“Wow,” I hear you say, “that is indeed a metric assload of pixels.” So it would be no surprise, statistically speaking, if at least one or two of those pixels were broken. Dead, as it were. Le petit pixel mort, as they say in Spain.

But no. I’ve been lucky to have two awesome Apple cinema displays that are pixel-perfect. “A rarity!” you cry out. And you would be right.

Until this morning.

The first thing I noticed when I started working was an irritant in my left eye, like a tiny ache. I turned my head to the left, and it was gone. Looking forward again, it was back. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the irritant wasn’t in my eye, but was in fact on the far side of my left monitor. A stuck pixel.

A stuck pixel is, in my opinion, an order of magnitude worse than a dead one. A dead pixel emits no light, so if you have a dark desktop area (like I do), it simply blends into the background, and you don’t notice it unless you’re looking at a window directly over it.

But this pixel on my left side, it is stuck. On green. Not a light green, but a glowing neon green. It has been irritating my peripheral vision all morning long. It stares at me, like an evil green Lovecraftian eye. Watching me. Tormenting me. Judging me. When I look directly at it, it looks away¹, feigning innocence. But I know it’s there, casting its green gaze upon me all through the day.

I hope it goes away on its own. Perhaps one day it will tire of watching me, and return to the inky blackness from whence it came. I can only hope.

If you decide to force-quit the application BBEdit, turn to page 9.
If you decide to sit there and wait while the Spinning Beachball of Death twirls around for all eternity, turn to page 10…

a) smile happily, put the unopened boxes in a corner, go back to work, and set up the new equipment over the weekend once you had met your deadlines,

or

b) squeal like a preteen girl at a Hannah Montana concert, rush the stuff up to your office, take geeky unboxing photos, set up the new machine, reinstall all of your software and documents, and hope that you can stay up late enough to make up for the roughly 4 hours of lost productivity in an already overscheduled day.

If you answered “a”, then I applaud you and your highly disciplined work ethic. I also herby revoke your nerd card and offer my gratitude that you’re not my writing partner.

(via PaleoFuture)

What I do have, courtesy of my good friends at Clusterflock, is a sleek and shiny new iPhone 3G.

There are a million reviews of the iPhone 3G out there already, two of the best being this very in-depth review by Cheng/Chartier/Ecker at Ars Technica, and this great analysis by Jason Snell at Macworld.

If you’re looking for objective information by pros who know how to do tech product reviews the right way, then I suggest you read one of the aforementioned articles.  But since I promised Deron that I’d let him know about the phone once I got it, better late than never, here are a few subjective observations of my own.

The purchasing experience.
Yeah, I stood in line for at least four hours like everyone else.  And yeah, the activation systems kept crashing and crashing, resulting in a lot of standing still.  Eventually I got my phone (16gb black, to be exact), but by that time the iTunes store had completely overloaded.  They were able to activate my phone in-store, but I wasn’t able to connect to iTunes to reload all of my information onto it until the next day.  Annoying, but not a big deal in the long run.  Overall the Apple Store employees were well-trained, handled the downtime like professionals, and kept everything running as well as they could.

The software.
One of the biggest draws of the iPhone 2.0 release is the availability of 3rd-party apps.  I’ve already downloaded and used (and deleted) several of them, but two of my favorites are Craig Hockenberry’s Twitterific Premium client app for the Twitter service, and Frasier Spears’ great Flickr client Exposure Premium.  I spend a lot of time on the Twitter¹, and previously used the Hahlo web-based service.  It was OK, but not ideal, and the Twitterific iPhone client is robust and full-featured.  The Exposure client is the best implementation of a front-end to Flickr that I’ve seen for a mobile device, and one of its coolest² features is the use of the Core Location function of the iPhone to show you photos on Flickr that were taken nearby wherever you are.  That’s neat on a 1st gen iPhone with only loosely triangulated location info, but add the 3G’s GPS in there, and you can get pretty precise.  The first time I used the feature, I was in a neighborhood bar, and the first photo that popped up was taken right inside that same bar near where I was sitting.  Neat.
Apple has also made plenty of changes to the core software on the phone, which are all well-covered elsewhere, but I did want to mention Apple’s new Remote app, which lets you remotely³ access and control your iTunes library and/or your AppleTV with your iPhone.  I’ve used this extensively, and it is a killer app.
The software still lacks a copy/paste function⁴, which is annoying but tolerable.  And while it works very nicely with MobileMe and push services, it still does not synchronize text notes, which is annoying and intolerable.

The hardware.
Okay, here’s where I’m going to gripe just a little. Yes, I’m admittedly an Apple fanboy, and yes, I loved my 1st generation iPhone, and yes, I also love my brand new one.  But I can’t help but feel that the build quality of the unit isn’t exactly what it could (or should) be.  I got my first iPhone on Day One last year, and loved it.  I never put it in a case, and it always stayed in my front jeans pocket.  For almost an entire year, it stayed in great shape, provided that I blew the speaker holes and headset jack out with compressed air from time to time, and polished it with a dab of cleaner and a soft cloth.  The edges of the phone were all perfecly flush; it felt like one whole piece of hardware carved out of something else.  But the new unit has some sharp edges on it – the new metal buttons feel sharp and rough, and there is one continuous sharp edge where the polycarbonate back meets the chrome front bezel.  Overall it makes for a much less smooth tactile experience in my hand.  This new phone feels like a manufactured device, rather than an organic thing.  I know that’s being somewhat nitpicky, considering the volume of iPhone production now must be orders of magnitude beyond what it was for the very first phones to roll off the lines last June.  But I guess I expected a little more attention to the physical quality of manufacture, even if it is now a commodity item.

Overall impression.
All that being said, I must say that the iPhone 3G is in every conceivable way the best piece of telephony hardware I have ever used or owned⁵.  I’ve used a lot of SonyEricsson phones and even a [cough] BlackBerry at one point, and while they each did some things well, none of them did anything consistently well.  The 3G doesn’t do everything for everyone, but it does everything I need and want it to do.  I’m not an enterprise user, so I’m not going to be one of the BlackBerry users who bitches that the iPhone doesn’t have this or that business app available.  As a freelancer it’s a device that I can mold to my work style, rather than the other way around.  Also, Mobile Safari is simply the best browser implementation on any mobile device, which in my opinion makes up for any other shortcomings.  Need I say more?

This is from the Featured 3rd Party Downloads pane today:

I mean, really.  I know it’s childish of me to even point it out, but if I were the developer, I wouldn’t be happy about it.

I used that model for years, from my Mac IIci right up until the time I got my first Mac with USB inputs (an original blue and white G3, maybe? I don’t remember for sure).  Every Mac I’ve owned since then has come with its own keyboard², which I’ve used, with varying degrees of pleasure and productivity.

I’ll admit that I never paid too much attention to the quality of the keyboards I was using.  Well, probably I did, because I sure bitched a lot about some of them.  But I never actually did anything about it until fairly recently.

When I got my first metal-cased Powerbook, I fell in love with the keyboard.  It fit my hands just right, it gave just enough tactile feedback without being too “clicky” on one end or too squishy on the other.  By the time I upgraded last year to a new MacBook Pro, I was doing most of my work on the portable machine and not doing as much on the Mac Pro in my office, mainly because I was much more productive on the keyboard of the laptop.  I tried replacing the stock Mac Pro keyboard — with its huge chunky finger-numbing keys — with a couple of models that seemed similar to the tactile characteristics of my laptop, but never found one I really liked.  I tried a MacAlly, and I think maybe a Kensington, but neither really did the trick.  They had function keys in weird places, and one of them didn’t have any USB inputs on it.  Besides, they were just butt ugly³.

Then one day I was tooling around in the Apple Store, and started typing on one of the new aluminum extended keyboards.  Wow.  It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest thing to the feel of typing on my laptop.  I walked out of the store with one, and now I can shift work between the laptop and desktop and not have that jarring feel from switching keyboards.

During the podcast, John and Dan mention that they would be happy to buy any new or new-ish Apple Extended Keyboard II’s that we might have lying around.  I remembered that I do in fact have one, in its original box, and barely used.  I bought it right before I got a G3 years ago, and it’s just sitting in storage.  At first I thought of offering it up to them, but I might just try using it again.

I’ve been playing with creating an Automator workflow and Photoshop actions to create iPhone wallpapers.  A few samples are above.  If you’d like to use any of them, you can download them here.

Some people deploy elaborate project-management systems to make sure they get everything done. Others just jot down their day’s tasks on the nearest scrap of paper. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Yeah, that’s me.  My personal productivity management system (ahem) consists mostly of a complex arrangement of sticky notes, colored index cards, iCal, and my iPhone.  I’ve been using the app for nearly two weeks, and it has been fairly good in freeing me from the Tyranny of Colored Bits of Paper.  But at heart I’m not a “GTD” person, and that’s made the learning curve a little difficult for me – it’s been hard to mold the app to my non-linear needs since it’s built around the GTD system.

More fundamentally, OmniFocus is not a simple program. It requires some learning and practice to really get adept at using it. It’s certainly possible to get a quick, simple list of the things you need to do today—but that isn’t the program’s default view. If you want a quick, unobtrusive way to keep track of your tasks, OmniFocus is too much.

That pretty much sums up where I’m at with OmniFocus.  I’ve had some success using it, and it goes well beyond the super-simple “To Do” structure built into OS X, but if I’m not using its full capabilities in a GTD way, I’m not sure I can justify the $80 pricetag.