The Instapaper Paradigm

Instapaper is a bookmarking service that lets you quickly save web pages you want to read later. You might find this useful if you subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, or follow lots of news sites on Twitter. I do both, and Instapaper has made me approximately a million times more efficient sifting through the information overload of RSS feeds and Twitter.

To use Instapaper, you go to the web site and set up an account. It needs an email address — that’ll be your login name — and you can choose to add a password if you want. Add a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks, and then whenever you come across an article you want to read later, just click the bookmarklet. The article is magically saved to your Instapaper account. So the next time you have a few minutes to catch up on reading, go to Instapaper.com and read your stored up articles.

There are a few other ways to get articles into Instapaper. Some RSS readers, like Google Reader, have an option to save individual articles to Instapaper. Also, some iPhone Twitter apps (Echofon Pro, for example), have Instapaper integration. So you can spend a quick few minutes scanning and saving articles you want to read later, then go to Instapaper to read them when you have more time.

And here’s where the magic really happens. There is an Instapaper iPhone app, which parses the text from the article, and presents them for easy reading on the iPhone. Actually, there are two apps. The free version is fairly robust, but only shows you 10 of your saved articles. It’s also ad-supported (the guy’s gotta pay the bills somehow). The pay version is $5, and honestly, it’s one of the best bargains in the app store. You can access all your articles, folders, and it’ll download articles in the background. Both versions allow offline reading, so you can save up a bunch of articles for a plane ride or somewhere you won’t be assured Internet access.

Instapaper has really changed the way I track and read news. It’s one of those services/apps that you don’t realize you need until you’re using it, and then you wonder how you ever managed without it. If you have an opportunity, give it a try.

iPhone 3GS

All the reviews said that there’s no point in upgrading to iPhone 3GS if you already have a 3G. It’s a point release, they said. Yeah, it’s a little faster. Yeah, the camera is a little better. But worth the non-upgrade price? No way.

Then explain why every time I went into an Apple store (which my husband will tell you is far too often for any reasonable human) I would spend much longer than I should have playing with the new, speedy device.

And don’t get me started about the camera.

I should explain how I use my iPhone. Or more specifically, how much I use my iPhone. It’s probably unhealthy, but it’s always with me. A couple seconds waiting in line? That’s plenty of time to check mail, Facebook, and Twitter. See something silly on the street? Out comes the camera.

I read somewhere recently (probably on an iPhone blog) that an iPhone app addict is someone who uses an app more than 100 times in a month. What’s the word if someone uses 100 apps in a day?

Anyway, details like speed and the camera matter. And for me, that was what finally pushed me over the edge. So while I’m loath to admit it, I did it. Ignored all rational reasoning, including the fact that I’m 6 months away from the upgrade price – and got the 3GS.

What’s good? Speed. Phenomenal. Apps, web pages, mail, everything is noticeably, significantly faster. Games that took a minute to load now just open. Mail downloads so fast I hit the reload button again because I can’t believe all my mail downloaded so quickly. Evernote, one of my favorite apps, but which has been sluggish since it started syncing docs and tags upon loading, is ready to go in the blink of an eye. Even dumb things like checking for app updates in the App Store – a task that took literally minutes just to tell me all my apps are up to date – now tells me in seconds if I have any new updates.

Some might argue that any new device fresh out of the box is going to be faster. And I’d agree, if I hadn’t restored the full force of my entire 3G backup onto the new iPhone.

So I’m a believer. Was it worth it? We’ll see how much I can get for the old device onto eBay. But it’s looking pretty good.

Oh, and as for the camera… well, I’ll let you decide.

WordPress for iPhone

I haven’t written for quite some time. No reason; just lazy, perhaps.

I’ve been furiously downloading apps, however, and happened across the WordPress iPhone app. It was interesting because, well, my blog is WordPress. So why not.

It seemed to connect to my blog easily enough. Unfortunately, it’s hard to edit existing entries, because it’s HTML. I guess that’s not too big a deal, but I am, at my core, lazy. But this entry seems to be fine as rich text.

The one giant advantage this app has over iBlogger is that it has a landscape keyboard. I’m still shocked that iBlogger does not, and that it hasn’t been updated at all.

So this may work.

We’ll test pictures out soon.

How to Type Faster on the iPhone

According to The AppleBlog guy, if you just give in to the keyboard and try to type while looking at the words you’re typing, you’ll go a lot faster.

Not just yet. I’ll need to practice some more.

+++++++

About 3 weeks later….

I’ve been practicing the touch type method, and I have to say, I might be a believer. It’s a little more difficult when punctuation or numbers are introduced, but if you can resist the urge to correct every little thing, it works reasonably well.

Now if I could have copy/paste…

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Importing Blogger Posts into WordPress

WordPress is my new blog platform. No particular reason other than I like the idea of someone other than Google hosting my stuff. It’s simple to use, and it has the features I need.

The real catalyst was that iBlogger, my iPhone blogging app, lets you upload to Blogger, but doesn’t support uploading photos. It supports photo uploads to most other platforms, including WordPress. So I tried it.

My other issue with Blogger was the line breaks and Ecto, my offline blog app on the Mac, weren’t compatible. I had to set some line break setting Blogger for the paragraphs to work right.

I moved my personal blog over to WordPress a week or so ago. It was pretty easy; WordPress has utilities for importing from several different blogs, including Blogger. You click an Authorize button, and *poof!* your blog posts came over.

My personal blog has been working well, so I decided it was time to switch my Tech blog over. Went to the Import utility, click Authorize, and — doh! — error on Blogger. Something about http://wordpress.com not being registered.

I searched all over the support site and didn’t find anything, but finally found a workaround in the WordPress Forums — which I will endorse as a spectacular way to find information about WordPress.

The workaround is:

1. In Blogger, go to your Settings > Basic > Blog Tools > Export Blog.

2. Click on Download Blog. It’ll save as an .xml file.

3. Go to http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/ and find the .xml file and click Convert. It’ll save as a WordPress.xml file.

4. In WordPress, go to Tools > Import > WordPress.

5. Find the WordPress version of the .xml file you just converted and click Upload File and Import.

Simple, and it works.

Do Not Get an Anti-Glare Screen Protector

I needed a new screen protector for the iPhone, so I picked up a new one. I didn’t know what kind to get, so ended up getting an anti-glare screen.

It went on really well, and fits even better than the old screen protector. And it feels great; it’s a teeny bit more tacky than the old one, which I like.

But it’s coming off. Looks terrible. Makes the whole screen fuzzy and gray. I can see how it can help in bright light situations, but I’m ok squinting.

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Bamboo Fun Tablet

I’ve never been all that interested in the idea of handwriting recognition on electronic devices. I used early versions of PDA that used Graffiti, and I didn’t like them because even after I’d learned the appropriate keystrokes for letters, it only worked sometimes. (I freely admit it was more because I never had the patience to get really good at it. Will used to swear by it, and he was, in fact, a Graffiti pro. He still laments the demise of the old Newtons that first had it. But I digress.)

Since I’ve had the Macbook Pro, I’ve spent a LOT of time in electronics stores browsing around for some new gadget to play with. Something that frequently caught my eye was the Bamboo tablet. It’s an external tablet and pen system that allows you to write or draw pictures in documents on your computer. It looked interesting, but I didn’t have an application for it, so I always passed it by.

The other day I was in my local electronics store and passed by it again. Maybe it was a moment of weakness, maybe I felt like I’d bought every other possible accessory in the store, or maybe I was just bored. But I decided to give it a whirl.

I’ll interject here that part of the intrigue was Evernote’s impressive handwriting recognition utility. I have been using the heck out of Evernote recently, and continue to be impressed by its ability to read handwritten notes. So I thought “hm, what if instead of jotting notes on paper, taking a picture of them, then adding them to Evernote, I write notes directly to an electronic file that gets added to Evernote.” It would let me skip the middleman — the paper — and get me one step closer to a paperless existence.

(Not that I really believe that a paperless office is realistic — you should see the amount of post-its I go through in a day. But it’s something.)

So with that tenuous possible application, I sprung for the Bamboo tablet.

Wacom, the makers of the Bamboo tablets, have been making tablets for PCs for years and years. Graphic designers use them all the time to make the beautiful pictures and icons that we see everywhere in the world. They recently (in the last year or so) developed some lower-end tablets for the home user to do things like simple picture editing, drawing, and handwritten notes to files.

The Bamboo line has 3 consumer versions. The most basic, called Bamboo, comes with a pen and a small tablet. The other two versions, called Bamboo Fun Small and Bamboo Fun Medium, come with a tablet, a pen, and a mouse. The Bamboo Fun tablets also include older versions of Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop Elements. The Small tablet has a 5.8″ x 3.7″ writing surface area, and the Medium tablet’s writing area is 8.5″ x 5.3″.

I bought the Bamboo Fun Small version which retails for $99. I’m not sure if I will ever end up using it as a primary notetaker, but it is a remarkable little device. It plugs into a USB port, and neither the pen nor the included mouse requires batteries. The mouse works fairly well, but it does have some drag on it, which makes it tiresome to use for long periods of time. The tablet is also much smaller than a normal mousepad, so it is easy to run off the tablet with the mouse.

The real life-changer is the pen, which can also be used as a pointing device. The tablet area represents the area of the computer screen, and wherever you point the pen is where the mouse pointer goes on the screen. You can double-tap to double-click, drag to scroll, and even right-click using the buttons on the pen. It takes some getting used to the eye-hand coordination required, but it is nice to have options besides the trackpad and the mouse.

The tablet itself also has configurable Express Buttons that can be mapped to different functions such as back, forward, or open a specific program. There is also a Touch Ring that allows you to scroll and zoom. Taken together, the tablet and the pen are an amazing combo of navigation.

I will eventually cover how notetaking works using the Bamboo Fun Tablet, and more importantly, how it works with Evernote. But for now, I’ll say that the tablet *is* actually fun, and has potential to be a very useful device.

AT&T’s Solution to the MMS-deficient iPhone

One of the annoyances I left out of my earlier post is that the iPhone doesn’t have MMS. I don’t usually care, but every so often someone who uses ANY OTHER CAMERA PHONE IN THE UNIVERSE sends me a picture.

AT&T; tries to help by creating a web site where you can view the picture or video. To keep the photo or video secure, AT&T; also gives you a message ID and password, each of which is about 9 characters long and includes letters and numbers. The URL, message ID, and password are all sent to your iPhone via SMS for you to view at your leisure. It’s a great idea.

It would be even better if the iPhone had *#(&%#$ copy/paste.

Irony?

iPhone (and Mac) News on the Web

What are some good web sites for iPhone news? How about Mac news? There are approximately a bazillion web sites and blogs dedicated to Apple. I know I haven’t found them all, but here are some of my favorites. Most have RSS feeds, making it very easy to stay on top of the latest news via my NetNewsWire reader.

General Mac / Apple News

MacWorld — The granddaddy of them all. Good for general news about all things Apple.

The Apple Blog — Good for tips and tricks on the Mac and the iPhone.

MacRumors — Keeps me up to date on the latest buzz. It’s usually the first place to break a story.

The Infinite Loop — Ars Technica’s Apple news. It seems smart, if you’re smart enough to understand any of it. I pick up a few gems here, but usually it’s a little over my head technically.

David Alison’s Blog — Dave switched from Windows to Macs a few months before I did, and began blogging about his impressions post-switch. He’s a smart guy (way, way smarter than me), and his blog has given me a lot of direction as I’ve set up my MacBook Pro and iPhone.

iPhone Apps

App Shopper — The holy grail of App Store addicts. This site keeps track of new and updated software. But what makes it a real gem is that it also tracks price changes, and has an RSS feed to the changes. Apps are always going on sale, and this site makes it easy to catch, say, an $8 dictionary app for $2. Gold.

AppCraver — Reviews of iPhone apps. Interesting and fun.

iPhone News

iPhone Freak — News about upcoming iPhone stuff.

iClarified — I’m not really sure who manages this site, but it’s usually the place I learn what’s new in jailbroken iPhones. I don’t have a jailbroken iPhone (and probably won’t), but it’s definitely interesting to see what’s out there.

What’s on iPhone — Mainly giveaway stuff, but lots of reviews of iPhone apps.

Things I Wish the iPhone Did (or what I haven’t figured out how to do)

There are a few things I wish the iPhone would do. They’re mostly minor, and it’s possible I just haven’t figured out how to do them. They are:

• When the iPhone is connected to iTunes, sync the calendar every time I add a new event. I don’t want to go through the whole backup/sync routine every time, but I do want to keep the calendar in sync when I’m connected. Windows Mobile / ActiveSync did this. Hm…
• Search contacts when using the keypad in the phone. The lack of this functionality is pretty shocking, as it has been on phones — even old crappy ones — since one could store contacts on the phone. There is a contacts icon in the Phone app and it’s fine if you’re in the right group and you don’t mind scrolling. But you can’t search. Very, very silly.
• Speed dial. Speaking of things every other phone in the world has. OK, so it does have Favorites, which is a reasonable substitute. But Apple is asking a lot to move away from the keypad as navigation tool. The reason it has worked for so long is that — uh — it works.
• Sync tasks from iCal. Are you kidding? How can you leave a core piece of the calendar app out of the iPhone.
• Copy/paste. This doesn’t get me as worked up as some people, but it is a bit of a pain sometimes. Frankly it’s not even about the copy, it’s about deleting large blocks of text en masse. (I make a lot of typing mistakes.)

I have workarounds for some of these.

• Phone keypad navigation and speed dial: SmartDial. Lets you do both. It’s a $.99 app and worth every penny.
• Tasks. Sadly, the workaround is to not use them on the iPhone. I have enough other to-do options that I’ll live. But when they add it, I’ll be a happy girl.
• Copy/paste. Lots of free apps in App Store that work your memory muscles. That way you have a better chance of remembering what you wanted to copy/paste.

Given everything I love about the iPhone, these are relatively minor annoyances. But still.