Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

The inevitable iPhone post

I'm really enjoying my iPhone. Apple obviously put a lot of care and love into this product, and it's a joy to use, especially when you consider it's a 1.0 product. (Mental exercise: compare the first iPod to the ones we have today. Now imagine what iPhones will look like in a few years.)

Rather than repeat what everybody else has written about the iPhone, I'm going to list some observations I haven't seen widely repeated.

The good stuff:

• Apple nailed the on/off/silence experience. One physical switch sleeps and wakes the phone, so when you finish a call, you push the switch and put the phone in your pocket. When you take it out, push the switch, slide the touch screen arrow, and it's ready. Another physical switch silences the phone -- just slide this one when you go into a movie or a meeting.


• The screen is made of magic glass that doesn't seem to scratch or get permanent smudges, in stark contrast to iPod screens. I think this is a function of Steve Jobs keeping the thing in his pocket all the time and disdaining a protective case. The back of the case also stays pristine, unlike my iPods, which get scratch marks on the back no matter how carefully I treat them.


• The touch screen and UI react instantly in almost every case, preserving the necessary UI illusion that you're pressing actual buttons.


• The phone app is terrific. Everything I might want to do (speaker, keypad, mute) is on the screen behind a big button.


• The cinematic quality of the UI, along with the touch screen, make the iPhone so much fun to use. It's hard to compare the iPhone with other phones -- nobody ever talked about features like animation or multitouch in a phone before, and everybody just assumed a phone's UI was awful.

The less good:

• The infamous headphone jack that doesn't fit most headphones or audio cables. This is annoying precisely because it's so petty. After paying $600 for the phone, it's lame to have to pay another $10 so I can connect it to the aux in in my car. And you don't have to redesign the phone to fix this: just put an adapter in the iPhone box.


• The dock is kinda tight -- it takes 2 hands to remove the phone -- and holds the iPhone too vertically, at a more severe angle than iPod docks do.


• In the iPod, manual mode is gone. This is the mode in which you can drag and drop items to the iPod, rather than using playlists to sync. Manual mode is especially useful for adding music from multiple computers to one iPod.

Random stuff:

• Most apps change the screen orientation when you rotate the iPhone a quarter turn. If this isn't working reliably for you, make sure you're holding the phone upright when you do it. The accelerometer that controls rotation is basically a gravity detector, and it doesn't work if the phone is flat to the ground.


• If Safari gets crashy on you, try turning the phone off (hold down the sleep/wake switch) and on. Better.


• I'm not sure I'm really getting better with the keyboard. I'm hoping more clever software will help me over time.


• Phone snobs and other folks who complain about missing features will be surprised when some of those features start showing up in software upgrades. This is going to be the most software-upgraded phone ever made. (I have no inside information here.)


• I'm not sure the iPod app is easier to use than a click wheel iPod (or maybe I'm just used to that UI), but the iPhone's iPod is way more fun.

Anybody else have iPhone comments?

They're Beautiful!

Want to send someone virtual flowers, for free? Go visit They're Beautiful!, where you can send a bouquet, or visit your own greenhouse to water your flowers. You can even post your greenhouse on your own pages (like I've done here). It's very cool. Go check out They're Beautiful!

It's a radio for speaking to God

Sure, it's iPhone day, but that's not the only thing going on for Steve Jobs today. It's also the premiere of Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. So far, it looks like the movie is getting somewhat better reviews than the gadget, but I'm betting that both will do just fine.

Café as corporate metaphor

Yesterday Jason and I were chatting on the way to lunch about, well, lunch. I noted that Google seems to be creating many new cafés in its buildings around the Shoreline area of Mountain View. Jason said that Google's café technique seems to match the way it does servers: have lots and lots of them.

I mentioned the café-coverage strategy of my Redmond-based former employer, which tends to build one big café per three new buildings. That's when we hit on the café as a metaphor for the companies we've worked for, then proceeded to have fun and stretch the metaphor completely out of proportion:

Google: many cafés, most of them small (like a cheap server) but with awesome food (great software). Lots of different kinds of cuisine (a healthy heterogeneous environment). Failover capabilities (e.g., "Charlie's is closed for a big meeting, so please have lunch at No Name today"). Meals are free (like most Google products). (And by the way, Google is hiring.)

Microsoft: fewer, larger cafés. Various kinds of food, but less variety. Meals are not free.

Apple: one café. Eat there.

IBM: the food isn't great, because it's outsourced.

I heart NY

Recently I spent a week working at my company's office near Times Square in New York City. I've only been to NY about a half dozen times in my life, and I really like visiting. On my first morning there, I was walking to the office from my hotel a couple of blocks away when I felt a couple of raindrops. I looked on the ground and noticed that the "raindrops" were very big and kind of foamy. As a few of these smacked the ground rapidly, I wondered if I was under some sort of gross bird attack. Then I noticed that the foam was really soap. I looked up and found a window washer half a block away.

This doesn't happen very often in Mountain View.

I saw my future

Recently I toured the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, located in a remodeled old SGI building just down the block from Google and Microsoft. The tour was pretty fun, with lots of ancient big iron and zillions of personal computers, some of them very familiar. I was amused to see how much of my work experience is now literally history.

At the end of the tour our group visited a working old-fashioned computer room, complete with raised floors and zealous air conditioning. In the room, amidst the giant electronic brains, keypunches, and tape drives, some guys working there were very excited: they had just gotten an old line printer to work for the first time in 25 years and were gleefully showing off the output. These men appeared to be 15 to 20 years older than me. That's when I realized I was looking at my future. In a few years, come visit me at the Computer History Museum. I'll probably be troubleshooting LisaWrite problems or something. ;-)

A man without a programming language

People who have read my ancient Mac programming books assume I'm some hotshot programmer. But I'm not -- I'm a writer, and I'm the world's slowest programmer. Most of the programs I've written are tiny examples that help me understand the way some language or toolkit feature works, but don't do anything practical.

Recently I was reading an old magazine and I came upon a programming puzzle in a Google employment ad. I wanted to try writing code to solve the puzzle. My most recent programming experience is with Cocoa via Objective-C. But I'm rusty with that, and besides, I don't think it's the greatest environment for whipping up very small programs, because every program requires a lot of boilerplate to get it going.

So I realized that I don't really have a language I can use for quickie programs, and now I'm looking for one. I need one that's suitable for tiny projects and fits my self-taught semi-programmer's brain (which means it has to be reasonably accessible). An interactive shell would be a great bonus, and so would the abililty to use Cocoa. I'm thinking of Ruby or Python. Anybody have an opinion?

Google ships blog search

Check it out here.

Apple /// mini-adventure

Last week we had a little party for our 25th wedding anniversary. Feeling geekily nostalgic, I decided at the last minute to dig out my ancient Apple /// computer (that's how we wrote "Apple III" back in the day) and set it up, in hopes of allowing our guests to type in their memories on this old hunk of technology.

My task started promisingly as I quickly located the computer (in its sleek leatherette case) on a shelf in the garage. Soon thereafter, I managed to find the monitor -- a monochrome Monitor ///, of course. The standard monitor at the time had green phosphor, but I owned a rare white phosphor model, its case now streaked with the grime that comes from two decades of resting in a garage. Back in the house, I cleared space on a kitchen counter by setting aside the bread machine and replaced it with ye olde computer.

Next, I located a power cable for the computer and plugged it in. The 5.25 inch disk drive LED came on and the drive made seeky noises: it was alive! An expedition inside the Big Bag O'cables quickly resulted in success, as I located a standard video cable for the monitor.

Now I could see what was going on as I booted the only disk that was inside the computer bag: the Pascal /// system disk. It worked fine, and it was a thrill to see that good old gray scale display. I was presented with the deeply familiar UCSD Pascal command line. But this was a dead end. I tried to run the Editor, which only caused Pascal to search fruitlessly for an unknown disk in a non-existent external drive.

So, back to the garage to look for some other software. Before long, I struck a rich vein: an entire box of Apple /// diskettes. Right on top was Apple Writer, the absolute state of the art in Apple /// word processing (written by Paul Lutus, a man who [according to legend] lived on a mountaintop in Oregon and drew his AC power with a five hundred foot extension cord, but that's another story).

I went back in the house and immediately caught the burning smell. Like the bread machine it had displaced, the Apple /// was cooking. A thin trickle of white smoke trailed from the opening at the back. The display was a sad, scrambled mess. I reached for the plug to pull it out of the wall, and two sparks of flame zapped loudly through the expansion ports on the back, leaving scorch marks on the kitchen wall.

As I yanked the plug, Barbara came into the kitchen, wondering why the house now stunk like melted plastic. Despite the fact that she used to balance our checkbook on that very computer in our first home (using VisiCalc ///, of course), at that moment she felt no love and ordered the thing out of her kitchen. I took it back to the garage, where it still remains.

I guess I should have dug out the old 128K Mac instead.

Spacewar

Decades ago, many a would-be productive hour was lost to one version or another of Spacewar, generally considered to be the first computer game. Now there's a Java-based version that emulates the PDP-1 version and runs in your browser. (The site seems to be down right now -- watch for mirrors.)

(Thanks to Dave McGary for this discovery.)