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There are so many great applications out there to choose from for any mobile device, whether you use a Blackberry, iPhone, Android or the new Palm Pre. If your device is new to hit the market there might not be as many options to choose from yet, but that will change quickly! One thing I love being able to check on mobile devices is the weather. There are plenty of weather applications geared for sailing, flying and other specific activities, but I like to know what is going to happen in my city for the next few days, and also other parts of the world.

One of the best weather applications I’ve seen so far has been Weatherbug. Improved since its days as a desktop application, Weatherbug is now offered on the iPhone, Google Android and the Blackberry Storm. The basic Weatherbug is an ad-sponsored free application that has plenty enough features to keep me happy. I get an unlimited number of locations showing 7-day forecasts, in-depth current conditions and weather superimposed on a map that I can adjust. There is also a paid version called Weatherbug Elite for those that need more sophistication and data.

Easier than free is the basic Weather application that comes with the iPhone. Adding and deleting cities is simple. I enjoy how quickly I can scroll left or right and see if a location is light or dark, rainy or sunny and the current temperature. If I look down the screen I get the forecast for the next 5 days also. It has become part of my daily routine to quickly check the forecast and what the weather is in other parts of the world. As much as I might be envious of Boca Raton or Sydney, I smile when I see that my friends on the east coast are buried in snow!

I’m not sure how long a novelty usually lasts but one that keeps going like the Energizer Bunny is the Map feature on the iPhone. There are people out there driving down the same road they’ve driven for years, who now confirm their known location with the GPS feature in the iPhone. “Yes, I am exactly where I already knew I was, and I can confirm it!” If the GPS gave the wrong location, I’m concerned that my kid’s generation might one day question whether the house they’ve lived in for so long might actually be where they live! “It sure looks like my house, but the GPS says…”

We are on family vacation right now and this one is a bit different. For the first time, we are traveling in an RV. At 30 feet long, it drives like a 12,000 lb marshmallow. It’s a bit old and the turning radius is not as good as a Boeing 737, but I’m optimistic it will get us to some great places of nature. Unlike the family van, it doesn’t have a GPS. We are navigating with a paper map - very old school. This is fine with me, as I’ve been looking forward to an old fashioned family trip. I was rather pleased that our older RV didn’t include a Satellite TV as I really wanted some good quality family time.

Of course there were a few items we brought for “comfort” that included the Satellite Radio, my laptop, an iPhone (actually two), a Blackberry (I’m still transferring contact info), digital cameras and the kids brought their Nintendo DS’s, which we didn’t realize until we checked to see why it was so quiet in the back of the RV. I really had no intention to use the iPhone, except to check for messages at the beginning and end of each day. The maps we had didn’t give much detail so I did end up using the Map on the iPhone to find the way to the first RV site we had pre-booked, which I also did on the iPhone or the Blackerry… I don’t remember which. I was surprised when we arrived at the site and they asked us which hook-up package we wanted. Water, sewer, 30 amp power, cable and Wi-Fi were some of the options. The site had a small restaurant, showers, laundry and a pool. While the kids were asking “are we there yet” I was wondering “have we even left yet?”

Finding our second RV site became somewhat problematic because it was the start of a weekend. Most places were full and some had offices that were closed Saturdays and Sundays. While we traveled, I entered about half a dozen locations in the Weather option on the iPhone and we choose our next area based on the weather forecasts. I was able to find an RV site on the web and I called and made a reservation. I entered the location on the iPhone and got a route and ETA for when we would arrive. Thanks to some traffic cams, we were able to avoid an accident on a bridge in one city. That saved us some time. Most importantly, I desperately needed a Latte at one point while driving. A simple search for Starbucks in the Map Application and I drove to the nearest red pin. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the iPhone a necessity on a trip like this but it helped us enjoy our time a little more with fewer hassles.

My idea of a long family road trip, like Clark Griswold and his family did in the 1983 movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, without any of the new techno gadgets was a bit unrealistic. So far we haven’t let technology interfere with quality time, but we have found a way to let it supplement our experience in a positive way. At one point while driving on a long straight section of highway, the song Holiday Road (them song for Vacation) started playing on the radio. I looked to my left wondering if I might see Christie Brinkley driving past me in a red Ferrari…. “CLARK!!!”

For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to start learning about iPhone code before actually knowing how to work the iPhone itself. I was deeply submerged in the iPhone SDK (software development kit) that Apple provided me, learning about Cocoa Touch, SQ Lite, nib files and Open GL, when I realized I still didn't know how to access email on the iPhone 3G.

I was behind the 8-ball, the football, the medicine ball and any other type of ball you could possibly imagine. The cart was WELL ahead of the horse... me being the horse and the cart being the rest of society. I needed a crash course (I never cared for the that saying) on how to work the basics of the iPhone and get the most out of the iPhone stock and add-on applications. Being too embarrassed to be caught reading anything that included "...for dummies!" I searched for the best iPhone book available. I finally came across a book called My iPhone (Second Edition), written by Brad Miser. The book is easy to read, unlike most manuals, and has plenty of pictures that helps you follow along. Having an iPhone beside you helps too.

My iPhone starts by giving a tour of the iPhone and it's many features. Following the book you set up your iTunes, Contacts, Email, Bluetooth, Web, Calendar and everything else you might need. The book does a great job of explaining how to use your iPhone and make the most out of what it does so well. My iPhone also points out what the iPhone doesn't do well at by displaying in a red block the title It's Not All Good.

Being just one evolutionary step ahead of the ...for dummies level, and with the knowledge of how to access my email, I must now gallop ahead in search of my cart!

Apple released the latest iPhone software package today called 3.0. We’ve been hearing about the details from Beta users since Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) finished in San Jose last week. Before applauding or complaining about the following new features that 3.0 gives you, keep in mind the price is right. The Apple iPhone OS 3.0 is free!

Cut, Copy and Paste: A great improvement is now being able to Cut, Copy and Paste, even between different applications. You can even use this feature for Internet images. A simple double-tap places two pins around a bubble that you can adjust. Careful when you only want to edit that you don’t open the Cut, Copy and Paste feature accidentally.

Landscape Keyboard: By rotating the iPhone 90°, sideways, you now have landscape view for Mail, Texting, Notes, Safari and SMS. This is basically a mathematical change called rotational transformation, or autorotation, calculated to display horizontally instead of vertically. This is my favorite feature of all, unless I’m trying to type laying down in bed… think about it!

Tethering: Tethering is the ability to use your iPhone as a wireless modem device to connect your computer to the web. Simply attach a USB cable or use Bluetooth. The one caveat being that you must be on at least a 1GB/month plan. Tethering is free until at least December 31st, 2009. Apple will likely introduce a price plan that includes Tethering sometime before 2010. Until then, this is an option instead of purchasing a mobile Internet stick. This is of course, based on carrier availability.

Spotlight Search: No, this isn’t like the flashlight application. Spotlight lets you search your iPhone content and displays the findings in a neat list that is easy to interact with. A swipe in the right direction, literally, brings up Spotlight Search that will peruse your Mail, Music, Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Applications to help you find what you are looking for faster than ever before. This is slick!

Some other improvements you will enjoy on your iPhone thanks to the OS 3.0 software are:

Multimedia Messaging Service, better access to pictures taken with camera, Voice Memos, Shake to Shuffle, an improved Calendar and a peer-to-peer ability for Next Generation iPhone Applications. Apple has even improved the Stock Application, but it won’t improve the stocks performances.

For starters, an ever-increasing number of applications, as games or tools, are becoming available for an ever-increasing number of mobile devices. Whether downloaded to a PC, iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Android or whatever becomes the flavor of the week, there will always be more applications available than any one person could possibly use. But is your current mobile device capable of holding enough applications that you might access on a regular basis?



As an example, the current iPhone 3G can show 9 pages of icons with 16 on each page. That is 144 applications, plus the 4 in the static bar or dock on the bottom of the iPhone. I say “show” because it is possible to load more, but the iPhone will not show the new applications until one of the previous 144 has been deleted. Of course you must have enough memory left to load these applications in the first place, which shouldn’t be difficult with 8 or 16 GB of memory.



How often do we load an application, use it a few times and then forget about it? Even a light user who loads 2 to 3 applications a week on their iPhone would run out of icon space in the first year. The hottest application to hit the download market will likely be somewhere near page 9 as it is the most recent application that we would have downloaded. For these reasons, it is prudent to keep our application icons tidy. Think of it like email. Your mobile device needs a good cleansing once in a while. Remove the unused applications and shuffle the icons around into a system that works for you!



How do we move and remove the iPhone icons you might ask? Since iPhone software 1.1.3, simply tap an icon and hold it until the icons start shaking. While they are shaking you can swap them with other icons and even move them to a different page. Click the small x at the top of the icon to remove the application. A couple of minutes playing with it and you will be an expert.



It might just be time for an application that manages all my applications!

Brad and Dave have been writing about the power of faces in user experience, but are missing the reason they are so powerful. As I said in The Social Cloud, and stressed again last week at Ignite I/O, Douglas Adams got this right 10 years ago:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

Trying to model these trust relationships in the computer is fraught with hubris and failure, but what we can do is associate information with people, and display the information from people we know, with their pictures (and names) next to it. Then, our brains can apply the subtle modelling of trust relationships that they have evolved to do so well.
Making faces bigger onscreen lets us blend the two modes of computation smoothly, and filter and understand the world better through our nuanced understanding of trust.