One thing I’ve noticed since switching to the iPhone from my Nokia N82 is that the iPhone has become my go-to device when I need to look up certain kinds of information.

For example, take the Now Playing iPhone app. Before the iPhone, I’d go to mytelus.com/movies, select my province, then scan through a long list of cities to find a theatre near me. If I wanted to find a particular film, my task flow was pretty much the same, except I’d start with the movie. Even though my N82 was Internet-enabled, trying to view this site or any site that wasn’t optimized for mobile viewing on it was frustrating, and I’d just turn to to my computer instead.

Now that I have the iPhone, I launch Now Playing and let the phone’s geolocation features find all theatres within a 5km radius, or allow it to suggest which theatres in a larger radius are showing a particular title. Even if I’m sitting in front of my computer, I still reach for the iPhone.

It made me think that it would be amazing if there was an app like this for libraries that worked no matter your location. The Worldcat app comes close, but for now it only works with US libraries (and maybe UK ones?).

How has the iPhone (or Droid) changed your behaviour? What kinds of information do you search for with these devices?

• Note & Point
  I've been trying to work on my slide deck aesthetics and overall presentation skills. I think I'm getting better, but I still have a long way to go. Note & Point is a great source for design inspiration and how to tell great stories with more impact.
  (tags: design powerpoint keynote Presentations)

• On Mobile Context • Tiffany B. Brown
  Tiffany talks about context in design, and lists some very important questions designers/developers need to ask when creating a tool for a specific audience, which in this case, happens to be transborder immigrants.
  (tags: ux design)

The Library Books application that I used in my “Screencasting for the Rest of Us” post is now Snow Leopard compatible. This makes my day more than it probably should.

Because I upload images to several different locations, I often have to resize images after I’ve saved them to my hard drive. Rather than saving several different copies in Photoshop, I save one large image and then use an Automator action to resize the images for this blog. If you’ve never used Automator on OS X, I highly recommend checking out Automator: Your Personal Automation Assistant to discover new ways to automate tasks on OS X.

This morning while working on another project, I discovered that my Resize Image workflow wasn’t working. I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday (no, I’m not going to say it), so I hazarded a guess that might be the reason my action wasn’t working anymore. After upgrading to OS X 10.6, you’ll need to update your Automator actions by turning them into Services. Here’s how to do that:

1. Open your old Finder workflow in Automator to use it as a guide.

2. Choose File -> New

3. Select Service as your workflow template.

4. Choose the kind of data input your service requires. I want my service to behave exactly like it did before, so I chose “Files or Folders” from the “Service receives selected” and “Finder” from the popup menus. If you want selected text to be overwritten with text specified in the workflow, select “Replaces selected text”.

5. According to the Automator Help documentation, I should have been able to select all in my old Automator Workflow and Paste the actions into the new one. I wasn’t able to do that, so using the old workflow as a guide, I created a new workflow with the same steps by dragging actions from the Library.

6. Save your workflow. After you’ve saved it, it will be available from the Services menu and as a keyboard shortcut.

Do you use AUtomator on your system? What kinds of tasks have you scripted?

One of my favourite Snow Leopard features is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention, and is one I discovered quite by accident.

If you use Microsoft Office for the Mac (or, like me, use both the Mac and Windows versions on the same machine), you may not know that every time you reinstall the application, the fonts are reinstalled too. I had no idea that I had in some cases up to five copies of the same font on my machine until I opened Font Book in Snow Leopard.

There are two ways to resolve the font duplications: the first is to select each font individually:

The second way is to select all suspected duplicates and remove them all at once:

It’s the little thoughtful but unobtrusive options like these that make me a dedicated Mac user.

(and yes, I know Anil Dash says FAIL is over. I’m just not capable of thinking of another way to put this…)

As many of you know, Apple plans to ship the latest upgrade to their operating system (code name: Snow Leopard) on August 28, 2009. It goes without saying that the upgrade will cost more in Canada, so I wasn’t surprised to see the above graphic when I visited the Apple Store online earlier this evening. What surprised me is what I saw after I clicked the “learn more” link.

I don’t think there’s any way to make a case of bait and switch, or false advertising. I don’t even think it’s worth it over something as little as six dollars. Still, it even goes to show you that sometimes the big guns get it wrong when it comes to designing task flows.

(And furthermore, KITTEH!)

As much as it pained me to sign a three year mobile contract when I’ve been without one for so long, I finally made the switch from my Nokia N82 to the iPhone 3GS.

Apple’s interface runs rings around the S60. I think even the most hardcore Nokia fan would concede that point. But where the iPhone falls flat for me is photo quality. I took the attached photo at night under low light, and the phone took forever to focus. Without a dedicated night photography setting like the N82′s, I imagine I’ll primarily shoot in sunny or bright overcast conditions. I don’t miss the flash at all (yet) because I thought the flash on the Nokia usually resulted in blown-out highlights.

I still am a great fan of Nokia phones; I hope to continue participating in the WOMWorld blogger relations program. The N86 looks like a powerhouse. But until Nokia either makes significant changes to the S60 software, I’m going to stick with my iPhone, limited feature set and all.

1 Password has released a beta that fixes the Safari 4 issue. Choose: 1 Password > Preferences > Updates and make sure Include Beta versions is checked.

If you’re like me, and you’ve come to rely very heavily on the 1 Password password management software, you were probably disappointed to find out that 1 Password “breaks” when you install the Safari 4 Beta. Luckily, I’ve found out how to restore 1 Password functionality to Safari 4, and it’s a relatively easy process.

As this involves modifying an application, if you’re at all nervous, you should probably avoid this.

While Safari 4 is open, choose About Safari from the Safari menu. Make a note of the build number, and quit Safari.

Next, in the Finder, find your 1 Password application in the Applications folder. Ctrl-click the folder, and choose Show Package Contents

With the Contents folder open, navigate to Resources > SupportedBrowsers.plist. Open this file in your favourite text editor.
If your text editor has line numbers, look around line 67 or so. You want to find the Safari key.
When you find the Safari key, look for the line MaxBundleVersion. Underneath that, you’ll see a string. If you don’t want to delete the line, you can comment it out, which is what I did. Replace the deleted/commented out string with 5528.16, just as I’ve done in the image below.

Save the file, close your text editor, and re-open Safari 4. Select Customize Toolbar from the View menu, drag your 1 Password icon to your toolbar, and voila, 1 Password functionality is restored!

You’ll have to edit the application with each new release of the Safari 4 Beta until the final version is released.

Well this is a fine how do you do. I finally found the one application that makes me wish I’d gotten an iPhone. If only Nokia would make a version of their blogging software that cooperated nicely with WordPress.
A blogger can dream…