Rubénerd!

Upon reading a few positive reviews, I decided to try the new AirMe iPhone application yesterday. I've been having lots of fun with it! AirMe is a free (cool!) iPhone and iPod Touch application that lets you upload screenshots and photos you've either taken with the built in camera or already have on your device to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket.

One really useful feature it has include being able to scale images down before transmitting which would be really useful if you're on a crappy 2G phone network or slow WiFi connection. You can also set it to only transfer images if you're on WiFi.

The buttons along the bottom of the screen could use some labels in my opinion to make them easier to figure out for first time users, but aside from that I think it's a fantastic application. And it's free!

In this post are the two shots I've uploaded directly to my Flickr account from my iPhone as of yesterday. The first that you can see above is a horribly out of focus shot of a pretty cup of coffee from the Boatdeck Cafe where I was sitting at the time. The second below is a screenshot of the iTunes application downloading an episode of Cranky Geeks which appears to be taking a while!

This post documents a simple little trick I learned by accident in the iPhone's and iPod Touch's Notes application. By default Notes uses the "Marker Felt" font for its interface which lends itself well to the illusion that you're writing on a notepad rather than typing on a computer screen, but the letters are quite thick and I've found they tend to run together outdoors when the screen is bathed in sunlight.

If you've enabled an East Asian script such as Japanese Katakana or Korean Hangul on your iPhone keyboard, if you tap on the little sphere button to change to it and add one character, the text on the note you're editing transforms into regular, clear, easy to read sans-serif font, including the heading when you return to the main Notes menu. Beautiful!

I suspect it has something to do with the character set changing that triggers this. For example bloggers know Lucida Grande on Mac OS X and Lucida Sans Unicode on Windows NT-derived systems have excellent support for regular Roman letters as well as Japanese characters. It's likely Marker Felt on the iPhone does not have such character support; and for good reason! I couldn't imagine trying to read East Asian characters in such a thick, fuzzy font.

The Ruben is a cranky geek episode! With special guest Elke Schade.

New iPods introduced

What Elke thinks of the new Nano, what I think of the Touch, Apple disabling Linux support, downloading cover art in iTunes.

Local Singapore news

World's largest water pumps being built in the Marina Barrage, what prevents people from being sucked in?

Facebook news

Microsoft buying a pointless chunk, profile gluttony, voting for the Aussie Greens, Elke's rant on registration woes, I use Twitter to pretend I update my profile, CSS customisation would mean death.

Ruben tries to make Mr Kloss proud

Why doesn't everyone use metric, what they teach you in school is pointless, why the whole Product Red scheme is no good, why can't Microsoft even create a spreadsheet app that multiplies properly, why are all men on television fat and stupid?

And the ratholes...

Lava lamp confusion, Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong armbands, eating grapes, failing MadPlayers and tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 54:46 minutes, 25.10MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

The fact is the "iPod Classic" is still technically the best iPod, but it has the outdated interface. The "Touch" is a glorified Nano.

- My post on Twitter just before I went to bed at 03:25

Just finished watching the live text and photo feeds from Tom Krazit on News.com, Ars Technica and MacDailyNews of Wednesday's Apple music player product launch.

From the features I typed up in my last post that I did and didn't want to see, it was really a mixed bag. It's great that Apple released the iPod Touch with the same interface and features as the iPhone; including the WiFi connectivity of which Singapore has a bountiful public supply; but my worst fear that they decided to use flash memory came to pass!

What was that image of Saber using an iPod I used in my previous post? Let's make it FULL SIZE:

As they did with iLife 2008 by bundling the older version of iMovie because they knew the newer version wasn't that crash hot (you can hear my rant on Rubenerd Show 225), Apple have kept the iPod Classic line going with hard disks despite the launch of a newer flash-based iPod Touch. I can't help but wonder if the iPod Classic is really just to give the excuse that they're still providing decent storage without actually having to provide it at the high end.

Despite the attractive WiFi functionality in the new iPod Touch which as I said above would work fantastically in Singapore, I think I'll have to side with Frank Nora and keep my iPod Video and Nokia e61i for the time being.

I can't help but see though, the price for the 16GB iPod Touch is the same as the 8GB iPhone. It makes you wonder if they're really just using the Touch as a stepping stone to convince people to move over to their phone, and with it their data plans with their approved carriers that they receive commissions from. Why buy just an iPod when the iPhone is the same price?

Okay, okay it's almost 03:00 here in Asia, I'm off to bed.