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Additional iPhone Thoughts and Notes

  • The “Apple” icon sits in front of the iPhone and tv. (yes, lower case). It seems Apple in deeply committed to rebranding as a consumer brand. New iPods, when they announce this year, will also be dramatically changed.
  • The iPhone is most likely a platform on which future high-end iPods will be released. The OS, as stated by Apple, is MacOS X. Essentially Apple have a common base OS from their multi-CPU boxes to the smallest device: in total control of the UI/UX. Or maybe smaller-configuration Mac tablets?
  • The only successful service Apple has is the iTunes store, which sells nearly 60 songs per second. In a connected world of desktops to phones, online services become more critical to tie things together. Both Google and Yahoo! were onstage with Steve at the keynote. There is more to come, here.
  • The target market is the current iPod user, not the standard Mac user. There are way more iPod users in the world than Mac users.
  • Apple has some surprises in Leopard to tie iPhone into the OS. Some people are thinking that there are components of the iPhone that will be in the desktop Leopard.
  • Can it do VoIP? The Wifi would lend itself to this. Breaking the lock on current carriers would be revolutionary. I suspect Apple is going to start out with carrier’s help and breakout. Or, they could test hardware-only sales in free-er 3G markets (Asia, Europe) where there is no lock-in.
  • The specs on the camera are not specified, apart from “2 Megapixels”
  • The operating system market from phones is rather saturated, but Apple could license this OS as there is no substantial potential revenue loss (if they did this with MacOS, they are risking their hardware revenues)
  • The whole experience of using the phone (as a piece of hardware) puts all other interfaces to shame. This alone will benefit all phone users as Nokia et al struggle to make their phones work like an iPhone.

More excellent notes on MediaVidea

Hands on the iPhone from David Pogue, NYT

Apple, Inc: The 2007 Agenda Setting Week of Keynotes

Steve Jobs renamed his company to Apple, Inc. Renamed the iTV to Apple TV and the iPod to iPhone. Well, not quite. However, the iPhone is an iPod with a new OS: a baby MacOS X and lots of connectivity. If you live in the US.

Apple’s first round of product announcements for 2007 at Macworld have been rumoured for many months – if not years. I think the build up has led to disappointment in the Mac-crowd.

The iPhone is available in June in North America, based on a 2 year exclusive with Cingular. Europe is slated for the end of 2007 and Asia for 2008. With the current shenanigans in Australia with Telstra’s new network and others scrambling – I am not asking for an iPhone for Christmas 2007. GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. etc. are all in a nice package where the screen is a touchscreen. Apple have innovated on the UX with multi-finger gestures to make all the apps work in a small package. Looking at the online demos, as you would expect – Apple have gone a long way to correct the current staid phone user interfaces

The Apple TV seems like a nice idea: a media center with wireless and smart integration with the Macs on your local network. Seems a little late and me-too. Not 1080i, nor can it play HD/Blueray DVDs. Niftly little thing, but it doesn’t do enough quite yet.

In what was a strange keynote, there were no MacOS X (a good call since all that would occur are many Leopard vs. Vista comparisons), no new Macs (strange since Intel announced new Quad-core processors overnight) or no new software. The keynote should have been given at CES, not MacWorld!

My opinion is that Apple Inc, as it moves out of the wild-west of computers into the highly controlled world of telecommunications and television is going to have to learn the art of partnering quicker. It is not yet big enough to push its weight around to get its own way. But like the iPod/iTunes store franchise: this could all change within a very short time. Apple is late to the game with both these products, and has a long road ahead to be successful.

Boom! The Ari Gold (Entourage)/Steve Jobs Keynote video

Microsoft, Inc: The 2007 Agenda Setting Week of Keynotes

Took the opportunity to watch Bill Gates and team present at CES 2007. The theme of the Microsoft show was Connected Experiences.

All devices, including the ‘fridge, all connected: this is the vision as described at the beginning, and shown in a futuristic bus-stop, kitchen and bedroom of the future. More than consumer, it pervades other environment – as we are seeing the explosion of the digital decade. In Microsoft’s vision, its most recent products are foundational: Windows Vista, Office 2007 to the Live services: we all must share files, connect email, schedules and files.

Justin Hutchinson gave an overview of Windows Vista, and a glimpse of a couple of things not shown publicly before: not searching, but finding files/apps/websites visted from all local computers. Thumbnails for files in your file system; restore previous copies (named Shadowcopy: “better than going back in time”). From Office 2007, link to live.com to navigate through Live3D using an XBox360 controller into Vista = Live3D fly thru’ (cool)

Also shown was SportsLounge, a new feature of Media Center: HD feed, Media Center, Fox Sports (SportsLounge) alerts based on players. The sooner Australian digital cable has extra, open features such as PVR the better.

Also, there is something in Vista Ultimate: Extras. This will download extra software pieces to the Vista desktop. For example: Groupshot for fixing images where there are multiple people.

Final “wow” feature is a Full motion video desktop background. Oooh, aaahs all round.

Windows Home Server, due in the second half 2007. The video cast feed was cut as a HP video was shown. Auto backup from home network; connectivity Zune XBox, remote from outside home network. Capacity, put new storage in – software move data around. Any house with more than one computer and loads of digital content need a server. From personal experience, doing this by yourself is too tough for the average user. May not be a hit in 2007, but certainly will go off in 2008.

Also coming XBox Live on Vista (Windows) and XBox 360 with IPTV along with HD DVD and Movies download (7Gb for Spiderman returns, formatted HD!). More into on Channel 10.

It will be interesting to compare and contrast with Apple in a few days time. Will Apple get this connectedness? It pervades Microsoft: from Zune to XBox; everything is connected.

Run downs: Engagdet, and Read/Write Web.

Gadget Geek Journey; Desintation 2: Vista Sidebar Gadget

What an interesting day with Windows Vista. It is certainly “polished” than Windows 2000 and XP; things seems to be placed in logical areas. Also took the opportunity to install Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta, which worked flawlessly – all running successfully in Parallels! Two computers in one is a major time saver.

It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expression Web, to complete the Microsoft-centric development environment. Expression Web certainly feels more polished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Closing the loop on my Thursday experimentation with live.com and Vista Sidebar gadgets: and the result is a new little gadget I am alpha testing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gadget.

And it looks sorta like:

Please right-click, save-as a “.gadget”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyricists. Comments and feature requests more than welcome.

Best starting place for the proverbial Hello World experience for Vista Sidebar gadgets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excellent screencast on the Channel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least getting your gadget running and drag and droppable.

You will need to do a little more Javascript, as this triggers events that ensure your sidebar gadget works

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updating. I wonder if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dashcode style of mini development application for widgets? Hope so. Whilst the development process is no more difficult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wiring that could be made easier with a simple builder.

Gadget Geek Journey; Desintation 1: live.com

Time to get serious on my resolutions. Well, at least one anyway; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gadget posting, and a general feeling that gadgets are where it is at for non-professional programmers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer center

Decision time: what to gadget up? A Cricket gadget is underway. I am sure that one of the various national religions of football will follow come March. For weather I can use my real window to look outside. (note: growing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by looking through the window at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyrics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small database, and rendering text smartly onto a random Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to confuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and download the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javascript. Easy. I have a localhost web server running, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, coding music in the ears.

How to test out the gadget? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of harnessing your local gadget to Internet Explorer and the live.com servers to test out before embarrassing yourself publicly! Hmm, seems like you can directly access the test harness with the correctly formed URL. There are three versions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gadget testing Javascript harnesses, Internet Explorer 7 and cross-site scripting are in the midst of a conspiracy to stop testing. Time to hit the production servers with the code.

This posting on the new Gadgets forums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of cleaning up and renaming things as per the recommendations, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Further comment live.com gadgets are simple to create. XML file manifest, or list of what’s important; a CSS file to style your content and the Javascript. This Javascript contains the logic of your gadget which is essentially inserting HTML into the stream. It can gather text externally to generate this HTML into something more interesting than a picture.

Aussie Lingo, Again

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi

Australian lexicon can leave you a few roos loose. And it’s been a corker for years – well, at least since cocky was a chick.
Not as dry as a dead dingo’s donger is the book Tobruk, by Australia’s smartest footballer Peter FitzSimons – a dead easy read, even for non-war history lovers. Highly recommended. Whilst I have read a couple of books on Kokoda, it is next on the list.

Climb every Mountain

Spent the last week and this week on a personal Ruby on Rails project. This involves subversion (as a version management system), mongrel, capistrano, ftp, postgresql, some smarts with DNS, exim and a two-day complete re-install of Debian. That re-install was not expected.

Unix has this wonderful and powerful concept: the root user knows what they are doing at all times. 99.9% of the time this is a safe assumption. 0.1% of the time you type “yes” instead of “no” – removing the kernel in this fashion is highly not recommended.

How do you fix a broken Linux install?

Stage one involved making what is known as a LiveCD, or bootable Linux. I decided to download and boot from a Knoppix LiveCD. A quick restart from the CD, and I could see that the data was intact.

Stage two was installing a new 350GB HD for the data to bring the server up to 0.5TB of storage. The old faithful Unix standbys of dd, fsck from the old 200GB to the new 350GB and start the difficult work.

Stage three is a full Debian reinstall onto the old 200GB with 0.5Gb download of the most current packages, and re-apt on a 686 rather than 386 kernel. This didn’t take too long. Re-configuring all the servers and services: dns, dhcp, CUPS, Samba, Apache, subversion, rails+gems, python took most of the weekend.

Stage four: backup scripts. 0.5TB is too much of a mountain of data to lose.