Design

Facebook's iPhone app: a bug that gives out magical iPhones (not really) to friends you never knew you had

This morning Facebook told me that 27 of my friends had downloaded the iPhone Facebook application. 27 out of 300+ is a good chunk of people and speaks to the fact that more and more people are getting iPhones. Of course, this is only if they can be patient to wait at least 2+ hours in line and if a given Apple/AT&T store actually has them in stock. It's hard to imagine that this has been going on for at least two weeks.

Anyway, I clicked the link to see who actually downloaded the Facebook iPhone … Read more

Arianna Huffington on the future of journalism

The (fabulous) "Communities Dominate Brands" blog points at a Guardian video interview with Arianna Huffington on the future of news journalism. Not too surprisingly, Huffington's view on traditional news reporting is not too rosy - in fact, she predicts a slow but inevitable demise.

I like her line on mainstream media vs. blogs: "Mainstream media have an attention deficit disorder, blogs have an obsessive compulsive disorder."

iPhone apps: Testing Shazam's limits - classical music

Instead of trying to scrawl down lyrics, doing a search on Google (only to be lead to some bizarre lyric website repository that may or may not work, all the while offering me free ringtones and ceaseless pop-up ads), with Shazam's app, I've actually found songs by, well, listening to them. Shazam is slick. You hear a song, start the app, hold your iPhone's mic up to the sound source and viola! It's been 'tagged' and identified like a wild bird you caught on Animal Planet. Another app by Midomi even lets you hum a tune … Read more

iPhone features: Lost in translation--Chinese style

One solution to the what-to-do-with-the-iPhone-1.0 dilemma that occurred to me over lunch with my grandpa on Tuesday (in San Francisco's Chinatown no less) was to give him my old iPhone 1.0.

My grandfather is an immigrant and a jolly, happy type who stays vibrant by talking with his friends from church or with family members. But because English is not his first language and because he's not as tech-savvy as his grandchildren, he has often found dealing with a typical cell phone difficult. The technology gap, generation gap, and language gap all posed by a typical … Read more

iPhone applications: A time sink and a battery sink

How 1.0 iPhones use battery life with the 2.0 firmware and all those tantalizing applications is something that may be worth considering against the iPhone 3G's voracious appetite for power. During the past weekend, as new applications get tested out, I've seen the iPhone 3G use more and more power with the charge indicator gradually slipping away, ultimately flashing the "low battery" warning. This warning wasn't something common with the 1.0 iPhone I had. In fact, I had never seen that "low battery" indicator even after 7 days of camping-like … Read more

The first 48 hours: Is that an iPhone 3G in your pocket? Or are you just excited?

Was it worth the wait? The 5-hour phone service/text/data outage? Do you really have to get the new iPhone on the first day? The first weekend? From a rational point of view, the answer is probably not. But, from an admitted early-adopter Apple-phile, a resounding hot tamale train YES is the answer. But, this is not without caveats of course (battery life, hassle, and jittery/buggy application crashes). Overall, the new iPhone 3G is slick. The applications (which work 90 percent of the time) are even slicker (many worth special attention to come in the next few posts). … Read more

Paused in Portland: the iPhone 3G takes longer to get and to activate...

It didn't take a check of other CNET stories to confirm that Apple/AT&T's registration servers have either went back to bed or checked out early on a Friday. After the cheers at 8:00 a.m. the line moved less than 20 feet within the first hour. There were at least two announcements from Apple reps (one in a utila-kilt even) that things are "a little bit slow," because of the "overwhelming demand." An insistent, we could always come back later was touted too.

At one point, I was getting discouraged. … Read more

Featured Freeware: JAlbum

JAlbum for Windows and Mac users is a long-time favorite free Web album generator. There's no wizard to direct you through the process, but a quick look through the menus will be enough to get you started creating image collections online.

To begin, specify the original image folder, set the album-destination folder, select the images, and generate the album--it's really not more complicated than that. Using the integrated FTP client, you can upload your album to your Web site or you can use the integrated Web server to serve your album from your computer. The JAlbum site also … Read more

Design mind event with Barack Obama's director of video field production

In a recent blog post on the upcoming Fortune Tech summit, Fortune's senior editor David Kirckpatrick hinted at the possibility of having "a super-amazing special guest from outside the industry who we aren't yet able to announce. (Joining us at the original Brainstorms were Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres, Jordan's King Abdullah, and John McCain.) This visitor could make things really rock."

Hmm...who might that be? The magazine, in its current print issue, just examined both candidates' economic policies in a 1-to-1 comparison, and, in a not so subtle endorsement, chose to display Obama on … Read more