This afternoon I drove out to Lookout Mountain and other mountainous points of interest. Photography wasn't good because of the weather, but it was a nice, relaxing outing. The guy at the hotel gave me directions for how to take the "scenic route" there. When I was done sightseeing, it was getting late and I just wanted to get back to town to get something to eat so I took the more direct route back. Problem is, I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in, shall we say, an undesirable part of town. iPhone's Google Maps to the rescue again. Granted, I could probably have used the Google Maps Java app on my old phone to get me out of a bind, but it would have been so painful as to be almost not worth doing. The screen on the CU500 is about one quarter the linear size and less than one quarter the pixel count. And "typing" addresses, or anything for that matter, is a royal pain -- in some situations it puts you in T9 and in some you're in plain old 724446633388555555999#833_3444666887777 ("painfully tedious") mode. Having a QWERTY keyboard makes everything go much faster as I'm sure Blackberry, Blackjack, and other smartphone users can confirm.

I've been in Denver for 24 hours now. My iPhone has helped me out immesurably every step of the way. It started in Houston when I went to check in for the flight. The process of checking luggage was unbelievably bogged down. I stood in line for close to an hour. When I finally made it to the desk to check my one suitcase, the attendant informed me that I missed the cutoff by two minutes. He tried to override the automatic lockout but wasn't successful. His exact words were, "You're going to miss it [the flight]." He directed me to a supervisor, who was fielding several irate travelers when I found her. I explained my situation to her and she directed me to her supervisor. The super-supervisor explained that there were weather issues on many of their flights and that they were having to reschedule and re-route hundreds of people. She put me on another flight that was to leave two and a half hours later.

What to do for a couple of unexpected hours in the airport? Luckily I had the foresight to rip a couple movies from DVDs (that I own, thank you very much) and encode them for the iPhone. Minority Report or The Matrix... decisions, decisions. The movie kept me entertained until it came time to board the plane and whizz off to the mountains.

I had reservations for a rent car that I was supposed to pick up upon arrival from my original flight. Since I arrived several hours later, it turned out that the company was sold out. iPhone to the rescue again! I used the Google Maps app to find the airport location of my backup rental company of choice. I chose Google Maps over using Safari to go to the Google web site because I knew it would have the phone number with the results. All I had to do was tap on the phone number that came up and within moments I was reserving a car with them.

Next challenge: getting a meal. I had directions to my hotel from the hotel's web site, so that was easy. Once I checked in I found a list of local restaurants among the literature in my room. Problem is, I don't know where any of them are. I had the address, but that didn't help me get there because I don't know the Denver streets. I bet you can guess what I did... used the Google Maps app, of course.

I really am enjoying the freedom to watch the video podcasts to which I'm subscribed anywhere, any time. Photoshop Killer Tips is perfect for those less-than-five-minute chunks of time when you'd otherwise be bored out of your mind. For slightly longer idle periods, the video variety of the Tips from the Top Floor podcast will keep you informed and entertained. For periods longer still, such as having a quick, informal meal by yourself, Photoshop User TV and Photo Walkthrough fit the bill nicely. If you're waiting in the airport, one of the Radiant Vista Video Tutorials might be a good choice.

If you are reading this blog then the chances are good that you already know about all the podcasts mentioned above. You are probably already subscribed to most (or all) of them. Maybe you've even been enjoying them on the road with a 5.5G iPod for quite a while. As someone who made the jump to iPhone from the 4G iPod which couldn't even display still pictures, I have not had the luxury until now of watching video while out and about. However, the iPhone has two key advantages over the 5.5G iPod that would have had me upgrade anyway: only having to carry one device, and that screen! Oh, and did I mention the screen? It's considerably larger than the iPod screen in both pixel dimensions and physical dimensions. Granted, an 8GB iPhone only holds one tenth the data that an 80GB iPod can hold, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make to have video-watching capability always with me at the ready and to be able to view it on that screen.

Two features sorely lacking from iPhone are to-do lists and checklists. The Newton had both, and Address Book has to-do lists. Rumor has it that AB's to-do feature will be incorporated into iPhone's Mail.app (strange, why not Calendar?) when Leopard releases. At least Mac users who are in a position to buy and install Leopard have something to look forward to. I don't know what will happen on this front in the Windows world, nor whether Apple will leave Tiger users in the cold. In the mean time, I know there are web-based to-do "apps" and checklist "apps" but all of them that I've seen require one to create an account to use them. I have too many accounts as it is. I don't want more. I already have to-do's in AB and I don't want to have to duplicate them into another app and keep them in synch with each other.

This really is a bigger deal than it may sound. Checklists are vital for making sure all your gear is accounted for before (and after!) a location shoot, keeping track of the shots you want/need/intend to get, and so forth. To-do lists are great for noting which client's deliverables you need to work on if there's not a fixed deadline. I've found it can also be a convenient way of reminding myself of upcoming projects that clients have in the works but haven't yet scheduled. Sure, I have a Palm with both checklist and to-do apps on it that I could use or I could even (gasp!) carry a small paper notebook, but that would defeat the purpose of using iPhone as a convergence device. See my earlier posts if you don't know why that's important to me.

Click to read how the iPhone camera’s deficiencies can be an asset. Read More...

I found snippets of time over the weekend and today to watch some of the aforementioned Photovision edition. It really is so much more convenient than allocating a block of time to sit chained to the TV. Just this morning, for example, I had an 8:00 appointment. They kept me waiting until 9:15 before I could meet with the person. Instead of twiddling my thumbs and staring out the window for an hour, I was able to watch a Photovision segment on my iPhone. The ability to turn previously wasted time into productive time is something I've been awaiting for quite some time, and precisely one of the reasons I got so excited in January when SJ announced the iPhone.

On a related note, the Google Maps app on iPhone rocks! I used it to guide me to this morning's appointment. It's the next best thing to a GPS navigation system.

As much as I like iPhone, I have to admit that the camera isn't really too good. Although by cameraphone standards, I suppose it's not too bad, either. I won't be shooting any magazine covers with it but it should be sufficient for attaching snapshots of prospective models to their Contacts entries.

I had time today to do some research on the color issue I mentioned on 7/7. The executive summary is that Photoshop sucks at doing color space conversions.

Here is the more detailed answer. A lot of people report the same problem when saving JPEGs from Photoshop for their web sites. The consensus is that it has to do with color spaces, but I didn't stumble on any good answers that explained why people are having so much trouble with Photoshop in this respect. Many people reported that JPEG saving "used to" work correctly then at some point stopped. My research was not exhaustive, nor do I have the time or inclination to do exhaustive research on the topic.

The workaround I found was to save the finished photos as flattened TIFFs and use GraphicConverter to generate JPEGs for web use or for storing photos on iPhone without taking up as much space as TIFFs. If you have a good explanation of why Photoshop does such a lousy job of getting colors right when saving JPEGs or a good way to get good color when saving JPEGs directly from Photoshop, please use the Contact form above to send me a note. I have comments disabled here because I don't feel like dealing with comment spam. Unless you object, I will publish the essence of your note so all may benefit from it.

I stopped by the post office to check my mail and what did I find in my box but the latest Photovision DVD. Right then a light bulb went on. Instead of having to carve out an hour or two to sit in front of the TV to watch the material, I can rip and encode it for the iPhone; then I can watch it segment-by-segment as I find the time no matter where I happen to be. When I got to the office I popped the disc into my computer and started the process. It took about an hour and a half to encode everything, but that's no big deal because I can start it and walk away (so to speak).

I did run into a couple issues, but nothing I couldn't overcome. It turns out that the Photovision folks mastered the DVD with no title 0. No big deal, it just took me a few minutes to figure out why the software was choking. The other issue (which turns out to be mostly a non-issue) is that the various segments are mastered as individual titles. This means I had to encode each one as a separate movie file to bring into iTunes. Inconvenient, but I can live with it. Now if I can figure out how to import the titles as individual episodes of a "TV show" I think that would make organization easier. I could have multiple Photovision issues on iPhone at once and keep them straight more easily than dumping them all into the Movie category and using a naming scheme to organize them. It would also be easier to get them from iTunes to iPhone that way since I wouldn't have to plug iPhone in, put a check next to each segment, and then do a second sync. I have iTunes set to automatically sync all unwatched episodes of all TV shows.

I started creating portfolio-related iPhoto "albums" about a week before iDay. I cleaned up my Address Book entries too because I wanted to be able to bring iPhone home and sync it right away with meaningful information. So I've been walking around with this exciting new device for nearly two weeks and indulging countless requests for demonstrations. Until now, people have been most interested in the phone and iPod aspects. A few have been curious about iPhone's Internet capabilities. But today, someone in the office finally had a reaction that validated what I already suspected. She asked if she could see what all the buzz was about, so I handed my iPhone to her. The first area she chose to explore was Photos. She brought up one of my portfolio categories and said, "Wow, the display is so crisp! Look how rich and beautiful the colors are!" My suspicion that iPhone would be a reasonable platform for displaying a super-compact, super-portable portfolio are confirmed. Validation feels great.

Why would I want such a portfolio? As I mentioned in the first post, I always have my phone with me. I seldom carry a portfolio of 8x10 prints, or even one of 5x7's, unless I'm going somewhere specifically to show a portfolio. So, what to do when I run into someone I might like to use as a model? In the past, I would give that person a business card and explain that I would like to have them model for me. They're usually distant because, despite what I tell them (which I think goes in one ear and out the other), they don't know whether I'm talking about so-called "legitimate" photography or porn. By the time they get home or somewhere else where they can look at my web site, they've already forgotten about it or thrown the card away. By whipping out my iPhone I'll be able to show them an approximate representation of the quality of my work and the styles I tend to shoot. When I've done that in the past in the rare instances I had my Palm or a 5x7 portfolio with me, that grabbed their attention and they took me seriously.

I've never really liked iPhoto. Blasphemous, I know. I'm sure it works quite well for family vacation photos and other "happy snaps" but it seems a little clunky and somewhat limited for serious photographers. That's undoubtedly why Apple produced Aperture. I don't use Aperture because my humble laptop doesn't meet the minimum hardware requirements. It sings with iView, however.

Getting back to iPhoto... since I don't use it (or at least didn't until I started preparing for iPhone) I had forgotten that I turned off the "Copy files to iPhoto Library folder when adding to library" preference. In my iPhone preparations I was a dragging-and-dropping fiend, pulling in photos from some of my external drives as well as my local drive. Last night was the first time I synced without those drives mounted. When I saw iTunes' status bar say "Deleting photos..." I started to worry. Why was it deleting photos from iPhone?

During my troubleshooting, I discovered that the files iTunes had deleted were all TIFFs. I naturally assumed that was the problem and used Photoshop to create JPEG versions -- I also took that opportunity to size the photos to fit iPhone's screen dimensions and apply size-appropriate sharpening. I synced iPhone and what do you know? The photos were back. Only they looked washed-out compared to how they looked on the iPhone before. The colors were less saturated and contrast was lower, as if they didn't get converted from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Of course I realize that sRGB has a smaller gamut than Adobe RGB, but the images looked the same on my laptop screen after the color space conversion. After saving as JPEG and then opening the JPEGs in Photoshop again, they still looked almost identical to their Adobe RGB brethren with only very slightly less saturation. In iPhoto and on iPhone, however, they showed a marked difference. I tried saving the JPEGs with and without embedded profiles, but it didn't matter.

So the moral of the story is that if you have richly saturated photos that you want to display on your iPhone in all their glory, save them as single-layer TIFFs.

It's one week and one hour since I unboxed what I believe is the most advanced, revolutionary handheld communication device ever released to the consumer market. A lot of people have been speculating that iPhone won't make inroads into the business communications infrastructure. I think they're wrong.

OK, so I've been using it for a week. The voice quality is (at least on my particular unit) among the best of any cell phone I have used. The only other phone that may have been better was my old-school (by today's standards) Nextel i1000.

Voice quality is important because you must be able to communicate efficiently with your customers and vendors. Frequently asking someone to repeat themself presents an unprofessional image.

The information management and productivity features of iPhone are amazing. Of course there are a few things missing here and there since it's a first-generation product, but on balance it is a very solid implementation. I tried several years ago to use a Palm for my calendar, address book, and notepad and as a super-compact version of my portfolio. While the Palm can perform in all those capacities, the main reason it didn't work out is that it was yet another device to carry. I don't typically wear clothes with a lot of pockets so I would carry the Palm by hand. I would invariably set it on my desk when I sat down to work and then forget to pick it up when I left. Even if the Palm could handle all my organizational needs plus drum up new business and take photos for me, what good is that if I don't have it with me?