Opinions - page 23

On my blog a couple of weeks back, I wrote the article More proof the iPhone App Store destroys people’s understanding of good value, highlighting rampant idiotic reactions to Loren Brichter having the audacity to charge three whole dollars for a complete rewrite of his stunning Twitter app Tweetie. Patrick Jordan referred to Tweetie 2’s price-point as a “very,very,very Bad Call,” (his emphasis), suggesting it was “spitting in the face of existing Tweetie users”. My thinking: You’d pay more than three bucks for a crappy sandwich or a luke-warm beer in the pub. But, apparently, three bucks is too much of a ‘reward’ for the hard work a dedicated indie dev has put into a leading and brilliant product.

The dev of Alchemize has clearly had enough of this kind of attitude. On the TouchArcade forum, he reveals that his company has received an astonishing 3400 emails in one month moaning about the price of his three-dollar game. Although its Puyo Puyo-style mechanics won’t win too many awards for originality, Alchemize is a fairly good game, and one that would set you back considerably more on competing platforms. To that end, the dev’s now upped his app’s price to an eye-watering $39.99 in protest at people constantly complaining about paying a few bucks for a videogame.

It’s pretty clear that something needs to be done regarding App Store pricing and value perception, because the race to the bottom is hurting many developers. Apple’s recent ‘top grossing’ chart doesn’t really help. Personally, I like Eucalyptus dev Jamie Montgomerie’s suggestion that the App Store should split its chart in two, along the lines of British 8-bit videogames during the 1980s and early 1990s, offering separate ‘budget’ and ‘full price’ charts.

Alchemize is available on the App Store, and really isn’t worth 40 bucks; but it’s probably worth a shot at three, after the 12th.

There are no big announcements from Apple today. No new products, nothing special happening. But it’s a special day nonetheless.

Because today, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg has finally declared Windows a match for OS X.

Many of you will know that Walt’s opinions are widely read, and are likely to sway a lot of people in their computer-purchasing decisions.

In recent years, he has consistently said that Mac OS X is a better choice than Windows, either XP or Vista. But with the imminent release of Windows 7 (on October 22nd), that comes to an end.

When I was a kid, digital calculators were roughly the size of a brick, and had satisfyingly chunky displays. They also, in those pre-internet days, provided a means of minor technical mischief. Type in 5318008, flip your calculator upside down, and it appeared to say ‘boobies’. If you were five, this was the most hilarious and original gag in the history of the world.

In this modern and rather less innocent age, the media would have you believe that personal technology devices in the hands of children merely teach them how to joyride while murdering innocent puppies and simultaneously fashioning bombs out of string, jelly babies and bits of twig. It’s presumably for this reason that Apple considers it a good idea to warn you (Every. Single. Time.) when you download an eReader from the App Store that it—shock!—potentially enables you to view content that some people might deem objectionable.

Enter, stage right, James Thomson, creator of iPhone/iPod touch calculator PCalc. In a minor slice of design genius, he combined the two issues mentioned above and PCalc now slaps a huge ‘Censored!’ sign across ‘naughty’ words when your device is flipped, thereby ensuring fragile little minds aren’t warped beyond all recognition.

This is a smart, funny, satirical swipe at the recent trend towards over-zealous censorship. Unless you’re, say, Sajid Farooq of NBC, who, inexplicably takes Thomson’s joke seriously (and, sadly, he’s not alone) and states PCalc’s change would “make even George Orwell shudder in his grave”. I’m thinking Orwell would be more likely to laugh his CENSORED off.

PCalc is available on the App Store for $9.99/£5.99.

This article originally appeared on Revert to Saved.

As Brian Lam on Gizmodo today says about Apple “redefining print” for its upcoming tablet, it’s all about the content.

If Apple has learned anything from the iPod, it’s that a modern consumer electronic device is a three-legged stool: hardware, software, and media that fills it.

Apple doesn’t want to launch a tablet without media to consume on it. This is the mistake Apple made with the Apple TV: It’s a great piece of hardware and software, but the content isn’t there yet (especially the paucity of Hollywood movies).

So Steve has set out to persuade publishing houses, magazine companies and textbook publishers to make interactive books and magazines that make sense on an interactive, multitouch device. Here’s the key paragraph from Lam’s story:

“Some I’ve talked to believe the initial content will be mere translations of text to tablet form. But while the idea of print on the Tablet is enticing, it’s nothing the Kindle or any E-Ink device couldn’t do. The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft’s Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static E-Ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it’ll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.”

But what might this “hybrid content” look like?

One clue comes from Enhanced Editions, a U.K. startup founded by former-book industry executives that seeks to marry technology with traditional print publishing. “We have long-since seen the destiny of the latter bound to its embrace of the former,” the company says.

Can Microsoft ever do anything right? The company has some produced some pretty good advertising for Windows 7, but for some inexplicable reason, the ads will not be shown on TV. Microsoft’s best advertising in years is restricted to a dusty corner of YouTube, where no one will see them.

After making everyone squirm with Jerry Seinfield and Bill Gates, and then reducing Windows 7 to rainbows and unicorns, the software giant has produced five new ads that are right out of Apple’s playbook.

Tech columnist Mike Elgan comes out swinging against the Microsoft tablet concept, codenamed Courier. It’s pure fantasy, says Elgan, and will NEVER be built.

“… you’ll never own a Microsoft Courier device,” he writes in his latest column. “It’s not real now. It’s not going to be real in the future. And even Microsoft does eventually make it real, it will fail in the market and you won’t buy one.”

As Elgan points out, the “leaked” photos and video of the device are pure CGI; Hollywood-style special effects that look great as mockup photos and demo videos, but may not be possible to build.

“Everything is awesome when it doesn’t have to actually be manufactured, sourced or developed at an affordable cost,” he writes. “It’s special effects wizardry, not software or hardware design.”

In edition, Elgan notes that a pen-based tablet is doomed to failure. He calls Microsoft’s repeated attempts to force pen-based devices on the market “crazy,” citing Windows for Pens in the 1990s, pen-based Tablet PC and Ultra Mobile PC, and Windows Mobile devices with pens. “I don’t think pens have any role in mass-market devices of the future — certainly nothing that could compete with an iPhone-like Apple Tablet,” he says. We agree – pens are a throwback. The future of multitouch tablets and PCs are finger-controlled.

Read the whole thing here.

If you haven’t encountered Reevoo before, go and take a poke around it now. It’s a UK-oriented customer reviews site that’s managed to aggregate an impressively large database of real comments from real people about real products.

And the iPhone version of the site is incredibly useful when you’re out at the shops trying to track down the best product at the best price.

There has been far too much stuff about minimalism on Cult of Mac recently, and it’s time we had a revolution.

What is it? It’s one of my all-time favourite Menu Bar apps, and was recently updated to work with Snow Leopard. I’m delighted to have just re-installed it after a spell of trying to live without it.

The app is called I Love Stars, and I prefer it over ever other iTunes helper I’ve tried. And I’ve tried quite a few.

Steve Jobs made a welcome return to the public eye last week at a special music event to introduce Apple’s 2009 holiday iPods.

“The September music event was classic Apple. It marked the return of the world’s greatest corporate storyteller,” says communications coach, Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.

Gallo’s book will be published later this month by McGraw-Hill and can be pre-ordered now from Amazon. Gallo’s written some insightful analyses of Steve’s presentations in the past, so we asked him to take a look at last week’s event. After the jump, Gallo breaks down his top ten presentation tips from Jobs’ latest speech.

iTunes 9 and OS X for iPhone 3.1 brought a bunch of refinements, but one strikes me as odd: along with charts for paid apps and free apps, we now have one for ‘top grossing’ apps.

It’s pretty clear this an attempt to appease developers, increasingly annoyed at the rush to 99 cents on the App Store. But here’s the thing: will anyone care? I can’t see too many consumers rushing to see which apps have grossed the most and make buying decisions based on that. ‘Top grossing apps’ also sounds pretty ugly—not really what you’d expect from Apple.

That said, there’s definitely a need to push apps with slightly higher price-points more prominently. Higher-priced apps (and I’m talking maybe $5 and above, not the likes of $50+ sat-nav apps) enable longer development periods, often leading to richer end products.

I wonder whether the App Store should instead have taken a leaf out of the 1980s games industry—at least as it was in the UK. Around 1985, publishers started toying with ‘budget’ videogames, selling cheap, relatively throwaway titles at £1.99, with full-price games being four or five times more expensive. Such publishers typically advertised less, and developers of full-price games started to get antsy. (Sound familiar?)

The solution then was simple: the chart was split. So you had a ‘full price’ chart and a ‘budget’ chart. One might argue this would only serve to push people away from high-price apps, but it would also provide a mechanism for highlighting stuff that’s unlikely to be crap. And ‘full price’ or ‘premium’ certainly sounds a whole lot nicer than ‘top grossing’.

I’ve been poking around iTunes 9 since yesterday evening (UK time), and there’s some good (app management), some bad (stability issues) and some “beaten repeatedly with an ugly stick until unconscious” ugly (most of the UI, the hideous column nav). But one thing with the App Store refresh within iTunes 9 just baffles me: the lack of wish-lists for apps.

As shown in the pic, access a song’s menu and you get to add the item to a wish-list. With an app, you can merely ‘tell a friend’. I’m sure owners of the many websites that provide wish-list functionality for the App Store are breathing a collective sigh of relief, but it strikes me a strange and inconsistent that Apple’s not enabling users to store a list of interesting apps for later purchase.

Remember John Lennon’s famous quip that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus?

Well, now Steve Jobs is bigger than the Beatles, says music-industry pundit Bob Lefsetz.

“Steve Jobs’ appearance today is the biggest story in the world,” he wrote today.

“What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where the biggest rock star doesn’t even play an instrument? I don’t know if you were online at 10 A.M. (1 P.M. on the east coast), but a roar was heard on the Internet louder than any audience explosion ever noted on a dB meter.  Steve Jobs hit the stage!”

Lefsetz has banged on about Jobs being a rock star before, but he is absolutely right.

Who’s heard a peep all day about the Beatles? It’s all been about Steve Jobs. And that’s because Apple has got someting new and fresh and honest, while the music industry is once again repackaging something old, something “that meant something once,” Lefsetz says.

Go read the whole thing.

While it’s great news that Steve Jobs is “vertical,” CultofMac’s readers are in revolt over the lack of a camera in the new iPod touch. One reader is even threatening to buy a Microsoft Zune.

“That pretty much seals the deal for me to go to Zune,” says reader Joan. “Darn, and I thought that Apple would have blown Zune’s top off today.”

Reader Miguel writes that he will not be upgrading his iPod Touch. “Big disappointment from Apple,” he says. “Hopefully they include it next year or before that.”

Why didn’t Apple upgrade the iPod touch with a camera? Here at CoM we suspect it’s the last-minute manufacturing glitches that were rumored to have delayed the new devices. After all, convincing photographs of a prototype, camera-equipped touch have been circulating, and case manufacturers are betting heavily that the iPod would get a backside camera.

CoM writer Giles Turnbull suspects it’s only a temporary manufacturing delay. Apple will add cameras as soon as the factories are ready.

Says Giles: “I think it’s coming, possibly sooner than people think. It’s madness to have a camera at the top end and bottom end and not in the middle, so common sense suggests it will be added to the touch as soon as manufacturing facilities can be secured for it.”

Basically: new iPods and iTunes, no Beatles and no tablet.

In declining order of likelihood, here’s what Apple will show off tomorrow:

Noted cogitator Jason Kottke has an interesting thought on the experience of getting fully up to speed with brand-new Apple hardware and software. Basically, things have gotten so good that, barring minor speed improvements, you can’t tell any difference between new and old. He terms it “The Apple Upgrade Problem”:

“Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.”

Jason’s on to something interesting here. If you are a frequent Apple upgrader, you get far less of a thrill than if you wait a long time between devices. Consider the negligible differences between last year’s MacBook Pros and this year’s (unless you love battery life, FireWire, and SD cards, there’s not much to discuss). Or between the first video-capable iPod nanos and the current models (styling and form factor tell the whole story). And that’s without mentioning that it’s literally impossible to tell a 16-gig iPhone 3G apart from a 3GS.

So what does this mean?

For most people, very little. Unless you’re buying replacement hardware on an annual or at most biannual basis, you won’t have these kinds of difficulties. I, for one, had an iPod from 2004 that lasted me until I bought a green nano last year — huge leap forward. My PowerBook G4 stuck it out for five-and-a-half years before my beloved unibody MacBook arrived. And I won’t even go into just how much better the iPhone 3GS is than the BlackBerry Pearl it replaced.

For some people, Apple’s current predictability is a major boon. For corporate purchasers for example, the ability to requisition multiple models of a computer and not make it clear in the design who has the nicest or newest machine is a big deal for IT. That way I don’t get jealous when my 2008 unibody MacBook starts to age unfavorably against what I can only presume will be a 2010 unibody MacBook Pro. That’s true on iPhones, too, where executives who adopted a 3G last year don’t look hopelessly out of date around their 3GS-packing peers.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the very few people who are negatively affected by stuff like this are Apple’s most diehard fans — creative professionals who rely on new Mac hardware and software to help them do great work. The same people, it should be noted, who carried Apple through its darkest days. I’m less concerned on the hardware front (Apple always sticks with a design for a few years to avoid costs and focus on bigger leaps forward), but in software, it is a niggling question. And if the Mac isn’t providing creative pros with interesting novelty and inspiration, Apple isn’t executing on the fullness of its mission — where’s the creativity?

Now, it’s clear that Snow Leopard was a deliberate pause in the OS X development cycle to make sure that everything just worked a whole lot better. Other than a few front-stage changes, it was meant to invisibly make your existing Mac more stable and speedy. The question remains just how Apple will evolve OS X next. There are a lot fewer gaps than there used to be — and so much interesting work to be done in mobile and other touch interfaces.

What do you think — is there interesting work to be done on OS X as we know it? Or does Snow Leopard signal an end to innovation in conventional desktop operating systems?

When I first went to pick up my iPhone 3G, I was scared. I know what my hands are capable of: Horrible, unthinkable acts of clumsiness. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve hurt others. I’ve even hurt my kitties. So why would I want to put this salvific piece of tech gold into harm’s way? I need to protect this treasure, specifically because I don’t have another $600 to spend on a replacement. And I will be needing one soon.

But I don’t put my iPhone in a case. You shouldn’t either.

If Apple wanted to stand the world on its ear next Wednesday at the It’s Only Rock and Roll But We Like It event in San Francisco, the company would announce it is opening iPhone software development to all comers and is dropping the facade of exclusive distribution through the iTunes App Store.

Heresy, you say? Perhaps in the eyes of some, but read on to learn why those two moves would be best for the company, the platform, for developers and – most of all – consumers.

Snow Leopard’s revitalised Services menu is probably my favorite improvement among the many included in the upgrade.

At long last, the user has been given total control over Services. We can choose whether or not they are used, we can assign keyboard shortcuts that suit us, and we can create entirely new Services using Automator.

The crucial difference between Services in Leopard and Services in Snow Leopard is context.

Coinciding with Steve Jobs return to the public eye next week, Penguin Portfolio is reissuing my book Inside Steve’s Brain with a new chapter about how Apple will cope without its dynamic CEO.

Published in April 2008, Inside Steve’s Brain was a New York Times best-seller and an international hit (translated into 15 languages and a best-seller in Brazil and Italy). But the book was written before Jobs’ recent liver transplant, so the publisher asked me to update it for a second edition.

Jobs will take the stage next week at Apple’s special press event to show off new holiday iPods to the press. He has to: If he doesn’t show up Sept. 9, there’ll be a media shitstorm and Apple’s stock will tank.

Jobs’ last public appearance happened exactly a year ago. Last Sept. 9, he presided over a similar iPod event at the same venue. Bloomberg had accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, and when he appeared onstage he flashed a slide with Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Indeed. One liver transplant later, Jobs is still with us, thank God. But there will be a time when Apple will have to do without its supreme leader, and as I explain in the new chapter of Inside Steve’s Brain, the company will be both royally fucked and totally OK when the inevitable happens.

Apple, you guys always make me smile! I love you and all your products!

I love surprises too! Those cute little tricks you discover when you’re using Apple stuff! Great!

And I’ve just discovered the best surprise yet!.

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more it looks like it’s designed to run Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Look at Expose in the Dock — the new feature that reveals all an application’s open windows when you click and hold the application’s icon. It’s tailor-made for fingers. Even more convincing is Stacks in the Dock. Hit a folder icon in the dock, and up pops the folder and all its files. Each icon is a big target for your finger, and the window has a big, fat slider for scrolling up and down (no more fiddly little arrows at the top or bottom). Both of these UI tweaks scream ‘touchscreen.’

And then today I discovered an unheralded feature that the minute I saw it, I thought, “Game over! Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens. This is a tablet operating system.”

Apple decides to open doors in Milan — recently named more fashionable than New York — so you’d think it’d be somewhere the city’s whippet-thin Pradamatons would want to be seen sashaying into.

Instead, Apple is opening its first Milan store this Saturday in a place called Carugate. It’s 15 km away from the city center,  a place best known to locals because Ikea also calls it home.

It’ll be in a mall — note the pic above of a woman with a grocery cart — and hopefully  the inside layout is a bit more interesting than the storefront. And instead of having 24/7 access, like many Italian malls, it’s usually closed on Sundays.

Rumors were that Apple’s first Milan store would be a former Stefanel store in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian shopping zone favored by locals and tourists who stroll from the Cathedral to Piazza San Babila.

Next time I need anything, I’ll be heading to the  reseller in the chic Brera area — used as a fashion shoot backdrop and where staff wears “Steve Jobs for Mayor” T-shirts.

People: location, location, location.

Via Corriere della Sera

Earlier this week we took a look at how Apple’s upcoming tablet will be a paradigm shift by introducing a different kind of computing. Here in more detail is how Apple’s tablet will be great for gaming.