Tag Archives: Apple

Apple vs. Adobe: This is fargin’ war!

I’m sure I’m not the only child of the ’80s who watched Johnny Dangerously several (hundred) times as a kid. One of my favorite characters was Roman Moronie, whose command of the English language — well, more specifically, English profanities — was tenuous at best. I’m sure he would be highly offensive to a particular nationality or ethnic group, if it were possible to tell where he was actually from. (That mystery itself being a joke in the movie; at one point a newspaper headline reads: “Roman Moronie deported to Sweden — claims he’s not from there.”) Yes, I was a big fan of ’80s Michael Keaton movies that, in retrospect, are somewhat problematic. Johnny Dangerously, Mr. Mom. I think I partly liked him because I thought maybe he was related to the characters on Family Ties. OK, I was old enough to know better than that.

What does this have to do with Apple vs. Adobe, or anything for that matter? I’m not sure, but I do know that their battle has escalated to fargin’ war!

Steve Jobs fired the first metaphorical salvo last month with his Thoughts on Flash. I thought he nailed it, as expected. Of course Adobe can’t let him win, so yesterday Adobe retaliated with their “We [heart] Apple” / “We [heart] Choice” ad campaign and an open letter of their own.

The idea that Flash is somehow open — or that Apple is somehow trying to “close” the web — is both disingenuous and misguided. My natural inclination is to blather on ad nauseum about such things, but as I’m home with a sick kid today (which is to say, there’s enough nauseum in this house already), I’ll let some more pithy writers say it for me.

First, an excellent and concise response from Jim Whimpey in Brisbane, Australia (by way of John Gruber in Philadelphia):

Adobe: not open, claim to be.
Apple: not open, don’t claim to be, contribute heavily to that which is truly open.

If that’s not pithy enough for you, a picture is worth a thousand words. Via Jeffrey Zeldman in NYC:

Update: Over on the Macworld website, the Macalope has some choice words on this topic. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s my favorite bit, dissecting excerpts from the Adobe open letter:

If the web fragments into closed systems, if companies put content and applications behind walls…

You mean like the wall of a lousy runtime environment that would just as soon crash the Macalope’s browser as play back a Daily Show clip? The wall of a development environment controlled by one company that makes some pretty good coin off the deal?

Oh, no. That’s not the wall you were talking about. Sorry. Go on.

…some indeed may thrive — but their success will come at the expense of the very creativity and innovation that has made the Internet a revolutionary force.

The Internet is an open range where anyone can compete in any way they like. But Adobe didn’t make the Internet. In fact, they tried to wall off a section of it. Apple, on the other hand, made its own walled garden with a scenic view of the Internet.

iPad: Son of Newton

There’s some buzz going around concerning Apple’s new iPad commercial and its similarity to one Apple produced for the Newton two decades ago. Though I’m not the first to comment on this, I have a few thoughts of my own, so here goes…

First, let’s watch both commercials. I did not remember this (apparently) “classic” (in John Gruber’s words) ad for the Newton:

Now, watch Apple’s new iPad ad:

Wow. Homage indeed. I doubt very many people remember the Newton commercial, but the iPad commercial is stunningly similar. This had to be deliberate, but I’m wondering what exactly that deliberateness is supposed to mean.

Well, I’ll tell you this: watching the two ads back-to-back, I’m left feeling that a) the Newton really was way ahead of its time, and b) the Newton ad seems like one of those futuristic concept videos Apple (among other computer makers) seemed to love producing in the 1980s.

Newton was a vision of the future. iPad is the reality. That Newton actually became a shipping product says a lot about Apple’s ability to realize its vision (compared to the long line of never-to-be-made concepts that have come from Microsoft over the years, most recently… well… this). But the Newton was too far ahead of its time. Then again, it ushered in the PDA era, which ushered in the “smartphone” era, which led to the iPhone and now the iPad. So maybe Apple was really seeding (if you’ll pardon the pun) its own future with the Newton.

There are two key lines that for me define the difference between the two ads:

“Newton can receive a page and sends faxes and, soon, electronic mail.”

“(iPad is) 200,000 apps and counting. All the world’s websites in your hands.”

Granted, paging and faxing were still relevant technologies when the Newton was released, but they were already doomed, and the best Apple could say was that “soon” Newton could handle “electronic mail” (even then, using a soon-to-be-antiquated term). In contrast, the iPad hits the ground running, leveraging the existing success of the iPhone, and with forward momentum for future technologies. Newton was about what could be, but iPad is.

More iPad observations: iBooks

Note: I originally wrote this as a comment on my previous entry, but it seemed substantial enough to warrant its own post.

I admit it. Much to SLP’s chagrin, I’m not a huge reader of books. In the past I typically read 10-15 books per year, although more recently, with the lifestyle changes that have come with young kids and new technology (iPhone, Nintendo DS), my book reading has really fallen off. I’m not sure I’ve read an entire book cover-to-cover since I polished off the Harry Potter series in late 2007.

Anyway… the reason I mention that is to say that I have never been interested in a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle, partly because I’m just not reading that many books these days. But I’m also not impressed by them technologically. The e-ink displays are cool (in a limited way), but beyond that they’re very unimpressive. I dislike single-function devices on principle. (And remember, the Kindle DX is only ten dollars cheaper than the entry-level iPad.)

Which brings me to iBooks, the e-book reader app for the iPad. I think I could embrace the idea of e-books on a device that also does a lot of other cool stuff, and even though the iPad has certain characteristics that are arguably inferior to the Kindle for the purpose of reading books — namely, a lower-resolution, backlit display, which can be harder on the eyes than the Kindle’s display, and that also doesn’t work so well in bright sunlight — arguments can also certainly be made in favor of the iPad as a superior e-book reader: you don’t need to have a light on to use it (meaning you can read it in bed without disturbing your partner), and the full-color touchscreen display is much more responsive, allowing for not just brilliant color images, but video and other interactive features.

And then there’s the iBooks interface: in particular, the way you turn pages. On the Kindle, you press buttons on the sides of the device, which “turn” the page in the form of a 3-second redraw. On the iPad, you really turn the page with a swipe of your finger, which causes the corner of the on-screen page to curl up and follow your finger movement as you lay it down on the other side of the “book.” It’s a cool effect, and it works incredibly well, but it wasn’t until I used it myself that I realized it wasn’t just a gimmick: you can stop partway through the turn and hold the page there, allowing you to see part of the page before/after the one you’re on. You can move it back and forth.

And that’s when it hit me that I do that a lot when I’m reading a “real” book. I will often be reading a passage and want to refer back to something I just saw on the previous page. On the iPad, you can do that, in exactly the same way that you do it with a physical book. And to me, that goes a much longer way towards making reading a book on the iPad feel like reading a book instead of reading dark gray letters on a light gray screen, and pushing flimsy plastic buttons to move to the next gray screen’s worth of text.

It is this kind of attention to the finer details of the user experience that sets Apple’s product (hardware and software) designs apart from the rest. In my experience no one innovates user experience like Apple. Eventually others catch on, but Apple has consistently led the way, for over a quarter century. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon (regardless of the continued presence of Steve Jobs).

Side note: iBook vs. iBooks. Apple let the iBook moniker for its consumer-level laptops die when it switched to Intel processors a few years ago. Now the name has a whole new meaning. I have yet to see anyone else make note of this, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this observation.

Random observations about the iPad now that I’ve actually used one

Tonight I visited the Apple Store at Mall of America (and, while I was at it, the Best Buy at Mall of America), and here are some things I observed or thought about during the experience:

I expected the Apple Store to have maybe 3 or 4 iPads on display. In fact there were at least a 16, and there were still crowds gathered around them waiting for a turn. The Best Buy had 3 of them, and a proportionately smaller crowd of waiters.

It’s simultaneously smaller and bigger than I expected. The physical form is maybe 80% of the size I envisioned, but the screen seems bigger, and the bezel is less… erm… excessive than it seems in photos.

The screen is just… wow. It’s a thing of beauty. Even though the ppi is lower than on the iPhone, it seems higher. The extra screen real estate makes an incredible difference. I played a round of my favorite iPhone game, Plants vs. Zombies, and was totally amazed at the difference visually.

This is how a touchscreen interface should be. The iPhone was just a warm-up.

When I first lifted it, I was surprised at how light it was, but before long it started to feel heavy. If I were to use one regularly, I’d definitely want to prop it up in some way.

iPhone apps look surprisingly good in double resolution. They’re intelligently anti-aliased in a way that reminds me of the DVD “upconvert” process on a Blu-Ray player.

Both the Apple Store and Best Buy had the demo units displayed on clear, angled, cylindrical acrylic blocks with a white rubberized ring on top. It put the iPad at a perfect angle for viewing at demo stations, and the rubber kept it in place while still allowing it to be lifted easily. They should sell these.

Apple might be singlehandedly responsible for another H1N1 outbreak. Just think about how many hands are touching these things. They should’ve had Purell dispensers at the front door.

This feels like a new beginning. Sure, the iPad has flaws. But this is the first of something new, and I think it’s an order of magnitude bigger than either the iPod or iPhone. (And not just in terms of the physical dimensions.)

I know it’s too early for me to get one — I want a camera, or at the very least 3G (the latter of which is actually coming, in a few weeks). I also don’t want to pay $829 for a 64 GB, 3G model. But I know by now that eventually… eventually… I will own (or have owned) multiple iPads. I can see buying the $499 entry-level model now, and then buying a higher-end model in a year or two, when the features I want are available at a better price, and keeping the old one around the house too. I bought an original iPhone 9 months after it came out, which I passed on to SLP a little over a year later when I upgraded to a 3GS. I can see the iPad following a similar path — but one slightly less painful, since I paid $200 more for the original iPhone than for the 3GS, and I don’t see the iPad following the same rapid price reduction path.

I cannot put into words just how much it pains me that I walked out of Best Buy, not with an iPad under my arm, but with DVDs of High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel along with two reams of printer paper. These are the sacrifices we make as parents. (Granted, if I were really being a good parent I’d refuse to let them watch this tripe — the Chipmunks movie, anyway; I have to admit I actually kind of like the HSM trilogy — but… well, OK, I won’t try to justify it.)

More to come…

iPokédex update

Back in early 2008, I set up an iPhone-optimized Pokédex web app. I pulled information from some of the usual suspects in the online world of Pokémon compendia.

A few people have asked me why I didn’t build it as a native app I could then sell in the App Store for boatloads of cash (because, you know, there’s a huge untapped market for… this).

Well, that’s a good question. A few answers:

  1. The App Store didn’t exist at the time I created it, and I had no interest in either jailbreaking my iPhone nor in supporting the jailbreak “community.”
  2. I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) have a developer account with Apple, and I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) know how to build a native iPhone app. Web apps, though, are second nature to me.
  3. It seemed clear to me that Apple wouldn’t (or, more accurately, shouldn’t) approve such an app. The entire contents of the app would be in violation of copyright, and there’s no way (that I could see) that Nintendo would license the content under the circumstances.

As far as I was concerned, that was pretty much it. The only way a Pokédex could live on the iPhone was as a web app. I’ve since learned that, whatever criteria they do employ in approving apps, copyrighted content does not appear to be a “dealbreaker” for Apple. I think it’s safe to say that Apple wouldn’t approve an unauthorized Pokémon game for the iPhone, but there are currently four Pokédex apps in the App Store.

Anyway… my iPokédex web app lives on. I just finished some updates: mostly some minor bug fixes, but also some visual refinements. Overall the improvements are slight, but I’m still pretty pleased with how well it works and how useful it is, especially considering that I essentially created it in an evening.

If you haven’t checked it out (ever, or lately), take a look now… especially on an iPhone!

http://pokemon.room34.com