You know, even after all these years, Mozilla Firefox still isn’t great. The interface looks un-Mac-like, the performance is worse than on Windows, and it just feels like an after-thought. Fortunately for those who still have a lot of love for the Gecko rendering engine, the folks behind the Camino Project continue to do brilliant work on their independent Camino browser, the 2.0 release of which shipped yesterday.
I’ve been an avid Camino user since it was known as Chimera, and the new version has lots to offer, particularly in terms of stability, security, and one totally unique feature. Needless to say, it remains (in subjective experience) the fastest browser on the planet, and it’s finally caught up to Safari with annoyance blocking, malware/phishing protection, tab re-ordering and Keychain support. But the headline addition here is Tab Overview, a very cool idea that works like Exposé for your browser tabs. Basically, you just type CTRL-CMD-T, and you get a dynamically resizing window with snapshots of everything you have open. It’s quick and nearly flawless.
I want to use it steadily for a few days before I render a final verdict, but I might just be in love.
Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an iPhone game, and a quite nicely produced one, at that. It might, in fact, be the bloodiest game to ever come to the platform, if that’s your thing. Seriously — you get measured on the number of successful decapitations per level.
For those of you reading this on a Mac IIvi, I have excellent news for you: Twitter is finally available for Macintosh System 6. And 7. And 8. And even 9, for those of you mad cats who have installed a PowerPC upgrade card.
It’s called Grackle68k, and it’s awesome. First, it allows you to post things to Twitter. Second, it allows you to learn that your post has gone through successfully. Genius.
Never one to rest on its laurels, Apple is piling on following its record Q3 with a big push for the holidays. Today, it launched its opening salvo for the season with “Gift” (above) and “Song” (after the jump). The former, in typical fashion, starts with something immediately relevant (using the Target app to get gift recommendations) before going off on tangents (photo editing, “Monopoly,” Zipcar?).
“Song,” meanwhile pretty much just goes full-on for the “There’s an app for that” mantra, touching on real estate, The Sims, Facebook, and Shazam. And honestly, in both cases, it’s pretty effective. There are more than 100,000 apps, after all, even if there’s no Google Voice. The campaign works because it’s welcoming and says you can find what you want to do easily. (via MacRumors)
Unfortunately, that selling point is actually pretty different from the real experience of using the App Store. Once you hit 100,000, discoverability becomes the killer app, not any single product within. This isn’t that big a problem yet (except for developers), but it will become an increasing one over time. What good are 100,000 apps when I struggle to use more than 10 on a daily basis?
Consider this: iTunes offers more than 10 million songs, but lots of users have several thousands of songs (I have nearly 5,000 and add more every year). Assuming that the average for a power user is around 2,000 songs per user, that rounds out to there being 5,000 songs to every one that most people download.
With apps, by contrast, there are 100,000, but I would guess most power users carry fewer than 30 on them at any given time (I’m actually closer to 20 beyond the initial set). That’s 3,300 apps per one download, a ratio that starts to get really dramatic as the app store grows toward a million choices but people install no more of them. It’s already pretty rough trying to break through as an obscure band on iTunes — it could get much worse as the ratio grows increasingly unfavorable for apps.
Fortunately, problems tend to highlight opportunities to innovate. Everyone knows that a more robust Springboard app is needed to help us sort through our many apps to find the one we want when we want it. Apple could also come up with new forms of App Store search to better surface apps better suited to you (imagine if Genius for Apps worked!), or it could take note of developers whose work you’ve enjoyed previously and recommend those. Moreover, Apple could even offer different ways to market oneself on the App Store. We’re used to bundling on the desktop side; why shouldn’t there by an iPhoneHeist next year to bring together rock stars with rising contenders on the fastest-growing platform ever?
The growth of the iPhone has been fascinating. OS 1.0 was about defining a new kind of mobile experience. OS 2.0 was about opening the platform to true development and making it more than just a product. OS 3.0 has been about fixing the most-requested problems, including MMS, copy-and-paste, and tethering (not that AT&T has implemented the latter). OS 4.0, it seems to be, would be an excellent time to figure out how one might actually benefit from owning a couple hundred different apps.
Since its introduction in September, Apple’s multimedia iTunes LP format has been the subject of constant speculation and teeth-gnashing. I took quite a lot of criticism a month ago, much of it well-deserved, for repeating a Gizmodo-reported rumor that Apple was restricting the format to a handful of titles from major labels only and charging high production fees that further marginalized Indies.
Apple denied all of this strenuously, and exactly four weeks ago pledged to release Open Specs for iTunes LP “soon,” as well as many more iTunes LP titles arriving in the store imminently, including Indies.
All I can say is, it ain’t true yet. Apple has not released the promised Open Specs, and only four additional iTunes LP titles have shown up in the iTunes Store, plus two that you can pre-order. They’re all from major labels, needless to say. For those keeping count, Apple has 19 iTunes LP titles, of which 17 are on sale today.
I’m not saying Apple won’t fulfill its promises here — I can’t wait until they do, in fact — but rather that they haven’t. The sooner Apple allows all of its record label partners to create iTunes LPs and offer a huge diversity of titles, the sooner it will have a chance of catching on. Until then, it’s just a cool tech demo for fans of Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson.
Do you think Apple will crack 20 titles in the iTunes by the end of the month?
The entertainment category is loaded with charming applications.
There’s a lot to like about the iPhone’s App Store. The more than 100,000 programs within its occasionally strict boundaries offer a bevy of experience riches unmatched in the mobile computing space. But it’s also frustrating. Great apps get postponed or blocked altogether, while great ones like Skype have key features removed.
All of this is nothing new. Mac bloggers talk about this all the time. But I think I’ve also pinpointed exactly why such minor complaints are so painful. It’s called the Entertainment Category of the App Store.
For those unfamiliar with its seedy contents, the Entertainment Category is sort of a catch-all for all kinds of applications that don’t have a good home elsewhere in the App Store. Here’s a chart I made to illustrate the problem:
Yes, despite the fact that the entertainment category does include some legit apps, some of which are great (Pocket God, Emoji, and Movies spring to mind), it is, for the most part, a giant blue Pac-Man of lame softcore porn devouring all in its path. And it’s impossible to find anything actually entertaining there. Which is a disaster. It’s a disincentive to develop something good (who can compete against Naughty Hotties?), and that means that it inevitably gets worse over time.
Serious craft from Japan’s Mobile Art Lab in transforming the iPhone into an amazing interactive image in a children’s story book from the future. I love it. All kids should get one for Christmas.
So, you know those off-the-mark iDon’t commercials Verizon’s using to hype the launch of the Motorola Droid? No removable battery, no physical keyboard, and a list of features only a developer could care about? Well, according to InfoWorld, that campaign could be turned against the Droid with the far more damning “DroiDon’t include free corporate e-mail access with a standard data plan.”
That’s right, in addition to the mandatory $30 data plan, equivalent to the iPhone’s, Verizon is charging Droid customers $15 per month extra to check their work e-mail — as they do all smartphone customers. It takes a lot to make AT&T look like the superior network, but Verizon has managed it.
And no, there’s no possible justification for this other than greed and foolhardiness.
Kara Johnson, a material scientist at design and engineering firm IDEO, has just posted up a fun behind-the-scenes look at how some of her colleagues created the above shot of a 12″ PowerBook for dinner as part of her book I Miss My Pencil.
It’s actually surprisingly hard to wreak such meticulous havoc, and it’s fun to see the process of great engineers up close — especially since IDEO and its predecessor David Kelley Design engineered a huge number of Apple products from the late ’70s into the mid-’90s.
Hit the link to see the full process, if you’re not traumatized by the sight of violence against a Mac.
There’s a dirty little secret lurking within the hearts of iPhone and the iPod touch: neither of them is a particularly great music player. A lot of iPhone owners actually keep a separate iPod nano or classic with them to listen to their music libraries. I’m not one of them, but I’m thinking about it.
Don’t get me wrong. Syncing media to modern Apple handheld is the best such experience money can buy, and the actual playback and browsing experiences are in the top tier of media phones and Internet tablets. That doesn’t mean they’re great, though. For the most part, the iPod app found on the iPhone and touch is a fairly literal translation of the original iPod interface ported over to a much higher-end device, plus an overly complex Cover Flow mode — which doesn’t even work well with Playlists. And that’s kind of pathetic, given Apple’s ordinarily high standards.
This is not the usual case where Apple is so far ahead of the competition that it’s not even clear how a media player app should change as it migrates to a modern multitouch platform. The video linked above is the proposed Rachael UI for the media player app in Sony Ericsson’s Android-based phones. It’s not amazing, but it does a few things really, really well. Notably, it provides a lot of rich information on artist pages that brings back some of the feel of listening to a physical album, and it also makes it easy to find your favorites, recently added albums, and tracks, and your most recently played music — all on one screen. That alone, in my opinion, annihilates the best of the current iPhone music experience. And I think we’d all agree it’s a refreshing departure from either a long list of artists listed in alphabetical order as a home screen.
The Zune HD, though its UI is an overly stylized collection of wank, also does some interesting things with tagged favorites that show the untapped possibilities available in next-generation handheld music playback.
I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for about four months now, and I love everything about it — except that it doesn’t do a great job of helping me rediscover diamonds in the rough of my music collection. The iPod app is good enough, but it isn’t great yet. Here’s hoping that the old competitive spirit will push Apple to truly push the edges of what’s possible. Shouldn’t we be able to view iTunes LPs on the iPhone, at the very least?
Customers check out the iPhone at a Beijing launch event. Bloomberg News
In spite of the fact that all iPhones are made in China, Apple’s super smartphone wasn’t officially available to Chinese consumers until this weekend. China Unicom, Apple’s network partner in the world’s largest mobile phone market, held a late-night kick-off event in Beijing on Friday to mark the momentous occasion, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the big to-do was mostly a to-don’t.
Hundreds of people braved cold and rain to attend a Friday night party thrown by China Unicom Ltd., the state-owned carrier selling the iPhone, at a Beijing shopping center. Still, the crowd seemed subdued compared with the thousands who turned up at stores when the iPhone was introduced in markets such as the U.S. and Japan, where it quickly sold out in many locations. As of Sunday night, stores around Beijing still had the iPhone in stock.
Why? Because imported iPhones are already widely available in major Chinese cities — and at dramatically lower prices. Official iPhones in China run $730 to $1,020, a premium of $200 to $300 over gray-market phones from Australia and other nearby markets. Worse, the official China Unicom iPhone has its WiFi disabled.
While it’s certainly too soon to call the Chinese iPhone launch a flop (that was the initial assessment for the Japanese market, and the 3GS went on to become the best-selling phone in Japan), these are significant hurdles that will be tough to overcome. Apple has taken nearly two and a half years to launch the iPhone in China, and offering over-priced crippleware after all that time is underwhelming in the extreme.
Only time will tell. Any Beijing readers with either a China Unicom model or gray-market iPhone care to chime in?
While Apple doesn’t hold any actual monopolies, Harrison Keely has create a board game remix that creates an idealized world where the goal is to own every Apple product ever. It’s not an actual game yet (someone would need to write some rules, design some playing pieces, and create draw cards for that), but it’s got some fun touches. Having to pay $100 extra when you land on Reality Distortion Field is a particularly excellent idea (I find it’s usually more in the neighborhood of $200 — ask 1st-gen iPhone owners). You can see the picture full size by clicking on it.
Apple isn’t done yet. The company also quietly put up for sale a brand new Apple Remote, the first revision since Fall 2005. It’s longer and aluminum, and now features good control of docked iPods and iPhones.
Though it looks like it has a scroll wheel, it doesn’t appear to. Still, nice industrial design.
Though the Apple Store isn’t back up yet, Apple has officially confirmed the announcement of new iMacs, a plastic unibody MacBook and the Magic Mouse, a stunningly proportioned wireless multitouch mouse. The iMacs include an awesome-looking 27-inch widescreen model; the high-end machine comes with quad-core processors, which Apple says boosts performance 2x over the previous generation.
The unibody MacBook is a nice consumer take on the new design language first established by the MacBook Air and then refined in the unibody aluminum MacBook Pro.
The Magic Mouse is…interesting. Will have to use one to get a sense for how well it handles gestures. I’ll be back with more analysis once the store’s back and I have more time for reading, but it looks like a solid refresh a day ahead of Windows 7.
Apple isn’t done yet. The company also 
