Mark Whitcher

I purchased the Invisible Shield screen protector from zagg.com a couple days ago and I just removed it from the device. I thought I would let you know what I thought about the product.

What I loved about it

• It is crystal clear. The shield doesn’t affect the way the screen looked at all.
• It looks like it would do a good job keeping the screen from getting scratched.
• It has a lifetime replacement warranty.

What I hated about it

• It feels rubbery. Your fingers don’t slide across it very well.
• It doesn’t stay in place. If you push on it, it will slide around the screen and not stay where you put it. This was a problem in my pocket.
• The edges kept getting pushed up by the case I was using. This sealed the deal for me. I kept getting air bubbles along the edges where the screen protector would get pushed up by the case.

A couple disclaimers

• Installation was not a problem at all. Product reviews for zagg screen protectors often mention that it is difficult to install. I did not find this to be true. Installation was unconventional to be sure (you spray the shield and your hands with a liquid that they provide and then you squeegee the liquid away with the provided squeegee), but I felt better about this installation than any other screen protector I have used.
• It’s possible that the protector didn’t adhere to the glass well enough because of oils from my skin. I cleaned the phone thoroughly, but I did not use any kind of detergent or solvent to make sure there were no oils on the glass. There where no finger prints or debris of any kind, but that is the only thing I can think of that would have caused the behavior I saw. Enough people are completely satisfied with this product that I am guessing I did something wrong. However…

I won’t buy it again

I spent $20 on this product at Best Buy and $20 has been hard to come by lately, so I won’t be purchasing this again. I don’t even know if I am going to pay the shipping to have it replaced under warranty and give it another chance.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have experienced anything similar with these products.

I thought I would take a minute to put a plug in for AT&T’s customer service. You always hear how good Verizon’s customer service is, but I have had nothing but good experiences with AT&T. I’ll illustrate with a quick story.

The backstory

Last week I got my iPhone 4 upgrade which I had pre-ordered through AT&T (got it a day early, actually). I was excited about the phone because it really is the best phone I could ever dream up. Enjoyed the phone all day Thursday and everything was going, as some would say, “swimmingly.” Friday morning, however, my shiny new iPhone decided to go for a swim in the toilet.

There are a bunch of web pages detailing what you should do in a such a case, so I promptly had my phone sitting in a warm dry place completely submerged in a bowl of uncooked rice to draw out the moisture. After two days of that, the phone looks good and works well, except for the fact that it won’t stay on for more than a few minutes. Every few minutes it tries to restart itself, and sometimes the battery just craps out and it shuts down (despite the fact it says there is about 84% charge on the battery).

So I decided to let the phone sit in rice for a few more days and then decide if I am going to pay the $199 to have my iphone fixed or replaced by Apple or try to have it fixed someplace else.

In the meantime I needed a phone. I was using the kitchen cellphone, but that could only last for a short while because I need my data. I can’t just put the sim card from the iPhone 4 into the old phone because they are different. So I put the sim card from the kitchen phone into the old iPhone.

The part about AT&T

The problem is the kitchen phone doesn’t have a data plan. So I called AT&T and within a few minutes I had the data plan for my iPhone moved to the number for the kitchen phone. So I’ve got a fully functional iPhone (including the tethering plan) which works great (except for the cracked screen and slower processor) and I can go about my work like normal. It also helps that my business phone number is a Google Voice number so I could route it to the temporary number I am using.

Since I had just renewed the contract on my number, I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to suspend the data plan on that number, but it was not a problem at all. The customer service reps that I spoke to were very knowledgeable, kind, and helpful.

The only bad thing

The only thing negative that I would say about the customer service is that it is not available 24 hours a day. There have been several times that I have been doing something during off hours and have not been able to fix a problem right then because the office wasn’t open. I don’t know if this is normal in the cell phone industry or not (never had a need to call customer service on Verizon when I was with them).

Today is Father’s Day, and I wanted to take just a minute to honor my Dad here before God and the world (and try to make up for not getting a card sent in time).

I am very thankful to my Heavenly Father for giving me the earthly father that he did.

Since leaving home for college, my dad has been a constant source of wisdom and counsel for the situations that have risen as I try to become a man of God. There have been countless phone calls asking for help about topics ranging from building a relationship with the young woman who became my wife to changing the intake manifold on my 1983 Chevy Monty Carlo to getting rid of credit card debt to raising up my son in the way that he should go.

Dad, there is no way I could put words together that would adequately communicate the blessing you are to me. So I’ll stop talking (before this gets too sappy) and just say “thanks” and I love you.

I was asked by my wife’s friend to retouch some old photographs of her family in China (the spot healing brush in Photoshop became by best friend). One scene, in particular, was very engaging for me—a bride being whisked to her wedding through a crowded street. (I haven’t gotten permission to use her photograph here on my blog, but here is a small crop of it. We’ll call it fair use until I get permission.)

I don’t know any of these people, and I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them if I did. As I am working on the image, removing the worst spots and scratches caused by decades of being stuffed into envelopes and transported around the globe, I see the faces of these people with their varied expressions and am reminded of how caught-up-in-my-own-world I get. I get overwhelmed by circumstances and start feeling sorry for myself, but on this one little square piece of paper is a snapshot of many different people, all with worlds of their own. Each one is worried about something, or happy about something, or excited about something. These aren’t just shades of light and dark on paper, these are souls at a specific point in time who were just as real as I am right now with my thoughts and feelings.

It takes a lot of effort on my part to look at this and try to think what they are thinking and feel what they were feeling—to feel the reality of it. I love old photos.

Ten years ago, I was an avid user of a Palm V pda (personal digital assistant). I would try to get as many real work items on my Palm as I could so that I could be productive anywhere I wanted to be. Sometime later I got a data cable so I could connect my Palm to my cell phone and have “internet access” anywhere I wanted. And this wasn’t just playing around, I was doing real work on my Palm.

The promise of what the future could hold for this device was very alluring to me. Imagine a small device that you always had with you that would let you read, write, play, communicate. This would let me use my time however I saw fit, wherever I would happen to be (full disclosure—I am sure I spent as much time playing as I did working).

A year and a half ago I got my first iPhone, and for me the future had finally arrived. It was everything I wanted my Palm V to be—small, powerful, and connected. It was, and is, great.

Two weeks ago, however, I got an iPad, and I now realize realize just how restrictive the small screen of the iPhone is. I was reading, writing, and playing on the phone, but the productivity of these (the reading and writing anyway) was severely hampered by the size of the devise. I didn’t realize it at the time because the ability to have the device with me wherever I was seemed to make up for the fact that my activities were held back by the size.

Nowadays, my iPad is my constant companion, much the same way that an artist might carry a sketchbook everywhere to sketch in, or a writer might carry a notepad to write in. I carry the iPad around to live my digital life in. I can read, write, and play, unrestricted by a small screen. If I want to view a webpage, I don’t tag it for viewing later on my laptop, I read it. If I want to draw something just for the fun of it, I do it on the iPad. If I want to write a blog post about how the device is changing how I do things, I write on the iPad.

You might be asking if the size of the device, compared to the iPhone, hinders it’s utility. Since it is bigger, I don’t have it constantly with me in my pocket. I have to consciously decide to carry it, and I don’t carry it somewhere when I think that carrying something might not work (like a long walk on the beach). This fact, however, is more than compensated by the fact that it is big enough I can do actual work on it.

Yesterday I was asked by a young man what the iPad was like. I said it is a big iPod touch; this answer seemed to disappoint him. This criticism has come up in many places since the release of the iPad, but if you think about the promise of a device like the iPhone or iPod touch, the iPad fulfills on this promise in a way that those smaller devices never could. It is a gloriously large iPod Touch. It’s size has relegated the iPhone to listening to music, making calls, and playing games. Oh, and in a pinch, I can read and write on it.

[Update] I’m now using Reeder for iPad and it is the best thing since on the iPhone. I highly recommend it.

Before I got my iPad, I was using my iPhone for reading all my rss feeds. If I was working on my MacBook and needed a quick break, I would read it there, but for the most part it was all on my iPhone.

When I got my iPad, however, most all of my reading started happening on it, instead of my phone. The larger screen is much better for doing this, especially if I ever have to view a real web page. Google Reader has an excellent version of their web application for the iPhone. It looks and works great, and that is where I spent most of my reading time.

However, that same application doesn’t translate as well on the iPad. On the iPhone it is all about maximizing use of the screen. They cram as much as they can in the tiny space. These features in the iPhone though just look awkward on the iPad. Line lengths are too long and it just looks off.

I switched to the desktop version of Reader for awhile, but the click areas are somewhat small and some of the tabs require two taps when it should only be one.

So I broke down and bought NetNewsWire. It is far from perfect but it gives me a pretty good experience for reading so I am happy with it.

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Along those same lines, I am using Twitteriffic on the iPad, but I cannot wait for Tweetie to come out with their ipad version (yes, I know it will be called “Twitter” when they do).

Also, it looks like Instapaper tweaked their site today for iPad. The pages have a wonderful margin and are a joy to read. Really like it.

I have had my iPad for almost a week, and I wanted to give you a short review of my experience with it. This isn’t a review of the iPad, as in listing features that it has or doesn’t have and telling you what I like or don’t like. Maybe the better word would be that it is an overview of my experience with it.

It replaces 80% of what I used my iPhone for

I realize now that my iPhone was just that, a phone. I was constantly using it for reading rss feeds, checking Twitter, checking email—it was my primary means of doing that. It still is when I am on the go, but when I am at home or someplace working, the phone has been replaced with the iPad. The form factor makes it easy to handle while doing these tasks, but the large screen makes it so much easier to do these things. I realize now how much time I spent hunched over my tiny little phone screen.

Previously, if I came across an article that was a bit too much to read on my phone, I would go to my MacBook Pro to view those. Now, it is all iPad. The screen makes keeps me from the mobile web and allows me to use the real web. I don’t have to zoom and pan; I can just view it as it was meant to be viewed. Originally I feared that the 1024×768 screen resolution would bother me; it has been a long time since I have used a computer with that low of a resolution. Something about how you are holding the screen, and how close you are able to get to it, makes that a non-issue. The ability to quickly zoom into an area of interest on a web page also helps.

Looking for ways to replace my laptop

The laptop, which has become the new desktop, is not going to be replaced completely. I am not going to try to give up my dual screens for coding and graphics work. It is perfect for that. In the new world of touch computers, that is where the old way of doing things is still going to win. Setting up large work areas with multiple screens and being able to move quickly between different tools with just a keystroke or two, all the while keeping everything else in view, can be very productive and very intuitive.

But there are many things that I will be trying to accomplish with the iPad instead of running to the laptop. One area is all the pre-work work that I do. Brainstorming, writing, planning, sketching. Those are all things that I can do on the iPad and have constant and easy access to it.

In fact, one of the ways I justified the expense of the iPad was how far behind I am in writing proposals for work. By keeping the iPad with me constantly, I can work on this anytime. I use simplenote as my text editor which is constantly in sync between my phone, laptop, and iPad. It works great and is a big help.

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So I am really enjoying the iPad, and am looking forward to seeing how it changes my work methods over the summer.