By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 15, 2007
Monday, 15 January 2007
- Dave Winer’s Supposed Cable Conspiracy ★
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Dave Winer:
I’ve heard from people who were at the Jobs presentation this week that there was a wire connecting his cell phone to something. I can’t tell you myself, because I am not allowed to attend Apple press events. If I were there, I would tell you.
Jobs specifically called attention to the cable during the keynote, explaining that it was a custom rig that allowed the display from his iPhone to be mirrored to the big screen on stage.
The iPhone’s software certainly isn’t complete, but the prototypes apparently work as advertised. David Pogue even has video of one in action, no cables attached.
- Steven Frank: ‘I’ve Got iPhone Fever!’ ★
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Steven Frank:
Steve made a comment during the keynote which, paraphrased, was something like: “I hope you never know how amazing this is.” Having been struggling with half-baked smartphones for over 5 years, I know EXACTLY how amazing it is.
- Matthew Lynn, Columnist for Bloomberg: ‘Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move’ ★
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I’m collecting links like this. I’m thinking they’ll make for a nice laugh in about a year or so.
Lastly, the iPhone is a defensive product. It is mainly designed to protect the iPod, which is coming under attack from mobile manufacturers adding music players to their handsets. Yet defensive products don’t usually work — consumers are interested in new things, not reheated versions of old things.
Right. The iPhone isn’t a new thing, it’s just a reheated iPod.
Also great is Lynn’s wishlist for features that would truly constitute “a fresh blast of competition”:
Or with never-ending batteries? Or chargers that don’t weigh three times as much as the phone?
Never-ending batteries? Jiminy, why hasn’t anyone ever thought of that before? Oh, that’s right, because of the laws of physics.
- Macworld Expo 2007 Keynote on iTunes ★
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Way better than the streaming version.
- DiskWarrior Boots 25 Percent Faster From DVD Than CD ★
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Great tip from Michael Tsai. 25 percent might not sound like that big a deal, but it’s actually a couple of minutes.
- iPhone Trails ★
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Jason Fried speculates on gesture-based shortcuts for the iPhone. I could definitely see something like this being used for, say, speed dialing favorite numbers.
- Tavo Gloves ★
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Gloves that allow for the use of capacitance-based touch pads like iPod clickwheels and, presumably, iPhones. (Thanks to Peter van Broekhoven.)
- TED Blog: The New Apple iPhone and Jeff Han ★
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This makes it sound like Jeff Han was not involved with the iPhone multi-touch display and UI, although he does seem to like what he sees. (Thanks to Amar Sagoo.)
- Twitterrific 1.0 ★
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If you use Twitter, you’ll want this free new app from The Iconfactory. It’s that simple. Great work by Craig Hockenberry.
- Another Cardboard iPhone Mock-Up ★
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Unlike that lazy-ass Kottke, when Steven Toomey made his cardboard iPhone, he rounded off the corners. Someone ought to give one of these to Merlin Mann’s That Phone Guy.
- A Plea for the Fat-Fingered ★
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Jason Santa Maria, worried that his “working man hands” are too fat of finger for the iPhone virtual keypad, wonders if a horizontal mode is in the works. (As he shows in a mockup, it wouldn’t leave much room above.)
- AirPort Extreme Drive Sharing ★
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Apple:
AirPort Extreme, AirPort Disk turns almost any external USB hard drive into a shared drive. Simply connect the drive to the USB port on the back of your AirPort Extreme and — voila — all the documents, videos, photos, and other files on the drive instantly become available to anyone on the secure network, Mac and PC alike. It’s perfect for backups, collaborative projects, and more.
- Regarding Java and the iPhone ★
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Ed Burnette, regarding Steve Jobs’s statement that “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”
Perhaps someone should tell Steve about one of the advantages of supporting Java: managed applications in Java or .Net are inherently safer than unmanaged applications. Unmanaged applications, written in languages like C++ or Objective C (the standard OSX programming language), are closer to the hardware and can suffer from problems like wild pointers, buffer overruns, and incorrectly using deallocated memory. Managed applications don’t have pointers and leave memory management to the virtual machine they run in.
They also have the advantage of being compiled once into a portable intermediate representation (bytecode) that can be run on any hardware architecture. C/C++ applications must be built separately for each and every architecture you want to support.
Steve Jobs doesn’t give a shit about pointers. And he most certainly doesn’t give a shit about apps written for multiple platforms. What would an app written for cross-platform compatibilty look like on an iPhone? No other phone has a UI even vaguely like the iPhone’s. The only apps on the iPhone are Dashboard widgets and apps written specifically for the iPhone using Cocoa. This is to be considered a feature, not a limitation. If you consider it a limitation, the iPhone is not for you.
Jobs’s stated fear that opening the iPhone to third-party software might bring down Cingular’s network, on the other hand, sounds like poppycock. Plenty of other phone platforms allow third-party apps to run.
Also, regarding memory, it’s entirely possible that the iPhone’s OS X supports Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection. That’s not the same thing as Java-style managed code, but still.
- Gorillapod ★
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Another clever little portable camera tripod; instead of suction (like the aforelinked Mosterpod) it uses bendable wraparound legs. And also unlike the Monsterpod, there are versions that support SLRs. $40 at Amazon. Update: Ends up the Monsterpod doesn’t use suction, it uses viscoelasticity — a goo that’s both viscous and elastic.
(Thanks to Pete Marozzi.)
- Crummy NY Times Article Conflates iTunes With FairPlay-Protected Media Files ★
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Randall Stross, in the second-most-emailed article published in the Sunday New York Times:
Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.
No. You can “pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod” and never once come into contact with a FairPlay-protected song or video. If you don’t like FairPlay’s restrictions — and there are plenty of good reasons not to — then don’t buy any, and rip your music from regular CDs.
iTunes Store music and video locks you in. iPods and iPhones do not.