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Yesterday morning Apple Inc. went ahead and showed the world their newest gadget, the iPad.  In pretty much every way, it is just an oversize iPod touch, but Apple hopes you will think it’s much more than that.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that the iPad is “a revolutionary device” and is “magical”.  Where’s the magic?  Well, it’s thin.  A half inch thin with nicely tapered edges on the back to make it look even thinner.  The back cover is a nicely-curved piece of aluminum and the front is a beautiful 9.7 piece of glass with an LCD screen behind it.  The screen is bright has great viewing angles but they still pack 10 hours of battery usage (and weeks of standby) into the guts behind the screen.  And, if you do go to the Apple Store and try one out in a couple months, you will most likely enjoy touching the screen and watching a video on it.  But I don’t think it’s magical or that everyone need save up their pennies to get the $499 device.

On the stage that they presented it, Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller demoed the new Apple iPad while sitting in a cushy living-room style chair.  And that’s just what Apple hopes you’ll think you need.  I carry my iPhone when on the go.  When I need to get serious work done, I go into my room and work on my laptop computer.  But although my laptop is portable and I could bring it into the living room for hanging out or personal entertainment, Apple would rather see me keep this lying about the living room.  I guess I wouldn’t mind, but I’m actually plenty comfortable watching videos and doing pretty much everything on my MacBook Pro or iPhone, thank you.  There will be the millions of Apple fans who will get one and maybe the rich who want another unique computer will get one, but it’s not yet apparent why I’d want an iPad if I’ve got the rest of the Apple family covering my needs.

As per usual, Apple has taken their popular, built-in iPhone apps and made them even more impressive.  With about 5x more screen real estate, the ability to browse through e-mail, contacts, calendar, photos and videos is even better looking and there’s much more room for ancillary features and buttons all over the screen.  And, of course, web browsing is really smooth and slick-looking.  Apple has also re-built their iWork suite for the iPad, building entirely new and intuitive ways to enter text and manipulate documents.  One of the standouts in this area is the input pads replacing the virtual keyboard: one that is a number pad, one that includes more of the common functions, and one that makes it really easy to input dates.  Also, there’s simple and beautiful interfaces for moving around slides in Keynote and text in Pages.  While these iWork apps are not as full-featured as the Mac OS X counterparts, most of the features of its bigger brother are retained, as opposed to the iPhone and iPod touch, where users can currently only view these documents.  The iPod functionality looks more like iTunes in its browsing and playback functionality as well, thanks to the bigger screen.

One of the main features of the iPod touch and iPhone is the myriads of apps that are available for free and for pay on the iTunes App Store, and the Apple iPad piggybacks on that very well.  Any iPod touch/iPhone app will run in a fifth of the screen area just as it is on the iPad’s smaller family members, but you can also quadruple the size to get a more full-screen feel to your old apps.  Even more exciting, though, is the great new ideas that developers will be coming up with over the coming months for the iPad.  At the event, The New York Times showed a beautiful app that displays the paper’s content in a way that resembles paper really well but also gives much more control over to the user in that they can change the columns, text sizing, and easily flip through sections without ever losing that newspaper feel.  No word of this yet, but I hope that an easy way to browse my favorite print magazines in full color comes out of this.

Gameloft and EA showed off games that use the bigger screen, touchscreen area and the new Apple A4 processor to show better graphics, but also to add more display bells and whistles such as maps and gauges as well as more controls, some of which can even be moved around the screen to wherever the user preferred to have them.  Also, MLB.com showed an updated version of their popular app that got me excited for April’s season opener: the Gameday screen on the Apple iPad has pretty much every statistic that MLB collects available on screen or with one swipe of the finger.  Also, they showed full screen live games and the ability to pull up lots of those statistics right on top of the live video in transparent overlays.  That will sell the iPad to those who want more than their transistor radios to follow baseball, I think.

The major problems with the Apple iPad are almost exactly the same as the iPhone: Apple is too controlling to make it a very useful device.  Developers such as EA, The New York Times, and MLB.com have been able to create cool apps.  But, as I said months ago, there are many ideas developers have for apps for iPad/iPhone, but they are not sure if Apple will let them sell it because it may compete with something Apple is building or one of Apple’s partners has created.  Also, especially with a more powerful machine such as the iPad, Apple needs to be allowing the iPad to run more than one program at once.  Yeah, only allowing one program to run makes the iPad seem faster, but all we’d really like to do is play Pandora (or some similar live streaming audio) in the background while browsing a site or working on a document.  Apple, in my opinion, needs to get these types of things fixed and figured out before real success will be seen among power users.

On the other hand, the reason Apple loves this closed platform they’ve built is because they control all of it and get a couple cents for every transaction made with their device.  There are other downsides, as well.  It’s not a great movie device because the screen is square and not widescreen so over a third of the screen will be black bars when viewing movies and video podcasts.  The base product has WiFi including the speedy 802.11n, but another $130 (and then $30/month) is required to get 3G cell phone data access and GPS capabilities, so it is not cheap to use this out of your house where you have the WiFi.  Also, there are a number of features of the Apple iPad that require fairly regular syncing with iTunes in order to be useful.  In a related note, there’s no way to use the iPhone or iPad as a USB hard drive and it is unclear as to how you get your iWork documents on the iPad, especially now that the iPad has (up to) 64GB of storage.

Even though I see no need for an iPad in my living room and in the living room of most people, there are some applications that may be perfect for the iPad.  One thing that Apple announced was the new iBook store.  In the iBook store, users of the iPad can purchase bestselling books that include full-color photos and even videos and users can change the font size and even the typeface of the book on the fly.  This may be a preferred view for those who currently enjoy the Amazon Kindle, and there’s talk of the iBook store selling textbooks and therefore it may be popular to give to students instead of carrying around piles of textbooks.  Persons who are on the road and manipulate geographic data will enjoy applications that use the big screen for maps and built-in GPS and compass data.  Medical applications may find the iPad useful, although some expect that the lack of the ability to write on the iPad to be a downside.  Another interesting application will likely be for artists, as some have been using the iPod touch and a program called “Brushes” to make professional artwork and the brilliant 9.7-inch display will no doubt bring in more creative opportunities.

Overall, the Apple iPad is a fairly impressive device looking for a market.  Only time will tell what that market is and how successful it will be.

This weekend, I’m going on a trip to South Bend, Indiana. For the trip, I decided I should have an iTrip, the very helpful device that charges your iPod or iPhone while also transmitting the audio over the radio waves. It’s a great product and I’ve had ones numerous times before, but I seemed to have misplaced mine over the last 6-8 months. I looked up the product on their site and found that the product I wanted was regularly priced at $69.99. (It seems that having an iPod connector and the stickers that say “Made for iPhone” and “Made for iPod” cost at least $20 per device, which is ridiculous.)

I am leaving on Friday night, so I was a bit short on time to get the product. So, I went to the most convenient location: the Best Buy in the Mall of America, which is close to work. Sure enough, they had the product there. But wait? Wasn’t the MSRP at $69.99? Yeah, it is, but Best Buy is charging $72.99! Well, I need it pretty quick and I don’t have time to order it online, so I went ahead and purchased it. With MN sales tax, my total expense was $78.30.

After the fact, I decided to do some online price comparison. Of course, I went to Amazon.com, where they verify that the MSRP is $69.99. But lo, they’re selling it for $46.99! Just as a comparison, I priced out overnight shipping from Amazon.com for the same product, and Amazon.com will get it to my door tomorrow for $64.97.

Why the discrepancy? First, Best Buy knows that you came to their store to get this item. The Griffin ITrip is not like the DVD, CD, or even that Nintendo DS game where you just say, “Yeah, that’s not too pricey, I’ll get this too.” You need the iTrip. Therefore, Best Buy is going to make sure they can get all the profit out of the iTrip that they can. Amazon.com, on the other hand, offers the iTrip at just a bit above their cost of getting the product, most likely. If we assume both Best Buy and Amazon.com have get these units for the same price from Griffin, Best Buy just got over 35% of my product’s price as profit. On the other hand, Amazon.com didn’t charge me the 33% and kept the couple percent as profit and operating costs.

Is this highway robbery? Not really. Best Buy has massive costs they have to cover, such as renting all that retail space and paying undereducated employees. The part I think is highway robbery is the extra $3 over the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). I probably should have left and gone to the Apple Store, because if they have the product, I doubt they sell it for more than the MSRP.

This morning it was announced that Marvel Entertainment is to be acquired by Walt Disney Corp. for $4 Billion. Many of my friends, as well as myself, seem to be a bit worried and skeptical about the future of their favorite Marvel characters. But, upon thinking about it more and more, I think this is a sound business decision and Disney will likely handle it well.

First, many Marvel fans seem to think that being associated with Disney means that Spider-Man and Wolverine will be portrayed as kids stuff just like Mickey and Hanna Montana. To many, that’s all the Disney brand means. Remember that Disney is a multinational corporation that owns Disneyland, Disney World, Walt Disney Pictures and PIXAR, as well as other Hollywood studios such as Touchstone Pictures, Miramax, and Hollywood Pictures. Disney also owns The ABC Network, ESPN, as well as a couple music labels and a radio network. People don’t think of Wes Anderson’s first four films, most of Quentin Tarantino’s films, as well as Scream, Spy Kids, and Farenheight 9/11, but that’s because Disney doesn’t stick the mouse ears right on the screen. Not everyone in the world is fans of Mickey and Donald, and Disney still does business that caters to them.

Second, Disney is always looking for some of the hottest properties out there. Marvel Entertainment, a leader in the comic book world, is definitely a great new business to get into when looking for more avenues to make profit. Marvel used to sell the movie rights to other studios for such things as X-Men, Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four. But more recently Marvel Entertainment has been financing and producing the movies themselves. So far, with films such as Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, the production quality and the reception by the fans has been even better than before Marvel Studios was formed. Marvel and Disney did say that the distribution agreements with Paramount, Sony, and Fox are going to be continued. I can see Disney wanting to buy back some of these rights, but it shows that Disney knows Marvel has done things right and they don’t want to ruin that for the rather small distribution fees. Also, the news also cited that Disney has many hot properties for the female market such as Hanna Montana and The Jonas Brothers and are looking for more products to capitalize on the male teen and adult, and that’s right where Marvel is at the top of the list.

Third, I think Marvel does stand to gain from the help of Disney. George Lucas may be known as the one who started “merchandising” for movies, but Disney definitely brought merchandising to a whole new level and does it in smart, intelligent ways that cater to their audience. Will we see cool Superman or X-Men rides at Disney World? That could be awesome! Will we see more Iron Man toys? Probably. One quote from Disney CEO Bob Iger, who brought Disney back from the brink of losing its magic touch four years ago, was that PIXAR Animation Studios is excited about working on Marvel properties. (Think the action of The Incredibles with some of the world’s best-known comic book characters.) Also, Marvel has over 4,000 characters, but they don’t really have the money to make movies for even a fraction of those characters. With the financial muscle of Disney, I think we can expect plenty more Marvel content in the future.

Don’t get me wrong. Disney could screw this up really bad. However, for these reasons and others, I think it’s too much in Disney’s best interest to let Marvel do their thing and help them out. In that, I mean that Disney sees the dollars rolling in with the acquisition of Marvel, as long as they stay smart. The last four years since Bob Iger’s takeover as CEO has been Disney’s best in the last decade, and with smart business decisions like this, I think Disney may get even better.

This week, Google released an iPhone web app for Google Latitude, their location-aware social networking tool. The weird part was this program was just a web app running in the iPhone’s Safari browser and not even an app like Google has made for almost every other phone. Here’s a snippet from the TUAW post about it:

As Google’s Mat Balez notes in his blog post announcing the Latitude release, Google actually developed a native app for Latitude… only to have Apple, uh, suggest that the big G redo the concept as a web app to avoid user confusion with the Maps app. Really? Must have been an interesting phone call.

No kidding. Google spent all their sweet time, no doubt, making a really nice and powerful iPhone app to allow you to manage contacts and see where your friends are on a map. Then, while submitting it to the iTunes App Store, they’re told that Apple will not accept this. Great, that’s a couple months of programmer time down the drain for Google.

Hold on a second here, though. When Apple announced the App Store, they announced their venture capital friends were putting together a fund for new small businesses to make apps for the phone. One of the first companies that got in on that cash was Pelago Inc., which started a service call Whrrl. I’ve since then deleted that app and used one that a number of my friends are on called Loopt. All of these apps are already doing the same thing that the Google Latitude app wanted to do, but apparently because Google is a much bigger partner and competitor of Apple’s they do not get the option to do an app like this. It doesn’t make any sense, and it costs Google thousands of dollars down the drain just because Apple can axe anything they don’t like for their phone.

It’s even a bigger problem for Apple and third-party hardware makers. Apple does give an API to interface with hardware devices that a company develops and plugs into the iPhone. Companies have already made nice car mounts that will charge your phone and add a couple other features. Medical service providers have made adapters to hook up various types of medical equipment, and Apple has been fine with this. But add some cool thing that will let you do things with still or video cameras? A cool way to import video to your iPhone? The company will likely spend millions developing that hardware component and thousands creating a cool iPhone app to interface with the hardware. But, in the end, if Apple wants to say “no” to the app submission the company has a cool hardware gadget with no way to use it.

On one hand, Apple does all this controlling of applications in the iPhone App Store in the name of protecting the customer, and in some cases they are protecting us from crappy products. But, with situations like this (and some other things that they should have protected us from but got out) it’s proving that not only are they doing a terrible job of protecting us, but Apple is too often blocking the cool stuff. Often Apple is even blocking the cool stuff because they want to release their own version a couple months later.

I think that Apple should keep the platform more open. We would get more crap, but the iPhone App Store ecosystem would be even more healthy and have even cooler solutions for iPhone users. Besides, without Apple protecting us from the crap, we would still mark it as crap and not use it. I’m not saying that Apple cannot host the app store, but let it run free and see it become even more useful and powerful.

Although I’m sure I’m not much younger than Robin Parrish, I feel like I grew up with Robin Parrish’s work. In the earlier days of the Internet, Robin Parrish was one of the leading journalists covering the Christian music scene on the Internet with his site on About.com. At a time when I was running my own, much less successful Christian music site, I read his insightful reviews and commentary constantly. When I graduated from high school, Robin was doing stuff that he was more interested in, covering movies, novels, and comic books with an even more undying fervor. It was during this time that Robin started publishing his own novels online, the last of which became a real, paperback novel this month. It’s titled Offworld.

Like the Dominion Trilogy that Parrish released the last couple years, Offworld starts with a mysterious hook. Everyone is gone. Everyone. It’s 2033 and the first manned mission to Mars has returned to earth successfully, but no one is there to greet them. Even the animals and bugs are mysteriously gone. After four years by themselves in space, this is hardly the welcome the team wanted.

Thus, the crew sets out to unravel this mystery. Along the way, the reader finds that these astronauts have their own personal secrets. Plus, there’s an anti-social young woman who seems to have spent her whole life on the streets and is the only person to not have disappeared. Not to mention that it seems that nature itself is trying to stop them from finding the answers.

Within Offworld, Robin Parrish creates characters that are as flawed and realistic as they are NASA’s biggest heroes. Throughout all his books so far, the characters have always had some mystery, such that just when you think you know them, they surprise you with a new wrinkle to their story. These are definitely no exception, and with less than a half-dozen main characters, there’s plenty of time to get to know them well. Although the character development has very little action to it, this was probably my favorite part of the novel.

Speaking of action, I found this the hardest book yet to put down. Nearly every chapter ends on a total cliffhanger. As many have said before me, Parrish’s books will someday do really well as summer blockbuster films, and Offworld is no exception. (That is, as long as Roland Emmerich doesn’t direct it and make the climax happen in New York.) In fact, the book was so intense I finished it less than 24 hours after picking it up. Good thing it was a weekend, or else I would have suffered at work from either sleep deprivation or thinking of nothing but what might happen next.

So what about Parrish being a “Christian”? Does the book create some big allegory to our life in Christ? Do some of the main characters get “saved”? Thankfully, no, Parrish’s books are not preachy. The heroes of the book exude characteristics that Christ teaches us like selflessness, hope, and sound morals. Some characters beg a higher power for help, but Parrish doesn’t slow the story down with any theological lessons. In my opinion, it’s great to see persons of faith writing positive, engaging stories that are for everyone, not just a church-going audience.

If you’re looking for a fun, engaging read during the heat of summer, check out Offworld. I’m hoping it’ll be hitting theaters in Summer 2013, but don’t count on it; get the book now and you’ll be ahead of everyone else.

P.S. – Going back to my old days with Robin Parrish publishing his early revisions of novels on the Internet, I hope something like that continues. I don’t read many novels, but because Parrish’s stories were released (at least partially) for free on the Internet, I was hooked. I’m not exactly sure if the first chapter will suffice for me as a hook to get me to buy the book – I’d like to see more to promote upcoming books online.

Well, it seems that, unless I’m doing a T-shirt post, I have to start these blog posts with a disclaimer.  So I’ll do that.  DrupalCon DC is the first large conference I’ve ever really been to, so I suppose lots of things impress me.  It’s been a great show to learn about Drupal so far, and I can’t wait to get down ‘n’ dirty with Drupal coding tomorrow!

First, the folks at Development Seed, who put on the conference, did an amazing job at the graphics for the conference as well as the website functionality.  First, there’s the DrupalCon DC website, which even won a design mention from Smashing Magazine.  It’s a great background and great artwork that immediately brings a DC feel.  They translated this graphic design to the posters in the lobby, like this one:

Also, the booklet with the map of the conference rooms and session schedule had another version of this graphic:

I also love how the booklets even have the Metro underneath the ground, because that’s also one of my favorite parts of DC in the first place.

The DrupalCon DC swag was also really fun.  First, there’s the badge that verifies you paid for the conference and lists your name, which looks like a coffee cup:

And, finaly, the DrupalCon DC bag seems to be a pretty nice, reusable grocery bag with a sarcastic-looking design of a recycling bin on the side.  I like it, though, because it’s not just a crappy messenger bag or something similar that will either break or you’ll just throw it out.

Another fun item is that, before the show’s keynotes, the large projection screens show Twitter messages from people about #drupalcon.  Here’s one of my Tweet’s on the screen – my Tweet is about 2 feet tall:

And yes, although I didn’t really attend any of the parties, many folks were getting creative in the party invites or other swag that they gave out.  My favorite is for tonight’s party put on by Lullaobot, which is a real floppy disk and emulates an old pin printer’s look:

So, I’m not sure if this is the fault of Apple’s iTunes or the makers of all the news podcasts, but I’m sure each are at least partially to blame. You see, last night President Obama spoke and I want to watch it on the train to work tomorrow.

First, let me say that when the debates and the inagauration took place, I had no problem finding video of it later in the day or the next morning on iTunes’ Podcast area. In fact, on a couple, I already had the feed on my iTunes and it just started coming in. But now, 24 hours after Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress, I can’t find a video version to easily load onto my iPod.

iTunes is definitely to blame on at least one count. The browsing of the iTunes Podcast area is abysmal at best and unusable at worst. You can find the top things and the ones featured, but you’ve got no good ways to browse other things. And don’t think the search box is going to help you much, because every time you type in a search it searches the whole iTunes Store and you get all this other crap until you click to say, “I want only podcasts, you stupid program! That’s why I was browsing in the Podcasts section!” Even then, searching for “Obama address Congress” in the search box give you nothing but one radio station’s commentary on it. If you broaden it to “Obama address” you get a couple top podcasts that do feature Obama giving an address, but this gets me to my next point.

First, Barack Obama’s White House administration does have their own podcast, and the weekly radio address is well-presented via this podcast in both video or audio formats. I definitely am subscribed to this podcast, although I recommend doing your research afterwords through other news sources, because even if he’s the President, you can’t really take his word on everything. Second, ABC News offers the next best thing: a podcast with the exact same stuff that they host and deliver. I like that they did put the address in audio form in their audio version of the podcast, but I want video! Their video version of the weekly address podcast has no such item. For the debates, other podcasts such as Anderson Cooper 360 also put the videos in their podcast feed, but none of them are offering it up this time.

The web-savvy crowd at my blog may say, “But Dan, it’s an hour long! That’s a big file and that’s lots of badwidth!” Yeah, you’re right, but that didn’t stop them for the Inaguration address or any of the debates. In fact, the debates were longer but they were done in great video quality that was easy to load on your iPhone. Plus, if you want, throw an advertisement or two in there, I’ll watch it if it’s interesting or is only 30 seconds long. Then, there’s the others who will say, “Dan, I already watched all of it on Hulu.” Yeah, I know, but I can’t load that video into my iPhone for my daily commute. Then, as TJ said, I could try loading it up via YouTube on my iPhone, but I like being able to see Obama if I’m going to watch the video, and the only that the YouTube video quality on the iPhone is good for is videos of a cat on the Roomba. Plus, when I hit the tunnel under the airport then the streaming video will just stop playing, probably, and that’s no fun.

Hopefully, in the next couple hours, a solution will appear. If they do, don’t let any tech person from the major network that put it out say it takes over a day to encode a video for the iPod, because it doesn’t. Otherwise, I may just have to stay uninformed for the rest of my life. Or, worse yet, I’ll have to read a transcript.

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been on Pownce for about a year.  In April sometime I started cross-posting my Pownce status posts to Twitter.  But, even before I started posting to Twitter, I didn’t like it.  However, now that Pownce is leaving, I just want to go through the main reasons that I hate Twitter:

1. 140 Characters: I like using these “micro-blogging” services to tell what I’m up to as well as to post quick thoughts on life, tech news, or whatever.  However, the limitation of 140 characters for each post is unneccesary and makes very little sense.  With posting to Twitter, I cannot just post a quick thought.  The 140 character limit makes me have to write down the thought and then spend a minute or two editing it down to 140 characters.  I’d rather write my thought and get back to work, not spend a bunch of my valuable time trimming my thoughts.  The 140 character limit to posts was because Twitter was designed to allow you to be notified and post via SMS/text messaging, but I only know of one or two of the 82 people I’m following who are actually using the phone to keep up with Twitter.
2. Media Support: Sites like Pownce gave you lots of options for posting media.  You could post a link to the URL with a comment.  You can attach a photo to a post.  Linking to a YouTube video on Pownce automatically added an embedded version of the video to the page.  These are just nice little tweaks that make Twitter more useful, but Twitter supports none of them.  Serioiusly, most of these little tweaks would take, at the most, hours to develop and implement.  Most of the Twitter iPhone Apps or browser plugins give support for TwitPic, but beyond that, Twitter gives no support for anything beyond text.
3. Follow Via IM/RSS: Back in the early days of Twitter, you could befriend Twitter on the Google Talk system and it would post all your friend’s updates through your Google Talk IM system.  Also, you could tell Twitter that you wanted to search for a keyword and it would give you all the Twitter posts with that keyword in them.  And back in the day I could also get one RSS feed with all my friends’ posts, which was really handy for making sure I didn’t miss a post.  However, as Twitter became more popular, these features were discountinued.

Of course, the main thing that Twitter has going for it is that everyone is there.  I mean, I got some friends to sign up for Pownce, but they weren’t doing much with it because no one else was there posting and reading everyone else’s posts.  Twitter was appreantly the first place to make this “micro-blogging” thing big, and they’ve got a long head start on everyone.  I think a good analogy is the MySpace world.  I mean, anyone who has used the web knows that MySpace looks terrible but because it was one of the first and it caught on, it still has tons of staying power.

So what’s out there instead of Twitter?  The most obvious is Identi.ca, a Twitter clone that is based on the open source Laconica platform.  The folks at Identi.ca have created a version of Twitter that can be set up by anyone who wants to create a server and the different instances of the Laconica service can communicate with each oher.  The folks over at TWiT Army have found that it creates smaller niche communities based on interests, but you can still follow people from other communities as well.  However, I’d have to say that the fact that Laconica still uses Twitter’s 140 character limit is a bit annoying.

Another service I’ve been hearing about a lot and just started trying is FriendFeed.  It allows you to give it tons of feeds, from Flickr to Google Talk to any RSS feed to your Amazon Wish List and lots more.  It then monitors all of them and gives one feed of all the latest information.  I plugged almost everything I’m involved into my FriendFeed page and you get plenty of information about my activity online.  Of course, you can only put as much as you want on there, and I expect you can make it so only your friends can see the information you put in if you are worried about privacy.  And, of course, you can post status notes, links, or even photos right on FriendFeed’s system – and they can even be longer than 140 characters!  Plus, to make sure your friend on Twitter are informed, you can have FriendFeed post to any or all of your information to Twitter as well!  Those who spend all day in their Google Talk screens can even get all FriendFeed activity posted to their Google Talk chat window as well, if they like.

Has Twitter created an interesting new medium for keeping up with friends online?  Yes.  But after a few years of keeping it simple and only lowering their services instead of expanding it, Twitter is just losing the battle.  I’d be fine if people started moving on or they started using a more open format, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

I love microblogging and the social medias.  I’m always looking for little social media experiments as well.  Besides this blog, I’m always thinking up other ways to drum up interested readers, inform readers, and give out my opinions.  Of course, one of those genres that I love commenting on is movies and the crazyness of Hollywood.

Microblogging services such as Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed and their social media friends are also another fun place to express an opinion.  Twitter has one interesting limitation – that is, all posts have to be 140 characters or less.  In some ways, this makes it as much of an art form as a short form blogging service.  For my personal account, one of the reasons I use Pownce is because I like to convey a unique thought without having to edit for 140 characters.  But, for more rehearsed messaging, I figure that the 140-character limit can be a sort of editing challenge.

With this in mind, I created the trailer_review Twitter account.  On this account, I post an 140-character or less review of the movie preview, starting with the title of the movie and ending with a link to the preview.  But, after posting a couple trailer mini-reviews, I decided that I’d want a website to go along with that I could provide more information at a later time, if I wanted.  Plus, not everyone is yet on Twitter, so maybe others would like a separate site where the could grab an RSS feed, leave comments, etc.  Thus, thanks to the power of Drupal, it took a couple hours to get a functional, decent-looking website working.  This is the store of Trailer-Review.com, my first-ever Drupal weekend project.  (Full disclosure: It took me two weekends to do all these steps because I was working on a couple paying freelance projects and doing other things, but these processes could easily be done in one free weekend.)  To paraphrase Strong Bad, “Feel free to follow along with my simple step-by-step instructions. I make [Drupal] FUN!”

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Last week, at this time, I was having major problems with my laptop.  Sometime around 6pm on Sunday, my MacBook Pro suddenly decided it could not use DHCP anymore.  (DHCP, for the uninitiated, is the ability for your computer to just work when you join a network.  If you don’t have DHCP, you have to know a valid IP address, the gateway IP address, and IP addresses of working DNS servers to connect to the same network.  DHCP just asks the router to give this to you automatically.)

So, upon realizing it was my computer only, I tried testing it at the neighbor’s house (because our Internet connection is crappy, at best).  While over there, I had Collin check the router and he said the router was handing me all the usual DHCP information, but apparently my Apple MacBook Pro was just not recognizing it.  I went to bed early and hoped we could get it working tomorrow.

During lunch on Monday, I checked at work to make sure their network was giving my machine the same problem.  It was, so I signed up for a meeting with a “Genius” at the Apple Store.  After waiting for 25 minutes for the Genius Bar to get to my turn, I spent a half hour working with the “Genius” to figure it out.  Most of the stuff he wanted to do I had already tried, such as booting Mac OS X in safe mode and even resetting the power system.  He booted from a FireWire external drive and the networking worked there, so it was a software problem.  We tried deleting a number of network-related settings files, which magically recreate themselves with the default settings in case something has gone wrong.  But, still, the “Genius” hadn’t seen this problem before, and therefore he didn’t know of any good solution besides the dreaded “Archive and Install” procedure.

Why the “dreaded” Archive and Install?  Well, because the process of backing up all your system and user files and then installing Mac OS X anew took two and a half hours!  OK, so it only took an hour and a half, but there was another hour of running all those software updates to get my MacBook Pro up to date.  That’s a long time.  Windows doesn’t even take that long, I don’t think.

So what’s the problem?  I believed the whole Apple hype that the Mac OS X experience was better than Windows Vista.  Yes, I got this issue fixed with only a day and a half of my free time taken away, but what would I have been out if I had a Windows problem?  With this kind of networking problem on Windows, all I’ve usually had to do is get a newer version of the hardware’s driver or slap the side of the tower and it would kick back into gear.  I would’ve had better ideas of how to fix it on Windows because of years of experience with it, but with Mac OS X I had to go see an “Genius” who really had no insight at all.

Is the romance with Apple over?  Far from it!  I’ve got an iPhone and everything on my laptop is working again.  I like the fact that there is someone I can go to and try to get help for my computer – there’s no such person on the PC world because the manufacturer and Microsoft just keep pointing fingers at each other.  After getting Mac OS X reinstalled, I only had to move my Applications and User folder back into the live system from the backup and I was up and running with the exact same preferences and settings as I had before.  On a Windows machine, most of my data is in my “Documents and Settings” area, but tons of my settings are scattered throughout the rest of the computer as well.

People talk about companies that need to be more open and public.  Companies should listen to their customers.  Apple makes cool products, but they always do it their way.  They never listen to their customers until a raging mob starts pounding down the doors at Cupertino.  They develop software for Windows but purposely leave out the features that would really make the application useful and keep those for Mac OS X.  And, for Windows, there’s a Knowledge Base article with five solutions to fix almost every problem – for Apple’s support website, they’ll just tell you to restart the computer and then go to see the “Genius” if it doesn’t work.

I’m not too mad at Apple – I just wish Apple would wake up to the world they live in and start acting like a real company.  I wish they’d really work to help their customers.  But, then again, maybe that’s what makes Apple cool and keeps people sleeping on the sidewalk for days in order to be the first to touch their product.