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This book is a top notch implementation of a questionable concept.  Like a shiny new sports car on a dealer’s lot, it looks and performs great right now, but its value will fall as time goes by.

The problem is that a book of iPhone app recommendations is similar to the “best of the Internet” books that appeared in the 90s – they were out-of-date within a year of their publication.

This book was published just last month (July 2009), but there are many excellent apps that were released after the book was written: Camera Zoom, Ragdoll Blaster, Comixology’s Comics.

Also, the book was written just before the release of the iPhone’s OS 3.0.  The new operating system made some entirely new types of app models possible, such as in-app purchases (the aforementioned Comics app) and augmented reality (Nearest Tube), while rendering some of the book’s picks inoperable (Darkroom) or considerably less valuable (Quickoffice – the first, and last, app to offer custom copy-and-paste support).

Having said all that, anyone wading into the iPhone App Store badly needs a guide of some sort, since the App Store is notoriously difficult to navigate when you are looking for the best rated apps of a specific type.

At present, you have two options: sort through the multitude of web sites that contain app reviews, or read a book like this.  For the time being, the only book like this is this (though I’m sure that will soon change too).

I found this book’s recommendations and reviews of apps I’m familiar with to be fair and accurate. In many cases I had already come across the same apps through other sources, but there were several instances where I switched app loyalties based on the book’s recommendation. The book really shines in the breadth of categories that it covers.  I discovered many apps, and quite a few categories, that I had no idea existed but now use regularly, such as Instapaper and Last.fm.

In addition to soon becoming out-of-date, the book has a couple of other drawbacks that are admittedly unavoidable for this type of publication. At least half of the app categories were ones that I have no interest in and skipped right past, making this a very short read. Also, a lot of the apps are either unavailable in Canada or of no use to people outside the US, but the book’s reviews clearly identify most of these instances.

I should mention that O’Reilly has also established a companion “Best iPhone Apps” web site.  Currently, the site only contains some abbreviated reviews of the same apps covered by the book, but hopefully they will cover new apps in the future.  At this point, the site isn’t an alternative to the book, or even a better alternative to the many other sites that publish iPhone app reviews.

The bottom line: although only a fraction of the apps covered in this book were of interest to me, I ended up using about 10 of those apps, all of them new discoveries for me. I didn’t find any of the book’s recommendations to be outright clunkers. This made the book a worthwhile investment to me. Those who are completely new to iPhone apps, or who love trying new things, will find this book to be particularly valuable.

Together with David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual, The Best iPhone Apps could be considered “iPhone 101″.  (Grad students can advance to yet another O’Reilly publication, iPhone Hacks, a book which truly lives up to the promise of “Hacks”).

I saw a rumour (not rumor!) over at iPhoneInCanada.ca.  They say that us Canadians can get our filthy mitts on those delectable Amazon Kindle books by doing the following:

1. 

   Mmmm, forbidden fruit

   Get an iPhone or iPod Touch.  (I suppose you could also try to get an actual Kindle, but that’s a different rumour).   If you’re on a budget then a 1st generation iPod Touch is the least expensive option, and you should be able to find one for about $150 on eBay.   Apple.ca occasionally sells refurbished 1st gens for about $180, and they currently have refurbished 2nd generation iPod Touches for $200.

2. Download and install iTunes as usual.  Sign up using your true Canadian address and credit card – you’ll need to do so to get your iPhone/iPod up and running.
3. Purchase a Mastercard gift card.  These are sold at Shopper’s Drug Mart and, perhaps, other retailers.  The key is that it must be a “Vanilla” brand Mastercard, which apparently does not appear to be a Canadian credit card to iTunes.  Accept no substitutes – the Visa gift card, for example, does not do the trick.
4. Follow the steps on iTunesInCanada to add a 2nd user-ID to iTunes, this time an American one. (Hint – don’t use a Canadian domain like sympatico.ca – Apple probably isn’t that stupid).   It appears that the billing address doesn’t matter, so long as it’s somewhere in America.
5. Log into the iTunes App Store using your new American user-ID.  Take a look around – there’s a lot more than Kindle to be found.  For example, they have a Last.FM client for streaming audio – banned in the Canadian App Store for no apparent reason.  They also have its main competitor, Pandora.  They have all 6 seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is 6 more than us poor Canadians are offered!  With all of these new entertainment options available, do you still have time to read books?  If not, you can stop here.
6. 

   Mmmmm, forbidden fast food

   Download and install the Kindle app from iTunes.  Surprisingly, considering how difficult Apple makes it to sync your iPhone/iPod to another computer, syncing  to another account is seamless – you won’t lose any of the apps or media currently on your device.

7. Run the Kindle app and use it to create a new Amazon user-ID.  (Note that this is Amazon.com, not .ca, so your Amazon.ca login won’t work).  Again, use a new e-mail address that doesn’t have a Canadian domain, like Gmail or Hotmail.
8. Now here’s the tricky part — things appear to have changed since the iPhonesInCanada article was written.   The Vanilla Mastercard trick no longer works at Amazon – hopefully Apple won’t catch on too!   However, since you won’t get very far without a billing address, go ahead and add your Vanilla Mastercard.  To do so, click on the Your Account link, then “Add A Credit Card”.  Be sure to enter an American billing address – the same one as you’re using on iTunes should work.
9. Logout of Amazon.com.  Then, log back in to Amazon.com using a Canadian user-ID.  If you’ve already bought from Amazon.com in the past, use that user-ID.  Otherwise, you’ll have to create yet another new user-ID, and add your Canadian credit card (not the Vanilla Mastercard) to this one, with your correct Canadian billing address.
10. 

    Loonie Launderer

    While logged in with you Canadian user-ID, buy a Gift Card.  Select the “E-mail a Gift Card” option, and enter the e-mail address of your American Amazon user-ID.

11. You should find that your American e-mail account receives the gift card within minutes.  Log into Amazon.com with your American user-ID, then go to the “Your Account” page. Delete the Vanilla Mastercard from your account (click on “Manage Payment Options”, then the delete button).  Then, from the “My Account” page, click on “Apply a Gift Certificate/Card to Your Account” and enter the code that you received in the e-mail.
12. And you’re done!  Go to any Kindle book’s page (best to experiment with a free one first) and click the “Buy Now with Click Once” link.  It should work, and the next time you run the Kindle app it will automatically download the book to your iPhone/iPod.
13. As you purchase Kindle books you will, of course, need to replenish your Amazon account from time to time, using additional gift certificates.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you go and do all this.   There are many good reasons why you shouldn’t.

Apple is becoming increasingly aggressive about enforcing the rules of the App Store, so they might close this loophole at any time.  Amazon has been known to make their Kindle books magically disappear when a publisher raises a licensing issue. Perhaps the best reason is that you don’t have to: there are plenty of other e-book retailers, including a home-grown one, who are quite happy to do business with us.

And, after all, it’s just a rumour!

Shipping included.  Seriously!

I bought one of these to protect my multi-thousand dollar (including data plan) iPhone 3Gs.  The photo pretty accurately reflects the styling (meh), but it doesn’t do justice to the fit.

The phone sits snugly in the case, which sits nicely in my shirt pocket.  The front flap has a hard (presumably plastic) insert that does a decent job of protecting the iPhone’s screen, and there is a hidden magnetic clasp that causes the flap to close tightly with a satisfying thwack.

Yeah, I know, I sound like the ghost of Billy Mays.  But wait, there’s more!  The case has holes for the camera, headphone jack and USB cable.  The flap does a reasonable job of holding the screen upright for watching videos.  Cell phone usage is fine when the iPhone’s sitting in the case – I can hear and be heard without any problems.

Things are little tight when trying to poke at the left and rightmost parts of the virtual keyboard, but otherwise I haven’t been tempted to remove the iPhone from the case.

Eventually I’ll probably give in to my iPhone’s whining about wanting to look cooooool, and buy it one of these sexy Proporta outfits — almost 10 times the price, shipping not included, but they do throw in a teabag.  (Seriously!).  I once stepped on my iPod Touch while it was protected by a similar Proporta case, and it survived without so much as a screen smudge.  But a lesser klutz could probably get by with the $4.38 knockoff.

While you’re at DealExtreme (the geek’s dollar store), you might want to fish out some change to buy their no-name versions of  the iPhone USB charger ($3.04) and cable ($1.77).  I own both and they’re surprisingly well made.  Together, with the case it will be the best ten bucks you ever spent.

Despite its source, the quote just seemed wrong: “Your microwave uses more electricity to power the digital clock for the 23 hours and 55 minutes a day that you’re not using it than the five minutes you do to heat your dinner.”

The source is a column by Jim Harris in the National Post newspaper.  I have a great deal of respect both for Jim Harris, former leader of Canada’s national Green Party, and the National Post.  I’ve never known either to play fast and loose with the numbers to prove a point — indeed the Post regularly exposes scientists who do so in their Junk Science articles.

But a clock based on ultraefficient LED or LCDs burning more power in a day than a food-zapping microwave does in 5 minutes?  That doesn’t sound right.

And it isn’t, for my oven.  Here are the stats for my 12 year old 1000W oven, a Sanyo EM-P540 with an LCD clock.  I measured these stats with the Kill-A-Watt gadget that I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries.

My microwave's power consumption

The power used by my microwave oven when not used is 42% of the power when cooking a meal for 5 minutes. Put another way, my microwave would use 30% less power if I unplugged it when not in use.

I was rather surprised at the wattage reading – it’s a 1000W oven, after all.  However, the user’s guide does confirm that it consumes 1480W to output 1000W.  Apparently this is fairly typical of a microwave oven: this Wikipedia article says that average power efficiency is 64%.

It could be that Jim Harris is referring to a particularly low power oven, or a ridiculously exorbitant clock.  There is no way of knowing, since he doesn’t provide a source for this or any of the other stats that are in his article.

The unfortunate thing is that he didn’t need to massage the numbers, since he has a point.   I would have thought that unplugging my microwave would reduce its daily power consumption by maybe 5%.   Thanks to his article, though, I now know better.

However, by exaggerating the numbers to support his argument, or quoting somebody else’s numbers without identifying them, I think he is less likely to make his case.  He is, after all, not preaching to the converted who already know about these issues — he’s trying to convince skeptics who think that a large part of the environmental movement is hogwash.  The sentence that I quoted at the beginning of this post is certainly not going to help to change their minds.

The main point of Jim Harris’ article, by the way, is that device manufacturers can and should engineer their products to burn less energy when not in use.  He’s absolutely right, and I hope manufacturers, retailers and consumers take note.  When Harris  led the Green Party he used common sense and business acumen to pitch green initiatives to the corporate world, a constructive approach that the Greens now sorely lack.  In his series of columns in the National Post columns he has shown a knack for pointing out needless wasting of our environmental resources that most of us overlook: escalators left running overnight, roofs that are the wrong colour, or microwaves with clocks that hardly anybody needs.

As an environmentalist myself, I just wish that he, and especially the better known and less responsible leaders of the green movement, would stop wasting another valuable resource, their credibility, by publishing unsourced, dubious statistics.

In the last few weeks I’ve gone from someone who thought Twitter was the apex of pointless self-obsession to, well, someone who reads books about Twitter and then writes reviews of them.

While there is definitely more to Twitter than “I’m eating a ham sandwich” posts, it isn’t a complicated piece of software to use, either.  To get up and tweeting, you can get just a) go to Twitter.com, b) select a user-ID and password, and c) fill in the “What are you doing?” box.

Most Twitterers quickly go beyond this to using other Twitter software clients, integrating keywords like “RT” (retweet) and #hashtags into their posts and sampling the rapidly proliferating web sites that extend the Twitterverse in some fashion.

Still, is there really enough to Twitter to merit a book?

The answer is yes, albeit a short book.

Happily, the authors of The Twitter Book have resisted the temptation to pad the book with abstract musing about Twitter.  (One of the authors is Twitterato Supremo Tim O’Reilly — the guy behind the O’Reilly publishing empire — who currently has about 819,500 more Twitter followers than me, the guy behind the GigaMegaBlog publishing empire.)  The book is chock full of tips, suggestions and recommendations, most of which are not at all self-apparent to the average Twitter user.

For example, I had no idea that each Twitter post has its own URL, and only a vague notion of when to use the “via” keyword vs.  “RT” when referring to a tweet.  While a Google search on “Twitter” shows that there is no shortage of web sites that provide add-on features and services, I hadn’t used any of them until I read about the good ones in this book.

Sample page from The Twitter Book iPhone app

The book is well-written and an easy read, and you’ll likely find that it takes just a couple of hours to go cover to cover.  There are only 6 chapters, the last of which is devoted to using Twitter for business use.  Casual Twitter users should not be put off by that, however, since the other 5 chapters don’t have a “business book” tone.

I read the ebook version,  as an iPhone app.  The big advantage of this format, as of July 2009 at least, is the low price – just 5 bucks.  The big disadvantage, of course, is that you’re reading it on a 2 x 3″ screen.  Personally, I’m quite used to ebooks and don’t find this to be a drawback at all, but if you’ve never tried reading an ebook on an iPhone I’d advise you to download the free Stanza app first.  The Twitter Book, like all of O’Reilly’s iPhone ebooks, uses the same engine as Stanza with the same wide range of settings.

Another relatively low-cost option for the Twitter Book is O’Reilly’s Safari web site.  If you’re a frequent reader of tech books then Safari gives you a great bang for the buck – I can’t seem to help gushing about it.

The one area where I found the iPhone app format to be a constraint is graphics.  The books makes extensive use of screenshots to show examples of effective tweets, and the text in some of the graphics is a little too fuzzy to make out. As shown in the screenshot above, the graphics are reasonably large when in a landscape format.  If the above screenshot (which is at its full iPhone resolution) is readable then you should be fine, but otherwise this app offers no way to zoom in on a graphic. Correction 7/29: Silly me – I pinched and poked at the graphics without realizing that you can zoom in on them.  If you hold your finger down on a graphic, the app switches to a special view, shown below, that supports the usual iPhone zoom controls.

Zoomed screenshot

All things considered, The Twitter Book is a very worthwhile read, even for casual Twitterers.  If you’ve been tweeting for awhile and scoff at the idea of a whole book being devoted To Twitter, then you are exactly the type of person to benefit the most by reading it.