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:
Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
Apple has posted their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG, PDF link) for programming for the iPhone. What this means is that they’ve completed the rules and guidelines for how they expect you, the iPhone user, to interact with applications on the device. It also means that now that they have interface guidelines, they can begin focusing on building the software they need for native third party applications and not web applications. Yes, I said it; worst of all, I believe it. Even worse, I think this is the big news of the weekend, even more than bricked iPhones. You’ll have to brave the cut for why.
Web Duck Hunt. It’s a bit slow, you have to lead it a fair bit on the iPhone, maybe a duck length or so and hope it doesn’t turn. Via iPhoney, though, it works great. If you want to see a lot of the dog giggling at you, though, go ahead and start it up. The above results were done with iPhoney; there’s no way a person could get their web high score of 150,000 from an iPhone without it. No way.
Update: I take it back. This web application is fully data-url-able, which means you should be able to run it from your iPhone bookmarks (i.e., it supports boonies mode). I still have a few card games to review, but this is by far the most impressive web game I’ve seen so far.
The hacking community continues to delight and amaze. Hacker stepwhite has ported the InfoNES core over to the iPhone. It’s not ready for general consumption; the controls apparently suck (as quoted by stepwhite), and it runs too slow to be playable… yet. Other important emulator functions like saving states and cheating outright also not supported, but at the rate that the hacking developer community has been moving, we’ll be playing Xbox 360 games on it by next week. The code is available at Google Code. [via]
It’s like a real breaking news story. There’s now an unofficial Terminal client for the iPhone. It’s important to note that this Mobile Terminal is not a web app; it’s a real GUI meat-on-the-bones fire-on-the-grill application. The project is hosted at Google code, which is interesting; it could mean an unofficial nod of approval from Apple, as the above gizmodo post details. The Terminal app will be an important development for further hacking at the iPhone, and it’s incredible that it was done without any kind of official SDK from Apple. My hat is off to you, good sirs and ma’ams.
In terms of getting to a place where they can unlock an iPhone and host applications, this is a big step; it means that hackers can interface directly with the iPhone instead of having to reload firmwares, reset the iPhone, test, etc: they can test changes on the fly now. A video is after the break, and you can visit the MobileTerminal.app page directly.
So, yeah. Favelets and bookmarklets. In the podcast, I promised a review article about useful bookmarklets and favelets, for the iPhone. And here it is.
I’ve written a few simple bookmarklets as well; it seems a lot of the bookmarklets are designed for web editors, and not always so much for the average web user. I’m guessing that not many regular folks need to edit CSS from the iPhone, and those that do already have those bookmarklets synched over. But still, there’s a void for popular sites. It seemed that all I found were eBay, Amazon, and Google sites. So I set out to make a few of my own, and edit a few others so that they’d work on iPhone Safari (henceforth, iSafari).
If you have any requests for a custom bookmarklet, put them in the comments. It has to be said that I make no guarantees that I can make the resulting request as I’m not an expert with javascript by any means, but the worst that can happen is that I say no. Okay, that’s not the worst that can happen. The worst is that I say no VERY IMPOLITELY.
TreoCentral’s Michael Ducker checks in with his thoughts on the iPhone’s hits, misses, and effects on the smartphone market. It looks like he agrees with my impressions on a number of points and, well, I agree with him on a number of points too. It’s so great to see everyone getting along! Now everybody hug. Anyway, read on for another former Treo man’s analysis of the iPhone.
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?
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.
