This week started with some absolutely torrential rain in Surrey, someone must’ve pulled the plug on the clouds over here! I was up at 7:30 on Monday morning, to be greeted by an email from O2 at which caused me to spend the next hour stressfully trying to pre-order my iPhone 3G. It turns out their website doesn’t like Safari very much so I had to switch to FireFox, finally becoming one of the lucky few to receive an iPhone 3G on launch day. I must say, it certainly lives up to the hype!
You can probably guess that this is going to be an iPhone themed Rawkes Weekly, so if you’ve had enough of that this week then feel free to skip past the news.
This week’s news
At 8am on Monday O2 started accepting iPhone 3G pre-orders. The site went down fairly quickly after O2 estimated they were sometimes receiving over 13,000 orders a second. The entire process was a mess and it resulted in hundreds of complaints on the o2 forums. Paul Boag (of Boagworld) summed up most of O2’s failures on his blog.
Tuesday saw the BBC announce an updated version of the BBC iPlayer, with radio and TV all in one place. I have to admit I really like the new layout and feel that it’s looking like a great resource for people in the UK – It certainly trumps the options for the other terrestrial channels!
Further into the week Apple released iTunes 7.7 and opened up the App Store. There are some great apps on there; it’s definitely going to play a major part in the future of mobile technology. I’ve actually been inspired by the app store to get into application development for the iPhone. Watch this space!
Following the launch of the app store came a flurry of announcements from iPhone developers. My favourite was Cultured Code with the release of their GTD app Things for the iPhone. I absolutely love this application on the Mac and having it on the iPhone is going to be a lifesaver. You can’t sync anything yet, but it will be coming soon apparently.
Another one to look out for is the official iPhone app for WordPress – a very promising application that has got me really exciting about mobile blogging.
With big hopes and a lot of drama, the release of the iPhone 3G brought this week to a climatic end. Needless to say I pre-ordered mine earlier in the week so wasn’t caught up in the whole activation debacle. Personally I haven’t had any major mishaps with my journey to the iPhone, and I must say it’s an absolutely stunning piece of kit which is going to seriously shake up the mobile industry. I’d recommend everyone to head down to their local Apple, O2 or Carphone Warehouse store (or AT&T in the US) and give it a try. Even if you don’t buy one it’s a good idea to get hands on with the future of mobile technology, or at least for usability and accessibility reasons!
Links of the week
- How to get in on early betas – Lifehacker shares how to get into those popular betas that everyone seems to be desperate for
- Google Maps without Javascript – An excellent implementation for getting Google Maps to degrade gracefully
- Cheat sheets for front-end developers – Anyone who uses programming languages on a regular basis should print out these cheet sheets and keep them on your desk
- Bgpatterns – Create your own background patterns with this generator
- This isn’t England – An interesting article about how countries are portrayed differently on certain maps
- Pinvoke mini icons – You can never have too many mini icons, and these even come close to FamFamFam!
Site of the week
DivVoted
Lovely illustrations on this website. I like how it looks like the island at the bottom is going to be expanded in the future.
Lesson(s) of the week
If you attack a fear head-on you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about
iPhones are all they’re cracked up to be!
Track of the week
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes. This little beauty has been keeping me soothed all week!
Predictions for next week
More iPhone madness, including loads of new applications and plenty of bugs being found in the 2.0 software.