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.

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.

TJ makes a point which is well worth making in the discussion over whether Apple should loosen the restrictions on background processes in the SDK:

“With these restrictions, Apple continues to do its best to protect itself against one of the iPhone’s biggest drawbacks, the lack of a removable battery. The lack of 3G, true GPS, and now background mode have all been explained away (largely, but not exclusively) on the basis of ‘They would be hell on battery life.’ Curiously, I haven’t seen a lot of push-back pointing out that the battery restrictions are only necessary because of the way that Apple designed the iPhone.”

There is no ease-of-use case for having a non-replaceable battery in the iPhone. It’s an aesthetic choice which actually reduces the usability of the product. And this fact undermines the case of people who claim that Apple only cares about the welfare of the user and should do everything to protect it.

As TJ also points out, there are other ways of protecting users from the potential of installing applications which reduce battery life:

“For example, apps can be run in “Background Mode” could be required to ship with preference turned off, and turning it on could pop up a warning message:

“Running in the background will decrease battery life. Do you want to enable Background Mode? [Cancel] [[Enable]]”

Apple could adapt a notice from AIM on Windows (please, contain your shock and horror). When you go to close the AIM window on Windows, it alerts you that the app is still running in the background. Given that the iPhone only has one button to pull you away from your app, it wouldn’t be too difficult to trap a button push and have a notice pop up:

“Leaving iChat will prevent you from receiving instant messages unless you enable background mode. However, background mode will increase battery usage. [Cancel] [Enable Background Mode] [[Quit iChat Anyway]]”

Are these brilliant UI ideas? Certainly not. I’m sure Real Mac Developers are still recovering from the idea that we might adapt anything that Windows does. Others might recoil at the idea that pressing the iPhone button would do anything but immediately bring up the Springboard.

My point isn’t that Apple should do any of these things; however, the idea that background mode would necessarily have to be done completely without any communication to the user is bunk.”

The comments on my earlier posts about this show that people aren’t really thinking creatively about the problem. Instead, they’re taking the line that “either Apple bans background processes or battery life shrinks to nothing”.

And TJ sums things up better than I could have:

“There are ways of addressing these potential problems that go beyond Apple’s blanket “No, You Can’t” and we, as customers and users, are perfectly within our rights to expect Apple to listen to us. Sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending not to hear us, or nodding and smiling while patting us on the head and saying “Trust us, you really don’t want what you think you want, because that non-swappable battery we gave you can’t handle it” is not for us.”

[Moderator] No iPhone SDK discussion here please:

“Reposting this just to be crystal clear.

iPhone 2.0 SDK is entirely covered by NDA, including the documentation. All of it requires login to access it at the iPhone Dev Center.

Items specifically discussed in the announcement are public. But even still, they’re not appropriate for discussion on this list.

Please stay tuned for more details.

Comments, complaints, etc to email@hidden

Thanks for you cooperation.

Scott
Tech Pubs
Apple Inc.”

Can someone explain to me what the justification of this is? Competitors getting hold of it? Like Microsoft, say - which is undoubtedly a registered Apple developer? Or Nokia? Because of course it would be completely beyond them to get hold of a copy - they’d rely on public discussion of it for all their info.

This just smacks of “we don’t want you guys talking about the limitations of this SDK until it’s released, please, so we can control the PR around it.”

The Flip Side of the Multitasking Argument:

“As I wrote this morning, I don’t think the ‘no background’ policy implies any spite or shortsightedness on Apple’s part. It’s simply the result of Apple’s decision to focus first and foremost on maximizing battery life and performance. Other mobile platforms, such as Android, may well have different priorities”

This may indeed be why Apple is blocking background processes, although there could be other potential reasons. But more importantly, since when was it the responsibility of the maker of an operating system to prevent poorly-written applications?

Of course, you could argue that the phone is a “mission-critical” piece of equipment and you can’t afford for it to perform badly. But that argument is bunk: all you need to do is allow users to uninstall applications if they find them slowing things down.

And, of course, the same argument could be made for my laptop, which is a mobile device that’s highly mission-critical for me. Will Apple be making that argument in the future, too?

Steve Jobs says that the Flash player performs too slowly on the iPhone, and the tech press swallows it without question.

So how come the Nokie N800, which uses a similar processor at a slower clock speed than the iPhone, runs the full desktop Flash player at perfectly-good speeds?

I’m not annoyed at Jobs bending the truth - if you’ve been around the Mac market for as long as I have, you get used to taking Steve’s statements with a pinch of salt. But as far as I can see, no technical publication took Jobs up on this. The only person that I’ve come across that’s even questioned Jobs’ statement is Robert Scoble.

If the tech press is now simply publishing the statements of CEOs without question, then it’s going to be dead a lot quicker than anyone thinks. If you can’t even do the basics of reporting right, then you have no business being in business.

Reading Steve Jobs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

“On Wednesday, at a financial conference, Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook, confirmed that the iPod Touch was a platform, not a single product. That would indicate that there is something like a Safari Pad in the offing — a Wi-Fi connected device that would be a scaled-up digital media reader.”

It will be interesting to see what kind of range that Apple comes out with, as you can see how they would scale the iPod architecture from cheap MP3 players through video playing, movie download entertainment machines all the way to a kind of notebook or web tablet.

Dear Steve Jobs,

If Wikipedia is to believed (and who wouldn’t believe it?) today is your 53rd birthday. So it seems like the time is probably right to look back a little, and think about how you’ve managed to change Apple since you came back to it, on the 20th December 1996 (which, incidentally, was my 30th birthday).

Is it really getting on for twelve years? I’m sure that you remember that day well, as I do. I was working as reviews editor for the long-defunct Mac consumer title The Mac, but was about the head back to my first magazine, MacUser, as a reporter - so, inevitably, I got roped into writing some instant news about it. Although at first you were just a “special advisor” to then-CEO Gil Amelio, within a year Gil was gone and you were “interim CEO” - abbreviated, of course, to “iCEO”.

You’ve brought Apple a long way since then. In August of your first year back, there was the release of the original iMac - the machine that, in more ways than one, saved Apple. Gil Amelio later emailed me to claim that he, not you, had initiated the programme that ended up with the iMac - but even if he did, it was your baby in a lot of ways, baring all the hallmarks of Apple product design that we’ve come to recognise in the years after.

And that’s the first great thing that you’ve done for Apple: re-emphasised the centrality of design in developing products. While Apple’s industrial design had always been well ahead of the competition in looks, far too many of Apple’s products prior to your return bore the hallmarks of what they call “lipstick on a pig”: products which were driven by technology, with designers expected to add magic pixie dust to products that were delivered to them at the end of the product development cycle.

What you did was move industrial design to the centre of the product development process in a way which, I think, no one else does - certainly not as well as Apple.

How do you do this? Not by being a technology leader: other companies often adopt new core technologies before Apple does, and few new technologies are actually developed at Apple and immediately deployed.

No: what you do is something better. You wait until a technology is mature enough so that it can be used in exemplary, leading-edge industrial design. The best example of this is the iPod. There were hard drive-based MP3 players well before the iPod, but you waited until hard drives were small enough to create something that was easily portable, the size of a pack of cards instead of a paperback book.

So here’s to you, Steve - happy birthday, and many happy returns. And, what’s more, many new products too.

The Mac mini which lives under the TV set and acts as a souped-up media centre alerted me today to an update of eyeTV, the marvellous TV recording software. I duly updated - I update everything - and found that it refused to launch.

In previous years, this would have been a disaster: although I’ve always backed up my files religiously, I’ve never done applications, figuring that I can always reinstall them from disk.

Of course, these days, I actually buy most of my applications online and never actually get a disk. Thankfully, though, the Mac mini is backed up using Time Machine, which means that all I needed to do was step back an hour, select the old version of the eyeTV application, and all was fixed.

So thank you Apple