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misc notes on iphone 3.0

Long time readers won't be surprised to learn that I'm seriously considering installing the beta of iPhone v3 for one single feature alone -- landscape mode in Mail, Notes and SMS. Like many others, I can probably count on three fingers the number of times I've missed not having copy & paste, but every single day there are two fat thumbs that long to romp through the landscape.

Other misc notes on v3:

• Matt Jones is right on the money -- the hardware integration stuff is big news, and an area that's wide open for crazy innovation in all sorts of verticals.

• Mmmm, push notification services. I didn't see any news mentions of developer pricing for that, so I assume they didn't discuss it. This is something to watch: ESPN delivering sports scores is one thing (there are a limited number of sporting events in a year)...messaging apps are another. The use case of real-time messaging notifications (Twitter DMs, IM alerts, etc.) is going to be an interesting one from a pricing perspective, since the volume and timing of those are, by definition, out of the application developer's control.

• In-app purchases are also going to be very interesting from a pricing and user behavior perspective. In their conversation at SxSW, Chris Anderson and Guy Kawaski touched on the psychology of charging even $0.01 v. giving things away for free, and the mental transaction cost involved in making the decision to pay more than zero for an item. The context for that conversation was "the web," so we'll see if the context of "the bright shiny phone" changes that at all.

• I'm assuming that a developer could use the in app purchase mechanism to sell a subscription or bundle of push notification messages. App developers are going to have to get savvy about pricing and business models -- the guys at Pinch Media have to be loving all the things they heard yesterday.

• I'm frankly surprised by the iPod library access APIs -- I'm imagining a whole new slew of UIs for browsing and playing and interacting with your own media. Paul Lamere showed some cool music library visualization stuff from Sun's Search Inside the Music project at SxSW -- I'd love to see some of that work / thinking end up on a pocket-sized multitouch display.

Until all that stuff surfaces, though, I'm gonna be happy with my landscaped keyboard. Because on my phone, I'm all thumbs.

when the hand passes over the bulb, your mind goes boom

Levitating, wirelessly powered lightbulb. Via today & tomorrow.

almost.

I really need to start blogging something other than the Times, but alas, here's Virginia Heffernan on her Kindle.

I can’t seem to put it down. It’s ideal for book reading — lucid, light — but lately it has become something more: a kind of refuge. Unlike the other devices that clatter in my shoulder bag, the Kindle isn’t a big greedy magnet for the world’s signals. It doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It’s almost dead, actually. Lifeless. Just a lump in my hands or my bag, exiled from the crisscrossing of infinite cybernetworks. It’s almost like a book.

android garage door opener

Brad Fitzpatrick is writing Android apps.

My main Android app I care about is my garage door opener. I have a webserver hooked up [to] my garage door opener, so I can open my garage over the network. Combined with a background process doing wifi scanning, the idea's that when I'm on my way home, I pull up to my house on my motorcycle and the garage door magically opens and I back into my garage without taking off my helmet/gloves/etc.

If you've already hooked up a webserver to your garage door opener you're waaaaay down the path to madness, so you know, why the hell not build a mobile app to control it?

bag of hurt

Quote of the day comes from Steve Jobs, in the post event Q&A. When asked why the (delicious) new laptops don't support BluRay, Jobs replied with this bon mot, according to MacWorld...

"BluRay is a bag of hurt," Jobs says. "The licensing of the technology is so complex that we’re just waiting until things settle down and waiting until BluRay really takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the drives."

Oh, and seriously, those laptops look delicious, don't they?

make a beat, eat the beat

How great would it be to play with the Skittle-based beat sequencer with the kids? How better to teach them about the near infinite glories of what you can do with sixteenth notes and 4/4 time than with a bunch of colorful candies. Make a beat, eat the beat. Yum. (Via Waxy, of course.)

(But you know, come to think of it, a simple sequencer like this would be a great iPhone app, even if you can't eat the Skittles after making your beat. Instead, you could share them online. iPhone as drum machine. See, I knew I had to have an iPhone 2.0 reference today somewhere...)

ipods that make you thin...and save your soul

I love this little tidbit from the Apple patent filing today...

The lifestyle companion system also can interview the user about non-health related topics, e.g., spirituality/religion, identity (e.g., sense of belonging), relationships, career, financial condition, environment, hobbies, interests, other personal information, and goals regarding the same. 

Can't wait to see the privacy policy on that one.

more reviews like this, please

Wil Shipley of Delicious Library fame posts a fantastic review of the Air, hitting all the right notes, including this pitch-perfect one:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I'd be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the "I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side" market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

+1

a quick note to the kindle team

Dear Kindle team,

I just finished a week of travel with a new Kindle, and I'm well into reading my third book on it. So far so good -- the screen is very readable, even for long stretches of time; I don't have a problem with the next page / prev page button placement; the little e-ink flash when you turn pages isn't that annoying; and the battery life is great.

The UI for finding and buying books is pretty good, and it will be interesting to watch how you use the limited screen real estate and UI controls as a merchandising advantage as more and more titles come online. I can't imagine using the device for browsing the web or reading email -- the screen refresh is fast enough for reading books, but not for skimming web content.  And while I wish the keyboard were virtual (I only use it when searching the store), I get why it's there and appreciate the tradeoff decision re. price & touchscreen.

A key feature of the device is a simple and elegant way to highlight and clip sections of text -- and once you get the hang of it you find yourself doing it all the time. When reading real books I'm always marking pages or making notes in the margin; the Kindle makes this a quick click and scroll action. But I was surprised to learn that these highlights stay on the device, and don't sync up to your Amazon account. (You can download them with the included USB cable, but who wants to do that?)

So here's the feature request that must be on your roadmap: send my clippings back up into the cloud, where I can copy and paste them for future use. Bonus points for giving me the opportunity to connect my Kindle account to my blog, and have the service automatically post new clips via Atom or MetaWeblog. Extra bonus points for illustrating those with a cover thumbnail, and embedding my Associates code in the URL back to the store.

Best,
Michael

so long, series 1

  Purple tivo 
  Originally uploaded by mathowie

Our beloved Tivo Series 1 kicked the bucket this week, dying a wheezing, whining, hard-drive clicking death after more than seven years of reliable service.*

Normally I'm not the type to mourn the passing of a device -- after all, how many have I willingly tossed recycled in the same period?  But there's something to be said for that simple, well-designed box that changed the way we watch television.  It paused while we went for popcorn, treated us to the entire back catalog of Sports Night, reliably delivered hundreds if not thousands of hours of season passes week after week, and kept us sane and entertained during countless 3am feedings.

Rest in peace, old friend. The house may be quieter without the constant whine of your tired, old, underpowered and undersized hard drive, but trust us -- we'll miss you.

* Don't panic, though, we have a Series 2 in the living room; the Series 1 was the luxurious second Tivo that lately was responsible for recording endless episodes of Arthur and Mickey's Clubhouse. Sorry, kids.

first world problem

From Katherine Boehret's review of the Wildpad:

The pad, from WildCharge Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. (www.wildcharge.com), eliminates the messy tangle of wires that many people struggle with each time they want to charge their portable devices. But more to the point, it turns charging a gadget into something that happens in the background rather than an active task. And it spares you from that nagging question: Did I remember to plug my phone or iPod or BlackBerry in before going to sleep?

Thank GOD charging my phone is now something that happens in the background. I can't tell you how much mental energy I've wasted over the years on that incredibly active task.

multiple vibrate options

I think Charlie Schick has Twittered about this, but as I get more and more SMS traffic, it would be great if my phone supported multiple vibrate patterns, a la ringtones.  (I always have my phone on vibrate, because in I have an impossible time actually hearing my phone ring.  Either I'm getting older (speak up, sonny) or I'm deliberately ignoring incoming calls.)

Here's what I want.

• Bzzt == twitter or other automated SMS.
• Bzzt bzzt == SMS from an actual human.
• Bzzt bzzt bzzt == phone call.
• Special pattern of bzzt's == phone call from someone special

Couldn't be that hard, could it?

appletorrent

So Cringely's vision of a million networked Apple TVs acting as a torrent-like P2P distribution network for digital content is very interesting...especially the part about taking the bandwidth cost out of the bottom line and the potential lift in AAPLs market cap. But it's Yet Another Chicken And Egg, since they would still have to get a million of those things out into the market before lighting up the network.

The Apple TV product offering as I understand it today is still too complex for mass market adoption (Requires a host PC or Mac? Bleh), so the near term interesting question is not "What's v2 of Apple TV," but instead, "What's v1.1?" What capabilities will they ship to propel them to a million installed, connected and configured boxes?  (For reference, according to their latest numbers, TiVo's currently at 1.2 million TiVo-Owned subscribers.)

they call it garbage collection

I have a need to clear these Apple-related things out of my head:

• Even if I don't use it as my phone, I'll probably still want an iPhone.  If only as a Wifi enabled, media-playing, web-browsing toy.

• Relatedly, what I want come June is a way to track the price movement of the secondary market for iPhones, esp. if an unlocking method is discovered.  I'm sure there's a way to do it on eBay (or through their API), but it will be interesting to watch the price differential between a subsidized model (with forced subscription) and a resale model (without).

• Surely they'll iTMS enable the phone, right? And leverage the Cingular billing relationship?  (I want that track, I want it now, and sure, go ahead and charge it to my cell bill.)

• I keep reading about how DRM will eventually go away, that it's days are numbered.  The strategic rationale for this is that Apple's dominance of the digital music market will force the labels into action that attempts to leverage distribution of other players (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Real, etc.) to break the iTMS stranglehold.  (E.g., sell it in non-DRM'd MP3 format so that people can buy it wherever they want and still play it where they want. Like on their iPod.)  This very well may happen, but it might not have that much of an impact on Apple's position in the market, since there would be nothing to prevent them from offering those songs in a non-DRM'd format as well, and they'd still be able to leverage the iTunes hardware-software connection.

OK, that's it for now.

brilliantly obvious

Put a datacenter on your roof.  Or in a parking garage.  Or in your backyard.  Or on a battlefield.  Jonathan Schwartz on Project Blackbox:  "The biggest thing we could build would ultimately be the biggest thing we could transport around the world - which turned out to be a standardized shipping container. Why? Because the world's transportation infrastructure has been optimized for doing exactly this - moving packets containers on rails, roads and at sea."

shuffle clip

So the new Ipod Shuffle's a clip.  Neat!  Here's something I wrote back in January of last year about the original Shuffle.

It's light enough to be remarkably light.  Ridiculously light, even.  So light as to truly deserve the "wearable" label.  Which is why I'm surprised they're shipping with a lanyard instead of some sort of integrated clip (like some other flash-based music players).  Lanyards would be great if headphones were wireless; otherwise you end up being a mess of cabling.  A clip would be perfect -- clip it to your shirt, your pocket, your bag strap, your coat collar, your tie even.

So, um, yeah.  A clip.  As I said...neat!

it's still plug and pray

Just spent about 30 minutes trying to get a Logitech webcam we had lying around the office to work with my Thinkpad.  Couldn't make it work, and gave up after I realized that I spent about 29 minutes more than I should have trying to find and install the drivers for the damn thing.  It's late 2006.  Shouldn't plug and play be a reality by now?

There was one nice touch in this otherwise incredibly frustrating experience -- Logitech has nice little pictures to help you find the right software for your device. Of course, the package for my cam was a 79mb download (who needs 79 megs of software for a web cam?) that didn't work.  But hey, at least their web team got their part of the experience right.

one laptop per child

Ethan Zuckerman has a great overview of the progress the "One Laptop per Child" project is making on designing an inexpensive laptop that's perfect for kids.

Most of the people who write me are interested in owning a laptop they can afford. And that, it turns out, is not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project. Their goal is to produce a laptop designed for use by children - students in grades K-12. And that requires radically different design decisions than what one would make in simply creating a low-cost laptop.

Worth reading, especially for the description of the challenges of adding a crank for human-generated power, and how they're thinking of integrating Logowiki on to the device... (Logo == fun! I always think of Processing as logo for grownups.)

autodim me, please

So Apple laptops have this great power-saving feature that will automatically dim the user's display after N minutes, and then return to full strength on any kind of keyboard or mouse activity.  Can someone please explain why my Thinkpad doesn't do the same thing?

more phone

Different strokes for different folks:  I'd probably find the Motorola PEBL (Won't somebody please start using vowels again? Do it for the kids; a generation can't be raised on consonants alone...) utterly boring.  Proof -- I just finished my first week with a new Cingular 8125 (aka the HTC Wizard), and it's pretty damn great.  It's about the size of the Treo 650 (without the antenna), has a slideout keyboard, a big touchscreen, wifi, Edge, a 1.3MP camera, an accessible miniSD slot, etc.

Of course, it's not for everyone:

1. You should not have an allergy to Microsoft products.  That rules out those different folks who think different. Ly.
2. Related to number 1 above, you best be using Exchange, with an IT department (or outsourced provider) who lets you sync over the air with ActiveSync.  (OTA ActiveSync is absolutely brilliant.  Step one:  take phone out of box.  Step two:  configure sync URL, username and password, press sync.  Step three:  enjoy up to date calendar, contacts and inbox.  Forever.)
3. You should have nimble thumbs. 
   

Note that numbers 2 and 3 describe a nice slice of corporate America that is laying the track for RIM's gravy train.  Something tells me that ride's gonna end soon, esp. with the update to Exchange which pushes email proactively to Windows Mobile 5 devices.