&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;Simon St. Laurent on the process forging HTML5:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;HTML5 will be damaged, its credibility weakened, but will still be important, one way or another.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yeah, I sure wish HTML5 were going more like, say, the W3C&amp;#8217;s XHTML 2.0 spec. That worked out great.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Mark Pilgrim says to &lt;a href="http://is.gd/8su1Q"&gt;look at primary sources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Widening HTML5 Chasm’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/html5-chasm"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ian Hickson:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Since I was mistaken about the formal objection, should I prepare the drafts for FPWD publication now? What date should I use?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Either this was all a major mistake and misunderstanding, or Hickson is calling Adobe&amp;#8217;s bluff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ian Hickson on Adobe and HTML5’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/hixie-adobe"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s Larry Masinter, in &lt;a href="http://www.9to5mac.com/adobe-html5-objections-95496864#comment-66680"&gt;a comment on 9 to 5 Mac&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, &amp;#8220;blocked&amp;#8221; in the W3C HTML Working Group &amp;#8212; not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video &amp;#8212; not by me, not by Adobe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Great news.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Adobe Claims Not to Be Blocking Anything Related to HTML5’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/html5-adobe-not-blocking"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The best, most precious photographs tell stories, eliciting visceral recollections of the people, places and times that matter to you. MemoryMiner is an extremely clever photo-annotation and storytelling tool that helps you take the long view, highlighting the connections between peoples&amp;#8217; lives across time and place. Like cooking, writing or gardening, MemoryMiner takes some effort, but offers unique rewards for every step you take. To see how, watch the demo screen movie found on the home page of &lt;a href="http://memoryminer.com/?df"&gt;memoryminer.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Daring Fireball readers can purchase MemoryMiner at a &amp;#8220;one finger&amp;#8221; (i.e. 20%) discount using the coupon code &amp;#8220;daring&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&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;&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;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;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;Josh Topolsky:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The design and layout of 7 Series&amp;#8217; UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an &amp;#8220;authentically digital&amp;#8221; and &amp;#8220;chromeless&amp;#8221; experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn&amp;#8217;t mean &amp;#8212; no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) &amp;#8212; almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it&amp;#8217;s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that&amp;#8217;s to its advantage.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Certainly interesting and original. My first impression, though, is that if nothing looks like a button, and tappable text looks like non-tappable text, how do you know what you can tap?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Josh Topolsky&amp;#8217;s Windows Mobile 7 Impressions’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/topolsky"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Matt Buchanan:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Every phone will have a Bing (search) button and a Start button. Custom skins, like the minor miracles HTC worked, are now banned. The message to hardware makers is clear: It&amp;#8217;s a Windows Phone , you&amp;#8217;re just putting it together. Basically, phonemakers get to decide the shape of the phone, and whether or not there&amp;#8217;s a keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Microsoft&amp;#8217;s dilemma by not building their own phones: they&amp;#8217;re acknowledging that hardware matters, but if hardware matters, what&amp;#8217;s the motivation for handset makers to excel if there&amp;#8217;s nothing they can do to stand apart from others except for lowering their price? Microsoft&amp;#8217;s message to handset makers is, more or less, &amp;#8220;&lt;em&gt;You&amp;#8217;re going to do what we tell you to do and we&amp;#8217;re going to take all the credit.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#8221; Very different from Android. Maybe that&amp;#8217;s what these handset makers want, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;One other word on hardware, in a manner of speaking. Hardware it won&amp;#8217;t work with? Macs. Which is kind of stupid to us &amp;#8212; a lot of the people Microsoft wants to use Windows Phone 7, like college students, have been going Mac in droves. You wanna lure them back Microsoft? Let them use your phone with any OS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think Microsoft has its fingers in its ears and is doing the &lt;em&gt;na-na, can&amp;#8217;t hear you&lt;/em&gt; thing regarding Mac market share (and demographics).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yes, the browser is Internet Exploder. And yes, the rumor&amp;#8217;s true: It won&amp;#8217;t be as fast as Mobile Safari. Not to start.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Not to start&amp;#8221;, eh?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;History is on Microsoft&amp;#8217;s side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Not to be a smug dick here, but wasn&amp;#8217;t the &lt;em&gt;last time&lt;/em&gt; Apple had a massive head start over Microsoft the iPod? Speaking of which, no word on whether Windows Mobile 7 phones will support PlaysForSure.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Matt Buchanan on Windows Mobile 7’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/buchanan"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Brad Stone, reporting for the NYT:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple’s chief executive is set to collaborate on an authorized biography, to be written by Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, according to two people briefed on the project.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘NYT: Steve Jobs Cooperating on Biography by Walter Isaacson’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/jobs-isaacson"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;What a great product name. Not a mouthful at all.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Windows Phone 7 Series’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Steven Frank:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is such a perfectly encapsulated nutshell of exactly why Apple does not allow third-party background processes on the iPhone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Homebrew App for the Palm Pre Reboots Your Phone on a Schedule’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/homebrew-palm-reboot"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Chris O&amp;#8217;Brien:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This column began when I tried to find the answer to what I thought would be a simple question: How many job cuts has Hewlett-Packard had over the past decade?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The answer shocked me: 75,505.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That includes people who were fired or took early retirement. Despite the cuts, HP&amp;#8217;s workforce has tripled in size as the company hired people in new areas and bought companies such as Compaq and EDS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Lessons From Hewlett-Packard&amp;#8217;s Massive Job Cuts’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/hp-jobs"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jason Kincaid nails it: &amp;#8220;write once, run everywhere&amp;#8221; has never worked out. It&amp;#8217;s a pipe dream. More laughably, this initiative comes from mobile carriers, not OS vendors. It&amp;#8217;ll never pan out.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Wholesale Applications Community’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/15/kincaid"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ed Finkler:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;We’re the Stupid Ones&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/finkler"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Luke Wroblewski compares the Windows Mobile 7 photos and app store apps to their iPhone counterparts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Information Resolution on the Windows Phone 7 Series’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/lukew"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Tonio Loewald:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is procedural bullshit, plain and simple.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I know Adobe claims they&amp;#8217;re not &amp;#8220;blocking&amp;#8221; anything related to HTML5, and many of you are taking them at their word on this. I hope you&amp;#8217;re right. But they are undeniably doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; behind the scenes with, as Loewald eloquently boils it down, W3C procedural bullshit. Adobe can call it &amp;#8220;seeking clarification&amp;#8221; or whatever they want. I say it&amp;#8217;s obstruction.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think they&amp;#8217;re trying to get the W3C to agree that 2D canvas is not part of &amp;#8220;HTML5&amp;#8221; proper as a first step.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tonio Loewald on Adobe and HTML5’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/adobe-loewald"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Every major mobile platform is now either using WebKit or will be soon. Except for one.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘RIM Previews WebKit Browser for BlackBerrys’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/webkit-rim"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I love the New York Times, and the iPad app demo they gave last month looked great, but $360 a year is insane. It&amp;#8217;s a simple choice between playing for the (digital) future and temporarily propping up the (print) past.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Gawker Reports on NYT Turf Battle Over iPad App Pricing ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/gawker"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;At least it wasn&amp;#8217;t Flash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Report Claims Malicious PDF Files Comprised 80 Percent of All Exploits for 2009’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/pdf"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;And just under 1 billion with Internet access on their phones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Earth: 6.8 Billion People, 5 Billion Cell Phone Subscriptions ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/cells"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jim Ray:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;More importantly, though, with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;First, I was observing more than celebrating. (But if any one rendering engine had to win the whole mobile shebang, I&amp;#8217;m delighted it&amp;#8217;s WebKit. But I&amp;#8217;d love to see Mozilla get its mobile balls on.) But, bigger point: if any individual WebKit platform vendor disagrees with the direction of the mainline WebKit trunk, or simply thinks they can do better, they can do so. Real open source.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;For one, replace “WebKit” with “Flash” and suddenly the iPhone is the holdout.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Really? Every WebOS, BlackBerry, and Android phone today ships with Flash? I didn&amp;#8217;t know that. (Not to mention Windows Phone 7, which isn&amp;#8217;t shipping until &amp;#8220;holidays 2010&amp;#8221;, and which apparently isn&amp;#8217;t going to ship with Flash.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jim Ray on the WebKit Mobile Browser Monoculture’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/jim-ray-webkit"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Greg Kumparek:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;As far as I could tell, there is currently no copy/paste functionality. We were told that “developers will hear more about that” at Microsoft’s MIX conference next month, though it was implied that it would be about why copy and paste “won’t be necessary” rather than when it was coming.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;How 2007.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Windows Mobile 7 and Copy-and-Paste’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/winmo7-copy-paste"&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;Google is a $170 billion company. It employs thousands of engineers and developers. It tests, tests, tests, and tests more. In fact, its “designers” once unable to pick a shade of blue tested 41 variations of it. It’s ludicrous to think that the Buzz fiasco was simply a result of under-testing. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Kontra on Google Buzz’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/kontra-buzz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Good questions, and some informative comments.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Simon Willison&amp;#8217;s Questions About the &amp;#8216;Blocking&amp;#8217; of HTML5’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/willison"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Me too.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘A Conversation Dan Wineman Has Every Month or So’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/16/wineman"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Judging from the description, it doesn&amp;#8217;t sound like it violates any of the rules, so I think it&amp;#8217;ll be accepted.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Dan Frakes on Whether Apple Will Approve Opera Mini for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/frakes"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Matt Gemmell:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;It’s difficult to get our heads around the fact that these non-technologically-savvy users can suddenly constitute a &lt;em&gt;core market&lt;/em&gt; for a device, yet that’s the case here. Nintendo saw it, and Apple sees it too. It’s an uncomfortable realisation since these people are so unfamiliar to people like you, as hardware manufacturers, and me as a software engineer. This discomfort leads to a kind of understandable blindness, and more importantly can make us leave money on the table. The relative sales and demand figures for Wii vs PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 over the last several Christmases are indicative of that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Matt Gemmell on How to Compete With iPad’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/gemmell"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Delightfully wonkish.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tim Bray on the Style of the HTML5 Spec’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/bray"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Aaron Swartz:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So it seems totally reasonable to imagine them releasing something without heavily testing it; their whole culture is based around testing things in the wild.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Good point, but I&amp;#8217;d replace &amp;#8220;totally reasonable&amp;#8221; with &amp;#8220;unsurprising&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Aaron Swartz on Google&amp;#8217;s Method of Testing’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/swartz-buzz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Harry McCracken:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Anyone want to explain why Moritz keeps relaying Kumar’s rumors as “exclusive” facts – and why TheStreet lets him do so?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Easy: because Moritz is an unscrupulous hack and TheStreet.com is a rag.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Harry McCracken on Scott Moritz’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/moritz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ebert:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I didn&amp;#8217;t need polite fictions.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Chris Jones&amp;#8217;s profile captured what I&amp;#8217;ve been thinking for the last year or so: that Ebert has become a far better writer now than he was before. And that&amp;#8217;s saying something, because he&amp;#8217;s always been a terrific writer. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Roger Ebert on His Profile in Esquire’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/ebert"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Spooky.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Mariana Trench to Scale’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/mariana-trench"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Techdirt:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The NY Times is now running yet another profile (they do this every two years or so) of Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures that &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/technology/18patent.html"&gt;covers the usual bogus claims by Myhrvold&lt;/a&gt; about how he&amp;#8217;s creating &amp;#8220;invention capital,&amp;#8221; with very little skepticism. However, it does reveal one interesting tidbit that we had missed. Last year, a research firm released a report highlighting that Intellectual Ventures has up to 1,110 shell companies, with which it can hide its activities. No wonder IV can pretend it doesn&amp;#8217;t sue anyone. It can simply hide behind its shell companies.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I like how &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/technology/18patent.html"&gt;the Times story&lt;/a&gt; (by Steve Lohr) starts the second paragraph like this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Admirers of Mr. Myhrvold, the scientist who led Microsoft’s technology development in the 1990s, see an innovator seeking to elevate the economic role and financial rewards for inventors whose patented ideas are often used without compensation by big technology companies. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But then never goes on to actually name any of these &amp;#8220;admirers of Mr. Myhrvold&amp;#8221;. Who admires this guy?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Intellectual Ventures Uses Over 1,000 Shell Companies to Hide Patent Shakedowns’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/intellectual-ventures"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Rall is financing a trip to Afghanistan using Kickstarter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Andy Baio Interviews Ted Rall’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/18/rall-baio"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#8217;re no longer in denial.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Microsoft Renames Windows Mobile 6.5 &amp;#8216;Windows Phone Classic&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/winmo-classic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Excellent profile in Esquire by Chris Jones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Roger Ebert: The Essential Man’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/17/ebert"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My thanks to GroupSmarts for sponsoring this week&amp;#8217;s DF RSS feed to promote MemoryMiner. MemoryMiner is a &amp;#8220;digital storytelling&amp;#8221; app for the Mac; it lets you link your photos to the people, places, and events in your life. MemoryMiner starts with photos, but it&amp;#8217;s a storytelling tool more than anything else. The demo screencast on the web site is a great overview of how it works, and MemoryMiner developer John Fox gave a &lt;a href="http://memoryminer.com/company.html"&gt;great presentation at the Los Angeles Idea Project&lt;/a&gt; that explains more.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Try the demo version for free, and save 20 percent when you purchase MemoryMiner using the coupon code &amp;#8220;daring&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘MemoryMiner’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/memoryminer"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Not sure exactly what Apple&amp;#8217;s new policy now bans, but apparently sexually-explicit apps are no longer allowed. The developer of &amp;#8220;Hooters Calendar Girls Crazy Eights&amp;#8221; forwarded me an email from Apple with the same language as the one forwarded to TechCrunch by the developer of &amp;#8220;Wobble iBoobs&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple Removing Porno Apps From App Store’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/porno-app-store"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Speaking of Photoshop&amp;#8217;s 20th anniversary, there&amp;#8217;s a Layer Tennis exhibition match going on right now, with commentary from Photoshop product manager John Nack.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Layer Tennis: Khoi Vinh vs. Nicholas Felton’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/vinh-felton"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Angela West:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;They called on Supermac and Aldus, but were turned away at both, a move that Aldus would come to seriously regret.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Shortly after, the Knoll brothers struck gold when they won over Adobe management with their product, and formed a licensing partnership with Adobe that was to launch their software and Adobe into the stratosphere.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘20 Years of Adobe Photoshop’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/photoshop"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Peter Kafka:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hulu and its owners, three of the big broadcast TV networks, want to bring some version of the Web video service to Apple’s device. But the most likely scenario is one in which access to Hulu on the iPad comes as part of a subscription package, multiple people familiar with the company tell me.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;A paid service could work and could be successful, but it&amp;#8217;d have to offer more than the free web version. It&amp;#8217;s not going to fly if the iPad version offers the exact same content as the Flash version except you have to pay for it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;And if Hulu decides to define the iPad as a mobile device, it would also need its content owners to grant it mobile rights, which it doesn’t actually have. Again, doable. But the broadcasters are already making money from other mobile services, like Verizon’s V Cast. So they have to tread carefully.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This sort of nonsense gets to the bottom of what&amp;#8217;s wrong with these entertainment executives&amp;#8217; outlook on the world. They want to define everything by arbitrary device types &amp;#8212; this is a &amp;#8220;TV&amp;#8221;, that is a &amp;#8220;computer&amp;#8221;, this other thing is a &amp;#8220;mobile device&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; and then sell/distribute the same content to different device types separately and with no spillage. But it&amp;#8217;s all bullshit in the digital world. It&amp;#8217;s all just ones and zeroes and pixels. To these TV executives it makes sense to block Boxee from supporting Hulu because Boxee is for &amp;#8220;TVs&amp;#8221; and Hulu is only intended for &amp;#8220;computers&amp;#8221;. Now they&amp;#8217;re stuck trying to figure out which arbitrary slot the iPad fits into.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Hulu May Come to iPad as Paid Subscription Service’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/hulu"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From Arthur C. Clarke&amp;#8217;s novel of &lt;em&gt;2001: A Space Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship&amp;#8217;s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world&amp;#8217;s major electronic papers.… Switching to the display unit&amp;#8217;s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.… The postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Kubrick and Clarke&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8216;Newspad&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/newspad"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/olympussp800in.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />The 14-megapixel Olympus SP-800UZ digital camera is now being offered for sale on Amazon. The camera has one of the longest zoom built-in lenses on the market, with a 30X zoom that has optical image stabilization. It's also capable of 720p HD video recording and has a 3-inch LCD screen....

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Apple, Developer, iPad

ABC is making moves to bring their content to the iPad, but before you get all excited about seeing the Lost conclusion on Apple's tablet, let us point out that we're talking about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the guys who write Jimmy Kimmel's checks. The down-under version has told Adobe that they want to build content for the iPad as soon as possible, and while Flash is tied up in a lot of back-and-forth lately, ABC confirms that they're excited to bring some kind of content to the iPad, even though they're not sure exactly what content yet.

Why? They're convinced the iPad is a whole new outlet for content consumption. They aim to use the iPad to "bring about a very different relationship with our readers than other platforms," and their head of strategic development says the iPad could create a whole new category of mobile content. While the iPhone is made for more quick hits of content delivery, the rep says that "with [the iPad] you can imagine people sitting back on the sofa and enjoying something longer."

After seeing the form factor in action at Macworld last week, we can, too. It'll be very interesting to see the types of content that come from a device like the iPad, and it's great to see big content companies jumping at the chance to create it.

[Via iPad Insider]

TUAWAustralian Broadcasting Corporation wants to be on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Barence writes "How good — or bad — are fake iPhones? PC Pro blogger Steve Cassidy has a friend who paid £25 ($40) for an 'iPhone' in a bar, and he's got the photos and full lowdown of what's inside this not-so smartphone. The phone looks convincing enough from the outside, with a genuine-looking backplate, but things start to go wrong when you switch it on. What's a "Java" and "WLAN" App button doing on the screen? And how about that Internet Explorer icon? It's like you're handling an artefact from an alternate history, dropped in via a spacetime wormhole. It has dual SIM handling, too, and came with a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/nokiastorenyc.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />The US International Trade Commission on Friday agreed to investigate Apple's patent complaint against Nokia. Its investigation will determine whether or not Nokia's phones are violating nine Apple patents. A successful investigation could result in a ban against importing most or all Nokia phones into the US....

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

One of the criticisms launched against prolific game designer Reiner Knizia is that his games get their the theme pasted on. This means that whatever the players are trying to accomplish through the game's mechanics really doesn't have much to do with the graphics and the box description. He has at least 200 published games - and might have another one thought up by the time you're done reading this review - so we understand that they can't all be perfect matches.

Knizia's card game Poison, first released for the table top in 2005, is a perfect example of this. The game could almost be played with standard cards - the deck includes three colors/suits (each with three 1s, two fours and one each of 2, 5 and 7) and eight "poison" cards worth 4 each - but the company that released the game, Playroom Entertainment, printed it with a magician/warlock/witch theme. It was later rebranded and slightly tweaked to include donuts as the game Baker's Dozen in 2008.

The iPhone and iPod touch version of the game (US$2.99) uses the earlier Poison graphics, and it's a gorgeous looking little translation. The app was released 2009 by Griptonite Games and we honestly wish they'd have updated a few nagging items by now. Read on to find out what is good, and what could be improved, in this clever card game.




The Game

There isn't much to the rules of Poison. In fact, all of the rules fit onto one iPhone screen (right). For people who can't read the image, here's how the game works.

Each player is dealt a hand of cards and must, on their turn, play a card into one of three piles. Cards of the same suit need to go together, poison cards can go anywhere. If the sum of any pile (depicted as little cauldrons) gets to 14 or more, the player who broke the 13 barrier needs to collect all of the cards in that cauldron except the one he just played into his score pile. You go until everyone is out of cards and then count up your score. The goal is to get the fewest number of points.

Since this is a Knizia game, the fact that the scoring round has a bit of a twist isn't a surprise. Whoever collected the most cards of one of the colors gets to discard all of those cards. This is really what makes the game worth playing, since it gives you a chance to score low even if you get stuck with a bunch of cards early in the game. Also, there are interesting decisions to make about filling a cauldron with lots of low-point cards or one or two big cards, depending on what you have in your hand and what you're trying to collect. Each card you end up with after any discarding scores you one point, except the poison potion cards. These are deadly to your score as they are each worth two points at the end of the round. You play a number of rounds equal to the number of players in the game (between three and six IRL and four and six on your iPhone) and that's that.


The App

Playing the game with physical cards around a table, you get to see how many cards a player has collected, but not how many points in each color he or she has. The iPhone version does show your opponents' point totals, and therefore makes it that much easier to push your luck and try and take the majority of one color or to stick a particular opponent with a poison card. If you like to say "take that!" to a real person, you'll need to search out the real card version. The app is single-player only. Pass ʻn' Play would've been nice, and this brings us to our first in a whole list of improvements that we would like to see.

The level of addition needed to play Poison isn't exactly difficult. For most people, it'll actually be quite easy. Still, considering that digital versions of board game apps have the potential to add interesting flourishes, the lack of running totals next to each cauldron/pile feels like neglect.

They are hard to see, but there are two important buttons near the bottom of the game screen, above your hand of cards. On the left is the quit/back to menu button. On the right is an info button that toggles between showing you the number of points an opponent has (like this and at right) and the name and total score of that opponent (like this). Why not show both at once? We can see it getting crowded when playing the six-player version, so we'll cut Griptonite a bit of slack on this item.

One thing that's a lot less forgivable is that that you can't listen to music while playing the game. Yon can mute the game's music, but iTunes won't fill the void if you do. Is there something incredibly difficult about coding the app to allow iTunes to keep playing when the game is running that's preventing Griptonite from implementing this option? If so, why can other developers figure it out? Players have been complaining about this since the app was released last fall and it still hasn't been updated.

Another annoyance is that there is no way to change the AI's ability level. The standard AI plays well enough to make the game interesting, but a beginner level for the first game or two would be a nice touch. Also, some players have complained that it appears the AI opponents know what cards you're holding (which would be cheating in the real world) and play accordingly. Not fun, especially if you're into the whole winning thing.

Even with all of these shortcomings, Poison is a fun little app. It doesn't beat playing around a table with friends, but what should we expect from a three dollar mini app?

TUAWReview: Reiner Knizia's Poison a fun way to kill (a few minutes) originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/briefly1902.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Photoshop, Russell Brown -- one of the program's original development team members -- has released a special iPhone application to select attendees of the Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event. The app is a replica of the original v1.0 release of Photoshop, which Adobe debuted on the Mac in 1990. The new title took two weeks to make, and lets users adjust things like the white/black levels of photos and separate red, blue and green channels....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/0909/tomtomsml.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Over 100,000 copies of the TomTom iPhone app have been downloaded, the company claims in its latest quarterly results. The title is one of the more expensive ones at the App Store, currently costing at least $60 in a US-only edition. It does however supply functions not available in Google Maps, namely turn-by-turn instructions....

Filed under: Macworld, Video, Interviews

It's hard to believe that it's been a week since I left Macworld Expo 2010 to head home. Last night, I finally went through the last snippets of video from the Expo and put together this short compendium of three interviews.

The first company I talked to was Telnic.org, a group which champions the use of the .tel top level domain as a type of global address book. There's a free iPhone app available for updating your .tel domain information from anywhere.

Next, I visited shortly with John from Agile Partners, the developers behind GuitarToolkit. TUAW's resident musician, Mat Tinsley, reported on this app last September and it's quite impressive.

Finally, I talked with the folks from myRete, who have created an interesting social networking app called WhosHere. There are over one million users of WhosHere, and with the free texting and VoIP capabilities of the app you can ask the locals in cities around the world for travel tips or a date. Want to perfect your language skills with a native speaker? WhosHere is an easy way to find someone to chat with.

As with several earlier videos, this suffers from a bit of mic noise. Our apologies!

TUAWMacworld 2010: A few more video tidbits originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 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/1002/activeusb3ssdin.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Active Media Products this week introduced two 2.5-inch external SSD drives with USB 3.0 connections. The Aviator-2 SuperSpeed SSDs are said to have performance theoretically four times faster than hard drives that rely on the USB 2.0 connection and has the headroom of the spec's full 4.8Gbps. Residing inside the USB 3.0 Aviator-2 case is Active's 64GB or 128GB Predator X7 SSD, which are rated at transfer speeds of up to 200MBps....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/kaching.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Developers can now incorporate contests and sweepstakes into iPhone apps, according to a new rule in Apple's SDK terms. The main restrictions are that a developer must be the sole sponsor of a promotion, and that an app comply with related laws. Apple also insists that the official rules for a promotion deny any sponsorship or responsibility on Apple's part....

Filed under: iPhone, MobileMe, iPod touch

Apple's MobileMe site at me.com used to be completely useless on the iPhone or iPod touch in Mobile Safari -- you'd get a splash page telling you to set up your contacts, calendars, and mail accounts, but that was about it. No webmail access, no direct access to galleries, iDisk, or even Find My iPhone. Apple introduced standalone apps that addressed some of these shortcomings (iDisk and Gallery), but there was still no way to access Find My iPhone unless you resorted to workarounds.

Things have improved somewhat with the new MobileMe page. Instead of simply admonishing you to set everything up on your Mac or PC, MobileMe now provides you with a link to instructions for setting up mail, contacts, and calendars. There's also links to download the iDisk and Gallery apps from the App Store. What's most useful about the change is you now have the ability to use Find My iPhone from an iPhone.

This might seem dumb at first -- "If I have my iPhone in my hand, why do I need to find it?" you may ask -- but if your household has multiple iPhone users and one of them leaves an iPhone at a pub, until now your only option was to dash home and try to find it on your computer. Now, you can access all the Find My iPhone features right at the moment your friend or significant other gets that wide-eyed, "I just misplaced a paycheck worth of electronics!" expression on his or her face. You can send an immediate message to the iPhone to get that loud, pinging submarine noise, which just might help you find the iPhone before you even leave the pub.

Find My iPhone is still only available as part of a yearly $99 MobileMe subscription.

TUAWFind My iPhone now works in Mobile Safari originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 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/gallery/sep2009/DNN.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Today's deals from DealNN include a wide selection of items from printers and iPods to portable storage devices. Most notable being a deal on the Iomega eGo BlackBelt 500GB portable hard drive, which is now available for $99.99 at Buy.com. The Iomega eGo BlackBelt 500GB Portable Hard Drive features Iomega Drop Guard Xtreme technology that enables drop protection up to 84-inches, along with a variety of data backup and protection applications....