To those following KeyCaps: though I still believe that having a blog with a consistent topic has real value, the fact is that there’s such a coherent fan base for the things I follow (games, Disney, Apple, etc.), that it seems perfectly fine to consolidate it all into my primary blog at http://gregmaletic.wordpress.com. I’m going to retire KeyCaps (all of these posts are now over there)… please follow me there!
Thanks.
For years, Java Web Start, Adobe AIR, several Microsoft initiatives, and who knows how many failed startups, have all tried to answer the question: does it make any sense to take all of that “traditional app”-development expertise that’s floating around in the world, and use it to try to write web applications that are based around something other than HTML? (Or, to characterize these companies motives more accurately: how can we own that thing that dares to compete with HTML?)
With iPhone apps, we may have the answer, and it’s due to the App Store and its highly compelling business model. What will make developers buy a Mac to write code on, learn Objective C, write to APIs they’d previously never heard of, and finally, pay (an admittedly scrawny) $99 for the privilege? Money. And the App Store provides an incredibly compelling way to make it.
I’ll now launch into an awkward analogy, but I’ll go with it, because it shows how far Apple has come over the past ten years: with the iPhone App Store, we have a bit of the promise of OpenDoc–small bits of code, sold quickly and easily for low prices, tying into larger ones floating around on the network–but wired to a business model that makes so much sense, it just slaps you in the face and dares you not to make sense of it.
We had to practically blackmail developers to write to OpenDoc. I’m not even sure there needs to be an evangelist for the iPhone App Store.
With iPhone apps, we have a technology that might just be able to deliver the viral addictiveness of Facebook apps, but combined with a monetization plan, something Facebook figures they can get around to some day, but for reasons they share with no one, haven’t decided to.
iPhone Apps have the same persistent user identity model that makes it so much easier to sign up for Facebook apps than traditional web apps (where each demands its own userid and password.) iPhone’s App Store also shares Facebook’s one-click installation model. Combine that with the fact that your iPhone knows your credit card number, and there’s something really going on here. (It does lack Facebook’s “social graph” aspect…or does it? How long before we see iPhone apps that try to spam your Contacts? I mean, Apple developers probably won’t be as crass as that, but no doubt they’ll figure out some way to do this tastefully and non-intrusively.)
I posed my headline as a question, but can there be any doubt?
Just going through the Apple keynote, and marveling at the moment where Jobs tells the world that developers get to pick whatever price they want for their apps. It’s a nice “screw you” to the record industry, who have long asserted that they deserve a similar right to charge different pricing for different songs.
I don’t think there’s any chance this represents a change in Apple’s thinking. Jobs will credibly (though not persuasively) assert that the app market is completely different from that for recorded music. But is Apple right? It’s possible the App Store may show that these two markets aren’t as wildly dissimilar as people suspect. Perhaps “digital goods” are just “digital goods,” whether they’re recorded music or executable code?
Amazon’s new Kindle is appealing. I haven’t used one, but I hope it works well. (Even if it doesn’t, one of these days, somebody will get these eBook things right and they’ll take off.) I especially love that the Kindle doesn’t come with a wireless fee. “Pay-for-use” feels refreshingly liberating in an environment where every product seems to require a monthly stipend from its owners, used or not.
Yet I’m having a hard time getting excited about buying a Kindle. The screen looks nice, but frankly, not nicer than the one I already find on my iPhone (both are 160 pixels per inch resolution). More appealing is the prospect of tapping into Kindle’s online library of e-content. How about a Kindle Reader for iPhone? No one would seem to lose in this arrangement. Amazon doesn’t really want to sell hardware, does it? And Apple garners another useful application for the iPhone.
For consumers, there’s the question of buying book content in Amazon’s proprietary .AZW format, and though I don’t relish the idea of DRM’d books, I have to admit that it doesn’t bother me, either. To wish that Amazon were publishing all of its .AZW content in some open format is exactly that–a wish–and to bemoan that fact is to sit out this current generation of eReading. Sure, I might have to buy the book again some day, in some new-fangled format. In the meantime, however, I got an electronic book at a discount price. There are worse things to blow your money on.
Kind of interesting article about Apple’s possibly developing a tablet PC. (I say “kind of”, because I’m not necessarily convinced this is a real product as much as a prototype for something Apple is playing around with.) But here’s the part I most took note of:
So, can Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is ‘yes’. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.
The thing that piqued my interest was the “slow Web access” comment. Is the iPhone’s web access really “slow?” It is, but only compared to mobile devices that virtually no consumers really own. And even on those devices, have you ever tried browsing the web? Is it anything like the experience you get when browsing on Mobile Safari? (Answer: no.)
So, yes in purely technical terms, iPhone web access is slow. But as a practical matter, it’s the only mobile web access I’ve ever seen that’s actually worth using. And so it follows: it’s the fastest available.
I know what you’re thinking: Time Machine is just another way to back-up your Mac. John Welch’s well-read post on “Best Leopard Features” even highlights TextEdit’s Word 2007 support, yet overlooks Time Machine.
But Time Machine is more than a backup solution. OS vendors have been shoving new features at us for years with something approaching the shameless irresponsibility of cell phone providers who convince us that cameras and ring tones are more important than reception and usability.
Hard drives crash. Files get lost. We accidentally save over the version of our document that we really needed. These scenarios have been with us so long that we’ve accepted them as inevitable; they’re not. It’s about time that the gargantuan storage space and lightning-fast processors of modern-day computers get turned toward the all-important (a term I don’t use loosely) task of making themselves fool-proof.
Time Machine could turn out to be lousy. Its interface might be annoying; it might not be reliable. But it should never, ever, be possible to lose data. At a minimum, Time Machine is an affirmation of that principle.
According to the New York Times, Apple is now the most valuable computer maker in the world, and the fourth most valuable company in high-tech.
Interesting, though the most interesting part is: why the hell is Cisco (#3 on the list) so valuable? I’ve never understood that.
My sense is that Cisco will soon become like Sun, a company that elevated itself by delivering a no-better-than-competent product to a red-hot market that needed it, but also a company that lacks any concept of how to design a product, or get its customers excited about what it does.
