There’s a big article in the New York Times that includes an interview with Steve Jobs about the excellent shape that Apple’s in nowadays. Apple is 3rd in computer shipments overall. They might slip to 4th when Acer buys Gateway after Gateway buys Packard Bell, but Apple will still have more growth than the resulting top three. The Times did an interview with Jobs, and he of course has some choice things to say about everything — Leopard vs. Vista, Ultimate Editions, the iPhone’s multitouch interface, the delays of Leopard, and the Newton.
‘Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.
There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.’
I’ve written about what Ars Technica called the ‘New Frontier’ of the SDK, and I agreed with Ars that it was coming. Anyone that gripes about the availability of the development kit for making apps on the iPhone doesn’t give enough credit for what Apple has created with multitouch.
Update: Of course, it goes without saying that Walt steals his best content from us. Case in point, Dieter ranted about this way back in February. Really, though, we’re just glad that Walt (or at least Katie) is reading us on a regular basis.
Pre-eminent technology writer Walt Mossberg excoriates the mobile carriers in a recent article he posted to the Wall Street Journal and his personal site, All Things D. In terms of rants, his cup runneth over. Ranging from comparing the mobile carriers of the U.S. to communist-era “Soviet Ministries” to acknowledging the iPhone as the first U.S. cellphone to break the current mold, he throws many darts and hits the bulls-eye every time. Well, almost every time. He does gripe about the lack of official third party applications on the iPhone, which strikes me as impatient. Walt knows as well as anyone that third party apps should be available in February, so the ding against the iPhone there seems a bit disingenuous. It takes time to put an application developer’s toolkit together; especially when the device itself breaks so many new grounds. I’d be surprised if Apple was even done with the SDK they used internally; it’s likely still a work in progress. But, I digress. It’s a fantastic piece of work, and if regulation (or the threat of regulation) is what it takes to get mobile carriers to clean up their collective acts, then I welcome it. The money quote, or perhaps his thesis statement:
“A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.”
Reminder: I’m at CTIA this week, so though I may be a bit slow on the news, I’m also going to be liveblogging anything cool and iPhone-related that pops up.
The Bromine Science and Environmental Forum has blasted Greenpeace for their report of brominated flame retardants, or BFRs, in the iPhone. They lambast the report for its speculative nature:
“The Greenpeace report does not say which brominated flame retardants are present in the iPhone because it does not know. Therefore, the report speculates about what substances might be present, and raises an alarm without any basis for doing so.”
If you’ve been hacking your iPhone to get 3rd party apps with firmware 1.1.1, there’s now a big reward. Installer.app has been updated, and some long-needed changes have been made. First, instead of browsing the entire collection in one huge list, you now select a category, and then browse a smaller list. Under the previous system, as the list of 3rd party apps got longer and longer, the interface for finding and installing a program became more cumbersome. With the new system, the category splitting should make finding and installing apps a lot simpler to use. Also, it should do a great job of hiding dictionaries, theme packs, etc. into their own subcategories. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, this should appear as an update.
If you haven’t hacked your 1.1.1 iPhone, there’s still no easy way to do it on a mac. There are, however, rumors of an AppTapp-type installer to make everything nice and simple coming very shortly. If you’re using windows, there’s a program called iDemocracy that promises to make everything fairly simple.
Erica Sadun, iPhone hacker extraordinaire and writer at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, has documented the entire set of Cocoa function calls required to program for the iPhone. These header files are used for programmers to properly create user interfaces, network code, and, well, pretty much everything. And the documentation effort is a massive job, usually not something to be done by just one person. I know that this site can get kind of wonky here and there, so I’ll do my best to explain why this is important, but for everybody.
All of the applications available from Installer.app have been written without any formal set of documentation. So, there may be some bugs, since there’s no single place to go for programming information. Usually, Apple would provide the documentation for programming on the iPhone. But, as they’ve recently announced, they’re not going to be doing that until February. So, now anyone that is planning or writing a native Cocoa app for the iPhone or iPod touch now has the means to research how to do it.
That includes both the folks that are hacking iPhones to install and write 3rd party apps, and any larger software companies that want to get a leg up on their software development. With this set of header files, it should be perfectly possible for any large development group to prototype their program well in advance of the official Apple release.
Of course, these header files may yet change. There’s no guarantee that Apple’s set of documentation will stay the same; Apple will definitely be adding to this, and they may not allow some of the function calls documented by Sadun to be accessible for other programmers. No one can tell. But, it’s a huge step for programming native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch
Shocking you with a day early this time instead of a day late. For podcast 7 we talk about CTIAthe iPhone on Orange, possible unlock rumors, a product red version possibly coming, an SDK in february plus some widget speculation, some leopard speculation, webapps, and a brief hacking segment. And then, a bit on the iTunes plus price cut, Greenpeace, new Apple ads, and att.com making changes. And of course the usual chat about the community.
No less chock full of stuff than last week, but I managed to shave off a few minutes and keep us under 50 minutes. How did I do it? By shaving off the talks about Apple vs. gateway / acer / packard bell. Sharp listeners, look for the “I’m going to cut this” and Dieter being sad. I’ll post it up later today.
There’s an easy new program you can use to jailbreak the iPod Touch, called iJailBreak. You can download the installer (which now includes both PowerPC and Intel mac support) at code.google.com. Sorry, no Windows love yet. iJailbreak makes “heavy use” of the iPod Touch / iPhone TIFF vulnerability, and its use requires that you only restart your iPod Touch. Simple enough, right? Way simpler than this, anyway. iJailbreak is programmed by a 13-year-old, and judging from the broken tabs at the top right of their website, they have an unbricker application planned.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has posted an excellent discussion on the various subtleties of the language used in Steve Jobs’ iPhone SDK letter. He talks of HTML widgets vs. the stripped-down Cocoa API, the security of the current iPhone, the hidden compliment-slash-dig on Nokia and their recent “open to anything” marketing slogan, signed apps, the iTunes App store, and with his usual attention to detail and insight. Well worth the read there, like any long Gruber post.
Gruber also points to a blog post for OSX developers that intend to write applications for the iPhone, which led to a comment-discussion by several mac developers, and where they intend to aim their development efforts — both in functionality of their applications, and price thereof. It looks like there’s plenty of hope for the $5 app, if they can be guaranteed to be paid. There’s still the lingering question of how available the SDK will be — and that’s excellently addressed by Frasier Spiers on a blog post at his site.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
