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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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| Wednesday, June 12, 2019 | |
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One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention directly is why Project Catalyst only lets iPad apps run on macOS, not iPhone apps: It’s because there aren’t enough good iPad apps, and Apple still wants to see people take the iPad as a platform seriously. I mean, I understand. iPad apps should work much more cleanly on a Mac than apps designed for iPhones. That is, if your app is well-designed for the iPad, it’ll likely be a lot fewer tweaks away from being a good macOS citizen than an iPhone app. The resonance between “iPadOS”* and macOS is clear. If you’re Apple and wanted the most Mac apps, you’d let anything from iOS run there. But if you wanted more apps targeting Pad, you’d bribe folks by saying their iPad-specific port gets them a macOS app for free, too. Guess which Apple did? * The most recent Talk Show suggested that iPadOS was still just iOS by another, marketing-friendly name. I think that’s even better evidence this “iPad apps only” is a bribe, not a tech requirement. posted by ruffin at 6/12/2019 12:00:00 AM |
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| Thursday, February 23, 2017 | |
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Daring Fireball has some thoughts on why iPad sales are down:
This begs the question, "Why do we feel we need to upgrade our phones so much more often than our tablets?" There are lots of "obvious" reasons.
But I wonder if there's an even simpler practical explanation: When we use our phones, we're in a hurry. A few hundred milliseconds is a much bigger delay for typical phone usage than when you're relaxing/consuming on your iPad. When I'm in a hurry, a faster processor/experience matters more. In "patting your own back" news...From Apple unlikely to develop an Echo-like standalone Siri speaker - report:
File that away in the annuals of, "I believe I had that." Labels: alexa, business, gruber, iPad, iphone, siri, TKHadThat, W1 chip posted by ruffin at 2/23/2017 07:50:00 AM |
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| Monday, July 30, 2012 | |
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Former Apple Ad Man Slams 'Genius' TV Spots as "Landing With A Thud" - Mac Rumors: This is different. These ads are causing a widespread gagging response, and deservedly so. I honestly canโt remember a single Apple campaign thatโs been received so poorly. It's probably time to start collecting the Apple Fails. I know that's tired, but the post-Jobs Apple is starting to act more like a typical company. As long as there's no serious brain drain (though Mansfield leaving isn't good), they'll remain above average, but things just don't feel the same from my poor vantage point. There was the issue sending out OS X Server codes for Up to Date folks who wanted straight Mountain Lion. There's, well, there's Bob Mansfield selling stock and leaving. There's Tim Cook's claim that Apple will start paying more attention to business users. There's a smaller iPad rumored to be on the way, something Jobs claimed wouldn't happen not because there wasn't money in it, but because it wasn't The Right Way to create hardware. Jobs left money on the table to stay idealistically committed to his concept of great devices. Cook's taking more of that money off. I don't know, perhaps it's even sustainable. I must think so on some level; I haven't sold all my stock yet. But it is time to start collecting Apple fails. And no, Ping, though a fail, at least works. It was a lost gamble, but at least it was a gamble. Apple needs social. Worth a shot. Labels: apple, apple fail, hats of money, iPad, Jobs posted by ruffin at 7/30/2012 11:25:00 PM |
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| Saturday, February 05, 2011 | |
 I've been meaning to watch the social network, and saw it teased on iTunes today. I clicked on the very off-chance that it was a cheap rental. No luck. But what was strange was the grayed out HD choices. I hadn't seen that, nor its "The HD version of this movie is available on Mac or Windows 7 computers with HDCP components." I'm using Vista right now. No dice, I guess. Nor is my monitor HDCP. I didn't think that always happened though, and somewhat randomly picked out the most under-appreciated Bond movie, The Living Daylights, to check. Sure enough, I'm good enough to rent that in HD. Luckily I already own it. On VHS, I think. This was pretty reminiscent of a complaint against the MacBook from Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign, whose banner I've got at the top of this page. The MacBook apparently won't let you play every movie through non-HDCP out. Here's a quote, if you follow a link to ars technica in the FSF complaint. When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system. Strangely, only some iTunes Store movies appear to be HDCP-aware, as other purchased media like Stargate: Continuum and Heroes season 2 play through the projector just fine. Attempts to play Hellboy 2 or other HDCPed films through the projector via QuickTime also get denied. Other movies that don't work include newer films like Iron Man, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Love Guru, but older films like Shawshank Redemption are restricted as well. So I've included Hellboy 2's entry from the iTunes store in this entry's screenshot as well. Yet another option: Here I can only grab SD versions unless I have an iPad or Apple TV. "Also Available in HD on iPad and Apple TV." That's strange, huh? I'm not sure if it's the SD version in the ars technica story. I suppose iTunes might even restrict SD playback. But it, regardless, is a third choice in HD content. 1.) Can't buy without the right OS. 2.) Can buy, no questions asked. 3.) Can't buy without the right snazzy Apple hardware. It's a strange new world of copyright. I like lending books. So much more intuitive. That said, I'm buying more and more from Kindle. Saves me gas, I can put the text on my iPod, and I've often got a free, if poorly read, audiobook to boot. Nothing better than listening to six hours of Foucault via computerized narrator. posted by ruffin at 2/05/2011 10:48:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, October 20, 2010 | |
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Nothing too earth shattering today from Apple. The App Store for Macs is a pretty good idea to steal from iOS, as are the WriteRoom like full screen apps. The item that hit me most squarely is the processor in the new 11" MacBook Air. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.4 GHz. That's not a misprint -- it's .4 GHz slower than the previous MBA lowest rung and about a third slower than the one I'm using in my year-old MacBook now. This reminds me of the Atom processors in netbooks, as does the size, price, and lack of ports. The 11" MBA is, essentially, Apple's netbook. Why does Jobs say it isn't one? Well, because they're charging more than $200 for it. Even with the Mac Tax, a netbook shouldn't be more than, what, $7-800? The MBA for a grand is tempting. I'd love to lose two pounds, and the new MBA takes 4 Gigs of RAM, twice the soldered-on amount previously offered. Still, it just ain't fast. Goodbye, Moore. If it had 3G for a grand, however, I'd be more tempted. Honestly, I half-way expected to hear 3G was the third iPad lesson to be brought back to the Mac. posted by ruffin at 10/20/2010 03:38:00 PM |
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| Thursday, April 01, 2010 | |
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From David Pogueโs Review of the iPad - NYTimes.com: Thereโs an e-book reader app, but itโs not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). Well, he's probably not wrong in the sense that movies in a book form factor have largely displaced the demand for text. That said, I've personally purchased a good deal more books (here, "books writ large") recently because of my iPod. I've sailed through a few junk novels (vampires and WoW fantasy), Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide (horrible job editing the eBook, however, RosettaBooks), part of Pygmy from that Fight Club guy (a little too hard core for me to finish), short story from Frank Herbert, a double issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, etc etc., as well as a few books for young'uns that I've managed to share. The key is that it's lots easier to read when you're accidentally carrying these books around with your calendar, notebook, mail handler, and mp3 player. If the iPad is mobile at all, those who do read will read more. And more importantly to book publishers (and this is where Pogue misses the boat), it's a lot harder to buy a used eBook than a used codex (ie, paper book). The iPod/Kindle/iPad/iPhone platforms all allow strict DRM, both in software and in physical tipping points (how exactly would I share my eBooks? I can figure it out, but 1) it's illegal to pass files, I believe and 2) I can't toss 'em across the office when I'm done and not worry about when they come back). The iPad will be much friendly to read on than the iPod and iPhone, even friendlier than the none too colorful (see Sega Game Gear commercial, above -- and that's the guy from My Name is Earl, ain't it?) Kindle. I've used my laptops a good deal, but a longer-lived battery and a friendly, hand-holdable device should encourage even more folk who like to read to read digitally and, I'll wager, to read more. And it's going to be much more likely that what they're reading is material they purchased directly from the publisher. Take that, local thrift store! Labels: amazon, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ebooks, hats of money, iPad, kindle, online distribution posted by ruffin at 4/01/2010 11:27:00 AM |
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| Thursday, March 25, 2010 | |
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If there's one thing that I know Jobs would like to have back, it's an Apple computing platform with tightly controlled access for developers. As the Wall Street Journal apparently reports (via AppleInsider): "Jobs has kept 'tight control and directors have rarely challenged him.'" His preferred dev environment is no different. Right now, on the Macintosh, anyone can code up an app and release it without so much as Googling (Binging?) the Apple Human (once User) Interface Guidelines. Heck, even I've released apps for the Mac into the wild. Oh noes!!! Oh wait, Jobs has gotten that closed development environment, hasn't he? It's the iPod, iPhone, and, increasingly overlapping with the Mac, the iPad: In February, it was rumored that Hulu, an online streaming video destination for multiple networks, plans to make its videos available without Flash for the iPad platform. Reports then alleged that the Web site could be prepared by the time the iPad launches April 3, though it was said the service would likely be subscription only. If the iPad only does HTML5/H.264 jive, the fact that this protocol isn't the most popular on the net gives it a leg up on open browsers. That is, if Hulu makes HTML5 pay to play only, thanks to the iPad's effectively closed platform, Hulu has a ready-made, similarly closed/captive market. * If the iPad did Flash, not only would there be a closed system involved that Apple doesn't control, but there'd be no easy way to differentiate folks using the iPad platform. Goodbye Hulu revenue stream. *With no Flash, Hulu has a reason to partner/get in bed with/come to the defense of Apple's iPad and to temper its support of Adobe's Flash. Captive markets are exactly what Jobs likes to have (see the iPhone developer program and the rules for distributing software, where Apple can even, 1984-style, rip programs off of your iPhone retroactively!), at least until he gets to the point that market dominance (digital music) makes it so that captivity works against Apple selling hardware. So once the iPod and the iTunes Music Store dominate digital music, Jobs makes DRM leave the stage precisely to ensure there are no competitors to the gorilla. But, again, the interesting point here is how Apple is reinventing the Mac. As the iPod stretches out and begins to swallow the Macintosh via the iPhone and now iPad, it's essential to pay attention to the compromises these [at least relatively] closed platforms are making. The iPad will do 50% of what I use my MacBook for and essentially 90% of what I use my iPod touch for (the balance being "fitting my pocket"). But I can't run my Java apps on my iPad, and probably never will, and certainly won't without Jobs' permission. (Yes, I realize Apple develops and maintains the standard Mac JVM, but there are others that work on OS X. Don't split hairs, please. ;^D) Labels: browsers, control, DRM, ethics, evil, html, iPad, iphone, ipod, iTunes, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/25/2010 10:01:00 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 03, 2010 | |
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From AppleInsider | WSJ has pre-release iPad kept 'under padlock and key' by Apple: How much to charge for content on the iPad and other devices remains a point of contention. While reports have suggested that Times executives cannot agree whether to charge $10 per month or closer to $30 per month, the Journal began charging users of its iPhone application late last year. Murdoch has previously said that News Corp. intends to charge for all of its online news sites, noting that 'quality journalism is not cheap.' A coworker once told me (luckily in a story about a third coworker) that, "A mistake on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." Same sort of reasoning seems to apply here. That good journalism is costly doesn't make it worth more to me. Let me be blunt: I'm not paying $10 a month to access the NYT on a mobile device. I love the NYT, and consider it, on some level, to be the national register. I'd gladly pay $15 a month to receive the Sunday edition printed and delivered to my door if I was within an area with delivery. But on an iPad? Forget it. I believe newspapers are going to have to learn to recut their information. I have no idea the best way to do it. I would have thought the current advertisement driven version would have to do (and I've enjoyed the interactive Apple dual-ad advertisements in particular; not all advertisement is bad). To sum this ramble, I think it'd be smarter to figure out how to get the most money out of an ad-supported, open publication model, and then determine how much information that medium/genre/style of publication supports. I'm occasionally tempted to argue against the operation of the open market in specific situations -- there are things which the market has not yet been able to price accurately, and things for which I don't believe accurate prices can be found -- but this is a clear example of where I'm all for it. I believe the Times et al will find that Pay to Play is going to taunt them a second time. Labels: ads, control, copyright, DRM, iPad, market, news, nyt, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/03/2010 05:50:00 PM |
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| Monday, February 15, 2010 | |
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AT&T to Carry 3G-Capable iPad in Stores? - Mac Rumors: According to the report, AT&T will be dedicating substantial display space to the forthcoming device. Okay, well, it could sell like gangbusters, but I'm more worried about the iPad being oversold. The report MacRumors quotes says, "We're told that the general plan is to convert one or two existing netbook display sections in each corporate AT&T location into a pretty substantial iPad display area," and later talks about putting the iPad in Best Buy as well. Though the iPad in AT&T's and Best Buy's stores is A Good Thing for Apple, the report makes it sound like they're getting a decent amount of real estate. If the displays full of iPads are too conspicuous, the iPad stands to become conspicuous in its relative absence later on if the stores scale their presence back due to slow initial sales. I'm not sure the iPad is going to have iPod-like success, and almost certainly not the same speed. I think I'd opt for the long haul when I decide how much pimpige space to give it. Now that said, I'm endlessly impressed with the number of nooks that Apple's managing to cram with stores for virtual goods. I haven't done a ton of wireless shopping with my iPod touch in the three months or so that I've had it, perhaps only one quick track. Like Tetris on my cell phone, iPod shopping is more of a time killer than something I set out to do. I've purchased one game for my Wii in the virtual console, but that was more out of novelty than desire. But I have purchased several books from Fictionwise that I read primarily on the iPod, and I know I'd rather buy full-fledged Wii games online than to run down to the GameStop (or whatever they're calling it these days). The iPad is probably large and fast enough that shopping there is going to be a much more pleasant experience. Compared to something like the Peek or even Blackberry, the iPad has great [hardware] stats and monthly fees for 3G. Its ability to slap a store next to your easy chair is a big reason why those prices might seem like bargains from Apple's point of view. Providing that Apple doesn't start by letting brick and mortars oversell the iPad out of the box, that is. Labels: apple, hats of money, iPad posted by ruffin at 2/15/2010 06:22:00 PM |
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| Thursday, February 11, 2010 | |
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AppleInsider | Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor: 'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesnโt support Flash, and all of Huluโs videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech. Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now. Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5? The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal. Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them. HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu|YouTube] Labels: aol, apple, control, F/free, hats of money, id, iPad, licensing, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM |
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| Thursday, February 04, 2010 | |
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How can Amazon be this far behind? (from AppleInsider) The New York Times reports that Amazon has acquired New York-based Touchco, a small start-up specializing in touchscreen technology. It's not like gestures are new; they're at least as old as the iPhone and iPod touch. Why is it that they wouldn't pull the trigger on something like this years ago? They're chasing technology, reminiscent of Microsoft and Zune or Linux and the desktop, copying paradigms that are old news instead of trying to help shape them as they form. I'm not going to say adding better gestures to Kindle (are there any now?) is a bad idea, but it is already a tired idea. posted by ruffin at 2/04/2010 07:31:00 AM |
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| Friday, January 29, 2010 | |
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Daring Fireball: Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad: Having used the hardware keyboard yesterday, though, it is clearly a secondary form of input. You cannot even vaguely drive the iPad interface by keyboard alone. It is almost entirely only for text input. The arrow keys really only work for text editing. Shift-arrow combos work for selecting ranges of text, and Command-arrow combos work for moving the insertion point to the beginning/end of lines. Option-arrow combos do not work for moving a word at a time, though. Perhaps it's finally time to give vi a look for word processing? I have noticed that my Magic Mouse's batteries have not burned out as quickly as most say they do. That could mean the reporters of quick battery death are at their computers 10 hours a day and I'm not. Or it could mean that when I do work, I don't use the mouse. Can you imagine using a mouse for select stuff from menus, moving from one app to the next, entering a URL into your browser, etc? It's madness, I'm telling ya. This entry written without the mouse. Vive los batteries. In other news, Grubes says... Lastly, a thought regarding the iPadโs aggressive pricing. Apple is obviously leaving money on the table here. They could easily charge $999 as the starting price and have hundreds of people lined up outside every Apple Store ready to buy one on day one. Then they could drop the price later in the year, as the holiday season approaches. Sounds awfully familiar. You can only, which few exceptions, sell the same tablet once to a potential buyer. Sell it to those willing to pay too much first. If 30% of potential buyers would pay more, why leave the money on the table? Do I quote myself [from just over a week ago]? Very well, then I quote myself. Daring Fireball's explanation for the overly low price of the entry-level iPad is that, "Apple is trying to stake out a long-term dominating position" in "the mobile computing landscape". Maybe, but I don't see WiFi sticking around at the high-end too much longer as 3G and 4G grow. If my laptop gets 4G speed built-in, do I need 802.11n? No. One barrier to entry down, and I don't even bother clicking the Airport icon in my menu bar at the coffee shop. And if WiFi isn't where the landgrab's at -- and it's not. You don't make subscription money on WiFi -- 3G and 4G are. So kill the $499 lowend, and at least make the $629 price your price of entry. (3G and 16 megs) or (32 megs with WiFi) both at $629. Who doesn't buy the 3G at this point, since there's no contract involved? I don't see how the WiFi-only $499 model is helping my Apple stock, middle (as opposed to short or long) term. Well, beyond the App Store. And iTunes. And maybe even iWork soon. And eBooks. And games. And... posted by ruffin at 1/29/2010 12:26:00 PM |
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| Thursday, January 21, 2010 | |
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Apple Tablet Hints: Virtual Keyboard, Camera, eBooks, More - Mac Rumors: According to those familiar with the situation Apple will be targeting the new device at both homes and classrooms. Apple is said to envision that one device might be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email. For classrooms, Apple is looking into electronic textbooks. The device will include a virtual keyboard for input. I enjoy reading pdfs with applications like Skim (OS X) and Foxit Reader (Windows), which both do a decent job of annotating pdfs, but on a tablet, I don't see how you make marginalia effectively without a stylus. The virtual keyboard of my iPod touch, even if it was in a giant device, isn't going to make the grade. The iSlate turned iPad is going to need a stylus for marginalia if any serious scholarly work is to be done, and if Apple's targeting educational institutions, I've got to guess a stylus'll be in there. That's about as far as my predictions/wish list go/es. In other news, $1000 is more expensive than my MacBook that I'm hypocritically using to type this, and more expensive by a pretty serious margin. I can't see spending that type of dough on an eMagazine/newspaper/book reader. Which, of course, means Apple is pricing this one exactly right. I'm an early adopter, but I'm also a cheapskate. As an example, I made the fam give up a Sprint cellphone plan to use Tracfones, and now I'm piddling around with plans from Cricket. It's amazing how much you can save on phones if you don't assume nearly unlimited minutes is a necessity and you use Google Voice for voicemail. Price it so that I'm interested in buying an iPad now, and you're leaving cash on the table from the "BMW drivers" of zeroes and ones. So the first wave -- rich early adopters -- pad Apple's pockets. Once the hardware costs go down, they start pitching the thing for schmoes like me who, in the meanwhile, have plunked down embarrassing sums for a Magic Mouse, iPod touch, and MacBook. /sigh At least I still own some stock. posted by ruffin at 1/21/2010 01:00:00 AM |
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