Posts tagged: APPLE

This began as a quick reply to a discussion on the Well about a recent posting from John Gruber which links to a hit list from Crackberry.com about the iPhone. Gruber focuses just on the keyboard issue, about which I found I had this to say:

With the built-in spelling correction, I can type close to 30wpm on my iPt keyboard. This is faster than I ever was with Graffiti, which I used for about 8 years and was pretty good at if I say so. Most of the stuff I do with the device doesn’t involve the keyboard, and then I’m really happy not to have a hard keyboard.

From a post at Rogue Amoeba:

• Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
• Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
• Allow access to root user on iPhone
• A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
• Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
• Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
• Permit Voice over IP on the cellular network
• Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port

Funny, it reads more like a list of demands! I’m +1 on it all though.

My first week with the iPt has been a thorough validation of my decision to jump ship from the Palm platform. The things this new device doesn’t do are still a problem, but the things it does do it does incredibly well. I won’t gush over those because they’ve all been thoroughly gushed over. But anybody who thinks the success of the iPhone/iPt platform is primarily based on superficial factors of appearance or brand image likely hasn’t used one for more than two minutes.

I bought my Palm TX in December 2005, a few months after it came out. In my blog post where I weighed the pros and cons of the device and the platform, I grumbled that “Palm has successfully crushed any optimism I might have had for fixes appearing in the form of a free, downloadable OS upgrade.” My grumpy intuition was right – in fact, the Palm platform has pretty much just stagnated since that time, punctuated with spastic feints toward Linux that you can read about elsewhere or in my old Palm-related posts.

From Apple’s release notes on the latest QuickTime update (emphasis mine):

QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:

• Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
• Updates to the H.264 codec
• Numerous bug fixes

Finally! Now Steve Jobs can rest easy, knowing that nobody is going to pour boiling-hot coffee on him. Not over this, anyway.