Rich Mintz  

Earthlink’s absurdly unsubtle challenge-and-response spam filtering has set the bar for customer unfriendliness for, what, a decade? Incredibly, James Fallows reports, they’re still at it.

There was a time when this technology, if not actually customer-friendly, at least felt like a legitimate response (albeit a heavy-handed one — this kind of stuff, which felt to me kind of “off,” was one reason I discontinued my own account relationship with Earthlink six or seven years ago) to a real problem. Spam certainly felt out of control a decade ago. And the brew-your-own vibe inherent in this approach to spam wasn’t entirely off-brand for Earthlink in, say, 2002 — although they were never a Panix or Pair.com (or even a Netcom), a decade ago Earthlink still had at least a whiff of popular-tech credibility about them.

But come on. Predictive spam filtering, at a whole-system scale, works much better now than it did in 2000. It’s based on Bayesian filters, vast collaborative databases of spam rankings, much better whitelisting and blacklisting at the domain level, and I don’t know what else — that in fact is my point. I’m pretty broadly technically knowledgeable about the Internet, and curious, and I neither know nor particularly care exactly how spam filtering works anymore. I just know that it does. I do see spam in my Gmail inbox, but not much, and it’s exceedingly rare that the spam filter is too strict.

I suppose people have a right to use a whitelist as their first line of defense, just as people have a right to keep rifles by the front door and to make a big deal about not picking up the phone when the caller ID is blocked. But having that sort of siege mentality is a pretty good indicator that a person and I probably will not be the best of friends.

Certainly if I try to reach anyone by email who makes any sort of pretense of being publicly available, and the first thing I get back is a set of tasks I have to complete before they may or may not see my message, I just throw the whole exchange in the garbage and give up on them, with prejudice.

And if someone emails me and I email them back, and then I get a spam challenge — well, that’s just pitiful. I understand how it happens (like most Internet grownups, I have a bunch of identities, and the Internet doesn’t necessarily know they all belong to me) …but come on, that seems to be the very kind of unfortunate customer experience with your product that you should aggressively plan for and mitigate against.

Aside from Flash, which we all know about, there are some quirks to working with common web apps on the iPad.

The various Google apps’ iPad-optimized mobile versions all seem to “just work” on the iPad — and some of them, like the Reader app, are obviously custom-built to work better on the iPad. But these are feature-limited apps, and sometimes there are things you want to do that you can only do in the full version. (Example: manage your subscriptions in Google Reader.).

You can switch to the Desktop version (inside Safari) of these Google apps on the iPad, and almost everything works, with a few exceptions. (Example: when attempting to retag Google Reader subscriptions in the settings, you can’t do it using the column of pulldown menus on the right; instead, you have to select the subscriptions one or more at a time and use the “More actions…” menu at the top.)

On the Yahoo side — aside from the extremely limited and awkward Mobile version of Yahoo Mail, none of the existing versions of Yahoo Mail seems to work right on the iPad. Problems range from display and redraw issues to not being able to edit at all inside text fields. This is really appalling — we’re not talking about a startup here, it’s Yahoo, and everyone knew the iPad was coming for months. Even a bunch of volunteers were able to pull together a WordPress app in a few weeks that’s largely elegant and functional on the iPad.

Do I have the hacker courage to jailbreak my iPad? It sure would be nice to be able to use a Bluetooth mouse with the thing…

I popped out this morning to J&R to buy the Macally BOOKSTAND iPad case and am here at home trying it out. It’s so popular that they’re clean out of the black, so I had to settle for the slate gray (which itself had to be pulled from backstock, it’s sold out on the floor).

Unfortunately the color and material (microfiber), and the light brown leather strap, give an impression that I can only call “Julia Sugarbaker’s Filofax,” which (although it will work for some people) doesn’t work for me. Fortunately I’ve hit that age where for things like this, function trumps form. It doesn’t look actively ridiculous; and functionally, it delivers. The tilted typing angle does indeed improve speed and accuracy, by a large margin; the thing can stand up by itself for watching streaming video or typing on an external keyboard. When in typing position, the tongue of the strap protrudes a little below the bottom of the device (below the space bar), and I was afraid this would make it jiggly, but it has no meaningful impact on the effectiveness of the thing. And it improves the lap-typing experience noticeably.

Here are a few views of the object just removed from the packaging:

And here are before-and-after views of Netflix streaming of “Monarch of the Glen” streaming on the kitchen table. The “before” braces the naked iPad awkwardly against a bunch of glass IKEA tea light holders.

And some typing views:

I saw the iPhone OS 4 today for about 90 seconds (someone at work has a developer license — one of the side benefits of working at a company that makes software) … and all my resolve not to bother upgrading yet to iPhone 4 (which even survived an encounter with this microsite) has gone out the window.

Since my iPhone 3G can’t run OS 4, looks like I’m going to be getting in line with all the rest of the sheep sometime later this summer…

Over at Signal vs. Noise, Ryan Singer muses about whether the iPad will simplify site design and kill tablet-unfriendly features such as the hover.

He doesn’t think so, and I don’t either.

The way he put it is this:

If I place a bet, it’ll be that the desktop negotiates its place among tablets to settle on a role we haven’t seen in a while: the workstation. As for interface designers, we will sometimes shift out of the one-size-fits-all mindset to ask ourselves: Which device is this app really for? The workstation or the tablet?

Agreed on both counts. From the user perspective, as I’ve gradually incorporated the iPad into my lifestyle, I’ve found myself bifurcating what I reach for and when. The type of interactivity made possible by the two devices is different, and so they’re good for different things.

The laptop (which, since it’s a 17-inch, 7-pound MacBook Pro, is effectively a “desktop, which you can use on your lap if you are in the mood to have a giant robot in your lap”) is for complex or fine tasks, for extended composing, for anything that demands task-switching, and for efficient processing of small tasks in volume. (It’s also for Civilization IV and SimCity 4.)

The pad is for light or casual Internet use — the more consumption-oriented the better — and for light composing (including many blog posts, though not this one). It also works for processing tasks (“doing email”), up to a point.

So, for tasks involving a lot of picking and poking and turning and manipulating (not to mention hunting and pecking), you’ll be happier on the laptop. But the pad is great for activities involving a lot of pointing and sweeping, which (as it turns out) is what a lot of our consumptive Internet use is made up of. Safari on the iPad, in its best moments, is a physical and immersive experience, much more different from a laptop browser than I would have expected — it gives us a taste of what virtual reality will be like when it goes mainstream.

As of 90 minutes ago, AT&T was still offering the upgrade to the unlimited data plan via the iPad interface, despite gazillions of Web articles asserting that the deadline was yesterday.

Yes, I caved. In my first month of data, in which I was very careful to use free wireless rather than 3G whenever it was available, I used about 140 of my 250MB. It’s not inconceivable to imagine myself going above 2GB if I let myself go — not likely to happen, but not inconceivable. So there it is.

The iPad cases available so far have been pretty dismal affairs, with the exception of the folding Apple case that’s backordered forever and ever. When I bought my iPad, the best of the not-so-good options available was the bright red Speck PixelShield. I like the built-in handle on the Speck, but as a fortysomething-year-old man with a Real Grownup Job I just feel a little ridiculous walking into meetings carrying something that looks like a potholder from an East German kitchen circa 1979. (Incidentally, don’t try clicking that link on an iPad; the site’s in Flash. They’ve been made aware of the irony, probably a couple thousand times, and will have a new site up real soon.)

So it was with not a little joy that I watched Kevin Tofel’s video review of the Macally BOOKSTAND case. Not only is this made of masculine gray or black microfiber with leather trim; it also folds up neatly, in the same triangular way that the Apple case does, into a typing support and into a landscape viewing stand. I’ll be stopping by J&R tomorrow to pick one of these up.

I finally went to Wikipedia tonight and looked up “regression testing”, one of those jargony software terms that I’ve heard over and over, in 23 years of working in and around software companies, but never understood.

I always assumed that the “regression” part involved something recursive or asymptotic — something infinite — but no, apparently all it means is that at later stages of development you go back and rerun all the previous test cases, to make sure that you didn’t break any of your earlier fixes as a side effect of a later one. Sounds sensible to me, and it probably wouldn’t even be a particularly interesting topic if not for all the various ways that people have automated the storing and rerunning of test cases to help bake regression testing into an effective production process.

Via Hagan Blount, this Engadget post, complete with video, showing an iPad deployed on the front of a kitchen cabinet. On the heels of this video, I’m even more sure that it’s time to find me some heavy-duty Velcro this week and do some experimenting…