yjblog

Hooray!

The boarding apartment I’m staying in has a curious design at the front door — a 5 x 4 grid of rack space, apparently for people with a shitload of shoes. I decided to put up a little shrine to my favourite company there.

From left: Windows Vista (oops), iPod nano, Mac OS X Leopard, iBottle, iPod dock, iPod power connector, iPod touch, iPhone, Nike+ iPod kit, iPod classic. Some boxes stolen.

Missing: PowerBook and MacBook Pro boxes (too large, rather silly to bring them over from home), Mac OS X Tiger (also at home).

Guess I won’t be needing both of these now, will I?

16 gig for USD499 + 8% taxes + $30 shipping, and a horrifically long wait for shipping by the US Postal Service (damn you for your slowness! And your catchy tunes!). Pretty reasonable price, especially with the hilariously weak USD (the dwindling value of my USD investments mean nothing compared to having an iPhone). Also surprisingly easy to unlock — one click, four minutes, bliss! See here.

Reviewers have said plenty about the phone proper, but I figure there’s no harm adding a bit to the great online blogovoid-of-crap about using an iPhone in Singapore from a heavy data user’s* point of view. Data settings for M1 were reasonably easy to find on Google — Settings, General, Network, EDGE; APN sunsurf, username 65, password user123. Pretty standard.

First slight annoyance after syncing with my Mac address book — the phone either didn’t recognise callers or SMS senders, depending on whether they had the +65 country code prefix in front. Callers were recognised if they didn’t have +65 in front; SMS senders were recognised only if they did. My Nokia used to deal with both fine. I toyed with the idea of adding both versions to my contact list, but was alerted to the presence of Installer application AppSupport, which fixed the problem. I also had to make some changes to the country list to reduce lag — there’s some pretty good documentation at iClarified.

The mobile web experience on GPRS is, needless to say, two giant bucketloads slower than on my Nokia 3G phone. However, the Nokia used to take nearly half a minute just to start up (start Opera Mini, wait 10 seconds; enter address, wait for phone to “scan available networks”, wait 5 seconds; choose the same bloody connection I always use why do you even bother asking and wait for it to connect, wait 5-10 seconds for “Connecting…” dialog; wait for data), so I’m glad to have the iPhone’s seamless experience for getting online (start Safari, wait 1 second; enter address, wait an admittedly long amount of time for data).

Having it able to check my mail every 30 minutes, regardless of Wi-Fi availability, is also nice, and the battery lasts decently long with this setup. The Nokia could do that with the Gmail Java app, but would lose half its battery life within 4 hours of being online. The iPhone does eat data like nobody’s business (1 meg a day if I leave it alone, obviously plenty more if I surf the web), but at least it’s making good use of my M1 1 gig data plan ($22).

After five days of use, I’m satisfied. How could I not be? I’m one of those raving Apple apologists, after all. Hopefully SingTel comes up with something better in September.

* Nearly 100 megs a month, or one-tenth of a ton, depending on how you read that.

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now — link.

Anyway, from daringfireball:

Remember back in November when Palm CEO Ed Colligan was quoted saying, with regard to a then-hypothetical Apple phone, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Guess what? They’re just walking in.

Made especially amusing by the following table (TUAW):

Alright, now which of my friends in the US wants to sign up for a two-year Cingular contract this June so I can have my iPhone before 2008?

Came across this pretty randomly today — Disco, the mystery Mac application featured for pre-order on MacZOT a while ago (who’ve recently gotten annoyingly kinda caught up in selling “mystery software”) finally has its own website, linked above. It’s from the same people who made AppZapper, a fine piece of shareware, but not much else is known about it other than this screenshot they recently posted:

It’s probably got something to do with burning discs, and their subtitle “We’re having toast for breakfast” seems to imply some form of direct competition with Roxio’s Toast software as well. Just a disc burning tool seems too obvious, so I’m hoping it’s some form of solution for burning media files as consumer electronics-readable discs (e.g. DVDs from xvids).

Link to Disco application website.

Also, umm, more comics at some point, yes. Sorry.

The new Safari web inspector (available in nightly Webkit downloads) looks very, very nice. Hopefully this makes it into a stable release of the browser itself, or someone hacks it in.

The Web Inspector lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers and WebKit hackers alike. The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.

(from Surfin’ Safari)

Screenshot (click to enlarge):

Dammit. The new MacBook Pros show up right around when the extended warranty on my trusty old PowerBook expires. Chinese new year ang pows + one month’s salary should raise just about enough funds for one. Hmmmmm.

So if the PowerBooks have been renamed to MacBooks, do the PowerMacs become MacMacs?

So Wednesday’s very cool Apple announcements came and went (won’t bother providing links — it’s all over the online news world), and people are bemoaning the iPod video and the iTunes video store for their lack of, well, everything (low download resolution, no DivX support, etc.).

Engadget’s The Clicker column, however, raises the likely point: it’s likely all part of Apple’s evil plan. My favourite proposition from the site that I can definitely see coming true? From “Step 3: Help drive Torrent traffic”:

What if, on the other hand, a new set of torrents emerged. Instead of files intended for all types of destination devices, these files just assume they’ll be played on the wildly popular iPod. It would be easy enough to encode iPod friendly versions. It’s just H.264 and Apple (surprise surprise) offers a $29.99 upgrade to its Quicktime Pro package which offers encoding into H.264.

All of a sudden you’ll be able to look at:

Lost.S01.E02.ipod

and know that not only will the file play on your iPod, but that it’s been optimized to do so. Suddenly, the lack of DivX support isn’t so important. In fact, by excluding DivX Apple might have given the torrent community the direction it needs to truly make iPod torrents consumer friendly.

The article goes on to mention how this would pressure content owners into coming up with better content and pricing, but I stopped paying attention after that little quote above… iPod-tailored torrent downloads! The sheer fucking brilliance of it all.