Convert, an app for converting an array of different units, looks great and, in theory, should be quite useful. Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the good on this one.

The iPhone isn’t just about gaming and entertainment. Admittedly, I’ve got two screens worth of music and gaming apps, another screen for news, books and recipes, and then a screen dedicated to file-sharing and chat.

On my fifth and final screen, however, is a selection of software tools. There’s the basics, like Calculator and WeDict, sat alongside GPS-tools such as Locly and HearPlanet. Until now though, there was no unit converter.

The clever people at Polar Bear Farm have created Convert, a unit conversion tool that marries a variety of seemingly esoteric units — to the layman — with a polished interface.

With quite a history behind them, having launched in 2007, Polar Bear Farm is no strangers to app development. Notable past releases included Nice List, a stylish holiday gift manager, and Note Pad, a replacement to the iPhone’s own Notes app, upping the game with graphical flair and desktop syncing.

Then there’s Telegram, filling the iPhone voice-messaging void by allowing users to send short audio messages to each other.

The point is, Polar Bear Farm is an app developer who seems to specialize in creating tools that manage data and make life easier. And what’s more, these tools are always visually stunning.

Units and Values

Moving on to Convert, the most exciting thing when first opening the app is the aesthetic. It’s not at all iPhone-esque — gone is the Apple-aesthetic we all adore. Instead is a reductionist approach — metallic and digital, calling to mind expensive electronic tools created for specialists.

This may not be too far from the truth though as, while the app is indeed visually stunning, it also seems to pack in an array of esoteric units for converting. The units are separated in to ten different classes: Angle, Area, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Speed, Temperature, Time and Volume.

All the basics are present and correct too, so entering the Length section will bring up Inches, Kilometers, Miles and Feet, among other conversion options. Notably, however, the app does not convert currency, something which — as an iPhone user who travels frequently — would have proved incredibly useful.

Perhaps more importantly, the app incorporates a diverse range of less commonly-used unit-types, such as radians, nautical miles, and drams. Unfortunately, Delorean owners will be disappointed to find that there is no option to convert Gigawatts.

Although the UI isn’t quite as intuitive as it should be, the actual conversion process is incredibly easy. Select the unit to convert from and then the unit to convert to, then tap the numbers on either side of the equation, enter the new figure and instantaneously the equation adjusts to display your answer.

Comparing Problems

When I initially heard about the app’s $1.99 price tag, I felt somewhat unsure, questioning whether a unit converter is really worth two bucks. For my own conversions, I use Google. It’s free to use, although admittedly somewhat clunky on the iPhone and requiring a data connection.

In comparing Convert to Google’s calculator, I discovered a couple of interesting anomalies. When numbers are displayed, it always expresses them in full, so 596 days in microseconds would be 51,494,400,000,000.

There are, of course, shorter ways of expressing the same value. Google’s calculator outputs 596 days as 5.14944 × 10^13 microseconds (see it here displayed properly). The issue is further compounded with even larger numbers — Convert doesn’t seem to like really big numbers, in fact. It seems if a number is too big for the display, nothing at all is shown. As such, converting 596 days to nanoseconds leaves the display blank (whereas Google has no trouble).

The point is that the tool should be able to handle these kind of equations and express the outputted value clearly to the user. Convert seems to have been designed as much for the layman as for Make enthusiast or even coders and physicists. Esoteric units of measurement are all well and good, but the app should be able to handle esoteric equations too.

Furthermore, there’s some notable competition on sale in the App Store. One app in particular, The Converter, packs in a serious amount of units for converting, including currency conversion too, for 99 cents. However, The Converter (and all of the other conversion apps on offer) certainly aren’t as aesthetically impressive as Convert. I just don’t know if a pretty user interface is enough to warrant an extra buck, though.

Summing Up

With its appropriately stylized visual, so much work seems to have gone in to creating an app that looks professionally produced. The sound design is excellent as well. The app clicks and bleeps just at the right time, giving a satisfying level of tangibility to this digital tool.

However, there seem to be a couple of drawbacks to an app that could be accused of putting form before function. Firstly, despite the range of different units on offer for conversion, in comparison to other (cheaper) apps, Convert actually only seems to provide a paltry selection. The app therefore needs an update that expands the unit library to something much more substantial.

The other issue is with the way the app displays — or occasionally doesn’t display — values. With the user interface so rigidly set as part of the design and the apps current inability to express x to the power of y, it literally leaves no room to display incredibly large numbers. I’m surprised that this issue didn’t get caught in the testing phase.

As the app currently is, despite the fact it looks so gorgeous, I really can’t recommend it. There are cheaper apps out in the store that, while they certainly don’t have the good looks, have the features and the brains to hold their own. Until this app gets a much-needed upgrade, I suggest you avoid it.

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So what can be done about, short of severe DIY case-cracking, mother-board soldering changes that could result in death and/or dismemberment? One option shows potential. According to ZDNet.com, Pixela offers a FireWire to USB DV transfer cable, designed specifically with digital video transfer in mind.

Don’t go ordering one just yet, though. Currently, the cable only officially supports Windows XP (no Vista, either). So unless you’re running Boot Camp, or virtualization software, you’re out of luck. That said, given the sheer volume of dismayed MacBook owners (and those unwilling to upgrade until they find a solution), it’s likely that OS X support is on the way. Whether that comes in the form of a third-party driver, or (don’t hold your breath) official support and/or hardware from Apple, remains to be seen. When we contacted Pixela, a representative told us that OS X support has been discussed by their planning committee, but no firm decisions to go forward have yet been made.

There are a few problems with this type of workaround. For one, you give up on the fast transfer speeds and power distribution capability of FireWire. Pixela’s cable apparently uses “micro chip” technology to ensure the quality and integrity of the DV transfer are maintained, but this probably doesn’t entirely make up for FireWire’s high sustained transfer rates. And it looks like Pixela might require you to use their proprietary software to perform any transfers, no desktop mounting or destination application selection. There’s also price, since the cable costs $119 before tax. High price to pay for Apple’s omission.

Still, it’s less clunky than analog-to-digital video converters, and prices could drop if demand is high enough and other companies start making similar devices. Apple may also be less than cooperative if the decision to kill FireWire on the MacBook was meant to force people up to the MacBook Pro. We can only hope that, as with the microphone support finally included in the new iPod Touch, Apple eventually sees that hamstringing lower-end devices isn’t the only way to get people to upgrade.

Would you buy a Mac version of this cable, or will it take more than another peripheral to fix this problem?

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Along with Office 2008 updates and announced Macintosh Business Unit hiring, Microsoft has also bestowed blessings upon older Office users (2004) with the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update and version 1.0 of their Open XML File Format Converter for Mac.

The Office 2004 update adds enhanced compatibility for documents that are in Open XML Format and fixes an issue where installer was not properly ignoring backup copies of Office that were created by the Time Machine backup tool. Word 2004 has stability improvements and there are fixes for table display and “Page Setup” dialog functionality. Excel has four groups of fixes and improves compatibility when running 2008 and 2004 side-by-side (and copying/pasting data between applications). Running both is not uncommon as the older version of Office still provides VBA support unlike its newer, shinier cousin. PowerPoint has two improvement areas and will be a welcome update for those with large presentations. You can grab the 59 MB update directly from Microsoft.

The Open XML Converter allows you to convert Open XML files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows so that you can open, edit, and save them in earlier versions of Office for Mac. Open XML Converter can convert Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations that are in the Open XML Format so that you can open and edit the files in Office 2004 for Mac and Office v. X for Mac.

If you experience problems opening the converter application after you install it, make sure that /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office Converter Support is installed on the startup volume. If it is missing, or if any of the files listed above are missing, try installing the converter application again.

If Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is installed on your computer, you will also find the new fonts installed to either /Library/Fonts/Microsoft or /User/username/Library/Fonts/Microsoft (new fonts include: Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel & Candara). Consolas makes a fairly decent Terminal font, btw.

Drop a note in the comments if you make use of either the update or the tool.

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