Jules Says

iPhone: iCal glitch & why it took me 22 hrs to set up my iPhone

Nearly 23 hours after I got my paws on an iPhone, I'm finally up and running, but it was far from painless.

The summary

• I was in the first group of 20 into the Apple store in Austin. I entered at 6pm to the applause of the staff (nice touch), bought 2 8Gig iPhones, and was on my way to my car by 6:04. Impressive!
• I came home and immediately tried to synch. Turns out I had to do some upgrading (yes, I should've known that). So, first I upgraded my system to 10.4.10 (I was one version behind) and iTunes.
• I went through the activation process, which went smoothly. I was porting my cell number from Verizon to AT&T.
• The last screen said it would be about 6 minutes to finish. I went to change, thinking I'd be leaving momentarily for a cocktail party, where I'd be able to show off my fabulous new toy.
• I came back to a screen that said roughly "it's going to take a while, we'll email you when we know how long. The neighbors may well have heard me yell at this point.
• Since I couldn't activate, I couldn't do anything - I couldn't use the iPod, the calendar, or even play with preferences.
• I went to the cocktail party, and rather pathetically showed off the Earth screen and emergency call pad.
• I was home an hour and a half later with an email saying it would be up to 24 hours before my phone was activated.
• I wrote my first bitchy blog post about it.
• I called the number in the email from AT&T to "make other arrangements". The first woman was nice, didn't know much about the iPhone, and gave me another number to call.
• I called that number. It was disconnected.
• I called the original number again, and a guy told me it'd be 6-24 hours - there was nothing he could do.
• This morning at 8am when I got up, my activation had gone through. I eagerly attempted a synch. No go. I got the error message shown in my last post. iTunes seemed to think the iPhone was disconnected. It wasn't.
• I restared my Mac. I restored the iPhone to factory settings. I tried a different USB port, and tried the synch with just the cable and again with the dock. Nada.
• I remembered that with my iPod, I've had trouble using the auto-synch feature of iTunes, so I tried synching manually. That seemed to work fine, and I thought I was set.
• But no. Everything synched except iCal. I tried manually synching just iCal, to no avail.
• Finally around 10:30 I called the iPhone help number. A recorded message said that due to heavy demand, my wait would be "5 minutes or greater." Understandable.
• 55 minutes later, I got a very nice guy who wasn't able to help. He said he'd connect me with someone for "more advanced" help.
• 1.5 hours later (!) I spoke with Nathan from Apple. Again, very nice. Finally I was going to get some help.

The iCal glitch
I have 6 calendars I use regularly. We experimented with trying to synch a single calendar at a time. At first it didn't work, and Nathan speculated that maybe you can't synch more than one calendar at a time. That would be a pretty glaring error if it was so.

My "home" calendar wouldn't synch. It would start, and I'd get the error message. If I synched any other single calendar on its own, however, it worked. Doing that, however, made each new calendar completely replace the previous one. Obviously, that wouldn't do. Then we discovered I was able to synch all calendars at once except for the "home" calendar. Something is apparently corrupted in that calendar.

So I've just spent the last hour going back and re-categorizing my calendars back to January. I deleted the Home calendar. It now synchs beautifully and completely.

My opinion, after a rocky start
The good

• It's lovely - feels good to hold, and I love the mutli-touch screen.
• It's fast, even on the EDGE network. I've played several iTunes videos with no cutting out.
• The browser is fantastic - surprisingly readable.
• I'm getting really good coverage with AT&T - better than with Verizon and miles better than with Sprint.
• The maps support is great - I easily get real-time traffic reports... sweet!
• The interface is elegant and mostly very intuitive. A few things will take a bit of getting used to, but that will happen quickly.
• Same goes for the keyboard. It'll take me a little while to get proficient, but I have no doubt that I will.
• I love the .com button on the keyboard.

The bad

• It felt hazardous to try to make a call while driving. The flow navigation doesn't work well with one hand. Once a bunch of people are on my "recents" list, this will be less of an issue, as I won't have to hunt for them.
• Making calls, even with "recents" takes too many touches. I want a favorites widget.
• 8Gigs will soon seem like not nearly enough. I'm already ready for an 80Gig iPhone :)

Overall, I love it, although my enthusiasm was seriously tempered because of my crappy initial experience. That'll wear off, though.

See also:
iPhone: still crippled, but getting there
iPhone: I'm officially pissed off

Wiffiti: your phone and my computer can make beautiful text

In my recent post about Reactee, I mentioned that I enjoy playing with new applications of technology that may seem silly or even useless at first. Wiffiti is another one of those.

With Wiffiti, you have a screen. You can show that screen on the Wiffiti site, full screen on your computer, or embedded in any web page. You have a name - people text @name to your SMS address (a five-digit number) and their message gets broadcast to the screen. Several messages show at a time, floating around the screen, getting smaller as they age.

Try it here - send an SMS message to 25622. Start the message with @jules, then type your message. It'll show up right here :) This screen is live. [update: odd... publishing this post cut off a whole chunk of text after the embedded screen. More of the review & a bunch of screenshots showing usability problems are after the jump.][update 2: if you're looking at this post in a feed reader, you may not see the screen - click through to the actual blog to see it.]

Everything is Miscellaneous

I'm not a particulary organized person. I can hear some guffaws in response to that understatement already. My kitchen table, more often than not, is covered with piles of books and unsorted mail, it's true. But check out my book and CD shelves. They're alphabetized. I may be behind in cataloging, but there is organization to be found. I do like knowing how to find things, I just can't stick with a single methodology. As for papers, files, mail... I need things in more than one place, but the geographical limitations of my home, and the fact that I simply don't have, or want to have, more than one copy of my stuff, rule that out as an option. Turns out what I need is the new digital disorder for things to make sense to me.

Dave Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, examines my dilemma. It's another in a growing list of fascinating, readable business books focusing on the way business is changing as result of the disruptive technologies of the internet. Weinberger is the co-author of the classic The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, which came to represent a shift in thinking of the net as just another medium to recognizing that we now have the opportunity for conversations and relationships as never before. This new offering fits nicely as a sequel to Chris Anderson's excellent The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The Long Tail showed us that the infinite inventory of web vendors allows for aggregate sales of minor titles can add up to profits even greater than the hits, and that in fact the days of blockbuster hits as we once defined them are gone. And for us consumers - there's so much available, we can now find niches that cater to our specific interests. Everything is Miscellaneous explores how we'll find those things.

Weinberger is clearly a pretty organized guy. He writes that "There isn't a part of our homes that is truly unordered, except perhaps under our beds..." That's kind of a reach. But his point is that we all employ various schemes to organize our physical space: spices go together, plates of a certain size go together, yet some things are ordered based on frequency of use.

Libraries have enormous problems to solve in deciding how to store things, for obvious reasons relating to physical space.

This is not a new issue, by a long shot. Over 2,000 years ago, scholars in Rome or Greece (depending on who you read) introduced the idea of alphabetization as a way to organize information. It took hundreds of years and many reinventions to stick. Alphabetization was considered an affront to god. It was argued that there is a natural organization for all knowledge, that alphabetization is unnatural. The Dewey Decimal System was the first widely-accepted method of organizing knowledge, employing a numeric categorization with alphabetization as the secondary sort. The high level sort was subject-based and reflects the sensibilities of a Christian man living in a small town in 1875. Thus, Philosophy was considered the foundation of everything, so it earned the the 100s. The system is heavily biased toward Christianity, of course, and (understandably) doesn't even include computer science. Buddhism doesn't get it's own number, but phrenology does. A wholesale change of this system is unrealistic, again for physical reasons. And though it's still in use in many places, it's not at all helpful in the online world.

Online, we simply don't need these rigid categorizations. We have tags now, and collaborative filtering. When I go to Amazon and look up a book, I get not only other related books in multiple categories spanning genres, I get a list of books bought by others who bought this particular book. I get my own customized organization system every time I visit.

Weinberger contends that as we move from physical to digital storage, we need to get rid of the idea that there is a right way to organize things. Rather, we need to embrace the inherent disorganization and allow people to access information in whatever way makes sense to them.

It's an engaging read. If you liked The Long Tail, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you'll like this too.

Note to self: don't bother searching Google Images for better images for a book title with keywords like "everything" and "miscellaneous" :)

Update: Bad netiquette alert! I didn't even provide a link to the Everything Is Miscellaneous web site! My apologies. And they were still nice enough to mention and link to this review :)