posts

Microsoft’s global chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie:

I think there’s an important distinction - and frankly one we didn’t jump on at Microsoft fast enough - between mobile and portable. Mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use.

These are going to bump into one another a little bit and so today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space in between. Personally I don’t know whether that space will be a persistent one or not.

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The tablet space is a weird little corner of the technology market right now. Apple’s crushing everyone with its iPad 2, clearly. There are several tablets on the horizon, but most of them feel like knock-off iPads.

There is more to a good tablet OS than the cloud, though. People are using tablets for content consumption, and with Android, that’s tricky. Android’s strength is its tie-in with the Google cloud, not with easy ways to purchase music and movies.Honeycomb apps can be counted on both hands.

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Jim Dalrymple:

The Internet is buzzing this morning with separate rumors that Apple’s iPad 2 and iPhone 5 will be delayed. The fact is, neither rumor is true.

From what I’ve heard this morning both products are on schedule and will ship when they are supposed to. Only Apple knows exactly when that will be, but the products are not delayed.

[…]

It seems amazing that rumors of Apple missing product deadlines are running rampant when Apple hasn’t even announced the product yet. The only deadlines that have been set are by the media, not Apple.

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Shawn Blanc:

I am as nitpicky about user interface as I am about user experience. There are some apps which, even though they offer a great service, I just never use because I don’t like to look at them. And on the other side you have those apps which look cute but are not very useful.

Instacast, however, is of my favorite breed of apps: one with pitch-perfect design and that does one thing and does it very well.

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Editor’s Note: This is written by a friend of mine, Caitlin Woodward, who spent countless hours trying to find an iPad 2 here in Memphis.

I’m that person who picked out a specific model. Looking for a black 32GB AT&T. My dad wants the same model.

It seems like AT&T are the popular ones. On launch day, the first thing they ran out of was AT&T ones, about a dozen people in front of me. Right then, I ordered one from Apple.com, it said it was going to ship Apr 1, deliver by Apr 6. Talked to my dad a short bit after that, he stopped at the Apple Store in Oklahoma City to see if they happened to have anything, but they only had a few tickets left, all were Verizon.

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Seth Weintraub:

Though there is nothing particularly new in these docs, we’ve been handed the full Apple Store layout documentation (100 page PDF) as of last month. It is interesting to see the attention to detail Apple puts into its Store layout and design.

The 100 page document goes into significant detail on every aspect of how stores are set up. Perhaps that’s why there is such consistency between stores.

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Jürgen:

Without large scale tests, it is not realistic to estimate how much resources our users will consume in the cloud. In particular, the frequency of interactions between users’ databases and the central service. Therefore we will be doing extensive scalability testing before we make an announcement regarding possible costs for the service.

[…]

I’m sure the question on the mind of many readers is: when will I be able to play with Things cloud sync first-hand? As it happens, the integration of cloud sync with the Mac version is a little further ahead of its counterparts on iOS. We have therefore decided to start with a beta of Mac-to-Mac sync first.

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My friend PJ McCormick, on the designer-client relationship:

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that pricing your work so low is a personal decision that only has an impact on your firm. Because it doesn’t.

Every time you hawk a logo for a couple hundred bucks or throw in a web site for free to get a promised bigger project from a client, you’re making a decision that effects all of us.

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The Apple PR Machine:

“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”

Jim Dalrymple:

Apple’s apparent focus on software in its WWDC announcement backs up what my own sources are saying about the annual conference. That is, expect a software show in 2011, not a hardware event.

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Be sure to check out Richard Gaywood’s great post over at TUAW explaining what TRIM does.

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Oskar Groth has released a neat little utility that will enable TRIM for any Mac with an SSD.

Of course, any time you play with kernel extensions, you could accidentally blow something up. That said, I ran this with no issue. Hopefully, my SSD will last longer with TRIM support now enabled in Snow Leopard.

[Thanks Todd!]

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