Month: August 2013

Regular People Have No Idea How To Manage Photos On Their iPhone

I found this post by Bradley Chambers via Daring Fireball.

Apple needs to do one of the following things (in my opinion):

Buy Everpix and integrate that functionality right into iOS and the Mac. I love Everpix as standalone company, but a lot of people aren't ever go to hear about them unless it was functionality built right in by default. Also, photo stream needs to be reversed. Apple should store ALL photos/video taken with your iPhone and just store the most recent 1000 (or 30 days) locally on the device.

Make iCloud free for the total size of all the active devices backing up to that account. If I have a 16GB iPhone and a 32GB iPad, I should have 48GB available on iCloud for backups. If a device doesn't "check in" every 90 days, then that amount is removed from your quota. This would also be another reason to buy higher storage devices.

Make iCloud storage a terabyte for all users for free. This is almost the same as number two, but giving you so much that you'll likely not run out for a decade or so. Yahoo did it for Flickr, why can't Apple?Bradley Chambers

I disagree with Bradley. Apple and Yahoo ( and Google ) are in different business. Yahoo and Google make money from selling advertising. The end-user is the product. Google and Yahoo can offer seemingly free services in exchange for collecting and analyzing use information. The continuous advertising revenue generated by the user offsets the cost of providing those services. Apple, however, sells an actual product. The end-user is the customer. I only buy a new Apple device once in a while but Apple would have to give me service for the lifetime of that product. I have no MBA or large business experience but I just don't see how Apple would recoup the costs or running these services?

Hibiscus at Blooms at Belle Mead

Bhavana and I stopped in at Blooms at Belle Mead yesterday. We were looking for a plant for flowers to take to a housewarming party. We spotted these beautiful bright yellow hibiscus flowers as we walked around the store and decided we wanted one. The yellow is so vibrant, and yellow happens to be our daughters favourite colour. Blooms have hibiscus in many other colours, including yellow with a red centre and a lovely orange. I'll be back to get a few more plants.

Sunday 11 August, 2013 | NIKON D5100 | Composer | 1⁄60 sec at f/8.0 | ISO 400

I captured both of these images with a Lensbaby Composer. One of the challenges with using a Lensbaby is that it has no electronics; the camera and lens are operated entirely manually. The Nikon has no information about the glass, so Adobe Lightroom has no information about the brand or focal length. So after I import my photos into Lightroom, I use an application called ExifChanger to add the lens information to the image files. From my web search, I think the Lensbaby may be a 50mm lens (75mm on a DX camera body).

Running a business from an iPhone

I've just stepped back into independent consulting and need an invoicing solution. I started looking at curdbee but also tried Harvest and FreshBooks and Outright. I'm not sure what is the best solution for my needs and these all seem capable. This is my first time consulting after 10 years and the market for small business services has exploded with options.

While Curdbee is inexpensive, its lack of an API has eliminated it as a choice for me. I want to integrate with Google and tax planning software etc.

FreshBooks_logo

I singed up for the 30 day trials of Harvest and Freshbooks. Even after a month I still couldn't decide. I think the features sets are comparable but Freshbooks seemed to have more integration options. Harvest is cheaper ( $7/month less ) and I don't need most of the integration options at this time but I felt that FreshBooks was the better choice. For now. I upgraded to the basic account for a year. The thing that sold me on FreshBooks over Harvest is the invoicing. While Harvest has more invoicing templates, FreshBooks has a feature that notifies me when the client has viewed the invoice. No more client excuses about not receiving invoices.

outright_logo_web_large

Outright has tax related and business accounting features that I wanted and integrates with FreshBooks. I linked my Outright account to my business credit card account. By linking my bank accounts I can track my business expenses by importing credit card transactions. My local business checking bank isn't supported as yet, which is unfortunate. I had hoped to pull in transactions to manage my cash flow. Fortunately, FreshBooks supports my local bank and I can pull in transactions that way.

By using Outright I can keep all my income and expenses (including mileage ) organized and categorized. I'll be ready to go at tax time; just print my Schedule C worksheet. Outright also provides estimates quarterly tax reports so I'll have no surprises.

I am using iOS apps for FreshBooks and Outright to management my business right from my iPhone and iPad. I can enter mileage, create invoices, track cash transactions etc. How cool is that!