It is often those little conveniences that make a huge difference. You know, those things you don’t appreciate until they are gone or those things you didn’t know you even WANTED until you have them. That’s how I feel about the new screen capture ability built into the 2.0 firmware.

Wayne over at the amazing, "over 2 million visitors" Gear Diary reminded me that by simply holding down the "home" button and hitting the "power/sleep" button you can create a screen cap of the current image on your iPhone.

It even works with the iPod Touch.

Yeah, it is a little thing but it is really a sweet convenience.

It struck me as funny ("funny"= "strange" not "funny"="ha ha") that just about everyone on the web came out with an iPhone optimized site over the last year except our friends at Apple. That’s right, Amazon had an iPhone optimized site, the New York Times had an iPhone optimized site but Apple, the creator and purveyour of iPhone goodness, didn’t offer and iPhone optimized site for their store or even their help pages. Well, now that’s finally changed.

My experience spending hours restoring my iPhone twice and then reloading my applications on to my iPhone earlier today should have left me wanting to step back and just enjoy my device for a bit. I’m not the only one. I had been speaking to my buddy Patrick from JustAnotheriPhoneBlog and we were both saying the same thing- we’ve been so busy setting up our devices and making notes on the experience that we haven’t really had a chance to play.

So that’s exactly what I was going to do… just USE the device for a bit. Then I noticed that the 2.0 Firmware upgrade was released for the iPod Touch and I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

I decided to go for it.

Okay, I did something to my iPhone after upgraded and ended up having to reinstall the new firmware. It was working again but timing is everything and it went from bad to worse.

I had just unpacked a MacBook Pro and went to sync my iPhone to it instead of my Air. Uh Oh! Something went terribly wrong. My apps didn’t transfer. My music didn’t transfer. Time for reinstall number three!

By now I had gotten pretty good at installing iPhone firmware and getting everything set up. Hey, practice makes perfect and I was getting a whole lot of practice.

Not much later things were back up and running. There was one tiny little problem. Actually, it was more like a huge upsetting problem…

My purchased apps- so far the offerings from Splash, OmniFocus, the apps from Big Stone Phone and FlipSide5 weren’t on my iPhone any longer and, while they were on my Air, I was getting a message that they would not load because the computer did not have permission to load them. 

Yup, I had spent sixty or seventy dollars on applications and I couldn’t find a way to reload them. I went to iTunes help but couldn’t find any information on it. I tried to call support but to no avail.

Come on Apple, you’ve had a full 24 hours- get some documentation up already. It isn’t like you have anything more important going on right now… like dealing with overwhealmed servers or anything.

I was getting frusterated. I sent an email to iTunes support. The emailed response said I would hear back in a day or so. Not surprisingly (to anyone who knows me, at least) my impatience got the better of me.

Yesterday I posted briefly about my excitement at discovering eReader had released an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Fictionwise, their parent company, had previously indicated that software for the devices would be coming but that it would not be until some time later in the year. And yet, here it was.

Well, I got greedy.  I mean, I just couldn’t help myself.  I had to download all of it.  AIM, Evernote, AOL Radio, Weather Bug, Facebook, Truphone, all of it, at least 50 apps.

Know what it feels like when you eat too much of one thing and then get sick and can’t ever look at that food again?  Well apparently, so does my iPhone.

I don’t know if it was the App that sheds light on a dark hallway (Light), or the one that pushes music and matches it to my tastes (Pandora), but something definitely crashed my iPhone.  I think it was the green faced goblin guy (Smugshot), at least it was the last thing to run before the iPhone said, "Ok, THATS IT!  No more of this, I’m not your portable play thing!".

So, after all was said and done and I couldn’t get my iPhone to reboot correctly, I did a hard restart, uninstalled a bunch of stuff and started adding things one at a time.  Maybe this time around, I’ll take the time to check everything out more slowly.

I think I’m going to go lay down now.