Phil's blog

After a rather delicious holiday dinner at Nora in DC, Nicco, EchoDitto's president, got right down to business.

"When we were setting this up, we thought, 'You know, I bet they want something better than bonus checks. They want something different, something way cooler than cash.' So we decided to get all you one of these."

And then, from a tiny little bag, he pulls out this gorgeous matte black box with the word "iPhone" emblazoned on the side. If you've ever heard the sound of collective jaws dropping, you know what sound was heard at that moment.

So now, I've got an iPhone. Correction. We've all got iPhones (with the exception of JP and Tom - more on that in a minute). And this is a pretty sweet thing.

I was lucky enough to be the first person in the company to receive a phone that night, and for most of the rest of the party I was too busy gushing over the fact that I, too, was now a denizen of the land of iPhone to have any sort of meaningful conversation. I couldn't wait to get home and try it out, although to say I was cautiously optimistic would be an understatement. I had heard numerous reports of five-hour phonecalls to AT&T's activation department; I really didn't want to spend half the night on the phone with a CSR only to find out I had to pay $500 to get the darn thing.

Thankfully, my worries were for naught. I got back to the hotel, plugged in the phone, typed in my name, address, social security number (egh...) and there it was: a fully-functional iPhone. It quite seriously took two minutes. I then proceeded to call my girlfriend, my dad, and then Jason (who had apparently already gone to sleep - whoops, sorry dude) to make sure a sufficient number of people knew about my great geeky step forward.

They say the honeymoon is great, that it's the rest of the marriage that can be a pain, but again, I found this to not be the case. I was lucky enough to get my iPhone right as my contract with Sprint was expiring, so I wouldn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to have service with two companies. I was, however, concerned about how long it would take to port my number from one company to the other.

The process was surprisingly easy, just like everything before it. I called Sprint, who, because I was keeping one of my lines to give to my girlfriend as a Christmas gift, were happy because they were getting a renewed contract from a new iPhone owner, and they told me they'd get everything ready and that I could go ahead and call AT&T. So, I made the call to AT&T, and other than a rather annoying 'location change' they had to process (due to my phone having a 202 area code, but my account being based in NYC), my old number was on my new phone in what I would consider record time.

The minute my number was moved over, I felt a pang of guilt. There lay my Treo 650, my good friend through two years of calls, emails, and texts, never to be used again. And then I remembered that the iPhone ROCKS, and felt better.

How, specifically, does the iPhone rock, if at all? This has been a point of contention on many a tech blog post, but I think they're just being nitpicky. The iPhone completely changed the way carriers and hardware providers interacted: the former way of doing things was that the carrier determined the hardware to be used, and in so doing, made the hardware awful. Now that device manufacturers are seeing that they can turn the tables and build better (and more profitable) devices, and carriers are realizing that the market won't stand for what they were taking in the past, the iPhone is going to see much more competition. When you consider this fact, the addition of great email and web functionality, coupled with an iPod video, are icing on the cake.

I personally enjoy how I can switch between tasks, and keep multiple browser windows open. The Treo 650 didn't even come close to this functionality - if you answered a call, or sent a text, or did pretty much anything other than keep your browser window open, it would lose your session. On top of that, the Treo didn't handle text messaging or email very well, and the interface and settings were ridiculous. Not so with the iPhone - Apple spent a lot of time getting the intuitive nature of the device as good as it is, and it shows.

Now, here's what sucks. Where's the flash? I saw a vid on youTube a while back that made fun of a recent iPhone ad: "It's not the mobile web. It's not WAP. It's not text. It's the web. On your phone. Without flash." Cut away to a screenshot of a tiny question mark, the telltale sign that Safari for iPhone doesn't recognize a plugin. I don't know how many sites use flash, but I know that a good number of the ones I visit every day utilize it in one way or another.

Next, what's the deal with downloads? Half the time I try to download something from Safari I get a "Safari can't recognize this filetype" message. PITA.

And finally, the much-ballyhooed (and soon fixed?) lack of cut and paste. I have NO clue how they could have left out this most basic of functions, but hopefully it won't be left out for much longer.

Really, as a first-gen phone of its type, the iPhone succeeds in a lot more areas than it fails. Which means that the second gen will be even better. Tom and JP are hedging their bets that a 3G iPhone will come out at MacWorld, and while you can be almost sure that one will be released eventually, I'm not sure that January gives the developers enough time. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that an SDK will be released really, really soon, which for those of us (like me) who get nervous at the idea of jailbreaking a $400 piece of glass and plastic. Until then, well, I'll just have to settle with being more productive, more connected, and more entertained - all in one package.

I've always been a bit perplexed by the relatively short lifespan of any given Drupal version, particularly when big changes, such as API modification, always rear their heads. I first began Drupal development back when things were still 4.6 and 4.7 was a whisper in darkened corners of run-down bars. When Drupal 4.7 finally came out I had just gotten a handle on how 4.6's APIs worked, and here I was, having to unlearn what I had learned. Thankfully, it was a quick process, and forms API turned out to be much more of a help than a hindrance.

About a year and a half later, we're on the verge of a stable release of Druapl 6.x, and I'm looking forward to this one much more than I was for 4.7. So, in celebration of that fact, I figured I'd run down a few elements of Drupal 6.x that I'm excited about.

• Theming for JS functions
  What it does:
  Allows customized JS output.
  Why it's cool:
  In the past, this stuff has all been hard-coded, but now, you can wrap your output functions in Drupal.theme('function_name','...') to get them to process out via either your custom theme, or via the default. From Drupal.org,
  

  "JavaScript theme functions are entirely free in their return value. It can vary from simple strings, up to complex data types like an object containing in turn several jQuery objects which are wrapped around DOM elements. See the original (default) theme function to see what your custom theme function should return."

• Actions!
  What it does:
  Allows for configurable Drupal-y things to occur after being triggered by some other Drupal-y thing.
  Why it's cool:

The other day we were faced with a dilemma: one of our clients needed to be able to upload daily (and sometimes hourly) videos for posting on their site - videos that were encoded as MPEGs, but needed to be FLVs. Until recently, we had been encoding them manually, using command-line FFMpeg, which, while being fairly flexible, was a slow, unreliable, processor-intensive action.

Jason did some hunting, and found an article on TechCrunch about this new web-based encoding service called Hey!Watch.

Holy crap, it's awesome.

Marseilles-based Hey!Watch has developed a system that offloads the encoding work normally done by your local machine onto their servers, virtually eliminating server load due to vid encoding.

Besides being able to convert vids from virtually -any- format to any other format, they've also got fantastic integration via APIs, browser plugins and Amazon's S3(!).

Cool stuff, right? I thought so, too, at least in theory. Thing was, I had never done anything with HTTP_Request, ever, so it was time to dive in. I learn best when thrown into things, anyway. The end result wasn't too shabby, and since I figure some of you out there might be in the same boat I was in at some point, here's the code I used:

--Pastebin seems to be down, I'll post it up as soon as pastebin comes back--

In the meantime, you can see it here: http://wilcoding.xs4all.nl/Wilco/Pastecode/4545/showpaste.aspx