Future iPhones

My guess for Future iPhones.

Really the size is about right.  Big enough screen to be useful, but small enough to fit in a pocket.  It could get a fraction bigger by having less border, but that's about it.

The biggest unused space on the whole thing is the back.  My crazy guess is double-sided, with identical screens front and back.  With motion detection (easy to detect a 180 degree flip) and/or the same "it's close to your face" type sensors, it would be able to figure which side is up and active.  My screen after months doesn't have a scratch so is plenty durable.

This would get around the only one program running at a time limit (well, increases it to two.)  Use the program, flip to use a different one, flip back.  Crazier things have happened :)

(Added 2/7/2009)

After reading about the new updated Kindle coming, I thought, maybe put a small bit of the "e-paper" sort of thing it uses on the back as the 2nd screen.  Not sure if that's cheaper than a whole full-size screen--but it probably is.

I don't think the e-paper stuff needs electricity to show stuff the way a regular screen does.  Would be perfect for text messages, showing new emails, etc.

That would be cool too!

First Email Address

I read that our new president is keeping his Blackberry for friends and family.  Assuming it isn't b_obama@blackberry.com, it makes you wonder what (hopefully) ridiculous name he had to choose.

prez44?  treklover61?  bearsfan873?

App Approval Process Dinner

Pete and I made another "quick" iPhone app, FTP Picture Upload. (Quick only because of the months putting together FTP On The Go and it re-uses big portions of that.)

It lets you take a picture with the iPhone camera and upload it to your website. I provided a test FTP server so the people reviewing it at Apple could upload photos.

Of course I can see what was uploaded to our server. They were apparently working over a dinner of shrimp fried rice at about 8pm on a Friday night...assuming they're in California. Could also be lunch Saturday in some other time zone.

Lost Ark

We watched Raiders of the Lost Ark over the holidays.

So at the very beginning, how exactly did the Aztecs make a light-sensitive trap?  Wouldn't it go off every night?  I suppose it's just magic.

A Stupid Name Idea

I keep waiting for the perfect project to use my silly name idea--to use a bunch of the "hot" name suffixes and prefixes over the years in one big awesome name.

iTwipediadangosterzilla

Been keeping that for a couple years, so likely will never come.  Maybe somebody else has a product that needs a crazy name...

More iPhone code, opening some URLs in Safari

I answered a question about this in the iPhone developer forums, so thought others might find it useful too.

If you have a UIWebView in your app to show some web page (which I'm using for all the help pages.) You may still want it to open a new Safari window for other things--like links to the AppStore for other programs. This little bit sees what they web view will open, and if it's a URL on apple.com or an email address, opens that in Safari or the Mail app.

An equivalent of the "myEndsWith" is something you'll still have to do :)

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView 
          shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request 
          navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {
   //Opens any to apple.com in Safari (so app-store links open right :)
   if ([[[request URL] host] myEndsWith:@"apple.com"]) {
      [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[request URL]];
      return NO;
   }
   //Mailto opens in email app...
   if ([[[request URL] scheme] myStartsWith:@"mailto"]) {
      [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[request URL]];
      return NO;
   }
   return YES;
}

1 Week, 1 App

I started pulling out a few of the features in FTP On The Go since put together, they really make an entire very useful program.

The Web and FTP servers, along with the directory manager to browse your files, and the viewers for individual files (editor for text, etc) all add up into a very useful program.

Crazy that I could have stopped after the first day of work and called it done. But I wanted to add a much cooler interface...the picture here doesn't show how cool the "bounce" sizing looks when you touch the things on the screen.

About a week later and it's all done and submitted to Apple. Even a website using Peter's nice templates: WiFi Disk. Hopefully shows up in the AppStore soon!

{Edit.  Names changed more for this than any other program we've done.  One of the working titles is in the picture.  Somebody already had a USB disk product with that name, so didn't use it.  But go the .com before I noticed.}