David Alison's Blog

There are a couple of things I've noticed about the iPhone 3G that I didn't mention in my original post that I would like to cover. First off, the iPhone comes with what look at first glance like standard earbuds. I simply ignored them since they looked like the little white earbuds that I received with every other iPod I own. These earbuds are different though. They include a little microphone 5 inches below the right earbud, harking back to the wired headsets that were popular before Bluetooth headsets became all the rage. You can use the them to listen to your music and it produces very serviceable sound. The best part though is when you use it for a phone call; the sound is loud, crystal clear and comes into both ears, something I rarely experience with a phone since I tend to use single ear headsets or just press the handset up to my ear. The other cool feature is that the little microphone is also a switch that can be used while playing music. A single click pauses the cu...

Last week the proverbial last straw was placed on my back by Sprint. Though they have tried like crazy to retain my business over the years and I still had 4 phones under contract I had had enough. At our home on the Eastern Shore of Delaware our signal had been deteriorating for many months, to the point where you could only maintain a phone call for 15-20 seconds. People would call, you'd look at the phone and see two bars, start to talk and POOF! The call would fail mid-sentence. Fan-flippin-tastic. Five different phones, all got the same result. I called Sprint to complain. The first person I spoke to told me that he would be happy to give me additional minutes on my account to compensate for the problem. Though a nice gesture, I declined because the phones were basically useless unless you liked to carry on Twitter like conversations with everyone. He suggested I speak to someone in the technical support group and transferred me over there. After a lengthy hold a nice guy from...

Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Beth Bulik at Advertising Age to talk about my transition from Windows to Mac . We had a long ranging discussion about the merits of switching to Mac. This got me to thinking, what role has Apple's marketing played in my switch? How heavily was I influenced by the regular drumbeat of TV ads, online ads, store displays, etc.? Though I am an entrepreneur and business owner my marketing experience has been with smaller companies. I never had the budget to run large scale ad campaigns so my knowledge of their effectiveness is minimal at best. I can however view them as an educated layman. What follows are my impressions of the campaigns and marketing material I have been exposed to from Apple and the role it has played in my switch. The TV Ads I'll just come out and say that I really like the TV ads with Mac vs. PC. Ironically it's the PC character, brilliantly played by John Hodgman, that I enjoy the most. His angst, the utter frustrati...

There are times that computers can be the most amazing devices; capable of automating mundane tasks, enabling communication with colleagues, friends and family or simply opening access to the great storehouse of knowledge represented by the interwebs. Then there are times you just want to have a little fun. I've mentioned before that Alex is one of the best synthetic voices I've ever heard , complete with pauses and breaths that make it sound much more natural than the cyborg sounding voices of the past. What I love about Alex is that you can read off sentences directly from the command line. Just open up Terminal and enter: say "This is coming from Alex" It may take a second but shortly you will hear Alex's voice emanating from your speakers. The ability to speak text directly from the command line is incredibly cool, but invaluable when you combine it with the ability to SSH into a machine. SSH and Remote Access SSH—which stands for Secure Shell—allows you to re...

Since I got my iPod Touch last month it has quickly worked its way into my daily use. Though I still keep the iPod Nano around for running, the Touch is my preferred device for general entertainment and music listening, especially if I'm within reach of a WiFi point I can access. On Saturday I upgraded the software on it to 2.0 and downloaded a couple of the free applications from the iTunes store. I'll talk about the ones I like in a future post. Overall I do like the new software. The ability to download applications directly from the App Store into my iPod through WiFi is fantastic. If I download an application and then later connect to iTunes it asks me if I also want to place the application into iTunes so that I have it there as well. It's very nicely implemented. The only problem that I've encountered so far is that the WiFi connection is now a bit unstable initially. Whereas before I could pop into Mail or Safari every time and it simply worked, now very often...

My nephew Dan—a Computer Science major at the University of Washington—is interning with me this summer. He gets an education in what it's like to create a start-up from scratch and I get a really bright young resource for a low weekly rate. I've known Dan his entire life and he's an exceptional young man. He and I get along extremely well and I've been looking forward to helping him learn the ins and outs of starting up a software business. There's just one catch; Dan is a hardcore Windows guy. We're building our product in Ruby on Rails so this isn't really a big issue. He's using an HP laptop running Vista and I'm using my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. Needless to say a lot of good natured ribbing goes on between the two of us as I continually tell him how easy things are on my Macs. A New Hope It was then that I found out that Dan really wanted to get an iPhone. Many of his friends at school have them and he was thoroughly impressed with them. Though ...

Late in the 20th Century Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is at the PLEXICORP offices with Dr. McCoy and trying to explain how to construct "transparent aluminum" to Dr. Nichols, the plant manager. Scotty is offered up the use of a Macintosh sitting on a nearby desk in order to demonstrate the design. Scotty speaks out in a loud voice: "Computer..." The Mac Plus sits there. Bones grabs the mouse and hands it to Scotty. Scotty pulls the mouse up to his face and says "Hello computer?" Dr. Nichols looks concerned and instructs Scotty to "just use the keyboard". Scotty says "The keyboard... how quaint" After stretching his fingers like a concert pianist Scotty begins typing furiously on the Mac's keyboard, quickly producing a detailed 3-D graphic to describe how to manufacture transparent aluminum. As Scotty would tell you, using the keyboard is clearly better than using a mouse. I mentioned before that one of the myths that I cl...