Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

Well, something I had suspected and maybe secretly known for awhile was in the works landed yesterday! Flickr Video! This is a natural feature addition to FlickrBooth that I’ll eventually be supporting. I don’t have much time these days and lets face it, FlickrBooth being free isn’t much of a cashcow. Is this feature something people really want? Put your money where your mouth is and donate! I’m not saying I won’t do this without donations or that I’m holding my FlickrBooth users hostage, but I certainly up the priority of work based on the interest of my users. I’d be interested to hear what sort of feature(s) surrounding the new addition you guys would like. Should uploading videos allow going to YouTube and Flickr at the same time? What if the video is over 90 seconds, should I clip at 90 seconds or split it into X number of videos? (The latter might actually be pretty tricky…). As an aside, I’ve also tossed around the idea of FlickrBooth for the iPhone, especially with some big names asking for it.

Broken iPhone
Originally uploaded by tristanotierney

So awhile back (just after macworld) Quynh’s iPhone mysteriously cracked. We didn’t drop it, we didn’t step on it, it just spiderwebbed in the corner for no apparent reason. Needless to say we were hesitant to take it to an Apple genius because anything involving what appears to be user-inflicted-damage is shrugged off. Well, we were browsing the mall today and said screw it lets give it a try. 20 minutes later we were blessed with a brand spanking new phone! I had a similar experience with Ikea, in which we actually brought in an photo of a broken drawer shelf (on our iPhones of course) and they didn’t even ask questions! They just went into the back room and gave us the new board we needed to repair the drawer. Not to go off into too much of a tangent, but I think these two companies share a lot in common.

(Most) everyone knows about the iPhone SDK, so I’ll try not to be redundant. In short, I think what was delivered was awesome. It’s a pretty good compromise on almost all levels. If you want to distribute software on the app store for free, you can. If you want to charge, they take a pretty fair percentage. The enterprise additions were all icing on the cake to me. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I’ll directly benefit from Exchange support since VMware is an Exchange company (ugh). It’s increasingly depressing that no one seems to be giving Microsoft Exchange competition, still, and it’s the year 2008 but that’s another blog post all together. Another thing that has me pleased and amazed is the $100 million iFund. This is a drop in the bucket for Apple, with nearly $18 billion in the bank. Yet that’s a lot of money. I’m frightened, in a good way, to think what can come out of this initiative.

Frankly I wasn’t quite surprised that they chose not to make a Windows compatible SDK. The entire iPhone development suite, from building tools (gcc, xcode, ib) to debug tools (instruments, which depends on dtrace) are just entirely incompatible with Windows. Even if Apple did keep Yellow Box alive in secret, it would be a monumental effort to port all those tools. So I guess that’s that — in order to code for the most popular mobile device within the next few years, you’re going to need a Mac. If that doesn’t pull in a whole new class of switchers, I don’t know what will.

When I originally got the idea to write this blog post, facebook had just released their iPhone version of the site. By the time I got around to it meebo joined the group of iPhone versions as well. This about that time where other cell manufacturers should have already or start taking notice. Despite the iPhone’s significantly lower marketshare (at the moment) it’s mindshare is a clear winner. Why is this even happening in the first place? Look no further than the modern Web 2.0 community. I remember not too long ago there was a ruby conference of some sort where the people who weren’t using macs were the ones who were noted for “programming different.” It was quite a site to behold. In terms of who runs web 2.0 right now, it’s an overwhelmingly large portion of mac fans. I think this is just the beginning of a larger trend of the “iPhoneification” of the web. Give it another year, and I predict people won’t have “mobile” versions of their site, they’ll have iPhone versions. Where does that leave all the other handset makers? Out in the cold I say.

Apple just put up an official developer information page at developer.apple.com/iphone. Good info all around if you’re trying to make some at-home web apps for the iPhone

iPhone size comparison
Originally uploaded by freshyill.

Well they did it, and beyond my most wild expectations — the iPhone actually got released. I was surly betting against this one mostly because it was the one Apple product I wanted the most and that usually means it’s the one thing I won’t get. This pic shows the dimensions relative to other phones / devices on the market. It’s not too bad really. For a bit larger than a 30gb ipod you get the whole package.