I said I would write a little more about the iPhone once I had used it for a while. I have been enjoying it quite a lot and it offers a lot of the functionality that I have been waiting for in a phone for a long time now. It is far from perfect and here are a few of my gripes. The battery is dismal, basically it lasts a day and I have to put it on charge every night. If I don’t, it will usually be almost dead by the time I wake up in the morning. The GPS is pants for any kind of navigating. It seems like a cool feature at first but don’t rely on it when trying to find something. Me and my friend were visiting Wolverhampton one weekend to visit another pal and we were trying to specifically find a street whilst driving and it was useless – completely. We ended up using the pretty good GPS/maps feature on my mates Crackberry. For the price of the phone the camera is just shit. I really don’t use the camera on any phone I have had so it does not really bother me but at this price level it is pathetic. So what do I like? I like the OS and user interface as it is very intuitive. I have never really used any browser on any of my past phones because it was just a crap experience whereas it is pretty nice on the iPhone. I like the amount of decent applications (there are plenty of crap ones as well) and how easy they are to find and install from the device. Pretty much all of the core features that I use you can get on the other top phones from the other manufacturers but for the reasons above I just prefer the iPhone. I do like Blackberry’s and a lot of the other smartphones and have played around with most of them. I find that the problem usually with the others (with the exception of the Blackberry) is that don’t seem that polished to me, especially after having used an iPhone and Blackberry. The Blackberry phones are really nice in both software and hardware and after witnessing my friends in action I was impressed. My preference of the iphone between the two is based solely on my own use, but I admit that I wouldn’t hesitate in buying a Crackberry in the future. I just like my iPhone more.

Here are some screen shots from my iPhone showing which applications I have installed. Some I have installed but never really use as they are just for those moments down the pub. My most used apps tend to be in screen order for quick access.

I have had to add a simple captcha to my comments form. The reason for this is the sheer amount of spam that I am getting these days. Askismet is doing a brilliant job filtering out about 400 spam comments/day but now I keep getting a few that do not get flagged and I have to keep checking them. I know that it is not a bulletproof solution but it has been p*****g me off so much I had to add one in, so hopefully it should stop most of them.

Lately I have found that I have not been enjoying my work as much as I used to and as much as I would like to for that matter. I find it more of a chore an inconvenience than something which is fun and challenging. Whilst pondering about this for a while I realised that just working on stuff all day that I don’t find that interesting has basically chipped away at me over time. It is true that life is too short to do something that you don’t enjoy – and it really is. I need a project that I find really interesting and that I can work on happily, something which is not about just making money to pay the bills, something which is about enjoyment. Basically an exciting hobby project.

One of my biggest problems is that I have too many ideas. Yes some of you might be thinking how can having plenty of ideas be a bad thing. Well, I actually come up with new ideas everyday and change my mind about what to do. I find that I have one of those minds that are constantly in overdrive and I cant slow down to concentrate on something. To be honest it is driving me mad because it feels like I am constantly going around in circles. I have that many ideas that I could create a website about sharing ideas so that at least other people could use them. There are so many ideas that I have had in the past that have since been done (and I am talking a year or two later) so it proves that some of my ideas must be credible. I am guessing that many people have the same problem that I do. Which idea should I actually pick out of a list of many? Or how do I find something to work on? This could indeed be the million dollar question.

What Makes an Idea Viable?

So what are the crucial and important parts about any idea that make it viable to spend months or most likely years working on it? I would say that the most important thing that will ensure that the project gets finished is to actually be passionate about the idea. This is simply the crucial part missing for me from my list of ideas. I have absolutely no passion for doing most of the things on my long list, but I am sure that many people would love to work on them. Damn, I seriously should think about doing some idea sharing site, I could fill it with hundreds of ideas instantly . Anyway, it would seem to most people that enjoying what your working on is obvious, but I find that this gets forgotten these days. It’s always about making money (well it was for me anyway) instead of doing it purely for passion. When you think about it, most of the best products out there were done probably because they enjoyed doing it rather than specifically to make money. Monetising seems to be something of a by product for doing something that turns out great. Great products are done by people who are passionate about the problem and solution. Markus Frindus wrote plentyoffish.com because he wanted to learn the .Net framework and created a dating site in order to do this. Now he makes gazillions of dollars but that was not his purpose from the start, it was a by product. Read more »