The Tumblr service has an elegant design focusing on simplicity. I was impressed with it and for a few days switched my mkaz.com blog over. However, after just a few posts I found the simplicity a little stifling and I wanted to be able to do a few other things, such as align photos, use categories and an organized archive.

So I switched back to WordPress, I updated to 2.5.1 and using a new theme. It really is the best platform, providing the most flexibility, especially if you know a little PHP.

Photophlow is a pretty cool new way to interact with photos and people. It ties into Flickr and allows you to view photos simultaneously with other users and chat in real-time about them. You can select a photo and everyone in the chat room sees the photo and can comment on it.

If you like talking about photos, check it out. They also have a Live Photo Critique Room.
Here’s an example of the UI, click for video tour:

What other people are saying about Photophlow:

» News.com Photophlow puts a fresh face on Flickr

» Ted Leung Photo 2.0 – Photophlow

» Thomas Hawk Photophlow Rocks

» Demo Girl 3 Words Describe PhotoPhlow: Totally. Freaking. Addicting

Let me know if you need an invite, I have a few to give.
Disclosure: I am an angel investor in photophlow

My biggest beef is that tar is still broken.

User Error: The terminal tabs shortcut keys was my mistake, they are curly brackets so I have to hold down the shift key to switch. Between Safari, Firefox, Terminal, and Adium there are just too many different ways to switch between tabs.

System Config Error: Spotlight issue was because Spotlight was not indexing on my system. So some searches worked and others did not. The odd thing is the Spotlight client did not realize this. It is now fixed and Spotlight has replaced Quicksilver. The auto calculator is awesome!

Still Sucks: The Opacity of Menu Bar and Menu Items still sucks. Plus the colors of foreground-background windows is still wrong.

Config Fix: I found a config parameter to stage the Stacks to show as a grid. Right-click on the Stack and select View As… Grid.

Config Fix: I also converted my dock to be 2D and not the weird 3D dock. From macosxhints:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

All in all, my opinion is now upgraded to neutral on Leopard.

Leopard upgrades tar to version 1.15.1, the previous version was 1.14. In the new version the –exclude file parameter does not work. I have several scripts using tar to do builds and packaging, and not being able to exclude files screws it up completely. I ended up booting into a VMware ubuntu environment to do a deployment, ridiculous. Looks like I’m not the only one with Leopard tar problems.

Here are some other annoyances:

• Opacity of Menu Bar and Menu Items makes the menu items difficult to read and adds no benefit at all. I’m surprised it is not configurable so it can be turned off.
• Applications icon in dock defaults to first application, this makes it look like the Address Book is always running. I solved this by creating an ” Applications” folder alias, notice the space in the front. The old Apple trick to get things to sort to the top.
• I thought Spotlight could replace Quicksilver since all I use it for is launcher and calculator, unfortunately Spotlight is too slow. It crashes frequently for me and I haven’t been able to get the demoed calculating to work. I disabled it again and using Quicksilver.
• I thought tabs in Terminal could replace iTerm, but alas the shortcut keys to switch between tabs don’t work
• Foreground and background window colors seem reversed, everything before was grayed out if it was in the background, but with Leopard the background windows are lighter and the foreground window is darker.
• Stacks not coming out in a straight line is annoying, that falling away curve just looks wrong.

The only new feature I’ve found that I like so far is the Applications folder popping up out of the dock, however since I use Quicksilver I’m rarely launching applications like that.

The operating system is mattering less and less as web apps are now the primary applications. I think the only reason I will probably upgrade to Leopard is to get the upgrades to Apache 2, PHP 5 and upgrades to Python and Perl. I can clean them out of my ports instead of running two versions of everything.

There are a couple of applications I’m interested in:

There are a lot more things I could completely do without, mostly flash and very little substance:

I’m just really not enthused by the upgrade.

In the image above the two small squares in the middle are the same exact color value. Really. Visually, the box surrounded by the darker background looks lighter, and vicey versey. This is due to an effect called simultaneous contrast.

Interesting to think about when viewing photos within a photo editor such as Aperture, see this Inside Aperture article regarding What Do You Know About Color?

More info regarding simultaneous contrast from Apple’s color people.

However, people are less likely to do either; visit my site or subscribe to RSS. The best way I can surface this content to my friends is via my Facebook profile. The Facebook news feed is a wonderful information delivery mechanism. Fortunately, Facebook allows you to import an RSS feed into your notes. Unfortunately, they only allow the importing of a single RSS feed.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. I wrote about them previously here and here. Using Yahoo Pipes, I can combine my three RSS feeds my blog feed, my photo blog feed and my Magnolia saved bookmarks feed into a single RSS feed, which I call “mkaz combined”

I then setup Facebook to import this combined feed and they all show up in my profile feed as imported notes.

What I love about this system is: (1) it uses open protocols and open systems. My blog and photo blog are published using Feedburner, so no additional load even hits my server. (2) It ties together the three power houses of the current internet: Google (Feedburner), Yahoo and Facebook, all working together.

You can subscribe to my combined feed here.

I was reading a tutorial on setting up an IMAP server and the guy was using the pushd and popd commands. What I love about unix is there are obscure commands on your system that do all sorts of things that you never knew about it.

The commands pushd, popd and dirs are commands which help track and change directories. The basics:
   pushd will push a directory onto a stack,
   popd will pop a directory off the stack,
   dirs will list the directories in the stack

When pushing and popping things on and off the stack, the commands will also change your current directory. Here’s an example, moving around while debugging web stuff:

First I want to add the directories to my stack:

You will notice as you push something on the stack, your current directory will also change to what you just pushed on. To see what is on your directory stack:

Now to move around if you use pushd without any arguments it will swap the top two items in the stack changing your directory to what is now the top item.

You can also use pushd +N and it will change to that position in the stack.

Use popd to remove items from the list. It supports the same +N syntax, or with no arguments will remove the top item and change your directory to the next. Use dirs -c to clear the directory stack.

I need to play around with them more, it seems useful but I haven’t quite incorporated it into my repertoire yet.

Here are online man page reference for the commands:
   pushd man page
   popd man page
   dirs man page

1. No MMS Text Messages. I do not know of any cell phone which can not receive photo messages, except the $600 most advanced phone on the market. This one just baffles me. I do not care about Apple budgets, timelines, time-to-market or any other business blah-blah. They sold me a $600 phone, I want it to handle the basics.

To top it off, if you receive a photo you are sent a text message which includes a link, a username and password to retrieve the photo from the web. However, this is completely unusable because the link doesn’t include an http:// which would make it clickable in the iPhone. Plus there is no copy and paste so the random username and password (unique for every message) is practically impossible to type while switching between SMS and Safari.

2. Recessed Headphone Jack. Another baffling design decision, the headphone jack is unusable by almost all 3rd party headphones. All those fancy Bose and Schure headphones won’t work without an additional adapter. The mini-headphone jack has existed since the 80’s, it seems like you would have to go out of your way to make your device not work with them. The least you could do is include an adapter.

3. Incompatible Power Adapter with MacBook. I wrote about this one before.

4. Sync. This isn’t an Apple issue per se, or even a direct iPhone issue but I really really really really really just want to be able to sync my GMail Contacts and my calendar (Google or 30 Boxes). I’ve switched back to 30 Boxes because they tie in nicely with Facebook, but that’s another story.

My current processes, which is not ideal but sorta works: Calendar items I can create on the web, which iCal then syncs to which then gets synced to my iPhone. However, I can not create an item on the iPhone and have it go back up to the web. At least this work flow is automatic.

Contacts are the opposite and more painful. I use the Mac OS X Address Book to manage all my contacts. So whenever I get around to “syncing”, I do an export from Address Book which can then be imported to GMail. This process manages to either get duplicates in GMail or I clear out Google before hand and I lose addresses that I only had there.

5. Custom Ringtones. How come I can’t use any of my MP3s for ring tones, or have custom ring tones for different people. Another basic cell phone feature you would expect.

However, one look at the beautiful screen and I forgive it for all its short comings.

Tyvek is a magic material made by DuPont [more info]. It is used for mailing envelopes and house siding. I even have a wallet made of Tyvek. It feels like paper, is easy to cut with scissors, glue and fold like paper, but is really difficult to tear.

To create your Tyvek iPhone case, all you need is Tyvek, glue and scissors. My source of Tyvek was a USPS priority mail envelope. You can also use a FedEx or even a NetFlix envelope, except NetFlix usually likes them returned. I used a rubber-cement type glue, which marketing has dollied up and is now called a Gel glue.

You will need two pieces of material. The first piece wraps the iPhone, leaving an opening at the top and bottom. Measure this out by wrapping the phone and cutting to fit, leaving enough overlap so you can glue together. The second piece of Tyvek will slip inside and provide a handle at the top to make it easier to get the phone in and out. At the bottom, the second piece loops over and holds the iPhone in place. The second piece can be long and then cut to fit after it’s in place.

Now, to glue it all together. I left my iPhone wrapped in the material but protected so that the glue would not get on it. This way I could pull the Tyvek around it, not too snug, and glue it at the overlap. I put the seam on the back of the phone in the middle. Slide the inner piece in and glue it on the seam, leaving extra at the top and bottom sticking out.

I glued the bottom piece to the outside, which if I were to do again, I would tuck it inside and glue so you can’t see it. Trim the top and you’re good to go.

Your own Tyvek iPhone case. The world’s cheapest case for one of the world’s most expensive phones.