Steve Jobs

I'm waiting to install iOS5 on my phone and iPad, and find myself thinking about Steve Jobs.  The photo here shows only the Apple products that I use every single day.  Not pictured are many others that are still in use in my household - the oldest one is a white laptop my son bought 9 years ago.  The battery will no longer charge but plug that sucker in and it still connects to the wireless network.  Also downstairs is the old lampshade type iMac

waiting for iPad3

I came really close.  Went to the Apple store the day after the iPad 2 arrived.  Had one been available for me to buy right there and then, I would most likely have done so.

But when I got home I started thinking more about it.  The camera on the 2 is only so-so, I think my phone camera is better.  And yes, the 2 is lighter but I don't really travel so much that this is an issue.  So while I really like the 2, I'm going to hold on to my original iPad for now and wait for 3!

Besides, there are rumors that it will appear later this year in order to sync up with a fall release schedule.  So for now, I'm waiting.

I spent a week without my laptop, just the iPad and my phone.  I'm frustrated that there is no photo app out there that works the way I'd like for travel.  I want to be able to dump all my photos, move them into albums (or at the very least rate them), edit and then upload the ones I like to Smugmug.  All that is easy in iPhoto on my mac, but not so much on the iPad.

I wish I had time to create an app, I know I'm not the only one who wants this. I'm sure if I developed the app I want, it would make money.  But I just don't have the time.  :-(

Confession

I have a confession to make. This may come as a real shock to some of you but here goes: I really have no NEED for an iPad. It is purely for fun.


One of the big reasons I don't need it is that I spend most of my life on my computer anyway; and since I now work at home there isn't even that commute time in which I could be using it.

Here I am now though; have been working intently on my MacBook all day long. Finally ready to go to bed and am using the iPad to do a little reading in bed before I turn in. Much more comfortable than the laptop.

So yes, it was completely a frivolous purchase for me. And I don't use most of the apps I've downloaded. But that's ok, most of them were free in the first place.

Apps I still love: Evernote is at the top of my list, and it was a free one! I have it on both my macs, on my iPhone, and on my iPad. No matter where I take notes, they are wirelessly synced to all other machines. I just recommended it to a friend this past weekend and he reported back that he couldn't believe he had gone without it for so long.

So I admit it. I didn't really need this iPad. But would I buy it again? Will I buy the next one when it appears? Oh, you better believe it.

iOS4!

I updated my iPhone today to iOS4. My son was making fun of me for doing it as soon as it was released, but actually I think it was 45 minutes after it came out as I was in the middle of working on something when it first hit.

First impressions: folders are AWESOME. My four pages of apps are now reduced to two. I can't wait till I can do this on my iPad as well! It is so easy to create, edit, modify the folder, also very easy to use an app inside a folder. Very well done.  And now I can actually find the app I'm looking for.

Not sure yet about multitasking because I'm not sure how many of my apps are actually making good use of it now; but I certainly see the potential there.

Photo albums now have a map showing you where photos were taken, and since geotagging has been around since I got my 3GS, many of the photos in my album are displayed on the map.

I'm also a fan of the combined email inbox, much nicer than having to constantly go back and forth between work and home accounts.  I wish there was a color coding of the different accounts though.

The upgrade process was very smooth and relatively quick, especially as I was working at the time and just letting it do its thing.  My only problem was that it lost the password on one of my two email accounts, a trivial thing to fix.

:-)

IE javascript bug finally found!

WARNING: this post won't make much sense to you if you don't know javascript and html. Feel free to skip it and meet back with me for my next post which I promise will be much less geeky. In fact, I would assume it will be about iOS4 which I am poised to download quite soon...

This has been driving me crazy for a few days. I've been struggling with a javascript error that was keeping a very simple piece of code from working in IE. It worked in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, but would give an error in IE.

The code was super simple. In the webpage I have a paragraph with id='inserttext':

<p id="inserttext">

Then in the script, I added the text, along with markup for the text to be a heading. But this line would give an error:

document.getElementById('inserttext').innerHTML = "<h2>
Here is the text</h2>"

I went down so many wrong paths trying to fix this. I read all about how IE confuses name and id, but the name "inserttext" was used only in this one spot in my page, so that wasn't it. Saw a post about this same problem but in his case the id was 'description'. Again, a case of mixing up a name somewhere else with the paragraph id.

I thought that it was a timing problem, that the paragraph didn't exist at the time the script ran. So I added a statement to only execute the code if the paragraph existed:

if (document.getElementbyID('inserttext')){
document.getElementById('inserttext').innerHTML = "<h2>
Here is the text</h2>"
}

Here was my first clue: the inner statment still gave an error. That means the paragraph was successfully found, but there was something wrong with the inner statement.

I commented out the whole section. The next section did the same thing with a different paragraph, this time assigning the innerHTML to a variable in the script. This one worked fine.

Uncommenting the section, I finally decided to remove the markup. AND IT WORKED. It was the <h2> tag that IE was choking on. Such a simple solution, I simply added CSS to style the paragraph instead of using <h2>.

Problem solved.

the new great phone that I can't purchase :-(

I can't be the only one to notice that a customer can't actually buy each of the new iPhone releases when it is released. The wireless company (i.e., AT&T) makes you sign two year contracts and Apple releases a new phone every year. Certainly seems like there should be some way that a customer can be allowed to purchase the latest and greatest when it is released if they, like myself, happen to want to stay on the cutting edge of phone technology.

I suppose the answer is to pay the unlimited price, but I don't think I can justify that. I'll be eligible to buy the iPhone 4 in Feb of 2011, I suppose in the meantime I"m going to have to be content to play with iOS4 on my 3G phone. :-(

Glad the same doesn't apply for the iPad. In fact, I'm already planning to buy the next iPad and give my son my current one.

I think I might be addicted. I suppose there is a reason that there's a magazine called Mac Addict - I take comfort in the knowledge that I'm not alone!

True Apple geek here

Today was the opening of WWDC, and the keynote address by Steve Jobs.

I was on my way back to Chicago from Indiana, my son was driving and I was following along as if I were at the WWDC event. There was no live streaming video, but no matter. I was initially following on Twitter on my iPad. Then I saw a tweet for live blogging from macrumors.com, went there and saw blog updates as the address progressed. And I switched to my iPhone to follow the tweets.

Tweets were streaming through in so many languages... Japanese, Arabic, German, Spanish, Italian, French to name a few. It was so fascinating to see what people are thinking as Jobs was presenting the new features of iPhone 4 and the new iOS4 that accompanies it. (No, I don't speak any of those languages, I stuck to reading the English ones!)

It feels a little like that movie "What Women Want" when the main character can read women's minds as he walks by. Except in my case, it's men and women and they are half a country away and I can't see them, but I still can read about what they are seeing and at the same time hear what they are thinking.

So what is the consensus of the tweets? Same as what I knew before it even started - I WANT one.