People living in Silicon Valley are spoiled. With 3G data speeds, I’ve been able to rely on Google Maps for most trips outside the daily commute. However, as the Arizona trip approached, I knew that one lousy data connection and I was going to be lost. With that in mind, I purchased the Navigon GPS app for the iPhone.

Fortunately, I did not wait until the last minute because downloading the app and its associated maps took a long, long time. Besides the map, there is an additional 194.8 MB of required files. I pretty much had to leave the iPhone alone and let it pull down maps overnight for all the states I was going to be traveling in–California, Nevada and Arizona. If you discover that you were missing maps, like I did, then pray that the hotel you are staying in offers a fast Wi-Fi connection. The Courtyard Page at Lake Powell really saved me when I discovered the night before I was heading out that I was missing the Utah map.

For the most part, the Navigon app is somewhat straightforward. However, if you are accustomed to entering free-form addresses into Google, then Navigon’s approach of requiring the user to select a state, then a city, then a destination may feel archaic. I experienced a slight learning curve in terms of getting acclimated to the voice directions. Took a couple tries at first to get on the highway, but once I achieved that milestone, I didn’t experience any further problems. The issue was that I was not used to thinking in terms of feet, so I had some difficulty at first in gauging how far away the next turn was coming.

At the Grand Canyon, the Navigon app was indispensable. Since the Grand Canyon Village does not have a traditional urban grid layout, figuring out which direction I was heading was not obvious, especially at night. The Navigon app took me from the highway to the hotel entrance without problems. The only hiccup I encountered was when heading out along the Desert View Drive. I always ended up at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center without the Navigon app telling me to turn right before the parking lot.

Two other problems I encountered were entering GPS coordinates for The View Hotel in Monument Valley and finding a place to eat in Page, Arizona. To learn how to enter GPS coordinates, I had to depend on Google. Google told me that More > Coordinates would lead to the form for entering GPS coordinates. Not the Addresses or POI button, but the unintuitive More button. The POI button is for selecting a hotel or restaurant nearby or in a city. If the establishment is not in the Navigon database, you can perform a local search using Google. Using the local search option lead me to the wrong place while I was in Page, Arizona. If the Navigon app was integrated with Yelp or TripAdvisor, I would have like it even better.

As it turned out, the Navigon app was absolutely indispensable. I’m not sure that I ever saw the 3G icon show up during the trek. I was mostly on EDGE, which is not much better than no connection at all. And, of course, don’t forget to bring a phone charger.

I was trying to look up my iTunes purchase history and even arrived at the correct support page. Unfortunately, I could not find the “Purchase History” link to click on. In a bit of frustration, I turned to the reliable keystroke for looking up all sorts of stuff on the Mac. ⌘+F triggers the find dialog in Safari, Finder, and a bunch of other apps.

But, in iTunes, it triggers the Lion full-screen mode. So, I was left with iTunes in full screen without the horizontal traffic lights–red, yellow and green buttons–to minimize my window. I scanned around the keyboard and was able to escape back to the desktop via the Expose function key.

To revert iTunes back to window mode, I had to move the cursor to the top of the screen to trigger the menu bar. In the upper right-hand corner, there’s a blue icon with arrows pointing inward to switch iTunes back to window mode.

Last Friday, I stopped by the Palo Alto Apple store during my lunch hour for the iPhone 4s launch. I guess everyone else must have ordered the iPhone online because the line out the door was surprisingly short. It reached just barely past the corner.

The drink cart and loaner umbrellas kept everyone cool under the mid-day sun:

Post-it notes with personal messages in memory of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs covering the front window of the store:

So, I’ve been skipping iPhone generations: iPhone to iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4s. The leap from iPhone to iPhone 3GS was tremendous in that I could browse the internet while away from a Wi-Fi connection, provided that AT&T cooperated. The move from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4s feels more evolutionary than revolutionary.

What I Like

64 GB. I found the 32 GB to be too confining. Glad Apple bumped up the optional storage. Definitely worth paying for.

Retina Display. I’ve already seen the retina display on other people’s iPhone 4. Something nice to have, but not completely essential.

Siri. I can see how some people may find Siri to be conceptually useful. For the first few days, Siri was giving me the cold shoulder. I heard so many excuses–one after another–about Siri not being able to reach the network. I guess that Siri was not prepared to talk to a million people all at once.

Despite the marketing of Siri as an intelligent personal assistant that understands natural language, I haven’t had too much success getting it to do what I want. It takes some effort to get it to follow instructions correctly.

Too quite a few iterations to get the phrasing just right. Also, had to add Costco to my directory in order for Reminders to recognize the name / location. Siri only understands Costco if I enunciate. When I pronounce it as Cosco instead of Costco (with a strong T sound), Siri gets confused.

What I Don’t Like

Network. If your iPhone 3GS has a poor connection to the network, don’t expect the iPhone 4s to perform any miracles. The AT&T dead zones afflict the iPhone 4s just as harshly as the iPhone 3GS.

Settings. Lost all my This American Life settings when I switched to the iPhone 4s. On the 3GS, I had marked all the radio shows I had listened to. Now, I’m back to step 1 again.

1. In Safari, select Safari > Preferences.
2. Click on the Advanced tab, and check the box labeled Show Develop menu in menu bar.
   
3. Select Develop > User Agent > Safari iOS 4.3.3 – iPad
4. Return to Facebook.
5. Say goodbye to Top Stories Since Your Last Visit, 100+ More Recent Stories, etc. Sorry, ticker is still there though.

Previously, I mentioned that BBEdit 10 was missing a “Set Key” button to map menu items to a custom hotkey. Well, I heard back from support, and here’s the undocumented trick. Clicking on the empty space to the right where the other hotkeys are listed brings up a field for entering your new custom shortcut. If the new shortcut conflicts with an existing shortcut, you will be prompted with an option to remap the hotkey to the current menu item.

Safari 5.1 is the latest version of Apple’s web browser. People who work on websites should notice a change in the Web Inspector, when compared to Safari 5.0. Previously, clicking on the Resources icon brought up the file size and loading time data, which is useful for diagnosing why a particular web page may be loading slowly.

In Safari 5.1, you can still view this data; however, it has been moved under the Network tab. Another difference is that in Safari 5.0, you could inspect this data after a page load. Safari 5.1 changes this. If you do not have Web Inspector open at the time a page loads, the Network data appears blank. That’s why I could not locate this data at first glance.

If you want to look at the Headers, clicking on the name of one of the files brings up the Status Code, Request URL, and Response Headers.

I don’t get Launchpad. It may be a cool feature if I didn’t have the most often used applications already in the Dock. As it is, the feature set seems a bit duplicative. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you should already be familiar with the UI–drag related applications on top of each other to create folders.

By default, Launchpad displays all the application icons in grid format in alphabetical order. And, when I say all, I mean all, including rarely used utilities like ColorSync Utility, Dictionary, Java Preferences, and Boot Camp Assistant. It will take some organizing for Launchpad to be useful.

Mac OS X Lion marks the end of Rosetta, the transition technology that allowed Intel Macs to run PowerPC applications. After installing Mac OS X, I took a peek at the Applications folder. If you have been migrating all your applications from computer to computer over the years, you may have some Power PC applications, such as Internet Explorer, sitting around unused on the hard drive. Now would be the time to clean up the computer because clicking on Internet Explorer (which now has a slash through it) brings up this warning:

You can’t open the application Internet Explorer.app because PowerPC applications are no longer supported.

No offer to download Rosetta separately. Game over. Of course, losing a 2004 version of Internet Explorer is no big deal with Safari, Firefox and Chrome offering newer and better options. The bigger problem is Quicken 2005. I haven’t committed to any of the alternatives yet. That’s why I installed Lion on the older MacBook Pro and not the newer one that has all the mission critical applications and data.

On one hand, I don’t have to drive to the Apple Store, find parking, pick-up a tiny box with a disk in it, wait in line, check out, and then drive back home.

However, waiting 1 hour and 55 minutes to download Mac OS X Lion, which weighs in at 3.74 GB, is far from instant gratification.

Yesterday, I updated to BBEdit 10. Outside of the different UI for open documents, I didn’t notice anything truly different until I tried to access my collection of Text Factories.

In BBEdit 10, the Text Factories still may be accessed under the Text menu, but the Text Factories have been renamed to Text Filter, and appear at the top of the Text menu instead of a third of the way down. Additionally, the hot keys for my Text Factories did not transfer over. To reset the hot keys, Window > Palettes > Text Filters brings up the menu for setting a key for the renamed Text Filters.

If you are upgrading, I would suggest renaming the previous version to BBEdit-9-6-4.app. After installing BBEdit 10, I was still able to access the older version to look up all my old hot keys. If I replaced BBEdit 9 with BBEdit 10, I would have been in big trouble.