Monday, August 24, 2009
Five Ways Your iPhone Can Save You Money
If you don’t have an iPhone, then you’ve theoretically saved yourself as much as $300 simply by not buying one. Good for you. The rest of us can use that addictive little device in our pockets to slowly recoup the money we paid for it. Here’s something I wrote for the October issue of Macworld magazine that has also been posted online. It’s about five apps that help you save some dough.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Lego My iPhone
I’m not as enamored of the new Find My iPhone feature as many reviewers seem to be. If you lose your iPhone and you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service, you can log on to your MobileMe account from any computer and locate your phone on a map (assuming that the phone is on at that moment and that you enabled the Find My iPhone preference on the phone before you lost it).
You can make the phone beep for two minutes (so that if it’s nearby you’ll be able to find it), and you can even send a text message to it so that if someone has found the phone, or stolen it, they’ll know you’re looking for it.
It’s a flashy feature to show off, but how often will it really be practical? Certainly there are other, simpler ways to track down a mobile phone if it’s lost somewhere at home. And there’s something creepy about knowing that your phone (and you with it) can be traced so easily. Although I guess that with or without this new feature, we’re way past anything resembling privacy or anonymity when it comes to using the cell phone network.
At least one person already has an interesting story to tell about using Find My iPhone. But was it the brightest way to go about recovering the phone? I’m not so sure.
You can make the phone beep for two minutes (so that if it’s nearby you’ll be able to find it), and you can even send a text message to it so that if someone has found the phone, or stolen it, they’ll know you’re looking for it.
It’s a flashy feature to show off, but how often will it really be practical? Certainly there are other, simpler ways to track down a mobile phone if it’s lost somewhere at home. And there’s something creepy about knowing that your phone (and you with it) can be traced so easily. Although I guess that with or without this new feature, we’re way past anything resembling privacy or anonymity when it comes to using the cell phone network.
At least one person already has an interesting story to tell about using Find My iPhone. But was it the brightest way to go about recovering the phone? I’m not so sure.
Cut, Copy, and Paste on the iPhone: Welcome, Even When Unwelcome
I’m quite pleased to finally have cut, copy, and paste as part of the iPhone OS. In less than a week it has already come in handy a few times. Just tap a screen of text and there it is. Elegant and easy to use.
But what may be the best part of this new feature is how unobtrusive it is if you don’t need it. Occasionally the menu will pop up when I’ve tapped a page of text for some other reason. Dismissing the menu is simple: Just tap again and it disappears.
It doesn’t nag me, misunderstand me, or do something with the text that I didn’t ask it to do. It just goes away. I like that.
But what may be the best part of this new feature is how unobtrusive it is if you don’t need it. Occasionally the menu will pop up when I’ve tapped a page of text for some other reason. Dismissing the menu is simple: Just tap again and it disappears.
It doesn’t nag me, misunderstand me, or do something with the text that I didn’t ask it to do. It just goes away. I like that.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
iPhone App Review: MeterRead
John Gruber provides this simple, useful guideline in his thoughts on making apps that are “iPhone-like”: “Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.”
I like MeterRead because it abides by that rule. It focuses on one purpose -- tracking meter readings -- and tries to make that task as simple as possible. It could use some more polish. But if I were the type of person who wanted to monitor my energy usage closely, I’d definitely use MeterRead.
My review of it is online today at Macworld.com.
I like MeterRead because it abides by that rule. It focuses on one purpose -- tracking meter readings -- and tries to make that task as simple as possible. It could use some more polish. But if I were the type of person who wanted to monitor my energy usage closely, I’d definitely use MeterRead.
My review of it is online today at Macworld.com.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
iPhone App Review: Frugal
Ever wonder if you’re really getting the best deal on a bulk buy of shampoo with a somewhat silly name when you’re at the supermarket? Maybe you need to read my review of Frugal for the iPhone at Macworld.com.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Want to Break into Audiobooks? Use This Brick
Scott Brick performed his first audiobook narration job on June 10, 1999. The fact that he remembers the date says something about how much he loves narrating audiobooks. Another fairly reliable indicator of his enthusiasm is that he has become one of the most prolific and best-known narrators in the audiobook business. He has recorded about 500 books in the past 10 years. That’s like a book a week. I’ve listened to and enjoyed a number of his audiobooks, most recently A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.
Feeling grateful for his success, and with the tenth anniversary of his first job approaching, Scott is using his influence in the audio publishing world to help a few aspiring narrators get into the business. Breaking into professional voice acting is not an easy thing to do; breaking into audiobook narration is even more challenging. There are fewer sources of work, and because of the considerable demands of audiobook recording, producers are understandably hesitant to hire inexperienced narrators.
With help from the Audio Publishers Association, Scott has launched a contest called Share the Experience. It’s open to anybody who has never been paid to narrate an audiobook. Participants submit an audition of three minutes or less, and a panel of judges representing many of the major audio publishing houses will choose a winner. First prize is a personal training session with Scott Brick himself, followed by real professional audiobook narration work on projects being produced by some of those same major publishing houses. The runner up gets a training session with Pat Fraley. Another great prize. I attended Pat’s audiobook workshop in Los Angeles in 2007 and recommend him highly.
Even if you don’t win a prize, your audition will be heard by a handful of important decision makers who are free to contact you and offer you work if they like the sound of your audition. It’s a great opportunity, and it’s remarkably generous and gracious of Scott to have gone to the trouble to make it possible.
Scott will start accepting auditions via e-mail on June 10. But he officially launched the competition last week at APAC, the annual conference of the Audio Publishers Association, which was held at the Javits Center in New York City on May 28. In the weeks leading up to APAC, attendees eligible for the contest were invited to record their auditions in person at the conference during a special session attended by many of the judges. I was registered for APAC, and without hesitation I accepted the invitation to audition there.
I chose to audition with an excerpt from Breathing Lessons, a book by Anne Tyler that I recently read and enjoyed.
(Breathing Lessons was the first book I ever heard in audiobook form, though I only caught a tiny portion of it. I put myself through college driving a delivery car, and one day while making a stop in Madison, Wisconsin, I happened to turn on a public radio station that played a program that consisted of a narrator reading books in installments, and that day’s installment was the opening pages of Breathing Lessons. I was on my way out of Madison when the program started. I remember thinking, as the signal faded, that I wished I could live in Madison, just to hear the rest of the book. I loved the idea of someone reading a book to me on the radio. I was also working at a radio station at the time [I worked a lot of jobs in college, sometimes all at once], and I thought it would be cool to have that job -- recording books for other people to hear. I’d like to claim that I chose to read from the first audiobook I ever heard in honor of the anniversary of Scott Brick’s first audiobook job, but it wasn’t until I started writing this that I remembered that story.)
Choosing a three-minute excerpt from a novel is a lot more difficult than you might think. It is for me, anyway. I prefer (and I think most people listening to an audition would prefer) the excerpt to be a complete scene -- something with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- rather than just any random three-minute segment. Scenes in novels generally last a lot longer than three minutes, so after you choose a scene you like, you’ve got to do some editing to compress the action, making sure the whole thing still makes sense when you’re done. I had my scene chosen and edited days before the event, but I was still working the red pen right up until the minute before I did my reading.
We auditioned in a large conference room, with each reader performing at a lectern at the front of the room. As the session got under way, I wondered if maybe choosing this route had been a mistake. Would performing live in front of the judges (and the competition) result in an audition colored by anxiety and imperfection that a normal audition -- one carefully recorded and edited at home -- wouldn’t have?
Scott served as the moderator and sat at the head table near the lectern as we read. My name was pretty far down on the list, so I got to hear a lot of good performances before my turn came. Scott was serious about the three-minute limit, and he was cutting people off if they went too long, adding a little more suspense to the occasion.
I thought my reading went well. I had some butterflies, but I tried to channel that nervous energy into my performance. I felt like it helped make the characters a little bolder, a little more distinct. The scene had some humor in it, and I don’t mind admitting that hearing Scott Brick laughing out loud as I read was a unique thrill. After I’d finished, I knew that doing a live audition had been worth the gamble.
That was confirmed two days after the event when Scott sent out this intriguing comment on Twitter: “Back from launching new narrator contest at APAC. Think some readers got work, and the contest barely started!”
Apparently the live audition has already paid off for somebody. That’s pretty cool.
Feeling grateful for his success, and with the tenth anniversary of his first job approaching, Scott is using his influence in the audio publishing world to help a few aspiring narrators get into the business. Breaking into professional voice acting is not an easy thing to do; breaking into audiobook narration is even more challenging. There are fewer sources of work, and because of the considerable demands of audiobook recording, producers are understandably hesitant to hire inexperienced narrators.
With help from the Audio Publishers Association, Scott has launched a contest called Share the Experience. It’s open to anybody who has never been paid to narrate an audiobook. Participants submit an audition of three minutes or less, and a panel of judges representing many of the major audio publishing houses will choose a winner. First prize is a personal training session with Scott Brick himself, followed by real professional audiobook narration work on projects being produced by some of those same major publishing houses. The runner up gets a training session with Pat Fraley. Another great prize. I attended Pat’s audiobook workshop in Los Angeles in 2007 and recommend him highly.
Even if you don’t win a prize, your audition will be heard by a handful of important decision makers who are free to contact you and offer you work if they like the sound of your audition. It’s a great opportunity, and it’s remarkably generous and gracious of Scott to have gone to the trouble to make it possible.
Scott will start accepting auditions via e-mail on June 10. But he officially launched the competition last week at APAC, the annual conference of the Audio Publishers Association, which was held at the Javits Center in New York City on May 28. In the weeks leading up to APAC, attendees eligible for the contest were invited to record their auditions in person at the conference during a special session attended by many of the judges. I was registered for APAC, and without hesitation I accepted the invitation to audition there.
I chose to audition with an excerpt from Breathing Lessons, a book by Anne Tyler that I recently read and enjoyed.
(Breathing Lessons was the first book I ever heard in audiobook form, though I only caught a tiny portion of it. I put myself through college driving a delivery car, and one day while making a stop in Madison, Wisconsin, I happened to turn on a public radio station that played a program that consisted of a narrator reading books in installments, and that day’s installment was the opening pages of Breathing Lessons. I was on my way out of Madison when the program started. I remember thinking, as the signal faded, that I wished I could live in Madison, just to hear the rest of the book. I loved the idea of someone reading a book to me on the radio. I was also working at a radio station at the time [I worked a lot of jobs in college, sometimes all at once], and I thought it would be cool to have that job -- recording books for other people to hear. I’d like to claim that I chose to read from the first audiobook I ever heard in honor of the anniversary of Scott Brick’s first audiobook job, but it wasn’t until I started writing this that I remembered that story.)
Choosing a three-minute excerpt from a novel is a lot more difficult than you might think. It is for me, anyway. I prefer (and I think most people listening to an audition would prefer) the excerpt to be a complete scene -- something with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- rather than just any random three-minute segment. Scenes in novels generally last a lot longer than three minutes, so after you choose a scene you like, you’ve got to do some editing to compress the action, making sure the whole thing still makes sense when you’re done. I had my scene chosen and edited days before the event, but I was still working the red pen right up until the minute before I did my reading.
We auditioned in a large conference room, with each reader performing at a lectern at the front of the room. As the session got under way, I wondered if maybe choosing this route had been a mistake. Would performing live in front of the judges (and the competition) result in an audition colored by anxiety and imperfection that a normal audition -- one carefully recorded and edited at home -- wouldn’t have?
Scott served as the moderator and sat at the head table near the lectern as we read. My name was pretty far down on the list, so I got to hear a lot of good performances before my turn came. Scott was serious about the three-minute limit, and he was cutting people off if they went too long, adding a little more suspense to the occasion.
I thought my reading went well. I had some butterflies, but I tried to channel that nervous energy into my performance. I felt like it helped make the characters a little bolder, a little more distinct. The scene had some humor in it, and I don’t mind admitting that hearing Scott Brick laughing out loud as I read was a unique thrill. After I’d finished, I knew that doing a live audition had been worth the gamble.
That was confirmed two days after the event when Scott sent out this intriguing comment on Twitter: “Back from launching new narrator contest at APAC. Think some readers got work, and the contest barely started!”
Apparently the live audition has already paid off for somebody. That’s pretty cool.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Close Call
This morning I woke up around 5 a.m. the way I often wake up at that hour: on my back, head propped up on the pillows, with the bedside lamp still lit. I read at bedtime most nights, and it’s not unusual for me to fall asleep before finishing.
Missing this morning, however, was one important element: the book. It’s usually right there on my chest, sometimes with my finger still dutifully marking the place where I’d stopped reading. Not today, though. It took me a few seconds to reconstruct who and where I was and what I had been doing before I fell asleep. Turns out I was me, in my bed, and I had been reading a book on my iPhone via Amazon’s Kindle app. (Nobody is more surprised than I am about my enthusiasm for reading books this way. But that’s a subject for a different day.)
I started fumbling around, trying to find the phone. First I brushed my hands up and down my rumpled shirt, as if maybe it would fall out of the folds like cracker crumbs. Not there. I had to widen my scope. I was fairly certain that it hadn’t dropped out of bed; the crack of it hitting the floor would have jolted me out of my sleep. Still, I eased my way over to each side to get a glance at the floor, just to be sure.
Even in my stuporous state, I had the good sense to move carefully, deliberately. When you drop something fragile on the floor, like a contact lens, the easiest way to find it is to take one careless step. By the same token, I imagined that one false move might send the phone tumbling expensively out of bed and toward the hardwood. I swept my arms across and under the covers carefully. Nothing.
I was getting a little frustrated. How far could the damn thing have gone? And how difficult could it be to find, really? Any speck of sand or dirt that gets into my bed invariably manages to make contact with my skin and irritate me to distraction. How could a chunk of glass and metal the size of a deck of cards elude me?
Then I had an idea. As a person of a certain age, with a strange preference for decent sound quality and a reliable connection, I still find it necessary to have a land-line phone, and I have an extension next to my bed. I picked it up and called my cell phone, and within seconds the familiar ringtone (“Old Phone,” naturally) and neurotically insistent vibration of my iPhone told me that it was hiding under the covers around where my left shoulder would have been while I was sleeping.
I suppose there’s a moral in there somewhere about simplicity or the triumph of low tech over high tech. But I’m a little too tired today to think about it. I had to get up early to turn off the light.
Missing this morning, however, was one important element: the book. It’s usually right there on my chest, sometimes with my finger still dutifully marking the place where I’d stopped reading. Not today, though. It took me a few seconds to reconstruct who and where I was and what I had been doing before I fell asleep. Turns out I was me, in my bed, and I had been reading a book on my iPhone via Amazon’s Kindle app. (Nobody is more surprised than I am about my enthusiasm for reading books this way. But that’s a subject for a different day.)
I started fumbling around, trying to find the phone. First I brushed my hands up and down my rumpled shirt, as if maybe it would fall out of the folds like cracker crumbs. Not there. I had to widen my scope. I was fairly certain that it hadn’t dropped out of bed; the crack of it hitting the floor would have jolted me out of my sleep. Still, I eased my way over to each side to get a glance at the floor, just to be sure.
Even in my stuporous state, I had the good sense to move carefully, deliberately. When you drop something fragile on the floor, like a contact lens, the easiest way to find it is to take one careless step. By the same token, I imagined that one false move might send the phone tumbling expensively out of bed and toward the hardwood. I swept my arms across and under the covers carefully. Nothing.
I was getting a little frustrated. How far could the damn thing have gone? And how difficult could it be to find, really? Any speck of sand or dirt that gets into my bed invariably manages to make contact with my skin and irritate me to distraction. How could a chunk of glass and metal the size of a deck of cards elude me?
Then I had an idea. As a person of a certain age, with a strange preference for decent sound quality and a reliable connection, I still find it necessary to have a land-line phone, and I have an extension next to my bed. I picked it up and called my cell phone, and within seconds the familiar ringtone (“Old Phone,” naturally) and neurotically insistent vibration of my iPhone told me that it was hiding under the covers around where my left shoulder would have been while I was sleeping.
I suppose there’s a moral in there somewhere about simplicity or the triumph of low tech over high tech. But I’m a little too tired today to think about it. I had to get up early to turn off the light.
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