How did Apple nail so many features of the iPhone and yet get picture messages so horribly wrong?

Right now when you receive a picture message via SMS on the iPhone you get an alert that looks like this:

But since there’s no copy/paste feature, you’re apparently expected to hold the 9 character MessageID and the 8 char password in your head, switch over to safari, go to viewmymessage.com and type these in the form fields. I guess that’s realistic if you’re this guy but us mere mortals don’t have that kind of mental swap space.

AT&T should just put a link in the SMS to retrieve the picture. It’s no Treo experience like getting the pic immediately but it’s a one-click retrieval step at that point since the iPhone automatically creates links for valid URLs in messages. And this method would be no less secure since they already put these tokens as text in the SMS now.

If getting AT&T’s cooperation to fix this isn’t an option, Apple could still solve it by the having the SMS app recognize and parse the MMS alerts that AT&T issues and create a dynamic local page that posts those variables. Either one of these would make multimedia messages tolerable on the iPhone- it’s basically unusable now. I don’t know how Apple is prioritizing their improvements - I know they probably don’t expose that anywhere but it would be good if they allowed people to vote for fixes. BTW, Matt Assay has a good discussion of other iPhone brokenness. It’s such a beautiful device but has some things that are conspicuously annoying. It’d be great if their calendar worked more like the Treo’s and I still haven’t figured out if/where it syncs data from the notes app to the Mac.

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Having just returned from Macworld late last night, here are a few thoughts/observations:

A massive ecosystem

It’s striking to see how many companies have sprung up around Apple products. Nothing like cramming all these people into the same spot to make you realize how many there are. They filled two ginormous exhibit halls at the Moscone center in SF. It was sensory overload walking the floor and the energy level was almost uncomfortably high to the point where you had conference fatigue after a day.

Masters of buzz

They certainly have demonstrated they know how generate buzz. Aside from having a stellar UI in their products they had amazing visual presence at the show. With these cinematic and creative displays you have everyone with a camera posing for pics with Apple logos in the background and then talking about how incredible the setup was (me case in point right now). As far as product launches, nobody needs the new Mac Air but the way they present it sure makes you want one.

What got the crowds

By far the most interesting thing for me was to see which booths drew the crowds. Every now and then you’d come across a booth that looked no different from any other and yet there would be 100 people packed around it watching a demo while the others were desolate. These ideas aren’t rocket science but the popular ones consistently had either:

a charismatic speaker

a product that visually demo’d well

a hot brazillian model handing out free stuff

an interactive experience.

This last one was the real eye-opener: whether it’s a game of chance that involved competing for prizes or some type of interactive demo where the passers by were projected on the video screen and then the demo somehow incorporated them- it’s clear that people like watching other people, not products. If your product can be presented in such a way to incorporate the people there in the demo itself, it’s guaranteed to attract viewers.

Interesting products

The two products that interested me most (aside from the new EVDO card from Verizon which I bought on site) were completely unrelated to Apple.

The company SmartBoard had some impressive options for making a digital whiteboard. Their most inexpenisve setup allows you to utilize your existing projector to project against one of their pneumatic screens. Using your finger or one of their soft pens, you draw on the screen and it senses the position, sends that data to the app and draws ink as if you were writing on a whiteboard. Because it’s essentially just a touchscreen for a projector though, you can do anything you can with a mouse (ie. surf web pages on a whiteboard, mark them up, capture the digital ink to a pdf and share). It had some pretty fantastic OCR features too that would transcribe a whiteboard full of notes into text. They had other more expensive options that either incorporated one of their plasma TV’s or allowed you to use an overlay on an existing television screen. This seemed like a killer feature for teams that do a lot of brainstorming and it has a solid “wow” factor for anyone who relies on making a stellar first impression when collaborating with a client on a whiteboard.

The other one that really grabbed me was Sawgrass. They provide an alternate method to creating t-shrits that involves dye sublimation printing with heat transfer vs. the typical silk screening process. It’s not a revolutionary technology but what’s impressive is the vibrance of the colors, how it doesn’t alter the feel of the shirt and the affordability of the system. It seems like it could enable a creative t-shirt company to bootstrap its way into a real business without much up front cost.

Parallels took best in show for the 2nd year in a row. We’re happy for those guys. As their largest virtual appliance vendor currently, we love to see Parallels being received well. Their new Parallels server product looks slick and has all kinds of neat features that should make it very appealing for anyone who is heavily invested in OS X. That beta just started accepting signups and you can apply here.

Lastly, Zimbra is looking really solid. We’ve had numerous requests for a Zimbra JumpBox and we hope to eventually deliver one as it’s something we want to start using ourselves. I was impressed with how responsive Zimbra was running in Safari 3. It’s almost indistinguishable from a desktop app and I’m assuming the offline access is even snappier. They’ve also bundled in a chat server (jabber?) to the latest version so you can have a central, searchable place for IM transcripts to accumulate for your company which is very cool.

Conclusion

If you’re into Mac products this is an impressive, high-energy experience I would recommend attending. The Mac market may still be a fraction of the PC market but the passion and vocal nature of its constituents means it moves twice as fast. The companies that ignore the Mac market citing present figures are going to kick themselves when its size rivals the PC market because by then they will have missed the boat.

I just got it.

I’ve been on the fence about getting an edge card for us recently. The people at the Verizon booth at MacWorld were giving away the cards and waiving the activation fee today- that was enough to tip the decision for me. We are getting to the point where we need flawless connectivity at all times when we’re on the road. The new version (USB727) supports their Rev A network and gets theoretical speeds of 3MB down and 1MB up. I’m on it now in the airport in SJC and here’s the actual result I just got via speakeasy:

Not the fastest connection. I was getting 1MB down earlier today but even though the current speed is slow, I’m still stoked. It’s a classic “Innovator’s Solution” instance of “competing against non-consumption”- I’m thrilled to have any access right now.

The VZ Access manager software that comes with it was trivial to setup and it worked right off the bat on Leopard OS. It has some performance diagnostics built into it, although it appears to be over-reporting the speed according to the Speakeasy results:

All in all I’m very happy with this purchase. At $60/mo with 30 days to try it out risk-free and $175 to back out of the two-yr commitment any time after that, it’s worth the price to me at this point to have guaranteed internet access wherever we go. I don’t know how it compares to Sprint’s EVDO network but I vowed 3 years back to never give those guys another dime. So far so good Verizon.

evdo verizon

Wow. This thing is great on so many levels. With the exception of one conspicuously-missing feature, I’d say Apple has a game-changing device on their hands.

The void that this product fills

On the continuum of multimedia-based, time-wasting activities there is a gap. If traditional television sits at the extreme of the passive / linear / spoon-fed type of media consumption, surfing the web and reading blogs is at the opposite end requiring too much effort and brain involvement for times when you just want to decompress. I just finished setting up an Apple TV box this evening and I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now and this thing falls squarely in the middle of that continuum as an easy way to consume digital multimedia without having to sit in front of a computer screen.

The Apple TV allows you to sync your iTunes via wireless and watch/listen via your entertainment system. It can aggregate media from multiple computers, display photos and album art in the background and has an interface for surfing youtube content (provided it’s connected to the Internet). There was an Apple TV at a birthday party I was at last weekend and it was a blast passing the remote around and be able to pull up an old SNL episode or Mr. T singing about his mom. In the same way that the Nintendo Wii transforms a typically anti-social activity of gaming into a social experience, the Apple TV makes for a fun way of exploring digital content.

Setup happiness

The setup was almost as painless and intuitive as configuring a JumpBox. Running the wires for the component video took the longest time of any step. Once we got the wiring right the on-screen setup of the Apple TV from that point was a snap and took all of about 30sec to connect to the hotspot and start syncing to my iTunes. We did have to disable mac address filtering for it to connect. You pair it like you would a bluetooth device by entering in a combo on the iTunes of the computer which you wish to sync and it does its thing. About an hour later it had successfully synced some 2000 songs, a handful of video podcasts and a movie. You’ll want to pull down the album artwork for your iTunes library if you don’t already have it because it makes flipping through your music feel like flipping through a CD collection.

Usability

The visual interface is clean and what you’d expect from Apple. The remote is the same one that comes with the MacBook laptop and has only a few buttons- it makes the universal remote on the coffee table look like a monster. You navigate a tree of options based on Music, Movies, TV shows, Podcasts, Youtube and device settings. The only thing that’s awkward is typing in characters for a Youtube search via an on-screen keyboard.

Valuable real estate for Apple

I don’t know the numbers on prevalence of Apple TV’s at this point- I would guess it’s just a sliver of the market. But this device represents the “last mile of track” for Apple in a digital entertainment railway into the living room. I can see how owning the iTunes player, the iTunes store and the Apple TV device gives them a wildly-valuable distribution channel for digital media assets.

My perception of the Apple TV before using it was “this could be neat but it seems like a technology solution chasing a problem.” My feelings after having used it is that it makes you forget that you’re using the Internet - it’s more like a Tivo experience than an Internet surfing experience. The interface, transitions and usability that went into it make you want to explore and play with it. By taking a situational vs. feature-centric approach, they zeroed in on the scenarios that people want to use this for and nailed it. There’s only a few minor deficiencies at this point - but like the iPhone, this is a strong first showing for a product.

Enhancements I’d like to see

So the obvious question is “where’s the Rhapsody integration?” They have Youtube integration - this is a glaring omission. There has to be a deal to be made there that makes sense for both companies. They have the ability to log you into your Youtube account so I can’t imagine it’s a technical issue that prevents you from authenticating your Rhapsody acct. It has to be either a political or business issue. Perhaps they see the unlimited access to your Rhapsody music eating away at iTunes purchases? I don’t buy that argument though- there’s no impulse buys via Apple TV like in iTunes because you still have to purchase via your computer.

Wireless keyboard - it has wireless built in but I don’t believe it has bluetooth. I don’t know how much of a stretch it would be for them to add the bluetooth capability or if there’s may an IR-based way of achieving this but it would be nice to see integration with their wireless keyboard. Typing text using the on-screen keyboard is clunky. Of course doing so makes it more like a computer at that point so I’m not completely opposed with how it is now- just would be nice to have that option.

Be able to treat it as an external HD - I’m running out of disk space on my laptop. I’ve been meaning to buy an external hard drive and offload my iTunes library. I was hoping that I could kill two birds with the Apple TV having it serve that function but it seems it can only sync what exists on my laptop (ie. removing a file from my Mac propagates to the Apple TV and kills it there as well). There may be a way to create a current playlist of all iTunes media, sync it and then disable syncing before removing it from the laptop but that’s hackish. I’d like to see an easy way to treat the Apple TV as an authoritative media base station subscribed to various content and have the syncing work in the other direction with my laptop pulling only a subset of those files.

Conclusion

This is cool device. I had tinkered with the Democracy player and Joost on my laptop awhile back thinking “wow, power to the people. I’m going to start watching non-mainstream content more” but then I never did because at the end of the day, sometimes you just want to plop on the couch and hit the remote. The Apple TV moves that unique, independent content into the living room where it can compete in watch-ability with movies and TV. I wouldn’t say drop what you’re doing and race out to get one but this definitely a neat addition to a media center and sure to further erode the receding coastline of the TV networks.

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File this one under the “nerd” category as this will be highly technical but I finally fixed the hotsync from my Treo 650 to my Mac. Hopefully this post will help anyone else grappling with the same issue and googling for the cryptic error message I was getting. The problem turned out to be multiple issues. First the background…

I had the bluetooth hotsync working under the Palm Desktop software and OS X for awhile but one day it just crapped out throwing the error message “unexpected error 71013.” It was seemingly a problem with the conduit since we could open the Hotsync manager but upon trying to open the conduit manager, nothing happened. I tried reinstalling the Palm Desktop software but ran into a strange issue where I couldn’t delete the old instance. Apparently the Palm installer installs the software as root rather than the administrator that it’s running under and I was getting the message “Cannot delete trash. Localized.rsrc in use.” It took a friend to show me how to go into the command line and navigate to this hidden trash folder under /users/root/Trashes to clear out the file in use. So we were able to get it back to square one with no Palm Desktop.

My friend Jay told me about an app called Missing Sync which supposedly would bypass the Palm software altogether and allow me to sync my contacts directly to the address book and my calendar to iCal (which was all I wanted). I bought the software (there is no free trial) and installed it per the readme but unfortunately got a new error saying “Unable to connect to Hotsync, port is in use by another application.” This was annoying. I followed the Missing Sync tech support representative’s instructions and tried killing the bluetooth preferences and repairing my phone to the Mac. Nothing.

What ended up being the problem was an obvious mistake on my part in failing to enable the bluetooth connection from within the Missing Sync software. Apparently the bluetooth is turned off by default and the interface for enabling it is an icon which glows blue when it’s on. I missed this crucial step so the bluetooth connection was working fine but my phone was effectively “knocking on a door that nobody knew to answer.” Once the Bluetooth was enabled from within Missing Sync, all worked perfectly.

I will say Missing Sync is pretty slick and gives you all the functionality you’d want from the Hotsync software plus the capability to sync iPhoto and your iTunes playlist as well as AvantGo. Kudos to Mark/Space for excellent software and solid support.

They are very versatile devices and while I’m fairly sure they could launch rockets with a little modification, they cannot be submarines. I learned this the hard way this weekend when mine decided to take a dive. It was the most expensive swim I’ve ever had but the silver lining of this cloud was the process for restoring the data the next day on the replacement device. I gotta hand it to Palm- it could not have gone any smoother. Every setting, application and piece of data (calendar item, contact, memo and todo) was fortunately backed up to my mac and upon syncing (s-Y-n-c’ing) the new treo for the first time, it functioned precisely like the old one. A few years ago this event would have meant a catastrophic data loss and hours of re-entering the numbers that I had a paper backup for. Today it was literally the time necessary to activate the phone and sync it once. Kudos to the folks at Palm for a sweet restoration process!