Today was the big day. Apple announced the new iPhone OS software that will be released in summer, available now if you are a developer like me hehe.. The biggest downfall for me is that some features won’t be available with the original iPhone. More on that later. They will be available for free to iPhone users, but $9.95 for iPod touch users.
New features:
Push service – Applications will finally be able to run in the background! What does this mean? Basically you can close a program and go into another, and the first program will still be running. So for example if you have AIM running it will always send you your messages.
Cut and Paste – Finally! It’s here, you will be able to cut and paste between applications
MMS messaging! You will be able to send messages, gps locations, contact card, audio file, etc. Feature not available on original iPhone.
Universal Search – You can now search in emails, and through out other applications.
Map Support – Applications can now make use of Google maps and there will be turn by turn direction.
Peer to Peer – you can connect multiple iPhones together through wireless for data transfer or gameplay.
Stereo Bluetooth headsets – not supported by the original iPhone.
These are the main items that I am excited about, but there are plenty more!
Still no video recording, laptop tethering, or Flash support. Also no word on hardware upgrade.
What is Apple doing to their products? The past week, Apple released a new iPod Shuffle. They moved the controls to the headphone cable, which is a feature I like. However, people have found a mysterious little chip embeded in it that many people suggest is a DRM enabled chip. If this is true, you could only use Apple branded headphones with it. If any third party company created headphones for it that bypassed the chip, then under the DMCA from 1998, it would be considered breaking a digital lock and be illegal.
Over at djsteen.com, he has a video up of Kevin Rose reporting that in Apple’s 3.0 release of the iPhone software, there will be cut and paste functionality in the new software release. There will not be new video features because of a technical problem with writing to the NAND memory. Though, it will have all of the features that the Palm Pre will have, that would have made it more attractable than the iPhone.
So I’ve been addicted to a little game called Spore in recent days. I know, I know.. this game came out last year already so why am I first writing about it now? Basically, because I finally got around to buying a copy of it. There has been a lot of ink on the game and rightly so. Both good and bad. I’ll start with the bad. One acronym sums it all up.. DRM. To you non technical people, it stands for Digital Rights Management. It’s purpose is theoretically a good one. It is to prevent people from pirating your works. It has been included everything from mp3′s, video games, to movies. The bad thing about it is that if you legitimately own media – you have the legal right to back it up and make copies of your software, in this games case… you can only install it 3 times before it becomes non functional. After that, if your hard drive goes bad, or you buy a new computer, guess what? Too bad! You need to purchase another copy of the game. That has turned many people off to the game. On top of this,the method of enforcing this may involve root kits which is basically software they install on your computer that tracks what you do and sends back data to them which raises privacy concerns.
Now onto the good… It is made by Maxis… Which if you are my age, you grew up with the classic game Sim City in your elementary and middle schools. This game is a larger scale version of that.. it’s at the species level. You start out as a single cell creature. Then as you grow and mate, you evolve. You can choose what changes your organism takes and shape the way your organism evolves throughout it’s history. Once you get so far, your creature comes up on land and you must now make nice with other creatures or become enemy’s and after that, you create cities, the world, and then colonize the galaxy.
The gameplay is fun, and the animations are amusing. I would recommend this game to anyone who is looking for something to take their mind off of the real world for a while.
So it looks like we may get a glimpse of Apple’s third version of iPhone software quite soon – March 17th to be exact. Invites have been sent out to the sneak peak Apple Event. The main new feature that is reported to be making the hype, is the ability of 3rd party Apps to run in the background. Long ago, Apple announced that they were going to allow Apps to run in the background through a push service that communicated with Apple services, rather than using processes on the phone itself which makes the phone sluggish like most Windows based phones. Well the date kept getting pushed back further and further and we havn’t heard anything about it until now. Personly, I’d like to see cut and paste features… oh yea… and MMS picture / video messaging!!!!!
So I’ve been reeeeaaallly bad at posting anything for a long time now. This is my goal to start posting new items. And first up is the rumor about an Apple Touchscreen Netbook! Woooo! This is a totally awesome concept. I’ve been waiting for years for Apple to release a touch screen laptop – or a tablet. However I’m not one that really likes Netbooks. To me I’d rather have a midsized laptop or tablet that I can work on many tasks. Having a computer that can pretty much only do minor tasks such as surfing the internet never really interested me. I have an iPhone if I wanted to do that. Besides that, knowing Apple’s products, it probably won’t be very cheap compare to other netbooks on the market, though I’m sure it will be very sexy! Now if they converted the Air to be touch screen, I think it would be sweet…. but again my complaint with the Air, is lack of ports.. if it had more and touch screen…. SIGN ME UP!
Now the biggest flaw in this rumor is that it’s just a rumor at this point. The Apple Touchscreen Tablet has been floating around on all the Apple fanboy sites for years. With each major revision or Apple event, people would suggest that one would be the new “big” product, but it has yet to happen. However, these were mostly before the invention of the iPhone, and it probably wouldn’t take too much work to adapt the iPhone’s operating system to one that would work on a Netbook, with touch screen interface. The rumor also suggests that Apple ordered larger than normal touch screen lcd’s from the manufacturer of the iPhone lcd’s. So is there truth behind it all? I guess we have to wait and see.
I’ve been an occasional twitter user for over a year now. In this this time period, it has taken off as a social networking tool, allowing thousands of people to communicate in over the web and text messaging. It has even been in the news for various reasons. For example, James Karl Buck alerted his followers that he was being arrested in a Egypt for photographing a protest. It actually got him out -His University (UC Berkeley) found out via his friends and hired him a lawyer. It has also been used to broadcast news – In the most recent near disaster in New York, where the Airbus made an emergency landing in the Hudson thus saving everyone on board, the first people on the scene tweeted it before people learned about it on the news channels. Speaking of the news, even the news media is getting involved with the technology. Rick Sanchez’s show on CNN is on Twitter. You can reply to his comments on air in real-time and he may air your comment. In addition to Twitter,you can comment using Facebook and Myspace.
Where am I going with all this? Well, with a user base of over a million people it seems that I know a whopping 2 people in my non-virtual life that actually use it. If Twitter is so widely popular, why don’t more of my friends use it? Do other people notice this paradox as well?
So everyone else in the world has written about it so I might as well too. Barack Obama has officially been sworn in as President of the United States, then again a day later after Chief Justice Roberts messed up the oath the first time… I watched most of the streaming video footage online at CNN and I must say I was kind of addicted to it. It was a historic campaign, but the fact that he is the first black president isn’t what is striking me as significant – though it is very – it is more the fact that we finally elected someone that for all purposes, seems REAL. He came from middle class and has a normal family. Not only that but Barack is INTELIGENT which gives hope for the future. It’s a nice change of pace to have a president who can actually speak English… so with that… Here’s to our future…
So lately I’ve had a few requests to create web sites for people / local companies, and I’d like to start making a nice income on the side of my job as a net admin. I’ve also been dabbling in iPhone dev and I’m thinking about creating a small LLC company that I can do all of this under. I’m more excited about creating an iPhone game, but lacking on ideas. If anyone has any game idea’s let me know! Also if you have any experience in running a small buisness I’d love to hear from you as well! I’m just worried about all the legal stuff and tax stuff, but it looks like creating a buisness isn’t too difficult through companies like legalzoom.com, so we’ll see. I’ll wait until January to do any of it if I do decide to take this jump.
hehe.. The biggest downfall for me is that some features won’t be available with the original iPhone. More on that later. They will be available for free to iPhone users, but $9.95 for iPod touch users.
Chadwyk Krueger - Information Systems Processing Consultant, Apple fanboy, internetaholic
