Rui CarmoGood times are being had for a change, mostly because the weather is markedly improved over the past couple of months. Entirely too much has been going on, though, especially at work where I’ve been doing some juggling acts. Those take their toll, though, and I hardly need other reasons to spend a good while offline at home.
Of course, thanks to the comforts of the modern age, I end up pulling out my iPod or iPhone to pipe some music to my speakers, check the news or fire off a personal note every now and then, so I am hardly offline in the full sense of the word – but the intent is there, and the main consequences or lack thereof (i.e., my creative output’s marked reduction) as well.
Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t try to do stuff. Photography, for instance, is an on and off thing for me these days, and since it’s now mostly kid-related, pretty much none of it pops up online. Add to that my disillusionment with MobileMe’s online galleries (which you still can’t password protect properly), and you get even less updates.
So I’m now fooling around with Facebook (of all things) and trying to figure out if it can give me the kind of fine control I want for publishing photos to friends and/or family, even though I seem to have pretty much no family there.
I still think it’s mostly crap as a UI and social medium, but I’ve seen worse (in fact, much, much worse) of late and pretty much everyone I know (and most of the people I care about outside family) are there and iPhoto’09 didn’t mess up publishing to it nearly as much as to MobileMe (shame on you, Apple), so it’s likely to see some action.
Also, Facebook seems to have infected pretty much every mobile platform I use or care about – the iPhone client is autistically superb (in the sense that it is utterly brilliant in what it knows how to do best, but somewhat dense in most other regards), the mobile version sort of works in most browsers, and the new BlackBerry client rates slightly better in the “we did it just because we could but we didn’t really mean it to be useful” scale.
It also scratches one of my particular itches: four years and score ago there was no universal way to post photos from a mobile to the Net, and now you can do it without gritting your teeth.
And since we’re talking about mobile phones, I’ve been feeling the need to go back to a BlackBerry for a while again. Wait, wait… there’s good reason.
I’ve written before that the Pearl was the last phone I’d ever wear, and were it not for the iPhone’s amazing user experience, I’d probably have stuck with it until now.
Sadly, RIM hasn’t done much along those lines of late (i.e., small and with SureType), and as such I’ve been toying with an 8900 – undoubtedly the best BlackBerry ever made – and yes, I’ve used both the Bold and the Storm to sometimes painful extents, but I prefer something smaller, lighter, and with a vastly superior battery life, even if it’s not 3G (something that I can put up with for a few months).
Before you ask, Android is very nice1, but it doesn’t feel all there for me yet – it’s a great start, but I’d rather use something that just works, even if it seems more limited – after all, like I’ve always said, it’s not about what features a gadget has, it’s about what you can achieve with it – and right now, I need to achieve loads of work-related stuff.
I can do most of it on my iPhone without qualms, but I don’t want to get too used to a single mobile platform, regardless who’s behind it. And besides the improvements to iPhone, I’ll have to deal with oodles of new devices soon, so a reset is clearly in order to appreciate them better.
Think of it as cleansing the palate by munching coffee beans, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how it’s going to feel for me.
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1 Yeah, I can now own up to having an Android device, what with it being available in the main European territories now. No, I won’t mention anything that isn’t public already