Nels Wadycki » iPhone

Apple Revamping Notifications: Best News I’ve Heard All Day

Nels — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:21:24 +0000

Knock knock. Who’s there? An interrupting notification. An interrupting notif… TWEET!

Apparently Apple is going to buy a company to redo their notifications for them. I’m not sure why they don’t just have the devs who did the original system fix it, but then again, I don’t really care. As long as they care of the ugly interrupting boxes it’s all good.

Give me the drawer!

Other Stuff Like This

Vying For Your Attention

Nels — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 04:05:00 +0000

In an effort to vie for your attention in the Check In Wars, Gowalla now lets you check in on Facebook and Foursquare.

In an effort to vie for your attention in the TV and Movie Watching Wars, Netflix is willing to shell out big bucks for in-season TV shows. Good thing because the prospect of paying $15 for Netflix and $8 for Hulu – while still cheaper than cable, satellite, or AT&T’s thing – is starting to look expensive to a ~~cheapskate~~ frugal person like me.

Other Stuff Like This

You Learn Something New Every Day: 002

Nels — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:20:28 +0000

I learned: That I can type on my phone for about 8 minutes in 40 degrees before my hands get cold enough that I want to stop. Of course I could do better if it was an emergency. You know, a typing on your phone for extended periods in cold weather emergency.

Other Stuff Like This

Evidently AT&T Does Know What Kind of Phone I Have

Nels — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:35:17 +0000

This one is a much better sell than the previous marketing email. Still kind of odd they’re going for the upsell iof adding a line with the 3GS instead of the 4G, but perhaps they did some checking and saw that I’m not actually eligible for the 4G just yet.

Other Stuff Like This

Doesn’t AT&T Know What Kind of Phone I Have?

Nels — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:40:21 +0000

Maybe they make more off the BlackBerry since they don’t have to give as much back to the manufacturer of the phone?

Other Stuff Like This

As the iPhone evolves, so does Gmail

Nels — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000

But none of the recently announced innovations are making my eyes light up like a kid first gazing on his Easter basket.

First, from the Gmail Blog: Nested Labels and Message Preview. The Nested Labels thing actually did have me excited as though it were a chocolate egg or perhaps a Peep. But then I read this:

Please note that this lab doesn’t play nicely with the “Hide Read Labels” lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won’t always appear when they should.

and all the twinkle in my eyes was snuffed out. I tried it out and found it to be true. It didn’t work.

Honestly, the “Hide Read Labels” lab experiment is more important to me than sub-labels ever could be. Since I make extensive use of the keyboard shortcuts, I can navigate to any label I want with a simple “g + l” or “/” and the name of the label. I use the “Hide Read Labels” so that I only see labels with unread messages, which gives me a visual indicator of what has been filtered out of my Inbox and placed under another label for later viewing. Thus instead of viewing 44 labels, I can collapse my chatterbox (which I don’t use anyway since I have Trillian) and see my Calendar Gadget. Viewing Unread Messages and Upcoming Events is easily of more value than being able to have labels under other labels. Of course, the whole labeling system was designed so that you don’t really need nested labels at all. I know there are people who have not given up the folder hierarchy mindset, but it’s too bad that they’ll have to give up their hidden read labels in order to get it.

Another thing it’s too bad people have to give up in exchange for something else: Flash. We all know Steve Jobs hates Flash, and since Apple can do whatever they want, they’re free to disallow the use of Flash on the iPhone and iPad until a court of law says otherwise. It just seems kind of mean and pointless. I mean, even if Flash goes the way of Cobol, Adobe isn’t going to die. They have a suite of graphic design and image editing tools that is basically unparalleled. Photoshop : Graphic Design :: iPhone : Smartphones.

It really just seems like another iPhone “because we can” move. Much like the we don’t want a porn store excuse for not allowing unsigned apps on the iPhone. At least with that one they have a reason, but really it’s just another “because we can” move. It’s not about porn on the iPhone, it’s about apps which provide no revenue for Apple.

It’s certainly not a dumb move by Apple, and in this case (as opposed to the Flash case), they at least have a legitimate excuse to hide behind. I’m sure Google is betting that once they hit a tipping point in terms of number of apps, normal people (i.e., the non-geeks) will get outside of the default “must buy iPhone” mentality and at least consider that there are other possibilities.

The other iPhone point I wanted to make was more related to the point I was making about addition of new Gmail features and concerns iPhone OS 4. Honestly, Multitasking isn’t something I think I actually need. It seems great in theory, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for. Since I can already listen to the iPod through the native app and then go do other things, I’m not sure what else I would want running in the background that doesn’t already provide push notifications (e.g., email, phone, etc). I would consider streaming internet music if there were a Lala app available, but since Apple bought Lala, I think that multitasking use case has all but died.

The folders thing will be nice, but again, not something I’m jumping up and down about. I have a pretty stable set of apps on my phone now, and while grouping them will probably make life a little easier, I’ve gotten pretty used to things as they are so I’m not singing out for joy at the thought of being able to reconfigure them a little bit more now… It’s a nice feature, but it’s also something that I would have already had if I’d gotten an Android phone. And if the Motorola Droid or the Nexus One had been around at this time last year, I probably would have.

Other Stuff Like This

Let Me Pay With My Phone!

Nels — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:02:30 +0000

ReadWriteWeb says it’s already common in Asia.

I told me wife when we got our iPhones last year that some day we’d be paying with our phones instead of credit cards. She wasn’t entirely convinced, but I think the only real argument she had was that if you lose your phone you lose not just your contacts, calendar, apps, etc, but you also lose your payment device. I don’t really see how that’s any more of a problem than losing your credit card… All you do is call your company and cancel it.

The argument I see is that if your credit card bill melds with your phone bill, we’ll probably stop getting the same kinds of rewards from credit cards. I’ve been able to save quite a bit of money for retirement simply by using cards that provide rewards with companies where I have my IRA accounts.

Of course, the RWW article doesn’t say if the charges on an NFC-enabled phone accrue to your phone bill, or if it can simply be used with an existing credit card account.

Other Stuff Like This

Mobile + Cloud = Magic … Right Now!

Nels — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:40:53 +0000

It’s funny that the these two posts both appeared on TechCrunch just yesterday…

First: Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt on the Magical Potential of Mobile Cloud. I will re-blockquote:

The mobile platforms, Android and the others, are so powerful now that you can build client apps that do magical things that are connected with the cloud. This is I think the most visually obvious example of that…don’t limit your imagination to this set of problems. Anything where you can produce this phenomenal customer benefit when you have a mobile device broadly defined connected to the cloud….Obviously we like the price of free because the consumers like that as well and we can figure out ways to use advertising to pay for it.

The way he says it, he makes it sound like this is still a few years in coming… but then there’s this post about Lala.com’s iPhone app which was just submitted a few days ago, and basically does exactly what Schmidt was talking about: Use the mobile cloud to make magic happen.

I’ve already expounded on my love of Lala, and how I may never buy another mp3 again, and now that I’ll soon be able to (hopefully) listen to all my music on my iPhone from the cloud, why would I???? I can store a lot more music on Lala than I can on my iPhone, and at significantly lower cost!

It’s like I told my wife last night (talking about why I didn’t want anything more than watching a Bulls game for my birthday): I can get any DVD I want from Netflix, I can get any music I want on Lala, and I can get any book I want from the library. When you couple with that, the fact that I don’t really need any new clothes since I don’t even wear everything I own now, and the only thing that I really need for my birthday is more time.

Other Stuff Like This

Aardvark on the iPhone – Mobile Answers

Nels — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:26:44 +0000

The need to call my brother-in-law when I was out and needed access to a computer ended when I got my iPhone, but now Aardvark has taken that sort of help and said “Hey, you can ask hundreds of people’s brothers-in-law at the same time!”

I’ve been a fan of Aardvark for some time now, so of course I downloaded the app right away. It’s great that the iPhone has Push Notifications now because otherwise the app would be fairly useless, but as it is, it works pretty much as well as the IM interface that I normally use.

Other Stuff Like This

Post To And Read Your TO READ List From Anywhere With Email

Nels — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:00:30 +0000

I don’t know how this is going to work once we start Waving everybody, but for now, this is how I populate my To Read List without using Delicious or Instapaper or {Your App Here}, but rather with a tool that requires no additional sign-ups: Email.

Okay, I lied a little. You’ll need an RSS Reader too. Because, if you didn’t have one of those, really, what would you be reading? Hardcopy newspapers? Get outta here! Anyway, I use Google Reader, but any RSS Reader with an “Email This” function will do (I know that Bloglines has one).

Here we go:

Set up filtering mechanisms for articles to add to your To Read List

For this, I added a contact in Gmail called Filtered Reader and added a “+asdfasdf” to my email address for that contact
Then, I added a filter for that particular version of my email address that will skip my Inbox and apply the To Read label

Then, you go to Google Reader and as you go through items, if you don’t feel like opening it in a new tab to read (I know this is a common practice), you can instead just email it to yourself
Do the same thing in your Twitter client by emailing yourself Tweets that you want to follow up on (ones where people post links to things you want to read)

Okay, now, I guess the “Anywhere” part of the subject will take some additional work. I.e., it will probably require a smart phone if you really want to read your To Read List anywhere. Of course, you can get an iPhone 3G for only $99 (at the time of this writing), and the normal 3G is plenty fast enough, because all you’re going to want to do now is make sure that the emails sitting in your To Read label or folder are downloaded onto your phone. *POOF* You now have your To Read List with you anywhere you bring your phone!

And! You can post to it using your phone as well because Google Reader has a very nice web interface. That will, of course, only work in places where you have 3G access, but I’ve heard talk that they’re going to develop off-line capable versions of the web apps, so if/when that becomes a reality, it will solve that problem.

Why Use This Jacked Up System Instead of The Glorious {Your App Here}?

Well, basically, because when I use {Your App Here}, I only use one end of it. That is, I post to it. But I never actually read it. My Delicious bookmarks To Read tag has 58 links going back as far as 2006.

But {Your App Here} Has an Awesome iPhone App!

So does Email. In fact, Gmail has two awesome iPhone apps: Mail.app and the Gmail Mobile Website. This allows me to download email to my phone for off-line access or apply multiple colored labels to emails. And as we (should) all know, everyone sits their with their email app open all day, but I would imagine that most people don’t sit with Delicious or Instapaper open all day. A To Read List in your email is ready to go without doing anything but switching folders.

Added Bonus: Instead of deleting a read item as you would have to do with Delicious or some other bookmarking services (not sure how Instapaper works for that), you can just remove the To Read label and you’ll still have the full article accessible if you want to refer to it later.