Starting my 365 project

As I’ve been getting back into photography over the last year one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is actually getting out to shoot. All too often I’m doing something else and taking photographs slips to the back burner. A few days ago I came across Shawn’s post about starting a 365 project (which essentially is a challenge to take at least one photograph everyday for 365 days) that is limited to shots taken with a 50mm lens.

I do like the 50mm lens, I feel it makes the photographer move to compose the frame. However, seeing as how I’m still working back into shooting I’ve decided to be a little less restrictive with my 365 project (come on 365 days is a long time!) in hopes that by providing myself the flexibility to use other lenses and cameras I can improve my overall skill.

Twitter overload?

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big twitter user. Previously, I’ve tried to find the perfect twitter client for me (worked only so well). However, recently I’ve started to feel the brunt of twitter (coupled with Google Reader) overload. I follow a good number of people and do try to read everything that comes across, which I feel is part of the problem I’m now facing. I’ve being coming around to the idea that twitter is a lot about stepping into the stream and then back out, consuming what you want while in the stream and ignoring what happens when not.

As a result, earlier this week I started to pair back on some of the people (in many cases bots) that I followed. For most of these twitter feeds I simply moved them from my twitter timeline and into Google reader as RSS feeds. So far, it’s been an enjoyable experience. Most of the users I transitioned were feeds or users who posted a lot of links; being able to consuming these links during my RSS time seems more efficient.

Now I’m left with one more issue to tackle, within my twitter stream there people I follow that I would prefer to see all tweets from, or at least the majority of them, even for the periods that I am “out of the stream”. Sure, I could add these to SMS notifications but I really hate twitter over SMS. The iPhone handles SMS poorly and I already get too many notifications on my iPhone. So I’m looking for an alternative to SMS for a subset of the people I follow.

I’ve considered hiring a programmer to modify the email twitter client that I had made to only email me tweets from select users in my feed. I like this idea; it allows me to continue to manage just one list of friends and the ability to read all the tweets no matter how long I am out of the stream. The downsides: 1) cost, hiring a programmer=$, 2) since I spend a lot of time in my main stream there’s the risk too many emails will pile up and go unmanaged from the time I’m in the stream and I’ll end up ignoring these emails during the times I anticipated using the system.

At this point I am going to try and setup an additional twitter account to follow this subset of people and launch that timeline when need be. The downside is maintaining two accounts and the potential confusion other people may have with the situation (so if you get followed by my second account you knows what’s up). The advantage being it should take quite a while for 200 tweets (the upper limit for most twitter clients to pull) to cycle through this timeline.

So I’m looking for alternative and am open to any suggestions, please let me know if you have any thoughts.

Microsoft Licensing of Exchange Active Sync to Apple

Brad Feld had an interesting post this afternoon about Microsoft’s intentions in licensing of Exchange Active Sync to Apple for their new Snow Leopard OS. I commented over on the post, basically in agreement with Brad (at least its how I interpret Brad’s post) that a potential motivating factor is to entrench Microsoft’s back-end enterprise system understanding that the end-user interface will face additional competition and its in their best interest to hold onto the back-end infrastructure.

Brad’s post raised a tangential question I had, which is the purpose of this post, how does Apple’s licensing of Active Sync affect Google’s attempt at interfacing with Snow Leopard’s native applications? A while back Google licensed Active Sync from Microsoft for use in their Google Sync product which helps connect Outlook and other handheld devices to Google apps. So now that Apple’s native apps can sync with Exchange and Google Apps have Active Sync capabilities when will Google Apps  sync with Snow Leopards native apps? Brad ponders that the Apple license may in an attempt to keep Google Apps out of the enterprise, but if Google is able to utilize their licensed Active Sync protocol do eventually Google and Apple do and end run around Microsoft and control the enterprise back-end and front-end? This of course assumes that enterprises would be willing to switch to Google Apps, which is still unproven. But as a user of Google Apps, I’m left wondering will I shortly have built in sync for all services between Google and OS X’s apps?

Apple’s 9/9/09 event

There has been a lot of speculation the last few days over what Apple will release or talk about at tomorrows event. In general, I’ve taken much of the talk leading up to previous events with a large grain of salt, just as I am tomorrows. I don’t think we’ll see an apple tablet, although I can’t wait for one to come out (or the CruchPad if its out first). But stepping back from tomorrows event and thinking about the next 12 months for iTunes/iPods/iPhones I personally feel moving to the cloud would be the biggest “revolutionary” step for Apple to make right now. MG had a good post on this topic today, and it rang true for me. I run iTunes on my iMac, which in turn is the central place for all my music, iPod/ iPhone syncing, and as a result photo storage. Its the only computer with enough storage to handle it. But I would love to be able to sync my iPhone with my MacBook Air while traveling, or play music from my Library through iTunes on the Air, or at my work computer. Such functionaly is going to come, its already coming, the quesion is will Apple lead or will another player steal their thunder.

Besides an iTunes in the cloud, i think updated iPod touch’s that include GPS and a camera would be nice. Not necessary but nice. I would actually like a large capacity Touch to put all my media on that would have GPS (camera don’t care so much about) to travel with. As a result of the limited iPhone battery and my constant usage of the device I’m basically unable to play music on the iPhone and would shell out for a second device to travel with. Even more impressive would be functionality to keep two device “in sync” so that application data would be shared between two device. The goal being a seemless user experience transition between devices (including data stored in applications) *even more important for an Apple Tablet, assuming it runs an iPhone like OS*.

On a related topic, come on Apple why can I not sync my iPhone/iPod Touch with my Mac via Wi-Fi if I’m on the same network? That would simplify things greatly.