It’s highly relevant to what I’ll be doing over the next few years and to probably 30% of my conversations with people these days — energy policy. I think everyone would benefit from staring at its many views for 20 minutes. Especially people who think wind and solar (or hydro!) will save us sometime soon.

I wish I’d built it.

When and why do you use Google, and what does it get you?

To find a home page of a site you’re already aware of — I don’t remember the exact URL of John Gruber’s markdown site, but I can find it in two clicks with a Google search. It’s not long before Mac and Windows will allow you to do this with one click (50% better). We all use Google for this today, but who really needs Google for this?

To find a person. The first few results are always Facebook, LinkedIn, WhitePages, and ZoomInfo. I can search those sites myself, thank you. Again, Google is only serving to save me 1 or 2 clicks today. Their service is easily replaceable by better-integrated interfaces like QuickSilver.

To research a technical topic. Today the only useful result is Wikipedia, and its content is becoming more and more incomplete and unprofessional (un-useful) every day. This used to be a core strength of web search engines — one of the original missing features of the internet, which they solved — but they all seem to have lost it, partly because experts don’t make webpages anymore and partly because the search engines have abandoned any desire to focus on serving a technical audience. I think the only audience that matters online in the long term is the technical audience, because today’s techies define tomorrow’s mass-market. Google Scholar and Google Search are opposite poles (both useless) of the service we need. This is technically feasible but completely un-implemented right now as far as I know, though I know a startup looking at business services. As an aside, I think PageRank is responsible for this mess.

To look up something in pop culture. At their current pace, this is probably the only place where Google’s general search will still be relevant in 5 years, which is sad for Google because MS, Time Warner, News Corp, and anyone else can do this just as well. This “lowest common denominator” search is not distinguished, interesting, or profitable. The only explanation for why Google has gone this way is relentless pursuit of growth (measured indiscriminately). Let’s hope they can spin out enough interesting side-products to remain somewhere near the cutting edge (or hope not, depending on who you root for).

Google Search is dead. Google will make plenty of money from organizing others’ advertisements for a while to come. “Internet Portal” has always been one of the most fickle and unreliable businesses to stake a claim in, and this is effectively where Google Search is. Now that I think about it I’m convinced that in the next 5 years “Portal/Search” belongs to the operating system developers (Apple, MS), and not internet companies — because operating systems own the first click, and that’s all it ought to take to find anything. Google won’t have a say unless they can get Chrome to replace the Finder/Explorer, which they want to, but I don’t think they can do that soon enough. Perhaps Facebook could get a niche foothold in if they can broaden their service enough to include static information as well as social info.

Rise Against – Appeal to Reason
Somehow these guys keep getting better. It’s hard to argue whether this album sells out more or less than Siren Song… did, but both are effective and I think this album returns them to slightly harder (while still extraordinarily well-produced) punk rock hooks. Infectious, and despite how catchy it is, you can’t quite label it pop-punk.

Hilltop Hoods – The Hard Road
Australia has a hip-hop scene. I discovered “Recapturing the Vibe” on the trailer to Poor Boyz’ latest ski film and there are a number of other standouts on the album (Stopping All Stations, What a Great Night). Also checkout Nosebleed Section on their Calling album. They rip the mic and they tell good stories. Oh, and they have funny accents.

E.S. Posthumus – Unearthed
Ever watched a movie trailer that had a symphonic score but with a techno beat to make it harder-hitting? It turns out all of those trailers feature one of 3 or 4 songs by E.S. Posthumus. Really good mood music, depending of course on your mood ;)

Review summary – Apple has created a little 3″ digital device that does almost everything, uses only your fingers as input, and has no instruction manual… and it works without an instruction manual.

Everyone knows the feature list, so I’m going to play Mr. Negative and tell you what it doesn’t do.

The three most ridiculous shortcomings are:

• Can’t use songs as ringtones or alarms. Are you kidding?
• No IM capabilities (just SMS). No AIM, iChat, ICQ, nada. Wonder if a web interface for any of these would work thru iPhone Safari?
• No scientific calculator. Silly. The widgets in general suck as much as the Mac OS X widgets do (calc, clock, weather, stocks, notes).

Other negatives:

• Mail Sync only syncs your account settings, not your current emails (the only emails you get are the ones iPhone downloads — you can download them all, 25 at a time).
• EDGE is slow. The biggest BS I read on the internet is that Apple chose EDGE “instead of” 3G because EDGE has better availability, lower power reqs, etc. I don’t think there exists a 3G device that isn’t also EDGE or at least GPRS compatible, so “availability” is not an issue. Better explanation might be Qualcomm lawsuit issues and/or physical space (it blows me away what they’ve crammed into this thing — this is a much bigger leap than the first iPod was).
• When your wi-fi connection fails, it doesn’t auto-revert to EDGE… you have to turn wi-fi off and then try again [edit: if wi-fi disconnects it reverts to EDGE... if wi-fi has a connection but DNS or something else fails, you have to turn wi-fi off to get EDGE].
• EQ is as annoying to get to and adjust as it is on the iPod.
• Mail has no way to select multiple items. This is a pain when you have a POP account that gets spam in 10-message batches and you don’t want the home page to constantly remind you that you have 10 unread messages (and don’t want to click each one to get rid of’em).
• Mail settings are universal — no way to set “Automatically CC me on all sent emails” for one account and not another.
• No contextual menus. Come on, a two-finger tap, or a tap-vertical-slide would be the perfect trigger for this. The gestures potential for iPhone is enormous. (aside – all Mac users with a 3+ button mouse need xGestures)
• The on-screen mini-keyboard sucks. I haven’t used smartphone before so this is a guess — it sucks slightly less than other mini-keyboards.
• No GPS. Not that fitting one in would be physically possible.
• Occasionally doesn’t register a “click”
• The camera is a cell-phone camera (crappy). You’ll note Apple didn’t sell this as 4-in-1 “iPod, Internet Comm, Phone, and Digital Camera”
• Calendar is better than iCal (not saying much). I need to find a way to sync this to an Exchange calendar to have any use for it.
• Guess what, YouTube is unusable on EDGE. Web browsing on EDGE is OK for text-heavy sites including Wikipedia.
• As far as I can tell you only get 2 ringing profiles – “silent/vibrate” and “not silent/vibrate” (the profiles I use regularly on my old moto are silent/vibrate/soft/loud/vibe-then-ring). You can set ringtones per-contact at least (but not using songs).
• Unlimited data is free but SMS costs if you go over 200/mo. Use smseverywhere.com or Yahoo SMS in iPhone Safari??
• Safari crashed once for no apparent reason (not a complicated webpage). Seems to have fixed (reset, lost session) itself before I could find instructions to reset it. [For reference - press and hold home button for 5secs from within the frozen app]
• Safari search options are Google or Yahoo. No Wikipedia, etc.
• Mail app didn’t find my subfolders in my inbox folder (IMAP account). This is an issue for me; hopefully I’ll fix it [update: fixed by setting IMAP path prefix].
• Mail can view MSWord attachments, but doesn’t show red-lining from “Track Changes”

Cool things that I wasn’t expecting:

• CoverFlow isn’t as useless as I would’ve thought
• It remembers where you were very well. After call or sleep it pops up right where you were. Also when you open iPod, Safari, Google Maps, etc., they show the last thing you looked at in that app (map/playlist/webpage(s)/etc). Not in Photos.
• Overall the UI is pretty hard to find fault with, which is unheard-of for a cell phone, much less a smartphone. No letdown there.
• The web browser supports multiple windows/sessions.
• It supports VPN. Cool. And of course SSL for mail and everything.
• The built-in speaker is impressive for its size.
• It remembers separate volume level for music, phone call, and speakerphone (if you turn volume up on a call, the volume reverts to what it was when the music resumes after your call).
• Maps shows live traffic info.
• I read a review that said you can only rotate to landscape counter-clockwise. Not true, you can rotate either way. In Pictures, you can rotate 360! (only 90 in Safari/Music). Maps, Calendar, SMS, others don’t rotate.
• The accelerometer is impossible to fool, whether you rotate slow/fast, jerky/smooth.
• “Double-tap to zoom in to fit width of the thing I double-tapped” works surprisingly well.
• You switch between silent/vibrate and ring via a physical 2-way switch on the side… no way to forget which mode you’re in.
• Headphone allows you to pause, skip track, and pick up call from mic button — so I will be able to use this snowboarding this winter (can’t use touchscreen with gloves).
• The screen is really good.
• You can use it while docked (not while syncing)
• Works perfectly with my Alpine car stereo. Doesn’t use car speakers for speakerphone, which would’ve been nice.

Apple’s iPhone Support Forums
iPhone Manual

I bought the iPhone because I was in the market for my first smartphone, UI is very important to me, and I trusted Apple to get it right. It’s only been a few hours but I am not disappointed.

What happened? Did their management get taken over by someone who cares about marketing? Yep, a quick click to their blog reveals that Yahoo! snatched’em up. Makes sense; they’re already doing exactly what Yahoo has publicly stated is their strategy for MyWeb 2.0 — rather than having Google (or Yahoo) tell you what’s good on the internet, ask your friends. Also not surprising given their ties with Flickr, which Yahoo grabbed earlier this year.

In related news, the internet may never be for sale, but the entire web is for rent. What would you do with every page out there? I want a directed graph of it, but that’s just a start. I might also want to sue someone for copyright infringement ;)

www.engageoregon.net

I did the current (soon-to-disappear) green version in about a day. Usually it would take three or four but this was the week when the powers that be were deciding whether they should hire me and I was leaving Thursday to go to the Sigma Xi conference and had to prepare my poster for that (I’ll post on the conference soon, it was really cool). So it was a rush job, but it turned out pretty well. A better red design that our marketing person did will be online shortly (tomorrow probably).

Pretty cool that I’m doing web development full time now…

Mt Hood tomorrow!

So last week I spent about 10 hours a day Sun-Tues working on a new web design. It finally works, with adjustable font and window sizes, dynamic rollovers, all the cool stuff, in practically every browser made since 1998. (Which is important, cuz even if only .5% of people have never upgraded from Win IE 5.0, when you’re talking about a major website they’ll add up to hundreds or thousands of people a year. And people are very turned off by broken websites.) I kind of want to rant about how hard it is to work around Internet Explorer bugs, but it’s already been done.

Anyway, getting it done was pretty gratifying, but then back in the office this guy I work with comes up and says “I can’t believe you got that design done!” and hands me a big’ol half gallon jug of Rogue Ale. That just made my day.