• the number of competitors in the marketplace,
• Apple as a relative newcomer to the cell phone market,
• the strict relationship with only one carrier

it is amazing that the iPhone has had such a strong impact on the revenue of Apple as well as the sales of other phones.

The one area that Apple really needs to develop is the developer network. While the App Store is the best method yet developed for delivering software to a cell phone, it does not appear that it is a great commercial success for many of its developers.  The vast majority of the apps on the store are priced so cheaply (or free) that it is not likely that they will return a profit to their developers.

While there are more appropriately priced software packages on the store, the comments show that these have a smaller community than many of the free or cheap apps.  Why is this?

My belief is that few people are willing to pay 10 bucks for an app when they don’t know how it will work and screenshots are a poor tradeoff.  Some developers have rigged up “trials” on their website. Solitaire Forever does this quite effectively.  I don’t know what technology the folks at Solitaire Forever used to have the product work in such a multi-platform environment but it is a great model.

Additionally, Apple could help the situation by allowing software to expire after a certain amount of time.  This would allow software developers to time limit the software and adopt the try-before-you-buy (TBYB) model that is so popular in desktop apps.  This is done in a small way by some developers when they offer a less functional “lite” version of their software but that is difficult for the developers to manage and difficult for customers to deal with.

APPLE - PLEASE INCLUDE TIME EXPIRATIONS IN THE IPHONE OS!

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

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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.

This post was created on an iPhone.

I do question Mr. Gingrich’s 7th item.  While certainly noble in intent, it doesn’t appear that it is measurable enough to warrant a big prize.  Perhaps a prize for the public school system that gets 99% of their non-special needs kids to some extremely high level of attainment on a standardized test.  If we use the SAT as an example, the school system that can get 99% of their kids to over 600 on the SAT test (the average is 515 out of a possible 700 and that was for college bound seniors - the challenge would be for ALL students in a public school organization).

In lieu of government funding, I am willing to help.  If someone would create a fund to go after these causes, I would contribute.  I can’t put a billion dollars into the kitty but I would definitely write a check for $100!

Here is Newt’s list from WSJ.com

1) A low-cost vaccine or preventive intervention for malaria — possibly the single biggest potential improvement in the quality of life in poor tropical countries.

2) A modestly priced, mass-manufacturable hydrogen engine for cars, which would be the biggest single contribution to reducing carbon loading of the atmosphere and reducing subsidies through high oil prices to dictatorships.

3) A cheap method for turning large quantities of seawater into fresh water.

4) A reusable system that could get people into space at 10% of the current cost, thus enabling genuine space tourism and launching an age of exploration.

5) The first privately financed permanent lunar base.

6) A method for reusing nuclear waste to make Yucca Mountain, Nevada unnecessary as a repository.

7) A method of learning math and science that kids like, and that enables us to leapfrog India and China by breaking out of our unionized, bureaucratic curriculum. This would enable us to replace “No Child Left Behind” with a more effective education model that could be called “Every American Gets Ahead.”

This is the type of leadership that we need in Washington.  Someone should name Newt Gingrich to be their Vice President so that he could actually do something about things like this.

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

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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.

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According to the BBC, it is rare for someone to be stoned to death - they haven’t done it in a year.  A YEAR?!?!?  For a country the size of California, that seems like fairly recent behavior.

How do you stone someone “Iranian style”?  Here is what the BBC reported:

The country’s penal code stipulates that before carrying out the punishment, men should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests. The stones used must be large enough to cause the condemned pain, but not sufficient to kill immediately.

So if the stones don’t kill immediately that means it takes several strikes to do the deed.

I suppose that Iran is never going to perfect the atomic bomb. It seems too merciful for their enemies.  I would think that they would instead just create big dirty bombs so that the enemies suffer over a long time from radiation poisoning and die slow miserable deaths.

I repeat my RANT from my original post on this subject:

PEOPLE OF THE WORLD - WE NEED TO CONDEMN IRAN FOR THIS TERRIBLE EXERCISE!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.  I just hope the judicial system in Iran doesn’t give me reason to ever think about this.

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

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I think most people miss the point (although Mr. Will probably comes the closest to getting it right, in my opinion). In most Parliamentary Government systems, the voters elect the Parliament and they, in turn, elect the Prime Minister (in the UK countries this is slightly different in that the Monarch actually appoints the PM but in modern history the Monarch appoints the choice of the Parliament).  So in this government, the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of the Parliament.

To compare this to the US would mean that the offices of Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader would combine to satisfy the role of the Prime Minister (not exactly of course, but close).

As any 7th grade US student should be able to describe, we have 3 separate and equal branches of government. The Senate and House form the Legislative branch and the President forms the Executive branch. The Executive branch is not more answerable to the Legislative branch than vice versa.  They are equals.

So while I think more open dialog in our government is important, Mr. McCain would be wise not to adopt the British form that is also broadcast on CSPAN.  He doesn’t answer to Congress anymore than Congress answers to him.

Instead, if Mr. McCain is elected and decides to implement this idea, it needs to expand:

• for every question from Congress, the President should be able to ask a specific question to someone from Congress that is in attendance.  This balances the level of accountability
• in Britain there is a time limit for the questions.  The US would also need a time limit to cut off long speeches (maybe even a time limit in the phrasing of a question).
• the overall time should be cut in half.  The first half of the US Question Time would be with the Congress and the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House.  Since they are rough approximations of the Prime Minister, it is reasonable that they should be accountable to their collective bodies.  Perhaps they could rotate who is grilled by week.  The second half of the event would be the US President and the two way question session I propose above.

I think that all of this would make for an interesting addition to the political process.  It would add more transparency to the process and allow the US President to remind Congress to get their jobs done.  It would also allow Congress the opportunity to force the President to explain his/her decisions and reasons.

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

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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.

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.

If this was Microsoft, I would expect this bad behavior.  Microsoft regularly rearranges my Start menu when I do a patch to it or upgrade their Office application.  I hate it but I expect the idiots in Redmond to treat me like an imbecile.  Apple though is the king of cool interfaces, but as I have said before, software should not act smarter than me.

I am not the only one that feels this way, I hope that Apple is listening to this complaint.

APPLE - PLEASE GIVE US SOME WAY TO BETTER MANAGE OUR APPLICATION ICONS.  YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

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

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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.

This would send a strong message to the world community that we are serious about energy independence. One of the big perils with electric cars is the lack of availability of infrastructure to charge them.

We need to stabilize the world energy market and this would show everyone that we see serious about getting our house in order.

I know that John McCain has advocated a similar suggestion but I haven’t heard anything of this from Obama.

The goal of a race is to win the race by a combination of skill, mechanical design, and luck. Would the tires of the cars shredded if the cars were going around the track at 150 mph? My guess is that they would have been fine.  So rather than forcing a series of 10 lap sprints (essentially what the result was) these highly skilled drivers should have just slowed down and won the race by perseverance.  The drivers that drove too fast would have wrecked or ran out of tires.  The drivers that played it safe with a steady effort that responded to the conditions of the day would have won the race.

You can vote for who you think caused the fiasco here.

NASCAR MANAGEMENT: FIX THE PROBLEMS AT THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY BUT ABOVE ALL ELSE - STAY OUT OF THE WAY DURING THE RACE!

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Obama promised that if he was nominated, he would use public money for his campaign.  Now he is backing out of that promise and is going to forgo those restrictions so that he can outspend John McCain by what some think will be 5 to 1.

Obama will run the richest campaign ever for the office of the US President!

While I have a hard time saying that people can’t give money to their favorite candidate, I do have problems with massive amounts of money being used to “buy” the campaign.  Never before has the disparity between candidates been so massive.  John McCain will only have 84M from the government to spend on the election and Barack Obama will be able to spend as much as he can raise and estimates say that could be 300-400M!

BARACK OBAMA - YOU NEED TO HONOR YOUR PROMISE TO USE PUBLIC FUNDS! DON’T BE A TYPICAL POLITICIAN AND CHANGE YOUR OPINION WHENEVER IT IS CONVENIENT!

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

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Tony Blankley does an excellent job of holding down the right. His opinions are typically well thought out and his intellect does a decent job in offsetting the radical left. My biggest complaint is that he always seems to have predicted everything and wrote about it months ago and it is amazing that us mortals have only just now got to where he has been for a long time. It appears that, in his opinion, if we were just smart enough to read his column every week we wouldn’t have any problems in the world.

Arianna Huffington is on so infrequently it is a joke. She used to be on the right when Bill Clinton was the President but now that we have George W. Bush, she has decided to be on the left. She does fine representing the left when she bothers to participate but she is out promoting her books or getting interviewed by the rich and famous so much that she is rarely there. When she is there it seems like she is sending emails on her Blackberry when someone else is talking.  She supposedly represents the “progressive blogosphere” (whatever that means) but this doesn’t make sense since Bob heads up TruthDig.com so they really don’t need both Arianna and Bob.

Robert Scheer is so ultra left that he is embarrassing and just saying he is on the left is insulting most of his true positions - they are farther left than just left. I assume the only reason he is on the show is that he is old, can’t find someone else to employ him and he needs the money. To him all of the ills of the world were caused by the Iraq war, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. He will go to great lengths to find some obscure way to link every bad thing to one, both or all three of them. He is so out of touch with mainstream America that he even supported Dennis Kucinich for President!  Bob lives up to his left title though in insisting that all taxes are good and all money should be taken from everybody and given back to those that the government thinks should deserve it.

Matt Miller is supposed to be the center and he is the moderator.  Occasionally, he is out doing something else and then we get to hear a real center as the fill in is almost almost always a true centrist.  How does someone that worked for President Clinton and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress call himself a centrist?  He is not as far left as Bob and Arianna so I guess that gives the producers the freedom to call him center.  He must be right of the producers!

All of them do a very good job of promoting their books.  I don’t have a big problem with that but it is obvious that they see this show as a way to sell more titles.

As much as I deride their non-balanced viewpoints, the show is actually quite good.  The three of them (when Arianna shows up) try desperately to outwit Tony and, for the most part, fail miserably.  They bring up weak ideas and Tony points out that they don’t have all of the facts.  Tony usually does the show from Washington DC and I have this feeling that he is laughing at them when he is off microphone.

KCRW MANAGEMENT - FIRE 2 OF THE LEFTISTS ON THIS SHOW AND GET SOMEONE TO BE A TRUE CENTER!  FAILING THAT, CHANGE THE NAME OF THE SHOW!

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

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I have listened to Ms. Crow’s latest CD several times. It is titled “Detours”. It is an apt title since it is a detour from her usual high quality work! I feel like the Democratic Party, Al Gore, and Laurie David have been injected into my brain via my ears! To think that I spent $15 for a CD of political propaganda.

I have no problem with the occasional activism song. I actually applaud this even when I don’t particularly agree with the message. For instance, Matchbox Twenty’s recent video “How Far We’ve Come” (see the bottom of this post to watch the video) is absolutely a political statement and it is excellent (I am not sure that the ending of showing Mr. Gore, Ms. Clinton, and Mr. Obama is a statement to the positive after watching the fall of the Berlin Wall but maybe that is their point).

Thankfully, Ms. Crow has put the lyrics to her songs in the CD package. I appreciate that gesture and she has regularly done this for her listeners. However, the words that she is portraying are over the top. Does she really know for a fact that the President was lying to get into a war? When I want to listen to someone exaggerate the truth, I will watch Al Gore’s movie since the British courts have already called that a political document.

Sheryl (and other artists) should limit her political statements to one or two well done messages and then spend the rest of the CD entertaining me. That is what I am paying her to do.

SHERYL - I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR POLITICS! I WANT YOU TO ENTERTAIN ME, NOT LECTURE ME ON YOUR OPINIONS!

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

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Technorati Tags: global+warming,sheryl+crow,politics

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

Having to hit the return key pretty much went away with manual typewriters. In fact, I would venture to say that your keyboard doesn’t have a return key but instead had an enter key in its place. There really isn’t any reason to break up your text manually. Your client surely supports word wrap. You can keep on typing until you get to the end of your logical paragraph!

Most IM clients open up their default window and show only 1 line of text. So fools like IDontKnowHowToIM get to the end of that window and hit return. Then they keep on typing. However, an amazing thing was popularized about 20 years ago - the mouse. Use your mouse to drag that typing window up and before you know it you can see 2, 3, 10, even 100 lines of text. No more one line IM messages!

Here are some examples from Trillian and Yahoo:

Before Trillian:

After dragging in Trillian:

Before in Yahoo Messenger:

After dragging in Yahoo Messenger:

INSTANT MESSENGER USERS - LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR CLIENT AND STOP SENDING BROKEN MESSAGES!

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

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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.

This is poor software design. Favicons are very small and would not detract from the user experience if it was checked every time.

HEY SOFTWARE DESIGNERS, FIX YOUR FAVICON IMPLEMENTATION!

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

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As dictated by the rules, the teams then met to flip the coin again and the Packers won the toss. Within the NFL, overtimes are decided by the first team to score any kind of point. The typical strategy is to get close enough for field goal and end the OT quickly. This definitely favors the team that wins the OT toss!

As fate would have it, the Packers turned over the ball and the Giants won the game with their own field goal. While this particular instance provided both teams an opportunity to have the ball, the rules are not that fair.

Sudden death is not an effective way to settle an important football game. Rather it would be far more fair to have rules that are similar to college football and most high school leagues. The ball should be placed at a particular yardage marker (I suggest the 50 yard line) and then each team is given the opportunity to score. They should be allowed to earn first downs and they should be forced to attempt 2 point conversions after a touchdown. Each team should have ball an equal number of times to respond to the other team’s scores.

Regardless of which official rules the league would adopt, the current rules are not designed to achieve a fair outcome.

HEY NFL, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER AND DEVELOP RULES THAT ARE FAIR!

Other opinions that you might want to check out:
From the Back of the Freezer
We MUST Change The NFL Overtime System, And Do It ASAP

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

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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

I did like some of the items on the original list. Especially

4. Amnesia

5. No Undo/Redo

6. No Cut/Copy/Paste

13. Tiny Fonts

19. Not Eating Their Own Dog Food (although I prefer the statement “Not drinking their own champagne”

20. Bugs - what is up with “beta” releases of software that go for months, if not years!

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS - YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT USABILITY WHEN YOU WRITE YOUR SOFTWARE (and yes, I did intend to have my caps lock on when I was shouting despite number 7).

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

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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.

So to all of the developers of desktop search: PRIORITIZE MY FAVORITE SITES ABOVE THE REST OF THE WORLD WHEN YOU SHOW ME SEARCH RESULTS!

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

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Technorati Tags: desktop+search