Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

Can someone please tell The Unofficial Apple Weblog to start a new iPhone blog, and leave my feedreader free of half a dozen or more posts everyday about the iPhone? I appreciate the need for constant updating, but certainly, you don’t have to post everytime someone who owns an iPhone coughs.

Recently, a friend with a slightly larger budget than I, bought an iPhone. Subsequently, they gave me their “old” Nokia e62. I’ve been a big fan of Nokia, simply because most of their phones that I’ve owned were well constructed, worked well with Cingular, and, just worked.

So quickly I discovered I can now sync my address book and iCal with the phone, which is nice. I then sought as many means as possible to use the phone with my mac. One downfall with Nokia, is they do not have a native Mac desktop interface, as they do with PC, but at least they’ve recently added a Media Manager, which allows for the addition of a folder in iTunes and iPhoto , in which anything added to that folder is added to your phone. I won’t be using the phone much for these purposes, but it’s a nice addition. Perhaps I can see myself using it for taking a podcast or two with me for listening to while out and about.

Another, not so familiar utility, is the Bluetooth File Exchange application in the Utilities folder. When I was given the phone, I didn’t get a USB data transfer cable, so I was having difficulty adding applications to the phone. One in particular, was a fix for sending SMS messages. They were taking forever to send. After discovering the File Exchange app however, I was able to navigate to the file on the harddrive, send it to device, chose the phone, and the app showed up as a text message. Opening the application allowed me to easily install apps or add new themes (even with the new phone, I’m still suffering from iPhone envy, so I found an iPhone theme, which I actually like much better than the default theme, or any of the other included themes on the phone).

I just added a link in the sidebar to an upcoming blogger “unconference”, BlogOrlando. I’ve not been to any type of meetup/conference/gathering of other bloggers, and am really looking forward to it. Not only to just get out of town for a day or two, but to actually meet and talk face to face with other bloggers and web geeks. I’ll probably concentrate on the technology aspects of the gathering, though I suppose I can sit in on other sessions as they are added and interest me. I’m also looking forward to being able to pimp Habari.

If anyone else in the Central Florida area is going, I’d love to connect in advance, and possibly have someone to “know” in advance. There are two dinners, one the night before, and one the night of, so having even a somewhat familiar person to break bread with would be nice, though I’m fairly good at making new acquaintances and meeting people. (Probably from years of sitting in bars and chatting up the person next to me.)

Also, if anyone has advice for attending an event of this nature, I’m all ears.

Finally did a cleaning up, got the Lifestream page slightly adjusted, and styled comments, with a little help from Will Mayo.

I’ve already mentioned, this blog is powered by a new blogging engine, Habari. A second developer release is out the door, and can be downloaded now.

As a developer release, it’s still not guaranteed for everyday, production level blogging, however it’s stable enough that you can certainly install it and get a feel for how far it’s come, and where it’s going. For the less faint of heart, you certainly can follow along using SVN.

This release among opening up many new features that have been in core for some time, also realizes a goal of having docs shipped with the release. It was a primary goal of the project from the start, and recent discussion about using the aforementioned TiddlyWiki as a means of distributing the documentation brought me into the fold on that aspect. Thanks to the initial work by Khaled, including customizing the CSS to match Habari’s proposed new admin interface, I was able to incorporate the basics from Habari’s wiki, and do some initial leg work on getting license agreements to use some TW community released plugins for future releases.

I must say it is quite satisfying to have contributed in some meaningful way to such a project, and certainly fueled the fires to more actively involve myself in documentation writing for the project, as well as any other positive contributions I can make. I’d really like to thank all of the project members, and additional community members who’ve brought Habari this far, as well as in general thank them for creating such a welcoming community. At this juncture in the development, it’s quite refreshing for there not to be a divide between users and coders, unlike an unnamed project I volunteered with in the past. This certainly is a goal for Habari, and I sincerely believe them when they say it will continue in that fashion. Alienation is the quickest, surefire way of loosing morale support and non code contributions to a community, and as I said, I whole heartedly believe the core of Habari understand that, and will avoid the culture of elitism that I’m sure permeates many other open source projects.

If you are looking for something new to get your thoughts onto the web, I’d seriously suggest considering Habari and getting involved in the community.