A Peek at iPhone 3rd-party Apps

In June iPhone owners can expect an avalanche of new capabilities being added to their iPhones with the new 2.0 operating system, an apps installer and the officially sanctioned Apple Apps Store. With all the talk and excitement building for the new iPhone, Apple stock prices have soared and analysts have set new targets in excess of $215 a share.

One such new application in development is iControl, a software application on your iPhone that will allow you to monitor the critical security devices in your home -- cameras, thermostats, heating and air-conditioning, lights and locks. On your iPhone, you will be able to monitor remote-access systems via broadband internet rather than on telephone lines as many smart home systems today require.

Another application in development with funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers iFund is Whrrl by Pelago, a Seattle based company located in the WaMu Tower. Whrrl is an internet 2.0 social discovery service that allows iPhone users to discover places "through the eyes of your friends and poeple you trust." The designers of Whrrl say that you will be able to "track the places you've been and the places you want to go." A beta version of the Whrrl is currently available for download from the Pelago web site

Apple has also acquired a Chinese third-party handwriting recognition application that will give iPhone 2.0 users the ability to write text by hand that will then be translated into text font on their touchpad screen. The application developed for entering Chinese characters is already available under the name HWPen for jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch.

GigaOm and Wired magazine have been reporting that the new iPhone to be released in June will have true GPS chips onboard. The rumors started to fly fast and furious when geotaged code was observed in the iPhone SDK. The Google maps application on the iPhone using wifi cell tower triangulation technologies has been very popular on the iPhone, however, with 3G and the new GPS technology it will become much more accurate and powerful as a platform for new application development.

iCall is a new application being developed for the iPhone that will allow its users to make and receive phone calls using the internet rather than the exclusive contract Apple has with AT&T in the U.S. and with other providers in foreign countries. The features of the new third-party app will allow you to integrate with your address book, customize voicemail options all while calling using a wifi connection. Also, the application encourages you to move away from using your expensive cell network plan minutes and move your calls to VOIP. As Walt Mossberg commanded, "Break the Lock!"

Loopt, a free social mapping application that uses location finder API in the iPhone to let you combine a GPS like searching for entertainment, restaurants and coffee-shops with social networking to hook up with friends, AIM buddies and contacts.

eBay has announced a client-side application that allows you to sign-in, search, preview photos of items for sale, monitor the bidding, and bid on items at auction on their service. It will be free on the Apple Apps store as soon as it opens.

TypePad Mobile is a free photo blogging service that allows you to take a photo on iPhone, upload it to the TypePad, and text and make mobile blogging much easier.

Associated Press has built a free mobile news network using location API it knows where you are and in stores information based on your location and it combines text, images and video directly to the iPhone and it allows you to send new images and stories to AP and they will weave it into the news after review by their editors.

Pangea makes games and Enigmo and Croman Rally are two of their games that use the iPhone itself as the controller will be for sale on the Apple Apps store for $9.99.


Mark Terry' application for MooCowMusic for the iPhone Band creates music on the iPhone itself using virtual instruments (Keyboard, Funky Drummer, 12 Bar Blues, and Bassist) allows an iPhone user to play instruments on their phone with simple touch user keys.

MLB.com has developed "At Bat" which lists all the days games and up to the minute line scores and even video of all the games as being played with a few minute time delay. At this time it is not known if the app will be sold or if you'll need to subscribe to the service but for baseball fans this is a "gotta-have-it" app.

Modality is a medical learning applications with illustrations of the complex parts and structures of the human body with instant mobile access and also search the web for additional information outside what the app provides. All these apps are indications that a huge variety of new programs and tools are coming to the iPhone and it has become a operating platform to rival Windows and Mac OS.

Other big news that seems to have made its way from the Apple rumor sites and now out into mainstream news services (BBC) is that Apple could drop the price of its new 3G iPhone to compete with the rift-raft of imitators and handset manufactors like Motorola and Noika who have begun to feel the heat Apple design has brought to the world of cell phones. That price has been rumored as low as $199 for the entry level 8GB iPhone.

Apple iMac Touch

Rumors are flying again as we approach yet another big Steve Jobs keynote in mid-June. 3G iPhones to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the most revolutionary cell phone in history are pretty much a given.

The new Apple Store Apps and version 2.0 with an applications installer are a certainity with a multitude of new 3rd-party iPhone applications. Talk is that Apple might announce a video camera/iChat capability for the iPhone but this is more speculation than confirmed.

But how about the Apple iMac Touch - Apple's possible foray into touch displays that remove the keyboard and mouse and utilize Apple's incredible touch screen technologies. Fact or fantasy? - you decide.

The Captain's Beard-off

According to CNN Money, there are a number of Silicon Valley mogals artfully engaged in a beard-off. Beards are back bigtime dude. Included in the ranks of the execs taking on the pirate look are Oracle's Larry Ellison, Pixar's Ed Catmull, Flickr's Stewart Butterfield and Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales.

And, of course, who could overlook the exec with the biggest lead in voting for the best beard Steve Jobs. Vote for yourself here but the judges will say otherwise... Michael Copeland, a editor at Fortune, credits Jobs with doing more than any other executive to forward facial hair among his peers among other innovations.

Fake Steve Jobs credits his masterful beard with Arafat-like salt and pepper perfection to Annalisa his colorist.

Apple TV 2.0 Still Far From Being a Media Star

Apple excels in personal media, communications, and computing devices because their user interface and integrated hardware/software platform serves up the best experience for its owners. For that reason, I've found Apple TV is a surprise disappointment since the linearity and deeply embedded menu user interface in Apple TV is retro early 80s computing, albeit with nice fonts. With this media device they have fallen short of the standard they have set in personal computing.

Almost everything with Apple TV is an embedded text menu. Okay, there are some non-interactive pictures and icons but you really cannot point and click, drag-and-drop or more effectively organize with them. When you start up the Apple TV, you get a text list of seven items and moving the selector (or might as well be a cursor) down the list will produce a cascading list of items you can access with the right arrow on the remote to select yet more text.

The style of this interface reminds me of DOS in 1982 or the various shell programs (like Peter Norton's shell) you could install on your IBM XT to make it a more user friendly text menu system of navigation. It was slow and arduous back then and still is today.

Add to that the fact that searching is a one letter at a time process in .Mac galleries, Flickr, or YouTube that is slow and painfully unforgiving - push the wrong button and your back to letter "A" and the drawing board - this interface seems positively anti-Apple. It is almost as if a neophyte group of old Microsoft DOS programmers invaded Apple and said they would write the AppleTV interface.

The embedded linear menu system is almost forgivable on a TV but the spelling out of words in search one letter at a time is unforgivable. It neither embraces the advancement Apple makes with touch screen technology nor does it employ "ease-of-use" concepts the basic GUI Apple introduced more than 20 years ago.

One of my main objectives in buying 160GB Apple TV was to create Web Galleries where my family members and friends could go view and possibly download and print my photographs. I thought surely Apple will use its rich integrated environment between iPhoto, .Mac, Apple TV, iTunes and even iPhone to deliver ease, fun, and an awesomely simple viewer experience. Not so.

We are given few options for presenting the photos in the web gallery, no templates to speak of and I couldn't preview the final design. You have to anticipate what the outcomes will be while they are neither explained nor easily offered during the assembly and uploading process. The first few attempts at Web Gallery produced bad captions, random viewing order and "Ken Burns" that slaughters the cropping for pictures. Apple needs to figure out a "smart Ken Burns" effect in iPhoto. iMovie, and for Apple TV.

Then, when it came to viewing my web gallery on Apple TV, the apparent default was for Apple TV to randomly select music from my iTunes Library. And not just music but podcasts, audio books and sound effects. It makes no sense. I simply wanted to assign a song to a particular web gallery that was appropriate for the subject matter. Randon in this case makes non-sensical chaos of image and audio.

When I pointed out this randomizing problem to friend who is also a Apple TV owner, he said, well you have to set up a special folder in iTunes with just one song, sync Apple TV to iTunes then go to settings in Apple TV and pick that folder to play that song "randomly" and that's how you are suppose to do it. Suppose to? That sounds like a kluge and not a thoughtful design implementation made easy for the consumer.

Clearly, Apple has a lot of fixing to do here before Web Galleries and My Photos are useful.

Most of Apple's effort with their web software and Apple TV hardware efforts have gone toward getting you to rent or buy their content from the iTunes store. And thus, that is where you will find the graphical eye candy. Movies have their standard DVD box covers and posters to lure you to buying them but it is all very linear and multi-threading of downloads is still not possible. And it is slow as molasses in Mississippi in the summertime.

Apple obviously has voided the users chance to use the Apple TV as a jukebox for the movies Apple TV owners have purchased over the years on DVD. By some strange and weird definition, they've come to characterize ripping a DVD (not unlike ripping your CD collection to iTunes and your iPod) as a criminal act. Boy, it is funny what can be construed today as criminal.

Apple has limited the users ability to record and store TV programs and timeshift them off cable or broadcast stations. I think most people today are looking for their digital media devices to converge but with Apple TV, they've missed by a mile.

Another huge drawback to the Apple TV is that you must be able to sync your media content to a hosting Mac laptop or desktop. Under this arrangement, the hard drive on the host computer becomes a bottleneck for the media content you will be amassing for Apple TV. In most cases, a person with a 60, 80 or 100 GB hard drive on their host computer will never use even half of the capacity of a 160 GB Apple TV. And from a technology perspective the limiter Apple places on giving the user direct access to store, capture, and back-up Apple TV directly without have to duplicate huge amounts of space on a host computer is severe.

Expansion? It seems Apple TV remains a closed system. You cannot add hard drive capacity or link it to other useful devices to enhance its limited capabilities. I look at the back of the slender sleek box and see a USB 2.0 port but what is it there for? It would be great if I could use it to plug in a huge backup drive, and enhanced remote device that would speed the navigation between the deeply embedded menus, or even better a EyeTV USB device that would allow me to record digital broadcast programs onto my Apple TV drive. But there it sits with nothing to feed it. Why?

The potential with Apple TV is there but the question is what is holding Apple back for making Apple TV an insanely great product?

PsyStar Mac Clone: An Emerging Trend (or Prank)?

A Florida based PC maker has begun manufacturing a Macintosh clone called "OpenMac" at the retail price of $399. The machine has a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 20X DVD+/-R SATA drive, a 250 GB 7200 RPM hard drive and comes packed in a tower styled white case.

The open hardware comes with an OSX operating system written by an open project community and is widely available on the internet for Intel PC users to download. However, PsyStar says you can buy Leopard separately and install it on the Open Mac. Certainly, PsyStar would further provoke action against itself if it installed Leopard itself on this clone.

A Mac clone? Some might remember the days in the mid-1990s when the Macintosh was cloned by StarMax, Radius, DayStar, UMAX, and Power Computing. One huge difference between the Mac clones of that era was that Apple licensed these other companies to try and expand the Mac user base. The Apple brand was in trouble and clones were viewed as a way for Apple to stay alive. And then Steve Jobs came back to Apple and canceled or bought out all contracts with the cloners.

Since Jobs return Apple has taken the position, as Phil Shiller says, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." Jobs and Schiller knew that Apple needed to sell hardware and software to recover the cost of R&D. Apple being a technology innovator has heavy R&D costs and the only way to recoup their investment in innovation is by selling hardware and software at a slightly higher price than PC hardware.

When Apple decided to make the transition to Intel in 2006 they opened the doors to a new cloning threat and modified versions of OS X 10.4 and 10.5 or Open Mac projects to run on generic PC hardware. Since Apple moved to Intel, a number of hardware manufacturers including Michael Dell of Dell Computers have indicated they would like to make and sell PCs with Mac OSX installed as the operating system.

Many expect Apple to take tough measures against PsyStar and the news today reported that their web site where a person can purchase a OpenMac had been shut down for unknown causes. While Apple might avoid going to court to protect its copyright there are many options open to rendering this machine broken with system updates as they did with jailbroke iPhones. But actions Apple takes to disable users machines remotely comes at a price to their reputation as a company concerned with "customer satisfaction."

The question PsyStar raises is with the success of devices like iPods, iPhones and the widespread adoption of Apple software on PC computers, will we start to see an emerging new Mac clone industry?

UPDATE NOTE: One day after the story appeared, PsyStar brought its site back up and had changed the name of its computer from Open Mac to Open Computer. Then just as quickly PsyStar disappeared completely and attempts to visit the companies offices in Miami were found to be non-existent and PsyStar a faux vendor. I cannot believe how many of the mainstream tech media publishers were reporting this story with no names, bad phone numbers, web site down and no actual office location. Was this all some kind of weird late April fools joke?

Mossberg Confirms 3G iPhone in 60 Days

At about 6 minutes and 53 seconds into this video, WSJ Tech columnist Walt Mossberg discloses his knowledge that Apple will sell a 3G iPhone in June.

The Future of Publishing

I think some publishers have got it right and others terribly wrong when it comes to the future of magazines and newspapers. Isn't that always the case with future predictors?

Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins, the first woman police reporter for our StarTribune said before she died in 2007, and I paraphrase, that it wasn't so much the impact of the internet on newspapers that is devastating to the industry as the response of newspaper publishers to the rise of the internet.

Newspapers downsized staff writers and got rid of much of the perspective that made them an unique experience to online media. These daily sources for news, like Ivins former employer the StarTribune, redesigned themselves to be unreadable and pushed most of us to the internet for our daily bread.

The most successful (although it has yet to prove itself out completely) were those newspapers like the New York Times and San Jose Mercury who leaped forward onto the internet but branded their image and internet pages with their distinctive imprimatur on this new medium. The Times still looks incredibly similar on the web as it did at the turn of the last century in print. Both publications succeeded in taking their brand to a wider national audience and I'd say younger demographic than their print versions. That's boldface confidence and smart positioning of the brand. And they understand it is about brand and not instant face-lifts and shallow make-overs at the last minute. The NYT's was quick to get its content positioned for the iPhone and the other smart phones with web browsing capabilities coming to the market.

Many other newspapers made huge strategic errors in repurposing themselves for the internet. Case-in-point, again, the StarTribune that locked its content beyond registration barriers and timed their content to a pay-to-read scheme that violates most internet readers the sense of freedom the net provides. That's what is termed, not understanding your audience.

When I search and get down to the level of a StarTribune article from 2003 or an obituary, when the site asks me to register, sign in, or pay to read I am gone in a New York minute. It is almost as if publishers wanted to punish internet surfers out of a resentment for change the new medium represents. Punishment, however, will never win hearts or build readership.

The other ones who have it wrong are the Kindle "electronic book" advocates (see my March 3rd blog about Kindle when it came out), like Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair, believe we will all be carrying around an electronic gadget and get their pages, picture, and movie content we will pay to download off the internet. Nobody wants to haul around yet another electronic device or reader like Kindle especially with its retro-tech rice button keyboard across the bottom of the screen (Did Amazon miss the memo that touch screen technology is going to change the face of all our tech-devices?). We have our phones, our laptop computers, and some even have a PDA or Blackberry. Add a device just for reading news and magazines and news? No way.

Breaking daily news content has to flow to our mobile devices where people do seek electronic convergence. Yes, I believe the instant news will no longer find its home on the multiple edition inky cheap newsprint of my youth. However, the high quality magazine with a distinct perspective will not evaporate off the pages any time soon. The experience of reading a magazine for leisure, relaxation, and entertainment will not be replicated in digital form on the internet or with Kindle. And ultimately, publishers need to see what the use scenario is and fulfill the readers experience in rewarding ways.

In the 70s and 80s, we'd rush to the comic store and could not wait to get our hands on MAD Magazine, National Lampoon and later British Spy (political satire magazine) or the New York Review of Books simply because there was nothing like these publications in terms of the content, comedy or intellectual standards they set. These magazines became icons in their day, not because of the quality of the paper they were printed on. I have very little sympathy for those who preach that we must buy newspapers when those who run them make terrible decisions that drive me away from their pages.

It is still all about the quality of the content and the internet can't change that fact.

image provided by Uh... Bob

Apple Leopard Shows Great Promise, Needs Fixes

The top-billing with Apple's new operating system, code named Leopard or OSX 10.5 is the backup system given the marketing name Time Machine. Backed up with space age style graphics, Time Machine zooms you back and forward in time on a space continuum that makes you think your documents, images and movies stretch out into the galaxy.

Without going into Time Machine at great depth (many other sites and blogger have been writing about it since last year when Apple previewed it), Time Machine lets you restore documents going back to a specific day, week or year and does so with the speed and simplicity to make other back up systems seem old and outmoded.

Apple still has some fixing to do with Time Machine. It has yet to work with the Airport Express USB drives and prefers Apple's touted Time Capsule -- a Airport hub with 500 GB or 1 Terabyte drive built right into the wifi router.

Many Apple faithful who bought Apple's marketing back in the summer of 2007 to buy Airport Express with USB port for a backup hard drive have been mightily angry that Apple uses its programming failure to market a new device of their making. Their chant is "fix Time Machine to work with third-party USB devices." I agree.

STACKS & SPACES

Over time Apple has been transforming the Mac Finder and Desktop to make it more configurable to different use scenarios and assist the user with organizing and keeping their desktops clean. Stacks and Spaces are Apple programmers recent additions to this never-end effort to bring order to a chaotic universe.

Stacks throw all your download and desktop cluttering documents into a menu bar stack that expands out like a geisha's fan and flutter out before your eyes when you click and hold on the stack. It is a pretty cool solution to the way our desktop tend to become a litter box of document icons.

Spaces has the similar quality of organizing for the clutter-prone and seem to match Steve Job's zen-like obsession with neatness and orderliness. Employees of Pixar often noted that Jobs office was like an Oriental rock and sand garden where the only thing a CEO should do in there was meditate. Spaces is the desktop and finder equivalent, allowing you to order your workspaces, save them and flip spectacularly through to each. Spaces is almost an Andy Herzfeld type application, allowing you to flip the cube and view different Finders from different angles of the prism. Again, totally stylist and cool in that Apple way.

Often Apple's best advances are in the little areas of the operating system that let you do things more easily or do things for you that are laborious yet routine. I've owned a personal computer, specifically a Macintosh, since 1984. In all those years I have a mantra playing in the back of my head that says, "The computer should be able to figure that out so I don't have to."

Back in the 80s and 90s I wanted the computer to simply know what ports I had my printer or scanner connected to without having to tell and configure the operating system. I wanted my desktop simply to sense it was connected to the network and show me the volumes I could access. Most recently, I want my laptop or iPhone to sense and know when there is a wifi network I can connect to and prompt me to select it and authenticate.

DATA DETECTORS

One of the greatest and most mundane (DOH) features added to Leopard is data detectors. This is the feature that you've always wanted when you say to yourself "why can't the computer figure it out." Whenever Leopard sees text that resembles an address or date it gives you a pop down menu next to that data with the option to add it to iCal or Apple's Address Book.

Taking this a step further Apple has given applications like Pages the ability for you to draft a letter in a template and then go to Address Book select 1, 5, 10 or any random number of people in your address book and then drag the names into the address space at the top of the letter and it simple performs a mail merge with one complete letter per name you've dragged.

The data detectors even figure out that if you have a salutation, it will place the persons name in the appropriate spot at the top of the body text. No more of the stupid double brackets - field name coding to achieve a mail merge. Let the computer software figure out the details. That's what computers are for right?

iCHAT THEATER

iChat has gotten considerably better with Leopard. In the past, some of the ideas Apple built into iChat were cute but not too useful. Thus iChat hasn't caught on like other Web 2.0 technologies that improve IP communications. Now, with iChat Theater you can share photos, movies and Keynote type presentations across the internet with family, friends and business partners. If you are in front of the camera, iChat Theater makes a small window for you to live in and a big theatrical window for your picture, movie or slideshow.

While this concept is great and could bring more people to use the iChat feature of Leopard, my experience trying to use it with an Leopard upgraded Powerbook laptop and iMac have been mixed. The slideshow were slow, the audio failed and it seemed to be CPU heavy and brought all functions to a stuttering halt. Let's hope Apple works on fixing iChat and making it more stable and reliable because they could have a winner here.

SYNCING

Syncing has gotten some changes with the recent Leopard release. In the past, Apple has been all over the board with iSync, iTunes, .Mac and I think it has driven many Mac users to resignation with trying to sync across their desktop, laptop and mobile devices like iPhone and iPod. I know I've been frustrated and flustered with it and still in Leopard, syncing the Address Book between laptop and iPhone contacts -- is really funky. The sync feature likes to mix up the photos of different contacts just to confound you. So my friend Diane's picture got randomly assigned to my lawyer John contact on the iPhone. Go figure.

I hope this isn't one of those creeping Microsoft sloppiness problems -- where getting feature to work is successful only 35% of the time.

Within the Leopard Address Book preferences you will find setting that will allow you to sync your address book with Yahoo and Exchange mail servers. This ability to communicate and sync outside the world of Apple apps will be a big boon to the "switch to Mac" market and enterprise computing where Active List and other company served mailing capabilities are necessary.

The coolness of these and a bunch of smaller features makes Leopard well worth the price of upgrade, However, Apple has some fixing it needs to do to iron out the odd imperfections with this system version.

Apple Fanboy Command + A (Attack)

Recently, I read about how vicious the Apple fanboys have grown on the web. First, lets be clear of the utopian misconception that the internet would connect us all, enlarge our communities, be egalitarian and make us better people. Peace, love and understanding hasn't actually arrived by digital download nor streaming.

In fact, reading the anonymous comments on Huffington post about the 2008 campaigns, or any political blog for that matter, can assure all Americans we have pathetically lost all sense of proper behavior and civil society. Talk about ad homonym attacks and bloodthirsty adversarial behavior -- that's just between fellow Democrats -- it is out of control.

But the thing I find so ironic is the attack mentality of Apple fanboys. Case in point has to be David Pogue. If anyone has a history of reading Pogue over the years you will know he has been one of Apple biggest advocates in print journalism alive. If anyone, Pogue deserves a Apple Fellow status and a shrine in the Apple Hall of Fame.

Yet, after Pogue wrote a column for the New York Times in which he mentioned that Microsoft might have implemented something better than Apple in their OS, Pogue was barraged with hate email. One reader accused Pogue of "hating Apple" and another of "Licking Bill Gates balls."

It's not hard to find equivalent behavior that harms Apple owners and prevents Apple itself from making honest assessments of their strengths and weaknesses. Criticism of Apple improves the company and its products. It is the bread and butter for upgrade input. On the .Mac support forums, users are encourage to post the technical problems and discuss Apple products, but users are frequently censored and often attacked by fanboys and even the discussion moderators.

Unreal. Apparently the Google employee motto "Don't be evil" has no sway over them.

Apple TV Plus Coming?

Obviously, I ranted at the beginning of the year about what Apple needs to do to not only improve upon Apple TV but make it a serious media center convergent technology. It is a no-brainer: ADD DVR. Wrongly, I predicted Apple would announce they were adding DVR to the Apple TV in Steve Job's 2008 MacWorld keynote.

But I wasn't the only one. All kinds of Apple Rumor pundits were clamoring for an improved Apple TV that would eliminate all those shiny odd shaped boxes surrounding their new thinner, smaller footprint HD LCD and Plasma TVs. Everybody wants convergent technologies and since Apple saw fit to give us a web browser, email, GPS-like maps and iTunes music and video on our cell phone, why wouldn't they provide a comparable media center device that would eliminate the need to buy four boxes when all you need is one?

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has been routing around Apple patent filings and found they have filed for an Apple TV device that has DVR capabilities included in a new box. Finally, I say, what is taking Apple so long to seriously get into the media center market?

Hopefully Apple will find the courage to stand up to the corporate lawyers who continue to set the standard for technology development or lack thereof. These lawyers know nothing about great industrial design nor could they care less about the users ability to use it easily. The industry moguls who insult the consumer will/are destroying their own businesses.

Many of the Apple products I own in my home are hamstrung to the point that I am unable to effectively and easily capture, store, organize and view my digital content. And it is MY content since I either created it myself or I PURCHASED it. Last time I was at an Apple Store I was given a unwanted lecture about "stealing" movies simply after asking how a person can transfer and store digital media onto the Apple TV. WTF! Apple Genuis' are amateur lawyers -- at BEST!

We are your consumers. We buy CDs and DVDs and it seems more like Apple wants to control the way we engage the content rather than give us as consumers the tools to manage our digital media. The situation has never been this bad whether it be broadcast recording to VHS or Beta tapes, cassette tapes from albums, CDs and digital ripping of them and the treatment of the customer by Apple and the industry has never this low. It is a disgrace Apple is involved with this sham against its loyal customers.

iPhone 2.0 is a Leap (Spring) Forward

Reset your clocks. When all the dust settles after the iPhone SDK announcement, even with all the concerns about Apple's control over the platform, one thing is very clear -- the iPhone experience will change radically with the release of iPhone 2.0 in June.

While many questions remain, Apple will promote development on the iPhone both with consumer level applications and with implementations of enterprise software tailored to individual companies and institutions.

No doubt museums and art galleries will be using the platform as a place to launch interactive media such as the Walker Art Center has already began to do in a limited fashion. Hospitals will find the handheld iPod or iPhone invaluable to searching and locating records. Schools, collections and libraries can be incredibly interactive and mobile inside their wifi domains.

We are also likely to see the iPod Touch become a much more popular tool as owning and using one will not require a AT&T cell phone contract and developers can use wifi to send and receive vital data. The iPod Touch running 2.0 might even become a way out for Apple to sell iPhone equivalent technologies without AT&T being party to the purchase or contract with users.

Using an iPod Touch inside a corporation for capturing and sharing data such as with doctors in hospitals, inventory in retail operations, or point of sale and service has huge potential for the Touch technology, where not having the cell phone capabilities becomes a plus on a mobile device.

In Apple's Thursday announcement they invited a number of developers on stage to preview versions of the games, data base tracking applications, and messaging clients for the iPhone. It was abundantly clear that the prospects on this platform are immense with robust development and will be enjoined by enthusiastic programmers.

And despite developer concern about the Apple Apps Store being the sole distributor for iPhone and iPod Touch applications, Apple will be partner with thousands of developers and enthusiastic about getting new tools and entertainment to iPhone users through this huge direct sales network and free distribution channel. As Wired said in it recent cover story, FREE is the future of business. All-in-all that is an advantage to the developers, iPhone owners, and Apple itself.

In Apple's defense, inside the IT departments I've heard many say that Apple should control the distribution of applications on the iPhone very tightly because he users don't want their cell phone riddled with poor designed and programmed applications that will destroy the iPhone experience and functionality. They often point to the wide-open nature of the PC and how it has become riddled not only with bugs, worms and virus' but also low functioning software by amateur programmers.

Adding to the excitement of the SDK package release was the announcement of the iFund, a one hundred million dollar capital investment fund by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. A chief partner in KPCB, John Doerr in founding this fund saluted Apple entrepreneurs as revolutionaries and called Steve Jobs the supreme commander who started Apple and the personal computer industry. He said $100 million is enough start-up money for "four Googles."

Apple's upcoming iPhone 2.0 will continue to jettison their cell phone business far ahead of any other smart phone company in the industry. Apple says the upgrade to 2.0 will be free to all iPhone owners (iPod Touch owners will need to pay for the upgrade) but this assures all of the millions who bought iPhones this year -- we can still look forward to one hell of a fun ride.

Is Your iPhone or iPod Touch Jailbroke?

Almost immediately after Apple shipped the iPhone, a group of developers began writing applications for the device that gave it additional computing capabilities they were used to with other palm computers and smart phones. Some of these apps were written as great fun like the one above with different looks or skins for the Home screen and icons. Don't you find youself transported back to the mid-80s looking at the screen on the far right?

A madcap group of developers wrote more serious applications that added functionality they missed by not using their Treo's or Blackberry. When sites like ModMyiFone popped up you could find over 300 applications written and available on your iPhone via the Installer.app. These apps are very cleaver, including one called Labyrinth, which emulates the old wooden and steel ball game you used to play as a kid where you tried to tilt the surface to guide the ball into a goal. The genius of the iPhone adaptation is that it commandeered the built in accelerometers in the iPhone (used to rotate photos, web pages and movies -- and WHY can't Apple do it for the mail client?) to mimic the actions of the physical game it emulates.

But these developers and their programs were not officially approved by Apple. And, in order for users to take advantage of serious and fun applications on their iPhone they had to "break" or in the parlance of the community jailbreak their iPhone or iPod Touch to install these applications.

After todays announcement of Apple SDK and Apple apps program for the development and distribution channel for iPhone applications, will Apple truly open the iPhone to all the range of possibilities for new applications or will it be a gatekeeper and cherry pick and restrict users from getting the tools they want.

A big part of the thrust of today's announcement focused on enterprise users and extending the office uses for Microsoft Exchange Servers and ActiveSync support. Certainly that is aimed at shoring up their corporate relations within the industry. But what about the larger community of non-corporate consumer users?

Perhaps the first question that developers wanted to know has been answered -- Apple will require all applications to come through the Apple iTS to be installed. The developer will be charged a $99 for the standard commercial and free application kit and $299 for the Enterprise developer kit. Apple will require a developer to register and split the proceeds from the sale 70/30 with the developer. 70 percent will go to the writer. Free applications will not be charged for the place in the Apple apps Store.

However, functioning as a gatekeeper, what will Apple allow and what software will it restrict on the iPhone?

Apple said publicly it will restrict pornography through its sales on iTS. Okay, but what else? Apple said it will restrict applications that invade people's privacy. Understandable in the abstract but not very clear since the Camera function on the iPhone could easily be classified (and often is by YMCA's and YWCA's as well as other athletic facilities) to be privacy invasive software on their properties. Apple says it will restrict applications that are "illegal." Sounds like room for a lot of interpretation and potential litigation.

The question will remain: Is it best to start buying your iPhone and iPod Touch applications through Apple apps or keep it jailbroken and use the applications being freely developed in the world of software? Will the new Apple Apps Store eliminate the need to jailbreaking your cell phone or iPod Touch or will users still need to be hackers to get what they want on their purchased electronic devices?

Back in the 1980s, when we bought our first Macs we didn't need to answer these difficult questions. It just shows how far we've come and how different Apple is as a hardware and software company today.

Reading Steve Jobs Like a Book

I happen to be in camp with those who believe if Steve Jobs says something cannot be done or it won't sell, he is more than likely working on the idea.

This held true for music. He told Apple, the Beatles record label, that Apple Computer, Inc. would never get into the music business. This year Apple iTune Store will become the largest music retailer in the world surpassing Target and WalMart and they changed their name to Apple dropping the word "Computer" -- the same name as the record label.

Jobs told everyone that nobody would ever want to watch a movie or video on a palm sized device and then a year later came out with the video iPod.

Jobs told the computing world that Apple would not get into the cell phone business, at the same time, they began developing the iPhone the most revolutionary handset the cell phone industry has ever seen and sales in the first year have been astronomical.

Now Jobs is saying Amazon's Kindle cannot succeed because nobody reads. Literal translation: Apple is posed to jump into electronic book reader market because Kindle will not succeed. If nobody reads why does the book publishing industry have $25+ billion in annual sales and more than 60 thousand titles every year and those numbers are U.S. alone.

Following Job's career in technology I think it is safe to say that one thing that gets in his craw is to see an good idea and huge business opportunity poorly designed and implemented. Kindle is just one of those devices. The first things that comes to mind when you see Kindle is "Who would want to carry this object around with them or use it for reading?" (see photo above) and the answer is "Nobody!" The question goes to the very heart of industrial or commercial design.

Wired's review of the Kindle named it one of the 10 heartbreaking gadgets of 2007, called the keyboard "klugey", the email "clumsy" and the web browser "crippled" and concluded by saying Kindle was begging to be redesigned by Apple.

With Apple iTouch technologies one can be sure that Jobs and Apple iTouch technology specialist Tim Bucher are exploring this realm of new business opportunities. Kindle leaves a big hole for Apple to drive their design and marketing team at electronic distribution of books and literature. With the infrastructure of the Apple iTunes Store delivering content to multiple hardware platforms, you can be sure that Apple is eyeing the book and print publishing industry as the next great digital frontier.

iPhoto 08 Makes Color Correction Easier

Improvements to iPhoto in the iLife 08 suite make it the only photo management and editor you'll need as a non-professional photo enthusiast.

In the past, in order to use iPhoto on a day-to-day basis a photographer still needed to have Photoshop installed and iPhoto configured to launch Photoshop to edited color, contrast, and midtone brightness that turns your standard awful looking snapshots onto bright colorful photos suitable for printing, the web, or animated slideshows. But not anymore -- iPhoto will get you there all by itself.

Most of the critical improvements have been made to the Adjust Panel to make the overpriced Photoshop no longer necessary for baseline color and image enhancement.

The most significant feature added to the Adjust Panel are the ability to edit the midtones, shadows and highlights separately. When you first open the Adjust Panel, you'll see the Histogram graph at the top of the panel. Under the curves, you'll see three chevrons that can be clicked on and dragged -- one for the dark tones, one for the light tones and a third for the middle tones. The critical addition of the middle tone is an feature added to iPhoto 08. This is just the adjustment tool needed to improve the large percentage of all amatuer photos as it is the place in the photo editing spectrum where skin tones reside and our eye seeks brightness and clarity.

Further down the Adjust Panel you will see slider bars for shadow and highlight values. This enhancement also gives you greater control of the values in areas of your photo image that shapshots with consumer cameras so often get wrong. As a photo editor for amateurs and quality-minded non-professionals, Apple's implementation of the cropping tool but adding a thirds grid and their insightful addition of the straighten tool goes to the heart of what most poor photo images suffer from and how to fix them. The Straighten tool has now been removed from the adjust panel to make room for more color correction fine tunning and has its own icon in the iPhoto icon bar.

Another great feature of the Adjust Panel is that once you open the panel and make all the adjustments to make your photo image look great, you can then click on the COPY button in the bottom right. This action copies all the adjustments you made since you first opened the panel. You can then close this window, go the the next photo you took during the event or in that same color space and click on PASTE and all the adjustments made to the previous image will be applied to this one also. This adds considerable ease to correcting a group of photos you took in a similar color space or location and it is so easy. All applications should be this smart!

And what few people realize when they start to color correct is most color correction is necessary to compensate for the bias of a camera or the particular color temperature or balance of the lights the photographer is shooting under. Once you have corrected one photo, you can easily apply the same settings to others you've shot. Color matching between images is the key to making a decent slideshow, presenting a group of pictures on the web or printing a series of photos, whether it be a journalistic essay or wedding photos. In iPhoto 08, Apple has made this simple. All applications should be this intuitive in watching your actions and recalling them with just one push of a button.

Friends I know who could no longer afford to buy Adobe's expensive applications had resorted to buy shareware programs that emulated and sometimes bettered Photoshop with a limited pallet of standard features. More power to them and certainly Adobe needs to learn the lesson that if they gauge their users they will loose them to competitors.

But the problem remained, using a different software application for editing and enhancing your images can be clumsey and slow. Having one application with all the tools and features to get you to your final destination is the BEST strategy.

Now that iPhoto has arrived I think you'll find yourself relying less on interapplication switching and that you can get all your desired results in iPhoto.

I can hear the critics complaining already that you do not have layers, masks, blur or lighting filters, etc. But I venture to say 90% of the users don't need these tools. If you asked yourself, "When was the last time I used layers or masks?" and cannot remember that time than iPhoto 08 is the tool for you.

Apple iPhone SDK Revealed on Thursday

Next Thursday (March 6th) in Cupertino, Apple will be revealing much more information about the long awaited Apple iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). Companies who write software for Macs and handheld devices have been watching anxiously with the hopes of jumping into a market of millions or iPhone users with huge expectations for applications to improve their mobile computing capabilities.

What is in store?

With all of the efforts of Apple to slap heavy penalties on the underground developers who have unlocked and pirated the iPhone away from the corporate contract restrictions Apple and AT&T have placed on iPhone users, there is a great deal of interest in how Apple will now allow developers to meet the pent-up demands of iPhone and iPod Touch users.

For many, the potential to go to the Apple iTunes store and easily purchase and download programs to expand their mobile capabilities is an exciting prospect. These increased expectations extend to business computing, were enterprise software and specific tools designed for financial and business management functions can make inroads for Apple in those arenas of the computer market.

In the past Apple refused to recognize and allow software to be added to the iPhone to increase its capabilities. They even went so far as to release iPhone system upgrades that "bricked" the iPhone itself and disabling the cell phone for any user who unlocked or jailbroke their iPhone or iPod Touch. This move by Apple shocked many in the computing industry, probably most some of the faithful followers of Apple who have always been opposed the the tactics of corporate giants.

However, Apple's heavy-handed approach to restricting application development might not end with their opening up of the iPhone to third-party software companies. According to CNET's Tom Krazit, "The company would retain veto power over the number and types of applications that could be installed on an iPhone, meaning no application could be officially released without a thumbs-up from an Apple committee or executive."

It is highly expected that Apple will restrict the ability of iPhone owners to obtaining and purchasing third-party software to buys from the Apple iTunes store. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is speculated that Apple will not allow developers access to the iPhone and iPod Touch dock. This means that developers will not be allowed the freedom to write programs and hardware devices to improve upon wifi or bluetooth capabilities for printing directly without going through a Mac operating system, add third party peripherals like keyboards and audio enhancements. iPhone and iPod Touch enthusiasts wait with baited breath to see if they will have Bluetooth functionality or Skype calling capabilities added to their palm devices. A few would like video recording software to use with their iPhone camera.

And certainly, Apple will probably restrict software development that gets the user around the AT&T exclusive contract or allow them to make internet calls without a provider contract. In the first six months of the sale of iPhone, near one quarter of all the handheld devices sold, it is estimated, were to break the lock and open them up to use without an AT&T contract. The question developers will be asking come Thursday is what limit Apple will place on applications such as Twitter that give iPhone low cost alternatives to SMS and other communications channels?

In the last few days leading up to the SDK announcements, Jobs has been attacking Adobe for its Flash mobile development. Since the iPhone was first announced, its users have been clamoring for Flash and Java capabilities on their phone. Is Job's critique and big no to Flash Light on the iPhone just a harbinger of Apple's harsh treatment to come for software developers wanting to release the applications on the iPhone platform?

Generally speaking, with the success of iPhone and it implications for Apple at AT&T, we will be waiting to see how restrictive Apple is becoming in the application-developmnt spectrum and if instead of empowering the end user, how they will control software to empower their corporate contracts. Being an final arbitrator or a gatekeeper of the software being loaded onto the iPhone would establish a new precedent in the industry.

Writing in the New York Times, Saul Hansell notes, "This level of control would be most unusual for the software industry. Apple doesn’t control the distribution of programs that run on the Mac, for example. And other mobile platforms, like Windows Mobile and Palm Treo, do not make these requests."

iPhoto 08 Improves Digital Image Management

In the past for iPhoto users to load their digital images from a camera or a disk reader, they would plug their device in, iPhoto would launch and an icon of a camera would appear in the middle of the iPhoto window signaling it recognized the card or camera. iPhoto would then provide a button saying IMPORT.

Unfortunately, I often did not need to import all the images on the card or camera. And, although iPhoto was kind enough to prompt you to pass over the duplicates or images you'd previously loaded, the import process was very analog, like the old days when you have to listen to ALL your voice mail messages. iPhoto was very slow if all you needed to load was one or two images from a disk with 100 on it. Scanning a disk and importing the files would take 15 or 20 minutes with todays large storage capacity digital media and large image files. A simple task of shooting a single image, loading it into iPhoto and emailing it to a family member or my publisher was agonizingly cumbersome.

With iPhoto 08 Apple FINALLY fixed this very non-Apple way of forcing the user to follow a protocol rather than given them options to control their digital content. With the upgraded version of iPhoto, when you plug the camera or card in it provides a preview of the entire contents and then allows you to select only a few or all images you wish to import. This is a huge improvement and timesaver over previous iPhoto versions.

Like my raves about getting around to fixing .Mac, I had been writing to Apple and complaining about this problem in iPhoto since version 5 and was disappointed they didn't provide a card browser in iPhoto 6, only to be told that there was a small application to previewing called Image Capture.

In fact, with this upgrade of iPhoto, Apple has made a concerted effort to improve the image management capabilities of the application. The iPhoto teams programming efforts are paying off with better image loading options, more information being captured and stored for each image, the addition of organizing stacks of photos into Events and the ability to hide images you may need to keep for some reason but not want to view.

iPhoto gave us the ability to capture and amass huge libraries of digital images but for most Mac users two, five or even ten thousand images quickly became unmanageable but iPhoto 08 truly improves upon the tasks of managing your ever expanding library of images. Many home and professional photographers will find the iPhoto 08 upgrade essential to their practical management needs.

Apple Hates Me!

Executives at Apple hate me. There is no point questioning this fact.

Apple execs waited and waited and waited, skipped all announcements at MWSF about a 16GB iPhone...

And they waited..

Then, on January 18th I bought two totally lame 8 GB iPhones. It probably took a day or two for my online registration to populate the registration database at Apple. Steve saw my registration and gave the green light to begin manufacture and then BOOM!

On Super Tuesday when nobody is watching they announce:

"February 5, 2008—Apple® today added new models of the iPhone™ and iPod® touch which have double the memory, doubling the amount of music, photos and videos that customers can carry with them wherever they go. The revolutionary iPhone now comes in a new 16GB model for $499, joining the 8GB model for $399. iPod touch now comes in a 32GB model for $499, joining the 16GB model for $399 and the 8GB model for $299."

WTF? Then, to add insult to injury Apple announces a 14 day upgrade policy. Count the days muthafukka from 1.18.2008 to 2.5.2008!

"For some users, there’s never enough memory,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing. No kidding, Joswiak, and why do you think that's true? Could it be that 8 GB is tiny given the phat size of the files for music, video, and photos? Why did Apple cancel its 4 GB iPhone within months of it release? Because 4 and 8 GB iPhones are ridiculously small especially in the face of the impending SDK and the expected additions of new applicatons on the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms.

Routing around the internet and reading Apple commentarists like Shawn King and articles in InfoWorld, Apple clearly has pissed some Apple faithful off. Timing of the upgrade seems to be aimed at users who held off buying an iPhone until after MWSF and the terms of the upgrade offer, designed to screw them. Apple knew at the time of MWSF but seemingly wanted to throw it up in the face of predictors who said Apple had all the technology to upgrade to 16 GB iPhones.

The iPhone storage upgrade could have been something Steve Jobs announced at MWSF 2008 and said "Will be available on February 5th" as is often the custom but no, they only released it AFTER I bought this freakin measly, piece of crap 8GB iPhone. But Apple hates me...

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/index.html#phone

Anyone want to buy a barely used 8GB Apple iPhone?

Eye-fi Wireless Promise

This is a development in technology I am excited about!
A digital media, camera memory card with built-in wifi capabilities. However, stay tuned, as the first versions of this technology is buggy and problematic in its requirements to be set up and communicate. Hopefully, plug and play are on its way.

Powerbook Step-by-Step HD Upgrade

Alright, you've decided to become an outlaw and open the box on your Powerbook. Right on dude, stick it to the man! Now, in order to go forward you'll need a set of tools to assist you with this act of uncivil anti-corporate disobedience. The first thing to arm yourself with is a step-by-step instructions on how to replace the 2.5 in. hard drive inside your Powerbook.

If you go to the iFixit web site you will be able to download a PDF file with illustrated instructions on the procedure you are about to undertake:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/PowerBook-G4-Al-12-Inch/HD-Replacement/53/11/

Then you will need two or three essential tools -- a T6 Torx screwdriver, a very small Phillips head, a tweezer (or dental pick), a roll of clear scotch tape, a pencil or pen and a few sheets of drawing or sketch paper. One 8-year old child with tiny fingers not unlike those who make oriental carpets in slave factories in Asia. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Oh actually I am kidding...

The best strategy is to stay organized, be extremely patient and move slowly. This process will take hours not minutes. If you are a nervous, impatient and fidgety person -- fund suitable medication. Frankly, if you are this type of person, performing this hardware breakout is not suggested. Honestly, that's s the truth and you'll only be sorry and the destruction you wrought on your computer.

STEP ONE:

Take the papers and pencil or pen and sketch two schematics of your Powerbook -- one for the top and the other for the bottom. Leave space around the edge of the drawn of the bottom to also draw the sideview. Make simple indications for the placement of the main elements of the case -- the battery compartment, the small cover for the memory slot, the keyboard, the tracking pad, and teh DVD slot as well as the ports on he side of the Powerbook.

What you are going to do with the schematic is use it to tape all the little screws you are removing from the case as you dissemble so when it comes time to reassemble, you will have a precise reference for returning them to their proper places. Keeping track of the screws is one of the most daunting parts of this entire procedure. This is a procedure that manuals don't tell you to do but you will not regret it.

STEP TWO: BACK UP ALL THE DATA ON YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Being following the instructions in the iFixit Powerbook HD Replacement manual. As you go, tap each screw you remove to the map schematic you've drawn on the sketch book paper.

Now, you will want to remove the battery and remove the memory from the backside of your Powerbook. Make sure you are grounded (and I don't mean in psychology or character) when handling these parts and it is best to place them on a static free matt if you can obtain one.

Next you will turn the Powerbook over, open the cover and remove the keyboard. his can be slightly fear inducing, since, you basically have to pry the F1, F2, F11, and F12 keys off their mounts. The action feels a little bit like you are breaking them but as long as you apply consistent and even force according to the iFixit instructions they will come loose and, once free, it is also probably best to tape the keys to the sketch paper as well.

Between the F1 and F2 keys is a screw that fastens the keyboard to the base. Another one is located between the F11 and F12. If you are working on a Powerbook that has never been opened, upgraded or rebuilt before, there will be little round grey or silver pieces of tape overing the screw head. This is how you, and Apple, can tell if the case has been opened before, if you find them missing or tampered with. As well, throughout this breakout procedure, you will find a bunch of taped seals that if missing, removed or tampered with Apple will consider the warranty not longer valid.

As you are working the process, remember that you main objective is to cause as little stress as possible to the parts and structure of the Powerbook. Good experienced Apple repair persons have mastered the technics of doing a system breakout without stressing the parts. I am an Apple certified repair person (certification obtained in a previous job) and the procedures for fixing and upgrading are not that difficult. If there is an art to doing this work, it is in the touch - being able to know how to handle the components and their connectors.

For instance, when you removed the keyboard by undoing the screws and then lifting the top f the key and unlatching the bottom hooks under the OPTION and ENTER keys, remember the keyboard is still connected by its data ribbon - a thin plastic ribbon that runs between the keyboard and the logic board. If you yank on the keyboard and try to pull it away from where it is seated, you risk breaking this ribbon. Once you've freed the screws and hooks on the keyboard you will want to flip it face down on the tracking pad.

Most of the instructions require that you remove screws al around the case. They have different threading and lengths so it is vitally important that you return them to their exact holes when reassembling. The trickiest part of disassembly is pulling the connectors free of their terminal plugs. You will really mess you system up if you break wires or bust-off the terminals. Be very careful and take time to gradually remove the plugs. A flat head screw driver used to gradually slide the plug free will yield the best results.

STEP THREE:

Once you have removed the old hard drive and installed the new bigger, faster hard drive it is probably best to reinstall a fresh version of the operating system. If you haven't upgraded to Leopard, this might be the best time, provided 1) you have >512 and preferably more that 1GB of RAM available to run it and >867 Mhz processor or preferably 1 Ghz or faster CPU.

Otherwise, just take your old Tiger or Panther install disks and reinstall the system directly. The performance of your Powerbook can improve radically just from doing a fresh install of the systems.

AND, if you are doing all his work to buy another 2 or 3 years of usability for this Powerbook, I'd suggest you consider investing another $80 for a 1 GB memory chip to maximized the amount for future applications and heavy duty work you will be doing on this laptop computer.

AFTER STATEMENT

In the bugger picture, I am a big supporter of upgrading computers. We live in a instant and disposable age, where computers are being make obsolete every six or 12 months. This rapid turnover is excessively wasteful truly shameful.

Back in the 1960s, there was a consumer movement that asked GM and other car manufacturers to stop the bleeding of "planned obsolescence" in the auto industry. Automobiles made in Detroit, it was alleged at the time, were being made to expire in 4 to 5 years and to encourage new car sales the manufacturers planned their expiration.

The fuel for this manufacturing wastefulness was greed. The computer industry -- all companies including Apple, Dell, HP, Microsoft, etc. -- are in the grips of the fever of greed that overtook Detroit in those times. Our new technology companies are better at this game that Detroit could ever imagine in its wildest profit generating dreams.

Upgrade your computer hardware. It is good for the planet!

Replacing Your Powerbook Hard Drive?

Have you been considering replacing your old 20GB hard drive in your Powerbook? You might want to think twice... or three times.

One thing you may have not considered when you went out to buy your aluminum Powerbook G4 with its ample 20GB of hard storage and huge 256 MB of RAM (which if you were smart you immediately upgraded to at least 512 MB so you'd never have to upgrade again) is that it would not be enough space for all your digital life in 2008.

In fact, if you have a handy program like Whatsize from ID-Design, you will find that if you have a digital camera or a iPod that needs to be fed, massive amounts of your storage is taken up in your iPhoto and iTunes folders with digital images and songs. For the average user who have embraced the digital worlds of music, video, podcasting, and photography, these will be the biggest space eating culprits. In a very short period of time you will find 20, 30, 40 and even 60 GB of storage space an impossible space restriction to your wildly expressive urges.

My good friend "Buy a Mac" Mike has an expression, "...hard drives are like home car garages, no matter how much space you have, you'll always fill it up..." Mike says this to encourage organization, thrift and off-loading to backup archives. And as a warning when entering his garage.

I hear ya bro, and I have lots and lots of firewire storage devices that archives tons of old files, images and media. I also have a 500 GB hard drive connected to my Airport hub for off loading current working content. But truth be told, in order for your laptop to have the effective amounts of data to do tasks like update the blog, load digital images into iPhoto, feed the iPod music and movies, sync with .Mac... I could go on and on, you must have a baseline amount of storage space to stay alive.

And then there is another aspect no amount of connected, networked and archival storage can help with: With Apple upgrading the operating system every 6 months and new applications taking up considerably more space, you do not have enough storage AND platter space just for your necessary applications. Apple's new operating system Leopard wants 12 GB and then add to that iLife, iWorks and.or Office 2008 for the Mac and you're screwed.

Okay, so you made the decision that you don't have enough space on your laptop OR life made that decision for you. What do you do about it?

Friends say, especially around tax return time, buy a new Mac! Bigger, better, faster, newer, smaller, thinner, a new operating system... blah, blah, blah... That urge is tempting I must say. Love the packaging and holding in my hands the newly manufactured Apple product for 2008 but... a $3,000 thin Mac with 64GB hard drive. No Way! A 64 GB or 80GB hard drive is just the problem I am trying to get away from, not buy into. In today's market, new computers must have >100 GB of hard or solid state storage. Easily, many of the off-the-shelf computers will be weighing in a 1/2 terabyte of storage or 500GB.

The prospect of a hard drive upgrade to the Powerbook is a sane and reasonable alternative. So what then? Take it to the Apple Store talk it over with the Apple Genius and get a new drive replacement? Not. Unless you like to throw your money away and pay Apple a ridiculous four times more than you need to pay, stay away from Apple Store for this type of computer expenditure. You can always go back and get sucked into their vortex for other types of purchases.

With hard drives and memory getting cheaper and cheaper on the internet suddenly you start to feel very handy with screw drivers and torx L-wrenches. A great big new 2.5 inch hard drive with five, ten and twenty times the space can be procured for between $100 and $150 dollars. At these prices, it is very tempting to think of yourself as Super Mac Repair Man.

Can't be that hard, after-all, it is a Mac, right?

Well, the Macintosh may have come onto the market as a kind of VW people's simple tool for the masses, however, that analogy did not extend to under the hood operations. A Macintosh computer, once inside, is a very complex and touchy piece of engineering. And that is doubly true for the Powerbook, iBook and MacBook lines. It holds triply true for iPods. And if you want to break the iPhone, Apple has a team of lawyers for you and if they could, they'd like to put you behind greybars. Apple absolutely does NOT want you messing around inside their boxes. Backyard mechanics NEED NOT APPLY. If you go in there with your screw driver at the ready, you will void the Apple warrantee and Apple employees will start treating you bad. You may even get band from the Apple Store.

But that's where your dark side starts to come out. Am I right?

Being told you cannot do what needs to be done, especially by a big powerful corporation and their shark lawyers fills your with tool lust doesn't it? A man (or in many cases a woman) needs to be a man and take destiny into their grasp. We all remember the dangerous and sexy James Dean, the rebel, the black hat, the hacker. Afterall, the two Steves (Woz and Jobs) began their lives as phone-freaks (felons) while Gates and Allen were mainframe hackers who loved to bring the Sperry-Univac down to its knees (anti-corporate terrorists) when they were in Jr. High School.

Crowdsourcing Bush False Statements

The crowdsorucing concept has to spread into other realms of information identification and social community on the internet. This time it is being used by journalists to dig deeper and track information further than just the day-to-day, as it happens nature of hot-press journalism.

According to the research web site The War Card, Bush and his administration carefully orchestrated a misinformation campaign to mislead the public and drive America into a war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

To account for this The Center for Public Integrity, an organization dedicated to investigative journalism along with Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith has set up a database of words to track Bush Administration misinformation. For two years following 9/11, their data tracking shows, four administration officials: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld made 935 false statements about national security threats.

Of course, we all know the biggest false statement by the President regarded the "weapons of mass destruction" the administration asserted that it knew Iraq had and that these words became the primary motivation for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, by their own later admissions, they did not know and according to American forces on the ground, intelligence, and UN inspectors there was no WMD. But that Lie (is lie too strong a word - is it lying if you really believe it yourself as George Costanza on Seinfeld would say) was only the beginning. The administration went on to make what it knew were false statements to the American public and world bodies.

We know that then Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. with carefully orchestrated (by Cheney's office) misinformation that the White House later blamed on faulty intelligence by the CIA. This carefully orchestrated misapplication of facts became the rational for the world that the American government gave for using force against Iraq and moving beyond U.N imposed inspections and sanctions.

You may search the database of 380,000 Iraq-related public pronouncements by top Bush administration officials here:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

Crowdsourcing American History

Recently the U.S. Library of Congress posted over 3,000 non-copyrighted images from its collection to the popular photo-sharing web service Flickr. According to a statement on the LOC's web site, the reason for uploading is ""enhance our metadata."

Crowdsourcing, following on from social networking concepts like wiki communities, has become the latest phenomenon in web-based knowledge sharing computing. According the the LOC crowdsourcing is working.

By this method the national resource for images and history wants to improve the information attached to the photos, for the benefit of historical researchers and cultural posterity. The LOC figures if they throw the images out into the big wide electronic cloud hovering about us all, viewers will step up and offer particular knowledge about the people, the locations and the moment captured in those images.

"We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves," the LOC web post explains. "For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured."

To visit the LOC Photo set on Flickr go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress

Defeating Edge

One of the first questions I had about the iPhone, prior to owning one was, "Can you turn off Edge?"

Edge is one of the two receiver/transmitter protocols the iPhone uses to conduct phone calls, receive email, surf the web and get information to populate Google maps with streets, traffic congestion, satellite views, etc. Edge is the slow one nobody likes. The other protocol is Wifi.

Now Apple built into the iPod a setting for users just to turn off Wifi because it can be a drain on battery when you are not in a wifi zone and its not being used.

"No, why would you want to turn off Edge?" was the initial answer I got from a friend.

My answer was because there are places I don't want the iPhone to start receiving calls and ring up excess charges on my AT&T bill, like when we go to Brazil, Prague, or travel in other foreign countries where Edge is extremely expensive. Edge is the metered pipeline into your iPhone. Since it is my pocketbook, I want to be able to take control of all charges. Another iPhone owning friend answered the question with a more cynical accusatory answer, "Apple and AT&T want you to be in a position where you cannot turn it off so you run up charges and they make more money off you."

Armed with Machiavelian suspicions, I went to the Apple Store and asked a sales clerk in the iPhone section, "How do I turn off Edge?" The Apple Store answer I got was you cannot turn off Edge but you can turn off Wifi. Again, the clerk asked me why I would ever want to turn off Edge.

Of course, my answer in part is the one given above but also, as a version of the iPod there are times when all I want is to listen to music, show my relatives a slide show of photos, or watch a movie, for instance, on an airplane without being interrupted by Edge. Bingo, this lead me to the answer. And I was surprised the clerk at the Apple Store didn't know to tell me about this feature.

There is no direct setting for defeating Edge as there is with Wifi so their answers aren't completely wrong, however, at the top of the Settings menu there is an item called Airplane Mode. Basically, Apple put this setting on your iPhone so when you get into an airplane and the steward announces you must turn off all cell phones and wifi devices, you have one simple setting to do so. This setting also defeats Edge by turning it off.

If you turn the iPhone to Airplane Mode ON, your iPhone will send all incoming phone calls to AT&T voice mail automatically and you can use all the other client features of your digital media device without being connected to the "cloud" as they like to say in the valley.

The downside is when you turn Airport Mode on, you will defeat both Edge and Wifi at the same time when perhaps all you wanted to do is stop Edge from communicating. This is not the same as giving iPhone users a desirable setting that would just turn off Edge but it works for now.

Now, when in Brazil or traveling to places were cell phone activity is charged a premium by AT&T, I can put the iPhone in the Airplane Mode, play music, take photos of friends and family, takes notes, use the calculator, check my calendar, and when I find a free wifi zone, I can turn Airplane Mode off and connect to receive my email without having to be pushed to the Edge.