I like my iPhone, really I do. I’ve had a number of phones in the past few years, some called phones, some called smart phones. None though have really captured my attention (nor yours) as much as the iPhone.

So, as I mentioned I do rather like my iPhone, however there are somethings that I feel could be tweaked, adjusted or simply changed to make the experience  just that much better.

Suggestion One:

The keyboard has been the item of much debate and all in all I quite like it. I do however have a couple of points that I’d like to change. I like to use the UK english keyboard, because we do spell things correctly (unlike my USA friends). However when I do this the $ is now 2 steps away from the primary characters, with the pound sign showing instead. This is annoying! Why can’t I have an Australian/New Zealand keyboard?

The other bizare thing that ticks me off is the fact that the space bar reverts the keyboard to characters. So if I’m typing in 10 000, you flip over to numbers, type in 10 and hit space and badda-bing you are back at the character set.

Where is the .co.nz or .com.au?

The last thing here I want to point out is again to do with the lack of a local dictionary. There is no option to have .co.nz as a domain shortcut. Why can’t I customise this list to domain types that I frequently use. I hardly ever use .net and .org and I don’t remember the last time I went to a .edu - so let me change it.

I would like to:

• have more english keyboards
• have the keyboard change only when I say “change”
• customise my .com shortcuts

Suggestion Two:

Auto-correct, is a nice feature but sadly it’s flawed, espcially for us here in New Zealand. Again what I’m about to say could be fixed with a localised keyboard/dictionary.

So lets say I’m typing an email and I want to tell you to visit http://www.finda.co.nz/ (disclaimer: I work here). So I begin typing, now as I get to the .nz part the iPhone thinks I want .ms - not sure why, but it does. So as I hit space or / or any other character it automatically changes the copy. I have to stop typing and click the X button to say no I don’t want this. Really really anoying.

It happens in TXT messages too. I often type “ey” as in “funny ey”. Well the iPhone likes to change that to eu, and so my friends are like “you are stoopid ey”.

I would like to:

• have an auto-correct that is location specific
• have an auto-correct that learns from your usage

Suggestion Three:

Camera features, or should I really say, photo features.

I'd like more options for the camera

The camera in the iPhone has been talked about enough - not enough resolution, better controls etc. I’m not going to talk about that. What I want is more Photo options. (although I would like a faster camera for taking shots of baby with)

I take a lot of photos of my darling little girl, along with various other shots. I use iPhoto (iLife ‘06) to take the photos off the iPhone and onto the Mac. I have the option to import all, import new (as in don’t duplicate) and delete all after import.

Well I don’t want to do that, I want to keep this cute photo, and that one .. and . … this one. But the rest can go. Why don’t I have the option either in iTunes/iPhoto or directly on the iPhone to select a handful of images and delete them?

At this stage it looks like I have to take all the images down to iPhoto, copy the ones I want to keep on my phone into my pictures library and have that sync back up to the phone - crazy.

I would like to:

• be able to select and delete multiple images on my iPhone
• be able to move images from the Camera Roll into my Photo Library for keeping, directly on the phone
• where is the video support (nuff said)

Summary:

I probably could go on and on, like many others do. All in all I do love my phone, it’s great for 90% of what I have to do. I do find myself checking gmail more on my phone now than on my Mac, I use Twitter from the iPhone almost exclusively now. I’ve bought Things so I can keep my task list sync’d with the Mac and I watch movies and listen to podcasts all the time.

There will never be a perfect phone, but I would like just some of the rough spots to be polished out a little more.

Bonus Comment:

Okay just one more … and it’s more to do with an Apple App rather than the phone. Apple Remote - fantasticly (useless) app for controlling iTunes over wifi. This is great if you want to drive your local version of iTunes, while not standing right by your computer. Great if you have say a Mac Mini set up as your home stereo or you are at a party and are playing DJ.

In the real world it’s pretty much a “show off” app. To me, what would make it a KILLER app, would be if it integrated with Keynote. See I’m speaking in a weeks time at an event, and I’ll be presenting using Keynote. I like to walk around when I talk - get out and amoungst the peoples. I need something to control Keynote from a distance & my iPhone would be perfect, except in Apple’s wisdom they don’t let the Bluetooth control work correctly (my old Sony had a cool bluetooth multimedia control option for Macs), and Apple Remote doesn’t support Keynote.

So I’m left looking into iPhone Remote or Remote Buddy that require using web & ajax to control Keynote - which is messy and frustrating!! *sigh*

Check out iPhonesource.org for more iPhone news & commets.

So yesterday I had an interesting day. It started out with a Tweet and email from Guy Kawasaki introducing his new www.alltop.com website. Now strictly speaking alltop.com is not new, it has existed as a collection of topics like mac.alltop.com for a while now.

So what was Guy on about? Well the team behind alltop.com had created a new frontend that unites the seperate collections together into one easy place to find data.

Simple enough right? Well … no, I in my usual fashion I mentioned something about how I felt the site was flawed. It wasn’t as user friendly and certainly wasn’t giving the results expected. So low and behold I got into a little of a … shall we say ‘discussion’ with Guy via Twitter, Techcrunch and finally via email (which is probably where it should have started and stopped).

Lesson One: pick the right medium to discuss with someone (doesn’t matter who it is) their website

So, what is alltop?

In Guy’s own words:

“Alltop is a directory to source news not a search engine of source news“

Okay that makes perfect sense right? I can stop writing now? Hmm no. See this is still not really what the average punter is going to understand - can you explain that to your mum?

So I tried to do a search on alltop, I wanted to find Mac news (or feeds, as alltop.com is at it’s base a feed aggregator). I performed this search and my results were not what I expected.

Example of alltop.com search results for "mac"

Scanning through this I saw nothing that screamed out “Mac stuff .. in here“. I wasn’t looking for iPhone stuff, nor Mobile, Tech or Podcasts and certainly not Windows. I’m not sure what MacIntosh (Steve) is. I’m looking for Apple Mac items.

So I talked to Guy about this, and he explained it this way (NOTE: I wanted to sketch this cartoon style, but 1) I can’t draw and 2) I can’t draw - well okay I can but I’m lazy this morning - sorry Guy).

Explaining Alltop - Borders style

You walk into your local Borders (or other book store). The clerk says “Hi”, you grunt and say, “I’m looking for Magazines all about Mac’s”.

I'm looking for Mac magazines

Now at this point IF the clerk was Google, he (or she) would reply “Well MacWorld has an article on the new iPod Nano and Byte has an article on programming for OS X Carbon while MacUser has some tips for getting more out of photoshop on the Mac”.

alltop.com doesn’t do this, instead the clerk provides you with the racks of magazines, showing you where the Mac type magazines live.

Information is stored in racks - like magazine racks

(Note: the pic above is from the matrix if you hadn’t guessed, with racks of stuff flying in to surround you and the store clerk)

You are told this rack has Mac stuff in it. And the clerk wanders off to help someone else. It’s up to you to scan the results and find what it is you are looking for.

Does this work?

Here is where I am torn. On one hand sure the metaphor works … in a bookstore, but I’m not sure it works online. Or should I say, here is where the naming of your “racks” needs to be clear.

For example: alltop.com have a rack of magazines called Windows, where you find various magazines with a Windows theme. Likewise you have a rack called Linux with as you’d expect Linux magazines. Sadly the Mac/Apple rack is called MacIntosh (Steve) and yes this is a joke (try searching for jobs).

Categories need to reflect the general understanding of what a topic is called. Guy mentioned last night “For those who don’t get the joke, we are willing to loose them” - which he might well be, but if you are building something - make sure you name your categories, or racks, or sections, to something that has relevance to your target audience.

Summary

Once I get past the search not being a real search - in that it doesn’t search it simply tells you where to look, and once I get past the MacIntosh (Steve) thing, I do think that alltop.com is onto something. I do think it’s the sort of site my Mother (who is a school teacher) would go to and say, “Hmm I need science stuff” and alltop.com is going to say “Great, here is a collection of science related feeds for you to browse and select from”.

Will it miss things out? Yes, as Guy admited, if you are looking for Mac magazines and Byte (which is in Programming) has an article on OS X Carbon development, you are not going to find it in the Mac section - but then, you probably where looking for Programming anyway.

I’ve now owned the www.studiowhiz.com domain since 16 Jan 2001, that’s coming up almost 8 years already and the site has been through a number of ups & downs since then.  I actually started the site as go.to/studioworks.com before I could afford the real domain. Of course you’ll have noticed I couldn’t get StudioWorks, and so studiowhiz it became. (funny story, go.to/studioworks.com still sends about 3 people a day to the site - not sure where from).

Originally slated as my place to share my knowledge, studiowhiz.com eventually grew into a fully fledged web & multimedia community, it even became my part-time job for 3 years while I ran Kiwi Interactive alongside. The internet archive (wayback machine) gives some snapshots at times throughout the life of this site, take a look at 2001, 2002, 2003 (complete with 3D animated character) and 2005 for some of the design over the years. (full history here).

I’ll admit once I wrapped up Kiwi Interactive, I no longer had the time to continue daily hands on involvement with Studiowhiz that the community needed. A series of hacks on the forums gave me headaches I didn’t want. I struggled to monetize the site (too wide spread focus), and it burnt a hole in my pocket (was costing over US$600 a month in bandwidth and brining in US$120 in advertising - ouch). So … I shot it in the head - much to the disapointment of many of my dear studiowhiz friends.

In the past few years the site has wandered around, and as some of you will be aware I recently toyed with brining back other authors and trying to rebuild a community here - but again, I don’t and the authors I talked too, don’t have the time and effort to dedicate to it that it needs.

So what about now?

If you hadn’t guessed I’ve done a full reskin (and yes there is still some work needing done - like searcch), and created a site I’d be happy to visit & read. I’ll post on here things from life, web, marketing, business, life, technology, life and well…. life.  Things I’m interested in - that you maybe as well.

So what have I done & why?

When I set about to create this skin I wanted to make the site funky. I wanted to try some new things and I wanted to bring into the site some of the social media stuff I tinker with (hence Twitter & Flickr on the home page). I no longer do html, css and design as part of my job, however I work along some some people that I can safely say are at the top of their game in NZ (Darren131 -  design, html & css guru, WebHelp - leading SEO and User Experience fella, and others). I guess I kinda wanted to see if I could still play at that level.

Fonts:
You might know I’m doing some Presentation Design at the moment where I’m learning to play more with typography. I wanted to trial some of this in the site header and so I went looking for fonts.

I decided to explore using the Vista Fonts and get away with using typography to add visual elements to the site header.

Example of Vista Fonts in header

For those of you who don’t have the Vista Fonts - this is what the header SHOULD look like - and NO I’m not (yet) allowing for other fonts in the CSS. This currently has a reflection in the header too, if I change the fonts this gets harder to do.

For body font I explored bigger than normal letters with decent whitespace around to make the site easier on my aging eyes - someone said “Your site is BIG” - my response is my eyes hurt, I wanted it to be easier for me!

Colours:
I have always loved colours, but struggled when it comes to picking ones to work together. I loved the freshness of this blue and so ran with it right through the site. Darren131 suggested I look at additional colours and so with his help introduced the Orange - I’ll continue to explore opportunities to have colour highlights throughout the site. (Thanks man! I value the input!)

Platform:
In a word - wordpress. It has it’s negatives, but after playing with it for a while you can pretty much bend it to your will easily and if you can’t no doubt there is a plugin to do it. The other reason I picked it, there is a GREAT tool for the iPhone to allow me to write and publish from the phone. The current version is SO much stronger than previous - and the admin is hugely improved (IF you can find everything!)

Integration:
Expect soon to see an iPhone optimized version - just because I can (or will be able too soon), and expect to see more rich content here as I’ve now got better flickr, YouTube and various other platforms integrated.

Marketing, Sharing & RSS:
In a nutshell - no. I know it wasn’t a question but I’ll answer it if it was. I’m not going to do any marketing or pushing of this site. If you want to Stumble something or Digg it, or whatever - go for it. It’s on a cloud based server so it’ll handle without a hitch - but I’m not going to encourage you to do it - that’s cheating. Sharing, RSS - meh, I’ve played with most RSS readers and personally I still love to visit the website. I’ll read Autoblog everyday - ON their site, I just find it a better user experience!  The RSS is still here if you really want it, and sure I will look at adding the link in the footer - but meh!

Future?

Who knows, in the past 12 months (almost to the day) I became a Dad and that changes lifes priorities. I also want to try new things (cake decorating probably be a full time option though). I’m working on my first novel (I’ve published technical books before), I’m starting to speak again (on christian subjects rather than technical) and I’m exploring life for what it can offer - rather than chasing the dollars for the sake of dollars.

I’ll write here what interests me. I have some future ideas for blogs such as reviewing Alpha & Beta apps, comments on tech gadgets, Mac’s & their software, web trends, blogging tips, web tips, business tips, marketing etc - things that interest me. If you want to come along for the journey, you are more than welcome.

Studiowhiz.com - a blog by Mr K, where you are welcome to read, comment and .. well what ever else you do with a weblog.

Many of you will know that in August I was the lucky winner of a brand new Apple iPhone 3G, thanks to a green slimy,  “high tech” cleaner. I purchased some Cyber Clean and entered, explicity because of the competition.

So, one of the first things I did was hunt around looking for a skin to protect it - after all the last thing an iPhone wants is a nasty big scratch. The first 3 weeks of having it I was SO gentle with it. I was hunting around for “Invisible Skin” and I tell you, it’s nigh on impossible to find anything like that here in NZ.

After looking around online I found someone talking about Best Skins Ever, and at less than 1/2 the price I thought it was worth a shot. Waiting the almost 14 days for them to arrive from the States, I couldn’t have them and not apply straight away.

So …. this post is about what I did, some lessons I learnt and … well hopefully it helps anyone else who’s going to skin their phone.

Step One: Getting things together

The first thing you need to do is get a handful of items together.

Getting things together

In the pic above you’ll see I have

• Laptop with instructions (simple and they serve their purpose - no diagrams etc though)
• Two skins (sitting on laptop)
• Small bowl of luke warm water, with 3 drops of liquid soap added
• Tea towl
• Hard sponge (didn’t really need this in the end)
• Damp cloth

One thing that is missing from the pic which you do need is a credit card (or any other card) to use to force excess water and air out from under the skin.

Lesson One: use a bigger bowl. Ideally use a bowl you can immerse the skin fully - a desert bowl would have been far better than this small chinese bowl that I used.  You may find you need to dip your skin more than once, so having a bigger bowl will help LOTS!

Step Two: Cleaning the phone

This turned out to be harder than I thought. I was considering using rubbing alcohol for this, however feared that could do more damage than it was worth. So one damp cloth  and a fair amount of gentle rubbing, she came up sparkling clean.

Concentrate on one surface. Do the front FIRST, the reason for this is when you flip the phone over to do the back - the front skin will protect your screen.

Lesson Two: use a lintless cloth. The iPhone seems to attract dust out of thin air, so if the cloth you are using has lint on it, chances are this will end up on the phone - PITA to remove. So use a cloth that won’t deposit these.

Step Three: Wetting and applying the skin

Time to get that skin on your phone. The first thing to do is to wet the skin. There is a fine line here between damp, wet, soaking wet. You want wet.  What I did was dip the skin fully into the water, lift it out and run the skin between two (wet) fingers to remove excess water.

One thing I did next that instructions say NOT to do! I put water directly on the phone - do this at your OWN risk. To do this I simply dipped my finger in the bowl and then ran the finger around the screen. What ever you do do NOT put water near the edges, home button or speaker!

Now place the skin on the phone - it’s all wet, it won’t stick. Here is where the juggling act comes into play, too much water and you’ll make a mess. Not enough water and the skin will stick (which can stretch when you pull it up to reapply). Having just enough water means you can move the skin around to get placement just right.

Note: don’t fret, it’s safer to err on the side of too much water, which you can always dry up with a cloth. You’ll soon get a feel for how much water you need.

Working quickly and carefully, line the skin up with the home button and speaker - if you get these right, the edges should be sweet. Now, holding one end use your finger to push excess water out to the edges. Do NOT push water towards the home button or speaker.

Check your skin as you work - now is the time to remove (and if you need too, like I did, remove it and place it into the water immediately). After this it will start to stretch if you try to remove it. Try to hold in in one place or it will move as you start to remove excess water. It will begin to stick, so just keep checking and making small adjustments if needed.

Here is where the credit card comes into play. Using the edge of the credit card and a firm (not hard) pressure, push from the center of the screen out towards the edge. You’ll be surprised how much extra water comes out.

Done. Using a damp cloth gently wipe away excess water and take a look. Don’t be too worried if it’s got a small bubble - they’ll dry out. Leave it for 20 mins.

Lesson Three: I needed more light and should have taken more time. I got my skin right around the home button but it’s out by less than 1mm at the top meaning I have the smallest of white in the top left corner where the skin hangs off the screen - not earth shattering. More light would have helped me to see this better.

Bonus Tip: Water is your friend and your enemy. If you get finger prints, dust or other items on your skin, simply dunk it in water and remove. However make sure you get rid of the excess.

Checking the front

So here we have the front sitting up to dry for 20 mins before tackling the back. You can see it’s good, but not great at this point. Notice there is a small white mark on the right side of the home button. This is where I hit the skin too hard with the credit card, leaving some gum on the surface. It polished out later.

Front all done

Here we are looking much better. As the skin dries it becomes clearer with any water trapped underneath evaporating.

Step four: The back

The back is a lot harder than the front given the curves, buttons and holes - but surprisingly simple once you get into it.

Again clean your phone with something that is not going to leave lint all over it. Again, take your skin, wet it fully and I again wet the back of the phone with my finger.

This skin I found I needed to take a LOT more time with. Due to the nature of the shape it’s hard to line everything up perfectly - but you’ll get it really close. With enough water you can simple slide the skin into place.

Back on waiting for some dryness

You’ll find you’ll get the bulk of the phone back to line up but the edges will not stick yet. It can be annoying with the smallest movement pushing the skin out of place. However you can use this to your advantage by holding one side where you want it, and moving the back around to ensure the holes line up etc.  You will find, because 3 of the sides have holes it’s easiest to work from the right side which has none. Make sure it’s lined up, hold it tight and move the rest around. You should be good. The other 3 sides are a little more forgiving as you can move the outter edge to get around holes & buttons.

Once you have it sitting in a suitable place, again use your finger to push water out & then the credit card. You’ll now be at the position I was in the photo above. Your edges won’t stick because they are too wet and you’ll probably have some decent bubbles in the phone.

I began to work the bubbles, fretting over them wanting to get them out.

After about 20 mins the excess water had dried enough for me to go around and force the edges down around the curves and such like.

Again a soft damp cloth was used to give the whole surface a rub down & the phone was placed in the hot water cupboard overnight.

Lesson four: take your time with the edges, if you get them wrong, gently peal up and if you need to remove finger prints or dust, again a little water on a finger will easily remove these. You can pull on the skin to get it to do what you need to do - just remember don’t pull (stretch) too much, and too much water means waiting again before things will stick.

Bonus tip: don’t sweat the small(ish) bubbles. By all means ensure the biggest bubbles of water (they won’t be air) are pushed out towards the sides, but the smaller ones - these will evaporate over the next 24 to 48 hours. I had 2 bubbles near the middle back of my phone, they are gone now.

Step five: done

99% done, waiting for dryness

This shot (sorry it’s not great) was taken just before placing the phone in the hot water cupboard. You’ll seed on the corner you can bearly make out the cuts in the skin to get it to form to the corner, but otherwise it’s hard to detect. You can also see a bubble up the left side of the picture. This bubble evaporated overnight, I didn’t need to work it out.

Summary

It’s not a walk in the park, but anyone taking a little time and care and being armed with a trusty bowl of water can apply their own skin to protect their device.

Now almost a week on there are a couple of things to note:

• skin doesn’t smudge anywhere near as much as natural surface
• the skin does add extra around the home button meaning it’s a firmer push to activate now
• likewise the sleep button needs a deliberate push to activate
• don’t fret the small things, the skin will dry and forgive a lot (but make sure you get it clean!)

So there you have it, skinning the iPhone.

Note: sorry I didn’t take more photos throughout the process, I should have asked my wife to snap some action shots, or simply taken more myself - doh! gotta get better at this

I’ve been working for a while on cleaning up the PowerPoint presentation that our sales teams use when presenting. Of course it’s littered with graphs about site traffic, demographics and much much more.

Presentations have a habit of getting out of hand, and many people don’t know how to present in a consice understandable way. I don’t pretend to be an expert, however I am having a crack at this one. Sadly I’m not working on my Mac and not in Keynote. I am however working on a Dell (the same as we give our reps) and in PowerPoint 2003.

I’ve taken some shots from the Dell on my iPhone and will share these with you here. (You can also view them on Flickr here)

A little note, all the existing slides had comparisson data on them, showing Aug 2007 against Jan 2008. In the new slide I’ve dumped that to simply show a snapshot of Aug 2008 - making it easier to keep the presentation uptodate regularly.

Age Demographics

The age demographics slide had a horrible long graph that was hard to read quickly, was very daunting and had too much fluff.

Example of new age demographics slide

As you can see I’ve cut it right back down to the bare facts. I’m using font weight and colour to draw the eye to the key points the sales rep will talk too. You can pick up the entire message of this slide in less than 5 seconds.

Regional Data

As part of our presentation we take a look at the break down of traffic and where it comes from to arrive at the site. Here is the slide we currently use:

Example of existing regional data slide

With a little tweaking and adjusting, a clip art gallery (yes I did say clip art - don’t judge) and some time in Photoshop we ended up with this:

Example of regional data after it's been tweaked

One of the advantages of this is that it’s easy to update. Generally while the stats may change from month to month the ratios will stay the same. The numbers are text areas in PowerPoint making it a simple job to update the stats, but keep the look.

Income Data

Given our site is a business directory, a number of people ask what is the spending capacity of our users. So we have a graph showing the household income ranges. As you can guess it’s not pretty:

Example of existing income data slide

So it wasn’t an easy one to create something sexy to show. I did spend a while wondering if I needed some visual of a house for this. However in the end simplicity rulled, and a huge dollar sign did what I needed. After all the slide is about money.

Example of the improved household income slide

Again with this, it’s quick and easy to update in PowerPoint. The orange bars are simply shapes, and the text are just text areas. Very easy to adjust as needed.

Gender Data

This one is something that often catches people off guard. Given that the majority of presentations are to senior management teams and it’s still a (sad) fact that a large portion of these are guys. So this gender information is important, espcially when thinking about target audience.

Example of existing gender slide

As you can see the female side of the graph is greater than the male, however it’s hard (at a glance) to see if this is a small or large difference. Again, I wanted to turn this into a visually rich and easy to consume slide.

Example of the improved gender slide

Using familiar artwork we have an easy to read at a glance slide. Again this is really easy to update in PowerPoint. The two characters are a transparent (PNG) image sitting overtop of two PowerPoint shapes. To adjust simply move the mask, adjust the shape, and bring mask back into place. Easy, peasy.

Summary

So it’s not finished yet, I’ve still got a lot to go. The existing presentation is 52 slides and almost 8 MB in size. I’m culling that down to 10 key slides (or slide groups) so the presentation is shorter, easier and better.

Well after a few hours, some time in photoshop, html and css, I’m setting the new look live today. I can’t promise it’s 100% done yet, but it’s certainly a lot better than the default Word Press theme.

I’ve taken styling cues from a handful of my favourite blogs & sites and have come up with what I feel looks like, well a half decent design. I’ve gone for big readable fonts, lots of white space and a sprinkling of icons here and there for flavour.

I hope you like it, with this new design I am again trying to blog more - won’t promise anything every day but hopefully something once a week.

I’ll leave it here for now, drop me a comment let me know what you think :)

A little taste of things to come here on studiowhiz - at least, a taste of what’s currently in photoshop

Cleaner, more white space, easier to read, easier to follow (hopefully) less focus on  the usual crap, more focus on  … well … me, it is my blog afterall.

Right, updated wordpress, dumped the themes and plugins (sorta meant to do it this time) so the site is temp. using the wordpress defaults.

Over the next week, look for a new look coming here

So over the last handful of days I’ve had the opportunity to register for a few beta’s & alpha’s for applications coming out soon. This is something I love to do, sign up, try things out & sometimes talk about them.

This goes back for me a long time when I used to formally beta test software for the likes of Macromedia, Adobe & Discreet. I always enjoyed getting the opportunity to play with something before most others. Sadly today the term beta is bandied around willy nilly online, and web2.0 apps never seem to come out of it.

Anyway that’s not what this is about. This post is about frustration trying to sign up to Nomee and Boxee (hmm funny just realised they both end in ee, don’t tell me ee is the new r), and both failed on my email address.

See, I use Gmail and one of my favourite features of gmail is the use of the + character (which by the way is not just a gmail thing, it’s email standard) to create on the fly email addresses. I’m always signing up with mygmailemail+sitename@gmail.com. This allows me to create filters to automatically handle email from these locations. I have HEAPS of labels and filters in gmail - but it works perfectly.

So a note to any new web2.0 companies creating “sign up and we’ll let you know when it’s ready” forms - please, allow us to use + in our emails.

I did something today I haven’t done for ages and now I feel dirty. Not only did I do it once I did it again and again.

I downloaded windows software … Agggh.

At church I am taking over the multimedia system which sadly is a PC (because they didn’t take my recommendation for mac). The machine has issues and needs to be sorted out. So I decided that I would try out Portable Apps.

I will write later what the apps are but let’s just say I was surprised at the volume of portable apps for exactly this sort of reason.

I still feel dirty!