Oswco: The Open SoftWare Company

By Tom Brander

The Google for Entrepreneurs One Day Conference held in Nashville on April 19, 2012 was very well done. Even though I follow Google closely, I still learned quite a bit as well as cementing past knowledge. The conference page and schedule, along with speaker bios, follows:

Update: the below site now has a nice summary and links to some of the presentation material.

http://www.findyourflo.com/g4e/

Google provided the following top notch lineup of speakers from Google:

• Mary Himinskool, Head of Global Entrepreneurship Outreach
• Bridgette Sexton, Global Entrepreneurship Manager
• Carl Damerow Tech B2B marketing and strategy, Google
• Margaret Healy, Strategic Partnerships
• Timothy Jordan, Developer Advocate
• Steve Grove, Google+
• Will Drewry, Technical Lead, Security, Chrome
• Derek Slater, Policy Manager

Most of the speakers indicated that they would make the presentation materials available, however so far I have not seen where or how.

The volunteer organizers from the people of FLO {thinkery} did a great job and I’m sorry I did not get a chance to get to know them and thank them in person.

The presentations were of uniformly high quality.

The audience was surprisingly diverse with a healthy percentage being from the music/entertainment industry, which of course makes sense given the impact that the internet is having on that industry, and the role it plays in the Nashville community.

Unfortunately, I was dragged away a few times by phone calls from a client about an uppity router, and a newspaper phone interview which caused me to miss some key parts of a few talks. As is so often the case with Google, the information density of the talks was very high.

Mary kicked things off by noting that this event was the first time that Google had gone out to smaller markets with a group to provide 1st hand information in person. She indicated that next week the team would be in Minneapolis. I later spoke to her about getting Birmingham on their radar for a future event, but we will have some work to do to achieve this.

Mary also highlighted many projects which Google has sparked around the world including crowdsourced mapping in underdeveloped areas andcommunications in politically sensitive countries.

Bridgett reviewed a number of lesser known tools for understanding your markets, including Google Correlate, Public Data Explorer, and Fusion Tables.

Carl gave a helpful presentation on using search and ad placement and tools. Of all the presentations, I found his two to be the most helpful to me since I do not use these features as much. While I am generally familiar with the area, the detailed explanations which he provided will enable me to be considerably more helpful and effective for my clients. I was able to spend some time with Carl after lunch and ask some specific questions about Real Estate Marketing, which as he had pointed out was a crowded market and therefore more challenging to breakthrough. He laughed and mentioned that he is a part time Real Estate Agent, as well as helping out some friends in that area, in San Francisco, a highly competitive market. He provided me with some very helpful hints which I doubt I would have ever figured out on my own.. And no I’m not giving them away here! (feel free to call though!)

Steve and Timothy gave a very insightful talk on how to effectively use G+ for business. Now Google + is still very new but it has already gotten significant traction in many dimensions. Perhaps the most significant is the G+ button.. To the extent that this is used by your circle to highlight your pages it will influence search results for people in your circle. I have found this quite helpful. People I know tend to have somewhat similar interests and tastes, they often find things before I do, so I am more likely to click on something that they have indicated is useful. There are many other aspects of G+ that are still emerging such as Hangouts..

Margaret gave a great presentation on “Monetizing Your Content”. It was rife with examples of great success stories of people making substantial incomes off of Youtube and G+. One highlighted success story is http://www.michellephan.com/ . She provided excellent suggestions on how to get started. The takeaway message was: Get started now! It is still a ground floor opportunity.

Carl and Bridgette provided a deep dive into analytics and website optimizer which I missed most of due to those phone calls.

Timothy showed how to put up a basic App-engine app using Python, then showed off some of the Google api playground, followed by material on G+ api interaction.

There was an open floor Question and Answer session where the audience attempted to get as much undisclosed information from the Google staff as possible, and the Google staff did their best to provide what information they could without violating company confidentiality.

Alex Curtis presented material on the Creators Freedom Project which included a panel from the Nashville music industry. They discussed the issues and opportunities presented by the new internet technologies and distribution channels and the question of how the industry and artists can make money in the new environment.

Margaret gave another talk about getting on with content creation with Youtube.

Derek Slater gave some insight on the regulatory process and the need for all of us to have our voices heard in addition to the Google effort.

Drinks and snacks followed, and I saw that dancing was on the schedule, but I had to leave for the 3 hour drive home.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of the Google faces at Google IO in June, although with over 5,500 expected, finding anyone in the crowd will be hard if not impossible!

See the notes below for how this is done.. The above gadget provided to the University of Alabama uses Google spreadsheets as the datasource so that non-technical users can update the data without having a complicated user interface. The code is well commented, you can use the view source to see how it works.

How to be more productive in 2012 or why don’t I get more stuff done?

As I looked back at 2011 I decided to analyze my productivity:

I get the rote stuff done:

1. Monthly reports on http://tombrander.com (residential real estate performance in Alabama) and the longer form that I produce for subscribers.
2. Quarterly Real Estate Surveys and reports for The Alabama Center for Real Estate
3. Two Revisions to the Real Estate Gadget for The Alabama Center for Real Estate
4. Additional specialized reports on real estate which provide detailed market analysis to guide investment decisions for clients
5. Developed a basic theory for forecasting local real estate markets, tested, and did initial implementations. (more to come)
6. Redid my wife’s real estate site using Google sites. Developed another draft site on Google sites for a friend (pending).
7. Posted several reviews on my tech site http://oswco.com
8. Completed the Stamford Artificial Intelligence class (abysmal grade, but I learned a ton)
9. Attended Pycon 2011, Oscon 2011, (participated extensively in the program committee for both) and Google IO 2011.

So It is pretty easy to get the rote stuff above done with the tools I know well, and for the jobs that pay!

I have a lot more difficulty expanding my toolset.

As I look around I have an excessive amount of uncompleted work lying around:

1. A version of Flask, a micro site building framework up and running on Python 2.7 for app-engine (dev only at the moment)
2. A version of All Buttons Pressed (Django), a big site building framework, up and running on Python 2.7 for app-engine (dev only at the moment)
3. Compass/Sass/Susy/320 & Up (with a few other bits and pieces required, like Ruby) up and running to develop responsive front ends (development only at the moment)
4. Basic operations up and running with Pandas, a remarkable analysis library for Python (requires numpy, sypy, Ipython and a few other libraries) (development only at the moment)
5. I have switched to only VIM (and I-python) for development

I  realized that I have been approaching Python without a proper commitment. I have been using the tools but avoiding really leaning the programming. So that will be my focus going forward. Getting into the code, writing code and debugging code, rather than spending so much time looking for pre-done solutions that I can modify. It is with this in mind that I am concentration on Flask, All buttons Pressed, and Pandas as they each provide useful starting points for being able to look at good code and modify it to produce useful work using Python.

I have spent too much time getting distracted by every new feature or program that comes along, and that is easy to do because so many people are creating such great stuff. So I want to continue to track it but just constrain the amount of time I spend doing that.

While it seems that all that stuff above is sort of random and overwhelming it represents my current best thoughts about good toolsets  for great, responsive, and powerful applications development. It is clear that I have to buckle down and push some samples out the door with the above tools. It seems that every-time I turn around there is major evolution with the tools and I’m just not comfortable and fluent enough to really keep up. ie. App-engine moving to Python 2.7 and many other evolutions. Further, each set requires differential thinking, the front-end stuff which is driven by the back end. But a compete product requires the creative use and blending of all.

I’d like to redesign/re-implement the Oswco site in a completely responsive manner. Remains to be seem on what back-end, maybe just modify/enhance and change Mingus, the current back-end?

More things that will help with the above, run, and do some resistance exercise daily, listen to more music, and meditate. Part of the “Sharpen the saw” as Stephen Covey recommends.

This last sentence added gratuitously by my Wonderful Wife...”Oh, and quit spending so much time on Facebook and Twitter!!!!”

The Python Standard Library by Example, Author:Doug Hellmann, 1344 pages, Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition cover Price $59.99 (June 11, 2011), ISBN-13: 978-0321767349

I cannot imagine the effort it has taken to produce this book which is huge, detailed, and authoritative. It contains excellent descriptions, code examples and discussions applicable to the main modules contained in the Python Standard Library. The audience for this book is the intermediate Python programmer.

Learning Python, or any reasonably current language i.e. Java, .net, perl, php, is a lot more than just learning the syntax. To be effective and productive you also need a reasonable knowledge of the libraries and functions that support the ecosystem of that language. There is little point in re-coding common functions that have been solved and debugged, in many cases by programmers way better than yourself. So each ecosystem has its own, usually massive library of so called "standard functions". In Python the basic or core functions are encompassed by the "Standard Library". As language libraries go the Python Standard library seems to me to be particularly well documented. Yet this book also has a lot to contribute. It is huge (did I mention that?), 1300 printed pages and 600 +pdf pages.

I read the PDF version on a new Android Tablet and the experience was quite good. For me, reading books such as this are an important part of the learning process. I'm sure not going to remember everything and I do skim a fair amount. The result however is that I have a nodding acquaintance with a broader set of capabilities and usually have a dim recollection of where and how to look things up when I finally run into the use case.

Compared with the Standard Library Documentation itself which weighs in at about 17 mb in PDF form, vs. this book which weighs in at about 10mb in pdf form, what is the difference? Other than 7mb?

According to the author, in several messages in response to me, he stayed away from the platform-specific stuff, and things like audio formats. He also didn't cover Tkinter, because there's a whole book on that by Grayson (688 pages by the way). Other omissions were a matter of having time to finish.

This book tends to include more discussion about use cases and alternative approaches and libraries than that contained in the Standard Documentation itself, more of the "why". Source code examples are presented with discussion, and a few cases include line-by-line explanations. It also contains many more cross-references to even more documentation in the standard documentation as well as in other on-line resources. In spite of the author's warning that some of the libraries and functions require knowledge of the subject area, particularly for some of the technical network libraries, I found that they presented the topics in reasonable detail for me with my limited understanding of the topic. That is very helpful for those needing deeper understanding of what for many of us is pretty arcane subject matter.

I received the e-version of the book as part of the Dzone review team, and the promise of a hardcopy when I get the review done!

This book is and will be a key resource for many serious Python programmers and provides a resource for understanding and using many of the Standard Library capabilities. It will be in a handy space on my bookshelf and is highly recommended.

Cooking for Geeks 2010. ISBN-10: 0596805888; Author, Jeff Potter, Published by: O’Reilly Media, inc.,1005 Gravenstein Highway North Sanbastopol CA 95472 cover Price $39.99, 410 pages

I just came back from the O'Reilly media sponsored Open Source Conference (OSCON). While there, I responded to a tweet offer for a give away for this book, and I got it, thank you very much. I really needed something to bring home to my wife as a peace offering of sorts. She loves to cook.

While on the plane ride back to Alabama from Portland Oregon I read most of this book. As I read I realized that my wife would also really enjoy this book. I'd consider my wife well beyond the average cook.

This book has a unique approach, which is to explore the science and background of each topic before presenting the more conventional advice or recipe for utilizing that knowledge. The "geeks" and programmers will quickly recognize this style from their numerous "tech" books. While there are various good cookbooks that do take a more technical approach, they tend to be the very dense ones such as Larousse Gastronomique . This book, however, has a very light and easy to follow tone.

At one end of the scale the book covers the basics of setting up and equipping a kitchen. It includes useful advice on equipment, gadgets, selecting good knives, and kitchen organization. The book then continues with advice on basic ingredients and flavors. Each of these chapters hold their own with interesting facts and side notes as well as experiments and recipes.

Following the initial chapters, which in truth have a lot of advanced material, the book goes into cooking techniques. The initial chapter covers "Time and Temperature"  and food safety. Once again there are fun recipes included to illustrate various points, for instance Caramelized White Chocolate illustrates caramelization along with various aspects of good time and temperature control.

Next we have a chapter on baking which includes two alternative chocolate mousse recipes. Followed by a chapter on "Playing with Chemicals" which includes recipes for lemon meringue pie and mozzarella cheese.

Finally the last chapter, "Fun with Hardware" goes into the trendy Sous Vide way of cooking, the practice of cooking meats and fish and other foods for extended periods in water baths at constant and low temperatures. It also covers some unusual uses for dry ice!

I have hopefully explained a bit why this book is fun and engaging. It should help cooks and would be cooks find real fun in the kitchen. After all, you are likely to spend a lot of time there if you enjoy eating well. This book will help you explore variety that you can achieve that you may never think of exploring on your own. Highly recommended!

Visualize This Isbn:978-0-470-9448-2 © 2011 Nathan Yau, Published by: Wiley Publishing, 10475 Crosspoint Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46256 Author: Nathan Yau, cover Price $39.99, 358 pages

Returning from a trip, I was very pleased to see a review copy of Visualize This waiting for me. The author, Nathan Yau has a great web site, FlowingData which I have been following for some time. I enjoy the site a lot and consider it to be one of the best sites for data display and inspiration.

This book is not for beginners who are not interested in getting their hands dirty with code and cleaning data. If however, you have done the basics, and maybe a bit more than the basics with Excel and want to explore the next level up, then this book is for you.

Visualize This is quite different from many of the other books that I have read on visualization in a good way. The author comprehensively explains how he approaches the task of coming up with useful concepts for data display and then shows you how to do it yourself. He immediately points out that "basic" data display can, and most often is, done using Microsoft Excel. Happily, we have little of that here. The tools of choice are Python (a popular programming language available on all platforms), and R (a sophisticated open source and free data statistics package), coupled with Adobe Illustrator, (a fairly expensive product from Adobe). He also highlights the use of Google Refine, a fairly new tool from Google for cleaning up messy data. This is probably the first time I have seen this useful tool mentioned in print, as opposed to seeing it on the web. The author does mention a number of commercial and open source alternative tools but the bulk of the step by step examples use, Python R and Illustrator.

I was very happy to see the concentration on these specific tools as I have been learning Python and R for a while now, and have Illustrator available (and have used it a bit) as well as the free alternative, Inkscape, which the author also references.

Throughout the book there is a useful survey of other tools, both open source and commercial for obtaining, formatting, and displaying data. There are a number that I have not yet explored. So this book serves as an excellent resource.

Inclusions of specific instructional material with real data and readily available tools sets this book apart.

The book is clearly the product of someone who has thought deeply about the process of producing useful visualizations. The chapter organization echo the suggested processes:

1. Chapter 1 — Telling Stories with Data
2. Chapter 2 — Handling Data
3. Chapter 3 — Choosing Tools to Visualize Data
4. Chapter 4 — Visualizing Patterns over Time
5. Chapter 5 — Visualizing Proportions
6. Chapter 6 — Visualizing Relationships
7. Chapter 7 — Spotting Differences
8. Chapter 8 — Visualizing Spatial Relationships
9. Chapter 9 — Designing with a Purpose

In short, the book belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who is interested in the subject of data visualization beyond the basic level. It has a permanent spot on my reference shelf.

An acquaintance and I were discussing what to do about moving from an older PHP based CMS, used in a somewhat complex University setting, that had grown unwieldy, to something newer like Drupal. Here are some thoughts.

I believe that if you are going to make such a major shift it is worth it to get out of any PHP framework. PHP while very popular and having many large sites is an inherently clumsy approach to programming, and therefore tends to introduce problems into most if not all the products derived from it.

Keep in mind that all of the below are Django projects therefore share a lot of common code and building blocks, making for a very rich ecco system. That is you can often take features from one and ad them to another.

There are a huge number of very large and high traffic sites implemented in Django

The main Django site is :http://www.djangoproject.com/

See this for some perspective:

http://birdhouse.org/blog/2009/11/11/drupal-or-django/

That being said there is no real reason to start off with "naked" Django. There are numerous CMS approaches all available as Open source, and by the way the Django/Python world is generally BSD licenced (one of the most liberal licences)

Projects worth a look at are (in no particular order):

Fairly basic and new but clean design:

http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

Django-CMS

https://www.django-cms.org/

Django Pyramid

Comparison: Django-Pyramid vs Rails

Site: http://docs.pylonsproject.org/docs/pyramid.htm

Pinax: A prefab set of Django components:

http://pinaxproject.com/

For an overwhelming overview check out this comparison site

https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison

Some thoughts for acquirers of Web Sites to help understand the choices that they are presented with.

Mostly they go to a Web agency of some sort then go along with what they say. They pick the agency based on prior work, which may or may not really be analogous to their specific needs. Usually the choice is made on what prior web sites look like, so a high premium is placed on design, often over functionality.

Some Web providers make, shall we say, interesting claims, when it come to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This a rather large topic that won't be covered here, but be very wary of exaggerated claims. Google is pretty smart in this area and there are increasing stories of sites and companies loosing SEO rankings due to bad practices.

Some considerations for choosing Web hosting tools and suppliers follows.

It is interesting how little most people understand about Web sites. Most Web sites are accomplished using some sort of target="_blank">Web Framework, such as Wordpress or target="_blank">ASP.NET MVC Microsoft technologies. Some of the other top frameworks are Drupal (used by WhiteHouse.gov), Joomla (examples), Ruby on Rails (examples) and my personal favorite Django (used by National Geographic, PBS, and NASA, others ). There are literally hundreds if not thousands of such frameworks each with its own strengths and weaknesses.  The framework often determines what the Web provider can do in a timely and cost effective manner and how much the end user can do for themselves. There is no one size fits all solution.

Beyond flexibility and efficiency, security is another aspect of Web Frameworks. It is not simply a matter of getting the firewall right. With some notable exceptions, firewall configuration is now pretty well understood, Only open port 80. But sadly that does not provide much security for many of the most common web attack vectors. Specifically it provides no protection for  Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) errors nor XSS issues explored here XSS Prevention Cheatsheet nor does it provide much for mis-configured servers and databases, the most common security issues for Wordpress (details on Wordpress security advice is here), and other frameworks. In fact this list of attacks http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:Attack contains none that are inhibited by firewall configuration.

Most any Web framework provides a fairly large exposed surface from a security standpoint.

Another consideration is where the site will be hosted. Many agencies do try to get the hosting business at the same time as the development business. Sometimes there is an urge to host the site on some sort of internal capacity. In general one would be much better of having the site hosted by  a real Web host rather than a small service provider for security, scalability and reliability, not to mention that most large Web hosts have inherent disaster backup that local companies would have a hard time replicating. Security threats such as denial of service (DOS) attacks are best handled by the larger providers.

There is however an emerging class of frameworks that is pretty bullet-proof, known as static sites. That does not mean that the sites do not have controlled levels of interaction or animation, but rather that the site and framework has no executing code on the server, it is in a very real sense entirely pre-compiled. Many smaller company sites are very amenable to this approach.

A leading implementation is Blogofile. Interestingly this was just recently implemented on Google App-engine, (Details here) It can also run on a free micro site instance at Amazon EC2  and or EC3 for very little. So for medium sized traffic the hosting can be free or nearly so. Of course these static sites are easy to host on internal infrastructure as well. Static sites do not however provide for user input, other than basic site search or commenting, usually provided by a third party service such as  DISQUS.

A Major advantage other that security is that since the sites are static HTML with the possible incorporation of Javascript, they are very fast and impose minimal load on the server. The dynamic aspect of web sites that are enabled by the frameworks in many cases is not needed. If there's any need for dynamic features, they can be provided at a per-path level or provided on subdomains, so that they aren't going out of their way to use a framework for portions that static files suffice for.

Static sites are maintained off line, behind the firewall and once updated the entire site, or just the "diff" (an automatically calculated change set) is pushed to the server for new articles and content, most ideally from a change control system such as GIT or Mercurial. This provides excellent change tracking, control and distributed contribution and multiple author capability.

It is further, easy to incorporate differing media types and embed links such as pictures video files and PDF's.

Do yourself a favor and before you invest or get invested in a full framework give static sites a look. Further, if your needs are more modest things like Google sites and other hosted full solutions like Squarespace can be quite satisfactory.

Programming the Mobile Web Isbn:978-0-596-80778-8 © 2010 Maximiliano Firtman, Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopal, CA. 95472 Author: Maximiliano Firtman Cover Price Us $49.99 487 pages.

I bought this book a few months ago as part of getting up to speed for programming some mobile Web applications. It is probably the most complete reference available today covering all mobile platforms. For each platform, there are more comprehensive single platform books. The challenge that most interests me is to build cross-platform applications. While there are some tool sets available that purport to allow write once run on any platform, it is my impression that they are still somewhat primitive and each tool set presents its own strengths and weaknesses.

A rapidly emerging concept is to program applications in pure HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript.And serve them as cache-able web apps.  This book covers this, although not as clearly as I would hope. For instance as I was doing an app I got it working fine on Android and then i-Phone (with some difficulty, due to a few features that i-Phone does not implement) but so far I can't figure out how to do anything with Blackberry or if I should be able to. I would have appreciated it if the book had provided more guidance in this area. This sort of information is very hard to come by or develop, so the lack is understandable.

This book however chooses to explore all the platforms and manufacturer specific approaches. It may be the only book to attempt that very hard task. The speed with which the mobile platforms have evolved makes any print book almost hopelessly out of date upon publication. Indeed due to this fact the book only has two paragraph references to the new Windows mobile phone system.

The book has several useful chapters on mobile phone system evolution, which helps to understand where each operating environment resides and how it got there. This in turn is quite useful in understanding how likely your programming product can be implemented across specific platforms.

The book does a good job of explaining how designing for smaller screen sizes is really different. It also has a good section on design patterns to support the smaller screen sizes.

Where the book falls somewhat for me is in the lack of  practical full examples. According to the author this is somewhat by design. I found it quite disturbing however. The various features are well explored but, implementation is really up to the reader to figure out. This can be quite exasperating. This is so because the various platforms each have pretty unique capabilities and restrictions and enhancements. Finding common implementation patterns that will work across a large section of platforms is my goal and I was left somewhat disappointed.

A better solution in my mind, and I have implemented one so far is to use pure HTML5 CSS3 and Javascript and for me at least only worry about Apple and Android browser capabilities. The book seems to support this notion. It also spends a lot of resource to specify the different implementation capabilities of most everything else on the market as well. I found that quite distracting, On the other hand if I need to find an answer for the lesser known platforms the book will be a good resource.

All in all an impressive resource. Useful addition to the bookshelf for the experienced programmer wanting to get up to speed on the Mobile Web.

This has been a Google Christmas for us. It began with the unnannounced arrival of a CR-48 laptop, which has been quite a pleasure to use (see the prior post).

My daughter and I both had the original G-1 phone, and they were on their last legs. Batteries that could barely last a few hours and then only if you did not get a phone call! We were seriously overdue for new phones, and the rumors of the Nexus S convinced us to hold out until this "super-phone" was available.

I am seriously impressed with how far the Android system has come. Even though, this review is still "early" impressions; it takes a while of day-to-day use to completely understand the strengths and weaknesses of any device.

Things on the phone are moving crazy fast! Google today released an over the air, or "OTA" update with a few bug fixes. It fixed for me the rendering of a mobile web gadget that makes some use of Javascript, so I imagine the problem was probably affecting others on certain web pages. Further, Swipe caught up with a new release for Gingerbread (and others)... which the OTA update promptly broke. However, a quick re-install of Swype easily fixed the problem.

The speed, form factor and screen readability (particularly outside in the sun) are nothing short of outstanding. Battery life is outstanding. Since everyone's usage is so variable , I can't be too specific on battery life, but both of us have been using the phones extensively all day mainly for surfing without running into a need to recharge. By the way the connector is a standard "micro" usb, which Motorola an Kindle both use...

The new and improved applications are welcome to those of us who were frozen on Android 1.6. Some of the new apps and features are discussed below.

The first of two outstanding features that I'm still adjusting to is Swype, a great alternative keyboard entry capability. Secondly, the phone has outstanding speech recognition. In fact, I used the speech recognition to find and install most of my applications and it was seamless. I also used it to send a text reminder which means that you say something like remind me to check the oil this week and you get a nice e-mail with the message nicely typed out in your inbox,  it works great.

I'm also enjoying the e-mail notifications from multiple accounts. I use the "mail" tone on the phone to remind me to check mail on the computer since the phone seems to get them sooner than my computers do and from all accounts. The phone handles Google Apps accounts and regular Gmail accounts very well. I was impressed with the automatic integration of multiple address books into contacts. I took the option of only having contacts with phone numbers on the phone. This avoids having e-mail only contacts appearing in your contacts folder on the phone, many of these may be E-mail lists and the like.  I don't deal with any Microsoft Exchange or POP3 accounts anymore (thank goodness) but the reports are that those are also handled way more gracefully than on earlier Android phones.

Maps are greatly improved but I have not had much occasion to use  them for real navigation.

Call quality, which also features noise reduction, is excellent. The noise reduction uses a rear facing microphone to detect and eliminate background noise. Call voice quality seems quite clear and good.

From Drop Box

This is a picture of a desert my Wife made for one of the Christmas gatherings "Bouch de Noel"

The regular camera takes very good pictures and has auto white balance and some additional controls. I'm actually a fairly experienced photographer (used to do it professionally) and have been surprised and impressed with the picture quality. However, as I mentioned previously, it's still pretty early to say for sure. I have seen some complaining about the camera but my experience would lead me to think it may be an operator error!  I was also impressed with how easy it is to share the images with multiple services; the integration with Picasa is outstanding (the "Gallery" app automatically syncs to Picasa). The front facing camera is clearly intended for video chats but at the moment Google Video is not available. The forums say that Tango, another package may be an option. I think I'll wait a bit though.

In many ways the phone seems way more advanced than the CR-48. It installs a wide variety of applications and files (like music and multimedia files) readily while the CR-48  so far deals exclusively in the cloud.

I have yet to experiment with the phone's tethering capabilities, but I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with it. There appears to be some confusion about T-Mobile's attitude to it, but I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Voice over IP is another challenge I have not quite gotten the hang of yet. The T-Mobile Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), a technology that allows mobile users to send and received phone calls via Wi-Fi, is not yet available, (don't know if it will be). Alternative VOIP approaches such as Sip ( target="_blank">Session Initiation Protocol) services seem to be a bit fiddly. I was able to cobble a solution together (based on Google Voice and Sipgate) but it only worked in one direction, they could hear me but not vice-versa. The help areas suggest that I should update my router firmware, but not sure I want to take that leap yet. I have downloaded updates but it remains a task for another day. Others report success with this path, so maybe I'll get around to it before too long. Google Voice seems to work fine on its own. I'm still having some difficulty getting the full use case though. I did allow Google Voice to take over from the carrier voicemail and I will say that I enjoy the voice transcriptions; they actually are useful.

At the time I was getting going with the phone the Delicious fiasco was also going on and I began to switch to Diigo for bookmarks and I discovered they have a suite of cool apps that integrate well with Android. Power Notes (part of Diigo) allows access to all bookmarks and notes, and is somewhat more lightweight than other apps. "Chrome to Phone plus" is also available (from Diigo) and allows sending "read later" items and maps to the phone. I could not get the Google version of the Chrome to Phone working, but it seems the Diigo product is far more functional anyway so I don't really mind.

The new Google Reader app is  a nice addition, and provides a much more seamless user experience than the previous version.

I'm looking forward to a better VOIP experience (and maybe UMA) (both via wifi and maybe even 3g), and Video calling via Google chat, I'm sure we are just at the beginning of the new features we will be seeing rolling out on the platform.

The new Car Home view is also a very nice addition for on-the-road. It provides much larger buttons for the main functions you might use while driving, including handy large buttons for calling frequent contacts. It sort of looks like the Windows Phone 7 interface!

(added by my daughter) >> OVERALL, I LOVE THE PHONE AND CAN'T PUT IT DOWN. MY FAMILY HAS TO SURGICALLY REMOVE IT FROM MY HAND WHEN IT IS TIME TO SIT DOWN TO DINNER. TOM BRANDER, PROPERTY OF GOOGLE. (it actually is a fair summary of my feelings.)