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Linked List: January 12, 2007

Friday, 12 January 2007

Stephen Colbert on the iPhone and Apple’s Name Change ★

The legendary and dreaded Double Wag of the Finger. (Thanks to Bryan Bell.)

James Duncan Davidson: Spectators at the iPhone Display ★

Terrific photos. He really captures the way people stood in awe. (Apple really did a great job with the displays, too.)

What makes Apple’s choice of processor for the iPhone interesting isn’t really which specific something-other-than-x86 CPU it is, but rather that they have OS X compiling and running on something other than PowerPC or x86 at all. Not surprising, but interesting.

Siracusa on Apple’s Corporate Name Change ★

John Siracusa:

Also, about renaming Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc., I could swear Apple did that already a few years ago. Anyone else know what I’m (apparently mis-) remembering? Whatever, I don’t see it as a big deal. People fretting about the name change itself have cause and effect reversed. The name reflects the product mix, not the other way around.

The way I remember it, Apple began calling themselves “Apple” instead of “Apple Computer” right around the same time they switched from the six-color Apple logo to the monochrome logo. I.e. in terms of their advertising and marketing, they’ve been just plain “Apple” since the end of the ’90s. Now they’re just officially changing the legal name of the corporation to match.

Pure conjecture on my part, but perhaps the fact that they didn’t change this earlier had something to do with their legal wranglings with The Beatles’ Apple Corps.

iPhones Are Available for Pre-Order From Amazon in Germany? ★

Unless this is some sort of prank, Amazon is taking pre-orders for unlocked no-contract iPhones; €999 for the 8 GB, €899 for the 4 GB. (That’s roughly $1,300 and $1,150, respectively, but don’t forget that the dollar is way down against the euro. Update: I forgot that German prices include a 19 percent VAT, too.)

At this writing, the 8 GB iPhone is their top-selling item in electronics; the 4 GB model is way down at #58.

Cisco May Have Lost the Rights to ‘iPhone’ Trademark by Not Using It ★

See also this article from Reg Hardware regarding similar laws in Europe. The gist of it seems to be that you can’t just hold on to a trademark that you never use, and Cisco’s launch of an “iPhone” VOIP handset last month might be too little too late. (In their filing for an extension to hold onto the trademark, they needed to show a photograph of the trademark in use; they submitted a photo of an existing handset package with an “iPhone” sticker placed outside the shrinkwrap.)

(Thanks to DF reader Zac Grose.)

Cingular: We Made Apple Bend ★

Smooth move, Cingular president of national distribution Glenn Lurie — go ahead and start getting people hepped up for future models of iPhones six months before the first iPhones even ship.

Merlin Mann Interviews Bare Bones’s Patrick Woolsey for MacBreak ★

Nice video interview with Bare Bones Software’s other founder.

M:Metrics Analyst Seamus McAteer Is a Moron ★

However, Jobs has a reason to make the iPhone live up to its hype, M:Metrics analyst Seamus McAteer said: 1993’s failed Newton handheld.

“There’s one big black blotch on his resume. … This is his chance to wipe that clean, and I don’t think he’s going to screw it up,” McAteer said.

Really? “1993’s failed Newton handheld” is a blotch on Steve Jobs’s résumé? The same Steve Jobs who was booted from Apple in 1985 and didn’t return until 1996, and whose only involvement with the Newton was to pull the plug on it?

I mean, holy shit, how stupid does an analyst have to be before a reporter decides he’s just too dumb to be quoted?

iPhone iPhud ★

The Macalope responds to iPhone critics Paul Kedrosky and Robert Scoble:

“How do you operate your phone under a table at a meeting”? This is exactly why Apple’s design is better than Microsoft’s. The five jackasses who need to do that — instead of paying attention to the meeting — can keep stroking their Blackberrys under the table.

In the comments, Robert Scoble claims that “if Microsoft had shipped this you’d be deriding it as the worst cell phone ever shipped.” What kind of sense does that make? I think most people might have had a stroke if Microsoft had shipped something this innovative.

MacFUSE ★

Amit Singh has ported FUSE (File System in User Space) to Mac OS X:

FUSE makes it possible to implement a very functional file system in a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to the operating system. More importantly, the FUSE API is very easy to program for. The large number of interesting and/or useful FUSE file systems out there is a testament to this. An often-cited example of such a useful file system is sshfs, which until now was not available on Mac OS X.

The biggest immediate practical upside is read/write access to NTFS volumes.

Jeff Han, of ‘Multi-Touch Interaction Research’ Drops Hint of Deal With Apple ★

Jeff Han, whose “multi-touch” screen interaction demo from a while back both looks and sounds quite similar to the “multi-touch” screen technology in the iPhone:

Yes, we saw the keynote too! We have some very, very exciting updates coming soon- stay tuned!

David Pogue’s Ultimate iPhone Frequently Asked Questions ★

Outstanding resource — there are numerous answers here that I haven’t seen anywhere else, including that the iPhone’s web browser supports neither Flash nor Java, and that the camera doesn’t (at least yet) support video.

Steve Jobs Talks About Third-Party Development for iPhone ★

Speaking to John Markoff of The New York Times:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” [Jobs] said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Markoff points out that even if Apple maintains complete control over native software running on iPhone, third-party developers still might have an in by writing web apps targeted at the iPhone’s web browser. The problem with that is that web apps, even really clever web apps, are never going to be as cool UI-wise as native apps.

David Pogue on the iPhone and Its Virtual Keyboard ★

One of my first negative reactions to the iPhone during the keynote is that now matter how well done, the on-screen keyboard couldn’t possibly be as good as a keyboard using physical buttons. David Pogue got to spend an hour with one of the prototypes, and concurs:

The iPhone is not, however, a BlackBerry killer. The absence of a physical keyboard makes it versatile, but also makes typing tedious. …

Fortunately, you don’t have to be especially precise. Even if you hit the wrong “keys” accidentally, the super-smart software considers adjacent keys — and corrects your typos automatically. If what you actually managed to type is “wrclme,” the software proposes “welcome.” You tap the Space bar to accept the fix. It works beautifully.