More applications

I’ve been adding applications almost daily – Koi Pond, Monkey Ball, Whoishere …

Koi Pond – a nice calm application. Though I seem to remember that real koi would be attracted to your finger rather than repelled. The graphics are what are most astounding. This is why the iPhone is not your ordinary cell phone.

Monkey Ball – a not so calm application, especially for those of us hand eye coordination challenged folks. Still it’s a fun game.

MPG – a small application to keep track of my car milage. It would be nice if it interfaced with my car, and my car kept a similar record.

Whoishere – is a social application. Intersting but perhaps buggy at this point. When I signed on, the nearest people it found were in Montreal – which it knew was 150 km away …

Then, not a true application, at least not explicitly …

Google Maps – I was chatting with Will about Whoishere, and it also gave him Montreal based fiends, but he is in Minnesota, not Vermont ! So, while sitting in the Waterman Cybercafe, I fired up google maps, searched for the Waterman Building. Google decided that my current location was at Main and South Prospect, and then gave me the one block walking directions to reach the Waterman building.

So, even with Wi-Fi, my location is well enough known for my uses.

Six more applications

6 Apps Screen Shot 200808-07-21

WordPress – so now my posts can say “posted with my iPod” … as this one does …

Graffito – a geo-tagging application. Go to a spot – a museum, a park, a public square, a shopping mall, a cemetary, … – and post your remarks. The next person to come by will be able to read them and respond. Of course, since it is spatially based, you won’t be able to read the reply until you to back to that location. The concept is intriguing, the comments on the developers board even moreso. Definitely mind bending.

NYTimes – provides a clean repackaging of the paper for the iPhone. They clearly see what’s coming down the street.

Scribble – a doodle pad that may allow you to email the sketches. It crashed the first time I tried it; will try again later.

BubbleWrap- pop virtual plastic wrap bubbules. Nice simple game to pass the time of day.

Banner Free – make psuedo LED display bnners you can show to your friends.

Ok but trying to type in the links is not going to be fun.

The Top Ten Free Applications

Like it’s parent iTunes store, the App store shows a list of popular downloads – on the left are the most popular free downloads for the US, on the right, those for Japan.

For most of the week, the top spot in the US has been stable, with only the bottom few shifting up and down, AOL and Facebook squeaking in there.

iPhone 2.0 and beyond.

Probably the best thing about iPhone 2.0 is Android. Or maybe I should say, no Microsoft.

The iPhone is a good example of the post-PC (computer, keyboard, mouse) world, but if Apple were going that road alone, things would move slowly. With Google entering the field, there is now, or soon will be, serious competion – both for technology and vision. Stuff.tv has an nicely written article on 10 things you didn’t know about Android. Details aside, the basic case made is “anything you can do, I can do better.” Missing is the important reply, “so can I.” Both are unix systems, and, when push comes to shove, both are open systems. The result will be good, a variety of “choices,” or at least a semblance of choice.

Today being Sunday, the application du jour is the New York Times. Again, they did it right. It does not emulate the webpage experience but gives you New York Times articles that are perfectly readable on the iPhone. The articles had a small mini-banner at the bottom, taking up maybe 2 or three lines of article text. But when you scroll through the article, the ad stays fixed and is totally unobnoxious. The only annoying things about it is that, like a lot of NYTimes ads, they are for things I’m not really interested in – the Westin Hotel Chain, Hewlett-Packard Printers, Sun Servers, etc. I’d almost prefer real ads from the real sunday newspaper. Book ads on editorial and review pages, music ads on arts pages, and hey, while you’re at it, if I’m in the city, how about a link to MOMA or the Met so I can buy a ticket on my iPhone, and just go there and show them the ticket on the screen when I show up. (And then, yes, buy the program and museum guide and install it on my machine.)

iPhone 1.99 – Now for some Google Tricks

Google has adapted to iPhone 2.0 at high speed – with a half dozen or so applications mobiized:

google

google/ig

gCalendar

Gmail

gNews

gNotes

gReader

Some, like mail and calendar, are SDK applications. Others, like reader and news, are Safari based.

What’s most fun about them is that they, like AIM, Twitterific, and Facebook, break away from the “web page” syndrome. Or at least they do so on the first level. Once you get into, for example, a news source or a blog source, you have to deal with the original site and it’s idea of a web page. I wonder how far Google will go to extracting information, leaving the style sheets, site advertisements, site navigation – eventually the whole site – behind.

Or perhaps, what we will see are sites adapting to the new media. Computing without computers, browsing without browsers. No mice, no keyboards, no Internet Explorer.

The Google Mobile Blog has a nice article on Google’s recent efforts, see “New updates to Google.com for the iPhone,” Friday, July 18, 2008 http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-updates-to-googlecom-for-iphone.html

iPhone 1.98 – Some Silly Fun

Friday, and some time to play with the less serious side of the phone.

First some wallpaper. Sciphone is a repository of cellphone and iphone wallpaper. Most of it is either tasteful or tasteless, hopelessly cute or hopelessly crass. Occasionally there is a photo, however, that is striking and cellphone apt, at least in my eye. Here’s what I’ve chosen, with homage to Wegman. One wonders what Andy Warhol or Ray Lichtenstein would have done with the wallpaper medium. Or even Pablo Picasso. Another hit towards the future, perhaps.

As an official project, I installed the Cisco VPN client. The major sticking point was the long url that advertises it … 80 some characters. TinyUrl reduced it to 25. There were a couple of certificate warnings along the way to add to the confusion (and, if kept in place, to encourage unhealthy habits.)

Then finally, another game. Tap Tap Revenge, or TTR, is a crazy disco fever Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. (An earlier version of the game was indeed called Tap Tap Revolution.) The video below shows it in play, though I wonder how they got two earphones on the system :). The lead to this came from TechCrunch via the Washington Post which noted “The game, which was released by new startup Tapulous, is currently number 7 on the list of top free applications overall (ahead of AOL Radio and MySpace Mobile) and number 1 on the top games list.” [1]

Here’s a quick video of the game in play.

If Carl Icahn and Steve Balmer knew what they were headed into, they would be trying to buy Sony or Nintendo, rather than Yahoo.

[1] Michael Arrington, Tap Tap Revenge For iPhone Launches Late, Surges Up App Store Rankingsm TechCrunch.com, Tuesday, July 15, 2008; 1:44 AM. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071500548.html

iPhone 1.97 – More applications

Alas, this time some applications without icons. Narrative rules.

• Remote Control. Sort of a disappointment, so far. Sure, I can control my MacBook, but I really want to control, say, the home TV set or the lecture hall projector :). This is from Apple, so we expect it to be maybe more suggestive than operative. I guess we will put those in the shape of applications to come.

• Moonlight Mahjong Lite. This is the simple tile game, with a three dimensional visualization option. Using multitouch, you can rotate, pan, zoom, and otherwise explore the area. Good thing this is not a driving game, I would have wiped out a dozen times. 3D navigation is not easy, with or without multi-touch.

• Molecules. This is a port of a BSD open source project and shows that, hey guys, there is a real computer in here. New molecules can be downloaded from the RCSB Protein Data Bank. (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb. This is a bit overpowering for Chemistry 1 and Chemistry 20 students, but I’m sure those molecules will soon become available.

• Weatherbug. I’m addicted to weather radar and weatherbug meets that addiction nicely. It’s always such a pain to go to a portal page, click on the weather icon, reach a weather site, click on a feature, find the map i want, click on it, and then finally get to see where that storm is. Weather bug puts that radar image right up front. Bingo. [Double bingo. I woke up Friday morning and heard that there was a weather alert - a supercell was headed into the Champlain Valley, due to strike at 7 AM. Weatherbug showed that this would pass well to the north of Burlington. Whew!]

What I like about theses applications is that they are real applications. You can immediately see where the iPhone is blowing away the telco model of the cellphone. Ditto why so many programmers are frustrated by the compromises Apple has made to that telco model. This is a real computing platform.

Google’s Android and the OLPC programs will, I bet, help those disruptive ideas bubble up.

iPhone 1.96

Ok, the first pass at adding applications. What looks like fun?

The first things are the ones that I already use most of the time – AIM, Facebook, and Twitter. Each of them now get a nice icon on the phone.

AIM, instant messanger

Facebook

Twitterific

The very first impression is that I think I like these better than the ones on my MacBook. AIM feels very chat-like, Twitterific is very twitterific, and most interestingly Facebook now feels more like chat and twitter than a portal page. That is something I like.

Facebook almost brings my exploration to a halt. The change in interface makes it seem much more personal, much more usable, much more mobile. This, I suspect, is much more like what Web 3.0 will be than some information portal like site.

Picking up the iPod touch was definitely a good idea.

iPhone 1.95

Quite frankly, the 10 million applications downloaded and installed in 3 days shocked me. On Tuesday (July 14th), I headed off to Small Dog to pick up an iPod Touch. I rationalized that I could turn this into my ibricking prototype. I’ll brick the pod first, then the phone. Any rationalization will do in a pinch.

That was, unfortunately, a slightly misfound action. I went to the store and the cupboards were bare, at least of the 8 Gb iPod. The weekend of the 12th and 13th was a Vermont Sales Tax Holiday, and Small Dog had a good weekend. But, I said, your website says you have some in stock! Yes, but those are in Waitsfield. Now if my check engine light wasn’t on, I would have driven to Waitsfield and been set.

Instead, I had to cool my heels and wait.

Two days.

The Touch arrived on Thursday and I picked it up that evening, and first things first, updated the software from 1.something to 2.0. Another $10 but, hey, it’s good practice for for unbricking :) It all went more or less smoothly except that:

• iTunes is showing it’s age. The product registration process and then the update process all took far too many clicks and page refreshes. No wonder there were problems last Friday. Strategically, iTunes has got to go – get replaced with an iStore or something that has one-click shopping features like Amazon or Google Checkout. This was not nice.
• Once I had downloaded some applications to iTunes to install on my iPod, iTunes said “ouch, that’s not my iPod, that’s someone else’s” – after, of course, it had installed the update. Luckily, the App Store Application downloaded the products I wanted directly to my iPod. And that was a 1-click process, with only a password required to verify the transaction. This was nice.

And now, spoiler coming, the real fun begins. And real fun it is.

iPhone 2.0

The process of bricking and bricking begins anew.

A month ago, Apple announced both the iPhone 3 G and the iPhone 2.0 software. The 3 G will work on (GSM) 3 G Networks; the 2.0 software will breakout of Safari browser land and work with the interal system with development supported by an SDK. The roll out would be accompanied by a the iPhone App store embedded in iTunes. [Hmm. Wondering if they are pondering an iStore in the future?]

On Friday, July 11, these became available in 22 countries – with 48 more countries lined up for the remainder of the year. The day was accompanied by server meltdowns – both at Apple and at AT&T. People were upset, at least until Monday when the story was unfolded. In the first weekend, over 1 million iPhones were sold, clearing the shelves. Even more interesting, over 10 million applications were downloaded.

Jailbreaking this time around will saner. The worldwide release means that the system has to be easily localized and relocalized; unlocking the sims is more of a feature than ever. The SDK will make it easier for the developers to build robust, interesting, and responsive applications. The ipod development team announced that the phone was ready to be broken – they already had the pre-release system jailbroken and would only have to tweak it for the released version. The unlocking of the 3G will take a bit more time since the hardware was unavailable and, initially at least, more difficult to obtain.