The world doesn’t need another blogger raving about his iPhone, but I just can’t resist any longer. I finally got my iPhone a few weeks ago and it has lived up to the extremely high hopes that I had for it. I put my old Sony Walkman phone to bed permanently and I have to chuckle at the post I made back in 2006 calling it an iPod Nano Killer.

Here are some of the ways that the iPhone has been sucking up my time so far:

Website optimization
This blog along with my other sites are now optimized for the iPhone browser. If you are a web designer, you should definitely check out the article at A List Apart for a good introduction to designing websites for the iPhone.

Email
I switched all my email accounts to IMAP from POP. This works better with the iPhone. I don’t want to get into the details, but if you are going to use email on your phone you should do some research on IMAP.

Portfolio on my phone
As a recent convert to iPhoto, I am just starting to realize how great that program is. One thing I can do is create a photo album in iPhoto of all my design samples. Then I can sync that album to my phone and I instantly have my design portfolio on my phone. Pretty handy, or at least I think it will be.

Twitter
I finally signed up for twitter and you can now follow my tweets in the sidebar of this blog.

Album Art
Now that I have an iPod that displays album art, it was time to update the music in my library that lacked album covers. A big chunk of my music wasn’t purchased through iTunes, or is somewhat obscure, so I had a big chore of updating my songs. A big help was an Applescript that creates a playlist of all songs without album art.

Wish list
An iPhone password application that syncs with my MacBook Pro. I use Steel currently. Pastor looks promising.

Standing 372 feet underground in Jewel Cave the guide turned off the lights. This was a rare chance to experience actual complete darkness. As my eyes adjusted I was distracted by little blinks of light. A screen on a phone here. The blink of a camera light there. A child’s shoe with blinking lights sitting on my lap. Even deep beneath the earth’s surface it was impossible to escape technology.

I went camping this week with my family and it was a great chance to try and unplug from the world. That was the plan at least, and it wasn’t a real easy decision. I was tempted to bring my laptop along, even knowing how silly it would be to be typing away in a tent in the wilderness of South Dakota. The reality of our culture is that it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to really unplug from the technology of our world. Throughout the week I took note of situations where man and machine clashed with nature and the wild.

A herd of bison ran down the mountain side, crossed the road and crossed through the field next to our campsite. We stood in awe as the huge animals passed us by. They just kept coming, hundreds of them. The line of cars grew waiting for the road to clear. Amazingly, several cars cut to the front of the line and tried to wedge their way in between the herd. Safety issues aside, where in the world would these people be trying to go that they couldn’t wait a few minutes to enjoy these amazing animals?

At Mount Rushmore we watched a presentation at sunset. It was dark by the time it was over and the climax was when the lights came up and lit up the president’s faces. I looked out over the audience and saw hundreds of tiny video screens. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised to see how thoroughly our gadgets have been integrated into our everyday life. We all have a tiny computer and video screen connected to the end of our arms. 

A tradition of this family campout is a slideshow to view pictures of the past 40 years of camp. Before the slideshow I was thinking that it would be so much more convenient to just have a group on Flickr where we could archive all these pictures. If the campsite had wireless we could just do the whole thing on a laptop. As we sat down for the show, a slide projector lit up a white sheet taped to the side of a cabin. We all watched captivated by the beauty of the pictures. The aged photos were so warm and real. The sound of the slide changing and the movement of the images as the wind gently blew reminded us that this was a physical thing. This wasn’t just some online community that we pretend to connect to. This was our family, and these memories were as real as the people sitting next to us. It was a beautiful thing that could never be replicated by Flickr and a laptop.

If it was hard for me to leave my laptop at home, it is going to be even harder for my son who will have lived his whole life with a mouse in his hand and on demand television and video games. He sat on my lap playing his Gameboy as I enjoyed the camp fire. I said, “Rian, look at that fire, isn’t it beatiful!” His response was “Why? What does it look like?” not even lifting his eyes from his Mario game. It’s hard to blame him though. That evening in the tent I turned on the fan. It wasn’t that I was hot or needed fresh air. What I wanted was the white noise. I couldn’t fall asleep without it.

I picked up the $49 software bundle from MacHeist last week and finally got to play with some of the applications this weekend. (If you are on a Mac, don’t miss the MacHeist deal!) The gem of the bundle for me was a program called iStopMotion. In a nutshell, it allows you to easily make stop motion movies. As I was playing with it I thought it would be really handy to be able to control the program with the Apple remote. Another MacHeist goody (although it isn’t part of the bundle - you had to play the games to win it) was an application called Sofa Control. With Sofa Control you can create custom scripts that let you control any application with the Apple remote. It was very easy and I thought I would share the script with anybody who might find it handy. Here is what the script does:

iStopMotion Apple Remote Mapping:
* Plus: Play
* Left: Previous Frame
* Right: Next Frame
* Play: Capture Frame
* Play Hold: Save Movie

(Click here to download the iStopMotion Sofa Control script)

If you have ever tried to purchase a domain name, you have probably been frustrated by the seeming lack of available domain names. The domain name market seems like the perfect storm of limited supply and high demand. There is only one “YourBusinessName.com.” You can’t get a smaller supply than that. You almost have to have the “.com” if you want to be seen as an important online business. In other words, the demand is extremely high. It would seem that good domain names must be worth a fortune! The result of these economics is countless domain name “pirates” holding domain names hostage. Almost any domain name you look for will be registered by someone hoping to strike it rich by selling it to you.

How many times have you heard somebody say “I wish I would have registered more domain names five or ten years ago? I would be rich!” The problem is that tons of people had that same idea and they registered any domain with half a chance of getting used. An interesting side-effect of the apparent domain name shortage might be that the market is flooded with pirates! Many of the pirates have been holding their domain names for years without getting any nibbles. The ones that went a little overboard and registered hundreds of domains are wondering if it was really such a good idea. They will still hold onto the best names, but they are looking for opportunities to cash out on the mediocre ones. It seems that maybe the market is settling down and there may be a more realistic price structure on the horizon. If the birth of a bunch of online auctions is any indication, the bubble may be on the verge of bursting.

So what are you supposed to do right now if you are trying to get a good domain name? Good news: it is not as hard as it may seem to secure a good domain name. If you are frustrated by trying to find a domain name, here are some options that hopefully give you some ideas…

1. Change your company’s name.
If you are a relatively new business or are launching a new product or branch you can base your name on a domain that is available or cheap. This makes more sense than using a name that you can’t secure a domain name for. The names Google, Ebay, and Yahoo sounded pretty silly before they were household words. Don’t be afraid to invent a word that might sound silly at first.

2. Be creative.
If the .com you want is taken you me be able to get creative with the extension. For example if you had a name like “Music Pages” you could try to use Spain’s country code and register musicpag.es. Maybe that isn’t the best example, but you get the idea. For a full list of country extensions click here. A creative extension can add memorability to your domain name if you do it right.

3. Watch the auctions.
There are a number of domain name auction sites, (like Sedo). It is very educational to watch the domain auctions to get an idea of what domains are worth. You might even find a bargain.

4. Use more than one word in your name.
You may not be able to get Anderson.com, but you might be able to get AndersonArts.com. By combinging words you increase your chances of finding a .com domain. If you look at my domains (Found Photography, Adrian3, Holy Gears, etc) you can see that this has worked well for me.

5. Make an offer with a backup plan in place.
Depending on the size of your business you will have to evaluate how much the domain name you want is worth. If you contact the domain owner directly you can get an idea of what it will cost to buy the domain name. Everybody has there price, but I wouldn’t spend more than $5,000 on a domain unless you are really a big time player. Have a backup plan so that you can walk away if the cost is too high.

There are also some things to avoid when you are looking at .com domains. Here are some things that could cause problems if you aren’t careful:

1. Avoid acronyms unless people use it a bunch.
It makes sense to have a domain name of “NASA” if you are NASA, but if your company is C&S Concrete Cutting Company it doesn’t make sense to register csccco.com because nobody will possibly remember it.

2. Don’t confuse your domain name with the competition’s.
If you sell whistles and your competition has whistles.com it doesn’t make sense for you to use whistles.net as your primary web address. If you promote that domain name people will undoubtedly go to whistles.com by mistake and you are sending traffic to your competion. With that said, it is a great idea to register whistles.net and have it redirect to your domain.

3. Avoid dashes.
People don’t remember dashes. If you have a dash in your name then register it with and without dashes and have the dash address redirect to your non-dash domain.

4. Use redirects, not multiple sites.
It is a good idea to only use one domain name for your site because you don’t want the same info mirrored in more than one place. There are exceptions to this rule, but generally you want to have one domain name that is getting promoted. It avoids confusion and keeps your domain name’s equity in one place. Have the other domain names redirect to your primary address.

5. Watch out for unintended phrases.
For example, it would make sense for Experts Exchange to register expertsexchange.com. Well, without the space between the words the domain gets read as ExpertSexChange. There are a bunch of funny examples of companies who didn’t think there domain name all the way through.

I hope that these suggestions are helpful. Good luck in your domain search!

Perhaps it was a stretch to say that the Sony Ericsson 810i Walkman cell phone is an iPod Nano killer, but it is a heck of a gizmo. I have been iPod free for two days and am still pretty impressed with this phone/mp3 player. I have been sorting through my music library trying to widdle my collection down to a 4 gigabyte (* see note below) playlist so I can fill my phone with tunes. Since the phone doesn’t have built-in iTunes integration, organizing your music is just a bit complex. You don’t want to be sorting through 4gb of music by hand. Rather than drag folders of music onto the phone, it would be awesome to be able to simply make an iTunes Playlist that you can sync the to phone with a single click. Believe it or not that is possible, but you won’t find instructions from Apple or Sony. Here is the method I figured out…

How to Sync Your Sony 810i Cell Phone With iTunes
I am using the Sony Ericsson 810i phone for this example, but it will probably work with other phones too, maybe even non-Sony versions. This example is also Mac specific, so if you use a PC you are on your own. I imagine there is a similar way of doing this on a PC, I just can’t tell you how. I barely got it to work on a Mac, so count your blessings.

The first thing to do is to make a playlist of all the songs you want on your phone. I am not going to take the time to explain how to make a playlist, but if you want the script I provided to work without modification, you should name your playlist “Phone Playlist.” This can be a regular playlist or a smart playlist (* * see note below about smart playlists).

Now that you have the playlist containing the songs you want on your Sony 810 phone, we need to figure out a way to get iTunes to automatically copy all the files in that playlist from your music library to your phone. This is possible by using an AppleScript. Download the .zip file below and unzip it.

Sync Sony Phone to iTunes Playlist (* * * see note below about this script)

Put the file called “Sync Sony 810 Phone” in your iTunes Scripts folder. This is located in “user name > Library > iTunes.” If there isn’t a folder named “Scripts” there, create it. Now in iTunes you should see an “S” shaped icon in the top menu bar with an option that says “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” (Don’t select it until we plug the phone in.)

Now all that is left is to Sync the phone with iTunes. Plug the phone into your Mac using the usb cord that came with your phone. Two disk icons should appear on your desktop. One is called “PHONE” and the other is called “PHONE CARD.” If the second one is called anything other than “PHONE CARD” you will have to modify the script I provided (*see note below) or rename the phone card. Now in iTunes go to the script menu and select “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” This will activate the AppleScript and copy all the songs from your playlist into the “MP3” folder on your phone. It will also delete MP3 files from your phone that are not on the playlist. If this is a problem, you can modify the Applescript so that instead of the main MP3 folder the script puts the playlist files into a subfolder that you will only use for iTunes files. It will take a while to transfer 4gb of music onto your phone, so be patient. Monitor the MP3 folder to make sure the transfer is complete before disconnecting your phone. When the script has completed the action, the AppleScript icon will disappear from your dock.

There are a couple downsides to this method. First, it just dumps all the mp3s onto the memory card and doesn’t put them in folders or organize them in any way. The phone somehow automatically sorts them by artist, so it only makes a difference if you want to get a specific album or song off the phone. I should also mention that this won’t allow you to play songs that you purchase from iTunes on your Sony phone due to the DRM. It would also be nice to have a progress bar to check the progress. Obviously this is a hack so it is hard to be too picky. Good luck if you decide to tackle this. Enjoy your phone!

* Expanding the storage capacity from 128mb to 4gb
Expanding the memory capacity of the phone is a simple matter of switching out the included 128mb memory card with a 4gb Sony pro duo memory stick which can be purchased at a Circuit City or Best buy for $150. If you buy it online you can probably get the memory stick for closer to $100 and the cost of memory will undoubtedly go down from the time I write this post. The 4bg card is actually only going to give you 3.75gb of real space, but the same can probably be said about the iPod Nano. Can someone confirm that for me?

* * Note about smart playlists
I would encourage you to learn to use smart playlists if you don’t already know how. For example, I make a smart playlist that contains only songs that are in a “phone” grouping. I adjust my view options to show the “grouping” column in the main window. Now I can simply put any track I want on my phone by putting it in the “phone” grouping Since it is a “smart” playlist it will automatically be updated and will appear on my phone the next time I sync it up.

* * *Note about customizing the script I am providing
The script I provided is available for free with a suggested donation from Doug’s Scripts for iTunes. The script is called “Sync Playlist to Folder.” If my script doesn’t work for you, Doug provides a folder of files that explain the script and help you customize it for your own needs. I take no credit for the script and encourage you to donate to Doug if you find the script helpful.