Thoughts on the iPad
Posted on January 28, 2010 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | 3 Comments
With the announcement of the iPad yesterday, everyone and their uncle has their take on who will want to use it, who won’t, and exactly what niche it will fill in the computing ecosystem. So of course, I can’t help but put in my two cents as well. 
What is the iPad?
One of the main points of contention seems to be how to categorize the iPad. What is it, really? Is it just a big iPod Touch? Is it a type of personal computer, just a variation on the laptop form factor? Or is it something entirely new that doesn’t fit any existing category?
To start off with, at least in its current form, I definitely don’t think you can call it a personal computer. The main reason for this is that, while it has a lot of functionality that a PC (or Mac) has, you still need to have a PC in order to be able to use the iPad for most of the things it does. The primary way of getting content onto the iPad is by syncing it with your desktop or laptop machine, via iTunes. Without a PC to attach it to, you can’t put any of your music, photos, or videos onto it, and you can’t even update the software on it or back up your data. In order for the iPad to replace a PC, it has to be able to exist without requiring another PC. Could this happen in the future? Perhaps, but it’s definitely not the case right now. For now, the iPad is a secondary device, and will almost never be somebody’s sole computing device. (One exception to this would be a family that all shared a single PC, with each member of the family having their own iPad. You still need a PC, just not one per person )
In his presentation, Jobs did specifically pitch the iPad as bridging the gap between PCs and mobile devices such as phones and music players. Currently, the most common tool for this job is the netbook, which is basically a small, low powered, inexpensive laptop computer. The problem is, while a netbook is certainly more portable than a full sized laptop, it still comes with all the complexities and headaches of a full-fledged PC, such as figuring out how to install new applications, dealing with viruses, organizing your files on your hard drive, and so forth. The basic premise of the iPad is that personal computers, no matter their size, are not the right tool for the large number of users who just want to do fairly basic tasks with their machines, such as browse the web, do e-mail, listen to music, and view their photos. The iPad is designed from the ground up to fill that gap.
Further proof that Apple is moving aggressively to capture this market can be seen in their pricing. $499 is a very competitive price point, especially for Apple. Remember, this is the company that started out charging $400 for a music player and $500 for a cell phone. It’s not quite at the $300 price point most netbooks are priced at, but I think it’s close enough, especially given the difference in quality between the iPad and a netbook. I predict that people will buy tons of these things at $499, then next year Apple will drop the price a hundred bucks or so, and then they’ll sell even more, just like they did with the iPod and the iPhone.
Open vs. closed platforms
One concern that many people (especially developers) have is the closed nature of the iPhone/iPad, both in terms of media content and software. It’s become pretty clear that Apple wants to have as much control as possible over the user experience on these devices. They act as sole arbiter of what software can and cannot be run on the device. If you want to write and sell software for the iPad or iPhone, you have to go through Apple. The downsides to this have been pretty well hashed over, and include arbitrary limitations on what is possible for your software to do, risk of rejection due to some reason not explicity stated in the SDK agreement, risk of rejection due to a simple error on Apple’s part, and the ability for Apple to stifle competition to their own apps.
What I think makes developers even more nervous though is not necessarily the current state of things, but rather the trend of where Apple appears to be headed. The iPhone has been a monster success, and presumably Apple will see at least some success with the iPad as well. As these platforms comprise more and more of Apple’s business, Apple could someday decide that they want to apply the same level of control to software written for the Mac, which does not currently have the kinds of restrictions that the iPhone OS platform has. For programmers such as myself who make their living on the Mac, the though of ceding that much control of my well being to Apple is certainly a scary thought.
Realistically speaking though, I personally don’t see this happening anytime in the near future. The primary (though not sole) reason for this is the huge difference in market share that Apple has in the smartphone and music player markets versus their share of the PC market. When it comes to phones, the iPhone is currently the 800 lb gorilla, and all the other phone companies are scrambling to retain their marketshare which is steadily being eroded by the iPhone. In the PC market though, even with the recent gains the Mac has made, Apple’s marketshare is still pretty low, much much lower than the iPhone.
Right now, for smartphone development, the iPhone is king, and everyone wants to develop for it, because that’s where the largest number of potential customers lie. This being the case, most developers are willing to concede to Apple’s terms in order to be able to sell their software to millions of iPhone users, and don’t have a lot of other viable options (though hopefully Android or some other platform will become good enough to compete well with the iPhone).
On the Mac, however, if Apple were to announce that all Mac applications needed to be approved by Apple in order to be sold, you would no doubt see developers desert the platform in droves. While developing for the Mac is nice, there are very viable alternatives for Mac developers when push comes to shove, including developing using .Net, Java, or any number of web based technologies. Simply put, Apple just doesn’t have the same leverage on the Mac platform the way that they do on the iPhone platform.
I also don’t give much credence to the theory that the desktop computer will eventually just go away entirely, meaning the Mac platform will be gone, and the iPhone/iPad platform will be all that’s left. I think the desktop will always be an the forefront of computing, and while mobile devices such as the iPhone or the iPad may take the place of some of what people formerly used laptops for, people will always want to be able to leverage the full power and flexibility that a true personal computing platform provides.
So basically, while I think it’s good to be wary about the openness of the Mac platform in the future, I don’t think this is something to worry about as long as the Mac’s market share stays relatively low. Apple currently only aims for the high end market, opting to make money off of high profit margins on fewer machines rather than selling more machines for less money per unit. Unless Apple changes this strategy drastically, I don’t see the Mac’s markeshare growing by leaps and bounds, certainly not enough to be anywhere comparable to Windows’ share of the PC market, or even iPhone’s share of the smartphone market.
iPhoto Library Manager and iPhoto ‘09
Posted on January 6, 2009 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple, News, Updates, iPhoto, iPhoto Library Manager | 7 Comments
As many of you know, today Apple announced a new update to their iLife suite, iLife ‘09, which includes an update to iPhoto. iPhoto ‘09 won’t be available until the end of January, but I’d like to fill you in on the status of iPhoto Library Manager compatibility with this new version of iPhoto.
I don’t get special early releases of iPhoto or anything like that, so I’ll be working with it for the first time once I can pick up a copy from Apple. In the past, major iPhoto updates have required updating iPhoto Library manager to provide full compatibility for all its features, and I suspect things will be the same this time around. The basic functionality of iPLM (creating new libraries and switching back and forth between them) has never broken in any previous iPhoto update, so I’m pretty sure that stuff will be the same this time around. The more advanced features, such as copying albums between libraries and merging libraries together, however, require a bit more work to make sure they work properly. For iPhoto ‘07 and iPhoto ‘06, it has taken me about two weeks each time to issue an iPLM update for the new version of iPhoto, so it will hopefully take approximately the same amount of time this time around.
What I can tell you is that the update will be a free update for any existing users of iPhoto Library Manager, so if you buy a copy now, rest assured you will be able to use it with iPhoto ‘09 once the update is released. For those of you wondering whether to upgrade to iPhoto ‘09, you should still be able to switch between your libraries fine after updating, but you almost certainly won’t be able to do any photo copying or merging until the iPLM update is ready. If you really need to be able to use iPLM to do photo transfers, I would recommend holding off upgrading iPhoto until the update to iPhoto Library Manager is ready.
My thanks in advance for your patience, I will be posting further updates on how things are going as I learn more about what needs to be done for the update.
MacFixIt’s scare tactics
Posted on October 26, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | Comments Off
I just read this article on MacJournals regarding MacFixit’s tendancy to overhype problems, and I’m glad someone is calling a spade a spade here. MacFixIt used to be a useful site, but in recent years it has gone downhill in the quality of what they publish, almost to the point of being useless, or worse, harmful. It reminds me somewhat of Symantec trying to hype nonexistent virus threats to the Mac so they can sell more copies of Norton AntiVirus that nobody needs.
The article uses a recent MacFixIt post on DiskWarrior as an example, and I actually used to work for Alsoft for a few years, and it’s definitely not the first time this sort of thing has happened with MacFixIt. We had to deal with them on several occasions when they posted various stories, mostly regarding DiskWarrior, that either stretched the truth or were just outright false.
It seems that a large amount of MacFixIt’s material comes from reader e-mails and other such input. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but the problem is that there is almost no effort put forth on their part to filter and/or verify the statements made by their readers. The result is that stories go up on the site that have absolutely no basis in reality, simply because one or two readers e-mailed in. “I noticed that when I upgraded my iLife on the full moon, it crashed my machine, but then when I rebooted and tried again when the moon was waning, it worked!” results in the headline “Warning: iLife installer deletes your photos when installed under a full moon!“
MacFixIt seems to hardly ever even bother to try some of these things readers write in about to see if they actually behave as described, but even worse, they often won’t even try verifying something with the developer of an application if a problem is reported with it. This happened several times at Alsoft, where some reader reported a problem with DiskWarrior and blamed it on something, and MacFixIt happily plastered it on their front page as though it were gospel, causing all sorts of people to panic about running DiskWarrior under whatever circumstances they claimed caused the problem. I remember one case in particular where they claimed that DiskWarrior wouldn’t work with Firewire 800 drives (which is utter nonsense), simply because some reader had had a problem rebuilding their own Firewire 800 drive. Of course it turned out to have a completely different cause (a bug in Quicktime), one that had actually already been well documented months ago, on MacFixIt’s own site!.
Had they bothered to simply shoot an e-mail or phone call our way, we could have provided them with the solution, they could have referred their reader to their old article with the solution, and saved everyone a whole lot of hassle. This is not only a problem for MacFixIt’s readers, but it costs the victim company time and money in responding to the resulting support calls and e-mails, plus the effort needed by the company to try to set the record straight.
So, if you’re a regular MacFixIt reader, I would encourage you to take everything they say at least with a grain of salt, if not to stop reading the site altogether. They have journalistic integrity on par with the National Enquirer. And if you do experience a problem with a program, contact the program’s developer. They are often quite helpful and actually know what they’re talking about, and will be happy to help you with your problem. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go install Leopard before the tides come in…
Apple totally stole my line!
Posted on October 17, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | 3 Comments
I was looking through the Mac OS X Server section of Apple’s website, which has also been updated with Leopard info in the last couple days, when I saw this:
Hmmmm, this is seeming awfully familiar… where might I have seen this before?
Yeah, OK, my evidence is a little slim…. so far. But I’ve got my eye on you, Apple!
Top 10 obscure new Leopard features
Posted on October 16, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple | 1 Comment
I was just reading through the 300 new Leopard features just posted today on Apple’s site. They usually have a list like this with each major OS X release, and I always find it interesting, as there are usually a few little features that don’t make the “top features” list, but are the kind of refinements that can make upgrading worthwhile. Here are a few that I found that I’m looking forward to using.
- Scriptable System Preferences: There’s all sorts of functionality in System Preferences that I wish again and again I could change using a script. It doesn’t look like everything is scriptable, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction
- UI Recording and Playback: Back in the day, Applescript used to support recording, which was a great way to set up simple tasks and learn scripting. This has fallen by the wayside in OS X, but I’m glad to see some kind of recordability make it back into the OS, even if it’s slightly less sophisticated.
- Spring-Loaded Dock: I knew about this before, but apparently in addition to opening folders via the dock, you can also “spring-load” applications. Pressing the space bar while holding a drag over an app in the dock will launch the application. I’m pretty sure I’ll find ways to use this.
- Finder Path Bar: This is a nice little touch that puts the full path to the current folder in the bottom bar of your Finder window, similar to the one you see when selecting a search result. Simple, but will definitely make life easier.
- Inline iCal Editing: I never really liked having to shuttle all the way over to a separate window/drawer to edit iCal events. This looks like it will be much more intuitive.
- iChat Audio/Video Recording: I don’t do audio/video chats that often, but I love having transcripts of my text chats to look back at, and being able to do this with audio/video chats is definitely nice to have.
- Self-Tuning TCP: One of those under-the-hood optimizations that probably should have been done a while ago, and for which there are multiple third-party ways to enable it. Nice to see this here.
- PDF Manipulation in Preview: This is sweet, being able to reorder pages in a PDF, or copy pages from one PDF to another. You can combine multiple PDFs into on or split them apart. Preview is really getting to be a pretty powerful little application.
- Calculations in Spotlight: Finally, I can do quick calculations directly from my keyboard without having to open a separate app or widget.
- Scroll Non-Active Windows: Another little feature that I’ve found myself wanting fairly often. I sometimes employ the command-drag trick to drag a background window’s scroll bar, but just being able to crank the scroll wheel is much nicer.
WWDC 2007
Posted on June 18, 2007 by Brian Webster
Filed Under Apple, Development | 1 Comment
Well, I just got back safe and sound from the week long Apple geek-fest know as WWDC. I hadn’t been to the conference since 2001, back when I was still a student going with a free pass provided by Apple’s student developer program. That was back in the heady days of Apple’s reemergence and the dot com bubble, when there were about 1/4 as many people, it was still held in San Jose, and Jamba Juice flowed like water…
Uh, what was I saying? Oh yeah, WWDC 2007! It really was amazing how many people there were this year, enough that it got me wondering if they’ll have to change venues in the future if attendance keeps growing like it has been. They couldn’t fit everyone in the room for the keynote, so lots of people had to watch from the overflow rooms, and there were also a fair number of sessions that filled up and threatened to violate the fire code.
The keynote didn’t hold many surprises, but Leopard still looks like it will do well once it’s released. My only gripe was Steve Jobs trying to pass off developing web apps for the iPhone like it was something spectacular. Sorry Mr. Jobs, your audience just isn’t that gullible. You can’t sell a Whopper and tell them it tastes like filet mignon. I understand why they wouldn’t be able to provide a full OS X based SDK yet, especially for the first release of the product, but I would have much rather he just admitted “Yeah, it’s not ready yet, but while we’re working on that, you can still write web apps for the iPhone. We’ll get working on the real thing right away though.”
The upcoming stuff in the real OS X is looking pretty sweet though, and I definitely learned a lot at the sessions. I found out that with Time Machine, it will xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xx xxxxx and also xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx. The Core xxxxxxxxx talk was my favorite though, where they had this really cool demo that made the xxxx xxxxxxx fly around over xxx xxxxxxx xxx and even if you xxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx x xx xxxxxxxxx xxx, it will still slice through that red ripe tomato! Oh, and did I mention that all the material presented at the conference is confidential? Yeah, bummer. But trust me, it’s cool.
So, after a week of sitting on my butt in uncomfortable chairs, I am glad to be back home, sitting on my butt in a much more comfortable chair. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Leopard beta seed to install… 
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