(The MacBook on the right, silly.)

So, after the initial WOW! and then the disorientation caused from the multi-touch trackpad, it’s time to move the data. I was a little worried, because I don’t just have data on my computer anymore. There’s Rails, PostgreSQL, SVN… things that are far more complex and I have no idea how they all work together. Surely these won’t migrate seamlessly, right? Au contraire!, Sean tells me. It worked for his white-to-black MacBook migration.

So, last night, I finally set up to migrate. I pull out my FireWire cable and… look… and look… and… whaaaa? As a loyal Mac user since I wore Superman underoos, I’m used to Apple’s “port Russian roulette”. But I thought Firewire was here to stay. I mean, I’ve got a Firewire camcorder, Firewire hard drive… I thought I was safe.

So, I’m not writing this post to mourn the death of Firewire. I had some data to transfer. Apple’s Migration Assistant recommends I transfer the data over wi-fi. ORLY? 60 or so gigabytes over wireless fidelity. I try it. After a couple hours, the progress bar has filled up exactly one pixel. That ain’t gonna work.

So, I dig out my Ethernet cable (remember those!) and connect the two machines. With an actual cable! I try Migration Assistant and it finds the other computer. It tells me to install something on the old machine—DVD or CD Sharing Setup Update. It came on the Mac OS install DVD that came with the new MacBook. Here’s what the installer says it’s for:

This software is recommended for all users and provides enhanced customization capabilities and improved performance for migration over FireWire, ethernet, and wireless networks.

So, I tried this. It took about four hours to migrate. But when it was done, I opened Coda, it refreshed my SVN status (yay!) and I updated our code without configuring anything at all.

That’d be a win.

So, long story short—don’t try the wifi. Tether those Macs!

When everybody was anxiously awaiting the new iPhone 3G, I just sat there and said “nope, not gonna upgrade—I like what I have.” No, I wasn’t in denial or just being difficult. It’s just that when you don’t really go anywhere, there’s not much of a need for things like GPS. And EDGE is pretty sweet where I am, so the 3G wasn’t all that appealing.

Plus there’s the fact that I’ve been with AT&T ever since they were Cingular (and actually had their shit together), so I’ve got some sort of grandfathered super cheap family plan that I’m not too keen on parting with.

But the big reason is that us iPhone 1.0 kids still get the software upgrade. That’s what I wanted. The software.

I wanted APPS.

So, a couple weeks after upgrading to iPhone 2.0, I wanted to share some of my favorite iPhone apps.

(Note that all links are to iTunes App Store)

Last.fm

During the first iPhone 2.0 weekend, if I saw one more tweet that said “OMFG Pandora for iPhone is sooooo awesome!” I… well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. I just sat there on my high Last.fm horse saying “so what, Last.fm is still better… even with no iPhone app!”. Then Last.fm released an iPhone app. And I was thrilled.

The Last.fm app allows you to listen to a radio station of your music library (tracks you’ve scrobbled before), stations based on any artist you like, stations based on any of your friends or neighbours (those Last.fm users with taste most similar to yours) libraries, and—of course—a station of only recommendations based on your listening habits.

I’ll save the gushing of how much I love the Last.fm service, because I’ve already done so here many times before.

Wish List:

• The app must stay in the foreground to keep playing. Would be wonderful if it kept playing in the background.
• Artist bios (which are user-generated and generally solid) being available in the app would be nice.
• I would like to sort my Last.fm friends by musical compatibility rating (this is also something I want to see in the web app).

Exposure

Wow. I just found this one today and I’m in love. If you’re a Flickr user with an iPhone, get it. Right away. Everything’s here. View your photos. View your friend’s photos. View featured photos. View geotagged photos near you. You can even view and add comments to photos from within Exposure. This app is about as good as it gets.

There’s a free, ad-based version for free and a $9.99 version with no ads. To be honest, the ads are so unobnoxious there’s little reason to upgrade beyond supporting this fantastic developer. I’d have no problem with them cranking up the advertising level a notch.

Wish List:

• Judging by this Get Satisfaction thread, I’m not alone in wanting the ability to upload from Exposure to Flickr. Why not just email photos to Flickr? Because that compresses them to 640×480. I’d love to retain the camera’s 1600×1200 resolution.

Twinkle

Ah, the race to create the best Twitter app for iPhone. There’s Twitterrific. There’s Twittelator. But for me, it’s Twinkle.

Why Twinkle? It’s pretty, first of all. That’s quite important to me. I also like that it’s location-aware. I can see who’s tweeting near me (quite cool when I was recently on vacation). One limitation is that you only see the local tweets from those using Twinkle, not the entire Twittersphere.

Wish List:

• I do wish there was one dedicated screen for @replies (like it has for direct messages). Twittelator combines these, referring to them collectively as “Replies”. I’m cool with that.
• This one is a limitation of the Twitter API and not Twinkle, but I
  will never be able to rely on a 3rd party Twitter app until they lift the restrictions on API calls. I don’t have Twitter open all the time, so just getting the last 20 or so tweets doesn’t work for me. For this reason, I use m.twitter.com to read tweets more than anything else.

AIM

Quite honestly, it’s AOL Instant Messenger. It works as advertised. In this case, no news is good news.

Wish List:

• My thumb is large. It really is. It covers about 18 iPhone keyboard buttons. Being able to type on the landscape keyboard helps me immensely. I’d love to see this added to the AIM app.

Facebook

I’ve got this love/hate thing with Facebook. Let’s just say the iPhone app is 100% love. The profile browsing, while pretty click-heavy, is very slick. The message inbox is well done, too. I’ve always felt Facebook’s messaging system is it’s #1 feature. It’s so well done. The iPhone app even has chat, though I haven’t found myself using that yet.

Wish List:

• Not much… just let me type in landscape!

WordPress

I’ll admit… this one makes the list without me really using it much yet. But the potential is awesome. Being able to reliably work on blog posts on iPhone will be a huge help. The WPhone plugin has served me well, but feels buggy (especially comment moderation).

This is a very early version of the app, though, and it does need some key features.

Wish List:

• Again… let me type in landscape!
• You can edit local drafts, but not saved drafts on the server. This is kind of a bummer—and weird since you can edit published posts that are on the server.
• Comment moderation, please?
• Being able to post and edit Pages (and maybe even tweak the theme code) would be nice.

I have been using some other apps, but they just didn’t quite crack my “favorites” list. Among those:

Games

I was on vacation last week, so I had a bit of time to play with games. Most often, I played Aurora Feint, but when I installed the update, it blew away my saved game. I’m thinking I won’t have the time or patience to work my way back to where I was. Tap Tap Revenge is just… too cool. I also have played Jirbo Break a bit. Not bad.

For the Pre-Schooler

My daughter is 3 1/2 but is becoming an iPhone power user. She loves flipping between photos, exploring on the Google Map, or typing her name in the Notes app. As far as third party apps, she’s been enjoying Scribble, a very simple drawing game. She also has played JirboMatch (a memory game) and Bubbles (a very simple bubble popping time-waster) a bit.

What else?

I don’t know. I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the apps so far. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but I’m not quite as excited as I thought I would be. I’m not really seeing any type of full featured word-processing apps or much productivity-wise beyond perhaps OmniFocus. iPhone definitely has the potential to be a viable platform, but I’m not feeling it is being taken advantage of yet. It seems that most of the innovation is in the gaming realm. That probably mimics the industry as a whole, but I’m not a gamer. I’d like to be wowed while being productive.

Again, I’m not sure what app it will take to do that. The WordPress app has the potential to be something along those lines. If the AIM app was actually Adium, I’d be far more excited. If the whole 2.0 update was a bit more stable, I’d be far happer.

So, what apps have been your favorites? What’s missing?

But, I’m always finding extra uses for my iPhone. I just wanted to share some of the products I’ll never have to buy, as long as I have my iPhone.

• Flashlight: I use this “feature” more than I use the phone. This thing isn’t a heavy duty flashlight, but it’s perfect for checking on sleeping kids, looking for a plug in a dark room, etc.
• Alarm Clock: Best UI of any alarm clock I’ve ever owned. In fact, my existing alarm clock has been blinking 12:00 for months.
• Watch: I haven’t had a watch since I got a cell phone. Not only do I get the time when I pull out my iPhone, I see my wallpaper of my kiddos.
• Calculator: Sure, I haven’t owned a calculator since high school. But on quite a few occasions, I’ve thought “oh yeah, my iPhone has one!”. Keep in mind that the new software update will add a scientific calculator.
• Notepad: The other day, I was fetching coffee for a couple guys. I couldn’t find a piece of paper anywhere. I took the order down as an iPhone note. Sure, they harassed me about it, but it worked!
• Newspaper: Google Reader on iPhone, FTW.
• Map: You know those huge maps & atlases a bunch of people have stuffed in their car? I have Google Maps on the iPhone.
• Pocket Calendar: My wife LIVES by her pocket calendar. I live by six ICAL feeds fed into iCal.app and synced to iPhone.
• Rolodex: Okay, I’ve never owned one of these. But between exporting my contacts to Address book and accessing BatchBook via the iPhone interface, I’m covered.

I haven’t taken the time to add up what all that costs, but I’m pretty sure it’d subsidize the phone.

Never before have I been so indifferent about a Mac operating system.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Leopard. But so much of my work has moved to the web… honestly a new release of Safari or Firefox is much bigger news to me than an upgrade to Mac OS. That said, I’ve installed it. So, I want to report some things that I do like about the new OS.

Calculator in Spotlight

Sounds like a dumb thing to lead off with, I know. But so, so often I found myself wanting to make a calculation, so I’d have to stop what I’m doing, go to the Applications folder, and open up Calculator. I eventually moved the Calculator app to my Dock to make this quicker, but man… it seems dumb to waste Dock space on a calculator. Spotlight’s release allowed me to just search for Calculator, which was nice. But in Leopard, the calculator is BUILT IN to Spotlight (see image above). Subtle, but a huge time saver.

Add to this the fact that Spotlight’s speed is greatly improved over Tiger.

Tabbed Terminal

I’m slowly moving away from graphics apps and more towards text editors and terminals. I know, it sounds dreadful (but really it’s not). No longer do I need to have to keep a half dozen terminal windows open. I’ve got ‘em tabbed. Just like a web browser. Beauty.

Better File Sharing

In Tiger, to connect to my home machine I’d have to command+K and choose it from my recent servers (or use the “Browse Networks” feature, that sometimes would work, but sometimes would take forever to find something). Leopard has available servers in the sidebar of every Finder window. Click on it and (if you have the password in Keychain), it just connects. Love it. Perfect for passing photos from the work iPhone to the home iPhoto, etc.

Safari

Safari 3 came out before Leopard, but you needed to go get it yourself. Leopard comes with the latest and greatest version of Safari for all. I still need Firefox when developing (gotta love Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, and Operator), but for my personal browsing I’m back to being a 100% Safari guy. I adore it.

So, that’s it. Not earth-shattering stuff for me. But these are the four things that have made a difference for me since I upgraded to Leopard. What have you enjoyed/disliked?

Yesterday, Apple had a special event in which they unveiled all new iPods, including the rather sick iPod Touch. It is an iPhone without the … er … phone.¬† If I hadn’t gotten an iPhone for work, this would have been the product I was waiting for. Since, besides SMS, the phone portion of the iPhone is what I use the least.

Apple also made another annoucement. The iPhone’s price was being chopped by $200. While price drops are usually welcomed with open arms, current iPhone owners absolutely went ballistic. I’ll admit, I was far less bent because it was a company device so it really didn’t come out of pocket. Plus, I’d say I’ve done at least $200 worth of testing on it, so it’s no big deal to me.

But others freaked. Hey, it’s the price of being an early adopter, right? Well, Steve got it right. In yet another open letter from Steve, he addressed the issue.

I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

Emphasis is mine. I like that he starts right off by saying he read every single one. While it may or may not be exactly true, it still conveys they “man, I really didn’t expect this shitstorm, but you have my attention” angle.

The three observations boil down to:

1. This is their chance to add as many users for the holiday season as possible. So, lowering the price will get many, many more users at this important time of year.
2. Things change in tech quickly. If you’re always waiting for a price drop, you’ll be disappointed soon after every time.
3. They need to do a better job of taking care of their early customers.

Whoa, what? Yeah, he said:

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

So, the best part:

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. Stay tuned.

Well damn, that was well played by Mr. Jobs. You just picked up a new iWork customer (and will reap the benefits of the upgrade path).

And I still love my iPhone.

But I still friggin’ hate AT&T. My second bill was more effed up than the first one.

I love underdogs. This is just one of the many reasons I’ve always loved the Mac. I knew that I wasn’t getting a mass-produced, assembly-line piece of crud computer. The things were workhorses. They lived forever.

My favorite Mac ever was Darcy. I had that PowerBook G3 forever. It was a sad day when she finally kicked it.

At my last job, I had a PowerBook G4 and a MacBook Pro. Both were nice and sexy and all, but they just weren’t as… strong as the old PBG4. The Mac is gaining market share, and I’m sad to see that reflected in the individualism of each unit shipped.

Mac hardware simply ain’t what it used to be.

When I started at BatchBlue, I got a MacBook (white one, no “Pro”). Now THIS was a nice machine. I love the thing. Compact, gorgeous, and just felt stronger than the MacBook Pro. I have had no issues with it. Not a thing. Nothing. Ran like a champ. I use this thing all day every day for everything from working to playing music to dance with Nolan to.

But today—in the middle of our weekly staff meeting—it died. No signs of warning. Nothing. I had actually just sent an email and noticed the wifi was crapping out. It froze. I did a force restart. I got the blinking folder.

Well, Sean called me up an hour or so ago and told me that the Apple Store called it dead on arrival. And for that, I get to scratch my head and wonder yet another “WTF?”

I’ll get to babysit the brand new BatchBlue iMac as my machine is getting fixed, but the hard drive was completely cooked. Nothing could be recovered. The shocking thing to me was that since I’m working on a web app and doing so much with email, Google Docs, and our internal wiki… I really didn’t need anything on that machine. Seriously, all I can think of I’ll miss right now is my instructions to run the Rails app locally.

But man… I’m irked. Seems like everyone’s Mac needs service lately. Give me the 2.5% market share back… when they actually had to fight to keep customers. The iPod has made Macs super cool, and it just feels like the quality is suffering. This is not the first time I’ve heard this. It’s a problem.

Well, hopefully it comes back stronger than ever. It’s a great little machine. I just can’t believe it is toast.

First of all, here’s why the EDGE was weak. This is where I was using it from… literally the end of the country.

If I drove downtown, the EDGE was much better. So, using it on the beach was an exercise in patience. But, I just wanted to share some more thoughts after using it more and more.

• I found myself wishing for copy/paste about once every hour. Or even just to select a large amount of text. I repeatedly wanted to reply to a long email, but only quote part of it. Forget about it… unless you want to hit that delete button 759 times.
• Not too many application crashes, but still some.
• I would like an Apple-created IM application that works a lot like the SMS one. I’d also like an Apple-esque RSS reader. Newshutch just isn’t working for me anymore on the iPhone. A shame because I love it on the desktop, but I need to use the same on both.
• Imagine my shock when a Word doc was attached, and I could click to open it. I can only view it (not edit), but that’s all I needed to do. I don’t remember Apple mentioning this, so it was a nice surprise. Opens PDFs the same way. Supposed to open an Excel sheet, but the only one I tried it with made the phone crash and burn. A rare restart was required.
• Using GMail isn’t all that smooth. I know you can “Add an Account” to Mail and use GMail through that interface, but you need to enable POP in your GMail account. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that mean it won’t be synced on all my machines/devices anymore?
• I love Mail for my IMAP work account though.
• It is a bit too easy to delete an email in Mail. It saves it to a Trash folder on the iPhone, but I still have yet to find this folder. I’ve put a couple emails in there I’d like to get back.
• I put about two hours of video of Ella on there. Gorgeous. She enjoys being able to see herself when she was Nolan’s age! So cute to see a two year old walking around with an iPhone showing it to everyone.
• Notes is pretty cool. But would be great to sync that with my Mac somewhere. Say you already have a lot of text on your MacBook you want to email. That way you can drop it in a note, bypass the copy/paste issue.
• Or, they could just implement copy/paste.
• I’d like to be able to attach files to emails that I put on the iPhone in disk mode (wait, does it do disk mode?)
• Okay, lack of Flash is a bit more annoying than I thought. For Flash Video purposes only.
• Wow, you get used to this keyboard really quickly. I’ve sent a LOT of email from this thing.
• I’m still shocked by the camera (see below):

And the one thing I’m almost afraid to admit…

I was looking in the rear view mirror to see if Nolan was asleep in his car seat. I reached up towards the mirror to do a two-fingered flick to zoom in. That’s almost like reaching for command-Z when you spill something.

I’m eagerly awaiting software version 1.1 (to get it a bit more stable—and can I get me some copy/paste?), but man, this thing is great.

Specs:

• Size was… pretty much what I expected. A slightly taller video iPod.
• As for the price, having the company foot the bill softened the blow. But I have to say, it was going to be purchased anyway after seeing how shockingly reasonable the plans were.
• I got the 8 GB version. As the boss said, “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Performance

• I love that it picks up wifi when I’m at home.
• EDGE is slow, but not painful (though this is coming from a guy that had dialup at home for years longer than most).
• The part I have to admit—Safari has crashed about five times (seems to happen with GMail and JiveTalk (which is in alpha, so that may be it).
• The iPod also stangely crashed three times while trying to get through one podcast episode. No other iPod crashes, though. Odd.
• Kinda expected a weaker antenna, but worth noting that my MacBook can connect to my wifi in the backyard. iPhone has to use EDGE.
• The keyboard is a bit daunting at first, but I’ve already gotten a lot better at it. You have to do what they say and let go and trust the autocorrect.
• Battery life seems adequate. I’ve only either lightly used it or heavily used it, so I’ve either barely touched the battery or strained it quickly. Still, I haven’t dropped below half. I’ll report more on this with more use.
• One of the big complaints people have is the omission of copy/paste. This is a very valid complaint. I’d love to just be able to select something and copy it. Of course, the interface doesn’t even have selecting at this point. It is a problem they will have to solve.
• I’m a big two-finger scroller on the trackpad of my MacBook. The iPhone scrolling actually works in the opposite manner. On the MacBook, you move your fingers downward to make the page contents move up (meaning you are looking below the current content). The iPhone metaphor is that the content goes in the direction your finger does. Takes me some time to get used to that going from device to device.

Safari

• Safari is really the #1 reason I got it. I want web browsing without lugging a computer.
• The zooming is extremely smooth. Really crisp text makes reading a breeze.
• One of the main reasons I wanted it was for RSS feed reading. A LOT of reading. It’s really not bad at all for that despite the size.
• I use Newshutch for RSS reading, though, and that may be an issue. Safari on iPhone has no scrollbars—to scroll you use one finger. To scroll a scrollable div within a page, you use two fingers. Newshutch recently made both columns into scrollable divs. Nice touch on a full screen, but if you are zooming to read text on a mobile device, it is a royal pain in the ass to have to deal with the scrolling divs.
• Also some advice for Newshutch is that the “mark as read” button at the top of a post should not only be visible on a rollover (no rollover on iPhone). That feature would be far more handy at the top of the post.
• Might have to switch to a different reader now that I’ll do most of my reading on iPhone.
• BatchBook runs great so far. Only one issue that I’ve noticed (one scrollable div doesn’t work with the two-finger trick).
• iPhone also overrides your minimum width in your CSS. So, some pages are thinner than they are meant to be and that can cause rendering issues.
• I’ve only noticed one site that served me a mobile version without me asking—redsox.com. I visited m.twitter.com on my own. Wishing GMail had a less heavy mobile version (it does have an app, but you can’t install those on iPhone). I may have to try out the HTML only version. See if that’s more lightweight.
• One complaint a friend had about the “JesusPhone” was that it had no IM ability. However, JiveTalk has been awesome. I can connect to AIM and GTalk using that now. That’s going to be incredibly useful. Just in alpha now though.
• When a web site doesn’t have a “Remember Me” checkbox, there’s no way to save passwords. Kind of a pain in the butt considering all the special characters usernames and passwords (should) have.
• Out of curiosity, I surfed over to some links to mp3 files. Safari played the mp3 files in a nice media player within the browser. Tried with some mp4 video. Said Safari couldn’t play it. (I thought standard Safari would, but I just checked and it downloads mp4s. So, I suppose this is as expected.)

Mail

• Number two reason I wanted it.
• Imported my IMAP work account without a hitch.
• I really like the interface of the inbox, messages, new messages, etc.
• Don’t have my other IMAP mailboxes available, so things I’ve archived I can’t get. This also means I can’t clean out my inbox on the go.
• Wish the write new message interface would switch to landscape like Safari. Would make the buttons much wider for someone with big honkin’ thumbs like me.

YouTube

• First YouTube search I did was for “Arcade Fire”, since I know they have a ton of cool stuff on YouTube. Was treated to a gorgeous quality version of Keep the Car Running.
• However, it seems just a handful of YouTube videos are actually in the iPhone format. Total bummer. Many searches I would expect many hits for yielded nothing.
• Can’t wait my own videos I uploaded to YouTube.
• Perhaps they are converting them over time? Other wise might not be that useful a widget.

Weather

• Just wanted to throw this in there because it is slick, fast, and zippy… just like the Dashboard widget.

Phone Calls

• Surprisingly, not my top use for the thing. I think I’ve made three phone calls or so and received about three. Nice keypad, though.

SMS

• Also not a big SMS guy, either. But I sent a couple messages. Interface to type is what you’d expect. Messages show up as iChat bubbles. Very nice. I’ve got 200 of these things a month. Might as well use ‘em.

iPod

• Wow, video is sweet on this thing. Loaded up the “Joe Carter game” from the 1993 World Series. Scrubbed to a random point and saw my beloved Pete Incaviglia make a catch. Beautiful quality. Watched one of my own TWML video podcasts, too. Very nice.
• Audio is slick, too. Coverflow is wow-inducing. I’ve still only uploaded a few albums on here though.
• Tried to play some podcasts from it in the car today. Apparently it must use some sort of different headphone jack, because a 1/8″ to a tape deck didn’t work.
• The number one most amazing and useful thing about the iPod features—the thing has a freakin’ speaker! Nolan is big into music to appease him, so it’s been nice to have Travis or Death Cab with me at all times to play for him if he gets fussy. Makes sense that a phone has a feature, but to have it for the iPod was something I hadn’t considered.

Photos

• Very slick slideshows, advancing animations, and rotation.
• Photos look beautiful on the large, bright screen.
• I find that when I sync, it keeps wanting to import photos to iPhoto that I’ve already imported. Just telling iPhoto to not import duplicates works, but it keeps asking me.

Camera

• I saved the camera for last so I can post some samples. First of all, the viewfinder is the WHOLE FREAKIN’ IPHONE SCREEN. So, it’s basically so enormous that it is shocking.
• It ain’t quick. Ella has often turned around by the time it takes the photo.
• 1200 x 1600 from a phone? What more can you ask?
• Tough getting used to how to point it. Doesn’t feel natural at first, especially in portrait mode. I’m getting used to it.

Some photo samples (click for larger versions):

Low light is a bit grainy, but really not too bad.

Nice focus and sharpness here. This was taken from inside Ella’s playhouse, looking at her outside the door.

A couple photos, like the one above, seemed oddly stretched. She’s skinny, but not this skinny.

Finally, this is the one that blew me away. This is Ella running, taken by a cameraphone. Please take a look at the full size version. Look how sharp this bad boy is. Very impressive.

Bottom Line

Wow.

I need to preface this with a couple things, though. First of all, I’m the person this device was made for. I’m a Mac Geek. I make web apps and need to test them on all browsers and devices. I don’t make a ton of calls or send SMS messages (so the minimum plan was good for me). I’ll use the unlimited data until they’re upset they let me have unlimited. I’ll use this from the couch just so I can hold Nolan while getting stuff done.

There are some issues, of course. The crashes were bummers. Copy/paste is really needed. An Apple-created IM app would probably be more robust.

But overall, this thing is sweet. Not only was it worth my boss’ money, it was really worth my own if I had to do it. I’ll have to write more when I find some web apps that work really well with the iPhone. It should be fun hunting for those gems.

Update: I posted my iPhone Second Impressions.

Update: With the first iPhone updater, all my IMAP mailboxes are now available. Sweet!

Okay, maybe I was a bit harsh.

I ranted the other day about Safari 3 replacing Safari 2 on my machine (among other things). It took a teenie bit of thinking, but I came up with a workaround.

Before installing Safari 3 Beta:

1. Duplicate Safari in you Applications folder.
2. Rename the new copy “Safari 2″
3. Run the Safari 3 installer.
4. Restart. You have two Safaris.

IE can’t even run two versions on the same computer (without hacking). I have Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 installed, but I can only run one at a time. I can run both Safaris simultaneously. Now that’s pretty cool.

So, Apple just released the new Safari beta. It runs on Windows now, too. While I don’t think it will have the same effect as iTunes on Windows, it can’t hurt. So, I’ve installed it on both systems (Windows via Parallels). I installed on Windows first. It was a breeze. Then I installed it on the Mac.

First of all, why the eff do I have to restart… to install a web browser? You didn’t make me restart on Windows, why on the Mac? Firefox doesn’t make me restart. Shiira doesn’t make me restart. Hell, I don’t think OFFICE made me restart. Why do I have to restart? I normally wouldn’t care, but I’m running Rails locally for testing. When I restart my Mac, I have to restart the local database, restart Rails, and do a bunch of other stuff I don’t really know how to do. Luckily, Sean gave me a step by step “so you’re a Terminal noob and you are still trying to run Rails locally” cheat sheet. But sheesh. I haven’t restarted in weeks. Why restart to install a browser?

Second… when did Safari become Internet Explorer. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. But where the heck did Safari 2 go? Why did you replace it? I need to test in both! So now, I get to UNinstall Safari 3… no doubt I’ll have to restart again (gah!) then test in Safari 2. If I want to test in Safari 3… guess what… install again… restart… curse…

Come on, Apple. You do this stuff right. I know it’s just a beta, but come on…

Update: Here’s a workaround.

So, Brian’s latest interview is with Guy Kawasaki of Garage. I touched on my long fascination with Guy before when Jennifer Jones interviewed him. One thing that I like about Brian’s chats is that he often is doing his interview subjects as much of favor as they are doing him by granting the interview. A lot has to be said for a good brainstorming session with a fresh set of eyes and ears. I’ve taken part in a few of these lately and I love the feeling of being helpful and being helped.

When Brian was talking to Guy about the possibility of blogging his next book chapter by chapter, Guy made an interesting analogy. He compared blogging to working out every day and blogging to going on a binge Jenny Craig diet. Frequently blogging keeps your writing—and your thought process—in shape. I noticed I’ve been slipping a little over the winter (an analogy for my physique as well?), so it’s time to start “working out” more.

Here’s a few things I’ve been doing/have done lately:

• Getting ready for the release of Aptima’s CogBlog. We will be launching February 28. When I say “launch”, I mean changing our URL from https to http. Then, of course, we’ll post our first content again so that our trackbacks and pingbacks can work properly. I recently wrote my first post for the blog. It is called “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” I’m consciously trying to make sure the subject matter between my two blogs don’t overlap too much. I’ll be one of four bloggers when we kick off, along with Daniel Serfaty (our brilliant and engaging founder who I have been working on “alternative” blogging methods with), Jared Freeman (our VP of Research), and Webb Stacy (our VP of Technology). Then there’s me. The web kid.
• Working on TRACE-SE. TRACE-SE is the project that really kicked off this blog. It is a community resource site for cognitive systems engineering, so I started this blog to document what I was learning about community and Web 2.0. Well, we’re back into some serious development on that project after a bit of time off, so I’m quite excited. Late last night I was getting my kicks doing an Andy Budd-esque CSS-based image map. Woo!
• Chatting with some interesting folks. As I mentioned above, I’ve had some good brainstorming sessions. I’ve also “met” a guy named Nick Peters, who has been writing some about Microformats and OpenID. One post of his that particularly smacked me upside the head was one about the iPhone and Microformats. As I wrote in the comments on that post, the iPhone (being a mobile device with a real, usable web browser) has the potential to really make use of microformats. Code marked up as phone numbers can be instantly detected and called. Code marked up as an address can be sent directly to that sweet Google Maps widget. Contact info can be added to your address book and synced back to your Mac or PC. Sweet.
• Playing with the new MacBook Pro. Oh god I love this thing. One other thing I’ve noticed… don’t listen to what they say about Rosetta. Office still opens as soon as I click on it. Going from PBG4 to MacBook Pro is insane, even on non-native apps. And the thing is just so sexy. The key to great computer hardware development is making something people just want to touch. When they’re touching, they’re typing. When they’re typing, they’re getting shit done. When they’re getting shit done but still thinking they’re just touching this extraordinary piece of hardware… well, then they become a fanboy.
• Securing everything for SXSW. Hell yeah, I’ll be there. Also, I saw that Webvisions 2007 is going to be in May. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it this year. But that’s when it was in July. May… that could be a different story. Two days? Cheap price? Gonna do my best to swing it again. It was life-changing last year.

Man, all that typing while getting back into shape? I’m gonna be sore.

At work on Thursday morning, I was presented with my shiny new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, it was a busy day so it wasn’t until Friday that I got to work on transferring files and playing around with it. Then I took it home this weekend and got to play. It looks like could compete with Darcy for my favorite Mac ever.

First, the stats. It has a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It’s got 2GB of RAM. It’s running Mac OS X 10.4.8. It has a 160 GB hard drive. It’s got a dual layer DVD burner and a 15″ screen.

It’s sweet.

Some observations:

• The big speed improvements are, of course, more noticeable in the larger tasks. The Finder is noticeably more responsive, but the real power is shown when doing something like opening a 90 minute, multi-clipped iMovie file. Zippy.
• Front Row may just be the coolest thing ever. The attention to detail is impeccable. For example, I love that when I go into Front Row and start some music, then escape out of it, it all keeps going and I can still pause/play/skip ahead all from the remote (while Front Row is not active).
• I also like that if I’m in Front Row and show off the video playing capability, I can go back into the music screen and it remembers where I was in the current song. iTunes by itself won’t do that.
• The built in iSight is just addictive.
  • QuickTime Pro can record 320×240 video from it. It is highly compressed, but decent in a pinch.
  • Photobooth is as slick as they say. It’s an app with no point, but it sure is fun. Ella loves it too.
• It came bundled with ComicLife (never got to try that out before—initial impressions are quite nice) and OmniOutliner (which I love). No OmniGraffle, though. Bummer.
• As I’m typing this, the fan kicked on (importing some stuff into iMovie). It sounds different… a little less intrusive.
• Transferring data was effortless. The Migration Assistant is top notch.
• Our IS guy watched in amazement as I simply dragged Microsoft Office from one machine to the other, fired up Word, and had it work.
  • My preferences were copied over by Migration Assistant and I wanted to do fresh installs of all my apps.
• The MagSafe power adapter is far cooler than I thought it would be.
• Whoa, on that page I just linked above, I found out that using two fingers on the trackpad makes it into a scrolling trackpad. Nice.
• No modem. Interesting…
• The keyboard lights up, just like Powerbook G4. But the MacBook Pro is much brighter and seems to be more consistent with the lighting conditions.

In short, this thing rocks. Looking forward to playing with it some more. Perhaps this week I’ll get Windows on this, so I don’t have to bug neighbors to do IE testing…

Photo courtesy of mdamli via Flickr.

So, I just sent off the spec sheet to our Information Systems department for my new DUAL BOOT MacBook Pro (with Parallels Desktop). Score! It’s replacing the nearly three old PowerBook G4.

Guy is as pleasant as ever. I have to admit, I have not been keeping up on his blog (not that I’ve been keeping up on too many blogs lately). He made a few great points about how marketing is changing, especially when marketers are trying to reach young people. This is the Tivo and YouTube generation. Traditional advertising is just not reaching them. A key point he made is that a teenage is far more apt to buy a watch because Jack Bauer was wearing it on 24 than if an ad for the same watch was shoved down their throat.

Two fun moments were when some strange squeaking noise (that sounded like a chimp) overtook the podcast. Jones’ asked “what was that?” Unfortunately, we never found out. Another highlight was Guy cutting out for a second to tell is son that he can’t practice piano while he’s recording a show.

A couple other recent shows of note from Jennifer include interviews of her new Podtech colleague Jeremiah Owyang and blogging guru Seth Godin.

It’s a sad day.

How often do you have a possession that you use just about every day for over six years? It becomes a part of you. And when it is gone, there is a bit of an empty feeling.

Today that happened. Last night when I went to fire up Darcy, my trusty Powerbook G3 Pismo, she refused to start up. Within an hour, I had her taken apart on the coffee table, trying to figure out what might be going wrong. Granted, I’m not hardware geek, so it was more on the “last ditch effort” side.

Darcy had been failing for some time. I knew this day would come. It’s like she had a terminal illness and it was just a matter of time. Her plate on the back that kept her connections away from the elements had broken off. Years and years ago her cute little red plastic thing that covered her infrared port fell out. She hasn’t had rubber feet in years. The display would randomly flop backwards because her hinges were so well used. But dammit, every single one of her 786,432 pixels was in fine working order.

I pimped her out after I first got her in the summer of 2000, with one of my first paychecks from my job out of college. For back then, 768 MB of RAM was huge. She had it. I took out her internal 6 GB hard drive and gave her a 40 GB one. I also go a sweet MCE expansion bay hard drive to giver her another 20 GB. She was a powerhouse.

For years, I ran my baseball simulation league (the Ted Williams Memorial League) on Darcy. For three years going to and from that first job on the train, she would always be out, always be used. During the work day, she would sit by my side, playing music as my own personal iPod, before there were iPods.

Well, my current job has no train time, so Darcy time was at night. I also had a work laptop, a PowerBook G4, but Darcy was still my favorite. Something about her was just so much better than the aluminum beast. Darcy had style. Black, curvaceous, and powerful—she was a goddess.

Over time, she had some failures. I thought she was going. First the hard drive died. Damn third party equipment. I put her 6 gigger back in and reduced her to *just* TWML duties (I also have an eMac at home that would do my iLife stuff). Later, there was another failure. Damn third party RAM. Took it out and she was back to normal.

But recently, she had been randomly shutting down while asleep. I would have to zap the PRAM to even get her started. So, I knew it was coming. And last night it came. Today, she perked up again long enough to transfer all her data to the eMac, but then, while still powered up… she died. Her display didn’t just black out. It was blue, but not blue screen of death blue. It was a strange gradient of blue to black that I had never seen before. At her time of death, she bowed out gracefully.

So, my #1 hobby (the TWML) will continue for a while on the eMac until I make the get me a MacBook Pro at work. The TWML needs to be run through Windows emulation and Darcy had some old, old school Virtual PC junk that was the greatest jimmy-rig ever.

So, I wanted to publicly say thanks to Darcy for six wonderful years. In the last six years, I have gotten engaged, gotten married, changed jobs, bought a house, and had a child. Darcy was there to see all of that. I’m not sure how she’s going to live on, but her case will certainly never leave me.

Rest in peace, Darcy.

1. iTunes. I used to tout this as quite simply the most elegant application ever. It still is, despite some quirks as features are added (I don’t think they have quite master the podcatching, for example).

I was a big SoundJam fan in the past and thought it was a bummer when they were bought out by Apple. iTunes 1 was nice, but lacked a lot of SoundJam’s features. But then, it got better. Repeatedly. I don’t miss line-in recording direct to MP3 anymore because the user experience is so gosh darn good.

2. Macromedia Fireworks. Very rarely do I open Adobe Photoshop. Don’t get me wrong, Photoshop is a great application. But rarely do I do any work for print anymore. I find that I can better get a grasp of color within Macromedia Fireworks (I used to open the same file in Fireworks and Photoshop all the time and the color would be different. When looked at in a browser, it looked like the Fireworks file. Not sure why, but that made the decision pretty easy for me.)

I often don’t use Fireworks for what others use it for, too. Lots of folks like to slice up big images to build HTML from (argh! where are the standards!) or make dynamic drop-down menus (I hear Fireworks is using CSS now). I use it for design—not just actions and optimization.

For example, when I need to build something like this mockup, I do it in Fireworks.

3. iMovie. I used to make movies of my cat in iMovie. That was fun. Then I had a daughter. This is where the true power of iMovie comes in.

At six months of age and one year of age, I produced 45-60 minute movies of my daughter, Ella, complete with short video segments, animated photos, and music. Family members love it, I love it, and some day I hope Ella loves. it.

4. BBEdit, BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler. How the hell can a text editor change your life? Well, I can’t explain it, but when it is made by Bare Bones software, it can.

At my previous job, we had the full version of BBEdit (OS 9 days) and I had the Lite version at home. Well, at my new job, they bought me Dreamweaver so I felt bad about asking for a $199 text editor, so I started using TextWrangler, Bare Bones’ new free text editor.

How is this thing free? It is so good that I barely miss BBEdit. I actually have an old copy of BBEdit Lite installed just for the “Copy Lines Containing” and “Auto Number Rows” features. I bet if I looked a bit, I could get these into TextWrangler, but then I’d officially give up BBEdit Lite… which might make for a sad day.

5. Out of the Park Baseball 2. Well, the last app on the list is the only Windows app (I run it with Virtual PC) on the list. And the sheer amount of my time I give this app probably means this list is in “no particular order.”

I use OOTP2 to run my baseball sim league, the Ted Williams Memorial League. It is a (pretty much) text based baseaball simulator that has such features as career mode, a solid financial model, and an easy interface. There are a ton of new versions (including a Mac version of the latest), but upgrading about five versions is pretty much impossible for an existing league. Besides, I’ve used the new version and there’s just too daunting of a user experience. This version is simple, and while buggy, it gets the job done.