Yeah, I dove into the iPhone after seeing Steve Jobs’s keynote where he talked about all of the new features. When I first saw the iPhone, I had no real interest in it, because I didn’t like the idea that the only apps I could use were those deemed worthy by Apple. I tend to like Apple’s applications, but to pay all that money and have zero say in the matter seemed… wrong.
So far, I have to say that I’m really happy with the iPhone, thanks in large part to the ability to run some non-Apple applications. Those of you who have read my blog for some time will remember my whole crazy time management setup post where I go over how I use Google Calendar and Remember The Milk and stuff. I don’t yet have iCal on the iPhone syncing with my Google Calendar, but I do have Remember the Milk installed and running like a champ. I’ll get around to the calendar stuff soon and let you know if I hit any snags.
The email application works just the way I want it to, which is to say I can get it to alert me to new messages just like my old Blackberry did – with a subtle vibrate+tone. The great new thing about the new iPhone email application is that I can use IMAP with GMail instead of being forced to have a Yahooo! account to take advantage of this feature. Far as I can tell, you can use the IMAP feature with whatever IMAP server you want. I’ve already used three different servers, including GMail.
The phone functionality of the iPhone are, to be honest, nothing to get excited about. The interface features are kinda nice. It’s easy to use speakerphone and add contacts and stuff, but aside from this really cool hack I found (and use), there’s no way to do ‘speed dial’ that I can find. In addition, I think the iPhone is probably the only phone on the market to *not* have voice commands — so you can’t rely on a bluetooth headset for complete hands-free operation of your iPhone while driving. This is *really* bad for me because starting Saturday, New Jersey will start enforcing the ‘no handhelds while driving’ law. No more warnings. If you get caught now, it’s $100 fine.
Yeah – I live in New Jersey. We all have to live somewhere :-/
So… has anyone done any Python coding on/for the iPhone? If it’s running OS X, it should be there, right? Let me know if you’re doing anything cool with it – I’d love to see a writeup in Python Magazine about it.