Tracking Books

For quite a while now I have been wanting to keep track of the books I read so recently I went looking for software or a website to keep track. I found a few good websites. My favorite is goodreads.com. It is free to sign up for an account and can easily track books. It has “shelves” which you can assign books to. By default you have a “read”, “reading”, and “want to read” shelf. You can add your own named shelves such as “I own it” or and other category you want to track.  There are a few other free websites so be sure to look around if this doesn’t fit what you want.  For software, I really didn’t find anything good – most people just suggested keeping an Excel spreadsheet like I do for my biking log.

iPhone Notes

I love carying my iPhone with me because I always have a place to jot down thoughts.  The Notes program is perfect for miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, or things to follow up on later.  You can even sync Notes with your Mac so you have them available on your computer.  This is a two step process:

1. In iTunes with your iPhone connected, in the left panel select your iPhone under Devices.  Then select the Info tab and scroll down until you see Notes and check the box that says “Sync notes”.  Now click Sync in the lower right corner and it should sync the notes onto your computer. Tip: the computer may warn you with a scary-sounding message like “this will change over 50% of the notes on your computer.  Are you sure you want to continue?”.  If you don’t have any notes already on your computer, this is perfectly normal and safe to continue.
2. The notes actually appear in the Mac Mail program.  If you don’t have Mail set up, you will have to do that now to be able to see your notes.  Once configured, the notes appear in the left pane under Reminders, Notes with the first line of the note appearing like the subject of an email, and then the entire note appearing in the email body section.  Very handy!

I hope you enjoyed these additional tracking tips.  I really like having an accumulation of data over time.  It is great to analyze for future reference, and also just to refer back to since it is so hard to remember everything.  Let me know if you have other data that you like to track or have found good methods.

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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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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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