So, without much fanfare, the 2.2.1 update for the iPhone and iPhone 3G quietly emerged from Apple’s update servers Tuesday afternoon. The advertised fixes were relatively minor: enhanced stability for the Safari browser, and a bug that involved images saved from Mail not displaying properly in the Camera Roll.

So far so good, and it doesn’t appear that there are many — if any — unannounced changes of note, as there have been with previous updates. But that could change as more and more iPhone power users examine every nook and cranny of the interface in search of more goodies and gotchas.

My experience was uneventful. Upon leaning of the update, I connected my iPhone 3G to my Mac Pro, and checked the option to download and update. The rest of the process was automatic, and I didn’t bother to babysit the process. When I returned to my desk after dinner, the phone was just recharging, fully functional with its firmware update.

A couple of hours of testing didn’t disclose much of a change, except for somewhat snappier performance. That impression is highly subjective, though it did seem I would wait a second or two less for the applications to launch when switching to and from Mail to Safari, for example.

In the past, I’ve encountered an occasional application quit when opening a site in Safari. That hasn’t recurred, at least not yet. Otherwise, this update is notable by the fact that not much has otherwise changed. I do expect, though, that some people will report problems performing the update, resulting in bricked phones and other calamities. The latter might occur if you’ve hacked the phone to run third-party applications, but it would be an extremely rare phenomenon otherwise, unless there’s a hardware issue involved.

What is most troubling to me, though, is what Apple hasn’t fixed or added.

Where, or where, is cut, copy and paste, a fundamental for a graphical operating system? Sure, Apple might feel other features ought to take precedence, but I think they’ve had quite enough time to devise an elegant solution. It’s not as if the ongoing illness of Steve Jobs prevents Apple’s iPhone development team from coming to work and getting things accomplished.

At the same time, it would seem that some additional text editing capabilities are required. It’s nice to be able to open a Word document, but what do you do if the file requires a change? Do you just return to a regular Mac or PC to perform that task? Or manually enter them in an email message and send them off to someone to perform the task for you? That hardly seems efficient. Indeed, it can be frustrating, particularly if you are suddenly inspired to make a useful edit in a manuscript or company report, only to forget your brilliant idea by the time you actually have the opportunity to make the alteration.

Speaking as a once-prolific book author, I can tell you just how frustrating this can be, not to mention the serious dampening of your creativity. Besides, you can edit your WordPress blogs using a special application on your iPhone, so why not other documents? Just what is Apple thinking?

Consider the lack of voice dialing. OS X has superior voice recognition capabilities, which are exploited in that Google app that lets you do voice searching. Consider, too, the fact that the cheapest Bluetooth phone supports the ability, after a fashion, to speak the number you want to dial. Why does Apple persist in ignoring the fundamentals of a good smartphone interface? Why indeed?

The highly-touted push notification is also missing in action. That tool would allow applications, such as instant messaging software, to let you know when a new message is waiting for you. At the last WWDC, its arrival was promised for last September. Then the feature reportedly disappeared from builds of the iPhone SDK, and there’s no indication when it might return.

Now I suppose that Apple might have discovered that push notification was more difficult to implement reliably than previously expected. That happens when writing software, but it would be nice for them to be a little more forthcoming about it, although I can sense the paranoia over revealing any unfavorable information that might reach the eyes and ears of competitors, of which there are many.

Now it may well be that there’s an iPhone 3.0 that will include all these features, plus others that we haven’t thought about yet. While I’m perfectly happy with my iPhone 3G, and pleased with the ongoing improvements in reception and reliability, there are times when I miss a few things. I’m sure most of you agree with me, and I can’t believe that Apple remains unaware of their significance.

So if you were architecting iPhone 3.0, what would you want? Glitz and sex appeal, or just a few more sorely-needed basics? At least you know where my feelings lie.

As I’ve said on many occasions, most of what you and I do these days on our Macs harkens back to 1984, when the first all-in-one Apple Macintosh appeared. As a matter of fact, this reminds me of the time I wrote a book about Mac OS X, back in 2001, where I presented screen shots of that first Mac’s desktop, compared to the cool, liquid Aqua desktop.

Sure, the newer version was prettier, with a shaded dimensionality that has been softened over the years, but the fundamentals were the same. Point and click and drag and drop, and there you go. It was so familiar that Microsoft was able to crib the Mac’s interface and convince lots of people there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference.

But I’m not about to replay the operating system wars right now. I think Microsoft’s poor decisions in recent years have caused serious problems for the company that the state of the economy has only compounded. Let’s leave it at that.

What most concerns me, though, is the fact that many Mac users still have a whale of a time getting accustomed to some of the basics. A typical example might be an Open or Save dialog. Rather than using the former to open a document within an application, I realize some of you still go to the desktop and double click on the file.

Indeed, when I try to help people navigate through the file system on the phone, I’ll utter those fateful words, “Choose Open from the File menu,” and have it fall on deaf ears. Even though some of these people may have been using Macs for years, they haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, and that has nothing to do with their intelligence. It’s all about the fact that not everything about the graphical interface of a personal computer is as intuitive as Apple would have us believe.

More recently, I was helping a client move to a new email system. He wanted a way to easily synchronize his messages at home and the office without going through hoops. So I transitioned him from a POP account to an IMAP account. The latter, of course, is an email protocol that stores all your messages on the server so that you can retrieve them from a desktop email application, or a Web-based one, and be able to see the very same messages, in all of your mailbox folders.

When I first set up the account for him, I moved all of his stored messages to the new server, a simple matter of drag and drop, followed by a long wait while thousands of messages were transferred. I mistakenly thought this to be a simple process, although I explained it to him several times, along with the process of creating new mailbox folders in Apple Mail and how they’d synchronize with his online mailboxes.

A few weeks later, as the result of a server change, I sent him detailed instructions on switching the incoming and outgoing mail servers in his Account preferences in Mail. This is a process that should take all of a minute or so to accomplish. Once you OK the Save function, the contents of the mailbox are regenerated upon hookup to the new server (where I had previously migrated all his messages online).

There was one further change, and again I presumed this to be a matter of little consequence, and went on with my business, until I got a frantic call from the client that he couldn’t find some of his email.

Well, after a little back and forth conversation, it appeared that, rather than just change the settings for his email account, he just created new ones. At the end of the day, he had three separate accounts, and because of his fiddling around with the contents of his various mailboxes, none of them truly reflected his current repertoire of messages.

I will, of course, be going to his office this week to sort out this mess.

Now maybe it was all my fault. Perhaps I just didn’t sufficiently explain what should have been a fairly easy process, but, no, I reviewed the steps, compared them to some of the online instruction pages covering similar topics, and I couldn’t find any serious lapses.

The client is a college graduate, and a gifted designer. You just know from talking with him for a while that he is quite an intelligent fellow, yet it’s also true that he has long been confounded by many of the common conventions of the Mac OS’s user interface.

I expect he’s not alone, and that he copes with the situation because there is simply no better, more efficient method for him to do his work.

His problems aren’t unusual either, so I often wonder if Apple or some other company might take stock of the situation, find out what confuses the typical Mac or PC user, and fix the problems. This may require a total rethinking of the present state of the art in graphical user interfaces, and I wouldn’t begin to know how best to accomplish that task. If I did, I’d be raking in millions selling the technology, rather than just hoping someone might produce it.

What do you think, gentle reader? Is the Mac sufficiently simple for you to use as it is, or does Apple need to make some serious changes? Would a better, more proactive Help system do the trick? Or should we be tossing out the baby with the bath water and starting anew?

In recent days, there have been reports of new Mac Trojan Horse threats, and you have to wonder whether Apple’s continued growth will come at the expense of making the platform a serious target for Internet criminals. Or at least that’s what the tech media has been saying for several years now, although it hasn’t quite come to pass.

The most recent outbreaks reportedly involve iLife ’09 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. But wait! It has nothing to do with the legal versions you buy of these applications. Instead, the Trojan Horse strictly impacts pirated copies.

In the case of Photoshop CS4, Adobe uses a sophisticated license activation method, and the malware comes into play with a program used to crack the license.

Yes, that’s the real issue. We’re talking here about malware that only presents itself as a potential threat if you download and attempt to set up a bootleg copy on your Mac. According to Intego, the security software company, these aren’t proofs of concept, but have actually impacted thousands of people already.

What this means in the scheme of things is questionable. You see, if you don’t go after pirated software, this isn’t your problem. And for those of you who do prefer the torrent sites to dealers who handle legal product, I suppose I could be cavalier about this and suggest that you deserve what you get. More to the point, it’s not as if iLife ’09 is an expensive product. Aside from being free with new Macs, it’s just $79 for a copy. Surely that’s far too cheap to expose yourself to such risks.

Now when it comes to Photoshop CS4, I realize it can be an expensive product, and that it’s hard to come by extra free cash these days. On the other hand, you can get most of the important features in Photoshop Elements at a fraction of the cost and be entirely street legal. So again, I fail to see much justification in taking chances with illegal product.

It is, of course, perfectly true that Intego’s VirusBarrier and other security applications will protect you, and that may be a good reason to get yourself a copy, and I hope one that you pay for.

In the larger scheme of things, however, it still seems rather premature to begin to become concerned that malware is now sweeping the Mac platform. There’s far too much traction on the Windows side of the ledger, despite flattening sales.

Just the other day, for example, it was reported that some 15 million PCs have been infected by the latest malware epidemic. According to a UPI dispatch on the story: “The virus — a self-replicating computer worm known as Downadup, Conficker or Kido — spreads across computer networks using Microsoft Windows software which have not been patched or updated properly. Microsoft issued a patch that fixes the vulnerability the virus exploits last October.”

The key part of that story is the last sentence, that Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October. Unfortunately, when it comes to Windows patches, businesses may be somewhat behind the curve. You see, their IT people will generally want to run the patch in test mode before deploying to the entire network, just to make sure the fixes don’t create new problems. With Windows, they often do, sometimes undoing the protection that’s offered.

When it comes to home users, they will be far less inclined to be up to date on malware protection and Windows updates. So they become particularly vulnerable to such outbreaks. Worse, it’s not yet known just what’s going to happen to those infected PCs. Under normal circumstances, this infected computer army would ultimately be activated to spread spam or possibly denial of service attacks.

The latter can be particularly invasive, because it means that sites are suddenly inundated with loads of bogus requests, and servers quickly become overloaded. The targets of these attacks might be unable to withstand the onslaught or be knocked offline.

In contrast, none of the so-called malware threats to hit Mac OS X have targeted more than a few thousand people. That’s hardly enough to really cause serious damage to the platform. Indeed, one of the key factors that helps the Mac is that it’s more difficult for infections to spread on a wide scale. So long as that situation continues, the dangers are severely reduced.

But I’ll repeat our usual mantra about such matters: Always practice safe computing, which means don’t download files you didn’t expect to receive, even if you know the people who supposedly sent them to you. After all, you may not be able to detect whether that person’s email account has somehow been compromised.

You will also want to be especially cautious about mail that purports to originate from a bank or other financial institution. Such phishing scams are designed to entice you to click on the link in the email, which will take you to a simulation of the real site, except one run by Internet criminals, who want to extract your passwords or other private access information and steal your money. The best protection is go to the site directly to check up on the status of your account.

As far as installing security software is concerned, well maybe not yet. But that time may still arrive, ultimately, so never say never.

You didn’t hear anything about it at Macworld Expo, at least from the mouths of Philip Schiller or any other Apple employee. During last week’s session with financial analysts, Apple’s executives weren’t even asked the question, and they felt no need to volunteer a response.

Indeed, the rest of the world is nevertheless observing the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple Macintosh. It was presaged in 1984 by one of the most famous TV ads in recent memory, directed by Ridley Scott, and surely drawing attention to a device that was unlike any other.

In those days, daring the suggest that you could get serious work done with a personal computer that used a relatively friendly graphical user interface was a heresy. Real PC users worked in the command line, and pointing and clicking was just a whole lot of silliness that would not survive the test of time.

Of course that came before Bill Gates and Microsoft decided to rip off the Mac OS and roll their own pale imitation known as Windows. That they got away with it is the stuff of legend and it doesn’t have to be repeated all over again, although there are still people who believe that Gates is a visionary and not a master salesman.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.