Jim Panttaja

We had a number of errands to run over the weekend - getting a few things for the office, and a few things for our apartment. Before heading out in the car Mary used Google Maps to set up a multi-stop trip, and then email them to the two of us. Here is the map:

View Larger Map

If you click the map (or the view larger map link), it takes you to Google, and you can see the turn by turn directions.

What is really cool is that when we clicked on the link in the email we sent ourselves on the iPhone, it brings up the Map application. Now you can step through the directions and it shows a map of each ‘turn’, and gives you the instructions for the turn.

Mary and I are sharing our calendars on Google Calendar, and now I learn that I can easily interact with Google Calendar via SMS (Brady Forrest post on OReilly Radar: SMS to GCal).

You can send an SMS to 48368: ‘next’ gets your next appointment, ‘day’ gets today’s appointments, ‘nday’ gets tomorrows appointments. ‘help’ gets a short description of these commands.

You can create events by sending an SMS to that same ‘address’. You can send phrases like “Family party Saturday at Sally’s at noon” - and it will figure out what you have in mind, and create the calendar event.

This approach is much easier than opening a web page, navigating to the right place, and picking menu choices. I now have a running SMS ’session’ with 48368 (GVENT) - so it is easy to find on my phone.

Brady’s post includes a couple of other links for further information.

By the way, I have finished scanning through the electronic edition of iPhone the Missing Manual by David Pogue. I have the print version on order - but while traveling it was easy to zip through the online version on my Mac. There are a number of useful tidbits in here. There were answers to questions that I had asked (not that I asked David - but I asked the ether, and David came through) - and answers to questions that hadn’t occurred to me… If you have an iPhone in your life, you need this book.

Mary and I want to share our calendars. We have utilized Google Calendars, and now have subscribed to those in iCal. This allows us to edit the calendars in Google (or send invitations from Outlook, Entourage or other sources), and then view them (read only) in iCal. We have a Google Calendar for each of us, and a joint one. In iCal you right click in the Calendar pane (left hand pane) and choose subscribe, entering the iCal URL from Google Calendar. It isn’t a perfect solution - but works for the moment.

I had hoped with a 2 megapixel camera, that we could use ScanR - sending faxes, entering business cards, and OCRing documents. But for the moment, Apple is resizing the images to 640×480 before emailing them (to ScanR) - which isn’t enough resolution for ScanR.

I am now using my iPhone to view my eBay to check on items I am selling, Google Analytics to check on access to our web site, and the TextDrive admin site to administer our hosted system.

I have added both an Exchange email account, and my personal email account (hosted by TextDrive) - as IMAP accounts. This does allow me to have folders that I save items to on my iPhone - so I have a way to ’store’ files of interest - spreadsheets and other items. It seems like there should be an independent folder system - but at least I can save content.

Note that the iPhone is turning out to be, primarily, a read-only device. There are limited places that you can write stuff: add contacts, add calendar entries, send emails, take pictures, add crude notes in the Notes application.

The map is quite useful. Although we travel with a GPS device (a portable one that can work in the car - as well as tell us how far, how fast and how high we have gone on our bike), we found the iPhone quite handy. It can give us a map of any of our contacts (I keep contact info for my 2700 closest friends on mine) by clicking on the address in the contact. You can then use that as a from or a to for a trip. The iPhone does not know its own location - so you have to provide both ends. But you now have directions - including a list you can step through. I click on the ‘car’ in the bottom right of the map page, and you get an overlay of traffic conditions.

I was in business as promised by iTunes (doing my activation) - actually earlier than promised. There were some complications of moving my phone number from Sprint (it was the primary number on an account that included phones for Mary, and our kids). But by about 3:00pm yesterday, all was working.We have a wireless network in our house (I haven’t tried it in the car yet) - and the iPhone picked up on it immediately. As I played with the iPhone around the house, I had fast access. On our bike ride this morning, we tried browsing the internet from Cloverdale - it was a bit slow, but email flowed, and it was usable. But I probably won’t be doing a lot of browsing unless it is urgent if I am not near 802.11 access.I am already checking my email more from my iPhone than my computer. My personal and Gmail accounts are working fine. I am having some problems with my Sapias account - but the incoming is me (Mahesh has it working) and outbound is likely fixable. The biggest issue on my personal account is the volume of junk mail I get. On my Mac with Entourage, the junk is filtered - but on the iPhone there is no filtering. And so far, I haven’t figured out multi-select to trash multiple emails at once (it may not exist yet).I have downloaded music and podcasts - and will at least spend some time trying these out. The features are as advertised - just have to see if I have the inclination to listen while I am walking or doing other things.I had to get Mary to get me pictures of my kids and grand kids - something I have never kept current before - I will likely keep this info current.I have found lot’s of useful web sites that I will likely look at more regularly. Some of the tools I regularly use work, others don’t yet.

• Mary has been able to post using WordPress
• I can view my iGoogle page
• I can view my Google Calendar, and add calendar entries. I am trying to figure out the best calendar solution on the iPhone - the problem with Google Calendar is that it requires connectivity. But Mary and I need some way to share calendars
• I can view Google Notebooks - but I can’t edit them. I put research notes on several different Notebooks, and like this technique - but I won’t be able to manage from the iPhone
• The Google Reader allows me to read my favorite RSS feeds and blogs - but it doesn’t support the unconnected mode that works from my Mac.
• See Mary’s notes on maps - this is pretty cool - effectively having an atlas in my hand at all times
• As mentioned above, I can check email - and send email - easily
• I have weather set up for home, and for my next adventure. It is trivial to view them.
• The new Sapias user interface - which uses flex - does not work
• The older Sapias user interface does work (though it isn’t nearly as cool)
• The Sapias.com site navigation bar does not work - though the site comes up. The navigation bar is not even visible.

I will be taking my iPhone - instead of my computer - to more appointments. Perhaps with a small notecard or notebook - until I sort out better ways to leave notes. There is a notes application that may handle brief things

I received my iPhones last night (one for me, one for Mary). I bought the beer and held down the fort at the Thirsty Bear while colleagues relieved the line-sitters at the San Francisco Apple Store, and made the purchases.

The device is small and beautiful. The activation process is through iTunes (a newly available version 7.3). The process was mostly clear as I made my choices.

I decided to use a family plan for the two phones, and on a whim (and perhaps against my better judgement) decided to move my existing phone number from Sprint. The bottom line is that “Your activation requires additional time to complete”. “Service is scheduled to be disconnected on your current phone at or after 12:31 AM EDT on July 01″.

So for the moment, I am waiting patiently.

The iPhone has the attention of many of us this week. The 20-minute video on the Apple website certainly provides a good overview (I suggest only viewing it in small mode), as does the article in today’s Wall Street Journal (a transcript appears at Just Another Phone Blog on blogspot).

One item pointed out in the Wall Street Journal article is the lack of Flash support. This means that applications written in Flex (for example, the Sapias Mobile Resource Management services) will not work on the iPhone - for now. This should be easily fixed by Adobe and Apple.

Since third-party development is limited to Safari, I assume that Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) will not work on the iPhone. AIR is looking like a good development environment for occasionally connected applications.

From watching the examples in the video, the iPhone is not location aware. There is an example of finding a sushi restaurant, and then getting directions to it. The starting location is chosen from a list of bookmarks. Although the iPhone does not appear to have a GPS chipset - it could still determine location (AT&T has to be able to provide the location of the phone in support of E911 - so somewhere that location is known). But it doesn’t appear to take advantage of that information (from the demo - or other articles I have seen).