Mike Industries

Given how pathetic the new iPhone 3G’s battery life is, and given that Apple recommends you essentially castrate your device in order to get more hours out of it, I have an idea for an app that would make the castration process both quicker and easily reversible:

An app that sits on your home screen and does nothing but turn a set of things on and off.

The app doesn’t even need to launch. Press it once and Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G, Location Services, and Push email all turn on. Press it again and they all turn off. Simple. Perhaps there are even three states to the button where the middle state is configurable.

With the above app, the process of going from power-sucking battery-hog to power-conserving battery-miser would take one-click.

Without the above app, here’s what it takes:

1. Click on Settings
2. Click on wifi
3. Slide wifi slider to off
4. Click on Settings Back button
5. Click on Fetch New Data
6. Slide Push slider to off
7. Click on Settings Back button
8. Click on General
9. Slide Location Services slider to off
10. Click on Bluetooth
11. Slide Bluetooth slider to off
12. Click on General Back button
13. Click on Network
14. Slide Enable 3G slider to off
15. Click Home button to get back to main screen

15 steps! That is crazy.

I wouldn’t even might having my iPhone in conserve mode 90% of the time if it were easy to switch out on demand, but it isn’t. I’m not sure if iPhone developers have access to system settings like this, but if they do, this would make a great app. If not, it would also make a great app… Apple!

I’ve spent a bit of time over the last month designing a new blog that I’ll be launching soon, and in doing so, I’ve become aware of some design and coding habits which, when put together, clearly compromise a bit of a “design signature”. If you’ve designed more than five sites in your site, you likely have a design signature too, although it’s probably different than most other designers and coders you know. You may not even know you have it, but you do.

Here’s part of what makes up my design signature:

• I start with a CSS reset
• For column layouts, I float every column (usually left but sometimes both left and right)
• I use the clearfix class to clear all of my containers
• I use dotted underlines for body-copy links that change to solid underlines on hover, and no underlines for links that appear within navigational lists
• I use desaturated colors for visited links
• I employ fixed-width centered layouts using a container div, auto margins, and a center text-align on the body

I almost can’t even think about producing a page template until all of these elements are in place, and no design would feel right to me without them. Additionally, I know the browser implications of them so well that I scarcely have to even test in IE anymore.

Do you have any design signatures of your own? If so, what are they and how do they affect your work?

At the risk of turning this into an all food-recommendation blog, my girlfriend found the best potato chips ever at the store the other day. They are called Flat Earth Baked Fruit Crisps and they are the best thing since Sun Chips. In fact, they make Sun Chips taste like dirt.

The only flavor I’ve tried so far is Peach Mango Paradise and they taste like no other chip out there. Made of rice, potato, apple, peach, and mango, they are flavorful without being salty… a rarity for a chip. There’s also a half serving of fruit in every ounce and no trans fat.

Although I’ve only seen them so far at one store in Seattle (Thriftway), the Flat Earth folks have a handy store locator on their site in order to help you find a bag. Apparently, it’s a Frito Lay brand so it should be widely available.

These are game-changing chips. Seriously.

Although I’m enjoying this year’s Olympics more than any since 1984 so far, it’s pretty obvious that gymnastics judging is at best, flawed beyond belief, and at worst, completely fixed. How these judges rationalize giving 8.8 scores to routines without any major flaws when their peers are giving 9.3s is beyond me. I’m looking at you, Argentinian judge.

Thankfully, we have world class athletes in our country breaking barriers outside the strong arm of the Beijing Olympic judging committee. Case in point, “buddysteve”, the first ever Men’s Uneven Bar World Champion who risks life, limb, and package in this video to prove to the world that the uneven bars is not just a women’s event. Go Steve:

Photo by Sunny in L.A.

A full month after the release of the iPhone 3G, I still see lines of people outside of Apple Stores around Seattle waiting to get their hands on one. Although the new, lengthy activation process is a waste of time for customers, it sure is good advertising for Apple. Having lines out front of your store tends to make passers by curious, and curiosity often leads to attraction.

After two weeks with my iPhone 3G, however, I must admit that I’m not as happy as I was with the original iPhone. In fact, if my original iPhone didn’t have an annoyingly quiet earpiece and speakerphone (should have gotten it replaced during the one year warranty period), I probably would have returned the 3G model or not even upgraded to it in the first place.

Now, granted the original iPhone set probably the highest bar for any electronic device I’ve ever owned, but here is what is maddening about the 3G version:

1. Battery, battery, battery. When Steve Jobs mentioned a year ago that battery life was keeping Apple from releasing a 3G version, he wasn’t kidding. Unfortunately, they released one anyway, and now even people like me who use a measly 5-20 minutes of talk time a day can barely go sunup to sundown on a single charge. It’s crippling and it’s frankly embarrassing, in my opinion.
2. In order to mitigate the battery life issue, I have now turned off Location Services, Push email, wifi, and Bluetooth, as well as dimming the screen. It’s kind of like buying a Porsche and replacing the engine with a Hyundai to get better gas mileage. Pretty ridiculous.
3. The 3G AT&T plans are more expensive, which sucks, but at least one can rationalize the data part by remembering that you are getting faster speeds. However, what explains 1500 text messages going from $6 to $15 a month??? Text messages? Ten cents a message as part of a plan is highway robbery. And considering most people won’t hit 1500 on the dot, it often times ends up being much more per message than that. Ok, it’s actually a penny a message.
4. The shape of the phone has changed ever so subtly such that I can’t even use my original iPhone dock with it. Apple doesn’t include a dock with the iPhone 3G and charges $30 for their new “compatible” dock. This is an especially low blow.
5. In my mind, neither the white model nor the black model look as nice as the old silver model and I don’t consider plastic an upgrade over metal.
6. Location Services takes quite a long time to triangulate your location and often doesn’t work. I guess since I was forced to turn it off, I shouldn’t really care anyway.
7. I live near downtown Seattle and a good portion of the time, I’m still on Edge.
8. There’s a $18 “upgrade” fee for no apparent reason to switch phones.

In the end, I’d be willing to overlook every item on that list if it weren’t for the battery life issue. I’m not opposed to charging my phone every single night but when you have to think about charging it even during the day, that’s just poor product planning. I’d gladly accept an extra few millimeters in thickness if it meant a 50% bigger battery.

So in closing, I would say that if you already have a first generation iPhone you’re happy with, by all means stick with it. When the iPhone 3G Rev B comes out in several months and sports an acceptable battery, you’ll be happy you’re not stuck with the “old” 3G model.

Don’t fall into the early adopter trap with this particular product release. Sometimes we Apple fanboys are such a captive audience that we ignore the flaws of the items we purchase. And by sometimes, I of course mean always.

The Philadelphia Inquirer will now delay the online publishing of many of their stories until their printed newspaper is already on people’s doorsteps.

This strikes me as the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a product on the decline by making a product on the rise intentionally worse?

Mmmmkay.

Why not just shut your website down entirely so that the only way to get Inquirer content is by paying for a paper to be produced and delivered to you?

A couple of weeks ago, I ditched coffee. I was generally a one-iced-mocha-in-the-morning guy with the occasional refresher towards the end of the day.

Bad.

Coffee as part of a routine is kind of like cigarettes as part of a routine. It’s not exactly good for you, and once you’re used to it, you need it just to feel “normal”.

Quitting coffee, however, doesn’t mean I never want an occasional dose of caffeine. There are all sorts of alternatives out there like Red Bull, Jolt, hot tea, or iced tea, but I think I found my favorite:

Hi-Ball Sparkling Energy Water

Hi-Ball tastes like San Pellegrino or Perrier, is available in plain or lightly flavored, and contains no sugar, sucralose, or other sweeteners. Its caffeine comes naturally from guarana berries and it also contains 120% of your daily B vitamins (whatever those do).

So if you’re looking for a reasonably harmless caffeinated drink to try, see if you can find Hi-Ball at your local store. Most places around Seattle don’t have it but I’ve found a few that do.

While out on the lake this weekend, I came across this sign:

So nice. I love how the neighbors not only call out the homeowner but the architect as well. Wrecking a neighborhood is a team process.

Here’s a shot of the offending house. It’s tough to tell how overbearing the concrete wall is from a straight-on angle, but it’s pretty awful:

UPDATE: Below is a better (worse) shot of the prison wall –

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could glance quickly through the beverage aisle and tell the diet beverages from the good beverages? We’ve had such a great system for so long: if it says “diet” or “sugar free” it’s DIET, and if it doesn’t, it has some form of super tasty sugar derivative in it, whether it be cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, or something else awesome.

I used to be so good at telling the two drinks apart.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself repeatedly hoodwinked by the chemically synthesized impostor known as sucralose… or “Splenda”, its Christian name. The substance is 600 times sweeter than table sugar, and although it’s not as bad as saccharin, aspartame, or any other past cancer-powder, it’s still not sugar, and it still tastes like crap.

As such, I humbly request of beverage companies that you please quit trying to be sly about these DIET drinks and label them just as previous DIET drinks were labeled: with the letters D.I.E.T.

When I see those letters, I know that purchase of the beverage in question will result in palate-shriveling aftertaste and lack of drinking satisfaction. When I see those letters, I know to move right along.

Instead, however, these sucralose-tainted drinks often use small, subtle terms like “lower sugar”, “lower calorie”, and sometimes no marquee labeling at all. This is confusing as there are plenty of legitimate “lower sugar” drinks on the market that simply removed some of the sugar (see Paul Newman’s Lightly Sweetened Lemonade). Often times, you need to read the entire label to know the difference. And to make matters worse, a lot of these drinks contain sugar near the top of the ingredient list and sucralose near the end… so it’s not even sufficient to just “look for the sugar” anymore.

“Noni Berry” for metabolism and “Goji Punch” for immunity. Can you tell which one is the diet one?

To be clear, I have nothing against sucralose itself. It could very well be the best artificial sweetener ever invented. I just resent that marketers, by not clearly labeling it, have blurred the representation of what is and what isn’t a diet drink; and as a front-line soldier in the weekly quest to discover and sample new beverages, I’m just sick of getting hit by all this repackaged, remarketed diet shrapnel.

UPDATE: Literally the very nanosecond I pressed the Publish button just now, a Splenda television commercial came on. It’s everywhere.

True or false: Most major news organizations (e.g. The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ESPN, etc) would be better off running their entire online publishing operations through a modified blogging platform (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Newsvine, or a home-grown solution) than through an enterprise CMS.

In other words, in five years, will mainstream news sites essentially be collections of individual writer blogs tied together mainly with section indexes and cross-linking?