Solipsism Gradient

Googling (oops, pardon, searching Google I mean) for iPhone just now yields “about 76,100,000″ hits. Wow. Just goes to show how Steve Jobs has perfected the art of letting the press do Apple’s marketing at very little cost.

As a stockholder, I’m all for it. By all accounts, the iPhone, which goes on sale the day after tomorrow, will sell very well, and AAPL stock has already gone up 50% this year. As a cellphone non-user I don’t care; it’ll take a long time to be sold here in Brazil, and even if it were on sale tomorrow, I wouldn’t buy one for my daily use. As I said before, a “OS X”-based tablet would be more interesting.

But speaking of OS X, I wonder what version will be installed on the iPhone. The TV seems to run a special build of version 10.4.7, by all accounts. Originally I’d expected the iPhone to run a stripped-down version of 10.5 (Leopard), but now that Leopard has been delayed, that’s no longer plausible. How Apple will manage the whole Mac OS X – OS X dichotomy still remains a mistery… no doubt we’ll have detailed dissections of the iPhone contents next Saturday.

John Gruber posts a follow-up about clickthrough. He puts the ball into Apple’s court:

Only Apple can fix this. Where by “fixing it”, I mean three things, all essential:

Mandate correct click-through behavior in the HIG.

Make Apple’s Cocoa frameworks do the right thing by default. Supply sufficient API hooks so that it’s easy for third-party frameworks to do the right thing.

All of Apple’s own software needs to follow these guidelines.

Hmm… I need an “applause” smiley here…

Here’s an additional interesting tip from Sven-S. Porst:

One thing I’d like to add on the topic of click-through is that while it had been possible for ages in MacOS to drag background windows without activating them by holding the command-key while doing so, support for this background manipulation has improved in OSX. In Cocoa applications you can command-click most controls and use them without activating the window first. I like that. Click-through for the people who want and it and can handle it. It’s far from perfect, though, as it doesn’t work uniformly through all applications and doesn’t work for toolbar items either as the command-Key is used for moving items there.

John Gruber affirms a conviction I’ve long held, namely that “clickthrough” is usually a bad idea in Mac OS X applications. In the process, he goes into interesting detail about the Mac’s emphasis on the frontmost window, and how this differs from Microsoft’s window-centric approach.

The concept of the frontmost (or active) application is absolutely essential to understanding how to use a Mac. The frontmost application controls the menu bar and handles all keyboard input, including command key shortcuts. The concept of the frontmost window is related and similarly important. You can click on background windows (thus giving rise to the potential for click-through), but that’s it – everything else you can do with your computer is directed at the frontmost window of the active application…