Apple released the iPhone OS 3.0 software to developers Tuesday. I’ve had a chance to play around with it the last couple days and have been pretty happy with the results. It does offer some nice feature upgrades, but it does it without changing the user experience a whole lot.

When I install beta software on any device, I realize that there could be bugs.  I take a look at the software and see if it will prevent me from doing my daily tasks and are the features worth trying out in testing mode.  With the iPhone I figured if I could still make and receive calls, get my text messages, and use my daily applications like Brightkite and Facebook, then it would be worth installing and seeing what’s new.

I logged into the developer site on Tuesday which was getting hit pretty hard, but after a few attempts I was able to download and install the software successfully on my iPhone 3G.  After initial install it seemed kind of slow, but I think it could have been indexing the content in the phone for searching.  Apple claims there are over 100 new features, but I don’t know all 100 and I think only the ones that really stand out are important to discuss.

The first feature worth noting is the one I just mentioned, search.  If you are on the first page of home screen, sliding to the left or pressing the home button will bring up the search page.  It’s a system wide search and it’s overall pretty quick.  It lists search results categorized by application.

Cut and paste is a big feature people have been waiting for and it works well.  There’s only been a couple of times where I’ve needed to cut and paste things.  For example when someone sends me a text message of an address, it was just a pain in the past having to swap between the Text app and Maps.  Also I noticed the phone being a little smarter with linking by adding more linkable text to items that were previously untappable.

The Text application is now referred to as Messages.  It now supports MMS integrated into the standard text message interface we’re used to seeing and also landscape mode.  It adds a camera icon to the left of the input field and in the settings application you can set the message to have a subject.  I didn’t get to test this feature since most of the people I would send MMS to have iPhones with the existing software or would really not want to pay an MMS fee for something stupid I send them.  I’m not sure if the feature is active on AT&T or even what kind of charges are associated with it.  On my old phones I don’t think I even used the feature and I’m not sure if that will really change on the iPhone.

The Stock application got a minor update.  The bottom pane now has three scrollable sections to show stock information, charts, and news.  The application also supports landscape mode which show stock charts at fullscreen.

Voice Memos is a new app and seems like it would be a cool feature that I don’t ever see myself using.  The app did seem to work though and might be cool for students to record lectures or conduct interviews as long as it doesn’t kill battery life substantially.  I didn’t use it long enough to find out.

I use Evernote on my iPhone and computer for note taking, but it’s worth noting that the Notes application syncs with the computer now.

Mail now works in landscape mode.  I noticed a bug in the UI for my email addresses spanning off the side of the screen.  I think it used to truncate so I’m not sure if thats how it’s supposed to be.  It also adds search which is a huge addition for me.  I get a ton of emails on a daily basis and if I wasn’t looking for something within the last day I’d never find it on the iPhone.

The UI of the Phone app has been slightly  updated.  The recent calls now show phone number type under the name for people in your address book and location information for numbers that aren’t.  The contact screen now has a share contact button where you can email the contact or send via MMS.  I’ve been previously using Easycontact for this task.  The voicemail screen has also been updated to show phone number type.  It’s a small but nice touch.

There were some new features I didn’t test.  I couldn’t test Bluetooth sharing because I don’t have two phones or know anyone else running the 3.0 software yet.  I don’t have stereo Bluetooth headsets so I couldn’t test the stereo audio.  Push notifications are supposed to be in place, but I don’t know any apps that currently support it.  If anyone does, please let me know and I’d be interested in trying that out.  Supposedly the calendar supports subscriptions, but I’ve yet to figure out if it syncs via MobileMe or how I go about adding those calendars in.  The phone has a find me function, but I have no idea what that does.

I did notice a couple of UI bugs and sometimes tapping on the screen gave no response.  It slows the experience, but doesn’t kill it.  All my applications seem to work as they did in the previous OS.  I’m sure this is a work in progress and by the time the final release hits the public it will be much more polished.  I’m also interested in checking out some of the new applications using the iPhone 3.0 SDK.  Overall I’m pretty happy with the update and I think it’s something for iPhone users to look forward to using.

According to USA Today, Southwest Airlines is testing in-flight Wi-Fi scheduled to go live next Monday. It will be using a Satellite based service so it should work over water.

Southwest Airlines is my airline of choice for short flights. I’ve been appreciating the free Wi-Fi in most airports, but in-flight internet access would be great. I’m assuming it will probably be pretty slow, something close to what you get when tethering to a mobile phone. The price seems right if they can get it down to under $10/day. Anything more than that I think I can wait until I land.

I don’t really see myself doing real work on the plane, but it would be nice to be able to access email, surf the internet, update my social networks, and write a quick blog post. I don’t have any trips planned in the near future, but would be interested in hearing responses from those that get a chance to try it out.

I went to login to my Brightkite account and saw that they allow login via Facebook Connect. It’s nice to see that more and more sites are starting to adopt the process.

It will allow more people to join services without having to sign up over and over. It brings OpenID style login to more of the masses. I would say most of my friends that aren’t too tech savvy have a good idea what Facebook is and probably have an account, but those same friends have no idea about OpenID.

Being a big fan of both Brightkite and Facebook it’s nice to see the integration and it works seamlessly as expected. I hope more sites that I use as well as new sites I might use in the future will support Facebook Connect as well.

With that being said I’ve had yet to enable it on any of my sites, but hope that some sort of integration will happen in the future.

Google Mobile sync looks like it’s been updated to work with the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile phones. That should cover the majority of the major smart phone players in the market.

I have an iPhone and now that MobileMe appears to be working I’ve been using that for the most part. Previously I had been using NuevaSync for push notifications via Google applications. It appears that the new updates allow Google contacts to be exchanged via Microsoft Exchange protocol so now iPhone users have the ability to get push notifications directly from Google.

I’m interested in seeing how this works, but since MobileMe is finally working well, I’m not sure if I want to change anything at this moment. I’m in an “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” situation. I would like to see how others experiences are and see if I can finally ditch MobileMe or not.

Google has announced multiple inboxes via Gmail Labs add on. It allows you to have you labels in view on your main inbox page. We use Gmail through Google Apps for all of the sites we own and we recommend it to a lot of our clients. While for the most part I use Mail.app or my iPhone to check email, the few times I need to use someone’s equipment it’s nice to have the web app available.

I’ve added Multiple Inboxes to a couple of my accounts and I can see it being beneficial for a lot of users. I can definitely see it helping those with large monitors, but it starts getting hard to read for those carrying small screen laptops. It’s a step in the right direction giving people an option.

I was contacted by Tapinoma to try out their new iPhone application Easycontact (itunes link). Since rebranding my company I had been thinking of creating new business cards and was looking around the web for inspiration. Everything I do deals with digital media and I rarely passed out the old business cards. People already had my contact information or it was just easier to send an email or punch it in my phone.

I still think the act of business cards, pushing information from one to another is still relevant, but not so sure the physical medium is still as efficient as it used to be. I connect with quite a few people digitally through email or sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Having connections through those channels allow me to meet new people and exchange information.

So where does Tapinoma Easycontact come in? Easycontact makes it easy to exchange vCards via email to any user or wifi if another iPhone user is running the software as well. It also allows for transferring via audio, but I was unable to test this feature. Having email and wifi is enough for me and it performed as expected. It takes the traditional sense of business cards into the digital age.

The screen on the left shows the main interface. It’s very clean like most iPhone applications. The method of transport buttons are across the bottom: email, wifi, and audio. Across the top you select what information you would like to send out: your card, another person’s card, a group of cards, or a photo. You are also able to select which vCard information is sent through the settings page.

The application is simple, but clever and it just works. The price point seems to be about right. I’ll have to use it some more and see how it fits into my business. If other iPhone users adopt this application I can see it being very useful, but even without other users it does a good job.

If you have any questions, as always they’re welcome.

If you have never heard of sIFR it stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. What it does is take plain text and replaces it with a flash object using a font of your choice. When developing websites to look a certain way you’ll want for the most part to use web safe fonts which are fonts that are available across platforms and browsers so that your site will look similar. The problem with that is you are really limited to the number of fonts you can use and limits the way the sites look and feel.

There is a newer updated sIFR implementation which promises to be faster and smaller. With more people wanting more than just the generic web fonts faster is always going to be better as long as it still works.

Personally if possible I like to stay with standard web fonts. Our company website does not use sIFR. I’m satisfied with how the fonts look and I usually don’t try to add additional things to sites unless it improves functionality. I weigh the pros and cons to see if it’s worth it and then implement.

With that being said for those already using sIFR for whatever the reason, trying out sIFR Lite would probably be a good idea to see if it will help speed up your sites.

Even though the Microsoft servers were down part of the day on Friday, I was lucky enough to download the Windows 7 Public Beta and install it on a dedicated test machine. Being a web developer, I was interested in seeing if there would be any rendering differences across browsers as opposed to the machine performing better than Vista. I’ve never really had any problems with Vista. My primary development machines are running Mac OS X and I have a single machine running Windows on Boot Camp for testing IE7/IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. For the most part we follow Yahoo’s graded browser support. However, we’ve dropped support for IE6 and most clients are okay with that as long as it works in IE7 and IE8. If a client really wants IE6 compatibility, we don’t have an issue supporting it, but at the request of the client.

Safari is really the only browser across platforms PC and Mac that visually looks equivalent. Most of the issues I had seen in the past had been due to things like anti-aliasing. While most clients aren’t that critical on the look, they do question why it does look different on PC platforms vs. Mac platforms. Most people just want it to look and function pretty similar in all the browsers. While you can’t compare IE across operating system platforms, you can compare Firefox and Safari. You can definitely see a difference in Firefox on the PC platform vs Mac and the look in Firefox on PC more closely matches IE8. Some clients like consistent looks of buttons for form elements, and until only pretty recently were developers able to skin those buttons without having to jump through hoops.

When comparing Windows 7 and Vista, I didn’t notice any differences in how things looked. I’ve been testing in IE8 on Vista for a little while, so I’ve already adapted some of the issues with that. I think the multiple browsers are finally starting to converge to standards. It’s not perfect by far and still plenty of hacks in the CSS, but we’re definitely in a much better place than we were years ago. It’s refreshing to see and I hope progress continues on the matter. If you are interested in upgrading your test machine to Windows 7 I have yet to see any issues.

It’s a new year and for most it means back to work or school. In the tech community it also means Macworld SF and CES conventions. The last time I went to Macworld was the year before last year. It seemed like an okay show. It was the year the iPhone and AppleTV was released and a lot of people were interested in that. From what I remember more people were interested in that than anyone else exhibiting there. That makes this year unusual. Steve Jobs is not giving the keynote due to health reasons and Apple has said this will be the last year they will be attending. To me this seems like a huge blow to the show. For me it’s almost no point in trying to go anymore. This pushes me more towards attending CES in the future.

While I’m not attending either show this year (we’re in a recession), I’m thinking CES might be better to attend. It’s got a more diverse product line up and the show takes place in Vegas. There are not many times I can go out to a place like Vegas that’s business related. I would be able to see first hand new products before they are released and also concept products that I wouldn’t see otherwise. While it isn’t a direct link to web development, it is people in the technology industry which can be tied into our field of work.

I’m still on the fence about attending CES next year. I think it might be fun. Then again I can just read everything going on on a variety of blogs and not really miss a beat. I’m intrested to see what comes out at both shows this year. I don’t think it will be as big as years passed, and with everyone blogging about every rumor nowadays it brings disappointment when the real products are actually announced. Tomorrow is the big day so I guess I’ll find out then.

There was an article on TechCrunch regarding Facebook growing much faster than their current investments.  According to the article, estimated costs include $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 in bandwidth, then there is their equipment costs and payroll for it’s employees.  These numbers don’t really surprise me all that much.  It seems about right and maybe even a little lower for the bandwidth number than I would expect.  I talk to clients and entreprenuers a lot and the big trend in the industry is user generated content focused on media (images, audio, video, etc).  People want to create sites like Facebook or YouTube competitors and have no idea how much monthly costs are to run an infrastructure like that.  People just figure they’ll hire someone to build the site and throw it on a shared server somewhere and make a ton of money.  The people at Facebook I would assume know all this and the clients I work with are on a much smaller scale, but let’s say you have 1% of Facebook’s user base the sites bandwidth costs are still quite a lot.

It’s hard to monetize a system like that and I’ve read articles in the past where MySpace has had similar issues.  I haven’t really been too impressed with the direction MySpace has gone in order to generate more revenue.  It’s always really been put anything and everything on your page and see what happens.  I’ve never really liked going to friends profiles and have 10 random videos load at once.  It’s just not a great user experience for me.  Because of that I left MySpace to join Facebook.

So how is Facebook going to generate revenue in order to keep up with its rising costs?  In the comments of the TechCrunch article, people were suggesting charging a yearly fee for users.  Some said they would pay others thought that people wouldn’t pay for something they want for free.  I think I’m one of those type of users.  I’ve joined quite a few social networks and the only one I’ve paid for is Flickr and that’s debateable on whether that is a network or not.  I paid because I’m interested in photo backup and not for the social aspects of the site.  I’ll probably also pay for larger space on Dropbox for the same reason.  For real social sites, Pownce offers a free and pro account setup, but I haven’t really felt like I should pay for the pro account.  It might be that I don’t have as many friends on Pownce so that might make a difference.  I think if Facebook did a similar scheme as Pownce that might work out for them.  I’m not sure how well it’s working for others using that model.  I still think they need to have a tier system instead of an all user paid system.

I think if they did charge I’d search for another alternative.  So I’m wondering for others out there, would you pay to use Facebook?