OK, so in my last confession I noted that Excel is my spreadsheet of choice. I should note, however, that there is one thing I absolutely do not use Excel for: graphing. My work is technical enough that I regularly need to make graphs. Frankly, Excel sucks for this. Excel’s defaults are awful. Here’s an exercise for the reader: make a bar graph using Excel’s defaults, and print it on a monochrome printer. You get gray bars on a lined gray background, making it visually impossible to differentiate anything. Nice job, Microsoft! (Now, you might argue that nobody uses monochrome anymore, but that’s not true; most journals in my field still print in monochrome, so they only take monochrome figures.) Furthermore, Excel handles the size of graphs in bizarre ways. If I know I want the x-axis to be 4 inches long, I guess you can get there in Excel, but woe to you if you try to simply resize the window—the graph resizes as well. Bleah.

This is another domain in which there used to be a great solution, and now there’s not. The best old-school graphing program for my money was Cricket Graph. Unfortunately, that died a long time ago. The closest thing to that, and what I have used for years now, is DeltaGraph. DeltaGraph is generally pretty good, though there are times when some of the features are better-hidden than they should be. A lot of operations require double-clicking on bits that aren’t immediately obvious, and you have to be pretty precise because double-clicking a few pixels away can give you the wrong dialog box; for example, you can end up with the dialog for grid lines and tick marks when you wanted the dialog for the axis title and units. On the other hand, DeltaGraph does a great job handling fussy bits of the graphs, like error bars. Graphs like this one, where the error bars are different for every graphed point, are actually handled quite well in DeltaGraph:

My only real gripe with DeltaGraph is that it’s getting a bit long in the tooth. It hasn’t been updated in some time and while it runs in OS X, it still feels like an OS 9 application in a lot of ways. Plus it’s gotten buggy and now generates more random crashes than it should. I’m starting to think that it’s been abandoned by its developers and so I’m now keeping an eye open for a new graphing program.

OmniGraphSketcher looks promising, but it doesn’t handle error bars well and so I can’t really go that way yet. Apple’s Numbers and Keynote have the same problem (that is, they also don’t handle error bars well). SPSS is a nightmare when it comes to graphs. Programs like ChartSmith and Aabel look like they might be OK, but they’re bloody expensive.

So, while DeltaGraph is hanging in there so far, I’m “in the market,” as it were. Suggestions welcome…

For some people I am exactly the wrong person to ask about this. I am not artistically gifted; if anything, I’m one of those people who has trouble drawing a straight line even with a ruler. So what suits me here may not suit you, particularly if you’re artistically inclined. For me, doing drawing and diagrams on a computer is a godsend, because that’s the only way something even remotely reasonable can possibly be generated.

To wit: I don’t use Adobe Illustrator as anything other than a way to give a quick edit to something in a PDF file. Illustrator, for me, is like giving a huge load of fireworks to a 9-year-old. It might be fun and something pretty could happen, but mostly it’s just really dangerous for everybody. It’s like going after a fly with a bazooka, etc., you get the analogy.

For me, Illustrator is too general-purpose. Most of the drawing and diagrams that I do are flowchart-like system diagrams and stuff like room layouts. I don’t freehand draw, I put arrows in between labelled objects. My tool of choice for this kind of thing is OmniGraffle Pro, despite the goofy name—WTF is a graffle, anyway?

I think of OmniGraffle as a diagramming tool which also happens to support some more general-purpose drawing. While it has some foibles, it is generally an excellent piece of software which not just lets me do what I want, but helps me do what I want, because in this domain, assistance is much appreciated.

Years ago I used to use Inspiration as both my outliner and my diagramming program, but Inspiration, while it runs in OS X, really hasn’t kept up with the times.

The bad news is that OmniGraffle isn’t cheap. The Pro version retails for $200 ($120 academic), which is not trivial for software that isn’t, for me, an everyday piece of software. However, when I really need a flowchart or something similar, I really need one, and OmniGraffle is the way to go for me.

I’ve looked at other programs like LineForm and Intaglio and while they seem like nice drawing programs, they aren’t really diagramming tools, and I need a diagramming tool. LineForm is sold explicitly as an Illustrator competitor, and while certainly a lot less expensive than Illustrator, it’s $100. (Considering that academic bundles that include Illustrator can be had for only a few hundred, that’s not much of a savings.) Intaglio is somewhat less full-featured and slightly cheaper ($90). Intaglio does have one particularly cool feature for those of us who have been around for a while: it can open ClarisDraw files. I wasn’t a big user of ClarisDraw but that may be a big deal to the few folks out there who were. So, if you’re in the market for a moderately cheap but decent drawing (but not really diagramming) program, though, those seem like good things to look into.

I guess the other tool to discuss here is Zengobi’s Curio. Curio is a funky but likeable program but it’s very hard to describe. It’s sort a graphic information management tool, and it includes drawing tools and outlining and a whole bunch of other stuff all in one package. While I do occasionally use Curio, I don’t use it as my primary diagramming tool because it just isn’t as good at diagrams as OminGraffle. Curio’s name will come up again (and could have already as a presentation program, because it’ll do that, too) because it has features that touch on many other areas.

I don’t do a lot of serious work with spreadsheets. Most of my data either ends up getting dealt with in stats packages or if it’s something requiring anything custom, I’ll write a program of my own to deal with it. I use spreadsheets mostly for things like grade rosters, when I do my taxes, and for non-mission-critical work like fantasy football rankings.

I own three spreadsheets: Apple’s Numbers, Microsoft’s Excel, and Mariner Calc. Those of you who follow along here are probably expecting another round of Microsoft-bashing, so perhaps this will be a surprise, but I don’t think there’s any real contest here: Excel is clearly the champ here.

Before I get into this, another historical note: my favorite Mac spreadsheet used to be Informix Wingz, which was then later rebranded as Claris Resolve. Powerful functions, great graphics, and a macro language which was actually parseable by humans (based on HyperTalk, how cool is that?). This was software that was way, way ahead of its time in 1989—no current spreadsheet is nearly as good. Progress is, unfortunately, not always forward.

This is a battle of attrition: I don’t really like Excel all that much, but the other two are just not ready for prime time. Mariner Calc is OK, but it lacks the statistical functions that I need (like z-, t-, F- and chi square distributions), I’ve found more than one error in calculations (I’ve reported them and Mariner claims that they’re fixed, but who knows if there are more?), and the UI just doesn’t make it. For example, when you’re in a cell, the row and column indicators don’t change to indicate where you are in the spreadsheet, like so:

Not really that big a deal when you’re in C5, but when you’re in K39 it’s often useful to know, visually, what row and column you’re in—like in every other spreadsheet I’ve ever used. I requested this feature ages ago, but Mariner never did anything with it. This is just a dumb UI fail, a “please don’t buy our product” signal from the developers.

Now, Numbers. Numbers is an interesting effort from Apple, an attempt to kind of change the paradigm for spreadsheets. Instead of the “sheet” being the basic unit, the “table” is the central unit, and each sheet can have multiple tables—and of course each document can have multiple sheets. This is kind of interesting and there are certainly advantages to doing things this way, but it does add a lot of clutter if you just want one single very large table (and no others) because there’s all this screen real estate devoted to managing multiple tables in a sheet that you won’t need. OTOH, there are some cool things that this enables, as multiple separate tables on a single page can be useful, particularly for things that have to be printed out. So, there are things about Numbers that I like, but there are just as many that I hate. Here are the two things I hate the most:

• Exporting from a Numbers document is incredibly cumbersome. This is important, because lots of other apps like simple and dumb, but also highly portable, you-know-everything-will-be-able-to-read-it-in-10-years formats like tab-delimited text. First of all, Numbers doesn’t even support tab-delimited text. WTF? It supports CSV, but I hate CSV because CSV files aren’t as human-readable, and commas are crappy delimiters because lots of data has commas in it one way or another. Second, Numbers handles multiple sheets/tables incredibly stupidly: you can only export the entire document, every single sheet and table, or nothing. You can’t just export the part you want. Mind-numbing.

• Sorting is stupid. Numbers won’t let you sort only a part of a table; again, it’s all-or-nothing. (Technically, this isn’t quite true; it’s possible to sort only some rows, but when you do, it still sorts all columns for those rows. Ugh.) This just defies any reasonable logic whatsoever. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. This completely defies my mental model for how a spreadsheet should work, and I can’t stand it. I don’t care how much of a “new paradigm” this thing is supposed to be, it should not completely break major chunks of previous knowledge about how spreadsheets work.

The other kind of stunning thing about Numbers is that there’s no way to edit a Numbers spreadsheet on an iPhone—at least, none that I’ve been able to find. The great irony is that there are many iPhone apps that will allow you to edit Excel spreadsheets on an iPhone, but not Numbers. (Double irony: Mariner’s Calc iPhone app will let you edit Excel sheets, but not Calc sheets. WTF?) Hey, Apple, fantastic job on platform integration there! (Side note: I like having small spreadsheets on my iPhone for small tasks, and usually all the editing I do is enter data onto them, but that’s enough that it’s useful.)

So, the winner—again, mostly by attrition—is Excel. I’m not thrilled with Excel, of course, as the launch time is hideously long and it has some UI quirks of its own, and of course is full of Microsoft bloat. However, Excel seems to do a better job of containing that bloat than the other Office apps and so it’s bearable. I think this is an area where a third-party really could compete with the big boys, but none has yet risen to the challenge.

My App Store review, in blog form…

First and foremost, I love the price. Free with no adware, that’s perfect for a Twitter client. I’d pay a buck, maybe two at most, for a Twitter client. Five bucks is right out.

However, TweetDeck has some issues:

• It crashes… often. Usually on launch, and other times for no apparent reason. This should be the developer’s #1 priority.
• It misses tweets! If someone you follow does an @reply but tries to broadcast it using “.@,” TweetDeck still doesn’t show it.
• I know the hipsters all love the white-on-black color scheme, but I’d really like at least the option to go with the more traditional black-on-white. This is particularly problematic in really bright light conditions.
• Needs better support for #hashtags. Right now they don’t do anything.
• I’d like the option to launch a URL in Safari rather than in TweetDeck itself.
• No landscape mode for composing tweets.

It’s a good start for a 1.0 and could be great… certainly worth hanging onto for the price, though I’m going to keep an eye on TweetFlip…

First, some context: I give a substantial number of presentations, because I do a majority of my class lectures using presentation software. Thus, I probably give 50–100 presentations a year. This means I spend a fair amount of time in presentation software, so again, I’m rather particular about it. However, it should be pointed out that none of these are marketing or motivational talks; these are all technical in nature. They aren’t snazzy and I don’t make a lot of use of animation or fancy effects, because I want people focussed on the content, not the presentation itself.

There are really only two serious players in this market: Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint. There are a number of minor players in this market, whereby I mean software that really does something else, but also happens to support some kind of slide show or presentation features. This list includes things like OmniGraffle Pro, Curio, DeltaGraph, and I’m sure many, many others. Many of those are nice, but they aren’t really centered on presentations and I give enough that I need a dedicated tool.

This one is actually a no-brainer: Keynote is my tool of choice, hands down, no contest. Frankly, PowerPoint blows goats. There is almost nothing that PowerPoint does better than Keynote, and Keynote can read and write PowerPoint files, so why bother with it?

However, in the interest of fairness, there are a couple things PowerPoint does do better. The main thing is drawing. PowerPoint has a wider range of drawing tools, and handles things like arrowed connecters between objects dramatically better than Keynote. (Keynote only recently added arrowed connectors at all.) Mostly I don’t consider this a big deal, since if I’m going to do a really complex diagram I’m going to do it in a dedicated drawing program like OmniGraffle anyway. The one place where there’s some real advantage here is that if you want the diagram to appear in stages (that is, via animation), then you basically have to draw it in the presentation software, so PowerPoint does get a point over Keynote here.

However, that’s pretty much it. PowerPoint is slow, generally much klunkier to use, more expensive, and generally vile. The most amazing thing about PowerPoint is how it has consistently failed to improve from one version to the next. The 2008 version is just simply not better than the 2004 version. If you want to mess with the animation of your bullet points, this still requires digging through multi-level dialog boxes. I hear that if you’re using PowerPoint on Windows, it’s better. There’s irony there—is there serious competition for PowerPoint on the Windows side? My impression, though I admittedly don’t really know, is that there isn’t. Yet there is serious competition on the Mac side, and that competition is staggeringly better, yet PowerPoint doesn’t seem to be getting any better in order to compensate.

Note that it hasn’t always been this way. For a long time I used PowerPoint because of its superior support for equation editing in an external editor (MathType). Since one of the classes I teach every year is statistics, I need to present a lot of equations. So I’ve stuck with PowerPoint just for that feature. The current version of Keynote has stepped up and now supports MathType, and last fall I dumped PowerPoint completely.

If you’re still using PowerPoint on the Mac, I’d highly recommend you look at Apple’s Keynote; it’s just simply better.

By input devices, I pretty much mean “mouse and keyboard.” Keyboard first:

The best keyboard ever made in terms of key feel, for me, is easy to identify: the Apple Extended Keyboard II (AEK2). Unfortunately, Apple stopped making those in the early 1990s, and they never made a version using USB. I gave up using my AEK2 in the late 1990s when I started seeing compatibility problems with the driver for the ADB-USB adapter.

Frankly, I don’t like any Apple keyboard offering; I don’t like the key feel for any of them. For many years, what I used was a Logitech Elite keyboard. The feel is not great, but better than the Apple keyboards around or any of the other third-party competitors that I got my hands on. Most current keyboards use membranes rather than individual switches for each key, which is why most modern keyboards feel mushy. I tried the Matias Tactile Pro which is supposed to use individual switches like the old AEK2, but the one I got was defective and the manufacturer never returned my attempts to contact them or return it, so I dumped it (and never got my money back—great customer service!). So, the solution ought to be a keyboard based on scissor switches, which is how the better laptop keyboard are made. The problem is that I don’t like the feel of most of those because the finger travel distance is too small.

Anyway, I did finally tire of the feel of the Logitech Elite, and briefly reverted to my old AEK2 when I discovered that the OS X drivers for the ADB-USB adapter worked pretty seamlessly. While I loved going back to that old feel, I still wasn’t satisfied, for multiple reasons. First, the 18-year-old keyboard sometimes dropped keystrokes (very bad), there are no media controls on the keyboard, and the keyboard is really loud. Keyboard loudness never used to bother me, but my life has changed since the late 1990s and now I do enough teleconferencing that a noisy keyboard is highly inconvenient.

Fortunately, someone finally made a decent Mac keyboard: the Logitech DiNovo Edge for the Mac. Yes, it’s terribly expensive. Yes, it lacks a numeric keypad. And it’s a scissor-switch keyboard. However, they’ve increased the travel distance over other scissor switch keyboards and the feel is pretty good—no, still not as good as the AEK2, but better than the Elite or any of Apple’s offerings. It has a great set of media keys as well as a trackpad and scrolling controls. It’s quiet. It’s low and flat, so it doesn’t screw up my negative-tilt keyboard shelf. It’s Bluetooth, which so far seems much less flaky than the wireless USB solutions I’ve used before. And as a final side benefit, it’s gorgeous, though that’s also probably a significant factor in the expense (the top is cut from a single piece of glass).

Next, the mouse. This is a terrific example of a technology where what’s good for learning is not what’s best for the skilled operator. From my perspective, it’s great to have lots of buttons on a mouse. However, if you want to see how this can fail, try teaching a 3-year-old to use a multi-button mouse. I’ve done this with both my kids, who are both smart and were motivated to learn. Small fingers aren’t the whole problem, the issue is the fact that with multiple options for clicking, they’ll use them all, won’t remember which to use, and cause glitches when they click with the wrong one. It’s a mess, because the left button is the one used some 90% of the time and the other button is just a distraction.

On the other hand, I’m not a little kid. In fact, I’ve been using a mouse more or less daily for the last 22 years. (As usual, insert your favorite age joke here.) At this point, I want a mouse with some extra buttons—in fact, lots of extra buttons! Of course a scroll wheel, but not just any old scroll wheel, one that also tilts to do horizontal scrolling. I like programmable buttons for “back,” click lock, close window, gesture, and Exposé. I’d rather not have to go back to the keyboard if I don’t have to, and this array of extra stuff right on the mouse allows me to keep it to a minimum. This rules out any Apple offering; the mighty mouse or whatever they call it lacks for extra buttons.

So, that’s a lot of extra buttons. I also like my mouse to have a good feel in my hand, track well, and wireless is also nice (Bluetooth preferred but not required.) If wireless, that means it will have an on-board battery so a battery charge indicator right on the mouse is also useful. Obviously, I’m pretty picky about this.

So far the mouse that I’ve found that best does all this is the Logitech Revolution MX, so that’s my desktop mouse. It’s quite excellent. I almost gave up on it when I first tried it because the shape is pretty extreme and I didn’t immediately like it, but it’s grown on me. I’m still not sure the previous-generation shape (e.g., the old MX700 or more recent G7?) isn’t actually better but I’m willing to live with the MX. It’d be even better with Bluetooth, of course, because as I said, wireless USB is sometimes kind of flaky.

So, there are my choices for keyboard and mouse. Yes, I’m a little OCD about it, I know, but I put a lot of hours in on them, so why not get good ones?

Final note on Logitech: I never had any intent of becoming a Logitech fan. And Logitech has an extremely sketchy track record when it comes to the software on the Mac side; Logitech Control Center is notoriously buggy. Turns out the DiNovo Edge is already a Mac keyboard and works just fine without the Logitech software. The mouse can be driven perfectly well with third-party shareware; both USB Overdrive and SteerMouse work great with Logitech mice. So I don’t run the Logitech software at all.

A long time ago (late 1980s) the best word processor for the Mac was Microsoft Word version 4.0, no contest. Basically, it was that or vanilla MacWrite. Word was much smaller then, more lightweight. Edges of the bloat could be seen with version 5, and version 6 was one of the most colossal disasters in office software history. I’ve also owned Write Now, MacWrite II, MacWrite Pro, various flavors of Nisus Writer, WordPerfect Mac, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, FrameMaker, Mariner Write, Pages, and I’ve taken several others for test drives (Mellel, a few others whose names I can’t remember). There is a clear winner in terms of history for the best word processor for the Mac, ever. In my opinion, MacWrite Pro was, hands down, the king. Things printed where you put them. Style sheets always made sense and worked in sensible, predicable ways, and there was a differentiation between character styles and paragraph styles that promoted a mental model of the system that actually worked. It had just enough page-layout-style features that you could control things, but it never overwhelmed you with that stuff.

But, unfortunately, MacWrite Pro is dead. The last version released was a long time ago, and once development stopped, it didn’t last long, mostly because it had issues with newer printer drivers, and if you can’t print properly from your word processor, it’s done.

Now, because I’ve tried so many, I now have a standard test I do when I take any new word processor for a spin. Before I get into that, though, I think it’s important to mention what kind of writing I typically do with word processors, because what works for me might not work for other people depending on what kind of writing you do.

I’m an academic, but I don’t write books. I write scientific journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and grant proposals send to federal agencies. I also write exams and homework assignments and answer keys for those. I write almost no memos or letters; that’s what email is for in my world. I don’t write fiction, advertisements, brochures, forms, or anything like that. I don’t use my word processor as an outliner; I have an outliner for that. (Yes, there will be a series entry on outliners.) So, my primary use is technical writing.

So, what’s my fist test? I try to generate a document in what I think of as “conference proceedings format.” This is pretty straightforward two-column format, which virtually all word processors can handle with very little pain. The tricky bit is that the first page is different; it requires a single-column start with the paper tile, author information, and sometimes abstract. I also need style sheets to handle various heading levels, figure captions, and body text that sometimes does and does not require a first-line indent depending on whether or not it follows a heading. Maybe this doesn’t sound complicated and it definitely should not be hard for someone with a graduate degree in computer science to figure out.

Most word processors, however, make this task way, way more difficult than it should be. I can usually get most word processors to do it, more or less, but the issue isn’t usually whether or not they can, but how much of a pain in the ass it is to get it running and how sensible the outcome is in terms of mapping from what it shows on the screen to what gets printed on the page. I dislike most implementations that require “sections” to do this. Doing it with a header that appears only on the first page is OK, but doing it with a WYSIWYG text box is the clearest and easiest way I’ve seen to handle this. This is, of course, how MacWrite Pro handled this.

When MacWrite Pro was no longer feasible to run, then I switched to FrameMaker for a while, but that never made the OS X transition, so that wasn’t a viable option. I had been floating around trying different things, none of them quite what I wanted. Mariner Write is non-awful and Nisus Writer Pro has some things going for it, but neither is quite it.

A word, then, on Microsoft Word. I hate Word with a passion. It’s slow (NASA launches things faster), it’s bloated with zillions of features that I will never, ever use, the UI is klunky (exactly how many modal dialog boxes are there?), the implementation of style sheets is horrible, its behavior is completely unpredictable (gee, I wonder where that figure will actually end up, or how it will reformat my text if I somehow accidentally delete the invisible formatting character), and so on. It’s a mess. I only use it when I absolutely have to, generally because I’m working with a colleague who uses it. Even then, I’ll generally translate from Word, edit in something else, and then save back to Word. This is not to say everything about Word is bad, as Word has been the source of some very good ideas. For instance, the first time I saw the dynamic red underlining of misspelled words was in Word, and even if Word didn’t invent that, it popularized it, and that’s a seriously good bit of UI.

So, what I use is Apple’s Pages. It’s the closest thing to MacWrite Pro out there, it’ll always run on the latest Apple hardware and software, it plays surprisingly well with Word, and the UI doesn’t suck. It’s certainly not because it’s an Apple product; I have to say that the first couple of versions of Pages weren’t especially great, and I didn’t really use it. However, the 3.0 (or ‘08) version (actually released in 2007) was good and the 4.0 (or ‘09) version is a useful improvement over that. When people email me Word documents, I almost always open them in Pages because it takes dramatically less time to launch Word and Pages usually does an excellent job of importing with formatting intact. And as much as I dislike “track changes,” Pages does a good job with it and generally handles Word files that have this turned on quite well.

However, it’s not perfect. For example, MacWrite Pro’s style sheets were still better, and it’d be nice if Pages did auto-numbering of figures and equations, but other than that, it’s good enough that I almost don’t miss MacWrite Pro anymore, which is an accomplishment. So, that’s what I use. For now, until someone finds something better.

OK, so it’s not football season and my blog is suffering from neglect. But classes are over and I can only watch so many movies, even on blu-ray, in a week. The last couple summers I’ve used the little down time I have in the summer to read a couple novels. Since the sequel to The Name of the Wind isn’t going to be out for a while, nothing on that front really grabs me right now. Thus I’m starting a new series on the blog, which I’ll try to update about once a week. So, what is this all about?

I’ve been using Macs since I started college in 1987 (insert your own age joke here). One of the things I often find myself asking when I meet other Mac aficionados is “what X do you use?” where X is software for some particular purpose, or hardware, or whatever. And I’ve noticed over the last few years that people ask me that question a lot.

So, I thought I’d document some of the storehouse of Mac knowledge and preference buried in my brain. Why should anyone care? Well, I have to confess that I have a problem: I’m a junkie. I’m completely addicted to Mac stuff, hardware, software, peripherals, you name it. There are (at least) four fully licensed word processors and at least three such spreadsheet programs on my hard disk. There are probably five or six keyboards in my study right now. I spring for MacUpdate Promo bundles and MacHeist bundles pretty much whenever they happen. I am, sadly but most definitely, addicted to this stuff—but it means my opinions are generally pretty well-informed and backed by a fair amount of experience.

Here are some planned topics, though I probably won’t go in this order:
• Word processors (and maybe reference managers)
• Mice & keyboards
• Web browsers
• Presentation software
• Utilities (this will take many posts as I’m especially addicted to these; I’ll need to generate multiple sub-categories)
• Spreadsheets
• Audio editing
• How I keep my multiple Macs in sync (I get asked this particularly often)
• Drawing and diagrams
• Graphing
• Outlining/brainstorming
• Text editing
• Image editing for the non-’shopper?
• Blogging/twittering?

And I’m open for suggestions on others. Let my addiction work for you…

One last sidebar. This will most definitely not be any kind of Mac vs. PC holy war stuff. I find that tiresome. I made a choice, it’s my choice, it’s not a choice borne of ignorance or incompetence, and I really don’t give a rip if there are people who don’t agree with it. Nor do I expect other people to be swayed by my choice, so I’m not going there. If you want that kind of utterly unproductive nonsense I’m sure there’s a thread on Fark or Gizmodo where people are fighting it out—there nearly always is.

Now, I will dip my toes into some the muddy waters of dissent on the Mac side, because it is germane to the topic. LaunchBar vs. QuickSilver. BBEdit vs. other text editors. There will be Microsoft-bashing, but only for some applications; and don’t worry, there will be Apple-bashing, too.

So, my Oppo BDP-83 arrived over the weekend and we got to experience the new tech. In a word, WOW.

I guess I didn’t fully realize just how used I am to upscaled video. The first thing we watched was Planet Earth. This is terrific but I’d seen it in HD when it first came out and the Discovery blu-ray is only 1080i so it’s not much different from watching it off the DVR.

Next was WALL-E. This is outstanding on blu-ray, no question. Of course, it’s a digital image to start with, and animated, so while it looks terrific, it was somehow not mind-blowing that it was so perfect. Well, that’s not quite true–the audio is pretty astonishing. The lesson, as always: lossy compression blows.

What really rocked me was The Matrix. I think what impressed me the most were the skin tones–just amazing. And smoke. And backgrounds. No banding or speckling or blurring. This movie was the “killer app” for DVD in the early days of that format and it’s one I’ve seen on DVD many, many times, so I’m really used to what it looks and sounds like in that format, so the contrast between blu-ray and DVD was particularly salient.

We watched The Dark Knight last night, and it’s also spectacular. However, since we didn’t have the DVD prior to the blu-ray, the contrast between blu-ray and DVD was obviously not at the forefront. Great blu-ray experience, though, for sure–I was actually holding off on buying this movie until we had blu-ray, as I did with WALL-E. Good choice.

The other thing I’ve really been enjoying about the BDP-83, and one of the reasons that I went with that despite its somewhat hefty price tag is SACD playback. The BDP-83 can output raw DSD multichannel, which my Denon receiver handles beautifully, and it just sounds fantastic. I know this isn’t a format which really took off, and I don’t have a lot of titles (mostly classical), but it’s fantastic where I do have it.

So, good stuff all around. Now if the price of media would only come down a bit, it’d be fantastic. The way to make this happen, I think, is for higher demand. So, if you have a decent HDTV, get a blu-ray player, dammit. If you don’t care about things like SACD, even a cheap one will be a big upgrade in terms of picture and audio quality.

So, on Friday I test drove four cars. As I noted in that day’s entry, I love my 2002 Mazda Protege5. However, it is getting a bit long in the tooth and I wouldn’t mind a more updated car in terms of saftey and gizmos—and I’d love something faster, of course. I love the size and handling of my Pro5 so I’m looking for something like that; a fast small car with good handling and updated content. Automatic transmissions need not apply. Now, I have two kids (they’re still small) so a strict coupe is out. To be honest, I also don’t really need a new car right now, as my Pro5 has been rock solid. But I just got a raise so it’s fun to look.

The good news is that there are some great cars in this segment and I liked everything I drove. These are all worthy cars and any one of them would be terrific. Of course, I liked some of them better than others. In worst-to-first order:

4th: Honda Civic Si
While overall I liked this the least—but let me be clear, I did like it—the Si has a fantastic shifter. Totally smooth, perfect snick into each gate. On the other hand, this is probably the slowest and worst-handling of the four. The steering wheel provides a little less feedback, the ride is a little too smooth, and it has the standard VTEC engine “torqueless wonder” problem. It’s possible to coax decent response out of the engine, but the thing is almost completely gutless until you hit about 6000 rpm. Now, this is actually doable, but requires a lot of rowing with the shifter. That’s actually kind of fun, but fundamentally the car just doesn’t seem as tight and responsive as the other three. The low torque is indeed smoother when not pushing the car and there’s something to be said for that, but it’s just not enough. Also, this particular Si didn’t have the upgraded tires, so perhaps it would have been better, but it just didn’t stick to the road the way the other cars did.

Also, I have to comment on the utterly inane speedometer. Digital speedometers are a horrible idea. It was a horrible idea on GM cars in the late 1980s, it’s horrible on the Prius, and it’s horrible in the Si. Rate of change is almost impossible to assess, it creates distracting flicker for night driving, and pretty much nobody wants to know that their speed is 57. Maybe the driver wants to know if s/he is above 55 and below 60, which is a very quick glance at an analog speedometer (is the needle in the region I care about or not?) but is harder with a digital. It’s just a bad idea.

Also, a comment to all floor sales managers: when you’ve talked to a customer who has clearly done his homework and knows rather a lot about the car, don’t send a sales guy on the test drive who knows nothing at all about it.

3rd: Subaru Impreza WRX 5-Door
The recent re-design of the Impreza line is pretty substantial in some ways and not in others. It’s a very similar engine, though the improvement in the size of the power band is certainly welcome. The body and interior are totally different, and IMO much improved. The old wagon (5-door, whatever) was ugly, and the interior more than a little on the Spartan side. The 2008 WRX has a dramatically more comfortable and well-appointed interior, and I’m in the camp that thinks the exterior also looks a lot better, too.

The ride is also a lot smoother. In fact, it’s too smooth. It still handles very well, but it’s not as stiff and responsive as the old WRX. The AWD is nice and offsets this a little bit, but Subaru’s obvious attempt to “go mainstream” here went a just a smidge too far and it took the fun edge off just enough that this car came in a bit behind the other two—but only a little bit.

In some sense the WRX is the jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. It’s not as fast and the cabin, while nicer, is still not as nice the Mazda. It isn’t as fun and with the content of the MINI, but rather strikes a nice balance between those other cars. But this is a race where I felt like one car had to be the winner at something, and this wins only at having AWD, which is nice but really not all that big a deal here. The AWD also makes it the big loser at the pump. Considering that this isn’t the high-miles car in the family (that’s our hybrid), that’s not my primary concern, but 25 highway? Really? Seems pretty awful.

Second comment to car salespeople: being knowledgeable about your product is good, but if you spend half your contact time with me denigrating the competing cars, that makes me think that that’s all you have. Sell me on what’s great about your car, not what you think are the flaws of the other cars. If your product is actually superior, that should be good enough.

2nd: Mazda MazdaSPEED3
This is the sub-$25,000 compact car equivalent of being shot out of a cannon. The Speed3 is just teeth-rattling fast. Given the numbers—263 horsepower and a whopping 280 lb.-ft. of torque—this is not a surprise. However, throwing that at the front wheels, well, it seems like a recipe for the worst torque steer ever. What was the most amazing thing to me about the Speed3 is how well-controlled the torque steer is. Apparently the computer works the limited-slip differential and limits turbo boost to manage the torque steer—and it works impressively well. Besides that, the handling is tight and responsive and feedback from the road through both wheel and tires is excellent. Certainly some people won’t like the ride—it’s very stiff—but I rather like it that way. It’s communicative and the tires seem good and sticky.

And it’s strikingly well-appointed—the interior is outstanding, particularly for a car in this price range. The driver’s seat is very good, the ergonomics are sound, the backseat and cargo area are generous (36.3” of rear legroom, which is more than some mid-size sedans); this is a terrific car, practical as well as a kick to drive. And the price is sweet. (Though I’d have to seriously consider factoring in extra expense for speeding tickets.)

I have four minor quibbles: you can’t get a moon roof (laugh if you want, but being able to vent hot air when parked in the Houston summer is not a trivial feature; note that the WRX lacks this as well), the color choices don’t appeal to me (they just dropped both the blue and the silver), no daytime running lights, and there’s a couple minor creature features I’d like (Bluetooth and real iPod integration), though those are indeed minor features. The other thing which was kind of a gotcha for me was the shifter. I think the problem is that in so many other ways it’s similar to my current car, but the gates are closer together in the Speed3 than in mine (which makes sense, since it’s a 6-speed) that sometimes I’d miss, particularly the 3rd gear gate. I think I’d get used to that in, oh, about two days. Or maybe the shifter really is a bit notchier than the other three. Hard to say for sure.

Fundamentally, this is the sensible choice. It’s what I should get if I were to replace my current car. In fact, if I really were going to replace my car now what I really ought to do is go back to the dealer on Monday and grab the last blue one before they’re all gone.

1st: MINI Cooper S (and Cooper Clubman)
I know, the MINI just seems so wildly impractical, but the new “Clubman” version seemed like it could be just big enough that with two small kids it could work.

Now, let me be clear. I am, generally, not into “retro.” However, there is something about the look of the MINI that just really grabs me. And, of course, being a lover of small cars, the size is just wonderfully appealing. But of course with two kids, the pure coupe—I don’t relish the idea of climbing over to buckle and unbuckle our 4-year-old—and the nearly zero trunk just would not work. But the Clubman looked good on paper (well, on the Web), so I had to check it out.

The dealer didn’t have a Clubman S. This is hardly a surprise, the Clubman is very new and they’re still pretty hard to come by. However, the dealer had a regular Clubman and of course many Cooper Ss, so I drove the one Clubman and an S.

First, the Clubman is a trip. When I first saw it, I had to say my impression was that of a really miniature limo—it looks just like a regular Cooper, but stretched out. I mean, it’s really not all that stretched out; the Clubman is only 9.5 inches longer, bringing the total length of the car up to 155 inches, which is still 16” shorter than my Pro5. And it drives… like a MINI. That is, spectacular road feel. The whole marketing brochure nonsense about “go-kart handling” is, in fact, not just marketing nonsense. There’s a button marked “Sport” in the car which tightens up the steering and improves throttle response—I don’t know why anyone would ever even consider turning that button off. (Well, OK, actually I do: supposedly the car delivers better mileage that way.)

And the Cooper S is just fantastic. No, it’s not rocket-fast like the Speed3, but the road feel on the MINI is just so much better than the other three cars that it feels almost as fast. The shifter is great, a very close second to the Honda, and the feedback through the steering wheel was easily the best. The cockpit is, of course, a little quirky. The truly gigantic center-mounted speedometer is weird, but unlike the speedo in the Si, this turned out not to bother me at all. I dislike the power window control not being in the door (it’s on the center console), but the driving position, pedals, and steering wheel are all very well-configured. It is simply a blast to drive. Hands down, the most fun driving experience of the four.

Being a BMW brand, just about every feature under the sun is available on these. There are a zillion options, from checkered flag side markers to Bluetooth and full iPod integration. Obviously this means it’s possible to really jack up the price, but all the gizmos are certainly available. The BMW thing also means reliability is only about average, but all maintenance included for the first 3 years/36,000 miles. The boys will outgrow the bitty backseat in not too long, so three years of total coverage would probably do the trick—that’s probably about how long I’d keep it anyway; I’d probably lease.

Oh, and the mileage is crazy good: 26 city, 34 highway. The salesman reset the trip computer when I took the wheel on the S, and I drove it very hard and still pulled 24 mpg for the trip. Again, not my primary concern but it certainly would offset the price tag a little.

And there’s no issue with color choice on the MINI. Gorgeous British Racing Green, anyone? Check this out:

As much as I’d love to jump in and lease it right now, the wait on an order for a Clubman S is now 16 weeks. Four months is quite a while. So, I think I’m going to wait for a while longer and see if availability improves and see what kind of track record the Clubman generates over the next year or so. But it’s wild good fun and I’m very positively inclined.

Always park bonnet out, right?