Buy in the iTunes App Store – $0.99

I’m delighted to announce that the Apple App Store accepted my first iPhone app, Fine Tip – Tip Calculator, on my first try. You can use Fine Tip to quickly calculate your next restaurant bill’s tip and grand total. It’s fast and easy to use. Take a look at the demo/tutorial:

Features:

Fast, Elegant, Accurate, Full-Featured, Yet Easy to Use

While some improvements were made – namely the ability to directly subscribe to podcasts from within the app – for several reasons, I will remain loyal to Downcast:

• Direct Updates, But No Wi-Fi-Only Updates: The most important new feature of Apple’s new ‘Podcasts’ app is its ability to directly subscribe to podcasts from within the app without the need to physically connect the iPhone/iPod to a computer. Inexplicably, Apple provides no setting to limit such updates when connected to Wi-Fi only. Without this feature, Podcasts users will quickly see their monthly bandwidth allotments eaten up by podcasts downloads. This is a major fail!
• 30 Second Skip & Instant Replay, But No Ear-bud Control: Finally Apple built-in the ability to skip forward 30 seconds. Instant replay has been built-in for years. But, surprisingly, you cannot trigger this functionality with the ear-bud controls. I listen to hours of podcasts every day through my ear-buds. While walking dogs, carrying a baby or out in the winter, I do not want to have to reach into my pockets every few minutes to skip forward or rewind a podcast. And there is no Siri control of podcast playback either.  Grrr!

• No Automatic Background Updating: Something I miss from my Android days is the ability for podcast apps (I used Dogcatcher) to auto-update podcast subscriptions in the background. Whenever I picked up my Nexus S, my podcasts were up-to-date and ready to go. This isn’t possible on iOS because Apple prohibits third party apps from doing background downloading. The net result with iOS is that each time I want to listen to podcasts, I have to manually start the podcast app, trigger podcast updates and wait for each podcast subscription to update before I can head out. I can’t blame Downcast for this Apple-imposed limitation. But I had high hopes that Apple would permit automatic background updates through its proprietary podcast player. No such luck.
• No Playlists: With Dogcatcher (on Android) and Downcast on the iPhone I can set them up to automatically create playlists of my favorite podcasts. I can give each podcast a priority ranking from which a playlist is automatically populated and continually updated with my favorite podcasts. When one podcast finishes, the next highest ranking podcast automatically plays. The new Apple ‘Podcasts’ app has no playlist functionality – at all! You can’t even set up playlists manually. Ugh!

When I first heard the news that Podcasts was released, I feared that the podcast players, such as Downcast and Stitcher would be Sherlocked. So long as Apple continues to lag behind with the implementation of important/useful features such as these, the other podcast apps should be just fine.

Yay, I was eligible for the free 25GB Skydrive upgrade (vs 7GB for new users). To see if you are eligible for the free Skydrive upgrade click here.

Because I used Windows Live Mesh in the past (or maybe because I tested out Skydrive in the past, I don’t know), I was eligible for the free upgrade. Without this free upgrade I probably wouldn’t have used either Google Drive or SkyDrive because their free storage options (5GB and 7GB respectively) were not quite large enough to contain all the contents of my pictures (7.5GB) and key files (2.5GB) directories.

While I was an enthusiastic early user of Dropbox, I prefer SkyDrive over the new Google Drive and DropBox primarily because I can sync any number of disparate existing folders from my PC. Google Drive and Dropbox limit your sharing to only one dedicated folder.

[Update: After reading the Paul Thurrott piece listed below, I discovered that, unlike Live Mesh before it, Sky Drive does not yet allow you to sync multiple disparate folders . It appears to have the same dedicated folder limitation that Google Drive and Dropbox have. Alas, while I’m happy to have the 25GB upgrade, it won’t be used until I can use SkyDrive to sync multiple folders.]

With Skydrive I can share any set of directories a single directory structure across my PCs, my Mac, my iPhone, my wife’s iPhone and our iPad. The only downside of Skydrive that I can see right now is that there is no Android app for it.

Here are several terrific articles comparing the various cloud storage services:

• Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off   (The Verge) The table at the end is particularly helpful.
• Cloudbusting: SkyDrive vs. Live Mesh vs. Google Drive vs. Dropbox (Paul Thurrott)
• Google Drive vs. the competition, pricing plans and perks, compared (Engadget)

If the warning above annoys you as much as it does me whenever you open an attachment in Outlook 2010 (or outlook 2007) the video below shows you how to get rid of it.

[Note: This is a reprise of an earlier post where I showed how to do this in the context of Outlook 2007.]

There is a known video rotation issue when importing videos into Windows 7 that were taken in landscape mode with the iPhone 4 and 4S . In Windows, iPhone videos will be upside down if, when you took them, you held the iPhone horizontally with the recording on/off controls at the top. Turns out that if you want your video to be right-side-up when importing them to the PC you will need to hold the iPhone upside down when taking the video.

Also, all videos taken in portrait mode on the iPhone will appear sideways when imported onto the PC. There is no way to take portrait videos on the iPhone 4 and 4S without them appearing sideways on the PC.

In the video below I show you how to use the terrific free ‘Freemake Video Converter’ app to solve this problem by rotating your imported videos to the proper orientation.

See also this video tutorial made by Freemake on the same topic.

To be fair, this is not an issue when importing iPhone videos onto an iMac. This is only a problem when importing them onto a PC. As I understand it, the problem lies with the fact that Apple uses proprietary orientation meta data that the PC can’t read. Interestingly, YouTube reads these videos just fine. No need to re-orient them before uploading. For more information, this issue is being discussed at length on numerous Apple support forums threads including here, here and here.

Note 1: In the video above I used Freemake video Converter version 2.2.0. If you have eagle eyes, you’ll notice in the video that a newer version, 3.0.1, was available for download at the time I made the video. I have since updated to version 3.0.1 and can confirm that the process for rotating videos is EXACTLY the same in both versions.

Note 2: When installing be sure to uncheck the various check boxes or you’ll end up with unwanted toolbars and other settings changes. Grr!! I don’t recall having to do guard against this silliness in prior versions.

GRRR!!! And, unless you want plugins in your browsers, uncheck these on the next page as well!

If you are interested, here is the video that you watched me convert in the demo above:

This is my wife, Dani Shaw, taken on December 10, 2011 during our honeymoon at Waipio Valley on the Big Island of Hawaii. The video starts off with us having some fun with a giant green bean. We then continue on towards Hi’ilawe Falls – a beautiful waterfall that is more than 1,400 feet high, the highest in Hawaii!

There is a known Windows 7  rotation issue with portrait photos taken with the iPhone 4 and 4S. Unlike with the 3G or 3GS, photos taken in portrait mode on the iPhone 4 and 4S do not auto-rotate when imported in to Windows 7. This is the case: (i) whether you sync your photos via iCloud; or (ii) whether you physically import them via USB; even when you explicitly set the Windows import utility to auto-rotate them on import. The issue is being discussed here, here , here and here on the Apple support forums and here on the Microsoft support forum.

To make matters worse, a good portion of these photos end up locked in such a way that you cannot subsequently rotate them with the various photo rotate tools built in to Windows 7 (see error message in the image above).

While there are any number of hacks and workarounds discussed in the Apple support forums, I found the easiest solution is to use the free JPEG Lossless Rotator app. When you install the app, make sure you select the ‘Integrate JPEG Lossless Rotator with shell’ option (circled in red below).

After installation, when you right click on a locked iPhone 4/4S image (or group of images) in Windows Explorer, you’ll have two new rotate options (circled in green below):

Without JPEG Lossless Rotator, the rotate functions built in to Windows Explorer (circled in red above) often do not work. You’ll hear a Windows 7 something’s-gone-wrong ‘clank’ noise and the ‘Rotation’ error popup shown above will appear . If, however, you choose one of the new ‘Lossless Rotate …’ options (circled in green above) the image (or group of images) always rotate as expected. Presto! Easy as pie. And, as the app’s name implies, without any loss in image quality.

The key benefit of this scanner is that I can scan into any app that accepts images or documents. Most importantly for me, it scans directly into Evernote. I’m finally able to ‘easily’ get rid of any number of rag-tag pieces of paper that collect with odds and sods of information.

I have a Brother copier, printer, scanner but its too difficult to use. To scan documents on it I have to, place it in the scanner, close the lid, press a whole bunch of buttons, open the archaic Brother ‘Control Center 3’ software, scan in the document (at a glacial speed) where it store the document somewhere on my computer. From there I have to find it, sort it, open it and do something with it.

With the Doxie, on the other hand, I just place the paper in the scanner, press the Doxie button, it scans (faster than the Brother) then it asks where I want to send it (to Evernote, Flicker, Paint.net, Google Apps, most any app on my PC) and then it sends it to where I want it stored/used.  It’s so much easier. There is no file where the document/image is stored on my PC unless I want it.

The only issue I have with it is that I still have not found a way to scan directly into OneNote. For now I scan into Paint.net, then copy it over to OneNote.

Bottom Line, it’s fast, easy, and exactly what I need.

As my friends know, I’m a Charlie Rose fan (witness this earlier Charlie Rose post) and a U.S. political junkie. Over the last 15 years, with TiVo at the ready, I have rarely missed an episode.

I’m also an admirer of the Pulitzer price winning, George Will, a level-headed, conservative-leaning, syndicated Washington Post columnist that appears weekly on the ABC Sunday morning news show This Week.  While an ‘admirer’, I often (perhaps, usually) disagree with him. George can fairly be characterized as both a thoughtful and principled Republican pundit. I, on the other hand, would characterize myself as a centrist – a fiscal conservative and social liberal. If I could vote in U.S. elections, I would be an Independent.

On August 9, 2011, Charlie Rose interviewed George Will for the hour (you can watch the full interview here – click on the image of George on that page to start the video).  George happily states that he’s a proud Madisonian – the fundamental characteristic of which is the notion that the U.S. Constitution imposes ‘a government full of blocking mechanisms’ that make it extremely difficult (usually taking a lot of time) for things to change – including for progress to be had and fundamental justice to be realized.

This is one area where I profoundly diverge from George – the belief that this is necessarily or always a ‘good’ thing. At the 18:34 mark in the interview, George states:

“I can think of nothing that the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they did not get. The system works!” 

The inference being, that George Will (and James Madison) have no problem with the fact that it too frequently takes years, decades, life-times, sometimes centuries for Congress and the courts to eventually get things right. I acknowledge that,  throughout U.S. history, Congress (and the courts) have often, finally, got things right. Examples abound:

• non-property holders eventually getting the vote
• emancipation of the blacks after almost a century
• women getting the vote
• blacks achieving equal rights
• prohibition being overturned
• Catholics being permitted to marry Protestants
• Christians and non-Christians being permitted to marry
• blacks and whites being permitted to marry
• women getting the right to divorce an abusive husband
• women achieving the right to safe and legal abortions
• gays having the right to serve openly in the military

What George touts as a fundamental strength of the U.S. constitution is, I believe, a fundamental weakness – it’s structure results in citizens often having to wait years, decades, lifetimes (often in extremely hostile, dangerous, discriminatory circumstances) for fundamental fairness and justice to be realized.

I often wonder how it is that Madisonians can be contented with this state of affairs. Aside from the obvious benefit of this leading to stability (and I acknowledge the benefits of stability), I can only conclude that the people who want ‘stability at all costs’ (that which the ‘Sainted’ James Madison seemingly wanted) are the people that are generally happy with the state of affairs – typically well-off white men and women who have rarely been adversely affected by the glacial slowness of the U.S. constitutional structure’s mechanism for brining about  fundamental change. 

While I admire much about the U.S. and, in many ways prefer it over my native Canada, to my mind, when it comes to fundamental justice, human rights and the ability for people to ‘pursue happiness’, Parliamentary systems such as those found in Canada and Europe have it much closer to ‘right’ than the U.S. system. I prefer a government that permits faster change, or as George will derisively characterized such governments, those that can act more “nimbly, decisively, boldly and constantly”. It’s this kind of government that solved the policy problems listed above far faster than did the U.S. Often decades earlier. While the U.S. continues to flounder, parliamentary governments have long since:

• provided universal health care to their citizens
• eliminated the death penalty
• legalized abortions
• allowed gay people to marry
• imposed reasonable gun control

People often wonder why I’m a U.S. political junky and rather indifferent to Canadian politics. One reason is because Canada has largely solved all the social problems that I care about. Another reason is that the remaining issues I care deeply about aren’t on the Canadian political radar and likely never will be in my life time. These issues include:

• a common market/currency with the United States and Europe
• true free trade between Canadian provinces
• abolishing the monarchy
• eliminating ‘Canadian Content  Rules’
• deregulation of the broadcast and telecom industries
• eliminating foreign competition rules
• increased consumer-friendly intellectual property laws
• decrease in the duration of patent and copyright protection
• the elimination of software patents
• stronger defense policy more willing to intervene with other Western democracies to gradually rid the world of authoritarian dictators.

I am willing to pay the price of a greater degree of instability in exchange for a system that brings about fundamental fairness, justice and common sense social policies at a quicker pace.

I profoundly disagree with George Will. The U.S. constitutional structure is broken. And, given the hyper-polarized nature of U.S. politics today, I don’t see how it can be fixed in my lifetime.

When I purchased the Nexus S at the local Rogers store a couple weeks ago the sales people assured me that this was not possible –that I’d have to pay Rogers a separate, extra $5 fee each month to turn tethering on. Turns out the  Rogers guys were wrong – at least in the case of the Nexus S. No doubt this is true for all other non-Nexus branded Android devices. I bought the Nexus S primarily because it is a stock Google Android phone with no carrier-futzing limiting what it can do.

Despite being told it wouldn’t work, I got around to testing it out today. I set up a portable hotspot on my Nexus S called ‘Dale’s Android Hotspot’ – see instructions below. I turned on my iPad, opened the Wi-Fi settings and, voila,  it saw the ‘Dale’s Android Hotspot’ (see image on the right). I typed in the password, fired up mobile Safari, and had full Internet access through my Nexus S hot-spot. Email worked too. Wonderful!

This means that when I’m out and about with my laptop or iPad, I can access the Internet from anywhere I can get 3G access (subject, of course, to Rogers wireless data caps and overage fees). Heck, I can even use this hotspot to connect my now SIM-less iPhone 3GS to the Internet.

I’m very happy about this.  I’m love’n my Nexus S more and more every day!!

How to Setup the Nexus S as a Portable hotspot:

• Go to the Android’s Settings screen
• Select ‘Wireless & networks’
• Select ‘Tethering & Portable hotspot’
• Click the checkbox beside the ‘Portable Wi-fi hotspot’
• Click on the ‘Portable Wi-Fi hotspot settings’ item
• Click on the ‘Configure Wi-Fi hotspot’ item
• Name the hotspot in the ‘Network SSID field’ – I named mine ‘Dale’s Android Hotspot’
• On the security pull-down menu select ‘WPA2 PSK’
• Type in your desired hotspot password
• Click ‘Save’

That’s it. Now turn on your iPad, iPod touch, laptop, whatever, search for the named hotspot, type in the password and you are off to the tethered races.

Today I received an email from Seppo Sahrakorpi of Pilvi Computing announcing his new ‘Streaming Guide’ which links to all the disparate TV streaming offerings available to Canadians. I tested it and it works well. The interface is rather sparse, yet simple and effective.  It’s a simple alphabetical list of all TV shows that can be watched online in Canada. You can sort by various genres.

While this worked well on my PC, unfortunately, owing to the iPad’s lack of support for Flash, I couldn’t get any of the shows I tested to work on my iPad.

Putting this together must have been an awful lot of work. What’s more, to keep it up-to-date, will require a herculean ongoing effort. Let’s hope Seppo is up to the task!  Thanks for all the hard work Seppo.

NOTE: Last I tested it, Hotspot shield still allowed Canadians full access to Hulu.

Zappos Canada was one of the rare exceptions. Sadly, as I turned to Zappos Canada to order a pair of running shoes today I found this depressing message (click image for larger view):

This week, Netflix launched its long awaited and much coveted Netflix Canada service. Unfortunately, the content selection cupboard is mostly bare.

The limited offerings (and lack of DVD service) explains the $7.99 Cdn per month price. The minimum monthly fee that Americans pay for their Netflix service is $9.95 U.S.. For that they get a DVD-by-mail service and a substantially broader array of on-demand offerings.

Limited Launch Offerings:

Browsing through their movie and TV offerings, it appears that there are only about 100 older movies available – too many of which are third-rate movies. There are no new movie offerings.

There are only 18 TV series available at launch, with Heroes seasons 1, 2, 3 and 4 constituting four of the 18.  Mad Men seasons 1, 2 and 3, but not any of the current Season 4, make up another three of the 18. Several of the available TV series I’ve never heard of (Hoarders, Paranormal State, The Boondocks, Drop Dead Diva?). Aside from Heroes and Mad Men, there are no other past or present broadcast or cable network prime-time hit TV series available at all.

Happily, the service is not chock-a-bloc full of the made-in-Canada TV content that riddle the Canadian versions of the Apple TV & Xbox 360 on-demand services. In fact, there isn’t a single made-in-Canada movie or TV show available through the service.

Hardware Access Options

To access the service in Canada you will need any of a PS3, Wii, PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The service will be available through the Xbox 360 “soon”. Surprisingly Netflix is not offering the service through the popular Roku device in Canada. Nor will it be available through TiVo as it is in the U.S.

No DVD-by-Mail Service

Canada’s Zip.ca (a rather poor Canadian alterative to Netflix) will be breathing a huge sigh of relief this week. Netflix will not be offering the DVD-by-mail service that made them a hit in the U.S (see ZNF for more details). In my opinion, this is just as well. Getting content via shiny disks whether through retail or the mail is set to go the way of the buggy whip.

One Month Free Trial

Until December 31, 2010, Netflix Canada is offering a 1 month free trial to new members. Click on the picture to the left to read the details or go to the Netflix Canada website for more info. There’s no real rush however.  This promo will likely be repeated in the future as it is frequently repeated and available to new U.S. customers.

Competitive Services

Both AppleTV Canada and the Xbox 360’s native movie/TV show on-demand services available in Canada offer substantially more content than does the initial Netflix Canada offering. Sony has still not launched a PS3-based on-demand video service in Canada. The native Rogers, Bell etc. made-in-Canada Internet-based on-demand services are poor by comparison, consist mostly of made-in-Canada content and/or are only accessible via PCs.

Canadian ISP Bandwidth Cap Issue

In the U.S. a typical ISP offers 200+ Gigabytes of bandwidth per month. In Canada the typical Bell/Rogers/Shaw/Videotron monthly bandwidth cap is set to 60 GB or less. If you purchase the typical Canadian higher-end (and more expensive) offerings you can get from 90 to 120’ish GB a month. Medium to high usage of Internet-based on demand video services such as Netflix will quickly eat away into your available monthly broadband caps. Canadians that exceed these paltry bandwidth caps face per GB overage fees. Watch your monthly Internet usage meter closely.

Possible Throttling Issue

Canadian ISPs may throttle video-on-demand services such as this. Most now throttle Bittorrent traffic through peak-usage hours – typically between 5pm to 2am – the very hours that Canadian consumers are most likely to use on-demand video services. If this happens, the quality of your picture may degrade substantially or the service may not be reliably available at all during these times.

In fairness, I have not, yet, faced this problem with Apple TV nor the Xbox 360 on-demand services. But video on-demand services like this compete with the cable and Internet-based video offerings of Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Videotron etc. Canadian ISPs therefore have commercial incentives to make the Canadian consumer experience with competitive services such as Netflix a poor experience. Unless and until Canada adopts net neutrality regulations, this will remain a significant possibility.

Hope for Improvement

At launch, there isn’t a single movie or TV show available through the Netflix Canada service that I haven’t seen that I’d want to see. For the time being, Apple TV still provides the most comprehensive, Internet-based, video on demand to the TV service available in Canada.

But, Netflix is an amazingly adaptive company with a terrific best-in-class service in the U.S. I’m delighted to see that they have entered the Canadian market and  look forward to their Canadian offering becoming comparable to their U.S. service over time.

At this moment I can access each of:

• Hulu: I can access full episodes of shows on Hulu now. Below, for example, is Episode 2 of Season 1 of MasterChef:

• Pandora: I had happily used Pandora for a long time before they cut off access to Canadians. I’m delighted that I can access it again.

• Live U.S. Open Tennis. One of the few things I missed after cutting the cable chord over a year ago was Grand Slam tennis. I can now watch U.S. network tennis broadcasts once again.

Each of these I cannot access from Canada without Hotspot Shield installed and activated.

There are two notable downsides.

• Annoying Banner Ads: While running Hotspot Shield, it places extremely annoying banner ads across the top of every websites I access. While I can click an ‘x’ on the banner to remove it, a new banner comes up with every new page I browse. I cannot find a way to shut this off.
• Intercepts Google Searches: When I do a Google search, Hotspot Shield intercepts the search and replaces it with its ‘private search’ results. I think I managed to shut this off by clicking on an option on the top right when this happened. Sorry, I forget the text of the option.
• Access to Blog Interrupted: I use Windows Live Writer to publish posts to my blog. I could not publish this post to my blog with  Hotspot Shield activated. Happily its easy to deactivate and activate with one click of the mouse. But this is annoying.

I, of course, do not want either of these. For Hulu and Tennis I guess I don’t mind that much because I can turn Hotspot Shield on and off for those specific uses. But I want Pandora to play in the background as I work away on my PC. I cannot stomach the above interference for normal day-to-day use.

Today iOS 4.0.1 was released. As you can see below it purports to include iPhone 3G performance fixes.

After futzing around with my updated iPhone 3G for an  hour I can report that the update has fixed the problem somewhat. Apps do start and function quicker than they have recently. But the device and its apps still run noticeably slower than pre-iOS4.

I’m still considering an Android but, for the time being,  am unlikely to completely abandon the iPhone. I’m  hoping future iOS updates continue to fix 3G performance issues. But, I’m not holding my breath.

I was listening to the above Episode 7 of the ‘This Week in Venture Capital’ podcast today, where Mark Suster interviews Dana Settle, a partner with Greycroft Partners.  See podcast summary here.

At the 8:35 minute mark, Mark and Dana discuss a new venture capital market segmenting trend where different funds are available to startups /ventures at different stages of their growth cycle. In this way VC’s can better focus on the different issues that affect startups at various stages.

I found this intriguing. I summarize the segments they discussed below:

Note: [CB] references below link to more info from CrunchBase on the applicable fund and its recent financings.

Super Angel / Seed Funds

• Funds with $25 million or less in capital
• Write cheques from $100K to $500K
• Funding pre-product in some instances
• Representative Firms: Founder Collective on east Coast, Dave McClure’s Felicity Ventures [CB], Jeff Clavier’s Softech [CB]. On west coast, CrossCut [CB] and Rincon Venture Partners [CB].

Early Stage Funds

• Smaller than traditional VC
• Funds with $50 to $125 million in capital
• Write cheques from $750K to $1 million
• They like to see a product launch with first cracks at revenue generation to prove the idea can be monetized
• Representative Firms: First Round Capital [CB], Greycroft Partners [CB], True Ventures [CB]

A Round Funds

• Funds with ~ $200 million in capital
• Write cheques from $2M to $3M
• Representative Firms: Foundry Group [CB], Union Square Ventures [CB], GRP Partners [CB]

B Round Funds (Traditional Growth/Equity Firms)

• Funds with ~ $400 million in capital
• Write cheques in the $10M range
• Representative Firms: Light Speed [CB], Battery Ventures [CB], DAG Ventures [CB], Matrix [CB], Polaris Venture Partners [CB]

Growth Equity Funds
(not discussed in podcast but mentioned in the podcast summary)

• Larger funds writing still larger cheques
• Representative Firms: General Atlantic [CB], Insight Venture Partners [CB], Summit Partners [CB], Francisco Partners [CB]

Of course few venture funds fall absolutely in any one of the above categories.

I’ve been waiting patiently for my Flipboard invite since its launch last week. I received my invite earlier today and have been playing with it ever since.

The generic Flipboard interface is nice, but, for me, its killer feature is its Twitter integration. I feel almost as excited about Flipboard as Robert Scoble .

At the moment I follow 74 terrific Twitter users. About 75% of their tweets contain links to interesting articles on topics dear to my heart. Flipboard turns this curated feed of news stories and blog posts into a beautifully personalized eZine. As I flip through Flipboard, instead of links to the stories in my Twitter feed, the first few paragraphs and accompanying picture from most of those linked stories are attractively and interactively displayed on my iPad. If I want to read the full story, I tap it and am instantly taken to the underlying story on its originating website.  Another tap and I’m back to my Flipboard eZine. See the demo below:

Its fast!

Flipping from page to page is instantaneous.

Until now, Twitterific was my twitter app of choice on the iPad. But, like all other Twitter apps, it doesn’t show the content of the underlying stories linked into my feed. Instead, the Twitterific feed contains clickable/tappable links to the stories. It can take from a few seconds to 30 or more seconds to load the underlying story on an iPad or iPhone. Frequently the story doesn’t load at all. When that happens I need to refresh the link or launch the story in Safari. Frustrating!

Not so on Flipboard. When I click a featured story, the webpage with the underlying story appears instantly. There seems to be some caching going on here. I note, however, that web pages linked into the ‘lesser’ stories, the ones contained in Flipboard’s side-bar tweets with links (ie: the ones not turned into the pretty story boxes in Flipboard), can take longer to load and can suffer the same fate as Twitterific linked stories.

Never-Ending eZine

From the early demos I had worried that there would be some kind of limit on how far back into my timeline Flipboard will allow me to go. There appears to be no limit. As long as I keep flipping, Flipboard keeps going further back. This is particularly exciting for me because unlike seemingly everyone else on Twitter, I like to take up my feed from where I left off and move forward. I can do this with Flipboard. Hooray!  Though, admittedly Flipboard is not designed to be used this way and it takes me some time to find where I left off – unlike the official Twitter app on the iPhone which does take you back to where you left off each time you return.

Emailing Stories from Flipboard

Another gripe I’ve had with Twitterific and all iPhone and iPad Twitter apps, is that when I want to email a story/link to someone, the link is copied into an empty email, but the subject line for the email message is usually something inane like ‘Message from Twitterific”. 

When you forward a linked story via email from Flipboard, the title of the story becomes the subject of the email. Wow, what a concept!

Feed Differences

When I compare my Flipboard feed to my Seesmic Twitter feed, for example, the contents of the feed ‘appear’ to be the same, but the tweets/stories are presented in somewhat of a different order. In Seesmic, like all other Twitter apps, the feed is reverse chronological. Flipboard, however, presents your feed in a quasi-chronological order. Rather than being precisely chronological the Flipboard feed seems to be arranged in an order that presents the feed in the most pleasing manner – remember it presents both the Twitter feed and the content of stories linked into the tweets, not just the 140 character twitter posts. But, it does provide the feed sort-of chronologically. For example, all the tweets in your feed from the last hour will generally appear within the last hour’s feed in Flipboard, but not in the precise chronological order that they were tweeted.

Feed Completeness

When reading the reviews over the last week it appeared as if Flipboard only presented a subset of the tweets in your feed. That did not seem to be the case for me. It was hard to compare my Flipboard feed to my Seesmic feed tweet for tweet because, as I mentioned above, the Flipboard feed is not presented in a strictly chronological order. But it did seem that the entirety of my Twitter feed was ultimately incorporated into my Flipboard feed.

This may be different for me than for other Twitter users though. I follow a relatively small list of Twitterers – 74 at the moment. Most people follow many more – hundreds and even thousands more.  I suspect that for those folks their Flipboard feed would be a subset of the originating Twitter feed. I limit the number of people I follow specifically because I want to read ALL their tweets. I was quite relieved that every tweet in my feed will continue to be fed into my  Flipboard feed. I’d appreciate it if others would leave comments below as to whether the entirety of their Twitter feed is presented in Flipboard.

One Gripe – No Classic RT Feature

While I can retweet a tweet using the new Twitter retweet function (which I dislike), I can’t directly RT the old way. Flipboard doesn’t even include the ‘/via’ RT option. RT’ing can be jerry-rigged however. Flipboard does allow you to reply to any given tweet. You can use the reply box to add an RT before the @name that is generated this way. Then you can copy and paste the tweet into the reply box to create an old fashioned RT.  A bit clumsy, but workable for now – especially since you can copy the underlying tweet with just two taps.

Another Gripe – Stability

In the first two hours of testing I had two problems. For a few minutes the app wouldn’t load my feeds on start. It took about 5 minutes of repeated restarting before the feeds loaded. Also the app just froze on me several times. Clearly there are still some bugs to be worked out.

[Update: Several days in now, the app continues to freeze me out periodically]

Originating Tweet Oddity

When a tweet is ‘featured’ in Flipboard, ie: when a link within it is surfaced to a story block within the Flipboard eZine, the text of the person’s tweet does not appear on the main presentation page. If you tap the story-stub to see more of it, you can then see the originating tweet. From this sub-page, if you swipe from page to page you CAN see the originating tweet above each story. However, this view is substantially less compelling than the eZine format. I don’t like this ‘compromise’. I’d rather have the tweet appear above the featured story on the prettier main page. This limitation is hard to describe. You have to see it to understand.

[Update: A few days in and I still don’t like this. It makes Flipboard less personal than using Twitterific. This design choice arbitrarily cuts me off from the comments my friends are making ab0ut the stories they are linking to. It limits my choices to either a pretty but impersonal feed, or a more personal, but less compelling, even kind of clunky, feed.]

Refresh Oddity

When reading a Twitter feed for, say 20 minutes, once you get to the end, you apparently can’t refresh your feed while within Flipboard. Rather, if you wish to see the tweets that have been posted during the last 20 minutes of reading, you have to close out Flipboard and start it up again. Weird.

Will it Pass Legal Muster?

I worry that the likes of the New York Times (see Pulse controversy) and Rupert Murdoch may try to sue Flipboard out of existence. As I understand it, Flipboard uses a combination of RSS and website scraping and caching to make this service possible. It is not clear whether doing this is legal. Rather than rehash this issue, I refer you to this Gizmodo article on the topic.

More to Explore

I haven’t yet looked at Flipboard’s Facebook integration. You can also apparently construct other customized Flipbook feeds from Twitter lists, RSS feeds and such. There’s lots more to explore.

[Update:  I have now played with the Facebook integration. It’s nice to see family and friends photos on Flipboard, but I do not use Facebook as a primary source of news. So as I figured, for me the Facebook integration is less compelling than the Twitter integration.]

Regardless of any other features, Flipboard will undoubtedly be my defacto iPad Twitter reader going forward. The Twitter integration alone makes it a game changer – or dare I say, a killer app.  Scoble would be proud!

Leo Interviews the writers/creators of the wildly successful ‘I’m on a Horse’ Old Spice commercial. They explain, step by step, how Isaiah Mustafa got from the shower to the horse.

Having recently updated my Adobe Flash Player software for the umpteenth time on two different PCs, I discovered that if you download and install it in the normal way, you end up with a new and unwanted Adobe Download Manager Firefox extension that cannot be removed.

Here’s how to avoid this:

On the Adobe Flash Player download page, uncheck the “Free McAfee Security Scan Plus” option (who knows what that will add to your machine), then click on the yellow “Agree and install now” button:

This will take you to a ‘Thank You!’ page where the little yellow ‘Firefox prevented this site [yada yada from installing something] bar comes across the top of the browser . DON’’T click on the Allow button as normal:

INSTEAD, click on the ‘click here for troubleshooting information’ option’. This will take you to a ‘Common Flash Player download and installation issues (Windows)’ page. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will find the ‘If you are still having problems…’ option to download the  most current ‘install_flash_player.exe’ executable directly by clicking on the “Flash_Player_10_ Plugin_(All_other_Windows_ browsers)” option.

Run the executable and you will install the latest Flash plug-in, without the unwanted addition of an unnecessary and unremovable Firefox extension.

Note: The narrated video above is hard to see because its dark. It is easier to see it on full screen. See the non-narrated version of the same event (below) taken 5 minutes earlier. It is a bit easier to see.

A few days after a man was arrested in front of my building with gasoline tanks and various items that could be used as weapons (see pictures below), a largish Toronto G20 protest took place under my window.

There were about 75 to 100 sit-in style protesters on Toronto’s The Esplanade, between Scott and Lower Jarvis (about 1/2 mile from the G20 fences). The protestors blocked the road, stretching about 5 people wide, between the Keg on one side of the street and the Novotel (where low-level G20 officials are staying)  on the other. Easily 100 to 150 police in full riot gear showed up in successive waves. While an initial group of police surrounded the protesters (2 lines, 2 officers deep), another phalanx of police organized at Front and Scott. They marched in formation (about 5 x 25), banging batons on shields with each step. After that group arrived, the police arrested the protestors one by one – dragging them into a dozen or so waiting paddy wagons as two helicopters hovered overhead. While all that took place a dozen or so police per street corner blocked all adjacent streets ensuring that no more protestors could arrive.

Non-Narrated Version of Video recorded 5 Minutes Earlier

At first the protestors chanted ‘Peaceful Protest’, ‘Peaceful Protest’. After most were dragged away, the  chant changed to ‘Let us go”, “Let us go”. That didn’t get them very far. All those that were sitting on the road were taken away. There seemed to be a smaller group that had been standing on the sidewalk that were permitted to stay – surrounded by police for hours after.

Of course this shut down our normally happy, bustling neighborhood. During the event, which lasted a few hours, I was a prisoner in my building. I wasn’t permitted to go out the front door – even to go to the convenience store 20 steps away.

The pictures below are of the man arrested three days ago (June 24) for having a weird car with gasoline cans in it and weird makeshift weapons including a cross bow.

Gas tanks, chain saw, cross bow, pick etc.

The man that was arrested

Hazmat Suit Guys
(there ended up being no hazardous chemicals or bombs)

Odd Looking Car and lots of police
(my building in behind)

See Also: TiPb’s terrific iOS4 Walkthrough.

* Requires iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 3rd generation
** Requires iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4

Be Warned: Downloading and installing the update takes awhile. It took iTunes and my 16 GB iPhone well over an hour to be updated.

—–

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

• Multitasking support for third-party apps*
  – Multitasking user interface to quickly move between
     apps
  – Support for audio apps to play in the background
  – VoIP apps can receive and maintain calls in the
     background or when device is asleep
  – Apps can monitor location and take action while
     running in the background
  – Alerts and messages can be pushed to apps using
     push and local notifications
  – Apps can complete tasks in the background
• Folders to better organize and access apps
• Home screen Wallpaper*

• Mail improvements
  – Unified inbox to view emails from all accounts in one
     place
  – Fast inbox switching to quickly switch between
     different email accounts
  – Threaded messages to view multiple emails from the
     same conversation
  – Attachments can be opened with compatible third-
     party apps
  – Search results can now be filed or deleted
  – Option to select size of photo attachments
  – Messages in the Outbox can be edited or deleted
• Support for iBooks and iBookstore (available from the
   App Store)
• Photo and Camera improvements
  – 5x digital zoom when taking a photo**
  – Tap to focus during video recording**
  – Ability to sync Faces from iPhoto
  – Geo-tagged photos appear on a map in Photos
• Ability to create and edit playlists on device
• Calendar invitations can be sent and accepted wirelessly
   with supported CalDAV servers
• Support for MobileMe calendar sharing
• Suggestions and recent searches appear during a web
   search
• Searchable SMS/MMS messages**
• Spotlight search can be continued on web and Wikipedia
• Enhanced location privacy
  – New Location Services icon in the status bar
  – Indication of which apps have requested your location
     in the last 24 hours
  – Location Services can be toggled on or off for
     individual apps
• Automatic spellcheck
• Support for Bluetooth keyboards*
• iPod out to navigate music, podcasts and audiobooks
   through an iPod interface with compatible cars
• Support for iTunes gifting of apps
• Wireless notes syncing with IMAP-based mail accounts
• Persistent WiFi connection to receive push notifications*
• New setting for turning on/off cellular data only**
• Option to display the character count while composing
   new SMS/MMS**
• Visual Voicemail messages can be kept locally even if
   they have been deleted from the server**
• Control to lock portrait orientation*
• Audio playback controls for iPod and third-party audio
   apps*
• New languages, dictionaries and keyboards
• Accessibility enhancements*
• Bluetooth improvements
• Better data protection using the device passcode as an
   encryption key* (Requires full restore.)
• Support for third-party Mobile Device Management
   solutions
• Enables wireless distribution of enterprise applications
• Exchange Server 2010 compatibility
• Support for multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts
• Support for Juniper Junos Pulse and Cisco AnyConnect
   SSL VPN apps (available from the App Store)
• More than 1,500 new developer APIs
• Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4
• iPod touch 2nd generation
• iPod touch 3rd generation (late 2009 models with 32GB
   or 64GB)

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guides for iPhone and iPod touch at:
    <http://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone>
    <http://support.apple.com/manuals/ipodtouch>

For more information about iPhone and iPod touch, go to:
    <http://www.apple.com/iphone>
    <http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch>

To troubleshoot your iPhone or iPod touch, or to view additional support information go to:
    <http://www.apple.com/support/iphone>
    <http://www.apple.com/support/ipodtouch>

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: 
    <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222>

Until recently I was using:

• iMap to sync email between Outlook, Google Apps Gmail and my iPhone/iPad;
• Google Calendar Sync to sync my calendar between Outlook and Gmail; and
• iTunes to sync contacts and calendar with my iPhone/iPad.

Until Google Apps Sync I had no way of syncing contacts between Outlook and Gmail. When iTunes version 9.1 crapped out and stopped syncing contacts and calendar with my iPhone (this was fixed in iTunes 9.2 by the way) I made the decision to pony up the $50 a year for Google Apps Premier which includes Google Apps Sync.

It was worth every penny. I am rid the sync hodge-podge described above. I now have an end-to end, email, calendar, contact sync solution across my PCs, Google Apps Gmail, my iPhone and my iPad.

The Problem – How to Sync Only Selected Contacts

I only want a relatively few current contacts synced from Outlook to Gmail, my iPhone and iPad – about 250 or so contacts. But, I have accumulated some 800 contacts including historic clients and colleagues from prior law firms, restaurants from when I lived in different cities, old friends I no longer keep in touch with and so on. I don’t want to lose these contacts but I also don’t want them cluttering up my Google Apps Gmail, iPhone or iPad contact lists.

While you can segregate contacts within different contact folders inside the Google Apps Sync account in Outlook, all contacts such segregated contacts continue to sync into the unified Gmail, iPhone and iPad contact lists – regardless of the contact folder structure you set up inside of Outlook.

The Answer – Move Older Contacts into a Segregated .PST File

This solution is essentially the same as the solution I used only to sync certain emails when I was using iMap (for example I don’t want archived emails synced to the server). However, in Outlook 2010, after Google Apps Sync is installed, it wasn’t particularly easy to figure out how to do this. Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up a separate PST file and how to create non-syncing contact folders within that file.

Create the New .PST File

In the Email view in Outlook 2010:

• Click the ‘Home’ tab
• Click the down arrow on the bottom right of the New Items icon
• Select “More Items”
• Select “Outlook Data File…”

• Select ‘Outlook data file (.pst)’
• Click OK

• A ‘Create or Open Outlook Data File” dialogue box will open (not shown)
• Navigate your PC’s C:\ drive (network drives work too) to where you want the PST file to reside.

Note: You can save the file anywhere on your system. I keep it within the hierarchy of directories that are backed-up each night.

• Give the PST file a name. I chose ‘Old Contacts”
• Click ‘OK’.

An empty new account item will appear on the left side of Outlook’s Navigation Panel with the name you gave it (see image on the right).

Note: You will not directly access your contacts from here.  Unfortunately, you can’t see this account as a separate account in the Contacts view panel (in the next image). But you can still use it as I describe below.

Create Non-Syncing Folders in the New PST File

Here’s the less-than-straight-forward part that took me awhile to figure out.

• Click on ‘Contacts’ view on the bottom left of Outlook’s Navigation Panel to bring up your contacts view (pictured to the right)
• Select the ‘Home’ tab
• Right click on any existing ‘Contacts’ group (as pictured) to bring up the required pull-down menu.
• Select the ‘New Folder…’ option

Note 1: Unlike what you see in the picture, you will likely only have one contact group called “Contacts’ under ‘My Contacts’ on the left.

Note 2: Do not right click on the ‘My Contacts’ heading. You’d think that that would be the logical place to right click to create a new contact group, but it isn’t.

In the resulting ‘Create New Folder’ dialogue:

• In the ‘Name:’ section, type the name of the new non-syncing contact folder you wish
• In the ‘Folder Contains’ section, select ‘Contact Items’
• In the ‘Select where to place the folder:’ section, scroll down to the new PST account you created (in my example Old Contacts’) and select it.  Note: This is THE critical step. By putting the new contact group in this segregated PST file, it’s contents will not be synced to Gmail, your iPhone/iPad etc.
• Click OK

That’s it!

You will now have a new contact folder (pictured in the image to the right), that is outside of the Google App Sync account folder structure.

Drag and drop all the contacts from your Contacts list that you do not want synced to Gmail, your iPhone/iPad to that new contact group. They will remain on your PC in Outlook but will no longer synced.

Contrary to what I read and heard on Twitter and multiple podcasts over the last week, I believe that Zuckerberg did not:

• self implode
• have a panic attack, or
• evade questions.

at last week’s D8 Conference. I think he acquitted himself well. Yes it was hot in there and he sweated a lot. Yes, he’s not an ideal public speaker. But at 26 years of age, for who he is, I think he did well.

At a few points there were noticeable gaps in time before he answered a question. Some characterized those gaps as a panic attack. I characterize it as the response of a careful and thoughtful person. Thinking before speaking is an admirable quality.

I understand why people disagree with Facebook’s privacy policies (most notably Jason Calacanis), but I don’t understand the rabid Facebook villainization I’ve  witnessed recently.

The D8 interview was interesting. Certainly the most insightful Zuckerberg interview I’ve seen.

Watch the video above (larger version here) and judge for yourself.

Unfortunately I’ve had to delete hundreds of spam comments over the last few days. Hopefully Disqus will soon get a handle on whatever technique comment spammers are using and put a stop to it. Otherwise I’ll have to seriously consider moving to IntenseDebate. Sorry about this.