6 posts tagged “apple”
For those of you who didn't have time to watch the full 90 minute keynote yesterday, here it is condensed down to 60 seconds. The scary thing is that it truly gives you everything you need to know about the keynote.
I have to say, the iPhone UI is absolutely fabulous. The navigation on the touch screen is really compelling. It makes things so simple. Particularly flipping through photos, or browsing through pages when they extend beyond the bottom of the page. The idea that to move something to the right, you sweep over the screen to the right with your finger, is unbelievable. Want to move it up? Sweep your finger up. In the short time that I have had the iPhone, I now find myself trying to use a similar finger gesture on the screen of my Macbook. Unfortunately, the Macbook doesn't have a touch screen or gestural commands. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that the next two significant product releases that Apple comes out with are 1) a touch screen iPod with the same gesture controls as the iPhone, and 2) a touch screen laptop that allows the same sort of browsing, etc. And I will be one of the first to buy the laptop. The iPhone experience is so good. And will absolutely translate to a bigger screen.
Ok, as if there isn't enough iPhone news in the blogsphere today, I need to correct some misinformation I spread last night. I was told by some ne'erdowell punk at the Apple Store last night that Steve Jobs was en route to New York to experience the first iPhone sales there. Wrong. I was just at lunch in a local Menlo Park restaurant and bumped into a friend who's an investor in PodTech. I was telling him that I was hanging out with his PodTech crew at the Apple Store last night when the guy I was eating lunch with quietly pointed to the sushi counter immediately next to us. There was Steve Jobs eating lunch with Scott Forstall (who, according to Wikipedia, is now Vice President of iPhone Software) and another gentleman who I couldn't see well enough to spy on. So I can say definitively that Steve is not in New York. See what a crappy reporter I would make.
I drove by the Apple Store in Palo Alto around 11pm to see if this camping out business was all hype. It wasn't. In fact, there were about 100 people in line to sleep over. I suspect they'll be pretty darn tired by 6pm tomorrow when they get their iPhones. And, of course, I bumped into a bunch of friends waiting in line. There were a bunch of folks from Podtech there (Steve Gillmor was hanging out kibitzing and Robert Scoble and his son were numbers 1 and 2 in line -- they'd been there since 9:30am). And the majority of the SmugMug team was in line as well (both Don and his dad were sitting in line with sufficient provisions to survive the evening). But the coolest person there -- particularly if you are a Mac geek -- was Bill Atkinson. Bill was the creator of the original MacPaint. Remember MacPaint? It was the coolest thing ever. My friend Stephanie's dad got one of the very first Macs and we spent more time than I care to remember drawing with MacPaint. Atkinson also created HyperCard and QuickDraw. While we are in Steve Jobs' back yard, apparently he's on a plane heading to NYC for the first sale of the iPhone. So there were no Steve Jobs sightings. But it was pretty cool to have such an important player in the history of Apple hanging out on the street chatting with folks as Apple enters this new chapter in the company's history.