Combined together with a few good apps, I can get most things done, from email to IM to programming. With each of these I can do the majority of thigns I would for work. This makes for a nice way to concentrate on my job while hanging out in the park (with WiFi of course) or at the coffee shop, without having to lug the laptop around. At present all of my work lives on an internal server, which means once I connect through the VPN and then via the iSSH app (Which I have found to be the best SSH app in the app store) I can connect to the remote server and access all of my work. Using Screen (if you are a linux/unix user and don’t know screen, look it up, you’ll love it) carefully configured to work exactly as I want, I can pick up on my work exactly where I left off. Should I get disconnected from the internet unexpectedly or need to shutdown for a while, screen automaticlly saves my place where I left off. This technique has even been useful while in the office when going to your standard boring meeting if I want to continue working on something right from my iPad.

Add in the native email app which allows me to stay responsive as needed, and then of course IM. I use BeejiveIM (pronounced beehive) for IM, it is a fantastic IM app with a variety of options available for configuration to make it the perfect app. You can connect to a variety of services, just about every service out there. And since we use it pretty heavily for communication at the office this is a great way for me to stay in touch. And of course, don’t forget the native Music app or Pandora or Spotify. These apps provide me with the musical entertainment I need to stimulate my mind and keep working. I use this together with my bluetooth headphones which keeps me completely wireless and productive.

Working like this is even better now with iOS 5.0 which has the notification center, that means that I no longer have notifications interrupting my work, but rather displaying a small banner at the top of the screen while keeping me working. The only down side to working like this is that there is a lot of functionality missing (that I hope  brings to us in the future) for working with a bluetooth keyboard. For example there is no “send” button on the keyboard, that means if you are in iMessage or sending an email, after you are done typing the email or iMessage, you will still need to touch the screen to send. Navigating between apps must still be done via touching the screen. But most bluetooth keyboards do come with extra keys for going to your home screen and controlling your music. You can also use a lot of key combinations available on your laptop such as command-c and command-v for copy and paste. Here is the keyboard that I use and recommend above all others: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=logitech+bluetooth+keyboard&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=9528725514121470562&sa=X&ei=g9z8TtrxMOf30gG9m9i8Ag&ved=0CHsQ8wIwBw

Head on over to Settings -> General -> Keyboard and down to the Shortcuts section, here you can create short cuts for entire phrases. Unfortunately  Does now allow the inclusion of carriage returns in the outputed text so if you would like to have the in your signature you will need to create multiple signatures. Here is how it works for me:

Shortcut ———–> Phrase
sig0 —————> Thanks,
sig1 —————> Paul B. Yorke
sig2 —————> myemail@email.com
sig3 —————> myotheremail@email.com
sig4 —————> — Sent From my iPad — (or iPhone)

Then when typing an email I simply pick and choose which aspects of the signature I want. It is a little hard to remember which shortcut represents which phrase but after a while you get the hang. I also may name my signature email portions as: sigehome or sigework as a means of easily remembering. Then simply add on the compents of the signature you want.

This is a little more work than I’d like to have to do but it is certainly a lot better than having to type it all out every time.

Unfortunately, the successors of Mr. Ford have not been so kind to his name. They took a great company and turned it into one with a bad reputation, easily one of the worst automobile companies in the world today. Likewise, the good Edison did for us is now marred by the money grubbing big money fat cats that monopolize power in the name of Edison. The question is, how will history look upon Mr. Jobs and the company he co-founded, a hundred years from now. Henry Ford is still today thought of as a great man, an inventor and a great contributor to society. His invention and innovation in the world of automobiles was by no means great compared to todays vehicles, but it was made so that all of us could have one, allowing society to gain access to something held back. Some may argue that Ford may not have really even invented the vehicle but rather built upon the designs of others. But there is no doubt that he took that invention and made it available to all.

As word of Steve Jobs’ death spread, there were a lot of comparisons likening Mr. Jobs to Ford, Einstein, Edison and others. And while each of these men have held their place in history for their many inventions and their greatness, it seems to me that Steve Jobs did so in much a different way than the others. Most of the others simply ‘invented’ things that were due for their time. Had Edison not invented the light bulb, Tesla surely would have and perhaps it would have been better. But much like Ford, Jobs brought us technology that was only available to the few and made it available to the masses, such as the Personal Computer which at the time was not available to ordinary Joes and Janes.

With Steve Jobs, I feel like he took the technology of the day, thought outside of the box and figured out what he could do to make it better, changing how we think and feel about technology. The iPod, iPad and iPhone each great devices, without them the world would have continued; that is to say I don’t think they were invented merely because it was their time like the lightbulb and the motor vehicle was. But with them, we now get the wonderfulness of having these devices apart of our lives, the convenience and ease they bring as well as the pleasure. I also think that without Steve Jobs, we would have missed his unique take on these devices which make them so much more superior to all other devices currently on the market. Without Steve Jobs we might all be stuck using Zunes or Androids today, what a cold desperate world that would be!

I truly hope that no matter what the future holds for the  corporation, that Steve Jobs can be remembered as I do today, for the greatness that he brought to all of us, for everything he did, for changing our lives forever in a way that was while, not needed, something that today I cannot live without.

For the past several months, my home button (on my iPhone 4) hasn’t been working properly. It started off rather innocuous, just behaving a bit odd, randomly, and not really reproducible. But as time went on it got to the point that it only worked (actions requiring pressing the home button) one out of every 10 or so attempts.  This made certain tasks down right difficult if not impossible, such as screenshots, working the multi-task bar and other things requiring the home button use. For a while, having the beta on my device, I wasn’t sure if this was just a bug in the software or if it was a real hardware problem. After the public release of iOS 5, I settled on it being a hardware problem that was quite the annoyance.  For those of you experiencing this problem, please read on there is hope!

After doing a bit of research online I found that this problem is fairly ubiquitous and actually can be found as far back as right after the launch of the iPhone 4. The solutions I am seeing online generally tend to be revolving around going to Apple and having them replace or repair your iPhone. Not only will this cost you but there is also a good chance you may be without your iPhone for a period of time. Luckily this is *NOT* the answer.

As it turns out this is a software issue, and I found a solution online that seems fairly random but I can tell you that it truly does work. After months of dealing with this problem, I have finally fixed it on my iPhone and am very relieved. I have no idea why this works but it does. To fix it on your iPhone simply do the following:

1. Plug your iPhone into a power source (I assume any power source will work, I plugged it into a computer that did not have my iTunes library and this solution worked.)
2. While plugged in, hold down the home button until Voice Activation turns on.
3. That’s it! Your iPhone is now fixed.

For some reason this resets the home button on your iPhone, it is not clear to me WHY your home button would need to be reset, but there it is folks. This worked for me and I am very happy to have my home button back again.  Feel free to leave comments below about your experience with this issue.

Be sure to upgrade to iOS 5.0 prior to installing these as most (if not all) require iOS 5.

• iOS 5 *Now Available! Update via iTunes 10.5
• iTunes 10.5
• iCloud
• Find My Friends (iPad and iPhone)
• iOS Airport Utility (iPad and iPhone)
• Cards
• TV Update for iOS 5 *Now Available Update via your TV

This update, a free update for most iPhones, iPods and iPads, (the exception is iPhones older than 3GS which do not support this update) is slated to be released later today and is by far the most incredible, feature rich update to the iOS devices thus far. Of course I say this every year with every new major update but the truth of the matter is they just keep getting better and better. The impending release of the iPhone 4S this coming Friday is relatively small news in my opinion compared to this release as virtually every new feature it sports is because of iOS5. Per usual  has worked long and hard to provide us with great new features and show us clearly why they are the best of the best when it comes to smart phones. This OS was in beta a lot longer than they normally do for iOS, perhaps because of all the great new features that really needed to be tested. Per usual I have been with it since the beginning. For those of you wondering what happened to all the app reviews this summer, that is a major contributor. Given that I had the beta I felt it unfair for the most part to give negative app reviews for issues which were likely the fault (or at least possibly the fault) of the beta os. Now that it is finally here, go on over to iTunes and install iOS5, you won’t regret it!

Upon announcing iOS5,  boasted over 200 new features. A lot of them are outlined in Apple’s documentation for this release, a lot of them had to be found by scouring the front and backend. But there are definitely a few key characteristics to these updates that I wanted to touch upon. This release has had a major focus on separating you from your PC, this is relatively important to keep in mind throughout as for some of you it may mean completely changing the way you use your devices. For others of you this will be a very welcome update. Now remember that despite the changes to separate you from that telethered connection, you still have the option of going back and doing things the old way. A lot of the major features of this update create a wireless environment in which you can work from here on out. This includes things like iCloud auto downloading purchased apps, books and songs as well as nightly iCloud backups. It also includes wireless syncing of your device with your pc and wireless AirPlay Mirroring for devices that support it (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S only). All of these features are very nice to have, but they’ve taken it a step further by now having a process for completely setting up your new device without a PC and for receiving future iOS updates over the air.  has done a fantastic job of making all of this work as smoothly as possible. With this update, all users automatically get a free iCloud account which provides wireless syncing of contacts, calendars and bookmarks as well as a free @me.com email address. For those of you with MobileMe already you can easily convert that account over to an iCloud account.

My advice to you is to setup your iCloud account with the same username as you currently use for iTunes and then migrate your existing MobileMe account into the new MobileMe account. The process will allow you to keep your existing MobileMe email address. This will allow you to more easily keep things together as the iCloud account will be used for everything from iTunes to iMessage to backups and data storage. Each new iCloud account comes with 5GB of free storage, but paying MobileMe users will automatically get 25GB for free their first year with a cost of $40 per year for future years, a much better price than the previous $99 or $149 for family accounts. iCoud is a significant part of the release today but certainly not all that is to come. iCloud has been great for me to backup my devices (and restore from an iCloud backup) as well as storing documents and sharing between devices etc. For example, in iWorks I can edit a document on my iPhone and see that change almost instantly on my iPad or Mac. Likewise with photo stream (an iCloud feature) any pictures I take on one device are automatically sent to all other devices linked to that account.

There are many other features but I won’t get into all of them here as there are plenty of places to find them. I may do another blog post just dedicated to listing all the new features I have personally found, there are many. From changes to the keyboard (allowing emoji for all and having keyboard shortcuts, split keyboard on iPad) to the new iMessage service which allows you to send an ‘SMS’ to all iOS devices. This update is significant and I recommend it to all.

To get started make sure you have iTunes 10.5 installed, you can get it from the software updates section on your mac or by going to http://iTunes.com and downloading it. Once installed, update to iOS5 by connecting your iPhone and clicking the update button. You may also notice a release of 10.7.2 for your Mac which will be important for you to use iCloud with your Mac. Enjoy!

There certainly is not a schedule laid out that  is beholden to follow, nor is there a need for them to meet the demands of the rumor mills or the general public, but I really do think that with the expectation that they built up with such a later-than-normal release, that this phone needed to be good, really good. I expected something that would knock my socks off and unfortunately that’s not what I found. Some of the new features, Siri in particular are very impressive. But is that enough to get me to upgrade? That has yet to be determined. The mere fact that I, an  fanboy, a guy who has bought every version of every iPad, iPhone, iPod ever made, is questioning whether or not I need or want to upgrade this time around is indicative of a greater problem I fear. The issue at this point as I see it is not a matter of the iPhone not being good enough, I am likely to be an iPhone fan for life, but rather are they doing enough to keep up ontop of the competition? Is competition even still alive?

Take the iPad as an example, there is not a single tablet on the market or announced (kindle fire included) that can come close to competing with the iPad. This is not because the iPad is too great for any other company to compete with, but rather in this case, a matter of no company having the ability/wherewithal/patents to compete with . Consequently we end up with mediocrity. Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad and could not live without it, but why haven’t we seen more innovation yet? Similarly with the iPhone, there hasn’t been a single device that can compete on the same level. Android attracts the same people who would settle for the likes of Internet Explorer simply because it’s free and designed with the ignorant in mind. There is no innovation there because there is no money when you market your product to the technologically inept. The iPhone stands alone in the smartphone industry and that stifles innovation and prevents progress.

So is this enough for me to upgrade this time around? I haven’t decided yet, I will soon. I am leaning towards no at this point in time. Siri is a very nice feature, but the additions and changes made to the iPhone 4S are not changes that are very compelling for me. I am satisfied with the speed as well as the camera. I know they could be better but these days anything that would need a better CPU I’d probably do on an iPad anyway. I am interested in hearing from each of you so please be sure and drop me a line.

iOS Release Date: October 12, 2011
iPhone 4S Release Date: October 14, 2011
Pre-orders for the iPhone 4 begin on October 7, 2011

The new features list are mostly those you find in the details of iOS 5 including a new notification center and iMessage as well as several nice new additions such as Reminders (location based reminders as well as time based), Family and Friends a Find my iPhone like feature for finding friends and family with a lot of built in security and a new greeting card app to send greeting cards via USPS ($2.99 per card pays for the card and the postage). But the iPhone 4S itself also comes with a set of new features specific to that device:

The outside of the iPhone will look virtually identical to the iPhone 4 with small (very minor differences), the majority of the changes will be found on the inside. The iPhone will have a dual-core A5 chip including a dual core graphics processor. Presumably more memory, allowing for a much much better game play experience. An all new and improved camera offering better zoom and better image quality with true 1080p video. The new camera is 8mp.

And of course the big feature of the day is Siri your new “humble” personal assistant. She can do just about thing for you as long as it can be done on your iPhone. If you need it, just tell Siri and she’ll be sure to handle that for you straightaway. Need to schedule an appointment? Change your alarm? Get the time in Paris, France? All of it, just ask Siri and she’ll have an answer for you.

This iPhone is definitely going to sparkle and bring a lot into the industry. Is it enough for you to plop down $200? What features did you want that are missing? Let us know!