In a moment of weakness (also known as a visit to the Apple Store) last week, I found myself parting with more money than I can easily justify for a shiny new iPhone. What followed was somewhat painful; canceling T-Mobile this soon after I had come back to them hurt, just not as much as the early termination bill soon to arrive in my mailbox.

I’ll get the obvious cheers and jeers out out of the way (I don’t expect that you, dear reader, will have missed them in any of the other thousand iPhone reviews, so feel free to skip the following lists)

Cheers

• The User Interface is amazing - I can’t imagine going back to my once loved PEBL (loved until last Tuesday)
• Apple did some amazing bargaining with AT&T over cost of the plans - I can’t imagine how much this would have cost on any other carrier right now
• I actually seem to like the keyboard

Jeers

• EDGE can be slow - I mean, a couple of minutes to download a text email slow
• The battery life is a bit low - I’m not one of those guys who plays chicken with my cell phone, but at the tail end of a normal day, I look at the battery indicator and wonder how this thing is going to die. It hasn’t yet, but it generally gets a bit too close for my comfort.
• Text selection - I find it interesting that the company famous for bringing GUI concepts like cut and paste to the masses seemed to forget to add that functionality to the iPhone
• Including the YouTube app was a mistake - now I lose so much time just killing my battery whenever I have free moments. I could take some personal responsibility, but blaming Jobs is so much easier
• Ear buds - why couldn’t Apple released at least their in-ear headphones with the push button microphone?

Now that we have the major items out of the way, I would like to discuss how this device changes things for me.

I no longer carry around a creased and bled index card full of notes to myself (the exact title of the book you are looking for is x, it is also found by other name of y). Instead, I put a note into Ta Da Lists and if I need more information, search Google (or Amazon or IMDB). This is handy.

I now understand the usefulness of Twitter and its ilk. I couldn’t understand dealing with it via SMS or just a computer, but with the iPhone it helps keep me sane (like when I spend two hours to see if certain contact lens work (they didn’t and then did) with my poor eyes).

I’m no longer dependent on restaurants (take out or otherwise) that I am familiar and/or have a menu for. Instead, I select my apartment bookmark in Google Maps (or wherever I am) and type in the type of food I am looking for. Minor annoyance, sometimes the most obvious (and closest) place doesn’t seem to make the grade (a direct search does work in those cases). The benefit of being able to call directly from Google Maps has been wonderful.

All in all, there are a number of features that don’t always make sense (why you can only edit contacts from specific screens, why a missed call and a voicemail look the same on the home screen, etc.), but ultimately, the iPhone shows a different perspective in how a cell phone should work. For me, it has ultimately been an extremely positive experience, and I truly can’t imagine going back to any other phone. Nothing even approaches the iPhone with regards to the pleasant experience (even if I cannot stand ear buds - I am not using them, by the way) you simply cannot avoid.

Thank you, Apple. Now, go and finish 10.5 and make me some in-ear headphones so that I may lay even more capital upon your retail alter.

I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

Near the tail end of last year, I replaced my Powerbook for some nice Apple Intel goodness. For the most part, I have loved my new MacBook, although it did require some changes in workflow. This is due to the fact that, at least for me, Microsoft Office runs horribly on Rosetta. It runs worse than my old Photoshop 7.

I switched my one email account (this one) that I used on Entourage over to Mail.app. That was the big change. I don’t use Word or Excel that much, and Keynote puts PowerPoint to utter shame. After that, I spent very little time thinking about it.

Today, I was forced to recall the pain. I needed to write a quick business letter and fired up Word. I guess it was the instance of Photoshop CS3 (wonderful, I should add), but it took literally a minute and a half for the project dialog to come up and be changeable. Everything just sort of hung there afterwards.

Ultimately, the whole ordeal took about an extra ten minutes because of Rosetta, and this was for a ten minute letter. I can only imagine what people who have to use Word for extended periods of time think about this joy. Personally, I’m glad I have nice Universal apps that cover my general writing needs.

While I can accept that it can take a bit of time to update an application for a whole new architecture, I am reminded of why most magazines (that are Mac houses) switched over to InDesign. Adobe took a bit of time in converting their apps over to Mac OS X, but Quark took a much longer time. This meant that any creative who needed a layout program and wanted a new computer had to either run Quark in a hobbled environment or use Adobe’s flashy InDesign. If you take a look at the field now, you can see what most shops with a decent budget chose.

Maybe it’s time for someone to really challenge Office on the Mac…

Well, it has been quite some time since we last spoke. I’m not going to lie; I’ve been seeing other people. We should not let this hamper our attempts at rekindling the flame. I’ve got some stuff waiting in the wings, so please bare with me.

That said, things are going to change around here. My long absence has removed any semblance of an audience, so that means this has become once again a blank slate. Things are going to be a bit different, more personal. I’ve missed just chatting with you.

Let’s go back to the basics and see what happens…

It’s good to see that my website does handle IE7 fine.  Aside from that, I should post a bit of an update.  In the past two months, I got a new job and moved up to Boston.  i will be strating everything back up again soon, in case you are still waiting patiently.  (If so, thanks)

In my new job, I am blessed (HA) with a Windows development box.  This has been awhile for me.  I thinks that it has been five years since I have done web development on a Windows machine.  The world has changed a bit since I left; I’m just trying to figure out how.

For development, I have been working with Dreamweaver (pretty much the same as five years ago, except that I now strictly use code view).  Photoshop is the same throughout. 

In a month, I have lost at least two days of total time to Windows Update and AV updates.  The OS is still slow and feels cludgy (more so than Linux even).  I come home at night and enjoy simple acts of checking mail and surfing the web on the Mac.

Being on the OS does allow me to try out some of the new toys (reviews of which are forth coming).  I am actually writing this on Windows Live Writer and it actually seems to be fairly intuitive.  Here’s to a brave new world.

This moment is the one I have feared for months: IE7 is here. Along with this momentous day comes the possible breaking of a great many sites.

If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, well, I’ll just tell you. I see the worst possible end result constantly, and, in this case, my Powerbook is of no use in determining if I have reason to be frightened. I have heard good things about the betas, but I do understand that the rendering engine, while much better, has some different behaviors when playing with compliant sites. If you are a Windows user who has upgraded, please let me know if anything isn’t working with my site…

Your Own Personal Internet (wired blogs)

I sually avoid politics on this blog (part of the reason why I have not yet stepped into the whole netneutrality nonsense), but I have a few excerpts from Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) that I would like to address so bear with me.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

So, because you, Sen. Stevens, do not consider your job commercial, those with jobs that would follow such a consideration cannot use the internet?  Regardless of the elitism that you so quickly espouse, there are other problems with your argument here:

1. Unless the United States Government is using phone lines to route governement traffic, I can personally assure you as an IT professional that your email wasn’t delayed due to being “tangled up,” but due to poor management by your System Administrator.  For once, you can blame IT.
2. Also, unless you never visit eBay, Amazon, Fox News, or any other non-government web site, you are actually using the “commercial web.” How would you feel if you had access only to Cox Communications Bidding and couldn’t from those on Verizon Bidding?

And some more…

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

Amazingly enough, the tubes isn’t that far off, but let’s simplify the metaphor even further.  The internet is a network of roads.  This metaphor allows me to really explain it fairly well.  Your ISP is, say your automobile manufacturer. 

So, let’s say that you drive a Ford and want to meet me at a McDonalds off of 95.  McDonalds is owned by Ford’s parent company (sounds odd, but this is common with media companies), so you have no problem driving there.

Now, I happen to own a Chevy and their parent company also owns Burger King.  The parent company wants me to eat at Burger King, so they make it so that I can’t drive on 95 to McDonalds.  They make me drive the backroads with express cut offs every mile to Burger Kings.  If they are nice, I will get to McDonalds at some point, but it will take me a whole lot longer than you, with much more work.

The internet is a commercial net and an individual net.  It is a wonderful tool, allowing for people to communicate without regard to borders, race, age, or anything that would divide us elsewhere.  Limiting access is an act of tyranny, pure and simple.  We call it that readily when it is a government that would do such a thing, such as the Great Firewall of China.  Why is it any different for corporations?