This won’t be an in depth review, since I think there’s enough of those out there. In that area, I highly recommend Engadget’s very in-depth iPhone review. They claim that it’s “the only review of it you’re going to need” and I think they are almost right.

I’d add that John Gruber’s iPhone First Impressions post over at the awesome DaringFireball blog is a great supplement. (Arguably, Mr Gruber is an Apple fan and an outspoken one at that. However, do not be mistaken. There’s no blind faith and he’s far from an uncritical apologist. All those qualities together make him my favorite Mac blogger.)

So, anyways, here goes:

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I’m now the proud owner of a brand new, black 2006 Volkswagen GTI MK V (2.0T). It fucking rules.

Fair warning. I’m about to gush, so stand back so you don’t get any on you:

FSI direct fuel injection 2.0 litre turbo gives 200hp and 207 foot-pounds of torque at the wheel, stock. (Yes, testosterone readings spiked dramatically as I typed that.) It’s an automatic… but it’s one of the most bad ass automatic transmissions out there. Six-speed DSG twin-clutch with electronic paddle-shifting. DSG is Direct Shift Gearbox, and what that means is that it’s got two manual gearboxes that are electronically controlled… and what THAT means is that while you’re in, say, 4th gear, the other gearbox is anticipating whether you are going to upshift or downshift and has the appropriate gear ready to go. The car is electronically limited to 130mph. There are, of course, after-market chips…

The little bad-ass car sits on big bad-ass 18-inch rims that definitely make it look meaner. Oh, they improve handling too, of course.

It’s got ESP (electronic stability program) and four-wheel ABS. Tons of storage, power sun/moonroof, great 10-speaker (yes, ten) sound system and awesome plaid seats. MPG is pretty decent and definitely better than my Mustang.

I plan to put in an aftermarket stereo so I can have both Sirius satelite and iPod integration in one unit. I think I found the stereo (Kenwood EZ900HDS with KCA-iP500), now I just need to find the shop to do the work. No way in hell am I installing it.

It makes me very happy. Anybody who says money can’t buy happiness doesn’t know shit about cars.

PS: I yelped my experiences at both Sunnyvale VW and Steven’s Creek VW, if you’re interested.

PPS: Yes, I know the downsides of a black car. I understand and accept the heat and scratching issues. It’s my first, and who knows, maybe my last, black car. Thought I’d give it a shot.

I saw X-men 3 on the Saturday after it opened, and have been meaning to post my thoughts on it ever since. Since I’m the only comics geek friend to several people, they keep asking my opinions and, while I’m happy to wax philosophical about the transition from comic books to film at pretty much any point in time, I do think I oughta put all my thoughts on X3 in one place. That’s here.

This might get long; moreover since I’m writing it in bits and pieces throughout a busy workday er two days er A WEEK of pure hell at work, it might get rambley. I might also make up new words like rambley. I’ll also let you, dear reader, know before I unleash any spoilers.

Ok, I feel you’ve been duly warned on all the dangers of proceeding.

Boring comic/movie geek stuff ahead.

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For quite some time, I’ve been needing a good app to organize various bits of data. Notes, snippets of code, shopping & to do lists, serial numbers; all sorts of things. I had been using a great little app called Notebook from Circus Ponies, but it didn’t quite do everything I wanted for quick storage, easy retrieval and organization.

Enter, Yojimbo from one of my favorite developers, Bare Bones software. (Creators of BBEdit, TextWrangler and Mailsmith.)

I’ve used Yojimbo for a few hours, and I can already see it’s probably the best tool for personal data management. Ever. It has a ton of strong points and I encourage anyone in need of this kind of app to download the demo. (It’s a 30 day demo, and the app is $39. Not cheap, but worth it, in my book.) These are some of the things that make it a powerful tool:

Quick, Easy Input - While Yojimbo is running in the background, you can copy data in any application, hit F8 and get a quick input window to make a new entry.

Print PDF to Yojimbo - If you buy a lot of stuff online, you might be aware of the rather cool feature in Mac OS X that let’s you “print” to a PDF file. This is excellent for web receipts. Well, Yojimbo lets you print a PDF directly into it’s database so you don’t have to keep a folder of PDFs, which is just the digital equivalent of a drawer with a buncha slips of paper in it.

Automatic Data Classification - When you enter new data into Yojimbo, the quick entry pane checks what you have on the clipboard and guesses what sort of data it is (e.g. serial number, URL, block of text) and then gives you a customized form to better input the data and save it appropriately.

Organization - The app’s UI is the design that’s become somewhat ubiquitous on the Mac. (…and with good reason!) To sum it up quickly, it looks like Mail. You can create folders collections for manual filing and recognized data types are sorted into smart collections automatically. You can also label and flag items.

Easy to Find - All of the text content in the Yojimbo database is indexed, thus allowing a very fast search. It even indexes the contents of the PDFs it’s storing.

Built-in .Mac syncing - Special bonus for those that use .Mac: Yojimbo integrates with the .Mac synching automatically. Once you install the app, just go into your sync prefs and turn it on.

Anyways, download it yourself and play around with it. I suggest you watch the little introduction movie at the beginnning, it explains some of the key features so that you can be up and running in seconds.

I’m going to take a couple minutes on this lovely Friday to pimp a couple of Mac OS X shareware apps that I deem worthy of my money. Both come from the same developer, David Watanabe. The guy really gets Mac OS X application design. His apps are useful, elegant and downright pretty. And useful. Yes, I know I said that twice.

I’m going to talk about two apps. One more pretty, the other more useful.

First, the pretty. NewsFire is an RSS reader. Yes, there are, what seems like, a plethora of these out there. And most of them are free. So, what got me to switch away from my previous favorite, NetNewsWire and pay 16.99 Euros for a new reader? The look and feel of NewsFire. No, really. A lot of RSS readers out there make me feel like I’m reading my email or Usenet (if you don’t know what that is, get the fuck off my blog) and neither of those tasks have ever really been pretty experiences. NewsFire, though, changes that. The display is elegant, and it just moves smoothly and easily. As feeds get new items they slide up to the top of the list (if you like) and when you quit it, it doesn’t just disappear, it fades away like it’s riding off into the sunset. It’s just sexy.

It has it’s useful features, of course. Smart feeds (i.e. smart playlists from iTunes or smart folders from the Finder) which is something I grew to love in NNW. It’s also got a great feature that allows to you ’scan’ a website for RSS feeds… very useful for when the site’s designer doesn’t make it obvious. One feature it’s missing i the “Dinosaur” list from NNW. That let’s you easily find feeds that haven’t been updated a while in case you want to prune them.

You might think this is expensive for an RSS reader… but I have one running pretty much all day… and good software design is worth supporting.

Second, the useful. Inquisitor is a very nifty extension to the search feature in both Safari and Camino. It allows you to have instant results, and suggestions, pop up for your search terms as you type. By default, it searches Google or Yahoo, and you can opt to search several other sites like Technorati, Flickr or Amazon. That’s the real power with this tool, in my opinion. That and the fact that you can configure other search engines with minimal effort. If you click on the screenshot to the right, you can see I’ve increased the number of instant results, left the suggestions at three, and added a custom search engine (Thottbot for WoW).

At 5 Euros (6.18 USD at the moment), it’s also very affordable. Small price to pay for a nice utility and supporting innovative app design.

Ok, I’m actually going to talk about a third app of his too. David also wrote Acquisition. That’s probably the most popular and successful of his holy trinity of apps and and so needs less pimpage than the others. It’s a P2P (gnutella) app that integrates well with iTunes, and has some other really nifty features and a great UI. I haven’t used it in a while, as I don’t need gnutella P2P apps all that often… but I bring it up because I just found out that he added BitTorrent support as well… very intriguing. I’m going to have to dig back into it again.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,I swear: Two great tastes that go great together.

If you’re a DVD lover and rent from Netflix AND you’re cool enough to be a Mac OS X user, then Netflix Freak is THE app for you. It’s a little cocoa app that manages your Netflix queue without having to log in to their website. It’s much, MUCH faster than their web interface and the GUI to rearrange your queue is drag n’ drop. So simple and well worth the $10 bucks for registration. (Come on, pony up for the shareware you cheap bastards….)

If yer a DVD user and don’t rent from Netflix, well… you should. It’s a great service. And if yer not a Mac OS X user, well… fuck you.