iPhone tidbits

Good and bad.

- The iPhone has a feature long lacking in the iPod family - a hardware rocker switch for volume, so I don’t have to fumble with a touch wheel to fix volume.
- The contacts system is slick, feels good, and provides correct features and mostly intuitive access to them.
- Said slickness is marred somewhat by the occasional unresponsiveness of the system. One of the the consistent problems I have with zero-impact equipment (I’ve been familiar with multitouch since I bought a ZI keyboard when my hands were at their worst) is the lack of feedback. Sometimes, I touch a phone number and I can’t tell if I missed, it’s thinking, or just wasn’t paying attention. It happens often enough to be the annoying feature of the phone. Hazards of convergence, it occasionally is just doing too much.

(crossposted from The Dream Library)

RSS

After a persuasive conversation with caladrius, I spent a bit of this last week setting up Google Reader to handle all the comics I currently read. I was a bit surprised how many of my comics have an official RSS feed - those were easy. About a third of my current crowd do not have a feed, though, which was originally a dealbreaker.
Found a solution, though - Dapper allows me to create a feed by parsing an existing webpage. The interface is point-and-drool, pretty easy, and works neatly for all of the ‘normal’ comics I’ve got. Sequential Art doesn’t work so hot, probably because the page is bizarrely dynamic, with cookie-based memory of where I left off reading kinda stuff. I’ll have to tinker and see if I can sort a way to make it behave. The rest work, tho.
All in all, RSS seems to be arriving at a point I could get hooked on; a way to render unnecessary the addict-like refreshing of half-a-dozen websites in favor of just keeping an eye on one…

(crossposted from The Dream Library)