512 Pixels

I am a big Remember the Milk user, and up until last week, was using Todo to sync RTM with my iPhone. RTM has since come out with a native iPhone app, and it’s stunning (and much better than Todo, in my opinion). Here’s the thought that led the company to create such a great app:

Building an app that simply gave access to your RTM tasks online wasn’t enough (after all, the web-based iPhone version does that already) The app needed to give you the power of all of RTM’s functionality in your pocket (Smart Lists, tagging, search, etc), take advantage of the device’s features (like knowing your location), and of course the whole thing needed to work offline too (it’s no good carrying RTM around with you if you can’t manage your tasks as soon as you’re out of phone or Wi-Fi range!).

The key here is simple: iPhone users want real applications that harness the iPhone’s power and ease-of-use, not rinky-dink wannabe apps that just get things done.

From the Memphis Flyer:

Almost nothing has worked this year for E. W. Scripps, the parent company of The Commercial Appeal.

First, however, a little perspective is in order. The CA can and does still make money, although Scripps won’t say how much or what its profit margin is at individual properties. The Scripps newspaper chain earned $58 million in profits on $431 million of operating revenue in the first nine months of 2008. Not great, but hardly a General Motors-style loss either. That said, the trend in circulation, advertising, and finance is not good.

I’m not sure my son will ever pickup a newspaper from a gas station for his news.

Lance Ulanoff over at PC Magazine has announced that the January 2009 edition will be the last printed edition of the 27-year old publication:

While we are energized by the endless possibilities of the digital format, I assure you that the decision to stop producing a hard-bound copy was not an easy one. But the reality is that the ever-growing expense of print and delivery was turning the creation of a physical product into an untenable business proposition.

I’m not surprised. I think more and more magazines will slowly adopt the web-only model, with special content available for “subscribers.”The most obvious problem with this model is keeping subscribers. If they can get most of the content without paying (and now don’t get a physical copy), what is to keep them writing those checks each year? Another problem is magazine rack sales. After January, no one will be able to buy PC Magazine in a bookstore or airport. That will hurt sales, but maybe the reduced cost (no paper, no ink, no shipping, etc) will make up for this loss.

I think this will creep into all genre of magazines at some point, but it makes sense for tech publications to make the jump first. But it’s still sad. There’s something nice about having something to stack up in the bathroom, you know?

MacRumors has a forum thread about a reader who just bought a used MacBook Air on eBay:

I recently picked up a used Macbook Air 1.6 The bottom case is black without any markings on it. Computer does boot up, but the battery has swollen and distorted the case. I removed the bottom of the case and pulled the battery with thoughts of purchasing a replacement battery. When looking at the connections they are different from the disassembly pictures on the web, and then most of the other internals are slightly different than on the various disassembly sites as well.

Throughout the thread, the owner updates with a few more facts, including the lack of the media function keys, the keyboard backlight, and the “MacBook Air” badge on the bezel. The unit’s logic board is red (it’s a dark green-blue in real life MacBook Airs), and the machine is running 10.4. The real MacBook Air shipped with 10.5.2.

There’s been some debate today about whether this is really a prototype, or a knock-off from China. I vote for prototype. Apple builds their machines and tests them internally, and those machines have leaked out in the past into the hands of regular users.

When I was in Cupertino, I saw a prototype MacBook Pro built inside a large acrylic case. The easiest way to explain the machine is that it was built in an “exploded view” so each part could be seen, and all the connectors could be easily reached. It was pretty cool, but it wasn’t anywhere near what the finished product would be. It used the old-style round power adapter, and did not have an iSight. It booted and ran, but was far from complete. I assume what that guy bought is a more evolved version of the prototype versions of the Air. I wonder what he’ll do with it.

Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, a well-known developer has created OpenRadar.app, an OS X application designed to help developers keep track of bugs that they submit to Apple’s internal (private, locked-away, secret) bug-tracking system called Radar.

First, little on Radar:

Radar is Apple’s internal bug tracking system. How Apple views Radar and how external third-party developers view Radar causes a bit of a conflict…

Apple encourages developers to file bugs, even those we know are probably duplicates, in order to “vote up” individual bugs and hopefully give them more priority when it comes time decide schedules.

This duplicate bug-filing encouragement never sat well with external developers, because Radar is completely opaque to us. It’s never clear whether we should spend the considerable time+effort to write up a great bug report (doing so can easily take an entire work-day or two) or if we should just do the minimum since it will just be immediately flagged as a duplicate and then mostly ignored.

Because Radar is opaque, we can’t look at an existing bug report we think is probably a duplicate and realize ours is actually an altogether different bug or that we have a critical piece of information that’s not in the existing bug report.

He goes on to describe the creation of Open Radar. Folks, it’s a thing of beauty:

Kicked off by a tweet from Dave Dribin, Tim Burks created a new Google AppEngine site named Open Radar. It’s already being populated as I type this by different folks, so it looks like it’s taking off… Dave Dribin wrote an app called RadarForwarder that accepts those radr:// urls I mentioned before and opens an Open Radar page for them.

And I just wrote OpenRadar.app, which allows you to file your Radars normally, but captures the information and saves it locally. I’ll be adding auto-upload of that information to Open Radar soon. It’s the next-best-thing to a “make public” checkbox.

Basically, Rentzsch and the others are slowly building an external (public, not secret) carbon copy of what bugs and issues developers submit to Apple. And while at first it will be small, overtime, it will grow into the beast that I’m sure Apple’s internal Radar system is.

It’s a great example of the indie Mac developement community seeing a problem, working together, and solving it.

David Pogue of the NY Times has re-released a review of the iPod Mini. If you haven’t seen his videos before, here’s a spoiler: he’s a major dork.

Today is day 321 of my Project 365. As the year winds down, it is becoming harder to find photographs that capture the day. But today was not one of those days. I had to go to campus and take some photos for class and came back with one I am very happy with:

Don’t click on this link unless you’re a hardcore Apple geek and have lots of time on your hands. It includes high-resolution images of every Apple ad from 1976 to 2002. Including ads for things I didn’t know existed.

Flickr user wolphcry has posted some pics of his very slick MacBook, which now looks like a little Mac Pro.

Very nice.

I ran across an article today on Roughly Drafted titled “Newton Lessons for Apple’s New Platform.” It’s an interesting read, especially considering it’s two years old.

The article discusses the failure of Apple’s Newton project of the early 1990s. The Newton was Apple’s first foray into the PDA/handheld computer, and frankly, it was not a bad attempt at all. The early models were plagued with slow hardware and rough software ( made famous forever in a comic strip), but at the end of the series (with the MessagePad 2000 & 2100 models), Apple had the kinks worked out.

But it was too late. Brant Sears, a Newton developer:

“The bottom line was that Apple created something really cool and almost usable with the Newton. But unlike now*, Apple products of that era were often great, but had one or two fatal flaws that prevented them from actually being practical to use.”

He cites reasons as the physical size of the Newtons (too big for a pocket, too small for a bag), battery consumption, poor APIs for developers to sync their applications, and more.

Nowadays, when people think of Apple’s mobile development platform, the iPhone comes to mind. Having used both (a MessagePad 2100 got me through college, and yes, it wasn’t that long ago), it is clear Apple learned from the mistakes of the Newton:

1. The iPhone OS is touch-based. The Newton was a hybrid- it used a stylus with handwriting recognition that was very poor until later models, but there was an external keyboard, which was great for longer sessions. I used to prop mine up at an angle and use the keyboard to answer emails or type class notes. The iPhone has yet to be open to this, but the touch-based OS is so good, I don’t see it is a need.

2. The iPhone development tools are quite robust. While they’re limitations and was a brutal NDA that has now been lifted, developers have much more power in the new OS to create powerful applications that can sync with other services and the customer’s desktop.

3. The iPhone is fast. Using a distant cousin of the same processor that powered the Newtons, the iPhone is far snappier than the hardware of the 1990s. Now, this is somewhat unfair, but the Newton OS needed more hardware than was available.

It’s not all hugs and sunshine though. Some of the old ghosts still haunt the current products:

1. The iPhone is a closed world. Don’t like iTunes? Too bad. Want notebook tethering? You have to take things into your own hands. The Newton synced with only a few applications on the Mac and PC. Hate AT&T? Uhh….

2. Hardware compromises still hang up some users. While the iPhone 3G’s hardware’s is a nice evolution of the first one, some things are still pretty lame. The 2.0 megapixel camera is out-paced by even cheap, crappy little cell phones.

3. Internal battery, what?!

I’d still perfer the iPhone over the Newton. At least for everyday use. But it’s nice to see echos of the past in my pocket today.

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*Yikes. Old Mac guys can be bitter.

Al Shipp, Apple’s senior vice president of enterprise sales is retiring, and isn’t being replaced. Lots of people have cried out that Apple is moving away from enterprise-level hardware and software. Macworld’s John Welch:

But honestly, every time I see that meme go around, I have to wonder why people would think that. Apple has never been an enterprise company, even when it had one of its Pre-Return Of Steve “Apple in the Enterprise” spasms. The company has less clue of how to be an Enterprise company than IBM had about selling computers to home users.

I agree. Working in the professional-level Apple support world, I can tell you that Apple is not an enterprise-minded company. Take any OS X Server guy out for a beer and he will tell you the woes of modern-Mac deployment. Don’t get me wrong, Apple’s server-end stuff is good, but it’s not the company’s focus. The consumer-level products are. iMacs and iPhones sell like hotcakes, so they get the attention. When’s the last time you heard someone boasting about their new Xserve? Just look at the company’s retail model - no server action anywhere in the Stores. The Genius Bar is designed to take care of the individual, but leaves the business customer and the school administrator stranded when they need repairs on 10 machines, and needs them quickly.

Welch goes on to make the biggest point of all:

The company literally makes a living out of surprising people, of ignoring common wisdom for something different and usually better. That’s been a fantastic business model for Apple, but would it work for an enterprise company? If Microsoft tried that, its big customers would be attacking Redmond with torches and pitchforks.

Here’s the simple truth: Enterprise hates surprises. It’s not what they want. Enterprise wants predictability. They want to know when, what, how much, and that it will be all new and cool, yet change nothing. (Yes that’s contradictory. Have you ever tried to use “Enterprise Software?” Winning usability awards is so not happening there.) And they want to know everything in detail a year ahead of time. Can anyone seriously imagine how long Apple would survive under that model? Right, not long.

System updates, new hardware, software patches and security fixes all have to be carefully implemented if you’re working large-scale, and that takes planning. Something that Apple doesn’t get.

The future of Apple Enterprise is still bright. They sell great hardware, and their server OS is great (for the most part). It’s not going anywhere, but don’t expect it to grow too much.

From the comments of the aforementioned Ars story:

- The Ars tip basically means blowing your redundancy, unless you have another backup drive somewhere. If the disk decides to bail out at that moment, your data is lost.

• I’ll tell you the biggest risk IMO - crashing hard drives… The second worst common problem I see is lost, deleted, or overwritten files… Compared to these, the “house burns up in a fire” risk is minuscule.

I agree. But my points were that my customer had balls and Time Machine’s biggest failure is the lack of physical security. Hard drives crash everyday. Thankfully, Time Machine has saved a lot of people who otherwise would never backup anything. But it’s not the perfect solution. This comment describes a great scenario:

I run Time Machine constantly with a small portable drive attached to my laptop whenever I am at my office or on site for any appreciable time with a customer. I also run a SuperDuper clone to rotating drives every night. I then back up just my customer files folder to a NAS Raid 0 every night and to S3 every night. Paranoid? Naw. Scared s**tless is more like it.

Data loss is not a bad thing to be afraid of.