• No third party apps

Now this is a real show stopper here. What good is having a phone that runs OS X if I can’t run Adium or Newsfire. Now, I don’t expect these app’s to work out fo the box, that is asking to much. But they should be able to scale down and port these applications for the iPhone. I see a huge market for third party developers on this platform, and can’t think of a reason Apple wouldn’t want that around. It brings more people to the platform, especially current Mac owners. Confirmed by Apple VP

• EDGE Data Transfer

Now this is something I can live with, but would prefer not to. For those not-in-the-know about all the different wireless data transfer acronyms. EDGE is basically the DSL of wireless data where EVDO and 3G are the cable internet(GPRS is the dial-up). EDGE gets a realistic 70kbps download speed on average. Even this site would take a while to download on that kind of speed. Now, my opinion has always been that if I am doing the web surfing on my phone, it’s because I need to look up something specific and waiting for it is not an issue, but if you are going to make a state of the art phone and tout the greatest technology including “200+ new patents” … you should use the highest wireless data transfer technology available! I am surprised Cingular signed on to the deal without any 3G data. Cingular has been pushing 3G majorly and wants to get all their customers onto 3G phones within the next couple of years.

• GPS

Where is the GPS? Jobs touted Google Maps as one of the killer apps of the phone, why can it not tell where I am at and give me directions, or local attractions. I can pinch a digital image to a smaller size, but I have to tell the phone where I am at? Bad form Apple.

• Battery Life

Now this one is more confusing than aggrivating to be honest. The “iPhone technical specs page”(which doesn’t have anything terribly technical on it) says that the phone has “Up to 5 hours of talk/video/browse” and “Up to 16 hours Audio playback.” Now … does this mean that one battery can last 5 hours of solid talking OR 16 hours of solid playback? Or is it how Kevin Rose said it would be last month on Diggnation with one battery dedicated to Audio playback that lasts 16 hours, and another battery for everything else that lasts 5 hours? Also, why is there no standby battery life listed?

• Syncing

Apple put Wi-Fi(a/b/g[/n?]) and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR in their phone. Good job Apple! They did something right with the phone part of their phone! Oh … but wait … you can’t use either of them to sync your iPhone with your computer, you have to dock it. I personally don’t see a reason for Bluetooth 2.0 EDR when the only thing you can use it for is a wireless headset, a lesser version of bluetooth would have been fine(and might have dropped the hefty pricetag a bit).

• IM

I know the text messaging looks a lot like IM, and you can AIM over SMS. But where is the true, honest to goodness, text messaging? iChat anyone? I’m not a huge fan, and there are better alternatives on the Mac, but for mobile IM, iChat would do just fine. What I really want? Adium on my iPhone. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, GoogleTalk(Jabber). All of them done right with a pretty interface.

• Cingular

I am not a huge fan of cingular. Thier plans are overpriced and they use Rollover to justify it, when in reality, I would hardly, if ever have rollover minutes. I am paying a $20 premium for a service I will never use. With other phones, this is not an issue. Go online, download a phone utility(or instructions), unlock it, and pop in your favorite sim card. But I think a few of the features of the iPhone will only work with cingular. Visual VoiceMail being the most obvious, as something like that requires a fairly large infrastructure change on Cingulars part.

• Expandable Memory

To be fair, I see a little slot on the side of the phone that COULD be used for expandable memory. But nothing was mentioned about support. Photo’s are another killer app for the iPhone. Why can’t I pop my SD card out of my camera, drop them to my iPhone, and email them out? 2 Megapixels isn’t enough for a lot of people.

• Battery

An internal battery on a phone? Palm tried that with the Treo 600, we all know how that worked out. Having worked in cell phone warranty/support I can not tell you how many issues were solved by removing the battery and reinserting it(also knows as second level reset, or a hard shock, or one of a hundred other terms used). iPod battery inside, phone battery outside(if they are seperate) would be an ideal configuration. On the contrary though an internal battery does make for a more solid feeling product. But practically I don’t think it is a good thing.

In the end? I will still get one. I might wait for Rev. 2. I might not. I am pretty impatient. Hopefully enough people will complain and allow third party development on the phone. Which would let me overlook the rest of the downfalls. I also give Apple a lot of slack on these downfalls, because they are new to the phone market. There is only so much you can learn from research and surveys. A lot of people don’t even know that they want to run third party desktop class applications on thier phone, but they do. Apple also has another 5 months to finalize this product. I am 100% positive that we have not seen a final product because there were so many standard phone features that were not mentioned. Does it vibrate? What kind of ringtones does it support? How many contacts can you have? MMS as well as SMS? Will it run current java phone applications? What kind of utilities does it have(calculator, alarm, chrono, etc)?

The first thing I did was resize the #LSResult div so that it fit to my new search bar length. My search bar was 220 pixels wide. I found that I needed to set the #LSResult div to 2 pixels larger, you may have different results but this is the code I used in my custom style.

Next we need to change the styling of the rows to fit with the new size. The live search page uses a background image for the header row, each result row, and each hilighted row located in the /wp-content/themes/k2/images/ directory called livesearchbgdark.jpg, livesearchbg.jpg, and livesearchbghilight.jpg respectively. In order to get these to display right you will have to edit the images. I am no artist or Photo Shop efficianado by any means, so take these directions with a grain of salt. For each image you will want to …

1. Open the image in <insert favorite image manipulation program here> … I used Photo Shop, directions might vary if you use something else.
2. Use the ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool (M)’ to select the left half of the image
3. Copy that selection(Edit->Copy)
4. Create a new image(File->New) … it should automatically insert the height for you, and the width will be whatever the width of your new search bar is plus 2
5. Paste your selection into the new image
6. Use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ and move the selection so that the top left corner of the selection is flush with the top left corner of the image
7. Go back to the original image and use the ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool (M)’ to select the right half of the image
8. Copy that selection
9. Go back to your new image that you created and paste the selection into the new image
10. use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ to move that selection so that the top right corner of the selection is flush with the top right corner of the new image

*note – If your new search box is smaller than the original you should have an image that looks just like the original except smaller, if your image is larger, continue with these steps

11. Go back to the original image and copy a portion of the center of the image
12. Go to the new image and paste this selection in
13. Use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ to move this selection so that it covers the empty space. You can copy in as many time as you need to cover the empty space

You should now have an image that looks just like the original Live Search image except it is the size of your new search box. Save and upload the images in a directory within the ’styles’ directory and add your CSS accordingly. Here is mine …

Again, I am no graphic artist, and really had no choice but to modify the originals to fit. Feel free to create your own background images if you have the skill.

The next thing I wanted to do was to change the number of comments to be more obvious. The following CSS code did that for me …

You may need to mess around with the font-size and the top settings to get it to look right for your site, but that is what looks best for mine.

Then there is this nifty little bug(feature?) that whenever you use the keyboard to select an entry and then mouse over the results div, the entry you hilighted looses it’s padding and expands it’s width. I didn’t like this so I fixed it …

The last thing I wanted to do was change the styling of the searchbox itself. I decided to remove the border on it entirely so it is part of the background instead of popping out or sinking in. I used this CSS code to modify the input box …

There is one pesky little problem I have found with this though … Safari doesn’t like your idea of how an text input should look, and decides to add some styling to it anyways. It kind of makes the results box not fit as well and just generally annoy’s me that Safari thinks it has a better idea of how my site should look than me. If anyone knows how to over ride this please leave a comment letting me know. There are a few other quirks with Safari but they don’t relate to Live Search so I will save them for another post. That is all I really felt the need to change, but I dug into it pretty well. If there is something you want to change and can’t figure out how, leave a comment and I will see if I can help you with that.

Wow, that was alot of writing to explain so little code. BTW, I know I suck at writing and I know it’s probably not the easiest instructions to follow and understand, but come on, i’m a technical person :-P

43 Things

43 Things is basically a to-do list on crack. You can enter anything you want and they are treated as tags. Anyone can search them and add them to thier to do list. You can use this as a daily to do list or a “things I want to do before I die” list, or somewhere in between. Every ‘thing’ created on the site has it’s own page that lists who has finished it, who want’s to do it, has a discussion board so people can discuss thier experiences with it. Ties in with 43 Things is 43 Places, 43 People, and All Consuming.

They are all pretty much the same. 43 Places is for places you want to go or have been. 43 People is for people you want to meet or have met. All Consuming is a bit different than the rest beig a list of things you have ‘consumed.’ From the obvious food and beverages to books, movies, and anythign else you may want to put on the list. Sort of a ‘Social Consumer Review’ website. Everything said I really like this network of websites. You can view my profile and get started with your own ‘things!’

Newsvine

Newsvine is the newest in News 2.0 offerings. Basically it is a news website that combines the best of editorial news postings and user contributes news postings. Think a combination of Digg and Slashdot. It encompasses much more than technology however. It allows you to add certain tag’s to your watchlist so you can keep an eye on certain topics or categories of news stories.

It has many different types of news stories you can view. There is the ’standard’ edtiorial posts, usually tha main news article and topics for things you would fine on CNN, BBC, and the like. It also allows users to submit stories and tag them. Users are allowed to vote on these stories ala Digg, however that does not play a huge part which is something I am a fan of. I won’t go off on that rant as plenty already have. It also allows any user to write thier own news articles, tag them, and have them read. A great way for any up and coming journalist to get some cred and gain a following.

This is currently in a private beta stage. Although as far as I am concerned, that is just a media hype, it is definately reday for the masses. They are giving everyone who signs up 20 invites and invites are easy as pie to come by. Kinda like when gmail started giving out invites like crazy once it was ready for the masses but still wanted to keep the hype going as long as possible. If anyone want’s an invite, you can reach via my about page and I will hook you up.

I have also started using the typical web services some would consider web 2.0 more frequently. flickr has alot more than I ever thought it did. I have been using it to store photo’s for a while now, but there are flickr groups too. Communities for anything and everything where they post discussions and photos. Really liking that right now. GMail is an obvious one, no need to go into that. And one that alot of people won’t agree with me on is Digg. It has it’s problems of course, my main pet peeve being that just about anything useless can get onto the front page and take up space. It does often have some decent news stories worth reading however. I subscribe to my friends digg feed’s only and occasionally check the front page or search for something. There is also Feendlounge which I wrote a review of a few days ago. I am not currently using this service as my paypal account is not in order just yet, but I fully intend to be using it by the end of the month.

That about wraps up my web 2.0 experience thus far. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid it, was just a matter of time before I fell in.

So this is a call to all you lurkers out there. I request that you de-lurk and announce where you hail from. I am hoping to have one or two of these coincidences myself and perhaps make some new friends! So … I know you all are out there, I check my website stats just like every other blogger. De-lurk away!

I see many merit’s in folksonomy over taxonomy. Mainly it will allow for easier navigation of the site and will cut down on clutter in the categories. I have so many of them! Also the UTW plugin will allow for browsing the archives by multiple tags which you can not do with categories. All in all, I think it will be a better system.

Several other blogs have switched over to this convention, namely Binary Bonsai. I draw alot of inspiration from Michael and would like to thank him for k2 and every idea I have ever had spawned from his work. Things will be hectic around here in the coming days. Just bear with me.

On another related note. I have decided not to build my own theme up from scratch but instead use k2 and it’s builtin scheming capabilities. It will severely cut down on the work I have to do(thanks again michael)! Still looking for a graphic artist though.

Today when I went out for lunch I decided to venture off to subway to try thier new Chicken Parmesan Toasted Sub. You may or may not have seen commercials for it, but it looks mighty tasty! Now the subway I went to was a little store(no seats) inside the Park Place building in downtown Boston. For those of you not from the area, its a pretty swanky place with a Fire & Ice Bar, Souper Salad, a few cafe style bistro deals, and some upscale shopping. Naturally I expected it to be one of the better subway’s and serve me some decent food. To my dismay when I get to the counter, the “Sandwhich Artist” is less than polite in asking me what I want, when I tell him what I want, he mutters something under his breath about my bread choice, i’m assuming it has to do with the fact that he had to get it out of the oven because non was out, adding to the amount effort required for him to make my $6.00 sandwhich. He proceeds to slopily toss a few slices of cheese and 3 pieces of chicken, followed by a splattering of marinara sauce. After that he tossed it in the “oven” to toast it, messing it up a deal more in the process. I asked for parmesan cheese and oregano on my sandwhich and he makes zero effort in putting any on. There was a small area with cheese and a small area with oregano and it didn’t help the flavor of it at all.

Now I know your thinking “I never would have paid for that sandwhich!” … and honestly, I would never pay for that sandwhich if I hadn’t asked them to make it, even if they did a shitty job, I just can’t do that sort of thing. So I pay for my sandwhich and go back to work. By now the bread is all soggy at the bottom from the marinara sauce and crunchy on top from the toasting. It’s quite disgusting. I wont bore you with anymore details, so lets just say I didn’t finish it. So I am hungry, irritated, and bored. The result of which is this pointless rant about subway. Now on to the point … Franchises.

I don’t think Franchises try hard enough in as heavily populated an area as Boston. It’s all about getting them out the door. The guy at subway was definately in a hurry to get me out of there with my haphazardly created(thier word, not mine) sandwhich. In Phoenix it’s more about making sure they come back. I went to the same places often and they all new my name. We would shoot the shit when I got up to the window, and I would get some good food.

I offer this piece of advice to everone who owns a franchise in Boston … Teach your employee’s some customer service and teach them how to make decent food. Until then … my hard earned money will be going to the much slower, much nicer, much better small operations. If you are in the Boston area, check out The Park Street Cafe in the Park Street building. It’s about 3 or 4 doors down from Subway and much much better.

After trying out bloglines and a few other like it I was very unsatisfied. I guess you could say I was spoiled by NetNewsWire these past few months … but it just doesn’t cut it. Theoretically, in order to keep my feed reading all sync’d up nicely, this is the only feed reader I would use, even on my desktop, and the offerings were just not good enough to replace NetNewsWire.

Thinking about other web applications and what makes them great. I had a thought … AJAX. If you haven’t heard of AJAX, it basically turns webpages into real applications. The possibilities are endless. The livesearch used on this site is AJAX powered. To my absolute lack of surprise, someone already had this idea … two people in fact that I have found.

FeedLounge.com – Written by Alex King. It is in a private alpha stage right now and the only taste I got of it was a screenshot on the front page of the site, but this program looks like the holy grail for web based RSS reading. I signed up to hopefully become a beta tester and make FeedLounge as good as possible. It appears that this will be a sign-up service like bloglines as opposed to a piece of software I could run on my own server and not have to worry about massive amounts of traffic and database slowdowns, but I am willing to make compromises :)

Tiny Tiny RSS – This is a very early release version of the software, but so far it is very slick. I installed it on my server and tried it out as well as trying out the demo he has up. Check that out if you don’t really know what AJAX is all about.

I can’t wait till these applications mature. I think they will both have thier own place and will both be widely used. I know I will use them.

Firefox

I have been using this browser since before version 1.0 back in my gentoo days and absolutely loved it despite its issues. Was an obvious addition to my new iBook when i got it.

Pros

• Extensions
• Huge user community
• Extensions
• Standards compliant
• On the forefront of browser innovation
• Full open source development
• Oh, and did I mention extensions?

Cons

• Slow
• Interface is a bit lacking compared to Safari
• Crashes on occasion

Safari

As the browser comes with OS X and is written by apple it is an obvious choice to at least check out if not be your first choice browser.

Pros

• Very clean interface, it IS an Apple application
• Standards compliant
• Also on the forefront of browser innovation, supporting lots of new technologies such as RSS
• Very easy to use

Cons

• Does not support extensions

As you can see my main focus on Firefox is the available extensions. It turns it into so much more than your typical browser. I use the Tabbrowser Extensions, SessionSaver, and, most importantly, the greasemonkey extions. The first two can be covered by the Saft Plugin for Safari. But the last, and most important extension does not have anything on par for Safari.

For those not in the know, greasemonkey is an extension that lets you automatically apply any DHTML script to a page based on its URL. For instance there is a script that loads on any URL that matches *mail.google.com/mail*(gmail) and rewrites the URL to use googles secure server instead of the standard for gmail which is unsecure. There is also a script that changes the mailto: links on every page to use gmail instead, a plugin to enhance flickr photo pages by adding additional information and links on each photo page. There is a script to add a link to rent a movie on netflix for each movie page on IMDB and vice versa.

After all is said and done, I *love* Safari, but the greasemonkey extension is enough to keep me from switching over from Firefox just yet.

The only hurdle left is figuring out how to fit all of our crap in my ‘98 Chevy Blazer LOL … I am going to have to not take alot of things unfortunately. But some stuff I can leave here and have shipped over when I have the money. There is also the issue of me actually finding a job once I get to boston so I can earn some money and go to Europe as planned in July.

I did the math and if I get a job as soon as I get there making at least $10 an hour(should not be hard in boston) I will have about $2500 which will cover my plane ticket to Amsterdam, my passport, my ticket to What The Hack, various other expenses, and (dun dun dun) an appartment in Amsterdam for 1 month!!! Thats right, I will get to hang out in amsterdam for 1 whole freaking month when I go! Unfortuately do to certain circumstances(my dumb ass not saving enough money), I will not be able to do my originally planned “Tour Across Europe” until next year. But if you are interested in it I will be going and documenting everything here, as well as my trip this summer.

In other news Apple has sort of pissed me off and I can only hope that thier product is better than thier service. I called last saturday(4/30) and placed my order, I ordered expedited shipping(2 night shipping) because I wanted it ASAP(I’m impatient). I also ordered the apple care protection plan. The sales rep I spoke to who placed my order decided that I wanted my items to ship seperately as they became available. He also forgot to take down my appartment number when I gave him my address *TWICE* and so when the apple care(a little box with a registration card and some ‘diagnostic CD’) package shipped with my address sans the appartment number and so it was never delivered and sat in the FedEx location for about 3 days until, I would assume, Apple contacted them and gave them the updated address … I received it today. Meanwhile during all this time my laptop, which takes 2-3 days to build according to thier site, is still being built. It was finally shipped out on wednsday, 5 days after I ordered it. And on top of all of that, they are shipping it from China and it wont be here until the 10th despite the fact that I PAID for 2 day shipping. Totally lame!