Today is going to be the iPhone's Day. If you still do not know about it you must have been living in an internet-free area. The buzz generated around this Apple-branded mobile phone is simply amazing; and did not cost that much in marketing to Apple. Indeed, giving some iPhone samples for being reviewed by some prominent columnists and tech-geeks and you get the following result:
- Steven Levy (Newsweek) calls iPhone "a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge. [iPhone] finally fulfills the promise of people-friendly palm-top communication and computing."
- Edward Baig (USA Today) finds iPhone "indeed worth lusting after. [Apple] has delivered a prodigy—a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod, and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset. The most chic cellphone I’ve seen. [iPhone is] a breeze to set up and fun to use, evident from the moment you slide your finger across the screen to unlock it. It’s a wonderful widescreen iPod and fabulous picture viewer".
- Walter Mossberg and Katherine Boehret (WSJ) consider it "a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface... [The iPhone] works well...[it combines] intelligent voice calling and a full-blown iPod... [The iPhone] offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone and robust email software. [The iPhone offers] the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we’ve seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim."
- David Pogue (New York Times) reports "The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and Blackberrys look obese. The Web browser is the real dazzler, [no] stripped down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view. [The iPhone is] the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years."
Some analysts evaluate the buzz and enthusiasms generated by the launch of the iPhone to the one generated around Starwars Episodes.
While the iPhone will not cross the Atlantic before the end of the year, additional information have been published by US Mac-dedicated websites.
ThinkSecret reports some iPhone screen captures illustrating different functions of features, while illustrating how to eject the SIM card.
Our friends at
ArsTechnica report that a Town Hall meeting was organized by Steve Jobs yesterday at Apple, mostly to explain to employees how the iPhone was important for the company. In addition, to thank associates, all fulltime Apple employees in the US and part-time employees who have been there for a year will be getting an iPhone at the end of July.
We will keep updating this news over the day to cover this event. Do not hesitate to react about it in the
dedicated topic on our forum.
[update1]
Giiks.com published photo of an Apple employee leaving Cupertino HQ while on the phone with his iPhone... so it seems that some of them do not need to wait for the end of July before getting their new mobile phone.
[update2]
Thanks to Camille for his report and photos from New York.
Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before the iPhone launch, despite a hot and humid atmosphere, as well as some showers, 75 consumers are already camping in front of the Apple Store.
The first one to queue since Monday 05h00 was Greg Packer, quite famous for being the first guy to queue for any events taking place in USA. Other consumers camping in front of the apple Store are either fans or opportunists who will purchase an iPhone for friends or for putting on sale on eBay.
Scott (senior manager software editor and Mac fan) and John (musician, queuing to buy an iPhone for a friend), respectively number 12 and 13 in the line, are already there since Wednesday evening. They spend most of their time being interviewed by CNN, NBC and other news networks.
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Well, seems like CoverFlow is all the rage right now. We had it on iTunes, we'll have it for files in Leopard and it's coming to an iPhone near you (well, if you live in the USA...).
My main gripe about CoverFlow has been that, on my 1800+ album iTunes Library, I had maybe 10% of album with cover art. Then came iTunes I-don't-remember-which-number and it could grabd covert arts from the iTS, but that still made for only about 50% of my Library. And CoverFlow is ugly and pretty useless with "blank" cover art.
So I went and started looking for a tool to allow me to add the missing artworks. I started using
Corripio, which is pretty neat, allowing you to batch search through your library and grab covers off the iTunes Music Store, Coveralia, Walmart, and Buy.com for artwork that is no less than 500x500 in resolution (and it uses plugins).
My main gripe was that there is no way to transfer the covers that you already grabbed from the iTS and which are stored outside of the ID3 tags, in a special folder, so it has to redownload all the artworks. But I must say that Corripio is free.
Then I found
CoverScout and decided to have a go at it. So this is going to be a mini-review of CoverScout, and not a full-on shootout of MP3 cover arts tools.
The CoverScout interface is, at the same time, simple and a bit clumsy. On the top you have a search field, some icons (come on guys, you can do better... ask the guy who did your website and other apps to redo the CoverScout GUI).
When you launch CoverScout, it loads your iTunes Library XML file, and provides you with a list of artists and albums. Each row shows an icon that indicates whether your album has full or partial iTunes cover art, ID3 cover art or a missing cover.
The first thing you want to do if, like me, you want your tracks to carry the cover art in the ID3 tag, is to use the "Copy iTunes Artwork" tool, which will grab all the covers from the iTS which are stored externally by iTunes and copy them over to the ID3 tags.
To look for a cover, simply select an album or track, and click on the Amazon button in the toolbar (note that you can choose which Amazon site to use, so it's quite handy for your German rock or French pop collection). CoverScout then searches and returns you the images it found on Amazon in the bottom of the window. To add a cover to your MP3s, simply double-click it. The Amazon search is a bit picky, so you might want to edit the search fields to remove things like "(Disc1)" or "Vol.5". OK, nothing new in the world of covert art grabbers. You can launch multiple searches at the same time, and they will appear in a side drawer, showing you the number of artworks found for each album.
But the real strength of CoverScout lies in the "Google" button. If your Amazon search doesn't return anything, hit that button and it launches a Google Image search in a dialogue sheet. You get a complete web page with Google search results (there's a URL field, so you can type any other URL you want). Browse through the results until you find the artwork you want, then right-click on the image and click "Apply Cover". That's it. Pretty neat. OK, usually it doesn't find 500x500 pixels artworks, but hey, better than nothing.
OK, and now for some complaining. There are two main issues. The first is speed: with 26000+ tracks, copying the iTS artworks takes a good couple hours, and reloading the iTunes Library takes even longer. And reloading the Library comes from my second gripe: stability. I don't know if it is related to the size of my Library, but I got several crashes of the app while doing multiple searches and cover additions at the same time. And when the app crashes, when you reload it it "looses" the status of many albums, so you need to reload the Library, which takes ages. After the third crash, I decided to do it the smooth way and went on not doing too many things at once, and it worked fine.
Conclusion: if you have lots of rather obscure albums, which are unlikely to be on the iTS or on major vendors like Amazon or Walmart, then CoverScout is your tool, thanks to the Google search integration. It has a couple other neat features, but is slightly buggy (which might be only a problem with huge libraries). You can try it out as a demo version and buy it for $19.95. This is going to be your friend when you put your dirty hands on an iPhone and want to show-off with CoverFlow on its shiny touchscreen.
Apple released during the night a software update dedicated to the recently introduced Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro (
14.7MB).
This update provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all 2.2/2.4GHz MacBook Pro models.
This update requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later.
