Well at some point over the last week, I updated my mac, and now it won’t boot.

I've started to Twitter (http://twitter.com) IM or Email me to get my address.

OK I have to jump in and say that I got to spend 5 minutes with one over the weekend at a party.  I have to say I’m very impressed.  As with any ad you see, you know that the situation is very controlled, and things are loaded up to make the product work as they want it to appear.  So my friend hadn’t had much time to fill the device up before meeting up with us, but he had music, video, family photos, YouTube, contacts and the calendar all populated.  Here are my bullet points.

1. The UI is as fast as the ad, except when rotating.  You rotate the phone a couple times and there is a delay… but it only seems like a delay because the rest of the phone UI is fast.  This delay is the NORMAL speed on my SmartPhone… its delays are measurable in 5-10+ second range.  iPhone was 3 seconds max.
2. Navigating and zooming with finger gestures was fun, not sure how much I would like it over time.
3. I spent some time watching the video on how the soft keyboard works, and feel frustrated it didn’t work as well as I hoped.  I wasn’t trying to type anything complicated and it still didn’t do a very good job predicting my key strokes.  But I only spent 5 minutes with it, I’m sure after a day, it would have trained me to type better.
4. YouTube looks like … um.  YouTube was not very good on the iPhone, because of course of source material.  The display is beautiful, and when higher quality stuff is uploaded I’m sure it will look better.
5. iTunes integration was apparently a breeze for my friend.  His purchased TV shows came over as well as music and album covers.  It all shows a well thought out strategy by Apple to prepare media for their devices.  The TV shows looked very good (in contrast to YouTube).
6. There is a lack of applications, which is frustrating, but with 12k+ Apple employees with the phone, I am sure there will be web based applications a plenty soon enough.
7. The phone is dense… compared with my MotoQ, it had a bigger screen, about the same size, but was a tad bit heavier.

That’s as far as I got before I started to drink and lost interest in the device.  My friend on the other hand was IM’ing people all night.  I couldn’t see what he was typing, just iChat like balloon windows on the screen.

As much as I have come to love RSS, I find that there are just some feeds that I don't check enough, or some that I just get to much information from. I just recently found a great way to keep up to date on the feeds that I don't check that often. To do that, I use a free service called RSSFwd which checks RSS feeds for you, and emails you with the content if there are updates.

Click to subscribe to my site via email. Each email has links to manage your subscriptions, and to unsubscribe.

A coworker pointed out this interesting utility for visualizing what files are taking up space on your hard drive.

http://windirstat.info/ 

 

 For work today I had to help someone figure out how to link our building database application to web based mapping software.  As of recently I've become bored with Google Maps, and spent time looking at Live Search Maps, since they have a bunch of web based tools for adding thumb tacks and a neat 3D view (which is kinda freaky).

First I found this Top 10 Cool Features in Live Search Maps and from there, I was able to figure out How to build a URL for Live Search Maps.  And from that you find out that you can just add any street address to a static URL and get the map and from there, someone could get directions.

One thing that I find Macintosh people are attached to, is the Dock... which is funny since its a new concept for OS X.  There are a couple free solutions that provide a 'simular' featureset for Windows Users.  I find its a bit annoying because besides LOOKING like the one on the Macintosh it doesn't do some of the key 'usability' things that the Macintosh one does.