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Behind the technology times
Yesterday I picked up a Motorola RAZR V3m on Sprint. While this phone has been out on every other carrier for ages, Sprint just got it. Normally I get technology stuff when it first comes out, but here's a case where I didn't have a choice (I don't want to switch carriers) and I'm happy about it. Instead of getting a half backed phone, I now have a phone that has had its kinks worked out by others. Why did I switch from my Samsung A900? The main reason is to be able to sync my contacts and calendars. There are some "hacks" out on the net for enabling this in iSync (hacks are just modifications of some text files to identify the phone), so I put one in and iSync happily syncs my contacts. Calendars are another story. I'm not quite sure the right mix, yet, but it would appear that certain types of events don't sync and cause the connection to barf. I think I'll figure out the right mix soon. While I understand that synchronization is hard (that's what I do for a living), I'd expect Apple and Motorola's software to be a bit more tolerant. Oh well. So far I'm pleased with the phone; others have complained that the screen resolution is less than that of the A900 and that the menus are slow, but I'm finding the phone a bit more useable than the A900. To each his own.
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ReceiptWallet finally released!
Today is a very exciting day for me as I just released my latest product, ReceiptWallet. It's been a long time since I've released my own product. This product allows users to scan, manage, and organize receipts. It came out of my own frustration in finding a receipt one day. With the help of a few testers, I think this is my best application, yet. I think it has the most user interface polish, the right feature set (for a 1.0 release) and works quite well.
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Damn credit card company
I received a call today that my credit card had been declined for a charge that happens every 2 weeks. I go online and see that the bank has a note to call them because there is high risk activity on the card. This is 2 days after I call them to straighten out the last mess. There were only 2 charges on the card since then and both of them with merchants I've used before. My guess is the last guy I talked to forgot to take the fraud alert off my card. At least I wasn't at a restaurant or store and have to go through the embarrassment of having my card declined. Idiots.
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Email program wars
I've been using email programs for the last 15 years on an almost day to day basis. While I definitely don't hold the record for how long I've been using them, I have been using email for almost the entire era since the Internet became popular (graphs I've seen show 1994-1995 is when there became a huge influx of users). Over that time, I've used a number of email programs and worked with a bunch more through my NotifyMail program. For a very long time, I used Eudora (1992-2002, I think) and even had the opportunity to be on the development team for a few years. Eudora had a ton of features and has an extremely loyal following. I gave up on Eudora a few years back because I wanted to have a central address book and Apple's Mail offered that along with iSync. Mail doesn't have all the features that Eudora has, but frankly, I can't even recall what I'm missing. Also, Eudora's interface was years out of date and user interface is extremely important to me.