One of the reasons I have not posted anything since the end of Jan is that I’ve been busy working on an iPad app.  But I decided to take a 10 min break from Xcode and discuss a quick topic that struck me tonight.

First, make sure you are sitting down because I’m going to reveal some shocking things about myself here:

In 1983 I was in high school.  (Yes, I am that old)  Pretty much I was late for school every day.  (again…  I know.. very surprising!)  As “punishment” I got detention and had to stay after school.  Detention could be spent in a variety of rooms, my preference was the computer lab.  The trick here was that I wanted to spend time in the computer lab.  So it was impossible to “punish” me.  At some point I think they caught on and made me spend my detention in a different room, but that actually punished them more than me, so eventually they gave in.  But I digress…

The point of this post is that in the 1980′s when I programmed, I just tried stuff to see what would happen.  I had no fear of typing “Run”.  The result was that I made some cool apps.  But these days, in iPhone OS, where I’m not that swift on objective-c, or these days Open GL ES – I tend to be taking more of a ‘research-research-research’ approach and am not clicking “Build and Run” as often as I would of when I was 16.  At least that how I feel at the moment.  I can’t say that it’s fear – because I know that nothing will explode.  But there’s something going on.

What do you think?  Are you less creative or less adventurous with technical things than you were when you were younger?

Wednesday was a very big day for me.  Even though I worked late into the morning Tuesday night on a project for work, my wife kindly came in at 9:58 am and woke me so that we could watch the web as Apple announced the long awaited tablet.  For over a year I’ve “known” approximately what this tablet would be and have impatiently awaited it’s arrival.  After all the news was out I can’t say that I was blown away, but on the other hand I wasn’t extremely disappointed either.  It is mostly what I expected it to be.  I was bummed about several things, but also pleasantly surprised at the price.  And after a few days of reflection I have a couple of things I want to say about the soon-to-be-in-my-hands iPad.  So read on for my thoughts about the missing flash, missing camera, weird aspect ratio, the product category and a prediction for release day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since my devistating review of the Camangi WebStation I’ve had some time to think about what my vision is for the soon to be announced Apple tablet.  This isn’t a prediction of what I think it will be, but rather a look at what I hope it will be.  Of course I originally wrote this about two or three weeks ago and since then there have been many rumors and speculations about what the tablet will be.  And by now we have a lot of clues as to what it will be.  And of course it’s very likely that in two days we’ll know exactly what it is, at least it’s initial itteration.  But hit the link and read on to what iWant it to be.

Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES

OCTOBER, 2009

Imagine you’re on vacation enjoying a day at Disneyland with your family.  You get your iPhone out of your pocket and it’s in your hand.  You set it down on the seat next to you for a second to help your 4 year old, then a few seconds later you suddenly realize that it’s gone.  You think “Wait a minute… where’s my iphone?”  Then you question yourself “where did I set it down and why would I set it down?” and then you re-step your path, ask around if anyone saw it, check all your pockets like 10 times, look in the stroller and all around.  It’s gone!  Now what?

What would you do?  “I have mobile me” you say?  Well, so do I – but there are some harsh realities to that.  If you’re an iPhone owner I suggest that you read on, find out what is and isn’t possible, and think about what you would do, because it could happen to you. Read the rest of this entry »

With less than 30 days until WWDC I’m starting to get anxious about what new Apple iGadgets might (or might not) be released.  Will Steve Jobs be back from his curious sick leave to unveil the next big thing?  Or will it be another disappointing and uneventful keynote?  The rumors have certainly been flowing recently and whether they’re based on anything real or are just wishful thinking on the part of a few fan boys, they’ve got me hopeful that my dream mac might be in my hands soon enough.  Either way, what might be has been enough to make me hold off on upgrading my first generation iPhone – hoping that I’m only a month or two away from that third gen iPhone hardware to go along with the 3.0 iPhone software.  But what will this new iPhone be?  And what of this controversial mac tablet?

About 2 months ago I was mocking up my own concept for a mac tablet when real life got in the way of blogging.  Since then I’ve blogged very little.  I’ve also seen (on other sites) a couple of very cool mockups, one that would be completely awesome but is at least a few years off due to it’s flexible OLED design, and another that is extremely close to what I was planning.  Whipping up a fake now would be completely academic.

Being somewhat of a fan boy myself it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between my wish list and what I expect will really be released.  But here’s my take on WWDC 09… Read the rest of this entry »

In 1986 I went into my local Atari ST store and was furious to find a cheap Othello-type game selling for $30 – which was like 100 bucks in ’86.  Why sooo serious?!  Well, because in my opinion it was a total rip off.  First off it showed no creativity – the graphics were just black and white circles for game pieces.  And second, it should have been free out of a magazine (back then you’d just type in the code).  It was a total rip off.  So I set out to write my own version of the game, and mine looked more like a 3D game table.  The rest of that story another time.

To my point, a similar thing has certainly happened to the makers of the iPhone app Bang!Bang! and Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Free (iTunes links).  They had what they thought was an original idea. They set out to make it professional, using realistic graphics and hollywood sound effects, and they worked it through the iPhone app approval process.  Only to find out that Apple was approving several ‘gun’ apps all around the same time.  No proof of this of course, but I suspect that Apple might have held theirs back to time the releases closer together. I believe theirs did hit the store first, but others soon followed, including what can only be described as an extremely cheap knock off called Shotgun Pro.  But plagiarism is the best form of compliment, right?  And competition is what makes this country great.

But still, the idea that Shotgun Pro had made it to #2 on the Entertainment charts got under their skin a bit.  And to be honest it also makes me scratch my head as it is a somewhat un-inspired soundboard app.  So to combat it they too set out on a mission, to ‘pop a cap in the arse’ of the competition.  Take the jump to read on and see the video…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok… Unfortunately I’m old enough to have lived through old Coke vs New Coke vs Classic Coke – which by the way isn’t the same as the old Coke. This might be just a matter of taste too, but I belive the original iPod Shuffle is still the best iPod Shuffle.  By now it’s quite obvious that Apple’s business model is to come out with new iPods every few months so that there’s always a new iPod that you’ll want to buy.  For most of their other iPod models the new ones generall are better than the old ones.  But I still have my original iPod shuffle and it still works great.  And while it doesn’t talk to me, it has some features that make it the best..

Read the rest of this entry »

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
Read the rest of this entry »

Like many others, I downloaded the beta of Safari 4 and am trying to get used to the new window layout.

One of the new features shows all your top visited sites as a grid of thumbnails. While on the surface it’s an interesting feature, it’s a bit annoying in it’s current state.  It also raises some interesting questions about things like “are advertisers paying for impressions for ads that are only shown on thumbnails?” But that’s probably a topic for a different post.

The feature also falls in line with a new trend at Apple – which is to take control away from the consumer and make certain choices for them. I originally thought of this Top Sites page as a cool way of keeping track of the main sites I want to visit each day. However, the way Apple sees it your Top Sites are explicitly the pages that you actually visit the most. Rather than giving you a list-view of sites and allowing you to drag pages into there from say, your bookmarks, all you can do is rearrange pages, and remove the ones you don’t want to see in your top sites. When a page is deleted the next most visited page is animated into place. It’s an annoying task to try to get specific pages on there. BUT NOW there’s currently no way to a secret way to manually edit those Top Sites.  (SEE UPDATE AFTER THE JUMP!)

SO! If you want tomorrowland.com to be one of your Top Sites you’ll need to start visiting us more often and convince the Safari 4 gods to make it one of your Top Sites.

But there’s more.. When I was trying to organize my Top Sites I accidentally deleted tomorrowland.com, which is certainly MY Top Site. So HOW do you get it back?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had my iPhone since day one. My wife and I stood in line, shelled out full price times two, and have been using them ever since. By the way, you know you have a winner of a bride if A) she’s hot and B) she’ll stand in line with you to get an iPhone. Guys, if you find one of those you better do what you can to keep her. But I digress!

In the early days Apple didn’t let you do custom ringtones and it was fraking lame. Some tools and hacks emerged to create and install ringtones and other sounds, but somewhere over the past 20 months I sort of lost interest in ringtones. Out of sight and out of mind. That is until today.

So what’s up with creating ring tones now?  I realized that many people are still confused about it and think that you can’t do it. Well you can. It’s easy. And Apple even tells you how to do it. Here I’ve outlined the process a little better than they do and included a few tips on how to get a good ringtone.

Read the rest of this entry »