HerringLaw: Civil Rights & Discrimination Law in Iowa

iPhone Sensitive to Releases, not Pushes

I've found this to be true with both taking pictures with a camera and using the keyboard. It is not the initial touch or push on the keyboard or camera button that activates the key selection or camera, it is the release of the finger from where you touched.

With the keyboard, that's really neat. It means you don't need to use 3 keystrokes to move from alphabetical to numerical and back to alphabetical. You can touch/push the number selector key and drag your finger to the symbol or number you want and then let go and the number/symbol will be selected and you'll be back in alphabetical keyboard immediately.

An Apple Store instructor the other day showed the camera suggestion to me: Click/push the camera button and hold it until you have the picture you want in the viewer and then lift up. The camera takes the picture then, when you and the object are not moving and without the lag time problems. Seems to work better.

Safari Searching on Steroids

I found this reading through a Mac|Life blog posting = AcidSearch = which expands the methods for searching for things in Google...I don't know much about it yet, but it may prove useful. You can find more information here.

How to deal with Junk Faxes

I was researching something recently regarding Junk Faxes and found this helpful website.

What to do with all that left over electronic gear.

I don't know about you, but I do upgrade my equipment [computer and office equipment as well as photography equipment] fairly regularly [I'm one of those geeky early adopters, as you might know from reading my blog posts of late. Well, a friend of mine on the MacLaw listserve, Carol Ruth Shepherd recently posted on her blog about SecondRotation which seems like a perfect solution for busy people to recycle useful items and move on. I did a trial run on my Canon 20D camera [which I love, but which is getting a bit 'long in the tooth' and for the condition and lack-of-hassle feature, the price offered wasn't too bad. Now I may have to get serious about a trade in. Now to test it by running it by a camera shop, which might do the same thing at a better price [don't know yet].

More on the iPhone, with apologies

I just spent a week at the AAJ [American Association for Justice] convention in Chicago, soaking up knowledge and becoming chair of the Employment Rights Section for this coming year. I took with me my new iPhone and the following are my findings, so far [some of many]:

To keep the battery as full as possible, I have Bluetooth off and Searching for Networks off and had the phone fully charged early yesterday. I used it a fair amount [mainly for phone calls] yesterday. I did watch YouTube's The Ultimate Canon [Pachibel's Canon played by rock guitar - very neat] for about 6 min. I just checked and the battery bar is almost full [prob. 90%].

It works great - I have it set up to cc to me [so my GMail account has my sent messages in it too] and I don't sense email is not getting through. I have email transferred/forwarded from my HL account [a GoDaddy email acct.] to my GMail acct. from whence I get it via my iPhone. I have had iPhone set on getting mail every now and then but switched it back to Manual so it wouldn't be doing it all the time. If I have my laptop, as I do now, I go into GMail and delete or archive out of the inbox all the emails that have gathered there [such as those for yesterday] so they won't be picked up by the iPhone, as I don't need to read them on the phone. However, they are in the archive area if needed. And they've been downloaded to the laptop, as I check my mail. David Pogue recently wrote about this in his blog.

As for finger size, that could be a problem though the letters get a bit larger when you're on top of them so you know what you're punching. The auto complete feature is great - instead of punching the last letter I can just hit space, which certainly is big enough. So you have 4-5 or so regular letter punches and the big space punch. Another thing is that one's fingers have edges on them. I find that if I use my right pointer finger just slightly turned that works best - it's just more of an edge there. Fat fingers may or may not have a similar high point or edge which can be used. I do know that pressure doesn't help and a light touch is all that is needed.

All in all it was a wonderful experience, going to a convention without hauling around my laptop and instead, using my iPhone to gather emails and check the web.

More on the iPhone

I was discussing with a friend and mentor [Mike Sansone, a blog coach assisting me with my meager efforts at becoming a regular blogger]  [and showing off my new iPhone] what I like about the iPhone and decided to look into whether one can [yet] create Typepad posts using the iPhone rather than hopping on one's laptop.  I came across an excellent comment at the Passionate Users blog describing the User Interface ["UI"] which makes the use of the iPhone so pleasant.  It's in the floppy dog ears.

The other point I made to Mike fits in with this observation of the fluidity of the UI:  the packaging.  Anyone receiving an Apple product, whether it be the MacBookPro, the Nano or the iPhone, receives a minimalist black box which to the touch feels almost glasslike.  Touch a sheet or pad of paper and you can still feel some roughness but touch the paper or cardboard of an Apple product box and it's like touching glass, it's fluid, not rough.  Not only visually stunning but tactilely pleasant. 

I got an iPhone and friends and family think I am crazy.

My experience so far = is not extensive. I just set up a new GMail account so I can have my herringlaw mail [which is full of spam which is caught by SpamSieve on my computer but won't otherwise be caught if I set that account up to be checked on the iPhone] forwarded to it and then to be able to download my herringlaw email via iPhone via GMail account....at least the GMail spam filter will help.

I'm still a bit confused about quitting the apps but do know the home button does that = of course, I haven't read any material and it might be good to do that....or at least watch the iPhone tutorial. I filled up the 8G with music and videos and have used it some - I found out that I could create a playlist [click and drag type, not smart] and just clicked all my 5* pieces and purchases - that's 12G and now I'm going thru and deleting from that playlist what I don't want or need then the only thing that needs to be synced is this playlist...this works great.

Tonight.....We just had dinner and I was going to put on the stereo but my favorite music is also on the iPhone so I just brought it upstairs, and played background music during dinner then we called our daughter....not that I couldn't use my iPod or stereo just as well, but it was a nice little change and certainly when one is not near the stereo or other source, it's an option = no need for speakers....nothing fancy about speakers and the music aficionados might not be happy with it but it'll do in a pinch. For now I have my Verizon account set to forward to the new ATT number = still need to shut down the Verizon account and negotiate the family plan stuff. All in all though it'll save my husband alot of $ and it'll cost me the same for more minutes [450

How to cut down on spam in your iPhone mailbox

I'm still playing with it and trying to learn how to use it. One use for me is the ability to get my email from my .Mac account and from others. But the downside is the spam that makes it through, since cell phones don't have much server-side nor any client-side protection. This was alluded to in a recent article in the New York Times by Michelle Slatalla"An iPhone Changed My Life [Briefly]".

I'm hoping David Pogue will cover this issue in his Missing Manual series, although he certainly has a start on a number of tricks at that site.

I use SpamSieve and know what Ms. Slatalla means every time I have to clean out my Eudora junk box. But that's not possible on the iPhone [or on Verizon's Treo for that matter]. What I was going to do with my 'old' Treo & Verizon Wireless account but have done with my iPhone much more simply is use GMail to trap spam. Basically, I forward email from my email account to a GMail account which then is checked as an email account by the iPhone [after setting it up to be checked on the iPhone in the settings area].

Email goes to my usual account and is forwarded to GMail [staying on my regular account server for the typical download and reading in my office] then iPhone checks the GMail account and gets, for the most part, only good messages. I'm sure some spam will slip through but looking at my Gmail account it shows several spam messages that were not in the inbox of GMail and thus, not sent to my iPhone. There may be a more elegant workaround but for now this appears to work. I see that iPhone can also be set up to check other email accounts [e.g., Yahoo etc.] and using those alternatives probably would work likewise.