Last night at the Cupertino City Council meeting, a handful of mere mortals were granted an audience with Steve Jobs. Apple has always referred to its campus as the mothership, and this new one they plan to have completed by 2015 certainly fits that. The entire video is worth watching.
If you ask me, from above it kind of looks like a Stargate.
[via TechCrunch]
Yesterday Apple announced a lot of new things at WWDC. Frankly, it has been a lot to process and figure out what the highlights worthy of discussion are. So I thought I'd share some (hopefully) brief thoughts on OS X Lion, iOS 5, & iCloud.
Apple showed off a lot of the same things it did during the first preview months ago and also on its website since. Chief among those are things like Multi-Touch Gestures, Full-Screen Apps, Mission Control, Launchpad, Auto-Save and Versions.
The Lion part of the keynote was really just a recap to show off some polish, and give details on its release. I was very happy to see the price tag of $29.99, and that it will be distributed via the Mac App Store in July. I honestly was a little surprised to see Apple killing off the optical disc this aggressively. I knew it would happen sooner rather than later, but I expected it for the next iteration of OS X.
My only curiosity with the whole thing revolves around whether or not we'll be able to make some sort of bootable recovery, whether on disc or USB drive. I mean, what if your hard drive goes kaput? We'll find out in July.
I do highly recommend you peruse Apple's extensive information about OS X.
There were two things I have been wanting built into iOS recently, and those have been a better notification system and a ToDo List that would sync over the air with my Mac and iPad. I had bought a few apps to accomplish the latter, but none work as seamlessly as I expect out of my Apple devices.
Thankfully both of those items and more came to fruition.
Notifications have, honestly, taken a cue from Android. They pop in briefly from the top while you are doing something and quietly disappear for later inspection within the Notification Center, which can be accessed by dragging a finger down from the top of the screen. Here, notifications can be acted upon, left alone, or dismissed. Another nice touch regarding notifications is how they stack on the lock screen, and can be acted upon straight from there by sliding your finger across a particular notification, which unlocks the device and pops you into that app.
Reminders is your regular old task list, with a twist. It has the ability to use geolocation as a way to alert you to a task, when you either arrive somewhere, or leave. For instance, you could set a reminder pick up dinner when you leave your office. As you are walking to your car, your iPhone alerts you. It looks like everything I could want and more.
The improvements to the Camera app have me fairly excited. There will be a software button you can tap from the lock screen to jump immediately into the camera. From there, you can now pinch to zoom, tap & hold to lock auto-exposure and auto-focus, and even use the volume up button as a shutter release.
After you take a shot, you can also do basic editing, such as rotation, cropping, red-eye correction, and an automatic touch-up process.
iMessage is a new, free service, that allows you to send text, pictures, video, contacts, location data, etc to another iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. It will be the default system in the Messages app, with SMS/MMS being a fallback if the recipient isn't an iOS user. This is definitely huge and I am sure the carriers aren't happy about Apple sucking away their precious overpriced texting plans.
By far the biggest announcement for iOS is tethering via USB will no longer be needed to sync and make backups. Heck, iTunes isn't even needed to set up your iDevice out of the box anymore. Just take it out, run through a set-up dialog, and you're on your way. This will be great for upgrading to a new device, and even more so, those buying an iPad as their only device.
Another perk is iOS updates will now occur over the air, and as delta updates. Delta updates are just the changes. Up until now, iOS updates have been the entire OS, which is kicking around 600+ MB these days.
iOS 5 is set for release this fall (I'd guess September). Check out the new features and a video.
iCloud is a new service from Apple that moves the focus of syncing off of iTunes and onto a server. Jobs said, "The cloud is the truth", meaning that all your devices — Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod touch, & iPad — will be communicating with iCloud as their main source of information.
iCloud will store email, contacts, calendars, iTunes, App Store, & iBookstores purchases, documents, photos, and backups. The idea is that you make a change on one device, and it uploads to iCloud, and then is pushed to the other devices.
For example, take a picture on your iPhone, and it is on your iPad and within iPhoto on your Mac in mere moments.
iCloud looks to be a big deal, and it will be available this fall alongside iOS 5, free for everyone.
I was very glad to see iCloud is free, and MobileMe accounts are being rolled into it.
Like I said, it's a lot of information to absorb. The implications of iCloud are staggering, something I'll expound on in a later post. I am excited to get Lion in a month's time, and find myself impatient, as always, for the next version of iOS.
Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference is tomorrow, and I think it may be one of the biggest game-changing events from Apple since the introduction of the iPhone.
Apple has already told us three main points of focus for the keynote address: Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. We know a fair bit of Mac OS X Lion already from a previous demonstration and leaks from the developer community. Its focus is to take what Apple has learned from iOS back to the Mac. Things like Launchpad and expanded gesture support via trackpads will be the foundations to bridge the gap between traditional computers and touchscreen devices.
My brain tells me iOS 5 will just add on a few more features to what we currently know as iOS, but part of me can't help but feel that something really big may come with the latest version. A lot of talk is swirling around the topic of Apple moving away from the USB sync cable in a big way. Personally, I'd love to see day-to-day syncs occur over my home network, updating music, photos, movies, and apps without needing to physically connect to my Mac. However, for iOS updates in and of themselves, well, that's something I don't think I'd mind still needing the cable for if need be.
Where I think the big news for both Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 will really be is iCloud. We don't know much about iCloud. What can be said with a fair amount of certainty is iCloud will be able to stream your iTunes music purchases. Apple's recent deals with music publishers have all but guaranteed that.
I'm hoping iCloud will be more than just music. I want it to take the promise of MobileMe to the next step. I want iCloud to be the new syncing hub for my iDevices, and to take much of that weight off of iTunes. MobileMe currently does a nice job of handling my personal email, and syncing my contacts, calendars, and bookmarks. The area MobileMe still lacks in is handling my files. iDisk is terrible. Contrast this with Dropbox, which is seamless and amazing.
I'd like iCloud to be Apple's Dropbox. One place I run into this desire is iWork. It is so hard to keep a Pages document up to date between my Mac and iPad. Both integrate with iDisk, but crudely just makes duplicates of the file. The user has to keep track of which one is the newest. Throw in iWork on the iPhone now, and it is an even bigger mess.
It'd be great if a Pages document could be put into iCloud, and that one file can be accessed from my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with changes saved to iCloud automatically. And giving the file versioning support would be even better. Just. Like. Dropbox.
I really think iCloud will be the defining announcement tomorrow. The clock is ticking.
[…] I am a South Dakotan, we are South Dakotans. We don’t give up. We always keep fighting because we don’t know it any differently.
Heather has been a friend of mine since kindergarten. We've known each other most of our lives. And now she is a journalist for my hometown paper. In case you haven't been following along, my hometown is about to undergo its first flood in 59 years.
I am proud to be a South Dakotan.
My favorite image editor, Pixelmator, debuted a sneak preview of their next major release, Pixelmator 2. There is a lot of amazing stuff happening in this release that brings it closer to a Photoshop replacement for many users. At the very least, I think Pixelmator 2 will certainly seal the deal on surpassing Photoshop Elements.
Pixelmator 2 adds a ton of new and improved brushes. The crown jewel among new features looks to be Content-Aware Fill, which is something that the world first saw in Photoshop CS5. Like I said, Pixelmator 2 will probably satisfy most people's need for Photoshop, at a fraction of the price.
Speaking of price, Pixelmator 2 will be a free upgrade for those who have purchased Pixelmator in the Mac App Store. If you owned Pixelmator previous from the pre-Mac App Store era, I would suggest moving over to the Mac App Store version now, as the price is $30 once again for a limited time to encourage folks to get on board with the Pixelmator team's decision to sell only via the Mac App Store. After a little while, the price will return to $60.
Also, if you don't currently have Pixelmator, but think you may want it, it'd be a good idea to pick it up now.
Apple updated its iOS version of the iWork suite with new file management and iPhone & iPod touch user interfaces across the board. I currently only have Pages, so I installed the newly universal app on my iPhone 4 to give it a whirl.
Let's just say it's bittersweet.
Pages on the iPhone looks very nice and operates well given the constraint on screen real estate. That said, I'm not going to write a novel on my iPhone. Heck, I'm not going to write a full page document on my iPhone unless the situation were critical.
This all being said, Pages will be handy for the occasional edit. And that's where I think this app fits on the iPhone. Creating very brief documents to send out on the go, or making quick edits and sending them out.
I like Pages on the ipad and find it very usable for brief document creation. The iPhone interface should be a nice companion.
I can't speak for Keynote or Numbers, but just from the screenshots, Keynote on the iPhone looks like it could be handy in the same capacity as Pages. The Numbers screenshots look downright atrocious on the iPhone.
For $10 each, the apps are a bargain, especially if you find you only need one or two of them.
Slate Magazine details the rising popularity of logical punctuation. To be honest, I didn't even know such a thing existed until today. It just so happens that I often write using logical punctuation, then question myself, look up what is supposed to go inside quote marks and what goes outside. Let's face it, American style is inconsistent and slightly befuddling.
I'll be using logical punctuation from now on.
{via Daring Fireball}
From Apple PR this morning:
Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.
It don't see how Apple could spell it out any more, but this year WWDC is all about software. Any next-gen iPhone hopefuls will have to wait until September, likely.
I'm glad to see Mr. Jobs will be on stage again. This medical leave has been very different than his previous ones. He is still very much involved during his absence.
Lastly, the iCloud rumor seems true. I can't remember the last time (if ever?) Apple pre-announced a product via press release. Needless to say, I have a feeling it will be big.
And who knows, maybe there will be "One More Thing".
I don't get very personal on this site too often, but today is one of those days.
Today is Memorial Day here in the States, a day which we set aside to remember the soldiers that have paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy. Many of us celebrate by enjoying those very freedoms, knowing that we are safe from threat.
This Memorial Day I find myself thinking not only of fallen soldiers, but also those who currently serve. Even more specifically, I find myself thinking of those serving in South Dakota.
See, my hometown of Pierre, South Dakota is expecting to endure a flood for the first time in 59 years. A flood that will likely be worse than the one in 1952. The most shocking part is that a flood was never supposed to happen again, as Pierre is home to the world's second-largest rolled-earth dam. I guess this just goes to show that mankind cannot control the forces of nature.
I have many friends who will be affected by this flood. My parents are affected by this flood. Thankfully, my parents will have their home — which resides a hundred yards from the river — evacuated by the end of the day. The Army National Guard is building a levee in front of their house. I hope it holds.
It is a very real possibility that the home I grew up in will be greatly damaged, perhaps irrevocably.
So yes, I find myself thinking today of those who selflessly defend our country and serve our citizens. And I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
I love Twitter. The service itself has connected and reconnected me with more people than I could have imagined. I have made lasting friendship with a couple folks on another continent. I have been able to candidly chat and bounce ideas off fellow writers who inspire my own writing. I have been able to help with the development of some of my favorite apps on iOS and Mac OS. I have met many of my local friends through Twitter, and a few of those friendships have developed into bonds similar to family.
To say that Twitter has become a new communication medium that has changed and will continue to change lives is an understatement. But some of the fun of Twitter is fading. And that's because the folks in charge of Twitter1 don't seem to be fostering a community and ecosystem anymore.
Those who have joined Twitter in the past six months or so likely don't realize that Twitter hasn't always had its own official app. In the old days, Twitter's official ways to access the service were via the website, the mobile website, or text message. Much of Twitter's popularity was garnered by third-party apps such as Twitterrific and Tweetie. Twitterrific was the first on the scene, and Tweetie was a late-comer, but quickly became the darling of many users.
In April 2010, Twitter acquired Tweetie and rebranded it as Twitter for iPhone, making it the official Twitter client. Over the next year official clients popped up for Blackberry and Android. The iPhone app became universal with the addition of an iPad interface, and the Mac version of Tweetie was updated and rebranded as Twitter for Mac.
This foray into official apps was the first blip on the radar.
Back in March, Twitter's Platform/API Leader Ryan Sarver posted a note to third-party developers about the future of fully featured third-party clients.
Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets. If there are too many ways to use Twitter that are inconsistent with one another, we risk diffusing the user experience.
and
Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
The day that was posted was not a good day to be a developer of a third-party Twitter client.
A year ago Twitter made a change in how third-party apps access the Twitter service. Instead of Basic Auth, where a user supplies their username and password and an app stores both of those credentials, the service moved to OAuth, where a client receives and stores an access token linked to the user's account. This token can be revoked at any time from a user's settings page on the Twitter website. So OAuth is nice in that revoking access from a client is much easier if needed.
The problem a year ago was that OAuth requires a web view for the user to give permission for the client to access the Twitter service. It's janky and ugly and doesn't work very well on a smartphone, in my opinion.
Third-party developers voiced these same concerns, so Twitter adopted xAuth, which allows a developer to make a beautiful interface that asks for the user's username and password, and uses that momentarily to request the OAuth token. The token is then stored, and the user's credentials are not. This is fantastic for third-party clients. All the security benefits of OAuth with the ease of Basic Auth. It's a win-win-win for Twitter, developers, & users.
Well, one week ago Twitter announced (developer oriented version here)that they were removing direct message access from xAuth, and all full-featured clients would have to switch to the problematic OAuth web interface if they wanted to continue giving their customers direct messages.
John Gruber comments:
That’s good news on the surface — it means you can use services and apps that require your Twitter credentials without granting those services/apps access to your private direct messages. For services/apps that are entirely public, this makes sense. But there’s a big shit sandwich attached: Twitter is implementing this change by requiring all third-party clients that want or need access to direct messages to use the cumbersome OAuth login flow for authentication.
[…]
Thanks to OAuth, you never need to give these sites your Twitter password, let alone allow them to store your password. Instead, they forward you to twitter.com, you grant them access to your account there, and then twitter.com forwards you back to the website where you started. It’s common sense: a web-based authentication flow works naturally from within a web browser. But the same web-based authentication flow is jarring for native apps. When you open a native app — Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, WebOS — you don’t expect to be forwarded out of the app and into your web browser. Developers can alleviate some of the context switching by using an embedded web view inside their native app for the OAuth authentication handshake, but at that point, why not just use xAuth and simply allow the user to enter their username and password in a native dialog box? So long as you remain within the app, there’s no security advantage for OAuth in an embedded web view over xAuth — but there’s a huge decrease in usability, simplicity, and clarity to the user.
[…]
And OAuth is even worse for setting up multiple accounts in a native client (and good multiple account support is surely one of the leading reasons to use a native Twitter client instead of the twitter.com web site). Because then, not only do you need to go through the cumbersome OAuth login process for each additional account, but you must first sign out of the Twitter account you’re already signed into in the web browser. The twitter.com web interface is inherently single-account. To use a different Twitter account in the same web browser, you have to first sign out, then sign back in using the other account. With xAuth, to add an additional account you merely enter another username and password. With OAuth, you have to start by signing out of whatever account you previously signed into. You only have to do this when first creating each new account in the client app — the app can save the OAuth credentials for multiple accounts — but it’s still far more complicated and annoying than simply entering a username and password.
The whole article is worth your time. There's a lot of gold in there.
To me, this move is solely to make life difficult for third-party developers. Even though I don't think Twitter would be nearly as successful today if the third-party clients hadn't made Twitter such an attractive medium, I also don't think Twitter owes developers in the long-run. It is their platform, after all. Same goes for Apple and Android, etc.
I do however, think Twitter has been rather duplicitous. Why have the annual Chirp developer conference when the company obviously does not want to foster an ecosystem? It doesn't make much sense.
Sadly, I don't think we will see fully featured third-party Twitter clients by this time next year. I think Twitter will cut them out. Which, in my opinion, will also cut out innovation on the Twitter service as a whole.
Throughout the past few years that I have been a Twitter user, I have always used a third-party client as my primary access to the service. I started out back in the day with Twitterrific, which was only available for the Mac (the iPhone didn't exist yet). My usage exponentially took off after I got an iPhone 3G on day one and Twitterrific for iPhone was available that day on the App Store, which also debuted that day. I had a brief affair with Tweetie on my iPhone for a couple months until Twitterrific updated with a lot of nice new features. And my Mac saw the occasional use of Tweetie for Mac, though I used my iPhone more because I love Twitterrific. And now Twitterrific is available using the same experience on iPhone, iPad, & Mac. So that is where I am happy.
Tweetie, however, was very great on both the iPhone and Mac. But the quality of both apps seems to have degraded since the developer sold out to Twitter. They may be the official apps, but they were both more stable and a better overall experience when Loren Brichter worked alone on them.
Now that I have established ad nauseum my preference for a third-party app, let me tell you why: that's where all the innovation has come from.
I'll start with a few that Craig Hockenberry, lead developer of Twitterrific, came up with regarding his app:
There are a number of the central themes of Twitter that came from one third-party app. Not to mention that @-replies and Retweets2 were innovated outside of Twitter itself as well.
My point is that third-party clients have been an important part of the Twitter experience. For many third-party clients were and are their main experience with Twitter.
Twitter gave developers a service to build upon, and developers in turn gave Twitter a user base and ideas on how to make the service even better. Many of these ideas I don't think Twitter would have implemented on their own. And now it just comes off that Twitter is stabbing developers in the back.
If you've seen the first Iron Man movie, Twitter sure seems a lot like Obadiah Stane, and developers seem like Tony Stark. And Obi is trying to kill off the golden goose that churns out invention after invention.
