Mat celebrated his 30th last weekend with a Magnum-inspired party. Hit up Beck's Facebook for some photos. It was a fun night, especially since we decided to put the band back together for a one-off show. Soul Intention was a band we put together when we were young, idealistic, and had the time and inclination to spend hours practicing. It all came back to us so easily I started to wonder why we stopped playing together. Then I remembered that we weren't very good.

I got an iPhone. Everyone talks about how good they are, how far ahead of other phones they are, but I didn't really get it until I used one. The interface is unlike anything I've used before. The controls are very intuitive, and everything works pretty well. It's like a cool new toy that also happens to be a phone, iPod and PDA.

Unfortunately, Apple has artificially limited how you can use it. This is their trademark - you get the best possible interface at the expense of functionality. At least with their computers, everything is still available if you know how to get to it. And if Apple doesn't provide access to something, someone else will write software to get at it. The iPhone has the potential to be just as useful, with a top quality SDK available for developers to create applications for it. But incredibly, once you've written an application people can't actually install it onto an iPhone unless you (a) pay Apple a $99/year subscription, (b) submit the application to Apple for approval, and (c) Apple decides your app is good enough to host in their "App Store" (they obviously don't get open source software). And there are other limitations that just don't make any sense. For example, you can add your own ringtones (by buying them from iTunes or going through a complicated process of converting and copying files) and then use them on the iPhone - but for some reason they're not available to use as your SMS alert tone. You get a choice of six pre-installed SMS tones. I have a phone worth hundreds of dollars, and I can only choose from six SMS tones, with no way to add more. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Of course the limitations give rise to a number of hacks, from the elegant to the more mundane. No doubt Apple will try and thwart these efforts, but if they would provide these obvious features themselves, the hacks wouldn't be necessary. One can hope.

All that aside, it is a really nice phone.

I had to link this

Work is pretty busy at the moment, with our next major release due out at the start of next month. This is probably the most ambitious release we've done, with a truckload of new features and fixes. Which means lots of testing, bug fixes, and documentation needs to be done between now and then. Hopefully the quality of the end product will be worth the many hours of work that have gone into it.