Tech Analyst Pundit Watch: Apple Could Really Use Those Warehouses Full of iPhones Right Now · 2008-05-12

The big buzz on the Internet these days is the imminent release of iPhone 2.0. I am not sure if I would go that far. If you are familiar with Mac OS versioning Lexicon, we would call it iPhone 1.0 version 2.0. But we haven’t blogged for a while, so we can’t complain about the naming conventions passing us by.

Tech bloggers all over the place point to iPhone shortages, which started when Carpone warehouse said they were out of stock of the 16GB model, but the chatter really started hitting the fan when the US Apple Store reported they were no longer in stock. Diminished stock of hardware has always been a way that the Mac rumor industry has keyed in on product updates. The conventional wisdom said that iPhone 2 would be out in June, approximately a year after the initial release of the phone. But if the company is out of stock now, somebody would have to do a lot of explaining to rationalize why Apple might go a month without selling an iPhone.

Back in January, some pundits speculated that Apple might be stuffing warehouses with excess iPhone stock to boost its sales numbers. If only that were true, Apple wouldn’t be out of stock now! We laughed at the shoddy analysis then and this being the Internet, we couldn’t resist another opportunity to call out the analysts once again.

— Joe Fahs

Reader Sponsorships Redux · 2008-05-12

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about how we’d attempt to support Mac Journalism on this site with reader contributions, ad revenue and sponsorships.

Here’s your chance to make a reader contribution and get some cool schwag in return.

Visit MacEdition’s Spreadshirt Store and grab an I Saved MacEdition shirt or Mousepad.

Note that while these shirts are expensive, about half of each sale actually goes to us. The Spreadshirt folks have a great product, but it don’t come cheap!

So, if you’d like to help us keep generating increasingly better Mac news and analysis, drop some $$ into our coffers by buying yourself something.

— Tom Ierna

Amazing Music Video, Made On a Mac · 2008-05-11

No, literally, made on a Mac; many of the sequences are done with elements of the OS.

Appearances are made by Microsoft Office, Time Machine, Final Cut, the Finder, Quicktime, VLC, Photoshop, Fast User Switching, and a slew of other apps.

Brilliant!

— Tom Ierna

That's A Big Aperture · 2008-05-01

Automatic text-shortening technology can be dangerous!

Apple’s 3rd Party Downloads section shows a little more of Aperture’s plug-in hole than normal.

Nod to the Hessian

— Tom Ierna

"Enterprise" iPhone Support Creates More Questions Than Answers · 2008-03-11

Apple has revealed that many of the Enterprise-class functions on the iPhone are Exchange-friendly. This is great news for companies which have Exchange servers, but it doesn’t address the standards-compliant ways it seemed that Apple was approaching to satisfy some of these demands prior to this surprise announcement.

Whither Darwin Calendar Server and CalDAV for Calendar Sharing? What of extending IMAP for To-Do Tasks and Notes? IMAP IDLE for “push?” How about MacOSX Server’s Open Directory for Contacts?

Calendaring

Darwin Calendar Server is great for collaborative calendars for the desktop and laptop, what with it’s slick integration with most of the vCal and iCal compliant clients. However, there is no iPhone support. As of iPhone version 1.1.4, the Calendar is a pretty limited app, requiring a sync from iCal on the desktop. Hopefully, Apple will decide to bake in Calendar Server support with the 2.0 upgrade, seeing as how they are leveraging ActiveSync to mesh Exchange Calendaring with the iPhone’s MobileCalendar app.

To-Do Tasks and Notes

There’s already seen some indication that Apple is going to support Notes and To-Do Tasks on the iPhone. They may use IMAP for the transfer of this information based on what’s currently going on with Mail.app and iCal, but the implementation is half-baked at the moment. Mail.app can put to-do tasks in an “invisible calendar” in an Apple-created IMAP mailbox called “Apple Mail To Do” in each of your IMAP accounts, but you have to begin this process from Mail. iCal remains mostly oblivious to this special calendar until you “reveal” it by right-clicking on the calendar in Mail and selecting “Reveal in iCal”. The iPhone can see To-Do tasks in this special IMAP mailbox, but they appear as Mime-Attachments in MobileMail, and the iPhone provides no way to view or edit them. Full, round-trip To-Do management should be a part of the iPhone experience, and Apple has many of the pieces in place. Will they only support the ActiveSync provided task management?

“Push”

In an always-on internet world, not having “push” e-mail seems almost antiquated. The Desktop version of Mail.app has IMAP IDLE support, which (for properly configured IMAP servers) will allow instant notification and synching of Mail. iPhone has some support for IMAP IDLE, the addition of which corresponded with GMail IMAP support, but in versions up to 1.1.4, it’s not immediate. If and when Apple makes IMAP IDLE work correctly, push e-mail should be a no-brainer for non-Exchange networks.

Open Directory

If you have Leopard Server (or correctly configured LDAP server), you can create shared contacts and contact groups. Address Book will connect to these types of servers and allow you to utilize shared contact information, but why doesn’t iPhone yet? Maybe Apple will extend the Mobile Contacts application to get information from their own Server products? We can hope.

Plea, Plea, Please?!

Exchange support will be a huge boon to iPhone market share in the short term. In the long term, the tea leaves don’t yet show if this is a positioning move for Apple to get the thin edge of the wedge of Apple ease-of-use into the Enterprise. Not all Enterprises use Exchange, though, and it would be in Apple’s best interest to complete the work that’s obviously underway to make iPhone an equal peer on the open standards-based server software being used in Leopard Server.

Hopefully, come June, we’ll find that the hooks into all of the mobile applications which allow ActiveSync support have analogs for configuring them to get data from CalDAV, IMAP and Open Directory.

— Tom Ierna