Basically, it lets you make lists in graphical ways.  I often take notes while reading a comic that I might want to review.  I’ll write them in small bullet points lists: First, a set of art notes, then some writing notes, and maybe some packaging notes. I’ll draw lines here and there, write footnotes, or whatever it takes to tie in some tangents or supporting statements.

Basically, I’ve been “mindmapping” for years without fancy software to make it color-coded and PDF-enabled.

But since the app was free in the Mac App Store, I thought I’d give it a shot. MindNode is very simple to use.  I didn’t read a line of directions or instructions. It’s all pretty obvious.  You start with a node. Give your mindmap a title there.  Then click and drag from the “+” button next to that to start a new node.  Create subnodes as you wish.  Each tendril off the root node will be automatically assigned its own color

Your work is saved in a MindNode file format, but you can also helpfully export out to a PDF (or PNG, or a few other formats) for those times you won’t be on a Mac but want to read it.

It also has the convenience of not being on a small scrap of paper that accidentally gets thrown out when I clear out my pockets at the end of the day.  I can keep it in DropBox as a PDF so it’s accessible everywhere.

I used it for Pipeline this week.  This is what the final output looked like for my review of “John Romita’s Amazing Spider-Man: Artist’s Edition”:

Mindmap used for this week's Pipeline

I didn’t cover everything in there, but I did get the vast majority of it.  When it comes time to apply butt to chair and write, you realize that some parts aren’t all that necessary. They just bulk up the writing at the expense of the reader’s attention.  That’s not something a mindmapping piece of software will teach you. That’s experience and ‘feel.’

Was the software necessary?  No, I could have just used pen and paper like I usually do.  But if MindNode feels more “fun” or interesting to use, then it’s worth it.  I made mindmaps of the next three books I read, at least two of which will see reviews in February.  We’ll have to check back at the end of the month to see how this goes. During that time, I’d also like to read more of the documentation to see if I’m missing some obvious feature that would make all of this even better.

If you’re not organized and scratching out bullet point lists on your own – whether on a scrap of paper, the back of an envelope, or your simplest text editor of choice on your iPhone or computer – then this might be a handy program for you.   It’s free, so what do you have to lose?  (There is also a “Pro” version of the software, which lets you add all sorts of funky stuff, including importing pictures, and even finer grain control.  It’s $20.)

I haven’t watched the whole thing in years. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 was even better than I remembered. You can see Steve Jobs almost doing a victory lap on stage there. But you also see why he’s so good on stage: You believe everything he says because it doesn’t sound like a script, and he’s not reading off cue cards. He’s sure of himself. He’s a little cocky. He’s not afraid to throw a barb. He’s clear spoken. He doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t use corporate doublespeak blather. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, and see how far we’ve come in the last four years.

And, on a personal note, here’s my first blog post from my first Mac in September 2004. That computer still sits under this desk, though it’s been replaced by a late model iMac.

I didn’t get too far into the water when I realized it, but I immediately took it out of my pocket and threw it in a towel in a bag and left it alone. By the time swim time was over with my daugther and we got home, the phone was dead as a doornail.

Well, not completely. Throwing it in airplane mode elicited a vibration. But the screen wouldn’t come on, and there was a white border along the upper corner of the screen. Water droplets were visible on the camera lens.

The phone was a goner. After two years of owning it without ever dunking it in the toilet, and two months before the next generation phone was due out, I had hosed my phone. Granted, Apple had a program letting me buy a new one for $199 one time only without affecting the carrier contract. But that’s still $200 more than I had to spend.

Thankfully, I had read about this kind of thing before, and my wife did a quick Google for it to confirm what I had read. So here’s what I did on Sunday afternoon:

1. Removed the SIM card. There was water on it. Dabbed it dry, laid it aside.

2. Took a blow dryer and blew into every open hole of the iPhone — namely, the spot where the SIM card slid out, the headphone jack, and the connector port at the bottom.

2a. After a couple of minutes of hot air, the camera lens was clear again.

2b. Two minutes later, the camera lens was covered in droplets and had to be blown dry again.

3. Took a sandwich-sized zip-lock bag, filled it with white rice (thankfully, we had some in the kitchen), and put the phone in there, with the wet side sticking most conspicuously into the rice.

4. Waited. A couple hours later, I did a quick round of blow drying. The camera lens was half covered, but that quickly evaporated.

5. Put it back in the bag of rice overnight.

5a. Before going to bed, I turned the phone over.

6. The next morning, plugged the SIM card back in, held down the power button, and — nothing.

7. Plugged the phone in. The battery was drained dry. The phone must have been on the entire time.

8. With enough power in it, the phone responded to the home button and came to life. The screen responded to touches. The camera took perfectly clear pictures. So I turned the phone back off –

9. — No, I didn’t. The power button at the top of the phone didn’t work. The water did its damage there. So anytime I wanted to put the phone to sleep, I had to wait for it. The worst part of that? No screen shots.

10. Also, the phone thought there were headphones plugged in at all times. That’s the way it behaved. So, no sounds, and no phone calls without Blue Tooth or ear buds plugged in.

11. By Monday night, the power button was working again, and the iPhone recognize that there wasn’t anything plugged into the headphone jack.

12. As of Wednesday morning, the only defect on the phone is that the volume up button doesn’t work. I can turn it down, but never back up again. Airplane mode works fine, though.

13. Now, a week later, I’m back to not being able to talk regularly on the handset. It’s back to thinking the headset is plugged in continuously, I guess. So it’s speakerphone, headset, or Blue Tooth for all phone calls now. And the volume up button is still hosed. The camera continues to work perfectly.

I just need it to last another month or two. C’mon, iPhone, you can do it!

It’s all a load of bull, frankly. Anyone carrying any cell phone is tracked by the cell phone companies anyway, and I don’t even subscribe to the notion that the real problem wasn’t “big government”, but the ability for your spouse to look on your computer and find where you’ve been. If you’re that worried about it, all you really need to do is enable that little check-box “encrypt iPhone backup” in iTunes and all your logs were locked up automatically. Anyway, it’s all a moot point now, since the most recent iPhone update gets rid of functionality. Which is a shame, because frankly, it’s cool!

I’m with him, actually. Looking at mine was pretty cool. I’m hardly a traveler, but I saw a couple of spokes in my travels that reminded me of specific trips. Fun stuff. Now, it’s all gone.

Verizon iPhone/AT&T Warning

Someone at Apple forget to do a s/AT&T/Verizon/g

* Cute, Motorola.  He’s reading “1984″ in an ad for the XOOM tablet, featuring the masses looking like Apple Zombies.  Cute.  Congrats on being the first Android 3 tablet, due out just in time for the second generation of Apple’s tablet.  Good luck with that  OK, so it’s actually looking like it wil be out a couple months sooner — but what about that $800 price tag?!?  Yikes!

* Very subtle of “Cowboys Vs. Aliens” to mention that it’s by “The Director of Iron Man” just before the shot of the energy cannon thing in the guy’s hand.

* I loved loved loved the “Captain America” trailer on just about every conceivable level.

* The Darth Vader commercial was as cute as all the pre-SuperBowl hype had it being.

* I’m glad I wasn’t watching the halftime show with my parents.  It would have been tough explaining how The Black-Eyed Peas qualify as music. But, hey, at least we know that it wasn’t all lip-synched for a change.  Who in their right mind would lay down a track that awful-sounding to lip-sync to?

* The half-time show is about spectacle, though, so good for them on that.  You can’t beat a “Tron” half-time show for that, can you?

* Congrats to Usher on not pulling a groin muscle with that last jump over Will.I.Am.

* GoDaddy isn’t even trying anymore, is it?  Their commercials are just teases for their website, which I have no interest in visiting afterwards.

* The SuperBowl is like the “Ed Sullivan Show,” isn’t it?  Who’s the big name guest star in the audience tonight, kids?

* Did that just make me sound 30 years older than I actually am?  Yes, I guess it does. I’ll shut up now.

* OK, one last one: Heard the Groupon ad was insensitive, horrible, and pure evil.  So I watched them on-line. I laughed out loud, mostly because I knew they were the kinds of ads that would piss off a certain type of people.  I am evil, and that’s OK with me.

* I forgot to mention in my Milwaukee AI10 round-up that one of my favorite songs was used as a bed in the opening. It’s Marc Broussard’s “Home,” and it comes highly recommended. It’s available on Amazon MP3 and probably iTunes, though I don’t have a link for it there at the moment.

* With any luck, the Nashville write-up will come this weekend, if anything interesting happened.

* Who’s the guy who discovered Sea Salt? He must be making a fortune, because suddenly it’s all the rage. The latest is in Wendy’s French Fries. I hate it when the fries I like change recipes. Burger King never recovered from their change a decade ago. When Wendy’s made the switch, I was worried. But, I think it actually improved the fries. I love them.

But what’s up with Sea Salt? Cheaper? Latest health craze? Makes cooking quicker? What do you think it is? The cynic in me doubts that it’s in there because it just makes food taste better. That has to be an accidental side benefit.

* Saw someone complaining the other day that Near Field Communications might change life as we know it if the next iPhone has one. Why the complaint? Because there’s an Android phone or two that have already had it for months now, and nobody got excited. This, the commenter said, was a sign of Apple Fanboyism in the press.

No, it’s a sign of reality. Android users don’t use their phone nearly as much as iPhone users do. Apps don’t fly out of the Android store the same way that they do with the App Store. And Apple has tens of millions of credit card numbers on file. Android — well, doesn’t. It’s the Apple infrastructure that makes the possibility of NFC so exciting. The pieces are in place if Apple wants to pounce on it.

* Apple’s “competition,” meantime, is keeping things classy:

“I’ve seen the NGP up close and the screen is the most beautiful gear I’ve ever seen in my hand. It punches the iPhone 4 screen in the junk,” said James Mielke, a producer at Tokyo game design studio Q Entertainment, on Twitter following the announcement.

The NGP is the “Next Generation Portable” that Sony plans to release for Christmas this year. It’s the next PSP. And the specs on it are so amazing that you know the battery life will be dwarfed by everything else in creation that runs on batteries. They claim it’ll run as long on a single charge as a Nintendo 3DS, but I’m not sure I believe those numbers either. Battery life is never up to the figures the manufacturers claim, after all.

* “Strength to strength” is another one of those overused phrases I’d like to see banished from the internet. It used to be just Brits I heard use it, but now it seems to be a worldwide thing. Thanks for that import, UK!

I have an old-fashioned Apple TV now, with a big beefy hard drive. I’ve used it over the last nearly three years to watch mostly video podcasts. I’ve downloaded a few TV shows through iTunes on it, and even bought a movie. But it’s most always been a video podcast player — iFanboy, HD Nation, a couple TED talks, D-Town, etc.

The problem is, for whatever reason, the Apple TV doesn’t connect to my Mac anymore. This might have something to do with the time I attempted to hack the box to install Boxee. Ever since, the box hasn’t found the home network. So I’ve been forced to manually download shows I want to watch. It’s not a big deal, but it does remove some of the automation that makes using such a box a no-brainer.

With AirPlay, my iPhone — always synced up with my laptop — can now be used to store the podcasts I want to watch. I can also easily and neatly play ANY video on the iPhone (in the iTunes app) to the TV. Why not just connect to the computer my main iTunes library is on? That computer isn’t always on, and it’s two floors above my TV, so running upstairs to turn it on is a pain.

This also allows me to keep track of what I’ve watched. The problem with a purely streaming service is that I don’t always watch the entirety of a podcast in one sitting. It gets broken up into two or three pieces. If I’m purely streaming, then I have to restart and wait for the stream to catch up to where I was, or I have to scrub ahead to the point I left off at and wait for the stream to find that spot. If the video is stored on my iPhone, then the iPhone will remember instantly where I was and start playing from there.

Another thing: Although I haven’t read any reviews that mention this or have tested it, AirPlay is supposed to work with any device within range of any AppleTV. Now my iPhone can be a mini video library for my daughter. I can put a few episodes of Dora the Explorer on it, and stream it to a friend’s TV with an Apple TV connected and keep her entertained. Or I can share whatever other videos I have stockpiled on there. Suddenly, I’m happy I paid the extra for the 32GB iPhone.

All of this is available for $99 for a box a fourth the size of the current one. The only downside is that my heating bill might go up, since the original Apple TVs were known sources of fireplace-level heat in any room they sat in.

I can’t help but think that this is only the beginning of the ways the various Apple devices can find to work together. I long ago replaced the simple remote that came with the Apple TV with the iPhone app. But what’s next? I don’t know, but it ought to be fun getting there.

I just know this — I had no interest in the Apple TV before this iOS update. Now there’s a killer feature that puts it back on my radar again.

• Haven’t done a hybrid car story here in a long time, but surely a Porsche hybrid calls for attention!

• Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” movie to be a 3D motion capture CGI film? Sure, why not? Like the initial reports that Roland Emmerich was directing it didn’t lower our expectations far enough…

• As a college Ultimate player, it’s very sad to see the guy who created the frisbee passed away recently.

• The Worst Apple Products of All Time. Includes the phone, the gaming console, and the iPod Hi-Fi.

• The military has been monitoring various social media to get ideas for where to help in Haiti. Interesting.

• Headline writers get it wrong sometimes. John McIntyre has some hilarious recent examples. Love his copy-writing blog.

• The first cowboy to draw loses. Here’s why.

• What is TiVo planning to unveil in March?

• Dear Amazon — I’ll take a free Kindle, too. I’ll subscribe to Prime, I promise. Thanks!

• Hilarious bit of SEO: A story about Facebook logging-in techniques gets higher rankings on Google than your actual Facebook log-in page. Confusion ensues from the clueless who use Google to go everywhere. Seriously, there are still people who type Facebook into Google to go there, instead of just typing Facebook.com. Ugh

• Rumor: Hulu to move away from Flash for iPad? Oooh, Adobe would not like that.

• Shocking: Higher song prices lead to fewer downloads. Does the music industry have any feet left to shoot itself in?

• I think I might still be drooling over the Canon T2i. And it’s only the entry level camera. This is nuts.