Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!
I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple hardware SVP who oversaw the creation of the iMac and generations worth of iPods (and, it goes without saying, dozens of early prototypes of the iPhone, given that he left Apple only a year before its release), claimed during an interview at CES that he has “never even used an iPhone.”
Now, whether or not this was a true statement (interviewer Kara Swisher didn’t believe him, and I’m mostly in her camp), it’s certainly not a terribly smart one. If he’s telling the truth, it means he’s never used the top-selling phone in the U.S. market, a device that has turned the global mobile market on its head and dramatically threatened traditional powers like Motorola and Nokia and, well, Palm. It’s kind of hard to beat what you’ve never tried.
If Rubinstein is lying, it’s almost worse, a passive-aggressive attempt at point-scoring that belies a grudge with his former employer that could get in the way of beating them. All in all, it’s just one of those moments that really makes you appreciate how effortlessly Steve Jobs belittles competitor products — he can actually make you believe he would never use anything but Apple because they’re that much better. When Rubinstein tries to be as dismissive in the other direction, he just sounds bitter.
Even though Apple isn’t part of this year’s CES, the floor has been buzzing with news of new hardware accessories for Apple’s multitouch devices. One of the most interesting of these is the AR.Drone, a quadricopter that you can control via iPhone or iPod touch.
As you can see from the video, the four rotors that give it lift are selectively turned on and off as you move your iPhone, and via the chopper’s forward-facing camera, the game positions killer robots for you to fire rockets at through the touchscreen. There’s even multiplayer for AR dogfights. No word on pricing yet, but looks like a heck of a lot of fun to fly if you’re on the floor.
Watch Conan on Hulu! http://www.hulu.com/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien
Having wrapped up the fairly well-thought-out and fairly grounded predictions for 2010, we thought it would be a good idea to try to take a look further in to the future of Apple. Now, before you proceed, you should be aware that looking beyond a one-year outlook is notoriously difficult. After all, at this point 10 years ago, Apple was more than a year away from shipping iTunes software, let alone making iPods and disrupting the mobile phone industry. So you should be aware that I refuse to stand by any of these five predictions over the long haul and expect to be wrong. With that, let’s take a look into the far future. All the way past the year 2000.
In the Year 2012, Apple Will Buy Both Yahoo! and TBWA/Chiat Day, Simultaneous Entering Both the Internet Services and Ad Industries at the Same Time. I actually don’t think this one’s insane. Yahoo! continues to struggle against Google, the ad industry is in need of grounds-up reinvention, and Apple has more cash on hand than pretty much anyone else. At this point, Steve Jobs is running out of challenges in both Apple’s existing and immediately adjacent businesses. To cement his reputation as the best CEO of the next decade, he should create a juggernaut capable of challenging Google.
Apple has a ridiculously good run over the past ten years. But in true Apple fashion, I’m not here to rest on the laurels of the past but to look into the future. So sit back, relax, and take a daring look all the way into the year 2010. Here are the five things that Apple must do to thrive in 2010.
Virtually every geek has spent, at one time or another in their lives, a lot of time playing with Lego bricks. They’re basically the single greatest creativity toy ever developed. And it’s been fun to see the world of Lego make a variety of appearances on the iPhone.
The newest app from Billund, Denmark is Lego Photo, which transforms your pictures into creative brick assemblages that are the perfect way to hide just how hungover you look in all your New Year’s photos.
See? Here’s my impression of what most people will look like tomorrow morning:
See? It’s “artistic”!
Free download, so check it out here (iTunes link). /via Gizmodo
With all the discussion of the New York Times’s bizarre decision to run a column that states as received wisdom that the iPhone’s poor network performance in the United States is Apple’s fault and not AT&T’s, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the track record of reporter Randall Stross with regard to Steve Jobs.
So I visited his website, and I remembered where I’d seen his name — on the cover of a book I read in high school that made a tech prognosis so spectacularly wrong that it’s occasionally used as a case study against proclaiming whether a particular technology is a winner or loser. That book? Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. And its central premise was that Steve would never produce another tech industry hit. Seriously.
Apparently, it’s been irrational Apple-Bashing Weekend for the last few days, and no one bothered to alert us here at the Cult. Lest the outlandish claims about the awesomeness of AT&T’s network from the New York Times get all the attention, Danish tech analyst Strand Consult (basically the Rob Enderle of northern Europe) wants to bend your ear with a list of inaccurate or out-dated complaints about the iPhone. Oh, and call iPhone users liars and victims of Stockholm Syndrome, too.
There are many similarities to the Stockholm Syndrome and from an outside perspective there is little doubt that many mobile phone manufacturers are most probably envious of the users on Apple’s platform. In reality the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple.
The alleged analysis attacks the iPhone for 20 “problems” that its users allegedly defend, many of which are strictly matters of taste or downright false. This includes the usual suspects, like having to use Apple’s designated carriers (an obnoxious reality) and poor network performance (likely tied to the previous) and things that most iPhone users don’t mind at all, like the lack of a hardware keyboard, SD card slot, FM radio, and removable battery cover.
The article, however, also attacks the iPhone for its lack of a 3G radio, MMS, SMS forwarding, poor camera, and tethering, issues that, at least outside the United States, have been resolved for a minimum of six months and up to 18 months. Even more comically, it tilts against abstractions as the iPhone is a “low-technology phone wrapped in a sleek design.” Yes, the low-technology that powers the Palm Pre and Motorola Droid. Such a laggard, the iPhone.
Also, horror of horrors, the iPhone doesn’t allow users to install their Web browser of choice! Worse, Strand alleges, the iPhone won’t run random Java games written for LG flip phones circa 2003. Both of these issues have been keeping me awake late at night, I must say.
Honestly, the few credible points the article makes (too much crapware in the App Store, inconsistent App approval process, no third-party multitasking) are well-covered everywhere in the entire world and consistently irritate every iPhone user I know, and the rest of it is irrelevant or delusional.
I mean, if you’re going to allege that I’m sympathizing with my abuser, at least say something original, OK? It’s pathetic that so many tech journalists are willing to print as gospel the words of the clearly biased.
Everyone knows that the one thing holding the iPhone back in the U.S. is AT&T’s poor 3G coverage, right? With a dropped signal, it can transform from one of the world’s most capable mobile computers to a video iPod that plays a pretty mean version of Doom. Everyone knows the problem lies with the network’s inability to handle iPhone data traffic, as iPhones have no such problems in the European market, Japan, and other regions where it has a major foothold — places where the network load is so much not a problem that they enable data tethering from laptops.
Well, everyone knows but the New York Times and the mobile industry analysts — some of whom work for AT&T — they interviewed about the matter. In a dreadful column titled “AT&T Takes the Blame, Even for iPhone’s Faults“, one of the paper’s correspondents in Silicon Valley, Randall Stross, goes so far as to definitively declare that the iPhone’s design “is contributing to performance problems” and that with regard to Verizon, “AT&T has the superior network nationwide.” Oh, for crying out loud.
Almost a year to the day since Google released its first stable version for Windows, the search giant has today announced a final release of its Chrome browser for Mac. If you haven’t played with it, it’s worth a spin — I use it as my primary browser on my work PC.
And yes, before anyone else mentions it, its add-on architecture isn’t completely rolled out yet, so if you love Firefox extensions, this isn’t the browser for you, and its benefits over Mac Safari 4 are dubious generally. But you might just enjoy how it feels.
As a sidebar to her mega-tribute to Apple’s mobile dominance, Jenna Wortham of the New York Times asked Phil Schiller about his favorite iPhone apps. And, quelle surprise, they’re all extremely popular, many of them having been featured in TV ads and Apple keynote events.
Shazam — The remarkable music-identification app has been featured in a TV commercial and regularly appears in print
CNN — The country’s No. 2 24-hour news network (and one of the most popular websites on the Internet) has been a perennial top-seller on the App Store, at one time hitting No. 1 for all paid apps
Facebook — Featured in more than one ad, and is the most popular social network in the world
MLB.com At Bat — Featured in TV ads and not one, but two Apple keynotes
NBA Game Time — Basically the above, but for basketball
ESPN ScoreCenter — The same, but for more sports
Eliminate — Demoed on stage at the introduction of the iPhone 3GS
geoDefense — Actually not that hyped. Probably the most obscure title on the list, but it’s still been named one of Apple’s top 4 favorite iPhone games
Best Camera — Created by award-winning iPhone photographer Chase Jarvis, but a legitimate app store success story developed by an indie team and rising thanks to its merits
What do you reckon? Does your taste trend with Phil’s, or is he hopelessly vanilla in his picks?
In yesterday’s Sunday Business section of the New York Times, tech reporter Jenna Wortham essentially declared the war for smartphone dominance over — with Apple as the champion thanks to the out-sized success of the App Store strategy. Interviewing developers, competitors, Apple execs, and analysts, Wortham looks everywhere for cracks in the iFacade, but ultimately comes up empty. If someone is going to unseat the iPhone as the most profitable and desirable mobile platform, they haven’t emerged yet, all apologies to Android, Palm, Microsoft and RIM intended.
What struck me as I read the article was just how much of a shock to the entire mobile industry the iPhone has been. I see that less in the outsized numbers the magical handheld has posted than I do in the day-late, dollar-short responses of pretty much everyone else (Google possible excepted). Palm still claims that its use of widely embraced web-coding techniques in WebOS app development will help it counter the iPhone, but the 500 apps in its woeful App Catalog counter this notion. RIM and Microsoft note, correctly, that the correlation between quantity and quality isn’t always clear (what else can you say when you’re out-numbered by more than 30-to-1), but offer only vague promises of innovation:
RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie: “We’re much more interested in changing the applications and changing the user experience and really unlocking the promise and the money and revenue opportunity for the ecosystem.”
“Our strategy is to look holistically at how we can provide the best all-around user experience,” says Victoria Grady, director of mobile strategy at Microsoft. The Marketplace now has more than 800 apps.
Edit: As several readers have pointed out, the film is also available on Hulu. Check it out.
MacHeads, the documentary on, well, the Cult of Mac, is now available to view for free online courtesy of SnagFilms, a documentary library. As Lonnie reported way back in January, the film premiered at MacWorld 2009 before an audience of more than 1,000 before seeing release on Amazon Unbox and iTunes.
To check it out, just click Play on the marquee above. Enjoy!
The “On Language” column in the magazine of the New York Times is among the world’s truly transcendent experiences. Fussy, concerned, and talky, it never hesitates to let you know how its author really feels bout minor issues of language and typography that scarcely manage to raise an eyebrow in the general population.
Last week’s target? Apple and its love of the so-called “Camel Case,” a typographical habit in which upper-case letters are sCaTtereD in the miDDle of otherwise unsuspecting words. Yes, the iPhone is named as chief perpetrator:
Though proper nouns conventionally begin with a capital letter, Apple spells the device’s trademark with an initial lowercase i, followed by an uppercase P. Thus styled, the word has a hump in the middle. I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured.
What’s great about this column is that Apple loyalists such as myself are every bit as likely to be offended by the rendering “Iphone” as the NYT’s Caleb Crain would be by “iPhone.” What we have is a Classic Camel Case Conundrum. Personally, I’m strongly in favor of rendering a trademark as its holder writes it, particularly when doing so has the potential for comedy (here I’m thinking of “Aol”). But the truth of it is that I’m typographically incorrect, as the author is factually fudging. Our language has been corrupted by Apple’s success.
Never one to miss an opportunity for adulation, Atebits founder Loren Brichter managed to get the new version of his superlative Twitter client Tweetie through the App Store over the Thanksgiving Holiday. And oh, boy, it’s a doozy. Download here (iTunes link) for $2.99 if you’ve somehow held out thus far.
Basically it implements every new feature that has shown up on Twitter in the six weeks since Tweetie 2 dropped — but better: Lists, new-style ReTweets, and GeoTags. It also throws in a ton of bug fixes; having used it all day long, it seems as solid as the previous iteration, if not a bit faster. Loren even threw in TweetStream break indicators to let you know when you’ve missed out on a few hours of your friends’ navel-gazing. All told, it takes the best Twitter experience on any platform to the next level without a hitch.
I said awhile ago that Tweetie 2 was the best iPhone app. I retract that now. Tweetie 2.1 is.
Never let it be said that Apple doesn’t keep its promises. Six weeks after announcing it would open up its iTunes LP file format to all developers and labels, Apple delivered this morning with specifications and resources for both iTLP and its DVD-like iTunes Extras. All of the contents are here. The company also through in the TuneKit framework, a set of resources for delivering superior multimedia experiences through iTunes.
Apple also reiterated its support for making iTunes LP and Extras the format of choice for the store, just not quite yet. According to its development site, all approvals for both features will be handled manually until the first quarter of 2010, at which point submissions will be handled like all other iTunes uploads.
I’m thrilled to see it. Digital media has so much more potential than just the content by itself. These are a clear step into a brighter future. Well done, Apple.
Rumors about Apple’s still-unannounced but wildly anticipated tablet are flying like crazy at the moment, in a fashion not unfamiliar to the last few months before we finally got to see the iPhone. And, as Ed told you last week, content providers are making pronouncements about getting their stuff on the device, believed to be optimized for reading newspaper and magazines.
Conde-Nast and our old friends at Wired, in particular, are announcing that they’ll be on the Apple Tablet and have already developed a special multi-touch magazine format just dying to be present at launch. They’re so confident about this, in fact, that the holidays-only Wired Store in Manhattan features a concept mock-up of the tablet and its interface, which you can watch in the above video.
Some things to note:
The design concept is…a big iPhone, more or less.
The interface actually looks quite nice, and I could imagine reading it.
There is no way that anyone at Conde has handled an Apple Tablet. They couldn’t possibly be this publicity-seeking or bold about their pronouncements if they had been brought behind the Steve curtain.
Also, the fact that Wired worked with Adobe to create the new format is a clear sign that they’ve had no contact with Apple. Anything based on AIR or Flash is unlikely to be compatible with the Tablet, for all the reasons there is no Flash or AIR on the iPhone
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.
