Macheist has another shareware bundle up that I guess will soon be available in box form. To me there are only a couple apps in there that are worth it.. but even then your saving a couple dollars compared to if you were buying them on their own.

• Coversutra is a great app that adds an item to your menu bar that lets you quickly search for and play a song, artist, or album. Also lets you control itunes with your keyboard even when its not in focus.

• Xslimmer can save you a whole lot of hard-disk space by deleting language files that you don’t need. Saves me a whole lot of hard-disk space.

• iClip makes your clipboard store more than one item. This is kinda like time machine for your clipboard and has saved me in more than one occasion.

A bit of a survey, if you’ve got the time. This is for shelfworthy and a feature we’re working on, if you can send us some information, that would be great!

Update the link can now be found off of our new fancy splash page here:

shelfworthy.com

I’m sorry that I abandoned you.

There is so much about you that is broken and unfinished.. I mean, your tracking the music I listen to, the my runs using Nike+, my xbox habits, and my twitter—and yet you can’t show it to anyone because I never finished the design. I know you found out about that other website that I’ve been spending all my time with. Please, just don’t be jealous. I’ll get back to you some day in the next couple of months. Promise…

this site is now officially off movable type and running on some custom blogging software built by yours truly in django.

There may be a couple bugs here and there, for example feeds currently are not working or done. I expect to get to most of these over the next week, but thought it was a good idea to at least get the main site back up and running instead of the placeholder that was here for about a week. So enjoy it (even though its the same) and let me know if you run into any issues!

the only issue is that I can’t have the reflections continue to the bottom of the screen. I’m sure I could have made them part of the dock, but then the shadows wouldn’t have a selected state… Ah the curse of being a designer…

The rest of this month is going to be pretty crazy.

I’ve got between 2 and 3 client sites I’m working on that need to be done by then end of the month. One of those is a web application that I just started today while the other two are upgrades.

On top of that, Peter, Jeremy and I have started to seriously design and develop a website that I truly hope will be something special and popular. We have a lot of really good new ideas (in our opinions) that I’ll be building into an alpha in django hopefully before halo 3 comes out.

With all my free time going to this new secret project (I’ll be sure to let everyone know when we’ve decided to say more about it) this site is not going to be getting any love. Over the last couple of weeks I have finished about 80% of translating this site from movable type over to django including some features that are not live here yet (twitter, flickr, nike+, and xbox live integration.) However, completing this site is going to have to wait for our other site which I find much more exciting 

So for now don’t expect a lot of changes on this site. At some point I am going to have to migrate it from its current home on an old joyent server over to a new and shiny shared accelerator this may cause problems, or the site to be down—but without new content this probably won’t be a big deal…

more news as it comes in (just don’t hold your breath.)

Today as part of a media event apple announced that the 8gb iPhone is now priced at $399, a full $200 less than it was yesterday. While this sure is lame for us early adopters, I think I see what apple is thinking. Apple sees that they have a chance at really making a dent in the cell phone market with the iPhone. Its a great product… and even at $600 blows everything out of the water including phones that companies like Motorola and Nokia won’t get out the door for the next year or two. Apple wants to keep up the momentum, there are a lot of people out there lusting over an iphone, and for a lot of them the $600 dollar price point was the only thing holding them back.

By pricing the iPhone at the same—close—price point of the top of the line iPhone they are placing it at a price that got the ipod where it is today. Sure this sucks for us early adopters, but in the long run its moves like this that are going to really bring the iPhone into the mainstream and give apple a chance to really grab market share while the phone manufactures spend the next couple years scrambling to catch up.

I’m sure the initial high price was a sort of insurance in case the iPhone became a nitch or luxury product. If it didn’t sell as well as apple hoped, at this price-point they could continue to support the iphone. But who knows, maybe apple really was taking advantage of us early adopters (shame shame… 

So I decided to take a little break this afternoon and replace the icons on my iPhone. This isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, so I thought it would be a good way to make my iPhone “stand out.”

Here are the results (picture not guaranteed to be well taken):

I think the whole process turned out pretty well. I used icons from the set sticker system by the icon factory. I did have to make the calendar icon myself because sticker system doesn’t included one, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t have worked. You see, the calendar icon on the iPhone is “live” witch means that text is superimposed on top of the icon graphic. This would be all well and good, however, the text is placed so high on the icon that to get the correct proportions with an icon that isn’t 64 pixels square is pretty close to impossible. The icon I made isn’t awful, its just awfully tall.

If you would like to do this yourself, instructions are here please note that this is not for the faint of heart, and could destroy your phone if you do something you are not suppose to… Also, if you are curious, the way I used mac icons is this:

• get info (apple-i) on the file who’s icon you want to use
• click on the icon in the upper left corner of the info window
• apple-c to copy the icon
• open preview and choose “New From Clipboard” in the File menu (or apple-N)
• do a “save as” and save the file out as a photoshop file
• open this file in photoshop shrink it to be 64X64 (or use this fancy photoshop droplet I made *Photoshop required)
• save the file as a .png and follow the instructions I posted before

whee!

So far I’ve very impressed. The iPhone is truly ahead of its time. Sure.. its not without its kinks but its all stuff they can fix. I could go over all the good things in the iPhone UI, but it would take forever because of the good mobile design that has been done. The one thing I must say is that the screen is amazing. Very bright, very clear, and very big.

Here is a list of the few things that annoy me (so far) that I think apple should fix…

• *No To Do App** are you serious?!? a todo app (or todo’s in the calendar) is in my top 3 features I wanted an iPhone for. On the road todo management.
• the calendar doesn’t tell me what events are mine sure, I know I am not in any plays, but at least let me turn off my brothers shared calendar if I want.
• notes seems like an after thought or really, un-thought. I feel like this icon is just filler. It doesn’t sync, it just got some fancy page turning eye-candy. Did I mention there is no todo app?
• the letters on the keyboard are always upper-case. The only way to tell if you have shift down or not is to look at the state of the shift button. I think the keys on the keyboard need to change from upper to lower to make this more clear.
• the “enter” button for tasks using the keyboard is not consistent The send/enter button is sometimes next to the spacebar at the bottom, sometimes above the keyboard, and sometimes at the very top of the screen… eh?
• the icons on the home screen are not “live” In many old screenshots the clock, weather, and calendar icons are live showing real data (time, date, and weather) on the 1.0 release of the iPhone UI, only the calendar icon is really live. The real annoying thing is that the other two look live, but its defiantly not 73 here.
• loading multiple pages on safari seems to be the only way to slow the iphone down. other than that the iPhone seems faster than my MacPro a lot of the time.
• The iPhone doesn’t work with my iPod car kit I think if they are going to add an ipod connector, you should make sure your device works with anything with a connector like that. The sound plays though the iPhone speaker and not the cars 

and thats it! what a great little device 

Benji has been in the hospital for the last couple days, and the prognosis is not looking good. I just thought I would post something. He really had the biggest heart a dog could ever have. He will be missed more than I can say.

Update: (From my mom)

Benji

2–27-98 – 6–28-07

Our ‘gentle giant’, ‘marshmallow
dog’, ‘polar bear’ found peace
today after secretly battling bone
cancer. What a wonderful
companion he was!

Thank-you, Benji for the smiles
and fun memories you gave us.
We will be thinking of you
swimming and running through
the fields with a big smile
on your face.

The more I think about it the more I think that the retail experience for the iphone will be buying the device at the store and going home.

Now this isn’t the current model for buying a cell phone. If you went to an at&t store today and tried to get a new phone you would be filling out paper work, opening the box with the salesman, activating your plan and maybe leaving half an hour later. The situation I just described is not very apple at all, its an awful experience. So how to fix it and make it more apple like? Take it all home.

I think that after buying your iPhone you’ll go home, plug it into your computer and itunes will walk you through setting up your service. This would work for both new and existing customers. If apple and at&t are smart, iPhone users will never have to visit at&t’s website, they can just fire up itunes and see how many minutes they have used and how much they owe.

Oh, and for those few (and I mean few) customers without a computer at home, I’m sure someone in the store can help them, or they could do the setup over the phone.

I was just talking to Don over IM about the iphone while we both were looking at the new iphone content on Apple’s website. One of the things that comes up—and always does these days while talking about the iphone—is the current lack of any SDK or third party support. “But wait!” you might say “Steve Jobs announced that at WWDC, with safari right?” Sure he announced that using safari to server web apps is a way for 3rd parties to get on the iphone, but this is nothing new. Nothing about safari was updated to support this, it could do all that before! So to me, this announcement is non-news.. or at least, its news that Apple isn’t supporting 3rd party development any time soon. Now Don brought up that Apple would be crazy not to open the iphone up, and that all the best applications and ideas eventually come to a platform from the outside. Just look at the mac and PC, while some of the built in apps are nice, the real stars are 3rd party applications. Just look at things like delicious library, disco, and coda. I totally agree, but I’m also worried that the iPhone will have much less of a chance being opened if it sells well as a closed system.

All of Apple’s crazily successful products—led by the crazily successful iPod—have been closed. Really, other than their computers, all of Apple’s products are closed to 3rd party developers at the moment. Now just because these closed systems sell just fine—and my guess is that the same can be said for the iPhone as well—doesn’t mean selling a closed system is a good thing. If Apple had let developers on the ipod in a smart way, just think of the applications we might have now. A nike+ipod application that automatically changes music based on how fast you run, a map application you can download directions into, visual equalizers, games, todo lists, etc. And this is just on the iPod, which in itself is pretty limited input wise but has shown, through many of the games Apple has put out that a lot is possible just using that capacitive wheel.

The iPhone presents a much richer range of input through its multi-touch screen, camera, internet connection and accelerometer. The possibilities are really endless, and sadly no one outside of Apple is going to get the chance to develop on the phone if things stand as they are. Just have a look at iphoneapplicationlist.com. These are not applications, they are web-pages. sure they are made for the iphone, and some even have fancy animations. But these are just web-pages, they can’t take advantage of multi-touch more than using it the way safari is set by apple to use it. They won’t run when you are on the train on the way to work underground. They won’t let you make a game that involves the accelerometer. You’ll have to log into these applications to see your data. The list goes on.

I’m not a iphone doubter as John Gruber might say, I do think that the iphone is going to do well. The thing is that the iphone doing well as a closed system may be the thing that keeps the iphone—like the ipod before it—a closed system. And in the long run, I don’t think this is good for anyone, even Apple.

The one ray of hope I see right now is what is happing with the AppleTV. The AppleTV is also a closed system, but a closed system that people have managed to hack it to do all kinds of things that Apple didn’t intend. If anything, this has been good for the OSX running AppleTV in the long run, and hasn’t hurt the consumers who don’t even understand what’s going on. This same thing could happen with the iphone, and I’m sure very dedicated people with too much time on their hands will be working on cracking the phone so they can write their own real applications for the device. And hopefully it won’t take them long, because I would really love to develop a real application for the iphone.

I just noticed when I got up this morning that somehow the text that I wrote in my colophon—or fancy designer about page—wasn’t there anymore. I’m not sure how this happened, but its back now. You can read it here.

I plan to add more to the colophon section when I have a little time. Mostly it is going to link to any of my notebook entries that talk about how I built this site and what stuff I used. One of the things I do on this site that I’ll just mention here because it just saved all that text I wrote the other night is backup. Because my site is hosted by joyent this is probably something they already do for me behind the scenes (I’m sure just about any hosting company would do this as well.) However, what’s so nice about joyent is that when you buy hosting, you also get all this backup space at Strongspace for free.

One of the things that you can do with Strongspace, because it is running a ZFS file system, is backup using snapshots. What this means is that every-night my web-server is backed up into a folder with that days date on it. So if I changed a file on Monday (like I did with this colophon) and it changes again on Tuesday I can just go into the folder with Mondays date and my file it there waiting for me. My understanding is that because of ZFS this can be done without taking up a lot of disk space at all. Fles that don’t change are still in each folder, but only take up any real space once. This, with the addition that ZFS compresses everything automatically means that something that should take up 27MB of space only takes up 9.7MB. Nice.

Now one of the things about this “backup by date” feature is its not exactly standard. What I mean by that is that its not something that Joyent will automatically do for you (yet.) If you are hosting with joyent and would like to set it up, your going to need to know how to use the terminal or a shell. If this is ok with you, here are the instructions that I used.

Lastly, this feature has saved my butt a couple times. I can’t wait to have leopard running with time machine so I can do this same thing with files on my mac.