Every business conference they give away an iPod as a door prize. I mean every business conference in every city every day all over the world. It accounts for 76% of all iPods sold.
> The early pda phones lacked keyboards. I've had three such phones. The lack made them a pain to use as a phone.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which there won't be a Bluetooth or iPod-dock keyboard for iPhone, but I simply cannot. If you are one of the rare people who wants a keyboard for your iPhone I'm sure you will have a choice of 3-4. Expect one or two from PC keyboard manufacturers, and one or two from iPod accessory makers.
> Try using a touch screen for navigating a touch-tone menu. You have to pull the phone away from your ear to press the buttons.
You can clearly use the included headphones with microphone, which are recommended anyway because you can listen to music playback between calls. There is also an Apple-branded Bluetooth headset coming, and you can use other ones also.
On many phones you have the buttons right below the screen it is the same situation.
You also have less reason to use a touch-tone menu, because you have a full-scale Web browser in iPhone.
> Not everyone will use their smartphone in the same way. The ability to install custom apps and memory allows the vendor > to sell one system that all customers can customize to meet their needs.
You could say the exact same thing about iPods and the iPhone has all the iPod features and more.
There are 3000 accessories that have zero IT overhead, you just plug them on and they work, the software is already inside. There are also installable games for iPod, the same will be true for iPhone.
I don't know how many Web sites there are right now, or how many qualify as Web apps, but they all run on iPhone. That is a lot of apps that you don't have in a typical smartphone that doesn't have a real Web browser.
> It's sad that my four-year-old Palm has a better feature set than this as-yet-unreleased phone of the future.
> Without the ability to install custom apps on it
Web apps. It has a Web browser. A real one. You can access the company network over Wi-Fi and run the Web apps you already have. You can VPN from elsewhere.
> Mobile phone manufacturers are dependent upon operators to sell their phones at a subsidized price which they recoup on expensive pricing plans
Apple is doing it differently.
1) they have their own retail stores and online store, their own sales channels.
2) the $499/$599 is the full price of the iPhone. That is not a hardware subsidized price. Instead, AT&T is going to sell you cheaper minutes, and you the consumer are going to be able to properly compare the iPhone to the iPod line.
3) iPhone has Wi-Fi "n" and a real Web browser, so the user is not dependent on the cell carrier to provide them with a data service unless they are out of Wi-Fi. VOIP also provides leverage, and Cisco wants to help with that, they're making it quite public that they want some of AT&T's lunch already.
4) the phone part of the iPhone is more of a soft phone, just one application on a handheld computer, it is more network-agnostic than any other phone, it will run on every phone network and still act the same, it is abstracted an extra level away from the carrier, so the carrier matters even less.
5) AT&T has not had to do anything at all and yet they got over 1,000,000 emails saying "I want to buy an iPhone" so I would be surprised if AT&T tries to squeeze Steve Jobs' balls any time soon
>> "You're arguing that a hypothetical bug in an unreleased product makes Windows Mobile better?"
> You're arguing that lack of choice is a good thing?
Where is the lack of choice?
Out of the box, you can run Gmail on your iPhone, you can run Yahoo mail, you can run Hotmail, you can run the Webmail from your Web hosting company, you can run whatever email you want. It has a full-scale, desktop-class, Web applications spec Web browser with the equivalent features of Firefox but with better typography.
On Windows Mobile you can choose from a handful of apps that are made with the same MS dev tools on the same MS operating system, often using MS "standards" and they cost money and you have to update them and authorize them and you also have to make sure to get the right app for the particular hardware/software combination you are using (e.g. do you have a touch screen?) it is like Windows 3.1 in there.
The thing with iPhone is that it has 21st century computing features in there almost for free along with the phone and iPod that people will actually buy the iPhone for. The parts of the iPhone that could be said to be stolen from the Mac are basically extras in "the iPod phone". It is not even primarily a handheld computer. On Windows Mobile you are paying good money for a 1993 computing experience and Microsoft's famous QA. It is not even a fair fight.
> I have no compunctions about saying that Keynote blows PowerPoint completely out of the water in every possible respect.
When people refer to An Inconvenient Truth as a "PowerPoint presentation" that is a laugh because PowerPoint cannot do graphics of that size or quality. Those are not 800x600 256-color PowerPoint slides in that movie.
> Apple hasn't had to say anything, QuickTime supports Flash (through version 7 or so) so the iPhone will run Flash apps. > The downside is QT is usually one version behind the mainstream Flash release.
No, I don't think this is true. I don't think you can say that the iPhone runs QuickTime per se. It is more likely that there is an H.264 decoder in there and an AAC decoder like in an iPod.
There are various ways Apple could go with this, but I would be surprised if iPhone supports Flash. I would be extremely surprised if they support Flash video such as YouTube. Purely for technical reasons.
> I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support.
This feature has already been announced in OS X Leopard as far back as last June.
I'm sure Apple would appreciate it if you would wait until you actually get your iPhone to complain about what's not in there.
> That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
You can use any Web-based email, there is a full-scale desktop-class Web browser in iPhone.
> It integrates so well with my Mac!
The iPhone integrates with iTunes just like an iPod. Use either Mac or Windows, that has already been announced.
> Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move.
It runs Web apps, therefore even if there is no way to install native software, the user will have billions of applications.
In other words, the Cocoa API is not the most important iPhone API... it is WebKit (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and the always-on Wi-Fi "n" and cell network connection.
Right now most mobiles are offering the personal computer application experience from pre-1995: you install a 31 kb application that manages memory so that you can install an 81 kb game. Think about it.
> Double-click on a button and you're immediately taken to the code editor
You're comparing the user interface of the IDE which is somewhat interesting, but what I find REALLY contributes to ease of use and rapid development is when you have lots of objects and components that you can access "for free" no matter what you are doing. If you are working in Xcode you don't have to do any audio coding because CoreAudio is there, you don't have to do graphics because of CoreImage, you don't have to do animation because of CoreAnimation, and if you want to display any kind of audio or video you have QuickTime, and WebKit gives your app HTML, JavaScript, and all of CSS 2.1, not to mention the way you can work with PDF.
Similarly, when you start working with AppleScript, then many of the built-in applications and many third party applications are objects that you can utilize. So if you want to search text files, you ask a text editor to do it, if you want to run a shell script, you can ask Terminal to do that. You just save your script as an application and you can make very useful little apps with almost no code, but what makes them powerful is that they're making images with Photoshop, encoding movies with QuickTime, saving HTML files with BBEdit.
One thing with the Mac is Apple builds in a lot of software and exposes a lot of stuff to developers, so there is just a ton of stuff to build on in Mac OS X.
From what I read it seems like the "closed" part is that you can't install applications directly onto the iPhone... instead they get on your iPhone through iTunes, same as audio and video and firmware updates and contacts and photos and iPod games.
When you plug an iPod or iPhone into iTunes it is like you go into maintenance mode, you pull into a pit stop. There are like 100 hidden advantages that Apple is taking out of that system. For example, if you lose your iPod or it dies completely you can get another one and plug it into your iTunes and sync and you are back to exactly where you were... everything on the iPod is just a cache for iTunes. It is not surprising that they're going to continue to do the same thing with iPhone. You will actually just customize your iTunes further as usual and some stuff from there will go on your iPhone, as usual. The greater capabilities of the iPhone hint at bigger apps than what's on iPods today but that system is in place and iPhone can certainly run Cocoa.
At one point there was an Xcode update that had an "Intel" check box in it, that was all you had to do to build your app for Intel as well as PowerPC. It wouldn't be surprising to see an "iPhone" checkbox show up there and some UI facilities so you can build your Cocoa app for Intel, PowerPC, and iPhone in one go. Maybe they'll release that as soon as WWDC. Certainly I would expect more information about iPhone application development at this year's WWDC.
> If you have a need to view Powerpoint presentations on your mobile phone, Microsoft is right, the iPhone is not for you.
The iPhone is also an iPod. If you have the need to VIEW any kind of screen-based media then the iPhone is definitely for you. It is painless to hook it up to a TV also just like an iPod. It will crash much less than your Windows laptop when giving a presentation.
There will be a PowerPoint Quick Look plug-in for OS X Leopard also if there isn't one already. In that case, you can open a PowerPoint presentation for viewing without converting it to something standard. PowerPoint on the Mac can output directly to an MPEG-4 movie that is iPod-ready also.
The key with the iPhone is it will be more versatile than other phones, and it will be much easier to use than other phones, so whether you are in business or whatever you're doing, many people will apply iPhone in a productive way.
> it's certainly useful to be able to read word and pdf documents when you are on the go
It is really, really easy to do this stuff with OS X. The PDF reading capabilities of the iPhone have already been shown off, and you can open Word documents with OS X for a few versions now. Authoring this stuff is also easy on the Mac even without Microsoft or Adobe because Apple do their own PDF stuff and have their own Microsoft file format converters.
Leopard's Quick Look feature is a system that enables you to view any document (view only) no matter what the file type, whether open or proprietary. For each file type there is an OS X plug-in that describes enough about it to open it for viewing. So expect the iPhone to be able to view every kind of document.
Of course you can already view about 200 different file types with QuickTime so there is not going to be a lot of stuff that the iPhone can't deal with.
There is absolutely no handheld application that can beat a real Web browser. The iPhone has one, and other handhelds don't.
With Windows Mobile you pay for and then install and maintain a mini MS Office suite like you are a Windows 3.1 user. With iPhone you just go to Google and run their office suite over the Web, no install, no maintenance, and you can also use Yahoo Office or whatever else comes down the Internet tubes in the future.
WebKit is like Firefox with great typography and text-shadow. Many Windows users are going to hold their iPhone up to their PC screen and ask themselves why the Web looks so much better on their phone than in Internet Explorer.
Another nice thing with iPhone is that if your CEO has one he is going to want the corporate Web site to be W3C compatible instead of Microsoft compatible. The iPhone makes the case for the cross-platform post-PC World Wide Web.
Microsoft likes to copy Product A and change "/" to "\" and call it Microsoft Product B. Frequently they get sued over this and they pay people off and it perpetuates the fiction that Microsoft invents things. It is part of the Microsoft Story that Bill Gates and Paul Allen brought computing to the masses by inventing the personal computer.
When the QuickTime file format was standardized as MPEG-4, with H.264 video and AAC audio for consumer devices, this effectively was open source QuickTime, leveling the playing field in multimedia. But rather than license MPEG-4 like Apple, Sony, Panasonic, Nintendo, rest of the world, Microsoft copied MPEG-2 as Windows Media. However they have now had to pay legal compensation to the MPEG-2 creators that they ripped off for Windows Media. Courts looked at the technology behind WMA and MP3 and ordered Microsoft to pay Fraunhofer, the creators of MP3, as if they had just licensed MP3 in the first place, which is what they should have done. You only have two honest choices: invent your own, license somebody else's. Microsoft spends a huge amount of time and energy and resources avoiding either of those honest choices.
So getting sued is part of their business model. They have money in the bank to pay future legal fees as compensation for crimes they are currently committing and that only they may even know they are guilty of right now. They have money in the bank for crimes they have not even committed yet. Everybody is like "why is their cash hoard so much larger than any other company?" Because the people doing the hoarding at Microsoft know where the bodies are buried.
The Mac is one object. It is an integrated system. Mac users don't know about various kinds of optical drive standards and other extraneous uninteresting bullshit. Since 2001 I can put a CD or DVD in my Mac optical drive whether it is blank or not it will just work. If I make a DVD-Video disc it will just work in consumer players. Apple takes care of that shit so that Mac users can focus on being artists and lawyers and Web developers, not IT staff.
Also on the Mac, we do not miss PCI because in the first place, Macs always have a whole range of stuff built-in, and even FireWire goes back to the 20th century, so plugging stuff on when you need it has been the rule. I have a MOTU 896HD FireWire sampler here for many years when I want multichannel audio it is hot plug and go. I have used it on about five Macs including a PowerBook recording a live concert, it beats PCI so many times over it is not funny. Also, standalone devices like this do not steal CPU from your machine like a lot of integrated peripherals.
A lot of the ways that the PC market works are built on these assumptions:
- you have only one personal computer - you are a full-blown IT nerd - you have all the fucking time in the world - you love to do Microsoft's QA for them for free - you have all the fucking time in the world
These days we have lots of computers, we even have iPods and AppleTV and more is coming. I got no time to fuck with them. I don't want to choose a pencil and pen and then later realize I need white-out, I want to choose a pencil case that has everything in it, in every case, so that I am always ready to work no matter what comes up.
I saw a guy on here the other day arguing that it is wasteful for Apple to put Wi-Fi in all their boxes when some users don't need it. He is missing the point that it is wasteful to take Wi-Fi OUT of some boxes and then put it back in later, all based on the changing needs of users. If you buy a system without Wi-Fi and then a year later pay an IT guy to put Wi-Fi in you have just shot yourself in the fucking foot. You just paid the IT guy more money to install and configure and test that Wi-Fi than it would have cost to just buy a system with Wi-Fi from the start and let the user either use it or not as required over the life of the machine.
> It's a whole lot easier to create playlists when one can just write a Perl script on the device, instead of fumbling through some bloated GUI (iTunes).
First, that is only true for Perl coders, and even then it is a pretty sketchy statement.
Second, you can script your iPod with AppleScript on the Mac. iTunes exposes its functionality as objects. There is no need to touch iTunes. You can create and modify playlists both in iTunes and directly on an iPod that is attached also. You can encode and transcode, rip, mix, burn all from outside of iTunes.
Further, because in AppleScript can always say:
tell application "Terminal" to do shell script foo.. you can also script your iPod with Unix scripting. If you want to use Perl or Python that is there also along with Ruby. If you want to use DOM Scripting you can go:
tell application "Safari" to do javascript foo... there is no shortage of iPod scripting options.
If you want to drop media files on an icon and they go directly on your iPod you can do that very easily with iPod + iTunes if you are using a Mac.
iTunes on the Mac is scriptable, its functionality is exposed as programmatic objects. If your iPod is called "iPod" and you make a playlist in iTunes called "iPod Playlist" and set your iPod to sync whatever is on that playlist, then you can use this AppleScript to add files to your iPod:
on open theFiles tell application "iTunes" repeat with theFile in theFiles add theFile to playlist "iPod Playlist" end repeat update "iPod" end tell end open
(Paste the above script into Script Editor and Save as an application. Drop files on your new application to add them to your iPod. Repeat.)
You can also add files directly to the iPod using "device playlist" but it is probably not necessary.
The above is a top-of-the-head simple example. You could easily add to it to deal with a full iPod, to remove the oldest items from the playlist in that case or whatever. The point is that you don't have to work with iTunes in the way that everyone else does, its functionality can be used as a library for your AppleScript applications.
This is a good place to start for iTunes scripting:
> Why would they use the relatively high powered Wifi instead of the low power Bluetooth for this kind of short-range wireless?
Because the one and only useful purpose for Wi-Fi in an iPod is real-time streaming of content to other devices on a Wi-Fi network. Why? Because other devices are likely to include the TV or speakers that the iPod lacks by definition, while at the same time, the other devices on the network might easily lack the content that is stored on your iPod video. This is how it works today with a Mac. Tomorrow it will work this way with iPhone and the day after that iPod.
If you examine Wi-Fi syncing for even like a half hour from a technical perspective it is a non-starter. It is still always going to be better to plug into the dock connector. Even if it takes you a full minute to plug the device in, you will get that time back even if you are only syncing one TV show because the USB will be at least 4x faster. Also the USB provides power and a way to do firmware updates.
> Just one thing and that is plugin support for extensions and add ons. It means that people could easily write things like cross faders, > support for additional codecs, etc.
This exists one level down from iTunes, in OS X.
You can add codecs through QuickTime. Once you add a codec to QuickTime it is available in all of your applications from both Apple and third-parties, both playback and authoring apps.
The plug-in format for audio processing is called "Audio Units"... it is part of CoreAudio. OS X ships with about 10 Audio Units, things like EQ and such. There are hundreds of third-party Audio Units, some are free, some are commercial. There are various plug-in hosts, you can pipe your iTunes output through there easily. These are professional tools, the highest quality.
> Of course, there are probably some major security risks around stuff like that... But it would still be cool.
Not if you build it in the right way, which Apple has obviously done because it's working great for audio and video content creators, these are the reasons why people buy Macs, to get this stuff.
The arguments against music subscriptions on Roughly Drafted seemed to me to be based on the past history of music subscription services, and not on anything to do with Apple, fanboy or otherwise.
I know lots of people with iPods but I don't know anybody who has every joined a music subscription service. XM and Sirius are having trouble making that work and they send the content to you wirelessly by satellite in dozens of simultaneous streams. Even there, people are having trouble paying $12 per month for radio. HBO has to do lots of exclusive content to make their subscription work and they are unique in that they started early in cable.
I don't think the different-countries issue is technical at all. Especially not with Apple, who always try to make just one product for the whole world. Rather it is a legal issue.
I live in the U.S. now but lived in Canada in the past. Canadians are always complaining about having to wait 6 months or a year for something to cross the border and Canada is as similar to the U.S. as you are going to find. However Canada is actually another country. It has its own laws and traditions and institutions and if you transplant your iTunes Store from California to B.C. you have to make sure you that 20% of the content in your store is by Canadian artists or producers - there are special rules for what qualifies - and that is just the first of 100 things I can think of that are different, off the top of my head.
In other words, when it opens up in your country, it may be called iTunes Store but it is unique to your country or region. The lawyers that are involved with this... it boggles the mind.
> 802.11n is on the horizon. When that is in place, you will probably see a wifi iPod.
Every Apple product already has Wi-Fi "n" except the iPod. It is in all the computers, base stations, routers, AppleTV, and iPhone.
The thing with Wi-Fi "n" is that it is the first video-ready Wi-Fi. Lesser Wi-Fi is fine for audio but useless for video.
Wi-Fi "n" will start in iPod video and trickle to all iPods, even shuffle eventually. This is because if you are 150 meters from an AppleTV you are a TV/radio station for that AppleTV. You can stream audio video in real-time to that AppleTV. You can stop by a friend's place and share a TV show with no DRM issues, you can show a 30 second commercial your company just developed on the client's 50 inch screen without leaving a copy behind. For all the reasons it makes sense to be able to do this with Mac + AppleTV today you want to do it with iPod tomorrow.
Syncing is not what Wi-Fi is for. USB is 400 kbps while even the newest Wi-Fi "n" is only 100 kbps under the most ideal of conditions. Further, iTunes Store has already doubled the file size of both their audio and video once and it will double again in the future. Finally, you also charge the battery and perform maintenance with the wired connection, it is solving a lot of problems for us that we don't even know we have.
All of Apple's products have Wi-Fi "n" in them right now except for iPod. Note the iPhone is essentially an iPod with Wi-Fi.
A key feature of AppleTV is you can stream video to it over Wi-Fi. Hard to imagine that the next iPod video doesn't have Wi-Fi "n" in it for exactly this reason. The Wi-Fi is not for syncing if you examine that for a moment it is foolish. You need power anyway, and USB is multiple times faster, and the content files are getting bigger, not smaller, as quality is improved (iTunes audio just doubled in size recently, video has already doubled in size once since it was added).
Getting audio and video from an arbitrary iPod to arbitrary TV/speakers in real-time is the reason to have Wi-Fi in an iPod. Even if you plug it into power for a two-hour movie it is still convenient not to have to make AV connections, especially when there are like 5 different kinds. For hours of music playback or for one TV show or a 5 minute video clip you want iPod and AppleTV to talk to each other easily.
> when I installed a new OS or go to a new PC
Now I see what is making iTunes so hard for you to use.
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Every business conference they give away an iPod as a door prize. I mean every business conference in every city every day all over the world. It accounts for 76% of all iPods sold.
> The early pda phones lacked keyboards. I've had three such phones. The lack made them a pain to use as a phone.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which there won't be a Bluetooth or iPod-dock keyboard for iPhone, but I simply cannot. If you are one of the rare people who wants a keyboard for your iPhone I'm sure you will have a choice of 3-4. Expect one or two from PC keyboard manufacturers, and one or two from iPod accessory makers.
> Try using a touch screen for navigating a touch-tone menu. You have to pull the phone away from your ear to press the buttons.
You can clearly use the included headphones with microphone, which are recommended anyway because you can listen to music playback between calls. There is also an Apple-branded Bluetooth headset coming, and you can use other ones also.
On many phones you have the buttons right below the screen it is the same situation.
You also have less reason to use a touch-tone menu, because you have a full-scale Web browser in iPhone.
> Not everyone will use their smartphone in the same way. The ability to install custom apps and memory allows the vendor
> to sell one system that all customers can customize to meet their needs.
You could say the exact same thing about iPods and the iPhone has all the iPod features and more.
There are 3000 accessories that have zero IT overhead, you just plug them on and they work, the software is already inside. There are also installable games for iPod, the same will be true for iPhone.
I don't know how many Web sites there are right now, or how many qualify as Web apps, but they all run on iPhone. That is a lot of apps that you don't have in a typical smartphone that doesn't have a real Web browser.
> It's sad that my four-year-old Palm has a better feature set than this as-yet-unreleased phone of the future.
That's just dumb.
> Without the ability to install custom apps on it
Web apps. It has a Web browser. A real one. You can access the company network over Wi-Fi and run the Web apps you already have. You can VPN from elsewhere.
> Mobile phone manufacturers are dependent upon operators to sell their phones at a subsidized price which they recoup on expensive pricing plans
Apple is doing it differently.
1) they have their own retail stores and online store, their own sales channels.
2) the $499/$599 is the full price of the iPhone. That is not a hardware subsidized price. Instead, AT&T is going to sell you cheaper minutes, and you the consumer are going to be able to properly compare the iPhone to the iPod line.
3) iPhone has Wi-Fi "n" and a real Web browser, so the user is not dependent on the cell carrier to provide them with a data service unless they are out of Wi-Fi. VOIP also provides leverage, and Cisco wants to help with that, they're making it quite public that they want some of AT&T's lunch already.
4) the phone part of the iPhone is more of a soft phone, just one application on a handheld computer, it is more network-agnostic than any other phone, it will run on every phone network and still act the same, it is abstracted an extra level away from the carrier, so the carrier matters even less.
5) AT&T has not had to do anything at all and yet they got over 1,000,000 emails saying "I want to buy an iPhone" so I would be surprised if AT&T tries to squeeze Steve Jobs' balls any time soon
>> "You're arguing that a hypothetical bug in an unreleased product makes Windows Mobile better?"
> You're arguing that lack of choice is a good thing?
Where is the lack of choice?
Out of the box, you can run Gmail on your iPhone, you can run Yahoo mail, you can run Hotmail, you can run the Webmail from your Web hosting company, you can run whatever email you want. It has a full-scale, desktop-class, Web applications spec Web browser with the equivalent features of Firefox but with better typography.
On Windows Mobile you can choose from a handful of apps that are made with the same MS dev tools on the same MS operating system, often using MS "standards" and they cost money and you have to update them and authorize them and you also have to make sure to get the right app for the particular hardware/software combination you are using (e.g. do you have a touch screen?) it is like Windows 3.1 in there.
The thing with iPhone is that it has 21st century computing features in there almost for free along with the phone and iPod that people will actually buy the iPhone for. The parts of the iPhone that could be said to be stolen from the Mac are basically extras in "the iPod phone". It is not even primarily a handheld computer. On Windows Mobile you are paying good money for a 1993 computing experience and Microsoft's famous QA. It is not even a fair fight.
> I have no compunctions about saying that Keynote blows PowerPoint completely out of the water in every possible respect.
When people refer to An Inconvenient Truth as a "PowerPoint presentation" that is a laugh because PowerPoint cannot do graphics of that size or quality. Those are not 800x600 256-color PowerPoint slides in that movie.
> Apple hasn't had to say anything, QuickTime supports Flash (through version 7 or so) so the iPhone will run Flash apps.
> The downside is QT is usually one version behind the mainstream Flash release.
No, I don't think this is true. I don't think you can say that the iPhone runs QuickTime per se. It is more likely that there is an H.264 decoder in there and an AAC decoder like in an iPod.
There are various ways Apple could go with this, but I would be surprised if iPhone supports Flash. I would be extremely surprised if they support Flash video such as YouTube. Purely for technical reasons.
> I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support.
... it is WebKit (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and the always-on Wi-Fi "n" and cell network connection.
This feature has already been announced in OS X Leopard as far back as last June.
I'm sure Apple would appreciate it if you would wait until you actually get your iPhone to complain about what's not in there.
> That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
You can use any Web-based email, there is a full-scale desktop-class Web browser in iPhone.
> It integrates so well with my Mac!
The iPhone integrates with iTunes just like an iPod. Use either Mac or Windows, that has already been announced.
> Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move.
It runs Web apps, therefore even if there is no way to install native software, the user will have billions of applications.
In other words, the Cocoa API is not the most important iPhone API
Right now most mobiles are offering the personal computer application experience from pre-1995: you install a 31 kb application that manages memory so that you can install an 81 kb game. Think about it.
> Double-click on a button and you're immediately taken to the code editor
You're comparing the user interface of the IDE which is somewhat interesting, but what I find REALLY contributes to ease of use and rapid development is when you have lots of objects and components that you can access "for free" no matter what you are doing. If you are working in Xcode you don't have to do any audio coding because CoreAudio is there, you don't have to do graphics because of CoreImage, you don't have to do animation because of CoreAnimation, and if you want to display any kind of audio or video you have QuickTime, and WebKit gives your app HTML, JavaScript, and all of CSS 2.1, not to mention the way you can work with PDF.
Similarly, when you start working with AppleScript, then many of the built-in applications and many third party applications are objects that you can utilize. So if you want to search text files, you ask a text editor to do it, if you want to run a shell script, you can ask Terminal to do that. You just save your script as an application and you can make very useful little apps with almost no code, but what makes them powerful is that they're making images with Photoshop, encoding movies with QuickTime, saving HTML files with BBEdit.
One thing with the Mac is Apple builds in a lot of software and exposes a lot of stuff to developers, so there is just a ton of stuff to build on in Mac OS X.
From what I read it seems like the "closed" part is that you can't install applications directly onto the iPhone ... instead they get on your iPhone through iTunes, same as audio and video and firmware updates and contacts and photos and iPod games.
... everything on the iPod is just a cache for iTunes. It is not surprising that they're going to continue to do the same thing with iPhone. You will actually just customize your iTunes further as usual and some stuff from there will go on your iPhone, as usual. The greater capabilities of the iPhone hint at bigger apps than what's on iPods today but that system is in place and iPhone can certainly run Cocoa.
When you plug an iPod or iPhone into iTunes it is like you go into maintenance mode, you pull into a pit stop. There are like 100 hidden advantages that Apple is taking out of that system. For example, if you lose your iPod or it dies completely you can get another one and plug it into your iTunes and sync and you are back to exactly where you were
At one point there was an Xcode update that had an "Intel" check box in it, that was all you had to do to build your app for Intel as well as PowerPC. It wouldn't be surprising to see an "iPhone" checkbox show up there and some UI facilities so you can build your Cocoa app for Intel, PowerPC, and iPhone in one go. Maybe they'll release that as soon as WWDC. Certainly I would expect more information about iPhone application development at this year's WWDC.
> If you have a need to view Powerpoint presentations on your mobile phone, Microsoft is right, the iPhone is not for you.
The iPhone is also an iPod. If you have the need to VIEW any kind of screen-based media then the iPhone is definitely for you. It is painless to hook it up to a TV also just like an iPod. It will crash much less than your Windows laptop when giving a presentation.
There will be a PowerPoint Quick Look plug-in for OS X Leopard also if there isn't one already. In that case, you can open a PowerPoint presentation for viewing without converting it to something standard. PowerPoint on the Mac can output directly to an MPEG-4 movie that is iPod-ready also.
The key with the iPhone is it will be more versatile than other phones, and it will be much easier to use than other phones, so whether you are in business or whatever you're doing, many people will apply iPhone in a productive way.
> it's certainly useful to be able to read word and pdf documents when you are on the go
It is really, really easy to do this stuff with OS X. The PDF reading capabilities of the iPhone have already been shown off, and you can open Word documents with OS X for a few versions now. Authoring this stuff is also easy on the Mac even without Microsoft or Adobe because Apple do their own PDF stuff and have their own Microsoft file format converters.
Leopard's Quick Look feature is a system that enables you to view any document (view only) no matter what the file type, whether open or proprietary. For each file type there is an OS X plug-in that describes enough about it to open it for viewing. So expect the iPhone to be able to view every kind of document.
Of course you can already view about 200 different file types with QuickTime so there is not going to be a lot of stuff that the iPhone can't deal with.
There is absolutely no handheld application that can beat a real Web browser. The iPhone has one, and other handhelds don't.
With Windows Mobile you pay for and then install and maintain a mini MS Office suite like you are a Windows 3.1 user. With iPhone you just go to Google and run their office suite over the Web, no install, no maintenance, and you can also use Yahoo Office or whatever else comes down the Internet tubes in the future.
WebKit is like Firefox with great typography and text-shadow. Many Windows users are going to hold their iPhone up to their PC screen and ask themselves why the Web looks so much better on their phone than in Internet Explorer.
Another nice thing with iPhone is that if your CEO has one he is going to want the corporate Web site to be W3C compatible instead of Microsoft compatible. The iPhone makes the case for the cross-platform post-PC World Wide Web.
Microsoft likes to copy Product A and change "/" to "\" and call it Microsoft Product B. Frequently they get sued over this and they pay people off and it perpetuates the fiction that Microsoft invents things. It is part of the Microsoft Story that Bill Gates and Paul Allen brought computing to the masses by inventing the personal computer.
When the QuickTime file format was standardized as MPEG-4, with H.264 video and AAC audio for consumer devices, this effectively was open source QuickTime, leveling the playing field in multimedia. But rather than license MPEG-4 like Apple, Sony, Panasonic, Nintendo, rest of the world, Microsoft copied MPEG-2 as Windows Media. However they have now had to pay legal compensation to the MPEG-2 creators that they ripped off for Windows Media. Courts looked at the technology behind WMA and MP3 and ordered Microsoft to pay Fraunhofer, the creators of MP3, as if they had just licensed MP3 in the first place, which is what they should have done. You only have two honest choices: invent your own, license somebody else's. Microsoft spends a huge amount of time and energy and resources avoiding either of those honest choices.
So getting sued is part of their business model. They have money in the bank to pay future legal fees as compensation for crimes they are currently committing and that only they may even know they are guilty of right now. They have money in the bank for crimes they have not even committed yet. Everybody is like "why is their cash hoard so much larger than any other company?" Because the people doing the hoarding at Microsoft know where the bodies are buried.
The Mac is one object. It is an integrated system. Mac users don't know about various kinds of optical drive standards and other extraneous uninteresting bullshit. Since 2001 I can put a CD or DVD in my Mac optical drive whether it is blank or not it will just work. If I make a DVD-Video disc it will just work in consumer players. Apple takes care of that shit so that Mac users can focus on being artists and lawyers and Web developers, not IT staff.
Also on the Mac, we do not miss PCI because in the first place, Macs always have a whole range of stuff built-in, and even FireWire goes back to the 20th century, so plugging stuff on when you need it has been the rule. I have a MOTU 896HD FireWire sampler here for many years when I want multichannel audio it is hot plug and go. I have used it on about five Macs including a PowerBook recording a live concert, it beats PCI so many times over it is not funny. Also, standalone devices like this do not steal CPU from your machine like a lot of integrated peripherals.
A lot of the ways that the PC market works are built on these assumptions:
- you have only one personal computer
- you are a full-blown IT nerd
- you have all the fucking time in the world
- you love to do Microsoft's QA for them for free
- you have all the fucking time in the world
These days we have lots of computers, we even have iPods and AppleTV and more is coming. I got no time to fuck with them. I don't want to choose a pencil and pen and then later realize I need white-out, I want to choose a pencil case that has everything in it, in every case, so that I am always ready to work no matter what comes up.
I saw a guy on here the other day arguing that it is wasteful for Apple to put Wi-Fi in all their boxes when some users don't need it. He is missing the point that it is wasteful to take Wi-Fi OUT of some boxes and then put it back in later, all based on the changing needs of users. If you buy a system without Wi-Fi and then a year later pay an IT guy to put Wi-Fi in you have just shot yourself in the fucking foot. You just paid the IT guy more money to install and configure and test that Wi-Fi than it would have cost to just buy a system with Wi-Fi from the start and let the user either use it or not as required over the life of the machine.
> It's a whole lot easier to create playlists when one can just write a Perl script on the device, instead of fumbling through some bloated GUI (iTunes).
.. you can also script your iPod with Unix scripting. If you want to use Perl or Python that is there also along with Ruby. If you want to use DOM Scripting you can go:
... there is no shortage of iPod scripting options.
First, that is only true for Perl coders, and even then it is a pretty sketchy statement.
Second, you can script your iPod with AppleScript on the Mac. iTunes exposes its functionality as objects. There is no need to touch iTunes. You can create and modify playlists both in iTunes and directly on an iPod that is attached also. You can encode and transcode, rip, mix, burn all from outside of iTunes.
Further, because in AppleScript can always say:
tell application "Terminal" to do shell script foo
tell application "Safari" to do javascript foo
> they paved the way for large hard drive mp3 players
LARGE is the operative word. Heavy is another word. Hard-to-use is three words.
If you want to drop media files on an icon and they go directly on your iPod you can do that very easily with iPod + iTunes if you are using a Mac.
iTunes on the Mac is scriptable, its functionality is exposed as programmatic objects. If your iPod is called "iPod" and you make a playlist in iTunes called "iPod Playlist" and set your iPod to sync whatever is on that playlist, then you can use this AppleScript to add files to your iPod:
on open theFiles
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with theFile in theFiles
add theFile to playlist "iPod Playlist"
end repeat
update "iPod"
end tell
end open
(Paste the above script into Script Editor and Save as an application. Drop files on your new application to add them to your iPod. Repeat.)
You can also add files directly to the iPod using "device playlist" but it is probably not necessary.
The above is a top-of-the-head simple example. You could easily add to it to deal with a full iPod, to remove the oldest items from the playlist in that case or whatever. The point is that you don't have to work with iTunes in the way that everyone else does, its functionality can be used as a library for your AppleScript applications.
This is a good place to start for iTunes scripting:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
One burden of being a Mac user is watching Windows users always doing things the hard way.
Ha ha ha that was funny because you are using Windows yet you are complaining about bugs.
> Why would they use the relatively high powered Wifi instead of the low power Bluetooth for this kind of short-range wireless?
Because the one and only useful purpose for Wi-Fi in an iPod is real-time streaming of content to other devices on a Wi-Fi network. Why? Because other devices are likely to include the TV or speakers that the iPod lacks by definition, while at the same time, the other devices on the network might easily lack the content that is stored on your iPod video. This is how it works today with a Mac. Tomorrow it will work this way with iPhone and the day after that iPod.
If you examine Wi-Fi syncing for even like a half hour from a technical perspective it is a non-starter. It is still always going to be better to plug into the dock connector. Even if it takes you a full minute to plug the device in, you will get that time back even if you are only syncing one TV show because the USB will be at least 4x faster. Also the USB provides power and a way to do firmware updates.
> Just one thing and that is plugin support for extensions and add ons. It means that people could easily write things like cross faders,
... it is part of CoreAudio. OS X ships with about 10 Audio Units, things like EQ and such. There are hundreds of third-party Audio Units, some are free, some are commercial. There are various plug-in hosts, you can pipe your iTunes output through there easily. These are professional tools, the highest quality.
> support for additional codecs, etc.
This exists one level down from iTunes, in OS X.
You can add codecs through QuickTime. Once you add a codec to QuickTime it is available in all of your applications from both Apple and third-parties, both playback and authoring apps.
The plug-in format for audio processing is called "Audio Units"
> Of course, there are probably some major security risks around stuff like that... But it would still be cool.
Not if you build it in the right way, which Apple has obviously done because it's working great for audio and video content creators, these are the reasons why people buy Macs, to get this stuff.
The arguments against music subscriptions on Roughly Drafted seemed to me to be based on the past history of music subscription services, and not on anything to do with Apple, fanboy or otherwise.
I know lots of people with iPods but I don't know anybody who has every joined a music subscription service. XM and Sirius are having trouble making that work and they send the content to you wirelessly by satellite in dozens of simultaneous streams. Even there, people are having trouble paying $12 per month for radio. HBO has to do lots of exclusive content to make their subscription work and they are unique in that they started early in cable.
I don't think the different-countries issue is technical at all. Especially not with Apple, who always try to make just one product for the whole world. Rather it is a legal issue.
... it boggles the mind.
I live in the U.S. now but lived in Canada in the past. Canadians are always complaining about having to wait 6 months or a year for something to cross the border and Canada is as similar to the U.S. as you are going to find. However Canada is actually another country. It has its own laws and traditions and institutions and if you transplant your iTunes Store from California to B.C. you have to make sure you that 20% of the content in your store is by Canadian artists or producers - there are special rules for what qualifies - and that is just the first of 100 things I can think of that are different, off the top of my head.
In other words, when it opens up in your country, it may be called iTunes Store but it is unique to your country or region. The lawyers that are involved with this
> 802.11n is on the horizon. When that is in place, you will probably see a wifi iPod.
Every Apple product already has Wi-Fi "n" except the iPod. It is in all the computers, base stations, routers, AppleTV, and iPhone.
The thing with Wi-Fi "n" is that it is the first video-ready Wi-Fi. Lesser Wi-Fi is fine for audio but useless for video.
Wi-Fi "n" will start in iPod video and trickle to all iPods, even shuffle eventually. This is because if you are 150 meters from an AppleTV you are a TV/radio station for that AppleTV. You can stream audio video in real-time to that AppleTV. You can stop by a friend's place and share a TV show with no DRM issues, you can show a 30 second commercial your company just developed on the client's 50 inch screen without leaving a copy behind. For all the reasons it makes sense to be able to do this with Mac + AppleTV today you want to do it with iPod tomorrow.
Syncing is not what Wi-Fi is for. USB is 400 kbps while even the newest Wi-Fi "n" is only 100 kbps under the most ideal of conditions. Further, iTunes Store has already doubled the file size of both their audio and video once and it will double again in the future. Finally, you also charge the battery and perform maintenance with the wired connection, it is solving a lot of problems for us that we don't even know we have.
All of Apple's products have Wi-Fi "n" in them right now except for iPod. Note the iPhone is essentially an iPod with Wi-Fi.
A key feature of AppleTV is you can stream video to it over Wi-Fi. Hard to imagine that the next iPod video doesn't have Wi-Fi "n" in it for exactly this reason. The Wi-Fi is not for syncing if you examine that for a moment it is foolish. You need power anyway, and USB is multiple times faster, and the content files are getting bigger, not smaller, as quality is improved (iTunes audio just doubled in size recently, video has already doubled in size once since it was added).
Getting audio and video from an arbitrary iPod to arbitrary TV/speakers in real-time is the reason to have Wi-Fi in an iPod. Even if you plug it into power for a two-hour movie it is still convenient not to have to make AV connections, especially when there are like 5 different kinds. For hours of music playback or for one TV show or a 5 minute video clip you want iPod and AppleTV to talk to each other easily.
> when I installed a new OS or go to a new PC
Now I see what is making iTunes so hard for you to use.