Steve Jobs, in today’s earnings call:
Our goal is to make the best devices in the world. Not to be the biggest—Nokia’s the biggest, and we admire them. But we don’t aspire to be like them. We want to be like us, and we want to make the best ones.
This sums up Apple so well, the company could print it on employees’ business cards.
Hilary Stout for The New York Times:
Along with fears about dropping and damage, however, many parents sharing iPhones with their young ones feel nagging guilt. They wonder whether it is indeed an educational tool, or a passive amusement like television. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advised parents not to let their children watch any TV until they are past their second birthday.
Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media, said the group is continually reassessing its guidelines to address new forms of “screen time.”
All indications are that Apple will preview the next version of Mac OS X on Wednesday. In keeping with the tradition of Apple-centric blogs, I’ve got some predictions about what the company has up its sleeve.
If the new MobileMe web apps are any indication, Mail, iCal and other OS X applications are going to get a serious visual overhaul to bring them more inline with the iPad’s apps, which isn’t a bad thing. iCal is stale, and Address Book in 10.6 looks like Address Book in 10.2.
You can download the Flash video right here.
Michelle Pauli at the Guardian:
It is also a fine line between indecision and obsessing over tools for the fun of it. Cross that line and you get into what is known on the web as productivity porn. GTD is big online, with entire forums devoted to the minutiae of how to implement it, from the right kind of notebook (Moleskines are popular), to the best way to tweak Googlemail to make it more GTD-friendly. Is this merely procrastinating about productivity? Merlin Mann, creator of productivity blog 43Folders, and author of Inbox Zero, believes so.
Apple next Wednesday will unveil its latest bid to cater to consumers in the market for a true sub-notebook with the introduction of a smaller, 11.6-inch MacBook Air redesigned from the ground up, AppleInsider has been able to confirm from several independent sources.
The first models, which are certain take the form of an 11.6-inch notebook, have been in rolling off Apple’s Taiwanese manufacturing lines for at least a week now, placing their availability on or shortly after their introduction next Wednesday at the company’s “Back to the Mac” special event, according to person with a proven track record of pinpoint accuracy.
Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian:
When it came to managing most of AOL’s 6 petabytes of data, a Fibre Channel SAN sufficed. But for its most critical relational database, AOL found that the SAN was too constrained and caused its IT shop to fail to live up to its service level agreements with business units more than 50% of the time.
After investigating what may have been causing I/O bottlenecks, AOL found the problem was back-end storage. To fix the problem, AOL decided to build a 50TB storage-area network (SAN) from solid-state technology.
Ben Brooks, on carrying a Verizon MiFi with an iPad:
The MiFi is super easy to use, but it is not as easy as just using your iPad. By that I mean that if you have a 3G iPad and you want to look up something on the net you flip it on, wait a second and surf the web – it connects to 3G for you if you don’t have WiFi available. With the MiFi you would have to pull out the iPad, check to see if you can get WiFi (because you are too lazy to pull out the MiFi first, trust me I am speaking from experience). Then when you see you have no WiFi pull out the MiFi, turn it on, wait, wait, then connect the iPad to the MiFi (it will do this automatically if you have used the two together before).
What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.
If there’s anything this week worth sending to Instapaper, it’s this interview.
Adam Saltsman on Canabalt’s physics:
Like we talked about earlier, the screen is 480 pixels wide by 160 pixels tall. The fastest possible speed for the player is 800 pixels per second, which in game scale translates to something like 80 meters per second, or 286 kilometers per hour! That’s pretty fast. But with a 480 pixel wide view, with the player on the extreme left, the player still has more than half a second (480/800) to react to whatever the game throws at them. This is a pretty good window, the limits of human reflexes for unexpected events is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3 seconds I think? According to hardcore Street Fighter players anyways. So even at it’s most intense, Canabalt is, technically, playable by humans.
As we bring our initial Android TweetDeck beta period to a close, we wanted to quickly reflect on the Android ecosystem and what might be considered extreme fragmentation. To date we’ve had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it’s pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations.