iPhone OS 3.0 available worldwide June 17th

My weapon of choice this year for the Keynote stream was http://www.macrumorslive.com.  They have a good stream text feed, and an even better streaming pictures feed.  The pictures updated more often than the text, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they caught every slide…  I also listened to the audio stream at http://live.twit.tv.

Without further ado:

iPhone 3GS!

• Same external design, all new internals
• Faster than the 3G.  2.1x faster loading of messaging,  2.4x faster sim city load, 3.6x faster for viewing an excel attachment , 2.9x faster for loading the NYTimes app.
• Brand new Camera: 3 MP, autofocus camera.  Also captures video (finally).  30 fps.  640×480 video.  You can scrub and edit video and send it straight to YouTube, MMS, email, and MobileMe too.  These features are also available for developers to use in their applications.
• Voice dialing
• Digital Compass
• support for Nike+
• Better battery life: 30 hours of music playback, 10 hours of video playback, 12 hours of 2g talk, 5 hours of 3g talk time.
• $199 is the price for the 16Gb.  32Gb $299.  Black and white colors. 3G is still available for $99 dollars!!
• 3GS iPhone is available June 19th.

iPhone OS updates:

• there are 100 new features… Cut/copy/paste/undo (works across all apps), landscape mode in Mail/Notes/Messages, MMS support (send and receive photos/contacts/audio files/locations) in Messages app (29 carriers in 76 countries will support MMS at launch — AT&T not until later this summer), search (mail — even on server, calendars, media, notes), spotlight (search everything in one place — first page of the home screen).
• rent and purchase movies from your iPhone!
• Parental Controls
• Tethering: Share iPhone’s internet connection with your computer (but I’m sure it’s going to be expensive…) Works wired and wireless over bluetooth. Seemless experience.  BUT AT&T DOESN’T SUPPORT IT!!  GARBAGE!
• Javascript is 3x faster.
• Inclusion of right to left languages and others.  Now support more than 30 languages in the iPhone OS.  One of the big advantages of a software keyboard.  They all have portrait and landscape mode keyboards.
• FindMyiPhone.  MobileMe users will be able to log in to MobileMe and find their phone if they lose it!  GPS location and everything!  It’s crazy.  Tons of awesomeness there.  You can play an alert sound from the webpage, and even wipe the data from your phone so that people can’t see the info you’ve got on it.  Then when you find it you can just restore the phone from a backup.
• Peer to peer connectivity over bluetooth!  Available in any application!
• Turn by turn directions and google maps can be integrated into any application.
• Push notification

Updated Laptops: MacBook Pro spec update and the starting price dropped $300.  They also added a 13″ MacBook Pro.

Expose has been updated (the dock at the bottom of the screen): The functionality is more like Windows 7.  You can click and hold an icon in the dock and Expose will show all of the app’s windows.  The same works for dragging things into an application – you can drag items to the dock, have the app’s windows pop up, and the drop it into the correct window.

Exchange 2007 (latest version) is now supported in Mail, iCal, and Address Book!  This is big for all the Mac users that work in large corporate environments that use Exchange. You can even see previews of Microsoft Office documents if you don’t have Office installed.

tom gerdhardt’s mud computer at itp 2009′s spring show from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

I’m not sure I can see how applicable this sort of interface would be for typical computing, unless it could be blown up to a large scale and used on a construction site or something.  What I’m more interested in are the possibilities of what could be gained from using this as a brainstorm tool: by interacting with the mud, what sort of cool new interactions can we create?  What sort of gestures can we think of for a flat surface?  Or maybe we can get ideas for a new peripheral device?  Tom Gerhardt, the creator of Mud Tub seems to think somewhere along the same lines:

With my most current work, the Mud Tub, I am particularly excited to see the impact mud has on an user’s attitude toward interacting with computers; they instantly seem to “feel at home,” as if they had found something missing. This spark I see in people is what keeps my research into organic interfaces moving forward

I guess we can all wait and see…  Or better yet, take a part in all of this brainstormy goodness.  Share your thoughts and ideas in general over at the NUI Group.

Thanks again to that clever monkey for the mud tub news.

Check out his bio and his Microsoft MVP Profile.

Welcome Josh!

You’ll also be able to follow all of these users at once by downloading this ruby script (originally provided for the iPhone developer Twitter list by David Clement – thanks David!) and running it using the following instructions (feel free to skip steps 2 through 5 if you know you already have the updated Ruby version, twitter gem, and google spreadsheet gem):

1. Open Terminal
2. Update Ruby by typing: gem update --system
3. Install the Twitter gem: sudo gem install Twitter
4. Add the google spreadsheet gem source location: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
5. Install the google spreadsheet gem: sudo gem install gimite-google-spreadsheet-ruby
6. Open up the .rb file you downloaded from here in TextEdit
7. Enter your google and twitter usernames and passwords (it’s safe, look at the code!)
8. Save the file!
9. In Terminal, navigate to the .rb file you downloaded from here and type: ruby follow_wpf_sl_devs.rb

Let me know if you have any questions. Happy tweeting!  Special thanks to the original iPhone developer twitter list and David Clement for the ruby script.

A large focus of the team at IdentityMine, and specifically Andrew, has been understanding at a code level what a user is trying to control when they click the screen – is the user trying to grab a picture, or pan the screen?  Is the user zooming in to an object, or trying to grab two objects and move them apart?  Understanding what the user is trying to accomplish in a multi-touch scenario can be very tricky, but we feel we’ve got a good hold on these interactions and understand them all the way down to the code level.

Here’s another internet video interview that was done on the whole Surface Application Suite.  Same day as the previous interview by Todd.  In the video is myself (left), and Chad Brown from IdentityMine.

I was ambushed last Friday to demonstrate one of the default applications on Microsoft Surface, the photos application.  I work for IdentityMine, a software development company focused on UX.  We worked with Hotel 1000 to customize the applications on Surface.  We worked to customize the software on Surface to fit the needs of the Hotel by branding all of the applications with Hotel 1000 logos, adding custom points of interest for the concierge application, and adding custom photos for their photos application.  We also ended up installing a media card reader.  There was a press release around the event.