Dom Davis (The Blog)

I am at times what you could charitably call “softly spoken”. The meaner among you might claim I mumble. It comes from not wanting to be a loud oaf and the premise that I can hear what I’m saying perfectly well. This generally happens in public places and when I’m feeling self conscious.

Sadly, as previously mentioned, I feel self conscious when talking to a phone. Couple this we me starting to speak to early for Siri and the fact that it’s not 100% accurate and you start getting some interesting responses.

The Zozo absolutely loves Siri, although not as a personal assistant. No, to her Siri is a constant source of amusement. “Remind me to pack Colin at 7am tomorrow morning” [Colin being my current Lovefilm DVD rental] resulted in a 7am reminder for “Meatpacker Colin”. “Cool, heading home” has been turned into “Call Ashton” and when it did recognise what I said I wasn’t after “T” being added to be shopping list. What The Zozo finds most hysterical though is the numerous occasions where I say something to the phone and it simply goes “I’m sorry Dom, I did not understand you”. it’s enough to give a person a complex.

It makes you wonder why you don’t get similar mishaps happening in the future. You never get captain Kirk going “Shields up! Red alert” and the computer responding “Shields are now up, but I could not find ‘Alert’ in your reading list to mark it as read. Should I order it from the Amazon Kindle store?”. The closest you get it HAL refusing to open the pod bay doors and while that was an AI deliberately pretending not to hear one can’t help but wonder if that kind of intelligence doesn’t already exist in computers given how bloody minded they can be.

To give you an idea of how badly Siri and I cope together I’ll try typing, dictating and then Dictating With My Deliberate Enunciated Voice which is like my best handwriting for speech and you can compare the 3. Obviously this will need to be done at home where I can be slightly less self conscious as there is no way in hell that’s happening on a train

Given my problems with Siri I decided to head to Temple and speak to someone about it. So, out with phone, Apple Store app, book appointment with genius at 12:20 (gives me the 20 minutes I need to get there), job done. The app even puts the appointment in my calendar.

At 12:20 I’m sat at the genius bar in the Chappelfield Temple showing the genius why problem. He instantly admits defeat, but, asks if he can pop out the back to consult ‘The Book’. I’ve no idea if ‘The Book’ is a real book, a folder full of paper, an online resource or just a really geeky person who works there with a vaguely amusing nickname. I’d like to think that if it were an online resource they’d have access to it front of house, but then that’s just one of the vagaries of the Apple Store.

A couple of minutes later and my genius returns, freshly boned up on the issue. The problem, he hypothesised, was to do with nicknames. The Zozo is in my contacts using her proper name, i.e. Zoe Davis, however, very few people call her Zoe so I’ve got her marked down with a nickname of Zo, which is how most people refer to her. Siri, it seems, uses both the relationship field for my contact and the nickname field to determin who my wife is. When you tell Siri “Zoe is my wife” it sets the relationship field and then tries to set the nickname to “My Wife”. Being well behaved it won’t overwrite an existing nickname which resulted in it getting confused on my phone. Deleting the nickname “Zo” and replacing with “My Wife” fixed the issue.

I’m not sure why Siri needs to do this. You’ve got the spouse field and surely it’s not hard to program it to use that field for “my wife”, “my husband”, “my partner”, “my other half” and “my spouse” to simply look up that field. You could even get slightly clever and code for people trying to fool the system by only including people marked as a spouse that had either no title, an ambiguous title or a gender specific title when doing the lookup.

I’m now learning how to talk to Siri properly as “text my wife, say ‘On my way home. Can you put the chicken in the oven please? Love you!’” was rendered as “On my was home can you put the chicken in the oven please have you”. I’m also going to have to get used to changing person when talking. Saying “Text my wife and tell her I love her” results in a text to my wife saying “I love her” which, rather than earning brownie points, is likely to be the basis for a long and protracted argument starting with the immortal line of “So who is she then?” and going rapidly downhill from there.

There’s a few things I’d like to see Siri do. “Check my email” tells me how many unread emails I have, but won’t read them to me. I’m not sure it’ll read texts either. I’d love to have it reading emails and having me reply without having to take the phone out of my pocket. I’d also like to be able to tweet things which, given the deep integration of twitter into iOS5 you’d think would be easy. I’d also like full Facebook integration. It’s still in beta so those things may come

One of the big features of the iPhone 4S is Siri, the voice enabled personal assistant. Siri understands natural language, so the marketing goes, and you can use it to perform a number of functions on the iPhone. Sounds great, and from the videos and reports I’ve seen it works great too. So what about in practice with my voice?

Well let’s start with actually using Siri: I can either press and hold the home button on the phone, press and hold the home button on my headphones or hold the unlocked phone to my ear. I then speak my request… which has me running into my first hurdle; I just feel like a complete twonk talking to my phone and saying “Text my wife, say ‘Do we need anything from the shops’”. Nope, I’ll be getting the phone out and typing that thank you very much.

Next up comes how well it actually works. At home last night I started playing with Siri and seeing how well it did things.

“Zoe is my wife”
“Would you like me to add Mrs Zoe Davis as your wife?”
“Yes”
“OK, I’ve added that relationship”
My wife’s contact details are then shown from my address book.

So far so good.

“Text my wife, say ‘testing’”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who your wife is”

WTF?

“Who is my wife?”
“I do not who who Mrs Zoe Davis is”

???

Repeated fiddling with my contacts and setting my spouse manually didn’t seem to have any effect. Not good. Still, I guess I can just say “Text Zoe”, not as good, but at least it works.

What about reminders? I need to look for my old iPhone 3 so I can box it and get it ready to go to its next home.

“Remind me to find my phone on saturday”
“I’m sorry Dom, I do not have a number for you”

Er….

“New reminder for Saturday”
“Ok, I’m setting up a new reminder for Saturday, what would you like it to say?”
“Find my phone”
“OK, I’ve set that up for 9am on Saturday”
“Change time of reminder to 11am”
“I’m sorry, I can’t change the time of the reminder”

Great…

“what is the stock price for Barclays?”
“The stock price for Berkley closed at £230″
“What’s is the stick price for BAR Clays?”
“The stock price for Barclays PLC is £180.50″

Close, except the stock price is 180.5p, oops.

Voice controls for iPod playback are still there, but I really don’t see the point. Compare and contrast:

*Press and hold button* “Play” *Pause while the command is processed* “Playing”

With

*Click button once* (With headphones)
*Doubleclick home button* *Press play* (With the phone in my hand)

OK, I can tell it to play a specific track, artist or play list but since I can’t pronounce half the artists I listen to how the hell is Siri going to cope?

I can see it being useful for quick reminders (much more so when the API is released and it’s integrated with things like my shopping list program) and possibly while driving… except it needs a 3G signal when on the move and I live in Norfolk.

As a final note, I was going to dictate this using Siri, but sadly it translates my saying Siri as “silly” and I figured the amount of correcting would be too much to bother with. I should also point out the responses are from memory so they may not be quite word perfect.

There was a blog post yesterday, despite evidence to the contrary, and a controversial one at that. It simply didn’t survive long enough to actually get posted. My iPad, which is now the principle method of blogging, only has wifi and I can’t post on the move. What i do instead is compose the entry, then publish it when I get in the office. While this is great in theory there is one element of it that fails to work in practice: should the blogging application crash, or be told to shut down by iOS then the post appears to be lost. What I shall try today is hitting e publish button, watching it fail miserably and hoping that it will still be on the failed publish queue when I get in to the office so I can republish for your edification and delight. As a precaution I shall also be cutting and pasting the post into my trusty notebook app for recovery should my plan fail.

The good news is that is would appear that the new tariffs for the iPhone 4S, which I will hopefully be getting soon, are both cheaper than my current iPhone tariff and include tethering so I can hok my iPad to my iPhone and publish in the move. That’s the theory at least.

While we’re on the subject of fondleslabs its the release of iOS 5 today which is very exciting. I’m not sure if I’ll have to wait until tonight before it’s available but rest assured I shall be upgrading all my iDevices pretty sharpish. iCloud is also arriving soon (new iTunes to support that) and there’s lots of excitement in the land of Apple. That said it may be time for me to bite the bullet and upgrade my main computer from Snow Leopard to Lion. I’m still not convinced with Lion whereas I am still very happy with Snow Leopard (there’s a certain irony that Snow leopards are my favourite cat while lions are my least favourite) but time, tide and Apple wait for no man and to not upgrade is to fall behind.

I woke this morning to the discovery that Steve Jobs had died. This sad news was delivered to me via email on my iPhone and confirmed by the BBC News app on the same device. As President Obama said “Much of the world learned of his passing on a device he created”. Not something many people can claim.

I’m also waiting to hear about the fate of Princess, one of our two remaining mice. She was ill last night and I haven’t seen her since about 7pm. I worry she too has passed and only Pinky remains. Today may turn out to be a sucky day.

I awoke this morning to a slight nip in the air from the open window. A nip that bought the promise of winter. A nip that gave credence to The Zozos claims of snow next week. I was all prepare to wax lyrical about the death of the wasps in the roof and the slow, freezing fate that awaited them; but instead I must talk iPhones.

On the 14th of this month I become obsolete. With twice the processing power and seven times the graphical power the iPhone 4S is going to overshadow my trusty iPhone 4 and make me lust over one. It’s happened before. When the iPhone 3GS came out I was locked into a contract with my old 3G and the cost to buy myself out and get the next iteration of shiny was just too much. I was forced to skip an iteration and wait for the 4. It was a dark time.

I’d rather assumed the same would happen this time. I fact I was praying for an iPhone 4S rather than a 5 as I was sure I’d be unable to join in with this iteration and would have to wait until the next. It seems I should have been careful what I wished for. Unlike previous models it’s been over a year between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S and this leaves me with a dilemma. You see, 6 months after the 4S comes out I go out of contract and can upgrade. But I then don’t know how kong it is until the iPhone 5 and how long I’d be tied to the 4S before I could upgrade. The 4S is faster shiny, the 5 will be faster and new shiny, an important distinction. This calls for careful checking of the various contracts and tactical upgrading. It also means trying to suppress my inherent need to buy shiny things the instant they come out. Not easy when the limitations to me getting them are lifted 2 days before the winterval religibreak.

I should probably also point out that if I get a 4S on a 12 month contract and they release the 5 midway through next year I will have to buy new toys simply so I can throw them out of the pram. Perhaps buying one outright and getting a cheaper monthly deal will be the way forward.

So for a while now I’ve been on the lookout for a track I’d head at Slimelight a few times. Sadly I had no clue who it was by, no idea what it was called, and rather got the lyrics wrong when hunting for it. To be fair it is in German and I had thought it was called ‘Stein Um Stein’, which to be fair is the name of a Rammstein track I have. A not so recent compilation purchase which took several weeks to get to me yielded excellent news. There, on the track listing, was a track by ‘And One’ called Steine Sinde Steine (Stones are Stones). Jackpot. Sadly it was a live version, however, 60 seconds later and I had the studio version downloaded an on my iPhone.

So I present for your listening pleasure, And One, Steine Sinde Steine:

Steine Sinde Steine

Lyrics (including translation) can be found here. Enjoy

Recently I’ve noticed a few people on Facebook posting updates from Endomondo about how far and fast they’ve run/walked/cycled/etc and I thought I’d give it a go, mainly to see how far I walk to and from work and how many cakes it offsets. I grabbed the iPhone app yesterday and gave it a go on my way into work yesterday.

Essentially the iPhone app is a GPS tracker, stop watch and calorie calculator all in one, recording your route as you go and timing you. You can get various stats, for example split times at 1km intervals. It will also feedback some information to you as you go.

What I wasn’t expecting was feedback from others. Goron had somehow spotted me signing up to the Endomondo website within seconds of me doing so and he was already on my friends list as I started my first “walking” activity. 200m in and my music fades out to be replaced by a computerised female voice: “Message from Adrian: Go faster!”

This rather unexpected and amusing “pep talk” did bring a grin to my face as I sought a way to retort on my phone. 800m later and again the music fades: “1km in 9m 18s”. Fair do’s. Except not everyone agreed: “Message from Adrian: 1km in 9m 18s? That’s a woman’s pace!”, which I have to admit made me laugh.

I’ve subsequently learned that my route home from work is 100m or so shorter than my current route in and that I walk 1km in 9m 18s almost exactly pretty consistently – and by consistently I mean it was 9m 17s on the way back. Sadly the 167 calories burned while walking does not offset a cake

The only downside with my train journey to work these days is that it passes through deepest, darkest nowhere. Lovely if you want to stare out of the windows. Hopeless if you want mobile data access. This problem isn’t limited to my line either. The Norwich to London line has crap signal. When I used to use it regularly I would be continually frustrated by the lack of signal in places like Stratford, somewhere you’d expect to be saturated with mobile coverage.

One thing I have noticed is the underlying infrastructure (where it exists) is much better at handing off between cells and switching between GPRS, EDGE and 3G than a few years ago. Despite this many apps are shockingly bad at handling patchy and/or slow data access. I’ve had games that were unplayable on the move because they’ve not been able to talk to an optional service, apps that crash because it’s taken to long for data to arrive and apps just behave badly due to losing connection.

Take the Facebook app. If I hit reload on the news page and the signal drops out it shows me a full screen message saying it can’t connect to the network. Useless. How about you cache what you’ve got, show that and inform me some other way (preferably not with an annoying dialog box) that this is old data. Chances are in 30 seconds I’ll have a GPRS signal again and you can resume loading. Useless.

Even the blogging software I use went through a phase of being utterly shit without a full speed 3G or Wifi connection. I can see how not being connected would be an issue when posting, but crashing every time you drop off the network when writing a blog entry? I believe the issue is now fixed, but I’ve had so many problems I use another app to compose blog entries and post them via the blog app when I know the signal isn’t going to crap out.

Still, give it 10 years and I’ll be bitching about how I’m only getting 1Gb/s downloads on my iPhone X thanks to being in the sticks… and I bet apps will still have issues if they lose connectivity

Yesterday, whilst perusing my technology news feeds, I discovered one more example of there being an iPhone app for just about anything. Pothole in the road? Yup, there’s an app for that. Using the GPS to locate yourself on Google maps and the camera to snap the errant road surface you can then add text descriptions plus, if you’re so inclined, details about size and condition of the defect. All this then gets set off to a website (which has been around for a while apparently) and then submitted to your local council who, in theory, dash out to fix the road. Ain’t technology grand?

Knowing of two new potholes in the road on my way home from the station in Cromer I decided to download the app and report them. Filled with excitement I headed out of the station and towards my quarry… only to find two fresh patches of tarmac. Oh well. Still, it’s nice to see the council is on top of these things and I am now poised and ready to totally own the next pothole I see and report it’s ass with the might of mobile tech.