iphone

=== Originally published at: The Agile Approach ===

In the ’90s romantic comedy that we borrowed the title from, a chain of dramatic events take place, while the main character (played by Peter Gallagher) is in a post-accident coma.

Comatose sleep is a little too dramatic for this, but just in case you spent the last couple of years on a beautiful island, away from the daily strains of the everyday life in the 21st century, let us list some of the major, latest technical advancements for you. For the less-fortunate rest of us, who did not get to lounge on an island, this is a chance to look back and identify new technologies that have changed the way we live and operate, but were not around just couple of years ago.

Twitter

Twitter took off during 2007 SXSW festival. This 140-character-limit social messaging service revolutionized the Internet landscape by inventing, and at the same time monopolizing, a completely new phenomena: Micro-Blogging. The invention was so successful that it went far beyond the initial idea and became the most effective way to share ideas on the Web.

Linked Data

If you are on a Wifi and both your mac and iPhone can access it, you can get free ride with controlling Keynote from your iPhone by using: Keymote, which in part uses Telekinesis iPhoneRemote.

Telekinesis actually uses iPhone Safari and Ajax so you need to point iPhone Safari to a specific address (https://192.168.74.104:5010/ by default). You can bookmark it as iPhone shortcut on iPhone desktop though, for easy launching.

Software engineering has introduced the paradigm of the separation of the View (visual representation) from the Model (business logic) long time ago. In the realm of the Web, this principle was re-emphasized. In the late '90s and early 2000s the separation was used to accommodate for differences between physical mediums that a web-page could be viewed on: from the lame WAP browsers to incompatible HTML ones of all kinds. Or at least, this is how it was commonly explained. I, for one, have rarely seen any actual web-application that would cleanly and transparently render to WAP and HTML from the same engine. Also, the WAP mess disappeared long before most developers would start to feel its pains. But that's a different story.

These days tiny gadgets (think: iPhone or Blackberry if you are "uncool") have better, more compliant browsers than some desktop systems (would that be Windows?). Is the need for MVC - the separation of Model and View gone?

On the contrary. The peak of the so-called Web 2.0 is characterized by the flood of widgets of all kinds. Widgets for iGoogle, "applications" for Facebook and even - web-enabled widgets for Desktop systems like OS-X Dashboard. Large companies of the kind of New York Times produce widgets for all of these mediums. Obviously, something like that can be a huge expenditure if you are writing each widget from scratch each time and do not re-use anything but the database.

Therefore, the Web Question of 2009 becomes: can your website's source code output a widget instead of a full-fledged website with very little code change?

Think about it.

I do usually try to not bash any particular company, in my blog posts. Every so often I may critique somebody and I like to think my criticism is factual and constructive. This time around, though, I will allow myself to go into a full-on ranting and smirking, because the person we are talking about is Mr. Steve Ballmer, the infamous CEO of Microsoft, and the subject is - his ridiculous "predictions" about iPhone.

I mean, we all understand why a Microsoft CEO would not love iPhone. It's also clear why he would try do diminish the importance of this revolutionary device. Still, the job of a CEO, especially a giant like Microsoft, is to be at least close to reality and not blurt random stupidities publicly.

Let's see what Ballmer was saying just a year ago:

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance," said Ballmer. "It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."
--- Source: ArsTechnica, April 2007.

And a year later, according to the report from Net Applications (Feb 2008), Safari on iPhone has 71% market share among mobile web-browsers in the US, leaving only 12% to the next runner-up, the child-product of Microsoft: Pocket IE.

Similarily, Canalys reports that as far as overall US "smart phone" market goes, iPhone, in just over a year, has gained 28% market share, only second to RIM (producer of Blackberry) that has 41%. If you take into account how long have the competitors been on the market (and those are wildly well-known brands like Palm, Nokia and others) and the fact that RIM has been selling its Blackberries to corporate clients in large bulks, for a while now and has tremendous head-start, the results are just amazing.

Back to Ballmer's "2-3% forecast" . Well, what can we say? Except state the obvious and say that we can't help feeling sorry for Microsoft when Bill Gates fully retires and the software giant is left to the mercy of Ballmer.

*smirk* (sorry, could not help it).

MediaTemple is a remarkable virtual-dedicated and dedicated hosting provider for numerous reasons. It is well-known for legendary reliability, quality of service and the level of expertise of the support staff. MediaTemple solutions like grid-deployed MySQL hosting are at the very frontier of industry innovation.

Recently, though, MediaTemple pleasantly surprised its clientele (including yours truly) with an iPhone-friendly control-panel. First in the industry, as far as we know. This sweet thing is definitely worth checking out: http://www.mediatemple.net/iphone/

You can bet that when a company is great, it's great in more than one way. Our deepest respects go to you, MediaTemple!

Since I was one of the roughly 1 million fanatics, that against all rational arguments, bought iPhone early, I became eligible for the $100 Apple credit. I got it back today from Apple website (look in the footer). It took me about 40 seconds.

Now the big question is - what to buy with it, since I already own like half of anything at the Apple store? :)

The much awaited first software update of iPhone is out!

One of many novel things about iPhone, setting it aside from the CellPhones 1.0, is that it is supposed to be frequently and significantly improved through a series of software updates. This first update is not that exciting - just a collection of bug-fixes, but marks a point in the history. I installed the update - the phone still works, so - good news :)

I wonder if the update will shut down some of the breaches the community was able to make into the closed world of iPhone.

Several "iPhone simulators" have been published on the Web, lately, that claim aiding web developers in creating iPhone-compatible web applications. Beware of them! Aside from a bunch of other issues, they do not display text and graphics the same way (size, proportion, layout) that iPhone does so you may fall in false confidence and when people do actually open your page in iPhone it will look freakish - neither like a normal site, nor iPhone-optimized.

I will list two of the most populart ones, here
freemacware.com/iphone-simulator
testiphone.com

Good news on the iPhone's bluetooth support front: you do not have to buy the $129.00 Apple headset of questionable wearing comfort. Third-party bluetooth headsets seem to be supported just as well.

We had no trouble hooking up a much cheaper, yet nicer Motorola H700 headset with an iPhone.

Apparently, headset model is one of the few things Apple decided not to lock its users into. Happy iPhoning!

There's been plenty of whining going on the Net about "iPhone does not do this" and "iPhone does not do that", so I am not going to bore you with all the known shortcomings like: half-ass (even less) bluetooth support, no Flash support, yadda, yadda, yadda. You've heard it, you know it.

However, having been using iPhone, for a while, I found couple of new suckers, that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere, yet, so I will annoy you with those.

First of all, aside from all the criticism that very naturally accompanies something so innovative, I must declare - iPhone is an amazing phone and you do want to have it. I know it, you know it, your mom knows it, so - stop pretending. The touch-screen keyboard is extremely usable, very easy to get used to, AT&T Edge is not too slow for a mobile network, zoom and pan finger-gestures are sweet and the screen quality is amazing.

Now, in addition to other goodies, iPhone is capable of displaying MS Office attachments in Mail. However, and this is when we approach the subject of my complaint, for some obscure, unfair and completely unjustified reason you can not view the e-mail attachements in wide-screen. As you were repeatedly shown, when you turn iPhone 90^o, iPod and Safari re-adjust to display content in wide-screen and give you more horizontal room. Guess what? Does not work for the attachments. No matter how many times and how I turned the iPhone, the Mail attachment viewer kept displaying the Word file vertically. Such a small detail, such a huge disappointment! :(

Oh, and one more thing: in case you missed it, iPhone has no file browser, repeat - none. You can not download anything from the Web, or otherwise store and view later. Wow!