The SF Chronicle reported yesterday that wireless service is apparently available in the Transbay Tube now between Oakland and San Francisco. From the Chronicle:
“(12-21) 21:51 PST — The latest wireless hot spot? Under the bay between San Francisco and Oakland.
That’s because four cell phone companies – AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint/Nextel and Verizon – have just turned on their wireless networks in the Transbay Tube, BART announced Monday.
“The best news is that the installation and operational costs are paid by the providers – not by BART,” said James Fang, president of the BART board.
Nearly 161,000 people take the Transbay Tube each weekday. Now their cell phones and laptops won’t have to be idle during the 10-minute or so ride under the bay.
Wireless service on BART has been gradually expanding since 2004.”
So I was looking forward to checking out this new service this a.m., but of course as expected crappy AT&T and their horrible network wasn’t able to get a signal in the tube on my iPhone once.
If all goes well, I suspect I *might* be able to get an Edge signal on my 3G iPhone if I’m lucky for about 20% of the ride by 2015.
Thanks for nothing AT&T!
Update: I tried the service again this morning in the Tube and it worked pretty well. I lost my AT&T 3G signal for the last 2 minutes or so of the Tube, but most of the time I was able to use the internet pretty well in the Tube. 
Thank you AT&T and BART! An update from the SF Chronicle on the service here.
Posted on October 9, 2009, 10:42 am, by Thomas Hawk, under
Adobe,
iPhone.
Adobe Systems today announced their free Photoshop IPhone App. The app is available free of charge at the iPhone store and allows users the ability to edit and add simple effects on photos with their iPhone.
“As the digital imaging leader, Adobe is excited to bring Photoshop.com Mobile to iPhone users,” said Doug Mack, vice president and general manager of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “Now, with access to powerful editing and sharing tools, iPhone users are armed with the resources to document all of life’s unexpected moments, make them look their best and then re-live those memories with friends and family.”
I played around with the app a little bit this morning and have to say that I think it’s very cool — especially for a free app. The app allows you to do some of the most basic edits with your iPhone photos including cropping, adjusting exposure and contrast, converting an image to black and white, rotating an image etc. It also has a very basic set of effects that you can apply and filters that you can add to create effects (like an image border, sketching or blurring effects, and the effect that I liked the most, an effect called “warm vintage”).
I especially liked the cropping tool of the app and found it reasonably robust (for a free mobile app) allowing you to do things like constrain crops to certain aspect ratios (a square crop for example).
You can also use the app to offload your iPhone photos to a free photoshop.com (2GB storage limit) account freeing up storage space on your iPhone. You can also easily access your photoshop.com account via the app to share show people photos from that account via the app later.
The app also allows you to email people albums of photos vs. just sending a single photo with Apple’s own email this photo feature. This feature seems helpful to me as well.
I’m not sure that this product is as comprehensive in terms of cool artistic effects as Chase Jarvis’ new iPhone app (although I still haven’t tried that app which costs $2.99 yet) but for a free app I was pretty damn impressed with Adobe’s initial iPhone product and the price is definitely right. I suspect that Adobe continues to improve it over time as well.
You can find out more info about the app here. If you have an iPhone, just go to app store and search for Photoshop and the app should pull up as a free download.
