The iPhone 3G: A Lesson in Frustration

If you check out Apple's website today (it sometimes changes on Tuesdays, so I won't speculate on what it will show tomorrow), you'll see, in big letters: "It's here. The new iPhone 3G." Which is a lie. It's not here. Not anymore, anyway. From the tales I keep hearing from AT&T, the iPhone 3G is gone. Completely sold out. In less than 3 days. According to the salesperson at the AT&T store, Apple has told them that they grossly underestimated demand. He said it in a tone as if to say: "Duh — you didn't figure it would be a hot item?"

Which is my thought exactly. I mean, really? Dropping the price $200 and adding a slew of new features, combined with Apple's typical hype of any new product, and they didn't expect mad demand? Either they were asleep, there were real, honest supply problems (and Apple's covering it with a "we underestimated demand" story), or this is a marketing gimmick: make it look like there's huge demand by constricting supply.

Except that Apple sold over one million iPhones over the weekend (according to various reports I've seen on the 'Net). That's a lot of iPhones, any way you cut it. Which makes me wonder: how much of a marketing gimmick did they think they needed? And wouldn't it have been nice to say "We sold over 2 million iPhones!" or "We sold over 3 million iPhones!" instead?

Perhaps it was intentional — to restrict the number of people who'd be trying to turn the thing on over the weekend. As it was, Apple's servers melted under the demand, and many people referred to their machine as the iBrick. Go Apple.

But actually, I digress. As it turns out, not only is the iPhone not here, it's also unattainable for a good many people. No, I don't mean people whose budgets won't allow them to purchase the device. I mean current AT&T customers. See, if you're an AT&T customer (already), then you only get to upgrade your phone (at the price everyone thinks of when they talk about phones) every so often (1.5 years, I think). And guess what? A great many people aren't amongst those. Indeed, anyone who bought an original iPhone can't upgrade to the iPhone 3G for the advertised $199. 2 year contract nothing. You simply don't have an option: either shell out $399, or wait until it's time to upgrade.

And no one's bothered to make that clear, anywhere. Well, I suppose that's not true. If you go to AT&T's site and look under current AT&T customer you can check your upgrade eligibility. They require your phone number (which you likely know) and your password (which I certainly don't know).... But it's not exactly screaming at you: "Beware! You might not be eligible!"

Need I mention that I'm not eligible?

All I can say is that I'm really, really, really glad I didn't wait in line for 2 (or 3 or 4) hours on Friday, Saturday, or this morning, only to get to the counter and discover that I can either a) go home sad, without an iPhone or b) shell out an extra $200 to get the thing now. Perhaps that's why they did it? So people (like me) would get up there and, stuck between a rock and a hard place, would shell out the extra dough only to regret it later? It'd have been really hard, after that kind of wait, to walk away.

So I'm stuck. I could open a new line and get the phone now, but it doesn't take much in the way of math skills to figure out that you'd be better off shelling out the $200. Besides, I'd have to have a new phone number, which would be an enormous pain.

I hope to get my phone on August 11th, when I'm eligible. At least I don't have to wait a year (or more)!

Truly Persistent QuickLook

I love the QuickLook feature in Apple's OS X Leopard (10.5.x). It's a great way to just see what's in a file without having to wait and first launch whichever app is associated with that particular file type. It's also great if someone sends you an Office document and you happen not to have Office (or iWork) on your machine. For instance, as long as there aren't lots of equations or important macros in a file, you can often view the contents of the document better with QuickLook than in, say, TextEdit, for Word files. And if it's an Excel or PowerPoint file, QuickLook may be your only option.

But there's one limitation of QuickLook that's been driving me crazy. As soon as you switch away from Finder (to another application), which is to say, as soon as Finder loses focus, the QuickLook window disappears. What I wanted was truly persistent QuickLook. There are a couple of hits on Google if you enter "persistent QuickLook" - but they only tell you to use Cmd+Y.... And that suffers from the same limitation as using the space bar to invoke QuickLook — at least, as near as I can tell.

Practically, this means that you can't view the Word (or Excel or Powerpoint) document while you type text into another program. Which is irritating, and, as far as I was concerned, rendered QuickLook very nearly useless — or at least, pretty much broken. I wanted QuickLook on the left, and TextEdit (or OmniOutliner or Pages, etc.) on the right, so I could transcribe the one to the other. I found myself frequently PDF'ing the source file so I could actually keep it up for reference while I worked.

Fortunately, there is a way to make the QuickLook window not disappear on you. You can invoke QuickLook from the command line, using qlmanage (man qlmanage for details). Irritatingly (though perhaps arguably correct behavior), qlmanage doesn't exit until the QuickLook window it summons has been closed — but we can get around that with a little dancing and a call to nohup. Here's how I do it:

nohup qlmanage -p "/path/to/file" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

This will bring up a QuickLook preview of the specified file, return you your prompt immediately, and suppress all of the output typically generated by nohup (both the "Appending output to nohup.out" message and the actual output that is typically appended).

Of course, you don't really want to have to open Terminal and type in that string every time you want a persistent QuickLook of a file. Neither do I. Automator comes to the rescue, and gives you the rest of the solution.

In Automator, make a new Workflow for which "Get Selected Finder Items" is the first step and "Run Shell Script" the second. In "Run Shell Script", change "Pass Input" from "as stdin" to "as arguments." Then, delete the template text Automator helpfully provides you with in the "Run Shell Script" box and replace it with:

nohup qlmanage -p "$@" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Then select "Save As Plug-in..." from the File menu. Automator, again helpfully, offers to build you a Plug-in for Finder — which is exactly what you want. Name it something descriptive (I called mine "Persistent QuickLook" and click Save.

Now, open a Finder window, right-click on something, select "More..."->"Automator"->"Persistent QuickLook" (or whatever you named it), wait a couple of seconds, and — voilà! you have a QuickLook preview of whatever you clicked that doesn't go away. That's a bit more work than merely hitting the space bar (and it takes a bit of time to open, which is a pity), but at least the QuickLook window won't disappear when Finder loses focus.

At the Beach

From Saturday to Wednesday morning, Tracy and I joined mom and dad and David and mom's brothers and sister and their families at Litchfield Beach, near Pawley's Island, South Carolina. There were great waves in the mornings, this year - much better than I remember from some years past, where it seemed we'd wait a long time between rides. Tracy wasn't a huge fan of being in the water, but with Patrick's 200mm lens on her dad's camera body (which offers a 1.6x FOVCF, yielding a lens effectively 320mm) she got some great pictures.


Twice in the four mornings we had at the beach we rose before the sun and watched the sun rise. On both days it was cloudy; the first day had fairly lousy light, but the light on the second day was marvelous. The picture at the end of this post is a sunrise Tracy captured with her dad's camera and Patrick's lens. The image is as shot - no post processing has been applied.

Waiting for the sun to do something exciting, we camped a sand-crab hole. I grabbed this picture (and several like it) using Patrick's lens. The clarity of Canon's L-series lenses continues to astonish me.


Walking up the beach after watching the sunrise, we came upon another crab, beached and likely dying - at any rate, he wasn't in any hurry to move. I got this picture, below, and then scooped him up in a shoe and tossed him in the water.


There were lots of butterflies just on the other side of the dunes, frequenting some of the bushes in the yards of the beach houses. Tracy snapped this picture, below, as we were walking back one afternoon.


I also took this mailbox, which was covered in a long moss. Dad was fascinated by it: just a simple, white plastic mailbox on a painted wooden pole that was almost covered on one side with moss.


Light in the evening favored the sea-oats and the dunes. The filter had fogged from being washed in the cold house and then being transported into the afternoon heat; the effect was an extremely soft background for this picture.


On our last evening, we were digging for coquinas (donax variabilis) when Tracy found a live conch, buried in the sand. We pulled it out, constructed a tide pool of sorts for it, and set it there to watch it come out of its shell. I took several pictures, but none showed off the animal as well as I'd have liked. A tank would have been better, as the conch wouldn't have buried itself and I could have gotten level with it, thus showing more than mostly its shell. For this picture, we put the animal on its back, so to speak, so it had to reach quite a ways to grip the sand and invert itself.


We didn't manage any pictures of fireworks this year; the family shot of fire works the night after we left (we stayed only for part of the week). Near our house, though, was a tree lit from below. The effect was stunning, so I took this picture.


It was a good break from work for both of us; it was nice to spend time with my family too. Both of us returned home well rested - and for me, anyway, my photographic batteries have been recharged.