I bought an iPhone

A couple of weeks ago I said I wasn’t going to get a first-gen model, but seriously, did you really think I could stop myself? Really? While I’ve written extensively about the iPhone’s shortcomings (see here, and more recently here), we all know that whatever don’t-buy-anything willpower I may possess (OK, so I don’t have any of that) dissolves in the face of mobile gadgets, especially those from One Infinite Loop.

As hokey as it may sound, I just kind of felt like I was supposed to have one (and if you know me at all you saw that coming from a mile away). As one friend put it, “How else am I going to know if I should get one if I don’t have you to tell me?” I’m just playing my part.  :)

Immediate impressions (likely colored by my “nerd high”)

Oh, and one last piece of advice for Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung: bow out gracefully.

Niggling complaints to follow.

The personification of the iPhone

Does it bother anyone else that Apple refers to the iPhone with and without the article “the?” The video demos, Steve himself, TV commercials, and other Apple-produced copy are rife with both the iPhone-is-an-inanimate-object and iPhone-is-alive phrasings. Personally, I think it sounds rather ridiculous when I hear something like, “iPhone does this,” or “iPhone responds to that,” or “iPhone loves to fetch tennis balls.”

Though they’ve been doing the same thing with the iPod for a couple of years now, it’s been largely ignorable; however, the current and incessant referencing of the iPhone without the “the” — as if it is sentient — is impossible to get away from and is really starting to grate. It just doesn’t ‘sound’ right.

I’m headed to New York City

Later tonight I’ll be taking a redeye to NYC for a firm-related event going on tomorrow night, and will be staying in the city until Sunday afternoon. I’m really looking forward to this mini-vacation, in part because my dad’s actually flying up there to hang out with the girl and I for a couple of days. Given that this is only my third time visiting the city, I’m quite excited and hope to be able to get some great shots for the photoblog.

I guess all of that was just a long-winded way of saying that this space will be a bit slow over the next few days (though I will be trying to keep up with Twitter). If you know of something neat going on in the city this weekend that I should check out, please e-mail me.

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean

Perhaps this is old news, but I hadn’t come across it until a couple of days ago. It turns out that if you ask Google Maps how to get from City A to City B, and the cities are on different continents, one of the steps will be to swim from point Y to point Z. To see this in action, check out the New York, NY to Paris, France directions (in particular, look at step 21).

I’m not buying a first-gen iPhone

Everyone and their damn brother has asked me if I’m getting an iPhone on June 29th, and my “no” response always invites a very puzzled look, to which I’m compelled to offer an immediate, excited defense of my decision. After all, I’ve prided myself, for the better part of my life, on having “it” first, even when 99% of the population didn’t start caring about “it” until some time later; cost permitting, I’m usually in the front of the line when it comes to tech ‘gadgets.’

As I’ve explained before, and which fear has grown more prevalent since, I’m scared of the iPhone’s keyboard. Scared. I’ve been indelibly connected to the net for over a decade and I’m an IP attorney — I text/e-mail from my phone a lot and just don’t think the iPhone is going to cut it for me. I want to be proven wrong, but I’m not going to camp out for a couple of days in front of an Apple/AT&T store on a chance that it might be good. Let me be clear here: if iPhone 1.0 was shipping with a mechanical keyboard and a 3G stack of some sort, I’d not only be first in line, I’d likely pay double what they’re asking (especially in light of the direction I think the iPhone is ultimately headed).

Every time I think it may be possible for the keyboard to work well, I just harken back to the fact that when Jobs demoed it, he used his pointer finger and not his thumbs. Yes, yes, it was a pre-release demo, not everything was finalized, and Steve Jobs walks on water. But, am I to believe that in the short time since Jobs’ demo it’s become a robust texter? Of course not. Indeed, just last week at the WWDC Keynote, the VP of iPhone software was demoing some new app built entirely on “web standards” (more on the whole stop-gap, iPhone non-SDK thing in an upcoming post), and when punching in “john,” or whatever he was searching for, he too used his pointer finger.

When is the last time you saw someone use something other than their thumbs to type on a handheld device? Never? Exactly. Oh, wait, you’re right, there was that whole Graffiti thing from Palm, and Windows Mobile has had some form of handwriting recognition for years, but seriously, does anyone use these things to type complete sentences?

I think we all know I’m an Apple fanboy through and through and have turned more people onto Macs than Jobs himself (give or take a few million), but I’m no apologist and will call Apple out as quickly as I praise them.

Let’s hope the keyboard is real-world usable and doesn’t suck.

Moving to Media Temple

I’m putting this site into the gracious and [hopefully] caring hands of Media Temple. After I finish transferring all of my files and databases (so. much. work.) to the new server, I’ll initiate the DNS changes (I’m hoping to get that ball rolling sometime tonight). Please bear with me over the next couple of days as the new DNS information propagates through the Internet’s tubes and the kinks are ironed out.

See you on the other side.

E-mail survival

Lately I’m finding myself further delaying the answering of questions I receive through e-mail (from people I don’t know) by responding to them, some two+ months old, with, “Are you using the latest version of the plugin?” or “What’s the address of your site? Let me take a look.” Sometimes I’ll just flat-out say, “Have you resolved the issue since you wrote me?” Best case, they have answered their own question and I can take it off my plate. Worst case, I have another couple of weeks to give a substantive response to their original e-mail.

For the e-mails that don’t contain questions, it’s now not uncommon for me to reply with a simple “Thank you” or “Good point,” whereas five years ago I probably would have engaged the writer much more and attempted to enter into some sort of sub-surface dialog.

Horrible, I know, but desperate times…

At least I haven’t declared e-mail bankruptcy.

Citrix ICA client and large screens

Dear lazyweb, do you know how to get the Citrix ICA client (for Mac OS X) to use the maximum amount of screen real estate available on my 23” Cinema Display? As it currently stands, it won’t go much larger than what looks to be SXGA (1280×1024).