Michael Koby

Today, Steve Jobs used this years World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) to accoune the release of the second generation iPhone, also known as the “iPhone 3G” and all I can say is “so what?”

Seriously, lets look at the latest features for this next generation smartphone from Apple.  We have 3G data speeds (something Nokia, Sony Ericsson, & even LG have had for years), GPS, and a new low entry price.  These are some of the features Steve made the center of his announcement.  Some others include Exchange support (and more enterprise worthy features), third party applications, and a nice new look.

So we have some features that have been in other phones for at least 2-3 years now and yet Steve Jobs demonstrated these features like they were extremely cutting edge.  Features like 3G and GPS have been in phones for the better part of 2 years (not all phones mind you) so these things are not new.

I guess the best the way to describe this latest generation iPhone is a true iPhone 1.0.  If Apple had wanted to be cutting edge on all fronts, they would have released the iPhone a year ago with at least 3G data speeds.  I’ll give Apple that GPS in phones is just now getting popular and a year ago wasn’t a deal breaker like it is now (though this should be some sort of testament to how fast technology moves).

In case you can’t tell, my general overall opinion on today’s announcements is lackluster at best.  We have features that people up and down claimed should have been in the first iteration (but I’m sure the Apple fan-boys will back-pedal on these previous statements under the guise of “Apple can do no wrong”).  I’m overly unimpressed, and was honestly expecting more from Apple.  There was nothing truely groundbreaking (though the service push for things like IM is nifty).  But I’m sure I’m a lone man on this opinion as I have already seen several blog articles touting the new iPhone’s supposed greatness.

Twitter has been pretty much unusable the last 2 weeks.  Things started to get bad last week, and then over the weekend they had a database crash which has caused them to turn features off and have extremely slow performance since Friday.

Twitter has never been perfect.  Its consistant downtime has been the subject of much debate since the the service debuted a little over a year ago.  The continuance of this downtime at greater intervals over the last month has rendered the service all but useless.

Current issues include:

• No pagenation on Twitter website
• No IM support (some of us don’t have unlimited text messaging)
• Constant “Limit Exceeded” on API driven applications (even when there is NO way an app could have hit the limit) - this is apparently due to a throttle placed on the API that Twitter has not made extremely known.
• Slow performance resulting in missing updates completely or getting them late

With these kind of issues, and no real word on when things will return to “normal” it is distressing to see that people still use and rely on this service (myself included).  Imagine what would happen if someone like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears started using Twitter.  The service would crumble from the spike in usage.  Twitter needs to get its act together, because if this keeps up much longer, people really will move to something else (FriendFeed?) if they find Twitter to be this continuously unreliable.

Last night my friend (another Linux junkie stuck in a Windows world) showed me a small little application called Win-X-Move.  This program is probably the coolest thing since sliced bread.  It gives you the ability to move and resize windows with the ALT key and your left & right mouse buttons, just like in several Linux window managers.

• Alt+Left Mouse Button = Move window
• Alt+Right Mouse Button = Resize window

This is such a nice feature and one that I was looking to get into Windows a couple of weeks ago.  So go my friend for finding this and letting me know about it.

The Free Software Foundation, yesterday posted an article about the NBC/Microsoft hiccup involving broadcast flags (article).  There are a couple of things wrong with this article but the main point I want to focus on is the fact that they go to great lengths to make Microsoft the bad guy in this little fiasco.

This is my first video with my new Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, hopefully the quality is a little better than my previous video entries.