James Holcomb

Seems that the App Shop has released their wine app for the iPhone:

Wine Pad is the iPhone app for wine geeks. Once you install Wine Pad, you will always have your wine journal with you; right on your iPhone. WinePad goes beyond the traditional paper notebook full of wine tasting notes.

With Wine Pad you can:
- Record your thoughts about the wines you try
- Rate the wines you try
- Take a picture of the wine label for future reference
- Look up wines that you have tried in the past

Wine Pad will also:
- Remember the wines that you really liked
- Let you browse your favorite wines by varietal, type, pairing and more
- Help you further your personal wine experience

Version 2.0.0 of Wine Pad includes:
- ways to record: wine name, vintage, price, rating, color, clarity, aroma, taste and personal comments
- lists of category descriptions such as type, varietal, winery, region and pairing
- a search feature to easily navigate long lists of tasting notes

Wine Pad is Coming Soon! Keep an eye out!

On our recent visit to Monterey, Terry, Guy and I discussed the possibility of an iPhone wine app that could narrow down and suggest a bottle from a restaurant’s extensive wine list based on a database of WS or RP ratings/reviews (which aren’t on the menu), food pairing, price-to-value, community rankings, etc. The technical challenge is getting the menu into the iPhone. Is it feasible to use the phone’s camera to capture the menu and use OCR to convert to text? The iPhone’s lack of flash and a dark restaurant might make it difficult.

New York Times OpEd piece by David Brooks:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Apple released the 2.0.1 iPhone firmware this evening, citing ‘bug fixes’ as the reason. It appears to have addressed the two annoyances I had in 2.0, namely the long wait you had to endure opening Contacts (down to 3 seconds from 9 for me) and the forced refresh of Safari when switching between open windows (not good for AJAX driven sites like Google Reader). General UI animation and transition seems smoother too, especially keyboard popup and entry.

UPDATE: The forced refresh bug has not been fixed…Perhaps Safari refreshes the page when switching to a tab if some predetermined time has elapsed.