Solipsism Gradient

I just heard the news; it seems the rumors were right. This year’s WWDC is now officially set for June 11 to 15, 2007. As I said below, this further reinforces my belief that the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone will be announced simultaneously by Steve Jobs at the keynote – June 11 – and, very probably, that the Leopard DVD will be distributed to every developer after the keynote. Let’s hope an iPhone developer’s kit will be thrown in… and that I will be able to attend.

Seems that rumor sites are saying that this year’s WWDC will happen June 10th-15th. June used to be the standard month – the Great Intel Switch was announced June 6th (my birthday!), just 18 months ago. Last year it was August, and the consensus is that the delay was to allow the first Leopard seed to be ready… and a good thing it was, too.

Now, the rumored dates are coincidentally still unbooked at the Moscone Center site. Apple is, so far, mum on the subject but insiders say that an official date might be announced in February. Currently, my feeling is that June 10-15 might be accurate, and if it is, very possibly Steve Jobs will officially announce the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone at the keynote. And that may well be the first time that the rumored new Leopard GUI is shown in public; unless my suspicions that the iPhone interface was a preview of one of Leopard’s UI modes are confirmed, of course.

Other rumors speak of a “special announcement” in the second half of February, and some say specifically that Leopard will be shown then, and that it should be out in late March. I’m under NDA about details of course, but I frankly don’t believe Leopard will be sufficiently stable in March, and so, if any special event happens, it will be used to introduce new Mac hardware. Any upgrades to iApps will of course use the cool new Leopard technologies and so won’t be available before the big L ships.

I really hope to make it again to this year’s WWDC; the last two were great. We have a Scandinavia/Baltic trip starting in late June so we might even join the two trips.

Here’s a good write-up about the reason for the absence of Java on the iPhone. Beyond Steve Jobs’ “ball-and-chain” comment, the truth is that Java phone apps are coded to some lowest-common-denominator UI – meaning standard phone keys, perhaps a stylus, and no support whatsoever for multitouch, zooming and everything else that makes the iPhone so cool.

Of course, all the Java enthusiasts are up in arms about this, but Steve Jobs is right. Java’s touted hardware independence is, on the iPhone, a serious disadvantage. A Java app on the iPhone would stand out as a clunky, last-millenium legacy thing that wouldn’t react as the user expects.

pervas wrote:

What about this?

Scott Stevenson has a great post about iPhone development and one of the comments points at Tom LaPorta‘s page. He has collaborated on many papers about cellular networks and has detailed how a SMS-based attack on the network might be achieved. I haven’t had time to check out details, though.

Greg Joswiak answers some questions about OS X. In particular, it’s “optimized but full” and uses “considerably less” than half a gigabyte of the built-in flash memory – not incompatible with my previous guess of between 64 and 256MB.

“Optimized but full” probably means that most of what makes Mac OS X be, uhm, “OS X” is present – like the keynote slide, it means Cocoa, multitasking graphic GUI, animation, etc. Since most of Cocoa runs atop Carbon and BSD APIs these must be present also. However, Darwin/XNU and the whole IOKit are a little hefty for an embedded environment and no doubt a new, much smaller kernel and driver model were slid underneath. Direct Mach calls are certainly still used in some places but no doubt were recoded or faked out with a compatibility shim. And the BSD subsystem/command line tools will certainly be absent.

The Apple-hating crowd seems to be out in full array. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much people calling “liar” or “bullshit” on almost every sentence of the keynote, or of often barely literate commenters saying such-and-such decision or feature are “brain-dead”; at least not since the iPod launch. It’s certainly easy to tell in retrospect where Apple or Jobs have been wrong – sometimes even egregiously so – in past years, but calling this in advance is a little foolhardy. Especially in light of the ROI for recent investors.

I just found an interesting post over at the ever-interesting Language Log:

…But it’s important to note that these people are not lying, exactly. They simply don’t care one way or another about what the facts are, and this shifts their work out of the category of lies and into the category for which Harry Frankfurt has suggested the technical term bullshit:

What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

So, while I don’t think Steve Jobs is lying about anything regarding the new products or Apple’s plans, he certainly is “deceiving about… his enterprise” in several places. And rightly so, as the competition’s watching and analyzing every word too. While as a developer I’m certainly miffed about all the secrecy, as a stockholder I approve.

Speaking of stock, here’s a nice quote from Jerry Pournelle:

If ever there were an indication that America has gone greedily insane and needs ways to curb the rapacious Trial Lawyers, the story of minority stockholder suits against Apple charging that in 1997 Steve Jobs manipulated options dates in order to keep key executives from bailing out has got to be it. The minority stockholders cleaned up because Jobs pretty well single-handedly saved the company; had he not done so, the stock would have become worthless. So in return for this, the stockholders let some contingency fee lawyers talk them into fronting for these suits. Any sane judge would throw all those out on the grounds of standing: “You weren’t damaged, so how can you sue for damages?”

pervas wrote:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

(…)Makes sense, unfortunately. Still, I get the impression that selected applications may apply for inclusion providing Apple can verify them thoroughly. Hm.

Ahem!

What about this?

This quotes the same story I linked to in my original post, but then basically says there’s no technical foundation to Jobs’ claims about the vulnerability of the phone network.

I’m can’t claim to be well-informed about the internal workings of the cellphone network. But I seem to remember reading that there are safeguard requirements for the 911 system at the very least. And even supposing that the Ars writer is right… most phones require certified apps. I’ve browsed a few developer pages for other phones and they emphasize that (for instance) Java’s ability to restrict access to some APIs is fundamental.

I think that’s about all one speculate before the device is actually out.

Jobs said in an interview that the iPhone is currently a closed system:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Makes sense, unfortunately. Still, I get the impression that selected applications may apply for inclusion providing Apple can verify them thoroughly. Hm.

Update: In another interview (registration required) he confirmed what I said above:

“You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers…

These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

This definitely mean’s there’ll be some sort of certification or verification program for selected third-party developers.

Let’s hope Apple has a non-cellphone, “OS X”-based tablet somewhere in the pipeline; that could be used as a development environment without spooking the cellphone providers, and selected/certified apps could then migrate to the iPhone…

Some updates in random order. No time to re-find URLs for them, sorry.

It seems pretty much certain that the iPhone (at least the prototype) uses an ARM processor. That said, much of the hardware – except that affected by the FCC certification process, not sure if that would include the “computer” parts – may still change in the next few months.

It’s now being said that Cingular isn’t helping Apple with iPhone pricing at all, meaning that those prices are the actual prices. Apple is supposed to handle support, too. I don’t know enough about cellphones to say much about that, but it strikes me as less restrictive than the usual abusive tie-ins.

Many people seem convinced the narrow black strip on the iPhone’s left side is a phone chip or SD card slot. It’s not. Now that I’ve finally watched the keynote, it’s clear (and Steve Jobs says so) that it’s the volume control. This means that the phone chip, and the battery, are built in. However, they should be replaceable with the same amount of care (read: a whole lot) as in the iPods.

Negotiations between Cisco/LinkSys and Apple about the iPhone seem to have broken down. Cisco says they’re suing, while Apple haven’t commented; but from all indications they seem to have decided that the Apple iPhone is sufficiently different from the LinkSys iPhone (which is a cordless/VoIP phone) that there should be no confusion. Apple seems to have entered an iPhone trademark request through a dummy company.

“OS X” seems to be a new generic term, with “Mac OS X” now being understood as “OS X for the Mac”. Makes sense. Birdies tell me the iPhone OS X (or whatever it’ll be called) has a different kernel, which would make sense if the ARM processor is used – embedded kernels should be very finely tuned to the hardware.

Phil Schiller is supposed to have confirmed that the iPhone will remain closed to third-party software. Some sources add the words “for now”. Apple ADC says people interested should contact them, which sort of confirms my theory that, for now, it’ll be invitation-only, like it is for iPod games.

Several reasons are being discussed for the closure. One, of course, is that Apple wants to ensure the UI quality of the system. Another one is that third-party software running on a cellphone must be isolated into a sandbox, to disallow them tampering with the phone hardware – disrupting US 911 systems or whatever. This is of course easier for phones that use Java apps, and it might be a reason for allowing only widgets on the iPhone. A third reason would be that releasing any developer kit might give away too much about the generic Leopard/OS X, which certainly isn’t beta-ready for now.

The new Airport Extreme now accepts any number of printers or hard drives over its USB port. meaning it’s a NAS server. I posted some months ago about inexpensive NAS being a necessity, and several such are being launched at CES, too. This ties in nicely to Time machine’s need for an external backup drive. Let’s hope it (or some future firmware for it) work with ZFS, too.

Nokia in an interview welcomed the iPhone competition. Curiously enough, a few days before they introduced a new cellphone while saying “this is a computer, not just a cellphone”. Maybe they’ll change their name to “Nokia Computer, Inc.”?

People are relearning in a hurry that the symbol can be typed (on my keyboard, at least) as shift-option-K; there’s no easy HTML equivalent though, so I had to make a new small image for showing it here. So, with the tv out, why didn’t they name it the phone…? Probably just to associate it with the iPod, a name they’d be ill-advised to change.

Hm. Did someone leak the iPhone design to LG? Or is it a case of “great minds think alike”? Not that you can say from just one photo…