This got mentioned on several major news outlets...must have been a very slow news day.
Happy Birthday!It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. :-) Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.
Digital 'Smiley Face' Turns 25
:-)
This got mentioned on several major news outlets...must have been a very slow news day.
What's sad is that I'm so used to typing colon-rightparenthesis that if I'm (gasp) actually handwriting a note, I make a horizontal smiley like that as well. Amazing how pervasive it's become in such a short time.
Oh please. Haven't you seen testimonials from several happy iPhone users on this board? It is shiny, but it also just works.
Yes, it wasn't the first phone to do most of what it does, and it doesn't have some features that others have. But it's easy, slick, and has the features most of us care about in a package and interface vastly more usable than anything else I've seen.
Same reason the iPod won.
That's really all it takes in the cell phone industry. The RAZR is one of the crappiest phones out there (Motorolas suck in general IMHO) and has been for a while, yet people just got it because of the cool commercials and because that's what was considered hip.
Having said that, I will give you that the iPhone did live up to a lot of the hype and expectations... for someone with FFS (fat finger syndrome) like myself, non-tactile kbd is the worst thing in the world (where's my typing wand, Steve Jobs?)
Darn it. I finally burned a hole clear through my smoke signal blanket.