After a long time of not moving ahead with this project I was persuaded by those around me to publish an app that I wrote and we were successfully using for months now.

So I added the final polishes to the application, created a mini-site for it with all the information about it, with the help of my wife put together a good screencast that demos the application and its functionality. And then it was uploaded to Apple for a review.

I’m happy to say that CheckSplit was approved by Apple and is up in the AppStore as of yesterday. I would appreciate any feedback and reviews.

Well, it didn’t take much time or effort to switch to the new phone. Simply plugged it into the computer and iTunes gave me an option to restore from my previous back up¹.

The phone looks exactly the same as the old one with the exception of lettering on the back being done in chrome instead of gray color. The screen is supposed to collect less finger prints and maybe it does, but it still does collect them.

The differences inside are more interesting. Obviously the biggest new feature is the compass. I have no idea how I lived before without it. It’s hard to imagine. But now those sorry days are far behind me.

On a more serious note — I really like the photo camera improvement. The photos above where taken with the phone in the same position. The phone now auto-exposes depending on your selection of focus point, which is done by simply touching the screen. Video is a nice feature, but I don’t see myself using that much as I never did before on my other phones.

Speed increase is much more noticeable than I expected it to be. iLounge has a good video demonstrating it.

Now I just need to find a good case for this thing, so Shublik doesn’t “upgrade” it.

Apple has finally approved the newest version of Beejive, the one that supports new push notifications. In essence that makes IM as effective as SMS with a key difference of IM being completely free.

Feel free to contact me through AIM or ICQ on iDR2000 or 424614398 respectively. I will get your messages instantly on my phone.

This recipe is easy and delicious, so I thought that it would be a good idea to post it here for the future reference.

The original recipe is here. I modified it slightly and here is what I did.

Pound 2 chicken breasts, rub with a bit of black pepper and stuff with the following mix: Read more…

Yesterday we went to our local Best Buy and bought¹ a whole bunch of mice. I wanted something for my Mac, since some development tasks with a touch pad are much harder to perform than they should be. A natural choice was Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse — Apple design and bluetooth technology in one package. So far I like it.

Another one was for Alena’s office. Apparently they still use non-laser, non-optical mice at her company, and since she spends all day holding that thing in hand it makes sense to get something nice, comfortable and wireless. We went with Logitech MX™ Revolution. It feels good in hand, has additional buttons to speed up certain tasks and comes with a charger — she doesn’t need to worry about replacing batteries.

I’ll start with the pleasant part. On July 11th we bought a pair of iPhones 3G. Mine is a 16GB white model and Alena’s is an 8GB black model. They both look great.

Here’s the box of my iPhone 3G right after we got home.

In the box we find what? Yes, iPhone, how did you guess?

And here’s its flip side. White one. It doesn’t collect finger prints as the black ones do. The screen however is another story.

Here are the boxes from 2 iPhones with a white phone on top. As you can guess the box color corresponds to the color of iPhone’s back side.

And here I have the phone hooked up to my Mac, trying to activate it through iTunes. This actually took quite a while to get done which brings me to the first part of the whole story. The actual process of buying the phones. And that part was not so much fun.

We arrived to the local AT&T store 15 minutes to 8. Yes, in the morning. When we got there were greeted by a rather long line. On the other hand this is probably considered a very short line when compared to some that were formed around Apple stores in Manhattan.

At 8am they let in several people and that’s pretty much when the fun part ends. After that it was 4 hours of waiting under a brutal sun. The line was not moving because AT&T couldn’t process any orders. We were told that iTunes and AT&T internal system went down. At some point they just started selling the phones without activation. Then the system came back, but was moving extremely slowly. They were letting 1 person at time into the store and it was taking hours upon hours. Then we were told that they are running out of 16GB models and we weren’t even sure if we’ll be able to get any.

By the time we got to the door I was pissed and wasn’t even sure if I’ll get what I want. We let Maruk go in first, since it seemed he would get a heart attack if he ended up without one. But once we were inside all went well. I actually ended up with the very last white iPhone they had. Some poor bastard after me had to go with a black one.

The whole buying process went very smoothly. We got our numbers transferred, accounts set up and so on. I even managed to apply 18% service fee discount, but we won’t know if it will work before we get our first bill.

After having the phone for a couple of days I must say that it lived up to the hype and my huge expectations. It’s as great as everyone said it was. The hardware is great and the software is just awesome. I’m glad we did this the first day and waited until the end so we didn’t have to go searching for it somewhere else the day after. That’s all.

Today I’ve met up with Alena after school near the local Apple store. I’ve got to give it to Apple — even the design of the store itself is nice.

Now this is going to be embarrassing — I touched the iPhone today, for the first time. It is as nice as I thought it was. I was especially impressed with Read more…