Techie Musings

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM...

Unless you want web server uptime? This is what greets me when I try to book a flight through American Express Travel. I have great confidence in Amex right now - love the generic 500 message. Wonder how well configured that server is?

Art Wolfe

I'm at The Complete Workflow Solution event that has been organized by Glazer's and Microsoft. It is being held at Art Wolfe's studio in Seattle and kicked off with Art spending 90 or so minutes entertaining and wowing us with his work and tales. A most illuminating, riveting and moving journey around some beautiful and remote locations.
Take a look at http://www.artwolfe.com

What's on my iPhone?

You didn't ask but I thought I'd share anyway - after all, what would blogging be without gratuitous detail about stuff that perhaps only interests me?

Ever since I got my iPhone, I've become an AppStore Whore, downloading pretty much anything that looks interesting. So here's a tour of what's on my iPhone (red box indicates installed apps). All of these are free with one exception.

 

Facebook	The two greatest phenomena combined: Facebook + iPhone. Unstoppable? Great little app that gets the status of all your FB friends in one place (a la Twitter), lets you edit your profile, see your FB contacts like the iPhone Contacts app, chat with online contacts and check your FB inbox.
TypePad	Blogging app for blogs hosted on TypePad. Auto updates Twitter and includes the ability to add or take photos.
SmugShot	Upload pictures to your SmugMug account and browse your on-line SmugMug albums. Includes GPS data.
AirMe	Photo uploader for Flickr and AirMe
Bubbles	Tap the screen, create a bubble. Drag across the screen, create a bunch of bubbles. Tap a bubble, watch and hear it pop. Simple-minded fun for all ages.
Twitterrific	Twitter client. Browse tweets and post your own. Location aware of course. Also has a premium version that costs $9.99 with additional functionality.
NetNewsWire	RSS reader that syncs with NewsGator. Nice, but doesn't really store locally, so you need network connectivity to read anything other than headlines.
Mobile News	Surprisingly impressive "electronic newspaper" from the Associated Press. Downloads stories so can be used offline. The future of newspapers?
Shazam	Name that tune! An awesome app that tells you what music you're hearing and let's you buy it on ITMS. Incredibly accurate even for more obscure tunes.
Pandora	The internet music streaming service from the Music Genome Project. Streams well over 3G. Seamlessly handed off from WiFi to 3G for me yesterday.
Exposure	View your Flickr galleries, other Flickr users and see pictures taken near your current location. Premium version available for $9.99.
Evernote	iPhone client for Evernote shared note system. Think "post it notes in the sky". Other clients include web, Mac and Windows.
BookSearch	Looking at a book in a bookstore? Type in its ISBN, title or author and see how much cheaper it is online.
Absolute Fitness	Costs $14.95. Meal and exercise tracking app. See my separate write-up here.
YPmobile	Location aware Yellow Pages. Also shows local events.
Bloomberg	A very complete financial data application. Slick UI.
Zenbe	To do list app that also syncs to a web site.
Loopt	A somewhat controversial location-aware social networking app. Controversial because it allegedly spams people via SMS, though it perhaps this is now fixed (I haven't been spamming my contacts so they tell me.) Cool because it updates Facebook and Twitter.
WritingPad	A novel way of entering text, which is unfortunately limited to taking notes in WritingPad. You can email these notes, though.
NYTimes	New York times newspaper reader.
Pocket Express	News, sport, weather, financial and entertainment news all in one place. To be augmented with movies, travel and horoscopes.
midomi	If you can hum it, say or type the title, or record it playing somewhere, midomi will identify the song, let you buy it on ITMS and watch videos of it on YouTube. A winner if it is as accurate as Shazam!

 

What's on your iPhone?

My first iPhone app purchase: Absolute Fitness

Not for me those $5 apps or games. Nope, ever since I started my new fitness programme (20/20 Lifestyles) I've been looking for a good mobile meal tracker. $15 later through the iPhone AppStore, I ended up with Absolute Fitness.
So far so good. It seems to have most of what I want though it's food database is lacking for branded stuff.
Desired future features include a web interface for tracking and better data entry through a real computer and the ability to export the data.

There now follow some pictures of the app.

Main food and exercise log screen

Drill down into specific foods. Nutrition information is shown for the exact quantity specified rather than serving size

Daily summary showing that I'm over my carb allowance. These daily allowances can be autocalculated based on your weight, height, age and sex, or manually entered if you are following a specific diet.

Tapping on the a line item on the daily summary screen shows you a ranked list of foods contributing to that item - in this case carbs.

Adding a custom food type

Selecting a pre-defined food type

Lists of different exercises, or define a custom one

Another way of entering a food or exercise is to search for it

iPhone

First iPhone posting