I love the concept of applications on my mobile device and the ability to expand the functionality to meet my needs. Nobody has really done that successfully since the Palm phones and it’s great to see a modern take on that.

Although there’s a lot of crap in the store, the quality of the applications has been steadily increasing in the past weeks. My current favorites are Twinkle, Things (once it gets sync), Remote, Pennies, and WordPress.

Some sample usage:

% touch foo bar baz
% trash -l
% trash foo ba*
% trash -l
/Users/dave/.Trash/foo
/Users/dave/.Trash/bar
/Users/dave/.Trash/baz
% trash -e
% trash -l

Install with gem:

% sudo gem install osx-trash

Nice Visuals from the Zürich Chamber Orchestra

Very useful for all those hard to remember user defaults. And good for discovering new ones too!

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent
To blow up the King and Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

“Happy Counterterrorism Day” by Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

I just installed it and it seems to work quite nicely. Thanks guys.

The only limitation for me is that it’s hard to write long posts or add links on the iPhone. That has nothing to do with their plugin however. Just lack of copy/paste and fast typing on the device.

Note: This was all typed on the iPhone interface but the links were added on the laptop afterwards. Lesson is to only use the phone for quick entries with limited or no links.

Definitely good to see some competition in this market. Hopefully, this will improve iTunes and add another nail in DRM’s coffin.

They arrived late today – yesterday technically. Me and a coworker picked them up from the states. 40$ in taxes. It wasn’t until later that the public open source hack was posted.

My coworker tried it first. I was going to wait. He’s braver than me! But ultimately who can resist?

I was surprised when talking to random friends to hear how many of them thought that the price drop was a “desperate” move by Apple to sell their excess inventory of iPhones. My take on it is that it’s an aggressive and totally calculated move to outdo the 1 million units sold benchmark by the end of this year. Apple needs to secure a good chunk of the cell phone market this Christmas to be a credible force next year. This is a good way to do it and it also doesn’t hurt to charge early adopters extra money.

Cringely also has a good take on the gift certificates. I didn’t think about it at first, but it’s quite true that many of the customers that will be getting these gift certificates are not current purchasers of other Apple products. This is a great way to make them buy more stuff and Apple is still going to make a profit on that 100$.