You know, there’s a porn store for Android. Anyone can download them. You can, your kids can. That’s just not a place we want to go.

But then, there’s this:

What is that? It’s the Porn Store for iPhone, aka “The App Store.” Get real. Apples doesn’t want you to run Apps because they want full control of the revenue the iPhone generates downstream. That’s it. It’s not about privacy, it’s not about children, it’s not about anything other than corporate strategy. And I predict it WILL come back to bite Apple in the butt.

Then there’s the now infamous section of the iPhone 4.0 SDK that bans the use of non-native apps on the iPhone.  But let’s get real, shall we? As Gruber said, this is about only one thing: once the apps are portable, the device lock-in is compromised.  It’s not about multi-tasking, although, there’s probably truth in that, it’s not about new APIs, although, there’s probably truth in that too.  But it’s about corporate strategy: keep people on Apple products in the Apple ecosystem.

Let’s not forget that Adobe has built its CS5 master suite with a new feature it’s been proudly touting: the ability to compile Flash apps as iPhone binaries.  So they are the ones with egg on their face since that feature is simply pointless now.

If I were Adobe, after the peak of sales after the release of CS5, I’d announce that it’s the last Adobe suite to be released for Mac.  No more Photoshop, no more Lightroom, no more Illustrator.  Maybe even cut off Adobe Air.  You could pretty rapidly destroy the enterprise presence for Apple, as people decide if they want to keep working on Macs, given the lack of true enterprise quality tools.   It would be an interesting corporate strategy. (Update: They say nope.)

If I were Apple, I wouldn’t worry too much.  Businesses are now a small subset of Apple users, who are, more and more, college students and home users.  And those users would rather buy iWork, and maybe a few more apps Apple wasn’t producing (such as Office or Pixelmator).  No big loss, right? Or is it…?

Once Apple loses the “it’s better for graphics” thing, then it might be labelled “not for serious work.”  Microsoft runs some ads pushing a new image: Macs are okay for home use, but you need Windows to do any real work.  And then “real workers” start switching back to Windows at home.  Maybe.  But it would make for a grand corporate strategy.

It’s interesting that once again, the computing landscape is full of action.  I can’t wait to see how Apple behaves in the next few years.  It may well deliver some of the best software ever.  Then again, soon enough, I might be using Windows 8, an Android phone, and an HP Slate. Either way, the future is exciting.

1. It’s time to regulate App Store approval process.  Consistency and transparency needs to be key.  I’m a web developer and I participate in the tech community.  To see Cocoa developers get screwed after spending all their time, energy, and capital writing an app only to be unceremoniously, silently rejected with no explanation is to see pure evil.  This is pretty much my main request.
2. However, I’m tired of the iPhone being shackled.  Unlike Eugenia, I don’t have specific requests like enabling EDGE on Pay-As-You-Go phones, but I’m tired of the iPhone being a closed platform.  I do not believe in “it’s Apple’s playground, if you don’t like it, go somewhere else.”  It’s my device. I bought it, I own it.  I want to theme my phone.  I want to run background apps.  And I sure as hell don’t need Apple telling me which apps are not suitable for me to run (outside of those that actually do harm to my phone and/or me, e.g. malware, spyware). It’s time to open the private APIs to the public, duplicate functionality or not.

That’s it.  I maintain that OS X is the best desktop environment today.  I *love* my Mac and I love how integrated and “at home” I feel with it.  I don’t want to give it up.  I certainly don’t want to go back to Vista (although 7 is nice so far) or start running Ubuntu or Fedora on my iMac.

I think OS X/iLife and the iTunes/iPhone combos are awesome.    I think the Cocoa frameworks are just genius, and they inspire programmers to write beautiful and slick applications rapidly.  I want Apple to do the right thing.

Just for comparison, I have nothing but warm feelings about Amazon.com, despite some issues people have had with them. See how Jeff Bezos stepped up and took personal responsibility for a recent fiasco.  That’s how a CEO should behave.  A big company I respect.  I trust and respect Google.  But Apple leaves me with a metallic taste in my mouth that I know isn’t good.

I hope things change, but I’m not holding my breath.  Then again, stranger things have happened.

Wireless Sync

Apple is the king of “no wires.”  They did everything wireless first.  But the iPhone still needs a wire to sync.  They have the perfect syncing technology already: Bluetooth.  Why not permit syncing over Bluetooth? I don’t any limitations on why you can’t sync over wifi, let alone Bluetooth.  This seems like a no-brainer.

New Springboard

How we’ve made it to 3.0 without a better way to manage our apps, without even folders, is a mystery. It’s imperative, especially as iPhone owners install more and more apps, that there is a better way to manage and access apps. It’s time for a re-thought Springboard.

File Management

Seems awfully odd that I carry 8GB of disk space on my hip but can’t carry a single document without emailing it to myself.  It’s time to permit some storage of files on the device.  Older iPods allowed “disk use,” why can’t the iPhone? And if not, at least a manner of loading the files through iTunes would be appreciated.

Background Apps

The chants have been loud and plentiful. We want to run apps in the background. It’s not fair to say it will chip into battery life: we understand that. Let us run down our own devices as we wish, okay?

Picasa is tightly bound to Picasa Web Albums, the first 1GB of which is also free, in contrast with Apple’s MobileMe, which runs $99/year.  In addition, in my experience, Picasa Web, while it has its drawbacks to be certain, worked pretty much everywhere, whereas I’ve had problems getting MobileMe’s photo gallery to work properly.  

I’ve chronicled my wish for Picasa for Mac for about 3 years now.  As you can see, the post continues to receive comments and remains, to this day, one of the most visited entries on my site. Clearly, there is demand for this product.

What I believe makes Picasa such a successful product is just how powerful it is. Although iPhoto works very well on the Mac and the iLife integration across applications is priceless, the fact remains that for serious editing and effects, the Mac user must venture outside of iPhoto. Picasa, on the other hand, has an entire suite of tools for photo finishing. Furthermore, Picasa features Google’s search tool, a bevy of organization tools, a plugin system using “buttons,” out-of-the-box integration with Gmail, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, and the ability to make collages, movies, and more. In fact, there is little doubt that Picasa is a much more robust application that iPhoto.

There are some missing features in this beta: Geotagging didn’t make the cut, nor did webcam capture, screen capture, and screensaver. Also missing are the ability to order prints, an HTML export, and the fantastic Picasa Photo Viewer. Most of these features are certainly tied tighter into the OS, and while they will be missed, they are by no means deal-breakers.

I noticed the menus in Picasa for Mac are very “Windows-y.”  The menu bar still has a “File/Edit/View/Tools” bar across the top, which is decidedly “un-Mac-like,” although the preferences window does use the current Mac look and feel.  

What remains to be seen is whether or not Picasa is stable, whether or not it’s fast, and whether or not it can handle large photo libraries. I know people with well over 15,000 photos in their iPhoto collection, and the application is solid. Since Picasa doesn’t store it’s own library, but rather, merely catalogs photos elsewhere on your disk, we’ll have to see whether this translates into a performance advantage or disadvantage. It remains to be seen if Picasa for Mac can go toe-to-toe with more mature, native solutions. That said, count me in as one of the many waiting to find out.

However, I’ve got a brilliant combination working now.  iSquint, the gorgeous free video editor, converts my files into high quality mp4/m4v files and adds them to iTunes.  iTunes then pushes them to my AppleTV.   It’s incredible to tell iSquint to covert several dozen videos and then the next morning they are waiting on my AppleTV. 

In the meantime, I just discovered something on iTunes that I hadn’t realized existed.  I went into the overcrowded “Movies” section of my iTunes library and found that you can convert “Movies” to “TV Shows.” Here’s the best part, by filling in the metadata – by adding the TV show title, the season, the episode, iTunes will properly group and organize them.  Whereas before, I had a huge section of movies, randomly plunked down in the same view, now I have a view of many logically grouped subsets, much the way iTunes handles artists and albums in grid view.  

 Furthermore, AppleTV obeys the organization as well! Instead of a silly, long list of movies, I go to TV Shows and then drill down by show, where they are sorted by season and episode.  

Using iTunes just got much better.  I had been thinking, lately, about how well music organization works in iTunes and how poorly video organization does.  I still think that’s the case – Videos are a mess.  But TV Shows and Music Videos work well.

Suffice it to say it was incredible.  Using just my external hard drive, it read my backup, asked me what I wanted to restore (it found 4 things: Users, Network Settings, Applications, and “Files and Folders”).  I checked them all.  After a few simple questions, it told me that it would take just shy of 4 hours to complete.   Surprisingly, it was done a scant 150 minutes later.  When I booted up, I was amazed. Not only did everything come over, it was almost as if it was my exact machine.  Barely a noticeable difference, save speed and size.  

A few things slipped by, for example, I had changed /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to a custom image, which it did not preserve.  I had changed some system icons, and those new icons did not preseve, but, for example, my external time machine drive had a custom icon, and it did remain.  The new install also required many updates I had already applied to my old OS X installation. 

Time Machine Restore: Incroyable!

All in all, though, I’ve never seen a smoother or faster migration.  The power of UNIX – everything living in predictable directories and segregated into “Library” folders, means that both backing up and restoring have a power that the Windows Registry simply can’t match.  In fact, in wading through all of this, it has a severe handicap when it comes to system migration due to the fact that data is mashed into so many inconsistent places.  

Apple has pissed me off quite a bit recently.  But – oh boy! – did they re-energize me with this one!

Update: worth noting, here is a great article on restoring from a time machine backup.

But Apple offers no phone support for MobileMe.    When you dial and tell the comoputer you want to discuss “Mobile Me”, it says “Our support is now available online at me.com/help.  Thank you.  Goodbye.”  Then it promptly hangs up on you.  Fail. 

My solution? Call and just ram through any menu prompt until I get to an operator and force them to help me.  Apple support is generally pretty decent, but aside from the fact that Mobile Me is priced about 5 times too high, they have the audacity to provide no real manner of support other than the massively un-realtime web.  

Boo, Apple, boo!  You’ve let me down a lot recently.  I hope my new iMac makes me happy, or it may be my last Apple product (for awhile, at least).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6tbRfrJd3BG887G96UjTQA&_render=rss

Enjoy.

I love Camino, really I do. But recently, its limitations have been bothering me. I prefer my tabs in a very specific order and often I have several tabs open. If ever I close a tab by mistake, I cannot get that same order without doing tons of work or re-launching. Safari 3 draggable tabs.

One of the things that used to bother me about Safari was that there was no “New Tab” button available for the toolbar. There is now. It’s also got great keychain integration, private browing, the original embedded RSS, true Aqua widgets, resizable text boxes, easy PDF integration, and it’s super-fast.

Camino doesn’t support Ad-Block, but rather, stylesheet-based filtering. Safari does that too, by default, and it’s even easier to use than it is in Camino. Safari doesn’t have any Flash problems and once you add “Safari Stand” and enable the debug menu, you have a perfect drop in replacement.

My biggest complaint about Camino was the lack of development tools. It doesn’t have a Javascript debugger (ChimericalConsole never worked me for), doesn’t have a decent source viewer, doesn’t have many third party hacks to add functionality – it’s a browser for users, not developers. Without XUL, it’s tough to add features easily. And that made it tough to use for me. When I did any serious work, I’d always switch to Opera or, more recently, Safari 3. Safari 3′s Inspector is just awesome.

So… for now, I am Opera on Windows and Safari on Mac. My browser requirements are more demanding than most. I have felt for some time that Opera and Firefox on Mac just “feel” wrong, they don’t fit. So we’ll see how the Safari experiment goes.