Thursday, March 20, 2008

I can't stand it anymore, I have to say it

I love my iPhone.

There, I said it. I feel dirty.

My Windows-based SmartPhone got crushed in an under-the-motorized-car-seat retrieval operation that went horribly awry. Faced with a rapidly diminishing usable space on the cracked LCD screen, I went to the AT&T store to get the new hotness.

I suspected I wanted an iPhone. I didn't want to pay a lot for a phone, but what can you do? I carefully considered each and every phone they had and compared it to the iPhone. The results fell into one of two catagories:

1) This phone is complete crap and they have the nerve to charge [$100..$200] for it.
2) This phone isn't an iPhone, but costs just as much.

So I bought the iPhone.

The installation experience was harrowing. I found out you have to activate it through iTunes. I hate iTunes. I hate QuickTime. I hate all Apple software. I hate all third party software. I don't like the way it infects my machine with little processes that run without asking and little icons littered about the desktop and quicklaunch and systray. I hates it all.

But my wife has an iPod, so it was already installed. What can you do?

However, I had to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. So I fired up IE and went to apple.com. Halfway through the download, IE crashed.

So I used FireFox to download iTunes.

As a developer who used to work on Internet Explorer, you have no idea how much that hurt me. It was a sad, sad day. Snow flakes were reported in Hell.

But now I have the iPhone and it's the best phone ever and probably the best UI for anything other than PicLens.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Quicktime can still BSOD my Vista box from user mode. nuff said. I would probably get an iphone if it didn't require so much interaction with itunes.

-petknep

jeffdav said...

I suspect that isn't necessarily QT, but QT and your video drivers having a bad interaction.

I'm actually quite shocked at how good iTunes is. I mean, it has the annoying "look-at-me! i'm important" issues that all such things have because it was built with the assumption it would be the center of my life and the sole purpose for me even owning a computer.

But if you get past all that, it's really quite good. It manages to do several different things, none of which are trivial, at the same time without hanging or crashing. E.g. I can download an update for the iPhone, sync the iPhone, and rip a CD all at the same time with no ill-effects.

Compare to IE where I can browse and download a file at the same time without getting nervous.

How's D.N.F. coming?

Unknown said...

Really happy for you. The iPhone is truly amazing. It is one of those gadget you just can't get enough...

Did you take a look at the iPhone SDK? Can we hope to see Piclens for the iPhone one day? It would really rocks !