Ever purchase a shirt.. wash it.. wear it.. then realize that you left one of the little plastic things in the collar?

I did. And, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I started bending it.. and soon had an “S” type shape. Rather than throw it away, I kept it sitting on my desk. Back to work I went.

A few hours later I was ready to watch the latest episode of Diggnation. I synced my iPhone, touched the iPod icon, touched “videos”, and then selected Diggnation. As it started playing, I went to prop it up against my mac mini and wedge it in with my dock, like I usually do. At that moment, a little piece of white plastic caught my eye. There it was, shining in the sun florescent light, like a gift from the heavens! I grabbed my iPhone, and as if transfixed by the blessing, slowly and carefully set it in the little white plastic thing. It was a moment of magic, like a kid on Christmas morning, I had the widest grin on my face. I now use it daily, as my little iPhone stand. Have a look:

BONUS: the white matches the Apple supplied dock. hells-yea! Oh, and sorry for the blurry pic, the iPhone doesn’t handle close-ups too well!

Sketch of my bike using my iPhone, originally uploaded by kenseals.

There’s a 3rd party app available for the iphone/itouch if you have it hacked called “Sketches”. Took 5 minutes at lunch and decided to see if I could actually make a legit sketch with it. I found it was difficult to make precise strokes, so I used that to my advantage. The squiggly lines and inaccurate strokes were great for portraying movement. I think they really brought this sketch of my Harley to life.. woot!

Maybe I’ll start a weekly sketch using this app.. would be cool to see how good I can get with it if I spent more than 5 minutes on a sketch. Hmph.. there’s some food for though.

iDay, originally uploaded by kenseals.

21st in line is where i stood. The geeks, the techies, the cell phone junkies, and the loyal apple fanboys made up the line outside the ATT store in Columbia, SC. But these stereotypes weren’t the only ones waiting, sweating, laughing, communing with one another. There were moms, dads, business professionals, teachers, grandfathers, and military personnel. All stood willingly, eagerly awaiting the 6pm release of the Apple iPhone.

Some waited all day, from dawn to dusk under the Carolina Sun. Others waited only an hour or two. I arrived at the ATT store around 5:15pm and snagged the 21st place in line. In front of me was Dan, a middle-aged fella sporting khakis and a fitted tee. He didnt say much, but laughed often. Behind me stood a young lady from Germany. She carried a gophone like you’d find at your local convenience store. She even had it equipped with a WIRED ear piece. Nearby was an older fella. 62? A loyal mac user since 1985, he caught my attention when he mentioned the numbers 10.4.10, signifying his knowledge of Apple’s latest public OSX build.

We stood together. Sharing stories and stealing laughs from one another. When 6pm came along we applauded in unison as the first customers, those who waited all day, stepped inside to be crowned iPhone owners and users. Moments later, when the first iPhone stepped outside, there were shouts of joy, hoots and hollers, adrenaline driven screams and smiles that could rival a child’s on Christmas morning. Full of excitement, I too soon had an iPhone in my hand. When I stepped out of the store I held my iPhone high over my head and gave a nice, “helllllllllllllll YEA!” to the 50 or more remaining in line. Minutes later I was at my computer, letting my iPhone activate and sync with all my music and videos in iTunes.

So, the iPhone, how is it?

If the dictionary was a Wiki, “phone” would be replaced with “iPhone”. As soon as I began using the iPhone, there was no doubt this was a revolutionary device. I was literally reaching in and grabbing the contact I was looking for. I was flipping through my album collection one at a time. I was elegantly manipulating web pages to get to the information I was looking for. It’s the same feeling I got when I booted up my first computer and logged onto the internet for the first time. The iPhone has opened a world of possibilities.

What does it do best?

Everything. Everything that the iPhone attempts to do, it does extremely well. The phone application is flawless. Dialing a number is as easy as flicking through your contacts and touching the name you’re looking for. The web browser breaks new ground. It loads a page, just as you’d see it on your full-size computer. Yet, it’s on a 3.5 inch display. See an area of interest? Double tap and it fills the screen. Want to scroll down? Flick the screen with your finger. The iPhone truly is the best iPod Apple has ever made. No longer are you confined to a list of songs and albums. Now you can browse your music by grabbing it and flicking through. It’s all at your fingertips, literally.

Will I go into more detail?

I won’t in this article. There have been millions of very detailed reviews explaining the iPhone in great detail. I will however answer any questions received in the comments. I will also soon post what I’d like to see added to the iPhone through a free software update.

Lastly, I’d like to point out this post was written on my iPhone

Spent my day at the SCWAC with a fellow designer, and co-worker. The event was held at the South Carolina Convention Center and was put on by the good folks at access-sc.org. The speakers were great, and I’m excited to say I came out as a more knowledgeable web designer. I’ve already begun putting this knowledge into action right here in this blog entry. To explain:

For the acronym “SCWAC” above, I added a title tag that reads “S C W A C” so that a screen reader will read “S-C-W-A-C” and not “Seh-Cah-Wack”. The second bit of advice I have implemented is a “skip to main content” rather than a “skip navigation” link. The reason behind this is because though we web 2.0 savvy design geeks, and every other persons that uses the internet on a semi-regular basis would know what the term “navigation” refers to, not everyone knows that it refers to the main menu used to navigate through-out a website. Thus, by changing the it to “skip to main content” one more question mark is erased from our users’ thought process and our end result of a happy user is even more likely. Cool!

Where is this “skip to main content” link that I am referring to? Well, because my main content is readily accessible for a sighted user, I hid it from you! Sorry, but all you have to do to get to the main content is start reading. This is why I have placed my main content where it is, well it is one of the factors that went into the layout anyway.

While we are on the note of hiding things. Geniese James, senior designer at sc.gov recently returned from what must have been an amazing trip to An Event Apart Boston and had a bit of knowledge to share with me regarding good ole “display: none;”. For those of you that don’t know, “display: none;” allows a designer to “hide” an element on the screen, while keeping it in the html document. I’ve often used this to hide things. If today was yesterday, I would have hid my “skip to main content” link with “display: none;”. However, today is not yesterday. (whew!) Today, is a day in which I have been enlightened. Apparently, screen readers have gotten “smart” and have started to plunge into style sheets a bit.. thus, users of modern screen readers may actually not be able to see the content that has purposely been set to “display: none;” for sighted users but left in the xhtml specifically so that users of screen readers could still see it. So, alas.. as much as I hate to do it, I’m forced to either absolutely position the element I want to hide off screen or use negative margins or some other creative and oh so clutter-like attribute to hide elements. In today’s “skip to main content” instance I decided to go with a negative margin, for the simple reason that it seemed like the most natural, cleanest way to do it.. well besides “display: none;”. Doh! This one is going to eat at me for a while! And so is the web..

On another note, Apple multi-touch displays… ooh, how nice would it be? You may want to check this out: Video of multi-touch display demo