Flock Flop 1

Update on my Flock trial. I had downloaded the 1.2 version to try on the Mac while trying  the beta on Windows. I've given up on Flock on the Mac. It refuses to connect itself up properly with FaceBook in spite of my repeated attempts. It never seems to feel it is really logged in and repeatedly tells me so :-(

I'm having a bit better luck with the beta on Windows. I'll see how that goes before deciding whether to try the beta on the Mac.

Have to say the fact all the setup info and data can't be kept on a cloud seems like a real feature miss. A  real pain having to configure this on each computer.

iPhone 3G - small things matter

Having blasted a few aspects about the iPhone and MobileMe I thought I should add a little balance and add some things I really like. I'm going to start with a few points that show why Microsoft and their Windows Mobile just don't get it. Today's two points talk about what to me were major annoyances with WM 5 and 6.

First, in WM if you hit the volume key on the phone/PDA it is ambiguous exactly what volume is being adjusted. It depends on the "mode" the phone is in as well as the handset vendor's implementation. You might be adjusting the ringtone volume, key click volume, speakerphone volume, earpiece volume etc. On WM there is absolutely no visual feedback on exactly what is happening. One of the first things I noticed about the iPhone is that when I hit the volume keys it shows a speaker icon, shows the resultant volume setting, and also has some text below the speaker icon telling me what volume is being adjusted (e.g. ringtone). Some people may not care but I really appreciate these user friendly touches.

A second "small" item is one that caused me problems on a regular basis with WM's email client. Like most people even with 3G service I don't normally download entire attachments when looking at email messages. I regularly get attachments that are >1MB and especially on the small WM screens there is no point in trying to view them. However I routinely need to forward the message on to someone else - to hand off a issue, or pass on an FYI, etc. Now, in WM if you don't manually download the entire attachment before forwarding the message it will send it without the attachment. I got numerous "there was no attachment" responses due to this silent decision by WM. The iPhone, blessedly, handles the situation properly. When you forward a message that has attachments it asks you if you want it to include them. Wow, imagine that - letting the user decide what to do.

These small touches, which are a couple out of hundreds, that Apple includes in its products are why it is kicking other technology companies' butts in consumer products.

Flock

One of my favorite low-volume bloggers is Bryan Frank, a broadcast news photographer and all-around good guy in LA. I've been a reader for years and recently noticed his posts were made by something called "Flock". Being the curious type I clicked the link and found this Firefox/Mozilla browser called Flock that provides some cool "hooks" into your online presences (like Google and Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger and so forth). I'm sure I've seen mention of it but I'm so inundated with innovations, gadgets and new tools/sites it takes some effort for one to break through into my consciousness.

I decided to give the Flock 2 beta a try and this post is coming from Flock's built in blog creation tool Hope it works :-) I'll give Flock a couple of weeks of play time before deciding if it can earn a place in the starting line up of browsers (I sometimes have 3 different browsers running...). BTW Flock is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Well, this post should have had a tag line of something like "posted by Flock". You'll note it doesn't because it refused to post to my Blogger account. Filed some feedback on that. I'm using a beta version so I'm not going to ding Flock for now over this. Though the fact this is failing really undermines the value. I might have to forgo the beta and drop to the current stable version.

It Truly Is My Lucky Day!

Well, I snagged the Wii Fit via Amazon right before lunch so decided to browse the local Best Buy for games compatible with the balance board. Didn't notice much but saw - to my amazement - that they had several Mario Kart's on the shelf. I had been keeping an eye out for those in the local shops as well as online stores like Amazon but hadn't found any. Checking around just now Amazon itself still has no stock, nor does GameStop or Target show stock. Wal-Mart does list it as in stock.

Anyway, I grabbed one along with an extra wheel. We're gonna be busy with the Wii over Labor Day - that's for sure!

Wonderful if I'll win the lottery today too? ;-)

Hearting Amazon - the Wii Fit Chapter

I've liked Amazon from the beginning but as it expanded its offerings and services I came to totally love it. Innovation and value is a combination I can't resist!

Latest example is my purchase of a Wii Fit - without needing to spend a lot of time checking retailers or paying some "middle man" markup. When I checked Amazon.com awhile back I noticed that even though these were out of stock there was a link to have Amazon notify me via text message when stock arrived. Had never noticed this before but since I knew Wii Fit was hard to snag I signed myself up. Sure enough I got text messages on my iPhone when they were available. All I had to do was respond with "buyfit" to snag one. The first time I wasn't near my phone and they were gone by the time I responded. Twice more I missed out. I think once because I had a typo in "buyfit" - these things sell out nearly instantly.

However today I saw the message right away and had no typo in my "buyfit" response. Very soon I got a confirmation that I had snagged one to be shipped two-day for free (I have a Prime membership). I feel all lucky and proud today :-)

MobileMe does NOT do Windows

MobileMe has gotten a lot of bad press since it's introduction. Initially over service unavailability and instability. I never had too much trouble in that regards. But it's claim of working with Outlook on Windows is very nearly unfounded. I'm not saying it is impossible to get it to work but it is improbable for a tinkerer to get it working and impossible for the average "Joe/Jane". This is one of the latest threads over at Apple documenting the mess.

I'm a software R&D guy myself so I am familiar with the many challenges in producing large scale commercial products. For this reason I am often a lot more tolerant of issues I see. But in this case I can only conclude serious irresponsibility or incompetence was at play.

First, MobileMe on Windows will not work through a standard company firewall. At all. Now, there is nothing in the docs to say it will work. But that is no defense. Any use case around Outlook has to assume the user is on a corporate network. Now, I'd be willing to work around this but for the even worse defect - even on a completely open internet connection MobileMe syncing from Windows just DOES NOT work. Worse yet there are no error messages or any other helpful feedback on what is going wrong and/or why. This is a feature that is claimed to be supported. Worser and worser is Apple's silence about the problem happily letting its customers thrash around wasting time and energy on what is documented as a simple "for the rest of us" feature that is an unmitigated disaster. If you poke around the support threads you will see a few people say they "finally" got it to work (without a firewall/proxy) but there is always a caveat like "except for calendar syncing" or some such. You can be sure that if any of the kludge solutions posted was fully functional Apple would long ago have published a FAQ or Knowledge Base article with the solution.

Very hard to take Apple seriously in the enterprise software space given the severity of this issue and their response - or rather complete lack of substantive response. I still love my iPhone and am using MobileMe from my Mac. But I am completely warning my Windows-using friends away from MobileMe.

N.B. I am using Google's calendar sync app for Outlook as a kludge solution for calendar access. This has a lot of failings but at least it does allow me to view my work calendar from my iPhone...

New Favorite "Lay me Down"

On a very short road trip this weekend I think we found a new fave hotel chain for those family "lay me downs". The accompanying picture gives you a glimpse of why - a 42" plasma flat panel TV in the room. You can't see it in this image but there is a very novice friendly connector panel that makes it trivial to connect a laptop, game system etc. to this TV for your work or play pleasure. Just plug in the cable and hit the button and off you go. In addition to this sweet bit of tech the room was a bit larger than normal and the sitting area is separated from the sleeping area (even though this isn't billed as a suite style hotel). The sitting area has a generous sized and comfortable sofa plus a - yes - generous sized ottoman for your laziness pleasure. Rooms included a cordless phone, wireless internet, fridge and coffee maker.

The lobby area was contemporary but with warm colors so it didn't feel unfriendly or cold like some do. Well trained staff. Continental breakfast on the house and cooked items available day and night in exchange for some dinero. This chain includes a pool and a wine/beer bar as well. The price was very reasonable too.

Move over Hilton Garden Inn. Hyatt Place now owns us.

Serendipity

Just have to share this bit of serendipity, happy accident, or whatever you want to call it. My 4 year old daughter was playing around with my p&s camera during the oath ceremony and when I uploaded the pics later there were some pretty awesome looking abstract photos. The room was dark so I have no idea exactly what produced this effect - maybe some crazy flash reflection off of something? Best not to think about it and just enjoy it. BTW this is SOOC. Anyway, I think it is way cool :-) Click the image to see it larger on Flickr.

Please don't repost or otherwise use this image without my permission. Thanks!

Jott out of Beta

Jott has made the big move out of beta which, as you might guess, means it is no longer entirely free. Users (now customers!) have the option to stick with a free ad-supported service with limited capabilities or to sign up for pay-as-you-go or monthly service plans. The low-end "pro" service is only $3.95/month which is quite reasonable in my estimation and so I am going with that. Don't have any feedback on how intrusive the "ad-supported" ads will be. Details can be found here.

Also of note is the introduction of a Jott Express desktop application built using Adobe AiR. This is a small desktop app (for Windows and Mac) that allows you to quickly created and view Jott items without having to visit a web site or use a clunky web UI. Jott has also introduced integration with Microsoft Outlook meaning you can now use their voice transcription service to add Outlook calendar items, reminders and to draft email messages. 

Woo Hoo!

Here is a mosaic from yesterday's oath ceremony. Click on through to see some commentary I posted on Flickr. It was an exciting and event and very well done.

A very special day!

The Princess and I are now in the family and friends seating area for
the BH's Citizenship oath. A major life event making us all proud! As
you can see there will be a lot of new citizens today :)

More pics and info to come. But there are around 650 new citizens at this oath ceremony and it is the second session of the day!

Jott Multi-tool

Like many new iPhone owners I quickly downloaded a number of free apps when the AppStore opened. Many were removed as useless or after a period of benign neglect. One of the definite keepers is an application called Jott.

Jott is actually a free service that bills itself as providing "voice to text" transcription. I had checked on it awhile back, when I was using a Windows Mobile phone, and didn't find the value proposition appealing. When I noticed a free app for the iPhone I decided to download it and give it a try. Boy has this app caused me to completely re-evaluate Jott! The change is something akin to finding out the unassuming-looking guy next to you on that coast-to-coast flight is actually a professional story teller willing to entertain you! What makes the difference?

The iPhone has a number of missing features, like all smart phones. One of which is the lack of a real to-do or list application. The Jott application provides a powerful list/to-do capability that can be accessed anywhere since it syncs to a cloud on the backend. Some use cases to illustrate its usefulness:

• Open the Jott app on the iPhone and add a few tasty tidbits to your grocery shopping list
• Call Jott while driving and use your voice to send an email to you office address reminding you to complete that action item that slipped your mind
• Access the Jott website and create a new to-do list of tasks you want to do in preparation for the birth of your son
• While driving call Jott and tell it to add a meeting to your Google calendar
  

Jott does this and much more. You can create as many distinct lists/to-dos as you wish to keep parts of your life compartmentalized. When you call Jott to send yourself a note it will ask if you'd like it to set a reminder.

Jott's list features, without voice transcription, are superior to most of the fee-based iPhone apps I looked at. When combined with the web/cloud backend and voice transcription this blows those away. Neither the list nor transcription capability would likely have sold me on Jott. But the combination is killer. And did I mention free? Visit jott.com to learn more.

What I don't miss about Florida...

is the hurricanes. Fay looks fairly minor as hurricanes go but could still cause a lot of damage and heartache for a number of folks. In my fairly short time living in south Florida we went through about 5 hurricanes 3 of which were pretty much direct hits. Once we were without power for 4 days (which was short compared to most folks). Another time we were without power for 2 days. In context these power outages and the attendant lack of any fresh milk, produce, meat etc. in stores covered a huge area. We suffered property damage several times but were fortunate compared to the many who lost their homes or suffered severe damage with insufficient (or simply dishonest) insurance coverage.

My best hopes and prayers to those in Fay's path.

Now for Something Completely Different

Today was my wife's second major sonogram. Like the first one everything turned out to be normal and healthy. The big news was that the baby has shifted around make a c-section unlikely. This is a big relief to my BH :-)

The photo was snapped while we waited for the doctor. Can't wait for the delivery date!

Life Poster

I've seen life posters around and found them intriguing. A few years back someone posted instructions on how to create them manually in an old version of iPhoto. With the passing of my mom earlier this year I embarked on a project to scan in a bunch of old photos, mostly B&W, to share with family members to help in remembrances. It struck me as I was working on this that it was going to be a bit of a shame for all of us to look at those memories only to file them in a folder to, in spite of best intentions, be forgotten. Or to be forced to only pick a couple to frame and leave out. A Life Poster project seemed like the perfect solution.

I recently did some searching around and after looking at a number of approaches including scripting, Picasa, and shareware tools I settled on a nifty little commerical application called Posterino. I liked the convenience of its UI plus its ability to create irregular posters. Unlike Posterino a number of the tools force you to have every photo the same size and aspect ratio.

I downloaded the demo version of Posterino and in not much more than one hour I learned the program and populated an irregular poster with nearly 100 images. Posterino allows you to individually resize each image to fit its spot in the poster as well as repositioning each one so the proper portion of the photo is being shown. Another key feature is the ability to simply drag a photo from one part of the poster to another - when you drop the photo in the new location the application automatically swaps with the previous photo in that spot (this is configurable behavior). Since I already had all of the old photos in a project in Aperture the fact Posterino could directly access my photo library was a big plus in quickly finding and placing the images.

Once you're done you can transfer the resulting poster image into iPhoto for ordering via its Kodak interface, upload it to Flickr, or export it to a file for other uses or for transmission to other printing services.

I am normally quite hesitant to spend money for software to automate a task I will do only infrequently. However in this case I think the money was well spent in ensuring a high quality result in an amount of time I could afford to spend on the project. Plus the license fee is about the same as the cost of one large poster print and so a misfire in creation of the poster to print would eat up any license fee expense. The demo is fully functional but does place a large image over the top of exports until licensed. This means you can give it a complete dry run to see if it will meet your needs before forking over your hard earned cash. Wander over here for more information.

Not wanting to completely leave out the Windows users, I found a nice blog entry at HelpMerick.com describing some options for you. Click here to give it a read.

Bringing Aperture and the World Together

Most digital cameras still lack GPS and hence their photos are not geotagged/location-aware. I've long made the effort to manually tag location info on photos I upload to Flickr but it is cumbersome in their UI. My iPhone has geotagging on its photos which has whetted my appetite for a convenient way to add this info to shots with my far superior Nikon D40x.

You can imagine my delight when Maperture was released. This is a plugin for Apple's Aperture tool that works with Google's mapping feature. So far this new plugin looks great and even better it is another freebie.

Thanks ubermind!

Radiant Green

Radiant Green, originally uploaded by Road Fun.

I really liked this houseplant image and wanted to post it on my blog for those who don't wander over to my Flickr stream. I'll do this from time to time...

P.S. The image is copyright and cannot be downloaded or reproduced in any fashion without permission.

Crikey - Apple's on Fire!!!!

A fire at the mothership can't be good. But it doesn't sound too serious either :-)

iPhone Disappointment Alert

No, I'm not going to start dissing the iPhone overall. In fact I love mine - there I said it! But there are a few issues that to me are major shortcomings. I'm going to blog a few of these so others considering a purchase - and it isn't a cheap one taking service into account - can be as well informed as possible.

Today's complaint is about the horridly anemic Alert sound. In my case this is specifically a problem on meeting reminders. My previous Crackberry and Windows Mobile 5/6 devices provided robust reminders - distinctive sounds that would repeat for some time in order to get your attention.

The iPhone's Alert sound, which cannot be changed, is first of all barely at the level of a beep even on the loudest setting. Even worse it only sounds once! Unbelievable to the point of rendering the iPhone useless as a reminder device. The only workaround is to manually add Alarms in the Clock application. Alarms have a pretty robust sound which is configurable. So I know Apple knows how to do this Alert thing properly if they chose to...

Klick for Flickr

One of my favorite iPhone apps is called Klick. A deceptively simple app that brings a whole lot of capability to anyone who is a fan of Flickr. Klick is much more powerful than it's competitor Exposure and in my experience it is more stable and has a very cool UI. Klick displays your contact's photos and has a UI that allows faving and commenting from the iPhone. You can also view your own stream and the comments folks are making. A quick tap on your photo shows the most recent comments. Clicking on the comment bubble takes you to a screen that shows all the comments on the photo. You can also view photos "Near Me" using the iPhone 3G GPS as well as your favorites and a sampling of Interesting photos from other users. The developers are extremely responsive to questions and enhancement suggestions.

Almost amazingly, given its breadth of features, this app is free in the AppStore. If you use Flickr you gotta try this one out.

Funky Sunrise

Saw this rather funky sunrise driving in this morning. Only had a
second to take a quick iPhone shot. The image is SOOC. I think it has some potential so I will likely touch it up later and post it on Flickr.

French Swim Team

I heard the French swim team was talking smack about the US men's team prior to the relay. Even spat in the water in the US team's lane. Really bad sportsmanship. But the best men won when the US out-touched France at the end. The French were big "favorites" but by their actions became losers (in the race and otherwise). Talk about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory!

Let's Make Cookies!

The Princess, Aunt and a cousin making mom's famous oatmeal raisin
cookies for the gang.

Where is this headed? Why does it exist?

Well, in typical form I'll answer the last question first. I've decided to create a blog to start to pull together the many online "presences" I have collected over time. Each one has a useful place in providing friendship, connections, useful info and general life enrichment. It will take me some effort to pull this off but I do think a blog is the best current vehicle to link all this together. Hopefully to your benefit as well as mine.

Where is this headed? Frankly, I don't know. So let's just enjoy the journey and enjoy the sights (and sites?!?) along the way. Thanks for reading this rather uninteresting post :-)

Threatening Clouds

Took the above photo using my iPhone 3G a few weeks back. Some dramatic-looking clouds brought to us by Dolly - but we didn't even get any rain from this. You'll be hearing more about my iPhone in coming posts. But I promise there will be a lot of other topics too. Apple haters fear not.