Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Yes. Believe it or not, there is something that has overshadowed the launch of the iPhone around the world. It is the story of the developer community that has come together around the iPhone to create a whole ecosystem of applications and clandestine methods for loading these applications onto this platform. In a matter of months, loosely organized individuals and companies with names like Nullriver, Conceited software, drudge and “Erica,” have managed to unravel the turtleneck of iPhone security and in the process they have created something entirely new in the industry: a mass-market mobile phone platform that is completely open to the application developer community. They have also created application loading tools for over-the-air installation which have no rival in terms of their sophistication and ease of use. Indeed, there’s no tip-off, except for the author names, that the software you’re using wasn’t developed and pre-installed by Apple - they’re that good.

Along the way, we now have a few new words in our mobile lexicon. Of course, there’s “brick” as a verb, as in “to brick your phone.” Of course, most iPhone users who found their phones bricked after the first software update have since “de-bricked” their phones through various widely available methods. There’s also “jailbreak,” which has come to mean to enable third party software to be loaded onto an otherwise closed platform. A platform so prepared can be called “jailbroken.” The rest of the lexicon is still being worked out. The popular press can’t seem to figure out the difference between SIM-unlocked and “contractless” for example. One can Jailbreak and SIM-unlock their iPhone but still be locked into a 2 year contract.

When the first iPhone “jailbreak” method came out, people were a bit tentative. Surely Apple would “fix” this in a subsequent update. Indeed they did, resulting in the “great bricking.” But when the new firmware was broken as well, the developer community began to smell blood. We’re on our third firmware revision (which has also been broken) and I do not believe at this point that the community can be stopped.

Unfortunately this has all somewhat overshadowed what possibly should have been the biggest story of 2007 - the rise of sophisticated mobile browsers such as Safari for iPhone. I still believe the roll-out of these browsers will have a huge impact in the mobile Web space. But the overall impact on the industry of the iPhone jailbreakers, I believe, will be more important in pushing the industry towards openness, user choice and the wide deployment of connected mobile applications - in a word, Mobile 2.0.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 14:43 under mobile 2.0
Tags: iPhone, Jailbreak

2 Comments

My Yahoo not working on iPhone

Originally uploaded by appelquist

Just thought I’d note this. My Yahoo! doesn’t appear to be working on the iPhone. Same result on the S60 browser. To be fair, though, the kind of user experience that My Yahoo! provides isn’t particularly suited to the mobile browser. What would be much better would be to provide a mobile-specific experience of the same content (for example, tabs instead of columns, a-la the fantastic iPhone Facebook app).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:35 under Misc

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I have a confession. I have been a user of “My Yahoo!” since its original release. I was one of the early beta users when beta really meant beta. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, as more sophisticated personalized Web portals and more recently RSS aggregators have developed, I have stayed with the tried and true My Yahoo! - a site that has essentially not changed its look and feel since the last century.

Well watch out.

My Yahoo! is back in beta, and it’s about time. What’s new? First of all, there are some outrageous new styles on offer, like this Leopard-print (incongruously named “faux fur” - as a colleague pointed out, why do they have to call it “faux fur” when it’s on a computer?). Unfortunately, many of the styles on offer are not very readable, and readability of text is pretty important in an application like this. It also offers a reader pane built into the application so you can read full blog entries (for those that publish a full feed) right in My Yahoo! This, and the UI tweaks are probably the nicest features. The other bits, such as a page-dominating animated ad (see upper-left-hand-corner) I am finding a little hard to swallow.

Even as a long time, user I was about to give up and move to Google Reader, Netvibes or Pageflakes. The new release is keeping my attention. I’ll definitely give it a spin around the block, but I’m thinking that what they’ve delivered, feature-wise, may be too little too late.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:33 under Web 2.0
Tags: yahoo!

6 Comments

So I attended this Future of Mobile conference on Wednesday. In general it was a great event. The one criticism that was thrown around at the event after-party which I kind of agree with is that it may have been a little heavy on Web topics. That might sound surprising, coming from someone such as myself who spends his days (and increasingly his nights) working on Mobile Web stuff, but I actually think there should have been some more material outside the Web topic. I did really enjoy a number of the presentations, including Brian Fling’s fantastic presentation on how the iPhone is changing the mobile space and great presentation from David Burke from Google which included live Java coding on stage (which in any other circumstance is sure to put people to sleep).

Apart from all that, Carsonified just runs really great events. In particular, they seem to have an intuitive grasp of the user experience of the events. Everything down to the badges is meticulously designed with a professional sheen that nobody else seems to be able to manage. In the case of the badges, they are printed on both sides (how often are you at a conference and you realize the person you’re talking to has no idea who you are because your badge has turned itself around), they are clearly printed and color coded based on whether you’re a developer, designer, speaker, etc… It’s just one of the many Carsonified touches that makes their events so pleasant. Great work!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 18:16 under mobile 2.0
Tags: FOM

3 Comments

I just spoke at Mobile Internet World here in Boston (as part of the W3C Mobile Web Standards track). Being part of this event brought me back to the first “Internet World” conference I ever attended in, wait for it, 1993 in New York City. I had been invited up there because my magazine, Quanta. At the time, the Web was a fringe at best. The event was meager, at best, but there was a definitely a sense that something important was happening. Mobile Internet World, in Boston in 2007, was considerably more impressive, but yet I had the same feeling of excitement. People were coming to this W3C session to learn about mobile Web standards and development. This crowd was not mobile industry people - I did not get the idea that I was preaching to the choir. I think that’s signifigant in the “mainstreaming” of the Mobile Internet.

I’m interested to see if I get the same vibe at Future of Mobile tomorrow in London.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:49 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: futureofmobile, mobileinternetworld, MobileWeb, W3C

2 Comments