&lt;p&gt;I question whether the survey group is representative of the platforms as a whole, but some of the numbers are striking. Android skews heavily male, for one thing. But by far the most striking stat in these results is the number for 17-and-under users:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;iPhone: 13%&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;iPod Touch: 65%&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Android: 7%&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;WebOS: 2%&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;For the phones, 17-or-younger is the smallest demographic. For the iPod Touch, on the other hand, it is by far the largest. More evidence that the iPod Touch is the strongest competitive asset for iPhone OS. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘iPhone, Android, and WebOS Demographics Via AdMob Survey’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/demographics"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Thank goodness AppleInsider is here to bring me wisdom such as this, from analyst Kathryn Huberty:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;We expect Apple to launch new iPhones in June that offer both a lower total cost of ownership and new functionality, potentially including gesture-based technology.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Huberty, of course, is the analyst &lt;a href="http://blog.asymco.com/2010/02/26/kathryn-huberty-predicts-apple-performance/"&gt;who 10 months ago set a target for Apple&amp;#8217;s April 2010 stock price at $105&lt;/a&gt;. As of Friday, it was over $204. I&amp;#8217;m sure investors who listened to her advice then have a certain gesture for her.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Deep Insight Into Apple From Morgan Stanley Analyst Kathryn Huberty’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/huberty"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The Macalope:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So far, 2010 has been dominated by non-stop iPad speculation and Macworld Expo, but it’s time to get back to basics: jerks!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘They&amp;#8217;re All Out of You’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/macalope-jerks"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I love this whole unfolding future-of-Flash saga because it&amp;#8217;s a wonderful mix of politics and technology. It&amp;#8217;s complex and multivariate, but not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; complex to get a handle on the basic gist. It occurred to me this week, after both reading and writing quite a bit regarding Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance issues, that the whole performance angle is a distraction from the fundamental issues at hand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/01/z"&gt;linked&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://www.zeldman.com/2010/02/01/flash-ipad-standards/"&gt;this piece by Jeffrey Zeldman&lt;/a&gt; three weeks ago, but it&amp;#8217;s worth a re-link. His first paragraph nails it:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to &lt;em&gt;build the semantic HTML layer first&lt;/em&gt;. Additional &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticflash/"&gt;layers of Flash UX&lt;/a&gt; can then be optionally added in, just as, in proper, accessible, standards-based development, &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/behavioralseparation"&gt;JavaScript UX enhancements&lt;/a&gt; are added only after we verify that the site works without them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you &lt;em&gt;don&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you&amp;#8217;re probably wrong.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems on Mac OS X and mobile devices are very much real. (As of today, note that there still is no shipping version of the full Flash Player for any major mobile platform.) And I do think these performance issues are a factor in Apple&amp;#8217;s decision not to include it in iPhone OS. But I believe the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn&amp;#8217;t part of that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So at the moment, Flash&amp;#8217;s performance issues provide Apple with a good apolitical explanation for why Flash Player isn&amp;#8217;t included with iPhone OS. It&amp;#8217;s a way for Apple to argue that they &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; rather than that they &lt;em&gt;won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yes, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical about how Flash Player is going to perform on Android and WebOS devices. I hope I&amp;#8217;m wrong though. If Adobe&amp;#8217;s able to squeeze acceptable performance out of Flash Player 10.1 on these (relatively) low-power ARM devices, then it&amp;#8217;s very likely that Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X is going to be much improved as well. (In the same way the constraints imposed on iPhone OS have been great for Mac OS X &amp;#8212; performance tweaks to components like WebKit (and especially JavaScriptCore) made to get MobileSafari running as fast as possible on low-power iPhones have resulted in fantastic performance improvements to WebKit on high-power Macs.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s what I mean about Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include it in iPhone OS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It boils down to control. I&amp;#8217;ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There&amp;#8217;s no bug Apple can&amp;#8217;t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can&amp;#8217;t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That&amp;#8217;s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I know there are some people who see Apple taking a stand against Flash and &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/9664056169"&gt;worry&lt;/a&gt; that Apple may someday take a stand against the web itself. One thing that everyone who&amp;#8217;s paying attention can agree on is that Apple greatly values control. That&amp;#8217;s indisputable, regardless whether you consider it a virtue or vice. So I think the worriers see that the web is beyond anyone&amp;#8217;s control and conclude that Apple sees it as a threat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I say what Apple cares about controlling is the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt;. That&amp;#8217;s why they started the WebKit project. That&amp;#8217;s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. It may well be true that Steve Jobs doesn&amp;#8217;t really give a shit about the web in and of itself. It&amp;#8217;s just good business for Apple to control a best-of-breed web rendering engine. If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior. (Needless to say, Apple is &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/"&gt;quite confident&lt;/a&gt; in this regard.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The weird thing about a completely open platform based on open standards is that while no single vendor, such as Apple, can control the content or the standards, it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; control its implementation. (And it can &lt;em&gt;influence&lt;/em&gt; the content and the standards.) That&amp;#8217;s all they need.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Likewise with Google&amp;#8217;s interest in the open web and HTML5. It&amp;#8217;s reasonable to be cynical and believe that Google is concerned only with making money, not with the open web simply for virtue&amp;#8217;s sake. So long as the web is open, Google&amp;#8217;s success rests within its own control. And in the same way Apple is confident in its ability to deliver devices with best-of-breed browsing experiences, Google is confident in its ability to provide best-of-breed search results and relevant ads. In short, Google and Apple have found different ways to bet &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the web, rather than &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The best counter-argument is perhaps that, given Apple&amp;#8217;s desire for control, they&amp;#8217;re always going to prefer their wholly owned proprietary platforms &amp;#8212; native iPhone and Mac apps &amp;#8212; over the web, and will eventually come to see the web as a threat. I don&amp;#8217;t think Apple sees it that way, though. There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it&amp;#8217;s the web. Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t build lowest common denominator platforms. Before, when Windows was the LCD, Apple was in a hard place because they were locked out of that platform: their platform was at odds with it. Now, with the web as the LCD, Apple has it both ways: their platforms gracefully coexist with it. Apple isn&amp;#8217;t a web company, but the web might be the best thing that ever happened to them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;From Apple&amp;#8217;s perspective, when it comes to software platforms, &lt;em&gt;theirs&lt;/em&gt; is best (Cocoa/Cocoa Touch), because they have complete control. &lt;em&gt;Everyone&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; is good (the web), because Apple has control over their own implementation and can influence the future direction of the standards. What Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t want is &lt;em&gt;someone else&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; proprietary platform, where they have no control at all. That&amp;#8217;s what Flash is.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve said this &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus"&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; and will say it again. There&amp;#8217;s only one path for Flash Player to make its way to iPhone OS:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;It appears first on other competing mobile platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;It works well on those platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Its presence and popularity on those competing platforms shifts consumer demand and adversely affects iPhone OS device sales.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;#1 will happen. Regarding #2, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical, but Adobe has smart engineers and their back is to the wall. #3, though, would require a major shift in momentum.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;So with this whole thing where &lt;a href="http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=apple+sexy+apps&amp;amp;scoring=a&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ned=us&amp;amp;um=1&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;sugg=d&amp;amp;as_ldate=2010/01&amp;amp;as_hdate=2010/01&amp;amp;lnav=hist0"&gt;Apple has removed and banned&lt;/a&gt; like 5,000 &amp;#8220;sexy apps&amp;#8221; from the App Store, I think I&amp;#8217;ve figured out the reason why, including why they&amp;#8217;re &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/app-store-sexy-apps"&gt;granting exceptions&lt;/a&gt; to established names like Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret. It&amp;#8217;s about branding. Let me just state right here up front that I don&amp;#8217;t agree with or like how they&amp;#8217;re doing this. I&amp;#8217;m just trying to make sense of it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s easier, though, to first run through what this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve seen a lot of speculation that the exceptions are about money. I.e. that Apple wanted to ban the sexy apps but left the big-name ones in because they don&amp;#8217;t want to lose their 30 percent cut of the money these apps generate. That doesn&amp;#8217;t hold water, though &amp;#8212; a slew of apps that &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been banned were top sellers, established brand names or not. If it were just about revenue, Apple would have left them all in the store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-apples-absurd-double-standard-boobs-skin-and-sex-apps-are-fine-when-big-media-makes-them-2010-2"&gt;Henry Blodget speculates&lt;/a&gt; that the established brand-name exceptions are about setting up deals for iPad apps from the companies behind them. But that&amp;#8217;s just a variation on the &amp;#8220;it&amp;#8217;s about the money&amp;#8221; argument. Again, if Apple&amp;#8217;s interest here was about money, they wouldn&amp;#8217;t be banning any of these apps in the first place. Apple is not going to be hard up for iPad apps and content. If anything, I suspect the problem with iPad apps will be just like that with iPhone apps &amp;#8212; too many of them, not too few.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-02-25"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-02-25"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Another iPad-related theory &amp;#8212; suggested by several DF readers via email &amp;#8212; is that it&amp;#8217;s about the education market. The idea being that Apple wants to sell iPads to schools and therefore wants anything even remotely objectionable out of the App Store. But institutional iPads will be managed devices, just like &amp;#8220;enterprise&amp;#8221; iPhones are today. Students using a school-owned iPad won&amp;#8217;t be able to install apps from the App Store, so it doesn&amp;#8217;t really matter which apps are for sale.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, if you think about it, it&amp;#8217;s clearly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about banning porno and bikini-clad-semi-porno from the iPhone entirely. &lt;a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/apple-iphone-pornography-ban/"&gt;MG Siegler writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple is going through all this trouble of removing these apps, and creating more work in scanning for the next sexy apps to reject, when built into every iPhone and iPod touch is not one, but two huge entry points for explicit material &amp;#8212; and both are apps made by Apple themselves. The first, I alluded to above: iTunes. There are no shortage of films and TV shows with nudity and sexual content (along with violence and everything else) that are available on iTunes for purchase on the device. The same is true for explicit music.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But the second app is far worse: Safari. Each iPhone and iPod touch has a web browser that is more than capable of accessing any site on the web with a few clicks. This includes sites with hardcore pornography, or anything else a teenage kid can dream up. Apple is going through all this trouble to block sexy apps (which have never contained nudity, by the way, just sexy pictures), when they offer one of their own that makes it much easier to find far more sinister content.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Siegler is correct that MobileSafari is completely open to anything and everything published on the web. But he draws the wrong conclusion. Apple isn&amp;#8217;t futilely trying to ban this sort of content from the iPhone. They&amp;#8217;re just removing it from the App Store. Think about a physical world analogy to the retail Apple Stores. There&amp;#8217;s all sorts of software (and hardware) you can buy and install for Macs that Apple would never sell in their stores.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The purest representation of the Apple brand is Apple&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/cook-goldman"&gt;remarkably small&lt;/a&gt; (for a company of its size) lineup of products. Retail Apple Stores (and Apple&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://store.apple.com/"&gt;web store&lt;/a&gt;) are a slightly expanded representation of its brand &amp;#8212; they sell many third-party products, but they are carefully selected by Apple itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The App Store is looser. The vast majority of the 150,000+ available titles would not be there if Apple were managing the App Store the way they manage their retail stores. It&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; that it&amp;#8217;s looser. It almost has to be. (It&amp;#8217;s pretty hard to find people complaining that Apple allows too &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; titles into the App Store.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But, still, Apple sees the App Store as an extension of the Apple brand. That&amp;#8217;s why flat-out pornography has never been and never will be allowed. You can walk into a Barnes and Noble and buy a copy of Maxim, but you won&amp;#8217;t find a copy of Hustler. Not because Hustler wouldn&amp;#8217;t sell, but because selling pornography goes against the Barnes and Noble brand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn&amp;#8217;t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn&amp;#8217;t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the &amp;#8220;new&amp;#8221; apps in the &amp;#8220;productivity&amp;#8221; category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The App Store is never going to be like Apple&amp;#8217;s retail stores, and Apple knows it. Apple&amp;#8217;s retail stores, branding-wise, convey an image sort of like between the Gap and Banana Republic &amp;#8212; friendly premium. The App Store is more Old Navy, or maybe even Target. But these sexy apps were casting the App Store into something junkier, bordering on the skeevy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What iPhone users choose to access through MobileSafari doesn&amp;#8217;t reflect on Apple. But what is listed in the App Store &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; reflect on Apple. What you see when you peruse the App Store effectively &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the App Store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So what I see as hypocritical about Apple&amp;#8217;s decision here is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about the fact that you can access the same sort of content via MobileSafari, but rather about the exceptions granted to Sports Illustrated, etc. I see &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;: Sports Illustrated, Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret, and Playboy are not just strong brands but also &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; brands. But who&amp;#8217;s to say some new brand couldn&amp;#8217;t be just as good? The best apps in all sorts of categories across the board in the App Store are frequently from new companies, building new brands. It&amp;#8217;s no more fair for the &amp;#8220;hot chicks in bikinis&amp;#8221; category to be occupied solely by existing major brands like Sports Illustrated/Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret/Playboy than it would be if the, say, photo manipulation category were occupied solely by Adobe and Corel, or if games were only allowed from companies like EA.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If Apple&amp;#8217;s going to allow any of these apps, they ought to allow all of them. They should be evaluated by content, not by the names submitting them. If Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t want these apps boogering up the best-seller lists in various categories across the App Store, they should assign them all to a single category. (Tough job: finding a name for that category.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The other thing that bothers me, and ought to bother Apple, is the obvious capriciousness with which these apps were removed. These apps were allowed for about a year and a half. Some developers were prospering by them. And then, boom, they were gone. The reason Apple ought to be concerned about this is that it unsettles &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; developers &amp;#8212; even those whose apps and &lt;em&gt;ideas for future apps&lt;/em&gt; were nowhere along the lines of girls-in-bikinis. What developers see here isn&amp;#8217;t Apple managing its own brand. What developers see is that the App Store is a shaky foundation upon which to build a business. One day you&amp;#8217;re prospering, the next day your app is gone. There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren&amp;#8217;t being built because developers don&amp;#8217;t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple sees the App Store as an aspect of its brand. Developers see the App Store as the entirety of the Cocoa Touch platform. This is a significant conflict. Developers, if rejected from the App Store, can freely deliver whatever content they choose through MobileSafari &amp;#8212; but you can&amp;#8217;t reuse compiled Cocoa Touch apps that way. The work invested in a native app can only be recouped through the App Store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s entrepreneurism to be willing to take your chances in the market. It&amp;#8217;s healthy skepticism to worry about being locked out of the market after you&amp;#8217;ve already invested heavily in building your product.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-02-25"&gt; &lt;p&gt;The cynical take on these exceptions, if you don&amp;#8217;t buy my branding argument, is that Apple might have decided not to antagonize those companies with large, talented, corporate legal departments.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-02-25" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/9363515820"&gt;Wil Shipley on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, presumably in response to &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/coldeway"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (and where by &amp;#8220;other platforms&amp;#8221;, Shipley apparently means &amp;#8220;Microsoft Windows&amp;#8221;):&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hmm, @gruber ignores that Flash on other platforms can and does use hardware H.264 decoding, but Apple won’t give Adobe access.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#8217;t mention the issue yesterday, no, but I wrote &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash#performance"&gt;a whole section about it in this piece&lt;/a&gt; a few weeks ago, and I specifically linked to Adobe&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/#FAQ"&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641"&gt;weblog entry&lt;/a&gt; on the issue.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash&amp;#8217;s Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. &lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What&amp;#8217;s Adobe&amp;#8217;s excuse for Flash&amp;#8217;s performance on non-H.264 video?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Second, even Apple&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html"&gt;QuickTime on Snow Leopard&lt;/a&gt; only &lt;a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/10/snow-leopard-h-264-hardware-acceleration-and-opencl-requirements/"&gt;makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card&lt;/a&gt;: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don&amp;#8217;t have that graphics card in your Mac, you don&amp;#8217;t get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use &amp;#8212; a majority I&amp;#8217;d wager &amp;#8212; which don&amp;#8217;t have that card. It&amp;#8217;s also not present in current brand-new Mac Pros and most iMacs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Third, no one is complaining about the lack of hardware acceleration for other video playback software on Mac OS X, like &lt;a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html"&gt;VLC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/movist/"&gt;Movist&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://perian.org/"&gt;Perian&lt;/a&gt;, or even (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) QuickTime itself on machines without the Nvidia 9400M. Even if we concede the point that Flash Player&amp;#8217;s lack of access to H.264 hardware acceleration on Mac OS X inherently blocks it from matching its H.264 playback performance on Windows, I fail to understand how that blocks it from matching the performance of other video playback software on Mac OS X itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fourth, hardware accelerated H.264 support is &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf"&gt;a new feature in the as-yet-unreleased Flash Player 10.1&lt;/a&gt;. It in no way explains the performance difference in Flash Player 10.0 on Mac OS X and Windows.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware? Is it absurd to think that it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable OS design to limit &lt;em&gt;plugins&lt;/em&gt; to higher-level APIs? Should Flash Player be a kernel extension, so that it can ensure it gets plenty of CPU cycles and have direct access to whatever hardware it wants?&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/"&gt;Macworld Expo&lt;/a&gt; 2010 kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. Is it going to fly without Apple? I don&amp;#8217;t know. I don&amp;#8217;t think anyone does yet. Apple&amp;#8217;s traditional presence at Macworld was so large, both figuratively (with the attention paid to their keynote address) and literally (with their massive booth on the show floor), that their absence has effectively rendered Macworld a new event. I think it&amp;#8217;s smart that IDG moved the date back a month; anything they could do to emphasize that it&amp;#8217;s going to be new and different this year can only help. (I have no idea if it was feasible, but if it had been, I&amp;#8217;d have advised moving the show across the street to Moscone West, just to make it &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; different, too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s absence will be felt in two ways. First, the lack of an Apple keynote address has significantly diminished the amount of media attention. That was inevitable. But it wasn&amp;#8217;t really Macworld Expo, the trade show and conference, that was garnering that attention. It was Apple itself. Apple&amp;#8217;s keynotes really didn&amp;#8217;t have much at all to do with the exhibit floor or conference sessions. I suppose there were some number of attendees who considered attending the keynote as a major reason to buy a conference pass, but percentage-wise only a small number of attendees could ever see the keynotes in person. It&amp;#8217;s not like Apple hasn&amp;#8217;t given us much to talk about recently &amp;#8212; hello, iPad &amp;#8212; it just wasn&amp;#8217;t announced at Macworld itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The more worrisome factor for me is Apple&amp;#8217;s absence from the show floor. They had a huge booth in a prominent spot and they drew people in. The role they played on the show floor is very much analogous, I think, to the role played by a big department store like Macy&amp;#8217;s or Nordstrom at a shopping mall.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;To me, though, the reason to walk the show floor has always been about the small companies &amp;#8212; often the &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; small ones. The ones where the employees manning the booth are the engineers and designers who made the product they&amp;#8217;re promoting. I&amp;#8217;ve been to a bunch of Macworld Expos and I never once failed to discover at least one fascinating product by walking the show floor. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In terms of what&amp;#8217;s going on other than the trade show, I&amp;#8217;ve long thought that the inordinate amount of front-loaded attention paid to Apple&amp;#8217;s keynote address drew attention away from the fact that Macworld has turned into a large and successful conference, with tracks spanning everything from programming to graphic design.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nothing could replace a Steve Jobs keynote address, so, wisely, they&amp;#8217;re not trying. Instead, Macworld has scheduled a &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/fp"&gt;bunch of featured speakers&lt;/a&gt; throughout the week, including David Pogue, Kevin Smith (yes, &lt;a href="http://www.viewaskew.com/"&gt;that Kevin Smith&lt;/a&gt;), Leo Laporte, and, yours truly. &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/sessions?s=QSHOWA0005AZ"&gt;I&amp;#8217;ll be speaking Friday at 4:30pm&lt;/a&gt;, where I&amp;#8217;ll share the secret recipes for my award-winning cupcakes and melt-in-your-mouth croissants.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(DF readers: you can register for the show using the discount code &amp;#8220;GRUBER&amp;#8221; to get a &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; expo pass that will get you into my talk (and the show floor, and the other feature presentations). That code is also good for a 20 percent discount on any of the conferences. Just keep in mind that with that code, it&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;totally free&lt;/em&gt; to come see my talk and the other feature presentations.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The bottom line for me is that the potential is there for Macworld to remain a great show. Imagine if there&amp;#8217;d never been a Macworld Expo before, and that this was the first year. It wouldn&amp;#8217;t be surprising that Apple declined to participate. But is there demand for a days-long nerdfest for Mac and iPhone professionals and aficionados? I say yes.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Some good questions &lt;a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/01/31/whatIfFlashWereAnOpenStand.html"&gt;from Dave Winer regarding Apple, Adobe, and Flash&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What if Apple were trying to erase something that&amp;#8217;s not company-owned? Either a formal or de facto standard? Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;d say that&amp;#8217;d be a different ball of wax entirely. It would depend, for one thing, on the specific open / de facto standard technology.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But as for open &lt;em&gt;web&lt;/em&gt; standards, the evidence &amp;#8212; actions and shipping code, not just words &amp;#8212; strongly indicate that Apple is a major proponent of them. Apple didn&amp;#8217;t have to release WebKit as an open source project &amp;#8212; they could have kept their extensions atop the LGPL-licensed WebCore private.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-02-01"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; They&amp;#8217;ve re-written WebKit&amp;#8217;s JavaScript engine from scratch at least twice, and released it all as open source. (Apple has also been aggressive about releasing its advanced non-web developer technology, &lt;a href="http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Conceptual/Blocks/Articles/00_Introduction.html"&gt;like blocks and LLVM&lt;/a&gt;, as liberally-licensed open source.) All of Apple&amp;#8217;s top competitors in the mobile space have either already adopted WebKit or soon will: Android, WebOS, even BlackBerry. Members of Apple&amp;#8217;s WebKit team have been helping drive HTML5 since its inception. In short, I&amp;#8217;d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;E.g., it makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.&lt;sup id="fnr2-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn2-2010-02-01"&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I do understand &lt;a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/31/ipad-review-comments-naughton"&gt;the fear&lt;/a&gt;. It&amp;#8217;s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don&amp;#8217;t think that&amp;#8217;s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it &amp;#8212; HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No one can tell them what to do with WebKit; they wait for no one to shape and bend WebKit to suit their needs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My feeling is not that Apple seeks total control over all content and software in iPhone OS. I&amp;#8217;d say it&amp;#8217;s more like they&amp;#8217;re providing two well-defined, nice, neat, easily-understood extremes: the totally controlled native Cocoa Touch, and the totally open web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Winer ends with a suggestion for Adobe:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple&amp;#8217;s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is &amp;#8212; as many would wager &amp;#8212; a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It&amp;#8217;s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It&amp;#8217;s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened &amp;#8212; or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE &amp;#8212; the web has already moved on.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;An earlier version of this article stated that the entirety of WebKit is BSD-licensed. That&amp;#8217;s wrong; the &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML"&gt;KHTML library&lt;/a&gt; that Apple started with is LGPL-licensed, and so therefore is the WebCore component in WebKit. We regret the error.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li id="fn2-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;H.264 is an open standard, but admittedly and unfortunately &lt;a href="http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/"&gt;not a free standard&lt;/a&gt;, hence Mozilla&amp;#8217;s opposition to it. My point here is simply that H.264 is not owned by Apple or any other single company.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr2-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Shawn Blanc on the state of iPhone feed reading apps. In short, there are a bunch that are pretty good, but not one that&amp;#8217;s great. (I&amp;#8217;m still using NetNewsWire, but I keep trying all the others when they release new versions.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/feed-readers-blanc"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Rafat Ali, writing for Paid Content:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Five of the leading publishers &amp;#8212; Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media, and Meredith &amp;#8212; have banded together for this “power of print” campaign, reminiscent of a similar campaign by newspaper publishers a few years ago, when the world was slightly rosier. [&amp;#8230;] One ad says: “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sure, that&amp;#8217;ll do it. Also, I did not know this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;And of course who else but the troglodyte Jann Wenner to “orchestrate” this campaign, the guy whose magazine Rolling Stone &lt;a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2010/02/rolling_stone_d.php"&gt;can’t figure out&lt;/a&gt; how to keep a domain name up; and oh wait, who outsources the running of the mag website to RealNetworks, until late last year. That Wenner. Good luck, the other four.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sure enough, look at this &lt;a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/signup"&gt;&amp;#8220;sign up for our newsletter&amp;#8221; page&lt;/a&gt; on Rolling Stone&amp;#8217;s web site:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This site is operated by RealNetworks, Inc. (&amp;#8220;Operator&amp;#8221;) in partnership with Rolling Stone L.L.C.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Magazines Double Down on Print’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/magazines"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jon Stokes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But it turns out that the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn&amp;#8217;t been made public, but I&amp;#8217;ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can&amp;#8217;t.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jon Stokes on the Apple A4’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/stokes-a4"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Clifford Stoll, writing for Newsweek, did not foresee a bright future for the Web in 1995:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we&amp;#8217;ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; It&amp;#8217;s not that the problems Stoll pointed out weren&amp;#8217;t very real in 1995. It&amp;#8217;s that he saw them as unsurmountable rather than as opportunities. They&amp;#8217;ve mostly all been solved.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Clifford Stoll Pooh-Poohs the Web in 1995’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/stoll"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The Mac Sale is again running a great bundle, $500 worth of applications for $49.99. The Mac Sale is a collaboration of The Escapers and MacZOT along with other Mac luminaries. This time the bundle includes, amongst others, MacGourmet Deluxe, VideoConverter Pro, Supercard, Shovebox and MiniOne Racing. This is the 3rd bundle by The Mac Sale, which was founded by The Escapers, makers of the critically acclaimed &lt;a href="http://www.theescapers.com/"&gt;Flux&lt;/a&gt; web design package.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Merlin Mann:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This reeks of the same bush-league decision-making that hobbled Hulu, gets music fans sued, and keeps high-quality content locked in a tower like an aging virgin &amp;#8212; too special to be manhandled by the riff-raff who are reluctant to pony up the lavish dowry that was the fashion fifty years earlier.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The good news: &lt;a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/02/yes-we-know-that-the-rss-feeds-are-broken/36782/"&gt;it&amp;#8217;s a bug in The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s updated CMS&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; full-content feeds are coming back. But so while Merlin&amp;#8217;s arguments don&amp;#8217;t apply to The Atlantic in particular, they stand as a fine essay on the turning point traditional paper-and-ink publications are facing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Merlin Mann on The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s Dropping of Full-Content RSS Feeds’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/merlin-atlantic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Patrick Seybold, PlayStation Blog:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘PS3s Unable to Access PlayStation Network Due to Clock Bug’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/ps3-clock"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Great idea, clever interface. $1 well-spent. (&lt;a href="http://beautifulpixels.com/iphone/attic-rediscover-your-albums/"&gt;Via Beautiful Pixels&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Attic: iPhone App for Forgotten Albums in Your Library’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/attic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kontra:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different for Opera Mini to &lt;em&gt;proxy the entire web&lt;/em&gt; through its own proprietary servers. Yes, you read it right. Opera gets in between you and &lt;em&gt;every single&lt;/em&gt; URL out there, from your bank to your school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s the pertinent entry &lt;a href="http://www.opera.com/mini/help/faq/#security"&gt;from Opera&amp;#8217;s FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Q: Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and &amp;#8212; for example &amp;#8212; paypal.com or my bank?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;A: No. If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full Web browser such as Opera Mobile.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#8217;d be better if Opera Mini simply refused to handle HTTPS requests on its own.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Kontra&amp;#8217;s Case Against Opera Mini on the iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/kontra-opera-mini"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ll believe it when I see it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘AT&amp;amp;T Says Its Network Will Be Ready for SXSW This Year’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/att-sxsw"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Andrew Sullivan:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I understand that advertisers like &amp;#8220;verticals&amp;#8221; to pitch certain kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers with style. I also know in this media climate how vital advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat, that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius here, congrats to all involved.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity.  I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous &amp;#8220;channels&amp;#8221; gain some editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg aren&amp;#8217;t treated as random fodder &amp;#8212; anchors! &amp;#8212; for &amp;#8220;channels&amp;#8221;. I believe in the Atlantic as a place for &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;. The redesign seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect that individual writers deserve.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;re not a regular reader of The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s online content (if you&amp;#8217;re interested at all in politics and national affairs, I recommend it highly), prior to their new redesign, they hosted about half a dozen individual writers&amp;#8217; weblogs. They looked and felt like separate blogs under The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s parent umbrella. The redesign throws all but Sullivan&amp;#8217;s together into a hash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Count me in with Sullivan that this is, from a reader&amp;#8217;s perspective, a change much for the worse.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(Noteworthy: Sullivan states that his Daily Dish accounts for 55-60 percent of The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s online traffic; hence the exception.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic&amp;#8217;s Redesign’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/sullivan-atlantic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The &amp;#8220;Any&amp;#8221; key, however, is still safe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Microsoft Warns Windows XP Users Not to Press F1 Key’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/microsoft"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The look-and-feel &amp;#8212; and in some cases, like the task killer and file manager, entire purpose &amp;#8212; of these apps is as good a summary as any of the differences between Android and iPhone OS. (&lt;a href="http://slidescreenhome.com/"&gt;SlideScreen&lt;/a&gt; being the notable exception.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Lifehacker&amp;#8217;s Top 10 Android Apps’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/lifehacker"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;So funny.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Adam Lisagor Responds to The iPhone App Review&amp;#8217;s Shakedown Attempt’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/lisagor"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From the Dept. of It&amp;#8217;s Funny Because It&amp;#8217;s True. (&lt;a href="https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/9882059403"&gt;Via John Siracusa&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Why DRM Doesn’t Work, Or: How to Download an Audio Book From the Cleveland Public Library’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/drm"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Edward Tufte:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The panorama sequence appears to be an interface for an interface, a distancing from the core activities of users, who just want to get on with what they want to do. My view is to let the user&amp;#8217;s eyes do more on a screen-image rich with opportunities rather than having to move through a sequence of thin decorative screens in order to find the desired action.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Edward Tufte&amp;#8217;s Initial Thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Series Interface Design’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/tufte-wp7"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Nilay Patel, Esq. has a rundown of the patents at Engadget. Some of these sound like the worst sort of software patent bullshit, like &amp;#8220;Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image&amp;#8221;, but others are hard to judge from the name alone. And despite Apple&amp;#8217;s PR saying there are 20 patents at issue, they seem to have only listed 10.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Summary of the iPhone Patents Apple Is Suing HTC for Infringing’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/patel"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;John Paczkowski has PDFs of Apple&amp;#8217;s two filings. (Click the orange down-arrow button to download the PDFs rather than read them in the inline Flash dingus.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple’s Suits Against HTC’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/apple-htc-docs"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Apple PR:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple today filed a lawsuit against HTC for infringing on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. The lawsuit was filed concurrently with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and in U.S. District Court in Delaware.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, this is the first time I can recall Apple filing a patent lawsuit against a competitor except as a counter-suit (e.g. &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/12/11countersue.html"&gt;against Nokia&lt;/a&gt;). I can&amp;#8217;t speak to the hardware and &amp;#8220;architecture&amp;#8221; issues, but I despise the idea of &amp;#8220;user interface&amp;#8221; patents.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple Sues HTC for Patent Infringement’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/apple-htc"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Y Combinator:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it&amp;#8217;s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Y Combinator Looking for iPad Startups’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/yc"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Imagine sweating every single detail like this. That&amp;#8217;s what it&amp;#8217;s like to develop great iPhone apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Scrollback in Instapaper Pro 2.2’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/scrollback-instapaper"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From an interview with Charlie Miller, winner of the Pwn2Own contest two years running:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Q: In your opinion, which is the safer combination OS + browser to use?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That’s a good question. Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7 with no Flash installed. There probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Pwn2Own 2010: Interview With Charlie Miller’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/charlie-miller-flash"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From the days when Apple&amp;#8217;s about boxes gave credit to developers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fireballed, but &lt;a href="http://www.storiesofapple.net.nyud.net/larry-john-steve-and-bruce.html"&gt;cached here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/01/larry-john-steve-bruce"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;h2&gt;They Stopped Digging&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Good for Microsoft for starting over with a truly new UI and new &lt;a href="http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/windows-phone-7-offer-both-silverlight-and-xna-development/2010-02-21"&gt;developer APIs&lt;/a&gt;. There&amp;#8217;s an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Microsoft found themselves in a hole the day Apple unveiled the iPhone, but continued digging for three more years. Better late than never, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The Zune UI&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Just about any new UI would be better than the existing Windows Mobile UI. But basing the new Windows Phone 7 UI on the Zune raises the question of why they think it&amp;#8217;s going to fare any better than, well, the Zune.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The &amp;#8216;Phone&amp;#8217; in the Name&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Renaming the platform from &amp;#8220;Windows Mobile&amp;#8221; to &amp;#8220;Windows Phone 7 Series&amp;#8221; makes it even less applicable than ever to non-phone mobiles, like the iPod Touch. I think the iPod Touch is the single greatest strength of the iPhone OS platform. You can argue that phones like the Nexus One and Pre Plus are worthy rivals to the iPhone 3GS, but &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/demographics"&gt;there is no rival to the iPod Touch&lt;/a&gt;. Now, admittedly, Apple&amp;#8217;s mobile OS has &amp;#8220;phone&amp;#8221; in its name too, so I suppose there&amp;#8217;s no reason why someone might not make a non-phone device running the &amp;#8220;Windows Phone&amp;#8221; OS, but it seems shortsighted to me. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Microsoft only plans to license the OS for use on actual &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;, and they&amp;#8217;re going to pull an Apple with non-phone devices for this platform with their Zune brand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The &amp;#8216;Windows&amp;#8217; in the Name&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The bigger naming question: Why name it “Windows” anything? If Microsoft is &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/technology/01soft.html"&gt;going for a clean break&lt;/a&gt;, why not a new non-&amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; name? I think it shows just how perverse Microsoft’s obsession with &amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; is. There’s no good way to leverage their Windows PC OS monopoly to extend it to mobile, other than the name, so they&amp;#8217;re sticking with it. It doesn&amp;#8217;t even make literal sense. The whole point of the &amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; name is that it was for a system whose UI revolved around the concept of on-screen &lt;em&gt;windows&lt;/em&gt;. There are no windows in the Windows Phone 7 interface. (There&amp;#8217;s also no Start menu in the WP7 UI; that was the linchpin of UI similarity between Windows (for PCs) and Windows Mobile.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;A new non-Windows name would have let Microsoft use a 1.0 version number. I think the &amp;#8220;7&amp;#8221; in &amp;#8220;Windows Phone 7 Series&amp;#8221; is a detriment to their message that this is a clean break from Windows Mobile 6 and earlier. The 7 implies &amp;#8220;new version of the old thing&amp;#8221;, which isn&amp;#8217;t what they want at all because the old thing is unloved and unpopular. A new 1.0 thing would have also dampened uncomfortable questions about why phones available today &lt;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/01/windows-mobile-6-x-users-wont-get-windows-phone-7-upgrade/"&gt;won&amp;#8217;t be upgradeable to the new system when it ships&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The Osborne Effect&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;That (a) Windows Phone 7 units aren&amp;#8217;t expected until late this year (and think about what happens if the schedule slips); and (b) current Windows Mobile 6.5 phones will not be upgradeable suggests that Windows Mobile phones &lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/5482641/every-windows-mobile-phone-out-now-is-officially-at-the-evolutionary-dead-end"&gt;aren&amp;#8217;t going to have a good year&lt;/a&gt;, sales-wise. Windows Mobile sales and market share were already in steep decline; the &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect"&gt;Osborne Effect&lt;/a&gt; isn&amp;#8217;t going to help.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Perhaps in the long run it doesn&amp;#8217;t matter just how badly Windows Mobile handsets sell between now and the debut of Windows Phone 7 handsets. But on the other hand, the last thing Microsoft needs in the weeks and months leading up to the new handsets debuting is bad press about tanking &amp;#8220;Windows Mobile&amp;#8221; sales. (Another reason why it would have been a good idea to use a new brand name.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Triumph of the iPhone Form Factor&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;When the iPhone debuted, there were no popular phones based primarily on a large touchscreen. Now, nearly all new smartphones share the same basic form: a roughly 3.5-inch touchscreen. (Non-touchscreen BlackBerries are the biggest exception.) Many include a hardware keyboard, but the touchscreen is the starting point. The Windows Phone 7 software doesn&amp;#8217;t look like the iPhone&amp;#8217;s much at all. But the hardware is pretty much an iPhone with two extra buttons (Back and Search). One advantage Windows Phone 7 may have over Android is that WP7 was designed with this form factor &amp;#8212; the large touchscreen &amp;#8212; as a baseline assumption. All major Android phones on the market have this form factor too, but the Android OS itself was designed to be abstract enough &lt;a href="http://www.slashgear.com/android-firmware-10-apparently-running-on-qualcomm-handset-video-demos-1316112/"&gt;not to require a touchscreen at all&lt;/a&gt;. That&amp;#8217;s handicapped Android in terms of things like text editing, which requires the use of a trackball or direction pad instead of a pure touch interface.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Who&amp;#8217;s the Competition?&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The big three mobile platforms right now are iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. (Feel free to add Nokia as a fourth.) I think Windows Phone 7 is most competitive with Android, because that&amp;#8217;s the one with the same business model: licensing the OS to OEM hardware makers. They&amp;#8217;re even competing for attention from the very same hardware makers, especially HTC. Google&amp;#8217;s been undercutting Microsoft with free (or nearly free) services for a few years now: Google Docs against Office, &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gmail.html"&gt;Gmail for Business&lt;/a&gt; against Exchange, and soon, Chrome OS against Windows. But this one, Android vs. Windows Mobile, is the first one where Google seems poised to take the lead. Windows Phone 7 doesn&amp;#8217;t just have to be better than Android, it has to be better enough to convince handset makers that it&amp;#8217;s worth the licensing fees.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Eric Von Hippel, professor of technological innovation at MIT, in an interview with The New York Times:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;“It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation &amp;#8212; that’s what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yes, the patent system is supposed to reward the innovators themselves, but it is also supposed to benefit the public interest.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The U.S. Patent System vs. Innovation’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/hippel"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#8217;s nothing Futura can&amp;#8217;t do. (Thanks to DF reader Tom Davis.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘London Sperm Bank&amp;#8217;s New Brand’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/logos"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Patent-by-patent overview of all 20 patents upon which Apple claims HTC is infringing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Nilay Patel&amp;#8217;s Apple vs. HTC Patent Breakdown’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/patent-breakdown"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The phone is the Motorola Backflip. I presume Motorola and/or AT&amp;amp;T did this because they worked out a deal with Yahoo where they get paid for making them the default search engine.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Interesting proof of just how much freedom Android&amp;#8217;s open source licensing model offers to handset makers and carriers. What are the odds that AT&amp;amp;T and Motorola will be able to make a Windows Phone 7 handset with, say, Google as the default search engine?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘AT&amp;amp;T&amp;#8217;s First Android Phone Replaces Google With Yahoo as Default Search Engine’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/att-android"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The second film in the series (after &lt;em&gt;Dr. No&lt;/em&gt;). I watched it last night for the first time in a long while. So, so good. Low on the cockamamie; high on style and lovely details, including beautiful on-location footage of early-60s Istanbul. The plot revolves around a Russian code machine and a possible defector (who is, of course, a hot chick), not a preposterous plot to destroy the Earth or all of Western civilization.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Not just quintessential James Bond, but maybe the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; Bond &amp;#8212; funny, not corny, a spy movie, not an action movie.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;From Russia With Love&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/from-russia-with-love"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The Register:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221; for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash. [&amp;#8230;] Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Virgin America Drops Flash From Web Site’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/virgin"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Amusing that the negative feedback dialog for Office 2010 is called &amp;#8220;Send a Frown&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Microsoft Visio 2010 Includes Ripped Off Version of Panic&amp;#8217;s Transmit Icon’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/visio-transmit-rip"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Clip from Ebert&amp;#8217;s appearance on Oprah this week, previewing his new custom-made text-to-speech voice made using audio he had previously recorded before losing his ability to talk.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;m tearing up.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Roger Ebert&amp;#8217;s New Voice’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/ebert-voice"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Joy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Dogs Catching Snacks at 1,000 Frames Per Second Super Slo-Mo’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/dogs-slo-mo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Edward Kim&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8220;Car Locator&amp;#8221; Android app is generating over $10,000 a month in revenue. Good to know it&amp;#8217;s possible to make meaningful dough from the Android Market.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘An Android Success Story’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/android-success"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Your humble narrator, back in October when Nokia filed a patent suit against Apple:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you can’t beat ’em, sue ’em.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I feel this suit against HTC is a terrible mistake.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘I Stand By This Quip From October’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/stand-by-this"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC):&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Every generation needs its own heroes. One decade into the 21st century, it&amp;#8217;s time to honor the last great president of the 20th and give President Reagan a place beside Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Bill Clinton, of course, left office with &lt;a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx#2"&gt;higher approval ratings&lt;/a&gt; (particularly the &lt;a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx#1"&gt;average for his second term&lt;/a&gt;) and a balanced budget.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Republican Representative Introduces a Bill to Put Reagan on $50 Bill’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/reagan"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Greg Sandoval, reporting for CNet:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The company&amp;#8217;s representatives have recently spoken with some of the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their content on the company&amp;#8217;s servers, two people familiar with the discussions told CNET. That&amp;#8217;s in addition to streaming television shows and music. [&amp;#8230;] Apple&amp;#8217;s vision is to build proverbial digital shelves where iTunes users store their media, one of the sources said. &amp;#8220;Basically, they want to eliminate the hard drive,&amp;#8221; the source said.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There are two ways to interpret this. One would be that Apple will provide online storage for your iTunes purchases as backup, so that if your hard drive fails or your computer is lost or if you simply buy more movies than you have space to store yourself, you still have access to everything you&amp;#8217;ve bought. Think of this model as like IMAP for iTunes content &amp;#8212; it would also allow multiple devices (computer, iPhone, iPad) to remain in sync over the air, rather than the current model where devices need to be tethered via USB to your computer in order to sync. I think this would be fantastic. As it stands now, iTunes customers are responsible for the data integrity of their purchases. &lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Think of it this way: if Apple &lt;em&gt;doesn&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; do something like this, then what&amp;#8217;s the model for owning an iPad as your primary computing device?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The other way to interpret it &amp;#8212; &lt;a href="http://scripting.com/stories/2010/03/03/whatIsAppleUpTo.html"&gt;the dystopic take&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; is that Apple wants to remove local storage entirely, except perhaps as a cache that we can&amp;#8217;t control. In this model, if you disconnect from Apple&amp;#8217;s servers, you lose access to your library. (Given that we&amp;#8217;re lucky to complete phone calls on weekday afternoons in certain U.S. metro areas, we&amp;#8217;re a ways off from this being feasible, even if it is what Apple has in mind.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Cloud-Based Video Storage From Apple?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/apple-cloud"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Worth a &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/11/05/dumbest"&gt;re-link&lt;/a&gt;, just to point out this remark from &amp;#8220;&lt;a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml"&gt;genius&lt;/a&gt;&amp;#8221; patent troll Nathan Myhrvold regarding Steve Jobs&amp;#8217;s return to Apple in 1997:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Apple is already dead.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(Myhrvold at the time was Microsoft&amp;#8217;s CTO.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Already Dead&amp;#8217;, Eh?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/myhrvold-genius"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Dan Frommer makes a good point:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But in terms of perception, it&amp;#8217;s really the latest sign from Apple that it is terrified of Google, whose Android operating system is becoming a formidable rival in the smartphone industry.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Whether it&amp;#8217;s true or not doesn&amp;#8217;t matter. This is how it looks.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Not a Good Move, Perception-Wise’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/03/dan-frommer-perception"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Filed under: Internet, iPad

If I ran AT&T, I would leave the subject of whether or not the network could handle the iPad's extra 3G traffic demands completely out of the picture, saying something like "we hope so," or "we'll wait and see on how popular it is." But Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO, seems to be tempting fate.

First, he promised that AT&T could handle any demand placed on its network by Apple's iPad, and now he's suggesting that it won't be that bad anyway. In a Reuters article, Stephenson suggests that the iPad will be a "Wi-Fi driven product," and that "there's not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription."

That may in fact be true, and while I'm almost willing to offer him the benefit of the doubt that the majority of browsing on the iPad will be done via Wi-Fi, I also doubt that those who elect to go with 3G won't be using the heck out of it. Maybe AT&T thinks the extra charges from the non-subscription usage will shore up the network, but it certainly sounds to me like Stephenson isn't too worried about AT&T's 3G networks, and from both our experiences with them on the iPhone and the expected popularity of the iPad, he probably should be.

Then again, maybe he's got to say that it won't be a problem -- suggesting that AT&T might not be able to keep up with service demands probably isn't the best thing for the CEO of the company to do. But it sounds like AT&T is underestimating, publicly at least, the kind of 3G network traffic the iPad will bring.

TUAWAT&T: iPad will be a "Wi-Fi driven product," 3G won't be an issue originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/htcnexusone-review.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Google today more formally put its weight behind HTC in defense against Apple's lawsuit. The company hasn't become an official component of the lawsuit but in a statement defended Android and the partners that make its phones. HTC has been key to Google's strategy and produced several of the most important devices, including the Nexus One, G1 and myTouch 3G....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/dutywatchremote.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />ActyMac has launched a new surveillance utility for the Mac, DutyWatch Remote. The program monitors the activity of one or multiple computers, and has tools for capturing screenshots, spying on keystrokes and recording which applications are used. Keystroke and usage statistics can be viewed in real-time. Through an iPhone or iPod touch, people can access online reports....

Filed under: Video, Podcasting

TUAWloha, everyone.

It's time for another chapter in the ongoing technical soap opera known as TUAW TV Live. This afternoon's show, beginning at 5 PM, has content to dazzle and amaze you. To avoid any broadcast nightmares this week, Steve will be doing the show solo in order to keep things simple.

As noted in an earlier post, today's topics include, but are not limited to:

• iPad availability (when and how many)
• A couple of Mac application demos
• Some fun videos
• A hands-on look at the LaCie Network Space 2 NAS
• Discussion of the topics you want to talk about in the chat tool

We now return you to our previously scheduled show, already in progress. Click the Read More link to view the show and interact with the chat tool.

TUAW(Not) live from New York -- it's TUAW TV Live! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/sonnetd800p2.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Sonnet says it has launched a new RAID system, the Fusion DP800P2. Described as mid-level, the unit can hold up to eight hard drives for a maximum 16TB of storage. Sonnet sells 4, 8, 12 and 16TB arrangements as defaults, but the rack can also be ordered without drives for custom installations....

Since moving to LA, I haven't quite had to deal with the potholes that Spring in Chicago usually brings (not that roads are any better out here, but at least they don't have to deal with all of the freezing and thawing). But despite the yearly flat tires and ruined alignments, Chicago hasn't gone quite as far as Boston, where the city government has developed not one but two apps to enable its citizens to report on potholes and other city issues.

Citizens Connect is an app developed late last year by the city that enables locals to report graffiti, potholes, broken streetlights, and other urban issues in the Boston area, and now they're working on a new app, nicknamed BUMP (for Boston Urban Mechanic Profiler), that will automatically transmit road conditions to a central database using the iPhone's accelerometer and data connection. That seems tough to do with all of the extra noise that must come from an accelerometer, but they are working with a researcher from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, so m

TUAWBoston creates app to report road problems originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPad

Y Combinator is a relatively famous tech startup firm, a company that invests in startup companies on a regular basis, both to encourage innovation and of course to pick up a tiny share of the equity. Their latest RFS (or Request For Startups) has them asking specifically for companies interested in iPad applications, and the reasons for this interest are pretty intriguing. They say straight off the bat that they don't think the iPad is just bigger iPhone or another tablet computer -- they believe that "the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender." Apple, they say, believes this as well, but rather than take on Windows face first, they've chosen to sideswipe them through the tablet platform. Consumers will pick up an iPad, and almost won't even notice that they're slowly using it more and more while neglecting their more traditional computers. And by the time the iPad is boasting apps that aren't even available on traditional PCs, it's game over.

Could it happen? Even Y Combinator admits that it's still only a possibility, but given that they're a company that makes their livelihood by investing in the future, it definitely seems like the windmill is turning in the iPad's direction.

[Via DF]

TUAWY Combinator is seeking iPad app developers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/tele.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />TeleAdapt has launched the Mini DisplayPort and USB Audio to HDMI Adapter, a new cable that enables Mac owners to use an HDTV as an external monitor. Unlike typical adapters that send just the video signal, the TeleAdapt adapter uses USB audio to combine the audio and video signals through the same HDMI cable. It is capable of connecting any Mini DisplayPort-based MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac computer, with supported resolutions up to 1080p....

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Even I was dubious about the rumor the other day of Steam coming to the Mac, but now here's something straight from Valve hinting that it might actually happen. MacRumors got an image of Half-Life's Gordon Freeman via email... with an Apple logo on his chest. MacNN got another picture, this one showing turrets from Portal and Team Fortress 2 parodying the "I'm a Mac" ads. And Shacknews got a third, with the Heavy from TF2 eating a sandwich shaped like an Apple logo in a parody of the iPod dancing ads.

Oh Lordy. Looks like Valve is planning to make a Mac announcement, and while it might not be quite as far-reaching as bringing the whole platform over, they might as well start with all of their blockbuster games. It's also possible that this is related to the secret message hunt going on the PC version of Portal, which itself seemed to be hinting at an announcement of Portal 2 or even the long-awaited Half-Life 3.

Whatever the announcement, it looks like Valve will have something to tell us at GDC next week. I'll be there with ears open -- if we hear that Valve is bringing some or all of their catalog to our platform, you'll be the first to know.

Update: Our game-obsessed friends at Joystiq have gotten copies of five of the images (there appear to be six total, according to the dots on the image above), and you can see them all in the gallery below. The rest of the images show the Steam platform itself, and Francis from Left 4 Dead. Awesome.

Update 2: Looks like Macworld got the last image. You hurt us, Valve. But we still love you anyway -- how can we not after seeing that "rest of us" ad parody for Steam below?

TUAWValve teases a Mac release of Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/atv_sml.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Fire Core has released an update to its AppleTV add-on, aTV Flash. Version 4.1 expands support for 5.1-channel audio from a wide range of media formats, including DVD files. The company has also improved Couch Surfer Pro, which is claimed to offer faster browsing and enhanced support for the Remote iPhone app....

Filed under: Deals

We wrote about blog app Blogo a while back and now it's on sale for $12.95. If you're in the market for a Mac-based blogging tool, give it a try.

If you missed Macworld then you missed Sennheiser selling their headphones for 50% off. But these Sennheiser PXC-310 noise-cancelling headphones for $179 (with free shipping) may ease the pain.

Earlier today we wrote about an iPod dock with a "bed shaker," but these Memorex Minimove iPod dock speakers won't likely shake you out of bed. Still, for under $30 it's a good deal if you're looking for a cheap dock to put in a spare room.

Those are all the deals for today, courtesy our friends at DealNews.

TUAWDaily Deals for March 3, 2010 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone, iPad

We've posted about the use of both the iPhone and iPad in the healthcare industry before, and there are a number of apps that have been developed to take advantage of the iPhone in hospitals and clinics. One of our readers pointed out that Voalté, a company that specializes in hospital paging and communications, has had a free iPhone app available for over a month.

The free Voalté One app works to integrate VoIP calling, text-messaging, and all of the alarms and alerts from patient monitoring systems onto an iPhone or iPod touch. Of course, there's more to using this than just installing the app on an iPhone -- the company designs and builds communication systems for hospitals -- so deploying an iPhone or iPad-based solution isn't exactly "free."

Screenshots found in the App Store show the app being used by a nurse to designate available or busy time, sending quick messages with a single tap, and a directory of hospital personnel listed by their current availability.

Voalté has also announced a version of the app for iPad. The company realizes that the size of the iPad isn't exactly perfect for nurses on the go, so they're targeting physicians and other clinicians who can benefit from the larger screen real estate for viewing medical images or educating patients. Voalté says that they'll have the iPad app available when the device ships, presumably later this month.

Thanks to reader Alex B. for the tip!

TUAWVoalté One iPhone and iPad apps streamline healthcare communications originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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