A lot less blog, a lot more magazine. It looks great.
FAA Ruining People’s Day
NPR:
An “equipment outage” at Atlanta’s William B. Hartsfield International Airport has forced a “ground stop” there, the Federal Aviation Administration says.
There’s also a “ground stop,” at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.
The problems, as often happens with the airline system, are rippling across the nation.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “a computer glitch shut down most, if not all, departing flights at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and other airports across the country Thursday morning.”
Of course — I’m flying from Dallas back home to Memphis in a few hours. Stupid computers.
Ars Reviews Ubuntu 9.10
Despite its strengths, Karmic still has a long road ahead before it will be a suitable candidate for desktop dominance. Audio support, hardware compatibility, upgrade reliability, and ease of use remain areas where the developers still have a lot of work to do. Canonical and the Ubuntu community clearly take those challenges seriously and are making good progress in each new release.
That’s always been an issue for Ubuntu, but this release is really, really slick.
Camino Hits 2.0
Camino is a weird, wonderful application. It’s a full-blown Cocoa browser powered by Gecko — which is the rendering engine behind Firefox. In almost every way, it is what Firefox for the Mac should be — fast, nimble and very Mac-like. And today, it’s reached the infamous 2.0 status:
After over a year of hard work by devoted volunteers, the Camino Project is proud to give you Camino 2. This latest version includes many bug fixes and new features, providing all users with an improved browsing experience.
This release displays web pages with Gecko 1.9, the same rendering engine used by the popular Firefox 3 web browser, and thus shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.
Normally I browse using the nightly builds of WebKit, but if you need Gecko, Camino is the only way to go on the Mac. Happy downloading.
Jailbreaking: Don’t Skirt the Issue
A couple of weeks ago, I had decided that it was time to make Google Voice a more central part of my communication workflow. Having not launched GV Mobile in a while, I fired it up to reacquaint myself with the interface, capabilities, etc. Trouble is, I couldn’t authenticate with Google. I triple-checked my credentials but the app would just throw an error on launch and that was that. A couple of people on Twitter had mentioned having the same issue and a quick Google search informed me that, sure enough, the app no longer worked. Apparently, Google had modified the Voice API such that authentication now worked differently than it did when GV Mobile was written. Because the app no longer had Apple’s seal of approval, I had little recourse because there obviously weren’t going to be any updates to the app anytime soon.
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I can confidently say that this little hiccup has seriously cramped my plans for more completely adopting Google Voice.
Brett raises the question of how users should handle orphaned/forgotten/rejected apps. It’s a legitimate question as long as Apple continues to reject applications or — even worse — pull apps from the App Store after approving them for sale.
The first option is for users to simply adapt. Most of the time, this means finding a web app that does what the native app was designed to do or finding another way to get the certain tasks completed.
Or users can take things into their own hands. I’ve discussed jailbreaking here before, and here’s what I said then:
For me, jailbreaking my iPhone isn’t about sticking it to the man or shaking my fist at Apple. I just want my iPhone to do things Apple won’t allow. If Apple would allow for these apps via the App Store, I’d go that route. But they don’t, so I jailbreak.
I still believe this, and I think it’s a great solution to Brett’s problem with GV Mobile no longer working. There is a fully-functioning, often-updated version of the app on the Cydia app store, which is a simple jailbreak away.
One big argument against jailbreaking is that it’s too complicated for the average user. True — I would never recommend my mom jailbreak an iPhone. It can be risky, and requires an understanding that by playing in the street, sometimes you have to dodge traffic.
But the average user isn’t interested in setting up Google Voice. It’s a geeky thing to re-route your voice traffic through a web service. People who want to use Google Voice on their iPhone are exactly the people who will (and have) jailbreak to use it.
Secondly, there is an entire platform that supports — even encourages — using Google Voice. If Google Voice is integral to your life, by an Android device. Really — Android is a solid OS that has really come into it’s own with the 2.0 release.
Google Voice isn’t a unique issue. NetShare was an app that Apple approved in the early days of the App Store that allowed tethering. While it still runs on current iPhone hardware and software, PDANet — which also allows tethering — is also for download via Cydia. Again, users who would tether would jailbreak.
So Brett, if you want your iPhone to do things that Apple doesn’t allow, just jailbreak the thing and move on.
Why Can’t MobileMe Be Like This?
Oh man, this would be sweet.
Painful Review of the Pixi
The Pixi is screwed. It’s totally cannibalized by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $30 at Walmart, it’s worth trading up to the Pre for $40 or $50 more if you’re absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.
Damn. I mean, damn.
The thing is, the Pixi is just another example in a long line of poor-performing, over-priced devices from Palm. They really need to stop doing this to themselves.
The Apple Store or Harvard?
At a press event today, Apple said that 10,000 people submitted applications to work at the new store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan.
Of those, just over 200 got jobs, for a 2% acceptance rate.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s acceptance rate was 7% this past year, according to a March report in the Boston Globe. That’s 29,000 applications for about 2,000 admissions.
Sad.
Bill Gates, on Steve Jobs
“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”
He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”
I just wish Jobs would start doing good stuff with his millions, like Gates has.
Where the Droids Are
Not surprisingly, most are in large cities.
The Risks of an Open App Store
The AppStore would turn into a market where a few big developers gain the trust of iPhone users, and users will be reluctant to try anything new because it could completely annihilate their phone. That’s not the world I want to live in as a consumer. I want to be able to install an application with some degree of faith that the absolute junk was already weeded out.
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The big development firms might find the process to be restricting because they have both the knowledge and the time to properly test their applications before submitting the programs they create for review, but, I’m not all that confident that the get rich over night crowd has the skill set to do that. Some might, but I bet a large majority of them don’t. The restrictions aren’t in place because of the Facebooks or the Rogue Ameoba’s of the world, they’re in place for us, the consumer, who wants a little assurance that a flashlight application won’t make their phone unstable, and that fart applications actually make fart noises. It’s not always about developers, and sometimes, just sometimes, it’s about consumers having devices that work.
Joshua is right about the approval process needing to keep apps that crash phones out of the App Store. That’s a good thing. But having Apple police what types of apps customers can use is a totally different issue. I’m fine with Apple keeping malicious code out of the App Store, but I’m not sure the company needs to continue to be the moral police for people.
At the very least, Apple needs to clarify and simplify their requirements, and be far more transparent and fast-moving when it comes to dealing with rejections, or open platforms like the Android Market will continue to attract customers and developers alike.
On Verizon and ATT&T’s War
Chris Ziegler over at Engadget has put together a good overview of the never-ending battle between the two carriers:
So listen, AT&T, we’re sorry Verizon made you upset, but the solution’s actually pretty simple: compete. Fix your network, keep scoring hot exclusives, and get hungry again — because in a year or two, no one’s going to give a damn that you used to have an exclusive on the iPhone.