MacRumors

Are there any problems with the iPhone that we girls may face that the average male wouldnt? Do long fingernails, for example, interfere with the use of the iPhone's touch interface in any way? Lets find out.

I've been texting on the iPhone like mad ever since I got it. Texting is the easiest way to get in touch with most of my friends, so if it didnt work well with long fingernails, my nails would be gone, or at least shortened. And I do love my nails!

But long fingernails do not, in any way, interfere with the use of this phone. The angle at which the phone is usually held facilitates the pad of the finger coming into contact with the screen, you arent approaching it perpendicularly with your fingertip while typing.

Answer:

All other phone functions are pretty easy to do with fingernails, too. I usually attack buttons with the pad of my pointer finger. Only once have I had to tap on an application more than once, and I was approaching it from a strange angle--someone else was holding my iPhone.

In all, this is a fantastic interface with or without fingernails. Ive never used a touch-screen that was this accurate before. All other ones, especially on portable devices (Palm Pilots, my old Newton, my GPS, et al) have been less-than stellar. It takes an annoyingly long time to type out an address on my Mio C220 GPS. The touchscreen of the GPS unit can be frustrating at times, having to repeatedly click on the same button several times to get it to register, while the iPhone does it the first time.

Multi-touch on the iPhone is fantastic.

One criticism about the iPhone is the lack of a dedicated iChat/AIM client. Some have tried to use Web 2.0 Instant Messaging applications such as Meebo with mixed results.

Forum user dontwalkhand provides an interesting tip that allows you to actually log into AIM over SMS and send and receive messages as if you are logged in. This means that you appear on your friend's buddy lists as logged in, and messages sent to you automatically arrive via SMS.

To Login to AIM over SMS. Send a text message

"ScreenName[SPACE]Password" to 265000
Example: "JohnDoe abcdefgh" (where JohnDoe is your username, abcdefgh is your password)

You will then recieve a confirmation message back with a list of your buddies. To send an IM to one of your buddies:

"ScreenName[Colon][Space] Message" to 265010.
Example: JohnDoe: Hey dude wahts up?

When someone sends you an IM, it will land in your SMS inbox, simply reply to the SMS as if you were sending any regular old text message.

Obviously, chatting over SMS can get expensive so unless you have an unlimited SMS plan, you should be wary. In my brief testing, it appeared to work well, but can be a little awkward initially once you get individual chat sessions started with your buddies.

A full guide to AIM Text Messaging services is available here (PDF).

Users of Yahoo Messenger or MSN can similarly use Yahoo's Messenger for SMS documented here.

The first iPhoneDevCamp takes place this weekend in San Francisco, CA. The 3 day event invites interested individuals to come develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for the iPhone.

It's a non-commercial event with free attendance.

Attendees will be able to:

Create new web applications for iPhone.
Optimize existing web applications for iPhone.
Migrate Dashboard Widgets to web-based widgets for iPhone.
Test and optimize web sites for iPhone.

David Pogue, of the New York Times, published an iPhone music video on the NYTimes.com sung to the tune "If I Had it My Way".

Very well done and worth a watch.

Michael Ducker, former senior editor of TreoCentral, offers his impressions of the iPhone (at phonedifferent.com) from the perspective of a long term Treo user.

He covers the typical areas which he feels the iPhone succeeded (touch interface, camera, transitions, keyboard) and areas that need improvement (dialing, stability, consistency, data entry), but does feel the iPhone is a game-changing device which suddenly turns the cellphone market from being about hardware to being about software.

That's no small task given that the main customers of cellphones (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile) haven't seemed to care much at all about software. Instead they've focused on encouraging handset makers to go ever sleeker and smaller, marketing each subsequent handset as the next sexy fashion accessory. That was great and all, but we're pretty close to an optimal size for a hold-in-your-hand handset. Where is the innovation going to happen next?

Ducker points out that the eye-catching transitions are more than just eye candy -- they provide critical user interface feedback that allows the user to follow along and not get "lost" in the device. He also points out that the elastic scrolling provides additional tactility and feedback to let the user know there is no more to scroll.

In conclusion:

Apple has a phenomenal first entrance into an incredibly competitive market, and I cannot wait to see how the other big players respond. .... Ignoring cost, the future phones that compete against Apple will have to not only have slick hardware, but will have to have an intuitive, easy to use interface, and complete solution to integrate my digital life with my real life.

Arkadiusz Młynarczyk (forum name: myiphone) has created a web-based game designed for the iPhone called Diamenty.

The web based game is a clone of PopCap's Bejeweled and provides an impressive interface for an entirely web/javascript game.

He is also the author of http://sudoku.myiphone.pl/, a Suduko port also designed for the iPhone.

The game is being distributed as donation-ware.

Lunch time. I take off my embroidered toy store apron, clock out in the POS, and scamper off to Whole Foods for a quick lunch of vegetarian lentil and spinach soup and a ciabatta roll.

Eating my soup, browsing the internet on EDGE, listening to some sweet, sweet Matt the Electrician. I click into a text box on Facebook and start typing. The music cuts off, and I return to the home screen.

I think theres something wrong with my iPhone, the "best iPod ever made."

I restart the music, and begin typing again. Safari quits! I repeat this little dance a few more times until I finally give up on the internet and just listen to music and people-watch until my lunch break is over. How un-technological of me. Its 2007! There should be internet on my iPod.. err iPhone!In sitting down to write this, I plugged the supplied headphones into the iPhone, turn it on, and it immediately slows down a bit. I turn on The Beastie Boys and the music player part of the phone stutters. The iPhone also gets pretty warm if you play the music for more than about 30 minutes.

So far, Im thoroughly unimpressed with the iPhone as a music player.

At home, I turned off WiFi, and I got it to crash again and again by listening to music and trying to type in a text box. Awesome: I can re-create the problem! Time to head to the genius bar to get it fixed once and for all.

Life would be so much easier if I went to the Houston Galleria Apple Store, but I abhor it. Instead of being a store in the mall, it is the mall: rich teenaged boys with their pants sagging halfway down their butt, people uninterested in technology hogging the MacPro with 30 display to check their Facebook or Myspace pages, people turning up the display iPod speakers all the way up because that wretched rap music just wasnt quite loud enough to begin with. So, I usually drive down to First Colony Mall. It takes about a half hour, but the experience is so much more enjoyable there.

I sit at the genius bar and wait for them to call my name. While waiting I got a very helpful suggestion from Vlady, the manager and all-around best Apple-guy ever:

"Dont use EDGE! What, are you in Abilene?"

Problem solved! I can sleep again! Hooray!

The genius and I looked at it -- we couldnt get it to crash again. I sat at the bar and furiously fiddled with it, desperately tried to make it hang up, or at least slow down. It was frustrating and embarrassing. He said he put a note in the system for if I have to come in with this problem again, and that I should go home and restore the phone. Fun.

On my way out, I waited in line to pay for a 3.5mm cable small enough to fit in the iPhone, the clerk whipped out his iPhone and scratched it with a customers keys to demonstrate the magical unscratchability of the screen. A little part of me died inside until I saw how utterly perfect the screen looked. I guess I can just throw the phone into the rest of my bag along with my keys and nail clippers.

And for anyone else that has to restore their iPhone: back up any pictures you take with it before you restore. I forgot to and theyre gone. I had a picture of the delicious soup I ate! Nooo!

This tip may prove useful to some. Forum user, technocoy noticed that the Safari on the iPhone intercepts a double-finger scroll differently than the usual single-touch scroll.

One issue for some web applications, including David Cann's iPhoneChat (iPhone Link) is the inability to scroll framed elements. In iPhoneiChat, this means users are unable to scroll long buddy lists with a simple finger drag. However, if you apply two fingers and scroll upward, the buddy list scrolls appropriately.

Per Ajaxian, Joe Hewitt has been trying to capture this event and has posted a small demo page which shows that you can drag an object (vertically only) with the double-finger scrolling on the iPhone.

Meanwhile, through some of the efforts involved in hacking the iPhone, there has been evidence that the iPhone may support up to three finger events. One event is named "tripleFingerGestureTriggered". All documented iPhone mutlitouch functionality to date has been limited to two discrete points.