[Via The Null Device]

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

We cannot believe we had to write this fucking letter. [...]

Using a Microsoft-like facility for descriptive yet forgettable product names, [Adobe's] “Digital Viewer technology” creates “a digital magazine format” made up of pictures. Twice I asked publicist Russell Brady how this output differs from exporting a PNG from Acrobat, and twice Brady refused to answer. (He didn’t ignore the question. He just didn’t answer it.)

Just imagine how different history might have been if AOL and Compuserve had just hit upon the notion of rendering web pages as .GIF files.

[Via Daring Fireball (Again!)]

I read a lot on the web and increasingly it’s becoming a social activity. Links come from all directions: Email, Twitter, RSS feeds, IM, Facebook and surprise surprise, other webpages. These links are the stuff of many of conversations we share, and a great thing about the web is the friction for the conversation to move across the various internet technologies is minimal. The URL breaks all the boundaries. In theory anyway.

On my Mac when I click a button to pass a link from one application to another, it’s up to me to remember where it came from, which conversation it was central to and who and where I should direct my response to regarding it. This mental load heavier on an iPad [or iPod Touch in my case] when you can’t leave the window of the first application visibly open as a reminder.

I kinda, sorta address this problem when I write weblog posts with a bit of help from an Applescript that in turn runs some Javascript to grab the page URL and referrer URL for the current tab and insert them into my weblog post template, but that’s limited to items I’ve opened in my browser.¹ It’d be really nice to have a helper application² sitting in the background and acting as a man-in-the-middle, gathering this sort of ‘application referrer’ information as a matter of course and making it available to other programs.

[Via Inessential.com]

1. I could probably adapt the script to pull the same trick with pages I opened in NetNewsWire, but my workflow generally involves skimming my feeds in NetNewsWire to find stuff I want to read and then opening those pages in Safari, so the need doesn’t arise.
2. Perhaps acting as a local HTTP proxy server?

If the iPad were a British party leader would it be:

1. Nick Clegg, because it’s new
2. David Cameron, because it’s shiny
3. Gordon Brown, because it displays the symptoms of severe control-freakery?

I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system”, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program [...]

We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We’re entering a modern version of “the Great Game”, the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them “points of control”.) This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

If your computer is being used to carry out a relatively limited set of activities, hiding the file system behind an application-oriented user interface can work well; I happily spent years using various PalmOS devices that did just that.

I think the problem arises when you try to apply that principle to a more general-purpose computer; once you have files that you might want to use in several applications – say, image files that you’ll want to view, edit and insert into documents – you need a shared file store which you can dip into and organise to suit your workflow.

While it’s true that tagging and searching can substitute for a hierarchical file system if you have a decent search tool, I’d hate to have to rely of that approach to manage a large number of files. I wonder if the first generation of iPad users will find that the approach to file storage that works well enough on their iPhone will prove inadequate when they’re trying to do real work with their iPad.

[Via Daring Fireball]

The most enthusiastic endorsement I read was Stephen Fry’s paean to a stunningly exciting object (or, more accurately, to the iPad 3.0 once it arrives a few years hence):

In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

At Pentagram, reflections on Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design:

A reset on advertising

“The mean little conventions of online advertising – banner ads, pop ups, and so forth – aren’t popular with readers, with advertisers, and certainly not with designers. The iPad’s a new medium that will create a whole range of opportunities. Once people start exploiting what it can do, we may see the kind of creative renaissance that will deliver the next George Lois or Lee Clow. People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone.”

Where by “people” they mean “design professionals”. This strikes me as wishful thinking. Does anyone else actually buy paper magazines just for the ads?¹

John Gruber is convinced that the iPad heralds a sea change in the way people relate to computers:

Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics.² So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

Much of my handheld computing experience over the last decade has been with Palm handhelds which did a great deal to hide the details of the underlying file system from the user. I understand the attraction of that approach to computing. Why should a user care where their device stores a letter they’ve written, as long as they can access it again when they want to. However, as with any general purpose computer, users will eventually find themselves wanting to do something that the computer’s maker didn’t cater for. This might involve improving on the functionality of one of the bundled applications. It might involve doing something that wasn’t even conceived of when the computer was produced, like deciding in 1993 that you want to add a ‘web browser’ to your PC running Windows 3.11.

This is where the iPad experience may fall a bit short. On a classic PalmOS device³ there was plenty of third party software you could get to add functionality to your handheld. You could buy it on disk by mail order, get it from an independent online store like Palmgear, or download it direct from the author’s web site. With the iPhone and now the iPad, the App Store rules. Rafe Colburn sees the implications clearly:

Apple decides which software I can run on my iPhone. Apple provides the only means by which I can get it. The platform is for all intents and purposes, closed, and the hardware is closed as well. Sure, the iPhone is great to use, but the price of using it is that you’re rewarding Apple’s choice to bet on closed platforms.

What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.

Even if the approvals process for the App Store didn’t have a terrible reputation for producing capricious, not to say downright laughable decisions, the prospect of Apple acting as gatekeepers to my computer would be distinctly off-putting.

My prediction, for what it’s worth, is that the iPad will be like the original iPod: Apple weren’t the first company to produce a tablet computer, but they’ll be rewarded for the sheer attention to detail they put into the machine’s design. They’ll dominate the category, and may well grab a chunk of the market currently served by netbooks and cheap laptops, but five years from now there will still be plenty of demand for general-purpose laptop computers and desktop computers in various more traditional form factors.

With any luck, somewhere along the way Apple will take that lovely iPad hardware and use it to run a slightly scaled-down Mac OS X, instead of iPhone OS. That’s the iPad I’d like to buy.

1. That is, buying magazines for the pleasure of viewing the ads. I assume some people still buy magazines to check out prices and specifications if they’re in the market to make a purchase, the way I used to make a point of picking up a copy of PCW and/or Computer Shopper back in the late 1980s or early 1990s when I’d outgrown my old computer in order to compare the deals on offer for a newer model. Somehow, I don’t think that’s the sort of buyer Pentagram are thinking of.
2. Just to nitpick for a moment, this view of the car market is a tad US-centric. In Europe, the vast majority of cars still come with a manual transmission, though admittedly the market share for automatic vehicles is on the increase, albeit fairly gradually.
3. i.e. everything prior to the Palm Pre.

This review dives into the under-the-skin changes more heavily than most, what with Snow Leopard being mostly a tidying up/polishing of 10.5 that puts in place various technologies that will really come into their own over the next couple of years as developers start to use them to take advantage of the more powerful hardware that’s available in modern Macs.

It’s just a pity that this is all of academic interest to me; 10.6 is the first release of OS X since I Switched back in 2003 that I won’t be using, what with Apple having decided not to support PowerPC-based systems in Snow Leopard.² I do understand why Apple have decided to prod users firmly in the direction of 64-bit systems, and why it’s not worth their while producing a PowerPC port of most of the new features in 10.6 given that they haven’t released a PowerPC-based system in some four years now. I just can’t afford to go down that path any time soon.

1. I know that’s a tad uninformative as descriptions go: all I can say is, if you have any sort of head for the details of how computers work you should read that section of Siracusa’s review in full for yourself. It makes a complicated subject crystal clear.
2. I don’t doubt that they’ll continue to produce security updates for PPC-based systems for a while yet, but I suspect that within a year – 18 months at the most – I’ll have come across the first application or upgrade I can’t install because it’s Intel Only or Snow Leopard Only.