Leander Kahney - page 48

Someone is looking for a Steve Jobs look-alike for an “impersonator event” on Friday and Saturday in San Francisco’s SOMA — the area around Macworld.

The actual job isn’t specified, but looking like Steve is important, of course, but so is “punctuality.”

“If necessary, we can provide a black turtleneck and glasses,” the Craigslist ad says.

Pay is $100 a day. Wanna bet it’s handing out Gold Club flyers?

Full text of the Craigslist ad after the jump and check out our Gallery of Uncanny Steve Jobs Look-Alikes

A lot of people are nonplussed by the iPad because it doesn’t seem so new, or even very useful. It’s just a big iPod touch. So what?

But one of the most interesting things Apple said has about the iPad is how it improves the “experience” of doing everyday computing tasks — email, web browsing, making photo slideshows.

Again, people say so what? We’ve already got laptops for email and watching movies. But improving experiences is exactly what Apple is great at. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but the first anybody could enjoy using. The same thing is going to propel the iPad into the mainstream. Everyday tasks like sending email and reading newspapers are going to be so much nicer on the iPad than any other device. (see for example the New York Times screenshot after the jump.)

Software developer Fraser Spiers has been digging through Apple’s iPad videos, pulling screenshots to take a closer look at the details of the iPad’s UI. His conclusion? It’s going to provide a very good experience not just for media consumption, but also media creation.

Look at what’s in here: a full stylesheet engine, multi-column page layout, a complete library of cell formulae and a full set of builds and transitions. You can create a Magic Move transition on the iPad. That’s probably the most advanced technique you can do in Keynote, and it’s there on the iPad.

The New York Times has a fascinating piece by ex-Microsoftie Dick Brass on how interdepartmental fighting is causing the company to fail. Microsoft has turned into an anti-innovation company, he says.

Internecine warfare among Microsoft’s divisions has created a “dysfunctional” corporate culture that thwarts creativity instead of nurturing it. “The company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers,” he writes.

Of course Wired is prepared for Apple’s iPad, says Chris Anderson, the magazine’s editor in chief.

Responding to Tuesday’s piece that Wired‘s digital version won’t work on the iPad, Anderson says the magazine knew all along about Apple’s aversion to Flash and Air, and has a solution.

“Obviously we knew about Apple and Flash from the beginning and there were no surprises there,” he says in an email. “We have a solution and will launch on the iPad according to plan and on schedule, along with Android and Windows — it’s a full cross-platform strategy, which was the idea all along.”

Anderson wouldn’t say what the solution is, but it’s a good one, he claims.

UPDATE: Just got word that Gruber is NOT cool with the site, and is demanding it be taken down. This about 20 mins after this post was published. Guess the “reasonably parodic period” is up. That was quick.

I’ve just been IM-ing with John Casasanta, the brains behind DaringFireballWithComments.net – a website that mirrors Apple pundit John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog — with the addition of reader comments on posts.

Casasanta says he’s received a short note from Gruber, who says he’s cool with the site. Gruber even gave Casasanta permission to keep the site up for a “reasonably parodic period” of time.

“This absolves me of any lawsuit,” says Casasanta, who runs the super-popular MacHeist software marketing operation.

As reported yesterday, DaringFireballWithComments.net mirrors everything on Daring Fireball — posts, ads and all — but allows anonymous commenting on posts. Gruber’s blog is famous for not having comments, an ethos at odds with most other web publishers (except Engadget, which has temporarily shut down its “out-of-control” comments system). Casasanta is mirroring Gruber’s site as a “social experiment.”

Meanwhile, most of the comments on DaringFireballWithComments.net so far have been exceptionally moronic, partly proving Gruber’s point that comments are a distraction.

Casasanta says he is unconcerned by the stupidity (which appears to be mostly purposeful. People are being deliberately dumb) and is willing to give it time. “It’s kinda what I would’ve expected so far,” he says.

One option is moderating the comments, but Cassanta says it hasn’t been discussed yet.

Gruber hasn’t responded to a couple of notes I sent him asking for comment, and hasn’t yet mentioned the mirror on his site or Twitter stream. As some have noted, with about 40,00 followers, Gruber’s Twitter stream acts as Daring Fireball’s behind-the-scenes comments system.

Adobe’s chief technology officer has finally weighed in on the great Flash debate, and is taking potshots at Apple for not supporting Flash on the iPad. Adobe’s head software honcho Kevin Lynch says Flash on the iPad is essential to the “open” internet. Except Flash isn’t open.

My old friends at Wired tell me that the magazine’s designers scrambled to finished their gorgeous digital version of the publication just in time for Apple’s big iPad launch last week.

Trouble is, the interactive prototype was built using Adobe’s Air — which means it won’t work on the very device it was built for. Like Flash, Apple isn’t supporting Air on the iPad.

“The magazine industry was hoping to finally get over the pay wall with a fancy, shmancy iPad version of their precious slick glossy (but) gets caught with their pants down and their wee wees out,” said one insider.

We were a pain, I know, bugging you guys to vote for us in 2010 Golden Retrevo Awards.

But it paid off — we won a 2010 Golden Retrevo Award for outstanding achievements in the “All Things Apple” space. The awards honor the “best and brightest independent gadget blogs on the web.”

Many thanks for your support!

Our friends 9to5Mac also won in the same category, along with iPhoneography, MacYourself and The iPhone Guru.

Retrevo is an up-and-coming electronics shopping/review site, which claims more than 5 million visitors a month. Here’s the full list of Golden Retrevo Award winners.

The formidable Economist magazine has blessed Steve Jobs with a rare cover story examining the potential impact of the Jesus tablet.

Even rarer, the iPad story is mostly positive, even if the religious imagery is over the top.

The Economist fancies Jobs’ chances of shaking up not just one industry, but three — especially media:

Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Read more: Tablet computing — The book of Jobs.

Via 9to5Mac. Thanks Seth.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball is the most influential Apple pundit on the web, but readers often complain about the lack of comments on his website.

In fact, Gruber’s site is famous for not having comments. In an age when every website falls over itself to accommodate reader interactivity, Gruber stands alone. He has stubbornly resisted adding comments to his site for years.

Gruber has explained that he dislikes comments because they distract from his all-important voice. This is exactly the kind of egotistical statement that makes him unpopular with many people, especially other writers, but a must-read pundit.

But Gruber is about to get comments, whether he likes it or not.

The team behind MacHeist has just launched DaringFireballWithComments.net— a website that mirrors Gruber’s site with, you guessed it, comments.

“It’s good timing since he was gloating over his lack of comments today,” said John Casasanta, the brains behind the project, “and we’re gonna allow anonymous comments. It should be a shitstorm.”

Sharp-eyed observers have noticed what looks to be an iSight camera in the iPad Steve Jobs used in last week’s keynote.

Even though Jobs didn’t talk about a camera, and it’s not mentioned in Apple’s official tech specs, something that looks like an iSight camera can be seen when Jobs first holds the iPad up for everyone to see.

As he holds it up, the light catches the iPad’s surface, illuminating something underneath. That something looks like an iSight camera, similar to the ones built into MacBooks, under the screens.

In the official iPad podcast, it can be seen around the 1:23:40 mark.

It’s not conclusive, of course, but corroborates the prototype images published by Engadget in the run up to the event, which clearly show an iSight camera in the same position. And references to a camera have been found in both the iPad’s Address Book software and the iPad firmware.

The absence of a camera on the iPad has been one of the device’s most puzzling omissions. Although, as our own John Brownlee first noted, a camera in a tablet that’s sitting in your lap, staring up at you, doesn’t produce the most flattering camera angles.

UPDATE: A repair company called Mission Repair says the iPad’s frame clearly shows an empty spot for an iSight camera, and it is exactly the same size and shape as the iSight slot in a MacBook’s screen frame. (Mission Repair received a shipment of iPad parts on Monday, the company blog says).

Thanks NyxoLyno.

Apple has just released iTunes 9.0.3, which looks like mostly bug fixes a big upgrade with a new look, among other things. Full details of the big, fat 100MB upgrade after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA

Here is Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote in less than 180 seconds. It’s wonderful! Amazing! Incredible!

The video sums up “all the important words,” says its creator, Neil Curtis.

“I assure you that no scene is repeated and everything was said on this keynote!” he adds. “Oh, and please don’t take it personal: it’s meant to be humor!”

Boy Genius Report has an interesting chart of Apple’s price points. The site claims the chart shows that Apple has all the price points covered:

“From $59 to $7,000, if you want an Apple product, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll be able to pick something in your price range. Simply brilliant,” says the site.

But note that the chart does not show ALL Apple’s products and price points: there’a lot of products missing. But it does show that although Apple has a reputation as pricey, it does hit a lot of sub-$1,000 price points.

Here are two interesting but conflicting opinions on the iPad, pro and con.

Con: Tech author Rafe Colburn says the iPad is a scary harbringer of the closed future of consumer computing.

“General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.”

Pro: But Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt is extremely positively about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:

“The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.”

I’m with Hewitt. The IPad is a cloud computer par excellence, and we will likely be able to run almost any software we want on it, but it’ll be on a server somewhere and not on the iPad. Colburn notes this too, but thinks it’s a bad thing.

Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.

It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.

“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.

UPDATE: Adobe says Flash is not buggy and that Apple is protecting revenue streams from content like movies and games.

Flash will not be coming to the iPad — not now, not ever — says a source inside Apple who is part of the iPad development team.

Instead, Apple will rely on HTML 5 and CSS to play rich media, such as YouTube videos, on the web.

“Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” says the Apple source. “Apple’s done no deal with Adobe.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHzgRPXRCM&feature=player_embedded

There’s some pretty good jokes is this Barely Political mash-up of President Obama’s State of the Union address and Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation.

Via Giz.

Apple has posted video of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad. It’s available in QuickTime and MPEG-4 formats — Low, Medium, or High.

The presentation is also available as a podcast through iTunes. Here’s the iTunes link.

The backlash against the iPad was inevitable and predictable. The lack of a hard keyboard was enough to send most geeks into a fit. But the backlash against the iPad is particularly vicious and visceral.

The word “iTampon” is the #2 worldwide trending topic on Twitter right now.

“This thing sucks. Anyone who buys it is a moron,” says one commenter at Engadget.

Some sites, particularly Gizmodo, are going the extra mile in iPad-bashing.

“My god, am I underwhelmed by the iPad,” says Gizmodo’s Adam Frucci. “This is as inessential a product as I’ve ever seen, but beyond that, it has some absolutely backbreaking failures that will make me judge anyone who buys one.”

But similar reactions greeted the iPhone, the iPod and the original iMac (no keypad, closed system, no floppy), and look what happened to them. They’re just the most popular smartphone, MP3 player and single model of a PC ever built.

Thing is, the last people to ask about the iPad are geeks. This isn’t a product built for them. They’re WAY too in the weeds. They can’t get over the lack of camera, multasking or Flash. But ask my wife about the iPad and Flash and she’ll look at you like you’re speaking in tongues.

As we predicted, the iPad is Steve Jobs’ “computer for the rest of us.” It’s a natural successor to the original Mac, which introduced the GUI to PCs – and was derided by geeks as a “toy.” But look around, the GUI kinda caught on.

The iPad is not for geeks. It’s for ordinary people who want a lightweight computer and are sick of computer headaches. This is a machine you’d buy for your grandmother and not have to worry about tech-support.

Yeah, you relinquish some control — which is something PC fans have always hated about Macs — but most ordinary people are grateful not to think about file systems, software installers and virus definitions.

The iPad is the first computer for people who are completely computer illiterate — and there’s millions of them.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGiUoXB6IV4&feature=player_embedded

Jonny Ive is on top form in this iPad introductory video from Apple.

“It’s true,” he starts the video by saying. “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.”

BTW: There’s a higher res version on Apple’s homepage, but it’s taking a while to load.

A lot of people following the Steve Jobs iPad keynote this morning weren’t convinced about the device until he mentioned the price: $499.

All of sudden, people wanted to buy three of them.

The price is the big news here. Everyone was expecting it to cost $700 to $1,000 — Apple makes pricey products, right?

But there’s no “Apple tax” on the iPad. This thing is priced to move, and they’re going to sell boatloads of them. And not just to Apple fans — the iPad will attract scores of Windows switchers.

Go to any Apple store and you’ll see heaving throngs of shoppers checking out Apple’s goods. A lot of them are Windows users shopping for a new home machine to replace an aging Windows box. They’re sick of the headaches and want an alternative.

The iPad is that alternative. It’s not an extra gadget, a luxury for someone who already has an iPhone and a laptop. It’s a replacement for that laptop — a true alternative.

And at $499, it’s also an alternative to the Kindle, cheapo netbooks and even Apple’s own MacBooks.

The iPad+ keyboard dock = cheap MacBook. It’s half the price of Apple’s cheapest MacBook, and a third of the MacBook Air.

Steve Jobs is a ballsy guy. He’s probably the ballsiest CEO in the U.S. right now. Who else would undercut their own laptop line — which are Apple’s most popular and most profitable computers — with a brand new device that costs half the price?

But this is how Jobs rolls. He killed the popular iPod Mini and replaced it with the iPod Nano. He’s undercutting the entire iPod line with the iPod Touch. He’s a forward-looking guy, and the iPad is a forward-looking computer.

Of all the people in the world, you’d think Cultofmac.com readers would go bonkers for the iPad. But judging from Twitter reactions, they’re not sold — and Steve hasn’t even mentioned the price yet!

Here’s some of the feedback tweets we’re getting:

@cultofmac Just a big iPhone, nothing special just yet.

@cultofmac i’m not sold. I mean why get this if you have an iphone or mac or both????

@cultofmac: It has huge borders!!! and i hoped to see usb conectors for the #ipad

Steve Jobs just took the stage at Apple’s special media event.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” he said.

Jobs looks pretty thin but his voice is a lot stronger than October, when he last appeared in public. He looks a lot better, in fact.

Engadget has just published another picture of the tablet prototype, which clearly shows a forward-facing camera. Earlier rumors, which weren’t very plausible, said the tablet wouldn’t have a camera.

The latest spy shot (if it’s real) also clearly shows the size. That’s an iPhone in the corner, and by the looks of it, the tablet’s screen is larger than 10-inches. (The iPhone may also be a prototype: it has a black bezel, like the tablet).

The tablet’s bezel looks pretty deep. Not one of the myriad mockups floating around the internet envisioned such a beefy bezel.