InterfaceThis » Zirrus

3G iPhone Isn’t Cheaper After All

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:35:24 +0000

The excitement over the $199 iPhone has so far masked an important fact: apparently, the data plan for the 3G iPhone will be $30 USD per month (plus $5 for text messages), rather than the $20 that current iPhone users are paying. Doing the math:

A first-generation 8GB iPhone costs $399. Two years of data service at $20 costs $480, for a total of $879 (not including voice service).
An 8GB 3G iPhone costs $199. Two years of data service at $30 $35 costs $720 $840, for a total of $919 $1039.

In other words, a 3G iPhone will cost you $40 $160 more than a first-generation iPhone over two years. (Over one year, it’s $20 cheaper.) Of course, as a colleague of mine pointed out, when our existing iPhone contracts expire AT&T may jack up the rates on us anyway, so this argument may be moot. On the other hand, if the prices had remained constant the resale value of first-generation iPhones would be much higher and upgrading users would save money that way. In the end, it all comes down to how much faster Internet is worth.

Update: It appears to be even worse. The new $30 data plan doesn’t include SMS text messages. To get the 200 included in the older $20 plan, you pay an additional $5. I’ve revised the numbers above.

Zirrus: International characters and RSS

admin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:07:57 +0000

Zirrus has continued its explosive growth in the last week, expanding to over 3500 registered users. We’ve received a lot of useful feedback; if you submitted comments and haven’t heard back yet, we’re working through it as fast as we can.

Today we’re excited to announce one major improvement and one new feature.Support for international characters is now much much better, from accent marks to non-English alphabets. You should be able to throw just about any language at Zirrus successfully.

We’ve had a lot of requests for RSS feeds and public tasks, and we’ve added both as one feature. In the lower left corner you’ll now see an RSS feed button (along with an Add to My Yahoo! button for Yahoo! users) that always provides an RSS newsfeed for the current view (list + tag).

These feeds are public: they don’t require login, but they do include authentication that’s unique to the view. That means you can share your tasks for one tag without making all your tags public. It also means you can share tags on a person-by-person basis. We think this new functionality is pretty powerful, and we’re curious to hear how you use it. We’re also hoping to put up some more specific documentation for technical types.

Zirrus: View Completed Tasks

admin — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:22:52 +0000

It’s been a big week here at InterfaceThis: Zirrus gained over 800 registered users. We’ve received a lot of feedback, and added one major new feature.Here are a couple of our favorite quotes:

“Zirr.us is a sexy newcomer to the web-based To-do list scene…” — Skin Deep

“…an amazing new Web 2.0 application that adds an innovation to to-do lists that I hope catches on.” — Musings from Mars

Of course, we’ve also received bug reports and feature requests, and while they aren’t as good for the ego they are greatly appreciated. By far the most-requested feature has been the ability to save and view completed tasks, and we’re thrilled to announce we’ve just launched it. Here’s how it works:

As of this morning, every task you check off is saved (though we may need to delete older tasks after a few months).
To see completed tasks, just select show completed from the new View menu.

Thanks for your support, and stay tuned…