iPhone at JohnnyWorthington.com

tweetiei2-large

Why does Twitter need an Official iPhone app? No, really, why? Is it really that hard to use?

I’m sorry, but in my suspicious mind, timing is everything.

Apple announces iAd… 36 hours later Twitter inks a deal for one of the best iPhone Twitter apps and announces it will be free…

Yeah, yeah… “I wouldn’t use it if it had ads”… 2 things:
1) If you wouldn’t, then you aren’t the type of person who would click on online/mobile advertising anyway.
2) The type of people who don’t ‘understand’ Twitter probably would click, and why shouldn’t Twitter get a slice of that.

Let’s play Punch The Failwhale, shall we?

J

The iPad is out. Some hate it. Some love it. I, for one, love what I have seen… but I love what it will do more.

One of the arguments levelled at the iPad is what it lacks in terms of what is commonly understood to be a ‘computer’. To me, this is the key.

If we take an honest look at computer geekdom over the past 20 – 30 years, there has been at least one occasion where we have each revelled in the ‘dark magic’ of knowing more than the common man about these machines.

The second you have exaggerated a technical problem or used some buzz words to purposely confuse a person, you have contributed in some small way to not progressing the widespread adoption of computers.

People are intimidated by these machines and I can’t help think that computer geekdom must take even a small amount of responsibility for it.

So, along comes this thing. Well, actually… along comes these things. I count the iPad along with the iPhone, iPod, Zune, Andriod and the upcoming HP Slate and JooJoo as devices that is shifting the goal posts on what we, and the common man, think of as a computer.

I heard on TWiT that Robert Scoble handed an iPad to his mother-in-law, who had never used a computer, and she took to it. My daughter loves our iPhones and uses them very well. I have seen guys who can’t switch on their computer rock an iPhone like no one’s business.

It’s simple. It’s not intimidating. It may not tick the boxes of geekdom but we can no longer stand on our higher ground waiting for the stupid huddled masses to realise how smart we are. The masses have found shovels and are taking our mountain down, one shiny black scoop at a time. Embrace it, use it as a gateway across that scary void. Every person you mock for going the simple route is one more you delay coming over.

So Is Apple Destroying The Computer?

Now, I have noticed a backlash against this type of closed system computing. Regardless on your thoughts about Apple and their ecosystem, you must admit they have shifted some units. 30,000,000+ iPhones… 150,000,000+ iPods. Now that’s a lot of ‘mini computers’ running around out there.

Throw the iPad and HP Slate and every other upcoming device… We’re reaching a tipping point.

So, what does this mean for us computer geeks? What does it mean for the Internet? The simple answer is infrastructure.

Despite not living in the States, I can assume that AT&T sucks balls for 3G coverage in most places. The explosion of the iPhone in centralised areas has put a strain on the existing infrastructure far beyond what was expected.

This can be summed up clearly by this year’s and last year’s SxSW Festival in Austin. From what I can tell, AT&T indeed sucks hard balls last year. This year, they brought an army of trucks to support the load. I was surprised to learn that they used larger towers in the trucks but these had been banned by local councils in places like San Fransisco in favour of smaller (and therefore weaker) towers more pleasing to the eye.

With the wide-spread adoption of such smart phones and wireless devices, how long can these bans remain before public demand for access outweighs cosmetic concerns? How long until ISPs spend the dollars to lay the fibre to our houses? South Korea has. Why not in our countries?

Here in Australia, where the phone companies and ISPs rob us blind on data, we have started to see a reduction in price and a rising of caps due to increased demand. I dare say the iPhone had some part in that (although Telstra continues to flat out rip-off customers with $10 for 100MB data).

It’s simple economics. The more devices that require infrastructure, the more infrastructure will be required to service them. Having a faster, better and stronger internet is never a bad thing.

You may hate Apple, but they are nudging the market in a direction which gets us all better Internet infrastructure in a very big way.

Hate the player, love their game.

J

UPDATE: Works with the iPad!

Dude. Seriously.

The biggest issue I have always had with my iPhone is the inability to sync music and movies from multiple computers.

I have a PC laptop at home which my iPhone is bound to. While it’s OK, most of my new podcasts and ripped movies are on an iMac at another location. Since you can only manage your library from 1 computer, I can’t transfer any podcasts or ripped movies from the iMac.

But, friends, take heart! Thanks to a heads up from Merlin Mann on Macbreak Weekly, I have been alerted to PhoneView http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

This program gives you access to your iPhone just like a mounted drive. You can transfer music, podcasts and movies ON and OFF your iPhone as well as backing up your SMS, MMS, voice mail and your entire phone history.

It even gives you deep level access.

Look, I suck at product reviews. Go to the site and read for yourself.

I thought I would mention it because my car stereo broke this morning and I need some music for my ride home.

J

I really hate using computers, I just like touching things.

Strap yourselves in kids, this one is a long-winded trip into my past.

My excitement by the release of Apple’s iPad can be easily be clasified by others as simple Apple Fanboism. The reason I push back so hard against this notion is it discounts my long love affair with touch interfaces and my standing hatred of the ‘computer’.

Don’t get me wrong, I love computers, I love my mastery of them… I just hate using a computer.

I love what they can do and what they allow me to create. I hate that a decent amount of background knowledge is required to get the most out of them. I do not roll gleefully in endless sheets of dot-matrix paper skillfully painted with masterpieces of coding. My passion is creating things with them, not things for them.

Despite using Macs from very early in my life at the advertsing agency at which my father worked, my first computer was an Atari ST 1040. I felt so cool having a computer. A computer which I bought with my own money gained from an appearance in a Toyota Lexcen commercial. The first computer we had in our house.

I was so pumped up. I was going to learn programming. I was going to be a computer hacker just like those ones I had read about… But 1 hour in… The fantasy faded away. I was playing games. I was typing letters to friends… I was waiting 10 minutes for the spreadsheet program to load.

This great fantasy I had crafted in my head about WHAT a computer was and what I wasnted to do with them was false. For me a computer was a tool for fun, creativity and communication. The most frustrating part of that expereince was the realisation that in order to do those things, and do them well, I still had to gain a solid level of knowledge about the inner workings of the beige box.

So, with my move to highschool. I got my first Windows PC and a modem. The world opened up for me. Again, the grandious thoughts of going hardcore filled my head. But, I was spending all my time chatting on IRC, playing games and surfing the emerging web.

Once again, I realized that I wasn’t a hardcore computer guy. The only issue was since I had confidence using the computer, I was fast becoming known as ‘the guy who was good with computers’. Anyone who has fixed a simple issue in Word or helped someone with a small task in Windows knows that the projection of confidence goes a long way in your status of ‘Guru’. This required me to level up my knowledge help others, again pulling me deeper than I truly wanted to go.

The biggest gripe about being ‘the computer guy’… viruses. It sucks. You can lobby as hard as you like to get enough money to put in place the best system possible but as soon as some downloads something or clicks on a link in an email etc… you have failed. It’s a lot easier to criticize the computer guy than try and yell at your employees for doing something you don’t truly understand yourself.

So as I moved from high school into University, and being a computer guy, I waded into a double major in Computer Science at Queensland University… and hated it. I could understand everything that was being taught, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I dropped out that year (not before switching to a double major in Philosophy and acing that for 6 months).

Next year I went to TAFE, kind of like practical university. I loved it. Hands on, the social interaction… but again, my heart slipped away.

So I went and got myself a 9 to 5 at a local fertiliser comapny, funnily enough, as their computer guy/graphic artist. It was the perfect job. I got to help people use computers, set up networks and do really practical stuff… without hardcore knowledge. This was also the first time when someone paid me money to use a computer to be creative.

Something I still do today.

So based on my non-hardcore use of the a computer, I just want something that does what I do.

Touch Me Baby

I love touch interfaces. When I use a keyboard or mouse, there is a mental disconnect. There is something very primal about touching something with your finger and it responding.

Anything touch screen I gotta try. The terminals at the malls for customer service. I use the self-service touch screens at my supermarket. Hell, Subway tends to give me gastro but I ordered it once JUST cause they installed new touch screen ordering terminals.

The Ahh-Ha! moment came for me when I found a funky looking phone on eBay from Germany.

The Siemens SX45.

To big to fit on my pocket (but I didn’t care). No microphone or speaker, just a tanglious headphone cord (I didn’t care)… It had a touch screen. While it did have a stylus, I was able to touch the screen and make things happen.

I bought it. $700. My life was complete. Yes it was a crappy Windows Mobile interface but it was tweaked just ever so to allow my big sausage fingers to whip through the menus. It had email, music player, Word, Excel, ‘web-browser’. Heaps of apps. I was like carrying around a brick but I loved it. I had direct control. Part of the reason I am so frickin’ ninja on the iPhone keyboard is I learnt to type on this about 6 years ago.

So I rocked that for a year or so until Rachael and I decided to get Motorola RAZRs. One of the best and worse phones ever (for me). I loved the usability, the camera and the games… but I couldn’t touch it. Phone navigation is hard at the best of times. Throw in sausage fingers and you’re screwed.

Then, one our 2 years were up, I bought my next phone. The LG KU990. It was the SX45 on steroids. It had a fat 5 megapixel camera and a touch interface based on buttons, not menus.

BAM! I had found sort of a computer that WASN’T a computer. It got out of the way and just let me rock the interface to get to where I wanted to go. It was rough but it was enough.

Now at this stage, the iPhone had just been released. For someone like me, Mr Jobs had just given me the next evolution of my dream device… But I didn’t get it year 1. It wasn’t until my fat ass broken the screen on my LG in a slide at a McDonald’s play ground that I got one.

It was the second Ahh-Ha. 95% of what I did on my PC and Mac was now in the palm of my hand and it wasn’t a computer. It had no File/Edit. It had no Maximize/Minimize… It was full screen environments running the task I was performing.

I’ll explain. The major thing I do on a computer is Adobe Lightroom for my photography. When I use it, I switch it to Full Screen mode and the Windows Start Bar or the Mac’s File Menu disappears. I simple use the application, not the OS.

I have used touch tablets before, all Windows devices. My most hardcore use was the set-up and maintenance of a DynaVox eyetracking computer with Windows 95. Despite all the bolted on features, at it’s heart it was the same tablet computer that Windows was selling off the shelf. I know this because when I unpacked it, I had to assemble it all and load the extra software on top of the pre-installed XP. It soon became clear to me that this was still a mouse and keyboard interface that you could touch. The Max/Min/Exit buttons were painfully small and trying to drag and select multiple files at once was almost impossible.

The attachment of a USB keyboard helped but eventually I had to submit and attach a mouse as well. Now, I am sure in future versions (Windows 7) that tweaks have been made but at it’s heart, and tablet OS maker must understand that a straight port without UI tweaks makes it difficult to use. Especially on anything under 13 inches.

I have the exact same criticism of the OSX interface. It is all still menu based and would be the same nightmare to use as Windows.

While my use may not be as hardcore as some, it is still valid and more closely aligned to the general population.

You win no badges for hardcoredness. It’s not what you got, it’s what you do with it.

So, now I have MY phone. The phone I have wanted for 6 years. The computer I have wanted for 20. It fits my work flow, my uses and I trust Apple based on years of solid service. Mr Jobs has stepped up again and said “Here is what you want, Johnny, but more powerful and a bigger screen”.

My answer? 1 please.