MidKnight Gallery

With a recent announcement by Google, you can almost hear the air getting sucked out of .mac’s sails.

Say what?

OK. .mac is Apple’s much touted, and honestly, underdeveloped mail hosting service/sync service/online disk space/remote access service that was recently rebranded as mobileme/.me. Frankly, it’s a bastard stepchild. While I’ve had legitimate uses for it and it’s premium pricing (just wait, I’ll explain), most users have never needed most of what it offers, or could easily get it for free. The biggest thing going for it lately was .mac-based syncing for the iPhone, that offered a compelling reason to shell out the bucks.

Well, Google is now offering exchange-server based syncing called Mobile Sync that works with a number of smart phones – including the iPhone. With it, you can keep your gmail-based contacts and Google calendars wirelessly synchronized with your iPhone. And it’s free.

OK. It’s hardly the end of the world. There are still a number of advantages that .mac has, but Google sync just made it a lot less compelling.

Pro’s for Google Mobile Sync:

• Easy to share calendars with other people and fairly easy to see other people’s shared calendars as long as they’re on Google. Google calendars has it all over iCal here.
• Reliable. You don’t have to deal with the vagaries of Apple’s built-in syncing services. Google has the server, Google keeps the calendar. Any changes you make to it after using the calDav tools like Calaboration to give you direct access to your Google calendar in iCal will be reflected within minutes no matter where else you look at your calendar. The calendar and contacts are synchronized over the relatively tried and tested (yes, I’m grinding my teeth saying it, but credit where due) Exchange activesync services. Since the current Apple Address Book app in Leopard natively syncs to any specified Google Mail account, this gives you a completely different channel to keep your mail and contacts and calendars synchronized on your phone and desktop. It also makes them available via the web, while letting you use the interface (web or local) that best suits your way of working.

Cons:

• Privacy. Well – there are some who worry about Google and privacy. I understand these concerns, but don’t worry enough to not use them where they’re the best tool for the job.
• Five Calendars synchronized. You can have more than five calendars, but only five of them can be synchronized to your smartphone. I solved this by grouping what used to be separate calendars together.
• Ease of setup. If you have a new computer and iPhone – great. No problem. However, if, like me, you have a bunch of contact and calendar information already, then .mac is still the clear winner here. Between consolidating calendars, backing up data on the phone and the computers, exporting out individual calendars to import into Google cal, importing them, etc… it’s hardly a painless synchronization  or one-click export. If, on the other hand, you already use Google and never used iCal anyway, then you still have the option of viewing the calendars in iCal. This is useful because a lot of programs in OSX are aware of the address book and the iCal calendars.
• .mac plays better with mail programs than GMAIL. Especially the built in Apple Mail.app. Go figure. That said, this is true because Google does a few non-standard things to make tags work within the folder paradigm that most mail programs use.
• Doesn’t replace the “Back to My Mac” functionality. – though as I recall LogMeIn now has a free mac program that allows you to get some of that (remotely controlling your computer) for free.

So… getting all this to work can be a little harder than .mac, and you still don’t get to synch bookmarks, but it’s free, and it works. For people like me who’ve had a .mac address for years, well, we’re not giving it up. At this point though, I can’t really point to mobileme sync as a compelling reason to push .mac/.me/mobileme.

Well. It has now been a whole year since I got my iPhone.

Insofar as changing my life, well, I’m not making millions in Hollywood, and I don’t have hundreds of devoted followers.

All in all, I’d say that’s a good thing.

It definitely has been a boon though. The ease of email, texting, keeping my calendar on me, etc. has made it much easier to keep my life in order. My wife called it the first phone she didn’t want to throw across the room. It definitely is the first phone she knows how to use everything. Of course, I would not be as happy if the iPhone were still stuck with its original capabilities, as the added software has made all the difference in the world. Google maps and street view have helped me get directions and verify them. Facebook has let me keep in touch with friends. Remember the milk has made todo lists that I can keep with me EASY. I can even read ebooks from Baen and other publishers, IM, check bank balances, keep up on Twitter, or write entries like this to my blog. And then there are the games.

All is not perfect. While most places had better coverage under AT&T, my home coverage continues to be flaky at best. It’s an awkward shape for a phone (though no worse than many Blackberries), and sometimes you trigger something you don’t want to because of the touch screen.

But I’m glad I have it.

–fixed some typos due to my fat fingers while punching it in on my iPhone

The kind of iPhone app I’ve been waiting for the longest….

One word: Amen

On an iPhone related note, there is now an app in the iPhone app store that allows you to post Worspress-based blog entries and edit them on your iPhone or iPod touch.

One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.

This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:

That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.

Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.

Just a thought.

Well, the 1.1.3 update is out, and with it came some nice improvements to maps and the browser. We are also a step along to adding custom software via the soon to be released SDK.

Nevertheless, there are still a few programs I really want to have on my iPhone:

• MMS – sending pictures with text messages.
• IM/Chat such as iChat/Adium.
• eBook reader like Mobipocket.

And still one feature – some kind of copy/paste functionality.

Aside from the two other issues I noted earlier with the iPhone, here’s an addition that’s a bit less obvious. It would be outstandingly awesome to have a functional variant of Mobipocket or a similar reader for the iPhone. While I can usually get to the Baen webscriptions site easily enough, and it reads quite well thanks to Safari, it still doesn’t match the ease of simply switching to Mobi and dropping right into the last page read.

One of the hottest-selling and most eagerly anticipated products of this last year was the iPhone, the “smart” phone from Apple. The device itself is an example of graceful, minimalist beauty. The operating system for it is well thought out and helpful in all of the right places, making doing anything on the iPhone nearly effortless, even without a manual. Unlike my Symbian-based Nokia with it’s thick tome, the iPhone comes with a small folded pamphlet that gives you the highlights, and assumes you can figure out the rest as you get there because it’s just so easy.

For the most part, they’re right. I’m sure there are Treo and Blackberry users out there that will grind their teeth at some of the limitations. After spending a week with one, I can say that for me, it’s almost perfect. The programmers at Apple need to be thanked.

I do have a few general complaints though. There are also a few oddities that tell me there is more to come.

First of all, there is no selection of text, or copy, or paste. Secondly, if you’re going to allow people to email pictures taken with the camera, not having the phone send and receive MMS messages is a bit odd. While it would be nice if I could SMS multiple people or use instant messaging, I don’t have a high demand for these features and can comfortably live without them.

The first two issues are the most annoying. The lack of select/copy/paste because it gets in my way the most often, and the lack of MMS because it just seems an odd oversight when you’ve included the lowest common denominator (SMS) and gone well past it (full IMAP email). MMS is still very commonly used and since my kids and many of my friends don’t have iPhones yet, how am I supposed to send them pictures? At least with the “select” issue there is a valid question of how do you “select” text on the touch screen that’s easily differentiated from the other touchscreen commands.

There are places where you can legitimately copy or paste entire blocks of text such as URL’s, without worrying about seelction. This brings me to an interesting incomplete feature I stumbled into. While reading an online book, I had quickly noticed that entire paragraph blocks highlight when you touch them. I didn’t think much of it, but at one point when the block highlighted, I kept my finger down, and a bezel popped up like so:

Note the tiny letters under the excerpt of text that say “Action.” This leaves open the possibility of copying or otherwise using blocks of text in the web browser, as well as suggests at least one way that selection can be done for at least paragraphs and perhaps even whole words.

I’ll probably write more about using the phone later.

Update: After doing a bit of digging, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s seen this inactive “action” button. It apparently shows up when clicking in the margins of web pages that have them. Why this applies to the html e-books available at Baen is a bit of a puzzle as of yet, andI have seen no mention yet of other text being incorporated into the “action” button.