The Biography

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I finished Steve Jobs over the weekend, and wanted to share my two biggest impressions:

Steve was broken

I can’t even count how many times Steve is portrayed in the book as crying or breaking down. He would fall apart in meetings, on phone calls and on walks.

Steve often befriended someone, just to use and discard them later. He struggled with the fact he had been adopted and later abandoned his own daughter for a time.

His issues weren’t just with abandonment. Jobs fought with what can be described as eating disorders. He took drugs. While he mellowed as he aged, there’s no debate that he was a complex man.

Steve was hands-on

Steve did things no other CEO has done. He met with content providers personally. He touched and played with countless versions of products while Jonathan Ive was designing them. In the book, Isaacson reports that the 9.7" LCD on the iPad was decided upon after Jobs played with numerous mockups of different sizes.

More striking to me, however, was just how often Steve invited people over to his home or for a walk. For all of his flaws, Steve liked connecting with people in a private manner. He tendered his relationships in person as often as he could.

In closing

All in all, while the book may have had some technical errors and didn’t discuss modern Apple as much as I would have liked, I believe Isaacson was fair in his treatment of Jobs — showing all sides of his complex personality. It was a good read, and I’m glad I spent the time to move through it slowly.

Adobe to Cease Work on Mobile Flash

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Danny Winokur:

Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML. Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Boom.

Russian Mars-Bound Probe Stuck in Earth Orbit

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Wired:

The craft successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November (Moscow time), and separated from its Zenit–2 booster rocket some 11 minutes later. But its engines failed to kick in, and it’s now trapped in Earth’s orbit.

The Russian space agency says that it now has three days to correct the probe’s fault remotely, turn on its engines and break out of Earth’s orbit, before the £105-million craft’s batteries run dry.

Whoops.

Sandboxing is the First Step

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Thomas Brand:

Developers are concerned Apple’s limited list of entitlements will make their applications incompatible with the future of the Mac. They have a reason to be concerned. It may not happen in Mac OS 10.8 or even 10.9 but someday soon the filesystem will be gone. Sandboxing is only the first step. The operating system on today’s Macs can already be restored from the net. The applications we use everyday can be already downloaded from the web. And very soon the data we use across all of our computers will be backed up in the cloud. Disk Utilities, Anti-virus software, and filesystem browsers will all be ill relevant. Computers will be more reliable, easier to use, and everything will be downloadable from the internet. Application and not the filesystem are the future of computing. You may not agree with this vision of the future, but mark my words it is coming. The sandbox is only the first step.

Unsanity: We’re Still Here

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Rosyna:

Currently, none of our products are enabled to work on Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”. The core APE component part works, but that’s useless without haxies and it’s disabled because of it. So it’ll be a few weeks or a few months before we get these into beta.

Honestly, I had forgotten these guys were around.