Like many others I upgraded to Safari 3.1 last night. Also like many others I’m now encountering the ’shift bug’ in Gmail. If you haven’t yet read about it, what happens is that for some reason in Gmail on Safari 3.1, and apparently only in Gmail Safari 3.1, when you hit the shift key (or caps lock key) in the body of the message it changes focus. The result of this is that it’s impossible to enter capital letters or any other character that requires the shift key suchs as ‘$’ in the body of your message. Basically, Gmail is unusable in Safari 3.1.

There is a workaround for most people: at the top right of your Gmail page you may see a ‘newer version’ link. If you go to that and then select US English as your language, this apparently fixes the problem. Unfortunately, the ‘newer version’ link isn’t available in the Google Apps Gmail, which is what I use.

The other fix, of course, is to simply use a different browser. I’m a big fan of Safari, and have been using it exclusively pretty much since it was released. I’ve tried Firefox a number of times, but never really liked it that much for a variety of reasons. But like others, this problem hasn’t really left me with much of a choice. So I’m writing this post from Firefox 3 beta 4 which, I have to say, isn’t too bad. It definitely, as others have said, uses far less memory than Firefox 2, which is a big part of the reason I generally don’t use Firefox. I’ll keep using it for a while and we’ll see how it goes.

The other reason I generally stick with Safari is the tight integration with OS X, as well as the .Mac bookmark syncing. But I have been looking into cross-platform alternatives to .Mac, because it would be nice to have a solution that would work with other OSes as well (the price issues doesn’t bother me so much because it’s such a useful product and it’s actually pretty cheap if you have a family pack). The one real issue with switching away from .Mac for me is that I make pretty extensive use of Yojimbo which uses .Mac to sync it’s SQLite database and Transmit which uses .Mac to sync bookmarks. Not to mention my use of Apple’s Address Book and iCal because they sync not only with my other computers through .Mac but with my iPhone. So if anyone can recommend a solution that would allow me to replicate all that functionality across multiple *nixes (specifically OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD), I’d appreciate it.

Tesla’s CEO Ze’ev Drori announced today that Tesla has met their goal of starting regular production of the Tesla Roadster today. This is big news. I’ve been watching Tesla for going on two years now and anxiously awaiting the day when their cars become available for sale (not that I plan on buying the $90,000 roadster anytime soon…). I really hope that demand will be high enough for them to keep on track to release their sedan in the near future (which I just might buy). As far as I know they’re still planning on finally unveiling it in the first half of this year, which means we should get to see it very soon. I wonder what I have to do to get invited to that party.

In other electric car news, ZAP, in partnership with the Chinese Youngman Automotive Group, is planning to release a limited number of cars based on the 100 year old Detroit Electric. An electric car that was in production from 1907 to 1939, back before the internal combustion engine was king and cars were electric as often as not. If they keep the original price point of about $2000, I’ll have to pick up one of those too.

I thought I’d expand a little on my description of my ultimate eBook product. I’ve put quite a lot of thought into this over the past year or so, and come up with what I think could be a great little piece of hardware.

The basic form-factor would be something like the iPhone/iPod Touch, but with a screen around the size of a sheet of paper. Personally, I think A4 would be a good size for it, although I’m sure there would be plenty of Americans then annoyed by the fact that it’s the ‘wrong’ proportions (A4 does have the benefit of being pretty much exactly the same size as my MacBook though, which is nice). I see no particular reason that it couldn’t be as thin as an iPhone, especially with all that area in which to spread out the innards. For the most part it would be relatively in-extraordinary: eInk touchscreen (ideally in color, but that might be pushing it a bit for our current eInk technology), some decent amount of storage for files (1 GB maybe? More?), WiFi, a web-browser (makes it very easy to implement my eBook store idea I posted about before), and the ability to view a variety of file formats like plaintext (really stretching it there, I know), RTF, PDF, &c. I think my eBook store idea would be a pretty-near killer app for it, but the real kicker, in my opinion is bluetooth.

Not just bluetooth, or course. What I want is the ability to pair it with my computer so that I can essentially use it as a second screen for viewing documents. What I envision is this. At it’s most basic, you pair the device with your computer over bluetooth and it shows up on your desktop giving your normal filesystem access to put files on it and organize them as you see fit. However it does much more than that. It also gives you a new application that can open all the file formats that the device can display. If you have a Mac you can either put this app in your Dock and drag files to it to be opened, or set that app as the default file handler for PDFs and/or other filetypes. When you open a file with this new app the file doesn’t display on your computer screen, it displays on the reader. Basically the reader becomes a second monitor for viewing content that lives on your computer. It should have a similar function that ties into the web browser on your computer so you can just click a button or hit a keystroke and the website that you’re currently viewing on your computer comes up on your reader.

For me, this would be huge. When I take my laptop off to a cafe or wherever to work I either have to lug around hard copies of any relevant documentation up to and including large reference books like The Django Book. My only other option is to use electronic references which, while more than adequate and sometimes even better for conveying the necessary information, take up quite a bit of real estate on my MacBook’s 14.1″ screen (or even on my iMac’s 24″ screen since I usually have anywhere from 5-10 windows of code open). If I had a product such as this I could just double-click my documentation PDF or eBook (many reference books now come with an eBook version) and it will pop up on my reader where I can reference it exactly as I would a piece of paper. True a conventional eBook reader would be able to fill the same function in many ways, but this functionality would significantly simplify the process and allow me to use the more functional interface provided by a full computer. It allows you to simply double-click a file on your computer to open it, and then walk away with the document in hand to read on your way to a meeting or to peruse over lunch. Basically it completes the metaphor of files on your computer and lets you physically handle them as if you’d just pulled them out of a file cabinet.

The really cool thing about this idea is that we could have it tomorrow. It would only be a software update for the iPhone or iPod Touch (plus the attending local app) to make this a reality. It probably wouldn’t be particularly hard to do either. If they wanted to, I bet Apple could give us this capability in the next update. Using the small iPhone screen wouldn’t be quite as good, but it would be a start and I, for one, would use it extensively.

It’s been far too long since I’ve written anything. A whole lot has happened since the last post, much of it work. I’m on track for my biggest project yet to go live pretty soon, and I’ve got a number of other smaller projects that should be released even before then.

In the mean time Jessi and I spent 10 days on the west coast at the end of last month. It was a fairly busy travel schedule: fly from Boston to San Francisco on Friday so Jessi could host an OurStage.com sponsored Yelp party, then Saturday morning fly from San Francisco to San Diego where we spent a relaxing weekend with some very fun members of Jessi’s family I hadn’t met before, the Monday Jessi took the train to LA for some meetings and I flew straight back to San Francisco (LA’s just not my town) to hang out with friends and see my dad until Jessi came back up on Wednesday for NoisePop (also sponsored by OurStage), then back to Boston on the following Monday. It was definitely very nice to be back in the Bay Area, although I learned that it’s never a good idea to plan on relying on the free WiFi in a hotel. Though our hotel (the Civic Center Holiday Inn) had it, it was pretty flaky and seemed to have some policy in place that prevented outgoing traffic, which meant I couldn’t SSH into my server, which meant I was severely limited in what I was able to do from the hotel. Fortunately we were right across the street from the absolutely amazing San Francisco Public Library main branch which is probably my second favorite public library after Boston’s Copley Square branch, and provides pretty fast free WiFi. All in all it was a very good, but very exhausting trip.

Since getting back, my focus has been pretty much all business. I’ve gotten a lot of work done, though I still have a lot of work left to do, and hopefully I should be able to make some pretty big business-related announcements over the next couple months. I did, actually, have one small business milestone while in San Francisco: I hired my first contractor for a small job. Jesse Legg helped me out with a quick project so that I would have the free time to work on another that had a looming deadline. Not really that big of a deal, but I think it’s still an indication that I’m on the right track and my business is continuing to grow.

In other news, I just saw on Gizmodo a story about a new eBook reader from Netronix. It’s basically like they took Amazon’s Kindle and made the changes that I would have wanted made: they added a touchscreen interface and gave it WiFi instead of EV-DO. While the lack of EV-DO obviously limits it in terms of being able to get content no matter where you are, I think it will prove to be a more useful direction for eBook readers. What I would like to see, similar to Amazon’s always-on eBook store, is some framework by which people with a WiFi enabled eBook reader can walk into a brick and mortar bookstore, browse through the books, and, when they find what they want, but it electronically and download it directly to their reader via the store’s WiFi network. In some ways this would be less convenient than Amazon’s store, but it would also be vastly more flexible and give people the option of still supporting their local bookstores. I would also really like to see this sort of technology extended to libraries, although the whole premise of the library is predicated on the limited time that you have access to the materials, so it would probably require some sort of DRM in order to be workable. Hopefully, with the popularity of the Kindle, eInk technology and the whole concepts of eBooks will start to advance more quickly and we’ll start seeing better and better reader technology. I know I will definitely own an eBook reader of some sort in the next few years. I just hope it has some mechanism for both the sort of WiFi store described above and some note taking capacity.