I'm an early adopter. And on the day of a rant post about the price drop of the iPhone and about how bad Apple sucks, how they stick it to their customers, blah blah blah.... I'm posting just the opposite. I know being an early adopter comes with a risk, price, features, models, etc. can all change in the blink of an eye.

Yesterday, Apple announced a $200 price cut in the Apple iPhone just 69 days after release. So after instant messages from friends all day long chastising my early adopter mentality, and laughing at my loss of $200, My favorite IM was this "You got powned by steve jobs".

Today, Apple steps up and announced a $100 in-store credit for people that purchased the iPhone at the release price, and that were not getting some sort of rebate or retail discount. That's me! So now I can load up a $100 iTunes card, or put it towards one of those new Nanos.

Let's be honest here, Apple really didn't have to do anything. They offered a product at a price I was willing to pay (and stand in line for all day). They had no obligation to make any concessions. Let's face it, typically the ultimate goal of a company is to be profitable. I'm sure this move will not be appreciated by shareholders and investors.

It's nice to see the gesture, while it's not $200 cash, it's really better than nothing, and will keep me as a continued customer.

Just dial 1-800-466-4411 and you're connected to the Google voice search technology. Just say your city and state, and then say the name of the place you're looking for, or a category like 'Home Improvement Stores'. The Google voice search service will repeat all of your input so you know it's correct. Once you've decided on a match, or if it matches your criteria exactly, it will connect you to the business/person for free. You can just say "SMS" or "Text Message". Before I could even put my phone down, a SMS message was delivered with the following information:

"Bethany Village Grill"
503-533-7736
4876 NW Bethany Blvd. #L1
Portland, OR 97229
Google Map Link that linked it to a map!

This screen protector is simply the best I've ever used. Over a month of use, in and out of my pockets several times per day, and not a single sign of impending failure. No peeling, no scratches, nothing wrong. This thing is as clear as day one.

Sounds really simple huh? I was creating a little tray application that did some screen scraping of HTML pages.

I ended up with a large string (scraped HTML data) that I needed to display on a Form.

This is what I came up with, use the WebBrowser control, but it does not take a string as input, I ddin't really want to save the string to a file on the disk.

   this.webBrowser1.Navigate("about:blank");
   HtmlDocument doc = this.webBrowser1.Document;
   doc.Write(strHtmlString);

Well it's been almost a month, and the iPhone is still by far the best mobile phone I've ever owned. One of the things that people chastised Apple for originally was that they did not open the device up for 3rd party applications. Apple responded by saying there was no need, developers could simply create applications targeting the phone's internet browser, Safari. When I first heard this was the answer to 3rd party applications, I kind of thought that Apple was looking for an easy out, and that it was a cheezy response. I've changed my mind. Here are just a a handful of applications I'm using on a daily basis, and why they're so great on the iPhone.

JiveTalk (Alpha)
iPhone Link
Alpha? Alpha? This thing is amazing. JiveTalk is a web-based instant messaging client, that aggregates almost every popular IM service. It works with AIM/iChat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Chat, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. I have three IM accounts, so putting all my instant messaging contacts in one place, and being able to carry on multiple conversations is great.

The user interface is amazing. You're able to have IM conversations with as many people as you want to. In the conversation screen, they even make it look like Apple's SMS threaded message view, complete with speech bubbles. The user interface is polished and slick. I had three IM threads going last night, and it was seamless to switch between each one, know when someone had said something, and manage them all as a whole.

I encourage you to check out this free (so far) IM client.

Scenario Poker
iPhone Link
Shuffle up and deal! This is another 'application' that I find myself frequently loading. I love poker, I love Texas Hold 'Em to be specific. Scenario poker allows you to play against 8 people in portrait mode, or choose the landscape mode and turn your iPhone on it's side to play against 10! The players all appear to be imaginary, as there is no lag or delay while playing.

The play is good. Animations for cards going to each player are smooth, I have yet to encounter a bug in this poker application. It's free, but purchasing a license via Pay Pal will allow you to upload your picture, give you statistics while playing, and they'll even mail you a poker odds card to keep in your wallet.

I have not paid to use this program at this point.

Showtimes
iPhone Link
Not that I get to go to the movies that much any more with two kids, this application is pretty cool. It beats loading Fandango and zooming around in the iPhone screen. You simply type your zip code into the search box, and you're presented with a list of theaters. Choose a theater, and you get a list of movies. Simple and slick.

Choose a movie and you get a image of the movie poster, a synopsis, rating, reviews, theater addresses and movie times. I would love to see a 'buy tickets' link, I can only guess if that's a future enhancement or not. Showtimes does a good job of delivering a plethora of information formatted just for the iPhone.

iPhone Network Test
iPhone Link
Let's bash the EDGE network and complain about how slow it is! Well, it's not a slow as you may have thought. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is not room for improvement, but this little gem will tell you what network connectivity speeds you're getting over EDGE or WiFi. Clicking on the Start Test button, a graphic is downloaded to your device, and the resulting speed in KBS is displayed above it. They even give you a link to click (or tap I guess) that lets you specify which connection you're using.

Ok, numbers. Most of the time on EDGE, I'm getting upwards of 200+ KBS. Sure it's not DSL or Cable, but it's not that slow!

Seeqpod
iPhone Link
Let me start by saying, use this site at your own risk. The legality of it seems a bit sketchy at this point. The site allows you to type in a song title, or artist and search the internet for instances of MP3 files that match your search criteria. Clicking search results stream music right to your iPhone. It's really amazing. I searched for some really obscure stuff and was able to listen to the entire song.

I've only tried this application on WiFi. My guess is that on edge, it would depend on signal strength and download speeds.

While you can't save files to your device, it's almost like On Demand Radio. You want to hear a song? Type the title in and listen! Very cool stuff here, but I bet we see this shut down in the next six months.

Do you have an application you'd like to see on your iPhone? Leave a comment, I've been trying to come up with an application to build, but I don't have any good ideas yet.

I read a post recently about how to get DVDs onto your iPhone. There must have been twenty steps, and I don't know if the software was free, or required a purchase. I think I've found better software, and less steps to do it. It is not a 'quick' process, maybe my computer sucks. Any ways, here's the approach I'm using, and all the software is free.

Download Software
DVD Decrypter (DVD Ripping Software)
Videora (Video Encoding Software)

Step 1.
Open DVD Decrypter

Click the stream processing tab, and check the video checkbox, and the 2ch English checkbox. This will get just the movie and audio. Then click on the destination folder at the bottom, and choose a location to save the file to. It will create a .VOB file. This file is what you'll encode in Videora. Now just click the DVD > Hard Drive image at the bottom, and wait... and wait... and wait.

Once the ripping is done, you can close DVD Decrypter. 

Step 2.
Open Videora

Click on the settings menu option and configure it to work with the iPhone screen. You'll only need to do this step once.

 Click on the Convert menu option at the top, and then Video Wizard, locate the file on your machine and click the 'next' arrow. Steps are highlighted below.

Next, select your video settings. You'll need to play with these to determine what you preferences are.

Finally, click the Start Converting button and wait... wait... wait....

Then, to get it on your iPhone, simply import the file Videora generates into iTunes, and then choose to sync it to your iPhone. So I have a process that is roughly seven steps to get just about any DVD onto your iPhone. The article I read was 19 steps, I didn't have the patience to read the entire thing, yet alone try it!

The videora UI is horrific. Lots of ads, but nothing shady gets installed. I like it because it's free, and simple. You can rip to other devices too like PSP, iPod video, and other formats. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

Sick of getting spam, here's a few things to try.

• If you run your own domain, turn off your settings to allow *@domain.com email to go to a single box.
• Remove text that contains your email address on your site, and consider changing it to be "user at domain dot com".
• Consider creating a windows live or Gmail account to use for sites that require registration. Once you've determined if they are trustworthy, change it to your 'good' email address.
• Double spam filter your email. The email from my site goes through my ISP's spam filters, and then Gmail picks it up from my inbox there, sure, it's a few extra minutes to get my mail, but then it goes through Gmail's spam checks. I think I get maybe one to two spam messages in my inbox per week. This also allows me to have a single point of presence for all of my mail, not to mention the hard disk space I'm saving by using Google 2.8 GB of online storage. I've set it up this way for close to six months, and I've only hit 5% of their allotted storage space.
• If you are getting a lot of spam from reliable companies, unsubscribe from their notices, they have to provide a way for you to opt out of their requests. Be careful though, a lot of spammers use this feature to fish for email addresses, so while it's ok to tell Macy's or Nordstrom to stop sending you junk, I'd be weary of BigOffers.com.
• Use Gmail's Report Spam feature in the web based email.
• If you're using Outlook, use it's built in Spam filter capabilities.
• Only give your email address to people you want to receive email from.
• Spammers use name lists to guess at common windows live, yahoo, and gmail accounts, when possible, add something that won't allow your name to be 'guessed' (jsmith89@gmail.com) . It's kind of cryptic, but yet another effective preventive measure.
• If you're getting more spam than good email, it might be time to retire that address and start clean.
• Don't get caught by a phisher either.

I ended up placing 11th place in the National Poker Challenge league that I've been playing in. So the 60 highest ranked players get invited to a tournament for the month of June. The really cool part of this tournament is that 1st place is around $1,000 cash for first prize, and the higher up you finished for the month, the more chips you start with.

The 1st place player gets $20,000 in tournament chips, and 11th place gets $17,000 and change. 60th place gets around $10,000. It will be good to start the tournament with a lot more chips than the rest of the field. I hope I have a lot of players with low chip stacks at my table.

Tournament play is difficult. It's very hard to bluff, or get away with much. My strategy will be to play premium starting hands, raising more than calling raises. I'm really going to focus on playing good poker, and concentrate on making the final table. It will be a long day, it's on Sunday July 22nd starting at 2:00 PM. Hopefully, by the time I get home, it will be dark, and I'll be counting my winnings.

I've switched my RSS feed to point to feedburner. Sorry for those of you that have 'subscribed' to the original feed.

Please update your RSS readers to point to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnbatdorf

Thanks