Mac Thought Crime

Tripod mounts for iPhone 4?

2010-06-27T23:00:00.004+02:00

Anyone out there? Hello? Seriously, what's wrong with the world?

Does Tim Cook's "netbooks not computers" angle foreshadow jumbo iPod touch?

2009-04-23T14:55:00.007+02:00

Tim Cook spoke about netbooks at Apple's latest earnings call.

Quoted all over the web, his comments are as follows:

For us, it's about doing great products. When look at netbook, cramped keyboard, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, just not a consumer experience. Not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. It's not a space, as it exists today, that we're interested in or that customers will be interested in long term. But do look at the space and see how customers respond to it. People who want a small computer that does browsing and email might want to buy an iPod touch or an iPhone.

If we find a way that we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we will do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space. Product pipeline is fantastic for Mac. 17 out of last 18 quarters, have exceeded market rate of growth. Quite an accomplishment in this quarter, especially when compared to very low-priced netbooks "that I think it's a stretch to call them a personal computer" which are propping up industry.

OK, what's the take home message here? Allow me to translate it from Applespeak for you.

Netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards, which we don't like.
We won't make netbooks, we're filling that space with the iPhone and the iPod touch.
We will attack that segment with something else too (unless Steve cancels it).
Netbooks aren't personal computers.

Okay, numbers two and three are easy. (Why am I so sure about three? Well, I think Tim Cook goes the closest possible here to announcing future products without actually doing so. Compare this to how Peter Oppenheimer confirmed the iPhone one year before its launch by saying as little as "we're not sitting around doing nothing.")

But how about one and four? I think the real hidden messages are buried in those two.

So netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards. Of course: that's how big they are! Obviously, a 14" netbook wouldn't be much of a netbook now, would it?

So how to make a netbook-like device that doesn't have a small screen or a cramped keyboard, while keeping it small?

Easy. By making it an oversized iPhone. An Apple tablet. The whole thing will be a screen, and a touchscreen at that, with the possibility of showing on-screen keyboards.

And finally, what about the "not a personal computer" comment?

It's obviously bullshit, for one. Why wouldn't a device with PC hardware (matching the capabilities of a top laptop from a few years back), running a full-blown PC operating system, be a personal computer?

Commenting the earnings call, Jason Snell sees it this way:

Boom! Tim Cook destroys the Netbook world again. "I think it's a stretch to call it a personal computer." Ouch. They've said much of this before, but it's very clear that Apple wants us to know that they're looking at this category and have some ideas... just nothing to announce today.

Well, I beg to differ. Not about the fact that Apple has some ideas, no. But I don't think Tim's comments were meant to belittle the netbook sector. No, I think what he's trying to say is something like this:

What we're going to release in that sector won't be a Mac, it won't be a real personal computer. And I know people will whine about that, comparing our product to netbooks, which are PCs. However, if we keep repeating that netbooks aren't PCs, it might actually start looking true, so people will stop whining.

So there you have it. A tablet device is coming, and it won't be a Mac. It couldn't be: if it were, people would start running all sorts of Mac software on it, and most of it would run very poorly on such an underpowered little thing.

So it will be something based on the iPhone OS. Hopefully, with enhanced functionality, though. Multiple apps, a true file system, saving documents, menus, windows, and so on... The possibilities (and the questions) are legion.

Questioning Tog: Does the Mouse Really Rule?

2008-05-23T01:13:00.025+02:00

Did you hear this one? According to Tog, the keyboard feels faster than the mouse, but it's actually slower. (This came via Tim Bray and John Gruber).

Tog says Apple spent $50 million on user interface related R&D by 1989, and learned, among (hopefully numerous) other things, that:

Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Tog's explanation: using the mouse is easy and boring, so it feels slower than recalling keyboard shortcuts, even though "the stopwatch will tell you" that it's actually faster.

No matter how many times I've read this very general statement, it never sounded right to me. Nobody seemed to ever mention any details. When I finally took the plunge and read Tog's actual analysis (parts 1, 2 and 3), I found out that the details still weren't there.

I would really like to know the answers to the following questions, for example:

How many different functions did the subjects have to perform in these tests?
What exactly did accomplishing a task by "mousing" and by "keyboarding" involve?
How many key combinations did the user have to remember for a test? How difficult were these key combinations to enter? How easy were they to remember?
How many mouse targets needed to be acquired, how big were they, and how far apart were they positioned?
Did the users have any previous experience with acquiring similar mouse targets to those featured in the test?
Did the users have any previous experience with using similar (or identical) keyboard combinations to those in the test?
Was the user manipulating an object (like a text box or an image) between these "tasks"? If so, how big was the visual representation of this object? Did the user have to return to the object after acquiring the target needed for the task? If so, was it also timed?

I think Tog's "mousing is faster than keyboarding" statement is akin to saying that "walking is faster than driving," and neglecting to mention whether you were running your tests on a speedway or in a staircase.

Tog's test revisited

Tog does provide us, though, some insight into the methodology of at least one of his tests in the third part of his discussion:

The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse. Using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh, I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." Just to make it even harder, the test subjects, when using the mouse, were forbidden to just drop the cursor to the right of the | and then use the delete key to get rid of it. Instead, they had to actually drag the mouse pointer across the one-pixel width of the character t o select it, then press the "e" key to replace it.

The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds. I also asked the test subjects which method was faster, and to a person they reported that the cursor keys were much, much faster. This was a classic example of the difference between subjective time (the passage of time the user experiences) and objective time (the passage of time the clock experiences). Put simply, the more mentally engaging the task, the shorter the time appears.

While I'm not a user interface expert, this passage leaves me scratching my head. It does seem to prove an interesting point on perception vs. reality, but it definitely fails to prove that the mouse is faster in general.

All it proves is that acquiring targets (vertical bar characters) scattered over a large area of the screen is more efficient with the mouse than with the keyboard. As we'll see in a minute, moving to smaller distances (especially single steps) would be much easier with the keyboard.

The same way, if you need to pick up 20 parcels which are miles apart, you'll probably take a car or a bike, but not if the same parcels are placed on the first 20 steps of a staircase.

As the vertical bars can be pretty far from each other, moving your pointer between them constitutes a significant part of the test, so it should favor the mouse, the faster vehicle – so I thought. But when I ran the test* on myself as a (somewhat questionable) test subject, using TextEdit and a paragraph from an Ask Tog article, I got the following results:

Mouse: 143 s
Keyboard: 133.5 s

I simply kept pressing the right arrow key until a vertical bar came up, at which point I selected it using Shift-Right arrow, and replaced it by pressing the "e" key. Surprisingly, and contrary to Tog's data, it was actually the keyboard that turned out to be marginally faster in this test.

By the way, having performed this test, I really fail to see how much it has to do with what Tog calls the "high-level cognitive function" of deciding "upon which special-function key to press." Maybe I'm really smart, but I didn't find that holding down an arrow key would tax my cognitive capabilities that much.

I also noticed how unnatural it felt to be using the mouse for the task. I was struggling to exert the right amount of force needed for precision alignment. It felt unbelievably tedious and even physically painful – my right wrist actually hurt afterwards. (Could all this suffering be another reason why using the mouse for the task seems longer than it actually is?)

*These test results are meant to serve little more than entertainment purposes. One (biased) subject, who happens to be the same person who devised the test, is less than statistically convincing. Yet I've made efforts to make these tests as meaningful as possible. I performed every task several times, and averaged the results. When I felt that fatigue, proficiency achieved by practice, or other factors interfered with my results, I kept re-doing the tests, switching their order, and sometimes taking long breaks from them, until I found that my results stabilized around a value, and that any difference between the values I got for the two or three tasks I was comparing was representative rather than accidental. I also honestly tried to achieve a reasonably good score in each test, without going into extremes. (I basically pretended that I had to perform actual work, in an office setting, on a looming deadline. I'm an average typist, and a power mouse user, having spent a decade working in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, all particularly mouse-heavy applications.)

The mouse fights back

It occurred to me later that my results may have been affected by the font size I happened to be using. It was 13 points (Verdana) on a 17" screen at a 1440 x 900 resolution; Tog might have used a larger font and/or a smaller screen resolution almost two decades earlier.

Sure enough, setting the font size to 22 points turned the results around, improving the speed of the mouse by a large margin, and letting it score a narrow victory over the keyboard (though nothing like the double speed that Tog reported). Keyboard times also improved a bit:

Mouse, large font: 113 s
Keyboard, large font: 122.5 s

So Tog seems to have neglected a very important factor in his keyboard vs. mouse test: font size. Larger mouse targets are obviously easier to acquire, so the point size of the text you're editing can decide which method is better or more efficient.

That got me curious. What happens if we increase the font size to a ridiculous 200 points? I found out that the difference between the mouse and the keyboard almost disappeared in this dreadfully impossible task. In addition, the test results varied greatly, and repeating the test again and again helped improve times by leaps and bounds as I learned new tricks on the way. The keyboard started to win again, though mouse performance improved by a small margin every time I repeated the test. I averaged the results when I felt that the curve of the mouse improvements was flattening out:

Mouse, huge font: 155.5 s
Keyboard, huge font: 133 s

Beating the test

But there's more. Trying to speed up my "keyboarding," I tried the Alt-Right Arrow key combination, which jumps one whole word ahead, making navigation faster – and stumbled upon a "cheat": TextEdit considers the vertical bar a word boundary, thus whenever one shows up, Alt-Right arrow will stop the pointer right before it. Using this cheat (which involved more cognitive brain functionality, as well as some keyboard acrobatics), I needed more concentration than before, so the task felt much more difficult, and I also had to stop and correct some errors (something I didn't have to do using the other two methods). However, it cut my keyboarding time by a fourth, beating the hell out of the mouse at both normal and large font sizes:

Keyboard "cheat," normal font: 95.5 s
Keyboard "cheat," large font: 94.5 s

Noticeably, increasing the font size did nothing here. My theory is that finding each vertical line character was somewhat automatized by the cheat, so better visibility wasn't much help.

One side effect of the cheat was that I ended up inadvertently typing a lot of uppercase "E"s. I think the reasons are that here (1) I had to use two modifier keys (Alt and Shift), (2) I had to switch between them pretty fast, and (3) almost every second navigational keystroke (i.e. Alt-Arrow) was followed by a selection (Shift-Arrow), then immediately by a replacement ("e") keystroke, requiring me to switch between three different key commands very often, making me mess up one of them a lot.

Using a huge font size slowed down this task as well, but it was still the fastest way at that size:

Keyboard "cheat," huge font: 123 s

The table and graph below summarize how the font size change affects the three input methods tested. The straight lines connecting the dots should by no way be interpreted as implying continuity, they are provided mostly for better visibility (and as hints at very vague trends).

I could come up with several pages' worth of analysis, comparing and contrasting how font size affects each test case, but suffice it to say that without specifying everything down to the smallest details, it's just about impossible to decide whether the keyboard or the mouse is faster even in a very simple test like this. Tog seems to have oversimplified things a lot.

The keyboard's turn

In order to investigate things a bit further, I also came up with a test of my own, one where I felt the keyboard would have the edge, as it required smaller, more precise navigational movements.

In my test, the subject needed to replace every second letter of every word in a (much shorter) paragraph with the letter "p." I was the test subject again, and these were my results:

Mouse, normal font: 137 s
Keyboard, normal font: 90 s

Mouse, large font: 118 s
Keyboard, large font: 76.5 s

Boy, did I manage to contrive a test that favors the keyboard! As expected, it performed better as a means for selecting every second character of a word. Rhythmically pushing the right arrow twice would always do the trick, whereas with the mouse, I had to move past small characters of varying width*, and had to strain myself to position the pointer accurately. It seemed unnatural.

Replacing the letters was identical in both cases, so it didn't influence the results. (Or did it? We'll get back to that very soon.)

Somewhat surprisingly, a larger font size helped both tasks equally well. I expected mousing to benefit more, as the targets became larger, thus easier to acquire. Investigating the reason for this anomaly is beyond the scope of my blog post, but it, again, proves my main point: that things are complicated.

If you think by now that I'm some sort of a keyboard evangelist and mouse hater, rigging tests so that they will always let the keyboard win, then well, you've got that mouse pointer hovering over the wrong guy. No, I'm the guy who keeps rigging tests in small ways that change the results in big ways, trying to show that simplistic statements like Tog's are simply wrong. And ultimately, I just want the help the case of redundancy and freedom of user choice in user interface design.

So then I changed a little aspect of my test: instead of the letter "p," the subject now had to enter the "¶" character in place of every second letter of every word. This turned the test on its head, making the previously victorious keyboard lose by a Tog-uesque 50% margin.

What gives? Well, it's simple. While the subject (i.e. yours truly) could easily rest his fingers on the "p" key while navigating with the keyboard in the previous version, that was no longer possible with the hard-to-reach Alt-"7" combination needed for the "¶" character. Thus, every time I had to switch between entering that symbol and navigating/selecting, I had to lift my fingers off the keyboard and reposition them, losing a lot of time. (With practice, my times improved greatly. From an initial dysmal 184 seconds, which I excluded from my calculations as an anomaly, I reached a much more respectable average of 149 seconds by the time I finally decided to give the whole frustrating mess a rest. As always, the number I provide is an average. However, an interesting trend to note is that this is an initially huge margin that gets significantly smaller with practice.)

Mouse, large font: 126 s
Keyboard, large font: 149 s

So, guess what? You can't say that "the keyboard is faster." You can't even say, "The keyboard is faster when replacing every second letter of every word in a text." No, you even have to say what character you're replacing it with. It gets as specific as that.

*Switching to a monospaced font didn't help much, though. I ran the test with Monaco, and didn't notice any statistically significant improvements.

Conclusions

After testing some very narrow areas of the huge field of "user interaction by keyboard vs. mouse," all I can say is that both input methods have their strengths and weaknesses, and their optimum fields of use should be analyzed and investigated much more carefully than Tog appears to have done.

Personally, I think it's best to let the user decide what method(s) to use, and provide for both keyboard and mouse-based functionalities, whenever it makes any little sense. But even providing several methods isn't going to be enough: you also have to get them right. Designing key commands and mouse targets is pretty easy to mess up, having the user end up with useless input methods even in their preferred contexts.

Also, even though some specific input methods may have intimidating learning curves, in some cases, they may be worth the effort (e.g. in the case of the iPhone keypad). Obviously, users may be a bit tough to sell on such user interface choices, so they must be explained in a careful and convincing way.

Finally, I also wonder whether it's always speed that matters. It may easily be the case that the faster way of performing a task is more exhausting, less natural, or simply less fun. Speed may or may not be important; the developer simply can't imagine every possible way his or her product will be used. Maybe a task you imagined to be pretty rare as a developer will end up being the one that your user needs to perform a thousand times in the course of two hours – so there had better be a fast way of doing it. And while you're at it, why not also create an easy way, and a fun way? Redundancy can be a great thing in the world of user interfaces.

That is, unless you can find a perfect way, one which is easy, fun, fast and natural in every situation – I'm hard-pressed to find too many examples, though.

The Magic Text Field: searching, URLs and bookmarks

2008-03-25T22:50:00.006+01:00

Cabel Maxfield Sasser notes how advertisements in Japan display search boxes with recommended search terms, as opposed to URLs. It certainly feels more user-friendly (and natural) to enter real words into one box (the search box) than to type something as geeky as a URL in another box (the URL field), and the author even speculates that future versions of Safari may transition to displaying a more prominent Google field and a less prominent URL field.

This has got me thinking. These are my closely related, highly anecdotal observations on URL entry vs. searching:

Some people (especially Firefox users) enter everything, even URLs, in the Google box. (By default, a new Firefox window has focus on the Google box.) These users will have to click again at the Google-displayed URL, but they don't seem to mind.
I sometimes catch myself mistakenly using the URL field instead of the Google field, hinting that search may be taking over from URL entry in my use as well.
Firefox actually accommodates (perhaps encourages) this previous behavior: entering expressions in the URL box yields Google search results or top hits. Other browsers simply display the predictable error messages caused by such attempts at connecting to malformed URLs.

But then I also have some more loosely related observations as well, mostly concerning bookmarks and history items:

I hardly ever use the bookmarks menu for opening a page, relying on the autocomplete feature of the URL field instead. That is, if I add something to my bookmarks, I will navigate to it later by starting to type some words from its URL (if meaningful), rather than choosing it from the menu.
But then I hardly ever add any bookmarks either. If I want to bookmark a page for later retrieval, I don't have to do anything: it will be automatically added to the History list, and thus it will be available for autocomplete, too.
In Leopard, Safari's history items and cached pages are indexed by Spotlight, even enabling users to find visited pages by searching for words in their contents.

The most perfect solution for me would probably involve one huge box with hooks for a lot of AI magic working behind the scenes, listing Google hits, URL matches, Wikipedia and Dictionary and other results, cached page search terms, all categorized, ranked in an ultra-smart way with the most likely results first, all displayed in real time, with easy keyboard-based navigation possibilities.

I think web pages are verbal, and the most natural way of relating to them is by typing text.

MacBook Air: harbinger of the tablet Mac?

2008-02-13T11:43:00.005+01:00

As I was re-reading, for some reason, my old post on the November tablet Mac rumors, and got to the part where I speculate on the features of the purported device (such as ports and disk drives), something suddenly occured to me.

As I speculated back then, a tablet Mac would very likely need to do away with some traditional Mac features, such as an optical drive. However, I didn't think it would lack Ethernet or FireWire: I thought those would be too extreme omissions.

Guess what: Apple has just shipped a Mac without any of these things. It remains to be seen how exactly people are going to respond to such a radical elimination of items whose presence in a Mac have been taken for granted for almost a decade, but looks like Apple is on to something there.

The Air is more of a breakthrough in what it lacks than it is in what new features it adds (basically, a MultiTouch trackpad), and I'm sure Apple is eagerly anticipating feedback.

If it turns out that there exists a significant enough class of users who don't mind the radical departure this Mac represents, Apple can be more confident in launching yet another product category: a tablet Mac, taking the Air's ultraportability concept yet one step further.

MultiTouch cannot be forever confined to cellphones and trackpads.

MacBook Air: iMac or Cube?

2008-01-31T01:05:00.001+01:00

The introduction of the new Mac laptop is a bold move by Apple, as the subnotebook radically eliminates some components that may be considered essential.

Every single Mac that Apple has released since 1998 has had Ethernet connectivity, as well as an optical drive. Since 2001, every Macintosh has also shipped with a FireWire port.

The MacBook Air does away with all three.

Sure, there are workarounds, but all are cumbersome. Ethernet is available as a $29 dongle that Apple sells separately, though it would occupy the single USB port of the Air. External optical drives also exist (Apple sells one exclusively for the MacBook Air), but carrying such additional devices around somewhat defeats the purpose of having a super thin, super light notebook. The external drive would also need to fight over the single USB port with competing devices, unless you buy yet another companion product, a USB hub.

You can also hack into the optical drives of neighboring Macs or even PCs with a piece of software that is reputed to "just work," as one expects from Apple. However, it's kind of creepy to be constantly asking favors from fellow computer users, even installing software on their machines, whenever you want to use an optical drive. And those computers had better be equipped with WiFi, too.

And as for FireWire, you're pretty much out of luck there.

So, what the hell were they thinking? How could such a device ever sell?

Well, Apple did make a similarly radical move back in 1998, when it introduced the original iMac. Steve Jobs was back with a vengeance, and he chose a pretty dramatic way to show everyone he means business: he released a sexy-looking, simple entry-level Mac that lacked a floppy drive, and eschewed traditional ports such as SCSI or ADB in favor of USB. So what happened? The iMac sold as hot cakes, and peripheral makers started to build USB keyboards, mice, scanners, etc. The floppy disk was already on its way out, but the iMac's snub might have been the last nail in its coffin. So, the iMac pretty much changed the world around it.

Will the MacBook Air do the same? Will USB flash drives kill optical disks? Will WiFi drive Ethernet into extinction? Is Apple knifing its own FireWire baby?

It certainly looks like Apple would very much like all of this to happen. Just as modems started to disappear from Macs, Ethernet may be next, surviving only in professional machines. Optical drives may still stick around for a while, though, but Apple doesn't think they will be missed from the MacBook Air. While you'll still need to leech the drive of a neighboring computer for software installs, the Mac maker would prefer if you turned to its products and services instead of using an optical drive: get music and video off iTunes, use iPods instead of burning CDs, and buy Time Capsule for backups. Clever.

There certainly is method in this madness. Anyone in the market for a $1,800 notebook must have some cash to burn on these products and services, so each Air sold (especially in countries where the iTunes Store is available in its full glory) should generate some guaranteed extra revenue for Apple. Besides, these relatively wealthy people probably already have a Mac at home anyway, helping them overcome most of their objections to the Air.

If sales of the Air reach a critical mass, the new Mac could help reform the computing landscape, just like the iMac did a decade ago. If sales end up failing to go off the charts, but remain respectable, then, well, Apple can still boast a successful niche product, and I'm sure that a hundred bucks or two may go off the price eventually, if needed.

But what if Apple has made a major miscalculation, like the one in the case of the Power Mac Cube? Wasn't it also a relatively underpowered pro-level Mac that the market deemed too expensive? Pundits crucified the Cube for putting style over substance, and weak sales of the radical-looking new Mac spelled serious trouble for the still-vulnerable Apple.

I don't think there's any reason to anticipate a similar fate for the MacBook Air. There may be some superficial similarities to the Cube, but the differences are more significant:

As far as tech specs go, the Cube was clearly a weaker product than the Power Mac, yet it cost more. The MacBook Air is also a weaker product than the MacBook Pro, but it costs less as well. (However, it may also be compared to the MacBook, and it wouldn't fare so well in that comparison: the Air is the less capable and more expensive of the two notebooks.)
Miniaturization is not such a strong selling point for a desktop Mac as it is for a notebook. The beauty of the Cube was mostly skin deep, whereas the thinness of the Air is also very practical.
Apple's revenues in fiscal 2001 were $5.65 billion, whereas in 2007, they were $24 billion. Apple can better afford to risk less-than-optimal initial sales of a new experimental niche product now than it could at the time of the Cube.

I definitely don't think one should worry too much about the fate of the Air. It may not necessarily become a second iMac, but it really shouldn't be a second Cube either.

Yet more whining on Apple secrecy

2008-01-24T16:53:00.000+01:00

I'm sure Jens Alfke is a great guy and a great engineer, and I understand if he leaves Apple due to creative differences. Yet some of his comments seem to warrant a big "Duh!"

I think Apple’s policy on blogging is one of the least enlightened of major tech companies; Microsoft in particular is surprisingly open.

Well, Apple has been all about secrecy for the past decade or so, while Microsoft, perhaps the world's greatest vendor of vaporware, has always embraced blabbering as one of its main communication tools. Isn't it as simple as this?

E-book readers: they look good on paper

2007-12-02T17:35:00.000+01:00

There's been some talk about Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader being the "iPod of books." This analogy might be cute and catchy, but it's deeply flawed, and wishful thinking at best.

First, being the iPod of books is a very ambitious undertaking. Much more so than being the iPod of music. Here's why:

With the iPod, the content that the device was built for is music. The display is only an organizer for it. The actual presentation of the content is audio playback. With an e-book reader, however, the display has to serve not only as an organizer, but also as the actual presentation canvas for the content itself. And that's hard, because
electric devices have been able to play back music for decades. Most users were already satisfied with the sound quality of existing MP3 players even before the iPod debuted, so Apple's device didn't need to achieve a technological breakthrough in its core competence of music playback. However, no electric device exists today that could "play back" a book or a newspaper at an acceptable quality. Therefore, a successful e-book reader will need to break new ground.
Listening is passive, while reading is active. Listening to a song only requires you to push the play button, and the rest will just happen to you. However, reading a book requires constant and conscious interaction: not just scanning the text with your eyeballs, but also physically navigating the book by turning pages.* A device for reading has to facilitate that as well in a very humane and user-friendly way, not to mention providing additional functionality such as annotation features**.

*What if an e-book reader could automatically scroll, tracking your eyeballs?

**This blog post of mine is serving me as a great lesson about procrastination. I've been working on it for over a week, and in the meantime, several other web authors have posted their opinions, which are in some cases very similar to mine. Ars Technica's John Stokes, for example, mentions annotation features, as well as several other points I also visit.

The Muzak of Books

But there's more on the iPod analogy front. The music you hear on an iPod is comparable to what you hear on your stereo. Sure, the quality is certainly not the same as on a high-end device, but it's is acceptable for the vast majority of users, most of whom would be hard-pressed to tell much of the difference anyway.

However, just imagine, for a moment, an iPod that could only play a MIDI version of any song. You would hear your favorite songs arranged for generic software instruments, and some machine voice would do all the vocals.

Would this device be a hit? Would you buy it?

I'm asking because this is more or less what Kindle, or any other e-book solution on the market today, does. What it presents is nothing but the MIDI version of a book. Layout is generated on the fly, using a generic font. Sure, the original words are kept, just like the original notes in a MIDI version of a song. But yet it's not the same song, and it's not the same book. It's the Muzak version of a book. It looks more like a webpage. Compared to the real thing, it's an abomination.

Readers want the real thing; the book as it has been designed and laid out by design professionals.

Sure, Muzak has its place in elevators and public toilets, but it's not the music you love, it's not what inspires your kids to write fan mail. And the same way, Kindle is perfectly suitable for reading an end-user license agreement or a shopping list – but not something you care about, not something you grow attached to.

A book reader? That's me!

And finally, there's a third thing. Your iPod does not equal to the music on it. The two are very separate things. An iPod is just the device that plays your music. The music is something you cannot touch, wherever it's coming from. A band, a stereo, a clock radio, an iPod: these are sources of music, you never think of them as the music itself. You don't even think of a CD as the music itself: it's just a recording that you have to get music out of by playing it in some device.

It's not that I have a penchant for stating the obvious, but this is a very important difference between music and books. Books have a physical representation that music or films lack: they are objects. The volume that you hold in you hand isn't a "source of book," or a "book recording" that you have to "play back." Nope. It's the book itself. It's a thing.* You need eyes and hands to read it, no other devices are necessary.

*Again, someone else has said it better as I was plugging away with this post. Damn.

Envisioning a device that will one day complement, substitute and perhaps even replace paper-based books, and calling it an "e-book reader" is a mistake. If such a device is to emerge, it won't be "playing back" a book: it will have to be the book.

I picture a featureless, lightweight, white or semitransparent, sublime-looking object, about the weight, size and shape of a book. Its surface would appear to be paper-like, with text and images apparently printed on it: it would show a page from a book. (Or maybe a spread. I know that there would be some serious and hard design decisions to be made, like how to accommodate oversized layouts such as a newspaper's.)

Looking at this thing from a distance, you could even mistake it for some high-tech version of a book. Not a reader: you're the reader. It's the book.

You would turn pages by imitating page-turning gestures on its touch-sensitive surface. You could flick it by manipulating its side. It would need to accommodate loads of other familiar gestures, in order to make you feel like you're reading a book (like, half-turning a page to see what's behind it, then turning it back). And the whole thing would need to bring you as much as possible of the whole book experience, such as layout, design, typography, look and feel, and even as many as humanly possible of these partly tongue-in-cheek, yet entirely perfectly valid points.

Maybe the world isn't ready for such a device. Not in the "world's not ready for Vista" sense, but simply because the hardware needed for such a device isn't feasible yet.

Of course, this thing will happen one day. Maybe it will work through directly stimulating parts of your brain to give you a complex multisensory illusion of reading a book, and you shouldn't expect it before 2100. Maybe it will happen next year. But it will be there.

We need to save trees. We need to simplify logistics. We need more interactivity: spoilt by the web experience, how many times did you wish you had hyperlinks or search boxes in a book or newspaper you were reading?

A real-world need

Two years ago, I left my home country. Among various other changes, I'm no longer able to read my favorite newspaper as it's not available where I live now.

Even though it's the year 2007, there's still no technology out there that could help me out. And no, Kindle won't be the answer either.

Back in the days, I would drive to work for an afternoon shift, and I'd make a stop at a drive-in restaurant for an early afternoon breakfast. I would buy my favorite paper, fold it out in front of me, and read it while eating.

I would look at the front page, and see what's above and below the fold. I would look at the teasers, the headlines, the subheads, the captions; the different fonts and typefaces, the weighing of contents by the size and position attributed to them by the editors and designers.

I would subconsciously use the placement of photos, the clever typographic solutions, and all the other subtle ways of presenting all the information and meta-information, to choose which stories I would read, and in what order. To this day, I can recall some of the stories the paper broke years ago, and my recollections are always complete with the entire layout, not just the words and the pictures.

After looking at the front page, I would go in. As I'd turn the pages, some familiarly distinct features would appear, making sure both that I feel at home and that I can find my way.

For instance, there was be the opinion page, one of my favorites. One big editorial, serious in tone, set in boldface (a bit of an assault on readability, but still, I'd grown to like it). A short, rather caustic opinion piece, in a larger font, set in italics. A small box with a short scathing op-ed always by the same guy, day in, day out. And in the center of the page, a large essay on some controversial issue, with an attention-grabbing pull quote: something I was almost certain to read every day.

When I moved halfway across Europe, I was looking for ways to keep reading that paper (which was not available on newsstands in my new adopted home). A subscription was out of the question: both the expense and the delay would have been forbidding.

So I subscribed online. I was looking for the same experience, or at least something similar. But it wasn't meant to be.

It's not just that I was unable to take my subscription to a restaurant. It's not just that I was confined to a computer for reading. All I could access was a page with a list of headlines. I could click on each, and the text would appear in my browser. As would the photos. I could also search, and get yet more clickable lists.

That was it. No layout, no design, no presentation. Just the words and the pictures. It was a website, except that the stories were not written for the web. They were cut and pasted from the paper. It was less than a website, and much less than a newspaper. It united the disadvangates of both.

I despised it and canceled after a few weeks.

Apparently, whoever was in charge of the online version thought that content was the only thing that mattered, where content would equal all the words and the pictures. According to this belief, when you buy a paper, you pay for words and pictures, and that's it. Today's newspapers place these things tediously on pages, requiring a lot of human effort, but that's only because a printed page has a limited capacity, and working with this limitation is hard. In a better, more advanced world, there will be no more paper, therefore there will be no need for laboriously placing the contents on these things called "pages." You would just present a table of contents, and the contents themselves, which are free to flow without any spatial limitation.

Therefore, a newspaper or a book would be just like a webpage, and all you'd do is search, click, and then scroll, scroll, scroll and scroll as you read.

Welcome to the brave new world. Luckily, this will never happen. Anyone who thinks that a newspaper, a magazine, a book, or basically anything that gets printed, is nothing but a sum of its words and pictures is seriously, sadly mistaken, and will not be the driving force behind a successfull e-book concept.

Anyone who doesn't know the vast, incredible importance of layout and presentation simply doesn't get publishing, period.

Anyone who gets publishing knows that an online HTML version of any print publication is not an equivalent of the original.

Apparently, Jeff Bezos doesn't get publishing. He's good at selling books and other things. He's a salesman. He may even be a sales visionary. But that's it.

An acceptable presentation of a book or a newspaper in an electric solution means that it has to look very close to the real thing. It has to make you forget that you're looking at a gadget.

Apple's chance

Currently, the only company that seems to even come close to "getting" things like these is Apple. In addition to its obvious lead in user interface design, its famous dedication to any design, and very specifically, typography, is a clear indication. Remember, the Mac was the device that kick-started desktop publishing in the eighties.

I think, or rather, I hope, that Apple will introduce a device to top Kindle, turning Amazon's attempt into the kind of roadkill that litters the technology highways. Kind of like the iPod did to the likes of the Archos Jukebox.

Three years ago, based on the success of the iPod, I thought Apple could probably be the one company to pull it off.

Now, in 2007, Apple has unveiled Multi-Touch, as well as an embedded version of OS X. If e-books are going to be more than a blip on the radar any time soon, they will be courtesy of Apple, not Amazon.

Kindle: damn, they stole my idea. Here's my mail to Steve Jobs from 2004

2007-11-20T00:22:00.000+01:00

Naive as I was, I sent the following e-mail to Steve Jobs back in 2004.
Needless to say, he never wrote back.

Dear Steve,

Here's a product/service idea I think Apple could pull off pretty decently.

We all hope that one day lots of trees will be spared by switching from paper to a digital alternative. Yet it's not happening. E-book readers crash and burn. People insist on real books and newspapers, and it seems to be an emotional thing.

Or is it? I think it's just that current devices suck. Apple could, once again, show the world how it's done, and make it a hit.

Here's what I think it needs.

(1) A reader (let's call it an iPad for now) needs to resemble a book. It should look non-technical, white, matte, and just beg to be read like a book. (Most of this is a display thing.)

(2) Once iPad resembles a book (breaking users' resistence), people will see incredible benefits. How about "A thousand volumes in your hands?" Readers easily navigate through book collections, take notes, use bookmarks, etc. (Touch-screen technology and on-screen keyboards should be considered. Miniaturization isn't such a big issue here.)

(3) PDF should be to the iPad what MP3 is to the iPod. Transferring these files for immediate access needs to be a breeze. One hidden benefit: users will stop printing long documents that they'd only read once (like software tutorials). People hate reading on computer screens – this should be a hardcopy replacement, not a computer replacement.

(4) Apple has good enough reputation in the contents business to launch an e-bookstore and get large publishers on board. If this catches on, it can be an even bigger cost saver than AAC vs CD. Not to mention periodicals like dailies that face stiff competition from the Web: they could fight back this way. DRM is needed, natch.

(5) You may want to take the computer partly out of the equation. Introduce a small, cheap flash-RAM dongle that retails free of charge as a supplement to books -- or is sold separately. It contains a DRM-protected copy of the book, and it plugs right into the iPad. You can read it while it's plugged (no piracy). Think about buying newspapers at the newsstands like this, on 1" by 1" cards! Quite revolutionary, saving huge printing costs and time.

That's it. If I got you started, I'll gratefully accept donations.

All the best,

András Puiz

Maybe this iPhone will be an U.S. thing after all?

2007-11-11T17:09:00.001+01:00

Despite all the hype, the response to the iPhone in Europe isn't nearly like it was in the U.S. Is T-Mobile happy with 10 thousand units sold in Germany on the first day?!

I hope Apple knows, but Europe is a different market. Mobile telephony was born here. There are several service providers, with competitive plans. People here live and breathe cellphones. They unlock phones. And there is a huge choice of devices. Oh, and the iPhone plans are horribly expensive.

Also, saying that the iPod doesn't enjoy a monopoly like in the U.S. (arguably an important factor in the iPhone's success) would be a huge understatement. The iPod's market share in Germany "hit a high" of around 28% in 2007: nowhere close to U.S. figures.

I wonder if Apple wants the iPhone to be a rock star in Europe, or just a device with respectable sales. In the former case, the company may soon be forced to go back to the drawing board and rethink its European iPhone strategy.

Behind the rumors: is it an iPhone Pro, or a Mac touch?

2007-11-08T02:24:00.000+01:00

According to recent rumors, "Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC." This comes only a few weeks after a rumor suggesting the return of the Newton handheld computer.

I strongly believe that (a) a new device is coming indeed, and (b) it will sport a MultiTouch interface.

But is it going to be an extended iPod touch/iPhone, or will it be a modified Mac? I think both are possible. Here's what I think about these two (not mutually exclusive) scenarios.

Mac touch

Tablet PCs have failed only because they were horrendously badly executed, and were saddled with ridiculous ideas. No usable keyboard? Why the hell would anyone want to interact with a computer via handwriting? Isn't typing demonstrably faster? Hello?

That doesn't mean, however, that a tablet PC is inherently a bad idea. On the contrary: at worst, eliminating a physical keyboard could easily save space and cost, ushering in a new class of unexpensive, miniaturized PCs. At best, a new set of thoughful metaphors could emerge, with several advantages over traditional input mechanisms.

The iPhone has shown us all that Apple gets it. The iPhone interface features direct manipulation metaphors that arguably beat everything else out there, including the mouse and the trackball. It can also simulate a keyboard, though the lack of physical feedback is a disadvantage. (Apple may be working on a solution there: I sure hope they are.)

How difficult would it be for Apple to modify Mac OS X in order to accommodate a MultiTouch user interface, complete with a usable onscreen keyboard? A stylus would probably be included for precision work, but most tasks could be achieved using your fingers. Just imagine your daily work on a Mac, and imagine using your fingers instead of the mouse: I'm hard-pressed to find anything that would no longer be doable. (Things like right-clicking would need clever substitutes, though.)

It can be argued whether or not "direct manipulation" of objects on the screen would be better than using a pointing device on a different surface. However, some new metaphors, borrowed from the iPhone and from trackpads of Apple's laptops, could definitely provide a superior experience. Think about two-finger scrolling, page-turning gestures, or the zooming "pinch": these certainly beat scroll arrows or "next page" buttons. And yet further multi-finger gestures could be born, something that no mouse could ever accommodate. (And besides, even single-finger gestures are much easier and more natural than their mouse equivalents: operating a mouse is not that easy; we've just all gotten used to it.)

Specs: If Apple believes the "Mac touch" to be a potentially superior device, one that would one day supplant both the desktop and the notebook form factors, shipping large and powerful configurations would make a lot of sense. If Apple only views the "touch" as a companion device, whose main selling point is its miniaturization, then obviously, we're only talking about smaller configurations. Maybe there would be a "Pro" class, even, featuring different storage and size options.

There's a minimum screen size below which the device would be hard to use; thus I don't think we would see a Mac touch with a screen smaller than 8" or maybe even 10". Larger configurations could be just about any size, even 20", though I would be surprised if Apple actually shipped such a huge Mac touch at the device's debut.

The small version(s) would definitely represent a breakthrough in miniaturization, so it's questionable whether they would even feature optical drives. I imagine a very thin form factor, dominated by a huge screen, one or two buttons, speakers, a microphone, and Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, USB and FireWire interfaces. It would definitely use batteries. As for internal storage, smaller models could avoid hard disks and use flash memory; a larger (Pro?) family could perhaps use both (as well as an optical drive).

Pros*: Compatible with existing Mac; full-featured; no need for Apple to port OS or apps
Cons*: Form factor too large for some uses; no real breakthrough in miniaturization; probably costly

iPhone Pro/Newton

I've always yearned for a time when miniaturization would endow a handheld device with the full functionality of a computer. Then I realized that it's not as simple as that. In order to be successful and usable, a tiny computer needs a different, well thought out user interface – it can't just run the OS of its full-sized siblings.

This is why I was so ecstatic about the birth of a new platform this January. Apple's handheld OS X and other related technologies have proven themselves to work beautifully, and they are bound to make their way into other products. Since then, they have already given birth to the iPod touch: a somewhat premature development in my opinion, but a necessary one to keep the freshness of the iPod brand (I'd wager heavily that most iPod sales come from the nano and maybe the classic.)

What if Apple were to release a similar, though somewhat larger device, one that could function as a supercharged PDA and/or a stripped-down Mac?

After all, most of the work is already done. The technology is there, all Apple needs to do is build a larger device, write some additional apps (or port some existing apps over to it), and voilà: there's your new Newton, powered by iPhone technologies (perhaps without the phone part, though)!

As an aside: I'm relieved that my iPhone predictions are turning out to be overly pessimistic in light of the SDK that Apple announced. We still don't know from Steve Jobs' musings how open the platform is going to get, or how smart Apple itself is going to make the phone – will it sprout a clipboard any time soon, for example –, but at least, the phone will further tap into the huge potential of having OS X running on a handheld device. However, I'm still not sure if the iPhone will ever be intended to become a true PDA or handheld computer. I think Apple will strive to keep simplicity as one of its main virtues. So, there may be room for a more powerful iPhone-like device in Apple's product matrix.

Specs: This would be a handheld device, though a somewhat larger one than the iPhone. It would expand on the capabilities and features of the iPhone – or of the iPod touch. (It's a good question whether it would double as a cellphone: such a functionality would certainly be welcome, especially for internet access, but having to commit to a monthly plan would also turn away some potential users. Maybe two versions would emerge, one with, and one without a phone.)

It would probably ship with enhanced versions of iPhone apps, as well as additional ones written by Apple. All in all, it would be a new-ish platform; an evolutionary development over the iPhone, but perhaps consummating the revoution it started.

Bluetooth, WiFi, flash memory would be a given, anything else (Ethernet, USB, etc.) could be anyone's guess.

Pros*: Smaller form factor; possible cellphone functionality; potentially lower price
Cons*: Incompatible with Mac software; still not a full-blown computer; yet another platform for Apple to support, and for third parties to develop for

* Pros and cons: a comparison between the two speculative scenarios.

Leopard's Stacks renders Dock even more useless

2007-10-26T10:51:00.000+02:00

It's obvious by now that the Dock is Steve's pet feature, otherwise such a usability nightmare would have been scrapped long ago. Yeah, I've kind of gotten used to it, but still: it's awful.

It fails most prominently as an application launcher. First of all, it can only hold a handful of your apps. If you add too many, they will be too tiny to be practical.

Second, this is clearly the case when a word is worth a thousand pictures. If I look for Photoshop, I want to find it under "P," not "next to the icon with the QuickTime logo, not far from the stamp icon." You can alphabeticize names. You cannot put icons in any meaningful order. So every time I look for an app in the Dock, I waste several seconds, and grow just a bit more frustrated.

Luckily, there is (or rather, was) a solution. I put my Applications folder in the Dock. I click on it, and up pops the entire hierarchical list of all my apps. This is such a great shortcut that I cannot live without it.

In fact, every time I sit down to anyone's Mac, I make sure to put the Applications folder in their Dock. That's the only way I can even begin to work. After I'm done, I leave it there. Nobody complains.

It should be there by default.

Shockingly, Apple is disabling this functionality. According to David Pogue:

I'm not totally sold on the Stacks feature. That's where you click a folder icon on your Dock, and rather than a complete menu of the folder's contents, you get a fan or a grid that shows an array of the actual icons inside. Trouble is, if there are more than 24 items in that folder (depending on your screen size), you get only a partial list. To see the rest of the contents, you have to click the icon that says, "35 more in Finder," which opens that folder's actual desktop window.
There's no way to make the Dock show the complete list of folder contents anymore; nor can you stick your hard drive's icon in the Dock and have complete, drill-down, hierarchical access to your entire computer, as you could before.

Wow. I didn't see this one coming.

This can very easily be a dealbreaker for me. I'm not joking.

Apple, Jobs developing new, human side?

2007-10-21T20:07:00.000+02:00

Ever since the return of Steve Jobs, Apple hasn't been about faces. Withe the exception of Apple's media events where Jobs, Phil Schiller, the occasional product manager or VP would take the stage, Apple's people have been mostly hiding in shadows.

When you interact with Apple's web page, you don't interact with people. You read news items or carefully crafted PR, search databases, buy with 1-Click™, or, at best, interact with other users in the support forums. It's all cool and impersonal.

Even video introductions for products show screencasts, and feature professional voice actors.

Under Jobs' tenure, "About" boxes of Apple's software products stopped listing the names of individuals (perhaps for fear of making the jobs of headhunters too easy). Even O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa book was, somewhat ridiculously, written by "Apple Computer, Inc." Not by people.

But that trend has been changing lately. First, there was the iPhone guy. Then Steve Jobs started to blog. And now we have the Leopard guy.

Why?

Jobs has "blogged" on the following occasions so far: when he delivered his open letter to record industry executives; when he addressed criticism by environmentalists and envisioned a greener Apple; when he announced a rebate for early iPhone customers; and finally, when promising an iPhone SDK (no link available, the announcement is simply a text-only item in Apple's Hot News section).

The first "blog post" is unique in that Jobs expresses a personal opinion and attempts to influence decisions by executives of an industry by summoning the power of media. It isn't something a company or a CEO does routinely, it certainly isn't business as usual, thus its unusual format is understandable and warranted.

However, the other items could easily be replaced by traditional Apple press releases. They do not really contain anything special that would necessitate their unorthodox format. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently suggesting a need for personal communication from Steve Jobs in those messages. Yet Jobs has chosen to present them as personally signed pieces of communication.

Again, why?

Similarly, the two new faces Apple has attributed to its iPhone and Leopard products (without names, though) mark a strange departure. None of the demos we see from these two guys would suffer one small bit, none would be any less informative or useful if we saw no faces, only narrated screencasts and close-up shots.

Yet Apple has decided to add those faces.

Why?

Is it just some PR stunt that Apple's advisers have come up with?

Or is Apple maybe concerned that it's growing too big and scary? Is it adding a human touch in order to counterbalance a (perceived or real) mean streak in its operations? The buy-me-twice ringtones, the options scandal, the monopoly accusations?

Or is Steve Jobs simply growing more vain, mellow or sentimental with age? Does he maybe think more and more about his image, his perception – maybe his legacy?

By the way. Did you notice how that Leopard guy really looks and sounds like Steve Jobs doing a keynote? By the time he talks about Quick Look, his voice could be mistaken for Steve's. He could be nicknamed Steve Lite. It's almost spooky.

Maybe this is what Jobs means when he keeps talking about Apple's DNA.

Quo vadis, iPhone?

2007-10-03T12:29:00.000+02:00

People all over the web are giving Apple hell for breaking unauthorized and unsupported third-party iPhone hacks with its 1.1 software update. There are two types of these hacks: ones enabling the iPhone to be used with any SIM card; and others which just let users install third-party apps on the device. The former directly hurt Apple and AT&T, therefore Apple is actively trying to prevent these hacks. The latter, however, don't do much harm, thus Apple doesn't go out of its way to break them. Break them it does, nevertheless, prompting liberation movements to spring up and demand the franchisement of the iPhone from the evil tyranny of Apple. What could be more ridiculous than that?

Some of these critics jump to the conclusion that Apple doesn't get the importance of third-party applications. Well, chance may have it that Apple doesn't plan to ever allow third-party apps on the iPhone, but we don't know that.

I'm more inclined to believe that Apple wants to do it right.

There's a common sentiment out there that accuses Apple of some sort of haughty elitism. Wil Shipley put it this way:

I know Steve Jobs; he's actually amazingly like my old business partner Mike Matas. They both love closed systems, for a simple reason -- they both know they're smarter than anyone else on the planet, and they don't need anyone else mucking up their systems. Steve would rather have no third parties for Mac OS X if he could get away with it -- Apple, of course, would do a much better job on anything, but since customers insist on Photoshop and Office and other apps, he puts up with them. (Well, except, now Apple has their own office suite.) Steve knows that on a computer, having a broad spectrum of apps is more important that having them all be Apple-perfect.

But on iPods, Airports, Apple TVs, and now iPhones, Apple wants every app perfect. Which is nice, in theory. In practice, it means innovation only happens at Apple's pace. The marketplace of ideas is much smaller, and the devices are much poorer because of it. (Example: Why can't I stream music from my iPhone or iPod touch to my Airport Express?)

Emphasis mine.

Now, we don't know if Apple plans to open up the iPhone for third-party developers. But Wil is right: Apple doesn't need anyone else mucking up its systems. Some of those unsupported, unofficial third-party hacks would do just that. Muck up the system.

If Apple opens up the iPhone for developers, making third-party apps official and a supported feature of the phone, it won't be able to afford to have those apps crash the phone.

Apps on a computer can crash, sure. We're used to that. There are about five ways to force a misbehaving Mac app to quit, and a crashed Mac up will leave the rest of your system intact.

But remember the days before Mac OS X? Remember the bomb?

Remeber when a crash could render your entire computer unusable?

Do you also remember what happened when your frontmost app got unresponsive? Basically, so did your Mac.

With the limited user interface of the iPhone, a misbehaving app can easily create the illusion of a misbehaving iPhone. How do you know that it's only Johnnie's Shareware Recipe Editor that froze, not your iPhone? Will you blame Johnnie's Shareware Garage, LLC, or Apple, Inc?

Besides, people are far less forgiving about a frozen phone than about a frozen computer. A phone is just a phone, even if it can double as a computer.

What next? Your car keys freezing? Your beer opener?

If Apple does plan to allow third-party apps, it needs to perform some magic that prevents the user from just about ever having an iPhone locked up by third-party software.

Perhaps a daemon should be running, monitoring every application's responsiveness, and returning to the home screen when the frontmost app is having problems? Add a status message that informs the user of this incident? Or should there be a well-advertised, sure-fire, and foolproof user action that never fails to quit a misbehaving app? These things would need to be sorted out.

And besides, Apple would need to isolate parts of the system from direct access by third parties. We know that the iPhone was completed on a tight deadline, remember why Leopard hasn't shipped yet? So, it's not unreasonable to think that its software still has some rough edges, and nobody other than Apple's engineers should really be playing with it for a while.

So even if third-party application development is in the iPhone's future, it's only reasonable to expect that it takes time to implement properly.

I think that, for the near future, iPhone development will consist of the following:

Apple delivering significant and free software updates: Notice how Apple's subscription-based iPhone accounting suggests that the iPhone will have more features in the future courtesy of Apple.
Hand-picked third parties delivering applications, either for free or for a small fee: think about Google Maps already on the iPhone, and iPod games that are sold via iTunes. The iPod is also a closed platform, but there's still some third-party development going on, closely controlled by Apple. There's nothing stopping Apple from doing just that. As they would get to "bless" any third-party app before it becomes available, Apple could maintain its strict quality standards for the phone. A rumor to this effect is already out.
Web applications may transition into Widgets. Rumors already suggest that improvements to the WebKit framework are on their way, enabling "web applications" to be stored offline. What exactly separates an "offline web app" from a Widget? Not much, mostly the capability to run arbitrary code (including Cocoa Objective-C). I'm inclined to think that a Dashboard-like SDK may be a compromise between the needs of Apple and developers: a sandbox with limited access to iPhone features, but at least not something that runs on a server.

Unlimited, no-holds-barred third-party development could turn the iPhone into a PDA and more. It could turn the iPhone into a VoIP device, causing a loss of revenue for AT&T (and thus for Apple as well).

Apple's new software updates for the iPhone will certainly serve as an indication as to where Apple wants the device to be heading. The first software update has come and gone, and we still don't have a clipboard, making the iPhone basically useless for any text editing apart from typing out a quick e-mail. There's no user-accessible file system, no SSH client, no instant messaging, no editing capabilities for Microsoft Office documents. In other words, the iPhone is not a PDA, and it's definitely not targeted at enterprise users or geeks.

The iPhone may be the smartest phone ever made, but it's not a smartphone.

Does Apple even want to change that? I'm getting the impression that Apple wants the iPhone to be pretty much what it is today, and those of us who expect software updates to turn it into a device with a greatly expanded set of capabilities will be ultimately disappointed.

I hope to be wrong, but I think Apple wants the vast, almost unlimited potential of the embedded OS X operating system to remain largely unfulfilled on the iPhone.

If the rumors of the Newton's revival are true, then perhaps those of us waiting for an ultrasmart PDA from Apple should set our sights on this new mythical beast, and resign to the fact that the iPhone is, and will always be, a cellphone.

Fake Steve: has he still got it?

2007-09-21T00:59:00.000+02:00

This stuff is just brilliant:

You let me know what time and what to wear. I'll be there in jeans and a black turtleneck, two hours late.

It's quotes like these that make me forget that Fake Steve has been exposed as some Forbes editor. Daniel Lyons is just brilliant, brilliant.

Something has been bothering me, though, ever since he revealed his true identity, and I haven't realized until recently what it was.

I thought Fake Steve was a thoroughbred, inveterate, dyed-in-the-wool Apple and Mac zealot, someone with a Steve Jobs fetish, and exceptional writing skills. Okay, it was incredibly naive of me to think that he wasn't an accomplished writer, that he was a natural. He is way too good for that.

But after the revelation, I felt that somehow part of the magic was lost. I haven't been able to pinpoint it for a long time, but now I know why.

Even though Lyons says that he's an Apple fan, it's this quote (same source) that's been bothering me:

Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder.

See? He's not obsessed with Steve Jobs or Apple. He could (and would) have chosen any other CEO.

When he extols the virtues of the iPhone, the Mac, or Apple's strategy with over-the-top exaggeration, his parody isn't self-ironic: it's merely surgically accurate.

My impression is that Fake Steve is less soul and more brains than I've believed.

Fake Steve was unavailable for comment.

Numbers rocks: how I forgot about the review and ended up doing my budget

2007-08-20T10:20:00.000+02:00

Apple has made a trial version of the iWork suite available as a free download. Pretty smart move: the suite is relatively small (it fits on a CD), so this is a great way to get people test drive the latest version of this emerging little office suite. (Let me get back to the "office suite" part later.) You can buy an activation code online to unlock the trial version, so basically, Apple is distributing iWork '08 as shareware. Cool.

I've put Keynote and Pages through their paces, and they're OK. But what I've been most interested in was Numbers. Why? Here's a list why:

It's new. Duh.
It's a spreadsheet app, and those are relatively rare. Word processors are a dime a dozen.
I wanted to see if Numbers is competitive with Excel.
I work with data a lot (Excel, FileMaker, and so on), and wanted to see if this new tool is of any use for me.

As anecdotal as it gets, but still, wow...

So I fired up Numbers, and started off by using one of its built-in templates. I noticed one that was called "Budget," [edit: originally I wrote "Home Budget," not sure how I'd got that wrong] and thought, what the hell, let me try that one.

I've been putting off drafting an annual personal budget for quite some time now. I was looking for the right tool for the job. Now, it's important to know that I'm a tool freak. (Also a Tool freak, but that's probably beside the point.) That is, I can obsess about the right tool for the job a lot more than about the job itself. It's almost a policy. Yep, I know this can be a flaw. But not always.

Anyway. So far, I've tried creating FileMaker Pro databases, using and extending Excel templates, and I've always given up after a certain point. Building a FileMaker database is almost like writing an application: you need to do a lot of work before you can start using it. About Excel, I just didn't know where to start. The built-in templates weren't much use, and as for rolling my own: the task seemed a little too intimidating. Before getting on with the already daunting task of drafting a budget, I would need to decide on how many worksheets to use, what kind of tables to design, and how to interconnect them, etc. I'm not bad with Excel, but whenever I embarked on this budget project, I must admit that I always ended up giving up.

So, last week, I fired up Numbers, and opened its Budget template. It was pretty straightforward, I just about immediately figured out how it worked. And to my utter surprise, it was almost exactly what I needed. I made some small adjustments, and started putting in my numbers. Then I made some more adjustments to the template, consulting the help file two or three times.

After about five hours, I was still frantically, furiously working on my budget. I was sweating, but what I was fighting was my numbers, not Numbers. I didn't even notice the app was there.

And that's just about the best thing you can say about an application. It gets out of the way, and lets you do your thing. Oh, and the template is very nice, too. Maybe that's where Excel lost me on this one, and Numbers won me.

These are my first main observations about Numbers

Numbers doesn't have one workbook with several infinitely large worksheets. It has pages with tables, which are the size you want them to be. This doesn't only make your numbers nicer to present, but also makes it easier to work with them: you can see all the tables at the same time, you don't need to switch between worksheets.

If you mouse near the border of a table, some controls pop up. You can insert, delete, or drag and drop columns and rows, you can sort and rename columns, and so on. These operations are extremely intuitive, though really mouse-heavy: there are no keyboard shortcuts for most of these. Working in Numbers feels a bit more like working in InDesign, and less like in Excel, where you can let go of the mouse for quite some time if you want. To me, this is a clear shortcoming, but a tolerable one.

Numbers is very good with defaults: it knows that most users will want their tables to have headers; and that when you sort, you'll usually want to sort the entire table. (This is a pet Excel peeve of mine: using auto-filters, you can never be sure if your entire table is being sorted. Some pesky little thing can prevent some columns from being sorted, and you'll end up with useless data.)

While sorting is dead simple, there are no auto-filters in Numbers. Filtering is dialog-based, and clearly more cumbersome than in the Microsoft suite. Also, the only way to tell if your data is filtered is by noticing missing row numbers. Excel has other visual clues, and they are important. Probably Apple's research shows that people don't really use filters that much. It's a pity, because I do.

Tables can have headers by default (there are several table templates you can choose from, but you can fully modify a table after creation), and they can also have titles (captions). These are great time savers as you add and arrange new tables to your work area (called a Canvas).

Numbers makes sure your spreadsheets are neatly organized and beautiful. Just like a great schoolteacher, it will instill a sense of work ethic in you, inviting you to keep your work clean and well-organized. (Don't use Numbers for committing tax fraud or plotting evil schemes. You will break down with guilt and give up.)

One annoying bit: as you move or resize a table that has another table on its right side, Numbers will always move that table too, keeping the distance constant between the two, even if that's not what you want. (Thanks to the reader who pointed out that this behavior can be turned off in Preferences.) And believe me: you will care about how your tables look. Numbers will make you.

Cross-references between tables and cells are quite like in Excel, except that they use column and table names, not numbers. Luckily, these names update dynamically.

There's a generous helping of functions, and for obvious reasons, they have the same syntax as in Excel. Not nearly all of Excel's functions are present, though. Worse, I've been relying heavily on Excel's extensive help system when constructing a function: as you type, it displays the syntax for you, and mousing over each part will show you additional details. It's very easy to get specific help for each function. Not so in Numbers: you're pretty much on your own, and help is awkward. Functions are probably also considered an advanced feature that relatively few users would be interested in. Hopefully, Apple will beef up this part of Numbers for the next version.

There is one very useful feature, though, that immediately made me a fan (that is, if one can get fanatic about spreadsheets). Select a few cells in Excel, and the app will display the sum of all the numbers in them. Numbers takes this concept a step further: not only does it display their sum, count, average, minimum and maximum, but also lets you drag these to your table, as a really quick and easy way to create a summary field. Well done, that one!

Bloatware vs. clutterware

So Lasso is here, and it's sexy indeed. But does it take on Excel? Well, yes, and no. Excel has macros (though you'll have to kiss them good-bye soon, as they will be absent from the next Mac version.) It also has tons and tons and tons of advanced features that Apple did not include in Numbers.

Now, there will certainly be people who dismiss all these tons of Excel features as "bloatware," but I will certainly not go down that road. I'm with Joel Spolsky here: he believes that the size (and the complexity and the feature count) of applications increases as do our needs. He also gives us his spin the 20/80 rule, i.e. that while it may be that 80% of users use only 20% of the features, it's not the same 20% for everyone.

I do believe that software can be too complicated and intimidating (and Microsoft Office is certainly like that). However, that doesn't have much to do with the number of features, but rather with their presentation. I would rather call it clutterware than bloatware. Features are necessary, but throwing them all at the user in a big scary mess is wrong.

For a version 1.0 release like Numbers, Apple did have to narrow its focus on the most commonly-used features. However, here's hoping that the scope of Numbers will grow in time. And knowing Apple, I'm fairly confident that Numbers will never become clutterware. Bloatware maybe -- but, as Joel says, that's actually a good thing.

Is iWork an office suite then? It would probably be an inaccurate moniker, and one that Apple seems to want to avoid (never calling it an office suite, going with "productivity suite" instead). This has to be at least partly due to a marketing effort that carefully tries to avoid the appearance of competing directly with Microsoft. But marketing materials, as well as iWork templates, also clearly indicate a focus on the home, small business, and educational markets, Apple's traditional strongholds. Besides, large corporations would need collaboration features clearly missing from iWork.

I wonder whether Apple will, over time, address the corporate market more aggressively. We can say that, with iWork '08, it's on the doorstep, but not yet knocking.

iMacs ditch iPod look for iPhone colors

2007-08-09T00:55:00.000+02:00

When the iMac G5 was released, its slogan was "From creators of iPod: iMac." I wasn't sure if the irony in that line was intentional, but it was pretty rich: how much has the world turned that the iMac brand, once a cultural icon, needed to be propped up by the popularity of a mere MP3 player?

But now, the iMac looks like the iPhone. It's silver and black, and its screen is made of glass (with its glossiness touted as a feature, which makes me shudder). Its screen has a black border. Even its iSight webcam looks a bit like the iPhone's single button.

Is this a new design trend for Apple's consumer products? Until now, Apple's professional hardware was very visibly made of aluminum, while most of its consumer products were black or white. The only exceptions were the colorful, metallic iPods (nanos and shuffles).

The iPhone is a brand new product category, and it comes as no surprise that its color scheme defies that of Apple's other products. But now the iMac is following suit. This can mean one of two things in my opinion, and only time will tell which one is the case:

1. Apple is shifting its design policies yet again, moving away from white/black plastics for consumer Macs. Such shifts have happened in the past, just think about the various color schemes for iMacs and iBooks (from bondi blue to various selections of multiple colors to psychedelic patterns to an elegant white) in the late nineties, or the similar changes in the professional line-up from the same bondi blue to various shades of graphite, and from black to titanium to aluminum in the case of pro laptops.

The color scheme has never been as straightforward and consistent as it was recently (until the arrival of the new iMac), we have to wonder whether Apple is giving up some of that consistency. Future revisions of the MacBook line will be a certain indication.

But luckily, I think every major color scheme transition so far has pointed to a classier direction (if we disregard the few last revisions of the G3 iMac).

2. The iMac is no longer a consumer Mac. Well, one can argue that it's now a pro-quality machine, or simply one that's sitting on the fence dividing the pro and consumer categories. Its software bundle doesn't contain any specifically consumer or pro apps, but then neither does any current Mac's: Tech Specs pages indicate that Apple seems to have quietly stopped bundling third-party apps with Macs.

In any case, the iMac seems to be a mighty machine. Some further random observations:

I wonder what the keyboard feels like. I have some doubts. Apple hasn't always exactly been a champion of input device ergonomy.
The mouse now looks out of place. Will there be one made of aluminum too?
Apple's digs at Windows PCs, specifically Dells, are back. The comparison photo is particularly mean.

Random anti-bad-idea post: Sentenc.es

2007-08-06T18:42:00.000+02:00

I learned about this a while ago via Daring Fireball. John Gruber was endorsing the idea.

Basically, Mike Davidson complains that answering even short e-mail questions may take very long, and also that as he gets too many e-mails, he tends to prioritize the easiest ones to answer, not the most important ones.

Don't we all. But his solution makes me shudder. He now always responds in five sentences. He wanted to do a word or char count, but that's difficult, so he arrived at counting sentences. He then posts a short Q&A at the end of all of his messages ("Q: Why is this e-mail five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es") linking to a little explanatory website he operates, where he sums up his policy.

What's wrong with this? Everything. First, writing short messages is not always easier than writing longer ones. You'll soon find yourself fighting the tool. Second, why be so damn restrictive and dogmatic? Couldn't you just strive to spend less time on answering e-mails? How about a timer? Or nothing at all, just an effort to keep it short? Maybe you'll average on five sentences, maybe you won't, but why this "one size fits all" approach?

And don't even get me started on the sociopathic explanatory link at the end. If your correspondants are insulted by your brevity, a pre-recorded explanation will only rub salt into their wounds. Guess what, you've been handled by a policy. You're not so important.

My suggestion: strive to spend less time on answering e-mails. If some of them end up too brief as a result, add this sentence at the end: "Sorry to be brief, I'm really busy."

No weblink or clever URL, though.

Are the boring years over for the Mac?

2007-07-20T00:53:00.000+02:00

You might think I'm nuts for saying so, and I'd really like you to put my words into the right perspective, but here is what I have to say: the history of the Mac has been a pretty boring ride lately, and I hope it will change soon. In fact, I think it will change in a matter of weeks, as Apple releases the revamped iMac.

Let's see. Over the turn of the millennium, Apple changed the Mac drastically. It simplified the Mac product matrix. It threw out a lot of technologies, and adopted some new ones. USB, FireWire, WiFi, UATA (then SATA) took over from the likes of SCSI and ADB. The floppy was killed. And perhaps most significantly, Mac OS X was born. In addition, industrial design started to matter.

And that was it. Nothing has happened ever since.

What could a true Mac watcher rejoice about in the last six years or so? New enclosures.

They have been great, they have been sexy, and yes, I have raved about many of them, just check out the Applelust archives. Apple has shown us all that computers can be beautiful. But as far as technological innovation goes, Apple's huge advances in industrial design are only skin deep.

The iMac now ships in six colors! Now in three! It now looks psychedelic! It has DVD! Now it has CD-RW! Now it looks like a sunflower! Now it's like a monitor! I'm going to swoon!

No wonder the Dark Side ridicules us, Mac fanboys.

I desperately yearn for something really new. The iSight, while unoriginal, was quite a relief, as was the Apple Remote: simple, yet greatly useful touches… And finally, hardware additions! The scrolling trackpad was also a step in the right direction.

But while Apple serves as an R&D lab for the entire software industry, its hardware is decidedly conservative. Couldn't we really use some new keys on the keyboard? All Command-something keystrokes are reserved now for some Mac OS X function. All Function keys already do something, and really, however futuristic and useful Exposé is, launching it by pressing a key that's labeled something as geeky as "F9" instantly throws you back to the days of DOS.

I desperately yearn for new gestures, new metaphors, new input devices. New hardware directions. Are we stuck forever in 1984, or what? If Apple can't deliver the future, who will?

But I think that future is just around the corner. The iPhone shows that Apple can still think outside the box. We have proof that Apple has still got it.

And while people can argue whether or not the iPhone is a Mac, its modest cousin, the Apple TV, is undeniably one, and is taking the Mac platform to places it hasn't gone before. We have a Mac that feeds content to a TV, and is operated by a remote control. To me, this is a much more significant development than yet another iMac facelift, or any transition from titanium to aluminum.

Rumors abound about the new iMac. It is said to have a redesigned keyboard, with lots of new features. Hoorray! I can't wait to see what else the revision will bring. And I have a gut feeling that Apple and the Mac will re-ignite a hardware revolution that goes beyond prettier and prettier boxes that essentially do the same thing they have been doing for decades.

The iPhone is the new Macintosh

2007-06-28T02:02:00.000+02:00

Apple is releasing an expensive device that attempts to redefine an existing product category. Its user interface is so much more advanced, better-designed, more beautiful and more intuitive than any competitor's that it makes Steve Jobs burst into genuine tears of pride and joy. Apple's engineers have put incredible amounts of thought, love and care into details that competitors have largely overlooked so far.

Just about everyone loves the new device, recognizing it as a watershed. And just about everyone bitches about some glaring omissions and missing features.

And they are right. Apple could have conceivably added more and more features to the first shipping version of the product, delaying its launch, but eventually it had to draw the line somewhere. Of course, some (lots) of features didn't make the cut. And many of these are important. But it's a safe bet that most, if not all, of these will be added over time.

Initial reaction […] has been strongly, but not overpoweringly, favorable. A few traditional […] users see the [new user interface elements] as silly, useless frills, and others are outraged at the lack of [certain features], but most users are impressed by the machine and its capabilities. Still, some people have expressed concern about the relatively small [memory] size, the lack of [easy programmability], and the inconvenience of the single disk drive.

Of course, I'm talking about the Macintosh. The quote is from Byte, issue 5/1984, page 339.

As for the iPhone: I wonder how long it will take Apple and AT&T to sell the first million. One week? One weekend? One night?

Now that the reviews are in, the consensus seems to be that the iPhone is a revolutionary device with flaws. Everyone has his or her favorite missing feature.* But the iPhone is already off to a better start than the iPod was five years ago. And boy, did that product evolve from the clunky, heavy, boxy kludge with the one-bit screen!

Apple has apparently mastered the art of show-stopping omission management. It makes bold guesses about which features it can leave out without having people not just complain about them, but also refuse to buy the product. Remember: the original iPod lacked an equalizer, among other things. It was easy to ridicule an MP3 player without such a feature, yet Apple went ahead without it. The omission was later easily corrected in software.

And a lot of the iPhone's missing features are, theoretically, just a software update away. And Apple has, somewhat uncharacteristically, already promised lots of (unnamed) new features.

Now, if only one could also download a GPS chip, a 3G antenna, and some Flash memory…

*Mine is the lack of copy and paste. However, one should realize just how much work it would, or rather, hopefully, will, be to add this: it needs a new gesture or a new mode, new buttons, new decisions, new metaphors. My suggestion would be an "edit mode," where "Cut," "Copy" and "Paste" buttons appear, and you select text by dragging with one finger; and scroll around by dragging with two fingers, à la MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Here is my executive summary of the WWDC keynote

2007-06-22T00:11:00.000+02:00

There's a new Desktop and Dock whose main feature is that they look much better in full page print ads. Call it marketing-optimization, but it looks good. Everyone hates the mimicry of the new menu bar, but I don't think I'll have any problems with it.

The number one top secret feature of Leopard is apparently Stacks. Huh? Dock folders done kinda right? Okay... Gimme some more RDF.

Brushed metal is dead, Aqua is dying. Welcome back, Platinum! Everyone, quickly redesign your apps now! I find the new look a bit too dark. But I like the huge shadow the frontmost window casts.

Now there is absolutely no way to tell the Finder apart from iTunes. Cover flow will be useful. Yes, I'm serious. Especially with inline preview, as well as Quick Look. These may become as revolutionary (that is, for people who actually work on their Macs) as Exposé was. But what about the new huge sidebar? Will there be a way to hide it? Or shall we all buy Macs with bigger screens?

The Finder is incomplete, though. Where's the online Finder Store? I want to buy files for 99 cents, folders for $9.99. And we need a good visualizer and an equalizer.

OK, maybe this iTunes fetish thing is going a bit too far. Maybe Steve needs therapy. But at least the iPhone holds strong, and fights back any attempted iTunes influence: no silly search field, no pesky visualizer, and definitely no connection to that stupid online store.

Core animation is still cool. It's being used in subtly cartoonish ways. I hoped, based on Wil Shipley's raving commentary, that Apple would use it in the OS in a lot of fun ways, but it's not the case. Maybe Steve's legendary taste won't allow that.

We're still going to get Spaces. Too bad that it still seems to break Exposé.

Dashboard. Apple is taking it to a whole new level by… adding, count it, one widget. Movies. Pretty slick. U.S. only, I suppose, though…

iChat never fails to impress. At least it never fails to impress Phil Schiller. (Actually, nothing ever fails to impress Phil Schiller, but we love the guy.) He was almost hyperventilating when he announced, "We can look at a PDF together!" Would you have thought that fifty years ago? Travel to Mars, maybe. Pimp your PDF over the Internet? No way, no how.

Time Machine is huge. Educating people about the importance of backing up. Changing habits of users worldwide. Boom. Dunno if it works, but definitely looks amazing. The retro sci-fi icon is insanely cool on so many levels. Time Machine seems to be the backbone of the whole marketing theme for Leopard. Aptly, this keynote already makes me feel like it's WWDC '06 all over again. But the "Final Countdown meets Star Wars" imagery is definitely refreshing after Tiger's unimaginative metal-on-fur logo.

A leaked screenshot mentions "hourly backups […] saved daily" until your disk is full, which is ambiguous and sounds potentially stupid, but I hope it will soon be clarified, and turn out to be something smarter. Like, only backing up files that have changed.

Mail is cool too. Notes are great, just great. Really. Too bad they look horrendous. It will be an open architecture, so third parties, please fix it ASAP. Mail also recognizes addresses. But will this work with non-English addresses as well?

There was no mention of iLife. I still cling on to my speculation that it will be bundled with Leopard for free. I guess I don't know when to give up. But anyway, iPhoto now integrates with Mail, so that's one more indication that iLife will be part of the OS. Right? Please?

iPhone: no additional features were revealed. We still haven't seen the Calendar or Notes, we still don't know how text editing works in any of the apps. Can you select text? Can you cut and paste? No sign of either has been revealed, ever. Still no Spotlight, either. OK, we have less than a week and we'll see, but I'm beginning to think that version 1.0 of the iPhone OS will be even more stripped-down than I'd thought.

iPhone: a new platform for web applications that could revive the NC concept

2007-06-12T01:27:00.000+02:00

Well, anyone hoping for a real SDK for the iPhone must be disappointed as hell. But then really, how reasonable was it to expect Apple to not just finish the iPhone in time (which we know was a close call), but also create a complete set of developer tools for it, including user interface guidelines and all? I think those who are disappointed kind of deserve to be.

So Steve tossed a bone to developers. His suggestion that they should develop web apps for the iPhone will certainly infuriate a lot of them, and it does seem a bit audacious to me as well. However, I'm sure that once Apple gets around to creating it, a real SDK will be there for all aspiring iPhone developers. But, seeing how carefully Apple wants to control both the stability and the public image of the iPhone, that should take a while. I agree with just about everything that Daniel Eran says on the subject.

However, I also think Steve Jobs is really on to something here. I don't doubt for a second that there will be hundreds, maybe thousands of websites or web applications written specifically for the iPhone. Not just because whenever Jobs speaks, people will start to listen, and stuff will be happening (though the Jobsian charisma is definitely part of it), but also because the iPhone and its Safari web browser will very likely create a new business: that of handheld web applications.

I don't think web applications will replace desktop apps any time soon, though they will certainly continue to complement them. We all know how networks, especially something as slow as EDGE can limit the usefulness of a web application.

However, I think a web app may make a lot more sense on a less powerful handheld device such as the iPhone than on a full-featured desktop or notebook. Here's why:

The iPhone has limited resources, while a web app usually lives on a powerful and scalable server. Therefore the remote app can perform operations faster than a local iPhone application could.
The user interface of a web application is closer to that of an iPhone app than it is to a desktop application. Due to their greatly simplified user interfaces, iPhone apps have fewer advantages over web applications than desktop apps do, so web applications will look less out of place on the device.

Case in point: I've always been struggling with the mail clients on my smartphones. They were slow to connect to the mail server, check for new messages, download them all, make decisions about attachments, and so on. There was also a limit on the number and size of messages that my phones could store.

So I switched to webmail. Google Mail has an okay webmail page for mobile devices, and for my other accounts, I installed IlohaMail on one of my web servers. This open-source PHP script is actually a mail client that lets you access any POP or IMAP mail sever on the internet, much like Apple's Mail App, except that Iloha runs on a server, and you interact with it via a simple web interface. So my web server does the heavy lifting (checking and fetching and rendering mail), all my smartphone does is display it as a web page. I don't have to force my poor little phone to perform loads of network operations, or to store megabytes and megabytes of mails or attachments in its limited memory. It all happens on my web server, and all my phone does is let me interact with all that data. Perfect!

Of course, handling mail should cause no problems for the iPhone. But more complicated tasks might. Heck, even an image editing solution such as Snipshot could probably be rewritten for the iPhone, and fill an important void – at least for the time being, i.e. before Apple opens up development for real, or supplies a native iPhone app that does all of this and more.

Thin clients or network computers never really took off. Well, the iPhone could become one that does – without really trying that hard. There has never been a mass-market handheld device running a full-featured web browser like the iPhone. If this isn't the time for the Great Handheld-Targeted Web Application Revolution, I don't know what is.

Leaked iPhone sales textbook reveals Spartan feature set, lack of AT&T crapware

2007-06-09T21:22:00.000+02:00

Uncharacteristically, Macrumors.com has posted an original story that got picked up by the entire Mac web, featuring the scanned pages of a sales training booklet that helps AT&T employees sell the iPhone.

No significant new features are revealed, though. As the workbook often states the obvious, it might be safe to assume that its failure to mention a functionality (e.g. voice dialing) probably means that the functionality in question is not going to be part of the iPhone, at least at the time of its launch.

The lack of GPS mapping is mentioned as a potential "objection" to be expected from prospective clients, and the guide even offers a canned answer, thanking the client for the feedback and promising to forward it to Apple. Unfortunately, there's no mention of any alternative geographical positioning solution.

Considering all of this, as well as the new TV ads, I'm getting more and more convinced that the iPhone's June 29 incarnation will to be a true 1.0 release, with the absolute minimum functionality Apple deemed necessary for the launch. MMS or voice dialing, which, frankly, nobody uses, have fallen victim to this strategy. The device should wow millions with its sex appeal and user-friendliness, and convert unsuspecting iPod users into smartphone owners.

As for business users, or even simple power users like yours truly: the iPhone will need some improvements to be truly useful for us. For example, I will definitely need to be able to select, copy and paste text, and so far, I haven't seen any indication that this would be possible.
But we are a small, hard-to-please crowd. Clearly, Apple isn't after us, at least not in the beginning.

By the way, for me, the most entertaining parts of the presentation have been the comparisons with other AT&T offerings. It's amazing how much crap AT&T is trying to feed to its customers, and Apple must really feel victorious about shielding iPhone users from all that: the AT&T Music Folder, MEdia Net, Cellular Video, and others all get a mention as no-shows on the device. Apple also doesn't believe in partnering with MobiTV or TeleNav.

OK, it's time for some WWDC predictions

2007-06-07T23:34:00.000+02:00

Let me grab my crystal ball. Damn, where have I put it… Uh, what the hell is it doing in the…? Never mind. I'll just wipe it off. OK, here's what I see.

I see Leopard, Leopard everywhere. It has been neglected. Everyone's talking about the iPhone, almost to the point where Leopard's only new feature seems to be its delayed launch. The WWDC will reverse that.

Speaking of the iPhone: it will definitely get a mention. If some iPhone integration thing is one of Leopard's secret features (outlook hazy), then there will be more talk and demos. Otherwise, just a recap of the January demo, answer to some FAQs, and an update on the then-missing features. As far as the rumored development options (lightweight apps or widgets): nope, I don't think so. It's way too early for that. Unless it's something really limited, like widgets with little or no custom code.

I see the iMac getting an update, not necessarily at the keynote, though. It could happen on Tuesday as well. Depends on how significant an update it is. Rumormongers are talking about a brushed aluminum enclosure, re-positioning the iMac as a pro machine, while discontinuing the 17" model. Well, maybe, but that would be a bit strange: will the Mac mini become the single consumer desktop Mac available? This might be one of the cases when the rumoristas are on to something, but they are getting confused by the reports they are receiving. (I just dropped my crystal ball, but before hitting the floor, it displayed the words "iMac Pro." Hmmmm… The "i" prefix used to be the antonym of the "Power" prefix, but now "Power" is out, and "Pro" is in… So iMac Pro is a possibility. Whatever. Stupid crystal ball. I think it's still under warranty.)

OK, back to Leopard. What will be its top secret features? Here's what I see.

Dot-Mac. I see that poor miserable excuse for a service finally undergoing a long-overdue relaunch, with increased disk space and functionality, tied in neatly to Leopard. I also happen to think that Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board for a reason: to teach Apple how to become a web services company. Remember what happened shortly after Gap CEO Millard Drexler joined Apple's board? (Hint: Apple became the best retailer in America.)

iLife. I think iLife will simply become a part of Leopard. It will be free, updates and all. It might be also integrated even more tightly into the OS, as in Finder contextual menus, etc.

Appearance. Will it change drastically, as everyone seems to hope, believe, or simply know? Nope. Brushed metal will be gone, Core Animation will be all over the place (I think Apple is the biggest customer of its own dog food when it comes to system frameworks.) But I don't think Aqua is going anywhere.

And… this is the point when the hard disk of my crystal ball died. I have checked it in for repair, but they say it won't be ready till Monday the earliest, and it will be far too late by then. Damn, it was just getting to the most exciting parts.

So I can't tell, for example, it Apple plans to announce some new device or new technology, like multi-touch input-output devices. I don't think so, though. Leopard needs to grab as much of the focus as it can.

Breaking news: Apple posts iPhone ads, sets release date

2007-06-04T01:41:00.000+02:00

See here. Release date is confirmed at June 29.

Notice how the ads all mention the phone functionality as a punch line, almost as some extra bit that you wouldn't expect from the product, despite the "phone" in its name. The first ad extolls the virtues of the iPhone as an iPod, which seems to further corroborate the speculation that Apple won't release a "phoneless iPhone" true video iPod any time soon.

I hope Apple will buy its soul back from AT&T one day

2007-05-08T17:20:00.000+02:00

Apple wants to make sure nothing goes wrong at the launch of the iPhone. For a while, everything else is taking a back seat, as customers are suffering in silence. You shouldn't expect any iPod updates any time soon. Leopard has been delayed. But the worse news is the oldest: Apple is teaming up with AT&T in an exclusive deal, tying all U.S. purchases of the phone to an AT&T subscription plan.

Apple gets help in something it has never done before: launching a mobile phone.

In exchange, it has agreed to sell its soul.

Everyone congratulated Apple for playing hardball with yet another industry (after successfully tackling record labels): there will be no stickers, no joint branding, no silly AT&T applications compromising the beautiful iPhone. Yet I beg to differ. I think buying an iPhone will be riddled with huge compromises.

Apple users are seen as discerning customers with a good taste, people who want value for money, who cannot be fooled into restrictive contracts.

This is why I think it's just simply against the DNA of Apple and its users to sell a cellphone that only works with one provider.

When I bought my Handspring Treo 270 smartphone four years ago (a revolutionary product in its own right), it came without a subscription or a subsidy. I took the SIM card out of my old phone, and put it into my Treo. That was it, I could start making phone calls right away. For data access, I had to change a few settings. It took me five minutes.

Later I switched mobile carriers. All I needed to do was replace the SIM card, and I was good to go. When I traveled abroad, I could just buy a pre-paid SIM card and pop it in, for much better rates. And if I wanted to, I could use my Treo without any SIM card at all, as it had lots of functionalities that didn't require one.

Today, Palm (previously Handspring, previously... never mind) offers subsidized as well as "unlocked" versions of its Treo phones. I think this is how a self-respecting customer buys an expensive, revolutionary smartphone. There should be a choice.

As for the iPhone: you absolutely have to get a plan from AT&T. There's no other way to buy one.

If you have another plan with another carrier, you have to cancel it or keep paying both.
If you go abroad, you have to pay roaming fees.
If you just want the device for its other uses (iPod, WiFi-enabled internet device) and aren't interested in a mobile carrier plan at the moment, again, you're out of luck.

In essence: If you want this date with the sexy iPhone, you'll just have to endure its big hairy uncle AT&T joining you for a threesome.

This isn't exactly the kind of hardball Apple plays with the music industry. Sure, if you want to purchase songs from iTunes, you'll have to settle for what the labels are selling you (though Apple is there to watch out for the terms). But that's where the analogy ends. if you don't like the iTunes Store, you never have to use it. Sales of iPod might be just fine without the approval of the five record labels. And Steve Jobs does display a "take it or leave it" mentality when dealing with the labels, when refusing to increase prices, when urging them to drop DRM in open letters. He's the last chance for a crumbling industry, and he knows it. His offers aren't supposed to be turned down.

Not so with the iPhone and AT&T. It's not the Apple with the pirate flag any more. It's not the defiant Apple we know and love. Nope, it's AT&T's little obedient lapdog that we see there. AT&T may significantly help Apple reach its iPhone sales goals, but I think Apple and its clients are paying a great price for this.

While I have no sources to back me up on this one, I'm also pretty sure AT&T has a say in what can and cannot go into the iPhone. I'm sure Skype or iChat, maybe the most natural applications for the device, were vetoed by the telecom giant as they could compete with its voice services. Basically any hope that the iPhone could truly change the mobile phone industry was lost when Apple went to bed with one of its giants.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a realist. I understand that initial sales of the iPhone are the single most important data that matters in the life of this product. This is what everyone, including investors, competitors, the entire cellphone industry and the media will be looking at. Apple has to get that right in order to establish itself in this new market. This is probably why it entered into such an uncharacteristic contract.

I just hope that eventually, Apple will be able to buy back its soul, and get out of this lousy, restrictive deal that screws its customers. I want to be able to buy an iPhone without being forever tethered to some big, dumb, evil telephone company.

Also, it remains to be seen how Apple plans to pull off the iPhone launch in Europe: a much bigger, more saturated, more mature cellphone market. A similar strategy might simply crash and burn in the old continent, where the iPod (a major iPhone component/selling point) isn't as strong as in America. For example, the iPod only has 28% of the German market.

Palm to compete against own OS: well done, folks!

2007-04-21T15:49:00.000+02:00

According to a Register story (Palm distances itself from Windows), Palm, Inc. is dropping Windows Mobile and adopting Linux.

In reality, it is likely that Palm will emulate its former stablemate, Palmsource (formerly the software arm of the company, which was spun off and then acquired by Japan's Access and is now focused on adapting features of the Palm UI for a mobile Linux platform). In other words, it will concentrate for its uniqueness on navigation, widgets, and other critical features of the modern mobile UI

So, allow me to recap some of this sad saga. Execs from a struggling Palm left to create Handspring. It made a hit, the Treo. But Palm owned the OS. Palm bought Handspring, so everything was finally in one hand. Palm could have started to be building the whole widget, just like Apple.

But it wasn't meant to be. Palm spun off its OS to PalmSource, then licensed it back. Then Palm decided to use Windows Mobile. Meanwhile, PalmSource (now part of Access) was moving the Palm OS (now known as Garnet) to Linux. So what does Palm do? Also try to move the same OS to Linux on its own, so it can reduce licensing fees.

Let me guess: when Palm is done with its new OS (and renames itself about three more times, to maybe to PalmTwo, Treo, Inc., and then back to Palm), it will spin off the new OS as well. Or maybe spin off the Treo. Yeah, I think that one is certainly in the cards.

Or, at least, it will sell the Treo name and license it back.

Is Apple Planning iPhoto for Windows?

2007-04-19T18:25:00.000+02:00

No.

Honestly, I'm just sick of everyone in this stupid Edelman/PC Mag/Twitter story

2007-04-18T23:41:00.000+02:00

This made news, I guess, because Twitter was involved. Do you remember the time when bloggers started explaining how they first heard of Twitter, and what the hell it is anyway? Me neither. You know, all bloggers have always known all about Twitter, so this is why they just started dropping its name whenever they felt the time was ripe. You know, me too. That Twitter. I'm not going to admit that I only got around to first reading about Twitter some three weeks ago. As a blogger, being well-informed is what I'm all about, and I always know about everything. Even if I don't say so.

Anyway, here's the story. Edelman PR is a company representing several tech firms. Its senior vice president Steve Rubel gets a free subscription to PC Magazine, and throws it in the trash. Tsk, tsk. Worse, he chooses to tell all the world about it via Twitter, even though his company routinely begs the editor of that very magazine in his trashcan if he could pretty please write about its clients.

I'm going out on a limb here, but my guess is that this may have been caused by Olympic-sized stupidity, and/or psychopathic tendencies that are not uncommon among senior vice presidents.

But anyway, PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jim Louderback learns this, and throws a hissy fit like I've last seen in fifth grade. He's taking his ball home:

Should I instruct the staff to avoid covering Edelman's clients? Ignore their requests for meetings, reviews and news stories?

I know Louderback meant this as a rhetorical question, but the answer actually exists: no.

Duh.

Louderback is an editor. His job is to know what matters to his readers, and then instruct his reporters to write about those things.

I somehow doubt that many PC Magazine readers think along the lines of "I wish they stopped covering all the companies who happen to be the clients of that PR firm whose senior vice president wrote something nasty the other day."

Or is it just me?

Yet his childish rant goes on:

I did a quick search through my recent email, and found that over the past few weeks Edelman staff pitched me about news and new products from Palm, MarkMonitor, Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft (hardware and Xbox), Eyespot.com, Vulcan Flipstart and Dash Navigation. Heck, they even pitched me yesterday on the release of Adobe's new Creative Suite 3, which has to be relevant to at least some of the 11 million folks we reach across our magazine, web and video properties each month. And then I realized that this was probably just the callous act of a rogue Edelman exec, and it didn't necessarily reflect the views of the rest of the company. Still, it made me wonder. And in the future, if I'm on the fence, I'll probably be somewhat less inclined to take a meeting with one of Edelman's clients.

OK. So if it weren't for Edelman, PC Magazine would never have covered Palm, Microsoft or Adobe.

Riiiiight.

And if some psycho at the same Edelman, a PR firm that no PC Magazine reader has ever heard of, says something nasty, the magazine will stop covering all these companies.

Here's the slogan of PC Magazine: the independent guide to technology.

If I were a subscriber, I'd cancel now.

And Twitter about it.

Europe: a fragmented market for the iPhone, despite EU-wide carriers

2007-04-17T23:17:00.000+02:00

According to AppleInsider, Vodafone is seen as the most likely European carrier for the iPhone. So, Europe will have a single iPhone carrier, just like the U.S., right?

Wrong. In Europe, Vodafone is not a company, it's a brand. In some countries, Vodafone Group Plc. has subsidiaries, in others, it has affiliates, and in yet others, only partners without any ownership affiliation. According to Wikipedia, Vodafone is present through partners only in as many as 12 of the 27 EU countries!

How fast will Vodafone get all these companies to launch the iPhone in their respective markets? Unless Apple bitches and moans and threatens the world's largest telecom company into getting its act together, there can be several-month differences between introductions in different member states, as has been the case with many cellphone launches. (One I have been experiencing, waiting for months in frustration, was the Sony Ericsson P910i a few years ago. The Hungarian launch came months after the UK and German introductions.)

The EU isn't a single telecom market yet: it's actually 27 separate markets, with their own separate national telecom authorities. This is supposed to change after this summer, but the iPhone will most likely still need 27 approvals.

Worse, the 27 Vodafones and Vodafone partners are very separate entities who don't really talk to each other. Yet another personal anecdote: when I moved abroad, I asked Vodafone if I could transfer my two-year subscription to the Vodafone in my new home country. Of course not.

Apart from the brand, there's very little in common between the different Vodafones in the EU. Terms, prices and services vary greatly. I wonder how Apple will manage.

So should Apple choose another carrier? Nope, my post wouldn't be much different if, say, T-Mobile were the most likely candidate. It's not a Vodafone problem, it's an EU problem.

Just think about the iTunes store. I'm not sure if everyone knows, but 12 of the EU's 27 member states still have no access to the store. (It's a different 12 from the countries without a Vodafone affiliate, so no, it's not a pattern.) Establishing a single European market is a great endeavor, and the EU has come a long way, but there's still a lot of distance to cover.

Do Apple's Final Cut intro videos contain synthesized speech?

2007-04-16T02:42:00.000+02:00

Apple has just released Final Cut Studio 2. The package is jaw-dropping. My favorite is the all-new Motion, with 3D capabilities and a vast array of other additional features.

While watching the introductory videos of all the various components of the Studio, I noticed something strange about the voice-over. At first, I thought, "Damn, who is this new guy? Something is bothering me about him." There was something strange about his intonation. And then I realized what: it very closely followed some pre-defined patterns. Upon further thought, I've made a wild guess: that guy probably isn't human.

Decide for yourselves, but if that's synthesized speech, it's pretty damn impressive. It sounds 99% human. It could be passed off as human. It's a huge improvement even over Alex, the great new voice coming soon to Leopard.

If it's just some guy who does voice-overs for a living, I apologize. But if not, I'm speechless.

Apple to rethink scrolling and mice?

2007-04-14T02:21:00.000+02:00

Two of Apple's hardware patent filings have made the news this Friday.

The first, discovered by AppleInsider, describes a new Mighty Mouse design that ditches the problematic scroll ball, and lets the user switch between a "traditional" (cursor control) mode and a "pan/scroll" mode by adjusting the position of the fingers holding the mouse. In the latter mode, mouse movement would translate into scrolling, and the pointer would not move.

It may sound like a nice idea at first, but it has some serious problems. First of all, while the current two hand positions that let users choose between "right" and "left" clicking are fine by me, apparently some users find it confusing. I'm not sure if introducing yet other hand positions for switching between yet other modes is a good idea.

The "scrolling mode" itself also leaves me scratching my head. It's nothing new: many traditional scroll-wheel mice have such a mode which you can enter and exit by pressing the scroll wheel. I use such a mouse at work, and I hardly ever use that feature.

Modes are bad. I've been conditioned all my life to using the mouse to point; now I'd be supposed to use the same motion for scrolling. To me, the concept of moving the mouse for anything other than moving the pointer is totally alien. It's like using the steering wheel to shift gears.

When I scroll, I expect to have my mouse remain stationary. And I don't want to readjust my hand position every time I want to scroll. So thanks, but no thanks.

I think all Apple needs to do is, really, just fix the damn scroll ball, so that it works and keeps working. Perhaps a new design should avoid the use of moving parts. But how would that be possible?

One idea that Apple was toying with (and filed a patent for) was the rotary wheel mouse, which would have featured an iPod-like wheel on top of a mouse. The patent application itself starts by dissing traditional scroll wheels in order to establish the superiority of the proposed solution. Ironically, its arguments also stand valid against the scroll ball solution Apple eventually adopted:

the user must scroll, pick up a finger, scroll, pick up a finger, etc. This takes time and can be an annoyance to a user. In addition, because a portion of the wheel protrudes above the top surface of the mouse, inadvertent or accidental scrolling may occur when one of the two buttons is activated.

The rotary wheel would have allowed lengthy, continuous scrolling, without lifting a finger. Note how neither the Mighty Mouse nor the new "dual-mode" mouse can do that.

So what was wrong with the rotary mouse? Simple: it would let you scroll either only vertically or only horizontally, just like traditional scroll wheel mice. This is probably why the idea was ditched, and the omnidirectional scroll ball emerged as a solution. At least for the time being.

Incidentally, this is why I don't think today's other hardware patent filing, the one about yet another iPod-esque rotary wheel put on a keyboard, is going to go anywhere.

I think rotary wheels are on their way out anyway. Looks like the iPhone won't have one, not even a touch-screen implementation featured in yet another patent filing. And I think it's a safe bet that the iPhone's interface will eventually, over the next three or four years, trickle down all the way to the iPod nano.

So, I think Apple should go back to the drawing board if it wants to dump the scroll ball. I have some suggestions, and I'll post them soon. Stay tuned!

Is the desktop dead? You wish!

2007-04-08T23:49:00.000+02:00

Paul Graham says Microsoft's dead. I think his statement is a bit premature, but in essence, right: while still hugely profitable, Microsoft has become yet another big dumb company that matters less and less. The once fearful software dinosaur keeps (admittedly) playing catch-up to Apple's software innovations, and just about every new endeavor it attempts ends up as a humiliating failure.

But according to Graham, the main reason behind Microsoft's demise is... the death of the desktop. Ouch.

Everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

He links to Snipshot, a web application with basic image editing capabilities to prove the Photoshop point.

While impressive and useful in some circumstances, I'd be hard-pressed to find that app anything more than a novelty today.

So is Graham a Photoshop power user? Here's his background:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He's currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

OK. I'm a bit tired of visionaries and web programmers pronouncing the desktop dead.

I'm a bit sick of platform-independent enthusiasts, including subcontractors I've worked with throughout my career, dismissing very legitimate usability and performance concerns. If the work you do involves several files, complex and quick actions, and a thousand clicks per hour, nothing comes close to a dedicated desktop application.

So let's talk again when someone develops a web-based version of, say, iLife. And yes, it does need to include optimized scrolling and full-screen slideshows in iPhoto, recording in iMovie, DVD encoding and burning in iDVD, and all the rich user interface features such as Exposé, multiple windows, drag and drop, immediate feedback, and acceptable performance. It might be possible in five years, but honestly, would it be worth the hassle?

Remember how television was supposed to kill the cinema? The desktop isn't going anywhere either.

Why the iPhone is a safe bet for Apple

2007-03-30T13:12:00.000+02:00

Does Apple run a huge risk with the iPhone? It has been pointed out several times just how competitive the cellphone market is, how unfamiliar Apple is with the sector, and how hard it may be for the company to succeed.

It might appear that Apple has sunk tremendous R&D costs into developing the iPhone: it's truly a revolutionary product, with hundreds of patents and breakthrough features. In creating the iPhone, Apple even ported OS X to a different processor, and shoehorned it into a tiny handheld device! And unlike the clumsy mobile version of Windows (whose name is seemingly changed more frequently than Steve Ballmer's underwear), the iPhone OS actually seems like a product that has actually been adapted to the needs of its users.

What if the iPhone fails? Will Apple just write off all the time and money it invested into it? Will all that great technology be thrown out, and will the company sulk back to manufacturing Macs and iPods?

No. First of all, I think the iPhone is very unlikely to fail. I think people want it badly. They can hardly wait to get one. The momentum that has been building up behind the iPhone should be strong enough to guarantee exceptional sales.

But even if initial reaction proves to be less than stellar, Apple can pretty much still fix the product in software: it can add killer features, it can open it up as a development platform, and so on. The possibilities are endless, especially in light of the Cocoa frameworks that enable rapid software development.

But let's imagine the worst-case scenario, a Cube-style disaster. Let's imagine that the iPhone sells so badly that Apple needs to discontinue it. Then what?

Here's what would happen then. Apple's stock would tank. Paul Thurott, Rob Enderle, and that other idiot whose name I forget would celebrate by tap dancing and farting.

And about three seconds later, Apple would release a new generation of the iPod that would make everyone's jaw drop.

It would be the iPhone without the phone. It would play widescreen movies. It would use multi-touch. It would have your photo library on it. You could take notes with it. It would still be a PDA. It would have WiFi, it would have Safari, it would have Google Earth, it would have Skype.

It would do things that AT&T/Cingular would never let the iPhone do. It would have dozens of gigabytes of flash memory. And it would sell below $400.

And this thing would sell like nothing has sold ever before.

How do I know?

Easy. That's because such an iPod is coming anyway. Can you imagine this not happening? Will the iPod forever have a screen the size of a keyhole? Starting June, if you want the best iPod Apple has made, you will have to buy the iPhone. That's yet another way Apple wants to help the sales of the phone. But obviously, that will change eventually: shouldn't the iPod be the best iPod ever made? How long can it afford to be out-iPodded by another product?!

Obviously, Apple's releasing a higher-end product first. If it created a widescreen iPod before the iPhone, the latter would sell worse. So the new iPod will have to wait. How long it will have to wait depends largely on the success of the iPhone, I think.

But I'm convinced that the new, "iPhone without a phone" iPod is already ready, and mass production could start any moment a certain red phone rings.

And of course, now that OS X has been ported to a tiny device, Apple will never be the same company again.

And it's not an isolated phenomenon, either. Apple TV has turned out to be a stripped-down Mac, running Mac OS X, performing a dedicated function. For $300. Am I the only one who thinks that the implications of this are huge?

Apple is taking computing into completely new places. It's porting OS X left, right and center. Who knows what products Apple has in the pipeline?

The iPhone is just a beginning. Sure, it's important for Apple that it succeed. Yet even in the unlikely event that it fails, the technologies behind it are ready to power several other products, including iPods with pretty much guaranteed sales.

George Ou: all your gerbils are belong to us

2007-03-20T11:33:00.000+01:00

George Ou is a blogger for ZDNet. You may be familiar with the clueless ramblings of this anti-Apple zealot, especialy if you've followed, in an ultimate test of geeky monomania, the story that Crazy Apple Rumors (seriously) covered under the apt title Security Bitch Watch, a sad series of events with so many twists, turns and so much idiocy that it would leave your head spinning, hadn't you fallen asleep about two minutes into it.

In his latest misguided rant, he argues that Apple shouldn't mock Vista's user access control system as annoying and insecure, since the Mac's similar system is even more so: it actually requires you to type your password (so it's more annoying), and requires that pretty rarely (so it's less secure). Touché!

But the true embarrassment arrives in the comments string, where Ou attempts to drive his point home by referring to none other than the infamous Joseph Gerbils.

Joseph Gerbils.

At first I thought I was missing some American cultural reference. But after staring blankly at the screen for about 20 seconds, frowning, and finally saying the name out loud, it dawned upon me that Ou actually meant to say Joseph Goebbels.

The Macalope gently classified this as a typo, but I beg to differ.

This ain't no typo. A typo means that you know how to spell something, but you miss it.

Spelling Goebbels as Gerbils means that you've never seen that name written down. You've only heard it spoken. And you may or may not have a clue who the hell this archvillain actually was.

In any case, you're talking about things you don't know that much about.

Um, when was that other time Ou was talking about stuff he didn't know much about? Was it maybe all the time?

Ou has this to say about the whole fiasco:

If that's how you want to judge me, that's your prerogative. I'm an IT guy; I don't spell German very well especially when I'm posting improvised notes in a comment section. But if that means you won't take my IT advice seriously (or at least objectively), I can only ask you to reconsider. Thanks for the correction.

He doesn't spell German very well.

Damn.

I didn't know he was trying to spell German there. Good thing he told us. I thought he had what may be called a "brain fart." One of those embarrassing moments when you absent-mindedly do or say something really stupid. A momentary lapse of reason.

But no, this was a real attempt at spelling German. He made an effort, and now thinks, based on the result, that his German spelling skill is "not very good."

Let me help clarify things a little here. If you spell Goebbels as "Göbbels" or "Goebels," we can agree that your German spelling is, no offense, but really "not very good."

However, if you spell it as "Gerbils," you're a jackass. It's hysterical. It's All Your Base caliber. You deserve to be laughed at till the day you die.

George Ou apparently thought that the way to spell a German word was to find the rodent whose name sounds the closest in English.

There's no use in trying to explain it away. Here's my advice to George Ou: quit writing. Now. And hide in a cave.

By the way, "advice" is spelled "Rat" in German. Don't try to pronounce it.

Update: There must have been a horrible misunderstanding. Joseph Gerbils was real. Read the comment below!

Quote of the week from Daniel Eran

2007-03-13T18:46:00.000+01:00

History reveals that partnering with Microsoft is like accepting a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter. One might as well just roll in seasonings and jump in the oven.

Gotta love the man. Great article, too.

Steve Jobs and his case of incredible backdating stock options

2007-02-16T03:04:00.000+01:00

Looks like some stock options were being backdated at Pixar as well. Ouch.

Gates: Vista sucks, dunno how to fix it

2007-02-14T23:00:00.000+01:00

OK, I've just read the infamous Bill Gates Newsweek interview, where the man tells some of the most embarrassingly bold-faced lies ever heard.

As the interview went live, like, five decades ago in internet years, it has since received most of the flak it deserves, for example, by the excellent Macalope.

However, I would like to reflect on a few things now, when the dust has more or less settled.

It has been covered that the interview sounds like a frustrated rant about Apple and the Mac, even though the whole piece was supposed to be about Vista, the brand new shiny Windows version that should have licensed the "65 million years of adventure in the making" slogan from Jurassic Park (at least, in internet years). Yet I find it noteworthy that in the interview, it was Gates who brought up Apple first:

The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.

Boom! He is talking about Windows security, and suddenly, he has to leash out against Apple, apropos nothing.

When did Microsoft become the underdog? Is it the beginning of the end? Is Microsoft growing tired of playing catch-up to Apple in just about everything except sheer volume? Is Bill Gates relapsing into the state of mind of his youth when Apple was the big guy and Microsoft was the poor wannabe? Does he fear that his company is going full circle after all these years?

But the real shocker comes later. When asked whether there will be another major version of Windows in three or four years, Gates has a staggering, unbelievable thing to say. I had to read it like four times, just to make sure I'm getting it right, and not missing a comma or a word somewhere. Here's what the chairman of Microsoft is saying about the latest and greatest version of Windows, the ubiquitous operating system that powers (yeah, right) 90% of all PCs worldwide:

Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Microsoft knows that Vista isn't good enough. But it has no idea how to make it better. So check back in about three or four years.

Um... If you're this bad about what you're doing, Dear Microsoft, and even your chairman knows… shouldn't you just quit?!

This is not humility or modesty. This is a flat-out admission of incompetence.
Looks like Microsoft has no quibbles about manufacturing the operating system for people who don't care. Hm. Maybe they should trademark that and use it as a slogan.

Fake Steve should write Apple's PR

2007-02-08T17:53:00.000+01:00

Fake Steve's thoughts on the iPod lock-in complaints:

it's akin to people saying, "I already bought this record on vinyl and it will only play on my turntable and not on my CD player. I mean I've tried putting it in the CD player and it's not even the right size! How can you sell me a piece of music that locks me in to one kind of player? And forget about putting it on my Zune! I tried that too and there's not even a slot where you can load the vinyl record in."

The man is good. He should be Apple's next CEO after the real Steve retires.
But here's a real prediction: he will either write editorials for mainstream newspapers, or have some sort of a presence at an Apple event within 12 months.

In search of Spotlight on the iPhone

2007-02-06T22:59:00.000+01:00

Only a handful of people outside Apple have had the chance to hold an iPhone in their hands, so we only know about it what Apple has publicly demonstrated (or allowed some lucky journalists to see on the few working prototypes).

Almost all of the functionality that Steve Jobs showed at the keynote is being presented as a series of demo movies on Apple's iPhone page, with the same glaring omissions (e.g. Notes and Calendar are both MIA).

This indicates that the iPhone isn't ready yet. Apple hasn't commented on the iPhone's features beyond what was revealed in January, so the product is still shrouded in a great deal of secrecy. In other words, what we haven't seen is either not planned, or simply not yet ready. We just don't know.

But one thing we really should have seen (but didn't) in a lot of the demos is the famous Mac OS X search box. The box with the rounded corners and the magnifying glass icon that first appeared in iTunes user interface, and became its main selling points. The box that has become synonymous with Mac OS X itself, the box that now appears in the Finder, in Mail, and just about every self-respecting Cocoa application. The search box that is now the front door to an excellent (and much-hyped) OS X search technology: Spotlight.

And that search box ain't there on the iPhone*.

We know that iPhone runs OS X. (Not Mac OS X, mind you, but still, some OS X. Jobs made a big deal of it at the keynote, listing its advantages and features.

Conspicuously missing was Spotlight.

Is it conceivable that Apple would ship its (first version of the) iPhone without Spotlight?

If one of the most important features of iTunes has been the easy searchability of large music libraries, how can the same feature be absent from the first iPod where it would be conceivable?

Scrolling through songs and genres and albums and so on is great, and it's fun, too, with the addictive multi-touch user interface. (I haven't tried it, but I'll believe whomever says so.) Yet why not let me search, too, just like in iTunes? What if I don't know the first word of a song's title? What if I only know the last name of the singer?

Jobs seemed especially proud of the iPhone's solution for a keyboard. Why not put it to some use then?

How about contacts? The Treo has got that one thing right. Shouldn't the iPhone at least match it?

As Jobs demonstrated the official way to select contacts, I was shaking my head. Again, flicking through names is cool, but quickly selecting contacts from a list has been done, and has been done better. Way better.

Even ordinary cellphones let you type in the first few characters of a name, and narrow your often-huge contact list down to your search results. Even with the cheapest multi-tap (not to be confused with Multi-touch) Nokia phones, one can quickly find a contact this way.

And if your phone has a QWERTY keyboard, the speed increase becomes dramatic. Add a smart search functionality, like that of the Treo, and (as Jobs would say) Boom! In literally less than a second after taking your smartphone in your hand, after all you did was type a few characters from a contact's name (could be as few as three keystrokes), you're one button press away from placing a call to the person you had in mind!

Flashy graphics aside, OS X notwithstanding, and however natural scrolling feels, it's dramatically less efficient to find and select a contact on the iPhone without a search functionality.

And again, what if you only remember a first name? A company name? A job title? A city?

Doesn't it just feel wrong if the iPhone won't give you one of the coolest, most useful OS X features: the possibility to narrow down a long list based on simply entering various uncategorized search criteria? Wouldn't such search functionality be the most useful on a handheld device, notably a cellphone, which you often use in urgent situations?

Spotlight alone, if fully implemented, could make the iPhone stand out even among the geekiest of smartphones. On the other hand, without any implementation of a search functionality, the iPhone could prove to be woefully inadequate in a field with cut-throat competition.

*Google Earth does have a search box, but I haven't found one anywhere else in any iPhone demo.

Google Maps: lack of international searches boggles the mind

2007-01-29T23:14:00.000+01:00

Google Maps should beat the hell out of ViaMichelin, with its maps superimposed over satellite images (if you want them that way), and its searching capabilities. But when you try to use Google Maps to search for an address that isn't located in the United States, most of the time, you'll get no results. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien.

It's not that Google Maps doesn't know about the street you're looking for. When you navigate there, you'll find it. By hand. By dragging the map. But searching for it? Nope.

What the hell is going on here? Wasn't Google started by two geeks who didn't care about anything but creating the perfect search engine? Isn't Google still about searching? Isn't it Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Since then, of course, Google has ballooned into an entire economy of its own, and it's easier to list the services it isn't offering as of 2006. (Full disclosure: Mac Thought Crime is powered by Blogger, also acquired by Google.) But has the company lost its focus in the process?

And ironically, while search sometimes doesn't work at all, it also tries to be too smart.
What's wrong with ViaMichelin's way of categorized information? I fill in the street and the city, and – boom! It's there.

It's not hard. It's no harder than typing the entire address in one text box and letting the software find out what I meant. Especially if it finds nothing. Or when the address is ambiguous, unless you specify what each part stands for: is it a city, a street, or a country?

Looks like it's hight time Google adopted another slogan to complement its famous "Don't Be Evil" motto: "Don't Suck."

Palm nosedive continues with more naming silliness

2007-01-26T12:43:00.000+01:00

Something was bound to happen, as there has been no name change, merger, acquisition or spinoff involving Palm for more than two hours straight.

The last time we checked, palmOne had acquired Handspring, and fearing that it would somehow end up controlling both the hardware and the software, spun off the OS into a new company, PalmSource. Then palmOne renamed itself Palm, for about the third time.

Now, Macworld reports that Access Co. Ltd., a company that had acquired PalmSource (and sold the PalmSource name back to Palm), is renaming Palm OS Garnet OS. In order to strengthen that brand, the phrase "Palm Powered" will be replaced everywhere.

To "Access Powered."

You can't make up stuff like this.

Widescreen Beatles Super Bowl iPod? I don't think so

2007-01-25T11:37:00.000+01:00

According to AppleGazette, people predict that a widescreen iPod would debut, loaded with Beatles songs (similarly to the U2 iPod), either at the Super Bowl in less than two weeks, or at Apple's rumored February 20 event.

I don't think so.

Beatles? Maybe. Steve Jobs did play a lot of Beatles during his last keynote, so many suspect an announcement regarding the addition of Beatles tracks to the iTunes Store is imminent. Either that, or Jobs was just being, well, Jobs again, asking for forgiveness rather than permission, just like with that Eminem commercial earlier (or with the iPhone name later). It's hard to tell, but one would think the former version to be more likely, what with the decades-long Apple vs. Apple saga.

My problem is with the widescreen part. Apple has just announced a widescreen iPod: it's called the iPhone. One of the main selling points of Apple's upcoming cellphone will be being "the best iPod" ever made. Apple wants to firmly establish it as its new platform. Apple wants to sell a lot of it. And Apple sure as hell doesn't want to cannibalize its sales with a competing product.

The iPhone won't ship for another five months. What would happen if a product went on sale next month, offering an attractive subset of the iPhone's functionality, including its mulititouch user interface, presumably a hard disk, and no shackles tying it to an evil cellphone company?

How silly would Apple appear for announcing a product months ahead, only to upstage it with a competing product that ships immediately?

That's right. The iPhone could be close to DOA. It could pull a Zune.

Unless Apple has been working on a completely different widescreen iPod, with a seriously dumbed-down multitouch user interface, I don't expect a widescreen version until the iPhone has shipped, and its first-quarter sales numbers have come out strong. I'd rather expect either price drops with but cosmetic changes to the current form factor, or not even that much.

I'm not expecting a widescreen, phoneless iPod running OS X and featuring a lot of the iPhone technologies until the next Christmas buying season.

Oh, and there's another reason why it's difficult to imagine a widescreen iPod going on sale in Q1, 2007: apparently, parts of the iPhone software, notably the Notes app, aren't ready yet. And iPods also have notes. No demo of the Calendar application (another iPod staple) has been seen anywhere yet, either.

Will iLife or iWork be part of Leopard?

2007-01-23T18:16:00.000+01:00

One of the already announced (and least impressive) features of Leopard will be being a "complete package," i.e. apps like Photo Booth, Front Row, Boot camp, etc. will be part of the core OS, not just something randomly available on some Macs, or something you can download as a beta.

However, that isn't much. How about integrating iLife and/or iWork deeper into Leopard, and discontinuing it as a separate product? How about free updates throughout the lifespan of Leopard?

Several rumors suggest that iWork will depend on Leopard technologies, and people speculate the same thing about iLife as well.

Apple has just had a billon-dollar quarter (in profits, not revenues), so it might as well write off the relatively small amounts of money these two packages make (both are sold at ridiculously low prices). In return, the Mac could become an even more attractive platform for switchers, and it could convince yet more of its installed base to switch over to Leopard.

As with rumors and speculation: we will see.

Hey, Cisco, just stop being obnoxious!

2007-01-13T22:33:00.000+01:00

A Canadian news source has some details on the Apple vs. Cisco case over the iPhone trademark.

Can Apple, for once, use the rumors defense? As in, everyone had known for months that Apple was going to release an iPhone, a fact that Cisco, a trademark squatter with nefarious intents, chose to willfully take unfair advantage of.

When 99 out of 100 people would associate the iPhone name with Apple, Cisco, in an obnoxious and childish ploy that amused only idiots, released some painfully uninspiring product by that name, so it could show it around in court, get some publicity, and try to force Apple into literally "being friends" and "playing with" Cisco.

While this defense would hold little water in court, and the whole affair is reminiscent of the old, legendary cheeky ways of Steve Jobs, who, at least according to the less-than-accurate iCon book, similarly failed to secure the Macintosh trademark in due time, let's just all agree that the iPhone name just belongs to Apple. I would be disappointed if Apple were to change it to "Apple phone," "MacPhone" or "iPod phone." It would be a shame.

Hey, Cisco's "iPhone" already got greater publicity than it ever deserved. Let Cisco sell the whole trademark to Apple for ten million dollars, and give its own pathetic excuse for an iPhone a real, serious Cisco-like name like "ONS 15310-MA MSPP."

My first 25 random questions about the iPhone (updated with some answers)

2007-01-09T22:39:00.000+01:00

Is Bill Gates calling Steve Ballmer about now, asking him in a broken, nervous whisper, "We didn't do that Zune thing after all, did we? It was just an idea we dropped, right?"
What processor does the iPhone have?
Probably an ARM. But definitely not an Intel (according to Intel, and they should know).
Will there be developer tools for the iPhone?
No. Apple execs tell Gizmodo that, "like an iPod, it won't be an open system that people can develop for."
Will iPod games run on the iPhone?
Stupid question, sorry. As the OS is different, it's hardly likely.
Can we say Apple released a tablet computer today?
Why isn't the iPhone full of Spotlight search boxes? They could be really useful.
What kind of Widgets can the iPhone run?
How many pundits will announce today that Apple is no longer interested in the Mac?
Does the iPhone have a clipboard?
Does the iPhone support drag and drop?
Can the iPhone squirt?
Just about now, does Palm CEO Ed Colligan start feeling really stupid? And insecure?
Will the iPhone display PDF files?
Yes, though it won't open Office documents.
Can the iPhone download things from the iTunes Store? Why not?
Nope (see the same Gizmodo piece). I can see, by the way, why it's not so easy.
What kind of OS X does the iPhone run?
"Not OS X proper," say Apple execs according to Gizmodo. Looks like OS X has just been moved to yet another processor (though this is not Mac OS X, just OS X.)
Is the iPhone GUI any indication for the upcoming Leopard look?
How much will an iPhone cost without a contract?
Looks like that simply won't be an option. Damn.
Are all smartphone manufacturers looking at their screens just about now, with a blank stare, swallowing repeatedly?
Can the iPhone do GPRS?
Can you save files from iPhone apps? Can you access them from your Mac?
What other phone functionality does it have? Voice dial? Alarm clock?
What angle will bloggers use to ridicule the iPhone?
Will the HD-based iPods become phone-less iPhones eventually?
When will we learn the answers to about a million technical questions that are on everyone's minds?
How many journalists are typing the words "Zune killer" somewhere right now?

It's official: iPhone is the Next Big Thing

2007-01-09T20:51:00.000+01:00

Wow. It's real. It's a smartphone indeed. It's also an iPod. And what few hoped or predicted, it's also a handheld computer, in the truest sense of the word. And it is called iPhone.

All in all, it seems to be almost exactly what I was secretly hoping for.

Here's where I wondered if Apple was going to add advanced input capabilities to an upcoming iPod:

If and when the touchscreen iPod becomes real, it could allow for an input area large enough to contain a QWERTY keypad [...]. And if the iPod gets a QWERTY, it may take on a completely new life with vastly expanded capabilities. Its software is quite advanced even today, and just imagine what could happen to the platform if its greatest limitation, its lack of input options, could be overcome...

(Apple files yet another weird hardware patent, Mac Thought Crime, November 17)

Here's where I speculated that Apple could revive the ailing PDA market with the iPod:

In what would be a small step for Apple, but a great step for the ailing PDA market, a new-generation iPod could sprout advanced PDA features any day, and take over the PDA market overnight.

(How the iPod could save the PDA without trying (too hard), Mac Thought Crime, November 21)

Here's where I pondered a scenario where Apple would turn the touch-screen iPod into a completely new platform, with phone capabilities:

[Scenario] 3. It's iPod 2.0, and it can do phones as well: Apple expands the iPod platform into a handheld computer, iPhone is just one application. OK, imagine this. Apple doesn't stop at putting video, games, calendars and some basic contact management on an iPod. Nope: Apple takes it all the way to the next level. With a touch-screen interface, the iPod could do anything. Apple could kick new life into the PDA market it created (though it wasn't Steve). It could consummate the mission of this MP3 player of truly evolving into the Next Big Thing. Oh, and it could also function as a phone. Let's dedicate one model to that. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the iPhone.

Odds: 9 to 1. I'd put in a larger number, but this is Steve Jobs we're talking about.
Wow factor: 300%. As in, "Holy @#$^%!!!"

(So iPhone equals iPod plus what? Mac Thought Crime, December 4)

Here's where I guessed (absolutely correctly) that Cisco may license the iPhone name to Apple:

Maybe Apple has sought a deal with Cisco about the iPhone name all along, and talks have broken down only recently. Or what the hell, maybe they haven't, and Cisco even allowed Apple to also use the name (without any announcements, of course). Maybe Cisco just wants to ride Apple's publicity a bit. Anything is possible, as far as we all know.

By the way, Apple does own iphone.org.

(Deal with it: Apple's cellphone is still coming, Mac Thought Crime, December 18)

And here are a few last-minute thoughts from earlier today that didn't turn out to be as clueless as I feared:

Touch-screen iPod, iPod phone, Apple smartphone, and the thing that makes Jobs more excited than the Macintosh did… How many things are these? Do they all exist? Or is it just one thing, grossly misunderstood?

(Confusing, contradictory rumors abound on Apple's new device, Mac Thought Crime, January 9)

I hope Apple is in a position today to become more like Sony, and diversify. Create new things. As in, mobile phones and PDAs. Apple-branded versions of these devices have been but a pipe dream for a long time, but not any more. The iPod phone is a given (though not necessarily at the Expo), and the iPod PDA is a possibility.

As it turns out, at least one of Apple's MWSF posters will tout the year 2007 (as does Apple's homepage). Will we see a(n unlikely) roadmap for the rest of the year, or will 2007 start with a bang? We'll see very soon.

(Will 2007 turn Apple into Sony? Mac Thought Crime, January 9)

But, of course, this was all mindless, idle speculation. What we have is an actual product that Apple has finally announced, taking up almost its entire two-hour MWSF keynote.

(OK, the device formerly known as iTV, and now referred to by an unpronouncable Apple symbol, also got some spotlight.)

Unbelievable

With the iPhone, Apple did not deliver on the expectations of the market or even the fans: it delivered on the wildest pipe dreams of its most rabid fans.

Who could have realistically expected all of these (in one device):

A handheld device running OS X? (Note how it's not called Mac OS X.)
A phone at that, with truly spectacular and innovative features?
A multitouch interface with some incredibly intuitive input methods?
A widescreen iPod with 320 x 480 pixels of screen real estate?
An entirely new, future-proof platform that can be extended indefinitely by software updates?
A beautiful and futuristic user interface, with elegant, smooth animations and transitions?
An almost non-Apple-like, cool, futuristic, yet elegant industrial design?
Such a tiny form factor?
Proximity, light and acceleration sensors?

This is just all too good to be true.

So, did Apple screw it up?

Of course, I'm still hyperventilating from the effects of the Reality Distortion Field. But let me try and approach the iPhone a bit more objectively.

In October, I posted a list of requirements for a smartphone I'd buy. Let me revisit that list, and see how the actual iPhone stacks up:

1. Give me a QWERTY – Done!
Apple does include a virtual QWERTY keypad on the iPhone. (How it will handle accented characters, copying, pasting, etc., remains to be seen. These can mean a lot.)

2. Let me work with files – Don't know.
There's very little information available on Apple's iPhone site. Even elementary things are missing, such as what processor the device will use. My second requirement isn't addressed either, but my bet is that we'll soon find out. Anyway, I would be surprised if the iPhone couldn't sync its files with a Mac (or a PC). However, it looks as though iTunes will be the main vehicle for syncing. (Note that the iPhone is also PC compatible.)

3. No artificial quotas, please – Probably done!
This was my request:

I hope iPhone will ship with plenty of flash RAM. But whether it's 128MBytes or 2GBytes, I want to be put in charge of how I use it. If I want to store a million SMS messages and no sound files, I don't want some silly quota that caps the number of text messages at, say, two hundred.

I guess iPhone's version of OS X isn't interested in such quotas. But we can't know for sure.

4. Let me save my text messages – Don't know.
SMS is handled by an iChat-like application. I saw no hint of any ability to save transcripts, but perhaps it's done automatically. Again, we'll see.

5. Don't make me use the touch screen – A big 'No,' but maybe it's all good
Almost the entire iPhone user interface is based on direct manipulation of screen objects, much more so than any device before it. This flies directly in the face of what I wished for, i.e. that a keypad and some controls should be able to suffice for any actions. However, maybe it's all for the better. I just want to be able to perform most operations, like typing and sending an SMS by one hand, and without moving all around the map all the time. I'll have to see an iPhone in person before I can decide.

6. I want a browser with multiple windows – Done!
'Nuff said. A big thumbs-up.

7. Multitask, and honestly, too – Done!
Apple is very emphatic about this feature.

8. Nothing should take more than three keypresses – Don't know, not really.
This is what I wrote:

Menus are all the rage, and Apple adores the iPod's limited number of buttons. But still, going into a freakin' menu so that I can change playback volume is a bit of an annoyance. On a cellphone, I need to be able to start typing an SMS after two keystrokes. I need to be able to locate a contact and place a call in two seconds (e.g. by entering a search mode, and selecting the contact by typing an initial letter or two of some of its contact info). I know Steve Jobs has probably fired people over the number of any extra keys, but there should be just enough of them to let me access any function in a few seconds.

My, oh my… The iPhone has only one button! The horror…!
But let's see the demos on Apple's iPhone page.

Calling: this requires a bit too many taps for my taste. I'd tap "Phone," the "Contacts," and then tap-search for my contact. I need additional taps to place the call. Maybe this can be quicker, and it's certainly not horrible. Without trying it myself, I have no way of knowing even whether this is the best way possible.

One thing that puzzles and disappoints me, though, is the lack of search boxes, both in Phone and iPod modes. I'd expect the inventor of Spotlight and the famed iTunes search box to do something about this. I mean, what if I only remember someone's first name? I need to go through my entire contact list to find him or her. The Treo may have beaten the iPhone in this.

Music: at least there's a separate volume widget that's always present in vertical mode, so you don't have a proliferation of menus.

SMS: accessible by one touch, but the demo doesn't show how to start a new conversation (rather than continuing an old one).

All in all, some quick-access features are impressive, while others may seem a bit lacking. And we have too little information as of now. This one also goes undecided.

So there you have it, iPhone has at least four of my eight requests covered. Another three look promising, and two are a bit worrying. But the iPhone also redefines some concepts, so these points may not even all apply to it.

In any case, one thing is certain. I will get one. And if I could get one today, I would get one today. I'd stand in a queue till midnight.

Confusing, contradictory rumors abound on Apple's new device

2007-01-09T10:55:00.000+01:00

Sometimes rumormongers, leakers and analysts get it all mixed up. For example, before the release of the Cube, many took whatever details they had and arrived at the conclusion that the Power Mac would get a new cube form factor. Few suspected a new Mac besides the Power Mac.

Maybe something similar is happening with the new mystery product Apple is now expected to release today. Maybe it isn't an iPod phone after all. Maybe it isn't a touch-screen iPod either.

Maybe it's both. And maybe it's neither.

To me, the hyping of the entire year 2007 suggests the emergence of a new platform from Apple. Maybe Apple didn't go out of its way and designed a new, scaled-down OS for handheld devices. Maybe Apple simply decided that now it's time for an ultra-portable Mac, in a subnotebook or handheld form factor, that is capable of running a (more or less) full version of Mac OS X.

We don't know. But… Touch-screen iPod, iPod phone, Apple smartphone, and the thing that makes Jobs more excited than the Macintosh did… How many things are these? Do they all exist? Or is it just one thing, grossly misunderstood?

Okay, we will see.

Beware the wrath of Motorolas and Nokias, oh Apple!

2007-01-08T16:19:00.000+01:00

The New York Times thinks that Apple will release a very smart phone tomorrow, more like a pocket computer.

"Apple is about to touch off a nuclear war," said Paul Mercer, a software designer and president of Iventor, a designer of software for hand-helds based in Palo Alto, California. "The Nokias and the Motorolas will have to respond."

Well, yeah. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the Panasonics, Pioneers, Sonies, etc. to respond to the iPod challenge.

Will 2007 turn Apple into Sony?

2007-01-08T01:00:00.000+01:00

Damn. One of the real reasons why I always wanted to write a Mac blog was so that I can publish Macworld Expo predictions and speculation. However, this year is difficult. There are already way too many shoo-ins, too much speculation, and a general cornucopia of rumors, predictions and wishes.

But anyway, these are my pre-expo thoughts. As this post will have a very short shelf life, I'm not bothering with links or references. Use Google at your own discretion.

What's given

iLife '07 can't just be merely inferred from a pattern, it's been leaked brutally (by Amazon.com). iWork will almost certainly receive an update, too. Leopard and iTV are the rare things that Apple pre-announced, so some details will certainly follow. Of these two, the iTV doesn't create that much buzz, though it's yet another non-Mac product from Apple with a GUI and an OS of its own, and should thus warrant great interest as a significant player in the diversification of Apple.

Leopard

I think Leopard's Top Secret features are perhaps the most eagerly anticipated items in the keynote. Leopard will certainly be a developer's delight with Objective-C 2.0, Core Animation, greatly enhanced developer tools and other killer features, but the consumer appeal of the new OS itself may be lacking a bit in comparison to earlier Mac OS X upgrades, especially in light of the slower update cycle that debuts with Leopard (which will ship after an almost two-year wait over Tiger). By the way, I don't think Leopard will ship any earlier than the spring deadline Apple announced. It just doesn't seem ready yet.

Rumors suggest an updated GUI, though nobody knows whether this change (if true) would only be skin deep, or it would add new behaviors or change existing ones. I guess the iTunes look (i.e. gray window borders without textures, flat, matte scroll widgets, and a shiny 3D selection highlight among others) will become more widespread, at least this would be the least surprising development (and certainly a welcome one over the brushed metal look, though not necessarily suitable to replace current non-textured windows).

If the look and feel change, I certainly hope for the following:

Hopefully, it won't be such a radical change that all icons, buttons and other custom graphics of third-party apps would need to be redone in order to avoid looking out of place. This was the case with the switch from Platinum to Aqua, and the transitional period wasn't pretty. Platinum icons on Aqua backgrounds looked decidedly horrible.

I hope pinstripes will be gone for good.

The ability to select a neutral gray color scheme (unlike the blue-biased Graphite theme) would be good for graphic designers.

If changes go beyond looks, I'd like to see a revamped Dock with some hierarchy or grouping of the countless random objects that thrive there. And, of course, many hope for the return of a spatial Finder, or at least the debut of a simply better one.

I've been thinking a lot about the "top secret" features, and have considered various theories on why these have been kept secret. The official explanation has been to prevent premature copying by Microsoft, but many wondered what Microsoft could have copied in the few months between the WWDC and Vista's debut other than looks – and this has certainly helped the "new GUI look" rumor gain momentum.

However, I don't think Apple's fear of the Redmond copycats necessarily involved Microsoft looking at Leopard features in August and squeezing them into Vista in two months' time.

Instead, this is what I think this "fear from copying" might have involved:

Announcing even difficult-to-copy features seven months before shipping, rather than only two months ahead, would give Microsoft five more months to catch up with these in a Service Pack release of Vista. Apple has bought itself five more months of market lead on these (still mysterious) features.

Microsoft isn't the only company that copies Apple. With the advent of the so-called Web 2.0, rich web interfaces abound, and many Apple design trends already surface on new websites. Today, web applications sometimes approach the functionality of desktop apps, and their development and distribution can be very fast.

Most likely, though, I suspect that at least some of the "Top Secret" features have something to do with as yet unannounced products, both hardware and software. Just one example: I think .Mac will be seriously revamped (the updated webmail client may be a hint of some progress going on behind the scenes), and just about everyone agrees that Dot-Mac sucks. The complaints have been going on for so long (and have yet to be addressed by Apple) that I'm sure something is happening by now. Oh, and of course, the iPod phone and the touchscreen iPod wil both use some extra tie-ins with Leopard.

Macs updated? Yawn…

Some Mac models will likely be updated. Eight-core Mac Pros do sound cool (c'mon, eight freakin' cores), even though the OS won't support them really, but come on, when did that particular problem stop Apple from releasing new pro hardware?

But frankly, who cares? If 2007 is going to be a great product year for Apple, I'd really like to see new things. Apple calls just about all of its years "great product years," with "exciting products down the pipeline," but these usually merely signify updated laptops, desktops and iPods with elegant, minimalist designs.

I actually hope that Mac updates will be a minor part of the keynote, or they may not even make it into the keynote.

Sonification ahead?

I mean, sure, it's great if the Mac Pro receives yet another update and gets even faster (prompting Phil Schiller to announce with genuine enthusiasm that "this is the fastest Mac ever," as if we were somehow expecting Macs to get slower every year), but still: there's only so much enthusiasm incremental updates, or even new form factors such as the Mac mini can create. I hope Apple is in a position today to become more like Sony, and diversify. Create new things. As in, mobile phones and PDAs. Apple-branded versions of these devices have been but a pipe dream for a long time, but not any more. The iPod phone is a given (though not necessarily at the Expo), and the iPod PDA is a possibility.

As it turns out, at least one of Apple's MWSF posters will tout the year 2007 (as does Apple's homepage). Will we see a(n unlikely) roadmap for the rest of the year, or will 2007 start with a bang? We'll see very soon.

Happy New Year from Mac Thought Crime

2007-01-03T20:46:00.000+01:00

Wonder what Apple's up to…

Deal with it: Apple's cellphone is still coming

2006-12-18T23:14:00.000+01:00

Gizmodo, like, so totally pwn3d everyone with its "clever" iPhone teaser story. When the online rag finally revealed what it had known all along, i.e. that the iPhone was going to be a Cisco product, the author of the original prank even added a half-assed apology:

P.S. Macheads--including those from Macrumors, Think Secret, TUAW, and Cult of Mac--know Apple likes to release gear on Tuesdays. So they didn't expect an Apple iPhone Monday. If you did read into my original post and feel like I misled you, sincere apologies for the discomfort.

Well, jackass, you went out of your way and added an "Apple" label to the story (see Google's cache for proof), and removed it after your joke played off, so this was a pretty obnoxious, childish trick for sure.

But let's move on. In the wake of the Cisco announcement, two new types of commentary have appeared all over the blogosphere, even at Daring Fireball, that piss me off.

This is the first: How could anyone have thought Apple would call its cellphone iPhone if Apple doesn't even own either the trademark or the iphone.com domain name?

My comment: hindsight, Watson, is always 20/20. But thanks for noticing. Yet there's more to it than that. Maybe Apple has sought a deal with Cisco about the iPhone name all along, and talks have broken down only recently. Or what the hell, maybe they haven't, and Cisco even allowed Apple to also use the name (without any announcements, of course). Maybe Cisco just wants to ride Apple's publicity a bit. Anything is possible, as far as we all know.

By the way, Apple does own iphone.org.

But in any case, it's just a name. Remember when Steve Jobs introduced iTunes? About half a dozen times, he accidentally called it "iMusic." My guess is that Apple had fought over that name with someone – and lost. (As an aside, I still think iTunes sounds awful. Especially with a British accent.)

And that leads us to the second type of comment that has reared its head today. Namely: How do we know that Apple will ever release a cellphone?

This one is easy. I'm quoting Bloomberg News (via seattlepi.com):

"We don't think that the phones that are available today make the best music players -- we think the iPod is," Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said in a conference call Wednesday. "But over time that is likely to change, and we're not sitting around doing nothing."

This is the absolutely most direct way imaginable in the universe in which an Apple exec can hint at a future product (unless it's being given away like the iTV).

Phones aren't good music players.

But that will change.

Apple will be part of that change.

How can you infer from this anything but a crystal-clear indication that Apple will create a music-playing phone?

Never mind the rumors, the analysts' reports, the whole thing. This single statement alone confirms the iPhone – whatever it's going to be called.

No offense to Daniel Craig, but…

2006-12-18T02:26:00.000+01:00

Finally, I realized why the new Bond looked so damn familiar.

Time's Person of the Year: You, using an iMac

2006-12-17T21:32:00.000+01:00

Time's Person of the Year title goes to "You," i.e. anyone browsing the web. The cover art features a photo illustration with a reflective surface, where each reader can supposedly see his or her reflection.

Notably, the silvery surface is placed over the graphic representation of a web video widget, running on what appears to be a post-2005 iMac. (The screen area is magnified so the computer isn't really visible, but its stand and keyboard give away the Mac.) Looks like Time's love affair with Apple is still on.

Why Apple can't let carriers subsidize the iPhone

2006-12-17T12:42:00.000+01:00

Brian Tiemann wonders if Apple can orchestrate a brilliant strategy of convincing mobile carriers not to subsidize the iPhone, and thus protect its baby from the fate of Nokias and Motorolas, where marketing and pricing is in the hands of telcos rather than phone makers, devaluing the product into a mere commodity, and even defacing it with huge, unsightly logos.
But really, Apple has no other choice. As a Think Secret report explains, the iPhone will be "an iPod with phone capabilities," and if it were havily subsidized by carriers, it may end up being (relatively or even absolutely) cheaper than a comparable iPod, adversely affecting the latter's perceived value – and even its sales. I think Apple has enough of a superstar status to play hardball with yet another industry. But we'll see, some say as early as tomorrow.

OK, Apple really needs to fix the Mighty Mouse scroll ball

2006-12-16T16:34:00.000+01:00

The Mighty Mouse is just perfect. The way it implements right-clicking is probably the best possible way: it will still let you left-click with your entire palm, not just your first two fingers, reducing the chance for repetitive-stress injury. Right-clicking may be a bit tricky, what with remembering to lift your fingers off the left side, but in the last few months, I haven't had a single missed right-click.

And don't even get me started on scrolling. It's absolutely indispensable. In the past, I've bitched about what I call "dumb scrolling" (and what Apple called "smart scrolling back then), i.e. having both scroll arrows on one end of a scroll bar. I still insist that the only way that makes sense from a usability point of view is having both arrows on both ends. However, today, I simply no longer care. Who needs scroll arrows when you have the Mighty Mouse?

Well, unfortunately, you do when your mouse stops scrolling. My pet peeves are silent failures: any minute, your mouse can just lose its scrolling functionality. At least, this failure is "silent" in a good way: the artificial clicking sound the mouse emits while scrolling will also go away, letting you know that it's your mouse that's failing (again), not some software problem.

Apple is aware of the problem, and details how it recommends you clean the ball when that happens. (Turn the mouse upside down, and roll the ball vigorously with a clean, moist, lint-free cloth.) A Google search will also yield useful tips, like blowing pressurized air inside the assembly.

Unfortunately, these tips solve the problem only temporarily. In my case, it has come to the point where I'm rubbing my mouse's scroll ball after every three to fifteen minutes of use. I'm going to have my mouse replaced under warranty, and I hope Apple will fix this flawed design as soon as possible. Public acknowledgment of the problem would also be nice, though that might easily cost Apple actual money in class-action lawsuits, so I'm not holding my breath.

Rampant speculation forces early iPhone announcement? Speculation

2006-12-15T12:36:00.000+01:00

Gizmodo "knows" that iPhone will be announced on Monday, and it won't be what they expected at all. People usually assume Monday means this next Monday, December 18, and hope that it won't be about, say, a product called IP-hone, a device for, erm, sharpening your IP address, or something.

In any case, this would certainly be a surprising development. Not just that it's announced days before Christmas, when people have already bought their gift mobile phones (if any), but even more uncharacteristically, because it's not a Tuesday.

Or maybe Apple's just sick and tired of the outrageous speculation and rumormongering going on about the product, even affecting the company's stock price, and wants to clear up the picture by saying, "Here's your iPhone, dammit! You can get it in March! Now leave me the $%^£! alone, will ya?!"

And then Apple can go on about its business, announcing new Leopard and iTV features, iLife 2007, a retooled dot-Mac service, and other business-as-usual stuff at Macworld.

Looks like Jobs just won't let the Mac Web ruin his Christmas. We're sorry, Steve.

Vista's 157 thousand new PR jobs

2006-12-14T02:54:00.000+01:00

A 14-page IDC report (download PDF here), commissioned by Microsoft, says that Vista will create "157,000 new jobs."

Mac fans could (and do) take cheap shots at this number. "Yeah, right. Vista will suck so bad that you'll need 157 thousand people to answer tech support calls."

But these shots would miss the point. They would imply that someone seriously investigated how exactly Vista would effect the IT job and spendings market. Instead, here's what the study does.

It forecasts that IT spendings, thus also the IT job market, will grow in 2007 in the United States.
It then predicts that the ratio of "Vista-related" spending* (thus also jobs) will grow.
As a result, 157 thousand out of the 400 thousand new jobs will be "Vista jobs."
Then it concludes that all these jobs would be single-handedly created by Vista.

Never mind that Vista will be bundled with just about every new PC sold, so Windows market share will continue to be determined mostly by license agreements with PC vendors. Therefore, any overall growth in computer hardware sales will likely result in a growth of Vista's perceived job market share, especially since IDC classifies anything that "runs on or supports Vista" as a "Vista job."

If you buy a Dell, erase Vista from it, and install Linux, IDC says you'll still contribute to Vista spending. If a company replaces all of its five-year-old PCs with new ones, it will contribute to IDC's idea of Vista spending. If you're a software vendor, and your software happens to be compatible with Vista, you're contributing to Vista spending, and if you increase your sales, even more so, according to IDC.**

But it gets better. According to the report, "For every dollar of Microsoft Windows Vista revenue in the U.S., IDC expects $18.00 to be generated in revenues by other companies in the Microsoft ecosystem. " A graph shows that these 18 dollars are made up of $9.75 in hardware sales, $4.60 in software sales, and $3.65 in services.

Here's the deal. You buy a PC, it will have Vista installed, and you'll pay a hidden charge for it. If you're IDC, you'll interpret it as wow, a one-dollar income for Microsoft has just created a ten-dollar hardware sale. But then in IDC's world, gas spendings probably lead to car purchases, just as hangovers lead to parties.

But there's another approach. How about, "for every ten dollars of hardware sales, Microsoft receives a one-dollar tax"?

Because, you know, I'm sure all that hardware would run something, even if Vista, or Heaven forbid, Microsoft weren't around at all.

Well, IDC's gig as Microsoft's court poet must have blurred its vision:

While it is easy to think of Microsoft as simply the world's largest software company, it is more than that. It is an economic force that has a direct, positive impact on the countries in which it operates.

Full disclosure: this blog has never been sponsored by Microsoft.

*IDC must have meant to say Windows market share here, as most versions of Vista haven't even shipped yet, so it would be pretty bad for Microsoft if Vista's current, virtually non-existant market share grew one percentage point between now and a year from now.

**Someone should do the same math with Tiger (as well as Leopard). Mac OS X market share has increased lately, and I'm sure all those extra users would never have bought any kind of computer had Tiger not been released.

What a week!

2006-12-13T00:04:00.000+01:00

Microsoft borrows an icon from Apple. Pixel for pixel. They just screw it up somehow while resizing.
The controversial, though caritative MacHeist is on.
Remember the QuickTime-MySpace debacle about a week ago? Now some people still try to pin it all on Apple, and also make it into some huge thing.
Someone has found a way to beat Apple's iTunes authorization limit, and is releasing sotware to help prospective EULA breakers.
Speaking of iTunes: music sales are said to collapse at iTunes (and elsewhere).
Even though iPhone rumor supplies still last, there's a new kid on the block: say hello to the Aqua replacement rumor.
Oh, and there's the Adobe Creative Suite 3 public beta rumor.
Documents reveal that Vista chief Jim Allchin went on the record saying 2 years ago that he'd buy a Mac if he weren't working for Microsoft.

And it's only Tuesday.

Adding reddit links to Blogger Beta

2006-12-10T22:32:00.000+01:00

As a gentle reminder to your readers to help popularize your blog via reddit, you can add a reddit button to each of your posts. This will give readers a one-click opportunity to boost your posts on reddit if they're already submitted, or an easy way to submit them if they aren't. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

I haven't found any literature on how this procedure works on Blogger Beta, so I had to do a bit of poking around in the less-than-spectacular Blogger Beta documentation, as well as some experimenting. It's no rocket science, but in case you were planning to do the same, and got stuck somewhere, here's how I did it.

1. Go to the buttons page on reddit, and copy the code for the button style of your choice to your clipboard. (The one this blog uses is style 1.) Paste the code snippet into some text editor.

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>
<script language="javascript" src="http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>

2. Log in to Blogger Beta, and navigate from your Dashboard to Template, then Edit HTML. Click the check box which says "Expand Widget Templates."

3. Now you'll need to edit your template. I recommend that you copy the entire template file and paste it into a text editor, so you'll be able to use Find/Replace and other text editing facilities. (Like, you can have the editor speak out the entire template file for you. It's great fun to listen to.) Good ol' TextEdit will do (if you're a Mac user), but make sure you work on a plain text file, not a rich text file. (You can switch between the two formats in the Format menu.)

It's also recommended that you save a backup copy before proceeding, just in case something goes wrong.

If you think you're done with your edits, copy and paste your template back into the browser's text field, and click on the Preview button to see if it looks fine. Don't click on Save unless it really all seems OK. (Don't expect to test links in Preview mode, though. They won't work. That's normal behavior.)

In case you really messed up, and want to revert to the original code, your backup copy comes in handy. Or, you can revert to Blogger's original version of the template, but then you'll lose all your previous hacks, if any.

4. OK, now you need to find the place where you need to paste the code. This is probably the trickiest part for most of us. The natural place for the button would be in the footer of a post. However, I placed the link at the end of the post body instead, for design considerations.

In any case, if you want to find the suitable location for your button, some elementary understanding of a Blogger Beta template is handy.

The template file usually starts with some lengthy CSS declarations. Then comes the part which instructs the Blogger engine how to lay out your blog.

This is an XML file which includes XHTML tags, as well as some proprietary tags that operate the Blogger engine, instructing it to display your contents. If you want to put the reddit button in the post body, you should look for a part in the file that says

<div class='post-body'>

This is where the post body begins. Depending on your template, various bits of code follow, and finally the <\div> closing tag marks the end of the body.

I placed the code I'd got from reddit right before that closing tag. If you want to put it in the footer instead, look for a suitable place between the <div class='post-footer'> and the <\div class='post-footer'> tags instead, but as I can't walk you down that path, be sure to test your code with the Preview feature before you commit to it by saving it.

I added a <br\> tag right before the reddit script just to make it look nicer. (Don't forget the "\" , as this is XHTML.)

5. Now comes the final trick: the reddit code contains a bit which needs to be rewritten. The part where it says "[URL]" is just a placeholder, you need to replace it with some Blogger code that yields an URL for each post. So after you've pasted the reddit code, change its first line from this:

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>

to this:

<script>reddit_url='<data:post.url/>'</script>

This was the part which took me the longest to figure out, as the documentation was, again, a bit sketchy. But now I've found the right syntax, and it should work a charm for you too.

Oh, and finally, a less-than-gentle reminder to my dear readers: please be kind enough to give my posts some boost on reddit… Thank you.

iPhone shuffle revealed

2006-12-07T16:46:00.000+01:00

Okay, it's hard to remain dead serious amidst all the unprecedented speculation and rumormongering concerning Apple's worst-ever kept secret. The iPhone has been perhaps the biggest shoe-in the history of the entire Mac rumor industry, as well as the obvious lock of the decade.

Hungarian news portal Index.hu had decided to join the mayhem, and announced a Best iPhoto Mockup contest among readers. Did the planet really need yet another iPhone mockup contest? Turns out it did.

One entry inspired by the contest might look conspicuously familiar to Mac Thought Crime readers, yet the winning enrty (or rather, the "enty that would have been a winner if one had been chosen"), reproduced here by permission, is a true gem. Kudos to fellow Hungarian György Gazics for an instant classic.

On a historic note, the launch of the iPod shuffle almost two years ago was orchestrated pretty carefully. Months before the product shipped in January 2005, Apple had started to hype the Shuffle feature, even making a big announcement out of putting it into the iPod main menu. Coincidence? I think not.

So, if Apple suddenly starts talking about how cool it is to just randomly call or e-mail people in your contact list; if a new minor update to Mail or Address Book offers a "Blindfold Mode" where you only have a BCC field and the recipient is randomly selected, you'll know: the iPhone shuffle is real, and coming soon.

So iPhone equals iPod plus what?

2006-12-04T22:25:00.000+01:00

So Digg's Kevin Rose "confirms" two iPhone models, according to Ars Technica's Mac blog. The big details are a small form factor, a separate battery for music, and two price tags of $249 and $449 for two models (4GB and 8Gb).

Ars Technica thinks the alleged separate battery will "firmly make this a music-playing device," though I'm not sure why anyone has had any doubts over this for a second since July 21, the day Peter Oppenheimer gave the secret away.

The large gap between the two models suggests more than just a difference in capacity, though it's anyone's guess what else is in the cards. The larger model may have a camera or, as rumored, some smartphone functionality as well.

The most interesting question is, though, how much of an iPod and how much of a telephone the iPhone is going to be. Did Apple focus on simply converging the iPod with a cellphone (any cellphone) so that you don't need to carry two devices? Or does the iPhone go way beyond that? And how does it affect Apple's product line-up?

Apple currently sells Macs and iPods. That's about it. With the iPhone, will a third category emerge, or will it the iPhone still be an iPod? And even if so, will it transform the iPod?

I can imagine the following scenarios.

1. The name's "iPod phone": Apple adds a so-so phone to the mighty iPod. When the iPhone emerges, it turns out to be just an iPod nano that can make phone calls. The new baby is integrated neatly in the iPod product matrix, probably called iPod phone. Phone functionality is less than groundbreaking (possibly even licensed from a third party), as Apple fears the unknown and simply wants to unify two existing kingdoms: its own, the iPod, and a foreign one, cellphones. The marriage would supposedly cement the leadership of the iPod in its own sector.

Odds: 3 to 1. Easiest to pull off, though rumors suggest otherwise.
Wow factor: 40%. "Still, Apple's making a phone! Wow."

2. Apple starts a cellular revolution with music as a Trojan: Apple adds a so-so iPod to the mighty iPhone. What if Apple wants to take on cellphones? Having tackled music, now it wants to show the world how phones are done. However, as mobile telephony is a large and mature market, Apple's only chance for entry is by grafting iPods on its phones. In this scenario, expect true cellular innovation from Apple, with the iPod as an add-on.

Odds: 5 to 1. Harder than it sounds, and Oppenheimer's words suggest otherwise.
Wow factor: 99%. "Wow, Apple makes the best cellphones! Who'd've thunk that?!"

3. It's iPod 2.0, and it can do phones as well: Apple expands the iPod platform into a handheld computer, iPhone is just one application. OK, imagine this. Apple doesn't stop at putting video, games, calendars and some basic contact management on an iPod. Nope: Apple takes it all the way to the next level. With a touch-screen interface, the iPod could do anything. Apple could kick new life into the PDA market it created (though it wasn't Steve). It could consummate the mission of this MP3 player of truly evolving into the Next Big Thing. Oh, and it could also function as a phone. Let's dedicate one model to that. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the iPhone.

Odds: 9 to 1. I'd put in a larger number, but this is Steve Jobs we're talking about.
Wow factor: 300%. As in, "Holy @#$^%!!!"

These three scenarios may not play out this purely, but I think one of them will definitely prevail. It'll be interesting to see which one. Do they all sound insane? You bet. But one of them will be reality soon. It's exciting to be an Apple head these days. (Just look at the Mac Thought Crime logo for proof.)

Saying hello to Btman

2006-12-01T23:05:00.000+01:00

So I somehow missed this… I just found out today that my old colleague at AppleLust, Brian Tiemann has a blog. It's not like it took me a long time to notice that: he's only had it for what, five years? Not only is the name of the blog truly brilliant (Peeve Farm), but the quality and quantity of his extremely opinionated writing are both commendable.

Apart from the obvious Mac coverage, his topics range from endless Lord of the Rings musings to Microsoft Schadenfreude to political affairs to growing a beard. Oh, and some priceless off-color jokes like this one:

You know... now, on top of the usual warnings against making jokes about bombs or hijackings at the airport metal detectors... kids are going to have to avoid telling each other "Your shoes are the bomb!"

I'm adding his blog link to my sidebar, and heartily recommending his blog to all my readers.

Joel Spolsky overreacts to Vista shutdown usability issues

2006-11-27T01:20:00.000+01:00

It doesn't happen very often that I strongly disagree with Joel Spolsky, the web's most prominent author on software, but I find his piece on Windows Vista's too many choices for "leaving your computer" flawed in several ways.

When you finish your work and leave your computer, you want to shut it down, put it to sleep, or something like that. Joel counts nine such options in Windows Vista, "two icons and seven menu items." The menu items are Switch User, Log Off, Lock, Restart, Sleep, Hibernate and Shut Down. The two icons are for Lock and possibly Shut Down (he isn't sure about the latter, the icon looks like a power button).

Then Joel goes on to count FN+Key combinations, the actual power button and closing the lid of a laptop, and arrives at a total of 15 choices to make whenever you leave your PC.

He then explains why that's wrong (emphasis added):

The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they'll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice. […] “Schwartz […] shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ('easy fit' or 'relaxed fit'?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”

The fact that you have to choose between nine different ways of turning off your computer every time just on the start menu, not to mention the choice of hitting the physical on/off button or closing the laptop lid, produces just a little bit of unhappiness every time.

Of course. Nobody would argue that it's acceptable to force you to make 15 choices each time you want to leave your PC.

But I have problems with the way Joel counts these choices.

Choices vs. redundancies

First, there are seven different choices for the operation to perform, and it's conceptually wrong to confuse these seven options with the different methods available for making your choice.

I can imagine in theory a novice user freaking out, "Should I choose sleep? Hibernate? Shut Down? Switch User? What the hell is Lock? Aaaargh, whatever, I don't care, can I just go away? Why so many choices?!"

Okay, maybe not exactly like that. But my point is that yes, Joel may be right, this can qualify as a problem of the "easy fit or relaxed fit?" variety (for some users at least): being presented with an unexpected or superfluous choice when you would like to just move on without making any further decisions.

But how can you count in here the different methods for making these seven choices? A user can close the lid, push the power button, use a keystroke, or click on an icon in order to activate any of these seven "leave computer" sequences. He'll choose one he prefers, and may not even know about the others. This is a very different kind of choice: it's a redundancy, an important element in user interface design.

Does it ever confuse anyone, or cause any unhappiness that you can select "Copy" from the Edit menu, from a contextual menu, or by pressing CTRL-C (or Command-C on a Mac)? It's not like you want to "Copy" and you have to make up your mind about how you want to do it. Probably, if you're near the menu bar, you'll choose the Edit menu. If you're using your mouse, you'll select the contextual menu. And if you've got your hands on the keyboard, you'll hit the keystroke. Or perhaps you're not even aware of all these options, and you use the one(s) that you like. Arguing against this kind of redundancy isn't something I'd expect from a great usability expert like Joel, and yet this is what he's doing here.

The elimination round

I'm not buying into Joe's creative accounting here, so like I said, we're down to seven choices.

Joel goes on to eliminate each of them, arriving at a single "b'bye" button that he thinks should suffice for everyone. It's an interesting idea and a good read, though it only survives on a couple of questionable premises, namely that RAM can be written out to flash memory, and that sleep/hibernation conserves as much energy as a shutdown.

But what's so wrong with these seven choices? True, having to choose between Sleep and Hibernate may be a bit unnecessary and geeky. But don't tell me that anyone's ever had a hard time choosing between Restart and any of the other six commands: when you want to restart, you won't be distracted by the other choices. You've made up your mind before going into that menu, and you won't start wondering whether you should maybe select Sleep or Switch User instead.

Similarly, when you want to switch to another user, you won't be bothered by the availability of a Hibernate option. The problem, if any, is simply that these choices live in one menu with perhaps too many (loosely related) items.

So I think Joel's argument breaks down here a bit as well: if you've already made your choice before going into a menu, why worry about other items that happen to coexist in that menu? By that logic, if you go into the Edit menu in order to select "Cut," does it bother you that you also have "Copy," "Paste," and even "Delete" right there, in the same menu? Should we eliminate them all, and arrive at a generic "Edit" command that somehow substitutes cutting, copying, pasting and deletion? I don't think so.

Joel also adds this comment:

Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these [shutdown] options is absolutely, positively essential. Don't bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.

Not these fifteen ways again! The last time I checked, we were down to seven. Since Restart isn't really a choice for leaving your PC (it just happens to be loosely related and therefore in the same menu), now we're at six.

And here Joel is right: Windows should really let another user log in when the system is locked. I mean, what were they thinking when disallowing that?! If that were implemented, Lock could become a safe option in any multiuser environment for walking away from your screen, protecting your privacy, but without locking out all other users. In this context, Switch User would become less of a way to leave your PC and maybe letting others use it, and more of a choice for an occasion when the other user goes up to you and asks you nicely to let him work in for a sec.

So that would leave us down to five choices. Sleep/Hibernate should definitely be merged (as Joel suggests), and that would leave us at four: Sleep, Shut Down, Lock and Log Off.

I think these four are manageable, and perhaps if there had been just these four options around, Joel would never have written his piece.

A (not so) theoretical alternative

What if we organize these menu items a bit better? Let's put Sleep, Restart, Shut Down and Log Off in the same menu (maybe adding the user name to the latter, signifying to Joel's uncle that we're only logging him out). Restart, like I said, arguably belongs there, but isn't easily confused with the rest, so it can stay.

Lock can maybe become a screen saver thing or a general security option: when you activate the screen saver or put the computer to sleep, it will get locked, and you can either unlock it with the current user's password, or a second user can log in. Moving Lock out of the menu may not be the best solution possible, but at least, you're making that menu less cluttered.

And finally, since Lock now lets others log in, switching users no longer belongs among power-off options or among ways to leave your computer after work, so Switch User could really be moved somewhere completely different.

How about this? Still too many choices? Or is this a acceptable now, having found a balance between having all the necessary options without confusing novice users?

In any case, the alternative I've just described happens to be the way Mac OS X handles all of this.

Conclusion

Joel's article closes with these comments:

This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.

True. But the complete lack of choices Joel recommends (while admitting that those choices make perfect sense) would throw the baby out with the bath water. Logging off is not the same as quitting your all applications and switching to another user, especially not manually. Restarting is not the same as shutting down and starting up again, manually. Especially if "Shut Down" were also eliminated – for the sake of a sleep mode where it would be somehow safe to (manually) power off. So I think Joel might have overreacted a bit to Vista's design flaws.

Alleged iPhone photo reveals 'rotary dial'

2006-11-24T18:46:00.000+01:00

A blogger has posted what is very likely a leaked photo of Apple's upcoming iPhone product. While no hints of smartphone functionality are present, the device apparently pays homage to old rotary-dial phones, using a modified version of the famous iPod click wheel. See the picture right after the jump...

Okay, the blogger, who goes by the name BlueBunny, isn't fully convinced of the image's authenticity...

Spaces breaks Exposé

2006-11-24T12:13:00.000+01:00

Macworld UK discusses Leopard's Spaces feature.

Expose will be closely integrated with Spaces. This means that you will be able to see all windows in all spaces using Expose, offering a quick and easy way to locate and switch to specific windows among multiple Spaces.

This may not be obvious at first, but the way Apple chose to implement Spaces pretty much gets in the way of Exposé. If you have created several Spaces and activate Exposé, it will only minimize windows in the current Space. Windows in other Spaces won't be visible.

If you want to see all your windows in all your Spaces, you need to reveal all your Spaces first (by pressing F8), and then use Exposé, which will work in the minimized Spaces: each window will be scaled to fit the minimized representation of its Space. Currently, before Spaces, all your windows would be minimized to fit the entire screen. That will no longer be the case when you have Spaces. If a Space has too many windows, Exposé will make them miniscule, while windows dwelling in other, less crowded Spaces will be scaled to large enough sizes.

If you have problems picturing it all, this Google video I found should help.

I would certainly prefer a solution where all my windows in all my Spaces would be scaled down and distributed to fit on the full screen. First, it would be a much better use of screen space. Second, for me, Exposé is all about revealing everything (as implied by its name). If I hit F9, I do that because I don't want to worry about switching apps or moving windows out of sight: I want to see everything. And no, I don't want to worry about Spaces either when I hit F9. And third, I don't want to use two consecutive keystrokes instead of one.

I think Spaces basically breaks Exposé in their current implementation. I'm not saying that the current solution is without merit, several users may actually prefer it to the alternative that I miss. But I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't implement that one as well. I certainly think we need a way to let Exposé minimize all windows on one screen, ignoring Spaces.

If you have any information suggesting that such functionality is available or is being planned, please let me know.

CEO: Palm 'struggled' figuring stuff out. In other news: Pope Catholic

2006-11-23T13:02:00.000+01:00

Palm CEO Ed Colligan chimes in on the iPhone "threat" (as quoted by Mercury News):

"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,'' he said. ``PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.''

Let's see.

For years, Palm (bought by US Robotics, then by 3Com) was migrating itself, its hardware, software, developers and users away from keyboards. Handwriting recognition (sort of) was the next biggest thing. It worked while the bubble lasted.

Then two founders left over management disputes, and formed Handspring. Handspring added a keypad to a handheld (called Treo) in a moment of clarity, and the smartphone became an instant hit.

So for years, the same inventors were migrating themselves, their hardware, software, developers and users back to keyboards.

Handspring was popular, yet it was dying. Palm was unpopular and dying. So Palm bought Handspring, and finally, all was together in a neat package: the Treo smartphone, the Palm mothership, and the much-tweaked, essential Palm OS software.

It all made too much sense, so something was bound to happen. Palm renamed itself PalmOne, spun off the Palm OS company PalmSource, then renamed itself Palm again.

And licensed Windows Mobile.

I'm starting to wonder if Palm / US Robotics / 3Com / Handspring / PalmOne / PalmSource / Palm is really the best role model Apple can have for straightforward business development.

Additional sources: Palm, CNN, Wikipedia

How the iPod could save the PDA without trying (too hard)

2006-11-21T01:29:00.000+01:00

Nobody wants a PDA anymore. Worldwide sales of traditional handheld devices (ones without phone capabilities) have been declining for eleven straight quarters, reaching a measly 1.1 million units sold in Q3, 2006 on their way down, according to IDC. Steve Jobs is even proud of not having released a PDA. That's right, nobody wants one.

But then nobody wanted video on an iPod, either. It was an experiment that few, if any, companies could have pulled off the way Apple has. It really struck me as a stroke of genius when Steve Jobs had this to say about the video iPod over a year ago (emphasis added):

"Millions of people are going to buy this to listen to music – and video is going to come along as a bonus. So if anything is going to happen in portable video, it will happen on the iPod. We'll find out what happens."

The exact same thing could happen on the PDA front. Today, the iPod has support for games, browsing calendars, notes, photos and videos. In what would be a small step for Apple, but a great step for the ailing PDA market, a new-generation iPod could sprout advanced PDA features any day, and take over the PDA market overnight. That's right: if the long-awaited touch-screen iPod becomes a reality and starts selling in the millions, it will immediately outsell the entire existing PDA market.

It's only a question of choice whether Apple wants to use this opportunity to extend its near-monopoly to handheld devices. Millions of users could buy an iPod – and get a PDA as a bonus. If that won't breathe new life into the personal digital assistant, nothing will.

After all, while traditional PDAs are a dying breed, so-called converged devices (smartphones and phone-PDA combinations) are on the increase. And we all know that Apple is interested in the phone market, don't we? Apple could test the waters with a traditional PDA iPod before plunging into the converged waters.

I think Apple should try its luck here. If the rumors are correct and the next-gen iPod is really going to be all covered by a large touchscreen, its input methods can be vastly extended by virtual (and/or clip-on) keypads, if needed, without compromising the simplicity or the core functionality of the device. You'd touch the screen, and the famous click wheel would appear right at your fingertips – that's what the oldest rumors claim. Okay, now touch the screen in a different way, and a keypad emerges... But only if you want it. If Apple's software people do their job right, the added functions would never get in the way of those who want the iPod to focus on being, first and foremost, an MP3 player. (And so we don't start getting into useless bloatware arguments, either.)

Mac OS Rumors hits rock bottom with more pathological lying

2006-11-20T18:28:00.000+01:00

OK, this should be the last mention of that filthy site for a long while, despite our quest to "Periodically check MacOSRumors.com so you don't have to." Remember how the site promised an update for that night just five days ago? Well, that was then, this is now. That update may never have appeared, but why always focus on the negative? Especially in light of today's grandiose update: three mouth-watering rumor headlines concerning the next iPod, an embedded OS X variant, iTV, gaming and iPhone.

Too bad that the articles only contain headlines and no content. However, that is, as always, due to some transient technical issue. This time, it's "catastrophic storm damage." Rest assured, though, that the damage will be repaired, so the "broken links & database bugs in the backup site" will go away by the end of the week.

What an assclown.

Apple files yet another weird hardware patent

2006-11-17T16:55:00.000+01:00

According to a patent filing that Appleinsider dug up, Apple is working on (or at least aiming to patent) a multi-purpose touch-sensitive input solution. While patent filings may be deceiving, this pretty much looks like a swappable keyboard/touchpad solution. You could place a QWERTY keyboard on top of it, a piano keyboard, a trackpad, or just about any similar input device that can take advantage of a touch-sensitive surface behind it.

Apple has filed a lot of exciting or crazy hardware patents that went nowhere. There were detachable, wireless screens. Mice with iPod-like scrolling devices. Tablet computers. And really, when was the last time any Mac shipped with a revolutionary ingenious hardware element comparable to such a multi-purpose input device?

Perhaps this has more to do with a handheld device than with a Mac? If and when the touchscreen iPod becomes real, it could allow for an input area large enough to contain a QWERTY keypad, either virtual (i.e. displayed on the screen), or as a strap-on like in this patent filing. And if the iPod gets a QWERTY, it may take on a completely new life with vastly expanded capabilities. Its software is quite advanced even today, and just imagine what could happen to the platform if its greatest limitation, its lack of input options, could be overcome...

Welcome to Mac OS Rumors Rumors!

2006-11-15T01:16:00.000+01:00

The outage of MacOSRumors.com left the entire Mac community in suspense for several days. We're happy to report that the website is back with a vengeance! Always at the bleeding edge of Mac news and rumors, the site breaks the top story of the week: Apple's no less than five firmware updates, with hard-researhed links to each. True to form, the 800-pound rumor gorilla promises even more relevant rumor updates for "tonight," and posts a personal message (detailing health problems and promising great things for the "prominent" site) by the Steve Jobs of the Mac rumor industry, Ryan Meader himself.

Meanwhile, we have received several, totally reliable reports over the last few days with the gruesome details concerning the cause of the worrisome outage, and once the embargo is lifted off them, we will return with a greatly detailed report. You won't be disappointed! Check back in about five minutes. Better still, keep clicking on our sponsor's advertisement for five minutes, then reload the page.

Also, according to several sources deeply entrenched in the grapevine, the Mac rumor giant has several great features planned for the holiday season. A new (long-rumored) site engine will finally make many of the site's problems a thing of the past. Based on bleeding-edge HTML and even experimental PHP technologies, a massive rewrite of almost the entire MacOSRumors.com system architecture will be finalized by late November, and it will radically reduce the occasions where online content published by the rumor king vaporizes, or worse, turns out to be completely fictional, for an estimated 99.7% of all viewers.

The rumor juggernaut is also in the process of developing new editorial principles that will, according to a handful of MacOSRumors employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity, turn the website into "the next Newsweek," or even "the next Playboy."
Wall Street analysts agree, though the details are vague. One source with an excellent track record in predicting MacOSRumors trends (including the "quite intentional" expiration of the MOSR.com domain name a few years ago) hinted at a "better reconciliation of MacOSRumors.com posts with reality and truthfulness," while another trustworthy source close to the MacOSRumors.com executive team pointed out an allegedly planned "gradual move away from bullshit and lies."

We will keep you posted about these exciting developments. And as always, please take some of these rather unlikely predictions (which many consider little more than wishful thinking) with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: In about nine seconds, I will post the greatest story ever gracing the pages of a Mac blog. Provided, of course, that my middle finger surgery is completed by that time. Luckily, I have all the funds for that. I have the cash right under the... Wait... Oh no! It's gone! My money's gone! Somebody stole it all! Can you help me? I need $15,490, or I won't be able to type! Donations welcome.

Are you bored? Here's some recommended reading

2006-11-13T19:42:00.000+01:00

I wasn't bored, and was definitely not trying to kill time. Yet I stumbled upon some articles on a couple of websites that just begged to be read. And I dove in. Hours passed, and I had to forcibly separate myself from all that great reading material, which will certainly provide me with a lot more hours' worth of entertainment and education.

Are you an Apple freak? Do you want to kill some time? Do you like reading long pieces? Do you want some perspective? Then these are for you.

Orchard. As a true Mac enthusiast, I've read all about the mercurial Steve Jobs and the lovable Woz, as well as the evil Bill Gates. Haven't we all? But I've always wondered about the other Apple CEOs. What were they like? I never knew that Amelio had invented the CCD, that Sculley lived in a fantasy world without liars, or that Spindler would sleep under his desk.

And it's not just about the execs. Part of the Low End Mac website, Orchard describes itself as "home to articles on the history of the people and decisions behind the evolution of the personal computer," by history major Tom Hormby. This is a general Apple history section and more, with lots of fascinating content (that is, if you're interested in Apple and tech trivia and timelines and stuff). Hell, it even recounts the story of Sony's original Walkman!

RoughlyDrafted Magazine. Daniel Eran writes about technology, the Mac, Microsoft, and other related topics. And he writes. And writes. And writes. He doesn't write blog posts: he writes articles, well-researched, informative, passionate and thought-out. One every second day or so. All of them are cross-linked and illustrated with sometimes hilarious imagery (with a recurring motif of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs), kind of the way I think Tim Berners-Lee imagined the web would be (maybe except the Ballmer part).

Just start reading any article, and branch out by clicking on the internal links... and be sure to find your way back. It won't be easy after five hours and a hundred followed links. A good starting point would be any of the articles in which Daniel delivers punch after deadly punch to Microsoft's DOA iPod killer Zune. You'll feel sorry for Microsoft, I promise.

So where's the media center Mac Mini?

2006-11-12T14:01:00.000+01:00

It has been rumored with great intensity. Apple would release a new version of its entry-level desktop, the Mac mini, with added media center functionality. One major rumor-writeup even called it a TiVo-killer, purported to know its internal codename (Kaleidoscope) at Apple. Estimated time of arrival: the January Macworld San Francisco expo.

Of 2006.

Well, it never materialized. The rumor mill has become rather quiet about it, especially since the announcement of iTV, a device which looks conspicuously similar to a Mac Mini.

Could it be that the "sources deeply entrenched in the grapevine" were fooled by its appearance, and mistook the iTV for a Mac mini?

It has always seemed very odd to me why, apart from the form factor, rumors would want to turn the Mac mini into a media center:

The Mac mini is the entry-level Mac. It's designed to be as cheap as possible. It was made for people with basic computing needs. Why increase its costs by adding functionality that most of its users don't want?
It's uncharacteristic of Apple to introduce functionality exclusive to one Mac model, especially the entry-level Mac.
Hooking up a Mac to a TV is inconvenient, and Apple knows that. "Would you like an iTV with it, sir?"

I believe the Apple media center will be the iTV, and that's it. What exactly it will do in addition to what's already been revealed is anyone's guess. From the specs that we've been told so far, though, recording is not included (RoughlyDrafted Magazine explains why not, and why it shouldn't be there anyway).

So were all the "TiVo killer" rumors just simply totally wrong? Maybe, but perhaps recording capabilities will arrive in a second high-end iTV model later. Just in case they do, let me take this opportunity and warn Apple how crucial it would be to be able to start recording a show immediately. As in, pressing the "record" button. Alas, with the Apple Remote, that would look more like emerging from the depth of a five-level menu, and then delving into another three levels elsewhere before recording can commence. And that would probably mean missing the fun part.

Are Widgets worthless?

2006-11-10T16:52:00.000+01:00

A caustically funny article by Mac360 states an unpleasant truth: Widgets are useless.
To quote:

Dashboard Widgets are worthless curiosities with high calories and low nutritional value, toy utilities for the weak minded, popular with recent switchers from Windows PCs, who, it seems, are attracted to glitter and bright colors, and Apple delivered.

I remember when Widgets were first rumored. I didn't believe them. Everything about them, including their design, seemed diametrically opposite to whatever Apple does. Sometimes I go hunting for widgets that make sense, but usually return empty-handed.

Here's what I use widgets for.

Weather. I'm an expat, and thus I have a Weather widget up for my native Budapest as well as my current home, Luxembourg. I also put up weather widgets for my holiday destinations, or the current locations of some of my closest friends.
Calculator. It's nice to have one around at the touch of a button.
iTunes album art fetch. I don't even remember the name of the widget. I guess fetching iTunes album art is such an unimportant task that I wouldn't go to the trouble of launching a full-blown app for it, but a Dashboard Widget is painless enough.
Translation. The widget beats the hell out of the clumsy web interfaces we have.

To sum it up: Widgets are nice when you need some fast piece of information, or to do some simple task, but don't really want to launch an app (or website) for it, either because the app (or web interface) in question would be a bit inconvenient, or because the information or task is so profoundly unimportant that it's just not worth the hassle. Or both.

I wonder if Widgets have a potential to mature a bit. I have the feeling that a few killer Widgets are yet to be conceived and built.

Dear Apple, please don't screw up my iPhone!

2006-10-30T02:35:00.000+01:00

So the iPhone is coming, it's a fact. These are exciting times indeed.

According to some analysts (the past few years' answer to rumor sites), there will be two iPhones, and one will be a smartphone.

Maybe. If so, here's my humble list of requests for a smartphone. This is something that hardly anyone gets right. Let's see if Apple does:

1. Give me a QWERTY
It's time to put the silly "look Ma, no keys" proof-of-concept-gone-horribly-wrong era behind us, and face it: Handwriting recognition just doesn't work. Or maybe it does, but even then, handwriting is much slower than typing, as mankind learned some 125 years ago.

2. Let me work with files
I don't want smartphone apps such as text editors to work with their own esoteric "databases" that need to be "synced" with my Mac. Nope, I want to work with standard files (such as RTF or TXT) that I can open, save, as grown-ups do. I want to move them back and forth between my Mac and my iPhone. I want to be able to locate, open and edit them on either. Sure, if iSync wants to help me copy my files back and forth, why not. But I want to be able to manage them myself as well.

3. No artificial quotas, please
I hope iPhone will ship with plenty of flash RAM. But whether it's 128MBytes or 2GBytes, I want to be put in charge of how I use it. If I want to store a million SMS messages and no sound files, I don't want some silly quota that caps the number of text messages at, say, two hundred.

4. Let me save my text messages
Speaking of SMS messages, here's a hint: they are text files. Computers can read and write text files. Why not connect the dots? I want to archive a lot of my text messages for posterity. They can convey important personal messages. They can contain important business information. They should be easily exported to my Mac. And I mean easily. Point, click, select all, copy, switch app, paste, repeat ain't easy.

5. Don't make me use the touch screen
This may be considered an extension to the first point. I just loathe it when I can't move around in a text field (including selecting text), respond to a dialog box, or bring up a menu without breaking out my darn stylus. I want to be fully functional single-handed as well, and it's actually possible. All it takes is a small joystick (or a set of direction keys), and a Menu key (or Alt, or Control, or Command... you get the idea). A touch screen is okay, but only as an addition.

6. I want a browser with multiple windows
Opera can do this on the Sony-Ericsson P910i. And it's a must. Period.

7. Multitask, and honestly, too
Some smartphones don't multitask at all. Others do, but lie about it, claiming that opening an app will close the previous one. Garbage. The app remains open, but you're not supposed to know about it. You're left wondering what's with the apparent memory leak and degrading performance. I want to know what tasks are running.

8. Nothing should take more than three keypresses
Menus are all the rage, and Apple adores the iPod's limited number of buttons. But still, going into a freakin' menu so that I can change playback volume is a bit of an annoyance. On a cellphone, I need to be able to start typing an SMS after two keystrokes. I need to be able to locate a contact and place a call in two seconds (e.g. by entering a search mode, and selecting the contact by typing an initial letter or two of some of its contact info). I know Steve Jobs has probably fired people over the number of any extra keys, but there should be just enough of them to let me access any function in a few seconds.

Here's my list for now... I'm sure I'll revisit it later when I'm back from holiday.

Today in history

2006-10-23T21:35:00.000+02:00

October the twenty-third.

Five years ago today, Apple released a small, white gadget: an MP3 player that changed... a lot of things. It changed Apple, and, as many journalists will no doubt say, it changed the world. Here's why I will be reluctant to say that.

Fifty years ago today, students demonstrated in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, against the totalitarian communist dictatorship imposed upon the country by the Soviet Union. As the protests grew larger in scale, the Stalinist State Security Police fired several rounds into the crowd, leaving hundreds dead. Thus began the great Hungarian revolution of 1956.

While the nation fought fiercely with the communist militia and the occupant Soviet troops, a new government was formed, lead by Imre Nagy, with universally accepted legitimacy. A ceasefire was reached with the Soviets, and Hungary had high hopes of a brighter future: a welcome change after a few excruciating decades.

Hungary had drifted into WW2 on the losing side, it was occupied and ravaged by both the German and the Soviet armies, and despite free elections dismissing any forms of communism, by 1950, the Soviets had gradually turned Hungary into a Stalinist regime. There was poverty, no freedom of speech, and an unbelievably paranoiac system of secret service agents and party officials making sure that nobody would ever feel safe. From laborers to suspicious intellectuals to highest-ranking party officials, people were terrified to hear their doorbell ring at night, for it usually meant being escorted to a black limousine waiting outside, and never being seen again. Torture, executions and deportations were commonplace. At one point, a full ninth of the entire population was under some kind of criminal procedure.

This was coming to an end in that October fifty years ago, as Hungary's new government had set out to transform Hungary into an independent democracy with a multi-party system, and the whole world seemed to agree.

But it was not meant to be. By November, the Soviet Union had decided that it cannot let its important satellite state gain independence. While international attention shifted towards the Suez Crisis, new Soviet troops entered Hungary and brutally crushed the revolution, killing and wounding thousands. Hundreds of revolutionaries were executed, including the Prime Minister. Over ten thousand people were imprisoned, and two hundred thousand fled the country.

The dark days of communism returned. A milder, less brutal form of dictatorship followed, as the powers tried to buy the support of the Hungarian nation by relatively elevated living standards and relative freedom: as opposed to many other countries in the Soviet bloc, Hungary's citizens were allowed to travel freely in a few hand-picked countries. The country earned the harrowing, cynical distinction of being nicknamed "the happiest barracks."

The 1956 Revolution was one of the first nails in the coffin of the Soviet Empire and the communist ideology. Yet those hoping for a quick resolution were bitterly disappointed: the communist dictatorship in Hungary lasted for another thirty-four years.

Thirty-four years.

When I was born, it had fifteen more years to go. The first fifteen years of my life were spent under a demeaning, soulless, grey, petty, humiliating dictatorship.

Hungary is now a democracy again, has been for sixteen years. But the traces of the communist rule are still all too strong.

For starters, a Hungarian gross average salary is about €700 (US$880). So, for example, buying a Mac has a different kind of impact on your budget when you're Hungarian.

But what fills me with even greater sadness is the way these old communists have reinvented themselves as "Socialists," became successful businessmen (instead of jailbirds) by selling out state property, and have bought their way back into power. As I'm writing this, they are taking a break from lying about the economy they ruined, and are actually shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters and bystanders commemorating the fiftieth anniversary.

How apt. By the way, the clip above (courtesy of PestiSide) wasn't filmed fifty years ago. It was filmed today.

Oh, here's my initial reaction to the iPod. I wrote it five years ago tomorrow. An interesting read in hindsight.

Woz visits Microsoft

2006-10-19T21:54:00.000+02:00

Interesting post and comments thread on Ars Technica on a recent Woz visit to Microsoft. Even the resident spelling Nazi is funny. Actually, the post refers to a post in another blog, that of Mac BU employee David Weiss.

Weiss' post is all about favorite quotes, and so is the Ars Technica one. So why don't I pay homage by also picking a favorite quote:

Woz was giving away his Basic schematics, then when Jobs found out, he said, "Let's sell it."

Doesn't it sum up very nicely what's the difference between the two Steves?

Steve Jobs to be fired?

2006-10-19T13:11:00.000+02:00

This Fake Steve guy sure is funny.

YouTube lawsuits armed

2006-10-16T21:41:00.000+02:00

The Register reports that the predictable has happened.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a group of the largest media companies are co-ordinating their negotiations with the copyright-busting site.

The Register adds something not unlike something I posted less than two weeks ago:

Now YouTube's dilemma looks like this. The only way Google can justify the $1.65bn acquisition is because YouTube currently has a lot of traffic. Large volumes, it argues, should eventually be monetised successfully...er, somehow.

But YouTube only has a lot of traffic because of this copyright-breaching content, most of which it's carrying illegally. By contrast, the much vaunted market for "user generated content" will be a paltry $850m by 2010, Faultline reported here on Friday.

If you'll hear a loud Ssssssssssshhhhhhhh............! sound in the coming weeks, it might be that of air leaving a big, fat, ugly bubble.

UPDATE: Also courtesy of The Register, an analysis on how YouTube prepares its legal defense at least in one infringement case, based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An interesting read.

Suffering through Mac OS Rumors, so you don't have to

2006-10-16T16:08:00.000+02:00

MacOSRumors.com is sinking to new lows just about every time it emerges with new content, mostly bold-faced lies about its real updates, or rather lack thereof. This might be the only site that applies the concept of vaporware to Mac rumors, always promising some juicy bits "next weekend" or "in the evening" (and hardly ever delivering on these promises), and even posting broken links pointing to promising contents that just aren't there. The explanation ranges from the slightly ridiculous to the infuriatingly impertinent. Right now, they have this gem to offer:

The past week's articles, which didn't work correctly for some readers, are being re-formatted to the older site engine filetype and should be back online without the language-detection errors that were preventing some users from being able to read them this week. In the mean time, all new articles which follow below will use the older format and any links will work correctly. Thanks for your helpful feedback and patience -- once debugged, the new site engine will pave the way for a lot of long-requested upgrades and we think you'll find it well worth the wait.

Yeah, right. I mean, it must be really hard to publish some plain text on the Web. MacOSRumors has been struggling with its "site engine" problems for quite a few months now.

So, as a faithful reader, you're expected to go back there every five minutes to see if they've solved their problems, try to click on all their ads, and make sure not to block any pop-up windows, they are important! Maybe you are the one billionth visitor of some website, and man, that means you'll win a lot of money!

Anyway, today's update can be summarized as follows:

Leopard might save memory contents to disk on Intel Macs when losing power while sleeping.
Laptops will be updated soon. Duh. Link to previous post also included for some reason.

Don't bother reading the original. Read the parody instead. It might be juvenile, it might have an anticlimatic last post, but at least it won't have people taking it seriously. Um, wait...

Should Apple blog?

2006-10-14T16:31:00.000+02:00

Daniel Jalkut mentions a few worthy blogs on his own, including Microsoft's official Office for Mac Team blog, personal blogs by two of that team's members, Google's Mac Blog, and Apple's infamous Masked Blogger.

He's going somewhere with these. He says Microsoft is "kicking Apple’s butt in terms of public exposure." He thinks the Masked Blog is a proof of "Apple’s idiotic blog-stifling policies," and the Google blog is a "'cooler than Apple' corporate blogging entity."

I understand if Daniel would like to read blogs by Apple employees, either personal ones, or perhaps team blogs on the latest goings-on of some particular projects. Apple is very picky about the way it communicates with the public. Major announcements are invariably delivered by Steve Jobs at press events. Whatever else Apple wants to tell the world will be communicated in the form of press releases. It's very rare to find anything beyond the already-stated official position anywhere else, be it interviews or conferences or any other forums. Apple's spokespersons sometimes seem to have one task to perform only: to decline to comment on any given issue. Rumors, leaks and any unauthorized disclosures are frowned upon, or even taken to court.

So where would blogging fit in this picture?

I was excited when Safari/WebKit developer David Hyatt started to publish his "Surfing Safari" weblog (moved about eighteen times, currently accessible here), where he started discussing a lot of the issues concerning his work and web standards in general. Of course, he never gave away anything that he wasn't supposed to, and it was nice to get some insight into a very important part of the Mac experience: the default browser, one that Apple developed no less.

So where are all the other blogs? How about an iCal, an iLife, or iWork blog, or a general Mac OS X blog? And an iMac or Mac Pro blog? How about blogs for the iPod, AppleCare, .Mac, and so on?

Well... I really don't see what anyone could post in those blogs, really, apart from truly uninteresting stuff. Any mention of upcoming products or features would be a big no-no. Not just that: any information from which any hint of a future direction might be distilled would need to remain unblogged. And unlike Surfing Safari, where the authors discuss an open-source framework and other general web issues, these other hypothetical blogs would have no subject to blog on.

Apple is a very secretive company. A vast majority of its products are announced the day they ship, or a couple of months ahead at the very most. When Apple announces a product, it means that it's ready. Apple might have worked on it for over a year, gone back to the drawing board several times, considered then dropped several features, agonized over all the specifications and the pricing, and worked excruciatingly hard on the design and manufacturing process. But now it's ready. What we get to see is the end result.

Of course, there are a few exceptions. Operating system upgrades are dealt with in a slightly different fashion, involving developers (and, in a limited way, also the public) six to nine months ahead. But with the hardware or paid software offerings, Apple usually announces when it ships. In fact, with the single exception of iTV, Apple never discusses any hardware products in its pipeline. And iTV had to be announced for Apple's movie download service to make a bit more sense.

Contrast that with Microsoft's constant blabbering about its upcoming products. Does it really help Zune that the whole world is discussing all of its features, bugs, color schemes, marketing blunders and limitations? Zune is still months away from going on sale, yet the world has basically already reached a consensus that it won't be an iPod killer.

Announcing something that you're still working on might signal that you're eliciting feedback or discussion. And Apple's lack of doing that suggests that the company is confident in its ability to design products, without constantly turning to the public and asking, "Is it going to be okay? Or shall I change something?"

Apple also tries to fend off copycat competitors by not pre-announcing its products. Just think about Leopard's still unannounced 'top secret' features.

Apple's secrecy has spawned a cottage industry of rumormongering. Apple and Mac rumor sites run stories not only based on purported leaks by Apple insiders, but also on Apple's patent filings and even job adverts. If an Apple employee were to write a blog discussing just about any facet of his or her work at Apple, those blog posts would be scrutinized by hundreds of people associated with a dozen of such websites, trying to gather even the tiniest bit of information suggesting an upcoming Apple release. For example, Apple developer Blake Seely's mere mention on his personal blog that he got transferred to the Aperture team caused considerable impact on the rumors community, fueling the on-going speculation on the future of Aperture.

If Apple allowed its employees to blog on company matters, it would also need to set up a censorship division pre-approving any and all blog posts. Not that employees would deliberately disclose classified information, but perhaps they might not always appreciate how a seemingly innocent little detail could open up a whole can of worms.

Unless Apple wants to stop spoon-feeding its official position on all relevant matters to the press, and wants to lose a lot of its control on what gets out from inside its walls, it couldn't easily just start sanctioning employee blogs.

But how relevant would these blogs be anyway? If they couldn't talk about future directions or even too much of the current or recent events, really, what purpose would they serve? They would perhaps put names or faces to products and teams... Well, except that Apple doesn't encourage that either. Apple stopped crediting its engineers by name in any of its products' About boxes, perhaps in order to thwart headhunters or competition in their attempts to get hold of its key people. And really, can you blame Apple when its key weapon against the Microsoft juggernaut is delivering innovation, which does require secrecy?

So I think Apple's authorized blogs could do nothing other than re-hash Apple's PR, and provide some decidedly uninteresting details. Posts could go on like this:

So I walked out of my office on the [CENSORED] floor, said hi to Karen* in next door's office, and talked to her briefly on how hard it was to implement the [CENSORED] functionality in [CENSORED]. She agreed, and we went on discussing a similar problem in [CENSORED] over lunch. The [CENSORED] was delicious, by the way.

*[NAME CHANGED]

Who wouldn't just love to read such a blog?

One comment on the Masked Blogger's site (which the Blogger themself embraces) blows the whole question of Apple employee blogs ridiculously out of proportion:
"Here’s a question for Apple’s PR: what happens when only anonymous employees can blog? Hint: your PR will be controlled by anonymous people!"
This is wishful thinking. Apple still controls its PR, and it will take some serious unauthorized blogging to defeat that.

I really don't think blogging could add too much to Apple's PR efforts. The only thing that Apple could easily achive on the blogs front would be renaming Apple's newsletters and public releases as "Apple Blog entries," but that wouldn't do much. So why bother?

If you think there are areas where Apple could be more communicative and still maintain its secrecy, please let me know. Perhaps developer resources could be a good candidate, though Apple probably has its reasons to enforce some secrecy there as well, since that's where most of the innovation starts.

Will Apple take on Excel, or settle for sexiest spreadsheet?

2006-10-13T15:52:00.000+02:00

As PC Magazine reports, Apple is rumored to include a brand-new, full-blown spreadsheet application in the next release of its iWork suite. If the past is any indication, iWork's next version will be called iWork '07, and should be released next January.

According to PC Mag's article (written by Think Secret staff), the new component, codenamed Lasso, will try to compete with Excel without being too competitive, just like Pages fails to pose direct competition to Word.

That approach, which seemingly runs counter to Apple's recent Mac-PC advertising campaign, might stem from the company's respect for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, whose continued commitment to bring Microsoft Office to the platform has helped make Macs more competitive in some environments.

Can't argue with that. Apple can't afford to lose Microsoft Office for the Mac, whatever a horrible beast that suite currently is on any platform. With Mac versions of Microsoft applications dropping like flies (Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player), Apple needs to be careful in posing competition to Microsoft's titles... At least, for now.

Perhaps one day, when Apple's top secret "Office Killer" inside iWork version (such a thing must exist, right?) is mature enough to be released and promoted as a capable replacement for Microsoft Office, Apple will launch an all-out attack against the Redmond productivity suite, even risking Microsoft's pulling out of the Mac market altogether. But until then, Apple needs to be really careful not to outdo Microsoft too much here. Must be a bitch of a feeling.

I for one wonder when we, Mac users (or actually the users of any computing platform) are getting a decent word processor that will, for example, get structured documents right.

Whenever I've attempted to use several levels of headlines in Microsoft Word, its unpredictable, counterintuitive, and sometimes downright buggy behavior has driven me nuts. I would usually quit trying and continue in Pages instead, even though Apple's word processor has, to my disappointment, turned out to be much more of a presentation tool than anything else, lacking some basic word processing functionality.

That, however, might change somewhat according to PC Mag. Even though Apple's walking on a thin line between complementing and competing with Microsoft Office, the upcoming Pages 3 is rumored to include a dedicated word processing mode:

The next upgrade to Apple's desktop publishing software, Pages 3, is set to receive a number of improvements poised to make the application behave more like a normal word processor. At present, Pages features a virtually identical interface for both standard document creation and more advanced publishing, but Version 3 will divide these two capabilities into separate Word Processing and Layout modes.

So Pages will move a bit closer to Word (or rather, let's hope it'll move closer to what Word should be), while Lasso will get Apple's foot in the doorway of spreadsheet aficionados. We can probably expect attractive presentation of data, as well as perhaps innovative and intuitive data entry solutions as Lasso's main selling points, while on the downside, the app's scope should be vastly limited in comparison to Excel (so that Microsoft feels warm and cozy and safe).

But in any case: iWork watch is on. It's unbelievable how much the world has fallen captive to the Microsoft Office suite. Shocking as it may sound, I think both Word and Excel are usability disasters, and the world would be a much better place if these apps did not have a monopoly. Most computer users in the world have resigned to the notion that a word processing document must be a Word document. Some less savvy computer users even wrap Word documents around images and ZIP files before e-mailing them, thinking that any document should be a Word document! Word is trying to be everything for everyone, and for a lot of people, it is everything. The poor devils. And while Word can do a lot, there's also a lot it does horribly badly, and frankly, just finding your way around that bloated beast can be a daunting experience.

It would be much nicer to have open document standards instead, and competing tools working with them. Hopefully, Microsoft's migration to open, XML-based document formats will help make that possible. And hopefully, one day we will see some real competition from Apple as well. Apple can do multimedia software and system software arguably better than anyone else. Office software should be somewhere inbetween, so Apple could excel there as well (no pun intended).

And by the way, I don't know how much of the user base realizes that the next version of Mac Office will do away with VB support. Microsoft Mac Business Unit development lead Erik Schwiebert explains very nicely how that decision was reached, and it ain't pretty. I'll give you the link to his blog, but be warned: the explanation will have you bang your head against a wall in frustration. Apparently VB support on the Mac was a lifesize model of the Eiffel tower built of matches, and it would all need to be dragged through the eye of a needle in order to be ported to Intel-based Macs. Microsoft says, "no can do." Not enough people. Yeah, right, you may actually read my comments on Erik's blog, so enough of that here.

What could be more ironic than having Apple come up with a way to implement VB in iWork? If Steve Jobs reads this, I think he will do it just so he can annoy Bill Gates. Just remember where you read it first.

Google buys YouTube amidst mounting concern over geeky song-writing lawyers with musician friends

2006-10-10T03:12:00.000+02:00

It's done. Maybe they didn't read this.

New 'Get a Mac' ad stars gossipy Gisele

2006-10-10T01:09:00.000+02:00

Apple has added three new 'Get a Mac' ads to its repertoire. Perhaps the funniest of the three is the one featuring a true superstar, none other than... the gorgeous... wait for it... Gisele Bündchen!

Surprised? Yeah, sure... Yawn... Actually, we've been waiting for her 'Get a Mac' debut ever since late May, when MacRumors (among others) broke the story that beautiful Gisele had told the whole world about her upcoming Apple gig.

And for three months, it has been nagging me: did she make Steve Jobs as furious as he normally gets when that happens?

If you're old enough, you may remember how ATI had to suffer Steve's wrath for their premature specification* of some Macs that Apple was going to announce the next day. As Inside Mac Games wrote, "the unveiling of ATI's new graphic cards based on the Radeon chip was pulled from Steve Jobs' keynote, and from demo machines on the show floor," as a consequence.

Imagine how angry Steve could have been with Gisele when she announced her supposed surprise appearance in Apple's commercials three months early!

But then I think she might have gotten away with it. She certainly is prettier than ATI, for one. And apparently, she was in the ad. No pulling action was performed this time.

Whew. Steve is human, after all.

*The term "premature specification" was coined years later by Steve Jobs.

Advertorials on MacMinute?

2006-10-09T22:46:00.000+02:00

Maybe it's due to the time I spent at a self-respecting news publisher, but somehow I just can't stand ads disguised as news. If I go to a reliable news source such as MacMinute, I do that because I trust its editors to decide for me what's news and what's not.

What's not news (like the release of an unimportant product) is very often something that some company would very much like to be news. So much so that they would pay a news source to make it so. And if a news source accepts such payments, there goes its credibility.

If you want to make the news, do something newsworthy. If you can't, buy an ad. And if you're a news publisher, please don't sell your headlines. Your readers will hate you for that. Just sell ads, and make sure they can't be confused with news.

In the news: Wirelessly Control iPod with the Belkin SportCommand! Now, as a general rule, if it tells me to do something, it ain't news. It tends to be something else.

It doesn't get much better when you click on it:

"The new iPod carrier features weather-resistant durability, and is perfect for outdoor activities, such as snowboarding, mountain biking, and hiking, notes the company."

So now it's also perfect. Thanks for the heads-up, MacMinute. What next? This just in: Refinance your mortgage!

I'm going to give MacMinute the benefit of the doubt here. It may be just some oversight or laziness from the part of the editor of the day. MacMinute might have posted Belkin's press release verbatim just because they had no time or energy to reword it.

But still, it looks bad. Now I don't know why Belkin's product is mentioned on MacMinute: Did its editors find the product important enough to grant it a headline, or did Belkin pay for the exposure? Re-publishing press releases certainly makes one lean toward the latter explanation.

YouTube to be Googled any minute now, says NY Times

2006-10-09T20:40:00.000+02:00

The New York Times now claims that Google's deal to acquire YouTube is imminent. Perhaps it will be signed and announced by the time I complete this post, huh?

Favorite quote:

But entrepreneur Mark Cuban was less enthusiastic. A merger would be “moronic,” he wrote on his blog, because of the threat of copyright lawsuits. “Dont think for a minute that there wont be lawyers writing songs, having their buddies perform them, and putting them on YouTube, jerry-rigging the number of views via any number of easy-to-do processes and then suing YouTube over it,” he wrote.

I swear I'm not making this up, folks.

YouTube gets new friends, humiliates new weblog

2006-10-09T18:04:00.000+02:00

OK, so I had to post about how I didn't see YouTube's whole business model working out for them. I had to point out, just two days ago, how they were fighting an uphill battle against Copyright itself. And I even had to pen a sentence that pits Warner, one of YouTube's few copyright-owning friends, against Universal, a company full of scorn and indignation towards everyone's online video distribution hero.

And all this only so that YouTube can go out and embarass me today by getting archnemesis Universal to switch sides! The Register reports.

But here I go on painting myself further into the same corner by saying that YouTube's business model, while more interesting than before, still lacks an important bit: that of revenue. Now it's paying for bandwidth and content. Some of the free lunches it's handing out just got more expensive, though at least they're no longer stolen. Shave a few percentage points off the likelihood of the arrested scenario, and add them right to the bankrupt case.

Good luck to YouTube, anyway. Maybe I'll even start rooting for them, for real. There's a moving, naive element to their apparent, infectuous lack of common business sense. Ah, or maybe they are geniuses. We'll see.

Will Google deflate the YouTube bubble?

2006-10-07T17:09:00.000+02:00

The New York Times has run a (pretty well-written and balanced) story on a rumored buyout of YouTube by Google (free subscription required). Apparently, Google is offering 1.6 billion dollars for the clever little company. Wow. 1.6 billion.

I keep reading that YouTube is worth billions of dollars. And I keep getting furious about this silly statement. I tend to think that YouTube is nothing but a huge, company-shaped warning sign: unless we watch out, the internet bubble can come back with a vengenace. With all the hype surrounding the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, to which YouTube is a brilliant poster boy, people seem to start forgetting (again) that a company needs a business model, or at least a potential source of revenue in order to survive. Well, duh.

So what's wrong with YouTube? It's very popular. Very, very, very, popular. I love it too. If I want to show some video to a lot of friends, I will upload it to YouTube, and send the link. No e-mailing of huge files, no searching for storage space, it's all there, and it's free. The user interface is simple and easy to use. There are tags to search by, and they work. The quality is acceptable, though barely. And while there are some nuisances, like the lack of a legitimate download option, I'm more than compensated for these by the availability of a huge selection of videos that my fellow YouTubers keep uploading at an incredible rate.

If there's something interesting on just about any TV channel that I missed, chances are that it'll be on YouTube within a week. Somebody tapes it and uploads it. I may be looking for an excerpt from an old movie, a video clip, some famous moment in television: it has a higher chance of being on YouTube than on any other place on the web.

So it must be worth billions, right? Right?!

Not so fast. Let me summarize why YouTube is so popular. It's an easy way to upload, store and search video content. It's free. You can find lots of excerpts from television, cinema and video/DVD content up there.

In other words:

Its software is cleverly written.
It gives away storage space and bandwidth for free.
It gives you access to illegaly distributed copyrighted material.

Number one is not such a big deal. I mean, kudos to the YouTube team, they really did an excellent job, despite the many unemployed developers claiming on message boards that they could have done it too. The software really is clever. Its developers have paid a lot of attention to detail, reaching Google or even Apple-like heights.

But then that alone wouldn't have cut it. Imagine if 2 and 3 weren't there. Imagine a paid YouTube. It definitely wouldn't be the household name it is today. Maybe "Twenty thousand users and counting." And imagine a YouTube with a careful monitoring process in place that would never allow television clips or other copyrighted content to be published. Well, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in watching home videos or podcasts and the occasional trailer or teaser uploaded by its copyright holder, but not nearly as interested as in watching real, professional content for free as opposed to getting it through their intended channels, for which you would pay either directly, or by watching commercials. So all three of the above factors are crucial for the success of YouTube, which, in a way, is a market leader in providing free lunches – or, to be even nastier about it, free lunches stolen from restaurants and given away to any random guy walking by.

Handing out free lunches will, no doubt, get you vastly popular. But another thing it will get you is bankrupt. Throw in arrested, too, if you also traffic in stolen goods in the process.

So eventually, YouTube will need to figure out how to get paid (as bandwidth is really expensive, and storage space doesn't grow on trees either), and also how to legalize its content. Make no mistake about it: the lawsuits are written, signed, and are sitting in drawers, waiting for the day when someone rich buys YouTube and can be sued into submission. There would be not much point in suing YouTube now, when it has no money of its own.

How do you fix these major problems? Legality is the bigger one of the two. You either get rid of copyrighted materials altogether, and start offering only videos that are in the public domain, or you start to sign deals and control the delivery of copyrighted content. Apparently, YouTube is attempting the latter. One deal has been signed with Warner Music, and as Fox News reports (and other new sources enthuse the hell out of the deal), Warner will upload all its video clips to YouTube, and also let users share Warner-owned content on the website. Warner will get to veto the use of any of its stuff on a case-by-case basis, though. I don't know, but the sheer magnitude of this undertaking seems scary to me. And here's an interesting quote:

To make the deal happen, YouTube developed a royalty-tracking system that will detect when homemade videos are using copyrighted material.

YouTube says the technology will enable Warner Music to review the video and decide whether it wants to approve or reject it.

While a technology that detects if a video uses material owned by Warner Music seems a bit dubious, let's concede that YouTube has scored a victory here, it got Warner on board. At least one less lawsuit to worry about. But what is Warner getting out of this deal? The agreement is being widely described as a "revenue-sharing" deal, with few details. The Chicago Tribune seems to know that "Warner Music in return gets a portion of advertising revenue."

Advertising revenue seems to be YouTube's only hope for profitability, and somehow I don't believe that the large bandwidth costs of serving a 10-megabyte page can be offset by whatever clickthrough-rate any advertisement may generate on YouTube without angering and alienating visitors. People go there to watch a movie or ten, using up tens of megabytes of YouTube's bandwidth, and I really have to wonder if there would ever be a sufficient number of advertisers willing to pay at high enough rates to support this

And in order to keep Warner on board, YouTube now needs to share even this hard-earned revenue with the music giant. Warner's bottom line from the deal needs to be attractive enough to even justify the costs of uploading its catalog to YouTube, constantly monitor the uploaded contents, and offset any revenue lost from the free availability of their copyrighted materials.

And Warner is just one company. If YouTube wants to stay afloat, similar deals would need to be signed with just about every single copyright holder in the world. And make no mistake about it: some videos on YouTube are the exact replication of subscription-only content from paid websites whose owners would never agree to getting their lunches eaten by everyone's favorite takeover target.

YouTube wants to change the way companies view copyright itself. And not every copyright holder is as happy about it as Warner. Universal, for instance, thinks YouTube and MySpace are "copyright infringers and owe [Universal] tens of millions of dollars." And something tells me there may be more Universals than Warners out there.

In summary, I think YouTube will have a hard time ever turning a profit, and an even harder time dealing with angry copyright holders breathing down its neck. Unless it can be the David that slays the Goliath of copyright, it will soon need to reinvent itself as a much smaller, more modest, more limited shop that no longer allows the nearly-unlimited distribution of illegal content. As a consequence, its viewership will also dwindle. Basically, I expect YouTube 2.0 to be the next Napster, going from a massively popular cult phenomenon to a small, struggling, boring business.

But wait, isn't Google buying it for $1.6 billion? So I'm all wrong, right? YouTube is worth billions! Right?

Absolutely not, unless you're Google. If there's one company that could integrate YouTube 2.0, a smaller, less popular, less blatantly copyright-breaking version of this website into its services and overall business model, then it's Google. Google Video is not as sexy or popular as YouTube, and it would make a lot of sense for Google to replace it with a better-established, more popular brand. Google is one company in the constant process of developing, exploring and acquiring new, exciting technologies, and building them into their vast portfolio, somehow making sure that they eventually start contributing to Google's bottom line.

Google today offers a free and totally phenomenal e-mail solution with non-intrusive ads, an unrealistically generous helping of storage space, and a webmail user interface so well-designed that it drives users away from desktop mail clients. Google also lets you publish your blog, and it goes by a separate brand name (OK, full disclosure: of course Mac Thought Crime is hosted by Google's Blogger, so I'm sure I should be totally biased), though it's tied in with Google's other services very nicely. Now, another solution to complement Google's myriad offerings could be the ability to easily publish and share your videos online, embed them into your blog, search them via Google, and integrate it into the AdSense network. Note that most of these features are already available, in one way or another, in YouTube. The integration could go very smoothly.

It would be up to Google to decide what to do with copyrighted content. If it would all be weeded out (save for the Warner stuff, of course), then of course, YouTube would lose a lot of its appeal. But as part of the whole Google widget, it may win back a lot of that. The chances of survival for a YouTube that strongly enforces copyright would be much higher under the Google umbrella than anywhere else, in my opinion.

And if the original strategy of reinventing copyright itself is to be pursued, then wouldn't Google, with all of its resources and experience and goodwill, be much better suited to spearhead such a revolution than an independent little just-out-of-the-garage outfit?

It shouldn't be inferred from Google's interest in YouTube that anyone else would or should ever extend a similar offer. And that's why I think YouTube should ask but one question: "Where do I sign?"

But wait, how can I still call YouTube a bubble if companies like Google offer billions for it? Doesn't Google's offer validate YouTube as a viable business entity? It depends. It may seem that the real plan for YouTube has been, right from the start, to build and hype a popular service and position it as a takeover target, then get bought out at the right moment. The founders would laugh all the way to the bank, and the buyer would inherit a whole world of trouble, including a huge helping of copyright infringement lawsuits, and maybe also devising a plan on eventually somehow turning a profit.

This is, of course, a rather cynical theory. However, to me, honestly, this seems to be the only viable one. And this, too, requires a lot of luck: YouTube needs a very brave, very gullible buyer... Or Google. (By the way, doesn't YouTube even look like Google? Maybe it was intended, right from the start, to be bought out by the search engine giant? OK, too far.)
The following NY Times quote, however, contradicts this notion.

If YouTube agrees to a deal, it would be a sudden change of heart. Chad Hurley, a founder of the company, has said that he prefers to stay independent. “We’re not even thinking about being acquired or going public,” he said in a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters last month.

Not that corporate comments, especially forward-looking statements, are always 100% truthful, but if this statement was made in earnest, then, well, good luck, Copyright Slayer! You'll need it.

The bubble could inflate some more, and while they currently adopt a wait-and-see approach, some more impatient and trigger-happy corporate lawyers could just simply burst it one day by firing off some of those nasty lawsuits.

If YouTube tries to go it alone, I fear that in two years' time, its name will tend to be preceded by the word "remember" in most editorials, as well as blog and forum posts.

"Remember YouTube? The company I used to hype the hell out of when they were the shit? Now that they're gone, let me poke some fun at their expense to keep up with current trend."

That's just my two cents, of course. Add it to Google's offer. Hmmmmm, $1,600,000,000.02.

On Lightroom and clueless CEOs

2006-10-03T20:53:00.000+02:00

This happened to me years ago. I was fed up with the gross incompetence and immorality of one of the top managers at the company I was working for. I was a middle manager, and had a pretty bitter conversation about the state of affairs with one of my peers, the head of a much bigger, more prestigeous department.

After listening to my complaints for a while, he interrupted me somewhat impatiently. "You need to forget one idea," he said. "It's a fallacy that your manager needs to know more than you do."

In our European culture, he explained, we accept someone as our manager either if he's older than us, or he's more competent than us in what we do. And that's wrong. He suggested I get more used to American-style management, where all a leader is required to do is, well, lead (hire, groom, maintain, etc.) a bunch of great, competent people. He should not try to outsmart everyone in their fields instead.

This sounded great in theory. But here's how the story ended. This fellow manager of mine left the company after some major clashes with the ever-so-incompetent top manager. He went on to become a whole different kind of manager at a whole different kind of company. And while he had been universally loved and admired as a boss at his previous workplace, he was regarded by many as a kind of an asshole at the new company.

Here's why. At the first job, he had gradually risen to the position of management. He never supervised anyone whose job he couldn't have done himself. In fact, he trained and groomed a lot of great workers, including his successor.

As a boss, he was kind and understanding. That was in large part due to his personality, but then again, he was able to be understanding because he was able to understand.

Been there, done that: he knew pretty well when someone would bullshit him about any specific facet of the job. He was able to use his knowledge of what a task constituted when assigning jobs, setting deadlines, or negotiating compensation. He was as good as anyone at anyone's field: a characteristic that he apparently didn't think he needed for his job. He just happened to have it, and ran with it.

So what happened at his new company, where many ended up fearing and even loathing him as a ruthless dictator with unrealistic demands – a shocking departure from his previous reputation as a genuine good guy and great manager?

Simple: he had to manage people whose jobs he had never done. This is one big step to make for any leader climbing up the leadership ladder. Suddenly, you lose your immediate grasp of what and how everyone is doing. Suddenly, you can no longer tell easily a good job from a bad job, legitimate complaints from bullshit excuses, being concerned from being anal, and so on.

What do you do about it? I don't pretend to know the answer. But you need to make up your mind about how you would like to be clued in on the missing bits of information. Do you want to learn, or remain ignorant? Do you want to get involved and micromanage, or take back seat and rely on the expertise of others? Do you want to trust your people, or do you want to keep auditing them? You need to be consistent, especially in relation to your people: you can't go back and forth between extolling someone's competence and dedication one minute, and frowning on him utterly convinced that he's a fraudulent, back-stabbing weasel the next. And a surprisingly large number of senior managers get that wrong. I'm sure you've seen quite a lot of them.

So at the end of the day, you need to decide whether to become knowledgeable or to stay ignorant. Many agree that it's no problem to be ignorant, as long as you display the right kind of ignorance. And I'm in no position to judge one way or the other. I've seen fairly ignorant managers who were much better than some others with vast knowledge of their field and everyone else's. So knowledge is just one of the factors.

But how important a factor is it?

While it's probably impossible to know all about every operation being performed at a large organization, I might tend to side with those who believe that the more you know, the better you're equipped to make judgment calls or decisions.

And finally: can you really run a company if you're no expert at the core competence of the business you're running?

For example: can a sales guy run a software company?

With the obvious example being Microsoft and Steve Ballmer, you might also want to take a glimpse at Adobe, as John Gruber did, at its sales guy CEO, and the company's dubious (to put it mildly) marketing decision to shoehorn their innovative Lightroom app into their Photoshop "product line".

A blog, of all the things in the world...!

2006-10-02T23:08:00.000+02:00

Years and years in the making (by which I mean "periodically wondering how cool it would be to do it"), Mac Thought Crime finally emerges as a weblog.

This came after some internal struggle. Me? Doing a blog? No way. But then a lot of things have happened since the first-ever time Mac Thought Crime was mentioned (and yes, that link does point back to the Web's Middle Ages) as a project to be launched, erm, soon. First, blogs were born as such. Then, another few years later (and still no sign of Mac Thought Crime save for a few first and mostly second-level domains containing little other than yet more "coming soon" pages), blogs started to become a legit source of information (as the link from 2002 proves, pointing to the ever-so-legit Wired Magazine).

After all, the main focus of my... blog... (OK, I'm now comfortable saying that) will be opinion pieces on all things Mac (and sometimes beyond), and what better way is there out there than a blog to post stuff like that?

So here I come now, trading in a bunch of unannounced features that will be, erm, coming soon, for the ability to start publishing stuff immediately. I might have frowned upon blogs as somewhat inferior, perhaps superficial creatures of the Web, but that is definitely no more. There are some insanely great blogs that can and will serve as a tremendous source of inspiration for yours truly (first and foremost, the inimitable, oft-updated and always spot-on Daring Fireball). So blogging is serious business, folks (OK, maybe not always).

Anyway, ladies and gentlemen... I give you... Mac Thought Crime.