iPhone and Touch Team

I had planned on giving my 16GB iPod Touch to my daughter after getting my iPhone. However, now my plans seemed to have changed.

It turns out that the two devices make a great team. In my car I have a Griffen FM transmitter/charger that works with both devices, but only charges the Touch (Apple changed the connector pin-outs again!). So my Touch is the best device to use for listening in the car to music, podcasts, and audio books on long trips. Also, I now have more than 16GB of audio and video files in residing iTunes. So, my iPod Touch has become the device for holding audio files and my iPhone for holding video files, allowing me to have ready access to all my media.

Finally, at home my iPod Touch now normally rests in the Altec-Lansing iPod speakers, ready to play music from its files or from Pandora, while my iPhone remains handy in my shirt pocket for quick email, SMS, Web/RSS reading, and even making or receiving the odd phone call! So it turns out that the Touch and the iPhone have turned into a mutually supporting team. I now think I’m keeping them both. Sorry, Wendy!

Google Application for iPhone

I’m really impressed with the Google application for the iPhone/Touch. Not only does it speed up the whole search process by providing suggestions, but it also can be used to search in the iPhone/Touch Contacts file. This search function is actually faster than the built-in search function in the Contacts application. The screen above shows an example of using this feature, with me entering “Mike” into the application. Clicking on any of the returned contacts will take you right to the associated contact record. Pretty nifty!

Cheap International Calling for iPhones

Packet8, my current home VOIP provider, just sent me information on a new international calling service that works with the iPhone. It’s called MobileTalk and it doesn’t require any monthly, connection, or setup fees. Now I don’t really make any international calls, but this seems like a pretty slick service. So if you do make international calls on your iPhone, check it out.

Back in the Saddle Again

We had a beautiful memorial service for my wife on Saturday and I’ve decided to return to blogging effective today. I really love participating in the Internet community and have greatly appreciated all the support I’ve received from it during my wife’s illness. I will be returning to work again on September 1.

Well, some interesting “Staying Connected” things have been happening to me. First of all my broken iPod Touch was returned to me by Apple’s service department just 2 business days after sending it off to them. Actually what I received was not my original Touch, but a new refurbished unit. This new Touch works great and I was frankly amazed at just how fast Apple’s service is – great job Apple!

Next, as the picture shows, I’m now also the very proud owner of a brand-new 16GB iPhone 3G. I ordered it at my local AT&T store on the same day I shipped my Touch off to Apple and it was available for pickup the same day my Touch arrived. Given the great difficulty everyone is having in obtaining iPhones from either Apple or AT&T, I rank this as something of a miracle!

Lastly, I’m actually using my iPhone to create this posting using the new WordPress application now available in the iTunes App Store. The posting is something of an experiment to see just how well this application works and how practical it will be to use it for it regular posting tool. Oh, and by the way, I’m loving the iPhone!

Barbara Connick, Rest In Peace

Today at 3:00 PM, my wife, lover, and best friend Barbara Connick died in the Hubbard Hospice House in Charleston, WV of an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer that had metastasized in her liver . In the end she passed very quickly and with little pain or discomfort, and received absolutely first-class care from the loving and extremely competent hospice doctors, nurses, social workers, and chaplain. We shared a wonderful 22 years together, and Barbara will be missed very much not only by me but by the hundreds of people whose lives she so positively affected. Good bye, Barbara, you were one in a million!

Taking A Break from Blogging

I’m taking a temporary break from blogging. My wife’s physical condition in her battle with cancer has taken a sudden and dramatic downturn. I simply don’t have the time or energy right now to post here. I’ll probably continue sporadic posts to Twitter, which of course also appear in FriendFeed, as they are short, quick, and pretty undemanding.

The picture above is somewhat ironic. It shows Barbara two years ago, before her cancer diagnosis, showing off her new short hair after she had her very long hair cut off off and donated to Locks of Love – an organization that provides wigs to cancer patients who have lost their hair due to radiation and/or chemotheropy treatment. Barbara lost her hair due to chemotherapy, but she has never worn a wig.

Thanks again for all of your prayers and words of support. They have meant a lot to both Barbara and me.

Saved By The Cloud

Now that my iPod Touch is off to Apple (it left yesterday on a trip to CA to be repaired), how have I been able to recover from its loss? What about all the data I worked with when using my Touch?

First of all, a brief aside: kudos to Apple. I logged onto their Web site on Thursday to request warranty service for my iPod Touch and the very next day, Friday, the packaging arrived for shipping it back to Apple. Very impressive turnaround so far.

My next aside is the fact that yesterday I visited my local AT&T store and ordered a white 16GB iPhone. So it’s a race between Apple and AT&T – which device will I receive first? I’m actually betting on Apple at this point, but who knows?

Now for the primary topic of this post: my iPod Touch has been the computer I used the most each day. In fact, I tell everyone that it’s a pocket computer that happens to play media. In addition to using it to play music, audio books, and videos, I used it to manage my daily finances, maintain contacts, keep appointments, maintain shopping lists, and manage all my tasks. I also used it to surf the Web, read RSS feeds, and handle email. Now that it’s gone, did all the data utilized by those functions disappear too?

Thankfully, not. You see most of the data I utilized with my Touch also resides in the “cloud”, that is, on Internet servers. So I did not lose a thing. For example, my tasks were managed on my iPod Touch using Appigo ToDo, a program which syncs with the wonderful Web-based task manager Remember The Milk (RTM). So all my tasks are still accessible to me through RTM’s web interface. My daily checkbook transactions were managed using the Web-based EditGrid spreadsheet system, which has a very nice iPhone/Touch interface. All my daily financial data  is likewise safe there. How about my RSS feeds? Well, I used Byline on my Touch, which is a Google Reader client. So all my RSS feed subscriptions are also safe and sound on Google’s servers. Shopping lists? Listingly has them…you getting the point?

Now this data protection is over and above that provided by backups. I backed up my iPod Touch at least once each day by syncing it with iTunes. However, without an iPod Touch I can’t get to this data! For the purpose of disaster recovery this backed up information is useless to me.

So, because of cloud-based services it’s very easy to access important data from multilple computing platforms (smartphone, iPod Touch, iPhone, PC, etc), but in addition you also get a safe repository for that information in case of a hardware catastrophy. Thank goodness for the cloud!

Oh No, My iPod Touch Died!

Yes, it’s true, my iPod Touch died! It will not connect reliably to the Internet anymore. I tried a couple of complete restores, but it’s no going, it’s definitely a hardware problem. Apple is sending me packing material to ship it off to California for repairs/replacement.

In the meantime my Asus Eee 900 will be trying valiantly to take it’s place. The 900 surfs the Web, handles email, plays media (it even runs Pandora!), runs applications, etc., but I just can’t figure out how I’m going to carry it in my shirt pocket like I do my iPod Touch.

If iPhones were more readily available, I might very well use this as an excuse to run out and buy one, but I’m pretty sure that my local AT&T store is out of stock and the nearest Apple Store is a 3-hour drive to Columbus, OH. Oh my, what a revolting development this is!

Finding Out What’s Happening in the App Store

So many new applications are appearing every day in the iTunes App Store that it’s becoming hard to keep track of the current state of iPhone/Touch applications. Pinch Media has just made it a whole lot easier to do by providinng a set of RSS feeds that report on the App Store. Right now feeds are available for new apps, updated apps, the top 100 paid apps, and the top 100 free apps. These feeds are updated hourly, so you’ll be able to stay right on top of the volitile Apps Store scene by subscribing to them.

I Like Byline for the iPhone/Touch

Byline is a program available from the iTunes App Store that provides a very nice Google Reader client for the iPhone/Touch. Now, I’m a huge fan of this program, but you might hate it. Let me explain.

First of all, I recently went through my RSS feed list and ruthlessly scrubbed it of anything but the most invaluable sites to me. I now only subscribe to 62 RSS feeds through Google Reader. Quite a few of these feeds are low in their number of weekly posts. So my daily volume of posts to read is pretty low and I don’t need a super heavy-duty RSS reader any more.

Byline meets my personal needs very well. Setting it up is incredably simple – you just provide it with your Google login and password. From there on it interacts automatically with your current Google Reader set up and retrieves messages for you. What I love about it is that it can save starred, noted, or even new messsages for offline viewing. This is obviously more important for iPod Touch users than iPhone users, but always a handy function.

Now for the big limitation of Byline – right now there is no “Mark All Read” function. That means you have to actually “read” all the posts. Now reading is VERY fast with Byline and consists of just tapping the down arrow on the screen. The next message appears immediately. So you can actually go through messages very quickly. I typically fly through my messages, starring those I actually want to read (and thereby saving them offline onto my Touch), and initially working my way through them all in only a few minutes.

This works fine for low to moderate volumes, but obviously if you are going through thousands (or even many hundreds) of RSS messages a day, then Byline is almost certainly not for you. But, if your feed messages are more moderate in volume and you want to be able to capture postings for offline viewing, then I think you will be as happy with Byline as I am.