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So, there has been quite a bit of rumours going around about the iPhone 3G and whatever else Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at WWDC2008. I heard so many stupid and ridiculous predictions that I felt the need to write my own thoughts out and do my own predictions for you to criticise in return.

Phone 3G

I think we can be sure of the iPhone 3G launch, although I doubt the name will be the “iPhone 3G”. The 3G name focusses a bit too much on the lack of 3G in the current model and doesn’t encompass all the new features I bet they will introduce next to the speed bump. What other new features they will exactly introduce is hard to say, but one thing is pretty clear to me: there won’t just be one iPhone model anymore. This might happen this year, or next year, but the iPhone won’t stay a lonely child.

iPhone Line

Like with the Mac and the iPod, Apple has always started with one, or a few, very strong products. The limited choice introduced in these products made it clear where these products were to be placed in the market, and in return people embraced these products for there apparant simplicity, which was to me enforced by the limited choice. In time though, the strategy Apple has had was to slowly expand a product into a line, adding more models that fit into the needs of certain focus groups of customers. See the iMac which in return spawned a few more generations of iMacs but also the Mac mini. But probably more prominent is the history of the iPod (now the iPod classic) and the introduction of the iPod Mini, Nano, Shuffle, Photo, Video, Touch, and eventually the iPhone.

For the iPhone I can really see Apple adopt the same strategy. They clearly have already committed to bring the next generation iPhone to more telcos in the rumours that have been going around, and the next step is to get those people who bought a first generation iPhone to eventually upgrade to something 2nd or 3rd gen that better fits their own personal needs. This might be a iPhone Pro that has GPS, 3G, bigger screen, and all business features any CEO might wish for, or it could just as well be a iPhone Nano that is a very simplified iPhone (no wifi, smaller screen) but only a fraction of the price.

Why it took so long to make the SDK

When you actually come to think of the iPhone as a line of products, it starts to make sense why it took Apple so long to make their iPhone SDK. I don’t think they spend all that time and all that effort into making sure all their future 3rd party apps will work fine on just 1 device. I think the SDK includes a lot off little magic bits that make sure that their apps can run on any of their short-term to-be-released devices, without any issues. I don’t know for sure, but it would make sense even for the SDK to have some integrated resolution independence to solve the problems of multiple devices with multiple resolutions like you get with mobile Java Apps.

Tablet

Once you consider a iPhone line and the possibility of an iPhone Pro, you might come to think of Apple releasing an Apple Tablet. As far as I’m concerned, one thing is clear: Apple won’t release a Tablet with plain OSX on it. With their history of the Newton, iPhone, and iPod Touch they have proven that touchscreen, handheld, portable devices require a different kind of user interaction to succeed. For exactly this reason the iPhone sports a nice “big-button”-userinterface and not something that requires a stylus.

So if we would see a tablet, would it use the iPhone OSX? I don’t know, but again it makes sense in retrospect to the long development time they have had on the iPhone SDK. Another question is: would it be equipped with a “slide out” keyboard?

Keyboard

Now the addition of a “real” keyboard is one thing I have heard quite a few times, especially in combination of the rumours of a “bigger” or “pro” iPhone. it is fairly simple to destroy this rumour with 1 fact: Apple doesn’t consider a real keyboard to be better. They said so at Macworld 2007 and the current iPhone sales figures have proven to them that they were right. Adding a keyboard to an iPhone Pro or a Tablet would be like they admitted that a keyboard was a pro feature. It isn’t. so it won’t be introduced in the iPhone line any time soon.

GPS

The final little rumour that has been going around is the GPS feature. Honestly I don’t know what Apple will do about this, because although it is obvious that having the option would be preferred, it has some caveats. The first option is to have an internal GPS as this will give the most integrated experience. Obviously the issue there would be the demise of the iPhone’s battery life, as GPS uses shitloads of power to run, let alone run constantly. The alternative would be to have a nice external Apple bluetooth GPS receiver, or possibly even support for 3rd party GPS receivers. I say possibly, as the reason I would see Apple make their own external dongle is because they can be a pain to set up to work with a phone. So if Apple controls all the pieces of the puzzle (as they like to) they might be able to make the experience more enjoyable.

Conclusion

There has been loads of speculations going around and I think I highlighted some of the few that annoyed me the most, and I hope I’ve been able to explain why I think they were utter bullshit. Obviously we will have to wait until the end of the keynote on the 9th of June to see if was even remotely close. Until then, let me know if you agree or totally disagree.

While none of the four starters have iPhones just yet (except for Cristiano apparanty), we do have apple notebooks and we are certainly considering them. Thus, I’ll continue the thread that Cristiano started about the new iPhone SDK, announced recently.

I’m a little bit disappointed that the iPhone SDK does not allow you to write software that runs in the background. Only apple’s own software (such as iTunes, which obviously continues to run even when you are not browsing iTunes on your iPhone) has that privilege. Many words have been written about this limitation. That last link in particular sparked my imagination.

Instead of reflecting on the fairness of the background thing, I thought I’d dive into the kind of application you could write if you could run your iPhone software in the background. A bunch of app ideas after the fold!

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There has been some controversy going on about the prohibitions on background processes for iPhone applications using the SDK.

Picture by Alper

This pretty much rules out a client such as the Jaiku mobile client which sends your status updates to a server and gets your buddies’ statuses. But yes there will be ton of useful applications nevertheless.

The single app model reminds me somewhat of my old Palm Vx which also had the concept of a single foreground app. It still is one of the most usable handheld devices I have used with loads of applications available for it. I used it intensively as the wear and tear on the picture probably shows.

Of course this was before the age of connectivity, so a background app could not have done much anyway and later versions of the Palm OS allowed for MP3 playback in the background while you were doing other things.

Palm is all but forgotten now, let’s see how the iPhone does.

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
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Originally posted on the “Cristiano on Tech/Life” blog

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend £35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

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Just a little something I noticed on apple’s wireless keyboard: The command and option keys, which are duplicated on both sides of the space bar, are symmetrical. There’s actually such a thing as a ‘left command key’ and a ‘right command key’ if you need replacement keys, in other words.

Design is in the details!

This article was originally posted at the blog of Sjors Timmer, besides doing MA in Digital Media at Goldsmiths in London, he is also involved in doing web design work

The Jesus Phone

The enormous media hype around the “Jesus-phone” proved it once again: there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there seems to be no other company able to sell a piece of the future than the Cupertino dream-weavers. Once bought however, the great promise turns out to be quite an ordinary thing which is certainly not as good as those futurists had promised. But at that moment it is already too late, so why do we still keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products that are over and over again still not quite there yet?

The Future Promise Paradigm

To get some answers on that question, we can take a look at three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us into accepting things that would normally not directly benefit us optimally.

1. The future is often used to force us to change our habits for own benefits. The products that use this tactic often send the message that “change in our way of working and living” is needed to improve our situation.
2. The promise of the future can be used to keep us from complaining. If a product or service might not be that good today, the promise of improvements in the future is a good incentive to continue on. In other words: be strong, keep going, everything will be alright….. soon.
3. The future is used as a shared dream of mankind, as one day we’ll all be united. If you want the best for the world stay with us, and if you don’t adopt you are obviously against the best interest of mankind.

These partly overlapping points can be found both in business and governmental planning and often tries to explain their choices for the future. (more…)

So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

Just a quick headsup for those mac users who are not particularly excited about upgrading their OS:

Boatloads of Leopard-only developer environment improvements will likely result in many applications releasing new versions that will no longer work in Tiger (10.4). If you’d like to keep your apps up to date, you’ll have to upgrade to Leopard.

Specifically:

• Objective C 2.0 has been released and it looks like a number of important improvements, such as automatic garbage collection, won’t work under Tiger.

• Core Animation makes it easy to add any number of shiny gimmicks to your app. Core Animation only works on Leopard though.

EDIT: Also check out Matt Gemmell’s partial list of 43 leopard-only development features - use any of those and your application becomes Leopard only.

Personally I wasn’t planning on switching until a suitable version of java 6 is released for OS X Leopard, but possibly I’ll be forced into switching sooner than I planned.

(Of course, Cristiano already switched - that’s his personal copy of Leopard above. He’ll write about his experiences installing Leopard soon.)

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.