iPhoneiPhoneiPhoneiPhone!!!

So, we're all officially feeling the post-keynote RDF buzz, and for a damn good reason.
My thoughts, no particular order:

• My overall reaction? "OMGOMGOMGIWANTONEIWANTONE!!!111eleventy"

• This will entirely turn the smartphone market on its ear and turn them from executive toys to something that soccer moms carry. Nokia, Motorola, RIM and the like have the right to be scared.
  

• Will I be able to turn off EDGE and use only Wi-Fi for data? Cingular's data fees are huge, especially in pay-per-use, and with Wi-Fi hotspots everywhere, I'll take the free option, thanks. (I suppose I can always call Cingular or hop on their account manager site and get rid of the pay-per-use data on my plan.)
  

• What's the price if I won't/can't/don't lock myself in to another 2 years on Cingular? Some have said that it won't be available at any price without a 2 year contract, and others have wondered how Apple+Cingular will force a contract if the phone is purchased at the Apple Store. Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll decide that $499/$599 are the prices before the two year contract, and will come down to $299/$399 after the activation discount. It would make the iPhone more price-competitive with the other smartphones out there, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
  

• I'm wondering how Visual Voicemail works, exactly. My theories:
• The brute-force option is the iPhone gets the voicemail alert silently, secretly dials into the user's voicemail and records the message, then presents its own voicemail notification. However, that seems very hack-ish and lazy, and wouldn't require this deep level carrier integration that Apple's bragging about.
• Another option, and the one I'm most dreading, is that it's data service-based. As in, the network pushes down voicemail messages as audio files over EDGE which are then stashed on the phone. Note my aversion to cellular data above. (Sub theory: This bit of data access is free as part of your iPhone's ordinary service plan?)
• Yet another option is that they have some way using GSM only to random access your voicemail messages that doesn't use data, (IMO the best option) but how this would work is not something I've got figured out yet.
  

• Lack of user-installable applications/widgets would indeed be a bummer, and may or may not be a deal-killer for me. I do, however, very much like Jon's theory on the matter, with one twist. The difference between widgets and applications in the context of the iPhone seems to be almost nil. The Stocks "widget" shown on the iPhone seems to be a straight port from the Dashboard version, and the Weather "widget" seems to only be modified to fit the screen better and allow for multiple locations. Remember that Dashboard widgets can embed Cocoa objects, allowing them much more power than simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (Heck, who knows how much of the iPhone interface is written as "widgets" as it is?) So Apple may, eventually, allow developers to write "widgetlications" (my term) for the iPhone, get them signed and put them on the iPhone one way or the other. In fact, the signing may or may not be required, if Apple's got Cingular in the corporate headlock that they seem to. In any event, I followed Jon's lead and filed a bug report, Radar 4918087. Here's what's inside, in case anyone wants to use it as the basis for their filing:
  

Title: Ability to Develop/Deploy Applications for iPhone
Summary:
Developers should be able to develop, code and deploy their own applications for the iPhone using Xcode. The iPhone's rich software environment and extensive hardware and communications capabilities open up a world of possibilities for third-party developers.

Notes:
see rdar://problem/4917169

Greatest Risk, Greatest Reward

I just learned about this fascinating little piece of Chicago television history.

This is one of those things that's amazing and creepy at the same time. Amazing that he was able to pull it off twice (the second time, uninterrupted by the station) and that he's never been caught. As for the creepy, well, just watch for yourself.

My hat's off to you, though, Max Headroom dude, wherever you are. Very cool trick, even if it was illegal.

Webcomic Viewers on Mac OS X, Round II

OK, so don't ask me what I did, but somehow, iComic 3.0 is running fine for me now, and it has for the past few months.

*shrug*

Huh...what?

So much for that whole "I'm going to post regularly, honest!" thing. I'm not even going to try to say that again, because I think we both know what it really means.

Webcomic Viewers on Mac OS X

For the longest time, I was a faithful user of Steve Saxon's iComic 3.0. It worked great to get all of the comics I like- Dilbert, Garfield, Foxtrot, and Penny Arcade. But alas, with the arrival of Tiger came iComic crashing on startup nine times out of ten. Oh, but Steve announced that he was working on a new spiffy version of iComic that worked with Apple's new buzzword-thy Dashboard environment. So I pulled down a copy of that and installed it. It worked okay, albeit quite slow. It even recognized the vast archives I had amassed. But then I began adding all of my comics to my Dashboard and I noticed one slight problem- there's no way to consolidate multiple comics into one copy of the widget, or to collapse the copies of the widget to make them smaller. So with just the 4 comics I currently read (not counting ones I want to pick up, like Ctrl-Alt-Delete), my screen is well past completely full. And unless someone out there wants to give me a Dell 2405FPW as a late Christmas present, that's not terribly practical. So iComic is out.
I remembered another piece of software, Spiny Software's Comictastic. I'd used it to mass-download the archives of Garfield back when uComics had the entire Garfield collection (back to 1978!) up for the Garfield movie. But I'd dumped the resulting files into iComic because, well, iComic was free and Comictastic was $15. I downloaded a fresh copy of Comictastic and tried it out. Hey, this is really nice! Well worth the shareware fee! Now I just have to....damn. Between the version of Comictastic I used and 2.3.1, the latest version, Jan changed the comic cache format from an iComic-like folder of date-named JPEGs and GIFs to a folder of .ctcache files...packages that include the comic image file and a bunch of other extraneous data related to the strip. So close and yet so far!
So here's the deal, Comictastic folks: give us back the old cache format (it can stay in the new location, but back to the old "folder full of image files" way of storing it) or, better yet, code in an option to either have the extra information or not, and I'll gladly buy a license code for twice your asking price.
Alternative idea: iComic is now open source. iComic stores its' extra data inside the image file's EXIF data. Pick apart how they did that and get the best of both worlds.

Apple Store Link Bookmarklet

Jon posted a note about how hard it is to bookmark a page on the Apple Store. Based on his findings, I threw together a little bookmarklet that will transform an Apple Store session URL to a nice, tidy bookmarkable URL:

Apple Store Links

Just stick that in your bookmarks bar, and click on it at the product page. The page will refresh with your bookmarkable URL shown this time.

Update:
Fixed it! I guess reading from and writing to document.location.href at the same shot wasn't such a great idea. ;-) Now it works in Safari, Firefox, and even Internet Explorer, if you're, y'know...a masochist or something.

Oh, and props to Jesse Ruderman for his rockin' JavaScript Dev Environment and JavaScript Shell, without which writing this bookmarklet would've been a heck of a lot harder.

Update 2:
I'd intended to mention the trick that my bookmarklet uses to get the part number that it appends to the URL that Jon so helpfully provided. It turns out that the session URLs also contain the part number in a URL parameter called "nplm". For example:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE...?mco=F6E8EACE&nplm=M9779LL%2FA

My bookmarklet searches for that "nplm=" and grabs the next 11 characters after it. The slash in the part number is even already URI encoded for me.

Makes Me Dizzy...

OK, so yesterday my mom, my brother and I all got new cell phones on Cingular. This way, we'll all be on one family plan and be able to call each other as much as we like, I can call Britt as much as I like, it'll all be gravy. Got really cool phones, too.

I come to find out today that Cingular is becoming AT&T (again?)

Why can't these companies just pick one name and stick with it? I found out not too long ago that BankOne, who I'd just moved my checking account to, was becoming Chase.

Cingular: take some advice- stay as Cingular. Leave all this AT&T (Wireless or not) nonsense behind, keep playing with that quirky little orange dude and don't change your name for at least two more years. Please?