David R Storms.com

Decision to Switch

I made the decision quite easily to switch to the Mac. I am a web development and programming professional, and I was already using Linux at work and I wanted the tools and ecosystem of the Mac OS environment. Obviously the tools available cannot be the only reason, since many (and more) exist on the Windows PC ecosystem.  For me there was a number of other factors that made sense for me personally, and even though I could have stayed in Windows, I felt the Mac platform was where I wanted to be.

Factors included:

1. I use Linux as my primary operation system (OS) at work and the sheer number of tools and ease of use is staggering. Ubuntu is the distribution that I use and it makes programs very easy to install and keep up to date. I think Linux got the label that it was not user friendly, I think depending on what you do this is not the case. It’s true that a lot of the common applications for the typical user are not there, such as running Microsoft Office. You would need to know the open source or commercial alternatives which could be a challenge to some users.
2. I love the integrated terminal. On Windows I used PUTTY, but I really like simply firing up a terminal window and having raw access to the system and remote systems.
3. On the Mac I liked the idea that it was an integrated solution. I already purchased an iPhone, and although it synced and worked fine with iTunes on Windows, I just like the idea of using the same manufacturers equipment to get the whole integrated experience. I would feel the exact same way with say the Zune using the PC software made for it.
4. The hardware was a big seller for me. My PC was aging and I always said that if I was to get another PC I would build it myself. But when I looked at the iMac’s, I fell in love with the large bright screens and the very capable components inside. Everyone trusts the quality and beauty of design of the iMac.
5. The iLife software and elegance of OS X was a draw for me as well. I was really interested in iPhoto and GarageBand.
6. I knew that I could make the switch easily since all the tools I used were available on the Mac platform.
7. Xcode was only on the Mac, I am really interested in iPhone development and I needed the Mac for this (simply put, no Hackintosh for me!)

Another thing I loved is that for $50 I got the wireless mouse and keyboard. That means the only cables I have, is the power cable plus the iPhone charging cable and the external hard disk. But out of the box just having 1 power cable was very nice.

Here is an overview of the applications I switched to and what I was able to still use after switching to the iMac.

iTunes and iPhone Apps

I had all my media on an external drive. Thanks to a tip from LifeHacker, I was able to backup my library (which was already consolidated and organized on the external drive) as an XML file. Then I just edited the XML to change the Windows paths to valid Mac OS X paths after connecting the drive to the iMac.

Using iTunes, I just imported my library XML file and it found and added all my playlists and song collection, just as it was before. I was left with a bunch of duplicate playlists but that was fine.

All my podcasts came over, but all of them were marked as not played. I couldn’t find out how to change this, so I just deleted all the previously listened to ones. I figured I wouldn’t need them again and they were just taking up space anyway.

I was worried when my Apps from my iPhone didn’t come over, but that was easily fixed by clicking on the phone in iTunes under Devices, then in the File menu click the “transfer purchased apps from iPhone” and voila, it started adding them back into iTunes. Perfect.

I didn’t notice that iTunes by default puts all of your music in the users Music folder. I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book where my music was and I thought it would remain there. But since I didn’t change the folder, all of the Music ended up copying to the hard disk. This actually worked in my favour as you will find out later.

iPhone

No real issues here. I was used to the iPhone under Windows and not much changes here.

Devices

I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book which I simply unplugged from my PC and plugged into the iMac. It mounted and appeared just fine.

Applications

Support now for the Mac platform is better than ever. I was able to easily get Skype (albeit an older version), FileZilla (FTP client) and Eclipse installed and ready to use. I installed Tweeite (ad supported – since I like the paid iPhone version) for my Twitter fix.  I used JungleDisk (excellent backup solution by the way) on Windows and wasn’t really surprised to find that there is a Mac version.  I purchased iWork 09 to replace Microsoft Office which I was OK with since I didn’t use the plethora of Word features. I do miss Excel and the Ribbon UI, but I’ve heard that Microsoft is going to be offering Office online soon for free. I’ve been getting the hang of the equivalents (Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets) and I still find them very functional. I haven’t had a reason to use Keynote yet but I am excited to try and use it since I’ve heard presentation software is way better than PowerPoint (as of now, some interesting things are coming down the pike I think for PowerPoint).

I plan on doing some iPhone development, so I installed the 2 GB+ iPhone SDK with Xcode.

I already knew how to use iTunes and Safari so I was happy there. I think I want to get back to World of Warcraft, and luckily enough the Mac version is right on the install discs, getting up and running was very easy. Ventrillo was also available for the Mac which I will use for voice chatting while playing WoW.

iLife 09

This suite is amazing! The first app I started to play with is iPhoto. I started by importing my 3-disc wedding photos. I started first by playing with faces. This is truly an amazing feature! The software recognizes where faces are in photographs, and since I was doing my wedding album there was a lot of faces so an excellent test! All you have to do is give names to the faces it recognizes, or you can help it find faces by drawing a little box around it. After you do your first photos, iPhoto immediately sets to work looking for those faces. The more you tag the smarter it gets.

When you go to the faces view, you are presented with a grid of the people you tagged. You can then double click them to see the full photos with them in it. iPhoto then below those gives you a big grid of possible pictures with those people in it, all you have to do is click the image if its correct. It zooms into the part of the image with the face so you can see.

This feature alone I think makes this product shine, I haven’t seen any free with Windows solution for that. I recognize that Windows Live Photo Gallery does do face recognition and I remember using it, but it just seemed to work much nicer on iPhoto, could that just be a perception thing? Going deeper I found that you can make really cool slideshows out of your events (aka photo albums) using built in templates that look remarkable. Also creating slideshows was equally impressive with amazing transition effect templates and even great stock music choices (of course you can use your iTunes library).

GarageBand I had a lot of fun with. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to create new music by taking the sample loops provided and just dragging and dropping drums, guitars, piano, sound effects and more! Podcasting is something I think I would like to play around with, and with all of the power of GarageBand, adding music and production value to the podcast just gets that much more easier and fun!

I haven’t played with iMovie or iDVD yet but the getting started videos (that you are directed to when you open the apps) make it look very easy to use.

New Apps

Growl is a tray notification system that many Mac apps can natively talk to. It gives you a customizable popup in the top right. It notifies me when Skype events occur, when TimeMachine starts working, when my JungleDisk backup starts uploading to S3, when I get new Gmail messages and more. So far this is a great update.

As I mentioned earlier all my music from the My Book was moved to my hard disk. So all I did was copy the rest of the data I had to the hard disk, and then setup the whole drive as my TimeMachine drive. This feature is great. I didn’t like always using files off of the My Book since it would always have to spin up. Now with it being for TimeMachine I just access my files locally and my entire Mac is backed up to the My Book. TimeMachine does hourly backups for the last 24 hours, then daily for the last month and then monthly until it runs out of disk space, then it just deletes the oldest. That is great. Plush the interface allows you to visually flow back through file versions in time. The entire desktop disappears and you are floating in space with the active folder in front of you and my more stacked behind it. You then move through those stacks and each one represents a different hour in history for the folder and the files in it. Very cool. My backup solution is now the entire Mac to the My Book, and then my special documents and pictures up to Amazon S3 via JungleDisk. I feel well protected. Especially with my contacts, calendar and email in the cloud.

Xcode I’m just getting started in. Learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK is a bit of challenge but I am slowing with the help of the Apple developer library and the online community I am starting to build simple apps using the iPhone simulator. I still need to get my $99 developer certificate so that I can install apps on my iPhone and eventually publish to the App Store!

MAMP is Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP. I have a few secret projects underway that require PHP and MySQL, and as a web developer this is one of the best turn key solutions. You simply install it, then it configures and sets up all the aforementioned packages so that you are ready to create databases and PHP applications. It amazes me how fast this worked, but I’ve used WAMP and LAMP previously and they are just as simple, so I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised.

GmailStatus is what I use to get the email notifications from Gmail. I have setup the Mail client in Mac OS X to work with Gmail, but I really do like the Gmail interface. This notifier app works with Growl so I get the same consistent action message when I get new mail.

Tweetie is an easy to use ad supported Twitter app. I like how it remembers where you were scrolled to in your Twitter feed. I really like the iPhone version so I didn’t mind paying for it, but I’m not sure I like the desktop client enough to buy it.

Textwrangler is a text editor recommended to me. The very simple text editor that comes with the OS wasn’t enough for me. This one offers highlighting by language and tabs and much more features than the simple editors.

I haven’t done it yet, but I will likely download Firefox and eventually Google Chrome but right now I’m pretty happy with Safari.

Conclusion

I think the Mac vs PC debate will go on and on with fanboys on either side. Ultimately some online OS where everything is web application based will likely make all of these irrelevant, but in the many years it will take before we get there, I think the real decision will simply be a matter of choice. I feel good about my Mac experience and it seems like a perfect fit for me. I like the idea of the OS vendor and the hardware provider being the same company. I like Apple products and I can be supported just fine on the Mac platform as I could have on Windows.

I am still very interested in Windows 7 and there are parts of me that will miss some of the features there, but I feel much better about joining the Apple camp.

Hopefully some of things I shared here will be useful to people making the decision or who have already made the decision. Please leave a comment if anything needs to be corrected or if you have anything you can add to help me (and ultimately other readers).

Like many millions of people I downloaded on June 17th the highly anticipated 3.0 software update from Apple for the iPhone. Since I’m not even a year into my contract with Rogers, this review will be based on my 3G. I think this will make a more accurate review of the software itself without confusing 3.0 features that work only with the 3GS.

For the most part I will revisit the highlighted items from my post back in March on the iPhone OS 3.0 Update.

Installing

Installation was a breeze. I have to admit that I was caught up in the excitment for this one and got up bright and early and started scanning for updates in iTunes but none were to be had. At work through TweetDeck I setup a search feed to watch Twitter for #iPhone3.0 and saw a lot of people waiting. I checked again at lunch time and nothing (I’m in EST by the way). Around mid afternoon, say around 3-4 pm I saw notes all over the place of people downloading. There was also reports of time outs, iTunes activation problems, delays, peoples phones not coming back, etc. Needless to say I was a bit aprehensive. But I know I would try anyway.

I was home around 5 ish that night and wondered if the servers would still be bogged. I plugged in my iPhone, gave it one last glace at 2.x, then proceeded with the upgrade. The download of a couple hundred megabytes took about 17 minutes or so. The backup of the phone took place, then the firm ware was installed. This was probably about 10 minutes. During installation my phone went black and I saw the normal silver Apple logo with a progress bar underneath. I thought I would see that progress bar each time the phone started as a new feedback feature, but alas not the case.

Before it was done iTunes alerted me that there was a software update from my carrier (Rogers) and if I wanted to download this. I can only assume that it had something to do with the MMS and tethering capabilities. I agreed and it downloaded and installed in no time.

That was it. My iPhone came back all loaded. I normally reseve the home page for the factory apps, and in 2.x I had 1 spare space where I put Tweetie. After 3.0 the Voice Memos app was added which pushed Tweetie to the next page. However what it did was put it on a blank page just to the right of the home screen all by itself. I was startled at first but fine with it. I believe you can go up to 10 pages now and I find that I now want to still reserve factory apps for the home screen, then frequently used ones on a more or less empty page.

Later on I’ll talk about Spotlight which kind of antiquates this.

App Store & iTunes (from iPhone)

I find these 2 apps now slower for me. Maybe I’m crazy but I get the loading screen a bit longer than I normally do. Even slower when not on Wi-fi.

First time I started the App Store I had 2 apps that had updates now that I was on 3.0. However each of them failed repeatedly. They would sit on the waiting stage for a while and then I would try again and from the App Store and I would get 2 failures. Finally I was in either the App Store or iTunes and I got prompted to accept the license agreement.

Finally on the App Store, when you look at the details of an app, you no longer have to click through the images, they all load on the detail page and you just swipe left and right to look at them. This is great for me beause I like to see all the screens but I don’t want to have to click one, then go back, click one then go back.

I did that and lo and behold I could update those apps. Only hiccup I’ve had there.

While I haven’t done it, I think it’s neat you can get TV shows and movies from iTunes right on the phone. I beleive you will need Wi-fi to download them because my 1 GB cap just won’t handle it!

Touted Features

Apple says over 100 new features, and I found this site that lists them all. Here is my personal experience with each of them.

Cut, Copy & Paste

Another feature that I think it’s great that it is there and extremely useful, but I just don’t do that much copy pasting on the phone to begin with. When I do use it though, it works as expected. And the shake to undo and redo blows a lot of people away and was a very nice touch on Apple’s part.  I’m used to double tapping to zoom things and often the bubble pops up with text selected but its easily dimissed.

It’s just the way it is, but without a mouse it is a bit slower to narrow down to select the text you want, and I do find that the feature is smart about finding a word, then paragraph and then page.

The fact that the feature works across all apps is expected and works great. Copying images (up to 5 I believe) from the Photos app to an email works well (although you can send via email right from the Photos app), but grabbing an image from a web page and mailing it off is great too.

I don’t use this a lot, but I sure am glad it’s there!

Landscape Keyboard

I sort of got used to typing in portrait mode so it is a conscious reminder to flip to this form. Primarily I would use it in Email and Messages. I don’t take notes very often but I’m sure I would use this there as well.

Text Messaging & MMS

As mentioned above, the landscape keyboard is now in text messages which marginally helps me type. I do find it can take up a lot of room and leave me little area to see what is there:

One of the first things I did was try to send pictures over MMS. This worked like a charm. The small camera next to the text line makes it easy to snap a new shot or choose an existing one. I was told by my friend that pictures with text came out weird on his phone, but I love how they appear in speach bubbles on my end.

Last week though I tried to send him some shots of our basement project and all of them failed. Failed messages have a little red exclamation point beside them that you can click and retry. I did this many times but they still failed and I just gave up.

As I found out tonight (June 24) my friend also sent me pics last Friday (June 19th) and Sunday (June 21) and I didn’t get them until tonight. I then replied back with a picture and it worked. Best guess is that Rogers was overwhelmed or had to work on something last minute to make MMS work better. No idea. Haven’t seen any word on this.

You can now selectively forward and delete individual messages which I like rather than clearing the whole conversation.

Sadly I can’t take video because I don’t have the 3GS so I don’t think I can MMS any either.

A great change to the Messages app is now that when you send you are not locked out of the app while it sends but your message bubble pops up and at the top the app you have the “sending” note with the progress bar. That made a lot of sense to me.

I don’t find the app opens any faster but in fact seems slower to me.

Spotlight

This is a great idea addition to the phone. However I keep forgetting that it is there and often find myself locating apps and contacts the old fashioned pre-3.0 days.

I know its there I just need to remember to use it. The number 1 reason I would use this is quick access to my contacts. I don’t have pages and pages of apps and I organize them a bit so it’s not such a big deal to flip through the pages. I think it’s great that it will look into my email and calendar events, not to mention the iPod library.

Other

I have noticed modest speed boosts in web site rendering but I don’t tax things that greatly. I do know that JavaScript heavy sites like the Google services work quickly. I use the mobile version of Google Reader and its fantastic.

Another feature I use often is the landscape support in Email. Not so much for flipping through the list of messages, but opening emails I find it very useful. I still get the delay while the app tries to adjust the font size so it is readible, but that is mitigated a bit by the landscape support. I find that I type faster in SMS using portrait mode but from time to time I will use the messages app in landscape mode too.

If you want, here is  forum documenting user found features you may not even know about yet!

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=715629

A major update is on its way to the software of the iPhone, and of course the iPod Touch devices. On March 17th (St. Patty’s!) Apple held a conference in which they divulged what exactly all this would be about.  They introduced the new 3.0 operating system that runs on the phones and the touch iPod’s, with it comes over 1,000 new API’s (application programming interface, stuff programmers use to interact with the hardware). They went on to explain the explosion of the app store which is sitting at more than 25,000 apps (much higher than they anticipated). 

Here is a rundown of some of things covered:

App Store

What’s also impressive is that there has been over 800 million downloads from the store, and that spanning more than 30 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices. That is incredible! This is a world wide figure of course.

So what’s coming now is a new way for publishers (app developers) to make money. They call in “in app purchase” and it gives the developers an API to let people who paid for your app to inside the app request more content and pay for it using their iTunes account. Now this does not apply to free apps, meaning no one can swindle you into a free app only to find you have to buy more once you get it.

They said this model would work great for games where you could buy the app with 10 levels, then once you are done right inside the game purchase the next 10 without having to download any new app.  Good idea. The cut Apple takes is still the same (30%) and again the developer can set the price. The beauty is all the e-commerce is handled by them, making this very easy.

Peer to peer

The iPhone has bluetooth, and now Apple is really cranking up what you can do with it. With peer to peer, there is now a way for developers to discover other nearby iPhones (and 2G iPod touches) for things like sharing and games. It uses bluetooth and involves no pairing. No idea on what the security around all this is, but the concept sounds great. I’m not around a lot of people that have iPhone’s but maybe with this I’ll discover more! But if they are like me, I have my bluetooth radio turned off to conserve battery life. I would guess using this feature you would want to turn off your Wi-Fi or else your battery will be dead quick.

Accessories

Apple has opened up the API to include the dock connector. While similar to peer to peer you could work with other devices over bluetooth, the latency issue may mean you want to connect to the device through a cable. The examles that were shown were a blood pressure tool that any doctor’s office would use. You could get your reading shown on your iPhone and stored. Another demonstration was using a blood-sugar devices for people with diabetes.

They also showed how with a stero you could plug your iPhone in and see equalizer controls on your phone that can control the stereo, sounds cool, but even better along this vein is that they have enabled A2DP support. Now this is stereo bluetooth, so now you can use those wireless headphones or wireless speakers from like 30 feet away! This is much more interesting to me.

Maps

The maps app that Google help Apple build is incredible. Now they created an API to allow you to embed the complete functionality of the maps into an application. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this! Good news is that now Apple will allow turn-by-turn navigation apps, but the bad news is that they won’t let you use the Google maps. That means you would have to download all the map details with the app. However, the fact that the license now say’s it’s okay and you can use the core location API’s is pretty encouraging.

Push Notification

While there is no back ground processes since the battery life and user experience would suffer, the push notification stuff from late last year is now going to be a reality. The idea is that Apple always has a connection to every iPhone, which is amazing if there is more than 10 million of them out there! The app developers can send a single to Apple to push down to the devices. They can send a text bubble with a message that would have buttons that can open the app, they could send “badges”, which would be the little red number you sometimes see on top of an app’s icon, and they can trigger a sound down on the device.

This kind of thing would be great for IM’s (instant messengers) and other services for late breaking news, my only worry is can you get yourself into trouble getting flooded with these updates?

More API Enhancements

To round out a bit more of the new API changes, you can now email from any app. This is a global thing so app developers can allow you to create an email using the same standard email application on the phone. There is now an API to get into the iPod library for music and video, this could open up some interesting oppurtunities.  They now have a “Shake API” which I’m not sure what you do with, and there are new Voice Chat API’s that you can use in games.

Over 100 New Features

Apple has of course added new features that help make this a very big update. Here are just a few I found very interesting

Cut, Copy and Paste

Ok, now now it’s here! I can’t wait to try this for myself to see how smooth it is. But the idea is that you can double tap on a single word or paragraph and the text would be highlighted with little grab dots. You can move these grab dots around to change the text you want to select. Then there will be a bubble above with the Cut and and Copy buttons on it.

Next you go to a blank area and double tap to bring up the bubble again, this time you have Paste available to you. This functionality works globally on the device, so any app can make use of it. For example you can copy HTML from the web and can even do image copying! Sounds simple but this is a big deal for the iPhone users out there. For the images, you can go into the photos app and go into a selection mode to let you pick mulitple images to copy, then you could go into something like an email and paste them in.

Landscape Keyboard

Now when sending text messages, writing email or making notes, when you turn the iPhone on it`s side you get the wide keyboard. I`ve learned to type with the normal one, but for Safari it works good for me landscape, so I can`t wait for this one, so how many words per minute I can get up to now!

Text Messaging

In the SMS app you can now forward single or multiple messages around, which could be very handy. Also with this is MMS support, or the ability to send multi media to another phone. Most phones have this and I think it would be great to take a photo on the phone and send it a friend. It shows up in a little bubble like a text message which is cool. For a lot of people I know they don`t have iPhone`s so their phones won`t let them check email the same way I can, so sending a picture like a text message will be great.

Voice Memo

There were other apps in the app store for this, but now Apple is adding their own that can record your voice for future reminders.

Calendar

The calendar was updated support CalDAV plus can now handle subscriptions, so you can subscribe to other peoples public calendars or holiday calendars or whatever. I sync my calendar through Gmail using their licensed version of ActiveSync so this is no biggy for me.

Spotlight

There is a new home screen just left of the normal home screen. You swipe to it and you are on spot light. Here you can type a search term in to find contacts, email (and even IMAP or exchange accounts where the mail is on the server still), calendars, iPod library and application titles. I`m very interested to see how fast this is, sounds really great for narrowing down what you want to find on your crowed iPhone.

Other

A couple other noteworthy items is Notes can be synced with a Mac or PC (obviously) but I don`t use notes that much and I`m not sure which programs they are syncing with. The iPod shake to shuffle feature has been added, I don`t run so this might be fun but I probably won`t use it. They added Wi-Fi auto logon, so you can save your credentials for hot spots and auto join the next time easily. There is also some improvements to Safari like anti-phising and general performance.

Conclusion

The beta of the software was available on the 17th, and you had to be a $99 USD member of the developer program to get it (enterprise people pay more). The upgrade will be free for 3G owners, and about $10 for iPod owners. A neat note is that 2G iPod Touch devices will suddenly get Bluetooth support with this upgrade.

What`s missing is the ability to record video and have flash support in Safari, but I`m sure that will be coming soon.

I can`t wait for this upgrade, I will be downloading the day it`s available. I don`t know exactly what date that will be, but Apple said look for it this summer!

This is the first post in this series of articles I’m writing detailing the products, services, web sites, technology, etc that I use in my day-to-day life. Hopefully some of this is useful to you when making decisions or maybe you are looking for something and I can help out by describing what I do.

For example, I LOVE THE iPHONE! Apple got it so right when they built this product. Being that I live in Canada, it wasn’t until July 2008 that I even had the option to get one (well, for me anyway). I dumped my carrier in the late fall of 2008 to pick one up. I have since been integrating this device into my life, and it has definately made an impact. I highly recommend this device for anyone that thinks they want a smart phone. Don’t know? Then read on and maybe I can sway you to the dark side!

Applications

Ok, let’s get this part out of the way first. When you talk about the iPhone the first thing most geeks think of is the apps you get from the Apple AppStore. Here are the apps that I use most frequently. I have tried many, but I only want to talk about the ones I like and use most often.

Right away I’ll tell you I have not purchased any apps yet. I will buy an app when I think I need it and the price is right (which for the most part everything is reasonable). I will do a part 2 if I find more apps that I use and maybe there will even be paid versions. Let’s face it, the free ones are where a lot of people go.

In order of most frequently used: (note that icons will launch iTunes and the AppStore)

	Free RSS This app is a great way to organize your news feeds. It simple and it works very well. I have an Engadget feed, the default Apple Hot News feed, CNN entertainment and technology feeds, the tech feed at Digg and Paul Thurrott’s Supersite site feed. I find the Engadget feed the best as it renders photos for each post, plus a built in browser means you don’t have to leave the app to view the web content.
	Twitterriffic & Twittelator Who isn’t using Twitter these days? I even broke down myself. I like reading people I follow on Twitterriffic. However, Twittelator has a cool feature to allow you to geo tag your Tweet, plus take a picture using the iPhone’s camera and include both with your post.
	Google Mobile App The king of search is on the iPhone. What I like is the voice search, which I find very accurate. I can speak “pizza pizza” into the phone and get the number, map and address to the local pizza shop. Very handy.
	WeatherEye Better than the provided weather app by far. It has up to date forecasts during the day and a 3 day and 5 day forecast. Add supported but not that intrusive.
	AroundMe Works using the built in GPS of the phone to use a category, like say Apple Stores and it will tell you the closest with address, phone number and a link to the maps to get directions. Has a very good library of places and works well even in my little part of the world.

Productivity

Web 2.0 was definetely thought of when this phone was built. I leverage a few online services for work and I like having access to them no matter where I am. So here is what I use.

Gmail – email from Google is super easy to setup. When you add a mail account it is one of the options. I highly recommend you use Gmail through the IMAP protocol (you can “Google” that if you don’t know what it is). With IMAP, your email always stays in the cloud (Google servers). This let’s me check my mail using a couple methods:

1. You can use Safari on the iPhone to access the mobile version of Gmail
2. You can use your email client on the iPhone to read, move, delete and respond to all mail
3. You can use your browser on any web enabled machine
4. You can use mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc to do everything with email

So no matter where I respond to emails or read emails, I edit only the copies on the server so I see the exact same results no matter how I get at my email.

Calendar and Contacts – Since I use Gmail for email, it only makes sense to use Google Calendar for my scheduling needs. The iPhone already has a calendar program and a contacts list. I wanted the same behaviour where I can keep all my data with Google’s services and have them able to be manipulated on the cloud or the phone. I discovered a service that let me take advantage of the 3G’s Exchange capabilities.

Here is how you get started. Visit https://www.nuevasync.com/ and create a fee beta account. They have a mobile phone friendly version of their site (which is the only version).  They have good instructions, but once logged in it’s very simple to activate email, contacts and calendar through their portal which uses the Google API. You have to agree to allow in Google Nuevasync to access your data feeds (nothing manual, you are just promted).

After that, you can simple go into the settings of your iPhone and enable the various Exchange like features so that you have push and pull calendar and contacts. I choose to remain with IMAP for email. It works great, I add a contact in Gmail or a event in the calendar either in my browser or on the iPhone and it appears in both places, and very fast too.

Accessories

There are tons of things you can get for your phone. I settled on some of the essentials. I still to this day use the standard headphones. They are excellent because of the small mic/button tab that works great for music and phone.

The stock head phones that come with the iPhone work great and sound very good. I do have trouble with them staying in my ears, and I am looking at other phones. But, the little mic attached on the cord I can’t do without. You can go forward or back on your iPod, or answer phone calls. The mic works great and I haven’t had anyone say they couldn’t hear me well. I actually prefer using the headset while talking on the phone.

Dock: I purchased the standard dock for the phone that used to come with it. I like having it sit up on the desk rather than have the perfect finish get scratched!

Case: I went with the Marware C.E.O. Sleeve because I liked the belt clip, plus the ease at which I can get the phone free. You have to take the phone out of the sleeve to charge, but that is what I have the dock for. No problem with the head phones and you can easily reach the buttons. You have to remove the phone to use the camera. The inside is a material that wipes the phone on the way in and out, ensuring less smudges. You can find the link here.

Face: I purchased the Power Support Anti-Glare Film set because I wanted to protect the glass surface of the phone. It works great and does indeed cut down on the glare. You lose a bit of clarity but not enough to worry about. I even find I like the touch interface better than using the glass directly. A bit tricky to stick in the right place, but not that hard. Here is the link here.

Thanks for reading my post. Of course there is more things I use with the iPhone, this is just for starters! Leave a comment and let me know what you think.