Today at 6:00 P.M. Leopard went for sale. Luckily, there is an Apple Store right accross from work, and they were giving away t-shirts. Here are a few photos.

Apple Store line for Leopard

Leopard t-shirt front

Leopard t-shirt closeup

Leopard t-shirt back

A while ago I signed up to beta test this new little application being developed by the folks at plasq called Skitch.

They are the same guys that make Comic Life, and like Comic Life, Skitch has a really nice, really innovative user interface. It’s hard to describe, so you should watch their short intro video.

In about 2 minutes, the first time I used the little program, I captured this little screenshot, added a watermark, drew a little arrow and uploaded to my server this little image:

Not too shabby… as you can see, this is a really useful tool for a blogger. Expect lots of images with cool watermarks and little arrows from now on.

Oh, yes, before I forget: I got 2 (two, that’s it) invites for people who want to try Skitch. If you think you deserve one of them (i.e. you are a Mac-using blogger who posts regularly) please leave a comment and try to convince me why you should get one of my precious invites.

I’m at the Houston Apple Store in the Galleria with Jaramillo and Johnny Kings (or Juan Reyes, depending who you ask), posting this from an iPhone. This thing is awesome… And the keyboard does work well. How do I get out of my current contract? Also, check out the mega-geek photo above.

Here’s a quick list in no particular order of (obvious?) features that the iPhone does not have, but could add in the future throguh a software update.

Obviously, people at Apple had to draw the line somewhere in the feature list so they can actually ship and start selling a product.

Some of the features probably ended in the wrong side of this line and will be added in the future. Others were surely killed by business deals with AT&T (VoIP anyone?). Others, they decided they don’t want it on the iPhone at all, even though it can be done.

Can you think of more?

• Video recording
• Voice-note recording
• VoIP (like Skype) functionality
• .Mac syncing
• Copy/Paste
• Ringtones from your music
• Synchronization thrugh WiFi or Bluetooth
• Keychain (password storing)
• Objective C/ Cocoa SDK
• Dashboard/Widget support (outside of Safari)
• iChat
• A2DP
• Voice dialing
• Games
• Slot for memory cards
• Spotlight
• Java
• Flash
• MMS
• Geolocation
• eBooks
• Built in RSS Reader
• SSH
• Bonjour iTunes sharing
• Printing support
• Video teleconferencing

(Disclaimer: I think that the iPhone is awesome and none of this missing things is a deal-breaker. It will do great for what it does have.)

Update 2:15 PM:

Some interesting suggestions in the comments. Some of them would require hardware changes, so they are not in the original list (more storage, video out, use EDGE while on the phone).

Also, answering to Hammer of Truth’s comment on spotlight: “Spotlight? How many files do you expect to have on your iphone and why do you need spotlight?“.
Obviously you don’t know what Spotlight is. Here’s why I’d want it. I search for Johnny Appleseed and in the search results screen I can click on his Address Book contact info, emails between us, an email message mentioning him, SMS messages between us, and more in the future. It’s a really powerful and useful feature of Mac OS X and would be useful in the iPhone too.

This from The Washington Post:

And if you haven’t done so yet, check out the iPhone Guided Tour. Really, check it out, it’s cool.

How long until my T-Mobile contract expires?
Click here to see them.

How annoying.

Last night I ripped my new Shlomo Artzi (Shfuim – not even in iTunes yet) CD in my Mac mini. It retrieved the track and album names from the series of tubes called the Internet just fine, in Hebrew.

I uploaded it to my iDisk, downloaded at work (Windows XP PC), and now track names, album names and file names are reversed (they read from left to right which makes no sense). Arabic and other right-to-left languages surely have the same problem. Any ideas?

gniyonna woH.

Click for full size image

[Update 5/22/2007] Here’s a link to the discussion in the Apple Support Forums.

[Update 2 5/22/2007] Ok, problem solved. Windows XP does not support Right to Left languages unless you explicitly install it. This was suggested to me through the Apple Support discussion linked above. I wonder if Vista does any better, but I’m not curious enough to install it on my Vista box, which I avoid as hard as I can. Thanks a lot to philboooo for the suggestion. Click below to see fixed version.

Click for full size image

The new Apple Store at The Domain (Austin, TX) opened this morning, conveniently located right accross the street from work. I had to go check it out.

The Domain is the name of the fancy new shopping mall. It’s located on MoPac and Braker. It’s got some very upscale stores (Lacoste, Louis Vuitton, Coach, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany & Co., Puma, etc).

People walking by seemed very puzzled at the long line. Here’s a conversation the dude in front of me had with a lady passing by:

lady: What is this line for?
dude: The Apple Store Grand Opening.
lady: What, do you all like Apple?
dude: Yes.
lady: But I don’t get it, why are you in line?
dude: The Apple Store Grand Opening.
lady: What, are they giving away stuff?
dude: Well, there’s a free t-shirt.
lady: Oh… now I get it.

No… she didn’t get it.

Check out the flickr photoset and the movie embedded below.

Sure, this is old (~24 years old) news…

See a left-handed Kevin Costner with a full head of hair in a vintage Apple Lisa ad (the predecessor of the world-changing Macintosh). Now that’s a weird way of holding a mouse, if I ever saw one. Remember, this is before most people ever saw a mouse or even used a computer.