Sometimes Apple still manages to surprise me (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

I've been using Apple computers and software for almost five years now. Since then the OS X operating systems has gone through a lot of changes, becoming nicer and nicer along the way. All kinds of nifty features were added, most of them without becoming bloatware. The fact that I've seen five years of this stuff has had its effect though and I find it hard to become enthused by most of the new stuff. It's great and all, but you won't catch me dancing down the street.

But sometimes, sometimes a little nugget of gold comes out of Apple and I'm completely in love with their software again.

Case in point: the Genius function that was added to iTunes recently and the Remote application for the iPhone.

Genius will take any song in your library and, given a few circumstances, will create a new playlist containing 25 songs that ought to go nicely with the selected song. This selection of tunes is based on data gathered from the iTunes libraries from thousands of users world wide. This doesn't work out perfectly each time, but usually it gives me great results.

Let's say that I pick the Beastie Boys' Sabotage. iTunes will almost instantaneously suggest songs that go with it. In this case I got (among others):
* Wu-Tang Clan, Gravelpit
* Black Eyed Peas, Pump it
* Outkast, Roses

And so on. I reckon that the quality of iTunes' selection depends wholly on the amount of songs you have from a given genre. I can imagine that a Genius playlist for German Schlager music would be quite impossible on my computer ^_^; The great thing about all of this though, is the fact that I am constantly re-discovering songs that I'd even forgotten I had!

Combine this with the Remote application which runs on my iPhone and I can have a very nice evening on the couch. Using the app I can control all of iTunes' operations without ever touching my Mac. And because I'm re-discovering music I can immediately assign rankings to these "new" songs, or just skip past them if I really hate them.

Posted in: apple , genius , iphone , itunes , remote

Flickr’s new iPhone web interface = AWESOME (with screenshots!) (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

Saw word from John “Daring Fireball” Gruber tonight that Flickr finally launched an iPhone optimized web interface. Finally!

Of course, I had to check it out right away, and I agree with John - it’s great. Possibly the best iPhone web interface I’ve seen. Really nice. There’s no way to upload photos from the site (though they do point out that you can upload via email, which I’ve been doing from the beginning from my iPhone, and it works really well). But that’s about the only thing I can see that’s missing.

Update - What Doesn’t Work: The things that work on the desktop but don’t work on the iPhone version are basically the parts of the site that use Flash - the Uploadr, the Organizr, the Map, and Video playback (you can still see video pages and their comments, you just can’t play the videos). Oh, and Slideshows. Everything else works. I see this as one big benefit of all the work Flickr did a long time ago to move as much of their interface as possible into Ajax and javascript, and away from Flash (which doesn’t work on the iPhone, and likely never will).

To check it out yourself, go to m.flickr.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I’m sure the other methods you can use to trick sites into thinking you’re using an iPhone will work, too. There’s even a nice iPhone Home Screen icon if you want to save a bookmark to it there, and launch it from the Home Screen.

I took a bunch of screenshots. Here they are, in no particular order:

Posted in: apple , blog , flickr , interface , iphone , safari , web

On Podcaster and App Store Rejections (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Podcaster, an iPhone app that downloads podcasts over-the-air, was rejected from the App Store this past Friday on account of it "duplicating iTunes functionality." The Mac community is justifiable upset, with at least one developer refusing to develop any more apps, and others looking to coordinate some form of organized protest. I think that many are confounding two separate issues that the Podcaster rejection raises. First, that there are App Store approval guidelines that extend being what is listed in the developer agreement, and second, that Apple has seemingly decided to not allow any third party applications to compete with their own.

The first issue is not new. I wrote about it in my post about Flickup being rejected and we've seen it many times of the past couple of months. This incident just gives us yet another item to add to our unofficial approval guidelines. That these guidelines are (1) not published provided by Apple, and (2) a result of trial and error on the part of many very frustrated developers is inexcusable and irresponsible. As both Fraser Speirs and Paul Kafasis mention, development takes time, effort and money, and without a reasonable expectation that an app will be approved makes the App Store that much more unappealing to develop for, scares away developers and undermines Apple's goal of building a long-lasting ecosystem around its mobile operating system.

The solution, of course, is simple. Apple needs to release an all-inclusive set of guidelines. Knowing what is off-limits cuts developers off from the get go instead of forcing them to develop an app and spin the roulette wheel. Developers may not be happy that they can't release an app that does X, but at least they'll know before pouring weeks into development. A scary, but entirely possible situation is that Apple hasn't released such a document because even they aren't sure exactly what's in it.

The second issue is the anti-competitive nature of this specific rejection. I don't want to spend too much time extrapolating meaning from this specific rejection, particularly the common view that this rejection indicates that Apple won't allow any application into the store that competes with *any* of its products. I don't see Apple being stupid enough to actually have an explicit non-complete policy in place, so my view is that this is simply a case of a reviewer not fully understanding Apple's (currently nonpublic) approval guidelines and I fully expect Apple to correct this mistake. Until we see more cases of this anti-competitive policy being applied, I don't think we should go running for the hills just yet.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G, App Store, iTunes, Podcaster

Posted in: apple , applications , development , iphone , software

Delicious Purple iPod nanos [apple] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Jacqui was invited to cover Apple’s special press event in San Francisco this past Tuesday. She got to watch Steve do his thing and announce the rainbow nanos. She’s pretty lucky ;)

She’s also reviewing the new nanos, so look for that by Sunday/Monday. I took some pretty nice pictures of it for her though, so I thought I’d post one to get everyone salivating:

Posted in: apple

Hooray for free Apple hardware! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Last week my colleague Albert mentioned that he had some old Apple hardware lying around that he needed to get rid of. Since the thing was still working, he though it a shame to just throw it away and so he was looking for a good home for the thing. Loving Apple classics I naturally obliged :)

I'm saying "classic" here, because the Powerbook 540c in question is supposedly one of the best laptops Apple's ever made. At the time (1994) it was nigh on revolutionary, with all kinds of features that'd never been seen before in a laptop. The 540c was even voted #2 Best Powerbook, right after the venerable Pismo G3.

As Albert promised, the Powerbook still runs perfectly well. It's got OS 7.5 on it and Word and Excel are even installed. Unfortunately one of the batteries is shot to pieces, while the other will still hold a nominal charge. I reckon this laptop will make a nice, first computer for our daughter to play games on in a few years. I'll just have to hope that the SCSI drive in it will hold out.

There's all kinds of improvements that I'm thinking of for this beasty. For one, I'm thinking of recelling the working battery with new NiMH batteries. I'm also looking for a way to get the laptop to work with Compact Flash cards. On the one hand this will make file exchange a lot easier and on the other it will make a perfect replacement for the SCSI drive. Apparently the 540 is perfectly capable of booting from a CF card. Unfortunately both of these improvements will cost at least a bunch of bucks apiece and for now I'm not at liberty to just spend money on old hardware.

Thanks Albert! You gave us a nice little plaything. We'll take good care of your old laptop :)

Posted in: apple , free , powerbook , powerbook 540c

Crazy Easy (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Merlin Mann on iPhone development (from the SF iPhone Dev Camp):

Think about having the courageousness to make an app that is crazy easy. Instead of making a circus that’s really fun to play in, just make something that’s easy to get in and out of quickly without hassle.

Yes! This is exactly what I'm going for with Flickup. I wanted it to be dead simple to post photos to Flickr and I think I've gotten pretty close. While I don't want to add frivolous features, there are some that are reasonable to consider - uploading to a set, security settings, etc. I struggled to fit the metadata view onto one screen and now I'm faced with the challenge of adding these new features without undermining the simplicity that I was going for in 1.0.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, App Store, Flickup, Flickr, Merlin Mann, iPhone Dev Camp

Posted in: apple , applications , development , flickr , flickup , iphone , simplicity , software , user interface

Flickup 1.0 Is Out! (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

A few hours after my post about being rejected from the App Store, Flickup was approved. If that was all there was to the story then I would have posted about it immediately. Sadly, however, it took nine days from the time Flickup was approved until the time it was actually available for sale on the App Store.

In preparing the now-defunct demo version of Flickup, I stumbled across the contracts page on iTunes Connect and realized that my Paid Applications Contract wasn't complete. I completed it on July 17th and incessantly refreshed the contracts page to see if it had been approved yet. When Flickup was finally approved hours after my last blog post, I was met with the status of "Pending Contract" and frustration returned. I would have thought that three days would have been enough time for someone to review the contract, but apparently that wasn't the case. Having given Apple some breathing room, I finally sent them an email on the 24th asking how long the process would take. Their response? Nothing.

I didn't hear anything from Apple until the contract was approval last Monday, July 28th and the status changed to "Ready For Sale." When I finally got tired of searching the App Store every few minutes to see if Flickup was listed, I sent Apple another email. Again I received no response. It wasn't until I saw a tweet from Jon that I learned that Flickup had finally been posted and that the three week ordeal was finally over.

When I first started working on Flickup I set a lifetime sales goal ("If only X number of people ever buy the app, I would be satisfied"). I'm happy to say that I reached 10% of that target in the first full day alone. Since the app went live, I've been answering support emails (already!), pushed out (well, submitted to Apple anyway) a new version with some bug fixes, and already started working on some new features.

Now go out and buy it!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iTunes, App Store, Flickr, Flickup

Posted in: apple , applications , development , flickr , flickup , iphone , software

Rejected (Twice!) From the App Store (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

I am now a proud member of the elite group of developers who have had applications rejected from the iPhone App Store.

The application I have been working on since a few weeks after the SDK came out is Flickup, a simple Flickr uploader. When Apple announced the July 7th deadline, I pulled an all-nighter that day to finish it up and submitted the app to Apple around 6am in order to meet the 3pm deadline for inclusion in the App Store at launch. When the App Store is launched on Thursday/Friday, my app is nowhere to be found and the status remains "In Review". I sent an email on Saturday to Apple asking why Flickup was still in review and I received a non-response three days later telling me that "In Review" means my application is being reviewed by Apple. I responded immediately clarifying my inquiry and I finally received this response yesterday:

At this time, Flickup cannot be posted to the App Store because it does not allow the user to logout or change the Flickr account that they are using.

In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.

This is a perfectly valid critique, and an oversight on my part, but did it really take them two weeks to tell me about it? Would they have even told me had I not emailed them about my app's status? In any case, the time it took to get a decision on Flickup gave me time to fix some bugs, and of course add the required logout functionality.

As an aside, the Flickr Authentication API's Implementation Guidelines merely states, "Users must be provided with 'logout' functionality." The API documentation does not provide any way to revoke tokens and log users out. I had to resort to directing users to their revoke permissions page instead.

In the mean time, the App Store turned one week old and gripes about the review functionality sprouted everywhere, particularly with regard to the ability for people to review an app without actually having used it. This "feature" of the App Store prompted the cheapskates out there to use reviews as a medium to complain about price. Taking this to heart, I spent some time last week preparing a demo version of Flickup that would allow people to sample the app before dropping two Washingtons on the full version. I submitted the demo version on Friday and received a decision today:

Flickup Demo cannot be posted to the App Store because it is a beta or feature-limited version. Any reference to demo or beta needs to be removed from the binary and metadata. Free or "Lite" versions are acceptable, however the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version.

In spite of the lightning fast turnaround time, I am still just as angry about this rejection than the last one since there was no prior warning (in program agreements or otherwise) that demo versions would not be allowed. It's hard to believe that Apple isn't aware that people are crying out for demos and trials; going as far as explicitly prohibiting them (while letting all other sorts of crap through) is nothing short of infuriating.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, App Store, Apple, Flickup

Posted in: apple , applications , development , flickr , flickup , iphone , software

Me and my iPhone... maybe (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I don't have an iPhone yet. I kinda considered getting it today. Now I am kinda not considering it today. I checked my old Cingular status (expired contract, available for upgrade, iPhone for $199 a GO!), made sure I knew a nearby authorized dealer (Fair Oaks Mall, "We're not dead yet!"), and I told myself if it was all crazy fan-boy monkeytards outside who had to be first and were clogging the store, I'd turn around and go home. I want one, but I can wait a few more days.

Originally, I was going to wait a week in case any bugs showed up hardware or software wise, but takayla wants my iPod Nano (yes, the one I just won), so I was all, "sure, okay."

Heh... it seems... Houston... there is a problem:

http://gizmodo.com/5024187/apple-and-att-stores-having-difficulty-activating-iphones

The iTunes site is screwed up because their servers are either overloaded or broken. What does this mean? Not only can the phones not be activated in store (by fault) or at home via iTunes (by design), but those who had the old iPhone and downloaded the newest and much-celebrated 2.0 firmware upgrade (by choice) found that it that killed their phones because iTunes won't respond. Not only that, but AT&T;'s payment system has also gone tits up. If you have an old iPhone, don't download the new firmware yet.

The best line out of this is someone who coined, "It's the iPocolypse!" Hah!

Yeah... I might wait a bit...

In other news, I still have no Internet/TV/Phone and Verizon hasn't shown up yet. Posted in: apple , iphone , oops

A while with an iPod (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Having an iPod is nice, but I am sort of glad I didn't pay $250 or whatever for my 8gb "3rd Generation" Nano. I have two major beefs with this player, and most likely all iPods.

The first complaint is the click wheel is really not that great an operating device. It took me a while to figure out the various ways this worked. There's a "Menu," back and forth arrow, a circular motion, a center button, and "play/pause." The circular motion does different things depending on what menu you have. In play mode, it's the volume. In menu mode, it cycles through the menu. Sure, fine, I can get used to that. Except for the worst part about this navigation tool: it is far too sensitive and had no tactile feedback. So my thumb or finger slides around a featureless smooth plane, which means I have to look at it or "guess" the distance based on how far my thumb and finger are from the edge. My thick thumbs have a tough time staying within the printed lines like a toddler with a jumbo crayon, and often I can't select what I want without staying perfectly still. It's like operating an old ball mouse over a table with crumbs on it.

Not only that, but having the player in my pocket or any enclosed space changes things at random. Yes, I even bought a protective case for it. Yes, I can lock the wheel to not move at all, but the lock is a thin, hard-to-grip button at the lower edge (especially with the protective case over it), so have to remove it from the case to slide it back and forth. Plus it locks everything down, so if I use it, I am unable to change the volume or anything, which means to suddenly hear what announcement is being made over the Metro or if someone starts speaking to me, I have to quickly yank out my ear plugs. Then there's my music which doesn't have a steady volume for each song, plus I'll need to change the volume from "drown out the city traffic" to "be polite and not irritate people near me with tinny techno beats on a quiet metro ride." I have had enough times where I had needed to hit a "mute" of sorts that I never lock down the volume/pause, and so I have to be careful I do not bump the face of the iPod. When walking, this means in my pocket will often raise or lower the volume, and click back and forth between songs randomly. I think the best solution would be to get a set of headphones with a mute built into the cord.

The second gripe is iTunes. I hate iTunes. It has made my Windows boot time nearly 3 minutes from the 55 seconds it used to be. Can I drag and drop music? Oh no... I have to let iTunes load it, and then it wants to scan everything else, and thanks to my iTunes, I now know I have 9800 songs on my shared drive, which it wants to reload any time I add music. Not to mention it wrestles to be the default media player, and then doesn't play the music I click on right away. Sometimes I have to double click a song several times to get it to go, "Oh, you want to play something! Sorry, how about renaming it instead?" It always seems to be "working in the background" in some way. I see it taking up to 150mb of RAM at times, take up 10-30% of CPU when loaded, and ... oh, won't let me play or load ogg files (I found a hack to let iTunes play it, but my iPod refuses to acknowledge it). Plus iTunes only uses Windows. I am going to give Banshee a try on Ubuntu, though.

An annoyance I have for all MP3 players I have ever had: Time left and skip ahead for podcasts. I want to know how much time I have to go before the end, in case I want to speed things up before I hop off a stop, or find a good place to pause. To find where I am, I have to fast forward or reverse to get that bar. Plus, I can only fast forward or reverse about 10 seconds per second, so if the iPod resets my placeholder to the beginning for various reasons, I have to remember where I was, and hope I wasn't in the last 20 minutes of a 2-hour podcast, because there's no "rewind from end" feature, only fast forward from the beginning. So if I got reset at 1:00 in a 1:20 podcast, it will take me nearly a minute to get one hour forward into the podcast.

I am not sure the iPhone will be much better (as a music player). It does not have a click wheel, but it's an all-screen interface. The headphones do have a mute feature, though, to answer calls. That will be REAL handy. My biggest fear with an iPhone? How to carry it around while using it. It's a bit big for a belt clip, and I am afraid as much as I run into things that I'll break the iPhone in a matter of weeks with it attached to my hip. Posted in: apple , ipod , mp3 , music

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment!
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog

Posted in: apple , blog , graphics , intel , mac , multicore , os x , snow leopard , software

Liveblogging the WWDC 2008 Steve Jobs Keynote (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

I’m pretty much counting on Twitter being down (or rather, turning into a smoking crater where their servers used to be) during this morning’s Steve Job’s keynote at WWDC. So I’ll be liveblogging it here. I’m not at WWDC, but will be following via various online tools, and geeking out with fellow Macheads at Intel while it’s going on. This post is mostly going to be my observations and opinions on the news, rather than actually breaking the news, so if you want to follow along as “live” as you can, check out ArsTechnica’s live coverage, MacRumorsLive’s autoupdating page, and Engadget’s live coverage. Twitter and Summize also have a page set up to track the news, but like I said, my money’s on Twitter getting obliterated (it’s already flaky this morning).

The world is about to change. New iPhone. The iPhone App Store. And then what? New devices? OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (here’s my prediction on what that one really means). I can’t wait! This is better than Christmas!

I’m in the new JF1 “living room” area at Intel, where they have a few tables set up under a 65″ plasma TV. I’m hooked up to it, using it as my external monitor, getting ready to scour the interwebs for each new tidbit as it makes its way from the mouth of Steve. I’ve got my Mountain Dew and some Pop Tarts. I’m ready. Let’s do this thing!

Steve’s on stage now. We’re getting the best updates from the Ars IRC channel (#wwdc on irc.arstechnica.com). Steve’s talking about the enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0 software - calendar and contact sync, remote wipe, etc. Stuff we already knew. Now he’s bringing suits out on stage, from other companies. Stuff we hadn’t heard already - capability of viewing office documents, SharePoint access, VPN and two factor authentication (as in SecurID/SoftID). Cool…

Now talking about the iPhone SDK and how many similarities it has with the “real” OS X kernel and code. APIs are the same, line for line. Location-based services, 3D positional audio, how easy it is to develop for it and debug it, etc. Showing a new demo app, “Nearby Friends”, which sounds really cool. I’ll have to go back and watch the video of this, showing how easy it is to build an application, live. Talking about how much developers love coding for this platform. Yay, look how awesome we are!

Now comes the game demos. First up, Sega, talking about Super Monkey Ball. I have a love/hate relationship with that game on other platforms. The “party” parts of the games are really fun, but the “roll the monkey in a marble across this platform surrounded by a bottomless abyss on all sides” are freaking FRUSTRATING. In the keynote, they’re saying the demo looks awesome. Full “tilt” control using the accelerometer. Will be available “at the launch of the app store” for $9.99. Not a bad price - people were speculating that iPhone apps would be a lot more expensive - $20 to $40.

Now demoing an eBay app, which sounds technically cool, but honestly isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t use eBay. Now they’re talking about an app called “Loopt” (”connecting people on the go”), which Ars is excited about, but I’ve never heard of. Sounds like “friends on a map, showing you what they’re doing”. I’m not to keen on the idea of these kinds of apps, but I guess I’d have to see a GOOD one in action to really decide.

BTW, thanks to Brent, Matt, Tod, and Jerry, who are sitting around the table, correcting my mistakes and typos as I write this. Matt’s trying to listen to a live audio stream, which is sort of working, but it’s more delayed than the Ars IRC feed (which is AWESOME! FAR better than any other way I’ve done this before. Thanks Ars! )

Showing a Typepad blog authoring app, that’s going to be free at the app store launch. Yawn. Show me a generic XML-RPC compatible editor (I can has MarsEdit for iPhone please?) or something that’ll work with WordPress and I’ll be interested. I’m sure that will come soon enough. And an AP “see local news and photos based on your location” app. Sounds kind of dumb - how much news do you know of that has specific location information, more than just “Dateline: this city”? Meh.

Next up a game developer showed off a couple of games that look cool (kind of hard to get a sense of them when I’m reading text descriptions in an IRC channel - I’m sure we’ll see lots about the games soon enough). And an indie dev who works in the insurance industry made a really cool virtual musical instrument app called “Band” that he developed in 8 months in his spare time. And now talking about Major League Baseball. Woo! Not.

Now showing off a bunch of medical reference/learning applications. Talking about med students and K-12 education. I love the idea, but how many K-12 students do you know that have iPhones (or would be allowed to have iPhones by their school’s policies)? Still, very cool ideas, and it’s great that these applications are coming, and relatively easy to develop.

Enough with the 3rd party app demos. I want to know what Apple has to show us today!

OK, now Forstall’s talking about the lack of a good chat platform, and how to receive notifications from your apps while they’re not running. He says the WRONG solution is background processes, because they sap battery life and performance. (And now he’s showing how Windows Mobile does this, and making fun of it! ) “We have come up with a far better solution.” A push notification service to all developers. When your app is running, you’re connected to a server. When you quit, the connection dies. Apple maintains a persistent IP connection to the iPhone, and 3rd parties can push notifications through that server to the phone (badges, sounds, alerts, etc.). Alerts can include buttons to automatically launch your app (so it doesn’t have to stay running the background), and the phone only has to maintain one server connection (presumably to Apple) to make this works. Works over wifi and cellular. Coming in September. I have to admit, this seems like a really clever solution to a really tough problem. We’ll see how it works out in real life!

Steve’s back on stage, and talking about new iPhone 2.0 software features. Contact search, iWork (create and edit iWork docs - cool!), bulk delete and move in email, save images from emails, new calculator, explicit content filters, and new language support for Japanese and Chinese character input - draw them with your finger. That’s a welcome feature for a lot of people, I’m sure. The 2.0 software update will come in early July, will be free for iPhones, and $9.95 for iPod Touch owners (gouged again!).

Now on to talking about the app store. Wireless download and install, automatic updates, devs set prices and keep 70% of revenues. “We FairPlay apps” - FairPlay is iTunes’ DRM for music, so that means that apps will be locked (and presumably, cracked shortly thereafter - FairPlay has a reputation of being pretty breakable). If your app is larger than 10MB, you can only install over wifi. Enterprise apps can be deployed on the intranet, downloaded to your computer, then synced and installed via iTunes. Sounds like a good solution for corporate apps.

Now for something completely different: Mobile Me, new mobile service. Worst kept secret in the industry - this is basically .Mac done right - “Exchange for the rest of us”. Works on Mac, PC (woo!), and iPhone (double woo!). Push your contacts, email, calendar, and files into the cloud, and keep them in sync across all devices. But I do this already with Google - Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Or maybe MobileMe will just be powered by Google. The site is me.com. Going into a demo now - I’ll check this out myself later, see if it’s worth it. It’s a cool idea, regardless. $99/year, 20GB of storage, and there’s a 60 day free trial. Expensive for what you get. I’ll probably pass. “Available with iPhone 2.0 in early July”. So, does that mean no iPhone until early July?

OK, now he’s talking about the new iPhone. “Next challenges.” 3G, enterprise, 3rd party apps, more countries, more affordable. iPhone 3G introduced today (big surprise!). Even thinner. The back looks plastic, black. Solid metal buttons. Same display and camera. Flush headphone jack (yay - no more adapters!). Improved audio. Feels “even better” in your hand.

3G = faster data downloads. Email attachments and downloads. Doing a video demo speed comparison between EDGE and 3G. 3G is faster. Duh. Comparing to other 3G phones. It’s faster. Of course it is. Tell us something new! Show us pictures! Their claiming “great battery life”, which was one of the big concerns with previous 3G chipsets (which were also too big).

Talking about location services now, and “GPS”. The question is, does it have REAL GPS (satellite-based, not tower based)? From the demos (tracking a drive down Lombard street), it looks to be the real thing. Or at least, good enough to pass for it (smooth tracking, etc.).

More countries - they’re aiming for 12 countries for the 3G launch, with a stretch goal of 25 70 (!) countries over the next several months. Hear that sound? It’s the bottom dropping out of the international iPhone resale grey market.

More affordable. It started at $599, sells now for $399. 3G 8GB iPhone is $199. Yow! Nice! 16GB is $299. And “something special” - a white one, 16GB. Same price. Saying launch in 22 countries on July 11. I wonder if the U.S. is one of those countries? Showing a new iPhone commercial. Twice.

Jobs has left the stage. No “one more thing”. Nothing on Snot Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 (though they said there will be a session after lunch to talk about it, that’s under NDA). Bummer! I still held out hope for a new hardware class of device, Atom powered. Oh well - there’s always MacWorld 2009 in Januuary!

This was fun. Ultimately, there’s no real new hardware. We all knew about the new iPhone and its features ahead of time. Kind of bummed that it won’t go on sale for a month, but that gives me more time to save up my pennies.

Posted in: apple , blog , iphone , keynote , liveblog , mac , wwdc

Why I think Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is for upcoming Atom-based devices (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

It’s the week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). That means the rumor mill is in overdrive. I’m not immune - it’s fun to speculate! Take this post for what it’s worth. I don’t have any inside information, I don’t know any secrets, I’m just guessing and having fun.

Besides the new 3G iPhone (which is almost a certainty), the other juicy tidbit that surfaced this week was news of a new operating system revision - OS X 10.6. Jacqui at Ars got the scoop, letting us know that it’s supposed to be called “Snow Leopard”, move completely to Cocoa (dropping legacy Carbon support), and that it will be for Intel processors only (dropping support for the PowerPC chips in older Macs), and not contain any new features, only enhancements to stability, performance, and security.

But a few things just don’t add up to me. It sounds plausible that a new operating system would get announced at the Developer conference (as opposed to a consumer event), to give developers time to get ready for its release. I could buy that it’s Intel-only - they’ll probably drop PowerPC support at some point. But it does seem a little soon to be talking about the next OS release - OS X 10.5 Leopard has barely been out 8 months. And people would be reluctant to plunk down the $129 that Apple has always charged for a new release of Mac OS X if it doesn’t have any new features.

Then, yesterday, it hit me. What if this new version of Mac OS X, 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, isn’t intended for Macs at all, but for a new class of device altogether? Say, the long-rumored Apple tablet device, a Mobile Internet Device, based on the new Intel Atom processor?

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, and it all makes sense. I can’t find anything that refutes the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think I’m right. I haven’t seen anyone else speculate along these lines (though I could be wrong), so if that’s the case, I may get to say “you heard it here first!”

Here are the reasons I think the new OS is for a new class of Atom-based, non-Mac devices:

1. A “tablet” device, bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook, has been rumored FOREVER. How many appearances has it made it to John Siracusa’s WWDC and MacWorld Bingo cards?
2. An Intel Germany executive was recently quoted as saying Apple would be launching an Atom-powered mobile internet device at WWDC (this was later denied by Intel).
3. Banners were spied at the Moscone Center this week with “OS X Leopard” and “OS X iPhone” on them. Some have speculated this might mean Apple is going to license OS X to 3rd party manufacturers. But what if it means there will be a new class of device that runs OS X that’s not a Mac computer, but isn’t an iPhone either?
4. It doesn’t make sense to do a whole new OS release (10.5 –> 10.6), with a new code name (”Snow Leopard”), but not add any new features. If they were just going to improve performance, security, and stability, that’s what point releases, like the recent 10.5.3 update, are for. For every one of the six “full” releases of OS X, up through 10.5 Leopard, they’ve charged $129 for the upgrade, but each version has added significant new features. People won’t want to plunk down money for 10.6 without new features, but if 10.6 IS for a new class of Atom-based devices, it would make sense to classify it as a whole new release, with a new version number and code name, since it won’t be sold on its own. The “Snow Leopard” code name also seems to indicate something related to Leopard, but different. No previous OS X code names (Puma, Panther, Tiger, etc.) have had such a close correlation.
5. Dropping support for legacy technology, like the PowerPC processors, and dropping Carbon for Cocoa, has to happen sometime. But the timing makes perfect sense if 10.6 is for a new class of device that won’t even have those technologies. No need for PowerPC support if the devices that run the OS are going to have Intel Atom processors. No need to maintain legacy Carbon applications if Apple wants to encourage developers to write new applications in Cocoa for this new class of device.
6. As I was talking about this idea on Twitter a while ago, @davechen pointed out a Gizmodo article that says 10.6 will still support PPC chips. But what caught my eye in the article was this little tidbit: “A number of drivers didn’t load on a Core 2 Duo MacBook, because it was using a 64-bit kernel and the drivers were only 32. The kernel was not only 64-bit though.” I could be completely wrong here, but I think the Intel Atom processor doesn’t have the 64-bit capabilities that the Core 2 processors do. So the seeming backwards step of not having 64-bit drivers could make sense for Atom.
7. Maybe developers will use a new version of the iPhone SDK to write apps for these new devices. Perhaps that’s why the SDK has been Intel-only from the beginning. Apps for the iPhone are compiled for its ARM processor, completely different from either Intel or PPC architectures. But why complicate things with PowerPC stuff if you wanted to expand the SDK to create apps for the Intel x86 architecture in Atom (which could compile and run natively on Intel CPUs).

Like I said, it’s just a lot of guessing and speculation at this point, but I think it holds together pretty well. If Steve Jobs wanted to say “oh by the way, we’re introducing a whole new class of device” during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he’s want to give the audience full of developers a heads up so they can start writing apps.

Think I’m on to something? Want to debunk my thinking, and tell me I’m full of crap? You’re welcome to. Maybe this will attract the notice of the Macalope or Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber, and I’ll get the full “you’re an idiot, and here’s why” treatment from them. *swoon* Either way, it should be fun! Only a couple more days until WWDC, and we’ll know if I’m right or wrong!

Posted in: apple , atom , blog , leopard , os x , rumors , speculation

Wired magazine covers, then and now [apple, fun] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

So I’ve had a mint copy of one of my favorite Wired magazine issues (5.06 from June 1997) laying around forever. Just recently, Wired released an updated version (16.04 from April 2008) which I thought was super clever:

Posted in: apple , fun

Lifehacker Condones Software Piracy (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

It always infuriates me when large tech blogs have seemingly innocuous posts on how to get "free" applications or violate EULAs (like CrunchGear did back when Leopard was released by telling advising readers to split a copy of the OS to get it for half off).

It happened again yesterday when Lifehacker linked to an article instructing users on how to get the apps included in the iPod touch's $20 January update for free. Whether or not you agree with Apple's decision to charge $20 for apps that came for "free" on the iPhone, stealing the apps is wrong. If you don't feel $20 is worth it, you aren't entitled to get the apps for free. It's as simple as that.

Technorati Tags: Lifehacker, software piracy, stealing, Apple, iPhone, iPod touch

Posted in: apple , iphone , ipod , piracy , software

Dell Responds to MacBook Air (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Found on Hell Yeah Bitch, "Dell Responds to the MacBook Air".

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook Air, commercial, funny, video

Posted in: apple , funny , macbook air , video , youtube

iPhone App Gold Rush (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

With 100,000 iPhone SDK downloads, the relative simplicity of the platform and the popularity of the iPhone, there's no doubt we'll be seeing tons of iPhone applications being released as soon as the App Store goes live. But will those apps be any good?

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, thinks we'll see a ton of to-do lists and Twitter clients. He's right: Apple has failed to provide a to-do list app for iPhone OS (or Mac OS X, for that matter) and people have complained about it since June 29, 2007. Twitter is also the love du jour of techies everywhere and an iPhone app would be much better than the web interface (look no further than Iconfactory's Twitterrific on the desktop for proof). I am personally working on an app that combines the two ;-)

Brent also thinks that the money is in the Cloud. He states that standalone iPhone apps are easy and cheap enough to write and too boring to use. The most interesting apps will be those that sync to the cloud. It's the development, maintenance and scaling of the server apps that will be expensive, and that's where he sees much of the iFund money going. Time to become an expert on NSURLConnection!

I can't help but agree. One app I'm working for will tie into a web app we've written internally - the API isn't currently there, but it will be. Blossom (as we call it) won't be the most revolutionary iPhone app out there, but it is a good testing ground for client-server iPhone apps. I've got ideas for other apps too, and the thing they have in common is that they all tie back into the Cloud. The 1st iPhone "SDK" (web apps) was far from perfect, but if it did anything, it helped developers focus their attention on where it should be - the Cloud.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, Apple, iPhone OS, Cloud, cloud computing, Cocoa Touch, development, Brent Simmons, NewsGator, NetNewsWire

Posted in: apple , applications , development , internet , iphone , software

I Have the Coolest Keyboard in the World - Apple Wireless Keyboard (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

It’s been over a year since I got my beloved MacBook Pro (when I joined Intel Software Network). For most of that time, I’ve been using one of the previous generation Apple Wireless Keyboards - the one with the white keys and transparent base. It’s been a great keyboard (even though the white keys get filthy, and the transparent housing lets you see all the disgusting gunk, dust, and board chow that gets caught in there). A couple of weeks ago, I was helping our department admin order an Apple keyboard for someone else in the group, and she asked if I wanted one. What do you think I said? A day or so later, in email, she asked if I wanted wired or wireless. I thought for a minute - the new Apple Wireless Keyboard doesn’t have the full size separate number pad, arrow keys, and PgUp/PgDown/Home/End keys (the wired USB version does). Could I live without those? I decided to give it a try.

Last week, the new keyboard arrived, and I’ve been blown away by it ever since.

It’s Bluetooth, which means that it will work with more than just Apple computers. It does have some Mac-specific keys, though, like Exposé and Dashboard. It also has the traditional Apple volume up/down/mute, and eject keys, and this latest version adds media shuffle controls - Play, Next, Previous, etc. - which to my delight work to control iTunes even when I’m in another application (like right now, writing this in MarsEdit). But the amazing part of it is just how freaking thin and light it is:

It is much smaller than the previous full sized keyboard. The little roll at the top/back holds 3 AA batteries. One end of the “roll” unscrews for battery access, and the other houses the power/pairing button.

The keyboard is almost exactly the same size as the actual keyboard on the MacBook Pro:

So how has it been to use it for a few days? It took some getting used to. My fingers had to relearn the spacing/layout of the new keyboard, but that happens with any keyboard. And now that I’ve gotten used to it, I’m in love. The feel is wonderful. Even though the keys are shallow, and the whole thing is very thin, the tactile response of each keypress is lovely. The old keyboard feels mushy and stiff (at the same time) and bouncy by comparison.

Do I miss the full size number pad? Not really. Once, today, I was typing a phone number or a zip code or something, and my hand went to reach for it, then realized it wasn’t there. Not a big deal. The arrow keys are in roughly the same place (and exactly the same place as on the MBP itself), and the trick of using Fn+Left, Right, Up, and Down for Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn is the same thing you have to do on the integrated keyboard, so that, too, isn’t really a big deal. I do kind of miss the dedicated forward Delete key, but again, Fn+Backspace does the trick, just like on the MBP.

Overall, I love this little keyboard. I pick it up and wave it around at people, just to marvel at how thin it is. And it just looks so darn cute sitting on my desk, being all tiny next to the huge stuff that surrounds it (the old Apple Wireless Keyboard, my 24″ monitor, my MBP, etc.).

This would be the absolute perfect home theater PC/living room computer keyboard if it had some sort of integrated pointing device or trackpad. So thin, light, and beautiful! Now, if they would only update the design of the Mighty Mouse to match it’s thin, aluminum companion…

Posted in: apple , blog , bluetooth , hardware , keyboard , wireless

The MacBook Air's Emotional Specs (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

The MacBook Air is selling well, Ars Technica reports, with many stores reporting stock shortages and long lead times.

As Railsdaddy David Heinemeier Hansson mentions, this probably comes as a surprise to geeks all over the blogosphere, who were largely focused on the shortcomings of the tech specs - the relatively slow processor, shortage of ports, etc, and not focusing enough on the design and feel of it. Whether it takes 20 minutes or 30 minutes to convert a movie to iPod format is largely irrelevant, what is more noticeable (and therefore more important) is the general feeling of delight (or despair) one feels when using any device. Remember the awe people experienced when flicking images back and forth on the iPhone? Similar experiences abound on the MacBook Air - the feeling of not feeling like you're carrying a laptop, the feeling of not feeling like there's a computer under your keyboard - these are the specs, emotional specs, if you will, that are causing people to buy MacBooks Air. Indeed, the MacBook Air is just another in the long list of examples that prove that Apple is destroying the competition when it comes to emotional specs.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook, MacBook Air, emotional specs, tech specs, design

Posted in: apple , design , macbook , thoughts

The next hurdle for the iPhone, well in business (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

At this weeks “iPhone Software Roadmap” event Apple will supposedly announce information on the SDK, enterprise support and software updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch. After those announcements I think will see is a new rash of complaints that the iPhone is no alternative for a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile devices from the other side of the aisle after the details are released.

Even with the recent job postings for a Windows Outlook / Exchange QA engineer maybe we will see more than just Exchange support added to fulfill the “Enterprise” slot. I would love to see support for Zimbra added, Apple is a strategic partner with them, though we probably won’t see it with the take over maneuver by Microsoft since Zimbra is a Yahoo! company.

But that won’t be the next thing that Microsoft / corporate IT centric writers will be complaining about. When the details for the software distribution are announced they will be crying foul, because both the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices support remotely pushing applications to the devices from their respective servers. So your accounting, inventory or what ever department has an application written it can then be sent to the mobile device in their own internal network, over a VPN or whatever they think best meets their needs.

I do not doubt that the reports of how the distribution model will look is correct and that type of outside control of what is allowed to be installed or not will be the hurdle for larger adoption of it as an “approved” device by many corporate IT departments. I don’t even think the idea of a tiered access to the SDK would encourage Apple to budge and allow an additional method to install applications to the devices that say only had Wi-Fi access.

Thursday I will be looking forward to see what the SDK will include, hearing from various Mac developers what they have planned and not so much into a new phase of anti-iPhone rhetoric.

Posted in: apple , blackberry

Bought another Macbook Air today [apple, ars technica] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Too bad I had to promptly overnight it to Boston :)

Posted in: apple , ars technica

Steve Jobs Is Your New Bicycle killed the meme [apple, fun, internet] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

My stupid little site got a lot of linkage. The first big site to link was Violet Blue’s TinyNibbles.com (NSFW). I emailed Violet a screen grab of what I considered to be one of the funnier lines I wrote, “Steve Jobs Told Katie Cotton That You’re Rude,” because it was specifically about her (Violet’s) experience with Steve Jobs on the floor of Macworld.

That got a lot of people linking to the site on Pownce, Twitter, and elsewhere.

Yesterday Eric Zorn, a technology blogger at the Chicago Tribune, emailed me with a series of questions about.
His article on the meme ran yesterday:

I am using] 66 [random phrases] currently, I started with about 20 I made up myself, but I had my friend Josette Torres help me with a bunch as well. I add a few each day as I think of them. The site is really simple. When you load or reload the site, a list of phrases is read in and a random phrase is chosen and displayed. A new item of the 66 possible choices is shown every time you load or refresh the site. It works just like a magic 8 ball except this one has 60+ possible phrases!

Around the same time yesterday, Christopher Beam, wrote a short post called “The Life Cycle of an Internet Meme” which sent a lot of traffic. Christopher created a timeline of each of the most popular “is your new bicycle sites” from February 14th when the Obama site was created through Feb 18 when I created my site, up til Feb 19 when the extremely meta, http://isyournewbicycle.com was created, successfully imploding the meme.

Even though my site hasn’t gotten nearly the same level of attention as the others (obviously), I still think it got way more popular than I had ever expected. Fun stuff :)

Posted in: apple , fun , internet

Apple Bumps iPhone, iPod touch Storage (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

In a stealth update this morning, Apple introduced new models of the iPhone and iPod touch with increased storage. Both lines received new models priced at $499, the new iPhone having 16GB of storage (double the previously available 8GB) and the new iPod touch having 32GB of storage (double the previously available max of 16GB). None of the other specifications have changed.

Introducing new models with increased storage space seems like a logical move on Apple's part. The new models have practically no R&D costs and might bump up demand for the devices while Apple prepares the 2nd generation iPhone, which many speculate will be released this summer. Of course, Apple hopes that the 8GB iPhone will go the way of the 4GB iPhone. That is, that almost everyone will be willing to spend the extra $100 to double the capacity of their phones.

Something interesting to note is that the iPod touch now has the same storage capacity as the low-end 5G iPods that were discontinued last September (albeit at double the price) and that the price points and storage amounts echo that of the 3rd generation iPods, which came in at 10/15/30 GB for $299-$399. Given another doubling of storage and the iPod touch will be closing in on the iPod classic's storage capacity. Meanwhile, Apple has kept around the $299 8GB iPod touch, most likely in an effort to hit all types of iPod buyers and signaling that the touch is definitely set to become the mainstream iPod sooner or later.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPhone, iPod touch

Posted in: apple , iphone , ipod , storage

Incompatible [apple, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

I really, really like this photo I took this afternoon of that MacBook’s 60W adapter plugged into the MacBook Air. I was attempting to show why it wouldn’t work too well. This picture doesn’t illustrate that very well, but the photo is really nice!

Posted in: apple , technology

Revolutionary iPhone ideas: Apple take note [apple, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

1. Let me stream internet radio to my iPhone over WiFi. I can’t tell you how awesome this would be. I don’t want to have to capture Groove Salad over night to a big ol’ MP3 and listen to it throughout the day. I want live radio! NPR, cool college stations, it would be extremely cool.

2. When my iPhone is attached to my computer, I should be able to send and receive text messages (SMS) via some method. Address book used to do this (I think) with phones connected via Bluetooth. Why not build this functionality into iChat? Or expose it via an API so developers can hook into into. Imagine sending texts to friends through Adium. Getting a Growl alert when someone sends you an SMS. You can already do this stuff on supported Bluetooth phones with an application called BluePhoneElite. If a really dinky RAZR can do this stuff, the iPhone should too!

So Apple, if you’re listening, figure this junk out! People would love it, I promise.

Posted in: apple , technology

Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS 10.5 or patching Dan Benjamin’s guide (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

Update: Dan has posted his updated guide for installing Ruby on Rails on Leopard.

I don’t think there are too many people who hasn’t come across either of Dan Benjamin’s guides when looking to install Ruby on Rails on a Mac. They are simple, to the point and you could basically copy and paste to get Ruby, Rails, MySQL and depending on which guide either Mongrel or LightTPD installed, but since the release of Leopard the instructions if unaltered would fail when installing Readline, Ruby and Subversion. Dan has mentioned that he will be providing an update to the guide for Leopard users, but with a new baby and job it might (and justifiably so) be a bit be