We wanted to throw a party for quite a long time, and what can be a better chance to do it than a New Year eve? The perfect cause. And what can be better than a fancy dress party? Said & done!

It was also quite a special celebration, since everyone was from our hometown, back in Latvia and it was such a good fun we can’t remember having anything like this in the last decade. No kidding. Our party people really made an effort to make it a memorable night - from the costumes to the home-made, mostly traditional (yammy!), dishes. And we had whole 2 V’s, both Olegs :)

The rest is a history, quite well documented in still images. Have a sneak-peek:

Special thanks goes to Marita for being a tireless camera-girl :)

Who could have thought that iPhone camera can be of any use? I gave up on it loooooong time ago. It’s not a camera. It’s a joke. Pure frustration. But I used to comfort myself with a thought that it wasn’t that important, in the end even phones with more superior cameras make rather mediocre pictures.

From time to time I came across galleries of ‘cool iPhone photography’, but either shots were made in quite a perfect environment and good lighting, or required quite an extensive editing or were not that awesome at all.

So I just said to myself: don’t bother. And I didn’t. Until the moment a few days ago my work mate introduced me to an app, which changed everything.  It is called ShakeItPhoto and you can get it from the iTunes. It is everything I need for just £0.59 (well, iPhone is not included :).

So what exactly do I need? Ideally it’s a gadget, small enough, so I could carry it around with me at all times, which wouldn’t intimidate anyone if I point with it at them and which would be capable of taking pictures of some artistic value. I don’t need my everyday pictures to be of outstanding quality, but to capture the mood of the moment. Yes, my DSLR can take great photos, but lately I have been even considering taking it with me when going on holidays. Cause it’s BIG and heavy. I also don’t have guts to point it at some stranger’s face. It just gets too much attention. On the other hand, phone is just perfect for this.

One more thing. I have quite a fascination with retro photography with it’s offset colours, occasional blurriness, lack of focus, with its imperfectness. Just like our life is - imperfect.

So here we are, I got it all now with ShakeItPhoto.

It’s a simple app. As a mater of fact it’s so simple that it does pretty much just one task. And this is exactly why I love it. It takes photos in a polaroid style. You point, you shoot, and… that’s it. It adds just one filter and the frame. Brilliant!

What also great about this app is that it’s a great fun to use. It takes time to ‘develop’ the photo and you can even shake ‘the picture’, just like the real thing. There is also always a bit of luck factor involved, which again, is what you get with an instant photography.

The first few days after I installed it, I just went crazy and took ,probably, hundreds of pictures, but they were mostly about what I saw at work or on my way to/from work. Naturally I ran out of things of interest, so settled down a bit, but still remain quite enthusiastic. I really feel like it brought the joy of everyday life photography back into my life and encourages me to experiment more and not just run through my life, but stop and have a look around and notice little things, to see the beauty in details.

These are just a few shots I did lately (I have also converted those few pictures I already had on my iPhone, which for me were DOA, but now they look great). I also started a new set on Flickr and constantly update it with a new material. Definitely go and check!

It would be a lie to say the app is perfect. The navigation is not particularly intuitive for the user, even for such a simple app - there is an extra step to get to the image folder, and the button which leads there says ‘Cancel’ (must be default interface used, but that does no make a lot of sense); it would be much better if the whole screen was a Shoot button, not just that tiny little one; and, probably the worst of it all, it crashes occasionally, while processing the picture and you can never recover that shot. But the app got a great feedback from other users and a warm reception so I hope the developer will continue to work on its flaws.

It also helps to have iPhone 3G with a letter S with its much much better focusing. I saw few shots and they were beautifully crisp (can’t get that with my phone).

One last thing. Of course there are tons of other similar apps in the Apple store, free or more advanced, and you should feel free to try them, but exactly the simplicity of ShakeItPhoto is what attracts me. Having said that, I would really recommend you to download an amazing Mill Colour app for a more advanced colour correction. It’s free and I use it sometimes on a picture before taking it to the ShakeItPhoto. They work really well in tandem.

My laptop stand has finally arrived. Yay! They got them back in stock in UK so I happily ordered it on a Friday night. The stand is lovely and sits great with my MBP (no I should probably say ’stands’ well, since it is a stand : ), and it goes hand-in-hand with apple’s ergonomics. From my experience (I tried it before) that’s the best laptop stand, but what I was actually surprised with was… the packaging. It’s really really nice, cubic and with a handle for a convenient handling :) I like it so much that I am actually going to keep it :) Well, until we run out of our storage space.

Another thing which amazes me, when I think about it, is how much the personal recommendation matters. Laptops, headphones, bags, hard drives, all sort of accessories… I am probably a collective look of my friends and people I communicate on a daily basis. Well, the choice of my gear. Yeah, we probably look ridiculously the same. But hey, at least when know what things work when we go to buy them :)

Today. In the London underground. Yes, even ultra-rich and famous use public transport sometimes.

Well, kind of. It was his lookalike, or maybe fake Steve, or maybe his brother, apparently less harsh version of Apple CEO.

Usually I hate taking pictures of people in the public places, but could not resist this time.
Why so blurry? Taken with iPhone…

On this picture you can see the fine example of a superb product wrapping/packaging. Makes you want to keep it…yeah…or to put it in a frame… or to donate it to the local art museum… beautiful…

So it has finally happened. iPhone has arrived. And yes, O2, my new mobile operator screwed up my supposed-to-be-the-happiest-day-in-the-year-of-2008. Doh! In spite of the fact that I made sure to register myself for my new friend the very moment I received an email saying ‘Go! go! go!’, and though the website said ‘yes, your 16G black is still in stock for you’ at that early morning hour, and even though my bank account was credited immediately (thanks guys!), they still failed to deliver it to me on the day of the release. Those were the darkest hours of July 11… Too dark to write about…

The next delivery could only be expected in a week or so, and still that was not the fact. So I mourned for almost two days… And then I found out that Apple store had got plenty of them in stock. The next day I called O2 and told them I did not want iPhone from them anymore, but was going to go down to Apple store and buy it there. And this is exactly what I did.

I made sure to skip my lunch break and thus finished my day earlier. I was in the store at Regent street right after 5 pm. There was a queue of around 15 people on the ground floor, which I joined. After queuing for 45 minutes and already reaching the top of the line I realized that at that point there were already 50 people behind me. I felt lucky. And smart, for coming earlier. At 6pm they stopped taking any more people into the queue, which meant it was going to take up to 3 hours for the last guy in the line before he could actually get his lusted tool of communication.

While moving along the line my heart was being filled with a greater and greater joy. And then I was taken to the top floor and found out there were… another 30 people queuing there, separating me from the Holy of Holiest - IiPhone counter. But the good news was there were chairs for all those impatient consumerists, so the queuing experience just got much better from that point. Luckily I had my laptop with me, so just started answering all the email which were begging for my attention for quite a while. And when I got bored with that I started talking to a gentlemen sitting next to me, who had a Russian name Yuri (actually named after Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut). So, long before we ran out of topics of conversation I was called to the counter. Another half an hour of formalities, credit check, collecting of details and all sort of registrations and finally, it’s here and it is mine! Mission accomplished! Now my life is perfect. My life is complete :)

It’s great, it’s awesome. It changed the way I organize myself, deal with emails and facebook, entertain myself while commuting, search places, navigate in town, traveling, communicating … etc etc etc. Though at the same time it does a fair bit of spoiling me, because now I want more of it: I want copy & paste, I want sync through wi-fi, I want it as a storage space, I want video recording, I want MORE… MORE… MORE… I want it to find me new music I would like, entertain me, talk to me, pay my bills, cook my breakfast, do grocery shopping… Oh… wait…

Yeah, I know what you are going to say… Other phones can do the same things… Yeeees, but it’s not that much about what it does, but rather HOW it does it :) And yes, there ARE things I could whine and complain about, but it is still The Gadget of this year. (It also brought texting back into my life [at this point i am getting quite emotional. Where was my handkerchief?? ] … I hated doing it on a tiny (yes, now it is tiny) Nokia screen with a help of just 10 buttons… I never used more then 5 texts a month out of hundreds available free on my tariff… Ouch. What a waste! …)

And one more thing. The very next day after I told O2 I was getting my iPhone from Apple store, surprise..surprise… I got a text, saying my headset had been dispatched and would arrive the next day. So, basically they were saying, ‘Oh Mr.Skrinda, you know what? We went down to the warehouse and searched it through and oh, wow, we found one more headset right behind those big boxes in the corner! And it’s just like the one you have ordered!” Yeah, right… Sure….

PS. As stupid as it might sound, there was something about queuing there. Something charming. Probably the dedication and excitement of those sitting next to me :) A bunch of morons, you say?

Ever wanted any of the widget from the Dashboard to stay on your desktop? May be a weather forecast? Or a dictionary? I did. And was wondering why this could not be done on mac? Now after a bit of research I know how to do it and ready to share with you.

• Step 1. Open Terminal ( Applications » Utilities » Terminal )
• Step 2. Activate Development Mode by typing: defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
• Step 3. Logout/login (or restart) to reload Dashboard
• Step 4. Open Dashboard (F12), then click on the widget you want and drag it a little bit
• Step 5. Without releasing mouse button exit Dashboard (F12 again) and voila, the widget stays on your desktop. A touch of magic :)

Now here is a bit of a drawback - the widget is going to stay on the top of all your windows all the time, which is not ideally what I would usually want, particularly when I work in Photoshop, but still I find it quite useful occasionally. May be there is another line of code you should type in the Terminal or may be this i something that will be implemented in Leopard OS … I honestly don’t know.

PS. Oh oh forgot one tiny funky thing. Click on the widget and then refresh it by pressing Command+R. oh it’s twirrrrrling! :)

PS2. Just in case you wonder how to take your widget back to the Dashboard - just follow the same root :)

Honestly… I never create a folder with the help of right click or the top menu. It is always Command-Shift-N. Absolutely loving it (this particular one you can not do in Windows… or may be they added it now in Vista??) File information? It’s always, ALWAYS Command-I. Find a desktop? Of course, Command-D. and so on… It does not feel very convenient in the beginning, but then things just fly :)

Browsing random sites I’ve come across a nicely done Mac OS X shortcuts sort of pocket book and liked it a lot. Even learned a few key combinations I was not yet using. So I thought it might be a good idea to put it on the server so you could find it, use it and enjoy it. I believe guys from macintalk.com would not mind me doing that.

So please, download it from skrinda.com/docs/MacOSX-Shortcuts.pdf. It’s a tiny one page document. First learn and then enjoy ;)

By the way, the craziest shortcut so far for me is Save for web in Photoshop : Command-Shit-Alt-S, which I happen to use, well, every day. As a matter of fact, it’s not that bad with Windows keyboard layout, but when you do it on mac, your look and actually feel like a crippled-hand man :)

As you might know, Macworld opened in SF today. From early morning me and Aidan were checking Apple’s website every half an hour to be the first to see new gadgets. I don’t know why now. It was still a night in San Francisco… So it was a bit silly of us, but still funny:)

Everything was pointing to the fact Steve Jobs was going to present much rumored and speculated iPhone. So we were very impatient to see it. After refreshing apple’s website a number of times I decided to play a joke on Aidan :) I made a screenshot of Apple home page, google for some nice picture of what-could-be an iPhone and mocked the page up in Photoshop, so it looked quite realistic. And then at certain moment I turned to Aidan, punched him and said with a certain excitement in my voice : “Oh look! It’s there! The iPhone!” The dude went crazy :) He just had a quick glance at my monitor and turned back to his computer straight away. Opened Apple’s page. Still old page. Refreshed. Still the same. But then, I guess, he thought: “Probably it’s just cached…” He was so excited that did not bother himself to double check it but wrote a quick email to send around in the company.

I was like “Errr, Aidan… ahh… listen… Can you stop doing this… Err…” But he did not listen. Email was sent, and then he finally paid attention to me. I saw no point of playing the game any longer and revealed to him my dirty secret that I had made it all up. Poor Aidan.. I have never seen so much disappointment on his face :) And then realizing he was fooled, and fooled so badly he became so pissed… But sure, me and guys around were having a good laugh. And Aidan did not know what to do. To laugh with us or to continue being pissed? Don’t get me wrong, I love my man Aidan. Actually everyone in the company loves him. Of course when he is not a moody bastard he can be and he is sometimes. He always messes around with me (especially mocking me for my accent) and other guys, so it was such a great chance to strike back :)) As a matter of fact he was so pissed with that, that could not do anything for a while :)

And then in the end of a day we finally saw it. The iPhone. Ironically, as it often happens, we were so tired by the end of it, tired with our anticipation and … just tired, so did not really care much of it anymore. Only when I got home and checked back Apple’s website I could truly enjoy what I saw.. Well, I was not disappointed at all. I guess, it was everything you could possibly dream of (oh sorry, no, it does not fly..). So well done, Apple, who are on the edge of the design and technology again. Man, this company is becoming really huge. And I am really impressed with their new stuff. Well done! So now I guess we wait until summer to able to touch and to feel that toy :) An may be even buy it…

P.S. Oh yes, Aidan is planing his revenge now. And I must be very cautious. This guy is very, very smart..

P.S2. Check appleiphone.blogspot.com, there are some really nice concepts of iPhone sumbitted by different people.