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Apple gets a lot of credit for putting effort into the user experience. Many attribute the success of the original Mac, iPods, the iTunes Music Store, iBooks, and their other products to ease of use. But building a brand based on user experience can be much harder than, say, a brand based on low prices (like Dell) or ubiquity (like Microsoft). Because it doesn't take too much to go from "it just works" to "it doesn't work," which has been my experience with iTunes 7. The worst problem: it freezes up whenever I don't have an internet connection. For a long time, I used WinAmp as my MP3 player. As a nerdy web developer, I'm stuck at my computer for inordinate amounts of time, so I tend to listen to a lot of music through my SoundBlaster. By long time, I mean 1997 through a few years ago. I didn't have much of my collection ripped, so a static list of the 100-or-so songs I did have converted was fine. After ripping the majority of my CD library, and getting my wife an iPod, I started using iTunes. WinAmp has media library features, but I just liked iTunes better. Fast forward to 2006, when iTunes version 7 appears. It added some cool features, like album covers. It also was pretty buggy. Apple has released a few fixes so far, but now with even the latest version - iTunes 7.0.2 on Windows 2000 - I run into issues whenever my Internet connection goes down, or I have VPN up and running, blocking all traffic. It will start up and play like normal, but then after a few songs, the audio cuts off. Sometimes the track looks like it is continuing to play, others the time stops ticking off as well. Skipping to the next track results in more silence. When I finally close iTunes, it doesn't really close - I have to go into the Task Manager and manually end the process. I've done some Googling to see if there was a solution, but so far no luck. I found a blog post by Don Loper talking about freezing, but disabling automatic checking for podcasts did not resolve my issue. I tried disabling Audioscrobbler, a great plugin that uploads what you've been listening to to last.fm, and anything else that looked like it might be trying to send or receive data. Still no dice. Now, this is obviously not a huge problem, but when I'm dialing in to work from home, it would be nice to be able to listen to music. I can always dig up WinAmp, but I don't want to bother importing or recreating playlists. My solution so far has been to listen to NPR on my headphones. The risk that Apple runs with each release of iTunes is that bugs, even if they are fairly uncommon, can put the breaks on the flow of the user experience like Fred Flinstone jamming his feet through the floor of his stony, Neanderthal car. Which is why all the hype (and the 6 month lead time) around the iPhone could still blow up in their faces. My advice: test, test, test, and do it with actual users. Oh, and anyone have any ideas to fix my freezes that I haven't tried yet?

Today Apple finally released details about their new iPhone. There have been rumors and speculation about how Apple could bring it's iPod design skills to the mobile phone world for years now. Lots of web sites have posted predictions, feature wish lists, insider information and supposed leaks, including this one.

Does the iPhone live up to the hype? We'll take a look at it by going down the list of our 10 predictions about the Apple iPhone.

1. Simple controls. - Apple has struck a blow against the proliferation of buttons by creating a phone with only a few buttons and a large touchscreen. This is a welcome change from smartphones and PDA-phones which have a whole QUERTY keyboard. The keyboard is nice the 5 percent of the time I'm taking notes to texting, but 95 percent of the time they just make it harder to hit the button I do want.

2. Consistent controls - This is a little bit harder to judge without having an iPhone in hand to play with, but from the demos and the fact that the iPhone runs OSX it seems likely you won't have to learn totally different ways to navigate your voicemail, songs, and photos any more. At the very least Apple has solved the mystery of the Green “dial� button and the OK button.

3. Innovative controls with obvious affordances - The iPhone's control scheme definitely falls into the innovative category, but is it's use obvious? Although I missed my guess about hanging up the phone, some of the features are automated responses to actions people are already very used to performing. The touch screen turns off when you put it close to your face, and the display shifts to landscape when you turn it. The learnability and obviousness of the individual applications which use the touch screen are a little harder to judge just yet (especially for old codgers), but it is nice to see the use of large, simple icons like the Palm or Blackberry rather that a Windows-style Start Menu, which just plain sucks on small devices.

4. Streamlined interaction design. - Apple has chosen to put Phone, Mail, Web and iPod icons along the bottom of the screen for ease of access. Presumably they expect other features, like the Calendar and Maps, to be used less often and so they are represented by icons filling the top of the screen. Assuming they are right about which tasks are most commonly used, this is a smart move. Calling and iPod functionality are obviously the biggies and are located appropriately at the corners in compliance with Fitt's Law. Will email and web browsing be as important? Millions of blackberry users say yes to the former, and built-in wifi make the latter possible.

5. No more disgusting face grease on your screen. - Unless the touchscreen is coated with some miracle material, maybe not. But wait - it looks like the solution comes in the form of the included hands-free headphones and optional bluetooth headset. I'm still a little surprised that the horror of gobs of face grease all over his beautiful device didn't push Steve Jobs over the edge. Apparently he can console himself with the thought that most people will use the headphones to listen to music and all the cool kids have headsets.

6. No more lock in - Not so fast. The iPhone is a Cingular exclusive, at least in the U.S., at least for now. It works on GSM, which is a widely used standard, and I am pretty amazed that Cingular is allowing a device with built-in wifi, but I will take this one as a failed prediction.

7. It will look really, really nice - This is, of course, completely subjective, but I have a feeling a lot of people will be lusting over iPhones when they hit stores this summer.

8. Integrated voicemail, chat, SMS and email - Hit the nail on the head with this one. This is the first device I've seen which takes the obvious step of allowing you to manage your voicemail the same way you do email. No more listening to 4 messages to get to the one you actually want to delete.

9. No camera - I was completely wrong on this one. The iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera built-in. I still think cameras on phones are really only used by drunk people and people with new phones. Maybe I have to add a new category, people who will soon be famous on YouTube.

10. Connectivity - The iPhone has bluetooth, Wifi, and EDGE meaning lots of potential for connectivity. Since it runs OSX, I'm guess that means the sky's the limit on how you connect and transfer files around. This is a very smart move – get your customers used to using the Internet often enough with Wifi, and they'll start wanting to use it all the time with EDGE (and an expensive data plan).

So that's that - our record was 8 out of ten. Not bad for a site with no insider information.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments below.

Since many of our troops are committed to the War in Iraq, we find ourselves once again facing an even more dangerous situation here at home. That's right, the War on Christmas. Because the politically correct mainstream media refuses to cover this silent scourge, it's a little-known fact that the War on Christmas now accounts for more deaths in the United States than any other single cause except for diseases and misfortunes. Every time the clerk at the Seven-Eleven says "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas," it is a terrorist attack akin to flying a building into a plane, except this happens 1000 times every day. So what can you do to survive this trying ordeal (and maybe kick some butt back)? Here are five tips for surviving the War on Christmas: 1. Remind everyone that America is a Christian nation, founded by Christians on Christian moral standards (as Jesus said, "If they raise the tax on tea again, I'm going to fucking riot!"). They have no choice but to celebrate Christmas, and wish you a merry one. It's in the Constitution... or the Bible maybe... whatever, same thing. 2. Build a Yuletide fallout shelter. You can find construction plans for a sturdy backyard bomb shelter for sale via mail order - check the back pages of a 1966 Popular Science magazine. When the big one hits, it won't be the godless atheists you are fighting - it will be your own neighbors. Stock plenty of provisions such as egg nog, canned Christmas Goose and mistletoe. When the evil radiation of agnosticism begins to clear, send out a dove and do not leave the shelter until it returns with an olive branch. 3. Refuse to shop at any big-box retailer whose employees do not vigorously and specifically bombard you with Christmas blessings. Remember, multi-billion dollar corporations have feelings and care about you as a customer - going to Best Buy instead of Circuit City really makes a difference in the world. Boycott any store with a "Season's Greetings" banner, except for the big sale next Sunday, because seriously, I heard they will have this DVD player for like $29 and they will only have 10 per store so I'm going to camp out Saturday night. 4. Don't forget the true meaning of Christmas. A lot of secular humanists and other fascists will blather on about the spirit of giving, the importance of charity, fellowship and good will towards your fellow man, and other hippy garbage. Also, Santa Claus Frosty the Snowman are not the reason for the season. The true meaning of Christmas is how important it is that Jesus' mom did not have sex before he was born. This is very important. 5. This last tip is absolutely the most important thing you can do this holiday season to survive the War on Christmas: whine and cry about it day and night. Bitch and moan to your friends, family and coworkers. If you have your own cable news show, talk about how offended you are, and how the liberals have gone too far this time, and how political correctness is sending America down a slippery slope toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Maoism. For god's sake, write letters to the editor of your local paper! Construct unfunny "observational humor" jokes to point out how ironic it is when liberals oppress Christians in the name of multiculturalism (BTW you don't understand irony). Strain to work in that zinger that your golf buddy faxed you in 1993 about 'Billary' Clinton, make relevant pop cultural references to the ACLU and feminists! Pontificate over and over about how much better things were in the good old days, when every five and dime had a big, gory crucifix on the wall and we went downtown to see the department store displays but then we saw a black person once in 1973 so we moved far, far out to the suburbs and I hear they are opening a Country Kitchen isn't that exciting! Why don't you call, what am I, chopped liver? You kids get off my lawn! Remember, when a cashier making $6 an hour doing a boring, repetitive job is required by company policy to numbly acknowledge your presence, and they don't do it in your preferred manner, you are being oppressed! You should feel indignant - who will protect Christianity if not you? It's not like you're part of the overwhelming majority. It's not like all three branches of government at the federal, state, and local level are dominated by Christians. You are the scrappy underdog in this Culture War (by Bill O'Reilly), imagine a Hanukkah boot stomping on the face of humanity for all eternity! Thanks to Business Week for bringing this issue to my attention.

What do you do When you find out you are wrong? Not just wrong about one thing, or a little bit wrong. What do you do when you find out you are very wrong, and consistently wrong, and there are really big consequences? President Bush, after three years, seems to finally realize he has been wrong. Well, not really. But he has finally acknowledged the big consequences part. Part of the problem has been that he has only gotten advice from those willing to tell him what he wants to hear. So the formation of the Iraq Study Group was a good thing, right? Finally, some independent experts would weight in, and tell the President some things he wouldn't like to hear. Except they weren't really experts. And their advice has little to do with Iraq. And Bush isn't really listening anyway. So how do we win the war in Iraq? Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't hurt to ask the real experts - the military people actually in Iraq. In fact, one of our troops has given us a PowerPoint presentation. That's right, it's even in the preferred format of upper management everywhere. Seriously, go there right now and watch the presentation, it's only 18 slides. It's a revelation. Not because this one soldier, Capt. Travis Patriquin, is a military genius, or that his ideas are a silver bullet that will magically solve all problems. It's amazing because Patriquin's presentation actually talks about the reality on the ground. He presents actual ideas, grounded in reality, that could actually be tried. This is a amazing. Think about it - this administration has spent years propping up non-ideas (like staying the course) as if they were ideas. They have spent more time and effort denying reality than dealing with it. I had almost forgotten what ideas taste like. It has been so long. Unfortunately, this presentation is the last insight we will get from Capt. Patriquin. He was killed last week. His "How to Win the War in Al Anbar" may go down in history as the first PowerPoint presentation to make a positive change in the world. Or maybe it will be ignored. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but based on 6 years of the Bush administration, my guess is it will be the latter. You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of every large company or organization I've ever worked for or dealt with. The people at the top are so disconnected from the people at the bottom that they begin to congratulate themselves for the disconnect. "I don't need to know how widget X works, in fact I shouldn't know at all. I need to think about strategic business decisions." We don't want to waste the chief executive's time with tactics, he has strategy to strategize about. We can lay off engineers, they just have domain knowledge, they don't contribute to the bottom line like sales. We need programmers with 5 years of Java and J2EE, don't worry about anything else, it's just business logic. We can outsource our call centers to India or Kansas or where ever - all they need is a script to work from, hire a consultant to develop the script. We need professional project managers, certified experts in the art of scheduling and tracking--they don't have to understand the project they're managing, what are you daft? Tactics matter. Actual information that reflects reality matters. They say it's not what you know, but who you know. That might be true in job hunting and getting political appointments, but apparently it doesn't win wars.

Since the dawn of time, man has wondered: will Apple come out with a iPhone, and will it match the success of the iPod? This is the Internet, of course, so by the dawn of time I mean three or four years ago, well before the Motorolla Rokr came out. Despite whipping the rumor mill into a frenzy, the Rokr ended up being not much of an Apple iPhone and was immediately overshadowed by the iPod Nano. Now, it seems Apple may be actually coming out with an iPhone in early 2007. And you are going to want it. Here's why. (A quick disclaimer: I don't have any inside info about Apple or the iPhone. This list is an educated guess. I like to think of it as "analysis" rather than "idle speculation.") 1. Simple controls. My very first cell phone, a Kyocera 2135, had a keypad, a directional pad, a total of four buttons and a couple of menus. Since then, as I have gotten new phones and new plans, the number of buttons and menus has increased at an exponential rate. It looks like amazing progress, a Moore's Law of mobiles, except most of the time, I'm just trying to make a stupid phone call. The evolution of the iPod has been a study in simplification, to the point where all you have now is the clickwheel, unless you have a Shuffle, in which case you have even less. 2. Consistent controls. When you get a new phone, how long does it take for you to get used to it? Forget any new features for now -- what about just using the "dial", "hangup", "OK", and other common buttons in different contexts? Earlier cell phones were often better current phones in this regard, probably because they had less functionality. When a phone has both a dial and an enter button (like the Treo), you're not always sure which is appropriate in which situation. I can almost guarantee the iPhone will embrace the "it just works" attitude Apple is known for. I know my contact list is getting way too long to navigate with up/down arrows, and even jumping by letter is becoming tedious. Look for the contact list to work the same way a playlist works, and expect to spend a lot less time figuring it out and more time just using it. 3. Innovative controls with obvious affordances. Big words, but all I'm saying is that the interface will be different from what's out there, but won't require much explanation. Affordnaces are surfaces and shapes that imply use - for example, a handle on a door implies "pull" while a horizontal bar implies "push". My guess? A haptic interface for common, atomic actions. Instead of needing to find and press a little button to hang up, maybe you can just shake the phone--think erasing an Etch-a-Sketch. 4. Streamlined interaction design. Current phones include a lot of functionality - calling, text messaging, taking photos, shooting video, sending email, surfing the web, etc. The current solution is a burrito-like seven layers of menus and icons. If Apple is smart, the iPhone will make sure the most common tasks will be the most visible and easiest to get to. Think of the actions you perform the most with your current phone - making a call, finding a contact, hanging up, etc. The main difficulty for Apple will be effectively combining music player and phone functionality without adding a whole layer of menus or icons. Something like Front Row might be a step in the right direction. Listening to music is a more passive activity that calling, and you don't want to add a "switch to phone mode" step when the phone rings, so It's not exactly the right metaphor. 5. No more disgusting face grease on your screen. This is, in my opinion, the holy grail of cell phone design. There have been a few phones that tried to address this issue, but the vast majority of phones are shaped such that you must press the screen to your face to make a call. I know what you're thinking. "But my face isn't oily and gross." Yes it is. Take out your phone and really look. Perform this experiment: clean the screen and buttons, eat a couple slices of pizza, and call your grandma (you really should call more). Now look at the screen. I cannot imagine Steve Jobs allowing skin oil and other human excretions on his beautiful devices, let alone requiring it just to make a call. I have seen the press conferences, this is a man who exfoliates. I'm not sure how exactly they will get around this one, but is it possible they might make a phone... actually shaped like a phone? I have never had this issue with a landline phone. 6. No more lock in. I'm not talking about the elimination of Apple's one major lock-in scheme, requiring iTunes for purchased, DRM-ed music. But notice that with the iPod there are no limits on loading up your own MP3s, photos, etc. My guess is the iPhone will be similar. This is actually revolutionary for a cell phone. There is a good amount of hardware and functionality built in to the phone in your pocket that you don't have access to. It's because the carriers will block anything they would compete with any service they offer (or think they might offer some day in the future). They also like to lock you in to a contract when you purchase the phone. Apple, debuting a shiny new must-have cell phone, just might have the leverage needed to just say no. 7. It will look really, really nice. This is subjective, and I'm sure there are a few people out there not impressed by the iPod. It's clear, though, that Apple knows how to fashion artifacts that a large number of people drool over. And this mass of drooling people seems to include geeks, hipsters, famous people, and all the popular kids at school. 8. Integrated voicemail, chat, SMS and email. This isn't a new idea, and there are plenty of carriers and startup companies promising to do this really soon now. As far as I know, there really isn't a solution that makes the different forms of messaging work together that has been adopted by the general public. It would require integration with the service providers (difficult) or a chip beefy enough to encode audio, but imagine if you could store and manage voicemail and SMS as easily as you do email, through a simple visual or audio interface. There is plenty of hard drive space on an iPod, so why not apply the Gmail concept of effectively infinite storage to voicemail? 9. No camera. I'll say up front that I'm not nearly as confident about numbers 9 and 10, but I have a feeling the iPhone will not have a camera. Why not? It is a little-known fact that people only use their cell phone cameras in two situations: the first week after purchase, and when drunk. The cameras themselves are not very good, the shots are low resolution, and the carriers have made it their mission to make getting the photo to your computer or printing it at Walgreens difficult and expensive. So why not leave it out? That's one less thing to squeeze into the form factor, one less item in the menu, less clutter. 10. Connectivity. At the very least, expect to be able to connect to anything an iPod can connect to now. The iPod does not have wireless features like the Zune, but it seems like the Zune was crippled for DRM purposes. Cell phones are inherently wireless, so it will be interesting to see what Apple does here. Is it possible they might make bluetooth actually live up to its promise? Specifically, it would be really nice if it was easy to beam contact info, photos, etc. to others. This is 2006, there's no excuse for making us strain to hear someone's number in a loud club or try to manually enter names and numbers while being jostled by a crowd. And every phone I've ever played with that can store or take photos makes it a major chore to ever get them off the damned phone. I'm not too sure this will happen, because getting the bluetooth turned on with my wifes iBook was a chore, and getting it to actually connect to my Treo was a pain too. Of course, there's no guarantee the iPhone will have any of the above.  It's possible that Motorolla or Nokia's next phone will cover enough of the items above to become the next must-have gadget.  But they've had plenty of chances.  I'm guessing it will take a company with a new perspective to make a really great phone, and Apple just might be that company.