Ben Brooks, on seven inch tablets:
This small size sounds great if you think about it, surely it will be lighter and more portable. Seven inches is a huge difference though, you lose almost 3 inches off the iPad size and for what? Well you get a smaller device that still doesn’t fit in your pocket and doesn’t have the screen real estate to be really great.
The problem isn’t that tap zones become much smaller, the problem is the onscreen keyboards get much smaller.
9 to 5 Mac has some photos of the new beast. I can’t wait to I have one on my desk at work.
The Apple II was a revolution. It took the computer out of the hands of the corporations and the goverment and gave it to the people.
The Macintosh was a revolution. It turned computers from mysterious boxes waiting on text-based commands to GUI-powered appliances.
The iPod was a revolution. It made portable music easy and fun.
But what about the Apple IIc? The Macintosh SE? The iPod mini? All of these devices — while important in their own ways — aren’t considered as important to the history of computing as the revolutionary products from which they evolved.
When you buy a new Windows PC, as you probably know, it comes festooned with little (or not so little) stickers on the palm rests. There’s one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on.
[…]
A.M.D.’s research shows that consumers hate the stickers (duh). But they’re not going away, for one simple reason: There’s big money involved. Intel, Microsoft, Skype and whoever else is represented by the stickers actually pay the computer companies for the billboard space. That’s why H.P., for example, would tolerate gumming up its laptops’ good looks with crass ads. (Apple refuses to put Intel stickers on its computers, even though there’s Intel inside. In doing so, it leaves millions of dollars a year on the table.)
Microsoft, on the history of the Internet Explorer logo:
The IE logo is well known as the way to the web. Internet cafés around the world use the IE logo on their signage to invite people in. Some of our teammates have snapped photos while passing cafés during their travels. The IE logo is right on the front of the buildings! It’s always fun to see that to many people, the blue e means the Internet.
Nokia’s problem — and I’ve heard this same story from at least half a dozen former and present Nokia employees who read DF — is that their handset business is fundamentally based around hardware teams. When they decide to make a phone, they put together a hardware team for that model, and that team makes all decisions. That’s why they have no cohesive software strategy. Nokia sees software as one component in a hardware-based view of the industry.
Hilarious. And sad.
Neven Mrgan, joking about developing for the new iPod nano:
We were super excited, and I made some mockups to show how this would work. Sadly, what Apple announced was a great new product which, despite its obvious similarities to the iPhone and iPad, lacks the App Store. So I’m sorry to say we won’t be able to bring you The Incident for iPod Nano.
Codenamed The Subatomic Incident, this is a wrist-sized bomb of pure multitouch microfun. As really tiny pixel-images of really big things fall, you climb your way to safety using a simple swipe-to-jump gesture.
At its annual music-based event, Apple today announced an all-new iPod nano.
The new player is small — 1.48 inches tall and 1.61 inches wide. Gone is the click wheel that for so long defined the iPod. Instead, the iPod nano’s face is defined by a 1.54-inch color, Multi-Touch display. The OS is still in question, even though it sure looks like iOS, and Jobs alluded to it running iOS while describing how to move icons around on the screen.
Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman, on Delicious Library 2:
So Delicious Library 2 would ship with a whole new back- and front-ends—in effect, it was like a whole new product. But Shipley didn’t stop there; instead, DL2 piled on new features, including a whole list of new product categories it could track, like video games, tools, and other items. It also added web exporting with iWeb integration, a companion iPhone app (which was later dropped due to API limitations set by Amazon), library sharing with friends, improved AppleScript support, and more.