For the longest time, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi has been the most widely used camera on Flickr. With a 10.1 MP Lens, an image sensor vibration cleaning system, 9-point auto focus, and a mid-range price point, it’s easy to see why the Canon camera has been so popular with the photography enthusiasts on Yahoo’s photo-sharing website.

But while Canon has dominated, there’s another camera that’s been zipping up the Flickr charts. Actually, camera phone would be more precise, because we’re talking about the iPhone.

It takes a lot of iPhones to overtake the Canon franchise.

Alternatively bluetooth can be used, but incurs the bluetooth bottleneck penalty like other mobile phone tethers. USB allows the full 3G. I’m also partial to leaving bluetooth and wi-fi off to conserve battery life.

So basically you plug in USB and immediately the network connection becomes active. Dead simple. No configuration and no dead phone battery.

The phone trail: BlackBerry Pearl 8100 -> iPhone -> BlackBerry 8800 -> iPhone 3G -> BlackBerry Bold 9000 -> iPhone 3G S

I really like the iPhone 3G. I lasted almost a full year, but something was missing. The push, immediate arrival of email, when one can blast messages out and get responses like an instant messaging client, is what I’ve always come back to on a BlackBerry.

This time there’s something different. It wasn’t as impressive with the BlackBerry email. And that must really suck for RIM because I know I’m not the only one who has grown out of their email awesomeness.

Gmail + push based IMAP and Exchange on the iPhone made BlackBerry email much less exciting when I switched back. If RIM can’t own the messaging space, they’re in for some trouble.

The other reason is that my team is doing some great things with the iPhone at Ingram Content. Customers can transfer their downloads through iTunes quickly and seamlessly. I’m using our own product on a daily basis and enjoying it (yes, I’m biased, but it’s still a good sign that a developer wants to eat the comapny’s dog food).

This post was written on the BlackBerry Bold 9000 during my morning train commute. I’ve been listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the iPhone 3G. The upgrade to 3G S is this afternoon. You can download using our Ingram Media Manager for free through your public library.

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It was April 6th, 2008 that I posted How to post images to Twitter and Flickr at the same time from an iPhone. It has been one of the more popular posts on this blog.

Flickr now makes it possible to post to Twitter directly via an emailed photo AND via Blog This. Their integration removes the need for TwitPic, and arguably SnapTweet too (though SnapTweet is faster than using Blog This and can be used for multiple images at once).

Images are posted to Twitter with Flickr’s new flic.kr URL shortener.

Here’s how to get set up:

1. Visit Flickr’s beta testing group’s page (actually, this step isn’t necessary, but if you run in to problems, their page is the best resource).
2. Associate your Twitter account with your Flickr account here. It leads you through the process and uses OAuth, a safer mechanism than providing your password.
3. You will be provided with a second special email address to send images to. If your main Flickr image email address is example42test@photos.flickr.com, your Flickr+Twitter email address will be example42test2twitter@photos.flickr.com.
4. Send away!

Photos sent to your primary Flickr image address will be processed as normal (not submitted to Twitter). Photos sent to your new 2twitter version will be processed and then immediately posted to Twitter. Your tweet will consist of [subject_line] [url], with the [url] being Flickr’s shortened flic.kr url.

Example.

After signing up for the Twitter integration you also get a new Blog This addition when viewing a single image. Clicking Blog This brings up the option to post an existing image directly to Twitter. You can post your own, as well as other Flickr users, images via this feature. Very powerful.

I’ve switched back to a BBerry instead of an iPhone. Again. This is the second time I’ve found I’m working less productively on the iPhone. This isn’t a switch because I enjoy working on a Blackberry. The Blackberry simply handles messaging more quickly and seamlessly, and that’s my impression even after using the iPhone 3.0 OS with copy/paste, etc, for the last couple months.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is the best phone on the market for consuming information. Browsing, the many apps and games, media consumption, appearance, performance, etc, make it the best platform. Ever (imho).

But it still sucks for Gmail and IM and these are the two most important features for a lot of us web jockeys. The native Gmail client on Blackberry enables Gmail searching of multiple accounts instantly. This is a feature worth switching platforms for. The web based Gmail on the iPhone enables such search, but it is web based and takes a lot longer to navigate, even with 3G, and can’t run in the background and perform alerts for new messages.

Background processes enable IM and immediate text communication on Blackberry. I’d gotten by on the iPhone with AIM’s SMS features, which is a nice way to work IM on any phone, but it didn’t cover Jabber and other instant messaging services.

I keep the iPhone in my bag, and continue using it on wi-fi for development and testing. And I can’t wait to get to WWDC and attend the iPhone dev workshops. When the 3.0 OS is out of beta we’ll get to see how these services affect a transition for me, and many others, from Blackberry to the iPhone. Again.

“On March 17, Apple presented the blueprint for iPhone OS 3.0, the next version of the world’s most advanced mobile platform. In addition to previewing its innovative features, Apple gave members of the iPhone Developer Program immediate access to the iPhone OS 3.0 software beta and an updated Software Development Kit (SDK) with over 1,000 completely new APIs.”

The announcement page is here (C&P’d, too): http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

I was impressed to click a video headline and have QuickTime immediately launch and stream the video. Very clean implementation.

Found a funny little bug with Apple’s dashboard weather widget this week. It comes installed and running by default when you set up a new OS X installation or buy a new Mac. I just got a new MacBook Pro a month ago and have been using the weather widget religiously. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball described, it’s one of the favorite widgets (and he has a good old how-to on how to make it better).

But rather than validating by zip code, the weather widget validates by city name only. It grabs the first city name, alphabetically, and plugs that in as your local weather default.

There are five cities in the USA with the name Philadelphia. In alphabetical order, they are Philadelphia MO (Missouri), Philadelphia MS (Mississippi), Philadelphia NY (New York), Philadelphia PA (Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia TN (Tennessee).

Apple’s widget grabs Philadelphia, MO for Philadelphia, PA (and MS, NY, TN). Until this week the weather patterns for MO vs. PA were the same for precipitation and within a few degrees on temperature. It took a month before the cities were different enough to notice the discrepancy.

For all you’z Philadelphians buying Macs, remember to plug in your 191xx zip codes :) To see this in action if you’re in another city, add a weather widget to the dashboard and search for “Philadelphia”. The same occurs This does not occur on an iPhone’s weather app.

Population data on the Philadelphias:

• Philadelphia, MO: 643
• Philadelphia, MS: 22,606
• Philadelphia, NY: 2,349
• Philadelphia, PA: 1,517,550
• Philadelphia, TN: 4,407

Attending an Apple Tech Talk at the Millennium Hotel New York was a good use of time today. The evangelism team, despite evangelizing, is highly competent and I came away satisfied with decent knowledge consumption.

The event had a massively different feel than John Resig described last year.

There was a lot of JavaScript hate by attendees (“blah blah… GWT is the only thing we trust… blah blah JavaScript is a stupid language…”).

This year it was all about at least 50% about the web. Apple has exposed touch events, multi-touch events, gestures, location based services, and rotation to javascript both for polling and callbacks. Some of the credit for the newfound excitement around Safari and iPhone web apps should probably be shared with WebKit’s HTML5 (file caching and SQLite)… All of which are supported in the iPhone 2.2 OS release.

Over the next few days I’ll have more details on specific highlights. For now, here are my condensed raw notes.

iPhone Safari browser, starting with the basic stuff:

• If not specified, assumes a web page width of 980 pixels and scales to 360
• To override, add <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=720″ /> (where you would replace 720 with your pages width)
• Or, if you’ve optimized for the full screen of the iPhone, add <meta name=”viewport” content=”device-width” />
• Additionally, you can specify a width, height, initial-scale, minimum-scale, maximum-scale, and user-scalable. If width, height, or initial scale are set, Safari will auto-calculate the others (i.e. if width is set, height and initial-scale will be handled for you). user-scalable means the user can not scale via zoom-in or zoom-out.
• Optimize for cellular networks (duh!). Latency is often a bigger factor than bandwidth on Edge and 3G (duh!). Beat this by using fewer, slightly larger resources in a page load (i.e. use a single image and use CSS to display portions of it instead of loading multiple separate images for buttons, etc).
• A nice tool for simulating throttled bandwidth is ipfw (duh, but I’ll this to my blog for others)… Do the following to enable throttling (from terminal.app): 1) sudo su 2) ipfw add pipe 1 src-port http 3) ipfw pipe 1 config delay 200 bw 700kbit/s. Do the following to kill the throttling afterwards: 1) ipfw flush.
• Give the latest rev of Dashcode a try to get a feel for how various transforms, etc, work. See the source in the supplied samples.

Home screen icons, total beginner stuff, but necessary (mostly so I remember the filenames):

• For a custom, iPhone specific, icon from your site (a la favicon), place apple-touch-icon.png at the docroot (http://www.apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png).
• For a custom icon, without the shiny polish (not recommended unless you’ve made it shiny already), use apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png.

How to make a web app feel like a real app (no nav bar, custom status bar, control of rotation, rotation notification, etc).

• To hide the Safari UI: <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes” />
• To change the status bar (the top space with signal and battery indicators): <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style” content=”grey” /> (replace “grey” with “black” or “black translucent”)
• When the Safari UI is hidden you are locked to Portrait mode (maybe a good thing!)
• You can get notifications for rotation and can rotate your elements via callbacks with the following:

<body onorientationchange=”updateOrientation();”> …

function updateOrientation(degrees) {

case 0:

case -90:

case 90:

}

Touch and gestures via JavaScript:

• Use <div ontouchstart=”trackTouches(event)”… and you’ll need three arrays for your touch points: var allTouches = event.touches; var targetTouches = event.targetTouches; var changedTouches = event.changedTouches;
• When a touch occurs, you’ll receive a touchstart notification.
• When a touch moves, you receive a touchchange notification.
• When a finger is lifted, you’ll receive a touchend or touchcancel (if the finger was moved off the screen).
• For gestures (pinching and rotating), the same notifications will be sent, but as gesturestart, gesturechange, and gestureend (or gesturecancel).
• For pinch gestures, you have scale information. A scale less than 1.0 means zooming out (fingers moving closer together). A scale greater than 1.0 means zooming in (fingers spreading apart).
• For rotation gestures, notifications are sent in degrees. Negative numbers indicate counterclockwise and positive numbers are clockwise.
• Transforms specific to the iPhone are provided, such as calling “-wekit-transform: rotate(-20deg);” for an object you wish to rotate. Make this type of call from a touch or gesture callback and you have dragability from within a web app. Additional parameters can be used during rotation, such as “-webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -webkit-transform-origin: top left;” to make the rotation of the object hinge on the top left (default is the center).
• An example of rotating, scaling, and moving an object: “document.getElementById(‘myFlower’).style.webkitTransform = ‘rotate(360deg) scale(0.5) translate(600px, 50px)’;
• Transforms are usually given a period of time to perform the transform (i.e. -webkit-transition-duration: 2s;). During that time the transform can be modified so as to transform in a linear, ease, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, or a cubic-bezier form.

Database support for SQLite and file caching (client side, duh):

• HTML5′s SQLite spec is supported by iPhone’s Safari
• The sample code in the presentation creates a 2.5 megabyte database. Not worth mentioning otherwise, but I was stoked with the thought of creating reasonably large DBs locally… Maybe we’ll see some radically enhanced Gmail and Google Reader web apps. Airplane mode will be a little nicer.
• filecache ability is in iPhone 2.2. This was too new and no slides were available… Still, another airplane friendly feature and would be great for flickr or other media intensive sites.

And that’s just on web apps. My notes on native apps are more sparse, partly because it was the end of the day and partly because it’s old news.

A nice finish for the day was a presentation on submitting one’s application to Apple. I’ll save those notes for later this week – too much commentary I want to include to just put it up raw ;)

Food and refreshments during the Tech Talk were top notch. They know how to take care of the folks that build their platform.

My dev team uses JIRA for bug tracking. It’s a flexible project management and defect tracking system. As with almost any bug tracking system out there (Bugzilla, Trac, etc), web based defect tracking from a mobile handset is not very user-friendly.

Enter JIRA Mate (formerly JIRA Buddy), written by Shaun Ervine, an application for iPhone and iPod Touch specifically for interfacing with your JIRA database. I was surprised by this application being available before a Bugzilla rev, let alone even being available at all. I’m not complaining. Bugzilla fans should get a move on for their own app.

JIRA Mate simply uses your saved filters allowing you to access your JIRA issues straight from your iPhone.

Since JIRA Mate is helping out your business I guess you could write it off as a tax deduction :)

The app is $8.99 and allows you to pull down issues organized in filters you’ve created in the standard web app, sorted by date (your filter sort setting is not utilized). It does not have issue creation or editing capabilities, but does pull comments and allow you to comment in kind. It’s perfect for keeping your finger on the pulse of your bug database and staying in communication via comments.

During the week I used the phone as my primary personal cell phone. Usually I carry an iPhone for work and a Nokia N82 for photography and personal calls. Having the iPhone and G1 on me for a week made for some great comparisons and a little benchmarking.

I do not recommend this phone. You should probably not buy this phone. BlackBerry and the iPhone are both superior in almost every aspect.

The Good

1. Great (for plastic) screen. Bright, smooth movement, and fairly durable. The Flashlight application is bright.
2. Terrific email client (see remarks about keypad below)
3. Market (aka Android App Store) describes exactly what systems (GPS, PIM, 3G, etc) an application requires before one installs it
4. Excellent USB implementation – The G1 reports as a removable drive when plugged in to a computer, and charges from the USB
5. 3G beats the heck out of EDGE – It’s about 75% of the speed of AT&T’s 3G here in Philadelphia, but it’s 4x faster than EDGE
6. Amazon MP3 store integration
7. 3 megapixel camera has better resolution than the iPhone or current BlackBerry units, but is still antiquated enough to generate smile fatigue
8. Hardware keypad is useful for customers who aren’t willing to type more quickly on a virtual keypad
9. “Chin” section reminds us of the 1995 Motorola phones – Great way to reminisce
10. Google logo on the back

Don’t mistake my statements as a knock on Android. Android is great. I love it. My statements in this post are not directed at Android. The G1 is an unfortunate first hardware release of that OS.

There are certain laws mobile manufacturers must follow: You may not offer a media device without a standard headset jack. You may not offer navigation with a week GPS. You may not double the actual required width soley to add a physical qwerty foldout keypad. Above all else, you may not offer a lifestyle device without style.

Now, I’ve said all this based on reading the spec, viewing the pictures, and palming it for 10 minutes. I’ve owned and reviewed many HTC made devices and this a completely obvious failure to me. Perhaps that’s not fair without real-world use though?

So I’m going to endure some pain and suffering so you don’t have to (not that you would buy a G1 – you wouldn’t). I’m going to replace my N82 for the rest of this week with a device I know has no hope. I’m going to use it side-by-side with my iPhone 3G. Wish me luck.

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For WordPress bloggers with iPhones, the iPhone WordPress application is close to the best gift since receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1983. The application is solid, allows tags and categories, posts pictures direct from the phone, etc. Awesome!

But what if you want to post pics from your Flickr stream? What if you’re shooting with another camera and want to post high quality photos not taken with the iPhone crackerjack cam? Here’s the instructions, including detailed pictures, on how I get photos from Flickr in to an iPhone WordPress blog post:

note: you can ignore 1/2 of the steps if you already know how to use WordPress and Exposure on your iPhone.

1. Get the WordPress app (Utilities section of the App Store).

2. Get the Exposure app (Social Networking section of the App Store).

3. Open Exposure and locate the desired picture or pictures in your photostream, as seen below.

4. Click the small right-pointing arrow, you will now see the image below.

5. Click the small arrow in the top right corner to see your Share Photo options.

6. Open in Safari, and Safari will open, as seen below.

7. To save the image, press and hold your fingertip on the image. Selecting Save Image will save the image to your Camera Roll on the iPhone. You now have your image.

8. Open WordPress and create a new blog post.

9. Select the Photos tab and click the “+” button at the bottom right.

10. Choose to Add Photo from Library.

11. Click the Save button in the top right – When you post, your photo will be appended at the end of your post (below image was pulled from Exposure/Flickr/Camera Roll exactly as described above).

It’s a great new world when we can blog and participate, without limitation, from a pocketable handset.

The pic is a snap of my N82 here at a diner over lunch.

On June 28th, 2007 I waited in line for the iPhone (and spent 3 days talking to AT&T to get it activated). The experience was a good one… The stench of rotten trash from a nearby McDonalds dumpster and seeing a full-grown man get beaten by his girlfriend and her purse for spending the $500 are favorite memories.

Normally I’d be all over the line parties (seriously)… This year I slept in and am happy to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Maybe next year.

I picked up the Nokia N82 yesterday from Import GSM, a great hybrid brick-and-mortage / online store. Think Dynamism for phones. It was my first visit, right at closing, and despite trying to get stuff out the door for the evening shipment the guys helped out with descriptions and subtle nuances between the N95 and N82 (special thanks to Eric – good guy).

Anyway, so why the heck would someone get a Nokia N82 when the iPhone 3G is getting released tomorrow? There are five reasons, one for each megapixel, and a lot of backup arguments. The iPhone 3G doesn’t hold a candle to the image sensor quality, flash, or lens quality.

This wasn’t meant to be an N82 vs. iPhone 3G post. They’re both the best mobile equipment one can get (imo).

The N82 is going to be my net enabled camera and broadcast machine. No more notebook + Canon SD-1000 combo!

The iPhone 3G is for everything else. I had the iPhone (1.0 / original / whatever). iPhones are the best for usability and communication. I gave it to my wife and she’s gone from check-email-and-browse-at-home to check-email-send-texts-and-monitor-weather-while-away. The wife-o-meter was pegged.

The Nokia’s OS, after 30 hours of tweaking, is finally usable for me. Very steep appreciation curve. I would only recommend such a phone to a power user needing the best tool for quality images… I can’t wait to start posting and qik’ing them.

• sol on Qik
• solyoung on Viddler
• sol on Twitter

Most smartphones slated for release over the next 12-months include a GPS receiver, built in. After that, it will be a marked failure to not include a GPS in a phone. The functionality that comes with GPS is outstanding – mapping, directions, location based experiences, etc. We’re about to enter an age of advancement in technological capabilities that we’re just beginning to imagine.

Consumers are moving to smartphones. The hottest smartphones (iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Bold 9000, most of Nokia’s Symbian and HTC’s Windows Mobile offerings) all include GPS and an exposed API for developing applications utilizing their hardware. Anything people can conceive of for location based mashups will be coming (more on these mashups in later posts)…

Here’s a first application…

BlackBerry is a leader in mobile phone GPS. Recently a few services that announce the location of one’s phone emerged. Initially these were billed as a sort of low-jack for one’s phone, a security service for the insecure (or those who want to spy on their kids, etc).

I decided to try a few of these. Most felt slimy, like, “you always know where your phone is, and you could also know where your wife is!” … I don’t know about you, but my phone is loyal and doesn’t run off with strangers… And I trust my wife far more than a phone.

My goal with trying these services was to mash Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and other social networking services with my location. Such a mashup will allow me to share my real-time location with all friends. I came across BlackberryTracker.com. Much like the others, the idea is to provide you with the location of your phone. However, they have something the other’s don’t… Facebook and Google Earth integration (as well as a drop-dead-simple semi-RESTful API).

Friends can pinpoint me down to the meter on my Facebook profile, updated every 30 seconds. To be honest, it feels strange to openly publish this data. Security, and lack thereof, has us believing we shouldn’t share such information. But this fear is caused by the exception and not the rule. And in reality, my location in public isn’t private. Additionally, there are laws and common courtesies we live by, and I trust that people are inherently good.

Soon these services will be in the mainstream. Everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Let me emphasize that… Soon everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Not publishing your location will be like not having a mobile phone.