Martin Gordon's Blog

From the Apple Hot News weblog (for lack of a better term):

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

I knew this had to come eventually, it was just a matter of when. The timing of a February launch is a bit strange only because a demo of the SDK (Software Development Kit) at January's consumer-oriented Macworld is inevitable. What was Apple's reason for waiting so long?

We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

I don't think needing to digitally sign every app is in all parties' best interests. Developers have another hurdle to cross to get apps out there, Apple needs to expend resources validating every app, and consumers lose out due to both of these additional costs. I don't see Apple blocking out unsigned apps completely, and I don't want responsibility to be placed on users to determine the safety of an app. Instead, I think we'll see Apple restricting what APIs an application has access to based on their signed status. This could be an extension of the new Sandboxing feature in Leopard:

Sandboxing
Enjoy a higher level of protection. Sandboxing prevents hackers from hijacking applications to run their own code by making sure applications only do what they’re intended to do. It restricts an application’s file access, network access, and ability to launch other applications. Many Leopard applications — such as Bonjour, Quick Look, and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed so hackers can’t exploit them.

The news item is short on details, so all we can do is speculate at this point. What is certain, however, is that this is undoubtedly good news, and the first good press the iPhone has gotten in a while.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, SDK, development, open, sandbox

Erica Sadun, TUAW's resident iPhone hacker/developer, reports on the difficulty of jailbreaking the new iPod touch. An iPhone update is expected sometime soon to add iTunes WiFi Store functionality, most likely a few of the UI niceties present on the iPod touch, and hopefully some long awaited applications (Tasks and iChat, I'm looking at you).

If the iPod touch's (or perhaps OS X 1.1's) ability to be jailbroken is any indication, then iPhone owners should enjoy their third-party apps while they can. Now, there may be a technical reason for the new sync scheme that prevents jailbreak, but a more likely culprit is a political reason: AT&T is upset. First, by introducing the iPod touch, Apple offers a way to bypass a cell contract for those wanting most (but not all) of the iPhone's features. Second, Apple's inability to keep the iPhone locked down for any significant amount of time (whether intentional or not) has paved the way for software unlocking, providing yet another way to get iPhone features without an AT&T contract. Depending on how large a fee (if any) Apple collects from AT&T for new iPhone contracts, Apple is largely indifferent as to whether they sell an iPod touch or an iPhone. It is unlikely that Apple would lock down the touch but not the iPhone and it's not unreasonable to conclude that our time spent sipping on Cocoa will soon come to an end.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod touch, jailbreak, OS X, unlock, hack, Apple, AT&T

Less than a day since Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone would drop $200 to $399, Steve himself has posted an open letter to iPhone customers in which he states that Apple has decided "to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store."

This is an excellent move by Apple and quite possibly the best way they could have handled the PR nightmare that would have been the 250-500 thousand $599 iPhone owners. While it's not exactly $100 in my pocket, it is exactly $100 more than I would have expected to receive. Store credit doesn't cost Apple as much as face value, but it goes a long way to satisfy those customers that felt wronged (again, I don't consider myself in that group). In addition to the PR boost, Apple could also benefit from the incremental sales this $100 store credit would generate. As a prime example, I was looking to sell my iMac in anticipation of the refresh and to take advantage of the free iPod deal. Not having easily found a buyer and realizing that I didn't really need a new iMac, I gave up on the refresh. This newly-found $100, however, might just be enough to relight that fire under me and get me to buy a new iMac: Apple wins.

I applaud you, Apple. With actions like these, you will no doubt win many customers for life as you won me so long ago.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, price cut, Steve Jobs, open letter, Apple Store, PR

Despite being a day late, I still want to comment on the iPod announcements made yesterday.

iPod shuffle
New colors and no storage bump on the shuffles gets a huge yawn from me.

iPod nano
The actual nano looks much better than those leaked shots that were floating around a few weeks ago. There was no storage upgrade for these guys either, only price drops to $149 and $199 for the 4 and 8 GB version, respectively. Video finally comes to the nano, but with such a tiny screen I wonder how useful it will actually be. Still, having the nano hooked up to a TV via video out makes for a very portable DVD player replacement.

iPod classic
80 GB storage for $249 (and 160 GB for $349) makes the 6th Generation iPod (or 1st Generation iPod classic?) quite the monster. The standard iPod form factor has become, as the name suggests, a classic and I'm glad Apple stuck with it instead of forcing everyone to the touch screen.

iPod UI
The new iPod UI is an incremental upgrade, with the most notable feature being Cover Flow (which I don't find much use for personally). The new UI also marks the first time that the nano and classic have reached software feature parity (video on the nano also means complete feature parity), so it'll be interesting to see if Apple considers the nano/classic "complete". Prior to yesterday's announcement, it had been two years since both devices saw a significant upgrade, and I wonder if it'll be just as long before we see the next big change for these two lines.

iPod touch
I couldn't make up my mind over whether I thought Apple would actually release a phoneless iPhone this soon. On the one hand, pricing would have been tricky - either it would be priced too low to cannibalize iPhone sales or priced too high to make it a terrible value. On the other hand, there was only so much further Apple could take the iPod classic before it had to enlarge the screen (thereby necessitating removal of the click wheel). I personally dislike the design of the device. The chrome border is gone in lieu of either a matte metal or plastic (hard to tell from the shots) and the iPhone's scratch-resistant matte back is gone for the iPod's iconic scratch-prone shiny metal back. Further, the upper bezel looks disproportionate without the earpiece and the WiFi antenna's plastic covering makes the back of the device asymmetric. Other minor things I noticed (and am apathetic about) are that the sleep/wake button has switched sides and that the headphone jack is on the bottom of the device.

iTunes WiFi Store
Apple is ever slowly creeping into tablet/UMPC space and the touch was the second step in that direction. Instead of working down from the desktop, as Microsoft has done (with limited success), Apple has worked up from the iPod. It's apparent from the name: this isn't a MacBook nano, it's an iPod touch. Unveiling the iTunes WiFi Store and partnering with Starbucks is a small step into building Apple's mobile eco-system, something other device makers have either not attempted or have been unsuccessful at. This will be the touch/iPhone killer feature, and perhaps the future of mobile advertising - truly contextual advertising and services that supplement a brick and mortar's main operations. It's not the device that will reach out to the world, but the world that will reach in to your device.

That said, I don't see myself using the WiFi Store that much since I don't use the iTunes Store much to begin with. However, if the WiFi store allows for over-the-air podcast downloading, then I'll be all over it.

Ringtones
I'm tech-savvy enough to not need iTunes to walk me through making ringtones, but I would argue against those complaining about the price. The extra $.99 is something I see as AT&T having a hand in. Still, $2 for both the song and ringtone is a good deal compared to the $2-$3 one might pay for a ringtone-only otherwise.

iPhone at $399
Though Apple announced during their last earnings call that margins would be lower this season, no one saw this coming. The market is interpreting it as a sign that iPhones aren't selling as well as Apple would like. The original 5 GB iPod dropped 25% five months after introduction (from $399 to $299), so large cuts aren't completely out of the ordinary for Apple. I see the price drop as something Apple planned all along as a way to aggressively go after market share after milking early adopters for an extra $200 and as a way control demand during launch.

Am I upset that I paid $599? Absolutely not. I was perfectly paying that amount and the price drop doesn't change that. I don't see Apple owing me anything much more than I see BMW paying me for the depreciation of my car when the 2008 models come out (in fact, I'm paying them for the depreciation). Price drops and technology progressing are facts of life. The only thing that I might be upset about is that the cost of entry to the iPhone Club has gone down and iPhone owners who felt a sense of superiority and exclusivity as a result of ownership just dropped a few rungs on the social ladder now that the iPhone is accessible to "regular" people. I am not in that group. I see adoption of the iPhone (or Mobile OS X platform in general) a good thing for users, both in terms of a greater demand for new software features or an increased pressure on other device makers to make better devices.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod nano, iPod touch, iPod classic, iTunes, iTunes WiFi Store

Scott Gilbertson of Wired writes on how the iPhone is breeding the next generation of IE4-only web sites in the context of iPhone-optimized sites:

In suggesting that developers use the web to build iPhone applications, what Apple has done (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) is force the creation of a subset of the mobile web that only works with the iPhone’s unique features — namely the touch-screen interface.

While Apple is pushing HTML and JavaScript for iPhone app development, they aren't (inadvertently or not) forcing the creation of sites that only work with the touch screen. In fact, I recall reading (correct me if I'm wrong) that the iPhone browser doesn't even support draggin or hovers/mouseovers. There's very little in the way of iPhone-only features (only a few CSS attributes and the tel:/map: protocol for dialing and Google Mapping, as I recall) and so the only way sites are being iPhone-optimized are that they're being dumbed down for the device, thanks to a lack of support for Flash and some JavaScript events (and possibly more). Furthermore, most iPhone-optimized sites are extensions of existing sites. There's no killer app for the internet out there that we're all missing out on because it only runs on the iPhone; hell, there isn't even a web-based killer app out for the iPhone (and I saw this as a launch day iPhone owner).

To be honest, I find all these iPhone-optimized web sites to be completely garbage. This stems largely from one thing: the sites are attempting to mimic Apple's native UI. Of course, the web apps have two huge disadvantage when compared to Apple's apps: they're loading data over a (potentially) slow data connection and JavaScript performance is atrocious on the iPhone.

For something I truly wanted to use heavily, I would go out of my to find a mobile, but not iPhone-optimized, site to use over its iPhone-optimized brethren. The two big winners in the mobile but not iPhone-optimized category are Google Reader and Twitter. I use both daily primarily because they're lightweight (prettier, slower competitors to both are out there). The most recent loser: Facebook – and I'm sure there are many others, but I stopped using them so long ago I can't even remember any of them.

The shoddy state of the mobile web being what it is, I went and jailbroke my iPhone last week, allowing for third-party apps to be installed. It was fairly straightforward, though I had to piece together instructions from a handful of websites to actually get it done. Tonight's release of the Mobile Twitterrific proof-of-concept also spurred me to get the iPhone development toolchain installed. Also, fairly straightforward except for finding out what the hell a "heavenly dmg" was (it's an unencrypted version of the iPhone restore image). There's nothing absolutely must-have out there yet, but it's only a matter of time. You don't really get a sense of how powerful and extensible the iPhone really is (or could be) until you've run a terminal on it or ssh'ed and sftp'ed in.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, standards, Wired, web apps, Web 2.0, Cocoa, hacking, JavaScript

Let's compare how many clicks it takes to get to weather, stocks, notes, etc on the iPhone versus any web app:

Apple apps:

1. Push sleep/wake or home button
2. Slide to unlock
3. Push Home button
4. Click on app

Web app:

1. Push sleep/wake or home button
2. Slide to unlock
3. Push home button
4. Click on Safari
5. Click on Bookmarks
6. Best case: The app is in my top 5 bookmarks
7. Worst case: I have to scroll/click on a folder before clicking on the app
8. Wait for page to load
9. Best case: App uses cookies to store my data and we're done
10. Worst case:
• Enter user name and password
• Click to login
• Wait for page to load

That's 4 actions for a Home screen app and 9-12 for a web app. Result: Web apps require 2-3x as many actions (and possibly more than that in time due to page loading)!

It's a good thing that Apple's apps are sufficient for me, though I am hopeful for an SDK eventually and those software updates rumored to be released sometime between now and Leopard.

I went back and actually tried every app on this list Lifehacker compiled of the Top 10 iPhone Apps (top only because there aren't any others?). I found that a lot of them need some CSS work to adjust to mobile Safari's idiosyncrasies. But anyway, here's the app-by-app:

101 Cookbooks: Works great, probably because it doesn't try to do anything fancy. Unfortunately, I don't see myself needing recipes on my iPhone (or much at all).

Go Movies: Requires a zoom-in on every page to be legible.

iPhlickr: A bit more legible, but requires a zoom-in, which cuts off parts of the page.

iPhoneDigg: Requires a zoom-in to be legible. It may not be an iPhone-related issue, but I wasn't able to get past the root level.

iActu: By far the best app on this list (so far). The JavaScript effects are a bit slow, but everything else works beautifully (including the PDF of the front page of newspapers).

Gas.app: Usable, but the CSS is a bit off and there's no easy way to go back to the zip code screen other than reloading the page.

Zoho: The main page suffers from the same issue as iPhoneDigg (I think it has to do with them set to auto width instead of a fixed width) and I didn't go any further because it required a login.

Google Reader: The Google Reader iPhone skin doesn't work because you can't drag the Bookmarklet necessary to do the changes to the page. Luckily the official mobile version of Google Reader works great on the iPhone, and Safari's built-in RSS reader (via reader.mac.com) is great also.

iPhoneChat: Again, there were issues with zooming. I also had trouble with the CSS not showing my buddy list in a readable manner. I didn't try IMing anyone because I just gave up after the terrible display of the buddy list.

OneTrip: This was the most refined application of the bunch, and it's one of only two that I'll keep from this list (the other is iActu). Everything worked like I expected and it remember my list even after shopping around a bit (I assume it's using cookies to store my info).

I don't see any of these as killer apps, per se, but I do hope that the developers weren't in it just to cash in on the iPhone hype and abandon these now that the iPhone is out. OTOH, perhaps showing Apple that HTML isn't a valid alternative to a proper SDK will push them to release one sooner rather than later.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, SDK, applications, web apps

My iPhone "crashed" today when I was deleting an email account. In reality, it was unresponsive for about 30 seconds and then went back to normal. When I plugged it into my computer, I was greeted with a prompt asking if I wanted to send diagnostic data to Apple and a button that said "Show Details" that took me to /System/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/My iPhone/ which contained two files: Preferences-2007-06-29-202724.crash and Preferences-2007-06-29-202724.plist (links point to the files).

I discovered some curious things while reading through the two files:

OS Version is officially "OS X 1.0 (1A543a)" (a similar crash log for a desktop process has the version number as "10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)")

A non-comprehensive list of Frameworks (Bold means it does not appear on desktop OS X):
AddressBook
AddressBookUI
AppSupport
AudioToolbox
BluetoothManager
Calendar
Celestial
CFNetwork
CoreAudio
CoreFoundation
CoreGraphics
CoreSurface
CoreTelephony
CoreVideo
GraphicsServices
IAP
IOKit
ITSync
JavaScriptCore
LayerKit
MBX2D
MBXConnect
MeCCA
Message
MessageUI
MobileBluetooth
MobileMusicPlayer
MusicLibrary
OpenGLES
Preferences
Security
TelephonyUI
UIKit
URLify
WebCore
WebKit

The most intriguing ones (to me at least) are: Celestial.framework (because of it's non-descriptive name) and CoreSurface.framework (because I think it deals with the touchscreen).

On a similar note, I tried SSH, FTP, Telnet, etc to my iPhone and as expected none worked.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple, crash, OS X, mobile

The iPhone nay-sayers are making a last-minute knock at the iPhone by bringing in the old Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) argument, which usually centers around uncovering the not-so-readily apparent costs associated with a device/platform/etc.

On a similar note, why is AT&T's early termination fee such big news now? ETFs have been around for as long as cell phone contracts existed. The fact that it applies the contract you sign when you buy an iPhone shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

I was going to post the above in response to this article on the iPhone's Total Cost of Ownership. I got distracted by this ridiculous video Scoble linked to, and I went to Apple's site to find where Apple is flaunting the iPhone as a replacement for your PowerShot when I saw that Apple had posted the iPhone rate plans (my first story to make the Digg homepage, BTW) and a video on how to activate the iPhone through iTunes.

Thanks to this fresh information, the argument about the exorbitant and misleading TCO becomes even more ridiculous. With the minimum data plan on a Blackberry at $40/month and the minimum data plan on the iPhone at $20/month, it's quite possible for a soon-to-be-former Blackberry user to get an iPhone for under $150 ($20 x 24 - $600 = $120). The iPhone is now cheaper than the consumer-segment Blackberry Curve.

The final piece of the iPhone launch puzzle is now in place (well, until the 80GB iPhone mystery is resolved) and it is killer. Undercutting AT&T's other "pro" data plans by $20/month is going to go a long way to boost iPhone adoption (as if it needed it).

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, mobile, AT&T, data plan

I can't believe I missed this: Google Gears is available for WebKit. This was announced three weeks ago, but I just found out about it on this TUAW post regarding future Google/Apple iPhone-related announcements.

News of this makes me feel better about AJAX/HTML based apps on the iPhone, easing my concern over offline access to these apps. I also haven't seen many developers complaining about the lack of a "real" SDK on the iPhone, which makes me believe that offline access and home screen placement was discussed at NDA-covered WWDC sessions.

A big question I have is that amongst all this Google/Apple collaboration, Apple decided to go with Yahoo for the iPhone's bundled email solution and widgets (you'll note that the Stocks and Weather widgets now sport Y! icons). Could Apple be playing both sides? If Google and Yahoo were desperate to get placement on the iPhone, then perhaps they didn't want to (or couldn't get) exclusivity. Google and Yahoo are currently tied on home screen icon placement at two a piece (Yahoo is slightly ahead overall because of the mail tie-in, however).

The biggest loser in all of this is of course is Microsoft. The one-two punch: iPhone is going to take away customers from the Windows Mobile platform (RIM sure isn't helping them out either). Thanks to the Google/Yahoo integration, iPhone users will have an investment in Google and Yahoo's online services, driving usage away from MSN/Windows Live/whatever it's called now. After the iPhone, Microsoft will be facing increased competition from both the mobile space and the internet space.

There is a bright side to all of this for Microsoft. From any way you look at it, Microsoft is seen as the biggest competition to Google and Yahoo: Either Google and Yahoo compromised to "share" the iPhone, in which case they don't think they can handle Microsoft alone, or Apple didn't want only Google or only Yahoo on the iPhone, in which case Apple thinks that Google and/or Yahoo are vulnerable to Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, SDK, iPhone, WebKit, Google Gears, widgets