Lots of discussion about iPhone development over at my other blog. Big debate going on … I don’t know enough about it all to chime in.
Month: July 2007
Adoption Time
About seven years or so ago I was invited to give a talk in Harrisburg (our State Capital) designed to address the notion of eGovernment. Back then it was all the rage — you know, renewing driver licenses and electronic voting and what not. I was part of a group of faculty from the College of IST here at PSU who were supposed to help the invited State officials understand where we could go. My part was called, “Challenges in an eWorld.” I’ve given that talk so many times I can’t count them all. I’ve tweaked it significantly through the years and still break out a hybrid version of it I use in my class. One of the slides is related to the number of years it took for specific mediums/technologies to reach 50 million homes. I’ve includes the slide below.
One thing I find interesting (on a whole bunch of levels) is how quickly the Internet reached the masses relative to something like radio — when I was growing up I was told over and over again about how everyone had a radio in their living room. Clearly the numbers are skewed by factors like PC ownership and total population, but they are interesting nonetheless.
If you jump out and look at the fact that Apple sold 50 million or so iPods in about 5 years you might argue that this device certainly needs to be considered in the chart above. I saw an article over in Gizmodo that got me thinking about all this … what is amazing to me is that Motorola sold 50 million RAZOR cellphones in about two years — two years! That to me is mind numbing. I doubt the iPhone can pull those kinds of numbers, but again I am not into predictions so I’ll leave that to others. Steve Jobs himself is shooting for much lower numbers, but if you take an argument like I have in my little presentation that the Internet reached 50 million users in about 4 years because the PC was its installed base, then the iPhone may have a shot at changing the rules of the game once again given the ubiquitous ownership of cellphones, the total reliance on the Internet, and the public’s fascination with the iPod. Who knows, I just found it all very interesting and it reminded me it was time to update some slides.
I doubt this post will spark the kind of open debate my last one did — that was fun to watch … and if I was smarter I might have even been able to participate.
iPhone and IMAP Mail
Prior to the iPhone hit last week I set out to switch to IMAP mail. Before I worked in ITS I was over in the College of IST … for better of for worse (mostly worse) we were all on an Exchange server. There were problems, but I have to say I had missed the mail functionality since coming over a year and a half ago. I missed having an identical view of my mail no matter where I looked at it. I am not a fan of webmail — of any sort, not just PSU’s — I am mail client kind of person, so that’s never been an option for me.
I had settled on dealing with the situation by only ever checking my mail from one machine — not something that is all that feasible given the fact I have a few different machines. When the iPhone pilot became a reality I knew I needed to get off POP and onto IMAP. Hence the switch. I have to say, the PSU IMAP service is rocking! My mail is always in sync, I never get the annoying error messages I was getting before, and I can feel confident that if I am away from my MacBook I can grab email. IMAP at PSU carries a small fee, but it isn’t all that expensive.
IMAP on the iPhone is the only way to go (IMHO) … I like to get mail on the go and have its “state” be identical when I get to the desktop. I only wish I had my MailTags plug-in on the iPhone, but you can’t have everything. At any rate, email on the iPhone is a pleasure and having my mail synced up with my desktop is wonderful. I am checking and sending more and more mail from my iPhone, so having it all work so nicely is very cool. If you are going to go down the iPhone path, I highly recommend switching to IMAP.
Developer Specifications
Apple has created a website that gives us the info we need to create the right kinds of web apps, but that is as far as they’ll go with it. What kinds of apps should we be thinking about? One I could use would be a better view of my calendar.
I have a more extensive post about this over at my other blog.
Being an Apple Developer These Days Must be Hard
I know lots of people were bent out of shape when Steve Jobs told the crowd at WWDC that they can develop for the iPhone as long as it is in the browser. The whole idea of providing access to build applications for a platform is typically at the heart of that platform’s success … when I think about Apple’s business models (or product segments) for a second I see things in an interesting way. Apple seems to have a few core areas of focus these days in the hardware space — the Mac, the iPod, the Apple TV, and the iPhone. Each one does some amazing things — and to tell you the truth it occurs to me that only the iPod isn’t running OSX … they’ll fix that. This is from a company who “ignited the personal computing revolution …” Things are shifting.
The Mac has always been a platform where developers have been invited to play. You want to make some software for it? Go ahead … Apple even has a whole developer relations group and associated services. WWDC is a developer’s conference — a developer’s conference for the Mac. With that in mind I can see why the masses were irritated when Jobs told them to build web apps to support the phone. These are real developers who write real code. Not that web apps aren’t real apps, but I think we all get the notion. I am quite honestly excited by the web apps I am seeing being revised to work really well on the iPhone. The Ta-Da List port is one that makes a whole lot of sense in the browser — I am now testing it with my administrative assistant as an ad-hoc calendar tool.
The iPod is a closed platform from what I can tell. There isn’t an open SDK for the iPod that I know of. I could be wrong about this one, but I don’t know of one — at least on the software side. I tell a story about a time I visited Apple right after the iPod was released … I actually told an product manager that if they really wanted to make this product successful they’d release an SDK and let computer science departments use it as a platform. I guess my brilliant idea wasn’t needed. Sure, Nike and a few other select feew companies have been able to release software that extends the functionality of the iPod, but for the most part it is a closed party. The Apple TV is being hacked all the time, but again, from what I can tell it is a closed platform. Yes, the Apple TV runs some sort of OSX, but it isn’t a true Mac.
The iPhone is in the same boat … it runs OSX, but it isn’t a Mac. Apple has created a website that gives us the info we need to create the right kinds of web apps, but that is as far as they’ll go with it. The funny thing is that the fact this thing has a browser opens up nearly unlimited possibilities — at least from my perspective. It has to be hard for real developers though.
The whole paradigm shift happening at Apple is interesting to watch — a computer company that is no longer just a computer company. How will this change developer relations? How will WWDC need to change to integrate the other three product lines? I have no idea, but I doubt Steve and Co. are done in the space that isn’t occupied by the Mac. Imagine being a developer and being tempted by these other products … just dreaming about what could be done. It must be so hard to step outside the Apple developer mindset.
Forgetting Wireless Networks
Here’s one that was stumping me this morning — how to not connect automatically to a wireless access point. It seems logical that you’d want the iPhone to switch over to an open wifi hotspot when it encounters one. The problem I was facing was that it was trying to connect to the PSU wireless (which requires VPN that iPhone doesn’t do) or a for-fee “getwireless.net” hotspot that is somewhere close to my building. These are open in that you don’t need a password to access the access point, but you must authenticate to join the network — either via VPN or a web page.
So this morning my iPhone refused to stick with EDGE and kept trying to join one of these two “open” wifi hotspots. I turned off wifi on the iPhone, but that is silly as I want to join truly open spots. I looked all over the Apple Support area and was unsuccessful at finding a fix. Brad Kozlek mentioned to me that there is a button on the iPhone that you can touch to “foget a hotspot.” Very cool. To find it:
- Go to Settings > Wi-Fi
- Let it bring up your available access points
- When/if your iPhone pulls up networks you do not want to join, first join it by touching its name
- Once you are joined (there will be a check mark by the name), touch the little blue circle with the arrow in it
- In the next screen, touch “Forget the Network”
That’s it.
Another Web App: Ta-Da List
In ETS we use 37 Signals’ project management/tracking application, BaseCamp. It isn’t perfect, but what app really is? What it gives us in an online hub for project tracking and communication. The other thing it gives us a great UI for working with.
37 Signals also has a free list manager called, Ta-Da List that helps people get things done — since GTD is all the rage these days, having access to a very well designed list manager from the iPhone is good thing. I am going to experiment with how well it can handle my daily calendar — again another step to manage, but until I can figure out (or more appropriately, someone who is smarter than I am) how to make our Oracle Calendar work more fluidly with iCal/iPhone I will continue to explore other options. 37 Signals has redesigned Ta-Da List so it is optimized for an iPhone browsing experience … I think we are going to see more of this. Accounts are free, so if you have an iPhone give it a try.
I know it is backwards, but that’s how PhotoBooth shoots it.
iPhone on Two Macs
I didn’t actually try to sync anything, but I did plug my iPhone into my laptop today to charge it and was surprised that it appears as though I can selectively sync content from multiple machines. I’ll have to investigate further, but if that is the case it will make my life a little easier. I keep all my media on my iMac at home and all my contacts and calendars on my MacBook Pro. Right now I am managing all of it by using .Mac to kepp the two machines in sync … that is a step I’d like to eliminate. I will test it more and see what happens.