Tag Archives: Apple

Things I Learned this Week

Among the things I learned this week:
* People love commenting on, mostly IRL, and reading this series of blog posts. (Courtesy: Personal experience)

* Apple played a significant role in the popularization and death of floppy drives. (Courtesy: Steven Vaughan-Nichols)

* Julian Charriere has an interesting art project in Venice’s Piazza San Marco that involves the coloring of pigeons. Surprisingly, most reports I read don’t bother including a photo. Odd Stuff Magazine (NFI) has a photo with its post on the matter. (Courtesy: NYT)

* There is an annual afro-punk festival in Ft. Greene. It amazes–in good and bad ways–that I only just now learned this. (Courtesy: NYT)

* During the Great Depression, leading US economists proposed the Chicago Plan: separating monetary and credit functions in the banking system and 100 percent backing for deposits. Repeated analysis demonstrates this model would have significant positive affect on the US economy. (Courtesy: IMF)

Initial Thoughts on the iPhone

I joined the cool brigade and bought an iPhone Friday night. Overall, it is an incredible device totally worth the large price tag (but worth is certainly a relative term).

I want to be brief with my comments on the device, but basically there are no significant issues other than third-party support, which seems to closer to reality every day, and the iTunes requirement (I despise this software).

The GUI is fantastic, touch screen incredible, screen resolution amazing, applications wonderful, size great, etc. Most of my initial issues with the iPhone washed away once I played with it a bit more and became aware of how to do certain tasks or find certain information; it wasn’t that these things were hidden or are hard to get to, just that I hadn’t paid enough attention.

I was surprised at the speed of the EDGE, which is about twice as fast as dialup, and activation was flawless (I was totally up and running in less than 15 minutes; note that I was and am an AT&T customer).

The one significant problem I had was connecting to my secured WiFi network. Passcodes required nuanced entering depending on whether they are ASCII or hex, and nearly all the information I found online about how to enter the information was using the network connection interface for firmware 1.0.0, which is a bit different than 1.0.1. In the end, don’t forget to reboot your router!

The one definite improvement I would like is that Safari would (1) continue loading a page when you switch to a new browser window so you don’t have to wait around and (2) not reload the page you were last on.