The image to the left is my iPhone with the cables I’ve been using. I have a window mount I occasionally use, but it’s mainly for long trips when I’m using a GPS app. It’s frustrating to have to deal with the two cables all the time.

The “Audio and Sync Cable for iPhone / iPod” from Monoprice eliminated my frustration. Because I have one cable now going into my iPhone it’s much easier to use (while the car is stopped of course). The dock connection is the older style that has releases on the side you need to push, but I prefer those connectors to the new ones. Another benefit to this cable is that it sends audio through dock connector’s line out. There will be no more constantly adjusting the audio on the phone, then on the car, then on the phone again. The car audio system now handles all volume, and it sounds great.

All that said, the best thing about this is the price. I paid $5.63 including shipping (it retails for $3.90 for a single cable). Compare this to $19 for a standard sync cable from Apple. I definitely recommend this cable for anyone trying to get audio into their car’s aux jack.

It seems that there is no good bus route application unless you live in San Fransisco or New York. Google Maps on the desktop works great for bus directions, and having recently tried the Pittsburgh Port Authority busses, the Google directions on what busses to take worked great.
To examine the new Google Maps features, I decided to take a fictional trip to see the Steelers in Heinz Field.

The orange icon in the search listing indicates street view is available. Note the “Share Location” addition to the info screen, it opens an e-mail with a link to Google Maps in it. It’s another nice feature that should have been in from the beginning.

I start my trip after having a nice meal in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and get these directions, first car, then bus, and finally walking.

The bus map has icons indicating where you would need to walk and get on the bus. Tapping the icon gives you more information. Viewing the text directions is a little clearer, and double tapping on a step takes me to the item on the map.

Once there, I double check with Street View to get my bearings. Street View has been pretty responsive, but occasionally it takes a second for the images to load and you see the grid they’re placed on.

Podcast downloading is something that should have been there from the beginning. You still can’t subscribe to new podcasts on the phone (that I can tell anyways), but you can get new episodes of any podcast in the iTunes store over the air, just as you can with music. When they added the store to the phone, the infrastructure was done. I don’t see why it took so long for this. Just as with the App Store, there’s a 10MB limit for 3G downloading, but none for wifi. itms:// links work in Safari on the iPhone just as they would on the desktop. They open the App store page and you can download a few episodes of a podcast. Below are some images of this feature

Tapping on the iTunes subscription link brings up the podcast’s iTunes Store page.

The podcasts show up in the iPod and the listings have a “Get More Episodes” link to go to the store as well.

When synced back with iTunes, the podcast shows up with a subscribe link.

Smule’s Ocarina has a very simple interface. In the main operating mode you have four circles that represent the air holes on the instrument and an indicator on the bottom that shows the intensity of the air being blown. You play the instrument by blowing into he microphone, and have the combinations of pressing or not pressing the circles to determine the notes. I admit that I was skeptical when I first tried this, but it works really well in practice. After working out where to blow for the best sound I was playing notes clearly within a few minutes. If you tap on the indicator at the bottom you get a menu with four options: he ocarina, a globe, preferences, and an information button that has links to tutorials.
The preferences allow you to change the root note and the sound of the instrument. As a nod to the videogame fans, there is a “Zeldarian” mode. On the ocarana site, you can find a growing number of songs being adapted to the Ocarina. Smile makes a nice score generator for users to use so they can share their creations. I’m addition to the many Zelda themes, there are a lot of good adaptations. The one downside to he music on the site is the lack of note length and rests. If you don’t know what a song is supposed to sound like, chances are that it won’t sound right.

The globe icon brings up a darkened globe with lights scattered over it indicating Ocarina users. One light has a DNA-like spiral coming up and plays the music from that user. It is amazing to hear how good some people are with this already. For those of us that aren’t experts yet, I haven’t seen an opt-out option other than not allowing the app to use your location. That should really be made more clear.

In the end, Smule’s Ocarina is a polished application that shows what out of the box ideas can do with the iPhone. My wife and I spent an hour playing with it, and it has renewed a desire to start playing music again. I highly recommend this application. Thanks to Lawson for telling me about this app!

For an example of Ocarina in action, take a look at this video from the Ocarina website:

Title: Ocarina
Publisher: Smule
Price: $0.99 (Introductory special)
Rating: 4/5

The hardest part of this process was to figure out how to get my addresses out of Exchange and into the Address Book application on my Mac. When you delete the contact syncing on the phone it removes them from the device, so syncing the contacts from the phone into Address Book was out of the question. There’s no good mass “export from outlook” and “import into Address Book” option either. My solution actually came from Entourage, proving that it is actually good for something. Entourage has the ability to sync with the local iApps, and it worked out really well. As you can see you can sync calendars and notes as well, but I only chose the addresses as I didn’t need notes and my calendar was already synced.

For Calendar syncing, I discovered BusySync. It can sync my Google Calendar with iCal, and include the multiple calendars I subscribe to as well. BusySync costs $25, but is well worth it. Updates to any of the calendars are quick as long as it’s running.

If that were all I needed, then I would be done with the only cost being the $25 for BusySync. However, to sync with my iPhone I had to pay for MobileMe. I got it with my new Mac for $79, and you can get it from Amazon at that same price. MobileMe syncs my local addresses and calendars with their servers as well as between their servers and my iPhone. I was hesitant at first after hearing horror stories when it launched, however I haven’t had a single problem with the syncing. Updates are fairly quick from phone to MobileMe, and from MobileMe to iCal.

It is frustrating to have to use two applications to get all my services synced, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I use Thunderbird, iCal, and Address book on my Mac, Gmail and Google Calendar on the web, or my iPhone when I’m running around and everything is up to date.