An “aha” moment
Ever since I upgraded to an iPhone 3G, my iPod touch has been sitting around getting dusty. But tonight I realized one way I can effectively repurpose it — make it into my kitchen computer/cookbook. In the past, when I’ve wanted to make a note of a recipe, likely found on allrecipes.com, I merely Google Bookmarked it so I could pull it up in any browser later. But since for whatever reason Google Bookmark still doesn’t have an iPhone-friendly site (or even a regular mobile site, AFAIK), pulling up recipes isn’t that easy, requiring multiple clicks and zooming in on the recipe text just so to make it readable.
Just today I realized that it would be better just to clip the recipe text and maybe a picture and send it to Evernote. Then I can open the note in the Evernote app on the iPod touch and it’ll be nicely formatted for the small screen. Sweet! 
Hi, Again…And a Test
Hey, Kids.
Sorry I’ve been so scarce for a while. I’ve been experiencing a summer slump of sorts, not really feeling in the mood to read much online, like my feeds in Google Reader, or keeping up with my buddies on Jaiku or FriendFeed. And before the summer slump, I was always on Jaiku and FriendFeed, essentially microblogging in a true sense. Frankly, I get way more interaction on Jaiku and FF about the RSS items, articles, and photos I post there than I do here. The almost instant feedback on Jaiku was fun and satisfying.
However, it seems now I am not in the mood to spend a whole lot of time on my social network sites, either. Part of that could be attributed to my wonderful Kindle that The Hubby got me for my birthday. I have enjoyed getting back into a reading mood with it! My relatively voracious reading of late reminds me of how much of a bookworm I used to be when I was younger, before Teh Internetz killed my attention span. **smirk** I also have been writing in my journal a lot more, partially because it’s a nice, inconspicuous way to kill time at work. 
And so I’ve been writing in my journal, even outlining things I’d like to blog about, but then never get around to actually writing the blog posts. Hence, not a lot of writing on the blog. I’ve been trying to supplement the lack of writing with pictures cross-posted from my Flickr stream, but that’s not really enough, is it, Dear Readers? So, I’m going to consciously make an effort to keep up with my RSS feeds again and post more, even if it’s just shorter, blurb-y posts that are more appropriate for Jaiku. All I ask in return is for a bit more commenting here so I can enjoy more interaction here as well. Deal? Okay.
Before I wrap this up, let me address the “…and a test” part of my blog title above. I am composing this post in the WordPress app for iPhone/iPod touch. I just downloaded it from the AppStore for free, and this is the first test.
Quick first impressions:
- UI is pretty good. When you set up your blog account, you can choose how many recent posts the app should display. I didn’t try it, but I assume this means you can edit currently published articles.
- It has an embedded browser so that you can preview your work. This worked pretty well when I previewed an older article.
- It has full access to your categories. It was pretty easy to scroll through the list (I have a lot of categories) with my finger, with the kinetic scrolling typical of OS X’s touch interface.
- It’s annoying that you cannot rotate the screen to landscape mode. Therefore, you can’t use the more comfortable landscape version of the on-screen keyboard. I don’t have as big of a problem with the iPod’s virtual keyboard as others do, but I still would’ve appreciated the “breathing room” accorded by the landscape keyboard.
I’ll see how well it works when you want to include pictures, or if there are any issues if you’re composing a post and you don’t have wireless access (you shouldn’t). But for now I’m going to wrap this up and upload the post. Later, Kids!
Geeze, How Long Has It Been?
Hi, Kids!
How were your holidays? What fun gadgets or other nifty gifties did you all get?
Sorry about the huge gap in blogging. I was slowly withdrawing from reading feeds & doing much of anything else online other than reading & posting on Jaiku, Twitter, & Pownce (mostly Jaiku). And over the holidays I got rather sick, which really sidelined me for a while. Anyway, enough excuses. I can’t promise that I’ll be more prolific in the coming days, weeks, or months, but I’ll try my best!
In other news, I’m excited for tomorrow’s MacWorld keynote. Rumors about a tablet-style Mac have been running rampant again this year, but I think the ModBook will be the only tablet Mac for a while. There will probably be an ultra-portable MacBook. I hope it’s not called “MacBook Air” as the rumors claim. What I’d really like is direct WiFi downloading of podcasts to the iPhone/iPod touch. Yes, I can already do this via a 3rd-party hack, but native support would be nicer. That’s really all I care to predict at the moment. I’d love it if Apple would release an iPhone-like tablet with a 5″ or 7″ screen and decent amount of flash storage, but it won’t happen this year. Maybe next year. Whatever is announced, I know that tomorrow is going to be unproductive while the keynote is happening.
The other even that I’m looking forward to this weekend is the Detroit auto show! The hubby & I have gone every year for at least the past 4 years (IIRC). It’s a nice weekend road trip to take after the holidays. I’ll talk more about what gear I’m bringing later. Right now I really need to get to bed!
P.S. I really hate touchscreen inking… *sigh*
* 10 points to the first commenter to tell me where “nifty gifties” comes from.
iPhone and iGoogle?
Hey, iPhone users, does the iGoogle page render properly on the iPhone? I’m asking because I just saw this interesting article about iGoogle gadgets and “web worker productivity”. Since I usually do a lot of stuff on the web, specifically using Google’s offerings, having these cool little widgets on iGoogle on the iPod touch would help make the iPod touch more like a PDA. I’ve become rather dependent on Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, and Maps, so usually I’m not as interested in desktop apps for mail, RSS aggregation, calendars, or mapping. If they’d work on mobile Safari, that would be all I’d need (along with easy network access, of course).
Please leave a comment if you’ve tried the iGoogle homepage on your iPhone. I’d appreciate it!
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I’m happy to be wrong
Yesterday I said that Apple was going to come out with an iPod with touchscreen similar to the iPhone, but that if it had WiFi, they wouldn’t allow you to surf over it. Well, I’m completely wrong. Today they announced the iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone part that many people were clamoring for. I actually can’t believe that Apple did it. They’re not known to make devices that people ask for, rather they make a device and make you want it. I thought they would limit WiFi usage somehow so that the iPhone is still their “high-end” offering. Perhaps they know that they’d get a lot more sales of an iPhone-like device without the phone, and are using the touch to make up for a slow down in iPhone sales? Or they’re just making sure all bases are covered by offering the iPod touch to users (like me) who really didn’t want to move over to AT&T? Whatever the reason, I’m very glad they made the iPod touch. In fact, I pre-ordered the iPod touch today. This is the first time I ordered a device online on the day of the announcement.
If you’re not as interested in the iPod touch, the rest of the iPod line got a nice refresh/update. The “regular” iPods are now called iPod classics. They got a bump in capacity up to 160GB, which is awesome. They also have a new metal casing, which I think looks pretty sleek.
The rumor of the “fat” iPod nanos turned out to be true! Luckily the devices do not look ugly. They have a bigger screen, video and game capabilities, and they have an upgraded UI like the iPod classic does. It seems both iPod classic and nano are running the normal iPod OS, but with different menus/display modes, while the iPod touch is running OS X. Don’t quote me on that, though. The nanos are also amazingly thin. I am a little wary about how fragile they could be in a pocket.
The shuffles are essentially the same, but there are 5 new colors. And one of them is purple! Purple is my favorite color, for those of you who don’t know. There aren’t many purple gadgets out there, so I may pick up a purple shuffle just because. Oh yeah, there’s also a Product(RED) edition of the shuffle and the nano.
The jury is still out on whether or not you can access podcasts via the WiFi iTunes store and download them directly to your iPod… I’m guessing that for the moment, that’s not an option. I hope that it will be in the near future, though. That would make the iPod touch pretty near complete for me (if it had external speakers, more PDA-like apps, and a BT connection for an external keyboard, it would be complete ). Wireless, direct podcast downloads is what I like best about my Nokia N95, but its music player lacks bookmarking, and its interface is sparse/basic.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the iPod touch and iPhone will get 3rd-party apps. If they do, they could be very close to becoming the Newton’s successors. As it stands, it looks like the iPod touch will have basic calendar and contact syncing. Combined with Gmail and Google Docs, the iPod touch could be a decent PDA-like device, or multimedia computer to compete with devices like the N95.
So now we have Leopard to look forward to sometime in October (hopefully), and perhaps around that same time, some MacBook or MacBook Pro refreshes will also be available. Still holding out for my ultra-portable MacBook with the 10″ screen… Very fun stuff for Apple enthusiasts.
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