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

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

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Leopard's Stacks renders Dock even more useless

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.

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Apple, Jobs developing new, human side?

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.

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The iPhone is the new Macintosh

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.

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Here is my executive summary of the WWDC keynote

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.

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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Steve Jobs and his case of incredible backdating stock options

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

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Are you bored? Here's some recommended reading

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.

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Woz visits Microsoft

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?

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Steve Jobs to be fired?

This Fake Steve guy sure is funny.

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New 'Get a Mac' ad stars gossipy Gisele

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.

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