On our recent trip to Tuscany, B bought a cheap local bottle of wine not because of the wine itself — we’ve not dared taste it yet — but because the bottle was pretty. It’s been sat on the dining room table since then, gathering dust.
Last weekend I decided to take a few pictures of it. It’s not my normal kind of photography but the results were fairly respectable I think.
When they first announced the App Store and the iPhone SDK I thought that a blogging tool might be something worth downloading. On the first day TypePad had their application but we had to wait until this week for the WordPress equivalent. On the plus side, WordPress for iPhone is both free and Open Source.
First impressions: it’s nice. Setting up a new blog is simple. Writing a new post is straightforward too, just press the “new” button, fill in the fields much as you would in the web interface and get typing. You can also add photos — either directly from the camera or from your photo library — but only to the end of your post.
The problem with trying to sell a lacklustre product to a disinterested audience is that even the best marketing that money can buy can’t help. Fortunately Microsoft had the wisdom not to throw good money after bad and decided to push Vista with their “The Wow Starts Now” campaign, one that neatly matched the quality of the initial operating system release. Very clever.
But recently Microsoft have decided that things have improved and that it’s worth marketing their flagship product with a little more gusto. I decided that I would help and try to think of a few new tag lines.
Earlier today daringfireball pointed me to Byline by Phantom Fish, a Google Reader client-side application for the iPhone.
Since I recently abandoned Safari’s built-in RSS reader for Google, this is just the kind of application that I have been looking for. Unlike a lot of programs I’ve found on the AppStore, Byline seems to be very well put together. The author appears to have included a thoughtful set of features. Not everything, just those elements you use every day; either a good starting point for later versions or an Apple-like approach depending on your perspective.
The Cinque Terre — a series of small, connected coastal villages — has been on my, admittedly rather long, list of places to visit for some time, but when I first flew out to Tuscany I didn’t quite know how achievable it would be. Sure, Google Maps said that it would be a two hour drive from the villa, but I wasn’t completely sure that I was using the right address and I have been late several times when relying on directions cribbed from the Internet.