Tip: Prevent iPhoto from opening when you plug in your iPhone – Wow. Thank you 37Signals, this has been driving me crazy as well. I haven’t tried this yet, but I hope it works. Unlike my Canon Rebel, I actually like to keep my photos on my iPhone to share and show people (I also liked keeping photos on my Treo before it too).

Blogs can kill brands – I’m not sure blogs can kill brands, but the the good ones most certainly have a lot of influence. I understand why Eric Karjaluoto gave it that title, it’s much more effective than Blogs Have A Lot of Influence Over Brands.

Hey InDesign! I need you to take your CMYK ass and go over and talk to your RGB step-cousin Flash, and get some of his tools.
Specifically, the ones that space evenly vertically and horizontally.

Last month marked the retirement of my Palm Treo 650. This phone, combined with my Treo 600 before it, lasted me for over 3 years – and it did it’s job very well. Its top selling point for me was the Hot Sync ability. The fact that if I ever lost or broke my phone, I could just sync my new phone with my computer and all my contacts would be back. In fact, the information on my Treo(s) was actually legacy information from my Samsung SPH-300 (Palm OS) and my Palm Vx before it. So you can see, syncing is very important for me. The idea of having to re-enter info into a phone annoys me to no end.

In January of 2007, I was almost ready to renew my contract with Cingular and get a new Treo 680 – but then Apple dropped the iPhone and that changed the whole game. Suddenly the Treo looked dated. Ok, fine, most mobile phones still look dated, but before the iPhone, the Treo had no foil, nothing innovative and modern to contrast its dated operating system. Looking at the Palm Treo now next to the iPhone is like looking at the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System next to a Playstation 3.

…and like the NES, I still love my Treo, but it’s day has passed. I might occasionally pick it up to look nostalgically at the antiquated OS.

…or to play Dope Wars.

Toshiba drops HD DVD, has no Blu-ray plans – It’s about time. This is one time where the better technology has won a format war.

I started out the day thinking I didn’t have anything I wanted to post. Now its just the opposite.
Keepin’ it Tween
Flash is Not a Stepping Stone! (thanks Len) – I’m one of these people who has started to feel like I wasn’t keeping up enough with the technical side of flash (even though I’m not a developer). Hearing this from one of the top guys in Flash (and who was hired by Adobe last year) is reassuring.
I think the bottom line is, does your Flash site work? Is it bug free? Does it run quickly?
Happily Never After?
Flash on iPhone Political Calculus – Gruber brings up some great points on why we might not see Flash on the IPhone. I have some friends who disagree.
There’s a lot of grey lines in technology these days. Not every company is strictly software or strictly hardware. Apple is a great example. Technically they are a hardware company – since that is where their money comes from, but if you take away their amazing software – you’ve just got a pretty shell.
Quicktime is an integral part of Apple, especially with online video becoming increasingly popular and as Gruber notes, I don’t see Apple ceding control of video to Flash.
For me, it comes down to the fact that if Flash never got implemented on my iPhone – I don’t think it would phase me in the least. I’m saying this as someone who has made a career from Flash. I’ve been asking myself what would Flash look like on the iPhone? What would sites look like?
With Apple releasing the SDK for iPhone development later this month, there won’t be any need for Flex applications as developers will have access to core aspects of the operating system (pardon my lack of a correct technical lexicon).

I’m not sure who Alex English is, but I’m really digging the hockey-masked busts.

I can’t think of much to say right now.
I can say there’s a lot of great things happening where I work, go check out the Schematic blog – InsideTheBox.

Apple haters love to screw themselves with outrageous predictions and claims.
This clip makes me smile, I believe it was shot in ’07, right around the time Apple either announced the iPhone or launched it, I’m not quite sure:

Most expensive phone ever in the marketplace? Ha! I know people who paid more for their Razr’s when they first came out. Hell, I paid over $300 for my Nokia 8290 back in the day when it was a “hot” phone.

I don’t like talking shit about companies, but when they mess up too many times, I have to say something.
For the second year in a row, ProFlowers has dropped the ball and has not delivered my order on time. In this case, when I got the email telling me my order had shipped, I noticed that it had been delivered to FT Worth, TX instead of Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Not good ProFlowers. You just lost a customer.

Mashable.com has an article on the various websites that have changed their logos to a Valentine’s day theme.

At first, I was inclined to credit (or blame) Google for establishing the precedent of changing your company logo for different occasions and events.
…but I thought about it again I realized this wasn’t true. Does anyone remember Paul Rand’s playful freestyle-mixup of the IBM logo?

Not every designer is Paul Rand, so if you decide to start experimenting with your logo, be careful. You can up with something beautifully unexpected or you can end up with a train wreck.

T-Shirt – God Save Stan Lee (via Tcritic)

There’s a post over at Engadget about Sony Ericsson’s new XPERIA X1 mobile phone. It features a ‘panel interface’. There’s a commercial showing the phone in action – if you can call it that.
All we’re able to see is these ‘panels’ – which bring to mind the window effect of Exposé on OS X – except, I have no idea why this is effective or how it improves productivity on the XPERIA X1.
Here’s the commercial:

Now this phone could very well be a winner and have an easy to use interface, but we have no idea from the video. Update: I skimmed through the comments of the Engadget post and found a link to another equally useless video from a mobile show in Barcelona. The guy showing the phone won’t even interact with it, he hits one button on it and spends the rest of the the time pointing at the phone. Bullshit.
If you’re going to make a video highlighting how innovative your product is, why don’t you show it actually doing something innovative instead of just using smoke and mirrors?
Like how you say? Like this:

VaryWell

My drink, the café au lait.
I think of it as a poor man’s latte.
If you go to a good coffee shop (Not Starbucks), they’ll have strong coffee, and once they drop in that steamed milk, you’re really not that far away from a latte anyway.
…and you’re saving yourself at least a dollar.