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My Leopard disk arrived at noon today. And, was in my Mac by 12:01pm. I started the install running, then went off for lunch, leaving the Mac to update it self.

Upon my return from lunch, I see the Mac just finishing its upgrade, then starting a reboot, and it reboots to a pleasant blue screen, with a mouse cursor.

Well, I sat and stared at that screen for over an hour, with absolutely NO activity from the hard disk, thinking that the Mac was tidying up some tasks or other.

Then I gave it another hour.

Then I powered it down, and rebooted - to the same blue screen.

And there it sits, my beautiful Mac, with a blue screen, and a mouse cursor.

Turns out I’m not alone. This is happening a lot!

Update: I followed some of the instructions on the site - re-installing a number of times, till I finally did a reinstall with the Archive and Install option. And, a shiny new OS, with no lost data. It took from 1pm to 11pm that night to get my mac updated.

And, the new OS??? Generally, everything is exactly like it was before. I don’t find myself using any of the new features - except for spaces, which I use rarely. The stacks are cute, but not too useful. Seems like some apps like Firefox crash  more often… So, all in all, not as impressive an upgrade as I’d been hoping for. I sold all my Apple stock that day.

Apple’s iPhone, whether successful or not, will have a huge influence on the telecom industry - changing cellular phones, voice and data bundles, UI / UX, hardware, software, telcos, and even reaching beyond the cellular world - right into mainstream corporate telephony where InGenius plays.

The iPhone’s UI, like all Apple UI’s is just beautiful. It brings a smile to your face when you use it, and if you are watching someone fiddle with it, you’d just have to grab the phone out of their hands and play with it. This is something that doesn’t happen to often these days - the last time I remember grabbing someone’s phone was when my friend Jacques got a Blackberry Pearl. I just HAD to try out that trackball.

The iPhone UI redefines mobile phone UI’s - it’s a complete redesign of every aspect of the UI, adding features that are intuitive, simple, and powerful.

Every mobile manufacturer HAS to have an iPhone by now - the CEO HAS to have stormed into the UI department, slammed the phone down and said “Make our phones work like this!” Which would be followed by a room full of Industrial Designers, UX experts, hardware and software engineers being excited, horrified and terrified at the prospect. I know we are!

The UI requires a ton of in-the-phone back-end infrastructure to make work - the phone needs tons of memory, a great display, a powerful CPU, a graphics library with a ton of 3D effects, and stacks and stacks of other software. This will end up being a fantastic benefit to us normal phone users - as all these software and hardware capabilities become available in phones, EVERY app on the phone will benefit, as well as third-party apps. It’s a great motivator to get decent performance out of our hand-held devices. I can’t wait to browse and use Google Maps on my mobile - at desktop speeds!

And the influence is felt in telcos as well. AT&T had to do a TON of back-end work to support the iPhone. Consider the voicemail application alone! The iPhone has a voicemail client that is very closely tied into the telco’s voicemail system - showing the user a list of voicemails on the phone, with caller ID info for each - and the ability to play voicemails in any order, and even to delete voicemails in any order. This is a HUGE barrier to entry for any telco that wants to support the iPhone - I’m sure Apple has defined an API that all the telcos and their big voicemail providers are busy implementing right now (ANOTHER reason why won’t see the iPhone in Canada any time soon…)

Hopefully the telco’s web sites will be improved as well. I remember how excited I was to get my first camera phone - a Samsung from Bell Canada. Then, I snapped my first photos (before leaving the store even!), and then I discovered the horrid UI on the phone for managing the photos - and the even WORSE UI at Bell for managing photo uploads. It was a complete disaster at Bell - the site was horrible, impossible to navigate, very difficult to download photos or share them, and very very slow. Hopefully the iPhone experience will revolutionize this area as well.

And the influence of the iPhone will extend well beyond mobiles as well. You HAVE to figure that Palm, Microsoft, and every other handheld manufacturer is busy revamping their UI’s - as well as beefing up their hardware capabilities. In a year or two, all handhelds will be much faster, and have much better capabilities - way beyond the normal speed of evolution - as the manufacturers struggle to catch up, and surpass the iPhone.

And, remember that this is only V1.0 of the iPhone. Apple is busy building newer and greater applications as we speak! Of course, the iPhone will transition from the cellular network to your 802.11 wireless network when you’re at home or at work. Of course, we’ll see companies licensed to develop applications for the iPhone - I’m sure Apple is talking to a ton of it’s loyal application vendors, giving them first shot at developing cool iPhone applications. There’s a camera there waiting to be exploited - video conferencing, live VLOGing, live podcasts. And, ebooks, social networking apps, uber presence, and on. I can’t wait!

And, the iPhone is affecting us in the landline phone business as well. We’re working on some awesome home and business phone products now - and our UI designs will certainly be influenced by the iPhone. We’re already pushing the hardware people to add tons more capabilities to the hardware we work with. Our customers expect very fast UI’s, a nice user experience, colour, video, andio, etc, and we’re working to add those daily. It’s a ton of fun in every aspect of the telecom industry right now.

Thanks Apple!

I recently purchased Apples new router, the Airport Extreme. It had a couple of features I really liked, so I thought I’d try it out.

The Features:

• 802.11n (it’s FAST!)
• Lets you share a hard disk and printer using USB
• Easy to configure
• It’s Apple Cool.

It arrived last week, and I hooked it up when I got home from work. Installation was easy (I used a mac to set it up. Dunno how easy this would be on a PC) since you use the airport admin tool to configure it. This is different and perhaps disconcerting to users accustomed to configuring routers by browser. Also, configuration was done over the air, which is a new, and a bit scary way of doing things. After figuring out that I’d reversed the WAN and LAN connections (I’m an idiot sometimes), the router was up and running.

I connected a Samsung CLP-300 colour laser printer and a 500Gig USB hard disk to the unit, then tried things out.

I could print easily from the mac, but the Windows PCs on the network couldn’t see the printer at all. I haven’t had a chance to dive into this - I was supposing that “Bonjour” technology would handle this, but apparantly not. After some quick research on the net, I found some mentions that the printer sharing may not work if printer drivers aren’t written to handle network sharing - maybe this is the issue?

The hard disk sharing worked well, again only on the mac’s connected to the network. The PC’s couldn’t see the shared drive at all. This is OK in my case since the drive is meant for the macs only. The drive is my main photo repository, so sees VERY heavy use through Aperture. This is the real test since Aperture places very heavy requirements on the disk sub-system. I found there was a noticable slowdown compared to having the drive directly connected to the Mac over USB 2.0. It appears to be something I can live with, but we’ll see.

Network access has been OK so far - but I’ve noticed that some web sites are VERY slow since I’ve installed the router. I’m hoping that it’s simply an ISP problem - Rogers is not exactly the most reliable ISP. For instance, some Youtube video’s I wanted to see have simply not played since I’ve installed the router. The big test will be to go back to the old router and compare.

I’ll keep you informed on long term testing as well. I’ve had really bad luck with routers in the past. My Linksys SRX200 had to be rebooted weekly as did my DLink DI713p. This is a piece of equipment you should be able to set and forget - and I hated having to reboot these when the network would fail.

I’ve got high hopes for the Apple Airport Extreme, hope they pan out.

UPDATE March 23: Early concerns about slow web site access were unfounded. The thing is fast - but I don’t really notice a huge improvement just surfing the web…

I have had to disconnect my shared 500G drive from the unit. Using it with Aperture was impossible - WAY too slow. Also, it was corrupting my Aperture library somehow - which Aperture handled nicely by rebuilding the thing. It works GREAT when I connect it straight to my Mac via USB 2.0, but just too slow wirelessly. Rats.

I haven’t been able to make the Samsung work from Windows when connected to the device. I’ve ended up connecting the Samsung to a Windows PC on the network, then connecting to that share from my Macs. Rats.

So, the USB port on the device sits unused at this time.

Update Aug 31, 2007: I have now got the Samsung working through the Airport Extreme. I ended up installing the Apple Bonjour stuff on my PC’s, then using Bonjour to find the printers. It worked great - much better than trying to connect to a shared printer on a PC in a workgroup. Still not using the hard drive connected to the Airport - but I’ll try that again in light of the new firmware in the unit.