Augmented reality on the iPhone

Oh my God, is this ever cool.  We're living in a sci-fi novel.

Must-have iPhone apps for New Yorkers

iAvoid
Utilizes dynamic GPS to route you past annoying sidewalk representatives for Greenpeace, Children International, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Save The Children, Save The Animals, DNC and Amnesty International. To name a few.

Whew. I sure coulda used that one.

Banterist: Three Must-Have iPhone Apps For New Yorkers

Hat tip: Tarus Balog

So, so wrong.

But so funny:



Hat tip: Scott (site comprehensively not safe for work unless you work for gay pornographers or your office has very relaxed Acceptable Use policies... in which case, click away!)

Holding the future of computing in your hand

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google's "supercomputer," will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today - in Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google's Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog - Google, Apple and the Future of Personal Computing

(via GigaOm)

Thanks, Steve

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs this afternoon responded to a flood of complaints from existing iPhone owners over yesterday's $200 price cut by promising the company would issue a $100 credit to anyone who bought an iPhone before the change.

"I have received hundreds of e-mails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale," Jobs said in a statement posted to the Apple Web site.

Jobs apologizes for iPhone price cut; Apple to issue $100 credit (Computerworld)

Hacking the iPhone

yep it's unix
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

The iPhone has been out not quite two months, and already benevolent hackers have been working hard to open up the platform.

With the help of community-built toolkits like "Jailbreak," serious Unix geeks have been installing new applications on their iPhones for weeks now.

For those of us a little less certain about DIY mods to our $600 cell phones, there's now a nice, hand-holding GUI interface -- Installer.app (Mac OS X only; there's a roughly equivalent program for Windows that is named, somewhat unsettlingly, iBrickr) -- that walks you through "jailbreaking" your iPhone and putting a nice Unix package installer on.

Once Installer.app is up and running, you can install everything from programming language runtimes (Perl, Python, Ruby) to OpenSSH and standard Unix apps like the Apache web server.

iPhone "Finder"

Cool.

iPhone: Will it blend?

Yes. Yes, it will.

Outmoded

Outmoded
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Doc, at They Rode On, is holding a reader photo contest called "Thirteen ways of looking at a BlackBerry." It is inspired by a picture a friend sent him (and it's quite a good one).

Here's my entry.

I call this piece “Outmoded.”

Pictured, left to right: Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry Curve, generously provided by my employer, adjacent to Apple’s new iPhone, generously provided by me, both displaying a favorite blog.

Damn you, Steve Jobs

sync in progress iphone is activated
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

You know, it seems like there was a whole lot of big talk in these parts recently about being over and done with Early Adopter Disorder, letting other people buy the Rev 1 Apple hardware and do the debugging, and so forth.

No iPhone for me, not yet, no sir.

And I was pretty damned smug on Friday about all the folks standing in line for their Jesus Phones. (I don't stand on line for *anything*. If the restaurant doesn't take reservations and it's full, I go somewhere else.)

My sainted grandmother gave me some good advice once: "Make your words sweet, son, because someday you might have to eat 'em."

And then a guy in our building reported a completely painless experience picking up an iPhone today...

Hi. I'm Barry, and I'm a gadget-holic. ("Hi, Barry!")

I must admit that the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue was handling a daunting logistical challenge with grace and style. Nobody enables better. The place was *packed* with people... but the longest and most difficult part of the transaction was getting up and down the stairs as the crush of acolytes descended and ascended.

From the time I walked into the store until the time I walked out with the iPhone... eight and a half minutes.

Total time, once home, to download iTunes 7.3, sign up for an AT&T account and switch our service from Sprint, and start receiving calls on my existing cell phone number on the iPhone: 45 minutes.

Yow.

So far I am completely and utterly delighted.

We're all living in a science-fiction novel; you realize this, of course. :-)

David Pogue, liking the iPhone

As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

Tog on the iPhone

Interface designer extraordinaire Bruce Tognazzini takes a close look at the new iPhone:

I could go down through the other “innovations” in iPhone and slowly knock them off. Yes, it’s the first cell phone with a visual display of voicemail messages, so you can randomly move among voicemails, etc., etc. However, such lists have been displayed, in an identical fashion, on enterprise-level voicemail systems and, of course, such lists have been a standard feature in email for decades.

The origins of these bits and pieces, however, is not what’s important about the iPhone. What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of Apple.

It’s also speaks to the limited vision of the cell phone industry. Exactly why have we never had random-access voicemail on cell phones? We’re talking about hand-held devices with more computer power than the Apollo spacecraft that took us to the moon. We’re talking about devices with screens of more than sufficient resolution. Could nobody think of displaying the messages?

The Macintosh computer did not represent a technological breakthrough either. The mouse was already 20 years old. Pointing interfaces were 20 years old. The Mac was a direct, studied “rip-off” of Apple’s expensive Lisa computer, developed concurrently, but shipped three years earlier. That detracted nothing from the genius of the Mac, for what that team did was to take highly innovative technology and make it (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.

That’s exactly what Apple has done again with iPhone. Multi-touch gestural interfaces have been hanging around in the laboratory, screaming for release, for as long as the mouse hung around. I’ve been pushing multi-touch gestural for over 20 years myself, beginning while I was still at Apple, incredulous that everyone has been ignoring it. Apple stopped ignoring it.

Fulton didn’t invent the steamboat. He just put in the hard work to make it practical. Apple didn’t invent the concept of the multi-touch interface. They’ve just, by all evidence, built the first one that, like the Mac before [it], is (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.

The iPhone User Experience: A First Look

Hat tip: Laurie

iWant

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Apple - iPhone

Je le veux

This little beast runs OS X.

A phone, an iPod, and a computer in a small, slim package... it's not really a phone, but the MacBook Nano.

And come June, I think there are two of them in this family's future.