In case you missed it, I posted this months edition of "This Month in Dreams" where I feature some of the best .dreams submitted throughout the past month.

Now for this weeks picks!

Tentacular for CursorXP By Subliminal Visions This is a very cool cursor for CursorXP with some fantastic animations.  Very nice.

Prototype 02 for CursorXP By J. Aroche This is the week of some great cursor submissions, and J. Aroche comes through again with another great set.

Plastique in ObjectDock Icons By bobbyhundreds I noticed these icons in the "what are you working on" thread, and couldn't wait for their release.  Definitely worth the wait.  Great work.

Quasimodo in Wallpapers By Ancient Knowledge Can't really describe it, but it's a great wallpaper so check it out.  Great job.

Onix in WindowBlinds By SKoriginals SKoriginals brings us an update to an old skin which had been "lost" for several years.  SK brings this skin back with an updated look but staying true to the original.

B54 in Xion By don5318 This is a clean and functional skin for Xion.  Be sure to download this one.

This week was definitely a big improvement over the slow couple of weeks we have had recently.  Be sure to check out the skinners galleries here on WinCustomize for more of their great works.  See you next week!

I can't believe summer is just flying by.  I almost forgot August was approaching, and that it's time for this months edition of "This Month in Dreams".  This monthly feature highlights some of the best .dreams that were submitted to WinCustomize during the past month.

How many of you are currently working on Dreams you plan to release soon?  Just as any other works in progress go, feel free to post your works in the "what are you working on thread" on the forums if you would to give members a sneak peek of what you are working on.

Now for this months .dreams video!

Reflect (Blue) by JuiceDaddy
Earth To Saturn by AzDude
Super Mario Bros 3 by goyney
Caustic Motion by JuiceDaddy
Electric Vista - Yellow by AzDude
Poubel Sunset by brenopoubel

I can't believe its almost August.  Where is the time going these days?  Well anyways, it's Friday, so you know what today is, right?  Yes, it's time for the ever popular "This Week in Skinning" where I features some of the most popular skins from our great community.

It looks like this week is a bit slower than others in recent weeks, but I know several skinners to have some really cool stuff in the works.  The SkinStudio 6 beta should be arriving soon, and I think we will see some great activity come out of that.

Now for the picks!

Sport Strip for DesktopX By RomanDA This Master Skin from RomanDa should definitely appeal to the sports fans.  This gadget shows the live scores from various sports games, updated every few minutes.  Check this one out.

Earth To Saturn in Dreams By AzDude AzDude has shared another .dream with us, this time it's a space journey from Earth to Saturn.  Great work.

Pale Moonlight for RightClick By buzzh58 Last week I featured another one of buzzh58's RightClick skins, and he comes through again this week with another great submission.

Skinner´s World RSS Reader in Screensavers By Jimbo9294 Want to keep up with the latest news from the skinning community?  This screensaver will give you the latest RSS feeds from the various skinning communities.  Nice work.

Metal Vista 3.0 in WindowBlinds By lypnjtu This is a very clean skin with a slick metal look to it.  Be sure to download this one.

Rusty for Xion By I.R. Brainiac We have been checking this out in the "what are you working on thread", and this very cool Xion skin is here.  Great work.

Great works from all the skinners this week, and be sure to leave a comment on their skins and check out their other works.  See you next week!

I recently wrote about the "Top 3 ways to use ObjectDock", which I showed some of my favorite setups for ObjectDock including a docket dock, drawers, and a minimal configuration.

I noticed this morning that a few people had questions on how exactly to configure ObjectDock into drawers, so I made a quick video showing how to do this.  It's quite simple, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
 

Here at WinCustomize we talk a lot about skinning in general, be it how to best skin some UI element, what the best skinnable web browser is, or to chat about the fantastic work done by many of the artists in our community.  One thing that we don't talk a lot about are the names and faces behind the tools and applications we use.

To that end, we're kicking off a new feature today, the Developer Interview Series.  The idea is to sit down with the main developers behind some of the most popular skinning/skinnable applications out there and pick their brain in a general sense, getting an idea of why/how they do it, some of their background and where they think they'll be taking things in the future.  It's not really an attempt to answer technical questions, because support forums are better for that, but more to get an idea of who the people are behind the scenes.  We give a lot of attention to the artists who create the skins, but we should also take the time to shine the spotlight on the people who make skinning possible in the first place.

Our first interview in the series is with Cliff Cawley, lead developer behind the Xion Media Player, a skinnable media player that makes it as easy as possible to create a skin by letting you directly import Adobe Photoshop files (PSD) into the application.  Instead of creating the image elements separately and then combining them in another application, you just need to layout your elements in layers and arrange them as you'd like.  So instead of skinning the application, it's more like doing the first design mock-up.

Last week, I sent Cliff a set of questions about Xion, himself, and skinning in general.  Read on for his answers.

If you have a specific developer you'd like us to interview, or if you are a developer of skinning/skinnable applications yourself and would like to be a part of the interview series, email me at mikec AT stardock DOT com with the mail subject "Developer Interview Series".

[WinCustomize] First off, I’d like to say thanks for taking the time to do this. Would you like to briefly introduce yourself before we begin?

[Cliff Cawley] Thanks Mike, this is the first interview I've done and I feel very honored to be interviewed by WinCustomize.com.

My name is Cliff Cawley and I'm the Developer of Xion Audio Player. I'm 26 years old and live in Queensland, Australia. I've been writing software for about 12 years now. I develop Xion in my spare time and work at a Computer games company to earn a living.

I also run r2 Studios (http://www.r2.com.au/) in my spare time where I provide quality software for a great price (free!). It hosts two of my other popular applications, Tonic and Startup Delayer.

[WC] Why a skinnable media player? WinAmp and Windows Media Player already do the skinning thing, and it's been done for quite a while now. What made you decide to do a new media player?

[CC] Music is a big part of my life. I listen to it whenever I can and it helps me power through my day. I used to use WinAmp , and even made some skins for it back when skinning was first discovered. Over time I found that it didn't always suit my needs and I noticed that it got more and more bloated. I was especially put off when they added a Web Browser. I wanted to make a player where the user could decide if they wanted a Web Browser or even a skinned interface in the first place.

[WC] You took a very interesting approach to skinning, using Photoshop layers to separate out the elements, basically making it as easy as possible to create a skin. Many skinners in the community have had heavy praise for this approach. How did you come up with the idea?

[CC] I was initially going to do some sort of slicing of images and perhaps even a script file, however after trying for the 20th time to get one of my artist friends to understand what he had to do to create a skin, I gave up on that approach and asked him what he uses and what would be easiest for him. He looked at me and said, "Photoshop". He didn't want to learn another tool, he just wanted to use Photoshop. He's always been a good point of reference for Interface Design as he comes from a Mac background and enjoys their clean and easy to understand UI. I came away from that trying to figure out how I could provide a similar experience for skins and for the UI in Xion. I didn't want artists to have to jump through hoops or find programmers to make their skins come alive.

I was aware at the time that Sonique used PSD files, however they used a scripting system to power the skins. After some more thoughts, I came up with the idea of using keywords in the layer names to represent the function of the layer. That way you didn't need a separate file to tell the skin how to function. Keywords were a simple, yet powerful way to describe the skin.

[WC] I'm guessing you're a fan of UI customization. How tweaked out is your desktop right now? ( Can we get a Screenshot?)

[CC] Haha, a couple of years ago I was all into customizing my UI. Ieven made several WindowBlinds skins. I then tried some of the shell replacements. However, due to my slow PC, I found that it slowed me down too much. I ended up reverting to the Windows Classic look. These days I have the simple Royale XP skin. When I get some more time to relax, I'd love to customize the whole UI again.

Cliff's current desktop, and a look at building Xion

[WC] How difficult was it to write the skinning portion of the audio player? What was the single hardest aspect in getting the whole thing to work right?

[CC] The skinning engine was very time consuming. I built the PSD reader by browsing the Photoshop 6.0 File format documentation as well as a lot of hex editing and stepping through while I loaded the PSD file. After I was able to load the individual layers from the PSD file, I verified that the loader had worked, by dumping the data back out to RAW files and reading them back into Photoshop. Thereafter I built the rendering side. It was very rewarding to see a skin load up into the prototype code I had built. I think the first functionality I added was 'Stop' and 'Play'.

[WC] What Xion skin are you running on your PC right now?

[CC] I currently use the Thin Default Skin. I use it when I'm busy coding so that I can see all of the code. I do have a lot of favorites though and occasionally switch to them when I need a change of scenery.

[WC]Have you ever built a skinnable application before Xion? Are you considering building other skinnable apps beyond media players?

[CC] I've built several skinnable applications, including Chat and Media Players. A lot of them were never released. I think you can still find a Media Player I wrote long before Xion. It was called 'SCAMPS'. It never quite made its way off the ground. I wrote it in Visual Basic and it included many utilities to help with making skins. I guess you could say it was Xion's predecessor. I've built many applications, some of which are available on my other website: http://www.r2.com.au/ (They are mostly not skinnable though)

I am considering using the technology I have developed for Xion in other applications in the future, however I currently have nothing in the works as I'm too busy with Xion

A snippet of BoXXi's Xion skin, Scope

[CC] Very similar to the current build actually, just with less features and more bugs! The first public build was build 56. You can download it from:

http://xion.r2.com.au/download/xion_v1.0b56.exe

I had wanted Xion to be well received and so I only released when I was happy with the quality.

[WC] What's next? Xion is at version 1 at the moment, and sees periodic updates (some quite significant). Do you have anything special planned yet for version 2?

[CC] I haven't really given any thought to a 2.0. I have found that users can get confused with the strange version systems that developers use, hence the reason I now make the build number the dominant number. For now I will be simply increasing the build number for each build. It may always be known as version 1.0, just with a larger build number. I think I will only upgrade to 2.0 if I make a large change that breaks a lot of things!

Some special goodies that I have planned for upcoming versions are:

• Hardware accelerated rendering (At the moment it's all done in Software. I hope to use DirectDraw or some form of DirectX to accomplish this)
• Better Playlist and Library support
• Support for WinAmp/Sonique/WMP visualizations
• Component SDK (Currently in Beta)
• For a more complete list, check out the forums under the Feature Requests threads

[WC] What are some of your favorite skinning/skinnable applications?

[CC] Haha I know this may sound biased, but definitely Xion! A couple of years ago I was into WindowBlinds and WinAmp. The funny thing is, that once you start developing your own such application, you tend to not have much time left for even checking out the new skinnable applications, so I guess I'm a bit behind the times in that respect! (Behind the times, not old timer! )

BoXXi's iPhone Xion Skin

[CC] Currently it is not available for developer license, however I've always wanted to make it available so that I can perhaps recoup some of the costs and time I've spent on it and others can benefit from the system I've developed.

[WC] It’s been a full year now for Xion, in that time how many downloads have you tracked?

[CC] Wow, has it been that long already? The downloads to this day are sitting at just under 94,000. The climb has been quite slow and steady until recent months where it has increased to almost 10,000 a month. It seems more and more people are discovering Xion

[WC] Right now Xion is completely free, I don’t even see a PayPal donation link on the page and only one or two Google ads on the entire site. In order to support continued development, will there ever be a premium version of Xion? We wouldn’t want to see you out on the streets after all.

[CC] That's correct. I actually originally released Xion as Shareware, however I received a lot of complaints and quite a few users insisted that Xion would never become large if people had to pay for it. It has taken me about 4 years in my spare time to develop it to where it is today and I hope that I can soon release a premium version that will help support me. It would be great to be able to work on Xion and my other applications as my full time job, instead of just in my spare time. I do have a PayPal donation set up on my r2 Studios website which you can find at http://www.r2.com.au/donate

I occasionally receive donations which help to pay for the Web hosting and Domain registration.

MysticSteel by REDstyler

[CC]Keep those awesome skins coming everyone! Its really great to see the way that the Community are able to use the skinning engine in Xion. You've managed to twist it to do things that I hadn't really thought were possible! If you have any bugs/feature requests or general feedback, don't be shy, come and visit us at the Xion Forums: http://xion.r2.com.au/community/ and post away!

Thanks again to Cliff for taking time out of his busy schedule to chat with me.  If you're interested in learning more about Xion, or want to snag a copy yourself to start playing with, here are some important links:

• The Official Xion Homepage
• The Official Xion Skins Gallery
• The WinCustomize Xion Skins Gallery

And of course, check out more of the great software Cliff has been working on by checking out r2 Studios.

ObjectDock is pretty flexible, and there are more ways to use ObjectDock than just having it sit at the top or bottom of your screen.  One of the big advantages of having ObjectDock is the ability to have multiple docks on your desktop along with the ability to have tabbed docks.  With ObjectDock you can also "mix" docks, and by that I mean you can have a tabbed dock and a "zoomer" dock on the same desktop which allows for even more flexible setups.

I use ObjectDock on my desktop in a variety of ways, and I wanted to share 3 of my favorite ways to use ObjectDock.

Learn more about ObjectDock  |  Get ObjectDock for just $9.99

1) Having a docklet dock 

I'm sure everyone knows what a docklet is, but for those who might not know, docklets are mini-applications that reside on your dock.  There are a variety of docklets available, including docklets for weather, clocks, web searches and more. 

One of my favorite ways to configure ObjectDock is to have one dock solely dedicated to nothing but docklets.  I usually place this dock on the right or left side of the screen, and depending on what's going on in the rest of my desktop, I might set it to auto-hide.  I will place all my favorite and most useful docklets in this dock, and leave my other docks for application shortcuts only.

3) Go for minimalism

Sometimes I like to go real minimal with my desktop, and ObjectDock makes this possible and even better than other methods.  For my ultimate minimalist desktop, I remove everything from the desktop except for ObjectDock, and if you don't want to see the dock you can set it to auto-hide.

The new start menu docklet gives me access to the Windows start menu, and I can choose to see any programs I have minimized in the taskbar.  Pretty much everything I need access to I can do through ObjectDock, and it even has an option to hide the Windows taskbar. 

I have listed my favorite ways I use ObjectDock, and I'd like to hear how you use it as well.  Have you used any of these configuration I mentioned, or do you have a setup even better?

Learn more about ObjectDock  |  Get ObjectDock for just $9.99

If you would like to see what some of the skinners are up to, or if you would to show off a project you might be working on, then head over to the forums and check out the "what are you working on" thread. 

Now for this weeks picks!

Arileen in Bootskins By Quentin94 A very clean and simple bootskin with a nice shade of color.  Quentin also has a matching logon and wallpaper so be sure to visit his page to grab that as well.

Lcars Computer net 5.5 in DesktopX Themes By HG_Eliminator HG_Eliminator has updated the Lcars themes by Adam Solley.  Lcars DX theme has been one of the most talked about over the years, and this is just something you have to download to experience.

Caustic Motion in Dreams By JuiceDaddy JuiceDaddy has been busy lately uploading .dreams, and it's great to see another person submitting.  This is a really great, although the loop could definitely use some work, it's worth checking out.

Office Glass for ObjectDock By Asect I'm always on the look out for Office icons, and this "glass" style is different and very well designed.  Great work.

Blue Glass for RightClick By buzzh58 A really beautiful skin for RightClick to match buzzh58's DX Theme, but this skin would work with many desktops as well.  Very nice.

Catch the wave in Wallpapers By teddybearcholla Well it looks like a wave, but other than that I can't describe it.  But that's common with me, so take my word for it and download this wallpaper.

Odyssey Suite in WindowBlinds By vStyler A great Master Skin from vStyler which features a great set of colors, and a clean, usable design.  Check this one out.

A great selection of works this week, and there are plenty more in the galleries, so be sure to browse to find more great submissions.  Unfortunately, I can only feature a certain amount each week, so a big  thanks to all the artists for their contributions this week.  See you next week!

When it comes to social networking sites, Facebook is at the top of the list lately with it's powerful application platform and robust user pages.  Unfortunately one of its most promising features, Groups, seems to have been left in the dust.

A lot of talk and attention has been directed towards Facebook lately, especially since the opening of the application platform so any user with a PC and an itch to code can add more or less any function they desire to the wildly popular social networking site.  On the whole, the applications platform has done great things for the site and turned the profile pages into great information, productivity and entertainment tools.

Of course, all of this is great, except it’s not applied evenly.  On one hand you have your amazing profile page system, with limitless potential thanks to third party applications, but on the other hand you have the Groups system.  Like the name implies, a Facebook Group is a point for users with some common interest come together.  In theory, you’d think this would be a fantastic opportunity to leverage all the vast amount of data each user represents in some really interesting way.  Wouldn’t it be cool to see what countries of the world are represented in a particular group?  There are tons of possibilities.  Possibilities that are sadly ignored at the moment.

In a Facebook group, all you can do is post to the “wall”, a common bulletin board that is displayed on the main group page, post to a more traditional discussion board for your group, or post photos.  There’s no way to integrate applications, no way to easily extend functionality.  When you form a group, you essentially have a glorified web forum.

Things aren’t much better from an admin standpoint.  I am the co-admin on the Desktop Customization group on Facebook, which has seen very strong growth since we launched it just a few short days ago.  What can I modify?  Group description, type, news, basic profile information, and who else has admin rights on the group.  The options for which functions you want to have on your group number a massive four.

• Show related groups
• Enable discussion board
• Enable the wall
• Enable photos

That’s it.  At this moment in time that’s what you’re limited to if you want to run a group on Facebook.

Here’s what I’d like to see added to the Facebook Group system.  Adding in some of these features would make the group system as much of a killer feature as the profile pages are.  Facebook could be the premier site for social groups as well as individuals.

1. Applications for Groups
   Let the ingenious developers get access to the group system.  You’ve seen the success that resulted from profile applications.  Imagine the possibilities when you have access to a much larger, and more diverse pool of information.  Opening it up for third party applications also means less work for the Facebook core team as they don’t have to worry as much about developing new functionality themselves.
2. Tags
   Tagging is the wave of the future man!  Allow groups to tag themselves with keywords, making it easier for them to be found, and also for users to be better able to sort what’s out there.  I’d love to see all groups at a glance that flag themselves with the keyword “Vista”  While searching does accomplish this to an extent, single-click sorting from the group page is probably a lot easier for users to get their heads around.  We have tags for photos, why not for groups?
3. News Feed
   Right now, you can specify one current news item for the group.  That’s it.  When you want to update it, you overwrite the current news.  It would be nice to have a listing of news items to scan back through.  This would help the Groups system supplant external web sites.  Many group web pages are used to distribute news or information, and have a news page of some sort.  Give users that same functionality as a group.
4. Better Member Sorting
   My group has 120 people in it right now.  There is no easy way to sort through them.  Who’s the most recent?  How many people belong to the same main networks?  I’d like to see if there’s any sort of commonality between my group members.  Think of it almost as groups within the group.  This information will help any group admin figure out how to best promote and manage their group.
5. Posting Video & Audio
   Ok, I can toss up photos, which are great and all, but video is where things are going… I mean, I hear there’s this new-fangled thing called YouTube out there that lets users upload their own videos to share with people.  Also, a bit older but still cool, are these things called podcasts.  Allowing a group to link and host rich media content adds a lot of value.
6. Invite Users Who Aren’t Your Friend
   Ok, this one could border on a spamming nightmare, but in general, groups should be able to invite users who might be interested but with whom the admins might not be friends with.  Instead of having an internal method for this, I have been emailing contacts outside of Facebook with a group link to join.  Make it easier to connect with people without having to resort to outside communication.
7. Block Rearrangement
   This one is more important once more features are added.  On my personal profile I can rearrange blocks of content more or less as I please.  I can’t move anything on the group.  If we ever get more options on what to include in a group, being able to move things around is a must.
8. Better User Access Management
   Lets say I have an officer who isn’t an administrator.  I would like them to be able to moderate the discussion board, but not the wall.  Or maybe I want them to just be able to update the news item.  Right now, if you want a user to edit more or less anything on the group, they have to be a full-fledged administrator.  Granular access for officers is key for large and growing groups.

This is all off the top of my head after playing with Groups for a few days.  I’m sure if I were to seriously sit down and try and design my ideal Group experience, I’d be able to come up with a lot more.  I’d be happy though if even half of the above ideas were implemented.  Facebook Groups stand to do for small online social sites (gaming clans, blog groups etc) what the Facebook Profile page did for personalized homepages.  It could make them obsolete.

But for now, I remain frustrated with the lack of options and make due with what we have.  It’d be nice if there was any mention on the official blog of any work on Groups being planned, but I know that right now all the attention and effort is being centered on the application platform for user profiles.

In the first part of my iPhone review I wrote about my experiences with features like the camera, SMS, Calendar, Widgets, YouTube, and the iPod function.  Today I want to give my review on some of the more important features, and give you my gripes and final thoughts on the Apple iPhone.  It's now over 2 weeks that I have had the iPhone and I spent more time using the features I'm going to talk about today.

Lets continue with Part 2 of this review.

E-Mail:  This is another feature that is very important to me, as I like to check and send e-mail from wherever I am at.  I use GMail as my primary personal e-mail and the iPhone already had most of the settings taken care of from start.  I just had to enter some basic information such as username and password, and the e-mail started coming through.  This also appears to be the case for Yahoo Mail, .Mac,  and AOL.  You also have the option to configure POP mail and IMAP.  Configuring a POP account was just as simple and I was up and running with just a few clicks.

The problem with using GMail is that all the mail comes through to the iPhone regardless if you have read it or not.  There is no option to select mail as read, and you have to manually delete all mail.  There is no option to "select all" which I have found to be quite annoying.  The iPhone also does not include any type of spam filter.  Many people have reported problems with receiving loads of spam, but I have not had any problems with it, so I can't comment too much about that.  On the good side is the e-mail is the same as you would see on your computer at home, it's not broken down into text as other phones commonly do, and is very easy to read.

Turning the iPhone gives you the "widescreen" view which is much easier on the eyes, and definitely gives a better view of the sites you are visiting.  One of my biggest problems with Safari is its lack of a password manager.  I visit many sites that require a login and having to log in every time gets old real quick.  I visited many websites over the past week and have not found any rendering issues, although some users have been reporting some slight issues with some sites.

 Phone:  I guess I should mention the phone part since it is the iPhone.  Nothing real groundbreaking here, it has all the normal functions of a phone just with a nicer interface.  The contacts are nicely displayed although it could use some improvements on navigating through a large contact list.  The call quality is fine on both sides of the conversation, and the speakerphone worked well although it could use a slight volume boost.

The much talked about Visual Voicemail feature is a cool addition as well.  You will appreciate this if you have more than a few messages and try to navigate through them.  The iPhone displays all the voicemails and you simply tap the one you want to hear, and you easily navigate through that particular message with a slider on the screen.  I have only used the voicemail a few times, but it seems like a feature that will come in handy.

EDGE/Wi-fi:  Now this has probably been the biggest source of complaints regarding the iPhone is the use of the EDGE network, and its lack of 3G support.  Now I'm not going to get into the 3G vs. EDGE argument because there is pro's and con's on both sides, and it really doesn't matter anyways.  I am averaging about 130kbps using the EDGE network here where I live, and while that is not the greatest speed in today's world, it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.   Most pages load in under 10 seconds, but more graphic heavy sites do take a bit longer, and updating widgets and maps takes just a few seconds as well.  My last data service was through Sprint and the speeds I'm getting now are equal to, if not better, than with them. 

Now EDGE is not the only way to get data as the iPhone also supports wi-fi.  When I'm at the home the iPhone asked if I wanted to join my network, and then asked for my pass key, and that was it.  It now seamlessly switches to my home network whenever it's in range, and if I'm in public, it also will notify me if I want to connect to any available networks.  The town I live in has free wireless to the entire town, so having that ability is great.  I'm seeing average speeds of 3.5mbs using a wi-fi connection, and it's obviously a much better experience.

 
Maps:  I think Maps was one of the first commercials of the iPhone I saw, and I wondered if it could really search for a restaurant or store and have it pop up with the directions, map, and info.  Well in short, it does.  You simply type the name of the location you want to find, and it will pop up with an option to see it's information such as its website, phone number, address, and directions.  I did quite a few general searches as well, and what that means is I searched for things like "grocery store", "restaurant", etc. instead of the direct name of the business I was looking for. The majority of times the results that came up were pretty accurate to what I was searching for.  This is a very handy feature, and something I will definitely use often.

 
Battery:  This is very hard for me to review because I never sat down and timed when I was using (insert feature) and for how long.  On a typical day I will use the actual phone for 1-2 hours, check e-mail maybe 10-15 times, and spend maybe 1-2 hours on the internet (using wi-fi mostly), and that will bring the battery meter down to about 50-60% if that.  Battery life was probably the biggest concern I had about the iPhone as stories of it being less than average seemed abundant.  For about 3 days I had it on standby mostly with very little use and it got down to about 10%. 

I wish I could give better numbers, but from a typical user standpoint, I don't think battery performance is a big issue.  Obviously if you are going to have heavy use watching movies and listening to music than it will greatly affect performance, but for what the iPhone does the battery life is sufficient for me at least.

Keyboard:  Many of the features I have already gone through such as Safari, e-mail, and SMS would be pretty much worthless if the keyboard was unusable, and being used to actual buttons was another area I was concerned about.  The first few days of use were "interesting" to say the least, but over the past two weeks I have become quite proficient at typing on the "keypad".  I still make a few mistakes, but the auto-correct feature usually takes care of any misspellings I might type.  The biggest downside is not being able to look away from the screen while typing, as with "normal" phone keypads you eventually get used to the layout and can learn to type without looking.  When you are using Safari you can turn the iPhone to get the "widescreen" view, with a wider keypad also, but it's a shame that it doesn't apply to everything else, especially with e-mail.