&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;&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;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>

&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;Freeverse is a long-standing Mac developer and publisher.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ngmoco Buys Freeverse’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/ngmoco-freeverse"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Peter Ha, writing for Time:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#8217;s a brand-new decade, and Microsoft is about to leapfrog Apple &amp;#8212; and every other player in the cell-phone world &amp;#8212; with the launch of Windows Phone 7 (WP7).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Filed Away for Future Claim Chowder’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/ha"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Scott Moritz, last month, reported that the &lt;a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/06/analyst-claims-qualcomm-3g-chip-destined-for-verizon-iphone-tablet-based-on-p-a-semi-processor/"&gt;iPhone was going to Verizon this summer&lt;/a&gt;. He also reported, in an &amp;#8220;exclusive&amp;#8221;, &lt;a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/10664179/1/exclusive-apple-tablet-headed-to-verizon.html"&gt;that the iPad would debut on Verizon&lt;/a&gt;. Now, rather than admit to being wrong, he&amp;#8217;s framing it as Apple having delayed it for another year. (&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/macjournals/status/9490154567"&gt;Via MacJournals&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jackass of the Week: Scott Moritz’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/jackass-moritz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Especially remarkable considering how much more reliable Twitter has been for the last year or so.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Total Tweets Per Day’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/tweets-per-day"&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;So great.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Justin Van Genderen&amp;#8217;s Minimalist Star Wars Tourism Posters’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/genderen"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From the department of tags I never expected to create for DF posts: &amp;#8220;Sexy Apps&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Daisy Mae&amp;#8217; Game Pulled From the App Store; a Few Days Later, It&amp;#8217;s Back In’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/daisy-mae"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My list of the top ten issues facing Apple, presented at Macworld Expo earlier this month. Thanks to everyone who was there &amp;#8212; it was a great audience.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Your Humble Narrator&amp;#8217;s Presentation From Macworld 2010’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/macworld-presentation"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://curvedwhite.com/post/405144449/minimalist-movie-posters-by-eduardo-prox"&gt;Via Curved White&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Minimalist Movie Posters By Eduardo Pox’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/poxsters"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;More information from Mike Chambers on how the Flash Player plugin for Android works with regard to scrolling. The key is that you double-tap to zoom the Flash element to full screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mike Chambers on Scrolling With Flash Content on Touch Devices’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chambers-scrolling"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Chait:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They&amp;#8217;ve already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team&amp;#8217;s fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it&amp;#8217;s certainly going to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; like some kind of crime to the right-wing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Coming Conservative Health Care Freakout’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chait"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Phil Schiller comments to The New York Times&amp;#8217;s Jenna Wortham regarding Apple&amp;#8217;s recent decision to remove sexually titillating apps from the App Store. I like how The Times uses the adjective &amp;#8220;blue&amp;#8221;. (I also love how The New York Times has published an article mentioning an app named &amp;#8220;Dirty Fingers&amp;#8221;.) I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/porno-app-store"&gt;used &amp;#8220;porno&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt; the other day, but that&amp;#8217;s clearly not just what&amp;#8217;s been removed. I think the best adjective to describe what&amp;#8217;s no longer allowed is &amp;#8220;sexy&amp;#8221;. The problem, though (in addition to the fact that saying &amp;#8220;sexy apps are not allowed&amp;#8221; sounds silly), is this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Indeed, a Sports Illustrated application tied to its annual swimsuit issue was still available for download on Monday, as was one from Playboy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t see how it&amp;#8217;s anything other than hypocrisy to say that Time Warner can have an app showing swimsuit models and others cannot. I totally understand Apple&amp;#8217;s desire to keep the App Store free of flat-out or even borderline pornography. I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; think it&amp;#8217;s wise to remove/ban R-rated content, though &amp;#8212; isn&amp;#8217;t that exactly what the 17+ rating is for?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But to allow Sports Illustrated and Playboy to publish it and others not? That&amp;#8217;s bullshit.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘NYT: &amp;#8216;Apple Purges Blue Apps From Online Store&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/app-store-sexy-apps"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Frame rates seem good. But it seems like the battery drains noticeably over the course of 6 or 7 minutes. It looks to me like it drops from about 50 to 25 percent in just 8 minutes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;By the way, my big question about Flash Player for Android is whether Google has any plans to include it with the system by default, and if not, which (if any) handset makers do.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Demo Video Showing Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus One’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/flash-android"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s how John Dowdell of Adobe &amp;#8220;would prefer Apple communicate&amp;#8221;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Get your CEO to either talk, or not. Put some skin in the game, put your rep on the line with attributed statements. The lack of confirmation, denial, or clarification from Apple PR about rumored quotes from The Great Man is telling.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What a great idea. Respond to every rumored quote attributed to Steve Jobs with a confirmation, denial, or clarification. I&amp;#8217;m sure Apple will get right on that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘How John Dowdell Wants Apple to Talk’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/dowdell"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Mike Chambers, responding to &lt;a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/"&gt;this piece at Roughly Drafted&lt;/a&gt;, shows that the only mouse events Flash Player doesn&amp;#8217;t have on touchscreens are those for right and middle buttons, and scroll wheels. Hover and mousemove events &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; work. The problem, though, for a hypothetical Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element. It can&amp;#8217;t do both, and it can&amp;#8217;t read the user&amp;#8217;s mind. (You can see these problems with straight HTML in MobileSafari today &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s cumbersome to scroll a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; field within a web page because a single finger tap-and-drag within the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; control still scrolls the entire page, not the text content inside the control.) This is one reason why, when you play a movie embedded in a web page on MobileSafari, it always switches you to a full-screen movie player view. Perhaps you could do that with a mobile browser Flash plugin, but except for Flash content that was designed to fit on a small screen, how do you allow the user to both scroll/pan the content &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; pass mousemove and hover events to the underlying content? I&amp;#8217;m interested to see how the upcoming Android Flash Player solves this.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not so much that you &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; use mouse-centric UIs on a touchscreen, but that they&amp;#8217;re inherently awkward.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash Player Content, Mouse Events, and Touch Input’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/flash-touch"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jason Garrett-Glaser, currently lead developer of &lt;a href="http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html"&gt;x264&lt;/a&gt;, on the state of Internet video. Thoughtful, detailed, insightful analysis.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash, Google, VP8, and the Future of Internet Video’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/garrett-glaser"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Filed under: Software, Freeware

While I'm saving my pennies for a new 27" i7 iMac, I'm finding that "free is good." Software development house Smith Micro made my day this morning when I received an email telling me about their free Photo A.K.A. application for Mac (site registration required).

The app is a single-tasker -- it is a bulk file renamer, much like Dare to be Creative's Renamer (US$29). Like its more expensive competitor, you can rename any batch of files, not just photos. While I don't think that the user interface for Photo A.K.A. is as well-designed as Renamer, the former application does have several features that can't be found in the latter.

For example, Photo A.K.A. can rename files, stuff them into an archive file, and then email the information to someone. There's also a handy built-in function to directly upload your renamed photos to Flickr or Picasa.

But wait, there's more! Photo A.K.A. can also burn your renamed files to a CD or DVD, or create a disk image file containing the files. It can also do batch resizing of photo files, display the renamed images as a slide show, and even batch print the files. Finally, there's a sandbox mode for trying your renaming scheme without actually renaming the files.

While Photo A.K.A. might not fulfill all of your file renaming requirements, it is free, and it has many features you may find useful.

TUAWFreeware find: Smith Micro Photo A.K.A. bulk file renamer originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/ipad-6.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Apple has released a third beta of iPhone SDK 3.2, an update of the company's iPhone OS development tools. Few details of the beta have emerged, but Apple notes that it allows "existing iPhone projects to include the necessary files" to support the iPad. Developers should thus be closer to producing working iPad apps, as there is now a Universal Application binary format that wraps iPhone, iPad and iPod touch code into the same bundle....

Filed under: Switchers, Tips and tricks

Every now and then I'll have an "I never knew about that" moment as I come across a setting or nuance in Mac OS X that I never realized existed. Take, for instance, character viewer, which allows you to display a variety of characters in your document. Whether you're a switcher or seasoned Mac veteran, here are five tips that could help improve your Mac experience.

"I hate that noise my Mac makes when changing the volume"

By default, changing the volume on a Mac will result an audible chirp. If birds could burp, this is the sound they would make. While tolerable with your Mac's built-in speakers as well as external speakers, the noise can be a bit startling when you have your headphones on. To disable, navigate to the "Sound" portion in System Preferences and uncheck "Play feedback when volume is changed." Now that's a sound decision.


"Why are the scroll arrows next to each other?"

Whether it's a Finder or Safari window, Mac OS X places scroll arrows next to each other by default -- in contrast to their top and bottom placement in Windows. If you find that your scroll arrows need some space from each other, head on over to System Preferences and click on "Appearance." Within the "Place scroll arrows" section, select "At top and bottom."


"Give me my translucent menu bar!"

When Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard first shipped, many cried foul at its menu bar: it was translucent. And whether you liked it or not, you couldn't do anything about it. It wasn't until the 10.5.2 update, a full three months after Leopard was released, that users could disable it. To toggle translucency in the menu bar, head on over to System Preferences and select "Desktop & Screen Saver," where you'll find the "Translucent menu bar" option at the bottom.


"I wish I could rearrange items in the menu bar"

After making your menu translucent (or not), you may want to tinker with the menu bar some more. Much like how you can rearrange icons in your dock, you can also arrange the icons in your menu bar. To do this, hold down the command key and then click on an icon to move it around. Similar to moving an icon out of your dock, moving an item out of your menu bar results in a cloud poof.


"I prefer right-clicking with two fingers"
The coming of the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro brought a more conventional way of right-clicking: the bottom right corner (or left, if you're left-handed) serves as a right-click. However, my fingers have grown accustomed to right-clicking using two fingers; I find myself constantly doing this on PC-based notebooks, obviously with no luck.

The only way to right-click on non-unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros (and on late model PowerBook G4's) was to use two fingers. To enable two finger right-clicking on the unibody MacBook Pro, select Secondary Click under the Two Fingers option in Trackpad preferences. On non-unibody models, select "For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button." And if you have an older model PowerBook or an iBook, some have found success with iScroll2.

TUAW5 tips for switchers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 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/sigmadp1x.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Photography camera and lens maker Sigma has plans to produce a mirrorless camera with interchangeable lenses in the near future, according to COO Kazuto Yamaki. Speaking to DPReview, Yamaki revealed the camera will sport the company's own Foveon sensors. At the same time, indicated Sigma would consider producing lenses for the Micro Four Thirds cameras out on the market at this time. While prime lenses are currently popular for the category, Yamaki believes future demand will turn to zoom lenses....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/0909/adobe.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Adobe will be showcasing a new, as yet unheard-of Creative Suite program in April, conference listings show. An "Adobe Technology Preview" is scheduled as part of the Emerge print production conference, to be held in San Antonio, Texas on April 21st and the 22nd. The product is described only as a "brand new application" that will "surprise even the most 'in the know' Adobe fans."...

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/acerbetouche110.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Acer is reconsidering its plans to launch an e-book reader, company chairman Wang Jeng-tang stated later on Monday. The company had already given signals that it would unveil a 6-inch reader by June and even has a prototype but is now hesitant as it's not convinced the market is ready. E-readers are still a small field and don't have a 'proven' strategy, the Acer chairman said....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/pocketgearin.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />On Tuesday, PocketGear announced it has acquired Handango, thus creating the largest cross-platform, open-source application store in the world. PocketGear itself already covered more than 2,000 mobile electronics and every main OS, while Handango offers nearly 140,000 apps for BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux platforms. The two are now nearly on par with the number of offerings in Apple's App Store....

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail, Apple Financial

Apple had a great holiday sales quarter in the US and now research firm Gartner is reporting similar good news from Europe. Specifically, Apple shipped 182,000 machines in the fourth quarter of 2009, giving it a 5.5 percent total market share in France. It should be noted that Apple didn't reach the top five in any other European country.

Overall PC sales declined throughout Europe in 2009, while Mac sales in the U.K. increased from 3.8 percent in 3Q 2008 to 5 percent in 3Q 2009. Gartner attributed the increase partly to the "halo effect." That's the common term for increased sales of Macs from PC owners who have purchased iPods or iPhones and find that they love the design and ease of use of the Apple devices.

The only manufacturer to out-perform Apple's growth in Europe during 2009 was Acer, which saw 35.5 percent growth.

Currently there are two Apple retail stores in France: Apple Store Odysseum in Montpellier and Apple Store Carrousel du Louvre in Paris.

TUAWApple earns 5.5 percent total market share in France originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 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/0909/xsan.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />About 66 percent of IT administrators from organizations mixing Macs and PCs expect their Mac populations to grow, claims a firm specializing in ways of streamlining Mac integration. The Enterprise Desktop Alliance notes that the figure is based on data from 322 administrators, each of which is from a company with over 50 servers or 100 Macs. Over 500 people in total responded to the survey....

Filed under: iPhone

We were all pretty gobsmacked last night with the news that iPhone gaming developer Ngmoco had purchased longtime Mac game developer Freeverse, so we went hunting for answers. Fortunately, Freeverse CEO and founder Ian Lynch Smith was nice enough to sit down and take our questions this morning, and he provided a little more background and insight on the deal.

The first thing we wanted to do was what would happen to Freeverse's extensive Mac catalog, and we were told conclusively that "it's not going anywhere at all." While Freeverse will still "sell and maintain" their Mac titles, Smith did tell us that they've "been pretty much exclusively focused on the iPhone for the last 18 months anyway," so while they have a legacy in the Mac, the company believes that OS X is "on a collision course with the iPad," and that the main opportunities and user bases for Mac software are now using the iPhone and, soon, Apple's tablet. "It's very hard," we were told, "to get the volume that the iTunes App Store has" for purely Mac software.

The other big question we had was what Freeverse thinks of Ngmoco's insistent support on the "freemium" model (where games are free-to-play, with extra content or add-ons to purchase later), something that has a lot of customers up in arms. Hit the "read more" link below to see what he said both about that and what he thinks about the iPad and the future of computing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Smith and his company is behind the Ngmoco model one hundred percent. "Obviously," he told us, "we didn't and wouldn't have gotten into this just for the sale. We didn't need to do this. We're profitable." But in the same breath he admitted that the traditional paid model (which Freeverse has used for all of its games right now) just isn't growing the company. "If Apple had a minimum price of 25 cents, the stuff on Top Paid Apps would be 25 cents right now. ... We wouldn't be having this conversation if iPhone apps were $20, but iPhone apps are basically free on the paid side."

Which means that Freeverse is more than happy, with Ngmoco's support, to go with a "freemium" model: "Flick Fishing has over 1.7 million paid users," but when you go to look at the audience for free games, "we're talking 17 to 35 million people." Smith says that just doesn't compare to the paid side or anything else. "On the Mac, we'd sell 10 or 20 thousand units and it was one of the best sellers of all time." And so that gigantic free app audience is what the company needs to go after, and Ngmoco is a company that will help them do exactly that.

Not to mention, says Smith, that the freemium model is a better way to make money, despite what customers think about it. "On the free model," he told us, "you can monetize even people who don't buy anything ever." Smith says that there are lots and lots of iPhone users who have nothing but free apps installed on their iPhones, who play hours and hours of games but have never paid a cent to the App Store. "Everyone's cheap, I'm cheap," he admits. But with this model, "there's ways to generate revenue from the 90% of customers who never pay a dime but still want to play your game."

We asked him what Freeverse titles would be going to the new model, and he said all of that would be determined going forward. He assured us that most of their popular iPhone titles would remain in their current form for the foreseeable future -- "Flick Fishing will stay on the paid side" -- but he admitted that some of their lower-selling titles might benefit from a change: "There are some titles that only sell through the visibility that free brings them at some point."

We asked him about the iPad, and even he admitted he was about as "bullish" as a developer can get. "The iPhone OS is, for most users, better than the desktop metaphor. The iPad is the start of something big." He says that Freeverse was one of the first companies on the scene with the iPhone, and they plan to do the same on the iPad. "We're always pushing that envelope."

Finally, he wants to thank all of Freeverse's customers for their support in the past, and promises that the company is still committed to the platform as they have always been. Ngmoco is a good fit for them, he says, because they understand how to fit a good game on the App Store ("we could tell they got it"), and Freeverse plans to take advantage of their experience and resources. "I'm looking forward to using their lawyers and acccountants," Smith joked. "But," he says, "Freeverse will stay with its own office and people in the middle of Brooklyn. Ngmoco didn't buy it to mess it up." And he specifically wanted to thank all the Apple and Mac fans over the years for their support.

Sounds good -- while the news of the purchase last night made us wonder what Freeverse thought of the "freemium" model, it turns out that model is the main reason, more or less, the purchase was made. Smith admits he's "sold" on it -- we'll have to see if a partnership with Ngmoco can bring one of the more storied Mac game developer the growth they've been looking for.

TUAWTUAW Interview: Freeverse CEO Ian Lynch Smith on the Ngmoco purchase originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Apple, iPhone, SDK

The new beta version of the 3.2 SDK (beta 3, for those of you keeping track) is now available for download. The Apple developer site will likely be getting slammed over the next hour or two, so plan your downloads accordingly. The beta is available to all paid members of the iPhone developer program, with at least the $99/year membership. You will need your credentials to sign in and download the new SDK.

As usual, the new beta SDK is under NDA, so please go check out the details for yourself to get further information about the changes between this beta and the last. Good luck, and happy programming!

Update: Here then gone? Readers report that Apple seems to have pulled Beta 3 for the moment and when I returned to Apple's iPhone developer site, I saw the same. Watch this space. We'll update as we find out more.

Update: This was not an accidental upload, per Michael Jurewitz, the Mac and IPhone Applications Frameworks and Developer Tools Evangelist:

TUAWiPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 3 available now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/CoxComm_sm.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Cox Communications' Stephen Bye, vice president of wireless service, says tests of the company's Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G network technology reached peak speeds in the 25Mbps range. The tests, occurred in atypical conditions, employing a single user with a multiple-antenna setup at very close range. Toward the limit of the test cell's coverage, data rates dropped to 10Mbps. In real-life situations, data transfer would be shared between multiple users in the cell's range....

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail, iPad

It's hard to forget the near mania that preceded the iPhone's US launch. New Yorkers began lining up to buy one four days in advance. David Pogue wrote a song about it. Things got out of hand. Now, according to RBC Capital Markets' Mike Abramsky, iPad demand is even higher.

RBC recently conducted a survey of 3,200 people and found that 13% are likely to buy the US$499 iPad. Initial interest in the iPhone was at 9% prior to launch in 2007. Perceived value for the cost is probably the deciding factor. Remember, the original iPhone was also $499. The iPad has obvious differences like size, resolution, a huge existing library of 3rd party apps and 16GB of memory (the $499 iPhone had only 4GB of storage). The iPad is also contract-free, something the iPhone can't (officially) do in the US.

What's most interesting is the number of people who said that the iPad is affecting other purchasing decisions. A full 25 percent of respondents said that they are delaying other Apple purchases as a result. Nine percent have put off buying a MacBook, and 10 percent have put off an iPhone. On a personal note, my parents just put off buying a MacBook until they get some hands-on time with an iPad at their local Apple Store.

iPad pre-orders could begin as early as this week, but Apple doesn't release those numbers. However, this report and the fact that some Norweigan retailers had to halt pre-orders because of the overwhelming demand bodes well for initial iPad sales.

TUAWReport: Initial iPad demand greater than iPhone's originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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