I am a relatively new Apple customer. It all started in early 2007 when I purchased a white 13.3" MacBook.

It was more of a novelty as I had no prior experience with a Mac. I never really used it, not because of OS X but because my desktop setup was just too good. All that monitor space, no need for a laptop. This is still the case today although I am beggining to bring it into work and use it a little more often.

My Apple purchase continued in late 2007 when I bought the iPhone. Loved it. I had some problems with it though.

Some of my previous posts have talked about my on-going problems with the iPhone. My first one couldn't hold a charge, my second one dropped calls like crazy and my third one I cracked the screen. Each and every time I brought the phone into the Apple store in Providence it was replaced on the spot, no questions asked. Yes, even when I cracked the screen!

Now, back to my MacBook. I bought it in early 2007 and it hasn't gotten much usage, except for when I travel and it is out of warranty with no Apple Care.

I recently decided to use Boot Camp and install Vista on a partition (I know....). Well, the 60GB default harddrive just isn't enough so I bought a much bigger drive from NewEgg.com and it arrived earlier this week.

I pop in my Leopard DVD to install it and what do you know? The DVD drive doesn't work! Well, that sucked. Had this been a desktop I could have easily bought a new drive cheaply and installed it in 5 minutes, not the case here with my MacBook.

I brought it to the Genius bar at the Apple store and they explained to me it would cost around $250, a bit much and at this point I was just going to junk the MacBook and get a new one. I thought better of it and called 1-800-MY-APPLE and asked to speak to a supervisor.

I explained to him (Jason) that I've probably used the DVD drive 10 times since I purchased it and it was working fine the last time I used it, yadda yadda yadda. Sure enough, with almost no questions asked, Jason tells me he'll place an out-of-warranty exception on the DVD drive.

There you have it. Once again Apple's customer support has gone above and beyond for me. A brand new DVD drive was installed in my MacBook about an hour later!

I am going to make a post in the near future about the downsides I see in Apple, such as iPhone 2.0/3G, but customer support is not one of them.

So I purchased MobileMe when I purchased the iPhone 3G. I was excited that I could finally get push email, contacts and calendar on my phone without the hassle of Microsoft Exchange.

This was actually the one thing that kept me up at night in anticipation for the new iPhone, it wasn't the 3G, the GPS or the App Store. Nope, just MobileMe. It hasn't lived up to my expectations, not even close.

Email that is received is almost never instantly pushed. I see the email in the box and then 10 minutes (today is more like an hour) later I see it on my iPhone. Not cool.

Calendar push never works without a fight, never.

MobileMe Gallery isn't that great. I've created albums and they don't showup on my iPhone when I try to sync a picture to MobileMe Gallery. Which, by the way, all it does is email the picture and since my iPhone doesn't appear to support different albums you can just use Tumblr for the same thing.

Contacts seems to work fine, although I don't do much changing to them on a daily basis so I can't tell you either way definitively.

I have 2 Vista machines and 1 MacBook. I receive error dialogs all the time on my Vista machines from MobileMe. Either MobileMe is down, your MobileMe login is incorrect, or Another computer is syncing at the same time. 1 hour does not pass without one of these error dialogs popping up requiring me to click OK.

Apple needs to fix these problems and fast. The 30 day (or is it 60?) trial is going to come quick and I suspect if these issues still loom many users will be canceling their account. I am one of those users.

This is inspired by what AdMob has done with their live ad-demand monitoring.

So I created a neat lil app that shows us(MoFuse) live traffic from across the globe hitting MoFuse servers.

This is just a glimpse of it, it's not public, and it's not 100% accurate as to the location but it does a decent job. There might be some privacy concerns if we release it to the public, if viewers could see live traffic to sites not their own. So for now all you're getting is this short screencast of it in action.

This is going on a large flat-panel display mounted on the wall at the MoFuse offices, pretty good eye-candy.

Click here to see the MoFuse Live Global Mobile Traffic Monitor screencast.

The New York Times published an article yesterday speaking to the fact that just because the iPhone can browse the full-web doesn't mean that's the best possible experience for the mobile visitor.

A quick trip to Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Zillow or Powerset, all of which have been redesigned to take advantage of the iPhone, makes it clear that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to exploring cyberspace. By stripping down the Web site interface to the most basic functions, site designers can focus the user’s attention and offer relevant information without distractions.

...

The shift to vertical Web pages is a big step forward, says Donald Norman, an expert in user-oriented design at the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm.

“A small window into a huge space is horrible,” he said. “It makes for a great demo, but it’s very frustrating to use.”

Agreed. Viewing a website through a periscope is possible, but not optimal. Having a website designed for the media that will be accessing it IS the best route to take. You're selling your website short by not creating a mobile and an iPhone presence.

Must read article for anyone interested in this space, or for anyone who is still convinced that there is only a need for 1 website ranging from 1" to 20" in width.

Read full story here.

I'm a Gmail user through and through. We even use Google Apps for Domains over at MoFuse, so it was kind of a downer when I got the new iPhone to realize that Gmail didn't have a push option like Yahoo or MobileMe.

I've been playing around for a little bit now trying to figure out a hack to get all my email pushed instantly to my iPhone and I came up with a workaround. It's actually not true push email from Gmail but rather a way to change the email address when you reply to an email (so it shows you@gmail.com rather than you@me.com)

You will need a MobileMe accounts, a Yahoo account might work but I haven't been successful yet.

Steps:

1. First thing you need to do is setup your MobileMe account and get it running on your iPhone.
2. Setup your Gmail to forward incoming messages to your MobileMe email address.
3. On your iPhone go to Settings->Mail->Your MobileMe Account->Account Info.
4. Click on SMTP towards the bottom.
5. Click on Add Server.
6. Enter in your Gmail (or other) SMTP server information here. Save and it should take you back to the SMTP page.
7. You will see at the top of the page the header Primary Server and right under it smtp.me.com, click this.
8. Turn Server to OFF, go back.
9. Click Account Info in the top left hand corner.
10. You should see smtp.gmail.com as your Outgoing Mail Server if you do goto step 11.
11. DONE.

Now when you receive emails to your Gmail account they will get forwarded to your MobileMe account and instantly pushed to your iPhone. When you reply to an email on your iPhone it will come from your Gmail account.

All email you send from your iPhone will also remain threaded in the Gmail web interface.

Screenshots:

smtp.me.com is set to Off

Outgoing Mail Server is set to smtp.gmail.com

But I can't, because Apple poorly designed the whole activation and upgrade process.

They should have released iPhone 2.0 software a lot earlier, hence, not on the same day as everyone else trying to use iTunes to activate their new iPhone.

That pretty much doubles the amount of traffic hitting iTunes -- not well thoughout.

So, I stood in line for a few hours this morning at an AT&T store just to get to my office and keep unplugging and plugging my iPhone back into the USB slot and crossing my fingers?

4 Hours and still without a phone. Very, very disappointed with how this is turning out.

I just sold my old iPhone for ~$300 on eBay. This is plenty to cover the expense of getting the new one tomorrow morning for $199. Maybe I'll use the spare change to buy a case or a bluetooth headset?

I heard Adobe say that they got Flash working on an iPhone in their labs. That was good news, or so I thought, then I read that the iPhone SDK won't allow for any plugins ala Flash. Originally we were all told, or led to believe, that technical hurdles needed to be overcome before Flash would make it to the iPhone. The longer the iPhone continues to not have Flash the less I believing that.

What gives? Why is Apple so against Adobe? They keep pushing Safari as the "real" web on a mobile device but last time I checked the "real" web allowed for rich content like flash.

My point being, if you're going to market your web browser as the "real" web on a mobile device, it should be able to do everything I can do on the "real" web. You don't even have to openly support Flash by having it come default installed, but atleast leave the door open for Adobe to make it. Let the consumer who just spent $400 on your device and signed away two years of their life and $2,000+ in service bills have the choice.

Artificial barriers are everywhere in mobile.

Symbian is charging developers $1,500 a year for membership into their partner program. This doesn't make much sense to me since they're now apart of Nokia.

It seemed as if Nokia bought Symbian to compete with Apple and Google's Android. My immediate reaction to the purchase was that Nokia is going to open it all up ala Android. Remove any barriers developers may have and try to compete. Google isn't charging developers a dime and Apple has a miminum fee attached.

So, if Nokia wants to compete against the iPhone and Android why in the world would they put a large tarrif between developers and their OS? Symbian is not trying to stay afloat on its own anymore and Nokia seems to be pinching pennies instead of looking at the longevity of their newly acquired operating system.

Joining their partner program makes developing for Symbian easier than if you were not apart of their so called ecosystem. They are putting up barriers to their growth during a time when they should be breaking them down. Not a smart move on Nokia's behalf.

I've been trying to get more involved with the whole social web thing lately. I've created my own blogging platform to help me post more, I started using Twitter, and because I was using Twitter I decided to use FriendFeed just now because Twitter isn't working.

I went to reply to someone on Twitter tonight and I was told I couldn't. Their service is not consistent and I don't think you need me to tell you that. So, since everyone is talking about FriendFeed and it's reliability I figured I'd give it a second go.

I signed up months ago and never used it. I added a few friends and I logged in once or twice and there was just way to much going on. I haven't been back since. I'm now on and I'm cleaning up all the mess and hopefully it will become useful.

Anyways, if you're interested in following me on FriendFeed you can subscribe to me here.

Update: Just noticed my bud Russell posted something very similar. Weird.