Source Jockey

Yep, just a photo:

As you all know, the iPhone 4 was released yesterday, much to the delight of Apple fans everywhere.  Like the iPhones before it, iPhone 4 offered a few new features, and improved on old ones.  In the last 24 hours, there have been tons of articles both praising and condemning the new device.

As a result of these articles, commenters from all over have gotten into arguments about the phone, most of which seem to have been summed up by, “You’re just a fanboy.”  What’s a fanboy, you ask?  A fanboy is someone who is blindingly attracted to a company and/or product, justifying its real or perceived shortcomings regardless of its consequence.

For example, there have been reported issues of Apple’s new iPhone showing reception problems when the phone is held in a somewhat common position in someone’s hand.  A rational person would say, “Gosh, that sounds like a problem.”  A fanboy, on the other hand, will defend the product, with claims like, “No one would actually hold it that way”, “Their hands must have been sweaty”, “They’re just haters because they don’t have it”, and “Every phone I’ve ever used does that”.

So am I a fanboy?  Actually, I am.  But I’m a selective fanboy, and my allegiances are petty.  Before I started using Apple computers regularly in 2002, I was a huge proponent of Microsoft.  While I was often frustrated with Windows and certain Microsoft software, I knew that the main alternative, Apple, just wasn’t ready yet.  But when Apple rolled out one of their big updates, I gave it a look–and so far, it’s been a winner.  I prefer using my Apple products, not just because they’re better for what I do, but because the support for them is far more complete.  Mind you, if Microsoft comes out with an operating system that fits my needs more completely, I will absolutely look into it.  At the moment, however, I’m happy with my Macs.  The iPhone?  It’s wonderful–but is not without its shortcomings.

So speaking of the iPhone…  Of the features people seem to like, we have:

• New design
• Front-facing camera & Facetalk (video conferencing)
• Better battery life
• Gyroscope
• Better sound
• Very high resolution screen

People DON’T like:

• Antenna problems (while my bars go down when I hold the phone in this “special way”, I don’t actually hold the phone like this normally.)
• Glass back.  Seems to be more fragile.
• Lack of 3G support for video chatting.
• App Store guidelines
• Lack of multiple carrier support in the United States

What do I think?  I think that the iPhone is probably the best phone produced *OVERALL*.  I need to qualify this.  There are definitely features missing from the iPhone that I feel should be there–features that should have been there since version one.  Features like:

• WiFi Tethering.
• Bluetooth/Wifi/wireless sync for apps/music to the computer.
• Bluetooth file transfer
• Customizable notification sounds/options, like scheduling profiles, etc.

I have an Android phone–it does pretty much everything I want it to do.  So why isn’t it my main phone?  It’s not as reliable as my iPhone.  It’s not as fast.  It’s not as polished.  The battery is inconsistent.  The camera, while higher in pixels, is lower in quality.

My analogy?  I like to drive on smooth, paved road.  While I want to offroad occasionally, it’s very rare.  The iPhone is like a sleek, luxurious, and expensive sports car.  It goes very fast.  It handles very well.  It has a few awesome bells and whistles–and they work perfectly–but I’m limited to the paved road.  The Android, on the other hand, is a sleek but utilitarian SUV.  It’s quick enough, but it can’t handle the corners too well.  It’ll go offroad, but even then, it takes its time.  It does everything–and more–but it just doesn’t do it that well.

Ok, I’ve typed enough.

To my Apple buddies:  Thank you for making the Apple experience, especially the iPhone 4 experience yesterday, such a pleasurable one.  Everything you did yesterday was professional, courteous, and cheerful, despite the amount of time each of you put into making the iPhone launch a success.  Last night, I heard that you worked all night until every customer who had been promised an iPhone, got one. While I got mine at 11:30am on launch day, it goes to your dedication and priority of servicing the customer making sure everyone was happy.  I was helped by someone I never worked with or met before at the Pasadena store–but he followed the same paradigm that I have both come to expect and experienced as a customer of Apple: excellence.  I’ll keep coming back to 034 as long as you continue to be the best frigging Apple Store there is. (Sorry 001 transplants!)  Thank you again for being such dedicated and important members of the Apple family; you know that you’ve got a promoter right here.

(I originally wrote this as a status update on Facebook.  It doesn’t like status updates more than 420 characters.  So now it’s on my blog, hopefully to be imported by the Facebook importer.)

I use a lot of geek-speak.  It’s often that I’ll get into a [one-sided] conversation with someone, and realize that their eyes have glazed over–I’ve geeked them out.  So here’s a little primer on some of the more basic geek:

dSLR – A digital camera that is a lot bigger than your point and shoot; it has swappable lenses.  It’s great for all kinds of photography, but fails the pocket test.

RAID – A bunch of hard drives put together to act as one.

GSM/CDMA – AT&T/T-Mobile and Verizon/Sprint’s network types, respectively.  They don’t work together.

Kernel Panic – You know it as a blue screen of death.  It’s what happens when your computer sees something bad going down, and decides to pull the emergency brake to make sure something else bad doesn’t happen.  It DOES happen on Macs–but it’s a pretty gray screen.

Memory vs. storage – When you ask someone “how much memory” a computer has, you’re really asking how much RAM (random access memory) it has.  Storage is how big the hard drive is.  Here’s an analogy: You, a human, have a brain.  You can remember most of what you need to remember almost instantly.  That means your brain is a lot like RAM.  But you have a finite amount of storage space in your head.  So when you need to look up information, you go to a library–that would be your hard drive.  You can “temporarily” store the info in your head until you’re done with it–then you probably forget it.  That’s how memory (RAM) works.  The more memory your computer has, the less often it needs to look at the hard drive (the books in a library) to get information.

BKAC Error – You should be offended if someone says this…  This means the error is Between the Keyboard And Chair. You.

Web Design vs. Coding – This one hits close to home.  Web designers are the visual architects of the web.  They make web sites LOOK a certain way.  If a page looks ugly, you can blame them.  Web Coders (or developers) make web sites WORK a certain way.  If it’s hard to get a credit card payment done, or the sign-up process for a web site is a pain in the butt, it’s their fault.  Web designers often cannot code, and web coders often cannot design.  If you see a gorgeous web site that doesn’t have any functionality, or a butt-ugly web site that works great, you know why.  Most firms have both.

Need a word/phrase defined?  Let me know.

On Friday, I had a small disaster.  My iMac’s hard drive failed.  I don’t know what happened exactly, but I’m assuming it’s some kind of hardware failure.  While I have backups, I haven’t gotten around to actually setting them up since I moved the computer from one room to another.  Fortunately, I was able to recover 100% of my data, so life is good.  While I was thinking about it, though, I realized that I have three old hard drives that I haven’t really looked at in a while.  Two of them turned out to be dead.  The last one, however, contains files from 2002-2006–and also contains emails back from 1997…  So I spent part of the night look through them–and it brought back some fun nostalgia.

Originally, I was not going to buy the iPad.  In fact, after seeing the Apple keynote presentation highlighting it, I felt somewhat irritated by the fact that Apple had not released a full-on convertible tablet (that’s a laptop that swivels into a tablet, or something).  No, instead they created their own idea.  The iPad.

So I went to the Apple Store in Pasadena to get my laptop checked out, and while there, looked at the iPad.  People were flocking around the display tables, happily playing with the iPad, much like they did with the iPhones when THOSE came out.

When it was my turn, I immediately opened up the applications I knew I would use most: Mail, Safari, Pages, and the iPod.  What I saw absolutely blew my mind.  Steve Jobs described using the iPad as “magical”, and honestly, that IS a bit over the top.  But the interface is smooth, tight, and extremely usable.  As they say, it just works.

But really, where does this thing fit into my life?  I bring my laptop virtually everywhere, and my netbook is only a little bigger than my iPad.  And that’s where the comparison really starts…  How is the iPad worse than my laptop?  How is it better than the netbook?  Well, as it turns out, there are OTHER applications that I use with the iPad that REALLY make it shine…

iBooks: That’s the book reader.  It’s amazing.  My father has a Kindle (that I appropriated, as he didn’t like it), and it was a pretty stellar experience.  The iPad destroys it.  Page turns are faster, quieter (that button clicking sound on the Kindle is obnoxious), and prettier.  It’s an overall better experience.  Mind you, the Kindle app that is available is pretty nice, too–but Apple knows how to make an interface.

Netflix:  If you have a Netflix account, and enjoy watching movies on your laptop with it, the iPad is even better.  The iPad doesn’t get hot.  It saves your place.  It’s got a decent resolution, so it’s not horrible to watch.  it’s enjoyable.

Games: Every game I’ve played so far that has been designed for the iPad is a great experience–it’s so easy to get into it.

Anyway.  The iPad was an unexpected surprise–and definitely a great netbook replacement.  I highly recommend just playing with one–you’ll probably end up buying it.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a post against commercialized Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  I’m bringing it up again because I have had a few clients complain that they are not getting the site visits they expected.  Some have asked to add keywords in metatags, and others have simply asked what they are doing wrong.

First and foremost: Metatags are out.  Google officially does not use them, and from what I can ascertain, Yahoo and Bing do not weigh keywords very high when performing indexing.  I personally do not really care about the other search engines, but it’s likely that they have also come to the same conclusion: metatags are worthless devices for determining the actual content of a page.

So my advice?  Don’t focus on metatag keywords, descriptions, etc–set your sights on the REAL problem: you don’t have enough interesting content on your site.  Sure, you might have some neat content every month (hell, that’s just like my blog), but without a constant flow of new, original content, no one is going to care about your site enough to link to it.  The more the search engines perceive (yes, I’m personifying search engines) that you have a popular web site, the more they are going to steer people towards them.

And all this fuss and muss about the difference between organic and sponsored results?  Bull.  Pay for advertising on the search engines. Sure there are people out there who don’t click on sponsored results–but if they search for “Pasadena real estate lawyer”, and your web site “John Doe and Associates: doing Real Estate Law in Pasadena since 1492″ shows up, they’ll consider clicking on it.  Maybe they won’t–maybe they will–but you’ll be damned sure they won’t click on it if they can’t see it on page 12 of the search results.  Right?

So what should you take from this?  Update your site regularly with interesting, engaging content.  If you’re a personal trainer, write a paragraph a day about a new exercise or routine.  Don’t think of it as much as a blog as it is news.  Pay for advertising–when you’re they only shop in town, you don’t need to let people know who you are–but when you’re one of hundreds, you have to stick out.

All of you reading this have passwords of some sort.  While some of you might have very secure passwords, like y&3uEY0(“329Hf1d, most of you have easier passwords, like “password”, your name, birthday, etc.  You probably also have the same password for a lot of different sites, like Facebook, MySpace, your email account, or even your online banking.  I just read an interesting article, however, that brings up a very interesting point: hackers don’t aim for your accounts at banks, where there’s high-security; they aim for the low hanging fruit, like a greeting card site, then use the password they figure out from there to get into your bank account.

Make a stronger password for yourself, and use this password checker from Microsoft to see how strong it is.  Don’t worry, it won’t send your password to anyone.  But try to come up with good passwords so that people don’t hack you–anywhere.

Something a lot of you may not know about me is that I love music.  My taste is very eclectic, and there are a few genres I just flat out refuse to listen to.  But when I find an artist I like, I can listen to it forever.  I love class rock, and I’ve found myself downloading music from The Who, the Allman Brothers, etc, without thinking twice.

There’s another artist, however, that deserves special mention.  Kina Grannis is an awesome artist, who has loads of talent, and her new album, Stairwells, is an absolute pleasure from start to finish.  I highly recommend listening to it–and check out her other work, too.  (And if that’s not enough convincing, support a fellow Trojan!!)

Have you ever wanted a more secure password than that dingy four number password for your iPhone or iPod Touch?  Look no further than Apple’s Enterprise Support Page. You can download the Windows or Mac version of the iPhone configuration utility to change the password requirements of your phone.  (This really isn’t for the non-technical, but it’s neat nonetheless.)  In about 3 minutes, you can change your password requirements from four numbers to 32 alphanumeric (plus symbols) for the ultimate security.  You can also change options for how often you must change the password, how many bad attempts you can make before the phone wipes all the data automatically, whether or not you can reuse old passwords, and whether or not sequences are allowed.  Cool stuff!