My Mobile Life

Generally one of the first things I do when I get back from a trip, particularly one that involves some leisure time in a new place, is upload photos to the web. Usually I use Facebook for this task, but this time I already had my photos in iPhoto (as iPhoto is automatically launched when you plug the iPhone in every time you sync). So I thought I’d explore the options in the Share menu. There are a couple of options from this menu which allow you to export selected photos or albums. One puts the photos up on your MobileMe account and other allows you to create a gallery via iWeb.

I figured I’d try the MobileMe account this time and I was blown away by how easy it is to get your photos up. Once you’ve clicked on the MobileMe menu option (and are connected to the web) iPhoto syncs the galleries automatically and there’s nothing else for you to do, except share the link with your friends and family.

Speaking of family, if you’re mother is anything like mine you probably get regular complains that since the age of digital photography she never gets printed photos anymore. Ah, well Apple have a solution to this too, iPhoto ’08 Print Products.

Printing a set of photos as a book, cards, calendar or individual prints is now a breeze from iPhoto. All you have to do is select the photos you want published and click on the Book, Calendar or Card options at the bottom of the screen in iPhoto. There’s also an option to Order prints from the web which making getting prints of the selected photos a breeze.

Once you’ve selected the format for the book/calendar/card you can then place the photos as you want them throughout the book. You can retouch while you go and add more photos from other albums if you didn’t choose enough the first time. Once the item is ordered you can duplicate it and modify it slightly if you want to customise it for particular people. I’ve just used this service to order 3 books in fact, one for each of my parents and another for my Grandma. What a great service!

Ah, what a weekend! Snowboarding is a blast! I had been told that it’s harder to learn (initially) than skiing, but the big line up at the ski rental counter compared with the relatively short one for snowboards, was all the convincing I needed. I figured there would probably be quite a few similarities with surfing and this certainly proved to be true.

I took a beginners group lesson on Saturday morning which got me off to a good start with essentials like getting on/off the chair lift, skating and heelside stopping, plus a little bit of riding. But it was the one hour private lesson I took in the afternoon that really got me going. By Saturday afternoon I was linking up my turns and riding heelside and toeside pretty comfortably on a blue run.

Sunday morning was spent consolidating what I’d learned and discovering new runs with Kirsten, a comfortable skier who managed to drag me down a black run from the summit. A 2nd private lesson on Sunday afternoon with a great instructor named Evan proved to be the best way to spend an hour progressing my skills. He got me improving the speed of my turns and showed me how to do 360′s and a few simple tricks & jumps to get comfortable on the board.

Riding up the chairlift at one stage during the lesson the conversation turned to work and travel. Evan mentioned a partner in Guatemala and a desire to travel more. I mentioned the blog and the background topic of mobility and the lifestyle design process that Timothy Ferris talks about in his seminal book for the mobile warrier – Four Hour Work Week.

I also showed him the iPhone and some of it’s cool features, SMS messaging and it’s conversation viewer, the camera, iPod and mail. In mail I showed him an email invitation I’d received from a friend which had a Microsoft Office Word document attached. Prior to this I wasn’t sure how the iPhone would handle viewing of Office docs, but I was impressed by how easy it was to bring up the doc on the iPhone. Once you’ve clicked on the attachment to download it, the file is opened much like it is when you click on QuickLook in Apple Mail. While you don’t get the ability to edit word or Excel documents, I found that even when I had the option to do so with a PDA I rarely did, as it’s just too fiddly on a small device. This may pose issues for some business users but for most people I would say viewing capability is just fine.

At the end of the lesson I got Evan to snap a few pics of me trying out the board skills he’d been teaching me and I followed one maneuver up with the best stack I managed in the two days on the mountain. A head over heels, free fall tumble. Looks like I have a fair bit more practising to do up here and I have a feeling I’ll be back soon.

Okay, so I’m passing through the township of Yea (pronounced Yay) on the way from Melbourne to Mansfield to go skiing. Mansfield is, it’s a sleepy little town at the base of Mt. Buller in Victoria three or four hours Northeast of Melbourne and the snowfields up there have been getting some excellent snow fall this winter.

I’ve never been skiing or snowboarding before but as it happens, I have an old friend from school named Sam who works at Mt. Buller as a ski instructor. I found this out about a month ago, when I was in Melbourne last and happened to get his number off a mate. Time ran out for a catch up with Sam on that trip but I was determined to get together with him this time and also get out for a taste of the snow sports that I love watching.

After a bit of effort to organise it, the trip has taken shape and started tonight when Sam and Kristy picked me up at 6. We spent a couple hours at the fine food/wine festival and we’re now in the car about half way up to Mansfield.

Earlier on the way out of Melbourne there was a momentary panic when we emerged onto a part of the highway that was newly opened and we ended up taking a wrong turn. Sam began flicking through a dated old refidex and was just despairing about the uselessness of it when I decided to provide directions using the Google Maps application on my iPhone.

Ah, the trusty iPhone to the rescue again. This is about the fourth such situation I’ve been in during the past 24 hours. The first was when I hoped into a cab at Tullamarine airport and the Indian cabbie asked me how to get to Fitzroy. Why do Melbourne cabbies always ask me for directions?

Anyway, this brings me to the realisation that I’m coming to rely more and more frequently on the Google Maps application on my phone to provide directions and/or the details of current location in a city where my knowledge of the directions is sub par.

Back to this evening, I offered Sam my iPhone after putting in Mt. Buller VIC as the destination and letting the phone default to my current location as the starting point. The route was quickly plotted and I read out the distance and approximate time to the Mountain. It didn’t take long for Sam to start lusting after the device but I think what sealed the deal was when I commented on the tune playing on the radio and I gave my travelling companions a demo of Shazam.

Not far out of Yay, we pass through Bonydoon where an iconic Austrlian film (The Castle) was filmed. Turns out our little roadside motel is located about 5 minutes past Bonydoon. It’s a simple accommodation facility but the locals are friendly and the bar has a fire burning and is happy to serve it’s newest guess. Ah this is the mobile life!

I’m on the road today, heading from Canberra to Melbourne this afternoon after flying down yesterday to meet a couple of clients here. Inevitably being on the road I’m making a lot more calls on the mobile then I do when at home. So this morning I was attempting to check my data and voice usage to make sure I’m not going to exceed my allowance for the month. I jumped online via the Vodafone website, for the 2nd or 3rd time this week, trying to do this. The last time was a couple days ago after a short visit to the Vodafone store where I’d asked them to check my usage but was turned away after being told that they didn’t have access to anything other then the public website to do this. They would’ve checked my usage there for me but the website was down and it was the same story when I tried to check it myself an hour later.

So I was somewhat pleased just to be able to get on to the website today, though I wasn’t overly hopeful of getting access to useful figures after the number of attempts I’d made at this in the last couple weeks. When you login and go to your account, you can get to a Bill History screen that shows you the Longest calls which includes your data calls (i.e. browser sessions and downloads) and I eventually worked out how to see my calls and data usage via the Call details screen. However there did not appear to be anywhere to see total data usage for the month (I currently have a 100MB download limit) or to see details on how much of my Best Mate entitlements I’ve used. Best Mate is a Vodafone offering which gives you a number of optional rewards/freebies. I chose the 100 free text messages, which is great, however it would be nice to see how many I’ve sent without having to go through 41 pages of data and work it out myself.

From what I’ve heard Optus has similar issues with allowing you to see your usage and entitlements and I suspect Telstra users might have a similar story. A part of me wants to give the Telco’s the benefit of the doubt and say that they’ll get these issues sorted out and that this has to do with the fact that many of the iPhone plans are new, etc… however I suspect that mobile phones have been around long enough that it shouldn’t be like this anymore. In any case I think we’d all like to see these services improved and a little more transparency from the providers when it comes to our mobile accounts.

The other day Cheryl, a colleague from work, told me about this great little iPhone application called Shazam (pronounced Shazaam). You use it in those situations where you’re listening to a song and you want to know the title or the artist but can’t remember it or never knew it in the first place. We’ve all been there I imagine. Sometimes it’s when you’re listening to the radio, maybe it’s at the pub. Well, this is where Shazam steps in. You fire up the app and it listens to the song, records it and then sends the recorded snippet to an online database where it matches the segment against existing music files. If it finds a match it sends you back a message with the artist and track name.

Now I must admit the first time I tried it, while listening to the radio in my car it didn’t work. I think it was a relatively new Australian track though and so it was understandable that the track might not be in the database. The next time I tried it however was at a pub on a Friday evening. To my surprise despite the din I got a message back with the correct song title and artist. Pretty impressive.

One thing that’s not clear to me right now is what the cost of this service is. Looking at the Shazam website it appears that the service is based in the UK and there is a cost associated with each successful track identification. If this is the case I should see this on my next mobile bill, so I expect to have an update on that for you down the track. In the meantime you might want to check with your carrier or even with Shazam if you’re concerned about the cost aspect before installing and using the app.

If you are keen to install it however, just go to the App Store on iTunes and download it from there, preferrably when connected to the Internet by wifi as this will speed up the download for you considerably. The app itself is free to download and install. Enjoy!

Interestingly enough, as I was reviewing the last post on MobileMe I checked my email address (the one that comes with the MobileMe account – mjmcmahon@me.com) and found the following message:

MobileMe Update

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details. The MobileMe Team

I guess there’s been enough issues with the service that Apple have recognised there are some deficiences in it and are working towards some resolutions to the problem which is nice to see!

The 60 day extension applies to all MobileMe users who were still in their trial period at August 19, 2008 at 0:00 Pacific Daylight Time (West Coast USA time). If you’re currently in the situation where you you have purchased the service but haven’t used your activation key it’s probably worth checking the additional details by following the link above as it appears that you would still qualify for the extension (just don’t use the activation key yet).

I suspect that for most iPhone users, one of the first things you’ll want to do when you unpack your shiny new iPhone is synchronise your contacts, email and data, quite likely with multiple computers. Maybe like me you have a mac that you use at home or on the road and another computer (perhaps a PC) which you use in the office. Given the limitation that prevents users from synchronising with more then one iTunes library at any one time, we are faced with needing to find another solution to this problem. The first one you’re likely to come across is MobileMe. An Apple offering, formerly known as .Mac, which offers to solve this exact problem using a data in the cloud* approach. The web based storage space that comes with your account provides 20GB of space and 200GB of transfers per month, a respectable amount for just about any data junkie.

The concept works on each computer and device updating the data in the cloud via it’s own internet connection. This works well in theory, though given the high cost of data plans in Australia, I can’t see too many users opting to let their iPhone sync with MobileMe automatically every 15 minutes (the highest frequency setting on the iPhone).

The account comes with a 2 month free trial, enough time to get you used to the idea and see if it works for you. After the two months is up you pay AUS$119 per year or US$99 for the service. Pretty good value for most users, who require such a service, I would suspect.

I signed up for the account straight away, thinking it would be the perfect way to synchronise data (particularly calendar appointments) with my work PC and my MacBook Pro. Time management is always a big issue and without my calendar to record appointments and engagements, I’d be lost. The email account that comes with the MobileMe account was added to the other half a dozen email addresses I already have. This one will be my fully mobile account. The one that I will give to friends and family when I’m on the road and want them to be able to contact me with ease.

The MobileMe application, it turns out, is automatically installed with the latest version(s) of iTunes and configuring your settings is pretty easy. I started with my desktop PC and synchronised my calendar items and uploaded a few photo albums to test out the account. This seemed to go quite smoothly, though transferring large amounts of data (i.e. music albums) to the iDisk appeared to be too slow to be very useful.

Next up I sync’ed my Mac’s contacts and calendar with the account. After sync’ing had completed, I compared my calendar entries on the laptop with those on the MobileMe account to make sure that they had been copied correctly and I was surprised to find that all the times were out by 7 hours. At first I assumed that this was caused by a problem on the server, though I eventually realised that it was due to the location settings for the calendar. I would’ve thought that the software might pick up your locale settings from your computer, but no you have to manually go to the calendar in MobileMe (through your web browser: www.me.com) and choose settings, Preferences and Advanced, select your time zone and click Save. A fairly major gotcha if you don’t know about it.

Finally I set up my iPhone to sync with my MobileMe account. To do this you have to turn on Push data and then go into mail, via your MobileMe account and specifically select each of the data types that you want to sync with MobileMe. If you choose to turn on this synchronisation for a particular data type (i.e. contacts) all existing contact info on your phone is deleted, so it’s essential that you synchronise your data with your computer via iTunes first, otherwise you could lose critical info.

After setting up MobileMe Sync for Calendar, Contacts and Mail I found that my Calendar information was synchronised but the Contacts in All Contacts had been deleted and despite setting up automatic synchronisation and leaving it on overnight the situation remained unchanged the following day. Interestingly the contacts in my various address groups (Clients, Personal, Company, etc…) were still there but going into All Contacts showed me an empty list. I had a look on the Apple website for tutorials on the synchronisation process to see if perhaps I was just doing something wrong but didn’t have much luck with that either. So far now it’s back to syncing with iTunes for contact info.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has had similar problems but have worked through them, so if that’s the case please share your experience in a comment to this post.

* For non-techy readers “data in the cloud” just means data out in the Internet somewhere. In this case on a server which hosts your MobileMe account.

Okay, so my Mobile Life started in earnest today having purchased the domains for this site and really conceiving the idea for the blog. But as a product of recent events it started a month ago with the purchase of a USB Mobile Broadband modem from Vodafone.

I was heading to Melbourne for a week to do a personal development course and being a full time Web Programmer and Part time Web Designer (in my other life) I decided it was high time I kept in touch with the world… properly. I mean if my girlfriend (a full-time uni student can afford a mobile broadband modem modem) heck, so can I.

So I bustled up for a 2 year contract on a $39 plan which meant that I got the modem for free and a respectable 5Gb of data to use per month (not to mention $500 to use on a hotel somewhere). 5Gb is considerably more than I would ever use mind you, but I suppose it’s a case of better too much then not enough.

The purchase turned out to be a rather wonderful solution to a problem I never really knew I had. I.e. that of being able to connect to the web when I felt like it, and I do mean whenever I felt like it, without having to cough up $30 a day for the privilege of doing it at a hotel or paying over the odds at an internet cafe.

Since then I’ve gone and bought an iPhone. An inevitability really given that I was converted to using a MacBook Pro and giving up my DELL 17″ laptop (read brick) a few years ago, just prior to a trip to the US/Mexico. The last couple years has seen me trade most of my Windows programs for their Mac equivalents or replacements and I find myself preferring to use a Mac when the option is available, even though I still use a Windows Desktop PC in the office of my employer.

In terms of connectivity the iPhone is probably the best thing since sliced bread, particularly now with the 3G version. Having come from a Windows based PDA Smart Phone (the 02 Xda Atom) it’s also a massive improvement in terms of the user interface. Sure it doesn’t have the Word/Excel apps for viewing Office documents but to be honest, I rarely ever used those features anyway. It’s calendaring, mobile mail and the to do lists that are the bread and butter of the mobile warrior. Which is why I was quite surprised to find that there was no built in support for Apple Mail’s To Do lists.

Apple Mail 10.5.4, which came with the Leopard OS, included a versatile To Do list feature that allows you to create items from emails and includes alerts by email or message. However, the iPhone which can be synchronised with your Apple mail preferences doesn’t actually provide To Do list synchronisation. Strange!

Fortunately I found a comprehensive article on the gap left by Apple here on MacWorld and I ended up with a tidy little list manager. I’ve opted for Paze Inc’s My Lists application. A $2 purchase through the iTunes App Store. Overall I find it a good solution though I am somewhat surprised that it doesn’t give me the option to set reminder’s or alarms for To Do items. Something I do regularly in Outlook of Apple Mail when creating tasks. That said it does provide a consistent user interface with the iPhone and includes features like list exporting (by email), etc… which may be desirable to some users.

Okay, so taking a step back to the blog and the vision I have for it. Ultimately this will be a blog for the Mobile Warrior. While I’m not someone who actually has to travel a great deal for my work currently, I have been in the past and I’ve recently been going through a process which involves re-designing my business and in fact my life so that I can travel when I want and do what I want ala Timothy Ferris (Four Hour Work Week). http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

This is one of the reasons why mobility is important to me and the technoloy that I use to support My Mobile Life will obviously play an important role in allowing me to achieve the goal of a Mobile Life. While it isn’t necessarily essential that I be connected to the internet 24/7, I have found that it’s nice to have the option of connecting to the web, where I want and when I want, as I use the net constantly for banking, communication, business and pleasure. Whether it be looking up session times for a movie, finding directions to an address in a foreign city or chatting with my partner from the other side of the world.

The blog then is about the journey that I’m taking from desk jockey to mobile entrepenuer and about the technology that I choose to support me along the way. My gut feeling is that there a plenty of other people either going through or contemplating their own journey along a similar line and I would love for us to go take the journey together. Here’s to the Mobile Life.