Eating My Own Dog Food
What? Another incarnation of The Gizmo Ranch?
Yep. As many of you know, I recently had a book published by Take Control Books called
No Comment
From a Lenovo ad that popped up on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) today:
Maybe they wouldn’t need the freakin’ “Virua Recovery Button” if they ran a different OS.
Back to Life
Well, I’m back up and running after a couple of days without my Main Mac, which is a 20″ Intel iMac. I had a failure in the SuperDrive (DVD burner) in which a DVD got stuck. Ouch. Well, it’s back and happy, so life is good. It’s also good that my wife is out of the hospital - she had severe abdominal pains for a few days and ended up in the Emergency Room yesterday. Fortunately, it’s something that she’ll be able to have fixed with minor surgery in the near future.
As noted in my previous post, I dumped Cingular. I am selling my Palm Treo 650 (New! In Box!) on eBay ASAP, and the old iPaq 4150 is going to be sold as well. I have a brand new T-Mobile MDA sitting in front of me syncing to my Mac right now. I am totally in love with this device, which means I’ll have to do a review. The MDA is the HTC Wizard, AKA iMate K-Jam, AKA Cingular 8125. The great thing about this is that I now have a phone with really good service in my office, and I’m saving money in the process. T-Mobile has a $29.95 all-you-can-eat GPRS/EDGE/WiFi plan, which means that anywhere they have their EDGE network or a T-Mobile HotSpot, I can connect. Sweeeeet. Here’s what it looks like with the keyboard out:
Since I’m a licensed user of MarkSpace’s The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, I downloaded their latest beta version that support Windows Mobile 5.0, and just synced it all up. Niiiice. Now I just have to see if it avoids overwriting voice tags when I sync.
Dumping Cingular
Have you ever done something, then regretted it?
I had been a very happy T-Mobile customer for over three years when I decided to switch to Cingular so I could get a Treo 650 and the advantages of an EDGE network compared to the slow GPRS connection I had with T-Mobile. That was December - now 7 months later, I’m ready to jump back to T-Mobile in a heartbeat.
Why?
First, my voice service sucks. I don’t know if it’s the way that Cingular has outfitted the Treo 650, or if it’s just that I’m in a null point on their network, but I have multiple dropped calls every day. While I was with T-Mobile, I don’t think I ever had a dropped call. It’s not just at my home that this happens; I travel a lot around the USA and the service seems to be shaky everywhere. My guess is that the Cingular implementation of the Treo 650 leaves a lot to be desired.
Second, the phone sucks. I’ve used a Sprint Treo 650 and never had a problem, but with this particular implementation I seem to have nothing but issues. For example, I’ve set the auto-off for 3 minutes, but the device will often power down within 15-20 seconds. Nice, huh? That’s not all. The Cingular Treo 650 also resets while I’m in the middle of phone calls, doesn’t seem to like the Voice Dial application (crashes or locks up while I’m using it), and all-in-all just seems to misbehave more than the Sprint model. This has been true with both my original Treo 650 and the replacement Cingular sent after I complained.
Finally, Cingular’s customer service sucks. With T-Mobile, I was usually talking to a customer service rep within a minute. On Cingular, I’ve had to wait upwards of 15 minutes to talk to someone who usually passed me along to another person. Take my recent call requesting an equipment replacement - During the hour that it took to get the problem resolved, I talked to four different people, all of whom asked me exactly the same questions. Is their customer service application so fragmented that every little department has their own version?
I know that I’m going to have to pay the penalty to cancel my service, but as far as I’m concerned it’s worth it. I’m thinking of moving to a T-Mobile MDA (Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone). If I don’t like it or it drops calls as well, I’m going to swap it out in the first 30 days for a BlackBerry 8700g. I like the BlackBerry 8700g , but there are a few applications that I need to run (VNC software, for example) that are prohibitively expensive on the Blackberry platform.
I’d be interested to see if other users have had similar problems with Cingular. Leave your comments below!
Press Release: VITO Theme Editor and VITO Screen Capture
Take advantage of your desktop PC to create new themes for PPC and make screenshots
June 14, 2006 – VITO Technology presents its new products for your Pocket PC’s big brother – the desktop PC. VITO Theme Editor and VITO Screen Capture offer you some basic functions for managing your PPC. These desktop applications both run on Windows 2000/XP desktop computer and need Windows Mobile 2003 or Windows Mobile 5.0 on your Pocket PC.
VITO Theme Editor is a powerful tool to customize your PPC by creating new themes. Your can change the color of every interface item and a background picture on the Today screen or in the start menu. The intuitive interface allows you easily change parts of interface and simultaneously watch the changes at the image. Every step you take while creating a new theme is accompanied by onscreen prompts. Make your Pocket PC look according to your taste!
VITO Screen Capture is another useful utility for making screenshots of your Pocket PC on the desktop PC. Its main advantage is its simplicity: you just connect your device to the desktop computer and VITO Screen Capture automatically detects your Pocket PC or Smartphone. Now you are one click from capturing the screen image. The screenshot is immediately displayed on the desktop PC and can be saved as a bitmap image file or copied to the clipboard.
VITO Technology ltd. is known for its high-tech products in the field of Pocket PC and Symbian software, GPS navigation and custom projects. Introduced in the present article VITO Screen Capture and VITO Theme Editor are desktop utilities for screencapturing on PPC/Smartphones and creating your own themes for PPC.
VITO Screen Capture: http://vitotechnology.com/en/products/screencapture.html
VITO Theme Editor: http://vitotechnology.com/en/products/themeeditor.html
Press Release: My New Book Is Available
“Take Control of iWeb” Helps Readers Make Great-Looking Web Sites
Ithaca, NY USA (June 6, 2006)–Apple’s iWeb is meant to make it easy for anyone to design a great-looking, media-rich Web site, but iWeb users who need help with the basics or who are unhappy with amateurish results can now find help in Steve Sande’s 123-page ebook,”Take Control of iWeb.”
Crafted with an eye to helping both the novice and those who are familiar with Web design, the ebook assists readers with the mechanics of using iWeb and with more sophisticated techniques, such as image maps and masking. Readers learn the best ways to make basic iWeb pages, including blog, podcast, and photo pages (via integration with the other iLife ‘06 applications), how to encode podcasts and videos for use with iWeb, edit graphics so a site loads faster, and
even set up an online store. For those with multiple sites or multiple Macs, the ebook explains how to edit one site on two Macs and how to put multiple sites in multiple iWeb files. “Take Control of iWeb” includes instructions for uploading a site either to Apple’s .Mac service or to a third-party Web host.
Take Control editor in chief Tonya Engst said, “What’s great about this ebook is that it doesn’t just walk you through the basic features in iWeb to make a cookie-cutter Web site. Instead, it explains how to use those features to make a customized site.”
Book Details
————
“Take Control of iWeb: iLife ‘06 Edition” by Steve Sande
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/iweb.html
PDF format, 123 pages, free 28-page sample available
Publication date: June 5, 2006
Price: $10
About TidBITS and Take Control Books:
TidBITS Electronic Publishing has been publishing highly regarded news and editorial since 1990 when Adam and Tonya Engst created their online newsletter, TidBITS, about Macintosh- and Internet-related topics. Their Take Control series has helped many thousands of readers with high-quality, timely, real-world, cost-effective documentation since 2003. To learn more, visit our FAQ at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/faq.html
Press Release: VITO Ringtone Editor
Start creating your own ringtones with VITO Ringtone Editor
June 29, 2006 – VITO Technology announces its brand-new product VITO Ringtone Editor. With VITO Ringtone Editor you can easily create your own ringtones. It supports Smartphones and Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003 and higher.
VITO Ringtone Editor is the quickest way to create your own ringtones. All you need to do is listen to the melody and choose the part of it you want to assign as a ringtone. User-friendly intuitive interface simplifies the process greatly. After you have started VITO Ringtone Editor, browse the folders to find the necessary music file in MP3, WAV or OGG format and start playing it.
While the melody is playing you mark the beginning and the end of a ringtone: just a matter of two presses. The ringtone is created! Now you can immediately assign it as a default ringtone or just save it. You can also replay the ringtone and if it doesn’t meet your expectations you can play the original file once again to select a different part. Create your own collection of ringtones with ease!
VITO Technology ltd. is known for its high-tech products in the field of Pocket PC and Symbian software, GPS navigation and custom projects. Introduced in the present article VITO Ringtone Editor is a useful utility for creating custom ringtones for Smartphones and PPC.
Useful links:
Screenshots: http://vitotechnology.com/upload/iblock/07e0ae69b5d88df01db63fd55b6bb52b.gif
Program page: http://vitotechnology.com/en/products/ringtoneeditor_smartphone.html
-
Joy of Tech!
-
MacLevelTen
