Unnamed Apple employee, recounting meetings between Apple and AT&T, quoted Fred Vogelstein in Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
Marco Arment, Great since day one
I don’t think I’ll be buying any more desktops going forward. I don’t think I’ll even be buying any more laptops going forward.
They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a “computer” in the traditional sense.
Chuck Holis, What iPads Did To My Family [via Chris Masto]
Bruce Tognazzini, Apple employee #66, in Mac & the iPad, History Repeats Itself, which draws parallels between iPhone/iPad limitations and the limitations on the original Macintosh. (And sheds light on the way small teams are responsible for innovations in Apple.)
Stross compares Apple’s relationship with telecom carriers to Google’s: “They [Google] intend to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like wifi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They’d love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access.” [via Tim Bray]
Kristee Rosendahl, via Andrew Chen’s Update on the Steve Jobs post from an Apple alum [via Buzz Andersen]
“‘People have accused us of simply following in Apple’s footsteps and copying everything they do years later,’ said Ballmer. ‘That is simply untrue. Organ replacement for top level Microsoft executives has been planned for some time now….’” [via rit in email]
MacRumors: “One new feature found in Safari 4 is the ability to save webpages as stand alone ‘web applications’ which launch much like regular applications. This replicates functionality found in Fluid, a Mac OS X Leopard application which creates these Site Specific Browsers.”
It is nice to see Apple jumping on board with Site Specific Browsers. It shows that they realize some web applications are full-featured and rich enough (in terms of functionality and user experience) to take their place alongside native applications. I bet usage patterns show that users are treating some web apps as full-fledged applications, too. In a way, this is building on top of the idea behind Web Clips for Dashboard: it is a short step from realizing some users want to display an area of a web page all the time in a Dashboard widget to realizing that some users want to use a web application as if it was a native application. Of course, it also builds upon bookmarking a web app with an icon on the iPhone’s home screen.
I have been using SSBs (created via Fluid) for several months, one for email (GMail), and one for to-dos (Hiveminder). It helps me work more quickly and in a more organized fashion when I keep these applications separate, in their own Space with their own dock icon, rather than taking up a couple of tabs in my main web browser.
