Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple Computer on Sept. 16, 1985, after losing a boardroom battle for control of the company with then-CEO John Sculley.
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On Sept. 16, 1997, Apple announced that Jobs had officially been named interim CEO, or — as the company cleverly put it — iCEO.
If you want a good look into Apple leading up to Jobs’ ousting, I would recommend you read West of Eden by Frank Rose. Fascinating stuff.
Inbox Zero means I care more about the outbox than the inbox. It means I choose to focus my time, energy, and attention on creating something worthwhile instead of feeding some unhealthy addiction to constantly check my inboxes. Pressing the Get New Mail button or refreshing my Twitter stream is like pulling the crank on a slot machine. Did I win? No. Did I win? No.
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.
There’s a point in any Mac junkie’s life when you have to stop and admit you have a problem.
For some people, it’s photo editing apps. They switch from Aperture to LightRoom back to Aperture and then to something I probably have never heard of because it’s open source and all the cool kids are doing it.
For others it’s GTD apps where the quest to streamline their work flow and to get more done generally ends in disaster when they spend eight hours trying to figure out what context and application to put “walk the dog” in.
It’s a problem all loyal OS X users have. We download an app, like it, buy it, use it and then three days later there’s another one out that does the same damn thing but we are right there repeating the cycle.
On my Macbook right now, I have six photo editing apps, four Twitter applications, four FTP clients, four GTD applications, five DVD rippers and five e-mail applications.
“To-Be-Shipped” still seems to be the status on any iPad rivals. This means that the iPad is still the only device in its class, which is good news for Apple, and for the folks who own the device too. For the consumers, it means that there will still be developers focusing on making amazing apps for them to make their iPad even more useful!
While I agree that there are no real competitors to the iPad at this point, her article only points out two oddball clamshell devices that don’t stand a chance of doing well — or ever being produced, in Lenovo’s case.
Not mentioning the forthcoming Galaxy Tab (and other Android tablets) is a huge oversight in Christine’s post.
Do I think Android tablets will ever catch up to the giant lead Apple is currently enjoying? No.
Is Android worth mentioning in a post about iPad rivals? Yes.
Is Christine’s fluff post just an Apple cheerleader making noise? You bet.
John Boudreau at Mercury News:
Apple is expected to announce soon a new subscription plan for newspapers, which hope tablets like the iPad will eventually provide a new source of profits as media companies struggle with declining print circulation and advertising revenue.
In short, Apple may do to newspapers what they did to the music industry. I don’t see a lot of newspapers being willing to give Apple 30% of their profits from this, but do they really have much of a choice?
Justin Blanton explains how he writes on the Mac. It’s a great setup, and the same thing I use, except the TextMate bit. I prefer writing directly in Notational Velocity.
As he mentions it in his footnote, Notational Velocity can store it’s files (as plain text files) in any folder, including a folder in your Dropbox. I store mine there as a second-tier sync, knowing I can get to my stuff, even if Simplenote is down.
Update: Trey Heath chimes in on Notational Velocity as well.
Macworld’s Benj Edwards has a great look back at Mac OS X Public Beta, released ten years go:
When users got their hands on the Public Beta, reviews were mixed but optimistic. It was obvious that OS X represented a promising future for Apple, but the company still had a long way to go in terms of producing a fully mature OS. Apple collected bug reports and ideas for its new beta through an Internet-enabled suggestion box in the Apple menu.
While OS X has made great strides over the last decade, it is a bit more mind-boggling to think about Apple’s other products that have surfaced since 2000 — the iPod, iLife, iOS devices and the best Macs the company has ever shipped.
If you don’t know much about the origins of Mac OS X, this is a must-read.
Update: Ars Technica has re-published John Siracusa’s review of OS X’s Public Beta.
Hilarious. And sad.
Jeremy Horwitz, on the new iPod nano:
More than most of Apple’s iPods—and certainly the majority of its iPod nanos—the sixth-generation iPod nano is a love it or hate it addition to the family, dropping so many of the capabilities of its predecessors that it’s hard to take seriously as a sequel. Haters will seize upon the omissions, the unchanged price tag, and the lack of true multi-touch functionality as reasons to pass on the nano, and we can’t say that we’d blame them; this would certainly be the first nano we’d have skipped, and as our limited recommendation suggests, we’d expect that most of our readers will do the same. There are enough of last year’s nanos floating around at lower prices to make this one extremely easy to forget; our editors all agreed that we would have felt differently if this was a $99 model; there’s just not enough here to justify these prices.
None of this is to say that the sixth-generation iPod nano is a bad product overall. The new form factor and touch screen represent one cool if not strictly necessary result of blending iPod shuffle and iPod touch DNA, and the result is surely not as ridiculously hard to use as last year’s iPod shuffle. Even if it turns off at least as many people as it ropes in, there will be some who embrace the new nano in spite of all it has lost—and don’t mind paying $149 or $179 for the privilege. Unlike the prior iPod shuffle, we wouldn’t actively urge them to save their money. The sixth-generation iPod nano may well wind up being a one-off design, like the third-generation “fat” nano, but like that model, the heart of this product’s a good one—it’s just the rough interface edges and limited feature set that need some additional work. Apple will have to decide going forward whether to shrink the nano further into the watch it could become, or enlarge it a little to regain the video features it has lost.