Not having to listen to voicemail is tremendous. I have probably saved dozens if not hundreds of hours of my life by not having to dial in, cycle through until I get to the correct message, listen (at least once perhaps twice to catch the number), then write numbers down. With transcription, I get an email with the who, what, why, and the number which I can just tap to call. Also, PhoneTag’s transcription is the best I have found for non-enterprise use, and even there it could be top tier as I have not evaluated those solutions.

 Now, this all takes into account the assumption that the voicemail itself can be transcribed. There are times when the transcription fails; it could be due to noise, interference, a thick accent, or just a different language entirely (I get calls in French and Italian which fail – at least for now). At that point one needs to actually listen to the voicemail, and this is where I have hit my iPhone wall. I know I can dial in but that kind of defeats the purpose, isn’t Internationally friendly with an 800 #, and not to mention the fact that there ought to be a more tech friendly solution.

 So, what are the options?:

 Phonetag offers a full Web site where one can preview the transcription of the voicemail and also listen to the actual audio file. If you open up the Phonetag site in mobile Safari and try to listen to a voicemail, it fails. Mobile Safari doesn’t embed the QuickTime file the way desktop browsers do: it tries to open up some embedded version of the QuickTime player which spits out an ugly and deeply unhelpful “Cannot Play Movie – The server is not correctly configured” error. Great. By the way, there is no irony lost on me though: it’s a QuickTime file which is an Apple format, in mobile Safari which is Apple’s mobile browser, on an iPhone which (all together now) is an Apple device, and it just doesn’t work. It’s a simple QuickTime file and should not be up to the server and its streaming protocols or header info, as to whether it works or not in an entirely Apple based user experience. Result: Fail.

 There is a way to have the audio included in the email sent to you but this is done on a global level, and that is the last thing I want clogging up my email. It would be nice if one could login to the Web site and choose to have messages emailed on a message by message basis.

 Anyway, I used to be in the blackberry world and there is a native blackberry application which is pretty great (as far as blackberry apps go): it would download the transcriptions in the background and stream the audio on demand (it might have even pre-fetched and cached it).

 Here’s the real iPhone problem. There’s no way Apple will ever approve a native app since Phonetag/Simulscribe directly competes with the visual voicemail product. I know Jott got approved but I think there’s enough difference in the product offering and conflict with existing Apple tech that I could see Apple’s “logic” for approving one and not the other. Then there was the whole Google Voice non-approval fiasco from a couple of weeks ago.

 So, barring a native app, which I could easily envision blowing away the blackberry version, that leaves us with the web site which doesn’t work in mobile safari, or calling in which is what I am trying to avoid at all costs not to mention that it’s an 800 # and not too helpful when abroad. I’m starting to wonder if Phonetag will ever have full iPhone compatibility.

 Am I missing something with PhoneTag? If so, please save me, and if not, how does everyone out there listen to voicemails if you have an iPhone and Simulscribe/Phonetag? Anyone? I wonder if Google Voice will fix this issue? If so, I might have to say goodbye to PhoneTag, and that would be really sad as it is the better transcription service. TBD/TBC…

  

 Here’s some further confirmation that we’ll never see a PhoneTag iPhone app:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/apple-lifts-the-curtain-on-app-store-approvals/?hpw
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/technology/companies/22apple.html?hpw

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Twitter by its very nature is not data intensive; 140 characters is not very demanding of whatever device you’re using. Even repeated over and over it isn’t an issue. What I did (and continue to) find to be a huge issue is the fact that most tweets are link driven which is clearly not a problem when on a broadband connection, but definitely an issue for me when on my mobile device.

 Even on an iPhone 3GS running full 3G the problems are plentiful: overall speed is an issue (not just the download but the consumpton), the lack of flash is a pain, and many of the things I do with content – like adding to Evernote, Delicious, printing to pdf, grabbing images/screenshots and so on – is near if not totally impossible. Ultimately, mobility has shifted my paradigm for consumption of content.

 Then there was my 2 week trip to Provence in the South of France and the egregious data-roaming charges. I didn’t want to be disconnected but also didn’t want to come home to a >$1000 phone bill nor completely sacrifice my significantly better iPhone user experience. For the most part, I did my mobile browsing on a Blackberry Bold (which was a horrendous experience) and used Twitterberry which was fine but paled in comparison to Tweetie on the iPhone. As for the iPhone, I turned off all auto downloading like syncs and push notifications, set email to manually sync so I could do it over wi-fi, and chose to not use the browser. When I wanted to have a better experience reading my Twitterstream I launched Tweetie on the iPhone.

 What I found with both the Blackberry and my data-limited iPhone in France, then here in NYC, was that I continually wanted to flag a tweet so that I could then go back and read it later from my laptop with broadband.

 Lacking real options, I first started copying tweets to an Evernote note but found that frustrating as I had to keep switching between apps, ultimately losing my reading place in my twitterstream (annoying). Then I took to using Twitter’s favorites as my “solution”. While that works somewhat, it’s less than ideal to say the least: they’re almost always not my favorites, it’s a public stream which for something like a “stuff I want to read more about” list isn’t optimal, and the workflow for going back and reading them isn’t efficient ( I’d periodically load up my twitter favorites page and go through and knock them out then de-fave them). Ultimately, it was just frustrating.

 I finally realized that Tweetie had integrated Instapaper. I had used Instapaper a long time ago and just didn’t see a need for flagging pages to be read from my laptop’s browser when I could just as easily just read them and be done – What was that about David Allen’s “if it takes 2 minutes or less just do it” rule? That said, the mobile paradigm shifted my thinking about Instapaper, why do something in an inferior way when you can quickly flag it and do it better later? Why spend 1+ minutes loading a page on your iPhone only to discover that it has a flash piece or there’s no mobile version and you’ve just downloaded a 500KB page, and end up SOL? That same page could load in 5-10 seconds on your laptop and work as expected, and probably read it in half the time due to the form factor.

 Instapaper pro (paid iphone app) also has a download for offline reading option which is total bonus because if something is mostly text based, I just sync Instapaper when on wi-fi and I’m good to go for my next subway/plane ride or data-roaming shit-show.

 So, Tweetie’s iPhone app with built-in webkit – if I choose to actually browse – so I don’t have to leave the app and lose my place in my stream, and don’t run out of windows since mobile safari allows for 8 windows, and single click Instapaper support, combined with Instapaper’s app iPhone app with offline reading, and Instapaper’s super-easy to use Web site which automatically archives links as I click on them to read them is my killer workflow.

 (iPhone + Tweetie + Instapaper) * (laptop + Firefox + plugins) = Huge time saver and better UX. Rock.

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If I haven’t made it apparent in past posts/tweets, OmniFocus is my second brain and rely upon it for keeping all the tasks in my personal and professional lives in sync and moving forward…

So, here’s  my monthly OmniFocus compacting routine which keeps the size of my database small, and speeds up the opening of OmniFocus on my iPhone. I have shaved MBs of my database in the past, as a matter of fact, the first time I did this whole process I reduced my database from 21 MB to 750 KB. That said, I now probably reduce it by about 75% (from ~600KB down to ~150KB)

First off, I use MobileMe to keep my sync in the cloud but this process could easily be adapted if you sync via other methods

0. I am starting with step 0 because this is optional but I would recommend it, archive your old data:
    File > Move Old Data to Archive…
    NOTE: I have an OmniFocus recurring task that appears and gets me to do this at the end of each month, so I archive up the 1st of the current month.

1. Clean up & Sync your desktop version so that it is current with the MobileMe version

2. Sync your iPhone version so that it is current with the MobileMe version

3. repeat steps 1 & 2 just to be certain no last second changes get missed (yes I’m paranoid about my data)

4. Backup your desktop database in case bad things happen (see step #3 re: data paranoia):
    File > Back Up Database…
    NOTE: For informative purposes, take note of the size of this database so you can compare it to the post-compacted version

5. Export your database to a temporary file you will be able to locate (say on your desktop):
    File > Export…
    NOTE: This is critical. make sure the File Format is OmniFocus Document

6. Now restore that exported and compacted version:
    File > Revert to Database Backup… and click Restore

7. Backup your desktop database
    NOTE: This is where you will be able to see the file size difference from step #4

8. Sync your desktop version first
    NOTE: if you get a warning saying that the databases are out of sync, choose to have the desktop override the MobileMe one but only this once

9. Now sync your iPhone version
    NOTE: if you get a warning saying that the databases are out of sync, choose to have the MobileMe override the iPhone one but only this once

Congrats, you’ve just trimmed some fat and should notice a decent speed bump on both platforms but definitely more so on your iPhone

If you do this monthly, you shouldn’t get the warnings in steps #8 and #9 as things will be similar enough to avoid conflicts.

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