Not bad, not bad!
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11
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Well, will you look at that; the App Store is open! Hmmm, let’s see … it’s probably still an NDA violation to show a screenshot of the store itself, but is it an NDA violation to show a screenshot of a device with apps installed from it? Well, let’s cross our fingers and hope it isn’t, shall we?
We’d go into more detail, but besides the NDA factor, there’s the all of a sudden rather pressing issue that, well, you see that “BrainJogging” icon above? You can not download that from the App Store … yet … and we need to be fixing that problem. Normal blogging will resume once that is sorted!
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10
JUL
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JUL
So all that Rogers-hatin’ angst has actually had an effect: Now both it and Fido have a slightly less limiting data option for you all, plus you can choose from their existing plans not just the iPhone plans:
Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate until August 31, 2008 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan…
New Canadian iPhone 3G customers will also have the choice to select from Fido’s existing voice and smartphone data plans and/or additional features to best suit their needs or from Fido’s specific value bundled iPhone 3G plans.
Although that’s more of a concession than we were really expecting, If you’re a big texter or really want to watch YouTube on your commute every day, this probably won’t do much towards satisfying you; but for those of us who use our cell pretty much only as a rather infrequently checked voice mail service and will be doing almost all our surfing over WiFi, this looks like enough flexibility to satisfy us pretty much completely, we figure.
[UPDATE] Heh. Missed this — Cavey McCave the CMO at Rogers flat out admitted that the online fuss made them cave, but only temporarily!
John Boynton, the senior vice-president and chief marketing officer of Rogers Wireless, said in an interview the promotional offer is in response to customer concerns … existing price plans for the iPhone will go back into effect Sept. 1.
“What we’re trying to do is satisfy a very small group of people, the early adopters,” he said. “When those customers are done, we’re back to our basic user.”
Translation: If we can get through August, the media fuss will die down and nobody will care anymore when you get pissed off. Alrighty then, shop now, people!
h/t: MacSurfer, Ars Technica, engadget, iPhoneFreak, IGM, MacRumors, Reuters, 9to5Mac, …
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9
JUL
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JUL
Well! Rumour has it that all that angst about Rogers’ iPhone tariffs has provoked a response — from Apple!
Blogger Daniel Smith claims multiple sources, including a senior Rogers representative, claim that Apple has diverted a significant amount of its initial iPhone 3G Canadian deliveries to Europe in retribution for the carrier’s steep rate plans, which at similar prices offer a third fewer minutes and limited data compared to AT&T.
Stores may be getting just 10 to 20 iPhones each and are being told to “exercise caution” not to promise ample stock on launch day, according to the rumors.
At the same time, Rogers is also claimed to be promptly firing the part-time staff that had been hired to handle an expected deluge of customers at some stores…
The interesting thing is that now that this story has hit all the MSM outlets, there’s going to be an awful lot of attention on release day on what if any the sales effect is. Sure, the geeks will whine to other geeks, and maybe 43,321 (and counting) of them will sign some whiny petition, but will there be any actual consequences to Rogers? ‘Cos bad PR, well, they’re used to that since their corporate motto is oderint dum metuant as far as anyone can tell, but actually impacting their sales, now that would be serious.
We recommend the best thing to do at this point is suck in your natural desire to get an iPhone 3G NOW! NOW! NOW! this Friday and hold off for at least a few days whilst watching the news to see how those 43,340 (and counting) petition signers react. If they’re all serious enough about their whining to actually boycott, and if Rogers is left with egg on its face from a botched launch, there *will* be plan adjustments there is no doubt. And if it sells out and there’s lineups anyway … well, you’ll have got a lesson in just how easy and pointless the online faux activism of those 43,366 (my, they do count up quickly, don’t they!) signers is, won’t you?
h/t: MacSurfer!
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6
JUL
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JUL
Well! It certainly seems that news of Rogers’ data plan tariffs for the iPhone has not precisely been greeted with unanimous hosannas of joy, to put it mildly.
Whilst we can’t exactly say with a straight face that we were pleased with the tariffs, hey, paying a lot for everything is what happens when you live in The Best Place On Earth™, so we were actually prepared for the plans to be significantly worse. And even the cheapest Rogers plan more than comfortably covers the usage we actually make of a phone, which is pretty much nothing other than “message storing service,” and virtually all our data transfer will be done over WiFi, so personally there’s nothing there that bothers us enough to get upset about. And in any case, hey, it’s still a significantly better deal than a Crackberry plan from Rogers, which is about the most we figure one could reasonably have expected.
However, others most certainly disagree! We find particularly amusing a 2225 2614 3277 and counting post on digg which directs the reader to a site which expresses their displeasure in extremely direct terms indeed. Whilst generally we wish to avoid the profane and scatological in our posts here, as that merely demonstrates one’s lack of true wit, in this particular case we’ll make an exception to underline the rage Rogers has provoked. OK, fine, we’re not being highbrow, we just think their link is funny:
Hard to mistake their sentiment, indeed. [UPDATE: Aw, they've toned the rhetoric down to G-rated. Shucks. It was much funnier originally!]
And if you’re a Facebook person, like we’re not, there’s a group for you:
and there’s another petition to sign here:
Rogers Canada iPhone Data Plan Petition
and even more rage-enabling links to be found here:
http://www.iphonepetition.ca/ (redirects to a blog post as I write)
In the meantime whilst we wait to see if these various initiatives do indeed serve as an epiphany for Rogers to change their ways — good luck with that, guys — Rogers’ subsidary Fido seems to be providing nontrivial additional benefits for identical cost with their plans — specifically, the evening option starts at 5 PM instead of 6 PM (and I would suspect that the non-optioned also starts at 7 PM and lasts until 8 AM instead of 7 AM, in keeping with non-iPhone differences between Fido and Rogers plans), membership in their FidoRewards program, and Fido provides per-second billing which I do not believe the Rogers plan does. So of your choices (well, choice-and-a-half or so) looks like Fido is the clear winner here. Good doggy!
And as a final note to you all — hey, it could be a whole whack worse. Check out what you’ll be paying if you live in Norway, for instance — $80 for 100 minutes and 100 megabytes? OK, that does strike us as over the top; the Rogers plans are positively generous compared to that!
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28
JUN
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Attention all Canadians: The iPhone subscription plans are now out!
Canadian cell provider Rogers Wireless and its sub-brand Fido today listed its iPhone 3G plans, revealing its strategy for carrying the device in the country. All plans will need both voice and data and have finite data limits; unlike previous rumors, there will be no option for unlimited access with either service, though all will include Visual Voicemail as well as unlimited weekend and evening calling; incoming SMS messages are also unlimited, as is access to Rogers- and Fido-owned Wi-Fi hotspots.
Both Rogers and Fido plans are identical. A base $60 plan gives callers 150 minutes of air time, 75 outgoing SMS messages, and 400MB of data for use with any app; a $75 plan boosts call time to 300 minutes while almost doubling the transfer limit to 750MB and increasing the number of outbound messages to 100. A $100 monthly plan gives 600 minutes of calls, 1GB of data, and 200 messages, while an ultimate $115 plan supplies 800 minutes, 2GB of data, and 300 messages.
Additional data is 50 cents per megabyte through the first 60MB, but drops to three cents per megabyte afterwards.
Unique among most current iPhone plans are the ability to add Value Packs. A $15 pack adds Call Display, WhoCalled, ringback tones, 2,500 minutes of call forwarding time and increases the number of outgoing SMS texts to 2,500. A $20 pack both supplies 10,000 SMS messages and drops the 9PM evening calling threshold to 6PM for very frequent users.
Every iPhone plan requires a three-year contract; the company has already outlined pricing for the phones themselves, which match the US prices of $199 for an 8GB model and $299 for a 16GB version. Both the plans and the phones become available on July 11th.
h/t: electronista!
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27
JUN
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w00t! Eighth AND FINAL-TESTING QUALIFIED iPhone SDK is out now! Grab it, polish up, and list your goodies on the Apps Store!
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26
JUN
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JUN
So, if you’ve been following the last few posts, you’ve no doubt got the idea that SproutCore is intended to fulfill the destiny of the YellowBox APIs in bringing Mac development to the rest of the world. Here’s a supporting link to demonstrate that emerging realization:
Apple formally adopted a new web design framework at the end of last week’s WWDC conference, accounts say … The technology is in fact said to form a key component of its MobileMe service, allowing basic online apps that function across multiple platforms. This may eventually expand to more complex programs, however, including iWork software that would substitute for local copies. It is speculated that third-party companies may be invited to build their own MobileMe apps, whether as a default part of the service, or for a separate fee.
Interesting, no?
h/t: MacNN!
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16
JUN
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There’s something really quite interesting about the iPhone-focused sessions we’ve attended here at WWDC; they have a demographic distribution which we have never, ever, seen anything even remotely akin to in over 20 years in professional programming.
Specifically, as we write this, we’re sitting on the side platform at “Controls, Views, and Animation on iPhone”, which is a pretty solidly geeky session even as the general run here goes, and of the four people immediately adjacent, two, that’s 50%, are women.
Those of you who have never been to a programming conference are, perhaps, thinking “yeah, women are 50% of the population, so they’re 50% of your neighbours, and why would that merit a post?”
On the other hand, those of you who have actually been to a programming conference before — well, you probably just figure we’re flat out lying. That would indeed be the rational response, as normally at these conferences, well, let’s put it this way, the pretend women — not that there’s anything wrong with that! — outnumber the biological women by a significant multiple. WWDC is noticeably less imbalanced than your typical Microsoft conference in that regard, and way less imbalanced than any Linux conference in that regard, but even in our comparatively-enlightened Apple world, the number of women in any engineering session could historically be most accurately quantified as “rounding error”. But here in the iPhone programming sessions, there’s an utterly unprecedented number of women. And generally attractive women, no less.
Looks like The Babe Theory of Political Movements applies to programming platforms as well … it’s just that until the iPhone came along, there never was a platform that qualified. Be interesting to see if these anecdotal observations of ours turn out to portend a statistically significant difference in iPhone programmer demographics from the general industry, won’t it now?
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11
JUN
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JUN
So we’re just starting to pack for WWDC now, and as our last post for a while probably (since anything that’s actually got us excited next week will probably be under heavy NDA) we’ll just go out on a limb with a rather out there but we think logical prediction for Monday’s keynote.
See, our Impeccable Sources™ in the Apple world have been dropping hints that there’s something Big And Unexpected up for announcement, which is not directly related to the iPhone in particular nor hardware of any kind in general. If they’re not just teasing to wind up our curiosity to fever pitch — which is hardly inconceivable, we grant you, in which case after the keynote feel free to laugh your head off at how well that worked for them — what could it be? This .mac to .me reworking thing? Naah, we don’t see that qualifying as either particularly Big or in the slightest Unexpected.
Well, after pondering it, we think we just might have an idea. You’ve all heard about this “Snow Leopard” thing, no doubt. Well, we believe there actually is a “Snow Leopard” project, which quite likely will be revealed on Monday, but it’s not going to be 10.6 like most everyone is assuming, because that would be a different cat — there’s no way Apple would not rebrand the OS name for a full point release. For the same marketing-related reasons, we’ll proceed to assume that this code name is not disinformation of any kind. So there’s something bubbling and simmering in Apple’s labs that’s recognizably “Leopard”, but distinctly different enough from the shipping Mac OS X 10.5 to merit a separate yet connected brand.
Right then, the next wide assumption is that the dropping of “Mac” from the “OS X Leopard” posters in Moscone implies that there’s going to be a non-Mac OS X Leopard for generic PCs, and that would be Snow Leopard. We’re pretty sure we can dismiss that one as well. Apple’s revenue numbers just don’t make that idea work, however you slice it. And when even all the PC magazines universally agree that Mac laptops are the best for running Vista, there appears to be no reason to defocus from shipping machines.
So what, then, is “Snow Leopard”? Well, to answer that, let us put on our thinking caps. What is the one feature that developers were most upset about losing in OS X — before it was actually named OS X, in fact? The feature that Apple has a clear and compelling reason to bring back now, in order to further increase the pool of developers familiar with Mac and iPhone programming concepts? The feature that did, indeed, actually ship from Apple on the Rhapsody DR1/Intel Developer CDs? The feature which if released on Monday would be a perfect fit for the “Snow Leopard” moniker? Well, here’s what we say it is:
Apple Rhapsody Yellow Box for Windows
Yep, that’s our call: “Snow Leopard” is the return of Yellow Box. Except that the point of it this time around is not only, or even mostly, to allow Mac Cocoa programmers to deliver Windows applications — although it’s pretty likely that will be supported — but to let Windows users who for whatever reason can’t get a Mac of their own to develop iPhone programs using the same Cocoa-written toolchain that supports iPhone development on real Macs.
You heard it here first, folks!
POST-KEYNOTE UPDATE:
Hmmmmm. It appears that the only non-NDA’d information y’all who aren’t here is gettin’ is that yes, there actually is a “Snow Leopard” project, His Jobness stated, and us here is gonna hear all about it after lunch, in an NDA’d session. So it’s not completely impossible yet that we’re on to something here — but the smart money is that probably, contrary to all previous practice, the rumours about “Snow Leopard” being simply a rather boring 10.6 version are indeed correct, and the Big Important Thing that had been hinted at was indeed Mobile Me, aka “Exchange that doesn’t suck”. Ah well.
We’re quite sure there’ll be no shortage of people willing to violate their NDAs so you won’t have to wait until tomorrow even to find out the exact specs of “Snow Leopard” somewhere else — but as far as this particular legally correct NDA-respecting space goes, we’ll just have to leave the discussion at “probably a bad guess but we’ll know for sure in an hour.” Ah well. Can’t always have everything you want, and we’re pretty happy with how the iPhone 3G turned out!
POST-WWDC UPDATE:
Well, although this speculation turned out to be completely wrong, we actually were not completely off-base in identifying Apple’s interests and goals we figure; we just weren’t thinking outside the box enough in figuring that resurrecting Yellow Box was how to go about it. See this post for what we’re thinking now!
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