NorthOfNormal

 

Seattle skyline, with cloud

Originally uploaded by briburt

Just a recent photo I took + a little editing in PhotoShop = not a bad picture at all. (Taken from the balcony of a friend’s house in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle).

Even though I didn’t specifically process it as an HDR shot, it has that look and feel about it.

Durham, boats on the River Wear

Originally uploaded by briburt

More boats on the River Wear in Durham. I think I like this one a bit better than the one that only has the wooden boats that I posted earlier.

Again this was just taken as a quick snapshot with a point-and-shoot Sony Cybershot digicam. I saw the boats, leaned over the railing of the Elvet Bridge and took the shot. Not much conscious thought involved.

 

English Channel, from Bamburgh Castle

Originally uploaded by briburt

I wish I could achieve the simplicity of this composition more often.

The funny thing about this shot was that it was taken as more of a snapshot in just a moment of time. I didn’t think about composing it first. I just ducked my head through an archway as we were wandering around the castle grounds, and I just took a quick shot, and moved on.

I do notice that the less I think consciously about composition, the better my shots turn out (for the most part).

Wall & Sky, Northumberland, England
Originally uploaded by briburt

This one makes a very nice iPhone wallpaper. I have got to get back to northern England again soon!

Northern England had the most dramatic skies. I tried to capture this drama as best I could when we were there last year, and I am just now getting around to sorting out the best photos. This is one of them, I think.

English Channel, Near Bamburgh Castle

Originally uploaded by briburt

Yet another attempt to capture the dramatic sky and landscape around Bamburgh castle in Northeastern England when we were there last year.

Durham, boats on the River Wear,
originally uploaded by briburt.

Just took this with my point-and-shoot Sony digicam without thinking about it very much. I just pointed the camera and got the shot. Funny how sometimes the best “compositions” are just sitting there waiting to be captured in a photo.

Fiddled with the color and contrast a bit in Photoshop, but other than that I didn’t do anything to deliberately “compose” this photo. The scene felt as tranquil as it looked, and I just managed to capture it.

Clouds over England,
originally uploaded by briburt.

Another English sky. One of the better photos I took there.

A great, rambling, quasi psychedelic post from Fake Steve Jobs today about the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas. The first part of the post is truly strange, but eventually (and as usual) Fake Steve cuts to the heart of things about what CES really means. Have a look for yourself, but here is the money quote:

I realized this morning as I staggered through the show floor with my head spinning that the show itself is a metaphor for the future of the digital home — and guess what? The future is not a place you’re going to want to visit. The future, in fact, is going to be a fucking nightmare, a total clusterfuck with everybody from Nokia to Seagate to Comcast to Verizon to Microsoft to Netgear launching overlapping products and overlapping services and everyone claiming they’re going to bring all of the zillions of pieces together into some kind of magical coherent whole.

Everybody talks about how you’re going to just move from one screen to another and take all your phone calls and data and videos and music with you wherever you go. The reality is that everybody is pushing only pieces of the puzzle, just ingredients in what is looking more and more like a highly fucked up stew. Hodgepodge city. Everyone agrees that physical media — DVDs and CDs — are dead, and battles like SACD v. DVD-A and Blu-ray v. HD-DVD are pointless. Everyone agrees that electronic distribution is the future. But nobody can figure out how the fuck this is going to happen.

The whole situation is crying out for someone to come in and make sense of it the way Apple made sense of digital music with iTunes and iPods. Lesson there was simple: People will give up freedom and sign away their souls if you can make a system that works. Whoever figures this one out is going to make a holy shitload of money.

My friend, Tim, and my good buddy, Seacat, (and now Blake, my favorite dangerously opinionated software developer and chronic entrepreneur) all just bought iPhones in the last 24 hours, and independently of each other (they don’t even know each other), they all sent me e-mail from their iPhones and used exactly the same phrase to describe it: “fucking amazing.” And I totally agree. As I noted in detail in an earlier post, the iPhone’s touch-screen design, inspired user interface, and thoughtfully implemented application integration adds up to an extraordinary user experience.

But the iPhone, though an astonishing achievement, is still a version 1.0 product and is not perfect, as I have discovered a number of times while using my iPhone extensively over the past couple of weeks. The good news is that all but one of the issues I’ve run into so far can be addressed in software, which makes it at least within the realm of possibility that Apple will deal with them.

If Apple does deal with these design issues, then the iPhone will become even closer to being the perfect mobile device than it already is. (Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t mean to join the ranks of the iPhone bashers. My list is meant as constructive criticism. I only want to show how this amazing device could be made even better than it already is.)

So, below is my list of the 12 things I would change in the iPhone to make it the ne plus ultra of mobile computing (in no particular order).

1. Tweak the E-mail app to make it more usable and scalable.
   E-mail on the iPhone looks better than e-mail on any other mobile device I’ve ever used. And if you’re dealing with a low volume of mail and one mail account, it is probably fine as-is. But for those who get lots of mail coming from multiple mail accounts, the current E-mail app doesn’t scale very well. It needs to deal better with multiple messages (like, how do I zap a bunch of messages simultaneously without having to go through and delete each one manually) and multiple accounts (we really need a single “Unread Messages” inbox that lists all unread messages from all accounts). In addition, it would be nice to have more push e-mail options (other than Yahoo mail) so that those who want Blackberry-like e-mail functionality can have it.
2. Add iChat.
   Currently, this is a glaring omission in the iPhone. Even most cheap-ass phones other carriers give away when you sign away your life for 2 years have a Chat application built-in. C’mon Apple. Don’t tell me you can figure out how to design the most amazing user interface ever built for a device since the Beginning of Time, and you can’t figure out how to get chat working. This should be one of their top priorities, I think.
3. Let people send SMS messages to multiple recipients.
   I’m not a big text message guy. I prefer e-mail or chat. But, again, being able to send an SMS text message to multiple recipients is such a common use-case that I can’t believe that Apple left it out.
4. Redesign the Notes app.
   It is currently ugly and nearly useless. It is the only feature on the iPhone that feels like it is implemented in a half-assed, less-than-thoughtful way. The font used for the Notes text is out-and-out ugly, and I have no option to change it. The Notes aren’t integrated with anything else on the device and don’t sync up to anything on my Mac. We need some useful way of creating short text notes and sync’ing them back out to our computers. Very underwhelming in its current state.
5. Fix the recessed headphone port.
   For some unfathomable reason, the headphone port on the iPhone is recessed in from the outer surface, which makes about 90% of 3rd-party headphone jacks not fit into the port without a special adapter or without you having to take a penknife and shave about 1/16″ of plastic off the headphone jack itself. What they were thinking, here, I don’t know, but from my perspective, it is the only real hardware design flaw. (The lack of a user replaceable battery doesn’t bother me in the least, btw.)
6. Enable landscape mode for all appropriate applications.
   Landscape mode looks awesome for video, photos, iPod, and Safari, and if you’re typing on the virtual keyboard, landscape mode makes true thumb typing a lot easier. But not all applications currently do landscape mode. E-mail and Google Maps are simply crying out for landscape mode, for instance.
7. Implement an option for Safari to Autofill fields in forms (like user name and address fields).
   Or at least learn my user name after I’ve typed it in a “user name” field more than fifteen times and offer it as a typing suggestion. I’m already tired of typing the same info over and over again on web pages.
8. Add To-Do lists.
   And sync them with with Apple Calendar To-Do lists, Entourage Tasks, or Outlook Tasks. Again, this seems like a real no-brainer in terms of how people use mobile devices. Heck, even the original Palm Pilot had a To-Do list front and center back in the day.
9. Put an Address Book icon on the main screen.
   Currently, the fastest way to get to your address book is through the Phone feature. Viewing your contacts seems to me to be such a common use-case on a device like this that the feature should have an icon on the main screen. It’s one of the few features on the device that new users don’t just automatically discover without being told where it’s at.
10. Let people save document and image attachments directly to the device.
    Just discovered yesterday that there is no way to take an image that you receive via e-mail on the iPhone, add it to the photo library on the iPhone, and sync it out to my Mac. Same goes for other document attachments. We should be able to save these attachments separately from an e-mail message on the device, if we so desire.
11. Add cut/copy/paste to typing with the keyboard.
    ‘Nuff said. I ran into the need for this one within minutes of typing my first message on the keyboard.
12. Add true 3G wireless connectivity.
    EDGE is not as bad as some people make it out to be (I go back to the days when 1200 baud modems were considered speed demons, btw, so my perspective is probably warped), but it is also Not Good, and will never be characterized as speedy. Experiencing the iPhone-web-on-WiFi and the iPhone-web-on-EDGE are two very different experiences, and seeing the speed that the WiFi connection brings to the experience makes me hungry to have that kind of speed on the device all the time.

That’s it. Feel free to add any more in the comments.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Well, I’ve had an iPhone now for a few days, and what can I say? It is simply amazing. An extraordinary device that will change how we interact with technology. And not only does it work exactly as advertised, but across all the iPhone’s features, it just works exactly as you’d expect. It is the most advanced technology I’ve ever used while being simultaneously so easy to learn that my 6-year old son figured it out within minutes.

Now, I realize you’ve all probably heard enough iPhone jabber over the past six months to last a lifetime. Even I can’t believe how the media hype machine went into overdrive on this one. But, for once, in this one magical case, the hype is pretty close to being justified. This ain’t the Zune, folks. So, let’s just ignore all of the hype and consumerism and frothing at the mouth for or against Apple’s masterful marketing campaign for a moment and just focus on what Apple has achieved with the iPhone, just focus on what it actually is, and what it means for the future of technology design.

It is a masterpiece of software design melded together with hardware that looks as if it could be on display at MoMA. It is absolutely THE state-of-the-art in user interface design, and all future mobile device UI designs will be measured in terms of how they stack up against the iPhone. The touch-screen interface is extraordinary, a revelation of design. It is everything we hoped it would be when we saw it demo’ed at the SteveNote at Macworld last January — and then some.

The overall user experience is a singular, inspired, artistic vision carried out consistently across an entire hardware/software platform. Indeed, using it feels magical. Just swipe your finger to scroll though a list of albums, or stretch a picture to zoom in on it, and you’ll know what I mean.

When I’m using it, I feel this same sense of wonder I had back in 1984 when I first used the original Mac — like I am living inside some sort of science fiction story about the future, where the technology does all this amazing stuff that can’t possible be real, but is. I really want to capture this feeling right now, because what feels so new and different and wondrous now marks a paradigm shift that will become the norm, just as happened with the original Mac’s GUI and mouse. In the future, we’ll think that interacting with devices in this way was always this easy and smooth.

In most of the reviews of the iPhone I’ve read so far, there has been a lot of emphasis on features — features Apple chose to put in, features that were left out (chat, games, etc.), features that 3rd-party devs aren’t being allowed to build because Apple has not opened up the platform etc etc etc. And this is the way that the techno geek boys at Engadget and Gizmodo like to focus on stuff: get your feature charts and lists and argue about this feature or that, and mainly complain that it doesn’t have this one feature that they really want and therefore the whole device will suck.

But for me the one overriding feature, the killer feature of this device that almost no one ever even mentions is that IT JUST WORKS. And it works in such a visually stunning and intuitive manner that you really have trouble putting it down. The iPhone is simply a joy to use. I’ve used Windows Mobile and Blackberry and Palm devices and of course the atrocious Motorola phone UI, and there is no feature that the iPhone has that these devices don’t have in one form or another.

The iPhone’s achievement is not in the features it includes or excludes. It is in the nearly perfect execution of the features it does include and their total integration together in a way that makes it fun to actually use it, rather than a chore.

Time after time, I notice little touches that show the high degree of thought that went into designing the device. The totality of the experience is so seamless and so breathtaking and works so smoothly, that you don’t even think about how hard it must have been to make it all work so effortlessly together. It is this illusion of effortlessness — this covering of complexity in a cloak of simplicity — that makes the achievement even more stunning.

Now when I say all of this, I don’t mean that the iPhone is without flaws or couldn’t use a few tweaks here and there. No, there are things about it that are annoyances, but these are mere quibbles in the face of its monumental design achievements.

For instance, it really would benefit from a dedicated chat program, and I’d like to see some simple games (like Bejeweled or Zuma) ported over. SlingPlayer also seems like it would be a natural fit for the device. The e-mail program needs some tweaks to make it easier to delete multiple items, and it would be nice to be able to copy/paste text, and would be even nicer if Safari would remember username and password fields.

I had had my doubts about the touchscreen keyboard, and it definitely took some getting used to, but it has become a real non-issue — I won’t be writing the great American novel on the device, but I had no expectations that I would. It works fine for what it was designed to do. The AT&T EDGE data network is noticeably slower than Wi-Fi for web browsing, and AT&T as a company just isn’t very customer-service oriented (I like T-Mobile much better). But as I said, these are mere quibbles.

The phone functions are logical and easy to figure out, and the integrated Google maps are simply awesome. The contacts and calendar features are also inspired and elegantly usable. Web browsing works amazingly well, and the media features — iPod music and videos, podcasts, YouTube, photos — all work beautifully and look stunning on the screen.

And speaking of the screen, it is a thing of beauty — sharp and clear with deeply saturated colors. Indeed, the overall look of the device is almost jewel-like while feeling very substantial and sturdy. The case is very solidly engineered and feels like it could withstand some hard use — stuck in pockets or purses with keys, dropped on the sidewalk (god forbid!), and the like. (I’ve been carrying it around in my front pants pocket, and I am usually very hard on phones, but I have yet to see a single mark on the front or back; be forewarned, though, that the glass front will collect smudges and fingerprints all over it.)

The overall look of the iPhone makes other fugly smartphones (Motorola Q, I’m looking at you!) look like they were designed as part of a junior high science fair project. Put simply, the iPhone will be the standard to which all future mobile device design will be held.

The upshot: if you have been on the fence about switching to the iPhone, it is time to get off the fence and go get yourself one. You won’t be sorry.