Linked List: August 4, 2008

Monday, 4 August 2008

The clusterfuck that has been the first month of MobileMe — a botched launch, permanently lost email messages, and syncing features that sometimes don’t sync — has resulted in the inevitable: a reorg. “Reorg” being Apple-speak for “this shit had better change”.

In a company-wide email, Steve Jobs today announced that Eddy Cue, whose former title was Vice President of iTunes, has taken on what I believe to be the new title of Vice President of Internet Services, overseeing both the iTunes Store and MobileMe. Jobs:

It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

Tap Tap Tap Reveals Last Week’s iPhone App Sales ★

John Casasanta reveals Tap Tap Tap’s App Store sales from last week for Where To and Tipulator ($9,547 and $349, respectively, for a post-Apple take-home cut of $6,928), and has some good words regarding the efficacy of sponsoring the DF RSS feed.

More on the iPhone NDA ★

A correspondent of Chuq Von Rospach suggests an interesting, and plausible, reason why Apple has not lifted the iPhone SDK NDA: because it prevents people who work at competitors from looking at it.

‘Why Your Computer Is Running Slow’ ★

One thing I’ve noticed in the hour or so in which I’ve been running iPhone OS 2.0.1 is that the UI, system-wide, is snappier — typing, animations, launching apps. It feels like the 1.1 OS in this regard. Perhaps this old Spamusement comic from Steven Frank explains what changed with those unspecified “bug fixes”.

iPhone OS 2.0.1 ★

In the history of Apple’s crummy release notes, this one might take the cake:

This version of the software includes the following improvements and supercedes all previous versions.

Bug fixes

One can hope, given how many bugs there were in 2.0.0, that the full list of fixes is actually pretty long. I’m also hoping that Apple soon updates the “recent security updates” page I’m linking to with at least some of the specific changes in 2.0.1.

Distorted for Readability ★

Interesting parking garage signage designed by Axel Peemöller. (Thanks to DF reader Derek Matyas.)

TidBITS on Security Update 2008-005 ★

Glenn Fleishman and Adam Engst:

Twenty-four days after the rest of the industry mobilized to patch a serious flaw in the domain name system (DNS) protocol that’s core to the functioning of the Internet, Apple has at long last released Security Update 2008-005, which includes its fix for the regular and server flavors of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard. If 24 days doesn’t sound like a long time, note that Apple was notified privately on 05-May-08, nearly 3 months ago, and this is for a vulnerability with significant exposure that had the potential to be disastrous for Apple’s business and hosting customers, as amply described in an opinion piece for Macworld by Mac system administrator John Welch.

Today’s issue of MDJ had this to say:

In the face of theoretical zero-day exploits, the question had remained: can Apple produce a zero-day patch if a real exploit shows up? Now we have the answer: no. The company’s deliberative and opaque security process can benefit customers by not rushing ill-considered patches out the door that might need subsequent patches a day or two later. Yet when a real zero-day exploit arrives, Apple has shown it has no mechanism for dealing with it.

Amazon Rebates on Mac Hardware ★

Rebates between $50 and $150 for various MacBooks, and $200 on the Mac Pro. Use this link and I’ll get a juicy kickback from Amazon, which I’ll in turn almost certainly squander on something else from Apple.

Apple’s Lack of Candor ★

Michael Tsai simply nails it.

Mike Ash: ‘Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today!’ ★

Mike Ash argues the other side:

But as they say, familiarity breeds contempt, and after using it more these past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that the iPhone platform is really pretty crappy in a lot of ways. And these ways are mostly not due to hardware limitations, but rather artificial limitations put in place by Apple. And mostly these are limitations which have been put in place For Our Own Protection, and which have been, shockingly, praised from many quarters.

Update: The problem with Ash’s argument is that it all hangs on this:

I am concerned that a lot of people have forgotten how resource constrained their once-powerful desktop systems of yesteryear were. 128 MB of RAM and a 600 MHz ARM is more than enough to run a modern mobile operating system, a music player, a chat client, and a web browser.

They might be enough to run a modern mobile OS, but they’re not enough to run the one that Apple has actually built. MobileSafari, by itself, can barely keep two typical pages in memory for me with iPhone OS 2.0. The number one complaint about the iPhone 3G is battery life — and battery life would be worse if third-party apps could run in the background.

Matt Gemmell: ‘iPhone Developer Complaints’ ★

Matt Gemmell:

I’ll just never understand this magical thinking process; it seems that whenever we don’t get access to a juicy API, or when Apple uses a new type of window appearance that isn’t yet publicly available, or when something gets locked down so that we can get access to it at all, normally sane and rational people contract some kind of temporary freetard rabies.

I think Gemmell is spot-on regarding the current limitations in the iPhone APIs, and whether it’s fair that Apple’s own software isn’t similarly limited. But I don’t see why he’s so sure that there’s a good reason behind the non-lifting of the NDA, or that it’ll be lifted any time soon. Game console development for Sony or Nintendo is under permanent NDA — I certainly hope that’s not what Apple plans for the iPhone, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s not.

Rob Enderle Is a Hack ★

Dan Moren on the latest “column” from Rob Enderle, wherein Enderle is bullish on the prospects of Dell’s purported upcoming music player, but doesn’t mention that he was (is?) a paid consultant for Dell on the project.

Black Hat Talk on FileVault Encryption Flaw Pulled ★

Brian Krebs:

Charles Edge, a researcher from Georgia, had been slated to discuss his research on a weakness that could be used to defeat FileVault encryption on the Mac. But sometime last week, Black Hat organizers pulled his name and presentation listing from its schedule of talks.

Contacted via cell phone, Edge said he signed confidentiality agreements with Apple, which prevents him from speaking on the topic and from discussing the matter further.

Me, Myself, and I ★

Caroline Winter, subbing for the on-vacation William Safire:

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.