Walt's Corner

TouchType is a new iPhone app that allows you to write an email in landscape mode, giving you better control and more accurate typing results. It doesn’t actually let you type within Mail on landscape mode, rather it let’s you compose an email, and when you hit “send,” it opens Mail and composes the new email for you using some hidden copy & paste functions that the average user doesn’t have access to. You can also use it to reply to an email. In Mail, select the email you want to reply to, hit the reply button, push the home button, open TouchType, write your reply, hit send, and TouchType will open Mail for you and insert your text into your reply email. For a mere dollar, this adds a missing feature to your iPhone’s Mail.

I think it’s too much work for a simple 1 or 2 line email or reply, but is great for those “novella” emails. Well worth your dollar.

Five more years, that is. The Copyright Royalty Board voted to keep the current rates in place for another 5 years. The news agencies are happy that the iTunes Store won’t be closing. I wish they would have raised the rate, just to show the world that iTunes wouldn’t have closed.

Come on folks, iTunes store first opened its digital doors in April of 2003. The dollar has significantly lost value since then. We expect to raise minimum wage. We expect our salaries to at least increase with inflation. But we are not willing to fork over a few more pennies to the artists?

I wish there could be an option to give the artist more money. What if I could purchase a 99 cent song off iTunes, and include a “tip” to the artist during that purchase? I’d love to add another dime. After all, artists only receive 9.1 cents per song.

Downloaded and tried out the new open source WordPress iPhone app. I don’t like the way it shows me all the coding right off the bat. iBlogger hides it at least until you enter edit mode. So I’ll stick with iBlogger for now.

Check it out

I’m trying out WordPress again. When I first started this blog in 2005, I started using WordPress. When iWeb came out, I used it instead with my .Mac (now called MobileMe). Now I’m trying it again. iBlogger, an iPhone app for posting to WordPress blogs prompted me to try it again. I appear to be liking it. So until further notice, you’ll find my blog over here (link removed… you’re here already).

I think not. Macworld reports that Apple may shut down the iTunes store should the music industry get their way – more money for their songs.

iTunes is a huge money-maker for Apple. Not in and of itself, but the halo-effect of all the iPods, iPhones, and Apple TV that sell to communicate and deliver entertainment. It’s the hardware baby. Apple shutting down iTunes would be shooting itself in the foot, and I believe Apple to be a bit smarter than that.

Bottom line: not gonna happen.