I was playing around with Flickr late last night and uploaded a few Wildflower photos from my Spring Chautauqua hikes. The Bluebells start blooming in late April and are usually gone by June. They seem to change from blue to purple as they pass through the season and are quite spectacular when they are kind of bluey/purply. Anyhow, one blue phase photo and three purple phase turned out. Missed the mid phase this year.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23323057@N05/sets/72157606483474174/
Well after trying an Apple store once or twice more and discovering unless you are willing to get in line at 5am, you aren't gonna get an iPhone, I decided to to pretty much give up on getting one any time soon. However, I decided to stop by my local AT&T store just for the heck of it. Turns out, they actually have waiting lists! Simply prepay for the phone, select the model you want and they can tell you what the wait is for it. Sweet!!
I wanted a 16gig model. The black version had a 3 week wait, the white version 3 days. So yesterday it arrived and now I have it. Woo hoo!
My first impressions are this. The phone itself is definitely faster than the old phone. Pages pop much faster when surfing via wifi as compared to the old iphone. And if you use the iPhone sites I listed in a previous post there is a very noticeable difference.
On a daily basis I do a lot of web browsing and use more and more online tools. Google docs being a prime example. So I often keep 2 web browsers open, Firefox and SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is descendant of the old Netscape browser like Firefox. But unlike Firefox, SeaMonkey kept all the integrated applications (e-mail, chat, composer) in the browser. But since it is based on the same technology it is also very fast, stable etc...
SeaMonkey has a pluggable themes feature which allows you to swap out all the icons and such for a different look. I find the default theme to be a bit drab, making the browser seem dated. Fortunately I stumbled across a really cool theme to spruce things up. Check out Mostly Crystal. If you install the Linux theme, it seems to work fine. So if you use SeaMonkey, give it a try and add a little color to your browsing life. :)
I wanted to be able to print the current year in an HTML document, so I came up with this line of JavaScript code to do the job.
1:<script type="text/javascript">var today=new Date();
2:document.write(today.getFullYear());</script>
Here is the code for cutting and pasting.
<script type="text/javascript">var today=new Date(); document.write(today.getFullYear());</script>
Before my recent trip, I decided it was time for a redo for the all website links for my iPhone. On the Edge network, loading a normal web page is freaking painful. I swear it always takes 30 seconds just for the flash ads to fail.
So i decided to Google for a list of iPhone friendly sites. I found lots of iPhone focused mobile sites, lol, but not many links to normal news and sports sites. Anyhow, I found a few sites here and there. A lot of sites have a special iphone.domain.com or m.domain.com version of their site. I found a number of these that way. So without further ado, the list!
General News
CNN - http://m.cnn.com/
Fox News - http://iphone.foxnews.com/
Google News - http://www.google.com/m/news?source=mobileproducts&dc=gorganic
My Way - http://news.myway.com/index.html
New York Times - http://mobile.nytimes.com/
Yahoo - http://us.m.yahoo.com/
Sports
BBC Football - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/football/default.stm
ESPN - http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/redesign/index
Sports Tap - http://sportstap.mobi/
Tech News
CNET - http://m.news.com/2162-12_3-0.html
Engadget - http://mobile.engadget.com/
Lifehacker - http://mobile.lifehacker.com/
SiliconValley.com - http://m.siliconvalley.com/
Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/
And one final mention that is a must have. I have found the RSS reader built into the iPhone .... lacking. But the folks at Google hit a home run with their mobile reader. So for reading RSS feeds use:
Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/?source=mobileproducts&dc=gorganic
It is a great example of a well written web app for the iPhone.
I plan to keep looking for good sites and will repost this list periodically.
I have been digging into cookies a little bit more recently as I want to build a few simple tools with no backend. The idea would be to store JSON data in a cookie and just push and pull the objects when necessary. Often, finding the basic facts on a subject can be more difficult on the web than trying to find more esoteric stuff.
So here are some of the links I found:
This info along with an O'Reilly book or two on your favorite programming language will get pretty much anyone going with the subject.