My Newfound Love of OmniFocus

Among my favorite types of computing applications has always been the organizer/checklist/outline kind of app. Back in my PDA days, the Palm apps Bonsai and ShadowPlan competed for my heart with each new update. When I got a Mac it came with a version of OmniOutliner which I loved a lot, but alas because it was one of those "came-with-the-Mac" things, as soon as I tried to install a new update it broke my fragile registered version, and I was pissed about it and refused to pay for it, so it was gone (I'm currently having that relationship with ComicLife).

The other problem I have with tasks in general is that the default Apple apps have a really stupid way of handling them, or at least stupid to me, growing up with Palm's big four apps: Datebook, Contacts, To-Dos and Memo. Apple seems to hate to-dos and memos, so much so that after what seems like centuries in technological time, we may soon finally be seeing them sync between iCal, Mail and the iPhone. What, I ask, was the damn point of using them at all until now? First I stopped using tasks, because I could never get them to sync properly between iCal and my Treo. So I just wrote everything as a note. Now as an iPhone user my notes don't sync with anything (???!!!!WTF??!!), and yet I still write everything as a note. Occasionally I will email that note to myself if I really need it in another format.

So of course I looked to the App Store to see what the third party developers had come up with that might serve as a basic tasks app. I honestly wanted a basic tasks app -- a list and a bunch of giant checkboxes. I tried, I really did. But at the time the basic apps were either ugly, overpriced, or reported buggy and lacking basic features. Who knows, since there are no free trials. But the one that sounded the best to me was the most complicated of all -- OmniFocus. At $20, it's one of the more expensive apps in the App Store, but that was back in the day when an average game was $10, so it didn't seem as expensive to me then as it might now when everything else is 99 cents.

Using OmniFocus brought some kind of order to my life. I use it sometimes for shopping lists, generally more of the long-term stuff, not like "what I need to get from Duane Reade in 3 hours," which is usually a straight list. I write down things I want to work on with my computer, like reinstalling Parallels, which I forgot to do the last time I was home; and things I need to pack for the next leg of the tour, or what I hope to accomplish during my down time on the next load-in day. I also have a special project for fight call, which is really not what OmniFocus is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. With both Henry V and The Spy, we have a rather extensive fight call, running through distinct sections of fight choreography with different actors. There is a standard order which we have developed for that, and especially because we perform The Spy so infrequently, Nick and I needed a way to keep track of that order and make sure we've hit all the proper scenes. So I have a project for Fight Call and a sub-project for each show, and inside each are the actions representing each individual fight and the actors needed. I'm not sure exactly what app Nick uses for his list, but he has it on his Blackberry. This allows both of us to open our phones at the top of fight call and Nick runs the current fight while I can let the actors know who is up next and which scene it is, and make sure they have their weapons ready when it's their turn. This is sort of a recurring checklist rather than a regular list of tasks, and the blending of the two types of lists is kind of weird to me, but I think OmniFocus can be made useful for things like this, or prop checklists, with a little work.

Anyway, I was very happy with my purchase. Of course it's designed to sync with the desktop version of the app. That is, if you're willing to pay $80(!!??!!WTF??!!) for it. It's kind of all or nothing. There's not a way to say "Gee I'd like to be able to see and edit my OmniFocus file on a desktop machine" without fully committing to using the software to run your life. I'm not sure exactly what happened to me, I think it was a conversation over drinks with a few of my colleagues about organization and task lists that led me to question if the fact that my technology has failed me, and is driving me closer and closer to having to etch my tasks on tablets, might someday result in me screwing something up. I've done OK with this seat-of-the-pants way I've been running my life and career with the occasional iCal appointment (with or without an alarm) to remind me to do things, or with a plain-text list in my iPhone's notepad. But really, how far I have fallen since the days when there was a checklist for home and shopping, and work stuff was laid out in fancy outlines with multi-part projects and due dates and things!

So I decided -- by way of writing an action in OmniFocus on my iPhone -- that when I got a chance I would download the 14-day trial of OmniFocus desktop. I have been using it for about two days, and so far I am hooked. It's got an even steeper learning curve than the iPhone version, but the larger screen in some ways makes the relationship between the different views and types of data clearer. I've also been watching some of the introductory videos on the website. After that, I discovered a great set of video podcasts called ScreenCastsOnline, which do in-depth screencasts of popular Mac apps. I've only watched a couple, but they have tons available that I want to see. They also offer podcast subscriptions in HD or iPhone-compatible sizes. I sense this will be a new favorite podcast of mine. You can get the links to either of these feeds on their website here.

In all, I've been having fun trying to think of every little thing I need to accomplish and entering it into OmniFocus and categorizing it. I think I'll be much more efficient using the desktop app since the majority of what I need to accomplish either requires me to be at my computer, or in an environment where my computer is out. This way, the iPhone app, which is a little more cumbersome to use due to the fact that it can't run in the background, is only really needed when I'm out and about. More thoughts to come as this experiment goes on...

My Week in Computing

The biggest event of my week was yesterday when we visited the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. As befitting a giant mall, of course there is an Apple Store. I decided to take my chances on a walk-in visit to the Genius Bar to see if anything could be done about my Macbook Pro battery.

A little background, because I don't bitch about my battery nearly enough for you to have known it was going on: my computer is not quite two years old, and its second battery has withered and died. The first battery lasted pretty much a year exactly, before the battery life got to a point where it was really negating the purpose of having a laptop (somewhere around a half hour). I probably had a case for premature failure, but I just bought a new one, and was happy.

Cut to ten months later. While the battery life on the second one had not become quite so brief (maybe an hour to an hour and a half), the battery was all confused. Diagnostic programs reported the battery health at 40% after 90-something charge cycles, which based on my perusal of the Apple Support forums, is way worse than a lot of people who were able to get their batteries replaced. Worst of all, instead of simply dying quickly, it was misreporting its charge, so that the computer would show it maybe 30% full, and instead of showing a low battery warning or forcing the computer to sleep, it would completely shut off without warning, which is, um, terrible, in so many ways. It had just started doing this before the logic board failure, so when the computer died I thought maybe the battery was not to blame after all, but the problem continued after the repair.

While my computer is sadly without Apple Care, the battery is less than a year old, and thus has its own warranty. It's clearly indicated on the receipt, which I made sure to have on my iPhone in PDF format before going to the store.

So I walked into the store and was able to get an appointment right away, and within 5 minutes was talking to the genius. He booted my computer from an old iPod nano which had some diagnostic software on it (as I tried to stifle my excitement at this idea of using my old nano as an 8GB flash drive), and after a few seconds, the screen popped up with this big red box with the word "BAD" in it in huge letters (artist's rendering above). It was really comical. Well that settled that! I showed him the PDF including the warranty date, signed some papers and walked away with a brand new battery. Between the logic board and the battery I feel like I have a brand new Mac.

Right now I'm using my days off to be a good little girl and train the battery properly. It's probably going to want to be shut down soon -- oops, there goes the warning -- so bye!

iPhone Case Review: iSkin Solo FX

I'm not a big fan of iPhone cases. I prefer to install the Zagg InvisibleShield, which is like a millimeter thin skin with a somewhat grippy surface, and be done with it. It adds almost no thickness to the phone, and is pretty much invisible.

However, my InvisibleShield has started to peel in a couple places, and that, combined with the fact that we have 5 iPhones on our crew bus, and all but mine are in cases of varying coolness, somehow got me researching iPhone cases again.

The only one I liked was the Solo from iSkin, which is pretty much only available online. There's the regular Solo, and the Solo FX. I will let their graphic explain:

They are basically the same case, except the solo is a solid primary color, and the FX comes in more funky colors, with a circular pattern.  I went with the orange one.

The other difference you can't see is in the screen protector it comes with.  The regular solo is a plain clear protector.  The FX comes with a mirrored screen protector.  This inherently sounds like a bad idea to me, and when I received the case this was proven.  The mirrored finish looks cool, and would be pretty handy as a mirror, but it creates a pinkish cast to the screen, and similar to a glossy screen on a computer, picks up reflections which make it harder to read the screen.  Most of all, though, I don't know why anyone would want a protector that affects the tint of the screen.  I've never felt it necessary to use a screen protector on the iPhone due to its glass surface which is very resistant to everyday scratches, so trying the protector on was more of a curiosity.

As someone not a fan of cases in general, I really like this one.  The material is somewhere halfway between a hard plastic case and the more rubbery ones.  It's kind of a jelly-like plastic, which is very flexible, but doesn't have the extreme grippy powers that make other cases hard to get in and out of a pocket.  It has enough tack to it that it easily keeps the phone still on a tabletop or in your hand.

All the buttons are covered by the case except the silencer switch, which has a cutout.  There is also a cutout for the camera and headphone port.  I'm not sure how it would do with more chunky headphone connectors than the one the iPhone comes with, but if you really had to I don't think it would be hard to cut the hole out bigger.  There is also a long cutout at the bottom for the dock connector and mic and speaker openings.  The case does not fit in the standard Apple dock (like pretty much any case I've ever heard of, except for the InvisibleShield and similar products), which is a bit of a compromise for me, since I like having the dock at my bedside.  I also found that my old-style iPod cable (with a larger connector and the two tabs you have to push in to disconnect the cable) is a teeny bit wider and took a little forcing to get through the gap in the case, so I recommend using a newer cable like the one that comes with the phone.

One other minor complaint is that the power button is a little tough to press through the case.  Personally I find that button harder to press than it should be under any circumstances, so I don't think it's really the fault of the case.  It just requires a firmer press than usual, and gives little feedback that you've actually depressed the button, until you see the screen react.

Overall I think the case looks cool.  It's semi-transparent, so you can still see the Apple logo on the back, if that matters to you.  I'm sure it looks even better on a white iPhone where the color will really come out, but it adds some color and personalization to the black phone as well.  It also does a cool thing when it's under a strong light, it almost seems to glow, and the color becomes brighter.

Here are some pics of mine. I purposely left the flash off because it was making the color seem a little brighter than it is under normal light.

iPhone Apps for Stage Managers, Round 2

For my initial review of helpful apps for stage managers, read this.

I've now had the iPhone for about six months, and the App Store has grown exponentially with new and updated apps, so here is another check-in on what I'm finding useful for stage management and life. All links will take you to the App Store page.

TimeCalc ($1.99) still remains the greatest single contribution of the iPhone to stage management, as far as I'm concerned. I use it every single day. Right now I use it most because the Guthrie requires an 18-minute intermission. Sucking at math as I do, I prefer to input the time the first act ended, and add 18 minutes to it.

Night Camera ($0.99) is a really cool camera app that has completely replaced the built-in camera for me. The gist is that it uses the accelerometer to tell when you are holding the phone perfectly still and takes the picture at that moment. It is so named because it creates much better pictures in low light (which is great for theatre), but also takes better pictures in any light, in my experience. Below is an example of a picture I took in tech, during a very dark cue. I'm no Joan Marcus, but for a midrange phone camera, you can see what it's a picture of, and I think that's the most anyone can ask for. The regular camera app would probably have shown a black screen with a red blob in the middle.


MobileFotos is more of a fun app -- it is a Flickr upload client, which I'm sure you could justify as a work-related app if you used Flickr to upload and share work photos of some sort -- which now that I think about it is not a bad idea for things like documenting the proper look of light cues or scenery on stage). I use the app to update my Flickr stream, which is linked in the sidebar, with photos from my tour. It also is a nice way to pass the time by looking at other people's photos. It's very full-featured and nicely laid out.

Night Stand (Free) is used for one thing in my world: it tells the time down to the second. For some reason the iPhone doesn't seem to have an app or an option somewhere that can show the time in seconds. A minute is a very long time when your director wants to know why the 2nd act got 30 seconds longer today. Personally, I take my running times down to the nearest 5 seconds. I've just started using Night Stand, and it's very good at the one thing it does. Just a few days ago it was updated with some alarm features, but because apps can't stay active in the background, there's not much point to using a 3rd-party alarm app, since you can't do anything else with the phone while waiting for the alarm to go off. I'm also looking at getting LCDClock or Table Clock, which are both $0.99.

Delivery Status Touch ($1.99) is the iPhone companion to the dashboard widget Delivery Status, which has long been a favorite of mine. It tracks packages from the major delivery services, and when you sign up on the developer's site, it will sync your deliveries from the desktop widget with your phone (which is invaluable for entering tracking numbers since the phone doesn't have copy/paste).

On the jailbroken front, I use PowerTool to restart my springboard when the phone gets a little sluggish. It can also trigger a full reboot or power down.

The most useful app, whether official or jailbroken, in my mind is PDANet (link goes to website), which has a long history of allowing tethering on Palm devices and others, and is now available for jailbroken iPhones. If you create an ad-hoc wireless network with your computer and join said network with your iPhone, PDANet will allow you to use the phone's internet connection through your computer. Since AT&T has decided they don't want our money (yet?) for this service, after a 14-day free trial, you can instead pay PDANet's one-time registration (I think it's about $30) for the ability to tether anytime and anywhere. This comes with all the usual warnings about tethering -- it's not allowed under your contract, don't use enough data that AT&T will wonder where it's going, etc. If you're jailbreaking your phone you probably know all about what AT&T doesn't want you to do already. It's pretty expensive for an app that violates your data contract and could cease working with a future update, but in my mind there is no price that can be put on this feature.

I often hear people talk about how tethering is useless (or not useful enough to be bothered with). I think these people must get paid a regular salary, file one or two W-2s per year with the IRS, and spend most of their time at a "desk" or in an "office" or "the same place of business every day" where things like "phones" and "internet" are provided by their employer. For those of us whose jobs are a little less predictable, but still desperately need full desktop internet access HERE and NOW, not in 10 minutes, not at the Starbucks down the street, and who have to provide this level of efficiency but aren't paid enough to afford a wireless broadband card for the laptop, tethering is the only option. I once distributed a rehearsal schedule while sitting in the trunk of my car in a restaurant parking lot. And I have done plenty of shows which rehearsed or performed for weeks in a room (or a building) with no internet available. For reasons such as this, I refuse to have a phone incapable of tethering, whether legally or illegally. When the 3G iPhone came out, before the tethering apps were available, I had to carry my previous phone, the AT&T Tilt, around in my bag so I could swap the SIM card into it if I needed to tether in an emergency. Obviously it was a huge pain, and I am very glad to see that PDANet has pretty much perfected the art of tethering on the iPhone to make it as reliable and simple as it can be without official support.

A Sonnet

Tonight I write a poem with pen and pad
Upon this two-show day of Henry V.
My iPhone rests behind my chair plugged in,
The cord supplied of insufficient length.
O what can I with simple paper do
Of import that would match my Facebook's state?
An email might for many minutes sit
Unknown, unread, devoid of swift reply.
Tomorrow's weather stays a mystery,
No picture sent to Flickr when it's took.
I fear a post comes from my favorite blog,
And yet I'll know it not upon this hour --
Perhaps to wait until I reach my home.
And oh for shame, however will I know
One of my apps perhaps is obsolete,
An update waiting in the App Store now
That was not there to get an hour past.
The world is changing, yet I can't be told,
But sit and call a show five centuries old.

An Observation on iPhone Battery Life from the Bowels of the Earth

We're teching The Spy at Baruch college, at the Nagelberg Theatre which is on level B3, so somewhere in the earth's mantle, which I can only assume is why the A/C is always cranked so high.  Of course cell service is nonexistant, and since the internal walls are made of generous helpings of concrete, even getting wifi from our production office to the house (probably about 60ft, if crows flew underground through concrete) took two days and two routers to pass the signal so we can get it at the tech tables.  I never quite managed to get it to the booth.


Once I had established our lifeline to the outside world, I kept my iPhone with wifi on and the cell radio off all day (if you don't know how to do this, put it in airplane mode first, then turn wifi back on.) I was expecting that keeping an active wifi connection all day would kill the battery, so much so that I negotiated an electronics deal with Ian, that I would lend him my Macbook 2-prong power adapter if I could charge my phone from his tech table's power, since the power strip on mine was being taken up by frivolous things like the light board, sound computer, and LittleLites.  As it turns out I have never needed to charge it in the middle of the day.

During tech I've been underground for 12-15 hours a day, off the charger for 18 hours or more, and only once did I come home with the 20% battery warning.  Some days the battery was hardly drained at all.  On an average day above ground, using only 3G and maybe a little bit of wifi, I almost always am pushing the limits of the battery by the time I get home. Plus, my commute to Baruch is longer, so the phone spends more time per day playing music.

All of this just to say that I was surprised to find that the wifi radio uses so much less power than the cell radio.

iPhone Wallpaper

I've created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I'm liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it's some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It's a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don't want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don't sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that's fine with me.

Cycorder Tutorial For Mac Users Who Hate Terminal

I mentioned in my roundup of useful iPhone apps, the video recording app Cycorder.  It requires your iPhone to be jailbroken (which I'm not going to get into, but this is the blog of the team of hackers who develop the jailbreaking software, which will have the latest software and info).  

I'm going to assume that your iPhone is jailbroken and you're on a Mac (there are ways to do this on the PC, I just don't have the experience or interest to do it just for the hell of it).  I am also doing this in Leopard, so the part about the Finder would look a little different in other versions of OS X.  

Cydia is the primary app for downloading unauthorized software onto your jailbroken iPhone.  It will appear in your list of apps once you have jailbroken.  The apps you will need to download in Cydia are:

OpenSSH (so you can access your iPhone through Terminal on your Mac)

Cycorder (the app we're talking about here)

Netatalk (so we don't have to use terminal anymore)

You can go ahead and install them all at once.  Only Cycorder will show up as an icon with your apps.  The other two are background apps.

Cycorder will function as an app on its own, happily shooting videos and playing them back for you on the phone.   If you want to move the videos off the phone, this is where the other stuff comes in.  Netatalk gives your phone support for standard Apple file sharing.  Once it's installed, if your iPhone is on the same wireless network as your Mac, it will show up in your Finder under "shared."  (If you don't have access to a wireless router, just create a network with your Mac using the "Create network" option in the airport menu, and call it whatever you want.  Then have the iPhone join the network.)  

So now you see your phone in the Shared section of your Finder, and when you click on it it will probably say "Connection failed." Click the button "Connect As" in the upper-right and it will bring up a username/password window.  Make the name "mobile" and the password "alpine" (the default iPhone password) and it will give you access to your files.   The folder you're looking for is Mobile/Media/Videos, in there you will find the videos you took with Cycorder, in handy .mov Quicktime format.

Now you have what you want.  You would be done, provided you never find yourself on the same network as someone who knows something about iPhone hacking and wants to take a look at your files.  So it's a good idea to change the password for the iPhone's "Mobile" user from "alpine" to, well, anything else.   Now we have to use the Terminal, just for a second.

1. Make sure your phone is on the same network as your Mac.

2. On the phone, go to settings, wifi, and then click the little ">" arrow for the network you are on to bring up details.

3. Look at the IP Address.

4. On your Mac, open Terminal

5. Type ssh mobile@[the IP address from the phone] and hit enter.

6. Terminal will probably think for a minute, then ask if you're sure you want to connect.  Say yes.

7. It will then ask for the password.  Type alpine and hit enter.

8. You will now be at the command prompt.  Time to change the password.

Type passwd mobile and hit enter.

9. It will ask for the original password (alpine), and then for the new password, and then for the new password again to confirm.  Make the password whatever you want.

10. We also need to change the password for the phone's "root" user, which is also "alpine," because the same random hacker on your network could also get in there and cause lots of trouble.  The process is the same.  Follow the steps again, except type "root" instead of "mobile" and change the password to whatever you want.

11. When you're done, type exit and hit enter, and close Terminal forever.

From now on when you connect to the iPhone through the Finder you will enter the name "mobile" and the password will be the new one you chose.  You can check "remember this password" and never have to enter it again if you like.  The important thing is that some random person who connects to your network won't know what the password is.  

Enjoy!

The iPhone App Store and Stage Management (and Fun)

Well I'm in music rehearsals for a NYMF show (Twilight in Manchego), so this means you get some blog posts while I sit doing mostly nothing to the soothing sounds of Chuck Cooper learning his music.

Today my topic is a roundup of what I'm using on my iPhone to make my job, and life, easier.  My initial reactions can be found in this post.

Time:Calc $1.99

Some people reviewing on the app store don't seem to get this.  "Why would you need a calculator to work with time?  Just do it in your head." These people obviously don't understand that there are people who suck at math, or the enormous amount of time calculations a stage manager does all day long, and moreover, that there are stage managers who suck at math.  This app is so amazing, I use it all the time.  I've gotten pretty good in my career at calculating in 1hr 20 min blocks (the standard Equity break schedule), but for more difficult calculations, like running time down to the second (i.e. 8:05:30 - 9:21:35), there is much more room for error.  Some conductors will drive themselves crazy over a few seconds variation in the running time, no need to freak everybody out with bad math when it can be done with instant accuracy on the calculator.  This is of course for situations where you don't enter the run times in a report that calculates it for you.  But whatevs, I don't spend my whole life on Broadway, you know, and I don't need to create a database for a show that runs 10 performances or less.  This app is attractive, cheap, and works exactly how you think it should.

OmniFocus $19.99

This app is pretty expensive at $20, but I find it worth the cost.  I can't afford the desktop companion, but I like keeping everything on my phone in one place anyway.  It also backs up to my iDisk, which is great, since I'm often updating my firmware and reinstalling my apps because the App Store/iTunes is busted.  I was looking for a simple Todo app, and found all the ones I tried suck.  So I decided to go for a very not-simple app instead.  I won't go into all the details, but it's location-aware (so you can see a list of tasks based on which are closest to your current location), very powerful with multiple ways to organize projects and contexts in multiple sublevels, and it's a neat and clean interface that's very finger-friendly while containing tons of information.   Considering I stopped using Todos altogether with Windows Mobile because the app was such a pain, I feel my life getting a bit more organized already.

iTransNYC $4.99

Much better than the cheaper alternative, it contains a very clean subway map, on which you can tap on a station to see a list of the trains that stop there and their schedules (which are never right, but I blame that on the MTA, not on the app).  It can put your current location on the map.  It gives you service changes as well as current alerts, like trains skipping a station because of police activity.  It can also do directions from one station to another (not from addresses, but I don't find this to be a big problem in my life), and it will tell you where you need to transfer if necessary and give you a time estimate.  I have no idea if the time estimate is accurate, probably not, but again that's the MTA's problem.   It's got my daily commute at 23 minutes, which is pretty damn close to my estimate of 25 mins, on a good day.  But if all estimates are assumed to be on a good day, at least that gives you an idea.   The best part of the app is that most of the features (including the route calculation, impressively) can be used offline, which is essential for anyone living in New York, where the majority of the time I'm looking something up on my phone I'm underground.   The service advisories are cached, although you have to remember to open the app above ground and download new ones if you want them to be up to date.  That other app, CitytransitNYC, looks up service advisories, but does it live, it can't show them to you once you're underground, which is close to useless if you're debating whether or not to change your travel plans en route.

Weatherbug Free

I don't trust the built-in weather app for a second -- literally I don't trust it to tell me what's going on right now, much less in an hour or tomorrow.  Weatherbug is more detailed and also gives advisories on serious weather conditions.  At Reagle I used it to warn me when I was about to get struck by lighting in the parking lot.  This isn't exactly job related (unless you're doing outdoor theatre, in which case it might be the most important app you have), but I feel it's one of those secondary jobs of the stage manager to have an answer for everything, including whether it's going to rain on our day off.

Flashlight Free, requires jailbreak

There are a number of flashlight apps.  The one I use requires the phone to be jailbroken, because it makes the screen brighter than Apple will allow the official apps to be.  But if you don't want to go that route, there are some on the App Store, many free.  Personally I think if you have to resort to this you have failed as a stage manager, but not as epic of a failure as if you don't have a flashlight and don't have this app.

Files $6.99

When I was looking for an app to put documents on my phone, I had three requirements: doesn't require a proprietary desktop app, displays the documents well, and has a pretty interface.  This app has all three, so I'm happy.  If you've got your phone on the same network as your computer, it tells you what address to put in to mount your iPhone in the Finder (I assume it works on a PC, probably not as simply).  I keep a PDF of the Equity rulebook for whatever contract I'm working on, the script, calendar, schedule and contact sheet for my current show, and whatever else I need.

Wikipanion Free

An app to easily search Wikipedia without having to load the rather phone-unfriendly web page. I suppose this could be used for legitimate rehearsal research, but what I find myself using Wikipedia most for while working is looking up trivia that comes up while running a show.  It can be hard to do while calling some shows, but generally you can find someone on the crew who plays on their laptop while doing their not-so-demanding job. For example when I was doing Annie this summer, during the cabinet scene Morganthau is introduced as "Acting Secretary of the Treasury." Why was he acting secretary, and what happened to the real secretary of the treasury?  Wikipedia can tell you.  I expect this app to make it much easier to answer these kind of burning questions when it's not practical to have a laptop backstage.

UPDATE: 1 More!
Cycorder Free, requires jailbreak
This is a video-recording app which takes very good quality video for a phone camera.  It did not originally support audio in its first release, but it does now.  It's free, and supported by advertising which is very subtle and non-intrusive, and very much appreciated as an alternative to the other video app which costs money (which I think is rather silly for an app that is technically not supported on the phone and could be disabled by Apple at any point in the future). The app doesn't have a built-in way to get videos off the iPhone, so it requires a little more computer knowledge to do that.  I don't know much about UNIX and I'm not a fan of using the terminal to work with files, so the method I prefer is to install an app through Cydia called Netatalk, which makes your iPhone able to communicate with a Mac through standard Apple filesharing, so if the phone and Mac are on the same network, you will automatically see the phone in your Finder under "shared."  From there you can log into the phone and browse to the folder where the videos are stored.  Check out this post for a tutorial on how to do this.

The Penny is Relevant Again!

This may be the only thing giving purpose to coins in the 21st Century.

Coinstar has begun offering gift certificates in place of cash receipts for coins. Doesn't sound that interesting yet, right? OK, Coinstar is now offering iTunes gift certificates for coins, AND, you don't pay any kind of fee on the amount you deposit. If you have $4.28 in coins sitting in a drawer or bowl somewhere, you get $4.28 to spend on the music or iPhone/iPod apps of your choice. This, combined with the fact that Duane Reade is now installing Coinstar machines in many of their stores, has made my app purchases for my iPhone essentially free.  I even bought the one that looks like a lighter, just because I can (iLightr, it's much more realistic and interactive than the others, though I don't recommend buying it with money that didn't come from your metaphorical couch cushions).

Anyway, this development has brought me great happiness, and turned change from a nuisance into an easy way to pay for apps and music.

3G iPhone!!!!!!

So I got a 3G iPhone this weekend. In brief, it's everything I thought it would be: incredibly cool, and lacking a number of obvious features that I hope I can live without.

Things I LOOOVE:
MobileMe (when it works). Push seems to work sometimes and not others. Sometimes my phone receives mail before the desktop, and sometimes it seems to forget to check. The other thing to know (which Apple never really made clear) is that push only works on the iPhone and the MobileMe servers, your desktop will not push out to the "cloud," only at 15 minute intervals. I can see how this will result in things getting completely out of sync.

I woke up this morning to see that about 700 of my contacts were gone. They still existed on my Mac and on MobileMe, so everything was fine, but somehow the phone lost them. Not sure what's going on with that. I love the idea of what MobileMe is, and I can't believe it's taken Apple so long to get something going on the concept of "Exchange for the rest of us." I don't work in a corporate environment, but my job could sure benefit from Exchange-type features, and Apple was just the company to do it. I'm glad to see that's finally taking shape. I just hope it's more reliable than .Mac was. So far it would seem... no. But it's only been like 4 days.

Coming from AT&T's Tilt (aka HTC's Kaiser), which has horrible video performance, the UI is just gorgeous. This is not something really particular to the new iPhone, but it's nice to finally get to experience a responsive UI. There are a lot of things that are just iPhone-specific that I'm now getting to enjoy for the first time. Like a wifi setup that's easy enough to do that I actually bother to activate it to take advantage of the higher speeds. On the Tilt it was such a pain that using AT&T's network everywhere was faster and more reliable in the long run.

The camera is actually really good so far. It is what it is, and I know other people expected an upgrade, but this 2MP camera takes much better photos than the 3MP one on the Tilt. It seems to do pretty well in low light conditions as well.

Google Maps -- so much better than the versions available for other phones. Most of all, the bookmarks. I don't understand why all the other versions don't have an easy way of saving locations you use all the time. It works basically like other versions, I haven't tried the turn-by-turn directions on the road yet. I did get completely lost driving in Boston last night and the GPS helped me escape back to the safety of the Mass Pike in just a few minutes, using just the time I had while stopped at red lights. I didn't actually do a search for directions, just pressed the button to find my location and looked at the map to figure out which street I had to get on. The GPS link is very fast (probably using a combination of cell location, that wifi-search-thing they're using, and actual GPS -- but I think the real GPS must work quickly because the location is too accurate to be anything else). My Tilt could take minutes to get a GPS lock, if ever.

The App Store I'm a bit addicted to the App Store at the moment, seeing all there is to see. I have always bought tons of software for my phones, but this is the first platform I've used where free trials aren't the norm. I haven't made any purchases that I really regret, but I know they're coming.
So far I have: Super Monkey Ball (just because it's the "in" thing to buy -- it's cool)
MotoRacer (just to play with the accelerometer in a racing game)
Enigmo (a puzzle game which got great reviews -- I like it)
SplashID (a secure password and personal info app which I've used for probably 7 years now on Palm)
Citytransit New York (I'm away from home right now, but this is a really cool subway / train map and service advisory program which I can't wait to put to use)

I haven't gone crazy with the free apps, but these are the ones I have:
Remote (Apple's own app to control iTunes on your Mac or AppleTV via wifi)
NY Times (nice format for checking out what's going on in the world while bored)
IGN Reviews (for those times when I'm in a game store and need to read a review fast)
Shazam (listens to a song and tells you the name and artist -- seems to work well, even on showtunes)
Facebook (quite limited, but good for quick status updates and stuff)

BAD THINGS:
No ability to send mail from an alias. I have 3 aliases in addition to my main account on MobileMe. Unlike on the desktop Mail app (or any other phone app I've ever used) there's no way to send an outgoing message from one of the other aliases. It's not something I need too often, but it's making me consider switching away from my MobileMe account and getting a bunch of gmail accounts for my secondary emails instead.

Copy and paste (of course). Have only needed it once so far in the last 3 days, when someone texted me and asked for someone else's phone number.

Tethering: I would gladly pay AT&T more if I had to in order to get Bluetooth tethering support. I use it CONSTANTLY at work, and kind of can't live without it. I often work in places without internet access, so I need to bring my own, and doing everything on the phone is not enough -- I need my laptop to be able to get online. The only way I managed to buy the iPhone at all is with the hope that if I had to I could stick the SIM card in my Tilt and tether that way (I hope). But that involves carrying the Tilt around and keeping it charged. Once the new software is jailbroken there should be a way to do it. I just hope that happens soon. I really wouldn't mind doing it legally, if AT&T were willing to take my money, but I guess they're not.

I read on a theatrically-minded review that you can't turn off the cell radio without going into airplane mode, meaning you can't use wifi with the cell radio off. I have happily found that this is not true! You go into airplane mode and it will shut off all radios, but you can then turn the wifi radio back on. This is very helpful for theatrical types because phone radios (particularly GSM) cause interference with speakers and wireless headsets, and the sound people and anyone on headset with you will hate you if you leave your phone on during a show. But wifi frequencies do not cause this problem, so I'm used to using wifi to continue to have data access when I need to turn my phone off, and I'm glad to see the lack of this was just a false alarm.

Anyway, so far I'm very happy, and I know this is just the beginning for MobileMe and the App Store, and there should be some new stuff coming soon.

I Have Left Verizon and Palm

One thing I haven't mentioned because of all the time I spent working and blogging about Frankenstein, is that I have had a major shift in my telecommunications life.

To recap:
* I have been a Palm user since 2000 (my first Palm phone was the Treo 650 in 2005)
* I had AT&T from 1997-2003 and HATED it -- couldn't make calls indoors
* I switched to Verizon and despite hating their policy of crippling all the good features out of their phones, their reception is pretty much perfect in NYC.
* I am a Mac user and as such am opposed to Windows Mobile for both philosophical and logistical reasons.

Then this happened:
* As I excitedly blogged in May, Palm released the Treo 755p for Sprint. My Treo 650 at that time was dying.
* Verizon was rumored to be releasing it in July, then it failed testing
* I bought a 700p and extended my contract because I seriously needed a new phone
* I was one of the first people to get the maintenance release for the 700p that supposedly fixed it. This blog made PalmInfocenter, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world, despite being labled a "he."
* The Maintenance release turns out to have some horrible bugs, and a relatively minor one which causes the phone to randomly make audible DTMF tones even when silenced.
* After way too much time they release another fix which still doesn't fix the DTMF bug (which I was able to notice within 30 seconds of buying the phone). It turns out the 755p also has the bug.
* At this point I give up on Palm OS.
* Months go by, the 755p continues to not be released, and the 700p continues to be buggy.
* Palm announces that their next generation OS is at least 12-18 months away.
* Verizon is rumored to be soon releasing the HTC XV-6800, known as the Mogul on Sprint. This is a Windows Mobile 6 device. By now (September) I've decided to turn to the dark side for multitasking and a modern OS. Meanwhile AT&T is about to release the Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser), which is the next generation version of the 6800.
* The 6800 fails testing. AT&T announces the Tilt release October 5.
* October 5, I call all over town before I find an AT&T store with one in stock and jump in a cab on my lunch break.
* I try out the Tilt for a month and decide to keep it and cancel my Verizon account, with 20 months left in my contract.


So my AT&T experience has been quite good. Reception is definitely not as good as Verizon's, but it's the difference between being able to make a call from the basement of a basement behind a cinderblock wall or not. My usage has shifted a lot in the last few years, too. I use my phone far more for data than for voice, and I find AT&T's 3G and HSDPA networks to be very fast. Overall my Tilt accesses the internet much faster than my Treo, which is probably more to do with the phone's hardware and software than the network, but the important thing is that it's faster.

I'll be posting more details about this whole experience in the future, specifically from the perspective of someone moving from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

Missing Sync Replacement Icon Set

Missing Sync is pretty much the only decent way to sync various PDAs with Macs these days. The Palm version just recently moved to version 6.0. Along with a bunch of exciting improvements came one incredibly ugly set of new icons that one would be unlikely to recognize as having anything to do with Palms. See here:
Color icons in the menu bar?! Are they crazy? Not to mention that a bumpy orange ball saying "Pa" is not the most intuitive abbreviation for the Palm logo.

I got really sick of this really fast, so as soon as I had a moment I set about designing new icons so I didn't have to look at that mess. At first I intended it only to preserve my own sanity, but then decided that perhaps the rest of the world could use an alternative as well. Because the MS icons are interactive, both in the dock and in the menu bar, it's more complicated than replacing your normal OS X application icon. It requires going inside the app file itself and replacing various .icns files contained within the package. Fortunately I've gone through most of the trouble myself so with a little clicking and dragging you can replace your icons.

This is my icon set:
For the main application icon you have your choice of a variety of Treo models and colors (I think I got all of them starting with the 650).

Here you can see the various states of the menu bar, and what the dock icon looks like with the little sync progress bar over it.
Installing the Files
If you want to be safe I'd suggest before replacing any files to drag the old ones to a folder somewhere where you can keep them if you have a problem, or if you really like orange balls that say "Pa" and want to go back to them.

First download the file MSicons.zip and unzip it.

In the folder "App Icons" you will find many subfolders with the names of various Treo models. Find the one you want, and inside will be the file missingsync.icns with the image of that Treo.

Find your Missing Sync application file (by default it should be in /Applications/Missing Sync for Palm OS -- I assume it's similarly named if you have the Windows Mobile version and want to apply these icons)

Right-click on the app and select "Show Package Contents." This will pop up a new window where you can see the files within the application.

navigate through Contents/Resources and inside the Resources folder you'll see lots of icons. This is where you drop your missingsync.icns file to replace the app's icon. It will ask if you want to replace the file, and you can just say yes, or remove the old one first if you want to keep it somewhere safe.

Back up one folder and you will see in the Contents folder another called SharedSupport. This contains little mini-apps that do various things.

Right click on "Missing Sync Menu Bar" and select "Show Package Contents"

Again go through the "Contents" folder to "Resources," where you will find another bunch of icons.

In the zip file you downloaded is a folder called "Menu Bar" with five files. Those five files get dragged into the Resources folder to replace the menu bar icons. Again, either agree to replace, or pull out the old ones first.

You can now close any windows you have open and you will be ready to go. Logging out is the simplest way to see the changes applied.

Hope you enjoy the icons. Please let me know if I've left out your favorite Palm.

I am the Chosen One

UPDATE A major bug has surfaced in the Verizon MR (which apparently is also in the Sprint MR). The data connection will not work when the phone is in a regular 1X data area, instead of the faster EVDO connection which is now available in some parts of the country. I can't even conceive of how a bug like this got through, and I'm not sure if everyone has it, but please consider that before you go running off begging Verizon to give you the upgrade. If you'd like to learn more, the TreoCentral forum for the 700p has several threads discussing it and other advantages and disadvantages of the MR, but this one seems to be the most directly related.

There's a developing situation in the Treo world centering around the maintenance release (MR) for the Treo 700p.

A brief background:
The 700p was released by Palm over a year ago, and from the start has had a number of bugs, enough to actually make it notable above the normal amount of bugs of any Palm device. The biggest one is what is usually simply referred to as "the lag." Instead of the normal immediate response that Palms are known for (and that makes the limitations of the Palm OS justifiable), the 700p was known for taking several seconds (or much more) to switch between apps or do various things. Some people were very much up in arms that the lag makes it skip when playing MP3s in the background. There is also something apparently wrong with the Bluetooth stack which makes it difficult for the phone to hold a connection with another device.

Cut to far too late:
Palm announces they are finally going to provide a maintenance release (not just a patch, sort of like a Service Pack is to Windows) that supposedly will fix all that ails the 700p, as well as adding a couple enhancements. Much fanfare was made when the MR was released for Sprint back on June 4. Of course the Verizon people were bitching that their version was not released simultaneously, which just poured salt in the wound of Sprint having released the Treo 755p first, also supposedly containing the same improvements. So the Sprint people had two options for a better Treo, Verizon users were still stuck with the buggy 700p.

Things evened out a bit more when after a few days it became clear that there was something wrong with Sprint's MR. Instead of being a simple patch added to the phone's RAM, the MR is a permanent upgrade to the ROM, which leaves open the possibility of the phone turning into a brick if something goes wrong during the upgrade. A lot of users were experiencing problems, either with bricked phones or the update failing to apply properly, and Sprint pulled the upgrade. Sprint then re-released the MR on June 21, which seems to be better at installing itself.

Verizon drags their feet
With this whole saga apparently resolved on Sprint (despite some new bugs that have arisen with the MR), Verizon users still have not heard a peep about either the fix for the 700p or the release of the 755p. So when I heard the rumor that the 755p was going to be delayed at least 6-8 more weeks, I decided I had to buy a 700p, even though I have a major aversion to paying for something that's already obsolete. My Treo 650 first of all had a talk time of less than 3 minutes from a full charge, and besides that was acting even more buggy and losing more data than even a 650 has any right to. And I was getting tired of the slow data connection, especially given that I pay Verizon $45/mo. for data, regardless of whether I'm getting dial-up speeds or broadband. I was a little worried about the fact that I would be getting a phone without the MR, but since people have at least been living with their 700p's, albeit unhappily, I decided it was OK.

Buying the 700p
So after kicking around some ideas, I decided that since the 700 is not that different from the 755, I should just get on with my life and enjoy the improvement over my 650. Plus, it would keep me from doing something stupid like jumping on the iPhone too early. So I called up a nearby Verizon store and asked if they had any. The guy I spoke to had to look it up, then said, "Yeah, I've got a couple." He took my phone number and said he would get it set up for me to pick up.

When I arrived I was thankfully able to skip past the line of people waiting for service, and we talked a bit about my plan and I made some adjustments from my last contract. Then when everything was confirmed he passed my phone off to be activated, for which there was a bit of a line, so I amused myself looking at all the other PDAs that I had been considering switching to.

I found it kind of odd that they didn't actually have the 700p on display. They had the 700wx, which is the Windows Mobile version, as well as several Blackberries, the Motorola Q, and the VX6700, which is soon to be replaced by the more stylish 6800. I have never owned a non-Palm smartphone, and have often wondered if perhaps I might like a less antiquated OS, but having so much free time to try all of them out, I was unimpressed. I'm sure if I owned them I would be customizing them more to my way of working, but the general feel of them was kind of nauseating. Anyway, it made me feel better about sticking with Palm. But I did wonder, as I watched salespeople showing customers around, how they were even supposed to know the 700p was available.

Finally my name came up on the list and I paid for the phone and signed my contract. However, when the rep tried to activate the phone, it started a reset loop. He showed me and I played with it while they brought out another one and went through the process of marking it as DOA. After completing digitizer calibration, the Verizon Wireless splash screen would come up and the phone would promptly reset.

The second phone they brought out started doing the same thing, so a tech was called out to look at it. He explained that they had just installed new software on all the phones and maybe the upgrades had failed on a few. I was surprised at this, because I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of the Treo world, especially given how desperately I was waiting for the release of the 755p. I asked if this was the big update Palm was releasing, because I didn't think it was out yet. He said they had just gotten it in the day before (which would have been July 1), and he had spent the day updating each of the phones in their stock. I believe he said he did 40 of them.

Of course I was very happy to hear I would be getting the MR, but I was still perplexed at how I could have missed hearing of this huge development. When I got home and checked TreoCentral, I read a thread which said something like "some people say they've gotten the MR," without a link to who these statements. So I chimed in that I had just bought a 700p and was told it had the MR. I asked what version numbers I should be looking for, and was told software version 1.10, and Bluetooth version 3.1.2 were the big indicators, as well as a new feature where you hold the home button and it pops up a list of recently used apps. My phone has all these things. A number of posters contacted Verizon, either the main customer service, calling local stores, or by e-mail, and were all told the MR has not been released to the public, is not available for upgrade in stores, and is not being sold on new units in stores. It was at this point that I took the above picture of my phone's info screen and posted it.

I'm not sure who these other people are who claim to also have the MR, but they've remained silent on all the threads I'm following, and I haven't seen links to any of these claims. All I know is I seem to be the only person in the Treo community who has it, and I'm not sure if I should feel lucky to be The Chosen One, or scared that my phone is running software Verizon swears up and down doesn't exist.

Other notes:
The Sprint MR's most apparent flaw is referred to as the "DTMF tone issue." What happens is that when you perform certain actions that elicit a sound, like a beep when you click on something, simultaneously with the beep coming from the phone's rear speaker, you will hear a sound from the earpiece that is the same tone you would hear when pushing the * key on a phone. As soon as I began using my 700p I noticed this, and being unfamiliar with the 700p, I figured I must have something set wrong in my system sounds or something. When I got home I found this thread, where I realized all the Sprint users were complaining about this on their MR. Just for the record, I would like to point out:

This update comes over a year after the phone was released

Palm has had ample time to test this update

Sprint has done their own tests to ensure it operates correctly on their network

Verizon has taken their notoriously sweet time with their extra "quality assurance"

NONE OF THEM NOTICED SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN HEAR WITHIN SECONDS OF USING THE PHONE

As it turns out, the quick and dirty fix seems to be turning off system sounds altogether, which sucks if you like system sounds. Personally I keep them on because it's a good reminder if I've forgotten to put my phone on silent, I will notice right away that I hear beeps when I tap on things. But for now I'm OK going without. I do hear the tone still when setting ringtones -- if I tap on a sound in the list it will first play the DTMF tone through the earpiece, then the sound through the speaker. It's also heard when that sound is played as an alarm (and presumably for calls as well). The sound doesn't play every time a system sound plays, but one method that's been discovered to be reliable is to go to the phone app and press spacebar. I would like to point out that this even happens if your phone is on silent (probably because silent mode doesn't affect things coming out of the phone's earpiece).

OK, a little annoying, right? But here's the kicker: it really is a DTMF tone, and as such, will send a "*" to your phone whenever it plays. Some people have reported being on phone calls and having it do things, like deleting their voicemail while they were listening to it. NOT GOOD, PALM. NOT GOOD.

Why am I so blessed among all the millions of Verizon customers to be the only one with this obviously carefully tested piece of software? I don't know. But there are many people trying to find out, and I will keep updating as the situation progresses.

Additional Reading:

The Verizon 700p Mr Is Not Available

Where to get Verizon MR?

Touch Tone Sound whenever I do anything! (AFTER MR)

Treo 700p and my first time touching an iPhone

As you may know, for the last several months I've had my eye on the Treo 755p, which came out for Sprint in May, and has been reportedly on its way to Verizon by July. Well despite rumors of a July 4 release, there's been no word on it, and today I read this post on TreoCentral claiming it failed its testing and will suffer further delays. My Treo 650's talk time is now down under 3 minutes from a full charge, and I'm getting sick of how out of date it is, especially since everyone's complaining about how slow the iPhone's data connection is, while it's several times faster than my Treo. In order to remind myself why I don't have an iPhone, I must have a device that is faster. So I weighed my options (everything from getting an iPhone just to spite Verizon, to a Windows Mobile device, to a $40 battery for the 650.) I decided to suck it up and do the logical thing -- get the 700p, which is exactly the same as the 755p except without the slick new form factor. I even get to keep my current SD card instead of having to buy a Mini-SD.

So I called up a nearby Verizon store and had them hold one for me. It took over an hour to get it, as they were quite crowded, and then they had some problems activating it. Unbeknownst to me, the long-awaited 700p maintenance release (read: Palm released a buggy phone a year ago and has just gotten around to patching it) just came out for Verizon yesterday. I hadn't heard anything about it on the internet, which really surprised me when the technician came out and explained that he had just installed the patch on all the Treos in their stock and it had probably patched badly or something. After some time he got one working and I went home.

I also decided to go ahead with the purchase because I actually wanted to renew my contract with the Evil Empire. My current plan is very expensive ($124/mo.), and I wanted to scale it down and add basic text messaging. I didn't realize until I got there and talked to the rep that in the two years I've had my plan they've actually come up with a cheaper one (imagine that!), because there's a phone+data plan now, which saves you $5. At the time I last renewed there was no such combo package. So I saved $5 on the combo (which I promptly spent on the TXT plan), and I also reduced from 900 minutes to 450. I will have to keep an eye on that to make sure it's enough. When I'm really busy my usage can get up to 500, so I'll have to be smart about it. Ever since my parents got Macs and broadband, we use iChat instead of the phone, so that has probably reduced my usage by 100-200 minutes alone.

I feel like a cassette tape user describing to you the wonders of the CD player, so I'm not going to go into any details about what's special about the 700p, at least until I've used it some more. To me it's a nice upgrade, though.

While I was waiting for my turn to have my phone activated, I had a lot of time to kill in the store, so I played with all the other smartphones that I had considered getting. To cut to the chase, all of them sucked. No question, I didn't want any of them, and once I tried them, I had no regrets about going with the 700p. I've never owned a Windows Mobile device, and have always wondered if perhaps I was missing something. When a friend will let me play with their phone I try to get a feel for it, but there's little you can mess around with without screwing up your friend's phone. A store display model is much easier to work with. I'm sure there are ways of customizing them, but neither the Blackberry or WinMobile UIs appealed to me at all. I'm sick to death of Palm OS, but I didn't find the others very usable.

When I arrived at the mall, I thought, "Oh cool, when I'm done I can go to the Apple Store and look at the iPhone." Then I decided perhaps it would be a better idea to look at the iPhone before buying the Treo, just in case the Apple Reality Distortion Field really was that strong. Well, obviously I made it out of the store, but I can't say I did it with confidence. I think I was shaking a little. God, it's pretty. If it wasn't for my strong distrust of AT&T, I'd have overlooked all the phone's other flaws and walked out of the store with one.

In brief, I found the touchscreen to be a little difficult. Every device responds best to a different amount of pressure, I've learned this from all my years with Palm, so maybe it was just that adjustment, but I found it sometimes didn't respond right away, or in exactly the way I touched it. When viewing web pages I sometimes had to poke at it multiple times to get it to click on a link. Everyone is saying "trust the keyboard." I found this to be true. When using it in portrait, I made quite a few mistakes, but the software correctly predicted what I was trying to type. I've heard in landscape mode it's more accurate because the keyboard is a little bigger. I didn't spend much time trying it that way. Overall, I agree with the general consensus online, it's an amazing piece of work. The screen is beautiful, and the design makes you just want to keep using it. I am more than ever looking forward to seeing what the next version can do.

First Rehearsal

My day started with a meeting at the theatre with my ASM, Paul, and our prop master, Justin. After stopping into the office and saying hi to a bunch of people, and then arriving on stage and saying hi to a bunch more people, I sat down in the shop with Paul and Justin and went over the props we would need for the day's rehearsal. The prop master of the previous production left us a very helpful list, and between that, our scripts, and the archival video, we came up with a list for the day and set out in search of the pieces. Not everything has been unpacked yet, so it took a little longer than we had hoped. I took what I could fit in my car and headed for rehearsal, and Paul and Justin arrived a little later with the large pieces.

The afternoon consisted of rehearsal with the three leads, who moved quickly through their material. Most of the cast has done the show before (some many times), so the whole process should be faster than normal. After dinner we had the full company present, minus a few who had conflicts. We had a little meet-and-greet, and then rehearsed the two numbers sung by the whole company. After that some folks were sent home, and we split into two rooms -- the girls upstairs to learn choreography for "All I Do," and several scenes and songs with the principals downstairs.

Then that part of my day ended at 10:30, and I began the final part, at home. First, the rehearsal report, which I start writing during rehearsal if possible, adding things as they come up, and then finish and send when I get home. Tonight I had to finish the contact sheet -- Paul and I didn't get to do our magical instant-contact-sheet production because we were at the alternate studio where there's no copier. I decided there was no need to kill ourselves trying to get a contact sheet out as long as we had the wallet cards done so people would have all the essential numbers if they had a problem overnight. The wallet cards deserve their own post, sometime when it's not 2AM. Then I did a rough calendar of the entire production so people have an idea of when they will be needed.

Finally, I did what is obviously the most important thing when starting a new production at Reagle -- it must be because not five hours after the start of the season, I had been asked by at least three people about it -- "When am I getting my Singin' in the Rain ringtone?" Since my first show here, I have made MP3 ringtones for every show, and assigned them (using the Palm app mRing) to my Reagle category, so whenever someone from Reagle calls me it plays the ringtone for the current show. Most newer phones have the ability to play MP3s, and assign them to individuals and/or groups, although the method varies. As more people have been getting phones with this feature, and showing it off to others around the theatre, I have been getting more requests of "I hear you can give me a ringtone..." So tonight I spent a few minutes and made the glaringly obvious one -- it goes "I'm singin' in the rain / Just singin' in the rain / what a glorious feelin' / I'm happy again." Generally I choose the selection so that it makes some sort of musical sense when it loops. I used to let them go for around 30 seconds, but I found that some phones had more difficulty with larger file sizes, so I've started making them smaller when it works well musically. I usually start with the most memorable musical phrase in the show, since I know it will be satisfactory to most people, and then will make alternate ringtones by special request, or if there's something else I'd personally like to use. I haven't received any requests for a specific piece of music for this show yet. I suspect "Good Morning" may be a popular one. It would actually make a very good alarm, which is the other thing I use my ringtones for.

So with that, my most important job as PSM complete, I go to bed.

Initiate, and the Visor Edge

I've recently made the switch to using Initiate as the launcher on my Treo, after what seems like an eternity of using ZLauncher. ZL is still a great and mature app, but not as Treo-aware, and the developers seem to have lost interest. Rob over at Hobbyist Software is always writing and updating new apps, so I decided to try for about the umpteenth time to switch to Initiate. This time it worked. I'm really bummed now that I passed on an offer to be a beta tester for Initiate v. 3.0, because a few months ago I didn't think I had the time commitment to properly test an app I don't normally use (and never liked very much when I tried). Now that it's my regular launcher I wish I was in on that --version 3 sounds like it's going to fix a lot of things I still miss about ZLauncher.

One of the remaining things that bugs me about Initiate is that it has this feature called "smart search," which lets you type in any letters that appear in the name of the file or contact you're looking for, as long as they're in the right order. The example given in the documentation is that if you wanted to launch Filez, you could type FZ and be pretty sure nothing else would come up. This feature kind of came up in a thread on the Hobbyist forums, where a poster used the example of Albert Einstein to illustrate how v. 3 will underline the letters in the name you typed.

I took this opportunity to add my two cents about the smart search feature, and how I felt that if it was really smart, when I typed "AL(space)EI" that the first result should be Albert Einstein and not Alan Wasser Associates.

I then went on a little tangent about this little-known, and probably not-remembered-by-anyone-but-me app that used to be on the Handspring Visor Edge.

First, a word about the Edge
If you came to PDAs after about 2001, you may not have ever heard of the Edge. It's probably for the best that you haven't, as it had this horrible tendency to freeze so bad that you had to wait for the battery to die, at which point you've lost all your data back in the days when there were no external memory cards to restore from. This was a somewhat common problem reported on the forums of the day, and it happened to me two or three times. The last time, I was in my first hour of a two-show day (at Les Miz of all things) -- so approximately 12 hours before I could get home to my computer and sync, when the thing crashed. So I had no access to my calendar or contacts for that entire day. The next day I bought a Palm 500m, which I still think for its day was the greatest PDA ever made.

But the Edge, while flawed and suffering from design decisions that can kindly be called "interesting," was really beautiful in some ways. It was thin, (thus the name). Maybe still the thinnest ever, as seen here measured in metric BreathSaver-widths:It was made of aluminum when most if not all PDAs were plastic. Due to the thinness, the stylus was not in a silo but clipped into these little slots on the side. The main problem with this was that the stylus was heavy and some ridiculous shape that was not really comfortable to use, and no 3rd-party stylus manufacturers even attempted to make a better one, although Handspring eventually came up with a pen stylus themselves that was better.

The protective cover was a good idea, but it couldn't flip all the way around to the back, so it always looked like something between a tricorder and a metal notepad.

It was removable, and I usually carried my Edge without it in a leather case, which of course even empty was thicker than the Edge itself, defeating the whole purpose. The Edge came in three colors: silver, and red and blue which were only available online. I still think the red one of the sexiest PDAs to look at. Even the hotsync cradle was thin and artistically designed. In the end it was not a very good PDA, but it was a brave attempt at something groundbreaking, which was what Handspring excelled at for a while -- in fact to this day when millions of us use Treos it's really their product -- but this particular idea turned out to be a really bad one.

But about this Address app...
Among the metal case and thin profile and crashing, most people lost sight of this little add-on to the standard Palm contacts app (then called Address). If you were in the regular address view and pushed the Up key, it would take you to something called Fast Lookup. Here's the screen, with my personal phone numbers blurred.
Speaking of which, those are my current contacts synced to the Edge. If software could think, I'd love to know what The Missing Sync thought when it was given a hotsync command by a Visor Edge, a handheld that predates the first version of Missing Sync by about two years. After a series of emphatic "No"s to questions like "Would you like to sync your iTunes playlists to this handheld?," I just synced contacts, and in one of the few benefits to Palm not having updated their OS significantly since the dawn of time, it worked well enough, although it seems to have mapped some of the numbers to the wrong description (e-mail addresses show up as "home").

Fast Lookup was designed to allow you to look up a contact by first and last name simultaneously. Basically it assigned the left two hard buttons to the last name, the right two to the first name. If the first letter of the last name was between A-L, you hit button 1, if it was between M-Z you hit button 2. Same deal with buttons 3 and 4 for the first name. If that didn't return your result you would move on to the second letter, and so on, working independently on each name.

As you can see in this picture mid-search, I am narrowing down my contacts, and there are dots on the bottom showing how many letters of each name I have already entered.
It usually only took a few presses to narrow it down to the result, from what I remember, but upon trying it right now I am doing horribly, and I'm having to spell out almost the entire name to get it down to the right person. I remember being pretty good at it at the time, though. Maybe because I had a few hundred less contacts back then (I keep everyone I've ever worked with).

It always amazed me, especially back in the days before PDAs had keyboards, that no one else ever tried to revive this style of contact lookup. My best guess is that Handspring may have patented it, but you'd think even then there'd be some pirated version floating around. Maybe enough people didn't try it for a developer to get interested in it. I know at some point years ago I tried to extract the .prc file and get it to work on another PDA, and failed. Of course in hindsight, maybe it just wasn't that good of an idea, except on a handheld where the stylus was so distasteful that you'd rather be pushing those four buttons for five minutes instead of writing a few simple letters.

In conclusion, I'm glad we've moved on from the days of the Visor Edge, but I still haven't quite found the perfect contact-searching app.

Treo 755p released for Sprint

The new excitement in my life is the announcement of the Treo 755p smartphone from Sprint. Now I'm not a Sprint customer and never have been or in all likelihood ever will be, but what's exciting here is that Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA for their phones, which means they usually wind up with the same hardware sooner or later. The phone is very similar to the 700p, but a little smaller and with an internal antenna. It also uses Mini-SD instead of a regular SD card, which has many people up in arms, but I don't really mind, since I've always been too cheap to buy an SD card for my camera, and take the one out of my Treo whenever I want to take a picture. At least now the camera can have the dignity of its own memory card. The phone also comes in two colors, midnight blue and burgundy. Colors are often different between providers, but I hope Verizon has similarly attractive options.

Although Verizon has not officially announced the phone, a thread on the very good TreoCentral forums contains a report of a completely unofficial claim by a Verizon rep that it's in beta now and is scheduled for release in July. Oh looky-there, my contract is up at the end of June, how convenient.

I was actually planning not to renew and stick with my Treo 650 month-to-month until things with the iPhone shake out, but more and more I think the iPhone is a bad idea for me, given how my phone is my only phone for personal and business use, the iPhone is new and unproven on basic things like battery life, reception and availability of software, and I don't trust AT&T/Cingular's coverage in NYC. On top of that I will be in Massachusetts until the end of August and in no position to judge call quality in NYC for several months. So right now my plan is to get a 755p as soon as it's released, which will be a big improvement over my 650, and I will probably not be tempted to get an iPhone until their second version.

And on a somewhat unrelated note, rumors are flying about the release of new Macbook Pros coming up with LED-backlit screens, probably in June at the Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC), which would be June 11. Now that I finally have the money saved up, it looks like it's going to be a very exciting summer for me, after a long two years of not upgrading any of the computer-like devices in my life.