Here are some lovely PSDs available for download; excellent for picking apart how to create great iPhone icons:

http://christianbaroni.me/?page=downloads

(Found via http://twitter.com/flyosity/status/15798736074.)

This will be important for iPhone apps but even more important down the road (in my opinion) for web apps that have custom icons associated with them. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, full instructions for creating a custom desktop iPhone icon for a web page or web app are right here in Jonathan Stark’s excellent go-read-this-now book on building web apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/ch03.html#ch03_id35932602

The gist of which is essentially you are creating a 57 x 57 icon and then adding one of the two following HTML lines to identify it:

The first option inherits the glossy light effect and corner radius from the iPhone OS. The 2nd one does not, so you have to handle corner radius and any desired light effects manually. iPad icons use 72 x 72 pixel resolution. I’m not sure yet, but I’m betting the new OS will have something closer to the 72 px size. Anyone know the answer?

PPK has written his impressions regarding his shiny brand-new Jesusphone. (I wonder did he get black or white?)

In his post, he tells us the initial reports for the behavior of mobile Safari with regards to things like documentation (missing), mouse event implications (game changing), and how the disjunct state of finger tapping and dragging compares with the continuous state of the traditional OS desktop mouse pointer. In particular, he points out the fact that the assumed ever-present mouse pointer (the little cock-eyed arrow which points black and to the upper left on Mac, and is white and points to the upper right on Windows) can no longer be counted on. And in fact, there is no icon any more. Your fingertip is it, my friend!

With the coming of the iPhone the mouse model has lost its inescapable logic. Mousemove, mouseover and mouseout (and even poor old :hover) have been downgraded to device-specific events that may not survive in the long run.

May not survive… hmmm, interesting impact. I think he could be right here.

But — and here lies the problem — these events are used in countless web sites and applications for a variety of purposes, and Apple simply cannot afford these sites not working on the iPhone.

Interestingly, so far Apple has found that it indeed can afford to dispense with Flash and Java on the iPhone platform, and while most complain that the checkbox isn’t complete, some argue that Apple is doing just fine and won’t be in any hurry anytime soon. Certainly demand for these babies has been extremely high so far. I would be interested to see how many of such sites absolutely depend on such functionality to work, and how many of those either change their site behaviors or create iPhone-friendly web presences as the demand for the mobile web increases. Wondering… but at the very least, things like these aforementioned mouse events – Flash, Java, and the like – are not yet queued up on Apple’s priority list, or else they chose to take the less-is-better approach. It is an interesting question: How much of the specifications do browser vendors adhere to on such a limited platform such as mobile devices? What is practical? What is feasible?

I think the MacBook Air is a beautiful piece of industrial design. Beautiful. I probably wouldn’t buy one, but I really admire it. I bet Yingwen would like it though. It is a sexy machine that is more about portability and fashion than functionality.

I know I am a power user at heart, and I’m always going to have my eye on the higher end systems that have long-term expansion capability, but I have to say that Apple did a good job on the specs given the space limitations. For one, the soldered RAM is set to 2 GB, so thanks for maxing it out. And 3 pounds for a full-size keyboard and screen is right there about the single most important reason I’d actually consider blowing upwards of two grand after tax and add-ons on such a machine. If I were still a hard-core BART commuter, this would make it a no-brainer.

Apple TV now looks cool now that it no longer requires a computer to connect to online services and they dropped the price, but the 24 hour limitation for rental downloads is too short. Yeah I know on-demand rentals from cable and satellite are about the same duration, and the iTunes downloads are a lot cheaper overall, but the current on-demand rental durations are too short anyway. Well, maybe it’s no big deal – I suppose the difference between paying $3.99 for a 24 hour rental and $12.99 for the full rights are pretty minimal in the long run. Ultimately I think the Apple TV features are pretty cool – especially with Flickr and Youtube connectivity. I was still hoping for an Apple TV that was actually a TV, and maybe with a built-in DVD player too. Less boxes and wires and stuff hanging off the back – something I could just stick on the wall. The only remaining complaint I have is that they still to this day have not implemented subtitles. Seems like a major failure on the part of accessibility here.

The iPhone updates were welcome. I think the most significant of these is the Maps app, where it now tries to triangulate your location. It actually works! Not perfectly accurate, but it seems to find me within the range of the circle that it renders. So much easier to now use “current location” as the starting point for generating driving directions.

I don’t get why they would charge $20 to iPod Touch users to get the software upgrade that gives them the same basic app suite as iPhone. Boo. Just give it to them already. Come on.

Time Capsule seems like a great idea, and certainly makes a lot of sense when used in conjunction with MacBook Air as a backup solution. This is a nice and convenient luxury item: If I had $500 bucks to burn, sure I’d go for a 1TB box. Otherwise I’d probably look for a decent tethered backup drive. UPDATE: Now that I look around and price these things, it isn’t that much more expensive than a standard off-the-shelf enclosed 1TB drive, and if you factor in the convenience of ubiquitous wireless backups, it is an attractive offer.

All in all it was a nice suite of announcements. Couple all that with last week’s Mac Pro/XServe items, and it is actually quite a lot of cool gadgetry. Apple TV seems the most significant to me at this point, and I hope they eventually make me my Apple HDTV already.

Via Jase:

88% Geek

77%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

This is how all rebates should work. Confirm ownership over the web rather than cutting and pasting and mailing in a bunch of junk that would take six months to get denied.

Thanks for the store credit dudes.

Update: All may not be entirely well in rebate-land for some.

Last Sunday I purchased an iPhone. This was not my plan, but a couple of things came up to prompt this move. This thing is incredible for the most part, but with only one complaint:

The Purchase

First of all, my expectation was that I’d wait until a second generation release came about. I was quite content with my old Sony Ericsson semaphoring to the bimmer’s Bluetooth interface connection, and the old 3G iPod was the hurdy gurdy churning away at the iPod interface in the glove compartment. And these were good times. It all worked just fine – contacts loaded to the dash, control both from the steering wheel, phone call comes in and the iPod pauses until my conversation completes.

Until last week, when the phone died.

It had been dying a slow but natural death. To be honest, the only thing that was wrong with it was that the battery was able to hold less and less of a charge. The thing on my last business trip would last for maybe one phone conversation after a charge, and certainly wouldn’t make it through a couple of hours away from its power leash. But finally it ceased to work while connected to the charger. It couldn’t even hold enough juice to muster up a single phone call connected to power. Clearly it was time for a change.

And then the urgency occurred when a loved one wound up in the hospital, and my phone wasn’t working to receive the calls for assistance. What timing. Friday night in a hospital I had become all too familiar with recently, to the point where you know half the staff by name. Ugh. I need to do something about this quick.

I had two choices: Get a replacement battery for my Sony Ericsson for around $20 to hold me over until a 2G iPhone appeared, or jump on the technology bandwagon early and get an iPhone for upwards of $700 including tax and AppleCare. Naturally I went for the irrational choice and got the iPhone.

I owned the 1st gen Treo 180 when that first came out, and I loved it despite all its flaws. It was a PDA and a phone, and it was highly functional. But somehow the Treo line got confused and didn’t go quite where I was hoping it would, Palm support for Mac was off and on, and the rumors of an Apple phone began. My next phone would be a cheap-ass one with Bluetooth just to hold me over a cycle until something decent appeared. So with the iPhone finally coming out and the glowing reviews, I was placing myself in line for one of these babies.

The Initial Experience

If I may gush…

The purchase took minutes, the unboxing and activation was effortless, and I didn’t find the keyboard too difficult to operate even with my fat, round thumbs and long guitar-player fingernails. The initial sync was a bit lengthy over the USB connection for about 6 GB of data I had ready to go, and I had to rerun it a couple of times to get my contacts list right and to get the software updated on the unit. But once running, it just worked like a hot knife through warm butter.

Every application on this thing works extremely well, and well together. Syncing with my Mac, browsing through contacts, dialing numbers, watching vids from iPod or YouTube, email, calendar, and the rest of it – all very nice. The browser picks up phone numbers and converts them to hyperlinks to dial. Nice. I am sure that this is the finest mobile device created to date – very elegant.

The Browser

I’m going to get this out of the way. At the risk of being unpopular, I really am not a huge fan of the Safari web browser on the iPhone. Here’s why: I can’t resize fonts beyond tilting the screen – unless the page itself has font resizing baked in to the controls – a rarity. Zooming in on the content is inadequate, because I wind up scrolling horizontally as well as veritcally. The default page width for the iPhone is too wide and makes font scales too small as a result.

Now that I’ve had the iPhone for a couple of days, I want the handheld media type even more. This is an effing handheld device – support the handheld media type and prod developers to use it for your world domination goals instead of having to get people to fork their code. Web page layouts are too big by default for this size screen, and the web developer is confronted with the choice of either writing a version of their website just for the iPhone, or they have to install some greasemonkey-style hack. And I’m seeing plenty of websites offering iPhone-optimized versions of their sites so don’t tell me you’re doing this to offer the big giant World Wide Web in all its splendor. Boo. This would be so much better with an option to load the handheld css as an option somewhere. So much. Heck, even on a per-site basis as a preference in the bookmark or something.

What Safari on iPhone does, it does well – zoom in, hyperlinked phone numbers, and highly usable for a PDA web browser. Give me font resizing and the option to load the handheld stylesheet associated with the given web page and I’ll be happy. Bonus points if you can squeeze in a Flash plugin.

The Money Shot

OK this part I’m about to tell you was entirely unexpected. I went in to the Apple Store with no expectation that this thing would want to have anything to do with my BMW’s iPod and/or Bluetooth interfaces. It was created in 1995. This is emerging 1st generation technology two years later – snowball’s chance in hell of working with my car I thought.

I thought wrong.

This thing is sick. I tried plugging it in to the iPod interface and it just worked. OK cool – I can listen to tunes on this thing in my car if I need to. But surely this won’t pair up with my bimmer, right? No – it works effing perfectly. I pair it up, it connects just fine, it syncs my contacts, and I can place and receive calls in my car. iPhone gets charged up in the meantime – bonus points.

This thing just rocks. I am very impressed with the elegance of this innovative and highly usable design. Well done! Just fix Safari for me and we’ll be good.

AirPortTV

Apple’s iTV project is exactly what I have been hoping they would do – create a media link from my network to my television. Bring it on. But waiting until Q1 2007 is such a tease, although I can see if the reason were to bring in a higher bandwidth specification for wireless.

I have to wonder about the long stretch between now and launch though, and the motivation behind announcing so early. Are they concerned a competitor will release a similar box beforehand? Probably. I mean, that’s why Microsoft does vaporware announcements – to create that purchase anxiety so people will wait for their offering before buying something that already works and is available in the marketplace.

Poo

Zune, Microsoft’s attempt to piggyback on some of the iPod shine, really looks like something I stepped in last week. The thing is an obvious iPod knock-off – looking like a cheap plastic piece of crapware that I would probably find in a flea market or mounted in cardboard and plastic in the Safeway toy aisle. I actually resisted commenting on this for a while, but when I saw the brown, I had no choice. Sorry.

The announcement of the Zune certainly has generated it’s share of poopy journalism, too. What really cracks me up is how people think that the wireless DRM-protected music sharing feature is going to force Apple to somehow react. As John Gruber points out:

If the Zune were already shipping, and people were buying it, and this feature proved to be popular, then, yes, Apple would need to do something about it. Or even if the Zune had just now shipped, and we could actually see this feature and determine that it was actually pretty cool, then, maybe, Apple would need to do something about it. But the Zune is vaporware.

Not only does the Zune look like a floating steamer, but in typical Microsoft fashion, it is all just pie in the sky now and months away from actually seeing the light of day. Every competitor to the iPod has crashed and burned so far, and it doesn’t look like Zune is promising to be much different. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to see a competitor, but no-one seems to have been able to step up to the plate yet.

Wee

Nintendo’s Wii looks pretty damn sweet. And looking at the comparatively steep price points for Sony and Microsoft’s bloated systems, combined with some cool new features, I suspect it will compete just fine in the game console marketplace. With plenty of interesting games (including Zelda, Mario, and Sonic themes), an innovative (if somewhat odd) game controller solution, and it’s low price point, it should do well. I myself lean towards the Wii, simply because it’s cheap, the kids are pretty young, and no-one does that much gaming in our house anyway. (That would have been my job before, but life is busy these days…)

Apple strikes cell phone music deal | CNET News.com

Outstanding move:

Apple Computer and Motorola announced a deal Monday that will let customers of the iTunes music store transfer songs onto the next generation of MP3-enabled phones from the handset maker.

Now that is a cool idea.

The holy grail of mobile technology is the ultimate all-in-one device. No-one wants to carry around a mobile phone, a pager, an MP3 player, and a PDA. Adding a little iTunes browsability and some music playback is a brilliant little move that would definitley get my attention when selecting my next phone. Let’s indulge in a bit of geek-struck fantasy for a moment, shall we?

Features

Our ideal mobile device would have these features: GSM/GPRS phone, SMS, web browser with text-only preference and media="handheld" understanding, Bluetooth, basic contacts/calendar/task reminders apps, AIM, camera, and music player. The device would have a bright and easily-read touch screen that makes efficient use of a very compact form factor, the battery would be durable and long-lasting, and all the data would synchronize effortlessly with my Mac. The device accepts flash-based media cards. Most importantly, the device would have a minimum of moving parts and be shock and moisture resistant. (I have kids…)

For the camera, would over the top to ask for a wide-angle and telephoto lenses? Why yes, yes it would. Let’s not ask for that. But what about two (or more) megapixels? Yeah, sure, why not…

Accessories

Any fashion girl knows that the key to looking sharp is knowing how to accessorize. The same goes for your garden variety geek. The perfect mobile device would offer a wide array of accessories to maximize productivity, ease of use, and l33t h4x0r d00d status. First off, nothing says “geek” like a nice Bluetooth stereo noise-cancelling headset. This unit doubles as microphone and stereo headphones, and has no wires to trip up on, and features incredible audio sound while cancelling out unwanted noise. Next, we want USB power. A simple, compact cable that will recharge the device from any USB source and will facilitate synchronization for the poor huddled masses who have not yet aquired Bluetooth. And finally, a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard. And no, not a full-size keyboard. We want a tiny, pocket-sized keyboard – even possibly a thumb keyboard like on the Treo, that could slip into a pocket, purse, or backpack, and be pulled out for setting reminders or creating text pages.

Service

Finally, the device must come with an always-on GPRS flat-rate internet access plan that is affordably priced at $10 per month. Nobody wants to pay $40 per month for metered internet access for a screen the size of a half-dollar. Make your extra ducats by offering services such as stock trades, ringtones, app downloads (i.e. games), and songs from the iTunes music store. Add to that natinowide free long distance, international roaming, free SMS and voicemail, and three-way calling.

Singing: And a partridge in a pear tree….