Apple

John Gruber has posted a really interesting and insightful piece on BlackBerry vs. iPhone, and why he thinks that RIM is, fundamentally, in a very very bad place indeed.

However, there’s one point that I have to disagree with John on:

“In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.”

For the majority of business users, I think John has got this completely wrong. For them, the ability to send and receive emails, and view the attachments which come with them, is far more important than web browsing. Witness the number of users who spend their time in meetings thumbing their BlackBerry.

That’s not to say that John is necessarily wrong in his overall point that iPhone is going to eat RIM’s lunch. But in optimising for email, as John acknowledges, RIM are actually delivering something that’s far more desirable for business than a device that’s optimised for web.

I’m really enjoying using Brightkite at the moment (I’m ianbetteridge if you want to friend me), and I’m pleased to see that the iPhone web application has now been released in alpha form.

But I was even more pleased to see this comment from one of the developers on the Brightkite blog:

“The native iPhone application with core location (cell triangulation, GPS) is in the works. Checking in will become much easier. We will be releasing it in June through Apple. There are no plans to release a jail broken version as of right now.”

With Jaiku effectively stalled, Brightkite looks a nice solution for location awareness. Plus, it integrates with Fire Eagle, which is great.

marketing: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Features:

“With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11. Thus, OpenOffice.org behaves like any other Aqua application. The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance. Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just because of its extremely good stability.”

There’s quite a few more goodies, but for Mac users this is the big one. Download from here.

Apple re-affirms commitment to video apps:

“To extinguish concerns that Apple was ‘giving up’ on pro video apps, their director of marketing for professional video applications Richard Townhill told TVBEurope, ‘I can categorically state, on the record, that is not the case.’ As for the delay, Richard said ‘… we wanted it to work without an IT department to support it.’”

Well that seems to put to bed that one.

Apple Adds Chinese Handwriting Recognition in 2.0?:

“A sign of things to come? Or just another in a long list of iPhone rumors? It appears
that Apple has included Chinese Handwriting Recognition in the iPhone 2.0 Firmware
Beta according to MacRumors.com.
Chinese users can apparently draw a character on the screen with their finger and
then choose from among options for the recognition.”

(Via GottaBeMobile.com.)

Now this might just tempt me back to NetNewsWire again:

“NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring new features and changes to fall in line with NewsGator’s aspirations for taming information. At the top of the new features list will be integration with AideRSS and the company’s PostRank technology for automatically filtering newsfeeds for hot topics and headlines. NewsGator is already using this technology in its web-based client for its top 1,000 feeds, but NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring AideRSS and PostRank to Mac OS X Leopard. If you’re drowning in feeds and headlines that you constantly shrug off with the ‘mark all as read’ command, this new PostRank technology should help you to at least catch the stuff that really matters.”

Plus, there’s this wonderful news about the iPhone:

“As far as a release date for NetNewsWire 4.0, Brent has a more general Fall-ish time in mind. On top of 3.2 and 4.0 development, he’s also working on a native NetNewsWire app for the iPhone, but I can’t share many of those details just yet.”

I veer between using Google Reader and using NetNewsWire on an almost-weekly basis. I love using NetNewsWire as a client, but - despite the massive improvements that the company has made - prefer Google Reader to Newsgator on the Web.

Robert Cringely thinks so:

“So why, then, was Apple quietly shopping around its entire professional application business to prospective buyers at the recently completed National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas? These include Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Shake — applications that are hardly also-rans in their segments and none of which are antiquated in the least. Final Cut, of course, absolutely dominates the video editing business. Why would Apple want to give that up?”

John Gruber, on the other hand, thinks Cringely is “off his meds”:

“Even if Apple were to buy Adobe (a big if), and if that acquisition raised anti-trust concerns, Apple would sell the competing Adobe apps, not their own current ones. (And Cringely’s suggestion that Sony might buy Apple’s apps is nutty too — none of these apps have Windows versions, so none would run on Vaios.)”

However, in the same post, John later recants a little:

“UPDATE: So, after fishing around a bit: Selling off the pro apps division? Doubtful, but there are rumors floating around about it. Buying Adobe? Not in the cards. The only reason Apple would sell off the pro apps division would be to keep the company smaller and more focused; buying Adobe would make Apple bigger and less focused.”

For what it’s worth, I can’t see Apple selling the pro apps, mainly because a lot of the technology in the pro apps feeds into the consumer stuff like GarageBand, iPhoto, and so on - and these have proven to be far more strategically important to Apple than its hold on the professional market. Selling the apps, and presumably the teams who make them, would mean losing access to some very talented people whose technology has added much to the Mac. 

I’m a Mac users. I tend to recommend Macs to people I know, once I’ve talk to them about what they want to do. But it’s the high of dumbassery for someone who know nothing about what someone needs a computer for to just blindly go “buy a Mac” as if it will fix someone’s computer problem.

And it’s particular idiocy when the problem is that the keyboard on someone’s new PC has a particularly stupid design flaw, as happened to this guy.

John Gruber linked to his story, and predictably he got a lot of people telling him to get a Mac, as if Apple was the only company in the world capable of making a keyboard right. They know nothing about this guy, what he needs from a computer, or what he wants to do with it. They know nothing about his preferences, his budget, the features he needs, or anything like that. Yes, they could have worked some of it out from looking at the model of Dell he bought - but I’m willing to bet that none of them even went that far before typing their silly “get a Mac” comments.

I think I’m going to ask John to write some magic Javascript code which will send the vast majority of his readers (reasonable, smart people) to the right link while the other 0.00001% (the MacMacs) get redirected to the collected speeches of Chairman Steve. A Mac is suitable for a lot more people than is represented by its market share, but it’s not right for everyone, and blindly giving advice to “get a Mac” to people you know nothing about is dumb.

Unless you’re Steve Jobs, of course.

The iPod firm makes computers, too? That’s amazing | Technology | The Observer:

“Apple is always going to be a minority player, but 6 per cent of a colossal market makes for a very nice niche. The best way of looking at it is to say that Apple is the BMW of the computer industry: minuscule in comparison with Toyota, GM and Ford, but a driving force nevertheless because of design, functionality and fanatical customer loyalty. It sets the standards that the others eventually have to reach.”

I’m currently on holiday down in Australia, so not posting much until I get back, but I’m very sad to hear the news that Stan Flack has died. I met Stan quite a few times at Mac events in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, and he was a top guy - he’ll be much missed.