Today may be a banner day in finding the perfect todo list option for me and my iPhone. Enter Google Chrome. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google has released a browser called Chrome.  It is clean, fast, and has some very interesting features that are growing more and more compelling to me all the time.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

South by Southwest is three conferences all rolled into one. First there is South by Southwest Interactive. It is focused on web and web development. It is the biggest geek party on earth. Mouth-breathers, neck beard-ers, and the socially inept let their hair down for a week of partying and passing out business cards. If you are a web startup…you have to be there. I wish I could have gone. Judging by all the twitters and blog entries, it was a lot of fun.

SXSWi lasts for a week. After that the South by Southwest turns into a music and film festival. The people there are a lot more mainstream, and the contrast in the atmosphere is quite funny. Justine Ezarik has been there during both phases of the festival and did a man on the street that is entertaining.

To listen to the Web 2.0 crowd, you would think that everyone is into this, but apparently that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The good news for me is that now it is a ton easier to post to my blog using my Samsung Blackjack. Wordpress 2.5 has redesigned the blog entry screen so that it is much easier to get to typing posts. Before Wordpress 2.5, I had to scroll past an extremely long list of Categories to get to the part of the page where you type your entry. Normally, when I log into my site I am on a full-sized computer that displays webpages correctly. On a big computer, my extraordinarily long list of Categories are hidden in a pull down menu. My phone’s browser isn’t powerful enough to display my dashboard correctly and just stacks each Category one on top of the other.

“What’s a Category?” Great question. If you look just under the title of each blog entry you will see some blue words that categorize that story. Wordpress doesn’t limit how many categories I use and obediently remembers every one I have ever used. The list is crazy long.

Now, I don’t have to deal with that list when posting from my phone. Upgrade!

Now if I could just figure out how to type faster on this tiny keyboard…

– Update–

I am on my laptop now so I am kind of cheating, but I had to give a quick update about completing my entry.  After I typed up my blog entry, I clicked done which launched me back to my dashboard window.  I still had to scroll past the some 150+ categories except now it is not as bad because I am now seeing all these categories after I typed the entry.  With the blog article still fresh on my mind, I can categorize it more effectively.  So, I still have to scroll a lot, only now it is more profitable.

One of the biggest complaints that people had about the iPhone has just been sorted. I am keeping track of Engadget’s coverage of today’s Apple iPhone event. According to Phil Schiller, Apple’s WW Product Marketing muckety-muck, says that Apple has integrated Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology into the iPhone making it complete compatible with corporate email infrastructures.

Now if you are a corporate drone, it is now possible for you to get your corporate email. That is a big deal because there is a huge number of potential iPhone customers out there who have averted purchasing an iPhone because it won’t work with their company’s email system. RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, has made its entire business model out of being business friendly. Now that the iPhone is corporate friendly, the mobile phone market is really going to change.

The iPhone has already gone a long way in changing the mobile phone ecosystem. It has shown people what is possible when you really put a lot of care in the design of your handset. Everyone I know who has ever purchased an iPhone loves it. The main sticking point is that it hasn’t worked with corporate email until now. Now that iPhone works for business world’s are colliding.

The event is still going so I don’t know if Apple has made any statements about 3G roll out, but if they do then the last of the major sticking points is gone. That will leave only the lack of a hardware keyboard as a problem. The keyboard issue will never go away, so you will either have to write that one off or buy a different product.

Wow, finally I can post to my blog from my phone easily. I just uploaded a new plugin called wphone, and it seems to be working really well. I have tried to blog from my phone somewhat successfully but because I have used all sorts of different categories or tags or whatever you want to call them I had to scroll like 15 minutes to get to the window to enter the post. Needless to say, I didn’t want to put myself very often so I didn’t post much from my phone. Now if I could just speed up my thumb typing, all would be good in the world.

If you have any interest in the iPhone, Apple, or Steve Jobs, then this is a must read.  It is an article by PC Magazines Sascha Segan.  It will shed some light into a possible falling out between Sir Steve and the AT-AT.  Very interesting…very interesting indeed!

If you want to hack your iPhone to work on other GSM based cell networks, and you are trying to go the hardware hack route then be careful because apparently the iPhone will quickly transform from your friendly, sexy phone into a Bic lighter.

Check out this article on Engadget about a guy who basically lit $699 on fire!

I mean… is AT&T really that bad??

If you have any interest in smart phones, especially Palm-based ones, then you need to read this incredibly thoughtful post from engadget. It was posted way back on August 21st, and a lot of you who actually keep up with your RSS feeds have already read or at least heard about this post, but it is incredible.

Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, and Joshua Topolsky have done an exceedingly good job at calling Palm to the mat on their lack of innovation, and ridiculous grip on past successes.

I have a lot of friends who have Treos, and all of them have MAJOR complaints about their phone, and the scary thing is Palm doesn’t seem to know that they are quickly becoming irrelevant.

I remember 4 years ago when Treos were all the rage. They were an exceptional answer to the lack of choice in the email phone market. Blackberries were great if all you did was email. I knew a number of people who carried Blackberries and a separate phone. Treo answered that problem. The issue is Palm hasn’t done very much since then, and all their competitors have.

There are a ton of sexy, thin smartphones out there, and people would have to be stupid to invest in a Treo now. Palm has to do something, and Engadget is calling them on it, and I applaud them.

Sorry this post is so late compared to the original article. I have been incredibly busy…too busy to blog.

Now that I have all the 3G goodness, I am going to use it with my lappy (laptop computer). I figured out how to do it and I blogged about it in a previous post.

Now that AT&T rolled out 3G in Northwest Arkansas, I tried to link up with those instructions and was unable to get it to work. I just did some investigation on the AT&T site and found these instructions.

I don’t have my USB cable here at the house so I can’t give it a try, but rest assured that in the coming days I will blog about my experience. It will be awesome to spread this high speed bandwidth goodness wherever I go with my aging HP lappy.

Engadget is reporting with “100% certainty” that a group of 6 guys who call themselves the iPhoneSIMfree.com team has made it possible to unlock the iPhone from AT&T and use it with any GSM carrier.

For those of us in the US, this isn’t that big of a deal. The only other GSM carrier of note is T-mobile, and they have their issues just like AT&T… mobile users just have to pick which issues they can deal with and go with that carrier.

The people who profit the most from this news are people outside of the United States. Many countries will never see the iPhone, and the ones that will, won’t be seeing it anytime soon…until now.

The iPhoneSIMfree.com team seems to have found an unreversible way to unlock the iPhone which is great news to us, the consumer. Products should be free. We should be able to purchase electronics and use them wherever and however we want to. These lock-in contracts break the fabric of our free-market system, and leads to artificially inflated prices and functionality-poor devices.

If real market forces are thwarted through monopolistic practices then the gray market will force the hand of the players involved.

I am an AT&T customer, and I don’t plan on buying an iPhone, but I still see this as very interesting news, and I am anxious to see how this all plays out.

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