After years of denying myself a cell phone, I finally could no longer forestall the inevitable and decided to give more of my money to Steve Jobs. The end result is my new Apple iPhone which I have come to nickname Athena. In the past 12 months I have had to be on-call for my day job and so I have had to carry some sort of company cell phone. The first was a Microsoft Windows Mobile which I must admit was easy to use, if you have had any experience with Windows at all. The second was a 7100 Blackberry which I found user-unfriendly and annoying to use if you were trying to do anything with it that was not phone related. For example, trying to use BlackBerry Browser or even Opera Mini on it was an exercise in futility. It took forever to type in urls, and when it did display a web page it was hard to look at. Some sites were better than others, but overall I really could not do much with the Internet on the Blackberry.

iPhone 1.1

Since the iPhone 1.1 Update came out the day after I got the phone, I never had a chance to really experience the iPhone at 1.0. That much said, after spending $400 for the phone itself, another $25 on a case, then there is the $36 activation plan, and then the $80 plan, the money quickly adds up and in the end you have what many consider an over-priced phone, (that is until you start looking at other smartphones and find out that the iPhone is not even the most expensive phone out there).

My daily experience is that I leave my iPhone charging overnight (connected to my Powerbook). I use iTunes to eject the iPhone and then physically unplug it from its cable. The iPhone comes with a dock, but if you use a case, it is much easier to just use the connection cable without the dock. I have setup the phone to use an unlock code, so after pressing the home button which is located towards the bottom, you then slide your finger on the bottom of the screen and enter your pass code. The iPhone comes up to your last screen, or the Home screen.

The Home screen has all your applications: Text for text messaging all your friends, Calendar for keeping track of your dates, Photos which holds your saved images (on a Mac, this syncs up with iPhoto), Camera for taking quick pictures, YouTube for watching videos, Stocks for seeing how rich Apple is getting everyday, Maps is straight from Google, Weather, Clock which has a world clock, stop watch, and alarms, Calculator, Notes which lets you jot down quick notes, Settings for all things you need to change or know about your iPhone, and iTunes which is the iTunes Store and not your iPod.

At the bottom of the Home screen there is a dock which has four buttons, which are really the four main uses of the iPhone: Phone for making calls, Mail for email, Safari for web browsing, and iPod for listening and viewing your iTunes collection.

Wow, It’s an iPhone!

While I asked everyone what they thought of the iPhone as a phone, the most I heard was that it was adequate as a phone. There is really nothing spectacular about the iPhones phone features. Where the iPhone really impresses is with Web browsing and the touch interface which allows you to be more productive then other phones. Originally I had settled on three choices for a phone, the Blackberry Pearl, a Samsung Blackjack, or an iPhone. Since I really wanted was a good internet browsing experience, it came down to the Blackjack or iPhone, however in the end I can never resist Apple technology, so I am sure it really was not that hard of a choice after all.

Some of the best things I like doing on the iPhone are adding contacts, connecting to WiFi networks, surfing the Web, and checking my email accounts. The contacts are actually under the Phone section and they sync up with the Address Book in Mac OS X. The iPhone automatically can connect to most open WiFi networks, though I have had problems with networks that require a sign-up page in a browser. For my own secure WPA network, it took a while to get it connected due to my long pre-shared key, but now that it is setup, I enjoy very speedy browsing at home. You can even use your iPhone to scan for wireless networks. For email, I was able to setup GMail very easily and personal domain email takes a bit longer to setup, but works equally well.

Overall with the iPhone, you can stay connected all day long to the Internet, to phone calls, to email. It is almost frighteningly to think about if you believe in conspiracy theories.

Limitations

Given everything that is great about the iPhone, there are some limitations. Namely you are tied to AT&T for two years. You can change your plan at any time without a fee, but plan changes reset your contract, so be aware of this before changing plans! Text Messaging is limited for the cheaper plans, so you might want to upgrade to unlimited messaging. There is no IM client builtin, so you will have to use a web service for instant messaging. Hardware wise, the biggest complaint is the battery, which is not user replaceable. And of course Apple and AT&T have locked the iPhone pretty well from anything that can hurt their business model. If you can live with all these limitations, then the iPhone experience is a pretty amazing one.

More iPhone Opinons

• Terry White’s iPhone Review

Over the last year, I have mostly been doing support for web based applications. It certainly has been a big change from having to support general Windows and Citrix users. The most obvious thing that struck me about web applications is the large number of problems that users encounter that are simply due to their browser. I quickly learned that there is no perfect browser, and at times there is not even one that works! By this time I have heard all the comments.

There is the adamant user who thinks the world belongs to IE6 and that “industry standard” is a synonym for Windows IE6. While IE6 is not the worst browser on the planet, it is prone to lots and lots of problems, in general everyone has a problem with IE6. Web designers hate it, cause of the CSS bugs that they have had to code for it. End users hate it because IE6 is usually so locked down by network administrators that it is practically worthless for running anything complicated at times. IT admins hate it because they have to lock it down or else all their users will install spamware toolbars and create more problems. Support people hate it cause they have to spend all day, trying to figure out how to disable pop-up blockers, reset security zones to their default level, and of course the old stand-by: deleting temporary internet files.

Then there is IE7, the better cousin of IE6. Except that IE7 has a new fangled interface and very little in real features or improvements. Then there is that whole thing about many sites not even supporting it officially. In other words, IE7 is a big disappointment, in that it has almost all the same problems as IE6.

Now as to the Firefox lovers out there, let me just say that Firefox is one inconsistent browser. It is harder to support, because there is no target version out there as of today, that I can point to and say it is the standard for Firefox. On average I encounter the 1.5 version of Firefox every day! I would even say, that it is more popular than even the 2.0 version! Just yesterday, I encountered 1.0 Firefox running on a Macintosh! While I like the CSS rendering, and love the expandability of Firefox, I also cannot count on any consistency with Firefox. On average I see problems with Firefox acting differently than IE when it goes through a proxy and running scripts. Common Firefox extensions like AdBlock cause tons of support problems, and did I mention that Firefox seriously lags on the Macintosh platform.

Last but not least is Safari, the up and coming star of the Internet. Safari has doubled its usage and if Apple strikes gold with their Apple iPhone, then Safari usage is sure to go higher. The more you think about it, the more you realize that Apple really needs to deliver a Windows version of Safari. It only makes sense to have Safari compete on Windows. Unlike IE6 it has a nice interface design and is simple to use. Apple has ignored add-ons and stuck with a slimmed down browser, while Firefox has somewhat embraced more bloat features with the 2.0 and future 3.0 versions. In general Safari does work well on the Macintosh platform. I can think of only two glaring problems, its CSS rendering does not work very well for sites that only test IE6 compatibility, and it does somewhat slowdown if you do not clean out favicons and pre-fill form data. Making the leap to Windows though would be hard, Apple would have to most likely use SUN’s JAVA run-time on Windows, and utilize more of the Windows operating system. These are all challenges that Mozilla has tackled and done so only much trial and error.

In conclusion, all browsers have inherent problems. Depending on your view, you can find glaring issues for any of the top browsers. According to my own Mint stats for WebKeyDesign.com, most of my site visitors use Firefox and IE, with Safari running a distant third. My personal favorites though would have to be Safari on OS X and Firefox 2.0 on Windows, and even then I find myself having to customize and hack both heavily before I am even comfortable using them. After all who would use Safari without a Tab button (in the toolbar)?

As usual, last Sunday night, my Powerbook decided to come down with a really strange problem. It slowed to a crawl and for a moment I thought my hard drive was dying a slow death. However Disk Utility, showed no problems at all, so I was a bit puzzled by the problem. Eventually after deleting cache files with Cache Out X and rebuilding Prebindings and Spotlight databases, everything was back to normal. Apparantly it does not matter if I run Windows or OS X, I still end up doing computer maintenance at late hours of the night, when I could be sleeping.

I found these terminal commands handy. Unlike third party utilities, you can run these on any up-to-date OS X system.

To update Prebindings manually:

sudo update_prebinding -root / -force

To delete the Spotlight database from the boot volume:

sudo mdutil -E /

To run Software Update from terminal:

softwareupdate -l

To install Software Updates found:

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

Notes: Prebindings usually do not have to be redone, as OS X does this automatically, but if you are having a strange problem; rebuilding might help. Deleting the Spotlight database forces OS X to rebuild it right away, so it is best to let the computer sit overnight while it indexes the vloume. Spotlight is a feature of Mac OS X 10.4. For Software Update, terminal will not prompt for restart, so you must remember to do this after the updates are installed.

To Disable DMG File Verification:

defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true

For web designers who don’t have access to a Mac OS X machine, you might be interested in the Swift browser which is a ported version of WebKit. The same engine Apple uses for Mac OS X’s Safari web browser. The port is very alpha quality, but it at least allows you to see how your site renders in Safari.

At the time of this writing, the site was down. However I was able to download the msi file and install it. If you would like to install Swift, you need to know that VisualC Runtime engine is required for the browser to even load. If the main site is still down, you can download the 0.1 msi installer in rar format from this site.

Swift 0.1.msi.rar

Everyone who knows me, knows I love everything Macintosh, and even in the dark days of Classic MacOS, I still did not give up and praise WindowsNT as the greatest of operating systems. The truth is that Apple makes great consumer products. The iMac was about packaging and catering to the consumer and since then Apple has excelled at giving consumers what they want in nice shiny products like the iPod and MacBook. However, after being in the business world for ten years, I have picked up a thing or two about the business world and just how this particular market segment works, and I must admit that Apple just does not get business users.

When I read statements about how Apple is poised to take over and reach critical market share growth, I cannot help but think these columnists are simply deluded. Apple will never reach a major market share without giving business users the solutions that they need. As much as I love the new Black MacBook, it is not a good business solution. In the world of business, you do not buy a laptop based on what color it is or how cool it looks, you buy it because it fulfills your needs and is cheap. Toshiba, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have business class laptops that can be had for $699. Sure these laptops are not as nice as the MacBook, but in the business world, the boss does not care. In business, the boss gets a great MacBook Pro, and the rest of his staff will have to do with Dell Latitudes.

Being more expensive is just one of the problems Apple faces in penetrating the business world. The main issue boils down to complete solutions. Business needs reliable support, planning, and software.

With Windows, you can get support everywhere and anywhere. If you run Mac OS X, most support technicians will recoil in ignorance and question why you even have a Mac. This is a huge problem for businesses who take it for granite that they can hire or farm out support to almost anyone, since everyone knows Windows. What Apple needs to do is to really offer business users separate support and asure them that they can get on-site support if they need it. This is easier said than done.

The next step is better planning. There has to be better and more frequent documentation of Mac OS X and Apple hardware. While Mac OS X gives users plenty of powerful tools like PHP, Apache, MySQL, it has also given users, programmers, and companies plenty of problems. Like the way SMB Shares work differently on each version of OS X, or the way OS X has developed with some APIs changing throughout the process. Apple needs to be consistent and help their customers plan for these changes.

Last we have software itself. Even with the abundance of OS X apps, OS X still does not have adequate business software. What Apple needs is really iOffice, a suite of applications focused at helping business users. For example, maybe Apple could take a clue from Microsoft on this one. Why not make a professional version of OS X that includes Pro versions of applications needed only for business? The issue is that Apple really has not thought about what small business users really need? Office management, accounting, scheduling, are just some of the areas that come to mind. I would think that if there was such a thing as a $600 iOffice that would handle just scheduling and simple entry accounting, that the small business market would break down the doors to switch. My own personal experience with QuickBooks was trying and I know if Apple could come up with a simplified QuickBooks they would more than save me countless hours, they would get my praises as well.

But all of this would have to mean Apple would have to change, from being the cool consumer oriented Apple to a solutions oriented company. Most of all it would mean Jobs would have to devote some actual talented people and plenty of resources to a market that would not yield immediate profits and which could possibly damage the company’s consumer popularity. I still think Apple iOffice would be a great idea and maybe perhaps Apple could actually help all us QuickBook users who have no clue what double-entry accounting is.