Baggas' Blog

After an hour’s download and installing at home, I’ve spent most of this morning playing around with iOS4 on my iPhone (and seeing a few patients in between…)

And thus far I’m impressed. I love the folders feature, although it took me a while dragging app icons around on my phone to get it all organized. Now I can get to all my apps so much faster, without swiping through pages and pages of icons. And I can also download heaps more apps to play around with. Yay!

One weird thing is that I’ve downloaded the iBooks software onto my iPhone, but can’t find the App icon anywhere. I can load the app by searching for iBooks on the search screen, but the icon is nowhere to be seen (and I looked in all my folders several times!). Weird and annoying.

I like the customisable backgrounds, little GPS icon and the new location services screen. Multitasking seems quite functional, and there is no hit in terms of performance, although I haven’t really pushed it too far just yet. In fact the whole phone feels considerably more zippy than with OS3.

For a good detailed rundown on iOS4, see this article from Gizmodo.

In other Apple related news, the Perth Apple Store opens this Saturday. Look forward to checking it out, but I’m afraid it will have to wait til I get back from my UK trip (leave next Monday).

While those of us in Australia have to make do with just our small screen iPads iPhones for a while longer, I thought I’d mention a few cool apps I’ve been using lately.

Ever since I got my iPhone I’ve been looking for a good to-do list app. I’m a big user of to-do lists and often have an old fashioned paper version sitting on my desk at work or the bench at home. I’ve tried a number of free and paid apps including Things, Tasks, and others, but never found one that really suited me. They are either too complicated or not powerful enough or not quick to use. In fact the one list program I use the most on the iPhone is a simple shopping list app called ShopShop that Jenni found. It’s created for creating a number of simple lists that you can cross off (ie when walking around a shop) and even email to other users of the software so they can import lists into the App on their own phone (Jen does this for me sometimes). I use this app not only for going shopping but also for longer term lists of things I need to buy, or tasks related to various groups I am involved in etc. It’s not very sophisticated, but it works.

But now I’ve discovered 2Do. This is a very impressive list app that is worth every cent of it’s A$5.99. It’s visually beautiful, easy to navigate, but packs a powerful set of features under the surface. I really like the tabbed interface where you can easily view tasks in different categories, or all at once. Very easy to create a new task and assign it to a category, set a date and priority, associate it with a contact, set all sorts of alarms and reminders. It supports push and can also send you an email at the time of your choosing. You can associate your tasks with audio recordings or photos from within the app. You can tweet them. It also allows you to sync your lists with the online free toodledo server so you can edit it on the web also. There is truly a myriad of options which you can check out on the website. But the good thing is that it does it’s basic functions very well. Lists are easy to see and tasks are easy to create and edit. This is fast becoming one of my most used apps.

The other App I’ve discovered recently is Gowalla. It certainly doesn’t enhance your functionality in the same way that 2Do does but it takes social networking in interesting new directions. Basically it’s a way of letting people where you are and seeing who else is around or has been there by “checking in” to various locations based on GPS. These locations might include restaurants, shops, cafes, museums, nightclubs, churches – generally any public place is legit. You can then also cross-post these to your facebook or twitter account, and upload photos from the location. There’s also a bit of a game to it where you earn badges and stamps on your “passport” and also collect these virtual items that your can then drop off in the places you visit. I can already hear some people say “what’s the point?” – really it’s just another amusing way of sharing your life with people online, with a functional and attractive app. Heavy duty users of facebook will probably understand. Others may not. Check it out if the idea appeals to you, and take a look at my profile if you want.

3 Other Apps I will briefly mention. The first is the Opera Mini browser, which was just released the other day. It’s faster than safari, but the pages don’t render as nicely. Secondly Doodle Jump, a totally addictive game where you are a little doodle man jumping up platforms (it’s better than it sounds, really). Screenshots of these two below. Thirdly, Angry Birds, another addictive game where you fling birds using a slingshot to try and smash buildings in order to kill evil pigs (once again just trust me on this – it’s quite good)

And finally, once we eventually get our supersized iPhones iPads in Australia, hopefully this app will be available – Pocket Bible for iPad. It’s the ultimate Bible reading app on any platform and the iPad is perfect for this use. If you’re into Bible software then just check out this sneak peak video…

Today a piece of software was released which I’ve been waiting for every since I got my iPhone – Laridian PocketBible. I’ve been a long time user of Laridian software on my Palm and Windows Mobile PDAs and phones and have acquired quite a large “library” of Bible versions, commentaries and other books from them. The great thing about this company is that when you switch to a different platform you don’t have to re-purchase all the books – you can download them all onto your new phone for free. So now I have my Laridian library on my iPhone at last!

The bibles and books are stored on the memory of the iPhone, thus once you have downloaded them initially, an internet connection is not required, unlike the YouVersion Bible software I have been using over the last couple of months. Some of the books I have on my phone include :

• Bibles – NLTse, NIV, TNIV, ESV, NRSV, NASB, MSG, NKJV, Amplified, and God’s Word (of course) plus many more..
• Study Bibles – ESV, NIV, NLT, Life Application study Bibles. Also ‘antique’ ones like Scofield and Ryrie (for curiosities sake) etc
• Commentaries – IVP New testament commentary, Life Application Commentary, Ancient Christian Commentary, Matthew Henry etc etc
• Devotions – My Utmost, Morning and Evening etc
• Books – Foxes Book of Martyrs, Pilgrim’s Progress, Imitation of Christ etc
• Dictionaries – a number of Bible and Theological Dictionaries, Greek and Hebrew, Bible maps etc etc

So as you can see, a big part of the appeal of this software is the range of resources you can have at your fingertips on your phone. Flipping between books is easy. There are powerful search functions included. Highlighting and bookmarking passages is simple and these can be categorized for later retrieval and sorting. The Settings page is well populated giving a range of options to customise the view. Font type and size can be changed, you can have red-letter on or off, view Strong’s numbers, set your preferred translation, dictionary etc, choose to show or hide the status bar, title, and buttons.

There are a few features that I feel could be improved but some are just things that I need to get used to. For example text does not scroll in the usual iPhone scrolling style, rather you advance text by pressing the left area of screen to advance a page or a verse at a time. I’m sure I’ll get used to this but it still would be nice to have the option of more traditional style iPhone scrolling. Another thing is it doesn’t seem to support having more than one book open on the same page, like previous versions of PocketBible on other platforms. I found this a really valuable feature, being able to view two bibles (or a bible and a commentary) at the same time – I really hope this gets introduced soon. Logging into your Laridian account and downloading books is very easy, but it would be nice if they somehow incorpprated the ability to purchase new books directly on the iPhone, rather than having to do so on their website as at present. This is not a big issue for me (since I already own most of their stuff) but for new customers would be a great feature. Plus I’m sure they’d sell more books that way!

Another possible idea for them would be to consider implementing some sort of social networking feature. This is one of the few things I liked about the YouVersion software – for any passage you can link to a section called Contribs which includes other people’s submitted thoughts/blogs etc – almost like a ‘wiki-commentary.’ Obviously this is quite a big step outside what Laridian software have done to date though. Another possibly easier suggestion (which YouVersion doesn’t have) would be to allow posting of verses to Twitter/Facebook etc. This would be in keeping with these ethos of a wide range of other iPhone apps which allow posting of all sorts of things. These are just pipe-dream suggestions though.

Having said all this, Laridian have made it clear on their blog that this is just the first release, and they have a number of updates already planned in coming months – so hopefully we will see some of these issues dealt with, plus other cool new features coming soon. (EDIT : I’ve already been informed on facebook that the split screen feature is  definitely in the pipeline).

Overall this is a great piece of software that finally makes my iPhone experience complete in a way. Even on it’s first version PocketBible is far superior to any other Bible software for iPhone in terms of both it’s functionality and the amount of resources you can get for it. If you are looking for Bible software for your iPhone then look no further – go and download this straight away and start building your library. Laridian also regularly offer good discounts like 20% off all books so make sure you subscribe to their email newsletter.

Here’s a few more screenshots from the program. I love the fact that it’s so easy to take screenshots on the iPhone (hold down home button and press the top button..)

Apple released iTunes 9 today, and it is probably the most significant update we’ve seen for the software in some time. New features include a redesigned iTunes store, enhanced ‘LP’ albums, improved library sharing over a network, and further improvements in the Genius function (which I have increasingly grown to appreciate..). But the feature I like the best is the new ability to arrange iPhone applications. You can now rearrange the App screens on your iPhone from within the iTunes software. Much easier dragging and dropping the app icons using a mouse on my iMac than using my finger to push them around on the screen. Very impressed with this update!

Note : make sure you update your iPhone to the 3.1 software to take advantage of this feature.

So it seems that the TNIV Bible translation is to be no more : Correcting the ‘Mistakes’ of TNIV and Inclusive NIV, Translators Will Revise NIV in 2011

It’s a bit of a shame. Looks like the failure of the TNIV was a failure of marketing more than anything else, and conservative/fundamentalist elements ended up being quite opposed to it. I never used it as my primary Bible but whenever I did refer to it I usually found it preferable to the old NIV. And not just because it is “gender-inclusive” I just found it had better readability and clarity. I hope they don’t sacrifice any of these 3 things in the NIV 2011. I’m actually in favour of the gender-inclusive approach to passages which are not addressed to a specific gender. It’s not standard english practice to address a group of men and women as “brothers” so why should a modern translation retain such culturally bound language? Maybe it’s just my non-conservative bias coming through

I don’t actually own a proper TNIV (only a parallel version with The Message – something the fundamentalists would hate even more!) so now might be a good time to invest in one before they disappear. Who knows, it might be a collectors item in future years…

Presently I mainly switch between the NLT-SE (very readable although at a cost of some depth of meaning I think) and NRSV (which seems to combine some of the best of the features of readability, clarity and depth, gender-inclusiveness, and still some of that classic English traditional feel) – sometimes I’ll look in the ESV which is a quite literal version but a bit heavy going.

[please note if you are searching for the NRSV online don't go to NRSV.com - you'll be in for a bit of a nasty surprise... lol]

For more discussion of the NIV issue take a look at Scot McKnight’s blog and the Better Bibles Blog.

In related news, my favourite Bible software company Laridian is close to releasing their PocketBible software for the iPhone. This will be far superior to any of the existing iPhone Bible software and since I already own all their Bibles/commentaries etc etc I will be able to get them all on my iPhone without having to pay again (including the TNIV and many more). The app is awaiting approval by Apple at the moment – keep an eye on their blog for updates or I’ll be sure to mention it here once it finally gets released

Another test post, this one. I just downloaded the wordpress app onto my iPhone, which is cool. Now I can write or edit blog posts, check comments and much more from anywhere, even my bedroom where I am now. The photo below is of my bedside table – posting it only for the reason of testing this app… Hope it works… If you can see this I guess it means it does

Spent the first part of the evening playing with Apple GarageBand – such a fun and easy piece of software. The new version makes recording guitars so much better as it gives visual representation and control over virtual amps and stomp box effects. I also added in some nice clarinet and organ sounds. It took 2 clicks to send it to iTunes and now I have the fruits of my labour on my iPhone. Very cool. I could easily waste a lot of time on this program…

Anyway typing on an iPhone is a little slow and I have stuff to do so I’ll end this now.. hope it works

Ever wished there was an easy way to save YouTube clips on your iPhone or iPod, or even to have them download automatically?

Here’s a great website I’ve discovered : http://www.rsshandler.com This site allows you to enter the details of a YouTube Feed or Playlist, and then creates a URL which you can use to subscribe to a “podcast” of the clips in that feed. That might sound a bit complicated but the instructions on the site are very easy to follow. Once you’ve generated a feed URL on the website, open iTunes – go to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Subscribe to Podcast’.. copy the URL into the box that comes up and Bob’s your uncle.

It works great. You can susbcribe to YouTube’s feeds (eg Featured, Most Popular etc) or create your own playlists (for example I’ve created a Humour, Music, and Family playlist. The only drawback is it seems not all clips can be successfully converted into iTunes format, but most can.

Give it a try! If you need any advice about it send me an email and I’ll try to help.

Cheers

Now this is an area where I think I’ve only barely scratched the surface yet, but the iPhone is a veritable treasure trove of useful apps for musicians and music lovers. Here’s a few of the ones I’ve tried so far…

Shazam

This is one of the Apps that iPhone users love whipping out to impress their friends. And there’s a reason for that – it’s just cool. Basically if you hear a song playing and want to know what it’s called and who sings it, Shazam listens to the song through your iPhone’s microphone, processes it, and then gives you the answer – as well as the option to purchase the song for yourself on iTunes or search for it in YouTube. Seems to work about 90% of the time. I’ve used it in the car, and even in a crowded restaurant, with surprisingly good results. Definitely worth downloading.

ooTunes

This is an internet radio program which you can use to listen to streaming radio stations from around the world. I first downloaded this when I wanted to listen to the JJJ Hottest 100 live instead of our usual 2 hour delay here in Perth, but have since discovered plenty of other cool stations from Australia and around the world. There is something cool about being able to tune into country radio live from Nashville, plug my iPhone into my HiFi and enjoy. Some stations are very high quality and even support listing of the currently playing song, lyrics display and links to buy the song. Other stations are poorer quality and some don’t even work so it takes a bit of experimenting to find the best stations. Also a warning this is probably an App you’d only want to use when connected to a WiFi network as I’d imagine this would use up your 3G download quota pretty fast. But keeping that it mind it’s well worth downloading.

Y! Music

Another app suggested to me by Deano, this is a similar program where you can tune into a range of radio stations. Seems to be less range than ooTunes (though still huge) but in general the stability is better with less drop outs and fairly good quality. I’m just tuned into a Reggae station at present. This program offers the ability to skip forward tracks so must work differently somehow. Free, and very useful.

Guitar Toolkit

There’s a myriad of guitar related apps out there. This is a paid one which I think was $9.99 – you can probably get much of the same functionality by getting a few different cheaper ones, but I found this to be the most elegant and powerful one I saw. It combines the following features :

• Tuner – accurate, works well, allows alternate tunings
• Fretboard / Scales – playable fretboard where you can display a huge range of different scales in different positions along the neck
• Metronome – Set your bpm and time signature (from a large selection) and off you go. Very useful
• Chord library – extensive chord library showing a large number of inversions/positions of just about every chord you can imagine. certainly more than I would ever use. And you can strum them all too.
• Instrument – this app can be used for 6 and 12 string guitars, 4 and 5 string basses, and includes a huge library of alternate tunings, as well as settings for left handed players

As I said, this is not free, but it’s an incredibly versatile and powerful app that I would recommend to all guitarists…

I still need to find a similar app with chord library and scales for my Mandolin. Must add that to my to-do list.

MiniPiano

Free single octave piano keyboard. Works fine, but very simple.

Piano Sharp

Similar to mini-piano but allows you to switch to higher and lower octaves. Also includes a library of classical tunes that it will play for you, and you can record your own compositions. Worth investing a few $ if you’re a keyboard player.

My Songbook

This is a very cool litte program, which basically stores a library of songs with lyrics and chords on your iPhone. Perfect for sitting around the campfire or a small group singalong or if you just feel like playing some music (I always keep a spare guitar in my car boot for such an eventuality…) It includes a built in search function so you can find songs on Google or Chordie.com, which has a large database of user submitted songs. You can also add your own songs but the uploading process is a little convoluted. There is an auto-scroll feature so you can use it hands-free while playing, and it will also transpose for you so you can find the perfect key to suit your voice. Definitely a great app to have. I’ve got 100s of songs ready on my iPhone for whenever I need ‘em

iPod

Ok, so this is not an App you can download in the store, because it’s a standard part of the iPhone, but I had to mention it because it’s just cool. This is about my fourth iPod to date, but it takes things to a new level. I love having my music constantly in my phone in my pocket. I can play any song in an instant and don’t even need to carry headphones around (although the sound is so much better with them – the in-built speaker is not too bad). Navigation on the iPhone (and iPod touch I guess) is a vast improvement over the classic iPods – I can find what I want so much faster. Also scrubbing within a song to find a particular part (eg a guitar solo I’m trying to learn) is easy and efficient. Cover Flow is just cool, like flipping through CDs on a shelf – great for getting ideas if I’m not sure what to listen to. And I really like the Genius feature – pick a song and it will create a playlist of related stuff – and the playlists are really good. Having access to the iTunes store on the phone is nice too in case I ever want to purchase a new song when I’m out and about.

This iPod is becoming much more a part of my daily experience than my old ones. The only limitation is that it only has 32Gig or less or space, but I still have my 160 Gig iPod classic for when I want to carry a more exhaustive music library around (or when I want to save my iPhone battery) – look forward to a 64 or 128 Gig iPhone in the years to come perhaps?

Been very busy since getting back from Queensland just over a week ago, and this week promises to be even busier with work, study (picked up an extra unit – studying Diving & Marine Medicine now), church (out 3 nights this week), and family things to fit in.. but I want to keep this blog ticking over and work is mercifully fairly sedate at the moment so time for a quick post about iPhone games.

I’m not what anyone would call a serious gamer, but I have found since getting my iPhone that I’ve been playing games more than usual. Perhaps it’s just having quality games constantly at my fingertips which load instantly on my 3GS and can be played for just a minute or two… or for much longer. So here’s a few of the games I’ve played around with so far.

Fieldrunners

This is a brilliant little game, recommended by deano and ob1. Basically you set up defenses against invading forces to stop them getting across a field. Lots of fun, starts easy and then gets more challenging. An easy way to waste hours of time. Owen loves this game too.

Real Racing

Excellent car racing game. Brilliant graphics and sound. Amazing that such a high quality game can be played on a phone! Works like any other console racing game – you work your way through a tournament with a series of progressively harder tracks and better cars. You steer by tilting the phone side to side like a steering wheel. It offers internet league races and local wi-fi challenges with your friends as well. Definitely the best graphics I have seen so far on the iPhone and well worth a few $$.

Waterslide

I just downloaded this one yesterday for free. Another game where you control the movement of your character by tilting the phone. In this one you are sliding along these massive waterslides which arch above a city landscape, trying to earn points, avoid obstacles like crabs, and not fall off. Reasonably good graphics and fairly simple fun for a few minutes here and there. And it’s free! You can’t beat that.

Paper Toss

This game was number 1 on the iTunes games list I think. Not sure why. It’s harmless enough, reasonably good graphics. You just flick a paper ball across an office trying to get it into a bin, taking into account the wind speed and direction from the office fan. Kinda amusing for five minutes or so at a time. Once again, it’s free, so you might as well get it.

Galactic Gunner

This game is a crack up. You are a gunner in a space ship shooting bad guys by touching the screen where they are. Think Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. The graphics aren’t bad but the funny thing is the dialogue. Your commander has a strong Aussie accent and uses a lot of slang, which seems kinda weird in the context of a space battle. Once again, reasonably fun for a few minutes at a time. Worth getting just so you can laugh at the dialogue.

TowerBloxx

Another cheap game with nice graphics. You have to build skyscrapers by dropping blocks onto them with a crane. Sounds boring but is actually quite amusing. Also involves some planning as to where you are going to build towers within your city to maximise profits/population. Quite good if you like that sort of thing.

Bejeweled 2

Surely I don’t have to explain this game to anyone? If you’ve seen this game on consoles, or PC, or facebook then you know what to expect. This version seems just the same. As always I love the encouraging voice telling you when you’ve done something good or excellent. I even caught Jenni playing this one last night … yes, we’re a two iPhone family now

Pac-Man lite

Didn’t want to spend $7.99 for the full version so I went for the free-lite version to try it out, but this is a pretty faithful rendition of the old classic. I love the little joystick graphic at the bottom. Very retro.

And I’d have given anything
To have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I’ve got it on my phone.

~ Brad Paisley “Welcome to the Future”

It’s a week now since I got my iPhone 3GS so a good time to post some of my thoughts about it. I’ll post more on some of the apps I’m using in the coming days/weeks.

Firstly let me say that the iPhone is a revolution. I’m been a long time PDA/Smart phone user (moving form Palm PDAs to the brilliant Treo which my wife still loves through to a couple of fairly good Windows Mobile HTC phones) but I’m a fairly late adopter to the iPhone. Part of the reason for this was being locked into my old contract and the other part was feeling that the iPhone was far from being mature, lacking in basic phone functionality like MMS, Video, Cut and Paste etc. The recent release of the iPhone 3 software and the new 3GS hardware dealt with most of those reservations.

I’ll discuss various aspects of the iPhone separately but at the outset let me say that two of the biggest reasons why this is such a joy to use are speed and integration. By speed I mean the speed at which programs load and run – there is virtually no lag or delay – almost everything loads in less than a second. Obviously there can be delays relating to the speed of your internet connection but that’s an network issue, not a problem with the iPhone itself. I’ve gone with Vodafone here in Australia and have found that 90% of the time internet connection/speed is more than adequate.

Integration is the other awesome thing about the iPhone – just how well the mail, messaging, calendar, contacts and related apps talk to each other, and how smooth and simply it all works. This is no real surprise though, coming from Apple. Having a Mac computer and a MobileMe account makes this whole experience even easier and smoother. Through push notifications all my contacts/calendar/bookmarks/email etc are instantaneously kept in Sync between my iPhone, my iMac and my MacBook. Push email through MobileMe works very well – there is virtually no spam and the email client is very easy to use. Using this hint I’ve been able to easily set it up so it sends as my main baggas.com email address instead of @me.com, which is nice.

As a phone it seems fine.  Call quality is good. As I said previously integration with the address book is fast and smooth. Visual voicemail is a cool feature where you can see all your voicemail messages on the screen and choose which one you want to listen to or just delete, without having to listen through them all in order or follow a bunch of menus (ie “press 3 to delete”) – it’s all there on the phone, just like SMS/MMS. Very cool. I don’t think all phone networks offer this functionality though.

The Camera is still probably the iPhone’s Achilles Heel. Apparently the 3 megapixel camera has been improved compared to the old iPhone 3G but it’s still not great. I like the autofocus or touch to focus feature. Photos of still subjects in good light actually look pretty nice, but in lower light or subjects that aren’t perfectly still (like 1 year old girls) the photos are blurry/grainy. Even compared to my old HTC phone there is a massive lack of settings here – no ability to adjust the camera in any way, and no ability that I can find to edit the photos at all. I’m really surprised at how little attention Apple seems to have given to this, given their excellent desktop photo software. It may be that there are third party photo editing Apps available for the iPhone but it’s one area I haven’t looked into… yet.

Taking Video recordings is a little better than photos. The videos aren’t bad quality for a phone, and you can do some basic editing like trimming your video clip which is implemented nicely. And sending your videos onward via email, MMS or uploading to MobileMe or YouTube is handled very easily and elegantly. Here’s the one and only video I’ve done so far, as a test mainly of the uploading process. The light in this room was a bit dim but it gives you a rough idea. It took me only a couple of minutes to take this video, trim it, and upload to YouTube. Very simple and smooth process – ideal for if you are out and about and want to share a video right away… I’ll try and take another video out in the sun in the next day or so to get a better idea.

Media playback is through the iPod section. What can I say about this? It’s an iPod! Music playback is flawless. The genius feature works well to create instant playlists of related music, you can flip through album covers using CoverFlow (never been a huge user of this on the Mac but on the iPhone it’s very nice). Searching for music works well and is very fast through the global Spotlight search (which you can also use to search the enture contents of the iPhone for just about anything). You can shake to shuffle which is kinda cool, and you can use voice controls (more about that later). Glad I went for the 32 Gig version so I can fit plenty of stuff on there. It won’t completely replace my 160Gig iPod classic, but it’s a nice option for when I only want to carry one device (which is most of the time actually). Media controls and a mic are built into the new headphones, which are fairly good.  Video playback is very nice on the widescreen – very usuable for watching TV shows or movies while commuting/travelling.

Voice control is another new feature on the iPhone which other phones have had for years. I’ve never been a huge fan of voice recognition stuff but the iPhone adaptation works fairly well. It gets it right for phone control about 80% of the time (eg “Call Jennifer mobile”) but probably only about 2/3 of the time for iPod control – maybe because the iPod database is many hundreds of time bigger than the phone database? I still haven’t quite learnt all the commands it recognizes yet. There’s also a nifty Google search App you can download which enables voice searches and is location aware, so if you say “Movie show times” or “Chinese restaurant,” it will fairly reliable bring up local results.

GPS seems to work well. Satellite fix outdoors takes only a few seconds. You can now buy turn-by-turn navigation software for the iPhone (I haven’t yet). The new iPhone also features a compass which you can see in the stand-alone compass App, or use in Google maps to orient your map. There are a  number of GPS apps you can download but this seems to me to be a relatively under-explored area of functionality.

Web browsing on the iPhone is a dream. This will not be news to previous iPhone users but compared to Windows Mobile the difference is immense. It’s great to be able to see the whole page rendered and then smoothly zoom in to view the sections you want. The text magnifies and renders beautifully and scrolling vertically and horizontally is easy and smooth. I love the way the iPhone responds to touch. It’s so easy to learn and use. The new iPhone 3.0 software also supports tethering where you can use the iPhone as a modem for your laptop via USB or bluetooth. Old news for other phones but I found this so much easier than it ever was on my old WM phone. Within 30 seconds I had my MacBook Air accessing the internet through my iPhone over blueooth. Simple. With a decent sized data plan road warriors may consider making this their preferred method of accessing the internet. Vodafone currently seems the best for this in Australia – I’m on a plan which includes 1Gig of data but you can add on more data if necessary. Optus have decided to charge people extra for tethering, and Telstra I’m not sure about, but the amount of data in their plans is paltry (a shame since they have the best network – offer a decent value data plan and customers would flock to them). Another beauty of the iPhone is it’s implementation of WiFi – if a network is available it will always either automatically connect or give you the option to, thus potentially saving a lot on your 3G usage.

Anyway that’s enough for now. If you couldn’t tell, I love this phone. It’s not perfect, but still amazing. The other awesome feature I haven’t mentioned yet is the App store, where you can download a myriad of free or cheap Applications for a multitude of uses, from games to networking to productivity… over the coming weeks I’ll start blogging here about some of the Apps I think are cool.

Like many, I’ve been watching the release of the iPhone 3G with interest. At present I have no definite plans to get an iPhone although I’m sure I will end up with one in the next couple of years. The main thing holding me back is that I’m less than halfway through my current phone contract and I’m fairly happy with my current HTC TyTnII phone – but if I found a way to get an iPhone cheap without having to pay huge contract fees I would jump at it. The other thing is, even in it’s second iteration I’m still not convinced the iPhone is a complete product – as a phone it lacks simple things like a decent camera, video capabilities, and MMS – I still cannot fathom why it won’t work with MMS. So for now I shall continue to bide my time, whilst still envying those cool people who have the iPhone already.

The other new release from Apple is their MobileMe service, which is an upgrade of .Mac which allows automatic over the air syncing of calendars, contacts, email and more between your Macs, PCs and iPhone. I’m quite excited about this one, having tried to achive similar things previously with Google with limited success. If I had an iPhone I would sign up for this in an instant but even without one I am quite tempted to do so anyway. Will be nice to have synchronized calendars on my Work and Home PCs and my MacBook Pro, which I can then sync to my phone with Missing Sync. I’m also planning to invest in a MacBook Air in the next couple of months to use for my Masters degree study and travel (just booked flights for my first Uni trip over to Townsville in October) – so keeping that in sync as well will be great. In fact, I think I’ve just talked myself into trying MobileMe. I’ll sign up for the free trial and let you know how it goes.

United Airlines offers in-flight iPhone and iPod Connectivity | The Apple Blog

Over the last couple of years I’ve spent many hours on planes, huddled over my iPod watching shows and movies on the little screen. In fact I watched the first three seasons on Battlestar Galactica (awesome show) in this manner. And almost invariably if you look around the cabin on any flight you will see several people with those characteristic white earphones in their ears. So the above story definitely appeals to me and I’m sure many other travellers. In a nod to the increasing ubiquity of these devices, United Airlines have installed iPod connectors in some of their planes so you can browse your iPod or iPhone and watch or listen to your own content on their screens, as well as keep your device charged. Certainly beats huddling over a tiny screen and definitely good to have more choice beyond the usual in-flight entertainment. Hope this comes to Australia soon…

In other iPod news, I noticed today that you can now purchase some TV shows via the Australian iTunes store. Only a couple of years behind the rest of the world! Hopefully movie rentals will follow. My guess is they’ve finally got their act together and done this because of the upcoming Australian iPhone launch.

• The Exigent City – this is a fascinating in-depth article from the New York Times on the history, sociology and architecture of refugee camps around the world. They also have a good article on the groth of new cities.
• Ben Witherington writes an excellent post on God’s freedom, love, and human free-will. I’ve been pondering some of these issues lately so this is very timely.
• On the US election, this article compares the online presence of Obama and McCain, and this article looks at McCain’s strategy in searching for a Vice President – Google!
• Apple News from the WWDC conference. A better, cheaper iPhone with 3G and GPS, coming to Australia soon (wonder how long I will be able to resist?). An upgraded .Mac service (no trouble resisting that) and a new Mac OSX ‘Snow Leopard’ next year. Read a summary of some of the buzz here. My only disappointment is that I was hoping to see an upgraded version of the MacBook Air with more storage and RAM – guess I’ll keep waiting for that one… until the next Stevenote..