The Apple Core

March 27th, 2008

Is Apple good or evil?

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 8:37 am

Categories: Opinion, Apple

Tags: Apple Inc., Public Relations, Web Browsers, Digital Music, Digital Media, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Internet, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

There has been a lot of talk lately about how is Apple becoming more like Microsoft and turning evil, but is it really the case? Personally I’ve known that Apple was evil since they tried to litigate me out of business and subpoena three years worth of my email, but I digress.

Recent examples of Apple’s evilness include pushing their Safari Web browser down the throat of iTunes users on Windows as a “software update” but other examples exist and bricking modified iPhones with a firmware update.

Leander Kahney points to several examples of Apple’s dark side in his cover story in this month’s Wired magazine, including: their walled-garden approach to software and hardware, secrecy, paranoia and managements sometimes poor treatment of employees.

On the other hand, lots of good can be found in Apple. Their technical support and build quality usually yields pretty high marks and their hardware continues to improve at an almost breakneck pace. Witness their successes with iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, etc.

Slashdot insists that Someday You’ll Hate Apple (And Google Too):

Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. ‘It’s that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google’s PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.’”

So which is it? How would you characterize today’s Apple, Inc.?

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March 27th, 2008

File systems of the Mac’s past, present and maybe future

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 8:00 am

Categories: Software, Storage

Tags: Apple Macintosh, File System, Reimer, Ext3, David Morgenstern

Over the past couple of years, the usurpation of the current Mac’s HFS+ file system by Sun’s ZFS has been predicted. Sometimes that message has been delivered (incorrectly) by Sun top brass.

While Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server supports ZFS, there’s no expectation that it will replace the current Mac file system any day now, or even any year now.

A recent Ars Technica article by Jeremy Reimer provides an overview of the file systems used by many platforms, including Macs, PCs and Unix systems. He discusses the merits (and historical context) of each, as well as the chances for adoption of ZFS by Apple.

Reimer asks why Apple didn’t switch over to the “newer and sexier” ZFS a few years ago instead of continuing to refine HFS+. He suggests that it’s an uphill task to move a user base to a new file system. For example, long-established file systems, such as FAT, still can be found in popular peripherals including flash drives.

Often it is easier to stick with well-established file systems, even when the cost of switching is ostensibly “free.” The example of Linux, which is completely open source and allows anyone to write a new file system for it, is a useful one. Despite valiant attempts to establish ReiserFS as a new standard, and the measurable superiority of systems like XFS, most Linux users are still using ext3. ext3 is not new. It’s not super fast. It’s not sexy. It won’t cook your dinner. But it is tried and true, and for many people, that is more important.

NTFS is likely to stick around for many years in the future, simply out of sheer inertia. HFS+ may kick around for a few years longer as well. Even FAT may still be on our thumb drives, haunting us with the ghost of CP/M long after everyone has forgotten what that even was.

Reimer may be overly optimistic in his time frame. Changing almost anything in the installed base and the developer base is difficult, and even an easy transition will extend over many years. Transitions that concern storage are usually even tougher.

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March 27th, 2008

Adobe launches free Photoshop Web application

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 6:34 am

Categories: Software, Adobe, Web 2.0

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe PhotoShop, Web Application, Sales Strategy, Desktops, Sales Force Management, Sales, Hardware, Jason D. O'Grady

Google, eat your heart out.

Adobe Photoshop was one of the original reasons why people purchased Macs. Adobe Systems, Inc. launched the powerful photo editing and retouching application in 1990 exclusively for the Mac and the software set the bar for graphic software and drove hardware sales. The next chapter was when Adobe launched Photoshop for Windows in 1992 – much to the consternation of Cupertino.

Adobe today changed everything again with the launch of Photoshop Express, a new Web-based application that allows you to edit photos in a Web-browser. The application was launched in beta form yesterday and is heavily dependent on Adobe’s flash technology.

It’s pretty funky in Flock but works well with the newly-Acid3-compliant Webkit nightly build, Firefox 2 and Safari 2.

Game-changer, or natural evolution to the Web?

March 27th, 2008

Employees steal 332 iPhones

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 6:02 am

Categories: Retail, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, Police, Productivity, Telecom & Utilities, Jason D. O'Grady

From the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department:

SALEM — Two men employed to sell iPhones at the Apple Computer Store in the Mall at Rockingham Park went into business for themselves, stealing 332 of them before being caught by their bosses, police said.

Police yesterday arrested Joshua Garrand, 28, of Methuen, Mass., and Christopher Nashed, 22, of Sandown on felony theft charges of stealing $132,468 worth of the popular computer phone and reselling them on the black market, police said.

Courtesy of the Eagle Tribune.

March 26th, 2008

UI guidelines: one reason the Mac shines, Windows sucks

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 8:15 am

Categories: Mac OS, Windows, Vista

Tags: Apple Macintosh, User Interface, Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Kermadec, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Apple Mac OS X

Is there a method behind the madness of the Windows experience and the elegance of the Macintosh? One reason can be seen with just one look at the human interface principles found on Apple’s and Microsoft’s developer sites.

This exploration was sparked by a blog post on O’Reilly’s Digital Media by FJ de Kermadec, a Paris-based designer and author. He wrote about several differences between Windows Vista and Mac OS X and the user expectations for each platform.

According to Kermadec, said some new users are either afraid of computers or bored by them. They don’t care about the metaphors of the user interface or the niceties of icons, menus and widgets.

Here, Vista’s start menu is brilliant: it shoves 99% of what you may want to do in one single menu, allowing users to immediately “get into” their tasks. Calling it “Start” in the old days was a very good move in that it clearly told users to “start here.”

From that menu, Vista will open a sort of window-meets-web-page, filled with buttons and icons, that clearly tells the user, in plain English, what to do. There is even a little colorful shield icon next to some links to suggest some kind of big security system is protecting the computer. When clicked, these links cause a playful cursor to appear and a big reaction – screen dimming. A strange, awkwardly worded dialog will pop up but that does not matter: there is a big button in there to proceed, which the user can now click, safe in the knowledge the computer is doing some thinking for them. Then, the appropriate window will load, with buttons bigger and brighter than the last one.

Yayy! The average user feels like a real computer user now: look at how the big machine reacts to his every whim.

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March 26th, 2008

The MacBook Air has no clothes

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 5:52 am

Categories: Opinion, MacBook Air

Tags: Apple MacBook, RAM, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

There. I said it.

After using the MacBook Air intensely since it arrived in February, I am beginning to feel the limitations of its pokey 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. I knew what I was getting into going in, but I was convinced that I could make it work. Initially the tradeoff of less CPU and RAM was worth shaving two pounds off my daily notebook heft but as I use the MBA more and more I’m increasingly frustrated by its molasses-like performance.

(I’m not complaining about the 80GB hard drive, either. With some careful data gymnastics I’ve found it pretty easy to live within 80GB, with the exception of Parallels disk images. Those, my friend, are a bear. To hell with music and photo libraries damnit! I need Windows XP!)

Take my morning routine, for example. Every weekday I launch Flock and open a bookmark of 14 sites in tabs, then I launch NetNewsWire, then Adium, then Mail. This process easily pegs both processors and sometimes make Flock totally unresponsive for several minutes. I sometimes have to force quit and re-launch Flock to get it working again and have to wait a few minutes for everything to refresh.

Granted, it’s a tall order.

Loading multiple Web pages, RSS feeds and IMAP accounts is undoubtedly resource intensive, but it’s not video effects rendering or high-end Photoshop plug-in work for Pete’s sake! It’s mostly network access. I wouldn’t expect it to completely hobble an Intel Core 2 Duo running on an 802.11g (sometimes n) network. But maybe I’m pushing the limits?

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March 25th, 2008

Troubleshooting Mac OS X software issues

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 9:46 am

Categories: Software, Mac OS

Tags: Software, Apple Mac OS, Apple Macintosh, Apple iPod, Apple Mac OS X, Hardware, Cable, Tools & Techniques, Network Technology, Telecommunications

Apple recently updated its Knowledge Base guide to troubleshooting software problems. Roll up your sleeves, it’s a long list.

Of course, the first item in Mac OS X: How to troubleshoot a software issue is whether the issue is in hardware or software. And that’s trouble right away.

Apple suggests that users try fixing software first before thinking about hardware, perhaps because a hardware problem is something that will push users into a support call.

All the same, I advise everyone to check connections of cables first, if there’s even the hint that a cable might be pertinent to the problem. And this advice means checking both sides of the connection. It can be very embarrassing.

It is impossible to mount a drive that’s not plugged into the host computer you’re working from, no matter how many utility programs you run and how long you keep at it. This used to happen with SCSI cables, which often came loose if you didn’t screw them in place. Or with RJ-45 Ethernet cables that have the plastic lock broken off.

Shamefaced, I admit that this happened to me the other day. I thought a USB hard drive was plugged into my MacBook Pro, but after checking all the various cables, hubs, switches, drives and I/O wandering around my desktop, I discovered that it wasn’t. Wrong cable. Duh!

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March 25th, 2008

Wired: Apple is Evil/Genius

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 7:37 am

Categories: Opinion, Apple

Tags: Wired Inc., Apple Inc., Wired Magazine, Recruitment & Selection, Apple Mac OS X, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Operating Systems, Software, Apple Mac OS

Wired Magazine’s Leander Kahney has a cover story on Apple (”How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong” Issue 16.04 ) that’s worth a read. Overall it’s pretty well balanced and fair and has just enough edgy snarkiness to keep you reading.

Kahney takes Apple to task for being the antithesis of Google:

Everybody is familiar with Google’s famous catchphrase, “Don’t be evil.” It has become a shorthand mission statement for Silicon Valley, encompassing a variety of ideals that — proponents say — are good for business and good for the world: Embrace open platforms. Trust decisions to the wisdom of crowds. Treat your employees like gods.

It’s ironic, then, that one of the Valley’s most successful companies ignored all of these tenets.

…by Google’s definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that either. (emphasis mine).

and Jobs for being a tyrant:

Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager. No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs’ exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor’s corners. “He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level,” says Cordell Ratzlaff, a former manager charged with creating the OS X interface.

The entire article is available free online at Wired.

To their credit, Wired critiques their June 1997 article on how they’d fix the then-fledgling computer maker in Our Bad. Wired Had Some Tips For Apple — We Were Wrong.

“Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely.” Hmm. Today, 83 percent of Apple’s revenue comes from sales of hardware like iPods, iMacs, and iPhones.

We urged Apple to consider an assortment of ill-advised partnerships. “Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola,” we said. We also suggested Apple team up with a bigger company like Sony, Sega, or Oracle. It’s hard to imagine Apple thriving under Motorola — the outfit that couldn’t milk a cash cow like the RAZR — or Sony, whose Walkman brand was rendered obsolete by the iPod.

And then there was the worst idea of all: Switch to Windows NT. Ugh.

Good thing Apple didn’t take (all) of their advice :)

March 25th, 2008

Circumventing iPod’s FairPlay DRM

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 6:49 am

Categories: Hardware, iPod, iTunes, DRM, iTunes Store, FairPlay

Tags: Software, Apple iPod, Apple iTunes, FairPlay DRM, TUAW, Digital Music, Digital Media, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Jason D. O'Grady

One of the first complaints you’ll hear from new iPod owners is that they can’t (edit: automatically) sync their new toy with more than one computer or that they can’t sync more than one iPod with one computer. Stop by any Genius Bar and you’ll hear this common refrain.

Veteran iPod owners know that Apple limits the ways iPods transfer music in an attempt to placate the RIAA and keep the music labels happy so that they’ll continue to hawk their artists on iTunes.

Apple’s proprietary DRM software is called FairPlay and has drawn scrutiny of the EU as being anti-competitive. FairPlay is built into QuickTime and used by iPhone, iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Store. FairPlay protected song purchased from iTunes are digitally encrypted preventing them from being played on unauthorized computers.

TUAW has an excellent story today rounding up the software tools that allow you to circumvent Apple’s FairPlay DRM on a Mac. Some of the local options include:

Podworks - US$8
Senuti - Free
iPod.iTunes - Free

If you want to share iTunes over a network, your options include:

Simplify Media - Free
KavaTunes - US$35
Mojo - Free, US$11 Pro

A new local software option called Misu (from the developers of Menuet and Art Collector) just entered a private beta period and allows you to connect two iPods to your Mac and sync them. If you hop over to TUAW you can get a code to test the private beta and if you email them feedback today, you’ll get a free license to the software when it’s released.

March 24th, 2008

MacBook touch concepts

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 6:21 pm

Categories: Patent, MacBook, Display, Touchscreen, Multi-Touch, Concept

Tags: Concept, Surface, Apple MacBook, Keyboards, Notebooks, Hardware, Peripherals, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

Gizmodo reader David McMillan has whipped up some amazing MacBook Touch concepts, based on one of Apple’s newly revealed double sided panel patents. The concepts use a transparent multi-touch display that can work as a control surface on two sides, both while the device is open and closed.

In the first concept (pictured above), the transparent panel doubles as a keyboard when it’s flipped open. That keyboard can also morph into a control surface and/or mixer thanks to its dynamic, electronic surface. When closed, the panel becomes a transparent touchscreen for the monitor underneath it turning it into a Mac tablet.

Could this be the ultimate hybrid notebook? The only problem with adoption of such a machine would be typing on a flat, non-tactile surface with no haptic feedback. Hmmm, sounds vaguely like another Apple product we know and love.