Category Archives: apple

Mountain Lion and the Future of Apple

Leave a reply

Johnathan Gruber has a big post today about Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X.

My reaction to the news: “finally.”  I’ve been waiting for OS X to fully embrace iCloud since last year, when I thought it would happen with the initial release of Lion, but it looks like it will finally happen this summer, when Mountain Lion is released.

Gruber’s post is worth reading. He gives his impressions of a pre-release copy of Mountain Lion he’s been using for the past week, and also ruminates on how Apple orchestrated the announcement. They used a new technique; VP Phill Shiller did one-on-one presentations to a dozen or so tech writers a week before the official announcement.

Among other things, Gruber considers what this announcement says about the current state of the relationship between OS X and iOS

[recounts a few years ago when Apple delayed an OS X release to devote resources to iOS]

 

Putting both iOS and OS X on an annual release schedule is a sign that Apple is confident it no longer needs to make such tradeoffs in engineering resources. There’s an aspect of Apple’s “now” — changes it needs to make, ways the company needs to adapt — that simply relate to just how damn big, and how successful, the company has become. They are in uncharted territory, success-wise. They are cognizant that they’re no longer the upstart, and are changing accordingly.

It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.

I don’t think this goes far enough.  What stands out for me is not just that OS X is (back) on an annual release cycle, its that the cycle is in close sync with iOS’s annual release cycle; both are released in the summer, rather than at, say, a six month offset. Why?

I think the reason is obvious, OS X and iOS are part of the same product. The promise I saw in iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion last summer was the arrival of a pervasive computing environment that spanned devices. Moving between a Mac, and iPhone and an iPad was close to becoming seamless. A Keynote presentation you started on your Mac would automatically be sitting in your pocket on your iPhone, waiting for a quick review while waiting in line for lunch. Without a second thought, you could open your iPad on the bus-ride home and finish up the last few slides. And that is just the beginning.

The Pettiness of Apple’s iBook Author License Agreement

Leave a reply

Today Apple held an education-focused event where they announced a major upgrade to iBooks and iTunes U, the launch of a textbook initiative and a free OS X-only tool for creating rich, interactive iBooks called iBook Author. Apple has received both praise, and criticism for their efforts, but one criticism stands out.

Dan Weinman called attention to a clause in the iBooks EULA which prohibits creators from selling anything they generate with iBooks Author anywhere but Apple’s iBookstore (they can give the books away wherever they’d like).  This has made a lot of people upset, and brought some people to Apple’s defense.  Apple’s defenders argue that it is perfectly reasonable that their Apple’s free software not be used to make a competitor money.

That may be true, but it is hard to see this as anything but a small and petty move on Apple’s part.

My perspective is this: without this restriction in place, how likely is it that someone would use iBook Author to produce an ebook for commercial sale and NOT offer it through iBookstore, considering:

  1. Apple makes the best device for viewing such publications
  2. Apple sells more of them than everyone who makes anything remotely similar, combined
  3. Apple offers the best ecommerce options for selling them?

Further, and for the same reasons, how likely is it that the sales through that alternate channel would be anything but a drop in the bucket compared to what flowed through iBookstore?

If, at some future date, Apple no longer makes the best device for viewing such content and/or, has serious competition for market share of iPad-class devices, and/or doesn’t have the best commerce system, then creators will have plenty of incentive to recreate their publications in order to get around this restriction anyway.

In the end, I think the ill-feelings this restriction creates is more costly than any additional value it might help Apple capture.

iCloud Looses My Data

Leave a reply

Apple has me very unhappy right now.

I installed iOS 5 and updated Pages, Keynote and Numbers when they gained iCloud support.  I had all my existing documents copied to iCloud.  I don’t think I’ve used any of the apps since last weekend.

When I started Numbers today, all the documents there quickly disappeared, leaving only the Getting Started document.  This evening, when I started Pages, and then Keynote, the same damn thing happened.  I checked on iCloud from my laptop and none of the documents are there either.

I tried looking for information on how to contact support and felt like I’d been dropped into a maze.  WTF, Apple, this is crap.  Complete and utter crap.

On all the iPhone 4s Inspired Whining

Leave a reply

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts and comments about today’s Apple iPhone 4s announcement. A lot of people are disappointed.  A lot of the complaints are about the fact that Apple is keeping the same form factor as the existing iPhone 4 (as if that wasn’t the likely course all along). Plenty more complaints zero on a handfull of specs, like the screen size, or resolution, or technology, or the camera megapixels.

Needless to say, I think they are myopic. Apple wins customers because of the overall experience. These days, with Apple, it’s not just how the parts come together into an exceptionally well made device. It’s not even about the combination of software and hardware. Its the retail and support experience, and now, with iOS 5, iCloud, and Siri, its going to be about how it all ties together across your devices, and even out into 3rd party websites.

iOS 5 and iCloud are going to be a major platform for future innovation. I think they are downplaying it after their miss-steps launching MobileMe, but with iOS 5 + iCloud + Lion, Apple has the foundations for pervasive computing. You’ll soon be able to close up your MacBook in the middle of editing a Keynote presentation. Review it on your iPhone while you are waiting for your flight and revise it on your iPad without really even thinking about syncing, or copying the file.

These complaints remind me of the whining about what was missing from the original iPhone. Yeah, it wasn’t 3g and lacked MMS, video recording, copy/paste, installable applications and who knows what else. On the other hand it was pretty awesome in a way that no other phone could touch, and Apple had a obvious list of improvements to make.

Apple stiffs iPad owners on RAM

2 Replies

New details of the iPhone 4 have me pretty pissed at Apple.

I’ve dismissed most of the criticisms leveled against the Apple iPad as clueless.  The few I’ve been sympathetic to are things that can and likely will be fixed with a software update.  There is, however, one thing that’s been bothering me, the iPad only has 256MB of RAM, like the iPhone 3 Gs.

Until I got my own iPad, the 256MB RAM limit was just an academic annoyance, but it quickly became clear that it was a chintzy move on Apple’s part. Mobile Safari on the iPad only lets you open 8 different “tabs” at once, but it often struggles to keep even a fraction of that number loaded.  Often if I switch between tabs, it ends up having to reload the pages, which is slow.  It’s even worse if I switch to another app and then back, then it often has to reload all the pages.

I put some of this down to the fact that it was the first release of iOS for the iPad, and assumed it would be improved any day by a software update (which has yet to materialize).  A software update could only go so far though, since the larger screen size on the iPad would likely drive up memory requirements.  And, of course, the eagerly awaited update of iOS 4 for the iPad would bring multitasking for third party apps, which would drive up memory requirements even more.

Well, now I learn that the iPhone 4 is confirmed to have 512MB of RAM, twice whats in the iPad (even though it has a smaller screen resolution).  This comes less than three months after shipping the first iPad, and less than two months after shipping the iPad WiFi-3G model I have.   I know that things move pretty fast in the tech industry, which is why I didn’t get bent out of shape when apple cut the price of the original iPhone by $200 only a few months after launch, but this really pisses me off.

The poor experience “multitasking” with Apple’s own apps on the iPad is the really my only big complaint with the device, and now its pretty clear that it’s likely that annoyance is going to extend to 3rd party apps when iOS 4 makes it to the iPad this fall.

Listen to Streaming Audio On Your iPad and do Something Else at the Same Time

1 Reply

Probably everyone who cares already know that you can’t listen to Pandora in the background while you browse the web, or do anything else on your iPad — that kind of multitasking won’t show up until iPhoneOS version 4 makes it to the iPad sometime in the fall. But did you know, you can listen to some kinds of streaming audio at the same time you browse and use other appsiu? I didn’t, until I decided to try.

For it to work, your streaming source needs to support streaming of MP3 or AAC audio over http like our local NPR station, KUOW. Then you just click the link to start the stream, which starts a player in a browser tab, then you just go ahead and open a new tab and continue with your browsing, or switch to another app. This isn’t an earthshaking feature, but it should come in handy.