Aug
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Bringing Home iPhone
August 2, 2008 |
Before my children were born there were lots of preparations to be made. We stocked up on parenting books, baby clothes, baby furniture, quilts, toys, mobiles, diapers, and all the other supplies and equipment of parenthood. It was a big deal! The preparation and anticipation were all consuming.
Lest you jump to any hasty conclusions, I’m not about to equate having children with acquiring a new iPhone. There are, however, some interesting parallels.
The Preparation
Once the iPhone 3G and MobileMe were announced I knew my time had come. I had been resisting the siren call of the iPhone up until this point but this was simply too tempting. I have been a .mac subscriber from the beginning but I never took full advantage of its features. I half-heartedly entered some events in the calendar and subscribed to the Red Sox season schedule. I had imported a list of contacts a while back but it was incomplete and not very useful. I had published a couple of photo albums a few years back but I could never remember how to access them. I had even used iWeb to create a website but, ultimately, I found Wordpress much more to my liking. I always had high hopes for the iDisk feature but it was like a black hole for documents. I never knew what had been synced with what and so it wasn’t reliable enough to replace jump drives.
All of this changed for me with the MobileMe interface. Knowing that changes I made in MobileMe or to any of my Macs would be instantly reflected on all other devices was the functionality I had been waiting for. For me, it trumped all of the other reasons I had been cobbling together to justify the use of an iPhone.
So, in preparation for the homecoming of my shiny new iPhone 3G, I set to work. The infrastructure needed to be in place so that, as soon as I first cradled the iPhone in my arms (errr…my hand) it would be fully functional. I started with ‘Contacts’.
My Contacts were incomplete and the list on my old Sprint phone wasn’t much better. So I set about deleting old business contacts that I would never have a reason to get in touch with along with people I knew were no longer alive. I divided the rest into 4 categories: Family and Friends, Old Business Contacts, Academic, and Services. The next step was a lot of fun. By going to my email inbox I was able to easily import everyone’s current (and complete) information into Contacts. I also added a number of friends and colleagues using this method. I was amazed how much information I had at hand. As a finishing touch I imported pictures of most of my family and friends from iPhoto.
iCal was the next project. I entered my academic calendar, conference dates and deadlines, my son’s academic calendar (he never seems to know when classes begin and end, or when his breaks are), and important family events. The next step is to set Linda up on MobileMe and to link to her calendar.
The next MobileMe tab to tackle was Galleries. Well, I obviously had to create some galleries. So it was back to iPhoto where I lost myself in nostalgic reverie for a couple of hours. When I was done I had a gallery for my wedding and familymoon, Red Sox games, and a few others for vacations and special interest categories.
Next was iDisk. This turned out to be more problematic. First of all, I wasn’t able to upload any of my iWork documents to MobileMe. I initially thought that this was a glitch that would be fixed and I moved all my Word and PDF files first. But, after a few days, a trip to the support forums informed me that Pages, Keynote, and Numbers docs are not individual files. Instead they are packages that can only be uploaded to MobileMe after being archived. I decided, instead, to upload these documents to the iDisk folder on my Mac. From there they were automatically synced to MobileMe.
Finally, I decided to visit the Apps store. So I fired up iTunes and entered a whole new universe. I will talk about this more in my next post but, suffice it to say, there were 15 really cool and free Apps waiting in the iTunes Application folder for my iPhone’s ‘first sync’.
So after many hours of preparing the nursery (errr…I mean the supporting software) I was ready to bring home my brand new, 4.7 ounce iPhone.
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