iPhone Poseur Sighting 2
Well, you knew it was going to happen. I just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. I was walking down the street, minding my own business. I came to a corner. I noticed this guy who had confidently been walking beside me like he owned the world. He was carrying a cell phone in his hand that looked a little different. It was, of course, an iPhone….
Here’s where it gets interesting: the don’t walk sign was flashing, so we were both stuck on the corner for a bit. Eventually, the car signal went from green, to yellow, and then to red. For a brief moment, the iPhoner’s brain misfired, and he somehow concluded that the red light meant it was now time for him to cross the street.
I say a brief moment, but he had enough time to get three or four steps out in to the street before he realized his error, and in that hesitant, diffident, and embarrassed manner that only geeks really ever master, he turned around and got back on the sidewalk. I could see the shame in his eyes: he had just exposed how uncool he was.
Now, I am a geek myself, and while I usually don’t walk out in to the middle of the street, I probably have geeky lapses like this several times a day. So I’m not about to poke fun at this guy for that. This stuff happens. What amuses me is what happened next.
In a desperate attempt to regain his composure and air of confidence, he brought up his iPhone to eye level, and started randomly fidgeting with it. As far as I could tell (based on his hand gestures), he was just scrolling through something, probably his contacts. He rubbed his techno-worrystone for a couple of seconds, and then lowered it back by his side.
His self-assured air had returned. He was cool again, because he’d just played with his iPhone. In that moment, I was forced to realize why Apple keeps winning the image battle with the techno-elite.
Apple sells something better than more speed, more capacity and more capabilities. Apple sells cool in a box.
That in itself was not a revelation to me. The painful realization that flowed from this moment, was that we geeks crave/need cool more desperately than any other segment of society, and for the most part we need it to be as straightforward to obtain as opening a box, because the road to cool involves dexterity or social skills, we’re screwed.
Just How Great Is Safari? 2
Apple’s launch of Safari for Windows has been… interesting. As Corey pointed out, Safari doesn’t exactly make a compelling case for why you’d want to use it over the others. Then, on top of that, a hand full of exploits emerged within 24 hours of the launch, some within a couple of hours. Either Apple doesn’t know squat about secure programming on Windows or Safari has had all kinds of exploits lying in wait for broader exposure to the security community (probably both). Apple has now released patches which hopefully close out all the newly discovered exploits, but at this point Safari feels less secure than IE, which is saying a lot. But wait, it gets better…
So, one of the things I thought would be fun about using Safari on Windows is I could see what the web looks like from a loyal Mac user’s perspective (I empahsize loyal, because as far as I can tell most Mac users just use Firefox or Camino).
So, for starers, you gateway to the web is a massive promo page for Apple and Apple partners. I hope the people behind this stick to criticising Yahoo’s home page on aesthetic grounds only. Anyway, at the top of the page was a link to Celebrating the Best in Mac Software. Well, how could I not check out all the great software I was missing out on by not owning a Mac?
That’ when it got interseting. So, their highlighted category is “Leopard Application”, of course. Interestingly, neither winner nor runner-up got a web link. How odd. Anyway, going to the “developer” section (guess why), the runner up was rooSwitch. Not knowing what that was, I thought I’d check out the website. I clicked on the link and…. got a broken web page.
That’s right, rooSwitch was one of those sites that didn’t render properly in Safari. Yup, they got an away from the makers of Safari… and Safari can’t render it. Basically all the text on the page was invisible.
I’ve since downloaded Apple’s “Security Updates”, and now Safari renders the rooSwitch page correctly. Great, so it was a security problem?!
[voice mode=”Colbert Report] So horrible Apple product launch?…. or worst Apple product launch? ;-) [/voice]