• March 7th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Premonitions

When it was announced back in Jan 2007, it was a foregone conclusion that the iPhone would be huge. Not only was it the most hyped product ever, but it delivered on all accounts - the largest shortcoming of the device being the speed of AT&T’s EDGE network. When I make a big technology purchase I like to think of the potential and use of that device, but then I patiently wait to see if my assertions were correct and I’ve stood on the sidelines long enough.

As a backstory, I wanted a PSP when they first game out, but I waited until it was hacked. What I really wanted to do was play old school Nintendo games on my PSP and I knew with the device it was a possibility. Then it got hacked, then someone created an emulator, and only then could I justify buying a PSP (which I’ve since sold).

With Apple’s recent release of an iPhone API and introduction of the new iphone developer program I’m about to climb onboard the iPhone gravy train. I was undoubtedly impressed seeing what the phone is capable of while viewing the keynote.

So far, I’d say most people may have bought iPhones for lust or they’re early adopter crazies of Apple products with plenty of disposable income. Only now will pragmatic people (such as myself) buy them for their software capabilities as well. The game demo’s shown in the keynote were amazing. The single point of distribution with Apple’s own App Store application to be included with the 2.0 update is incredible integration. The iPhone is going to become a candy store of applications for users that I can no longer ignore.

I was hoping to stave off the forgone conclusion of iPhone ownership until Version 2 (The second version of Apple products are always exponentially better), but then I had a realization this morning. Apple is in bed with AT&T for 5 years and they are hoping to sell 10 MILLION iPhones by the end of 2008. Why would they release a second better version of the phone to upset 10 Million users before hitting sales targets? And you know the backlash of consumers who feel they’ve been cheated is severe. Besides Apple will take care of you anyway. More so, are millions of users really going to be locked into a shitty EDGE data network indefinitely? That is, aside from those that jailbreak their phones to use on other GSM networks… Apple has a master plan, and there are a lot of intelligent, crafty people out there that will all be in the same situation and won’t be happy with their crappy EDGE data plans if there’s an alternative.

To steal a page from Malcolm Gladwell, I’ve reached my tipping point with Apple’s iPhone. I must have one, now.

With Microsoft Exchange Server support with the 2.0 firmware update not even the Crackberry crowd of business lemmings will be able to resist. The naysayers have officially been trumped.

Reactions around the Interweb

• 37 signals
• Daring Fireball
• Apple iPhone 2.0 ‘Bigger than the Personal Computer’
• That’s how you launch a platform

Update

Rumors of 3G

I’m going to wait a couple months before jumping the gun after reading this article. It does add up and some of my conversations with current iPhone owners lead me to believe that patience will be a virtue when it comes to my iPhone purchase.

From Seeking Alpha

And then, of course, despite the lack of any announcement, the iPhone v2 (3G) would be coming out soon. In my mind, this development is more definitive than speculative. I think the only reason Apple did not announce the iPhone v2 is because such an announcement would halt the sales of the current generation of iPhones.

Popularity: 9% [?]

• January 18th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Life Hacks
  • Review

Usually I have minimumly 5 tabs open @ any given time - and I’m not even doing anything.

When I used Firefox I’d use the faviconize plugin which helped somewhat, but now I only use Firefox when I develop so I have the same issues with Camino.

But just recently, Scott showed me he found something better.. Fluid is an OS X application that will let you create custom Site Specific Browsers (SSBs).

Fluid utilizes Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and is a native Cocoa OS X application. Essentially you can think of it as a site-specific custom Safari browser.

One thing I immediately wanted to do was separate my Google Apps into 1 SSB with Fluid. But, by default every new instance does not have tabbing enabled, but you can easily enable tabs via the application’s Preferences. Now all the Google Apps I use daily - gmail, calendar, reader, docs, and analytics are separated out and saves me from tab-salad-hell.

Another good use for Fluid is to create applications for 37signals products. I spend a lot of time daily in Campfire and Basecamp. It was only a logical move I should create an app for each. 37signals went so far as to provide icons just for this use so your dock can stay pretty.

Previously I used Pyro which was a less-than-stable wrapper for Campfire around the same idea. The jury is out as to which is better, but since it’s essentially just a Safari browser tab - I’m pretty certain Pyro has seen its day on my desktop.

Fluid even handles notifications from the various apps. Check out the Fluid icons Flickr group to keep that dock sexy.

I was pretty impressed, and I’m glad I run a Mac so I can enjoy all the goodness Fluid has to offer. Bye bye tab-salad, this is the end of web browsers as we know them.

Update (a couple days later)

So I’ve been using Fluid based SSB’s for Basecamp, Campfire, and Gmail for the last couple days and wanted to air out a few annoyances.

• I’m back on Pyro. Growl notifications for Campfire are just too important and are not available in the Campfire Fluid-based SSB. I found myself checking Campfire for no reason frequently because I got no notification like I used to. I didn’t realize how reliant I was on them.
• Basecamp as an SSB is good enough for me right now - I’ll probably stick with it.
• Gmail & Google Apps work okay, not great. Camino is my browser by default, and usually if you open a link from Gmail it will fire that url in another tab - however with Gmail as a Fluid-based SSB a blank window (not a tab) is created, and then the link is opened in Camino in a new tab (if it’s open). This is a pretty big annoyance, although I’m trying to stick it out, but when I remember to avoid the blank window from opening I find that I’m copy and pasting the link itself into Camino which is pretty lame.

That’s it. I’ve only had it a couple days and already an update was pushed out to me, hopefully these minor annoyances will get fixed promptly and I can continue the SSB goodness!

Update 3/30/08

2+ months out I’m now ONLY using Fluid for Basecamp.The other services (like gmail) were just odd to work with and felt like a pain more than anything. I’ve since installed the Google Notifier so I can be alerted there’s a queue of email backup before I even bother to check. This method seems to be working best.

Popularity: 19% [?]