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

In practice, TripIt is pretty useful. I've used it on about four or five trips, and in all but one, the itinerary from the booking site was recognised. I'm not sure what happened with the one that wasn't, but when I used them again about a month ago it was imported with not problems. If you book items from multiple sites, say you go to Expedia for your plane ticket, but Travelocity for your hotel and car rental, TripIt will figure out that they're all on the same trip for you. You can also share the trips with multiple users and give them read or write access to the trip. In practice it's pretty useful to have my wife and I both add things to the same place rather than e-mail things back and forth when preparing for a trip.

One of the best features is the print option. Once all your bookings are consolidated onto TripIt, it can generate a really nice looking printout that includes all the information, including driving directions, maps, confirmation numbers, and phone numbers for the entire agenda. It can be a lifesaver not having to search around for that restaurant phone number if you're running late.

TripIt also has a mobile site that has improved greatly over the months I've been using it. It started with a fairly bland text based interface, but now it visually looks much better and is easy to navigate. My favorite feature is probably more of an iPhone feature than a TripIt one, but I love being able to click on the Google Map directions and have it open in Google Maps on my phone, with the directions ready to go. If you don't have an iPhone, you still get a picture of the overall map with the text based directions.

One of the problems I've had with the site is slow iCal updating. I subscribe to my TripIt calendar feed on both Google Calendar and iCal on my Mac and they both take a little time to update the entries for the trip. When we were adding things to the agenda during the trip, I had to delete the subscription and re-add it on Google Calendar in order to force it to show up immediately. It does show up within an hour or so if you don't do anything, but when you're on a trip and you're using it for organization, you'd like it to be quick.

Overall I give TripIt a good review. It's a really useful site that seems to be heading in the right direction and I really like being able to have my calendar updated so easily with trip information.

Some people at work used the betas of Entourage 2008 and I had hope for the new version. Anything would be better than Entourage 2004. Last week I decided to use Entourage for a full week. Trying to use Entourage was an exercise in futility. I prefer to live in the "Unread" mail view with my e-mail clients, and Entourage 2008 was like 2004 in the time it took to customize it to only show incoming mail. When most people want to see unread mail, it makes sense that they wouldn't want to see mail in the "Sent Items" or "Junk Mail" folders.

Outlook has had a great feature since at least 2003 where you can drag an e-mail over the calendar or tasks button and it will open a new calendar entry or task with the contents of the e-mail as the basis of the new entry. This comes in handy and is a time saver I've really gotten used to. Entourage does not have this feature. Despite the feature being around for 5 years, Microsoft didn't include it Entourage 2008. I don't see why they wouldn't try and make the two products a little more similar. At least take the better features of both and integrate them to make a better product. Speaking of tasks, Entourage doesn't pick up Tasks from Exchange either.

The deal killer for me was when I opened up Outlook yesterday and my wife called to ask why she was suddenly getting some e-mails I automatically forward to her. It was then I realized that Entourage doesn't get the list of Outlook rules from Exchange. I have rules set up to organize my mailbox and I didn't realize that they weren't being filtered as they should have been.

The other Office apps are fine for my basic editing, but for any intensive work, I'm opening up Parallels and going to 2007. It's nice being able to use the best tools from both Windows and OSX at the same time.

Tags: Windows, Mac, OSX, Office 2008, Office 2007, Entourage, Parallels, review, technology, Exchange