Category: Geekery

I’m looking for recommendations for the following apps for my iPod Touch:

1. A good aviation logbook. When my flightbag was stolen, my bacon was saved by the fact that every flight I’ve ever made is on my Treo. The ability to import and export to CSV would be a huge plus.

2. I use a spreadsheet on my Treo for two reasons: to track my hours at work and to record the mileage on my car. I’m looking for either a simple cheap spreadsheet or separate apps for each of those. Actually if there were a google gear for iPod so I could use Google Doc even when I’m offline, that would be ideal.

At Mark and Kris’s urging, I’m giving two thumb typing another try. It seems to be getting better and i’m more impressed with the quality of the auto-correct now that I’m purposely making more mistakes. And Andy’s mention of the hold-drag for minor punctuation is a big time saver too.

I had the Touch at work for the first time yesterday. It was really nice to go out at lunch and do some web browsing with a decent browser for a change. I just wish I could have that all day – oh well, maybe when the Palm Pre comes out. It was also nice to be able to compose a blog entry while off line like I’m doing now.

I’m getting more used to the predictive text. For instance, I don’t bother going to the number and symbol keyboard to find the apostrophe when I’m typing contractions – I just type the letters and hit space. I also like the double space to get a period-space at the end of sentences. I don’t know why, but I’m having far less trouble with the keyboard than I did with Vicki’s, possibly because I’ve given up trying to use two thumbs like I do with my Treo.

Yesterday I was a little perturbed to see the low battery warning when I still had three hours to work. I got through the rest of the day by hitting the off button as soon as I finish interacting with it instead of admiring the album art as I had been before. Maybe I should bring a charger to work so I can continue to look at them.

Ok, this new iPod Touch has made me a little app-store happy. I just found the free WordPress app. It’s not bad.

For some reason I am not having anywhere near as much trouble with the touch keyboard as I did when I’ve tried Vicki’s in the past. Which is good because the predictive text is way worse than it was on my old Motorola V180 that I had 4 or so years ago.

Ever since the iPhone came out, I’ve been hoping for a smart phone that was a compromise between it and my Palm Treo.

I like the physical keyboard on my Treo. I like the fact that it does cut and paste. I like the fact that it can take an external data card. I like the fact that it has bazillions of third party applications. But I hate the slowness, the fact that it can’t even check for email in the background while you’re doing something else, and that the browser sucks. I hate the fact that it doesn’t have a decent music player.

On the other hand, the iPhone is sleek and beautiful. It has a truly beautiful hardware and software user interface. It does music excellently, as well as doing videos. It has a very good browser. It has third party apps, including a new version of my favourite flight planner CoPilot. It even has a built-in GPS. But it has a frustrating soft keyboard that doesn’t even have cursor keys, so you can’t move over a couple of letters to delete something wrong at the beginning of the word you just typed. It doesn’t have cut and paste.

For a while I thought the Google phone might be the answer, but the current incarnation, the G1, has other problems. The phone is clunky looking, and T-Mobile’s network isn’t very good around here – no 3G, and some pretty large gaps in even ordinary phone coverage out of town. Plus it seems like the gui isn’t very consistent between apps. It looks like a competitor to my ancient Treo, not to the iPhone.

But now I’m wondering if my answer might be just over the horizon, because the Palm Pre was just shown at CES. Very nice – it has a keyboard, it has multi-touch gestures, it has a new OS, it looks like a real iPhone competitor. Not beautiful like an iPhone, but not down right ugly like a G1. Plus it’s on Sprint, which has a family unlimited data plan that looks like we could both have smart phones for less than we’re currently paying on AT&T. The only open questions in my mind are whether the music player is any good, if it has cut and paste, and if it’s compatible with existing Palm apps.

My 80Gb Video (aka “Classic”) iPod stopped working on me the other day. Everything else was fine, but the buttons and scroll wheel wouldn’t respond. I tried the “5 R” trouble shooting on the Apple web site, but that didn’t help. For some reason, I thought I bought this iPod last summer, but when I got to the Apple store, they said no, it was bought in 2006. And of course, I’d procrastinated about buying AppleCare and now it’s too late.

So with no other options, I bought a new one. This time I got a 32Gb iPod Touch. As you can see from the image, that’s going to take a bit of getting used to. Oh well. Maybe there will be wifi near work so I can actually see things on the web properly instead of dealing with the horrible browser on the Treo.