WezM.net

A friend asked the following today, the reply was big enough I decided to post it:

So Wes, you’ve had your iPhone for a week now - what are your initial comments?

Pros / Cons?

Has it changed your life? Has the battery life been crappy for you? Talk time OK?

Its definitely the best phone I’ve had. Part of that is due to the tight integration with Mac OS X, which obviously very few companies were going to pull off. As a device its brilliant to use and full of functionality. I’m loving the apps and decent browser. The WiFi is really nice at home. The iPod part obviously works as well and better than any prior iPod.

The on screen keyboard is pretty much as described. You have to give it time to get the hang of it and you have to trust it. If you’re typing a word that would be in the English dictionary you’re best to keep on typing even if the word is way off. By the time you get to pressing space its usually selected the right word, which is selected automatically upon space. Two irritations with typing though. Its less likely to get shorter word right, particularly when there’s multiple valid options. There’s no way that I’m aware of to get a list of possibilities and choose the one you want. Of course being a small word means its not hard to fix and if you type it correctly in the first place then it isn’t a problem at all. The other minor annoyance is when you get to the last word in a sentence that is mis-typed with a correct suggestion it appears the only way to accept it is to press space (and then delete the space) or grab a full stop.
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I’ve make a bookmarklet out of David Gouch’s Javascript implementation of John Gruber’s Title Case Perl script.

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Title Case

Seems to work ok in Firefox, IE 6 has issues.

Randall Munroe proposed the awesomely geeky idea of geohashing via the xkcd comic and blag recently. The idea basically involves using the MD5 hash of a date combined with the opening value of the Dow Jones Index for that date to derive a latitude and longitude relative to a (generally your own) location.

However there is a problem for those of us residing in Australia (and other locations with a time zone significantly different from EST). With the Dow Jones Index operating on US time its not possible to determine a geohashed location in Australia until about 23:00 AEST for a given date. No doubt others have thought of this but I suggest we use the All Ordinaries Index instead. With that out of the way we just need some enterprising sole with some spare time to implement a version of the map based on this.

Update: More info on geohashing in Melbourne on the Visible Procrastinations blog.

Another Update: Using the Dow on the weekend works well though. As over the weekend everyone is more or less synced to the same index.

Final Update: The xkcd blag has a follow up article that clarifies the behaviour for Europe, Asia and Australia. It boils down to using the previous day’s Dow Jones Index.