Apple released the latest version of its mobile computing operating system – iOS 5 – which I proceeded to install on my aging iPhone 3GS.  It was a challenging update due to the heavy demand on Apple’s servers.  If you have yet to perform the upgrade, prepare to dedicate a few hours to this task. I would also say that some of my delays were to installing on an iPhone 3GS – a smartphone that now seems a bit underpowered.  It’s possible that it’s too underpowered for iOS5.  Certainly, extended use of iOS 5 powered iPhone 3GS would drive me crazy.  Luckily I only have another day of this.  Come on little iPhone 4S, travel safe.

Regardless, I’ve still had ample time to play with some of the new features of iOS 5 and here’s a collection of thoughts.  Starting with two of the areas I was most excited about – Notifications Center and iTunes syncing over wi-fi.

Notifications Center

• To give the notifications center a proper trial, I turned on every notification for every app that used the feature.  Both ways of interfacing with the notifications center worked great – on the lock screen and the pull down interface are great additions.  It’s nice to be able to surface granular details such as who is commenting on your Instagram photos without diving into the app itself
• The best comment on can give on all the notifications I have turned on is that compiling them into the notifications center makes them less intrusive.  Banners seem to be the way to go.  I think I’ll be shutting off the bubbles and the app icon indicators.  There’s also way too much noise coming from my phone right now, so some sound alerts probably need to go as well.
• This is a useful notifications setup guide: http://lifehacker.com/5846375/how-to-configure-notification-center-in-ios-5

iTunes syncing over wi-fi

• Sounds great in theory, but I haven’t had it successfully sync this way yet.  I did my first big sync while my phone was tethered.  Then I added a new album into my iTunes Library¹ and tried to sync.  Didn’t happen.  One song made it.  And that took about 20 minutes. 
• Wi-fi syncing really impacted overall performance.  It’s great that you can do other things on the phone while syncing (supposedly).  So while the sync indicator was spinning, I decided to update my Facebook app and try to open up the Twitter app.  I thought my phone might start melting.  Twitter app never managed to open.   Though my FB app has been updated.
• It says that your phone has to be connected to a  power source to do this.  But I don’t think there’s a sensor detecting this. 

Other random thoughts

• I knew there was a camera shortcut being added to the lock screen. That’s good news. I was worried that this feature addition was going to come in lieu of the music playback shortcuts on the lock screen. It did not. That’s even better news.
• Did I mention how much I’m looking forward to a newer, faster iPhone?

1. It was “All Things Must Pass” by George Harrison

(Note: I rarely cross post the same piece to multiple blogs.  But in a tribute to Steve Jobs, I’m going to do so with this post.  Steve liked to say that he worked where technology met the liberal arts. His work crossed a lot of boundaries.  In that spirit, I’m going to share this on the many blogs I contribute to where the subject cross various boundaries.) 

I have always found it interesting to assess how I react to the passing of people whom I never got a chance to meet.  But despite that, they’re still people that have played a significant role in my life by inspiring me, adding joy, and impacting my life in so many positive ways.  It always takes me a while to collect my thoughts and find that proper clarity.  Clarity that helps me determine the proper perspective and context of the significance of the person the world has just lost.  As clarity emerged for me late last night, too late for me to start writing anything, I realized that the last time I felt this deep sense of loss (for someone who I had never met) was when Jerry Garcia died. 

Like Jerry Garcia, Steve Jobs infused a lot of joy into my life. Jerry did it with the sounds of his guitar, the songs he played, and the festive parties¹ we both participated in.  Steve jobs impacted my life with technology.  Life changing technology.  As Steve would put it, it was (and is) technology infused with the  liberal arts.

I did not grow up an Apple user.  I do not have a story that involves my first Apple II. In fact, I learned computing on TRS-80s, Commodore 64s, and IBM PCs.  On those systems, I learned how to write programs in BASIC, how to operate MS-DOS, and how to launch computer games via the DOS prompt. 

Back in the 80s, my mother was involved with desktop publishing and, as you might expect, involved with evaluating Apple products and desktop publishing software.  My first exposure to Apple and the genius of Steve Jobs was the Macintosh she brought home to evaluate  The Macintosh – a personal computer with a graphical user interface that made a fun, somehow appealing deep tone announcing its presence whenever you turned it on.  Mom may have brought that home to evaluate for work, but I was the one really evaluating it.² This only child found an instant playmate.  MacPaint.  Solitaire.  Just moving the mouse around and seeing the cursor move with you was a thrill.  It felt like…the future.

You would think that such an experience would create an Apple fanboy for life.  But it didn’t happen that way.  The main computer in the house remained an IBM PC.  That’s what got me through high school papers and college applications.  Attending the University of Vermont meant having a PC as well.  And so it went for me.  Developing early computing proficiencies that do this day have me primarily working primarily on a windows machine.  Nevertheless, the windows machines were life changing and would not be the same without Steve’s innovations with the graphical user interface.  I use computers every day.  Personally and professionally.  I can manipulate, absorb, and produce information in countless ways.  Ways I never would have imagined as a 13 year old boy.  If Steve doesn’t evolve personal computing with the GUI, I’m probably not writing this blog post right now. Or working in the job I have right now.  Or living in the house I am right now. Thank you, Steve

No, Steve Jobs didn’t start impacting my life with his own life altering inventions until the iPod came out. That was the first Apple product I ever owned. When I got one, my music collection was already spinning out control.  Having to select 10 CDs to take with me in the car or to work was not only hard to do due to having to think ahead about what I might want to listen to 4 hours from now, but also time consuming.  The iPod changed everything.  I could put the bulk of my music and have it at my fingertips for any moment. And it was the size of my wallet.  So small that it was easy to misplace. I once wrote that if my house was on fire, I would first make sure my family was safe then see if I could run back inside and grab the iPod. It was a device that infused my life with a constant soundtrack.  Thank you, Steve.

And Apple and I went from there.  The iPod was a gateway drug device. The iPhone. I can’t even tell you how much the iPhone has changed my life and so many others.  All this information from every corner of the globe.  In my pocket.  Thank you, Steve.

The evolutionary device of the iPhone, the iPad has once again shown me the future.  All I need to do is watch my kids with an iPad.  It’s just like when my Mom brought that Macintosh home.  I  have given my kids zero instruction with an iPad. They are three and five years old and they can both find a movie on Netflix, browse maps, play Angry Birds, and launch apps to help them learn spelling, math, and music.  It is the future.  My kids thank you, Steve.

They also thank you for Pixar. And the most impressive family friendly animated films the world has ever seen. 

The inventions of Steve Jobs continue to infuse the life of this family.  A family slowly morphing into an Apple household.  My wife now has a Macbook Air.  A machine so impressive that I myself have thought of ditching the windows laptop and purchasing one. 

It is perfectly natural, that I learned about Steve Jobs on his invention.  An iPhone.  I then used the same device to connect with friends on Twitter and Facebook.  And then used an iPad to read news stories and coverage of his death. His legacy and impact will be felt for generations to come.  It is hard to sound full of hyperbole with Steve Jobs.  He was the Einstein and Henry Ford of our times. He will be missed and there will never be another.

1. aka Grateful Dead concerts
2. Looking back, maybe that was Mom’s plan all along.  To see how a 13 year old boy can grasp the Mac with zero instruction and guidance.

I’ve been playing with it for about a half hour now.  And it’s…OK.  Scoble is loving it because seemingly because of tech early adopters (in the same way that FriendFeed was).  But diverse subject matter is exactly what Google+ is missing right now and only when the masses have arrived can full judgment on Google+ be made. 

I did enjoy the process of creating circles of friends. The interface reminded me of a seating plan for a dinner reception.  Work friends here…family over there…people I went to college with in this circle.  The Hangout video chat feature contains much potential.  I’m still looking for a social service that will cause group video chatting to tip.  The Hangout has that promise.

Of course the big question is will people abandon Facebook for Google+? At this very early point, my initial gut reaction is no way.  Facebook has embedded social networking within our culture, but not to the point that the majority of people are willing to switch to something new.  Changing your social networking behavior is not as simple as simple as dropping Coke for Pepsi.  For most, switching from Facebook to Google+ will mean convincing a dozen or so people to switch with you.

When I checked with Tumblr, I didn’t find a migration utility anywhere within the service.  I even contacted Tumblr support to inquire and they indicated that they do no provide any type of service, script, or utility to accomplish such a task. So it was into Google searches to find what I was looking for. I found some information on a php script to perform a WordPress to Tumblr migration.  I tried that a half dozen times or so, but each time it failed.  Most likely due to the amount of content I was trying to migrate from WordPress into Tumblr.

In the end, I did come up with a recipe to move my content, but it involved the utilization of Google’s Blogger service.  Here’s are the steps I took to move the content of my self hosted WordPress site into a Tumblr hosted site.

1. Sign up for a new blog at blogger.com.  You’re going to need this blog for about an hour.  And when you’re done, you can delete the blog.  You’re just using this temporary blog as a content holding intermediary between WordPress and Tumblr.
2. Follow the instructions on this page to export content from WordPress and then import it into Blogger.
3. Assuming that you’ve already signed up at Tumblr, you can use this utility to import the content from Blogger into Tumblr
4. Check your new Tumblr site and if everything looks good, you can delete that temporary Blogger site

Down for everyone or just me?

The next time one of your clients calls you frantically saying his site is down, first use this tool to find out.  Then email him the link and tell him to use it to check before contacting you. 

Doodle event scheduler

Calendaring systems keep trying to find ways to make it easier to schedule meetings.  But none have hit a home run on that feature yet.  And we all know that using email to try to find the best time to meet is absolute nightmare.  Doodle is still the easiest way to poll people on available meeting times.  No account sign up required.  Love tools that allow me to make use of them without having to register an account.

Five Second Test

This is the one that is more involved.  But we all know we should be doing more usability and focus group testing.  But we all know that is ultra time consuming.  Five Second Test facilitates that process of getting feedback on your comps. 

First off, I don’t agree that the Web is dead.  Is it evolving?  Of course it is.  Now a young adult in its eighteenth year, the Web is no longer a child.  I remember what I was like 18.  Those were the college years.  And the experimenting and fun was just beginning.  And that’s definitely fodder for an entirely different blog post.  Maybe.  If I get the guts to actually put those tales online.

So why isn’t the Web dead?  Here’s why…

Walled gardens don’t last

I still can’t get past the notion that Facebook feels like AOL did in the mid-to-late 90s.  In fact, a few years ago Facebook felt even more like that.  But we’ve seen Facebook’s walls continue to crumble and inherit the openness of the Web.  Facebook continues to intelligently transform itself from a social network into a platform. 

HTML5

The rise of HTML5 will make web experiences increasingly robust with a barrier to entry that’s lower to developers than that of Apple or anyone else’s app store.  Even the robust API of Facebook (one of the more evolved Web 2.0 platforms we have) is still a relative pain to make use of.

One last thought…

All that said, the most interesting thing to think about with user experiences migrating off the open Web and into apps where Google can’t spider and index is the need for social interactions to facilitate discovery. 

Holly and I started Shiny New Toy in early 2008.  At the time, we had both moved on from working together at NASA.  Holly found a great opportunity working with Hot Studio in downtown San Francisco.  I left NASA when Stanford University came calling.  And I was preparing for life with a second child.  There were a number of reasons we created Shiny New Toy.  First (and most importantly), Holly and I missed working on things together.  Our skills, cultural sensitivities, and work habits complement each other perfectly.  Second, we are often approached with opportunities outside of our day jobs.  Shiny New Toy became a mechanism by which would could easily assess those opportunities and chose the ones that we wanted work on.  Third, we’re always coming up with new (often silly) ideas that we quickly wanted to execute.  Shiny New Toy could be a banner for various skunkworks that we wanted to crank out.

We’ve had ups and downs in momentum over the last couple of years.  Over the past year, we’ve been pretty quiet about what we’re up to.  Last summer, I started working full time at a startup.  That was pretty much all consuming.  Doing that with a one year old and three year old at home was practically suicidal.  Meanwhile, Holly continued to crank out work for high visibility clients over at Hot Studio.  And a few months, the circle completed for me as I returned to a role at NASA.

Concurrent to all that activity, the WordPress niche which were pretty invested in began to change.  Simply put, the landscape of WordPress resources out there is pretty saturated now and forced us to reassess our focus.  In response to that we tried some different things including attempting to work on projects for pure company equity.  Not so great results with that on first attempt.

Essentially, we realized that Shiny New Toy was meant to complement our existing professional lives (for now) not be the centerpiece of it.  We’ve become self aware and comfortable with what Shiny New Toy (see previous paragraph).  Ideally, we’d pick three projects a year to work on and going forward that will be the metric we will seek to achieve. 

No, we don’t have anything big to announce today.  So stop holding your breath and exhale.  But something needed to break the silence here.  For a couple months, I started wondering what would be the tipping point to break the ice.  And last week, I think the spark that we needed was lit with the Thesis/WordPress cage match.  It got Holly and I riffing again.  Stay tuned for more thoughts on that. 

JJ and I are proud to announce our first official desktop wallpaper. I jokingly made this for JJ yesterday and we figured why not just offer it up. It’s inspired by a ridiculous term we’ve been joking about for months…

Dynamism: Keep web sites “fresh” by periodically adding new material and features, and by updating information regularly. A dynamic site will draw more repeat visitors and garner good press coverage.

Enjoy! 1440×900,  1920×1200

Note: If you are looking for more sizes, just let me know and maybe I will just add them to the list.

But wait.  The Google Chrome OS may give that old PC a second life.  Google is claiming that the Google Chrome OS is being built to target the netbook monitor, but that should mean it should help infuse new energy into any old Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP or even Windows 2000. 

And that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing with an Windows XP system I recently built.  It has decent specs.  A Pentium 4 2.25 GHz Processor with 1 GB of RAM.  I originally purchased it around 2002, then put it into a closet when I bought a new Vista capable desktop.  Just recently, I dusted it off, reinstalled the operating system and put it into use in an office where I’m doing some contract work.  Two big things I’ve found out in the past month:

First, even Firefox tends to bog the machine down.  Sure I’ve got a lot of extensions running, but its pretty clear that much of today’s software wasn’t built with older processors in mind. 

Second, I’ve yet to install Microsoft Office on it.  It’s been a month and to be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it this far without having to cave in and load up Office.  In fact, the Office DVD is currently sitting within my eyesight.  Collecting dust on the corner of my desk.  Instead I’ve been easily getting by with Google Docs.

Go I’m fairly certain I can get by with GMail and Google Docs; Meebo.com for IM; Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix Watch Instantly for entertainment; and the other 500+ bookmarks in my browser. 

I’m with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:

The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

I’ve agreed with that sentiment for a long time.  It’s one of the reason’s I pursued a career in web development.

Now, I disagree with the ridiculous statements that many blogs are making. The Google Chrome OS is not a stake to the heart of Microsoft’s business.  This is a very cool possible step forward for technology.  But not a groundbreaking move that will make a big dent in Microsoft’s OS business.  I think Fake Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping things in proper perspective.

You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?

Now Fake Steve’s post is rich in comedy and snark, but he’s right.  Mainstream America is not using Chrome simply as a browser.  There’s no way their going to flock to a Google Chrome Operating System.

But me?  I’ve got another reason to keep my old PC’s around. 

Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.

So if the younger generation is indeed leaving Facebook, the question is where are they going?  A return to MySpace seems pretty unlikely.  Just where are those 18-25 year old folks that advertisers love trying to run and hide to?

First of all, its a big “if”.  It’s very possible that the true problem is that 18-25 year olds simply are not indicating the high school or college that they attend or graduated from.  Since this is no longer a requirement like it was in Facebook’s earlier days, the numbers could easily shift over time.  Perhaps we are seeing that.

One of the most interesting possibilities is that they’re heading to the closed off world of email.  The most interesting comment on Marshall’s post was from a recent college graduate.

I, as a recent graduate, do not use Facebook anymore because of e-mail. I would say that most of high school, and college, students have not discovered e-mail yet, as email is used a lot in corporate America. Ever since I started working, where I had to use e-mail all the time, I switched to e-mailing friends instead of going to Facebook. A few of my friends have done the same thing.

That’s an amazing revelation, people being exposed to email for the first time and liking it so much that they’re getting off the Facebook boat.  Meanwhile almost everyone I know (I’m 38 years old) is trying do the opposite – break free from  these archaic, closed off systems like email and have conversations out in the open where they can be easily and efficiently discovered.