This morning I woke up to the same error messages as before. After about 12 hours no change. I just couldn't quite face another round of customer service hell -- so I opted for one more pass through the activation setup. Everything was exactly the same right up until the last screen. I changed nothing, but this time it just said to wait. Good news? Bad news? It was hard to tell. But when things are bleak, different has a good chance of being better.
After about 3 hours there was still no change. But then while out and about with my Sidekick I got an email message from Apple welcoming me to the iPhone. Now, "please wait" was pretty ambiguous, but "Welcome" is definitely a good thing.
Sure enough when I arrived home all was well. From start to finish it was about 15 hours of waiting. WAY to long in my book. But that's behind me now and I the iPhone is so completely great that I've all but forgotten the pain. No, I'm serious, it's that good. If you were on the fence, get off, go to the Apple Store and pay the cash, wait the 15 hours, it's totally worth it.

The "keyboard is hard to use" nay-sayers are clueless. I think it's better than my sidekick and the sidekick wasn't half bad. The auto-correction thing is freaky cool and very awesome. I gave up on the one finger typing after about 15 minutes and went straight to thumbs. Works great.

Everything else is really just the same features that I had on my sidekick -- except how you would imagine them to be if you were dreaming. Instead of pictures looking pixelated and weird they're big and sharp. Instead of some weird Sidekick software to load music, it's an iPod. Instead of a weird web browser, I actually have something useful.

When I got email on my sidekick it used some half-assed attempt at IMAP protocol. Sort of pulling the info down, but not really behaving like a real IMAP client. The iPhone is just like the real deal. I can now get email EVERYWHERE -- and respond. I will never have any sort of life ever again.

Of course I haven't tried everything, but I'm finding even the cliche stuff like YouTube pretty damn addicting. Oh and shockingly the EDGE speed seems about 2x faster than it did on my Sidekick. Why? I don't know why, but I sure am glad. It's actually quite usable.

So run on out and get yourself one. You'll be happy you did.

Had To Have It
So tonight after reading about the many wonderous things people were doing with their snazzy new iPhones I finally break down and figure it's only a matter of time, so either buy it now or buy it later. I called the Apple Store over in San Jose. They're open until midnight, have stock on hand, and no line. I was a little surprised to find myself getting in the car at about 10pm driving the 45 minutes over to San Jose.
The Apple Store experience was a bit surreal, but fun as usual. Because the store was staffed for mayhem and the mayhem had clearly come and gone, the employees had formed a sort of greeting line and would let out a huge cheer whenever a new person came in asking for an iPhone or someone left with an iPhone bag. Since one of those two things was always happening it was a sort of black-shirted cheering gone mad festival experience. Demented and sad, but cheerful.
But I was in and out in less time that it takes me to buy a laté at Starbucks. It was exactly what I expected from Apple. Perfect.

Bad Coder, No Credit
The perfection ended when I got home. I knew that I'd need to activate the phone somehow, but I really didn't know what I was in for. It started out like I expected: Plug in, lauch iTunes, detect phone, start activation. Cool.
After entering in a few choice snippets of info I was shown the screen to the right. Basically they had denied my credit. Those that follow along with my Twitterings know that I've recently been very stressed about buying a house. As recently as 3 days ago I was approved for a loan of more than 3/4 of a million dollars. Yes, houses are kind of expensive here in California. Needless to say, my credit is pretty damn great.

I'm An Engineer, I Can Fix It
I spent the next couple hours trying to change various parameters -- billing/shipping addresses, iTunes account info, credit cards, etc. The behavior never changed. My device remains stuck in deactivated mode. An 8GB, multitouch, phone, ipod, and revolutionary internet device reduced to a shiny little flat thing with no function at all.
So I starting doing a little web browsing and it turns out I'm not the only one. I spent about an hour trying to find a customer service number. Nothing I tried ever got me anything more than a polite "call back on Monday" when our office is open. In desperation I posted to the AT&T forum asking how to get hold of a human.

Not Happy
Some other iBrick owner gave me the magic direct line: 1-877-419-4500
But I might as well have called a small shack in the middle of some other country (oh, wait, I think that's what actually happened) because they were absolutely powerless to do anything but say sorry and tell me to go to an AT&T location to get this fixed.
I eventually was escalated to Monica Schaar, a very patient person considering my tone of voice by this time. Monica was full of choice quotes like (paraphrased), "the systems are overloaded. We just didn't expect everyone all on one day." AT&T execs must watch different TV shows because even with just the couple shows a week that I do watch I was palpably aware that the 29th was going to be a very big deal. The Apple commercials made it crystal clear.

An Ice-Cube's Chance In Hell
In the end Monica could not do anything for me. She did agree to call me back personally on Monday. I'm guessing the odds of that happening are pretty slim, but you never know. Tomorrow I will brave the AT&T store, I'll let you know how it goes.

I've been having a lot of fun building Smart Blocks recently. Today I'm posting two more. They're both from a vast library of fun stuff that you can put on your web page called Google Gadgets. They're a lot like widgets, but for you web page. And best of all they're really easy to make into Smart Blocks. It's mostly just a copy and paste task.

If you want to build your own Smart Block from a Google Gadget, you can use the code from these. You can see how I used the <blocks type=property id=width /> markup tag to let the embedded gadget know how big the block is. That way you can resize the block and the Gadget will resize or center itself appropriately.

Something Useful
The first Smart Block is just a little calendar. It's a monthly view of the Google Calendar app. If you use thee online Google Calendar then you can even link this view to your own Calendar. I haven't done that though. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

Something Fun
And in the not-so-useful category is a nice little koi pond. Some little fish swim around in the pond all day and will follow your mouse if you get near. If you click they get fed and I think they like that. I didn't write this one, I just brought it to RapidWeaver. You should really go thank Adam Bowman for bringing such cool things to our sites.

To Download
1. Click here for the calendar.
2. Click here for the fish.

To Install
1. Download.
2. Decompress the file (Safari does that automatically).
3. Open a Blocks page.
4. Drag the icon from the Finder to a Blocks layout.

To Use
1. Install
2. Open a Blocks page.
3. Open the Blocks Library Window
4. Drag from the Library to you Blocks layout.
5. Enjoy.

Everyone liked the Flickr SmartBlock so much that I decided I'd do one more. This is the same thing, but this time without Flash — so now it'll work on your iPhone too.

Just click on the image to the right to download.

The bonus of doing it without Flash is that the interface is a bit more flexible. You can change the shape of the block and the number of images that it displays. Of course those are great things to do with Smart Tags, so don't worry about editing the HTML -- just open up the smart info window and drag the slider.

If you're new to this thread, then you might want to jump over to the previous post and read how to find your Flickr ID and install this SmartBlock. Yahoo doesn't exactly make it easy, but once you know where to look it's not too hard either.

I whipped up a little smart block today. It's just one of the badges from the Flickr site. I took the code they provided, simplified it a bit and inserted a SmartTag to control the user ID and voila, it's a cool little reusable library element.

To use it:
1) Click on the picture to the right to download it.
2) Safari usually decompresses these sorts of things, but if your browser doesn't, then double click the zip file to decompress it. It should then be called, "flickrbadge.block"
3) Drag the file from the Finder to the middle of a Blocks layout.
4) Open your Blocks library.
5) Drag the library element to a blocks layout.
6) Open the Smart Info window and customize the Flicker ID

To find your Flickr ID, open up your Flickr photo stream and click on the RSS feed (it's the blue rectangle in the address bar of Safari).
Your Flickr ID is in there. Here's what Nik Fletchers RSS feed url looks like:
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=80573242@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom
The ID is the part in there that's after "id=" and before the next "&". That's what you'll want to put into the Smart Info window.
Just so were clear, here's one more example (this is my stream):
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=41787274@N00&;lang=en-us&format=atom

The guys at RealMacSoftware just updated their site showcase page. I think all of the sites use YourHead plugins somewhere, but one site in particular uses Blocks and looks really cool. Check out the simple design, inclusion of graphics, text, and white-space. Love this site.
Check it out: e-glue

Collage 1.7 is here: Go get your download.
This is primarily a bugfix release, but we've taken the time to refine the user interface a bit, reduce the file sizes dramatically, add support for RapidWeaver 3.6, and give the drop shadow a few more controls. Although there aren't too many new features, we think this version will be a significant refinement that you'll appreciate.

Happy Birthday
Looking back out our Download page, where we keep all of our version numbers and release dates listed, I see the the previous version of Collage is almost a year old. That's quite a while for one of our plugins. In that period of time a handful of blemishes have been pointed out. In this version we've tried to nail down every last one we had in our bugtracker, but if we've missed one, let us know.

Collage is #1
Collage was our very first plugin and also holds the distinction of being the very first third party RapidWeaver plugin. Even though it has remained at its current version for quite a while it's still one of our most popular downloads. It fills a very essential need and it does it really well with a minimum fuss. It's stylish and bloat-free.

Keep it Simple
But if you think it might be missing something, we want to hear from you. We still want to keep Collage in the bloat-free zone, but maybe it could do with a few more features, if carefully chosen. What do you think? Where should Collage go in the next year?

Things you should know
Collage 1.7 is free to all registered users.
Collage 1.7 works with RapidWeaver 3.5.1 and 3.6
Collage 1.7 requires Mac OS X 10.4 -- if you're using Mac OS X 10.3.9 you can download the Collage 1.6 from our Download page.

Blocks 3.0.1 is here: Go get your download.

It's been a little over a week since we released Blocks 3.0. In that time thousands of people have downloaded it and a lot of you have written in to say how much you like the new features. But a few others have had some suggestions, and a couple of you have had problems. To the all the "thank you" messages, I say, "you're welcome!" To the suggestions, I say, "We'll think about it." And to the bugs... well... there's no time for talk, let's just fix it.

Blocks 3.0.1 is a bug fix only. It significantly reduces load times and should free up quite a bit of memory on site-files with many Blocks pages. If those things weren't really an issue for you, then this probably won't be a big change... but it might not be a bad idea either.

And one more thing...
We'll be releasing another plugin too... in less than 24 hours.
So stop back by tomorrow, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Blocks 3.0 introduced 4 very large features and they've dominated most of the forum posts, screencasts, and blogging. But there were a lot of additions to Blocks 3.0 that flew in under the radar. So I figured I'd blog about a few.

First up is a much requested feature: the grid. It's just an alignment grid, but used in conjunction with the guides and the Snap-To feature it can make laying out a page a whole lot easier.

To turn on the grid, open up the Blocks Inspector and select the Settings tab. Here you can turn on the grid by selecting Show Grid and enable snapping by choosing Snap To Grid. Snapping allows blocks to jump a few pixels when they get close to a grid line. In Blocks 3.0 snapping also works when resizing with the handles. Of course you can also specify exactly how bit you'd like the grid to be. I keep mine set at 25px, but you can make it different for each Blocks page.

Want to learn more about Blocks. Visit the online manual, the detailed Library reference, or the Smart Block™ page.