Dave Balmer

I was looking some months back at the “Hot” iPhone Web apps, and was amused to find the “iPhone Flashlight” and, later, the various strobe lights and other things which basically set the background color from #000 to #FFF. Not to be outdone, I made the iPhone SOS app one night which used the same “high tech” approach to make Morse Code signals. Then I chuckled, showed a few friends who also chuckled, and I promptly forgot about it.

If you want to preview it, you’ll probably need Safari or Firefox because I’m too lazy to fiddle with IE for something this small and specialized. So point your iPhone to the URL, bookmark it, and use it in cases where all other forms of communication break down:

mtskull.com/sos

Tap the three screen keys (dot, dash and space) to hand-key your code, or tap the input box on the top and key something in using the iPhone text input. Tap “send” and signal that special someone across the crowded room, or call for help in a remote area with no cell phone coverage. You can also play party games with it, learn Morse code by trial and error, or just marvel at the latest thing in wireless communications. Options let you set the color of your light and the speed which it sends your messages.

Let me know if you come up with any other interesting uses for this thing.

I haven’t really played with the “Wii” much since we got it last year, and only recently enabled the built-in wifi, so this sweet news viewer has been lurking in my living room for quite a while.

Spin the globe and see news story pages pile up on cities where they happen. Zoom in, and the piles break up into several smaller stacks. The whole interface is fun, smooth and delightful (a user interface cliche that I tend to eschew in favor of less emphatic adjectives, like “cool” and “neat”).

Out-of-browser experiences like this are getting better. Aside from the mild annoyance of downloading some specialized client, the end result is often worth it. Another one I was turned on to recently is CoolIris. It’s a downloadable that turns YouTube and your photo streams into a more channel-like experience. Very interesting.

I was all prepared to give a dismissive, sarcastic review of this gadget, but the silly thing is good. Not only has everyone in the family used and enjoyed it, but it’ll even support my weight. And that’s no small feat.

In case you’ve missed the ads, web promotion and signs in most metro areas, the “WiiFit” is a new personal fitness and training system for the Wii. Basically, it’s part aerobic step, part scale and part video game.

Setting it up is easy. You pop in the included AA bateries, and synch it just like a WiiMote. Then set it down, turn it on and pop in the game disc.

The WiiFit focuses on balance and core training. Every exercise so far has some element of balance and weight distribution built-in. Sections include yoga, aerobics, strength training and balance games. Yes, yoga. My friend Rand would be quite pleased to see me trying to balance my bulk and practice deep breathing and graceful-yet-mildly-uncomfortable poses.

Also built in is a daily body test, which uses BMI and balance exercises along with your age to compute your “WiiFit Age”. After three days, I’ve gone from 45 to 41. Not bad, except for the fact that I’m really 37. But that’s fine, because there’s also a built in nag system to encourage, praise and even chastise my ups and downs. Mildly annoying, but generally effective.

The thing really shines in a family or group of friends, because you can watch and encourage each other as well. Actually, more like shame and ridicule each other, but I think that depends on the group dynamic. Either way, feedback from other people who are doing the same thing is a major plus.

And the thing actually works. We all went crazy with it the first day, spending about an hour apiece trying to unlock new activities, and get better scores on the ones we had. It was fun! The next day everyone — and I mean even the fit 12 year old — were feeling some sore spots from the previous day’s workout. After some groaning and sharing our various aches and pains, someone popped WiiFit back on, and away we all went all over again. Each day since has been the same, but with a little less griping the next day.

Go get one of these. It costs about what you’d pay for a boring night on the town, and is a heck of a lot better for you.

IE8 is looming on the horizon for release into the wild later this year. It looks promising. According to what I’ve seen so far, it’ll be largely compliant with HTML 5 and the latest and/or greatest CSS specs from W3C. Awesome!

And yet… 30-40% of the installed Windows base out there seem to still have IE6, one of the buggiest browsers in existence (motto: “IE6: now powered by more interns than ever!”).

IE7 has been out for, well, a long time now. It’s not too bad, and offers the casual surfer a good browser experience. So what’s the holdup? Why was user adoption so pitifully slow?

Are we going to see a similar adoption curve with IE8? Because I’m really not looking forward to supporting three different IE browsers at once.

For the first time in, well… a long time, I’m actually interested in getting a beta version of IE.

So far, I’ve spotted what looks like support for HTML 5 CSS transitions (physics-based animation of CSS properties), some document messaging thing which I haven’t played with yet, and client-side storage (SQL based persistent storage).

Thanks to Parallels, I can investigate safely inside a VM without blowing up my test versions of IE6 or IE7. I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to downloading IE. I hope Steve Jobs will forgive me.