Web Directions

Mark Pesce on the iPhone

• In: Uncategorized
• By:John
• January 11, 2007
• Leave a response

It should come as no sur­prise to any­one who heard Mark Pesce speak at Web Directions that he’d be excited by the iPhone. The real­ity, peo­ple who have been­dead for sev­eral years are excited by the iPhone. Anyway, Mark is one of the web’s deep thinkers, and excel­lent writ­ers, and gner­ally makes me ashamed of my puerile rant­i­ngs when I read his eru­dite pieces.

Mark con­cludes

While the iPhone both excites and daz­zles me with its inge­nu­ity, design and inven­tive­ness, I am not com­pletely sat­is­fied with it. It is still a phone, an iPod, and an “inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tor” rolled into one. It is not, in any true sense, wholly inte­grated. There is no way for my friends in San Francisco, with their iPhones, to know what my favorite songs are, or what I’m lis­ten­ing to at the moment, or what I’m read­ing on the web, or who I’m tex­ting. It is halfway to the social device which I see as the inevitable end point. But the rest is just soft­ware. The hard­ware plat­form is there, ready and wait­ing, and will be dis­rupted by a dozen inno­va­tions that no one can yet predict

Check out the whole piece, and lis­ten to his related clos­ing keynote at Web Directions South 2006, Youbiquity (along with slides, and related resources).

By con­trast, my puerile piece can be found here.

John

[tags]iPhone[/tags]

3 responses to “Mark Pesce on the iPhone”:

1. • By:Mark
   • January 11th, 2007
   

   Pshaw, John, such flat­tery. Seriously, while I am excited by iPhone, it seems to become increas­ingly appar­ent that this is a “closed” plat­form. Apple — as far as any­one can tell, 24 hours into the iPhone era — sim­ply doesn’t want third-​​party devel­op­ers. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they think they can own the whole thing. Maybe they want to charge for every Widget you down­load. And maybe they think they can dream up every pos­si­ble appli­ca­tion for iPhone.

   Then again, maybe they’re just smok­ing crack.

2. • By:John
   • January 11th, 2007
   

   I agree Mark — espe­cially as there are 50K devel­op­ers rar­ing to go. PSP lost the oppor­tu­nity to be this device by lock­ing the sucka down so hard that play­ing a new game forces firmware upgrades which break home­brew stuff. Insane.

   I can see why they kept the iPod closed to an extent — the cost and effort of putting together a devel­oper pro­gram, tools etc for the plat­form, the fast mov­ing field, where new fea­tures, chipsets, etc come all the time. But iPhone is dif­fer­ent. Surely they could get xCode to com­pile for it almost triv­ially. n+1 plat­forms for n>1 is easy, its the sec­ond one which is hard, and they have PPC plus i86 now.

   Surely at least they’ll allow widgets?

   I actu­ally think they should dump the (GSM) phone bit and go straight to voip over wifi and REALLY rede­fine tele­phony. What was that quote from Gretsky Jobs used about being where the puck will be? Wifi is where tele­phony will be (and not too far off). So why the GSM?

   j

3. • By:Mark
   • January 12th, 2007
   

   Cringley had some excel­lent com­men­tary today on his web­site about why it’s only GPRS/​EDGE. Basically, Cingular is locked into RealMeda for their 3G sys­tem, while Apple would insist on H.264. Compromise? It’s a non-​​3G device. Additionally, 3G net­works are a lot less com­mon in the US than in mobile-​​crazy Australia. Some are sug­gest­ing that 3G is sim­ply a firmware upgrade. While I doubt that, I also doubt it’s a major change to the hard­ware. We’ll see a 3G iPhone in 2008, which is still six months before any Australian release.

   As for Widget devel­op­ment, yes, I do think Apple will allow that — and we’ll be using iTunes to send Widgets to the phone, just as we send MP3s and AACs to the iPod today. But that’s not nearly enough. Widgets, while they are a nice mix­ture of HTML and Javascript, don’t give you any mean­ing­ful access to the device. I want to *know* what my SMS mes­sages are, who I’ve called recently, etc. I *need* that infor­ma­tion to do any suc­cess­ful social net­work mod­el­ing. I doubt that infor­ma­tion would be exposed to a Widget. (Caveat: It is con­ceiv­able, if read file access is granted to a Widget, that you could get the data from the iPhone. But Apple would need to make all of those data struc­tures public.

   I have some hopes that at WWDC this year they’ll release a full iPhone devel­op­ment kit. But it’s just a hope, and utterly unsup­ported by any evidence.

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