Wrapped up iPhone Shirts,
originally uploaded by webmacster87(flickr).

All of our photos from the iPhone Launch Event at the Apple Store Burlingame can be found in this Flickr photoset. Thanks to Daniel Brusilovsky who helped take many of the photos while I was busy with PreviewCast production.

I summarize all of my experiences at the Apple Store during the iPhone launch.

Stay tuned for photos to be posted on Flickr, plus the release of PreviewCast’s almost-live coverage of this crazy event.

I’m reporting live from a store MacBook in the Burlingame Apple Store. In 30 minutes, this store will be closing, which will mean that every Apple Store across the continental 48 states will be closed.

Here in the store, the Genius Bar is totally closed, and has been closed since 1 PM. I can’t remember the last time the store itself was this empty. The Apple Store employees just ordered themselves a cake from the local Copenhagen Bakery (and by the way Bay Area readers, if you’ve never had a Copenhagen cake, you’re really missing out on a sweet part of life). There is already a long line with caution tape out here going around to the back of the store–there’s unconfirmed rumors that people here have ordered catering!

I’ll be hanging in the store until 2 PM, when they close, then I’ll be spending about an hour taking pictures and chatting w/ people in the line until we start recording our podcast. Here’s hoping that my MacBook’s battery holds out!

Anyway, hope to see people drop by for when we interview the people in line and in the area after we record PreviewCast… we’ve got a special surprise!!!

Douglas Bell, over and out.

Props to The Daily Show for this excellent satire on the iPhone hype. Rob Riggle obviously goes overboard, but then again, I bet that a lot of other people are going just as overboard, or maybe even more so.

Thanks as always to the Joy of Tech for accurately putting my attitude towards the iPhone into words.

Slightly buried along with all of the suffocating iPhone hype, which is starting to make me go completely insane (although the fact that I have to cover ALL of it during tomorrow’s PreviewCast episode is what’s going to drive me totally bonkers), is a reminder to people to sign up for Yahoo! Mail because they’re the only one that’s going to offer “push” IMAP e-mail to iPhone customers. What this basically means that instead of relying on iPhone to periodically use the network/battery power to connect to the e-mail server to find out if there’s any new messages, Yahoo! will immediately send any new e-mails that come in straight through the internets to your iPhone, so that you’re iPhone doesn’t have to go check itself.

As an example:
Traditional Script
iPhone: “Oops, it’s been 15 minutes! I need to go on the network to check for new e-mails!”
Battery: “You’ll need some power to do that, here’s 0.5% of my life to help you along the way.”
iPhone: “Thanks, Battery. I need to stand in line for the network bandwidth, now…”
After going through the network…
Mail Server: “WHAT DO YOU WANT???”
iPhone: “Umm, any mail for me?”
Mail Server: “NO YOU IDIOT! GET OUTTA HERE!”

“Push” IMAP Script
Mail Server: “Oh, a new message just came in. Oh look, it’s for Douglas. Better kick that message right off to his iPhone.”
iPhone: “Hey, here’s a message that Yahoo! just pushed over to me. Thanks, Yahoo!”

Now this may be well and good, but I’ve still got a few beefs about Yahoo! Mail, and so I want to share three good reasons why I wouldn’t use it even if I had an iPhone, and then a few other beefs about iPhones compatibility with e-mail.
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The MacCast Loop, that is. That’s right, I was on last Sunday’s episode of the MacCast Loop (the June 24th episode) in which I talked about Skitch, Last.fm, and PreviewCast. Check it out on the MacCast Loop website.

I am really excited to finally pull off the curtains of the brand new version of Webmacster87.info, which I have touted for last month as version 5. So excited, in fact, I’m worried that deep-fried pickle hearts might be coming out of my ears by the time I finish this post! I have been spreading around a great deal of hype over this new site, and a lot of people have really been jealous annoyed envious excited in anticipation of the new site. I think that between your first impression when you saw the new site and what you’ll experience as you read this post and check out the new features, you’ll see that it was well worth the wait.
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Hans (macattacks10) just finished the header today, and he totally exceeded my expectations. Like I haven’t been wowed that much until I first tried Skitch a few days ago. In all honesty, the work he did totally blew my mind, and it’s still blowing my mind. I figure that the wind has probably carried my mind halfway across the Pacific Ocean by now! Man, you all are in for a real treat.

But you don’t have to wait much longer! That’s right, Webmacster87.info 5 is finally done and the U-Haul is on the way. Webmacster87.info, the main website, will be taken down tomorrow starting at 8:30 AM Pacific Time (that’s 11:30 for you East Coasters) for the purpose of backing up the current version of the blog, exporting the posts/content on the current version of the blog, importing them to the new W87.info 5 site, consolidating a few pages and things, giving the new site a final check out, writing a post to welcome you to the new site and give credit to the new design and all the new features, deleting all of the current blog files, moving all of the new blog files from the super-secret location onto the main site, doing a final check to make sure everything is working, and then taking down the placeholder page to welcome everyone to the brand new site!

I’m estimating the downtime to take between 2-3 hours total, however as always, this is subject to change depending on the willingness of technology to cooperate. As usual, I will be sharing my detailed progress on the merger on my Twitter (although not giving anything away until the time is right). And of course, there will be a brand new, wacky placeholder page of nonsense here to great you during the merger.

So let’s begin the countdown because Webmacster87.info 5 is almost here!

Why is it that in every screenshot, commercial, demo, or whatever that I’ve seen of the iPhone since the beginning of June from Apple, the time on the phone has constantly been 9:42 AM on Sunday, June 3rd every single time?