Introducing “Talkin’ iPhone!” - The iPhone Ranch Podcast
It’s really hard to keep me from talking. I’m so enthusiastic about the iPhone that I’ve taken my podcasting background (I run Podbus.com, a podcast hosting service) and put it to work on Talkin’ iPhone!, a semi-regular podcast about nothin’ but iPhone.
Right now, you can’t subscribe to the podcast through the iTunes Store since it hasn’t been added to the directory. But you CAN listen to it here by clicking the player button below, and you can also subscribe by opening iTunes, choosing “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast”, and entering the following URL: http://www.iphoneranch.com/?feed=podcast.
And here’s a new feature for iPhone Ranch readers and Talkin’ iPhone listeners - you can now leave me voice feedback by calling 303-800-4568 or Skyping stevesande and leaving voice mail. Long distance phone charges may apply. If your comment is less than 10 minutes long, includes your name, and is insightful, I’ll use it on the podcast!
My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-58f8ffb50900f5065fd4478ef5a5fd5f}
Books on iPhone
The iPhone helped me to move from carrying three gadgets with me most of the time - a phone, an iPod nano, and a laptop. Now it’s going to lighten my load on trips by providing me with a source of reading material!
There’s a new web app for iPhone called “Books on iPhone” which is exactly that - a repository of over 20,000 Project Gutenberg copyright-free texts that have been formatted for iPhone and made available at www.booksoniphone.com. Just point your iPhone to that URL, create a new account (it saves your list of books that you want to read), and then start searching. Note that if you go to the Books on iPhone site with any other browser, you’ll end up with an error message that informs you that you need to visit the site from an iPhone.
While I don’t find the search capabilities to be the best right now — I’d like to be able to browse a list by category, thank you — it’s still a great little application. There was one small bug I ran into when I tried to save some settings, but I’m sure this will be worked out as this moves from being a beta application to a full in-production app. The folks at Books on iPhone are also asking for authors who would like to make their works available without copyright to the general public. If you own an iPhone and love to write, here’s your chance to get published!
Popcap Bejeweled for iPhone - It’s FREE!
Attention iPhone Geeks! Popcap’s classic jewel-matching game, Bejeweled, is now available as a free web app from the company. All you need to do is point Safari Mobile to http://www.popcap.com and the app will load. The screenshot below is of the online version of the game, but the iPhone version is very similar and plays very well. You’ll have to get used to tapping on those jewels with your finger!
One Month With An iPhone
Wow, after all of that anticipation waiting for the iPhone to appear it seems amazing that I’ve now had mine for a month! Here are some random thoughts about that first month:
? AT&T’s coverage doesn’t suck as badly as I thought it would from my previous experiences. In fact, as soon as I can get all my clients used to calling me on the new number, reprint my business cards, and update my company website, I’m going to drop my T-Mobile account. That’s something I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do.
? The only bug that really seems to bother me so far is when Safari Mobile crashes while loading complex pages. That’s a bit annoying. I haven’t really seen many other issues, which means that this was a very clean device. I guess taking all of those developers off of the Leopard project and putting ‘em to work on iPhone was a good idea!
? I’m starting to see many iPhones in the wild. Several of my consulting clients have them or are thinking about getting ‘em, and every time I show one to someone who hasn’t yet stopped by an Apple or AT&T store to play with one, I think I sell one more… Too bad I can’t get a commission!
? Some of the web apps people are generating for the iPhone are pretty good, while others are pure crap. Good apps will tend to win out over time since nobody will download the junk and that will discourage the developers who just don’t get it.
? I’ve used my iPhone for a month and have had it sitting in my pocket unprotected most of that time. Total number of scratches? Zero. I do think I may get an iSkin Revo just so I can keep it looking new. I hate the InCase leather belt clip case that I got at the Apple Store…
? Do I find myself missing 3G data service? Not really. EDGE is sufficient for most of my mobile surfing, and if I really need speed I can usually find a Wi-Fi hot spot somewhere close by. Would it be nice to have 3G? Of course!
? What other accessories do I need? I’d like to be able to charge my iPhone in my car if I need to, so I’ll probably buy one of the Xtrememac InCharge Car Chargers for those situations where I’m not near a power outlet and absolutely need to “top off” the iPhone’s battery.
? I found it really amazing that I can actually view and use many of the administration tools that I need to work with for my websites. I couldn’t use these at all on Windows Mobile, and found it difficult to use those tools with a Palm Treo.
? I have been recommending to friends and relatives that they might want to wait until the 1.1 revision of the iPhone software comes out before buying one. Hey, I’m used to using new devices so some of the little quirks just seem “normal”. Someone coming from a DumbPhone to an iPhone might find those quirks annoying as hell. I’d guess that Apple will have an update available sometime in August.
August 7th Rollout for New iMacs?
Now that we don’t have the iPhone to speculate about anymore, people have been pointing their attention to the rumored release of a completely redesigned series of iMacs. The rumor states that the 17″ model will disappear and the 20″ and 24″ models will receive a speed boost, new keyboard design, and a brushed aluminum case to replace that Oh So Tired gleaming white plastic look. A number of sites have had pictures of the alleged new keyboard, which is only about a half inch thick and uses the same keys found on the MacBook.
At the same time, we’re supposed to see iLife ‘07 or iLife Leopard or whatever the heck it’s called. Frankly, I still think it’s going to become part of Leopard and that we’ll have to wait until October for the release of the iPackage.
Of course, all of this is speculation, and we may or may not see anything on August 7th. But it’s sure a lot of fun to watch everyone scrambling to try to foretell the future!
Fudder.de: The very first iPhone
German bloggers at Fudder.de have dragged up this wonderful photo of an Apple design from 1983 that never made it into production. This was to be a desk phone (you know, that type that has a wire hanging off of it?) with an LCD that would let you do a number of things, including writing checks (how quaint!). One of the bloggers is Marc Esslinger, son of famous designer Hartmut Esslinger of frog design. The elder Esslinger designed a number of devices for Apple, including the Apple IIc - Apple’s first “portable” computer.
It’s cool to see the entire gallery of Esslinger designs - click here to view. And it’s so nice to know that Apple still has that passion for good design.
Technorati Tags: Apple
The iPhone “Security Issue”
Geeeeeeze. Some organizations really go overboard in their hatred of the iPhone. SPI Labs, which just happens to be part of SPI Dynamics, a company that makes a security assessment tool, came out with a “warning” about a security issue with the iPhone related to the fact that it can dial numbers with a simple tap on a phone number listed on a web page or in an email. Apparently, they see this as a huge problem, with concerns about the following attacks:
iPhone Blogging
The question du jour - can I update iPhone Ranch from my iPhone? Absolutely! I’m sitting at a table at the Maggiano’s restaurant in St. Louis near the Galleria, and I was able to bring up the WordPress dashboard and start typing away. If I’m able to insert pictures that I take with the iPhone camera, who needs a computer for blogging?
Telemoose: The most dangerous iPhone application?
OK, so I’m on the mailing list for Karelia Software, and they announced today that they’ve updated Sandvox, their cool and easy web development package, with some iPhone-happy templates. Then I notice that they’ve done a little iPhone dev work as well, and that they’ve come out with a web app called Telemoose that is an iPhone front end to Amazon.com.
Well, soon after giving it a peek with my iPhone, I had ordered three books for a total of $39 worth of dead trees. Damn, this is a dangerous application. Karelia notes that David Pogue, who griped about AT&T’s “slow EDGE network” in his initial iPhone review, should consider giving Telemoose a try. Great idea, but not if he doesn’t want to spend a ton of money buying goodies from Amazon! To start exercising your credit card, go ahead and point Mr. or Ms. iPhone to http://telemoose.com.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Software
Using iPhone With Kerio Mail Server
I’m a huge fan of Kerio Mail Server, which is Exchange-compatible groupware software that runs on Windows and Mac servers and can be accessed by (for those of you who know what this means) Exchange, IMAP, POP and Webmail. KMS has also has the ability to push email to BlackBerrys through a third-party add-on, and also supports push to Windows Mobile devices.
Since I have a number of clients who are using KMS, I’ve been interested to hear what they have available for iPhone now, and what the plans for this company are in the near future. I received an email from Chris Peluso, Kerio’s Director of Sales for North American, stating that at the present time KMS users can point their browsers to https://mail.domain.com/pda, where mail.domain.com should be replaced by the usual webmail path to the mail server. I tried this out, and it worked very well. Chris also mentioned that Kerio will have an announcement specifically regarding iPhone support coming out in the very near future.
It’s great to see that we’ll soon have a number of enterprise-quality groupware solutions available for iPhone!
Technorati Tags: iPhone, email
iPhone: Will it blend?
Yes, it does! Not for the faint of heart…
Ten Years Later: A Look At Newton and iPhone
Ten years ago, I was a Newton Developer. Well, at least I had the development tools and was writing some software, although my programming skills sucked. But I was one of the lucky few to be part of the Apple Personal Interactive Electronics (Apple PIE) Newton Pioneer Developers. By 1997, I had upgraded to a Newton Messagepad 2000, which would be my last Newton for a while. The MessagePad 2000 was amazing at the time, with a 162 MHz StrongARM SA-110 processor, 5 MB of RAM, two PCMCIA slots for expansion, a 480 x 320 16-bit backlit greyscale display, and all of the amazing software that we Newton fans knew and loved.
About the same time that I purchased my iPhone, I also bought a “cherry” Newton MessagePad 2100. This was the last of the MessagePads to be developed, varying only in the amount of built-in RAM (8 MB). After firing this baby up the other day, it amazed me with some of the features that still aren’t equaled with most of today’s PDAs:
- Assist - simply write something like “Lunch with Jackie next Wednesday” on the MessagePad’s screen, tap the Assist button, and the device would create a new calendar event for 11:30 AM the following Wednesday with someone named Jackie as an attendee. Amazing!
- Really good handwriting recognition - The original Newton was panned by the press for having lousy handwriting recognition, and of course they never followed up to talk about how good it was by the time the MessagePad 2100 came around. How good is it? I find it to be much more accurate than Transcriber (built into Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phones) and Transcriber is pretty damned good!
- An incredibly easy-to-use user interface - Everything was based on the idea of a piece of paper, which could be scrolled indefinitely, cut off, written on, tossed into the trash, or act as a “window” into some application.
- Huge battery life, which unfortunately meant huge batteries as well! I remember being able to use my MessagePad 2000 for up to 30 hours without recharging (with the backlight off).
- A unique data store called the “Soup” in which data and metadata floated about, then were accessed by the various applications.
The remarkable thing is to think about how far we’ve come in terms of communications in those 10 years. With the MessagePad 2000, I was limited to a dial-up connection to the Internet through my ISP at the time. I was probably one of the few people who actually did wireless data with the Newton MessagePad - I had a portable acoustical coupler that plugged into the modem on one end, then strapped onto my cell phone with Velcro on the other end. It was easy to amaze and impress people by sending emails and faxes with this mashup. Now I can literally connect to anyone, anywhere with the iPhone through Email, SMS and phone calls. If I’m near an open Wi-Fi hotspot, I just jump on that connection, but if I’m not, EDGE is a hell of a lot faster than 300 baud dialup!
Movable Beast Post –> Ten Years Later: A Look At Newton and iPhone
I’ve posted a short article on my other blog, Movable Beast, that compares the 10 year-old Apple Newton MessagePad with a brand new Apple iPhone. What’s surprising, other than how damned small the iPhone is compared to the old “Newt”, is that there are still some Newton features that are well beyond what iPhone or any other mobile device can do today!
Click here to read the article!
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Newton MessagePad
Yet Another Sign That Steve Ballmer Is Clueless
Today’s Rocky Mountain News had a short article about Microsoft CEO’s keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver this week. Of course Mr. Ballmer had this wonderful statement to make about the iPhone:
He gave passing reference to Apple’s new iPhone. He said that one thing Apple and Microsoft agree on is that mobile devices will become richer for consumers, and then he referred to the Apple phone as a “heavyweight operating system, blah blah blah.”
Is this man on drugs or what? What a dick.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is a dick
iPhoneDrive
In my book “Take Control of Your iPod: Beyond the Music“, one of the big things I talk about is using the iPod as a backup drive. An iPhone is supposed to be an iPod, right? So how come Apple left out the capability to store files from your Mac on your iPhone?
Never fear, the Ecamm Network folks have just shipped iPhoneDrive ($9.95), a package that runs on Macs only and enables a disk mode so you can drag ‘n drop files onto your iPhone like there was no tomorrow! You need to install the application on any Mac that you’ll be moving data to/from, so you can’t just walk up to any old Mac and pull your files off. Since I currently use disk mode on my 4GB iPod nano to keep backups of special files that I use for the classes I teach, I’ll now be using iPhoneDrive and my iPhone to do this. That’s one less device, one less power brick, and one less cable I’ll have to carry on my trips.
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Joy of Tech!
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MacLevelTen
