johnwilker.com

The Mobile playground is shrinking, buh bye Nokia

it’s been an interesting few days for those who obsess over mobile stuff, myself included. First HP announced their new WebOS line up. In a word, “sexy”. In another, “too late to market” Ok that’s four words, but still. The current time frame for us to play with a TouchPad or Pre 3. “Summer” not [...]

iWatch Review Part two: The Lunatik

I’ve already reviewed the iPod Nano as a watch, this review is an addition to that. Primarily for the Lunatik, watch enclosure. Or “Multi touch watch” as they call it.I got in on this awesome kickstarter project very early, well before they even met their minimum funding level. You can get more info at the [...]

AppleTV vs. GoogleTV… Fight!

I’d kill a kitten, maybe 2 for a device that is a goto media center device. What would that be? Well it’d have access to hulu, Netflix, my local music and video files (On a Drobo over SMB), be able to rent content from somewhere (I don’t care whether it’s iTunes, Amazon, etc since I [...]

Disney world, it’s not so magical

Ok so we spent much of last week and Christmas day in Orlando with the In-laws. Mom-inlaw wanted to do Disney World.

Overall, I had a good time. Having been to Disney World with my mom two years ago, there wasn’t much “awe” happening since in 2 years Disney hasn’t done much to the place.

Magic Kingdom

I was really bummed that the Haunted Mansion wasn’t all “nightmare Before Christmas”-ed out. Must be a CA thing? Overall the park wasn’t too crazy, crowded to be sure, but not bad. It’s funny tho, i was talking to Mike Lee about his recent trip to the Magic Kingdom and he was saying how it’s odd when you see things not go right. Disney (like Apple) tries really hard to manage the entire experience, and when something goes wrong it’s glaringly wrong. Well we definitely had the BMF experience at the Kingdom.

Apparently part of experience now when waiting in line is to have the line be less a line, and more a mob. On two, maybe three rides when the iron bound queue ended and we got into the actual ride building, Disney employees informed us that the line wasn’t single file, fill all available space. I’m guessing as a way to make the lines outside seem shorter, or something. However as in all cases with mobs, it quickly went from “happiest place on earth” to “mob rules; cut in front, elbow and kick your way into the Pirates of the Caribbean”

So that kinda sucked and really ruined the experience of the ride. Thankfully most lines weren’t too long in general, and we fast passed the popular stuff.

Christmas day, we were flying home, so after breakfast with the fam we went to epcot to walk around. To get from breakfast to Epcot/our hotel we had to go past the Magic Kingdom. Here I was thinking, “Who the hell wants to be at Disney World on Christmas day?” Turns out, a lot of people do! We asked the gal behind the counter at hour hotel about it and she said, at around noon that day they were at “level 3″ meaning only season pass holders and resort guests could get in. The park was already turning away folks who were staying elsewhere or driving in. ON CHRISTMAS DAY! She said on New Years Eve day, they’ll be at “level 4″ meaning once you leave, you can’t get back in, and even resort guests and season pass holders might not get in.

I gotta admit, I’m amazed that it’s that busy on Christmas. New Years, sure, I bet it’s a pretty fun party, but christmas?!

Oh and Space Mountain, the new music sucks. I need a fast rock track to make the ride fun, the current music is way to mellow, i found myself just sitting there waiting for the ride to end.

Epcot

My favorite part of being in Orlando is Epcot. Mostly because of the world tour part, and beer. Epcot itself is fun, the rides are cool, and the new (even new to me) Nemo ride is pretty sweet. Actually the ride is lame, but there’s an aquarium attached (you can just walk into that part, the ride exits there) that is really awesome.

It’s funny, we went to a beer/snack cart in the United Kingdom Pavilion, and i got mocked (rightfully so) for ordering a Stella.

Also, if you like trying candy we don’t get in the states, the Twinnings Tea shop has a pretty good, but small selection. SKIP the turkish Delight. This ain’t Narnia!

Thankfully, with the Magic Kingdom being so crowded on Christmas day, Epcot was not. We breezed thru the park using up the last of our meal plan snacks with hardly anyone else around. AWESOME!

Meal Plans

I dont think the meal plans are worth it. Ours was actually free with our package booking, so that was nice. I’d have been annoyed if I had paid for it. For one thing it’s very rigid. A “meal” is an entree, drink (non alcoholic) and dessert. I don’t like dessert and would often prefer an appetizer, no go cowboy! (Props to the waiter at Nine Dragons in Epcot. he hooked us up with some apps for free. Course with a party of 8 and 18% tip built in, why not make sure we’re happy. I know we added a little more tip to the bill)

The way the plan (ours at least) worked was we got 4 meals, 4 snacks, and 4 quicks. After cracking the code on what exactly each of those was, then it was a matter of scoping out the icon on the menus around the parks to see what applied and what didn’t, and then having to tell the worker, “I want a snack, what’s that entail here?” every time.

So overall it was way more effort than it was worth.

Ok that’s a quick and dirty run down of my christmas (oh and along with being at Disney World on Christmas, flying on Christmas is also very popular! WTF) vacation.

All in all, a good time.

My Review, the iWatch

Whether Apple would/will release an iWatch or not has been a source of speculation and flame war for years.

The first thing that came to my mind during the recent Apple event around iPods was “Holy crap, the new nano touch, would make an awesome watch!” I wasn’t alone in that. My Pal Christian made this review before I got mine.

Clearly Apple at least contemplated it as a watch, since it has a built in setting for watch face on wake. Essentially when you touch the wake up button, it comes to life as a watch. Maybe this is Apple testing the water for an honest to goodness iWatch. I certainly hope so, because as much as I like my iWatch, there’s a few things I’d like to see improved.

The Pros:

It’s an iPod. I mean really, that’s it’s main feature and like all iPods it’s good at what it does. Plug in some headphones and away ya go.

Reminder! National Comic Sans Day is Friday 10/1

Last year several folks updated the CSS for their blogs to participate in National Comic Sans Day. I’m hoping more will do it this year!

Why? You ask. That easy, we take ourselves too seriously. If folks directed their Anti Comic Sans energy into something productive, we’d probably have cures for Cancer and the Common Cold. And really it’s just a font. And it’s just one day.

We need to lighten up, laugh at ourselves, and take a day to have some fun at our own expense.

Do it, you know you want to! It’s simple, just create a second style sheet of all comic sans and drop it in on Friday. Take it out Saturday morning.

Be bold!

iApp Review – Free Fallers

This is a short review for a pretty simple little game, but it’s hella fun. It’s kinda like PETA vs. the world. Animals air dropping in to attack bulldozers. Maybe a new wave of iGames with a social message?

Free Fallers (iTunes Link), is a cute game where you direct parachuting animals in to land on bulldozers and other construction equipment.

The premise is simple. Animals drop in from the top of the screen free falling towards the ground. You guide their fall and then when ready you tap to deploy their parachute. You can still guide them once the chute is deployed as well.

The more construction equipment you crush, the higher your score. That’s it. Easy.

This is one of those games that’s great to have on your phone for when you’re waiting in line at Starbucks, or at the store waiting for the lady with 13 items in the 10 item or less line, who’d paying with a check.

Go check it out. It’s worth the $1.99

Technology and Conferences, finally some good

Last week was Ignite Denver 7. You can read all about Ignite Denver on the blog, but among all the numerous new things we did to reboot Ignite Denver, we used technology.

It worked awesome!

There were two things we used, Eventbrite’s iPhone app and the Square reader and iPhone app.

iApp Review – Popular Mechanics Does it Right

I’m a sucker for giving publishing a chance. I don’t know why, they fail more often than not. Just look at Wired (iTunes Link), and Men’s Health (iTunes Link).

Popular Mechanics (iTunes Link), might be the exception for many reasons.

1. They priced the app right. 1.99. It’s a beta, so I hope they see that the price is a huge deal and keep it at something reasonable, and below the dead tree edition.

2. They don’t go rich media crazy like Wired did. There’s plenty of pages of simple text for reading. Maybe a nice transition of a graphic element sliding in slightly after the page transition finishes, but every page isn’t a multimedia orgy.

3. They started slow. Both Men’s Health and Wired, dove right in with high priced, “billed as complete” as far as I know offerings. It’s nice to see Pop. Mech. admit they’re testing the waters.

How does iThoughtsHD have this and Apple doesn’t?

I caved, and paid $10 for pages. Complete waste of money. I edit a lot of pages files. Sponsor packets,etc. All the time. I’d love to pull one up on my iPad, edit, and without having to think about plugging into iTunes, copying the files out of iTunes back to my iDisk where they live, overwriting the old one.

Pages, and most apps, come kinda close, you can access the file, pull it in locally, make edits, but then you’re stuck, the document is trapped in the iPad and iTunes.

Why not make the iPad apps (at least the Apple ones) more connected to Oh I dunno, say Apple’s own cloud services. iWork.com and mobileMe. Some of us (still) pay for mobileMe hoping it’ll mature and actually be useful. I have no idea what iWork.com is for, but it seems like it’d make perfect sense to tie the iWork iPad apps (maybe the new iLife ones too) to Apple’s own (though dropbox, et. al. would be nice too) services to extend their usefulness.

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