Macworld Expo Prelude

Tuesday, 9 February 2010

Macworld Expo 2010 kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. Is it going to fly without Apple? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does yet. Apple’s traditional presence at Macworld was so large, both figuratively (with the attention paid to their keynote address) and literally (with their massive booth on the show floor), that their absence has effectively rendered Macworld a new event. I think it’s smart that IDG moved the date back a month; anything they could do to emphasize that it’s going to be new and different this year can only help. (I have no idea if it was feasible, but if it had been, I’d have advised moving the show across the street to Moscone West, just to make it look different, too.)

Apple’s absence will be felt in two ways. First, the lack of an Apple keynote address has significantly diminished the amount of media attention. That was inevitable. But it wasn’t really Macworld Expo, the trade show and conference, that was garnering that attention. It was Apple itself. Apple’s keynotes really didn’t have much at all to do with the exhibit floor or conference sessions. I suppose there were some number of attendees who considered attending the keynote as a major reason to buy a conference pass, but percentage-wise only a small number of attendees could ever see the keynotes in person. It’s not like Apple hasn’t given us much to talk about recently — hello, iPad — it just wasn’t announced at Macworld itself.

The more worrisome factor for me is Apple’s absence from the show floor. They had a huge booth in a prominent spot and they drew people in. The role they played on the show floor is very much analogous, I think, to the role played by a big department store like Macy’s or Nordstrom at a shopping mall.

To me, though, the reason to walk the show floor has always been about the small companies — often the really small ones. The ones where the employees manning the booth are the engineers and designers who made the product they’re promoting. I’ve been to a bunch of Macworld Expos and I never once failed to discover at least one fascinating product by walking the show floor.

In terms of what’s going on other than the trade show, I’ve long thought that the inordinate amount of front-loaded attention paid to Apple’s keynote address drew attention away from the fact that Macworld has turned into a large and successful conference, with tracks spanning everything from programming to graphic design.

Nothing could replace a Steve Jobs keynote address, so, wisely, they’re not trying. Instead, Macworld has scheduled a bunch of featured speakers throughout the week, including David Pogue, Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith), Leo Laporte, and, yours truly. I’ll be speaking Friday at 4:30pm, where I’ll share the secret recipes for my award-winning cupcakes and melt-in-your-mouth croissants.

(DF readers: you can register for the show using the discount code “GRUBER” to get a free expo pass that will get you into my talk (and the show floor, and the other feature presentations). That code is also good for a 20 percent discount on any of the conferences. Just keep in mind that with that code, it’s totally free to come see my talk and the other feature presentations.)

The bottom line for me is that the potential is there for Macworld to remain a great show. Imagine if there’d never been a Macworld Expo before, and that this was the first year. It wouldn’t be surprising that Apple declined to participate. But is there demand for a days-long nerdfest for Mac and iPhone professionals and aficionados? I say yes. 

Tuesday, 9 February 2010

Adam Engst: Does the iPhone OS Need Multitasking? 

Better questions: when will iPhone OS support third-party multitasking, and in what form?

What’s New in Aperture 3 

Faces, places, and brushes.

ComScore Reports December 2009 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share 

Palm, RIM, Microsoft losing market share; Apple and Google gaining. (RIM has the most to lose, of course.)

BashFlash 

Nice complement to ClickToFlash — BashFlash monitors Snow Leopard’s Flash Player process and lets you kill it when it starts using excessive CPU time.

Monday, 8 February 2010

LESS CSS App for Mac OS X 

CSS nerds: have you checked out LESS? If so and you dig it, you might be interested in this.

Panelfly 

Gee, I wonder if e-comic-book distributors are excited about the iPad?

Wolf Rentzsch: MobileSafari Is Not the New IE6 

Wolf, responding to PPK’s argument that MobileSafari is the new IE6:

Mobile web developers, like most developers, are future-focused. We’d rather all mobile phones catch up with the iPhone we have in our pockets today, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate the current majority.

When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

Count me in with Wolf on this one.

An Even-Tempered Apology From White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel 

Apologies to the Hulu-less.

‘Who’s Scruffy-Looking?’ 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt on the highlights of this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco:

John Gruber. The ill-tempered author of the widely read Daring Fireball blog is flying from Philadelphia, presumably without his “What Are You Looking at Dicknose?” t-shirt, to discuss the “top 10 issues facing our world.” Friday 4:30 p.m. PT

First, “ill-tempered”? Second, everyone knows that shirt doesn’t have a question mark.

How the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl Ad Came Together 

My favorite commercial of the night by far.

‘The Gadget Disappears’ 

Love this line from the New York Times’s David Carr on the Charlie Rose show, regarding the iPad:

One thing you have to understand about this gadget is that the gadget disappears pretty quickly. You’re looking into pure software.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Carr is a business reporter, not a tech reporter. He sees the forest, not the trees. But this is really astute. I’ve been using a Nexus One Android phone for the last few weeks, and Carr’s quote summarizes the fundamental difference between Android and iPhone OS. On the iPhone, once you’re in an app, everything happens on-screen, with touch. Everything. You go outside the screen to the home button to leave the app or the sleep button to turn off the device. On Android, many things happens on screen with touch, but many other things don’t, and you’re often leaving the screen for the hardware Back, Menu, and Home buttons, and text selection and editing requires the use of the fiddly trackball. An Android gadget never disappears.

Before You Place Your Bets on Retrevo 

Keep in mind that back in August, Retrevo released survey results showing that Apple’s MacBooks were getting killed by netbooks in the back-to-school market. That didn’t exactly pan out.

Retrevo: iPad Doubters 

Retrevo, which bills itself as “the ultimate electronics marketplace”, has been getting a lot of attention in recent months for its consumer surveys on Apple products, including this one from Friday:

As we like to say, it’s the apps that sell smartphones like the iPhone and it could very well be those same apps that motivate buyers to run down to the Apple Store and get in line to buy a shiny new iPad. Whether this device becomes a big hit is anyone’s guess but based on this study it sure looks doubtful.

So let’s mark them down as bearish on the iPad.

Let’s also keep in mind that Retrevo is the same outfit who, just three weeks ago, released survey results showing that the most important features in an (at the time, hypothetical) Apple tablet were “long battery life”, “3G”, and “an e-book store with big selection” — and that the main thing people did not want was a required monthly data plan. Oh, and the price needed to be under $700. Sounds like something familiar.

Saints Beat Colts 31-17 to Win New Orleans’s First Super Bowl 

A great win by a great team from a great city. Sports at its best.

Sketchpad 

Simple web-based painting/drawing app. No Flash.

Sunday, 7 February 2010

Five Dials No. 10 (PDF) 

Special issue of Hamish Hamilton’s excellent literary magazine, “A celebration of the life of David Foster Wallace with contributions by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and others.” Designed by our old friend Dean Allen. So good — do yourself a favor and print it out.

Liquid Scale: Content-Aware Image Resizing App for iPhone 

Remember this video from 2007, demonstrating a technique for content-aware image resizing that didn’t involve cropping or distorting the central elements of the image? Savoy Software’s Liquid Scale brings this technique to the iPhone. Pretty cool.

Saturday, 6 February 2010

The Second Post 

Dan Phiffer’s second weblog post is about second weblog posts.

Friday, 5 February 2010

Radioshift 

Radioshift is a Mac app that acts like a DVR for Internet radio stations. My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote it. Radioshift has thousands of preset stations from around the world (including, for me, all my favorite stations here in Philadelphia) and a great interface, including the ability to schedule shows to be recorded automatically. Download it for free, and through the end of February, save 20 percent when you purchase using coupon code “DARINGRADIO”.

Plus, Rogue Amoeba is exhibiting at Macworld next week. See them at booth #1545.

Microsoft Joins SVG Working Group 

Bill Clinton was president of the United States when SVG started.

Greg Knauss: ‘The Days of Miracles and Wonder’ 

So good.

If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It Cold? 

Funny, never heard that one before.

How Long in the Works Was the iPad? 

Ken Segall:

My point is, Apple has always demonstrated tremendous common sense. It’s just hard to believe they’d choose the name iPhone OS if iPad was already on the drawing board. My inner Sherlock tells me iPad wasn’t even a twinkle in Apple’s eye until well after March, 2008.

There’s no argument about it that “iPhone OS” no longer makes sense as the name for this OS. The iPad HIG and developer documentation is chock full of features and APIs and guidelines that do not apply to the iPhone (or iPod Touch). So there are features in the iPhone OS which do not apply to the iPhone.

I still say the iPad has been in the works for a long time. Many, many years. Certainly not the iPad exactly as it was announced, but the general idea — the final design of an Apple product is the result of non-stop iteration. I could be wrong, and Apple, of course, isn’t going to say. But I’d say the awkwardness of the “iPhone OS” name is proof only that Apple picks names from the gut — names that feel right rather than think right. “iTunes” is exhibit A.

Clang Successfully Self-Hosts 

Doug Gregor of the LLVM project:

We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM’s regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap.

Is there any other type of project that offers the same potential for recursive satisfaction as a compiler that can compile itself? It’s a singular milestone for LLVM.

Engadget Staff’s Initial Thoughts on the iPad 

Remarkably dismissive overall. Nilay Patel is the only one who sees the potential.

Sling and AT&T 

Chris Foresman:

AT&T made headlines Thursday by announcing that it had decided to allow SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone to stream video from a Slingbox over its 3G network. AT&T’s CEO claimed in the announcement that Sling Media modified the app to be more efficient on its network, but Sling has responded, saying it didn’t have to change a thing.

Update: Foresman has updated his article; seems Sling did do some lab testing with AT&T to prove that the app behaved well.

Apple: Core Location Not for Use Solely for Serving Location-Targeted Ads 

Apple Developer Connection:

If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Movist, Alternative Video Player to VLC for Mac 

Federico Viticci on Movist, an open source Mac video player:

Where Movist really outstands the competition is in file support. It’s the only app that played my .mkv files perfectly, even when VLC was crashing. Not to talk about .mp4 and .avi support, pretty obvious. Moreover, Movist plays .wmw files faster than Quicktime, and you can also switch from FFmpeg to Quicktime playback with a single click on a toolbar button. Awesome.

Thursday, 4 February 2010

The Official Microsoft Blog Responds to Dick Brass’s NYT Op-Ed 

Why in the world did they respond to this? And even worse, without refuting any of his claims, most especially his core premise that Microsoft is divided into dozens of bureaucratic fiefdoms that fight against each other to protect their turf?

App Store Previews Now on the Web 

I’ve been waiting for this for so long — a way to link to App Store entries without requiring iTunes.

Jonathan Schwartz Tweets His Resignation in Haiku 

Ran Sun into ground.
Schwartz cracks cute with jokey tweet.
Ignominious.

AT&T Gives Green Light to Sling TV Over 3G 

Brad Stone:

AT&T announced Thursday morning that it will now allow the SlingPlayer iPhone app to stream live over its 3G network. “Since mid-December 2009, AT&T has been testing the app and has recently notified Sling Media — as well as Apple — that the optimized app can run on its 3G network,” said the carrier in a press release.

Comcast Rebranding as ‘Xfinity’ 

Bob Fernandez, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Comcast Corp. said yesterday that it would re-brand its TV, Internet, and telephone services as Xfinity on Feb. 12 to signal to customers that this isn’t the same old company. […]

This re-branding comes as Comcast has struggled to rebuild its reputation because of poor service and problems with its network that resulted in telephone and Internet outages. Its customer-satisfaction rating is among the lowest in the industry, but it has improved slightly in the last year. Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the re-branding was not an attempt to distance the service from the Comcast name. “This is about our product. It is about providing our customers with products that just keep getting better.”

Many companies walk away from household name brands just for kicks. Sure.

James Kendrick Gets Poor Results From Palm Mobile Hotspot 

James Kendrick:

My findings are disappointing to say the least. I found that both the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus performed virtually identically in the testing, which was expected given the similarity of the phones. The problem is I could never get anything above abysmal bandwidth with either phone.

I hope it’s something Palm can fix in a software update. It’s a killer feature on paper.

‘They Want the Thing in the Movies’ 

Mike Monteiro gets it.

‘Microsoft’s Creative Destruction’ 

Former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass, on Microsoft’s internal culture:

Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

Can you imagine the head of Apple’s iWork team declaring by fiat that there wouldn’t be versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers for the iPad because he didn’t like the concept?

Speaking of Gays in the Military 

Speaking of which, this piece from The Economist is delightful.

Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Tweets His Support for Repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Policy 

Is there a more iconic sign of the times?

Firefox for Maemo RC3 

Stuart Parmenter:

We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release.  The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Shut Up 

Steven Frank:

shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention.

What if Flash Were an Open Standard?

Monday, 1 February 2010

Some good questions from Dave Winer regarding Apple, Adobe, and Flash:

What if Apple were trying to erase something that’s not company-owned? Either a formal or de facto standard? Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?

I’d say that’d be a different ball of wax entirely. It would depend, for one thing, on the specific open / de facto standard technology.

But as for open web standards, the evidence — actions and shipping code, not just words — strongly indicate that Apple is a major proponent of them. Apple didn’t have to release WebKit as an open source project — they could have kept their extensions atop the LGPL-licensed WebCore private.1 They’ve re-written WebKit’s JavaScript engine from scratch at least twice, and released it all as open source. (Apple has also been aggressive about releasing its advanced non-web developer technology, like blocks and LLVM, as liberally-licensed open source.) All of Apple’s top competitors in the mobile space have either already adopted WebKit or soon will: Android, WebOS, even BlackBerry. Members of Apple’s WebKit team have been helping drive HTML5 since its inception. In short, I’d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.

E.g., it makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.2

I do understand the fear. It’s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it’s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don’t think that’s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it — HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No one can tell them what to do with WebKit; they wait for no one to shape and bend WebKit to suit their needs.

My feeling is not that Apple seeks total control over all content and software in iPhone OS. I’d say it’s more like they’re providing two well-defined, nice, neat, easily-understood extremes: the totally controlled native Cocoa Touch, and the totally open web.

Winer ends with a suggestion for Adobe:

Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple’s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.

That’d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.

The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already moved on. 

  1. An earlier version of this article stated that the entirety of WebKit is BSD-licensed. That’s wrong; the KHTML library that Apple started with is LGPL-licensed, and so therefore is the WebCore component in WebKit. We regret the error. ↩

  2. H.264 is an open standard, but admittedly and unfortunately not a free standard, hence Mozilla’s opposition to it. My point here is simply that H.264 is not owned by Apple or any other single company. ↩

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

Saturday, 30 January 2010

Robert Scoble has a good analogy:

Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.

Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad is going to fail because of its own set of broken links.

But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t.

What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.

The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.

Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?

  1. Adobe can’t. They can’t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.

  2. Apple could, but they won’t.

  3. Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don’t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.

  4. Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.

Adobe’s initial reaction to the iPad seems to be geared toward #3 — emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.

Adobe’s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.

The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.

Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”. Adobe’s own statistics on Flash’s market penetration claim 99 percent penetration as of last month. That’s because, according to their survey methodology, they’re only counting “PCs” — which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.

What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.