LBnuke

I cracked. Didn’t even last a week. I tried to resist, but every day I went to the apple store to play with an iPhone. The 8GB models were continuously out of stock. Usually the 4G models were too. It compelled me. Like the iMac did nearly 2 years ago, and like another mac most likely will at macworld 2008.

I checked the apple store iphone availability link every morning. Finally, on saturday, the dot was green. it was still only 8am and apple store opened at 9. We got there around 8:30 and there was already a line outside. I got on line while k parked the car.

About 5 minutes after we got there, an apple store employee walked down the line handing iphone shaped tickets to everyone. The ticket was a guarantee of 8GB iphone availability if purchased by 10am. We didn’t even have to stay on line, but stayed anyway. Less than half an hour later, me and K walked out of the store with a pretty iphone bag containing a beautiful well designed iphone box. I was kind of in shock.

We went across the street to the cingular store to add the iphone data plan ($20/month for unlimited data and visual voicemail). They let me log in to my itunes account from there and activate the phone so they could make sure the att account end of things went correctly. It did. Before we left the store, my iphone was working and my motorola was dead.

When I opened the box, there was a beautiful shiny iphone packaged in a very neat and elegant way like most apple products are. On the way home, I took photos, called my folks, and surfed the web. Don’t worry, Karen was driving

The screen is beautiful. The video quality is amazing. The sound is clear. The screen gets lots of fingerprints on it, but you can’t notice them unless the phone is off or sleeping. A small cloth was included to wipe it. The cloth did an okay job, but the one that came with my case was much better and wiped off every smudge.

I could open a Word doc in email with no problem. The wifi speed is relatively fast. The edge network connection is more like dialup, but definitely usable. It is amazing to be able to look stuff up from anywhere that a cell phone signal can be had. This is something I think will come in very handy. I can look up directions from google maps when I get lost. I get lost a lot.

The touchscreen is fun, especially the pinchy thing where you can zoom in or out. I started out slow on the keyboard, but can type much faster now. Still using one finger, but I have read that typing with 2 thumbs can be much faster. There is a good video on the apple site about the keyboard.

One very cool thing that the video mentions is that the iphone will dynamically resize the letter tap zones for the most likely letter, and make the adjacent letter’s tap zones smaller.

Something that is essential to know is that you can zoom in on the text and cursor on the screen by holding your finger down in the area you want to magnify and moving the cursor. This makes it MUCH easier to move the cursor to where you want it to be.

Word prediction is much better than it seems at first. The trick is not to doubt it and refrain from backspacing to fix your own errors. Sometimes that is necessary, but most often, the keyboard will guess what the misspelled word was supposed to be, even though the guesses it makes while you are typing are not even close.

Word auto-complete sucks. While the late guessing of correct words works okay for typos and spelling errors, it is terrible for completing words. Sometimes it doesn’t guess the word until the last letter, making it useless, or even worse, guesses the wrong word on the last letter. In that case, you have to cancel the suggested word or it will replace your correct word. Easy to miss this if you are looking at the keyboard instead of the message. To auto-complete a guessed word, tap the spacebar on the keyboard. To get rid of it, tap the word on the screen.

I am loving the Notes app. For the non-mac people, an app is the same thing as a program. Usually, I have about 10 random scraps of paper in my back pocket, and another 100 or so on my desk, all containing information that I want to remember, but will most likely never see again. The iphone offers a very easy way to keep notes in one place.

This past week, I have been taking notes about things I have been noticing and learning about the iphone. For the most part, I think this is the coolest phone I have ever had or ever seen. I am very lucky and happy to have it. Even still, there is definitely room for improvement.

I knew going in that this is a version 1.0 product, so was expecting things to be missing or broken. I don’t think anything is broken. Some of the things that are missing surprise me very much and I am guessing (and hoping) that at least some of them will be added in a software update.

Some things that are glaringly missing:

• Text select - This is so basic. It is hard to believe it is not possible. I have checked, and it really is not.
• Cut/Copy/Paste - See text select.
• MMS (multimedia messaging - text messages with pictures) - Basic mobile phone feature.
• Notes do not sync with anything on the computer. Very strange. I should note — haha, note. that’s funny — that you can email a note easily, so it is not that hard to get it on your computer, but syncing seems pretty basic.
• You can not add attachments to email. I think it would be better to include the ability to email pictures, notes, and other attachments directly from the mail app, while still keeping the option to email them from the pix and notes apps.
• No Select All option for email messages (or anything else). There is no way to delete a bunch of mail at a time. Why?

Not glaring, but still missing:

• Voice memo - probably glaring to anyone who was used to using it on their old phone. It is kind of weird since there is an included recorder for setting voicemail greeting.
• There is no video recorder.
• No included games.

Other random gripes:

• Some things take too many clicks. Navigating through different email accounts really needs to be streamlined. It would also be nice to have a period and comma key available on the same keyboard as the letters for text apps.

  Keyboards for some apps are specialized and smart. For example, the safari keyboard includes period, slash, and ‘.com’ keys.

• No way to choose which widgets appear on the main screen.
• Safari does not remember the zoomed screen size so I have to rezoom on every page.
• The screen does not always rotate from portrait to landscape view on the first try.

3rd party apps!

The way Apple has set up the iPhone to work with 3rd party apps is to run them in safari. To use an app, just go to the app’s url. If you like it, you can bookmark it for easy access.

There are also a few launcher type apps that act as a main bookmark page that is only for your third party apps and prettier to look at than regular bookmarks.

There is a big list of iphone apps here: iPhone Application List and another here: appleopolis.com. You can skip the login on the second one. No login for first one.

I am currently trying out mojits.com, which is a launcher type thing for iphone apps that you access through safari. Hard to tell if I like it because I only tried using it for 5 minutes.

I was pretty impressed with a shopping list app called OneTrip. OneTrip makes it easy to make a shopping list by offering prewritten selections that are organized by category. There is an option to add your own things to each category.

I also added a bejeweled type game, a movie time finder, and an app called iActu that brings the content of 6 popular newspapers in a cool looking newsstand style. When you click on a paper, the newsstand goes away and the news is displayed in an easy to read way.

WordPress iPhone Theme and Plugin by Content.Robot - automatically reformats your site’s content for optimized viewing on an iPhone. Thank you content.robot! I am using it on LBnuke, with the only modification being changing the blue to red to match the site.

Other interesting tips and factoids gathered from around the web:

From iPhone Central at Macworld.com:

“When browsing a web page in Safari on an iPhone, one tap of the top status bar (signal strength, time, etc.) brings you back to the top of the page, complete with the URL field visible.”
–Dan Moren

Airplane Mode … disables all wireless functionality (phone, EDGE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) but lets you use the iPhone’s non-Internet applications.
–Dan Frakes

If your iPhone freezes…
Reset: Apple’s first reset tip, which is pressing and holding the Home button for about six seconds. This quits any application that may have locked up the iPhone.
Reboot: Press and hold the Home and On/Off for about 10 seconds until the Apple logo appears.
–Christopher Breen (edited by LB for length)

In Safari on the iPhone, holding your finger down on a link pops up a balloon displaying the underlying URL. Also works on HTML messages in Mail. Holding your finger on a link shows you where the URL is really going to take you.
–Dan Frakes

There is a great tip from David Pogue on the The Missing Manual website about how to type punctuation without having to switch back and forth between the letters and the number/symbols keyboard. Basically, you hold down the “.?123″ key when you are switching to the numbers keyboard and rather than letting it go, you slide your finger to the punctuation that you want to type and then release it. After release, the letters keyboard returns. Click here to read the full keyboard punctuation tip at the Missing Manual site.

That is all I have for now. Maybe I will write again if I notice more things, find some cool apps, or if Apple releases software updates that adds new features.

I have finally updated my business site! I last updated it in 2004 and it was so out of date that I had to unpublish half of the pages because the information was no longer accurate.

The focus of my business has changed over the years. When I first started out, I made mostly static table-based HTML sites. I started using CSS for presentation soon after that, and eventually started using CSS for layout as well.

When I first created LBnuke, it was made with a content management system (CMS) called PostNuke. It was my first experience with PHP, MySQL, and a CMS in general. I had never seen anything like it and quickly started investigating just about every open source PHP/MySQL CMS that I could find. Once I learned how they worked, I started specializing in customizing the design and function of open source CMS’s. After years of experimenting, I finally decided that my favorite CMS of them all is WordPress.

All this month I have been working on my new business site. I ditched a custom design that I was working on and then an XHTML/CSS template site that I was contemplating before finally deciding to convert BeeDragon to wordpress using a really nice wordpress theme that I found. I added some images (including a bee and a dragon of course), some rounded CSS boxes, updated my site content and pricing, came up with a few special offers, and put it up live last night.

I am very thankful to Karen for helping me with the site content! My goal was to keep it simple and easy to understand. I am still tinkering some with the content, but even in its first version, it is far more up to date and easy to understand than my old site. I am not sure if this design will be temporary or permanent, but it is nice to have it finally done

A Short History of BeeDragon.com:

• 1995 - version 1.0 - No layout at all, not even a table. All text is centered. Animated GIF of a dragon flying across the screen repeatedly.
• 1997 - v2 - Table based version of the same site. Graphic page title images. Presentational CSS added. <FONT> tags removed.
• 1999 - v3 - Template Monster template with Flash header. Need I say more?
• 2004 - v4 - Mambo/Joomla CMS. Nice for 2004, but too boxy and modular for 2007. Very web 1.0. Hardly anyone has ever heard of a blog, so long detailed explanations were necessary but confusing.
• 2007 - v5.0 - Customized WordPress site. Reflects what I do. Updated prices. Simple. Pretty. Tables for data only.

I am starting to believe that the days of the fast and easy WordPress upgrade have come to an end. Version 2.0 brought some problems for upgraders. Version 2.1 seemed to bring even more due to some database changes breaking certain themes and plugins.

The 2.0 upgrade went very smoothly for me. 2.1 did not. My theme had some db calls to fetch page links using post_status='static' which no longer worked after the database changes. Calling them with post_type='page' instead fixed the problem quite easily, but it took a while of troubleshooting before figuring that out. The 2.2 upgrade was the worst yet.

After having trouble with the 2.1 upgrade, I decided to follow the upgrade instructions for a change and turn off all of my plugins. I have never done that before and have never had a problem because of not doing it. This time, after uploading the new files and running the database update script, I was greeted a by a PHP fatal error message in place of my website. Pretty. This was due to the call in my header.php file to the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which was not activated. No problem. Easy to fix. Comment out the UTW code in the header.

I started reactivating plugins one by one and then testing to make sure nothing went wrong. Everything was going smoothly until activating the King Categories widget. Another fatal error. This time, I emptied the active_plugins field from the wp_options table and tried again with the same result. It occurred to me later that I probably could have just renamed the widget instead of messing with the db, but why do things the easy way when you take the scenic route?

I gave up on the King widget and instead downloaded and installed Breukie’s Categories widget. This worked fine except that every time I made a change to the widget in the admin section, it would forget my exluded categories, so I had to reset them every time. Too annoying.

I was about to hard code the categories into my sidebar just below the hard coded search form and above the widget test statement when I discovered my new favorite widget, the Executable PHP widget, while reading Aaron Brazell’s 10 Things You Should Know About Wordpress 2.2. It was also in this article that I was notified of a workaround by Ryan Boren for this widget that is required if you want to use more than one PHP widget in wordpress 2.2. This widget rocks! Endless possibilities. I used to use the King Text widget to include PHP in widgets, but was too afraid to activate it after the trouble with King Categories. I created 3 execPHP widgets to replace the King Categories widget, a King Text widget, and one to add my RSS links. I am not sure why I didn’t just use plain HTML in a text widget for that last one. Never even occurred to me. Finally my sidebar was back to normal.

One more thing about widgets in wordpress 2.2. They are built in, so do not try to activate the widgets plugin ten times like I did. It will never work.

There is a very cool new Plugin Sandbox feature in WP 2.2 that evaluates the plugin code on activation for fatal errors and does not activate the plugin if any are found. This kicked in for the widgets plugin, but not for the King widget. I suppose a widget is not technically a plugin. Or is it?

I still love wordpress as much as ever and will always upgrade my own site at first stable release of each new version. There are always changes for the better and bug fixes.

I will no longer be upgrading all of my wordpress sites at first release. It has become almost impossible anyway since the 120-day release schedule has been in effect. Most of them are client sites that I do not want to break or cause to have any downtime beyond uploading the new files. It is not part of any agreement I have to keep sites updated with the latest files, but sometimes I like to throw it in as a freebie for increased security and ease of future upgrades, not to mention access to new features. Now that it is not always a fast and easy job, I will probably only do it at a client’s request and for a fee. It is probably best that I charge for my work anyway!

One good thing about being useless for a couple of days is that my brain gets a rest and then suddenly I can do things! I have worked almost non-stop for the past 2 days and gotten tons of stuff done. I realize that working non-stop was how I got to be useless in the first place, but at least there is a flipside.

My biggest jobs are done. Another site is almost done. Another couple lined up after that. And a bunch of smaller maintenance type jobs. I also worked on another free autism site that looks like it will be very cool when it is done. Wordpress, of course The folks running the site have been hard at work adding content and getting it ready for public launch in September.

K almost always sees the glass as half full. I love that about her. She had a crappy day today, so it is one of her rare half-empty days. Maybe I can cheer her up. Not exactly sure how since we were both up half the night and are completely exhausted. We weren’t even up for the same half. She was up until around 3am and I got up at around 3:30am. We just missed each other. Dang.

We have been listening to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on tape from the library. 12 tapes to be exact. It is unabridged. The guy who is doing the reading is really great. He does different voices for all the characters. I have been trying to read that book for the past 2 years since it first came out and have not been able to. Sometimes I can only read tech books. K listens to books all the time. This is my first one. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to concentrate, but it turns out that I love it.

Another good listening experience has been these nature sounds cd’s that K got for me to help me relax. We have been listening to them before bed and I am out cold pretty fast. There is one of frogs, one with birds, one with assorted wild life, and one with waves. I am getting tired just thinking about them. Good night.

The first plugin of today is not actually a wordpress plugin at all, but it works like one (at least like one that has a slightly complicated installation). It is called iBox. Installation is relatively simple if you are comfortable with uploading and modifying files. Kind of a pain if you’re not. There is some code that needs to be added to the header.php file of your theme, an image that needs to go in the root images directory, and two files that need to go into your theme’s main directory.
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