I’ve been using the latest version of the iPhone software (iOS 4) for a few days now on my 3GS. The backgrounding feature is pretty cool, though I’ve only really seen it useful for listening to things like Pandora while doing something else on the phone.  I haven’t really found any other good use for it yet, though the quick switching between applications is cool.  I just wish that nearly all applications didn’t stay running all the time, making it optional would be nice.  Maybe there is an option that I just haven’t found yet.  I haven’t given it too much time.

Another thing that is great is being able to group apps into folders.  Before this I had maybe seven or eight pages of apps, which made it difficult to find what I wanted.  I did try to keep them all alphabetized, but now I have only two pages of apps.  The first page has a couple of folders but other than that it has my most commonly used applications.  The second page is all folders of various categories with the remaining apps fitting into one of them.  This really helps to keep things organized.  Of course all folders now have the apps inside them alphabetized for even quicker use.

Those are the biggest changes I’ve noticed so far.  I did download iBooks and a couple of free books.  I doubt I will ever buy a book as I prefer to get them from the library, but I’m hoping I can sync some library ebooks up to iBooks in the future.  I’ve noticed the threaded mailbox, but haven’t much time to use it.  The same is true with the 5x zoom that is now available on the camera, and places stored in the photos.  So far I’ve been impressed with the new features and look forward to getting more familiar with them.  Anyone considering the upgrade should absolutely do so if you are running the 3GS.  I’ve heard the upgrade can slow down the 3G, but I haven’t noticed anything like that on the 3GS.

The day has finally arrived! I have my very own laptop for the first time. Sure it is a work laptop, but I am excited nonetheless. Being a self-diagnosed computer addict, it may come as a surprise that I’ve never owned a laptop before, but I have multiple desktop machines to make up for it. I’ve wanted a laptop for some time, but always talked myself out of it. When the opportunity for a new work machine came, I was happy to go the laptop route, especially in my new position where we are constantly moving from cubes, to laps, and to meeting rooms. This machine, a Dell Precision M4500, is a monster and will be great to work with. It features an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processor, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics card, and 4 GB RAM!

Another busy day at work.  I did manage to squeak in a little personal time to follow the launch of space shuttle Atlantis.  This is the 32nd mission for Atlantis, and will be the last one unless there are some unplanned changes.  That leaves only two more launches in the history of the space shuttle program.  My brother’s friend, Nick Volpenhein, finally got to see a space shuttle launch live in person.  Over the past few days, he participated in the NASA Tweetup with around 150 other users of Twitter and fans of NASA.  From all that I can tell, his trip was well worth it and he is pretty much speechless at this point.  It’s always nice to fulfill a lifelong dream.

In addition to my curling addiction, I’ve tried to keep up with as much of the Olympic hockey action as I possibly can. Fortunately, nbcolympics.com has a very nice Silverlight player that is available for streaming lots of live events, especially hockey and curling. I was able to follow along with the USA hockey game this afternoon, even if I only listened to the audio most of the time. The really cool thing is that the video player seems to automatically adjust the quality based on your connection. So rather than dropping out and buffering the video, it can simply display a lower bit-rate and then automatically switch to a higher one when the connection improves. I’m not really too familiar with Silverlight, but this feature seems really desirable compared to current flash video players.

I think I’m many years behind in saying this, but I’ve created my first flash animation.  I’ve had Adobe ImageReady installed on my computer for a while, since it is installed with Photoshop, but I’ve never really used it.  I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not that big of a fan of flash-based websites, especially with the increased use of mobile browsers and their lack of flash support, but I feel that it can be useful in moderation on websites.  Anyway, to create a simple flash animation, I created individual slides in Photoshop and then transferred them into ImageReady and used the built-in Tween command to automatically transition between slides.  The result is pretty smooth, and I was able to save the animation directly into flash from inside of ImageReady.

I actually had a very positive experience with Comcast support on Friday.  Early that day I had noticed an increase in the frequent outages I was having with my Internet service over the last week or so.  I complained about it on twitter and was nearly immediately contacted by a member of Comcast’s support team (@ComcastDoug).  Through some back and forth messages on twitter, he determined that there were some issues and my report was escalated up to the local tech team in Denver.

Later that afternoon someone on their support team called and setup an appointment for a tech to come out between three and five.  That tech arrived promptly around four and immediately got to work.  He tested the line at the modem first, and then I showed him to all the splits and connections around the house.  He also spent some time out on the lines outside and later told me that he made some fixes there.  He also provided me with an updated cable modem and even threw in an improved remote control for the TV.  I was really impressed with his service, and so far today I haven’t seen any outages.

Recently I read on kottke.org about the research a few websites have done that show the increased use in Mac computers. I wouldn’t disagree with their findings, but decided to look at the numbers from my own website to see if I could notice as big a difference as they had seen. Below are the percentages for each operating system that has hit the site during a month in half year intervals.

As the numbers show, I’m not seeing the large increase in Mac usage that other have seen.  While I do see the drop in percentage of users using Windows systems, the only gains I see are for those using Linux and the iPhone operating system.  Below are the percentages broken out for web browsers using the same time periods.

From this chart you can easily see the large decrease in users of Internet Explorer.  Firefox has been fairly consistent, with a peak around a year ago.  Safari has also been consistent, but has shown some growth recently.  I’d contribute that growth the large increase in iPhone usage, as the primary web browser on the phone is Safari.  Opera is another browser that has been fairly consistent, and often not talked about very much.  You can see that it still has yet to peak much over 1% of the user share.  And finally there is Chrome, which is the relatively new browser from Google, which is perhaps stealing a little bit from all other browsers as it slowly makes its debut.

I’m curious to see where the trends go from here, so perhaps I will post more updated statistics in another six months or so.

The other day I finally signed up for my very own Google Voice phone number (the last 4 digits spell PAFF by the way). I only have one phone, so the new phone number isn’t much use to me for controlling multiple lines. However, I was really interested in the unlimited SMS messaging feature. I don’t text message that much, but figured if I could somehow eliminate paying for any SMS service if the Google Voice setup was good enough. Unfortunately, Apple (or is AT&T behind it?) has blocked access to the new Google Voice application for the iPhone and has also removed all similar third-party apps from the app store. Unbelievable!

One of the last space shuttle missions ever could happen today. That is if it isn’t scrubbed like the first five launch attempts. According to the list of space shuttle launches this is the 8th last shuttle mission. The final mission is scheduled for September 16, 2010. The goal is to have the International Space Station completed at that time. The shuttle will then be retired and eventually replaced by the new Orion spacecraft.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. One of the astronauts on this mission, Commander Mark Polansky, has been posting updated on his twitter account and will continue doing so from space. This will not be the first time this has happened, as Mike Massimino also was updating his twitter account on the previous shuttle mission. I later read that the updates are not actually real time, the messages are sent down to earth where the are later posted, but it’s still pretty cool nonetheless. I will definitely be tuned to NASA TV at 6:03 PM EDT for the launch.

In other NASA news, tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. This mission placed the first men onto the surface of the moon. An amazing slide show of pictures from the mission can be seen at this link.

After a few days of iPhone use, I can honestly say that I am even happier with it than I could have imagined. The first thing I had to do was figure out how to get all of my contacts off of my old phone and onto the iPhone. Previously I had service with Verizon and took advantage of their Backup Assistant to store all of my numbers for me. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find a good solution for performing the transfer from the Backup Assistant to my iPhone contact list. I was able to login to the Backup Assistant website but unfortunately I could not export the data. However, I was able to print the data, though that really wouldn’t help. So I came up with the following method to manually copy all of the data and get it in to the iPhone.

1. Select Print Address Book from Backup Assistant website (popup window).
2. Copy all rows.
3. Open Excel and paste.
4. Format in Excel:
   1. Copy and paste the data into another sheet, this should remove the pesky check marks in each row.
   2. Move phone numbers around into separate columns specified by type.
   3. Use find and replace to replace all instances of “Mobile”, “Work”, “Home”, etc. with blank text, leaving only numbers in each cell.
5. Save the worksheet as a csv file.
6. Open outlook and create a new sub directory under Contacts.
7. Under File menu select Import and Export…
8. Import from another program of file.
9. Comma Separated Values (Windows).
10. Browse to the file saved earlier.
11. Select the sub directory created earlier.
12. Click Map Custom Fields…
13. Map Name to Name, Mobile to Mobile Phone, Home to Home Phone, etc.
14. You can use the Next > button to see how your data will map.
15. Click Finish.

From there you should be able to use the Outlook Contact syncing in iTunes to send your phone numbers to your iPhone. I think that was all of the steps. I didn’t think to write it all down until after I had successfully performed the sync. But then I realized that my work might actually help someone out. Leave any questions or comments below.