What is all this hubbub Gizmodo is reporting this morning that Apple did not leak the iPhone 4 prototype out to the public? On the contrary, I think they did and here is why.

In an admittedly great blog post this morning on Gizmodo by Joel Johnson, Giz’s editor-at-large, Johnson details why he believes Apple didn’t intentionally leak the iPhone basically because there was nothing to gain from the move. I happen to disagree, as it seems to me that Apple had much to gain from this move, and the circumstances surrounding the “lost” iPhone 4 seem ridiculous.

Much To Gain

Let’s just right off the bat acknowledge that previous Marketing Executive of the Cupertino company, John Martellaro, had admitted that Apple has intentionally leaked product specs, pictures or even given out false information as part of their PR strategy. If we look back to January, when everyone was sure that the iPad was to be called the iSlate and that it was going to cost “about $1,000″…those leaks were coming from Apple themselves. What did Apple stand to gain from these leaks? Well contrary to what Johnson has wrote, all this PR is about Social Engineering/Media buzz and that kind of buzz (not Google’s version) is good to have for a product launch 2 or 3 months away.

This is the single biggest story of the year thus far. Every tech-media blog has written about it, it has been retweeted 10′s of thousands of times and the speculation will continue for the next 2 to 3 months. This is ALL free advertising. FREE! Tell me, why that is not a desire of a company who leads the industry in how they handle and control their PR?

This Is Just The Beginning

OK. So now the public has an idea of the kind of hardware that will be in the next gen iPhone. The buzz doesn’t stop here though. Now that the hardware has been leaked, we can only speculate about the kind of software that will run on that hardware. A front-facing camera? Hello iChat with video support! What about a mobile version of Photo Booth or Aperture?

There has also been a lot of talk about how the iPad is a content consumption device and much less of a content creation device. I do believe that before the mobile revolution, Apple wasn’t about content consumption but content creation. Their product line was, and still is, mostly about content creation whether it be the hardware like high end Mac Pro’s used almost exclusively in the video editing community for their insanely powerful processors or the software of OS X that allows dragging and dropping of files almost everywhere and features such as Expose that increases work-flow by some 40%.

The point is that maybe, just maybe Apple is trying to fuel the mobile content creation market, which has barely been tapped. Devices with the kind of hardware that was in that prototype have this ability, and the excitement, for me at least, to push the buzz through until the actual unveiling.

Gray Powell, and Apple – Come On…

Gray Powell. The young 27 year old software developer who is the one who supposedly “lost” the iphone. It is absolutely ridiculous that Apple, the most secretive consumer device manufacturer on the face of this planet, would go from bolting down the iPad to tables at Apple HQ in order to prevent a leak, to giving a young, 27 year old, just another software developer at Apple, the prototype of a flagship product to freely walk around with, and obviously use enough where he brings it with him to social situations where anyone with an eye looking over his soldier could have seen that it was a different kind of iPhone.

It is absolutely ridiculous that Apple, the most secretive consumer device manufacturer on the face of this planet, would go from bolting down the iPad to tables at Apple HQ in order to prevent a leak, to giving a young, 27 year old, just another software developer at Apple, the prototype of a flagship product to freely walk around with, and obviously use enough where he brings it with him to social situations where anyone with an eye looking over his soldier could have seen that it was a different kind of iPhone.

You know, I was going to write more, but then while doing research I just stumbled across this fan page of Gray Powell and after reading the comments, I think I’ve made a good case for why Apple intentionally socially engineered this whole thing. If you can’t see how controlled this entire thing was by Apple, from the open letter to Gizmodo stating it is indeed an iPhone to this Facebook page, it just screams everything that Apple has ever tried to avoid; and that alone makes this story bogus.

P.S. – I want one.

Lighter design convey's a better spring twitter background.

Many times I have a client ask me for a specific implementation (most commonly carousels or slideshows) and instead of developing a functionality from scratch, I just grab one of these plugins and customize it a bit. I use these the most often:

NextGen Gallery

Very customizable picture gallery.

Contact Form 7

Simply the easiest AJAX powered contact form. Fully customizable.

LightBox 2

If you don’t know what a Lightbox is, then I feel sorry for you. Make your clients pictures pop, literally off the screen.

TubePress

As time goes on, more and more of your clients will also have YouTube accounts.  Why not use the click of a button to import, list, and play their YouTube videos right on their website? Tubepress is easy to use, and for additional features you can upgrade to TubePress Pro for a one time donation.

My Page Order

Learning WordPress for the tech-impaired is like a sensory overload.  Keeping track of page order by way of those little numbers in the edit-page area can be managed much easier with My Page Order. It uses a drag and drop interface to order pages.

Finally after nearly 3 months of going into the studio, Brandon and I finished the Skin Pink Album.  It wasn’t a stressful process at all, as it has been in the past when I went into the recording studio with my previous band, Paperhouse.  The recording process is a very robust emotional experience that entails frustration, love, hate and competition. It taking everything that want, and setting it in stone.

Brandon and I have been friends since mid-high school, but only recently did we start playing music together.  We each, for the most part of our friendship, had our own respective bands, and rarely, if not ever, played together.  About a year ago, upon a quick visit to Pittsburgn (where Brandon went to college at Dusquesne), we went to a Bob Dylan show and wrote our first song together named “Drink It Quick”.  An experimental country tune, I think we both realized that maybe we could make something together that was unique, yet completely accessible even to the popy-ist ears.

This experimental pop, if you will, matched our personalities perfectly, as well as our conventions in songwriting respectfully.  I am more of a pop writer.  I have never found interest in experimental sounds.  To me, anyone can sit down and make sounds that sometimes, out of pure luck, produce a song that sounds interesting or really conveys a powerful emotional response.  Now in pop music, and by pop music I mean music that makes you want to tap your foot, dance, sing out loud and is so accessible it appeals to every audience.  I do not mean music that is produced by major labels with tons of production and requires almost no intelligence to create.  Ok, off that tangent and back to pop music.  Pop music, to me, has the unique ability to touch some kind of inner part of us that appeals to everyone in some profound way and is at the same time insanely creative.  I love that. That is what I want to create, listen and ponder when it comes to music.

Brandon, on the hand, takes all of this one step further.  He is an experimentalist.  A crazy man who throughs himself into a black hole of originality, and comes out perfectly understandable to those who are willing to listen.  Yes, sometimes it comes off as abrasive.  But almost all of the time, it is deep and relatable, and makes you either laugh or cry.  And I mean these things in the best possible way.  He is by far and away, the most original and creative individual I know.  And when it comes to music, his experimental side really creates an experience to listen to.

Now when you combine the both of us together, you get our new album.  It’s a pop artist, and an experimental veteran of creativity.  Boom. Experimental Pop.

The album starts with a straight up rock-punk piece thats about devotion and the absurdity of love.  Then goes on to detail a psychedelic paranoia adventure of the anxiety of growing older, back to the timeline of love from knowing how deep it goes to experiencing its end.  The lyrics that Brandon wrote, are beautiful.  I highly recommend you listen to what its trying to say as much as how it sounds.

I couldn’t be happier with it.

Download Here

I guess this means I have to start writing more….

The question was:

I have a question. I am following people and in their tweets, Sometimes I see @-reply’s from people in my timeline and sometimes I don’t.  I want to be able to see ALL of someone’s tweets, is there a way to do this?

~Anonymous

This is a great question, here is whats going on:

Unfortunately no.  Pretty much what Twitter has done is make it mandatory to be friends with the person who is being reply to. So if I am X and you are Y and some other person is Z, If I(X) tweet Z and you(Y) don’t know Z, then you would not see my(X) reply to Z. If you knew Z however, and I @-replied to him/her, then you would see my @-reply to Z in your(Y) time-line.

There used to be an option in your settings to change this, but they removed it (I believe) to help lower traffic and also to increase privacy in conversations on twitter in a, now that I think about it, odd way.

Google Fail

So I live in College Park, Maryland; which is directly on the North Western side of the infamous Beltway…and let me tell you: traffic is a bitch right outside of DC.

For those of you unfamiliar with the DC area, there is a single, unifying highway that loops completely around the metropolitan area of Washington and it is absolutely plagued (daily) with traffic.  It is, with out a doubt, one of the most traffic-prone highways in the country, and it can take up to an hour and a half just to travel 15 miles to my hometown of Rockville, Maryland.

Anyways, if duty, family or friends call and I need to head back west towards Rockville, I have taken it upon myself to check Google Maps for the traffic.  Google recently started collecting location data from people who use smartphones and have Google Maps installed.  When this geo-location data is cross referenced with location change over time gives Google the unique opportunity to display live traffic on their maps…or so they say.

Whats that you say? That sounds awesome! Well it would be, if the damn data was correct.

Tonight I took a short trip back to the Rockville area for a meeting that was scheduled to begin at around 7:30pm.  I figured, given no traffic, I would be able to venture home in about 30min MAX.  So I open up my browser and head over to maps.google.com, only to discover at about 7:00pm (optimal time for departure from College Park under ideal circumstances) that the entire route back is shaded in red.  Red = slow (or sometimes danger or stop…but this is irrelevant to this discussion).

Since according to Google Maps the traffic was bad and I had no time to waste, I decided to head out west anyway. And guess what? NO TRAFFIC.

I was in a green situation, not a red catastrophe like I was expecting.  After about 5 minutes on the highway, traversing many more miles than Google Maps predicted, I checked Google Maps on my Palm Pre.  Still red! Even in the area I was currently in.

So no, Google Maps can’t possibly have “live” traffic reporting.  I even restarted my phone just to see if it was a caching problem…but no, Google was just flat out wrong.

Google, take off the “live traffic” label on your maps.  I really rely on that to planning my schedule in a hectic traffic are of the country. Could you (Google) or anyone else provide a legitimate excuse for a misrepresentation like this? I can’t see one…and I am part of the Google Generation.  My contemporaries, at the very least, need to feel like they can rely on Google…and usually they deliver.  But no on this one.

I’d really like more in depth idea of how Google’s Live Traffic feature truly works, or the “Live” aspect of the system needs to be revised or removed. Gracias.

</end rant>

Mac and I started working together at a marketing firm located in Georgetown, DC where we both found common ground on web practices and standards based solutions.  Over time, I became increasingly frustrated with the firm with their lack of web 2.0/3.0 practices, and eventually left toward the end of summer 2008.  Mac worked there for a while longer before moving to Chicago doing exclusively remote work for the company, until finally leaving to start Pixel Dreamer.

After enough money was saved, we decided to make a run for our money and start preparing Pixel Dreamer for launch this past September.  At its core, we wanted Pixel Dreamer to be done right from the get-go.  We setup our online client management tools, invoicing systems, work-spaces, and various other communication tools. Just for reference, here are the tools that we use to get things done:

• Backpack – 37 Signals – For notes, ideas, and write-boards.
• Highrise – 37 Signals – Contact Management
• Action Method Online – Behance – Task Delegation
• Rackspace Hosting – Our Cloud Hosting Solution

Believe me, these weren’t the first system that we tried out.  We tested about 20+ management/administration tools that are available and we finally settled with this list.

In addition to opening ourselves up for business, we also created PD.AM – a URL shortener that was to be used with twitter to save character space in tweets.  We are currently in the process of improving the API documentation so that PD.AM has a chance at becoming integrated with popular twitter clients such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Twhirl.  I believe we have a good chance since we still have the shortest URLs that can be found.  If you haven’t tried it yet, head on over to http://pd.am and shorten your important links!

Aside from Pixel Dreamer, I am also finishing up my studies at university.  Oddly enough, I will be receiving a BA in Philosophy of all things…nothing to do with web development.  I was in Computer Science for a long while, until I discovered web programming and realized that’s what I was really interested in.  At University of Maryland, they do not touch upon web programming languages in Comp-Sci, so I had to learned everything I know on my own, on my own time.  Having some Java programming experience did not hurt either .

Anyways, I am looking forward to the upcoming year, great things will happen with Pixel Dreamer.

Derek Kessler of PreCentral.net just disclosed some very interesting information on their blog.

Apparently, putting his Palm Pre, which so happens to have a Touchstone back cover, caused his MacBook Pro to go into sleep mode.  This is because Apple’s mechanism for sleep mode is initiated by magnets; so when Derek’s Pre hit the right palm rest of his MacBook – it turned off.

So this is just a reiterated warning from me, an owner of a Pre, to be careful where to place this little puppy.  Magnets do not play nice with computer electronics.  Until it is determined how strong these magnets are, refrain from placing the phone (Pre) anywhere near your computer.

Here is Derek’s explanation:

As you know, the Touchstone charger and associated induction back use built-in magnets to align and secure the Pre to the charger. The magnets on the charging “puck” are the more powerful of the sets, but those in the Pre’s back could be strong enough to cause problems if inadvertently placed. I write this post because this morning after I was awakened by my Pre’s daily alarm, I grabbed the phone, killed the alarm, grumbled on the way to my computer (a MacBook Pro that crunches numbers through the night), and then set the Pre on the right palm-rest area (no pun intended) of the laptop. To my bemusement, the computer immediately went into sleep mode. So I pushed the power button on the laptop, it turned back on, and after a second went back to standby. “This is odd,” I said to my empty living room, so I turned it on again. And it turned off again.

Oh wait – that’s right, the MacBook uses a magnet to activate sleep mode.  Whoops.  Although the magnets on the Touchstone battery door are fairly weak (far too weak to disrupt a hard drive, one hopes), I imagine that it’s possible that they could disrupt other bits and bobs in a way similar to what happened to my MacBook.

The first thing that comes to mind is credit cards and access/ID cards. Every credit card and most state/federal/corporate ID’s have a magnetic strip across the back that can be disrupted by magnetism. Thankfully, since these cards’ magnetic strips only need to be written once, they are what’s called high-coercivity strips and are thus not very coercive to magnetic interference (as tested by Mythbusters). But hotel room key cards are a different story; they use low-coercivity strips to allow easy and quick rewriting for new customers, and are thus prone to failure in the face of magnetism. You or somebody you know has had a hotel key card stop working and the only explanation you (and the front desk) could conjure was that your cell phone had killed it. Most cell phones don’t even have magnets and yet are capable of causing wanton key card destruction, let alone the low-but-powerful-enough magnets in the Touchstone back.