The Piano Inside My Brain

Check out my post on the World Wide Web Communications company blog:

Keys to your Domain

Just to add as a side note, you can use QuarkBase to help research the whois information about your domain.

Yesterday, someone was showing me his new iPhone 3G, perhaps in a slightly futile attempt to make me jealous. He was talking about how it felt in his hand and how he liked that it was thinner. I reminded him that it was thinner “at the edges,” but thicker in the middle. His is still cooler.

But that got me thinking. If Apple designers added the thickness all the way around, what improvements could have been made?

• Battery life - 20% more time using the phone on 3G or GPS would be good. Perhaps Apple wouldn’t advise you to turn off all of its new features in order to get the most out of the battery.
• Camera - an upgraded camera would certainly be appreciated, a little higher resolution and a little better optics would make a huge difference to many people. It still wouldn’t be an SLR, so people will complain anyway.
• Antennas - there are at least four antennas inside the iPhone, so a little extra space would have allowed for slightly larger antennas to improve reception for 3G, WiFi, EDGE, Bluetooth, etc. And better reception helps everything.

What else can you think of that would be a welcome addition?

Now that the first wave of iPhone applications has basically hit, I’m anxious to see what the next wave brings. One application that I would like to see would be the ability to attend webinars from the iPhone.

Someone like WebEx or Citrix (GoToWebinar) would be the natural choice to develop this. As an attendee, you could call in on the phone and then view a shared screen, allowing you to zoom in for details. And add the chat window to complete the experience. I could see this requiring 3G or Wi-Fi access for speed reasons.

I would see this as a free application, since the goal is for attendees to participate from a mobile platform.

Does this make sense to you? Post your thoughts in the comments.

So this post is being written from a new iPhone application now available. While it doesn’t give full administration, it does let me add new posts.

It also lets me add photos to the post, in this case a screenshot from the application.

Also nice is the ability to schedule posts, add tags, set categories and preview the post. One major problem is the lack of cut and paste on the iPhone, but that is certainly not the fault of this app.

It will be interesting to see how this application improves over time as well as whether I find myself posting more often.

One of the keys to being an email Ninja is the tools you use. For many people, the choices are Outlook or Gmail. Lifehacker brings us the following post:

• Outlook vs. Gmail - The Definitive Comparison

They talk about everything useful, from search to folders/labels to rules/filters to contacts to spam and more. Gmail is getting better all the time and I find myself appreciating it more and more. I gave up on Outlook years ago when I switched to the Mac.

Even though my day to day has more to do with strategizing with clients, I still love to roll up my sleeves, fire up my graphics programs and code editors, and get under the hood for some good old fashioned website development. With that in mind, one of my favorite tools is Iconfactory’s xScope.

Think of xScope as a graphics Swiss army knife. It helps with all of those little jobs where there is no really good way.

• Rulers - measure horizontally and vertically and even angle the rulers on the screen.
• Dimensions - measure the inside dimensions of any element on the screen, which is great for figuring out the margins or padding of objects.
• Screens - this gives you an overlay of standard browser windows at a variety of screen resolutions, which is perfect for design mockups.
• Loupe - magnify anything on the screen which also shows you the exact color of the center pixel and gives precise coordinates for the point.
• Crosshair, Guides and Frames - vertical and horizontal tools for additional ways to measure screen areas.

If you use a Mac and do anything design related, this is a great tool to have at the ready,

In spite of the activation woes that struck Apple & AT&T yesterday, I was able to download and install the official iPhone 2.0 Firmware to my iPhone “classic.”

After exploring the new features of the device, here are a few of the highlights:

• I have multiple email accounts setup on the phone. In your settings, you choose a default mail account to use as the “send” account when you click on links from websites. To forward a picture from my phone to a friend, I had to have a personal account set as default. To forward a link to a client, I had to have a work account as the default. With the new firmware, I can select from the message itself which account the message is coming from. For people that have both work and home addresses on the phone, this also allows you to reply using your personal account when your friend sends something to your work address.
• One of the very cool applications for the iPhone is Apple’s remote control application. From this new application you start by pairing your iPhone with iTunes, Airport Express and AppleTV on your local WiFi network. From there, you can use the phone as a remote control. The content doesn’t play through your phone, but rather its original source.
• There is now a “Contacts” application, rather than having to go through the phone application to the contacts area. And in this, you have contacts search. So when you start typing a person’s name or company name, the phone immediately shows the results. This is great if you know the company that you want to call, but cannot remember the person’s name. I’d love to see this extend to a partial phone number search as well.
• As good as web based games can be on the iPhone, native iPhone games are amazing, and there will be lots of them. The one game that all iPhone owners should get is Trism, a puzzle game similar to Bejeweled and Tetris. The twist is that you tilt the phone to slide the triangles into place. It is very addictive and this game can only be played on an iPhone.

I’m very excited about OmniFocus for the iPhone, but I want to spend some more time with it before giving it a more in depth review.

For some reason, lots of people have been mentioning to me that they are going to be near an Apple store over the next few days.

Perhaps they are going to purchase a new iMac or MacBook?

So, for all of those people ready to jump from the PC to the Mac, here are some good resources for you to ease the transition:

• Some General Tips for Switch to Mac From Windows – Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal
• Mac 101 – Apple’s website
• Hack Attack: A Guide to Switching to the Mac – Adam Pash, LifeHacker

And if you still need some convincing, perhaps Ellen Feiss can help.

In Seth Godin’s latest post Let Me See, Seth lists out 18 ways that you could mashup data and present it in ways that are useful and very powerful.

This got me thinking: Did he just post 18 ideas for startup companies? Yes, I think that he did.

So, what ideas do you have for mixing contextual data? And how can this be delivered on mobile devices, like the iPhone or the Android platform?

Post your thoughts in the comments.

Over the past month, everyone who knows me has been asking me about the next iPhone. Usually, it includes the obvious question, “Are you getting the new one?”

For me, the answer is simple. “No.”

Here are my reasons:

1. Many people are excited about the 3G speeds for the network, but the coverage is still pretty scarce. Yes, it is in my area, but I don’t have to drive too far to be outside of it.
2. Many people are excited about the GPS chip in the new iPhone, but it is not a replacement for a turn-by-turn directions device, like a Garmin or a TomTom.
3. Running the 3G and GPS will kill your battery life, and Apple recommends turning these off when you don’t specifically need them. Chances are that in the moment that you want to quick check a website, the 7 seconds that you will shave off from having 3G speeds will be replaced with 20 seconds to turn on 3G and then jump back to find the link and then… oh, never mind. I’m willing to trade a few seconds here and there when browsing the web on my phone for all day battery life. Not to mention that WiFi is very pervasive and faster than a 3G network.
4. The new pricing plans are significantly higher than the existing plans and text messages are not included. If did the same exact plan that I have now, I would pay an extra $360 over the 2-year contract plus an $18 upgrade fee plus the cost of the phone itself. Yes, the plans are still reasonable compared to Blackberries, but I like my current deal.
5. With the original iPhone, Apple revolutionized the activation process by doing it through iTunes. My experience was flawless and it took less than 8 minutes while I was surfing the web in another window. With the new iPhone, activation must happen in the store. If you want to try to avoid the 30 minutes of annoyance that it takes to purchase and activate a cell phone, AT&T has provided a “Get iReady Checklist” PDF file.
6. The compelling feature of the new iPhone is the 2.0 software update, specifically ability to have third-party applications. And the original iPhone will run these perfectly. There may be some applications that will benefit from the precision of a GPS chip compared to cell tower triangulation, but I will be able to live without that. I’m most excited about the productivity apps and games (not-so productive apps) that will run locally on the phone.

All that said, the new iPhone will be great and I highly recommend it. But if you have the current original iPhone, wait for the 3.0 iPhone that will probably ship sometime in July of 2009.