After three calls into AT&T I finally got to talk to a technical support specialist who figured out the problem. Apparently if you had an original 1st Gen iPhone on an original 2G plan and have since upgraded to a 3G or 3GS, like I did, then AT&T (most likely) didn’t actually update your account. In my case, the original IMEI settings for the first iPhone were still listed in my account. So on AT&T’s end it figured I wasn’t capable of handling MMS and shut everything down before it passed to/from my phone. Once he corrected that setting for the 3GS, everything sent to me so far today started flying through. Looks like if you’re having issues, you have to call AT&T and have them fix the IMEI settings on your account.

Note that the customer service representative who first answers the call will not have the ability to correct these settings. You’ll need to ask for a Technical Support Specialist who can make these correction. It’s also advised that you call from a different phone then the iPhone in question as my agent had me reset the phone to make sure the new settings took and then sent me a message to make sure it was actually working.

It was a bit of a hassle, but now it’s working. Hopefully this saves some people some frustration.

Right off the bat I realized that Safari 4 looks much nicer than it’s predecessor. It seems more refined, cleaner. There are some swanky new features that make it really stand out, namely the Top Sites and search suggestion features. It’s eye candy, but it’s also functional. The Top Sites is an especially nice feature when you open a new tab.

One thing that seems to be causing a significant amount of debate, at least on Twitter, is the new location of Safari’s tabs. Instead of under the address bar, like they are on every web browser, Safari 4 has moved them to the top of the browser. I actually really like this. It’s practical, it utilizes some screen space that would otherwise be wasted and in turn allows for more of the page to be shown at one time.

There are a few things I don’t like, however. The first and foremost is that 1Password, a tool that I can’t live without, currently doesn’t work with Safari 4. I’m sure the Agile team will fix this in the coming days, but I’m literally dead in the water without 1Password. Another thing that I absolutely can’t stand is that the website progress bar, which was a nice blue bar going through the site bar while the page is loading, is gone. Now there is no real way to tell the sites loading progress. Luckily, someone already figured out how to get it back.

There is one thing that’s not currently supported that I’d like to see added in a future update, and that’s handling the domains in much the same way that MobileSafari does: dropping the http:// and www for the address. They’re useless anyway, why should I have to see them? twitter.com/justincox is the same as http://twitter.com/justincox, it just looks a lot nicer.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got to say about Safari 4. (Can you tell I’m running out of ideas for the February Blog-O-Rama?)

Update: Thanks to 1Password’s awesome Twitter presence I have found out just how to update 1Password so that it works with Safari 4: have it check for beta updates as well. My life is once again complete. See, I told you the Agile guys would figure it out.

Awesome!

What’s great about this comment is that while the poster, Nerd Killer, obviously has eclectic music tastes (s)he has little in the way of intelligence. You see, Mr. or Miss. Nerd Killer is, presumably, a self proclaimed killer of nerds. Though at the end of the post (s)he announces that they are a big music nerd. Awesome is right! Is that a conflict of interest or just another person that needs to get punched in the jeans?

Since that was so much fun, I decided to look at some reviews for a few “featured” yet poorly rated apps. Boy am I glad I did! The official Grammys app brought not one, but two reviews worth pointing out.

Anynomuss?

Alright. I don’t have a clue what this app is about but I can assume, by the coherent review given by “bobbyriggs,” that it involves some sort of music trivia game. The first reviewer, B2melo, brings all kinds of hilarity. Now I can understand the principal of wanting to give the app a zero star review. For not letting he/she/it play. But come on Grammys app, you didn’t play on B2melo. How dare you be so rude? I’m not really sure what Anyomuss is so whiskey tango foxtrot over, but they’re worth pointing out because anyomuss is about the coolest way of possibly spelling anonymous wrong. [Fort the record, it took me two tries to spell anonymous correctly.]

This next review comes from some sort of diet app — I can’t remember the name and it’s not worth my time to go back and find it.

To skinny? Where'd that come from?

The Rose Queen moniker is perfect. While the name makes her sound like a nice girl, you know she’s got that thorny aspect to her. And that shows up in her review. Though, the rose in question probably got hit with a bit of pesticide in the growing process. She offers up a pretty good review, until she starts talking about being too skinny. If I get a diet app and don’t like it, I don’t like it. How does that mean I’m to skinny? And there was no offensive taken. Though when the rose offensive is underway, I don’t want to be anywhere near here…

I was wondering if there was any justice for the app store reviews so I decided to see if the app’s content made any difference. Enter some $10 app that features information on every member of Congress.

Well thought out and written reviews? It's possible? Amazing!

Apparently making an app that intelligent people use will merit intelligent reviews. Who would have thought? Hum. You know what this means, right? There’s a freaking comedic gold mine in the fart app category!

Apple changed the video editing game with iMovie ’08 by taking out the traditional timeline view and leaving the actual editing to a drag-and-drop interface. This angered some and liberated others. Me? It didn’t matter that much. It seemed to make editing videos much easier but tweaking fine details and making pinpoint cuts very difficult.

Precision Editor
iMovie ’09 brought some minor refinements to the new system introduced in the ’08 model, but ones that raise the video editing bar. Added back, in the form of a “Precision Editor,” is a modified timeline that is very simple, yet allows for very precise cuts and timing. It’s very, very cool. In fact, the Precision Editor is so smooth, that it seemed to make the whole video editing process much easier.

Precision Editor

I broke iMovie ’09 in editing a video for Operation BLIND. The original video was the same speech given by nine different kids. It amounted to about thirty minutes of footage. The task was to edit the video together so that entire two minute speech was given with a different person speaking each line. A tall task. But with this new Precision Editor I had the whole thing chopped and put together in a few hours. Thats it. I had planned to work on this for most of the week, but it took a few hours — with a break for lunch and a trip the drum store. (To see the complete video please visit the link above.) Needless to say, I was impressed.

Dynamic Themes
If you’re familiar with iDVD (which oddly wasn’t touched with this update to iLife) then you get the basic idea of Dynamic Themes. Basically it’s a themed video with drag-and-drop zones for videos or images as well as specialized title graphics and transitions to match the theme. This thing is pretty incredible.

It’s very easy to use; you can simply select a group of pictures or videos, drag them into an empty project with a set theme, and iMovie will place all the videos/images into the drop zones and add the specialized transitions and title cards. That’s it. You can refine it and tweak it from there, but you don’t have to. And let me tell you, these themes are slick. I’ll be using the photo album one for the annual senior video I make for the youth group and I can’t wait to put it together.

The only thing I don’t like about the Dynamic Themes is that there’s only six of them. As Apple expands upon the idea and continues to update iMovie, I’m sure they’ll add more. I just wish there were more to play with now. They’re that cool.

Animated Travel Maps
This new feature is also known as the Indiana Jones effect — you know, where the little red line goes from airport to airport on the map while the travel music plays? It’s a little gimmicky but still pretty cool. It seems just about every global airport is available in the setup, along with a mileage between points (in case you were wondering). The only thing I couldn’t figure out how to do was have a map show multiple stops. Not a big deal, but I might not have been looking hard enough.

Final Thoughts
iMovie ’09 is pretty much a knock out. If you’re a video editing hobbyist like me, you’ll be very happy with the changes made. If you’re an editing purist, you might be pleased with the direction Apple is heading. Sure, it’s not Final Cut Pro, but as part of a $79 suite of apps, it’s well, well worth the cost of upgrading. To put it in context, I can see paying $79 for iMovie ’09 by itself. It’s that good.

iMovie is a part of iLife ’09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). This is part two in a series reviewing iLife ’09. Look for a review of GarageBand sometime in the foreseeable future.

Faces
I’ve got to say this was a feature a long time coming. Tagging someone in the keywords of a photo is one thing, but actually tagging their face is another entirely. iPhoto ’09 allows you to do just that but takes it one better, it uses some sort of facial recognition algorithm to connect pictures based on who is in them. At least that’s the theory.

In actuality, iPhoto seems to detect about 75% of faces. This percentage is very good in my opinion. The system has no trouble at all finding faces in portraits/close ups but in candid or group shots it’s a bit spotty. If the subject is wearing a hat, glasses or even has hair in front of their face sometimes the system doesn’t recognize the face. What iPhoto doesn’t do all that well is figure out who’s in the picture.

Over the last week I’ve gone through the 10 or so years worth of pictures in my library and have tried to tag the faces of most of the pictures in there. This has resulted in nearly 150 different people, each with somewhere from 2 or 3 pictures to a whole lot. On average I’d say each ‘face’ has about 10 to 15 images. Now I don’t know if it’s because there are a lot of different people or not enough source material for each person, but I’d say iPhoto only gets about 25% of the facial recognition correct. I will say that the first person I trained iPhoto to recognize was me (is that conceited or what?) and after tagging 3 or 4 photos, it was able to find a dozen or so more and so on.

In theory the system is awesome and perhaps as I give it more input it’ll get better, but the facial recognition just isn’t quite where I’d hoped it would have been. I’m not sure if the technology behind the recognition is something that could be updated through Software Update, but it’d be interesting to see if Apple improves upon it in the future.

Places Map

Places
Places is iPhoto’s implementation of geotagging — the ability to tag photos with GPS coordinates. This feature is pretty much smooth as butter — quote that. I was able to tag the few hundred events in my library in only a few short hours (it would have been quicker but I’m anal and wanted to make sure pictures taken in transit were tagged different than the rest). The result is a cool map view for each image and a very cool map showing where all of your pictures were taken.

Finding locations is pretty easy and there’s a fair amount of default locations built in — all cities and a good amount of landmarks/points of interest. Adding additional locations is just as easy and uses a Google Maps search engine. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can always just drag the pin where you want it to go.

It’ll be interesting to see how the map grows as I take more pictures with accurate GPS location information, and not just tag with the generic city location.

Location of individual picture.

Online Sharing
Newly integrated into iPhoto is the ability to easily upload and share photos on Facebook and Flickr. It is a very easy process, select photos and pick which service to use. The first time you use each service you have to activate each account — it takes about 30 seconds. Once everything is up and running, sharing the photos is dead simple.

One thing I was interested in was the advertised two-way communication between iPhoto and Facebook with respect to Faces tagging. According to Apple, if you tag a face in iPhoto and upload to Facebook, it’s already tagged. Likewise, if someone tags a photo in Facebook it transmits that to iPhoto. All of this works as advertised except for one feature that you would think would be standard.

When I upload a photo that has been tagged with a face in iPhoto it does tag that photo in Facebook. However, it doesn’t determine if that name is a friend or not so it doesn’t actually link to their account. For example, I tagged a photo of me in iPhoto and when it was uploaded it was tagged but in name only. Couldn’t click on my name to view my profile, etc. It was the same with all the photos I uploaded. If I tagged them in Facebook and re-synced with iPhoto, I was given the “Is this so and so” confirmation. It seems that’s the best way to go about this. Kind of a silly extra step, but one that seems necessary for it all to work properly.

The only other glitch I found here was when I tried to delete a shared album with Flickr. It showed the progress bar, but nothing happened. I quit out and restarted iPhoto and then tried again and it worked — in iPhoto. When I pulled up Flickr the pictures were all still there. I had to delete them using Flickr’s “organize” feature. Again, a strange hassle.

Final Thoughts
So is it worth it? Well, there are some things I was disappointed in, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with iPhoto ’09. I wish the Faces technology was a bit more refined, but it’s made up for in the Places feature. I’d like to see how future updates and Apple’s infamous “bug fixes” effect iPhoto’s usability. I feel like it’s a good basis to start from and it should continue to grow from here.

iPhoto is a part of iLife ’09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). Over the next few days weeks I’ll go through iLife’s other apps of note, GarageBand and iMovie, and review them as well.

The Dashboard has been a staple of OS X since 10.4 Tiger was released. It’s concept — that you can have different widgets that do different things — has been repeated all over the internet and now in Windows Vista. With the influx of Web 2.0 website offering basically the same functionality, the Dashboard has become outdated and, dare I say, useless. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened the Dashboard willingly — the occasional accidental F12 key strike does the trick — nor actually used a widget. 10.5 Leopard brought a new feature to the Dashboard, the ability to create your own widgets from any website you wanted using a button on Safari. I can safely say, I’ve never used this feature. It’s a good idea, but again, basically useless.

The problem is not the concept, that in and of itself is okay, the problem is usage. It’s a screen that runs in the background and, when pulled up, is ready to go. The problem here is that it sucks up memory causing the entire system to slow. The other problem — and here’s the kicker — is that why would I launch the Dashboard to see what time it is, look at my calendar, check a contact’s email address or see what the weather is when I can simply do that without launching the Dashboard. So maybe part of the problem is the concept after all.

So here’s what I propose: Apple cancel the Dashboard. 10.6 Snow Leopard is set to debut sometime next year and is not actually offering any new features, but rather a promise to slim down the operating system and make it run much more efficiently. Could there be a more perfect time to get rid of something that causes bloat and inefficiency? While people will miss MacWorld, and probably Christmas too, I’m not sure if I know many people who would miss the Dashboard.

But this isn’t going to be a review of iTunes 8 and the Genius feature. It’s a look at the name itself. I’ve got a huge problem with it. Other sites around the web are arguing over Apple’s use of the word “funnest” in their new iPod marketing, but I think the use of Genius is a much bigger mistake on Apple’s part.

Anyone who has ever walked into an Apple Store knows that the word Genius is not new to Apple. Apple uses the word to describe it’s tech support people. Computer broke? iPod showing the sad face? Go see a Genius at your local Genius Bar. Makes sense considering a genius should know what to do. Apple has effectively branded the word genius to demote support for your Mac. Now, with the launch of iTunes 8, they are telling us that it also means something that can pick songs for you. I mean, it’d be stupid to walk into the closest Apple Store, wait in line, and then ask a Genius to recommend some music for you. But maybe that’s what Apple want’s us all to do.

I might be looking too much into this, but I think Apple is making a mistake here. The iTunes feature could have easily been called something else leaving the Genius moniker for the support folks at the local store. What do you think? Did Apple make a mistake using the word Genius or am I just overreacting? Let me know in the comments.

iMac
This screen is a whopping 24″ and might possibly have a hand in causing me to go blind. Even at it’s lowest brightness setting it’s too bright. The good news is I can code and design like a fiend on there.

MacBook
This screen, compared to the iMac, is a tiny 13″. Unfortunately those 13″ are what I spend almost all day looking at as the MacBook is what I use in the office — and everywhere else. This one will probably cause me to go blind but not because of the brightness.

iPhone
This screen is an even smaller 3.5″. Since OS 2.0 came out I find myself staring at this screen more and more. The Twitterriffic and Facebook apps don’t really help. Oddly I don’t think this one will cause me any future blindness.

TV
This screen is a very nice 32″. If you spend any time reading this blog then you know I spend way to much time watching TV. It’s really hard not to watch it when it’s on a beautiful Aquos HDTV. Let me tell you, there is nothing like the Olympics in HD. But that’s the story for another day (probably not because that’s really all I have to say on that subject).

There you have it. The collection of my typical daily screens. It seems like the bottom line is I spend too much time in a stationary position and will more than likely drive myself blind.

Do you stare at too many screens? Let me know about them in the comments section below.

A year ago when I picked up the original iPhone it was pretty much the greatest personal computing device I’d ever laid eyes on, let alone owned. While it pretty much revolutionized the cell phone industry it had a few things that I grew to live with. The biggest flaw was that it only supported one calendar. On my computer I have iCal set up with three calendars: Home, Work, Birthdays, and Holidays. They all synced to my iPhone but were all considered to be one and the same. If I added an event to iPhone’s calendar it was added to the Home calendar. There was no way to mark it as a work event. Now, with iPhone 2.0, all calendars are supported! I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, and I’ll say it again now: the greatest feature of iPhone 2.0 is multiple calendar support. What can I say, it’s the little things that make me happy.

But there are other, more high profile features in iPhone 2.0 that excite me as well, namely the App Store. I’ve downloaded a few Apps and have found some great ones and some bad ones. Here’s what I think so far:

NetNewsWire
I use NetNewsWire on my Mac more than any other application (behind Safari and Mail). Yesterday when I found out there was an iPhone version, I had to give it a try. It only lasted about ten minutes before it was deleted. It’s got the worst UI I’ve seen, it’s not really fun to use and it makes reading feeds more or less a pain. They’ve got a long ways to go to match the desktop version’s functionality.

MLB At Bat
When Steve Jobs gave this years WWDC Keyonte and started to preview iPhone apps, there was one that caught my eye had be looking forward to it ever since. The momentous app in question was MLB At Bat. It’s a baseball fan’s dream: every game, play-by-play, and almost instantaneous highlight clips. The UI is great and the video quality is ridiculous. There are so many clips per game, it’s like having ESPN in your pocket (MLB can use that if they can get around the trademark issues). This app is top notch.

Twitterrific
The final app I’m going to look at tonight is Twitterrific. Like NetNewsWire, Twitterrific is the iPhone version of it’s desktop counterpart, but unlike NetNewsWire the iPhone version has the desktop version beat. While on my Mac I prefer using Twitter’s web interface to any of the tweet applications I’ve tried though on the iPhone I have been a fan of the web-interface Hahlo for it’s simplicity and UI. Though when the App Store launched I figured I’d give the native Twitterrific a try. Twitterrific might be the best app in the entire store. It comes in two flavors: free and premium (no ads just like the desktop version). I run the free version because the ads (from The Deck) aren’t that bad. Twitterrific (it’s really hard to type this word over and over again) has the best UI I’ve seen from an application, iPhone or otherwise, in a long time. It’s simple to use, looks great, and makes Twitter a breeze to use. Sorry to say it, but Hahlo and I are dunzo.

There you have it, my initial reactions on iPhone 2.0. There are a bunch more apps and a lot more features but these are the highlights that I thought were worth sharing. Oh, and all the screen shots were taken with the new iPhone screen shot feature (hold the home button and then hit the lock button) and then uploaded to MobileMe — the other great thing that came with iPhone 2.0 but I’ll save that for another day.

Once I put the disc into my computer I was greeted with a simple menu with one icon reading “Double-click to transfer movie to iTunes.” So, I double-clicked. (Note there is a little more involved process for Windows. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll call it the Windows Penalty.) After double-clicking iTunes opened and read the dick and pulled up the code entry page. I typed in the code, as found in the DVD case, and iTunes communicated with some distant server and agreed that it was OK for me to have the digital copy. After that it was on like donkey kong.

I was presented with this “Thank You” screen. It’s a very similar screen to the one shown when you purchase a movie from iTunes. I thought it odd it said my movie was now downloading considering it was really just being copied from the DVD. Note the recommendations in the image. Their all great movies, except for Kissing Jessica Stein which I’ve never heard of.

It took about four minutes to transfer the roughly 1 GB file from the DVD. Again, interestingly enough, while it was transferring the movie was considered a ‘download’ by iTunes. Once fully transfered, Juno appeared in the ‘Movies’ tab of iTunes, as well as the ‘New Stuff’ playlist.

At native size the quality of the picture is quite impressive. It was solid at full screen on the 24″ iMac, though the DVD version would be preferable if watching on a screen that large. On both the iPhone and a 5.5 gen iPod the picture is clear. Pictures of all the different versions are included below for your viewing pleasure.

Overall the process was extremely easy and produced some pretty quality results. The Digital Copy version of Juno was $2 more than the Standard Edition, but it also came with swanky Dancing Elk High School t-shirt. It’d be nice if more studios got on board with the Digital Copy and finally put the fair use debate to rest.

Native Resolution