Paul Graham (Wikipedia article) on Apple's Mistake, with a great comparison: What would happen if every update to Mac OS X had to go through an opaque, fickle intermediary?
Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, following an egregious Apple rejection.
Steven Frank (Panic) is Furious with Apple and AT&T. Impossible to argue with any of this, really.
Palm doesn't need iTunes to sync music to the Pre
Palm's USB trick to get iTunes to load the Pre was a clever, if unethical1, hack.
Today, iTunes 8.2.1 broke that. But despite the ridiculous accusations of lock in, Palm doesn't need the Pre to sync music to the iTunes.
iTunes saves its entire music index as an XML file in iTunes Music Library.xml. It's XML. Palm can open it, read it, and get whatever they want.
New music is unencumbered by DRM. There's an exception, music bought before DRM was removed, but Palm wasn't able to play that before.
And, of course, the USB bus is available to any Mac or Windows application programmer.
So, then, nothing stops Palm from shipping a Pre Music Sync program. All it would have to do:
- Read the XML file.
- Grab the music using standard file I/O.
- Send the music to the Pre over USB.
If Palm is less dumb than a sack of hammers, they expected Apple might fix how they validate the iPhone to exclude the Pre's tricks.
If Palm is less dumb than a sack of hammers, they would already have a Pre Music Sync program almost ready for deployment.2
In fact, this should have been their solution all along. Why wasn't it? Well, assuming Palm isn't a bunch of idiots3, Palm probably didn't have their music sync program ready. Ship the hack or slip the date? And somewhere along the line, some marketing type probably decided that impersonating an iPod was a good idea. They wanted a bullet point that it worked without installing software. Well, now Palm is going to have to write software and get users to install it.
They just did an entire OS. I think they can handle Pre Music Sync. And if they can't, I'm sure Markspace can handle it with The Missing Sync.
- Yes, I mean unethical. Of course it's unethical to promote a feature you have no control over that could disappear in instant. And especially when it probably will. [↩]
- But Palm being Palm, you should probably expect a Pre Music Sync program some time in October or November. [↩]
- And, again, this is Palm. [↩]
iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate
Tapbots on iPhone OS 3 adoptions among their active users:
We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.
Ars Technica: Boxed, retail copies of iWork 09 do not require a serial number. Smart choice by Apple.
Macworld Keynote
A few thoughts, based on watching the keynote via QuickTime:
- Phil Schiller was great. He seemed to be a little nervous in his delivery, but he was interesting in a casual, friendly way. If he has a chance to do some of Apple's special events in the future, he'll be a little less awkward.
- From any other company, this would have been a slam dunk, and people who are unhappy are clearly expecting too much.
- The iLife 09 upgrades make it a must-have purchase for me. I'm looking forward to working through the Garage Band tutorials, and iPhoto face and location metadata is an omission I've been struggling to find workarounds to. And as an owner of a Flip Ultra, I'm really looking forward to having image stabilization.
- The 17" MacBook built-in battery seems like a great trade-off to me. I don't have two batteries anymore, I just replace the one I have when it won't hold enough charge anymore. It sounds like that will still be possible.
- I'm really happy to see DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. I'm less impressed with the all-or-nothing upgrade, but will probably upgrade sooner or later.
iCal View menu
Here's iCal's View menu.
What's so confusing about it? You really need to see how it interacts with the iCal main window to understand. We're going to be focusing on the group starting with "Hide Calendar List."
The iCal main window looks like this:
The sidebar on the left side of the screen looks simple enough. Now let's look again at the menu. What would you expect Hide Calendar List to do?
Wrong. It does this:
Both the calendar and mini month calendar are hidden. Hiding both makes sense, but calling the command Hide Calendar List doesn't. Go back to the menu, and we see the helpful command "Hide Mini Months." What Mini Months? Oh, the ones that were on the iCal window, but aren't anymore? I wonder what it does?
It does this:
That's right. Choosing Hide Mini Months showed the mini calendar.
So here's how the menu commands work:
The first command, Show/Hide Calendar List, hides the entire left side bar: The calendar list and whatever is under it.
The second and third commands, Show/Hide Mini Months/Notifications, control what's under the calendar list, but still controlled with the Show/Hide Calendar List command. And they don't actually do what they say they're going to do if the calendar lis is hidden. They're mutually exclusive: Think of them as Under Calendar List: None, Mini Months, or Notifications.
The fourth and fifth items are entirely independent of the first three items.
Granted, coming up with menu commands to control a UI like this is hard. But that's no excuse to throw your hands in the air and settle on this UI.
Are you sure?
My biggest pet peeve in iTunes is undoubtably how it asks you "Are you sure?" before doing anything, and always in an unhelpful way.
As an example, I mentioned to my wife a Christmas album I used to love. I spotted it in the iTunes Store and clicked Buy Album1. iTunes "helpfully" asked me:
This is a completely useless confirmation screen. If — and we're talking hypothetical here — I considered $7.99 a big purchase and needed a confirmation screen for it, wouldn't I want to know the price, too? Wouldn't this dialog make more sense as:
Are you sure you want to spend $7.99 on an 80s Christmas album?
Really, you're being a bit impulsive here. That's cool, we'll take your money, but we want to make sure you've checked with your wife first.
(Okay, not actually those words. But something involving the price.)
But instead, I'll shake my head at the idiocy, of click "Don't ask me about buying albums again," and never see the warning again. What was the point, then?
- After discussing it with my wife, of course. [↩]