All that being said, the iPhone is not ideal, nor flawless. The PIM features are, in my opinion, incomplete. I am referring to the fact that you can’t enter new data into the Notes, Contacts or Calendar apps, except by syncing the device to a Mac running Stickies, iCal and Apple Address Book. I hope Apple starts to see the potential market this has with more PIM features. Maybe they were pressed for release, and cut the features out for now to add them later. We’ll have to wait and see on that.

Apple could also open the device for third party development. According to Apple, it’s just Mac OS X Tiger inside. Perhaps someone will figure out how to hack Safari to download Mac OS X apps on to it. Or at least let us install Dashboard widgets on the thing.

But this being an Apple product whose name begins with I and P, it is a great media player. Strong Bad Emails, Ask A Ninja, and Tiki Bar TV rule! They’re my favorite videoblogs. Evil Genius Chronicles, Coverville, Raven n Blues, and Bandana Blues, are among my favorite podcasts. Since the iPhone is essentially a phone with 8GB video iPod features, we’ll be able to access all our new media on it, with a better interface than anyone has ever produced. I predict Apple will bring the iPhone UI (without the phone features) to the rest of the iPod family within the year. They’ll be stupid not to. MultiTouch rocks!

Of course, the iPhone’s price has to come down for it to be really mainstream. I predict (you heard it here first, folks, LOL) that next year, the 8GB model will be the low end, and a higher capacity (16GB?) model will be the $600 high end.

In order for the iPhone to be really successful and mainstream, it should also be sold unlocked, free of carrier lock-in. Not everyone wants to be Cingular subscriber. The whole carrier lock-in thing is bone headed anyway. It surely has been demonstrated in Europe that expensive carrier-exclusive phones are not necessary to retain customers. And the practice isn’t that effective for that purpose either anyway. Carrier chickenshits, if you ain’t got good service, an expensive locked-in phone won’t help you keep any subscribers you’ve pissed off. They’ll just sell it on eBay and move on.

In conclusion, the iPhone is a great innovative cellphone/media player with some PIM functionality. The crux of its innovation rests on the MultiTouch touchscreen interface and wide screen media playback. It has a few flaws, namely the lack of smartphone PIM features and a closed development model. To really hit it big, it has to come down in price a bit, and be available at more than one carrier in the US. In any case, Apple has essentially raised the bar way up in the user interface front, making the competition look ancient in comparison.

Technorati Tags:
technology, gadgets, iphone, podcast, personal.media, videoblogs, mac.os.x

It’s not a permanent job, it’s more like “we’ll pay you decent money if we publish your article.” Print magazines pay a pittance for a two-thousand word article. This website pays pittance x 3, making it a lot more worth the trouble. If I can get on the stick and write an article per month, it could make a decent source of part-time income.

I know I’m being vague about the site. Once I get my first article published, believe me, I’ll post all the details.

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I have finished setting up Trac for hosting my open source projects. As if installing Subversion last week wasn’t enough, Trac configuration took a lot more trial and error. My web hosting provider uses Plesk for setting up web domains. Even though I know my way fairly well around Apache, I had used the Plesk configuration app to set up this web site and my friends’ websites on this server. I practically painted myself into a corner, as Plesk doesn’t like geeks messing around the Apache config files, which you have to do to set up Trac and Subversion. ** sigh **

I am still fighting with the configuration of the Subversion code repository. I want to have check-ins through ssh+svn, and anonymous checkouts through HTTP via Apache mod_dav_svn. I hope to have that all set up tonight so that I can check in the first files of my open source project’s code.

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I like and use Google Calendar, but as a bona fide code geek, I am more interested in getting my calendar data out and integrating Google Calendar into desktop and web applications.

My first open source project for pjtrix is a Mac OS X application to integrate together iCal and Google Calendar. In the last few weeks, I’ve been researching the Google Calendar API, writing some test applications to insert calendar events into Google Calendar, pull calendar events out, change calendar event data and put it back in, etc. It’s all done in Ruby, which has made it all really nice.

Right now the integration between iCal and Google Calendar is only one-way. You can import your iCal calendars into Google Calendar. Or you can import your Google Calendar calendars into iCal. But you can’t have changes flow from one application to the other without creating a mess of duplicates every time you change the date or time of an event.

You can read more information about my project at the project’s Trac home page.

Technorati Tags:
web architecture, software development, open source, ruby, life

It all began around March eight, when my PowerBook started having bouts of narcolepsy while I was working on it, going to sleep on me at random times. Turns out it had a bad temp sensor under the trackpad. This sensor worked fine for the first one to three hours after power-up, then it would start going nuts, reporting temperature extremes between -140 F and 190 F. The PowerBook went to sleep to protect itself, thinking it was really overheating.

My PowerBook is the center of my computing life. And without it I am totally lost and unproductive at my personal stuff: my feed reader and blog post editor is there, along with my browser bookmarks, my iTunes library, and my podcast subscriptions. While I back up everything daily to an external drive, I don’t have a spare PowerBook to dump my backups on when my main PowerBook is gone. If I depended on the PowerBook more for work-related stuff, I would be totally SOL if it was gone.

Anyhow, things are sorta returning to normalcy. I’ve been moving my computing life to a dual booting Windows/Linux laptop I use for my work as an open source Java VM and open source Java Enterprise Edition frameworks expert.

The PowerBook returned and then was sent back: they wasted many weeks of my time ordering parts and what not, but they hadn’t repaired or replaced the failing temp sensor. :: sigh :: Here’s hoping it comes back soon, really repaired this time. The only consolation I have is, if they don’t get it fixed for a third time, I get a free new MacBook Pro.

Catch you all soon, I have other things to share …