Thus spoke my old friend Kent, who’s long had a knack for uttering Truth, after I’d driven us through three yellow lights in a row to arrive for an appointment at just the right time.

We were all playing role-playing games back then, and Kent was referring to the eshu of a game called Changeling. Based on the Eshu of African Yoruba, the eshu of Changeling were storytellers and travelers. Fate had a way of smiling on them in a capricious way. An eshu could be relied on to never take the most direct path to a location, but the one that gave him the best story to tell. Likewise, an eshu rarely arrived at a place when he was supposed to arrive - but he always arrived when he needed to.

And yes, Kent’s offhand comment had that ring of Truth.

When things have needed to happen in my life… they’ve happened. Not what I wanted, when I wanted. It’s never been like. But when something has needed to happen… it does. In time, when I let it. Wu wei in practice. I owe my life to it, actually, but that’s a story you have to buy me scotch to get.

Eshu of Yoruba is the protector of travelers and the deity of roads, particularly crossroads.

For the last several years I’ve felt like I’ve been on a rail rather than a road. I made decisions, and there were precious few crossroads once I got on that path. As I look back I can see that, while it might not have been the most pleasant of paths, it was still a path that took me past much that would have been unpleasant otherwise.

But the path was still a rail. Not a road, and precious few crossroads.

That’s been changing the last few months. I’ve caught few glimpse of other paths through the undergrowth, the rails have faded into the dirt and it’s starting to feel like I’m walking on a road again rather than riding the rails.

There might even see a few crossroads up ahead.

I’m letting them come. I feel like an eshu again.

Blog is suffering.

Twitter is alive and well

Classic applications do not work on Intel processor-based Macs or with Mac OS X 10.5.

[From the Apple Support knowledge base:]

It flies in the face of Apple’s human interface guidelines in terms of the 3-D perspective and light-sources. If you aren’t aware of such things, then it just looks a little… wrong. If you’re aware of such things, it screams like a misused “it’s” to an editor.

It looks horrible at the side of the screen. Many users - especially those with multiscreen or widescreen setups - place the dock at the side of the screen. The sideways shelf looks really…. wrong.

Apple apparently listened. One last-minute change in the final release version of Leopard is an alternate appearance for the Dock that’s “flat” - avoiding the perspective and positioning issues of the Shelf appearance.

Whew.

This generally has two reactions. If you’re in the “W00t! IMAP!” camp, then have at it.

If you’re in the “what’s IMAP?” camp, and ever have a desire to access Gmail from something other than the web interface, then rest assured this is Good News.

The money quote?

Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Exactly. Good response, Apple.

• A phone, including voice and 2.5G data.
• 2MP camera.
• A little more size and weight (15 grams more)
• 2 hrs more audio playback, 2 hrs more video.
• Speakers and a mic. Headphones only on Touch.
• A power adaptor for recharging without a computer. Sold separately on iPod touch.

Here’s something else the iPhone has that the Touch doesn’t. Email.

That’s right. The iPod touch lists “Wi-Fi Web Brower”, not “Breakthrough Internet Device.” No Mail. Go ahead, look around the Apple site. There’s no Mail button on the Home screen, no mention of email anywhere on the iPod touch site. Steve didn’t demo it.

While we’re at it - there’s no Google Maps application visible, no Stocks widget, no Weather widget. The iPod touch is an iPod first and foremost. Wi-Fi is there to allow you to get to the iTunes Wi-Fi Store, and Apple knew people would scream murder if they didn’t put in mobile Safari and YouTube.

Looks like Apple may try the road of differentiation by bundled software. We’ll have to wait and see if the iPhone and Touch share similar enough hardware that the hackers can migrate apps from one to the other but, until then… email only lives on the iPhone.

Yes, you pay to early adopt. Price cuts are a reality of technology - costs of flash memory and other components have likely dropped since iPhone pricing was established earlier this year. Not to mention the price point had to be aligned with the iPod Touch.

But the scale of this price cut is pretty big - I’d hazard that $100 would have been easier to swallow. $200, to judge the responses so far, makes the early adopters - the “Cult” that has helped promote the iPhone to friends and strangers - feel stupid. It would be good if Apple could address this, even in a symbolic fashion.

And they can.

Every iPhone had to be registered with Apple via an iTunes account. Apple knows when each iPhone was registered. Apple could easily announce that any iTunes account that registered an iPhone before September 1st receives a credit for the iTunes Music Store - some placating amount - effective upon the launch of the wireless version of the store.

There’s the gimme. Acknowledge the early adopters, don’t piss off what Guy Kawasaki long ago described as The Cult.

Yeah, I thought so.

(Edited to point to original source)

Step two is to add a second ball in your other hand and do the same consistent arc. Toss the first ball right-to-left, and toss the second ball left-to-right just before the first one reaches the top of the arc: toss-toss catch-catch. It’s this two-ball motion you need to practice the most.

Now here’s the thing. When that toss-toss catch-catch motion feels incomplete, like there’s something missing at the end and you just want to keep going without that awkward pause you get after catching the second ball… that’s when you add the third ball. Suddenly you’re juggling, and the motion doesn’t feel incomplete any longer.

The sensation of that moment - when one motion feels incomplete - that’s the closest thing I can come to how I feel when something I’m using is well-designed well but has a lack someplace. It’s designed well enough that I can start to get into a groove: toss-toss catch-catch. But then something happens that incurs that awkward pause - and I start looking around for the equivalent of adding the third ball. How can I make it feel like a complete motion?

I guess I spend my time trying to find the things that help me juggle.

When my iPhone gives me a happy bleep to tell me that new email has arrived, the Mail app icon on the home screen just tells me how many unread messages I have. That’s cool, I don’t want it to even try to tell me what account(s) those messages are in. The home screen for Mail does that quite nicely - listing all my accounts and letting me how many unread messages there are in each.

But here’s the situation: I get that happy “you have mail” beep, and pick up my iPhone. I unlock it, tap Mail. Looky here, I’m still at the last message I was reading in Mail. Tap top-left, wait for transition to message list. Tap top-left, wait for transition to folder list. Tap top-left, wait for transition to account list. Now, and only now, can I see which accounts have new email and navigate to those new messages.

Awkward. I want a shortcut - double-tapping the top-left for example - that take me directly to Mail’s account list regardless of where I currently am in Mail.

“Cisco worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue. Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke’s network and there have been no recurrences of the problem since. […] Earlier reports that this was a problem with the iPhone in particular have proved to be inaccurate.”

Kevin Miller, Duke’s Assistant Director of Communications Infrastructure, back on Monday when the whole highly-publicized kerfluffle started:

“I don’t believe it’s a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form.”

Kevin Miller, your extra-large order of crow is waiting. Who wants to bet that he was once one of those admins who tried to forbid MACs (sic) from the network because AppleTalk was “too chatty”?

If it turns out Duke’s problems (2 iPhones supposedly taking down 20-30 WiFI access points) are Cisco or configuration-based, their assistant director of communications infrastructure, Kevin Miller, is going to have an awful lot of egg to wipe off his face…

Having used Apple products for well over two decades, I’m well aware of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I know what to expect from 1.0 software running on 1.0 hardware. With iPhone, you can tell that Apple was very self-aware of their own history as well. What iPhone does, it does amazingly well. The screen is sharp (I was using it in full, cloudless, no-shade-for-yards sun without problem), hard to scratch, and very responsive as a touch interface. The apps work well, the connectivity works well, and I’ve had no problems with data input (then again, I’m not a hardcore long-practiced thumb typist of Blackberry or Treo vintage).

Apple hit it out of the park. The nay-sayers will rightfully have egg on their face, and Apple is gonna sell so many of these its gonna be scary.

However, as Mike Davidson said, it’s “like someone assembled the finest orchestra the world, but decided to leave out the trumpets.” That is - what iPhone does it does very well. But there are things that it just doesn’t do, and they stand out like missing trumpets. One gets the impression that the product team chose to omit features for the 1.0 rather than half-ass them.

Rather than focus on what the hardware doesn’t do such as GPS, or 3G, or memory cards, I’d prefer to focus on what the software doesn’t do. Because that can be changed - and I’ll wager that much of it will be changed in future updates, especially considering that Jobs has already been talking up what an excellent software platform the iPhone is. So without further ado, here’s what I’d like to see in some future iPhone 1.x software updates:

Document Management: This is another gateway feature - required if you want to store/edit/view supported document formats (Word, Text, Excel, PDF). Images are managed in Photos, Audio and Video in the iPod application. But there’s no analogue for… well.. Documents. With iPhone 1.0, the only place for this is in Mail, with your documents as attachments. (The Notes application isn’t even the beginning of an answer here - see Gruber’s comments on Notes in his iPhone First Impressions). If you want to be able to save a linked Word doc from a web page, use a PDF as a presentation, or have a reference file on your iPhone - you need a way to manage all that. I don’t see it on my iPhone yet.

Full-Resolution Image Support: I haven’t heard this mentioned much. iPhone’s image support seems to be limited to 320x480. Images synced from iPhoto are downsampled to 320x480 (or 480x320). Take a picture with the camera and view it in Photos - zoom in and it gets jaggy well before a 2MP picture should be jaggy. Receive an image as a mail attachment - same thing, regardless of actual image size. Same thing for images viewed on web pages with iPhone Safari. I haven’t gone back to the video of the WWDC SteveNote, but I seem to to recall that he zoomed in deeply and got sharp images during that demo - doesn’t seem to work that way on the 1.0 release. There are certain uses where this really stands out as an issues - images of diagrams, for example. Such as iSubwaymaps.com.

After those big three - which have a fairly broad impact - these others seem more like one-shots:

Disk Mode: We’ll probably see this when Apple figures out Document Management. Whether it’s a Disk Mode, or a Sync Folder between your iPhone and your Mac, I want to have a way to move Documents directly from my Mac to my iPhone.

Video Capture: Don’t quite understand why iPhone doesn’t do this yet. Don’t want to use the CPU/power to encode the captured video to an acceptable format? Don’t know, but I’d expect we’ll see this one added.

Video Out: Wow, that support for PDF files is nice. Wouldn’t you love to be able to plug your iPhone into a projector and make a presentation? How about show your videos or view your photos on a television like you can on your iPod? Yes. Video out, please.

Stereo Bluetooth Support: You’d need a stereo bluetooth headset that also has a good microphone on the market first - so look for this feature to hit when Apple has a product.

iChat: Perhaps omitted as a sap to AT&T (sell more text messages), or axed to make a clean 1.0. Seems a no-brainer.

MMS: Another one of those features that must have been chopped to make a clean 1.0, I’d expect to see it sooner rather than later.

Games: This will come when (not if) Apple creates a real SDK and method of iPhone Application certification.

Unfortunately, I’ve been burned by headphones before (bad fit, bulky, bad sound, shoddy workmanship, etc.) So I was happy when I came across this photoset showing someone in the UK getting replacement earpads. Comments on an Amazon entry for these now-unavailable headphones led me to a US source: servicesales.sel.sony.com.

My headphones are fixed. My ears are happy. And my conservative anti-sustainability boss thinks I’m even more a liberal for not contributing to consumer capitalism by buying new headphones. Win all around.