posts

Leading off his recap of WWDC:

No discussion of a modern day Apple event can occur without at least some passing mention of Steve Jobs, who now both looks and sounds like he’s dying. I’m sorry to have to write that, and I know people get freaked whenever anyone has the temerity to even mention it, but come on. Aside from the weird psychological needs of a guy who feels he needs to market the hell out of products before an adoring crowd even though he is clearly–and literally–a shadow of his former self, the whole thing is just sad. Suffice to say I’m really pulling for the guy. But I am afraid for him.

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Timothy B. Lee:

Steve Jobs is apparently hoping that iCloud will break Apple’s losing streak on building cloud-based devices, and he’s hoping that the tens of millions of dollars the company has poured into its gigantic new data center in North Carolina will make the difference this time. But he may be stuck with the strengths and weaknesses of the company he has built over the last 35 years. We wish him well, but we won’t be surprised to see stories in the coming months about iCloud having performance and reliability issues.

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Joshua Topolsky:

In a bizarre twist to an otherwise exciting news day, during an interview today just following Nintendo’s showing of its new Wii U system and games, company honcho Reggie Fils-Amie told GameTrailers that the sizzle reel of games shown today were not actually from the Wii U. Instead, when asked if they were from PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, Reggie replied “Absolutely, because we’re talking a year away from when the console will launch.”

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Marilyn Halpin. She and her husband run mac-fusion, an Apple-Authorized Service Provider in Signal Hill, CA. As such, she knows all about Apple support in the realms of education and business.

Yesterday’s announcement of Lion and Lion Server being only available in the Mac App Store made me cringe. Not because I will no longer be able to sell it. Not because I will lose what tiny bit of profit there was on it. Not because I have a love of physical DVD media. Not because you have to be on Snow Leopard to have this option.¹ I cringe because of how this shift to the Mac App Store works in the corporate world. As of today there isn’t a great way to deploy apps that are available in the Mac or iOS App stores. If you have 50 users that need FileMaker Go I can’t just buy a volume license of it and push it to their iPhones and iPads. I can’t use one Apple ID to manage 50 computers and apps that are only available through the Mac App Store. While there are several work arounds, none of them are optimal:

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Brett Kelly:

To maintain a task list in Evernote is fine and not especially difficult in terms of keeping the data in the app. For me, it gets dicey when I need to access or manipulate the data, particularly on a mobile device. If I keep my tasks in a separate notebook and tagged them all such that I could call them up quickly with a saved search, I’m still looking at what I would consider a prohibitive number of taps + waiting time.

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I was chatting with Aaron Mahnke this morning about some things concerning iCloud and iOS 5 and I had a thought:

Beta is stressful.

I am not an app developer, by any stretch of the imagination. Programming is the one part about computers that I just don’t understand.

But I do have access to a developer account. So both my iPad and iPhone 4 are running beta software at the moment.

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David Sparks:

I’ve been thinking about how to take advantage of this iCloud love and am afraid I may have some trouble. My iTunes account is really old and affiliated with an older e-mail address. When I joined .Mac so many moons ago, I created a separate Apple ID, my .MAC account (which later became my MobileMe account). This has never been a problem. I’ve bought lots of apps, books, music, and video with the old iTunes account and the MobileMe account handles e-mail, calendar, and address book.

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According to Thomas Brand, it’s pretty easy:

• Purchase and download Lion from the Mac App Store on any Lion compatible Mac running Snow Leopard.

• Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”

• Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc we have all been waiting for.

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Holy crap, what a day. Too much information to think about yet, honestly.

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Check them out over at Macgasm. It’s going to be one crazy day tomorrow, no matter what Apple announces.

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A great look back by Kelly Hodgkins at TUAW.

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Michael Lopp:

The problem with notifications is that the cost to create them is close to zero — just hit that Like button or go ahead and click that retweet button. As their creation cost approaches zero, notifications rapidly become spam-like as the noise of their quantity masks the quality of their signal. But we learned our lesson with spam. We knew what happened when we lost control of our inboxes and spent our time sorting through the useless noise searching for the signal. We learned how to curate. Curation is social-media-douche-speak for “deliberately choosing and pruning the content you care about” and I think part of the next Internet is curation at scale thanks to notifications.

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