I’m trying out the wordpress iPhone app and so far I’m impressed. I can easily make a blog post and also see my recent posts and even check comments. Pretty cool.

And in case you didn’t know this, you can just double tap the space bar on your iPhone while typing and it will put a period and a space.

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Ted and I each got iPhones last month (I know, I know, just before the new ones came out, but our other phones’ contracts were up, and even so, we were charged an extra $70 or so because we didn’t switch over right).

We love them. I actually enjoy speaking on the phone with people and that’s saying a lot for me, because I don’t like talking on the phone. The square shape is closer to a “real” phone headset shape than any of the small cell phones I’ve had, but the really great thing is using the headphones to talk on the phone. If I’m doing housework and listening to my podcasts, the podcast fades out, the ringtone fades in and I just squeeze the little mike dealie on the headphone and answer the call. Then when I’m done, squeeze the dealie again and I hang up and my podcast starts up from where it left off.

Not only that, I’ve finally been assimilated and joined the legion of the borg with a bluetooth headset. I can just pop it on in the car, listen to my podcasts my normal way, through the car speakers, and when a call comes in, just push the button on my headset to answer. No fumbling with the ipod. I’m sure the other drivers around me on the freeway are relieved.

Of course, there are all the apps available (I have 7 screens of them, no, I don’t use them all, it’s kind of a collecting thing). I have the Kindle app and am currently in the middle of a 700 page novel (Ahab’s Wife, which I’m really enjoying). I also have iTalk to let me take audio notes in the car and record stuff (there’s also a built in app to do that now, but I still like the free iTalk). Twitterific for Twitter, Motionx GPS for finding the car and tracking my path, Dictionary for a dictionary/thesaurus, To Do for to do lists and that’s just the first screen).

The new push available with AIM is cool. When we were driving up to Lompoc for the Flower Festival and PCPA’s production of Les Miserables (which was fantastic), I had the notifications on so I knew when my dad, my sister, or my friend in Seattle chatted me and I could chat back.

I could go on and on. Being a macmac, I’ve never had a phone that synced with my desktop calendar or contact list. That’s probably something that windows people take for granted, but it was wonderful to see my full contact list and my calendar there on my phone. And I like to make custom ringtones in garageband.

Now I’m waiting for TomTom to put out their gps app.

The only downside so far? We’re not thrilled with AT&T. We have pretty good coverage here, but I’ve had a few calls dropped.

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I had a tough one yesterday. A client of mine told me that when he was in the Finder, clicking down through his folder hierarchy, it would suddenly jump him back up to the top level of his drive. It did the same thing if he changed the sorting in the view pane. There didn’t seem to be any correlation between what folder he was accessing. One time he could click down several levels with no problem, the next he would get in two levels and it would jump him back up to the top level. It was making him crazy.

After much searching I came up with no matches, but for Finder issues Apple suggested throwing away the com.apple.finder.plist file in the user’s Library – Preferences folder. I also found a couple that suggested tossing the invisible .ds_store files. Luckily, Onyx (a fantastic utility) has an option to clear all the .ds_store files on a drive.

End result…. it worked! No more jumping – now we just have to see how long it lasts

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I wrote about my iPod touch earlier (after getting it for Christmas). I had a few reservations about it, so couldn’t give it my unconditional love, but that’s pretty much changed now after the update that came out at Macworld Expo.

The update addressed a few of my concerns: it fixed the sleep timer (hooray!!) and let me move stuff around on the main screen, so it’s easier to get to the sleep timer, so I don’t notice the interface being slow. I found an easier way to pause the music: hit the main button twice and you get a small set of controls where you can pause and change the volume. Better than what I was doing, still not the best set up.

Still can’t see my podcast info, but that’s fairly minor.

What the update added was major: Google maps app including a gps-like locate me feature, notes, weather, and stock apps, and the ability to move buttons around and have extra screens to put new stuff on (when Apple opens the touch and iPhone up to outside developers).

I had to pay $20 for the update. A lot of people complained about this. It didn’t bother me. If it was only a bug fix I would have been annoyed, but might have still paid for it just to get the sleep timer fixed. As it was, I paid my money knowing what I was getting with the iPod touch. Then for just $20, I got a lot of the functionality of the iPhone, that’s awesome!

It also points out the beauty of the touch and iPhone interfaces, since they are all software based. Apple can roll out wonderful stuff for them and we won’t have to buy new hardware, we can just get a software update.

So, there is now one big problem with the touch. It’s not an iPhone

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‘Twas the night before Macworld Expo and you could almost hear all the mac-macs and tech geeks holding their breath, waiting for what Steve Jobs will reveal.

As I also wait breathlessly, I thought I’d review the iPod touch. As soon as the iPhone was announced, I told myself, ‘When they put out an iPod with the touch interface, I’m getting one!’ Well, I waited until Christmas to get it and it was worth the wait.

I’m not much of a cell phone person (though after playing with the touch, I would love it if someone dumped an iPhone with a pre-paid lifetime contract in my lap), so I couldn’t justify the price of the iPhone. But I loved that interface, it looked so cool.

I read several lukewarm reviews of the iPod touch (dark video, not as nice as the iPhone), decided that since I didn’t have an iPhone, that comparison wouldn’t matter and I didn’t have any other handheld video device to compare it to (I had an old, white nano), I would go for it.

I’m very happy I did. The iPod touch interface is as much fun to use as I’d hoped. I could spend a few minutes each day just flicking through my photos. It’s actually fairly easy to type in the little keyboard (make sure you turn it sideways so the keys are larger) for things like web addresses. Being able to surf the web off this little device is awesome.

Oh and it’s very easy to read the display. My eyes aren’t as young as they used to be (no parts of my body are, when it comes to that) and reading that little nano screen could be hard at times. The text on the iPod touch is fairly large and very crisp.

In fact, I was standing outside an Apple Store, waiting for it to open (my MacBook Pro battery was bulging, oddly enough, on the day I went, there were about 10 people waiting for the store to open, is that normal?) and I could pick up their free wi-fe. I was so engrossed with surfing the web, that I almost didn’t notice when they opened the store.

Is it the perfect device? Not yet, but I have high hopes that some of the hiccups can be fixed with software updates.

Here are the nits I have to pick with the iPod touch:

• The sleep timer doesn’t work correctly. Okay, this is a big one, it’s a testimony to how much I like the iPod touch that this isn’t a deal breaker. When I set the iPod touch to have a sleep timer, it resets itself to play an alarm when the timer goes off if I go to any other menu (for example, to change the volume of what I’m listening to). So, instead of fading to silence, an alarm goes off, not good.
• I’m faster than the interface. I notice this mostly at night when I’m futzing with the sleep timer (maybe because I really want to just get the timer set and go back to sleep). This happens with almost any interface, so not sure what they can do about it.
• It’s hard to pause the music. When I’m washing the dishes and someone wants to talk to me, I have to take the iPod touch out of my pocket, click the home button, move the slider across, then hit the pause. Once again, not sure what they can do about that, but having a one button pause on the headphones (like the iPhone) sure sounds nice.
• I can’t see the text info on my podcasts. I often use that to see if I’ve listened to the whole podcast or not. I don’t see it anywhere on the iPod touch.

But, all in all, I love my iPod touch. I can’t wait to use it at Macworld Expo. I can surf the web without lugging my MacBook Pro around! Sweet.

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More People at the Apple Booth
Originally uploaded by kayjummac.

The only trade show we go to is Macworld Expo in San Francisco. There are many reasons for this, my husband and I are both long time mac users, he’s a computer consultant, I make my living using my mac to make web sites, we can get free tickets to the expo floor, and it’s in San Francisco, one of our favorite cities.

There were some dark years when the mac market was shrinking, companies were trying to force even their graphic designers onto windows pc’s and no one knew what an ipod was. During those years, Macworld Expo shrank from two halls down to a portion of one hall in Moscone Center.

Those years are definitely over. Of course, every third booth was showing something off for the ipod, but I’m an ipod owner, so I didn’t really mind. There was plenty to look at for digital photographers and I managed to scrounge a single web development presentation (on Ruby on Rails).

What did I learn? That lynda.com offers some really great online training, including a full set of Russell Brown Photoshop presentations, which are really cool. You can access the entire training library at lynda.com for a month for $25. That’s something I’m going to look into.

Other than that, most of the expo floor is a blur in my memory. I did see some of the Windows emulation software, that looks very cool for me so I can view my web sites in Internet Explorer for Windows right on my Mac. Oh and I played Lego Star Wars II (the original trilogy) and I am getting that as soon as it comes out from Feral Interactive.

To get an idea of what the show was like, you can check out our photos in our Macworld Expo 2007 photo set on flickr.com.

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