River Design began offering video services late last year, with significant investments in a professional rig. We’ve seen some early success with several projects already completed (I’ll be posting those soon), but I was most impressed with my recent experience with the iPhone.  While on vacation in France & Switzerland, I decided to whip out my iPhone and film a bit of the beautiful mountains while I was skiing.  I then did a quick edit in about 10 minutes and uploaded the resulting video to youtube.  All of it was done right on my phone.  It’s not a terribly professional result, but considering that the camera, editing and encoding package, and uploader all fit in about 1/5th of my pocket, I was pretty amazed.

Check it out for yourself:

And as a little bonus, here’s one I shot with my iPhone and the GoPro Hero, mounted to a chest strap.  I edited this one using iMovie on my laptop, so the result, while still far from professional, is a step up from what the iPhone can produce by itself:

Notice anything different about my site? Perhaps something in the typeface? Yup, my site and blog are sporting new fonts, and the really amazing thing is… none of them are the standard web fare of Verdana, Georgia, Arial, or Times. Typefaces that went beyond this limited list where usually done through rendered graphics, but not now!  Go ahead, try selecting the text on this page.

“Web Typography” used to be an oxymoron. The palette of type faces was limited to a “safe” list of (more…)

I thought this was pretty funny, as is most of the fare that comes from woot.com.  This list would clearly comes from Windows Mobile lemmings…

12 Bugs We’ve Found In iPhone OS 3.0

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Of all the crap Microsoft sells, Outlook has got to be among the foulest.  Here are a few reasons why:

1. Mail merge to Word requires 800 steps and doesn’t offer obvious things like filtering on category. I would think mail merging is an extremely common task, so why is this extraordinarily difficult?! and don’t even get me started on the troubles with mail merge formatting in Word…
2. Outlook is random in how it files names: first, last and sometimes last, first.
3. It randomly decides who it remembers for autocomplete while typing in an addressee for email.
4. The autocomplete for e-mail addresses is very persistent.  When someone gives me a new address, I’ll change it in his contact record, but autocomplete will never give me the new address… it insists on filling in the old address.  I’m sure there’s some cache that could be flushed, but seriously, that sort of thing should NOT be necessary.
5. It strips support for about half of CSS, making my life as a designer frustrating.  Yeah, I know, nobody else knows or cares about that one.
6. It is not clear at all what the differences/purposes are among groups, distribution lists, or categories
7. Searching for contacts can be rather random. This inexplicably got better for me for a couple of months, but then went back to being retarted.  For example, I will search for something like “brooks” and get zero results. Then I’d search for something like “mark” and I’d get my brother, who obviously has “brooks” as his last name. (!)  This happens for about 1/3 of my contacts, making searching useful only 2/3 of the time.
8. The only way to filter your contacts is to right click on the column header. Again, this is a pretty common task, yet it’s not even remotely intuitive, never mind accessible from any of the menus!
9. You can’t create an event in the calendar and link it to a contact, unless you explicitly “invite” that contact to the event, which then sends an e-mail to them, etc.  For example, I often want to schedule a phone call to a client, but you can’t do this.  Along with this, it would be very helpful to see a full history for each contact (including calls, meetings, emails…) OK, OK, so Outlook isn’t a CRM solution.  I know; it’s barely an e-mail solution!
10. The e-mail basically can’t be used with the preview pane open.  It eventually crashes in this mode.

OK, so I’ll limit the list to just 10.  But seriously, isn’t this supposed to be rather mature software by now?  So why do I use Outook, if I hate it so much?  So far I haven’t found a better solution.  Why is decent (and accessible) CRM so hard to come by?  I used Goldmine for years, and had a love/hate relationship with that.  It does a good job with a lot of the CRM-specific tasks such as complete contact history, but it didn’t handle e-mail so well.  Also, it provided no (official) way to do data backup or migration.

But the final straw reason why I left Goldmine for Outlook was that it’s the only application that will integrate with the iPhone.  Well for Windows, anyway.  Maybe I really should switch to a Mac.  Yeah, Outlook’s bad enough to nearly make that major of a switch worthwhile.  Guess that also says something for how great the iPhone is too!