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USATODAY.com: Apple’s iPhone isn’t perfect, but it’s worthy of the hype
The reviews are now pouring in, and they all say the same thing: iPhone rocks, as long as you spend most of your time on WiFi, don’t miss the lack of instant messaging or MMS, and give the virtual keyboard a week or so of getting used to.
God I’m going to be pissed if I can’t get one of these bad boys on Friday.
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Walt Mossberg: The iPhone is Breakthrough Handheld Computer
Mossberg, in his video review: “The keyboard issue on the iPhone is a non-issue” He says, after five days, he was just as fast or faster than he types on the Treo he’s been using for years.
Like Pogue, he decries the pathetic speed of EDGE, and calls WiFi the iPhone’s saving grace.
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Gizmodo can’t beleive John C. Dvorak would compare iPhone to Hitler
This, from the blog that’s been calling it the Jesus Phone since the day it was announced.
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New York Times Video: The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet
Pogue’s video review of the iPhone is cute and funny. If you like gadgets and you don’t subscribe to his podcast, get on it already. Good stuff.
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First iPhone Review, David Pogue: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
The New York Times’ David Pogue gets his review out first, and it’s generally very positive. He notes that the network is slow as shit (duh, it’s EDGE), and that the keyboard does take some getting used to (but says that it works quite well once you learn to trust it), and it stupidly doesn’t have MMS (which, frankly, is going to be a huge dissapointment to buyers who don’t realize it’s not there, given that every cheap-ass phone on the market has it and a ton of people use it every day), but glows and glows about basically every other aspect of the device.
VisitBut even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”
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iPhone: Unlimited data starting at $60; activation exclusively through iTunes
Nice. Both of these make me very happy. Voice, SMS, rollover minutes, unlimited data, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile starting at $60 a month is definitely less than I expected. And activation through iTunes hopefully means those lines won’t be too ridiculous to wait in on Friday.
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Apple WWDC iPhone Development
Some nice notes on a WWDC session about web development for the iPhone. Nothing terribly interesting here, but it’s nice to have some of what I expected confirmed.
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Versions: Mac Subversion Client
Although the tools built into TextMate cover most of my needs, this appears to be a tremendously-designed and full-featured SVN client for the Mac (of course, I’m going off tiny, partial screenshots, so take it with a grain of salt). I can’t wait to try it out. Private beta coming soon.
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Daring Fireball: WWDC 2007 Keynote News
Gruber has basically the same take as me on this year’s WWDC: meh. Leopard looks neat enough and I certainly do want it, but there’s nothing I’ve seen that really feels revolutionary. Everything is just nice incremental changes. The one exception — maybe — is Time Machine, but we saw that a year ago, so it didn’t feel that exciting this time around, either.
The iPhone-doesn’t-require-an-SDK thing was pretty lame. We’ve all known that you could — and that people will — build web apps targeted at the iPhone for six months now. That’s neat, but it’d definitely not the same as writing apps for the iPhone. The lack of real third-party development on the iPhone isn’t a deal-breaker for me, but it’s certainly a bummer. And it just doesn’t make very much sense. Every other mobile phone on the market today has downloadable third-party apps. Every single one. Steve’s lines about it reducing stability or security are bullshit. It’s god dammed Mac OS X, right? If so, then it has memory protection. If allowing third-party development for the iPhone is unreliable and insecure, then so is allowing third-party development for Macs. And yet, Apple allows that.
Apple should just say what it means: It is going to ride out the iPhone as a closed platform for as long as it can. Eventually, they’ll probably let some choice companies in on development for it. This is exactly the plan Apple has used with the iPod, and it’s worked beautifully. I don’t blame them for wanting to repeat it with the iPhone. But why can’t they just say it?
Safari on Windows was a nice surprise. Doesn’t affect me a lot personally, but I’m glad to see it happen.
And finally: does anyone else think that Steve Jobs is personally obsessed with Cover Flow? In reading the MacRumorsLive coverage of the Keynote today, almost every line ended with “Cover Flow.” Pretty much every app on Leopard and the iPhone now include some for of Cover Flow. Hell, even the Apple website now includes Cover Flow as a means of navigation. It’s just starting to feel like Steve’s pet gadget and I just have this impression of the designers at Apple rolling their eyes every time Steve asks for it again. “Well, guys, Steve pretty much liked the new version of iCal. However, he wants you to be able to browser your to-dos using Cover Flow. Yeah, I know. But, Steve said. Sorry, guys.”
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Pixelmator
Cool-looking OS X app. Like most cool-looking things, it’s not available yet.
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Panic Coda: One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
Okay, okay — let’s everyone just chill out a minute. I love Panic, and I’ve bought every app they’ve ever released. I think they’re probably the single best Mac development company in the world. But hot damn, this app has been out for all of five minutes and my feed reader is already overflowing with jizz coming out of every web developer’s pants. Yes, it look very cool, but let’s wait a few more than five minutes before we proclaim it the next coming of the Lord himself, okay? Has anyone actually built anything with it yet?
I live in TextMate. It’s my everything. It’s going to be really hard to get me to switch away from it. But if anyone can do it, Panic can. Initially, I feel like Coda has some really kick ass tools built in, and I’m definitely going to give it a shot. But it’s missing two very big TextMate features (for me personally): Subversion integration and a Django bundle. I rely pretty heavily on my Subversion repository, and not having tab completion and syntax coloring for Django would be pretty hard to get used to at this point.
We’ll see. This does look like an awesome app, especially if you just do HTML/CSS and not so much programming. But TextMate it is not — at least not yet, and not rom my initial five-minute glance at Coda. I’ll be keeping my eye on it, though.
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Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 Sessions
I wish I could go, just for Developing Cocoa Applications with Python and Ruby. It’s so awesome that Apple is making these two languages first-class Cocoa development environments with Leopard. I really hope they take off.
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Slife and Slifeshare
Holy shit. Onlife becomes Slife, adds a web service, and a REST API. I see a lot of additions to my lifestream in the near future. Awesome.
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I’m a PC: Hodgman improv testing video
In this testing video, PC freestyles an Apple commercial in which he delivers a “personal message from Steve Jobs.” Steve has asked all Mac developers to “just stop for a while,” and maybe even take some time to help out with Vista. Funny stuff that was probably never supposed to see the light of day.
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Mac Rumors: Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 at End of March?
If this is accurate, it means Leopard will either be disappointing (it certainly wasn’t ready for primetime last time we saw it publicly, and there hasn’t been any evidence to suggest it is now), or freaking amazing (in the case that Apple has been keeping major tricks up it’s selve for launch).
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Garrett Dimon: Ambient Close Button
I’ve also always thought the unsaved-document close button was a pretty awesome little UI touch.
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KeyCue
Sweet little Mac app for helping you find and remember keyboard shortcuts for menu commands in any app. Via Lisa McMillan.
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Leopard’s Terminal.app has tabs.
w00t.
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Andy Ihnatko: The iPhone runs Leopard
I hate to say I told you so, but…well, I told you so. :) “Everything I’ve learned says that it truly does run Leopard, the upcoming 10.5 OS that will be released for the Macintosh late in the spring.” A lot of other great iPhone stuffs here, too.
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Onlife
Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with sofware applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the related data. This looks looks awesome, but it’s missing the one feature I want the most: the ability to export the data (so that I can import it into my Django apps, of course, and make more fun stuff on this website).
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Daring Fireball: At ARM’s Length
Gruber speculates on what processor might be tucked away inside that iPhone. He suggests ARM is the likeliest candidate, and that makes a lot of sense. However, my first thought was that it was probably PowerPC.
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Microsoft reveals details of Office 2008 for Mac
Universal binaries, with a heavily reworked version of PowerPoint and a UI that looks like a significant improvement, indeed.
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Apple: Apple TV
I’ve been trying to order an Apple TV since the keynote ended, but the store keeps failing me. Nonetheless, it looks quite nice. Nothing revolutionary here, but a good, solid product that does everything it needs to, from what I can tell.
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Apple: iPhone
I’m being completely serious when I say, “this changes everything.” This device stands to be every bit as revolutionary as the Macintosh and the iPod. There are people who shouted from the rooftops that it couldn’t be done — that no one could make a pocket device that was all things to everyone. And yet — at least from what we’ve seen — it seems as though Apple has done it. In-fucking-credible. There’s really no other way to describe it. Beautiful work by Wilson, Paul, and the rest of the Apple.com team, as well. It was a nice demo of Leopard, as well. ;) I have a lot more to say about this — including why it may actually be a good thing that it is shackled with a two-year contract. So stay tuned for that.
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The Missing Sync for BlackBerry
Well, if Apple doesn’t release a phone today, this probably sells me on the Blackberry Pearl.
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Cabel: Apple’s Next-Generation Themes
Cabel finds and analyzes Apple’s patent filing for a resolution-independent user interface, which includes screenshots of their internal theme creation tool. I stand by my prediction that we’ll see a whole new visual look for Leopard, probably tending more towards the darker look of Apple’s “Pro” apps like Aperture and Final Cut. And yes, it’ll be resolution-independent.
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Dashalytics: A Google Analytics Widget
Very nice-looking Dashboard widget for viewing your website’s stats very quickly. Look great. If I were using Analytics, you can bet I’d be using this.
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Dan Benjamin: Regarding Macworld 2007
Dan goes out on a limb with some predictions, most of which seem like they should be pretty accurate.
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AppleInsider: Apple iTV availability to escape Macworld Expo
Having just bought a large-ish, HDMI-capable TV, I’m getting more and more excited about Apple’s iTV. Even with the announced feature set, it will suit my needs — but it sounds like it could be much more by the time it’s available. And if it’s true that Apple has built an embedded “light” version of OS X for the device, that stands to not only make the iTV all the better, but to give Apple a real powerhouse OS for all sorts of interesting devices. This should be a good MacWorld.
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10 Questions Apple Must Answer in 2007
Wired’s Cult of Mac drops another year end top-ten list — and it’s a good one. Surprisingly insightful commentary on what’s to come from everyone’s favorite company.
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Ten Years Ago Today…
“It also means that our co-founder Steven P. Jobs, will rejoin Apple, reporting to me. I know I speak for everyone at Apple in welcoming Steve home.” - Gil Amelio. Doh!
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TubeSock - Rip videos from YouTube
$15 for a Mac app that will convert YouTube videos to iPod/iTunes/FrontRow formats for me? Yes, please!
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Gizmodo Knows: iPhone Will Be Released On Monday
Gizmodo’s Brian Lam is “guarantees it.” Hard to believe, but we’ll see.
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Rutter on Mac browser font rendering
Just recently Jeffrey Zeldman has been bemoaning the sub-standard state of text rendering in Firefox on a Mac. And the sad truth is he only skimmed the surface; Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino may render even the same font differently.
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Jon HIcks: Cairo beats Safari
Jon Hicks points out that new versions of Firefox and Camino will use Cairo, a improved graphics library that makes text rendering far, far better than the current Gecko engine — and maybe even better than WebKit. This may just be the thing that finally convinces me to switch to Firefox or Camino full time.
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Browser Smackdown: Firefox vs. IE vs. Opera vs. Safari
“Four experts go head-to-head (to-head-to-head) to defend their Web browser of choice in an opinionated free-for-all.” Decent article. I’m still firmly in the Safari camp for everyday browsing, but I often switch to FF when in development mode.
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IE7 running in Parallels “coherence” mode
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IE7 running in Parallels “coherence” mode
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Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3036 Beta
Wow. There are a lot of killer new features in Parallels. This is one seriously ambitious release. Can’t wait to give it a shot.
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YUI Bundle for Textmate
Useful.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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