This is pretty easy and I don’t know why I never thought about it before, but I just added Twitter and Brightkite SMS numbers (40404 and 80289 respectively) to my contacts on my iPhone so whenever a new message comes in, it’ll label as the name and not the number. I never really thought about doing that until I had a momentary lapse in recognizing Brightkite’s SMS number.
With the introduction to the new iPhone, I figure many folks will be picking it up when it gets tossed into the wild on July 11. Why? Well, not just because of the increased speeds, GPS capability, actual native applications developed for the device or its impressive battery life. The most outstanding feature? Its cost; $199 for the 8gig model and $299 for the 16gig one. A two year contract with AT&T is needed, but personally, it’s not like I’m going anywhere (I don’t like the other carriers, except for T-Mobile, but we’ve moved on). The data plan will be $30 for unlimited data. If unlimited text messaging isn’t included, I’m going to be a sad panda.
When I bought the first generation iPhone (and its still kicking… never had to exchange or repair it), I promised that the only way I’d buy a new model was for increased storage capacity. I couldn’t care less about GPS (unless there’d be an app like TomTom). I even didn’t really care much for 3G (although I admit, EDGE is hella irritating). However, a friend of mine did bring up a good point about 3G, which was that we could use our iPhones in Japan; just need to get a local SIM card. Other hardware features didn’t really matter to me (my N80 took really oustanding photos… the iPhone’s camera doth sucketh), mainly because I was focused on the software/firmware stuff. While most phones, smart or not, have hardware (buttons) tied to their software, the iPhone doesn’t have these limitations. Many new features can be added to the iPhone, even if they’re the first gen models. That impressed me and got me to buy one. It’s also a strong point for not getting a newer model just because it’s new.
But now, I wouldn’t complain if the new iPhone came with GPS capability. I don’t mind the fact that 3G has been incorporated, because Apple purports that the battery life hasn’t suffered, in fact, it’s improved even with the new candy. Most of all, none of these features have increased the cost of the device itself. For me, I’d get one because every point of interest seems to have aligned just perfectly.
Would you get one? Why or why not?
So it seems that not all is perfect in my little Mac bubble. For some strange reason I’m getting Finder crashes/freezes. I did have some problems like that on my other drive but doubt it contributed to its crash. I’m thinking the freeze/crash of Finder is either attributed to VirusBarrier X5 (which was the cause of making my Time Machine browsing irritatingly slow) or my plopping in Firefox 3 RC1/2. I didn’t do a full overwrite and probably did the installation wrong. Still, I don’t have definitive proof that either of these two is the culprit for my less than stellar experience.
I’m going to have to do some experimenting and see what other apps might be the cause of these irritating bouts of unresponsiveness.
So, my HD crashed on my Macbook Pro. My digital life was potentially stripped from me like a foot length of duct tape on my chest. But, thanks to Time Machine, I was able to restore (nearly) all my data to the new drive. The only casualty that didn’t make it was my copy of Untraceable. However, since I bought it on iTunes, I made the cute anime eyes and wrote to the support group about what happened. Not even 24 hours later, I get the reply that Diane (the rep) understood my troubles and made the movie available for download again. All felt right in the world, until I realized I needed to build my Vista Boot Camp install again for gaming night.
Now that was torture.
Ever since I started blogging and adapted to a CMS system, I’ve always used the built in editor of the systems themselves. The only time I didn’t was during my Alaska cruise since the ship had really crappy satellite internet, not to mention it was expensive. So, I ended up using NeoOffice to write my blog entries and waited until I got home to post them and that was sufficient for me.
But now, I’m interested in using an offline application to write up my blog posts, save them and publish them whenever I want to (and if I’m connected to the Internet). Copying and pasting the entry is all well and good but why not have a one click solution? So here I am, using a weblog client called ecto and so far, I like it. While I don’t have any means to manage comments, ecto’s pretty full featured by allowing me to not only write a post and save a draft, publish posts and delete posts, I can also lay out my posts if other elements are used (like images or flash movies), whereas I couldn’t if I used NeoOffice. I must admit, getting an image positioned just right through a WYSIWYG editor is still a little finicky but when I encounter such difficulties, I can just go into HTML edit mode and conduct my fine tuning.
ecto’s been able to retrieve my posts successfully as well as my About page and I can go through and view or edit them. When creating posts, there’s automatic spellcheck and I can also get a word count. Preview doesn’t show the posts in my blog theme but rather a basic view state akin to Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane. However, I did notice a template feature in one of the menus when I took a cursory glance. Perhaps I can modify the template to match my blog’s design? I’ll have to look into it further or read up on some support material. I am trying to see if I can send a draft to the server without modifying the Publish button to do so as I’d like to keep that functionality the same as my Wordpress interface.
It’s not without its flaws however, and I find myself using the HTML editor quite a bit (besides the aforementioned image finickiness, there’s also problems with editing link text while trying to keep the hyperlink reference intact). All in all, though, ecto is pretty darn nifty. and with a license being sub-$20, it’s very affordable and I think worth the price of admission.
While there are other clients out there (like MarsEdit and even TextMate), ecto is the first one I’m trying and I’m really pleased with it.
