The "iTwinge" iPhone keyboard - explained

A few weeks ago a Canadian company claimed to have an iPhone keyboard ready to role ...

A Real Keyboard for the iPhone? - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com

... The keyboard will sell for $30 with $5 shipping to the United States. There are prototypes in beta test now that have rubber keyboards. The final version will be made of hard plastic, said Mr. Nykoluk.

The keyboard is available for pre-order and should become available around November, said Mr. Nykoluk...

I noted it back then in my Google Reader stream. I though it was at best a trick, at worst a scam. There's no iPhone OS support for an external keyboard.

Now, looking back, I realize what they've done. They've put a mechanical prosthesis atop the virtual keyboard. I presume they're using a small battery so it emulates the electrical properties of a fingertip.

Now the Canadian angle makes more sense; you could operate this thing with gloves on!

It's ingenious in a sick sort of way.

SyncWiz for Outlook Review - how not to do trial software

When I was using Outlook 2003, I had a kludgy but reasonable way to get my corporate Outlook contacts to a primarily personal iPhone.

I started out using MobileMe to get PST transported contacts to OS X Address Book.

Once I'd done the bulk of the work I found my workplace Outlook 2003 could export .VCF (vCard) files that OS X address book could import. Contacts don't change too often, so I just sorted by Contacts by date revised and emailed the new ones.

Then I went to Outlook 2007, the poor, broken, abused step-child of the Office 2007 suite. Outlook was ugly but serviceable in 2003, but Microsoft butchered it for the 2007 transition. One of the many broken bits was the semi-documented vCard export. In 2007, the only vCard export option is tied to sending them as email attachments.

I could live with that, but in OS X Address Book these Outlook 2007 vCards have notes full of unreadable XML.

So, in desperation, I closed my eyes, tried to ignore my past experiences with Outlook Add-Ins, and tried this product in trial mode ...

SyncWiz

... With SyncWiz convert selected or all of your items to vCard, iCard, iCalendar (iCal), or vCalendar file format. This file is so portable and compressible, that you can easily send the whole folder to anyone (4000 contacts in a zipped Vcard file is less than 100Kb)...

After installation I tried the VCF export. SyncWiz told me I had more than 5 contacts, so it quit. It didn't export five then stop, it just quit.

I decided that was a strong sign this wasn't a serious product, so I uninstalled it.

I then restarted Outlook 2007 -- and found the Add-In had not been removed and Outlook was revolted by it.

So now Outlook showed the SyncWiz add-in as disabled. Fine, but I'd just as soon delete it forever.

Except, you can't delete an Outlook Plug-In from Outlook 2007. You can only inactivate it, and admire the festering corpse.

I hate Outlook Add-Ins. I ain't well disposed to either Microsoft or Outlook 2007 either ...

MindManager: nasty bug with task roll-up

Mindjet’s MindManager is an exotic organizational/planning mind map app for XP and, to some extent, for OS X. Definitely for corporate use -- it’s expensive, proprietary file format, completely data locked (no data freedom here!) but very pretty.

Pretty matters in the corporate world.

I use it a lot, and today I ran into a nasty bug. I assigned a set of items task/hour info, then used the “roll up” feature to summarize them at a root concept.

The rollup displayed days instead of hours. That’s ok, but MM rounded up the task hours on every item to days – and the act is not reversible.

I lost all my item-specific task data.

I don’t think this always happens – it’s too obvious a bug. I do have a very large and complex map.

Still – be warned. If you’ve found this post because you ran into the bug please leave a comment. If I get a few I’ll rouse myself to file a bug report with MM (though I’m not sure they take bug reports).

Silver Apple of Death: iPhone hangs on startup

My iPhone 3G showed a cheery silver Apple icon this morning.

The same Apple icon it showed last night when I did a routine (hygienic) shutdown and restart. The phone was stuck on startup.

I rebooted and, after rather a long time, it restarted. I then tried running iSystemInfo, which crashed immediately.

A great way to start the day. I didn’t have time to mess around, so I mounted the phone in iTunes. There was 1.85GB free of 16GB, but I deleted a movie anyway to free up even extra space. I then did a shutdown/restart and iSystemInfo ran normally.

I’ve seen similar behavior in the past when OS X desktop runs out of swap file space. I’ve also seen some curious messages lately from Byline, complaining of a lack of memory.

It smells like a software/hardware problem – maybe something wrong with the file system or to the physical storage media.

I didn’t find much searching on “iPhone hangs startup”, but I eventually found the key search phrase “Silver Apple of Death” (SAD) or Apple Logo of Death (ALoDs) or White Apple Logo of Death (WALD) [1]

For example (I’ve rewritten the original post) [3]:

You must restore your iPhone with iTunes ….

Reset it by holding home button until your phone is shut off.

Hold the Home button while you connect your iPhone to a computer running iTunes. Wait until your phone shows the connect USB to computer screen, then release the home button.

Choose restore as a new phone.

Search for restore mode for more details, this is a well know problem and have already been complained thousands times…

I’ve come across several explanations, including problems with “Springboard” on complex iPhones. I suspect there are multiple causes, and the Springboard bug may have been fixed in 3.0. In my case I’m hoping it’s a file system corruption problem or the solid state equivalent of “bad sectors”.

My phone is working for now, but I’ll put some time on my calendar to do a restore [2].

[1] We need some acronym consensus! Note these are of a family: BSOD – Blue Screen of Death (Windows), SPOD – Spinning Pizza of Death (OS X) and SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death) (OS X – alt). Tradition favors a four letter acronym, all upper case. I’d say WALD or SALD.

[2] If the restore doesn’t work I might try a “wipe” – forcing the OS to write to all sectors and perhaps mark some as unusable.

[3] This is from Apple discussions. There are fewer of these than one would expect. That’s what you see when Apple is deleting posts. Just saying …

Update: If you search on the words in the various names of this syndrome one finds better posts, such as this one and this one. Most do very well with the restore mode, but in some cases the problem recurs and the phone has to be replaced. Looks like a combination of hardware and software. I’ve read recently that RAM and other memory defects are much more common than once thought, I suspect that in older phones this may be due to emerging memory hardware issues. Even then a restore might help, especially if the issue is bad storage that the OS can work around.

Update b: When got home I synced the phone. I ended up doing a wipe first (from iPhone:Settings:Reset). That took about 90 minutes. I then plugged it into iTunes and I was invited to restore from my last backup. After the initial restore you get to restore Applications and Music. With past restores I've had quite a bit of cleanup and credentials re-entry, but this one worked perfectly. Nice improvement, even though a complete restore takes hours.

Web filters - return to OpenDNS

We're having to deal with the so-fun task of managing child net access.

I'm obliged to confess that I once, long ago, thought this would be pretty straightforward. Just whitelist a few accepted sites and go with it. That was pre-Google and before web sites became so enmeshed.

Later I figured we could restrict access to watched machines. Yeah, if we weren't so distracted that might work. The logs, though, tell me that ain't doin' it.

Multiple computers with multiple accounts on each computer doesn't help. Neither does running OS X, there's not much of a market for OS X access management (see: Children Online: Web Filters); they are sold but I can't find any reviews from anyone I trust [1]. There might be a market except Apple bundled Parental Control into the OS.

Oh, wait, why not use Apple's Parental Control features? Because they're $#!$#!$ broken and they've been $&*^%^% broken for years. Maybe they're fixed in 10.6, but I lost my trust in Apple years ago. This is one of the things they can't do.

Our new Time Capsule (AirPort Extreme) doesn't support any kind of domain blocking, but our Qwest 2Wire DSL modem does. It's pretty crude though, and it turns off services for everyone.

So I'm back to ad-supported OpenDNS, which I got away from in my post-gerserker simplicity quest.

In the past I'd configured my router to use the OpenDNS Nameservers (just enter the IP addresses in the DNS settings), but this time I figured I'd change it for the one machine that's hardest for us to track.

I was hoping OS X would allow each account on the iMac to have its own Location Setting, but, unsurprisingly, this is a machine setting. I had to create a new Location I titled "OpenDNS" and change the DNS settings for that location only. You can stay with DHCP configuration, any IP addresses entered here over-ride the DHCP provided configuration.

That's now the default for every account on the iMac. Parents can change it of course, but the trick will be remembering to change it back! (If the kids figure out how to change Location Settings I'll have to either lock it down or make the changes on the router.)

My old OpenDNS account still worked, so I adjusted my custom filters to fit our current needs. I also discovered my external (Qwest) IP address had changed since I last used OpenDNS, so I'll have to monitor that. (OpenDNS uses the IP address to apply custom settings.)

We'll see how this goes ...

[1] I assume this software digs into OS innards, so I ain't letting it near my machine unless it's been blessed by geeks I trust.

Update 12/15/09: OpenDNS works well for us. I use OS X Location to switch to Google DNS if I want to bypass OpenDNS filters. So far the kids haven't found that technique. I would like it if OpenDNS offered me a password option to open up traffic.

I found that my IP address was changing, which breaks OpenDNS filtering. I had to install the small OpenDNS updater app. It seems modest and well behaved. I start it with each login and it checks for DNS changes. If one is found it updates my OpenDNS settings.

My standard iPhone configuration

I've recently configured 3 iPhones - one for Emily, two for friends. So the configuration routine is fresh in my mind and ready to share.

I'll hopefully update this with some reference links, but here's the quick summary. The phones are configured around Google Services, except for Contacts which are a festering sore in Google-Land.

Basic setup

1. Check version (lately has been 3.1)
2. Turn off auto-ask WiFi
3. Picture of business card as wallpaper (so phone can be returned if found)
4. Google-phone configuration
5. Auto-lock to 2 minutes, show passcode lock
6. Mail: Show To/CC label, Signature, Default account (if needed),
7. Contacts: Sort and display order, Default account (if needed)
8. Calendars: Time Zone support Off, Default Calendar (if needed)
9. Demonstrate use of the Search screen

Google-phone configuration (calendar sharing)

1. Mail: Default iPhone Gmail setup (IMAP)
2. Google Calendar Configuration including Calendar subscription and sharing
3. Calendar and Google Contacts: Exchange Server ActiveSync then Google Sync so phone can display multiple Google Calendars selected from the primary Google Calendar collection (m.google.com and tap on "Sync") [1][2]. Warning: This setup tries HARD to get you to wipe out all other iPhone accounts. Be careful not to do so. In the setups I do people sometimes need to sync with an Outlook desktop calendar, and they almost always need to sync to a desktop Contacts collection. [2]
4. Desktop Contact synchronization (this is controlled by iTunes) [2]

Third party apps (install and configure)

1. Google Mobile (m.google.com)
2. Facebook
3. Optional: Appigo Tasks.app sync to Toodledo

Problems

1. No Google task sync solution
2. Google Contacts smell of squashed skunk
3. Only one Exchange Server account per phone (CalDAV?)

See also: My iPhone Home Screen

Footnotes

[1] For Google Apps setup see a recent Google Sync post of mine.

[2] The one substantial advantage of MobileMe for Mac users is the Contacts integration. If the Calendar sharing were not so pathetic and the data lock not stronger than Sauron's Ring it would be interesting.

Palm to Google calendar migration: Dba2CSV

I received a comment on on of my many Palm to iPhone migration posts plugging a calendar migration tool:

... To move from Palm Desktop to gCal/iPhone etc you can also try Dba2Csv or Palm2Google to move your calendars. No sync here - this is just accurate conversion from .dba to .csv (for Palm Desktop 4 files) or direct export from Palm to Google Calendars (for Palm Desktop 6 files) ... Unlike some other solutions to this problem, I am an independent freelance developer, and I provide unlimited online help (chat/email) AND a 100% quibble-free money-back guarantee :-)

The author's web site advises ...

... The best method for Palm Desktop 4 users is usually to upgrade to Palm Desktop 6 & use the Palm2Google tool within Dba2Csv. This process should only take 5-10 minutes, if you read the instructions under "Palm2Google" in the main menu on the left first. Once Palm2Google has moved your data to Google you can easily sync Google Calendars with nearly any software or mobile device, or export as an iCal file to import to most calendar software ; once your data is where you need it, you can stop using Google Calendars altogether if you wish, use Google Calendars to keep syncing with your new device, or just keep the data there as an online backup...

With Emily and I sync our iPhone Calendar.apps with Google's Calendar using Google's Exchange server ActiveSync (Google Sync). It's worked very well for us and I'd vouch for it, though the semi-secret UI for multi-calendar support on the iPhone is obviously not for general consumption.

So how did we get to Google Calendar?

Emily had given up on Palm many years ago, but in my case I just gave up on my Palm calendar and started a new one. See a prior post with several options for Palm calendar migration.Now that Google has an Outlook Sync product that's an easy option for any Palm user with Outlook available.

If you're on Palm Desktop though, there may not be a lot of options. So this might be worth looking at.

Incidentally, this post inspired me to update my old Palm to iPhone migration table.

iPhone and Google Maps: Go to here -- just drop the freakin' pin

For the past year or so I've been really annoyed that I couldn't pick out a spot on an iPhone Map.app map and get directions to it. It's such an obvious need, so why did Apple omit it?

Sometimes I wanted to tap real hard to see if I could get a pin to stick.

Today, when I was switching from Map to List view, the "Drop Pin" button caught my eye. I'd ignored it for a while. What the heck did it do, anyway?

Riiiggght. It drops a pin on the map. It seems to leave it there, after the first time I did this the button changed to "Replace Pin". I didn't see a way to "Undrop Pin" -- maybe once you put it on any map it's bound to a map forever.

You can move the Pin around, bookmark it, get directions to it, etc.

Just what I'd wanted, though I do think the UI is less than intuitive.

Once I'd figured this out I went looking for documentation. My copy of Pogue's Missing Manual for iPhone (3G version) didn't mention this feature, but Google tells me it was introduced with firmware 1.1.3.

Apple has some documentation. As a fringe benefit, I now understand the two modes of the nameless icon and I see that Apple advises us to turn off location services when it's not in use ...

Apple - iPhone - Learn how to use all the features of iPhone.

Your current (approximate) location is indicated by a blue marker....

As you move around, iPhone updates your location, adjusting the map so that the location indicator remains in the center of the screen. If you tap [the nameless target thingie to the left of the Search button] again or drag the map, iPhone continues to update your location but stops centering it, so the location information may move off the screen....

... To conserve battery life, turn Location Services off when you’re not using it. In Settings, choose General > Location Services.

... Tap the blue marker, then tap [the blue arrow] iPhone displays the address of your current location, if available. You can use this information to:

• Get directions
• Add the location to contacts
• Send the address via email or MMS (iPhone 3G or later)
• Bookmark the location

Use the dropped pin:

Tap [upturned page icon, lower right], then tap Drop Pin.

A pin drops down on the map, which you can then drag to any location you choose.

Replace the pin:

Tap [the upturned page icon], then tap Replace Pin. iPhone drops the pin in the area you’re currently viewing.

You can get directions to the Pin. Am I the only geek who missed this? Did Pogue miss it too?

Yikes.

So how can you do this on Google Maps?

Yeah, I didn't know how to do that one either, but seeing it on my iPhone convinced me it has to exist though.

The trick is the right click. I'm not used to right clicking on web apps doing anything interesting, but Google Maps does have a context menu. You can get directions to whatever you right clicked on. That's a truly lame UI, but it's good to know how to do this.

This is an example, by the way, of the curse of being an elder geek. There's almost nobody to show me interesting stuff; my few geek peers assume I know it all or, like most people lucky enough to have a job, they're crazy busy.

I think we need to explore new ways to create documentation. I'd love to read an iPhone document titled "Fifty things longterm users tend to miss ...".

My iPhone home (main) screen - latest rev

I attended a physician meeting tonight where I was told that 80-90% of physicians in one large vendor's base (large, wealthy, integrated care delivery systems) carry an iPhone or iTouch.

That seems high, but I did get to share app screens with several other attendees. Alas, I didn't find any new apps. We all had fairly similar apps, or at we spanned similar app domains.

It's a good reminder though to share my main screen, it's a bit unusual for me to go beyond it (when I do I use the search function, I don't navigate the other screens) ...

The screen does have turnover. Today I finally gave up on Night Stand -- an app I once liked. I still like the idea but the product had become unstable. I also switched VoiceRecord (old app, never updated) for iTalk Lite for the same reason.

Off the main screen other apps in active use these days include:

• 1Password: encrypted store
• i41CX+: beautiful HP 45 emulation
• Light (of course)
• PhoneFlicks
• Flixster
• Pandora
• MPR Radio
• NYTimes
• about 16 kids games and 7 educational apps
• Google Earth
• Kindle
• WikiHow
• ePocrates
• Easy Wi-Fi
• Wi-Fi Finder
• iSystemInfo
• Twitterific
• Sky Voyager
• Public Radio
• myWireless (AT&T)
• Flight Update

Update 10/5/2009: In iTunes you can switch your Application view to "list" view, get a convenient list of all apps, and see when apps were last updated.

TUAW has a post on team member home screens and Firstand20 has the home screens for geek celebrity iPhoners. I'm most like "Brett" of TUAW, looks like I need to research "MindMeister" and "Cities". Seems like there ought to be a social graph application based on home screen overlap.

See also: my standard iPhone configuration.

Bento 3 gets encryption - mildly interesting

Bento annoys me. I'm on FileMaker 8 because I'm waiting for FileMaker Inc to do something useful for me -- like the ability to use FM power on OS X data stores. Instead FM has delivered yet another version of Bento, providing brain dead access to OS X data stores.

This release has one potentially interesting feature:

Bento 3 - All Features | FileMaker

... Use the new field type called “Encrypted” to store sensitive data, like web site logins and banking details.

Unlock encrypted fields to display contents by entering the database password.

Assign a database password to your entire Bento database. You will be prompted for the password upon launching Bento. Once the correct password is entered, Bento will open your database giving you full access to all your libraries.

Assign a sharing password to allow others access to your shared libraries. This password is different from the database password and only allows access to specific libraries that you have chosen to share over a local area network

If Bento for iPhone ALSO gets encryption then I may have to, very grudgingly and painfully, consider sending FileMaker money they don't deserve.

Grump.

Beejive - IM for iPhone as an SMS replacement

Now that iPhone OS 3 has notifications, I'd like to try to use Beejive as an SMS alternative.

Problem is, the default behavior of Beejive is to disconnect from the Beejive server a minutes to hours after use. When that happens, there are no more iPhone notifications.

If you want Beejive to behave more like SMS it looks like you need to set a very long Session Timeout. As long as you use Beejive once within that time it keeps your session running. I chose 7 days for Emily and I (but really we want "forever").

At least that's how I think it works, because as of today Beejive's online directions are for OS 3 and an earlier Beejive release.

This is not a good sign. Did the entire company (3 people?) implode?

I've written asking them for an explanation of the obsolete documentation.

Update 10/5/09: No response to my email. I discovered this am I was logged out -- but I shouldn't have been.

Update 12/4/09: More instances of being logged out, or Google thinking I'm offline when I'm supposed to be connected. The iPhone notification/IM infrastructure seems too fragile and demanding for this type of use.

iPhone Google Sync - Mail and Google Apps

I've been a pretty happy Google ActiveSync (Exchange services) customer since they saved my iPhone last February. The only downside has been that you can only have one Exchange account per phone, so if my employer ever enables Exchange support for iPhones I'll have some touch choices.

Today I've got some updates based on configuring Emily's new 3GS yesterday. One update is that you can now configure this for Google Apps accounts like our family domain, another is the difference between IMAP email and ActiveSync email.

Since Emily's primary email is through our family domain (free) Google App suite I had to learn the Google Apps configuration. It's a bit obscure, but not too bad.

First, your Google Apps domain admin has to go to Mobile Services setup and enable synchronization.

Then you have to follow Google's Exchange services setup directions on your phone. It's a bit weird, since it's easy to miss the step where you get the option to enter the Google server address.

So far, not so bad. But, of course, you're a power user. You have to push it, don't you? You want to be able to sync all your subscribed calendars to your iPhone, not just your primary calendar.

This is where it gets weird. I'll tell you what I did ...

1. In iPhone Safari enter the URL http://m.google.com from the phone.
2. Look for the link that does setup for Google Apps. It's easy to miss, I think its towards the bottom of the screen you see.
3. Do the Google Apps setup. NOW when you enter http://m.google.com you see a new Google Apps section. Look for "Sync" and click it.
4. Now you get to see all your Google calendar subscriptions and you can add all of them.

Clearly this is a beta type configuration, I assume Google will fix it up some day (though sometimes they don't fix things!).

So far this is much like what I did for my personal Gmail setup, just with a few odd quirks. Mail, however, is new. You can enable an ActiveSync connection to Gmail instead of the older IMAP connection I use.

For Emily I enabled ActiveSync mail. If you're doing Contacts and Calendar it's an easy way to add email. From what I'd read I assumed it would behave very much like IMAP, but that's wrong. If you have Mail sound on in Settings then every time email hits your inbox your phone "pings" -- even if it's asleep. So your email behaves more like instant messaging (or BB email). The mail icon always shows the current unread message count, and it updates within a second or two of email transmission. [see update]

We turned off the "ping" sound -- though it would be "nice" to be able to configure that for certain senders.

One last comment that's probably most relevant to BlackBerry users. Until we retired Emily's Pearl she used 'Missing Sync for BlackBerry' to sync to Address Book, and Google Sync/BlackBerry to sync to Contacts. This meant she had one address book.

Now things aren't so neat. Her Google Contacts sync to her iPhone Exchange account, her Address Book syncs to her iPhone 'on my mac' account. So her old pool of one set of contact has just become two! I have the same problem; I need to explore some solution for the both of us. (Maybe I’ll return to Spanning Sync).

Update: When browsing Emily’s iPhone Contact Groups I found this novel entry at the end of the Groups list: “Google apps Global Address…”. It lets me search all contacts – I wonder if it’s the precursor for some kind of Google Apps Domain directory (an obvious need). As of today there are NO Google hits on this string with “iPhone”, so it must be quite new.

Update: I reverted Emily to IMAP. The Exchange mail setup was saving drafts her emails to the trash folder every few seconds. This feature needs more work.

Incidentally, Google's IMAP directions, esp the recommended IMAP client settings are badly written. In particular they do a poor job of explaining why one shouldn't use Apple's default Gmail setup. I've done it both ways, and I prefer the way Apple's setup works.

iTunes Library divided between iTunesMusic and iTunes Music

Somehow, in the long and twisted history of my iTunes Library, which has moved from Mac to PC and back again, I ended up with my Library divided between a folder labeled ‘iTunesMusic’ and another labeled ‘iTunes Music’, both within “iTunes Library”.

It’s doubtless been this way for some time, but I only noticed it today. It seems to work fine. Even so I used the iTunes 9 File:Library tool to both consolidate and rationalize to the newish library hierarchy.

It seems to be copying everything over, when it’s done I’ll copy ‘iTunesMusic’ to an external drive and save it – just in case something was missed.

It would be nice if this was somehow related to iTunes not updating last played data on some of my podcasts …

Update 10/8/09: The iTunes Consolidate feature worked well. I deleted my iTunesMusic folder and didn't have any problems (I had backed up of course). This didn't solve the problem with the iPhone "not updating last played" bug -- this is a frustrating and longstanding bug that Apple has to fix.

iTunes 9 missing the rearrange iPhone app option?

Everything seemed pretty fine with Emily's brand new 3GS -- until I tried rearranging her app screens in iTunes 9.

The sync list was there, but not the rearrange screen.

What the ?!

I restarted the phone, speculated it was somehow related to disabling app store access, restarted iTunes, quit and connected a few times ...

Nothing. I was stuck.

Thanks Google ...

Apple - Support - Discussions - iTunes9 / iPhone Rearrange Apps Home ...

... Never occurred to me that it would be 3.01. I have a 3.1 phone so I was confounded when the screen for rearranging apps was missing...

Yep. The phone still had 3.01. I upgraded to 3.1 two weeks ago, I just assumed it was a 3.1 phone. Since her phone syncs on her user account there was no 3.1 update on the system.

It's a bit of a pain, by the way, to now have two downloaded copies of 3.1 on the same machine. There's now one in her user account and one in mine.

AT&T A List feature

When we made a bunch of contract changes today our AT&T store rep (did a great job btw) reminded me of AT&T's "A List" feature. It was activated about a week ago; it's not clear if it's automatically added to every account or if it's being rolled out and, for now, only available on request.

There's no charge and, I'm told, no contract change.

The A List is a set of numbers that can be dialed without a "per minute" charge. I think they're only available on higher end plans. On our family plan we get 10 numbers.

Since in-network mobile calls are already free you don't want to add those. We added our home number (Qwest), my office phone, and several Google Voice numbers (let's see if AT&T allows those!). If this works I won't even spend minutes when I use GV to call Canada.

Numbers must be within the US, there are a few exclusions but I don't recall them all and I can't retrieve the list. Google Voice wasn't mentioned.

Numbers currently take a day or so to be activated.

Update 9/28: All of my numbers were accepted, including our Google Voice numbers. I think people eligible for this feature also have free calls to AT&T mobile phone subscribers; it this is correct you would want to avoid using up an A List slot this way. I think the system will allow you to add an AT&T mobile phone number to the "A List".

Update 9/28b: See comments. " ... you need to be on a 1400+min/mo family plan or a 900+min/mo individual plan for this to be offered." In other words, this makes for good marketing, but no impact on AT&T's revenues. Admirably diabolic.

It might help with 3-4 phone families, though nowadays young-uns don't talk much anyway -- and AT&T isn't reducing their texting fee!

We are really moving to a flat rate for unlimited voice, and a crazy AT&T revenue stream from texting- a cost structure completely disconnected from bandwidth and infrastructure load. It's a weird wired world these days.