I got writeroom for mac during macheist 3 for free. Recently I became interested in writing again and decided to give it a try. I was impressed with how much I like the no distractions approach to writing. Sure it is inconvenient if you need to do stuff like checking references and getting some “inspiration” from someone else’s work. But for writing down stuff that is 90% opinion like my blog it’s just perfect. Another cool feature is the “typewriter effect” of keeping the area I’m currently typing in the middle of the screen.
I’m finding it surprisingly therapeutic to just write stuff down… it’s sort of the GTD way: get stuff out of your head and into a “System”. This “system” consists of a directory of text files synchronized with SimpleTex.ws.
In fact when I start to work seriously on my thesis I plan to take a no distraction’s approach by turning off IM, email and facebook notifications and closing firefox instead of just moving to another space.
I’ve written most of this post on my iphone which i’m finding much more appealing for text input than before. In part that’s because I decided to shell out the 4 eur that writeroom for the iphone costs (yeah didnt even wait for a promotion… It was a leap of faith! Much better than evernote and still capable of online sync. I’m not dropping evernote for actual notes completely, just for blog posts and other large blocks of text that aren’t strictly speaking “notes”.
I had previously began using AwesomeNote for quick notes such as song names and contact info (names, emails, skype/IM contact) before either adding them to the app (facebook, skype,…) or addressbook at a more convenient time. I do not need these notes to be synched.
I’m also more interested in reading. I was using read it later but the iphone app has some inconveniences – it failed to keep track of position and scrolling was often an issue. Both of which were solved by switching to the paid instapaper app: it keeps track of my position in the text between sessions and tilt scrolling works awesomely. And since I switched to Instapaper I actually stopped using firefox tabs to keep track of what I had to read – even things that I can’t/don’t want to read on the iPhone (stuff containing videos, lots of images, …) and stuff that I want to blog. There was never that big of a reason to to that before and I hadn’t forced myself into that system with read it later.
So far it’s working. I’m reading all those articles that would normally linger in my firefox session until I finally gave up on ever reading them or accidentally closed them or whatever.
PS: The iPhone is the best invention since electricity
Posted: February 4th, 2010 | Author:lrei | Filed under:Misc | Tags:apple, iphone | Comments Off
So what are the reasons for my iPhond to be jailbroken?
The number one reason was that I wanted it unlocked. I’m temporarilly living in Rome and simply wanted to use my iPhone. When I go back to portugal, this reason will no longer exist.
Still I do like my iPhone unlocked so I can use it when I visit other countries.
Which apps/hacks do I use that are only available fof jailbroken iphones?
SBSettings should be an iphone feature provided by apple. Sadly, it isn’t. It provides fast access to enableing and disabling 3G, wi-fi and bluetooth as well as brightness control.
Five-Column SpringBoard,five rows and five dock items and winterboard for things such as removing app names (yeah icons alo e works better with the overcroweded hacked launcher).
So… Will I continue to jailbreak my iphone after it’s not vital?Depends on how much trouble it is but I hope so.
Written in Writeroom for iPhone, posted via Wordpress iPhone app at Ciampino Airport (Rome), Italy
This is my obligatory iPad post. All throughout the many years since we began hearing Apple Tablet rumors every time an Apple announcement/conference was imminent I’ve have constantly been against it. I don’t like tablets and I thought (and still think) that the introduction of one by Apple would stop them from making other, better products to prevent cannibalization of their tablet.
Obviously, Apple can’t make a netbook. It would be just as unreasonable to expect Ferrari to introduce an actual Ferrari-branded car below the $2000 price line. But Apple could’ve made an ultra portable – think 10-11″ Macbook Air. Now I doubt that will happen.
There is certainly a product gap between the phone and the laptop but neither the netbook or this ipad are going to fully fill it in my opinion.
From an OS perspective, the iPhone OS was the natural choice and the only one that made any sense. The lack of Multitasking in non-native apps is not the biggest limitation of the OS currently. In fact, that’s mostly a non-issue. It’s also temporary. The original iPhones, before the 3GS, simply didn’t have the power to handle multitasking properly so Apple disabled it. They will no doubt enable it in a year or so. For now it’s not a priority (since it is a MINOR issue) and they probably don’t want to anger everyone that doesn’t own a 3GS yet. I would like to see Multitasking in an instant messaging app. The hack that apps like IM+ use (having the connection to IM networks established in their servers) is nice but it’s slightly inconvenient since it takes some time to “restore” the connection to the iphone.
I’d also rather see them overhaul the terrible notification system which is far inferior to Android’s notification system.
The biggest problem however comes from the fact that it so heavily sandboxed/compartmentalized. As a use case example, you can’t easily expect to browse the piratebay in safari download a .torrent, add it to the bittorrent client, pass the resulting downloaded file to the zip extractor app and proceed to add the resulting music folder to the ipod app music library.
And You can’t easily add a video to the iPad (or the iPhone) without having to go through iTunes. Or dealing with format conversion in (too) many cases.
As for Flash support, I finally understand how Zararthustra felt when he came down from the mountain and realized that people didn’t know god was dead. Flash is dead.
The three most positive surprises were the ePub format support, the ability to run the iPhone apps you already purchased for your iPhone and the 500USD price point. I have no interest in 3G since I already have it on my iPhone and I’m not going to pay for two data plans.
Unfortunately there were also three rather negative surprises: the non-widescreen non-720p display and the lack of a front camera (or any camera for that matter) and the low storage of the entry model (16GB, seriously?).
In conclusion, inadequate video support, lack of a front camera, the inability for apps to truly cooperate in a PC/Mac fashion, a bad notification system, a poor display and low storage in the entry model – all problems present in the iPhone but somehow made much more significant in a tablet make the iPad rather unappealing. The potential is there but will Apple be able to exploit it or will the iPad be another Apple TV? Only time will tell but I think at least some of these problems will remain for the foreseeable future.
If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.
I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands
Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.
But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.
Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.
The second beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available and includes Interface Builder, a powerful tool that allows you to visually build your interface and makes creating a UI as simple as drag and drop.
I’ve recently started using my macbook as my only personal computer.
One of the big side effects is that I no longer need to synchronize multiple computers running different Operating Systems. This had been one of my major headaches with computing. My solution was mostly rsync/ssh synchronization of certain directories with my home server and a switch to web applications.
So, now that the need is gone, I’m migrating back to conventional desktop applications.
Gmail
The first web app I started using. I tried to migrate to thunderbird but I simply don’t like thunderbird. So I’m now using Apple’ Mail App.
I still use the gmail service, I just don’t use the web interface regularly.
Google Calendar
The second web app I started using. I like it a lot but it did make 2-way synchronization with my cellphone and palm (up until Palm Desktop stopped working) painful. Yes there is software around to do it. BusySync looks awesome but I don’t think there’s any reason for me to pay money to use a service I don’t really need anymore. GCALDaemon is Free but I was unable to get it properly configured plus I just don’t trust software that’s hard to setup.
I now use just Apple’s iCal to manage my calendars and in case you’re curious I used the BusySync trial to migrate – it was painless.
Remember The Milk
Less known than the google services, Remember The Milk is an online task manager. I started using it less than a year ago – only after Palm Desktop stopped working. Before that, I used just my Palm TX and I had started using iSync to synchronize my Palm and my cellphone. The side effect was I couldn’t use 2-way sync with my cellphone which isn’t that much of a problem as it seems because I don’t really like using my cellphone for that. Still, there’s just no point in using RTM anymore, so I now use iCal/Mail App to handle my tasks. Since I only had a handful of tasks to complete, I migrated by hand.
What’s next?
I’ll consider switching feed readers from google reader to NetNewsWire. Migrating is painless since I can just download my OPML from google reader
I use a private blog as a notepad of sorts. I previously used just regular .txts in a specific directory and then switched to Journler. But Journler wasn’t available on Linux.
Maybe I’ll continue to use the blog for my longer notes but switch to Mail App for smaller ones. Maybe not. I’ll need to think about it and try it.
Plus there’s the issue of wether it’s gonna be easy to get the data into whatever application I choose. I migrated from Journler to a wordpress blog via an Automator script and MarsEdit.
The Elephant In The Blog
The iPhone. With the SDK out and App Store, I want one. So I now have to think what will work better with the iPhone. For instance, how good is the Newsgator iPhone web app compared to gReader? What’s the best way to synchronize my notes with the iPhone? Etc. I’ll want to speak with iPhone users about this.
It’s been months since I was insulted by Apple fanboys for saying that the iPhone needed an SDK and now Apple has officially released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK.
The good news is apple provides the App Store to distribute your applications with the iPhone Developer Program and all you have to do is pay them $99 and 30% of what your customers pay for your app.
The bad news is that, from what I understood, there’s no other way to get apps on an iPhone, even if it’s your own apps on your own iPhone or if they’re Open Source apps.
The other good news is that if they’re free apps, they don’t charge the 30% (30% of 0 is 0 so…). So as long as someone paid $99 to be part of the Developer Program, they can put free apps on the Store at no additional charges.
The other bad news is there won’t be porn games on the iPhone I wonder if they consider hentai (Japanese eroge visual novel) games “porn”.
I think the iPhone Developer Program is a really Great Thing (TM), think Steam for the iPhone/iPod Touch but more open. I just wish it were “optional”.
There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.
I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will get one – in your face zealot ).
The second beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available and includes Interface Builder, a powerful tool that allows you to visually build your interface and makes creating a UI as simple as drag and drop.
I wonder if they consider hentai (Japanese 
).