Alex Cone wins the prize for the geekiest name tag at the first Silicon Valley iPhone Developer meeting put together by Tim Burks.

Chi-Hua Chien of KPCB talked about the iFund, KPCB's $100 million fund for investing in new iPhone applications. The meeting was well-attended: probably close to 80 people there.

Tags: iPhone, Xcode

With the iPhone SDK coming soon, I'm looking forward to a new kind of application, one that installs in two or more places and uses the mobility of the iPhone to extend the Macs that we currently have on our desks in a new way.

Many iPhone apps will offer this:

The app installs on the phone and that is it. It runs on the iPhone and doesn't talk to anything. Think of games, utilities, and the like. Of course the iPhone has internet access, so we'll also see apps that do this:

Safari already does it, so it's no big deal. Weather, stocks, and other simple gather-the-data-and-display-it apps will be numerous. There will be others that have a server end and an iPhone end:

The Google map application does this. Note that Google/Apple writes the code for both ends of the connection; if you don't have both, nothing happens. There is no browser in use here, and not necessarily any standard protocol. But most software developers don't have a huge server infrastructure like Google. And there are all sorts of scaling and billing problems with this kind of application if you are a small shop. So what do you make?

What I'm thinking of is an application that looks like this:

This is one application from one vendor that comes in two parts: one part that is installed on the iPhone and one part installed on the Mac. There are no scaling problems since for each customer only a few iPhones connect to a few Macs. The customer owns both ends. Billing is also not an issue, since it's not the Mac that is a precious resource here. This kind of app extends what I have on my Mac to my iPhone. Quicken could do this (but I bet it never will). Back up software could do this to tell me what had happened and get my response.

Another type of application could look like this:

The iPhone accesses data on the internet and the home Mac to get its job done. The Mac supplies personal information, maybe passwords, home address, account information, and the internet servers supply the other data needed. The idea here is that the Mac has the personal knowledge and the internet servers have the world knowledge. The two are combined to do things that could not be done in any other way.

Probably a better way of doing the same thing given the much larger storage and bandwidth of the home Mac is this:

Apple is already doing this with iTunes, but nobody else is. The iPhone can now use all the accounts that the Mac can, so there is no extra work. Privacy and billing are handled by the same mechanisms that the desktop uses.

Let's say you were running Delicious Library on your home Mac. With an app from Delicious Monster running on the iPhone you could access your media library in real time. With that, you could use your iPhone to lend things out, look up books you found on your travels to see if you already had them or needed just that one to complete a set. You could add voice annotations to books that you have at home. You could browse your home media collection and compare what you paid with those in front of you at the thrift store. Or compare what you see with what is currently selling on eBay and be sure you don't already have it. And a zillion other applications that create value by extending the personal desktop computer to the mobile hand.

Tags: iPhone, Applications, Crazy Ideas

I visited Macworld today. My immediate impression was that It was more crowded and larger than last year. Notably there were many companies selling storage solutions: clearly back up and media storage is now becoming mainstream in the Mac world.


This is a plastic missile launcher powered and controlled by USB. I was lucky enough to get the missile streaking out of the frame while the shutter was open.


Ever wanted to type with one hand? The FrogPad lets you do that. In the foreground are two pads, one for left-handed people and one for right-handed people. The common letters are on the keys and to get the less common letters you chord with another key. There is also a symbol and a shift lock key. It takes a little getting used to, but I was able to type a simple message without too much trouble.

These are relaxation pods. I didn't ask what went on inside them.


One use for an old iMac case: turn it into a trash can.


I got my hands on a MacBook Air after waiting in line for a while. It's very thin, very light, and it's a Mac. There's not much else to say about it. Performance seemed fine for the small amount of playing that I did with it. The case got warm, but definitely not hot. Since it is all aluminum and curved, it's much stiffer than you would think it would be. MacBook Pros look like huge ugly bricks next to this thing.

Apple was showing off very little this year. The only Macs apart from the MacBook Airs were Mac Pros with two big screens each. These were being used to show off some pro apps and also for general OS X demonstration to any interested parties. No sign of Aperture. No iMacs. No minis. There was a whole wall of Apple TVs and plenty of iPods and iPhones on display.


Eye-Fi was there with their orange wireless SD card. You plug it into your camera and it transmits your JPEG images via regular wifi to your computer. Their software then stores it or automatically uploads it to a photo sharing site.


I also saw people creating hideous creatures with Spore. The gaming area was small this year.


Need a cover for your laptop? I didn't think so.

Tags: Macworld, Fun, Apple TV, Apple, Dinosaurs, Interesting Stuff, iPhone, iPod

The big surprise at Macworld last year was that the keynote was pretty much about about one product: the iPhone. This year there seem to be many things that are already known: a slim laptop, an update to the iPhone, a new Apple TV and movie rentals. So none of these is probably the big thing. And the banners saying "There's something in the air" have everyone talking about wireless technologies.

[Update: Less then 100% wrong this year. Home storage yes, but not attached. In fact very unattached: Time Capsule. Apple is moving the world slowly to computer appliances. We did get the rambling CEO again]

Last year my predictions were 100% wrong. Throwing caution to the wind, I present my probably all wrong predictions for Macworld 2008:

A Home Storage System
I keep putting this one up, and one day I will be right. Nobody does home storage right, particularly for Mac users, so there is a big market opportunity there. I think it will not be a networked box (NAS), but instead will be locally attached for performance. If you want to make the storage available on the network, plug it into an Airport or a Mac. Software does the bridging.

Wireless Data Service In Every Laptop
WiMax is a little new to the market, so if Apple has built it into anything, they have been doing an awful lot of work with chip vendors and software in secret. It's quite possible that Apple is putting WiMax into everything portable, but more likely is the addition of 3G or EDGE into the laptops.

No Shows
This is not the venue for for a new release of Aperture. PMA is much more likely. There will also be no new iLife of iWork: we already got those last year. The no-show I am hoping for is the "other CEO" who comes in at about minute 35 and rambles with notes until the audience winces. I really think that Steve puts these in so we can deal with the calls of nature.

A New Mac
I think a new desktop Mac is quite likely. Something that fits between the high-end of the Mac Pro and the low end of the iMac. It would be bigger than a mini, with at least two hard drive bays and at least one open slot for a PCI card. This would keep many people happy who need some expansion and flexibility but don't have the wallet for a full-blown Mac Pro. What makes it possible now is the low-power Intel chips and the subsequent option to package the electronics compactly.

Multi-User Mac Software
This is a long shot, but I think it will come one day. The Macs are already multi-user, but not with with multiple simultaneous screens. This software will allow a number of people to plug mice, keyboards, and screens into one mac and all use that one machine as though it were their own machine. That makes things much cheaper for schools and other high-density applications.

A Recording Device
Except for building it into Macs, Apple has avoided making audio and video recording equipment of any kind. Even the iPhone and iPod can't record video or sound. So there is a product gap for some sort of device that does one or both. You sync it with your Mac or PC just like an iPod and iTunes tracks it in its library. What Apple can better the market with are ease of use, recording quality, and capacity. With iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, YouTube, all the infrastructure is in place for personal event recording, editing, and publishing. We just need the gadget.

Tags: Apple, Macworld, Wild Guesses, Server, Fun, MacPro, Wireless, iPhone, iMac, iMovie

Here we are at the start of 2008 and AAPL has a price of $198.08 per share. About a year ago when it was 91.66, I predicted that it would hit 160 by the end of 2007. To my surprise, it got there several months early (October), and has continued to rise.

In October 2007 I made another prediction: $225 by the end of 2008. That seemed pretty wild at the time, but soon after all the analysts moved their targets up and now they are mostly saying $225-$250 for the end of 2008. Some are toying with $300, and one has even said $600 in 18 months.

Just to confuse everyone Apple is notoriously conservative with their estimates, and so the analysts beef it up a little (and still come up short). Last quarter Apple was uncharacteristically bullish and everyone was surprised. But it seems that Apple was being conservative yet again, as all the indications are that this has been a blow-out season and the numbers will be very good again.

I got to $225 by taking $160 and adding 20% for growth and 20% for the "look out here they come" factor. Now the price is just shy of $200, I'm going to adjust my guess again. I'm increasing my annual growth estimate to 30% based on expectations for the Mac and iPhone, and adding 25% as the "look out here they come" factor. The latter is a wild guess based partly what I see in terms of realization that Apple really is taking over, and partly on the effect on the investing public of the products and stores. People go into the stores or buy the products for the first time and are so wowed that they (or their parents) go buy stock ASAP. For a high-flying stock AAPL has a remarkably small short ratio.

That puts my current wild guess at $310 for the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see what the quarter's results are like when they are announced January 22nd.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, iPhone

A report that says iPhone browsing is approaching 0.1% market share has been causing a stir. It doesn't sound like a large amount, but the device has only been out for 5 months and that is a bigger share than a decade of Microsoft-based phones.

The stats for this blog show an even bigger percentage of mobile Safari users, close to that of Linux.

The yellow sliver is iPhone, and the blue sliver below it is iPod. Here are my numbers:

Macintosh	80.12%
Windows	17.97%
Linux	0.96%
iPhone	0.56%
iPod	0.22%
(not set)	0.12%

Here's the Wild Guess. Comparing my stats to those in the article, it is interesting to note that the ratio of Macintosh page views to the sum of iPhone and iPod page views is about the same: 100:1. So I conclude that roughly one in a hundred Mac owners have a mobile browser now. But with unit sales of Apple's mobile devices running something like 50% of Macs, I'd expect the 100:1 ratio to change dramatically over the next year: maybe to as much as 10:1.

Tags: iPhone, Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Browsers, Wild Guesses

Gruber has a short article that references a longer article on why the iPhone uses regular (gray-scale) anti-aliasing instead of the clever sub-pixel method used by OS X. He concludes that the pixel density is high enough that regular is good enough.

But there is a very simple reason that sub-pixel is not used on the iPhone: screen rotation. Sub-pixel anti-aliasing relies on the increased spacial density in the horizontal direction of the individual color bars (and on the pathetic color-resolution of eyes). Once you switch vertical and horizontal by rotating the screen, this no longer works and you have no option but to have a high-enough pixel resolution to make simple anti-aliasing work well. It also helps that sub-pixel anti-aliasing takes a lot more computation than simple, and you want to minimize that in a portable device.

The 160 dpi used on the iPhone is probably about the minimum you can get away with. The current 100 dpi of Cinema displays is about a factor of 2 better (100 * 3 = 300, just about 2 * 160 = 320) than the iPhone. And in Leopard in the places where sub-pixel anti-aliasing is not used, you can see the difference in the way the text looks and it is irritating.

Tags: Gruber, iPhone, Anti-Aliasing

From the Hide-a-pod site:

You love your iPod. It’s a great product. You take it everywhere and you use it every day. But owning a device so desirable and fashionable as an iPod comes with one major drawback . . . the iPod has become a target for theft. So how can you take your iPod out of your home without fear?

Looks like a terrific anti-theft device. It's compatible with the iPhone, and I could use it to stop people stealing my chocolate at work as well.

Tags: iPhone, iPod, Fun

Some of you have iPhones and are using them to read this site. Since I am using Google Analytics, I have only limited access to the access data. So how to create an iPhone visit report? It's actually quite easy. Select Visitors > Browser Capabilities and click on Screen Resolutions:

Find a line that claims 320x396 as the screen size and click on that:

Then add it to your dashboard:

Tags: iPhone, Blogging, Google

I spent a brief ten minutes playing with an iPhone in an Apple store this week -- and remembered that it was a phone only after I had left the store.

In conversations since with people who have only seen the marketing and not the real thing what struck me was their disbelief that it really is as easy to use and as responsive as it is made out to be. Apple still has a credibility gap, but with the iPhone that will be narrowed considerably more than has been achieved with the iPod. There are a ton of non-iPod people out there who are phone buyers and those people, even if they only drop by an Apple store to kick the tires (or just know someone who has), will have that gap closed considerably.

So just what is iPhone?

It's a new word, created for the world to absorb and enjoy.

That's all it is: a new word. iPhone is less a thing, or even a family of things, than it is a word to symbolize an experience. Apple did this already with the Mac. It's Welcome To Macintosh, not Welcome To The Macintosh. And with the iPod. Always iPod, never the iPod. It's the press and you and me that gets this wrong.

Here's a diagram I published in March 2006 in a posting entitled Possession, Function, Access, and Emotion.:

It was about the iPod at the time, but look how well it fits the iPhone. iPhone is all of these elements, as is the Mac. This is why Apple is so hard to beat in the marketplace. iPhone (the object of possession) will change. iPhone (the functionality) will change. iPhone (the emotional connection) will change. iPhone (the access it offers) will change. But iPhone as a whole will not because it is all of these expressed as one. iPhone is not just a glimpse of the future, it's a glimpse of the now.

Tags: iPhone, Fun, Apple Store, Possession, Function, Access, Emotion

Terry White has a long and interesting review of the iPhone on his blog.

The iPhone is a huge step forward in the right direction. The more I use it the more it makes me smile and I catch myself thinking “this is so cool!” The iPhone is not perfect by any means. Show me a smartphone that is. Some of the missing features just make me smack my forehead and say “how in the heck could they have left that off?” However, the iPhone is the most interesting phone I’ve seen to date. Like it or not, the iPhone HAS changed the world of cell phones forever. Apple has raised the bar and everyone else has to now step up. This is good for us all. I’m pleased with my purchase and my gauge is, “would I buy it again?” The answer is a resounding YES! Sure I want iPhone 2.0 with all the missing features that I’ve stated above and then some, however, for a 1.0 product this phone lives up to the vast majority of the promises and even most of the hype. Oh how far Apple has come since the Newton 1.0.

Terry is the Director of North America Creative Pro Core Business at Adobe.

Tags: iPhone, Review

If you have a regular Mac, you can filter out the ads, either by using Firefox with AdBlock, or by using Safari and running a proxy such as privoxy. But how about the iPhone? It's closed, at least for now, and so there will be no way to filter content. Annoying Flash ads may be impossible to banish if it runs Flash. Even when it is more open there may be no relief.

This, combined with the possibly huge number of users, and the personal nature of the product makes it very attractive to advertisers. So maybe AT&T is going to be able to tap advertising revenue from this product? Apple provides the hardware and the appeal, Google provides the ad content and specificity, and AT&T the airtime.

... special deals, ads, and offers ... on your phone.

Tags: iPhone, Advertising, AT&T, Google

Apple is now showing three short ads for the iPhone and announcing that it will be available June 29th. The pages with the ads are a little kooky, so here are direct links to Never Been An iPod, How To, and Calamari. I expect there to be lots more of these very effective nuggets of marketing.

Tags: iPhone, June 29th, Anticipation

Almost nobody has seen or used an iPhone, and so the press is having a very hard time covering it. What coverage there is comes from two forces camped on opposite sides of the only known geographical feature called One Percent Of The Mobile Market Hill. The Yes They Will camp says they will have 1% or more of the mobile market by the end of 2008 and so be Successful and the No They Won't camp says they will not and will have Failed. Roughly Drafted chimes in too.

I'm betting that they will. But I think the real surprise will be the number of people seen carrying an iPhone in countries in which it isn't sold and doesn't work.

Tags: iPhone, Yes They Will, No They Won't

The Register talks to Bill Buxton (who has built several multitouch systems) about Microsoft's Surface:

In fact, according to Bill Buxton - ironically a Principal Researcher at Microsoft's own research centre - these kinds of multi-touch interfaces have been around for over twenty years. Perhaps the Surface Computing marketing guys at Microsoft should check out Bill's web site. Moreover, perhaps Microsoft and developers like Jeff Han at NYU, who are building these 'old-school' multi-touch interfaces out of cameras and projectors, should consider the fatal flaw in their 'innovations'. This being that all back-projection interfaces are enormous. Think about it - you've essentially got a small cinema in a box behind a screen. Forget mobility and portability. Is it even moveable?

I remember using The Wasp, a portable and very yellow synthesizer in the early 80s. The keyboard was touch-sensitive, not in the sensitive-to-velocity kind of way, but in the touch-a-picture-of-a-key-to-press-it kind of way. As the site says:

Its most distinguishing feature is the keyboard and its awful non-moving touch keys. That's right, the flat plastic keys are only sensitive to your touch and so they are difficult and unreliable to play.

Anything that uses a touch interface has this tactile/audio feedback problem. A touch-input display also has the problem of planarity: the display and the input are co-planar. There are very few interactive systems designed this way -- none that I can think of that are designed for more than infrequent, dedicated use. The bigger the device (and so at least on paper the more impressive the display) the worse the situation becomes. Go smaller and the interface becomes usable because the hands can be positioned independently of the surface. Go too small and the area becomes too small to be useful.

I am wondering if Apple actually designed the iPhone like this: starting by finding the most functional form factor, then getting the feel and weight right, then moving on to the display, functionality, and finally electronics.

Tags: Microsoft, Multitouch, History, iPhone, Interesting Stuff

With the hype of the Apple iPhone in full swing and the stock reacting admirably, now is the time to recall the Apple Product Lifecycle. It all starts innocently enough:

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Products, Fun

That's the top-level screen (or so we believe) for the iPhone. But why those buttons? It's really not all that different from any smartphone or PDA and I wonder why. Everything else about the device is revolutionary.

I see icons denoting services and tools, but none relating to people. Communication starts with a person, then with a selection of the method. iChat works like this. With iChat the method is easy to select because I can see if and how the person is currently connected. With the iPhone interface I have to select how first, then who. Which means that I have to know who has SMS, who has voice, and who has email right at this instant.

And what of incoming information? If someone urgently contacts me three ways, I don't know that. All I see are three items in different media: one phone message, one SMS message, and one email. From the top level which do I check first? How do I know these are all the same person?

What would I change? At least half of the main screen should be dedicated to people, either icons of individuals or groups (such as colleagues). Those icons should show me how many voice messages, SMS messages, notes, and anything else associated with that person I have currently, and should also show their availability. Some icons should be fixed, reserved for family members and colleagues who I communicate with regularly. The others should vary according to what messages I have. Having a small number of people icons available on the screen would also add a social twist to the iPhone: being on someone else's iPhone would be a badge of honor, getting bumped an embarrassment.

The design reinforces my opinion that the iPhone is destined to be more of a machine communication device than a human communication device. In other words, its ability to communicate with people is secondary to its ability to communicate with other devices. This may seem like an odd idea, but it is exactly what the iPod achieves with the support of a desktop computer and the iTunes music store: seamless communication of music. The iPhone really is a hand-held computer, an extension of the desktop, and of anything else connected to the internet.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Design

I visited Macworld 2007 today. It was very busy all day. I took these pictures with my Canon S3 set to ISO 200 since the light was pretty low.

Many people sat to watch demonstrations of the features of Leopard, the iPhone, Apple TV, and others:

Here are some new Mail features:

Apple TV was on display:

Apple TV is much like Front Row but outputs to your TV instead of the computer screen. It can be synced like an iPod. So another way of thinking of it is as a high definition video iPod with wireless streaming added. The unit has a fat rubber base that does not slip and cannot scratch anything. It gets quite warm during use.

Aperture training was popular:

There were about thirty 24" iMacs set up for the attendees to play with and follow the demo. This is the same model that I use for Aperture. Lightroom was also popular.

The iPhone was displayed like the Hope diamond, with security and plexiglass:


Getting close up pictures was tricky, but possible:



It is smaller than you think it should be and very rounded:

The screen is extremely sharp and crisp. I could read the smallest text. At 160 pixels per inch it is about twice the linear resolution of a regular computer display.

Tags: Macworld, Photography, Canon, S3, Apple TV, iPhone, Aperture, Apple

She's moved from a PC to a Mac and is finding the experience of locating the perfect photo application infuriating. iPhoto is too simple, and the other alternatives all have problems. Her experience is probably typical of many. It's not that she is ignorant of the technology; as a self-confessed geek, she has many gadgets and builds her own web pages.

My reading is that she is being mislead by her assumption of difficulty and doubt of simplicity from many years with PCs. It must be hard because it is a PC, and if it is simple, it can't be a rich enough tool for my needs.

Tags: iPhone, Aperture

With all this talk of iPhones coming in January, it is interesting to speculate what Apple's overall strategy is. How will they get anyone to try it? What happens when someone decides to go Apple?

My wild guess is that from some point on (determined by the technology) every iPod will come with a phone built in. In just a few years there will be tens of millions of iPhones in circulation just waiting for their owner's contracts to expire.

And it will be very easy to try it out: just get an iTunes account and sync the iPod. Now you have a working phone and billing is automatic. Use the trail period of free calls to see how it works.

Tags: iPhone, Apple, Wild Guesses

Speculation about the "iPhone" has been rampant, with discussion, speculation, mock-ups, fakes, history, concepts, and jokes like the one above.

Here's my prediction about Apple's phone: it's just a phone. Yes, there will be a camera and a click wheel, and games, and it will play music, and it will make calls of course, but it will still just be a phone.

JUST A PHONE??? This is Apple and they always make this groundbreaking stuff, so how can it just be a phone? Actually I may be overstating things. It probably does not have a camera, and may well not have all sorts of other features that high-end phones have today. That's because Apple wants mass appeal and they want something that is basically a low-price, simple device. A very simple device. Because simple devices are easier to design, make, sell, support, market, and everything else. Apple wants to do one thing well with this phone, one thing so well that it is head and shoulders over the other phones that are out there. So what is there?

Integration. This phone will be so integrated with the iPod, the Mac, and the internet that it will be hard to tell where one ends and another starts. Many of the features that would normally be crammed onto a small display and keyboard will be missing entirely, transferred to your desktop. Syncing will be effortless and automatic. Your address book and calendar will be there. And your music and games. And the phone will have multiple identities, like fast user switching, to allow families and other groups to share one phone. You'll be able to listen to your voice mail on your iPod or in front of your TV (via iTV) because your Mac will automatically download voicemail for you, and you will be able to manage it in iTunes. You'll also be able to use the phone as a voice recorder and have it drop those files into iTunes. If you call someone else's phone (any phone) and get voicemail, you'll be able to press a button and have your phone leave a standard message.

Wonder why speech is going to be so much better in Leopard? You'll be able to have your Mac call you as long as it is connected to the internet to provide status information or to pass on voice mail it has received. There will be exclusive Apple ring tones that you buy on the iTunes store. You'll be able to use your iTunes account to pay for time used on the phone. And you'll be able to use your phone number as an identity for email, iChat, and other forms of communication through the Mac.

Your calling history will download to your Mac and display in nifty ways. If you pull up a contact in the address book you'll see when you last called that person. Reminders will be able to ring you phone when they occur. The phone will be able to take part in audio iChats too. You'll be able to start a chat on your Mac and then dial out to anyone you want to include. Chat invitations that come in will be routable to your phone. All phone functions like call forwarding will be done on your Mac.

You'll have a choice of bandwidth too: need it fast, pay for the call and deal with a slow transfer rate. If you can wait until you get in the office, sync through Bluetooth for a faster choice. Or for best speed (USB 2.0), use the cradle. The screen and keyboard will adapt to the environmental light level so it is never dim or glaring. It will have an audio input jack so you can hook up an iPod to it and play through one set of headphones attached to the phone.

But despite all that, it will still be just a phone.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Wild Guesses