Having slept on it and digested a lot of articles, these are my comments on the iPhone announced yesterday:

• It runs OS X. In my book that means a BSD platform. I’m looking forward to having this confirmed. I so miss having BSD on my mobile.
• WiFi - thank you
• Cool browsing interface due to CoreAnimation - great!
• No UMTS/3G? Yes, we all know 3G is slow, but EDGE is way slower. What’s up? I really hope the European version will sport 3G
• 2MP camera? Come on, Apple, that is SO last year!! I thought Apple was supposed to set a standard other would come running after
• Max 8GB disk? Ok, fair enough, but you already have that out on the market and have had it for a while. Look at Ritek & co, they just announced 16 and 32GB solid state discs
• Why is it not possible to buy music on the run? When I’m over at my friends’ place and we talk about music, I’d love to be able to get the tune right away. But it seems I can’t buy it from iTunes. (I’m sure they’ll fix this soon enough, though )
• I must admit I’m skeptical towards the QWERTY keyboard on-screen with no tactile feedback, but I’m looking forward to giving it a spin and see what it does for me.
• Google Maps is great! But I already have that on my Nokia 6280.

Further things I’d like to know: is there a camera connector for it? And if so, does the internal software support RAW?

Now, I’m cautious about one thing: warranty. Apple has a reputation to refuse to repair iPods that have been handled extremely nice. I don’t handle stuff nice. My Ericsson mobile phone drowned when I took a dive in the ocean, not long after my Palm 3e took a fly through the air and landing on the floor in an awkward position after being out drinking. I figured I’d smack it all into one, and got the Sony/Ericsson P800 which got a dint in the screen a year after I got it. Figuring I’d only go with cheap stuff from now on, my Nokia 6280 has survived a few rides through the air with no problem. They are even making sports versions that are extra protected. I’m always doing something, always in action, and the stuff that I take along gets a trip trough the air occasionally. So, I’m really going to be looking at how fragile these phones will be. If they’re not, I might just spend the $599 for one. Probably in its 2nd iteration, though

I’m waiting attentively. Wonder what goodies Macworld ‘07 will bring. I admit it, I’ve become some sort of a fan. But in my defence: THEY STARTED IT! They took FreeBSD and NetBSD and threw a great UI on top of it and sold computers that were set up in a way I liked it with this preinstalled. Hmm….! Waiting….

Recently two screen shots appeared of the upcoming Leopard. Everyone is screaming fake, even the author sais so. But a solution like in the first picture would actually make complete sense. I mean, for OS X Apple has basically been making a nice layer that everything interfaces. First up, the reason I switched: X11. X11 integrates quite nicely with OS X and keeps in style with Aqua without loosing the X11 feel. Classic has been running on OS X from day 1 (not sure if it’s still running on those shiny Intel Macs), and after a boot-up the applications integrate nicely with Aqua but retain the Mac OS 9 feel. In comes Mac OS X for Intel, all PPC are done through Rosetta, and voila, it looks like its running native, and is nicely integrated with Aqua. Now would it be so strange to conceive that Windows is booted in the background running in its own environment just like Mac OS 9 does on the PPC and the applications integrating with the lovely window manager Aqua? I don’t think so. What I think is that it’s time to bump up that X11 integration to make it a tan smoother. And I know that I’d prefer FreeBSD booting up in the background and using Aqua for my window manager.

So where is this screenshot? Well, it’ll probably go offline soon, but in the meanwhile: http://www.picturetrace.com/images/leopard_img01.0.png

From the rest of the speculations that followed the fake screenshots: I don’t think I prefer a tabbed Finder. While a cool idea at first, I think I’d be clicking to much between windows. If tabbed, then just not the way proposed in the screenshots. Second, I don’t need Adress Book and Calendar integrated, I need tighter integration between these apps and other apps I use, for instance Google Mail/Google Calendar, Thunderbird, Firefox etc). For the OS X/Windows integration, if Apple isn’t already working on a scheme like this (I’m sure they are) then they should hire this guy and exploit his imagination

Too cool! Today I found pdf which is Pure Data’s take on mxj. It’s supposed to be API compatible with mxj, which is great because that’s what I use for all my Java-based externals. Suddenly I feel like I’m in the open again after having been digging myself further and further into Max/MSP. Don’t get me wrong, Max/MSP is nice but Pure Data is closer to my heart. Well, as far as software goes, anyways.

Everyone and their grandma seems to blog about Google Notebook that was launched today. They support Windows and Linux officially, but the Firefox plugin worked great with OS X 10.4 at home as well, so Mac users aren’t left behind. Now I’m looking forward to all those “Note This!” plugins for WordPress that are sure to come within the next few days.