Drinks in London?

Well it’s been a month or so since we did a meetup in London, no Keynote Drinker this time, but at Kerr’s behest, how about a few beers on Thursday 31st July at the usual venue?

New Domain Name for "me"

My name is incredibly common, there are even websites and Facebook groups set up for all of the Matt White’s of the world. And the poor old Matt White Band has to compete with all of us to get internet traffic! Anyway as my name is so common I thought it would be sensible to get a hold of mattwhite.me before anyone else does. So until I can think of anything better to do with it, my new domain points back here for the moment. Have you got yours yet?

New iPhone Finally

I got a call from a contact at the Carphone Warehouse today saying that they had a batch of phones in so I dashed up to Oxford Street to pick up one while they were still there. The process of the upgrade is still pretty slow, a huge form which takes (if my experience is anything to go by) over 15 minutes to get approved. No wonder there were serious queues last week. Anyway it all went through fine and I got my nice and shiny new iPhone.

The software of course is old news now that I’ve been using it for a week but the GPS and 3g speeds really make it come alive even more. I’m not sure how much this is rose tinted glasses but the new phone also seems slightly faster to respond for me as well.

I also picked up a set of the BodyGuardz protective film to go over the case of the phone. It works really well to protect what looks like a fairly easily scratched plastic backing to the phone, well worth the 30 minutes effort to get it stuck on neatly and without bubbles.

I already knew that the new phone didn’t come with a dock unlike the first gen version, but I had assumed that the old dock would work with the new phone, not so, and I really used my dock a lot so I picked up a new version of that as well, which is a tad annoying. But so far that is the only annoyance, I’ll be able to test the battery life over the next few days, but I don’t anticipate that being a problem as I plugged in the phone every night anyway to pick up new podcasts for the next day.

Oh, and for all of the people who asked, the old phone has already been reserved by a friend so no hand me downs available here sorry!

PlanetLotus Superfeed

Yancy set me up on the PlanetLotus superfeed beta last night so I could test it out from NetNewsWire on the Mac and the iPhone (still first gen unfortunately but we are hopeful for the end of the week!). The feed is brilliant, I no longer need to try and keep up with all of the Lotus blogs in my own RSS reader, and I can also cut down on the number of trips to the PL website as all of the posts come to my feed reader direct. Excellent stuff as ever Yancy, thanks!

iPhone updated

Tomorrow was always going to be fun with the new iPhone being released. Of course I’m going to get one (assuming the O2 store has any in stock after the debacle of earlier in the week), but to whet the whistle I’ve upgraded the firmware of my current phone to the 2.0 software (using Volkers tip to jump the download queue).

Boy is it good, the app store is very easy to use and there is already an amazing selection of apps to download. So far I’ve got the iPhone version of Evernote, the AIM client, Twitterific and of course Super Monkey Ball installed and they really do feel very professional.

I’m not convinced that the v2 hardware will actually be that much of an improvement, but you know me, I have to have the latest and greatest Apple hardware so I’ll be queuing in the morning at the Surrey Quays shopping centre, there’ll be more impressions then (or a couple of hours later once I’ve got activated).

Update: And I’ve just found out that if you hold down the Home Key and the Power button then it will take a screenshot of your iPhone. 🙂
Updated iPhone screenshot

New IdeaJam features

Just to let you know that we are about to release v1.2 of IdeaJam. There’s a whole ton of new configuration options which are detailed here but we did also manage to sneak out a couple of extra features for the public site which people have been asking for. One of the most frequent requests we’ve been getting has been the ability to filter the Unvoted screen by IdeaSpace, well that’s been added. And we have also finally added the change password function as well.

If you’re an existing IdeaJam customer then you can go to the downloads site from tomorrow to get the latest templates and documentation, if you’re not yet a customer then you really need to talk to Gayle at the contact page.

LinkJam is coming

You may have seen that Bruce has published the brochure for LinkJam. And now we have got a release date as well, so on the 31st of July the first version of LinkJam, the social bookmarking tool for Lotus Domino, will be launched upon an unsuspecting world. We are already dealing with quite a few sales enquiries for LinkJam, so if you’re interested then please do contact us for more details.

Bathroom progress

The bathroom refit is ongoing, as I suspected the builders now aim to finish this coming Friday rather than the Wednesday that they hoped for, but I’d rather they do a good job than rush it. So I’m up in Suffolk at my parents this weekend taking advantage of their wifi for a change and enjoying working looking at the countryside rather than the city.

New Bathroom Progress
New Bathroom Progress

My living room is so packed with equipment for the bathroom that it’s hard to move around it, let alone work in there, so when I’m back in London next week I’ll be basing myself in a temporary office. This is where London is great, anything you can think of is offered somewhere, so I can go into this place and rent a desk by the day with wireless thrown in for a very reasonable £20 and get out of the builders way.

This week I’ve been onsite at a new client outside London and it worked out cheaper to rent a car and drive rather than train and taxi every day, and most of the time it was fine but London traffic can be really appalling sometimes. On Thursday evening it took me over three hours to do 60 miles home! uckily I won’t have to do that journey very often, maybe twice a week for the next month or six weeks.

And in the meantime, version 1.2 of IdeaJam will be released shortly, we are just finishing off testing this weekend. It includes a whole pile of new configuration options which clients have asked for, so is well worth a download once we have released it. LinkJam is getting steadily closer to version 1.0 as well, we have knocked off a few more bugs this week, are busy writing documentation and are generally getting ready to release it in the coming weeks. So all is busy as ever here, now if only the weather would clear up so I can enjoy a barbeque sometime this weekend, unfortunately we can’t get everything we wish for.

What's going on?

I’m not posting very much at the moment really, there’s a lot going on with the real world at the moment…

The builders arrived this morning to start ripping out my bathroom so the next week or two is going to be messy at my flat. I do get to keep water for cups of tea but I’m going to be borrowing friends showers and staying away for the next few days as my living room is full of the new bathroom fittings, I’ve already walked into the new bath and skinned my shin on it twice since it was delivered 🙂

Luckily work has worked out well with timing, as I am going to be at a customer site for the next couple of weeks, so at least I’ll be out of the flat (although today it was way too loud to do any work so I’m sat in a Costa Coffee typing this using my new 3G card. The pay as you go deal I’m on is actually pretty good, you can get 7gb of data for GBP25 which sounds a lot but you’d actually be surprised how little you use as long as you’re not streaming audio or video all day long.

On the LinkJam front we are up to version 0.9.6 in development at the moment and I finished adding internationalisation over the weekend so we’re pretty much feature complete for the official release. If you’ve not tried it out yet, Bruce has enabled access for all IdeaJam users, just head over to linkjam.elguji.com and have a play around, both Bruce and I are now using it in place of del.icio.us and, for us at least, it is proving to be a really good replacement.

The next couple of months are looking incredibly busy with trips planned to see family around the country in the next couple of weeks, then a jolly to Belgium (after Amsterdam two weekends ago and a great trip up to friends this weekend just gone) and finally another trip over to Dublin in August. Between all of this there’s IdeaJam and LinkJam, plus client work to fit in. It’s really just as well I don’t have a “day job” in an office any more!