Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

The awesome: I deposited my first check via an app on my iPhone today. I love my credit union. This is awesome as the closest branch is approximately 300 miles away. Since I moved to Pennsylvania, I’ve been depositing expense checks and other miscellany in the joint account for the house but I want to move away from that bank (fees, hassle) eventually. (“Eventually” is a promotion from “as quickly as possible” because they gave out tree ornaments in December that you can plant in the Spring. Yes, I’m a sucker.) I’m hoping to get all our accounts at the same financial institution so we can do easy transfers instead of writing checks to ourselves every month.

The irritating: I also had an unplanned upgrade to Mac OS Lion (10.7.2) this week. My system decided it wanted maintenance and I haven’t seen my system disks since we moved sooooo… luckily I had a copy of Lion hanging around. The Internet told me how to build a bootable disk, and, when the repair failed, I installed Lion fresh over Snowleopard. I was promptly reminded why I was procrastinating the upgrade when Photoshop (CS1), Quicken 2007 and Mouseworks (Kensington trackball software) all ceased to function properly. I found a poor substitute for Mouseworks (Trackball Works – fewer features but I could reverse my scroll direction at least). Intuit promises a rewrite of Quicken 2007 for Lion in the Spring (not holding my breath) and I’ll find another image editing program to replace good ol’ Photoshop as I use very little of its vast functionality.

The amusing: My old MacBook Pro (running Tiger, 10.5) valiantly built the boot disk as requested and tried to remind me of its loyalty and love. I keep pricing MacBook Airs, you see. I think it knows. But the MacBook is a 15″ laptop, heavy and unwieldy rather than sleek and sexy like the Air. Most of the portable functionality has already been taken over by the iPad. (Oh, iPad, you are my own true love.) However I do sometimes want true multi-tasking, a real keyboard and proper OS in my portable device. I’m big on procrastination though, so I’ll be waiting to see if Apple announces an iPad 3 this Spring. In the meantime, I’ll be moving Quicken and Photoshop to the MacBook Pro!

The horticultural, which is utterly unrelated to technology but I’m going to make it fit anyway: My little key lime tree bloomed. My tiny olive tree is doing something. The paper whites were pretty even if it was disappointing that only 2 of the bulbs produced flowers… but hey, they were $2.50 at Home Despot…

Shameless self-promotion: I have an article up at Internet Evolution about simple tools that can be used to build teams across vast geographical divides.

Lesson learned for the week: Migrating data from one computer to another over wireless is rather foolish as it will take forever. I knew it would take forever, I knew I should just set up a spare ethernet hub… but, instead, I spent a day getting to know my laptop again. However, Apple’s Migration Assistant is an awesome thing. The new Mac Pro is laid out exactly like the old PowerMac G5 now! This is both good and bad… Good because I have almost everything on the new machine and that’s lovely. Bad because, well, now my new machine is as cluttered and busy as my old machine. The new computer would have devolved to that point sooner or later anyway, so I guess I’m efficient. Right? The new machine is zippy and happy.

Hand-woven, natural fibers: Could I do an update without mentioning the kittens? Okay, probably I could, but not this one. The girls clearly enjoy hand-woven fabrics. Their original perch and nap zone was atop a handwoven wool blanket. Now they’re snuggled in behind my sewing machine on a pile of scarves, the top most of which is super-fine merino. Good thing I have a steady source of hand-woven goods to keep the kittens happy, right Mom? At least there’s no doubt that they have excellent taste.

AUTUMN! Tis the season to wear sweaters! Fa-la-la-la-la! The-Fall-is-here! Don we now our warm apparel! Fa-la-la, fa-la-la, FALL IS HERE! Ahem. I might be a little excited about the cooler weather and impending darker months. Just a little. It’s about time. We did have a fairly mild summer, so I didn’t have to complain as loudly or as frequently about heat and humidity. I’ve made applesauce once already and have apples and pears downstairs for more cooking. YUM!

autumn, internet evolution, kittens, lessons learned, mac, migration, random, teams, weather

We visited the Apple store last night. I bought the latest Apple Keyboard. It’s going to take some getting used to. The keys are smaller but spaced the same as a standard keyboard. This gives the keyboard a sleek look as each key is framed with shiny aluminum – the frame is not quite flush with the top of the key but it’s close enough that typing is definitely a different experience. It also means there’s less room for sloppy typing, in my case at least. I’m also noticing that my fingernails are a little long as they glance off keys. I like the action of the keys and it’s a quiet keyboard as well so I’ll definitely adjust. It’s nice to have my volume and iTunes commands back on my keyboard. As an added bonus the “help” key has been replaced with a “function” key so I can accidentally hit it all I want without invoking the stupid little “helpful” creatures.

I got an iPhone earlier this month too. It’s fun though rather anticlimactic since they’ve been around over a year now. I did not wait in line for it, which was of course a requirement. I didn’t wait in a line last year to buy Will’s, I wasn’t interested in queuing up for my own. I like the little apps. I particularly like that it serves as both cell phone and iPod on short trips at least. We’ll see if the battery can manage longer trips. The screen is lovely, the headset that came standard in the box is good enough for me, and it’s a pretty cool toy. 3G was definitely worth waiting for. Edge is doable, but 3G is tangibly faster and very usable. I am a patch behind because the next update requires iTunes 8.0 and I’m not quite willing to do that yet. I need to rearrange some files first. My primary hard drive is nearly out of space. Again. Big video files are not helping my cause apparently.

apple, iPhone, keyboards, technology, toys

Too many interesting links this week… time to corral them into a neat list! They’re really really random this week. I blame the heat.

The keynote at Macworld went well – AAPL is up $7+ today.

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple, Inc. which seems both insignificant and significant all at the same time. Remember when Apple changed from a color logo to a monochrome logo? Today’s name change is far more subtle but means far more. By dropping “Computer” they are admitting that their roots no longer account for their core business. It’s been a long and nail-biting wait, but I think it’s almost safe to say that Apple may have a stable future. I’ve always said that Apple isn’t going anywhere but now I’m almost convinced of this myself! Of course, I’m also a Red Sox fan, so I still worry even when things are going well. I wonder if Apple, Inc. finally paid off Apple Records sufficiently such that there will be no additional lawsuits. The last I heard was that Apple Records would appeal the May 2006 decision in the UK courts but that was months ago.

So, about that phone…

The iPhone has been announced! Let’s start with the important information, the size!

• Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches
• Screen size: 3.5 inches (diagonal)
• Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
• Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Battery life: 5 hours of talk/video/browsing time or 16 hours of audio playback

My 3.5 year old 3rd gen 40gb iPod is 4 x 2.5 x 0.75 inches (approximately). My fairly new LG flip phone is 3.5 x 1.8 x 0.75 inches. And neither of them are nearly as cool as this iPhone! Size does matter, at the iPhone is a little bigger than I usually like my cell phones to be, but useful functionality will make up for needing to buy a new case! It’s a touch bigger (less than half an inch taller, the first dimension listed above) than the current video iPods and but the iPhone’s screen is considerably larger (3.5 inch cinema vs 2.5 inch).

That battery life doesn’t suck either!

That little screen… my first laptop, a Powerbook 165, only had a screen resolution of 640×400. Of course it was 4-bit grayscale and only had 128K (yes K, that’s smaller than MB and much much smaller than GB) of video memory.

But back to the iPhone. Other important details for us Mac heads:

• The iPhone won’t be available until June. Yes, June. Steve Jobs may be a god, but he’s a bloody tease too.
• It will debut on the Cingular network only – there’s a multi-year exclusivity contract in place.
• You’ll be able to buy them from the Apple Store and Cingular.
• There will be 2 sizes available, an 8GB model for – $599 and a 4GB model – $499. Expensive and a little small but the new Samsung BlackJack is $449 and other PDA/smart phones currently on the market run from $400 to $650 even with less functionality. (Base prices, before discounts from contracts, etc.)

A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a phone! It’s a camera! It’s an iPod! It’s a browser! It’s a WIDGET MACHINE!

Were you actually interested in the functionality? Yes, it runs widgets and a slim version of Safari! It also supports POP3 and IMAP mail. There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera built in as well as WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, Edge and Quad-band GSM. I can’t wait to try one of these out. Maps, weather, e-mail, music, not to mention all the classic cell phone features, only smarter!

Everything is done via touch-screen, no pesky stylus required. But do not fear! The qwerty touchpad is predictive which basically means that it will figure out what you’re trying to say rather than inputting your typos. From the various demos availalbe on Apple’s site, it looks like the rest of the interface will be as intuitive and slick as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

I’m really not one to combine my toys. I have resisted the combined cell phone + (camera, music player, video player, browser) for a long time. Call me a luddite, but I’d rather have 2 devices that work really well and do exactly what I want them to do. I don’t want to need to remember the magic key combination to make my cell phone convert into a waffle iron at some critical moment. That said, I think the iPhone may be the combo device that does it all well. Apple’s amazingly talent for intuitive design will save the world. Well, may save my world at least! …if only we didn’t have to wait until June…

apple, iphone, macintosh, macworld, steve jobs, technology