tech ronin

Upcoming Mini iPhone + iPod touch option

One of the more credible iPhone rumors of late is that of a smaller, thinner plastic-covered iPhone with a 2.8" screen. I don't pretend to fore-knowledge about Apple's plans, but if this smaller iPhone happens, I would welcome it.

I plan to continue my combo iPhone + iPod touch approach. Here's why. I use my iPod touch about 80% and my iPhone 25%. The extra 5% is the overlap when I want to keep my place on one device while looking something up on the other.

iPod touch. I'm in a wi-fi hotspot about 90% of the time. Since the iPod touch surfs as well as the iPhone when wi-fi is available (and is thinner and lighter), I use it. I spare my iPhone battery and avoid missing calls which get routed directly to voicemail when I'm accessing the web from my iPhone.

iPhone. I use my iPhone for EDGE-based net access when wi-fi isn't available. I use it to take casual photos. I use it as a phone. And I use it to listen to podcasts while walking alone.  I also prefer it for listening to podcasts or music in my car because it switches so seamlessly between hands-free calls and content.

In this 2-device division of labor, I could see myself using a smaller, more elegant iPhone with 2.8" screen. The iPod touch needs as much screen as it can get. I will find a way to carry a larger iPod touch or iPod tablet if one becomes available since the screen real estate is so valuable.

Apple wants us to carry 2 Apple handhelds. My experience of using the iPhone and iPod touch together makes me look forward to fitting enthusiastically into their plans.

Making a Typepad Blog into a website maybe

I've been having fun with some of the new TypePad themes. I am using the Ragged Marine theme on my product blog called Studio Manager Bulletin. I have a whole Studio Manager website composed of static web pages and I have the Studio Manager Bulletin blog. Static information like product features, screenshots, pricing, a FAQ and contact information is all on my Studio Manager site.

TypePad now has a feature called Pages which lets you create any number of additional pages with same style as your blog. Here's the TypePad Customer Stories page I just made by copying most of the HTML and a little of the stylesheet information I am using in my website Customer Stories page into a new TypePad page.

It is actually something that could work I think. The content came in quite nicely. All I need to do is make sure that any stylesheet info that is unique to the Customer Stories page not override styles for the main page.

Creating a static page in TypePad. There you have a page Title and the a Post Body box which can be modified as rich text. You can also use the Edit HTML tab and paste in HTML. That is what I did quite successfully. I created an html page which was the main column in my current website and saved that. Modifications can be made there. Then you just paste it into the HTML tab and if it needs tweaking go back to the HTML page and edit it and paste again. The reason for this is that once the HTML goes into TypePad and is saved, TypePad will put a bunch of extra stuff (garbage?) which makes it harder to edit the html in TypePad itself.

Modifying the Styles for the static TypePad page. I go to the Design tab in TypePad and select Custom CSS. That gives a text box where I can type in stylesheet information like this that I want to override or extend the Ragged Marine CSS theme I've chosen:

#section    {border-bottom: 1px dashed black;}

Now my only problem is to think about and be sure I really like the Ragged Marine theme well enough to base a whole blog + website on it. Not so sure.

Added my Twitter feed here in the side bar

Hi folks. I just added my Twitter feed (the feed will always show my latest 5 posts) to the sidebar near the top of my page. For the most part, these are my 1-liner ideas as they occur to me. Some of ideas the I post on twitter may later appear in a blog post where I have plenty of room to do them justice.

One of the things that stops me from doing some blog posts is that the idea is either too short or too involved. Now I have a place to put my quick insights, opinions and finds.

Lately, I've been surfing the social web. These are the sites that take advantage of exciting social web and web 2.0 concepts like friends, groups, ratings and comments. The top one at the moment is Twitter. I like following the thoughts of smart and interesting people who are interested in some of the same things I am.

If you are going to use Twitter as an information source, all you need to do is find people whose thoughts and discoveries you want to follow. A good way to do that is to use TweetScan or Summize to find people who are engaged with some of the things you are.

If you just bought an iPhone, you'll probably want to search for the word iPhone. That sort of thing.

Oh, you'll want to get yourself a free Twitter account, of course.

The second thing you can do with a Twitter account is to post your own thoughts and discoveries in 140 character blurbs. You can include URLs by typing or pasting them in.

You'll want a Twitter client if you get more serious about it just because then you have a more powerful tool at your disposal. I'm using and enjoying Twhirl on my Mac these days.

As far as what to post, the rule that unless you are only trying to communicate with close friends, don't post about the mundane things you are doing, is a good one. If you are going to watch or finished watching a movie and can add some interesting comment about it that's good. You can really post whatever you want. Maybe just type something in for now.

Later on, if you enjoy writing to an audience, you'll be thinking of them when you write and that will guide what to post. If you use Twitter professionally or want to build up your blog readership, this could start feeling like work. That's OK in those contexts, but otherwise, have fun with what you want to do and if something seems like a good share, share it.

This really wasn't meant to be an introduction to Twitter, but I wanted to explain what the Twitter posts are doing on my blog page and while writing, thought of a few tips for those of you who are interested in what Twitter is all about.

TweetClouds for Twitter are here

The more I use Twitter as a microblogging tool, the more I want features that I've come to take for granted in the blogging realm. One of those is tag clouds. TweetClouds to the rescue.

If you use Twitter as a microblogging platform rather than a shared virtual space among close friends, you might want your own tweet cloud.

Just go over to tweetclouds.com and enter your twitter account name and press go. As you can see above, it took 111 seconds to calculate my cloud. That's how long it took with 150 tweets to process. Tweetclouds have taken off in the Twittersphere this week so going is a little slow if you have a lot of tweets. But, how cool?

After it is done, you see your tweetcloud and get your own page and URL. Here's the tokerud cloud URL.

The next step from my point of view is to have links in each of those cloud words so I/you can click on a word and see the tweets. I'm thinking everyone on Twitter needs a dynamic cloud that is connected to search.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is above all fun. But, part of using Twitter as an information aggregation tool is building a good list of people to follow.

I am following about 100 people right now. I spend a bit of time each day browsing for new people to follow. These tweet clouds would be a boon to this endeavor.

If every tweeter had his or her own searchable cloud, I could tweetscan for people based on my interests and some resourceful twitter developer could match my cloud to other tweeters' clouds and give me friend recommendations. Wouldn't that be fun?

Quake 3 on two iPod touches

HermitWorks made a YouTube video of one guy with an iPod touch in two hands playing what looks like two players at once in Quake 3. Worth a quick look if you are a gamer and a current or prospective iPhone or iPod touch owner. I just want to try that for myself. My having an iPhone and an iPod touch makes this video particularly appealing. I just like having my mind blown is all.

Bush Iraq war $ will bring US to its knees

Read it and weep: The Three Trillion Dollar War. The Iraq war has already cost us more than the twelve year Vietnam war and twice the cost of the Korean war.

The Bush tax cut, shoddy reporting, a timid congress and a huge real estate bubble lulled Americans into a stupor while our future was being flushed down the toilet. If pro-war McCaine wins the election, I'm outta here.

US infrastructure both old (highways, bridges) and new (broadband, fiber) is long overdue for an upgrade relative to our aspirations and size. Our primary and secondary schools are obsolete.

Imagine what that wasted money could do for infrastructure, schools, job retraining and healthcare. We are spending $12 billion a month. Let's shut this war down now!

The crazy thing is that besides this horrific financial loss (and carnage let's not forget), we are less safe from a military standpoint. Way too many of our troops and military hardware are in Iraq. This leaves us unable to respond to other legitimate threats.   

Someone please pull the plug on the outdated and, as far as I can tell, greedy and malevolent leaders responsible for this mess.

Weak enonomy will slow iPhone vs BlackBerry

Enterprises married to the BlackBerry won't switch any time soon. But any with an eye to the future are likely to invest in trial programs with iPhones. Someone in IT is going to see to it that some experimentation is done with the new SDK for enterprise-critical apps.

Meanwhile, forward-looking firms that may still be using Treos would be first candidates to switch to iPhone.

Companies have been putting the brakes on IT spending since last August's market scare. IT cuts won't help Apple make a big splash this Summer, but early adopters in enterprise IT should start spending enough to help Apple hit their 10,000,000 iPhone target by year end.

Expect vertical corporate software like Salesforce.com's iPhone app to proliferate quickly.

It will be hard to wait till July. But I expect to be seeing an ongoing series of Youtube videos showing off alpha and beta software to keep us going in the mean time.

Realistically, RIM can't compete with Cocoa touch as a development tool. Here's where the vaunted "desktop class" mobile software Steve talked about at the iPhone keynote in January '07 comes into play.

This is the joker in the deck. RIM talked about how playing media on a phone isn't that hard to compete with. Perhaps, but couple that with mobile Safari, core animation, OSX and a killer SDK and RIM, Microsoft and Nokia have something to worry about.

Upgraded MacBook Pro and iMac 24 to 4 gb RAM

In the last couple of weeks I upgraded my MacBook Pro and iMac from 2 to 4 gigs of RAM. It cost me about $100 at Other World Computing for the 2- 2 gig sticks of RAM, so that was about $200. I checked just now and you can get out the door with UPS ground shipping for under $98 for 4 gigs of RAM for the MBP or iMac Core 2 duo machines.

I tried on my own to install the RAM and after encountering the slightest bit of difficulty in each case (a screw was too tight for me and I worried about stripping it), decided to just ask my local Marin Mac Shop to install the RAM. Their charge? $27/machine. Any questions?

If you operate towards the power user end of the spectrum and have relatively powerful hardware to match, RAM is so cheap right now that you would be foolish not to upgrade up to 4 gigs of RAM if you can. That gives you headroom for things like 25 tabs open at once in Safari plus maybe 10-20 open applications. Works for me!

Now I feel like I'm not handicapping my fast Macs. It's crazy to spend around $2500 for the Mac and then cripple it even a little with not enough memory.

I have to admit that both these machines were fast to begin with and I really didn't have any complaints at all about my new 2.8 ghz iMac. But, who knows what it is capable of if it is limited by RAM a lot of the time?

Recession is Apple Talent-grab Opportunity

You know that $18 billion in cash Apple has lying around gathering dust? What say Apple starts staffing up for the coming era of iPhone / iPod touch platform domination? You can buy both companies and talent on the cheap in a recession. Steve is Scotch as I recall.

Combine a crappy economy, an awesome new iPhone SDK, a frictionless wireless App store and a $100 million iFund and what do you get? The best and brightest global entrepreneurial software talent are going to swarm this. Look what jailbreaking wrought and multiply by 10 for a start.

Update Mar 9: Upon further reflection, it strikes me that Apple may well scoop up the a few of the most promising iPhone SDK developer companies themselves. I'm convinced Apple needs to staff up.

I noticed that last year their R&D spending was less than 4% which is pretty low for such an innovative company as Apple. But then maybe some of their recent spending hasn't been expensed yet due to the 2-year window within which they can recognize expenses for the iPhone.

Attentive Mac fans have noticed the fairly high number of missed deadlines. Most recently Leopard was late and a bit buggy when finally released and now the SDK is just in Beta rather than done by February. Apple needs talent - the best available. I almost think they've been too busy building stuff to go out and find some more good people. But that only works so long.

I liked seeing Steve including two of his most able executives in important parts of the Roadmap presentation. They were looking good, actually. Steve casts a long shadow, but he needs plenty of help at the size Apple has grown to be.

iPhone/iPod touch: THE platform of the next decade?

Apple today introduced a glimpse of iPhone 2.0 to be shipping in late June. They showed lots of enterprise features. They are going for the enterprise which is appropriate to compete with the BlackBerry and because the US consumer market is going to be slower than molasses for a while.

Apple showed vertical market software with early non-shipping versions of SalesForce.com and Epocrates. Both looked sensational. I am counting on my md to be sporting an iPhone when I have my checkup in August.

And the fun part, of course, is iPhone games. Glimpses of Super Monkey Ball, Spore and other fun titles look fantastic. Fun but more waiting.

Steve's perfectionism was in evidence. This is an incredibly complete and well-thought-out SDK effort. Steve mentioned we might be living with it for 20 years. But that perfectionism will cost us a few more months of waiting.

It is clear that Apple is making a play for what they feel is the next computing platform of note. The mobile computer.

I was pleased hear reference to wi-fi as being a part of 2.0 because if they introduce 3G around this same time, we get wi-fi AND 3G, not 3G OR wi-fi. I'm ready to pony up for such a combo device.

Also, questions about VOIP were raised and Steve said Apple is OK with VOIP over wi-fi but not over the cellular network. I can live with that for now.

I'm tokerud on FriendFeed.com

Friendfeed.com launched today. It's been in Beta for a while. Very cool at least on first blush. It aggregates a whole bunch of posts according to your settings. I set my Friendfeed to show del.icio.us, flickr, tech ronin and twitter posts for openers.

The people behind this are from but not currently of Google. This is moving towards what will be better when OpenID gains adoption. Check it out!

[Book] The Black Swan Enlightens

I'm loving The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb! Really well written non-fiction. Somehow Mr. Taleb has made a complex non-fiction book into a page turner. This is a masterful book about how surprises can change everthing and how we understand the workings of our daily lives and the world much less than we think we do.

This delusion of certainty and knowledge can cause us regularly to make bad decisions in our lives. The whole housing and credit crunch mess is a perfect example.

Taleb argues that in simpler times things were more predictable and linear but now we live in a world where winner takes all or close to it. This is a complex argument and I'm not doing it justice.

Blogging beyond the diary-level is akin to trying to write a best-seller. According to Taleb, gaining wide readership is an endeavor with long odds. (Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail loves this book, by the way.)

Besides being a blogger with ambition albeit not a lot of time to invest, I'm also a software developer another occupation where The Black Swan holds sway.

A few will strike it rich with a software hit and the rest will labor in obscurity with dissappointing results. You don’t know whether you will get lucky one day and reach a tipping point that sweeps you into the bigtime. And even if you do get a hit, will you be a one-hit wonder? it seems a little like playing the lottery at the moment.

Please take a look at this book in your local bookstore and see if you don’t get drawn in.

Taleb is a quant trader who got fascinated by the unexpected and then went into a field where uncertainty reigns supreme. Then he started writing books about it. The Black Swan is currently 34 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

I'm Using MegaPhone to edit iPod touch and iPhone Notes on my Mac

MegaPhone used to be iPhoneDrive. MegaPhone 1.5, from Ecamm Network, finally lets you edit notes. There is a large caveat which is that it seems to need to reboot your iPhone or touch every time you edit an individual note. That's pretty inconvenient should you need to edit lots of notes. Each time you edit a note, prepare to wait 30 seconds or so while your device reboots.

Editing notes and pasting content from your Mac does work and that's the main thing for now. One interesting little extra. As soon as you are done editing notes or adding them by dragging or by using the copy to iPod (or iPhone) command, you can eject your iPhone or touch and you've got your new and newly edited notes with you.

The content you paste in will retain its font, color and style information. This means you can see color and different fonts and such in your iPhone or iPod touch notes.

You can copy PDF, RTF, RTFD and Word documents in as individual notes. Graphics will not make it over, RTFD and PDFs convert to RTF minus any graphics. I'm good with that. Graphics would be nice but that's not essential.

Thanks Ecamm!

I Want to Annotate My Online Banking Transactions

I was just reading over my Wells Fargo checking account online. And for the second time today, I wanted to make a note on a transaction. I saw gibberish and googled to see how I had spent $112 at an unrecognizable vendor. Well, I found out right away from my Google search and wanted then to annotate so that later I would remember what the transaction is.

We've all gotten used to the ability to see (read only) our bank transactions at our banks' online sites. How about let me annotate your often gibberish entries in a memo field and ideally categorize according to my categories? Now you are helping me. Why not?

This idea wouldn't occur to me if (1) it wasn't useful and (2) other programs weren't moving in this direction. Online is moving there. Let's go!

AT&T's free wi-fi at Starbucks is a Game Changer

Wow, this is huge and especially benefits Apple with its lead in the wi-fi-based mobile space. Steve got AT&T to support free wi-fi. How great. AT&T DSL customers get unlimited free wi-fi at Starbucks.

If you have a Starbucks debit card, you get 2 free hours a day. No more having to pay $20 or more a month to get free wi-fi at Starbucks. Keep in mind that Starbucks is the king of coffee. If they give out free wi-fi, doesn't that mean that all the other coffee places will need to provide free wi-fi to compete? The answer is yes.

If everyone was paying Verizon for 3G access (which is slower than wi-fi by the way), no one would need free wi-fi unless they were carrying a laptop which most people don't do.

This totally supports the iPod touch and significantly increases the value of its free wi-fi access. Remember that Apple kept mentioning the iPod touch as a wi-fi mobile device at their quarterly finance conference. Now we know why.

I've been saying all along that we need more free wi-fi. This is the best news ever on that front. The enemy of wi-fi is the cellular carrier. To get the biggest US cell carrier to give away wi-fi is huge.

This move also really helps the current iPhone which has wi-fi but not 3G. I've always wondered why people were so much in a big hurry about 3G on the iPhone because (1) I thought AT&T would charge more than $20/month for a 3G data plan - try $30 or $40 and (2) there is a good chance Apple would drop wi-fi capability once the iPhone is 3G.

Wi-fi is the populous choice. It allows the technology makers like Apple, cell phone makers like Nokia and little-guy-makers to freely create what they want and helps their strength vis-a-vis the carrier. All mobile phone makers get leverage with the carrier to the extent they can use wi-fi in place of cellular.

All along the carriers have been restricting trade in a monopolistic fashion (2-year contracts for example) and have been suppressing the expression of the mobile phone makers. Here's Steve rescuing the industry again if they could only admit it. He deserves some kudos.

Among others, Matt Hamblen at Computerworld has the full story.

Sunset iPhone/iPod touch RPG rocks

Wow! Those of you who have been waiting for an RPG shooter rejoice. This is a free, fun little web-base demonstration that will tide me over for a bit. Navigate to the Sunset game with your iPhone or iPod touch to play it. Made by Donald Hays.

On level 2. Took me a couple minutes to figure game play. Go to the site and start. Remember to save.

Got an EyeTV Hybrid, yay!

I'm not a big TV watcher. I've never owned a TIVO, I get the barebones cable with a few HD channels for about $25/month.

But, I did get a Sony 42" XBR TV this year and wanted something to take advantage of it and my iMac's 24" screen.

I've got the EyeTV Hybrid plugged into my iMac and a cable outlet. Without a cable box, I pay nothing for that extra cable connection.

Last night I recorded Lost episodes that were running back to back while watching a DVD on the TV. Nice. Full quality for this 3 hour program was 16 gigs. Not a problem with my 500 gig drive.

The recording looked awesome on my iMac. When I get an AppleTV, I'll try watching there.

I exported the recording to iPhone format and will be trying it out on my iPod touch. That 3 hour file will take up a little over 1 gig there.

For $100, this EyeTV Hybrid totally rocks!

Can Twitter Replace IM on the iPod touch?

Ever since I got my iPod touch during the holidays, I've been websurfing and tweetsurfing to learn about it. By the way, tweetsurfing is done by using Terraminds' free twitter search engine. At least, that's what I have been using quite happily.

One common complaint about the stock iPod touch is that it doesn't have an IM client built in. The iPhone also doesn't have an IM client but at least it has SMS as a substitute.

I have an iPhone and an iPod touch and I carry both around with me whenever I leave the house and most times in the house. So, I always have the SMS client of the iPhone. But, I also have twitter which I check regularly.

Maybe twitter can serve as a more generic, web-based way to stay in touch (no pun intended). I do think if you have an iPod touch, some kind of web-based IM or Twitter client would be essential. Of course, since everyone has a cell phone and a lot of people use SMS on whatever cell phone they have, I guess my iPod touch pals are covered there.

Now that you can make a webclip button for your favorite twitter client, you are set there.

One last issue is connectivity. Unfortunately the touch doesn't have Bluetooth so you can't get connectivity from your cell phone. That sucks and of course is almost certainly due to the demands of AT&T to keep the that sort of functionality for the iPhone only. Of course, too the iPhone's Bluetooth is crippled.

All this leads me to mention my hopes that somehow we can (1) be freed from the cellular provider obstruction of free wireless access or (2) we can get a lot more wi-fi hotspots out there. I have to believe the cell providers have killed the wi-fi proliferation that we used to see.

Finally, I can't get a decent AT&T signal in my new condo in Tiburon. Why oh why can't I talk on the phone using wi-fi in my house? I am very encouraged to see that T-Mobile is offering just that now with some phones like the BlackBerry Curve.

Update Jan 31: I am using wi-fi to make any calls outside my local calling area when I can with Skype. To clarify, I want the wi-fi in my iPhone to be able to use wi-fi to fill in when my EDGE voice quality drops. I believe that is what T-Mobile is starting to offer.

New Blog Look for the New Year

Sometime in the last week, I just got sick of the look of Tech Ronin. Too bad because it is a lot of work to change things. But then, it is quick to get started and that's what I've done so far.

Here's the new look. Yes it is still me. Still Tech Ronin. And this may be a transitional look. I'm not sure how much of this will stay but someone at TypePad put a lot of work into this look and I really like it. I want to add something so every link in the side columns isn't underlined, but other than that, this is AOK by me.

Right now I am doing spring cleaning of my long neglected link lists. It takes a while. You need to click every link and see if it works, change it if the URL has changed and delete things that are dead. Good stuff! Once I clean out the old, I can get more enthused about adding some new things.

My favorite new feature is the categories cloud. I've wanted one of these for forever and now it is a simple option to check or not check. That's what I like, click to get a new feature. I can program, but I'm busy and would rather get what I want without getting down and dirty with the code.

I have also added links to my flickr, del.icio.us and twitter accounts on the left. And a Save to del.icio.us link underneath each post. All by simple menu selections. Go Typepad!

iPhone Update Jan 17 '08

Firmware 1.1.3 has made the iPhone and iPod touch more useful and fun than ever and...

Wishlist:
Here are a few things I really want to see on the iPhone and iPod touch now that I'm back to the straight and narrow:

1. Notes syncing both ways. I need to be able to store information for reference on my iPhone or iPod touch without a hassle or hack. I wanted to put As We May Think by Vannevar Bush on their, for example.

2. A wireless keyboard. I want to be able to do what Palm users and I as one of those Palm users have done. Bring one of those little foldup keyboards with you with an iPhone and be able to type long communications not just little stuff - a paragraph or two on the onscreen keyboard.

3. Cut, Copy and Paste. Please.

Firmware 1.1.3:
1. Lyrics. Ooh. Had fun tonight grabbing tons of lyrics quickly with the aid or donationware: GimmeSomeTune. You can get fancy and use Automator to go through your music collection but for now I just installed this little program and it went and got album cover art and lyrics for most songs in my collection one at a time. It will keep searching if it can't find something right away and fill it in when it finds it. Very cool.

2. Webclips. Yeah that's fun. Especially since you can fill up to 9 home pages with buttons now and rearrange according to your own preferences.

3. Upgraded Google Maps. The locate me function isn't working very accurately, I can drop pins for now which is easier than typing in address info as your starting place.

Conclusion:
Apple really must be pushed to not have gotten more upgrades out for the iPhone by now. They do have a ton of plates in the air. In an interview in June, Steve said you can't just hire more people to get more done in response to questions about the delay of Leopard. I wonder if their past performance and stock price drives them. Actually I think it is the opportunity to change the world that can't be refused.