Tonight on Cane: New iPhone features

The next time Apple wants to bring the hammer down on someone for leaking details about an upcoming product or feature, maybe they should start with Jimmy Smits.

That’s what faithful reader Markito is wondering, anyhow, after watching an episode of the CBS drama Cane, which stars former U.S. President Matthew Santos. We’ll let Markito pick up the narrative from this point:

I was excited to see one of the characters (a daughter) texting her boyfriend on her iPhone about being grounded. Suddenly I was shocked to see the boyfriend’s photo next to his text message, as if it were iChat.

My question is, is the chat-side photo a new feature that I just never found out about, or is Hollywood photoshopping again (like the upside-down iPhone on Journeyman)?

It wasn’t a static shot of the phone, as she was actually typing a text message on it. But it all looked very black and white, so probably fake.

Markito thoughtfully included a screen capture so you could see this iChat-like interface on the iPhone with your own two eyes.

So getting back to the question at hand: Is this some actual new feature or just another example of Hollywood fakery like CGI and green screens and Dane Cook’s career?

Hollywood fakery, I say. I’ll explain my rationale after the jump.

About six years ago, we did a quick story in the pages of Macworld on a fellow by the name of Bob Self, who earned a living building the mock-applications you see running on computers in your favorite television programs. (Sadly, the article is not online, but if you happen to archive your issues of Macworld, it's on page 24 of the July 2001 issue. You do not archive your print issues? I'm crushed beyond all imagining.)

The idea is that actors have enough trouble remembering their lines and standing in the right place and looking unfathomably attractive -- asking them to operate a computer (or in this case, a smartphone) on top of that is simply courting trouble. So what someone like Bob Self does is use programs like Photoshop and After Effects to phony up a computer interface that operates independently of the actor. That way, the show's director can film the scene without fear of having to do one take after another when one of the actors keeps hitting the wrong key.

My guess is that someone working behind the scenes on Cane dummied up an iChat-like program and stuck it on a Web site, and that's how you got the interface you see above. Although given the need to spruce up the texting features of iPhone, maybe there should be a job opening for this nameless Hollywood wizard in Cupertino.

I would love it, though, if someone were to use the comment feature below to tell me that I'm wrong.

Category: Musings, Reader Experiences

Posted by Philip Michaels on Oct 29 2007, 2:26 PM ET

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