SynCainicity
Posted on | September 12, 2008 at 7:03 am | 6 Comments
Time to take a short break from talking about iPhone apps while I do some more research and testing. On to another subject. Every once in a while, I have to do Josh’s job and point out something in a comic strip that he and the Curmudgeon Commenters might have missed. I especially enjoy seeing two (or more) strips that use something close to the same gag on the same day, apparently unplanned. In yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News, it was especially jarring because the two strips are right next to each other. Both strips, Candorville and Doonesbury, are often politically focused, so it’s no surprise they latched onto the same “John McCain is sure using his awful Vietnam experience to sell his campaign” issue on the same day (click graphic to enlarge):
Bonus points to Candorville for getting in a Palin-slam, and hugs & kisses to Doonesbury for working in the “I don’t remember how many houses I have” McCain Senior Moment. Coincidentally, the same day also saw the release of a film showing McCain’s release from the Vietnamese prison. And yesterday was also the anniversary of 9/11. The cynical part of me thinks this was engineered on purpose to help McCain with his campaign. But a politician and his handlers wouldn’t do something like that, would they?
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “shampoo in my eye now eyesight is bad”.
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS3, demo), Heavenly Sword (PS3)
The inPhonite Migration: Evernote Never Forgets
Posted on | September 11, 2008 at 7:50 am | 2 Comments
You may remember that when I initially bought the iPhone back around March of this year, I was hoping to eventually give up my Palm TX PDA, which I use for everything in the world. When the iTunes App Store opened up in June, that started to bring me closer to my goal. I have yet to even come close to ditching the PDA, but I can now envision a world where that will happen, probably within the next year. The iPhone applications are getting more varied and sophisticated, and are coming closer to giving me what I need.
A lot of the problems with the iPhone apps involve the data being limited to storage on the device itself, i.e. it doesn’t get synced up anywhere and you can’t enter it on anything besides the iPhone. That can be quite time consuming if you have to enter a lot of text using the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. One native iPhone application that demonstrates this issue is its “Notes” application. You can enter all the notes you like into it, as long as you do it from the iPhones keyboard and don’t wish to see them anywhere else (other devices, computers, web sites). And even though you can sync up calendar and contacts info from the iPhone with Microsoft Outlook on the desktop, for some reason you can’t do Notes and Tasks. That’s a serious design flaw.
So I’ve been looking into other Note applications that will fill this need. One interesting (and free) one I’ve been playing with lately is Evernote. It has a native iPhone client, as well as a web client and a desktop client. And all of them sync up: The data is actually stored on the website. Besides Text Notes, you can also store Voice Notes, Snapshot Notes (using the iPhone’s camera) and Saved Photo Notes. The Text Notes can be formatted, and can also contain content captured from the web using browser plugins for clipping, or just simple copy/paste.
Here’s a screen capture of the Evernote “saved notes” screen in my iPhone:
The text from the notes is all searchable, including text that appears in graphic images. Yes, they run the photos through OCR software. It seems to work pretty good too. I took a picture of the Multi Function Display on my Prius and uploaded it to Evernote. It was able to identify many of the words in the pic: “consumption”, “mpg”, “outside”, “current”, “miles”, “trip”, and most of the numbers. The ones it couldn’t find included “regenerated”, “temp”, “reset”, “energy”, and “average”. Predictably the blurrier ones were not identified, though I would think it would be able to spot “reset”. And weird that it got “outside” but not “temp”. It even helpfully highlights the word in the pic when you filter by it:
So that’s all pretty cool. The disadvantages are:
1) Does not cache the notes locally on your iPhone. You must be connected to the cloud via the cellular network or WiFi in order to read any of your notes. So if you’re on a flight that’s not equipped with WiFi, for example, you can’t view your notes. I think I heard the company is going to address this with a future release. It can also take quite a while to download even the thumbnails to your iPhone if your data access is slow (hello, EDGE), so firing up the app and going to “view notes” may take some time.
2) There is no password protection for viewing notes, so you shouldn’t put anything too sensitive in there. Supposedly you can encrypt notes in the desktop app and decrypt them with a password in the iPhone client, but that doesn’t seem to actually apply to the Windows desktop app – I couldn’t find the encryption option there. Must be a Mac-only thing for now. Or maybe that’s part of the premium (paid) edition? But anyway, that applies to each note individually, while I want a password for getting into the app as a whole. I guess you could do a “logout” anytime you’re leaving the app, which would require a login with password the next time you fire it up, but that’s a pain and hard to remember.
3) I’m also not totally sold on having my data stored on some company’s server. But at least that does provide a good backup if something happens to your phone and/or desktop.
4) It has an extremely rudimentary task list function (basically you’re able to add checkboxes to items in a text note, but only on the desktop app, which then syncs over to the iPhone client). That needs to be fleshed out more.
Evernote has a lot of nice features which I’ve just barely touched on here, especially for a free app, and I think I’m going to continue using it for awhile to see how it performs. The user interface is nice and easy to use. But it really needs to fix some issues before I consider it to be a decent replacement for the old Memo function on the PDA.
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “shampoo in my eye now eyesight is bad”.
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Castlevania:PoR (DS)
[Edit]: Post title updated to be part of series.
Circumnavigating
Posted on | September 10, 2008 at 7:17 am | 8 Comments
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about my iPhone – a few days at least. Although I did post yesterday’s entry from the iPhone using the iPhone WordPress app, and I even attached a photo taken at the same time. I wasn’t sure that would upload or display correctly, but it did. I was shocked. This will make it easier to do blog entries from the “road” in the future. I’ve finally been installing more iPhone apps lately and checking them out as time permits. My ultimate goal is to not have to use my Palm TX PDA at all anymore. How am I doing on that? I’ll reveal that in future entries.
What I want to talk about today is the built-in Google Maps function, and how it helped me out on the road today. It took me awhile to discover it, but Google Maps on the iPhone has a “show traffic” function, which will give you a realtime (more or less) indication of traffic flow on major highways/streets in your area. This indication is in the form of a green, yellow, or red line. Here’s an example from yesterday evening, late rush hour in the Denver metro area. (Love the screen capture function in the new iPhone software.) The red horizontal line is westbound I-70. The yellow vertical one is southbound I-25. They are trouble spots! Avoid!
Anyway, when I was driving to work yesterday morning, I got onto eastbound 6th Avenue at Kipling, and it was a parking lot. It wasn’t moving at all, which is always a bad sign. That usually means there’s an accident ahead, but there’s no way to tell how far ahead. So instead of merging onto the highway proper, I got off on the next exit, Garrison, and took that north to eastbound Colfax Ave. Colfax was okay for a little while, but as I approached Wadsworth, it started getting crowded too, and after Wadsworth, before Sheridan, it was almost a parking lot like 6th Ave. A parking lot with stoplights. So while stopped at a stoplight, I took out the ol’ iPhone and brought up in Google Maps. Unfortunately, Colfax isn’t a major enough street for the traffic flow to be shown, so I couldn’t tell if it was going to open up or not. However, it did have the traffic flow on 6th Avenue. I noticed that the red area there extended eastbound only from Kipling to just past Wadsworth, and from then on it was green. So I turned south on Sheridan and went back to 6th Avenue. Sure enough, 6th was totally clear and I floated the rest of the way into work. I heard later the accident was between Wadsworth and Sheridan, and was still not cleared up by the time I got back onto the highway.
I probably wasted some time doing the Colfax detour and it might’ve been better to just stay on 6th the whole way and crawl past the accident. But I couldn’t really check the iPhone at the time I got onto 6th to see how far the slowdown extended. The iPhone did help when I was on Colfax though, and I think it saved me some time. And then on the way home during the evening commute, westbound 6th Avenue was backed up pretty bad from Kalamath on. I was hardly moving at all. I checked Google Maps and the red line extended just past Federal. So I knew that I could tough it out that far and then it would be clear sailing. I love this! I know this is probably old hat to people with cars that have built-in navigation systems and GPS and all that, but it’s a novelty to me with my dinky iPhone. The only problem is trying not to get distracted while driving.
I also realize that the traffic reports may not be as “real time” and reliable as they appear. It takes awhile for things to get reported. But that technology is improving all the time, and it’s better than nothing.
Note: I’ve got an “old” first generation iPhone and it doesn’t have GPS like the new 3G iPhones. However, the locater function still works pretty good even though it’s just triangulating by cell phone towers or whatever. When I hit the locater in Google Maps on the road, it’s usually able to zoom in on my location within a pretty tight radius. That helps when checking out the traffic.
So… thumbs up to Google Maps, again! I can’t live without it now.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: I installed iTunes 8.0, and it brought back the stupid and useless screen-wasting Genre column in the iTunes Browser!! And there’s no option to get rid of it this time! There’s a hack for getting rid of it in the Mac version, but I want a Windows fix!
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “pepsi cans leaking”.
Return of the Mailboxes
Posted on | September 9, 2008 at 4:25 pm | Comments Off
Our mailboxes are back! Our mailboxes are back! Now that the DNC is over, I guess it’s safe to use the US Postal Service again. Somehow, I think Sarah Palin must be responsible for this. Thanks, Sarah!
Latre.
Posted from my iPhone using the WordPress app.
Re-Kirkenized
Posted on | September 8, 2008 at 9:11 pm | 1 Comment
Movie Review Sunday Monday!
The only movie I saw during the past week was Blind Dating. This may’ve been a direct-to-DVD only release, but I’m not sure. I don’t remember it ever being in the theaters. My girlfriend saw a trailer for it on another DVD and thought it looked amusing or interesting, so she got it from the library. Once I saw that it starred the Dude Who Is Playing Captain Kirk In The New Star Trek Rebooted Movie (Chris Pine), I said I wanted to see it too. Gotta check that dude out, since I’ve never seen him in anything else.
The movie is about a good-looking guy who’s been blind since birth and who is just trying to get laid. His brother, a limo driver, tries to set him up with a number of freakish women, with the expected comical results. Hilarity ensues. But our hero dude Danny only has “eyes” for the Indian receptionist at his doctor’s office. And of course, she’s about to enter into an arranged marriage with an Indian dude, played by the scientist guy who’s the only person without superpowers on Heroes. So there are lots of barriers to their love that must be overcome. No phasers or transporter accidents though. The movie takes kind of a weird, dark turn when Danny gets a chip implanted into his head which allows him to see in black & white with these weird glasses that have a camera hooked up to them. (The glasses are hooked up to a machine that connects to the chip in his brain via the 802.11b wireless standard.) This experiment goes predictably wrong and almost kills him. And all he wanted to do was see what his girl looks like! (Digression: If you’ve been blind your whole life and you suddenly gain sight, would your brain actually know how to process the images?)
The movie had its poignant and funny scenes, though it was all extremely predictable. It would’ve played much better as a raunchy R-rated flick in the manner of The 40-Year Old Virgin and other flix from the Judd Apatow Arrested Development Production Factory. It certainly could’ve used something. It was just way too tame. But the important question is of course: Can this Chris Pine dude pull off Captain Kirk? Based on this one part, I think he can. He’s got the look and the arrogance down, he’s got the cocky charm, and I can definitely see him spewing Shatnerian dialog. I think the alien princesses will be dying to check out his photon torpedo, if you know what I mean and I think that you do. He does seem to have some acting chops, which I guess would help, but some of his instances of sudden temper/aggression in the movie played false. Come to think of it, that couldn’t hurt.
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “iphone in microwave”.
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Heavenly Sword (PS3)
This Day In History
Posted on | September 7, 2008 at 9:55 am | 7 Comments
September 7th is such a momentous day in history, isn’t it? Just look at everything that happened! Here’s some highlights:
1533 – Queen Elizabeth I of England is born
1776 – World’s first submarine attack
1864 – American Civil War: Atlanta, Georgia, is evacuated
1901 – The Boxer Rebellion in China officially ends
1921 – In Atlantic City, New Jersey, the first Miss America Pageant, a two-day event, is held.
1927 – The first fully electronic television system is achieved by Philo Taylor Farnsworth
1936 – Buddy Holly is born
1940 – Dario Argento (Italian film director) is born
1945 – Japanese forces on Wake Island, which they had held since December of 1941, surrender to U.S. Marines.
1951 – Chrissie Hynde and Mark Isham (musicians) are born
1953 – Benmont Tench (musician) is born
1954 – Corbin Bernsen (actor, L.A. Law) is born
1954 – Michael Emerson (actor, Lost) is born
1955 – Mira Furlan (actress, Babylon 5, Lost) is born
1956 – Diane Warren (songwriter) is born
1963 – Eazy-E (rapper) is born
1963 – The Pro Football Hall of Fame opens in Canton, Ohio with 17 charter members.
1967 – Toby Jones (actor) is born
1969 – Angie Everhart (model) and Diana Farr (actress, Rescue Me) are born
1970 – Tom Everett Scott (actor) is born
1973 – Shannon Elizabeth (actress, American Pie) is born
1978 – Keith Moon (musician) dies
1987 – Evan Rachel Wood (actress) is born
1994 – James Clavell (author) dies
1998 – Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University
2003 – Warren Zevon (musician) dies
Latre.
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Heavenly Sword (PS3)