I often hear people touting features that make device A or device B the best. Whether it is the screen size, processor speed or any other metric that is easily comparable in a spread sheet. The problem is that actually the hardware isn’t what is important to me. I don’t care that it might be slower, the screen resolution might be smaller, it doesn’t have a front facing camera. What does matter to me is how the software platform makes my life easier.

10 years ago I was exceptionally happy to hack away at code, configurations, themes and installed software to find out what it could do. 10 years ago I was at university with plenty of time on my hands. 10 years ago I was still trying to work out what was important to me.

Now I work. That is 8 hours every day for five days that I sell to the company I work for. Given that I am only awake for 16 hours – that leaves me with 8 hours for myself. I have, at maximum efficiency, half the time I used to have (given that I rarely went to lectures and spent most of the time doing what I wanted to do). The result? My time is more valuable. If I am going to tinker with something then it has to be something I want to tinker with, something that has value. I take my mountain bike to the bike shop to get it fixed, serviced and issues resolved. Not because I’m incompetent but because I want to ride my bike and it works out more efficient to pay someone to do the job whilst I work.

This thought process is what has led me to being a Mac OS X user: it worries about all the parts I don’t care about (~95% of the system) but is UNIX enough for me to worry about the bits I want to worry about as a developer. It makes my life easier. I don’t have to worry about unstable software. I don’t have to worry about messing about with configuration files. Life is easier for me.

So where does iPhone OS fit into this?

I own two desktop macs, a laptop and an iPhone. Soon an iPad will be joining the ranks.

The feature I covet more than any others with the iPhone is synchronisation (and, by proxy, backup). I have a MobileMe family subscription with my wife. I use it to synchronise. I don’t use any of the other features, just synchronisation. I have my contacts and calendars syncing over the air almost instantly as changes are made. Yet these are the obvious places for syncing ones that are features Apple push. There are three other uses that are invaluable:

1: I use OmniFocus on my desktop to manage tasks that I need to be doing. Using the iDisk on MobileMe, I have the software syncing across two iMacs (27″ i7 and 20″ G5), a macbook and my iPhone. This means that what ever device I am using I have access to my tasks and can keep track what and when I am supposed to be doing things.

2: Bookmarks. This is the best kept secret. Bookmarks are synchronised over the machines I have and my iPhone. This means I can use my 27″ iMac to search, find and manage interesting sites and get access to them on the phone. The most common use of this is to work out routes in Google Maps, bookmark the route and then opening the bookmark on my phone and it popping open within the Maps application.

3: Music but specifically podcasts. I love that I can listen to a podcast at my desk. Pause it, synchronise my phone and then continue to listen where I paused it whilst I walk to the shops or take on a vehicle based adventure.

All this synchronisation makes iPhone OS not just another device but an extension on how I operate. The ease at which data flows between my devices means that I don’t need to worry about where the data is – I know it is at all my computer terminals. I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t have to tinker with it. It just works. Purchasing an iPad is an easy decision, I plug it in and it is setup to operate within moments within my own personal computer ecosystem.

So where does this leave me? I will continue to buy into iPhone OS mobile devices until someone can provide this level of integration in a way that just works. This means data flow without corruption, between multiple devices without me having to even think about it.

Unfortunately this is a hard problem – so I wont be holding my breath.

South Coast Crut – Before Summer 2010 from Cruton Films on Vimeo.

This is some footage Karl took of me near the end of a great session.

I was pretty tired and trying to remember, after a very long wind free winter, how to do the various tricks and shiz I used to be able to do last year on some South Coast flat water lushness. Did ok. Not great. But fun to be out.

I’ve uploaded this so later in the year I can compare my progress over the hopefully very windy summer we are going to have!

There was a song a while ago produced by the BBC called ‘Perfect Day’. I had my perfect day yesterday.

It started off meeting some friends north of Brighton to tackle some dusty single track goodness. If I’m honest, I was exceptionally nervous. My recent riding has mostly been cross country stuff with little single track riding with few jumps to be seen. We rode off into Stamner Park and enjoyed various trails. I felt exceptionally rusty. I didn’t feel connected to the bike. I kept trying to keep the bike on the leash. I was anxious and my riding was suffering. It took a few hours and a number of surprise trail elements for me to shake the cobwebs and I was soon really enjoying being out. The trails were dusty, fast and was a nice challenge throughout. By the end of the ride I’d gained a huge smile and felt like my riding mojo had returned. We were out for most of the morning and got rained on a couple of times.

Normally I would say that I went home. Which I did.

Normally I would say I then sat down, had some food and didn’t do much. Which I also did.

However. Captain Wind and Captain Sun decided to come out and play. They also brought out Captain Low Tide and his mate Captain Flat Water. It would have been rude not to go out and enjoy the weather conditions presented to myself. I grabbed Karl and we headed over to ‘hampters. We were presented with almost perfect kiting conditions: lit 11m weather, flat water, only a few kiters, blue skies and friends. Steve and Sarah met us there and we went out to tear things up a little. The session was immense. It really felt like I was getting my kiting mojo back too. I was boosting big, chucking in proper kite loops, doing lush flat back rolls off waves all whilst I was listening to tunes on my iPod. It was amazing. I also felt like I was starting to really get used to my new kiteboard which rides so much better when your feet aren’t numbed by wetsuit boots. Riding barefoot you get much better feed back and can really feel what the board is doing. It was great to see the others who I enjoy being out with having a sick session too – both Sarah and Steve boosting big with Steve landing some sick front-loops.

After about two and a half hours of riding, I came off the water a broken but very happy man. Karl took video and some photos as he is currently suffering from injury so it is nice to have a record of one of the best sessions I’ve had in a long time.

The day was finished with a Chinese take away and Doctor Who on DVD with my wonderful wife; punctuated the only way such a day could be with crashing into bed which felt marvellous.

I sit here in pain. I feel like I’ve been beaten up. I can’t stop smiling. Bring on the next session.

A while ago we had a planned to spend all our time kiting in Wales for a while. However, the weather conspired to stop that and we have only had one day. We did however spend upwards of an hour trying to work out what to do. Do we come back home? Do we stay and risk it not blowing and miss out on other fun things? Not one piece of software or website could concisely answer that question. It involved looking at different sites for predictions, live weather and tide states. Life shouldn’t be that hard.

So I wrote Wind Groupie.

It is now in a state where I can show off one part of it – the iPhone application. I am planning on iPad and desktop versions of the system to make it really easy to track weather with ease.

Now to check out Wind Groupie.

When you start the application you are presented with a list of known locations. They are sorted in a very specific order: rating then name. Each row has a direction arrow that details the currently known wind direction and a colour code that indicates the strength. In the above shot you can see that Greatstone has a rating of two ticks and
a label stating when the next favourable conditions are. Already we are one up – we can see that only one spot has good conditions for kiting coming up – we need not waste time looking at other spots unless we want to.

Tapping on a location will take you through its detail view. You get a map of the location, a nice friendly arrow showing you the direction of the current wind state. This is exceedingly useful, no point knowing the wind direction if you can’t see how that relates to a spot. If you tap the arrow, you get the chance to open the location in Maps.

This view also provides a number of details: current wind direction and strength, the nearest tide change for the location with its time and height, whether or not you are likely to see rain, air temperature and finally sun rise and sunset. If you tap on the wind details you are taken through to the wind detail view:

You are presented with recommended sessions, wind history and the list of weather forecasts the application has access to. At the point part of the magic comes out to play. The recommended and ratings on other sites are very much related to the wind speed. Wind Groupie takes it to the next level. Ratings are based upon:

• Wind direction in relation to the operating range of the beach and the ideal wind direction.
• The strength of the wind and how close it is to 25 knots.
• The tide conditions – how close the time slot is to the ideal tide state for the location.
• The light conditions – when it is between sunrise and sunset.

It combines all this information into a rating, scans the forecasts and reports back what it finds. Tapping on a recommended session or forecast will pop up a graph so you can see the forecast and how it is due to change over the duration of the forecast:

This all leads to a very swift and pleasant data discovery when it comes to the wind and kite based activities.

Much nicer than any other application.

So what is next? Got some more data display to be done for tidal information, automatic updating, notifications, improved network error handling and lots of testing. At the moment it is very much a personal project to play with ideas and some data whilst refining my iPhone OS programming skills.

That being said, let me know what you think!