BradPace.com

Now that I have had a bit over a week with my new iPhone I figured it was time to write a bit about it. First of all I upgraded from a 2G so it was a big change. Here is what I love about it.

• GPS/Digital Compass – My 2G didn’t have GPS. I love the GPS features on the 3GS. And the digital compass on the map is very slick. I purchased the Geocaching app from Groundspeak and it ROCKS! It almost makes geocaching too easy. We found a couple of caches within a half mile of our fathers and sons campout last weekend. No more typing in the coordinates. Plus I will be using the compass app. Anyone want my scout compass?
• Voice Commands – I have some mixed results with voice commands. Sometimes it works and at other times it doesn’t. But I am learning how to get better results (and I swear the iPhone is getting better as well). But the feature is SOOOO cool. And I have used it in the car. If I had a dashboard mount for the phone it would be even better.
• Landscape keyboard – I love that you can use this in email and texting now. My big fingers need all the help they can get and I probably can type 2x as fast in landscape mode.
• Speed is BIG! – I love the increased speed and notice the difference. Both at boot up and on all the apps. If I cant have multi-tasking apps at least it makes it quick to switch back and forth.
• Push notifications – I bit the bullet and paid for BeejiveIM (when it was on sale) and I love it. It has push capability and it works great. I like this app much better than Palringo (which is what I used before. I also tried fring and didn’t really like that app). That is the only app I have that used Push notifications (other than email).
• Improved camera and video – The photos are much better with the new improved camera. I take a lot of photos with my iPhone. I played with video but have not really had much to video yet. But I am sure this will replace my Flip.

Overall it has been well worth the upgrade. And with 32 GB I have lots of memory to play with. It’s nice to have more music and podcasts.

Other apps that I use and love:

• Scriptures – This app was pricy but worth it. It is the best version of the LDS scriptures. Plus it includes a bunch of other content like the Hymns, Manuals, Resources, General Conference and more. Search works great and so does bookmarking. I love following along in Sunday School with the Teachers manual. I do use it in church and because all the content is in the app it is very fast.
• Evernote – I still use this great app and it is only getting better. I cut and paste tons of stuff into it to save for later. Their tagging system works well. You can store just about anything in Evernote.
• Content Apps – I love apps that provide easy access to data. Like the LifeHack app, USA Today, Digg, WebMag, LDS radio, NY Times and others. My new favorite content app is the iStake app from Avikey. It integrates with LDS.org and provides my ward directory and the ward directories of all the wards in my stake. I don’t know how many times I tried to look up people in my area and did not have their contact info. It’s worth the $10 and works great. Also I love tying knots and love the knot guide app (a must for any scoutmaster).
• Photo Apps – I love the apps that do fun things with my photos. My kids and I have spent hours messing with photos on the iPhone. The most entertaining is the Face Melter app. We have ended in tears laughing so hard. My kids love it! I recently added the OldBooth app that allows you to put your face on different old photos. I just started using Animoto to take my photos and build mini-video slide shows. It is so easy and the videos are very cool. Plus with the new version you can download the movies. (It’s kind of lame you can only do 30 second movies without paying). And yes I use my company’s app FamCam to easily send any photos to my family members. I also use Photogene to improve the photos I take. Adjust the curves and to do all kinds of other tweeks to the photos.
• Web Apps – I still use some web apps on the iPhone. Like the Yahoo movie web app. And if you have not visited on NBC.com on your iPhone you are missing out. They have tons of content that streams. It works perfectly. Someone at work just showed me this just today.
• And let’s not forget GAMES! I love puzzle games like VaultBreaker, BrainTeaser, Sodoku, touchPhysics, and Chess. But my favorite puzzle games are Enigmo, cubicMan, and Peggle. Other fun games are Knights, Ignite, Air Hockey, CannonGame, iFish, Crazy Tanks, Oregon Trail, and the Tap Tap games.
• Other apps I use regularly are Kindle, Facebook, Twitterrific, i.TV, Yammer, Guitar Toolkit, and The Weather Channel.

Anyone that knows me knows that I LOVE my iPhone. I use it for everything and have 7 screens of applications installed. Many are free and quite a few are applications I paid for. But this last weekend I wanted to try the Kindle on the iPhone from Amazon. After all the app is FREE so I had to try it.

First off I do NOT have a Kindle and have never had the chance to try one. I have read several short ebooks on my computer and found it to not work very well for me. Part of it is that I sit in front of my laptop all day (and often late into the night) for work. The idea of reading a book there as well during my free time just does not appeal to me. Also I find the screen to bright and it strains my eyes. I can stare at the screen for 10-12 hours but even I have my limits .

The Kindle app for the iphone intrigued me for several reasons. One is the portability. The idea of always having something in my pocket to read is great. I already have plenty to read on my iphone. I do about half of my time on Facebook from my iphone. Also I read many blogs (like the lifehacker blog from their app) and news (like the USA today and Digg). Plus all my email accounts! But sometimes I want to curl up with a good book. Usually about technology, marketing, church stuff, or sci-fi / fantasy.

The second thing that I thought I would like is the actual presentation on the screen. The lines are short because of the size of the iphone screen. I have not officially taken any speed reading courses (not since 6^th grade at Delta Middle School) but I do know that you should try to read 4-6 words at once and the iphone screen size seemed perfect for this. (My next quest is for a good speed reading course).

So on Friday night in bed I downloaded the kindle application. It took about 15 seconds. I thought it would come with some type of free content or book but it did not. But it had a link to Amazon.com to get a book. I did not want to buy an actual kindle book to test this out but I did find several free books. I navigated the Amazon easily on my Safari browser and “purchased” the free book on the iphone. By the time I could fire up the Kindle app my new book was already there. A fantasy book called the “Assassin’s Apprentice” by Robin Hobbs. I barely read the description of the book before downloading it just because I was conducting a test.

I am now on chapter 20 of the book and on page 5339. Obviously the pages are much smaller . The experience of reading this book on the iphone has exceeded my expectations. I find it very easy to read. There is no vertical scrolling of any page. Just flip the page to the left or right like a real book. Be it a book that is 3”x4” and has 9000 pages! I have spent about 5 hours over the weekend on the book and found that it has not strained my eyes at all. I read in the car, waiting for a movie to start in the theater, waiting for my food at sizzler, and in my back yard. Plus I think the for factor of the pages has helped me to increase my reading speed.

An added bonus has been that I have really enjoyed the book! It is great and has really sucked me in. I like her story and the world she has created for this series of books. Yes it is a great marketing ploy by Amazon to give away the first book in several series to hook you into reading the rest. It will probably work for me. I love the long series of escapism literature.

Overall I give the kindle for iphone app and overall experience of 5 out of 5. It makes me wonder if I would like a Kindle. I probably would but will never fork out the cash to buy one. Why should I when I have my iphone!

I love to watch the Olympics and get quite obsessed about it.  I had thought about getting a DVR for some time but just never did it.  Well the Olympics as a good reason so I purchased my Tivo a few weeks ago.  Then I could watch the games on my own schedule and watch just the parts I want to see.  Here are some reasons that Tivo make the Olympics even better.

1) My Tivo HD will record 180 hours of video (I don’t have an HD TV).  Many sessions of the games are 5-8 hours long.  Try and record that on a VCR!  I can easily record every session of the games.

2) I have things to do between 6-9pm and don’t like to watch TV during that time.  With the Tivo I can fire it up at 10pm and not miss anything.  Don’t have to sluff church (like some of you!) because I can catch up later.

3) It is amazing how much “filler” there is in Olympic coverage!  For every hour of coverage there are usually about 20-30 minutes of actual athlete competition.  I can easily fast forward though all the junk and just watch the competition.  I can easily make it though 5 hours of coverage in 2 hours and still see all the exciting stuff.

4) I admit there are some less than interesting events in the Olympics.  Some I can skip completely (like badminton, cycling, rowing, synchronized diving and others).  Some are actually more fun to watch at 3x speed.  Watch soccer at 3x speed and it is like a pinball game with the little white ball just bouncing all over the place. Tivo has a very smooth 3x fast forward and you can still see all the action.  Then just slow it down at the end or during the goals.  I am not a huge fan of gymnastics, but on high speed they are much more interesting.  And I was able to watch the exciting endings of the men and womens team competitions.

Overall I love my Tivo and will never watch TV the same again.  It is amazing that there is actually some good stuff on TV.  And when it is waiting for me I find myself watching better quality TV and actually watching less hours per week. I have also loved their online free content.  Like I downloaded free guitar lessons from Guitar Sherpa.  Plus with YouTube on the Tivo I can tons of other great how-to content.  I would love to see us have a genealogy/family history content channel on Tivo. I haven’t tried an Amazon Unbox movie rental.  This is the future of TV.

I heard about a new web service called Evernote.com on one of my favorite podcasts (this week in tech or TWIT).  The site is still in beta but I wanted to try it out.  I signed up for the beta and within a few hours had an invite in my inbox.  The idea behind evernote is that it is a place to store your “brain” on the internet and then go back and search it later. Their tagline is to remember everything! Upload anything you want to store for later reference.  Images, snipits of text from webpages or emails, text notes, and even audio can be stored on evernote.  One think that made evernote interesting to me is their multiple client strategy.  They have both PC and Mac clients.  As well as a nice pure web interface and firefox plugin. They are also working on blackberry and iphone clients that are coming soon.  This is important because often time you want to access this data from strange places.

The coolest thing about this service is their ability to scan and index all the data that you add as notes.  So if you upload a digital photo of a receipt you can later automatically search for the text in the image and evernote will highlight it on the image.  I am sure there are other online OCR apps but this is the first I have seen that does it well.

My first thought was that this would be a great place to store family history and genealogical data online.  I immediately uploaded a bunch of family history pages I recently scanned at my Grandmother’s home.  This included photos with names, newsletter articles, and pedigree sheets.  About 60 high res images.  I uploaded the images using their PC client and it took about 30 minutes to not only upload the images to the website but to also OCR all the text on the pages.  If I had all my genealogy on this site I could easily search for any person, place or date and Evernote would show me all the documents I have that relate to this person (assuming there is some text associates with the photos).  You can also manually tag images.  Here is a few screenshots of a search I did for my grandfather Elwin (Pace).

Here is a pedigree file where I searched for James Pace. (Yes I do have second cousins in my tree! Paces on 2 sides.)

Here is a photo that shows it does pick up hand written text as well (searched for Paul). (Yes that is me on the right with my oh so hip 70s pants.  I don’t think I was invited to be in the photo).

Now this is in beta, but here are the drawbacks. I did not that the OCR is only about 50-60% accurate.  Surely not good enough for what we do on WVR. There are many places that I thought it should have picked up “Elwin” when I did the search (like the pedigree).  Also it is hard to flip through the results.  They just list every note in order that has your search results.

Next their tagging feature is very week.  Facebook does that best at tagging photos (selecting an area on the photo to tie a tag to) and Evernote just does it at the noto (or photo) level.  Lame!  Also because some of the OCR is not correct I wish I could see how their software sees all the text and be able to fix it or add the text to anything they missed.  So I could know for sure that everything was indexed correctly.  This is a major drawback to this system.

All in all I think this site/software is very cool and as it improves should be very useful.  Just the mobile aspects of this are amazing.  Think about doing price comparisons at the store by just taking photos with your phone and mailing them to Evernote.  Then going back and comparing all the prices and features.  But I think it needs to have better OCR and indexing and a few more features before it is ready to be a serious tool (especially a genealogy tool).

Today I read a great article on webpronews at http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/06/25/all-the-good-kids-are-on-facebook entitled “All the good kids are on facebook”. I have been a long believer that we have not even started tapping into the demographic and sociological information that is available on the web. I find it interesting that there is such a large difference in the types of users on myspace and facebook. I have a profile on both systems. (for market research reasons when we where building familylink.com). From my experience in both systems, I do find their analysis in the article to be correct.

I think much of the difference is due to the difference in features between myspace and facebook. Myspace is built around expressing yourself and customizing the system. While facebook is for users who actually want to “DO” stuff.

So I decided to look at the quatcast.com charts for both. Quantcast is awesome and I have found it to be much more accurate than alexa. And I think alexa is getting worse. But here are some differences I see when I compare the reports.

1) Obviously myspace has 3-4 times the daily visitors. But it is interesting that facebook is growing more quickly.
2) Facebook is almost exactly 50/50 male to female visitors. Myspace has more females than males (probably from all those fake female profiles promoting their porno sites).
3) Both systems are 3x the internet average for the age group 18-24. Face book is weak in the 25-44 range but much stronger in the 45-54 age demographic. A few months ago this was not true. I think facebook will quickly become more popular for all age groups. I wish quantcast had a 13-18 age range. Maybe they don’t want to know.
4) Household income is almost opposite between the 2 systems. Myspace has more in the 0-30k income range. Where facebook has the most in the 100k+ range! This is very interesting and is a good sign for facebook.
5)Ethnicity is also interesting. Both show more than average in the African American range and below average in the Caucasian and Asian groups. But Myspace is also way above average in the Hispanic and other categories. What is other anyway? Native american and other nationalities? This stat could show that myspace has more international users.
6) both have mostly Regular and Addicts as their visitors. Are social networks addictive? I know my friend Jon feels he is addicted to facebook and has limited his self to only logging in on even days
7) myspace has many more users with no college education. This could be in large part to the history of facebook being a college site.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the shortcomings of wikipedia and I understand both sides. But there are some things that are perfect for widipedia and don’t exist anywhere else. One example is the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_games_released_as_freeware. This is information that many people have looked for in years gone by and have never found. Well here it is.

The last few days I have been doing research on building a social network. I have uned LinkedIn for several years. But I have never had a myspace page or any of the others consumer sites. I did signup for facebook a few months ago. But in the last few days I have been signing up for many of these and analyzing their signup processes and their features. So obviously I am no expert. But I do have a fresh perspective. Here are my observations:

1) myspace is JUNK! I just hated everything about this site. Every single page I found was ugly and unusable. I remember when I was in collage and built my very first webpage in 1993 at the University of Utah. It had tons of text on the wildest background image you have ever seen. It looked like an iridescent piece of transparent colored paper. You could barely read the text. This is how most of the pages on myspace look. Is this what we are going back to after 14 years of progress? Ok there are some communication tools here that are useful. But I think myspace is on a long walk off a short pier.

2) Face book is the best of the bunch for general consumers. I can see why so many collage students use this to organize their social lives. There are some great tools here. I do not like their home page. If you don’t already know what it is and have a reason to join you would hit this page and just leave.

3) LinkedIN is by far the most useful social network. I have been using this for several years and have 40-50 connections. If you know me and use linkedIn send me an invite and we can connect. This service fills a real need and provides great tools and functionality. But only if you are in business in some way.

4) Digg and other social news sites are great tools. I need to add digg links to my blog. I love how some of the most interesting items bubble to the top by the nature of the product. The problem here is that everything is and everyone is grouped together. So much of the most popular diggs are offensive, stupid or unrelated to my interests in any way.

My conclusion is that social networks will start to diversify into specific niches. People with similar views or interests are more willing to share information that is related and interesting to everyone else. I also think that we have just scratched the surface of the communication tools that these sites use. IM, email, mobile phones, chat, forums, blogs, feeds and more can all be hooked into social networks and used more effectively.

You have to check out this new multi-touch screen technology that is demonstrated in this video.

The technology is explained a bit in this article at FastCompany Be sure to watch the video by clicking on the link on the right.

When you see this you cant help but think there are much better ways to interact with a computer. I hear that Microsoft Vista has some of the best voice recognition software yet. Think if you combined multi point touch screens with voice recognition. Heaven!

I especially love the idea of interacting with data this way. Internet and computer searches, graphics design and even things like doing your genealogy. Think of having a virtual tree that you can zoom in and out and rotate in 3D to determine where you are missing data. Just awsome.

If you have not seen the new yahoo mail client that is in beta now you need to check it out. This is by far the best email client I have ever used. I have been using it for several weeks now and just love it. It uses web 2.0 technologies to allow features like drag and drop and dynamic functionality. Here are some of the features that I like:

1. New tabbed interface. There are now tabs within the client that allow for different views. This is great when creating an email for example you can switch back to your inbox.
2. Improved address management. It makes it easier to add new addresses to your book.
3. Preview pane. The preview pane works just like the outlook or thunderbird email clients. But it is online.
4. New RSS reader included in the menu. The RSS feeds I have on myyahoo page where automatically included in the menu of my email client. This is very slick.

With the new client I get the best features of an installed email client but with the added benefits of a web client. Yahoo has hit a home run with this one and I cant wait for all the bugs to be worked out.

I have just added the feed links to the right hand menu. This way you can add my blog to the rss reader of your choice.