Haven't posted in a while. Life has pretty much been a monotonous blur since I got back from Ohio. Every work day starts out with answering a dozen emails and voicemails from impatient students who can't seem to register for courses. They all have one thing in common: they all feel the need to tell me they "really really need to get into that class." I'm aware of that; you're call will be answered in the order it was received.
Well some pretty exciting things happened in Macworld yesterday. I updated iTunes, which now has the App Store for iPhone applications, first. Perusing the free section first, I pre-downloaded the Google app, remote control (controls iTunes from iPhone), a sports score app, a over-simplified to-do list app, a silly "flashlight" app (nothing more than a white screen; funny thing is, another developer actually charged for this and got reamed by reviewers), and a lightsaber sound effects app. :)
At various times in the day, I tried to access Apple's new online syncing service, MobileMe. If you've been around me the past couple weeks, you know I've been eagerly anticipating this. You probably know that my email change was in anticipation of this service. I got about a 15 minute glimpse of it before it crashed for a good 36 hours. Just for the heck of it, I tried to open it in Safari, rather than Firefox. And it worked! And that's still the situation as of this post. It's up using Safari but not Firefox. I went through and altered settings to meet my needs and browsed around. Couple of things to point out:
Calendar has no way to set an alert, like I can on my phone or iCal desktop application. Major boo! Hopefully to be remedied soon. Also, I have an activation key that I bought for cheap and plan on using when my trial period is over. But currently I see no way of entering it. They just want credit card info. Apparently, anything that says .Mac on my desktop and settings should now say MobileMe with the 10.5.4 update. Well, I have that update but everything still says .Mac. So I'm not sure how that is going to affect my pushing updates. I went ahead and turned everything on for syncing so we'll see how this goes. I fully expect it to be slow for a while. Man, have people on the Apple forums been irate over this. But the fact is, new roll-outs in technology will always have bugs, no matter what company it is from. Deal.
I also kept my phone docked and periodically clicked "Update" for it, but never got through. Rumor was there was a direct link and manual update method, but I'm not all about that. I'll take the update when I can get it through "official" methods. I happened to double click the button once and on the second click it oddly found the update and so I proceeded. Took about 20 minutes and I was posting live info on the forums and drew quite a following as the process did its thing. My apps were loaded and although settings were returned to default, I quickly got it back to the way I like it. Sometimes the touch response is a little sluggish, but not too worrisome. If you're an iPhone user, here's a little gem you may not know: hold the home button and press the power button to take a screenshot. :)
There were a couple of paid apps I'm keeping an eye on reviews for. But today as I waited for a haircut, I got a 4 1/2 star-rated game called Enigma. 3-D puzzle game and it is quite difficult. Well, I think I've spent enough time in front of this screen--most of it spent exploring MobileMe--so that's it for now.
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