The blog is official now – I have completed the incorporation of this blog, so please welcome Lopaul Industries, LLC to life!  I want this to be more than a casual hobby, so I committed to making it a business and have begun investing in it and treating it as a business entity.

Look for new and current posts.  I have a notebook full of ideas and a number of draft posts already in progress.  I also have exciting ideas about how I can help my readers with motivation and inspiration.  Please stay tuned as I kick this thing into high gear and start cranking things out.

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iPhone Main Screen

Have you seen blog posts or stories where they included really nice screen captures from an iPhone and wondered how they did it?  Well I did too.  I was curious about how to do this because the iPhone only allows one program running at a time.  Well, I did some searching and the answer is simple and awesome!

The secret is that the screen capture functionality is built into the iPhone OS – and it works great.

• Press and hold the <home> button
• Press the <sleep/wake> button on the top

The screen will then flash white and you will hear the camera click sound.  It takes a little playing around to get the right combination and button hold times, but once you figure it out it is simple.  The pictures get added to your camera roll right along with the rest of your camera pictures.  Then when you sync the phone next just suck them down with iPhoto or your favorite Windows image software.

Here are some examples from two of my favorite games:

Screen Capture From Toobz

Screen Capture From Toki Tori

Now that you know the secret, lets see some awesome screen captures! If you have one, comment below and link to it.

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Track consistently

This is really the most important part.  When you have a nice long history of data it is great to be able to know what you have done and then you have a sense of accomplishment.  Get in the habit of recording your data as soon as you are done.  This will become natural and then you won’t have holes in your data.

Do something

It really doesn’t matter how you track, just keep track.  This can be a simple as writing it down in a notebook, keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet, or getting some specific software to help you track.  Obviously, if your end goal is something to display on the web then it makes sense to input it into a computer.  The format isn’t as important, however as data can usually be repurposed and translated to different applications once it has been entered on the computer.

Using the data

Make sure that you actually use the data.  Periodically go through your numbers and look at things like how often you did your activity, what improved, and what you could stand to improve.  If you have something that would make a great tutorial, publish it on the web and let other people enjoy and learn from your experience.

If you haven’t done anything like this before, I suggest you start today.  Yes, you may not have data from before which would be nice to have, but if you put it off more then you have even more data lost.  Make it important and simple, and keep with it!

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Purchase Experience

It was a Tuesday night and all the AT&T stores in Austin were sold out of the 3GS, so we headed to one of our Apple stores.  I first did the pre-approval process online, but we would have had plenty of time to do it in the store while waiting.  There was a good line even at 6:00 at night so we ended up waiting about 45 minutes before getting called.  We both got the 16G black 3GS phones and our helper Nick was awesome.  I really get why Apple is popular.  They make really nice solid products with software that is excellent and treat the customers really well.  He was wearing a blue shirt, which I’m sure has some funky designation in apple-land.  Anyway, after talking with him for almost another hour, we left with our new iPhones.

Initial Thoughts

The iPhone certainly isn’t the panacea that it had built up to in my mind, but I am really enjoying it.  The interface is great once you figure things out.  The figuring out does take some doing, though.

Last night our biggest issue was setting up email.  We both use Yahoo email and this process was incredibly frustrating!  I ended up spending 45 minutes on the phone with Apple support before we got Yahoo mail connected and working.  The short story is that the built-in Yahoo email uses imap and apparently Yahoo doesn’t do this well at all.  We had to set up the Yahoo accounts under “other” and use POP3 mail instead of imap.  Since this was the main feature my wife wanted, I had to work on that instead of playing around with everything else   Anyway, now that is working and I’ve had some time to play around with it and I really like it.

Plans Going Forward

One of the main things I want to utilize is the ability to look up activities and restaurants while we are out.  Too many times we will be out on the weekends and not really want to go home, but not know where else to go.  Being able to look up activities on the go is my primary motivator for finally getting these.

I also plan on heavily using the camera for pictures and video.  This will enhance my blog with the ability to easily add images to my posts.  Having the Apple hardware and software all through this process should make it streamlined and easy once I get a system down

Conclusion

After being totally out of the iPhone craze for so long, I’m finally happy to have my hands on one.  I am excited about putting this thing through it’s paces and trying to figure out how to improve my life and my family’s lives with it.  Now I just need to not get too caught up in in that I spend all my time playing with the iPhone instead of being with my family!

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Tweepular has a tab that isn’t working yet labeled “Recent Unfollowers”. This is a much needed feature that they will hopefully release soon. In the mean time, I’m looking for a tool to monitor people that have unfollowed me. If you have one, please comment and let me know!

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Hardware

There is no doubt that the Apple design engineers are awesome.  This laptop is a thing of beauty like I haven’t seen on a Windows machine.  The glass screen is beautiful to look at, the aluminum chassis is sleek and gorgeous, and the trackpad – OMG!  Two-finger gestures to scroll is the coolest thing I have seen in years.  If you haven’t seen this before, you move the cursor around with one finger like most touch pads.  The trackpad can tell when you use more than one finger and it does different things.  Moving two fingers scrolls in the current window, and tapping with two fingers is like a right mouse click!  The magnetic power cord is pretty cool.  Instead of the power cord plugging into a hole in the laptop (which can get ripped out and damage the laptop) it seats in a very shallow rectangle and is held in place because one part is magnetic.  Accidentally yanking the power cord does nothing but pop it off and can’t damage the laptop.

Software

The Mac OS X is certainly quality software.  I love the underlying Unix-ness of if and it is great having real terminals.  Most of the things have taken a little getting used to, but are fairly quick studys.

Different for the sake of different?

Some of the differences from Windows make me wonder if they are just doing it to be different (or if Windows was different to be different).  Things like the status bar is on top instead of the bottom, the Close, Minimize, Maximize are on the upper left instead of the upper right, etc.  Once you get used to it, these aren’t hard changes.

“It Just Works” – truth or myth?

I had heard many times that Macs are awesome because “it just works”.  Well that hasn’t been my experience so far.  My experience has been pretty devided between things just working and things being a pretty big pain.  I would say that it is certainly sometimes true that things just work.  Connecting to a printer at work was trivial and completely intuative.  On the other hand, when things don’t work they can be a major pain.  At home, it took me about an hour to get connected to my wireless network!  And I still haven’t been able to print to the printer connected to a networked Windows XP machine.  Yes, my wireless network problem was partly because my router is ancient and only supports WEP, but still – an hour!?

Just as bad as Windows

I was hopeful that the Mac would improve on some of Window’s bad quirks, but I have found it is just as bad in some places.  I hate that some Windows settings are found in multiple places.  The Mac is just as bad with this.  There are different ways to get to the System Preferences, and individual Preferences are found sprinkled around in different places as well.  I always dread the Windows slowdown – meaning I must finally relent and reboot.  My Mac has had the same slowdown already a few times.  Granted, the reboot time is amazingly fast compared to Windows, so it is much less painful to reboot!

Smaller selection of software?

This is one that I was worried about.  The Mac is a niche thing, and more software is going to be available for Windows than the Mac.  So far this has not been an issue for me at all.  I have not encountered anything yet that I couldn’t download a Mac version of.  i’m sure I will run into something eventually, but this looks like a much smaller issue than I thought.  Firefox seems almost identical on the Mac and all it’s plugins just worked (at least the ones I use).  Microsoft Office seems Ok (Entourage is a bad imitation of Outlook, but that is another post entirely).  The additional software that ships with the Mac like Preview, iPhoto, iMovie, even GarageBand are all nice and seem well done.

Jury still out

So far I think I have been pretty impressed, but not completely sold on the Mac yet.  Only more time with this machine will tell.  I have managed to completely switch over.  I haven’t touched my PC laptop much over the last week, and have gone days at a time without accessing it.  I’ll post in the future when I have some more time with my MacBook Pro and we’ll see where I’m at then.

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Tools

Twitter Website

The Twitter website is still the best place to get a good start and get used to the whole Twittering thing. This fancy graph here shows that over half of all tweets are still made from the Twitter website. There are two main problems with the website – it is often very slow, and the timelines don’t update in real time as people post messages.

As a result, many other people have written programs or web pages to solve common Twitter problems. Twitter provides the Twitter API which is a way for outside programs to access Twitter’s data – both the posts and the following/follower data. If you are a programmer and are interested, there is a ton of documentation for the Twitter API.

Client Tools

The most popular client tools are TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. These are both Adobe Air applications so they can run on any platform supported by Air (Windows, Mac, Linux).

HootSuite is a web-based client that is worth mentioning. Its interface is better in some ways than the Twitter site, but its main power is the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts if you need it. You can quickly switch back and forth between multiple accounts.

List Management Tools

The one I use the most is Twitter Karma. This shows you a big list (with or without the avatars) of all your followers and following. You can look at your lists and filter by showing just those following you or just those you are following. Then you can easily select a bunch of people and bulk follow or bulk unfollow. This is a great way to find all the new people who followed you and follow them back in a few clicks instead of having to click “follow” on everyone one by one.

Fun Tools

TweetStats is a fun website to get stats about Twitter in general and your own tweets specifically. By plugging in your username it will give you statistics about your posts. Also, you can view general Twitter stats showing top tweeters and a breakdown of what tools are being used to post tweets.

Other

There are whole other categories of tools which I won’t go into here. I found this list of 140+ tools which has some really odd and niche tools. The post is almost a year old so some of the links don’t work any more, but still has a lot of good info.

Basically, if you have a need or a way you want to use Twitter, someone has probably written a tool for it. A quick search should turn something up.

If you have a tool you can’t live without or something I majorly missed, comment and be sure to let me know.

Increasing Your Followers Count

Easy Things

Add yourself to John Chow’s TwitterFollower list. Then go through all the pages and follow everyone there. Yes it is time consuming, but this is still a very easy way to get a lot of followers. I did this on another account and have 200 followers after only 1 day without following anyone on the list – just followed back the ones who followed me. (I am going to follow everyone there, just haven’t yet!)

Find lists like this of people who will follow back. Follow as many people on the list as you can and wait for them to follow back.

Harder Things

Follow a bunch of people and hope that some of them follow you back. After some time, unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you back and then repeat the process. You need to be careful here because this is getting close to spamming and should be done right. Here are some basics to stay on people’s good side:

1. Give people time to follow back. I suggest at least 24 hours. Remember that the people may be on the other side of the world from you and be sleeping when you start following them.
2. Try to find people with something in common. Do searches on #topics that interest you, follow your follower’s followers, etc. I search #vegetarian #mountainbike and #austin regularly.
3. Keep track of what you are doing so you don’t follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow, etc. the same people.

A good tool like Hummingbird can help you manage this process.

What NOT To Do

The worst thing to do is follow a bunch of people, get people to follow back, and then unfollow them. Sometimes called “Twitter Spam”, this is hugely frowned upon and most people will unfollow you when they recognize what you have done.

Final Word

The best way to get followers is to actually use Twitter. Do searches on topics that interest you, find posts and reply to people. Sometimes people won’t see your replies or won’t reply back, but many times you can start up conversations and get people talking.

Also, come up with something useful for your followers. Can you regulary (but not too often) post funny quotes, interesting pictures, useful links? Watch the traffic from the people you are following and see what you consider valuable and interesting and try to provide something similar.

Have a tip that I forgot? Make sure to comment or send me a message on Twitter.  Make sure to follow me while you are at it.

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The Basics

Just in case you have been hiding out somewhere, Twitter is a social website where people post very short (140 characters maximum) posts typically about what they are doing at the moment.  Posts are also referred to as “updates” or “tweets”.  You can “follow” people and then their updates show up in your stream.  They can follow you back if they want and then they will see your updates in their stream.  I’m LoPaul on Twitter and you can follow me on Twitter here.  You can post updates from the Twitter website, from your cell phone or your iPhone, and also from several different Twitter tools – both standalone applications and web applications.  Twitter was originally designed with cell phone texting in mind and this is where the short limit comes from.  You can add your mobile phone to your Twitter account so you can text in your updates and have other people’s updates texted to your phone.  Make sure you have an unlimited texting package if you choose to do this!

The Follow

You have 2 numbers – your “following” and your “followers”.  This is the number of people you are following and the number who are following you, respectively.  As a general rule, you want them to be about equal without one hugely bigger than the other.  Unless you are a celebrity like Ashton Kutcher (142 Following and 1,574,304 Followers at the time of this writing) you need to follow other people in order to get them to “follow you back”.  Also, Twitter places limits (I’ve heard it is about 2,000) on how many people you can follow who don’t follow you back, so if your following is greater than your followers by over 2,000 then you won’t be able to follow anyone else.

The Follow Rules

These are rules to follow if you are trying to increase your followers count.

1. Always follow back to anyone who starts following you.  This builds goodwill and people will spread the word that you will follow back and recommend others to follow you as well.
2. Don’t let your following get much above your followers count.  Having wildly different numbers will turn people off and prevent them from following you.  Periodically go through your following list and purge people who haven’t followed you back.

The @

One important thing to know is you can reference someone in a post by adding @name in your post (change “name” to the person you want to reference).  Anything with an “@” in front gets turned into a link to that person’s profile and also they can easily see any responses that mention them.  When you are logged in, there is a “replies” tab (labeled @LoPaul or whatever your name is) which shows any posts with your @name in them.  Even if you don’t follow someone and they use your @name, you will still see it in your replies list.  This is the most common way to direct a message to a person.

Keep in mind that your @name post is directed at a specific person, but it is not private to them!  It appears in your timeline and in the timeline of everyone else who follows you.  You can also include as many @name’s as you want in a message.

The DM

Unlike using @name, a Direct Message (or DM) is a private message only seen by the recipient.  This is sort of like a Twitter inbox.  DMs are still held to the 140 character limit.  Many people have abused DMs for spam, so DMs typically aren’t used by the community.  You can pretty safely ignore DMs completely.  In your account settings you can disable DM so people can’t even send you DMs.

The #

Putting a # (hashtag) in front of any word marks it as a keyword.  For example #Austin would mean your post was relative to Austin or #cooking would mean it was relevant to cooking.  Warning: Use hashtags correctly and sparingly.  They are socially understood to be informative on the topic.  Hashtags will often come from an authority on the hashtag topic.  For instance, you shouldn’t use hashtags when just posting about your daily activities unless it is something informative to the topic.

The RT

Putting a RT in your message indicates a “ReTweet”. If you see a great tweet, you can re-broadcast it to everyone that follows you using this method.  The RT is usually at the beginning of the message, but can be anywhere in the message. It should include the @name of the original person posting it as well. This is a decent way to build good will by retweeting other people’s posts, but make sure not to overdo it.

The #FollowFriday

This is a good common tradition to know about.  Hopefully obviously, people post “Follow Friday” posts on Fridays.  This is a post with #FollowFriday (or #FF) and a list of @name people that you recommend for others to follow.  It is a way to give back to people you have been corresponding with and recommend them to your followers as someone that they should follow as well.  This is typically done in the hopes that other people will reciprocate and include you in a #FF post.

Next Time

The basics turned out to be more lengthy than I thought.  Next time I’ll cover the common Twitter tools, how to simplify tasks, and how to increase your follower count.

For now, get Twittering and make sure to follow me on Twitter!

Proceed to Part II

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