&lt;h2&gt;Automatic Transmission&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn&amp;#8217;t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s not to say there aren&amp;#8217;t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they&amp;#8217;re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it&amp;#8217;ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt; is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Popovers and Split Views&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Across the iPad system, Apple has introduced a new UI element, which they&amp;#8217;re calling popovers. It&amp;#8217;s a perfect name. Popovers are like a cross between dialog boxes, drop-down menus, and inspector palettes. One example is the list of mailboxes in Mail when in vertical mode. When iPad Mail is in horizontal mode, you see a split view with two panels at once: accounts/mailboxes/messages on the left, and an always-present message detail panel on the right. When iPad Mail is in vertical mode, you just get one panel, but you can tap a button at the top left to show a popover of messages in the current mailbox.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;They&amp;#8217;re very well thought-out. As their name implies, they appear on-screen &amp;#8220;over&amp;#8221; existing views. But you can&amp;#8217;t drag them around. They aren&amp;#8217;t windows. They&amp;#8217;re in a fixed position, always with an arrow pointing to the button or other control (like an event in Calendar) that the user tapped to open the popover. To close a popover, you just tap away from it &amp;#8212; tapping anywhere other than within the popover closes it. Perhaps conceptually, it&amp;#8217;s more like tapping the view &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; the popover to make it disappear. So popovers don&amp;#8217;t have an &amp;#8220;X&amp;#8221; button in the top-left corner, or anything explicitly labeled &amp;#8220;Close&amp;#8221; or &amp;#8220;Cancel&amp;#8221; or &amp;#8220;Done&amp;#8221;. You just tap away. This is one of those aspects of the iPad UI that you just have to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; to get. It feels perfect.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;According to the iPad Human Interface Guidelines (which, alas, are only available to registered iPhone SDK developers), there is a modal variant:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Popovers and modal views are similar, in the sense that people typically can’t interact with the main view while a popover or modal view is open. But a modal view is always modal, whereas a popover can be used in two different ways:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modal, in which case the popover dims the screen area around it and requires an explicit dismissal. This behavior is very similar to that of a modal view, but a popover’s appearance tends to give the experience a lighter weight.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-modal, in which case the popover does not dim the screen area around it and people can tap outside its bounds to dismiss it. This behavior makes a non-modal popover seem like another view in the application, not a separate state.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t recall encountering the modal variety during my all-too-brief iPad spelunking expedition; the non-modal ones seem far more prevalent.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The overall effect of popovers is that you do &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; less view switching in an iPad app than you do an iPhone app. Things that slide an entirely new full-screen view on screen on the iPhone &amp;#8212; like say going back from a message to a list of messages, or displaying your Safari bookmarks, or showing the details of a calendar event &amp;#8212; on the iPad instead appear as popovers on a main view.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So imagine, say, an iPad Twitter client in horizontal mode. You could have a split view with a list of tweets running down the left. On the right, you could have a web view for reading web pages linked from tweets. Rather than sliding over and replacing the tweet list, they could exist side-by-side. And then a popover could provide an interface for switching between different accounts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Information Density&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad display offers 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 pixels. At 9.7 inches diagonally, the pixel density is roughly 132 pixels per inch. That&amp;#8217;s less than the iPhone and iPod Touch, which have 480&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;320 displays with roughly 162 pixels per inch. So text looks a little less sharp on the iPad. But it seemed to me that I naturally held it further away from my face than I do my iPhone, such that it seems just about equally sharp &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What I found interesting is that I&amp;#8217;m very familiar with this resolution &amp;#8212; for &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; I used PowerBooks and iBooks with 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 displays running Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 somehow seems very different on the iPad than on Mac OS &amp;#8212; physically smaller but conceptually bigger. The full-screen concept, without Mac-style overlapping draggable windows, leaves the iPad free to use as many pixels as possible for display &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; rather than UI chrome.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;With the iPad Calendar app for example, the month view seemed more efficient and information-dense than iCal running on my 1440&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;900 pixel MacBook Pro display.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Also interesting is iPad Safari. Even though the screen offers the same pixel count as what was once the standard size for a laptop display, iPad Safari renders pages like iPhone Safari. The web surfing experience is all about zooming and panning.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Hardware Keyboard Support&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The announcement that most surprised me is the iPad&amp;#8217;s support for hardware keyboards &amp;#8212; not just the new docking unit, but also Bluetooth keyboards. I&amp;#8217;m surprised because it is a very practical decision, but not elegant. There&amp;#8217;s a certain beauty to how, with the iPhone and iPod Touch, input is completely and utterly limited to the touchscreen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Needless to say, though, I&amp;#8217;m surprised in a happy way. I can totally imagine traveling to conferences (or events like this) without a MacBook, but rather with an iPad and a keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The on-screen iPad keyboard is not bad at all, for what it is, but it&amp;#8217;s exactly what you think &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s for &lt;em&gt;pecking&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;typing&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to do actual writing, you&amp;#8217;re going to want a hardware keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Having used the hardware keyboard yesterday, though, it is clearly a secondary form of input. You cannot even vaguely drive the iPad interface by keyboard alone. It is almost entirely only for text input. The arrow keys really only work for text editing. Shift-arrow combos work for selecting ranges of text, and Command-arrow combos work for moving the insertion point to the beginning/end of lines. Option-arrow combos do not work for moving a word at a time, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Arrow keys don&amp;#8217;t work for navigating the interface. This is the sort of thing I expect to improve over time (and who knows, maybe even before it actually ships), but there are some glaring holes. For example, in iPad Mail, when you start typing in the To: field to address a message, and the iPhone-style autocomplete suggestion list appears under the field, you cannot select from it using the keyboard. You have to touch the screen. The docking keyboard has no Esc key, replacing it instead with a key to simulate the iPad Home button. But so if you try to dismiss a popover with &amp;#8220;Esc&amp;#8221; and hit that button, boom, you&amp;#8217;re dropped back to the home screen. And once back at the home screen, there doesn&amp;#8217;t seem to be a way to launch apps via keyboard alone. It just seems like it&amp;#8217;s not finished yet.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Typography and iBooks&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad&amp;#8217;s version of iPhone OS contains more fonts than iPhone OS 3.1, including my beloved Gill Sans. The iBooks app lets you switch the text face, but only from a choice of five fonts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;iBooks uses full-justified layout for books, with no apparent option to switch to ragged right. It doesn&amp;#8217;t do hyphenation, so you wind up with very unsightly word-spacing gaps. No e-reader I&amp;#8217;m aware of does justice to proper book typography, but I was hoping for better from Apple. It&amp;#8217;s decent web-caliber typography, not print-caliber typography.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As for Amazon, they might wind up delighted with this thing. Apple&amp;#8217;s in the business of selling devices first, content second. I think Amazon is in the content business first, the device business second. A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there&amp;#8217;s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Money on the Table&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, a thought regarding the iPad&amp;#8217;s aggressive pricing. Apple is obviously leaving money on the table here. They could easily charge $999 as the starting price and have hundreds of people lined up outside every Apple Store ready to buy one on day one. Then they could drop the price later in the year, as the holiday season approaches.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Clearly they&amp;#8217;re more interested in unit sales than per-unit margin. The mobile computing landscape is in land-grab mode, and Apple is trying to stake out a long-term dominating position.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;There was a meta-message in today&amp;#8217;s Apple event, not about the iPad in particular, but rather about Apple as a whole. Jobs&amp;#8217;s brief preamble included a bit of extra emphasis on the fact that the Apple now generates over $50 billion per year in revenue. (Apple also emphasized this $50 billion revenue thing in their &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/25results.html"&gt;PR two days&lt;/a&gt; ago announcing their Q1 2010 financial results.) He also said that when you consider MacBooks as &amp;#8220;mobile&amp;#8221; devices, Apple generates more revenue from mobile hardware than any other company in the world; the three competitors he singled out were Sony, Samsung, and Nokia. The adjective he used was &amp;#8220;bigger&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, there&amp;#8217;s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be &amp;#8220;fast&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It is fast, fast, fast. The hardware really does feel like a big iPhone &amp;#8212; and a big &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; iPhone at that, with the aluminum back. (I have never liked the plastic 3G/S iPhones as much as the original in terms of how it feels in my hand.) I expected the screen size to be the biggest differentiating factor in how the iPad feels compared to an iPhone, but I think the speed difference is just as big a factor. Web pages render so fast it was hard to believe. After using the iPhone so much for two and a half years, I&amp;#8217;ve become accustomed to web pages rendering (relative to the Mac) slowly. On the iPad, they seem to render nearly instantly. (802.11n Wi-Fi helps too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Maps app is crazy fast. Apps launch fast. Scrolling is fast. The Photos app is fast.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad hardware is exactly what you think. It looks great, it feels great. It&amp;#8217;s very nice to hold. (People are &lt;a href="http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2010/01/27/apple-drops-an-idud.aspx"&gt;complaining&lt;/a&gt; about the wide bezel around the display, but without that, where would your thumbs go? You don&amp;#8217;t want your thumb that&amp;#8217;s holding the device to cover on-screen content or register as a touch. Trust me, it&amp;#8217;s just right.) Just like with the iPhone, it&amp;#8217;s all in the software. And the software is obviously marvelous in many ways. It is clearly the result of deep thought and hard work.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year&amp;#8217;s new iPhone, look out.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t talk much about the technical details of the iPhone. They never talk about CPU speed or the name of the chip being used. They don&amp;#8217;t tell you how much RAM is in there. Part of their vision for moving computers from technical culture to popular culture is about getting away from defining these things by their technical specs. So the prominent talk about A4 is telling. This is something they want us to notice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I mentioned this year-ago quote from Apple COO Tim Cook the other day, but it&amp;#8217;s apt here, too. &lt;a href="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090621_038917_page_2.htm"&gt;Cook told BusinessWeek&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;#8220;We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren&amp;#8217;t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t just own and control &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They&amp;#8217;re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they&amp;#8217;re getting into it to kick ass.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;They&amp;#8217;re Microsoft and Intel rolled into one when it comes to mobile computing. In the pre-taped video Apple showed, Bob Mansfield said of the iPad, &amp;#8220;No one else could do it.&amp;#8221; Only Apple.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And so my takeaway from this &amp;#8212; with the bragging about making their own CPUs and their annual revenue and their size compared to companies like Sony, Samsung, and Nokia &amp;#8212; is that this is Apple&amp;#8217;s way of asserting that they&amp;#8217;re taking over the penthouse suite as the strongest and best company in the whole ones-and-zeroes racket.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;On my flight to San Francisco yesterday, I finished reading &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1578062977/ref=nosim/daringfirebal-20"&gt;Stanley Kubrick Interviews&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, an excellent collection edited by Gene D. Phillips. I was struck by this passage by Richard Schickel from Time magazine in 1975, a few weeks prior to the release of &lt;em&gt;Barry Lyndon&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;About his work Kubrick is the most self-conscious and rational of men. His eccentricities &amp;#8212; secretiveness, a great need for privacy &amp;#8212; are caused by his intense awareness of time&amp;#8217;s relentless passage. He wants to use time to &amp;#8220;create a string of masterpieces&amp;#8221;, as an acquaintance puts it. Social status means nothing to him, money is simply a tool of his trade.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Reminds me of &lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/4307703430/"&gt;someone else&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Special issue of Hamish Hamilton&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://fivedials.com/fivedials"&gt;excellent literary magazine&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;#8220;A celebration of the life of David Foster Wallace with contributions by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and others.&amp;#8221; Designed by our old friend Dean Allen. So good &amp;#8212; do yourself a favor and print it out.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Five Dials No. 10 (PDF)’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/07/five-dials-dfw"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Remember &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg"&gt;this video from 2007&lt;/a&gt;, demonstrating a technique for content-aware image resizing that didn&amp;#8217;t involve cropping or distorting the central elements of the image? Savoy Software&amp;#8217;s Liquid Scale brings this technique to the iPhone. Pretty cool.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Liquid Scale: Content-Aware Image Resizing App for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/07/liquid-scale"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&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;Robert Scoble &lt;a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/30/can-flash-be-saved/"&gt;has a good analogy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like &lt;a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/apples_ipad_--_a_broken_link.html"&gt;Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad is going to fail&lt;/a&gt; because of its own set of broken links.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adobe can&amp;#8217;t. They can&amp;#8217;t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apple could, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash"&gt;but they won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don&amp;#8217;t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/29/porno-flash"&gt;initial reaction to the iPad&lt;/a&gt; seems to be geared toward #3 &amp;#8212; emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it&amp;#8217;s fair to say that we&amp;#8217;re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703"&gt;made his little poster&lt;/a&gt; showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they&amp;#8217;re missing anything because, well, they&amp;#8217;re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigiphoto/4314276957/"&gt;Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version&lt;/a&gt; of Brimelow&amp;#8217;s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they&amp;#8217;re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There&amp;#8217;s a big difference between &amp;#8220;everywhere&amp;#8221; and &amp;#8220;almost everywhere&amp;#8221;. Adobe&amp;#8217;s own statistics on Flash&amp;#8217;s market penetration &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html"&gt;claim 99 percent penetration&lt;/a&gt; as of last month. That&amp;#8217;s because, according to their &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/methodology/"&gt;survey methodology&lt;/a&gt;, they&amp;#8217;re only counting &amp;#8220;PCs&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That&amp;#8217;s no longer true, and Adobe&amp;#8217;s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What&amp;#8217;s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn&amp;#8217;t care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Adobe. They care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Hulu. Hulu isn&amp;#8217;t a &lt;em&gt;Flash&lt;/em&gt; site, it&amp;#8217;s a &lt;em&gt;video&lt;/em&gt; site. Developers go where the users are.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Sourcebits is a leading developer of software and services for iPhone, iPad, Mobile, Mac and the Web. We specialize in robust, high performance code with an elegant, easy to understand front end. With over 4.5M downloads from the iTunes App Store and a growing portfolio of Android, BlackBerry, and Rich Internet Applications, Sourcebits brings its record of innovation and success to each new project. Whether mobile, Mac or RIA, trust our 200+ strong team of talented programmers and user interface designers to build your next application. Contact us today for a quote.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;A great win by a great team from a great city. Sports at its best.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Saints Beat Colts 31-17 to Win New Orleans&amp;#8217;s First Super Bowl’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/super-bowl"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Simple web-based painting/drawing app. No Flash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Sketchpad’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/sketchpad"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Love this line from the New York Times&amp;#8217;s David Carr on the Charlie Rose show, regarding the iPad:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;One thing you have to understand about this gadget is that the gadget disappears pretty quickly. You&amp;#8217;re looking into pure software.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t think it&amp;#8217;s a coincidence that Carr is a business reporter, not a tech reporter. He sees the forest, not the trees. But this is really astute. I&amp;#8217;ve been using a Nexus One Android phone for the last few weeks, and Carr&amp;#8217;s quote summarizes the fundamental difference between Android and iPhone OS. On the iPhone, once you&amp;#8217;re in an app, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; happens on-screen, with touch. Everything. You go outside the screen to the home button to leave the app or the sleep button to turn off the device. On Android, many things happens on screen with touch, but many other things don&amp;#8217;t, and you&amp;#8217;re often leaving the screen for the hardware Back, Menu, and Home buttons, and text selection and editing requires the use of the fiddly trackball. An Android gadget never disappears.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;The Gadget Disappears&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/rose-carr"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that back in August, Retrevo released survey results showing that Apple&amp;#8217;s MacBooks were getting killed by netbooks in the back-to-school market. That &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/19results.html"&gt;didn&amp;#8217;t exactly pan out&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Before You Place Your Bets on Retrevo’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/retrevo-netbooks"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Retrevo, which bills itself as &amp;#8220;the ultimate electronics marketplace&amp;#8221;, has been getting a lot of attention in recent months for its consumer surveys on Apple products, including this one from Friday:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;As we like to say, it’s the apps that sell smartphones like the iPhone and it could very well be those same apps that motivate buyers to run down to the Apple Store and get in line to buy a shiny new iPad. Whether this device becomes a big hit is anyone’s guess but based on this study it sure looks doubtful.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So let&amp;#8217;s mark them down as bearish on the iPad.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#8217;s also keep in mind that Retrevo is the same outfit who, just three weeks ago, &lt;a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=11426"&gt;released survey results showing that the most important features&lt;/a&gt; in an (at the time, hypothetical) Apple tablet were &amp;#8220;long battery life&amp;#8221;, &amp;#8220;3G&amp;#8221;, and &amp;#8220;an e-book store with big selection&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; and that the main thing people did not want was a required monthly data plan. Oh, and the price needed to be under $700. Sounds like something familiar.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Retrevo: iPad Doubters’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/retrevo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Philip Elmer-DeWitt on the highlights of this week&amp;#8217;s Macworld Expo in San Francisco:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;John Gruber. The ill-tempered author of the widely read Daring Fireball blog is flying from Philadelphia, presumably without his &amp;#8220;What Are You Looking at Dicknose?&amp;#8221; t-shirt, to discuss the &amp;#8220;top 10 issues facing our world.&amp;#8221; &lt;em&gt;Friday 4:30 p.m. PT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;First, &amp;#8220;ill-tempered&amp;#8221;? Second, everyone knows that shirt &lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035767733@N01/3183085025/"&gt;doesn&amp;#8217;t have a question mark&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Who&amp;#8217;s Scruffy-Looking?&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/ill-tempered"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My favorite commercial of the night by far.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘How the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl Ad Came Together’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/letterman-oprah-leno"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;CSS nerds: have you checked out &lt;a href="http://lesscss.org/"&gt;LESS&lt;/a&gt;? If so and you dig it, you might be interested in this.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘LESS CSS App for Mac OS X’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/less-css-mac"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Gee, I wonder if e-comic-book distributors are excited about the iPad?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Panelfly’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/panelfly"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Wolf, responding to &lt;a href="http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/02/the_iphone_obse.html"&gt;PPK&amp;#8217;s argument&lt;/a&gt; that MobileSafari is the new IE6:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Mobile web developers, like most developers, are future-focused. We’d rather all mobile phones catch up with the iPhone we have in our pockets today, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate the current majority.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Count me in with Wolf on this one.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Wolf Rentzsch: MobileSafari Is Not the New IE6’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/wolf-ppk"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Apologies to the Hulu-less.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘An Even-Tempered Apology From White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/rahm"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Faces, places, and brushes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘What&amp;#8217;s New in Aperture 3’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/09/aperture-3"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Palm, RIM, Microsoft losing market share; Apple and Google gaining. (RIM has the most to lose, of course.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘ComScore Reports December 2009 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/09/comscore"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Nice complement to &lt;a href="http://clicktoflash.com/"&gt;ClickToFlash&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; BashFlash monitors Snow Leopard&amp;#8217;s Flash Player process and lets you kill it when it starts using excessive CPU time.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘BashFlash’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/09/bashflash"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&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;Better questions: &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; will iPhone OS support third-party multitasking, and in what form? &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Adam Engst: Does the iPhone OS Need Multitasking?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/09/engst"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Google:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We&amp;#8217;re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We&amp;#8217;ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Google Announces Experimental Fiber Network’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/google-fiber"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Arik Hesseldahl on a &amp;#8220;preliminary estimate&amp;#8221; of iPad component costs from iSuppli:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Research firms including iSuppli conduct so-called teardown analysis of consumer electronics to determine component prices and makers and estimate margins. Researchers at iSuppli didn&amp;#8217;t have an actual iPad and instead relied on Apple&amp;#8217;s public statements on its features.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The next step, I guess, is issuing &amp;#8220;pre-preliminary estimates&amp;#8221; of component costs for products that haven&amp;#8217;t even yet been announced.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Remember the Old Days, When iSuppli Would Actually Wait Until They Could Take a New Apple Device Apart Before Making Up a Ridiculously Lowball Estimate for How Much It Costs to Make?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/isuppli"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;However, from the comments:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There are plenty of third-party web browsers in the App Store. It&amp;#8217;s just that the ones that are allowed are ones that use the system version of WebKit. See &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2008/11/opera_app_store"&gt;this piece I wrote back in November 2008&lt;/a&gt; for more on Opera Mini, including why it might be a very cool app.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Opera Mini for iPhone to Be Previewed at Mobile Web Congress’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/opera-mini"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;No sarcasm intended, I&amp;#8217;m enjoying Thurrott&amp;#8217;s perspective on the iPad. I found this perspective intriguing:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Further unclear is why we would want to learn yet another user interface. Phones, by nature, are simple to use and limited by onscreen real estate. Laptops, of course, offer more expansive screens and more powerful capabilities. But the iPad introduces yet another UI, one that is based on that of the iPhone, of course, but one that is different and more advanced (and complex). Not as advanced and complex as a PC, perhaps. But different from both the iPhone and laptop.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The starting point Thurrott is espousing here, more or less &amp;#8220;&lt;em&gt;Let&amp;#8217;s start with something the user will already be familiar with&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#8221; sounds good, and many times it is the right approach. That&amp;#8217;s the consistency argument for Mac software being Mac-like, and Windows software being Windows-like. But if you shackle yourself to starting with something already familiar, then the state-of-the-art is never going to make a great leap forward. This sort of thinking is why Microsoft&amp;#8217;s tablet computers all run Windows 7.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Clearly, the way Apple approached the iPad was that &lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt; the iPad was going to introduce a new UI. They&amp;#8217;re really rather fearless about it, because, I think, they&amp;#8217;re so confident in its obviousness. Unfamiliar and new isn&amp;#8217;t a problem if the whole thing is obvious and easy to figure out.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Paul Thurrott, Warming to iPad’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/thurrott"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Insightful reporting based on interviews with current and former Microsoft employees:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates,&amp;#8221; Boris said. &amp;#8220;In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer.&amp;#8221; Fred said, &amp;#8220;the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10,&amp;#8221; during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I&amp;#8217;ll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Fascinating stuff, too, about the bizarre incentive structure for Microsoft employees. I think this gets to the nut of exactly what&amp;#8217;s wrong with Microsoft. They&amp;#8217;ve evolved a powerful, deep bureaucracy that has lost any sort of focus on creating great products. Worse, for obvious reasons Microsoft&amp;#8217;s management is unlikely to see itself as the problem. As Upton Sinclair said, &amp;#8220;It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Joe Wilcox on Microsoft&amp;#8217;s Glut of Middle Managers’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/wilcox"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Apple didn&amp;#8217;t emphasize this heavily at the introduction, but the iBooks app is not going to be bundled with the iPad &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s an app you download from the App Store, putting it on an (at least somewhat) equal footing to e-book readers from other companies. From the &amp;#8220;Features&amp;#8221; page in Apple&amp;#8217;s iPad web site:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iBooks app is a great new way to read and buy books. Download the free app from the App Store and buy everything from classics to best sellers from the built-in iBookstore.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you look at the &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/gallery/"&gt;photos of the iPad&lt;/a&gt;, the only bundled apps included with the system appear to be Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Videos, YouTube, iTunes, App Store, Settings, Safari, Mail, Photos, and iPod. Perhaps this will change if and when iBooks becomes available outside the U.S.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/perfy/status/8929095037"&gt;Good point&lt;/a&gt; from a reader on Twitter: making iBooks an App Store download will allow Apple to update the app more frequently than if it were tied to OS updates.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘iBooks Isn&amp;#8217;t Bundled With iPad’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/ibooks"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ian Youngs, reporting for BBC News:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Record label Warner Music has said it will stop licensing its songs to free music streaming services. Companies like Spotify, We7 and Last.fm give free, legal and instant access to millions of songs, funded by adverts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Warner, one of the four major labels, whose artists include REM and Michael Buble, said such services were &amp;#8220;clearly not positive for the industry&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Spotify, on Twitter, &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/Spotify/status/8919825963"&gt;says Warner isn&amp;#8217;t pulling out&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Warner Retreats From Free Music Streaming’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/warner"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I missed this last month. Ends up a financial analyst last month really did issue a pre-preliminary estimate of how much it&amp;#8217;s costing Apple to manufacture the iPad &amp;#8212; &lt;em&gt;three weeks before Apple announced it&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/lgerbarg/status/8925185690"&gt;Via Louis Gerbarg&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘I&amp;#8217;m Too Late’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/ipad-pre-preliminary"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Holman W. Jenkins Jr. on the iPad:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;And what about Apple&amp;#8217;s decision to exclude Flash? Apple and its supporters stake out aesthetic and philosophical grounds: Flash is buggy. Flash is a power hog. Flash is &amp;#8220;proprietary&amp;#8221; (horrors). Flash is used to create those annoying Web ads (never mind that advertising is what pays for most of the Web).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Uh huh. Flash would also allow iPhone and iPad users to consume video and other entertainment without going through iTunes. Flash would let users freely obtain the kinds of features they can only get now at the Apple App Store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So his argument is that no matter how bad Flash is technically and experience-wise, Apple should add it to the iPad so people can watch Hulu. And that there&amp;#8217;s no other way to obtain video for the iPad other than stuff you buy from iTunes. Jiminy. If only there were, say, a YouTube app included with the OS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I suppose that if you really miss things like Hulu and animated web ads, it makes sense to argue that Apple should support Flash on iPhone OS no matter what. I honestly don&amp;#8217;t see how anything regarding the iPad, the iTunes Store, or Apple&amp;#8217;s policy toward Flash is in any way reminiscent of Microsoft, though. I&amp;#8217;d say the iPad only serves to bring into relief just how different the two companies have become. Perhaps what Jenkins is getting at is Apple&amp;#8217;s willingness to impose its will, to make decisions rather than offer choices.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘WSJ Op-Ed Piece by Holman W. Jenkins Jr. Argues Apple Is Getting All Microsofty’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/jenkins"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New site for tech and design news. I dig it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tputh’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/tputh"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Nice chart from Alley Insider, showing Microsoft&amp;#8217;s operating profit by division.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Microsoft&amp;#8217;s Profit Comes From’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/10/frommer-microsoft"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Bill Hill, formerly of Microsoft:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The trouble is trying to innovate at Microsoft, which is a company of geeks, run by geeks, and dominated by Windows.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When TabletPC began at Microsoft, it was a research effort - outside of the regular Windows organization. Once it was re-organized into Windows, that was the kiss of death. I never really thought much about this while I worked there, but it&amp;#8217;s my belief that despite all the lip-service paid to end-users, the only Windows customers with any real power are the Windows Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Bill Hill on the iPad’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/bill-hill"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Patrick Burgoyne:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;After 29 years, MTV unveils a logo &amp;#8216;refresh&amp;#8217; – like many of its viewers, the network has become a little wider and a little fatter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Creative Review on MTV&amp;#8217;s Tweaked Logo’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/mtv-logos"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Better and better.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘SublimeVideo Now Supports Firefox’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/sublimevideo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Now with support for extensions.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘New Beta of Google Chrome for Mac’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/chrome-mac"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kara Swisher on the dwindling enthusiasm for Windows Mobile:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Indeed, this is why Microsoft and its giant wallet might be better served by buying one of the big and more established telecom companies, such as Research in Motion, Palm or even &amp;#8212; as another Microsoft exec said to me, “Why not?” &amp;#8212; Nokia.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nokia has a market cap of close to $50 billion, with RIM at close to $38 billion. And Palm? A paltry $1.74 billion. Microsoft’s current valuation is $246 billion, and the company has $40 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand. [&amp;#8230;] And, in fact, many sources at Microsoft have told me that CEO Steve Ballmer has expressed interest in buying RIM many times (while also dismissing any interest in Palm).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;RIM seems like a natural fit, in terms of its customer base and the whole look and feel of BlackBerry software. Palm would be the bolder play.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Kara Swisher on Microsoft&amp;#8217;s Mobile Dilemma’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/swisher"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My thanks to Sourcebits for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Sourcebits is a contract developer specializing in iPhone, mobile, Mac, and Web software. Their iPhone apps have been downloaded over 4.5 million times from the App Store, and they have a growing list of Android and BlackBerry apps, too. If you’re looking for software development services, check out Sourcebits’s web site for examples of their work, and contact them for a quote.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Sourcebits’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/12/sourcebits"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google&amp;#8217;s search results for &amp;#8220;Facebook login&amp;#8221;. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think that this is the new Facebook login page.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s funny, yes, but it&amp;#8217;s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don&amp;#8217;t use bookmarks, they don&amp;#8217;t type &amp;#8220;facebook.com&amp;#8221; in the location field. They just Google for whatever they&amp;#8217;re looking for and assume the first result is correct. All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple &amp;#8212; if anything it&amp;#8217;s probably still too complex.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Facebook Login&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kottke:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sales of CJ Corporation&amp;#8217;s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don&amp;#8217;t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Meat Stylus for the iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/kottke"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Interesting perspective: looks like they sell about 100 songs per second.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘iTunes 10 Billionth Song Countdown’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/itunes-10b"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Another little masterpiece from my friend Adam Lisagor.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Introduction to Square’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/square"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;In public, Adobe claims to &amp;#8220;support&amp;#8221; HTML5. On the private W3C mailing list, though, they&amp;#8217;ve placed an objection to prevent the current spec from being published. My understanding is that Adobe is trying to block the API spec for the canvas element. The canvas element hasn&amp;#8217;t gotten as much attention as the video element, but clearly, 2D graphics in canvas is competitive with Flash, and it appears that Adobe&amp;#8217;s plan is to sabotage it via W3C politics.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Adobe Puts Secret Hold on HTML5 Spec ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/14/hixie"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Seems like a terrible mistake to glom a public broadcasting feature onto a private email system.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Google Buzz a Privacy Disaster’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/13/google-buzz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Filed under: Macworld, TUAW Business, Podcasts

We're live tonight, with those of us who are sad not to have been at Macworld Expo 2010 (yes, that mostly means Kelly... I'm already saving my pennies for next year!), and hopefully some of us will be able to scrape together enough energy to give some live wrapup action. As per (recent) tradition, I'm sure we'll hear the word iPad once or twice, we'll chat about the first TUAW booth experience, and how all the technology bringing live floor reports behaved, or didn't. Not to mention we'll have all sorts of other things to talk about, since you'll be there with your own burning topics, right?

We'll kick things off at 10pm Eastern (7pm Pacific); hopefully those in the Pacific time zone not celebrating some sort of arrow-based holiday can join us. Once you sign in on Talkshoe, you'll be able to call in with your own phone and chat live with TUAW bloggers and listeners. (Pro tip: This is my favorite part, interacting with all of you. So make it worth my while to be hanging with you tonight, OK? OK!)

To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantage of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk with you then!

TUAWTalkcast tonight, 10PM ET: Macworld Expo 2010, the aftermath originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/samsungi8520halo-leak.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Samsung has inadvertently revealed a new Android flagship in one of its spec sheets. The i8520 -- to be labeled the Halo in a formal launch tomorrow -- should be Samsung's first phone using Android 2.1 and should be the company's most capable smartphone to date. It will use an even larger 3.7-inch version of the Super AMOLED screen found in the Wave and will have support for a DLP pico projector with a customized interface for the low-res but large screen area....

agoston.horvath writes "I've written a HOWTO on replacing Mac OS X's built-in encryption (FileVault) with the well-known FUSE-based EncFS. It worked well for me, and most importantly: it is a lot handier than what Apple has put together. This is especially useful if you are using a backup solution like Time Machine. Includes Whys, Why Nots, and step-by-step instructions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/samsungwave.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />As expected, Samsung at its pre-show Mobile World Congress event launched the Wave. It becomes the first phone to use the Bada mobile OS and has a new, cleaner interface with TouchWiz 3.0 to handle widgets. The new UI supports as many as 10 home screens, an "ultimate" inbox that merges messaging and social media like Facebook or Twitter, and a social hub that also unites contacts from similar sources....

Filed under: Macworld, TUAW Interview, iPhone, App Store

WebIS Pocket Informant has been a powerful Personal Information Manager for years, having made an impact in the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry world before moving on to the world of iPhone. The iPhone version has been recently updated to version 1.21, and the feature set just keeps growing.

As part of TUAW's continuing coverage of Macworld Expo 2010, I visited the WebIS kiosk to learn what's new with the app. Among other things, Pocket Informant now has German and French localizations, the ability to group by context and project, Outlook sync, and over-the-air sync with Google Calendar and ToodleDo.

Pocket Informant 1.21 is available for a special Macworld Expo price of US$7.99, and is a powerful way to keep your life in order. Check out our video interview with WebIS by clicking the Read More link below.

We apologize for the static-filled audio in this video interview.

TUAWMacworld 2010: WebIS Pocket Informant video interview originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Video, iPhone, App Store

App Cubby has some of the more popular apps in the App Store. Whether it's Gas Cubby for tracking car maintenance, Trip Cubby for capturing mileage information, or Health Cubby for motivating ourselves to get into better shape, the company keeps customers coming back with well-executed and full-featured software.

We talked with App Cubby's David Barnard at Macworld Expo 2010 to see what's new from the company. While we won't tell you about the new and completely different app he has recently submitted to Apple, David told us a lot about the free version of Gas Cubby -- Gas Cubby by FRAM -- that provides the functionality of Gas Cubby in an ad-sponsored format.

Check out TUAW blogger Steve Sande's video interview with David by clicking the Read More button.

We apologize for the sound quality, which was hindered by interference picked up by the microphone.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TUAW talks with App Cubby's David Barnard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, iPhone, iPod touch

I stopped by the 4iThumbs booth to check out their product that would purportedly increase my (admittedly dismal) typing speed on the iPhone/iPod touch. It consists of a plastic overlay that puts small ridges between the letters of the standard iPhone keyboard, available in both portrait and landscape formats. The product comes with some tabs that you affix to the top and bottom of the device, and you can then slip the plastic overlay on and off. You can touch through the overlay and use the phone as usual while it's attached, although the bumps aren't terribly comfortable for swiping. There's a matching set of tabs for the back of the device which can hold the overlay when it's not in use.

I tested it out, and it works. I never texted much on any device other than the iPhone, so I can't make a direct comparison of typing speeds between an iPhone and, say, a Blackberry. I do type a lot on my iPhone, though, and I can readily say that my typing speed and accuracy increased dramatically while using the 4iThumbs overlay.

4iThumbs is $19.95US online for 1 set, which includes portrait and landscape versions and the tabs to attach them to your iPhone/iPod touch. At Macworld, you can pick up 2 for $15US, but you'll have to get there quick to take advantage of the show pricing.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Hands-on with the 4iThumbs keyboard for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Graphic Design

On the last day of Macworld, I caught up with the guys from TypeDNA to take a look at what I soon realized was going to be a revolutionary bit of software magic for designers of any ilk. TypeDNA is a series of plugins for Adobe CS4 applications (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) which makes finding the right font a simple matter.

It has several methods for navigating font collections, starting with a search by name, which is handy on its own. The functionality expands from there, doing such things as automatically offering suggestions for similar fonts and font harmonies. The harmonies feature is especially interesting, and the suggestions it offered while they were demoing it were very good. You can pick a font from the suggestions and search for similar fonts to find exactly the right typeface for your project. TypeDNA always offers a variety of suggestions, and recognizes that font choice is entirely subjective ... you make all the decisions, it just helps you navigate a large font collection quickly and intuitively.

I'll be doing a more in-depth review as soon as the demo version comes out (soon). The full version will be available in March, and will run $59US per plugin, or $89US for a full set (3 plugins) and two licenses so you can use them on two separate machines.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TypeDNA originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Video, Internet, TUAW Business

TUAW is broadcasting live from the show floor of Macworld 2010. Stay tuned all day long for live video from the show floor, including interviews, demos, and hands-on with vendors, friends, and luminaries. On the schedule today: Blue Microphones, the makers of the Gorillapod, Telltale Games, Shawn King of Your Mac Life, and many more.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TUAW livestream from the show floor originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Internet, Apple, iPhone, App Store, iPad

Frog Design is here on the show floor at Macworld 2010, and we stopped by their booth earlier in the week to check out what they've been up to on the iPhone. They're a storied design firm (they worked on the Apple II series back in the day) that is diving headfirst into the App Store, with two apps out already and one more on the way.

We've talked about Postcard Express on the site before, but they ran us through the latest version of the app, which has fixed a lot of the problems that users originally had -- the picture size has been tweaked a bit, and the geotagging has been updated and smoothed out to work much better. The most intriguing part of the iPhone app is of course the design -- everything, including emailing out the actual postcard, works completely within the app and is as intuitive as possible. While the actual act of sending a virtual postcard might not appeal to everyone (the charm of postcards is that they actually come through the mail), the app itself makes the process easy and fun.

We also saw two more apps from Frog Design: tvChatter, which is a TV-centered Twitter app, and the upcoming Temptd, a "health-based social networking app." Read on for more about both.

tvChatter is an interesting twist on Twitter apps: it's centered around television-related tweets. The first thing you see when you log in is a grid of various shows and discussion topics, which you can slide around and browse to see what's hot in television lately. After clicking on your favorite show, you'll get a slowly scrolling list of tweets about those shows, which is generated from a constantly-updated search by Frog Design themselves. In other words, click on "Lost," and you'll get a list of tweets about the show, the latest episode, and any other news about that show. You don't actually need a Twitter account to use the app, as they just pull in tweets with the API, but if you have a Twitter account, you can reply and send messages straight from the app while you're browsing the TV zeitgeist.

What's most interesting about tvChatter is actually behind-the-scenes: Frog Design actually has real-life people working on the ever-changing content for each show, so every time you log in, you'll be able to see updated news and information about the shows you're viewing. And while the app is free, they pay for that content choice with paid placement -- the top level of shows on the app is actually placed according to ad payments from television networks. There is a separate section where you can browse an unfiltered list of television shows, but the main app page, with the cool graphics and the hip interface, is all paid placement.

Unfortunately, tvChatter isn't much more than you'd get just browsing Twitter yourself -- while Frog Design told us that their searches for tweets to include are done professionally, they didn't look much more different than browsing for "Lost" and "24" on the regular Twitter site. And the paid placement might rub a few users the wrong way -- in our short hands-on time with the app, we didn't see that area marked as advertising at all. While it's an intriguing way to support a content-driven app, consumers might not vibe with it, especially with so many other sources for TV news and views out there.

Finally, we were shown an app called Temptd, which is still in beta and scheduled to come out later this year. The idea behind it is a "health-based social networking app" -- basically, when you feel tempted by something unhealthy, be it food or smoking or anything else, you can send out a message that you've been Temptd, and those messages then hook into your Facebook account (so your page will say something like "Mike's been tempted by pizza"). Being tempted starts a timer, and if you can make it through that time without succumbing to temptation, you get a certain amount of points that go into your stats, called Willpower, Karma, and Overall. It's a very social app, so you can also support and congratulate others on fighting or overcoming their temptations, and your own actions are rewarded and affect both yours and others' stats.

Frog Design told us that their work in the medical field suggested that social networking would be a good outlet for support on this issue, so they put together this game-style social networking app to help connected users overcome their main temptations. Will it work? We're not sure -- the app (and the concept) was still in beta, and some details (like what rewards you'll eventually get if you do overcome your temptations) haven't been decided yet. But like all of Frog Design's other work, it is an interesting idea. Stay tuned -- Temptd should be out on the App Store soon, and we'll see if it makes the splash they hope for.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Frog Design shows off their iPhone apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Hardware, iTunes, Music

DJ software tends to be hit or miss -- the ability to make a music player match beats on songs, even with different tempos, has been around for a while. For most software designed to allow you to mix and play music, the interface is the important part. What you want is a nice clean interface that's simple enough for almost anyone to pick up and use, but complex enough that DJs who know their stuff can take advantage of deeper features and functionality. Fortunately, that's exactly what Algoriddim has put together in the newest version of their app, djay 3. The app offers an excellent interface with quite a few nice touches of flash, and also offers up solid functionality for those who know their way around the ones and twos.

The app opens on the standard two-turntable view, with an iTunes interface sitting right on the side of the window. That's important, the Algoriddim rep told us, because many DJ apps require you to import your songs, or put them in certain formats that might not be compatible with the most popular music player on the Mac. But djay 3 actually uses your iTunes music and playlists right in the app, so right at startup, you can just drag and drop songs onto the turntables, and start mixing right away. Of course, everything can be adjusted manually, but there are also buttons that allow you to automatically match the speed (beats per minute) and gain of the two songs, and a fader at the bottom allows you to switch back and forth between them just as a DJ would in the club. Everything else works as expected as well: you can drag the needles on the records to travel within a song, twist the records themselves to move around, or set EQ or balance as you'd expect.

That's the basic functionality of the app, and it works well -- I asked the rep to mix two random songs, and while Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" didn't exactly sound good together, they did beat match and gain match perfectly. Which makes sense: we were also told that the point of the app is to turn DJing into something that doesn't require hours of practice with turntables in a bedroom, but rather that the point of playing music is music choices, not just how fast you can flip the fader or spin the record back.

Of course, for DJs who have spent those hours of practice, Algoriddim has built in plenty of advanced features. There's a very impressive looping system, that allows you to create loops of any length, lined up right to the beat of a given song, and then adjust or cut those loops on the fly. There's also a full-fledged cue point system, so you can instantly jump to a cue point in any song, and all of your cue points are saved as metadata, so the next time you want to play that killer breakdown right in the middle of one of your favorite songs, it'll be there when you want it. And perhaps most awesome, the djay 3 software works with the multitouch trackpad on your MacBook Pro, so you can move the fader, turn the records, switch tracks, and do almost everything else just with gestures on the trackpad. And djay 3 doesn't require extra soundcards for more technical ouput -- with the in-app settings, you can plug in any USB headphones, and send the pre-cue sound out to a separate sound source.

And if you're not an experienced DJ, djay 3 goes the other way, too -- you can turn on the Automix feature, and the app will actually beatmix your songs for you, like an enhanced version of iTunes DJ. You can even program it to run certain transitions, like a full stop, a hip hop-style reverse twist, or a number of different options, all that run automatically. Obviously it won't be perfect, but even if you're just looking for a little more smooth party mix than the standard iTunes DJ, Algoriddim will help out with that, too. And the company is working on an iPhone app that will let you remotely control the mix via Wi-Fi -- while we didn't get to see it in action on the crowded floor, they're hoping to release it later this year.

The app is available now for $50 on the website and in stores. It's an excellent DJ app, and one of the best you will find on the Mac. It won't turn you into an amazing DJ right away, but if you're an experienced DJ looking for a way to mix music straight from your Mac, it's a great solution. And even if you're a music fan who wants to experience music in a different way, it's more than worth a look.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Hands-on with Algoriddim's djay 3 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Hardware, Blogging, iPad

We are live from the floor of Macworld 2010, where they're be talking about the iPad in a special event feature Jason Snell, Macworld editor-in-chief, and a panel of industry experts. We have heard that won't be an actual iPad on the show floor, so it's not clear whether we'll get to see the device, but we will hear commentary and insight on what the iPad means for Apple and the world at large.

After the break, find an updating liveblog of the event as it happens, straight from Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Apologies to Dan Moren for misspelling his name, which he made a point of telling us when he stopped by the booth after the session. Whoops! Our bad.

TUAWMacworld 2010 special iPad event liveblog originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Apple, iPhone, App Store

If you've ever had a need to create or edit Microsoft Office documents on your iPhone or any other mobile device, you're probably familiar with Quickoffice. It's a solid app that provides a way to transfer documents to your iPhone, open them, make changes, and then save them back to the device. At Macworld 2010, Quickoffice announced some changes to their iPhone product line.

The app now comes in two flavors -- Quickoffice Connect [Free, iTunes Link], which is a document viewer, and the full Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite [US$9.99 sale price]. Both apps now have a feature that should make almost everyone happy -- integrated access to multiple cloud services including MobileMe, Dropbox, Box.net, and Google Docs.

TUAW editor Steve Sande visited the Quickoffice booth at Macworld Expo 2010 yesterday and was treated to a full demo of the the Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. We've got video, so see how Quickoffice can help you keep those docs in order by clicking the Read More link below.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite demonstration originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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