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.

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.

I’m giving up on this piece of crap. I get to play a while, but then it hangs my machine and requires a hard reboot. I have a quad core machine with 4 gig of RAM and an nVidia geForce 8500 video card, but both my XP and Vista installations of the game completely hang the machine. Their licensing scheme limits how many machines I can put it on (even though it insists on logging in before I can play), and one of my three installs got burned on a Parallels install on my Mac that won’t run because it says I don’t have enough video card power to do it. They don’t support the Macbook video card, so even if they released a license back to me, it wouldn’t run native on Leopard – and this machine isn’t even a year old. Customer support is unresponsive, firing off canned responses that are just the same junk that’s in the read me file. I’ve had enough. Spore stinks. Don’t buy it. As many computers as I have it won’t run for crap. I’m sorry I plunked down the money for it.

I’ve been playing Spore a bit. I’ll admit, it’s quite engaging. However, I’m disappointed by a couple of things:

First off, it won’t run on my MacBook. They were kind enough to include a Mac installer, but Spore doesn’t like the graphics hardware in my year-old notebook. If I’d been toting the thing around for four or five years I might be able to understand, but it’s really disappointing that they didn’t provide support for this very popular platform. Hopefully they’ll fix that in the not too distant future.

Second, it tends to hang – at least on my Windows hardware. The first few times I played I never got around to saving my game (it doesn’t take all that long to get through the microbe phase) and, before I got too far into the creature phase the game has locked up on me (in Windows XP and Vista both), requiring a hard restart of the machine.

It’s early in the game, so I’ll cross my fingers and hope for some updates. In the meantime, even with those annoyances, I will have to guard my time preciously so that Spore does not continue to steal hours from things I really ought to be working on.

It was odd… when I would hit the Maps icon on my iPhone from inside my house, the application would act like it was triangulating from cell towers (the blue circle would show up and waver, then zoom in), but it always homed in on my old address. We moved six or eight months ago. I had never actually had the iPhone in that house (we moved before I bought it). I thought maybe it was using the old address from my contact record, so I cleaned that out, but it didn’t make any difference (which makes sense… unless I had told the phone to use it, how would it know which one to use?).

So I went digging.

I finally ran across Skyhook. I’ll admit, I didn’t know that this thing was out there, but here’s what it is, in a nutshell:

Similar to Google Streetview, where they drive around with cameras installed on top of cars and take pictures of everything in site and tie them to map coordinates, Skyhook rolls around and collects information on wireless access points (using the MAC address) and hooks those to geographic coordinates. At some point in the past, the friendly Skyhook van rolled through my circle and geocoded my WAP. When my iPhone goes to see where I am, it sees that I’m connected to a wireless access point and uses the MAC address to ask Skyhook where I am. Last time they heard from it, that WAP was in another city, so it takes me to my old address.

So I used their form to submit an access point, which required my address, my MAC address, and an email address so that they can update their database. I have mixed feelings about how much they know about me now, but it’s all becoming so transparent today anyway… everyone knows a lot more about you than you would rather they did, or they can find out easily enough if the mood strikes them.

So, for good or for ill, Skyhook knows where my WAP is sitting now, and within a few days (hopefully) my iPhone will figure it out as well. Skyhook offers a plugin called Loki that will make your notebook computer able to locate itself based on the WAP it’s hitting as well, share that information with friends, etc. Attempting to install Loki didn’t work, though… Firefox 3 claims that the plugin does not provide secure updates, so it told me to take a walk.

My iPhone was bricked most of Friday (like everyone else’s) after Apple’s botched iPhone 3G rollout. I was surprised at how few articles about it hit my feeds on Friday, but now they’re starting to show up.

I can’t say it any better than Seth Godin did in this post about Scarcity.

Steve Wozniak purportedly cut in line to get his 3G iPhone.

Here’s one more from Wired Magazine.

Things is my favorite GTD tool for the Mac. It will be even better now with Things for iPhone. They got their iPhone version ready (sans a few features) in time for the iPhone 3G release, and even hit the top 25 apps list. I already paid the money for the app – I’ve been using Things on the Mac ever since it showed up in beta, so I was happy to throw them a few bucks in support. I’ll license it as soon as they’re ready to take my money.

The iPhone application looks pretty good, although it is pretty much a straight up iPhone list management tool. It will be better once they get tags implemented, and of course synchronization with the Mac version. I will wait patiently. Things is a fantastic tool.