As I'm sure most people are aware, it's possible to install apps on your iPhone that aren't available through the AppStore. This requires you to go through a process known as 'jailbreaking' (which is surprisingly easy, and has been around since before there was an official App store), which in addition to allowing you to install apps (including an online repository rather like the official App store), means that you have to be wary of any software updates becaues they, at best, will undo your jailbreaking or, at worst, might brick your iPhone if you don't un-jailbreak it first.

But there's another method of installing apps that haven't been given the official Apple stamp of approval on your app. One that doesn't require jailbreaking, and is absolutely authorized by Apple. If you are an iPhone developer, you can install the app that you're developing onto your iPhone to test it out. I haven't done this myself, not having tried my hand at iPhone development yet, but I've seen it done. That being said, and being a known fact, doesn't this mean that we have another avenue to installing apps on iPhones available to us? Shouldn't it therefore be possible for these unapproved apps to be distributed in such a manner as to be installed through the iPhone dev tools and therefore without having to jailbreak your phone?

Might it not also, therefore, be possible for the installer app that connects you to the repository of available unofficial iPhone apps to be installed in this way? I'm asking these questions because I don't know the answers, but I'd like to find out. The one real problem that I can see is that maybe apps installed using this method won't have access to all the underlying functionality that is available to unofficial apps but kept hidden from those approved ones. But again, I don't know. I can't imagine this question hasn't been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one. But if people can figure out how to jailbreak the iPhone in the first place how much harder can it be to figure out how to use the dev kit to install the installer app without jailbreaking?

Google Analytics tells me that my post on problems with MobileMe is currently one of my most popular, so I thought I'd write a little more about that.

As I said before, I had been having some big problems with MobileMe. For a while, my iPhone simply wasn't syncing at all. Since I do a lot of work at home where I have access to my iMac, but also do a lot of work elsewhere on my Thinkpad this was a bit of a problem. Initially I got around this by migrating to Google Calendars. But, to be honest, this didn't last for long. My approach was to import my iCal calendars into Google, then subscribe to them in iCal via CalDAV. This worked decently well, and allowed me to keep my calendar in sync on Google, iCal, and, via syncing through iTunes, my iPhone. It was a bit more cumbersome, but at least I had full access to my calendar wherever I went. The main problems with this were that on my iPhone, the Calendar app didn't have write access, I'd have to go into Safari and edit the calendar that way if I wanted to do it on my iPhone (a process which I don't really like; I'm not a huge fan of web apps in general). The other problem was being tied to syncing through iTunes again. In the brief time that MobileMe worked propertly, I got very attached to my over the air syncing, and didn't really like giving it up.

Long story short, it didn't take that long for MobileMe syncing to start working again, and I switched back and have been very happy since. Since I can still access me.com/calendar in Firefox on Linux by simply changing my user agent (and it works perfectly), I really have no motivation to use anything else. So for the foreseeable future I intend to stick with MobileMe for my calendaring needs. If apple offered some sort of hosted MobileMe the way Google does with Gmail I might even switch to that so that I could have full integration of all my tools (it's annoying that the address book on my mac and my iPhone isn't the same as my gmail address book, and the syncing between the two is so horrible that I have no desire to touch it ever again).

Another alternative I'm somewhat considering is Zarafa. Zarafa offers a drop-in Exchange replacement that, basically, exactly duplicates all of Exchange's functionality including the ActiveSync that iPhones now support. Even better, they just open-sourced it. This is actually a fairly attractive possibility as it would give me everything I like about MobileMe, plus all the other advantages that an Exchange solution would offer except for the licensing costs (and hopefully some of the annoying design decisions, though I don't know enough to really say yet). The downside, of course, is that I'd have to maintain my own server (or pay for a hosted solution, if such a thing exists). But I do know a number of other small business owners who could probably benefit from such a thing, so I could probably go in with them on a server to run Zarafa for all of us (and maybe even get them to pay me to maintain it and such). It's certainly worth considering at any rate. I may try and set it up on either my Gentoo-powered Thinkpad or my FreeBSD server at home and give it a whirl.

A lot of people have been writing about problems they've been having with MobileMe, Apple's recent replacement for .Mac, to the point that I can't actually think of any good things that I've heard about it. Steve Jobs is even on record as saying that it's not up to Apple snuff.

Thus far I've been silent on the issue, mainly because thus far I haven't had any problems. That, however, has changed. About two days ago, my calendars stopped syncing. Changes I make in iCal are no longer reflected on the me.com web calendar, nor do they get pushed to my iPhone. This is rather a large problem, as it means I have no access to my calendar when away from my desk, which I am most of the time. To make matters worse, me.com claims to be incompatible with Firefox 3.0.1, at least when I visit from my Gentoo Linux powered ThinkPad which means that even if it was syncing, I wouldn't be able to access my calendar from it and would be restricted to just my iPhone. I'm sure that a little messing around would result in it working in some browser, whether it's Firefox inaccurately reporting its version, or a WebKit based browser claiming to be Safari.

This is rather a large problem for me, as it basically means that I have little to no ability to view or manage my calendar when not at home despite paying not only for MobileMe, but for an iPhone, the one device you'd expect to not have compatibility problems. This may be enough to make me switch to using Google calendar, despite the fact that it won't sync with iCal or my built-in iPhone calendar app, which I vastly prefer to a web-based interface.

With all my posts about the new iPhone software that I've got installed on my first-gen iPhone (and I do mean first-gen, it's a 4 GB), the question still remains of if I'll upgrade my hardware as well. There's definitely some good arguments either way, but my answer, at this point, is a resounding maybe.

To be honest, I don't really care about the 3G data speeds. EDGE is by no means blazingly fast, but it meets my needs sufficiently well that I'm don't feel the need to upgrade just for the faster data network. The feature that really does attract me, however, is the GPS functionality. The built-in Google maps feature that I've got now is nice, and certainly a lot more convenient than having to look up direction on your computer and print them out, but it's definitely less useful than it could be largely because it requires user input to be of any use. You have to take your eyes off the road and your hand off the wheel/shifter so you can see have it show you the next step in the directions. Because of that limitation I have been, for a while now, seriously considering buying a TomTom GPS navigation device for the car.

The existence of real GPS on the iPhone, however, calls that plan into question. Especially as the price of a TomTom is greater than or equal to the price of a new iPhone minus the proceeds I might get from selling the one I've got. Yesterday AutoBlog posted a review of the GPS functionality on the iPhone. Apparently it leaves a bit to be desired, and doesn't actually do anything more than the old iPhone does except have a more accurate idea of where you are and put a moving dot on the map to show your position along the route. It doesn't automatically tell you what the next step in the directions are, you still have to do that yourself. So with things as they are, there's really no reason for me to even consier getting an iPhone 3G. It offers no compelling new features for me.

But wait! Just before the iPhone 3G was released, TomTom announced that they were working on porting their software to an iPhone app! When they made this announcement there was all sorts of speculation as to why it would never work. Some insisted that the iPhone SDK agreement forbid the development of navigation apps. Some insisted that the iPhone 3G's GPS antenna wasn't good enough to provide turn-by-turn directions. Since then, however, there's been clarification from both Apple and TomTom that there is no legal or technical barrier to this happening. TomTom reports that they've got the software pretty much working as well.

So I think it's just a matter of time (weeks, hopefully) before we see the iPhone becoming a fully featured GPS navigation device. Even better, it will be a GPS navigation device with internet access! That means that all of the advanced features that TomTom currently offers (if you have a compatible bluetooth enabled phone) should work including real-time traffic reports and, what I think is one of the coolest, buddies!

So basically, if the TomTom software proves to work well, I'll probably get an iPhone 3G. If it doesn't, I probably won't, at least not until either TomTom or someone else does get a good GPS navigation app out there. Assuming, of course, that I don't get tired of waiting and just buy a TomTom device.

I wasn't really intending to write a whole lot more about the new iPhone software, but I've actually seen a fairly huge spike in traffic since my first iPhone 2.0 post and I feel like I should probably pass this info along. It appears that the earlier, pre-release 2.0 software that I downloaded and installed on my iPhone to great effect the other day may have been intended for the iPhone 3G only. This isn't confirmed, but since we do have an official release now, it's probably not a bad idea to install that instead (I just finished doing so myself). Again, MacRumors has the download link and instructions for doing so.

Yeah, yeah, 3 posts about the iPhone in two days, and you still can't even buy the 3G iPhone yet! But I was taking advantage of the new iTunes remote last night as we had some company and so were in the living room and wanted music playing there without having to go into the office to mess with the computer. One of the nice (and necessary, really) features of the remote app is that it lets you turn on and off any speakers available on the network. In our case it's just the computer itself and the living room, though eventually I'd like to put some on the back deck and in the kitchen. This makes it a breeze to have your music play on any subset of available speakers. But what would be really cool is if it had the ability to determine which set of speakers you were closest too (shouldn't be too hard, just see which AirPort Express base station you get the strongest signal from) and automatically switch the music to the appropriate speakers. That way as you walked around the house your music would follow you. Of course you could always just play it on all your sets of speakers, but what kind of fun would that be?

It didn't take very long, but I found a bug in the iPhone 2.0 software. It's nothing major, but a bit of a pain. Basically, if you install an app via iTunes rather than directly on the iPhone, or if you install it on the iPhone then have iTunes transfer it to your computer when you sync (it asks you), you have to then delete it from both places if you want to get rid of it. If you delete it from only the iPhone or only from iTunes a sync results it in being back in both locations. I imagine this will probably be fixed relatively quickly.

Thanks to a tip on MacRumors, I've now got the 2.0 firmware running on my iPhone. This means I've got apps! Without resorting to jailbreaking! So far, I've got to say it's pretty slick. I've only got a few apps installed so far, but the app store works incredibly well (you can see reviews of it and videos of it on Gizmodo).

For me, there are two apps that are absolute must haves: the iTunes remote and the Pandora app. We have some speakers set up in the living room via AirTunes on an AirPort Express so that when we have company we can play music in the living room without having to drag a computer out there or something like that. The only drawback to that setup has been that someone needs to get up and go into the office to change the music. No more! Now we can just whip out one of our iPhones and take care if it from right there. Now if only it were possible to play music over AirTunes with an iPhone so that a friend who was over could play their own music if we wanted.

But even better than the remote app is the Pandora app. Pandora, if you don't know, is a website that basically helps you find awesome new music (kinda like OurStage, but it's music from big name artists). Basically you start a 'radio station' by seeding it with either an artist or song that you like. Pandora then picks songs for you based on the characteristics of that song (characteristics such as 'traditional blues melodies' and 'minor key tonality'). You can then rate songs with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down to help fine-tune the station. I've found a ton of good music thanks to Pandora, and now I've got access to it wherever I go (it didn't work before because the site is Flash based). Anyone who likes finding new music should definitely check it out. I find it especially useful for exploring new genres: just find a single song you like in that genre and it will help you find more. The iPhone app even has a button that lets you buy the current song/album in the iTunes store.

There are a few other features that the 2.0 firmware brings of course. Most notably is MobileMe, which gives push email, contacts, calendars, &c.; to MobileMe (previously .Mac) subscribers. I am a subscriber, but the new services aren't actually active yet so I haven't really been able to play around with that yet (But once they do go active I'll be faced with the conundrum of what to do about email. Currently I use Google Apps to manage my email which I really like and works really well, but using my mac.com email address would give me push email. Maybe Google will give us push eventually and I won't have to sacrifice their awesome spam filtering and the ability to host my own domain's email with them. Or maybe Apple will offer something similar.). The new firmware also gives us the ability to search contacts in our address book (and adds a Contacts icon to the main screen so you don't have to go through the phone just to find an email address). I'm sure there's all sorts of things that I haven't found yet too, but for now the only other thing I'll touch on is a better implementation of password field. Previously, when entering a password you had to either pay very close attention or just assume that you weren't hitting the wrong keys on the virtual keyboard. Now, however, it shows the last character that you entered and only hides the previous ones so you can tell if you've made a typo. Not huge, but a nice touch.

Anyone who pays attention to Apple news is, I'm sure, aware of their recent announcement of Snow Leopard, the successor to Leopard, which will be coming out in about a year. They're also probably aware that Apple is advertising this release primarily as a code refactoring that will add stability, optimization, and 'no new features'. Since that announcement there have been any number of blog posts explaining how there actually will be some significant new features, they're just mainly under the hood enhancements that the average user wouldn't actually be aware of. RoughlyDrafted has an excellent post explicating what some of those features are, so I'm not going to rehash that discussion. I do, however, want to address one of the points made, specifically that 'ZFS isn’t going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system'. I disagree.

This statement is partly true in that most people, especially those with only a single HDD, won't benefit from ZFS' pooling and the various benefits that come from that (such as RAID-Z). But I still think it's inclusion in OS X will be a coup for the average user as well. Specifically, the use of ZFS means that silent data corruption will be a thing of the past thanks to copy on write and full data checksumming. Also, the advantages that ZFS' snapshots will bring to TimeMachine will greatly enhance it's usability, speed, and effectiveness for anyone with an external hard drive, network hard drive, or Time Capsule. On top of that, there are, in fact, a few benefits of ZFS pooling for those with just a single hard drive. In particular, filesystem level compression will allow the user (or, more likely, Apple) to designate certain folders to be their own filesystems that are automatically compressed to to provide a) more efficient use of space and b) faster access. This won't help much with your music and video files, but it should do a lot to greatly reduce the size and increase the access speed of the configuration and preferences files in your Library (mine is currently 3.24 GB uncompressed). I don't imagine it would be difficult for Apple to update OS X so that /Library, /System/Library, and /Users/*/Library are all their own filesystems with compression turned on. And even if they don't a savvy user could do this themselves if they really wanted to.

ZFS will also be a boon to those who might want to create their own home server. A niche market for now, perhaps, but the ability to just keep adding new USB or FireWire (or eSATA?) hard drives to their computer and have that storage space just seamlessly added into their storage capacity will make it significantly easier to manage.

I, for one, think that ZFS is probably the best news related to Snow Leopard that I've heard. I've already been using ZFS in both Leopard (you can download an update from the ADC that gives you full read/write access to ZFS) and FreeBSD and loving every minute of it. I just wish Sun would release it under the GPL so it could be included in Linux as well...

I've been working away from home more and more often lately, and the 13" screen on my MacBook has been feeling more and more restrictive. So I decided to replace it with a something bigger. Obvoiusly my first thought was a MacBook Pro, but they're just so expenssive that it's hard to justify the cost. So instead, I bought a ThinkPad. I got a T61 with a 15" WSXGA+ screen, 802.11n, dual-layer dvd burner, 2.5 GHz Core2Duo... basically the exact same features (and even hardware probably) as a MacBook pro. The biggest difference? I spent less than $1000 dollars on it.

This is actually my second ThinkPad; I had an x61 that I bought in college and actually used as my main computer when I first moved to Boston because my PowerMac was in-transit and I didn't have anything else. I've also been impressed with the ThinkPad line, the higher end ones have very nice build quality, and they're popular enough with the Linux crowd to have good Linux support. So, for the second time in my life, I'm running Linux as my main OS (specifically Gentoo Linux on kernel 2.6.25 with the tuxonice patches).

The biggest issue with using Linux was finding the appropriate replacements for my commonly used apps. Most of them were Easy: Firefox stays the same, I use Google Apps to host my email so no problems there either. For instant messaging I was planning on using Pidgin, but ended up going with Kopete because after trying it out, I just like it better (that's right, I'm using KDE, 3.5 for now). The biggest challenge, was trying to find something to replace TextMate for coding in. I absolutely love TextMate, and take advantage of a lot of its advanced features all the time. Fortunately, back when I was a CS student, I got nice and familiar with Emacs, and was well aware that, even if the functionality I wanted wasn't built in, someone's probably created an add-on for it, and if not it would be pretty simple for me to do it myself. Turns out I was right.

I haven't completed all my Emacs modification yet, but so far just two little scripts have given me most of what I was looking for. First was yasnippet, which provides a snippet feature that works in pretty much the exact same was as TextMate's. Someone even wrote a script that will download TextMate bundles directly from the repository and covert the snippets they contain to work with yasnippet. You can't do much better than that. I'm also using emacs-textmate which provides an Emacs minor mode that emulates some more of TextMate's behaviors; specifically, it adds in the ability to automatically insert paired characters, so if you type '(' it automatically inserts ')', and handles deleting them gracefully as well.

There were a few other features that I use extensively in TextMate as well that weren't provided by either of these add-ons. Fortunately, it was relatively simple for me to implement them myself (with a little help from a friendly Emacs guru on the Gentoo forums) and patch emacs-textmate to provide it. Specifically, I duplicated TextMate's auto indent feature by adding an extra keybinding to emacs-textmate to bind the return key to the built-in Emacs function newline-and-indent. I also bound M- to a new function of my own creation defined thusly:

(defun open-next-line()
  (interactive)
  (move-end-of-line nil)
  (newline-and-indent))

This duplicates the behavior of command-return in TextMate, which is pretty much the same as 'o' in vi[m]. I'm still working on how to duplicate command-shift-return, which inserts the appropriate line ending character based on language (';' for C and C-like languages, ':' for Python, &c.;) and then opens and goes to the next line. But I don't think that will be too hard once I learn a little more elisp. After that I just need to figure out how to duplicate Textmate's tag closing function, which is a huge time-saver when coding HTML.

All in all, I'm quite happy with my new computer. Things may not be quite as pretty as in OS X, but they can be if I just put a little work in to making them so (I've already got e17 installed, which comes close and with some more tweaking may replace KDE as my default environment). As much as I love Mac OS X, there is definitely a strong argument to be made for Linux, at least for people who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty with the command line and a good old text editor. Even with just a couple days spent adjusting the system, I think it's already at a point where I could see using it full time, maybe even prefer it to OS X. Which is really saying something when you consider that I've been a Mac user for about 24 years.

So as I mentioned, I was at the opening of the new Boston Apple Store on Boyleston St. last night. Unfortunately I was a little late showing up and didn't get my free t-shirt. :(

As I mentioned, it's an extremely nice location with some extremely cool design. The entire top floor (of three) is dedicated to support with a gigantic Genius Bar that is apparently able to support several thousand people per day, and a ton of iMacs lining the walls where you can get one on one help/tutoring (they call it their One-to-One program). Another cool new features they're rolling out (or possible already had and I just haven't been paying attention) is their personal shopping service. You can make an appointment to show up and have, essentially, a personal shopper to help you out with any questions or help you might need while shopping. Seems like a pretty cool idea, and I imagine it will be very useful for the parents who want to get their kid a new computer or something but really have no idea what they're looking for.

All in all, I think this store is going to be a huge success. Especially positioned, as it is, directly across the street from the Prudential Center and the soon-to-be-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel. It will definitely be a little more pleasant to visit than the Cambridgeside location, though parking won't be nearly as easy so you'll probably start seeing more people with big iMac boxes on the T...

And in closing, these people weren't on the guest list and therefore aren't as cool as me:

(Yes, both pictures in this post were taken with my iPhone.)

I'm currently at the grand opening event of Apple's new flagship retail store in Boston. I've only just gotten here, but so far I've hot to say that I'm impressed. It's something like a cross between the 5th Ave. location in New York and the Miracle Mile location in Chicago. In short: three stories of beautiful, glassy architecture with a huge skylight topping it off and the iconic white Apple logo overlooking the Pru. Also, they're giving me free beer and appetizers, so far so good. I'll write more about itlater, for now I'll just enjoy it, and play with the toys.

For the past week or so, I've been running FreeBSD on my MacBook. So far, I've got to say, I absolutely love it. I have a lot of experience running a range of Linux distributions on all sorts of hardware including both PPC and Intel Macs, but just a week or so of FreeBSD usage has convinced me of the OS' value over Linux.

A standard FreeBSD install is incredibly simple. If you don't want to dive into any messy details you don't have to (though you do need to be comfortable with the fact that you're going to be using a curses interface rather than a real GUI). You could probably have a full, working install of FreeBSD, complete with X.org, in 15-30 minutes if you didn't want to do anything crazy.

I, of course, wanted to do some crazy things. Namely, I wanted to have it running on Sun's ZFS, which took a little extra work. If you just want to run FreeBSD on your MacBook easily, I highly recommend this howto from Goddess-Gate.com. It's very good and very easy to follow (just remember that you might not use a French-layout keyboard and you'll be fine).

To start things off, after partitioning my drive with BootCamp, I used this ish.com howto to get a minimal FreeBSD install running with ZFS. At this point, my Airport card was working with the built-in drivers, which was absolutely stunning after all the work and effort I've put into trying to get WiFi to work with Linux in the past. After that I took a few tips from zenspider to get the basics setup like configuring my own user with sudo privs, and ZSH as the default shell (I'm a fan of things that start with Z, I guess...). After that, just a few tips from the Goddess-Gate.com howto as well as the MacBook page o the FreeBSD wiki (the wiki page will be important later) got me to a basically complete and usable stage.

In addition to the basics, I installed the e17 window manager, which so far I really like, gvim and xemacs, for my basic work needs (traditionally I'm an emacs guy, but lately I've been playing around with vim a lot), Opera for web browsing and some of the KDE packages, though I don't want or plan to use KDE, I just wanted a few of the applications to play with (Konqueror and Kate), so I removed all the KDE packages other than kdebase and it's dependencies.

At this point I only had a few issues with my install:

1. the trackpad - FreeBSD currently has no support for advanced features with the MacBook trackpad. The synaptics drivers available in FreeBSD don't recognize the USB trackpad that Apple uses, so you're forced to use basic mouse drivers which means no two-finger scrolling or right-click. The best solution out there (and I'll address this in a bit) is to configure xbindkeys so that F10 sets your mouse button to left-click, F11 sets it to middle-click, and F12 sets it to right-click.


2. fn key - FreeBSD also currently has no support for the fn key on the MacBook keyboard which means that the home, end, pgup and pgdn keys are unusable. This isn't a huge deal as you can use various other keybindings to the same effect, but it's annoying.


3. battery monitor - For some reason the battery monitor widget that comes with e17 only sort of works with my MacBook. If my battery is full, it says so. Otherwise, it just says 'DRIVER'. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to indicate an actual driver problem, because I can get the full info on my batter at the command line including time remaining and all that fun stuff. Since the information is obviously all available I'm going to try and patch the e17 widget to work with a MacBook when I've got the time. Meanwhile, I'm sure that other battery monitor probably work, though I haven't had a chance to try any yet.


4. Firefox - I simply have not been able to get Firefox to work properly. I've tried various ports (firefox, firefox-devel,linux-firefox, and linux-firefox-devel), but sometimes they fail to compile, and even when they do, they won't run. Since I've got both Opera and Konquerer installed I'm just going to ignore this issue until Firefox 3 is released and makes it into the ports tree.

Other than those four things, everything else has really been a dream in terms of ease of setup and use. And, I'm happy to announce, I've come up with a better solution to the right-click issue!

You have to install xvkbd and then add the following to your .bindkeysrc:

"xvkbd -text '\m3'"
	Control + b:1


"xvkbd -text '\m2'"
	Alt + b:1

This will allow you to use ctrl-click for right-click, as in the Mac OS, and alt-click for a middle-click.

The one caveat, which Rui Paolo, writer of the MacBook entry in the FreeBSD wiki helped me discover, is that you have to compile the latest version of xvkbd yourself, as the one in ports is outdated and doesn't work for this. So I'm going to work on building a new port with the latest code. The lack of a simple way to right-click was the one thing that was really bothering me with my FreeBSD install, so this is a pretty huge deal as far as I'm concerned.

Well, that was a very long and geeky post. Now I have to get ready for my international flight tonight.

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. ;)

The other day I got a call from a recruiter. Apparently Apple wants to hire me to work at the Genius Bar at the new Boyleston Apple Store. Presumably they found me through my Apple certification, and I certainly have the resume for the job. Being a Genius isn't really that bad a gig. You get something like $20/hour, benefits, and, of course, you get to play with toys all day. Of course this isn't exactly the direction I'm looking to go in professionally. I have no particular desire to work retail. And I certainly have no particular desire to do nothing but fix people's computers for $20 and hour when I already do that for more money on the side of a more lucrative business. I might consider a job managing the Genius Bar, but retail tech support seems like a bit of a backwards step at this point.

On top of that I think I may be on the cusp of moving my business to the next stage. As I've mentioned before, I've transitioned my business into being primarily about web development and services. My business model has been to partner with web developers who need someone to do the programming for them. This strategy has been working very well, and for the past few months I've been much busier on average than I had been previously. Now, I think, things may be about to really take off.

I'm about to start a very big project, my biggest so far. Because of that, I'm basically going to be completely booked for the next two to three months while I work on this. But, with my business model being as successful as it has been lately, I can be pretty sure that during this time there will be a number of other opportunities that arise (in fact I already know of a few that will be coming up soon). This is exactly the position I've been working towards since I started this whole experiment just about 18 months ago: having more work coming in than I can handle myself. This means I'm finally at the point where I can seriously consider hiring more people. Of course at this point I'm really only looking for a contractor or two. Someone who can put in a few hours a month for me doing the work I don't have time for myself.

Having gotten to that point there's a clear path forward. While I work on this big new project, I'd only hire contractors as I need them for the work I don't have time for myself. Once it's done and I have a little more leeway to think about other things I can continue to take advantage of them to reduce my own work load and let me spend more time on finding new business. At some point after that I should be able to have enough business coming in that I can afford to hire a developer full-time and focus primarily on sales myself. And, of course, if that goes well I can hire someone to do sales full-time, and then I'll really be getting somewhere. The obvious 'end-point' of this strategy is for me to be managing a company that employs a full-time sales staff as well as a full-time development staff. Maybe even bringing in my own design team, although I think I'd prefer to maintain my partnerships with a large network of designers. At any rate, I think I'm finally approaching the point where I can truly consider this whole venture to be 'successful'.

In the meantime, I guess I should start looking for some contractors. Any LAMP developers out there who might be interested in a little freelance work? I'm mostly looking for PHP developers, but those working with Python, ASP, Ruby and others are welcome as well. Also, I'd favor the Boston area at this point, but am definitely interested in expanding geographically as well. Feel free to send me resumés at josh@dydxtech.com.

My new iMac came a couple days ago. So far it's absolutely great. Unlike my PowerMac G5, it plays HD video without choking. Even better, after installing Perian I can watch all that HD video in Front Row using the remote instead of having to deal with navigating through the file system, opening it with VLC, and then setting it to fullscreen. I also really like the new keyboards. A lot of people have been complaining about them, but they're like the MacBook keyboards, which I love, only better. It is annoying that the switched around the functions of the F keys though (going to the Dashboard used to be F12, but it now F4; hitting F12 increases the volume), but that won't take too long to get used to.

The only annoyances so far have been dealing with my external hard drives, and Leopard. The hard drives are really my own fault, when I originally put together the 500 GB RAID to store my video I used an eSATA enclosure along with an eSATA controller card in my G5. The iMac has neither eSATA ports nor anywhere to put an eSATA controller card. Fortunately, however, it does have FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b), so I just replaced my old eSATA enclosure with a new USB 2.0/FW/FW800 enclosure and that was ready to go. Leopard is a slightly larger problem however.

I've already upgraded my MacBook, and so far I really like Leopard. However the vast majority of my work requires me to edit remote files which I do using Cyberduck and TextMate (two fantastic programs, anyone who has use for an FTP/SFTP client and/or an advanced text editor should definitely check them out). Unfortunately Leopard breaks the integration between the two so that I can't just easily edit files on my server as though they were local. This isn't, I don't believe, a bug in Leopard, merely a change in functionality that Cyberduck and/or TextMate will need to take into account before the it can work again. I know that TextMate 2.0 should be coming out soon and that it will be Leopard-only, so hopefully that means it will fix the problem. Until then, one of my computers needs to stick with Tiger, and since I already upgraded my MacBook that means it's my iMac. I kinda wish it were the other way around, but it would be way too big of a pain to change that now.

Last night I sold my PowerMac G5 and 24" Dell monitor. I bought the G5 almost exactly four years ago on October 20, 2003. At the time it was the top of the line Macintosh with all the options, but since I had an Apple Student Developer account, it only cost me about $2500, the cost of the low-end PowerMac. Despite being four years old, it's still a great machine. It's perfectly capable of doing just about anything you might want it to do including video editing (which is what the guy I sold it to is going to use it for). The only thing it really has a problem with is playing HD video. It had problems decoding 720p H.264 content fast enough and would often stutter. 1080p content was completely unplayable. If it hadn't been for the fact that watching video was my main use for it (I can do all my work on my MacBook just fine) I would have kept it until it either failed catastrophically or simply was no longer able to run the software I needed.

I'll be replacing it with an iMac. It seems like a bit of a shame to replace a PowerMac with an iMac, but a 24" 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac will be completely paid for by the money I got for my 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac and 24" Dell LCD monitor, so I'm essentially upgrading my computer for free. The iMac should have no problem playing even 1080p H.264 content, as my 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook plays it about as well as my PowerMac played 720p. The screen in the iMac should also be slightly better than the one I sold, so this turns out to be a pretty good deal for me. Actually, it's a really good deal for me. The only out of pocket expense when getting the iMac will be AppleCare, which I definitely think is worth it. Oh, and I also have to get a new hard drive enclosure. Before I was using a SATA to eSATA enclosure along with an eSATA controller card for a 500 GB RAID, but the iMac won't have eSATA so that's out (and I sold the enclosure along with the G5), so I also had to order a SATA to USB 2.0/FireWire/FireWire 800 enclosure to replace it.

Until I get the iMac I'll be stuck with just my MacBook. It's a little odd right now having nothing but a little laptop sitting on my desk, but, to be fair, it's just as capable of a computer as the PowerMac was, so currently I'm not actually missing out on anything other than the bigger screen (and the use of my 500 GB RAID) in the meantime.

Apple has surprised me again and really come through. Apparently it's no longer the case that all laptop repairs are sent in; they now do about 95% (according to the woman at the Genius Bar that I talked to) right in the stores. They had the right size hard drive in stock, so I was in and out in less than an hour with a fully functional MacBook. Also, for the first time since the Genius Bar concept really took off (it took about a year, really) I didn't even have to wait in a long line for service and even got in before my scheduled appointment. So apparently they've done something to vastly improve the appointment system.

On top of all that, since they had to replace the hard drive I got a fresh OS install. And the version they installed is 10.4.8. Ordinarily I'd be a little annoyed about the forced downgrade, but in this case I'm rather happy about it. I've been one of the unfortunate few who's been experiencing AirPort problems in 10.4.10 (although I was only having intermittent dropped connections and not kernel panics like some people), so I'm leaving it at that version for now. Hopefully the 10.4.11 update that should be available in the next day or two will fix those problems, otherwise I'll just wait for Leopard to update.

In other news, the Indian place in the food court at the CambridgeSide Galleria is extremely disappointing. At first I thought their prices were ridiculous. Then I saw how huge their portions were and though the prices might actually be fair. Then I tasted the food... Needless to say I won't be going back (not that I often eat at mall food courts anyway).

I've now spent a weekend (and weekday) playing with my iPhone. So far I've discovered nothing to dampen my enthusiasm about it. In fact, I probably like it even more than I did before. Having confirmed that the touchscreen wasn't a significant impediment to typing or dialing the only concerns I had left were the low speed of EDGE for data transmission and the lack of an IM client on it.

Neither of those things are concerns anymore. While EDGE is slow, it's sufficient for the basic needs of email and looking up driving directions with the built-in google maps application (which is completely awesome; a fun test is to center the map on your current location and then just type 'starbucks'—or 'dunkin donuts'—into the search bar and watch all the little red map pins drop out of the sky skewering your local caffeineries of choice).

As for IM, I've always been a huge fan of meebo.com, a web-based, multi-protocol IM app. They've been my favorite Web 2.0 app for as long as Web 2.0 has been around, and their recently released iPhone optimized version doesn't disappoint. Unlike most sites, you don't even need to go to a special address to get to the iPhone version: just type meebo.com into your browser and it automatically detects that you're using an iPhone and shows you the correct interface. You can log into any account for any protocol they support (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber) or into your already existing meebo account (unfortunately you can't create a new one from your iPhone) and it takes you to a low-profile, low-bandwidth, IM interface optimized for the iPhone. They didn't try to mimic the way the site works in a traditional setting (exactly like it does on your desktop, complete with a separate window for each conversation), and they didn't try and shoehorn desktop metaphors like tabs in. Instead they simply show you your buddy list. Click on a contact and you get a conversation screen where you can chat as you normally would. The only elements on the screen are their buddy icon, a small icon to take you back to your buddy list, a text box to enter your message, and a send button. If someone else IMs you while you're in the middle of a conversation the number of new messages you have appears in a little bubble over your buddy list icon (just like a dock icon in OS X) and the content of that message briefly appears in a little pop-up. Switching conversations is just a matter of going back to your buddy list and selecting a different person to talk to. It's that simple. And it's been designed specifically with the limitations of the EDGE network in mind so it works just fine even if you don't have access to a WiFi network. It's done incredibly well, and even if Apple adds iChat in later I don't expect I'll stop using meebo (which isn't too surprising seeing as I don't use iChat on my Mac either in favor of Adium; also, I imagine that the reason iChat isn't in there is because AT&T; doesn't want there to be a messaging application in there that doesn't let them charge per message as they usually do when it comes to instant messaging and there's no way I'm going to eat up my text messaging allowance with iChat when meebo's around).

So basically, the iPhone rocks. That's my review. Unless something seriously unexpected happens, I don't expect I'll be commenting any more on the iPhone itself. But you can be sure you'll be hearing about whatever apps I end up using with it, whether they be web apps or actually apps added through hacks (I'll start messing around with iPhone hacks soon, I'm sure).

As you probably know, I spent last weekend in New York. My last post was actually written from the SOHO Apple Store. The main reason I went there was because I knew I could get a free internet connection, but I was also hoping for the chance to play with an iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone table was about five deep in people, so I gave up on it. But I did manage to play with one at the 5th Ave Apple Store the next morning.

Prior to having actually touched one, I was of mixed feelings on the iPhone. On the one hand, I've been awaiting the so-called touch-screen iPod for as long as there have been rumors of it. The iPhone is clearly that, and more. However I was, as most people were and some still are, concerned about the efficacy of the interface, in particular typing on the touch-screen. Beyond that there were obvious, to my mind, flaws of the first generation device that everyone has gone into already. Jesse Legg has already written on the technical flaws of the iPhone and I see no reason to continue harping on them myself. Instead, I'll just say that I never had any intention or desire to buy the iPhone as it currently is. My plan has been to wait at least until the 2nd generation when they've repaired those flaws and hopefully made some other improvements as well.

That was, of course, until I actually got to use the iPhone. My expectations for the interface were high, but the actual product completely blew them away. Using the iPhone is so incredibly simple that anyone should really be able to do it. The screen is extremely bright and sharp and the interface is well designed and takes full advantage of the enormous screen available to it. In other words, it's an absolute pleasure to use for all the basic tasks. This was really to be expected, but Apple completely outdid themselves this time. Then, of course, it came time to test the virtual keyboard. I honestly was not expecting much, and when I saw how small it actually turned out to be I thought I'd be disappointed even still. The fact that the first time I tried to hit a letter I hit the one next to it instead didn't do much to improve my outlook. But when I tried actually typing out a message I was amazed. Within a minute or two of practice my accuracy had improved amazingly, but it really didn't need to at all. At one point I accidentally typed in 'uojpmw'. The iPhone correctly translated that to 'iPhone'. In fact probably about 99% of the time when I hit the wrong letters because of the small keyboard and lack of tactile feedback it didn't matter because the software was able to correctly predict what I had intended to type. The only times there were ever any problems was with it not getting the word right was with shorter words. For some reason it wasn't very good at the two letter words. Other than that, I was flat-out amazed. Even disregarding the auto-correcting, I'm now of the opinion that the small, touch-screen keyboard is more than sufficient. I think that within a week of using it, anyone should be relatively comfortable with it. Within a month, they should probably forget that there was ever any other way of having a keyboard on a phone.

Having entered the store with the position that 'the iPhone is cool, but I have no real desire to buy one at least until they fix a few things', I found myself very tempted to buy one right then and there. As much as I enjoy using a Mac, I would hardly call myself an Apple fan boy, but just then I was probably as close as I've ever been. I resisted the urge, of course; I'm very happy with my current phone (the Motorola e815, though I plan on replacing it with a RAZR 2 when I can) and provider (Verizon) and don't particularly want to drop $600 on a phone and then spend an additional $75 per month or so on the plan (also I have no particular love for AT&T;). None the less, I was forced to walk out of the Apple store with the opinion that Apple really hit the ball out of the park with this one. The fact that they sold nearly a million units on the first day would seem to support that thesis. I'm very much looking forward to the future of cell phones now. The iPhone and it's successors, I think, will really stir things up. We're hopefully going to start seeing a whole lot of innovation in cell phones, something we haven't really seen in a while.

I can't wait.

Well, I'm currently at the SOHO Apple Store. My bus arrived at 11:20, well before I expected it to. The trip was almost depressingly uneventful. The bus was clean, in good repair, and well driven. No problems what so ever. The only delay we encountered was a broken down bus, and it wasn't even a Fung Wah!

So far, I have to say that Fung Wah does things far better than the MBTA.