Mac Net Journal

Two weeks ago I had to fly to the East Coast for a FEMA disaster training exercise for work. Like many people, I dislike flying - it is the worst part of any trip - but this time I had some work I wanted to do on the flight and I knew that when I arrived on the FEMA campus in Emmitsburg, Maryland, I wouldn't have an Internet connection waiting for me to send an e-mail from my 15-inch MacBook Pro. But I needed to get a piece written for an employee newsletter and sent back to the West Coast for inclusion in the next edition on Monday.

iPhone to the rescue. When the fellow in front of me on the plane decided to put his seat all of the way back into my lap - so close that there was now way I could use my MacBook Pro even if I wanted to - then I could just pull out my iPhone and start writing.

For all of the complaints I have read about the virtual keyboard on the iPhone, it worked fine for me to write and then edit a 500-600 word piece. Granted, I don't use my thumbs to do all of the typing on my iPhone. Thumbs seem to work fine for short messages, when combined with the iPhone's auto-correct features, but when I write anything longer than a sentence I revert to holding the iPhone in my left hand and typing with two or three fingers on my right hand, which is much faster and more accurate for me.

And so I wrote the piece on the iPhone and used the convenient ability to e-mail any note to send it once we landed to a co-worker to start the review and revision process.

In this case, the iPhone was the best tool for the job, and it was not just about doing things that the iPhone really excells at - like checking the weather or mapping the route from point A to point B in an unfamiliar area. This was about actually creating content, doing real work with a tool that works best as an interface to entertainment.

During my week-long trip, the iPhone was clearly my tool of choice. I had my work Blackberry with me as well, but since I couldn't get online with my MacBook Pro during the entire trip, instead I found myself living with the iPhone as my interface with the online world. And boy what an interface it is, when compared with the woeful experience with the Blackberry. I won't kid anyone that I would have preferred to have a fuller experience with the Net through my MacBook Pro. But since that wasn't available, the iPhone allowed me to stay in touch with work and actually create and do work while on the other side of the country and outside the range of normal computer access.

What could be better? Battery life is not as good as I would like, and I kept having flaky connections to the AT&T network, especially from inside some of the thick, brick buildings on the FEMA campus. And I often wish that Apple had chosen to make the iPhone bigger. While the current size works great for slipping into my pocket, it would be fantastic to have all of the features of the iPhone in a small tablet computer - something that many others have noted and been predicting that Apple could produce in the future.

I look forward to seeing what the iPhone 2.0 software update does for doing real work with the device in the near future. My guess is that the upgrade will make it even more painful to keep using my "state-of-the-art" Blackberry.

Update: I didn't realize until just now that Rich Mogull wrote a similar piece for TidBITS recently: iPhone survivor - Traveling without a laptop. It's a good read. Although I didn't go so far as to leave my MacBook Pro at home, it turns out that I could have. I would have missed OmniFocus and the ability to offload, browse and edit images during the trip though.

Time for spring cleaning for my MacBook Pro
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, 11:35 PM

I may have a 100 GB hard drive in my aging 15-inch MacBook Pro, but with years of photos, many gigs of iTunes and a 30 GB installation of Parallels on my machine, I am feeling the squeeze with less than 5 GB of free disk space on my machine at any one time. My solution is simple - reduce the size of the partition for Windows XP, which I use very infrequently. But so far I haven't found an easy way to do that without completely erasing my hard disk and rebuilding the machine from the ground up - something that wouldn't be a bad idea in general since I haven't ever done that with this computer.

And so I am contemplating a complete rebuild of my machine next Monday, when I have enough time to devote to such a mundane task on a day off from my job. I won't say I am happy with the idea of spending the time on this, but I don't see an easy alternative. Ugh.