I Think, Therefore I Rant!

Typing a password on a small keyboard is typically a chore. I have used a variety of mobile devices in my career and have always dreaded typing in passwords.

While the iPhone is not as easy as your full keyboard it is easier than any other mobile device you probably have ever used.

First, the iPhone pops up a large rendition of the key tapped. This makes it easy to change your mind if you have tapped the wrong key. This is easier than a chiclet keyboard like that of a Blackberry which makes you commit to the key that is depressed.

Second, the iPhone displays bullets in the password field like it should. But it displays the actual character of the last key tapped so that the user can hit the backspace key.

Congratulations to the great user interface developers at Apple.

I tend to agree with The Fishbowl that it would be great to have a try-before-you-buy at the Apple iPhone store.  It would help alleviate the fear factor of hitting BUY when looking for an application for the phone.

I think the only saving grace to not having this capability is the very easy comments feature in the store.  A few weeks ago, when the iPhone was first coming out, it was all a crapshoot as to the quality of the software.  Now that every application has a couple dozen comments, the cream easily floats to the top.

I also wish that Apple would require their vendors to have a better website to explain the apps.  In some cases, the sites are incredibly bare and almost non-existent.

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

I have used other phones with virtual keyboards. Most of these phones have been Windows Mobile based. One of the complaints that I have always had was when I had to press other keys after the phone call. You know what I mean, you need to press 1 or 0 to reach someone else of maybe press pound.

In most virtual keyboards, the screen is dimmed after the phone is connected to save power. This is true of the iPhone as well but since the iPhone senses motion it realizes that you have moved it from your ear, so the display lights up again so you can type.

This is one of the reason that the iPhone is easily the best phone I have ever owned.

This post was written on my iPhone.

Yes, I know that I just praised the iPhone from Apple as being a great phone.  In fact, it is the best phone that I have ever owned and I have had quite a few.

However, the management of application icons leaves a lot to be desired. 

First of all, it is not possible to name the different screens.  So while it is possible to congregate all of your games onto a particular screen, there is no way to name this screen and jump instantly to it.

Second, whenever you update an application to its next revision (and at this early stage, this happens a lot) the icon will jump back to the earliest possible spot.  This means that when you do an update, the icon forgets where you first put it (as in the games screen described above) and sticks it on the very first screen of the phone.  If there are no more open spots on that first screen, it puts it on the second screen (and so on).  This makes it tedious to reorganize your applications as developers work out bugs in their early versions.

I own a first generation iPhone. While I have considered buying a new 3G version, I really don’t know why I should spend more money. I am very happy with the speed of my present phone as it does email and newsfeeds plenty fast.

The really great thing about the new operating system of the phone is the cool apps that are starting to come out. For instance, it has a FREE Wordpress management tool and I am using it to write this column.

I will write more about my iPhone in the coming days. Subscribe to my feed to follow the discussion.

A lot of us use instant messaging (IM) in our private and professional lives. It is a convenient and quick way to talk to others without the formality and delay of email. A new jargon has been created to talk in this medium and emoticons are often used to express feelings and emphasis.

You can tell a lot about someone by reading their instant messages. The biggest thing you can tell to see if someone is just plain clueless is if they send you messages like this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game
IDontKnowHowToIM: this weekend? I thought
IDontKnowHowToIM: it was great and I was
IDontKnowHowToIM: amazed at how well Tom
IDontKnowHowToIM: Brady played he must be
IDontKnowHowToIM: the best player in NFL

What IDontKnowHowToIM meant to type was this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game this weekend? I thought it was great and I was amazed at how well Tom Brady played he must be the best player in NFL

Do you even know what a favicon is? It is the little image that sits just to the left of the URL in your address bar. For this site the favicon looks like this: If you can’t see it then that pretty much proves my point!

When you surf to a page that you have previously visited, the browser checks to see if anything has changed since the last time that you visited. It then downloads the new text and graphics and combines this with data in your cache and displays this to you. This technique can greatly reduce your surf time.

Unfortunately, most modern browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) do a pretty lousy job of checking and updating if the favicon for a site has changed. In fact, if you using an older version of IE, it may not even display a favicon. Even Firefox will occasionally display the wrong favicon for a site.

I recently came across a post on a different kind of top 20 (or worse 20) list. This list is of bad software (or at least poorly behaving software). The focus of the article was on web applications but, too be honest, I think there are still some ‘regular’ applications that make these same mistakes as well.

I don’t want to reproduce the entire 20 items, you can go to the original article here and read those. I would like to point out that that author forgot some of my personal least favorites:

• 21. Desktop search that doesn’t pay attention to my bookmarks/favorites.
• 22. Blog software that puts you into the middle of the article (the site that this list originally shows up in is guilty of this one).
• 23. Software that installs wherever it wants to without asking the user
• 24. Fighting music formats

Like a lot of people, I have become hooked on “desktop search” products. These products index your hard drive’s documents so that you can quickly and easily search for that piece of information you know that you have but are missing. The most popular version of this is Google Desktop but there are others and I particularly like Copernic Desktop Search because I find it more stable than the other utilities on the market and it can read my calendar in Outlook which is a big deal to me.

As much as I like these tools, I find that there is one big thing that they all miss. They don’t rank my favorite sites higher than other sites if I am doing a web search. This simply doesn’t make sense. Obviously, I have been to that site before (or else it wouldn’t be in my Favorites/Bookmarks folder). Therefore, I trust that information more than other information.

Your signature on an email is essential. It should contain the information that allows the reader to contact you without sending you an email. It should not contain images as these will only slow down the transmission of the email and may not be read by the reader’s email program (remember, assume they are reading this on their phone).

Your original email should have quite a bit of contact information. This may include your full name, phone numbers, address, and a link to a website about you or your company. However, don’t be a bandwidth hog and include that same signature on a reply email since it is likely the person already has most of that information. For replies, you should only have the basics e.g. your name and a pertinent phone number.

INCLUDE A SIGNATURE AFTER EVERY EMAIL BUT DON’T OVERLOAD IT WITH WASTED JUNK - EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO KEEP IT SIMPLE!