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The Address Book application in Mac OS X Snow Leopard has a new telephone number label for contacts: “iPhone.” (Credit to Jeff Carlson for bringing it to my attention.)

What I find just as interesting as its existence is its order in the list. The “iPhone” label comes before “mobile,” the label I used for all cellular numbers. Is that a subtle dig to put the iPhone above other mobile phones?

It is also the only label that rates a capital letter.

I have no idea how or if this label will survive through Entourage Sync Services and Exchange synchronization. Hm.

Update: I wouldn’t advise using this label right now if you use Sync Services or otherwise sync data elsewhere. I’ve already lost cell numbers in Entourage with Sync Services enabled when I flipped an existing “mobile” number to “iPhone” and back.

Update: I have tested it twice with dummy contacts and could not reproduce the problem that resulted in the number being removed from both Entourage and Address Book. (I believe this is odd because it happened to two of my existing contacts when I flipped them to “iPhone” and back to “mobile.”) However, the “iPhone” number does definitely get removed from Entourage through Sync Services, which means you would lose the number on anything connected to an Exchange account (if Entourage is synchronizing with Exchange). … Such as an iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync.

“Life Balance 3.x customers with Macintosh licenses can upgrade to version 4 for just $59.95,” claims Llamagraphics, the purveyor of the fine time management application, Life Balance.

This sounds like a great deal! Until I remember that the only reason I want to upgrade from version 3 to 5 (not 4) is for compatibility with the new iPhone version of Life Balance! So to get them both, I’d be spending:

Compare that to my current cost for Life Balance — which I’m not currently using because my Treo repeatedly made me want to throw it forcefully into the ground (loved the Palm, hated the defective phone!) and the desktop software looks like crap — which I’ve summarized below:

That’s right, folks. After an investment to date of $89.95 in this software, I’d have to shell out another $79.94 to stay current and get the application on the mobile device I currently use. I’d be paying more for the Mac upgrade than I’ve ever paid for any single purchase or upgrade from Llamagraphics in the past!

I’m surprised I’m even thinking about this. However, Life Balance has always made the most sense of any task management application, and has always done the best job of helping me prioritize. (Of other current applications, OmniFocus doesn’t make sense to me, and Things was great for entry but felt horrid at showing me what I needed to do next.) At the cost of Life Balance, despite how it worked for me, maybe it’s simply time to try something else.

The least expensive overall, and perhaps most interesting because it supports task sharing, is to go with Remember The Milk. I’m not sure I want to use a Web or “cloud” service for this, and there’s no desktop application per se, but I’m at the point in my life where sharing to-do’s with others (and outside the work environment) is compelling. The new Remember The Milk iPhone application may tip me in that direction.

ABC News is but one news outlet saying that a Faster iPhone on Its Way, after AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson “spilled” this news last week. (Nevermind that, as others have said, Apple’s own CEO has said much the same thing already.)

What really annoys me is that every time I’ve looked into AT&T’s 3G coverage, the glaring lack of it has become apparent. Sure, you have to delve down into a lower level than their national coverage map, but you can look for yourself.

In New York State, only the New York City metro area had coverage when I’ve looked. (See The iPhone objections and At least 2G is better than nothing, and you can blame AT&T.) Forget upstate and its several MSAs in the top 100 in the nation by population.

So why, exactly, would a 3G iPhone be of broad interest in the U.S. if AT&T is the exclusive carrier? What good is a 3G iPhone if I can’t use 3G where I am? Is there something AT&T isn’t showing us? Right now, it seems like they are the bigger part of the problem, yet every story I see seems to focus on how this is Apple’s fault. I’m not trying to be a fanboy, but let’s at least get some balanced media coverage on this.

[Via MacInTouch.]

You may find this odd coming from a relatively security-conscious sysadmin-type person, but I’m not totally convinced that having everything run as root (if that is indeed true) on the iPhone is a bad thing. See The iPhone’s biggest security pitfall: All applications run as root at iPhone Atlas and Effective UID: 0 at Rixstep.

As first blush, yes, it seems like a horrible idea. Enabling root is bad. Running as root is bad. It’s anathema to even think these things … the whole device running as root? What about privilege separation? Doesn’t that expose user data and so on?

Yes and no. It exposes more than if the device were running everything in an unprivileged account, certainly.

But … the user will presumably always have access to his or her own data. You could probably separate privileges here somehow, but I’m sure that would have downstream effects on performance, usability, complexity, and even on the amount of storage required to run the iPhone’s operating system.

So, if you can get malware onto the device, it appears illogical to me to think that you could really protect the user data simply by not running everything as root. Therefore, root or not, the data must depend upon other protections. Presumably the attacker would get access to the system, but on a 4 or 8 GB device, the delta between that and the user data is small; most of the value to the attacker would be in user data. This would probably be followed by some kind of input logging to collect more such data over time.

If you’re going to trojan the iPhone, wouldn’t it be just as easy to do that in user space? It looks like launchd is there (and being PID 1 on Mac OS X, I’d assume it would have to be), so all you’d have to do is slip in a Launch Agent running as the user. Boom, as we Mac people like to say now, you have a process that starts up with the user. I don’t know how or if Mac OS X protects input, but the possibility of capturing it is probably the greatest risk of running everything as root rather than a less privileged user.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. I think the iPhone is less secure with everything running as UID 0 than it would be if that were not the case. Security — like many things in life — is all about tradeoffs. The tradeoff here is probably a smaller operating system that fits on the device and is still able to provide some pretty amazing capabilities that we wouldn’t have associated with a phone one year ago. We will see if the tradeoffs are worth it over time.

One bit of good news, however, is that the iPhone is, for all intents and purposes, a single click away from a complete restore. Let’s for a moment assume that this wipes the file system and doesn’t just overwrite existing files. (Am I the only one concerned about securely deleting the iPhone? Can’t be.) If so, we can nuke and pave it, eliminating harmful files/executables that may be in its storage.

A difficult problem: What if someone manages to get something malicious on an iPhone, and it is able to jump the barrier from the device back to the host computer?

I got a chance to use Aaron’s new iPhone yesterday, when Elijah and I met up with him for the afternoon.

Friday evening after work, Aaron stood in line briefly at the new Cingular/AT&T store just west of Eastview Mall. After a customer earlier in line came out empty-handed, he learned that the store had sold its last 8 GB model. Aaron — sensing that it was not to be — left at that point for wings at Duff’s, celebrating his friend Matt’s birthday in Buffalo.

After the celebration, he and Missy stopped at the Apple Store Walden Galleria, sauntering in around 9:30 p.m. The Apple Store was the only one open in the mall, and of course would not close until midnight that night for the launch (which is one of the strangest parts of the iPhone debut, to me). About twenty people were lingering, most clustered around the display models. He told me he was trying one of those out when he saw a gentleman who had just purchased one — Aaron had just wanted to try one, and had no idea they’d still have any for sale.

Since it turned out that they did have stock of the higher-capacity iPhones, he bought one. He was already in my access logs by 8:24 a.m. the next morning:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

I got to see it on Saturday, when we decided to see if the Apple Store Eastview had any remaining PowerSupport Crystal Films — we both now swear by these for adding some protection to our video iPods.

At the mall, he let me run the iPhone through its paces while he graciously watched his nephew. Having loaded a few Web sites, clicked around through the interface, and typed a little bit with the on-screen keyboard … well, I can say that it’s awesome. Solely as a handheld computer — throwing out all of the things it currently lacks, like some sync features and an SDK and so on — it’s a fantastic device.

Once I got to see it in person, hold it in my own hands, I felt like it was just right. It’s a natural extension of many trends — the iPod’s media-savvy, smartphones’ calling capabilities, and Web-connectedness.

Three things were immediately surprising. The screen is incredible, bright and crisp oh so hi-res. The phone calls were wonderfully clear — compared to the choppy and processed audio of every Verizon Wireless phone I’ve used, this was a winner (and on par with the GSM Treo 650 I had briefly two years ago). The Safari browser is much better than I expected, being both clear and readable in both portrait and landscape at multiple zoom levels … blissfully, much better than the display I got from the initial version of the iPhoney simulator.

The iPhone is not perfect, but it does seem futuristic and it does all fit together very well.

Now, if I can just store my 1500 existing Palm notepad notes on it, and create new ones that will sync to my desktop, I think I could live with it. I’m still not sure I can afford it, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks to Aaron for letting me play!

The Daring Fireball iPhone first impressions are in, and overall, the device sounds good.

However, for me, three glaring points pop out. They are all about data sync:

• The iPhone calendar shares the same limitation of my current Treo sync setup: it basically ignores multiple calendars/categories, and syncs to a single calendar in iCal.
• The Notes application doesn’t sync its data anywhere, at least not yet.
• To-do’s are not present at all on the iPhone, and do not sync to the desktop.

The first item is not a deal-breaker. Given the amount of micro-notetaking I do on my Treo, the second one is. I’d have to find some Web-based way to write down funny quotes and other things I want to remember. Hm.

I’ve never been great about consulting an electronic to-do list of any kind — most recently trying to keep up with Life Balance, but failing — so the third point is probably not going to hurt.

Gadget news sites today are carrying reports of upgraded EDGE speeds on the AT&T wireless data network. EDGE performance seems to be at the core of most of the negative reviews of and objections to the iPhone (see Why You Don’t Want an iPhone — Yet for one example), so any improvement is welcome news. It’s clearly good for existing AT&T customers, and probably a great sigh of relief for all of the new iPhone owners who’ll jump on the network starting this evening.

This factor is also important to me, since EDGE performance has been building in my mind as a serious drawback, reminding of my less-than-stellar experience with 1xRTT data speeds for my Treo 650 on Verizon Wireless. Eventually, I got so fed up with the price vs. performance — even though I wanted pervasive ’net access — that I cancelled the data portion of my plan. (It didn’t hurt a bit that we shaved around $45 dollars off our monthly cellular charges.)

I did some research this week and discovered that with AT&T’s current data coverage, none of the cities in the Empire State other than New York City have any 3G data. Not Buffalo … not Rochester … not Syracuse … not Albany-Schenectady-Troy … not Yonkers … not Binghamton. That’s right, only one of the state’s top cities/MSA’s has 3G UMTS data. It’s exactly like watching those commercials about wireless cards for laptops where the two competitors are responding to questions about their coverage, and the Cingular guy keeps saying “No,” for every city named.

Sure, more of the metro areas will be upgraded in time — perhaps as early as this summer, if I remember some news/rumors correctly. Hopefully my home will be one of them. But, this is still a significant drawback today.

Those that (rightly) see EDGE as a weakness of the iPhone should still take a dose of reality by looking at those coverage maps. That will clearly point out that AT&T’s 3G network is currently deployed in very limited geographical areas. Why have 3G support on the iPhone (or even other AT&T devices) if it can’t be used? If AT&T really has been upgrading their EDGE capability to support higher speeds, that change will have a significant and widespread impact in the short term and be of particular benefit to the iPhone launch.

Anyway, my conspiracy theory is that UMTS (or even HSDPA) support is actually in the iPhone, but will only be revealed later as an update when the network can handle it.

Update: Thanks to the iFixit take-apart, 3G support through a software update no longer has any credibility for me. If the chipset doesn’t handle 3G, game over.

Since the on-line frenzy surrounding the iPhone is building feverishly before its June 29 release, I thought I would try out Marketcircle’s iPhoney browser simulator. It’s bare bones, but interesting nonetheless.

Basically, it showed me that my site will look like crap on the iPhone. Even in landscape, the Garland template for Drupal, along with my Drupal block configuration, makes Irreality far too wide to be seen without scrolling on the iPhone’s screen.

Ah, well. I’m not going to bother fixing that now. Too much else on my plate.

Apparently, my site is not hip enough to have been browsed by a preproduction iPhone … yet. I checked my access logs and have not seen anything similar to the following user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

Bummer.