Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise! I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number — Matt Mullenweg: .) Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love. When I first heard that Apple would release a touchpad cell phone with VoiceOver, the screen reading software used by Macs, I scoffed. The blind have gotten so used to lofty promises of a dream platform, only to receive [ continue reading My First Week with the iPhone | Behind the Curtain ] Awareness! The Headphone App lets you listen to your music with complete piece of mind, knowing that important sounds (warnings, shouts, sirens, alarms or conversations) won’t be missed. In other words, you get to hear the things you NEED, even when you’re lost in your music. Awareness! cleverly turns the microphone on when any sound exceeds the level of everyday background noise and delivers it to your headphones or earphones. This makes it safer to listen to music whilst travelling – driving, riding, commuting, walking, crossing the road, cycling and jogging. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» essency | [ continue reading essency, Awareness! The Headphone App ] Further examination of Apple’s new social network reveals more problems. To review from last night’s post: 1. It’s awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There’s no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we’d be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future. 2. There’s no way to Like the song you’re listening to. In other words there doesn’t seem to be any integration with the [ continue reading Scripting News: Ping: It’s even worse than it appeared ] People are boasting on Google’s behalf of their prowess in being able to catch Apple in market share. It is impressive, but not as much as you might think. Apple has never tried to lock-out their competitors, they’ve never designed their product strategies for market share. Jobs said that in a recent interview (I think it was at the D conference). Google has been able to do to Apple in mobile devices what Microsoft did to Apple in PCs, because Apple would rather control their share of the market and have a single target defined by both hardware and software [ continue reading Google vs iPhone and Facebook ] So Google Fonts is out ♥ and a WordPress plugin exists ♠ to rapidly apply them – delight! I have shown remarkable control in changing everything but only with one font, for a while. The new Safari extensions allow a Google Fonts preview extension to try them out ♣ and the list is growing fast. Installing is a cinch and the settings are simple. First impressions of the display after installing the WordPress plugin are that it increases the loading-time but seems to play safe with most browsers on the mac and the PC however the implementation and display is [ continue reading early adopter or flim-flam addict? Google Fonts in the wild ] Apple Study: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google) View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon. Apple is a company that desperately needs to grow up and wipe the smile off its face, and roll its sleeves up and start to appreciate that they’re no longer the upstart, the underdog, the Crazy One in the Richard Dreyfus ad. They are The Man, the Boss, the one who, from now on, everyone is going to be taking shots at and shits on. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» Scripting News Apple’s brewing shitstorm: .) iPhone/iPad users: the new version of iTunes showing up on your computer right about now has new, non-negotiable terms of service. If you install it, you “agree” to allow Apple to collect precise information about your location in real time and use it, sell it, or give it away. Apple promises that its location data is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” Of course, AOL thought that the search data it released was anonymous and didn’t personally identify people, either. They were wrong. New Apple terms allow them to collect and share your “precise, real-time [ continue reading New Apple terms allow them to collect and share your ‘precise, real-time location’ ] 22 June 2010  |  | category: Apple, iPad, iPhone, location+, maps & mapping, the new 'priest class', the state we're in  | comments are closed  Knew This was coming. On top of a service that doesn’t cover large parts of Wales, Shropshire, Northamptonshire and LONDON! this is not the best way to ensure a smooth renewal by this customer! It seems like the entire United Kingdom (at least those who aren’t out partying it up with Patsy Kensit at the Met Bar) has emailed us in the last two minutes to clue us in on the fact that O2 has posted its newiPhone 4 pricing. It looks like your beloved “unlimited 3G” plans of are a thing of the [ continue reading UK’s O2 to impose 3G data limits for iPhone 4 users ] MG Siegler: The Mac vs. PC debate has often found people using a car analogy to explain things. I keep coming back to that when thinking about iPhone vs. Android. For a long time, iPhone felt like a Lexus while Android was more like a Kia. With recent upgrades, Android has transformed into more of a Honda. But with iPhone 4, the iPhone is now an Aston Martin […]. But the crazy thing is that the iPhone is an Aston Martin with a Honda-price. Meanwhile, Android remains a Honda at a Honda-price — it’s a good deal, but [ continue reading MG Siegler on iPhone 4 ] OK ALREADY! I am an Apple zealot of more years standing than I want to accept or admit and I am seditious enough and ready enough to get pissed off by the claims of any snake-oil salesman … but I really don’t think Apple has short-changed ME, ever! It seems to ME if that if I am ready to publish this then I must have weighed up a whole trug of stuff … and that’s all I want to say about that. “Steve Jobs has already been busted for exaggerating the resolution of a new iPhone screen the Apple CEO [ continue reading How Apple Tricks You … says some twonk ] AT&T will halt new signups for unlimited cellular data plans for the iPhone and 3G iPad starting 7 June 2010. Instead, the firm is offering two cheaper data plans that have usage limits, but also feature the cheapest overage fees in the United States. AT&T [ continue reading AT&T Ends Unlimited iPhone and iPad Data Plans, change is coming. ] Buying a new iPhone today should be the last thing on your agenda. At 6pm GMT, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will take to the stage of WWDC — Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference — to deliver his keynote speech. The contents of his talk are likely to involve the announcement of a brand new iPhone. Should the rumours pan out to be correct, the new iPhone HD (as it has been dubbed), will be slightly smaller than the current model, feature improved screen resolution, a five-megapixel camera, a camera flash, the same processor as theiPad (that means it’ll be way faster [ continue reading New iPhone 4G expected today ] Every WiFi wireless router – the device that links most computer owners to the internet – in every home has been entered into a Google database. The project had remained secret until an inquiry in Germany earlier this month in which Google was forced to admit that it “mistakenly” downloaded data packets, which may have included fragments of emails and other data, from unsecured wireless networks where they were not protected by a password. The information was collected by radio aerials on their Street View cars, which have now photographed almost [ continue reading Google has mapped every WiFi network in Britain ] 2 June 2010 | | category: can't make it up!, Google, iPhone, location+, maps & mapping, the state we're in | comments are closed The following is very much a rumor, but if true, it would be absolutely huge. A UK publication is reporting that Apple is considering buying ARM Holdings — aka, the company behind most of the world’s mobile phone processors. If Apple were to buy them, it would likely reshape the mobile landscape completely. To be clear, London’s Evening Standard is only citing “gossips” within the city’s financial district. But those gossips aren’t the only ones convinced there is something to this talk: ARM’s shares went up 8.1 points today, with more than 5 million shares changing hands by midday, the [ continue reading Rumor: Apple Thinking About Buying ARM. iPhone Rivals To Sleep With The Fishes? ] During a discussion today about potential iPad sales, a friend and I got distracted by reflecting on the tremendous value delivered by a vanilla PC. Over on the Dell Web site right now, a basic 15″ laptop costs $499 and includes 320 GB of hard drive and 3 GB of RAM. So for the same price as an iPad, you’ve got a machine that can do the following: give each family member his or her own private and personalized set of files, programs, and bookmarks support the creation of almost any kind of document, plan, or project run [ continue reading iPad discussion spurs reflection on the PC as a bargain ] Apple’s intentions to dominate handheld gaming were already pretty clear back in March of 2008 as game studio after game studio lined up behind the iPhone (and iPod touch by extension). Now look at the graphics above. Yeah, based on the report from Flurry Analytics, Apple’s casual gaming approach is carving out a nice slice of the US revenue pie related to gaming software. The PSP was hit especially hard dropping from a 20% share in 2008 to just 11% of US revenue last year. Numbers that highlight just how ridiculous John Koller’s spin maneuver was after the [ continue reading Apple increases gaming share at the expense of DS and PSP ] 26 March 2010 | | category: Apple, Gallery of the bleedin' obvious, iPad, iPhone | comments are closed The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple’s approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. So today we’re posting the “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement“—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must “sign.” Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked “I agree,” public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on [ continue reading All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple ] A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately. For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s book [ continue reading Social Today Feels Like Search A Decade Ago: Lots Of Noise And Lots Of Spam ] 4 March 2010 | | category: advice, empires flux, Gallery of the bleedin' obvious, iPhone, maps & mapping, Nerds, the state we're in | comments are closed As everyone knows, Garmin and TomTom have their backs against the ropes in a fight to remain relevant in an age of free GPS turn-by-turn navigation on smartphones (thanks Google and Nokia). While dedicated personal navigators are almost always superior to their converged competition, the gap has certainly narrowed such that it’s become difficult to justify another device when an increasing number of people already carry a fine navigation device in their pockets. But that’s just gut instinct talking, where’s the hard evidence? Certainly not speculative stock prices. A good place to start is in forward-looking financial statements like the [ continue reading Garmin and TomTom cling to profits, hope ] 25 February 2010 | | category: Apple, Google, iPhone, location+, maps & mapping | comments are closed Many of you have been asking when we’ll release a version of Skype for iPhone which supports 3G calling. Well, the simple answer is soon. An update on Skype for iPhone and calling over 3G ] Example: Pizza Ordering Application Users are hit with this registration demand when all they want is to browse a selection of yummy pizzas. This was very off-putting to our test users. The proper sequence? Show the list of basic pizzas. Let users customize their order. Show the price, along with any salient ordering info (perhaps after having users enter their ZIP code to get delivery times and such). Take the order. At this point, it’s appropriate to ask for personal info because users are now sufficiently committed. iPhone Apps Need Low Starting Hurdles Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. [ continue reading iPhone apps need low starting hurdles ] There is absolutely no reason for an iPhone/iPod to trust root CAs for over-the-air mobileconfig downloads. Apple needs to define who should be able to download mobileconfig files onto a device, be it an end-user or a company, and devise a correct way to share keys between the device and its associated provisioning server. January « 2010 « Cryptopath. So why is it any different than what Foursquare, Gowalla, and most recently, Yelp, are doing with location-based deals? It would seem that Loopt is trying to convince venues to use their system by offering the most customizable deals to give away. For example, certain deals are only unlocked if you do certain tasks, such as check-in at a certain time of day. This could be enticing to venues because while something like a coffee shop may be busy in the morning, it may be dead in the afternoon, and may want a way to pull in more traffic [ continue reading Loopt To Start Pushing Check-In Specials Hard Using A New App And Facebook ] OK! hmmmm. This seems perfectly sensible to me. (ps I am stark, raving bonkers) Quite simply this time Apple have got it wrong. All the tech press is saying the same thing and comments made by readers of those websites are echoing, mostly anyway, their sentiments. The iPad is nothing more than a large iPod Touch. It’s lacking a 16:9 screen and while the bezel has to be of a reasonable size to allow for holding the device with your hand without your thumb poking the screen all the time, it’s simply too big. Finally those few people who’ve [ continue reading Why the iPad will fail and help Windows 7 to succeed ] The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but [ continue reading Alex Payne — On the iPad ] David Worthington interviews Brandon Watson, “director of product management in the developer platform at Microsoft”: Watson claimed that many developers of applications for the iPhone OS–which the iPad uses–are not making money. Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive, he said, because iPhone OS uses the Objective-C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform. And Apple’s control over the platform has alienated some people that make software for its products, he said. Yes, there is much jealousy from iPhone developers at the sacks full of money being made by Zune and Windows Mobile app developers. [ continue reading Microsoft Reaction to iPad ] Anything you can run in a web browser can also run inside a desktop app, thanks to the modular embedding capabilities of WebKit on the Mac and Internet Explorer on the PC. However, it should be obvious that the inverse is not true. When something truly innovating and mind-blowing happens on the web, I can drop it into a WebView on my Mac and make it a part of my desktop experience. When something mind-blowing happens on the desktop, you can bet you’ll have people scurrying to painstakingly imitate it on the web. It takes a lot of work, [ continue reading Can’t Catch Me ] |  
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