The iPhone rocks but...

Well my "kids" got me an Apple iPhone for Christmas. Needless to say it's an awesome gift. The 3G has worked great most places and I've found a lot of nice apps for the phone.

My wife is happy because the best feature to her is someone actually answers the phone. But my other phone had issues so you can't really blame me. ;-)

Anyway here are just a few of the features I use daily; GMail, facebook, twitter, Weather App, Google Maps App, Camera Bag App. There are really too many to list. The one downside and I'm not sure why Apple has not fixed this, is there is no easy way to copy/paste.

The lack of copy/paste is a known sore spot amongst iPhone users so I assume Apple will address this soon. When posting to facebook, twitter, or Gmail it would be nice to have that feature.

Fix that Apple and you will make a lot of happy iPhone users lives complete!

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Credit Card Fraud - Update

This is an update to an earlier post about how easy it is to make fraudulent donations to the Obama campaign.

First post:
http://thejagergazette.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-fraud-my-experience.html

Today I tried the same fake donations while filming. The two times I tried this time, the transactions were declined. I called in later today to check on the declined transactions and AMEX told me they were actually approved. Go figure?

So now I am somewhat perplexed. I placed two donations, one for $30 and one for $5, and both were declined according to the Obama donation website but my credit card company shows it was approved.

Again I used, John McCain, Washington DC etc... for the donation info. The transaction was processed by Obama Exploratory, retail, Middle East Rest.

I will check tomorrow to see if these charges actually hit my card.

Please pass this information to others so they know how Obama is running his donation campaign.

For anyone concerned don't worry I am disputing all the charges!

-jag

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Google Chrome Search and Spell

Ok - it's been about a week and I've had some time to use Google's Chrome browser and still find it a nice browser. I'll touch on two nice features real quick I've come across thet have been helpful for my needs.

The first, and this is great for me, is an auto spell check or sort of. I haven't quiet figured this one out because some sites will spell check and others will not. I assume it's a bug that will get resolved. But when it does work it was great. If I misspell a word it automatically underlines the word and I can right click for spell suggestions. This seems to be pretty much the same as Google's spellchecker for the "other" browser. I like it because, when it works it takes care of spell checking as you type. By the was the spell check is not working now so I'll blame Google for any misspellings.

The second feature I came upon by trial and error. Sometimes I'll search a web document itself using the "find" feature which is usually the ctrl+f shortcut. Given the fact Chrome is pretty scaled down there is no toolbar for the "find" feature therefore leading me to try the ctrl+f and voila, a small drop down box pops down at the top right of the browser. No big deal right? Well this is what I expected so I typed in my search and all instances on the page were highlighted. The other nice feature was that on the scroll bar all areas where the word occurred were also highlighted, nice. Since I was looking at a lengthy database web document the scroll highlights allowed me to scroll quickly to each instance of my search. It's hard to explain so just try it!

Chrome still has some issues but it's still only a few days old. I will keep plugging away and what doesn't work in Chrome I will simply pull up my old IE clunker and go back to the good ole days!

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Google Chrome hits the streets or uh Web

Google has entered a new battle - the browser wars. While Microsoft currently dominates the market with Firefax and Safari hanging second and third, Google has subtly created a "new view" of the web. On the surface it may look similar to other browsers but under the hood it's running on a new engine.

Having some programming skills I can appreciate this new approach. Ever since I opened Mozilla way back when, sometime in the early 90s, each new browser or version of a browser has built upon previous versions. This has led to some "in the box" thinking and one way thinking of how a browser should work. It has also led to some hefty browsers.

Users over the years though have changed their browsing habits. In the early days having one browser open was normal, but now having several browser windows open and ultimately the "tabs" feature is common. Email, blogs and blog editing, social websites like facebook, are all open at one time. This is great. The problem with browsers like Internet Explorer is they all occupy the same memory space, or home and when one goes bad everything goes bad - crashes.

Google has taken a new approach in that each tab uses a new memory space or different home. When one tab or site causes a problem it doesn't effect the other tabs - or neighbors. This is really nice so your email or blog post doesn't crash because another site sitting in another tab goes haywire.

Another nice feature is the one address bar. It acts like a URL bar as well as your search box. It also fills in sites below the box for faster typing. For example if I type in weather, weather.com shows up below the box so I can click directly on the url rather than go through the Google search process.

I am giving all this praise after one day of use. So I'll put it through the rounds and do a follow up in a week or so. In the meantime drop by Google and download Chrome and give it a spin. Another nice feature is it's very light in that it's a small download and installs quickly.

Enjoy!

Resources:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/How_Chrome_Changed_the_Web_Overnight

http://www.google.com/chrome

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