Linked List: April 8, 2010

Thursday, 8 April 2010

Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig, from Apple’s WebKit team:

This is a heads-up that we will shortly start landing patches for a new WebKit framework that we at Apple have been working on for a while. We currently call this new framework “WebKit2”.

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

Whoa.

Why Does AppleInsider Make It So Easy for Me? ★

“Kasper Jade” and “Prince McLean”, one week ago:

The upcoming 4.0 reference release of Apple’s iPhone OS will deliver new support for running multiple concurrent third party apps, and allow users to switch between them using a windows management mechanism similar to one made popular on the company’s Mac OS X operating system. […]

Those familiar with the design of iPhone 4.0 said that the user interface will resemble Apple’s desktop Expose feature, in that a key combination — reportedly hitting the Home button twice — will trigger an expose-like interface that brings up a series of icons representing the currently running apps, allowing users to quickly select the one they want to switch to directly. When a selection is made, the iPhone OS zooms out of the Expose task manager and transitions to that app.

Where by “familiar with the design”, they meant “making shit up”, unless by “Exposé-like”, they meant “not at all like Exposé”.

Tim O’Reilly on the iPad and the End of the PC Era ★

Great observations from Tim O’Reilly on Apple’s weakness:

Media and application syncing across iPhone and iPad is poorly thought out. MobileMe, which should be Apple’s gateway drug for lock-in to Apple services, is instead sold as an add-on to a small fraction of Apple’s customer base. If Apple wants to win, they need to understand the power of network effects in Internet services. They need to sacrifice revenue for reach, taking the opportunity of their early lead to tie users ever more closely to Apple services.

It wouldn’t even be that much of a sacrifice to revenue if Apple included, say, a year or two of free MobileMe service when you buy an iPhone OS device. Or just make MobileMe service free for the lifetime of the device — that way, developers, including Apple, could count on a cloud-based syncing service.

This is Google’s primary advantage, but Apple — judging from how the iPad iWork apps don’t even attempt to sync documents, and how non-MobileMe users are stuck with USB syncing through iTunes — doesn’t seem to see that.

Justin Long Says ‘Get a Mac’ Might Be Done ★

Leaving on top, if so.

Apple’s iPhone OS 4 Preview ★

Brief overview of what’s new.

How a Book Publisher Blew the Deal to Publish J.D. Salinger’s ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ ★

Roger Lathbury:

After thinking I could do right by a man I admired, I let him down.

‘Pyramid Lake (at Night)’ ★

The story of the iPad’s default wallpaper, photographed by Richard Misrach.

Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 Event Starts in 30 Minutes ★

Here’s a link to Gizmodo’s live coverage, which seems the best so far. (Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica is doing a great job, too.) I generally follow Macworld’s live coverage of these events, but they’ve switched to some new dingus called ScribbleLive, which I presume is using Flash since it requires a dedicated iPhone app, which app is, alas, not iPad-native. And on my Mac it just renders as a big empty white box.

Anyway, if you want predictions, here are my predictions, based purely on my own speculation and few coin tosses. iPhone OS 4 will introduce background processing for third-party apps (expect demos from developers like, say, Pandora and Skype), and, perhaps, some sort of suspend-resume model for going right back to where you were when you re-open an app. iPhone OS 4.0 will only be for the iPhone and iPod Touch, not the iPad. The iPad, like any such project at Apple was developed by a team that was locked away in secrecy, so the team working on iPhone OS 4.0 only found out about the iPad when the rest of us did, on January 27; Dalrymple has it exactly right: OS 4.1 will be the unified OS for all these devices. (My spidey-sense tells me that iPhone OS 4 is going to drop support for first-generation iPhones and iPod Touches, and some of the features may only be available on the 3GS and this year’s new models.)

Apple will not announce new iPhone hardware at this event. Just like the last two years, this is only about the OS and the new stuff for developers in the SDK. But there might be hints about next-gen iPhone hardware features. If I’m right that the next-gen iPhone will have a 960 × 640 display, they might start talking about higher-res iPhone apps today, and spin it as a way to make iPhone apps look sharper when run on iPads.

The Digg iFrame Toolbar Is Dead ★

Kevin Rose, who just took over as CEO of Digg from Jay Whatshisname:

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg.