The Big iPhone Zapruder #3: Music, Cover Flow, Video and more

slow day?

Is play by play analysis really required of an instructional video? Anybody who bothered to watch it knows everything you just reported. I should write a blog which describes everything you've already written, the Unofficial Unofficial Apple Weblog Weblog, call it TUUAWW.

Let's start...

The Big Uselessness #3: Musing the Obvious and more

After exhaustive analysis of TUAW's exhaustive analysis of Apple's exhaustive audio-visual demonstration of the iPhone we found a number of fascinating features of this article. This is of course one of TUAW's main components and David Chartier has made some great improvements to the experience of reading TUAW.

While we've all seen articles on TUAW before this article reveals a number of handy new tidbits:

English
The article is written in the English language. It's obvious but has never been clearly stated before and quite fascinating.

Ads
There are nine ads on the page. Some at the top, some on the right and more at the bottom. You may not have noticed this.

Paragraphs
David used six paragraphs to state the bloody obvious. That's one more than five and six more than required.

Gallery
The article includes 5 still captures from the video the article describes and which are part of the video and which anyone who has seen the video would recognize because they would have seen them already.

Well that's all of the titbits we picked up from the article. Stay tuned for more in-depth analysis of TUAW's in-depth analysis of Apple's in-depth audio-video demonstration of the iPhone soon.

whatever you say steve

Dear Naysayers and Negative Commenters,

Please come and work for Apple. We would love your expertise. Our team of engineers who have spent the past 5 years of their life and have devoted every waking moment as to how to make its user-interface nothing short of kick-a** - well, they were completely off the mark. Your genius has revealed to us just how stupid we are. We should have thought to ask you, because, obviously, you have thought of everything.

Please respond soon to this offer. We would hate for our next multi-million dollar endeavor to go an inch further without your inspection and approval.

Yours truly,
Apple

[plebes.]

I don't really *get* why the four bottom apps (phone/mail/safari/ipod) aren't in an overview with the top apps. Just 1 grid with apps; you could drag them into the order you prefer.

I agree with the other criticism here, the use of this stupid word "Zapruder" in itself is almost making me delete TUAW from Google Reader... TUAW has some useful stuff, but the actual writing style is appalling - I find that about 80% of the articles I read here make me want to write this kind of criticism. I've resorted to just skimming articles for links and reading them - and it very infuriating when you don't even provide any links, or link to some random website...

Please listen to your readers, or you'll lose us...

One thing to mention: iPhone doesn't use a standard audio jack. It's a slightly thinner and longer version of it. Belkin and Griffin will be selling adapters, and standard headphones will not work without this.

This iPhone looks cool!

iPhone

Well I learned a few things I didn't know from this post. I don't always have time to sort through all the Apple news myself, so a nice summary of stuff like this is appreciated, and anything I've heard already only take up like half a sentence, so I don't consider it a huge waste of time. Not all TUAW readers are going to have exactly the same amount of awareness of what's going on, so they have to compromise at some point.

And I guess I'm in the minority, but "Zaprudering" has never bothered me. The first time I heard it in a TUAW post, I knew exactly what it meant and in one word summed up pretty well what exactly the author intended to do with said video. Language evolves because it's useful. A few years ago a lot of people were like "OMG Google isn't a verb!" Well it is now. So is "Photoshop." If people see a need for it, it becomes a word.

Respectfully, customizable iPod buttons isn't "brilliant", as you write -- it's a workaround for an interface that cannot scale. The iPod menu is brilliant because it scales -- no matter how many menu items there are, it still works. But a toolbar interface is limited to the size of the display, and a single row limited even more.

Now, simplicity is a good thing, and I think the iPhone gets it right. But brilliant? No, it's a workaround to a limitation of the chosen user interface.

About the switching of buttons in iPod-view: I really like this feature, and I REALLY, REALLY, hope that the four "main" apps on the home-screen will be replaceable as well, I'd much rather have SMS down there than mail...