Today I get to add another entry to the fairly long and growing list of countries I've visited: Iceland. In about 4 hours my dad and I are hopping a plane from Boston to Reykjavik. It's going to be a short trip, only four days, but Iceland has long be high on the list of places I want to visit, so I'm excited to get a taste of what will someday become a destination for a longer trip (not to mention whale, and maybe even hakarl). As I did with my Europe trip last April, I'll be taking advantage of my iPhone's ability to not only take pictures but also upload them directly to a MobileMe gallery, though this time I'm also taking my nice camera as I won't be staying in hostels and aren't worried about it getting lost stolen, so there will be a second gallery of higher quality pictures after I get back. The only downside of the trip is that I'm going to have to wait to Wednesday morning to hear about the results of today's election. We're landing at 11:30 local time, which is only 6:30 Eastern, so the polls won't even be closed yet. I might stay up for a while to watch the returns, but apparently everything closes at 1, so I'll just be sitting by myself in the hotel room... Oh well, I get to go to Iceland.

The gallery for this trip will be at: http://gallery.me.com/josh.ourisman#100051

As I'm sure most people are aware, it's possible to install apps on your iPhone that aren't available through the AppStore. This requires you to go through a process known as 'jailbreaking' (which is surprisingly easy, and has been around since before there was an official App store), which in addition to allowing you to install apps (including an online repository rather like the official App store), means that you have to be wary of any software updates becaues they, at best, will undo your jailbreaking or, at worst, might brick your iPhone if you don't un-jailbreak it first.

But there's another method of installing apps that haven't been given the official Apple stamp of approval on your app. One that doesn't require jailbreaking, and is absolutely authorized by Apple. If you are an iPhone developer, you can install the app that you're developing onto your iPhone to test it out. I haven't done this myself, not having tried my hand at iPhone development yet, but I've seen it done. That being said, and being a known fact, doesn't this mean that we have another avenue to installing apps on iPhones available to us? Shouldn't it therefore be possible for these unapproved apps to be distributed in such a manner as to be installed through the iPhone dev tools and therefore without having to jailbreak your phone?

Might it not also, therefore, be possible for the installer app that connects you to the repository of available unofficial iPhone apps to be installed in this way? I'm asking these questions because I don't know the answers, but I'd like to find out. The one real problem that I can see is that maybe apps installed using this method won't have access to all the underlying functionality that is available to unofficial apps but kept hidden from those approved ones. But again, I don't know. I can't imagine this question hasn't been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one. But if people can figure out how to jailbreak the iPhone in the first place how much harder can it be to figure out how to use the dev kit to install the installer app without jailbreaking?

Google Analytics tells me that my post on problems with MobileMe is currently one of my most popular, so I thought I'd write a little more about that.

As I said before, I had been having some big problems with MobileMe. For a while, my iPhone simply wasn't syncing at all. Since I do a lot of work at home where I have access to my iMac, but also do a lot of work elsewhere on my Thinkpad this was a bit of a problem. Initially I got around this by migrating to Google Calendars. But, to be honest, this didn't last for long. My approach was to import my iCal calendars into Google, then subscribe to them in iCal via CalDAV. This worked decently well, and allowed me to keep my calendar in sync on Google, iCal, and, via syncing through iTunes, my iPhone. It was a bit more cumbersome, but at least I had full access to my calendar wherever I went. The main problems with this were that on my iPhone, the Calendar app didn't have write access, I'd have to go into Safari and edit the calendar that way if I wanted to do it on my iPhone (a process which I don't really like; I'm not a huge fan of web apps in general). The other problem was being tied to syncing through iTunes again. In the brief time that MobileMe worked propertly, I got very attached to my over the air syncing, and didn't really like giving it up.

Long story short, it didn't take that long for MobileMe syncing to start working again, and I switched back and have been very happy since. Since I can still access me.com/calendar in Firefox on Linux by simply changing my user agent (and it works perfectly), I really have no motivation to use anything else. So for the foreseeable future I intend to stick with MobileMe for my calendaring needs. If apple offered some sort of hosted MobileMe the way Google does with Gmail I might even switch to that so that I could have full integration of all my tools (it's annoying that the address book on my mac and my iPhone isn't the same as my gmail address book, and the syncing between the two is so horrible that I have no desire to touch it ever again).

Another alternative I'm somewhat considering is Zarafa. Zarafa offers a drop-in Exchange replacement that, basically, exactly duplicates all of Exchange's functionality including the ActiveSync that iPhones now support. Even better, they just open-sourced it. This is actually a fairly attractive possibility as it would give me everything I like about MobileMe, plus all the other advantages that an Exchange solution would offer except for the licensing costs (and hopefully some of the annoying design decisions, though I don't know enough to really say yet). The downside, of course, is that I'd have to maintain my own server (or pay for a hosted solution, if such a thing exists). But I do know a number of other small business owners who could probably benefit from such a thing, so I could probably go in with them on a server to run Zarafa for all of us (and maybe even get them to pay me to maintain it and such). It's certainly worth considering at any rate. I may try and set it up on either my Gentoo-powered Thinkpad or my FreeBSD server at home and give it a whirl.

A lot of people have been writing about problems they've been having with MobileMe, Apple's recent replacement for .Mac, to the point that I can't actually think of any good things that I've heard about it. Steve Jobs is even on record as saying that it's not up to Apple snuff.

Thus far I've been silent on the issue, mainly because thus far I haven't had any problems. That, however, has changed. About two days ago, my calendars stopped syncing. Changes I make in iCal are no longer reflected on the me.com web calendar, nor do they get pushed to my iPhone. This is rather a large problem, as it means I have no access to my calendar when away from my desk, which I am most of the time. To make matters worse, me.com claims to be incompatible with Firefox 3.0.1, at least when I visit from my Gentoo Linux powered ThinkPad which means that even if it was syncing, I wouldn't be able to access my calendar from it and would be restricted to just my iPhone. I'm sure that a little messing around would result in it working in some browser, whether it's Firefox inaccurately reporting its version, or a WebKit based browser claiming to be Safari.

This is rather a large problem for me, as it basically means that I have little to no ability to view or manage my calendar when not at home despite paying not only for MobileMe, but for an iPhone, the one device you'd expect to not have compatibility problems. This may be enough to make me switch to using Google calendar, despite the fact that it won't sync with iCal or my built-in iPhone calendar app, which I vastly prefer to a web-based interface.

If you didn't already know, WordPress has released an (free) iPhone app. I'm writing this post from it.

So far it seems pretty cool. All the basic functionality is there, plus a few really cool features like live previews that work exactly as they do when you're editing online, and, even better, the ability to add pictures either from your iPhone's library or directly from the camera. I'll test that out now:

Ah, apparently the picture(s) will simply be attached to the bottom of the post. Makes sense. If you're wondering, that's Dexter, our crosseyed kitten, named after the eponymous serial killer hero of the amazingly awesome Showtime show of the same name (which is based on the novel(s) by Jeff Lindsay which are, sadly, not nearly as good as the show).

The iPhone's auto-correcting type is very useful here. Sadly, it's not all that great for manually entering HTML, which is how I prefer to do things (and, as far as I can tell, the only way to do things with the iPhone app).

Anyway, the app is, in my opinion, pretty great. Anyone with a WordPress blog and an iPhone should get it.

With all my posts about the new iPhone software that I've got installed on my first-gen iPhone (and I do mean first-gen, it's a 4 GB), the question still remains of if I'll upgrade my hardware as well. There's definitely some good arguments either way, but my answer, at this point, is a resounding maybe.

To be honest, I don't really care about the 3G data speeds. EDGE is by no means blazingly fast, but it meets my needs sufficiently well that I'm don't feel the need to upgrade just for the faster data network. The feature that really does attract me, however, is the GPS functionality. The built-in Google maps feature that I've got now is nice, and certainly a lot more convenient than having to look up direction on your computer and print them out, but it's definitely less useful than it could be largely because it requires user input to be of any use. You have to take your eyes off the road and your hand off the wheel/shifter so you can see have it show you the next step in the directions. Because of that limitation I have been, for a while now, seriously considering buying a TomTom GPS navigation device for the car.

The existence of real GPS on the iPhone, however, calls that plan into question. Especially as the price of a TomTom is greater than or equal to the price of a new iPhone minus the proceeds I might get from selling the one I've got. Yesterday AutoBlog posted a review of the GPS functionality on the iPhone. Apparently it leaves a bit to be desired, and doesn't actually do anything more than the old iPhone does except have a more accurate idea of where you are and put a moving dot on the map to show your position along the route. It doesn't automatically tell you what the next step in the directions are, you still have to do that yourself. So with things as they are, there's really no reason for me to even consier getting an iPhone 3G. It offers no compelling new features for me.

But wait! Just before the iPhone 3G was released, TomTom announced that they were working on porting their software to an iPhone app! When they made this announcement there was all sorts of speculation as to why it would never work. Some insisted that the iPhone SDK agreement forbid the development of navigation apps. Some insisted that the iPhone 3G's GPS antenna wasn't good enough to provide turn-by-turn directions. Since then, however, there's been clarification from both Apple and TomTom that there is no legal or technical barrier to this happening. TomTom reports that they've got the software pretty much working as well.

So I think it's just a matter of time (weeks, hopefully) before we see the iPhone becoming a fully featured GPS navigation device. Even better, it will be a GPS navigation device with internet access! That means that all of the advanced features that TomTom currently offers (if you have a compatible bluetooth enabled phone) should work including real-time traffic reports and, what I think is one of the coolest, buddies!

So basically, if the TomTom software proves to work well, I'll probably get an iPhone 3G. If it doesn't, I probably won't, at least not until either TomTom or someone else does get a good GPS navigation app out there. Assuming, of course, that I don't get tired of waiting and just buy a TomTom device.

I wasn't really intending to write a whole lot more about the new iPhone software, but I've actually seen a fairly huge spike in traffic since my first iPhone 2.0 post and I feel like I should probably pass this info along. It appears that the earlier, pre-release 2.0 software that I downloaded and installed on my iPhone to great effect the other day may have been intended for the iPhone 3G only. This isn't confirmed, but since we do have an official release now, it's probably not a bad idea to install that instead (I just finished doing so myself). Again, MacRumors has the download link and instructions for doing so.

Yeah, yeah, 3 posts about the iPhone in two days, and you still can't even buy the 3G iPhone yet! But I was taking advantage of the new iTunes remote last night as we had some company and so were in the living room and wanted music playing there without having to go into the office to mess with the computer. One of the nice (and necessary, really) features of the remote app is that it lets you turn on and off any speakers available on the network. In our case it's just the computer itself and the living room, though eventually I'd like to put some on the back deck and in the kitchen. This makes it a breeze to have your music play on any subset of available speakers. But what would be really cool is if it had the ability to determine which set of speakers you were closest too (shouldn't be too hard, just see which AirPort Express base station you get the strongest signal from) and automatically switch the music to the appropriate speakers. That way as you walked around the house your music would follow you. Of course you could always just play it on all your sets of speakers, but what kind of fun would that be?

It didn't take very long, but I found a bug in the iPhone 2.0 software. It's nothing major, but a bit of a pain. Basically, if you install an app via iTunes rather than directly on the iPhone, or if you install it on the iPhone then have iTunes transfer it to your computer when you sync (it asks you), you have to then delete it from both places if you want to get rid of it. If you delete it from only the iPhone or only from iTunes a sync results it in being back in both locations. I imagine this will probably be fixed relatively quickly.

Thanks to a tip on MacRumors, I've now got the 2.0 firmware running on my iPhone. This means I've got apps! Without resorting to jailbreaking! So far, I've got to say it's pretty slick. I've only got a few apps installed so far, but the app store works incredibly well (you can see reviews of it and videos of it on Gizmodo).

For me, there are two apps that are absolute must haves: the iTunes remote and the Pandora app. We have some speakers set up in the living room via AirTunes on an AirPort Express so that when we have company we can play music in the living room without having to drag a computer out there or something like that. The only drawback to that setup has been that someone needs to get up and go into the office to change the music. No more! Now we can just whip out one of our iPhones and take care if it from right there. Now if only it were possible to play music over AirTunes with an iPhone so that a friend who was over could play their own music if we wanted.

But even better than the remote app is the Pandora app. Pandora, if you don't know, is a website that basically helps you find awesome new music (kinda like OurStage, but it's music from big name artists). Basically you start a 'radio station' by seeding it with either an artist or song that you like. Pandora then picks songs for you based on the characteristics of that song (characteristics such as 'traditional blues melodies' and 'minor key tonality'). You can then rate songs with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down to help fine-tune the station. I've found a ton of good music thanks to Pandora, and now I've got access to it wherever I go (it didn't work before because the site is Flash based). Anyone who likes finding new music should definitely check it out. I find it especially useful for exploring new genres: just find a single song you like in that genre and it will help you find more. The iPhone app even has a button that lets you buy the current song/album in the iTunes store.

There are a few other features that the 2.0 firmware brings of course. Most notably is MobileMe, which gives push email, contacts, calendars, &c.; to MobileMe (previously .Mac) subscribers. I am a subscriber, but the new services aren't actually active yet so I haven't really been able to play around with that yet (But once they do go active I'll be faced with the conundrum of what to do about email. Currently I use Google Apps to manage my email which I really like and works really well, but using my mac.com email address would give me push email. Maybe Google will give us push eventually and I won't have to sacrifice their awesome spam filtering and the ability to host my own domain's email with them. Or maybe Apple will offer something similar.). The new firmware also gives us the ability to search contacts in our address book (and adds a Contacts icon to the main screen so you don't have to go through the phone just to find an email address). I'm sure there's all sorts of things that I haven't found yet too, but for now the only other thing I'll touch on is a better implementation of password field. Previously, when entering a password you had to either pay very close attention or just assume that you weren't hitting the wrong keys on the virtual keyboard. Now, however, it shows the last character that you entered and only hides the previous ones so you can tell if you've made a typo. Not huge, but a nice touch.

So as I mentioned, I was at the opening of the new Boston Apple Store on Boyleston St. last night. Unfortunately I was a little late showing up and didn't get my free t-shirt. :(

As I mentioned, it's an extremely nice location with some extremely cool design. The entire top floor (of three) is dedicated to support with a gigantic Genius Bar that is apparently able to support several thousand people per day, and a ton of iMacs lining the walls where you can get one on one help/tutoring (they call it their One-to-One program). Another cool new features they're rolling out (or possible already had and I just haven't been paying attention) is their personal shopping service. You can make an appointment to show up and have, essentially, a personal shopper to help you out with any questions or help you might need while shopping. Seems like a pretty cool idea, and I imagine it will be very useful for the parents who want to get their kid a new computer or something but really have no idea what they're looking for.

All in all, I think this store is going to be a huge success. Especially positioned, as it is, directly across the street from the Prudential Center and the soon-to-be-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel. It will definitely be a little more pleasant to visit than the Cambridgeside location, though parking won't be nearly as easy so you'll probably start seeing more people with big iMac boxes on the T...

And in closing, these people weren't on the guest list and therefore aren't as cool as me:

(Yes, both pictures in this post were taken with my iPhone.)

I thought I'd expand a little on my description of my ultimate eBook product. I've put quite a lot of thought into this over the past year or so, and come up with what I think could be a great little piece of hardware.

The basic form-factor would be something like the iPhone/iPod Touch, but with a screen around the size of a sheet of paper. Personally, I think A4 would be a good size for it, although I'm sure there would be plenty of Americans then annoyed by the fact that it's the 'wrong' proportions (A4 does have the benefit of being pretty much exactly the same size as my MacBook though, which is nice). I see no particular reason that it couldn't be as thin as an iPhone, especially with all that area in which to spread out the innards. For the most part it would be relatively in-extraordinary: eInk touchscreen (ideally in color, but that might be pushing it a bit for our current eInk technology), some decent amount of storage for files (1 GB maybe? More?), WiFi, a web-browser (makes it very easy to implement my eBook store idea I posted about before), and the ability to view a variety of file formats like plaintext (really stretching it there, I know), RTF, PDF, &c.; I think my eBook store idea would be a pretty-near killer app for it, but the real kicker, in my opinion is bluetooth.

Not just bluetooth, or course. What I want is the ability to pair it with my computer so that I can essentially use it as a second screen for viewing documents. What I envision is this. At it's most basic, you pair the device with your computer over bluetooth and it shows up on your desktop giving your normal filesystem access to put files on it and organize them as you see fit. However it does much more than that. It also gives you a new application that can open all the file formats that the device can display. If you have a Mac you can either put this app in your Dock and drag files to it to be opened, or set that app as the default file handler for PDFs and/or other filetypes. When you open a file with this new app the file doesn't display on your computer screen, it displays on the reader. Basically the reader becomes a second monitor for viewing content that lives on your computer. It should have a similar function that ties into the web browser on your computer so you can just click a button or hit a keystroke and the website that you're currently viewing on your computer comes up on your reader.

For me, this would be huge. When I take my laptop off to a cafe or wherever to work I either have to lug around hard copies of any relevant documentation up to and including large reference books like The Django Book. My only other option is to use electronic references which, while more than adequate and sometimes even better for conveying the necessary information, take up quite a bit of real estate on my MacBook's 14.1" screen (or even on my iMac's 24" screen since I usually have anywhere from 5-10 windows of code open). If I had a product such as this I could just double-click my documentation PDF or eBook (many reference books now come with an eBook version) and it will pop up on my reader where I can reference it exactly as I would a piece of paper. True a conventional eBook reader would be able to fill the same function in many ways, but this functionality would significantly simplify the process and allow me to use the more functional interface provided by a full computer. It allows you to simply double-click a file on your computer to open it, and then walk away with the document in hand to read on your way to a meeting or to peruse over lunch. Basically it completes the metaphor of files on your computer and lets you physically handle them as if you'd just pulled them out of a file cabinet.

The really cool thing about this idea is that we could have it tomorrow. It would only be a software update for the iPhone or iPod Touch (plus the attending local app) to make this a reality. It probably wouldn't be particularly hard to do either. If they wanted to, I bet Apple could give us this capability in the next update. Using the small iPhone screen wouldn't be quite as good, but it would be a start and I, for one, would use it extensively.

Apparently she sends you an email:
From: Josh Ourisman Mailed-By: dydxtech.com
To: Josh Ourisman
Date: Jan 22, 2008 10:18 PM
Subject: d :

Tel: +1 857-753-0060
Web: www.dydxtech.com
Blog: www.joshourisman.com

I really didn't even have to provide any help at all. All I did was (using her fingers) slide the unlock thing, and then help her click on my name after several failed attempts. Everything else is entirely her own input. Unfortunately, she seemed upset that she wasn't able to enter text in the body except as part of the signature due to her lack of hand-eye coordination and started crying, so I had to hit the send button for her.

But still, I'm pretty impressed that she managed to enter an emoticon for the subject.

(No, this wasn't my two month old, I'm currently in Minnesota visiting some friends and their new baby.)

This will be my second post written from my iPhone. I'm currently in the middle of nowhere in Illinois at Jessi's mom's house. We'll be here until the 30th, which means I'll have some work to do on the trip. On my previous visits here there was always a wifi network available from one of the neighbors who was kindly sharing his sattelite Internet connection with the rest of the town (it's a very small town and they can't get cable or DSL out here). Sadly it turns out that someone had been using up his monthly bandwidth allotmen so that's no longer available to me. Hence me writing this entry from my iPhone.

Fortunately, I came prepared to work without Internet access. I had planned to do some work on the flight over here, so before I left I created a new Parallels virtual machine and installed a copy of Gentoo Linux in it, and set up a lighttpd server with PHP and Python running in FastCGI as well as SQLite and MySQL so I could do both PHP and Django development without having to only guess at whether or not it would actually work (technically this wasn't necessary for Django since it comes with a lightweight development server built-in, and OS X comes with SQLite installed standard, but I figures I might as well).

I also tried setting up Tinyproxy on my iPhone so I could share my iPhone's EDGE connection with my laptop for browsing, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be working even though I had no problem with it at home.

The end result is that, even though I have no real Internet access to speak of, I can still do my work. I can even keep in touch with everyone thanks to my iPhone and meebo, and, if the need were to arise, I could always set up an SSH tunnel through my iPhone and get SFTP access to my webserver (or any other, for that matter) that way. So even way out here where they don't even have DSL, I'm still fully connected. This is one of those times where, even though I spend pretty much all my time working with technology, I'm still completely amazed by it.

Now, I believe, it's time for dinner.

This is, oddly enough, another iPhone post. I know I said I wouldn't really be commenting on it any more, but this is a post that will be useful to other people and isn't relevent only to iPhone owners. Really, this has more to do with email than iPhones.

The story starts out, however, with my iPhone. One annoyance of the iPhone is that it doesn't have any spam filtering capabilities for your email. Whatever shows up in your inbox shows up on your iPhone. This isn't necessarily a problem for everyone, but it is for me because the nature of what I do requires that my email address be easy to find and easy to read. So I get a lot of spam. And I use a client-side spam filter to deal with it (specifically, the one built into Apple's Mail, but that's not so important). As a result, having my iPhone check my mail automatically didn't work so well. Every 15 minutes (the period I had it set to check email) it would ding to alert me that I had mail, only for me to find that it was, almost without exception, spam. So I needed a way to filter my email before it got to my iPhone. There are a couple way that could be done. The most obvious is probably to install something like SpamAssassin (a server-side spam filter) on my email server. But I didn't really want to do that. I've never really liked SpamAssassin, and maintaining it can be a chore.

There is, however, a very reliable and very accurate server-side spam filter available that I actually already used. That would be the spam filtering offered by Google's Gmail. Applying that spam filtering to my regular email was actually very simple and in some ways increased my flexibility in terms of ways to deal with my email. What I did was this:

1. On my email server, set my email addresses (josh@dydxtech.com, josh@joshourisman.com, and a couple others that I keep around for legacy support reasons) to forward to my Gmail accounts (one for personal, and one for business).
2. Create new, private email accounts on my email server. These are where all of my email is going to end up, but I'm not going to publish the address anywhere or tell them to anyone.
3. Set my Gmail accounts to forward to the appropriate private email accounts
4. Transfer my archived email from my old accounts to the new private ones

Pretty simple, as long as you have a basic understanding of how email works. Basically email goes to my public email address, is forwarded to Gmail which filters out all the spam very reliably, and is then forwarded to my super-secret, private email account. All mail sent from that account has a from and reply-to address of my private account, so it's difficult (though not impossible) for people to determine the addresses of my private accounts thus cutting nearly to zero the amount of spam that I ever have to deal with. Gmail, of course, isn't perfect, but if some spam gets through all I have to do is log into my Gmail account and mark the offending message as spam there. Similarly if I'm not getting an important email I can log into my Gmail account and check the spam folder there and mark it as not spam if necessary.

So what does all this have to do with carrots? Well, that comes in at the last step: transferring my archived email from my old accounts to my new accounts. This turned out to be the most difficult step, although it didn't have to be. It sounds easy enough: set up both the old account and the new account in your mail client, drag the messages/folders from the old account to the new account. Done. It actually worked exactly like this for my work account. But I've only had that account for a little over a year, so there isn't all that much email in there. My personal account, on the other hand, contains my archived email going all the way back to September 6, 2000 when my Carleton College email account became active (it was from my dad). Sadly all my email from high school and earlier were lost that same day due to me being naïve enough to think that now that I was in college I could trust the IT people to know what they were talking about. They didn't, and I lost several years worth of email because of it. Come to think of it, that's probably why I do what I do all these years later. I also, in the process, found this gem sent on December 30, 2000, it was the very last email I received in the year 2000:

             \     /
              \\   //
               )\-/(
               /o o\
              ( =T= )
              /`---'\
         ____/ /___\ \
    \   /   '''     ```~~"--.,_
 `-._\ /                       `~~"--.,_
------>|     Go Carrot!                 `~~"--.,_
 _.-'/ \                            ___,,,---""~~``'
    /   \____,,,,....----""""~~~~````

So anyway, the problem I was getting to. Basically, when trying to copy all that email over (nearly 6000 messages) it wasn't working. I'd try and copy it only to find that I was ending up with some tiny subset (usually less than 500) emails in my new account. So I tried splitting it up into smaller quantities. Same problem. I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to fix this. This morning I woke up to find only about 200 messages in my account. So I finally put a little extra thought into it and realized what I was doing wrong: I had SSL turned on. All IMAP traffic between my computer and my server was being encrypted. That meant it was going slower that it normally would be. That meant very long copy times, the potential for time-outs, and the potential that my client would decide to synchronize it's folders in the middle of a copy. Seemed like a likely culprit. So I turned off SSL and tried again. The first thing that I noticed was that the transfers were suddently blazingly fast. I had known there would be a speed different, but the actual slowdown you get in email tranfser when using SSL is vastly more significant that I had expected it would. The result? Everything copied over perfectly in one try.

So really there are two lessons in all of this: 1) a good way to filter the spam out of your email before it gets to your iPhone (or other email device that lacks it's own spam filter, or if you just want to filter your spam without having to train filters on multiple computers) is to route your email through Gmail, and 2) if you're going to be moving large amounts of email messages around, especially between accounts, you might want to consider turning of SSL for the duration (keep in mind, however, that this exposes your email to the internet; it would not be impossible, or even all that difficult for someone to snatch the text of those emails if they wanted to).

I've now spent a weekend (and weekday) playing with my iPhone. So far I've discovered nothing to dampen my enthusiasm about it. In fact, I probably like it even more than I did before. Having confirmed that the touchscreen wasn't a significant impediment to typing or dialing the only concerns I had left were the low speed of EDGE for data transmission and the lack of an IM client on it.

Neither of those things are concerns anymore. While EDGE is slow, it's sufficient for the basic needs of email and looking up driving directions with the built-in google maps application (which is completely awesome; a fun test is to center the map on your current location and then just type 'starbucks'—or 'dunkin donuts'—into the search bar and watch all the little red map pins drop out of the sky skewering your local caffeineries of choice).

As for IM, I've always been a huge fan of meebo.com, a web-based, multi-protocol IM app. They've been my favorite Web 2.0 app for as long as Web 2.0 has been around, and their recently released iPhone optimized version doesn't disappoint. Unlike most sites, you don't even need to go to a special address to get to the iPhone version: just type meebo.com into your browser and it automatically detects that you're using an iPhone and shows you the correct interface. You can log into any account for any protocol they support (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber) or into your already existing meebo account (unfortunately you can't create a new one from your iPhone) and it takes you to a low-profile, low-bandwidth, IM interface optimized for the iPhone. They didn't try to mimic the way the site works in a traditional setting (exactly like it does on your desktop, complete with a separate window for each conversation), and they didn't try and shoehorn desktop metaphors like tabs in. Instead they simply show you your buddy list. Click on a contact and you get a conversation screen where you can chat as you normally would. The only elements on the screen are their buddy icon, a small icon to take you back to your buddy list, a text box to enter your message, and a send button. If someone else IMs you while you're in the middle of a conversation the number of new messages you have appears in a little bubble over your buddy list icon (just like a dock icon in OS X) and the content of that message briefly appears in a little pop-up. Switching conversations is just a matter of going back to your buddy list and selecting a different person to talk to. It's that simple. And it's been designed specifically with the limitations of the EDGE network in mind so it works just fine even if you don't have access to a WiFi network. It's done incredibly well, and even if Apple adds iChat in later I don't expect I'll stop using meebo (which isn't too surprising seeing as I don't use iChat on my Mac either in favor of Adium; also, I imagine that the reason iChat isn't in there is because AT&T; doesn't want there to be a messaging application in there that doesn't let them charge per message as they usually do when it comes to instant messaging and there's no way I'm going to eat up my text messaging allowance with iChat when meebo's around).

So basically, the iPhone rocks. That's my review. Unless something seriously unexpected happens, I don't expect I'll be commenting any more on the iPhone itself. But you can be sure you'll be hearing about whatever apps I end up using with it, whether they be web apps or actually apps added through hacks (I'll start messing around with iPhone hacks soon, I'm sure).

I'm writing this from my brand new iPhone. I know that I had previously said that I would wait to get one and that I wasn't particularly interested in the first generation one, but it turned out to actually be a fairly practical purchase, surprisingly enough.

It all started because Jessi's birthday is coming up (as is mine) and I knew she wanted an iPhone. We had, up until today, been on a family plan from Verizon, which saved us a fair bit of money over the two individual plans we had before. But because of that it complicated the matter of getting an iPhone for Jessi. So I looked at just about every possible configuration of cell phone plans we could possibly have.

It turns out that T-Mobile is unequivocally the cheapest provider, while Verizon is the most expensive (I didn't bother looking at Sprint, they have nothing that would interest me over the others). AT&T; are in the middle. After comparing the monthly costs of a Verizon family plan, a T-Mobile family plan, an AT&T; non-iPhone family plan, an AT&T; iPhone family plan, an individual iPhone plan and an individual T-Mobile plan, and an individual iPhone plan and an individual Verizon plan I found that there were only a few cases that actually made sense.

Due to the fact that there was still a whole year on our Verizon contract it just didn't make financial sense to switch to another provider to try and save money, so regular family plans on T-Mobile or AT&T; were ruled out. The only way that it made sense to switch wireless providers was if it was going to involve getting Jessi an iPhone (assuming an iPhone is actually worth the extra money, that is). Between the theee options that involved getting an iPhone for Jessi (an iPhone family plan or an iPhone individual plan for Jessi and an individual plan for me from either Verizon or T-Mobile---an iPhone individual plan plus a non-iPhone individual plan from AT&T; would actually be more than the iPhone family plan because if the amount of minutes needed) the cheapest actually turns out to be the iPhone family plan.

So the only remaining issue was the initial cost of two iPhones plus the early termination fee from Verizon. Apple's new price drop on the iPhone pretty well took care of that and the clearance prices on the 4GB model offset the cost of the early termination fee. So I figured that there's no time like the present and ordered two 4GB iPhones.

Making this even more amazing is the fact that I placed the order Yesterday, I got the free shipping that's supposed to take 5-7 business days, and the iPhones arrived TODAY! Way to go Apple.

And yes, I typed this whole entry out on the touchscreen, I'd have to say that the concerns about it not being usable were unfounded. The only problem I'm having with it so far are that it can't quite keep up with my typing which can be annoying and takes me back to the days when I was using a IIgs. Also when it gets too far behind the autocorrection stops working until I stop and let it catch up. But even so, this is by far the best phone I've ever had, and I like it way more than a Blackberry.

Now to turn of the damned keyboard sound...

As you probably know, I spent last weekend in New York. My last post was actually written from the SOHO Apple Store. The main reason I went there was because I knew I could get a free internet connection, but I was also hoping for the chance to play with an iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone table was about five deep in people, so I gave up on it. But I did manage to play with one at the 5th Ave Apple Store the next morning.

Prior to having actually touched one, I was of mixed feelings on the iPhone. On the one hand, I've been awaiting the so-called touch-screen iPod for as long as there have been rumors of it. The iPhone is clearly that, and more. However I was, as most people were and some still are, concerned about the efficacy of the interface, in particular typing on the touch-screen. Beyond that there were obvious, to my mind, flaws of the first generation device that everyone has gone into already. Jesse Legg has already written on the technical flaws of the iPhone and I see no reason to continue harping on them myself. Instead, I'll just say that I never had any intention or desire to buy the iPhone as it currently is. My plan has been to wait at least until the 2nd generation when they've repaired those flaws and hopefully made some other improvements as well.

That was, of course, until I actually got to use the iPhone. My expectations for the interface were high, but the actual product completely blew them away. Using the iPhone is so incredibly simple that anyone should really be able to do it. The screen is extremely bright and sharp and the interface is well designed and takes full advantage of the enormous screen available to it. In other words, it's an absolute pleasure to use for all the basic tasks. This was really to be expected, but Apple completely outdid themselves this time. Then, of course, it came time to test the virtual keyboard. I honestly was not expecting much, and when I saw how small it actually turned out to be I thought I'd be disappointed even still. The fact that the first time I tried to hit a letter I hit the one next to it instead didn't do much to improve my outlook. But when I tried actually typing out a message I was amazed. Within a minute or two of practice my accuracy had improved amazingly, but it really didn't need to at all. At one point I accidentally typed in 'uojpmw'. The iPhone correctly translated that to 'iPhone'. In fact probably about 99% of the time when I hit the wrong letters because of the small keyboard and lack of tactile feedback it didn't matter because the software was able to correctly predict what I had intended to type. The only times there were ever any problems was with it not getting the word right was with shorter words. For some reason it wasn't very good at the two letter words. Other than that, I was flat-out amazed. Even disregarding the auto-correcting, I'm now of the opinion that the small, touch-screen keyboard is more than sufficient. I think that within a week of using it, anyone should be relatively comfortable with it. Within a month, they should probably forget that there was ever any other way of having a keyboard on a phone.

Having entered the store with the position that 'the iPhone is cool, but I have no real desire to buy one at least until they fix a few things', I found myself very tempted to buy one right then and there. As much as I enjoy using a Mac, I would hardly call myself an Apple fan boy, but just then I was probably as close as I've ever been. I resisted the urge, of course; I'm very happy with my current phone (the Motorola e815, though I plan on replacing it with a RAZR 2 when I can) and provider (Verizon) and don't particularly want to drop $600 on a phone and then spend an additional $75 per month or so on the plan (also I have no particular love for AT&T;). None the less, I was forced to walk out of the Apple store with the opinion that Apple really hit the ball out of the park with this one. The fact that they sold nearly a million units on the first day would seem to support that thesis. I'm very much looking forward to the future of cell phones now. The iPhone and it's successors, I think, will really stir things up. We're hopefully going to start seeing a whole lot of innovation in cell phones, something we haven't really seen in a while.

I can't wait.