iPhone!

Well, Apple announced a new iPhone today. Oh, I am excited! It looks lovely; slimmer than the old one, better battery life, faster, 3G, GPS, and, most significantly, way cheaper; Jobs alleged that it would be under $199 everywhere that it's being sold! It'll be available on the 11th of June; I'm going to be sorely tempted, I know...

Watching the stock price was quite interesting; Apple's fell throughout the keynote, then surged up when the 3G iPhone itself was announced. If you had some nerves, you could make a fair bit of money on Apple's keynotes; this is always the pattern. Research in Motion's (the Blackberry people), meanwhile, fell sharply, then recovered slightly; they're still a bit down. Not surprising; given that the new iPhone has Exchange integration and so forth, it's easy to see that it could be a threat.

There were two other interesting announcements. The first, I feel, is a terrible mistake on Apple's part. They're relaunching an enhanced .mac service at me.com, with email, calendars, photos, files and so forth syncing to the phone. The big mistake, in my mind, is that they are going to be charging for this; $99 a year. You might think that many people would be willing to pay for the convenience. Which leads me to the other interesting announcement.

One issue a lot of people had with the iPhone SDK was that you can't have apps running in the background; this would, on the face of it, make it very hard to write an app which notifies the user, or does something, when something happens. Noticing this deficiency, Apple are releasing a service which allows third parties to push messages to peoples' phones, notifying them that something has happened. With this, and the Google APIs, it seems to me that one could more or less replicate the me.com functionality with Google's services quite easily, and for free, or at least for far cheaper than Apple are doing it. Everyone already has Google accounts, too. I'd be amazed if me.com is a success.

One other thing; no video-conferencing with forward-facing camera, as was much-claimed beforehand. No loss, say I; I've never been convinced that anyone uses videoconferencing except to impress people in big corporate conference rooms, or to show dodgy Internet people their naughty bits. Exhibitionists will just have to stick to Nokia for now.

All in all, I'm really impressed... and I really want one. (an iPhone, not an exhibitionist). I supppose I could justify it to myself on the basis that I might write apps for it and sell them on the app store...

Oh, also, MacOS 10.6 is coming out in a year or so. It doesn't look terribly interesting so far, though besides the now-mandatory faster Javascript, they'll apparently be doing clever things with GPUs and many-core computers. Making a HPC bid, perhaps? Cray already have the glamour supercomputer market sewn up, I suspect...

Embarrassing iPhone article from CNN, and Flash musings

The iPhone is on everybody's mind right now, or at least on the minds of all us obsessive Apple followers. It seems fairly certain that a new version, probably 3G, will be released tomorrow.

Here's CNN's take (on the speculative patent-based third-generation iPhone, which they think is the fourth-generation one because the second-generation one due out tomorrow has '3G' in it, you see...). Besides the talk of noted always-just-round-the-corner vapourware Wi-MAX, there's this gem:

Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

Apple has said that Adobe's flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn't perform up to Apple's standards for the iPhone.

Erm. Right. Having more Flash memory makes Macromedia/Adobe Flash faster, you see. The fourth-generation (fifth, or possibly nineteenth in CNN land) will have Java memory to make Sun's Java faster, and possibly Office 2009 memory to make Exchange faster.

Honestly, I realise that they're not a technology writer, but could they at least have someone proofread this crap?

Also, what is going on with that Flash thing, I wonder? The iPhone isn't dramatically slow, and most non-video Flash apps aren't that demanding. If I had to guess, I would say that it was more of a manifestation of Adobe's slowness to port to new platforms (no x86-64 version, yet, remember), and possibly a bit of payback for Apple's cruelly grabbing the Carbon rug from beneath their feet; the next version of Photoshop for MacOS will only be 32bit, allegedly, because Carbon (Apple's old, creaky, SDK, used by Photoshop, MS Office, MCL, various others, and for that matter, I believe, Flash) never made it into the 64bit world; they'll have to switch to Cocoa for that.

Could that be the issue with Flash-on-iPhone? iPhones don't do Carbon at all, I don't think; it's entirely possible that Adobe just didn't have a suitable plugin in time.

Little UI slipup for Apple

This appears on Safari password boxes when you use HTTP authentication without HTTPS. "Your password will be sent in the clear". I mean, I know what they're trying to say, but it's hardly the most obvious message, now, is it? The phrase only appears a few hundred times on Google.

It's surprising here because Apple is famed for its dialogs, especially since the release of MacOS X. The Windows Vista usability guidelines (which even Microsoft don't seem to be to inclined to follow) even take some inspiration from them.

Apple in vast update shocker

The new MacOS X minor version update (10.5.3) is 420mb. That's an hour on a 1Mbit/sec line. Madness, just madness.

Oddly, it is apparently only 140mb for the 32bit MacBook; wonder what the difference is?

Have you bought YOUR chip company yet?

Everyone's doing it! Within a few days of each other, both Sun and Apple bought a chip designer. Apple's makes low-power PowerPCs, Sun's makes (imaginary, as yet) low-power x86s.

Funnily enough, before the Apple/Intel deal, it was widely expected that they would use processors from said PPC designer in their laptops. Interesting... Apple, of course, have kept their options for fleeing to another platform quite open; just about all Apple applications are still compiled for PPC and Intel, which forces developers to consider endian issues and so forth, and a move back to PPC would be particularly easy. However, Apple seems to have most-favoured-vendor status with Intel at the moment, so a move at the moment doesn't look likely. Still, Apple has been known to dump chip makers rather publicly and violently (Motorola over the G4, IBM over the G5), so maybe they're keeping their options open.

Sun's move is more obvious. They bought a low power x86 company. They have a low-power many-cored UltraSparc (T1/2/2+/3) themselves, and would no doubt like to improve it with IP from the acquisition. They might also be interested in making many-cored, low-power x86s, stealing a march on Intel and AMD.

Interesting, nonetheless. I wonder who will be next to buy a weird chip designer? I'm sure Sun is eyeing Azul...

Disturbing UI message of the day

You know how Apple is famed for their wonderful UI design? Well, they don't always hit the nail on the head, it would seem. From the iPhone SDK installer:
Yargh! In fact, it really means that it is installing MacOS 10.5 development tools, but it is one scary way to put it.

In fairness, though, the new version of XCode is quite the prettiest IDE I have ever used. You should see the code completion! And as for the electric brackets... stunning, simply stunning. Brings a tear to the eye.

Sadly, I do most of my proper work in Eclipse (CUSP and ErlIDE), which isn't so pretty.

Apple finally push out Java 6

Apple's latest MacOS update finally (about two years late) pushed out their version of Java 6 (also known, rather confusingly, as Java 1.6). Bizarrely, though, it is 64 bit only, so it will not be used in Safari (which is still always 32 bit); Safari is still on 5.

It doesn't seem to be on by default, but you can enable it through Java Preferences (just type it into Spotlight, then drag 1.6 to the top of the list, and click save).

It really has taken them an amazingly long time, though, considering that it's just Sun Java with OS hooks. Here's an enthusiastic post from 2006 looking forward to its imminent release. Bet he was irritated...

What's it like? Well, Eclipse feels considerably snappier. I'm not a Java programmer, and don't really use any Java apps except Eclipse, so can't really comment further.

Somewhat worrying Macbook Pro issue

After not having used it for 20 minutes or so today, I opened the lid of my new Macbook Pro to see, well, something like this, though without the swirly effect; that seems to one of those taking-photos-of-screens issues:

Vertical dark bars down the screen, more visible on low light settings.

There's a forum post on the subject here, and, as it says, opening and shutting the lid again fixes the problem. This leads me to believe that it's probably a software or firmware problem; maybe some of the screen illumination isn't being switched on correctly.

Scary, nonetheless. I wonder how common it is?

Oddly, it's not the first weird display issue I've had, but the first one was definitely software and only started happening after I upgraded to 10.5.2. Scrolling slowly in Safari would cause some minor distortion of the page being viewed, and buttons in Eclipse flicker madly. This has only happened twice, and rebooting seems to fix it, but annoying all the same.

Macbook Pro!

I got my Macbook Pro today. Oh, it's lovely; I'm very glad now that I didn't go for the Macbook. Amazingly fast, beautiful high-resolution screen, light, decent battery life, surprisingly good keyboard... Next to it my poor old iBook looks quite tawdry.

Anyway, I am now learning to write iPhone applications; great fun, and Apple's documentation really is very helpful.

RIP RIM?

The recent Apple iPhone announcement has caused a lot of fuss, but people have mostly been concentrating on the pending availability of third-party applications. There was something else, though, something which may in the long run do more to boost the thing's market share.

You see, the new iPhone software will support push email, calendar, contacts and so forth from Microsoft Exchange. Through an Exchange plugin, so anyone who has an Exchange server will be able to allow iPhones to use it with no extra software. Compare this to Research in Motion's very popular Blackberry, which seems to still require extra software, and operator support. I'd imagine that many companies, especially smaller companies, will be tempted by the iPhone simply because it will be easier and cheaper to set up.

Where, then, for Blackberry? I suspect that RIM will have to make big changes if they wish to remain a serious player.

The joys of inconsistent user interface design

Today, I installed GMail Notifier, a little widget which changes colour when you have new mail in your GMail account, on Windows Vista. Now, I already use it on my Mac at home, so I thought I knew what to expect. On the Mac, it is a grey envelope which turns red (like the GMail icon, in fact) when you have mail. You can click on it, bringing down a menu with a list of new messages. This is handy.

I was slightly worried installing it on Vista because it clearly states on the website that it's for Windows 2000 and XP; however, there hasn't been a release on Windows in over a year, so they may just not have bothered to change the website; a big oversight for Google, you'd think, but they often don't keep their less prominent websites in wonderful repair.

Anyway, it does seem to work correctly on Vista, but the interface is different to the Mac version, and, in my opinion, worse. The envelope turns blue instead of red; this isn't a big deal, but it's quite a lot less obvious. More irritatingly, when you click on it, you don't get a list of message subjects. I'm not sure why, as this is an obviously useful, clever feature present in the other version, which can hardly be difficult to implement.

Even more irritatingly, it doesn't tell you how many messages there are! On MacOS, the number of messages appears on the toolbar icon, but not on Windows. I can't see any reason that this should be technically infeasible, so it looks like just poor sharing of ideas between the same teams. This same problem seems to be epidemic in Microsoft, by the way; just compare the feature sets of IE5.5 for Mac and its contemporary Windows version to see what I mean.

There's one other issue, but I suspect it to be more of a Vista oddity than a GMail notifier one. On installation, it asks you which browser you'd like to use. I left it on the default setting, 'System Default', as I had my default set to Firefox; I cannot abide weird, menu-less IE7. When clicking, however, on 'View new messages', it came up in IE7. I'm not sure why; other applications used the correct browser, and when I set it explicitly to use Firefox it was fine. I've seen this with other applications on Vista from time to time, though, so am inclined to blame Microsoft until proven otherwise.

Things I didn't know about my Mac

One thing that's always vaguely annoyed me about my Mac is that it was not (I thought) possible to turn off the (Mac-supplied) monitor without turning off the machine as well; when you press the off button on the monitor, the computer tries to switch off.

Turns out that there's a setting in the System Preferences Display console, of all places, to switch this behaviour to actually switching off the monitor. Boy do I feel silly now.

Welcome Datacomp!

A number of years ago, a company produced a third-party keyboard for the Apple Mac. Not in itself a particularly unusual or interesting occurance, I suppose. However, this was a keyboard with a quirk. Every now and again, completely without provocation, it would 'type', or send to the computer, the words "welcome datacomp". This was, presumably, a debugging value of some sort which mistakenly got into production.

The fun bit is that you can occasionally spot the phrase inserted randomly into older websites and newsgroup postings.

• Here, it intrudes on an endorsement of a record turntable.


• And here, a post about a game level editor is graced with its presence.


• In a mysterious Taiwanese site.


• In music babble.


• And, best of all, a book reviewer notices and questions the presence of the inexplicable phrase in a review of a book on Buddhism.

Sadly, the keyboard never became very common, and there are no modern examples.

Zunetastic!

Remember the Zune? Yes, that Zune. Microsoft's dodgy MP3 player, the one chiefly famous for (a) not working on Vista (fixed now, I believe) and (b) being the first piece of consumer electronics of the 21st century to come in brown. After much fanfare at launch, it appears to more or less have faded into obscurity.

Anyway, it turns out that some people still love it, brown or not. Here is a guy who has had not one, but two, Zune tattoos. (Please note that you click that link at your own risk; it ain't a pretty sight.) He has also been invited to visit Microsoft. Now, if I were him, I really would think twice about this; when it comes to it, if Microsoft don't want this to be a marketing coup for Apple, their only real option is to have him killed. He just looks too perfect next to those Apple ads depicting operating systems as people.

Shortly thereafter, he left the highly important crappy MP3 player forum in a huff.

By the way, the whole website is a bit weird, as are most forums devoted to worshipping a particular brand of consumer product.

Please note that lots of people also have Apple tattoos, but they're generally a little more svelte.