Over the past 2 months I’ve been down to the Big Nerd Ranch three times and it was well worth it. The Big Nerd Ranch offers courses in various software development topics such as Cocoa programming, Ruby on Rails, OpenGL, and PostgreSQL. They are taught by experts in those topics, and are fairly Mac-centric. Although, for topics where cross-platform-ness applies, Linux and Windows machines can and have been used by some students. But don’t bother bringing your Windows or Linux box to the Cocoa class, obviously.

Aaron Hillegass, who founded BNR and wrote the book (literally) on Cocoa, structures the week-long courses in a way similar to monastic retreats so that the attendees are hassle-free and can just concentrate on the classes. The cost of the course covers room and board and the class. Everybody stays on-site at Serenbe Inn, a beautiful location in the country southwest of Atlanta. (They also hold classes in Frankfurt, Germany and will hold them at your site). Serenbe is beautiful, the food is great, and the schedule is the same every day. This allows the students to concentrate on the classes and not worry about hotels, traffic, or meals.

This year I attended the OpenGL, Ruby On Rails, and Cocoa classes and they were all excellent. I experienced these classes from three different perspectives. I was a total newb with OpenGL, an “advanced beginner” with Ruby On Rails, and I’ve been doing Cocoa development for two years, mostly for my own use. But with each class I learned a lot of useful information and techniques. I highly recommend the Big Nerd Ranch for an enjoyable way to get a brain-dump from some very smart, experienced, and good folks.

Aaron, Rocco, and Charles are all excellent instructors and their material is well put together and is constantly refined and updated. I know I’m still processing all of the information I’ve absorbed over the past two months. And I’ve already been putting a lot of it to good use. These courses are all meat and no fluff. The accommodations are comfortable. The food is amazing. So while the courses cost a decent buck, they are *definitely* worth every penny. And when you tally up the cost of spending a week in a hotel, restaurant meals, parking or other transportation costs on top of the course itself, I think you’ll find these courses to be very competitive price-wise, and a lot more convenient and hassle-free.

Will I go back? You bet. When next they hold the Advanced OS X Programming class or my hope, an Advanced Cocoa class, I will be trekking back down to Georgia. And if you can’t make it there any time soon, the next edition of Aaron’s book, that covers the changes in Cocoa for Leopard, will be out sometime in 2008.

Note: If you don’t want to read all the geeky details, just skip down to the bottom paragraph with the link in order to use it.

Mahalo Follow has a toolbars for Firefox and IE but nothing yet for Safari. I decided to try and remedy that, al least for the function of submitting a link to Mahalo Follow. The toolbars do several other functions that I have not attempted to implement. Because I am lazy, I did not want to try and implement a full toolbar. I’m not even sure if that’s really possible with Safari/WebKit. It probably is, I just haven’t looked into it yet. But I wanted instant gratification. I figured I could create a bookmarklet fairly easily that would allow a link submission to Mahalo Follow. A bookmarklet is a regular bookmark that contains, instead of a normal URL, a snippet of javascript. Any javascript can be contained therein, but it must be all on one long line. No line-breaks. This makes it hard to read and edit and understand without expanding it back out to multiple lines, doing whatever you want with it, and squeezing it all back onto a single long line. Nevertheless, I had several hours to kill, so I began.

I delved into the javascript contained within the Mahalo Follow Firefox extension and figured out how to make the submission. Then I crafted the bookmarklet that would do it. It was actually very quick and easy to accomplish. Except that it didn’t work. It turns out that the javascript engine in Safari doesn’t support the btoa() method in the Window object (or any other object as far as I could tell). btoa() takes a string of binary data and returns a base64 encoded ASCII string. Both the title of the page and the URL to be submitted are base64 encoded. This is a nice way of avoiding odd characters in the URL or title being munged by the web server or anything else on its way into the code that actually decodes it and submits it. Since Safari didn’t implement this btoa() method, which is apparently non-standard but widely implemented by other javascript engines, I would have to implement or include someone else’s btoa() implementation in the bookmarklet. That’s going to be a heckuva long line of javascript in that bookmark. Luckily, again because I am lazy and I firmly believe in not reinventing the wheel, I found an implementation by Masanao Izumo that is freely available at Snippler. With this addition, the bookmarklet works… mostly.

The bookmarklet brings up the Mahalo Follow link submission page, and after filling it out, the “Recommend Link And Stay Here” button works perfectly. The button entitled, “Recommend Link And Go To Mahalo” submits the link, but it does not go to Mahalo… it stays on the page you submitted. I haven’t looked into why that is yet. Also, the Firefox tool pops the link submission page up in a new pop-up window that’s sized and centered nicely, with no address bar visible, etc. I don’t have any sizing specified in the bookmarklet because I have Safari, via Saft, forced into a mode where everything is opened up in a tab. Specifying sizes for the link submission page resizes my main Safari window because the page is opened as a tab in my window rather than a pop-up. So I have to add some javascript to detect how the window will be opened and specify a size if it will be a pop-up window and not specify a size if its going to be a tab. I hope its possible to detect this from within javascript before actually opening the window. I don’t yet know.

There may be other bits of Mahalo Follow link submission mechanics that I’m not implementing properly (or at all) because I really didn’t spend a whole lot of time studying their Firefox extension. But it *does* seem to submit the link, and nobody from Mahalo has yelled at me so far, and Jason Calacanis twittered about the existence of my bookmarklet. So I guess its not doing them any damage.

So here’s the bookmarklet. Just drag the link below into your Safari bookmark toolbar. Then whenever you’re on a page you’d like to submit just click on that bookmark. Up will pop the link submission page just as in Firefox.

Submit to Mahalo Follow

This bookmarklet may even work with Firefox, but I have not tested that yet. I’ll do that tomorrow and update this page. Enjoy.

Update: The bookmarklet does not, in fact, work on Firefox… at least, not on the Mac. Oh well. Mahalo has a good toolbar extension for you folks on Firefox. Use that.

I am a glutton for punishment. I bought the original Sony Reader (PRS-500) when it first came out. When it worked right, it was pleasant reading a book on it. But it often flaked out on me. And it was kinda clunky and, of course, it didn’t work with the Mac. I had to run XP in Parallels to buy books and sync them to the reader. Then I bought the updated Sony Reader, the PRS-505. And now I’ve bought the Kindle. From this I can only deduce that I must have more money than brains and am a glutton for punishment. But I want the electronic book, e-reader, or whatever you choose to call it, to succeed. I want to carry around one thin device that can hold hundreds of books and get new ones from thin air. That being said, the current crop of devices are definitely still first generation attempts… or worse.

The Good

The Sony PRS-505 is an immense improvement over Sony’s initial attempt, the PRS-500. This device is thinner, with a metallic case. Think how much nicer the aluminum-clad iPod nano and iPod mini’s looked and felt over the earlier plastic-coated models. The PRS-505 has its own book cover that it is permanently attached to and which serves as a screen protector. The next and previous page buttons are excellently placed for use while holding the device like a book while reading, and are not in the way where they’ll get accidentally pushed (Amazon, buy a clue here). This device just feels nice to hold and read from.

The Amazon Kindle has the uber-cool ability to browse the Amazon Kindle store and purchase books wirelessly using Sprint’s high-speed cellular EVDO service. I don’t have to worry about whether it works with my Mac or not. No computer is required to purchase and load books onto the thing. The actual act of reading text on the screen of the Kindle is fairly decent. The contrast ratio, to my eye, is not quite as good as the Sony PRS-505, but its acceptable given the current state-of-the art of the e-ink technology that both devices use. And the Amazon Kindle bookstore has a much greater selection than the Sony Connect bookstore. That’s about all the good things to say that I can muster for the Kindle.

The Bad

The Sony device still doesn’t work with the Mac. Oh, it will show up as a drive on the Mac when you plug the USB cable in and you can drag the books on or off the device that way for backup or restore purposes. But to buy books you must still use the Sony Connect software which only runs on Windows. There’s still that annoying flash on the screen when you “turn” a page, but the Kindle has that as well. Its an unfortunate effect of the e-ink technology that will probably be with us until that technology advances a generation or two. The Sony Reader lacks any wireless capability (Wi-Fi or EVDO) for buying books. Finally, the battery seems to drain fairly quickly on the PRS-505… quicker than the original PRS-500. This is odd. The way the e-ink works is that the device requires no power to display a page once its drawn. Power is only needed to change the page. So when the device is sitting on the shelf it shouldn’t really drain the battery except by normal internal battery leakage. Why the 505 drains way faster than the 500, I don’t know. I hope its not that my unit has a bad battery that’s going to explode in my face while I’m reading it.

Other people have said it, but I must repeat it because its true. Whoever designed the Kindle obviously never bothered to try and pick it up and use it. Nearly the entire left and right edges of the device are covered by the next and previous and back page buttons. There’s no good way to pick this thing up without accidentally hitting a button that sends the Kindle off to some other page that you did not intend. Never, ever pick up this device without carefully paying attention to what you are doing. But after you’ve picked it up, what about holding it and reading? There’s almost no way to hold the thing for reading without accidentally hitting those paging buttons over and over again. I have found that I can hold it in a position that looks like I’m pinching the device between thumbs and index fingers. Its very unnatural and uncomfortable, but there’s only these two little spots to hold the thing without pressing the ill-placed buttons. The Kindle is also slow. I don’t know what kind of processor is in there, but it needs a little more oomph.

Both companies’ bookstores prices are too expensive. OK, sure, the Sony Connect store has to pay for bandwidth and the Amazon Kindle books’ prices probably have the Sprint EVDO service costs built in. But still, there’s no physical manufacturing and transport of books going on here. E-books should cost 20% of their physical counterpart. If that.

And Amazon, if you think I’m going to pay a couple of bucks a month to read blogs that are re-formatted for the Kindle using the EVDO service, think again. I have an iPhone and Google Reader for that.

The Ugly

The Kindle… I’m sorry. I just embarrassed for Amazon. Where to begin? The physical design is just so… to quote Cali Lewis… Commodore-64. Its cheap early 1990’s PC pearl colored plastic. Its big, bulky, clunky and looks like something I might have carried around at college… in 1985. That’s it! It looks like my HP-15C’s mutant cousin. Its about 3 times as thick as the Sony PRS-505 and slightly wider and taller. Just too big in all dimensions. Those idiotically placed paging buttons feel like I might snap them off when pressing them. All in all, the Kindle feels like device that I have to pay an insane amount of attention to when using or I will accidentally hit some badly placed control or break off some piece of cheap plastic. The user interface is also a piece of crap that looks like a DOS-based menu user interface style circa 1988.

Notice that I don’t really have anything to say about the Sony Reader in the “ugly” section. The PRS-505 is really a beautiful looking device… especially when what I have to compare it to is the Kindle.

The Result

I really like the Sony PRS-505. It feels good in the hand while reading and its easy to read from. I would like to use it more than the Kindle. The Kindle is big and bulky, incredibly ugly and looks dated compared to the PRS-505. But the Kindle doesn’t require me to fire up a virtual machine with Windows on my Mac to buy books. Being able to buy books anytime and anywhere the Sprint EVDO cellular signal reaches is a killer feature. I guess time will only tell which device’s drawbacks I will put up with. I want it to be the PRS-505 but I fear it will be Amazon Kindle because of the wireless book buying and no need for Windows.

The Hope

For the next gen device, I can only hope that Amazon and Sony will get together and mind-meld the EVDO service and Kindle store with the Sony reader device and scrap the Kindle device. Sony has already closed their Connect music store. They should do a deal with Amazon and close their Connect store and use the Kindle store, and put the EVDO modem in their device.

Alternatively, Apple should come along with a e-reader that eats both Sony’s and Amazon’s lunch.

This post started out as a comment to Justin Kownacki’s post about Why Twitter Scares People. But it started getting long and going far afield from Justin’s post, so I decided to completely start from scratch and contribute my two cents via my own blog post rather than as a comment to Justin’s.

I’ve been fascinated for a while by several different aspects of Twitter regarding following, being followed, and the etiquette of twittering.

Some people mutually follow each other because they know each other outside of twitter, either on the net (bit-space) or in real life (meat-space). Others follow someone they may have heard speak at a conference or seminar. Maybe they have even met them briefly, but the follower may not remember them or it was in a group situation and so the follower is completely unknown to the followed. Others follow someone because they read their blogs, listen to their podcasts, watch their videocasts, use their software, admire their accomplishments, etc. The follower finds what the followed has to say interesting and informative… or humorous, scandalous, shocking, or (insert your favorite reason here).

Then there are the expectations that people have about being followed. Some people expect they will be followed in return for following someone, whether or not that person knows them at all. Some people happen to see what someone they don’t know has said on twitter, find it interesting, and decide to follow them. Some people on twitter get creeped out by someone unknown “following” them. For my part, some of the most interesting people I have met and talked with on twitter was because of them randomly finding and following me or vice versa.

Finally, there’s the twitter etiquette (twittiquette?). Most people seem to belong to several semi-overlapping, semi-orthogonal circles of friends who mutually follow each other. Many times these groups seem to have developed their own expectations of proper twitter etiquette. And sometimes these groups’ ideas of good etiquette are in conflict. Some think its bad form to post links back to your own blog posts. Others think its OK, just don’t abuse it. If you post 20 articles a day, don’t twitter about each and every one. Sometimes these rules don’t apply. If you’re a podcaster, especially a prominent one, you are going to, and are almost expected to mention that, “Hey, episode 182 of The Wonderful World of Weasels is now online”. Other groups treat twitter as simply another instant messaging app, holding long ongoing conversations. Others view the 140 character limit, the SMS notifications, and the simplicity of twitter as making it unsuited for long conversations. Their tweets are essentially one-shot comments sent off into the ether of whosoever is following. Sometimes folks will reply to this, sometimes not. But no actual extended conversation is going to take place. That being said, if the uber-marketers and ultra-spammers attempt to use twitter they will be simply be shouting into the wind. No one will be listening. They can’t make me follow them, much less take SMS notifications from them.

I expect some interesting sociological process is happening on twitter as these multiple, semi-overlapping, semi-orthogonal groups of mutual followers semi-consciously evolve semi-conflicting rules of etiquette and then react and adapt to them, slowly smoothing out the differences over time. Somebody should probably do a study or something… maybe someone is.

Anyway, for the record, I became intrigued with Twitter before anybody that I knew in bit-space or meat-space was. So I was alone in twitter-space. But I found out about it from some podcast or other… don’t remember which one. So I started following that and other podcasters. Through following them, I discovered other bloggers and software developers whose products I used were twittering, and I had always found what they had to say interesting… so… followed. And I twittered off into the black ether of the public timeline… because no one was following me, because I didn’t know anybody else personally using the thing yet. Then random people started following me. Well, that was weird. I read their tweets and decided to follow some… and not others. But mostly I followed anyone who was following me. Then, amazingly, some of the bloggers/podcasters/software developers that I followed but did not personally know started following me. I thought that was very cool and unusual of them. How could they possibly manage to deal with the tweets of everyone who was following them? Some of them did, though. Then suddenly twitter exploded and people that I knew in bit-space and meat-space all started colliding in twitter-space. I have not yet figured out how to best manage twitter. Some people’s tweets I receive SMS notifications for, others I don’t. Some people post way, way too often about nothing. A hypothetical person who posts interesting things might post “I have hangnail.” and it will be received with humor as a bit of random non-sequitur-ness. But when it comes from a hypothetical person who has just posted 50 other tweets in the last hour, all along the lines of: “I’m going downstairs”, “petting the cat”, “blowing my nose”, “fixing lunch”… well, its a bit tiresome. Some folks post links to their every blog post. Some do it occasionally. Some don’t like that. Some don’t mind.

I’m interested in hearing how you follow people, what you think of being followed, how you manage the onslaught of twitter-postings, how you deal with SMS, and your thoughts on twitter etiquette? Enlighten me? How can I can I not abuse twitter for you?

Technorati Tags:
Twitter, social+networks

Google Reader is unbelievable. For those of you who are new to the concept, Google Reader is an RSS reader or news aggregator that allows you to aggregate the content from news sites, blogs, and other web-sites and read them in organized lists of articles, tracking what you have read already and what is new. Its a great way to be able to follow news and blog articles for hundreds of sites and keep up with their daily stream of content. Up until Google Reader appeared, I was a loyal user of NetNewsWire which is a fantastic piece of software for the Mac. But Google Reader has won me over because it is web-based and I can access it from any computer at any time without having to have software installed on that computer. And it is by far the best web interface that Google has in any of their services and far better than any of the other web-based RSS readers that I have checked out.

And it works great with the iPhone. This is especially appealing to me, because I can read the news while I’m waiting in the allergist’s office for my weekly shots or at the diner for breakfast and so on. And they have a special interface for the iPhone and it is very good. But it could still stand a few changes that I will humbly suggest here.

Google Reader on the iPhone uses text links to access the Tags and Subscription pages, but they are too small and too close together and way too close to the text link entitled “Sign Out”. Too small for my fat fingers, anyway. Turn these text links into buttons and move them further apart. I’m forever hitting Subscriptions when I mean to hit Tags. I always mean to hit Tags. I never use the Subscriptions page. But what is worse is when I hit Sign Out. With that you can’t even hit the back button and try again because you are logged out and have to type in your user name and password to log back in. Typing text is something you want to minimize as much as possible on a mobile device. The same thing goes for the “Add star” and “Share” links on an article’s page. Button-ize them and move them further apart.

It would also be helpful to button-ize the “mark these items as read” and the “more” links. And to add a “mark all articles read” button that would mark as read all the articles in the current “tag” or feed, not just the current page. A nice addition to the settings would be an option to have Google Reader automatically display the Tags page when all articles on a given “tag” have been read. So rather than displaying a blank page with navigation links, automagically go to the Tags page when the “mark all articles read” button is clicked or when the “more” or “mark these items as read” buttons are clicked and there are no more articles in that tag or feed.

Other than that, Google Reader is golden and it alone is reason enough for me to have an iPhone, with Twitter being a close second.

Update: Oh yeah, the Reader crew at Google should fix how it works when you turn the iPhone on its side. The tags page does not expand horizontally to cover the whole screen. And when you select a tag, the page of articles you get to after the Tags page also doesn’t expand to fill the screen.

I’m going to talk primarily but not exclusively about what Google should do to GMail for the iPhone. Yes, another frackin’ iPhone post. I know. But I’ve had the thing for 2.5 months now. That’s enough time to post some thoughts and reviews about it with some real-world usage under my belt. So I’m going to get it out of my system with this post, another one about Google Reader and one final post: an iPhone review.

I love GMail. I use is personally and I use it and the whole Google Apps suite with my business, where appropriate. But GMail is lousy on the iPhone so far. If you use the iPhone’s mail app then you are accessing GMail via POP. Which means you end up with duplicate copies of email on your iPhone and on GMail. And that could be a ton of emails being sent to your iPhone all at once over that piddly little EDGE connection, if that’s all that’s available. It could take a while. But really, I don’t want all of my emails being sent to the iPhone. So GMail needs to allow only emails with certain labels to be accessed. The GMail account configuration software on the iPhone would need to be updated to allow input of label names (yes, plural) for which email should be retrieved. That way I don’t bother getting the high-traffic mailing lists clogging up my iPhone. But I can get my business-related emails, friends, family, a few important but low-traffic mailing lists, news alerts, etc. And finally, GMail should push that email out to the iPhone like Yahoo! Mail does.

Some may say just use the GMail web interface in Safari. I have been doing that. Its not a very good experience. The screen is just too small and my fingers too big. Another alternative would be if GMail had a completely different web interface when accessed via iPhone. The more I think about it, the more it seems likely that this would be the way Google would go about it. And its a good way, except for losing the push and notification of new emails while the iPhone’s in your pocket. It would let you navigate to any and all folders… um… labels… that you have. So… how do we get notifications back? Have GMail send you an SMS message every 10 minutes (configurable) or so to tell you that you have new GMail in certain labels. You should be able to configure which labels are included in the “check for new email” SMS feature. Again, I don’t care about getting notified that the high-traffic email list has new messages. It always has new emails. And it should allow the configuring of time periods when not to send SMS notifications… like at 3 AM.

Finally, a couple of non-iPhone-related GMail feature suggestions. Currently, the configuration screen for filters allows you to apply a (singular) label to the emails that match the filter’s search parameters. Multiple labels should be able to be applied. I might want a filter to apply the label “bacn” and “pending” to some emails, for instance.

I also think that GMail should have filters that run due to other triggers than just matching some text. For example, when an email changes state from unread to read. Why can’t that kick off some filters? There are some emails that I’d be happy to have land in the Inbox and as soon as I read them they become archived and labeled, thus cleaning up my Inbox automagically.

OK, we all know Apple’s on a treadmill of refreshing their Mac line and their iPod line and probably their new iPhone fairly regularly. And the iPhone has been launched and they’ve sold over a million in the first 2 and a half months. So what is next for Apple? Or rather, what should be next for Apple? In other words, what cool new gadget do I want next?

I know a lot of people say it should be a sub-notebook form-factor Mac. But that would still be part of their Mac lineup. I’m talking a whole new and different product line here, yet one in keeping with Apple’s dominant role in digital media: an e-book reader. And I’m not talking a small tablet-style Mac or an inflated iPhone. I’m talking a real book-size e-book reader with e-ink technology not a normal LCD screen.

E-ink technology displays text and images on a screen with no flicker and with no backlighting. This reduces eyestrain and comes very close to duplicating the experience of looking at ink on paper. I have a Sony PRS-500 e-book reader (one of the few Sony products I own) and I can read for hours with this device just like I can from an actual paper book. Whereas, from a regular computer monitor, reading a book quickly becomes tiresome. The Sony device is a version 1.0 device and has a few downsides to it. It hasn’t really taken the world by storm. Price is part of the problem, and it would be with Apple, too. It always is. But with Apple you get something for your money. The Sony Reader is tied to their online Connect e-books store. They’ve recently announced they are closing the music side of their Connect store, but the e-book store will remain. But the Connect bookstore doesn’t have a huge number of titles that I’m interested. I purchased a ton of books initially, but now only purchase one or two books from that store every few months. I’d really love to be able to get the O’Reilly computer books in e-book format rather than have to read them online via their Safari site. And of course, being Sony, the books from their store are in their own bizarre format, and, of course, encrypted with DRM. Anything that Apple would offer would probably come with DRM as well, but at least Apple has started pushing the media providers to ditch DRM. Also, the Sony Connect store doesn’t support Macs. I run a Parallels virtual machine just to purchase e-books and load them onto my Reader.

I think Apple could do this kind of device right. The iTunes store is a natural for adding e-books to their collection of tunes, podcasts, university lectures, movies and TV shows. And iTunes runs on Windows and Mac. Add in wifi for mobile purchasing and downloading of text and I think they could grow the e-books market. Heck, while I’m dreaming, let the mythical Apple e-book reader use the iPhone via bluetooth to purchase and download e-books. e-books are small and compressible, so downloading them over EDGE wouldn’t be too painful. And while we’re at it, add e-book storage and reading capability to the iPhone for those times when you don’t have your e-book device with you and are willing to suffer the smaller iPhone screen with its lack of e-ink. And just as the iPod will let you play generic non-DRM’d MP3 files, the e-book reader from Apple should be able to display regular old PDF files just as the Sony Reader does. Only Apple would do it better. Some normal PDFs are illegible on the Sony Reader, depending upon the fonts and sizes used.

Maybe e-books don’t appeal to everybody. But I like being able to carry around several hundred books at a time in a paperback-sized device that is easy to read. As I stated before, I’d especially like to be able to carry around a lot of those huge computer books as reference material without requiring a truck to haul them in. I think it would take Apple’s marketing and design magic to make e-books appeal to the mass market. And it certainly wouldn’t be a radical departure for them, simply an expansion of their media device and software line into another media. And its what they did with music players. They stepped into a lackluster market and set it on fire.

Of course, Amazon may be beating them to the punch with a market-owning device called Kindle. High speed cellular EVDO for downloading books? Sweet.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, e-book, e-book reader, ebook, ebook reader

I bought and have been using the Sena Magnet Flipper iPhone case for over a month now. I got it because it seemed to be the iPhone case that was most like the DLO PodFolio case that I have for the “iPod for Video” (what a product name that one is). The Sena case fully covers the iPhone leaving opening for every iPhone button and orifice, including the camera. There is a cover flip that covers and protects the screen that is fastened via magnets at the two bottom corners of the device.

It is easy enough to hold the iPhone in one hand and flip open the cover with my thumb. Yet the magnets hold cover flip securely closed from accidental openings (and scratchings) when in my shirt/vest/coat pocket. The best part is that the case has been designed so that the iPhone is dockable while in the case. Even the PodFolio case from DLO for the iPod for Video didn’t allow that.

There are just a lot of nice little touches to this case, such as holes where the iPhone’s speaker is so the case doesn’t muffle speakerphone use… or iPod use if you want to use the iPhone’s iPod capabilities with the built-in speakers. And the belt clip screws on, which means I don’t have to use it. I carry my iPhone in the chest pocket of my vest or coat, so the belt clip is just unneeded bulk. Cases with integrated belt clips are an annoyance.

So, all in all, I’d give this case five out of five pocket protectors. I really don’t see how it could be improved upon.

Technorati Tags:
Sena, Apple, iPhone, case, review, iPhone case review

At PodCamp Pittsburgh this weekend a new term was coined and I was there at its birth. Bacn. What is bacn? Well, as bacn’s website proclaims:

Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

Bacn… it’s what’s for breakfast… and your inbox. The meme is spreading. Spread the bacn. Mmmmm… spreadable bacon.

bacn

• CIO Insight asks if Twitter is the next killer business app?
• Cenatek has an 8 Gb flash drive in an ExpressCard/34 form factor. This might be good for extra storage on a laptop that’s strapped for HD space. Works with Macs, PCs, and Linux says Cenatek. I might get one.
• Sourcefire has bought ClamAV, the open-source security software. They’ve supported Snort, so lets see what they do with ClamAV. As a Mac user, I’m not currently a ClamAV user, but I’m glad there’s a good open-source anti-virus app out there for it.
• This guy wants websites to block Firefox because Firefox users are more likely to use AdBlock Plus which blocks ads and therefore reduces revenues for the websites whose ads are blocked. OK, I get that argument. But this guy seems to be as fanatically anti-Firefox as those pro-Firefox cultists he’s worried about. Besides, if someone is that annoyed by ads that they would block them, I don’t think they’d click through any ads if they were using IE or Opera and not blocking.