I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was on the train home from NYC tonight reading tweets on the Twitterific iPhone app. I got a tweet from TUAW that said:

i.tuaw.com

This is (of course) the iPhone-optimized version of The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Is this new? If so, it's long overdue. It takes at least a minute to load most pages from the full TUAW site. The iPhone pages load as you would expect an iPhone-optimized page to load, in a few seconds.

Wish I'd seen the tweet about i.tuaw.com before I read the story about the iPhone 2.0.2 Firmware Update from the main TUAW site.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, I said I'd publish my daily schedule so you readers of Operation Gadget could see what life is like for me now that I'm working full time in Manhattan. Here it is:

• 4:40am: Wake up, dress in workout clothes, drive to the gym
• 5:00: Arrive at gym, do approximately 45 minutes of exercise, shower, dress for work
• 6:20: Leave for NJ Transit train station in Hamilton, NJ
• 6:45: Arrive in Hamilton Train Station parking garage
• 6:56: Board express train for Penn Station in Manhattan
• 8:00: Arrive Penn Station, change to New York Subway Number 1 train, head downtown
• 8:10: Exit the subway at 18th Street & 7th Avenue, walk east on 18th Street, south on 6th Avenue, east on 17th Street
• 8:20: Arrive at office in a non-descript office building on West 17th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues

• 5:30pm: Leave the office, head for the subway at 18th Street & 7th Avenue
• 6:03: Board the NJ Transit express train, bound for Trenton
• 7:10: Get off at the next to last stop, Hamilton
• 7:45: Pull into the driveway at home in Newtown, PA

If all goes according to plan, the total time in transit is about 4 1/4 hours.

I get a lot done on the train. I get extra programming done. I write my articles for Inside iPhone and Operation Gadget. I've been planning my hockey officiating podcast, which I'm still planning to launch in September.

It's hard to believe, but I'm probably in better shape, more organized, and more productive commuting over four hours a day than I was a month ago when I was working at my dining room table.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been working out at Newtown Athletic Club, a massive gym complex in Newtown, PA, every morning before work. In order to do this and still get to my desk in Manhattan reasonably early, I show up at the gym when the doors open at 5:00am.

There appears to be a huge correlation between New York commuters, triathlon participation, and daily 5 AM workouts. The conversations that take place in the locker room between 6:00 and 6:15 are a mixture of commodities trading small talk, and multi-sport training and race discussions. It's truly amazing.

Earlier this Summer, an article that appeared on the Bloomberg news service said that triathletes that work on Wall Street are known for their 5 and 6am workout routines. I now realize that the 5am crowd is working out in suburban gyms, while the 6am crowd is working out near work.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Monday I bought my wife Kathleen an iPhone 3G. I finally figured out the new iPhone line protocol at Apple Stores, swung by The West 14th Street Apple Store on my way to work, and found the line almost pleasingly short.

If AT&T Mobility hadn't had some meaningless flag on my account, and I had remembered to pay my bill on time, I would have been in and out of the line in less than 45 minutes. Instead it took me 90 minutes and two phone calls to the Small Business group at AT&T.

I went back to the Apple Store at 5:30pm and walked out about 6:45 with her new iPhone and a new 3G-compatible case. It was waiting in the indoor line and case selection that took the most time.

I got home from work about 9:00, and Kathleen was so happy. We spent the remainder of the evening iSyncing her Treo 650 one last time, and then syncing her iPhone 3G with iTunes. All of her smartphone data made it on to the new iPhone. Her iTunes content took some time to transfer, but it was done fairly quickly.

Some friends asked me what it's like to have the inferior phone in the house. I'm more than OK with it. With my new gig writing for Inside iPhone, it's helpful to have access to both iPhone models. I just won't be carrying the new one most of the time.

Looking at it from a different perspective, Kathleen has been holding the bag for a long time. I got an iPhone when money was tight. I got a MacBook Pro right after I got laid off from my full time job in February.

Kathleen soldiered on with the Treo 650, waiting for the iPhone 3G to come out so she could run ePocrates Rx on it. Epocrates has been the key app on her Treo 650 since she started using it in residency over five years ago.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest Inside iPhone post is called How an iPhone Can Help You Be More Productive When Commuting Via Mass Transit. One of the things I talk about in that post is the power of using location-based contexts within the OmniFocus for iPhone application.

I realized while writing the Inside iPhone piece that setting locations for contexts within OmniFocus for iPhone 1.0.1 is not straightforward. So I thought I would expand upon that issue here in this post.

The Fundimentals of Context Location

Each context within OmniFocus for iPhone can have a location associated with it. The location can be:

• the iPhone's current location,
• a street address,
• an address associated with a contact in the Address Book, or
• a business name retrieved from a search conducted using Google.

The location of contexts is set on a hierarchical basis, so I set the location of my home at the "Home" level of the context tree rather than at each sub-context.

Errands Context: Set locations of the contexts in the
Errands list by tapping "Edit" on this screen.

Establishing a Context Location

I set the location of a context by tapping on the "Contexts" choice on the OmniFocus home screen. OmniFocus presents the top level of my context hierarchy. I descend through the context hierarchy by tapping until I reach the list of contexts containing the context whose location I want to set.

I'm talking about my "Errands" contexts in this article. These are stores and service providers that I do business with often. Most of them have definite physical locations that I go to on a regular basis.

In this article, we're talking about my "Target" context. This is where I put my shopping list of products I buy at a Target Store.

If I want to set the location of the "Target" context, I need to stay on this screen and tap the "Edit" button. Once I tap "Edit", I can tap the "Target" element in the list and go to the screen where I set the location of the Target context.

Continue reading "Assigning Locations to OmniFocus iPhone Contexts" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know what you're thinking. Dave was about as absent from the 2008 Tour de France as Team Astana. More in fact, because Johan Bruyneel appeared on Versus during the last week of The Tour as a color analyst.

So what happened?

I accepted a new job in New York working for a travel-related Internet company. The job started last Monday. Getting into commuting from Newtown, PA has been a huge effort for me, as well as for Kathleen and Jimmy. It has changed our lives and our schedules quite dramatically.

I'm doing the best I can to keep up. It's going to be tough again this week, because I've got a lot of hockey-related work to do in addition to the work at my job.

I did get a post published on Inside iPhone last Thursday. If you have time and are interested, check out Obvious Winners and Losers in the iTunes App Store Rollout. There I talk about an app that I think is a game changer because it makes the iPhone usable by people in a new industry, an app that surprised and delighted me, and a couple of apps that disappointed me somewhat.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm pleased to report that I am contributing to Inside iPhone, a new part of the O'Reilly Digital Media Website. I will be posting over there once a week.

My first post is Dave Aiello's Attempt at Introducing Himself. It explains who I am to people who have never seen Operation Gadget before, and also hints at what I'm planning to talk about in my first real post next week.

There are several other good writers contributing to Inside iPhone, including Derrick Story and Erica Sadun.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the few nagging problems I've experienced with my iPhone is a photo saving problem. This has been described in several different ways by other iPhone users out on the Internet:

• iPhone "disappearing photos" bug experienced by Jeffrey Zeldman back in November 2007.
• iPhone Camera Problems: Blank White Thumbnails mentioned in June on iPhoneGuru.org

This problem started happening to me a couple of weeks ago when I was still running iPhone Firmware 1.0. I had hoped that the 2.0 Firmware Update would solve this problem, but it didn't. At that point I had to start doing serious research, otherwise my camera would have been useless to me.

Apparently there is some recurring issue with saving photos taken with the internal iPhone camera once more than 1023 photos have been saved. In my case, the problem started happening when the LastFileGroupNumber was at 1043. It is not clear to me whether all iPhones have this problem, if all first-generation iPhones have it, or if this is only affecting users of the first-generation iPhone under certain circumstances.

The best solution to this problem that I've found so far was first discussed in Topic : Camera will not save pictures to phone after snapping photo, an Apple support discussion. About a quarter of the way into the thread, a contributor named "JKeenan" said the following:

Continue reading "A Solution for iPhone Photo Saving Problems" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Screenshot of Twitterific Application on my iPhone: This
is a screenshot of the new Twitterific Application installed
on my iPhone after I performed the 2.0 Firmware Update.
[ Screenshot: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

I found a way to access the iPhone 2.0 Firmware in advance of the official release through iTunes. I decided to give the upgrade a try and liveblog it on Twitter. You can see the transcript of this on twitter.com/daiello.

I had complete success with the installation. I was able to install Epocrates Rx, Twitterific, and Evernote. The preceding links are to screenshots of each application on my Flickr account.

The most interesting feature addition I've found in the iPhone 2.0 firmware is in the Calendar. Calendar now shows which iCal calendar each event comes from. Here's a screenshot I posted to my Flickr account that illustrates this feature.

I would provide details on how to perform the 2.0 Firmware update yourself, but Apple has asked other websites to take down the information that they previously provided about where to get the firmware image. I have no interest in repeating information that Apple is actively trying to quash.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)