Today I played with the iPhone for about an hour in the store. In person it’s better than anything you’ve read. I don’t understand how Apple got the phone to be so “snappy” (aka. responsive). You can switch tasks, watch videos, scroll around on a website, all without any lag. It’s amazing for a phone. I’ve used Sony, Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, and LG phones. None which come close to matching the iPhone’s responsiveness and overall aesthetics. My current E62 takes 5+ seconds whenever I click on a application, and the multimedia features are about useless.

It’s really like going from Windows 3.1 from 1994 to Apple’s OSX in 2007. They both have “windows”, let you use multiple applications at the same time, both have calculators, and both let you type Word documents - but once you get past the list of features and actually use it - it’s obviously a world of difference.

The one thing that was holding me back from getting an iPhone was the lack of corporate email support, but after playing with it today, that seems minor…

Today’s the day… The app l spend the most time in (besides good old Firefox) has turned universal. PhotoShop CS3 is here.

I’ve posted some screenshots on my flickr account. So far so good, it’s faster - has some nice UI changes, and it’s faster. Did I mention it’s faster? My MacBook Pro is loving it!

My .mac is up for renewal and I’m not going to renew this year. I just received this email:

Thank you for being a member of .Mac! Your .Mac membership is set to renew on October 07, 2006 PDT; however, the credit card information you provided when you joined .Mac may now be invalid or out-of-date. Please check your credit card information in your Account Settings to update it (if you want to renew) or to remove it and uncheck auto-renew (if you do not). We appreciate your attention to this matter.

Now the problem with this is you can’t remove you’re credit card info (like the email says) - and if you can’t remove your credit card info, because then the form won’t validate - you can’t un-check auto-renew either.

So here’s me trying to un-check the auto-renew option…

My Google services in Gmail just got a little longer. What’s next? Word Processor? Files Storage? Media Center? Google, what would I do without you?

Apple just released the new MacBooks, and in a new color too - black!

What do you get when you put up to 2GHz of pure Intel Core Duo power, an iSight camera, Front Row, iLife ’06, and a 13-inch glossy widescreen display into a sleek case? More than you thought possible for less than you thought possible. Meet MacBook, starting at $1099.

Looks like a sweet little laptop. I may be selling my 17inch here shortly!

Finally, something besides outlook accepts outlook requests, not only that - gCal (aka Google Calendar) one-ups outlook with some great new features. A no-brainer was adding the maps link to the location, but I really like the quick view of “your agenda” where you can see what you have going on before and after the meeting request time.

So far I’m in love with gCal, not sure how the other calendar apps out there in “web 2.0 land” are going to survive.

A co-worker of mine just got a new MacBookPro, and I wanted to point him to some resources on where to get Macintel software. For those of you not familiar with Apple’s line up of computers, the new Macs run on new Intel chips that need updated software to take full advantage of the new architecture. You can still run your old non-updated software, but you will take a big hit on speed.

Here are some resources to help keep up with the growing collection of Macintel software:

• http://www.versiontracker.com/macintel/
• http://www.maconlysource.com/
• http://osx.hyperjeff.net/
• http://www.osx86project.org/
• http://www.maconintel.com/

Some handy apps that have already made the jump include:

• Transmit
• Adium X
• OSXvnc
• SubEthaEdit
• OmniGraffle
• OmniOutliner
• NewsFire
• CSSEdit
• Adobe Lightroom Beta
• Chicken of the VNC
• Tag
• tickr
• xTime Project
• HandBrake

Some new apps I’ve never used before, but work great (and they are freeware!):

• Transmission (BitTorrent Client)
• SimplyBurns (Toast Replacement)

Last, good old Firefox:

FireFox 2.0 Intel version

Apps that are missing, and may be missing for a long time:

Every Adobe app
Every Macromedia app
Every Microsoft App
Google Earth
Flickr Uploader
Skype (should be coming soon…)
Toast
Suitcase Fusion

Any Macintel gems I’m missing?

Well, I’ve now attended my third Apple Store opening in the North Texas area. I haven’t been to NorthPark in a long time - they’ve added quite a bit. This Apple Store was the biggest of the three i’ve seen and had three different “bars”: genius, studio and iPod. Other then that, pretty standard fare for an Apple Store.

If you were not able to attend - check out my photos on Flickr - and yes I got a free t-shirt

I recently decided to move as much of my life online as possible. One thing I had a hard time with was my Bookmarks. I’m a bookmark junkie. I currently have over 6,500 bookmarks from the past 4 years. They are loaded on my laptop in a program called URL Manager Pro. Not a bad little program, but not online (I have a upcoming post about why I’m moving online).

There are a lot of different bookmarking online apps.

• del.icio.us:
  No private bookmarking
• furl.net
  I started here, I imported my bookmarks (all 6,500 of them) and they imported correctly, but they did not keep any of the tags/folders and stripped the page titles. Also the search was not that great
• spurl.net
  Next tried spurl, which looked great! I imported my bookmarks, was able to mark them private or public - they said they would send me an email when the import was complete, that was more then a week ago…

After browsing eHub for more solutions I came across simpy.com. Again, tried importing - and yes, it took all 6,500 - simpy even made tags from my folders. Simpy has privite/public features, del.icio.us integration, tag management and a bunch more. The site is ugly as sin, but it gets the job done. It even has a notes feature where you can highlight text on a page, store and tag it for future viewing. It also has a great search feature that also searches the homepage content for all the bookmarks.

So here I am, finally an online home for my bookmark addiction.

I just received this e-mail from SearchFox:

SearchFox Users,

Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak

SearchFox

415.642.2170

I started using SearchFox when it was first released, but slowly stopped using it - I still can’t find anything online I like as well as NewsFire on my Mac. SearchFox was one of the better looking as well as functioning RSS readers online. Soon someone will need to start www.deadweb2-0.com to keep track of the applications that won’t make it. To take a look of the HUGE amount of “web 2.0″ applications that have been released in the last year check out eHub’s collection of 437 different online applications.