Hot off the presses! David Pogue’s Favorite iPhone Tricks, perfect for the Missing Manual fan who wants the inside scoop on how to get the most out of a new iPhone.
The iPhone’s finger-driven interface seems natural and obvious. But when you really think about it, making it seem that way was no easy task. There are no menus in the iPhone software, for example, and no checkboxes or radio buttons. Everything on the screen has to be big enough for a fleshy fingertip.
On the other hand, the finger makes an outstanding pointing device; heck, you’ve been pointing with it all your life. It’s much faster to scroll diagonally with a fingertip, for example, than with fussy adjustments on two different scroll bars.
Here, then, are some of the iPhone’s unadvertised taps, double-taps, and other shortcuts, all culled from iPhone: The Missing Manual.
No time to read all the iPhone reviews. The folks over at Gizmodo put together a handy matrix of the top reviewers’ sound bites, justifications, raves, and quibbles. Take a peek.
Lightroom 1.1 is available starting today. And Mikkel Aaland’s Photoshop Lightroom Adventure is ready. The up-to-the-nanosecond publication will be available mid-July. In the meantime Mikkel is talking about some of Lightroom 1.1’s neat new features on the Digital Media blog. Says Mikkel:
All of you who bought version1.0, don’t worry. The upgrade to 1.1 is free. All you need to do is go to the Adobe site: www.adobe.com. This upgrade, in my opinion, is the best deal of the year. (Depending on how large your library is it will take some computer time to migrate your old “library” to 1.1’s new catalog system, but it’s worth the wait. Catalogs are so much easier to deal with than a single “library” and give you a lot more flexibility.)
I spent the last several months completely rewriting my book to make it 1.1 centric–and I’ve come to love several of the new features. (Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, by the way, goes to press Friday and should be available in a couple weeks.)
“The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones,” proclaims David Pogue. David is presently writing a book for us about Apple’s innovative new phone, “iPhone: The Missing Manual.” The PDF will be available July 17. Advance purchase starts Friday morning.
In his entertaining review of the iPhone in the New York Times, David continues: “Unless you’ve been in a sensory-deprivation tank for six months, you already know what the iPhone is: a tiny, gorgeous hand-held computer whose screen is a slab of touch-sensitive glass.”
What’s so great according to David:
“On the iPhone, you don’t check your voice mail; it checks you. One button press reveals your waiting messages, listed like e-mail. There’s no dialing in, no password — and no sleepy robot intoning, “You…have…twenty…one…messages.”
“To answer a call, you can tap Answer on the screen, or pinch the microscopic microphone bulge on the white earbud cord. Either way, music or video playback pauses until you hang up. (When you’re listening to music, that pinch pauses the song. A double-pinch advances to the next song.)”
Cool!
Read David’s New York Times review of the iPhone here. (Registered with NYTImes.com for free access.)
Check www.oreilly.com Friday for a specially priced advance package (and surprise bonus) of the book and PDF of “iPhone: The Missing Manual.”
“In our increasingly mechanized world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives easier–bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness. Yet are any of those promises being fulfilled? Are we not instead becoming slaves to the very “conveniences” that we struggle to master? These weighty questions are addressed by Steve Talbott in his book Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines.”
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com’s free newsletter. Dan Sisson is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently building and living in a replica of Monticello.
Millions of Microsoft Excel users create and share spreadsheets every
day. Yet many users are unable to take full advantage of the program.
Yet according to the authors of Excel Hacks, David and Raina Hawley,
there are lots of ways to take advantage of Excel’s capabilities
without requiring years of study. These tools or hacks are quick and
dirty solutions to problems or clever ways of doing things. David and
Raina, who live in Bunbury, Western Austrailia, also offer hundreds
of Excel Add-Ins and business software designed for data analysis in
all industry areas through their website, www.ozgrid.com.
Raina Hawley
We run one of the largest Excel Question and Answer Forums in the
world and the book is a product of some of the more common problems
that people may encounter.
Did you know that you can add Ajax to an existing web application without redoing the whole thing. In O’Reilly’s Adding Ajax, Shelley Powers illuminates the benefits of adding Ajax to enhance, rather than replace, the way an application works. Here she talks about her new book and how to polish applications with Ajax.
Sara Peyton
Why did you write Adding Ajax?
Shelley Powers
I’ve worked with the technologies associated with Ajax for ten years, so it was natural I became interested in Ajax. However, much of the emphasis with Ajax is on RIA (Rich Internet Applications) but I saw the value of incremental updates to existing web applications–a concept known as progressive enhancement. I thought a book focusing on this, and aimed at developers newer to Ajax, would be a good addition to the growing Ajax library.
After many hours of dedicated developer time, our customers now have the ability to buy our book content by the chapter in PDF format. Pricing per chapter is $3.99.
This feature is being rolled out on 714 books initially, the same books that are part of our Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink project, through which our customers can purchase reuse rights to the same material for their Intranets, newsletters, course packs, websites, etc.
You can see an example of what the chapter purchase feature looks like on catalog pages at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527440/index.html. The button is on the right side of the page, clustered with the other purchase buttons.
I love the usability of these independent chapters. Each has its own table of contents and index, which is possible because of the infrastructure we built for delivering content through SafariU. Each chapter is also bookmarked and searchable. What they are still lacking is a book cover, and the ability to click a table of contents or index entry and have that part of the chapter appear, but those features are coming.
I’m eager to know what customers think of this, and what we can do to make the packaging of our content even more convenient. This is yet another step towards providing our content in whatever form you, the customer, wants it in.
Recently I traveled cross-country to attend my first Tech*Ed in Orlando, FL. My fist stop was INETA’s (International .NET Association) User Group Leader Summit. Where over 50 UG leaders, mostly from Florida, got together to talk about running their groups. Florida has an extremely well organized .NET UG community with the help of Florida .Net Developer User Groups, Microsoft’s Codezone, and of course INETA.
Several more UG Leader Summits are on the way to San Francisco, Austin, and Los Angeles.
Ethan Salwen’s lucid article about photo capture-sharpening practices in AfterCapture features O’Reilly author Mikkel Aaland.
“There are compelling reasons to apply capture sharpening during the RAW
conversion process,” explains Mikkel Aaland, a San Francisco-based
photographer and digital-imaging expert. “And there are compelling
reasons to turn off a converter’s sharpening function and wait until
the file is in Photoshop.” In accurate, down-to- earth language, Aaland
outlines some of these reasons in his book Photoshop CS2 RAW
(O’Reilly, 2006). However, Aaland encourages photographers not to
hyperventilate over this topic. What’s called for is simply a basic
understanding of how to approach capture sharpening during RAW
conversion (or not) in a way that best meets your specific workflow
needs.”
Scott Berkun’s new book The Myths of Innovation has been getting a lot of publicity lately. Many readers have posted reviews about this book and how it opened their eyes to what innovation truly is - a result of years of work and trials and failures.
Scott did a recent Q&A with Digital Web Magazine and expounded on the idea of innovation being a result of failures. He clearly defines innovation in the following paragraph:
Most true stories of innovation involve these unpleasant, complex, and frustrating experiences, and it’s rare that a person, or an idea, transcends those challenges. Innovation is rare. To be an innovator means to accept these odds, to see the frustrations as likely experiences, and to choose not to give up based on those reasons alone. That’s one of the best lessons to take from the analysis offered in the book of Gutenberg, the Wright brothers, and Edison–they all failed in various embarrassing ways before, during, and after their famous successes, and that resilience is more useful than the romance many innovation books focus on.
I stumbled across a great quote for one of our newer books today - Programming Flex 2 - by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott. The reviewer, Matt Pearson of BlogCritics, points out that Kazoun is a “new name to tech literature” while Lott is “an old pro,” and that the book itself is “unreservedly, excellent.”
And while I’m introducing a somewhat new author and a new book review, I might as well introduce myself as the newest member of the O’Reilly PR team. Nice to meet you all :-) I’ll be in and out… taking off for a few weeks of vacation soon (aka wedding and honeymoon!) but I’m looking forward to blogging in the future.
We get a fair number of site license requests for our books, where someone wants to host digital copies on their Intranet so a group of developers can access them. The customer experience to do that was very Web 0.5, and required the customer to search our website for what they hoped was the appropriate email address to send a query. I think we’ve fixed that. For books that are already available in PDF format, there is now a link that says “Buy PDF Site License” on the catalog page. Clicking it opens a simple form with the book title and ISBN already blown in. Just include your name, email address, and phone number, and our Customer Service group will be in touch.
We’re rolling this out on more and more books as we convert files to PDF. We’re processing an additional 115 now, and they should be available within the next week.
While printing is no longer a messy affair - digital means no messy chemical developers, no stinky fixers, no more hours and hours of washing a photo in a stinky, usually messy dark room - it still requires a savvy eye, a studious curiosity, a fairly robust investment in equipment and commitment.
“It’s tricky, printing digitally,” says Per Gylfe, a veteran instructor at the Digital Media Lab at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. “Most users get only a decent print from their inkjet. The software that comes with cameras and printers needs to be upgraded, and all the equipment needs to be adjusted.” In other words, don’t expect a perfect print out of the box.
In his fine book, “Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography” (O’Reilly), the internationally renowned shooter agrees, explaining that preparation is critical: A monitor properly calibrated to show the true colors of the print, correct printer and paper settings, restraint on enlarging a small photo file to an unrealistically large size, and restraint, period. “Take it slow and understand your choices,” Johnson writes. “Don’t flail about pushing buttons, turning on features you don’t yet understand, and printing as though there were no costs involved.”
O’Reilly author James Kalbach’s terrific blog aims to illuminate how we expereince information in a digital age. On June 4 he wrote about our brain’s frustration with reading block text when “our eyes view text as if they’re peering through a straw.” Apparently reading would be so much more fun–and we’d comprehend more, too–if our sentences were broken into parts and formatted more like haikus. See an example of before and after formatting here.
CBS Morning News puts the spotlight on Maker Faire. Read the story.
Or watch the video.
William Keller invented cupcake cars for the Maker Faire. (CBS)
From Kathryn Barrett: Actor Matt Damon recently announced that he would not play Bourne again, giving Unix enthusiasts everywhere pause to wonder. The Bourne Again Shell, or bash for short, is a modern, general-purpose shell, freely available, and the shell of choice for users of Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, and other popular systems. As immensely useful as it is, it is not typically something you “play” as you would Tetris or Warcraft. Whether you’re a system administrator, programmer, or end user, there are countless occasions when a simple shell script can save you time and effort. “The bash Cookbook” by Carl Albing, JP Vossen, and Cameron Newham, is packed with examples and advice for anyone who wants to learn shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft. Read more.
Flash CS3, the latest version of the premier tool for creating web animations and interactive websites, can be intimidating to learn. And although Flash has become more powerful and sophisticated, the woefully poor documentation remains the same.
Happily, an entertaining new reference tutorial–Flash CS3: The Missing Manual–provides a reader-friendly animation primer and a guided tour of all the program’s tools and capabilities. Beginners will learn to use the software in no time, and experienced users will quickly take their skills to the next level.
They give it a 7 out of 10 and say:
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