Category: Apple

Some late night thoughts on the iPhone…

This is only Apple’s second major consumer electronic release and an initial Cingular-exclusive release means that Apple has to support only one network/data plan. If Apple had just sold the phone as is, a zillion people with more money than sense would snap it up, wonder why it didn’t work with Sprint/Verizon/AlfredENewmanTel and then compose two zillion web pages about how Apple’s iPhone sucks it.

A similar situation occurred with the roll-out of the iPod. At first, iPods were Mac-only and only later rolled out to Windows after having gone through a generation of improvement.

My gut tells me that Apple will open iPhones up to any carrier with iPhone rev. 2. My gut also wants an iPhone, but not enough to compromise my current set-up with an unlocked Nokia 6682 (works anywhere! use any SIM card!) and T-Mobile’s service.

I love the new phone, but I’ve got questions…

• No tactile surface on the phone makes me wonder how well non-line-of-sight dialing will work. I’ve griped about this before.
• Cingular as the service provider? At least my T-Mobile contract will have expired by the time the phone ships.
• Locking the phone to Cingular (if in fact that’s the case) sticks in my craw. What happens if I visit another country and I want to put a prepaid SIM card in it?
• How come Yahoo can push out IMAP email to it, but can’t get it’s own new mail client to work in Safari?
• For that matter, why can’t .Mac push email out to it?
• I wonder how soon DarwinPorts builds will be available on it. Having a phone-portable version of Wireshark would be significantly awesome.
• With all the sharing/collaborative stuff that’s supposed to be included into Leopard Server, I can see this being a direct replacement for corporate Exchange/Blackberry servers. I’m envisioning an “Allow iPhone Connections” checkbox in Leopard Server Admin. A million network admins will stand up and applaud if this happens.
• Sucks to be RIM, Palm, and Nokia right now.

Equally as important, but not mentioned in the keynote at all is the new Airport base station. You can connect a USB hard drive to it and have an instant media server.

To counter all the FUD that’s being expended on the new iTunes, all I have to offer is: I installed it. It found all my music. It synced with my iPod. It works fine. My only complaint is that the icon looks like crap on a light-colored background.

And finally! Something that I wanted over a year ago is now in…

Start/stop podcast downloads at will.

Another AppleScript problem that was vexing me this morning. Again, you would think that this would be easy… I wanted to rename a file to append the name of the enclosing folder onto it.

For example, the file “Testfile.txt” inside a folder called “Folderstuff” would be renamed to “Folderstuff Testfile.txt.” Here’s the (drawn out) AppleScript code:

(*
Renames the selected file to append the enclosing folder name to the front.
*)
tell application "Finder"
activate
set theFile to selection as text
set TheName to name of (theFile as alias)
set SourceFolder to name of (folder of the front window as alias)
set NewName to (SourceFolder & " " & TheName)
set name of file theFile to NewName
end tell

I know it’s faster to do this with a shell script, but I want to keep it in AS for now.

OK, so there’s already an army of Apple watchers out there who are blogging the minutest speck of black or white smoke coming out of the chimneys of 1 Infinite Loop so the last thing I want to do is add to the hype surrounding this non-product that may or may not exist.

However, since my career wagon has been hitched up to Apple for so long I do have to comment on the rumored touch-screen iPod. The various mockups all look cool, but I have to go all Donald Norman here for a minute. One thing that I’ve liked about the iPod’s design (I’ll ignore the aberrent 3rd-gen iPod) is how it feedbacks to you – the “click” noise it makes when you scroll and the decisive “whunk” when you make a selection on the contoured click wheel. Stuff like this is a big deal for me because without glasses or contacts I’m effectively blind. I often listen to my iPod as I’m falling asleep and navigating blind is easy: I know where to go to skip a song, go up a level, move ahead, and so on all without having to physically look at it. I wonder how the heck I’m going to find the mark on one of these touch-screen models.

I blame this……….

Ever since that damned desk showed up in Tron, tech manufacturers have been obsessed over impressive-looking touch-screen controls that are utterly non-usuable. I still have nightmares trying to code on the Atari 400 which has the most user-hostile keyboard of any computer ever made. Remember the all-black stereo craze of the 1990s? They all looked great in a stereo store, but the controls were impossible to see or use in anything other than direct sunlight.

I wonder if there’s also a “non-brightness” mode to the screen. Call it reverse-aesthetics… I want to be able to use it without having a television screen light up. I’ll give you even money that the next iPod accessory line will be a red translucent bag for amateur astronomers to put their iPod in.

Anyway, I hope there’s a slight contour to the “screen wheel” in the new iPod (if there is in fact a new one on the way). If there are any Apple engineers out there that run across this, please give us mole-visioned a break. k thx bye!

Dear Apple,

Thank you for the following improvements in Tiger:

1. Reducing the time it takes to launch an app.
2. Making the default screenshot format PNG instead of PDF.
3. Changing Safari so that when it errors out on a web page it displays an actual error page instead of that silly sheet that flows out of the toolbar.

Everything else looks kinda cool, but I like these best right now