Digg founder Kevin Rose announced his concern for Steve Jobs’ health Tuesday, but there’s always a subtext to such public displays of empathy. We’re not sure what it is in Rose’s case, but a few guesses are he:
a) puts way too much stock in what he reads on Gizmodo
b) is more worried about getting publicity for his own Internet venture
c) is a typically clueless amateur money manager
d) lives to see his name on the Internet
e) all of the above
On top of which, he’s either a very careless typist or an embarrassingly poor speller.
News broke over the weekend that iFart Mobile, the current #1 paid application on Apple’s iTunes AppStore, netted its creators $40,000 in two days at Christmas, according to a blog post by Joel Comm, the application’s lead developer.
The two-day holiday haul was in addition to $25,000+ in profits the app generated in the two weeks prior to Christmas.
Comm’s is by no means a unique success story. Steve Demeter, developer of the game Trism, made $250,000 in the first two months the AppStore was open; Eliza Block, the developer of “2 Across” app, was reportedly earning $2,000 per day on her application back in September.
Granted these are but three names out of the more than 10,000 apps now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s not difficult to do the math, though, and when an application designed around people’s fascination with flatulence – one of dozens dedicated to the same theme – can net its creator $40,000 in two days, it would seem irresponsible of a director attempting a remake of The Graduate not to write this exchange into the script:
Mr. McGuire: I want to say two words to you. Just two words.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: iPhone Apps.
I have to admit I have been keeping abreast of technology news with one eye, sort of, during this Holiday Season. I have a family, and my one child is going to grow up fast, so I’m told. Thus, I’ve been spending more time with him since he’s off from school for the winter break.
I was a little surprised, then, to see all the hoopla frothing around HP’s introduction Monday of a new Home Media Server for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network. “That sounds kind of familiar,” I thought.
But there it was, all over Gizmodo and Engadget and TUAW and I said to myself, “Has the Apple community been somehow missing this appliance and its amazements?”
To be fair, some of the reportage was done in the context of wondering if Apple itself might be coming out with a similar appliance, and whether or how it might be integrated with the company’s MobileMe web services product. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s this trade show coming up next week in San Francisco, which would be a perfect time and place to introduce just such a device. The suspense is now killing me.
But this HP baby that got all the ink? Well, it’s compatible with Mac and Windows, organizes files across all PCs on a connected network, streams media across a home network and the Internet, has a server for iTunes that centralizes iTunes music libraries on the server for playback to any networked Mac or PC running iTunes, and costs $600 with a 750GB hard disk or $750 for one with a 1.5TB disk.
Sort of like a souped up version of the Lacie Home Media Server I reviewed six months ago for Mac|Life Magazine, priced at about $150 with a 500GB disk.
Also to be fair, HP’s server plays nice with Time Capsule and Leopard, and lets you easily publish pictures and video to social networks such as MySpace and YouTube – which is not to say Lacie has not updated its software to do the same in the past six months – but on the whole, HP’s latest venture outside its core printer making business struck me as something of the very slow-news-day variety.
More Apple oriented websites felt obligated to post the news on Monday that casemaker Vaja has added an iPhone Nano category to its offerings of cases for Apple phone products. Coming on the heels of last week’s news that XSNS had done the same, the pre-Macworld rumor mill seems to indicate a strong likelihood that Apple will introduce a mini-me version of its popular mobile phone next week in San Francisco.
Is this what we’ve come to? Roughly 10 million people have bought iPhones this year. AT&T is selling refurbished iPhones for $99 and now you can buy them new at Walmart, too. Who, exactly is dying for an iPhone Nano?
I have to go on record as saying I’ll be disappointed to see Apple cave in to the mobile handset market’s mystifying tradition of churning out 1001 minutely varied executions on a theme, for the sake of what? Surely not functionality.
Prior to the iPhone you had relatively similar smartphones made by a few companies (Palm, RIM, Nokia) and hundreds of other devices that were just, phones, made by dozens and dozens of manufacturers. Even within the smartphone realm, my eyes glazed over at the number of “different ” Blackberries, for example.
The iPhone came along and changed everything. And in perfect Apple fashion there were basically two choices, a perfectly fine device and another one for those whose device must, under any circumstance be perceived as “bigger.” Hey, fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Corvette…
But now, a Nano? Something smaller? Less functional than its big brother? Less touchscreen real estate? A virtual keyboard for really tiny fingers?
Knock yourself out, Apple. I would think there are greater heights to scale.
It seems that suing Apple is no longer just the sport of crazy chicks allegedly denied their dog-given right to resell iPhones at extortionist rates because Apple discounted them. Instead, we have crazy patent campers who think that 25 years after Apple pioneered the use of the GUI in personal computers, they’re entitled to license fees on a patent granted last March.
Join me in going totally off the deep end after the jump…
Last week I asked Cult readers for their nominations for new Mac app of the year. Things, 1Password and Dropbox seemed to be the consensus choices, all of them excellent new software products.
It got me thinking, though: how has my computing behavior changed during the last 12 months? What new software am I using that I wasn’t using last Christmas, and why?
Writing Monday for the eWeek blog, AppleWatch, Joe Wilcox gave the iPhone a D in telephony and a C for battery life, saying he simply could not recommend the device as a phone. Despite singing the praises of Apple’s mobile platform he gave it an overall grade of B- and seemed mighty pleased to announce that everyone in his family has rejected the iPhone in favor of an iPod Touch + some other cell phone.
I find Wilcox’s assessment curious and wonder how many of the other 8 – 10 million iPhone owners feel their device is so disappointing from the telephony and usability standpoints that they’d actually prefer to carry two devices around instead of one. Follow me after the jump to learn what Wilcox thinks is so bad about iPhone and where my own assessment takes me in response.
When it comes to competition, the one between Apple and Dell often breaks out beyond traditional metrics such as revenue, profits, market share and units sold.
Many years ago, before Apple reinvented itself under the return stewardship of Steve Jobs, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was famously quoted as saying the best thing a new commander could do with the Apple ship would be to shut the company, sell its assets and give the proceeds to the shareholders.
This fall, around the time of Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, when Jobs took a rarely exercised opportunity to bask in glory of his company’s recent success in a lighthearted, congenial chat with analysts, many technology writers were quick to point out that Apple had more than enough cash on-hand to buy Dell outright, should the Board choose to do so.
In a recent blog post, Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communications and conversations, sought to extend the competition between the companies to a battlefield on which many will be made and broken in the next decade – the environment.
Apple is all talk and no walk, to paraphrase Pearson’s criticism. He is apparently unappreciative of new Apple advertising touting Mac notebooks as “The World’s Greenest Family of Noteboks.” Pearson goes on to list some specific measures Dell has taken to reduce its carbon footprint and describes interactions with suppliers that will reduce Dell’s responsibility for millions of pounds of unnecessary shipping and packaging waste. Apple’s advertising is dismissed as “wild claims” and mere “rhetoric.”
Fighting words, perhaps, to some. Edible Apple has a nice critique of Pearson’s post – much ado about nothing, in short – though I can speak to one suggestion Pearson has for Apple that they might consider at One Infinite Loop. Pearson says “be part of the conversation,” and goes on to whine about Apple employees not being permitted to write blogs, which seems an off-the-mark complaint.
But I have been working on a story for a green designs publication for over a month, trying to get someone at Apple to speak with me about the very things the company advertises in its “greenest family” spots – and I’ve run into a brick wall. There are over two dozen Public Relations Vice Presidents on my list of Apple contacts, and from what I can tell none of those people seems interested in speaking to journalists – even to those of us who are nominally interested in helping Apple tell its story to a wider audience.
We want to know what the Mac community’s favorite new apps are. What software – first released during 2008 – has fired you up, made you incredibly productive, had you screaming with joy or laughing with delight, or generally just been jolly useful?
We want to know.
We’re prepared to be a little fuzzy with the rules. If your nomination first appeared as a beta in late 2007, that’s fine. If it’s only just appeared in the last few days, that’s fine too. But it needs to be a NEW Mac app, and it needs to have been new this year. You get the idea.
(And yes, we’re going to do one of these for iPhone apps too – maybe next week. One thing at a time.)
So, fire away. Speak your branes. Perhaps we can reach some kind of consensus. The comments box, lovely Cultists, is yours to sully.
“Apple is sending a message to the entire community–professionals, hobbyists, media, Mac User Groups, and even IDG themselves–that they care nothing for the community who supported them through thick and thin,” she declares.
And so: “If you’re attending the Macworld Expo keynote on Tuesday, Jan. 6, you can send a message to Apple by remaining silent during the 2009 keynote. While Phil Schiller is on the stage, let there be no applause, no whistling… just utter and complete silence.”
What do you think of Lesa’s plan? Will you join her in silent protest? If you do, and Apple DOES finally unveil that updated Newton-Pippin-Tablet-iPhone crossover that everyone’s been going on about for so long, how will you manage to contain yourself?
I can’t help thinking that Lesa’s just shooting herself in the foot here. By announcing that it will quit Macworld, Apple has already made clear that it doesn’t care what Macworld attendees think. It’s going to do its own thing, regardless.
(Photo used under Creative Commons license: thanks kradlum.)
Every time I say this, some people start getting all shirty and saying: “Yes it is! Steve matters!”
After my Don’t Panic post yesterday, there were similar comments, like this one: “Yeah, actually Steve Jobs health is our business. He made Apple, he revived Apple and he brought Apple to it’s current massive success. Steve Jobs IS Apple. Without him the company has a far smaller chance of survival.”
I completely disagree with this line of thinking, and here’s why:
Politics, not platelets, are why Steve Jobs is turning over the Keynote responsibility to Phil Schiller at next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo, according to CNBC correspondent Jim Goldman.
Citing “sources inside the company,” Goldman writes that Jobs’ demurral from the Keynote address for Apple’s last appearance at the venerable trade show in San Francisco is assuredly not a product of any inability on his part to perform for health reasons, but is rather a result of the company’s “trying to separate itself from Macworld for some time.” Amid the growing trend of big companies scaling back participation in traditional trade shows world wide, Apple has also in recent years taken the lead in producing its own product release events, such as the ones that introduced the company’s new iPods this summer and new notebook computers in the fall.
Apple also directly reaches millions of visitors who come weekly to its growing chain of world-wide retail stores, and millions more who receive the company’s carefully designed and controlled messaging through visits to the company’s iTunes stores.
Knowing how the Apple-interested universe’s collective pulse begins to race with every inkling of Jobs’ mortality, it’s no surprise to see Monday’s announcement generate lots of speculation and extra volatility in the movement of the company’s stock price. As Goldman writes, however, the party to be concerned about is not Jobs, and not Apple, but Macworld. For some time now it’s been fashionable to imagine scenarios about Apple in the inevitable post-Jobs era. But will there even be a Macworld in the post-Apple era?
Apple’s decision not to attend Macworld might mean any of the following:
– Yeah, maybe Steve Jobs is really ill. It’s none of our business, though
– Apple no longer wishes to indulge the trade show industry
– Apple would rather present stuff on its own agenda, to its own timetable, when there is stuff ready to present. And if it wishes to hire a big room in which to do so, it will certainly have the money to do that
– Perhaps, given the success of the iPhone, Apple would rather devote its energies to publicising and marketing the iPhone and the App Store
What Apple’s decision not to attend Macworld might NOT mean:
– All of the above
– Any other speculation you read elsewhere today
Meanwhile, keep injecting the rumor sites if that’s what grabs you. New Mac minis! Some kind of netbook! iPhones on skis! Yeah yeah yeah; it’s all just hot air and page impressions until Phil Schiller stands on that stage. And even after that, it’ll mostly be page impressions.
In the wake of developer Craig Hockenberry’s “Dear Steve” letter complaining about feeling forced to drift in a sea of 99¢ “ringtone apps,” and the inevitable charges of petulant whining that some accused him of in response, developers at Appcubby have published detailed financial records showing, down to the dollar, what goes into keeping food on the table for an iPhone app developer.
Among the things Hockenberry mentioned in his developers’ wish list to Steve were: ways to accurately track who exactly is downloading apps (and which ads/links they clicked on to get to the store), and the ability to offer free demo version of apps that expire after a given time, prompting people to buy the full app. Appcubby’s records would appear to support the view that Hockenberry was not just crying in his beer, and their post supports his call for free demos and more ad-tracking capabilities as two things that would greatly help the situation.
We reported last week on internet voice service provider Truphone’s mobile app that enables Voice over IP phone calling over WiFi using Apple’s iPod Touch. Wednesday, the company announced availability of Truphone Anywhere, an update to its iPhone app that lets iPhone users make VoIP calls “even if you’re not connected to WiFi or a 3G network.”
With TruPhone Anywhere you pay for a local connection – meaning your call is routed to the cellular network – before the rest of the call is connected using VoIP. Change-o, presto: cheap international calling is here.
Except that it’s been here for more than a year. San Francisco-based service provider RF.com has enabled the same type of calling with any VoIP provider (Skype me, anyone?), and even Asterisk, since shortly after the debut of the original iPhone.
Another mobile VoIP provider, JAJAH, had an app to enable VoIP-completed cellular calling ready for the AppStore launch this past July, but Apple rejected it “because the VoIP service is active over the cellular network, which as outlined in the iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.15 is prohibited: ‘If an Application requires or will have access to the cellular network, then additionally such Application: – May not have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality,” according to JAJAH spokesman Fredrick Hermann.
Perhaps Apple is less concerned with enforcing the SDK’s VoIP via cellular prohibition today; perhaps Truphone’s “Anywhere” functionality slipped through, or perhaps its app will be pulled from the AppStore tomorrow, or next week. As usual, Apple isn’t saying anything publicly.
At a talk in San Francisco tonight, I encountered a very cool (relatively) new OS X app called MemoryMiner. Basically, it takes all of your photos, your address book, and Google Maps to create interesting, shareable stories with friends and family. The most important piece of the app is its ability to quickly tag a portion of an image, much as Facebook and Flickr do, then associate those pieces of data back to your wider social network — over the course of time. It’s explicitly designed to allow you to tag a person at different points in their lifetime, so you can track and associate your family’s history over the course of centuries, if you have the documents to support it.
It’s currently in version 1.85 (available for a 15-day trial or $45), and creator John Fox tells me version 2.0 is well on its way, as is a social tool to track your personal geographic history compared to others. Having played around with the app for a few hours now, I will say that the program is really great at tagging and adding in new people to my MemoryMiner people file. In a few minutes, I had clips of pictures and names with all the people I wanted to. Unfortunately, for those whose birth dates I didn’t know (most of them), I had no ability to track their photos over their lifetimes. But it largely works as advertised.
Unfortunately, it has some pretty basic, pretty show-stopping limitations for the time-being. I couldn’t get it to import my iPhoto 08 Library, so that’s a huge portion of my memories that aren’t included right now. Even more troublingly, the program lacks the basic functionality to rotate photos so they’re in the correct orientation. Or, if it’s there, I just couldn’t locate it, which would almost be worse
Still, it’s a program with considerable potential. I could even imagine the company setting up a service to scan, upload, and tag archival photos so they can be associated and studied by users at home. I can just see the genealogy lovers getting way into this. Maybe in version 2.0.
The proliferation of cheap applications on the AppStore is stifling innovation and holding Apple’s mobile touch platform back from realizing its true potential, according to developer Craig Hockenberry.
In a post Tuesday at his furbo.org blog, Hockenberry published an open letter to Steve Jobs, saying, “I’m not going to give you suggestions on what to do” about developers (himself included) working on 99¢ titles that have a limited lifespan and broad appeal instead of on “the cooler (and more complex) ideas that could see the utility of the platform taken to another level.”
He goes on to describe the economics of paying development team members the going rate of $150-200 per hour, the realities of having to make up the bulk of development costs during the short period of time an app is likely to be featured among the tens of thousands soon to be available on the AppStore, and concludes “there’s too much risk…in developing something that takes 6 or even 9 man months…with a break even at 215K or 322K units.”
Under the prevailing conditions, where 99¢ “ringtone apps” dominate the landscape, Hockenberry says “going for simple and cheap instead of complex and expensive” is the fiscally responsible choice for developers to make.
In the end, he says “We’re not afraid of competition. In fact, we welcome it as a way to improve our products and business. [But] we’re hoping for a way to rise above the competition when we do our job well, not just when we have the lowest price.”
It’s hard to quibble with Hockenberry’s assessments from a developer’s economic risk perspective, especially in the midst of a contracting economy such as the one at present. It’s also unlikely the iPhone’s “killer app” will end up being one that goes to market at 99¢.
From the perspective of consumers, though, from that of users of new technology that is itself in the midst of early stage development, of users who in many cases make purchase decisions sight-unseen or on the basis of 2 minute YouTubed product demos – simple and cheap seems just about right.
So here’s some footage from this weekend’s opening of the first German Apple Store in Munich. If you’ve attended one of these before, there won’t be much that’s new in this video; you know about the line outside, about the cheering, whooping staff, about the free t-shirts, about the buzz inside where everyone’s either looking at Macs, or photographing people looking at Macs.
It’s so dismally identical to all the other Apple Store openings that it’s a little depressing. Isn’t this in danger of becoming a parody of itself? Maybe that fridge has already been nuked.
I don’t mean to sound all curmudgeonly here, but a thought occurs to me: if you’ve ever defended Apple in a web forum, then been set upon by a rabid hoard of Mac-haters who tear your opinions to shreds and call you a nutter, and you’ve wondered WHY they do that – well, this is why.
Just in time for getting a little bit of the backstory before the 25th Anniversary of Mac kicks into high gear, Computer Shopper has a great look back at the very early years of Apple Computers by Editor in Chief Emeritus Stan Veit. We’re talking early enough that Steve Jobs was willing to give away 10% of the company for $10,000, according to Veit.
The long article is well worth a read for Veit’s inside take on the two young, “long haired hippies and their friends” who eventually revolutionized the world. It’s not an especially flattering portrait of Jobs, though it’s had plenty of company on that score over the years. The article does contain some great early pics of Jobs and Woz and some of the earliest Apple gear.
I wrote my last “OS9 – Blimey Some People Still Use It” article for Mac DevCenter back in 2004 (see OS9, Mine All Mine); it was fun to write and nostalgic too, but I didn’t imagine I’d be writing a similar piece four years later.
But – blimey – there are STILL some people out there using OS9 and very happy with it too, thank you very much.
One of them is Jerad Walters, who runs publishing house Centipede Press and does so using a mirror-door 1.2 GHz G4, 1.25 GB RAM and 1.7TB of hard disk space spread across four hard drives.
But why, Jerad, why?
“My books are built with InDesign 1.5 and Photoshop 6 running Suitcase 8. The G4 boots up in about 30 seconds and then I have a QuicKey sequence that loads all applications in largest-chunk–of-RAM-required order (Photoshop first, InDesign second, etc). It is all up and running in a couple minutes.
“The speed of the Finder is simply draw-dropping. However, the speed of the Finder is OS X is also pretty quick, but there is just a responsiveness in 9 that cannot be matched by X.
“Menu and window actions all take place so quickly. Plus it is easier to tell windows from background from menus. There is a clarity to the OS 9 display that is lacking in OS X.”
For email, he uses Claris Emailer. For word processing, TexEdit. He makes use of the DragAnyWindow control panel for easier window management, and of HoverBar, a precursor to the OS X Dock.
Jerad does use OS X occasionally – it has a drive all to itself – but when he’s using it he misses things only found in OS9.
“I miss the Put Away command, and the regular trash can more than anything. There’s one thing I wish OS 9 had: an option for a toolbar for Finder windows; that is a really nice feature of OS X.”
So, OS9 users, this is your comments thread. Tell us why we’re all wrong to be using this newfangled OS X stuff.
First: here’s Dong Chang! (App Store) What is it, and what does it do? I think we’d better let the developer explain:
“It is every funny and easier to play. Try to sway your iphone/itouch Three dimensional direction, You can get three Hip-Hop’s accompanist. Whenever, any where you can dancing with your iphone/itouch. Come on, Move your body, geting Exercises! You will be enjoy it.”
Fantastic! Next!
Whacket! (App Store) “replicates the experience of playing your favorite racket sports – without the hassle of all those silly rackets.” Thank goodness for that. Rackets, eh? Who needs ’em?
The thing about Apple Stores – the thing that makes them such a perfect target for the writers of The Simpsons – is the vibe they have about them. They’re not like most stores; entering the Apple Store is supposed to be an experience beyond that of simply handing over money to Steve Jobs. There’s supposed to be a wow factor. And the architecture and interior design is essential to that.
This is what Cultism is all about. Not merely that you make a stop motion movie using your Mac; not merely that you make one featuring dancing Mac buttons; but that you own five of the things in the first place.
