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iPhoto Wish List

I recently caved and got an iPhone.  I’ve really liked having it so far, although I have experienced the unreliable 3G connection, poor battery life, and frequent application crashes of which others have complained.  I have to assume that these issues will be fixed via a software update in the near future, so for now I’m just enjoying the technological convergence.

Perhaps my favorite “feature” of the iPhone is having a decent (though some would call it sub-par) camera with me at all times.  What’s really cool is that the iPhone includes GPS tags for every photo that you take.  This allows you to create albums like this one of my recent trip to Golden Gate Park.  This is arguably useful, but it’s definitely really, really cool.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, iPhoto lacks the ability to create these maps, either natively or through an iPhoto plug-in.  It seems silly that I need to upload my photos to the Web to accomplish this, and thus I hereby declare my First iPhoto Wish.

My Second iPhoto Wish also relates to the iPhone and a Web service which takes advantage of the phone’s capabilities even better than its applications do.  It seems to me that Photos is Facebook’s really killer app so far, or at least the one that draws the most eyes to the site.  I’m a fairly active Facebook user, and when I log in, what I’m most interested in seeing is the list of updated photos; it’s more interesting than, say, your recently-updated list of favorite music, or the non sequiturs on your Wall.  What makes Photos especially cool is its ability to tag friends in your photos.  At this point, I would go so far as to call it uncouth to not tag the people in your photos.  Unfortunately, while Facebook provides an iPhone application which allows you to directly upload photos from your iPhone, it doesn’t allow you to tag the photos with friends.  So, you need to upload the photo to Facebook (via your phone or computer), then log in with a browser to actually tag people.  This is silly (as is the ability to fulfill my First iPhoto Wish in an analogous way by viewing a map on Facebook) and should be corrected.

An alternative would to rely upon the iPhone’s Photos application to do the tagging.  What would be nice about that is that it would let you sync the tag information to your iPhoto library, which is helpful if you’re slightly uneasy, as I am, about entrusting your photos to Facebook.  The problem there is the iPhone and iPhoto don’t know your Facebook friends - they only know the contacts on your phone and computer.  Perhaps Apple could use the Facebook API to get around this limitation.

My Third iPhoto Wish is for the ability to assign photos taken on the iPhone to an album before syncing to the computer.  As I understand it, the current sync procedure is this: when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, iTunes handles backing the phone up and also syncing audio and video files, calendars, contacts, and applications, and also uploading photos to the phone.  iPhoto is used to download photos from the phone.  While this makes a certain degree of sense, it’s not terribly convenient when you’re like me and only take a handful of pictures per day.  I have to plug in the phone, wait for iPhoto to open, import the picture, assign it to an album (and tag the people in it, via the Title field), and then confirm the deletion of the original from the phone.  It would be much better if I could take a picture using the phone, immediately assign it to the “San Francisco” album, and just let everything be synced automatically.

Gold Rush City

A few things have happened in 4+ months since I’ve last posted.  In no particular order (other than chronological), they are as follows:  First, I finished up 2L year.  I feel no particular sense of relief or joy about this; the year was uneventful and at times downright boring compared to 1L.  Does this come down to UCLA v. Columbia, or is it an inevitable part of the law school experience?  In the fall I’ll be externing for Magistrate Judge James Francis in the Southern District of New York.  I’ll also be doing research for Prof. Clarissa Long.  The rest of my schedule isn’t set yet, but it’s already shaping up to be a fairly solid semester.

After school let out I had a great time working at Quinn Emanuel’s New York office.  The work was interesting, the people were friendly, and the summer events were just good, old-fashioned fun.  I have a lot to say about my experience there (all of it positive), so I might save it for another post.

After New York, we had the firm hike in Switzerland.  This was my first trip to Europe, and it was an absolute whirlwind.  We left Wednesday evening and arrived Thursday morning.  On Thursday I was way too tired to do much of anything other than to rest for the hike.  On Friday morning we took a train up a mountain, got off (the train), and started hiking.  Five or so hours (and a rainstorm or two) later, we were done.  It was pretty intense, but the scenery was beautiful.  The rest of Friday, and the better part of Saturday, were spent in the hot tub at the hotel.  Evenings were spent at Black & White, a dance club about which nothing further need be said.  Like all good things, our Switzerland trip had to end, and so it did, early on Sunday morning.  I got back to New York Sunday afternoon and slept for 15 hours or so.

The next day I flew to San Francisco.  I arrived fairly late so had only enough time to meet my roommate and then crash.  I started in Quinn’s SF office on Tuesday, and have already been given some interesting assignments.  After my first day we went to a German pub and then had dinner in Chinatown.  On Wednesday we went to a party at a partner’s house in Marin County.  On Thursday we saw a partner’s band play at a local bar, and on Friday we were in Napa all day (after that, I saw The Dark Knight and then did some karaoke in Japantown).  This weekend was a little slow (pretty much all I did was go on a historic walking tour of some parts of the city), and then yesterday I went to a bar and then a really good pizza place.  So, it’s been a lot of fun.

I’m working until Aug. 22, then sticking around until Aug. 30 for some additional sightseeing.  Becky and her family rented a house here for that week, and we’re also going to go to Sonoma for a few days, so I’m really looking forward to that.  Also, my family is coming out the week before.  I’ll still be working so I’ll only be able to spend the evenings with them, but I’m excited for them because they’ve never been to California.

I’m very much open to suggestions for things to do in my remaining time in San Francisco.

A riddle

Who is visiting Disney World, Switzerland, and San Francisco in the next few months, is less than six feet tall, and writes this blog?  To find out the answer, read the next paragraph.

Me.

This pretty much sums it up

Blister in the sun

*

Tomorrow’s Professional Responsibility final exam will be my last of the semester. I also have one short essay to write, but there’s not really a set deadline for that.

Now, most semesters, I yearn to stay around school over the break and verify the accuracy of the footnotes in my casebooks. I’m not in the mood for that this semester, though - it’s been a fairly exhausting few months, between the transfer, job interviews, moot court, and normal school stuff.

I’m going home on Saturday. Bright and early Sunday morning, my family and I leave for San Juan, the departure port for our cruise.

* Image - My disgraced childhood hero.

Coming and going

November 19, 2007: Amazon releases Kindle e-book reader. CEO Jeff Bezos: “We . . . wanted to go beyond the physical book.”

December 13, 2007: Amazon announces it has bought one of only seven copies in existence of “The Tales of Beetle the Bard,” hand-written by J.K. Rowling.

So are physical books dead, or what?

Devil in the details, vol. 2

Ouch, right on the homepage of the new psucollegian.com:

This is not only embarrassing, but slightly mean.

Devil in the details

Please fix this.

Heroes

After diligently watching the first two volumes of Heroes, I can say this: it is a very bad show. Bad, bad, bad. And the first volume was bad, too. I’ll report back after watching volume three.

Don’t call me

I know that picking on the DMV is like shooting fish in a barrel. I don’t care.

Recent events have forced me to interact with PENNDOT. I wanted to contact them with a question, so I went to their contact page.

The page isn’t terrible, really, but it’s guilty of committing two design mistakes that drive me up the wall. First, look at the telephone number entry form. Dividing the form into three fields is just plain inexcusable. All you need is one field - let people put in parenthesis, or periods, or whatever punctuation they wish to use to separate the area code, exchange, and number. It’s trivial to parse and trim the user entry, on either the client- or server-side. If you’re worried about people forgetting to include an area code (in my opinion, unlikely in this day and age), you can check for this, too. So, there’s really no need to have the three little boxes.

Even if you think having the clutter is necessary, though, having the “helpful” Javascript to advance you automatically between fields is a usability no-no. Consider the following:

1. I, like most computer users, am entirely accustomed to using the tab key to move between form fields. So, I see the three telephone fields on the PENNDOT page. I enter the three digits of my area code, and then press tab, excited about the prospect of entering my telephone exchange. However, my dreams are dashed: I am now at the third field, rather than the second (because, of course, as soon as I entered the third digit of my area code, the Javascript advanced me to the second field; my tab press moved me to third). Not a big deal, but come on, that’s annoying as hell.
2. A variation on the above. Say that I’m entering my phone number and I realize that I made a typo in a previous field (Aside: Is “made a typo” the right phrase? It seems awkward. Perhaps “committed a typo” is better, or “brought about the existence of a typo”). So, I use the helpful shift-tab key combination to go back and correct the misdeed. However, since that field is already filled, I automatically get pushed back to where I started; it is impossible to go back to a filled field using only the keyboard. What a drag.

Anyway, PENNDOT, if you’re listening, make life easier for everyone and just have the one field. Then, write the single line of code that will check the length of the parsed, trimmed entry.

So, that’s the first problem. The second is that “Driver License/Photo ID Number” field a few lines down from the phone number field(s). You go out of your way to implore “(no spaces of dashes - Example: ABC1234)”, when we all know perfectly well that one line of code can do this work, instead of the user. Also, I think you mean “spaces or dashes”…