Author Archives: Ted Leung

What is iPhone?

So a very odd keynote at Macworld yesterday. There was nothing said about Macintosh related products at all, which surprised everyone, and probably annoyed a number of people. Clearly Steve Jobs wanted to send a very direct message about the future of Apple.

As I said before, I wasn’t really that excited about the idea of an iPhone, because I didn’t (and don’t) consider a cross between and iPod and a telephone to be very interesting. I think that how you react to iPhone depends on how you view it. Even though it is a converged device, I think that people still view it through a primary modality: widescreen/video iPod, telephone, or internet device.

As an iPod, there are cool features: the touch screen based interface, the quality and resolution of the display, CoverFlow, the ability to play video. But there also drawbacks, the biggest being the amount of storage being offered.

Most of the coverage that I have read emphasizes the telephone aspects of iPhone. The iPhone UI works the way that I would like a phone to work. The interface for call management, putting people on hold, the ability to use e-mail and the web browser while on a call, and the visual voicemail feature, are the kinds of features that any mobile telephone ought to have, and just about every other phone UI is clunky in comparison. I know that the Series 60 in my Nokia 6600 does. The ability to seamlessly switch between the Wifi network and the cellphone network is also a big plus, although we didn’t see that in action. Perhaps we’ll see this capability in a future Macintosh as well.

There are a lot of issues around the telephone features. Many people will be unhappy with iPhone being locked to Cingular, although the choice of GSM means that the only additional options in the US would be T-Mobile. Part of this is due to the collaboration between Apple and Cingular on visual voicemail, which is one of phone features that appeals to me the most, since I hate voice mail interfaces with a passion. There’s also a big question around the pricing of data plans, but more on that shortly. As a phone device, there are some scary features. Battery life is a short if you look at being able to fully use that converged device throughout the course of an 8-12 hour day. The battery is not replaceable, which seems to ignore the physics/chemistry of battery wear. As a phone, I think that there are some questions about single handed use, although I think the use case is more for texting than for one handed use while driving (scary). The durability of the screen is also an issue since the interface is completely dependent on the screen.

I personally view the iPhone as an Internet access device. This is the functionality that interests me the most, since it is the functionality that I wish for the most when I am untethered.

The promise of having Safari on a phone and being able to run AJAX apps on that form factor is very appealing, and I was very excited about this until I watched the keynote video. In the video, Google Maps is a separate application from Safari. It’s possible that this is a widget style application, which would be okay, but not great. So from what I’ve seen so far, the jury is out on whether we can really do AJAX on iPhone, which I think is important. Also, there doesn’t appear to be a GPS in the iPhone, which is curious given the promotion of Google Maps. I’m sure there must be some hardware related limitation here, but location information is pretty important to mobile applications.

I also liked what I saw of the mail client, especially support for IMAP, since I do a lot of e-mail. The touchscreen isn’t a real keyboard, but I think it’s a step up from a phone keypad.

Steve demo’ed an iChat like interface to SMS, which is definitely and improvement in my mind. It doesn’t look like iChat was present on the phone, and that’s something that I’d like to see. SMS is cool, but in the US, they charge for those messages, and if you want to have things like twitterbot, you’ll go broke inside of a week.

Many people have pointed out the 2G/3G issues and the uncertainty around Cingular’s data plan pricing. Lack of 3G is definitely disappointing. iPhone would be awesome at EVDO speeds, but it doesn’t look like we are going to get that. My 6600 is on GPRS, and the the speed is definitely an issue. You might have Safari, but if the pipe is slow, that’s not much help. You also want unlimited bandwidth usage, so Cingular’s data pricing is going to influence the success of the iPhone, and I can only hope that Steve Jobs managed to work some deal for iPhone subscribers.

The last and perhaps biggest problem is the third party applications issue. Right now it appears that 3rd party applications will not be allowed on iPhone. All the reports that I’ve read say that users won’t be able to install applications. I’ve had a few conversations in person that suggest that this may not be a permanent situation, but until it changes, this is a problem. Couple this with uncertainty about AJAX support in the iPhone Safari, and things start to look a bit less cool.

I was pretty excited about the iPhone. When I was at Apple and the disposition of the Newton division was uncertain, there was a cell handset company that was interested in acquiring Newton, but it didn’t work out. I was really disappointed when that didn’t work out. The concept of the iPhone that we saw yesterday is what Newton should have become, but I think that there are still a few things that will hold the initial iPhone back. I think that all those issues will get fixed in time, but it’s frustrating to see that they weren’t addressed in the initial product.

I’ll end with some good iPhone links:
Engadget’s keynote reportage
David Pogue’s hands on time
Time’s coverage
Some perspectives from Europe
Updated: I incorrectly attributed the Microsoft Watch post to Mary Jo Foley – my apologies!
Microsoft Watch’s view

Obligatory Pre-Macworld Post

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‘Tis the season for MacWorld predictions. I’m not going to predict much, but I am going to comment on what I’d like to see at MacWorld and some of that will overlap with popular rumors.

New Macs
I don’t think there’s much excitement here. One of the results of the transition to Intel is that you can get pretty decent visibility into the basic skeleton of future Mac by looking at the Intel roadmaps. So we might see an 8 core MacPro, although it’s seems like it would be awkwardly positioned, since the clock speed on the 8 way machines is relatively slow, and it doesn’t seem like there are many apps, even Photoshop (see this excellent post at John Nack’s blog), that could really take advantage of the cores at this point. Still we know that the 4 core Xeons exist, and that they can work in the Mac Pro as it exist today. So maybe it will happen just because it can.

On the notebook front, you have the availability of Intel’s Centrino Pro/Santa Rosa chipset, which includes Robson flash technology. This might combine with the rumors about LED backlit notebooks, which could mean new laptops, and possibly that top to bottom Pro laptop refresh that I wished for last year. The only problem with this theory is that Centrino Pro hasn’t shipped yet.

There are a few things that could happen that would get my attention. I’m likely in the market for a Mac Pro sometime this year – primarily for the memory expansion capability. A notebook that went to 4GB or more would be interesting, and a smaller Mac Pro would also probably get my attention. Since I am looking for a machine to do lots of Aperture (and Photoshop and general hacking), a GeForce 8800 series video card option on Mac Pro would be cool, as would some better hardware RAID support so that you could make really good use of those new 1TB drives. Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burners are interesting as backup solutions. But these are all at the periphery of the system because Apple is constrained to what Intel has today. Unless Steve has charmed Paul Otellini into holding out on the whole rest of the world, which I think unlikely.

New Displays
New LCD displays with iSight’s aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but if they have the increased color gamut of the Dell 3007WFP-HC or the HP LP-3065, then that would be noteworthy.

Leopard
Mostly what I am looking for is a ship date. We saw a bunch of stuff at WWDC, and I know there is the secret stuff, but I don’t have many expectations here. If there is something cool, that would be fine. The biggest things I want from OS X are more performance and more stability. In particular, I want Spotlight to be usable — it is just too slow now.

iLife/iWork
We all know this is coming, I mean the products have the year in them, after all. The only piece of iLife that I used to use was iPhoto, and now I have Aperture. I will be paying attention, though, because Julie is using both iPhoto and iMovie.

Wide screen video iPod
I have a 3G iPod that’s still going strong. If the thing is really wide and full screen, it might be a great way to take a photographic portfolio around, but I’m not really in the market for that yet. It would be cool, but I won’t be lining up with my credit card if it launches.

iPhone
I’m not sure what I think about this. Replacing a phone and and iPod sounds cool, except that what I want from a phone and what I want from an iPod are different. What I want from an iPod is wide-video. What I want from a phone is clamshell (small size), very tight, wireless, integration with my computer (ala Parliant’s PhoneValet or even further), ability to run apps, GPS, long battery life, and being on a clueful 3G/EVDO carrier. Music isn’t that high on the list.

Not very high expectations, but that ought to make it easy to impress me. I’m more interested in the Canon PMA announcements than I am about MacWorld. Other than for standard extrapolations of current systems, things are working pretty well for me in Mac land.

Hats off to the iTerm folks

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Hat’s off to the iTerm folks. During my PowerPC OS X days, there were very few updates of iTerm, and while I used and liked iTerm, I despaired of ever getting any bugs fixes or enhancements. Recently though, things have really picked up. Not only did iTerm go Unversal, but it also included Sparkle for automatic updates. And boy does it update now. It seems like everytime I start iTerm (which isn’t that often because it’s gotten pretty stable), there’s a new update.

So to the iTerm team: Thanks from a happy user.

Photoshop and Switching

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For the most part, I’ve been very happy with Apple’s Aperture photo post production app. Of course, it’s also the only such program that I’ve ever used. When I got started in photography, I was convinced that I was not going to modify my pictures in a computer, and therefore I wasn’t that concerned with the image modification capabilities of Aperture.

However, as I’ve learned more about the art and craft of photography, I’ve also learned that many many modern photographs were altered in the darkroom, or with filters, or by some other means. One particularly important moment for me was a scene in the movie War Photographer, where James Nachtwey is working with someone in a darkroom on how to print a photo. The scene shows the actual dodging and burning being done to a wall sized print. So as I’ve learned more, I’ve accepted that someday I was going to come to the point where I would want a program like Photoshop, which could perform edits and modifications to portions of a photograph, instead of all of a photograph.

Funny thing is, that I already have a copy of Photoshop, or should I say, had. Back when we lived in Silicon Valley, I won a copy of Photoshop at a trade show. I took it home and installed it on my WIndows box, but I didn’t really have the interest or pressing need to learn how to use Photoshop. Of course, that’s all different now. And now I am back on the Mac, not on WIndows. So that copy of Windows Photoshop wasn’t really doing me any good.

I figured that I would be stuck buying a brand new copy of Photoshop once the Intel Mac version came out. On some of the photography forums that I read, some people were saying that they had convinced Adobe to allow them to upgrade a Windows Photoshop to the Mac version. I took heart from this, but didn’t do anything about it. When the Beta of Photoshop CS3 came out, I learned that Adobe was going to restrict the set of versions that would be allowed to upgrade to CS3, and version 5.5, the version that I had, was going to be dropped from the list.

I figured that two upgrades of Photoshop were still cheaper than buying a brand new copy, and finally picked up the phone and hoped that Adobe would let me upgrade. It turns out to be ridiculously easy. I called the Adobe sales phone line listed at http://www.adobe.com/buy/. The person that I talked to was very helpful and there was a clearly defined procedure for doing what I wanted. In addition to my order information, I had to fax back a form where I promised to get rid of my copy of the Windows version – no problem there. After that I was all set. Yesterday my copy of Photoshop CS2 arrived, and I installed a copy of CS3 as well. I haven’t had any time to play with them yet, but I figured that there might be a few people out there that might benefit from my experience.

Props to Adobe for making this possible – in fact, you can do this for any Adobe product that has a Mac and Windows version, and you can do it the reverse direction as well. I wish Microsoft would let me do the same from an old Office for Windows version.

In San Francisco during MacWorld

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I’ll be in San Francisco during the week of Macworld (Jan 8-12). I’m not there for the show, but I will be around in the evenings and looking to connect up with people who are also in town. Leave a comment or send a note if you are up for getting together.

Size isn’t everything

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Stephen O’Grady del.icio.us’ed the inaugural post of the new blog, and his comment was “biggest community wins”. It’s true that the size of a community matters, but it’s not as simple as absolute size. Communities need to reach a point where they become resilient and self sustaining.

That means you need people, and you need enough of them so that there can be an reasonable distribution of work – if one or two people are doing all the work and there are lots of bug/feature requests, then that’s not a reasonable distribution of work. I’ve heard this called ‘scalable’ but it’s not necessarily the case the communities need to scale to accommodate lots and lots of users, but it does need to support its user base well, and the key to that is to share the work.

Another way of measuring the reasonable sharing of work is to look at the “hit by a bus” number – the number of people that would need to be hit by a bus/truck/etc in order to make a substantial impact on the sustainability of the community. If this number is “1” or if there are multiple “1”‘s, then that would be another indicator that the community hasn’t become self-sustaining.

Communities (like marriages, I suppose) that can’t fight well, can’t stay together. So another indicator of a healthy community is the ability to have and resolve conflicts. This is especially important, but often left un-stated as an important quality. It is important for communities to have diversity of opinion and approach, and if they do, conflicts will inevitably follow.

Also related to conflict resolution is the ability of a community do deal with difficult people – Ben and Fitz have a great talk on this [PDF], and it also contains some good content on what makes a healthy community.

So these are just a few of the other factors that influence the quality of a development community.

Announcing Guinea Pig TV

2006 – A photographic review

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Following in Ryan’s footsteps (although not his skill), here are some important moments/photos from 2006.

January

Bainbridge Island had it’s first Chinese New Year’s celebration, and I spent a rainy afternoon with the festivities. I’ll be doing this again this year.

This photo of (part of) the Mac Geek contingent at Microsoft’s Search Champs event is my most view photo on Flickr.

February

Flower portrait season started early

This shot happened accidentally on the way back from lunch during Northern Voice 2006. It was a reach out and grab you photo moment for me.

March

The flower portraits come easily to me, and I enjoy them. For the first time in my life, I actually appreciate flowers.

April

A portrait of chives in our front yard, a great memory of a warm spring afternoon with the family.

Pike Place Market is a beautiful place – we were there for a tourist visit with my brother who came to visit from the East Coast. There was some very good eating that night.

May

2006 was also the year of Strobist. The little that I know about flash photography, I’ve learned from David’s great blog. I still have a lot more to learn, and a bunch more practicing to get consistent, but I’ve definitely made the transition from “natural light only, I hate flash” to “I know that this could look great if I can light it right”.

June

We spent the beginning of June at Gnomedex 6.0, where Chris and Ponzi asked me to do some shots for them. It was a great learning experience for me.

Also in June, Abigail had her annual dance recital. That isn’t her above, it’s one of the older students. I still remember this shot. There was a lighted window frame being projected onto the floor, and dancers were cycling through that patch of light. I remember scrambling to try to get one good shot…

July

July is OSCON month, and the camera went with me, as usual. The picture above won the OSCON photo contest — a great honor for me. This shot was also one of the few shots where I actually asked someone if I could take their picture before I did it.

Also in July, one of my Strobist Boot Camp Assignment shots caught David Hobby’s eye. My friend Paul and I had a great time doing a bunch of these shots in his painting studio.

August

In August, we discovered the band Late Tuesday at the Bainbridge Island waterfront park concert series. Sadly for us, this is their last year playing together.

September

Abigail caught a snail, and we subjected it to the photographic treatment.

October

In October I went to Austin for ApacheCon. Austin was a great location for ApacheCon, with plenty of evening activities. I spent more time shooting evening activities than I did actual conference sessions.

November

Yep, snow in November. On Bainbridge Island, no less. I hope our weather is better in 2007…

December

The biggest event in an action packed December was Chris and Ponzi’s wedding. Julie and the girls were in the wedding, and I was shooting all over. It was all the benefits of shooting a wedding, and none of the scary responsibility. It was Chris and Ponzi’s day for sure, but being at a wedding always makes me think back to mine, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that this is my favorite.

Ok, that’s all the year in review or year to come type stuff you’ll be getting from me. I promise to resume technology blogging in short order.

Long gone Cosmo

Happy New Year!

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If you are reading the RSS feeds, you may not have noticed that I’ve done a revamp of the blog. Starting with 2007, I’m switching over to the WordPress blogging system. The contents of my old blog can be reached via http://www.sauria.com/pyblog. Existing permalinks to the old content should continue to work. If they don’t that’s a bug and I’d appreciate a comment or an e-mail. Expect there to be falling plaster and such for the next few days while I get things sorted out. I’m going to redirect existing RSS feeds for quite some time, so the move should be invisible to most RSS subscribers as well. The one thing which looks to be a problem is per-category RSS feeds, but the only people really using those are Artima.com, which will just have to be broken for now.

So why the switch? For the past few years, around New Year’s I’ve pondered switching my blog to a blogging package that has a larger community. I originally got involved with PyBlosxom because I was really interested in learning more about blogging specifications, and I wanted a project to force me to play with Python. While it’s been fun to hack on a blogging package, I’ve reached the point where I want to simplify some things in my life in order to open up some time. Also, the comment spam situation has gotten ridiculous, and I wanted some better tools for working against spammers. So for now, what I really want is to move my blog onto a community owned blogging system (as opposed to a commercial or hosted system). That’s not to say that PyBlosxom is not a community owned blogging system, and indeed the community there seems to be broadening out a little bit. But there’s a huge difference between the size of the PyBlosxom community and the size of the WordPress community, and that’s what won me over in the end.