kingsley: November 2008 Archives

If you go to the App Store on your iPhone, type in "black friday" or "thanksgiving" under Search, it will list a whole bunch of apps that are free or on sale for one day only. I already found a few to download. Don't miss this once a year chance to shop for your iPhone. [Update: 29 November 2008] I just found a more comprehensive list of apps on sale through AppShopper. It's fun because you can see the price of the apps goes up or down.

Just one short day after Google released its voice search app for the iPhone, another nifty search app is made available. SearchMe has no voice activation, but whatever you type, the results are shown in Cover Flow-like view, where you can see the content of the page in thumbnail view, which you can enlarge, or swipe through the thumbnails to find the page you're looking for. Double-tapping on the page will open the link in Safari. Both Google Mobile and SearchMe bring a unique angle to searching, and take full advantage of the iPhone interface. Where Google is good for doing specific searches, SearchMe is great for browsing your search results. Plus, both are free, so the only thing you have to consider is finding another empty spot on your iPhone.

Adding voice recognition to search sure takes a giant like Google to invent. But for Google to release the technology to the iPhone in the way of a free app is simply amazing--one that will change the way we use our mobiles.

For some, the novelty might wear off shortly, and away they go back to the old ways of searching. But for others who stick with it, and continue to explore the vast use of this app, it will become a way of doing things, a way of life.

Here are some phrases I used to get results right in the app without having to open Safari:

Weather: "Hong Kong weather" shows the current weather, and the forecast for next three days. Unfortunately, the weather defaults to Fahrenheit, not Celsius as used in Hong Kong.

Currency: "100 Hong Kong dollars to U.S. dollars" shows the exchange rate between the two currencies. Spelling out "R.M.B." for Reminbi works, too.

Definitions and spellings: "Define subjunctive" shows the definition of the word. And when I didn't know how to spell "Fahrenheit" above, I only had to say the word to get the correct spelling on the screen. Some words are just easier said than spell.

Stock quotes and indexes: "Apple stock price" shows the current stock price and chart for AAPL. "Dow Jones Index" also shows the current index and chart. Alas, "NASDAQ Index" or "Hang Seng Index" only shows links I have to click on. But the fact that it understands the Chinese words "Hang Seng" is pretty cool.

Conversions: "Convert 1.75 meters to inches" shows my correct height in inches. "How many liters to a gallon" shows the correct conversion as well.

World facts: "Population of Hong Kong" shows 6,980,412 people as of July 2007. "GDP of Hong Kong" shows $258.8 billion (2006 est.), and "Map of Hong Kong" shows a clickable Google map.

Remember, these are phrases that will display results directly in the Google app, and even that I haven't scratched the surface. I would love to hear what phrases you have discovered that can do the same.

An update to the iPhone blogging app is released. Version 1.0.7 is generally bug fixes, nothing you'd notice unless you had that specific problem. Still, it's THE blogging app I use on the iPhone. I hope the next update will do without the need to press the "Edit" button before typing in an entry. That's just unintuitive and annoying. Otherwise, I'm happy.

I'm really proud of my recent efforts (actually doesn't take much effort) to refresh the looks of my two blogs. Here is a theme called Notepad Chaos for Movable Type. It's a bit "flowery" for my taste, but it works well with the asia-exotic theme of this domain name. Then there's my WordPress blog, with a Moleskine theme. As you can guess, I'm a sucker for the notebook-page look. But what I really like about them is that they look different from the typical themes that come with the two blogging systems. Next task is tweaking the body font in the stylesheet.

...it would have to be the Eee PC S101. It has a 10.2-inch LED widescreen, SSD drive, 30GB online storage, 1.8 cm thin and weighs in just 1 kg. But what's important to me is that it looks classy, not cheap like other netbooks or even its other Eee PCs. I saw the real thing last week; the one on display was in graphite (also in brown and champagne) with a glossy finish, accented with 2 Swarvoski crystals embedded at the hinge. It was a beauty. Lucky for me, it wasn't the champagne or brown that was on display, or I might not be using the subjunctive "If I were..." and bought myself a netbook.

I wrote about netbooks, but called them ultra-portables back in June. The Asus S101 should go well with the ThinkFree Mobile: Netbook Edition software I got.

Now that I gave MacJournal 5.1 a try, I'm back to using ecto to blog. MJ has improved a lot, no doubt, but it might be that it's difficult to switch from the familiar. Or it could be that while using MJ, it reminded me of the little quirks that kept me away in the first place. For example, when I press return after a paragraph, it doesn't translate to the web; the whole post is one big paragraph. I looked in the settings to try to change it, but couldn't find it, so I had to edit it from the browser. I'm sure the setting for it is in the program somewhere, but why not make this very basic function the default? That said, MJ is still a good journaling app, but I won't use it for blogging.

Microsoft has come up with a slick answer to Apple's MobileMe cloud service. It's called Live Mesh, and it's free. It syncs files in folders you designate on your Mac to your Windows PC, of course. And when you're away from your computers, you can access your files on Live Desktop in a browser. The Live Mesh software is for Intel Macs only, so if you have an older Mac, you too will need to run Live Desktop. Live Mesh doesn't have all the bells & whistles of MobileMe or its tight integration with Apple apps. But if you add Google's list of free Mac apps and services along with Live Mesh, you basically have a MobileMe equivalent for free.

Live Mesh for Mac is in beta, but you can sign up for a Live account to try it out. It comes with a generous 5GB of cloud storage, enough to sync lots and lots of stuff.

You may be surprised to find this type of sync software for Mac made by Microsoft, but did you know before Live Mesh, Microsoft has acquired FolderShare that does exactly that, sans the cloud?

I signed up for a free license to the ThinkFree Mobile: Netbook Edition software last month. It required filling in an online questionnaire. Long a fan of ultra-portables and as a MacBook Air owner, netbook is something I follow closely, even though there's not one from Apple, yet. What made me motivated enough to fill a form, however, was that in addition to Windows and Linux, an edition for Mac will be available as well. MacBook Air with SSD is certainly the closest to a netbook Apple has, despite being many times pricier. The purpose is the same: to use as a secondary computer to do basic tasks--word processing, e-mailing, browsing, blogging, social networking, instant messaging, etc.--that can sync with your main computers at home and office. ThinkFree's software and cloud service should fill most of that bill nicely. I'm eager to try the Mac edition to see how it's different from its regular online suite.

Somehow I missed it. I knew Six Apart made an iPhone app for it's subscription-based TypePad service, but I didn't know it also made a web app for the iPhone that connects with all the other social media and blogging systems out there. Movable Type and WordPress are supported, even though MT already has a 3rd party web app called iMT, and WP has its own iPhone app. Blog It is powered by TypePad, so you access it at http://blogit.typepad.com/ to post to your other blogs. You can even log in with your Open ID. The features of Blog It are limited compared to the iPhone app, iBlogger, but Blog It is free and handy, nonetheless.

I’m always looking for a desktop blogging client to write my entries. Sure, the ones that come with the blogging system using the browser has improved enough for everyday use. WordPress even allows for offline access with Google Gears installed. But something about using the browser for writing doesn’t jive with me. It never did. It’s why I don’t use Google Docs and other browser-based word processors to write. For a long time, I used the defunct iBlog to keep my .Mac blog, and tried a bunch of different clients for this blog: ecto, MarsEdit, Tinderbox and MacJournal. Now that I’ve moved the .Mac blog to my personal domain running WordPress, I’m even more devoted to find a capable client that works with MT and WP smoothly.

This new version of MacJournal looks better than previous versions I’ve tried. Setting it up with my two blogs isn’t difficult. I also like how it can work with .Mac to post your entries, though only in their barest forms; none of the other clients supports this, so it’s good to have the option. MJ can also sync to MobileMe, so that I can have MJ on my PowerBook G4 and MacBook Air and both will contain the same content. I know blogging clients pull data from the server, so you will have the same content on any computer anyhow, but since MJ supports personal journaling that isn’t published to the server, the MobileMe syncing does come in handy in this respect.

MacJournal is having a promo sale on MacUpdate right now, so I downloaded the demo to try it out, and if it works well enough for me to use regularly, I can buy it at a discount.