even do that right now. It’s therefore a far cry from many other phones, which let you use any playable media file on the device as a ringtone. There are tools that use undocumented hacks to import custom ringtones in to iTunes, but that’s not the point — I’m not bitching about Apple’s lack of interoperability in this review, so I’m sure as hell not going to give them a pass on this because others have found ways to hack around their bullshit.

The UI has some performance issues as well. A number of the applications take several seconds to open sometimes, or open immediately but remain unresponsive for several seconds. This seems more related to the 2.0 firmware than to the device itself, though, so it’ll likely be addressed in the future. Stability hasn’t been an issue though — I’ve seen Safari and the iPod app crash (the latter of which should really never happen), but the device itself has been fine, and I’ve never had a problem making a call or sending an SMS.

Perhaps my biggest issue is with the touch interface itself. It’s hardly fair to critisise a touch-screen device for having a touch-screen of course — it’d be like reviewing a car and complaining that it can’t fly — but I think it’s important to mention that touch screens are not some fundamental improvement over physical buttons. There’s no physical feedback to button presses, so it’s sometimes hard to tell if the device has registered your button-press and is just being laggy, or if it hasn’t noticed it at all. It also means that you can’t do anything without looking at the screen, which among other things makes the iPhone a terrible MP3 player for in-car use.

The other main problem with the touch-screen interface is that it’s really geared toward two-handed use, holding it in one hand and using the index finger on the other to work it. You can do some things with one hand using your thumb, but answering a call, which uses the same slide control as unlocking it, is very difficult, and typing on the keyboard is fiddly as well. Even the iPod interface is difficult, since the back button is in the top left corner, which is quite a stretch to get to.

Overall, if you’re using an iPod and iTunes now, are looking for a new phone, and like the idea of a touch-based interface, it’s a good device, and well worth checking out. Definitely check one out first if you can, though, since you couuld be more annoyed by the touch interface than you might think.

Coming up next: reasons why I could never really use an iPhone myself.