Yellowpages, the Google of the analog age, is jumping on board the iPhone bandwagon. The old offline search directory has rolled out a very slick looking mobile web interface designed for Safari, offering the usual “Find me” search service for businesses, as well as maps - powered by Microsoft MapPoint (bleh).
While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.
Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to
deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.
Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.
Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)
Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:
The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.
iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.
iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.
AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.
We are one step closer to editing word documents on our iPhones today. Google is now offering a mobile format of Google docs, viewable on mobile devices. The bad news - it’s Read-only mode, so no editing capabilities are available… yet. But at least you can access important docs while on the go, right from your iPhone, and that’s something to cheer about. Right?
Apple has created a searchable directory of mary various online web applications. The service is available at http://www.apple.com/webapps/, and offers over 200 (!) online applications. We had considered doing an online application database very early on, but we didn’t. And it now makes me happy that we didn’t, for very real. All of the iPhone application list sites are now competitors with a company with very deep pockets.
Apple has quietly posted a Safari web app directory, similar to the one for Dashboard Widgets, featuring every available iPhone-optimized web 2.0 service or web app created by human hands. Ok, so these aren’t the apps we’re looking for, and there are dozens if not hundreds of directory sites in existence already, but let it never be said we iPhone users are in want of a good web browser. Right? crickets chirping
[Update] Amazingly this directory isn’t formatted for iPhone. Strange that Apple would build a web app directory for iPhone, designed to be accessed from a desktop.
It seems that Mozilla has finally acknowledged the need for a mobile browser on the mozilla codebase that isn’t wreteched. PC Advisor reports that the mozilla foundation will be putting resources towards a mobile browser. And they didn’t act until now on the mobile browsing kit on the iPhone, 3 months after WebKit shines on the iPhone. To add insult to injury, Nokia has been using Apple’s WebKit, the browsing engine that powers Safari on the iPhone, instead of anything based off of Mozilla’s code, though Nokia also has a mozilla-basbed browser on their N800 tablet.
For those of you that are aware of Minimo, the project to bring mozilla to mobile devices, erm, make that Windows Mobile devices, the project is essentially dead. Minimo, doomed with only one developer who was not willing to expend extra time on the project, will never see an update again. A mobile browser project will now instead start from scratch.
You know, Opera has really been on top of the browser space. They put opera pretty much everywhere they could, and really got it out there. Their J2ME browser, Opera Mini, is a breakthrough bit of software for featurephones. I’m not generally liable to say anything pleasant about Internet Explorer, and by extension Pocket IE, but Pocket IE was a sight better than Minimo. It makes sad that Mozilla didn’t get until now that the mobile browsing world isn’t really a segment of the market where you want to be in last place.
Ah, the joys of public transportation. Nothing else quite compares to the stimulating experience of standing in the company of drunks and derelicts at a bus stop late in waining hours of Saturday night, waiting for a fuming smoke filled bus to arrive, concluded with sharing a body fluid-stained seat with the unwashed, unwashed masses. But enough about my college days.
If you happen to live San Francisco, a new service called MoMuni provides instant real-time access to bus or train routes and waypoints, right on your iPhone. Users can select the route and stop of the bus or train they’re waiting for and then determine how far away the next 3 are. What’s more, you can bookmark stops most often used, like commuting from home or work, for example, and access them from a tabbed interface. Nice.
Of course, once you board the bus… you’re on your own. One word: deodorant.
It looks like Apple might have some web apps of their own that are perhaps going live very soon. Both the Register and the Boy Genius Report indicate that the ‘recent downloads‘ (RSS link) page of Apple’s points to a few iPhone web applications. It unfortunately looks like Apple has wised up, and removed the applications from their feed, but you can at least view the screenshots in all of their glory courtesy of tBGR. Although they’re in Apple’s download RSS feed, all indications point to this web app directory being simple repository for online web apps. That is, not web apps that are run from your iPhone, aka widgets.
Longtime forum member Cliff Maier (cmaier in the forums) just posted his sixth full game, making him long overdue for accolades on the front page. All of the games are simple, clean, and optimal candidates for boonies mode data URLs. All of the games are small and make excellent use of the fonts present on the iPhone; due to his careful programming, all of the games com in at around 80k (and even less for ThumbTrek). This is important, as it means that the games will still be eminently playable over EDGE networks.
The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:
“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:
“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”
The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.
There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:
  
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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.
