Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

I’ve had a half dozen blog posts waiting in the wings lately, but at this point I think it’s better to just combine them into one ‘what’s going on’ post, rather than 5 or 6 separate posts. Enjoy.

Mass Transit

Over the past month or so, I’ve really started to try to ride MARTA to work every day. So far, it’s been fairly successful, and it has saved me a lot of money in the process. Now, there are problems with this decision. The main issue is that fact that I live in North Fulton - not exactly MARTA country. To get to work using mass transit, I have to drive 7 miles from home to the park/ride station on Windward Parkway, take the bus to the North Springs station, then ride the train to the Buckhead station. From there, i walk the mile or so to work. As you can see, it’s not exactly a commuter’s paradise. However, if current gas prices were to hold, I would be saving around $70 a month on transportation costs. That doesn’t even include the decreased wear and tear on my car, so it’s not a bad deal at all really.

The funny thing is, due to the awful traffic that exists on 400, it takes nearly the same amount of time to drive from Alpharetta to Buckhead as it does to drive to a station, get on a bus, drive to a train station, take the train to Buckhead, then walk a mile to work. Sad, but true.

While MARTA is far from perfect, I do like avoiding the stress of sitting in traffic in the AM. I replace that with reading news on my iPhone, listening to music, and reading books. It’s also nice to take a little stroll in the morning on the way to work. I always feel a lot more relaxed and ready to go when I get in now. Hopefully the daily afternoon thunderstorms don’t ruin this for me. I figure that if I can make it through August okay, I’ll be on easy street after that.

finding a house / apartment

Speaking of Alpharetta’s insane distance from downtown, Michelle and I have started talking about finding a place to live in the spring. That’s obviously very exciting news for a number of reasons, and I hope that we do end up a lot closer to downtown than where we’re at now. She works up in Alpharetta, so I’m sure we wont’ be too far south, but anything is an improvement. I’m hoping for somewhere in the Sandy Springs area, near the MARTA line, to keep up my good habit. It’s still a ways away, so we’ll see what kind of places we find. I am excited about getting out, closer to Atlanta, and living with my ladyfriend.

football season

With the start of August comes the excitement over football season. For the third year in a row, Erik, Bonnie, and yours truly will be attending GT football games this fall. However, to add to the wonderful addition of Michelle from last year, we have now brought in the duo of Rick and Becky, further bolstering our tailgating crew. We have basically the same seats at last year - which I thought were pretty solid for the price. I think after a year of learning from our lack of tailgating gear and experience, we’re now ready to rock.

Last.fm

I’ve gotten hooked lately using Last.fm, and I recommend you jump on board as well. It’s a really neat way to keep track of what your (and your friends’) music listening trends are, and to get personalized recommendations based on those trends. I’ve found a number of smaller artists that I’d never even heard of, and it’s really nice to use the software to listen to your ‘radio station’ - a personalized internet stream of music you’ve listened to - at work. You can even listen to a ’station’ of your recommended artists using the software, so it’s a neat way to check out new artists before buying. Join, and add me!

MobileMe

With the release of the new iPhone software a few weeks ago, Apple released their MobileMe ‘cloud’ (I hate that word) service. Now, calendars, contacts, bookmarks and emails modified on your phone are (nearly) instantly reflected on the me.com website, your desktop computer(s), and other iPhones if you have them. Even though the service has had some uptime hiccups so far, I haven’t really experienced much of it other than the first day (where NOBODY could get online). The main reason that I bring this up is that I’ve changed my default email address again. You can reach me at daniel@danielandrews.com or cdanielandrews@gmail.com, but they’ll just forward to daniel.andrews@mac.com.

July notes and news, over!

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Posted on August 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Allow me to be the last blog owner in the galaxy to write a post about the iPhone apps that I’m using, and a few that I’d love to see come to fruition in the near future. I’ve been really impressed with the first batch of software released last week, but a few have really stood out:

Twinkle - Twinkle is a really cool Twitter app that also shows you folks around you that are posting to the service. Stalker-ish, but not too terribly much as it only gives the city and how many miles (roughly) they are from you. The UI is kind of lame, but overall a nice product.

Facebook - the 1.0 release was kind of weak, but by 1.1 they have really put out a solid version that quickly allows you to update your status, look at other’s profiles, and upload photos and whatnot. Pretty cool stuff if you’re a Facebook user.

OmniFocus - I have a tendency to forget things if I don’t write them down and keep them super organized. OmniFocus for the Mac lets me quickly enter my thoughts, assign them to contexts, and remind myself to get things done when they need to be done. Having a mobile interface for the same program is excellent, as it insures I can always enter those random thoughts into my OF database.

BofA - The Bank of America app isn’t all that pretty, but it does what it’s supposed to do, and rather quickly. A UI refresh (it currently looks just like the mobile version of the website) will surely improve that.

Remote - A cool app that allows you to control any iTunes installation on your LAN, or an AppleTV if you have one. Great for when I’m playing video games and want to change the tunes on my Mac.

Last.fm - Streams music over WiFi, EDGE, or 3G to your iPhone from the excellent Last.fm service. Unfortunately, as of now it doesn’t submit songs played thru your iPod to the online service (yet). Fingers crossed on that.

Yelp - Yelp is an excellent service for finding ratings and info on local restaurants. This application finds your location and shows you the top rated places around you. Very cool, especially when you’re lacking inspiration on where to eat and need a nudge in the right direction.

Exposure - Nice app by Frasier Spears (of FlickrUploadr fame) that allows you to browse your Flickr library and view and comment on other’s. Very nice app.

NYTimes - A very straightforward app that allows you to browse the NYtimes site and customize what type of news you see when you launch the app. It has a customizable bottom row of icons, much like the customizable iPod app’s buttons. If you don’t care about political news and want to see an editorial menu items instead, so be it.

Shazam - If you’ve ever been out and wondered what the song on the radio or in the store was, Shazam can help. Simply open the app and press the ‘tag this song’ button, and after about 20 seconds, Shazam will record the audio, send it to their server, analyze the waveforms, and send back a result. I’m yet to stump this app with any songs in my iTunes library. It’s truly amazing how far technology has come.

Other apps I’m using

Here are some other great applications I’m using on my iPhone right now. Some of these I either don’t use much, or are rough around the edges and need some work.

• AIM
• Twitterific
• NetNewsWire
• Instapaper
• Jott
• CheckPlease
• Mobile News
• Scribble
• SportsTap
• Loopt

Apps I’d love to see

Amazon.com barcode scanner - Let’s say that I’m at my local Target, Barnes and Noble, or some other retail establishment. I’m browsing around, and see a book that I’d really like to get, but not today (for whatever reason), or that I just cannot carry at the moment. It would be amazing to have an app that let you use your iPhone’s camera to scan the barcode, and either a) buy it now or b) add it to your wishlist. Someone would make a killing off of the referral cash alone.

Fantasy football app - Once fall gets here, I will be playing Yahoo! Fantasy Football. I would love an app (even if it’s only for the paid members) that allows you to quickly see lineups, player news, and league standings.

And Finally…

I’m really excited to see where the software development community takes us as the platform matures, and competition begins to spring up. I think that the iPhone OS will be the dominant Apple OS within a few years, and this is going to be a huge cash cow for them. Moreover, I can’t fathom what type of amazing technology is going to be in our hands within the next 5 or so years. The iPhone 3G and the iPhone OS 2.0 is just the beginning.

Posted on July 20th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

One of my biggest complaints with the first-gen iPhone was it’s weak ringer volume. I’d miss a ton of calls when walking around (maybe 1 in 10 - although I only get about 10 calls a year anyway, so…), and it really started to annoy me. That’s when I decided to take a look and see if it was the ringer, or the actual ringtones that were at fault. As it turns out, most of the sounds that come with the iPhone are just pathetically quiet. With a little time in Garageband (or QuickTime Pro), you can have some ringtones on your Jesusphone that are substantially louder than the default ones. Honestly, the first time I gave this a test run, it scared the hell out of me it was so loud.

The first thing that you do is find a track that is to your liking. If you have Garageband installed, there is a good cell phone ringtone in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/iLife Sound Effects/Work-Home/ and it’s called ‘Cell Phone Ringning.caf‘.

I made a copy of this file on my desktop and opened Garageband. From there, I just dragged the file onto the stage, clipped out the deadspace, and bumped the master track volume to the absolute loudest it would go. I exported it out to the desktop as an AAC file, and then opened up MakeiPhoneRingtone.app, which can be found here for free. Drag the exported song onto this app, and you’ll have the new ringtone in iTunes.

From there, you just sync up the new ringtone to your phone and change it in your iPhone’s system prefs. If you’re lazy, I’ve attached the m4a of the ringtone that I created. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags:
apple, applications, iPhone, macintosh, software, gadgets

Posted on July 1st, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

All of you Mac users out there probably know about Camino, the excellent open-source browser that is based on Gecko (Gecko, you may not know, is the same basic codebase that FireFox is based off of). You may even have heard that Camino 1.6 was released this week, after nearly a year of work on the 1.5 codebase.

Some of the new features are as follows:

• Toolbar search (you can now add on searches using OpenSearch) improvements
• Find bar now is not a pop up dialog. It’s on the footer, where it should be. Safari still kicks Camino’s ass with it’s search highlighting, however.
• Built-in software update via Sparkle framework.
• Better session saving
• Better Keychain support
• Leopard-specific UI fixes (retouched toolbar icons as well)
• Newest stable Gecko rendering engine.

Camino would be my default browser of choice if it weren’t for a few nagging issues. That doesn’t mean that I don’t use it almost all of the time, but little things keep me falling back to Safari. But the bottom line is that Camino is fastest browser on the Mac with a very low memory footprint. That means that it’s fast, and it doesn’t ever slow down your system over time. The Safari folks can’t say either of those with a straight face, though they seem to want to claim it. Throw in excellent cookie management, built in flashblock and adblock, and throw in the excellent UI and wonderful Camino community, and you’re set.

However, with all of that said, as long as some of the following nag the browser, I’ll be sticking with Safari 3.1 as my default:

• Buggy Flash: flash still doesn’t play nice with Camino all of the time. Sites that don’t crash any other browser have a tendency to crash Camino.
• Camino needs draggable tabs, a la Adium, Safari, etc. This was supposed to be in 1.6, but has been pushed back to 2.0.
• .Mac sync. I want the same bookmarks at work, at home, everywhere. All the time.
• Widget weirdness - this should be fixed in 2.0 when they switch to Gecko 2.
• If I can be picky, I’d love some developer tools type stuff: Activity monitor, DOM inspector, javascript debugger, source/css editing … but I’m not counting on it.

Still, Camino is the fastest. lightest browser on the Mac as it is, and the issues I have are all trivial. If you haven’t ever used it, you should give it a try. You’ll definitely be happy with your experience.

Technorati Tags:
applications, macintosh, reviews, software, camino, gecko, mozilla

Posted on April 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

WordPress 2.5 has been released, and so far I am quite impressed. What’s new, you ask?

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

The Happy Cog folks were responsible for the UI refresh to the backend and it’s quite impressive. It seems that every little detail was re-thought from a user’s perspective and they have gone go great lengths to make the simple things like writing, editing and managing your blog much simpler. The administration panel is a lot cleaner now, with fewer options jumping out at you from the start.

On top of those features, one of the things that I’ve been most excited about was the now-functioning MarsEdit integration that allows me to set a post as a ‘draft’ and it sticking on the server. And my dear lord, is the auto-updating plugins feature amazing or what? No longer do you have to download a plugin to your desktop, upload it, log in to WordPress, and activate the plugin. Now, the software tells you there is an update, and you click ‘update’. Done.

If you are a Wordpress user, I highly recommend the 2.5 release. They knocked this one out of the park – not only from a design standpoint, but from a usability and ease of use angle as well. As a side note, the SquareOne blog and this blog now are on 2.5. Let me know if you see any visual oddities.

Ok, end blog nerdery … now.

Technorati Tags:
site-news, software, wordpress, wordpress-2.5

Posted on March 30th, 2008 | No Comments »