512 Pixels

Excuse me while I go burn my Rob Enderle effigy yet another time.

The Apple PR Monster:

Apple today announced that iPad sales have topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

Damn.

Some of the entries are pretty good.

Matthew Brown for Boston.com:

Coast Guard officials also said there was no intent to conceal the scope of the disaster. Rather, they said, the spill’s complexity had made it difficult to allow the open access sought by the media.

Reporters have been turned away when attempting to reach the coast — even being threatened with arrest. This is a huge problem.

Steve Jobs, in a 1996 interview with Wired about the future of the Internet:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

It’s like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there’s some fundamental technology shift, it’s just over.

The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it’s ubiquitous. There will be Web dial tone everywhere. And anything that’s ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don’t think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it. There’s going to be a lot more innovation, and that will create a place where there isn’t this dark cloud of dominance.

Jon Gilkison over at InterfaceLab, on Wired’s iPad edition:

There are certain interactive elements to the articles, but – and I apologize to all of the people who put in a lot of back breaking work into this – they’re pretty lame. Tapping on a button-looking element switches out part of the page with another image. You can drag your finger across certain images to make them sort of animate like a flipbook (and in truth, that’s what it is – a series of PNG or JPEG images). There are videos you can tap on to view fullscreen. There are audio clips that you can play. The interactivity in the Wired application is very 1990’s. I am not trying to be insulting either, it’s simply the truth. The Wired application has pretty much brought back image rollovers.

[…]

The problem with these XML + images architectures is that they are essentially reinventing HTML with no added benefit. When I showed the Wired app to a colleague of mine, someone I consider to be one of the top HTML/Javascript developers in NYC, his assessment was the same: Why the heck didn’t they use HTML5? We stepped through each “page” of the Wired application, looked at each interactive piece – but failed to find anything that ruled out the use of HTML and JavaScript.

I stand by what I said the other day — that the Wired app is fantastic, but at the same time it is very disappointing after reading this and spending a few days with the app. After reading almost the entire thing, it’s obvious the app isn’t as cool as it seems when you first open it. Which is a bummer.

Hopefully the design — and more importantly the technology behind the design — will continue to evolve.

It’s quite interesting. Here’s Brian Lam, in response to a question the criticism voiced about the leaked iPhone story:

I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I notice it’s usually Apple-only press. I don’t know how they see their jobs, but I think reporters have to be critical of their subjects and hungry for stories that expose the truths that companies may not want in the light of day.

Exposing the truth means writing about suicides at Foxconn. Paying for stolen property and writing about it something else entirely.

Andrew Munchbach at BGR:

One of our AT&T Ninjas just hit us up with some news that will excite those of you who have a chronic case of the dropsies and own an iPhone. AT&T will be launching a new insurance service starting June 6th, named MobileProtect, designed specifically for the Apple iPhone. The insurance plan, which will be run by Asurion, will carry a price tag of $13.99/month and will be available for purchased through Apple’s App Store. The charges will be billed to the credit card on file with Apple.

It’s about time. Hopefully this will end the “why doesn’t AppleCare cover my shattered screen” question Apple Store employees hear over and over.

It’s interesting this starts one day before Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC.

Joshua Topolsky:

The new architecture of the device will be based directly on the iPhone 4, meaning it will get the same internals, down to that A4 CPU and a limited amount of flash storage – 16GB to be exact – though it will be capable of full 1080p HD (!). The device is said to be quite small with a scarce amount of ports (only the power socket and video out), and has been described to some as “an iPhone without a screen.” Are you ready for the real shocker? According to our sources, the price-point for the device will be $99. One more time – a hundred bucks.

[…]

Not only will this be priced to sell (like hotcakes), it seems that Apple is moving away from the model of local storage, and will be focusing the new ATV on cloud-based storage (not unlike Amazon’s streaming scheme). For those still interested in keeping their content close, there will be an option to utilize a Time Capsule as an external storage component, but the main course will be all about streaming.

All of this is reported to be powered by the iPhone OS, not the weird, stripped down Mac OS X that the current AppleTV runs. Moving the device into the iPhone OS would help simplify things for Apple, I would think.

Apple executives have repeated the mantra of “The AppleTV is a hobby” several times now, and it is starting to show more and more. The device has been out for three years and has only received a price cut and a hard drive upgrade. The AppleTV software has had two major revisions, but the core functionality — and limitations — haven’t changed that much.

It’s hard for me to justify $229 for the current AppleTV. The AppleTV remains (primarily) an extension of iTunes. The Mac mini is a much more attractive media rig in my opinion. Going that route allows for not only iTunes, but Netflix, Hulu and DVD playback, all in one box for just a few hundred dollars more.

So, is Engadget right about what Apple has in store for the AppleTV? I think they are. And while they don’t spell it out, hopefully Apple will be able to bundle services like Netflix on the device. It would be killer.

Earlier this month, Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry set forth a challenge:

Low end Mac users are masochists. There’s no easy way to take a classic Macintosh and do modern, enjoyable work without some pain or effort involved. Everything is a project.

[…]

I’m undertaking a bit of an experiment: spending an entire week with nothing but my low end Macs. I’m leaving my new 21.5″ iMac switched off, using my iPhone 3G for phone calls only, and relying only on Apple products that were released in the 1990s.

His original post outlines the hardware and software he is planning on using. The title of his project is a little misleading, though, as he is now looking at using OS 8 — not System 7 — as his main classic OS for the length of the experiment. That aside, it is a totally badass summer project.

During the preparation phase over the last few weeks, Lawrence ran into a major problem: iTunes. He explains the problem:

For music, I have a few options – all apps that, as the classic Mac OS period ended, paved the way for iTunes’s dominance. These are apps like SoundJam, iTunes predecessor, and Audion from Panic. I grabbed the final copy of Audion, but wondered if OS 8 could handle an early copy of iTunes.

In a roundabout way, it can. Apparently, the original version 1.0 and 1.1 are both able to run on Mac OS 8.6, with help from a certain patch. Load the patch, install iTunes 1.0 or 1.1, and enjoy the wonderfulness of Apple’s first version of its now-dominant music app.

Except when it comes to legacy software, patches, and theoretically-incompatible operating systems, failure is always an option.

Patching iTunes to work with Mac OS 8.6 ended up being a major failure, as these things often do. He ended up with this jewel of an error message at one point.

I simply love projects like this. Seeing new life breathed into old Macs is always fun.

The only downside is that now I want to install 8.6 on my original Clamshell iBook and go to town.

The Apple-following portion of the Internet blew up earlier today when an analyst floated the rumor that part of Steve Jobs’ keynote would be set aside for Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer. Eric Savitz with Barron’s Tech Trader Daily:

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is Section 3.3.1, the provision in the iPhone OS SDK License Agreement that forbids cross-compilers to be used when building iPhone apps. Here’s the exact wording:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

As things played out in April after that discussion, it became clear Apple had Adobe’s “Flash-to-iPhone” technology in mind.

The rumor that Apple and Microsoft were going to be announcing that Visual Studio would be retooled for developers to build iPhone OS applications seems to be a pretty clear violation of Section 3.3.1.

Section 3.3.1 aside, what would Apple gain by allowing Visual Studio to be used to build iPhone apps? As it stands today, the only way to build and compile iPhone apps is using Apple’s Xcode, which only runs on OS X. Thus, iPhone developers are tied to the Mac platform. Why would Apple want to change that? Why split resources into more than one development tool?

Of course, all of this is Visual Studio/WWDC talk may be pointless, as Microsoft announced this afternoon that Ballmer would not be at WWDC:

Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t be present in some way or another. There is always the possibility Apple will announce they are partnering with Bing for map and search services.

Replacing Google services with Microsoft’s seems more likely that adding Visual Studio to the Xcode family. Thankfully, we don’t have long to wait.

Nilay Patel:

We’d heard rumors this morning that Matias Duarte had left Palm for Google, but now we’ve got it straight from Mountain View: Mr. Duarte is the new User Experience Director for Android.

This could be the shot in the arm Android’s interface team badly needs.