Today was a draining day for me. The other days before this were draining as far as personal drama goes. None of that happened today, thank God! Today was only draining as far as work goes. I’m under a lot of pressure right now, this time of year. I’m taking it well (sometimes venting to Twitter, hehe!) and at home, I always take some time to de-stress and think and be alone with my mind for a bit before doing anything productive or online. Photography always helps me with stress lately. So, here I am, with another attempt at a portrait pic.

The pic was shot with a Fuji Finepix S2000HD, edited using iPhoto on Mac and PhotoFX iPhone app.

My 365 Project is going well so far. One picture (anything relating to the day or whatever), one short video, and one blog entry. Sometimes, two of any of these keep me in the habit. You can see my progress here: http://chrisw357.tumblr.com/

Speaking of photography, check out the collection of pics I did in the last two days: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisw357/collections/72157623140974758/

If you want to, tell me what you think. Give some criticism, or whatever.

I decided to take a cue from one of my Dailybooth friends, crlyqmagee, and do a post on my favorite (at least for now) iPhone apps! Here, I narrowed it down to ten favorite apps, along with five favorite games. Here’s the list, not in order of favorites…



Apps

Here I am, typing on the iPhone into Wordpress’ blogging app, and wishing more developers were quicker on the uptake when it came to the iPhone’s impending improvements. For instance, I just tried getting the landscape keyboard to appear. It did, with a pretty heavy lag time. Also, saving my entry and then going back into it made half of the entry text seem to disappear. It’s remedied by playing with the app, but it’s certainly annoying. However, copy and paste works wonderfully across most main and third-party apps (exception of Tweetie, so far). Of note, I just did some copying and pasting for the HTML code for the picture featured in the third paragraph. Now I have the main code in my Notes app so I don’t have to remember it.

The iPhone is now able to send multiple photos at once! This is something that came too late for me at a critical time. Recently before the 3.0 upgrade, I had to email pics from my phone to a manager at my work, and it was embarassing to send them one… at… a… time! Now you can clutter your family’s inboxes with pictures much more efficiently. How cool is that?

The search feature, both on the phone itself and on its main apps, is a great addition. I typed in a few test words on the main search and I found stuff I didn’t know existed on my phone or on the mail servers! If you’re like me and have pages and pages of apps, the main search can also double as a app launcher, once you configure the search settings. Search in the iPod app is also awesome. I loved just typing in the first two letters of a song and playing it instantly. (pictured to the left is a search I did for the Wordpress app. Saved me quite a few swipes!)

Other improvements were either a hit or miss at times. YouTube’s app got an overhaul, and it was much needed. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve wanted to log in with my username without having to navigate YouTube through MobileSafari. All of my favorites are saved in the app now, and I have easier access to my vids in case the need arises. However, the shake-to-shuffle feature is one that I quickly learned to turn off. The one day I used it, I forgot about it and started dancing to a tune, only to have my good time cut short by another track cutting in unexpectedly because of me shaking my admittedly skinny booty!

There’s one smaller feature that I like that wasn’t really talked about in the main 3.0 documentation. When playing music, you can hold the time scrub bar, and drag your finger down for finer scrubbing control in the song. This helps in not having to fight so hard to get to a particular timeframe within a long track.

There’s other improvements that I haven’t fully played with yet, but I know I’ll love when the time comes. Being able to rent a movie on the fly, without having to connect the phone to the home computer first, will be very interesting and cool. I don’t use the calendar app as often as I should, and there’s new stuff in there I haven’t gotten to use yet. However, I did get to use the Push Notification service, courtesy of AOL’s speedy update to their instant messenger. It worked like a charm, even when the phone’s display was off. I can’t wait to see how the other app developers will use the new features.

Now, we just have to sadly wait until AT&T gets off of their butts to enable MMS messaging! Cheers!

On Friday, July 28th, I walked into an AT&T store to pick up my iPhone!

It really is… just a phone. That is, of course, its main function. Of that, I won’t kid myself. However, I’ve been exposed to the vaunted Blackberry phones and, knowing full well their capabilities, I have to say that my new phone really is a Blackberry on major steroids! In fact, I’m writing this entry on the phone itself using the Wordpress iPhone app. It’s true what others have said about typing on it; you have to get used to the on-screen touch keyboard and the auto correction feature. Once you get past that, typing on it is awesome!

In fact, it’s the apps for the phone that make the iPhone so special and a pleasure to use. It comes with the standard smartphone apps such as mail, contacts, calendar, notepad, camera with photo app, calculator, world clock and maps (yes, it has GPS, too!). From there, though, you can also add apps from Apple’s App Store, most of which are free! I now have enough productivity apps (and productivity-killing!) apps to let me do whatever I want when I’m not near a computer.

The sheer usability of this phone is amazing. Trying to do the same things with my old phone was either a headache (or impossible) compared to the iPhone. Typing out this much so far has taken 30 minutes, and that was with a few interruptions! The Mobile Safari browser looks and acts like a real desktop browser. I’ve tried the “push” email feature and it does work (my Cox email), but I put it back to hourly checks to conserve power.

All in all, that is the only disappointment about the iPhone, which is battery life. You simply have to be conservative about how you use the features. However, I estimated that, from full charge to 10% juice, I did about four hours of mixed 3G and Wi-fi internet browsing, and I still had power to play music! (Yes, the iPhone hasn’t forgotten its iPod roots!)

So, yes, I’m very happy with the iPhone. I will endeavor to post screen shots of some of the features, with explanations. My new phone, part two?

I’ll have to post this entry now to final draft and finesse it before publishing. Cheers!

I know I haven’t posted any updates in a while, and for those of you who visit regularly, I’m terribly sorry about that. I would write about some of the cool things that I’ve gotten recently, or some of the awesome things that have happened to Christine and I, like I wanted to for the past half-month. However, now would actually be a good time to discuss the newest development that just took precedent in my life.

A couple of years ago, my computer suffered a power supply meltdown. The subsequent repairs were covered by Apple through their iMac Logic Board/Power Supply recall and I didn’t have to pay anything, of course. Now, it appears that something similar has happened yesterday morning as I was cruising and perusing my favorite sites. Only this time, there was no warning whatsoever. One second, everything was fine… next split-second… poof! No power. Nothing. Repeated attempts at either the power switch or the internal switch were met with little whines of protest from the power supply, and nothing else.

I went through the online Apple troubleshooting documents (with Christine’s computer, of course), and determined with about 90% certainty that the power supply is at fault. Here’s the kicker: it’s not covered under the recall anymore! Of course, I don’t blame Apple for not covering the recall anymore, since all the problems should have been resolved, and nothing really lasts forever. I don’t have AppleCare coverage but, even if I did, that coverage would have expired. So, that leaves me little choice but to cough up the near $200 for a new power supply.

One other caveat I have to offer myself is this: if my diagnosis is wrong, and a new power supply is inadequate to fix the problem, then the only other thing it could be is the logic board. Unfortunately, that costs over $500 to start with, not including shipping if I wanted to do it myself, or labor if I want someone else to do it. That’s over half of the cost of the computer’s worth by itself! At that point, I’ll have no choice but to save for a new computer.

Well, if that is the only thing going wrong in my life, then I really can’t complain. I can always use Christine’s computer if I’m in a pinch, or I can use my new phone to do some of my usual browsing and instant messaging and, yes, even blogging aaaaaand even my financial needs as well. OH!! The new phone … I’ll talk about that one in my next entry!

Cheers, and please wish me luck with the repairs!