Walt's Corner

Apple announced today the new features coming to the iPhone 3.0 software. Among the “100” new features lie a nest of basics. Copy/paste. MMS. Universal searching. Note syncing. All items that should have been included with the original, but for some reason or another were not.

I’ve been able to totally enjoy my original iPhone that I paid $600 *and* waited in line for over 12 hours for. All without any feelings of regret. When the new model comes out, I’ll be all over it. Plus, my original contract will already be expired.

This just goes to show how decent of a product this has been – Apple selling over 13 million of these “crippled” phones by the end of 2008.

As for me, the next Apple Countdown has begun. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy my original iPhone.

Last weekend I rode with my HOG Club to Tombstone, Arizona. It was pretty fun. We left Friday morning and made our way west via the back roads; riding through Columbus, NM, Douglas, AZ, Bisbee, AZ, and finally up into Sierra Vista, AZ, where we had our reservations. Everyone pretty much went their separate ways for dinner that night because there were so many of us.

The following day brought us a host of scenic views and good eating. The local HOG Chapter (Thunder Mountain) hosted a few rides through their rustic setting and made arrangements for lunch at a local golf course – the only place that could host a crowd our size on such short notice. After lunch we rode into Tombstone and enjoyed the sights and shops as well as dropped a few coins into the pockets of the shopkeepers. That night our chapter had a huge cook-out and invited Thunder Mountain to partake. Sunday morning it was KSU (Kick Stands Up) at 9AM as we took to the interstate for the ride back.

Herein lies the lessons I learned. First, never, under any circumstances, put a breath-right strip on your nose if it happens to have a bad sunburn. Ever. When I awoke Saturday morning and ritually tore off the strip from my nose, the strip insisted on taking the skin with it. Boy did that burn! It burned worse when I proceeded to take my shower. And then a bit more every time I generously applied more sunscreen to my raw nose-meat. When I returned to work that Monday, people were asking if I fell off my bike.

The second lesson I learned is never take an MP3 file that is made with the express intent of putting you to sleep in your playlist for a road-trip. This was an accident. I have this recording that is designed to put me to sleep and it does a pretty good job of it. In order to place the MP3 on my iPhone so that I can listen to it easily at night, I have it rated as a 5-star song (I only sync 5-star songs to my iPhone), insuring that it stays on the iPhone. Imagine my surprise as I’m riding down a long stretch of road rocking to the likes of Sevendust, Tool, and Fair to Midland, when all of a sudden this put-me-to-sleep song comes on. The worst part of it all is that my iPhone is tucked securely in my leather vest’s inside pocket. I was using in-ear-canal headphones that have no controls on them. I was not able to skip to the last song. I had to endure 15 minutes of this sleep-inducing music and sounds. If you’re interested in the sleep song, I got it from pzizz.

My one-time favorite Mac web browser is now free. It was my favorite until I waited those 12 historic hours to lay my hands on one of the first iPhones. Then bookmark syncing between the browser on my iPhone and my desktop overuled any loyalty I had for OmniWeb.

I started using OmniWeb during my OSX Public Beta days, even buying a license at that time, and I’ve renewed it ever since.

The folks at OmniWeb replied to my emails requesting dynamically updated Safari bookmarks and said they were working on it, but it never came to fruition that I saw. That would have kept me using OmniWeb on my desktop.

In this blog the good guys at Omni make their announcement, including a handful of other applications. Linda, who writes this particular post, anticipates some questions. Questions like, “Wait! Does this mean you’re discontinuing these products?” The answer: No. We aren’t ruling out future updates at all, and we’re keeping our options open. We have lots of ideas for what we’d like to add to these products, and it’s possible that at some point we’ll have more resources to allocate to them.

That’s business-speak for “yes, we are discontinuing these apps, but who knows? At some point we may choose to bring them back into development if it becomes economically feasible.” Shut it down but keep the door open.

They are not killing off OmniWeb; it will simply go off to live with other browsers at this browser farm where it can roam free. OmniWeb, you have served me well.

Terms of Service, or TOS. Are you really reading everything you are agreeing to when you click on that “I agree” button? Here’s an excellent article on FOX News that shows many of the more common services and some portions of their TOS. Money quote: “In the extreme, he said, “They can take little Susie’s pictures on the beach to Playboy, who then has their own license for using it — and you may not even know it. And then what? You’re institutionalizing child pornography.” I’ve harped on Google’s TOS for years now. The main reason I rarely use any of their services.

A nice experiment was had over at appcubby. This has been one of the main guys complaining about the way Apple’s App Store operates. Reading his little experiment, you get the impression that he has created quite a few awesome applications for the iPhone platform. He continues to explain that he decided to lower the price point of his applications from around $5 to the standard 99-cent, while offering a way for folks who really appreciated his software to give a donation. That’s when he learned just how appreciative people really are: not. We live in a world where most people are accustomed to gaining their software for free via piracy. I personally know very few people who buy their own software. I can count them on one hand. These are the same folks who don’t buy their own music either.

Without providing any real numbers, he said that he only received $75 in donations. He does provide a simple graph showing a spike in sales for the week in question, but doesn’t offer what those sales numbers were. Jumping from 2 to 5 sales would show the same spike. Your guess is as good as mine. I would hazard a guess that somewhere around 7-15 people contributed to his donation scheme. I base that off my own experience in donating for software. When I get ahold of a decent app that I feel is really worth more than the standard 99 cents, I generally donate $5-10 to the author/creator via paypal. $10 per person and a $5 would put the amount at the $75 that the author claims he received.

He then goes on to explain that because of the structure of the App Store, he has decided to start selling his apps for around $10 a pop. The structure of the App Store seems to be productive for those who sell over 100,000 copies of an application. That’s pretty expensive for an App Store app, so this is where I decided to see exactly what this author was selling that he thinks is worth so much money.

Here they are: Trip Cubby, Gas Cubby, and Health Cubby. Really, guy? These are what you refer to as such great software? Software you expect to make a living off of? I’m sure they’re good and all, but come on. Aside from the obvious cutsy names to match the “cubby” theme, the Trip and Gas Cubbies are pretty much what the first few applications available from the App Store were (what, no Tip Cubby?), and available from a plethora of authors, some of which were free. I tried 2 or 3 of them out myself. Where are they now? I keep Car Care on my iPhone (which ended up getting 4.5 out of 5 stars from Macworld) but I haven’t used it for about half year now. I’m not saying that Car Care is better or worse, just that there are many good utilities out there that offer varying levels of features that Trip/Gas Cubbies do for varying-to-non-existent prices. Don’t plan on getting rich off them.

I know a few developers who are in reality a one-person operation, but whenever that person refers to his/her company, that company suddenly becomes a second or third person plural. We have created. Our company. The payroll of our employees. Because I know people like this, I cannot help but ask myself, is this really a group of people working in collaboration, or is this simply the product of one person’s spare time and motivation who is a bit disappointed in the amount of money coming in?