It’s time to expose myself. Yes, even more than my current pyjama pants afford. It’s been on my mind. I knew I had to tell people. I was waiting for the right time. How would they take it? Would I be resented? People were from a different era, they wouldn’t understand. Things are different now. Not that I’m ashamed of it. Not at all. In fact, I’m quite proud of it. If I haven’t told people before, it’s more because I’m a private person and it’s really none of their business. Anyway, now is the time to officially state it and clear all the rumors.

Yes. I have an iPhone.

Wow, feels great, weight off shoulders, all that business. I’ve had it for three weeks now, and I must honestly say that it is the most well considered and executed device I’ve ever used. In fact, it goes beyond a device. It’s as elemental to my life as pen and paper. But wait, let’s start at the start.

Firstly, let me state that while I may well be a gadget person to some degree, phones have never been the fetish of choice. Mobile phones, at least (I still dream of the day I’ll have a firetruck red pulse phone). I’ve always had the cheapest Nokia prepaid I can get - usually a new one for christmas every second year - except for the brief time I borrowed my brother’s unused Nokia N-Something or other which had tiny buttons and thousands of menus. With my last cheap Nokia finally falling apart, the iPhone had attracted my interest.

What struck me was that for the first time a phone interface seemed human, not like I needed a CompSci degree to be able to find the Missed Calls. I also knew that I had always said I would never buy an iPod until it was full screen and touch based. My original plan was to buy an iPod Touch, but between the price drop on the iPhone and the fact that an iPod Touch has no email client, the iPhone was the obvious choice.

I imported it via eBay, tracking it across the world and occasionally e-mailing people to tell them “It’s onboard the plane!” or “iPhone has landed!” It conveniently arrived one day after the free Sim card hacks were released, and when it arrived it was a simple matter of running a few apps on my mac and my iPhone was saying, “Yes Optus” (It’s actually a Virgin prepaid SIM). What struck me at first was just how easy it was to use. I figured it would take a little while to get used to the on-screen keyboard, but actually, it was very simple. I usually type with two fingers on my right hand while holding it with my left, and I can type quickly. Certainly quicker than I ever had with predictive text. Much of the interface is similar to OSX, particularly what we’ve seen of the forthcoming Leopard. SMS is reconfigured to be more like IM. You hit SMS, see a list of who you have SMSed and one tap and you have the SMSes in chronological text bubbles like iChat. Absolutely perfect. The camera, photos, safari, phone, ipod, weather, notes, etc. are all as you’d expect from a mac app. The interfaces are so smooth and easy to understand. Never more than a few buttons at once.

I didn’t really expect this, but the killer for me is the mail app - thank goodness I didn’t hold out for an iPod Touch. I promise you, email on a phone has never been this clear and simple. I’ve been a long time gmail user, and being POP3 only doesn’t bode well for using email on both my mac and the iPhone. I did what was recommended by several websites and forwarded my gmail to a free aol email account which has IMAP. Now if I’m on my phone and I cull through some unwanted emails, by the time I get back to my desk the same has happened there. If I reply to a message, the little replied icon will appear at both places. I find this a huge time saver as I can check if that one important email has come through without going to my desk. Probably the other great thing about the iPhone is the fact that it is everything in one. As I was walking down the street the other day listening to music, I got a text message. The music fades out for a moment, I hear the new SMS sound and the music fades back in.

I was lucky enough to buy one just after the price drop, but before the firmware changed to restrict third-party access to the phone (including the SIM unlock). It’s a little disappointing Apple made the decision they did to lock out hackers when they are only adding value to the phone as well as opening up larger markets for Apple. I’m very glad I got mine when I did and I can continue using it this way until the new firmware is hacked and I can update the firmware (although I’m not busting for any of the new features).

Between my new phone and OS X.5 coming out this month (if it’s still on schedule), there are plenty of new toys for me to play with. Isn’t it telling that my windows PC which I use to record TV on just deciding to stop loading some software the other day, out of the blue? I almost put it out on the trash heap instantly. Now to tell my parents…

With MacWorld San Francisco only 7 days, 14 hours and 25 minutes away (according to my dashboard widget), there is an abundance of rumours flying around the interwebs as to what Steve is going to announce. This excitement is probably something PC users don’t understand. Thousands of products are released every week for the PC, of varying quality, but the bulk of ours come from one place: Steve. He gives us new hardware, new software, new iPods, new cell phones (possibly?). It’s like following a soap-opera for nerds. What technological advances have they made in the past few months? Which subplots have they been developing? How will the fans react?

Apple rarely pre-announce their products for just this reason. The iTV, Apple’s forthcoming media centre hardware device was a strange, strange exception, but it was probably because they simply had to let people know to not buy a PC for this purpose. With only vague and often conflicting reports coming from less-than-reliable sources, the fans are left wondering what will be announced on the big day. Here are some of the rumours, and my take on them.

Apple Phone: This one has been going around for a while, and with another product called the iPhone being announced by another company, people are starting to wonder whether it will happen or not. I personally don’t think I’d buy an Apple based music/phone convergence device unless they were both fully featured. This means I’d want a hard-drive based music player (or at least flash in the higher Nano sizes of 4 or 8 gigs), and a fully featured phone. The trouble with most convergence devices nowadays is that music is an afterthought. You insert your SD card and have to go through three hundred menus to find the “media player” and then open the file in a clumsy browser. No thanks. I do think Apple is the one the sort out the UI problems, but I’ll wait a few generations down for this one.

Mac Pro: Apparently we’re getting 8-Core machines. That’s two quad-core 2.0Ghz processors. That’s 16Ghz of processing power. What the hell do you people need 16Ghz for? What are you using iTunes and Safari at once or something??

iTV: What they originally announced seemed a little expensive and still lacked the features anyone can get with a simple PC solution. I hope this is expanded to integrate with web applications, as well as support TV recording. Not everyone wants (or even can) to purchase their TV shows for 99cents when it’s free on the TV. I guess the American scenario is different where everyone pays for TV. If you only watch 3 shows, it would probably be cheaper to iTunes them than pay your monthly subscription fee.

On a related note, I came across a program called Ted (Torrent Episode Downloader) which monitors RSS feeds and automatically downloads torrents of your favourite shows each week. Great idea, I thought, so I downloaded it before I realised there are actually no TV shows on television that I am remotely interested in. It might be nice for you though.

Leopard: I love having the latest version of programs on my MacBook, no matter how small the changes. I think Leopard is going to bring big changes to OS X, blowing Vista out of the water. If we don’t see Leopard released (or at least announced for shipping soon) in a weeks time, we’ll definitely be hearing more within the next few months. I’m looking forward to the seamless backup solutions and getting used to multiple desktops.

iLife and iWork: I’ve always found iWork to be a wholly under-featured software package and never found a use for it. Now, without my reliance on iPhoto, iLife has become less important to me also, but it’s a strong possibility we’ll see a new version of both next week.

Video iPod: This will be the first iPod I buy. I held off this year because the video and photo integration still wasn’t right. The screen was too small (although of amazing quality). I don’t want a mega screen, but I do want to be able to comfortably see and share when I put videos on it. Hopefully Steve pulls one of these out of his pocket, and if it follows the patent designs that have been showing up, I’ll be very happy.

Okay, so it’s not quite as exciting as the days when they announced the iMac G4 with flat panel LCD screen (wow!), but there’s still enough anticipation there for a Mac geek to wake up half an hour earlier to read all the details. Of course, they could surprise us with what I’ve really been wanting for the past five years: a seamless integration of home and technology… the coffee table PC where the table is the actual screen with holographic interaction. Oh well, maybe next year…

It seems the wind is ripe with change. I decided to make a break from my previous FruitBoy design which has served well since September 2005. Over the year and a bit, I had been continually refining it in small doses, making the changes I needed along the way. The capture above is what I referred to as Fruit1.1, taken just before the switch, although I never documented the smaller changes I made.

The whole thing was becoming a bit unwieldly and I didn’t know what code I was using and what I wasn’t. A fresh start, writing all the code from scratch seemed the best idea, and this now, Fruit2.0 is the result.

The change in design was mostly inspired by a slight change in direction with the site. I’ve basically decided (as the more perceptive of you will have noticed a few weeks ago on the site) to discontinue any hope of a regular podcast. The effort and time required to put them together was impossibly huge, something I couldn’t sustain. I also had serious questions regarding just what kind of content I wanted to deliver. That’s not to say audio content won’t return at some point, in some form, but I have no idea what that form might be.

The new design is also a lot more flexible than the previous design. It gives me room to display larger photos (actually, the perfect width for integration with flickr: 500px wide), and a nicer, white backdrop to present them against. I know some people will lament the colour, but I hope to be providing colour in other, less intrusive ways.

This design was fairly quick to knock up. It has remained pretty much intact since the first draft about I did around last friday, but the patterned bar and logos have moved, changed colour and form. I spent more time designing than coding this one, mostly due to all the revisions I made to the mock-up. I paid careful attention to sizes and making it possible to incorporate new elements and features later on down the track. The coding took place in about 24 hours, mostly due to its simple layout. The code (if not the images) is fairly well contained, although it did get a little sloppy at the end trying to accomodate for Internet Explorer as usual.

I’ve recieved mixed reactions so far - some people think it’s fresh, some people lament the loss of colour. I’m interested to hear what you guys think, so if you have any questions, opinions, or bugs that you’ve found, leave a comment below (hit “comments” and it will drop down automatically… no need to refresh). For the record, this is what it is supposed to look like, although perhaps not with that body font.

Isn’t Flickr great? Not only can you check out my photos from last Saturday night, but you can overdose on both Zoe’s and Becky’s photos, each posted to their respective Flickr accounts.

Why is it, then, that I spent a few (cough) hours today researching alternatives? Well the 200-photo, 3-set limit is squeezing now and I find that old photos I try to reference have been pushed off the back of the stream. I also pay for this hosting and only use a fraction of it, so I’m not really willing to pay another $25 US a year for the pro account. There should be server-side software which does everything I need, and look good, right?

Well, it seems that isn’t the case… yet.

What am I trying to do? What’s my brief and what are my requirements. I need an easily and significantly customisable content management system for my photos so I can present them in the way I want that matches the rest of my website design. I want an easy method of uploading photos in album sets. I don’t care if that’s FTP or with some sort of iPhoto plugin, although the latter would be preferable. I would like an easy way to edit the metadata associated with the photos, and would like customisable thumbnail rendering. As an added bonus, I’d like built in watermarking, but that’s not essential. Other features such as commenting, rating and keywords would also be nice.

I tried a few software options. One came close.

Zenphoto undoubtably looks great. Full of Web 2.0 goodness, it bills itself as “a simpler web photo album”, implying a few less features than other packages. The Stopdesign template is very good looking. Better than Flickr in fact, but is in most cases going to present as a seperate design entity to your main website. A nice comment system is built in, along with automatic (and user-definable resolution) thumbnail generation. Metadata editing can be done through the admin interface or as-you-go, browsing through the gallery as Flickr users will be accustomed to. The simplicity of ongoing use is certainly this product’s highlight, but what’s missing? Ratings, keywords, email submission, and search. What would have sealed the deal for me, and helped me put up with a few missing features would be a customisable thumbnail editor. Selecting just the photo isn’t enough. When I’m imposing a rather impossible crop, I need to be able to position it just right to be effective.

Is it really worth all this work and to loose the great social networking infrastructure established by flickr? I think it is worth it if what I gain is complete control of my photos, the way they are presented how they are stored. I’ll keep working on it and see if I can come up with a solution.

Just briefly, with all this speak of photos, I sent in five old rolls of film I found lying around the house to be developed. I assume they are from early to mid ’90s, but some could be older. I hope they are still in a usable condition and that they bring back some crazy memories.

I woke up in a swell mood today, albiet around 11:30am (Shudarp!).

Last night I played for the Back to the ’80s musical band just filling in. I had fun hanging out with the band and catching up with everyone, and afterwards headed back to a patented Party At Jess’. We must have had about a dozen of them during the run of Little Shop of Horrors, and it’s always fun to hang out with the assorted crowd there. This show has a bigger cast than Little Shop did, and the dynamics at the party are different, but it was a great night. I believe we left around 3ish, so that’s my excuse for the sleep in.

Today, however, I’m traveling Back to the ’90s. It seems I blew out my download quota on my internet, and they’ve pushed be back to 64kbps, almost dialup speed, almost 1996-speed! It must have been all that illegal music downloading… all those new release movies I downloaded… all that heavy research. What ever it was, I’m in the 90s until wednesday when I am shot back through to the now. In the meantime, it’s not all bad. I’m just listening to Peter Andre, wearing white denim and taping the odd “Murder, She Wrote” telemovie off the TV onto my VHS tapes.

Heh, VHS. You were good to us, but we dropped you as soon as something prettier and shinier came along.

Until wednesday, if you want to contact me, use my Ozemail email account. It might me a few days to reply though, they charge $5 an hour, and I’ve gotta wait for my brat sister to stop calling her friends about the latest episode of Friends.