May Contain Nuts

I’ve been itching to get off of the dark blue design for a while now… it was a fun theme to build, but I never felt like it was really all that readable. Perhaps I shouldn’t take The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’s advice when it comes to blogging (“change your website to use dotted lines and tiny, unreadable fonts wherever possible”)…

Anyhoo, continuing with the product warning label concept that goes so well with the title of this blog, I put together something a bit fresher, with some larger font sizes for added benefit to those who prefer to actually read my blog. I’m still working out the exact design of the sidebar, but I’m aiming for something similar to the US nutrition facts label, because the idea amuses me. So, my apologies for the archives going missing for the moment… they’ll be back in a little while.

As a side note, this theme was designed entirely in Pixelmator. I wanted to see if I could use it for something more serious than minor photo touch-ups and image resizing. Turns out, you can. It takes a little more effort to work with than Photoshop because it’s missing any sort of vector tools, but it gets the job done pretty well. Between this and DrawIt (the Snow Leopard version, anyway), I’m really not missing Photoshop all that much. Pixelmator’s PS brush support and DrawIt’s awesome bitmap filter tools cover the vast majority of my Photoshop use cases for design.

Next up on the redesign table: Revision 1. And boy does it need some love… (also need to update my portfolio, heh).

In my opinion, the two most useful features that have been added to Safari 5 are the extensions API and Safari Reader. For those who may not know, Safari Reader is basically an Instapaper-like reformatting of page content to remove extraneous elements and focus on presenting the actual meat of the page: the article. It also merges multi-page articles into a single extended view so that navigating from page to page is no longer necessary.

At least one staffer at Ars Technica has gone out of his gourd over this feature. He complains that Apple is being hypocritical by providing users a means of blocking ads on the web while building an unblockable ad framework into their mobile OS. However, I feel that the author, his like-minded co-workers at Ars, and the innumerable knee-jerk anti-Apple commenters are missing several key points that distinguish what Apple has done in Safari 5 from what they’re doing with iAds in such a way as to make the two situations incomparable.

First, Apple is not blocking ads with Safari Reader. They’re still loading the page in its entirety and serving that to the user with the option of then going into what is basically a super-accessible “printer friendly” view to read the content of the page. Considering how piss-poor some website layouts are when it comes to presenting content over irrelevant material (multiple navigation sidebars, inline and sidebar ads, overlay ads, intellitext bubble ads) from a reader’s perspective, this is a welcome addition to the web.

Ars argues that since Safari Reader auto-loads every page of a multi-page article in rapid succession, ad providers are likely to discount impressions on later pages as robo-loads designed to artificially inflate a site’s ad usage statistics. This is where Ars has a semi-valid point, but ultimately the widespread implementation of multipage articles on the web trumps whatever altruistic pro-advertising stance they may wish to take. While Ars argues that somehow, by definition, multipage articles are only those articles that are more expensive to produce (using their 24-page Snow Leopard review as an example), the simple fact of the matter is that many websites are already artificially inflating their site’s ad usage statistics by breaking even modestly-sized articles up across multiple pages, to the point where it has become a pain for users to actually read the content they came to see (how many “top 10 X” articles have you seen that are needlessly split into 10 one-paragraph pages loaded down with multiple ad placements?).

I do not fault Ars for breaking their Snow Leopard review up into 24 different pages. In fact, I tend not to fault Ars much for any of their multi-page articles, because they are well-implemented. Each page has a generous amount of content on it, a comparatively small number of ads, and the splits are done in such a way as to improve the readability of the article as a whole by reducing page size into manageable chunks. I would certainly not want to see a single-page article the length of their Snow Leopard review (and entertainingly, I just checked… Reader won’t be offered when viewing that review in the first place!). That’s just mentally and visually daunting. Still, the side effect of this decision to be intelligent about how they serve their content means I’m less likely to use Safari Reader when viewing an Ars article. In the end, Ars wins more ad revenue from me by doing the right thing with its content, while people who are already doing their best to game the system by making their content hard to access are going to be the losers because people will essentially be voting with their wallets by activating Safari Reader to get the whole Top 10 Most Awesome LOLcats of 2009 article on one freaking page.

Secondly, Ars is making a false equivalency argument when it comes to the nature of what ads Apple is willing to support and what it’s willing to “block”. Setting aside the fact that Apple is not blocking any ads with Reader, and that ad impressions on multipage articles are being discounted by the ad provider based on past abusive behavior, there is a fundamental difference between web ads and ads in applications that the author seems to be missing, either unintentionally or willfully.

Ads in applications have always been unblockable (at least by the average user… people who know how to use the hosts file and configure their router to block requests to specific domains are the exception to the rule here), whether they’re on the desktop or the mobile device, but have also been comparatively tame and tolerable for most users. If you want to get rid of them, you generally have to pay for that ability, and that ability is (usually) provided. Ads on the web – by their very nature – are much easier to block, and due to the abusive extremes web advertising has been taken to, people tend to be much more inclined to block them first and ask questions never.

Thus, asking Apple to provide an opt-out switch for iAds is inconsistent with years of general ad practices in applications. Beyond that, it would put Apple at a competitive disadvantage on their own platform, as other ad networks already provide unblockable ads in iOS applications which Apple would get absolutely reamed for if they tried to allow users to block against the wishes of the developers or ad networks.

Honestly, I just don’t see anything intellectually dishonest or hypocritical in Apple’s actions on both Safari and the iOS when it comes to ads. Apple is driven by a desire to give users the best possible user experience. In their opinion, existing ad platforms “suck”, not just for users, but for developers as well, who aren’t getting as much value out of existing advertising as maybe they could. So, to improve the user experience on their mobile devices, they’re offering their own ad platform. In the opinion not just of Apple but also of many web users, reading stuff on the web “sucks” too, depending on where you go to read it. So, to improve the user experience on the web, Apple provides Safari Reader as a way to get around efforts made by obtuse web developers and content producers to make actually viewing their content as odious as possible in a desperate (and in my opinion, self-defeating) attempt to drive up ad revenue.

To be clear, I don’t think Apple is in any way trying to be altruistic towards web users by building Safari Reader. It is, however, an entirely intended consequence of selfishly trying to make something they themselves enjoy using, and then sharing it. At the end of the day, stuff like this improves their profits by providing a better user experience than their competitors, which is all that really matters, corporately speaking. However, I don’t think Apple is being intentionally antagonistic towards advertisers or the people who use them on their websites as a whole, nor do I think they’re being hypocritical in their behavior. They’re just being incidentally antagonistic towards ad networks and websites that are already being antagonistic toward their readers, and even then only in one small metric (multipage articles) whose real-world use in no way matches up to Ars Technica’s altruistic “multipage articles cost more to produce, and so require more ad revenue” argument. While this may be true (and entirely acceptable) for their multipage content, the web as a whole has an entirely different reason for creating such content: it artificially drives up page views on content that’s no more expensive to produce than Ars’ “etc” posts, and that’s just fsking annoying.

In the end, Safari Reader continues the fine browser tradition of empowering users, and will likely have even less of an impact on actual ad revenues than the invention of the pop-up blocker. Bringing iAds into the argument is nothing but a non sequitur which ignores the differences in advertising usage and history across two very different platforms. It also ignores the present realities of mobile advertising, and the proposed solution would put Apple at a competitive disadvantage at best (by only blocking iAds), and draw the ire of its competitors and developers at worst (by allowing users to block all ad platforms). Pretending that Google isn’t up to the same practice with Android, and not tearing them a new one as a result, is just downright disingenuous.

So it looks like the idiots in Microsoft’s marketing department responsible for the laughably inaccurate “IE9 is more awesome than Firefox” list that I deconstructed last year is at it again, this time comparing Windows Live Essentials to iLife ‘09.

I’d first like to put aside the absurdity of Microsoft comparing and contrasting the two creativity suites in the first place. The simple fact that this chart exists demonstrates how prevalent the “Macs are better creativity machines” meme is in the marketplace. You just don’t do stuff like this when you’re in a confident leadership position. And you especially do do such a piss-poor job of fact-checking your claims.

Second, this is being written in advance of the WWDC keynote, which could change some of these arguments depending on what Apple decides to announce. This most heavily applies to MobileMe’s pricing, which is rumored to be getting a serious overhaul today. Still, I’ll be going to battle with the facts I have, not the facts I want.

Ultimately though, there is a degree of apples-to-oranges comparing going on, largely because Microsoft considers Apple’s lack of support for Microsoft’s services as dings against Apple, but frequently fails to ding themselves for failing to support MobileMe (ah fairness, wherefore art thou?), but also because Microsoft keeps having to drag other OS X applications into the chart to fully compare the two suites since Essentials includes stuff like an IM client, mail client, and (bizarrely, IMO) parental controls which are built into Mac OS X. But bizarre comparisons aside, how accurate are they? Well… not very, I’m sad (but not surprised) to say. I’ll be tackling this section-by-section, so hang on for a lengthy bitch-fest .

Application Suites

Cost & Multitouch Support

What a bizarre (I know, I keep using that word) category heading. Whatever. I don’t think either of the “cost” columns really accurately portrays the cost of purchasing these two offerings. First, iLife comes free on every new Mac, so the effective cost of the suite itself is effectively nothing for those reading this chart from the Windows side of the fence. However, new Macs start at $599, so on the other hand there’s a hidden cost to be factored in there. From the other side of the fence, buying a new Windows 7 machine (or at least a new Windows 7 license) to run Live Essentials is between $100 and $250, depending on which version you buy and whether you skirt legality with OEM or system-builder licensing (unless you’re a student, in which case you may be able to get it for right cheap).

Ultimately this pricing thing feels like a huge gimmick spun up by marketing to intentionally misrepresent the facts of the situation as they pertain to their target audience. People interested in actually comparing the capabilities of these two suites for the purposes of buying a new computer are likely to be taken in by Microsoft’s implicit claim that in addition to getting that new $600+ machine, they’ll need to spend $79 to do anything “useful” with it, which makes Apple’s offering look even worse in comparison to getting a new Windows machine (which may or may not be cheaper, depending on the user’s needs) and getting a free software bundle on top of it.

Further, Microsoft seems intent on wrapping MobileMe into the iLife suite as well, which is by no means necessary for taking advantage of the capabilities of any of the iLife software. Sure, it allows you to take advantage of additional outlets for sharing, but it’s not like you’re locked into Apple’s platform end-to-end if you go with iLife. But sure, whatever, point to Microsoft for offering their cloud services for free. We’ll see how long this advantage lasts though.

Finally, the multitouch thing just kills me. How many people are going to take this bullet point seriously? First off, Apple doesn’t sell touchscreen devices that will run iLife, so the point of being able to use screen-based multitouch in their software is moot. More importantly though, who the hell cares about this feature in the first place? Are there really that many people with touchscreen computers aching to be able to rotate their photos with their fingers? Ugh. Points for the feature sprawl, Microsoft, but nothing else.

Chat/IM Apps

Instant Messaging

From here out, we get into the nitty-gritty stupid. Let’s leave Adium out as a free downloadable alternative multi-chat client and just stick with Microsoft’s decision to put MSN Messenger and iChat head-to-head.

Okay, MSN Messenger (from here out, MSMM) supports YIM, iChat doesn’t. Fair enough. And shock of shocks, iChat also doesn’t support the arguably arcane and proprietary “Office Communications Server”. Shocking.

Personalization (Scenes/Themes). Wow. Because I always thought MSMM was way more beautiful to look at than iChat. Why is this always such a huge bullet point when all it ever seems to do is make your application even uglier than it is by default? And seriously, games? This is an IM client, not a full-on replacement for fucking Facebook.

And now, the first of many actual inaccuracies (rather than pointless marketing fluff): iChat does indeed support tabbed chat. It’s had it since Leopard came out in 2007. It’s even on Apple’s feature sheet for iChat! I found this in 5 seconds by googling for “ichat tabs” images. Maybe Bing just doesn’t find that result… (oh my god, it really doesn’t!)

Social Networking

Beyond the falsehood of the initial claim that iChat can’t connect to Facebook Chat (yes it can, Facebook Chat uses Jabber, which iChat supports), I’m guessing that the rest of this is accurate, if irrelevant in my opinion. MSNM is a bloated pig of an application (as evidenced by the fact that it has games built into it) that tries desperately to be a social media hub by taking on huge swaths of functionality that are poorly designed (again, in my opinion) and make the application less capable for its original purpose: instant messaging.

A couple of final notes on this section, though… first, is anyone actually using this impossibly vague “Web Activities” feature? And is it just me, or is Microsoft actually working hard to make sure that you’re less productive at your computer by incessantly telling you about what all of your hundreds of Facebook friends are doing right this very instant?

Finally, what the hell kind of email integration is MSMM capable of that iChat isn’t? iChat ties into your address book to pull contacts into your buddy list (which I guess is technically Address Book integration on the Mac)… beyond that, what other aspects of my email would I even need to have integrated? Explain, Microsoft! Vague, unexplained bullet points in a vast sea of feature lists do not a convincing argument make!

Access Anywhere

Does Microsoft have an MSMM client in the App Store, or are they just proclaiming that since apps in the App Store support MSMM, they have an iPhone client? A search for “MSN Messenger”, “Windows Live”, and a review of apps published by Microsoft in the App Store revealed no first-party Messenger clients, so I’m not sure why they get a check mark here when iChat – which uses chat protocols equally well-supported in the App Store – doesn’t. The rest is fairly tech-y… IM on the web I can see as being marginally useful in out-and-about situations, but “IM Developer Platform”? You’re really pushing that as a client-relevant feature? Also, iChat may not specifically support SMS and mobile chat, but AIM – which iChat integrates with – does. Just because Apple hasn’t poured unnecessary resources into duplicating others’ work in creating mobile AIM clients doesn’t mean you can’t use them.

This whole category feels improperly targeted, to be honest. Microsoft is running their own social network through MSN Messenger on top of the MSN Messenger (sorry, Windows Live Messenger) client application, so they get to claim a ton of ecosystem benefits that iChat can’t, because Apple isn’t running the AIM network. That doesn’t mean iChat is less capable, as is implied, it just means that if you’re tied into the AIM network, you need to use other pieces of software when taking advantage of non-desktop-specific use cases.

Photo Gallery/iPhoto

Here we go…

Organize/Find

Top People: I’m assuming this lists the people who appear most frequently in your photos. In that case, I can’t easily find a way to replicate this feature in iPhoto. Fair enough.

Photo Finder Filters: For quick searches using the search bar, yes, iPhoto only allows one type of filter at a time (name/rating/tags/etc.). However, I’m not above creating a quick, disposable Smart Folder to do a search on multiple criteria. This seems to be something of an Apple-ism: want to find something quickly? Use a general search. Want to find something a bit more involved? Use a Smart Folder.

Batch Face Detection Confirm: Um… iPhoto does this. I’m not at home with my library of face-tagged photos, but I’ve done it before. It’s not hard. I think it’s a tied to a button in the bottom toolbar actually. Fail again, Microsoft.

Touch Up

Microsoft wins this category fair and square with some more advanced photo editing capabilities, especially the content aware fill-like Photo Fuse (which I think is just kinda creepy) and panorama stitching. I’m amused that it took them until Wave 4 to add a retouch feature though.

Publishing & Sharing

Flickr Sharing: It’s like Microsoft doesn’t even bother opening these applications before comparing them to their Windows Live counterparts. Flickr sharing is indeed supported in iPhoto. In fact, again, this is even called out by a huge “Flickr” button in the bottom toolbar!

Share to Windows Live: “for MobileMe”. What? If anything, I guess I should give Microsoft credit for giving iPhoto a check mark here, but I guess the alternative was to add another row for “Share to MobileMe” which Photo Gallery would have failed at.

Plugins: Not really a huge deal for me, and I can’t imaging it being one for many others, but whatever. Point.

Native Sign-in: Again, vague feature is vague. iPhoto features integrated, native sign-in with MobileMe (I just opened iPhoto for the first time on my work machine and all of my MobileMe albums were already accessible), but not Flickr or Facebook. Of course, “publishing partners” under Photo Gallery’s check mark is equally vague, so I can’t say for sure if Photo Gallery automatically signs you into Flickr or Facebook either. In any case, fail for not mentioning the integrated MobileMe sign-in when touting your own product’s Windows Live sign-in.

Video & DVD Apps

Editing

A lot of the reasons Movie Maker wins in these feature comparisons is because Apple completely rebooted iMovie a couple of years ago, and has yet to rebuild the feature list in the new product. And to be fair, comparing your release to your competitor’s current release is pretty standard. Still, for those looking for more capabilities without springing for Final Cut Express, iMovie HD is still floating around the Interwebs.

AutoMovie from movies, photos, music: iMovie does a limited version of this, but I don’t have the media at work to test the extent to which this is still true. iMovie HD did a lot better in this arena.

Auto-preview effects, transitions, & animations: Again, the new iMovie doesn’t live preview against your own content, but the non-rebooted version did. I can’t imagine this disparity persisting for many more versions, but Apple does have a bad habit of pushing people into the more expensive solution sometimes unnecessarily, so we’ll have to wait and see. If we’re lucky, Apple getting some competition in the “free” media editing software space should help spur faster development.

Publishing & Sharing

So remember in the Photo Gallery/iPhoto comparison when I said it was a wonder Microsoft gave iPhoto a pass on publishing to Windows Live? Yeah, they reversed course here for no readily apparent reason and split out Windows Live and MobileMe into their own rows. Also, Microsoft continues their Facebook hard-on. Was Facebook video publishing even available when iLife ‘09 was released? I expect that if not, it’s something that will be remedied in the next release of iMovie. Apple’s getting better about social networking outside of their own services.

Output Support

I need to check at home to verify the output resolution claim, but I also don’t really have any 1080p video to work with, so… yeah. Also, I’d much rather have h264 video than WMV. Seriously. Finally, video mail? How important is that to people, or are we just padding the feature list again? Besides, I can do video mail… it’s called a private YouTube video with the link sent via email, or a video uploaded to MobileMe with the link sent via email. Way more efficient, and way less likely to consume the recipient’s entire email quota.

Mail Apps

I can’t believe Microsoft is actually tooting Apple’s horn here by promoting Mail.app’s Exchange support. But hey, I did make the point at the beginning of this post that these guys are idiots .

Why is Mail listed as having an attachment file size limit? I’ve never run into an attachment size problem in Mail.app. If that’s a mail provider limitation, then be specific about that, MS. People can use Mail.app with Hotmail, which I’m guessing is where your claim of unlimited file size for photo attachments is coming from. I’d still much rather cloud-source the files than potentially destroy the recipient’s ability to receive more mail by stuffing their inbox… not everyone uses your services, Microsoft!

Point for irrelevant “Slim Cal” feature… can’t say I’ve ever needed or missed the integrated calendar from Outlook after moving to my Mac at work, where I use the calendar a lot more than I do at home.

Conversation threading: again, Microsoft fails at actually knowing what they’re talking about. Mail’s supported threaded conversations since at least Leopard, if not Tiger or before (I came in on Tiger and don’t really use the feature, so I can’t say for certain when it showed up).

I have no idea what “integration with cloud storage” Microsoft is talking about here that Mail doesn’t support. Mail.app can access any web-based mail service that Live Mail can, plus a few more that may support Exchange ActiveSync, which Live Mail doesn’t.

Publishing Apps

Here again, Microsoft is going for an apples-to-oranges comparison between Writer and iWeb. They serve different purposes and different audiences, but they tried to shoehorn them into a single feature comparison chart. The end result is that neither really looks exceptional in all categories (as would be expected when comparing to products with wildly different aims). Bullet points like “Familiarity with Microsoft Office” just make it look like they’re trying too hard to come up with downsides to ding iWeb for. This whole section doesn’t even deserve a more drawn-out review.

Security Apps

Once more I’m puzzled as to why Microsoft is offloading parental controls into a separate, non-bundled product, but whatever. I’m betting they’re using Family Security to trojan the rest of the Live Essentials platform into the computer by promoting that Live Essentials (through Family Security) can give you more control over how your kids use the machine.

I’m not even sure why most of these check marks are in this list, since they pretty much exclusively apply to Windows Live and Family Safety themselves. About the only thing you could possibly give them credit for is the live website filtering. Everything else is either totally irrelevant to a Mac user, or OS X supports out-of-the-box.

Music Creation Apps

I’m entertained that Microsoft is even choosing to promote the fact that this is something you can’t do with Live Essentials. Aside from that, I’m not sure why they aren’t using the GarageBand icon, or why GarageBand isn’t spelled correctly (there’s no space in “GarageBand”).

Wrap-up

To be fair, this list is a bit better than the IE9 vs. Firefox/Chrome/Safari chart they came up with last year. However, there are some pretty incredible and glaring inaccuracies that even a brief usage of the apps in question would reveal. Plus, the majority of the pro-Essentials check marks are relatively obscure features that seem to be there mostly to give Microsoft something to brag about, rather than something that would provide actual utility to the user (particularly in the MSMM/iChat comparison). Between that and the obscure FUD-ness of the pricing at the beginning of the chart, it seems like this was hastily thrown together to meet some new demand from management that they counter the “Macs are better at creative stuff” meme in advance of whatever Steve might say at WWDC today. D-, Microsoft.

Engadget has rumors of a new Apple TV product refresh that seems to play into a few of the ideas I had for the device after the iPhone OS 4 announcement.

Possibly the most interesting thing is that the report indicates Apple is ditching the Apple TV-specific branch of OS X for the iPhone OS. This is indisputably a good move. Apple TV’s software is still built on 10.4 Tiger, while the Mac has advanced to 10.6 and the iPhone OS branch of OS X is nearly 4 revisions along now. It always struck me as odd that Apple would put so much effort into maintaining a major product on such a legacy platform (by Apple’s standards, anyway) when the newer releases of both OS X and the iPhone OS are so much more capable.

Also interesting (and a point of pride given that I freaking called it! ) is that the Apple TV is moving to Apple’s A4 processor, away from the tremendously underpowered mobile Pentium-era chipset in the current model. Again, this makes considerable sense, because it reduces development expenses and complexity across Apple’s product line. Apple’s done a good job at demonstrating the power and efficiency of their custom silicon through the iPad (and presumably the new iPhone), and leveraging that hardware in another product seems like a given. Apple TV’s form factor and performance needs are much more suited to an ARM chipset than anything from Intel. Hopefully this will also bring the device’s power consumption down to more “environmental checklist”-friendly levels.

Given the paucity of onboard storage space (only 16GB SSD), I think this rumor also dovetails nicely with the rumors of an upcoming cloud-based iTunes service that have been floating around since Apple started building their new North Carolina data center, and which intensified after they bought Lala earlier this year. It’ll be interesting to see how this service ends up working, and whether it will allow users to upload their existing non-iTunes content into the cloud for universal access.

The thing that interests me most about this rumor, though, is the possibility that Apple could open up the Apple TV as a new platform for applications. Depending on how they approach this, it could be as simple as allowing services like Netflix and Hulu to stream their content onto the device through custom apps, or it could be as advanced as a full-on gaming console-type device. I think the “standard” approach would be to limit the device to audio and video playback, with the basic Apple remote for navigation, since that’s what most people would likely be buying one for. However, provided it had a Bluetooth radio in it (and why not?), it wouldn’t be difficult to expand support to more complex inputs such as dedicated controllers – or even iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad inputs – for gaming.

As I mentioned in my iPhone OS 4 post-mortem, Apple has a significant amount of support on their mobile platform for gaming (and now with Steam on the Mac, growing support for gaming on their desktop platform as well, hooray!). Major companies like EA and UbiSoft are developing major titles for the iPhone and iPad. Why not build on that support by expanding from the mobile space into the living room? With additions to the iPhone OS like Game Center, a robust platform for development, high-powered and highly-efficient hardware drawn from the mobile space, and serious support from major publishers, I think Apple could easily leverage their success with the iPhone OS into a major play for the living room by providing a familiar and broadly-supported platform to the masses who have already bought into Apple’s media ecosystem through iTunes.

The one potential sticking point in the gaming arena is the paucity of onboard storage. 16GB isn’t a lot for games designed for the TV, presumably complete with major-platform price points and gameplay length. I sort of hope that Apple differentiates the line-up with larger-capacity devices (up to 64 or 128GB) and supports cloud storage of apps and app data so you can swap out titles as you play them without having to worry about losing your games or your progress.

Will all of this happen? Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, the potential is there for Apple to swing straight from their success in mobile computing into a play against Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and now Google for control of the living room, using their experience with the “hobby” of Apple TV as a springboard. If nothing else, ideally the promise of third-party streaming services like Netflix and Hulu will come to pass. Given the rumored $99 price point, that may not happen as Apple may seek to make money off of this device through services rather than the actual hardware, but one never knows. I kind of hope this ends up being the “One More Thing” for the WWDC keynote despite Engadget’s assertion that it won’t be mentioned, because with the next iPhone essentially being a known entity already, it’d be nice if there were something like this to announce and flesh out to retain a certain level of interest and surprise. Assuming Apple plans to open this platform up to developers, WWDC seems like as good a place as any to get the word out – even if it doesn’t ship the product until later this year – so that the device can hit the ground running with a broad range of applications already available for it. I don’t think the iPad approach of scaling existing apps up to fit TV screens is going to work at all for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that TVs aren’t multitouch-compatible. There’s going to need to be a longer lead time on 3rd-party development to build apps that are Apple TV-compatible; existing apps simply won’t translate despite the commonality of the underlying architecture.

Hey, this tech pundit stuff is easy! Why can’t I get paid for it?

“Why hasn’t Cyan released the Plasma source code by now?”

Because, as RAWA explained, it’s a long, painful process. As RAWA somewhat implied, there are very few people at Cyan who even know anything about the engine code anymore. Most – if not all – of the Headspin team they bought the engine from have since left the company or been laid off. The number of “Don’t use this, we don’t know what it does” comments in the ResEng documentation I was given when I started there speaks volumes about how much work needs to go into the engine to get it ready for release.

Further, open-sourcing the engine as it stands now faces a number of additional issues. First, I’m under the impression that Cyan wants to separate the engine code from any game content that might be tied up in it, in order to retain legal rights to their D’ni universe intellectual property and released content. Given how often purpose-built engines have game content references hard-coded into them for the sake of convenience, this may be more likely than it seems. Second, I’m fairly certain that Cyan intends to continue using Plasma after they open-source it, so it must be done in a way that doesn’t prevent Cyan from using the engine commercially in the future. Third, there’s a number of proprietary components in the Plasma engine that are the property of third parties (PhysX is a good example), which Cyan can’t release the code for. However, stripping the references to that code out of the engine would make it essentially useless.

A good parallel to draw, I think, is to Relic’s decision about 5 years ago to open-source the engine they used to create the original Homeworld title in 1999. As with Plasma, everyone at the time was mind-boggled at the fact that a AAA game engine for a best-selling title was just going to be given away by its creators. However, to this day there still isn’t an openly available version of the engine that can be used for anything besides running an extremely buggy and feature-deprived build of Homeworld, because so much of the engine got crippled when Relic ripped out stuff like the Bink decoder used for the animatic cutscenes (which weren’t released along with the engine, so until the hard-coded references to them were removed from the engine, the game would just crash because of the missing assets), and there’s a pile of assembly code that just doesn’t work very well on modern hardware, including a lot of homebrewed custom OpenGL assembly code (dubbed “RelicGL”) that was written to get bare-metal access to the anemic or even non-existent graphics hardware available in 1999. Check out the Homesource forums for a taste of what fresh Hells Relic’s engine hath wrought.

So, if Relic’s approach can shed any light on this subject (and I think it can), throwing the code out now now now isn’t going to accomplish Cyan’s goals any faster than releasing the code at a later date, and is in all likelihood actually going to slow things down even further. I know there’s a lot of code monkey geniuses in the Myst community, but Plasma is a 15-year-old monster of an application, and more eyeballs on the problem doesn’t always mean faster results.

Which leads me to…

“Why won’t Cyan let trusted community members help get the code ready for release?”

As RAWA’s noted, and as many others have mentioned, there are a whole swarm of thorny legal issues involved with granting non-employees access to a proprietary code base full of more licensed proprietary third-party software, on top of the very probable situation that Cyan doesn’t have a system in place for allowing outside access to their Plasma code repository, it’s probably in a rather outdated source control system (perhaps even Visual Source Safe *shudder*), and compiling it may also require licenses for software that volunteers would need to be given (just as an example, anyone who’s tried to recompile a C++ VS6 or VS.NET project in VS08 should know it’s not likely to go smooth). Getting all of this set up, settling the hazy legal issues surrounding unpaid labor in the US, and drafting and issuing contracts and access permissions that are locked-down to only the relevant material is probably more trouble than it’s worth, honestly. Again, remember, this is a spare-time effort that Cyan can’t afford to expend valuable resources on when they’re needed elsewhere for other projects.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Cyan is holding onto the code to try and hammer out some additional security issues, which they don’t want out in the open for discovery when they’re also running the only (legal *ahem*) active shard of the game on the planet. Given the (admittedly long-ago) history of outsider abuse of the Myst community (such as hacking the Riven Lyst), I would understand it if Cyan wasn’t willing to expose the Uru community to another outage resulting from someone exploiting the code’s most evident weaknesses. Considering the Vault always struck me as being held together with duct tape and bailing twine, I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot that can go wrong very easily, and again, right or not, Cyan may just want to avoid that situation if at all possible by keeping the code internal for now (and please spare me the “security through obscurity” arguments, because they never seem to convince anyone in either direction).

And now, for my own petty comment: I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Uru hacking community’s tendency to do whatever they want with or without Cyan’s permission is putting Cyan off from being willing to accept their assistance. I applaud Paradox for actually working with Mark on the Pidgin KI plugin, and that sort of approach – independent development of tools and extensions with Cyan’s permission since it’s their property – if repeated elsewhere, could go a long way towards improving the apparent lack of interest on Cyan’s part towards the hacker community, and community involvement in general (assuming the aforementioned hurdles aren’t going to get in the way).

I think I need to work on my witty titles…

As I alluded to on Twitter earlier, I’m trial-running an app called Delibar for OS X that syncs with Delicious for bookmark management. The problem I’ve had with Delicious in the past is that there’s no really really good solution for Delicious that integrates with Safari, on account of Safari’s lack of an official plug-in architecture. There’s a handful of 3rd party apps and a couple of SIMBL “plug-ins” that support Delicious in various ways, but nothing that ties directly into Safari’s bookmarks system to sync it with Delicious directly, and give me access to those bookmarks from Safari’s bookmark bar (yeah, I’m annoyingly picky). I’ve also tried to switch to Firefox on the Mac, but it seems slower than Safari, and it’s always just different enough from the rest of OS X to annoy the hell out of me whenever I try to use it long-term (again, picky…).

Ultimately, I took some time to reflect on how I use my bookmarks in an effort to figure out how best to approach the issue of keeping them organized and accessible in as many places as possible with as little fuss as possible. What helped the most was when I stopped thinking about my bookmarks in such a monolithic, all-or-nothing manner, and approached them on a more purpose-driven basis. To make my point, a little bit of informative explanation is probably in order.

Upon reflection, I use my bookmarks for three things: first, I use them for regular, everyday sites like comics that don’t have RSS feeds, forum links, and some work-related items. These tend to sit towards the right side of my bookmark bar in Safari, and get used with relative frequency (once a day or more).

Second are the bookmarks I create to be sure I “get back to” a certain site, because I want to spend more time reviewing the content, or because I want to show it to someone else who is unavailable while I’m looking at it, or because I think it’s neat, but don’t want to clutter my bookmarks folder with something I’ll probably look at once or twice a year at most when I’m looking for something to spark my creativity (or whatever). These tend to pile onto the left side of my bookmark bar, and thus have an annoying habit of shoving the frequently-used bookmarks into the “>>” chevron menu. I also have an annoying habit of ignoring them despite their prominence, because they’re more often just in the way.

Finally, there are the bookmarks I create to make sure I have the content available for future reference. These include things like troubleshooting articles, interesting (but not immediately useful) jQuery or WordPress plugins, application websites, and articles on subjects I’m interested in learning more about (or that I think are awesome). These are rarely-used but important for me to keep around in case I need them in the future, but tend to end up poorly-categorized because of the rigidity of Safari’s folder-based bookmark system.

I’ve also noticed that I tend not to use bookmarks on my iPod all that much. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re effectively hidden all the time and thus out of sight, out of mind, or if it’s because my mobile browsing habits are just different from my desktop ones, and I tend not to visit the sites I’ve bookmarked as much. Either way, cutting down on bookmark cruft in MobileSafari will be nothing but helpful in keeping only the stuff I access most frequently at my fingertips; everything else will still be accessible, but through different means, as explained below.

What I’ve decided upon is a system that puts each type of bookmark into a system that best supports what I’m using those bookmarks for. Thus, I have a more complex – but easier to mind-space – three-pronged system that I’m trialing starting today.

First, for my frequently-used bookmarks, I will continue to rely on MobileMe’s bookmark sync to keep everything consistent from device to device (including my iPod). There are a few bookmarklets on my bookmark bar now for MobileSafari-specific actions (such as a tool for displaying the title text of an image, which is useful for things like XKCD), and then my commonly-accessed bookmarks, which tend to break down into folders much more cleanly than my other two types of bookmarks.

Second, for bookmarks that I make just so I can check out a site’s content at a later date, I’ve started to use Read It Later, which should help cut down on the number of tabs I have floating open between Safari and Gruml (my desktop RSS reader) from day to day. I’ve also downloaded the service’s free iPhone app, so that I can, for instance, poke at stuff while I’m on the couch, rather than at my computer.

Finally, I’ve decided to start using Delicious again as a way to house all of my “type-3″ bookmarks that I make largely for reference purposes. By splitting these bookmarks away from my main bookmark content, I’m less averse to using a separate app in OS X to access/maintain them because I won’t be losing toolbar-level access to all of my important/frequent bookmarks as a result.

Not the fun part will be getting everything re-organized, because having just started, everything’s sort of all over the place at the moment. It’ll probably take a day or two of concerted effort to get it all cleaned up and properly categorized, but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. Once I’m done, I’ll have a concise collection of bookmarklets and frequently-used  bookmarks in Safari, a consolidated collection of “things to get back to” on Read It Later that I can check regularly, and a nice tagged archive of “stuff” reference links in Delicious.

Now I’m off to work on my organization. Wish me luck!

The interwebs are abuzz today with Gizmodo’s comprehensive tear-down of what’s very probably the next generation iPhone. With that buzz has come some of the long-standing complaints and gripes about Apple’s mobile business, and I wanted to weigh in with my thoughts on them, plus the new iPhone.

Apple’s still playing catch-up

For playing catch-up, Apple is doing a pretty darn good job of selling their crappy products. For some reason usability for the masses never factors into the equation for people who like to cite their 5-year-old Japanese-imported phones with feature lists as long as a school bus and a user manual the size of War and Peace. That’s not to say that the iPhone is perfect, or that it already does everything anyone would ever need (if that were the case, there would be no new iPhone), but Apple is usually very serious about usability, and tends not to build in a feature until it kicks some serious ass. This is why the iPod, while not the first MP3 player, is the most popular one, and why the iPad, despite being nothing like what the geek crowd wants from a tablet, has already sold over half a million units in its first two weeks.

So, kudos to Apple for taking the time to get a feature right, and I’m glad they’re (supposedly) bringing some of the geekier stuff like video conferencing to the device, along with improvements to the guts like a better camera and display.

The iPhone is still a single-carrier device

Largely only in the States, but I get that this is a serious problem for some people. Choice is always good, after all. However, I think AT&T netted themselves a pretty considerable exclusivity contract and has been working overtime to mend fences with Apple on sore points like New York and San Francisco connectivity (to the point where they actually gave the Apple staff some cellular network training to try and reduce problems), so overall Apple is probably not as hard-pressed to find another partner now as they were a couple of years ago when the AT&T hate was in full swing, along with their exclusivity. Apple is also in something of a tough spot because the next most likely iPhone carrier is Verizon, who uses a completely different cell radio type that’s probably on the way out, thanks to an inevitable LTE roll-out in the future. Given the choice, I don’t think Apple would want to spend the extra R&D and manufacturing costs on a CDMA phone when a better alternative is up-and-coming (and how better to drive roll-out and adoption than with an Apple-branded product?).

I’d love to see the iPhone come to T-Mobile since, in the States, they use the same kind of network as AT&T, but their comparatively small size is probably off-putting to Apple, and their willingness to hop into bed with Android as a flagship product platform probably has probably also chilled Apple’s opinion. For that matter, Verizon being so focused on the Droid is probably not helping their iPhone chances either. Apple is a fickle bitch, I’ll give you that. I’d still like to see the iPhone on T-Mobile though, if only because their plans would likely be less ass-rapey than AT&T’s.

The App Store approval process is terrible

Yes, it is. And while I think it’s in Apple’s best interests to keep their platform well-policed, I think there are a few things that could be done to alleviate some of the tensions in the developer and platform openness communities.

First, turn the approval process over to a third party, so that Apple can’t be seen to have a vested interest in controlling the store’s content to reduce competition. Apple made a huge stink with its rejection/indefinite hold of the Google Voice app, and aspects of the approval process that allow Apple to reject an app for “duplicating core functionality” are nothing but trouble for them in the future if they continue to grow in mobile computing influence.

Second, stop rejecting apps based on content. The marketplace is a perfectly viable place to let apps with really terrible purposes or content get dumped into oblivion; Apple doesn’t need to lend a hand by preventing those apps from coming to market. Regulation based on intent is really hard, and demonstrably prone to inconsistencies. If someone wants to put a porn app in the App Store, give them a category to put it in, and give users a filter to exclude that category if they don’t want to see it. Heck, building in a filter system so we can hide portions of the App Store we don’t care about would be awesome regardless of whether it led to an “explicit” category.

Now, if developers can be shown to be making malicious or duplicitous use of the App Store (such as selling single-site RSS readers to make money off of the content without that site’s permission, or stealing a user’s contact information without their knowledge), then yes, reject and/or pull their apps from the store. Anything else, though, should be left to the users to patrol, rank, and reject from their own devices. I know Apple is trying to maintain a certain appearance of being family-friendly (as Jobs’ comments during the iPhone OS 4 Q&A illustrate), and that’s hard to distance yourself from when you’ve built the application store for your product directly into your sync software, but properly established with parental controls and such, I think it would result in more positive press for Apple than negative.

Apple is being duplicitous and/or greedy by charging iPod Touch owners for OS updates

This is one that really kind of blows my mind. I mean, seriously, when did we decide that mobile operating systems were free? I know the iPhone seems to set an “updates are free” precedent, but that’s because the cost of the updates are amortized into the cost of your service contract with AT&T. You’re still paying for updates, just not as explicitly up-front. For iPod Touch owners, there’s no service contract (or revenue amortization, ala Apple TV) and thus, no way to pay for updates surreptitiously, so you get charged for an upgrade. And honestly, paying 5 or 10 bucks for an entire major release of an operating system is a pretty damn good deal regardless of the device it’s running on. I’ve never had a problem paying to update the OS on my iPod Touch (and I do seem to be the only person on the internet who feels this way sometimes) because the device did what I needed/wanted it to do when I got it (as a present, full disclosure), so any improvements to its functionality are things I’m willing to pay to get.

Also, more specifically on the subject of the Apple TV, I don’t think Apple’s really putting a lot of effort into that project anyway, so the resource commitments are probably small enough that even if they weren’t amortizing the cost of the device out over 2 years of financials, sales of their other products could easily fund Apple TV OS development without impacting the company’s bottom line.

—–

I do also want to express some initial thoughts on the supposed (but very probable) iPhone Gizmodo got their hands on over the weekend, so here we go.

First, I’m very pleased that the thing isn’t rounded on the back like the 3G and 3GS are. That’s always struck me as an odd design decision for something that’s going to spend at least a fair amount of time on flat surfaces like desks (and it’s even more perplexing that the iPad does this too, since it’s even more likely to be a desk-mate device). I also think the new design integrates the device better with the rest of Apple’s product line, which is pretty much defined by aluminum-and-glass-oriented industrial design with lots of rounded corners and flat faces. The 3G and 3GS just seem like such bizarre departures from that approach, and the 4th-gen device seems to bring it back into the fold alongside the iPad. I really, really hope this design trickles down into the next-gen iPod Touch too, because I’d love to get my hands on one of those.

Second, the overall industrial design of the device is very interesting. It’s something of a break from Apple’s “no seams” policy, though that may change with the final device. In any case, the all-glass face and flat aluminum sides give it a certain amount of visual heft and maturity that the current design lacks. The glass/ceramic/plastic back (there’s uncertainty as to what it actually is) also looks very nice, with a matte finish that both mimics and counter-balances the all-black face, giving it a nice symmetrical, balanced feel.

Some people have said that it looks like Apple took a page from the Zune HD in the design of the new device, and while there are similarities, I don’t seem the resemblance to the Zune as much as I do to the rest of Apple’s products. This seems like an migration back towards Apple’s dominant design aesthetic, more than a desperate grab at Microsoft’s overtly-industrial industrial design.

Finally, the higher-res display sounds like a really nice improvement, and the OS already supports pixel-doubling applications on the iPad; a slightly more improved implementation would do just fine with running apps pixel-doubled in the same physical space as the original device. I’m also honestly glad they’re not going with OLED displays, because their daylight usability really is crap.

So it looks like I was both close and far off on my predictions for the new iPhone OS that Apple previewed today. I wanted to post some thoughts on how well I did, as well as a general collection of thoughts on Apple’s presentation itself. So first, how well I did on my predictions.

Multitasking

I don’t think this was a huge surprise for anyone, but it was still very nice to see it actually happen. I was mostly wrong about the UX for it though, and to be fair the rumors weren’t entirely correct either. The Dashboard widget toolbar interface (as opposed to the rumored Exposé interface or my conceptual Safari web pages interface) is an interesting decision on Apple’s part. The design details are perhaps the most interesting thing to me, actually. The iPhone OS dock now reflects the desktop OS X dock across all platforms. I find this interesting mostly because the original iPod Touch firmware had a similar dock UI, but changed to match the iPhone in a later update. Now with the iPad and the new iPhone OS, everything is switching over to the glass Mac dock.

I like the spread of features being made available to developers to create backgrounded applications, and totally understand the way that multitasking is being handled on the iPhone for battery life reasons… tying into services that the OS offers is way less intensive than everybody writing their own services to do whatever they want whenever they want, and with the possible exception of RSS feed fetching in the background (something which can technically be done with push notifications when the app is tied to a service), this handles pretty much every use case people have been griping about on the iPhone.

I was of two minds regarding the multitasking behavior after the presentation was over, but the hands-on stuff from Engadget and others has given me a pretty good glimpse into how everything works, and I’m pretty pleased with it. I’m still not sure if apps will continue to spawn into the multitasking dock until the system runs out of memory, and how it will remove them from that dock at that point (presumably on a least-recently-used-first basis), but other questions like how apps get into the app switcher (by default) and how to remove apps from the app switcher (press and hold to bring up a minus symbol) have been answered to my satisfaction. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the implementation, even if it’s nothing completely ground-breaking.

Unified Inbox

Something else that was pretty much a given, though the additional Mail improvements are also nice, especially the “open attachments in 3rd party apps” feature. I’m looking forward to seeing the video of the presentation that Apple will inevitably release tonight so that I can see stuff like mailbox switching and threaded conversations “first-hand”.

Home Screen Contacts

This one didn’t seem terribly likely to me, but I included it due to the rumor mill’s general enthusiasm for the idea. Not really surprised it isn’t there, but then Apple also didn’t show off all of the new features in OS 4.0, so it might be tucked away for devs to discover while they tinker with the beta. Combined with the new Springboard folders, that might be a relatively useful speed dial feature.

Springboard Wallpaper & API Enhancements

I’m somewhat surprised that there wasn’t more of a focus on the developer side of the new OS, but everyone does love new shiny features they can brag about, so I’ll take what we got for what it is. That said, I’m glad to see the iPad Springboard improvements making their way into the iPhone/iPod Touch release, and look forward to finding out if the other API improvements like embedded video content have made their way in as well. Guess we’ll have to wait for the developers to get their hands dirty.

File Store/Sync

Nothing mentioned on this front. This may be another wait-and-see thing, but it may just not be in Apple’s plans for the iPhone builds of the OS since Apple doesn’t treat the iPhone as a work productivity device the way they do the iPad. They may just not feel that file store/sync is as important on the smaller-screened devices.

New Lock Screen

I’m also honestly not all that surprised by this one not showing up, but I don’t think the final nail can be quite put into the coffin yet. During the Q&A Engadget asked about it, at least as far as the iPad is concerned, and the response from Apple was somewhat cat-and-mouse-y, with Jobs saying that they had just released the iPad on Saturday, and on Sunday they rested. Given that the iPad release of iPhone OS 4.0 won’t be until the fall, it’s possible they have a few bonus features planned for it which they’re holing close to the vest right now.

New Push Notifications UX

This is the one I’m perhaps least surprised and most frustrated about not happening. I do like that apps can now generate notifications locally though, and hope that developers do so in a mostly unobtrusive manner by using icon badges and sound alerts more than the annoying modal pop-up dialogs. This should be a big hit with to-do list apps and such, so that they can update their application icons with new badges without having to be launched first.

Home Screen Organization Improvements

As may be obvious based on the fact that I only gave this a 5% chance of happening, I’m very surprised by the addition of folders to the OS, but also greet it warmly, because it’s something that’s become more and more necessary as the App Store continues to overflow with new apps.

Thoughts on Apple’s Event, by Tent Pole

First off, before I get to the feature focuses, I’m excited by the possibilities of Apple opening up 1,500 new APIs for developers to get their hands on, and can’t wait to see what comes of it as a result. I’m also looking forward to seeing what secrets Apple has slipped into the SDK for developers to discover and take advantage of that weren’t mentioned during today’s presentation. Now then, on to the big top!

Multitasking

Again, I’m glad this is finally coming, and it’s nice to see that Apple will once again be out ahead of Microsoft in the mobile arena by the end of the year in pretty much every respect when compared to the Windows Phone 7 OS. I’m not at all surprised that only the iPhone 3GS, the Gen3 iPod Touch, and the iPad will be getting all of the new hotness including multitasking, but am a bit saddened (though not entirely surprised) by the fact that original iPhone and iPod Touch owners are out in the cold entirely. Oh well, the mobile space has grown and shifted dramatically since the iPhone came out in 2007, so it’s not entirely unexpected that these platforms would need to be cut loose eventually when the software is now doing WAY more than it was ever originally designed or intended to do. The fact that we’ve gotten the 3.0 OS is no small wonder.

I very much like the fact that third-party apps are being given access to the iPod controls on the lock screen, the “return to call” double-height information bar (for stuff like Skype), and the headphone hardware controls. This again provides for a better framework and a consistent UI that users don’t need to re-adjust to when using third-party apps instead of first-party ones.

Folders & Wallpaper

I like these. I even like their implementation, because it’s pretty much as drop-dead simple as you can get. The auto-naming feature based on the category of the app in the App Store is pretty clever too. Being able to keep folders in the dock is double nice, and the UI is very slick (and even slicker after having watched the Engadget hands-on video), even if the folders are limited to 12 apps each.

The wallpaper on the Home Screen is also a nice touch, though obviously both of these are nothing revolutionary (or even new, for jailbreakers).

Enhanced Mail

Huzzah!

So, unified inbox, multiple Exchange accounts, and threaded conversations. IIRC from the Ars coverage, you can even save searches. No word on content searching though, which is something of a bummer. Anybody with a dev account want to give it a spin? In any case, this pretty much matches all of the major selling points of Windows Phone 7’s mail client.

Third party app support for attachments is also great to see. Very pleased about that one in particular (though unified inbox is still #1 for me).

iBooks

Um, yay? I’m not entirely sure why this is a tent pole feature for Apple, but kudos to them for back-porting it from the iPad I guess. The wireless bookmark and position sync is interesting… based on this and a couple of other things it seems like Apple is starting to get closer to a fully wireless sync process with iTunes, which would be nice to see.

Enterprise Support

This isn’t really something I’m particularly interested in, but again, kudos to Apple for improving their position in the marketplace. The wireless application roll-out and device management features are perhaps the most interesting things here for me, because as I mentioned in my iBooks comments, it look like Apple is sort of building a wireless sync process piecemeal. It’d be nice to see more expansion and consolidation of these concepts further down the road.

Game Center

This is just incredible. Apple effectively building their own mobile (and free!) X-box Live service for developers and tying it straight into the OS is a fantastic move, especially for a company that has historically eschewed games as a platform of interest. It’s a really powerful answer to Microsoft’s X-box Live integration in WinPhone 7, and I’d be interested to see if this is something that eventually makes the jump over to the desktop OS in the next major release. If Apple can get as serious about building a quality gaming platform on the desktop as they are in the mobile space, Microsoft will have some serious competition on their hands, because let’s face it: Games for Windows Live still sucks rocks through a straw.

As unlikely as it may be, I think this also opens the door for Apple to get into the console gaming business, and seriously expand the Apple TV market by tying it into the Game Center. Obviously this will require some new hardware, but with Apple having an in-house chip designer (or two), and the obvious power available behind their existing mobile devices, I think it’s much more doable today than it ever has been before. Apple’s already got all of the big gaming studios on-board with the iPhone and iPad… leveraging their existing expertise with Apple’s mobile platform by hooking it into a TV is almost a no-brainer.

I think this was the biggest news to come out of the event, because I don’t think anyone saw it coming, and it has the potential to completely redefine the mobile gaming space (again) before Microsoft ever gets their first WinPhone 7 device out into the public’s hands. If they move fast enough, Apple could very easily put out a console device tied into the iTunes Store by the end of the year and start some very serious competition with Microsoft for the living room.

iAd

Terrible, terrible name. I liked the “AdKit” name that was floated earlier, though that may also be in use as the developer-side term for the mobile marketing toolkit itself.

I’m actually quite positive on this framework, because to be honest, Steve’s right: I rarely click on ads in apps, even ones I’m actually interested in, because I know it’s going to pull me out of the app I’m using, and I Have Things To Do Right Now. Giving devs a framework for providing ads that they don’t have to think about, while giving users a better experience with the ads they decide to click on that isn’t disruptive to their usage of an app is a win-win as far as I’m concerned.

The thing that annoys me, honestly, are the idiots who are intentionally misunderstanding Apple’s ad framework and using it to knock the OS as being ad-driven, even for paid apps, simply because they can’t bitch about multitasking anymore. Anyone who says anything along the lines of “why is the iPhone OS serving me ads in paid applications?!” is deliberately misstating the facts of the situation. This is a framework for developers to use instead of services like AdMob, to serve you ads where they were already planning on serving them anyway. Paid applications will only have ads in them if the developer wants to put them there, and the OS itself isn’t going to just start throwing ads at you.

I also want to give Apple kudos for showing up Adobe yet again by making incredibly rich, dynamic ads using nothing but HTML5, and for deliberately making a point of that during the presentation. Just one more nail in Flash’s coffin at this rate. It’s weird to see a company push so strenuously for an platform over which it has no control in an effort to ostracize a closed platform it also doesn’t control, rather than making its own closed platform (*cough*Silverlight*cough*), but ditching Flash for an open standard is to everyone’s benefit, not just Apple’s, and it’s nice to see them dragging Microsoft kicking and screaming into the future of the web in the process.

Versus Windows Phone 7

I don’t really think Microsoft has much going for it now with Windows Phone 7 beyond the X-box Live service integration. The WinPhone 7 Home Screen’s big claim to fame is the live-updating tiles, almost all of which can also be done now using the iPhone’s combination of local and push notifications, and I personally prefer the icon-based home screen UI of the iPhone to the sea of solid color and text that is the WinPhone 7 home screen UI. While theoretically the live tiles can be used to push stuff like weather info, the only thing I’ve seen demoed that the iPhone can’t do is photo pushing, which isn’t that huge of a thing to me. I’d love to see Apple live-update the Weather app icon the way it does the Calendar app though. Also, I find the constant movement of the live tiles incredibly distracting, like I’m looking at a web page full of Flash ads. Ugh.

I’m entertained that the iPhone will have better mulitasking support than WinPhone 7 will at launch, because Microsoft has confirmed that apps like Pandora won’t be allowed to continue running in the background in a way that actually matters (i.e. playing music). It’s still not full multitasking like what you get on the desktop (or WebOS [whose multitasking seems possible largely because so much of its application base is WebKit-driven], or possibly Android), but it’ll do the job for 99.9% of the usage cases people have been grumping about over the past 3 years, and the multitasking behavior is otherwise on par with Microsoft’s “suspend and resume” architecture. I’m also entertained that the iPhone will have copy and paste this winter, while WinPhone 7 will not. And for some reason the pundits aren’t nearly as apoplectic over Microsoft not having this feature at launch as they were over Apple leaving it out.

I also think WinPhone 7’s “hubs” are slightly overblown when it comes to their level of importance and game-changery. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see someone build iPhone applications that replicate the functionality of the People and Photos hubs, pulling in information and updates from multiple sources and sending updates to various networks as well (in fact, I’m pretty sure these already exist), and with the new APIs for photos and such in version 4, it should be even easier to build stuff like that.

Again, Microsoft’s biggest built-in advantage over the iPhone is X-box Live. If they can spend the next 7 months getting developers to build high-quality games with multi-system support (desktop, X-box, and WinPhone), I think they’ll easily hold onto their place as a gaming king-pin. Apple’s nipping at their heels now in the mobile department, and has been for some time. The new Game Center services which Apple is building around their iTunes empire (based on the Engadget walkthrough, you log in with your iTunes user account) are sure to cause Microsoft some stress, and as I mentioned earlier, this positions Apple well to launch into the console arena using what they’ve learned from their mobile ventures to build something really awesome and bring a more serious device to the war for the living room than the Apple TV has been.

Wrap-up

Overall, this was a pretty sizable, quality update. Not everything in it is revolutionary – or even new to those who have already jailbroken their devices – but for those of us who don’t want to futz with breaking out of the walled garden, it’s nice to see these improvements come to the general populace. It’s frustrating that the first-generation touch devices are excluded from this upgrade entirely, but it’s understandable, given that Apple’s mobile devices have changed so much in the past 3 years. My Gen1 iPod Touch is starting to get noticeably sluggish running 3.1.3, so I don’t think 4.0 would be a terribly good idea anyway. I’m also a little frustrated that the iPad won’t get 4.0 until this fall, but like I said before, there’s probably additional work to be done getting it ready for the iPad, and some extra bonus features may squeeze their way in as well, so I’m OK with that. I’m also much more enthused about getting an iPad now (like I wasn’t already, haha), knowing what’s in the pipeline for it with the 4.0 upgrade.

So Yahoo News has a blurb on 13 glaring iPod shortcomings. Having spent at least half an hour messing around with one at Best Buy on launch day Saturday, I’d like to provide my thoughts on these reported shortcomings. Most of them seen to stem from a continued insistence on misunderstanding the use cases for the device that Apple has been doing a pretty consistent job of highlighting in their PR.

It’s Awkward

I wouldn’t consider the iPad any more awkward than trying to walk around using a netbook on the go. In fact, I’d personally consider it less awkward in that respect. Yes, it’s more awkward than a phone or an iPod Touch, but it’s designed for portability, not mobility. It’s a “sit on the couch and use it”-type device, not a “check Facebook in the line at Subway”-type device. It’s still easier to carry or pass around than a laptop or netbook; it’s a “casual use” device, not an “incidental use” device. Trying to use it for something it wasn’t really targeted at as a use case is obviously going to be awkward.

It’s Heavy

Yes, it is. And if it were a phone this would be a serious problem. But again, that’s not the use case it was built for. Sitting with it in your lap or resting beside you on the table is probably far more what Apple’s got in mind for the thing, considering that’s how everyone in their guided videos and press material is using it. That said though, even in the considerable time I spent standing at the Apple booth in Best Buy with the thing in one hand, it wasn’t that heavy. I decided to put it down after about 20 minutes to do some typing tests (which I’ll address later), but it wasn’t a pain to hold up, and was actually a bit easier to hold in landscape mode (not sure why, it just felt better that way… good thing iPhone OS 3.2 supports a landscape Springboard). Keep in mind, also, that I’m not exactly the most buff person on the planet… I’m more of your typical stringy weakling nerd type.

Maybe you can use the “it’s heavy” thing to justify keeping it away from your kids though .

It’s Slippery

I really have nowhere to go on this one, because I just don’t agree by any means with this assessment. Of course, I wasn’t trying to carry it under my arm at Best Buy, but even holding it in my hand, I didn’t feel like I was going to drop it, or that there was going to be some serious issue with carrying the thing around with me from place to place. Perhaps this would become evident if I spent more time with the device, but after 30 minutes, the “slippery” contention doesn’t match my experience.

There screen has too much glare

Am I the only person on the planet who isn’t annoyed by glossy screens? Am I the only person who remembers back all of 5 years ago to the time when we had glass-fronted CRT displays (and flat-faced ones, at that!) without wondering how on Earth we managed to actually get any computing done with all that glossy, reflective, shiny glare in our eyes?

Seriously. Yes, the screen will show reflections, and light can be a bit of a bother, but here’s the thing: I used this device at Best Buy, which isn’t exactly a glare-friendly place with all of its fluorescent lights, and I had no problems with reading the display while poking around with the Star Walk and iBooks apps (both of which I think require a certain extra level of focus and display clarity to use well). Maybe I’m just extra good at focusing on the screen and not the reflections. In any case, it’s no more or less bothersome than the iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch, and iMac displays (these being the other glossy Apple displays I’ve had experience with over the years), and their glossiness has never bothered me that much at all.

Forget reading in the sun

I didn’t get to walk outside with the iPad I was messing around with at Best Buy, but I’ve also never had major issues with using my iPod Touch in direct sunlight either, so somehow I doubt that the experience is markedly worse on the iPad (and if it is, I’ll stand corrected). Just be glad Apple didn’t use an OLED screen in the thing… I’ve seen pictures of a Zune HD in direct sunlight and could barely tell the thing was even on.

Fingerprints are annoying

Hey guess what, it’s a touch-screen device! And while the iPad may end up being the thing everyone points to in the future as the reason why large-format touch displays never really took off, I think this one’s a bit petty. But then again, this may be a personal thing (like reflections and sunlight readability), since fingerprints on my iPod Touch never seem to annoy me as much as they do other people. Still, glass display or not, touch-screen devices are going to have fingerprint problems. Duh. If you obsessively polish your desktop display after someone points at something on it, you should probably avoid touch-screens as a general rule.

It doesn’t multitask

No. It doesn’t. And we knew that going in. If this is news to you and it actually matters, then you’re probably not who the iPad was made for. The people who don’t know it doesn’t multitask are the same people who very probably don’t care, because they have Internet Explorer open full-screen on their home computer (if they even have one), and might have iTunes or Pandora radio playing in the background. And guess what? iTunes plays in the background on the iPad, too! The people who do know that the iPad doesn’t multitask are the ones most likely not to actually really need an iPad, because they’ve already got a desktop, a laptop, a netbook, and a smartphone. In this case, the iPad is simply not for you, so stop grumping about it.

Really, I’ve never really gotten the “OMFG NO MULTITASKING!!!!” argument. Clearly it hasn’t detracted from the iPhone OS platform’s performance in the marketplace thus far. Would it be nice to have for those rare edge cases like Pandora (or possibly an IM client, but that’s more of a notifications UX issue than anything else) where being able to run a third-party app in the background would actually improve the behavior of the device? Sure. But because iPhone OS applications don’t (or shouldn’t, if they’re well-designed) behave like desktop applications when you close them, it’s not that big of a deal.

Just for kicks, while I was at Best Buy I launched Pages, opened a document, and scrolled down a few pages. Then I left Pages and opened Safari, ostensibly to look something up or copy some text out of it. Safari opened immediately and the page was responsive to commands as soon as the application was done filling the screen. Then I left Safari and went back into Pages. Pages remembered what document I’d opened and remembered where I’d scrolled to in that document, so I was right back where I left off, with maybe 2 seconds (at the most) taken to launch the app and re-initialize the document. For the light computing use case that this thing was intended for, that’s perfectly acceptable.

This argument may even be a moot point by the end of the day on Thursday (at least conceptually), depending on what the iPhone OS 4.0 preview brings. Practically speaking, it may be an argument for another few months after that, but with a guarantee that the experience will become more robust without additional expense quite soon, and for free (because Apple’s not going to charge for iPhone OS 4 on the iPad, according to Ars Technica).

Also, I question the article’s assumption that Apple wants you using this thing as a primary device for “hours at a time”. I’m likely to spend hours on it at a time, yes, but with an understanding of what it’s for: watching movies or TV shows, listening to music, getting some light work-related stuff done, and browsing the web. I’m not going to try and replace my desktop with it; that would be stupid.

The browser is limited

No, Flash will not work in MobileSafari. For me, that means I can’t watch Homestar Runner or the handful of stupid human videos that trickle through the FAILblog website each day (and if DailyMotion would support h.264, I could even do that via their DailyMotion links!). Oh noes, whatever will I do without it? I hate Flash. I hate Flash games, I hate Flash being used for video (might be me being bitter because Adobe doesn’t give two shits about non-Windows platforms anymore, and their software quality on those platforms reflects that), and I especially hate Flash being used for stuff that regular HTML and JavaScript could do just as well, with twice the accessibility, and half the processor usage.

I’m amused that their other argument against the iPad browser is the fact that Google Docs is read-only. I’d bet $20 that this will be something Google corrects within a month, because their current mobile docs site for MobileSafari targets the iPhone and iPod Touch, neither of which make terribly good text editors. There’s also Google Docs apps in the App Store that will grant you this functionality now for a price, but given Google’s swift update to Gmail for the iPad, Google Docs very likely isn’t far behind. In any case, this isn’t something that’s Apple’s fault or an iPad shortcoming because MobileSafari can’t handle the full Google Docs interface. It can, Google’s just not serving it yet.

The virtual keyboard stinks

No. No it doesn’t. I wouldn’t want to try and write a novel on it, but I got through my “I realized the moment I fell into the fissure…” test typing paragraph without a single spelling error (I use the Myst intro for a test paragraph because it’s several lengthy sentences long, uses every letter of the alphabet, and I know it by heart), which is well more than I can say for the iPhone keyboard. The landscape keyboard is a lot easier to use than the portrait one, but both are serviceable, and the landscape one is almost exactly like typing on an Apple aluminum keyboard, just without the physical response of the actual keys depressing.

Now, I’m also not someone who’s good at touch typing, and my WPM count is never going to climb into the hundreds, so it might just be that I’m not running into the limitations that more savvy keyboard users have with virtual keyboards. YMMV here.

There’s no USB port

No. No there isn’t. Very perceptive of you. However, again this isn’t supposed to be a primary computing device for heavy workloads. There are printer apps in the App Store (though none currently support the iWork apps… I’m sure they’ll get there though) if you really desperately need to print something from the device, but otherwise, print content from your desktop or laptop, which you almost certainly already have if you’re using a printer in the first place.

I’m also amused by the “you can’t hook an external hard drive to it” argument here. Because external hard drives just scream “portable” to me…

If you can tell me what, besides a printer, scanner, or external hard drive, you’d want to plug into a USB port on the iPad, I’d love to hear it. The first two you’re already likely to have hooked up to a desktop or laptop, and the last wouldn’t make any difference if you could or not, since the iPhone OS doesn’t really support open access to external drives anyway (you can count this as a drawback, but not the missing USB port). I personally have nothing I’d need to plug into it, and the last time I used a printer when I wasn’t at work was… about a week before Mysterium 2009. For something that was done on my desktop because it was a complex graphic design project.

iPhone-only apps look terrible

Yeah, they do. However, not all developers are gouging assholes looking to turn another bit of profit by selling us iPad-only versions of apps we already have so that they don’t look like crap on the iPad.

Example: Agile Web Solutions, the guys behind 1Password, are selling a universal “Pro” iPhone/iPad app for $14.99. If you already had 1Password Pro for the iPhone, you get the iPad version for free with the latest update, even id you don’t have an iPad. If you don’t have the iPhone version, you can buy one just for the iPad for $6.99 (an iPhone-only version is also available for the same price). The Now Playing developer and the WordPress guys are also following this strategy, offering iPad versions of their app via a free update to the existing one for the iPhone. Others, like the What’s On devs, are making iPad-specific versions of their apps but not charging anything for them (which is nice, since the apps are also free on the iPhone).

In some cases, I’m actually amazed that the software being offered is as cheap as it is… Star Walk is a good example here. A full-featured planisphere app loaded with information and magnetometer/accelerometer-driven “point it at the sky”-style star-seeing is only $4.99. That’s just amazing.

Given the more prolonged (yet casual) use case the iPad is built for and the larger area for productivity the device affords, I think apps can deserve to charge more for what’s being offered. I do actually think devs deserve to get paid for their efforts, after all… (and I also really hope that Cyan does real justice to Myst and Riven on the iPad by releasing versions with larger graphics).

The price is too high

Oh FFS, Apple could give this away and people would still complain about the price. Remember when it was going to cost $999 and people were being optimistically wishy-washy on that price? Do I wish it were cheaper? Yeah, but then I wish everything was cheaper, because I don’t have a lot of money. Lucky for me, I seem to be getting a string of good but small web development jobs that will finance my 3G iPad within a month or two, so I’m not going to gripe about the price. Again, this isn’t a shortcoming, it just is what it is. If it’s too expensive, then don’t get one, but that’s a personal decision that you have to make for yourself after you evaluate what the device is worth to you.

Apple’s not likely to drop the price either the way they did for the iPhone when it first came out. The iPad slots nicely between the iPod Touch/iPhone and the MacBook on their pricing chart, starting just above the iPod Touch and ending just below the entry-level MacBook. There’s nowhere for this product to go price-wise without impinging on Apple’s carefully-configured linear price/features escalation metric.

It doesn’t replace anything

Where did Apple say it was going to? Which part of the “between a phone and a laptop” slide in the unveiling presentation did you not grasp? I guess you could argue that it’s supposed to replace/usurp the netbook, and on that point I think you may have an argument, but based on my experience with netbooks, they could use some replacing/usurping.

If you already have a desktop and a laptop, then no, this device probably doesn’t have much relevance for you, because you already have your preferred mobile computing platform. It’s even less relevant if you already have a desktop, a laptop, and a smartphone like the iPhone. However, that doesn’t describe the vast majority of people who use computers, and Apple’s not really trying to sell to you.

If, however, you’re like me and only have a desktop machine (and an iPod Touch, whose utility is reduced due to a janked headphone jack), the iPad presents an interesting alternative to the traditional laptop or netbook purchase.

I actually debated with myself about getting a refurbished or Craigslisted MacBook for a couple of weeks before the iPad launch, because a 16GB WiFi+3G model was going to cost about as much as a laptop would. In the end, though, I decided to go with an iPad because it was more convenient for how I’d want to use it: on the couch, or face-to-face with someone else like a client, doing simple web browsing, checking email, reading, watching videos, listening to music, light writing, and preliminary design work for websites and graphics. Stuff that I can then take back to my desktop machine and refine the hell out of, but which I can very quickly, easily, and (most importantly in the client scenario) personally share with other people in a very physical format. I know it’s super-cliche to bring up the physicality of viewing content on the device, but it’s true: stuff just feels more real and tactile on a touch-screen tablet device than it does on a laptop or desktop, because you’re not separated from it by a mouse and keyboard, you’re interacting with it directly, and that resonates powerfully with people.

Ultimately, this list of 13 shortcomings seems like a re-hashing of what’s been said about the device in the 3 months since its announcement in January, none of which is really new information. Now, for things that might actually sway you from buying an iPad for practical reasons after assessing whether its capabilities are in tune with what you want/need from a portable computing device (something which, IMO, is best done by actually messing with the device in question and not reading about it on the interwebz), Engadget has a nice quick run-down of issues being reported by the early adopters that may give you pause (none of which I can substantiate one way or the other because I didn’t get to spend that much time with it).

Engadget got an invitation today from Apple to join them for an iPhone OS 4.0 “sneak peek” on the 8th. This isn’t exactly a typical move from Apple from what I can tell. They tend to prefer to spread news about their products out relatively evenly throughout the year to be sure that each one gets its due time in the press cycle, and this press event comes less than a week after the launch of the iPad.

Granted, Apple’s running out of time before the typical June/July release window for the next iPhone, so they may not really have a choice on timing if they want to talk about it publicly and still give developers time to start building new apps to take advantage of whatever is new in the OS this time around before the new hardware rolls out this summer.

It will be interesting to see how this event is presented now that the iPhone OS supports two different classes of devices: the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad. I’m curious to see if any of the new stuff in the iPad-specific iPhone OS 3.2 update will be rolled back into the iPhone-compatible version, like the wallpaper persisting onto the Home Screen, or if that’s intended to remain an iPad-only feature. I’m also curious if they’ll be breaking the presentation up into 2 pieces for the different hardware platforms, or if it’ll be more of a general 20,000-foot overview.

So, what do I think is going to be announced? Well, the rumors have an Exposé-style multitasking implementation, a unified email inbox, and the ability to add contacts to the Home Screen. I’d guess that multitasking is pretty much a lock, and the inbox seems like a probability as well given that Jobs personally indicated that it was coming down the pipe. Contacts on the home screen maybe, but I won’t hold my breath for it.

It would be interesting to see how MS responds to 3rd party multitasking on the iPhone since Windows Phone 7 won’t support it any more than iPhone OS 3.x does right now. I’m also curious about the implementation details… the icon-based Exposé idea is nice given the screen real-estate (and may feature full-sized window previews on the larger iPad), but something about it strikes me as off. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to delineate on the user-end which apps you want to close and which you want to leave running using this approach, without adding a Multitasking pane to the Settings app, and that seems decidedly un-Apple-like. The rumor also claims that task switching would be triggered by a double-click of the Home button. Given that the Home button already does up to 2 different things when double-clicked already (iPod controls and Search or Home Screen), using this behavior for a system-wide task-switching trigger seems ill-advised. A long-press of the Home button seems like it would make more sense since no existing behavior is tied to that action and it remains fairly simple to execute.

Additionally, since I don’t think multitasking is going to support more than 2 or 3 apps at a time, an approach more akin to Safari’s page-switching implementation would be more intuitive to users since the metaphor is already built into the OS via the web browser. In this implementation, a click of the Home button would still close an app, as usual. A long-press would toggle the task-switching UI, with any currently-open apps and the Home Screen display available to select from. To keep an app running, you’d need to long-press to task-switch back to Springboard and launch another app. From there, you can long-press to switch between open apps just like you switch between pages in Safari.

I wouldn’t be surprised if multitasking is only available on the iPad, iPhone 3GS, and Gen3 iPod Touch, because I think those are the only platforms with the power to support it. I’d be a bit more surprised if multitasking were restricted to only the iPad and this year’s upcoming iteration of the iPhone hardware, but not horribly shocked. I’m also not going to rule out the possibility that apps will need to explicitly opt into being able to multitask, or that they can explicitly opt out of it (opt out makes more sense, since only heavy apps like games would need to set this flag, rather than everything else needing to set one for opt-in).

On top of all this, I think the embedded video controller and local file store/sync will get ported over from the iPad SDK (though they may not make a deal out of that at the event). I also think/hope something is going to be done to improve the push notifications behavior to be more robust, since the pop-up implementation starts to kind of fall apart in terms of usability after more than a couple of apps start tying into it at once. Exactly what that something is, I’m not sure, but I think something will happen on that front (not a lock, but close). On the subject of locks, a more information-laden lock screen is also a possibility, but given Apple’s minimalist design tendencies, I’m not exactly counting on it coming to pass. Also, the very unlikely but perennial favorite: better Home Screen organization with folder support etc.

tl;dr predictions:

• Multitasking, but not with the UX indicated by the rumors. 75% chance of 2G, 3G, Gen1 & 2 iPod Touch locked out. 10% chance of 3GS & Gen3 iPod Touch locked out.
• Unified email inbox.
• 50% chance of Home Screen Contact icons.
• 25% chance of some back-ported iPad features: wallpaper staying on the Springboard after unlocking and the ability to embed video in a larger window.
• 50% chance of iPad’s file store/sync features getting back-ported to the iPhone.
• 50% chance of richer, more information-dense Lock Screen.
• 25% chance of new Push Notifications UX.
• 5% chance of Home Screen organization improvements.