Pixelhum

One of my favourite albums is Marillion’s “Misplaced Childhood”. I wore out the cassette tape (remember them?) listening to it and I knew the album inside out. When I first listened to it on CD I noticed things I hadn’t heard before, particularly the singers wail as the guitar solo started, so I had to go back and listen to the tape again to see if it was there which, of course, it was.

Well, I’ve had the iPhone 4 for about 3 weeks now, so I can write a bit more about my first impressions with it.

So on Thursday 24th June I decided to go and join the queue for the iPhone 4. Thankfully I was early enough and, after waiting for about 3 and a half hours they finally let me into the o2 shop to buy one.

Since buying my Powerbook 6 months ago, I can’t help feeling that Apple products are currently a bit form over function. Don’t get me wrong—I love my Powerbook, and the Mac OS is well designed, slick and easy to use—but it often seems as though features that might seem fundamental in other apps are just left out, perhaps because they want to sell you a ‘Pro’ version with that feature and many others (Quicktime is one good example) or just because said feature ruins the lines of the suit, as it were.

So far, the one thing that has been bugging the hell out of me with OS X is the mouse control panel. On Windows I used to just switch the acceleration off altogether, as I’m firmly in the camp that believes the mouse pointer should follow the mouse 1:1. In fact, I even had a registry hack that disabled mouse acceleration completely, even when the ‘Enhance pointer precision’ option was checked. While we’re on that subject, who decided on the name of that option anyway?!?