*Monkeys with bones not included

I wake up in the morning to my iPhone alarm, usually hitting the snooze button about three times. Oozing out of bed, I grab my iPhone and head upstairs to sit with Lisa for a little bit before work.  I’ll usually open up Reeder to check the morning news.  Couch time is also a good time to check email and maybe G+ (Lisa in the meantime is checking Facebook on her iPhone).  Then sometime before I hop in the car I’ll crack open Instacast and check if there are any new podcast updates.  On the road to work I’ll listen to one of my podcasts, the audio edition of the Economist, or one of my many audio books on the Audible app.  At work my iPhone keeps me informed if I have upcoming meetings, email, or important site monitoring alerts.  During the day I get text messages from my wife, I take turns of the Carcassonne game I play with friends, and trade instant messages over Google Talk using BeejiveIM.

I have other activities that my iPhone gets used for irregularly, but listed above are things that I do almost every day.

From Chuck and Beans at shoeboxblog dot com

Once upon a time people didn’t have Google, and so there were many things that they did not know.  Pieces of trivia would simply go unknown for days or weeks until a proper dictionary, almanac, encyclopedia or other reference material could be found, often at a local library.  These days my intelligence is directly proportional to the signal on my smartphone.  I can answer most arcane trivia questions in less than a minute, provided I have a 3G signal.

There is really no doubt about it, my iPhone enables me in many different ways, most of which are quite enjoyable.

But I could live without it.

It is a very convenient device because it travels around with me so easy it’s accessible at a moments notice, but I don’t need that.  I wound’t be happy getting along with out many of the things it does: audio books, music, internet searches, etc, but I can do all of that stuff on my computers.  I have computers an internet at home, I have them at work.  Audio books and music can be carried on any number of other devices or formats.

I would miss it, but the iPhone does not in fact fill any unique purpose in my life.

Having your email account become compromised is probably the worst thing that could happen to you, digitally speaking.  It is worth your time and effort to secure your account. Spending an hour securing your account today will prevent you from having to spend many many hours recovering from a hacked account in the future.  I’m going to detail some important information for you about how to do this.

Passwords:

Step #1 is very important.  You need a good password.  If a very recent analysis of the passwords leaked from Sony is any indication you do not have a good password.  The easiest way to start fixing this is to install and use LastPass.  I will write more about LastPass another time, but it makes it very very simple to mange very complicated passwords.  If you don’t want to use that though you need to get a better password.  There are lots of good ways to create a strong password, but Steve Gibson at grc.com has some very good ideas about this.  You should read this article on Haystack Passwords.  It tells you some easy ways to create very secure passwords.

Two Tier Authentication:

If you don’t know what that is let me break it down for you.  Your bank probably already uses an example of two tier authentication already.  When you log in you enter your username/email and password; that’s tier one.  Then you are asked for a second piece of identifying information, such as “What was the name of your first pet”; that’s tier two.  Two is better than one right?  If someone get’s your password they might get stymied by the second question.  It’s like having two locks on your door.  Stealing one key doesn’t let you get in.  But stealing your keyring might mean that the person gets both keys, so two tier authentication works best when the second form is a completely different kind of security.

Enter Google two-tier authentication.  In addition to your password you must also authenticate through a second method.  Google currently has 2 options for tier-two authentication: an iphone/android app, and phone SMS.  Adding either one of these authentication methods to your account makes your account inaccessible by anyone who does not have access to your phone/mobile device.

Google’s options for two-tier authentication has two benefits: first you get a second level of security in front of your account rather than a single point of failure (weak/compromised password), and second the person who wants to log into your account must have physical access to your phone which is a very high bar to clear.  Your spouse or significant other could pull it off but anyone else is probably out of luck.  This kind of security makes the likelyhood of your account being compromised virtually non-existent.  It doesn’t require you to have a smartphone either, if you don’t have a smartphone you can simply configure Google to send you a SMS message to your phone’s text plan.

For convince you can have Google only ask for your second tier of authentication every 30 days for a given computer.  This means that on your primary system you won’t constantly be required to get your phone out to authenticate on Google’s services.  This is a perfectly safe practice since Google requires you to re-authenticate anytime you try to change your login information.  Google also gives you a couple of one time use passwords to print off, it’s a good idea to print these off and stick them in a desk drawer in case somewhere down the road you lose your phone or any other authentication information.

I urge you, if you use Gmail as your primary email and have other accounts tied to it, turn on two factor authentication right now.

My iPhone Homescreen

I’ve been a dropbox user for quite a while now.  I signed up for an account the first day that I heard about it and I signed up for a paid account the moment that paid accounts became available.  Safe to say I use it and love it.  I found another great iPhone app yesterday that uses it, and I looked at my homescreen and realized that quite a few of my apps have dropbox integration these days, and that’s awesome. QuickShot – Easy way to take pictures and immediately upload them to dropbox.  It can also upload multiple photos at a time from the camera roll. PlainText – primarily a note taker, it just very simply handles plain text files and keeps them sync’d. Dropbox – Access to any of my files. Trunk Notes – A great markdown notebook.  Lately I’ve been keeping notes about the various games I’m in, in here, but I think it could be used for much more. DropList – This was the app I just picked up.  It’s a pretty simple to-do application (of which I’ve tried many).  This one is pretty unique in that it just keeps a very basic plain text file in dropbox, and puts a pretty face on it on the iPhone. Atomic Web (not shown) – A web browser that allows me to download files and upload them directly to dropbox. GoodReader for the iPad – not shown on the screenshot, because that’s my iPhone.  GoodReader is a great tool for  managing read-only documents.  PDFs, word documents, etc.  It’s a great way to keep gaming books and documents with me.

Side note: the updated wordpress app means that I can once again post from my iPad!

The second step is Linux:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/12/1831208/Steam-Client-for-Mac-Launches-Linux-Client-On-the-Way

So… beautiful… should have sent… a poet.

Everyone, its time to celebrate.

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

I’m still annoyed that I can’t subscribe and auto update my podcasts without syncing or using a 3rd party app. I’ve switched to using my iPad for audiobooks and podcasts since it has a much better battery life than my iPhone.

Ok, first things first, pics:

So it’s a good size. Feels great in the hand. I’ve been carrying it around, as you might imagine, and its been very comfortable. The screen looks fantastic! I really like how this thing looks! When the screen is powered on you cant see the fingerprints on the screen. So aside from how this thing feels, the experience has been great so far. For those of you with iphones you know what it is like when you find a really good app, well there are quite a few apps that are really nice. I knew what I was going to be interested in when I bought this. Here are a couple of snap of my app library so far:

Quite a few fun toys. I have to admit that one of the big reasons I wanted a iPad was for comic books. I love me some digital comics! Digital comics are something I’ve been waiting for for a long time and I absolutely love this incarnation. Cheap, easy access to comics, I can download what I want when I want it, and re-download later if I want. I’ve been out of the paper comic world for a while, but they’ve got me hooked with this new comic access. I need to check out the Marvel app. More fun things that I am looking forward to doing with this is taking it on trips, talk about portable! The ten plus hour battery life really makes it a great traveling device. This is going to be fantastic for plane trips. I really need a good offline google reader app. Right now i have a pretty good app that was designed for the iPhone, but i’ve already seen the massive difference in the quality of an app that is designed for the iPad. The Netflix app is really nice, I’m pretty shocked apple let it into the store as it will surely cut into apples sales. If Netflix lets you cache a movie on the device, it will be a real killer. The book applications are really nice. I will definitely end up reading books on this thing, in addition to audio books. There is one thing on top of all that I want to use this device for:

Playing games with my nephew! One of the most important features you could possible imagine for a device.

A lot of people have correctly identified that the niche for this device is one that apple is carving from in between phones and laptops.  There isn’t a “netbook” space really.  There is a “cheap computer” space, and portable cheap computer happen to be netbooks.  Is it a “netbook” competitor?  I don’t believe it is.  For one thing, there is no real comparison between the iPadOS (not the official name of the OS to my knowledge) and a full-fledge operating system like Windows, Mac, or Linux.  The iPadOS is very limited in terms of what it is capable of because of the platform restrictions and DRM that lockdown the system.  So what the iPad device really is is a media platform that is highly extend-able.  Is there a market for such a device?  I think there’s currently a small one, and that as the device gains popularity, it will grow (see: ipod, iphone).

The major media the iPad handles are Video, Music, Books,  Games and Web.  Do you want a “larger than an iphone” device that can do that stuff?  If you do then you are interested in the iPad.

The iPad will excel at watching iTunes videos.  It will not excel at watching other video sources.  Make no mistake that Apple has done a lot of work trying to tie you to iTunes for all your media consumption.  If you can watch it on iTunes you can watch it on your iPad.  If you cannot watch it on iTunes, don’t think you’ll be able to on the iPad.  The iPad isn’t going to support flash so no hulu for you.

I don’t think I need to say much about music.  If all you want is a music player, get an iPod.  If you want to do more and don’t mind the size of the device this will work equally as well as the iPod.

How will the iPad function as a book reader?  Well, its hard to say for certain because I don’t have my hands on one, but I think the answer will be “pretty good for people who don’t mind reading on backlit LCDs”.  Fortunately for Apple I think “students” fall into that category.  For people with sensitive eyes, something like the Kindle will probably work a bit better (though the kindle is unreadable in low light conditions, just like a book).  Personally, I’ve read 2 books using the Kindle App for iPhone so I think I would have no problems reading a whole book on this device.  I still listen to books much more than I actually sit down and read them, so I’m not certain if I would use the iPad all that much for book reading.  I tell you what would be a killer app though: Graphic Novels.  If the comixology app updates for the iPad I might have to pick it up just for that.  Having a comic book collection sitting on a single device would be really really cool.  $1-$2 dollar digital comic books is a great way to consume comic books.  It’s one of those things that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

The iPad is going to be a pretty good gaming platform, but lack of hardware controls will keep it from being a great game platform.  There are tons of good games for the iPhone and most of those will translate very well to the iPad, but there are tons of games and game types that require the tactile feedback of a d-pad to work well.  So, as a game platform there will be some areas where the pad will be deeply lacking.  That being said, Telltale games, one of my favorite game companies currently has mentioned that they are interested in developing for the iPad.  Monkey Island on the iPad? Yes please.

If all the iPad did was browse the web, there would be people who would buy this device.  And they would probably be very happy with it.  This device will work very well for browsing most web content.  It doesn’t have flash, if you need flash this device won’t work for you.  If you require Java this won’t work for you.  If you just like hitting google news and other sites that know to make their content broadly accessible, you’ll be fine.  At $500 ($630 w/3g)  its a little pricey for just a web browser, but it’s still tempting to have access to web content on such a device at all times.

In addition to all that stuff, if you currently own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will be able to transfer all your apps to it.  That’s a pretty good library of software (not fantastic, but pretty good).  Given that the iPad does not run a full OS, I think a strong app library is crucial.

So my final verdict?  You don’t need one today (though you might want one).  In 2 years?  I think the iPad is gonna follow the same path as the iPod, it’s a joke to a lot of people today, but it’ll become very popular in years to come.

wishlist for v2.0:
-front facing camera for video chat
-subscription based content access ($20 dollars a month for access to all the itunes video and music).
-more open system (no gonna happen)