The End of the Google Voice Affair

Last December I posted that I had taken the plunge with Google Voice by emailing my closest contacts asking them to use my new GV number instead of my AT&T one.

After six months of being an outspoken advocate of the service I'm planning on walking that request back. Fortunately I don't have to send out a mass email again because I can just configure my GV calls and texts to forward to my AT&T number and let people know one by one.

So why the sudden change of heart? There are several reasons, but I'll start with the catalyst which was Apple's announcement of iMessages in iOS 5. Free unlimited texting was my primary draw to Google Voice, but being able to text anyone with an iPhone for free is huge for me because most of the people I text with already have iPhones. Plus I've been frequently annoyed when my friends ask me "did you get that picture I sent you?" and I have to explain that I can't get MMSs via my GV number.

There were several other irritating limitations. For one, initiating a call required opening a Google Voice app, selecting a contact, then waiting for the app to contact Google's server to get a number to call, then wait for the app to hand off to the iPhone's dialer. Because you can't just use the built in dialer directly (otherwise your GV number doesn't appear on the caller ID) you can't initiate calls with the iPhone's voice commands.

I was willing to endure these limitations for the benefits Google Voice's texting, which I used far more often. I loved being able to text from any device, which has nearly eliminated my use of IM. Now iMessages will allow me to text from my iPad and perhaps someday from my Mac via iChat (iMessages are based on XMPP, an IM protocol).

But the biggest reason I'm moving back to my AT&T number is that I've made piece with AT&T. Six months ago I had a fantasy that I would ditch my iPhone for an iPod touch an a mobile hotspot. Once iOS 4.3 was released I realized that my iPhone was the most practical and cost effective mobile hotspot, plus it required me to jump through fewer hoops.

Using Google Voice was a fun experiment, and I'm sure the service still makes a lot of sense for many people, but I'm going back to my old, reliable phone number. That relationship has proven that it can still change for the better.

A Call From the Cloud

Today I made a big commitment to one companion and pushed another further away, though not entirely.

I emailed a large number of friends and family with my Google Voice number and asked them to update their address books with it. Until now I've only given it to people I text with often, placing the burden on them to keep track of both numbers, but now I'm taking a few more eggs out of AT&T's basket and putting them into Google's.

Texting has become a big part of my life over the past year or so. I was late to the game compared to the younger generation, but paying for every message seemed silly, so I made due with IM and email. When I bought my first iPhone my there were 200 text messages included in my plan, so I started to use it a little more.

Then when iOS 3 was released in 2009 and I had push messaging, I installed Textfree on both Becky and my iPhones and we began texting each other several times a day. I tried to get others I knew with iPhones to install the app, but it was a pain to setup and only worked with other people on Textfree, so I kept my 200 text message plan to use with everyone else.

Then in September Apple relaxed its ban against Google Voice apps in the App Store so I began using it for text messaging instead. We had already increased Becky's text message limit to 1500 so I could use GV to communicate with her, and eventually I started using it with others.

The experience thus far hasn't been perfect. The first version of Google's official app was terribly slow and buggy in its first release while the third party apps were much better but didn't give me push messaging. Now Google has updated their app to 1.1, which is a major improvement.

Beyond the iPhone app it's really nice to be able to send and receive text messages using my two full hands instead of just my thumbs through GV's browser interface. I can even send and receive phone calls from a computer, so I can have long conversations at work without using up daytime minutes.

Last but not least, I can make calls from my iPhone over wifi, which is nice because even though I've lived in a high density neighborhood for five years, my cell reception still sucks!

Getting the people I communicate with to switch to my new cloud-based number is the first step in my plan to eventually drop my cell phone carrier entirely. I'm hoping within two years to trade in my iPhone for an iPod touch and a mobile wifi access point. Not only will this save me a ton of money over time, it moves the carrier into the only roll it is any good at, providing bandwidth... though even that point is debatable.

Better Indoor Photos

The easiest way to create an amateurish looking photo is to take a casual picture of someone indoors in low light. Now that daylight savings time is over this is a common problem.

This is a picture I took over a year ago. The camera (a Canon Rebel XS) was set on Program mode with an ISO of 400. The camera picked an aperture of f/4 and a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second. Aside from not being well composed, the boy is lit up with the on-camera flash and you can see that the light falls off very quickly; even the top of his head is dark. This is your classic mediocre indoor photograph.

Here is a more recent example which looks much better. Here is what is different:

• The flash is still coming from the camera, but I'm using a hot shoe flash head and pointed it at the ceiling to bounce the light which is far more even on the girl and also lights up the background.
• I'm shooting in Manual mode with the aperture set to f/2.8 which throws more of the background out of focus (particularly since it is a tighter shot).
• I'm shooting at ISO 800, meaning that I needed half of the flash power than I did at ISO 400 and provides for softer lighting.

There are two lessons to be learned here.

First, the better you know your camera settings and get comfortable choosing them for yourself, the better your pictures will look. The camera is trying to be safe by trying to keep as much in focus as is reasonable, but if you isolate your subject with a shallow depth of field your pictures will look more professional. The drawback is that it will take more effort to get your subject in focus.

Second, you get what you pay for. The second picture was taken with my Canon 7D, which costs a lot more than the Rebel XS, but performs better at high ISO making me more comfortable setting it at 800 or even 1600. Also, I added a hot shoe flash and got rid of the kit lens in favor of a fast 50mm f/1.4.

If you're willing to learn a little more about photography and spend a little extra, you can make your holiday photos look much cheerier.

Get Off Of My Cloud

I've had this back and forth relationship with Gmail and MobileMe, like a friend of mine who in high school kept bouncing back and forth between two girlfriends. Each girl had something appealing about her that the other lacked.

At first I was a big fan of Gmail because of it's unique approach to conversation threading and message archiving. But then after I got my iPhone in 2007 I couldn't stand being limited to POP access, so I switched to .Mac so that I could keep my inbox in sync with IMAP. Google addressed this shortcoming and offered IMAP for free, so I switched back.

Then in 2008 Apple relaunched .Mac as MobileMe and included push email notifications. This was appealing so I switched once again. Both times that I used MobileMe as my primary email address I continued to give out my Gmail address which I forwarded to my me.com address. This works pretty well but it is a source of confusion for some people who notice that I'm responding to them from a different address. They often send their messages to both and then I end up with two copies.

Google fired back by giving its users push messaging by implementing the ActiveSync protocol. I was tempted to switch again but initially choose to stick with MobileMe.

Then in October I felt it was prudent to start using a Windows machine at work while I was engaged at Microsoft, so I was forced to use MobileMe's Web interfaces (well I could have used Outlook, but that just didn't sit right with me). These Web interfaces look great in demos, but in practice they pale in comparison to the usefulness of Gmail and Google Calendar.

So I've switched again, hopefully for the last time.

I've fallen back in love with Gmail, and she hasn't been cruel in light of my infidelity. On the contrary, Gmail has gained some useful features like priority inbox and the ability to make phone calls from my Google Voice number. These are features that it will be difficult for Apple to match since they assume you're using Mail.app for email which only gets updated with Mac OS X every two years or so.

Google Calendar is also far better than its MobileMe doppelganger. Hell, after learning it's keyboard shortcuts I would say it is more usable than iCal. Plus it has more robust sharing features so Becky and I can stay in sync.

I never got much use out of iDisk and recently I've become a fan of Dropbox, which I really believe Google needs to buy.

The remaining feature that MobileMe had that did not have a free counterpart was Find My iPhone, and Apple recently decided to give that feature away for free. Even though I'm paid up on MobileMe until July, I have disabled automatic renewal as I have fully moved my life from Apple's cloud to Google's.

But don't get me wrong, you should expect a blizzard in hell before you should expect me to give up my Mac or my iPhone. The beauty of Google is that they don't care whose hardware or operating system you use as long as you use their Internet services and see their ads.

First Attempt at a Portrait

On Thanksgiving, as the night was winding down my cousin asked me to take a four generation picture of her family with her parents and grandparents. She had me use her camera so that she could process the pictures herself.

I've never been asked to do a portrait and I was excited to try. No one was expecting this to be a "session," so I had about five minutes of good humor for the attempt which didn't leave me with a lot of time to experiment.

The backdrop was the curtains in my uncle's bedroom. The camera was a Canon Rebel XSi with a 17-85mm IS lens. I had my 7D there with my 50mm f/1.4, but I stayed with my cousin's lens because I was too close to get the shot without a wide focal length.

I mounted my flash to the Rebel I pointed it at the white ceiling, then dialed the camera to Manual mode with an Aperture of 5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/60th. I set the ISO to 800, which is what I typically set my 7D to when shooting indoors, but I'm not sure how well the XSi controls noise at that ISO since you can't really see it on the camera's screen.

The first shot I took was in a landscape orientation, but I realized that was a mistake as soon as I looked at it. The grandparents were sitting with everyone else standing tightly behind them, so a portrait orientation was more natural.

In my second series of shots I laid on the bed in an attempt to look silly to the two year old I was trying to get to smile, but this lower perspective made the grandparents looked bloated.

Finally I stood up tall and shot slightly down on everyone (I can do this as I am 6' 3") and I got a decent shot in the series where everyone was smiling with eyes open. The only issue is that there was a curtain rod above the subjects' heads that looked crooked, but if you printed the photo as an 8x10 it would get cropped out.

Considering my limited experience and set up time I think I did OK, but I don't know for sure because the camera didn't go home with me. Hopefully I'll get another chance before too long with better results.

Brett's Photo Tips

For over a year now my passion has been to take my photography to the next level. I'm not a professional but I've learned a lot so I figured I pass along some basic tips.

1. Avoid Clutter In The Frame: By far the most common mistake the average picture-taker makes is that he or she will have too much going on in the shot. Whether the subject of your picture is a person, place, or thing, that should be the only thing that draws your eye in the photo. Either zoom in with the camera, or zoom in with your feet.
2. Take Lots of Pictures: Taking more pictures doesn't cost you anything with digital, so if you want better ones take more of them. You'll benefit from the experience and increase the odds that you'll get a good one. How many times have you snapped a picture of someone and you happen to catch an awkward expression on his face?
3. Throw Most of Them Away: The greatest blessing of digital photography is the amateur's greatest curse because she will keep both the bad and the good. In photography quality always trumps quantity. If you took 10 shots of the same thing, delete 9 of them. The other 9 only serve to dilute the value of the best one. And if you only have one shot and it sucks you should still delete it, unless it is of a special occasion and a bad picture is truly better than no picture.
4. Avoid Centering Your Subject: If you take a landscape picture of a person, your natural inclination is to center that subject in the frame. You'll have a more compelling picture if the subject is off center (unless you've filled the frame with it). If the subject is looking to the right, put him over to the left. If the subject is in motion, give her space in the direction she is headed.
5. Get Down: Most people take pictures from a standing position, which isn't ideal if the subject is shorter than you. When photographing children, get down on their level to get a more intimate perspective.
6. Size Matters: Compact cameras are highly portable, but the sensors are very small by necessity. Smaller sensors gather less light making for pictures with less sharpness and more noise. An entry level SLR has a much larger sensor and better optical components than any point and shoot camera. If an SLR doesn't fit your budget then look for a deal on Craigslist because last year's SLR is still better than this year's point and shoot.
7. Organize Your Pictures: Don't just put them into folders, get software that specializes in photo organization. I'm a fan of Aperture but you can also use iPhoto, Lightroom or Picasa. Keep in mind these apps aren't any better than folders unless you use their features for adding metadata. For every shot that I keep I give it a title, keywords, and a rating.
8. Back Them Up: Your hard drive will fail, it's a matter of when not if. You could lose all of your photos, or you could end up spending a lot of money to recover them from the failed drive. I use Time Machine to back up locally and a cloud storage service in case of fire or theft.

Dude, I Got a Dell

When I first joined Slalom in 2006, I asked if I could use a Mac as my work laptop. I was told that wouldn't be a problem, as long as I bought it myself.

Since then I've used my Mac for both work and personal activities. Everything was easy when I did Java or iPhone development, and when I did .NET I would run Windows in a virtual machine. It has been very convenient to have only one go-to machine for everything I wanted to do.

Recently it has become a pain. I've been doing much heavier .NET development which pushed my MacBook Pro to the limit. It has four gigabytes of memory and when I run a Windows VM with only one gig the Mac side still worked fine, but I needed at least two gigs on the Windows side for this project and I was constantly hitting my memory capacity.

As a result I had to limit the number of apps I would run on the Mac side to a bare minimum. If I wanted to open iTunes I had to close NetNewsWire and vice versa. And the Windows side also ran at a snail's pace which was seriously cramping my productivity.

Eventually I concluded that I was living with the worst of both worlds, so I notified our IT department that I was in need of a beefy Windows laptop. They quickly set me up with a Dell Latitude E6410, which is an excellent little computer.

The most impressive thing is its speed. It's 18 months newer than my MacBook Pro which means a faster CPU, but I believe the biggest factor in its peppiness is the solid state drive. Now that I'm not lugging around my entire Aperture photo library with me I don't need a lot of disk space. I'm convinced now that my next MBP will have an SSD as its main drive and I'll use an external drive for photos.

There's no need to check the temperature in hell, I'm not switching back to Windows. My personal machine remains a Mac, and I'll use that for work again if I end up back on a non-.NET project. Windows 7 is a major step up from XP, but it is still no OS X.

Now I need to adjust to life without having everything I need on one machine. I'll write about how that goes in a later post.