Davison Online

As a Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee is a perfect Republican candidate for Iowa where 4 in 10 voters are evangelical Christians. His surge into the polling lead there is remarkable–tripling his numbers since the summer–but Iowa is no bell weather state. It far more conservative than either of the coasts and although a Huckabee win will cause voters to take another look at him, don’t be surprised if the non-evangelical crowd don’t care for a lot of what they see.

Huckabee is personable, to be sure, but he’s a creationist (meaning to me that he’s anti-science), he thinks God is responsible for his rise in the polls, and his political history is not without its share of problems (unlike say, Romney, who has a solid history of success).

Still, the party Karl Rove created is a Christianist one, and Huckabee fits the bill better than anyone else in the field at present. The biggest loser from Huckabee’s rise is undoubtedly Romney, who has outspent him 20 to 1 in Iowa, and despite a decent speech apparently can’t convince Iowa christians to vote for a Mormon.

I don’t think Huckabee’s candidacy has legs, but unless something dramatic changes, Iowa is his.

The plan is for yours truly to give this month’s presentation on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at next Tuesday’s Salem Mac Users Group meeting, so I was a little perturbed when day after day my copy of the new operating system refused to be delivered by FedEx.

Happily, yesterday finally saw its arrival–almost a week after some other Apple Consultants Network members, but hey–and I installed it (after making a backup of my hard drive of course) last night.

The early report is good: So far everything is snappy and stable. I’ve updated a few programs for compatibility reasons, but nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the update process. I’m very pleased with how well the update went.

What I like:
• Spaces: Virtual desktops would be more valuable for someone with a smaller screen or someone not running dual displays, but I can see this being an incredible useful feature when I’m on the road with the laptop and its relatively small 15″ LED monitor is all I have to work with. Even on a dual display setup like mine, Spaces takes advantage of both screens. It’s really neat! (And Control + Arrow keys makes for great key combos.)

• The overall look: Windows seem more clear, the red/yellow/green window buttons seem more distinct, and everything seems more crisp than Tiger. (There are, however, notable exceptions to this which I’ll hit in a moment.)

• Speed: Intel-based machines reportedly show 5 to 10 percent speed gains over Tiger, and this corresponds with my experience. Everything feels snappier. Mail in particular feels wonderfully faster. (Note that Leopard on PowerPC Macs is reported 3 to 5 percent slower.)

• Parental controls: It’s not like any of my kids will be hopping on my laptop, Asgard, any time soon, but eventually they’ll be using a Mac that runs Leopard and when they do, it’s nice to know that I can set all kinds of parental controls to keep them from doing things that they shouldn’t.

• Universal Access: I have several clients with macular degeneration, which means that they’re slowly but surely losing their eyesight. Leopard’s Voice Over system coupled with Alex, the new synthesized speech voice, will go a long way toward improving their Mac experience.

• Time Machine: I’ve not really restored any files using it yet, but the set up–plug in an external hard drive and click “Yes, use this drive for Time Machine”–was about as painless as possible. The visual effect, for all its flash and bang, is actually quite effective in promoting the “travel through time” metaphor.

• QuickLook: Huge timesaver. Love not having to open Preview all the time to see what’s in a document. Just select a file and hit the space bar. Neat!

• LAN control: If you’ve got another Mac on your local area network (LAN), you can now log into it from the Finder, see its screen, and control the computer remotely. It’s like having Apple Remote Desktop built-in.

• To-dos: I’ve not really started using them, but I love the promise represented by a “to do” list that syncs from Mac to iPhone. The “to do” list Mail integration is a great idea, too, since I’ve been using my In Box as a to do list for years now.

• iCal interface improvements: It’s a small thing, but the new iCal places the day/week/month controller at the top window instead of inexplicably at the bottom as it had before.

What I dislike:
• The new folder icons: Looks like they were designed by a committee. No personality, no character, and, worst of all, it’s darn near impossible to see the symbols on them.

• The Dock (when placed at the bottom): Horrible, horrible, horrible shiny glossy 3-D effect renders everything like the Desktop version of Las Vegas. The open applications indicator, heretofore a smallish black triangle, is now replaced with a spot of light which is virtually impossible to see against Apple’s default Leopard background and which only adds to the feeling you’ve entered a casino. Happily, a dark desktop screen and a move of the Dock to either side of the screen mitigates all problems. (I remain a Dock-hater, though.)

• Stacks: Worthless visual eye candy. I have no idea how this in any way represents an improvement over just opening a window. I do like the concept of a Downloads folder, though.

Those interested in an upgrade to Leopard can purchase it at my online store for $20 off retail (with free shipping).

My order of Apple’s iLife ’08 came yesterday and although I’ve only had the opportunity thus far to play with iPhoto and GarageBand, I’m utterly smitten. iPhoto is a terrific update and GarageBand’s new Magic GarageBand feature let me make the following song in–I’m not kidding–5 minutes and 1 take.

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Bought a $20 rubberized iPhone case when I bought the phone. I’ve been pleased with it. Recommended if you’re getting an iPhone.

Apple announced massive ($5.41 billion in sales, $818 million revenue) quarterly numbers today, with 1.13 million portable Macs and 634,000 desktop Macs sold. They also shipped 9.8 million iPods.

Only two days of iPhone sales were included in the quarter, and Apple rather cagily says that they sold 270,000 “iPhones and Apple-branded and third-party iPhone accessories.” AT&T announced on Monday that they’d done 146,000 iPhone activations, so a reasonable guess on the opening two-day numbers is probably around 200,000 iPhones sold.

UPDATE: According to an Apple spokesman, the language in the financial report refers to the revenue not unit shipments. In other words, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first two days and AT&T activated 146,000 of them. Presumably the remainder were activated in the follow few days.

Nonetheless, sales have continued apace according to my own local research and what I’m reading online. Additionally, as one of the people who purchased an iPhone after the two-day opening bell, I can tell you that I remain utterly smitten with it.

And it’s not just Ty off on another pie-in-the-sky, pro-Apple flight of fancy either. EVERYONE who I’ve showed the iPhone to is blown away by it. I don’t know if they’re “I’m gonna run out and spend $600″ blown away by it, but they’re either quite impressed by it or they’re all really incredibly good at faking envy.

In the long run, I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about in the iPhone business. Just like with the original iPod, these things are going to get even better, and I would not be at all surprised to see an iPhone nano with phone, picture, texting, and iPod functions for $300-$400 in the next few months. Given that the iPod nano outsells the regular video iPod by a very wide margin, I think such a move borders on a no-brainer. If it’s in time, it could also be the hit of the Christmas season.

Five days along now with my iPhone here’s what I’ve discovered:

• It is the best way to look at pictures that I’ve found. Flicking from picture to picture and pinching with your fingers to zoom in or out is incredibly satisfying. The image quality is spectacular, too. As far as pictures I prefer my iPhone to my 20″ Cinema Display.

• It’s a great phone. Your mileage may vary of course, but I’ve had no problems with AT&T’s coverage and, subjectively, I think the call quality is actually better than my Motorola E815 on Verizon.

• The contact information on the phone is superbly organized and syncs beautifully with Address Book on my Mac. This is so much better than the E815 that I’m reminded of George Will’s comparison of Babe Ruth to the rest of the baseball players of his era: “Like Mt. Everest in Kansas.” That’s how the iPhone feels overall, too.

• I like that web authors can now embed tel: tags that will allow the iPhone to automatically call a phone number. For regular (non-phone) web browsers it just looks normal. For the iPhone it appears as a link. Cool!

• I’ve typed up several SMS text messages (all AT&T plans include 200 messages a month) and found the virtual keyboard to be significantly faster than the E815′s phone keypad method (where in to type the letter “c” for example you’d hit the number 2 three times). According to an iPhone typing test I took, I’m getting about 24 words a minute. That’s nowhere near what I can do on a full-size keyboard of course, but it’s probably 10-12 times faster than the Motorola. I may learn to like texting.

• Being able to add events into my calendar and have them sync into my regular iCal calendar makes all the difference in the world. I could carry my calendar with me before with my iPod but I couldn’t modify the entries. That’s only half useful. Now that I can change things? ENTIRELY useful.

• Like with the E815, I doubt I will use the built-in camera very much. Two megapixels isn’t getting it done for me and lack of any optical zoom renders most shots difficult. I guess I’m glad it’s there, but if I need a picture, I’ll be using my Canon Digital Elph.

• YouTube is an amazing waste of time. I won’t say it’s without its virtues, but it’s pretty close. Then again, what’s not to love about a laughing baby or a skateboarding dog? (And, OK, the Ronaldinho videos are mind-blowing.)

• The stock and weather widgets are reasonably useful but slow to update on AT&T’s Edge network. On a Wi-Fi, they’re fine.

• I’ve not used the World Clock, Alarm, Stopwatch or Timer more than one in the last five days. I’m glad the functionality is there, but I’ve yet to see much use. Also, the Alarm that plays for the timer always seems to revert to Marimba instead of holding whatever ringtone setting I give it.

• I like that the iPhone Notes can be emailed. I wish they could be synced as well. And I agree with other commentators who say that the font, Marker Felt, should be taken out and shot.

• I’m eagerly awaiting the opportunity, which will probably come in November when I transfer my main line from Verizon, to use Visual Voicemail. Thus far, I’ve not had the chance.

• The iPhone is a decent email device. Since I use IMAP for the accounts, it syncs perfectly with Apple Mail and my web mail, and I love being able to check and respond to email on the go.

• Safari on the iPhone is a hit-or-miss affair. Some of the iPhone-specific web sites that have cropped up lately are cool, offering some features that went a-missing (tip calculator, chess, etc.) from Apple. At the same time, while you get the real world wide web on the iPhone not some baby Internet or specially formatted web pages, there is no way in which this experience is better than sitting in front a 20″ Cinema Display and seeing the same web page, except one: The iPhone is portable.

• I’m going to guess that the iPhone makes a decent iPod. It does a great job with video. I’ve tried video podcasts and TV shows and they’re terrific. The iPhone is a marvelous video player. But I’ve not really used it as a music player, and I’m not sure that I will. At 8 GB, it’s like a large nano so it just won’t hold that many of the 1700 plus songs that I rate among my favorites. I’m not saying it’s bad, mind you, just that I have a hard time envisioning it being my primary music player. God knows that if it could be, I’d ditch my video iPod altogether.

So…worth $600? At this point, a resounding “YES!” We don’t know precisely how many iPhones Apple sold in the opening two days [well, we do now—see update above], but I for one am not the least bit concerned. They’re going to sell a lot more.

I purchased an iPhone this afternoon from the local AT&T store. Just because I’m the curious type I asked how sales were going. Answer: They’re mostly selling out on a daily basis and receiving new shipments of 8 to 16 phones every day or so. That bodes well.

In my own case, I wasn’t planning to jump on the iPhone bandwagon until my Verizon contract expired in early November, but I’ve shot past my allotted minutes both of the last two billing cycles and been painfully charged 45 cents a minute on the overages. For now I’m using AT&T’s lowest-priced iPhone plan ($60 a month for 450 minutes (which rollover) and 5000 weekend/night minutes). When the Verizon contract expires I’ll up this to the $80 a month for 900 minutes and unlimited weekend/night. The very sweet data plan for the iPhone is unlimited 24/7 regardless of which voice plan you are on.

In the meantime, this should be sufficient to keep me out of cell phone overage disaster when coupled with the 700 FamilyShare plan minutes a split with Erin and my Mom. Here’s hoping anyway, because using up the 700 minutes—Verizon offers no minute rollovers, so I had nothing to save me from my previous months of under-usage—is nobody’s fault but mine. Erin and my mom use made 200-300 minutes a month; the rest is all mine.

So anyway, the iPhone itself. It makes my Motorola E815 look like Windows 95. Seriously. SERIOUSLY. More on that in a moment.

I know a few folks have had problems with activation, but for me it was a walk in the park. Picked what I wanted through iTunes 7, click, click, click, and I had the phone activated in 20 minutes, tops. Utterly painless.

The iPhone is a remarkably beautiful device. It’s thin, it feels good, it’s heft is nice, and its screen is amazing. Like most Apple products it would not look out of place in a museum of modern art.

I am thrilled to report to you that my experience is the same as every other reviewers I’ve read: The iPhone functions as well as it looks, which is to say it’s the best cell phone device ever by a wide margin.

My favorite things:

• The contact manager that syncs with Mac OS X 10.4′s Address Book is excellent and makes it super easy to call folks. This stands in marked contrast to my e815′s crappy contact management system which, to this day, I still do not fully understand.

• Setting up Mail was a breeze, and while I’m not pulling all down all email accounts to my iPhone, those I’ve chosen to link have worked flawlessly. Very happy with this so far.

• The web browsing is relatively slow via AT&T’s Edge network. I’d estimate 2x dial-up speed. Hopping onto a Wi-Fi network helps load times considerably. I’ve got the iPhone on my WPA2-encrypted home network and the speeds feel like DSL. That is to say that it’s not as fast as Safari on my laptops, but it’s perfectly acceptable.

• The iPod functionality is terrific, with video podcasts, TV shows, and movies really shining on the iPhone’s awesome screen. Only real downside is having only 8 GB of storage on the phone.

• The Google Maps feature was a bit confusing to me—I typically using MapQuest when I’m online—but now that I think I’ve got it figured, I’m sold. It’s like having a faux-Garmin GPS. Very nifty.

• Weather widget is also very handy. I programmed in four cities just because I enjoying flicking pages out of the way. The iPhone is fun like that.

• I like looking at photos on the iPhone, zooming in, pushing them aside, and so forth. Again, it’s just fun—something I never said about my old Motorola phone.

• I’m starting to get the hang of the virtual keyboard for Mail and Safari. Most reviewers have said it takes five days to get really proficient at it, but I’m feeling somewhat comfortable now. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.

I would say that for a 1.0 product, the iPhone is a stunning achievement, but on second thought, we should just leave off the opening phrase. The iPhone is a stunning achievement PERIOD. It’s not perfect by any means, but what it does well, it does VERY well, and assuming AT&T can hold up their end of the bargain, I can see myself being happy with the iPhone for years to come.

[I'm on a Norse mythology kick recently: My new MacBook Pro is Asgard. The iPhone is Gungnir.]

So it turns out I’ve been living with a very big mistake for well over a year now. (If any of you guessed Jonah, Elisha or Erin, well, then ha ha ha, NO.)

I’ve been using LinoType’s excellent Font Explorer X to manage my extensive font collection. It’s nifty in that it can auto-activate fonts for various projects, it’s simple to use, and it’s free.

As you might guess, I have thousands of fonts. Some 3000 actually. And over the course of time I’ve been gradually activating a font here and a font there, and, moron that I apparently am, not deactivating any fonts.

So Mac OS X has been been puttering along under the crushing weight of 249 activated, wholly optional fonts. Guess what happened on Asgard, the new MacBook Pro when I deactivated those fonts?

If you supposed that it flew like a banshee, you supposed right. So let that be a lesson: Idiocy does not pay.

Safari 2 wouldn’t stop crashing, so I also downloaded Apple’s beta of Safari 3. I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned font deactivation or if it’s Safari 3 (or both), but I have never seen web pages load faster. Furthermore, make sure you check out the Inline Find feature for searching within a web page. (Hit Apple + F to bring it up.) Tell me you’re not impressed. Best of all, though, even with an updated version of Saft installed, Safari 3 hasn’t crashed.

The issues of speed and stability now resolved, I find the MacBook Pro much more to my liking. I continue to need more hard drive space, which I can’t really blame on the Mac, but I’ve removed the blue color cast of the super-bright LED screen by recalibrating the screen. It’d be a terrible thing to do if I were trying to achieve color fidelity between screen and printed output, but I’m not, so there it is.

It’s early on yet in my time with Asgard, but I’m sufficiently impressed to give it an 8.5 out 10. If all goes well in the next several months, I’ll probably revise that number upward.

I’ve been so busy with work and with remodeling that it took me three days to open the MacBook Pro box after it arrived. THREE DAYS! Talk about purgatory. Anyway, it’s open now and here are some early impressions:

• The LED screen is incredibly bright, outshining even my 20″ Cinema Display. It also has a very blue cast to it, something I’m going to try to solve via color recalibration. The thing just looks wrong otherwise.

• It’s nifty to have an iSight camera built in.

• I expected a massive speed increase moving from my PowerBook G4 1.5-GHz to the MacBook Pro’s 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo. Overall, not seeing it. Things are snappier here and there, and certain applications (iPhoto, for example) are blazingly faster than before, but over all system performance doesn’t feel orders of magnitude quicker.

• This lack of perceived speed could be related to the number of non-Universal applications I run (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.), all of which have to be emulated in a transparent environment called Rosetta. Rosetta works great, but it does entail a performance hit.

• After transferring my user account from Mystic (the PowerBook) to Asgard (the MacBook Pro) and importing in all my digital photos, I only have 25 GB of hard drive space left of a 160 GB drive. I still haven’t moved back my music, and given this I’m unlikely to.

• Safari is doing a lot of crashing, more than I’d consider normal. I run a couple of plug-ins for it (Saft and Pith Helmet), so either of those might be the problem.

• Everything else I’ve thrown at it has done well in terms of reliability.

• I am very much looking forward to being able to run Aperture, Apple’s Pro photo manipulation and management program.

• I’m still strongly considering a Mac Pro later this year or (more likely) the middle part of next year.

• If you don’t need to run high end applications (Aperture, Final Cut Studio 2, etc.) or power-hungry games, you can save $1000 by getting a MacBook instead of a MacBook Pro. (I have to run the high end applications, otherwise I might have opted for the MacBook.)

• I’ll be very curious to see if Mac OS X 10.5 brings a big speed increase to the MacBook Pro and every other 64-bit capable Mac. (That’d be everything in the lineup right now except the Mac mini.)

Update from the Apple Consultants Network ListServ where ACN members were asked to comment and provide mini-reviews of their new iPhones:

Overall this is by far to coolest, most innovated phone I have ever seen. I’ve been waiting for this for 6 years now….It just doesn’t seem real. Someone pinch me.

Watch Microsoft will make a phone. Maybe zuner than later.

This fairly accurately sums up the feeling on the list. There are NO bad reviews, and the ACNs are ecstatic.

My mini-review follows:

I used the launch of Apple’s iPhone to sashay over to the local AT&T store and hand out business cards to the 40-50 people in line. After that I went home to dinner and out to dessert. Then I returned to the AT&T store, grabbed a sales rep (it probably didn’t hurt that I had my Apple shirt on) and headed over to play with one of the two iPhone display models.

The store had sold out of the 30 units they were allotted (15 of each model). They have no idea when they’ll get more in stock. I hope it’s going that well around the country.

As for the phone itself, well, my Motorola E815 is a pile of steaming something in comparison. The iPhone is brilliantly designed and executed, and I dare say that I grasped how to use 80 percent of the features on my first time through. I still don’t know how to use my Motorola’s camera functionality completely, and what I do know of it stinks. Like so many people, I hate my cell phone.

But I already love the iPhone. The multi-touch display works great, and web surfing, while a bit slow on AT&T’s EDGE network, promises to be terrific on any available Wi-FI network. The rest phone’s functions seemed very snappy and responsive, and one features after another just blew my away.

I confess to having a bit of trouble with the two thumb virtual keyboard typing, but as a full-size keyboard touch typist, I’m not used to typing with my thumbs. In other words, much of that may be my lack of talent and not a reflection of an iPhone problem. Using the delete key, I got everything typed up anyway. Apple says it takes a few days to get used to typing that way, so I’m not particularly worried.

Otherwise, home run. Out of the park.

My contract with Verizon expires in November. I’ll be getting an iPhone.

All I did was upgrade the hard drive from 120 GB to 160 GB. Ordered on the day the MacBook Pros were announced. Shipped this morning out of Shanghai.

Trinity, my PowerBook G3/500, will be for sale within the next few weeks. Price TBA, but if you’re looking for an inexpensive Mac portable, this might be it. Contact me if you’re interested.