Daylight savings

As much as I like getting an extra hour of sleep on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago I’m really over daylight savings time now. Sure it’s all nice and good to have a little extra daylight in the morning but its incredibly annoying leaving the office in the late afternoon for a coffee break and having it nearly dark out, or leaving the office at normal time and having it pitch black out. It would much nicer to have that extra hour of daylight in the evening in my opinion. End of my rant.

JMBlogUpdate Twitter account update

Recently I started adding services that are being pushed to my @JMBlogUpdate twitter account. Historically this account has been primarily used to push new posts from this blog.  Recently I’ve added my Google Reader Share feed (via reader2twitter) and Delicious feed (via twitterfeed). I’ll see how permanent this is, but for now I figure it’s a good way to distribute the articles/ websites that I think others may enjoy but don’t necessarily rise to the level to distribute on my primary twitter feed. If you’re interested in checking out this feed follow @JMBlogUpdate or follow the RSS feed and let me know if you think pushing these feeds is worthwhile.

iPhone 3Gs

Finally decided to take the plunge over the weekend and upgrade my iPhone 3G to the 3Gs!!!

I had become so frustrated with the speed of the 3G. Hopefully, the 3Gs will be significantly faster. So thats my new toy to play with. I’m looking forward to a better camera. Ideally, it may be able to replace a point and shoot.

iPhone rant #2

Continuing my rants about the iPhone (which I still love, it’s a sort of love hate thing). In most all native apps the screen changes to landscape view at the slightest hand gesture sideways but it seems nearly impossible to get the screen back to portrait orientation. Come on Apple! either make it just as sensitive to switching back to portrait or let me disable landscape view. This happens to me at least half a dozen times a day.

Photo library management: iPhoto and Aperture?

I am looking for input here. Presently I organize my photo libraries (yes two) using Aperture and iPhoto.

I use iPhoto primarily for what  I consider personal shots (shots w/ friends, family, camera phone etc) mostly because I had the library organized the way I wanted using folders and, when I first moved to a Mac, iPhoto understood this organization. I use Aperture for more what I consider my photo projects which has become the lion share of current photos taken.

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.

Google Calendar Quick add via email?

For a wile I have been looking for an easy way to add entries to my google calendar. I’m a pretty heavy user of google calendar and love the existing quick add option from the web site or via SMS. but sadly, SMS is just too slow and buggy on my iPhone these days to make it useful for me to quickly add items to my calendar. What I really want is the ability to add items via an email address.Frankly, I can’t believe Google hasn’t already added this feature. I can add doc’s via email why can’t I create an appointment via email?  Come on google calender.

Until google creates an official option, does anyone know of a work around?