Archive for July, 2007
It’s been a few days since the “iPhone”:http://www.apple.com/iphone/ launched and there’s been quite a plethora of reviews. The ratio was originally leaning towards good until the sudden burst when people started getting problems with activation. Of course, that’s not really the fault of the iPhone itself but while some people realize that there would, of course, be some network clog (about 500,000 iPhones sold over the weekend), others are adamant that the iPhone is to blame for giving them such problems.
I’ve been looking for objective posts about iPhone’s shortcomings that couldn’t be addressed via software updates and could prove problematic for me. Rather, I’ve seen gripes mostly from folks who want everything in their cell phone.
Wading through all the whines and QQ’s, I found a few points in the “negative” that could impact my experience with the iPhone.
# Bluetooth Stereo is a no go – Not really a big deal for me. I plan on using the OEM headphones that come with the phone.
# Can’t mount iPhone as removable storage and/or browse the files with a file system application – I’d love to dump some stuff in my iPhone but with the largest, currently, being 8Gigs and discovering that my entire _Music_ Library consists of 6.4Gigs (not as much as I thought but still hefty), I’m not even including podcasts and videos, I don’t think I can hide my pr0n in my iPhone.
# Speaking of space… 8Gigs? – Kinda sucks comparing the iPhone to my video iPod, which has 60Gigs. But comparing the iPhone with my 8525, which has 1Gig, well… I think I’ll be happy with 8Gigs for a while.
# Some “potential problems”:http://geothought.blogspot.com/ with Google Maps – Now here’s a real valid complaint. I was planning on using my iPhone for maps and stuff since the feature was supposed to be well integrated. If there are problems (I’ll know in a week or so), then that’ll lower my enjoyment factor.
# No copy/cut and paste feature – If I were composing love letters or my disseration on the iPhone, I would probably be griping about that too… but I don’t. The most complex writery I do are basic emails and text messages.
# Speaking of SMS… no MMS? – This is a bummer, but I’ve mostly sent pictures via email. Wi-fi enabled iPhone? Damn skippy.
# But the EDGE network! – Yeah, slow but not game breaking for me. Even with 3G tech, my 8525 failed to load MySpace in 30 seconds. Or at all, actually.
# No video recording capability with iPhone’s camera – I admit, I’ll kinda miss the video recording feature of my 8525. But umm… picture quality isn’t all that. Seeing some examples of iPhone’s picture taking abilities… well, I think I’ll deal just fine.
# Feature bland camera – The 8525 has a switch from regular photos to macro. I don’t use it often. I have a digital camera to take sexy photos. I use my camera for quick snaps, nothing fancy.
# Basic ringtones are lacking, no way to select music as ringtones – This is a big bummer for me, but it’s a superficial one in actuality (since I’ve gone back to using regular ringtones). After a while, having a song played as a ringtone kind of drags the song down. Still, having an option (and it being free) would be mighty appreciated.
# No games – Ok, this kinda pisses me off. I want games man, games! Of course, not having games on my iPhone isn’t reason enough *not* to buy one. My DS and PSP do just fine.
All in all, there are some things that the iPhone lacks that kinda brings down the Wow! factor, but it’s still a really good phone. It has a revolutionary UI and makes using a cell phone an experience, not a chore.
In another 10 years, we just might have William Gibson Cyberspace realized. Even with video glasses being refined, there was little hope in having a new way to interface with a computer.
Of course, the iPhone launched with its revolutionary method of user interaction. Then Microsoft mentions their Surface technology.
And now, NTT reveals an interactive 3D system that you can actually “feel.”
Are you ready, cowboy?
Transformers was awesome…
More later when I’m not reeling.
Edited July 5th, 2007
So, Transformers could’ve been written better. The dialogue was kinda cheesy. But some of the one-liners were funny. Especially those that related to quips from the cartoon series.
Campy aside, the robots were awesome. Good CGI and interaction with real life stuff. In this day and age, it’s not really saying much but when was the last time we saw huge honking robots? And ones that could transform to boot?
That’s what I thought.
I do hope they’re able to make a sequel. I’d pay admission.
I’d love to go about the visuals but the movie’s still new and I’d hate to spoil it. I’ll say this though… these Transformers can kick ass!
Just got my iPhone tonight.
Yes, friends, I am in love. Sleek, sexy, sultry, seductive. And stuff.
After fiddling with all the different programs, I did experience what seemed to be a crash with the iPod portion; it wouldn’t play music. So, I just turned off the phone and turned it back on and I was good to go. I haven’t encountered any other issues.
Of course, having missed the whole weekend crusade, I was able to activate my phone in a matter of minutes.
Someone mentioned that they were able to connect to their secured wireless network without inputting the password on their iPhone. I call bull-doodoo since my network is secured and my iPhone detected it and asked for a password to connect. Either the person didn’t secure his network or he already slotted his password into his iPhone.
The maps portion seemed to be okay but all I did to test so far was look up the nearest Starbucks to my house. Google Maps picked it out correctly and gave proper directions. I’ve relatives incoming and I’d be interested to test the maps out for finding the good eats.
Other gadgetry, like camera, SMS, email, web browsing, were all good. Nothing outstanding, besides the interaction, but nothing glaringly wrong.
Mmmm… so wonderful.
Of all the movies in my collection, I’m planning on loading Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on my iPhone. While I don’t know entirely how to get the subtitles imported in when converting the movie into iPod format, I’d like to. But then how would it look on my iPhone? Would I even be able to read the words?
So I guess what I’ll do is just load the English dub. Those who know me know that I don’t like that. Most times the English dub comes out corny and stupid.
If anything I can always spend another couple of hours reconverting the movie.
Anyway, time to check it out on my iPhone, which is where I’m writing this post. 
No, not “The Man” as in the big dude we gotta rebel against. But the man who gave Cyberspace its ring. “William Gibson”:http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/ is to appear in “Second Life”:http://www.secondlife.com/. Seems Gibson’s journey is “organized by Penguin Books”:http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/the_penguin_blog/2007/07/in-cyberspace-e.html.
While such a thing is awesome and I’ve heard lots of good things about Second Life, I just couldn’t get used to the interface. But maybe, just maybe, I might try again. If only to see if I can see the avatar of William Gibson.
Spotted an “article”:http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/07/sunshineQA on Wired News about a new sci-fi movie called _Sunshine_. I love me some science fiction, especially ones that put in doses of realism. But I wonder just how “real” this movie will be when the director can’t even get his movie release dates right…
There was a strong strain of it into the ’70s that tried to depict space realistically, but it’s been replaced. Alien, one of the great masterpieces, was quickly followed by Star Wars. And Star Wars, of course, led everyone to fantasy sci-fi, that playground where anything goes. You can imagine any creature, on any planet. And they all talk English.
As commenters pointed out and anyone who’s even dabbled in the sci-fi genre could tell you, _Alien_ was released two years after _Star Wars_. Oh… and it’s funny, but I don’t remember Jawas speaking English.
Suddenly, I’m not all that inspired to watch _Sunshine_. Maybe I’ll watch it when it gets to DVD but I’d be afraid of how much things would be “wrong” in the movie.
So, as the hype sort of dies down about the JesusPhone… I mean, the iPhone, people who’ve kept their hot piece of tech probably have chosen their favorite web apps. While I can’t remember the blogs and sites that have listed all the wonderful iPhone-centric programs, here’s a list of the applications that I like to use.
# “Movies.app”:http://www.moviesapp.com/ – What’s playing tomorrow? Oh cool, let’s get tickets for the nearest theater!
# “Jive Talk for the iPhone”:http://iphone.beejive.com – While it’d be nice to get sound pings when a message comes in, this program still does all the clients I use and makes them look shiny.
# “PocketTweets”:http://www.pockettweets.com/ – This has actually made me use Twitter more than I had been using it in the past.
# “Listingly”:http://www.listingly.com – Until a taskpad program becomes native to the iPhone, this site does wonders in helping me task out my day.
# “Leaflets”:http://www.getleaflets.com/ – They don’t lie when they say their app loads pretty fast on EDGE. It does and is pretty nice. But getting to all the apps listed can be a bit annoying.
# “AppMarks”:http://www.appmarks.com/ – Unlike Leaflets, currently, you can customize the “start screen” with apps you want quick access to. Takes a bit to load though on EDGE. However, you could keep the “start screen” up in Safari and cached.
I have always wondered why bother using bookmark sites like “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ when you could just bookmark a web site in your browser. However, now that I have an iPhone, I’ve started to use del.icio.us. It’s not because iPhone and del.icio.us works awesomely together, but it’s rather because I’m using the iPhone to browse and read web sites a lot more than I have with my other cellphone/smartphone devices in the past. So having my bookmarks floating in the web makes it super easy to get access to them whether I’m on my iPhone or MacBook.
*Why not just sync them?* I could do that, but with the clutter of my web apps for my iPhone, I’d lose my “reading” bookmarks easily.
*Haven’t you heard of folders?* Yes, I have and am using the default ones that were created in my Safari browser. It’s just nice having my bookmarks accessible from anywhere at virtually at any time. If they were only residing on my iPhone or MacBook, then there might be some instances where I can’t share my bookmarks or access them.
Now, I’m not dumping all of my bookmarks from my MacBook to del.icio.us, but what I am doing is saving bookmarks on things I’d like to write about here. And this works especially well with my iPhone and when I’m just lounging about web surfing with it. And right now, it’s actually pretty darn cool.
YAiP (Yet Another iPhone Post). Get used to it. 
A “post over at Hackszine”:http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/07/offline_iphone_apps_with_rfc_2.html mentions that it might be possible to create offline applications for the iPhone because Safari on the iPhone supports data URLs. While this might be really cool, I’d be afraid of the exploitability that this would present.
I’m not all that knowledgeable in this so I could just be paranoid. But still…
Testing Flickr2blog
Just testing the Flickr2blog feature because I can’t sleep. Oh yeah, this was sent from my iPhone.
A bit ago I mentioned my recent usage of “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ and how it helps bridge what I surf and read on my iPhone, to what I could potentially write about on my laptop. What I’ve also been doing is, if I come across any articles while on my iPhone or laptop and want access to them wherever I go, I tag it to del.icio.us., then I can hit up my del.icio.us page and clicky the linky.
I mentioned a couple reasons why I don’t want to bookmark them in Safari (whether on my laptop or using my iPhone). Here are two more…
# I don’t use Safari as my default browser on my Laptop.
# I tend to bookmark things in my iPhone so that when I tap on the bookmark icon, the first screen has my bookmarks. When I sync my safari browsers on both the iPhone and the Laptop, my bookmarks are moved to the “Bookmark Menu”, which requires me to execute an extra tap. I haven’t taken the time to delve into changing this default setting so I’m not sure if I can control this behavior.
So how do I integrate the web service del.icio.us, my iPhone and my laptop?
*Laptop*
On my laptop, I use Firefox and have the del.icio.us extension installed.
*iPhone*
On my iPhone, I use “Leaflets”:http://app.getleaflets.com as my “jumping off” point. It has a start page icon for del.icio.us so I just tap on that and get a list of my bookmarks.
When I want to tag an article, I either use a “Tag this to del.icio.us” link on the article, or I, currently, use the “Lazy Sheep”:http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/ bookmarklet. I’m still in the process of finalizing which bookmarklet to use. The next one I’m going to try out would probably be the “one listed on Quick Online Tips”:http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/01/fastest-ways-to-post-bookmarks-to-delicious/.
So far this setup works pretty well and while I could just bookmark my del.icio.us page in my iPhone Safari browser, I like the list of my bookmarks that Leaflets generate because it’s fast all the time (optimized for the EDGE network).
An “article mentioned how today’s operating systems may be behind the times”:http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/are-todays-operating-systems-behind-the-times/. In a way, I agree with it. I was an instant fanboy when I first picked up Neuromancer by William Gibson. I did what I could to get every bit of “Cyberpunk”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk I could. To think, back in the 80′s that it was far fetched to have a PDA that played video in full color. To think that there’d be cellphones that wouldn’t also be used as a lethal weapon, that could play all sorts of media, not just make phone calls.
But in the here and now, we have PDA’s that plays full video, that can be your music player and can even access the Internet via Wi-Fi. But that’s not all, we also have cellphones that are PDA’s and some that redefine the user experience, making it a wonderful tool not just for making phone calls. However, we don’t have Cyberspace decks that use neural interfaces or fingertip sensors. We don’t share a “consensual hallucination” to surf through the Internet, we still use monitors, we still use two dimensional interfaces to work with our data. While it would be great to have Cyberspace decks and to have full blow three dimensional operating systems, I don’t think we’re all that far behind.
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I’ve noticed a trend lately that most of the songs that I really dig tend to be sad songs. First it were the songs Naturaleza Muerta and Hijo de la luna sung by “Sarah Brightman”:http://sarah-brightman.com/. Then it was Wuthering Heights (sorry Kate Bush fans, I like “Hayley Westenra”:http://www.hayleywestenra.com/’s rendition). Now it’s the song Personal by “Stars”:http://www.arts-crafts.ca/stars/.
Personal is about a guy posting an ad in the Personals and a woman responding. The guy sets up a meeting and the woman gets to the meetup and is left hanging. Afterwards, the guy posts another ad with slightly different wording that presumably excludes the girl who initially responded.
Very sad, especially coupled with the solo piano section. And every time I listen to the song I see the scene in the movie “You’ve Got Mail” where Tom Hanks’ character leaves Meg Ryan’s character hanging in the coffee shop.
Arrgghh! But the song is so good.
Last night’s “ARTafterDARK”:http://www.artafterdark.org/event/2007/07/27/kabuki event was pretty interesting. I did get there later than I intended since I decided to get a haircut beforehand. And what a haircut it is.
Enough of boring, it’s time for some _texture_!
Anyway, back to the event. So, after about 20 minutes of driving around to find parking, I got one (through a little cheatery) and entered a world of bodies. Lots of people were there including some co-workers of mine. At first, I was alone, stranded in the sea of more-fashionably-dressed people, I found the mini-bar (too expensive), then the food stall (much too expensive), then the bathroom (quick break!) and finally I ventured into a gallery to be blessed by cool air conditioned atmosphere.
I caught up with my friends a little bit later. Or should I say, one of my friends found me and dragged me to where the rest were sitting. Finding out where they were, I looked at the photo above and come to find out, I took a snapshot of one of them. 
There was a performance in another area with a stage and I was able to get a glimpse, nothing more. A bit sad but the performers ended up walking about and so one of my friends snagged my iPhone and took a few pictures. It was a pretty fun night. Got to see some art and get nostalgic as well as hang out with my co-workers and friends. And I even got to see whacky and crazy peoples.
After the event (we were kicked out of a gallery; they sure are prompt about closing time!), some were thinking of going out to eat. But after that long exposure to many people, I figured it was time to head off. Besides, I had to take my car in for service this morning and didn’t want to stay out too late.
If I go to the next event, I’ll make sure to take more photos (co-worker took the last two images and a couple others)… and dress more sleek.
Kawaii desu yo!
I pity the fool who thinks otherwise.
One of the biggest aggravation with Internet Explorer is its listing of URLs in the address bar history. I could allay this aggravation by using bookmarks, which I do, but I don’t want to make a lot of bookmarks that clutter up my UI or even my Bookmarks list. What I do instead is use Firefox as my main browser of choice.
The reason I use Firefox (amongst other reasons), and I notice Safari does this too, is that it lists the URL history according to the most “used” link. For example, say I visit somesite.com and I find out they have an Australian parallel site called somesite.com.au as well. So I visit both. Now while the Australian site is informative, I visit somesite.com more regularly. Firefox will always list this at the top when I type something like “som” and it shows the URL history. Not so with Internet Explorer, which works differently.
Internet Explorer doesn’t list the URLs according to most used. It seems to list it in a weird alphabetical organization. Rather than listing somesite.com at the top, it’ll list somesimte.com.au first, then any subpages within that site. Finally it’ll list somesite.com and whatever subpages. I’m under the assumption, where alphabetical organization is concerned, that somesite.com is supposed to be listed first, then somesite.com.au. And it can’t be that Internet Explorer is listing by frequent clicking because I do use somesite.com more than the .au version.
Aside from that, Internet Explorer is… well, still not fun to use. Even their Developer Toolbar doesn’t work (at least on my work laptop, which is where I need it the most). Oh well, that’s my rant for today!
… though the day is still young and I might have more.
