Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category
Nokia’s “iPhone Killer”
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, iPhone
But until they stop using that decades-old font for everything, it won’t feel nearly as good. There’s a reason that iPhone uses Helvetica freaking everywhere (the Notes app’s Marker Felt being the sole exception): it’s because it’s a good font. See for yourself.
Cocoa Camp
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, Bay Area, Coding, iPhone
I’m at Cocoa Camp this week, a five-day intensive series of courses hosted by Apple about Objective-C and the Cocoa application development framework. I won’t be posting here until I’m done, mostly because I’m in class all day at Infinite Loop and everything I learn is covered under the iPhone non-disclosure agreement. That probably tells you enough about what we’re learning.
In the meantime, follow me on Twitter, where I dribble out minutia far too often.
Link: Lord of the Memes
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Miscellaneous, iPhone
David Brooks of the New York Times simultaneously captures and parodies the ”tectonic shift in the basis of good taste” perfectly in his op-ed, Lord of the Memes:
When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.
Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.
Via Hacker News.
Unplugged
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Meta, iPhone
I’m going to just go crazy here and talk about my “feelings”, whatever the hell those might be. This post is technology-related, but takes a different tone than the archives.
When I was in high school, I dated a girl for eight months, and was good friends with her for several months before that. At the point that we became good enough friends for her to be calling me fairly often, I assigned her a specific ringtone on my cellphone. I think it was called “Chimes”. I can still remember this ringtone.
In the beginning, it was wonderful. When I heard the echoing tune, my mood would brighten and I would be in heaven. We’d talk for hours and think that we had something unique, something special, as high schoolers are prone to doing. No matter how asleep I was, that particular series of tones would dive through my dreams and float me gently to consciousness to answer my phone and hear her sweet, sweet voice.
The relationship began to sour, and heaven began to slowly, gruesomely, morph into hell. I would break out into a sweat. My heart would start pounding with sickening anxiety. By the end of it, I couldn’t even think about her ringtone without feeling slightly, uncomfortably dizzy.
Today I learned better; I found out how I could have not put myself through that at all.
This afternoon, I had a conversation on the phone that left me more anxious than normal, setting me on edge and slipping me into a kind of vaguely preoccupied state; in short, I was regressing to high school. I tweeted about it, thinking that it would make me feel better to get it out, but instead it just compounded my anxiety as I awaited any response from certain people.
And then I realized: I could just turn it off.
So I did.
My phone remained off for the next few hours, and thus, I remained unplugged this evening. I laughed, talked, ate, drove, and shared in good company.
Disconnecting myself from the constant stream of information didn’t just stop the firehose of bits, it also yanked from the roots the related anticipation of the torrent; something new and priceless to me.
Now, do people wiser than myself do this on a regular basis? It seems a terribly important skill, one that isn’t mentioned on the web design blogs, the coding forums, or the front page of digg. You don’t learn this in the pages of an O’Reilly book or Designing with Web Standards, 2nd Edition.
And yet it is vital for surviving and navigating this network of ours. As humans, we adapt easily. If a ringtone typically heralds an emotion-soaked conversation, the feelings pregame for the party as soon as they hear it. When a particularly personal missive is sent out into the world, the nerves and heart prepare for the equally personal messages expected in response.
But we’re also logical, so when you turn it all off… blissfully, deliciously, it all goes away.
Unfortunately, no one can hide forever. So I’m back on the grid, so to speak, writing this post in the hopes that it will help me remember when to simply step back and hold down the power button.
iTunes App Store Failwhales, Bodes Ill for the Future
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, iPhone
(Sorry for another iPhone/Apple post.)
So basically, it’s all gone to hell. The iTunes App Store is down, meaning a couple things: new iPhone 3G owners can’t activate their phones, and more disastrously, old iPhone owners attempting to upgrade to version 2.0 will get their phones bricked.
As Merlin Mann notes, “this is not the Friday Apple had wanted.” I propose that in particular, it doesn’t bode well for the future. Apple, like Microsoft and many other companies, is moving towards a partial services model. But for this to work, consumers have to be able to trust that when they want a service from Apple, Apple will provide. These server failures and overloads don’t exactly give me faith that Apple can uphold its end of the push notification system that iPhone app developers were promised (releasing in September) and more than that, strengthens my already .Mac-fueled skepticism that MobileMe can indeed be my own personal Exchange server. MobileMe’s already failing, and it’s barely a couple days old; it’s almost seeming like Apple just dumped an additional load on its outage-prone .Mac servers (adding on push email, contacts, calendars and web service) and somehow, perhaps delusionally, expected them to grin, bear it, and work fine.
I’m reading blog posts now from TUAW and others that iPhone activations are again working, but the fact that buying a new phone or even merely updating your old, previously-working phone landed you with a very nicely designed paperweight scares me, and will also spook the enterprise customers that Apple has been courting lately. Businesses can’t trust iPhones for corporate use if there’s the potential they’re going to be bricked for a morning, and I certainly won’t trust MobileMe for my email, contacts, and calendars if it’s going to fall this close to the .Mac tree.