New Software updates from Apple and they are huge
Apple released an update to OS X 10.6 and the iPhone & iPod Touch this week. How big are they?
They are almost half a gigabyte. This is going to be one very long, slow download and update process.
Looks like Mac owners with iPhones are going to have their computers tied up for a number of hours sometime this week.
Remember the old days when the operating system just occupied a few tracks on a 113 kilobyte floppy disk?
On the other hand, the state of the art for OS X technology has advanced another notch this week.
Labels: apple, iphone, macintosh, macosx, software
Firefox adds client for its browser to iPhone
Mozilla said they will be releasing a new iPhone app that gives you convenient access to the bookmark keywords and titles you have saved in Firefox.
The pages will then be rendered by the Safari web browser in iPod/iPhone/iPad, since Apple insists on the Safari WebKit web view pane being the only web rendering component in the system.
Understandable, because if you look at the statistics, you would not want Opera or IE based rendering components in the system because they are unsafe even in their own apps. Someday things might change. But it does not look like it so far.
This new app could be a great convenience and a nice way for Firefox users to save themselves a lot of typing effort on iPhone when they browse the web.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, firefox, iphone, software, web
Tech blogs slipping into murky world of underworld crime?
I do not think all tech blogs are bad, but lets face it, some of them do not have the ethics or code of conduct of 20th century journalism institutions. So it is sad to read almost back to back articles about how reporters are being laid off at some of these warning institutions, while their nouveau replacements at blogs have sunk to new lows.
Take for instance the case of a tech blog that allegedly paid $10,000 for a prototype phone device a third party claimed it "found" and must have been lost by the owner.
The blogging company, rather than returning it, dissected it.
The Guardian, a UK news organization,
analyzed that conduct from the standpoint of the California legal code. It sounds like that was an illegal way to handle lost merchandise.
And that assumes it was lost and not stolen - in which case we all know a lot of additional laws that were broken by virtue of watching California cop shows and reading the news.
There are some really good bloggers out there. Just like there is some really good software out there. But there is some software that puts the integrity of your computer, privacy, and data in jeopardy. Likewise, patronizing some unprincipled news outlets instead of the more respectable ones jeopardizes the quality of news you will be receiving in the future.
Labels: apple, blogging, california, crime, iphone, theft
Save a wounded American's life in Haiti? There's an app for that.
An American, badly
injured in Haiti used a medical app on his iPhone to diagnose and treat his broken foot.
He used its camera to map the room where he was trapped. That enabled him to find the safest way out. Then he made his way to an elevator shaft to await rescue.
Life saved.
Labels: apple, iphone, wins
comparing Apple iPod with 2 other smart phones
I stumbled across an info graphic tonight that objectively evaluates the iPhone against a couple other popular smart phones.
If you thought you would pay a little more for the iPhone, you are probably right. The analysis seems to indicate you do not pay a lot more for it versus its competition.
I like this analysis because it gives you an idea of how much value extra things like more apps, better security, nice user interface, and so forth need to be worth to you. They are hard to quantify. Having the other quantifiable things written down in front of you does let you kind of gauge what whether they are worth the slightly extra higher price or not.
Easier than evaluating all the features of the phone in your head, I think.
Labels: apple, iphone
CNET, the technology web site, has already created a special section on their web site covering the latest on Apple's latest overnight success: the iPhone.
Visit CNET
iPhone news, reviews, videos web site if you would like to take a look at it for yourself.
About a year ago, a former coworker of mine avidly professed his certainty that when the iPhone came out, it would be a flop.
The phone did far better than his prediction. Apple announced last week that in less than two quarters, the iPhone became the #2 best selling smartphone in the world. Blackberry, made by Canadian company RIM is the #1 selling smartphone. All the others have already moved down a position.
Blackberry has over a third of that market. Apple commands exactly half the market share that Blackberry has, according to the statistics from Apple.
What that tells me is that the rest of the smartphone market is very fragmented indeed. If each remaining competitor has less than one-sixth market share, they are not in control of all that much. They cannot set sweeping standards unless they band together.
Apple has banded together a bunch of standard technologies itself. Web Services, XHTML, and so forth are all part of the iPhone technology. Apple has a section of its site dedicated to rounding up the latest and the greatest iPhone / iPod Touch web apps so that their customers will not have to hunt far and wide to get their hands on these goodies.
Apple is rolling out the iPhone SDK that some developers have been clamoring to get. It will be familiar ground to many, since at this point there are probably not too many web developers and programmers who have not used these technologies.
Labels: apple, cnet, iphone, news, standards
Okay, the whole family uses Macs now
My brother called last night. Just after I walked in the door after spending Christmas day with my Mom, he rang me up on his new iPhone.
Normally, he is not the type to get excited about gadgets. This time was different. He enthused over the abilities of his iPhone that let him do things he needs to do.
In addition to getting an iPhone this week, he also got a brand new Macintosh computer. This one, he informed me, his wife will be sharing with him.
He has already bought the Parallels software that will let him install MS-Windows on his Mac.
I got two other emails about the Macintosh today.
One was from a college days friend of mine. He sent me an article that decried the failure of Microsoft Vista to catch on with the IBM PC clone owners out there currently running Windows XP and older stuff.
The part of the article he highlighted was the ironic fact that the fastest notebook for running Windows Vista on is ...the Apple MacBook Pro. Apparently, Apple is not just outdoing the old school PC companies in the software area - but in some crucial hardware areas too.
My uncle sent me a couple emails with questions about Mac OS X - particularly the new Leopard version that just came out a couple of months ago.
He wants to make sure that it will be able to understand documents that come from MS-Windows PCs a lot better than his Mac OS 9 computer. Fortunately, the answer to that was
yes.
One year ago, another old friend of mine told me how the stock price of Apple was going to plummet.
He also claimed that sales of iTunes music had dropped off - which was untrue. His basis for claiming it was a pseudo-fact conjured up by a research firm that asked a paltry few hundred people if they were buying more or less music from iTunes store.
They obviously asked the wrong people because they were not representative of what millions of iTunes customers were doing. They were buying more music than ever and weeks later Steve Jobs announced contrary to the bunk conclusion of that survey, it was a record quarter for iTunes.
His next pronouncement was that the iPhone would bomb. Apple had no clue how to build a phone good enough for people to buy, supposedly.
All of his assertions were wrong - and my family has proven that. Mom ignored his advice and made more money with Apple stock - and she bought her first iMac ever. My brother ignored his advice and got a Mac, and an iPhone - which he loves.
So, despite the the claims of those clutching a Zune in one hand and a bunch of anti-virus utilities in the other hand - 2007 was a record year for Apple. Apple excelled in all the areas that they would supposedly fail miserably in this year.
I am left with just one question.
Which is a bigger failure: the Zune that was supposed to let people share their music but frequently did not - or the anti-virus software that was supposed to keep all the viruses and spyware off PCs but somehow did not?
To a lot of families this holiday season - the answer to that question is moot. It does not matter to them anymore. They have escaped to someplace better.
Labels: apple, iphone, macintosh, vista, zune
Normally, I write about Macintosh computers and accessories in this blog. Today, I want to write about an Apple accessory for people: the iPhone.
I saw the ads, watched the commercials, read the articles, scrutinized the specs, and viewed the demos.
After seeing all those things my mind was going: yes, it seems great.
But my gut was going, yeah, but is it really as good in real life as it appears from each recording and recounting put down by people I do not even know?
So today at lunchtime I glided into a nearby Apple store.
I saw the iPhone and it is totally real. It really does all those things you see in the ads and it is really easy to use. I darted around a circle of people surrounding a table full of iPhones.
Everyone was doing something different on them. And everyone was darting from one application or aspect of the device to another.
Nobody seemed to be having trouble trying to use a feature. Nobody seemed to have any trouble going from one feature to another. It was just fast. I've never seen so many people doing so many things so fast.
It made archetypal
channel flippers
look slow as snails by comparison.
To me, knowledge has always been the at-handedness of information. If you have the information in your head, great - you have knowledge. If you have it at your fingertips and can pull it up in half a second - that is just about as good to me as if you had memorized it.
Anyway, Apple has put the at-handedness of information, communication, and entertainment right at everyone's fingertips. If anything, it seems like they have slightly undersold it and marketing has for once sheathed its exuberance over a great product.
One thing I could not tell from vicariously enjoying the PDA aspect of the product was how well the onscreen virtual keyboard works. I have to try it before I can tell if it is wonderful or not.
Also, I did not try making any calls. Since Friday night, those iPhones have probably made a million calls from all over all 50 states of the US. So, I'm sure call quality, frequency of dropped calls, coverage area - all those sorts of things will be recounted in detail by their owners. I look forward to reading about that.
I bought a new cell phone last year and I am pretty happy about the phone itself and the cellular service I have. I plan on eking at least several years of use out of it. So I am not chomping at the bit to buy an iPhone in the near future. I already know I am buying one someday - when is not a pressing concern.
Personally, I think that as great as the device is - it needs to have more storage for songs and video. 8 GB is not enough. In a couple years, when I finally in the market for a new cell phone - I hope they have a 64 GB model out. That seems realistic, given Moore's Law.
Having used a couple brands of cell phones before - and seeing the iPhone in action - there is NO COMPARISON.
The iPhone is a modern 21st century phone/PDA/player/viewer with terrific usability and power. Compared to it, other cell phones are like pocket calculators or those simplistic PDAs that first arrived around 1990.
I have hunch that iPhones unlike some consumer electronics equipment will not be crashing with silly messages like "INVALID PAGE FAULT" displayed on their screen.
I believe Apple made a wise decision porting the most relevant subsystems of the Mac OSX down from the Mac to the iPhone. The iPhone does not seem like a tiny gadget making pretensions of being a miniaturized computer. It seems seems like another case where Apple has so smoothly met the needs of consumers that the product seems like a work of art - not a crude but functional tool.
Another thing that surprised me is that the monthly rate plan was priced lower than I expected.
Apple will not have to spend a lot of money on marketing this product. It seems they sold out so quickly that people who never read/watch/hear an ad for iPhone will still get an eyeful of one when a colleague, fellow restaurant patron, or relative whips one out to look up something, show them the weather forecast, or communicate with someone.
After that quick glance of the iPhone in action - nobody could respond,
What's it for?
. If they did, the answer would be pretty simple: You just saw!
Labels: apple, iphone, mp3, music, phone, video
