When you watch Steve Jobs’ demo of the iPhone, he makes the argument that the fixed keypads on mobile phones have many disadvantages and no advantages. But today plenty of people are talking about the advantages of keypads. With my Pebl, I can get my phone out of my pocket, open it, and call my wife on speed dial using one hand without looking at the screen or the keypad. Jobs pointed out the utility of the mouse in his presentation, but a computer with only a mouse would offer very little in terms of productivity. I can type over 90 words per minute and I never have to look at the keyboard.

The two big user interface questions I have about the iPhone are how useful it will be if you can’t pay full attention to the screen, and whether it will favor power users once they’ve gotten the hang of it. Keypads and keyboards are awkward for the first time user, but once you’ve gotten used to them, they can provide amazing productivity. The iPhone may make it easy on people when they initially get it out of the box, but will we find it significantly more useful after we’ve had it for six months? The jury is definitely still out in that regard.

In thinking about the iPhone, it occurs to me that it is more a small handheld computer with a telephony application than it is a traditional mobile phone. In this vein, I have some questions about the iPhone:

1. How easy is it going to be for third party software developers to create applications for the iPhone? Clearly the phone will have some different APIs than the desktop version of OS X, but will developers be able to build applications using their regular development tools?
2. How will software for the iPhone, from Apple or third parties be distributed? Will it be easy to install applications and system updates via the iTunes syncing? If the answer is yes, the iPhone is clearly vastly different from other mobile phones, which most people never update at all.
3. Can you turn off the phone features and still use the music player and other non-communications features? In other words, can I use it on an airplane?
4. Is the IMAP push protocol the phone uses going to be open? Will Gmail be able to offer it as well as Yahoo? Will I be able to deploy some software on my own server that enables IMAP push to an iPhone?
5. If it’s a little computer running a Unix-like operating system, how easy will it be to crash?
6. How long until we see the first iPhone virus?

In other news, David Pogue has posted some first impressions after spending an hour playing with an iPhone.

Update: Apparently it is more a mobile phone than a tiny personal computer. Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg says it’s a closed box.

I’m not normally a gadget person, and I am almost always a late adopter. I didn’t try out an iPod until the third generation was released. It took me forever to get a mobile phone and a digital camera. I’m always in that group of people who would prefer to feel the smug satisfaction of getting a good deal on something that has been out for awhile rather than being the first person on my block to pay too much for the hot new thing.

So I am surprised to find that I really, really want an iPhone, and that the $599 price seems reasonable.

Part of it is my grave disappointment with mobile phones as they exist today. I have the unlocked Motorola PEBL that I bought on eBay, and I like it. The form factor is great. That said, I hate the user interface. The menus are clunky, the buttons can be hard to deal with, and the built in Web browser is a total loss. I hate the idea of getting killed for data usage whenever I want to look up the weather or a sports score.

I want a phone that’s as easy to use as my iPod, or my Tivo. That’s what the iPhone promises to be. To me, the killer thing about the phone is the user interface. Comparing it feature for feature with other smart phones is all well and good, but leaves out the fact that this phone should actually be enjoyable. (If it’s not, I’m not dropping 600 bucks on it.) This is the first phone I’ve seen (or seen demoed, anyway), that looks like it would be pleasant enough to use that I could see myself sitting in a coffee shop checking my email or catching up on some feeds without opening up a laptop. That, to me, is a compelling feature. The fact that I can join the local wifi network and surf the web without paying data charges is even better. And check out the screen resolution on this thing. The other phones hardly compare.

The voice mail application alone shows that the iPhone is to be taken seriously. Voice mail has been broken forever. It sucks on land lines, it sucks on mobile phones, it sucks everywhere. Nobody likes getting voice mail. The iPhone addresses that, and it makes you wonder why none of the other mobile phone providers have before.

Of course the phone also has a camera, and a bunch of storage space for songs and video, and a ton of other cool bells and whistles, but that’s just icing on the cake. I want to be able to do the stuff the phone I have now can do without aggravation.

There are some complaints about the iPhone, the primary being that it’s a Cingular-only product. If I were a customer of some other provider, that would bug me too, but I’m already using Cingular, so OK. There’s the related complaint that EvDO is faster than EDGE, but Cingular is a GSM carrier, so EDGE is what you get. I’m sure Apple would love to offer EvDO speed, but for whatever reason, they wound up building a GSM phone, so customers are out of luck. (For now, I wonder whether they’ll offer HSDPA by the time the phone is released?)

There are some complaints about the cost, and yeah, the phone is expensive. But are you getting value for your money? It sure looks like it from the demo. I can remember people paying $800 bucks for Motorola Startac phones ten years ago. You’ve always had to pay to be on the cutting edge, especially when it comes to mobile technology. In a couple of years, there will probably be cheap iPhones that do what the iPhone they’re releasing in June does, and expensive iPhones that blow our minds.

Bottom line: I will be at the Apple Store checking these out in person as soon as possible.

I admit that I can’t wait to see Apple’s iPhone up close.

Update: Gizmodo is rocking the keynote coverage. (Engadget’s coverage is great as well, and really, why not follow them all?)

Scott Rosenberg, in discussing the new version of Microsoft Word, makes the following observation about icons:

Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean.

I was thinking about the applications I use, and how often I wait on the tool tip to figure out what an icon actually does. The other day I was using an application that I don’t use very often, and I had to wait over every icon to get some of the most basic things done. Part of that was my unfamiliarity, and the other part was that the icons just weren’t very well designed, so their use was not obvious.

On the other hand, pulldown menus are no pleasure cruise, either. When I’m using Microsoft Word or some other feature-heavy application, I almost always find it difficult to remember which menu I need to scour for whatever it is I want to do. At least with icons I can see them all at once and make an educated guess based on appearance and context when I’m searching for a feature.

I’d also be interested to know how many different toolbar buttons people recognize on sight in any complex application that they use. I am extremely familiar with Eclipse, having used it daily for many years at one time. The toolbar in the Java perspective has 24 icons with no files open and at least 27 if I’m editing a Java file. I use five of them regularly. I recognize maybe 10 or 12 of them. Looking over them now, I see that most of them offer functionality that I usually access via the keyboard or via context menus.

I don’t really have any conclusions to offer here, other than that it seems like user interfaces with a lot of redundancy make sense. In Eclipse, most features can be accessed from a toolbar, from pulldown menus, from context menus, and via the keyboard, and I use a mixture of those methods depending on which feature I’m using. I’m sure if you talked to another Eclipse user, they’d access the same features in completely different ways. That’s one good reason why getting rid of the pulldown menus in Office may not make the most sense. If I’m used to enabling and disabling “Track Changes” from the pulldown menu, it doesn’t matter if I can do it from the Ribbon, or a button, or the keyboard, learning a new way to approach the problem is going to slow me down.

As I have mentioned many times before, I’m a big adherent of unit testing. If you have a comprehensive suite of unit tests, seeing them all work before you commit a bug fix or feature to an application provides at least basic assurance that you haven’t screwed things up too badly. In the case of Web applications, the utopian goal is to be able to run your unit tests and feel assured that your application works without doing any testing through the browser at all.

There are many reasons why we’ll never see utopia, including client-side scripts and other problems related to display rather than basic input and output. However, it’s very difficult to consistently test an entire application going through it by hand using a browser, so you need to have a certain level of confidence in your unit tests. What I’ve found lately is that there’s a specific area where my unit tests usually fall short, and that’s in wiring forms up to actions in my application.

If you think of an application as an API, you can think of a URL as a method or function name, and its parameters as arguments. For example /search.cgi may take parameters like terms and language. When you write a unit test for this code, you use a test harness that pretends to post to that URL, and passes in the required parameters. If the call produces the output you expect, the test is successful. What my tests often lack, though, is a guarantee that the pages that submit to that URL use the correct parameters. There are three places where the parameters are referenced: the code itself (in search.cgi), the test, and the view that calls the URL. The view layer oftentimes goes untested.

So say someone wants to change the name of the terms parameter to query. They update the CGI program and the unit tests for it, and they update every page they can think of that calls search.cgi to update the parameter name. Most of the time, there are no unit tests that verify that the parameter names are correct in forms throughout the application, and even if you wanted to write such tests, there’s no good way to make sure that those parameter names are properly checked, since they live in the middle of freeform data. Your code coverage tool isn’t going to tell you that you missed a search form on some web page in the application.

Anyone know of a good approach for this problem? It’s been giving me fits lately.

To remind readers from last year, I’m constraining my predictions to areas where I have some expertise (meaning no political or current events predictions), and avoiding areas where any predictions would be completely speculative, like future product releases from Apple.

I expect that in 2007 we’ll continue to be blown away by the progress we make in getting Web applications to work more like desktop applications. I think that more than seeing the state of the art advance in terms of what can be done with JavaScript, we’ll see use of these techniques become significantly more widespread. You can already do most of the things you can do in a desktop application in a Web application, or at least companies like Google can. We’ll see knowledge of these techniques spread to a much wider group of developers, thanks in large part to further integration of the popular AJAX libraries into Web development platforms. Ruby on Rails already provides many shortcuts that make adding AJAX features to your applications, we’ll see similar progress for other frameworks as well. (I think that when you perform a Web search for “jstl ajax” this time next year, the results will be more interesting.)

2006 was a big year for spammers. Prior to 2006, spam filters were winning the fight, but spammers made huge gains last year thanks to image spam, abuse of botnets, and other factors. I think that spam filters will claw their way back in 2007. The only spam filter that works really well for me right now is the one in Gmail, but I think that other spam fighters will figure things out this year as well. Either that, or everyone will just migrate to Gmail.

Google will continue to do things that give people reservations about trusting them. Google keeps getting bigger and bigger and assimilating more and more of our data, mainly because their services are just that useful. I am now reaching the tipping point where I intentionally avoid using some Google services based on a vague fear of relying too much on Google. You can pry Gmail from my cold dead fingers, but everything else is negotiable. Google Reader is great, but I don’t want to give Google a list of all of the blogs I read. I’ve quit using Google exclusively for Web search. Given what I’m reading on other blogs, I think that this is a trend we’ll see growing in the next year. People will continue to increase their reliance on Google, but more of them will come to resent that reliance as well.

Web advertising will become even more obnoxious. In the past couple of weeks, I finally gave in and installed a Flash blocking extension for Firefox, and even with it, ads are still out of control. Sites run Flash-based popups, click-trapping transparent Flash movies that take up most of the browser window, and tooltip-based ads that make moving your mouse across a browser window feel like crossing a mine field. For awhile it looked like context-keyed text ads from Google, Yahoo, and others would take over from the more intrusive forms of advertising, but obnoxiousness is still on the rise.

I have a couple of hopeful predictions as well. I’d like this stuff to happen, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that it actually will:

I’d hope to see more progress in decentralized communication among weblogs, and less progress toward people moving into centralized weblog services. TypePad, Vox, Blogger, and other services are great, but I’d like to be able to exchanging information with other weblogs without having to be on the same network they are. Trackback and pingback seem to be on the way toward death due to spam issues. OpenID is great and seems to be on a path toward growing like gangbusters. Maybe OpenID could save trackback? There have to be other ways to enable people with independent weblogs to communicate among one another the way Vox users can. I’d love to see progress made on this front in 2007.

I’d also like to see more progress on the copyright and DRM front. Almost everything the copyright industries are pushing right now is broken and unsustainable. I’d love to see more risk taking from them, and less reliance on abusing customers via the legal system. I’d also love to see more customers refuse to give their money to an industry that regards them first as potential criminals. There’s very little evidence that we’ll see these leopards change their spots.

Jim Henley:

And it’s also true that the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it.