Scripting News for 7/2/2007

Attn TwitterGram Devs 

A new entrypoint in the API.

http://docs.twittergram.com/#isPhoneRegistered

There will be an end-user announcement here tomorrow.

Exciting times! 🙂

On the Libby Clemency 

NY Times: “Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons. But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”

Miguel de Icaza: “No criminal left behind.”

Why I love the iPhone 

I do actually love this product.

And I’m grateful for it too.

Basically I like all Apple products. To me, it’s a way to buy a BMW every month, without having to pay $60,000.

Have you ever driven a mid-to-high-end BMW? I have, recently, I test drove a 535i. The car feels as if it has a grip on the road, it’s got a confidence, it’s upright, and fast, and it maneuvers, but most important, it feels good to sit in one, and it feels even better to move one. Feels, feels, feels. We buy these things for the feeling. Same with Apple’s products.

My MacBook Pro has the BMW feeling, with its Titanium everything, it’s just got that solid, upright feel to it. But it’s big. The iPhone has that feeling, in something small, that fits in your hand.

You don’t want to give it to someone, you want to just hold it. I know it sounds silly and dorky, geez it’s just a phone, after all, but it’s not. It’s a totem. A symbol. A charm. A fortune cookie. It’s personal. It’s mine.

Yes I know I sound like Gollum. 🙂

That explains the “love” part of the relationship. But what about the gratitude?

Well, we’ve needed to have a serious conversation about mobile devices for a very long time. I realized this when Scoble was starting to nudge people about how their sites looked on his cell phone. Then I got a Blackberry, and started playing, and all of a sudden I wanted to have serious conversations about where this stuff is going. Plenty of people showed up, with tons of knowledge and experience, but the conversation drifted to the background. Now it’s back in the fore, and I don’t think it can drift to the back, not after so many people waited in line, and they sold 500,000 in the first weekend, and they’ve got a software updating mechanism that as far as I know no cellphone manufacturer has ever had. There’s going to be an update for the iPhone in July, and one in August, and in September, and on and on. Eventually you’ll have to buy a new one, probably long before the battery wears out. That’s how Apple works of course. 🙂

So while I list my wishes, and complain about their chutzpah, that’s just to make sure these things get on the record, maybe finally Apple will have some competition, someday I’d like to buy a Mercedes or a Lexus, nothing wrong with that, right? You learn from your competition, and Apple hasn’t had that benefit. I hope they do, so we can spread the love and gratitude.

iPhone wishes 

I’m still finding things I wish they did, not little things, but big ones, incongruities, things about the iPhone and its positioning that don’t match the feature set.

Probably the biggest area the product is lacking is in browser prefs. i’ve been using the web for almost 14 years. We’ve seen a lot of ideas come and go in prefs for web browsers, but it has settled down to a predictable set. Apple says this is a real web browser, as opposed to the more limited browsers that come with other cell phones. If so, where are the most rudimentary of preferences?

The one I miss the most from my Blackberry is the option to set the start page. I created a list of sites that I like to check when I’m on the BART or waiting in line at the supermarket. Without the ability to set the start page, I have to rely on memory, and I have to type the first few characters of the URL.

The ability to set the default font and size is a very standard and time-tested browser pref. I always set this in a new browser, I never accept the default. And never have I seen a browser that needs this pref more than the iPhone does.

Wouldn’t it be great if it had a fractional horsepower HTTP server built in, so when you’re near a laptop or a desktop, you could configure the iPhone from a full-size screen and a computer that has a clipboard (another thing I suspect I’m really going to miss on the iPhone).

Things I have figured out 

Okay, I made my peace with synchronizing to get music on the iPod, but it doesn’t do me any good because the ear buds hurt my ears, after just ten minutes of use, and that’s hardware I can’t replace, so I’m afraid the iPhone loses on that one. However it is nice that the speaker is loud enough so that you can hear the player even without the ear buds, and it’s nice that the buds have a mike too, but of course that’s useless to me because of the physical pain.

Basically I want to use a pair of cheap Sony headphones to listen to podcasts on my daily walk, and you can’t do it with the iPhone and sorry I don’t care what the excuse is, that’s just wrong.

An aside, I wasn’t able to figure out how to get an episode of The Wire onto the device so I could watch it. I just wanted to see what watching a TV show would be like, and I’m opposed to using their store to buy shows I’ve already paid HBO for (twice, not only have I had a subscription for the last 30 years, but I also bought the DVDs from Amazon). Try as hard as I can, I couldn’t get iTunes to upload the video to the iPhone.

PS: Thanks to Matthew, I got it working.

I figured out how to email a picture taken by the camera, thanks to a tip from Robert Scoble. And Flickr has a special email address for every user that makes it easy to connect the camera to Flickr, so here’s a picture I snapped of myself with the iPhone, uploaded seconds after taking it. Nice!

Briar Dudley on the iPhone 

Every one of his ten points is right on the money.