1. Like going to Macworld
2. Enjoy surprises

I really look forward to “the new thing” being introduced and gawked at by the geek masses. That is one of the best parts of Macworld, the surprise. I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus, birthday party magicians, or unicorns (although part of me holds out hope). But I can count on a cool new gadget from Apple every January and whether I ever purchase said new gadget, the surprise is always worth it.

I must be in the minority however, because everywhere you go on the web, people are telling everyone rumors about what Steve Jobs will deliver tomorrow morning at the “Stevenote”. Yes, I know it happens every year. Yes, I know that the rumor game is just as fun as the surprise for some people. However, I believe breaking the secret of what will be revealed is akin to telling the kids there is no Santa Claus, that party magicians are fake, or that there are no unicorns (NOOOOOOO!!!). It sucks the wonder out of the event and the surprise. We should be thankful that Uncle Steve still comes to Christmas with something new. The fact that Apple has been able to maintain this kind of hype and surprise for the last several years is amazing. We should enjoy it and live inside of the wonder, not kill ourselves trying to spoil it for everyone.

Surprises are special gifts. Whether you actually get something tangible or not usually doesn’t matter. It is a moment when — despite your expectations — life catches you off-guard in a joyous way. You smile bigger than normal and usually a piece of your true self is revealed for everyone around you. I love surprises.

Uncle Steve’s coming to town tomorrow and he’s got a few surprises. I’ll be offline until then.

Rob

The Loves

For starters, it is simply amazing to have a phone that actually functions the way I expect it to. Most of what I want to do is less than two finger taps away and I don’t have to hunt for functions I need. We all know that Apple really puts time and effort into user interface design and they have delivered a rich interface on this phone.

I’ve noticed that I’m less likely to get on my laptop when I’m at home to do simple things like checking email or reading RSS feeds. The iPhone is very capable and easy to use for doing these things quickly. And although I thought it would leave me chained to my email, The luxury of having email in my pocket at ay moment has calmed my propensity to check it. It’s right there if I need it, so I only check it when I need it. And increasingly that is not too often. It has meant that I’m sending more text messages. Because it’s so flipping easy!

I cannot stress enough how handy it is having a full web browser on your phone. On my previous phone, I struggled to use the mobile web browser because it looked like an ad–supported, poorly written piece of shareware from 1997. This is a major reason why I think there aren’t more people (at least amongst people I know) using the mobile web. No one is going to use it for anything more than sports scores when it looks as bad as it does on your standard flip phone. For those not lucky enough to have the mobile version of the Opera web browser, the mobile web just doesn’t cut it yet. Here’s hoping that the entrance of a full web browser on a mobile device helps change that.

It plays with my mac. Holy crap, it plays nice with my mac! My last phone played with my mac (sync’d my contacts, and I could pull movies and pictures off it and onto my mac). But it didn’t play nice (didn’t sync calendars, restricted what I could do over bluetooth, couldn’t add my own music to it without taking it apart**). I have complete control over what goes on my iPhone and what stays off. It’s a simple question, but seriously, shouldn’t I be able to do what I want with my phone? The iPhone just works and that is infinitely more handy than a device with arbitrary restrictions placed on it.

But it isn’t perfect

I need copy and paste! This sentiment has been echoed elsewhere and I couldn’t agree more. One of the first things I tried to do with my iPhone was copy and paste my 63 character wireless network password from an email into the password field of my phone. Surprise surprise, I couldn’t. After valiantly attempting to keep track of and type the password in manually, I had to give up and just set a shorter password on my wireless network. John Gruber makes a good point (see link above) about why it wasn’t in there when the iPhone was released, but I’d like to see it added soon.

The calendar app isn’t as useful as I’d hoped. I have several calendars with very different types of events listed on each. In iCal on my mac, the calendars are color-coded, so it is easy to see the different events and what calendar they belong to. On the iPhone, all events are listed in black. In the month view, a single black dot shows a day when I have an event listed. I’d like to see event colors added to the iPhone’s calendar app. I’m still not sure the problem isn’t just my resistance to calendaring in general. But I’d like to see colors in the calendar listing before deciding that I’m just a dumb ass when it comes to effective calendaring.

I want to take videos with my iPhone. It is such a bummer that I can’t take video with this phone. I love taking video with my still camera, but don’t carry that with me everywhere the way I do my phone. It seems like a feature Apple may have had to leave out in order to get the phone out by June 30 as promised, so I’m willing to play along. But I would be quite disappointed if they didn’t add this feature in a software update and instead waited for v2.0 of the iPhone to add video support. Most new phones today have a video camera, so it seems strange that it was left off the iPhone.

I’m embarrassed to pull it out in public. This is no fault of the phone, just the hype. I have a hard time pulling it out of my pocket in public because I don’t want anyone to notice that I have it. For me, it is a functional device with great features that make certain aspects of my life far easier than before. It isn’t a status symbol or sign of the devil (even if Karl Rove uses one). Once the hype wears off, the weird feeling when pulling it out of my pocket will go away.

None of these things are deal breakers for me. They’re just minor gripes. I really couldn’t complain too much about the phone. It has performed flawlessly for me, including the virtual keyboard, which some people have complained about. I’m a very happy iPhone owner. After using it for 10 days, what is amazing to me is that Apple absolutely delivered on the impossible hype that surrounded the iPhone.

You can watch the episode yourself (.mov 88MB). I stroll by at 5 minutes and 33 seconds into the show and stroll out at 5 minutes and 35 seconds.

I should note, while I appear to be straining under the weight of Macworld schwag, there was no such bounty this year. I’m holding purchased items only. It was kind of…a bummer.

Now they have created a mobile phone. And it has wi-fi. So you don’t have to pay for high speed mobile data network plans to get internet access on the iPhone. For some people, paying expensive monthly fees for high speed data access over a mobile network is a no-brainer. But for those of us who could never afford such plans, having wi-fi built into the iPhone makes all of the internet-based features of the phone (email, messaging, web browsing) accessible. Assuming that the iPhone will sell a few units (wink wink), the mobile web is about to go mainstream.

For a web developer, this is an exciting time. Work that I do now can be accessed from nearly anywhere at anytime. The caveat to that is: work that I do can now be accessed from any size screen on any number of products with any combination of processors, and form factors.

That means that we need to build websites that scale, literally for any size screen. To make life easier on us, Apple’s iPhone uses the same HTML rendering engine as their Safari web browser. One can only hope other phone manufacturers follow suit, because the multitude of proprietary browsers on mobile devices up until now has made transitioning to the mobile web a difficult task for web developers. Having to make sure a site looks good on 3-4 browsers is a difficult task. Having to make sure a site looks good on 20 different mobile phone web browsers makes web developers poop their pants. It’s a messy task.

So now we have a mobile phone coming in June that has wi-fi, a standards compliant web browser built in, and a sub-4 inch screen. Did you catch that hint? Standards compliant. If I as a web developer use web standards in building out websites, I can offer clients a smooth transition to the mobile web. No expensive ports or re-designs for mobile devices. Build the site with content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS) separated, using semantic coding practices, and the transition to a mobile web can be achieved without touching the site content.

As smooth as it sounds, moving to the mobile web will not be without hickups. On any site, there is the content layer (XHTML), the presentation layer (CSS), and the behavior layer (Javascript, Flash). As the web has advanced, that behavior layer has become considerably more advanced. Many sites on the web simply fail to work with Javascript disabled. Moving those advanced behavior layers to a mobile device hasn’t been easy up until now. Javascript support in mobile devices has been spotty at best, and poop-my-pants-bad at worst. We’ll have to wait and see how Apple has handled it in the iPhone to get a gauge of where we stand with mobile devices. It is promising to see a slick implementation of Google Maps on the iPhone. Google Maps is an advanced web application with a complex behavior layer.

Again, I know all of this technology exists in phones available today. But it can’t be understated that Apple has now entered the market. That single fact that will change the shape of the mobile phone market and the mobile web over the next 12 months and beyond. As a web developer, I’m excited to see what comes from this and I’m looking forward to developing for mobile users in the months to come.

Please feel free to tell me I’m full of shit in the comments. (Do I detect a poop theme?)

Cheers

Thankfully, a sizable chunk of those great moments have made their way to the iTunes Music Store. The Bridge School Concerts (iTunes link) is an 80-song collection of tunes from the 20 years of “Bridge”. It has many of my personal favorites (Pearl Jam’s reworked Corduroy from 1996, Thom Yorke doing Street Spirit sans accompaniment, and Rebel Yell from the year when Bridge was “knocked the fuck out” by Billy Idol). I can think of several more tunes I’d like to see added down the line. Pete Townshend showed up in 1996 and was amazing. Sheryl Crow needs to be in there as well. But that’s a small knock on what is otherwise an iTunes addition that makes my day.

The beauty of the deal is that, like all things Bridge, proceeds from the sale of the tracks go to The Bridge School.

Buy up and enjoy.