Me, on the iPhone 4 Antennagate:
Apple has arguably the most loyal fans of any firm, and if it had addressed their concerns earlier and got them on its side, this supposed scandal would have remained a minor kerfuffle. Look how quickly and how widely fake Jobs emails – “it’s just a phone” – spread. A real one sent to every Apple ID could have stopped the whole thing before it started.
The inimitable Ian Betteridge nails an annoying meme that suggests anyone who doesn’t program is merely a passive consumer of content. Naturally it’s a meme started by people who can program rather than, say, create an illustration good enough to go on the front of the New Yorker in an iPhone drawing app.
I’d argue, in fact, that the history of computing teaches us the exact opposite: the less people are required to learn programming in order to be creative with computers, the more creative work you get.
He’s right, and he’s right when he dismisses a claim that people who don’t get down and dirty with their computing kit are like cruise ship passengers who never leave the boat and discover anything about the local culture.
I’d argue that the approach he’s taking, which encourages users to get deeper into the hardware and software, to (as he puts it) “find out about the local culture†is actually more like requiring the passengers to do their stint maintaining the engines of the ship, whether they want to or not. The price they “have†to pay for getting on the ship in the first place is to become engineers.
You do? Here you go, then: a free, legitimate online version of Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As at least one person on MetaFilter says:
This is a good book.
Apple’s holding a press conference to talk about the iPhone 4, presumably to address the ever-worsening signal strength PR mess. I think it’s been blown out of all proportion, but that’s partly Apple’s fault:
Instead of putting their hands up and saying “hey, it’s possible to bridge the antennas at one particular point and that can make the signal drop, but that’s the price you pay for the BEST RECEPTION ON AN IPHONE EVER!” they’ve said that the reason for disappearing bars is “both simple and surprising”.Presumably it’s simple as in “let’s make something up! Simple!” and surprising as in “we’ll be surprised if anyone believes this”. In Apple PR land an issue that can be fixed with nail polish, a rubber band or a different grip can also be fixed with… software!
Microsoft is “hardcore” about Windows Slates, consumer-focused tablet computers. Me:
The danger here is that Microsoft approaches Windows slate devices from the wrong direction. If Microsoft asks “how can we stuff Windows into an iPad-style device?” rather than “how can we make the most awesome tablet computer ever made, a machine so mind-meltingly incredible that Steve Jobs fills his pants when he sees it?” then all we’ll end up with is a bunch of slightly smaller tablet PCs.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Windows 7, and I quite like tablet PCs. But I like the iPad much, much more. It’s an amazing device, and that’s largely because Apple hasn’t just sawed the keyboard off a MacBook Pro and jumped around the place shouting “and that’s magic!” like a demented Paul Daniels.
Fancy a free book? Publishing firm Simon & Schuster is giving away a free ebook version of Loser’s Town, a Hollywood-set thriller by Daniel Depp. I’ve no idea what it’s like but it’s free, it’s a PDF so it should work on anything, and all you need to do is provide an email address, so you might as well get it while you can.
In other news, the new Tim Dorsey novel is much cheaper as an ebook than it is in print: the latter is £11 to £14 plus postage, while the Kindle edition is eleven dollars flat. That’s around seven quid.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun John Walker has been publishing a list of do’s and don’ts for video games. Many of them made me laugh. Here’s the first bit. And here’s the second.
Do: let me carry more than two guns. Just when did we all decide that we weren’t okay with that element of unrealism in gaming? Sure, it can be set in the retro-future on a spaceship made of time, but god forbid we holster an improbable number of weapons. Especially if you’ll then let me carry hundreds of bits of ammo for all the weapons anywhere. Where am I storing those? In my magic trousers? And if so, why can’t I stick a pistol and a rocket launcher in there too? I want to stick a rocket launcher in my magic trousers!
It’s easy to mock Apple – and I do – but the App Store’s had an enormous effect on software. So when I say app-y birthday, I mean it.
Being able to pick up apps for a few quid here, a few pence there encourages us to experiment, to forget our favourites when something brighter and better comes along – and that in turn means developers are constantly under pressure to raise their game, to create even better applications. Software hasn’t been this exciting since the online shareware explosion of the nineties.
Don’t worry. Taking my cue from Richard Cobbett – who didn’t blog about his iPad on the grounds that there were probably enough reviews of that particular device kicking around already – I’m not going to go on about it other than to ask for one little feature. User accounts.
The iPad is a great family machine – I pick it up and use it for X, Mrs Bigmouth picks it up and uses it for Y, Baby Bigmouth grabs it from us to use the colouring apps – but user accounts would make it even better. At the moment we’re divvying things up, so I get the mail app for my email and Mrs B uses Safari; Mrs B gets the Facebook app and I promise to use the web version, and so on. I have no idea whether multi-user support is in the forthcoming OS update, but I’ll be delighted if it is.
Anandtech has looked at this stuff in incredible detail.
The fact of the matter is that either the most sensitive region of the antenna should have an insulative coating, or everyone should use a case. For a company that uses style heavily as a selling point, the latter isn’t an option. And the former would require an unprecedented admission of fault on Apple’s part.
Apple’s dropped a bollock here. But – and it’s an enormous “but”:
reception is massively better on the iPhone 4 [compared to the 3GS] in actual use.
If you’re in a place with patchy reception – some people know it as “Scotland” – then the way you hold the phone makes a difference to the number of bars you see and the speed of your data connection, but the iPhone 4 gets a signal and can download data in places the 3GS can’t.