Release Tuesday

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Adam S

This week has already seen a slew of releases: first came an updated Airport Express (I want one). Then today, Apple unleased Safari 3.1, which vastly extends support for bleeding edge web standards like CSS3, HTML5, and expands support of ECMAscript.

Finally, not to have all headlines stolen this St. Patrick’s Day, Microsoft loosed Vista SP1 to Windows Update.

I have installed Safari 3.1/Win and this evening I will upgrade at home on the Mac. I am currently downloading Vista SP1 for my work PC. Reviews to follow, for certain.

The Third Great Platform

Posted on March 6, 2008 by Adam S

First, there was the PC.
Then, there was the web.
Now, there is the iPhone.

At long last, the iPhone will become what it was destined to be. In June, when the iPhone 2.0 update is released, the iPhone’s true potential will be unlocked. VoIP? Sure, why not!? Games? You betcha. Exchange, ActiveSync, Remote Wipe, 802.1X? Check. How about access to the entire SDK via XCode, a compact framework (Cocoa Touch), a native emulator, and access to the SQLite databases present in the iPhone file system? Yup. Lastly, how about the most innovative platform in the last 20 years that has single handedly made the mobile web viable? Present and accounted for.

In fact, the iPhone is a new generation, and it’s been grunting along the sidelines as a gloried browser. But come iPhone 2.0, it will validate itself as one of the most amazing devices out there.

Remembering Why I Mostly Hate Apple Users, Even Though I Am One

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Adam S

This week, I had to make a trip to the Apple store. My iPhone began growing some “bubbles” under the screen, so they swapped one out. I had also brought back a flaky Airport Extreme, but since I only made an appt for my iPhone, they told me I’d have to make another appointment for my Airport with the “Mac” team. Frustrated, I spoke to the store manager and got in via “standby” appointment. They didn’t have an AE in house, so I had to order one and go back this weekend. The people at the Apple store were nice, but the entire thing was a cluster. The Apple Store is always so crowded and chaotic and it’s hard to find someone to help you. Luckily, it turned out ok, and I got a new iPhone and a new Airport. I wanted to post, but then I remembered what happened in the past when I posted about Apple.

I wrote a piece for OSNews some time ago called “A Month With a Mac.” If you read it, it’s not really very negative – in fact, it’s mostly positive – but I eventually decided to stick with PC, predicting, accurately, I’d add, that I’d be a Mac user by 2005, which I was.

But after a little Google’ing today, I found this thread at MacSlash. I read it today, and almost immediately, I hate Mac extremists.

In my house, in the last 2 years, we’ve owned an iBook, a Macbook Pro, a 20″ iMac, a Macbook, an iPhone, an Airport Extreme, and three iPods. We’ve purchased iLife 08, a Leopard family pack, and several Mac apps including my favorite, Transmit. We have no operational PC’s in-house. But I swear, reading this pathetic crap makes me want to burn my Mac.

What a bunch of pricks? They think I made facts up – like the error message I received. They think that the first thing you do with a review unit is break the seal. Although I mistakenly referred to 10.1 merely as “OS X,” they don’t beleive I got the discs. It’s really pretty amazing to see a decent review get such incredible responses. Genius comments like this one (where I’m apparently gay) and this one (where I’m paid by Microsoft) and this one (I don’t care what he says, he’s absolutely 100% wrong) ought to embarrass the Mac community. But instead, they stay on their own board masturbating each other and growing insanely angry about what, in essence, is a decent review. Truly, they make me hate my Mac right now and they make me hate the elitist community.

F YOU, APPLE AND AT&T

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Adam S

So, my wife just sent me a text message with a picture of my baby. Unfortunately, Apple and AT&T still make us use the incredibly stupid “viewmymessage.com” to see our MMS messages. They text you a URL, a username, and a password, but not a link, for reasons I can’t understand. So, as I attempt to fetch my MMS, this is what I get.

Click image for larger version

#$!@* YOU APPLE!! Add MMS to the iPhone already!!

Airport Extreme is Extremely Extreme

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Adam S

For Christmas, my wife gave me the new Airport Extreme. As a result, as of yesterday, we are now officially 802.11n in our house. Unfortunately, the iPhone degrades it back to 802.11g. However, I must say, the speed before I connected it was immediately noticeably faster. This was not “it feels snappier.” Right away, the effect was staggering. Web pages loaded in a tiny fraction of the time they used to. Made me wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with the old D-Link g router.

Anyway, I highly recommend 802.11n to anyone thinking about taking the plunge. Incredible difference.

iPhone: 1 Month Later

Posted on October 23, 2007 by Adam S

I’ve now had the iPhone for over a month. Let me just come out and say it: there’s a reason this device has something like a 97% satisfaction rating. The thing is awesome. It’s easy to love it: it feels like Apple, it’s beautiful, it’s easy to use, it’s pretty first and utilitarian second. It really makes its competitors blush, particularly things like the Blackberry Pearl, which looks like an old terminal compared to a 24″ cinema display: it’s just not even comparable.

There are surely missing features: no Flash is one, no current SDK is a big one, no copy/paste is often cited (but not a big deal for me), no way to mass remove images from the camera without first importing them into iPhoto, no iChat, and a big ball buster is the crippled Bluetooth profiles (no send file? No send contact? C’mon apple!) But the two biggest for me are as follows:

* No voice dial.
This is just silly. If you truly store all of your contacts, it’s a REAL pain in the ass to call a random one. And secondly, what good is a headset if you have to fish the phone out of its holster to scroll to the contact first? There is no way to go hands free on this device, period. Lame!

But the biggest one is this:

* No MMS.
This is more and more unacceptable every day. No only can I not send someone a picture via text, as my friends do to each other ALL THE TIME, but should someone send one to me, I get a stupid message that says something like “Yu’ve received a multimedia message! Go to viewmymessage.com and type in code 12345678 and password r4ndDoMPaS5w0rdd and retrieve the worthless picture that was worth a glance on your phone, but is almost certainly not worth the work it will take to check it out online. By the way, even though you have a browser in your phone, we won’t provide you a link, making it virtually impossible to check this unless you happen to be in front of a computer right now, bitch.”

Apple, please make 1.1.2 or 1.2 worthwhile and add some of these features present on like EVERY PHONE MADE IN THE LAST 3 YEARS. Seriously.

A Violation of the Spirit of Free Software

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Adam S

For a long time, I really liked this unattractive, but incredibly useful website called macfreeware.com. I am not linking to the front page because shortly ago, it was sold and the result is really bumming me out.

The new owners decided to make some changes to the site that I personally think are a slap in the face of Mac freeware developers. See, the first thing they did was remove the developers’ credit in the RSS feed. Then, they took the developers’ info out of the individual pages, and finally, in the final insult, they cloaked the download links so that all of the downloads direct through a form hosted locally, so even if you were crafty, you couldn’t find the actual software on the internet without your favorite search engine.

I wrote the guys over at MacFreeWare.com – via their generic contact form, since there is no other method of communication available – and told them about this egregious violation of developers, and they temporarily complied, re-adding the developer info to both the RSS feed and the software pages. And yet, today in my Bloglines feed, and once again, the RSS feeds do not include developer info at all – not even a link to the application’s webpage – and the majority of the featured apps don’t include links on their individual pages. Some examples:

http://www.freemacware.com/inquisitor
http://www.freemacware.com/disk-inventory-x
http://www.freemacware.com/vacuummail

Click the thumbnail for a larger version

I didn’t search these out – they were the first three links I clicked on the homepage.

So what we have is an ad-supported website aimed at cataloging Mac freeware that doesn’t even feature, or allow you to research, the very developers writing that freeware. They are making money of free apps, without any credit, any outlinking, or any way to research the software beyond their two sentence write-ups. Am I wrong or is this a complete violation of the spirit of free software?

Update: Okay, so at least some of the items in the RSS feed have a link to a developer website and most of the newer featured app pages have a link to the developer website listed. But most still don’t, which is pretty bad.

Shame on Apple!!

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Adam S

Shame on Apple. As a huge Apple supporter, I am shocked and dismayed by today’s news that Apple will be “bricking” – or fatally breaking – iPhones that are either unlocked or contain third party applications with their next update.

Even more shocking is the comment section of this article on tuaw, where Apple fans are actually supporting Apple on this matter!

I can understand entirely Apple’s decision to break unlocked iPhones. Apple probably gets a nice cut of at&t iPhone plans, for one, and they cannot be expected to support your iPhone as you move it to another carrier by changing the very nature of the hardware.

However, by voiding the warranty of those who have installed “Installer.app” and third party applications, they are making a very silly move. For one, Apple is biting the hand that has fed them so many users and in all actuality, market viability. OS X is only truly useful because freeware and shareware development has really ramped up and brought us an amazing array of Mac apps, enough to complement OS X and provide that elusive “Google it and you’ll find an app that does that” level of prevalence. In the meantime, they taut the iPhone as running OS X. So when developers – often the most loyal of fans – extend the functionality of the iPhone the same way they’ve done the desktop version of OS X, they have added value to the iPhone.

Steve Jobs, who runs Apple with an iron fist, is understandably mad about third party apps, but it’s fruitless to spend his tears. Developers have rapidly put many things on the iPhone that should have been there to begin with! Where the heck is iChat? Even Verizon includes AIM compatible apps now! How about a dictionary or games or themes or GPS… all now doable in a few finger taps via Installer? An Apple product ought to provide for users, not work against them. Apple – learn from Google – “don’t be evil!”

Apple missed the boat on the iPhone went Jobs decided to exclude an SDK from the plans. When he told us that “AJAX” was the SDK, I threw up a little in my mouth. Notice my comment from back in January… even then we knew that the lack of an SDK was bullshit.

If Apple decides to truly brick iPhones with third party apps, they are doing a tremendous disservice to all iPhone owners. They are removing capabilities from a device that really ought to have extendable capabilities; well, that or admitting that Windows Mobile or Java platforms are superior. I suspect Jobs is locking it down so he can resell it to us in iPhone generation 2, which is so Microsoft-ian is scares me that maybe Apple is becoming just as evil as Redmond.

An unintended side-effect is that Jobs will birth a new hacking community, one that will certainly rival Apple in what they provide. It may be that all 1st gen iPhone owners decide to stick with 1.0.2 firmware and let hackers extend the functionality, which I glibly believe today will offer more than Apple foolishly will ever allow. To their own peril, I guess. I suspect that Apple’s limp effort to contain iPhone hacking is going to backfire as the people who make a difference forsake them in favor of a community firmware, or maybe just community added functionality.

Frankly, I think the solution is to quickly organize a massive “Do Not Buy Apple Products” day before the new firmware comes out. Maybe October 1. Send a message to Apple that they enjoy success at our pleasure, and that a second rate iPhone experience is not acceptable and not what we’ve come to expect from Apple.

So on October 1, do not run Software Update. Do not buy an iPhone. Do not buy Mac apps at all, including shareware or third party OS X stuff. Let’s piss off Apple, let’s piss off small developers who will have no one to complain to but Apple. Let’s make them open up the iPhone, which has the potential to be great, but may perhaps be, at the very wish of Jobs, destined to remain just a fancy phone.

Update: A few things for those who emailed me —
1) I am a very loyal Apple user, all of the computers in our house are Macs. I do not hate Apple, I do not hate Steve Jobs, I’m just pissed that they are condemning my iPhone to death if I want to actually use the “OS X” on it. Their over-eager rules actually prevent me from doing things I can do on a comparably priced Windows Mobile phone.
2) About the “boycott just shifts the spending to another day” argument – no one is trying to hurt Apple financially, just send them a message: that we won’t stand for the half-assed “SDK” they have provided when hackers have already demo’ed better capabilities the phone inherently possesses, but can’t access due solely to …a EULA?!
3) I am still in love with my iPhone, I just will love it much less if Apple decides to make me restore it, and I’ll love it A LOT less if they destroy it. Oh, and I will NOT replace it. They will simply lose me as a customer on the iPhone. There are some awfully nice Nokia sets out there that allow me to download Java applications like Gmail that really extend the phone as a platform rather than cripple it on purpose, which sounds a lot like Vista and its ridiculous “editions.”

The Equal Accessibility Paradox

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Adam S

Whilst reading Bruce Byfield’s “Divining from the Entrails of Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon” today, I began pondering the evolution of Ubuntu. Ubuntu began live as Warty Warthog back in 2004, and rose quickly to fame. Its biggest selling point was that it was user friendly Linux, the best, most accessible Linux distribution to date. Now, just a few short years later, Ubuntu has truly conquered the Linux market with an estimated 30% of the field, and suddenly, there is some pushback.

I’ve seen a project take this path before, but project was Mozilla Firefox. The Firefox devs suddenly turned their back on their userbase in favor of catering to a wider audience. As a result, I – an obsessively dedicated Firefox user since at least Phoenix 0.2 – have sworn off the software completely.

Enter the “equal accessibility paradox.” I see this often with software projects especially, but it exists in all sorts of arenas, from websites to cell phones, cameras to iPods, from cars to TVs, even in restaurants and stores. The problem exists as such: you have two distinct groups of customers, one who prefers additional options or features even if it introduces complexity; and another, possibly larger, audience who prefers elegant simplicity at the expense of features. The goal is to provide everyone with the options and abilities they expect without overwhelming them. Can a new, non-savvy user control the product to do what they want equally as well as an advanced user can configure the product to do what he wants?

The problem comes from the fact that all too often, like with both Ubuntu and Firefox, you begin to favor one community over the other. I believe the Mozilla Foundation, at least in the provided example, unfortunately decided to cater to a wider audience by making decisions at the expense of its current users. They have made decisions that have cost them at least one user. Ubuntu, if the article is to be believed, has provided plenty of advanced options but over-simplified the non-advanced procedures. In short, if you aren’t a complete novice, you’re an expert. Thus the paradox takes shape: the gap between your two user groups becomes greater. Hopefully, along the way, you don’t so aggravate your most vigilant supporters so that they abandon you.

I’m positive I haven’t best expressed what I intended to say, but I think there’s a theory in there. As your userbase grows, the gap between your two user-types widens, and your target generally becomes one or the other.

As Apple grows and branches out from the Macintosh computer line, I can only hope they don’t cater to new users to a degree that forsakes the current users who kept them afloat for so long. As Microsoft has grown, they have taken more and more steps to frustrate the people who best support their products, so much so that my business now uses Linux on web servers and PHP for programming and I always recommend Macs and Linux to my friends and colleagues. As Firefox grew, I felt they left users like me behind. As Ubuntu grows, I hope they can control the divide before they find themselves head-to-head with the “equal accessibility paradox.”

Confirmed: iPhone is Awesome

Posted on September 10, 2007 by Adam S

My cell phone saga stretches back for several weeks or even months. I decided to leave Verizon for AT&T GSM, then decided to stay with Verizon, and ultimately, bit the bullet after a month and a half of waffling.

iPhone I had no intention of getting an iPhone, mostly because they were more money that I wanted to spend and because I expect rev 2 to come out by spring at the latest (or sooner?) But the fact is, at $299, I was probably going to get an iPod Touch, and the iPhone was just too compelling. So last Thursday, I went for it. Ported my number and just took the dive.

Let me assure you: the iPhone is worth all of the hype. Yes, it doesn’t record video, it doesn’t have GPS, it doesn’t have a flash, it doesn’t do cut and paste, there is no SDK, and EDGE is no Verizon EV-DO. And yet, despite all of that, the iPhone is likely the coolest “gadget” I’ve ever owned. It’s incredible; it’s got technology never before seen (multi-touch) and it just… it makes people giddy to see it. It’s tons of fun and it’s easy to use. It was seemeless to sync it and watch it receive my Gmail, import my contacts, bookmarks, appointments, and music from my iMac. It’s worth every penny of the $299 I paid for it.

Maybe they will release new iPhones soon, and almost assuredly I will want one, but it doesn’t mean this thing isn’t still every bit as incredible.