Thursday, 26 November 2009

‘It’s Like Twitter. Except We Charge People to Use It.’ ★

This is what every client should get when they ask for spec work. Brilliant.

iTunes LP and iTunes Extras Developer Documentation ★

Apple:

Automatic, electronic submission of your iTunes LP or Extra is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. Until then, the submission process is manual and limited.

Includes an interesting appendix on TuneKit, the JavaScript framework.

Dan Frommer: Android and Palm Need Their Own iPod Touch ★

I agree wholeheartedly. Remember: the iPod Touch accounts for about 40 percent of the overall iPhone OS market. Neither Android nor Palm has anything like it.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

Voices ★

My thanks to Tap Tap Tap for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Voices. Voices is a fun new iPhone app — make an audio recording and Voices will change your voice into one of several funny characters, including a chipmunk, a robot, a protected witness, and over a dozen more. You can even share your recordings over the Web (like this) via Twitter, Facebook, and email.

Voices is available at an introductory price of just $0.99. Perfect iPhone gag app for Thanksgiving.

Pie Guy ★

Free Pac-Man-style iPhone game by Neven Mrgan — but, fitting in with this week’s theme, it’s a web app, not a native app from the App Store. And it runs locally, no network access required.

Field Notes: Just Below Zero ★

I want to kiss them, they’re so beautiful. Best batch of Field Notes Colors yet. And check out this swell video the gang at Coudal just released (which includes a nice coupon on yearly Field Notes Colors subscriptions).

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

PPK Follows Up on Native iPhone Apps vs. Web Apps ★

Still no mention of the Cocoa Touch framework. I’m telling you, that’s the key to the popularity of native iPhone development.

Apple Is, in Fact, Attempting to Trademark Just Plain ‘Pod’ ★

Which would explain the stink eye Apple Legal cast at The Little App Factory’s initial attempt to rename iPodRip to PodRip. I still say it’s crummy. (Via Nilay Patel.)

The Droid Battery Cover Problem ★

Funny, I’ve never heard of any problems with the iPhone battery cover falling off.

Turley Muller on Apple and AT&T ★

Fact-checking and countering a Bloomberg TV interview with analyst Brian Marshall.

Palm Profiles Suffering Major Backup Failures ★

Love that cloud.

iPodRip Renamed iRip ★

At the request of Apple’s attorneys, The Little App Factory has renamed their iPodRip app “iRip”. (Disclosure: The Little App Factory is a previous and future sponsor of the DF RSS feed.)

I’m sympathetic to both sides, especially with regard to The Little App Factory’s rights under Australian trademark law. (They’re not a U.S. company.) But I also understand Apple’s desire to protect and control its “iPod” trademark. I think a name change to “PodRip” would be the ideal middle ground. I asked TLAF’s John Devor about that, and he replied, “That was the original plan and we bought the domain and setup the new website. Apple’s lawyers noticed and made it clear they would go after that name as well.”

That’s crummy. “iPod” is Apple’s. “Pod” is just a word.

U.K. Retailers Suspend Sales of Sony Ericsson’s Satio After Customer Complaints ★

The Telegraph:

Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U suspended sales of Sony Ericsson’s Satio after a flood of returns from angry customers citing problems with the phone. […]

Speaking at the launch of the handset in May, Nathan Vautier, managing director of Sony Ericsson UK, said the phone would “help return the company to profitability”. Sony Ericsson has made a loss for the past five consecutive quarters.

Jon Stokes on Chrome OS ★

A smart take on Chrome OS from Jon Stokes:

Apple and Microsoft began decades ago with “the PC,” and they’re currently involved in a slow and painful process of trying to stretch and push “the PC” out towards the Internet and towards a more useful and integrated relationship with the cloud as a new type of server. Google, on the other hand, began with the Internet, and it presumes the cloud in everything it does. With Chrome OS, the company is now trying to push and stretch the Internet back down onto “the PC” as just one of a growing range of cloud clients.

Magic Highway USA ★

“Speed, safety, and comfort will be the keynotes of tomorrow’s highways.” Awesomeness from Disney in 1958.

When Information Overwhelms Facts ★

Alexander Micek on last week’s report on laptop reliability from SquareTrade:

When you only have two data points to model, however, two things happen: (1) you can easily model the two points with a linear curve that perfectly fits the data (R2=1). (2) Your model is capable of predicting nothing. So, the SquareTrade authors have formed an inappropriate model based on sloppy data to make fallacious projections.

Zeldman on Self-Promotion ★

Jeffrey Zeldman:

Marketing is not bragging, and touting one’s wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler “fresh rolls” if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

Howard Bryant on the Misguided Demand for a Salary Cap in Major League Baseball ★

Howard Bryant nails it:

So the Yankees are champions, and thus begins an offseason that will be centered on money. Owners across the league this offseason will promote the creation of a salary cap, ostensibly for “competitive balance” — a way to take money from the players and take down the Yankees simultaneously. All this at a time when the owners have a golden opportunity to improve the quality of the game but won’t because they refuse to reduce their sizable profits.

Apple’s iPhone Web Apps Directory ★

Just in case you’ve forgotten, Apple has a directory of iPhone web apps that predates the native App Store. Slim pickings, as you might have guessed.

(Judging by my email, one misconception many people have is that iPhone web apps only work when you have network access. That’s not necessarily true — you can write an iPhone web app that runs offline, uses local storage (via HTML5), and launches from your home screen without the MobileSafari browser chrome. My favorite example of such a web app: Neven Mrgan’s Glyphboard.

Snow Leopard’s Creator-Code Snubbing Now Official ★

Apple updates the Launch Services documentation to address Snow Leopard’s abandonment of creator codes.

iPhone Web Apps as an Alternative to the App Store

Monday, 23 November 2009

Peter-Paul Koch (a long-time, highly-regarded expert on web standards and rendering engine compatibility), argues forcefully that developers who wish to write software for the iPhone should skip the App Store and write iPhone-optimized web apps instead. His essay, perhaps because it is so strongly-worded, seems to have polarized the responses. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle.

His piece is definitely worth reading, and his primary point is true:

In order to release an iPhone application without having to submit it to Apple’s insane App Store process, developers could just use Web technologies and create Web apps instead of native apps.

iPhone web apps are not in any way restricted by Apple. And I think he’s correct that the technique is currently under-utilized, and it’s a huge benefit to developers that such apps should also work just as well on Android and WebOS, with minimal additional work.

But he’s also very much wrong about just what’s possible in an iPhone web app, in terms of user experience. Koch writes:

I reviewed the apps I have on my iPhone, and most can be released as a Web app right now. The exceptions are complex games that are both graphically and programmatically intensive, and apps that depend on device functions such as the accelerometer or GPS.

As I said, Safari supports geolocation, and maybe Apple is working on other device APIs. That would solve all problems for the second category. Complex games will remain very hard to release as a Web app in the near future.

Still, the graphically simple games such as sudoku and chess, the interactive shopping lists, the dictionaries and bible citation apps, the beer appreciation apps, the firmware Yahoo weather app, and most importantly all social network clients could have been written as a Web app without any loss of quality whatsoever. (Most have fairly little quality to lose in any case.)

I don’t know about “social network clients” in general, because I don’t use many social networks. But I do use two of them heavily: Twitter and Flickr.

There is no way anyone could write an iPhone web app that works as well or feels as good as any of the top native iPhone Twitter clients. You can make an iPhone Twitter client as a web app. You can even make a good one. In fact, Dean Robinson did — it’s called Hahlo. It’s a good iPhone Twitter client. It’s a web app. It’s also slower, less graceful, and less useful than any of the popular native iPhone Twitter clients.

With Flickr, it’s even worse. For just viewing existing Flickr content, Flickr’s own m.flickr.com web site is great. But you can’t write an iPhone web app Flickr client that lets you upload new photos or videos. It isn’t technically possible, because iPhone web apps don’t have access to the device’s image library or the camera.

The argument that you can make iPhone web apps that are “good enough” misses the entire point of iPhone apps — the entire point of the iPhone itself, even — all of the things that drive Twitter users to pay $3, $4, or $5 for apps that do the same things that can be done for free by loading Twitter’s web site in MobileSafari. “Good enough” is not good enough on the iPhone.

There’s a serious dog food factor at play. Apple’s own apps for the iPhone OS are written using Cocoa Touch. The only iPhone web app I can think of from Apple is the RSS reader at reader.mac.com, and the domain name alone tells you just how important that app is to Apple.

Koch writes (childish Jesus-caps on the pronouns his):

Apple’s original plan for iPhone development was to use Web technologies. This plan caught both Mac developers and Web developers by surprise because it was totally unexpected.

The plan failed. Jobs Himself ordered His developers to create Web applications with Web standards, but a deafening silence ensued. Then He hurriedly thought up the App Store. Too hurriedly, as it now turns out.

I can’t prove that this isn’t true. But my theory has always been that Apple’s initial “sweet solution” for third-party iPhone development — to just write web apps — was never intended as a long-term solution. I think the plan was always to allow native Cocoa Touch development eventually, and I don’t think there was anything rushed about it. The delay between the debut of the original iPhone and announcement of the SDK was, I think, simply due to the SDK not being ready in June 2007. Everyone who followed iPhone OS 1.x jailbreak development noted that the Cocoa Touch APIs changed significantly between iPhone OS 1.0 and 2.0.

But the best proof is what I pointed out above: Apple itself created almost no iPhone web apps. Successful iPhone developers don’t just want to write software that works on the iPhone. They want to write software for the iPhone that’s just as good as Apple’s. Today that means using Cocoa Touch and the native SDK.

When you write a Cocoa Touch app for the iPhone, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting with the Cocoa Touch framework. As Faruk Ateş astutely points out in his response to Koch, to discount the framework is to discount everything that sets the iPhone apart as a development platform. Not only are native iPhone apps faster and more capable than their web-app equivalents, but they’re easier to write.

This may change. A combination of increasing CPU performance, further improvements to WebKit and the Nitro JavaScript interpreter, more RAM, and additional web app capabilities in the iPhone OS (things like access to the camera and image library) could, combined, make for a future where some types of iPhone web apps aren’t just “good enough” but are truly indistinguishable from native Cocoa Touch apps. The hardware performance improvements are inevitable, but it remains to be seen whether Apple will provide deeper and more significant iPhone OS-specific hooks for web apps. I hope they do. I think it would be good for everyone — Apple, developers, and iPhone users — if unrestricted web apps became a serious alternative to the restricted App Store. But it isn’t credible to argue that they already are.¹ ★

But even then, iPhone optimized web apps in this hypothetical future would still lack the commerce features provided by the App Store. Web app developers can charge for subscriptions to their software, sure — but it would be difficult to match the App Store in terms of the “just click ‘Buy’ and type your iTunes password” experience. ↩

Monday, 23 November 2009

Sunday, 22 November 2009

Friday, 20 November 2009

Maybe Instead of Two Cars, You Just Need a Car and a Bicycle

Friday, 20 November 2009

One thing that strikes me about Chrome OS and Litl is that neither bother trying to do everything Windows or Mac OS X can do. Not even close. I don’t think either even bothers trying to serve as one’s primary computer.

The idea that they’re designed to serve as secondary computers is a big part of the opportunity I see for new Web-focused OSes. I think that’s one of the implicit factors that define what people call “netbooks”. How many people use one of those as their one and only computer?

If you start with the assumption that a computer will be a secondary machine — something purchased because it’s cheaper, smaller, and lighter — you can make all sorts of different assumptions about what it needs to be capable of.

In the early part of this decade, Apple’s turnaround under Steve Jobs was based on the concept of the Mac as a “digital hub” — a device to which you connect and manage satellite devices like iPods and cameras.¹ If you have more than one computer, why should the secondary computer (or computers) need to be just as capable — and just as complex, expensive, power-hungry, and heavy — as your primary one? Why should it run the same OS?

The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating. That’s the opportunity, and that’s the idea behind Chrome OS and Litl and even Android and iPhone OS.

Long-term, there’s no denying that Google is steering toward a future where typical users have no “primary” computer, but instead where every computer is just a terminal to Web-based software running on servers across the Internet. But there’s an opportunity today for secondary computers that offer just a subset of the functionality of Mac OS X and Windows, especially if they don’t just do less, but (like the iPhone) do less really well. ★

Here’s a YouTube clip of Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s “digital hub” strategy in his January 2001 Macworld Expo keynote. It’s sort of mind-blowing — both in terms of the prescience of the strategy itself and just how long ago it seems. There was no such thing as an iPod yet, Mac OS X 10.0 was still two months away from shipping, and, talking about digital cameras, Jobs mentions that they then accounted for 15 percent of the camera market but would “soon” account for 50 percent. ↩

Friday, 20 November 2009

The OS Opportunity

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

A few weeks ago, in a piece here titled “Herd Mentality”, I argued that PC makers who want to succeed should create their own OSes:

It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS. It should be embarrassing to companies like Dell and Sony, with deep pockets and strong brand names, that they’re stuck selling computers with the same copy of Windows installed as the no-name brands.

Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.

Microsoft, I think we’d all agree, sees things the same way (well, in terms of software being more important). They’ve got PC makers under their thumb.

The most common bit of critical feedback I got in response to “Herd Mentality” is an argument that goes like this: You don’t want a world with several additional desktop OSes. It would make for a compatibility and interoperability nightmare. We were there before, in the early days of the personal computer, and it was a mess.

I say two things to that. First, it may have been a mess, but it was a beautiful mess. It was glorious. It was fun. The Apple II, the IBM PC and DOS, Commodore, Atari, Acorn. The TI-99/4A.

Second, this ain’t then. The world is a very different place today.

In those days, before DOS ran most competing platforms out of the market, interoperability and data interchange were at best difficult, and often impossible. Data was stored in incompatible file formats written to incompatible floppy disks¹ by incompatible apps compiled for incompatible CPU architectures. Even later in the ’80s, when networking became common (at least in businesses) the network protocols were proprietary.

That was the world where DOS won out. Get everyone on DOS and you could all open each other’s WordPerfect and 1-2-3 files, if only by sharing them on floppy disks. So DOS gained users, and because it gained users it got developers, and because it gained developers it got more users.

A similar feedback loop is going on with the iPhone today, but it’s far less sticky. The DOS/Windows monopoly grew impregnable because it was a platform where the only way to play along was to join it.

That’s not the way things are today. Sure, there are massive business markets where Windows remains essential. But the Web is a bigger platform than Windows. The Web is universal. Every computer is on the Web. The Web provides us with a core set of software and APIs that work everywhere.

Supposedly, tomorrow Google is set to unveil the details of Chrome OS, but we already know one thing about it: it’s designed around the assumption that the Web is the most important software platform in the world today.

But last week came news of another, similar initiative, from a far smaller company than Google: the Litl — a $700 “webbook”. If you haven’t seen it, go check out their web site — the videos on their support page offer the best introduction to their UI. It’s fascinating and clever in several ways. It is refreshingly simple. And most importantly: it is truly new. I don’t know if Litl is going to be a success — $700 seems steep for this when you can get a MacBook for $999, and the easel mode strikes me as an awkward gimmick without a touchscreen — but everyone involved with the Litl deserves tremendous credit just for having the stones to do this, to say, Hey, maybe computers in 2010 can do better than a user experience that is fundamentally unchanged from the original Macintosh in 1984.

If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers? The hard part of what Palm is doing with WebOS is getting acceptable performance out of a cell phone processor.

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying. ★

If your computer even had a floppy drive, that is. Some, like the TI-99/4A, typically used cassette tapes. Cassette tapes! ↩