Thoughts and Ideas

Had a wonderful and exhausting weekend. It was great to see so many people interested in these technologies. The crowd was eager and gracious for the event. Thank you to everyone involved: the attendees, the staff, the speakers, and the people that made it happen for us, the sponsors!

I’m still recovering and have a booked schedule this week. But, I still plan to follow up with the subject of transitions in the TileList that I talked about in my session.

It looks as though I will be teaching a single-day session on Beginning Adobe Flex in Bloomington, Indiana on September 7th.

The event is shaping up to be nearly three times as large as last year. This year we are providing a day of ColdFusion training. So, Saturday’s CF event is named BFusion.

For more information about the session, visit the BFlex website.

Following these instructions I was able to set up a way to Twitter from Quicksilver quickly and easily, check out the video below.

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I always end up going from Google to Ultimate-Guitar.com to find guitar tabs.

The entire process was distracting and kept me from focusing on what I wanted to do, play my guitar.

So, in some of my free time, I’ve created a new application, TabApp, which allows registered users of Ultimate-Guitar.com to quickly access their saved tabs and search for new songs.

If you are one of the lucky ones who happens to own an Intel-based Mac, check out the most recent Beta Build of Parallels.

They have included a new feature called “Coherence” that allows you to run Windows applications in the same ‘window-space’ as Mac applications. This means you can have your Outlook running in a window next to Safari without having to switch back/forth between modes. I’ve included a video from LifeHacker below, which shows Coherence in action.

I really wonder if Apple is planning on integrating this type of functionality into the next version of the OS. Imagine an environment like the old ‘Classic’ environment where you launched Windows once and then, transparently, when you clicked on Windows applications, they would launch in a new window.

I’ve been wanting to get a MacBook Pro for some time now. This might just be the motivation I need.

Thanks to LifeHacker for this great video!

The Wii is Popular.
On Saturday the 18th of November, I began my quest to obtain a Wii. Having been thwarted on my attempts to pre-order through Amazon, GameStop, and other retailers, I was determined to be the “first on my block” to have one. Many people, including myself, anticipated Amazon’s launch of the Wii to take place at midnight on the west coast, or 3 a.m. here in Indiana. I settled myself in to a long night’s haul with several DVDs, my laptop, a blanket, and my DS… on my couch. That was the draw, sure I’d be a guy who spent his night trying to get a Wii, but at least I would be warm and comfortable while I did it. 3 a.m. came and went with no change on Amazon’s site. Those other souls who waited up like me began to theorize when Amazon would actually launch the Wii. 4 a.m. came and went, no Wiis to be found. Finally I grabbed an hour of sleep and ventured out, in the freezing cold, to Target, Sears, K-Mart, and Best Buy to find that all Wiis were accounted for and my late-attempt to obtain one was heckle-worthy, and I was unwelcome.

I went home and sat on my laptop with cat-like reflexes and was finally able to place an order at around 10 a.m. on CircuitCity’s website. Success! Many were not so lucky and, even after having spent the night on Amazon’s site, were unable to order a Wii on that day.

The Wii is Well-Received!
My Wii showed up a few days later (Yay FedEx!). Over Thanksgiving, I took it with me to visit my family and friends and hooked it up everywhere I went. Amazingly, people of all ages had to try it. My grandmother, who happens to be a near-luddite, raved about the marvels of technology and how “fantastic” it was. She really was awe-struck. Several family friends, all in their late 50s and 60s, played tennis, bowling, and baseball for an extended amount of time. People loved it. Many of these same people, who don’t normally even consider playing a video game, started to ask me about buying one.

Once the Thanksgiving week was past me. I playing Zelda and Sports without an audience. Paying close attention to the controls, I realized that the motion sensing acutally added some fun into Zelda. I imagined what it would be like to look at a person playing Twilight Princess on the GameCube and on the Wii side by side; Who would be having more fun? The Sports games are very fun but rather shallow and I find that I’m starting to tire of these (after almost a month).

Will the Wii keep it’s new-car smell?
Remember when you got your last ‘new’ car? You were careful not to spill food (or even eat in it for some of you). You washed it whenever you thought the glare off of your shiny paint wasn’t blinding enough. You loved your new car. Then sometime, a few weeks later, you dropped a straw wrapper on the passenger-side floor—”I’ll just pick it up when I get home.” you told yourself. The car needed to be washed, but you were busy. You are heading to work and you catch yourself: you’ve stopped thinking of the car as new and it’s just a car again. These moments are disappointing, but unavoidable. It struck me the other day, my Wii is just another game system.

Yes, the games are fun. Yes, it’s shiny. But I’m just not excited any more.

I have a feeling that many people out there are experiencing this effect right now. The novelty has worn off. So, what’s next? Will game developers harness this new controller scheme to create excitingly new and engaging games the likes of which we’ve never seen? Or, will this now-golden-boy be relinquished to the bottom of your entertainment center and slowly be forgotten?

What are your thoughts?

Two weeks ago, I sold my Treo 650 and ordered a Nokia e62.I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this phone, but eventually began reading raving reviews about the phone’s design and the s60 3rd edition Symbian OS. I know that an attractive pricepoint on eBay and the phone’s “newness” all contributed. After waiting like a kid at Christmas for the FedEx delivery person to arrive, I finally had it in my hands.

First impressions
The phone is gorgeous. It looks like the hot cousin of a Blackberry. Comfortable to hold. Great looking keyboard. The display was crisp and colorful and HUGE.

While sitting at my desk shortly after it arrived, I heard some weird music coming out of the speakers on my desk. I was surprised when someone yelled at me to turn off my ringer, dug deep in my pocket and retrieved the phone and answered the call. The quality blew me away. The call was crystal clear. I completed the phone call and was absolutely ecstatic about my purchase. I decided I would set up my email next.

Email Connectivity
When I did read the reviews of this phone, some of the reviewers complained about slightly slow transitions between programs. I had experienced some slowdowns with my Treo in the past and had assumed that it couldn’t be worse than those. I was wrong.

I first noticed the sluggishness of the phone when I began the process of setting up my email accounts. I started navigating the menus and entering in my account details. What would normally amount to a half-second delay on the Treo seemed annoyingly long at 2 seconds. Sometimes screens would take 5-7 seconds to appear. When setting up my email accounts, I had many pages of options to fill in. In the end, I’m sure that over 2 minutes of the 10 minutes it took to set up my email account was spent staring at the screen wanting something to happen. This was VERY annoying.

I have two accounts that I check: a personal IMAP account and work IMAP account. With the Treo, I had used a program called ChatterEmail which provided near-push responsiveness with my email. After I got my email accounts set up, I enabled ‘automatic retrieval’ in the options. This setting allowed me to check my email every 2 minutes. It wasn’t instantaneous like with the Treo, but I figured it would be fine. Had this worked, yes it would have been fine. But, like many devices out there, I think this device over-promised and under-delivered. I started to receive emails at somewhat regular intervals. It was odd, sometimes a message wouldn’t come through until 15 minutes after I had received it on my laptop. Eventually, the mail application began crashing. It would just hang. I did find that the Symbian OS has a nice interface to kill errant processes… quite convenient in this scenario.

During the entire time of using the phone for email, I would experience the following problems:

• The ‘auto-retrieval’ functionality would toggle itself off, leaving me thinking that the phone was checking my email when it wasn’t.
• The mail application would freeze up and become entirely unresponsive.
• Mail would not actually be checked in the time specified.

If it didn’t crash, and the auto-retrieval worked, I could use this phone. There were still a dozen things about the mail application which I couldn’t stand. The most painful was that, in order to mark a message as read, I had to either ‘click’ on a message, download it from the server, wait for it to load, and return to the message index (about 30-40 seconds), or go into a contextual menu and click ‘mark as read’ (which was about 9 button presses and about 10 seconds). To clean out an inbox of 5 messages, would take me about 3-4 minutes by the time I entered the mail program and had deleted, marked as read, or read these messages. If I want to reply, you can add into the equation another minute plus the the time it takes for you to write the message. So, if you had 10 messages and wanted to reply to 3 and read the others, you are looking at about 15 minutes just to fire off a few emails.

Phone functionality
At first I was VERY impressed with the phone as a phone. I still think the sound-quality is better than any other device I’ve used (landline included). My only complaint, and it’s a large one, is that I have had a couple equations where someone is sending me SMS messages and they don’t arrive until hours later. I would think this to be a carrier problem, but I never experienced this on my Treo and the other Cingular users in the room both sent and received messages without problems. I had the same issue with voicemail notifications.

Final thoughts
I think the phone is a great phone that has rich email capabilities for a casual user. However, this phone is not the Blackberry-killer that it has been made out to be. I would recommend this phone for someone who likes to know that, if they need to, they can still read and respond to email when they aren’t around a computer. For professionals or email junkies, don’t get this phone, stick with your Blackberry, Treo, or WM phone.

This phone is going back today. I will miss looking at it.

Dinner with Jane Martin and the WT Crew

Last night, I had the opportunity to enjoy a nice meal with a decent portion of the WisdomTools crew. Brian Bothwell, our VP of Systems and Development, was in town to assist with our office move. Jane Martin, WisdomTools’ former CEO and current board member, invited us all.

I am really glad to be part of such a great team of people. If you don’t know what we do, check out the WisdomTools site at WisdomTools.com or drop me an email and I can set you up with a demo.

We all had great food, great drinks, and great fun.

Thanks again Jane.