My iPhone experience

First off, I loved my PalmOS Treo 650 - it very capably contained my life. It held my calendar, my contacts, and my to-do list for many years. The base system filled most of my needs, but of course I couldn't leave well enough alone. I added more applications. They made it unstable, but I felt I couldn't live without their added functionality.

Then it died back in June. It refused to power on and I didn't have cell phone insurance on it - even if I did, it was obsolete. What should I do? I toyed with the idea of getting a Sprint Centro, but after playing with one at Best Buy, the keyboard was just unusable to me. So then it was a choice between the latest Treo 755p or something new. I tried out a Blackberry and absolutely hated it. I decided to get the iPhone mainly because the PalmOS platform is a technological dead end.

What I miss:

• DateBk5 calendar - the PalmOS third-party calendar/to-do list program added so much to my calendar. The iPhone doesn't even have a to-do list!!
• ChatterEmail - an amazing third-party mail application that allowed me to read (and FLAG!) my mail messages in all my different mail accounts.
  

What I love about the iPhone:

• The web browser is amazing.

What I hate about the iPhone:

• Battery life is atrocious
• Apps are buggy
• Poor Outlook/Exchange integration -- NO TASKS??
  
• Poor email handling - how do I flag a message for later action?
  

So far I'm just syncing with Outlook and downloading my gmail. I haven't gotten it to talk to our Exchange server yet. It just says "failed" with absolutely no reason why. I'll have to check the logs on Monday, I just don't feel like doing that from home - too many other things to do on a weekend.

All in all, it's a neat device, fun to use, and can probably satisfy most people that aren't coming over from an environment they've used and enhanced for 5+ years.

Me? I'm hoping to find a lot of third-party apps to give me back the functionality I've lost.

Can anyone recommend a task list program that can handle outlines?

More web design

I've been spending quite a lot of time on my organization's web presence, it's definitely been interesting. We have 4+ different sites, using 4 different custom-designed technologies. I've got one that was built in Dreamweaver, one in .ASP, one in PHP, and a couple of static sites I haven't had enough time to investigate yet. Not one is a true CMS, and all have plenty of "issues", mainly on the back-end.

So the plan is to standardize and consolidate. After a lot of investigation, I narrowed the possibilities down to Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3. Of these, Typo3 is possibly the most powerful, but my previous experience with it showed me that the user community just wasn't as willing to help as with other systems. Plus, the back-end interface is a bit more complex than I would like it to be for my target content-producing audience. So it was down to Drupal and Joomla. I finally chose Drupal as our CMS technology because of the power and helpfulness of the user community, its powerful customizability, and the wealth of existing modules.

Since I didn't want to start a 6-12 month "web redesign" by committee process (my organization is heavily into the democratic process), I chose to commission someone to build a theme to mirror our existing theme. This way there wouldn't be quite as much time spent on details already decided long ago, and most future effort would go to content.

It took about a month to make the decision to use Drupal, including test installations and web research. It took only three more weeks to build a proof-of-concept site mirroring our existing organization's website design.

Not bad, I think! Drupal rocks! Oh, and so does browsershots.org!

Wireframing a website with text.

Over the last few weeks I've learned just how much I didn't know about web design and management, but I was also pleasantly surprised by just how much I do know. One of the things I learned is that it's easy to picture a site design in your head, but a little harder to actually explain it to someone without a wireframe. Enter Balsamiq Mockups, a tool that lets you have that "I designed it on a paper napkin" look even though you'd never touch a pencil to save your life because you're a total computer geek...

I also absolutely hate having to make up filler text for my test sites during the design. I remembered seeing the Lorem Impsum random text whenever someone wants to show off a site design or even a font, so a quick Google search turned up the Lorem Ipsum generator. Way faster than making up something funny for a wireframe.

ScribeFire

I recently read about a few tools that might make blogging just a bit easier, hence more likely to actually get done. For instance, I installed the ScribeFire Firefox extension. Pretty darn cool so far! Blog while you surf!

Mild Mannered, Not for Profit

So the old gig with the high-tech semiconductor intellectual property company is over. It was interesting for a while, but really started going downhill post-IPO when the goals changed from "let's do the best possible job we can and really make an impact!" to "OMG, we have to make the numbers this quarter!! Ship it!!".

My new gig is with a Not-for-Profit outfit trying to make the world a safer place. Conflict Prevention & Global Security are the new goals for me. It'll be both fun and fulfilling to start off with a small organization and lead them into the 21st century (technology-wise).

Wish me luck!