iphone

I don't know about you, but around our household, nothing says "Christmas" like farting.

This is apparently true elsewhere as well. On December 22, "iFart Mobile," the leading fart app in the iTunes store, pulled down nearly $10,000! That's right, in a single day. This is one of many, many fart apps in the store.

I got this from VentureBeat, a blog syndicated by the New York Times covering venture capital in Silicon Valley. Founder Matt Marshall used to cover technology for the San Jose Mercury News, the undisputed authority on tech news in the Valley.

So if you read on VentureBeat that on December 17 Apple approved FOURTEEN NEW FART APPS for the iTunes app store, on that single day, or that there are now 50 fart apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, you can take it to the bank. Or if you're not as lazy as I am, you could look it up yourself.

In the meantime, you might well be asking, why so many fart apps in the iTunes store, especially so many new ones being added for Christmas? (Seriously --14 new fart apps approved by Apple on a single day, the week before Christmas.) One of the developers puts his finger on it: "We asked ourselves over and over, why must I always carry a phone, iPod, AND electric fart machine?"

Now THAT's the holiday spirit! A gift that makes people's lives easier!

See here here and here. Plenty of other links in those stories, including one directly to iFart Mobile in the iTunes store.

A couple of random notes:

1) There's more than one iTunes store app with the words "Pull My Finger" in the name. Of course, how could there NOT be?

2) A reminder that this really IS a Christmas story. Every event described in it takes place after December 12.

3) My mother asked me once why men laugh at farts. "Because they're freaking hilarious," I said. At least she laughed at THAT.

4) This all kind of begs the question. Not why there are 50 fart apps in the iTunes store, but why aren't there more?

Tidings of comfart and joy, my friends! Ho ho ho!

So on March 23 we hear that Leopard's coming in October rather than spring, to wait for Vista compatibility. Later that day, Apple's official response is that we don't respond to rumors. The same day, someone says that Apple says Leopard'll come out on time. Three weeks later Appple announces that Leopard is coming out in October, but the reason is iPhone, not Boot Camp. So there you go. Wait. Did somebody say they're delaying Leopard to wait for Vista compatibility?!?!

Taipei-based DigiTimes was first on the scene. On March 23, they cited "industry sources" who claimed that the reason why Leopard is slipping is "not due to software design problems with Leopard but instead is attributed to Apple's plan to have its new OS support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp."

So ZDNet asked Apple straight out for a comment that day, and got the very straight-out reply "We don't comment on rumors and we've made no announcements about Leopard availability more specific than Spring 2007."

Alas, nobody asked the obvious question: Delay Leopard for Vista on Boot Camp? Are you kidding? "We're keeping Leopard off the streets until we can support Vista" is a story that not even Jose Chung would buy.

(Please tell me you know who Jose Chung is. If not, follow that link, then check this one, too.)

Just when it seemed all was lost, up stepped our boy Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch Analyst Weblogs, with just the sanity we needed. He kept sniffing around the story, and firmly reports on the very same day, March 23: Just spoke with Apple who confirmed the reports are wrong and Leopard is still scheduled to ship in this spring as they previously announced. The rumor mill is wrong again.

Oops. Way to get it right, dude. The rumor mill is wrong, but so's your source.

Okay, back to actual news.

Anyway, once Apple announced the delay themselves on April 12, I like how very plainly they say that Leopard is running late, and they say plainly why: to ship iPhone on time, "we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team."

Actually, I love it. Crystal clear. No excuses, just an explanation of the way it is, and the steps they're taking to get it all done.

While Leopard's features will be complete by [the Worldwide Developer's Conference in early June], we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

Getting it right takes as long as it takes. Love it. I've had to help craft similar statements, and they're much harder to get right than they look. Apple gets, as always, maximum style points.

The trade-off also sounds about right to me. They'll have iPhone out on time, and a tardy OS won't delay the sale of a single OCTOMAC (hey, that's right! Apple has new CPUs out!!) C'mon, it's not like we're talking about a release as disruptive as Vista....or even System 7 and OS X.

For the record, I liked both of those releases...but don't try to tell me they weren't disruptive. Leopard'll be a walk in the park.

But my guess is that Apple will make more money from the first six months of iPhone sales than they might ever make from selling boxes of Leopard. The more I think about it, iPhone's sales in the first month will probably beat Leopard's total sales. I'm sure it'll sell plenty, but not iPhone plenty.

So my next guess is that this wasn't even a very long conversation around the ol' whiteboard...if it even got that far. No brainer.

PS. The address for you cats to send the iPhone? Right there on my business card. They'll sign for the delivery at the front desk. Thanks.

From Fake Steve Jobs, who remains the absolute best resource for Apple information, and by far the funniest blog on the web:

The nice folks at Sugarcat Cakes sent along this photo of their latest cake creation. They call it the Jesus Cake. Feeds a whole party of hungry geeks, but alas, you can't remove the battery.

You know that you can't remove and replace the iPhone battery yourself, right? Just like the iPod, you have to send it to Apple, and pay $79 plus $6.95 for shipping for them to ship it yourself.

On top of wiping off the fingerprints, they throw in erasing everything stored in your phone for free. Classy.

You're probably a couple hundred charge cycles away from need to replace the batter, but seriously, back your stuff up before you do.

I've got one of them here, of our boy Derrick (really?), eating his toast. Really. By itself, it's not much. Unless you're Derrick or love toast. But it's part of an online mystery unspooling around the iPhone.

Quite the saga behind this. The Mobile Guerilla had been searching online for "taken with an Apple iPhone." Good for MG! This one of Derrick was the first of two posted to Flickr, marked private, then removed. I'm still not exactly clear what happened from there to make them public, if obscure. But whatever it was, I came across them, which means they weren't all that hard to find.

Although getting harder. One of the Flickr pages had a comment that I was going back to bookmark, but even the comments have been deleted now. Eerie.

[Update: found this in the Google cache, although it too may be gone by the time you get there. This, btw, is where I found out that the name of the dude eating toast is Derrick.

Now, for what it's worth, the iPhone-ishness of the image was "verified" by the EXIF info, which can of course be edited...but here it is: 

Camera: Apple iPhone
Aperture: f/2.8
Orientation: Rotated 90 degrees clockwise [which means the image was saved to disk horizontally oriented, but rotated in the phone, i think]
Date and Time: 2007:04:21 10:23:45
Color Space: sRGB
Tag::EXIF::0xA500: 11/5
Compression: JPEG
Image Width: 1600 pixels
Image Height: 1200 pixels

Okay, so how'd the photos get taken in the first place? Has to be a hoax, right? Well, no. Somebody at Apple's been testing it of course. And the taker of the pictures is indeed someone at Apple...or so it seems.

The Flickr page with the second photo, also deleted, had a comment from a visitor, also deleted, but copied in a comment elsewhere: "The Flickr account however belongs to an individual who can be tracked down to a LinkedIn profile which reveals that they are a Program Manager at Apple in the Consumer Electronics industry." I took a gander at her LinkedIn profile, and that is indeed what it says. So there ya go.

Of course, since her profile is private, she might be funnin' us all the way across the board. Maybe she's just good at Photoshop (not all the EXIF fields are easily or obviously edited), and her boy Derrick just dig toast. Which is probably the case, hoax or not.

Then again, maybe she works at Apple. It's happened that Apple (like every company you know) has had a "leak" that they've had to "plug," intended all along to say exactly what it said. In this case, that the iPhone is very much on the way, demonstrated with a feature that we've not previously seen in action.

All of that said, I truly hate phones with cameras. Many companies won't allow them on the premises (too easy to document and disseminate things that shouldn't be), ditto gyms (same reason), and one of my favorite pastimes, movie sneak previews (hey, same reason, although this one's especially stupid. The movie's going to be in 1500 theaters in two days! BTW, I'm not a supa-dupa secret insider any more, just an Entertainment Weekly subscriber.) I've even gotten turned away from some concerts, although fewer as time goes by. In any case, I got tired of having to put my phone in a bag at the door...or just flat being turned away...so no camera phones for me.

And I'm sure there's an amount of money that can get me to switch to Cingular...but nobody has offered me that much yet.

So let's say that ain't you, babe. Don't forget that you can register at Cingular to be notified by email when it's ready.

PS. My favorite thing about the iPhone is something that didn't come from Apple, but from Jeff Han and the geniuses at Cornell.

PPS. The saga of iPhone sneak previews continues to continue, although this one's a Photoshop job.

That's from AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson, in his keynote speech at the CTIA wireless technology conference. But made "the audience snap to attention" was when he pulled one out during his speech. Before the speech, the chairman of the FCC grabs the phone from Stephenson. "He spent more time with it than I did," Stephenson said in an interview afterward. For a minute, "It seemed like he wouldn't give it back."

The part of the story I find most remarkable is that there a million people who've taken the time to get on AT&T's radar. Doesn't that seem low to you? I swear I've heard at least a million people talking about it myself, and I doubt any of them have also spoken to AT&T about it.

While they're not taking pre-orders yet, Cingular has set up a page on their website for you to enter your email address. When the iPhone's ready to order, they'll let you know. That and a picture of the phone is pretty much all that's there, but chances are that you've already heard plenty from your millions of friends.

BTW, we've mentioned that The COW's podcasts do pretty well. That's not just in the software how-to section of the iTunes music store. Our business podcast debuted ahead of The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. And the debut of our Serious FX podcast went to #3 in the overall technology category...just two spots behind the keynote speech introducing the iPhone. Gotta love that....