So the iPhone 3G is out. In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, I ended up waiting in line for 10 hours to be one of the first in Montreal to get the new gadget. Since I didn’t know just how long the lines would be, I figured getting there at around 11PM would be OK. When I got there, I was 2nd in line at the flagship Rogers store in downtown Montreal.

The night was weird to say the least. Being second in line meant giving at least 30-40 interviews over the night (and morning) to just about every major news organisations in Montreal. Since I was one of the first out of the store with the iPhone, it meant even more interviews after getting the phone. Got to meet the Rogers VP who told me “please don’t be negative during your interviews”. He said that laughing, but you could tell he meant it. That was such a big day for Rogers, any negative publicity would have contributed to ruin the day.

I wasn’t interested in torpedoeing Rogers anyway. I used to pay $60 a month for 50MB a year ago on my Blackberry, so the $30/6GB ends up being quite a deal for me. The Visual Voice Mail is, quite honestly, a game changer for me. This feature alone was worth the price of the phone. I had always hated the damn Voice Mail system, but this makes it so easy to check messages that I’m almost looking forward to getting more messages.

I spent the last year with a first gen iPhone, so the update is minimal, but I have to say the App Store is really quite nice. I’ve already downloaded over 12 free apps for the phone, some of which are really nice like Shazam which detects a song that’s playing in the background and can tell you the song’s name and author. Twitterrific is also quite nice. I’m using the Mac desktop version of this app and it works quite well, so having it on the phone makes it perfect. The Facebook app (also free) is pretty nice although I’m not a big fan of the site, on the desktop or on the go.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the phone. If you’ve never had an iPhone, its UI alone makes it a  phone that no other phone can touch. You really need to try one to understand the difference. I loved my Blackberry Curve, I really did, but the iPhone is such a superior phone in every possible way that even though the Curve is a really good phone, in my opinion it can’t quite compete, even though it does have a few advantages as far as emails and instant messenging go.

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Well, seems the launch of web applications never go without a glitch. Apple’s new MobileMe service was no exception to Murphy’s Law—if anything can go wrong, it will. It forces me to revise my description of the service. There is now an official call back on the meaning of the word “push”. From Apple:

“Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.”

You know how summer usually provides excellent settings for taking time off the regular routine, especially when this routine is embedded with technology. If you don’t know about iTunes U then you must look it up. It’s a choice among several in the Store of the iTunes application.

If you’re lucky enough to own an iPhone with the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade, you will have noticed the Apps store which was recently added. That’s a sidetrack, but Apple has allowed developers to sell or offer software and obtain a percentage along the way. Apparently, downloads have already exceeded the 10 million mark in one week-end. But that’s off topic and warrants a review in by itself.
iTunes U is rich with courses offered for free. Time to get the old brain cells fired up again. I’m especially impressed by MIT’s Open Courseware offerings. Have a look at something light and pick SP.287 Kitchen Chemistry, Spring 2006. Looking for something more involved? Look at Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There is a lot more on iTunes U, have a look at it and synchronize your iPod and/or iPhone. Enjoy your time off!

Get Smart is a great TV series from the 60’s by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, turned into a 2008 movie. MobileMe is the new Apple service soon to replace .Mac (maybe as soon as today). Apple tackled many problems at once and came up with a potent combination of key personal and business web services. They got smart, as in smartphone. The idea is that a “cloud” i.e. a server on the Internet, keeps track of all incoming emails, contacts, events and “pushes” the information simultaneously on all registered devices (iPhone, iPod touch, MacBook, any Mac).

Of course, this has been the idea and the success of the Blackberry for years. It was also the Achille’s heel of the first generation iPhone. Thanks to the upcoming iPhone 3G— coupled with MobileMe— corporate communications will never be the same. Guess what, the service is Microsoft compatible…

This is a definite tendance inspiring web 2.0 start-ups picking up on the trend of creating virtual desktops. Look at Jooce and Wixi. Dunno what their chances of success are as the OS is eroding the notion of the desktop in the traditional sense. If the big boys clue in, soon there won’t be a “personal” computer anymore but rather a distributed presence in the cloud. Google, Microsoft and Apple stand to dominate the necessity of dispersing data and its ineluctable synchronization.

I could never keep up with the synchronization of all my computers, mixed with my permanent mobility, my many mail accounts and FTP servers. Apple has succeeded in finding a solution to another modern age plague— the multiplicity of devices and user mobility. Allow me to coin a new term: mobilicity. Just kidding we haven’t talked about the abundance of data yet…

The recently released Firefox 3.0 is really worth the free download. It is packed with new features and has been streamlined. It is faster and nicer looking. It rightfully claimed the “default browser” title from Safari 3.1.1 on my computer.

Now, you don’t have to be as accurate as humanly impossible upon entering an address in the url input box. Enter a term and Firefox will suggest sites related to this word or expression. Nice. The interface is also more polished à la Safari, slick grey.

You might want to boost your Firefox experience by installing the following add-ons: Zotero, a powerful search utility allowing the fast notation of web sites and Showcase, a quick way to open as thumbnails all your opened bookmarks, in one convenient window. In addition, you might consider Speed Dial, it enables up to nine default thumbnails and associated urls onto one practical page.

Also, if you’re like me and you feel your web browsing should be kept to yourself— or sold at a fair price—disable “Accept third party cookies” (on by default, go figure) under Firefox, Preferences, Privacy. Third party cookies are really annoying as they are put on sites by firms like Double Click (bought by Google) managing ads on behalf of the site.

Bought an iPhone, actually, the original one developed by Linksys (A Division of Cisco), not Apple’s. Remember they settled a trademark dispute on: “The companies (Linksys and Cisco) said Apple will be allowed to use the name for its sleek new multimedia device in exchange for exploring wide-ranging “interoperability” between the companies’ products in the areas of security, consumer and business communications.” as announced in February 2007.

I badly needed a wireless Voice over IP phone and the WIP330 appeared quite amazing. I’ll get you pictures as soon as I charge up my digital camera. Charging devices will go down in history as a malaise of the technology era. Basically, setting it up was an initial nightmare as it shipped with a “not so current” firmware version which you only find out after reading and reading, googling and googling. Guess what, the device has to be connected to the Internet wirelessly to upgrade…

As I am a Mac guy, I own an Apple Airport Extreme router with 802.11-n, a, b and g compatibilities. The mix mode is probably not “pure” g as the phone never found the network. You’d figure there were enough alphabet in there for them to talk properly to each other. To make a long story short, I ended up connecting an old g-compbatible router, unprotected, wide-open for the upgrade process to the latest firmware version v1.03.10S. Then, satiated with the latest code, the WIP330 found the Apple network.

It is now supposed to support n-networks capable of 300 Mb/s theoretical data transfer speed. The point is not really that you need that speed for voice over wireless, the point is that g devices on your network force your router to downgrade its transmission rate. Perhaps I should run two wireless networks in the house, one for g and one for n devices.

Getting back to the phone, if you want to get it to work with an Apple Extreme router, set the Extreme to Radio Mode = 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible), use channels 3 or 5, and set Wireless Security to WPA/WPA2 Personal. The phone’s current firmware does not support WPA2 (or at least Apple’s version of it, next to heresy for a standard). WPA2 as you know, uses a new AES based algorithm and CCMP, way more secured that dear old crackable WEP. WPA is just PSK (pre shared keys) over wireless with 128 bit encryption using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP).

This phone has a Web browser built-in and will use free Internet access points to search for your SIP (session initiation protocol) account all over the world. Currently, it will not handle multiple accounts through the phone’s interface. So basically, you set portability on a phone number in your local town (or get a SIP account on the Internet) and people can reach you as if you were still in town minding the necessary time zone adjustments. Make free calls from your local San Francisco Internet café or from anywhere else with free WiFi piggybacking.

The phone also has a web interface for admin access on the local network. If you’re not too keen on typing with an alphanumeric keyboard, I suggest you use it. You can set up to 250 contacts, you can change the wallpaper and you can play with the SIP settings. Too bad you cannot import contacts, too bad it does not handle multiple SIPs. It handles multiple Internet profiles though. A user name and password can be entered when they are required for wireless access.

I believe this phone has a great future and that it is influencing it too, mine at least ;).

I just bought Periscope, a very innovative software for your iSight. It is by Freeverse, a company I’m starting to like a lot. They make PulpMotion and Comic Life. It allows you to trigger captures of whatever is in front of your computer’s camera with different options for the number of photos taken and the trigger mechanisms. As you see in the picture I have included, you can set zones for motion detection. You can set microphone levels to start snapping pictures. Imagine you leave the room and ask Periscope to detect any noise, then imagine that the pictures taken by iSight are automatically sent to you well, you have yourself a surveillance system. You can also set a timer to trigger the captures. You can even use Apple’s remote. I just wish that in upcoming versions, they actually captured video and that you could set the desired quality. The software makes it easy to share your photos to .Mac, Flickr, Email, FTP, iPhoto or a local folder. You can assemble a series of pictures into a movie quite easily. So who’s Big Brother now?

This is just to let you know that I took my MacBook to the store in Montreal with my three loose screws totaling in size a bit more than the diameter of a pregnant flea. First, to make a long afternoon on the phone short, the vendor is going to replace the logic board (over $ 1,000.00) *because* Apple Canada agreed that six months later, it was still covered by the warranty. I had problems with the vendor, not with Apple. The vendor argued that the MacBook had been opened and that it voided the warranty. Apple said that if there were no evidence of physical damage to the board, it was still covered. Of course, I only had taken the MacBook apart to remove the Superdrive and to eject a stuck CD with brute force, not the network kind. I consider myself lucky, I did not have to buy the same computer twice.

There are so many possibilities for digitally recording anything these days that finding an application as simple as Tapedeck is refreshing. It’s bringing back the ol’ tapes in a neat interface for storing or recalling any recorded bits. I grew up with tapes (it seems so long ago now). If you want to reminisce part of the analog era, rent The Conversation, a Francis Ford Coppola movie from 1974 starring Gene Hackman about recording gone wrong. Tapedeck is free.

There is also the Open Source Audacity, often buggy but improving. Less slick but it does the job. You can also buy Ambrosia’s WireTap Studio (the makers of the finest video capture soft on the Mac, SnapzProX).

For those of you who wish to record your Skype conversation, there’s a cool little plugin to do just that.

Of course you can record off Garage Band and iChat. You can Podcast at your heart’s content. You can use Soundflower 1.3.1 to redirect inputs into other applications. You can buy Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Highjack Pro, a classic. Try out Nicecast too if you’re into broadcasting (which we are currently discussing with Jonathan to let you hear our voices). Nicecast allows you to create your own radio station or stream your iTunes library on the Internet.

And if you want to get into professional editing and recording then you have quite a choice on a Mac.
SoundStudio3 by Freeverse
Sound Studio 3.5.5
Soundtrack Pro, part of Apple’s Logic Studio bundle
Peak Pro

Why is it that every time I start something simple, it gets complicated? It must be the sound of it that pleases me. And you know what, I probably left out a lot of other applications that allow you to record off your Mac. Are you recording this?