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June 19, 2009

iPhone 3GS Day

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 5:39 am

4:32AM (Yawn) Good morning! Almost time to go! Jean-Alfred will be picking me up at 4:40. I’m not really tired, but I had no idea what my alarm was doing going off at 3:30.

4:58AM We timed it well. One guy arrived about 10 seconds ahead of us. We’re 2nd & 3rd in line.
burlington_morning
After a couple minutes we’re up to about 6 people. The security guard is letting us wait in the vestibule cause it’s raining. The doors will open at 6:00.


5:20AM I don’t think you can tell from the picture but they’ve set up some velvet ropes outside the store.

5:40AM We are in the mall now and in front of the store. A friendly Apple employee is chatting us up. He has the new phone to do all their sales stuff. Here’s a picture of the compass. He said there’s 400-something reservations here!

The current topic of conversation is the Palm Pre. People surprised they went with a plastic screen.
The view from my spot in line:

As has been reported elsewhere, there are two lines — one for reservations and one not. I’m glad we’re at the front since we don’t have reservations and there are over 400 people who do. I heard a rumor that they will pull people from each line in turn (I believe 3 reservations to every 1 non-reserved). No idea if this is true though.

Many more employees showing up, wishing us good morning as they pass.

6:20AM Lost you there for a while. Man this WordPress client sucks. Had to delete and reinstall.

They came around serving coffee a little while ago. The line is now getting substantial. It hasn’t gone outside the ropes yet. Jean-Alfred is estimating about 40 people.

Apple employees inside look like they’re having a meeting.

The giant iPhone in the window next to us is showing demos of the software, including MMS. Ummm. Are they trying to antagonize AT&T, or too lazy to have multiple videos for different regions?

6:37AM Employees still meeting. Nothing much is new. The line has only grown a little bit.

6:50AM. Meeting over. Employees manning battle stations. We may be going soon!

Manager heard asking employees if they’re ready.

Looks like they may just be waiting on the clock.

Employees look as restless as we are!

And we’re going!!!

Because they are taking more reserved, I’m the 1st person who didn’t get immediately to a salesperson.

Being helped. The guy went to get it.

Having problems with upgrade pricing. On hold with AT&T. I think Jean-Alfred is done. Looks like he went for the white one.

No he’s done with purchase, now has to activate (he’s switching from Verizon).

Jean-Alfred is done, now waiting for me! Still on hold after at least 20 minutes.

Apple Store still unable to reach AT&T in excess of 45 minutes.

The plan now is I pay full price and can return the phone within 30 days if they establish that I paid too much. Just waiting for my original salesguy to be free. Employees here are great, keeping those of us at the problem desk in a good mood. I feel bad for them being on hold with AT&T all day.

8:55AM I’m home now with my new phone. Sorry I couldn’t update, but once my phone switched over, I didn’t have all my apps on it yet (and didn’t want to bother downloading them). Setting up the phone now.

Jean-Alfred tried to take a picture of me leaving the store with my phone, but he took a video instead. It cracks me up, so I will share that.

9:20AM Looks like the Apple servers are having some problems (maybe AT&T’s). My phone restored, but doesn’t seem able to register. iTunes is hanging at “Connecting to iTunes Store.” It restored my icon placement and bookmarks on the springboard, but hasn’t restored any of my apps or music. I hope it’s not a repeat of last year where I had to wait hours for my phone to be able to sync. I hate that they make it so that you can’t accomplish anything with the phone until it’s registered. Oh, it just gave up with an error message. Now it looks like it’s letting me sync anyway.

Oh, P.S. at the store they also were pushing a 30% discount on MobileMe when you buy the phone. Good deal. Jean-Alfred signed up for it, and I bought it as well, since I can apply that to my existing subscription, basically giving me a discount on my next year.

To elaborate on what my problem with AT&T was…
A while back I checked my eligibility for an upgrade, and the Apple and AT&T sites were showing only the option to pay $699 full price without a contract extension. I emailed AT&T customer service about this, and it was explained that if I signed a new 2-year contract I could get it for $499. Well when I went to buy the phone of course that option does not come up. As I said, the customer care guy was on hold with AT&T for an hour before I left, and none of the store employees had successfully gotten a call through to an AT&T rep since sales began. So they couldn’t straighten it out, but I bought the phone for full price, with the promise that I could return it within 30 days if I later was able to establish that I was wrongly charged, and then re-purchase it for the lower price. So I have just sent an email to my AT&T person, asking if there’s something wrong with my account file that needs to be corrected to allow the sale to go through. As I said at the Apple Store, I’m starting to believe she may have just pulled that story out of her ass, since none of the Apple Store employees knew anything about the policy either.

10:20AM Done syncing for the moment. I think maybe the speaker is just a touch louder when playing music. I’m listening to the same song on both phones side-by-side. The 3GS just sounds a little “fuller” somehow. Entirely possible it’s my imagination.

I’m still not able to access the App Store. Also my MobileMe SMTP server isn’t working. Incoming mail seems fine. Hardly surprising, I’m just really frustrated that no decent push-enabled apps have shown up in the store yet, and I want to see if more have been approved!

I may go back to bed now. I need to be still awake and calling a show in about 12 hours, and that just ain’t gonna happen! Maybe the server traffic will be better when I get up.

4:00PMI slept for a couple hours. By the time I got back up, OS 3.0 jailbreak is available for the 3G. Did that. All is well and the 3G works fine with the 3GS’s SIM card. Not sure what AT&T thinks of that. I’m sure they have some problem with me using the SIM card for the phone I paid $700 for in the phone I paid $500 for, for which service I pay $100/month. Those couple KB of data must really be causing some irreparable harm to their business because I used a different but almost-identical piece of hardware to consume it. I’ll be cautious with my data usage until some time passes and there are no horror stories from other people.

Also, I got a response to my email from a different rep at AT&T saying my problem is being forwarded to a “specialty group” and I will be contacted within one business day for more follow-up.

UPDATE: Just a couple hours later, somebody from AT&T called me, which I appreciate. Turns out I’m actually NOT eligible and the customer service lady who originally handled my inquiry, in her “extensive review” of my account seems to have neglected to check that I was eligible before telling me I was eligible. Well the good news is that it will all come out in the wash next year, as by paying $200 extra this time, I will be eligible for $400 off the next model.

Speed
I haven’t touched on this now because unless one wants to do complex testing, it’s kind of hard to objectively test speed. But lest you think the phone is not faster, let me just say it is. It’s snappy. I also noticed a speed boost with 3.0 on my 3G, but I wasn’t sure if that was simply because I was using a non-jailbroken firmware. Jailbreaking adds some background processes, so a legit firmware always runs a little faster anyway. Which is why I hope AT&T gets their tethering plan together quickly so I will never need to jailbreak again.

But with the 3GS, there is a definite speed improvement above and beyond the performance of the 3G. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade. Annoying splash screens on apps that almost made me want to delete them are now gone in just a second or two. The camera takes pictures faster, everything just kind of zips along. To me even a couple seconds’ difference is a huge advantage in usability, because I will now make decisions differently. If I only have a couple seconds to take a picture or jot a note to myself, I may now bother to do so where before I would have thought I wouldn’t have time.

I can’t wait to play with the camera more. I think this is the best thing about the phone for me. I take a lot of pictures, in situations where a phone camera is not really the best choice. Almost all the photos in this blog in the last 9 months or so were taken with my 3G iPhone, as well as my entire Flickr photostream. One of my Flickr photos of the St. Louis arch was even chosen to be published in an online travel guide. I have been very impressed with the ability of the iPhone to take decent pictures and upload them instantly and with GPS coordinates to various places on the web. I think it has changed the rules of casual photography, especially for bloggers. The 3G does pretty well for a phone camera, but I think the 3GS will close the gap between phone and real camera even more. When I’m someplace more interesting than my apartment I’ll start taking some pics for a later post.

Important Tip!
gpsI was about to write a strongly worded post about how the Maps app doesn’t show the direction you’re facing to take advantage of the new compass, but TUAW has a post explaining all. You just have to hit the location button twice to toggle it on, and then you can spin around and the map will rotate so that the direction you’re facing is always “up” on the map. As someone who is frequently away from home and in unfamiliar places, this may be the greatest feature ever. I feel like a character in a video game now.


June 18, 2009

iPhone 3GS News Coming Soon

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 9:19 am

picture-1Well it’s just 22 hours or so before the release of the iPhone 3GS here on the east coast. Hello, Dolly! has its first performance this afternoon, then we have a little party at our choreographer’s house (famous for her midnight volleyball games, although this time it might be “rainy, early-evening volleyball”).

Then tomorrow at the crack of dawn — literally — I will be traveling with my friend and co-worker Jean-Alfred to the Apple Store, where we will line up for the new iPhone. I did it last year, but I was by myself so it was kind of boring, and I was there for four and a half hours with only a Windows Mobile phone (yuck!) to keep me entertained and informed. I think this year will be much better, and I hope I will not be standing still in line for an hour or more while AT&T’s servers are crashed.

I plan to blog our experience in line, so check back tomorrow!


May 30, 2009

Razer Mamba Review

I call this: computers,gaming,pc — Posted by KP @ 3:50 pm

side1My birthday present to myself was the brand new Razer Mamba wireless mouse.  How new?  Well actually I don’t know, because last I heard it was supposed to come out on May 18, and then on like May 3rd I went to the website to see about preordering it, and there it was, “in stock.”  I feel like Razer sends me a promotional email on pretty much a daily basis about some headphones or keyboard or some crap, and yet they never actually bothered to advertise via email or on the front page of their website that pretty much their biggest product release ever was now available for purchase?  Razer mice aren’t always carried in stores, but I did find it on Amazon, which is where I purchased it, since I have an Amazon credit card and some gift certificates to spend on it.

First of all it should be said that the mouse costs $129.  If you can’t see the value of spending that much on a mouse, you can stop reading now if you like, or continue reading for fun if you want, but I understand there are only a certain percentage of people for whom this product is intended.  Those are probably the same people who have a keyboard worth $129, a joystick worth $129, and a set of rudder pedals worth $129.  At that point, why should the mouse — the primary way to interact with most games — be given any less attention?

The big deal about this mouse is that it’s the first time that Razer has released a wireless mouse.  Being the dedicated gaming hardware company that they are, they didn’t believe any wireless mouse could stand up to the needs of serious gaming, so they simply chose not to make one until they thought they could do it right.  So it was with much fanfare that they announced some months back that they thought they had finally come up with something worth doing.

Despite the enormous potential for it to be a disaster, I decided that my lifestyle which will have kept me away from all the comforts of home gaming (big monitor, joystick, pedals, TrackIR, surround sound) for basically a full year deserves to be treated to the finest of the one peripheral I actually get to bring with me — the mouse.  My current mouse of choice was the Razer Deathadder, which is a wired mouse in basically the same shape as the Mamba.  In addition to being wireless, the Mamba also offers two additional buttons, placed kind of strangely in the upper-left corner of the left mouse button.  They’re primarily intended to adjust sensitivity on the fly, but can be configured for anything.

One of the coolest things about the Mamba is that it can convert pretty much instantly from wireless to wired mode and back.  The transmitter has a dock built into it that the mouse can rest on when it’s not being used, and it charges over USB.   If you’re using the mouse and start to run low on the battery, or simply want the reliable performance of a wired mouse, you can pop the cable out of the transmitter and plug it directly into the mouse, and voila! you have a wired mouse.  The delay is only the time it takes for Windows to recognize a mouse being unplugged and then plugged in.  I have found that sometimes it seems to take a little longer for the connection to become stable when switching to wireless, but it’s still about 30 seconds.  I wouldn’t recommend doing it in the middle of a firefight, but it’s easy to do during a quick break from action.

Here are a couple shots that illustrate how the cable is removed:
topwire1

topwireless1
On the underside of the mouse are a few buttons. The latch on the upper-right is the release for the USB cable. On the lower right is the pairing button. I don’t find it generally necessary, but there’s one on the mouse, and one on the transmitter — I guess for when they get confused, or perhaps on a new install. And on the left side is the power switch for the mouse — it’s turned on for wireless mode, and off when charging or when wired.
bottomwire1bottomwireless1

The two little gold dots are the charging connectors.  The mouse docks on the transmitter, kind of like a pedestal, like so:

charging1Of course if you’d rather play than stare at your beautiful mouse, you can just use it wired, and it will charge as you continue playing.

Mamba vs. Deathadder
As you can see in the photos, they are really pretty much the same size. The changes are very subtle, and from what I can tell, all seem to be good adjustments.
img_2761img_2763

I’ve found the adjustment from the Deathadder to be pretty seamless.  The Mamba is a bit heavier because of the battery, but the teflon feet are much smoother, so I don’t notice the weight.  I’m also not the kind of gamer who really has to lift the mouse that often, so it’s not a big thing for me.  Another small difference is in the area of the side buttons.  The buttons themselves have a thin layer of rubber on them, which feels nice, and there is a more generous rubber area below the buttons, which makes it a nice comfortable place to rest your thumb when you don’t want to hit the buttons accidentally.  There’s also a very slight lip towards the back of the mouse which gives a little more grip and control in the thumb area, especially if you need to lift the mouse a lot.  The cord, should you choose to use it, is woven, not rubber like the Deathadder.  A lot of people prefer that because it moves a little more freely.

Aesthetics
Any gaming gear strives to be both functional and sexy.  The Mamba has the standard blue LED style going.  Some people think blue is too cliché, but I don’t mind since it happens to match the lighting on my keyboard and joystick.  The Mamba has less lighting than the Deathadder — just two narrow strips of blue on the mousewheel.  However, the charger/transmitter has blue lighting on the bottom, and around the button on the front of it.

Another good thing is that like most of Razer’s mice, the settings are saved on the mouse itself so when you plug it in on another computer your keymapping and sensitivity settings travel with you.  I believe that requires the drivers to be installed on each machine.  That’s fine with me, since I primarily need it when switching between my home computer and laptop, it’s nice to know that any changes I make to the settings will be up to date when I switch machines.

Rant On
One thing I absolutely hate about Razer is their driver software.  They packaged this thing like it came right out of the dark side of Cupertino (the packaging would take up a post more complex than this one — feel free to google, I’m sure you’ll find lots of unboxing videos and photos).  I swear, I have never seen a product packaged this well from Apple.  And yet their software is absolute crap.  Look at this mess:

mambaNot only is it ugly, I don’t know what shenanigans they have to do to make the edges do that, but whatever it is is totally non-standard and refuses to pop up when I alt-tab out of a game.  Like it can’t overlay against a 3D game or something.  If they had just made it a regular damn window it would be fine!   There’s a lot of shenanigans going on in their software.  Like why is it when I plug in my Deathadder on my Mac, before choosing an OS, it goes backwards? The X axis is reversed! See most fancy mice, when you plug them in to an unknown computer, the computer’s like, “Oh, that’s a mouse.”  And then you install the driver and the computer’s like, “Wow, that’s a really fancy mouse!”  Well with most Razer mice I’ve owned, you plug it in, and the computer’s like “WTF is that?”  And then it does the hardware detection thing, and slowly gets the idea, and the mouse starts working, and then you install the drivers and it starts working well.   But right out of the box, it’s not actually a mouse.  And that pisses me off.  Every time they release a new product I hope they’ll change all this crap and stop acting like, “Hey look at this cool interface we coded in our dorm room — it has jagged edges,” and act like the professional purveyors of pwnage they otherwise present themselves to be.  Whoever designed the packaging for the Mamba needs to bitchslap whoever designs their GUI, and get them on the same page.  Rant off.

Summary
Overall I’m very happy with it. It hasn’t changed my life, but even as a wired mouse it’s a step up from the Deathadder. When gaming I like to have the mouse directly in front of the keyboard, but the wire usually gets in the way when I need to type. This is the biggest change I’ve noticed in usability from being wireless –I only need to worry about where the mouse is, not what the cord is dragging over.


Look – It’s a Game You Can Carry in Your Pocket!

I call this: gaming,phones — Posted by KP @ 12:27 pm

games
While visiting my parents last week, I ran across this contraption that was rather special to me in my childhood. On one side, it has a chess board with little holes, and these two drawers slide out and there are little teeny tiny chess pieces you can stick in the holes. On the back, there is a circular maze-like game where you have three silver balls and have to tilt the board so that all three balls wind up in the center of the maze. I thought this multi-purpose portable gaming device was the coolest thing in the ’80s.

It was nice to see it again, and I had it just sitting on the table in front of me for a while, and then at some point put my phone down on the table. Eventually I went to get my phone and found these two devices sitting side-by-side. See, 20 years ago, the device on the right was sooo cool, cause it was portable (although you’d need some pretty big pockets!), and you could play two games!


May 29, 2009

Crazy Pre-Pro Day!!

I call this: mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:33 pm

Well it would seem to be “that day” in the preproduction week for Hello, Dolly! at the Reagle Players. We start rehearsal in four days, and this seems to be the day it’s all coming together. It’s a really good thing I like to multitask. It’s like a puzzle. Some pieces can’t be put together until other ones are complete, and then all of a sudden a bunch of pieces start getting fit together and all of a sudden the things that can be completed start growing exponentially, and I’m racing to keep up before new ones come in.

I’ve been getting several emails per minute for the last few hours, mostly due to the fact that I just sent out an email blast to our 49-person cast with a bunch of questions. As each one comes in, I have to take the information out of it, put it where it goes, and get the email out of my inbox and into my Reagle storage folder before another one comes in.

While this has been going on, I’ve been making up the schedule for Week 1 based on a meeting the director and choreographer had earlier this afternoon (which in turn is based on my recommended schedule for the rehearsal process in general). That’s done, has been proofed by the director, but not the choreographer. Once she gets back to me, it will go out to the cast, who are dying to see it.

I also have a contact sheet that needs some details filled in, but is probably about 90% done, and waiting on people to get back to me. My next project is to finish the production calendar (which is in a very rough draft at the moment, only because I drew it up to show the director what the usual structure of the process is). I’d really like to be able to send that to the cast tonight with the week’s schedule.

Then I have to do all the things for me — like laundry and packing and cleaning my apartment.

What I’m Using

I have something of a love-hate relationship with the “Spaces” feature of Mac OS X Leopard. What it is, in brief, is a way to have several different setups of windows arranged on your desktop that you can flip between, instead of having 10 random windows from a bunch of apps all piling up on top of each other. I don’t generally bother with it, as I tend to find it more trouble than it’s worth. But as I’ve been having one of those days, that’s exactly what my desktop was starting to look like, and I needed some organization.

The overall project I had going on (and is still going on) was that I sent out an email to the 49 people in the cast asking them to proof their information on the contact sheet and tell me if they have any conflicts. When they respond, I need the contact sheet open, and the document where I’m tracking their conflicts (and highlighting their names in green if they have confirmed their contact info is correct). Because some of them responded right away and others might not get back to me for hours, I need this stuff open and arranged in a way where I can use it easily, but also not getting in the way of me using other apps, or other documents in the same apps. So I shoved those two documents over to my #2 space. When an email comes in pertaining to that, I see it in Mail, which is in my main #1 space, then I can hit ctl-rightarrow to swing over to the #2 space, where I have the two documents ready to receive changes. The 2nd space looks like this:
spaces1
The other major app I’m using to keep track of things is OmniFocus, which is a task manager, though that’s a bit of an understatement. For more on that, check out my section on it in the Stage Mgr Tools area of the site (it’s under iPhone and Mac apps). I’ve been checking off a lot of tasks, but also adding a lot of new ones. I have one in progress called “confirm production meeting” which has sub-tasks with the names of all the people I invited. As each one RSVPs I check their name off. When all of them are gone I’ll be able to confirm the meeting is on. I have one major one I’m waiting on — the lighting designer — which is kind of a dealbreaker if he can’t make it. So that is always a big ball of stress over my head when trying to schedule a meeting.

I have a lot of pending tasks I have to do (like 33 of them) cause all of the individual things I have to pack just hit the “due soon” stage, so I’m going to try to cut down on some of those now.

This is also the time to run frequent Time Machine backups, now that I actually have a ton of paperwork that wasn’t done yesterday when I last backed up. These next couple days will probably see a lot more backups than my normal schedule of every 2 days (which are also managed with recurring tasks in OmniFocus).


May 2, 2009

Turning 30

I call this: gaming,random — Posted by KP @ 10:49 am

You know when you’re playing an RPG, where you have to complete some side tasks before moving past a certain point in the game, or not make any mistakes, or else you’ll never be able to achieve the good ending? And once you’ve failed to do that, you might not even be halfway through the game, but from then on you know the best you’re going to get is the generic ending. And maybe you bother playing the rest of the game out, but you’re not really enjoying it, because you screwed it up and no matter what you do you can’t get to the result you want. That’s how I feel about turning 30.


April 29, 2009

Dear Apple

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 1:05 pm

Thank you for your recent emails suggesting that I get my mother an iPod Touch for Mother’s Day.  Were it not for your almost daily reminders, I would not actually have been aware that Mother’s Day was approaching, or that I needed to be planning gifts for both my parents (as I’ll be out of town by Father’s Day).  I’ve been quite busy on the road and thinking of days in terms of load ins and load outs, and completely oblivious to weekends, birthdays or national holidays.  Actually I’m turning 30 in a few days, and the most I can tell you about that date is that we have performances of The Spy at 2 and 8, with a seminar prior to the matinee.  So you can see how I greatly appreciate your reminders that I need to get a gift for my mom.

However, while my mother is a Mac user and might have an iPhone except that AT&T sucks at her house, I don’t believe that the iPod Touch is the ideal gift for her.  She’s not much of a music lover — I think she still has yet to spend all of an iTunes gift certificate I got for her several years ago — and I don’t imagine she’d enjoy watching videos or TV shows on such a small screen.  Personally, I don’t see the point of an iPod Touch for anyone who doesn’t intend to use it first as an iPod.  I would like someday to be able to get her an inexpensive Macbook, as she would truly use that, but this would be exceedingly more difficult if I now spent $300 on a gift she won’t really use.  And P.S. Mr. or Ms. Apple Marketing Person, I have a feeling you have a larger and more regular income than I do and can afford to drop $300 on a Mother’s Day gift — and then presumably match that gift a month later when Father’s Day rolls around.  Well good for you.  

In brief, I appreciate that you’re looking out for my mother, and for my own preparedness, but the next time you feel the need to send me 5 or more emails suggesting I buy a specific gift for someone, please pick something more appropriate.  Thanks!
Love, KP


April 24, 2009

My Newfound Love of OmniFocus

I call this: computers,mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 9:40 pm

Among my favorite types of computing applications has always been the organizer/checklist/outline kind of app. Back in my PDA days, the Palm apps Bonsai and ShadowPlan competed for my heart with each new update. When I got a Mac it came with a version of OmniOutliner which I loved a lot, but alas because it was one of those “came-with-the-Mac” things, as soon as I tried to install a new update it broke my fragile registered version, and I was pissed about it and refused to pay for it, so it was gone (I’m currently having that relationship with ComicLife).

The other problem I have with tasks in general is that the default Apple apps have a really stupid way of handling them, or at least stupid to me, growing up with Palm’s big four apps: Datebook, Contacts, To-Dos and Memo. Apple seems to hate to-dos and memos, so much so that after what seems like centuries in technological time, we may soon finally be seeing them sync between iCal, Mail and the iPhone. What, I ask, was the damn point of using them at all until now? First I stopped using tasks, because I could never get them to sync properly between iCal and my Treo. So I just wrote everything as a note. Now as an iPhone user my notes don’t sync with anything (???!!!!WTF??!!), and yet I still write everything as a note. Occasionally I will email that note to myself if I really need it in another format.

So of course I looked to the App Store to see what the third party developers had come up with that might serve as a basic tasks app. I honestly wanted a basic tasks app — a list and a bunch of giant checkboxes. I tried, I really did. But at the time the basic apps were either ugly, overpriced, or reported buggy and lacking basic features. Who knows, since there are no free trials. But the one that sounded the best to me was the most complicated of all — OmniFocus. At $20, it’s one of the more expensive apps in the App Store, but that was back in the day when an average game was $10, so it didn’t seem as expensive to me then as it might now when everything else is 99 cents.

Using OmniFocus brought some kind of order to my life. I use it sometimes for shopping lists, generally more of the long-term stuff, not like “what I need to get from Duane Reade in 3 hours,” which is usually a straight list. I write down things I want to work on with my computer, like reinstalling Parallels, which I forgot to do the last time I was home; and things I need to pack for the next leg of the tour, or what I hope to accomplish during my down time on the next load-in day. I also have a special project for fight call, which is really not what OmniFocus is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. With both Henry V and The Spy, we have a rather extensive fight call, running through distinct sections of fight choreography with different actors. There is a standard order which we have developed for that, and especially because we perform The Spy so infrequently, Nick and I needed a way to keep track of that order and make sure we’ve hit all the proper scenes. So I have a project for Fight Call and a sub-project for each show, and inside each are the actions representing each individual fight and the actors needed. I’m not sure exactly what app Nick uses for his list, but he has it on his Blackberry. This allows both of us to open our phones at the top of fight call and Nick runs the current fight while I can let the actors know who is up next and which scene it is, and make sure they have their weapons ready when it’s their turn. This is sort of a recurring checklist rather than a regular list of tasks, and the blending of the two types of lists is kind of weird to me, but I think OmniFocus can be made useful for things like this, or prop checklists, with a little work.

Anyway, I was very happy with my purchase. Of course it’s designed to sync with the desktop version of the app. That is, if you’re willing to pay $80(!!??!!WTF??!!) for it. It’s kind of all or nothing. There’s not a way to say “Gee I’d like to be able to see and edit my OmniFocus file on a desktop machine” without fully committing to using the software to run your life. I’m not sure exactly what happened to me, I think it was a conversation over drinks with a few of my colleagues about organization and task lists that led me to question if the fact that my technology has failed me, and is driving me closer and closer to having to etch my tasks on tablets, might someday result in me screwing something up. I’ve done OK with this seat-of-the-pants way I’ve been running my life and career with the occasional iCal appointment (with or without an alarm) to remind me to do things, or with a plain-text list in my iPhone’s notepad. But really, how far I have fallen since the days when there was a checklist for home and shopping, and work stuff was laid out in fancy outlines with multi-part projects and due dates and things!

So I decided — by way of writing an action in OmniFocus on my iPhone — that when I got a chance I would download the 14-day trial of OmniFocus desktop. I have been using it for about two days, and so far I am hooked. It’s got an even steeper learning curve than the iPhone version, but the larger screen in some ways makes the relationship between the different views and types of data clearer. I’ve also been watching some of the introductory videos on the website. After that, I discovered a great set of video podcasts called ScreenCastsOnline, which do in-depth screencasts of popular Mac apps. I’ve only watched a couple, but they have tons available that I want to see. They also offer podcast subscriptions in HD or iPhone-compatible sizes. I sense this will be a new favorite podcast of mine. You can get the links to either of these feeds on their website.

In all, I’ve been having fun trying to think of every little thing I need to accomplish and entering it into OmniFocus and categorizing it. I think I’ll be much more efficient using the desktop app since the majority of what I need to accomplish either requires me to be at my computer, or in an environment where my computer is out. This way, the iPhone app, which is a little more cumbersome to use due to the fact that it can’t run in the background, is only really needed when I’m out and about. More thoughts to come as this experiment goes on…

UPDATE: there is now an entire page of the site dedicated to OmniFocus tips!


April 23, 2009

My Week in Computing

I call this: computers,mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 10:17 pm

The biggest event of my week was yesterday when we visited the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. As befitting a giant mall, of course there is an Apple Store. I decided to take my chances on a walk-in visit to the Genius Bar to see if anything could be done about my Macbook Pro battery.

A little background, because I don’t bitch about my battery nearly enough for you to have known it was going on: my computer is not quite two years old, and its second battery has withered and died. The first battery lasted pretty much a year exactly, before the battery life got to a point where it was really negating the purpose of having a laptop (somewhere around a half hour). I probably had a case for premature failure, but I just bought a new one, and was happy.

Cut to ten months later. While the battery life on the second one had not become quite so brief (maybe an hour to an hour and a half), the battery was all confused. Diagnostic programs reported the battery health at 40% after 90-something charge cycles, which based on my perusal of the Apple Support forums, is way worse than a lot of people who were able to get their batteries replaced. Worst of all, instead of simply dying quickly, it was misreporting its charge, so that the computer would show it maybe 30% full, and instead of showing a low battery warning or forcing the computer to sleep, it would completely shut off without warning, which is, um, terrible, in so many ways. It had just started doing this before the logic board failure, so when the computer died I thought maybe the battery was not to blame after all, but the problem continued after the repair.

While my computer is sadly without Apple Care, the battery is less than a year old, and thus has its own warranty. It’s clearly indicated on the receipt, which I made sure to have on my iPhone in PDF format before going to the store.

So I walked into the store and was able to get an appointment right away, and within 5 minutes was talking to the genius. He booted my computer from an old iPod nano which had some diagnostic software on it (as I tried to stifle my excitement at this idea of using my old nano as an 8GB flash drive), and after a few seconds, the screen popped up with this big red box with the word “BAD” in it in huge letters (artist’s rendering above). It was really comical. Well that settled that! I showed him the PDF including the warranty date, signed some papers and walked away with a brand new battery. Between the logic board and the battery I feel like I have a brand new Mac.

Right now I’m using my days off to be a good little girl and train the battery properly. It’s probably going to want to be shut down soon — oops, there goes the warning — so bye!


April 13, 2009

iPhone Case Review: iSkin Solo FX

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 9:46 pm

I’m not a big fan of iPhone cases. I prefer to install the Zagg InvisibleShield, which is like a millimeter thin skin with a somewhat grippy surface, and be done with it. It adds almost no thickness to the phone, and is pretty much invisible.

However, my InvisibleShield has started to peel in a couple places, and that, combined with the fact that we have 5 iPhones on our crew bus, and all but mine are in cases of varying coolness, somehow got me researching iPhone cases again.

The only one I liked was the Solo from iSkin, which is pretty much only available online. There’s the regular Solo, and the Solo FX. I will let their graphic explain:

They are basically the same case, except the solo is a solid primary color, and the FX comes in more funky colors, with a circular pattern.  I went with the orange one.

The other difference you can’t see is in the screen protector it comes with.  The regular solo is a plain clear protector.  The FX comes with a mirrored screen protector.  This inherently sounds like a bad idea to me, and when I received the case this was proven.  The mirrored finish looks cool, and would be pretty handy as a mirror, but it creates a pinkish cast to the screen, and similar to a glossy screen on a computer, picks up reflections which make it harder to read the screen.  Most of all, though, I don’t know why anyone would want a protector that affects the tint of the screen.  I’ve never felt it necessary to use a screen protector on the iPhone due to its glass surface which is very resistant to everyday scratches, so trying the protector on was more of a curiosity.

As someone not a fan of cases in general, I really like this one.  The material is somewhere halfway between a hard plastic case and the more rubbery ones.  It’s kind of a jelly-like plastic, which is very flexible, but doesn’t have the extreme grippy powers that make other cases hard to get in and out of a pocket.  It has enough tack to it that it easily keeps the phone still on a tabletop or in your hand.

All the buttons are covered by the case except the silencer switch, which has a cutout.  There is also a cutout for the camera and headphone port.  I’m not sure how it would do with more chunky headphone connectors than the one the iPhone comes with, but if you really had to I don’t think it would be hard to cut the hole out bigger.  There is also a long cutout at the bottom for the dock connector and mic and speaker openings.  The case does not fit in the standard Apple dock (like pretty much any case I’ve ever heard of, except for the InvisibleShield and similar products), which is a bit of a compromise for me, since I like having the dock at my bedside.  I also found that my old-style iPod cable (with a larger connector and the two tabs you have to push in to disconnect the cable) is a teeny bit wider and took a little forcing to get through the gap in the case, so I recommend using a newer cable like the one that comes with the phone.

One other minor complaint is that the power button is a little tough to press through the case.  Personally I find that button harder to press than it should be under any circumstances, so I don’t think it’s really the fault of the case.  It just requires a firmer press than usual, and gives little feedback that you’ve actually depressed the button, until you see the screen react.

Overall I think the case looks cool.  It’s semi-transparent, so you can still see the Apple logo on the back, if that matters to you.  I’m sure it looks even better on a white iPhone where the color will really come out, but it adds some color and personalization to the black phone as well.  It also does a cool thing when it’s under a strong light, it almost seems to glow, and the color becomes brighter.

Here are some pics of mine. I purposely left the flash off because it was making the color seem a little brighter than it is under normal light.

UPDATE: Because the iPhone 3GS has the same dimensions as the 3G, it works just as well.

Update – Jan 2010

Last time I was in the Apple Store (Mall of America), they had some of these in stock. Nice to see they’re being carried in stores now.


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