Newton Poetry

Here we go again.

After Apple’s third quarter 2008 conference call, Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer hinted at “product transitions” – and BOOM, everyone goes nuts over What That Means.

It could mean something as simple as Macbooks being $200 cheaper (imagine that!), but that wouldn’t be as exciting. Oh dear, no. Instead, the Newton 2.0 engines – also known by Macbook Touch, now – have fired on all cylinders and are charging ahead.

Which is cool. This thing has been around as long as…well, as long as this blog, actually, and probably before.

It’s not enough that everyone loses their friggin’ minds after the financial results and AAPL shares fall like a stroke victim. No, we have to dig up this dry-bone skeleton.

Drop Mac prices, drop iPod prices – hell, start giving MobileMe away (you sure as hell can’t sell it). But don’t drop Mac tablet rumors again.

Although those new patent pictures…

It’s typical of an Apple product to delight and amaze the more you use it. The iPhone 3G is no different. It’s been a ton of fun to use and explore in the week I’ve had it.

First, I discovered this blog looks good on the iPhone’s screen, both in vertical (above) and landscape mode.

Other blogs out there are helping me discover new things.

Lifehacker shows how, by holding down the “.” and “.com” buttons in Safari and Mail, you get more options:

First, in Mobile Safari, just hold down the .com button for a second to see other domain options (namely .net, .edu, and .org). Second, when the keyboard has the @ symbol but no .com key, you can hold the ‘.’ (period) key to get the same domain shortcuts – something that comes in especially handy when you’re manually entering email addresses or filling in login credentials in new apps.

Just the “.com” in Safari was enough to make me smile. But this? That’s handy.

Wired’s How-To Wiki taught me how to avoid SMS charges (I opted for no text plan): plug your contact into AOL’s free iPhone AIM client and text to your heart’s content for free.

I’ve tested it, and it works great.

To Do apps, however, were another story. I struggled with the multitude of options out there: free apps, pay apps, voice note apps. I hate to sound cheap, but I was mostly looking at free solutions, and the reviews were of little help because they went either way. Finally, a new app popped up in the App Store – Dobot’s To Do app – so I downloaded it on a whim. And so far, it suits my needs pretty well.

I was never a big fan of the Newton’s solution to to-do lists. The easiest way was to sync the Newton with Newton Connection Kit and type up the list on my iMac. The keyboard made the whole process more comfortable and quicker. But on the road, you have to scribble a note, highlight it, have Assist interpret it, and the it appears in your to-do list. Way too complicated, and awkward when all you want to do is have a list of check-off items. In fact, it’s one of the key gripes that I have against the Newton. I’m sure there’s another to-do app out there, but I’m limited with my Newton OS 1.0.

If Dobot’s To Do app fails me, I can always spring for app that costs actual money. What I’m hoping, however, is that somehow Apple includes some sort of iCal to-do list sync.

My experiment is to try and use only the iPhone for lists, to-dos, and calendars for the next few weeks. By forcing myself to one platform, I can get to know its ins and outs, and find out what it lacks.

From Paul Potts, back in 1993:

Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, Jabberwocky, begins as follows:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

This is fun nonsense, but interestingly, nonsense can teach us a bit about how the very first MessagePad’s handwriting recognition software works, by bringing about some “worst-case scenario” behavior. Handwriting recognition was one of the features of the original MessagePad that was perhaps too strongly hyped with respect to what it delivered, while the improved recognizers in later models never received the public credit they deserved.

Potts explains in this Folklore.org story how word lists and dictionaries can affect how the Newton translates handwriting. Interesting reading. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of Folklore – Andy Hertzfeld’s compendium of early Macintosh stories.

The above shot was taken on Sunday’s Macsurfer homepage. Just look at those headlines. If that isn’t a PR nightmare for Apple, I don’t know what is. This after they did such a super job before the iPhone 3G was announced.

Fortune talked about the perils of “event marketing” – how, yeah, a big huge event like this is fun and draws attention, it’s catastrophic when something breaks down. As it did on Friday. Apple is an expert at drawing press attention. That only makes the scrutiny laser beam that much hotter.

Despite everything that happened, it could’ve been worse. But I’m starting to wonder how. Just from personal experience, this week has been a bummer with my Apple gear. First, I updated my Airport Express base station’s firmware. Afterward, the thing crashed, and now I can’t use my external USB hard drive.

The update must have damaged my USB drive somehow, because I had to repair the thing in Disk Utility and now iPhoto crashes every time it tries to load my library from the disk. Even worse: my iBook and Airport Utility won’t even recognize the base station:

So much for a helpful “update.”

Then, after I thought MobileMe was actually giving me a chance to try it out (I set up my account, and could log in online), I find out that OS X 10.4 has issues connecting with MobileMe. In fact, the .Mac icons won’t even change over:

Just when it looks like MobileMe (or .Mac, or .Whatever) is going to sync my contacts and calendars and whatnot, I get this:

At least this is just the 60 day trial. If I were paying for this, I would not be a happy Apple customer.

And that’s just it. Even amidst Friday’s hellbroth during the iPhone 3G launch, I still played the dedicated Apple soldier. Most of the folks in line with me understood, too, that these things happen, and we were still a part of Something Special. But when the nuts of bolts of Apple’s operation start to come undone, that’s when you get people angry. People will stand in line for hours for the iPhone, no matter what activation issues are taking place, with a gritted smile on their face. That smile soon disappears, however, when basic things like Airport and “Exchange for the rest of us” (more like, “for the most patient of us”) start breaking down.

Apple has got a mess on its hands, it seems, and I wouldn’t want to be their PR department for the next week or so. The least they should do is offer some sort of apology, admit their mistakes, and fix their damn software. Those are the basics.

Do that, and we might forget our USB drive crashing through Airport Disk Utility. Might.

That’s probably the best news I’ve received all day: my iPhone is synced and ready to go.

At 10 p.m., I finally got up the nerve to plug the sucker in and give it a whirl. And everything went great.

MobileMe is offering a free 60 day trial for us suckers, so I thought, why not? My System Prefs are still showing .Mac syncing, however, and I imagine it’s because I’m still a OS X 10.4 user. MobileMe is giving me error messages, so I’m not going to get my hopes up. But a free trial is a free trial. What’s the harm.

Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at see, I hope you’re having the same luck I’m having right now – which is good luck. Now I’ve got all weekend to play with the beast.

• Apple statement on MobileMe delay (Macworld UK)
• TUAW’s liveblogging
• Bad weather in Chicago (Ars Technica – and it’s headed my way!)
• iPocalypse (Gizmodo)
• Failures halt, delay iPhone sales (iLounge)
• My report on Macenstein (the Doctor never did show up)
• iPhone launch-o-mess-o-rama (Macalope)
• AAPL stocks down a bit as of 3 p.m.
• Even Facebook is affected?, and Six million iBricks…and counting (BuzzYA!)

UPDATE: Gizmodo just posted a possible fix to the iBrich problem. Engadget posted a video unboxing, for those who want more iPhone porn along with all this bad news.

Made it home safe and sound, and finding out news about the server crashes have spread like wildfire. I helped break the news over at Macenstein, but I think everyone eventually got the message.

The iPhone 3G launch was a worldwide event. Something had to go wrong. It’s too bad that “something” was of this magnitude.

More… »

Almost noon now. Finally made it inside the store, but was getting nervous there for a while. More nervous for Apple employees than anything else (see above).

People keep coming into the front of the store expecting to just “shop.” One can’t feel sorry for these folks; who DOESN’T know iPhone 3G day is today? One lady came up to replace a printer, though, and they let her in and out – with a new box. They probably just wanted to get her out as soon as possible.

The line wait has been a boon in one way: people can read the labyrinthine AT&T disclosures on the brochure they’re handing out. Ann Arbor is a liberal town, and it’s hard to make sense of anything AT&T explains. How can one company, besides Microsoft, be so evil?

One two people in front of me. The lady behind me’s cut-off time was 2:30 p.m. “You’re halfway there,” I told her. California is just now coming on line. Will things get worse?

This last hour or so has been pretty slow. We were moving at a steady pace at first, but not so much now.

Got a call from my buddy Keith, who almost made it with me today. He stopped at the Toledo, OH AT&T store but said “at least 200 people were in line.” Instead, he headed to Bowling Green and got the last phone at their AT&T store.

“But it works,” he said. “I’m talking to you on my new iPhone.”

Right-o. Here in Michigan, we still have a wait. Luckily the lady next to me let me move out of line to take some video, which I’ll be posting later. I took some shots of the poor schmucks at the T-Mobile stand right next to the Apple Store entrance. Why even show up today?

Serious doubts about supply are starting to make us nervous. Keith said they only had 8 GB models at Bowling Green. Will there be a white iPhone for me?

This is why I’m an Apple person: the nice lady who has been running up and down the line, answering questions, just brought me a hot coffee with cream. Apple has always been great in terms of user experience, but not they can add “people waiting in line” experience, too.

It’s 9:20 a.m., and a few people have trickled out of the Briarwood Mall Apple Store with the sleek, white iPhone 3G bags in-hand. One guy stopped to see a buddy in line, and compared his new iPhone with his friend’s “old” iPhone.

I talked with a lady from Ann Arbor who has been a Mac person since the days of the beige G3. “I don’t know why everyone’s not a Mac person,” she said, and it’s hard to argue with that. She had made fewer decisions than I had: no phone choice, no AT&T plan choice, not even the color concerned her. “I have a whole half-hour or so to think about it,” she said. You can’t help admire that kind of live-for-the-moment philosophy.

The store is letting in groups of about six or seven at a time, and where I’m standing, near the end of the line, we probably have another hour to go. There are at least several hundred people here. The line doesn’t seem to be growing much, either: whoever wanted an iPhone 3G this bad is already here and waiting. The Detroit Free press claims Apple can handle 100 customers an hour, which seems about right.

Our group is surely a curiosity to the walkers in the mall. “Kids these days,” they must be thinking, but truthfully all ages are represented here. Apple is an egalitarian company.

We’re almost to the amusement-park-style stanchions, which shows we’re “almost there,” whatever that means.