tin-men

London Calling: Live blogging the UK iPhone launch

And so the anointed day came to pass. Graham and Nik are the first two people in the iPhone queue. I’ll be writing on here as long as my battery lasts, so enjoy.

Thursday 10:27am: Been here for two hours now. Camp iDay is set up and coffee is in hand. The Apple reps have already come out to say hello. My mac is getting dirty from the filthy London air…

11:26am: And we’re still the only people in the queue. Had apple PR asking if we want to be on TV. I think tomorrow I’ll only be capable of grunts after three days of little to no sleep.

12:40pm: We had a visit from a guy from The Cloud. He wants us to wear a Cloud hoody in exchange for a rather nice bribe. I think I’ll take him up on the offer!

6:04pm: In the Apple Store giving our macs a little drink. Have been wearing my Cloudy hoody in exchange for food and tea. There are now five of us in the queue, and I’ve been giving interviews all day to the press. I still suck at it. And it’s only going to get worse. Hoping the rain stops tonight so I’ll have a chance of getting a little bit of sleep.

Friday 5:08am: Didn’t get any sleep unfortunately – central London seems to attract a few drunk people at night (hence the non-blogging). A very nice chap from Apple brought us out a cup of tea about an hour ago, and about five minutes ago the 7th person to join the line turned up bringing a gift of wine gums. I’ve been reading the press so far of our holy quest (will be writing more about that another day – one or two of the articles made my first exposure to the mainstream press a not entirely pleasant one).

1:15pm: It’s been a busy day so far. Given more interviews than I can remember and I still haven’t slept. We’re getting ready for the final push now. Just need to sort out the escape route after we’ve got our JesusPhones and we’re pretty much away!

Sunday 11th November
I’ve just about recovered now. And yes, I have in my hands the first iPhone in the UK. I will write a full round up of the experience over the next week.

Screencast: A simpler Dock in Leopard

Dislike the new Dock in Leopard? Watch the video to see how to change it.

Click To Play

Download (mp4)

Tweet IM 1.8.2

Here’s yet another update to TweetIM. This is a minor bug fix that sorts out updating the Adium status that broke for some reason in 1.8. So, cheers to Isaac for the fix.

Download TweetIM1.8.2.zip

TweetIM 1.8.1

I’ve fixed a few bugs related to special characters in TweetIM 1.8.1 today. If you’re a current TweetIM user, just download the script and replace your current one with the new one. If you’ve not used TweetIM before, it’s probably best if you head over to the original post to see what all the fuss is about

Download TweetIM1.8.1.zip

Graham is easily impressed

The past couple of days I’ve been hard at work giving grahamgilbert.com a much needed overhaul (go an have a look – I’m pretty proud of it – and give me work while you’re at it!). Why does this concern you, I hear you ask – well, ok then, you’re not asking that, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

So there.

Anyway, my text editor of choice is TextMate. It’s quite possibly the best text editor I’ve ever used, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Right, to the point. I discovered a handy new feature today. What it basically does is automatically make a link for you. Sounds simple I know, but it saves a metric buttload of time when you’ve got to add a load of links to a page. All you have to do is get the url into your clipboard – like when you’re browsing and want to link to the page when you’re writing a blog post in your favourite text editor (oh, didn’t I tell you? TextMate can post to WordPress too). Then just highlight the text you want to link, bash Control – Shift L and Bob’s your uncle.

Sounds simple, right? What really impressed me was that is goes out onto the internet and grabs the page title you’re linking to and puts it as the title of the link.

Now that I think about it, it doesn’t sound that impressive.

It impressed me anyway… But I guess I must be easily impressed!