Just like a ton of other people I spent a bunch of time from the end of last week thru the weekend thinking, dealing & playing with new new iPhone related stuff Apple’s just released. I’m a huge Apple fan but I’m gonna be honest here - not everything in this post is BS, suck Steve Jobs off fanboyism.

Is it good? Is it worth it?… etc. Well, here’s my impressions on the whole suite of things. One caveat though: I don’t have a 3G iPhone (yet) so I have no impressions on the new device - just the new slew of software.

Me.com

I was pretty excited about MobileMe in general. I’ll talk about the push/sync stuff later but first I’m gonna get into me.com’s web stuff.

There’s really no way to avoid calling the launch a disaster. .Mac (mac.com) went down in the late afternoon on July 9. It was supposed to come back on July 10^th around midnight - 2am (from what I read). No dice there. The service started to show signs of life before noon PST (or is it PDT now, i forget) but from my experience (and other accounts on the web) it was down way more than it was up. For a brief moment the service was live and I was able to snag the username I wanted but was unable to do anything on me.com for a long while. The site was down a lot and when it wasn’t down it was slow as hell: irresponsive and unusable.

Since Saturday or so the site been consistently “up” but is largely unusable. I have all of 2 message in my @me.com inbox and I cannot get that page to load. I’ve had better luck with the address book and the calendar but Mail seems to be hoepless. I see this about 95% of the time:

It’s not just that the site’s chillin there trying to load my mail… it’s hung up. Using FireBug on FireFox you see there’s usually 14 HTTP requests when you click on the Mail icon (the last 2 are for the soundmanager2.swf). If you wait a bit you’ll see an AJAX request pop thru which results in a JS error::

page is not defined
[Break on this error] function parameterString(){var paramString=”;var topWindow=getWindowOpener();to…

Anyways: Mail’s really broken on me.com (IMAP seems to be fine though).

The next most disappointing thing about me.com is the fact that it’s not much of a(n) RIA. Hand’s on it’s not as slick as the demo during the last keynote. My biggest gripe is the lack of right-click integration/handling (whatever you wanna call it). In Yahoo! Mail etc if you right-click a message you get some options: delete, reply etc. In me.com I have yet to find any feature that responds to right-clicking the way you’d expect a highly anticipated & PR’ed rich internet app to respond.

Right clicking on a calendar item results in this:

What the fuck is that? Where’s my context sensitive menu with options to edit this calendar item? Same goes for Mail (which currently isn’t loading). Right-clicking on a message should give me a list of actions I can perform upon that message - but, no, not in Me.com’s interface.

Hell, I can deal with a lengthy/delayed/fucked launch but c’mon. If I’m dealing with stuff like the site just not working etc at least make it worth my while when it’s finally up. Why does my frustration have to be in vain?

So, in a nutshell, me.com kinda - sorta sucks. Most apps are really, really slow and mail doesn’t ever seem to load. Even when you get it to load there’s a lot of polish that’s missing (compared to benchmarks set my Yahoo mail and other RIA’s out there).

MobileMe Softare Update

The MobileMe software update was another mystery. From what I can tell there was supposed to be a software update through OS X’s normal update mechanism which changed all your .Mac references to MobileMe.

I actually have no idea if this update actually did anything besides replace .Mac references in OS X to MobileMe: Icon’s in System Prefs, settings in Mail.app etc. Is there any functional change? I dunno… I’ve never used .Mac so I have no basis of comparisson.

Anyways - this was something that was annoying a ton of folks. Honestly, its not a huge deal but given the fact that so many people were excited, couldn’t get onto me.com and were left in the dark re: what you actually need if/when me.com is up it pretty much ballooned into a ton of frustrated chatter. TUAW and other Mac blogs/sites linked to a package you could manually download but that package was pulled and eventually 404′ed.

I finally got the MobileMe update to show up by reinstalling iTunes 7.7. I read that the new iTunes triggered the update for some folks. I’d already received an update for iTunes 7.7 but I figured I’d manually download and reinstall it. After the reinstall I checked out System Prefs -> .Mac and at that point Software Update popped up with the MobileMe update.

So this became another frustration for a bunch of folks. I’m assuming the update was throttled or there’s some whacky dependency thing that OS X was goofing on. Either way, way too many people were perplexed and were instigating updates to no avail. Better customer communication would have been appreciated here. We were all left guessing and some official word would have been nice.

MobileMe Push Email, Calendar & Contacts (Cloud to Mac)

After getting the MobileMe software update I thought I’d risk trying to see if the sync/push stuff worked. I backed up all my shit and gave it a go. I was pleasantly surprised. Personally, I had zero issues here. The contacts & calendar items on my MacBook went up to the cloud without a hitch. I checked ‘em out on me.com and they looked fine.

With that going well I started editing some entries on the web and the MacBook and it successfully pushed and sync’ed both directions. I was expecting a disaster but it worked fine.

iPhone 2.0 Software Upgrade

I was fully prepared to end up with a brick but my impatience and curiosity wouldn’t allow me to wait any longer. I read about the activation servers being flooded but I took my chances.

This process was also pretty easy. When I plugged my iPhone into iTunes it asked if I wanted the update and there it went. Now, the only weird thing here is that the update might be a bit too communicative about the current status. You see a bunch of messages like “youre iphone has been set to factory settings” etc that make you think that the updates actually going backwards or something. Later on you’ll see it telling you that’s it’s restoring a backup of your settings that it made earlier. So - ya, the status messages are weird but it worked without any issues.

The upgrade to the iPhone 2.0 software took about 10-20 minutes. Something like that. Not super quick but not “i fucking hate you’ slow either. Re-activation worked the first time too. So, no issues with the 2.0 upgrade at all.

Those 10-20 minutes are VERY worth it. Hell, even if my phone was fucked for an hour it would be worth it b/c what you get is killer!!!…

The AppStore and the Apps

This is the icing on the cake. All the bullshit people have dealt with, the frustration & mysterious - they’re worth it. The AppsStore’s potential is rad.

There’s really not much to say about the AppStore besides it works; both through iTunes and the iPhone’s AppStore. You click on shit and you get it on the phone. LOL

Here’s the deal though: I dunno if its the 2.0 software or the Apps themselves but my phone is a bit less responsive than it used to be. Its not yet pissing me off but I can definitely notice lags now. The lags show up when flipping between home screens, hitting the home button when on an app etc. They’re there. Is it the fault of the Apps, their notification stuff or the 2.0 software itself I dunno… hell, it could even be b/c I enabled MobileMe’s push (get to that later).

I’ve installed a handful of apps. Here’s what I think of them so far:

• AIM:
  Fuck this app! I hate it. I may have a unique situation but I cannot login. It will not accept my login credentials. My screenname used to be an AOL screenname. I cancelled my AOL account about 8 years ago but have been paying them $5/mo for the luxury of keeping my screenname for AIM use. I cannot login to AIM via the iPhone app or any of their web iterfaces (not even AIM express). However, logging in through the AIM desktop client and Adium works fine. I assume there’s some whackiness w/ my account but its really frustrating. This app may be fine but since I can’t log in its pure shit to me.
• PhoneSaber:
  Totally dumb. Makes noises when you move your phone. If my girlfriend hadn’t installed it I never would have bothered.
• Evernote:
  I don’t understand what’s going on here. i’ve added a few notes and they’ve been in “pending” state for about 15 hours now. How do I get ‘em to go up? No idea….
• Monkey Ball:
  Yup, I paid the $10 for this one. It’s fun and it works. It’s actually amazing. I kept thinking “fuck this is on a phone?”. Pretty rad.
• Pownce:
  This app is bland but it works. If I had more friends on Pownce I’d probably love it. It’s nice and simple and does what it says it’s gonna do without any hassle.
• Twitterific:
  This is probably one of the more popular free apps. It’s kindof good but there’s a few annoyances. Double tapping a Tweet to get to the reply functionality etc is a bit unnatural given the fact that I’ve been single tapping the little, blue arrow things in all the 1.x iPhone apps. I’m get used to it though. Also, I have no idea how the app decides where in the list to scroll to when it’s launched. I end up in the middle of the list. It would be great if it started you off at the last tweet you saw. So when I launch it i get tossed into the middle of some big list and have to scroll up a while to see new stuff… that’s annoying. I’m 50/50 on paying for the premium version. The ads aren’t annoying enough… yet.
• Twitterlator:
  This apps not bad. The UI feels more comfortable to me than twitterific. + you get the delete and reply buttons on the list view which avoids the “double-tap for details” thing which I’m not loving on Twitterific. Its actually got a nice little directory type view for picking what Tweets you wanna see: “My Twitters”, “My Replies”, “Everyone’s” etc. It may become my go to Twitter app. The Emergency feature is kinda dumb though. I wish th
  ere was a setting to hide that functionality.
• Google:
  This apps is pretty cool. You can search your phone (contacts etc) and the web. It also has stuff like “find coffee near me”. The location stuff is a bit bla cuz it just kicks you into the Google Maps app but it works.
• Remote:
  This app is pretty cool. I always lose the little while remotes and my phone is always near me - so this makes things pretty sweet. My only gripe is that it’s not a real remote. It doesn’t actually have the menu and play buttons etc - so you cannot use it to navigate through AppleTV’s YouTube menus or the movie rental menus etc. If it was more AppleTV-menu-aware i’d be more stoked. But its still pretty rad.
• Loopt:
  The app would be cooler if I had friends. i don’t see much value w/o the social stuff. Now, here’s my gripe. Even without friends you can search for “coffee near me”. So little Google Maps type markers show up but there’s no good way to scroll through them. There’s an up and down arrow but they don’t seem to be useful. So if I have a high concentration of coffee markers on the map I have zoom in so that they’re not overlapping then click on em individually to check out details. Why no next/previous functionality?
• Whhrl: (however you spell it)
  This app just crashed my phone so it can suck it as far as I’m concerned. This app’s another one of those “great idea but doesn’t work” things. I just set my location as “San Mateo CA” and searched fro “taqueria”… it got 1 result. So i tried “Mexican foof”, “mexican” and “burrito”… all resulting in < 3 results. Complete bullshit! Google maps found 3,995. LOL

Eh, that’s enough for now I guess. I have more apps but this is just a quick overview. I’ll do real reviews of apps some other time cuz this post’s just getting way too long at this point.

MobileMe (Push Via iPhone)

This actually works just as well as the Mac -> MobielMe push/sync. No problems at all. It just “works”. Now, I’m not sitting around changing stuff all over the place but i did about a dozen tests and all my devices updated correctly. This is pretty nice.

Bottom Line

This stuff’s all a big deal. Honestly! Remember your old Nokia 5190 on Cingular? Mobile stuff (phones & services) have come a really, really long way. You’re phone can play Monkey Ball, sync contacts, do email, has a proper web browser and all sorts of crazy shit. Hell, it can even help you start a conversation with that cute girl/dude at the bar; your treo can’t do that.

Yes, RIM’s been around for a while and you can download apps for the BlackBerry but this is different. People are excited, developers are excited… This is key. How many people do you know who have been stoked about building BlackBerry apps? I know zero.. but tons of people are DL’ing the iPhone SDK and are amped on building stuff. The delivery mechanism is great too: over your iPhone or over iTunes… the same way you’ve been buying music for the last few years. You trust this handshake & know how to do it… hell, my sister can figure it out yet she had no idea that 3rd party BlackBerry apps existed; she assumed you’re limited to the crap the carrier installs and the 2 random enterprise apps: “the IT guy at work put ‘em there”.

There’s essentially 1 iPhone too (as far as screen size etc is concerned). So if you build an iPhone app it’ll work on all permutations of the device. If you’re building BlackBerry apps you’ve got how a ton of devices you’re just not gonna support: the Pearl’s screen is tiny, the Verizon phone had GPS crippled last time i checked etc. Those variations are a pain… you’re not writing a BlackBerry app; you’re writing a BlackBerry 8xxx app (Pearl not supported) etc. That’s a barrier to entry for shops. + what’s the obscure ass BlackBerry software updater? How’s that work? When if a lay person gonna remember to launch that? But everyone launches iTunes all the time.

Love the device and services or not - Apple’s genius at packaging. It’s all 1 big happy package. hell, my TV’s even in on it. I can click a few things on my iPhone and make my TV play episode 3 from Dexter season 3. I mean, c’mon! It’s a very calculated move to take over your life/entertainment and its genius.

MobileMe’s great too. The push works fine (for me). I’m really excited about this. Even with Plaxo keeping stuff up to date across devices has been a pain. It’s probably going to serve as an intro to an “always in sync” digital life that non-geeks aren’t into yet. But put some hype and some icing on that cake and the “normal” people will start talking about push and will soon learn to expect it from any new service that pops up.

Me.com’s the bastard here. It’s still slow and sucky but that’s fixable… it’s just web shit right? I’m definitely annoyed but it’ll get there soon (I hope).

So, in a nutshell, there’s been a bunch of bullshit to deal with the last couple days but it’s worth it. The patient folk win here. Someone going through all this crap next week will have a much smoother transition than the early adopters.

This really is the beginning of some radness. Someone had to make this geek stuff sexy & capitalize on it; and for now Apple’s the only player planting a real flag here.

I’ve been stoked about MobileMe since the keynote and, like a bunch of other people, have been checking in the last 18 hours to see if the service is live or not.

Apple seems to be having some issues launching MobileMe causing all the excited folks to hit refresh over and over again in order to see if it’s up or not.

So, I create a quick page, Is MobileMe Up, to auto-check for us. So, if you want to know if MobileMe is alive over not you can use my li tool to check if MobileMe is up or not.

Hopefully some people get some use (and a few laughs) out of ismobilemeup.com.

I just saw this pop up on my MacBook.

I didn’t realize I’d installed any Google stuff so I was pretty confused. “WTF is this?”. Turns out its something the OS X AppEngine thingy installed.

Anyways… ya, that’s the big update. Sorry I haven’t written in a while… blame twitter

I’ve been super busy with Blip.fm stuff lately so I haven’t had a chance to blog at all. I’ll write about Blip.fm soon enough but for now Craig’s Little Buddy gets a bit ‘o lovin’.

Last week Little Buddy got 2 (I think related) writeups in the blogsphere which was a total surprise to me. The 2 writeups are on:

• Killer Startups
• Simple Spark

I found out about these through my referrer reports in Google Analytics. It’s pretty cool. All in all it really doesn’t mean anything at all but it’s nice to see my no-pr, side project getting a bit of notice. It’s actually got a little CrunchBase profile as well. I dunno how it got there but it’s pretty cool.

Blip.fm also got written up in Killer Startups this/last week. So, I’ve got 2 Killer Startups. LOL. Now I gotta go for a hat trick.

I was watching Sarah Lacy interview Mark Zuckerberg on AppleTv and for some reason this video game up as a “related” video.

I have no idea why or how this video’s related but I’m glad it showed up. I used to watch this video all the time a year or so ago and I’d like to thank YouTube for reminding me of it. I was even learning how to play this song but due to being busy as hell I abandoned that lil project but I figure this is as good of a time as any to resume.

If anyone else is interested here’s the tabs.

I remember thinking 60GB was tons and tons of space. I still think it is… but it turns out I’m just wrong.

I’ve got 2 MacBooks, one at/for work and the other at home for my personal stuff… and they’re both running out of space. It’s pretty damn annoying. Where’d all this space go?

I keep all documents on an external HD. So big ass Photoshop files, all my MP3s etc are not on my machine. The only documents on my machine are about 4GB of photos and code for Fuzz and various other side projects I tinker with. Being way over-generous, lets say I have 1/2 GB of code/images (that’s a serious over-estimate). Then WTF happened to the other 55GB of space on these machines?

My Applications folder clocks in at 13.5GB. My Home directory something looks like this:

• Sites: 10MB
• Dev: 117MB - nowhere near the BS 1/2 GB number i pulled out of my ass earlier.
• Downloads: 7MB (a couple zip files and some PDFs)
• Movies: 16K
• Documents: 1.3GB (mostly local copies of tons of Photoshop docs)
• Public: 4K

That’s pretty much nothing. My MP3s are on an external… so my Music folder’s pretty much empty.

So where the hell’s my space? Turns out my ~/Library folder’s 1.3GB (not bad) but the /Library folder’s eating up a good 14GB. What the fuck is in there?

Anyways this isn’t an analysis or anything. I’m just frustrated. I’ve always thought that documents took up most of the space and using an external for that stuff would keep me pretty clear of nuisances like this…. but, ya, I was wrong.

Normally I’d use this as an excuse to go get a new MacBook Pro. Fuzz is a member is iTunes’ Label Connect program so we get a nice price cut. But, I’m trying to be good with the whole “unnecessary purchases” thing and am trying to hold out until it’s a 100% show-stopper. + it would suck ass if they introduced some new laptops in June. Everyone’s saying there’ll be new iPhone but you never know with Jobs n crew.

I was just checking out Photoshop Express to see how their Flickr integration works and came across this cute lil error:

Nothing big but its cool seeing that the Adobe guys have bugs in their ActionScript too

Oh ya… and for the record. I have no idea where the Flickr integration is:

Maybe they haven’t rolled the upgrade out yet or something. I’m looking forward to it though. It would be a good to for doing quick image edits for blog posts etc.

The insane drum fills towards the end are, well, insane. That Mike Portnoy really is one hell of a drummer.

Here’s what I love about this song.

• 2:45 eerie stuff
• 3:23-3:31 cool bass thing
• 3:31 rockin’ stuff w/ strange time
• 4:12 strange keyboard solo
• 4:29 cool keyboard tone kicks in. sounds like a piano but not quite
• 5:26 chills out a bit. kinda calm almost
• 6:01 rocks again
• 6:08 klutch pinch harmonic
• 6:16 drum beat changes & Mike stands which is pretty sweet
• 6:34 first of my fav drum fills
• 6:41 french horns
• 6:42 snare madness on drum
• 7:53 eerie keyboard stuff is back
• 8:42-8:58 absolutely amazing drumming
• 9:15-end take us home boys

Now image you’re in the NY orchestra and they tell you you’re gonna be backing a metal/prog. rock band. You’ll probably think there’s gonna be some wanking and non-musicianship going on. It’s totally beneath an orchestra guy to play metal. But then, they hear songs like this… or the 24 minute long Octavarium.

Dream Theater’s no joke dude. These guys are musicians. I really wish I was there and could see the orchestra guys’ faces when they first heard the music that they’re gonna have to back. I bet they were pleasantly surprised/interested.

Ever since I started doing Flex development my installation of Eclipse has been pretty pissed off. I guess having a big ass PHP project and a Flex project open at the same time is a recipe for disaster.

I’ve change the Eclipse ini file to allot more memory but that still doesn’t do the trick. My MacBook’s one of the earlier ones so I can’t expand beyond 2GB of RAM either

I guess I’m gonna have to get Jeff to pony up and buy me a new machine. Getting a new machine is 1/2 way exciting 1/2 annoying though but it’s easily better than having my IDE crap out 3 or 4 times a day.

For the last 2 days I’ve been getting errors when trying to view reports in Google Analytics.

Anyone else seeing this stuff? Hitting “refresh” or clicking back and selecting the report again usually works. Just wondering if anyone else was running into this issue…