Adam's Interweb

I’ve been thinking about whether it will be worth it to pick up an iPhone 2.0 on July 11th.  I’ve had the original iPhone for a while now (I picked it up when they discontinued the 4GB version) and I have mixed feelings about it.  iPhone 1.0 is certainly the best PDA type phone I’ve ever used.  Everything is very well designed, the battery life is good, sound quality is at least as good as other phones I’ve had, the web browser is fantastic (unless you need to view Flash content), and it’s a great iPod.

So why am I not already getting in line for 2.0?  Well, the first thing is that the 2.0 software will run on the 1.0 hardware.  So any bug fixes, new core application updates (e.g. scientific calculator), and other improvements will work just fine on my original phone.  The only real hardware features that matter for version 2.0 of the hardware are 3G network chip and the A-GPS hardware. 

2G is certainly not setting any speed records – but for the most part, it gets the job done fine for me.  I use the web more on the iPhone than I have on any other phone, but it’s still nothing at all compared to my web use on a real PC – so 3G would be nice, but it’s nothing I can’t live without.  The main issue with the 3G support is that my phone bill will go up by $10 per month for 2 years – so $240 total increase on top of buying the $200/$300 iPhone 2.0.  It’s not a horrible price increase, but in my particular situation, it’s harder to justify the benefit outweighing the cost there. 

The A-GPS is a bit more appealing though.  I have a handheld GPS unit from Garmin, but it’s meant for hiking/geocaching type activities and not for navigation.  I do like the idea of buying a cheap dash mount and then my iPhone could be a very decent auto navigation system that moves around to different cars easily.  Of course, this all depends on what GPS software is released for the phone, but I’m sure we’ll see great things in this area.  The other thing is that we really haven’t had a small GPS device that had an always on broadband-link internet link – that could allow for all kinds of interesting situations that make the GPS ability of the iPhone unlike anything we’ve seen (for better or for worse).

At this point, my feeling is that I’m going to hold off for a bit and see what applications come out that make use of iPhone 2.0 hardware features.  If they are compelling enough, then I may make the jump, but I’m starting to get to that point where I need to see real world benefits from new gadgets instead of just the conceptual greatness of them…  Even on July 11th, the really amazing applications for iPhone may not even be ready because of the way Apple has chosen to limit the developer program – from the latest Apple keynote, it sounds like some developers (and some SDK functionality) won’t even be ready until September anyway.  We’ll see how things play out, but for now, I think I’ll be keeping my $440.

I just spent a few hours working on a small iPhone app using the Beta 2 iPhone SDK and thought I would share my my initial thoughts. Keep in mind that this is the first time I’ve tried programming for OS X period and I spend 99% of my time programming in C# with Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

Xcode itself is not even comparable to Visual Studio (I realize VS isn’t free, but even the free Express Editions are much, MUCH better than Xcode). I found out how to turn on the autocomplete functionality in Xcode, but it’s so unhelpful that I may turn it back off since it seems to get in the way more than it helps. I’m so accustomed to intellisense in VS – if you know nothing about a library, you can use intellisense to get up and running in a flash (usually), but not in Xcode. In Xcode, if you don’t know the frameworks you’re using in and out, prepare to be checking out Safari constantly. The whole Interface Builder application doesn’t really make sense to me yet, so I won’t really comment on it yet. The error messages from Xcode have been fairly useful so far, so that’s a good thing. The editor is decent in that it color codes syntax for you and it does have the ability to jump directly to specific functions from a menu (very similar to VS on this one).

Perhaps the bigger issue for people coming from a non-OS X background is the knowledge of all of the frameworks. It’s not nearly as expansive as the .NET framework, but it’s quite different – so you’re not going to be able to just pick up the frameworks and hit the ground running. The documentation on Apple’s dev center isn’t terrible…it takes a little bit to find what you need, but it’s usually there somewhere. The naming convention does make it pretty clear what you’re doing when calling a method, however, this is realllllllly irritating without intellisense. I’m still trying to figure out which classes do what and how to structure the View/Controllers in my application. The sample apps are really helping out there. It does seem like I have to write quite a bit of code for even fairly basic stuff. I just feel really unproductive at this point..I know that’s mostly the learning curve that I’m working through, but I would have thought Apple would have a better developer toolset in this day and age. I don’t think the Objective-C language will be that hard to pickup since it seems pretty logical once you get the syntax for methods and method calls. The frameworks are going to take some time and I’m sure things will still be changing between now and June, but hopefully I’ll get this stuff figured out soon so I can have my little app up and running in the simulator.

I don’t normally blog about random things I see on the internet, but I ran across an article by John C. Dvorak today (The iPhone Is No Desktop) that really annoyed me enough that I have to do this. John is basically saying that it’s ridiculous that people are using the iPhone as a desktop computing platform and that drives him crazy in many ways (10 ways to be exact). I don’t disagree that the iPhone is not a “desktop replacement” in the typical sense, but what bothers me is the fact that he thinks this is important.

In the technical world, so many people still believe the “platform” is the key to everything. There are always discussions about which platform is the best – laptop vs desktop vs PDA, Windows vs OS X vs Linux, Nikon vs Canon, Ford vs Chevy – you get the point. That’s all fine and dandy and I don’t disagree that sometimes there are certain benefits to using a specific platform. But the kicker is that this is a stupid argument to begin with.

People don’t care about the platform. Even if you think you care, you probably don’t when you get right down to it. For example, when I’m using the Windows platform, I keep my current TODO list in Microsoft Outlook. Now that I also work on a Mac, I decided to move my TODO list to an online platform. Sure – I moved to a different “platform” because it made it easier to get to my TODO list from either OS, but it’s not the platform I really care about, it’s the data.

Whether my TODO list is on the web, on my desktop, on my iPhone, or on my physical notepad, the platform is of little importance to me as long as my list is there and it’s accessible when I need it. The platform only comes into the picture when it can better enable me to manipulate my data in ways that make me more efficient and effective. In reality, forget the platform and focus on the data (or on the actions driven by the data) and you’ll see that the platform being the key is a fallacy in this day and age.

Well, I finally decided it is time for me to give Apple’s OS X a try. I’ve been interested in seeing how things work on an Apple system, but I haven’t really had a reason to buy an Apple machine. I still don’t *really* have a reason, but I do want to play around with the iPhone SDK since I have some ideas I’d like to try out so I used that as an excuse to buy a MacBook.

I ended up going with a black 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo version. It came with 2GB of RAM, but that’s not really enough since I want to run VMWare Fusion so that I can have Visual Studio 2005/2008 running in unity mode as well as SQL Server 2005/2008. So I had the MacBook upgraded to 4GB DDR2 RAM. Apple wanted $400 extra to add 2GB, but I used Crucial memory and did the upgrade myself for a grand total of $111 including tax & shipping. Not a bad deal since I effectively saved nearly $300 by spending about 10 minutes swapping the RAM sticks out.

So far, my impression of OS X is favorable. I’ve found replacements for everything I typically used on Windows (except development tools and Quicken) and I’m fairly happy with the way things work. For the first week or so, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to like OS X, but it’s one of those things that grows on you. I wouldn’t make the claim that a lot of people when they say Macs are easier to use than Windows. I think usability (as a whole) is pretty similar between the two. OS X does have some standards that most applications seem to follow which is better than on Windows, but the big difference is that the “graphic arts” background of historical Mac users has resulted in software developers taking more time to refine the user experience to the point that things are a bit more logical than they are in Windows-based counterparts.

I’m really happy with the battery life on this thing. As long as I’m just surfing the net, typing up blog posts, reading e-mail, and other light tasks, I get fantastic battery life. I have a feeling even playing a DVD will still result in good battery life, but it may not be the 4 or so hours I get now. Time machine seems useful, although I keep forgetting to eject the disk before I unplug the backup drive – so I think I’m going to end up getting the Time Capsule before long, but I don’t really want to spend that money right now.

The one thing that is slightly disappointing thus far is that the MacBook gets a little choppy when playing World of Warcraft with everything maxed out. It’s not terrible and I do realize this machine has an integrated graphics card, but WoW isn’t *that* demanding…either way, it’s still plenty playable, but it’s just a little disappointing that it’s not as smooth as I’d like.

After I’ve used OS X for a few more weeks, I’ll post my updated impressions, but so far so good.

I’ve had my 4GB iPhone for about a month now so I thought I would share my impressions now that I’ve had plenty of time to check things out.  Overall, I’m still very happy with my purchase, but there are a few annoying things:

No Tasklist.  I don’t know why Apple decided to include all of the other PIM applications (contacts, calendar, notes), but decided to leave off a tasklist.  I really miss that feature from my Windows Mobile phone.  Hopefully Apple will add this soon.

Random Crashes.  It isn’t clear why it happens, but every once in a while, the iPhone will freeze and I’ll have to reboot.  Most of the time, I can just use the home button to kill the application and things are fine (although you usually lose whatever data you were updating, if any, when you do this).  It doesn’t take long to reset (maybe 20 seconds), but it’s still a bit of a pain.  My Windows Mobile phone and my PocketPC seem more stable (and I don’t have non-Apple applications on my phone).

No local downloading.  You can browse anything you want via Safari, but you can’t save anything.  I had one time when I really wanted to save a PDF document for viewing later or even e-mail it to myself…but the iPhone doesn’t support that.

No copy & paste.  There have been a couple of times when I needed to take a snippit of a webpage (or even copy a URL) and paste it into a note or e-mail, but at present, there is no ability to copy and paste on the iPhone.

Of coure, there are still the original issues of not having Flash support and no Assisted GPS.

But other than these few issues, the phone really works well.  The photo viewer works great, the call quality has been excellent, the EDGE network in my area is certainly speedy enough for everything I’ve needed, and the battery life is better than I expected.  It may not be the perfect phone, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.