My new unlocked 4s is in action here in Canada. I went to a Virgin Mobile kiosk in a mall here in Welland and got a pay as you go plan set up, the sim card installed, and unlike my experience with Yes Optus in Australia, it worked right away.

So now in Canada, I have a new phone number, can SMS, and most key, have 3G data wherever I go (and where it is).

The other gain here is that I can swap in my AT&T sim when I go south of the .ca border and be back on their network– and I don’t have to renew my contract with them when I got the new iPhone (though it cost much more; it ought to make me more careful with it!)

I have have seen (and installed) the Golden Light, the Grail (for now) — Phone Disk – it mounts your iThing as a drive! And what is crazy is you can download a fully licensed version for free until December 1st. If you have an iThing, stop reading my stuff, and download a copy now! Do it!

What it does is mount your phone (it can be automatic or you can set it in motion) when you connect it with the USB cable. There is a menu tool that you can control it with, but it mounts the iDevice as a drive.

By default you get the root drive of your Media directory.

You can navigate the directories and find files like your photos. Each application essentially has its own root directory, so with the menu tool, I can change the mount point from the Media root to that of an app, say my Goodreader root (documents)

If I had files here, I could copy them to my hard drive, but I can also load files from my hard drive INTO the GoodReader documents directory on my Phone Disk. Here I am dragging a PDF of Vannervar Bush’s As We May Think essay (still a classic, 55 years later!) onto my phone.

Woah, Neo Directory access to AND from my files on the phone. I hope Uncle Steve does not stomp on this app!

And here the document is now ready for my to read on my iPhone.

This is heady, I may be getting dizzy, but this is the biggest thing since sliced sex. Whatever, I am so happy my metaphors are crossed.

What are you waiting for? I cannot thing of an iThing user that would not want this app.

It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate.

So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity.

It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure…

The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an activity. The “AS” is the way in which a person must try to present it. So you simply shake the iPhone, and you get an assignment like:

“Do the twelve times table as a rhyming couplet”

The green arrow offers a web link to more information on either side of the “Do/As” line- links to WikiPedia for reference or YouTube videos to demonstrate a process.

Maybe that would go…

Twelve times one is an easy one on the shelf
It’s 12 Since anything times one is itself.

If you do twelve times two it’s a simple chore
As doing this one gets you twenty four

Or another shake gets you…

I will leave this one as an exercise to the reader ;-)

Technically its a really simple app. But I like it because

• it leads to being creative.
• It is a technology tool that sets up an activity that is not done in technology. The app gives you something to do, but it is not done in the app. So you might have to act it out in front of a group, or maybe you would build the act in say a pecha kucha form, or something else.
• It is inherently social- you would do the activity in front of other people.
• The format lends itself to further research- if you do not fully know the “do” or the “act” (I had to look up rhyming couplet to be sure), it calls for further inquiry.

It’s a great recipe. The web site has a great set of video examples of how people have “done the RAG” http://theragis.us/

I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step.

I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)…

So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week).

For you urbanites who have a bank branch for every Starbucks it may not be a big deal, but I am more than 20 miles from a branch, and each time I get a travel expense or other check in the mail, it means a drive into town. Not anymore.

And yes, I can hear all of the weeping and moaning about security. Sure its more secure to shove a piece of paper representing money into a metal box, there is no way that ATMs can be burgled, eh?

I’m game to try,. If anyone wants to mail me $100 I’ll let you know if it works ;-)

Rather than trying to page through screens and type names, I found a slicker and more elegant solution for sharing your apps – the AppsFire site/tool. You download a small addon for your desktop (a preference pane for Mac OS X) that does some sort of communication (I am guessing) with your iTunes to get a list of installed apps. From there, you can go to a web site, where you have options to share all or selected apps by link, email, widget, or social media tools.

Here’s the widget version of my apps (no snickering)

Each icon leads to the link to the app in the iTunes store. It also provides the stat you may not want to see- the total amount spent on the selected apps (I am at $114 spent, gulp).

A few are missing as I just added two new word games directly on the phone (iTunes way of syncing is not completely 2 way or I missed a checkbox somewhere).

Or as an alternate example, I made a link to a subset, my camera related apps.

But I love this as a clever way to be able to share apps easily.

Update! Ouriel, the creator of the AppsFire site saw this post and offered me a custom URL http://myap.ps/cogdogblog for my app set as well as listing me on their VIP page – check it out, I am behind the velvet ropes, walking up the red carpet!

I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory).

But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one):

The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.

So what this new API allows is a way to subscribe to content — via a twitter client– from WordPress.com blogs — it’s been a long time since I;ve been in their dashboard; they have ways to subscribe to blogs directly or via tags to content from WordPress.com blog stuff. And.. you can use the same client to create a post from a twitter client. In Matt’s post, he tells you how to set up Tweetie 2 on an iPhone to do this.

Now this hardly seemed really earth shattering world changing etc, but sometimes, I am just curious to see how it works. So I set up an account in Tweetie for my WordPress.com account, and saw it pull in the posts from my old CogDogRoo blog there (not much else as I am not subscribed to anything).

That was easy. I had to go to my WordPress.com profile, and select which blog I wanted to post to via twitter:

And then I was able to post to a WP.com blog from Tweetie 2:

which ended up, as advertised, on my CogDogLab blog http://cogdoglab.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/okay-i-am-trying-the-new-twitter-api-th/

and because I forgot I did it, went back out to my regular twitter account because I had enabled that in WordPress.com

It seemed weird at first that there was no link to this post, but why? There is nothing else more on the blog then in the tweet.

So I don’t know here what practical application this has, but it now resides as a potential capability hanging out in the internet wind. One could set up easily with a P2 like theme, a microblogging looking site on WordPress.com, perhaps providing a place to hang updates in a place that looks like twitter but is actually not. I cant see blogging by twitter being something I would be doing… but this does seem like an interesting blurring between things we see as distinctly different (blog platforms and twitter).

There is something to what Matt write suggesting about the power of APIs being able to move data between services:

APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 — thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)

This is a very subtle point- the developer of the Tweetie 2 app had not built this functionality into his software, but left a door for other people to be able to by adding the capability of extensible APIs. This is getting to be familiar but its also a radical way of building things from the way ti was done before the read/write web age.

No sign yet if this will be rolled into the self hosted wordpress code.

Just interesting.

It’s been on my machines for months, and to date, my great use of it has been to store my airline frequent flyer numbers, my prescriptions, and someone;s flight details I saved when I had to go to down to the Phoenix Airport.

But it was reading Guy Kawasaki’s 14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote that some neurons began to snap, like:

Photograph business cards. Rather than collecting a pile of business cards that you’ll never go through, photograph them with your iPhone and send their images to Evernote. Evernote recognizes text on the card, so you can search for names such as “Apple” or “John” when that’s the only thing you can remember about the person. If you’re using Evernote on a mobile phone, it can also geotag the photo so that if you can only remember that you met the person in Cupertino, you can still find it. And you can save trees: When someone hands you her card, take a picture of it and hand it back.

I cant wait to try sticking back to them someone’s card they just handed to me.

But wait, Jeeves. Rewind.

You can take a photo of a document, business card, receipt, etc, with your mobile version of Evernote, and it does OCR magic to make the content in an image searchable.

Well, gollllllly, that sounds magic. So I had to try, taking a photo of the covered of Mired… errr, Wired I was reading on an airplane. You can do this right inside the Evernote iPhone App- take a photo and it shows up as a “note”:

And sure enough, when I enter a word in the title of the cover *”Dangerous”_ in the Evernote search field, it lists this as the only note matching, and when I go to the cover, darned if it finds the word:

The other piece that interested me is that using Evernote’s plugin for Firefox (or Safari), I can easily save entire web pages to Evernote. Why do that? Well, I come across some people who still write really really really really long blog posts– so if I Evernote them, I can then read them offline, like when I am on a plane.

So for example, I might save something from Stephen Downes’ Half and Hour blog (Some of his posts would take me half a month to write!)- life his recent post on An Operating System for the Mind, I just use the Firefox contextual menu (I have an Evernote extension in there somewhere):

And just like that, it is in my cloud, and then syncs to my mobile. IN the desktop Evernote app I can assign tags; I move it to a new notebook I set up called “Stuff to Read”- but the web content is there for me to read later:

Wow, that was easy- so I grab a few more long scrollers- Henry Jenkins’ The Message of Twitter: “Here It Is” and “Here I Am” and Jared Stein’s Online Class: What Size Do You Want To Be? – both some extensive writings that deserve more than a twitter span of attention.

And now I have them stored in my Evernote and on my iPhone for later reading:

What impresses me is how fast, simple, and seamless the moving of content into Evernote is, as well as how it moves back out to my iPhone and back.

I still don’t know how else I might use Evernote (might have to play with the audio recording of notes) but I file it away for a time when a need for its features will rear its head.

Here’s my quick little demo of it in action:

It charges up when you charge the iPhone (blue light indicators on the back show how much juice is in the juice pack). There is a standby switch so I run my iPhone battery down, then flip the mophie power on, which then recharges the iPhone. I get at least one full charge and there are still 1 or 2 lights lit up, si estimate I might get another 40% charge out of it. I do agree with what others have said the sliding the top case off the mophie is a little tricky; it seems to require some extra force, and when it doe snot nudge one begins to wonder if it will snap.

The mophie adds a little bulk to the device, but for not having to have a battery brick, its impressive. I was eager for mine, so I pre-ordered mine and paid for 2 day shipping for the April 21 launch since I was leaving the 30th for a 2 week east coast trip. Frankly I expected by pre-ordering, the thing would ship on April 21, but it was almost a week later I had not heard from them. I did email and got a very quick response from Rebecca there, and she pushed the right buttons so that it came the day before I left town.

That scored some points in my book. What I did not know for a long time is (and I am guessing) since I complained about not getting it within the time frame promised, they ended up crediting me back the entire amount I paid for it (unless they just made a billing goof). So it has been free.

One small downside is the little mini USB like hookup the mophie uses to connect to the internal connector of the iPhone- you use a special cable that has regular USB on the other end so you can charge it from a computer or from the standard iPhone plug charger. This does mean I cannot power it in my car, where I have a cigarette lighter attachment to a standard iPhone dock. I could charge it by yanking it out of the mophie case.

The other thing is that the little mini USB port on the mophie might be fragile– probably because I had mistakenly got the mini USB plug in upside down, I managed to dislodge the plug from the inside, and once loose it became detached and in essence, the mophie was dead and could not get a charge. If you scan the comments in the c|net review of the mophie, you hear that this happens at some frequency for people.

The mophie customer support was really responsive for me, and I shipped the busted to them and got a new one in return soon after. I’m being a bit more careful with checking the cable orientation before connecting it.

All in all I am happy with the battery boost the mophie gives. I am usually putting on for travel, and going back to a basic case at home (in the car where I use it for my stereo I can just hook it to the DC power)– and more, I;ve ben happy to get good customer service, a refreshing change from the experience with other companies.

But like others who find the notion of an “upgrade” for buying the most recent model an interesting term….. apparently the pirates known as AT&T want to Ssssssuck more money out of the Apple love.

I went to check how I could buy an iPhone. The “early upgrade” fee of $18 which is really $36 which is really $236 if you are a sap who owns a 3G.

That $299 iPhone 3GS will cost me $499. It is explained really clearly:

As a valued AT&T customer, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 01/19/2010.

In the spirit of Tom Woodard, I am close captioning this for the AT&T impaired…

As a valued AT&T customer Yep, we value zinging you with fees, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee Whoops, we forgot to mention that extra $18 other fee, the 100% gravy on top of gravy fee. And oh yeah, as a “valued” customer, once you get to step 5 you will find that the phone that costs $299 for people who bought an older phone costs you $499 although you bought a $399 phone last year. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 01/19/2010. Yep, and if you think you can pawn off your 3G phone, dream on..

I’ll be waiting until my indentured service to AT&T hits the 18 month mark in January. While my work pays for my phone, and I could have them pay the extra hit– it just seems wrong. Maybe I’ll change my mind, wont be the first time, and really it is maybe and extra $30 a month to get a newer better phone faster?

But.

It just seems wrong

In the meantime, I am sharing my list of desired features that maybe they will get around to by January 2010.

• A better way to manage handoff/switch off of 3G/wireless connectivity. I’d really like some way from any screen to turn on/off wireless. I can best describe it by what happens when I travel to the Phoenix airport. I park at long term parking, and on the bus to the terminal I usually am checking mail, twitter etc. As I pass terminals 4 and 3, my phone picks up the free airport wireless, but using it requires an authentication login (passing through 3 questions and a button). The wireless network gets in the way. The same is entering a space where the main public networks are all locked. Maybe a wireless connection option that will only look for public/open networks?? The bottom line, I end up having to go to Settings — Wireless continually to turn on and off wireless. I’d like to do this from the menubar of any screen.
• Apple prides itself on UI but the UI for managing my app screens is worse than something Microsoft might give us. Managing the arrangement of apps by sliding around on the phone screen is sheer torture. It is in new way a fun or desirable activity. I want a graphic tool, maybe in iTunes, to organize and manage my app icons. I want to be able to easily group them so I can find things. I have 6 panes now of random apps. If I add a new one, it might take me 15 minutes to make room and slide things around to fit in a sensible place. Give us a GUI app organizer editor!
• Let me customize the keyboard Some apps change the keyboard- Safari gives you a “.com” on the keyboard. I’d like to customize more common keys for the way *I* work, not the way an app designer thinks I should. Typing URLs is just plain super tedium, only to be relieved slightly when we get cut ‘n paste. Some entry fields are “smart” like in the Contacts when it knows how to capitalize and accept things like zipcodes, but web site fields want to capitalize email and URL fields? Yech.

I’d write more but I am tired and defeated. Tell me how groovy the 3GS is, but I will be “S” less til released from the shackles in January.

I have to admire and respect the radical gusto with which Stephen Downes postulates What Not To Build — it matters not even if I agree or disagree (which I do), is that he puts out there no holds barred, as he has done for longer than some of you kids have known what a browser is. And I always learn things–

My sort of environmental scan is a bit different from what you’ll get from consultants and venture capitalists. Don’t ask me what companies are developing what products, how industry stocks are performing, or where all the ‘smart money’ is going. I don’t know and I don’t care.

What I can tell you, though, is what technologies are working, what technologies are flopping, and what technologies are fads. It’s practical, down-to-earth advice. For example, if you are a technology developer, you already know that you should not try to build a new operating system, a new word processor, an online store or an auction site, for example. These have been built and have established a mainstream presence. You would need thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to compete with them.

But when it comes down to it, it is an opinion, based on a lot of things Stephen looks at, but we all carry the perspective of our own goggles. So of course there is going to be a lot of vehement agreeing/disagreeing with his convention that “the iPhone is a fad”. And… mostly it is “people who have/want versus iPhones” versus “people who don’t/hate Apple”.

Even if it is a “fad”– and in technology, for that matter, what is not a fad? What really lasts? What is the staying power required to be “not fad?”… Videodiscs? fad. Floppy disks? fad. 256 color web safe color palettes? fad. Stephen’s position seems to be it is a fad if all you think of it as a phone. That’s just part of the name, dude.

So if the iPhone is a fad, it is without doubt, IMHO, a game changer. If it were not, why are all the competitors rushing to make clones? Without the iPhone, would we see other phones with multi-touch screens or would it be a proliferation of more years of button machines, sliding keyboards, and horrific interfaces?

I’ve been tracking the stats on the NMC web sites this past year with the nifty Clicky service (click image for larger view). Without wavering, for as many months as I cannot remember, the top search terms coming inbound to the main NMC web site have been combinations of “iphone” “iPod Touch”.

And consistently over a stretch of 6 months, one of the top 3 or 5 pages accessed has been a May 12 blog post by Keene Haywood Keene Haywood on iPhone vs iTouch and why I would always choose an iPhone. The blog part of the NMC site is hardly used, Keene and maybe 5 others out of 3000 accounts actually publish on this site, but this relatively obscure post (no offense keene) has been a top accessed page for 6 plus months.

That seems interesting.

But this is even weirder. (click image for larger view)

Another site, NMC Virtual Worlds, has nothing to do with iPhones- it is about our projects in the virtual worlds space — and here too, we get a steady stream of search terms leading here on “Second Life iPhone” mainly from one post from August 6 Second Life Communication via iPhone– which again has consistently been in the top 5 or so accessed URLs.

But in some interpretations, this is the sign that this is a fad… or really?

In the end, or not the end, I am not standing on either sign of the “fad” sense as I don;t even fully understand what makes or breaks a fad. If it is a fad, it will fade? Or it means other phone makers should not copy it? or they will?

Informally, and when I travel, I watch the people using iPhones. They don’t look like all geeks, or Apple heads, just ordinary folks.

And I find my access to information is changing with the iPhone. You do get accustomed to being able to have access to email, the web, RSS feeds, twitter where-ever you are (that gets a signal). This, yes, is not unique to the iPhone, but BI (before iPhone) I don’t recall so many people getting the web in a web browser on a phone; it was always a stripped down WAPpy web.

Looking at the innovative developments with the accelerometer, the camera/microphone as an input device, the integration of portable apps with web content… seems more ripe for expansion than fade to fad-dom.

I await the response ;-)

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