Firmwarez

So the iPhone 3.0 OS rolled out yesterday and despite my many protestations I've come to accept that its a necessary upgrade. I'm not gonna get much from many of the features, like MMS, voice memos, internet tethering (although none of you will see that one either), stereo bluetooth, or "find my iphone". I mostly wanted the update so I can continue to pay Apple and developers for apps to run on my iPod touch. Never you mind that I already paid them $20 to update my fresh out-of-the-box device with a current OS; charging customers for the privilege of giving you money doesn't seem like a very good strategy. But I digress.

I really wanted to point out a feature that I wasn't very pumped up about till about 5 minutes ago. The Spotlight Search. I've been pretty annoyed with apple's system for organizing apps on the iphone, which basically consists of one list that stretches for as many pages as is necessary to show all the icons. You can drag them around, but its pretty much a pain and they don't stay sorted well as new apps are purchased. But now with search I can type in the first few letters of the app I want and up it pops. Pretty nice actually, considering its fixing such a stupid problem.

• Apple - iPhone - New features in the iPhone 3.0 Software Update.
• Apple - iPod touch - Software Update

UpdateHoly crap, it searches through your music too! No more scrolling through the alphabet like a sucker!

I'm So Over Longhorn.

Vista is ready to roll out and under-deliver on all those promises that Microsoft made way back when they decided to make Longhorn instead of Blackcomb. The new phenoms are now Fiji and Vienna. Fiji being a kind of Vista second edition (remember when you got win98 second edition? That was pretty sweet.) And Vienna is the whole new shebang that was sposed to be Blackcomb in the first place. (remember when you got winxp after win98se? Even more sweet.) It'll use voice recognition as a major input and do away with folder management and menus. Sounds like the computer scifi writers have been dreaming about for centuries. Of course a bunch of this stuff was sposed to be in here by now but was postponed so don't get too excited. The cool features will most likely get the "that's really hard, it'll be in the next generation" bump just before release.

Oh, and all of you who think you just wasted 70 seconds reading that cause there's no way you're going to remember that Blackcomb is now Vienna just like you didn't know that Vista was Longhorn, you're right. You wasted your time.

• Next up after Vista? Fiji and Vienna - Download Squad