1. You probably want to wait for the binary UI toolchain if you can. Getting it built and configured is a nightmare.

2. /private/var/logs/CrashReporter is, as you expect, your friend

3. You don’t have to edit DisplayOrder.plist. SpringBoard will add any applications it finds to the Widget display. Only use DisplayOrder.plist to change the order or to hide items from the /Applications folder.

Here’s a quick how-to for people wondering how they can install the iPhone toolchain and try out their own command-line programs.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone and install ssh. You need full access to your iPhone’s file system.
2. Download a copy of the binary toolchain and unpack it onto your i386 Macintosh.
3. Copy arm-cc-specs to your home folder as .arm-cc-specs
4. Move the entire build (local-toolchain) into /usr/local/. (I don’t recommend breaking it out any further so you keep the entire install together.)
5. Edit .arm-cc-specs to match the location of your toolchain, e.g. /usr/local/local-toolchain/share/
6. Edit your path to include /usr/local/local.toolchain/bin and start a new window so the path matches up.
7. Create a new, standard helloworld.c
8. Attempt to compile it using arm-apple-darwin-cc, which will now be in your path. This will fail.

And now we come to the hard part. You either have to edit your system headers, which Apple made read-only for a reason, or load pre-updated headers, which you’ll have to google for. Editing headers basically goes like this: Whenever your compile fails, add || defined(__arm__) to any line that includes if or elif defined (__i386__). Repeat as needed until your hello world compiles. Then, copy your executable to your iPhone and test it there.

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GnuCash 2.2.0. is an Open Source finance software that has been available for Linux and Mac OS X for a while now. However, this recent release (July 15) is the first production release that provides a binary version for Microsoft Windows.

The Open Source online video player formerly known as Democracy Player got a new name…

Miro (version 0.9.8)

I’ve had problems with the Windows version. But, the Mac OS X version worked fine the last time I tried it.

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Geek gushes.
Granny calls him a hopeless fanboy.

Dan Knight at Low End Mac has written an obituary for the Mac mini, basing his assumption of its death on the lack of updates since September 2006.

Dan’s theory boils down to this:

If Apple still considered the Mac mini a viable model, at the very least they would have upgraded it to 1.66 and 1.83 GHz Core2 CPUs or 1.83 and 2.0 GHz Core Duos by now. The fact that they have allowed the Mac mini to languish when an upgrade requires nothing more than plugging in a better CPU tells us that the Mac mini really has reached the end of its road.

The mini’s lack of easy expandability was the main thing that made people hesitate, Dan asserts.

I’m inclined to think that the reason was even simpler than that. Dan writes:

All the Mac mini really had going for it was offering a decent amount of power in a very compact package. It wasn’t enough.

Right, because there was another Apple computer offering the more power, in an even more compact package: the MacBook. Yes, it costs a bit more, but as many reviewers have said, it represents superb value for money. As demonstrated by rocketing sales. I suspect that the MacBook has ended up taking a lot of sales from the Mac mini.

I rather hope that Dan’s wrong, and that the Mac mini has years of life left. I think it’s a great little machine, well-suited to use as a basic family PC, or a geek’s tinkering playground, or even a dedicated server. For the time being, I hope that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

Introducing TimeDrawer…

One Leopard feature that a lot of people are looking forward to is Time Machine. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start using it right now?

If your answer’s “yes”, you might be interested in TimeDrawer. As you might be able to tell from the name, it’s an application that does a similar job, keeping an eye on changes to your files and letting you flick back through time to see what changed and when. You can even pick out two previous versions of a file and compare them directly.

What’s most appealing about TimeDrawer is the quality and smart design of the user interface. Instead of Time Machine’s cheesy cosmos backdrop, you just get a nice translucent overlay and a series of timestamped file icons to choose from.

There are plenty of extra helpful touches, such as a search box, a default setting that Time Drawer should ignore changes to anything in your user Library or in the system Library, and an option to make the recorded history Spotlight-searchable. Wow.

Time Drawer functions as a prefpane and requires use of an installer. You have to log out and back in, then enable it in System Preferences, for it to start working. I’ve only been playing around with it for a few hours, but I’m already wondering if TimeMachine’s functionality and design might scoop that of Time Machine - we shall have to wait and see.

Recently, my iPod has been collecting duplicate playlists like a child collects dirt. It’s not an unknown problem. A bit of googling shows that others have had the same issue and as there didn’t appear to be a simple solution, I decided to write a little script to take care of things. The following code deletes zombie playlists from the iPod. After, I re-sync to restore the playlists. This takes only a second because the iPod has already been synchronized before I run the script. Figlet, as you probably might guess, is the name of my iPod.

tell application "iTunes"
	set Figlet to first source whose name is "Figlet"
	set pls to every user playlist of Figlet
	repeat with eachpl in pls
		try
			delete eachpl
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

Film Roll 1.0 is a bunch of little Finder plug-ins useful for manipulating photos in situ.

Nokia Media Transfer 1.0 beta lets you move stuff from your Mac to your Nokia. It’s a 1.0 and it’s a beta, clever.

TabletDraw claims to let you “draw like you draw”.

What’s Narc? “narc is a ‘total conversion’ software package that transforms an Apple Xserve into a network traffic authentication, authorization, accounting, auditing and instrumentation (AAAAI) appliance.”

Aquamacs, the easy-to-use emacs, has been updated to 1.1.

I spent a few hours this weekend upgrading a Core Solo Mac Mini to a Core 2 Duo. Here are a few thoughts on the experiences and lessons learned.

At first it seemed odd to take a look at an audio file player for the Mac. But, if you have a format not supported by iTunes or Preview, take a look at the Open Source Cog 0.06 for Mac OS X. This version was released on July 12.

I mentioned the freeware Twitteriffic Twitter client for Macs last week. Here’s an Open Source Mac OS X (Tiger only) client for Jaiku fans…

juhu 0.6.7

If you’ve never heard of Twitter or Jaiku, wow, come up for air and take a look around! :-) This hybrid multi-point IM mini-blog (your thoughts in 140 characters or less) concept has really taken off this year.

I heard Virb mentioned on the Net@Nite podcast. Not being much of a social networker, it seems like a MySpace or Facebook kind of site to me. It says you can put all the things that make you you on it. But, it only let me import one blog. Hmm. I guess I don’t get it. If you do, chime in and clue me in. You can find my uninspiring Virb page here.

I was somewhat surprised when I saw the following sidebar in my GMail earlier today:

Yep, that’s a UPS tracking number. Perhaps this is one of those great little features that they’ve had all along, and I just haven’t noticed it — or maybe it’s new? At any rate, I couldn’t help but be strangely mesmerized by the sheer convenience of it all when I first saw it.

An e-mail provider identifying simple things like tracking numbers in my data and giving me those little extras seems dirt simple, doesn’t it? But it also makes me wonder just how many other things in my data Google can (and does) index and track about me.

Call me apathetic, but these little niceties are exactly the kinds of things that drew me to GMail in the first place, and despite the fact that I *know* Google is harvesting the heck out of my information, I seem to be strangely okay with it.

I’m feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance over here: they’re harvesting my data to the point that it’s starting to make me feel a little bit weird, but I don’t want to leave, because I just don’t know of a better free e-mail provider. (And heck, even when I was willing to pay good money for .Mac e-mail, it was mediocre at best.)

A question to GMail lovers: what would it take for GMail to lose you as a customer?

That is, just how much of their uncanny ability would they have to expose to spook you away for good? There has to be a tipping point somewhere…I wonder just how carefully they’re factoring this type of calculus into what they actually expose about their magic…

QuickTime 7.2 adds new export presets for the iPhone and an improved H.264 codec. Publishing movies on the Web and mobile devices has never been more beautiful. David Battino just published QuickTime Web Movie Secrets on O’Reilly’s Digital Media site. He’s included some great playback and embedding techniques. Definitely worth a read.

If you want to learn more about QuickTime Pro 7.2 and its capabilities, you might want to download the User Guide from Apple.

From MacJournals, Let’s make it “Understand the Dock Day” instead:

Yet from the first public descriptions of “Mac OS X” from Apple, the company has made it clear that the Dock is not optional and not replaceable. It’s a poor amalgamation of a program launcher, status center, and application menu/switcher–but Apple has affirmatively acted at every revision to make sure that you can’t do away with it without losing access to exclusive features like badges, notifications, and Dock menus.

I read this piece and nodded my head in agreement with every point, but there’s one point I’d differ with: the Dock is optional, and you can live without it. There’s a minority of people who do, including me.

The gist of the MacJournals argument is that you need the Dock visible to make use of its unique ability to display changing icons. Third-party Dock alternatives like Dragthing often do the Dock’s job better than the Dock does, but they cannot display dynamic icons - those icons that act as status indicators in the Dock.

Personally, I think the Menu Bar is a much better place for anything that displays any kind of small-scale, constantly changing information. That’s where I want my status indicators to live. I don’t want them in the Dock. The Menu Bar takes up less space than the Dock, and is always present without being intrusive.

Furthermore, a little searching uncovers third-party Menu Bar status displays for many commonly used Apple apps. What to keep an eye on the unread message count in Mail? Try Mail Unread Menu. Need access to iCal? MenuCalendarClock or High Priority might do the trick.

I’ve been living without the Dock for a while now, probably 18 months or so. I didn’t bother to kill the process - as the MacJournals article points out, that would also kill Dashboard, which I occasionally make use of - I just kept it hidden out of sight. It’s no big deal. And on the rare occasion when I need to drag something to a Dock icon (this happens about once a month), it’s right there.

Using a combination of Quicksilver for launching apps and finding files, the Menu Bar for keeping me informed about what the system is doing, and my frequent use of Command+Tab to remind me what’s running, I managed to go Dockless without any problems.

Here’s the weird-download-of-the-day: Subliminal Message lets you create custom subliminal text or image blipverts that will flash up on your screen - so fast you can hardly see them - at user-defined intervals.

Just why would you want that to happen? Good question. Let me know if you have a good answer for it.

Still, at least you now know that in the event that you ever need to have something subliminally flashed in your face every 20 minutes, there’s a tool out there that will help you do it. And take note:

Because of its perceived power and influence at the subliminal level, this effect is not allowed in TV advertisements in many countries.

Power. Influence. Not many apps offer you that.

Bloggers rejoice, because Daniel Jalkut has offered up a sneak peek at the forthcoming Mars Edit 2 release, and very nice it looks too.

New stuff to spot (in both the post and the comments that follow it): bye bye drawers, hello sidebars; a new markup selector (for Markdown goodness and more, no doubt); choice of metadata fields to display (like title, slug, URL, keywords, and excerpt); and quicker and easier category editing.

And that’s just the sneaky peeky stuff. There’s much more to come, we’re told. Dunno about you, but I’m looking forward to it.

Craig Hockenberry makes some excellent points about the possibilities and pitfalls of using multi-touch technology on a desktop computer:

The iPhone’s multi-touch UI works similarly: if you watch people use it, I think you’ll see a lot more people working at waist level than at chest level. The only time you need the interface close to your head is when you’re enjoying those 3 pt fonts in MobileSafari :-)

He’s not the first person to point out that no-one will want to spend hours reaching up to touch a notebook computer’s screen, but his reminder is useful nonetheless. If multi-touch is indeed coming to our computers, it will have to come via a different route.

There are delicious avenues for exploration, though. Bigger, wider touchpads. Or perhaps, using iPhones and future iPods as wireless touchpads, complete with interactive display elements that marry up with on-screen controls. Or just giving into geek demand and creating a Mac tablet - think iPhone, but stretched until the screen’s about 13 inches big.

So does the iPhone contains Mobile Web Server, aka Raccoon? Instead of “websites”, Raccoon asks us to think using “mobsites”, mobile websites. This comes as a port of Apache web server to mobile phone platforms. From what I’ve been able to google, Raccoon enables mobile phone users to become content providers (using their keyboards, microphones and onboard cameras). I am just starting to learn about this so thanks in advance to anyone who can point me to more information about iPhone-generated content, Raccoon, and gateways. Am I right in thinking this goes beyond just normal virtual private networks?

Update: Here’s a post from Radar last year by Nikolaj Nyholm on Raccoon.

Update 2: Reader Rodolphe suggests that the racoon on the iphone is not the Nokia variant but rather part of the IPSec tools and used for connecting the iPhone to VPNs. Man page

Update 3: The “cc” versus “c” should have given it away. The cool Mobile Web Server has two c’s. The VPN stuff only has one c. Mea culpa–or more realistically mea reculpa.

Screenshot by request after the jump.

Over at iPhoneWebDev at Google Groups, Blake Burris has posted that iPhoneCamp will next stop in Dallas, after the success of last week’s event in San Francisco. The specific barcamp wiki site is here. Dallas-area iPhone enthusiasts and developers may want to check this out. For sponsorship ideas, space available or questions, Blake requests you ping him at his AIM account, which can be found in the first paragraph on the about page.

Apple has posted “Puzzler”, sample code that illustrates iPhone web standards and javascript integration. Take a look at the details on the Puzzler page.

Vienna 2.1.3: Open Source Mac RSS/Atom Newsreader
Sat, 07 Jul 2007

Vienna 2.1.3 is an Open Source Mac OS X RSS/Atom newsreader client. It has an impressive list of features including smart folders for organizing feed items, multiple reading layouts, a built-in browser (based on Safari), and OPML export.

The MySpace Minisode Network takes a bunch of old TV shows and compresses them down to their basics. This results in start-to-finish episodes that are about 6 minutes long viewable in a web browser. The service includes about a dozen or so very familiar TV series including the geek classic Dilbert. Looks great for taking a mini-vacation from reality

You probably read that Google bought FeedBurner (the RSS feed service)recently. But, did you know that one of the benefits of this purchase is that FeedBurner’s formerly for-fee services FeedBurner Stats PRO and MyBrand are now FREE. Check out the FeedBurner blog entry titled…

FreeBurner for Everyone

It may just be me, but I find installing or upgrading the Java JDK/JRE, Eclipse, and various plug-ins to be a gigantic chore. If you feel the say way but would still like to use Eclipse on a Mac or Windows box, check out…

EasyEclipse 1.2

It claims that: EasyEclipse packages together Eclipse, the open-source software development platform, and selected open source plugins. We select, assemble, test, patch, build installers and document a full IDE, offered as reliable distributions and plugins.

Amazing. Moments after I mastered the .QTL hack to make QuickTime movies launch in full-screen mode from a Web browser (!), Software Update informed me the new version finally supports fullscreen playback. I commenced downloading, headed over to MacFixIt to read about the other new features, and saw this:

The QuickTime 7.2 disaster: Breaks all CFM apps on Intel-based Macs (Office, Photoshop CS2) for some; Problems playing Flash

I’m running a dual G5, so apparently I’m safe, but I canceled the update anyway. What have your experiences been?

Just an observation… I read an item over in TUAW the other day noting that Apple’s stock (AAPL) hit a record high and that its market cap was over $100 billion ($114.51B as of July 11). I wondered where Dell (DELL) and Sun (SUNW) were since both had been sometimes (jokingly sometimes not) mentioned as possible acquierers of Apple in the pre-iPod pre-iMac days. Looking them up, I found their caps at $63.38B and $19.21B, respectively. So, Apple’s market cap is now greater than Dell and Sun combined..

Just wanted to drop a heads up that the iPhone Web Development mailing list on Google Groups is lively, helpful and full of great people. If you’re interested in developing web sites specifically for the iPhone (whether you do so to expand an existing site or creating a site specific to iPhone use), you’ll probably want to check out this group.

If you think iPhone is too closed for the developers, you could give a shot at Newton OS.

During the 3rd Worldwide Newton Conference held in Tokyo, Dr. Paul Guyot has announced “Open Einstein”; the open source version of his famous Newton emulator licensed under GPLv2.

“Open Einstein” project is available immediately at Google Code:
https://code.google.com/p/einstein/

As a fruit of this announcement, Matthias Melcher has released a port to Windows + Cygwin + X11 environment.

Beside that, “Open Einstein” runs on Mac OS X (ppc and x86), Zaurus (with OpenZaurus), Nokia Internet Tablet 770 and 880.

Twitterrific

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:49:15

Twitterrific is a Mac OS X (Tiger) client for the Twitter, uh, how do you describe it? Minimalist social blogging service? It lets you both post and read tweets. Be sure to read the brief installation instructions before firing it up for the first time.

Microsoft Windows Live Folders gives you 500MB of free online storage. It may not seem much compared to some of the other online storage services. On the other hand, it is free, looks simple to use, and should be around for a while.

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I use Google Docs daily (usually several times day). So, I was a bit surprised to see its new look and features when I logged in tonight. So, I headed over to the official Google Blog and got the details at…

More organizing tools

The major feature addition is the ability to create personal folders to organize documents.

The Ardour Digital Audio Workstation is an Open Source Mac OS X (and Linux) application that is a multichannel audio editor. Its web site says it has unlimited undo and redo, unlimited tracks, timecode synchronization, and bunch of other high-end (IMHO) audio editing features.

Here’s the scoop on this weekend’s iPhone development event from Raven Zachary. Note, that Adobe has dropped their requirement for attendees to sign an NDA, so if that was keeping you on the fence there is no longer any need to worry about it.

iPhoneDevCamp is an upcoming gathering, inspired by BarCamp,
SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop web-based applications
and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event,
organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the
completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web
applications and web sites will be launched to the public. The event
will be held at the San Francisco offices of Adobe, and out-of-town
guests are welcome.

Attendees will include web designers, developers, testers, and iPhone
owners, all working together over the weekend to improve the web
experience for iPhone. Development projects will include both solo
and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during
the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to
work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be
prepared to work on a development project during the event. You do
not need to own an iPhone to attend (although, a large number of
iPhones at the event will make the development and testing process
much easier).

Attendees will be able to:

• Create new web applications for iPhone.
• Optimize existing web applications for iPhone.
• Migrate Dashboard Widgets to web-based widgets for iPhone.
• Test and optimize web sites for iPhone.

There are more than 30 sponsors for the event including Adobe,
Yahoo!, O’Reilly Media, BMC Software add Laszlo Systems (among
others). iPhoneDevCamp is not affiliated with Apple, Inc.

The event is being held the week following the public release of
iPhone, to allow prospective attendees some time to acquire an
iPhone. This also allows early-acquirers the opportunity to do some
experimentation before attending the event.

Opera, makers of fine cross-platform browsing software, are so proud of their new Opera Mini beta that they’ve made a (not very funny, unfortunately) Apple-baiting “PC and Mac” style video ad.

The idea, it seems, is to point out how much more widely available Opera is, and how free it is (disingenuous, I’d suggest, since all handsets cost money, not just iPhone; and all handsets come with built-in software, just like iPhone).

(And that goes for “free” handsets, too, which you still pay for via your fixed-term contract fees.)

The new features look pretty good, and I particularly like this note from the developers:

Opera Mini 4 beta installs beside your current Opera Mini version without overwriting any of your existing files or settings.

How nice to see a dev team that’s thoughtful enough to tell users a little thing like that before they go ahead and start downloading…

Brent Simmons strikes a chord with his summary of Mac email software failings:

Email is, or ought to be, a keyboard thing–it’s about reading and writing. I’m not drawing anything or applying gradients or moving shapes around–I should be able to set the mouse aside.

Since getting an iPhone, complete with IMAP support, Brent’s been hunting for a new desktop mail client, since his previous favorite, MailSmith, doesn’t do IMAP. But Mail lacks features Brent insists on, and no other product quite offers all of them.

It’s a situation a lot of people (myself included) will sympathize with. I’ve spent many long hours comparing email clients, trying to find something that had everything I wanted. Like Brent, keyboard control and IMAP were must-haves for a long time.

I haven’t solved the problem - I reached the same impasse that Brent did. I suspect a lot of other people are in the same boat.

O2 has won the rights to sell Apple’s iPhone in the UK, according to a report in The Times.

The story says:

Apple’s agreement with O2 is thought to include a continuing share of the revenues generated by each iPhone customer. O2 ’s network will also have to be specially configured to accommodate the Apple handset. The lure of the Apple brand is expected to lead thousands of UK mobile customers to ditch their existing contracts and switch to the iPhone provider.

It also claims that O2’s rival Vodafone pulled out after deciding “that the commercial terms on offer were not viable”.

The O2 press office wasn’t answering the phone when I tried calling just now to get comment or confirmation. Maybe they’ll get back to me after they’ve checked their visual voicemail.

Apple has just posted their iPhone Web development guidelines. (Thanks John.) As expected, the iPhone integration seems limited to a few “special links”.

Mailto: works as expected, opening the built-in mail application with a new compose-mail sheet. Google Maps linksare recognized by the iPhone and opened in the iPhone Maps client. The phone link (tel:) calls the specified number when clicked, e.g. <a href=”tel:1-408-555-5555″>1-408-555-5555</a>.

There are also some useful guidelines to be found about formatting media for smooth iPhone playback, a list of iPhone gestures (double-tap, touch-and-hold, drag, flick, pinch-open, pinch-close), a discussion of the iPhone viewport and more.

The most startling part of Engadget’s iPhone review:

We expected that if you’re an email user, when you plug in your iPhone and iTunes says it’s “syncing your mail accounts,” that means it’s actually comparing and moving messages between the device and Mail.app. Not so. In fact, the iPhone does not interact in any meaningful way with Mail.app, other than to simplify the setup on the iPhone by copying account settings over from the desktop client’s settings.

That’s just … nuts.

CrunchGear claims that new MacBooks coming in October will support iPhone-style multi-touch interaction on their trackpads. Is that a hardware thing, or just a software thing? Might it be a Leopard feature, as opposed to a MacBook feature?

Some nice ideas for cheap laptop stands and lap-protectors, at Ikea Hack.

About this particular outliner makes a welcome return, although this time it’s mainly about WWDC and the culture of innovation and research in computing.

Pierre Igot had a bad experience with his 10.4.10 update:

I had been monitoring the usual Mac news web sites and, apart from a strange audio popping problem on some laptops, I hadn’t noticed any significant issues mentioned in the forums. So I went ahead with the update. And that’s when Mac OS X decided to punish me.

It’s no secret that I own a Zune. (It is my four-year-old’s music player of choice–kind of the Fisher-Price iPod.) It’s also no secret that I hated the pouch that came with it. It barely fit the Zune and was so much work to put on and take off the Zune that I eventually gave up, bought a generic mobile phone case from the dollar store and used that for protecting the Zune.

Yesterday, I was going through one of my boxes of iPod-related odds and ends while searching for a workable iPhone cover and came across the unused Zune pouch. It fit the iPhone beautifully. It’s very soft and protective. The cinch at the top isn’t worth a damn but the Zune-fob attached to the cinch makes a nice grab point.

If you work out the money, $100-odd bucks (the going rate for a Zune) is a bit pricey for a soft iPhone case but if you already have one around the house, it’s terrific.

With one click, Spencer Critchley just eliminated the nail-dragging squeak my dual-G5 used to make every time it ran a complex screen saver or iTunes visualizer. His tip was to disable processor napping.

Click once, squeaks vanish. Disabling processor napping on my dual G5 eliminated the squeaking sounds it made when running complex visuals. But could there be any drawbacks?

Question: Why did Apple not make iCal todos synch with the iPhone?

My first reaction on hearing about this problem was astonishment. I couldn’t understand it - if they went to all the trouble to make sure the event data was used, why not go that final step further to get the todo data synched as well? It just seemed like a bizarre omission, especially given the iPhone’s role as a PDA.

But since then I’ve started to think. Perhaps the iCal todos were ignored because in Leopard, the focus of todos has shifted from iCal to Mail. The official Leopard iCal page doesn’t even mention todo items (but the official Leopard Mail page does). I say the focus has shifted, because there will be some way of viewing your todo items in iCal. They will still be there. But Apple’s pre-Leopard publicity only talks about todos in reference to Mail, not iCal.

Now consider the Leopard launch delay. In April, Apple released a statement saying:

We had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

So here’s my theory: todos are coming to your iPhone, but they’re coming in the Mail application, after Leopard has been released. If Leopard hadn’t been delayed, todo items (and possibly a few other things that are missing, like synching of notes) would have been present on iPhone from the start.

I learned a lot about this device by downloading the iPhone User Guide from Apple. Very helpful.

Just in case you’re worried about the glass screen, don’t. The iPhone is designed for the road. I slipped mine into an InCase sleeve that provides protection on the corners (which is where my devices always land when I drop them) and hit the road yesterday. I had a great day, and the iPhone helped facilitate that.

First of all, I’m not a fan boy here. Over on The Digital Story, I published a post yesterday titled, Lots of Reasons to Buy an iPhone: The Camera Isn’t One of Them. I think the iPhone camera suffers from too much simplicity. But then again, I’m a photographer.

Where I am thrilled is with email, web, and maps. I’ve been waiting for years to have a mobile email experience like this. The “Mail” app on the iPhone is stunning. I’m testing it with both my IMAP O’Reilly account and a personal POP account. It is fast, beautiful, easy to use, and did I mention beautiful? I have the iPhone set to check mail every 30 minutes. While I was on the go yesterday, I was easily able to keep a few plates spinning with work-related issues using this device, and I had fun doing so. In my opinion, the iPhone is worth the purchase just for the email client.

Another big joy was Safari RSS. On my Mac, I have an RSS Feeds folder set up on my Bookmarks bar. The iPhone grabs all of this stuff on its first sync. When I had a few moments to kill, such as waiting in line, etc., I’d hit the “Safari” button on the iPhone, then check out the news from my RSS sites. It’s fast and easy to read. And the EDGE network is performing much better than I had anticipated. I’m guessing there is some network optimization in the iPhone.

I then needed directions. I hit the “Maps” button, entered my starting and ending points, and was treated to written directions, street map, and satellite view — easy to read, easy to use, and once again (I know), beautiful. I arrived to my destination with time to spare.

I’m having good luck with most of the other features too. The battery life is great (I’m on the second full day of use and still have half a battery to go). And this thing is a joy to use. I know we like to pick apart highly-hyped devices when they hit market. It’s human nature. But I have to tell you, the iPhone is worth the investment. And thanks to Software Update, it’s only going to get better.

At the top of my wish list: iChat for the iPhone.