Sitting in the Virgin America part of the SFO International terminal.  Talk about an awesome terminal.  Can’t wait to fly Virgin, too - my first time (hah!).  I doubt anyone on the plane throws down in DOOM the way I do, so I expect a river of tears in the aisle.

Wish I could be at the Google Campfire tonight, cuz the news is awesome, but Microsoft got to me first, so up to the frigid North I go….  Hope this MS stuff is as good as it sounds.

It turns out the Seattle Photography Group is meeting on Wednesday night.  Cool!  So I’m going to that. You should come.  :)

Then, afterwards, I’m hoping we’ll head out for some food.  If you want to get food afterwards, please leave a comment so we have at least a rough head count.  Attendance at the SPG isn’t mandatory, but I’m sure you’re welcome to come.

On Tuesday, I already have dinner plans, but wouldn’t mind hanging out with some geeks afterwards.  Doubt I’m up for going into Seattle, though, so if you’re in Redmond or Bellevue, holler.

(I’ll try to email everyone who sent emails, commented, and twittered - but if you haven’t heard from me, re-comment because I’m lame)

photo by: Shay Stephens

I’ll be up in Redmond (first time!) for business next week (sorry sweetie!), and have no plans Wednesday evening, the 9th. Anyone wanna get some food, play some games, or just hang out?

Post in the comments.

photo by: Steven Le Vourc’h

I’ve been telling everyone I know just how great Tripit is, but realized I hadn’t told all of my readers.

It’s the most useful web service I’ve seen in years.  It’s drop-dead easy to use (just forward your email confirmations) and just plain works.  I’m learning a lot about ease-of-use from these guys, and  I can’t imagine traveling without it anymore.

If you haven’t checked it out, go.  Now.

photo by: Mom4squirrels

Ok, heard you all loud and clear. The old design was too tough to read. Plus I couldn’t post big photos and videos, which I’m obviously pre-disposed to do.

So thanks to GreenJimmy, I have a fun new design to play around with. Is this the final design? I doubt it, so you may see it change over the new few days or weeks. Knowing us, it may never be done…

I dig how it’s got old-school darkroom photos clothespinned up top, too. Reminds me of the days of chemicals and film… can’t say I miss them, but they were fun.

Like it? Don’t like it? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks Jimmy!

I’m going to be in Seattle on the 15th and would love to get some great food with some great geeks in the area.

Anyone interested? If so, please comment or email and we’ll coordinate. Appreciate suggestions on places to eat that are tasty and good for geek conversations, too.

You can always see where I’m going at Dopplr, too, if that’s your thing.

Got my Kindle today and have been playing with it for a little while. FYI, I’ve owned a Sony Reader since the day it shipped, too. I’ve always loved to read, and as a result, I’m usually reading multiple books at once. I think I’m currently partway through at least 10 of them, so when I travel, it’s hard to know what kind of mood I’ll be in and I have to pack lots. And they’re heavy. A device like the Kindle or Reader is the holy grail for someone like me, plus I’m a gadget geek, so I’m always an early adopter.

I’ve loved my Sony Reader, the device itself, since I bought it. But the Sony Connect software is so unbelievably bad, I can’t really bring myself to use it. Combined with a terrible selection of books, the Reader has been mostly worthless, despite being a fairly great device. Which is really sad. When I heard the Kindle had the ability to just buy books with a click, no software required, I knew I had to at least give it a try.

Here’s a brief rundown of my thoughts so far:

• It’s not ugly. I’ve been moaning to everyone who would listen that it’s an ugly device for awhile now, but in person, it’s actually small, light, and understated. It’s certainly not an Apple-designed wonder, but it’s hardly ugly, either. And I find I enjoy reading on the white device (Kindle) more than the black one (Reader), probably due to the contrast or maybe just the white gets “out of the way” more easily, letting me slip into the book.
• The display is gorgeous, just like the Reader. I have zero problems with it. I’m already used to the lag when you change pages from using the Reader, and I found that after just a few days of using the Reader, I was already hitting the Next Page button early enough so the page turned just when I wanted it to.
• The scroll thing is very cool and fun to use. I got some ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ here at the office as worked it’s magic.
• The Next/Prev page buttons are much nicer than the ones on my Reader.
• The EVDO works like magic. Buying books online with a click, no software required, is the killer feature here, and it’s perfect.
• It comes pre-associated to your Amazon account, so there’s no configuration. Just pick it up, turn it on, and start browsing & buying. *Very* cool.
• The book selection sucks. There are big gaps, even for well-known bestselling books. Having worked in the book industry before, I put most of this blame in publisher’s laps. They’re just a nightmare to deal with, and paranoid about their content. Apparently they don’t want my money or yours, and even Amazon doesn’t have the weight to make them see reason. Shades of the music, TV, and movie industries, anyone? This must be incredibly frustrating to Jeff and everyone else at Amazon.
• The web browser worked surprisingly well in the few minutes I used it. But at Amazon.com, I was getting some strange results. Using my Mac’s browser, I searched for a product and quickly found it. But on the Kindle, it failed to turn up the same results, even when I searched for very specific words in the title and description. I was hoping to buy it from my Kindle, but alas, I had to do it the old fashioned way.

More about the book selection… Wanting to have a reference library on my Kindle, I started looking for some of my favorites I refer to often. I searched for Good to Great, my all time favorite business book, first and instead managed to find a weighty tome of eight papal social encyclicals that I could buy for the low low price of $100.80. Built to Last isn’t there either. Pour Your Heart Into It? Nope. Innovator’s Dilemma? Nope. They did have The Wisdom of Crowds and The Culture Code, both of which I bought.

On to a personal favorite category of mine, historical fiction, I knew they’d have James Clavell’s Shogun - but it wasn’t to be. Nor most of Colleen McCullough’s awesome Masters of Rome series, though luckily The October Horse is available (and now on my Kindle). Fine, how about history - Guns, Germs & Steel. Bzzt, no joy. How about the best book ever written on health & nutrition - The China Study? Nope, none of that either. (They did have another excellent book, the Omnivore’s Dilemma). Luckily they did have my favorite fantasy author of all time, George R.R. Martin, and his Song of Ice and Fire books.

There were some strange ones, too. For example, they do have The Daring Book for Girls - but not The Dangerous Book for Boys. And you would be surprised at how many of my search terms turned up weighty, expensive scholarly works rather than the books and novels I was looking for.

Bottom line: I love the device, I love the Kindle Store interface, I just wish the selection was better. I believe it’ll be a permanent resident in my laptop bag, going everywhere I go, but it looks like I’ll still be forced to lug around some dead trees.

UPDATE: Spent quite a bit more time with it last night doing what it’s really supposed to be used for - reading - instead of playing with all the whiz-bang features. I curled up on the couch with Jedi and the Kindle and got lost in The October Horse. And I’ve gotta tell you - it’s a much better device than the Sony Reader in lots of subtle ways:

• The Next Page buttons are in *much* better places and are much easier to use than the Reader. I tend to curl up on my side to read a lot, switching sides every 15-30 minutes, and the Kindle is easy and natural to hold in such a way that turning to the next page is very easy.
• I was right about the white color - it makes it easier to sink into reading as well as read the text. The device does almost get out of the way better than the Reader because it’s white.
• The flicker when you turn pages is still mildly annoying, just like it is on the Reader, and distracts you from completely sinking into the book… at first. Just like the Reader, though, a couple of pages in, your brain has magically figured out the right timing to turn the pages at precisely the right time so the flicker happens as your eyes are traveling from the bottom-right to the top-left of the page. Then the flicker feels no more jarring than turning a page on a dead tree.
• The cover sucks for reading. Seems like it’s probably great for when I throw it in my laptop bag, but the Sony Reader’s cover is a much better fit, less bulky, etc. I guess the Kindle’s cover needs to be sorta bulky so it can prop the book up for optimal EVDO range, but it still sucks. Take it off to read - it just gets in the way.
• The text, just like the Reader, is just as easy to read as any book. I have the font on the smallest setting, to minimize page turns, and it’s beautiful and legible. That part of the experience is literally almost indistinguishable from reading a book.

More as I get it…

Wanna come geek out over the best Mexican food in Silicon Valley? LunchGeeks is on tomorrow. Sorry for the late notice - almost didn’t realize August was over until the Wall Street Journal mentioned us today.

Here’s the Upcoming event. Add yourself at Upcoming, on the LunchGeeks blog, or right here so I know if you’re coming.

I promise I’ll try to give more notice for September.

I AM
68%
OPTIMUS PRIMETake the Transformers Quiz

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
- Arthur C. Clarke

The iPhone is magic.

The very first time you flick your fingers to scroll something, like your address book, I dare you not to grin from ear to ear. Many dozens of people have played with my iPhone over the weekend, and every single one gets a huge, goofy grin on their face the first time. The videos do not do it justice - the user interface is beyond amazing.

It’s perfect. I don’t use that word lightly - anyone who knows me will tell you how anal I am about word precision, especially absolutes. But the touch interface isn’t just great, it’s not just nearly perfect. It is perfect. The speed and acceleration at which things scroll when you flick them is so perfectly timed that you resonate with it on some sub-conscious primal level. It feels like a dream.

And almost everything else about the phone is in nearly the same ballpark. This phone is an earth-shaking game-changer, and exactly what everyone has wanted for a long long time. Not a single person I’ve ever met has actually liked their cell phone company, and this is the first step towards a device-centric world rather than a network-centric world. You and I win, because every device maker on the planet will get to build better phones because of this one, not just Apple. Competition rules.

Now, on with my breakdown of the magic, the mundane, and the wishes:

THE MAGIC

• As I said, the touch interface is perfect. Scrolling, pinching, stretching, sliding - it’s all so buttery smooth you won’t be able to stop doing it. I dare you to put the thing down.
• Speed. The phone never hiccups, stutters, or pauses. Clicking on an app or an action is instantaneous at all times. Smooth fades and transitions make the device a joy to use, unlike every Windows Mobile and Windows SmartPhone I’ve ever used.
• The battery. I’ve been using Bluetooth, WiFi, Maps, Safari, and YouTube like crazy and the battery just doesn’t drain.
• Syncing. I long ago switched to Address Book and iCal (plus Spanning Sync!) for my contacts and calendar needs, and iPhone just works with them. Awesome.
• The screen is drop dead gorgeous. It’s huge, the colors are vibrant, and text is super-readable even at tiny font sizes. Rotating for a widescreen view is just brilliant.
• Super easy to use. My wife and mother-in-law are a strange combination of technology lovers and user interface haters. They get frustrated faster than my car goes from 0 to 60, but I haven’t had to tell them a single thing about the phone or any of its functions. That’s unheard of in my family.
• WiFi. There’s WiFi almost everywhere I use the phone heavily (home, work, friends houses, etc), so the EDGE speed hasn’t been a big issue for me at all. I’ve been shocked, to be honest, because I was really bummed when it was confirmed to not do 3G. Not any more - it works great with WiFi. Oh, and Mountain View has free WiFi city-wide - thanks Google!
• The keyboard. Steve says you need 5 days to get used to it. It took me about 5 minutes. If you forget about mis-keys and just trust it, it works brilliantly. It’s better than any Treo, Blackberry, or SmartPhone I’ve used - at least for what I do. SMSes fly back and forth faster than ever now. (I haven’t done email seriously yet - still trying to tame my Inbox first)
• Web browsing. Internally at SmugMug, we’ve always referred to Safari as Suckfari. It’s been slow and a real pain to write software for in the past. On the iPhone, it’s like a dream come true. Every web page (unless it uses Flash or Java) just works - no need for a crappy mobile version. Web browsing is finally a non-frustrating experience on a phone - a first. (On a related note, we’re in love with the new Safari 3 Beta. It’s super-fast. The Suckfari era seems to be ending!)
• Music. Duh.
• Headphone interface. Squeezing the bulge on the wire to answer, having your music fade out gracefully, then fade back in to exactly where you left off after you’re done, works perfectly.
• Activation - when it works! - is a pleasure. No more hour-long wait in a store or on a phone with a clueless rep just twiddling your thumbs. 2 minutes and you’re done. Now if only it worked every time…. Which brings me to:

THE MUNDANE

• AT&T & Apple: Business accounts can’t use iPhones. I’ve blogged about this before, and we went through hell all weekend to get ours working. I’ll blog about exactly how to do this shortly, but the bottom line is: disconnect your phone # from your business account. Which sucks. Money quote from AT&T rep on the phone? “We had no idea this many corporate accounts would want iPhones!” (after telling us how swamped they’ve been with these requests). Ya think?
• Apple: The SMS tone is too quiet and too short. I rely on my phone to page me when there are problems with our site, and the tones aren’t loud or long enough for me to notice reliably when I’m awake, let alone asleep. (I thought this was just a business complaint at first, but coming into the office this morning, all of the employees who just use SMS for fun are complaining that they’re missing messages cuz they don’t hear it in their pocket too). Please, Apple, let us configure the length & volume of the SMS tone. Better yet, offer a “don’t stop playing until acknowledged” option for us network geeks / doctors / on-callers out there.
• AT&T: Shipping on a Friday night when most of your staff is at home on the weekends. Um, did you really not expect tons of calls about these things? According to every rep we could get on the phone, that’s the case - most of the company was off for the weekend and those that were on were swamped. Poor souls.
• Apple: No drag-and-drop in iTunes to your phone? I can drag music/movies/tv shows onto my iPods, but not my phone? Why not? Most of us have libraries >8GB, so picking & choosing is the best way to get the good stuff onto our phones.
• AT&T: None of us have been able to browse EDGE here in Mountain View all day. Lots of phones without connectivity until we hop on WiFi. I’m not complaining about EDGE speed - I realize the limitations there, and I’m ok with them. I’m talking about getting any data whatsoever.
• Apple: Some fields do spell checking and others don’t. Very awesome when they do, very frustrating when they don’t. Confusing when you come across one that doesn’t too - jars you out of the experience. Why not do it everywhere? One great example: Entering a new contact, why doesn’t it know that there are lots of “MacAskill” names in my contacts already and recognize it as a word? It does when I’m SMSing, afterall.
• AT&T: The error messages when activation isn’t working for some reason aren’t human readable. I realize these are being displayed in iTunes, but it’s clearly not Apple’s fault - their writers always write with humans in mind. Some non-human wrote this stuff and it’s terrible. Almost like having to deal with some clueless sales rep again.
• Apple: IMAP folder support is iffy. Some folders show up, some don’t. You can’t subscribe/unsubscribe on the phone.
• Apple: Can’t send SMSes to multiple recipients. wtf?

THE WISHES

• GPS. Maps needs it, photos need it, the phone needs it. If you can’t do GPS, do cell tower-based triangulation. Or if that’s too tough, use something like Skyhook. WiFi’s already built in, so why not? Charge me more for it - I’ll gladly pay.
• A “keep beeping until ack’d” setting for SMSes. See above.
• 3G. I thought I’d want this a lot more than I actually do, but hey, if wishes grew on trees…
• Videos. It has a camera, it has storage, why isn’t this here?
• .Mac syncing. Why can’t my phone sync “with the cloud” like my desktops and laptops already do?
• 3rd party apps. Not AJAX web apps - that’s a cop-out, and I’m saying this as an AJAX web app developer. Flash would be a good first step, but a real development platform is what we all need.
• IM. iChat, GChat, whatever. I love the SMS-as-conversation metaphor, but it’s still not IM.
• Better Bluetooth. It works great in handsfree & headset modes, but it’d be nice to Bluetooth sync with my Mac when I get close, without docking. And I already miss sharing things like contacts via Bluetooth, something I did often.

Bottom line: This phone is at least 100X better than anything else I’ve ever seen (including plenty of prototype phones coming out that you probably haven’t).

Run, don’t walk, to your nearest store and buy one.

Want more? Read about how we got our phones (and where the pink hair comes from).

Yes, I got one.

In fact, we got 14 of the 8GB models. I love it, and as you can see, my kids love it too. We got those ‘iGot iPhone’ shirts (with “iWas there - 6-29-07″ on the back) while waiting in line at the Palo Alto store on University Avenue. This is that story - I also have a review written up.

I apologize that this isn’t technical, or even particularly well-written, but I wanted to get a brain dump of the event out so I could remember it.

The whole event was a blast, as I knew it would be. We (lots of SmugMuggers) showed up in Palo Alto on Thursday around noon. Robert Scoble and his son, Patrick, were already there, along with two others. We decided to get some lunch first and then get into line. 30 minutes later, we came back, and the Zooomr crew was in the house along with a handful of other people. We decided things were getting serious and hopped into line with numbers 16-20. (The numbers were written on some great Zooomr stickers).

We had a blast hanging out with Robert, Patrick, Kristopher, and Thomas immediately. Geeking out comes naturally to us. We were all wearing our red SmugMug hats, and people started asking us for some, so we sent a few SmugMuggers out on errands: get some hats to pass out, more chairs so we could have guests hang with us in line, a generator in case our power went out, etc. Soon enough everyone in line was sporting SmugMug hats and Zooomr stickers - how cool!

Pretty soon things started to get crazy and we had over 70 people in line. A few encounters with the police (who were very polite) later, we relocated around the corner of the store, instead of in front, where we were seriously obstructing University Avenue. Lots of press were there, from CNBC to the Palo Alto Daily News. Diggnation did a broadcast, too. I was pretty busy getting interviewed, but we also managed to get some coding and lots of testing done in line, which was fun.

People were getting hungry in line, so we called down the street to Pizza My Heart and bought pizza & drinks for the whole line. There was a real community feeling going on, and we were happy to contribute. Pizza My Heart gave us some great pizzas and a great deal.

Later in the evening, my father bumped (literally) into an old friend: Bill Atkinson, he of HyperCard and MacPaint fame, from the original Mac team. He’d come down to the store just to make sure the line wasn’t crazy, but we quickly convinced him both that it was crazy and that he needed to camp out with us. He called his daughter and asked her to bring camping gear and food, then settled in to regale us with some hardcore discussion about the AI work he’s involved with at Numenta. Turns out he’s literally helping to bring about the singularity, and it sounds amazing.

The dude is still freaking brilliant - I’m blown away every time we chat. He’s possibly the smartest person I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and possibly the best photographer, too. There were lots of old Apple tales told, too, as you can imagine, including two of my favorites: the “I swore I saw windows re-drawing under other windows” story, and the “dolt” story. I don’t see them up on Folklore, so I’ll see if I can get Bill or someone to write them up.

The night went on, and we had a blast meeting new people, sharing ideas, and talking about the iPhone. Even Bill hadn’t played with or seen a real one yet, though he had a homemade one in his pocket. The day Steve announced the iPhone, Bill took a piece of wood and made a mock-up to the same exact size specifications, complete with rounded corners, printed out a high-res shot of the user interface, and glued it on top. He wanted to play with it in his hands to get a good feel for how it would work early on. The line ate it up, as you can imagine, and we all passed it from hand to hand.

Sometime around 1am, I realized that with the light and noise, we’d be lucky to sleep past 6am, so I busted out my sleeping bag and curled up next to Bill on one side, and Lee on the other. The streetlamps turned out to be the worst part - they were like laser beams boring into our eyes all night. The line started to compare notes on ways to “hack” the problem, including some suggesting shimmying up the lamp posts, but strategic hood usage from our hooded sweatshirts turned out to be the best solution.

I made it until 6:30am, so I did pretty well. Most people were up and awake by then, though, and I heard from plenty who got no sleep. Guess I was lucky. By this time, the line was well over 120 strong and growing - and they needed food.

So we wandered down to Noah’s Bagels and told them we’d need 180 of them. The employees freaked out, and actually seemed upset with us. We nearly cleaned out the store, and the customers in line behind us weren’t so thrilled - but they could have just walked two blocks and gotten all the free ones they wanted.

Meanwhile, other fun people had been coming by. David Hornik, a smart and funny VC from August Capital, came by on Thursday night and Friday morning. Bruce Gee brought both his Segway and a SnoCone maker. And mid-afternoon, another old friend and original Mac team member, Andy Hertzfeld, showed up. We were all lamenting that Woz had gone to the Valley Fair store instead (it was closer to his house) because then we’d really have an amazing amount of early Apple talent on-hand.

Andy had actually played with an iPhone for an hour, and regaled us with tales of both the things it did great and the things that weren’t so great. We all talked about whether Steve would show up, but the rumor was that he’d gone to Manhattan for the first sale, so we guessed not.

My wife and kids came by for an hour or so, which was awesome. I missed my kids, sleeping on the street, and everyone in line loved seeing and playing with them, too.

Finally, the moment arrived. About thirty minutes before the store opened, we’d packed up all of our gear in one of our cars, and the line massively compressed - hundreds of people were basically hugging each other in line as we pushed to the front of the store. An enormous crowd of people not in line was gathered, and inevitably a few tried to sneak into line. But since we’d all been together longer than 24 hours, everyone knew their neighbors and the community easily took care of the problem.

We all counted down from 10 to 1 just like it was New Years Eve or something, and doors were finally open! Patrick went in first, to great cheers from the crowd and Apple employees alike. And then the rest of us streamed in. I’m not sure how many they let in at first, but I know we were in that batch, so it was probably 30 or so. We were screaming and cheering as we went up to our Apple sales rep and told him we’d like 14 phones (we had 7 people at 2 phones apiece). A few quick swipes of barcodes and one credit card and we were done - we had our iPhones!

After perusing the accessories for a few minutes, we figured we’d better leave to give other people a chance to get in the store. Bad move - Steve showed up literally a minute after we left. Dang. We’d gotten a chance to chat at D a few weeks ago, but my father and Steve haven’t seen each other in years and it would have been a blast to see them say hello again after so long.

And that’s it! We had a blast in line, bonded as a team, got our phones, and were a part of fanboy history.

(Oh, and the pink hair on my kiddos? My wife’s pregnant with a girl - and I started a family tradition of dyeing our hair to go along with the sex of our upcoming babies last time. The tradition continues!).

Want more? Here’s my review.