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MacCog: I help humans.

... your Digital Life Coach and Apple support guru

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on the train in…

here's a cool shot I snapped from the train while watching the live
blog of the keynote with my iPhone.

the motion of the train seems to have skewed this pic in a very cool
way!

hello from Macworld!

hello to my fellow mac travelers… I'm going to be at Macworld San
Francisco for the next two days and thought you might like to follow
along.

it's a journey a long time in the making for me so I want to make the
best of it and remember as much as possible, so I'll be blogging my
discoveries and experiences as they happen so you can share with me
the excitement.

as I write this I'm waiting in Palo Alto for the train to SF. though
it is cold and foggy, my spirits are bright and clear. if you're a
SERIOUS mac fan you are watching one of the many liveblogs of the
keynote right now as I type this. Since I didn't spring the $250 for
the keynote ticket, the one I'm using is the iPhone formatted version
at macrumorslive.com

after the keynote is over, the fun begins. bookmark my maccog blog and
check back for updates over the next two days to get pictures and
commentary on the best booths I find. better yet, subscribe to my RSS
feed with apple mail or safari and leave lots of comments for me to
let me know what you think and that you're paying attention!

j

Sent from my iPhone

here I come, Macworld!

Having the best airport salad EVER in the Bob Hope Burbank airport and
getting psyched for the future being bright 🙂

this is going to be the first industry tradeshow I've been to since
I've stopped collecting comics! and that was a long time ago for this
old man!

How to Manage Your Passwords

A Digital Life is rich with lots of great things, but keeping track of the many many passwords you’ve set up over the years is not one of the greatest. 
This article on a cool new search engine called Mahalo.com will provide some great tips and help you weigh the pros and cons related to managing this lifelong challenge…

http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_Manage_Your_Passwords


If you choose the password management software route, I would suggest most people just need to learn how to use Keychain Access (in the Utilities folder of every mac) or 1password, a great third party solution has even more features, and is part of the software package deal called MacHeist which you should check out if you’re at all into extending the usefulness of your computer with 3rd party software… this is a great deal…

justin

oh, the joy of the iPhone…

If you’re reading this, it’s because I know you to be either an iPhone owner, and iPhone desire-er, or an iPhone resist-er-soon-to-be-owner.


Here’s an excerpt of Stephen Fry’s new blog/column about technology. If you guys don’t know, Stephen Fry is a great British comedian who is also a tech head and writes a column for The Guardian.  I love his stuff and thought I would share this one… which pretty much echoes my own sentiments with my new favorite gadget, the iPhone…

Beauty. Charm. Delight. Excitement. Ooh. Aah. Wow! Let me at it.

In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say. What it does, it does supremely well, that what it does not do seems laughably irrelevant.

The iPhone is a digital experience in the literal sense of the word. The user’s digits roam, stroke, tweak, tweeze, pinch, probe, slide, swipe and tap across the glass screen forging a relationship with the device that is like no other.

It’s so true. Ask anybody who has one. Or get one. Or just read this article by Stephen Fry:



yours truly, 
justin bradshaw

PS: in addition to being an email BCCd to 62 people I know who might be interested, this is a blog post. If you’re reading it as an email, you might want to check out the maccog blog where it will live forever alongside lots of other neat things i’ve posted…
(one of those aforementioned posts is my iPhone wishlist!)

my iPhone wishlist

I originally composed this list for my own edification and never thought it would do anything other than allow me to check off the list as time goes on and Apple puts in my desired features…. assuming they take my sage advice.

Here’s hoping that releasing my grip on this list somehow leads to someone on Apple’s iPhone team reading it…
(I already sent a version of this to their development team but it never hurts to try again, right?)
This list is basically in order of importance and obviousness:

To-Do Application.
WTF??? Is the only thing I can say about this one. So simple, so necessary and so NOT THERE! Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to make this program sync with iCal/Mail’s to-do list. Good, just thought I’d remind you.

t-mobile-like VOIP/cell combo HOTSPOT at HOME
This request, unlike a To-Do list, is non-trivial. Allowing the iPhone to make free-over-wi-fi voice calls would require a hefty programming addition and more importantly an okay from AT&T… grrr.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the single feature that came out just a few days after the iPhone release and got completely overshadowed. But the reality is that it’s almost as cool and just about equally as game-changing. I ALMOST wished I was back on T-mobile so I could sign up for “Hotspot@Home”.
…. and then I picked up my iPhone and kept playing footsie with it and forgot all about it.

Grand Central widget or at least flash in safari
The irony of this situation is not as funny as it used to be. It’s now over 6 months after the iPhone release and I can’t visually check my Grand Central voicemail from my iPhone
Grand Central, (www.grandcentral.com) if you haven’t heard me rave about it yet, is the voicemail box I use for 90% of my calls because it had visual voicemail on the web WAY before the iPhone came out. It’s an amazing life-changing (free!) service that I recommend to just about everyone BUT they have yet to deliver an iPhone interface that works. I’ve emailed them at least 4 times asking when and how they’ll do it and not heard a peep… which is strange because usually they’re johnny on the spot with my comments. weird.
It’s not all Grand Central’s fault, though. Apple has not delivered Flash support on iPhone’s Safari and it’s really not clear why.
This gets another big WTF???

iChat (duh)… or even better, Adium
Since I’m over-using the WTF thing, I might as well keep going… WTF? No iChat? only SMS? And you even make SMS LOOK like iChat so we’ll be lulled into forgetting that we’ve only got 200 of them PER MONTH? Oh and did you say “incoming AND OUTGOING?” I smell a scam… or a rat… or whatever you can think of to describe this corporate greed.
The problem isn’t just Apple leaving an IM client off this device, it’s the added insult to the injury my pocketbook would feel if I used the SMS client like I do my IM client.

copy/paste
I don’t miss this very often, but when I do, I REALLY do. The device is a bit crippled without this very basic of tools. Get with it Apple, it needs to be a full screen shap that we swipe. THAT would be cool!

Spotlight… especially with addressbook
For people like me with less than 1000 contacts, the lack of Spotlight is a mere annoyance when we’re looking for that specific email, but for people (many of my clients) that have upwards of 4,000 contacts, the lack of a quick search is devastating to the usability of this as a phone. How do you find someone’s number easily when there are 400 names under S?

selecting and dragging text
Right there with copy/paste. Absolutely essential for a handheld computer, but granted not so much for a phone, but c’mon, let’s live up to our potential, shall we?

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi syncing
I don’t see any big technical reason Apple hasn’t done this yet. The ability to be able to sync your computer (especially Address Book and iCal) with your iPhone without having to plug it in… (and perhaps even automatically whenever they’re in range of each other) would be amaaazing and I really look forward to that day, yessireee.

Address Book and iTunes integration
My trusty Sony Ericcson 610 (I think that was the model) could connect to my Addres Book and do some pretty cool stuff: I could dial the cell phone just by clicking on a number in Address Book and choosing “Dial with Justin’s Cell Phone”… It was awesome. It would even pause iTunes when I got a call. Why, oh why doesn’t the iPhone do this???? An ominous sign for this feature came when, in Leopard, the button to connect to a cell phone in this way was removed from the program.
Apple, say it isn’t so… say you’re gonna bring back this cool AND useful trick… oh and while you’re at it, why not build support for controlling my computer’s iTunes directly from the iPhone. Sure you can do that very nicely with Remote Buddy (which I love) but c’mon that stuff should be BUILT IN!

.Mac wireless sync
A very close friend of mine who is a huge mac geek and REALLY needs an iPhone more than he knows refuses to get one because it won’t sync the Address Book over the internet with his .Mac account (which by the way he doesn’t have. Apparently he’ll buy .Mac AND an iPhone when this feature goes prime time. Are you listening Apple???)
This is a fancier (and even more useful) version of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi syncing. But just think of the possibilities here! Small businesses could rejoice in the ability to deploy iPhones all over the company and keep a central list of contacts no matter where any of them are on the globe! ah, one day people, one day….

More Storage
I haven’t been too terribly crippled by only 8 gigs but… aw who am I kidding, I can’t fit all my stuff on there! Constant compromising? Not interested! I used to have a 60 gigger folks! It held ALL of my stuff. What can I say, I’m spoiled.
Macworld will most certainly bring a 16gb iPhone. My out-on-a-limb-prediction.

notes syncing with Yojimbo
It doesn’t have to be Yojimbo and I suspect this will be cured by the developer SDK coming out in February, but oh for the love of all things holy, let us access our iPhone notes by some other means than emailing them to ourselves.

voice activated dialing (duh)
A really weird and glaring omission, too. Not something I personally use a lot so it’s not high on my list, but who knows, maybe if it was on my iPhone I would use it…. well of course i would!
Voice Notes would be great, too. For those looking for a great way to take voice notes using any phone, try Jott.com, it’s very cool.

3G network
Yeah, yeah yeah. everybody complains about this one. I think EDGE is reasonable. I mean I rarely find myself waiting for it. Yeah, browsing on espn.com over edge is ridiculous, but that kinda sucks on a desktop with DSL too. So yeah, it would be nice to have the faster 3G network, but I’m not sweating it. The Japanese on the other hand, will have nothing to do with a device that doesn’t do the 3-to-the-G and I don’t blame them. They’ve got so many cool phones that we’ve only dreamt about it’s not even funny. But the iPhone will rock their world when it comes out in 3G (and in their native GSM frequency)

laptop connections through EDGE/bluetooth
Oh yeah, another thing I could do with my trusty Sony Ericsson (albeit slowly and unreliably) was use my laptop to connect THROUGH my phone to the internet with the cell data network. THAT was really cool and I think to be the endgame for connectivity. I suppose Apple wants to wait for 3G and an okay from AT&T for this, but it’s a BIG one on my list (don’t be fooled by it’s proximity to the end of the list)

flickr integration
Sigh, back when I had 1.1.1 on my iPhone and I was downloading tons of stuff with “Installer” I found a program that would upload pictures from my iPhone to flickr. It was not very good actually but got me enticed. I would LOVE to see Apple’s relationship with Yahoo! climax in a dedicated Flickr app for uploading to and viewing of this amazing network of pictures and photographers!

skype
This goes along with, but is not the same as, my request for Wi-Fi based VOIP as provided by the carrier. But Skype is going to produce an iPhone client with the SDK coming in February…. I just hope that Apple or AT&T – or both – don’t try to squash this one for some stupid corporate agenda.
gps
The more I use the amazing Google Maps the more I want to know where I am and which direction I’m going. Having a GPS in the iPhone, while not being essential to me, would be insanely cool… I mean “insanely great”!

better wifi reception
the range for my iPhone is woefully behind that of my MacBook. Sure, the MacBook has the best reception of any laptop (apple’s or otherwise) that I’ve ever seen and it’s probably unfair to compare a phone to this, but I’m doing it anyway… give us better reception so we can sign onto more wireless nodes and buy more songs on iTunes!

Multi-media messaging
Filed in the category of absurd ironies like my Grand Central/Visual Voicemail dillema, getting a text message that says I must go to a website and use a cryptic and complicated username and password to retrieve a MMS someone sent me from their crappy flip phone… seems insane when one considers that this thing is capable of holding over 3000 of my pictures and geting new ones vial email all day…. but text messaging? no way. weird.

File-level browsing
the geek in me really wants to get in there and explore the guts of this mobile OSX. I used “Mobile Finder” when I was in iPhone app-bliss but want it to be official and supported.

I want my m-p-3-tooones
iToner does this for me, but that stuff seems to keep getting randomly deleted from the phone. An annoyance for me and for the developer caused by Apple. Stop being boneheads! We should be able to make our own ringtones and legally put them on our phones! geeeeez.

iTunes purchasing power (delivered)
Of course, the one thing on my list that they’ve already handled… is a way for them to make more money.
Don’t get me wrong, I love apple, but sometimes it’s a tough love 🙂
If you agree, disagree, or want to burn me in effigy, please comment on this post and share your thoughts….
thanks,
justin


The truth about bad companies…

Sometimes bad companies can get away with harming customers for a
long time without getting caught. Businesses that rely on one-off
relationships especially.

It's extremely stupid to burn a bridge with anyone when you're in my
business because it's so repeat and referral driven. However, business
models like spa promotions can thrive for quite a while before
awareness reaches the level it needs to for people to avoid being
victimized…. Case in point: BDBG Promotions and Spa Society owned
and run by Elizabeth Martin.

While I have my own stories to tell about this company and this
person, I'm here to promote an effort to expose a bad company in the
interest of protecting the future consumer.

Not all spa promotion companies are crooked. One of those (in which
I hold personal interest) is The Eleanor Group. Once upon a time BDBG
Promotions filed a vicious, slanderous and frivolous lawsuit against
The Eleanor Group. It has survived, even thrived because it stood up
against Elizabeth Martin and BDBG and won in court… (though it was
easy because the plaintiff didn't even show up to court for the trial)

So please check out the new myspace expose!

http://www.myspace.com/antispasocietybdbg

justin

PS: I don't know the girls who created this myspace profile, but I
sure wish them luck and perseverance in going after this lady!