vespa wheelie

MVR
Originally uploaded by rgr.jnr

this is awesome... not sure i could ever get my Vespa to do this, but still impressive

iPhone OS 3.0 update

I updated my iPhone yesterday morning with the latest OS up date from Apple: iPhone OS 3.0.

Within a few minutes of having the new update, I had already used the copy and paste functions. I had a phone number that was texted to me by a friend and, in the old OS, I would have had to have called it, canceled the call immediately after starting it, and then saved the number from the call log to save it as a new contact. Now, I just copied the phone number from the message log and pasted it into the phone field of a new contact. It was great!

Since installing the new update, I’ve seen some small differences in the interface that I haven’t seen noted on blogs before the release. One such change is the call log as seen here. I must say, this used to not show very much information and be only the phone number and not much else and they’ve done a good job updating it with relevant information.

I attended a conference a few years ago hosted by Edward Tufte whose thoughts on data visualization interested me greatly. Last year, he wrote in his blog about the lack of utilizing space properly in the interface design of parts of the iPhone among other arguments. I think that Apple has made a sufficient attempt to add some complexity (while keeping simplicity) to the iPhone interface in this latest OS update.

Soocial syncing Gmail and Outlook contacts

So, a month or two ago I signed up for the beta of Soocial – this Web 2.0/AJAX style site that is a hosted solution to synchronize your contacts between mobile handsets, GMail, and desktop contacts applications (like Mac OS X Leopard Address Book or Microsoft Office). For while now, I’ve needed some type of synchronization tool to sync my contacts that I have stored in GMail (some of which GMail has generated because it can store frequently emailed addresses automatically) and contacts that I have in Microsoft Outlook (which I synchronize with my iPhone 3G and phone numbers).

This is a great idea because they have a good AJAX-style contact management tool on their web site.

Now, all they need to do is fix their Microsoft Outlook connector….