Wednesday, 8 February 2012

Fountain: Plain-Text Markup Format for Screenwriting ★

What Markdown is for web content, Fountain is for screenplays. Looks great. See more in the announcements from co-creators Stu Maschwitz and John August. (Writes August, “Good ideas sometimes sit around for a while.” True.)

My favorite iPhone Twitter client is now available for the iPad too. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it’s just terrific. I love it.

How iTunes Match Works for Copyright Holders ★

Jeff Price got his first iTunes Match royalty check, and he’s happy:

A person has a song on her computer hard drive. She clicks on the song and plays it. No one is getting paid. The same person pays iTunes $25 for iMatch. She now clicks on the same song and plays it through her iMatch service. Copyright holders get paid.

Same action, same song, one makes money for the copyright holder, and one does not. This is found money that the copyright holders would never have gotten otherwise.

I wasn’t really sure before how artists would get paid for iTunes Match.

Path Makes Things Right ★

Dave Morin, CEO of Path:

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

In Path 2.0.6, released to the App Store today, you are prompted to opt in or out of sharing your phone’s contacts with our servers in order to find your friends and family on Path.

Perfect response.

Inside Instagram ★

Nice profile by Mat Honan:

Instagram isn’t just small; it’s tiny. It’s miniscule. It is famously located in Twitter’s old digs in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. But here’s the thing: Instagram subleases its space from another company. Instagram isn’t in Twitter’s old office, it’s in Twitter’s old conference room. The entire company is nothing more than a collection of desks arranged bullpen-style in a room that is smaller than most two-car garages.

Nothing Personal ★

Cade Metz, reporting for The Register a year ago:

“The proliferation of Flash [on mobile] is actually happening,” David Wadhwani, executive and senior vice president for Adobe’s Creative and Interactive Solutions, told reporters on Thursday during a gathering at Adobe’s San Francisco offices. “Flash does not run in the browser on iOS devices yet, but we’re confident — given the momentum we’re seeing on other devices and the consumer interest — that we’re on the right track [in the rest of the market].”

That didn’t last long.

Steve Jobs’ rather personal attack on Flash only encouraged his competitors to embrace the technology — in a big way.

The thing is, it wasn’t personal. Read Jobs’s Thoughts on Flash again. His argument is rational, technical, and strategic — and holds up very well in hindsight. The ones who allowed personal feelings to enter the equation were those who mistook Apple’s stance toward Flash as a spiteful vendetta.

Path Uploads Your Entire iPhone Address Book to Its Servers ★

Arun Thampi, after examining the network traffic between Path’s iPhone app and their servers:

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result — my address book was in Path’s hands.

Path’s reaction, paraphrased: Hey, no big deal. We’re only using the data to help you find your friends.

Everyone else in the world’s reaction: Dude, that’s fucked up.

Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Gartner: Western European PC Shipments Fell 16 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2011 ★

Gartner:

PC shipments in Western Europe totaled 16.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 16 per cent decline from the equivalent period in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. For the year, PC shipments numbered 58.5 million units in Western Europe in 2011, also a 16 percent decrease from 2010.

The PC market in Western Europe has suffered four consecutive quarters of shipment decline.

Sounds like a trend.

Chrome for Android Won’t Support Flash ★

Remember when Android’s (and the BlackBerry Playbook’s, and WebOS’s) support for Flash was supposed to be a competitive advantage against iOS?

Chrome for Android ★

MG Siegler reviews the brand-new and long-awaited Chrome for Android:

First of all, yes, Chrome for Android is here. Second, it’s only compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich which is currently on — wait for it — 1% of Android devices. But in an attempt to add some silver-lining to the 1% joke, I will say that Chrome for Android is of a much higher class than the previous Android browser, the aptly-named and horribly icon’d: Browser.

Browser is dead. Long live Chrome.

Thus ends the single most perplexing thing about Android: why its web browser was so horrendous. Conventional wisdom says Apple is the one pushing native apps and Google is the web-first company, but you’d never guess it judging by their respective mobile web browsers.

I installed Chrome on my Galaxy Nexus review unit and I concur with MG — it’s good. It still doesn’t zoom or scroll as well as Mobile Safari (not even close), but it’s so much better than the old Browser it isn’t funny. My biggest gripe with Chrome for Android is that it feels overly skewed toward search. Bookmarks are tucked several taps away, unlike Mobile Safari where they’re one tap away in a menu at the bottom of the screen. But overall, the interaction design is good: useful, attractive, obvious, and efficient.

That’s No Moon ★

Samsung is heading into Gordon Gekko territory.

Alternate Joke: If your phone is bigger than your face, you have polio.

It’s Been a Long 15 Years ★

If you want a visceral sense of just how far Apple has come since the NeXT acquisition and Steve Jobs’s return, you’ll do no better than watching this video from Macworld Expo 1997. Then-CEO Gil Amelio rambles on and on, woefully unprepared and unrehearsed. Then, Jobs takes the stage, unusually-dressed but with a tight presentation and an actual plan. Then Amelio returns to preside over what must be the worst and most awkward product introduction in company history.

Salon: 33 Percent Fewer Posts; 40 Percent Greater Traffic ★

Salon editor Kerry Lauerman:

We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.

Good news. But it shouldn’t be surprising that for a certain audience, quality is far more important than quantity.

Apple Shopping New Apple TV to Potential Broadband Partners? ★

Intriguing report by Rita Trichur, Grant Robertson, Boyd Erman, and Steve Ladurantaye, for the Globe and Mail:

While the iTV product remains cloaked in secrecy, sources say Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has approached Rogers and Bell as it actively pursues partnerships with Canadian carriers.

“They’re not closed to doing it with one [company] or doing it with two,” said one source who is familiar with the talks. “They’re looking for a partner. They’re looking for someone with wireless and broadband capabilities.”

Another source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers and Bell already have the product in their labs.

I’ve never heard anything about this before, but if true, it suggests that Apple is approaching this new (or perhaps just updated?) TV product as something akin to the iPhone — with broadband providers playing the role mobile carriers do with the iPhone.

The Best Super Bowl Ad ★

Jim Cramer:

But there was one ad that struck me as the most honest, most riveting and most compelling of all. You see, the game had just ended, and Colts great Raymond Berry ran the Giant gantlet with the Lombardi Trophy. Suddenly it seemed like every other Giant pulled out an Apple iPhone to snap pictures of the moment. One after another after another. And I said to myself, there it is, not some pet dangling a bag of chips or some headlights killing vampires or King Elton getting trapdoored. Nope, there was an ad worthy of Steve Jobs and the company he built.

Screenshots here.

Monday, 6 February 2012

New High-DPI UI Resources in 10.7.3 ★

Have you noticed that Safari’s hovering-over-a-link pointing-finger cursor looks a little different in Mac OS X 10.7.3? It’s not just that the finger is at a slightly different angle — it’s a new UI resource that scales gracefully to larger sizes. That’s not the only new high-DPI image resource in 10.7.3: the grabby hand in Mail, the camera cursor for selecting an individual window to take a screenshot of, and a few other UI elements got the high-DPI treatment in 10.7.3.

The simplest explanation is that Apple only just now got around to increasing the resolution of these elements for the benefit of users who use the cursor-zooming Universal Access feature. But, combined with the fact that some people with Mac Minis connected to TVs via HDMI are reporting that after upgrading to 10.7.3, their system rebooted in HiDPI mode, I can’t help but wonder whether we may be on the cusp of Apple releasing HiDPI Mac displays and/or HiDPI MacBooks. I.e.: retina display Macs.

I’ve been anticipating super-high-resolution Mac displays for over five years, so take my conjecture here with a grain of wishful-thinking salt.

Steve Ballmer Laughs at iPhone in 2007 ★

After noting that Apple’s iPhone business now generates more revenue than all of Microsoft combined, MG Siegler linked once again to this classic 2007 interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Nobody enjoys laughing at utterly-wrong-in-hindsight claim chowder like I do, but in all seriousness, this interview, to me, is all the proof Microsoft’s board needs that Ballmer should be asked to step down. (Or, really, that he should have been asked to step down a few years ago, as soon as it became clear just how successful the iPhone was going to be.) The damning thing isn’t that Apple got there first; it’s that even after Apple revealed it, that Ballmer didn’t get it, that he didn’t see instantly that Apple had unveiled something amazing and transformative. All Ballmer could see was the near future, the next few months where the iPhone was indeed too expensive and where typing on a touchscreen was a novelty.

Of course Microsoft’s CEO wasn’t going to sing the iPhone’s praises. But if he had a true understanding of what they suddenly found themselves up against, he sure as shit would not have laughed at it.

Honeywell Goes After Nest Learning Thermostat for Patent Infringement ★

So depressing. It’d be one thing if Honeywell had an even vaguely Nest-like product to defend. But they don’t. And how did they get a patent for this:

U.S. Patent No. 7,634,504 - this patent was filed in 2006 (issued 2009) and covers displaying grammatically complete sentences while programming a thermostat.

Why Didn’t Apple Advertise During the Super Bowl? ★

Lance Ulanoff thinks Apple should have advertised during yesterday’s Super Bowl:

I worry that without Steve Jobs, Apple may have lost some of its fighting spirit. For all his quirks, Jobs was a fighter. He liked to deride the competition and then beat them, as publicly as possible. Imagine if right after the Samsung Super Bowl ad, Apple had run some sort of iconic spot for, say, the Apple iTV: “Television is about to change forever, thanks to the company that, 28 years ago, changed computing forever. Watch…” Now that would’ve been cool. Jobs would have done it.

No he wouldn’t have. The 1984 Super Bowl ad was amazing, but it’s ancient history. An Apple Super Bowl ad yesterday teasing an upcoming product — Apple TV, iPad, anything — would have been a sign of post-Jobs strategic change.

Jobs is only dead for a few months, but Ulanoff has seemingly already forgotten how he ran the company. I can’t remember the last time Apple ran a Super Bowl ad. Super Bowl ads bring high-profile attention to major announcements. Apple doesn’t need to pay for Super Bowl ads to get high-profile attention for major announcements. Apple uses TV advertisements to reinforce the message and branding of its most popular existing products. The Super Bowl is of questionable value for that sort of advertising.

Apple doesn’t tease upcoming products. They announce them when they’re ready. As for Samsung’s ads mocking those who wait in line for new Apple products, I imagine Apple sees no more need to respond than Coke does to Pepsi’s decades-long “we’re happy to be in second place” advertising strategy of making fun of Coke.

Whoops ★

Chris Davies, SlashGear:

HTC “dropped the ball” on its 2011 devices, the company’s CFO has admitted, with LTE-equipped handsets simply too thick and offering insufficient battery life. Speaking on the company’s financial results call today, following HTC’s unappealing Q4 2011 results, Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung conceded that HTC had plenty of work to do improving both “design and components.”

I, for one, am shocked — shocked! — that big thick phones with poor battery life fared poorly.

The iOS-ification of Apple’s Ecosystem ★

Federico Viticci:

The iOS-ification of OS X is, at this point, inevitable, and anyone who doesn’t see it, or tries to neglect, is either software-blind or has some kind of interest in that way of thinking.

Prime ★

Terrific short film by Ben Wu and David Usui about Prime Burger Restaurant, a midtown Manhattan institution. (Via Rusty Blazenhoff.)

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Name Rings a Bell ★

Robert McMillan, writing for Wired:

Could the low-power chip design that’s used in your iPhone someday show up inside the chips built by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices?

Definitely maybe. Or as AMD’s brand new Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster put it to us: “The answer is not no.”

Yeah, that Mark Papermaster.

Friday, 3 February 2012

Doxie Go + Wi-Fi ★

My thanks to Apparent for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their new Doxie Go + Wi-Fi — a tiny, portable, wireless scanner that works anywhere. It includes great Mac software that creates searchable PDFs and integrates easily with just about any imaginable workflow. Save scans to Dropbox, Evernote, Yojimbo, your iPhone/iPad photo roll, or keep them in the Doxie app. And with Wi-Fi, your scans push wirelessly and instantly to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Doxie Go helps you go not just paperless, but wireless. I bought one a few months ago and love it.

Judge Not By What They Do, But Rather By How They Spin ★

Avram Piltch of Laptop magazine, talking to Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch:

“Dell and Hewlett Packard are not doing as good as Apple is doing right now,” Li Said. “But when we talk about publicity and public relations, it’s another story.”

So who does CLW spend the most effort criticizing — the companies whose actual labor practices are worse, or the one whose “public relations” (read: willingness to take a meeting with CLW) are worse? Take a guess.

Apple Updates iBooks Author With Clarified EULA ★

Matthew Panzarino:

Apple has updated its iBooks Author app in order to clarify the language of its End User License Agreement. The changes to the EULA clarify that Apple does indeed intend the packaged product to be sold on the iBookstore only, but also make it clear that it does not lay claim to the content that you use to create the book, nor does it try to limit what you can do with that content elsewhere.

First ★

Horace Dediu:

Apple reached 75% of profit share, nearly 40% of revenue share and 9% of units share.

Apple and Samsung combined for about 91% of profits with RIM third at 3.7%, HTC fourth at 3.0% and Nokia last at 1.8% of a $15 billion total for the quarter.

Not bad.

In Praise of Cheap Labor ★

Paul Krugman, writing for Slate back in 1997:

Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

Keep in mind that Krugman is, by anyone’s standards, a true liberal.

I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Ed Bott, “How Apple Is Sabotaging an Open Standard for Digital Books”:

Apple’s behavior is a modern, sophisticated version of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” behavior that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 1990s: Enter a product category supporting a widely used standard, extend that standard with proprietary capabilities, and then use those differences to disadvantage competitors. (The strategy is even more effective if you have a dominant market position in another, related category that you can use for leverage. Think Windows in the 1990s, iPad in 2012.)

I agree with Bott that Apple is being competitive here, but disagree that it’s an example of embrace/extend/extinguish. Put another way, over the weekend Bott called the iBooks Author EULA “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil”; I agree with the greedy, but not the evil or the mind-bogglingliness.

So Apple, which claims to use the ePub format exclusively, has now created an incompatible, proprietary version of that format. And with iBooks Author they’ve added licensing terms that restrict what an author can do with the generated content.

This is why I disagree with the comparison to Microsoft’s embrace/extend/extinguish strategy: Apple isn’t calling the new iBooks Author format “ePub”. They never mentioned “ePub” during last week’s event. iBooks Author doesn’t use “ePub” anywhere in the user interface or documentation. The filename extension is ‘.ibooks’, not ‘.epub’. Arguing that Apple is following the embrace/extend/extinguish strategy implies that Apple was attempting to redefine “ePub” to mean “ePub plus Apple proprietary extensions”. Apple isn’t doing that. They’re very clearly presenting the output of iBooks Author as something new and proprietary to the iBooks Author.

Bott points to this iBooks FAQ from Apple, which states that the only formats supported by iBooks are industry-standard ePub and PDF. Given that the modification date on this FAQ is 22 December 2011, it seems clear that this is simply an outdated FAQ, not an attempt to describe the new iBooks format as ePub.

I’m not trying to be cute here. I understand that technically, under the hood, the iBooks Author output is standard ePub plus Apple proprietary extensions. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple is attempting to confuse anyone in this regard. The under-the-hood similarities to ePub are an implementation detail. No casual user creating a work in iBooks Author should have any reason to believe they are creating an ePub file, or something that can be used anywhere other than in the iBooks app on an iPad.

I don’t disagree that Apple’s goal is for the proprietary iBooks format to become a de facto standard — for it to become popular and widely used and thus, because it only works on the iPad, further cement the iPad as the leading next-generation personal computing platform. I simply disagree that Apple is being in any way disingenuous or misleading about it. The only people who seem to be confused about iBooks Author’s relationship to ePub are technically-minded people who know exactly what ePub is and who have a vested interest in seeing the open standard become the de facto industry standard.

Bott writes:

They also could have included the option to import ePub files. As a publisher and author myself, I would have welcomed that option. I could create a book using the industry-leading standard ePub format, for sale in any outlet, then import it into iBooks Author, add interactive elements, and sell an enhanced version in the iTunes Store for the same price.

What Bott is asking for here, to me, would have been a more embrace/extend/extinguish sort of move — to allow iBooks Author to open a cross-platform ePub book, make changes, and then save it in a proprietary format that can only be read in iBooks. It might have been a convenience to authors and publishers who already have ePub source files, but by not even allowing iBooks Author to import ePub, it only serves to emphasize that iBooks Author is not a general-purpose ePub or e-book tool. It is an iBooks tool.

Apple, which uses the ePub standard as the core for iBooks, could easily have produced their free authoring tool so that it continues to support what they acknowledge is the “industry-leading standard.” The program could offer users a choice of output formats: a standard ePub file or a fully interactive iBooks file.

They could have, but they didn’t. And if they had, when exporting to standard ePub, the books would lose all of the formatting and interactive features that are exclusive to the iBooks format. Apple wants authors and publishers to use those features, because those features are what differentiates iBooks on the iPad from all other e-readers.

Bott’s on firmer ground with this follow-up piece: “Some Standards Are More Open Than Others”, wherein he makes the case that Apple is a hypocrite for developing and promoting its own proprietary e-book format while serving as a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the trade group behind the ePub standard:

OK, everyone, you got that? It’s just capitalism! Why should Apple care about other companies in the digital publishing industry? Let them go build their own tools and design their own formats!

Except for one little thing. Apple is a member in good standing of the International Digital Publishing Forum, which identifies itself as the “Trade and Standards Organization for the Digital Publishing Industry.”

As a member of the IDPF, Apple most certainly is on record as agreeing to do what Gruber thinks they don’t have to do: reduce the cross-platform burdens of the entire digital publishing industry.

There are an awful lot of companies on the IDPF members list, including at least a few that produce tools that generate digital publications in proprietary formats (e.g. Adobe and Quark, to name two that compete directly against iBooks Author).

On the one hand, iBooks, since its inception, has had best-of-breed support for the ePub standard, and all the regular books available for download and purchase through the iBookstore (i.e. every book other than the dozen or so made using iBooks Author which appeared in the store last week) are in standard ePub format. (Apple even requires books submitted to the store to pass ePub standard validation tests.) And Apple has made no mention of moving away from this support for ePub.

The question is, what does it mean to be a “good” member of IDPF: supporting ePub alongside any proprietary formats, or supporting ePub to the exclusion of any proprietary formats? Bott clearly sees it as the latter.

Put another way, if you’re a producer of ePub-formatted books and wish to remain so, your books are just as welcome in the iBookstore and just as well-rendered in iBooks as they were prior to Apple’s announcements last week.

To me, again, it’s like mobile web apps versus native apps on the iPhone. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, Apple declared that the only way for third-party developers to write software for it was to write mobile web apps. Such mobile web apps were far more capable than mobile web apps on any other platform — but they were far less capable than the native Cocoa Touch apps Apple provided with the iPhone. In 2008, when Apple unveiled the App Store and native Cocoa Touch SDK, it didn’t drop support for mobile web apps. Indeed, mobile web app support in iOS has continued to improve, and today still exceeds the mobile web app support in any other OS. But the fact that mobile web apps on iOS remain far less capable than native App Store apps paints Apple as “anti-web” in the eyes of some critics.

I believe the new iBooks Author format is to iBooks as native App Store apps are to the iPhone, and that ePub is to iBooks as mobile web apps are to the iPhone: closed/proprietary/technically-superior/better-looking on one side, open/standard/cross-platform on the other side. I expect Apple to continue to support ePub the same way it has continued to support mobile web apps — as a second-class citizen compared to its own proprietary format, but still just as good as, if not better than, anyone else in the industry.

I don’t know enough about the collective politics of the IDPF to say whether this stance is contrary to the group’s goals or mores. If you see the goal of ePub as serving as an expressive, standard, cross-platform format for e-books, Apple remains fully on board with that. If you see the goal of ePub as serving as the only commercial e-book format — i.e. that all e-books should be cross-platform — I don’t see how you can argue that Apple was ever on board with that. There’s a big difference between arguing “There should be a good standard for cross-platform books” and “All books should be based on a good cross-platform standard”.

Lastly, Bott thinks I’ve slowly changed my mind over the last few days:

The top defender is ace Apple-watcher John Gruber, who has been slowly and publicly changing his mind on the new iBooks format and accompanying license agreement over the past few days. First he said it was “Apple at its worst.” And then he began backtracking.

First:

The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C…

Next:

Apple’s concern is not what’s best for the publishing industry, and it certainly isn’t about what’s best for the makers of (and users of) rival e-book reading devices.

And most recently:

But again, Apple’s not in this game to reduce the cross-platform burdens of the publishing industry. If the publishing industry wants to reduce the number of formats it supports and the hassles of converting from one format to another, Apple’s pitch would be to go exclusive to the iBookstore.

There are two separate issues in play. First is the iBooks Author EULA, and its requirement that if you sell a book generated by the app, you must do so exclusively through the iBookstore. Second is the proprietary file format of the new iBooks Author and its relationship to ePub 3.

My “this is Apple at its worst” remark was regarding the EULA. That criticism still stands. I believe Apple should treat the output of iBooks Author as it does Mac apps: allow authors and publishers to choose to sell them through the iBookstore and/or to sell them on their own. I could even see Apple requiring books made with iBooks Author to be submitted to the iBookstore if they’re going to be made available for sale anywhere — just remove the exclusivity clause. I see no reason why the iBookstore would not succeed in the same way the Mac App Store has. I say this is Apple at its worst because Apple has chosen the path of exerting the most control.¹ A little more flexibility on Apple’s part would do well for everyone, even Apple itself, as it would only further encourage the use of iBooks Author.

The other remarks of mine that Bott quotes are regarding the second issue — the proprietary file format versus ePub one — and my stance on that is largely unchanged. The only thing I believe I was wrong about is my initial conjecture that the output of iBooks Author is mostly or entirely expressed in HTML5. It is indeed largely based on ePub (and thus HTML5), but significant aspects are not. Here’s another snippet from my first piece Bott quotes from above:

It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks.

I no longer believe that to be true. I think it would take significant effort for a competitor to render the output of iBooks Author with full or even near-full fidelity. All the more reason for Apple to remove or loosen the exclusivity clause of the EULA. ★

Actually, I take that back. Exerting the most control, they would disallow the free distribution of books generated with iBooks Author, and make it more like the iOS App Store. But such a restriction would completely contradict the role iBooks Author is intended to play with the new iTunes U, where individual teachers and professors are encouraged to use iBooks Author to produce their own courseware. What Apple has chosen is the path of exerting the most control while still supporting the new iTunes U. ↩

On the Proprietary Nature of the iBooks Author File Format

Friday, 20 January 2012

Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the W3C CSS Working Group, has a detailed technical analysis of the iBooks Author file format:

The iba format clearly extends CSS (and therefore EPUB3) to offer the following features:

Template-based layout including special areas (gutter)

Extended underlining

Ability to control the size of each column and column gap in a multi-column layout

Something equivalent to Adobe’s Regions and Exclusions.

He thinks these nonstandard extensions are a strategic mistake on Apple’s part:

When a piece of software is so well designed from a UI point of view and could become such an attractor in terms of usage, I feel this is a totally wrong strategy. Opening up everything and using only carefully chosen standards and matching the version of WebKit used by Safari would have given an immense and almost unbeatable competitive advantage to Apple, would have attracted even more people to the Mac platform and would have turned the iBooks Store into the primary online choice of publication for all new books.

It should surprise no one that the co-chair of a W3C working group deems standards compliance to be more important than does Apple. And he may well be right that it will prove to be a strategic mistake. But it’s worth noting that the e-book market leader, Amazon’s Kindle, uses a proprietary format. Eschewing ePub and any sort of standards compliance doesn’t seem to have hurt Amazon. And, up until yesterday, the only e-book format supported by iBooks has been standards compliant ePub, and that hasn’t made Apple the market leader. It’s a small sample size and we’re early in the game, but the evidence to date suggests the opposite of what Glazman is arguing. Kindle, with its proprietary file formats, is more popular than iBooks, which has been based on ePub.

Nor is Apple claiming this new format is ePub. They haven’t asserted proprietary new features or syntax for ePub the way, say, Netscape and Internet Explorer asserted proprietary new tags and features for HTML. The output of iBooks Author is no more intended to be an industry standard than are any other Apple-proprietary document formats — Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. This is Apple’s own e-book format, intended only to be displayed (played?) using Apple’s own software running on Apple’s own devices.

As with the end-user licensing kerfuffle, it’s worth noting that the app’s name is iBooks Author, not eBooks Author. Just because there’s demand for an open-standards-based e-book production and layout tool of the scope and caliber of iBooks Author, doesn’t mean Apple has any interest in making such a tool.

Starting with full conformance with EPUB3 and pushing for a fast update of EPUB3 or release of EPUB4 including all new CSS cool kids was a much better, and much more secure way of doing things.

But if Apple had taken this route, the books generated by iBooks Author today wouldn’t have any of the layout features Glazman cited above. The iBooks format isn’t different just for the sake of being different; it’s different for the sake of being better — not better in the future, after a W3C review period and approval, but better today, in the textbooks you can download and read in iBooks right now.

It’s the difference between “What’s the best we can do within the constraints of the current ePub spec?” versus “What’s the best we can do given the constraints of our engineering talent?” — the difference between going as fast as the W3C standards body permits versus going as fast as Apple is capable.

Apple’s concern is not what’s best for the publishing industry, and it certainly isn’t about what’s best for the makers of (and users of) rival e-book reading devices.

In some sense this is like a rehash of the App Store debate — iBooks Author is a developer tool for the iBooks platform. As I’ve said regarding the App Store, Apple’s priorities are as follows: Apple’s best interests first, users’ second, developers’ third. In this case the developers are the producers of commercial e-books, who must now choose between (a) going iBooks-exclusive; (b) figuring out a way to work iBooks Author into a cross-platform production workflow; or (c) eschewing iBooks Author entirely and using whatever other tools are out there, missing out on all the new iBooks-exclusive layout and design features.

If they go iBooks-exclusive, you can see how Apple would love that.

If they choose to work iBooks Author into their cross-platform production workflow, and it proves to be a pain in the ass, that’s not Apple’s problem.

If they eschew the use of iBooks Author altogether and suffer using worse-designed and less-capable tools, that’s not Apple’s problem. And if the book they produce based on these lesser tools and technologies doesn’t sell as well because it doesn’t offer the attractive and fun layout and design features available using iBooks Author, that’s not Apple’s problem either.

(What would be Apple’s problem is if iBooks’s new layout and design features do not prove to be a competitive advantage in the e-book market. But even then, Apple would merely be right back where they were prior to yesterday’s announcements.¹)

Glazman looks at these new iBooks books and sees a nonstandard proprietary format. Apple looks at these new iBooks and sees layouts and design features that no other e-book platform offers today. One man’s nonstandard is another man’s competitive differentiation.

iBooks still offers full support for the open standard ePub format. So as a loose analogy, I see ePub being as to the new iBooks format as mobile web apps are to native iOS App Store apps — one is an open industry standard fully supported by Apple, the other a closed proprietary platform with superior creation tools and end-user experience, which if you want to use, you must use on Apple’s terms. ★

Another possible problem for Apple resulting from its decision to restrict iBooks Author as a tool only for the iBooks platform: resentment from publishers and authors who see this restriction as spiteful and greedy, not as strategic or competitive. Again though, that’s just a replay of the risks Apple took with its restrictive App Store policies. ↩

Regarding the Scope of Apple’s Education Initiative

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in a piece headlined “Apple’s Education Event Is Getting Seriously Over-Hyped”:

We interviewed MacInnis over the weekend, and as near as we can tell, Foresman — and the 18 other reporters who followed his lead — got it wrong.

“Apple is not trying to kill the incumbents,” MacInnis told us. “They’ve learned their lesson from upending the music industry.”

I don’t get the logic here. What about Apple’s success in the music industry does Apple regret? I can see how the music labels resent Apple’s rise to dominance, but I can’t see how Apple does. So maybe (actually, almost certainly) the established textbook industry does not want to see Apple do to textbooks exactly what Apple did to music. But why would Apple not want to do to textbooks what it did to music?¹

The other factor here is Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. It’s quite possible that Isaacson and Steve Jobs have already spoiled tomorrow’s announcement.² At the very end of chapter 38 (p. 509 in the print edition):

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

Now, it seems like quite a trick to me how Apple could both hire its own writers to create free-with-the-iPad textbooks and at the same time partner with traditional textbook publishers, who presumably want to sell, not give away, their digital editions. But it’s not like there isn’t a damn good source that suggests Apple’s plans for K-12 textbooks are anything short of ambitious and transforming. I’m guessing Apple’s pitch to the textbook companies is something like this: “Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.” ★

Also worth noting that in music, Apple didn’t kill the incumbents. The major music labels are still around making money from sales on iTunes. I think you can argue that Apple saved the major labels — that without iTunes, bootleg filesharing would’ve put them under. It’s true that the labels resent Apple, and dream of a hypothetical world where they make money as they did during the CD era. But people in hell want ice water — that doesn’t mean they can get it. ↩
It would be rather ironic for the first post-Jobs Apple announcement to have been spoiled by, of all people, Steve Jobs. ↩