iPhone 2.0

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MacRumors noted that the iPhone 2.0 firmware leaked early this morning. I grabbed it and decided, even if it wasn't official, that it was probably the same as the final release given that it was the day prior to the iPhone 3G's release.


While I waited for the somewhat large download (~250MB) and during the lengthy install process, I grabbed a bunch of apps from the iTunes app store. It was like Christmas.


I'm going to play with these new apps for a while before upgrading to the iPhone 3G. As most of the early reviewers have noted, most of the upgrades this day can be had by iPhone 2G users simply through the software update. GPS and 3G certainly would make many of the apps more snappy and useful in more places--ensuring many of my apps run more quickly more places will be the primary reason I upgrade--but given how much time I spend at the office or at home right now (I can get Wi-Fi in both places), I'm able to get a feel for all these apps and hang on to my cheaper phone plan for the time being. Even though I'm in a new walking boot as of noon today, I wouldn't enjoy standing in it for hours fighting others to get one of the first batch of 3G iPhones.


The first app I paid for is one of my favorite so far: MLB.com's At Bat ($4.99). It allows you to get video highlights from MLB games, even games in progress. On Wi-Fi, the landscape full-screen video quality is very good. It's a fantasy baseball/reality baseball fan's dream come true. Finally we've realized the full potential of mobile video for MLB fans. I only wish that box scores were part of the application; it currently redirects to MLB's WAP site to see that info which seems odd.


Some applications don't seem like huge improvements over their Mobile Safari renditions, but many are huge improvements over their current mobile browser versions. Many new apps take advantage of iPhone's ability to approximate your physical location, one of the great and hitherto unrealized potential benefits of mobile phone computing. Some apps recommend restaurants and other services in the area, while others promise to notify you of where your fellow iPhone-wielding friends are. Tracking/stalking your friends will be so much easier if they're fellow iPhone users.


When you think of the range of data and functionality an app can take advantage of: your address book, your physical location at that moment, the iPhone camera, the Quicktime video player, your calendar, the Accelerometer, multi-touch, the speakers, the microphone, among others, I'm certain we haven't yet seen the mindblowing application that I know is waiting to be written. It's ironic that you can write many apps for my iPhone that you couldn't write for my Macbook Pro.


Beyond MLB.tv's At Bat, other apps I dig so far include Shazam, which, once fired up, can tell you what a song is when you let your iPhone listen to it; the award-winning Twitterific, which seems like the last Twitter client I'll ever need; Urbanspoon, the part slot machine part Magic 8-Ball app that lets you shake your iPhone to get a random restaurant suggestion nearby you, and Exposure, a Flickr photo application that has a Near Me button that shows you photos taken near your physical location.


In the course of this day, I went from one-legged to one-and-a-half legged (the damn hard cast is off, and in its place a soft boot, though I'm not yet ready to ditch the crutches), and it feels like my iPhone took a similar leap in functionality. MobileMe indeed.


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Camus: "[the] one truly serious philosophical problem"

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Illuminating article on suicide in this week's NYTimes Magazine. The key insight is that many suicides can be prevented by making it harder to carry out: make the act itself more work and the impulse towards suicide will often just pass. I'll just excerpt large portions as it speaks for itself.



To turn the equation around: if the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance.


But is it?


As it turns out, one of the most remarkable discoveries about suicide and how to reduce it occurred utterly by chance. It came about not through some breakthrough in pharmacology or the treatment of mental illness but rather through an energy-conversion scheme carried out in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s. Among those familiar with the account, it is often referred to simply as “the British coal-gas story.

It really does go to 11

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On this, day 1 of the 2008 Tour de France, I was going through my inbox and found an e-mail from Campagnolo pimping their new groupsets with 11 speeds, up from 10.


I had a bit of the Tour on in the background while cleaning the apartment this morning (picture me hopping around on one leg, sweating in the afternoon sun, trying to work a broom and dustpan with my arms; yes, it's not exactly Melanie Griffith vacuuming in the nude in Working Girl). I'll always associate cycling with my comeback from my ACL tear and a low point in my life, the year of 1998. I have not ridden much in LA. The aggressive drivers in LA are not just annoying but a real danger, and I haven't found many paths I enjoy riding near where I live.


But today, struggling to do household chores with my cast on, I caught a brief montage of highlights from the stage--riders jumping out of their saddle to sprint for intermediate stage points, quick attacks among the early breakaway group on mild climbs, the peloton ripping through the French countryside--and I was filled with a harsh longing to be on my bike, legs in motion. These days I dream of being able to walk, like a bald man dreaming of hair.


I've always ridden Campy on my road bike (speaking of Nikon and Canon, the same binary choice of gear religion exists in road cycling between Campagnolo and Shimano), and just seeing the carbon fibre components of their new gruppos is like a visual cue turning on some Pavlovian instinct inside me. If I could fit my left foot, cast and all, into my road cycling shoes, I'd go out right now, in the night, and ride.



Nikon vs Canon

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James Duncan Davidson writes about Nikon's comeback versus Canon in the battle for digital SLR market supremacy. The first salvos were Nikon's release of the D3 and D300, and now it's the D700. And sometime later this year, perhaps the D3X. Meanwhile, after years of seemingly being always a step ahead of Nikon, Canon is suffering a tough year.


The truth is that for the average photographer who has committed to either Nikon or Canon, switching is possible but a hassle, especially with a significant lens investment. You can sell your lenses and camera body on eBay and cross brand lines, but for most people the hassle of doing so and learning new controls would be prohibitive. And on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't really matter.


The biggest advance with the new Nikon FX sensor SLRs is the low-light performance. Not having to use a flash except for fill is life-changing.


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iPhone pricing

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I thought the new lower prices for the iPhone 3G would apply to new subscribers, but apparently only previous iPhone owners and those who have been with AT&T long enough to have paid of subsidized phones will qualify. All others will have to pay $399 and $499 for the 8GB and 16GB models.


Which tempers my outlook for sales to new customers. I thought the half price would apply to new customers as well, and everywhere you see ads for the new iPhone they tout "Twice as fast. Half the price.*"


The asterisk turned out to be bigger than anticipated. On a positive note, maybe it means shorter lines on July 11 for those who'll be standing out there, being filmed and photographed by local press and people uploading pics and video to Flickr and YouTube.


UPDATE: Oops, as Andy notes, the full price of $399/$499 is just for AT&T customers who don't already have a 2G iPhone and who haven't finished their current contract. Which makes sense since some of the subsidy for the phone is in the 2 year contract that most cellular companies offer. The new iPhone 3G has a subsidy built into the monthly rates, which is why it will be cheaper to buy up front. But this means that if you buy an iPhone 3G, if a new model comes out and you have not completed your 2-year contract, you won't get the subsidized price on that new model.


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Quantum of Solace

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The trailer for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace (sounds like a spa treatment), is up at 007.com.


Casino Royale, like Batman Begins, deals with that common sequel malady, protagonists who have become locked in character stasis, by discarding previous installments and starting at the beginning (the former was more successful than the latter, IMO). What story throws a longer character arc than the origin story? Now both franchises are moving onto the second installment since the relaunch, and so the odds are against them achieving as interesting a story, but nonetheless, I predict I will be planted in a theater on opening day of both.


UPDATE: You can watch the trailer in HD at Moviefone. It's very confusing, finding out which sites have which trailers for which movies in HD.


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Weekendery

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30 Tables of Contents


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When I'm working on my computer on a project, like wireframes or sketches or just writing, one of my favorite CDs to pipe through my headphones is Ghost In The Shell: Original Soundtrack by Kenji Kawai. I'm not sure why it sells for $57 on Amazon. Perhaps because it's an import. If you can find a cheaper copy somewhere, perhaps on eBay or on your next trip to Tokyo, I recommend it.


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Andrew Stanton consulted with Johnathan Ive, Apple design guru, on the design of Eve, the white robot in Wall-E.



A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)



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Speaking of Wall-E, a bunch of us caught the midnight showing Thursday night at the El Capitan theater. No surprise, I enjoyed it on many levels, in particular the early scenes on earth. With a score by Thomas Newman and Roger Deakins-consulted cinematography, the creative talent was A-plus-list. Comparing it to Hellboy II, which I saw Saturday night at the LA Film Festival, helps to illuminate why the latter fell flat for me.


Wall-E and Eve, though they are robots without mouths or noses or much in the way of facial muscles other than articulated mechanical parts and blue digital LEDs for eyes, respectively, move with a fluidity and expressiveness that was lacking in most of the characters in Hellboy II. Under all that makeup, Hellboy is working with a more limited facial muscle repertoire than a middle-aged actress on her tenth round of Botox. The fish character, Abe, and a new character, Johan Strauss, have even less expressive faces. Abe wears a rubber fish mask that can do little other than blink, while Strauss has no face at all, just a glass dome for a head. Voice work can only take you so far.


Hellboy II also suffers from what plagues stories for most sequels, which is a sort of character stasis. Sequels that are conceived of only after the success of the first installment tend to be "the further adventures of..." rather than stories with any character arc. From the first movie, we know Hellboy is a sarcastic, wisecracking brute who likes to pummel monsters first, ask questions later. In this movie, he still is. The screenplay has several storylines, including one about Hellboy's uncomfortable relationships with the humans he protects, but the mix of fantasy and real-life isn't organic and tightly woven the way it was in, say, Pan's Labyrinth.


I look forward to more work from Guillermo del Toro, but I hope it's original stories and not more installments of Hellboy.


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Style icons

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June 14 weekend I was in Chicago for Jae and Esther's wedding and to visit with Joannie and Mike, who were moving back to Chicago, and Karen, who was in town for a wedding also.


Here are some pics from Jae and Esther's wedding which was held in Woodstock, a town I haven't visited since I was in grade school, when a family friend used to live out there. The wedding was held on Esther's parents apple orchard.


My favorite photo of the weekend came from a table setting and was of Esther's parents James and Ae Soon. James, in Seoul, looked up Ae Soon, a nurse, for a hospital tour.


If you look at the photo below, it's no surprise that they were married three years later, in 1976. His generous shirt collar coming out to grab some sun, his left hand on his belt, his right hand casually tucked behind her waist--he's the Korean Stetson man. She's rocking the stylish specs and hip handbag, and her expression says she's not playing second fiddle.


Seeing this photo I just feel like going shopping.


Esther's parents


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Interview with Guillermo del Toro

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[via thesetoday from many days ago] Interview with Guillermo del Toro as Hellboy II is just around the corner.



And he has retained a highly contagious passion for every aspect of filmmaking. He refuses to start using a 2nd unit camera team, preferring to oversee every shot with trusty cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who has shot all of his movies.



On projects he hopes to shoot in the future:



And if you’re very lucky he’ll show you his constant companion, a dog-eared notebook stuffed with intricate sketches of past, present and future films. Highlights include demon drawings from Mephisto’s Bridge (a 15-year-old del Toro script about a Faustian doppleganger) recycled into Hellboy II; and concept art for dream projects like satanic Sherlock Holmes mystery The List of 7 and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains Of Madness, about the discovery of a lost civilisation in Antarctica.



Pages from his scrapbook related to Hellboy II are online.


On the connection between his childhood and his choice of material:



I saw my first corpse at four, I worked next door to a morgue as a teenager, I’ve had guns put to my head and seen people killed in front of me. That’s why I turned down directing Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban and The Chronicles Of Narnia – I don’t understand youth because I’ve never had one.

Hellboy II closes the LA Film Festival tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to it as he's a consummate visual stylist.