Seems odd. I guess they’re standardizing on the fifteen inch model, which you can get in i5 or i7, but they only have i5′s in the seventeens off the shelf. The web site is the same way – i7 is an upgrade for the seventeen inch machine.

Actually I did find one store that had one, but it had the matte display, which is also an upgrade. I wonder if someone ordered it and didn’t claim it.

Anyway, if you want a seventeen inch i7 with a 7200 rpm disk, better get on the web site. You won’t find it in the store.

I’m one of the early adopters. I had my iPad on April 3rd, day one. I scrambled for eight weeks prior to have a game built and ready and waiting in the app store on day one as well (more on that later). So some six weeks later, I’ve been living with my iPad day to day.

I follow the news, I follow the feeds, I follow the pundits, but for the most part I don’t listen to what they say… No secret that you generally get negative opinions on the web. They’ll tell you that the device will not sell, will not catch on, and will not go mainstream, and in the same breath they’ll tell you that HP and Google and others are bringing tablets go market to compete with the iPad. If it’s destined to fail, why are so many emulating it?

Experts aside, I’ve made up my own mind. I love my iPad. Say what you will about the on screen keyboard, but I’m a fast touch typist, and I’m getting to where I can type pretty near full speed on the thing. Say what you will about the lack of a camera, front facing or back, but I still have my phone in my pocket if I want to take a picture, and I just don’t do the video chat thing anyway, so i haven’t missed the camera. Say what you will about the lack of Flash, but I don’t miss Flash at all, and in most cases I’m glad it’s blocked without me having to run a browser add-on to do it. The web without Flash is a much quieter, calmer place.

It’s still early, but I do think it’s a game changing device. I’ve been leaving the laptop at the desk and taking nothing but the iPad to meetings lately. Until you try working with it in this way day to day it may look like an expensive toy to you, but it’s so nice to be able to leave the laptop bag behind, leave the power supply behind, and not have to look for the nearest power outlet if it’s going to be a long meeting because you know the iPad is just going to keep going all day long.

I say it’s a winner.

If you’re doing any iPhone development, be ready for some headaches if you get a new machine. While the migration assistant does move all of your applications and settings over from your old machine, it doesn’t necessarily copy keychain items, and if you haven’t brought across your private key for your distribution certificate you’re going to be out of luck. Don’t miss these important bits from this Program Portal page:

Saving your Private Key and Transferring to other Systems

It is critical that you save your private key somewhere safe in the event that you need to develop on multiple computers or decide to reinstall your system OS. Without your private key, you will be unable to sign binaries in Xcode and test your application on any Apple device. When a CSR is generated, the Keychain Access application creates a private key on your login keychain. This private key is tied to your user account and cannot be reproduced if lost due to an OS reinstall. If you plan to do development and testing on multiple systems, you will need to import your private key onto all of the systems you’ll be doing work on.

1. To export your private key and certificate for safe-keeping and for enabling development on multiple systems, open up the Keychain Access Application and select the ‘Keys’ category.
2. Control-Click on the private key associated with your iPhone Development Certificate and click ‘Export Items’ in the menu. The private key is identified by the iPhone Developer: <first Name> <last Name> public certificate that is paired with it.
3. Save your key in the Personal Information Exchange (.p12) file format.
4. You will be prompted to create a password which is used when you attempt to import this key on another computer.
5. You can now transfer this .p12 file between systems. Double-click on the .p12 to install it on a system. You will be prompted for the password you entered in Step 4.

Happily enough I had done all of this, but there was still a great deal of revoking, requesting, and installing of certificates and provisioning profiles before I finally got App Store builds of my application working on the new machine.

And I still haven’t submitted a single one. I’ve actually only written one, but I keep dragging my feet on submitting it. Perfectionism kicks in… it’s a simple app and doesn’t do much except help you walk through the Getting Things Done processing model for incoming stuff. With as many crappy apps as there are out there I don’t know why I hesitate to just shove this up there, ship something, but either way I pay Apple their $99 every year for the privilege. For some reason I thought I would make money off of iPhone apps, but so far only Apple has profited from my efforts.

I just can’t stop reading this essay by Paul Graham: The Power of the Marginal. Deeply insightful, it encourages me to remember that mainstream is not the goal, but usually a side effect of something that entered from the periphery and became accepted. Just as anything mundane was once innovative, things in the mainstream were once in the margins. To really get hold of something, you have to grasp it at the edges.

I just sent some feedback to Apple about iPhone OS 3.0. My company requires that I run with a passcode set on my phone, and as of version 3.0, Apple has removed the option to set the time interval on the passcode requirement. I used to be able to set it so it only bugged me for the passcode once every fifteen minutes or once every hour, but now I have to type it every single time I turn the phone on. The only passcode option you have is Require Immediately.

Okay. I don’t like it much, but I can live with having to type my passcode in every time. The thing is, the iPhone also presents you with the Slide to Unlock control when you power it on, so I always have to slide to unlock, then I always have to type in my passcode. Seriously, if I always have to type in my passcode, that ought to be enough. The Slide to Unlock bit is redundant and annoying.

If they’re worried that the Emergency Call button could get pressed accidentally then I would suggest that they put that under a slide control if the password is required. Otherwise the Slide to Unlock control should only present itself if you don’t have to enter the passcode.

UPDATE:

I found out that this is only happening on my phone because the Exchange server I connect with appears to be inflicting this limitation on me (a friend of mine who has a Passcode set but does not connect to a corporate server showed me that he still has other options than Require Immediately), so I have to take back at least a little of what I said, but not all of it.

Regardless of the Passcode requirement interval, if the phone is going to insist that you type you Passcode at this power-on, it should not require the Slide to Unlock.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

I was browsing this site to learn how to reset my iPhone 3GS and hopefully escape from the horrible battery life I’ve been experiencing. One of the happy side effects is that now I have the passcode timeout settings available again, so if you have upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0 I might recommend that you do the reset, too.

This is an old list I found in my file drawer. I wrote it some time ago after reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s a pretty good list, so I decided to post it.

Impeccability says:

• Everything needs an assigned place.
• Don’t stop…If you catch yourself sitting, take action that increases your impeccability, even if it is a small one.
• Do things all the way… avoid “staging,” which creates new piles of incompletions, or simply relocates old ones.
• Don’t step over the garbage.
• Plan you work, work your plan, document your results.
• Slow and steady wins the race… if you will down and do things with impeccability, rework and delays will be reduced.
• Let the desire to give up become a trigger to take action, even on a small, insignificant change. Action is the cure for lethargy, depression, and distraction.
• If you take care of the small things, the big things will handle themselves. How many big issues would you have avoided if some small detail had been handled beforehand?
• Impeccability lives in the heart of your thoughts. If it is in the forefront of your mind, you will act impeccably, or experience discomfort when you don’t.
• It may seem daunting, but one detail at a time you can bring your life into tight focus.
• Routine is your fiend, if it’s the right routine.
• Let impeccability become a habit. Your mind craves impeccability, organization, and completion. Feed it.

It’s a little kludgey, but it can be done.

If you have a Things project with a bunch of items under it, first create a project in Omnifocus that will be the destination project.

Go to Things and open up the project. Select all of the items and then drag them to the Omnifocus icon.

You’ll get an Omnifocus import dialog. In the dialog you’ll notice that all of the items have been split out on rows in the notes field. Select and copy this text and then cancel the import dialog. Alternatively you can just drag the projects to a text editor and copy the lines from there.

Go into Omnifocus and paste the copied text into the main area. Omnifocus will paste the items as projects, but they’ll all be selected. While they’re all selected, grab them and drag them on top of your container project. When they fall into the container context they are converted into tasks.

Due dates and notes and things like that are naturally lost when you do this, but it does beat typing everything over again.

I’ve been using Things since the beta, and was one of the first to buy it when they started accepting money. I bought the Things Touch app for the iPhone the minute it came out. Unfortunately, I’ve just hit the point where Things doesn’t support me in my GTD life, so I’ve had to move to something else. Why? Because the biggest hole in my GTD system is the weekly review, and unfortunately Things doesn’t do anything to make the weekly review any easier.

I’m pretty good at capturing things I need to do – not as good at actually doing them, and horrible at completing my reviews. I’ve tried some Things tricks like making a new tag for the review date, so it’s relatively easy to go through and mark things as reviewed, but there’s no way to filter for things that don’t have a certain tag, so you can’t filter it down to the things that still need reviewing. In addition, when you mark something done, Things doesn’t give the focus to the next thing on the list, so if you forget to click the next one you wind up all the way back at the top of the when you hit the arrow key and have to start scanning for the next unreviewed item again. I tried using Midnight Inbox, which had a fantastic review mechanism, but the rest of the program seemed a bit buggy (it’s been a while, it may be better by now), and I had already wandered away from iGTD. The Hit List looks promising, too (great look and fantastic interface), but it doesn’t provide any review mechanism either.

So this week I finally took the plunge and paid for Omnifocus. Yeah, I’ll agree with everyone that says it’s too complicated – it is definitely more complex than Things – but I’ve already found ways to arrange items in Omnifocus so that I can quickly and easily pull up tightly focused lists of task repeatably, and there is a Review menu item that will march me through all of my projects that need reviewing and give me a chance to mark each as reviewed. It even lets me set different review intervals, so my Someday/Maybe list only has to get looked at every month or two, while my active projects get the once a week treatment, and my higher altitude objectives can get the semiannual or annual once over. I’m still learning the ropes, but with Omnifocus it’s pretty clear that I’m going to be able to make it do what I need it to do, while I’m still struggling to make Things really useful these many months later.

So that’s the good news: I appear to have found a tool that will support me in my GTD lifestyle. The bad news is that one of Things other shortcomings is its inability to export its contents in any useful fashion. I’ve spent all this time moving from iGTD and my paper lists into Things – now there’s not easy to get out short of moving each item over manually, at least far as Google and I can tell. If you have any tips for how to do it I’m all ears.

Oh well. What better review could I possibly perform than taking each item, one by one, from one software package to another?

WordPress Theme Generator: I don’t blog so much, and I certainly don’t spend any time trying to make my site look good. As a hopeful attempt to get myself to do something about it, I’m linking this WordPress Theme generator, which will purportedly let me interactively create a good looking theme and then dump it into my site. We’ll see. At least this way, the next time I come look at my ugly, uninteresting site, I’ll be reminded that there are tools that can help me address it.