&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;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;&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;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;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;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;Appended to the bottom of this item by the NYT&amp;#8217;s Dave Itzkoff, regarding David Remnick&amp;#8217;s upcoming biography of Barack Obama:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/reader_survey.php"&gt;Via David Kurtz&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Correction of the Week’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/correction"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Free Software Foundation to Google:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world&amp;#8217;s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec &amp;#8212; VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web&amp;#8217;s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There&amp;#8217;s a chicken-and-egg problem with regard to client-side support for VP8, but that can be solved over time. (Hardware decoding chips, in particular. The reason H.264 playback is so smooth and uses so little power on mobile gadgets like iPhones is because of dedicated hardware.) Google hasn&amp;#8217;t said what they want with On2 and VP8, but it doesn&amp;#8217;t seem silly at all to think that they&amp;#8217;d want to establish it as a truly free and unencumbered video standard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Free Software Foundation&amp;#8217;s Open Letter to Google Regarding VP8’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/fsf-vp8"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kennedy flat-out lied about his dual-identity as late as Friday. Keizer:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But on Friday, after I confronted Barth with evidence that linked him to Kennedy &amp;#8212; I didn&amp;#8217;t yet know they were one and the same &amp;#8212; he assured me that although the two had worked together in the past, and in fact, now worked together at Devil Mountain, any allegations that he and Kennedy were the same person were ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Gregg Keizer on Randall Kennedy’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/keizer"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Paul Thurrott:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But what makes this delicious is that the &amp;#8220;source&amp;#8221; for this information was egotistical evil maniac Randall Kennedy, and I want to be clear about this description here, because calling him this makes other egoists, evil people, and maniacs look bad by comparison. Put simply, Kennedy is one of the craziest guys I&amp;#8217;ve ever met and I state that with no sense of humor at all; &lt;em&gt;the guy is nuts&lt;/em&gt;. Like actually crazy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Paul Thurrott on Randall Kennedy’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/thurrott-kennedy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kennedy has posted several comments on the ZDNet exposé, including &lt;a href="http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&amp;amp;threadID=75498&amp;amp;messageID=1468545"&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Would you people please get down off your high horses, remove your blinders and realize this was a &amp;#8220;hit piece&amp;#8221; order [&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;] by MS?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(I&amp;#8217;m always wary of believing that commenters really are who they claim to be, so I&amp;#8217;m hoping that ZDNet has verified that the comments in this thread from &amp;#8220;Randall C. Kennedy&amp;#8221; truly are from him.) More damning for InfoWorld is &lt;a href="http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&amp;amp;threadID=75498&amp;amp;messageID=1468379"&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, however:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;1. IDG knew. Galen Gruman, Executive Editor of InfoWorld knew. As did Eric Knorr. And several others. But poor Gregg Keizer &amp;#8212; hey, the man was looking for an anti-Microsoft angle at every turn, and he let his zeal get the best of him. I honestly never meant any harm, especially to Gregg.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;2. InfoWorld didn&amp;#8217;t let me go. I resigned. In fact, up until Saturday afternoon they were still trying to salvage the situation. They didn&amp;#8217;t want to lose 2+ million page views per year, which is what the shock jock persona they developed for me delivered.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Take all of his claims, including his accusations of IDG&amp;#8217;s complicity, with a large grain of salt &amp;#8212; quite obviously Kennedy&amp;#8217;s word isn&amp;#8217;t exactly good. (Gregg Keizer is the Computerworld reporter who frequently cited Kennedy&amp;#8217;s alter ego &amp;#8220;Craig Barth&amp;#8221; as an expert source on Windows performance issues.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Last, Kennedy &lt;a href="http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&amp;amp;threadID=75498&amp;amp;messageID=1468412"&gt;claims to be semi-retired at the age of 40 and living on Mauritius&lt;/a&gt;, a tropical island in the Indian Ocean, famous as &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius"&gt;the only known home of the dodo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Randall Kennedy, Unapologetic, Claims Microsoft Ordered &amp;#8216;Hit Piece&amp;#8217; Against Him and That InfoWorld Knew What Was Going On’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/kennedy-unapologetic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Eric Knorr, InfoWorld:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Integrity and honesty are core to InfoWorld&amp;#8217;s mission of service to IT professionals, and we view Kennedy&amp;#8217;s actions as a serious breach of trust. As a result, he will no longer be a contributor to InfoWorld, and we have removed his blog from this site.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;A few of Kennedy&amp;#8217;s recent greatest hits that DF readers may enjoy:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/why-apples-rumored-itablet-will-fail-big-time-119"&gt;&amp;#8220;Why Apple&amp;#8217;s Rumored iTablet Will Fail Big Time&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/ipad-netbook-killer-i-think-not-570?page=0,1"&gt;&amp;#8220;iPad, the Netbook Killer? I Think Not!&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/snow-leopard-just-cheap-windows-7-knockoff-798"&gt;&amp;#8220;Is Snow Leopard Just a Cheap Windows 7 Knockoff?&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Going to be hard for InfoWorld to fill his shoes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘InfoWorld Fires Randall C. Kennedy’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/infoworld-kennedy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Griffiths founded the site in 2000 and sold it to Macworld five years ago, but he&amp;#8217;s remained the editor. It&amp;#8217;s simply a great site. It&amp;#8217;s amazing how many Google searches for how to do something on the Mac lead to a Mac OS X Hints entry with the answer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;He&amp;#8217;s leaving to join Peter Maurer&amp;#8217;s software company, &lt;a href="http://www.manytricks.com/"&gt;Many Tricks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Rob Griffiths Leaving Mac OS X Hints’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/griffiths"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Stream your movies, pictures, and music to your Xbox or PS3 with Rivet. Use coupon DARINGFIRE2010 to receive a 25% discount (this week only).&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Good investigative reporting by Larry Dignan and ZDNet.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Bizarre Saga of InfoWorld Writer Randall Kennedy and Devil Mountain Software ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/21/randall-kennedy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Adobe engineer Tinic Uro on the performance improvements in the forthcoming Core Animation-capable Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In his browser comparison matrices, Uro only mentions Safari (which gets the Core Animation support in Flash), Firefox (which gets Quartz 2D), and Opera (which is still getting QuickDraw). But in the comments &lt;a href="http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html#2847412408141138746"&gt;he states&lt;/a&gt; that Chrome (which is already far more popular than Opera on Mac OS X) doesn&amp;#8217;t yet support Core Animation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Core Animation and Flash Player’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/20/core-animation-flash"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;It&amp;#8217;s a little slow… but we haven&amp;#8217;t really optimized this yet for this sort of thing.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flex 4 List Scrolling on Android With Flash Player 10.1’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/20/flex-list-scrolling"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ian Fette, of Google&amp;#8217;s Gears team:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;ve wondered why there haven&amp;#8217;t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it&amp;#8217;s because we&amp;#8217;ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Google Deprecating Gears in Favor of HTML5’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/20/gears-html5"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

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

&lt;p&gt;Free utility from Panic; losslessly shrinks PDFs by running them through Mac OS X&amp;#8217;s built-in PDF engine. See &lt;a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/146492/2010/02/shrinkit.html"&gt;Dan Frakes&amp;#8217;s review&lt;/a&gt; at Macworld &amp;#8212; which review, &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/panic/status/9350209039"&gt;Cabel Sasser notes&lt;/a&gt;, is 17 words longer than the source code to ShrinkIt itself. Note that ShrinkIt wasn&amp;#8217;t designed for typical (for users) PDFs-as-documents, but rather for PDFs-as-vector-images; in Panic&amp;#8217;s case, for resolution-independent user interface elements.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘ShrinkIt 1.1’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/20/strinkit"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Garry Kasparov:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it &amp;#8220;Advanced Chess.&amp;#8221; Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Chess Master and the Computer’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/kasparov"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Devin Coldewey:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Now here we have Steve Jobs saying &lt;a href="http://gawker.com/5474900/what-steve-jobs-said-during-his-wall-street-journal-ipad-demo"&gt;in a WSJ interview&lt;/a&gt; that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Where by &amp;#8220;WSJ interview&amp;#8221; Coldewey means &amp;#8220;anonymous paraphrased summary at Gawker of Jobs&amp;#8217;s remarks from a private meeting with WSJ staff&amp;#8221;. The remarks as reported by Gawker may well be accurate (and they ring true, mostly, to my ears), but to call this a &amp;#8220;WSJ interview&amp;#8221; is curious.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;They’ve got a grudge against Flash and Adobe and they’re going to pursue that to the bitter end. They could call up Adobe and say “Hey guys, Flash is blowing it in our OS, why don’t we get a few guys together and work it out?” But they won’t. They’d rather they had an excuse for railing at it and excluding it from the table. Flash is getting punched in the breadbasket here for no reason other than that Apple doesn’t want to play nice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Couple of things are wrong here. For one thing, I know for a fact that Apple&amp;#8217;s WebKit team &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work with Adobe&amp;#8217;s Flash Player team. &lt;a href="http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html"&gt;Reports indicate&lt;/a&gt; that the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 will perform significantly better on Mac OS X than before.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But &amp;#8220;better&amp;#8221; does not necessarily mean &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221;. And &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221; on multicore 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo CPUs is a far cry from &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221; on mobile 1 GHz ARM CPUs. Flash has always sucked performance-wise on Macs. It sucked on Mac OS 9 and has always sucked on Mac OS X. &lt;del&gt;At one point Adobe even let the version of Flash Player for Mac OS lag behind the current version for Windows.&lt;/del&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I recall the aforestruck sentence being the case, but can&amp;#8217;t find a source to verify it.) Adobe (and before their 2005 acquisition, Macromedia) has had over a decade of chances to show that they&amp;#8217;re committed to making Flash Player sing on Apple&amp;#8217;s OSes, and they haven&amp;#8217;t done it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And let&amp;#8217;s just wait and see how well Flash Player actually runs on Android and WebOS and whatever other mobile platforms where it&amp;#8217;s supposedly coming soon.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Devin Coldewey, Jackass’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/coldeway"&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>

Filed under: Multimedia, Video, iTunes

Apple has been courting US TV networks recently in a bid to get them to drop episode pricing from its current level of $1.99 down to $0.99. The New York Times reports that, predictably, many TV networks are resisting Apple's push for lower episode prices, even though iTunes's initial $0.99 per song price point is arguably what made purchasing digital music palatable to consumers.

Music sales through the iTunes store have fallen off recently, at least partially because of record labels' demands for a price hike to $1.29 per song for popular tracks. Meanwhile, though TV shows have been available for download in the iTunes Store since 2005, only 375 million shows have been downloaded in that time -- compared to nearly 9.5 billion songs downloaded over the same period. With a reported 125 million iTunes Store accounts, that equates to an average of 76 song downloads per customer compared to a paltry 3 TV episodes downloaded.

Click the "Read More" link to find out more about the current state of TV on iTunes.
The Times states that "television production is expensive, and the networks are wary of selling shows for less." However, analysts have stated that TV downloads through iTunes represent a "marginal" or "niche" portion of the market, and this is borne out by the relatively low download numbers. TV episodes are already available from a number of other (legal) sources, and all of them are less expensive than iTunes: free over the air, free over Hulu (in the US anyway), for-pay via a cable subscription, and for-pay via purchases of TV seasons on DVD.

As one example of iTunes's extremely uncompetitive pricing for TV shows, Season 5 of House, M.D. costs $39.99 on iTunes in Standard Definition, and that's for the TV shows alone; the same season currently costs $24.49 on Amazon for a DVD box set complete with many special features not available on the iTunes Store. Even if the studios still think charging an extra $15 for digital versions of the same season of the same show is worth it to consumers because of the convenience of one-click downloading, based on the relatively low number of downloads thus far, it's pretty clear consumers don't feel the same way.

Although TV networks are reportedly resistant to price reductions, unless they can find a more compelling way to sell digital versions of their shows based on content, the only way they're going to get more people to download more shows is by budging on the price. Apple has reportedly pitched a $30 per month "subscription" model for popular shows, which could be a compelling alternative to cable TV for many consumers. TV networks haven't dismissed this proposal outright, but they are experiencing "trepidation" over it according to the Times. However, considering that spread over five years the amount of money that all studios combined are making per year off iTunes Store downloads equates to less than the three-week gross of a popular summer theatrical release, it seems like they have very little to lose.

[Via MacRumors]

TUAWTV networks continue to resist iTunes price cuts originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Tips and tricks

I have to admit that I don't always use them, but I do always enjoy reading the hints over at Mac OS X Hints -- there probably isn't a more eclectic or helpful mix of random hints about how to use your Mac or iPhone available on the Internet. So I was saddened to read today that editor Rob Griffiths (who always adds in his confirmations and other testing on the various hints posted) is leaving the editor's position. He's moving on to join Peter Maurer at Many Tricks, where he'll handle the business aspects of the company. He mentions that they're working on "some good stuff in the pipeline, especially for the upcoming iPad."

As for Mac OS X Hints, the site is owned by Macworld, so it will continue to run under the oversight of a new editor, who will have the benefit of Griffiths around for training as long as necessary. But it will be a little bit of a disappointment to not see the little "robg" notes on the hints in the future. Good luck to Rob on his next venture, and here's hoping his successor keeps the site up as an endless fount of interesting tips and tidbits about all of these Apple products we use.

TUAWRob Griffiths leaves Mac OS X Hints originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/junctionlesstransistor.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Scientists at the Tyndall National Institute in Ireland have built what they say is the first connection-less transistor in the world. This is significant as it could change the way 10-nanomemter semiconductors are made, simplifying the process. The basic idea involves a control gate built around a silicon wire that is a few dozen atoms in diameter. The gate can squeeze the electron channel to nothing and not require junctions or doping to do so....

Filed under: Hardware, Apple, iPad

Apple may have finally gotten the chip they wanted with the iPad's A4, but a little freedom from contracting with other chip makers didn't come cheap. In a piece about how to make silicon chips, the New York Times estimates the cost to put a chip like the A4 together at a whopping $1 billion. And that's just for a design -- actually making a state-of-the-art factory to create the chips will run you a cool $3 billion. The NYT is just estimating for all companies here -- especially with Apple's purchase of PA Semi, they probably got the design for a relative song, and they're working with contractors to actually make the chips, rather than building their own factories. So $1 billion is a higher estimate than evidence would make you suspect.

For Apple, though, whatever the purchase price is, it was worth it -- watching Jobs talking about this chip and its power conservation (the iPad will last for a month on standby!) a few weeks ago, you get the sense that he's really excited to finally be in charge of his own chip destiny rather than having to rely on Intel or another silicon company to do it for them.

And heck, even if they did spend $4 billion to make the A4, Apple can build ten more chips and separate factories to build them with all of the cash they've built up. Considering the freedom that Apple got out of their A4 design, whatever it cost was probably a check they were more than happy to write.

[Via Apple Insider]

TUAWNYT: Chips like the A4 could cost $1 billion to design originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/briefly2202.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Open Door Networks has released an app providing access to collections of artwork from over a thousand of the Western world's major artists. Art Authority includes high-resolution images of famous art, as well as information about periods and artists. Users can also organize images into slideshows, which can include music. Most data is stored online, which while slowing access also reduces hard drive consumption. The app is available as both a Mac and an iPhone title for $10; an iPad version is currently in development....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/pentaxk7sein.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Pentax on Monday announced a limited edition version of its K-7 DSLR, which is easy to spot thanks to its exclusive silver finish. The color matches that of Pentax' high-performance FA Limited lenses, and there is a new golden section ratio focusing screen that sports guiding lines and points that are curved on the screen. The LCD also gets a reinforced glass plate for protection against scratches and breaks....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/fiberoptic-sm.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Multiple cities have already queued up to volunteer for Google Fiber. Palo Alto, Seattle and a coalition of 16 towns in Utah have or will soon have responded to Google's request for information as the first step to getting the service. The municipalities in most cases have argued that they already have the infrastructure to make the 1Gbps Internet access easy to deploy, such as Utah's UTOPIA fiber project....

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

On the list of "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes" apps, this one takes the cake... and chokes on it.

The free I am choking app could save your life if you are choking on food and can't speak. If you have your iPhone in hand and can avoid panicking, then you can launch the app, wave your iPhone frantically in front of someone who is nearby, and hope that they can a) read English, and b) follow the instructions in the app to perform the Heimlich Maneuver on you.

Actually, this is no joking matter -- about 3,000 adults die every year from choking on food. Of course, you'll need to have the app downloaded and installed on your iPhone or iPod touch before this happens. As fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun noted, "by the time you download and install, you could be dead."

Apparently the developers, Thought Shaping LLC, don't want to get sued by the relatives of people who are not saved by the app, as they've added the disclaimer "Note that this is for novelty use only!" at the bottom of the app description in the iTunes Store.

Want to see the app in action? Check out a public service announcement video made by the folks at iPhoneSavior.com by clicking the Read More link below.

TUAWAre you choking? Yeah, there's an app for that, too. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/belltvapp.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Canadian carrier Bell has launched Bell Mobile TV, a new app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Users can watch a variety of TV channels, such as CBC Newsworld, MTV, Muchmusic, Treehouse and The Weather Network. On top of this is live coverage of NHL games, as well multilingual video from the Vancouver Olympics....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/proclip.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />ProClip and TomTom have collaborated on a new car mount for the iPhone. As with some existing kits, users can fit the ProClip mount in a car for use with TomTom's iPhone navigation app. The ProClip gear attaches directly to a part of the dashboard, however, eliminating falls because of problems with windshield suction....

Filed under: Apple, iPad

Normally readers write directly to Aunt TUAW using our tips line or feedback form. But today, we're switching things up a bit. Instead, Auntie is responding to a comment left on her last post about whether you should buy the Wi-Fi only iPad or wait for the 3G version. That's because Aunt TUAW has a bug up her sleeve about GPS and its role on the iPhone, the iPad, and its tie to social media. Without further ado, here's today's "letter" and Auntie's response.

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I'm on Facebook, but why do people need to read Facebook updates when they're traveling? Whatever happened to looking out the window at new places? And geez, how about a simple paper map?!?

If I have to go somewhere new, I print out a Google map before the trip or bring the old Rand-McNally. I may be weird, but look at all the dough I saved. :-)

I live in northern New Mexico with wilderness available just a few miles outside of town. We hike and walk everywhere, assuming the MUD isn't so bad. I've never used an iPhone or a GPS device of any kind.

What I'm wondering is, just why do people have those things? Seriously. Is it just a game? I take hikes in the backcountry with a compass and a topo map, just like in the old days with the Boy Scouts. :-) I can look at a hillside and point to where it is on the map. I almost always know where I am. So what is it about living in a city, forgodssakes, that makes one addicted to GPS??? Aren't there street signs? If you didn't have GPS, would you just sit down on the curb and have a nervous breakdown?!?

Sincerely,

John Hamilton Farr

Dear John,

If my 3GS iPhone has taught me anything about GPS, it's this: GPS on the iPhone is not just about the location; it's also about the social. Knowing where you are is just the start of geolocation. While, I fully expect the iPad to rock when it comes to displaying maps and working with navigation apps, that's not why GPS on the iPad is so exciting.

GPS is already about mapping my walks and sharing them with my friends and family as I achieve new distances and other new goals like upping my average pace, top speed, and the number of feet I've climbed. GPS is about yelping to see what restaurants and points of interest other people have found nearby, and adding my own personal spin into the mix. GPS is about virtual location tagging and games like geocaching, adding a social layer to our outdoor activities.

The iPad brings all of that into the equation and adds a much bigger screen with enhanced gestures and interaction styles. It offers a jumping off point for every kind of social GPS app that you can imagine, from virtual location-based coupons that you can scan at your local Target or Starbucks to new and innovative solutions that developers are only now beginning to dream of.

Think back to 2007. Then consider the array of App Store products that you never once guessed would become a daily part of your life. That's how I feel about Yelp, about other geo-aware apps like Trailguru and Echofon, and more. Now that I'm hooked on GPS, whether in the city, the countryside or the mountain wilderness, I simply can't wait to see what's next. The more I head off on foot, bike, or car and take advantage of this marvelous gift of good health and opportunity, the more I can't wait to share that gift with the people I'm close to -- and make new friends along the way.

Love,

Auntie T.

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Why GPS? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/vizio-vudu.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Walmart's tenative buyout of VUDU has been sealed, sources claimed on Monday afternoon. A pair of insiders aware of the deal told the NYT that the deals weren't available but that it was part of a return to offering online video services. Neither of the involved companies has agreed to confirm the deal....

Filed under: Software

I'm a big fan of Zykloid Software's Posterino, a Mac app that allows you to create elegant collages. Similarly, you can use Shape Collage to create a collage. However, as implied in the app's namesake, you can also customize the shape of your collage to one of the many included preset options, as well as your own customized shape. One example would be pictures of hundreds of shoes in the shape of the Nike swoosh logo -- you get the picture.

While the app is billed as "free," the free version stamps a watermark that, while small and light, is nonetheless noticeable. US$25 removes this watermark, and adds the ability to export to an Adobe Photoshop PSD (where you can manipulate photos).

Shape Collage was created by developer Vincent Cheung, and is available for download here.

TUAWCustomize your collage with Shape Collage originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments