You’re… kidding?

Oh, come on.

“Source: Apple’s next-gen iPhone has video camera”

Just like I think the omission of Bluetooth keyboards in the OS 3.0 keynote is an indication that something key-shaped is in the near future for the iPhone, you can’t dismiss the idea that, if the 3.0 beta mentions movies somewhere and it wasn’t talked about on Tuesday, there has to be something brewing.

It’s hard to imagine how Apple could justify that video capture wouldn’t be enabled on existing iPhones — what I’m seeing in the Camera application’s virtual viewfinder is video, after all, right? Unfortunately, there is one possibility: if the new iPhone has a much faster CPU, then Apple can say that it is required to compress mp4 videos with adequate picture quality, and that they didn’t want to allow for anything less. It would still be bullshit, as I would much rather be able to capture 15-frame-per-second poorly-compressed low-resolution videos (like the lowest-end mobile phone is able to) than have to upgrade my iPhone (no matter how much I’m actually going to want to, anyway), but it’s something you can just see Apple saying.

I used to think that they should want to delay as much as possible segmenting the hardware platform with the introduction of a more powerful chipset, but I’m changing my mind right now: if there’s a way Apple’s own applications can leverage the new processing power, then it does make sense. And transforming the iPhone into a Flip Mino would certainly be a good reason to go there.

By the way, I’ve realized today that there was another possible explanation to the lack of announced support for Bluetooth keyboards: if Apple intended to launch its own wireless keyboard in June, they’d just as well not talk about software support in order to keep the advantage of surprise over third-party manufacturers.

But I’m still thinking (and/or hoping) that they’re about to launch a model with a slide-out keyboard, either Pre- or G1-style. By finally, reluctantly implementing copy-and-paste, they’ve shown that they’re motivated to do what it takes to conquer the world. They started with a single model to minimize costs and simplify the marketing process, but now that the iPhone’s been launched and very well received it’s just the right time to introduce a variant with a keyboard.

Your message has been sent. Undo?

Google is launching a GMail Labs feature called "Undo Send," that lets you abort the sending of any GMail message–if you use it within five seconds.

I’m enabling this on my account right now (under the assumption that Google looks at how many people adopt any given Labs feature and uses that information somehow).

This is genius UI design: functionally, it’s exactly the same as having a dialog pop-up to ask “Do you really want to send this message?” and auto-accept after a few seconds. But, as far as the user’s perception is concerned, it’s the polar opposite: instead of being an obnoxious Clippy the Paperclip, you just execute the action like the good computer that you are, but leave a small window of opportunity for the user to scream “Oh shit I didn’t mean to!” and undo.

Not sure who invented this first and I don’t care (I feel like I’ve seen something like this before); all I know is that every single developer in the world needs to look at this very tiny bit of functionality and rethink their worldview around it.

P.S. Forgot to mention: of course, it doesn’t belong in Labs.

A ma gauche, la mise à jour iPhone 0S 3.0 qui rend possible l’utilisation de tous les périphériques Bluetooth imaginables… à part les claviers. Qui ne peuvent pas être bien difficiles à gérer au niveau du système, ni vider la batterie tellement plus vite que l’utilisation d’écouteurs stéréo sans fil.

A ma droite, Apple va devoir annoncer un nouvel iPhone en juin, et proposer de nouvelles fonctionnalités à même de faire saliver les utilisateurs potentiels aussi bien qu’existants — tout en évitant de segmenter la plateforme matérielle/logicielle aussi longtemps que possible (ce qui rend problématique une nouvelle résolution d’écran ou un processeur plus puissant).

Au milieu, le Palm Pre.

Bingo.

Je prendrais presque les paris, sur ce coup, c’est dire.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

iPhone 3.0

Well, that was boring. Not much of a surprise; I guess Apple doesn’t want to make a whole keynote about “iPhone OS 2.2,” so they’re padding the numbers like everybody else.

Kevin Rose was right on that one (except for the fact that everybody said not to expect MMS; I don’t know if he was the source for that, as I didn’t watch the video). The interface for copy-and-paste works, mostly; it’s a little annoying that you double-tap in text fields and tap-hold in web views, but I guess there’s little they could do about that. If you were still wondering, the fact that there wasn’t an identical tap-shortcut left available for both types of content views is evidence that they didn’t plan that from the start, and originally intended never to have copy and paste.

I’m waiting to see videos of the new Spotlight that “lives on the far side of all your apps” or whatever that was; the UI concept is scaring me a bit. Oh, right, that was a stupid misunderstanding. It’s funny that the most Pre-like new functionality sports huge rounded corners; not sure if that’s actually inspired by webOS or just the honest evolution of the Mac’s convention that search fields are rounded.

Speaking of Spotlight as an alternative to the Home screen for launching applications is a joke, however, on a device with no hardware keyboard. I can only pray that one of the unmentioned 1,000 new API hooks is the ability to list and launch installed applications, so that developers can finally make their own launchers. And that users can configure their iPhone to replace the Sprinboard with a custom app. Huh. Yeah, I don’t see that happening.

(I’m not sure if I — and all other Cocoa Touch bloggers — will be allowed to blog about the new API once the SDK is available for download; I think betas are still under NDA.)

Miscellaneous:

• Actually, from a technical standpoint, you could argue that enabling access to third-party hardware accessories is almost big enough a change for the update to be worth the 3.0 moniker.

• In-app downloads are a very good idea, but they won’t work if the minimum stays at $0.99, as it seems to on the examples.

• I don’t particularly mind their excuse for not having enabled push notifications yet. It’s important, and you might as well wait to get it right from the start.

• I’m not sure if citing the existing AIM client as an example of a background app draining the battery is disingenuous or just extreme.

• Peer-to-peer (which is a rather misleading choice of a name) is a nice gimmick but won’t be that useful in real life, beyond exchanging electronic business cards.

• Can’t imagine a reason why they’d enable all sorts of Bluetooth communication, but still offer no system-level keyboard support. At this point it’s a bit psychotic.

• I wish they had announced some kind of revamping of the approval process. Even just symbolically.

Hands-on with the new Facebook home page

My Facebook account has switched to the new home page, and of course it doesn’t fucking remember which group of friends I want to see updates from, because of course I have to be interested in what every single of my contacts has to say.

And, speaking of groups, it looks like there still isn’t any way to just list the contacts that I haven’t tagged into a group yet. Which, you know, would be somewhat convenient if I were going to actually manage them. (But, yeah, it’s kinda moot since groups still aren’t of much use.)

I have this tingling sense that Facebook’s designers know how to make cool stuff, but are more and more losing track of what made Facebook take off in the first place — the actual social aspect. It seems to me that someone who wants to focus on “charting the social graph” ought to concern themselves with making it easy to differentiate between the friends I care about and those I accepted just out of politeness and don’t wanna read about; now that everybody and their mom are on Facebook, it’s a little bit more important to the users than being notified of what people rented on Netflix.

(I know some people have been saying that for a while, but I’m only getting there now. Unless I already posted a comment to the same effect before, in which case that means I felt that way and just forgot about it. That happens. I don’t care enough about Facebook to remember what I’ve thought about it yesterday.)

One nit: Although Facebook calls it the "real-time stream," it doesn’t auto-update. You have to refresh the page to get the latest. But overall, this is a strong update for old guys like me who want their Web services simple. It puts your friends more in front of you than the old design did, and that’s what Facebook is really about.

What? Scratch the “they know how to make cool stuff,” then.

Here’s hoping we get a new home screen that lets users organize their apps better.

As for speculation, I don’t expect any kind of hardware announcement next week. The invitation wouldn’t be so specific. (Wait, I hadn’t seen this: “Get an advance preview”? That means no actual, downloadable update for a couple more months?)

If Apple is to license any technology to third parties, I’m surprised they don’t sell embeddable iPod shuffle functionality to headset manufacturers at this point.

Fresh (OS X)

Fresh is another one-word application from the makers of Yep, Leap and Deep — that is, they’ve found yet another way to leverage Spotlight into helping your productivity in some way, shape or form that never really makes sense to me.

But this one is interesting, because it’s simpler: it just displays the n last opened or created files on your computer (where n depends on the size of your screen and nothing else, because you can’t resize the list). Yes, you could create a smart folder in the Finder, but who does that? And it wouldn’t open in the middle of your screen at the press of a shortcut.

Fresh also provides a “shelf” (which it calls the Cooler, because those developers are nothing if not dedicated to word play) where you can drop files you expect to need later, which enables you to clean your desktop a bit while keeping a pointer to the files you want to come back to.

And Fresh also offers an interface for adding Spotlight tags to any file you drag onto it, which has nothing to do with the rest of the application’s functionality except that it fits the general theme of helping you organize your files, and they’re evidently quite intent on popularizing OpenMeta (a Cocoa library they created that embeds tags into undocumented system-reserved Spotlight metadata fields so that they can be searchable).

The multiple concept is a bit messy, you can’t resize the icons, and the main window takes too long to fade in, but I like the clean interface and I’m interested in the idea, so I’m going to try using it for a while.

Besides, it’s the first application from Ironic Software that doesn’t take ten minutes to process what it wants to display when I launch it, so I’m a little curious to see what it’s like to actually use something they made.

Text to get smarter in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I absolutely do not want OS X to replace “teh” with “the” when I decided I wanted to type “teh”; I’m interested however in the system providing TextExpander-like user-defined text replacements, because — like virtual desktops for example — that’s the kind of thing that only works really right when it’s done at the OS level. Although it’s going to be very annoying when you end up missing them in some random application that happens not to use CoreText services directly.

I’m a little surprised that they’d want to re-emphasize Services (by adding them in the contextual menu); at any rate, we’ll have to see how much slower it makes the right-click menus. Wonder how it could have taken so long for stuff like “Make Lower Case” to end up in the contextual menu, though.

And Data Detectors? Really? I thought Apple knew to abandon ideas when they turned out not to work; instead, they’re putting them everywhere, with a subtle highlighting that will necessarily end up being both too subtle and too distracting. Hope they can be disabled this time.

Oh wait, I forgot again — nobody’s asking for my opinion anyway, until I can afford an Intel Mac.

Facebook Redesigns Home Page — Again

Going live next Wednesday, Facebook takes yet another step into FriendFeed territory (which includes, but is not limited to, trying to knock Twitter off its perch) with a self-refreshing ajaxy home page that looks nice enough.

But then, I already can’t leave Facebook open too long because the Javascript chat seems to hog resources, so I’m a little bit afraid of what the fun scrolling news feed might do to Safari.

Thanks to updates to Facebook’s privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual ’friends.’ This is basically the same ’friendship’ model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

I don’t know that I like that. That is, I know I don’t, but I’m not sure yet whether I’m right about it — feels to me like this is stepping a step too far in abandoning the Facebook “friend” model. (And it’s also going to wreak havoc with privacy settings: either your updates are public by default and people will complain that it’s stalkerish to let non-friends subscribe to your news feed, or they’ll be private and the feature will be utterly useless.)