My mom was visiting today and Mazie wanted to perform a song for her. Out came the microphone!

Tyler Playing with his Shoes

Tyler was having a blast flinging his shoes around on the coffee table.

And then he coyly hid them under the table and gave me this great look. 😀

Guy on bus is listening to his Android phone using white iPod earbuds. Is that allowed? 😀

The new Minnedemo demo room is huge, which is great. Nice to have a place to sit. My buddy Ira grabbed a photo of me with my spiffy MacBook Air.

View from the balcony of Minnedemo!

I got my Grantwood MacVelope today for my 11" MacBook Air. I like it. It’s fun, small and will protect the Air when I don’t want to carry a larger bag.

Plus, it is cool looking. 😊

Kindle Icon Confusion

Just yesterday Amazon released the Kindle application into the Mac App Store. They also released a new version of the iOS Kindle application. Time to install and update. On the iPhone I noticed that they had a new icon that put the Kindle brand front and center.

Kindle app listing in the Mac App Store showing a blue icon of a person reading under a tree, labeled Books, updated Jan 10 2011, free

Nice. I then went to the Mac App Store and found the old icon?

Amazon Kindle iOS app listing showing a dark blue icon with a person reading under a tree, 4.5 star rating, 77 ratings, marked as Installed

Huh? The same app, released within a day or two of each other? Maybe someone missed an email.

Apps With Notifications

I’ve got a lot of applications on my iPhone. They are spread over multiple pages, and some of them are in folders with similar applications. I also get notifications from a lot of applications. I’ve found that it would be really nice if there was a way on my iPhone to see all the applications that had badge notifications for me to see. But where would you put it? I thought about it for a bit and it hit me that it would be really cool if when you swiped left to the Spotlight screen to do a search, it could show the applications that have outstanding notifications. Something like this.

iPhone Spotlight search screen showing Mail with 1 notification, OmniFocus with 6, and Carcassonne with 1, above a keyboard.

If you start to type those icons would go away and the typical search results would show instead. I think that would be pretty slick!

"Synced" Is Not a Word

Let me nitpick for a moment. I’m a huge fan of Omnifocus and I use it on my Macs, iPhone and iPad. I’ve bought it for everything I use regularly and I use it dozens of times every day. One of the key things that Omnifocus does so well is synchronize all of your task data across all the devices you use. It works great. I’ve never had it lose anything and I can really trust that nothing gets lost.

However, when I synchronize my phone I’m always irked with the screen. The problem: synced.

We also “synced” on the iPad.

Yes, I’m being picky. The problem is that “synced” is not a word. Don’t believe me? Ask the OED.

That’s right. It isn’t a word.

There isn’t a great solution. Apple decided to use “Sync in Progress” when connecting to iTunes. That seems a lot better than “Updating with synced data” to me.

From yesterday’s junk mail. Why not a more direct message, like “Stuck in a contract? We’ll pay to get you stuck in our contract!

Red text on white paper reading Stuck in a contract? We'll pay your cancellation fee. Details inside, framed by red bracket marks.

Tyler Conquers Stairs

This weekend Tyler decided that the stairs were his. He can climb them in no time, and immediately started going down them as well. He proceeded to do this, up and down, about 30 times today.

The next year is going to be exciting! :-)

Baby in purple and yellow outfit crawling up carpeted stairs while a woman in a cream sweater watches from below.