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I love reading Robert X. Cringely’s articles.  Always have.  He’s definitely one of my favorite writers.  In his most recent posting he states that Apple appears to be looking to unload its Pro applications in preparation to clear the way to acquire Adobe.  Interesting idea, but I’m not sure I agree as Apple’s Pro apps are some of the tops in the industry and Apple has made acquisitions that sure up that side of the business.  It might be nice for Apple if they controlled Flash, but I’m not sure any of that affects me much as a consumer.  Plus, those Pro apps only run on OS X, not Windows.  That may come in to play with the company that would want to acquire such applications.

While listening to my weekly fix of MacBreak Weekly, the topic of GPS came up and I was happy to hear that some of the folks on the show feel the same way that I do about the Garmin Nuvi GPS - it’s an excellent product.  So that got me thinking.  I don’t care about an Adobe acquisition as much as I would like to see Apple acquire Garmin.  I have used Magellan, Tom Tom, and Garmin GPS systems in my car and I have always felt the Garmin was the best.  I have the Nuvi 350, which fits easily in a pocket and takes us through turn by turn directions.  I like the interface better and I definitely like the maps better.  I’ve always found the Garmin to be very accurate as well.

Whether or not the rumors are true about the 3G iPhone having built in GPS, I think it is a safe assumption to believe it will be in there some day.  It’s just the way most phones are headed.  Nothing revolutionary, just evolutionary.  Many already have GPS included.  So why not take the best GPS technology and marry it with one of the best phones out there?  If not an outright acquisition, at least license the Garmin technology for the GPS solution that Apple uses?

If I remember correctly, I believe that even Garmin is working on a phone.  That could be an interesting product depending on how well they implement it and its final size, weight, and especially battery life, but Apple has already set the bar pretty high with the iPhone, so Garmin will have its work cut out for it.

So Apple, you know what you have to do; acquire Garmin, kill the Garmin phone, integrate Garmin’s GPS technology in the iPhone, wrap your interface around all that tech, and price it aggressively.  Oh, and figure out how to achieve decent battery life.  Easy, right?  So go get started already - I’ll be over here waiting with my credit card.

I was picking up some new music for an upcoming trip when I thought I’d look at the Amazon.com MP3 Download store.  I’ve done 100% of my music purchasing on iTunes for the last few years because it is just so easy the way things are integrated with my iPods.  I was surprised to see how easy Amazon has made it not only for those of us that use iPods, but OS X itself.

Amazon provides a decent downloader that brings down the music and adds it to your iTunes library automatically.  It’s completely browser based so it’s not as seamless as iTunes, but I think it’s about as good as we’re going to get with a vanilla web browser for a while.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  I picked up 3 “albums” (is that really still a valid term?) and not only were they $2(US) cheaper per album, but they even had one that iTunes did not carry - an old Radiohead album. $7.99 for the full album definitely has my attention.  The no DRM piece is a nice bonus as well, and I’m happy to take 256k MP3 files for less money.

I think iTunes finally has a little competition here and competition should be good for the consumer.  I felt a little like I was cheating on iTunes with the first purchase.  The second click was easier, and by the third click the guilt was gone and I was just begging to get caught.

Nice job Amazon, I’ll be sure to check your store as well as iTunes when i am looking for music in the future.

There has been something that drives me crazy about using Safari to access Outlook Web Access for Exchange email on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Whenever I reply to a message it is always a surprise where the cursor will land and I found that if I just press in one location and move upwards the magnifying glass will popup and it will slowly scroll to the top of the message where I want to reply. The longer the email the more patience this move takes.

Then I ran across this post that discusses two-finger scrolling in Safari on the iPhone. Although it doesn’t specifically mention Outlook Web Access, it does work for what I needed.

When you reply to a message in OWA on the iPhone/iPod Touch just tap inside the message area and the keyboard will popup. Press Done and the keyboard will then go away. Now scroll in the message area using two fingers to the top of the message, tap, and the keyboard will now let you reply where you expected it to. I never knew you could scroll in a text box like that with two fingers. That should take care of Safari Mobile’s lack of scroll bars in certain text boxes.

So thank you to Brett Peters at http://nobodywantsastyl.us/ for teaching me something new, and valuable, today.

I forced myself to go back to Safari when the beta for version 3 came out.  I now run the nightly builds of Webkit as well.  Overall version 3 is much nicer than version 2, but there is still one thing about Safari that is just driving me crazy -  Wordpress.  I host this blog on my own site using Wordpress and the editor is terrible with Safari.  It’s basically unusable.

When you open any post in the editor it strips out all of the line feeds and html.  Just destroys the formatting of your post.  Uploading a picture seemed impossible as well.  Of cource Firefox and Camino work great, but I was trying to stick with the Safari engine for everything and it is just not working out.  I had to fire up FireFox just to create this post.

I’m not looking to use more than one browser, I just want one that works for everything and, unfortunately, that just may not be Safari.  Is this an Apple problem or a Wordpress problem to fix?

My car has an Aux port in the glove compartment that lets you plug an iPod in and listen to it through the stereo.  It’s easy to find a cable to go from the headphone jack of the iPod to the Aux port, but what has always driven me crazy about this solution is that the headphone jack only puts out so much power, and if you turn the iPod volume up too far the sound through the stereo gets distorted.  If you have ever listened to your iPod when connected through the Dock to a stereo you can really tell how much more power there is without distortion.

So I have been looking for a cable to go from the Aux port to the dock connector of the iPod.  You’d think this would be easy but I checked at Radio Shack, Best Buy, WalMart, etc. and I couldn’t even find anyone that had ever heard of a cable like this.  I found a couple cables online, but one was retractable and wouldn’t work for the routing I wanted to do between the glove compartment and my center console, and the other was 4ft long and white.  The second cable was inexpensive, but I really wanted a black cable to go with the interior of my car and I didn’t think 4ft would be long enough, so I kept on looking.

What I ended up with was a connector called the PocketDock Line Out USB from SendStation that plugs in to the iPod dock connector and has a line out port. I can then run from the line out port to the Aux port in the glove compartment and the power and fullness coming from the iPod now is amazing. I bet it is at least 4-5 times more powerful than the headphone connector.  I don’t know why this isn’t carried in stores, but I was only able to find it online and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a way to get better sound, and more power, from their iPod to their car stereo.

My only complaint would be the cost, but if you shop around online you can take a few bucks off of list.

Feel it in your hand.  Run your finger across it.  Flick left.  Now right.  Try up and down as well.  Bring your fingers together, now apart and watch the size change.  Feels amazing, doesn’t it?  Is it heavier than you expected?  A little more substantial?

That’s the way I felt when I touched an iPhone for the first time today.  I’ve read all the hype and a lot of the reviews, but I have avoided the iPhone in person.  Today I held one for the first time and it really feels like Apple has just changed the game a bit.  I’m not even sure I care about the phone piece of the picture - everything else was enough to keep me entertained.  I didn’t get to use it on a WiFi network, but I did get to try it while running on the Edge network and understand why people would be unhappy with the performance.  It would be nice if that part was faster.

It was a great experience and definitely made me want to use it more.  If you are not ready to hand over your hard earned money to Apple and AT&T you better not touch one.  You may just find it is impossible to put down.

I still find web sites that are not 100% compatible with Safari - this blog’s editor being one of them.  I find that Firefox gives me the most chance for success while browsing the Internet, with Camino coming in a close second.  Don’t get me wrong, Safari is a nice browser and I test the WebKit nightlies often, but why introduce site compatibility issues to the Windows crowd?  Put the effort in to the Mozilla browsers and put Safari out to pasture.  Do we really need another one?  Sure, more choice is almost always a good thing, but until site developers actually write according to standards…

I’m sure it makes sense to someone at Apple but so far it is not making enough sense to me to try to displace FireFox on Windows.  I’ll keep reading until I find the answer.  Until then, flame on.

Is anyone really surprised that Apple has pushed back the release date of OS X Leopard to October?  Rumor sites have been saying for a while that the releases they have received were still pretty buggy and that they expected Apple to miss the “end of Spring” release date that Steve Jobs announced.  This doesn’t bother me a bit, as I would rather see a stable OS than a bug-ridden one that needs followed up with a couple quick patches.  On the surface Leopard doesn’t really look to offer all that much different from Tiger, but I guess we’ll see what the “top secret features” are when it finally ships, but Time Machine isn’t enough to pull the $129 upgrade fee from me this time.

Don’t kid yourselves, writing operating systems is not an easy thing.  Timelines slip, priorities happen, things change.  I hope all the Vista bashers out there remember how they beat the hell out of Microsoft for Vista’s release date slipping.  What comes around goes around and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of web sites out there beating the hell out of Apple for letting Leopard’s release date slip.

I sure hope the iPhone is worth it.

Back on February 7th, I asked “Would you pay more for DRM-free music?” Looks like I finally got one right as EMI announced they would be selling DRM-free music on iTunes for a premium price. Full albums will remain the same price, so they are clearly trying to get us to purchase more albums than singles.

I’ll let you guys do the Google searching yourselves as it is probably harder to avoid this story than find information on it.

Ran across this while trying to find anyone that may have the same problem. I like to have the Desktop Alert display the Subject and From when I get a new email. I lost that functionality when I got my new MacBook Pro. Thankfully Microsoft has written a support tip on how to get it back.

You can find it here. Thanks Microsoft. Now let’s get Office 2008 for the Mac out the door (or at least let me know if you need a beta tester). I’d still rather have a real Outlook client, and now the Calendar Items in Outlook2007 look like they were done by the MacBU, but entourage has worked out pretty well so far.