OK I just had to post this. I have Windows Vista Ultimate running on a laptop right now and I was playing around with the various games it offers. One of them is Texas Hold ‘Em, a game near and dear to my heart. Actually the game is fairly passable … pretty enjoyable actually. It does a fine job. But this was just hilarious: I decided to go all-in on a hand where I had suited ace-king and top-pair on the flop, and it pops open a Windows warning dialog that says “Are you sure you want to go All-in?” Then has a check-box for “Disable All-in confirmation.” I laughed out loud for about 5 minutes. That definitely made my day. Cheers.
So it’s been two weeks to the day that I’ve had my iPhone, and although my overall opinion on the device has not changed (still excellent), I do have some definite concerns and fixes that I would like to see implemented in the next software revision, as well as some clear design flaws that should be fixed before the next revision. I will, in no way, review the lack of features … I am getting sick of people saying nothing more than “it should have 3G/HSPDA and GPS”. Well no kidding, it should have a built in projector, blender and tazer too, but it doesn’t … get over it. You can always keep adding an endless slew of hardware features but at some point you have to produce a device: I still think they did a nice job regardless of these shortcomings. I also don’t want to hear any more about AT&T locking and EDGE shortcomings. I am sick of this.
Things that I’d like to see in the first software update:
Mail is both excellent and a complete disaster. Where are bulk functions: batch mark as read and delete should be standard features.
Keyboard! Although I’ve gotten pretty fast with the vertical keyboard, every application should have a horizontal keyboard …
… and therefore every application (including the home screen) should rotate into landscape mode … not just iPod and Safari.
The notes and calculator application could definitely use the ol’ design once-over.
I personally want dedicated gmail application integration instead of this POP crap. Getting the phone has definitely made me want to go back to running my own mail so I can at least do IMAP.
I want a terminal application.
I want a good jabber/IM application.
… c’mon, seriously, you’ve got the room on the main page for more icons
The clicker/mic on the headphones is awesome, though it is a little obnoxious that often after I pause music for awhile (> just a few minutes), I have to both unsleep the phone *and* then click the music play button. Granted this is just a two-step procedure to turn music back on, but it would be nice if the clicker maintained functionality after music had paused while the phone is sleeping.
Dedicated google calendar integration. I don’t really want to use iCal … it should download and sync directly from the phone.
iTunes should *definitely* have a ramdom-autofill function like the iPod shuffle, with a size limit. AKA, sync random music from my music up to a 2GB limit. Even the 8GB version is too small not to have a feature like this.
802.1X support!!!
The phone does sometimes have a little trouble with bad wireless networks. I have found myself in situations with wifi connectivity but something wrong with their external link to the net. It just keeps on trying to get data from wifi (since it has a valid DHCP address). I feel this could be improved with a simple timeout or timeout+testing function. Maybe something even as simple as a DNS resolution test.
That’s what I’ve got so far. Cheers.
I found this little kernel-init application called bootchart today (OK so it was on some blog that I get in my RSS feed), and it’s sort of clever. It just loads as you load your kernel and stores a bunch of data in memory (as generally one grabs /boot in read-only) then writes it out to file in /var/log/bootchart.tgz. They’ve written a little java application that interprets all the data it gathered and pushes out an image of everything it knew about during the boot process. I thought it was sort of clever. If you install it and are running grub, it’s pretty simple to set up. Just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add something like this (this is mine):
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.21-2-amd64 (bootchart mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-2-amd64 root=/dev/sdb1 ro init=/sbin/bootchartd
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.21-2-amd64
savedefault
For most of you the only real difference is the addition of ‘init=/sbin/bootchard’ to the kernel line. I added a new selection to my grub menu for this but I suppose you could run it at every boot … though I can’t imagine this being that fun more than once or twice. Here’s the image of what I ended up with on my machine at work (8 processor Xeon, 16 gigs of RAM and 15K disks). (more…)