jeremyrandall / blog /

Macword is going on now and Steve Jobs is in the middle of his keynote.

Apple’s iPhone looks really cool. I’ve been wondering how they were going to fit all the disparate features of a “mobile communicator” — phone, iPod, a camera — into an “Apple looking” package. The iPhone looks sort of like a full-sized iPod, except nearly the entire front of the unit is a touch screen and all functions are accessed from it. So it’s smooth and doesn’t have clunky sliding or flip components. It has senors so it can tell which way you’re holding it and whether you have it up to your ear. And it runs some permutation of OS X. Very cool.

Now what I’m not interested in is a two year contract with Cingular/AT&T. I’m appalled that Apple appears to be forcing folks to lock into one company that requires a long contract. As for the wireless providers, it’s time for the industry to embrace flat-rate plans with unlimited minutes and data services.

Back to Apple. The Apple TV product also looks good, though the prototype had been demonstrated previously, so it wasn’t a big surprise.

I’ve been learning Microsoft’s new PowerShell. I have to admit, I am really impressed. They’re finally putting an emphasis on the command line, and giving us some powerful tools to manipulate Windows systems programatically.

I’ve never been much of a developer, but I’ve certainly hacked together some scripts over the years. That’s included batch files and a bit of VBScript on the Windows side, and some shell scripting on the UNIX side. I’ve put together a little bash script that runs via cron to backup my main workstation, for example.

PowerShell essentially gives Windows the power of a UNIX shell, with some new advantages. The two most exciting ones:

• The command syntax is consistent. Every command follows the same naming scheme and the same ways of passing arguments. It’s always driven me a little crazy that many UNIX commands have obscure names and the syntax is wildly different across commands.

• PowerShell “cmdlets” output information as objects. So instead of parsing text you can just grab a specific attribute by name from the object returned by the cmdlet. Pretty sweet.

PowerShell pipes from one cmdlet to the next via the familiar “|” character, system processes can be started and killed, text output can be imported from and exported to CSV, HTML and XML. Various “provider” services give access to other parts of the system. For example, a registry provider allows access into the registry at the command line and a WMI provider allows access to the Windows Management Instrumentation.

I’m looking forward to automating more tasks and getting more skilled at this new and nifty (yes, I said, “nifty”) shell.