Apple TV

I am still reveling in the iPhone app store (how did we ever live without super monkey ball on our phones?!?). It really seperates the iPhone from your normal smartphone. While reveling, I spared a thought for what may be the apple product payed the least attention: the Apple TV. Currently Apple is pushing the Apple TV as a way to rent and buy movies and television shows without leaving the house. But what good is the always-on Internet connection of the Apple TV if it is only used on video. The Apple TV is a product with a huge amount of potential, potential which has gone underutilized. Couldn't the Apple TV also use an app store? After all, it would make a good gaming platform (personally I want to see it as a
host for iPhone Texas hold'em games... Showing everyone's status on a big TV would be awesome.) Third party app developers would be able to fill in the places that apple didn't have time to finish, like DVR or the aforementioned gaming. Apple could brand the Apple TV as 'internet brought to your television' without doing very much work, as the Apple TV is hooked into the iTunes store already. Naturally the same degree of control as the iPhone apps would be required (P2P on your TV would really upset Apple's iTunes partners, not to mention it's iTunes revenue stream. Apple has a chance to expand a vast, untapped market, something it has historically been very good at (iPod and iTunes, the Mac). All it needs to do is seize the opportunity.

But it won't see the light of fiber this year.

Apple is still recovering from the iPhone app store. It physically would not be able to keep up with two review processes at once. My guess is either Macworld or WWDC next year. The Apple TV app store is low hanging fruit. Apple just needs to seize it without all of the other apples rotting.

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Nevermind

Nevermind.

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Apple.com Is Down!!!

And not with a nice yellow sticky note either! An HTTP 1.1 error! The horror!

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802.1X And iPhone

I am trying to get my iPhone connected to an 802.1X network. I enter in the network name, my user name and password, and press join. I get to the certificate screen, press accept and... The accept button disappears. Every time.

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Apple.com

Wow, no one has registered www.%ef%a3%bf.com. This may not seem like anything special, however on Macintosh computers, %ef%a3%bf in a URL resolves to the apple logo. Interesting. .

The Tower of Babble

$824 worth of blackberries. Boxes for a few of them.

Communication?

Only 20% of communication is words. The rest of it is body language, tone, etc.. As we move towards a detached, cell phone and computer society, think about how much is lost. Instead of gauging a person's reaction when speaking to them face-to-face, we coop ourselves away and tap on tiny keyboards. Is this the future of the web? Or is the future of the web a supplement to more interesting things, such as downloadable movies and sharing photos?

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Apple Does Not Copy And Paste …

Copy and paste has no place on the iPhone. It's another desktop convention that does not scale well to mobile devices. For one, where would they put it? Should every app devote a spot in it's toolbar to a button that brings up a cut/copy/paste action sheet? Why do you need copy and paste on a phone anyway? You can already email URLs from Safari. Applications working together is a much better substitute for copy and paste. If you really want a URL from Safari, put in a bookmarklet and have your app implement a web protocol ((with proper security, of course.) Developers and designers should think of an easier way to get that URL. Because copy and paste can stay on the desktop. User Interface 2.0 is about inter-applicarion communication.

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The Blacberry Thunderless

RIM has announced the blackberry thunder, and I have seen links to it on crackberry.com. All that I can say is that... you've complained about touchscreen keyboards, and you've got the tactile response thing covered, but it will be a really bad experience foe your users to have the two-letters-to-a-key thing going on when they have this beautiful screen in front of them. And I can say that I have had trouble typing on the iPhone's keyboard in widescreen mode, as the keys seem too big.

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Still?

There's still a line at my local apple store (Boston). All that I can say is wow.

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Protecting Users From Themselv…

There is a law in the computer world that states that the simpler that computers are to use, the less technical the general population of the people using them will be. Therefore, computers will tend to get simpler over time. There is another law in user interfaces. That law states that if an interface is too complex for your mother to use, then it is too complex for general computer users, because the majority of computer users will be able to navigate an interface about as well as your mother can. Naturally, it is the designer's responsibility to consider this when designing an interface. Designing with your mother in mind is called protecting users from themselves.
Protecting users from themselves is harder than it would appear, because users, just like your mother, are not stupid, they're just forgettful. Users will not have a good experience when using your software if they feel that the software thinks it is smarter than they are. The trick here is to provide a good experience to the first time user, while making the person who uses the program every day feel that the program adds to his day. The regular user does not want to see the tip of the day about some option buried in some menu. He wants the software to be intuitive and to bring back the feeling of when he first used the software and it was dead simple to use. The first time user wants the software to be dead simple to use.
Simplicity is not the enemy of power. A designer simply has to layer the interface, presenting the simple interface first. This is not an excuse to have a two different interfaces, however. The trick is to display the simple interface, then hide the power user functions. A good example of this is the Mac OS X dock. The beginning user will simply click on applications in the dock to launch them. The more advanced user will drag the icons around and right click for menus. The expert user will shift-drag the divider to move the edge of the screen the dock is on. (if you thought that every Mac OS X user knew to drag the icons in the dock, think again: my mother didn't.) The dock serves its base purpose, launching applications. People that want to explore further can. But the average "mom" user can use it to serve it's purpose, and is not exposed to anything out of the ordinary. That's the developer thinking ahead, which As we move on into the computer age, will become even more important.

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LifeCasting

As any iPhone owner would be doing in the last few days, I have been playing around with all of the cool new iPhone apps. Of those, I have discovered a few really cool ones. Number one is LifeCast, which lets you take pictures, geotag them, and optionally post them to either a Blogger or Tumblr blog. Aside from my excitement of being able to play collosal cave adventure on my phone, I have also really enjoyed Super Monkey Ball and Texas Hold'em. Of course, life can't be all fun and games, which is why I also downloaded NetNewsWire, so that when I am not playing games, I can catch up on my RSS feeds. I highly reccomend all of these apps.

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What Apple Did Not Tell Us

The 3G iPhone launched today. Woohoo. What is far more interesting is the 2.0 software update. Apps! Yay! Super Monkey Ball and Texas Hold'em are both awesome games (note that Super Monkey ball should not be played while driving or in a car because the accellerometer ... works.) However, the update heralded some more subtle changes to the iPhone software:

1. Alternates on the .com key. Of course, there have been alternates on the .com key since 1.1.4, they've just been specific to the localized keyboards (co.uk on the British keyboard, for example.) Now you can have commonly used top level domains all accessible at the swish of a finger. However, how long its usefulness lasts is anyone's guess.
2. You can take screenshots by holding the home button and pressing the lock button. I'm sure you heard about this.
3. WebKit CSS Animations and Transitions are now supported. This should provide for richer web apps, if anyone really does those any more. For those of you not in the know, Safari 3.1 premiered a feature that let developers animate elements on a web page. Now that feature has moved to Mobile Safari.