FREN

#FF00AA


11 jul. 2008

iPhone 2.0

Well, it’s been a long wait — I didn’t jailbreak my iPhone, so I wasn’t about to install a leaked firmware just because I couldn’t wait to try the applications I downloaded 24 hours in advance — but iPhoneOS 2.0 is finally available… if you can get it (and you might not want to hurry).

You’d think, after the difficulties Apple’s servers had with the first iPhone launch, they’d have gotten their act together, and that would be as naive as thinking that .Mac is gonna get reliable just because they renamed it MobileMe and hired good Ajax developers. It turns out that iPhone 3G buyers can’t activate their phones, and it also happens that the same activation platform needs to be contacted when an old iPhone owner upgrades their system — meaning lots of bricked iPhones across the world. Awesome planning, guys. As in, criminally moronic. (Who’da thunk having new buyers and early adopters activate their phones all at the same time might incur some kind of exceptional server load?)

I’ve been lucky, though: after more than half an hour of an infinite progress bar (not counting the twenty minutes it took to actually upgrade the phone), iTunes managed to contact the servers and reactivate my phone, so I’m not stuck with a brick. I’m stuck, however, with a fully-functional iPhone 2.0 that will not sync to my computer because the damn software still wants to contact the iTunes Store when I plug the phone in. Go figure.

But, at least, I can use my phone — and try out the free applications — which is more than many sad users can say tonight.

 

iPhone 2.0

Let’s focus on the OS upgrade itself, first: if you’ve read blogs, and/or you’ve watched the guided tour videos, you already know pretty much all there is to know.

Interestingly, the iPod touch’s Contacts application makes its appearance on the Springboard. Even more interestingly, it has everything the Phone app’s contacts pane has except the shortcut that scrolls back to the top of the list (and its search bar) when you tap the application’s header. So much for hoping that this cool addition was part of the system list framework, then.

And, yes, I’m glad there’s a Contacts application, because (1) I like to select a contact on the list, then click their email address to send them a message (instead of starting from Mail then choosing the recipient), and it doesn’t make sense to go to the Phone app for that; and (2) I don’t like the Phone app anyway, because it aggregates functionalities that are too separate — contacts, voicemail and call logs have no reason to be grouped together when SMS isn’t.

What else? I’m using Gmail and Google Apps, so I won’t enjoy push email for a while. I don’t have enough appointments to care about the improved Calendar. Appallingly, the camera still doesn’t record video, although at least it does record geolocation.

Oh, speaking of which: it doesn’t seem to be every time you launch them, but basically each application that accesses GPS information is going to make the iPhone ask you if you’re okay with that. A lot. It’s going to manage to be more annoying as Leopard’s “security” prompt when you open a downloaded zip or dmg.

And… that’s pretty much it for the OS upgrade, but that’s kind of okay, because Apple had to focus all of its development power on implementing the application SDK. You can expect the next few double-point releases to fix SDK bugs, and then we’ll get to version 2.1 or something and Apple will be back to improving the phone’s UI. Hopefully.

Oh, I forgot: you can take screenshots by pressing the Home and Sleep buttons at the same time. As cool as it is, I’m not sure there couldn’t have been more productive uses of such an exclusive shortcut.

 

The App Store

Well, this is breaking the chronology, obviously, since everybody could access it yesterday, as soon as iTunes 7.7 was available. (I didn’t blog it then, because I was waiting for the OS update to come out a few hours later, which would have been entirely possible and might incidentally have spread out the server load.) And, from a cursory glance at my aggregator, it seems like the general opinion is pretty similar to mine: boy, there’s a lot of crap out there, and a lot of it is way too expensive for what it is.

Of course, there’s a gold rush aspect to it: no matter how mediocre a developer you are, you have an opportunity to prey on stupid customers who discover the App Store and its only five hundred applications (seriously, when you see what’s considered an application, that’s no number to boast about) ; the quality of iPhone software will only improve from here on, so it’s now or never to sell overpriced crap for early adopters.

But there’s also the perverse effect of a $99 entry fee to the developers program: sure, big web 2.0 brands are going to shell it out and offer their applications for free, but as far as individual developers go it’s a little harder to justify the expense if you’re only going to release small freeware stuff. Sure, there will still be a lot of passionate freeware developers going for glory and self-satisfaction, but there’s also a very real incentive to make it worth their while, even if 99$ isn’t a fortune. And Apple is certainly very aware and satisfied with that.

As for the store itself… well, there’s my problem with the iPhone not syncing with the Mac, so I had to download again, from the mobile application, all the apps I’d downloaded through iTunes. I got an email receipt for all the $0 purchases I’d made, which is pretty much akin to getting a receipt for each podcast episode you download. The mobile store is very annoying in that it sends you back to the Springboard every time you download something. And I’ve triggered a weird bug that created two blank spaces in the middle of my Springboard. Ungh.

 

The applications

So, okay, most of what’s there is crap, but how about the apps I did download? I didn’t pay for anything yet — I’ll probably buy Super Monkey Ball and one of the photo annotation programs later — but there’s enough free stuff in there to have a little fun (or lack of fun). I’ll go with those in alphabetical order, since that’s the way they’re listed in iTunes.

AIM: Everybody says it’s buggy, but I didn’t go far enough to notice, because I don’t use AIM and only have two .Mac contacts there. All I know is that persistent conversations don’t seem to work, so it’s pretty much useless. (I read somewhere that the SDK’s notification system, which lets the server ping you, via Apple, when something’s happening, wouldn’t be available before September, so maybe it’ll be more usable then.) I’ll just wait the Google Talk app. Or use Facebook chat.

Evernote: The very existence of an iPhone app might just push me to pay for the Evernote subscription when the beta ends. The desktop application was already the most efficient Yojimbo-like program I’d found, and I was reluctant to use it because it’s going to be subscription-based, but their cross-platform development is so aggressive I might not resist much longer.

Exposure: A Flickr app whose most interesting functionality is that it can display pictures that were taken close to your current locations; that’s pretty cool and well done. I’m disappointed, though, that you can’t actually post pictures with it — even if they probably intend to add it later (and it’s not a big deal because you can very easily email pictures to your account), I don’t quite get why it wouldn’t be available from the start.

Facebook: I wondered when the iPhone web application would implement chat; well, they were saving it for the native application. It’s all very clean and fluid and well-done — except for choking on accented letters in names, which I’m sure will be easily fixed soon.

Google: Not available outside the US, apparently. Not that it’s a big loss — it’s more of a placeholder than anything for now — but why the hell?

NetNewsWire: I’m currently not syncing my feeds with Newsgator, because I found it unreliable in the past. I’m going to have to try again. I would have liked so much to just import a list of feeds via Rendezvous.

PhoneSaber: Hee. That’s much better than jerking a whole MacBook around, isn’t it?

Remote: It’s nice that Apple’s developers had the time to throw us a bone and bring something really new, and fun, to the table. Basically, it’s the exact same interface as the iPod application (minus Cover Flow) and it controls your home computer’s iTunes. And it’s really cool — best free app on the Store, hands down.

Twitterific: Beside the activation servers crashing (which was not surprising), this is the big letdown of the day. The interface is nice and all, but scrolling the list is horribly laggy, of the headache-inducing kind. They’re aware of it, didn’t have time to find a workaround, and will fix it soon, but I really think they should have just skipped the grand opening (which they might not have been able to because they got a design award from Apple). That’s just not acceptable, especially in a program that’s available in a for-pay version.

 

I don’t think there’s been an Apple event that hasn’t been disappointing since the initial iPhone introduction, eighteen months ago. Between technical problems and the lackluster lineup, today is yet another bad day for Apple fanboys.

I’ve actually never been so tempted to jailbreak my iPhone.

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