start?

Thursday, December 27th, 2007.

That is the day of reckoning. It will be the day that a bunch of strangers meet at a coffee shop for a day and crank out an entire website. Oh, man. It's gonna be awesome.

Details to follow.

What Apple Wants

Nearly every rumor out there about Apple is fueled by what consumers want or expect from Apple. But what about Apple wanting things? More specifically, who do they want?

Apple is hiring. Apple has been hiring. Apple will probably continue to hire for years on end. But if we look at who Apple wants now, we may extrapolate what Apple wants to provide in the future.

One of the largest complaints about Apple right now is its lack of 3rd party apps on the iPhone. Rumors abound indicate a migration toward the release of an SDK. But does that jive with what Apple wants? Here's a list of selected job postings on the Apple website:

• Phone Tools Software Engineer - iPhone - Develop tools to aid in the development and debugging of the phone functionality of the iPhone
• iPhone Applications Frameworks Engineer - We are looking for a proactive, highly motivated engineer to work on the Applications Frameworks for iPhone.
• iPhone -Telephony Embedded SW Engineer - Adding features to telephony middleware library

Seems like those rumors are, at the very least, plausible. And what about the next generation of iPods? Here's a good posting that mentions the iPod, but not the iPhone:

• iPod SW Developer Tools Engineer - Experience working on Media/Audio/Video and Wireless products a plus

Does that mean the next iPods will have wireless?

On top of that, there are a good number of "iPod Graphics" jobs that require plenty of 3D experience. Now, as far as I can tell, the only iPod capable of 3D graphics is the iPhone... and it only uses 3D for Coverflow (please, correct me if I'm wrong, or send me an iPhone so I can verify for myself). Does this mean a considerably more interactive (ie: reactive) interface for the iPod? One might draw that conclusion.

Please, proffer your opinions in the comments.

Can I get in on this?

The iPhone. It's all the rage on the blogs. "It'll do this!" "It can't do that!" Obviously, there's some stratification out there. Either you love it or you hate it.

I'm not going to lie: I will probably buy one as soon as I can get my dirty mitts on one.

But that's not why I'm posting this. I'm an engineer, and I like to think things out in a quantifiable manner. So, I'm going to compare the RAZR that I bought two years ago to a potential purchase of the iPhone.

First off, let's look at each plan's features: With the RAZR, I pay $0.15 per SMS, receive no internet, and get 450 minutes each month (of which I usually use about 250). With the iPhone, I would get 200 free SMS messages, unlimited internet (yes, it's EDGE, but it's infinitely better than nothing), and the same 450 minutes. Keep in mind that I live in a city with municipal wi-fi, so I won't be languishing with EDGE at all times.

What about the plans' costs? For the RAZR, I end up paying, depending on that month's SMS usage, about $45 after taxes and fees. The iPhone plan costs $59.95, which I'll round out to $65 after the government takes their cut.

And finally, the equipment cost. I plunked down $200 of late-2004-cash for the RAZR. Tax (5.5%) and inflation (a conservative 3%) brings that to $223.85. The iPhone, assuming a 4GB version, would cost me $500 plus tax, or $527.50.

Let's amortize the costs, forgetting about inflation in the monthly rates. After 24 months of the RAZR, I'm out $1303.85. The same calculation with the iPhone and its plan yields $2087.50.

That's a considerable difference until you start looking at feature difference: The iPhone is basically an iPod nano, so let's subtract the nano's educational price (hooray grad school!) of $209.95, tax included. The iPhone now sits at $1877.55, giving it a $573.70 premium. Averaged over 24 months, I'm getting unlimited internet and a vastly superior interface (no really... the RAZR is terrible) for $23.90.

Is $24 per month worth it? That's your call.

Simultaneously search multiple cities on craigslist

I was bored today, so I wrote a yahoo pipe that is completely unrelated to 500points. I hope you like!Yahoo Pipe that gives you the ability to search the "for sale" sections of up to 3 craigslist cities at once. It defaults to motorcycles which is my personal preference. And no, it does not work on the "w4m" section."



read more | digg story

Looking for a designer

I'm not entirely convinced this blog has made its way to more than 10 people or so, but I thought I'd post this anyway... maybe someone reading this knows someone who would be interested.

We're looking for an honest-to-goodness web designer. Scot and I are perfectly capable of writing code, but we have pretty much zero art talent between us. If you, or someone you know, is looking for a fun leisure project and is fantastic in the art department, let us know. Send me an email... my username is listrophy, and I use gmail, so hopefully you can figure out the address.

first post!

...and we're off!

Ok, so maybe the site is a bit sparse. In fact, all it has is a signup form and the tagline:

do you have what it takes?
get ready to change your life (you're gonna need to)

Argh! Dangling prepositions! My high school English professor would most certainly not be proud.

Well, despite the vague verbiage, I think it conveys exactly what 500 points means. It's just up to my dear readers to figure it out.

...readers? *cricket* *cricket* Hello? If anyone can hear me out there, would you mind visiting the site and signing up?