see a puffin eat a fish

I have a jesus phone. I wasn’t planning on it or anything but an unstoppable convergence of events led me to the kool-aid. My N95 was getting pretty beat up (a couple of the keys were permanently recessed) and i’ve been itching to give iPhone development a shot. Then, when Anna and I were at the Apple store to buy a DVI to S Video/Composite adapter (Otis A/V media system!!) she said “Why don’t I get you an iPhone?” And I didn’t really know why she shouldn’t get me an iPhone, so now I have an iPhone. Just like that.

I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks but I think it’s made me a little stupid. Like forgetting how to find a parking spot on the streets of Brooklyn after parking in a garage for a few months. The iPhone is making me lose my edge. I now have a hard time working with interfaces designed by engineers. Which I guess is a compliment to Apple, except that the iPhone is going to make me slow. Maybe there is an app I can buy to screw up the interface?

Overall I dig it but I am not enamored with it. The browser is super dope as is visual voicemail and the location services but I have the usual litany of complaints (Flash, MMS, video, cut and paste, etc.) Also WTF is with running one app at a time? Such a bad call. That’s what I really miss about Symbian.

Since I am on my phone a lot more than my macbook, the convergence of my mobile and desktop interfaces has made me feel like my laptop is a giant phone. The iPhone is the closest thing i’ve used to the computers I use every day. Not bad.

The phone keeps on correcting ‘ooh’ to ‘pooh’. I don’t say pooh.

The past week i’ve been working with the Plodt team as part of the the Twitter Vote Report project. Lots of buzz words in the previous sentence. I’m pretty excited about it. On election day, people will be able to send in their voting experience via SMS, Twitter, iPhone, Android and voice. Good coverage. We in turn will localize and visualize the data showing polling place wait times, issues with voting machines as well as positive/negative experiences with the whole voting process.

Also this past Tuesday I was a guest critic in Family Feud Dennis’ Designing Around Place class at ITP. Lots of great projects and always nice to come back. Dovetailing with the Twitter Vote Report, check out one of the projects from that class, The New Vote with fancy custom mapping tiles.

The FireEagle badge has been up for a week and I have users checking in from Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Moscow and Isle of Man. Oh also Iowa. Very cool.

I’ve been using ZoneTag to update my personal FireEagle location, which I figured out has a ‘continuous upload’ mode, so I don’t have to take an unnecessary picture to report my location. This has the unintended effect of making my badge perpetually current. This would be very eerie if I was updating my exact, instead of approximate location. I’d try updating exact location but the GPS kills my phone — plus it’s not so hot in the city.

On the accuracy end of things, my location badge is only as accurate as the service writing to FireEagle. In the case of ZoneTag, although I am Brooklyn Zonetag insists on putting me in “New York, NY”. Passing that information to Yahoo maps gives me a map of the Upper West Side. That still shows that I am in the five Burroughs area and not Iowa but I don’t like the misleading implication of the pinpoint map. One way around this may be to implement the “i’m in this general vicinity” map overlay box like on the FireEagle website.

Finally, i’ve always been interested in passively recording location so without any extra effort I can see all the places i’ve been the past year. I could do this with my badge except that it runs on a pull from the FireEagle API. It only requests my location if someone loads the page where the badge is embedded. So a log entry is inserted only when the badge is loaded. If I have changed my location ten times in the past day but my badge (embedded in my blog) has not been visited even once, those locations will be lost. To that end i’ve written a cron that periodically loads up my blog every once in a while so I don’t loose any locations. Now I can generate a dynamic places i’ve slept map.

After my unpleasant experience hacking up a WordPress plugin to display location within my blog, I decided to write my own Fire Eagle badge that isn’t associated with any particular service or CMS. Here is how it works: You authenticate against Fire Eagle, I give you a few lines of HTML, you insert the code anywhere you want. If you know what you are doing you can even hack it up. The map is optional. Four lines with the map, two without.

There’s no login on my end, I have no idea who you are. If you lose your badge, just make a new one.

Try it here. If it works for you (or doesn’t), let me know.

Update: I had to take the badge service down temporarily because of cross site scripting restrictions but I think those are resolved. If you’ve made a badge you’ll have to generate yourself a new one. Sorry about that. On the up side it takes a few seconds to do. thanks

Badge spotted in the wild:

Check it:

I take a photo and my location is updated on my blog. This will really motivate me to take even more photos as I am getting a tangible added value from photo documentation.

This would be nice to have embedded in Facebook, as an iGoogle widget or possibly something much more lightweight that you could embed with javascript anywhere.

Also, unrelated — Jake at Local Projects has launched his City of Memory project, curated stories from the five boroughs. I had a small hand in this project a few years back, well worth checking out.