Opinions

An app getting a lot of attention lately is an app called Birdhouse. Birdhouse is a unique Twitter application for the iPhone with the purpose of captureing your ideas for Twitter posts with the intention of perfecting them over time.

You can save and rate as many drafts as you like and sort them by time or by rating. You can also add multiple accounts which is something a lot of Twitter users like.

Once you’ve tweaked your tweet, you can publish it from Birdhouse and view an archive of published Birdhouse tweets.

I have received a few emails that this just isn’t an app that that is worth the $3.99 especially with the iPhone 3.0 software soon to be released. So tell me - what do you think about this new app? Leave your opinions in the comments.

Apple doesn’t comment on rumors or give users a roadmap to the future so no one is quite sure what today’s press conference about iPhone 3.0 will reveal. That doesn’t mean you can’t dream (for a few more hours anyway, after that your hopes for an iPhone nano will be smashed against the unyielding wall of reality) for nifty new features. Macworld has done just that with a list of fifteen things they’d like to see revealed at today’s event.

All the usual suspects are on the list: cut and paste, Spotlight, tethering etc. The more interesting thing about the list isn’t what is there but how basic the stuff on the list is. It’s basically fifteen items of “Wy the hell hasn’t this been here since the first iPhone came out?”  A little depressing really but it is important to remember that the iPhone excels at usability. Sure a lot of phones can do everything on the list but none of them do it very easily.

If you look hard enough you can find a lot of annoyances with the iPhone, why we just posted a story earlier about 8 iPhone annoyances. Of course there are obvious annoyances and not so obvious annoyances. For an example of not so obvious annoyances consider the decline button. You know, the button you use to send people straight to voicemail. Now contemplate if the button is in the right place. Shawn Blanc has done just that. From the article:

There is one thing that I still have not gotten used to: the location of the ‘Decline’ and ‘Answer’ buttons when there’s an incoming call and the phone’s screen is not locked. This throws me off every single time.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. Shawn spends several paragraphs of careful argumentation on the topic. The post (iPhone’s Misplaced Decline Button?) is well reasoned, well written and well worth reading. The only downside of Shawn’s xcellent observation is after reading it the decline button, which most of us never gave a second thought to, will now bug you all the time.

John Gruber has a nice piece up on the recently concluded Mobile World Conference. John grabs some of the best quotes emanating from various CEO’s pie holes and susses out the deeper meaning. And that meaning is: Crap the iPhone is killing us. Well that’s what I got out of it, John’s conclusion differed, he thinks what the CEOs were trying to say was:

We’d all have more choices if we’d all just choose Windows Mobile.

Either way it is rich stuff.

At our sister site Apple Matters, Chris Howard has an interesting piece up on the fate of the iPhone. Specifically Chris is wondering if the iPhone’s lack of features will doom the device. After hearing the doom sayers wondering where some particular feature Chris concludes they have it wrong.  From the article:

Looking at more recent history, we can look at the iPod. Didn’t you just get so sick of the stories predicting its inevitable doom because it didn’t have features, such as FM radio? And every time a new media player came out that had any of those feature it was touted as an iPod killer. And yet they all failed and the iPod is still the marketshare and mindshare leader by a street. Clearly it’s not all about features.

He’s got that right! Check out the full piece.

Daniel Eran Dilger is full of righteous indignation about the attacks of Apple’s multitouch patent. You know, the idea that either Apple doesn’t really own the patent or that there was some prior art that negates the patent. Mr. Dilger lays is out right away:

According to a wide range of frothy mouthed pundits, Apple has announced patented ownership of “multitouch,” and will now destroy the future we deserve by forcing all competitors to stop using a basic concept that was already in wide use long before Apple ever demonstrated the iPhone. They’re wrong, here’s why.

And it just gets better from there. Roughly Drafted takes a bevy of claims about multitouch as reported by bloggers and dissects them thoroughly. Along the way he manage to work in Saturday Night Live (the 70s version) and Apple’s legal troubles with Microsoft back in the day. It’s a well done article and worth your time.

Let’s do a “best of” iPhone rumor list:

1) Flash on iPhone
2) iPhone in China
3) $99 iPhone

The great thing about predicting anyone of the top three iPhone rumors is that sooner or later you’ll be right. It is a little like predicting tomorrow will be cooler than today. IT might take a sometime but sooner or later the temperature will drop and you’ll be correct. Once that happens you can amaze your friends by your psychic powers.

Today’s predictor of the predictable is Mike Abramsky. He predicts Apple will release a cheaper iPhone with scaled back features to appeal to a broader base. That is undoubtably what most companies would do but Apple doesn’t always go down the most predictable path. Where’s the mid priced expandable tower every other computer manufacturer sells in Apple’s Mac lineup? And you surely remember that TIm Cook said that Apple wasn’t interested in competing in the low cost phone game.

Mike Abramsky seems certain that the low priced iPhone is Apple’s next move. So certain that he’s got the specs for both the as yet unrevealed cheap iPhone and a new flagship iPhone. Specs that are more...

When the iPhone first came out all you heard was “Where the hell is Flash?” Then you’d hear about all the reasons Flash couldn’t be on the iPhone. How much Flash sucked. How much flash powered websites sucked and so on. There were good points on both sides of the debate.

The odd thing is that you don’t hear people talking about Flash on the iPhone anymore. It could be that people just got tired of wasting pixels on the topic or it could be that the App Store has satisfied most users needs. Sure the App Store doesn’t have a way for you to navigate Flash based websites but it does give you a lot of options when it comes to one of the big reasons people use Flash and that reason is games. Whether you’re a fan of word games or those tower defense games there’s a great chance you can find a app close enough to your fave Flash version somewhere in the App Store. If you can get it from the App Store and use it anytime there isn’t a real compelling reason to have Flash on the iPhone.

Of… more...

I’m sure most of us type many words on our iPhones that autocorrect changes - even English speaking folks. (It was the absolute bane of non-English speaking folks until the option to turn it off came along.)

Autocorrect lets me type very fast, but the speed advantages get undermined by it changing words I didn’t intend it to. Of course you can watch the screen for the popup of the alternative and then hit that to keep the word you’ve typed, but when you’re typing fast it all happens too quick and you miss it.

(BTW I find that counterintuitive to have to touch the word I don’t want to keep the word I do. I know you’re telling it to dismiss the word you don’t want, but I find I have to consciously think that way.  I used a third-party predictive text system on Palms that popped up a list of possible words to select from, which I found worked very, very well.)

Anyway, I got to thinking that since I was giving that backspace key a bit of a workout, maybe I could turn off autocorrect and train myself to be more accurate on the keyboard.… more...

This kind of stuff happens every so often. I’ll post something short and some feature writer will take the concept and run. All without giving me the credit I so richly deserve for pointing it out in the first place. Today’s outrage? The post about David Chartier’s look back at the iPhone was basically stolen and reworded. The cretin responsible? Chris Seibold at Apple Matters.

Here’s what stooge did. After reading my post Chris decided to argue that David wasn’t necessarily wrong but that he was missing the larger picture. The larger picture being that Apple isn’t out to sell iPhones to smartphones user, Apple is out to sell iPhones to everyone else. If that is the kind of thing that appeals to you read What the Technophiles Don’t Get about the iPhone at Apple Matters.