Tag Archives: apple

iPhone: Which iPhone 3.0 software features does my iPhone support?

iPhone 3.0 Features Matrix

Notes:

  1. Peer-to-peer connectivity requires compatible applications, which can be downloaded from the App Store when available.
  2. The original iPhone does not support using Bluetooth for peer-to-peer connectivity. It can use Wi-Fi and cellular data networks for peer-to-peer connectivity.
  3. MMS is not available in all areas; fees may apply. See your carrier for availability.
  4. Internet tethering is not currently offered in the United States and some other countries. See your carrier for availability.

via iPhone: Which iPhone 3.0 software features does my iPhone support?.

Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple

The last session of WWDC ‘09 yesterday was about publishing on the App Store. The content of sessions is under NDA, so I can’t tell you what it was about. So I’ll tell you what wasn’t in it: the audience Q&A session that succeeded nearly every other WWDC session and usually provided invaluable access to Apple employees and useful additional knowledge to attendees. The session itself blew through its lightweight examples quickly, ending 45 minutes early. The majority of the audience was clearly there for the Q&A. As people lined up at the microphones around the room, the presenter abruptly showed a simple slide with only “WWDC” in plain lettering, thanked us for coming, and bolted off the stage. The Apple engineers, usually staying around the stage for one-on-one questions, were gone. The lights came up instantly, and it was the only session that didn’t end in music. The audience was stunned.

via Marco.org – Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple.

Picking nits: why I’m skipping the Palm Pre

Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, the Palm Pre is a groundbreaking smartphone that portends the obliteration of the line between phone and full size computer. It joins the iPhone and arguably the Android devices as the only computer some people would ever need.

However, Palm missed a lot of the little things in this first release. It’s an admirable attempt, given what they’re shooting for, but the fact of the matter is that the devil is in the details, and Palm fumbled too many. Any one of the following items is easy enough to overlook in an otherwise stellar device. But the difference between, frankly, the Palms and the Apples of the world is that the Apples don’t miss over 20 of them. They add up to an annoying user experience more akin to Windows Mobile than the iPhone.

via Picking nits: why I’m skipping the Palm Pre.

An excellent, concise list about why the Palm Pre isn’t the next “iPhone killer” – instead, it’s just another chance for Apple to prove how awesome they actually are. XD

My favourites are the no scroll bars (which genius thought of that one?), no way to jump to the top or bottom of a long list (oops, huge oversight there), non-universal “universal search” (if you’re going to do it, do it right, like iPhone OS 3.0), copy and paste only in “editable” text fields (no, you can’t copy that text from the web page, or an email unless you forward the email first (cmon, l-a-m-e), no Street View in Google Maps (lulzor).

Favourite quote would have to be:

22. Easy to run into “can’t open a new card until you close some existing cards.” Say what you will about the iPhone and multitasking, but memory management generally isn’t something the user has to think about.

…and people wonder why the general public refer to “iPhone killers”. It’s really no surprise – in this day and age, there’s simply no way any company can catch up.

However, kudos to Palm for trying. Thanks for helping Apple stay ahead of the curve. 🙂

The Apple Store That Almost Was

Apple Cafe

(© Landmark Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.)

Before there was the Apple Store that we know and love today, there was the Apple Cafe — well, almost. On November 12, 1996, Apple announced plans to open a chain of cybercafes around the globe. State-of-the-art, even by today’s standards, Apple Cafes promised health-conscious food (served up via a high-tech ordering system), video conferencing with neighbouring diners, and on-demand access of movies and music videos. A screenshot from an old promo gives us a few clues as to how some of this might have worked.

via Guifx Blog : Blog Archive : The Apple Store That Almost Was.

Where the rounded rectangles in OSX came from…

Bill had added new code to QuickDraw (which was still called LisaGraf at this point) to draw circles and ovals very quickly. That was a bit hard to do on the Macintosh, since the math for circles usually involved taking square roots, and the 68000 processor in the Lisa and Macintosh didn’t support floating point operations. But Bill had come up with a clever way to do the circle calculation that only used addition and subtraction, not even multiplication or division, which the 68000 could do, but was kind of slow at.

Bill’s technique used the fact the sum of a sequence of odd numbers is always the next perfect square (For example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16, etc). So he could figure out when to bump the dependent coordinate value by iterating in a loop until a threshold was exceeded. This allowed QuickDraw to draw ovals very quickly.

via Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Round Rects Are Everywhere!.