If you’re wondering how to keep your iPad and iPhone copies of WikiPad in sync, don’t worry. Sync support is coming soon.  Stay tuned!

Back in late 2001, I attended Jerry Weinberg’s Problem Solving Leadership workshop with Andy, and during a break we got around to talking about what apps we had on our Palm V organizers. Andy said that he wished somebody would write a wiki for the Palm.

“That’s a stupid idea,” I said. “Wikis are about sharing information. What would the point of a wiki be if the information were all locked up inside a single device?”

Andy shrugged and the conversation went elsewhere. But after a few months, the idea of a personal wiki started making more and more sense to me. It would be a relatively simple Palm OS application to write. So on a plane flight in August 2002 (ironically on the way to Jerry Weinberg’s Change Shop workshop), I wrote the initial version of WikiPad for the Palm. I still have the notes I took that week on WikiPad to this day.

I used WikiPad for Palm happily for many years, first on my Palm V, and then on a couple of Palm Treos. Once Apple released the iPhone SDK, I created an iPhone version of WikiPad for my own use almost immediately. And now, after much polishing, I present the first public release of WikiPad for iPhone. Use it in good health.

[Update 4/9/2010] WikiPad for iPad is coming soon.

It was okay.

I guess you could sum up my feelings with that Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is?” The reason that I went to see the shuttle launch is because of the essay Penn Jillette wrote about it in Penn and Teller’s “How to Play in Traffic”.

“It’s 3.7 miles away, and your looking at this flame and the flame is far away and it’s brighter than watching an arc welder from across a room[….] The fluffy smoke clouds of the angels of exploration spill out of your field of vision. They spill out of your peripheral vision.”

“You don’t exactly hear it at first, it almost knocks you over. It’s the loudest most wonderful sound you’ve ever heard. […] You can’t really hear it. It’s too loud to hear. It’s wonderful deep and low. It’s the bottom.”

“This is a real explosion and it’s controlled and it’s doing nothing but good and it makes your unbuttoned shirt flap around your arms. It’s beyond sound,it’s wind. It’s a man-made hurricane.”

The key point there being, “3.7 miles away”. In the VIP section. I was in closer to 7 miles away, along the NASA Causeway, in the closest section open to to the general public. From there, the Shuttle is a tiny speck without binoculars, and the sound of the launch, when it hits you, is reminiscent of the sound of distant thunder in the midwest. And with the low clouds, the whole show was over in matter of seconds. I could tell you more, but just watch the movie. That’s pretty much what I saw and heard, and I’m nowhere near as good at words as Penn.

Next time, I’m bringing binoculars.

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• Bliki
• GeekLog

But, hey, this time for sure!