I know I know, I'm pretty late to the game, but hey, I'm in Germany and Apple decided to let us wait. I have spent two days with the iPad now, and I think that is enough time to form an opinion, so here it is.

You can't form an opinion from blog posts or from spending 30 minutes with the device! I spent about 30 minutes over the weekend to play with various people's iPads. It was fun. I liked it. Then on Tuesday my own iPad arrived and I have now had two days with it. Spending two days with one is definitely different from spending 30 minutes with it. I am looking at it with different eyes now. There are many little things that you can't grasp in a short time. Especially not if you stay at a level where you only compare features and leave out all the interaction details that make or break a device. Let's face it: the most complete feature set can be useless if the interaction with it is broken.

Flash? Didn't miss it in the past two days. Yes, I ran into the odd website that was 100% flash, but it was never something that couldn't be easily worked around. A lot of embedded videos (especially those from YouTube) are now HTML5 anyway, and those play just fine embedded into web sites.

Battery? The advertised 10 hours of battery life are pretty accurate. As with most Lithium Polymer batteries I expect things to become even better after a few charge/discharge cycles.

Weight? It is a bit heavier than I thought it would be, but after handling it for two days the weight is basically a non-issue. Reading in bed works, but not with holding it up above my head. Same as with a big book. Lying on my side with the screen locked is great.

How to hold it? The iPad is a new class of device. Yes, there were tablet computers in the past, but they were the size of laptops, none of them was ever this thin and had such a large screen. Which means we will have to come up new ways of holding it. When sitting down I tend to prefer the landscape orientation holding it with both hands, using my thumbs to interact. A lot of apps and games seem to follow this model quite well, so most of the time it's very convenient.

I can totally see the upcoming iPhone 4 with its super high-res display to take the "reading in bed" spot.

Which case? I don't have a case yet, but played with the Apple case on the weekend. I like the fact that it can easily be used to put the iPad on a flat surface at an angle in horizontal mode. I've been propping the iPad up exactly the same way here on my table and it felt very natural. I also like the flip-over cover, easy access is king.

Consumation or production device? The iPad is awesome to consume content. I like reading on it. I like watching videos on it. I don't really use it a lot to listen to music a lot. I downloaded some magazines (Spiegel, Popular Science, brand eins) and Zinio (a magazine store) to test the interaction model. Everyone is doing their own thing right now, and I guess it'll be a while until some sort of a standard emerges. Or maybe they don't want that to be different.

Production-wise I got Pages, Keynote and Numbers and I played with all three of them. Easy enough to manage, and I can totally see myself using them. Let's see what the next 6-hour train ride will bring. From a photography point of view I can see myself importing selected pictures on the road (I'm still waiting for the camera connection kit) and putting some touches on them right where I am to show a customer an idea or a concept. Or to do a quick upload to flickr. But then this is early days and I didn't really have the opportunity to put that side of the iPad to the test yet.

On-Screen Keyboard Usable. I touch type and as long as I can get the iPad into a comfortable position (see Apple case above) I can type quite well. Maybe at 50-70% of the speed I would get on a hardware keyboard. Good enough to answer emails or even write longer texts. Painting brush strokes into a picture during editing (for example with Filterstorm) is fun and easy.

Apps! The iPad would be nothing without its apps. Here's a small of mine: AirVideo (plays my video collection over the air), 1Password (stores and protects all your passwords and more), Outliner (does what it says, syncs with iPhone version, has a web interface too), Evernote (I love the iPad version), Osfoora (great Twitter client), Pinball HD (bye bye productivity..), GoodReader (get and read your docs from virtually anywhere), Photogene (image editor), Filterstorm (more control over local picture changes), Delivery Status (very useful and beautiful, Junecloud's design rocks), WolframAlpha (yey, big screen geekiness), Pulse News (a beautiful great approach to news reading).

There are probably more to come, but hey, I've only had it for two days...

Two apps I hope will be out as iPad versions very soon are Pocket Informant (calendaring, gtd-style todo management, etc.) and Reeder (Newsreader that syncs with Google Reader. I've briefly played with a beta on the weekend, it rocks!)

iPhone apps They work. Some of them scale up nicely, some of them are better used in their native resolution. Switching between the iPad keyboard and the iPhone keyboard on the same device is awkward. Many iPhone apps will upscale much nicer soon, as Apple has come up with some easier ways to make higher-resolution artwork available for developers even in standard iPhone apps. This is a side effect of the higher-res iPhone 4, but the apps will look much nicer on the iPad then too.

Games Yes, games. The iPad is a great gaming platform. Pinball HD is fast and fun, play Flight Control HD together with someone else on one iPad, and Mirror's Edge is exciting and really well done. Can't wait for all the great titles that will be released on the iPad!

My conclusion is this: The iPad is an awesome media consumption device, and it has a huge potential to become a production device as well. Not on the level of your Mac Pro, it doesn't have the horsepower for that, but that's not what it was made for anyway. It's all in the apps, we see that with Apple's own apps Pages, Keynote and Numbers. All three of them are capable and follow a new interaction model. We are already seeing a lot of promising apps that take advantage of the zippy hardware and bring with them a much more natural interaction model than it was ever possible with the mouse-screen disconnect. I'm happy with the iPad, and being able to say that after just two days, I know I will enjoy it even more as the platform evolves and new and well thought out apps come along. And looking at the simplicity of the just-point-your-finger-at-it interface, I know that the iPad will open up computing to a whole new range of people who up to now had all the reason to be afraid of computers, even of Macs.

Okay, so I record an MP3 for the Daily Photo Tips With Chris podcast using VR+ (my favorite voice recording app on the iPhone) and send it off via email to Posterous. I've done that for a long time and it has never failed me.

Normally what happens is that Posterous picks up the email, extracts the MP3, hosts it, adds it to the according blog and then my dptwc site picks it up from the RSS feed that Posterous automatically generates for me.

When I posted the last entry, it came up without the MP3 link in the RSS. On closer inspection I found that the entry on the Posterous site was not hosted by Posterous but by some third party and that Posterous didn't include the MP3 link.

My first assumption was that Posterous had changed their process without telling anyone, and I got quite frustrated to find out that the very service that I had built an entire podcast on was now broken for me.

Had I been aware of how wrong I was, I wouldn't have gone out on Buzz and Twitter and on this blog entry to talk about it.

AvirajPosterous was quick to react on Twitter and forward it to their dev team and I thank him for this, because it saved me a lot of embarrassment in the long run.

Turns out it was my own fault all along. The VR+ recording app can send out MP3s vie email, which is why I love it so much. One feature I never used was to send the MP3 as a link, in which case they upload it to their own VR+ servers and then send the link via email. I had accidentally enabled that feature and by doing that I broke the entire process.

All I can offer are my sincere apologies to Posterous, I should have done a much more thorough root cause analysis before I went out and made so much noise about this. I like the service that Posterous offers a lot, it enables me to do so much and I'm happy that they are around.

Note to self: Social media are a great way to generate buzz about things and the companies who get it and react fast are going to be the winners in the long run. Social media are also dangerous when it comes to spreading false information. Always (ALWAYS!) make sure you check and doublecheck the facts before you complain in public or it can backfire.

For months and months all your gadgets work like a charm, then all of a sudden everything breaks at once. Ever happened to you?

It's pretty clearly my turn right now.

It all started with my trusty HP B9180 photo printer. It behaved nicely for about two years, then all of a sudden gave me a blank stare and a nasty SERVICE STALL message on its display. I tried Google and everything to find out if there was an easy way to reset something or clean a specific part that was causing this, but to no avail. No warranty of course. So I was really pleased to find out that HP has an out-of-warranty replacement program in place, where you get a refurbished or new machine for some €130,-, which is not too bad given the price of a new unit. The replacement printer arrived without any accessories, only a set of ink cartridges and a pack of paper for the print head alignment and color calibration. First I had to move the print heads from the old printer into the new one though.

Slightly unnerving fact: from the time I filled out the replacement form to the time the replacement arrived, the process took more than two weeks, which means some of the printhead nozzles were actually clogged now, because the printer wasn't able to do it's daily quick maintenance cycle. Bad process design HP, someone should've put a bit more thinking into this. Took me almost the entire set of inks, some manual nozzle cleaning and an additional 10 sheets of paper until the print results looked good again.

What I also found out in the process is that the B9180 seems to be discontinued now. Looks like HP is pulling out of the prosumer photo printing segment, and that's a pity because I really liked this printer and what that means is once this unit breaks, I'm out to find something else from a different manufacturer.

Next up: Mac Pro. My workhorse. My Precioussssss.. after almost three years of tugging along like a real worker bee, it died. Just like that. Click. Off. Turns out the power supply was gone. Which is a good thing compared to the bill a motherboard replacement would've come up to. Only €240,- in total. Plus 1.5 hours of driving time of course, because that's how far away the next official Apple partner repair shop is from here. A bargain!

Now they say that all good things come in threes.

What's next? Got a good guess? Leave a comment!

Update Feb/25: It was all my fault. Read the latest blog entry for more details.

Posterous just lost a huge amount of its awesomeness for me.

I used it to receive my Daily Photo Tips With Chris MP3s via email, and bake them into an RSS feed that I could then read over at the Daily Photo Tips web site and create the feed from.

They have now decided to remove an important element from their RSS feeds, the media item which previously contained the link to the MP3 file. As a result all my RSS processing is dead and people cannot get the latest photo tip as a podcast anymore.

I'm pretty sure this change breaks a lot of things for a lot of people out there.

Can you recommend a good blog service that accepts MP3s via email and bakes them into an RSS feed with an actual link to the MP3? You could be the one who saves the Daily Photo Tips!

Leave your comments below.

It's pixel peeping time again. And today's question is: How accurate do the colors in our pictures have to be?

Compare the following two images and then tell me which of the two is more accurate.





Hard to tell, right? Both images are based on the same RAW file from a Canon 5D Mark II, managed in Lightroon, neutrally white-balanced using Lightroom's WB eyedropper on the middle grey patch in the lower of the two rows of grey patches in the color chart on the top. Both files were then exported to JPG with sRGB profile embedded. The only difference is that the top image uses the camera profile that Lightroom assigns to camera images by default ("Adobe Standard"), and the second image is based on a custom-built camera profile based on the ColorChecker card present in the image.

(Note: Lightroom's "Camera Profiles" are not the same as ICC profiles)

The differences between the two images are subtle indeed, the camera and the Adobe Standard profile that gets applied in Lightroom do a remarkably good job, especially with a custom white balance. In fact I'd happily use this outcome for all sorts of professional projects (and have actually done so in the past) - as long as the spectrum under which those pictures have been shot is at least somewhat daylight-ish. With daylight-ish I mean an as full as possible spectrum, one that you'd get outside in the shade at 3pm on a summer's day. Not one that you'd get from a yellow sodium light at the side of the road.

So the question is: why would anyone want to use a camera profile if the output is as good as it is?

Let's first take a look at what profiling does. Consider the color chart in the image below.



In the lower half it shows four rows of color swatches, and all of these are very precisely manufactured to be of a very specific color. Whenever you take a picture, there is an analog process involved where photons hit light-sensitive cells that accumulate a charge based on the amount of photons, and are then read by circuits and converted to numbers. These numbers are then read by software, magically converted into other numbers and finally interpreted as colors and translated into brightness levels of individual red, green and blue pixels on a screen. Or converted into various amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink and squirted onto paper. It seems like a miracle that in the end we get to see our pictures at all.

But I guess you get the idea, it's a very complex process with quite a few areas of variability, and in order to make sure that we get consistent results, a profiling process can be of great value.

So back to the color swatches. The manufacturer knows pretty much exactly what color values the individual swatches have. If you shoot a picture, it's very likely that your camera and the attached software don't interpret the colors exactly the same way. Blue tones might be a bit more violet than you saw them, greens might be a bit less vivid and reds might be slightly over-pronounced. In an every-day snapshot type of situation this is no biggie, in the analog world, this is even the norm, because every film you choose will have different color and contrast characteristics, but we're in the digital world here and what if you want to get just that little bit more accurate?

Here's where the profiling software comes in. It looks at the picture, finds the swatches (that have been shot with your specific camera under specific light conditions and therefore look slightly different than expected) and it can easily tell that the blue in your picture is different from what it should be and the green is too bright and the red is too dark and so forth. Based on this information the software builds a profile, which in fact is just a lookup-table with mappings from wrong to right color.

All in all this used to be a tedious process that required a great deal of care, expensive software and hardware, and could only be afforded by the professionals who had to get color exactly right, for example in areas like product photography.

Enter ColorChecker Passport by x-rite. After reading up on it and receiving a few recommendations I've finally spent the 100 bucks for this little gadget, and I must say I pretty much instantly fell in love with it.

The chart comes in its little rugged plastic case, so the delicate color swatches are well protected, and it can be swiveled so you can set it down and it will stand by itself.

And if you are a Lightroom user, the process couldn't be easier. In fact this solution is built around Lightroom and RAW and it won't make much sense on its own.

All you have to do is install the software (make sure you download the latest version from their website) which adds an export plugin to Lightroom. Then during your photo session (which ideally takes place under consistent light conditions) you shoot a well-exposed reference picture of the ColorChecker chart and that's all you need to think of during shooting.

After importing your pictures into Lightroom find the one with the ColorChecker, and export it using the ColorChecker export preset. Within less than a minute the software will analyze the picture, find the ColorChecker automatically, create a new profile and prompt you to restart Lightroom to make it aware of the new profile.

Now all you do is switch to the develop mode, select the newly created profile from the Camera Calibration section and you're mostly set. For more accuracy you can also white-balance based on the grey swatches in the upper chart, the bottom middle one is neutral, the ones to the right create warmer tones, the ones to the left make the image slightly cooler.

Still sounds difficult, but after working with it for 5 minutes it was second nature.

This is the first camera profiling solution that I can envision using regularly because it's not only fast, it also almost seamlessly integrates into my existing Lightroom-based workflow.

Move your mouse over this picture to see the differences the profile can make:



Is the difference so big that I'll from now on use it everywhere I go? Absolutely not. It's great to get that extra bit of accuracy where it's needed, and it's definitely quick and simple enough for me to use, so it'll be more than just a paperweight (believe me, I have too many gadgets that I don't really use because they are either too complicated or because they don't add enough value to my photography). It'll clearly help me get better colors in some situations where the light spectrum is difficult, but on the other hand there are many light situations that I don't want to correct for, many of them for creative reasons, so that's where I will happily leave it in the camera bag or at home. And this is true for both my personal projects as well as customer projects.

Is it as accurate as the bigger and much more expensive systems? Probably not. I've never had the need to work with one of those, and with the type of photography I do, I doubt that I ever will. But under light sources with an uneven spectrum (fluorescents for example) it's clearly more accurate than just using the good old white balance and it renders very pleasing colors. It's a logical next step that is lightweight enough in its approach.

Is it for everyone? No. It only makes sense if your workflow is RAW + Lightroom. There it integrates nicely and takes a lot of pain out of the camera profiling process.

Will you be a better photographer if you use the ColorChecker Passport? Let me ask you this: Has buying that new lens made you a better photographer? How about that new camera body you got for yourself last Christmas?

In short: nope.

Photography is still about capturing wonderful moments, telling stories with your pictures and making an emotional impact.

And I would even go further and argue that getting more accurate and neutral colors in your pictures can do both, help the story and the emotion or be completely in the way of telling the story that you want to tell.

Try to imagine the following images perfectly color balanced - I bet you most of them would lose their impact right away.

Video is wonderful. It lets you develop this quick feeling for something, usually much quicker than reading through paragraphs of copy or listening to lengthy audio. And social video is even cooler, as it lets the producer get his video out to so many more people, and collect inputs and get social linkage, and sometimes... very rarely, one might even go viral.

The flood of video sharing sites also has its drawbacks of course, as you might eventually end up with quite some fragmentation as to where your videos are. I sure experience that. Some videos are on Youtube, some are on Vimeo or Blip.tv, just to name a few. And pulling those together into a coherent user experience has been pretty difficult in the past.

Has been.

Because now there is yubby, a free online service that lets you quickly and easily create a channel with videos from all types of sources, that you can then embed in a web page as a widget.

I have just done that. Thanks to its great search capabilities and somewhat consistent tagging of my videos, it took me about five minutes to pull together a channel of the videos that I (and others) produced at various workshops, and place it on my main workshop page.

Yubby lets you then choose one of several ways to present your videos, from a grid down to a small player, which is the one I opted for. I should actually even be able to embed it here. Let's try.

See? It's that easy.

» The widget in action on the workshop page

» yubby.com

Workshops, workshops, workshops... 2009 was such an exciting year in so many respects and I am very grateful for being able to do the things I do.

With Brooklyn Cookin', the workshop that I held together with Chef Mark, this year's season is now over, and what a great final workshop that was. Both Mark and I found that we'll have to do a workshop along the same lines again next year. The concept is perfect: the target audience is couples where one half is into cooking and the other half is into photography, and here they have a way to learn and spend time together.

Even though this year is over from a workshop perspective, it actually isn't. At least not for me. I am going to spend most of November preparing everything for a smooth 2010 launch. My goal is to have everything ready by December. And there are a lot of things to be worked on. Luckily most of my workshop locations are already nailed down, some helpers need to be briefed, and then there's the whole registration process. I have looked into offers in the cloud, but there is no workshop/seminar management system that even remotely seems to fit the bill.

All I need is to manage the registration process and payments for about ten workshops. Internationally. With deposits. And limited number of seats. For a decent price. And no, in an economy where everyone needs to think twice before spending anything, I consider taking 10% of the workshop fees *not* decent, because that would eventually increase the workshop price by that same amount.

So in short, I haven't found a good and easy way to automate this yet. Which is why I've taken things to the cloud in a different way for 2009 and why I'm going to go even further in 2010. In short: I'm using online services and forms to handle the sign-ups, I have simplified the confirmation and registration process using Services on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I use PayPal to handle the bulk of the payments, and I use my own time to keep it all together. Not ideal, but workable. The KISS principle applies. Keep it simple, stupid. I don't need a full-fledged database to handle a couple of hundred participants. Every participant ends up in a spreadsheet with a status field depending on where in the registration process they currently are, and if I need to send out a bulk mail to all participants of an individual workshop, a simple copy/paste of the email address column for that workshop will do just fine.

The biggest item are the workshop pages on the web site. This is where everything is supposed to come together in a nice and easy to navigate way. I have spent hours and hours to design something that ties together everything from basic information about the workshop ("why would I want to come to this workshop?"), the agenda ("what are the workshop details?"), timing ("when does the workshop start and end?"), accommodation ("what hotel is near by?"), navigation ("how do I find my way to the workshop?") and pricing.

Obviously I design this once and duplicate it for all the workshops, but the content will be different for each workshop. The overview, the detail description, the example images, the example video, the FAQ. And the language.

So I guess I better get busy and finally start tying all those lose ends together to bring you not only an excellent 2010 workshop season, but also a great experience when it comes to finding the right one for your needs and going through the registration process.

If you want to be notified as soon as the 2010 workshops are ready, please make sure you are on the newsletter (get the newsletter here).

Got a way to help me simplify the registration process? Leave a comment!

I've just found the solution! You can help me save a lot of time, which in turn will allow me to concentrate more on the production side of my shows instead of the planning side. And it's simple: all I need is the help of 94 of you clicking a vote button.

update: just one day later and 34 of you awesome individuals have already clicked. thanks!!

Okay, hear me out, my logic on this is impeccable, I'll just need a few sentences to explain.

If you've read this post about my new iPhone calendar app you know I've become a big fan of Pocket Informant on the iPhone. And you also know that I am still searching for an app to help me with year planning. Each year around this time I'm knee deep into planning next year's workshops. And each year I spend hours trying to find out if anyone has written an app that will help me doing that.

I have very simple needs:
- a view that shows me the entire year with my workshops as time blocks
- a fast and simple way to move around these workshops
- calendar data linked/synced with my existing calendar (currently Google cal)

There is no such application for the Mac. Or the iPhone.

So every year I fall back to a stone-age year spreadsheet and changing cell background colors to indicate events. This takes time. Lots of it. And this is valuable time that I can't use to bring you exciting episodes of TFTTF, HS, Daily Photo Tips and so forth.

Here is where you come in.

If you're a fan of any of these shows, or the workshops, you want to help me finally get such a year planner, right? (See? I told you my logic was impeccable!)

But this is not just for me, it's useful for everyone. Plan out vacations, keep track of your kids school projects. Name it.

So you can imagine how happy I was to find the Pocket Informant feature request list. If anyone can pull off that year planner feature, it's these guys with their mad coding skillz! The feature request list is powered by Uservoice and you can vote for features. Three votes per person and feature. 280 votes to get to the top of the request list and a chance to be looked into. 280 / 3 = 94 people.

Please help vote this feature request up to the top of the list!

Instructions

1. Go to the log in page of the voting site


2. Click the login provider of your choice (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID,...)


3. Once logged in, enter "year planner" in the search box


4. Click the vote button next to the "Year Planner" title and leave three votes.

Let's move it up to the top of the list!!

Here's another post that's not about photography. I promise, I'll stop talking about geeky infastructure as soon as finished testing my latest acquisition: a sensor loupe and a Sensor Klean .. errr.. sensor cleaner.

This post is about some more recent infrastructure changes though that I put the finishing touches on over the weekend. Did I mention last weekend I was super productive with both, fixing my iPhone and switching my calendar infrastructure? Oh, I have? Never mind.

I recently installed my own URL shortener. It helps me paste short links into Twitter or other short form communication, it lets me get some basic stats on these links, and in general I get a lot of fun out of dabbling with these sorts of things. If I can find the time for it. Luckily I didn't have to write my own solution, as there is YOURLS. And as I happened to own the tfttf.com domain, which is reasonably short, I thought "why not?" and went ahead. It works flawlessly.

The other tool that I wouldn't want to miss is Textexpander. It runs on the Mac and what it does is simple: it replaces short strings with longer ones as you type. So if I send out an email to someone in Germany, instead of copying/pasting the signature for that, I type siggg and Textexpander automatically replaces that with my full German email signature block. For the English signature I use sigge. To insert the current date I defined the shortcut ddate and so forth. A big time saver and totally transparent. Works system wide.

Textexpander can execute scripts too. And this is where the magic starts. It comes with a script to shorten URLs using bit.ly. All you do is copy a long URL into the clipboard (CMD-C) and then type /bitly at the place where you want the short URL to be pasted.

/bitly is the trigger for Textexpander to execute an Apple Script that takes whatever is in the clipboard, hand it to the bit.ly API for shortening and returns this to wherever the cursor was.

If you are as keyboard-focused as I am, this is bliss. (And believe me, I am keyboard-focused. I even use the jkhl keys in vi so I won't have to move over to the cursor keys and leave the 10-finger base position on the keyboard)

Long story short, I have adapted said AppleScript to run in conjunction with YOURLS and it works like a charm.

» download the script here (instructions inside)

And that's it. If you have YOURLS installed and use Textexpander, this ought to make your life quite a bit easier. It sure does that for me.

And please note: I'm not an Apple Script developer, this script is part of the Textexpander distribution (I hope I'm not gonna get into any trouble by posting it here in its modified form) and I merely adapted it ever so slightly for use with YOURLS. I will not be able to provide you with any scripting support whatsoever. Believe me, you really don't want me to give you scripting advice...

A warning upfront: if you came here for a photography article, this one's not for you. This is about the iPhone and a little odyssey that eventually lead me to solving all my iPhone 3.1 issues. Wall, almost all of them...

I love my iPhone 3G. I'm doing more and more with it, from emailing, stats checking, podcast recording (Daily Photo Tips is entirely produced on my iPhone), calendaring, checking my bank accounts, .. you name it. It has become so important to me that I have even started to use an iPhone case to protect it. And if you know me, you know that I've NEVER used a case on any of my phones before.

I'm still on the 3G, because my German T-Mobile plan ("1st generation plan") wouldn't allow me to early upgrade the phone without having to also upgrade to the next higher plan ("2nd gen") which for reasons that most Germans on the 1st-gen plan who use the MultiSIM option know is a pretty much no-go. But I digress.

Let's start at the beginning:

The update to 3.1 and what it broke

When I updated the iPhone to 3.1, all hell broke loose. Or rather the opposite. My iPhone came to a screeching halt. All of a sudden it wouldn't react for a minute right after a reboot. Or scrolling in a podcast list would be super jerky. Or flipping the home screen sideways would stop for 5 seconds before it would resume. Or the calendar app would try very hard to open but fail and return to the home screen. I could go on and on and on. I tried a lot of things, lots of detective work, but couldn't really piece it together. When I twittered about it, I received a note from someone who seems to work at Apple letting me know that it's not 3.1 being the problem but that iTunes 9 was buggy. Well, the iTunes 9.0.1 update came along and nothing really changed on my iPhone. Still the same lack of response to so many things.

What I found out early was that it was likely to be a memory issue. Using the iStat app I could see that the amount of free memory was pretty low. Usually in the 1MB range.

The other thing I noticed was that when I hooked up the iPhone to iTunes, the bars that show you how much of its capacity is filled with music, videos and apps, had changed. The usually very small orange-colored "other" portion was much bigger all of a sudden. At this point I still didn't have enough information to piece it together.

The phone call with Apple Care

So with my out-of-warranty phone I finally gave in and called Apple Care. Got a nice lady on the phone who couldn't really help me. I managed to talk her into letting me talk with a 2nd-tier engineer and from him I finally found out one crucial piece of information: the orange bar contains calendars and contacts. I probably could've found this information online, had I know what to search for.

The calendar and its "new and improved" broken behavior

Around the same time I started noticing that all my subscribed calendars were now being synced to the iPhone. This is new behavior in 3.1 and it only happens if you sync them via mobileme. If you sync via iTunes, you can make a choice which calendars to sync.

This is especially interesting as I am subscribed to some high-volume calendars, such as Leo Laporte's TWiT Live production calendar (I'm a guest on his Tech Guy radio show and this calendar is my main way to know if I'm on his recording schedule or not), and Twistory, which is my twitter history as calendar entries. This last one is really high volume depending on how much I tweet, but I've found it really valuable at times and don't want to miss it.

The epiphany (or: what needs to come together to break things)

Here is my root cause analysis, mixed in with a good portion of guesswork:

1. Calendar entries and contacts obviously take up working memory on the iPhone. To be able to sync and fire off alarms at the right time, I assume the iPhone calendar reads all calendar entires into memory on startup.


2. mobileme syncs all calendars to the iPhone, even the subscribed ones. With mobileme there is no way to select which calendars to sync and which to not sync.


3. I have 596 conctacts in my address book. Some with pictures. Most likely another memory eater.


4. I have a bunch of high-volume calendars subscribed in iCal.


5. Disabling mobileme or even just disabling the calendar on the iPhone brings it back to life.

This would explain why only 3G users see the issues (the 3G has less memory than the 3GS) and then only some of them (who is crazy enough to have 596 contacts and god knows how many calendar entries in about 7 different calendars?)

The solution

I spent good portions of the last weekend on finding a solution. And thanks to Monika's just recently re-ignited love to sock knitting (a lovely cherry-cream-colored pattern emerges as I type this post), this has even still been a weekend in sweet harmony ;)

1. Find a way to not sync the high-volume calendars to the iPhone

The best solution was to use Google Calendar™ to help with this:

a) Dump the subscribed calendars from iCal
b) Instead subscribe to them in Google Calendar
c) Now add your Google account to iCal and enable the subscribed calendars in the delegation tab of the account settings

Voila! The subscribed calendars don't sync to the iPhone anymore, but you still have them in iCal.

2. Move everything to Google Calendar

I could have stopped here, the above solution already does the trick for me to speed up the iPhone, but - alas - I'm on another calendar-related quest, so I continued to do my research: The search for a better calendar that helps me with my workshop planning.

But that's a story for the next blog entry.

Got similar iPhone 3.1 experiences? Share them in the comments!

I love to keep an eye on my web sites and see how they're doing traffic-wise. I also like to have a look at the more geeky stats, such as how many of the visitors have JavaScript enabled, what screen resolutions do they use and what their choice of operating systems is.

One of the web sites that I host (and that Monika did a wonderful job putting together) is the Everest Trek 2010 web site.

I think the web browser that you use says a lot about you and your geekiness. That's why I call that browser overview my "Geek Index".


Now higher on that list doesn't mean more geeky, but there's something to be read from that chart.

Let me got through the top three individual browsers on that list and tell you my thoughts about them:

1. Safari - the Mac browser. What this chart doesn't say is that the Windows portion of these 48.93% is only a minor fraction. So I guess it's fair to assume that this part of the audience are mainly the podcast listeners, as that also still seems a little Mac-centric.

Are Mac users especially geeky? Yes and no. There are those who want the ease-of-use and the "it just works" thing, but then there are people like me who also love it for the fact that it's a Unix system that has all the important tools, scripting languages, terminals, process control etc. available, that I just need in my every-day life. The split between these two groups eludes me, but I'm sure there's at least some geekyness here.

By the way, I'm one of these Mac Safari users and I'm proud of it.

2. Firefox - the customizer's browser. Tons of add-ons, themes, extensions, plug-ins, name them whatever you like. I guess the most customizable browser on the market. It also managed to become the de-facto alternative to Internet Explorer.

Is it geeky? Sure, but again, I don't know the percentage of users who use it just to not have to use IE, and the users who use it because it allows this extreme level of customization.

As with Safari, it comes on both Windows and the Mac. In case of the Everest Trek website, Windows makes three quarters of the Firefox traffic, the Mac stays well behind here.

3. Internet Explorer - the Windows browser. This is interesting. Only 15%? On the one hand I would've expected a higher number, just because IE is still the market leader. On the other hand, the average podcast consumer is more likely to be a Mac user and IE doesn't have any relevance on the Mac. Or is it because I'm a geek and I attract other geeks, and IE is just almost by definition a non-geek browser?

I guess we'll never find out, but maybe you have an opinion? Let me know in the comments!

There are a lot of different ways for listeners to get to podcasts. There are a lot of different podcatchers out there, the Zune platform is getting a bit more traction, but iTunes is still the most important distribution vehicle by far. So whenever a show gets featured in one of the more prominent listings on the iTunes store, the producer gets to feel it.

Yesterday I received an automated email from my web hoster, telling me that the traffic for the server that my shows reside on was above the hourly threshold. Nothing to worry about, just slightly over.

An hour later I received another automated mail telling me the same, and this kept going on for the rest of the day.

I know out of experience that there can be many possible reasons for something like that, including the possibility that my server was hacked and used as a relay for vast amounts of spam or as a file server for porn movies.

So I started to go through the log files and reports and tried to find the reason why all of a sudden there was such an interest in my server. But nothing looked totally out of the ordinary, email traffic looked alright, there wasn't an unusual amount of traffic on the two big shows (Tips from the Top Floor and Happy Shooting).

By the end of the day the amount of used bandwidth was about four times as high as it should've been for a regular Tuesday and I went to bed knowing that if things weren't back to normal in the morning I had to spend some time doing some deep digging today.

What I hadn't checked for was one of the more obvious things, and when I opened my email box this morning I found a mail from Jon Miller saying "Did you see that you're being highlighted on the front page of the US iTunes Podcast Directory?"

That's what happens when you produce a small little show (that would be my Daily Photo Tips) that sort of flies under the radar and doesn't get much exposure, just to be discovered by someone at Apple who likes it enough to put it up on their podcast directory home page.

I guess getting traffic warnings from your web hoster isn't always a bad sign...

No, it's not easy to make a first blog post into something interesting. Not that I think it has to be. It's mainly a post to test all the integrations and here we truly have a HUGE amount of stuff going on behind the scenes.

First there is a blog over at Blogger, Google's blogging service. This is the source that keeps the blog posts and where I edit the posts. How do they end up here? The key is integration. Loghound is a small company who writes awesome RapidWeaver plugins. Oh, I have to explain first that this website is made using RapidWeaver, a website development system. Pretty nifty, and I like it a lot. Anyway, back to Loghound, so they made this little plugin called Rapidblog and this in turn allows me to seamlessly integrate a Blogger blog here on the site. There's a huge advantage doing it this way: I get all the convenience from Blogger (such as posting via e-mail, editing it via Marsedit, which I'm in fact doing right now) and the seamless integration into my personal web site.

Admittedly, I make myself dependent on Blogger, but a) the service has been around for a long time and Google isn't about to go away any time soon and b) if my personal web server goes down or gets hacked (which is more likely than Google's service going down) then I have a fallback, because I could simply send you over to the original Blogger blog, which doesn't look nearly as cool, but which does the trick.

But we're not finished yet with the integrating. Did I mention that I *LOVE* social media? Instead of using the Blogger commenting system, Rapidblog allows me to integrate with the Disqus commenting system which totally embraces the Web 2.0 social way of doing things. Post about this blog post on Twitter, Wordpress.com or many other sites and these comments will automatically show up as comments here. Speak of a great integration. And all that with setting up a couple of accounts and a few mouse clicks to integrate things. That's the way a-ha a-ha I like it...

Let me know what you think about all this. Scary? Way cool? Leave a comment!