SMELLING THE COFFEE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 216 09/07/2012

I'm writing this column at my desk in Italy, on a balmy evening, watching fireflies drift in and out among the vines. (I thought I'd see, as an experiment, whether I could type that sentence without smirking, but the reflection in my window pane says I've failed...) Seriously though, putting all climatological disparities aside, our existence here is a remarkable testament to advances in comms technology over the last few years. Communication with the rest of the world happens through a Telecom Italia Mobile mast on the mountain opposite, via which my laptop and my partner Marion's iPad are connected on pay-as-you-go mobile data plans. These are now fast enough to watch live streamed television, listen to music and radio, without recourse to the huge and expensive satellite dishes that were required just a couple of years ago. And my ALICE package gives me unlimited data for €19 per month.

Being here has given me the opportunity to get to grips with the iPad, and hence caused me to oscillate wildly between very impressed indeed and hair-tearing frustration. The latter state is almost always induced either by lack of documentation, or by Apple's smug assumption that everyone buys into its total ecosystem, which I most certainly do not. A most egregious example of the latter concerned Marion's contacts information, which it fell my duty to transfer from her netbook back in London into the iPad's Contacts. For purely historical reasons these have been kept for many years in Palm Desktop rather than Outlook (and she's quite happy with its facilities). When the iPad first arrived I realised there wasn't going to be any direct way to export addresses to it, because its Contacts Book appears to lack any menu for importing stuff. So I opened a Gmail account for her and successfully exported them all into that via a CSV file, believing job done. Fat chance. The Apple Contacts Book of course lacks any mechanism for importing from the enemy GMail either. After hours of footling around I gave up and suggested she log onto Gmail via Safari to see her contacts.

Months passed and a friend loaned us a book called "iPad 2: the missing manual" which solved many puzzles, like how to recover when you've accidentally locked the screen orientation into portrait. One chapter began with the soothing words "Putting a copy of your contacts file onto your iPad is easy" and suggested using either iCloud or iTunes. Like an idiot I decided iTunes would be easier since it was already installed there on the iPad's home screen. More head-scratching followed because iTunes would do nothing but offer to sell me David Guetta albums.

I'm embarassed to tell how many hours it took me to realise that iTunes has to be installed on another computer (assumed to be a Mac) rather than the iPad for this task. I flirted briefly with the idea of polluting my Viao with the Apple software, but fortunately took the precaution of Googling "uninstall iTunes from Windows 7" before committing: dozens of horror stories about how much junk it leaves behind cured me completely of that impulse. I Googled some more and then suddenly the scales were removed from my eyes by a sane and crystal-clear blog called "Apple iPad Tablet Help". The answer is use iCloud stupid! 

It took about ten minutes once that penny dropped. Pull up GMail on my Viao; log out as me and log back in as Marion; export her GMail contacts to a vCard file on the Viao; go to www.icloud.com and log in with Marion's Apple ID; drag the downloaded .VCF file onto the Contacts icon in the iCloud window. During this whole procedure the iPad remained lying on a table in the other room and no cables were involved. I fetched the iPad and opened Contacts, where to my disappointment were just those three entries I'd added manually months before. But before I could even muster a curse, up popped another, then another and in they all streamed over the airwaves, all 1200+ of them, in less than a minute. The moral of the story for me is that The Cloud just works: feeble documentation, different OSes, squabbles between Apple and Google, smug assumptions that iPad owners have a Mac too, all just melted away in the universality of HTTP and the internet.

This was the same month we finally decided to adopt Dropbox in place of Dennis Publishing's own server to transport Real World copy, and so far it's proving more convenient and reliable for all concerned. The Cloud just works. (Of course being a cynic/paranoiac I download it all to archive on my local machine too). For extra cloudiness I've also recently built an archive of all my previous Idealog columns from 1994 to 2012 in Blogger, where you can read them on-screen in a nice convenient format. As I was uploading one from August 1996 its headline, Wake Me When It All Works, caught my eye. In it I complained: "Somewhere along the line everyone seems to have forgotten once again that simplifying means actually removing stuff, not just hiding it on the ninteenth tab of some dialog". I believe I can smell the coffee...     

[Dick Pountain's back issues of this Idealog column are now readable on http://www.dickpountain-idealog.blogspot.it/]