All Articles Tagged hype

Several sites have been reporting

the presence of strings about gaming (perhaps slightly less exciting are the strings about voice memos and Nike+iPod, no one is reporting about those) in a localizable.strings file found by download squad. But what do those localizable strings really mean?

Well, as Engadget notes, strings like that are all over the place. A lot of it is just copy-and-pasted code from other devices, as noted by Arn of MacRumors. Arn checked his history, and noted that the same text appears in the Apple TV localized strings, from iTunes 7.1, way back in March, and you know what? Still no games there either.

The following is taken from a June 29th post on Apple Insider:

/* ===== Mobile Phone Strings ===== /
...
"4301.136" = "Sending workout data to nikeplus.com…";
"4301.137" = "Downloading Nike+iPod voice kit…";
"4301.138" = "Installing Nike+*iPod voice kit…";
"4301.079" = "The mobile phone “^1” contains new voice memos.
Would you like to move these voice memos to your
iTunes library?";
"4320.300" = "iTunes has detected a Macintosh-formatted iPhone.
You must restore this iPhone before you can use it
on Windows.";

/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */ "4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?"; "4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?";

This isn’t to say that I hope games don’t arrive on the iPhone. Au contraire, mes freres et mes soeurs, I dearly hope they arrive. But I don’t expect their arrival based from programmer strings in a localised file. I’ll wait for them, and hope for high-profile leaks and actual product announcements instead.

I won’t lie to you: the only thing I’m hoping for is .mac updates. Everything else is ancillary to me. There’s no feed, and I’m not flying down for this one, as it won’t be iPhone related. I will instead direct you to coverage at TUAW, as they will be meta-liveblogging the liveblogs from Chicago, far away from the Event itself.

There’s some posts at hackint0sh that indicate the iPhone might have a hardware unlock code, and some entries at iPhone JTAG that might corroborate that. Might, you have to take this with a big grain of salt. A BIG grain; iPhoneDevWiki lists nothing new. Except for their new jailbreak app. Oooh, new jailbreak app! [via]

If all of these were made into news slices, we’d have to reconfigure the page to fit everything in. So, it’s going to have to go into a roundup article instead. We’ll start with the above cartoon from Gizmodo, who apply the curious moniker of “Jesusphone” to the iPhone. I’m more prone to calling it the Mosesphone, as it’s leading me to the promised land of smartphones. If it really was the Jesusphone, all of my other smartphones would suddenly stop sucking, right?

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So, after twelve hours of waiting in line, it didn’t take me long to take the iPhone out and start playing around with it. I didn’t get the zip and seal treatment that some folks got at AT&T stores, but then again, the MOA was trying to zip people through as efficiently as possible. Here are my impressions, there will be a full review later with video and pictures.

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AT&T’s store display video has been posted to YouTube.

[via]

It’s seriously a smorgasbord of hype out there. I read more daily than I can shake a stick at. If hype was gold I’d be a leprechaun.

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There’s a great article at UPenn that delves into the study of marketing and hype, geared directly towards gadget release. The you-know-what is the main thing under their microscope, as it goes into detail as to why it was pre-announced by 6 months. They cover how some companies really have their way with marketing and pre-releases and hype, and some others, well, how does one actually come out and say it, not have way.

There has been an iPhone sighting on the Caltrain in San Francisco.

[via the Boy Genius report and Flickr ]

Gah. I’m not thrilled with the news of web apps being the application delivery method, but I don’t think that web 2.0 is Apple’s permanent answer to an SDK.

Web app functionality is something you talk about if either

1. you’re not ready to talk about the external SDK. We already knew it would do web apps — reference the “kinda sorta internet” commercial. We knew it would do the full internet, javascript, the whole shebang — last January.
2. There is no SDK, Web 2.0 / AJAX all the way.

Of course, both are a possibility. It’s a possibility than an SDK was given the kibosh; it’s an equal possibility that Jobs decided the market pressure dictate that he announce something at WWDC for the developers so they’re not left out on launch day. It’s, of course, always a possibility that the SDK is still being worked on. Jobs stated earlier that he intends to report the accounting revenue over two years so they can improve the iPhone on a regular basis over its product lifetime.

• Jobs said at D5 that if folks are willing to hold on for a while, he’ll have an answer for that. I have said that I didn’t think we’d have an SDK at launch, and it looks like at least that much is true. I still think we’ll get one later.
• though I’m not excited about Web applications, they are powerful. Case in point: Google Documents. There’s an interesting wee tidbit from that website: “Safari support for Google Docs is coming soon!” I don’t see Opera, Minimo or Pocket IE on their list of compatible browsers.
• Web 2.0 / AJAX devleopment is going to be a boon for web developers, and it’s simultaneously a shot in the arm for Safari. It’s quite possible that Safari as a targeted web platform is more important to Jobs right now than an SDK (it does burn me to say that). Conversely, web apps significantly lower the bar of entry for application development, and opens up subscription and service-based application licensing models.
• I’m still convinced the market potential is large for iTunes as a signed app delivery vehicle. I think I’ll stick to my guns on this one; we’ll see what other announcements Jobs makes in the next year or so, maybe as early as January at MWSF.

That said, there are still some vexing questions:

• Whither YouTube?
• is Adobe’s flash supported? If so, expect it to basically become the default application language. This would be a huge boon for Flash Lite apps.
• Can you store web apps on the iPhone directly, i.e., run them from flash storage? If you can run apps without incurring bandwidth, that’s great. If not, this could be a huge issue.

It’s very clear to me that we still don’t have all of the SDK answers yet; I don’t think this issue will be resolved yet on launch day.