The Syncing Apple

It looks like on Friday hermitworks released a video showing a patched version ioquake for the iTouch/iPhone. No word is this is built on the opensource toolchain or the Official SDK, but I bet its jailbroken.

I’ve never been happier with a device than I have been my my iPhone. However, there is one huge problem. You can’t write your own software for it (this doesn’t count) , or even hack some existing software that someone else wrote. OK, at least you can’t do those things without using a process called jailbreak, and then you can’t even update your iPhone without worrying that you’ll lose everything you’ve installed on your it. Recently Android was announced by Google as a device platform, not a device implementation. They got other people on board. But the killer piece is that you can go out right now and download a full SDK for OSX, Linux or Windows. It includes a full emulator to test your code and even a plugin for eclipse. And you can code in Java. Why did Apple skimp on the SDK for the iPhone? February is a long way away. There is probably a legion of people out coding for Android tonight that would have been working on iPhone apps had Apple released a SDK. Some are already wondering if the iPhone can be put to better use….

Can it crush the iPhone? Maybe. In 2008, when there are HTC devices running Android for $99 (or even free) at Sprint, who is going to pay $400 for an iPhone? When they build a dozen different form-factors of Android devices how can the iPhone compete? I suppose there will always be a market for iPhone as long as they function as video iPods, and as long as Apple keeps us locked into iTunes. But Android is using webkit! That’s half the reason I bought the iPhone. Here is a deeper look at the Android stack. Plus you can win some of the $10 million they are giving away for cool applications written from now till March 2008.

After getting my iPhone, I thought I finally wouldn’t need or want another device for long time. Too bad it only took two months for that sentiment to disappear.

A screen grab of the SDK running on my Mac….

I’ve hit on a little TV obsession here in my idle hours between baby feedings. This one is cool because it involves way more than just watching something on the telly. This is unavailable-in-the-US show watching. The kind where you pull torrents of the show down from the net using semi-legit sites, then go about converting them so I can watch them on my Mac and put them into iTunes with the correct MPEG format for watching on my iPhone. Now I can watch these episodes on the go, or rather, seated with my one hand full of baby, the other clutching the Jesus Phone and keeping it away from baby vomit.

The show is The IT Crowd, [Fancast Link] and here is a little snippet on YouTube to give you a taste…

Here is a site with links to the 1st season episodes. I found my shows here.

Converting them to iPhone format– that was a another little battle in itself. Google should be ashamed of the link-spam mess that they have become, all in the name of profit. If you google iphone video convert you get pages of link-spam and junk sites pushing ads at you. After more careful digging around on some macintosh sites, I found what I was looking for. VisualHub did the converting perfectly, and gave me excelling quality videos on my iPhone. It cost $35, but is well worth the price for converting Windows format movies to the Mac compatible formats, as well as formatting for the screen size of the iPhone and all the iPods capable of playing video. It will even put them into iTunes for you after it has finished converting them.

I recommend VisualHub if you have a Mac and video-capable iPod and want to easily convert over some of the many free shows available on the net.

I’m planning on getting iLife ‘08 or an airport express.

Getting the $100 credit is the nice touch by Apple. I was happy paying $599 for my iPhone- the price drop will only mean more iPhones on the street, and more iPhone compatible websites.

Yes, this is all over, but it’s so funny.

iTunes has the new iPhone 1.0.1 update- the first one from Apple. It says it just has some bug fixes.

There is a lot of buzz regarding this article that was printed in the NYT this morning. ISE (Independent Security Evaluators) found that not only does every process run as root on the iPhone, the heap is executable. So they fuzzed mobileSafari till they found an overflow, which allowed them to execute any API call on the iPhone. More details are in their white-paper at their site (and direct link is below). They notified Apple back on the 17th of July.

THere white paper discussing their discover techniques and findings is here.

I suppose we’ll be getting our first iPhone update fairly soon now.

The first ever non-apple application has been allegedly run on the iPhone. The people over at the iPhone DevWiki report. Watch out Nokia 770, soon the iPhone will be as hackable as you are!

At least, some day it will. This user, Nightwatch is using his own arm toolchain, so this isn’t like we have a nice Scratchbox available to install onto debian. But as time moves on, our own apps on the iPhone draw closer and closer.

Nokia must be responding internally to the iPhone mania. The question is, will it be a more advanced smartphone, or a phone enabled internet tablet? Scoble asked around and only got some smiles. Can Nokia really continue to push the Internet Tablet line, sans phone, now that the iPhone has set the bar so high? Nokia has some cool devices, good technology, mature development infrastructure and a lot of community based support and coding efforts. But relying only on wi-fi will not enable a truly mobile communications device. They have something ready to replace the N800. Will they strap a phone onto it? Will they dump Opera for Mozilla or build-out their Webkit browser? That would certainly be in the arena for an iPhone competitor.

For all the committed Nokia users out there, hating the iPhone buzz– if you haven’t seen this page yet, give it a look. Why? ’cause someone thinks that The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face. Perhaps Nokia’s answer to the iPhone is already here, it’s just losing marketing game.

Update 06/17/07: Here is the link to the original post over at atmaspheric. The blog is worth reading.

I found a cool video over at umpcportal.com, filmed by Jonathan Greene. He puts an iPhone, Nokia 800 and the N95 thru their paces while browsing the web. The video is nicely done and well narrated. It shows a lot more than my pictorial essay from a few days back. Worth a look at only 22 min long. You’ll certainly get a sense of the various levels of ease-of-use for these devices when browsing the web.

Some points that stuck me as I watched it:

There was immediate and critical response to Steve Job’s announcement of the SDK for iPhone…. use html. But is Apple on to something? Forcing eager developers to use the open standards of the web? Forsaking almightly Flash? No IDE? Apple seemed by many to be channeling the Reality Distortion Field at full blast. But the more I read about this, especially in regards to dumping Flash (and I don’t think Apple will release it for iPhone) it seems that Apple may be helping foster a new, more open, standards-based category of web applications– freed from the sluggish, cpu hogging stinking pile of crap that is Flash. Because what has been happening so far, and so rapidly, is amazing to me. A growing hot bed of activity is the google groups organized by iPhoneWebDev. How hot is this? So hot that a few old skool Newton developers are kicking around with web apps for iPhone. Both Hardy Macia and Serg Koren have posted recently, and I’m not surprised that they are embracing the iPhone development as it stands now. Javascript is probably pretty easy compared to NewtonScript.

iPhone

I took some pictures showing the size difference between the 770 and iPhone. iPhone is really is smaller than you’d first think. Unfortunately, it also has a lower resolution screen than the 770. The zoom feature makes up for that somewhat (see the last picture in this post for an example of a zoom). It is nice that Safari always renders the whole page, so there is not any horizontal scrolling (unless you pinch-zoom). On the 770, boing-boing was wider than the screen and so it used a horizontal scroll. You can see that Safari didn’t render the flash banner add on the top of boing-boing. You can also notice in the first picture that Safari does a better job of using larger fonts- the smaller screen is more readable than on the 770.

The touch-screen on iPhone is remarkably different than what is on the 770- it only requires the lightest touch of a finger, not physical pressure. Using a stylus on iPhone doesn’t work- the screen is using the conductivity of your flesh to make contact, more like a touch pad on a laptop than a traditional touch-screen.

You can click on each of these to load a larger version in a new window.

The iPhone and the 770 both rendering boingboing.

Size comparison- stacked up.

The iPhone’s tabs - multiple windows open. You slide the windows left and right to go to each one.

Safari zoomed for the main column of text on boing-boing.

Posts that contain IPhone per day for the last 30 days:

Posts that contain N800 per day for the last 30 days:

How about posts that contain Nokia per day for the last 30 days:

Amazing. I wonder how much Apple spent on the marketing for iPhone launch?

Speaking of the iPhone, I’ve been happily using mine since release and I’ve been able to do what I wanted to for the past few years: use a PDA sized device to browse my favorite websites and have them render on the device in an acceptable time frame. Using the iPhone for browsing is a delight and is many times faster than my n770. The cpu in the iPhone is a screamer. I can listen to music via the iPod functions and browse (with multiple ‘tabs’) with ease- as long as I’m in wifi range. Edge is pokey, but the majority of my browsing is a work and at home, where there is plentiful wifi. Nothing else near this size can render pages this fast- it’s faster than some older laptops I’ve used.

And having a real working phone to boot is just one less thing I have to carry around. I’m sure there is a place for the Internet Tablets, but the 770 was never so useful as this iPhone has been in just a few days of using it. My 770 is fun to hack around with for a few hours at a time, but I’ve never been able to use it like i can the iPhone. And just imagine what is going to spill out once Apple gets a SDK out. Ebook readers alone will be a killer app. A lot of possibilities.

UPDATED: Neils in the comments set me right…. I’m just blocking the sound with my finger. I don’t think this is any haptic interface at this point. Too bad, it’s a cool idea.

The iPhone is an ingenious device– anyone that’s used one for a few hours can tell you this. Even with all the missing features, so much thought and design has gone into this first generation iPhone that getting this to ship on the promised date must have been a staggering amount of work.

The iPhone is on the cutting edge of haptic interfaces- the much vaunted pinch-and-zoom is the most striking example of that. But there are other interfaces around, some more subtle. I’m sure there are more that I haven’t even found yet. But here is one I haven’t seen written about anywhere else- the mute-touch.

If you play a video on iPhone, (YouTube or iPod video) the screen wants to go wide, and so you rotate it counter-clockwise, with the speakers now pointing to the right.

You need to be using the speakers for this to work- as you are listening to the video, touch the lower speaker (this would be the right-hand bottom quarter) on iPhone. It mutes the sound. Let go and the sound pops back to normal. A really nice touch.

Since I activated the iPhone on Saturday morning, Edge has never worked here in Philly. I finally called ATT and they reported no Edge for PA- all of PA? Regardless, it just started working now. I get a little E icon replacing the wifi icon. Seems pretty snappy.

There is a special number for ATT iPhone service issues: 1-877-800-3701

This seems to be for ATT accounts, and not the Go-Phone pre-pay accounts.

They pushed out half a million of them, mostly the 8 Gig. So much for it being a flop. I’m sure verizon and sprint execs are taking the day off, for counseling.

So the iPhone is everything that Apple has said, as far as I concerned. I telling testimonial is over at Scobleizer. Scoble has had the Nokia N95 and been swooning over it- till he’d had a day to play with his son’s new iPhone.

I didn’t wait in line- just drove over to a Center City AT&T store about 8:15 pm. They were sold out, so I drove out to the ‘burbs in Ardmore to the nearest Apple store. They had plenty, and I was parked, in, out and back in my car in 7 minuets- it was that fast. Back at home I updated to iTunes 7.3 and activated it- porting over my number from Sprint, where I was month to month. It did take about 6 hours to activate (I went to bed) and about 36 hours to port over the number, but it was all working by Sunday evening.

The iPhone is amazing, it’s just what I’ve been wanting since I started this blog. It syncs perfectly so far w/ my .Mac apps, the phone works great and the browsing is the best ever, on anything short of a laptop. No other handheld has ever even come close to being able to browse this fast (on wifi). With the iPhone it is finally possible to whip it out and check out a site in a few moments. Plus the SMS interface is nice, the iPod functions and the screen is amazing- very readable in full direct sunlight. The keyboard is fine and I can type pretty quickly after just about an hour or so of adjusting to the spacing. The email is great w/ my gmail account.

So I’m having fun with it so far.