Quality vs time to market
or "When is WiFi coming"
Today my WACS700 went dead. It's a Streamium music center from Philips. I was trying to connect to it from an older Windows app included as a bundle to upload some new music. Something happened with the Streamium when starting the app at one time and since then the music center hangs when booting up. I've just mailed the support so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. My best guess for the reason is that the music center has poorly written logic - a.k.a. buggy.
It got me thinking about how often products including WiFi are too quickly released to the market. I don't own any product, except the Iphone of course, that has WiFi implemented in a way OK for the user. In addition there are several fields where you'd think there were products with WiFi but there isn't. Digital cameras is one.
I don't know, but I'm still waiting for the world of no cables.
First post from the iPhone
That's it. Now I got my own iPhone and I'm writing this post directly on it using the WordPress for iPhone app. Works very well so far although I haven't published this yet. Anyway, back to iphoning.
Creating mockups for the iPhone
There is a tool out there called Balsamiq Mockups. It's a layout and mockup tool for quickly putting your screen, window and view ideas into concrete. Instead of drawing on paper or on the white board, you use Balsamic Mockups.
In March 2009 (yes, I'm a bit late) they added support for the most common controls in the iPhone. The following UI bar is now available:
iPhone UI bar for Balsamiq Mockups
And here is a quick example for yet-another Task app:
Balsamiq Mockups iPhone example
Very nice work by the Balsamiq people.
iPhone tripod
I stumbled upon this today while browsing casually. It's a tripod for the iPhone - or actually it's a mini tripod with an iPhone adapter. It's a fairly high want-to-have score on it, but I wonder how much I would use it in the end. Quite cool though, and it even has adjustable legs.
iPhone rules
Yesterday I wrote about the iPhone lacking in some details. Today this still stands but the iPhone simply rules. I base this sudden aawh on seeing the text thread feature - simple and elegant - and also how to edit a recorded movie. As a techie I'm a bit surprised I haven't even touched an iPhone before, but today I don't mind. Next thing up on the list is simply an iPhone of my own.
New phone
Today we had a new arrival in the family. Until now we've been calling it "the iPhone", mainly because it's an iPhone - who could guess. Unfortunately for me, it belongs to my wife but this post will not be about jealousy; instead I thought I'd drop some of my immediate thoughts and comments after being allowed to watch over a shoulder for a couple of minutes. Even though the iPhone isn't new on the market, I write this anyway because I want to.
Packaging
It's very elegant. Instead of coming home with a rather big box made up of a mix of carton and transparent plastic, it's a quite small, black box made of smooth carton. On the top is the image of an iPhone with its home screen displayed. The edges of the phone are reliefs.
In that box, together with the phone and charger, is a bunch of small papers, five to be exact. There are two quick start guides or something like that, one in Swedish and one in Finnish, one legal information for each language and two Apple logo stickers on the last paper (maybe I'll convince my wife to put one of the stickers on my Lenovo Thinkpad - or not). The quick start guides may be more of introductions to the cool touch features than information on how to get started. That leaves out real documentation which I cannot see anywhere, but who should need it, right.
All-in-all the packaging is very elegant and eco.
iPhone - My ego: 1-0
Physical installation
Applying the SIM-card. That shouldn't be too hard. We're looking for some slot or something to pull out where a SIM-card can be placed and then applied to the phone. We cannot find anything of the like, but the inner packaging where the "quick start guides" were located we see a figure explaining how to do just this. Something that looks like a tuning fork or a clip should be applied to the bottom of the phone. This small tool is finally found and can then be used to pull out a small container where we put the SIM-card. It's quite cool, cute, elegant but my final feeling is "why"? Now we have to make sure not to lose this stupid little tool if we would ever want to switch SIM-cards. Maybe a standard clip will work, but I'm not convinced.
It's been equalized: 1-1
Startup
My wife did all of this - kudos to her - but I heard her groaning a bit in the background while doing it. I'm not sure this is required, but she had to install iTunes on hew EEE in order to get the SIM-card validated or something like that. I really hope this is not the case, since even if every person has a computer today, it shouldn't be required to install a phone. But then again, iPhone is so much more than a phone.
After all, I think now have the lead: 1-2
UI
This is where it starts to get very interesting. Just to unlock the key-lock (or is it screen-lock) is so super cool. Just slide your finger to the right and voila, you're in. Looking at a web site and doing the zoom-in and zoom-out is also very cool. Graphics are very nice and they've nailed the scrolling and switching page thing. Pre-installed applications are quite OK. Not too many eye-brow raisers but having YouTube and Maps directly in the phone is nice.
There are some negative things though. The keyboard is a bit hard to use, but maybe you get used to it. They should have spent more time on being able to type numbers and the most common special characters (like @ and . etc) on the first key-page. Maybe there are some special gestures or something which I'll learn. The check box is also a bit strange. It's like a physical flip-button which says | or O. It's not obvious what means turned on and off.
Overall, they made a three-pointer here: 4-2
Continuing
I've also looked very briefly into how to develop own apps to the iPhone. Even though there seems to be ways of developing on a Windows machine, it turns out that you are really forced to have a MAC OS computer. This smells so bad that I could almost refuse to get one for myself, but I will probably surrender in the end.
Small comforting goal in the end: 4-3
Summary
As a quick summary for this very brief review I can say that I like the iPhone, it feels like a mature phone and they have really spent time on the user interface. I feel like it lacks in functionality, but I can't pin-point what I'd like to see more. It is truly a fun phone, but maybe it's not the best business phone yet - that's yet to be evaluated by me.
New car – part 2
Yes indeed. We now are a happy car owning family. Or at least very soon, some formalities left - like payment. And it turns out that the car was in stock at the dealer so we're probably have it in 14 days or less.
Another color though:
Renault Mégane Sport Tourer - Extreme Blue
New car
Despite the title of this post, we don't own a new car ... yet.
But we are looking to buy one. By living in central Stockholm and working from home, you don't need a car very often, which is why we don't have one. But now we have a kid and even if it's quite easy to take the commuter train to visit our families it's always somewhat of a hurdle. Plus, with a car of your own you get a completely different freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want without having to loan one from your friends or family.
As the third city in the world, Stockholm introduced congestion charges in 2006, but if you have an environmentally friendly car (relatively speaking) you're not charged anything. In a similar way it was free to park on the streets without paying any parking fees up until 2005 if you had such a car. That's history now, and so will probably the exclusion from congestion charges be as well, from 2011.
Nevertheless we're aiming for this car, Renault Mégane Sport Tourer (Swedish link), Expression Flex Fuel version, and we're going to pay a visit to look at it today.
Renault Mégane Sport Tourer
Perhaps we're a lucky car owning family by the end of the weekend. Then it's just n number of months before we can take it for a spin.
Old work
I promised I would write a post with some old work. So here it is. These pictures have more affection value to me than real value but nonetheless they tell my story a bit.
I have some personal bests, and these are the one with the palm tree and the one with the bridge. I'd like to think they have some artistic quality. The rest are just examples of pictures I've taken. To be fair, it could even be that some are taken by my wife.
All are taken without any kind of real stand and all are taken with the auto exposure set, if available. Most are taken with a compact that has only the auto exposure.
Anyway, enjoy.
Rookie mistake – ISO revisited
I said I may revisit the ISO topic in the future, but I didn't think it was going to be this quick.
After playing with the ISO value the other day I accidentally left it set to ISO H 1.0 (or ISO 3200.) I couldn't see that much difference between the different ISO values at that time.
Yesterday I was shooting taking pictures of my son while he was taking a bath. I don't think you can find a more cheerer picture to be honest. I set up the stand, mounted the camera, composed the picture and set focus, aperture and shutter speed. I took some shots and checked their sharpness in the LCD display. It looked good so we (me and my wife) tried getting the best smiles and cutest, funniest, coolest poses. I think we succeeded, tell by yourself.
f/5.6 - 1/80s - ISO 3200
This is just one of them, but he's just great!
Click on the picture and you'll notice all the grain. Unfortunately I didn't notice this until checking on the computer, and then the moment was gone since ages. I'm quite positive this is due to incorrect ISO setting. I'll make sure to check all settings next time.