Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

• I was pretty concerned about the iPhone form factor, specifically not being a flip phone. Previous “stick-style” phones have been a pain in the butt, dialing or otherwise doing random things in my pockets or Rochelle’s purse. The flip phone I’d been using most recently had convinced me that they were the only way to go. But the iPhone’s combination of a physical wake button and a virtual slider has worked perfectly so far, and I love how thin the phone is, feeling much better in my pocket than my old LG flip phone, in spite of being bigger in the other dimensions.

• Although many people have complained about Cingular/AT&T’s network, and the general consensus seems to be that Verizon has the best US-based wireless infrastructure, my own experience has been that I get great reception, everywhere I’ve been, but especially in San Francisco. I last had AT&T Wireless service about 4 years ago, and reception in my own house at that time was pretty poor (that’s why I switched to Verizon). But these days it seems to be very, very good.

• I want a version of 1passwd or Wallet on the device; not just integrated into Safari, but also as a separate application, to be able to carry my passwords around with me, in case I find myself at another computer. This is something that cannot be done with a web-based solution, I would never trust all my passwords to a web site.

• I want to be able to prioritize my WiFi networks, by sorting them, so that of the networks that I come into contact with, I will use the best ones available to me, where “best” is defined by sort order. I’m not sure what process the iPhone uses to select a network, when it encounters several that it knows.

• I really don’t want my entire Safari bookmarks list from my computer; overall I have thousands, and maybe half of them are seriously out-of-date. Cleaning them all up is certainly something I should do, but it’s a very large task, and not going to happen soon. I think that here’s a great opportunity for a feature upgrade in Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) and the new version of Safari that will accompany it. In any event, I would like to be able to create groups of bookmarks, and choose which groups to sync, just like I can with my playlists, photo albums, address book groups, etc.

• I want (even) more tasteful, high-quality ringtones — rings that sound like phones, not song excerpts. The provided ringtones are wonderful, I just want more. I would be willing to pay for packs of them, ala the instrument packs that Apple offers for GarageBand. I’d hate to pay 99¢ each, unless I could preview and select them individually, but I’d be willing to buy packs of 25 for $10-15 per pack.

• I bought an original Newton MessagePad, the day they were available. The difference between the Newton (awful, too-big form factor, low utility, ugly, slow, awful input method) and the iPhone (gorgeous, perfect size, extremely useful) could not be more extreme (though text input remains a limitation, I’m sure the virtual keyboard will prove better than handwriting recognition ever was). I think this is much more than just 10+ years of Moore’s Law and other technology advances; it’s very much an example of the effect of the taste and ability to focus that Apple has today.

• The main area where the Newton outshone the iPhone is in having a developer’s kit and a way to put third-party software on it immediately. I’m certainly hopeful that will stop being an issue at some point, but I totally understand that Apple isn’t ready to release an SDK just yet (though I wish their explanation of the issue was less spin and more honest).

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Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.

Buying and Activation Was Painless

I wasn’t willing to camp out or wait in line more than an hour prior to the store opening. But in spite of having 200-250 people ahead of me (a line long enough that it had to be split into two, with us “overflow” people being in a second line outside the mall), once the store re-opened at 6pm it only took about an hour to get to the front of the line, and about 4 minutes to actually purchase my phone. My overall time commitment was about 2 hours. Apple, and presumably the mall folks as well, did a terrific job of managing the external queue, and the customers inside the store.

Once out of the store, I actually had Real Life Activities planned, so I didn’t even open the box to look at the unit until almost midnight. My activation process, unlike a few I’ve read, was quick and smooth, no hiccups. And although I was transferring my number from another wireless provider (goodbye Verizon!), it transferred with no further intervention from me; within an hour I could make calls, and about a day later I could receive them. All in all, a very satisfying and convenient process — which is kind of amazing given that there are three major businesses involved, including one (Verizon) who has every incentive to make the process hard.

What Other People Are Saying

There are a number of other online reviews and personal experiences; here are a few that are both thoughtful and I (mostly) agreed with:

• Daring Fireball’s iPhone First Impressions
• The Official stevenf iPhone Review
• James Duncan Davidson’s iPhone Lists
• Glenn Fleishman’s First Days with the iPhone

(The NYTimes and WSJ reviews are also good, but their for-pay nature makes them harder to link to…)

Audiobooks on iPhone Notes

A few things I haven’t read elsewhere. First of all, the main reason I got the phone was to keep Aldo on Audiobooks current on listening to audiobooks on an iPod. I’m happy to report that the iPhone is a superb audiobook playback device. It is in most ways a major leap forward, making my 2nd generation iPod nano look primitive. There are also a few serious flaws, which I hope will be corrected. I’ll have more details on both sides of the coin in a post tomorrow Sunday soon.

Second, getting the 8 gigabyte version of the iPhone is a no-brainer. Previously I recommended the 4 gigabyte iPod nano as the best iPod for audiobooks. 4 gigs of memory is plenty of room for audiobooks, podcasts, and a modest collection of music. This is because the iPod nano’s screen is small enough that it’s not very interesting for photos, and nanos cannot play video at all, so you don’t need much, if any, room for these media.

The iPhone’s screen and features, however, are such that you’ll almost certainly want to have a collection of photos, and videos have never looked so good on such a small device. As a result, the percentage of space I allocate to audiobooks has gone from 75% to 50% of the total capacity, making the extra space much more necessary. For only 20% more cost, you get double the capacity. Yeah, it’s an extra $100, but if you’re already spending $500 on a phone, you can spend $600 just as easily. Get the 8 gig model.

Third, you can listen to an audiobook over the speakerphone. The audio fidelity and volume are not good enough for music (IMHO), but are decent for listening to spoken word, at least in a reasonably quiet environment. This is really cool, especially because…

Fourth, while the built-in microphone and click-control of the included iPhone headphones are very, very cool, I had forgotten how much I hate the standard iPod earbuds. Uncomfortable, and they won’t stay in my ears. Just awful. But I don’t want to give up the microphone or one button control; it’s far too useful when listening to audiobooks, where you need to pause playback to talk to someone. Audiobooks are different from music; you can’t just pull out an earbud and miss a few minutes of the track while you talk. But hitting pause on the iPhone itself is a multi-step process, once the screen sleeps and locks. The click-control makes that a non-issue…except it means you have to use the included headphones.

This is a huge opportunity for Shure, Etymotic, and the other makers of high-end headsets (my wife likes her Shure E3c set, and I was about to buy the new Shure SE210, which fit great at Macworld Expo, but they don’t have a mic or controls). I am totally ready to buy a whole new set of nice headphones to work with my iPhone, but only if it has the built-in mic and controls.

Other iPhone Notes

Fifth, while others have complained about AT&T’s “2.5 gen” EDGE network, my experience has been better. Maybe my expectations were lowered by the universally negative comments, but personally I found it amazing that I could be on vacation in a semi-rural town (~2500 official population) this past week, and have a usable version of the Internet in my pocket. Yes, it could be faster; I wouldn’t want to do my daily surfing on it. But to pull out the phone to get a definition of “second cousin, twice removed” while drinking margaritas on the deck, or to read MacInTouch while lying in a hammock, it was a perfectly adequate implementation of a capability that is, or ought to be, mind-blowing.

Finally, 373 contacts on my phone is too many; finding a phone number on the phone is slower and harder than it should be. Not horrible, not hard, just not graceful. (Favorites are only useful if you keep the list very short; I’m trying to keep mine to one screen, no scrolling.) My first attempt to improve this was a Smart Group in Address Book that only included contacts that were useful on an iPhone, that is, those with a phone number, email address, or URL:

This reduced the total number of contacts to 363 — not exactly a huge improvement.

More fine-grained groups on the iPhone do help, but Address Book needs some small-but-significant improvements to make my groups more useful with my iPhone. Specifically, I want to be able to exclude a set of contacts that are not useful on my phone, because they are old or or people I am not ever likely to call (but need to keep for e.g. twice-yearly mass mailings).

To do this, I need a way to create Smart Groups that exclude contacts which are in another group. That is, I have an “Old / Hide” group of contacts, that I manually maintain, of those contacts which I want to hold onto, but which I don’t want to carry around with me. But for that to be useful, I need to be able to create Smart Groups that subtract this group out of it. You can do this with Smart Playlists in iTunes, but there is currently no way to do it with Smart Groups in Address Book.

My initial suspicion, based solely on looking at the screenshots, is that it may be a little complicated if your needs are simple. For myself, I usually only want to merge entire CDs into chapters, which iTunes does if you use the Advanced > Join Tracks command, and then join those into a whole book, with chapter marks and full audiobook format and metadata, which Join Together does quite ably, and very simply.

In any event, I’ll be giving Audiobook Builder a try in the near future, and I’ll post a full review then, but in the meantime, I wanted to point to it, and see what other people think.

Change to Import Settings

One option has changed in the Preferences > Advanced > Importing preference panel, what should iTunes do when you insert a new CD. There are a couple new options, and the one you want has changed, from Show Songs to Show CD. Here’s the updated settings panel for my Optimal iTunes Import Settings description:

Change to Start Import

The button for importing a CD has moved, from the top right corner to the bottom right corner. It no longer has an icon (it’s a text-only button now), and it only appears when you have a CD inserted and ready to import. Seems to have hidden itself from a lot of people.

Change to Expectations

When you import an audiobook using my instructions, it will appear in the Music source list, which is not what people are expecting. The expectation is that it will go into the Audiobooks section, but that won’t happen without more work.

I’ll provide more details in the revised instructions; for now, you can read through the FAQ for the information about putting tracks into the Audiobooks menu on the iPod; the steps involved are the same.

This announcement comes as something of a shock to me. After holding on waiting for Cocoa Eudora, this shift in strategy feels like the rug being yanked out. It’s going to take some time to digest, and I suppose we should wait for a few days before forming a mob and see if further details emerge. I would especially like to hear more about what “using the Thunderbird platform” really means, and what will be happening with the Eudora code base, especially the long-rumored Cocoa Eudora code.

For now, we’re a bit light on details. The spin on the announcement is that Eudora is being released from the constraints that come from being a commercial product, freed to grow, change, and thrive as an Open Source project. Who knows, that may happen — but it’ll be 6 months before we see a release that might give a clue as to how well it will work out. I confess, I’m skeptical, and not optimistic, for a couple reasons:

• After using it for several years, I still think that Mozilla Thunderbird basically sucks. It has a lot of usability issues, it doesn’t feel like a native OS X application, non-Mac-style text editing, the anti-spam filtering is mediocre, no integration with anti-virus software, no support for platform technologies like the Address Book, AppleScript, or the system-wide spelling checker. Grafting a Eudora-style interface onto Thunderbird may improve the usability, but I don’t see how it deals with the other issues.
• In all of the various description pages (press release, FAQ, Mozilla Penelope project page), no mention is made of what is happening to the Eudora source code (either Classic or Cocoa). Reading between the lines of the text, it sounds like the project is to make Thunderbird more Eudora-like, and will abandon the Eudora code base. That’s the opposite of what I think should happen; even the current Eudora is a lot closer to being a great OS X email client than Thunderbird is.
• From the team listed on the Mozilla Penelope project page, it seems as though QUALCOMM is providing to the venture resources in the form of developers. So, everyone who might have done something useful with the Eudora code base is committed instead to the Thunderbird mashup project. In the long run, that may result in a much improved Thunderbird, but I’ve already waited a long time for Eudora to improve.

I would probably be despondent right now, except I’ve been using Apple Mail more over the last month, and with the use of plug-ins like Mail Act-On and Mail Tags, and the OS X system capability for remapping keyboard shortcuts, I’m coming to like it.

Update: I don’t know where the quotations come from, but the TidBITS posting about Eudora going Open Source contains some comments from Steve Dorner, the original and continuing developer of Eudora. Nothing he says contradicts my comments above.

• The packaging is not just smaller, it’s hard, clear plastic instead of cardboard. It’s a really clever design that holds the nano suspended in the front of the box. There’s a small label on the back of the bracket that holds the nano tightly, which illustrates how to flex the bracket to release the nano. Very clever design…but it took me a few tugs and pulls and a bit of frustration, before I turned the piece over, and saw the illustration.

• The new nano looks and feels substantially smaller than the old nano, until you line them up right next to each other. The new nano is a teensy bit thinner, but virtually identical in the other two dimensions. The size difference is mostly optical illusion caused by the new rounded edges.

• Speaking of rounded edges, the new nano comes with a new dock connector fit bracket. The new nano fits into the nano bracket of my Logitech mm50 portable speakers, but my old nano will not fit into the new Apple bracket. It’s a bit too thick, and doesn’t have the rounded edges. I suspect that the new nano will work with most products which fit the old nano form factor, but the reverse will be hit and miss. Products that support a perfect fit for the new nano will not work with the old one.

• The new nano requires iTunes 7 to sync with a computer. Normally I like to wait a week or two before trying new versions of iTunes, but in this case, I had to install it. (Working wonderfully so far, knock wood.) A very nice set of improvements, including a few things of use to audiobook aficionados like me; more on those in another post.

• The center select button, the “dot” in the middle of the click wheel, is very slightly concave (the button on the old nano is perfectly flat). It seems like such a tiny difference, and I’m sure by measurements it’s a small fraction of a millimeter, but it’s both quite visible as a real-world gradient, and a really wonderful tactile difference. You instantly know when your thumb is on or touching the button. Just another one of those aesthetic touches that only Apple seems to think of and consider worthwhile. They seem small, but they add up.

All in all, I think the new 8 gig nano is a terrific refinement to a device which I already thought was nearly perfect. And now that it’s sync’ed up with my audiobooks, I am looking forward to road testing it later today during my commute.

I use a virtual desktops utility today (Desktop Manager), but Spaces looks to be far better implemented, interface-wise. I use backup/archival software today (Retrospect), but the interface is baroque, and frankly Retrospect seems to be resting on its laurels (and patents), making almost no progress since the transition to OS X. (Which is why I’ve switched to SuperDuper for my most critical, daily backups.)

Maybe others have implemented features grossly similar to things coming in Leopard. That doesn’t mean it won’t be the first time those capabilities actually get used by large numbers of people. It doesn’t mean that things like Time Machine won’t be potentially life-changing for a large percentage of Apple’s customers.

(When I say “life-changing” I am thinking of how I stopped using Quicken, forever, after a hard disk failure cost me a year of transactions. I’m religious about backing up now, but it wasn’t always so…)

It doesn’t sound particularly close, but making a statement at all seems to imply that there continues to be commitment and progress, and I consider it a positive sign. I’d love to see betas of the new version, too, but we take what we can get.

One of the top two questions I get asked about audiobooks by visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is, after importing a bunch of audiobook CDs, is there any way to join the many tracks together to get a single track for the audiobook?

For a while I simply shrugged, and said I hadn’t found a good tool. Then I found a good tool, and added it to the FAQ, but didn’t advertise it too heavily because it was only available for Mac users. But with the latest release the tool has gotten so good, I feel the need to share and promote it. (Windows users, I am sorry, but I haven’t found anything for you yet.)

Doug Adams runs a terrific site called Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Now on its fifth revision, his Join Together tool has evolved from a basic AppleScript into a stand-alone application which gives you a terrific interface for combining tracks and adding the right metadata such as title and author, along with options to convert to different formats, and even add chapter marks to the resulting merged track:

It’s truly an outstanding piece of work. If you’re importing audiobooks on a Mac, get it now. And if you use it and like it, be sure to thank Doug with a donation!

The overall quality of the sessions was very high, among the best of any technical conference I’ve attended. A couple of duds, but some really amazing speakers, too, bringing the average way up. But what I thought was particularly interesting was that, of the top five speakers I listened to, one was the creator of Rails (so set him aside), and the other four are current and former Java luminaries.

Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland of Relevance are still doing work for clients in Java, but also in Rails, and were to my mind the best speakers at the event. They speak at a lot of conferences, so if you ever have a chance or choice, choose their sessions. Great energy, great speaking skills, and exceptionally well-designed slides combine for two of the best technical talks I’ve ever seen. As professionals still working in Java, their insights into what makes Rails special were the most clear and well-defended of any at the conference.

Dave Thomas and Mike Clark, by comparison, like to start their talks with “My name is x, and I’ve been Java-free for y months and z days.” Not only did they give great talks during the conference itself, but they also taught the Rails Guidebook the day before RailsConf opened, and are terrific trainers and speakers. They still speak on the Java circuit, not about Java, but rather explaining this new Rails thing to Java developers.

At any rate, there are enough Java luminaries who are leaving Java for Rails that it at least should make any Java developer stop and think about why that might be happening.

Another thing I’ll mention is to repeat something Stuart Halloway said at the end of his talk. RailsConf 2007 will not be like RailsConf 2006, because even though Rails is experiencing strong growth now, it’s going to explode in the second half of this year and first part of next. As steep as the adoption curve is today, it’s going to be more vertical in 6 months.

Which means next year RailsConf will be a lot bigger, and accordingly less tight-knit and informal. This year’s RailsConf sold out the 550 seats in days. Even with a larger venue and 2000 seats, I predict next year sells out in less than two weeks. It’ll feel different. So if you attended this year, spend some time reflecting on the experience. It was special, and may not be repeated.

Last, let me be yet another person who points out how weird it was to be at a non-Mac technical show, and see so many PowerBooks and MacBooks (Accordion Guy covers this nicely).

This could be because Rails strongly imposes the taste of the primary developer of the framework. DHH’s sense of style and design is simple and elegant, and reflects his own personal vision of how things should be done. (I don’t mean to discount the contributions of the Rails Core here, but they are a self-selected group who had to possess similar tastes to join the project started and still guided by DHH’s (strong ;-) opinions.) Who does this remind you of? Is it any wonder that this appeals to Mac people?

Of course, it could simply be a reflection of how much better Ruby and Rails, and the associated software like Apache / lightTPD run on Unix-style operating systems compared to Windows, where they run OK, but not well.

At any rate, let me conclude by admitting that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and my goal is to be doing 100% Rails development work by the end of the year. I doubt that I’ll be giving a talk at next year’s RailsConf, but if I did, I want to be able to start with “My name is Michael Alderete, and I’ve been PHP-free for x months and y days”…

My interest in and comments on the announcement are quite a bit less global in scope.

Rochelle’s current PC is a desktop system I assembled myself. It’s got a 1 GHz Celeron processor, and 512 megs of RAM. It’s sloooooow. But this is Rochelle’s year for new computing hardware, so we’d been planning to replace it, with a top-of-the-line ThinkPad.

I had entertained the idea of getting her a MacBook Pro, because I think that she’d probably come to like Mac OS X (and the iLife applications) quite a bit, but also because it seemed likely that someone would eventually announce a decent way to run Windows on that system.

But while I would love to Switch Rochelle, I know that a fallback plan of “it will probably eventually run Windows” will not save my ass if she decides she wants to stay on Windows. (And Rochelle quickly saw through my real fallback plan of “Well, I guess I could take that brand new MacBook Pro off your hands. It’s a little better than my two year old PowerBook…”)

With Apple delivering today dual-boot capability (and no doubt delivering more sophisticated virtualization capabilities in Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, when it ships), I don’t need a fallback plan. I don’t have to figure out the Lenovo online store and how to order the damn ThinkPad I decided was the safe choice for what to get Rochelle. I tried twice to work my way towards the model I wanted, which is basically the T43 with similar specifications to the MacBook Pro. But I must be stupid, I couldn’t figure out how to get the store to let me select anything like that, even though I could find the model number in PDF-only spec sheets…

I continue to use and love Eudora as my email client. This despite it being a little long in the tooth, and with a visual style straight from 1999. It may look like a Classic application, and it might not have had a major release in a while, but it works, and is highly usable, especially for people like me, with a huge archive of email messages.

On the Windows side, a new version of Eudora was released late last year. From what I’ve read on the Eudora discussion forum, Qualcomm is working on an all-new release of Eudora for Mac OS X, which will bring a great many improvements, including one that I’m eagerly anticipating, use of the OS X Address Book to maintain the email contact list, instead of Eudora’s nicknames list (which is also confusingly called Address Book in Eudora, but it used to be called Nicknames in earlier versions, so that’s what I’ll call it here).

But, Eudora 7 for OS X is apparently behind schedule (it was supposed to start appearing in beta in the fall of 2005), and not having that feature is driving me nuts. Eudora can already read addresses out of Address Book, so all I need to tide me over is a way to easily add a new sender to the Address Book.

I looked for a while to find an existing AppleScript to add a Eudora sender to the OS X Address Book, but as far as I can tell, nothing exists. Indeed, it looks like people stopped writing AppleScripts for Eudora years ago. But by stitching together ideas and techniques from old scripts, scripts for Apple Mail and Address Book, and some new code, I was able to create a script which pretty much duplicates Eudora’s Make Address Book Entry command, except sticking the new entry in the system level Address Book.

Download the Add Sender to Address Book AppleScript

The distribution includes a Readme file with much more detail, but here’s the basics: To install, download and decompress the script distribution archive. Then move the script file to your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Eudora folder. To use it, select a message in your Inbox, or open a message, which is from someone you’d like to add to Address Book. Choose Add Sender to Address Book from your Scripts menu. Edit the sender’s name and address in the dialog, click Add to Address Book, and voila, Address Book should come forward with the new entry displayed. Add further information to your contact there, if you wish.

There are a number of limitations to the script; see the ReadMe file for details. Hopefully this will be useful to someone besides me!

A little over a year ago, a new kid on the OS X text editing block appeared. TextMate was the first text editing application I’ve seen in 10+ years which has tempted me to leave BBEdit, mostly on the strength of a screencast for Ruby on Rails, where TextMate was (in theory) an incidental part of the demo.

A BBEdit user who simply tries TextMate, and looks for features to be similar, or in similar places, will probably be quite disappointed. TextMate feels, at first blush, like it has far fewer features, and is a letdown if you’re looking for BBEdit with a few added features like the snazzy snippets feature from the Rails video. But this is because the two applications are designed with different philosophies, and BBEdit exposes much more of its features in the menus and dialogs.

TextMate, on the other hand, sometimes seems like mostly text editing infrastructure. Much of the functionality — and virtually all of the really sexy stuff — is “hidden” inside the bundles which provide language-specific tools and commands. TextMate provides the infrastructure to allow very sophisticated features to be built into these bundles, many of which are created or enhanced by third-parties.

It is an application which rewards — many, many times over — the explorer who invests time in learning how to use it, the “zen” of TextMate, which is quite different from how you use BBEdit. Once you have invested the required effort in learning where TextMate’s power lies, I think it compares very, very favorably with BBEdit; for some, it stands head and shoulders above.

If you spend a fair amount of your time coding for a living, TextMate is definitely something to check out. But, invest the time to really understand how it’s supposed to be used. The TextMate Manual and Garrett Dimon’s Trick Your TextMate Series are good places to start.

Update: I learned a few new tricks in this capsule review of TextMate at Vitamin, and someone built this nifty customized quick reference card generator for TextMate that could be indispensable.

Another Update: This TextMate Basics Tutorial may be the best introduction to TextMate available today. Truly outstanding, both for learning how to use TextMate, but also for understanding what makes it so powerful.

Do check it out, and then come back to Aldo on Audiobooks to start on iPod 102, all audiobooks, all the time.