Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn Writes: It’s finally out. We had a last-minute conference call yesterday afternoon -- involving Ithaca, Charlottesville, Philadelphia, Monterey, Singapore, and me in Oak Harbor -- making sure everything was set up, and then Todd told Apple to release it to the App Store. Within a couple of hours the app was available online, and reviews of it were appearing here and there on the internet. If you’re just joining us -- if you have been out paying attention to birds, for example, rather than the latest in tech toys -- "app" is short for "application," but the millions of people downloading these applications for use on their iPhones just call them "apps." An iPhone -- well, that’s like a supercharged combination of a cell phone and an iPod, and it can do everything from place calls to navigate cross-country, to check the stock market, to send e-mail, to store photos, to play games, to play music (of course, just like an iPod). An...

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: No, this isn't another post about a gig with our band. This is just to update a couple of points from yesterday's post about our "Puzzled By Birds" quiz. In introducing the quiz, we mentioned a similar (but faster!) bird quiz available for iPods and iPhones, but we made a couple of errors. For one, we got the capitalization of the company wrong: it's birdJam, not BirdJam (small b, capital j). Capitalization is important -- just ask the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, who would be vexed constantly by the many incorrect printings of his name, if only he could read! Secondly, we mentioned that we thought that our friends at that company had gotten the idea for their new "birdJam Twitch" game from our quiz back in January, but they didn't; they had come up with the idea independently. Great minds running on the same tracks (or flying in the same flocks), you know. We don't have any connection with birdJam; we just kno...