Sysadmin Field Notes

July 1, 2007

Wow. It's hard to not say much about this thing without sounding like a fanboy. Boing boing's iPhone post is spot on for me, and I could some up the whole experience in a single sentence:

Suddenly every other piece of technology I own seems like a pain to use.

The interface has amazing attention to detail; the touchscreen is pixel-by-pixel perfect. Rather than repeat everyone else's reviews, here are a few of my favorite things that I haven't seen much posted about:

Filling out forms in Safari. Works amazingly well, even long ones. There are "next/previous" buttons that go through the form in tab order, so you just have to pick the first field, safari zooms you into it, and then you can type it in, and hit "next", which zooms to the next field and lets you enter it. Then done pops you back to the page and you can click the 'submit' or whatever button. Fabulous.

Plus, the keyboard is field-context sensitive. If you're on something it guesses is a phone number field, it's just a number keypad. If it's a drop-down list, you get instead of the keyboard, a fully scrollable/flickable list of the contents.

Keyboard/Text Entry Works wonderfully. The big variable is hand size (which is why I'm curious that they only support the horizontal keyboard layout in safari, since it's much easier for big hands). I have long fingers, but they aren't too big. I'm already at or past blackberry typing speed. The auto-correction works great, and even picks up proper names out of your contact list, including names and addresses. Just barrel though typing, and it matters amazingly little if you typo something, it will get fixed. The context sensitive bits are a good touch too. If you're in a URL field, you get "/" and ".com" instead of the spacebar. Nice.

Also nice is that if you hit symbol/number mode, when you hit space, it reverts back to letter mode. I find this saves a lot of time.

Fit and finish. Crazy good, everywhere. The feedback is so immediate you feel completely connected to the thing. It's just so natural. The little magnifying glass for text correction has lens flare, distortion at the edges...which is funny and maybe a little too eye-candy, but it's touches like that that make this thing so damn fun to use.

Activation/Sync. Very nice to have all of your contacts automatically synced without even thinking about it. All my numbers in the phone right from the get-go. Activation for me was totally painless, even with number portability. I did it friday night, and I think I finished in about 15 total minutes.

In syncing, it -also- syncs your safari bookmarks, which is a great touch, and in a real, real move of genius, your auto-complete text as well. Most of the URLS I use are there, so entering common urls is -very- fast.

Issues. There is some sort of DHCP problem in some cases, there's a few threads on
Apple's discussion forum. My fix was manually setting my IP and giving the iPhone a reserved address in my router.

Deleting text is the one slight "clunky" spot in the interface. You just have to backspace it...press and hold works fast enough, but I'd like to be able to notch it up just a smidge. After several characters, it does switch to word at a time deletion, which helps. Also, the email icons were a bit inscuritable to me..the arrow indicating reply/forward wasn't obvious. The fact that things like that stick out shows how well the rest of the interface is put together. No cut and paste will weird some out. Not so much the paste, but the "cut" part is something I miss.

EDGE seems pretty quick to me, but to be fair I had a terrible phone in some terribly slow 1.5G network or something before. Web browsing with it isn't fast, but email seems okay (even up in Apple hill in Placerville where we went on a picnic yesterday), and google Maps is nice.

Oh, and it seems to make a pretty good phone too. Being able to set/enter your voicemail password right on the device, and choose/record your greeting is very cool, as is being able to play your voicemails like a media player. Sure, the out-of-order aspect is cool, but being able to fast-forward or continuously replay a particular part of a mail is really the neat part.

And to think this is just a platform. It's all software, and I expect that will be the exciting part over the course of the next year.

Massive props and kudos to everyone at Apple for pulling this off. IMO, the bar for human/computer interaction has just been raised. Sure, this keyboard/mouse might be faster (I was going to to this entry via the iPhone, but the links would have been a bit more than I could bare), but it's about half as fun as well. I -really- want to just be touching my monitor and dragging the windows around right now.