Greetings from New York City. I can confirm that the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down; the Mayor says that his “strike zone” counter-drug program is dworking but the signs of amphetamine and barbiturate use in the local populace are impossible to miss.

Yup, yesterday was a travel day. I arrived in the city on just 90 minutes of sleep. Suffice to say that I could have used trip to the Bronx and Part 2 of the Great Google Phone Brain Dump had to wait.

So let’s continue with the Google Phone Brain Dump. The first topic in today’s installment is so important that I’m going to do a solo:

The Touch Interface Versus The Clickbutton Interface

Or:

The G1 Is Not An iPhone…And That’s Not A Complaint

The big gotcha of a job like mine is that I have to bury my prejudices and preconceptions when I try out something new. Because though there are retreads and ripoffs in every product category — and the iPhone spawned more bad sequels than “Rocky” and “Saw” combined — it’s entirely possible that something new is, indeed, Something New.

During my first day with the G1, I grumbled and I groused. I clucked and I tut-tutted. The pitching coach picked up the bullpen phone and messaged that it was time to warm up the standard “Yet Another Damned iPhone Ripoff” commentary.

On the plus side, the G1’s touchscreen is terrific from a hardware perspective. It’s a flat glass panel that responds to finger contact, not a mushy piece of plastic that needs to be pressed, like the worst of the iPhone influencees.

I did encounter curious moments in which an onscreen button refused to respond to the edge of my thumb (as when you’re holding the phone in your left and) and instead demanded a rather explicit fingertip (which I was more than willing to give it, after three failed buttonpresses). But that’s probably a software problem and not a hardware one.

Good, good. But the G1’s touch-interface experience is incomplete and unfulfilling. On the iPhone, the touch interface is gravity, oxygen. Every action and activity is influenced by it. On the G1, the touch interface is just a feature. Even after a week with the G1, it’s hard to detect any real commitment to touch on the part of Android’s developers.

When you’re using the G1’s touchscreen you’re forced to change mindsets often. Sometimes the interface is up there on the screen. Sometimes, it’s down there among the mechanical buttons.

I’m in the browser, just messing around. I tap on a picture and a dialog box pops up. Would I like to Save this picture? Open it in a new window? View it?

Hey, cool. Thank you, Android; that’s a good feature in a mobile browser. But actually, for the moment I’d just like to Cancel. I’ll just tap the “Cancel” button…

Oh. No “Cancel” button.

After I moment’s confusion, I realize that I have to press the clicky “Back” button underneath the screen. The Back button is a consistent part of the user interface (it always takes you one step back away from wherever you are) but shouldn’t there be a Cancel button right in the onscreen dialog box?

The browser, in fact, is the best illustration of the problem. I’m astonished that Android doesn’t have a virtual keyboard.

“Hold the phone!” you’re saying. I’m about to make a joke about how I am in fact holding an actual phone but you wisely don’t pause long enough to let me draw my gun. “That’s my big complaint about the iPhone! Being forced to write emails on a ‘fake’ keyboard instead of the cushy comfort of the Blackberry keyboard!”

Yes, and we’ll be getting to the G1’s keyboard in a moment.

But a phone that claims to be usable in both portrait and landscape modes needs an onscreen keyboard.

Viz: I want to see if my friends have posted new photos to Flickr. I press the mechanical “Menu” button and then I tap the onscreen “Open URL” button. That’s a major modal disconnection but I’ve already complained about that so let’s move on:

I need to type in “m.flickr.com.” Which means I have to turn the phone on its side and slide open the keyboard.

I’m a big dumb Human, so when I type the URL and hit “Return” I close the keyboard and return the G1 to its original position while the page loads. Damn. Now I need to log in.

Turn, open, type, close, turn.

I acknowledge that this isn’t a hell of a lot of effort. But web browsing is mostly a passive, non-typey sort of activity. Every now and then you need to type a URL or a password and every time I’m forced to Transformer the device to do this trivial thing, I taste copper.

A minor aside: obvious errors like the lack of an onscreen keyboard are what bother me the most about Android. If I make a comparison to a current Presidential campaign I know that certain readers will Hulk Out a little so instead, I ask you to remember how you felt when Mike Dukakis tooled around at a campaign stop in a tank.

You imagined him making “Vroom! B-Pow! Budda-budda-KRACK-POWWW!!!” noises as he went.

Which is precisely what I would have done in such a situation. Perfectly understandable. No, it isn’t the actual thing itself that caused you to sour on Dukakis. The chill came from the realization that it was such an obvious mistake. The sort of mistake where you wondered exactly where the ceiling was on the man’s mistake-making abilities.

Not all plumbers are kind enough to (for instance) mount your new toilet on the wall instead of the floor. Obvious mistake. You red-flag that one almost immediately and stop payment on the check. You’re almost grateful. Why? Because you could have gotten the sort of plumber who forgot to bring right kind of soil-stack pipe and just substituted whatever he happened to have in the truck.

That’s trouble. you don’t know what sort of trouble you’re in until much later, when there’s this incredible smell coming out of your new bathroom and you discover that a crack in the joint has been slowly filling the wallspace with human waste for the past five weeks. As men in Hazmat suits are ripping out the walls and the flooring, you remember seeing the plumber’s truck as it pulled in and thinking “What kind of a man hangs chrome bull testicles off the back of his car?” and now you know the answer. You wish you’d followed that first pang of doubt to its logical conclusion.

Yeah, yeah. I could have just written “No onscreen keyboard? Really?” but look, the lack of an onscreen keyboard is bloody annoying. Let’s hope that a developer comes up with a third-party solution.

I didn’t appreciate how nice a true multitouch display is until I started using the G1. I just naturally expected to pinch and stretch things. But every time I tried, the G1 reacted only with a polite cough and an arched eyebrow.

Even basic touch actions things like scrolling don’t work as well as I would have hoped. “Very good” isn’t good enough. In a touch interface, either the finger-scrolling is absolutely perfect or it isn’t. Touch-scrolling on an iPhone is absolutely perfect. On the G1, it isn’t. There’s just enough of a lag that you don’t feel an organic connection to the interface.

So: Android touch interface = Disappointing.

I can’t help but write the review in my head as put a new thing through its paces. I imagined a paragraph that began “In fact, eventually I gave up on the touch interface and started using it almost exclusively with the keyboard deployed.”

I intended for this to sting. Surely its developers would throw themselves out of windows when they read that line. Waiters would seat them at the table near the bathroom. Assuming that their spouses ever even made love to them again, their lovemaking technique would be posted and critiqued on eOpinions.com immediately after each session.

(You laugh, but just go to the site and look for content created in the weeks after my Zune 1.0 review was published.)

Imagine! A touch-based phone where you wind up using the keyboard and the microtrackball all the time!

Then I had one of those moments where I suspected, just suspected, mind you, that I might be a moron. It’s okay for the G1 to not be like the iPhone. It just needs to find greatness via the path of its choosing.

I stopped thinking of the G1 as an iPhone-like device and the scales fell from my eyes almost immediately. I started to see that the G1 is really quite awesome.

Truly. The G1 isn’t a touch phone. It’s a clickybutton phone. Held like an iPhone, it’s clumsy and awkward. Held on its side…well, damn.

Android’s clickybutton interface is consistent and easy to suss out:

You got your microtrackball: that’s yer pointing and clicking device. North of it is the Back button. Use it to take one step back from wherever you are. The Menu button is to the West. It brings up the application menu of whatever app you’re running. Tap the Home button due south to get to the Home screen, which acts as an application launcher and (as with the iPhone’s Springboard) gives you access to phone settings and other “above the title” functions.

(Sorry. Continuing.)

They’re all arranged within casual reach of your right thumb. And remember, the clickybuttonpad is canted up slightly, making the phone very comfortable and grippable.

Holding the G1 on its side with its trackball under your thumb has an immediate psychological impact. Yes, the onscreen touch interface is inconsistent and poorly-thought. But you stop even thinking about that interface. The trackball is your connection to this machine, not the tip of your finger.

And then the G1 starts to really sing. “Back” as a “Cancel” button? Makes perfect sense. Specify a URL by bringing up an application menu, instead of just tapping in the browser’ address bar? Sure.

Sickeningly, the G1 starts to feel faster than an iPhone. At least the bit where you translate a thought into a correctly-inputted command. The onscreen buttons are big, fat targets that you can briskly and efficiently trackball into.

One of my top five functions for a smartphone is reading blogs via Bloglines or Google Reader. The G1 reminded me how nice it is to have an explicit “Page Down” button. It’s a particular luxury when I’m Smartphoning with my left hand and Sandwiching with my right. Zap straight to the bottom or the top of something? There are keyboard shortcuts for that, as well.

I even started to get the hang of the thumbboard. And I’ve always hated thumbboards. Although I must cite the fact that I can type way, way faster on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard than I can on any thumbboard (record for typing Robert Frost’s “In Winter In The Woods Alone”: 48 words per minute) I must also report that I didn’t consider the G1’s keyboard to be an annoyance.

I wouldn’t say that the Android clickyinterface is better than the iPhone’s. But it’s different, and I have to insist that a power G1 user will leave an iPhone user in the dust, in certain tasks.

Why? Because there are clickybutton shortcuts for everything.

My favorite reaction when I’m trying a new device is when I discover something about it causes me to find a new disappointment in an old device that I love. Holding down the G1’s “Home” button instantly brings up a launcher containing your six most recently-launched apps. Damn…I wish I could do that on my iPhone. I’m always forced to click the Home button and then scrollscrollSCROLL(dammit)scroll to get to the Camera app…which I use alllll the time.

(Yes, there are four slots on the iPhone springboard where you can keep your favorites. But hello…I have more than four commonly-used apps.)

Buttons do different things when you double-click or click-and-hold. And you can assign a keyboard shortcut to almost anything.

Result: it would be trivially easy to set up a realistic, real-world triathalon of smartphone tasks in which a sophisticated iPhone user would finish in a hopeless (correction: utterly hopeless) second-place to an similarly-experienced G1 user.

Caveats:

1. You can’t say a line like “Zapping back to the top of the page is as simple as holding down the ALT key and flicking the trackball up” and still believe that the sophistication of user interface design in general is still trending upward.
2. The power of the clickyinterface, like the true face of God, reveals itself to you in tantalizing sections, and at its own frustratingly-slow pace. You will need to read the manual, and even then you will fail to remember what many of these shortcuts are. Especially when you’re trying to convince an iPhone user that your spiffy new Google Phone is way faster than his.
3. I’m the sort of person who scoffs and asks a Blackberry power-user “So: you saved yourself a little time by creating a new message to your boss via a hotkey, instead of launching the Mail app and tapping the first couple of letters of her name manually. Tell me, whatever are you going to do with that extra 1.7 seconds of free time you’ve gained?”

Well, there are people who put a real premium on getting from Point A to Point B via the absolute shortest distance possible. That’s their workflow. Suffice to say that these people, baffled by the perceived inefficiency of the iPhone, will love the G1. The G1 serves as an important reminder that “most advanced” is not always synonymous with “most effective.”

That said, I ought to close this section out with an observation: though the clickybutton interface is quite agile and pleasant to use, it has inescapable limitations. Yes, you can easily get through all of the Four Major Food Groups of the smartphone experience (Mailin’, Browsin’, Textin’, and…er, Dairy) without ever reaching for the screen. But the psychological oomph of a clickyinterface is the persistent connection between your fingers and the controls. Every time you need to take your hands off the buttons and interact with the screen, it’s a defeat. You lose time. You also break that mental connection for just a moment.

So what happens when you want your phone to go beyond the basic expectations of a smartphone?

The iPhone has no buttons (please ignore the big Home button under the screen; it has been placed there by opposition-party operatives who fear my maverick, pro-change agenda). Which means that it can have any buttons. It can have the perfect button controls for a web browser. Or a GPS navigator. Or a music player. Or a plane simulator. Or…or…or.

Whatever the need is, the iPhone immediately reconfigures the interface to meet you. By contrast, when a G1 owner feels the need to go beyond mere utilitarian functions, they’re going to feel like a DOS user in a Mac and Windows world.

The key line in my Sun-Times review was this one: from a user perspective, the G1 is not a revolutionary next-step towards anything. That’s the goal of the iPhone. The goal of the G1 and Android is simply to be a smartphone.

And the G1 is truly a great smartphone. It’s a strong and compelling implementation of the “big screen phone with a flip-out keyboard” concept. Potentially, it’s the best smartphone on the market. If the iPhone didn’t exist, I’d buy a G1 in a heartbeat, forsaking all others.

The G1 versus Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry

I did intend to just make this a solo piece, but that last line sort of compels me to continue straight on and talk about the G1 in relationship with its competition.

G1 versus iPhone: I don’t see these two phones as being in competition with each other. As with movies, when you judge technology you should consider the maker’s goals and evaluate how successfully those goals were met. Apple didn’t just want to build a smartphone. They wanted to create a whole new computing platform.

The iPhone 3G is as close as we’ve ever come to the ideal of “that one device you carry with you everywhere, that does everything you could ever want a mobile device to do.” And (goddamn it) the iPhone 3G more or less succeeds.

The G1 is an awesome smartphone. But it’s a crappy media player, for example. If you buy a G1 expecting it to be an iPhone, then there will be many, many scenarios in which you will travel with way more devices and chargers than you had hoped.

G1 versus Symbian and Windows Mobile. I see the G1 as having huge advantages over both of these operating systems. It’s not slam-dunk superior, but personally, its fundamental strengths would compel me to take an Android phone over either alternative.

Symbian and WM are venerable institutions with massive software libraries. If you’re in love with a certain Windows Mobile app or apps, that should be your decisionmaker.

But these operating systems are trapped by their history. Their designs go back to the Nineties and at times, this comes through in their products…subtly, from an architecture perspective, and frustratingly from a user-interface perspective.

Whenever I get a new Windows Mobile touchscreen phone to play with, I steel myself. I start to play with the “kewl” iPhone-inspired touch interface but I know that it’ll be minutes before I touch something the wrong way and the Windows Mobile start menu and taskbar will temporarily appear. Inevitably, I’ll be looking at an alert system that was designed back when Clinton was president.

The iPhone and the G1 have great advantages over every other smartphone OS thanks to the simple fact that its designers got to start from scratch in the mid-Aughties. They never considered a world in which screens were small and black-and white. These phones never had to exist in a world without WiFi and mobile broadband.

Yes, I manfully acknowledge the possibility that the designers of the latest edition of Windows Mobile 6 are aware that you can now receive email on the road without having to stick a phone handset into an acoustic coupler. What I’m getting at is that History can often become a terrible liability as 1.o becomes 2.0 and ultimately 6.0 becomes Vista. History becomes Baggage. When Baggage becomes corporate philosophy, the only solution is to nuke the whole compound from space.

You see this sort of thing time and time again. A database program doesn’t support XML, because Version 1.0 was created before the standard became a Big Deal and the schema underpinning the entire system doesn’t provide a simple way to store data that way. That’s mere Baggage. “Why would our users even want to use XML, when we can provide them with a much more sophisticated proprietary package format?” is a sign that the disease and the product have reached the terminal stage. I hear it allll the time.

I have a personal prejudice against Symbian, though I think its a defensible one: it’s woefully out of step with modern mobile computing and every new iteration is just another boob and butt lift on an increasingly frail body. I think it’s coasting by on its enormous international user base and software library.

I thought Windows Mobile was the greatest mobile OS out there, before the iPhone was released. And I still think it’s terrific. But Microsoft is going to need to make that “MacOS 9 to Mac OS X” transition sometime soon. You know what I mean: the gutsy moment when they decide to throw out every scrap of code and start all over again. Not because what they have now is garbage…because the world has changed around it and its current architecture is going to find it hard to keep up.

(My hometown tore down its high school recently for much the same reason. The building itself was in fine shape, but it had been built at a time when weatherstripping, network infrastructure, and controlling access to school property weren’t on anybody’s radar.)

The big caveat about the G1 — more about Android, actually — is that it is indeed a 1.0 OS. But cripes, it’s a free OS, and the whole world is welcome to enhance it. Symbian is royalty-free these days, true, but it’s like General Motors. Symbian feels like an organization that would rather walk to the guillotine than whistle the songs of the revolutionaries.

Give it a year and Android going to become a serious challenger for anybody trying to make a smartphone OS.

G1 versus Palm. Bit of a toss-up. Palm is old-fashioned and you’re sort of embarrassed to still be using one, but it’s just so convenient, you know? My iPhone battery started to die yesterday so of course I looked up the address where I was meeting a friend and wrote it on the palm of my hand so I wouldn’t lose it. Top that for convenience.

Huh?

Palm OS, you say?

“Spock, what does the ship’s computer have to say about this ‘Palm OS’?”

“Accessing, sir…details are sketchy but the library claims that Palm Oil Spray was a consumer brand of aerosol food-preparation lubricant sold in the late Twentieth to early Twenty-First century. It was taken off the market when it was determined that prolonged exposure led to increasingly-erratic behavior, such as wearing trousers with words printed across the seat in large letters adorned with light-refracting crystals.”

“Set phasers on ‘Stun,’ Mister Chekov. Fire at will.”

G1 versus Blackberry. I keep trying the new Blackberries as they come out and I keep coming to the same conclusion: the Blackberry is an email device “with benefits.” Every app I use has to be described as “a spreadsheet you can use on your Blackberry” or somesuch, instead of being praisable as a destination of its own.

Which isn’t a slam against the whole platform. It’s just that a Blackberry an office chair. Your first day in a new job, you’re issued this thing. It’s perfectly comfortable and you take absolutely no notice of it until it breaks, and then someone from Maintenance comes by and fixes it or gives you a new one.

There are chairs which are designed to get you excited about sitting in them. But the only office where you’ll find such a thing is the offices and studio of the Howard Stern Show. And it appears that they’re only issued to female employees.

A Blackberry would be the very last thing you’d buy for yourself. Well, maybe if you’re going to a Halloween dressed as a Hollywood douchebag.

Okay. The City awaits. Tomorrow, let’s talk about apps and the G1’s camera.

Occasionally, Apple throws a special media event to announce Cool New Things. Unfortunately, they generally don’t hold them in the Boston area and in general, I can’t spend the $500-$1000 to head out to Cupertino for them unless I can manufacture another excuse or two to be in the area.

So I’ll be liveblogging the event just like the rest of my brothers and sisters in the press corps. Only I’ll be doing it from here in my living room, with a freshly-made lunch on a TV tray (turkey and swiss on wheat, with a handful of Doritos and a soda) and last night’s TV shows on the PVR. I’ll be following Macworld’s reliably-excellent liveblog, posted by my Close Personal Friend Jason Snell.

I stress that this is the reason why you bought a copy of the Web. Where would you have been twenty years ago, unable to read about how I was reacting to reading the news online via someone else’s liveblog?

Actually, twenty years ago there wouldn’t have been a liveblog for me to post from.

Nor an iPhone for this event to have been about.

My head hurts.

Liveblog starts. Hit command-R on the Macworld page. Jason Snell identifies the file-in song as “27 Jennifers.” Cool song. Go to iTunes store.

Try to buy “27 Jennifers” but this is a loaner MacBook Air and I’ve already authorized my 5 computers for iTunes purchases.

Oh, right, the event. Refresh page. Apparently this “Steve Jobs” (of the Cupertino Steve Jobses) is heading this thing.

Whoops, no he isn’t: he hands it off to Phil Schiller. Who always makes me think of the guy who made those awesome short films for the original seasons of “Saturday Night Live.”

He leads off by talking enterprise. Check off the first item on the expected announcements.

Tab over to Google Reader. 5 new articles in ModBlog. Do I dare? Hell yeah. Fingers crossed…

…the score: one “holy CATS is that an extreme mod (extensive facial tattoos + piercings + horn implants” one “okay, kind of an interesting tat” (cute cartoon of a giraffe and an elephant on someone’s chesticological ladyparts), one flat-out “Ewwwww…” (gross, in-your-face pornographic cartoon on someone’s calf), one fairly interesting tribal backpiece (though as always, those tribal designs make me wonder if in the future, people will point to that and say “2004, right?”).

Back to the event…

Cool, Apple’s giving the enterprise IT managers nearly everything they’ve asked for. Microsoft Exchange compatability…they’re licensing MS ActiveSync, push services for calendar, contacts, etc., support for more VPNs, tools that allow remote admin of phones….meaning, the ability to set up hundreds of phones at once, and wipe phones remotely if they get lost or stolen.

Let’s see how my man in the office Iditarod pool is doing…

Awesome! Martin Buser has passed Ed Iten and Hugh Neff and is now at the Cripple checkpoint in 4th place. Still with 15 dogs, nearly his full original team. This means he can start choosing his team for the “real” race to come. Wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped two dogs before taking off for Ruby.

From Ophir we swing our Camera of Truth back to Cupertino, where the local residents would bravely throw their bodies in front of those 15 dogs to prevent them from being exploited thusly. (And then the dogs would immediately pounce and eat them).

Demo of Exchange contact syncing (if Bob adds a new contact to his iPhone at the trade show hospitality suite, it immediately appears in Alan’s iPhone at the strip club champagne room five blocks away from the convention center). Demo of push email (you don’t have to “check” email…there’s just a wide-open pipe from the company mailserver to your iPhone).

What’s going on at Twitter? Tab.

….nothing much. Hokay.

Second of two cans of Diet Pepsi With Cherry is poured into an insulated travel mug. Hmm, ice has melted. Back into kitchen.

Did I mention how awesome it is to own an icepick? I used to have to toss the bag of ice in the air and let it smash to the floor to break it into cubes. Having the right bar tool for the job makes me feel, y’know, sophisticated and junk. I bet Hef owned an ice pick back in the golden days.

I unmute “Dirty Jobs” on the PVR. It’s the one where he’s working at a tannery. Good god, I think there are visible, cartoon-like stink lines radiating off of the screen.

Back to Cupertino. The thrilling — seriously, the aisles at Town Hall are littered with convulsing bodies of industry analysts, like at a revival meeting with a good cover charge — demo of enterprise push email and contacts is over with and now Scott Forstall is talking SDK.

…After showing off web apps.

No, that’s good. I’ve said before that Apple has made a huge hit with their custom web hooks in iPhone Safari. There’s now actually three versions of the Web: the “real” web, the stripped-down no-fun version that exists for mobile browsers…and a version that only appears to people visiting with an iPhone. What an achievement.

On to the actual SDK (Mike Rowe is now shoveling huge, wobbly wads of deer flesh, fat, and hair from a rotating tanning drum). Sounds like a really cool talk; they’re finally saying “Here’s what we meant in January 2007 when we said ‘the iPhone runs OS X, with additions and deletions that make it relevant for a touch-based handheld phone instead of a keyboard-and-mouse computer.”

There’s a real sense of “pulling the tarp off of something you’ve been using for months” aspect to this. Truly, it is OS X, with all the familiar frameworks.

I’m seeing a lot of familiar terms and tech here. As a geek with some basic Cocoa programming skills — not “mad” by any means, but perhaps I could claim to have “irked skilz” — this is actually getting me keen to write iPhone software.

(Which of course is the whole point of this presentation.)

Now explaining “Cocoa Touch.”

The skins have been cleaned and tanned. Now Mike has taken them to the second floor, where they must be scraped and made supple once again.

Is there a name for those three or four sad little broken Dorito corners that are left over on the napkin, from the original handful you plated from the bag? Part of me says “they’re still tasty” and eats them. Part of me wonders if this isn’t like an alcoholic sucking on the ice cubes left over from a glass of scotch.

Onward to a demo of XCode. Oh, awesome: developing iPhone apps uses Interface Builder just like any other apps. I wonder if it works with AppleScript Studio?

(I am drooling at the thought of being able to simply port all of my script-based XCode apps onto the iPhone. Hell, man, I could have six useful things on my iPhone a day after I get the SDK.)

Sounds like a very slick development system. You get an iPhone simulator for “live fire” exercises. When it’s done, you build the app as usual, select an option, and bango, it lands on the iPhone you’ve got tethered to the build machine.

Cool demos of sample apps, demonstrating full access to the touchscreen and the onboard accelerometers (demo app that “distorts” a photo by letting you mush things around with your finger, like mashing up a Polaroid; shake the iPhone like an Etch-A-Sketch and it restores the original photo.

Equally neat is the fact that this is just OpenGL. So no need to learn anything new…just as in the Mac, games and graphic apps written to use that library are a (relatively) straightforward port.

Oh, good Lord: Mike is using a scraping machine that looks like it’s designed to grab your wrist, skin all the skin and muscle from your arm, and then rip the skeletonized limb from your shoulder. Wisely, Mike is having little success with operating it.

Put th PVr back on pause, back to the liveblog.

Oh, man: Apple is getting serious about the iPhone as a gaming platform. This takes me a bit by surprise as (frankly) so long as Macs and iPods can run both Solitaire and a Tetris clone, they seem to think that this side of the software business is more than covered.

Nice point they’re making: they invited a bunch of developers (under double-secret-probation NDA) to come to Cupertino and see what they could build in two weeks. First to demo: Electronic Arts, demoing some work on porting Spore to the iPhone.

(Sounds like a good demo, but…Spore? IMHO this is the most “You can’t have your dessert until you’ve eaten all of your vegetables” game that’s selling well enough to be well-known. Give me stuff to blow up, fer crissakes, and don’t make me think about Darwin!)

I feel sorry for the next guy to demo: showing off a vertical-market app for (I gather) organizing sales leads. This is like that day in school when the kids’ parents come to talk about their careers, and the nice Mom with a consultancy firm specializing in process control in light-industrial manufacturing has to follow the firefighter.

AOL is up next, showing off AIM for the iPhone. Good. And I’m absolutely confident that now, all of the bloggers and messageboard posters who bitchily insisted that Apple would never support chat on the iPhone because they didn’t want to give users a free alternative to AT&T’s text messaging are dislocating their wrists in their rush to post their apologies.

“I have besmirched not just Apple, but my own reputation as a technology observer” they will post. “If I do not retract these wild and unfounded claims, I cannot live with honor.”

I am so totally sure that this is what will happen. I imagine that you won’t be able to get your email for at least another twenty minutes, because of everyone posting at the same time.

Next is Epocrates. My folks have been having a batch of medical experiences of late, and so I’ve been spending a certain amount of time explaining to doctors and nurses the situation on iPhone software development. “If it doesn’t run Epocrates, I can’t use it,” they moan. Many just carry two phones and use their Treo almost exclusively for the doctor stuff.

Note how carefully this event is being orchestrated. Apple has carefully lined up a series of white porcelain plates at the far and of a shooting gallery. Each one is labeled with a known percentage of the marketplace that “can’t” buy an iPhone for specific technical reasons. Annnd…plink! plink! plink!…they’re knocking them all down.

Final demo goes to Sega, bringing monkey-based gaming to the iPhone.

Monkeys are like bacon. They improve just about anything.

Interesting that all the game companies are keen on using the iPhone’s acceleromoter. Call this the “Wii Effect.” I wonder if this will translate to truly effective game interfaces or if this will be a flavor-of-the-month sort of feature that soon gives way to a more practical static virtual gamepad.

(I predict that the first “iPhone as pedometer” app will arrive about 48 minutes after the SDK goes live).

Mr. Steve Jobs (of the Cupertino Steve Jobses) returns to the stage to talk deployment. Looks like the iPhone firmware will now include a built-in app browser and loader, like the iTunes Store widget. Slick and simple (but I wonder how folks will get a “try before you buy” sort of experience?)

Sounds like a fairly neat deal for small developers. Developer sets the price and there’s a simple 70-30 split between the developer and Apple. No service charges, it costs nothing other than that 30%.

Naturally, if you want to give things away for free, Apple will take 30% of $0. IE, it costs nothing to distribute freeware or open source apps.

But I’ll be interested to know how developers feel about this. This is the only way to deploy iPhone software. You cannot sell an iPhone app without paying a 30% tribute to Caesar. I suppose their happiness will be tied to how good this Apple store is at steering people to their products and converting casual interest into an actual buy.

Mention that some apps won’t be accepted into the Store. Porno, malware, apps that slam bandwidth…sounds reasonable, but this is the overture to a whole new discussion: “What right does Apple have to dictate what apps I can and cannot use on my iPhone?”

I don’t think it’ll be a big argument when it comes to porn. But what happens when an online poker site wants to create an iPhone app? Apple’s already kiboshed one department of the Vice Store…is gambling also an affront to God (meaning: Jobs)?

Hmm.

Surprise, the SDK beta is available today for free (but only to developers) (like me, hee hee hee).

Interesting note: joining the dev program costs $99. I wonder if this means “the iPhone developer program” or “the Apple developer program”?

Either way, a $99 buy-in to become a fully-supported developer isn’t a lot of money. Folks who bought the first Palm Pilot and found that the box contained a developer CD, a small assortment of quality chocolates, and a nice handwritten note reading “Please please oh pretty please write apps that make our hardware more awesome” might arch a Spock-like eyebrow, but again…$99 isn’t an exclusionary buy-in by any means.

(Remember: becoming a Newton developer cost about $800. This meant that you didn’t write apps for the Newton unless you had a business plan of some sort. Or if your company needed the SDK and you were able to cook your own apps with it on the side.)

Final announcement: the iFund. I have no clue what’s this about but I see “fund” and “$100,000,000″ and I think “How can I get my hand in the till?”

Event is over and ends with a good, strong comment: the iPhone and iTouch are now real, red-blooded platforms, not just a phone and an iPhone. Remote shared computers > desktops > portable computers > palmtops > touch computers?

Steve dismisses everyone but the press. Red Five, standing by…

…Time for Q&A.

Voice over IP? Yes for WiFi, no for cellular net.

Security? Obviously a big concern, but that’s part of the reason for the $99 fee. They collect lots of information about the developer so that people can be held responsible for Bad Apps.

“SIM unlock software”? Thank you, we’ve all enjoyed a good laugh.

Mmmm…okay, I’m ready to push the button, Frank.

Try to appreciate that life usually looks very different through someone else’s eyes and experiences. “What is it with these idiots and ‘road rage’?” I used to think. “It’s pretty freaking sad if someone cuts you off in traffic and you can’t simply deal with it.”

And then I got my first iPod cassette adapter.

It worked great for a good long while, but then some crucial atom inside either the adapter or my car’s tape deck decayed. Once every half an hour or so, I can count on my podcast or musical reverie being interrupted by the clk-CLK of the deck’s auto-reverse feature and then…silence.

“…Which is why, when the data was finally tabulated, the worldwide scientific community reached a terrifying but incontrovertible conclusion: By the year 2012…”

clk-CLK!

(Ihnatko reaches over and taps the “Tuning” button to manually re-reverse the playback head)

“…including most mammalian life on the planet. But the effect would actually leave many parts of the planet unscathed. If you live in…”

clk-CLK!

(Ihnatko reaches over again. He taps the button with greater force and impatience this time)

“…during the last break, Debbie here admitted to having a huge, girl/boy type of crush on her favorite technology columnist. I don’t know if he even listens to this podcast, but she has some photos she’d like to send him privately, if you get my meaning. So if you’re listening, Mr…oh, I just know I’m not going to pronounce this correctly…”

clk-CLK!

And at this point, I’m punching the button with the knuckles of my fist and yelling “Gawd-DAMMIT!!!“

(No voting on this one: hands-down the chewiest and most satisfying of all curses.)

Which would actually be quite an appropriate reaction if denial of personalized naked pictures were involved. But I find this error so annoying that I’m sometimes even shouting during, say, an NPR program about the decline of the Sudanese tradition of sock-puzzles. That ain’t healthy.

It’s endlessly infuriating and infinitely frustrating. In general, I mean. The worst possible feature for any piece of technology is one that makes decisions on your behalf, which often gets those decisions wrong, and which can’t be turned off or adjusted.

“Just. Do. Nothing!” I keep seething to the tape deck. “Don’t make any decisions of any kind. Do nothing, and you will be working perfectly!!!“

This type of problem keeps rearing its head over and over again. There’s the presentation program that automatically snaps items to a center grid whenever you drag something anywhere close to it. The photo organizer that won’t let you crop a photo with any precision, because every time you drag the selection rectangle into a certain section of airspace, a floating “filmstrip” window that you never use and can’t disable fades into view, obscuring your vision. You could set the clock on a new component manually in about eight seconds…but no, the machine would rather spend ten minutes trying and fail to set itself automatically via radio.

And so, the hunt is finally on for some sort of hardwired car solution for my iPod and iPhone. FM transmitters? Good idea, but unfortunately I live in that rare part of the country where FM radio stations are still being operated. Most FM adapters can’t even deliver clean iPod audio in my driveway. Those few that can get clobbered by a nearby station within the first two miles.

It’s probably going to come down to having a new radio put in…one with an MP3 input jack. I’ve avoided this up until now, because I happen to drive a fine automobile that’s well within the means of a freelance journalist in this economy who works out of his house and doesn’t need to commute anywhere in the morning.

IE, it’s a bit of a beater. A $200 radio wouldn’t double the value of the car, but the percentage increase might actually be in the double digits.

Nonetheless, it’s time. I fear that if I let this sad state of affairs continue, the day will come when I’m delivering the live version of this blog post to a police officer while my vehicle is idling in the town common’s new drive-through gazebo.

My parents aren’t in my age group. So if I call the house and say “Great news, Mom…my book got BoingBoinged!” there’ll probably be a few seconds of silence and then a very tentative “That’s…lovely, dear.” I’m not sure that they’ll understand why this is such cool news.

(How old are they? They’re way too young to respond to “We’ve won a contract from Uncle Sam to provide 50,000 copies of my book for the war effort!” Let’s get that straight. They’re probably at the top end of the “It’s going to be an Oprah’s Book Club selection in January!” demographic.

Yup, getting a great notice from such a popular site will help get the word out on the book but it’s really spiffy to know that someone like Mark really dug it. I don’t think I’ve done a great job of concealing my own enthusiasm for this title, but honestly, at this time of year I spend a lot of time addressing packages using Sharpie markers. There’s always that nagging suspicion that the fumes have left me loopy and delusional.

So this makes me feel pretty damned good. Plus, this is one of those incredibly hectic days (make-or-break week on a huge project, friends) and some positive words from the outside world are very much appreciated.

Suffice to say that when I go out to lunch tomorrow, I will be ordering my usual slice of pizza…but with pepperoni.

An edited version of this column was first published in The Chicago Sun-Times on October 4, 2007.

How tragic. What was once thought of as America’s sweetheart of the cellphone industry, a fresh, charming piece of technology with a bright and exciting future, is starting to become more famous for making headline-grabbing stumbles and sprawls.

Horrifuingly, iPhone has become the Lindsay Lohan of technology.

I blame the iPhone’s management, of course.

And the latest flap has been the worst one of them all. Apple released a major update to the iPhone’s firmware last week. Firmware 1.1.1 adds an iTunes Store application as well as some security fixes and minor user-interface tweaks. And if you’ve used a tool to unlock your iPhone so you could use it on T-Mobile and other outside phone networks, it will probably render the phone inoperable and maybe even unrecoverable.

Yes, it’s that last thing that’s grabbing the headlines. And not just in the nerd press, either. “Apple disables users’ iPhones,” I heard on the local nightly newscast. “and the company says they won’t fix them!”

As for the nerd press…they’re reacting the way a cat does when it’s taken a nap in your clean laundry and suddenly finds itself tumbling around in the dryer. Suffice to say that they are not calm and measured. Even folks on highly-partisan Mac sites are accusing Apple of intentionally breaking those unlocked phones out of pure spite.

Well, that’s just rubbish. I’m almost willing to dismiss that idea purely on a humanist level but in addition to my basic faith in humanity there’s the fact that unlike other phones, SIM-unlocking an iPhone is a very messy trick. They’re hacks, not consumer solutions, and the risks are severe and unavoidable. It’s not like riding in an airplane…it’s like jumping out of one.

Apple couldn’t have protected these phones without a great deal of time and effort that was better spent improving the iPhone itself. And they did warn the iPhone community about the dangers of SIM-unlocking. They did it when these tools first became available and they even inserted a big warning — in capital letters, no less — in the firmware installer itself. What we have here isn’t a case of Apple being evil: It’s a demonstration of what can happen when hacker tools are sold as consumer solutions.

Folks still have a right to be very upset at Apple, though. The update trashed some phones that hadn’t been modified at all, its users claim. Worse…it removes all unauthorized third-party applications and makes it impossible for them to ever run again.

And this hits me right where it hurts. I count on my iPhone eBook reader to keep info and documents from my desktop at hand. Plus, I’ve finally gotten to the point in “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” text adventure where I need to get the Babel Fish.

It’s amazing that the iPhone developer community has come so far without any help whatsoever from Apple. The company released no sample code, no tech docs, no software development kit. But the iPhone is based on a popular OS, and Unix programmers took the ball and ran with it. By September, there was a friendly, consumer-level app that downloaded, installed and ran commercial-quality software.

It was such a rich system that the iPhone was gaining new and wonderful features every week. Sure, these apps technically broke the rules of Apple’s user agreement, but unlike the SIM hack, it broke nothing on the device itself.

With the new firmware installed, it appears that all software must be “signed” by Apple or else it’s a no-go. So if I upgrade my iPhone’s firmware from 1.02 to 1.1.1, I’ll gain an app that lets me buy music directly from the iTunes store, but I’ll lose all the other apps I’ve installed over the past month.

It’s a bad trade. I ain’t updating.

But back to poor Lindsay iPhone. The iPhone — and’s Apple’s — reputations have taken a real hit, even though these issues don’t really affect the average iPhone consumer. As with the real Lindsay, it can all be fixed if Apple just learns how to communicate better.

There are reasons why the firmware update created so much havoc for so many phones, and it mostly isn’t the company’s fault. Why aren’t they explaining this clearly? And while ideally, I want to have full control of my hardware, all I truly need are beautiful, reliable tools that help me get through the day. If the best apps are only available signed, sealed, and delivered from the iTunes Store, fine. But when, kind sirs, will that be happening?

So here’s the public impression that Apple has created via its silence: the iPhone is a $399 phone that can be crippled via a software update and in some cases, if you take it in for warranty service, they won’t fix it. This expensive device can’t run any “real” apps that didn’t come pre-installed, and Apple has announced no plans to give the iPhone the same ability found in every Treo, Blackberry, and Nokia that costs half as much.

Please, Apple. Fix this before the court orders the iPhone to be fitted with an ankle bracelet or something.

After The Show…

I felt sort of an obligation to write this column. My iPhone review was pretty damned enthusiastic and the effects of the firmware update really influenced my thoughts on the device. I didn’t really care so much about what happens to phones that had been SIM-unlocked — like I said in the column, it’s inherently an unsafe hack and you’re foolish to try it if you don’t appreciate the risks — but zorching third-party apps with the new firmware update limits the potential of the iPhone.

The iPhone needs real, third-party apps. That’s really the distinction that separates a plain-Jane contract phone from a true smartphone.

And yes, Apple has opened the iPhone wide for developers of web-based iPhone apps. Seriously, if you can only associate the phrase “web-based app” with images of a JavaScript-based currency converter, then you desperately need to take a look at EditGrid. It’s the most impressive iPhone app I’ve seen. It might even be the most impressive handheld spreadsheet I’ve ever seen on any device:

Yup, that’s technically a website you’re looking at. And yet it’s a full-featured spreadsheet app with tables, layers, charts, and everything. I use it all the time, both as a simply way to carry arbitrary desktop data around with me and as something of an outliner and list manager on my iPhone.

Cool. But when I board a plane, that spreadsheet goes bye-bye. Ditto for parking garages, the Amtrak station where I board the train to New York, and most of the state of Vermont, in my experience.

I insist that this is not a good thing.

Compare and contrast this state of affairs with the world that a Treo or Nokia or Blackberry owner knows. They can simply copy files directly onto their handsets. Hell, many models even have a card slot. Just copy files onto a memory card and then stick it in your phone, just like a thumb drive. And a cheap third-party spreadsheet app, word processor, list manager, et cetera ad infinitum will let you read and work with the file no matter where you go.

Yes, you can use it on a train. You can use it on a plane. You can use it here or there…you can use it anywhere.

I really shouldn’t complain. Much of my new book (”iPhone: Fully Loaded”; bless youfor asking) deals with ways of getting around the “thou shalt not put your own damned files on this device” commandment imposed by Apple and iTunes. But statistically-speaking, a serious percentage of iPhone owners aren’t benefiting from book royalties so they’d probably prefer these sort of tasks to be so simple that you don’t need to buy a book at all.

(No matter how pornographically-low the price of said book might be.)

No, I still haven’t updated my iPhone to 1.11. This is what my iPhone’s home screen looks like:

…I think you can appreciate that at this time, a firmware update would be a bit of a downgrade. Visit the homepage of AppTapp Installer for instructions on how to do this to your iPhone.

(Or, better yet…buy my book. Please. There’s a hole in the roof and the children need shoes and winter’s coming but screw all of that because I’m sick and tired of not owning an HDTV.)

As I suspected, the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Apple and third party developers is indeed ongoing. The latest round has gone to the mice, with new tools for jailbreaking iPhones and even iPod Touches.

I’ll update my firmware after I’ve had a chance to digest these new techniques and understand how they work. All’s I can say is that one of the most important apps on my iPhone — following only the Big Four at the bottom of the Springboard screen — is indeed a simple book reader app that allows me to view documents I’ve copied into my iPhone’s storage. The phrase “cold dead hand” leaps to mind when asked to comment on my commitment to retaining this app.

But the real point of the column is that Apple has been doing a terrible job of addressing people’s concerns. Apple should have put Greg Joswiak or some other high-ranking, avuncular, and camera-ready employee in front of a sympathetic interviewer, and made the company’s side of the story plain.

And it’s unquestionably time for Apple to make its application strategy plain. Folks like me will be mollified by the knowledge that an SDK is definitely coming. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and then for the rest of our lives we can play Joust on our $400 phones (or hell, even have a to-do list).

For now, the question “Should I buy an iPhone?” has become a bit more complicated. I remain an enthusiastic user, but Apple needs to decide whether they’re building a mobile computing platform or an iPod. If it’s a platform, then the users should be able to count on a certain amount of control over the device.

If it’s an iPod, then the users should be warned that it is what it is and if it isn’t already what they want it to be, then they should buy something else.

And here we see one of the advantages of using Wordpress as your blogging platform instead of a homemade AppleScript app. I’m on the Acela train, about an hour from NYC (first-class car, thank you very much) and lookit me: I’m blogging.

I went and installed a special iPhone plugin that served a cool mobile admin page when the blog senses that I’m accessing the admin side from an iPhone. I had been slightly miffed that I’ve (as yet) failed to get blogging-by-email working but hell, so long as I have something that works.

I had one of those “life is good” moments a couple of hours ago. The Boston-NYC run takes you down the New England coastline. At sunset, as it happened. I had tjis week’s (unseen) episode of “House” going on the iPod Touch, dinner on the train was very nice, the views from my seat were quite pretty, and I was getting some nice photos.

“Life is Good,” I sighed. And it was.

Of course, later I realized that I’ve left my credit cards at home. But it was still a nice moment.

5 days until final book deadline. There’s a certain amount of shaving and showering that should be happening but isn’t.

The true sign that I’ve reached the end game (as well as the low reserves of my mental faculties) is when I must resort to lab rat methods of motivation.

Witness (metaphorically only, unless you’re that kind person who sent me the vintage moose head and the 802.11g antenna that appears to be sticking up behind its left ear is transmitting video from an embedded camera) the small dish to the left of my keyboard. This morning, it contained eight peanut M&M’s. It now contains three. Each candy represents a specific item on today’s punchlist that must be completed before I’m allowed to close my eyes and adopt any posture that invites or even risks sleep.

Yes, I both need a tangible reward for each goal met, as well as a visible indicator of progress and a clear marker of when it’s time to walk away from the keyboard and follow the orange pixies into their magic gumdrop forest.

It is very appropriate that I’ll be boarding a plane and fleeing this whole half of the USA on the day I submit the last bits of this book. I think I’m going to desperately need to spend 48 hours forgetting everything about my office and cocooning myself in a world apart where there’s a king-sized bed, maid service, and cheerful Texans eager to ply me with barbecue.

You can tell that a project is going well when you’re pleased to be busting your ass. Case in point: my iPhone book, which is in its final week of writing.

It’s coming out great. It goes its own way and it justifies its existence in the marketplace and it’s going to make a lot of iPhone owners really happy with their purchases. Of both the iPhone and the book.

Oh, and iPod Touch owners, too. It would have been great to be one of the first to market but good God! The iPhone is a completely different beast today than it was two months ago.”iPhone Fully Loaded” won’t be the first iPhone book but it’ll probably be the first one to reflect the actual state of the world, not the one that existed a week or two after the release date.

Among the benefits: the evening after Apple announced the iPod Touch, I laughed and laughed and then I went through the manuscript, looking for places to change “iPhone” to “iPhone or Touch.” A couple of phone calls to the publisher and the marketing will reflect that it’s full of tips and techniques for Touch users. First to market!

So today I finally bit the bullet and canned Chapter 8. It was…interesting,  but it was kind of just sitting there between chapters 7 and 9. I looked at its place in the structure of the book and suddenly remembered a much more interesting topic I’d come up with about a month ago, when the book was “locked.” But I had to put it aside, because I couldn’t insert a new chapter at that point without completely disrupting every chapter that came after it.

Welp, I realized that if I dumped the current Chapter 8 — which was damned-near complete — this new topic could slide right into its place. And nobody would have to spend two days renumbering illustrations and callouts because of an inserted chapter.

It was lots of work but damn, it’s much better than what I had there before. If the project were going poorly, an element that requires only 20 minutes of thumb-twiddling would feel like torture. As it is, at the end of six hours I was no farther along than I was when I started, vis a vis the number of completed chapters. But I couldn’t be more pleased.

MessagePad 2007

Originally uploaded by andyi

There we go. I knew my new iPhone was missing something…