marypcbuk | Entries tagged with apple

To the tune of 'Oranges and lemons/say the bells of St Clements'

"The idiots and bunglers
Believe the rumours on the tumblrs.
They promise us screen inches
And gestures beyond pinches;
But all they deliver
Is drinking-game-damaged livers"

Prepare a good drink. Look at iPhone rumour sites. Any time you see a rumour about screen size, pens, 3D gestures or anything that adds complexity: drink!

Add extra verses; I'll include good ones with the right scansion

Why did Steve Jobs use the passive to talk about the patent threat to Ogg and what does that ahve to do with HTML 5 and Flash?

Anyone who's worked on any title with me knows that I exchew the passive voice; the passive voice is to be avoided. Over on our ZD blog I enjoy dissecting an superb example of why it's not as clear as the active voice and when that can be an advantage.

There are a lot of myths in the Apple/Adobe arguments about Flash; Adobe is keen to give its side of the story, and make a point about ubiquity.How much of the Web do you get without Flash? Not much, says Adobe somewhat pointedly. Which phones will have Flash? Flash 10.1 and Air will be on smartphones and tablets, on Palm and Android and LiMo – but not on iPad and iPhone...

I covered this for TechRadar today: Adobe believes that Apple is missing a trick by not supporting Flash on either its popular iPhone or its forthcoming iPad, with the company pointing out that 85 per cent of the top 100 sites use the company's technology.

Apple makes its money from the hardware - and it has margins the rest of the industry only dreams of. When Mac margins fell from 28 to 26%, Apple called an all-hands meeting, the iPhone 3GS margin might be as high as 60%; most PC manufacturers are down to single digit or in-the-teens margins. So Apple can promise more generous ebook deals (and while we're at it, can I predict that the latest Amazonfail will turn out to be cockup rather than anti-Macmillan conspiracy?) and make the money on the iPad. how much money? According to one analyst, 43% on Wi-Fi models and 52% or even 55% on 3G models. I've said for a while that Apple wouldn't touch the netbook market unless it could find a way to do it with much better margins, and margins don't come much better than this...

As usual, I'll believe the rumours when I see the actual announcement (the rumour mill for Apple is a perpetual hype machine), but there is one thing we know for certain. There is no UK press event for the launch, which means that the product itself will, initially at least, only be available in the US; global products like notebooks and iPods get parallel events in multiple countries but there isn't an official UK event with a stream of the Yerba Buena presentation. That may be to do with geolocking of content - ebook rights are sold by territory (see the issues of Kindle outside the US) - or it may be iPhone style carrier deals.

EDIT Yes: 3 months before international units with 3G, but no international data plans until June/July - slightly shorter than iPone but still US only initally.

EDIT 2
"iPad will be available in late March worldwide for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) for the 16GB model, $599 (US) for the 32GB model, $699 (US) for the 64GB model. The Wi-Fi + 3G models of iPad will be available in April in the US and selected countries for a suggested retail price of $629 (US) for the 16GB model, $729 (US) for the 32GB model and $829 (US) for the 64GB model. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorised Resellers. International pricing and worldwide availability will be announced at a later date. iBookstore will be available in the US at launch."
Apple
No international prices yet, no international data plans for six months, no international e-book store; yes, you can get the Wi-Fi model at the same time as the US, but I wouldn't say you're actually getting the same product if the connectivity and content are the main thing (and I'd compare the sales of the iPhone and iPod Touch to say that the connectivity is pretty key).

Sitting in Samovar in Yerba Buena and a (locked) wireless network has appeared since yesterday, called APPLE.

And yesterday, indeed, we heard a fascinating business pitch in here for mobile search by scraping your social network and comparing it to reputation network information. I stopped eavesdropping when the user interface fail line was spoken: "and we're making it fun by doing it in the touch interface rather than that boring old typing thing".

Adobe brought Flash to the iPhone, at least for standalone apps, without any help from Apple – after Steve Jobs famously declared last spring that Flash ran too slowly to be usable on the iPhone. At Adobe MAX last week CTO Kevin Lynch mocked ""Steve in Cupertino" but there's a serious side to the lack of co-operation between the two companies. Here's why

Between CES and MacWorld I got to see lots of neat things last month...
My CES top ten for Tom's Guide including the Casio EXILIM Pro EX-F1, a camera that does more with being digital than replicating film
The MacBook Air is shiny in both senses but there was something smaller at MacWorld I liked more

Two pieces up on Tom's Hardware today; mobile search and mapping tools and a notebook buying guide - so you could pick the notebook you want and get directions to go buy it ;-)

When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...

Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...

If you want to try out most Apple kit, you can do it in the Apple Store. Unless it's an iPod Shuffle when you can press the buttons but not hear what it sounds like as none of the units have headphones. If you go to the wrong Apple store - in the local mall, say - you'll be told that you don;t need to listen to it because 'it sounds like an iPod'. If you go to the right Apple Store - Palo Alto say - an employee will scratch their head and suggest that you unplug the Bose headphones from the iPod next to the Shuffle display and plug that instead, and if you find the one Shuffle in four that actually has any charge, you can hear what a $79 player sounds like with $200 headphones. If you want to hear it with the headphones that come in the box, you can find a Shuffle and a Nano that are close enough together that you can pull the headphone half out of the security tag so that they reach the Shuffle. At this point I had to fold forward from the waist, lean on the display case of iPod Nano boxes and lay my head on the table in order to get the headphones to fit in my ears. Or I could have bought one, taken it out of the shop and come back in five minutes later saying 'actually, no, I don't think it does sound like any other iPod'. Could be they've left on the auto-convert down to 128kbps setting in iTunes; I haven't yet found if you can actually turn that off - further investigation on the review unit. Until then, I'll be bending over the counter...

Current Location: Campbell CA

I completely agree with Passionate Users today (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/07/we_cant_leave_i.html) that you can't leave it up to users to know what they need or ask for it. Finding out what they want is hard enough and it's not a user's job to know what system would improve their life and work properly for the business.

It goes for little things; I didn't know I wanted a running word count in the status bar until it showed up in Word 2007. I thought I wanted word count on demand, but actually ambient word count is more useful. Of course there are things we users know we want; I've been telling people at Microsoft in detail what I wanted for timezones in Outlook and lo, Outlook 2007 has a Timezons button for appointments. It goes for big things; I might say I want a macro to export an Excel table to ICS format so I can import it into Outlook's calendar, but what I'm really asking for is an integrated accounting and time management system.

But I'm going to take Passionate to task for saying "The world never needed the iPod until Apple created it". One; I needed it. Two; Apple may have created the iPod but it was neither the first MP3 player (Eiger Labs branding of Saehan) nor the first hard-drive based MP3 player. That was the 5GB Hango Personal Jukebox (PJB-100), designed by Compaq, abandoned to a Korean company without the distribution or marketing to get it out there. Back in 1998 you might have seen me testing the anti-skip on the hard drive by hurling it across the table at

lproven in The Lamb, or being dragged back onto the pavement just before I got run over by a taxi I didn't hear because I had headphones on. I was copying MP3s from my PC, making playlists, browsing my library with an easy to use menu system and generally making like I had an iPod. (The PJB site has become a shop but CNET remembers and so do I http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5622055-1.html)

What Apple did was take an existing product, design it beautifully, make it with the cheapest possible components engineered to an inch past their predicted life and market it superbly. That's what Apple does. Their innovation is all in the implementation; it's all in the delivery. That's OK - that's often what the user needs to realise that this is something they really do need. A geek will have hunted out the first version (and probably written a macro to get around the problems that Apple will smooth over in the design). Just don't tell them they didn't know they needed it till someone prettied it up.

Last night after wandering through Santana Row (it's very Stepford Wives but I do like the decor and the Gaudi mosaics and the fountains) and dinner with ocean-song and rob (yummy thai at the only Thai Pepper neither Google nor the GPS knows about) we enjoyed another hot tub in the rain with

mr_kurt and

saffronrose and Stephanie. This morning Marina treated us to hot cross buns Santa Cruz style - spicey and fluffy and fruity, with the cross icing rather than pastry. Then we stuffed the car (technically, the honking big SUV with surprisingly good gas mileage) with our suitcases, did a little roadtrip snack shopping at Trader Joes (mmm; dried white peaches) and drove up to Cupertino to have lunch in the Apple canteen (mmm; sushi) and talk iWeb (publishing for the rest of us) with an old friend Marc who now handles marketing for the software. No sign of a plateless Mercedes (in the handicapped space or otherwise).

We stopped in Capitola to buy more lovely pottery and take pictures of the beach and eat ice cream from Cafe Violetta. Down the coast to Moss Landing where we saw a sea otter floating lazily around the marina, white herons (both smooth and fluffy) and huge crashing waves on the beach, with a side order of halibut and chips at Phil's Seafood Market. Then through Monterey and around the point to Pacific Grove and the lighthouse on Ocean View Boulevard (the poor man's 17 Mile Drive) watching the surf roll in and almost wash the seals off the rock, then down to Carmel. Walking around Carmel in the rain wasn't as nice as coffee and cake at the Red House Cafe (and Mrs Trawick's Garden Shop). Driving back round the point in the dark, we saw the surf roiling and swirling onto the rocks and beaches in the moonlight.

Favourite road signs of the day; a leaping deer balancing an added red ball on his nose and the people crossing sign on the way into Carmel where the little people are all carrying shopping bags.

As Macs become more popular, they become more of a target for hackers (old-school bragging rights and new-style theft both go best with a big pool of targets), but Apple's dismissal of the Oompa Loompa trojan reminded me of the old joke about the Unix virus (read the mail, forward the instructions to a friend and then format your hard drive): they say it "requires a user to download the application and execute the resulting file".