iPhone Passion

The Register has a cool scoop on the history of the iPhone name, since it first appeared back in 1994:

The iPhone has been with us for many years, in a variety of forms, and its slow and painstaking development has taken many twists and turns before reaching its forthcoming destination.

Briefly: there was a band called Eyephone back in 1994; then a PC-to-PC VOIP software in 2001, then a Palm OS one in 2004, a voip service in 2004, etc..

The news is all around the blogosphere: an unofficial report from Wired says that the Cingular exclusivity for the iPhone will be actually a two-week one.

Although still secret, this info seems to come from within T-Mobile, whose employees are already starting signing people up for the iPhone.

… The fellow was a T-mobile agent/employee and very excited about the news. He was willing to pre-sign me for the iPhone. That all I’ve got but he was convinced.

[tags]Cingular, T-Mobile, exclusivity, iPhone[/tags]

Engadget has the scoop: Cisco settled its Apple lawsuit, after some interesting business deals behind.

Could this be the secret of the reality distortion field? If not, then at least it shows us something: Steve is a mere mortal..

via Seth Godin
[tags]Steve Jobs, video, youtube[/tags]

Our fellows-in-passion from MyIPhone.com and UnwiredView introduce us to the latest gadget in the iPhone market niche: it’s concept prototype, the Asus Aura, designed by the Hungarian design company Egy Studio. It was clearly inspired by iPhone, although it has some interesting innovations that could make it quite a treat. We have no other info on the Aura, and it’s mostly probable that the gadget will remain a prototype and never reach to market, unlike the LG Prada, for instance…

(via)
[tags]iPhone, Asus, Aura, phone, design[/tags]

Parody, off-course

Apple never stops innovating, and just three weeks after they introduce the iPhone, Apple tops itself by introducing the iPhone shuffle!

via Digg
[tags] iPhone, Shuffle, iPod, Apple, Digg, links, fun, humor[/tags]

From Techmeme we find an interesting article that shows us the graphs of iPod vs iPhone searches on the American Online market.

As you can see for yourself, , iPhone searches started as early as August 2006 but were close to nothing; same in September, October, November. December started to spread some more rumors, but still an insignifiant number of searches compared to the ones for the iPod. However… January came and with it a HUGE peak in internet searches.

The lean guys from weblogs.hitwise.com also give us the list of the sites receiving all this huge traffic. On the first position, off course, Apple Computer, followed by Apple iPhone Blog – now that’s a lucky site owner. Surprinsingly, MySpace is on the fifth position, tightly behind Engadget – I say surprisingly, since after all Engadget IS the most trustful ressource for everything gadget related.

Hmm… quite interesting, ain’t it? We’ll just see what the future brings, and whether the search in interest for the iPhone is more than just a temporary fashion. I guess we’ll have to wait until August for this…

via JoyOfTech

Via TUAW (the unofficial Apple Blog) we hear that Andi Ihnatko from Chicago Sun Times has been playing a bit with the real iPhone. Here are, briefly, some of his insights:
1. the touchscreen works great, but it’s skin-sensitive: won’t work with gloves, nor with screen protectors.
2. the virtual keyboard seems to work great, despite what some critics would expect:

After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true e-mail demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.

3. the iPhone software will be most probably be available on iTunes, and only Apple partner developers will be allowed to create it. This is directly answering everyone’s questions. (though not all of them – I’m still curious if iPhone Widgets will be installable from the net)
4. the iPhone widgets are NOT Dashboard Widgets, though they have some part in common.
5. the OS is the stripped-down Leopard (OSX 10.5), and the cool animation effects we’ve seen on the keynote are made via Core Animation.
6. no Flash plugin for now. Damn!

Colin, a student blogger passionate about Mac development, has written an impressive and insightful article about the architecture of the Cocoa software that runs on the iPhone.
While all of his theories are just that – theories,(since Apple has not disclosed so far any details about iPhone software programming), they are still very well-conceived. Basically, Colin’s remarks make a lot of sense:

- there are no “Windows”, only full-screen “Views”, and whenever you switch the app you actually commute the view; something similar happens with the Pocket PC
- the GUI library is a stripped-down version of Cocoa – no scroll-bars, since they’d take up vital screen space, full-width horizontal toolbars.
- the Cocoa controls are themed with big bold fonts and lighter colors

The Screen is another thing to take into consideration. Clearly whoever is using the iPhone can switch the view from portrait to landscape at anytime so your app needs to take advantage of that. Im guessing here 1 of 2 things happens

Colin does something even more exciting: he mocks-up an iPhone simple app, trying to figure out how things might look and the ways we could develop them.

All in all, a very exciting article. Now all we have to do is:
1. wait for the iPhone to come out
2. wait for some brilliant hacker to manage to install custom-made apps on the iPhone
3. wait for some (other) hacker to put together some development tools for the iPhone.

The sad part, off course, is that it should have been Steve’s Job (Pun intended) to open up the platform and the 2 and 3 points as well. Sadly, this is not the case…

Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO, and his reaction to the iPhone. I guess we’ll see who’ll be laughing once the iPhone is available. In the meantime, the LG Prada seems to laugh harder

via cybersurge