Tag Archives: software

Reality Distortion Field

No longer missing iPhone features

1 Comment

hero-intro-20090608

In June of 2007 I wrote a post titled “Seemingly obvious software features missing from the iPhone“.

Today, iPhone OS 3.0 will be available and the iPhone 3G S is shipping, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how things stand now.

Below is the original list, with the items that are now covered striked through:

  • Video recording
  • Voice-note recording
  • VoIP (like Skype) functionality
  • .Mac syncing
  • Copy/Paste
  • Ringtones from your music
  • Synchronization thrugh WiFi or Bluetooth (done through MobileMe)
  • Keychain (password storing)
  • Objective C/ Cocoa SDK
  • Dashboard/Widget support (outside of Safari)
  • iChat (through 3rd party applications)
  • A2DP
  • Voice dialing
  • Games
  • Slot for memory cards
  • Spotlight
  • Java
  • Flash
  • MMS
  • Geolocation
  • eBooks
  • Built in RSS Reader (through 3rd party applications)
  • SSH ((through 3rd party applications – client only)
  • Bonjour iTunes sharing
  • Printing support (through 3rd party applications)
  • Video teleconferencing
Almost everything is covered now. What do you think the new list should contain? Here’s a recent article with 25 still-missing features.
Reality Distortion Field

Safari 4 beta

2 Comments

overview-hero-image3-20090217

The good people at Apple released Safari 4 beta yesterday. For those not in the know, Safari is Apple‘s web browser. According to the traffic analysis for The MKX® (more on that sometime next month), a large amount of readers are still using Internet Explorer.

At home, I’ve been using Safari for years. Before that I used Camino. At work, I had been using Firefox, but switched to Google Chrome a few months ago and liked it very much. Now I’m giving the new Safari 4 a spin both at home and at work. Call me a browser slut if you’d like, I’ve been known to use iCab and the now free Omniweb in the past, and even IE for Mac back in the Mac OS 8 days.

I like it so far. For example, on Windows I can make the fonts look like they do on the Mac: much better – but perhaps a personal preference… from someone with better taste. I also like the new tabs (heavily borrowed from Chrome) and the fact that it will sync my bookmarks with my home computers and iPhone through my MobileMe account.

You can download it and test it here.