blogitech from Chris Maddern

I realise that the 3.0 Beta was a development Beta; intended for use to test out the iPhone SDK 3.0 and aid in development. However, I am an Apple iPhone developper, I am also an iPhone user. I have one iPhone. This means that I test on my day-to-day phone so I would appreciate that it still remains usable in this capacity with the software I’m asked to install on it.

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes. continue reading…

So, Steve’s taken the stage and done his bit. Now it’s up to us to spend the next 3-5 days marveling at the design brilliance of Apple and how they’ve changed our lives before settling back down in to the (not unimpressive) reality that they’ve just re-engineered an existing solution to be intuitive and look very nice.

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

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Someone today said to me…

“…a Zillion is 1 followed by a Katrillion zeros…”

I thought that was funny!

On an unrelated note, I got my iPhone today :). Oh god is it good… loads more soon, check out my twitter and flickr for more regular posts… more iPhone-native :)
Chris

What a great time to be getting on board… my new iPhone is ordered and will arrive on Monday. I can’t wait… and now I can’t wait *even* more. My one hold-back was no native solution for MSN chatting and VoIP was something that seemed as obvious a service to feature on a 600MHz processor-wielding phone as there is!

Now, on the very day that I ordered; this appears to solve all our VoIP and IM woes. I’ll be sure to post a review of that and other things iPhone some time after Tuesday when the initial excitement decays.

Photo courtesy of Engadget, Video after the break!

Chris

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It was once famously said that ‘everything that could be invented, had been invented’.

I found this idea to be ridiculous and we have since proved it to be so; this was over a hundred years ago I believe. However, if this were ever to come close to having a believer, it could be me and it could be in reaction to an article I read on engadget this morning!

It seems that LG aren’t happy with skin merely covering our entire body, it must now cover every object we own as well. I have no idea how that idea got incubated and passed around; it must have come up at a board meeting and everyone thought that ‘everyone else’ was in on the joke so went along as not to look stupid. It wasn’t until production had begun that they realised that old Paul had genuinely been suggesting that they produce a device that actually invokes a feeling of not wanting to touch something that is essentially a ‘touch-operated’ device.

Did I forget to mention that every single one of them was also high.

I think that’s all there is to say on the matter, except, please don’t release it; your phones are bad enough.

Chris