Month: July 2008

There are two great posts on Techmeme right now about whether links are important or not.

I agree with Stan Schroeder’s Mashable post when he says:

“So, why do we still do it? Well, links are still the glue of the Internet. Without links, there’s no context:

Every week or so, I goto technorati and see who might be linking to this site. I want to see who agrees with me, disagrees with me or what else they have to say.

But my favorite way to check out incoming links is inside my Tumblr dashboard.

For example, here is one of my recent song of the day posts.  In the upper right corner you can see how many times it was reblogged. And when you click on the number a list pops below called ‘notes’ that shows who reblogged it and if they added anything. You can also click on their name and visit their tumblelog as well.

I only screen grabbed 9 people because it would have been a large image to grab the whole thing but you get the idea.

David Karp has his tumblelog set up so you can see the reblog list & notes for a given post in all of his permalinks. Here’s an example. Damn cool.

I’m hoping to add that to my site very soon too!

I’ve been using my iPhone with 2.0 OS since Wednesday. And the big deal for me at least is that I haven’t touched my blackberry since that day.

Here was my initial thoughts after just a day.

Few additional obervations:

-Before the 2.0 OS release, iPhone had no easy way of deleting many emails at once. Now it’s a breeze. Just click the ‘edit’ button and then you can touch as many emails as you want to do a mass delete. Very simple and way more advanced than the blackberry UI

-When my blackberry tries to send an email is a poor coverage spot it sometimes keeps in the queue. but if sometimes it will barf and you’ll see a red ‘X" in the messages. i’m sure my fellow blackberry users know what I’m talking about. on the iphone it does the right thing with my Exchange messages.

-all of my Exchange folders show up with iphone 2.0

-I really like how all calender invites show up in two places (both are in sync). you see them in the inbox. but you also see them in calender view with a little icon in the lower right that shows you have active calender invites. that’s extremely helpful.

-I love how Summize looks on the iPhone. Not a 2.0 OS feature but I was away from the house all day today but followed the men’s wimbledon finals. So cool.

-I figured out that the battery drains faster if you are have “push” turned on by default and have poor coverage. the easy fix is to turn off push if you go to a known poor coverage area or live with less battery capacity. The choice is yours.

Okay, okay, it’s early and I’ve only had it running for less than 24 hours but Apple made me very happy with the new 2.0 OS. I picked up an advance copy from a friend and have it running on my first gen iPhone hw.

I bought this first gen iphone on the first day it came out. And try as I might, it just became a very expensive ipod with a killer browser. I’ve been in hell – carrying around a blackberry for work and the iphone at the same time. Two devices everywhere just sucks.

But those days are gone. The new 2.0 OS addresses all the things I’ve been waiting for.

1. Full MSFT Exchange support. It just works. It took a little while to configure our server properly and open up the correct ports but once we did it my iphone was getting push email and wirelessly syncing with our company calender, phone book and mail. The only thing it doesn’t have is a task manager sync but I’m extremely happy with the performance.

2. Address book search. Up until now, the address book didn’t have a search function. That was a big problem for me. The new search box works well. Slower compared to the blackberry but it’s fine for me.

3. App store. I have a button now on my home screen that says App Store. It doesn’t work yet of course but I’m on the edge of my seat to download apps when they become available.

Other observations:

-the browser seems to be improved. text fields are easier to manage with the onscreen keyboard. Fonts get smaller as you type in more characters in the text field.

-still no copy & paste function :(

-promising location based services

-battery life with push email seems to be taking a hit or maybe it’s because I’m using my iphone constantly now :). I really wish there was a way to change batteries on the run.

-the keyboard still isn’t going to work for everyone. a lot of blackberry users are going to be tempted by the msft exchange support but won’t like the keyboard. It’s fine for me and I’m actually digging it

I can’t wait to get the iPhone 3G now. My blackberry is going to be sad & lonely in the desk drawer…

Update: one more thing. Attachments are amazing. I just opened up a 2 page excel spreadsheet and it looked great!