Linked List: July 10, 2008

Thursday, 10 July 2008

The iPhone Naysayers, One Year Later ★

Jake Widman at The Industry Standard tracks down a bunch of iPhone doubters and critics from a year ago to see what they have to say now. Rob Enderle chalks up the iPhone’s success entirely to Apple’s marketing acumen. Steve Ballmer, unsurprisingly, did not offer a comment.

First Look: Exposure for the iPhone ★

Scott McNulty looks at Exposure, Fraser Speirs’s very cool Flickr client for the iPhone:

The neatest feature, and the creepiest, is the ‘Near Me’ button. Press it, and through the magic of Core Location, Exposure will show you all the photos on Flickr that were taken near your current location.

How to Hide Selected Feeds From NetNewsWire for iPhone ★

Better than nothing, which is what I thought I had.

Pinch Media: iPhone Application Price Distribution ★

Most are $5 or less, but $10 is a popular price point, too.

NetNewsWire for iPhone ★

I’ve been using Brent Simmons’s NetNewsWire for the Mac for just about as long as I’ve been publishing Daring Fireball. The iPhone version is one of the apps I’ve been most anticipating, ever since the iPhone shipped a year ago. It doesn’t disappoint, but it’s far from perfect. On the plus side, I’ve found it to be far superior to any web-based feed reading option for the iPhone. And, because it’s backed by your (free) NewsGator account, it syncs your subscriptions and read/unread status with the Mac version of NetNewsWire (as well as other NewsGator clients like FeedDemon for Windows).

But synching has its downsides. The main one for me is that I have a lot of feed subscriptions in NetNewsWire — and most of them are things I have no interest in reading from my iPhone. What I’d prefer is to have the option of synching just a subset of my feed subscriptions through NewsGator — just the ones I’m interested in the most.

My other complaint is the built-in web browser. In theory it’s a lot like Twitterrific’s — when you tap a link while reading a feed item, NetNewsWire displays the web page in a built-in browser, so that you don’t have to quit NetNewsWire to switch to Safari every time you follow a link from a feed. But unlike Twitterrific’s, NetNewsWire’s browser replaces the current item view, rather than appearing on top of it. When you go “back”, you go back to the list of feed items, not to the item you were reading. This makes it a pain to follow multiple links from the same feed item: tap link, read web page, back to the list, tap the same item again, tap the next link.

Those complaints aside, in the week or so that I’ve been using it, NetNewsWire for the iPhone has proven to be very satisfying for “standing in line at the grocery store, wish I had something good to read for a minute or two” situations. And don’t miss the Clippings feature — tap the “+” button to add any item to your NewsGator “clippings”, which sync across clients just like your subscriptions do. A perfect feature for flagging items you want to come back to on your Mac.

Twitterrific for iPhone ★

The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific is another of the iPhone apps I’ve been beta testing for a bit. It’s not just a great iPhone app, it’s a great app, period. I prefer its layout and presentation to that of the Mac version. Like its Mac sibling, you can choose between paying for Twitterrific for iPhone ($10) or using it for free, with occasional ads from The Deck.

Use it for a bit and you can see exactly why it won an Apple Design Award for the user experience. First, it looks beautiful. But it is very, very usable. My favorite feature is the built-in web browser. When you tap a link in a tweet, the built-in browser slides down from the top. In the browser itself, there are three standard browser buttons — back, forward, refresh — plus another button to leave Twitterrific and open the current page in Safari. Tap “Close” and the built-in browser slides away, putting you right back where you were in the tweet view. If it weren’t for the built-in browser, you’d have to quit Twitterrific each time you tapped a URL.

Google Mobile App ★

Google engineers Alastair Tse’s and Nicholas “Quicksilver” Jitkoff’s free iPhone app is sort of a universal search app, with options to search the entire web, Wikipedia, news, shopping, and your own contacts database on the phone. The UI is very well-done, but I’m not convinced I’ll ever use it instead of MobileSafari’s built-in search.

The Angry Drunk: ‘Dan Costa Has Sand in His Vajayjay’ ★

If you like your jackass mockery straight up, this one’s for you.

Actually, It Might Be Like VersionTracker ★

Touché.

iPhone OS 2.0 Screenshots ★

Great tip from Gina Trapani:

With the iPhone 2.0 software installed, hold down the Home button and press the Lock button and your screen will flash — and an image of your phone’s screen gets saved to your Camera Roll’s images.

PCalc for iPhone ★

James Thomson’s $10 PCalc is one of the iPhone apps I’ve been lucky enough to be beta testing for a few weeks, and, while I’ve seen a few iPhone apps that are really good, PCalc is the best so far. The iPhone’s built-in Calculator app is much improved over the 1.0 version, but it’s got nothing on PCalc, which offers: unit conversions, paper tape, hex/oct/bin modes, and more. UI cleverness includes a very intuitive visualization of parenthesis stacking when you use the “(” and “)” keys — the only other calculator app that’s this nice is PCalc for the Mac.

And speaking of keys, PCalc’s work just like the iPhone’s keyboard — you not only get sound when you tap them (the built-in Calculator 2.0 finally has sound now too), but also get the large-type pop-up showing exactly which key you hit. The keys feel perfect.

The App Store in Your Pants ★

Jacqui Cheng walks through the process of buying/downloading an app from the iPhone’s App Store app.

Paging Returns to the Twitter API ★

Lost amid the iPhone 2.0 and App Store hoopla: Twitter has apparently restored paging to its API, which means third-party Twitter clients should now be able to load more than just the 20 most recent tweets in your timeline.

Amongst the aforementioned slew of task list apps, there’s one called “To Do” and another called “ToDo”. (“To-Do” is still available.) Also: “Shopping List” and “ShoppingList”.

Update: Gedeon Maheux observes that six different apps in the “Productivity” category use a checkmark for their app icons.

Browse the App Store in iTunes 7.7 (iTunes Link) ★

Seems like some people are having trouble getting the App Store to appear in iTunes 7.7. This link should do the trick.

Apple Remote: Remote Control Done Right ★

Bill Bumgarner on the new Remote app:

This changes the game in my living room. Completely. My media center’s remote is now more powerful than any computer I bought in the 1990s.

Enterprise Rails Tapping ★

Jesper spotted something unusual amidst today’s avalanche of Apple releases:

Perhaps the weirdest creature to come out of the iPhone 2.0/3G launch paraphernalia is the iPhone Configuration Web Utility. It is a Rails app using SproutCore, downloaded and installed on your local machine. It literally starts a server on port 3000, as a service using WEBrick on Windows and as a launchd job using Mongrel on Mac.

Apple Launches MobileMe and Apple TV 2.1 Updates ★

The new iPhone Remote app works like a charm with my Apple TV. Very slick.

E-Books as ‘Apps’ ★

Raven Zachary:

Almost 8% of the apps on the App Store right now are individual public domain ebooks by AppEngines! Apple, please create an eBook category.

The other overloaded category, as Koz quips, is task/to-do/”GTD” apps.

iTunes Remote ★

“The free application that turns iPod touch and iPhone into a remote control for iTunes and Apple TV.”

iTunes 7.7 ★

Now available for download, and from Software Update.

Amazing New Cell Phone in AT&T Stores This Friday ★

Looks like it has a great web browser, too. (Via Jack Shedd.)

Survival of the Sudsiest ★

George Will on the importance of beer.

ChangeWave Survey on Near-Future Smartphone Purchasing ★

Paul Carton, reporting on a survey of 3,567 consumers:

An astonishing 56 percent of respondents who plan to purchase a smart phone in the next 90 days say they’re getting an Apple iPhone — a huge 21-pt leap from the previous survey.

The second chart — showing future smartphone buyer results for Apple, BlackBerry, and Palm — is rather striking.

Forbes: App Store to Launch Thursday ★

Mary Jane Irwin, reporting for Forbes:

Apple may launch its iPhone App Store Thursday, according to three people who have been briefed on the matter. The online store will open at noon, Eastern Time, Thursday, to coincide with when the iPhone goes on sale in New Zealand, according to one source.

Jibes with TechCrunch’s report a few hours ago.

NY Times Story on iPhone App Store ★

John Markoff and Laura M. Holson, on the debuting-in-a-few-hours App Store:

Twenty-five percent of the first 500 applications at the store will be free, Mr. Jobs said. Of the commercial applications, 90 percent will be sold for $9.99 or less, he said, adding that a third of the first wave of applications will be games.

The sidebar features a preview of all three apps from Tapulous — not a bad publicity coup at all for Mike Lee, I’d say.

Update: Gibberish alert:

Mr. Jobs failed to make his personal computers dominant, in part because software developers did not write as many programs for Mac-based machines as they did for Microsoft Windows PCs. He did not make the same mistake when he developed the iPod music players. Apple’s iTunes stores, with easy and inexpensive downloads of music, gave the device an insurmountable lead, to date, over other players.

So Markoff (and/or Holson) are arguing that the Mac failed to dominate because it had less software written for it, and Jobs “did not make the same mistake” with the iPod — a platform whose entire third-party software library consists of a handful of casual games — because it had a music store? Methinks Markoff is holding on too tightly to his own fallacious 20-year-old pet theory about why the Mac was overrun by DOS and Windows in the ’80s and ’90s.