Great Scott. There has been so much news in the last couple of days, that I pretty much have enough for a weekend extra. There is, of course, no main item but lets see how this works out.
Not long after Podcast #224 went out, I did install the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard. As some people had reported problems, I was ready. And careful. I moved the package from the download over to the Admin account on my MBP then shut down all applications on the user account -- I always have loads open and there are one or two that need files to be saved, so this catches that problem. Then a restart. I just want everything to be tidy and to make sure no rogue processes get forgotten.
I start up in the Admin account then and repair permissions using Disk Utility. This is done once a week anyway by Macaroni, but lots of stuff is going on in my house and who knows what might change in three or four days? With that done, I restart again. Boring I know, but stability is the key.
Then the upgrade which, despite the size of almost 500MB for the Combo which I always use, was fairly fast. It of course requires its own restart to finish the process and once more we repair permissions in the Admin account. Then I restart again and get back to work.
I was half-expecting a problem with Mail, but that was all clear; and then I brought up the rest of the applications one by one. I must say I was pleased with Aperture as that sluggishness that I have been experiencing has all gone and it is quite snappy now.
Then on Thursday, with morning teaching and a presentation at the university scheduled for the afternoon, I saw a new version of Safari was available: 4.0.4. and that also now needs a restart, so we did it all again. No problems again.
That presentation was part of a meeting concerning the conference in Kuala Lumpur I am going to, along with what appears to be a massive group: along with about 10 presenters. As part of the meeting we were asked to do the presentation and I only had two days notice. I wish I had not gone as only two of us attended. As the presentations began, most of the groupies slipped out, leaving about a dozen people from what had been a room-full; and those that were left, spoke on their phones, chatted to each other and then shredded the output.
I am infuriated as the core of my academic presentation was gutted because of sensibilities and the need to present a benign face to those at the conference. One of the things I do with students, to make them generate their own data, is to have them test condoms. As soon as I mentioned this, the phone calls and chatter stopped and a couple of faces turned ashen.
A secondary point of this task is to educate the students as, some of these kids are surprisingly naive and most have never had a one on one relationship or experience, so the Introduction they write brings in the problems and reasons for using prophylactics and why they must be tested. Some of the work has been highly thought of by outside organisations. But we must not let these others think that all Thailand has is bars and bar-girls; or bar-boys of course.
Using Apple's plain templates in Keynote was also not acceptable and I have to add a university logo to each slide; and when I put the URL of the eXtensions Education page on the last slide, as that is where the article and an .MOV file will be for downloading, I was asked why the university URL was not there. The last time I tried to modify a Faculty web page, several years ago, I was asked to provide a written letter from the Dean to ask for permission.
I have been here a long time and I shall of course comply with all requests. To the letter. But there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Late Thursday I saw something on a Twitter feed that suggested Snow Leopard problems and viruses, but it was a shill. It linked to a BBC story on real Snow Leopards who have sadly died from a real virus. Ha ha ha, and all that. I wonder how many looked only at the headline and said, See? Or how many Mac users had a minor panic. There are no viruses for OS X.
North of Cupertino, the picture may be somewhat different. Windows 7 has not been getting the good press that Redmond was hoping for and one of the reasons may be what seemed to be an admission from one exec that they had copied from Apple. Well, of course they did. Us Mac people are convinced they have been copying for years; but for someone from M$ to come out and say this is the rarity.
Oh yes we, did; oh no we didn't. Damage control announced Condition Red pretty quickly and I expect ballmer threw a few chairs to get things moving. As an aside, how come people always moan about Steve Jobs' reality distortion but not about Ballmer's.
It starts with an interview with Simon Aldous in PCR by Andrew Wooden in which Aldous says (among other things), "What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 . . . is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics". He expanded a bit more on this when questioned by Wooden. We note the update at the start of the article that says there has been input from Redmond. I bet there was.
The Windows Blog hits back hard claiming this was an inaccurate quote and marginalises Aldous, who I guess may be brushing up his resume right now; and there is a summary by Jeff Gamet at Mac Observer.
Is the Register letting style get in the way of content? Reporting on Apple's rumoured tablet, Rik Myslewski's headline seems to have made a major error in the interests of adding to their sometimes ambivalent Apple reporting over there. We read that the "Apple pen-tablet plan revives Newtonian handwriting" and I was stopped by the adjective there, which I have always linked to the thinking of the great British Scientist and not the recognition software that Apple called Newton in his honour. Rik Myslewski has a fair report on the latest Apple patent filing which is actually an old one that has been reworked when certain parts were rejected. Unlike the picture we showed of a mystery device in Podcast #224 the diagram here is upright and more in the shape of the iPod touch. Much speculation here, of course.
While we are on patents, Microsoft has stirred up a hornets' nest this week as they appear to have patented something that is already used in Unix by lots of operating systems, including OS X. We are used to SUDO to run a Root command from the Admin account, but this is the idea behind Redmond's filing which one expert is calling a rebranding of the SUDO command which was first developed in the 80s. Some guess they may be trying to obtain revenue from others' uses. Not getting enough from their own efforts these days? The Register has some more and fairly useful information on this as well.
The App Store featured in some news this week with Apple revising its process for approving apps and at the same time, the main Facebook developer moving on because he did not like the way Apple's approval process worked. I guess that is going to take a bit of balancing. TUAW had a good look at this, and make the point that, while there are good developers out there, there has been a lot of rubbish and some insecurities. For example we mentioned one developer last week that had been reaping user information, and there was also that worm that affected jailbroken iPhones: that alone is enough to accept Apple's processes while understanding there are improvements needed.
Intego report another worm: again one that affects jailbroken iPhones. Those of us with the real ones need not worry just yet; and I am sure Apple is looking at this too.
For Apple's updated process, I think it is best to stick again to a TUAW link which summarises the main points and itself links to a blog with more information. It is pointless me putting on the link to the Apple pages as that would need a developer login and that requires all sorts of registration, just for information that is available elsewhere. One of the main points, is the progress report, showing how the app submitted is working its way through the system. Improvements are still needed of course according to many developers. How many years has this been going?
Talking of Facebook, a guy in the US decided to update his Facebook page and put on there, "Where's my pancakes" although I am not sure what the phrase actually means. However, the next day Rodney Bradford was picked up for a robbery but the time of the update, 11.49 am, meant that he could not have been in two places at once and, process requiring reasonable doubt, he was not prosecuted to a lot of sour grapes from the police. Chris Matyszczyk has the best comment on his article, "why is it so hard to give young people the benefit of the doubt--especially on Facebook?"
And as an appendix to the iPhone, O'Reilly has released a book called, iPhone Game Development by Paul Zirkle of Konami Digital Entertainment and Joe Hogue of Electronic Arts. The book is $34.99 or $27.99 as an e-book.
I am afraid I fell off the O'Reilly reviewers' list, so they don't send me books any more.
That the iPhone is successful is beyond doubt, although there are many who still feel negativity about it. A free world, I guess. This week we hear that Gartner are now reporting that the iPhone now has just over 17% of smartphone sales world wide. Not bad from nothing in less than three years. Oddly I ran part of that Steve Jobs video yesterday in class to look at presentation techniques. Even now, the students are impressed with the features. I remember Jobs saying they were aiming for 1% of the market in the first year.
This means that Apple has not only exceeded its own targets -- nothing new there -- but has passed Nokia. Perhaps more interesting, I read in a Rik Myslewski article in the Register -- that Nintendo are now worried too. There is a quote in the article from Nintendo's boss who says that if they cannot respond, "our future is dark." At least he has taken the first step and recognised the problem unlike others.
As if to make the point, there was an interesting comparison about the figures, reported by MC Siegler in Tech Crunch who tells us that although Apple has a smaller market share overall of the entire phone market with 2.5% as opposed to Nokia's total of 35%, in the 3rd Quarter, Apple made $1.6 billion as opposed to Nokia's $1.1 billion. As Siegler comments, this is standard for Apple and by concentrating on the high end, it makes money for the shareholders and almost as a side-effect the users get better products and software.
And on that idea of better products, while the recession bites into sales for most computer makers, both Apple and Acer have seen improved sales in the UK: opposite ends of the price scale of course.
Profitability seems to be eluding Motorola these days and here may be an object lesson in how one of the greats of technology can sink. Not the first star company to have problems, and we can think of several, including Palm. And Apple of course. Motorola however, is trying to resurrect itself by breaking itself into three, perhaps hoping it will rise phoenix-like from the ashes. I am linking to the MacDaily News article as the original is on the NYTimes and I refuse to use that any more. Plus MDN have an interesting comment at the end concerning industry myopia.
As we are on super-phones at the moment, I thought it was interesting on Friday morning when I saw a headline that debated whether Research in Motion -- the Blackberry -- was ripe for takeover. The original MDN article linked to something in the Canadian Globe and Mail by Andrew Willis. The page that opens includes a video section. So who would go for this plum? Microsoft? Apple? Motorola? Dell?
On this theme, Tech Republic's Eric Eckel has an interesting article on why enterprise should be looking at Apple products. We noticed a couple of weeks ago the way more companies were moving from Blackberry to the iPhone and this may have a trickle up effect as more bosses make their reluctant IT staff think outside their boxes. Eckel has a fair analysis of the things companies should think about when comparing the platforms, but misses the costs, particularly of product life and of server licensing, which as we suggested last time, may be significantly less for a Mac-based system.
Also in the UK, we saw recently that there is no longer a sole carrier there with Orange also joining the party and, perhaps reflecting dissatisfaction with O2, sales the first day were some 30,000 iPhones, according to Erica Ogg, in what some thought was a saturated market. That compares well with the first few days of iPhone sales in China of about 5,000 units; although sales there are hampered by the widespread use already of jailbroken phones and the lack of wifi.
I saw part of this on a newsfeed Friday morning, but MacDaily News brought out a story on a Forbes, Powerful People list that had Steve Jobs at #57. There are some interesting names in the Top 10, and down at 47 is a major Mexican drug dealer. A drug dealer is more powerful than the head of Apple? And the Prime Minister of Russia? Oh well.
There was a complaint in my house this week about the lack of games on a certain 3Gs iPhone. So I said, at least the Thai equivalent, Seek and Ye Shall Find. A couple of free games were highlighted and downloaded. Now, here comes the good part, although not for me. One of the games, was an absolute winner as far as the PC-using game player with the iPhone was concerned, and we had a 20-minute whinge session until I downloaded the full version of the game and I was allowed to head off to my bedroom to sleep.
I cannot recommend the game, Blades of Fury [iTunes link], as I do not often play these and only the intelligent ones, like SimCity or the long-gone Transport Tycoon. However, there is a clear lesson in the idea of speculate to accumulate which a lot of iPhone developers follow: tease them with the free version and some of them will follow up and buy the full version, in this case for $4.99 (about 160 baht).
In some cases, the Lite version will do the job. In some cases it will be found to be not what was really wanted, but in some, the free one will lead to a purchase. Gameloft, who produce this game have taken this lesson in.
I must admit that when looking at information for this little piece, I decided to look at their Bailout Wars, another free game and one that looks at the US Financial problems.
Before attempting to wade through the latest in the 3G saga in Thailand, let me mention that as well as a limited rollout of 4G in some US cities, Qualcomm has just announced a combined 3G and 4G processor, which will enable those used to 3G to switch seamlessly to 4G when they are in the area.
The 3G arrival was put back again this week a couple of times and then a bit more on Friday when the Senate decided to join the game and put another brick in the wall with its concerns over the committee that may one day decide on the network allocations. While we also read in the Bangkok Post that Power Technologies are building a factory to make 3G wireless equipment most of which will be exported, with around 1% destined for Thailand: there's confidence for you.
The design of the iPhone is something a lot of people find attractive although they bemoan the lack of things like flash for photography (as well as the Flash plugin of course). There is a telephoto lens for the device which is effective but ugly and this is now joined by a telescope that magnifies 8 times for $30 and a $13 tripod. Of the two, the tripod looks the best and would work with the timing features of photo apps I have.
Something that could affect users of the 3Gs iPhone is the decision by YouTube to allow direct uploading of content in the 1080p HD format.
Google is set to roll out the Mac version of its Chrome browser in December Kelly Fiveash reports. I think this is somewhat ironic as Chrome uses Webkit that was developed by Apple for Safari.
Partly connected with this is news that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was interviewed by CNET this week. That interview of just under 20 minutes, can be seen on the CNET page where there are some background comments on the interview by Tom Krazit and Molly Wood. Ironically it was sponsored by Windows phone.
Among the things Schmidt talked about were searching, Google Wave, the Droid, the Chrome OS and its 2010 release, Government interaction, globalisation; and there were the obvious comparisons with Apple and Microsoft. What I was interested in apart from his insights, was the way that many of the technologies integrate so well with each other.
