I primarily use Photoshop for my image editing work and this process will be easy if you have Photoshop and are comfortable using it. It’s a very simple process and could be completed with virtually any image editor, although ones that can read Photoshop (PSD) files will make it easier to import the template discussed below. If you don’t want to spend money on a photo editing application GIMP is a free option that offers a decent interface and lots of tools to experiment with.

The first step of the process lies ahead: selecting the image to use. Ideally images should fit into one of two categories. These images have either a uniform simplicity, or a design flow that works with the iPhones overlaid controls.

The first type of image that works well has a uniformity to it. Because of the user interface controls partially obscuring the locked iPhone wallpaper images that focus on color or texture will work very well for this as obscuring a part of this kind of image does not hide key aesthetic elements. This kind of image is great for capturing a favorite color or surface while not adding distraction to Apple’s clean and minimalistic design.

A simplistic background

The second type of image that works well are images with a central focal point that is well buffered by simplicity. As the top and bottom of the iPhone are obscured by the overlaid controls having an image which can appreciated from the lower than center portion of the viewport on the lock screen, and with a background or less important top and bottom that are not critical to the aesthetic appeal of the image.

When taking photos for use as an iPhone wallpaper consider using a very narrow depth of field to direct interest to the center area of a vertical shot. Alternatively for a bolder look consider incorporating strong design elements such as bright angular sections of color. Remember that although the top and bottom will be obscured the image will still bleed through the overlay and provide some visual impact.

A more visually complicated sweet spot

Once an image is selected I use the iPhone template pictured below to help me compose it for the iPhone. I found this template on the Mac Rumors forum in this thread. Full credit goes to TheSpaz who created the awesome resource and shared it with the world.

The template is free to download and comes in the form of a PSD template with each element set up in a separate layer with the correct opacity. This template makes it easy to drop an image into the background layer and compose it to look its best on the iPhone.

As your source image is likely much larger than 320×480 pixels you will have to transform the image down to size. By using Photoshop’s free transform option on the layer you can adjust both the scaling of the image, as well as drag it around to ensure that the portion of the image you want visible is perfectly framed by the overlays.

The shot being used in this particular tutorial was taken with a Lensbaby, a lens that adds a significant amount of blur and vignetting away from the center of the screen. This effect helps draw the eye into a subject and simplify the background making it ideal for use in creating iPhone wallpapers. If you have an image you really like, but that does not work well with the overlays due to visual distractions consider vignetting the image in photoshop by gently blurring or darkening the top and bottom edges to draw the eye to the center of the composition.

Because the iPhone displays bright colors so well I usually find that bumping up the saturation of an image 4-8% adds a bit of pop to the wallpaper. A slight bit of sharpening with the unsharp mask filter often helps more detailed images retain clarity on the iPhone’s densely packed pixels. Both of these steps also help make the image look it’s best once it is saved out of the Photoshop format and into either a JPEG or PNG image.

Once you are happy with how your image looks within the preview offered by the template you are ready to save the image and put it on your iPhone. For this process you don’t want the templates overlays added so hide all of the overlay layers leaving your resized and cropped photo and any adjustment layers as your final image. From the file menu select ‘Save for Web & Devices’ to compress your final wallpaper down. I usually save my wallpapers as 32bit PNG images, however JPEG format backgrounds will work just as well.

Save the wallpaper with a recognizable name into the location where you have iTunes set to sync photos from. The next time you sync your iPhone the image will be synced into the iPhone’s library. From there you can view the image with the Photos application and then click the export scarab at the bottom of the screen to select that image for use as your wallpaper.

If you are interested in the image above the version saved without the overlays suitable for immediate iPhone use is here. You can also get the original PSD file here including all the layers, adjustments, and overlays used to create this.

See something I like and think I might someday want to return? Click the star to bookmark it, and forget about it. If it’s something I’m likely to use frequently then another click of the star lets me add a few appropriate tags to speed up the search.

No longer do I have an organized collection of bookmarks, and a bookmarks bar crammed with common links and folders of bookmarks. With the ability to search my history and bookmarks from the address bar an entirely keyboard and search based browsing habit has evolved. A few Quicksilvr like keystrokes reveal an impressively accurate and intuitive list of what I want, culled from the URLs, tags, and titles of the visited pages.

The Firefox user interface has become minimal, The address and search bar, a list of my open tabs, and nothing else. Pure efficiency and elegance in internet consumption. I have achieved Firefox zen:

Interestingly enough it would seem that my visitors have as well. A quick look at the last few months of visitors shows that over half of my visitors have selected Firefox as their browser of choice with Internet Explorer coming in 2nd and Safari trailing in 3rd.

With the Mozilla Foundation putting so much effort into setting download records at the release of Firefox 3 I wonder how that percentage will grow in coming months both on Futurist Now as well as the internet as a whole.

Side note: yes, I see the irony in cheering for Firefox given where I work. I don’t actually see a problem with that – I think Firefox has given Internet Explorer a lot and the more recent versions of Internet Explorer have been better for the competition that Firefox and Opera have provided. I strongly believe that competition is the key to any successful market and am always happy to see multiple contenders reaching for the stars – the biggest winners in this kind of technology arms race are almost always the consumers.

My new EeePC
I picked up one of Asus’s delightfully tiny new netbooks, the EeePC. A netbook is a new category of sub-notebook device with low end specs designed primarily for browsing the web. The EeePC clocks in at a measly 900Mz, but at 9″ and under 3 lbs it’s easy to forgive it’s specs in lieu of it’s ultimate portability. So far I’m finding it an ideal email machine for use at meetings at work, and as a great bedroom/couch machine for keeping an eye on the tubes while relaxing or watching movies.

Being entirely solid state (the EeePC 900 series comes with 12GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive with spinning platters) it’s shock resistant, and gets surprisingly good performance for it’s diminutive specs. Due to the random access nature of flash memory the EeePC boots quickly and gets great battery life (3 hours of real use). While solid state drive (SSD) technology is still not competitive in price or storage capacity to typical hard drive (HDD) technology I can see the potential and am starting to get excited about the predictions that in 2011 or so SSD will all but completely replace HDD technology in notebooks and desktops.

While the EeePC 900 I picked up came pre-loaded with Windows XP I’ve done some experimentation with putting Ubuntu on it. As with my typical annual cycle I attempt to put some variant of Linux on my computers to see how the OS X/Windows competition is doing. This time however I was surprised – the latest Hardy Heron (8.04) release of Ubuntu is slick, polished, and works ‘out of the box’ on all the hardware I had laying around. While Ubuntu might be getting attention as a decent desktop alternative where I think it really shines is on a low end PC like the EeePC – it’s limited feature set and lean architecture work perfectly on a device with CPU and memory constraints.

Movies
Being a 3 day weekend I took the opportunity to see a couple of movies with Brien and Brian. We saw both Indiana Jones 4: The Crystal Skull, and Iron Man. Both movies were excellent (if not over the top) and fun movies to see while on holiday. I was never the hardcore fan of the Indy series that Brien was, and much to his horror I actually liked the newest one best from the series. It captured the fun essence of the earlier flicks while maintaining a fresh and modern feel even while being set in not so modern times.

Iron man also kept a modern feel, although it did so with a very modern setting. Having never read the comic book I assume I missed out on a lot of the back story, but still found the story presented in the movie touching and engaging. Having grown up idolizing gadget superhero (Hello, Inspector Gadget) it’s nice to see a modern take on a technological super-hero. Final note on the movie: I need a flying metal suit, that looks fun!

Lensbabied sneaker opus
Last but not least, a quick shot I took with my Lensbaby 2G while out on a photo walk on Saturday. I’ve been using my 18mm and 50mm primes a lot and decided to take the Lensbaby out and go for a stroll. I’m certainly glad I did as one of the resulting shots is a clear winner in my odd little abstract world.

What makes Traskpro so great? What do I do with it?

• Manage projects at work
• Keep track of all the little details
• Brainstorm ideas
• Create shopping lists
• Plan maintenance projects around my condo
• Capture ideas for creative photography
• Track car maintenance needs
• Know who has borrowed one of my DVD’s
• List my goals the next 1, 2, 5 and 10 years
• Maintain a list of expenses for reimbursement

Amazing ehh – give it a whirl or check out the Traskpro blog – you can do all these things and more! With Traskpro’s flexible design you can track almost any kind of information – all for free!

Now what would a big Traskpro advert like this be without a few power user tips? Traskpro uses the URL to determine what tag you are viewing – this means that you can bookmark frequently used tags for quick access. I am able to use this feature by setting my internet home page to my “work” tag at work, my “personal” tag at home, and the high priority view on my iPhone – whenever I open a browser I immediately see a highly contextual view of tasks related to my current environment.

Further to URL bookmarking when setting a sort preference the sort preference is added to the next page view URL. This allows you to bookmark not only a specific tag, but also to make it so whenever visiting the bookmark the sorting options can be left intact – useful for power users looking to really take control of a large list of tasks.

So far I’ve actually made good progress. I made it up to Broadway to pick up some Gear Live branded business cards for CES, have done 5 loads of laundry, packed most of my stuff, and cleaned up. I still have a little work to do, but over all I’m feeling much better about leaving – thanks to Traskpro

Amazingly with all the CES stuff I did today I even found time to do a few usability tweaks to Traskpro. Now tags can be entered separated by spaces, commas, or semicolons, and tags can be marked as high or low priority by tagging them ‘high’ or ‘low’. I got some great user feedback from two of my users and hopefully this will make entry more intuitive for new users by sticking to the arching design goal of flexibility.

Not too sure if I’ll be doing much personal blogging from CES – I will be pretty busy this year between doing video production and writing up the sights and sounds of CES. Check out the Gear Live coverage of CES, or you can click to see Gear Live filtered to only my content.

Most notably I took a lot of hacky if loops to select SQL queries and moved them into a net-new function which builds the queries based in inputs so the code is both easier to read and easier to maintain long term. I also moved a lot of in-line functionality to within functions which has made long term maintainability and new feature development a breeze.

Not only does this re-factoring provide more readable code, but having everything generalized into functions made adding a few new features a breeze. For instance I just added a capture feature to Traskpro for capturing more than one task (and tag array) at once. This makes capturing action items in a meeting brain dead simple and removes the need for a round trip to the server between each individual addition. Because of the functions for adding/editings tasks, or adding tags to tasks this new feature was developed in a far more efficient fashion – rather than building from scratch I could re-use code.

Simple stuff I know, but not developing for a living really does give me appreciation for elegant, maintainable, and readable code.

Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.

Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die – they are just so much fun to experience.

Right – back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!

This has been quite the productive and exciting weekend: I’ve seen Alissa’s play again (this time with Jesse and Brenda), taken interesting makeup photos with Jessie (see above), learned bucket loads about SQL, and released an early alpha of Traskpro.

I’m feeling surprisingly good given that I didn’t have much downtime this weekend. Having a personal project like Traskpro has re-energized me. I’d forgotten how fun coding can be – particularly with tons of small rewarding features to work on. I feel like I’m using agile with a 2 hour sprint!

Traskpro is finally feature-complete enough to stand up to day to day use. I still have a TON of work left to do on it, but that can happen over the next few weeks. Go in and check it out – updates from now on will be pretty much transparent to the users. The temporary production location is at Traskpro.com – I’ll be getting a more official URL for it shortly.

Update: Changed the URL above to the actual production URL. No more temporary URL’s for me baby!

I have spent the last couple of days analyzing and designing my user scenarios and figuring out exactly how best to implement a task tracking solution so that it’s as flexible as possible and requires the fewest number of actions to operate. The Traskpro specification is now complete for version 0.1 and I started to dive into coding tonight. Having spent my first few days planning is making a huge difference – coding is easier this way and I suspect the end result will be a lot cleaner.

I’ve started my development with MAMP (PHP/MySQL on the Mac), but am toying with switching over to Ruby on Rails at some point. For now I’d rather stick to a language I’m more comfortable with given that I have a big learning curve ahead for SQL which I haven’t touched in ages.

More to come – I need to get a few more of my classes built out and then get to bed. I have two more days of ‘day job’ ahead before the much needed weekend arrives.

Not that I’ll stop writing real content by any means – just an easy way to share things that interest me day to day.

Update 1 week later: It was a great idea while it lasted, but I’ve pulled the twitter and del.icio.us posts as I’ve gotten a surprising amount of negative feedback from my users. Lesson learned.

Overall not much has changed but just in case let me know if you see anything broken on the site and I’ll be glad to take a look at it – you can just leave some information about what you saw and what browser you are using as a comment.

Backpacks genius lies in its simple interface to import email, notes, lists, and documents and allow the user to organize them into meaningful groups and pages. Entering information can be done through the AJAX powered web interface, or emailed to unique email addresses per page you create.

For the mildly OCD and scatterbrained professional like me it’s a perfect information dump solution. Previously I had accomplished this task with a mixture of desktop search technologies (Spotlight and Windows Desktop Search) and text files. Backpack allows for the capture of my stream of consciousness and later triage and sort information into tasks, savable bits, and ideas.

A web based solution is the perfect answer to my multi-computer, multi-platform lifestyle – all of the power of text files on OS X, OneNote on Windows, and accessible from any browser at the drop of a hat. Each page also has a unique email address making it possible to send notes and todo’s from any email capable device for quick entry on the go.

Backpack tops off it’s powerful information management technology with a well implemented developer API, SMS or email based reminders, and basic calendaring and calendar sharing functionality. I’m hooked on the Exchange/Outlook calendaring solution at work, but were I not chained to the evil empire the calendar looks well enough implemented to live out of.

Ta-Da Lists is likely enough for most people, and is entirely free. Ta-Da offers a maximum of 10 concurrent lists, and a very slick iPhone specific interface for those iPhone owners dying for a task/list solution. Backpack is very iPhone friendly, but lacks an iPhone specific interface which does make it slightly less useful on the iPhone, but Backpack’s power-user interface and abilities to go beyond simple lists into key-worded pages full of lists, notes, images, documents, and emails makes it an easy sell.

Backpack offers a free version which is likely sufficent enough for most users, but for a small monthly fee they will increase the number of pages you can create as well as increase the amount of storage available for you.

Check it out – it’s free for basic use and if you manage information anything like I do you will be instantly hooked.

Now that I’ve spent a full week with the iPhone I wanted to put pen to paper (or should that be fingers to keys) and write a more in depth review than my initial impressions. Needless to say Apple generated a lot of hype with the iPhone and many feared it would flop in the face of near impossible levels of pre-release fanaticism. Thankfully I am glad that after a full weeks usage I can attest: Apple actually pulled it off. They lived up to or exceeded every single promise they made about the iPhone.

My impressions are obviously quite favorable over all, but the iPhone does have a few flaws. Regardless of it’s flaws I think this will be an industry-changing phone and will raise the bars for Microsoft, Symbian, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and other competitors in the mobile marketplace to produce better phones featuring integration, ease of use, and stability all orders of magnitude ahead of what they now offer.

Things Apple got right with the iPhone:
The experience
Using the iPhone is just plain fun. Apple has managed to take something fairly common like a phone and completely revolutionize it. From the simple fades and transitions between modes to the delete animations the whole device feels very modern and high-tech. It’s a thin and highly attractive device that attracts attention and feels a little like something from a few years in the future – particularly compared to the industrial design of its main competitors. It’s a simple interface to learn (more so than any previous OS I’ve used before – mobile or desktop) and has playful feel that just begs to be explored.

The iPhone provides a fun to use and mostly consistent experience end to end. In all previous smart-phones each different feature had a different experience: you could use it as a phone, or as a browser, or as an email client but each different application and experience has a very different feel to it. With the iPhone you don’t use a phone, browser, or email client – you use the iPhone. Everything feels very well integrated, and intermeshed. It does have a bit of a learning curve for the device as a whole, but once you learn it you can have any of it’s features at your fingertips. The closest competitor they have in this space is the consumer-oriented Sidekick from Danger, but the iPhone puts even that to shame.

The screen
The screen on the iPhone is crystal clear and very high resolution. It features a 480×320 screen (more than twice the resolution of your standard 320×240 screen), but at a very high DPI so text, images, and video looks stunningly crisp. The screen has an ambient light sensor so it’s always the perfect brightness for your environment. The brightest setting is stunning and makes the iPhone’s screen completely visible outdoors in bright sunlight – a feat most phones (smart or otherwise) can’t lay a finger on.

The browser
The Safari browser on the iPhone is simply stunning. Not only can it properly render websites that previously been completely impossible to view on mobile phones, but the intelligent zooming, rotating, JavaScript/AJAX support makes the Safari browser the pinnacle of the iPhone’s applications. While viewing a web page simply rotating the iPhone to either side rotates and re-zooms the section you are viewing. A quick double tap on any section of a web page (for instance a column, image, or form) zooms to that section for readability, and then you can either scroll to other sections or double tap again to go back to seeing the entire website. The Safari browser included in the iPhone even has a multi-window feature allowing you to browse multiple websites at the same time, or handle popups if a site requires them (and it blocks the popups you don’t want).

The advanced Javascript and CSS/DOM included in the Safari browser make some amazing applications possible. People have already written browser based interfaces for SSH, IRC, and other chat programs. Obviously a web application can never be quite as integrated as a thick client can be, but this browser proves it’s a fairly minor distinction at this point. I expect to see a large crop of iPhone web applications springing up in the next few months as developers hone their iPhone web development skills.

Mapping by google, interface by Apple
Apple’s much vaunted Google Maps application delivers as promised. The pinch and zoom features are well implemented, although it’s usefulness is limited without some sort of geo-location feature, be it actual GPS or based on cell towers/Wifi access points. One of the ‘hidden gems’ of the Google Maps application is it’s traffic feature – on the way down to my car every morning a quick click into the iPhone’s mapping experience and I can see which of the freeways has the least congestion for my morning commute.

Talking about talking
When it comes to being an actual phone the iPhone delivers above expectations. Sure, I’ve used better ‘dumb’ phones in terms of signal strength or voice quality, but as smart phones goes this is well implemented and very usable as a voice communications device. Conversations are easy to hear for both parties and the interface for dialing is very slick looking. While you can’t type out someone’s name to call them the scroll by letter feature is well implemented and you can set as many contacts as you want to be favorites and show up on a short list of people to call. Since I use my phone to make and receive calls so infrequently I’ve not found this to be a problem.

Messaging
Further on the topic of the iPhone as a phone the new Visual Voicemail feature is stunning. Rather than having to call up my provider and navigate through Byzantine phone menues with a dial-pad AT&T sends the voicemail to my phone using the data network, and I can browse, play, replay, call-back, and delete all without calling my voicemail. The Visual Voicemail feature brings more of an email paradigm to voicemail and makes someone like me who usually HATES voicemail find it pleasant to use and entirely tolerable.

In addition to making voicemail a pleasant experience Apple chose some highly tasteful alerts. When an SMS, calendar alarm, or missed call occurs the lock screen displays a visual history since last unlock on translucent blue pads. Sadly emails (and their subject lines) are not privy to the same unlock screen notifications and must be accessed via the email application.

The mail client is a well implemented piece of software. While it’s still not perfect. It’s better than all mobile email solutions I’ve seen, and a good number of desktop mail clients. It lacks true push capabilities with most email servers making the iPhone not the ideal solution for many enterprise customers, but it more than makes up for it in my book with near perfect IMAP support. I can have it check my inbox regularly (every 15, 30, 90, or 120 minutes) as well as browse my entire IMAP hierarchy and browse my last 10 years of mail, pulling down emails and attachments from the server on demand.

Many of the initial nay-sayers of the iPhone were focusing on it’s virtual keyboard. Having come from several years of QWERTY phones I myself was more than a little worried about this. Luckily Apple pulled it off and I’ve found that after a few days of getting the virtual keyboard into my head I actually like it as much as a physical keyboard. While it lacks tactile feedback it does offer the ability to change the keyboard depending on the task (adding a .com button to the keyboard while in the browser for instance), and it’s predictive text corrects pretty much every ‘fat finger’ mistake I’ve thrown at it. After a while you learn to just trust they keyboard and grind away at typing as fast as you can and magically what you meant to appear on screen does – just be prepared for a couple of days of re-learning the skill of typing on QWERTY thumb boards.

The iPhone as an iPod
The iPod portion of the iPhone is extremely well implemented. It’s more intuitive than even the 5.5G iPods which preceded it. While I barely use Coverflow at home in iTunes I’ve found it to be a very natural way to browse the 20 or so albums that I have selected to bring with me. There are other nice touch based interface tweaks which make selecting music easier, and allows for a ton of eye candy. I have a few minor complaints about the iPod interface, but I’ll leave those for the ‘what Apple missed’ section later in the article.

There are a lot of nice audio touches like slowly fading the music when a call comes in, and pausing the music entirely when you accept the call. When you hang up the music un-pauses and gracefully fades back in. Most alert sounds (new email or a calendar event for instance) are accompanied by the music fading down just slightly to make sure you hear the alert but without jarring you out of your music listening experience. These touches make using the iPhone in a car with an auxiliary input or iPod integration fun and far less jarring or complicated than dealing with a separate iPod and phone.

The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with any headphones, not just the manufacturer provided ones like so many phone manufacturers force you to by using a non-standard jack. This let’s the audiophiles of the world ditch the built in earbuds for some high end headphones. Doing this loses out on the built in microphone, but gains a lot of quality. So far the audio quality has been fantastic and even when hooked up to my high-end home stereo system the output sounds great! See the ‘what Apple missed’ section below for some more comments on the headphone jack.

Connectivity
The network for the iPhone is both a good thing and a bad thing. The inclusion of EDGE data (it’s faster than dial up was way back in the day – but not by that much) for getting the internet from ATT&T was a surprise, and makes browsing out on the road somewhat painful. Luckily Apple made up for this by adding a great WiFi implementation. The handoff between WiFi and EDGE is seamless if you have previously approved a wireless access point, and the WiFi power consumption actually appears lower than EDGE to me.

As much as some might gripe about the EDGE data connection it’s obvious that they did it for battery life. 3G networks like AT&T’s HSDPA network use far more power than EDGE modems do and would have significantly reduced the fantastic battery life the iPhone offers. On my old AT&T 8525 (an HTC Hermes) I was lucky to get 12 hours of use out of my phone between the occasional phone call, some web browsing, and a few hundred emails. The iPhone makes it through all that (and a lot more web browsing because the experience is so much better) and still has 40-50% of it’s battery life left at the end of the day. Apple quotes 8 hours of talk time and over 24 hours of music playback – very impressive numbers for any phone.

The camera
The 2 megapixel camera included with the iPhone is definitely a camera phone and can’t hold a finger to a dedicated camera device it still takes some impressive photos. Like all digital cameras it does best in bright, evenly light scenes, but even in unevenly lit scenes (like the shot below) come out looking halfway decent. The iPhone camera falls flat on it’s face in dimly lit scenes though, and produces something that could be considered modern art of sorts: black canvas with slightly less black blobs hovering over it like ethereal souls from our ancestors.

YouTube is nice, although unless you are within range of a WiFi access point be prepared to both wait a long time and get very poor quality video. The fact that the videos are encoded in both EDGE and WiFi friendly versions is a nice touch, but the limited availability of the YouTube library is a bit annoying at times.

And one more thing: syncing
A final slick little touch iPhone has over previous iPods and competing media-centric smart-phones is that you can sync an iPhone to multiple computers at once. For instance I was able to sync my iPhone with a Windows PC running Microsoft Outlook to get my contacts and calendars onto the iPhone, but sync music, podcasts, and video from iTunes on my mac. This is a slick little touch and one that will make it easy for people to keep their contacts at work, and their media collection at home.

Things Apple missed with the iPhone:
No IM client
No instant messaging application. The SMS and email clients are very well implemented (chat bubbles aside in the SMS client) but with todays youth generation ditching email for IM I’m surprised to see it not included at launch. I am guessing that iChat will be one of the earlier software updates – sadly that will likely continue with the chat bubbles, and be AIM only – a tough pill to swallow for a heavy MSN Messenger network user. The good news is that various clever web guru’s are already working on hacking IM, SSH, VNC (done by my uber-geek friend Nate), and IRC onto the iPhone via web interfaces.

No 3rd party applications
No SDK for building full blown iPhone applications for 3rd parties yet. A lot can be done with a Safari web application, but there are a lot of Mac applications that I think could port fairly well to the iPhone – Adium, Ecto, and NetNewsWire to name a few. Hopefully Apple will amend this shortly and release a full blown SDK for the iPhone to the legions of hip cool Mac developers.

iPod niggles
The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with the headphones of your choice. The only problem is that the headphone jack is recessed slightly more than normal headphone jacks are so some headphones require an adapter to work properly. I was able to trim down the rubber hump on one of my headphones with a sharp knife, but for my metal tipped Grado SR225′s and Etymotic ER-6′s I’m out of luck until I get my hands on one of the adapters.

Another miss is that while locked in iPod mode the unlock screen fails to show a scrubber (a bar representing the track with a ball on the track to show the current play position), the length of the track, and other information so I see everything about a track without having to unlock the iPhone. It’s nice that the unlock screen shows my album art and the current time, but I’d like to get more information about the track I’m listening to than just the name.

It’s also mildly annoying that while playing audio you can have the scrubber or the rating of the song visible but not both at the same time. I have a large music collection and I’ve been working to slowly rate it all for future use – with the current iPhone music interface it takes several more ‘clicks’ than I would think necessary. These are both such minor gripes that I’m almost certain Apple will address them in a future build of the iPhone software.

More connectivity
The inclusion of slower EDGE data rather than AT&T’s high-speed HSDPA connection. AT&T ramped up their EDGE network for the iPhone at launch to 200kbps, which is 2-3 times faster than dial up, but nothing like the 700-1,000kbps connections I regularly saw with my HTC Hermes on AT&T’s network. I’m listing this as my last “thing Apple missed” because with the seamless transition to wifi, and increased power consumption of HSDPA I think Apple may have made the right decision in the short term – but keep an eye out for a 3G iPhone once the chip-sets become more power-friendly and as battery technology improves.

Conclusion:
My goodness run, don’t walk to buy an iPhone. I bought it with reservations – particularly about the EDGE data, yet everything else about the iPhone makes me feel so warm and gooey inside that I’m keeping the iPhone for sure. The iPhone will revolutionize the mobile industry and for once I’m pretty damn proud to be an early adopter and on the bleeding edge of tomorrow. I can’t wait to see some of the new phones Apples competitors will be coming up with in the next few years, and what kind of long term impact the iPhone will have on the mobile phone market as we know it – consider the bar officially raised!

The iPhone is the first phone I’ve ever used that works as advertised, offers a great mobile web browsing experience, great battery life, and is fun to use. I give it a solid 8 out of 10 Stars of Sparky, and would have given it the 10/10 Stars of Sparky had the iPhone featured a true SDK and high speed data out of the box.

I personally was glad it was changed in such a way – being as tired as I’ve been of late meant I likely wouldn’t have gone had it been the full meal deal. Doing most of the day however was perfect, and I got to go get my geek on with fellow Seattle techies without straining myself.

One things that surprised me this time was how well Apple is hitting their target market with the iPhone. Mind camp was 2 days after launch, and more than 15% of the attendees had one. Admittedly world has been waiting for this phone for quite some time, but it was still rather shocking to see that many of them all together at once. There were a lot of discussions of not only what a world changer this device will be (and of course nerdy details as to help enable this through cool use of it’s technology), but also a good explorations of its weaker points.

More to come on the iPhone – I’m still wrapping my head around all the little details and don’t want to go into the full rundown of my opinions quite yet, but suffice to to say most of it will be positive!

For a long time software firewalls on computers have been problematic for many reasons. While they can be helpful in keeping malware and hackers out of a computer once something has breeched the firewall in even the tiniest of ways it’s possible to disable or subvert a software firewall to enable further attacks or malicious use of the machine. This is the reason most businesses put their trust in hardware firewalls – a hardware solution is much more difficult to remotely disable and can do a much better job of filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic.

While businesses with IT professionals can manage and maintain a hardware firewall with little muss or fuss it’s often beyond the average consumer. Many consumer grade routers offer firewalls and in addition offer a level of security by putting users behind NAT (Network Address Translation) which helps mask them from the Internet as a whole. These routers help, but not everyone has a router at home, and even a router can be tricky to set up.

What is needed is a smart network cable with a simple built in firewall. Imagine a cable with a “bump in the wire” which contained a small embedded OS which performed simple firewall and content filtering duties. It of course would be difficult to offer an enterprise grade solution from something this simple, but even the most basic filtering would make helping secure a computer as easy as plugging it into the wall. Because the cable would offer a hardware solution it would be far easier to not only prevent incoming attack vectors, but also if the attached computer does become compromised common outgoing ports used by malware could be blocked.

To take this kind of solution to the next level the cable could be offered as a managed service. The bump would be automatically updated by a server side component which could manage ports for their users and adapt the firewalls rules to new malware that has been identified in the wild.

Simple and transparent to the user, and yet another layer of security in this wild west we call the Internet. Am I a genius for coming up with such a simple but effective idea, or is the idea flawed in some way that’s escaping my exhausted mental state right now?

In thinking about my photography I often muse on how to exhibit my art. A proper exhibition is something I’ve never actually done, but may be doing at some point in the future.

I think of what kind of control I would like over the environment, the speed at which people moved through it, the lighting, the music, and so on. Obviously having this level of control allows an artist to complete his message, to really forge an experience out of it.

On the other hand most of my art gets displayed on people’s computer screens. It gets displayed in the manner which my viewer wants, on their schedule, their location – they control the experience. As the artist loses control over his (or her) artistic experience the viewer gains it.

Tools like Flickr and Youtube have opened up the viewer centric experience allowing almost any artist to throw their creations up on the net, available for anyone to experience on their own terms, and do with what they please. Our technological society has even created Creative Commons usage licenses to grant and communicate rights from the artist to the viewer.

Strange thing is I’m not entirely sure which one prefer. Part of me thinks that people can enjoy art more if they are in the right mindset – and when I control the environment and experience I’m more likely to help them into that mindset. Part of me thinks people would enjoy art more on their terms, in their favorite coffee shop with their laptop, or at home in the den on the big screen.

Which do you prefer? Does it really matter? Is it the work of art itself that matters more than the setting, or are both the design and the viewing experience combined required to make ‘art’?

Aside from recovering my health I’ve been relaxing with video games quite a bit, and doing some reading. I finally beat Super Paper Mario for my Wii, and have been getting back into Oblivion for my 360. I had managed to put down the Oblivion addiction a while back, but with the Shivering Isles expansion out I’ve found myself spending more and more time in Cyrodill. I’ve built (yet another) new character and am focusing on trying to work through not only the new expansion pack, but also all of those miscellaneous little quests that I’ve never bothered to go through – shadow over Hackdirt, Aleswell, and other little one-off quests that really add some depth to the game.

Aside from gaming my reading has been quite interesting. I picked up a copy of Inside the Machine, and illustrated introduction to microprocessors and computer architecture by Jon Stokes. It’s an interesting read and offers a nuts and bolts view of how a computer works from the ground up. I’m about half way through and am simply fascinated by the view it’s giving me into the “world of the machine” that so often slips under the average computer user. Modern computers, operating systems, and programming languages have done a beautiful job of abstracting hardware from software, but the hardware still exists, and knowing how it operates has given me some insight as to why some weird things in the more abstracted levels “work the way they work”.

All this scripting paid off via the side benefit of making the rebuild almost entirely painless. It look less than an hour to reinstall OS X 10.4.1 from the DVDs that came with Marbles and then run software update to get it upgraded to 10.4.9. Once that was done I hooked into the gigabit network, copied over a few applications, ran my update script and Marbles was back in action.

I remember back in my Windows days how rebuilding a machine and moving data over could be a day long saga – no more of that for me though – an hour and some Unix hackery is all you need now!

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that rebuilding fixed whatever system corruption I had that was causing the system hangs to begin with.

In addition I also picked up a copy of EvoCam for my iMac. Bre suggested it as a Photobooth replacement when I was looking to remove the “screen flash” and I ended up falling in love with it for some of it’s more advanced features. At first I was a little hesitant to throw $25 at webcam software, but even after just a few hours I was in love with EvoCam.

It has a really neat way to set up motion activated time lapse movies using the iSight. Basically my iSight is on all the time now. Whenever movement is detected (i.e. I am sitting at the computer) it takes a photo every 15 seconds, and adds the photo as a frame in a time lapse movie. At 24 frames per second playback speed and 15 seconds of real time per frame of video it makes it easy to watch my life go by at a 6 minutes per second. Even cooler is that since it’s motion activated there are no long gaps of nothingness while I’m at work or sleeping.

I’ve got it set to cut the movie and start a new one each day at midnight so I’ll end up with a detailed log of my computer usage, and something that’s actually pretty cool as an art project by itself. Below I’ve posted a quick one that only takes up an hour or so of “real time” and was more of an experiment than anything else – be expecting cooler versions at some point in the near future.

The Quicktime version is very large, but has a keyframe for every single shot in the time lapse so it’s very high quality. I’ve compressed it down to a flash video to show here, but might be making DVD’s to mail out if any of the coming days produce anything particularly interesting or thought provoking. Without further ado:

Taken at Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 – Seattle’s premiere un-conference featuring the best and brightest of technology all under the same roof for 24 hours learning from each other, and exploring our passions. This particular crosshatched image was drawn with a pen by a drawing robot put together by the MAKE crew. The original image was taken with a camera and fed into a computer to be processed by the Drawbot. I took a lot of photos with my Lensbaby. Check out Flickr for 100′s of shots I’ve taken in the last 24 hours.

All in all I had a blast. I actually left a little early (I’m too old to stay up for 36 hours at a go) but had 20 great hours geeking with like-minded souls, and playing a delightful game that was passing around: Werewolf. It’s a great mix of social skills, logic, and really getting to know your neighbor in an effort to figure out if they are the werewolf!

I also got my first chance to get some hands on time with the Wii. Nintendo brought one out for part of the evening and let us get some hands on time with it. I’m very impressed with how intuitive the system is, and was taken aback by how small it was – the Wiimote was about 25% smaller than I had envisioned, and the Wii it’self is barely bigger than a DVD case (obviously wider than a single case – but no wider than 4 standard DVD cases stacked together).

“Mind Camp 3.0 – Favorites” by sparktography

Are we the trend leaders, or has Apple really made that much of an inroad into the Seattle tech community in the last 12 months? I realize a lot of companies have come to Seattle that buy Macs for their employees (Google to name a big one) but still – it’s a lot of growth.

Viva La APPLE!

Today was the first miserably wet day of the year. Rain was pounding when I drove to work this morning reminding me just how poorly my car handles in low traction situations. Luckily it let up enough by the time I had arrived to snap a few quick pictures of the construction around my office that gets ever closer to the building and entrance I use.

As you can see from the picture the massive equipment is now literally up to the door. I can’t imagine being one of the poor people who’s window looked out on to a back-hoe from 5 feet – I know I would go mad with the distraction.

Aside from the rain today was actually a pretty good day – I got a lot done at work, and have been home for the last couple of hours working on reorganizing my condo and poking at email.

On another good note Firefox 2.0 launched today. I have always loved Firefox from a functional perspective but prefer Camino for it’s speed, elegance, and simplicity. The new 2.0 release is a lot leaner and faster than 1.5 yet improves on usability. Given the power that Firefox brings to the table with it’s extensible plugins I might just have to try using both it and Camino for a while to see what my long term impressions of the new release are.

“POTD 10/24/06 – Yet more construction” by sparktography

Screen is an old session management tool for unix systems and boy is it neat. It basically lets you run terminal programs in sessions, and manage those sessions in very interesting ways. You can connect, share, and disconnect from remote sessions at will making managing multiple context-insensitive applications over SSH a breeze.

Delicious Monster makes a DVD/game/book management tool that I had looked at previously, but not investigated fully. They offer some amazing technologies to make it easier to manage a big collection. Most uniquely it offers easy data entry via the camera built into my iMac by “scanning” the barcodes and pulling all the information down automatically.

It took me a little under two hours to scan, sort, and manage all 300+ movies that I have in my collection. I used a tool called Deliweb to create this nifty view of all my movies.

Technorati Tags: Cory Doctorow, Interview, Podcast

Counterize does a great job of giving some high level stats, and as well puts a row into a MySQL table for each visitor with some basic information about what is being requested and such for statistical analysis. I broke out the PHP and had some fun.

Now up until now I had assumed I had about 10 readers. Some close friends, perhaps a few random strangers, and of course my mom. I guess I was wrong – I have had over 11,000 page views in three months from 1,827 unique visitors (not including known bots). These figures do not include viewers who view my site entirely via RSS and never visit the blog directly. Given my sometimes blathering rantings I’m actually rather surprised.

Now for the statporn: The highest pageview days are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday by a good margin. Tuesday’s on average get about 23% of the page views of a Friday. The last week in any month has about 10% more page views than any other week. About half of my page-views come either between 8-9am PST or between 2-4pm PST.

I have no idea why this would be, but for some reason I have visitors who only seem to visit me during certain parts of the month. I can see later in the week being more popular because some people are looking for minute little escapes from their jobs on Friday’s, and weekends being popular because people have a chance to “catch up” on their web browsing.

My most popular two entries are about my encounter with Ambien, the saga I went through to get my sweet Oblivion, and an example of my hatred/fear of company parties.

Technorati Tags: blog, ego, FOSS, math, OSS, stat, statistics