iDallas!

I was out Christmas shopping this afternoon with all the people and the traffic and the hustle and bustle, and it wasn’t all bad.

I do nearly all of my shopping online, and I generally much prefer it.  The selection way later, you don’t have to worry about crowds of people, the ambience is as comfortable as my couch (since it often IS my couch).  You also have access to tons of reviews and other information so you can be pretty sure you’re getting what you want.

There’s another side to that too, though.  Having access to SO MUCH information can make me take so much longer to make my purchase decision that it probably wasn’t actually worth the effort.  It’s sometimes nice to just walk into a store and then walk out 20 minutes later with a working product.  It may not be perfect, but it’ll probably work well enough.  Nothing ever works perfectly no matter how much research you put into it anyway, and I may actually enjoy the thing more when I don’t know everything about it and all of its competitors.  Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss!

When you’re doing Christmas shopping specifically, it’s also really nice to know what gifts you have and which ones you don’t yet have.  There’s no anxious waiting for last minute deliveries and no fear of receiving something other than what you were expecting.  I’m not organized enough to do all of my shopping early enough to avoid those situations altogether, unfortunately.  Also, when I’m out in the crowds of Christmas shoppers is most when I feel that holiday spirit.  The hustle and bustle and the tired enthusiasm and cheer are just a part of the holiday for me.  I’m just a sucker like that!

I’ll still be doing most of my shopping online in the future, but today I was reminded that offline shopping can be nice, too.

I’ve had an iPhone since the first day they came out but I had never used one regularly to listen to music until recently. Overall it’s nice but it’s not all roses.

What I like:
32 gigabytes is enough space to be really useful.

On-the-go Genius mixes are awesome! I thought it was a gimmick when they came out but it works great. I pick a song at semi-random in the morning and have similar music all the way to work and back, and it changes daily.

Listening to that genius mix while reading my day’s RSS feeds on Byline.

The little pop-up iPod control overlay is handy.

And what I don’t like so much:
It’s hard to change the volume by feel. I think I’d be happier if I was using headphones with the integrated controller. I’m going to get a set.

I’d prefer the headphone jack on the bottom so the button would be easier to reach in my pocket. As it is now I find myself having to flip the iPhone over a lot. Maybe I’m dumb, but I find it awkward. This comes up when I want to see what song is playing and the iPhone is in my jacket pocket.

I noticed that my complaints are both about the physicality of the device and not about the software at all. I guess I might prefer the headphone jack on the top when using the device as a phone so maybe it’s just hard to fill both roles.

An interesting change in OS X Snow Leopard is how the installer works. In every previous version of Mac OS X you would boot your computer up using the installer disk and install from it that way. In Snow Leopard that’s not the case anymore. The installer runs directly from the mounted DVD, closes all of your applications and then installs a bunch of files for awhile before rebooting into the installer to finish the job.

That’s interesting because it means the DVD itself is not as central to the process. It is still used in Snow Leopard, but this is a step towards removing that dependency. If the process could be tweaked to boot the system from a specially crafted disk image file, you wouldn’t need the physical media anymore. Operating Systems will certainly be distributed as downloads at some point, but will it be as soon as Mac OS X 10.7?

As a side note, this new install method makes it easy to upgrade a Macbook Air to Snow Leopard. Once you share the DVD from another computer, you’re all set. The Remote Install Mac OS X utility doesn’t have to be running.

Update: I originally thought the install process didn’t boot from the DVD at all, but while doing an update on an iMac I saw that it does indeed! Whoops!