I’ve been gathering requirements for my Asterisk-based home VOIP system and have just had an epiphany.

I don’t need to buy any wireless VOIP phones to use with my Asterisk box; soon I’ll be able to just use my iPhone as my home phone!

I was looking at the Aastra and Linksys options, for example, and preparing to do research on which would integrate best with an contact directory. Ideally I am looking for a solution that can tie into my Apple Address Book.

The SDK to Save the Day

But no worries — as of the 11th, when the iPhone 3G and version 2 of the SDK launch, the reality of VOIP on the iPhone will likely be upon us. There are already a ton of projects out there that leverage the iPhone for VOIP capabilities, so this iPhone/HomePhone functionality could not be far behind.

Why Do We Care?

Think about this: when you get home your iPhone will connect to your home wireless, which is tied in with your Asterisk system. It registers itself with Asterisk — basically saying, “I’m home now, send any home calls to my iPhone.” As of that moment, any incoming calls to your home number will ring on your iPhone.

Plus, any outbound calls you make from the house will route out of your Asterisk box (VOIP) instead of over AT&T, meaning you’ll save money on minutes. Not only that, but there are even projects that are working on letting you browse your Asterisk VOIP voicemail through the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail interface.

The iPhone is about to change VOIP forever, and having it replace common household phones is going to be a big part of it.:

Links

[ The Asterisk Project ]
[ The Top VOIP Soft Phones for the iPhone ]
[ iCall ]
[ Fring ]

iCall is a new, totally legit native iPhone application that will let you swtich from a regular AT&T call (which uses minutes) to a WiFi call (which is free).

Check out the video.

iPhone. Want.

Let me start off with a reverse disclaimer: I’m something of an Apple fanboy. I camped for the first iPhone and I’m camping for the next one. So that tells you where my heart is.

But I’m a logical and open-minded fanboy (if there is such a thing). In between my Steve Jobs worship rituals I take time to work in the information security field, and that’s the role I’m in for this post.

So, let me be forward:

The new iPhone is going to get owned. And not just a little bit — a lot.

This will come from two main causes:

Unprecedented Functionality

The iPhone is about to be the phone to have. Between the new SDK and the AppStore it’s going to make all other platforms look downright silly. And in the security world functionality is often a bad thing — especially when it’s not thoroughly tested.

I believe this to be the case with the iPhone. I don’t think Apple fully comprehends how powerful a platform they’re releasing. I think it’s too much power in the hands of too many developers and users, and the outcome is going to be serious and widespread exploitation.

Massive Popularity = Extreme Hacker Scrutiny

The Apple security zealots can claim marketshare doesn’t matter all they want, but it isn’t true. Next to security design, nothing matters more than exposure. In the mobile world the roles are going to be reversed from that of the desktop. Apple will be the big target, while relatively few people will spend time developing malware for Windows Mobile.

In short, attackers go where the users are, and they’re about to all be on the iPhone.

We’ll See

This is my prediction; let’s hope I’m wrong. If anyone’s capable of pulling off something this big without mucking it up it’s probably Apple, but I remain skeptical. I think it’s going to be an absolute mess.

Right, so I’ll see you in line on the 11th.:

I don’t mind too much when Safari lacks advanced features found in other browsers, but it’s highly annoying when it lacks the basics.

Why, for example, can’t I tab from the URL bar like Firefox? (shown below)

I mean, even Internet Explorer has this ability. How sad is it when the hoity-toity Apple browser doesn’t have basic UI functionality present in IE 6? Isn’t Apple supposed to be king of UI?

Dear Safari Team, you have a ton of really cool functionality in your browser, but unless you’re also doing the basics it doesn’t matter.:

Video capability? Check.

Apple complicated things yesterday when they released MobileMe. I’m a huge fan of Google services and use Google Apps to host my domain’s email. Plus I use Google Reader, Google Calendar, and a number of other applications of theirs.

Until Apple’s announcement I was looking for more integration between iCal and Google Calendar with the new 2.0 software. Now I’m not sure what to think.

My first thought is to forward all my email from Google to my MobileMe account, and then point my iPhone and Mail.app clients to MobileMe. Basically, I’d be standardizing on MobileMe for my mobile device world.

The problem is that I don’t see Apple keeping up with Google when it comes to web services. I just don’t. I think they’ll catch up once in a while, like they just did, but Google’s constant improvement is just overwhelmingly compelling.

So, what are you iPhone/Google users out there going to do? Are you going to move to MobileMe or stick with Google’s services for Calendar, Mail, Photo sharing, etc?

[ One thing we need to consider is the fact that Google is likely to launch all of their tools for the iPhone in native format. I would not be surprised to see them introduce push email, contacts and calendar as well. The question would just be whether or not they could do it as cleanly as Apple. ]

Is this for real? Rumors are saying the new iPhone will be announced on the 9th and released around the 18th.

I so hope this is true.

[homer]burger…[/homer]

Related

[ What I Hope to See with iPhone 2 ]

I just got my first new computer in around three years - a top of the line 24″ iMac with four gigabytes of RAM. Plus it has an nVidia 8800 with 512MB of video memory. The display makes all the difference, let me tell you.

Unfortunately I’m feeling a bit like crap tonight. So I’m going to take more medicine and try to sleep it off. I’ll start the data migration and application refresh tomorrow after work.

A slightly subdued W00t.

I am still very happy with my first generation iPhone, but I can’t wait to upgrade. Here’s a short list of things I hope it has, sorted by “mandatory” and “would be nice”. These are in addition to the things we already know are in the 2.0 software release.

Mandatory

1. Video Recording
2. True GPS (to supplement the GeoLocation)
3. Battery Life (At least as good as the current generation)
4. Better Camera (4MP minimum, 6MP would be excellent)
5. iChat
6. MMS
7. Copy and Paste
8. 16GB-32GB of Storage

Would Be Nice

1. Flash
2. File System Access / Browser
3. A QUERTY shortcut option on the Contacts menu (autocomplete)
4. Video Chat (rumored; would be nice)
5. Voice Recording
6. Text to Speech / Speech to Text
7. TV Show Purchases / Rentals through iTunes
8. Bluetooth Sync
9. Wireless Calendar Sync with Google Calendar
10. Bluetooth Keyboard Functionality
11. 64GB of Storage

What are the features you want to see?

Safari is an excellent browser for many reasons; its speed, clean aesthetics and ease of use are attractive from the outset. In addition to these obvious strengths there are a few extremely attractive features of Safari that most are unaware of.

1. Browsing and Search Snapback
2. URL Path Navigation
3. Web Inspector
4. Activity Window
5. Inline Dictionary
6. Selection to Speech
7. Quick Notes
8. Email Page Link
9. Visual History

Browsing and Search Snapback

Search snapback allows you to instantly jump back to the original search you made after clicking on a bunch of results. So if you originally searched for programming, and you clicked on a bunch of Wikipedia links and didn’t find what you want you can, with one action, instantly get back to the original Google results.

There are two ways to do it; you can click the little orange arrow to the right of the search as seen above, or you can use the keyboard shortcut — option-command-s

You can do the same thing with browsing as well, but it works slightly differently. If you type an address into the URL bar and go to that page as your initial page in a tab or window, that page is marked as your snapback page. You can then go anywhere else and snapback to it by hitting the orange arrow or by using the keyboard shortcut — option-command-p

You can also set a new snapback location by marking a current page as your snapback location. The fastest way to do that is with the keyboard shortcut — option-command-k , but you can do it from the history menu as well.

URL Path Navigation

It’s also possible to view and navigate through the various levels of a nested site using Safari. So on my site, for example, I have the root, then /study, then various pages. Well from one of the nested pages I can right-click the title of the page and see exactly where I am on the site. And from there I can navigate up if I want to.

Web Inspector

With the latest version of Safari (3.1) you can now inspect HTML and CSS elements right from your browser. The functionality is similar to the Firebug extension for Firefox, and gives you all sorts of information that’s helpful during web development and design.

To enable the functionality just go to Preferences –> Advanced, and select Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar. Once you’ve done this you can then right-click on various elements in the browser and select Inspect Element.:

Activity Window

The Activity Window is visible by going to Window –> Activity on the menu bar, or via the shortcut — option-command-a. This functionality lets you see what pages, images and scripts are downloading behind the scenes when you browse the web. Open a few pages and check out the Activity Window; it’s surprising how much goes on when you click a single link.

Inline Dictionary

Safari, being a Cocoa app (OS X), allows us to instantly define words we find. Simply highlight the word and hit the ctrl-cmd-d shortcut. So if I highlight the word “functionality” in Safari and hit the shortcut, here’s what I get.

Selection to Speech

This is another one that Cocoa affords us and is therefore available in Safari. It’s probably not useful on a day-to-day basis, but it’s great for showing OS X off to those who have yet to see the light. When in Safari, highlight any portion of text and select Services –> Speech –> Start Speaking Text. The amount of power we have from that Safari menu, through Cocoa, is just staggering.

Quick Notes

One of the really powerful features of Safari is the ability to instantly capture text to a note-taking interface — in this case Stickies. When you’re browsing and need to capture a bit of information, simply highlight the text in question and click shift-cmd-y. This will take whatever you had highlighted and pull it into a Stickie note for safe keeping.

Email Page Link

Another task that’s frequently performed is emailing the link to the current page you’re on. So normally when you want to send the link to a friend it takes multiple steps, but you can copy the link and paste it into a new email in a single keyboard shortcut — shift-cmd-i.:

Visual History

One of Safari’s nice touches is the ability to visually recognize sites in your history based on their favicons. It’s minor, but in a major way.

Conclusion

I think these features, combined with the obvious ones, make a pretty strong case for Safari being the best browser out there. If we could just get a few bits of functionality from Firefox and/or Opera it’d be a done deal. Also, many thanks to the commenters on the original article who pointed out the features that I included in this expanded version.: