spain, rubyfringe, iphone

I’m back from Spain. It was awesome. Barcelona is my new favorite city. Also, the Citroen C2 is amazingly roomy for a tiny car and has an insane turning radius. Hopefully I’ll steal Auriol’s photos soon and you can all see them.

I landed at 9pm on Friday and headed immediately to the opening night event of RubyFringe, Unspace’s punk-rock tech conference. The whole thing was an unmitigated success (in my humble opinion) and I was very glad that everyone I asked seemed to agree. All of the presentations ranged from “awesome” to “best I’ve ever seen”. The food and parties set a new bar for tech conferences (in my humble opinion). Though lots of people helped out, my fellow unspacer Meghann deserves an insane amount of applause for doing such an amazing job organizing and planning the event. Checkout what people are saying about RubyFringe on Twitter here and tons of photos on flickr here.

And now that I’m back, I went out and bought a 16GB iPhone. $90 a month to the man (Ted Rogers). Maybe I should buy like $1000 worth of Rogers stock just so I feel like I’m not getting completely screwed by this GSM monopoly.

RuinedIphone.com | Screwing Canadian iPhone customers since 2008. i agree. but come on people, there’s better things to protest.

iTunes 7.7 to allow remote iPhone/iTouch control. that’s cool. via ram.

Coming Soon, Even Faster EDGE Networks - GigaOM. seems nokia has a software solution to double EDGE networks. iPhone users rejoice.

Steve Jobs speaks out - FORTUNE. page 10 on “overcoming roadblocks” is really interesting.

FT.com - Google homes in on revenues from phones “Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset”

AppleInsider | Rogers unlimited data plan an inroad for iPhone in Canada?. $20 for unlimited data on phones other than blackberrys. that took long enough.

Edward Tufte on the iPhone interface. tufte had to take this video off his site for a couple days cause it got hit too much.

apple stuff

Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?

Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.

Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.

Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. really, wireless web access on any other phone is just ghetto.


David Lynch on iPhone. oh man is he crazy. i love it.

Apple - To all iPhone customers. You’re getting $100 back. Also, you know apple is rolling in it when they can just dole out $50M in refunds.

Apple launches 3 new ipods: a nano with video, a bigger standard ipod, and the ipod touch. which is basically an iphone without a phone.

Facebook for iPhone. a very usable iphone page.

iUI. css + javascript for iphone apps. via ram.

Apple Hard At Work Making iPhone Obsolete | The Onion
“When the second-generation iPhone comes out this fall, we want iPhone users to feel not just jealous, but downright foolish for owning such laughably primitive technology”

AppleInsider | Apple to see near 50% gross margin on each iPhone sale. not too shabby.

Engadget: 10 million Page Views on iPhone Day. that’s 10 times more than normal. and that’s one busy blog.

YouTube - A Closer Look At The iPhone. cbs news footage of the iphone in use. pretty slick. via ram.

GigaOM » Forget iPhone, Think Google Phone. rumor has it that google is talking to HTC and Orange about a possible google phone. Om fuels the rumor further by pointing out a purchase google made last year related to a possible mobile/cell OS.