Apple’s iPhone Web 2.0 AJAX Mumbo-Jumbo

OK, Steve Jobs told developers they had a way to add applications to the iPhone. He said Apple wants to “expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure.” The “sweet solution” for this will be to use the full Safari engine inside the iPhone to write “amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly, and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services – they can make a call. They can send an EMail. They can lookup a location on Google maps.” As Web apps, you don’t have to distribute them to individual iPhones, just put them on the Web. And they can run securely, without compromising security on the phone itself. 

As an example, Scott Forrestal showed a corporate address book Web application. Using Safari, he went to a Web page. He typed into a Web page’s search field and it brought up a Web page with a list of names that looked a lot like the list in the phone’s native address book. He scrolled them up and down, tapped on one and a Web page came up with the person’s address information, and this Web page looked a lot like a native Address book page. He then showed that if he tapped a phone number on that Web page, he could initiate a call. If he tapped an EMail address, he could bring up an iPhone mail message pre-addressed ready for typing. And if he tapped a street address, it brought up the iPhone’s Google Maps facility showing that address.It was nice. And nice things can be done.

But how much of an iPhone app was that, really? The three Web pages involved seemed to be standard Web pages formatted to look like fields, lists, and information you would see on the iPhone’s native apps. And tapping specialized fields was something already shown in the January keynote as something you could do in any Web page. So what was special about this Web application that made it an iPhone application? Nothing I could see in that demo.

What I didn’t see was a way to write that Address book entry they looked up into the iPhone’s address book. Or a way to download the office layout image he bought up into the Phone. I suspect there isn’t a way to get any of that info directly into the phone, or to get any of the phone’s info directly out of the phone, because the point of this sandbox is to maintain the phone’s security.

You can make nice Web pages that do very nice things and we will see lots of useful Web apps, but to run them you have to host them apps on the Web, and users have to have access to the Web. This is not iPhone Software Development. Steve Jobs said “No SDK needed” and none is supplied either.We can still hope that in the near future there will indeed be a way to make stand alone applications that run on the iPhone. I was predicting in this WWDC we would see Steve tell us that the OS X DashCode application (which makes OS X widgets) would make Widgets that run on the iPhone, and that maybe next January we would see an iPhone SDK running in XCode. I’m still predicting that path will be followed. But when?

Why you shouldn’t worry about iPhone’s keyboard

There seems to be a flurry of worry about the iPhone keyboard. People want the tactile feedback of real keys, it’s said. You can’t tell if your finger is in the middle of a key… You can’t touch type on it…

Phooey. These are not big problems on a phone keyboard. The only legitimate complaint about it will be that you can’t touch type on it. But how many people actually type on a phone keyboard without looking? A lot of people can type on a small keyboard quickly with two thumbs, and this should work just as well on the iPhone as on a phone with a lot of tiny physical keys.

What about the argument that you can’t tell if you finger is in the middle of the key? Well, Apple says they addressed this by using special software that makes corrections based on a dictionary and which keys are nearby to the ones you touch. They also address this by popping up the letters in large type above your finger as you type.

There has also been comments about how easy the phone, and typing on it, will be with just one hand. All the demos so far show the user holding it in one hand, while typing and pressing onscreen buttons with a finger on the other hand. Thi is simply for photographic clarity. It is going to be just as easy to press buttons with your thumb while holding the device in your palm curled in the other four fingers as it is on any other phone.

We are going to see people typing away on the iPhone just as fast as others do on their Blackberrys. Problems typing on the touch screen is simply a red herring issue.

Apple WWDC keynote: Here’s what Steve will announce

First, he’ll talk about the iPhone. He’ll show a production model. He’ll talk about the tinyBluetooth headset bundled in the package. He will show the iPhone dock in the package that lets you plug in the phone and charge the earpiece. He will mention the iPhone dock connector is compatible with almost all current iPhone accessories that plug in to an iPod, especially the interfaces in many current automobiles. He will announce new iPhone interfaces in some cars that integrate both music and phone functions into the automobile. He will talk about the new stereo bluetooth headphones that are available and how great they sound playing music. He will mention iPhone’s software update system which happens through iTunes syncing. He will show functions he didn’t cover, including the calendar and notepad apps. The notepad is essentially the Mac Preview app and opens PDF, Word, Pages, and Keynote files. He will show new apps including Apple Remote Access and the GPS turn by turn directions tied into Google Maps. He will show printing to Bluetooth printers and over WiFi to printers on local networks. He will say DashCode widgets will run on the iPhone, allowing anyone to write simple iPhone apps. Oh, one more thing – he will sell iPhones to anyone at WWDC who wants one out in the hall right after the speech. WWDC attendees will be the first iPhone customers, two weeks before anyone else can get them.

Then he will talk about .Mac, which hasn’t been updated in a while. He will show full integration with the iPhone. He will show that .Mac will push EMail to the iPhone. He will show iPhone syncing directly with .Mac’s calendar, address book, and bookmarks. Oh, one more thing, a free year of .Mac comes with your iPhone.

Forty minutes in, he moves to Leopard. He will say everyone gets a full beta copy in their attendee goodie bag. A week later, it will be available for developers to download at ADC. It does not run on the G4. It will use a new default disk format called ZFS. Older formats will of course be supported, but you want to migrate your system disk over, as well as disks you want to use for Time Machine backups. This is for a few reasons. One, backups and Time Machine will be simple, fast and smooth, as ZFS makes snapshots of every change you make to your files as it goes. You will be able to set up very fine grain backups if you wish, not just being able to go back to a particular day, but even to a particular save. Another reason to switch involves Spotlight. Spotlight will be much faster and searches will be more detailed. Spotlight will be integrated into Time Machine and into more apps.

There is a completely rewritten Finder. It is much faster and much more efficient. It is more extensive in the way it displays and allows you to see and manipulate file metadata. It gives much better and faster access to Spotlight. Spotlight itself finds faster, is much more consistent in its interface, allows you to do much more detailed searches, yet is simpler to use. It is a very efficient app and file launcher, more like Quicksilver.

There is a new default User Interface look. Aqua is still available in the Appearance preference pane. The new look uses the unifies window look, colors tend toward smooth gray and blue gray. The look is flatter, more subdued. The look is similar to that in the current iTunes. Scroll bars are rounder, thumbs are blue gray. The look is made to fall farther into the background than Aqua, and be more neutral in color, to let window content be the focus.

Leopard fully integrates Multi-Touch into the system. Steve announces a new line of Multi-Touch displays available now. The new displays have a gray aluminum look, are thin, use LCD backlighting, and all have Multi-Touch ability. The displays can be oriented vertically, or placed flat on a table or at a low angle like an easel or tablet.

Leopard can be completely controlled by MultiTouch. Fingers can work as a mouse, tapping and dragging on the surface of the screen. Thus at this point, Macs can be controlled by a keyboard, mouse, voice, or touch, alone or in combination, and peripherals like the new touch displays will take advantage of that.

One more thing. One “remote screen” display model will be wireless and portable, around 10″ diagonal and 12mm thick, run on WiFi and uses Apple Remote Access to put a Mac’s screen on its own screen. This portable tablet is a display, not a computer, but works as a second screen to any Mac on a network. It can control all Mac functions remotely via Multi-Touch. It is available now.

There are a lot of predictions here, let’s see what comes true!

iPhone’s data throughput – Just you wait!

The iPhone uses EDGE for its cellular data transmission. What’s up with that? AT&T already has a faster method called HSDPA, and that deployed in many areas, so why in the world didn’t Apple use it? Here are some answers.

Apple says EDGE is a good method, and of course the iPhone includes WiFi connectivity that is very fast, and WiFi is available in many places and there are more hotspots all the time. In fact, a lot of people already have WiFi in their homes, their friends homes, and theor schools.

Something we haven’t heard as of this writing are the actual speeds we can expect from the iPhone using any of these connections. We may get some surprises.

WiFi comes in several flavors. “B” can theoretically go up to 11Mbps, “G” up to 54Mbps, and N up to 200Mbps or more. Those speeds are never actually reached, however, and throughput depends on things like distance and the type of antennas used. The point is, it’s much faster than any cellular data transmission method deployed in the USA today.

EDGE can be theoretically as fast as 470Kbps. In reality, EDGE under AT&T in the real world yields perhaps 40Kbps. This is on a par with dialup speed, and that’s not saying much.

However, AT&T is said to be enhancing its EDGE service in time for the iPhone launch. We may be seeing throughput of 80Kbps on the iPhone im most places. That’s getting better! The iPhone might not be quite a pokey as everyone expects.

But what about HSPDA? It’s already out there on AT&T’s air. I believe AT&T is running it at 1.8Mbps. Now we are getting somewhere! It’s ten times faster than EDGE, so why isn’t this technology in the iPhone?

I think there are two reasons. One is that current chips that implement this in mobile phones are relative power hogs. The iPhone is already sniffing for WiFi and Bluetooth signals in addition to running a hefty CPU, a big chunk of memory, and a large bright display. It’s battery must already be stressed.

Here’s the thing. The iPhone version 2 is going to be a killer! Much lower power chips for HSDPA are already in the works. And AT&T is said to be cranking up their deployment of HSDPA to the maximum specified throughput of 14.4Mbps. That’s Ethernet speed! Imagine this kind of Internet connectivity on a phone. It is going to blow the doors off other US carriers, for example Verizon’s EVDO runs at 2.4Mbps.

I think this is a major reason Apple went with AT&T. Looking ahead, they saw AT&T is going to deploy, and fairly quickly, a very fast 3G data service. They also knew appropriate chips will be available that will let a near-future version of iPhone take full advantage of this system without killing the batteries. Steve Jobs said in his January keynote that 3G would be coming, and I believe this is what is planned.

So. I think the first iPhone will run EDGE twice as fast as people are thinking. And when a 3G iPhone does come, the over the air data throughput is going to knock people’s socks off! Let’s see what happens!

(I hope I have all these numbers right, if not, please leave a comment.)

iPhone: How the release and contracts will go down

June 11th, at the World Wide Developer’s Conference, Steve will give a keynote. One of the things he will talk about is the iPhone. In his speech, he will give all the details we haven’t heard so far – the AT&T cellular service deals you can get with the phone, and the date of release: June 20th.

Then Steve will say oh, there’s one more thing. We have iPhones for any attendee who wants to purchase one, right here, right now! Sign up and pick up your new phone right now out in the hall. Hundreds of attendees, and some press who attended the keynote, will go home from WWDC with new, working iPhones. Others can get them on the 20th.

Not only does the crowd go wild, but this gets lots and lots of advance reviews into the public a few days before the main launch. Press will print columns, developers will blog, the public will read.

Apple will do this because they know the reviews will be very, very good, especially with this crowd. And, it will get wide publicity for the new service plans and system they have set.

You will be able to get a 2 year contract with your phone. You pat full price with the phone, but the iPhone service and data plan, with unlimited messaging and data, will run about $150 less than the equivalent existing AT&T plan. You will also be able to get a no contract, pay as you go plan. With that plan you again pay full price for the phone, and there are per voice minute, per data kilobyte, per SMS message charges.

Why a pay as you go plan? This way, people can pick up an iPhone even if they have an existing phone and service with another carrier. They can simply use the device as a widescreen video iPod and Wi-Fi web browser, without even using the cellular system. Or they can make a call or send an EMail here and there from the road. When their old contract is up with their other company, they can switch to a contract plan with AT&T.

And WHY will they want to switch? Aside from falling in love with the phone, those pay as you go charges will make your eyes water. Did you know AT&T now charges up to ten cents per SMS message, and a cent per KILOBYTE of data? And that iPhone will suck up data faster than a tick on Dracula. Once you start using the phone, you are going to want to switch to the contract deal.

That’s my speculation. What’s yours?

Why Multi-Touch is a much bigger deal than you think!

Where is Leopard? What’s up with those top secret features? Why haven’t there been any new displays released in so long? Where is that long-predicted mini-laptop? I believe it’s all tied together, and it has to do with the iPhone.

Multi-Touch! It’s one of the defining features of the iPhone. The touch screen hardware looks great, but it is the software that goes with it that makes the device work smoothly. A lot of care has been put into that. Touch is more than just tapping onscreen buttons. There are substantial innovations involved.

Let’s start with the on-screen keyboard. When you tap a key graphic with your big finger, it senses which key you meant with a combination of position-checking and predicting the word you are typing. Visually, each letter zooms up from under your finger to show you what letter is hit. Finally, the word being predicted is shown, and if the prediction is right, you can quickly complete the word by tapping the space bar. The predictions even appear to take into account which letters are adjacent to the ones touched. Nice.

There’s finger-scrolling. It’s finely tuned so you can “flick” through a list, not too fast, not too slow, with inertia and bounce, it looks almost physical.

Then there’s “the pinch” a gesture used to zoom in and out of pictures or anything else that needs zooming or resizing.

There is tight software/hardware integration throughout. There is a position sensor that can tell if you are holding the unit in portrait or widescreen mode, and a proximity sensor that turns off the touch screen when you are holding the phone against your face (and presumably when it’s in your pocket).

What a unit! And what an announcement! Oohs and ahhs all around.

That’s why Leopard’s features couldn’t be fully announced before the iPhone was introduced. Things like the Multi-Touch support built into Leopard!

That’s my prediction as a major top secret feature. And that’s why there have been no displays announced for so long. I believe new displays will include multi-touch in them, and they will be able to lie flat on the desk, or at a shallow angle. And, they will have sensors to show if they are being used in portrait or landscape mode.

We’ve all seen and drooled over those demonstrations of multitouch on big screens! And think about the iPhone, think if there was an iPhone with a 20-inch wide screen! Or with a 10-inch screen for that matter… Multitouch will work great on a Mac. You just need a multitouch display, and the kind of software we’ve already seen demonstrated on the iPhone.

So what will we see in the future? New displays with multitouch. Multitouch support in Leopard. And, we know Leopard is on our desktop Macs, on our phones, on our laptops, what is missing? A mini-laptop! And it doesn’t have to be a laptop – it can be a tablet. I predict a tablet is coming, with multitouch, voice control, and wireless. Let’s see!

Welcome to Lepton’s Blog!

Lepton’s Blog will hold my opinions and speculation about technology, articles on the Web, new gadgets, and anything else that seems interesting. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

How an Application Evolved into a Website

Recently I completed a major project – a standalone Macintosh application called “Myallo” (a name based on a Greek word meaning “brain”) that used neural network techniques in order to do web searches and rank the results much better than any online search engines could.

If a traditional search engine pulls up a million hits on “gardening”, how does it determine which ones to put at the top of the list? It only has a few things it can do; estimate general popularity by counting how many other sites link to it, see how many matches to the word ‘gardening’ are on the page, check the locations of those matches in the on the page and so on.
But if I gave a program more info on what I’m interested in: gardening yes, but I’m more interested in vegetable gardening than flower gardening. Now it can rank these hits according to my own actual interests!

So in the stand-alone program, you first create an Interest Profile based on a hierarchy of topics. The application can then go to a search engine to pick up hits, then scan the contents of some of those pages to see how they match up with all of the user’s interests.

This works well, but the application was restricted to Mac users, and the user had to set up a profile of all his interests manually. So I determined that making this a website could be good. Any computer user could utilize it, it could scan a large number of articles from around the Web for all site members simultaneously, and by using a large set of topics common to all site members, it could be made so a user wouldn’t have to set up a profile, rather they could just give some feedback on the results, and the profile can be gleaned from that.

The new site, “Myallo Online” at www.myallo.com doesn’t have the user doing any searching at all, and they don’t make up an Interest Profile either. The web site does the searching and interest-tracking, all you do is rate how interesting some of the articles are, and since it pre-scanned articles to see what topics they are relevant toward, it can compute how interested you are in those topics, and makes up your Interest Profile automatically. You can still see and adjust the profile directly, but it’s not necessary. If you rate a bunch of articles about vegetable gardening very high, but those on flower gardening only moderately high, it figures out you are quite interested in gardening, but more in vegetable than flower gardening.

Instead of asking for search terms and running them through search engines, the site just goes out and picks up lots of RSS feeds from around the Web and scans them to see how interested you might be in them. Then, when you come to the main page, it shows you the most interesting stuff first.

Basically, you do no searching and no setting up, yet you get a sort of constantly updated newspaper that automatically gets smarter about what kinds of things should be on your customized front page. As you tweak things by setting a slider next to the article to say this story was more (or less) interesting than Myallo Online predicted, it literally learns and improves.

So i think it’s a pretty cool concept, it’s up as a pretty nice looking website, all it needs is a little traffic now. But that’s the real trick, isn’t it…

Visit myallo.com, a free Internet article discovery engine!

Making the Automatically Customized Newspaper a Reality

“I think many of us grew up with the dream of waking up in the morning and having your computer screen display a newspaper fully customized to your tastes and interests,” said Michael O’Connor, president of Leptonic Systems Inc. and developer of Myallo Online at www.myallo.com.

O’Connor says his site uses a sophisticated learning process to find interesting Web articles for you, without you having to search around for them. Myallo does the searching, literally learning, based on your feedback on articles you’ve seen previously.

Like some popular social networking and RSS aggregator sites, Myallo (a name based on the English pronunciation of a Greek word meaning “brain”) gathers thousands of articles from Web pages, Blogs, and News sites that cover all kinds of topics, in text, image, and video media. But unlike those sites, it purpose isn’t to rank articles based on popularity, or make you tag or submit your own articles. Instead, it predicts your interest in each article, and puts the ones it thinks will be most interesting to you at the top of the page.

At first, it just shows you random articles. Alongside each one, a slider control appears where you can set your level of interest in the article. After it sees how you’ve rated a few articles, it begins to get the hang of what you like, and is able to put more of the interesting stuff up front. Over time, it gets quite good at showing you articles you’ll want to see.

How does it do it? Myallo maintains an interlinked network of thousands of topics, associated according to conceptual relation to each other, forming a sort of “neural network”. Myallo’s server pre-scans each article to see how relevant it is to each of the topics. Then, when you rate an article by setting the interest slider, the system learns by propagating this information back through the interlinked topics, adjusting your levels in each topic with which the article is associated, plus those topics to which those topics are related, and so on. Knowing your interests in each topic, it is able to predict your interest in new articles.

O’Connor says “Myallo Online literally learns what you like, and customizes itself to your tastes with almost no work on your part. There’s no searching, no relying on what others think is popular. It brings us closer to the dream of an automatically customized, real-time updated, multimedia, hyperlinked newspaper. That’s our goal!”

Visit myallo.com, a free Internet article discovery engine!