I’ve got a new cell phone, as of Saturday evening at around 8PM. What’s the big deal? Well, it’s a black RAZR:

That would be enough to go crazy about, but it’s replacing utter crap in the form of the Sony Ericsson T635. I’ve now used each model of this phone from the original iMac-inspired one on. My previous phone was the SE T610, and when that was stolen I lived out the remainder of my T-Mobile contract with an old Nokia. I then got the (then new) SE T635, hoping and hearing that they had indeed fixed some of the major flaws of the previous models. Alas, after about a year, I can safely say that not only have they not fixed those problems (hanging interface, no I/O interrupt system, bad joystick hardware implementation, etc.) but they actually introduced some new ones!

Anyway, this is supposed to be about how overjoyed I am with my new phone, the Motorola Razr V3 Black Edition. First, the geekiest thing I love:

Yup, that’s a standard mini USB connector right smack on the phone. In fact, it’s the ONLY connector the phone provides other than the cellular connection and the Bluetooth wireless. The included power plug is an AC/Mini USB cable. This is absolutely amazing for me – after years of struggling with Sony Ericsson’s flimsy proprietary connectors, I finally can connect my phone to anything over mini USB/USB. Proprietary connectors are not inherently evil. Case in point, my iPod mini uses Apple’s own private standard “Dock Connector” for connection to computers and other devices. But it has never broken on me, I have never had a problem with either the cable or the port on the iPod (am I jinxing myself) and believe me, I am not so gentle with either sometimes. SE’s connectors, on the other hand, even when I treated them like newborn babies, would stop working, need to be jiggled, and any time a cable went bad, it was back to eBay to see how much it would be for a new one this time, cause buying one of those charging cables out in the real world is just too damn expensive. OK, so I love the USB connection (the same as on recent Palms and Digital Cameras, like my fiancée’s Palm Z22 and our Canon S410).

And look how thin…

Other thoughts…

Battery life so far is great. I charged it the first night and have not plugged it in since. Let’s see how long that lasts.

The interface is nice and the responsiveness is almost perfect – a far cry from my infuriating T635.

The reception is excellent. Voices sound crisp and clear and I’ve been quite pleased with the quality of the speakerphone.

More thoughts to come later…

It began on August 31:

And the incredible Xeni Jardin kept it up, posting great piece after great piece, pointing us at content from the MSM, as well as the individual stories that were coming through the internet and cellular networks.

She provided background and informative analysis from experts, like in Civil Defense in Cuba and Disease Threat Analysis.

There was the anonymous message from the relief worker and the updating on the state of the New Orleans nuclear power facility.

She chronicled the horrible responses from Barbara Bush and the Army Times.

She also followed the FCC’s attempts to restore some kind of infrastructure.

Last, there was the heart-wrenching video from the president of Jefferson Parish, and the applause-earning statement from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

This is the new media. When the Lusitania was sunk, Americans read about in the newspaper. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, they listened by their radios. When JFK was shot Americans watched it on the Broadcast News. We tuned in to CNN and Cable News as the Towers fell on September 11. Let history now show that when the levees broke in New Orleans, Americans turned to the internet and to a new breed of journalist – a journalist who has as much heart as she does guts, and a journalist who isn’t afraid to publish something controversial, but is equally unafraid to correct her reports when new facts are brought to light.

We are living in a bright new age of technology and communication, all the while the world around us becomes darker and more dangerous. Let us continue to build this new transparent communications network as it makes weathering the gathering storm just a little bit easier.

Weird name I know, but one of the coolest things I’ve downloaded in a long while.

Anyone who manages a website knows that you spend quite a lot of time in your FTP client of choice. This is one of those few areas where I simply must have my mac, because the FTP clients out for Windows are absolutely horrible. (well, except for Windows’ built-in FTP in explorer, which is really quite good for basic tasks and puts Apple’s similar efforts to shame) All the Windows clients are a mess of buttons with no labels, and feel like they were designed by someone who couldn’t decide what he loved more: DOS or UNIX. In absolute stark contrast, Fetch has been the mac client ever since ever and it is really quite a nice program. Nowadays, though, with Mac OS X and modern Cocoa software, there are some great options like FTPeel and Interarchy. My personal favorite though, is Panic Software’s Transmit.

Transmit is not only beautifully designed and deceptively simple, but is also incredibly reliable—something of real import when we’re talking about FTP and one’s web site. The main interface looks like this:

As someone who deals quite heavily with images and photos for his web site, I really appreciate Transmit dynamic preview pane, which includes a zoom feature for images as well:

Transmit also has a really well implemented sync feature:

But for me, the absolute kicker is the Edit in External Editor feature. This allows you to specify your external editor (something else of which the mac has a great selection) in the preferences:

Then, when you go to edit a file that is on the server, it downloads it to a temp folder and opens it in your editor of choice. As soon as you make changes and hit save, it re-uploads the file to the server. Beautiful and seamless.

Update: Here’s a video of the process.

Enter Apple. Tiger was released with a bit of fanfare, touting Spotlight and Dashboard as the two most important—and most valuable—features. Dashboard, however, quickly became marred by the realization from outside Apple that it was quite the security risk. Safari automatically downloaded and installed widgets and there was no built-in way to manage widgets. Many on the net proposed that this would usher in a flood of spyware and other malware via Dashboard on the OS X platform. Well, that hasn’t happened. Not only has that NOT happened, but Apple has solved all those problems while keeping Dashboard the friendly development platform it was built to be, all in the new 10.4.2 release.

Yes, there’s not a built-in widget manager. No, it’s not a Preference pane (the Mac equivalent of a Windows Control Panel). Instead, it’s actually just a widget itself, but it works just great. Widgets now prompt the user to be installed and upgrading prompts the user to replace—both good improvements.

The best improvement by far, though, is the “test drive” mode into which all new widgets launch. It looks like this:

Visually the user can understand that this widget is closed off, though perfectly usable, and there are clearly marked buttons to keep it or delete it. Underneath that though, Apple has adjusted the dashboard engine so that these widgets that are being “test-driven” cannot harm the system in any way. Score 1 for Apple.