I lost my job last week. Or, to quote Bob­cat Goldth­wait, “well, I didn’t actu­ally lose my job, I mean I know where my job is still. It’s just when I go there, there’s this new guy doing it.” I won’t go into the details, other than to say a lot of peo­ple got let go at the same time, and I’m not sure it was a coin­ci­dence that nearly all of them made more than the aver­age salary for their job title. #justsayin

Even though I know it had noth­ing to do with me per­son­ally, it still threw me. I was already down in the dumps over look­ing back at the last decade (it wasn’t the best time of my life), and even though my peo­ple (I have peo­ple) are already work­ing on get­ting me on board some­where else, I let the accu­mu­lated self doubt knock me off my stride and didn’t write for days.

Part of it was that I’d already stalled out on Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I was bored with revi­sions on Rev­e­la­tion, and scared of con­tin­u­ing with Cru­sade. I’m start­ing to think I’m still too close to the story to revise it prop­erly, and yet burned out on it after writ­ing the whole first novel. I need a change of pace. Maybe I should start work on some­thing really dif­fer­ent, like Ghost Ronin, Titanus or Home­world.

Or maybe I’m just wuss­ing out again. I’m mak­ing it up as I go along here. Now that the “seven books in ten months” marathon is out the win­dow, I’m try­ing dif­fer­ent things.

On a sim­i­lar note, I’m back to writ­ing every­thing in one mono­lithic Word file rather than indi­vid­ual chap­ter doc­u­ments in Ever­note or Google Docs. Just feels more nat­ural. Maybe I’m old fash­ioned. I am still keep­ing the Word doc­u­ments in Ever­note to keep them synced any­where, and if I need to write a lit­tle extra, I have a new jail­break exten­sion for my iPhone that lets me quickly scroll down to the bot­tom of the Word doc­u­ments to see where I left off before typ­ing in the new stuff in Evernote.

On the tech front, I’m work­ing on a review of the new Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver for the iPhone, which allows me to use my Stow­away in sit­u­a­tions where I’d rather not carry my net­book. Some­times that three pounds mat­ters. What?

“Don’t blame the car­pen­ter. Blame the tool.” –Howie Long in a new Chevy commercial

Am I the only one who thinks he’s call­ing that guy a tool? Any­way, I’m not going to com­plain about my tools today, so much as doc­u­ment one more step in my never-​ending quest to find bet­ter tools for writing.

My grand Google Docs exper­i­ment lasted all of two chap­ters into Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this has noth­ing to do with Google Docs, but when I hit a slump one of my first impulses is to mix up how I do things. As it hap­pens, a major improve­ment to an old friend hap­pened along at just the right time.

Ever­note

Two days before Christ­mas, Ever­note gave us iPhone users an early gift. Ever­note for the iPhone ver­sion 3.2 fixes most of the prob­lems I had with the iPhone ver­sion. Sync­ing is no longer modal, mean­ing you can search and do other things while sync­ing to your data­base, and you can store selected note­books locally on the device, mean­ing you can always access them offline even if you’ve never opened that par­tic­u­lar note on your iPhone before. While Ever­note for the iPhone still doesn’t allow you to edit rich text notes directly, ver­sion 3.2 does allow you to make a plain text copy and edit that rather than just append­ing to the rich text note. This allows for revi­sions I couldn’t do before.

These changes make Ever­note vastly more use­ful to me for writ­ing on the go. And of course it doesn’t hurt that the lat­est build of the 3.5 beta — yes, I know I said I wasn’t upgrad­ing, I have a sick­ness — is pretty solid as well. These changes are so impres­sive, in fact, that I’ve gone back to Ever­note for my actual draft­ing. I keep each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate note, tagged as “draft” and in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles note­book. I really like hav­ing all my stuff in one place again.

BTstack Key­board Driver

Of course, writ­ing on the go with just the on-​screen key­board on my iPhone only works for rel­a­tively short pas­sages. For any kind of speed, I’d still need my net­book, with the addi­tional five pounds — 3 for the net­book, 2 for the AC adap­tor and cables — to lug around that this would entail, right? Not so much. The BTstack Key­board Dri­ver also appeared on Cydia last week. This is part of the over­all BTstack project, intended to pro­vide an alter­na­tive Blue­tooth stack for the iPhone that han­dles pro­files Apple chooses not to sup­port. The key­board dri­ver, as you might expect, allows the iPhone to use exter­nal Blue­tooth key­boards using the Blue­tooth HID (Human Inter­face Devices) profile.

I still have my Think­Out­side Blue­tooth Stow­away from my Win­dows Mobile days, so I paid my five bucks, down­loaded and installed the dri­ver and set about test­ing it. It’s def­i­nitely still a work in progress, but it’s very promis­ing. Not all of the ancil­lary keys work, and some­times I get a string of garbage char­ac­ters, but over­all, it works for get­ting text into the iPhone fast and easy on a full-​size key­board (my Stow­away is actu­ally mar­gin­ally more com­fort­able than my 92% full size key­board on my net­book). So add this to Ever­note and now I don’t have to take my net­book with me to Chipo­tle for lunch. My back and shoul­ders already thank me.

Enso Words

Writ­ing in Ever­note has a few dis­ad­van­tages, chief among them that Ever­note has no word count func­tion. How do I track my progress with­out work count? Enter Enso Words. This is a small util­ity pro­gram that runs all the time in your Win­dows sys­tem tray and waits to be called either by hold­ing down the Cap­slock key like a sec­ond shift key, or as I pre­fer, tap­ping the Cap­slock key and enter­ing a com­mand and enter, or esc to go back to what you were doing. When you have Enso Words acti­vated, you can have it per­form a vari­ety of func­tions on what­ever text you have selected in vir­tu­ally any application.

So to get a word count on my cur­rent note in Ever­note, I:

1. Hit Ctrl-​A to select all text
2. Tap Cap­slock to invoke Enso Words
3. Type “wo” to nar­row down the com­mand selec­tion to “word count”
4. Hit Enter

Enso words then pops up a lit­tle box on screen with my cur­rent word count, and that box fades away auto­mat­i­cally as soon as I type some­thing or move the mouse. With a lit­tle prac­tice, this becomes sec­ond nature. I could even shave off a key­stroke if I used Enso in “qua­si­modal” mode and just released Cap­slock after typ­ing “wo”, no longer hav­ing to hit enter to send the com­mand. Enso is also great for look­ing up def­i­n­i­tions and syn­onyms, spell check­ing in any appli­ca­tion, chang­ing case, search­ing Google and more. It’s free, and takes up very lit­tle sys­tem resources, even on my netbook.

Write­Mon­key

When I want to get hard­core, though, I break out the mon­key. Write­Mon­key. This is a text proces­sor for Win­dows inspired by the pop­u­lar Write­Room on the Mac. While it works win­dowed — and that’s how I use it at the office — it’s really intended to run full screen. In full screen mode, Write­Mon­key takes up your entire mon­i­tor, hid­ing even your Win­dows taskbar and shows you just what you need to see to write. It’s small, fast, portable and keeps a run­ning word count at the top or bot­tom of the screen so you can see how you’re doing. The idea here is to remove all the dis­trac­tions and just write.

Write­Mon­key doesn’t inte­grate auto­mat­i­cally with Ever­note, but it’s not all that hard to get them to play together. I select all the text in a note like I would with Enso, but then copy it, fire up Write­Mon­key, paste and start writ­ing. When I’m done, I select all and copy from Write­Mon­key and then paste back into the note in Ever­note. Pretty simple.

Google Docs

I still use Google Docs for one thing: spread­sheets. I keep my word counts there in a sim­ple sheet that holds the word count for each chap­ter and then sums them to tell me the word count for the over­all novel. And hey, I can even update Google Docs spread­sheets on my iPhone! (Now I just need Enso Words for the iPhone.)

So that’s it, my new sys­tem, designed to be the sim­plest I’ve come up with yet (since it can’t really han­dle for­mat­ting, there’s no temp­ta­tion to spend time mak­ing it pretty). How do you take your writ­ing on the go?

Nuance released Dragon Dic­ta­tion for the iPhone yes­ter­day, and they made it free. By all accounts, it works pretty well, and should make using an iPhone much more intu­itive for lots of people.

So it should come as no sur­prise that peo­ple are already whining.

See, Dragon uploads your con­tacts to their servers the first time you run it. It does this because all the recog­ni­tion is done in the cloud — you didn’t think it could really do nearly flaw­less voice recog­ni­tion with the iPhone’s RAM and CPU, did you? — and Nuance fig­ures that if they pre-​recognize all your con­tacts, it will save time when you, like, use them. You’re prob­a­bly going to be men­tion­ing at least a few of your con­tacts a lot.

So what’s wrong with this? It’s an inva­sion of pri­vacy, of course! How dare Nuance upload your dic­ta­tion to their servers, tak­ing it lit­er­ally out of your hands, just so that they process it via a free ser­vice you opted into by down­load­ing and installing the gor­ram app in the first place? The nerve! And they keep the record­ings — so that they can con­tin­u­ally refine their recog­ni­tion, the same way Google keeps all your search queries — mean­ing that if you were to use their free ser­vice to dic­tate your plans to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, and if they didn’t anonymize the results — they do — and if said gov­ern­ment went sniff­ing around in those record­ings because the NSA clearly doesn’t already have enough data to sift through, well, that would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it?

Get over it, people.

Look, cloud com­put­ing isn’t the devil, and it isn’t here to take all your pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids. But a cer­tain degree of trust/​sphincter-​loosening is required if you’re going to join us here in the brave new world. Peo­ple need to get over this idea that they even have pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal age. Hey, you, in the shack up in Mon­tana. Yeah, I’m talk­ing to you. If you pos­sess any­thing in dig­i­tal form, guess what? You ain’t the only one with access to it. Deal. Or go back to keep­ing your man­i­festo scrawled in pen­cil on toi­let paper.

Relax, peo­ple, it’s okay. Just lie back, close your eyes and think of Eng­land. Or bet­ter yet, here’s a rad­i­cal idea. If you don’t agree with the terms of ser­vice, DON’T USE THE GORRAM SERVICE! Vote with your dol­lars, all zero of them! Nuance is giv­ing you some­thing valu­able for FREE. If you don’t like the fact that, hey, they’re going to use your anonymized data to improve said ser­vice, set your boots a-​walkin’, mis­ter. It’s the price of admis­sion, and guess what? You’re not enti­tled to any­thing. Keep bang­ing those rocks together, you’ll make fire some­day. But if you want to sit at the grownups table, act like you’ve been there.

As my Twit­ter fol­low­ers know, I’ve been pretty peeved with Ever­note recently. The iPhone client ver­sion has decided that it absolutely, pos­i­tively will not com­plete a sync with the Ever­note servers on my 3G. I’ve done every­thing I can, even sent my log files to the com­pany (no response as of yet), and all of my tou­bleshoot­ing comes down to the same thing. Even after a fresh reboot of my iPhone, with 30MB of RAM avail­able (the most a 128MB 3G ever gets after load­ing the mobile ver­sion of OS/​X), Ever­note will fight for a while and then either spit up the error mes­sage you see here or just crash com­pletely and dump be back to the home­screen, the typ­i­cal reac­tion when an iPhone app runs out of RAM. (The new iPhone 3GS seems to run Ever­note just fine, but then it would; it’s got 256MB of RAM, or five times the free RAM on boot as the 3G has, 150MB com­pared to 30MB.)

The prob­lem with this is that up until just a cou­ple days ago, the mobile web ver­sion of Ever­note wasn’t all that impressive.

This was a pain in the ass to use on my Win­dows Mobile devices, and it’s a pain in the ass to use on my iPhone. It’s a sim­ple WAP-​style page that doesn’t do much. But hey, it worked on my iPhone when the ded­i­cated client didn’t, so at least it was some­thing. I only used it for look­ing up notes, opt­ing to email new notes to my pri­vate Ever­note email address when I wanted to cre­ate some­thing new. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Well, now it’s pretty too.

The new ver­sion of the mobile web Ever­note uses some nice iPhone/​Androidish CSS to look far more pro­fes­sional, more like a real app than a web page. It even sports some slick new menus that are both touch friendly and easy to use.

It’s a webapp rather than a native app, but that really isn’t a prob­lem for me. I’m already using the Safari-​optimized Gmail instead of the iPhone’s Mail client for read­ing my Gmail, the Safari-​optimized Google Reader instead of Byline, and iPhone-​friendly ver­sions of Google News, AP News, GoodReads, Wikipedia, the list goes on and on. Using webapps instead of native clients is a way to mul­ti­task on the iPhone with­out jail­break­ing and run­ning Back­grounder since you can have up to eight pages open at a time. And the inter­face for man­ag­ing them even bears a strik­ing resem­blance to man­ag­ing cards on the Pre.

Only one prob­lem remains, really. There is a JavaScript-​based clip­per avail­able for Safari Mobile that allows you to send what­ever you’re cur­rently look­ing at to Ever­note. The JavaScript looks like this:

javascript:location.href=‘http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

And it works.

The prob­lem, as you can see above, is that this script directs you to the full size ver­sion of Ever­note rather than a mobile page. This is espe­cially awk­ward when try­ing to tag what you just clipped.

I’ve tried every vari­a­tion I can think of to merge the JavaScript above with the URL of the new mobile site:

https://www.evernote.com/mobile/MobileSetup.action?noRedirect=true

And noth­ing seems to work. So for now, I’m deal­ing with the awk­ward clip­ping in Safari, but pretty happy with the rest of the Ever­note Mobile Web expe­ri­ence. So much so that I’m really not even all that wor­ried about the iPhone client. The mobile web ver­sion does almost every­thing I need, and for the rest — pho­tos and other mul­ti­me­dia — I can email stuff to Ever­note. All I’m really miss­ing is the iPhone client’s offline favorites, but I’ll live.

As I type this, there are less than 36 hours to go before the open­ing keynote of Apple’s 2009 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. The inter­nets are buzzing with spec­u­la­tion as to what we are going to see. I’ve read all the rumors, spec­u­la­tion and pre­dic­tions, and run them through my sophis­ti­cated bull­shit detec­tor, and applied my years of expe­ri­ence ana­lyz­ing the mobile indus­try to suss out what I think we’re actu­ally going to see. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I really don’t think it’s likely.

(and for what it’s worth, I think this is not too far from how it might go down)

I don’t think Apple intended for this to be a release con­fer­ence. I think even as recently as a month ago, they expected to have Phil Schiller make some announce­ments about iPhone OS 3.0 and Snow Leop­ard, and maybe announce the third gen­er­a­tion iPhone, which I think was intended to be called the iPhone HD. The actual release of the 3.0 firmware and the new iPhone would be in mid-​July.

The events of May and the first week of June have, I believe, changed Apple’s plans, and forced them to accel­er­ate their time table. Microsoft’s announce­ment of the Zune HD and the incred­i­ble media hype sur­round­ing the release of the Palm Pre, not to men­tion Palm’s sur­prise announce­ment that the Pre accom­plishes media sync by pre­tend­ing to be an iPod and using Apple’s own iTunes soft­ware, has, shall we say, fired the com­pet­i­tive flames within Apple’s Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and yes, Steve Jobs.

Check your iTunes instal­la­tion. Does it say it will check for the next update on June 8? Even if you just installed 8.2? That’s because it knows some­thing we don’t, namely that the new iTunes firmware will be avail­able right after the keynote, rather than in July. If you have a jail­bro­ken iPhone, restore it now, because you’ll need a clean instal­la­tion to upgrade on Mon­day. The 3.0 firmware will be pretty much what we saw in beta 5, with no big new fea­tures like back­ground processes. AT&T will offer to add unlim­ited teth­er­ing for your lap­top to your account for an addi­tional $30 a month.

More than that, Schiller (and maybe Jobs) will unveil the new iPhone Video, a name which has already shown up in some behind the scenes code. This will be very sim­i­lar to the iPhone 3G in size and shape, but will have a slightly dif­fer­ent face. It will have a 320×570, 16×9 aspect screen. push­ing the ear­piece grill fur­ther towards the top of the device. In many ways it will look like a “stealth” 3G, with a gun­metal bezel and a matte fin­ish black back. The front glass will con­ceal a VGA front fac­ing video cam­era for iChat to go along with the 3.2 MP aut­o­fo­cus cam­era on the back.

The iPhone Video will be avail­able imme­di­ately via Apple.com, and at Apple stores either Mon­day or Tues­day. Not sure when AT&T retail out­lets will get it. It will come in three capac­i­ties: 8GB for $99 with a two year con­tract, 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $299.

That’s a lot, and I think they’ll stop there. I don’t expect them to announce the iTablet or iPad or what­ever they call the Kindle-​sized iPod Touch we all sus­pect them to be work­ing on. Steve’s a show­man and he knows the first rule of show­man­ship: always leave them want­ing more. We’ll hear a lit­tle about Snow Leop­ard in the open­ing com­ments, which I expect to be released sooner rather than later, prob­a­bly late July or August. And of course, judg­ing by the ban­ners already hang­ing at WWDC, they’ll be play­ing up the App Store, and will show­case a few big name appli­ca­tions that take advan­tage of fea­tures exclu­sive to 3.0. Look for Doc­u­ments to Go and Bee­jive to fig­ure prominently.

Am I off base? We have 36 hours to find out. Josh Curry and I are plan­ning to record our return to Max­i­mum Geek Mon­day night, so be sure to check in for our analy­sis and other tech news hijinks.

From engad­get:

Think you’ll have to wait until June 6^th for all the Pre sur­prises to emerge? Think again. A break­ing Reuters report has just dropped one of the biggest cel­lu­lar bomb­shells of the year: Ver­i­zon Wire­less, America’s largest mobile oper­a­tor, will soon be car­ry­ing Palm’s Pre. Oh, that’s not enough? No wor­ries — it’ll also be sell­ing a “new ver­sion of the touch­screen Black­Berry Storm,” which is obvi­ously the Storm 2 that we’ve been toy­ing around with. The report makes clear that both phones would be cleared for ship­ment in around six months, which cer­tainly jibes with whis­pers we’ve heard about Sprint’s mighty short exclu­siv­ity period. The news came from the company’s Low­ell McAdam, the top exec­u­tive for the ven­ture of Ver­i­zon Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Voda­fone. To quote: “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Storm.” First Sprint, then AT&T, and now Ver­i­zon? T-​Mobile, where you at?
[Thanks, E]
Update: Seems Mr. McAdam con­tin­ued on by not­ing that VZW would get the Palm Pre “and a cousin.” Hmm, Eos, any­one?

So Ver­i­zon is get­ting the Palm Pre, the Palm Eos, the Black­berry Storm 2 (now with­out inher­ently lim­it­ing click screen) and we keep hear­ing rumors from trusted sources about Ver­i­zon get­ting some vari­ant of the iPhone. Prob­a­bly not just a CDMA ver­sion of the 3G, as that would poten­tially vio­late their con­tract with AT&T, but I’ve heard rumors that Ver­i­zon may be get­ting either or both the iPad tablet and the iPhone Mini.

Admit­tedly, this is all spec­u­la­tion, but I’ve pointed out before that each major US car­rier seemed to have a stan­dard bearer smart­phone plat­form. Ver­i­zon pushed Black­berry, Sprint had the Pre, AT&T had the iPhone and T-​Mobile had the Android G1. Now it seems Ver­i­zon might be mov­ing to con­sol­i­date every­one else’s mar­quee phones under their own ban­ner. Any­one got any good Android on Ver­i­zon rumors?

From c|net:

Sprint Nex­tel and Palm announced on Tues­day an offi­cial release date and pric­ing for the Palm Pre.

The Pre will be avail­able nation­wide on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-​in rebate and with a two-​year con­tract on Sprint’s Every­thing Data plan or Busi­ness Essen­tials with Mes­sag­ing and Data plan. In addi­tion to Sprint stores, the Pre will be sold online and at Best Buy, RadioShack, and some Wal-​Mart Stores.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Pretty much what we expected, and com­pet­i­tive with cur­rent iPhones.

Sorta. Don’t for­get to read the fine print. Like how that $200 price tag is after a mail-​in rebate, so it will actu­ally cost you $300+tax to walk out of the store with it. And then there’s the date, June 6^th. That gives them 48 hours to sell this thing before Apple announces the iPhone 3.0 at WWDC. From Wired:

The source told iPhone fan blog Apple iPhone Apps that the new iPhone will launch July 17. Many of the pro­vided spec­i­fi­ca­tions cor­rob­o­rate with past rumors that the device will intro­duce a dig­i­tal com­pass and a video recorder, among other fea­tures. (The source did not pro­vide a photo; the image to the right is from a past rumor report for the sake of com­par­i­son.) Here’s the list:

• 32GB and 16GB stor­age (up from the cur­rent 16GB and 8GB models)
• $199 and $299 price points to be maintained
• 3.2-megapixel cam­era (up from the cur­rent 2-​megapixel camera)
• Video-​recording and edit­ing capabilities
• Abil­ity to send a pic­ture & video via MMS
• Dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of the metal band sur­round­ing the edge of the device
• OLED screen
• 1.5 times the bat­tery life of the cur­rent models
• Dou­ble the RAM and pro­cess­ing power
• Built-​in FM transmitter
• Apple logo on back will glow
• Rubber-​tread backing
• Sleeker design
• Built-​in compass
• The cam­era, GPS, com­pass and Google map com­bined will iden­tify photo and inform about photo locations
• Turn-​by-​turn directions

Again, this is pretty much what we expected, though both I and Wired find the FM trans­mit­ter and OLED screen details a lit­tle dicey. But the rest parses with what I’ve heard else­where, as well as fit­ting Apple’s evo­lu­tion­ary update style.

So, this means the Pre will have 41 days, not quite six weeks, to sell against the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of iPhones. But once July 17 rolls around, the Pre will have half the stor­age of the sim­i­larly priced iPhone (8GB vs 16GB at the $200 price point, or a quar­ter of the 32GB that costs the same $300 as the pre-​rebate Pre) and will lose a lot of the soft­ware advan­tages the Pre has over the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion iPhones. The iPhone 3.0 firmware will pro­vide sim­i­lar uni­ver­sal search and push noti­fi­ca­tion fea­tures that the Pre will already have, clos­ing the gap between the two plat­forms. The Pre will still have true mul­ti­task­ing, but rumor has it Apple’s look­ing into that as well, and I can attest it’s not hard to add on your own (I love being able to play Pan­dora in the back­ground while I’m reading).

And on the other side, Black­berry Curves are out­selling the iPhone if you count all the Curve mod­els as one. And for half the price of the Pre. So I don’t think Palm is going to cut nearly as much into the full QWERTY mes­sen­ger mar­ket as they will into the sleek touch screen smart­phone market.

Is the Pre, on Sprint, worth pay­ing the same price for half the capac­ity com­pared to an iPhone 3.0 on AT&T?

Okay, I’ve been using Apple’s mobile OS, first on an iPod touch, then on an iPhone, for a few weeks now, and I’ve noticed that my “tin­ker­ing phase” is draw­ing to a close. I’ve set­tled in on a com­fort­able order of apps on my home­screens, and fig­ured out which of the var­i­ous apps I’ve tried out works best for me. So I thought it might be use­ful to go over what I’m using on my iPhone and why.

There’s no one “right” way to orga­nize apps on the iPhone’s home­screens. Ini­tially, I tried to orga­nize them by cat­e­gory or type: PIM stuff on the first page, media on the sec­ond, util­i­ties on the third and so on. But over time this became cum­ber­some as I’d have too many apps for one page and not enough for another. So now, I just keep things orga­nized by fre­quency of use, most used apps on the first page and descend­ing from there. But first, let’s look at the Dock, since it’s on every screen.

These are my four most used applications.

• Action Lists won out over a very tightly packed field of con­tenders in GTD task man­age­ment apps that can sync to Toodledo.com. I like it because it’s quick, sim­ple, syncs auto­mat­i­cally and pro­vides a zen-​like no-​frills imple­men­ta­tion of David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done method­ol­ogy. It’s a lit­tle pricier than the other task apps for the iPhone (other than the absurdly over­priced Life Bal­ance) but it’s worth it.
• Twit­te­la­tor Pro also had to fight some very capa­ble com­pe­ti­tion to win its spot on the Dock. In the end I picked it over Tweetie or Twit­terific Pro because Twit­te­la­tor Pro has more fea­tures than the eas­ier to use Twit­ter clients and is eas­ier to use than Twit­ter clients that match it on fea­tures. I par­tic­u­larly like the abil­ity to cre­ate sub­groups of tweeps à la Tweet­Deck on big computers.
• eReader, in my opin­ion, has no peers. Stanza and Kin­dle are nice (and may soon be the same thing), but I have hun­dreds of eReader titles I’ve pur­chased over the years on my book­shelf. I’ve been buy­ing from eReader since they were Peanut Press in 1997, and wouldn’t have moved to the iPhone if they hadn’t had an eReader client. Even bet­ter, the iPhone ver­sion is prob­a­bly the best ver­sion of eReader for any plat­form, includ­ing the abil­ity to bulk down­load my entire book­shelf. So now I have every­thing I’ve ever bought from Fic­tion­wise and eReader every­where I go.
• Ever­note was my other MUST HAVE soft­ware. I use Ever­note for, well, every­thing, with thou­sands of notes in my data­base. I write my drafts in Ever­note, I keep my photo col­lec­tion in Ever­note, I use the phone’s cam­era to “scan” doc­u­ments into Ever­note, where they’re auto­mat­i­cally OCRed for search­ing on their con­tents. And I’m happy to say that the iPhone’s Ever­note client is another best of breed, with even the abil­ity to cache favorite notes on the device so you can always get to them even if you lose net­work signal.

Next up, my pri­mary screen. I’m not going to cover every app on here, because, well, bor­ing, but I’ll hit the high­lights. These are the apps I use a lot or want to get to quickly, as you can hit the home but­ton from any home­screen and jump back to screen 1.

I tend to arrange things by rows. Across the top are my mes­sag­ing or noti­fi­ca­tion apps, things that show counts on their app badges (like the five unread emails shown here). Byline is a great RSS reader that syncs auto­mat­i­cally with Google Reader, includ­ing starred and shared items.

The sec­ond row are mostly web items, stuff to look for. In addi­tion to Google, we also have loca­tion search and media search.

The third row are things I need quick access to but don’t fit any par­tic­u­lar theme. Speed­Box is an excel­lent GPS-​based speedometer/​odometer which replaces the shorted-​out instru­ment clus­ter in my car, and Ambiance is a great med­i­ta­tion aid that plays loops of ambi­ent sounds with an optional timer. I like play­ing a bin­au­ral tone designed to shift your brain­waves into a REM-​like state with a gong alarm after 20 minutes.

The last row are daily liv­ing apps, cal­en­dar, shop­ping list, logs for food, exer­cise and blood pres­sure. I think of this as the “take care of myself” row.

The sec­ondary screen is filled with things I use less fre­quently, but still a lot. You see IMDB and movie ticket apps on the top row, games and video on the sec­ond, GPS-​based search apps on the third (Have2P is a life-​saver) and social media clients on the fourth.

The ter­tiary screen is where things start to get scat­tered, because while these are rarely used, when I need them I want to get to them rel­a­tively quickly. Some of these, like Pal­ringo and CraigSearch, I haven’t even opened yet. Nota­bles on this page are Ama­zon, AT&T myWire­less, Word­Press and MotionX GPS. Cam­era and Pho­tos are here because I use Ever­note for most of my pic­ture tak­ing and organizing.

The qua­ter­nary (yes, it’s a word, look it up) page is even more scat­tered, stuff I almost never use but like to have avail­able. Here we have a band­width tester, copy of the US Con­sti­tu­tion, an app to actively can­cel out back­ground noise and ebook read­ers. Dice­Shaker is pretty cool if you’re a pen&paper gamer.

And finally we have the quinary page, mostly stuff I’m try­ing out or stock apps I can’t hide or get rid of. I pre­fer using the Weather Chan­nel app on the pri­mary page for weather, so the stock Yahoo-​based weather app gets dumped here, etc. I’ll prob­a­bly move iOwn to the ter­tiary page at some point, as I’m just now get­ting into cat­a­logu­ing and orga­niz­ing my stuff.

So that’s it, what’s on my iPhone and why. What do you have on your iPhone? Am I miss­ing any gems? 

WMEx­perts has a story about the specs for the new Win­dows 7 Chas­sis 1, a tech­ni­cal spec or base­line upon which hard­ware mak­ers will base their first Win­dows 7 phones. Take a close look at this list and see if any­thing jumps out at you.

WM7 Chas­sis 1 Spec­i­fi­ca­tion

Core require­ments:
Proces­sor: ARM v6+, L2 Cache, VFP, Open GL ES 2.0 graph­ics HW (QCOM 8k, Nvidia AP15/​16* and TI 3430 all meet spec)
Mem­ory: 256MB+ DRAM, 1G+ Flash (at least 512MB fast flash – 5MB/​s unbuffered read @4K block size)
Dis­play: WVGA (800×480) or FWVGA (854×480) 3.5” or greater diag­o­nal
Touch: Multi-​touch required
Bat­tery: Suf­fi­cient to meet Days of Use LTK require­ments.
Con­trols: Start, Back, Send and End are required (soft con­trols allowed as long as they are always present).

Periph­er­als:
Cam­era: 3MP+, flash optional, 2^nd cam­era optional (VGA res­o­lu­tion suf­fi­cient)
GPS: aGPS required
Sen­sors required: Light Sen­sor, Com­pass (3 axis, 5 degrees, 100 Hz sam­ple rate), Accelerom­e­ter (3 axis, 2mg res­o­lu­tion, 100 Hz sam­ple rate)
USB: High speed required, 20 MB/​s trans­fer rate.
Blue­Tooth: BT2.1 required, must run MSFT BT stack, CSR BlueCore6 or later rec­om­mended.
Wi-​Fi: 802.11B/G required, must run MSFT Native Wi-​Fi stack, Ath­eros 6002 or Broad­comm 4325 rec­om­mended.
Con­nec­tors: Micro USB and 3.5mm Audio required.

Options:
FM tuner: If tuner HW is present it will be detected and sup­ported by the Media appli­ca­tion.
Hap­tics
SD Card (Micro SD rec­om­mended)
DPAD, qwerty or ¹²⁄₂₀ key key­boards all optional

Think about this. The new Win­dows 7 hard­ware is going to require mul­ti­touch. This means it’s going to require capac­i­tive touch­screens, dif­fer­ent hard­ware from the cur­rent resis­tive touch­screens that itself requires a com­pletely dif­fer­ent, finger-​friendly user inter­face. A sty­lus will be use­less on these devices, which means none (or most) of your exist­ing soft­ware won’t work.

We can see from this spec list that Win­dows 7 will be a clean break from pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Win­dows Mobile, even from 6.5, which itself requires users to buy new hard­ware if they want the OS. (Though it’s more than capa­ble of run­ning 6.5 my Sprint Touch Pro isn’t eli­gi­ble for the upgrade. Why? Because the home but­ton is a lit­tle house rather than a Win­dows flag and Microsoft man­dates a Win­dows flag home but­ton on all 6.5 devices.)

New hard­ware. New OS. New soft­ware. And you need to wait until mid to late 2010 to get it. If you’re going to deal with all that change any­way, are you really going to wait for Win­dows Mobile?

I didn’t. I bought an iPhone.

Given that AT&T finally charged my debit card overnight, I had a finan­cial incen­tive to try to get my iPhone deliv­ered one last time (hint for the suspense-​challenged: I’m typ­ing this in the Word­press app on my iPhone). I knew they would attempt to deliver it to my old apart­ment today, so I called my boss and begged for the day off, a request I have no doubt was granted at least on part because my boss is an iPhone enthu­si­ast her­self. Then I scarfed down my break­fast and raced over to my old apart­ment complex.

Once there, I ful­filled what seems to be a rite of pas­sage for iPhone own­ers: I waited, out­doors, for hours. Six hours, in fact, from just before 8am to just before 2 in the after­noon. But then, finally, the UPS man showed up, and I had my iPhone.

Get­ting the device set up when I got home was harder than expected, given that I had to kill and restart iTunes twice dur­ing the process, once result­ing in an incom­plete restore to the device and sub­se­quent hard reset and start­ing over from scratch. But now, I’ve got every­thing installed and most of it con­fig­ured (down­load­ing my entire hun­dreds of books eReader library takes a while, even on WiFi).

So my impressions?

• While the iPhone 3G is nearly twice as thick as the iPod touch, it’s some­how more com­fort­able in the hand.
• Hav­ing GPS and Inter­net avail­able every­where (or at least, not depen­dent on WiFi) is a total game changer over the Touch. My few weeks with the Touch (which will go to my mom or my niece, most likely) tolde that the day of the non-​smartphone PDA are over, at least for peo­ple like me. Twit­ter, email, even down­load­ing new pod­casts require always-​available data, which means a phone.
• The speaker is much louder on the iPhone than the iPod touch, prob­a­bly because it’s on the out­side of the device.
• 16GB is a lot more space than 8. Seri­ously. Not sure how how peo­ple with 4GB iPods do it. 8 is the min­i­mum, and 16 is the “sweet spot” assum­ing you don’t need to carry your entire col­lec­tion with you.
• Given how sim­i­lar the two devices are, why can’t Apple stan­dard­ize but­ton place­ment. After weeks with the iPod touch, I keep press­ing the head­phone jack of my iPhone to try to turn it on. Grr.
• Ever­note seems to work fine, and will be even more use­ful once I get the Grif­fin Clar­ifi case so I can take pic­tures of things like busi­ness cards and search their con­tents later.
• T-​31 days to the release of the 3.0 firmware, and then things get really inter­est­ing. I can deal with­out A2DP and copy&paste because I know they’re com­ing, but the wait isn’t fun.