Steinblogger

I discovered a great iPhone shortcut by accident. While in the email list view, slide your finger left-to-right over the message title and description. The delete button will appear. That drops a click from the deletion process (no need to click edit).It’s fun to discover little touches like this after 7 weeks with the iPhone.

Apple’s new Numbers software doesn’t support custom number formats. That means you can’t use a real value of 10,000,000 but display it as 10M. This is a deal-breaker for me. Hopefully, 1.1 will fix this missing feature. (I’d also like to see full AppleScript support. Heck, any AppleScript support!)

At Heidi MacDonald’s insistence (no, she didn’t personally insist that I go, but rather posted it to The Beat) , I went to see Paul Gravett’s talk on comics and art at MoCCA tonight. His presentation was subtitled Comics as Art, Art as Comics.

Mr. Gravett has written several books about graphic novels and manga, and I found his talk to be thought provoking. I also left looking to buy some work I wasn’t familiar with (Mattotti’s Fire and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan), always a good thing.

For me, the Big Thought of the Night was on the perceived difference between comic book art and fine art. Images in comic books, according to Gravett, are “expendable.” The reader is “driven by the pulse of the eye-stream that takes you across the page.” Fine art, as in a gallery or museum, on the other hand, is slowly taken in, contemplated. You take your time with it. Taking a slow, contemplative manner with comics gets in the way of the narrative “eye-stream.”

(An aside: I love that combination of words: eye-stream. It encompasses what web comic books need to achieve to be a great way to read comics. By the way, a really interesting “infinite canvas” — a la Scott McCloud — was created for an exhibition Mr. Gravett talked about. Check it out.)

I can think of more than a few examples in my collection where the comic book art needed to be contemplated. Bill Sienkewicz’s Moby Dick, which he told me is being republished by Image this Fall, comes to mind. I spent many languorous hours contemplating the last page of that book. Dave McKean and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum. Matt Wagner’s hand painted foregrounds, airbrushed backgrounds, and Sam Keith’s inks in (the original) Mage: The Hero Discovered. Ted McKeever’s Metropol. These examples have compelling eye-streams. There is worth in being able to consume a comic book, yet come back and meditate on an image or page to be enveloped in a particular feeling, or line, or color. I don’t think Mr. Gravett would disagree with me.

I think both expendable comics and comics that demand contemplation can have compelling eye-streams and great narrative power. It’s just that some you come back to just to look at, and some you don’t.

I received my first AT&T bill yesterday. It was a whopping 61 pages long! On top of that, because of all my trials getting the phone activated, AT&T had me down for three accounts with my number and one account for my wife. My heart stopped when I saw the total: $456.99!

I also received my last bill with Sprint. We were very careful about our Sprint accounts, making sure to not renew them so we could switch, pain-free to AT&T. In fact, I called Sprint in May to complain that they surreptitiously renewed both of our accounts. They agreed it was a mistake and confirmed they had removed the renewal. Yet they still charged us a $350 penalty for leaving them! It took over a half hour on the phone to get it rectified.

AT&T only took about 20 minutes. We’ll see next month if we’ve resolved all of it. Part of the shock is that they pre-bill, so I received both July and August. To their credit, they finally heeded my request to give us back our activation fees.

Sprint vs. AT&T, who comes out ahead? I don’t think I’m any worse off than before. So, AT&T comes out ahead simply for being smart enough to get iPhone.

Here’s how I know FedEx Kinko’s is struggling, from a quick stop there the other day: none of the self serve printers were working; I couldn’t find someone who worked there for about three minutes; customers were literally yelling “hello, hello” and walking around behind the counter trying the machines; when an employee did appear, she had no idea how to put toner into the copiers; and of course, there was the candy rack at the check-out counter. I kid you not.

That’s right, Kinko’s is trying to win the big money by enticing you to make an impulse candy purchase at check-out time – that, folks, is what the MBA types call value-add. “I know, let’s sell candy at the counter! That’ll bring in the extra revenue we’re losing by being incompetent!”

This is what Network Effects are all about. Compatibility. Mossberg calls it versatility.

I already stopped by the Apple Store Soho to pick up iLife and iWork ‘08. They didn’t have it yet. I want to get my hands on Numbers. Finally, Apple is fully back in the business game. The only reason I use Word and PowerPoint is for group projects (and only when I have to share files). Most group presentations I do in Keynote now, because the people who work with me understand what a superior presentation they’ll get if they allow me. Let’s see if Excel stays in my regular stable of applications. I kinda doubt it.

Now all I need is a Keynote viewer for Windows…