Dreaming Of Beetles

I have to admit that I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m not one of the switcher fanboys, but one of the longhaul fanboys. My first exposure to a computer (well, after the teletype my father brought home) was our family’s Apple IIe and my first programming was done in Apple basic. I had an Apple sticker on my bedroom door when I was 10.

When I first saw a Macintosh, I was blown away. I knew right there and then, the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing) interface was the future. I got my hands on one in the computer lab and was infected.

I’ve never owned a Windows box. My brother got one when I was in high school and this is what I used to check out the Internet while Netscape was still in beta. I hated it.

I went off to college and gained quite a bit of experience with Unix (and VMS). Indiana University is one of the top most progressive schools with technology so often times we were forced to turn in our homework via ftp on Unix. I was intrigued. I guess it was the days of Adventure and Zork and Apple Basic that made the command line something comfortable, not frightening. So I became as profficient as possible with the command line, but not gaining root hampered me a bit.

When I got seriously into computing, I bought a PowerBook 5300ce, one of Apple’s most infamous products. I suffered through all its problems, but it worked well enough for me to learn. And that is what I did. During this time, I wasn’t really a fanboy though, I didn’t know who Michael Spindler was or who Gil Amelio was and I didn’t really care. OS 7.5 and all its elegance was what mattered.

Skip ahead a few years, and I’m riding high on OS 8/8.6. I started following Apple religiously – their stock price, the hardware, the software updates, third party support, etc. I was very happy to see them buy Next rather than Be and kind of laughed when I heard that Steve would be a special advisor to Gil. I knew this arrangement wouldn’t last very long and it didn’t.

I’m not going to recount the story of Apple’s re-emergence from beleagured computer manufacturer to dominant media company, everyone knows that story. It’s the stuff of legend.

I’m happy I was able to see Steve Jobs speak twice, but kind of bummed I never got to meet him. I haven’t met Gates either, but met Ballmer and that was no fun.

While Steve enjoyed the limelight and kept the inner workings of Apple top secret, he is not an idiot. He brought in the highest caliber people possible and instilled in them the Apple spirit and these are the people that run the day to day of Apple. With Steve out of the picture, I’m sure the pipeline is not going to dry up – just read the story of Jony Ive coming up with the 2nd gen iMac. And Jony Ive is a pre-Jobs fixture at Apple. (I got to see him in the first Apple store in Tokyo).

For a while Steve was CEO of both Apple and Pixar, how could they BOTH do so well. Surely it wasn’t Steve micromanaging 24/7, it was his brilliant ideas like putting the Pixar bathrooms in the middle of the building so everyone crossed paths eventually.

I’m not worried about a post-Jobs Apple and will remain dedicated to the best OS and software ever produced (hardware is a different story). So when I start going Apple Fanboy in my posts, I’ll point people back here for reference. I’ll try to keep my Apple slant out of my writing though.

Popularity: unranked [?]

With the Palm Pre announcement, the media reacted as if this device was the second coming. Wall street also reacted in a similar way, shooting the stock up 35% immediately. Since then the stock is up around 75%, an amazing turnaround for a company swirling in the toilet. But what is so amazing here?

I have not used the device, but watched the announcement, plus other videos of the device in use. Sure there are some neat features:

• Integrating the “cloud” (I hate that term) into the device to group data from different services into one convenient location (nothing groundbreaking)
• Multitasking with a new paradigm based on a deck of cards (cool)
• A gesture area below the visible screen (only innovative thing really)
• Capacitive multi-touch (doesn’t Apple have patents on this?)
• Copy and paste (whoopee)
• Replaceable battery (whoopee)
• An API based on HTML, javascript, and CSS (hmmm…)

It is this last point that has me confused. Palm touts it as expanding the developer community from a couple hundred thousand Palm developers to a couple million web developers. Wasn’t this Apple’s strategy from the early days of the iPhone – an AJAX “SDK”? Palm states they will not make the same mistakes as Apple (not in those words) and that their Mojo IDE will be different by allowing javascript access to low level areas of the underlying OS (some variant of GNU/Linux).

Well then, I see three huge problems with this:

1. Web developers will not be able to get off and running in no time as Palm wants you to believe. There will be additional APIs that must be learned to make your application semi-useful. I’m sure Mojo will make this easy on you, but there will STILL be a learning curve.
2. HTML, javascript, CSS can produce some interesting effects, but these technologies are still extremely limited. Look at the web apps we got for the iPhone. The best of the bunch being facebook or bejeweled. Palm is eating their own dogfood and producing the native apps based on these technologies, but watch the demos closely and you’ll see that the interfaces are crap. This leads me to the third point.
3. What about games? Let’s see Centipede done in HTML, javascript, and CSS. There will have to be some sort of animation engine baked in for these types of games to even be possible. Flash? Silverlight? OpenGL ES? Whatever route is chosen, Pandora’s box will be opened and this base of a couple million web developers will be dramatically reduced.

Why aren’t these questions being asked? Why do we get dead silence when Jobs announces this strategy and Wall Street going nuts when Palm is trying the same thing? And don’t get me going on the security nightmare this could be.

Anyone know something about this I don’t?

Popularity: unranked [?]

Checking out the Wordpress iPhone app to post this. Many have given this app horrible reviews. While it doesn’t have every feature, it is quite solid and seems to perform it’s main function well. I applaud Automattic for open sourcing this app even before the NDA was lifted. Also, happy 25th Matt!

Well, that crash kind of sucked and that one. Maybe this app does have some problems. I’m going to dig into the code a bit.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I’m making another go at this blogging thing. I’ll be experimenting with the site, widgets, etc. so things may break here and there. I’ve bolted on a framework to create dynamic content as you can see on my Recently Read Articles page.

Popularity: unranked [?]