Technovia

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?:

"At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids ‘publishing’ the software and any inventions contained therein."

While John finds this credible, I'm going to call "bullshit" on this. Software is published the moment it is made available for sale. The iPhone is for sale. Keeping a tiny subset of customers under NDA will not affect that.

Of course, some might argue that there's something specific about the APIs which is patentable, but this is unlikely. Remember that patents don't cover the specifics of code.

My guess is there some unspecified legal snafu, but I don't think this is it.

It's time for the digital hub to quietly die

In a post about iPhone calendar syncing, John Gruber notes this:

"But as it stands today, with MobileMe syncing, there is no hub."

John is right - and it's now time for the digital hub to go away.

With the iPhone 2.0 release, iTunes has been reduced to music transfer, podcast hub and playlist management. Contacts, email, calendars are all pushed from the cloud. Songs and applications can be bought directly from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It wouldn't take much to completely set the iPhone free.

Two things I need to see in MobileMe

I've been a .Mac subscriber since the day the service came out, and despite the various moves from free to paid, I've stuck with it all the way.

MobileMe, the service's successor, was pitched as "Exchange for the rest of us", which is something that really excited me. I've had an Exchange account on my personal domain for a while, and got used to having the capabilities it gives you.

So I was eager to try out MobileMe. But, sadly, it's proved to be a bit disappointing. That's not only because of its well-documented early problems, but because there are a couple of things missing which I really would miss if I switched away from using Exchange.

Reliability

There's no doubt that MobileMe hasn't had the best of starts in terms of its reliability. There is the oft-cited 1% who have had no email. There have also been various other gremlins in the system, such as the one which robbed me of all but three of my Address Book contacts. Thankfully, I had a backup - Time Machine saved me.

With a service such as MobileMe, reliability isn't optional. Even if I'm not using it for business, I can't afford to lose my calendars, address book and email. It needs to be there, 100% of the time, with no if's or buts.

Better email

One of the nice things about .Mac (and its successor) is the personalised domain. Basically, give it a domain name, and it will use your MobileMe web space for it. It's all highly-intergrated, and works very well.

Except for one thing: it only works for web traffic. If you have email at that domain, you're out of luck - Apple does nothing with your mail exchanger records, which means you won't receive email to an email address at your personal domain.

To put it bluntly, this is pretty lame: this, after all, is a feature which Google gives away for free in Google Apps for your Domain. To pay and not get the same from MobileMe is pretty poor.

MobileMess

Apples MobileMess - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog:

"I called Apple. Would the P.R. team be willing to say what the problem is? What is being done to solve it? When might it be fixed? What kind of resources or time is being spent on a resolution?

No. Apple declined to comment on any of that.

A P.R. manager did, however, offer me this official statement: ‘The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped, and we are still having some growing pains. Some users have been having problems with their e-mail in particular, and we are trying to restore the service as soon as possible. We’re very thankful for our loyal customers’ patience as we work out the kinks.’...

It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation. This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’"

David is completely right. It's not just that MobileMe is a MobileMess, although launching a service that's clearly nowhere near ready is bad enough. It's the completely lack of communication about the issue, other than the same message, over and over.

This is the flip side of Apple PR's inability to comment on anything. "Wall of silence" isn't always a good marketing message.

The third option for Apple's "product transition"

Link:
What is the “product transition” Apple alluded to? | The Apple Core
| ZDNet.com
.

So what does this mean? Obviously lower margin products are coming, but will they be entirely new products or lower prices on existing products?

Piper Jaffrey’s Gene Munster thinks there’s “an 80% chance Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks and possibly new MacBook Pros at lower price points” and “slightly redesigned iPods” including “lower-cost touch-based iPods.”

There is a third option: revamped MacBooks/Pros which are at exactly the same price points, but which include higher-specced (and thus higher cost) components. Historically, this tends to be the way that Apple works (the exception being the iPhone). Also historically, their price points tend to remain around the same on existing product lines - only rarely do they reduce them.

Control your Keynote presentation from your iPhone

Haven't had chance yet to check Stage Hand out properly, but if it works as advertised, it will be a definite "buy". It's a simple application that lets you control your Keynote presentations from an iPhone, and includes the ability to show your slide notes on your iPhone screen. Great stuff.

Well now this is interesting

WordPress app for iPhone:

"Robust but simple to use, the WordPress for iPhone Open Source application allows you to create and edit content on your WordPress blog(s) with support for offline use."

Can an application that comes wrapped in a DRM layer even when it's free (as in beer) and the source code is freely available truly be "open source"?

Motorola sues Apple executive over trade secrets

Bloomberg.com: Technology:

"Motorola Inc., the largest U.S. mobile-phone maker, sued a former executive now working for Apple Inc., accusing him of disclosing its trade secrets to aid in the marketing of Apple's iPhone.

Michael Fenger in March ended an almost six-year career at Motorola where he was a vice president for the company's mobile- device business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is now Apple's vice president for global iPhone sales, according to a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Chicago"

Apple isn't named as a defendant, but obviously will be rather unhappy if Motorola wins this one.

The best comment I've read on this whole iPhone activation silliness

From Digg user "Luminoth" (caution - contains naughty words):

"I hope whatever fucking moron that thought releasing both the new firmware to old users and the new phones on the *same* day and having *every* user re-activate was a good idea gets his ass fired. This is such an incredibly stupid thing to do, I can't believe anyone would be so brain damaged as to think it would work out."

One good thing: this might actually pull a few of those who never believe that Apple can do any wrong out of their mental tail-spin and back into the real world.

And the award for hyperbole of the day goes to...

...TUAW, for "Five ways the App Store will change the world", and especially the opening line:

"There are historic days, people"

Yes, there are. This is not one of them. Someone launched a mobile phone, not a nuclear missile.