We all know Valleywag is over the top. $1,237 for the true cost of the new 3g iPhone is incorrect. He doesn’t take into account only incremental costs as it’s not fair to assume you never had a cell phone before this and you were not paying anything before.
I will pay $179/yr in incremental costs and here is why:
• Unlimited data plan: I currently pay $20; now I will be paying $30 for a network 2x as fast. Net $120/yr.
• Text messages are not included in the new plan. Net $60/yr.
• Mobileme ($99/yr) will be a “nice to have”, but Funambol has already announced their sync app is ready to go for launch. Net $0/yr.
• My voice plan will not change. Net $0/yr.
• The cost of the 3g iPhone is $199. I have a bid on my 2g for $200. Even If I do decide on the 16gb, I shouldn’t count that because I have 8gb more of portable storage. Net -$1.
It obviously will be different for other people. If you are switching from another service provider that cost could increase by a pretty hefty amount. I also understand that FamilyTalk plans are being forced into higher rates as well. This same thing happened with the 1st generation iPhone as well…people are still amazed to find out I only pay $70/mo for service (which is $12 more than what I was paying for a SLVR) because rumors were flying around saying it would cost $120/mo just for service alone.
I’ve updated the extension to add support for Firefox 3.0 RC1. I haven’t been able to really test it like I wanted to, so please let me know if you run into any problems and I will address them.
You might have also noticed a few extra comments on posts…using the RSSMeme API I am now able to pull in Google Reader Notes on every post that has them. They will show up at the bottom of the gReader Comments inline page inside Reader. At the top you can also see the share count & how many notes are tied to that particular post (thanks again to RSSMeme).
I threw together a new iPhone web-app. This was by far the quickest & easiest one I have done yet. It’s based entirely on the CSB Sportsline data. The idea for it came from trying to get the Sportsline scores gadget from iGoogle on the iPhone, but none of the pages it produced looked good on the phone.
If you want to check it out - head on over to http://www.sixteenseven.com/scorestapp
I submitted gReader Comments to Digg…if you find this extension useful please digg it below:
Up until about a week ago I was using IntenseDebate for my blog & the gReader Comments extension. I’m not a fan of just adding work-load to my free time, so the short-term reason I switched was because I didn’t know how to stop all the Arabic comments coming through ID. My blog is no big deal, obviously, but switching services on the extension caught the attention of the CEO of IntenseDebate (they like it so much they wrote a blog post about it).
Disqus vs. Intense Debate
- Track anonymous comments: not all of my friends that comment like to have accounts
- Community pages: http://reader.disqus.com
- Dashboard simplicity - much easier to manage
- Disqus took the lead in people count & growth (see chart below). An extremely important question to ask yourself when working with startups is “will they be around next year”; based on the growth rate & low market share it will be extremely hard for IntenseDebate to come out on top.
- $500k vs. $15k - this goes with the point above about stability. Publicly, Disqus just received a round of VC money for $500,000 which can keep a startup afloat for quite a while.
- Simple integration: things just seemed to work when working with Disqus and I wasn’t having to encode URLs in funky ways to get them to pass through (with IntenseDebate I was having to change all ‘&’ signs to something like ‘??—??’ and then check for those on the other side to switch back). The Disqus default comment count script could use some work, but with the API all things are possible.
- Integration with FriendFeed - the target market for people leaving comments (that you actually want to read - digg fails) are the big name bloggers & the people they follow, opinion leaders, your friends –> right now that’s all FriendFeed consists of…and the beauty of it is that no matter how big it gets, those people are my only “friends” so that’s all I will ever see. Greater interoperability between FriendFeed & Disqus is one of the bigger goals for my project.
- Great support - Both have this, but Disqus has turnaround in about 12 hours [2] while ID had turnaround in about 24-36 (although I did have a great hour long conference call w/ ID)
I put together a page that displays all the features of the Firefox extension (and now bookmarklets) I’ve been working on. Big release: 4.0 - now that I’ve got most of the features I want in it maybe I’ll get those taxes done next weekend.
Check it out:
The Google Reader comments add-on for Firefox I created has been updated to use the Disqus commenting system instead of IntenseDebate. The old version will still work, but the Disqus & IntenseDebate versions will not talk to each other: so any comments that are made will not be seen by all users. I encourage everyone to update to the new version.
FB has had this feature for a while, and I submitted a request for it over a year ago when Picasa (Google photos) put it in. Try looking through a facebook album using the arrow keys on your keyboard - convenient, eh? Now all the creepy stalkers should have more time to actually do something other than facebook stalking.
I’ve updated the extension to fix all the bugs I could find. On the initial release [link] there were a few entries that would show up funny, but they should all work now.
If you are a developer (or just want to help), please review the extension on the official Firefox Add-ons page to get the extension out of the “Sandbox”.
If you want to look at screenshots you can look at this page.
UPDATE: trackTapp has become my 2nd iPhone web-app to be featured on Apple.com in 2 months (but it only lasted about 14 hours before Apple replaced my spot). tipTapp was featured and now has an avg of 530 visitors/day. If you got here from Apple.com, please leave a comment on what you think of trackTapp (you can leave anonymous comments).
My Sunday project lasted 16 minutes into Monday. Oh well.
trackTapp is alive. After looking for an application that would let me track my packages on my iPhone and coming up empty I looked into what it would take to just build one myself.
These were my demands:
• Save tracking numbers (I would hate to have to type those 48 character long numbers in with my iPhone everytime)
• Easy interface w/ few details, but quick access to full details if needed
• One screen for all carriers
I did find one app that you had to use with a jailbroken phone - unfortunately the app didn’t work when I tried it with my tracking numbers. Next.
trackTapp : http://www.sixteenseven.com/tracktapp
Some of the code that I used is specific to the iPhone, so if you’re using a regular browser (especially Internet Explorer) the page might look a bit ugly or not even work. I promise you…it does. If you want to try it out but don’t have anything being shipped in, it does work with old tracking numbers as well so search those emails for an old order!
You might also find my other web-app useful as well:
tipTapp: http:/www.sixteenseven.com/tiptapp