iPhone SDK

I'm trying to figure out exactly why I'm so psyched by the Apple iPhone SDK announcement. The basic announcement wasn't a surprise, and I don't even own an iPhone. I did, however, dig out my Cocoa programming book and start studying.

Further thoughts:

• The tools themselves seemed somewhat slicker than what was expected -- a lot of Mac developers were pleasantly surprised that Interface Builder was included (although apparently it's not in the first beta). There was a lot of speculation that the SDK release was delayed over security issues, but it also looks like polishing the tools took some time.

• The demos were exceptionally well done, a very nice range of choices, and the continual push of how easy it was to make them. The quality of the demo is clearly one of the reasons that I'm excited.

• As an aside.. say your boss came up to you and said you're going to fly to Cupertino for two weeks to build something in the super-secret iPhone SDK, which you will get to present in a full-on Steve Jobs media event. How many nanoseconds would you need to wait before accepting?

• Let's see, the iPhone 2.0 comes out the end of June. So... by August 1, it should be the top mobile gaming platform going, right? Those were some seriously cool looking games...

• The terms were more open than I expected. It's particularly nice that Apple is allowing the developers to set the price. It's particularly nice that they specifically included "free" as a price. They seemed to emphasize that Apple was going to try and get as many apps in front of developers as possible -- I'd take the inclusion of AIM as a demo as a sign that even things that AT&T might not be thrilled with will be allowed.

• The general sense of the existing indy Mac community is that the 70/30 split is reasonable given what Apple is offering. It'll be interesting to see how the price points play out. (As pointed out by Jens Alfke, the App store model enables an entirely new class of micropayment software)

• Still a number of questions: how will developers manage limited betas? Will developers be allowed to have the download be free, but have a separate license authorization? What about free but add supported (like Twitteriffic)?

Early line, here's a short list of people or apps off the top of my head I expect greatness from:

• MobileTwitteriffic, already essentially announced. The trick here will be improving on the web UI.

• Red Sweater, apparently Daniel is considering porting Black Ink, and maybe MarsEdit.

• Ambrosia Software. For a really great game -- Sketch Fighter would work...

• The Desktop Tower Defense guy. The UI would be tricky, though...

• Somebody to do the killer To-Do list or GTD app. Omni?

• A really cool doodle/draw program.

I think this is going to be a very fun ride...

Pre Macworld stuff

Haven't done an Apple post in a while, just a couple of pregame things I want to get down...

• I would not have projected that the remaining three music companies would go DRM free on all other services just to spite Apple. It's probably their smartest business move in a while, at least for some definition of smart, but it's not exactly consumer friendly. It does make the Amazon store pretty compelling though.

• For what it's worth, I find the Amazon store pretty good for downloading entire albums, but kind of a pain for just grabbing a bunch of unrelated tracks (the iTunes feature of being able to complete the set at the discounted album price is an advantage).

• Tomorrow's keynote: A new iTunes with rental movies seems to be a forgone conclusion. I would probably use this service, assuming the price and terms were convenient, which I'm kind of skeptical about.

• iPhone SDK is a probable announcement, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was delayed a bit -- I think the original claim was for February.

• The other hot rumor is some kind of subnotebook or tablet or whatnot. Any of the proposed specs sound cool and I suspect they'll sell a skillion of them.

More tomorrow, when there's actual news.

Apple Fanboy Stuff

Naturally, I did have a thought or two about the new Apple products and the other announcements this week:

• While I certainly understand why somebody who had purchased an iPhone early would be annoyed by the price cut, I did find it kind of funny that many of the same analysts who said the iPhone would never sell at its original price were then jumping on Apple for dropping the price.

• Every now and then, you'll see an economist writing about how online stores should do more variable pricing -- charging a premium price to customers who are more willing to pay it. This week should be an object lesson in why companies don't do that. Since the people who are willing to pay more are usually your best customers, you run the risk of really ticking them off by making them feel like chumps. Which is generally not considered a good business strategy, I hear.

• My read on the price cut is that it comes from three factors:

  1. To keep the price in line with the new iPods, particularly the iPod touch.

  2. Taking advantage of lowered manufacturing costs since they are now making more of the touchscreens.

  3. Really try to drive sales this quarter to take advantage of what Apple perceives as a key moment -- not so much that sales have been disappointing, but that the really are trying to seize the moment.

• It could work, although the analogy to Motorola's strategy with the RAZR (gain market share at the expense of profits) is a little disquieting. On the other hand, Apple has a lot of benefits that Moto's cell division didn't, but it's probably not a good idea for me to list them...

• As for the products themselves, they seem pretty cool. Like just about everybody, I wish they had merged the two iPod models and combined a hard drive with the touch screen. I need to see what the iPod Touch reviews look like in a couple of weeks. It is annoying that Apple seems to have made video out a proprietary cable.

WWDC Keynote, 2007

I think I'll have to join in the general chorus of the underwhelmed. Bullet points:

• The new desktop and finder sure look shiny. The dock stacks do look kind of useful, and having a dedicated downloads folder strikes me as a classic kind of Apple UI move.


• Having the finder be visually similar to iTunes strikes me as, on balance, a good idea. And, although I don't find Cover Flow tremendously useful in iTunes, I can see a place for it in the Finder. Especially if you can page through PDF files and other similar tricks.


• I don't think the power-user critics of the Finder are going to be much impressed, though. For one thing, no tabs. (Come to think of it, I'd like tabs in iTunes, too...)


• It was really weird to see so much time spent on features that have already been demoed and known for a year. I was definitely hoping for more new stuff.


• Core Animation looks really cool, and if it's half as easy to use as advertised, there's going to some very pretty Mac apps coming down the road.


• Safari for Windows, which initially sounded kind of weird, actually makes sense to me. It's probably not a very large development effort, and anything that makes Safari more valuable as a development platform for web developers makes Safari more useful, and by extension, the Mac platform more useful.


• I did not have good luck with the Safari betas, though. Windows side, the beta crashes when I try to set my proxy. Mac side, the address bar doesn't do anything when you enter an address. Worse, it broke the nightly WebKit builds that I've been increasingly using as my primary browser, so I had to uninstall.


• As far as I can tell, developers seem to be downright irritated by the non-SDK announcement for the iPhone. The thing that's not clear to me is whether the webapps would have any hooks at all into the iPhone OS -- at least one of the liveblogs I was following on made it seem like there'd be some nod to tighter integration that a typical web app. Anybody else get that? Because otherwise, to go up and make the big announcement that the web, you know, still works even on an iPhone, that's just strange.


• They placed the iPhone announcement for 6PM, which feels more humane than making people stand in line for a 9AM open


• A lot of notable non-mentions: ZFS, iLife, iWork, any hardware, resolution independence, and so on...

iTunes Plus... A Fresh Lemony Scent, Perhaps?

Couple thoughts on Apple's first foray into the brave world of non-DRM'd music:

• I think the most of the user experience in iTunes is handled nicely. There had been some worry about this -- I seem to recall some speculation before the EMI announcement that Apple would only take out DRM if they could do it store-wide, and keep things simple. Anyway, the iTunes Plus branding and the simple option to either always or never see the plus songs seems to work just fine.



• That said, it's very odd that the upgrade songs feature does not allow you to select individual albums or tracks -- it's all or nothing. That's not a good user experience.



• I'm a little surprised by the album upgrade, as well. Since they seem to have mostly held the line on the $9.99 album even for Plus albums, it's not completely clear to me why I have to spend $3.00 to upgrade my old $9.99 album to a new $9.99 album.



• I do hear some difference in sound quality on the new tracks. Granted that a) I know that there's supposed to be a difference, b) I have really cheap sound equipment and c) not exactly professional-quality audiophile ears. Even so, it seemed to me that sharp sounds like percussion and acoustic guitar seem to pop out of the background a little more. The effect is more obvious in my car than on my cheap headphones. Go figure.



• The big controversy, of course, is the fact that account information is still embedded in the non-DRM files. (Unless I'm mistaken, that information was in the DRM files, so before we get all conspiracy theory we should at least consider the possibility that it was either overlooked, or a pain to remove for some reason). I was amused to see two different blogs where the blogger breathlessly posted this dastardly information only to have commenter after commenter say it isn't that big a deal. Which it isn't — it's not like Apple removing DRM from the music somehow changed copyright law... I'll grant that it's always a little creepy to find a personal infobit somewhere you don't expect it, but I'm having a hard time getting worked up over it, especially since I expect it'll be fully hacked by the time I finish typing this sentence.

from internet import *

Three posts that caught my eye today.

Ruby School

Gregory Brown over on O'Reilly net has an article about using Ruby in Computer Science courses, at least in later algorithm classes. It's not a bad argument, but I think it'd be more convincing if the Ruby example was a little cleaner and easier to read compared to the pseudo-code.

Let's see... The last time I had to care about this issue was about eight years ago when my grad institution was going through a somewhat controversial revamp of the CS curriculum. The fight, as always, is between the theorists and the pragmatists. The theorists want to teach a lot of "pure" CS up front -- Turing machines, big "O" analysis, computational theory, that kind of thing. The pragmatists want the students to be able to get jobs.

You should know that I spent the better part of three years as part of a group working with an object-oriented class that we taught in Squeak Smalltalk. Lovely language, to be sure, but we had to spend part of every course explaining to some nervous students why we weren't teaching them C++ or Java...

At the time, the initial CS classes were moving to Java, with some relief. This is because a) nobody wanted to inflict C or C++ on unsuspecting new CS majors, and b) the previous most common language, Pascal, was woefully obsolete. Java is reasonably straightforward to teach and is actually used in real programs, both high points.

Personally, I think you can make a pretty nice case for a scripting language like Python or Ruby in the initial CS class. They are both pretty easy to get started with, the syntax is clean enough that algorithms are easy to visualize (which was Brown's original point). In Python you can do it without introducing objects (which most CS1 classes didn't do eight years ago, don't know if that's changed). In Ruby it's easy to teach meta-programming.

Cha-Ching

Paul Julius of ThoughtWorks about how CruiseControl can save you $12,535 per broken test. The money coming from the difference between the cost of fixing a bug immediately versus not catching the bug until integration testing.

I dunno. I love continuous integration, and would shout about it from the rooftops if they'd let me on the roof, and that number still sounds a bit more "look what I can do with numbers" than "look what I can do with Continuous Integration". But then I'm skeptical of nearly every numerical analysis of programming productivity.

Plus, Marshmallows

Over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Eran goes on about the smooth, harmonious relationship between Apple and Sun. Naturally, I want to talk about one of his sidebars...

The name of Apple's Mac OS X frameworks was even named Cocoa in part to associate it with Sun's Java. The other reason was that Apple already owned the Cocoa trademark, having using it earlier for a children's programing environment.

You know, I've always wondered about that. The original Cocoa was a project that was being worked on in Apple's Advanced Technology Group the summer I interned there, plus it some buzz in Educational Technology circles for a while. Internally, it was called KidSim, but the name was changed to Cocoa when it was being prepared for release. Java was programming for grown-ups, so Cocoa was programming for kids. It seems like Apple isn't really using that connotation of the name anymore.

The project (now called Stagecast Creator) is a graphical rule-based programming language, something like a cellular automata program. The user specifies an initial arraignment of sprites on the screen, then specifies how that arrangement should change in the new time slice. Complex programs could be created with almost no typing (although, like all such programs, you still had to use drawing tools to create your own sprites -- that was still hard). Stagecast still seems to be around, although it's been ages since I tried the software. It was pretty cool, though.

Wow, There Are Comments

It's true -- the way to get comments on your blog is to mention Apple... I do something like one substantive post in three months, and then two apple posts in 48 hours, and bang! Four comments within a day. I'm surprised, not least because I really wasn't sure anybody was out there.

Anyway, interesting points have been made, and I thought I'd pull them up to either agree, or whine defensively.

On the Win 95 post, Massive writes:

My observation at the time was that the 'competitve analysis' of the OS features and capabiltiies was basically bogus and totally irrelevant. I felt that Apple wasn't whistling past the graveyard so much as completely lying to itself.

You say "tomato", I say "tomahtoe". There was a lot of denial in the air, that's for sure.

Still Massive, about the impact of Win95 on end users:

You could already, with Windows 3.1, show demos rigged to look identical between Mac and the Windows apps. And people were sufficiently ignorant about computers at the time that they would actually buy Windows 3.1 and tell people that it was 'just like the Mac'.

I can't really disagree with that, but I still think the general point that Windows 95 brought the two platforms much, much closer together holds. I certainly remember that to be the theme of much of the Win95 press coverage. I also remember Apple's slogan "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89". Y'know, Apple's marketing also kind of stunk in that period...

Massive also mentions that Apple had a poor relation with the dealer channel and that didn't help. Also true. As far as I can tell, still kind of true.

On to the internet posting, a couple of people comment on some other facets of how Microsoft eventually took over after they decided to start competing in browsers. Right, but there was a time when it was not yet clear that they were going to be willing and able to do that.

One anonymous poster did bring up a long-buried memory:

Nonesense. Apple's initial 'internet strategy' was CyberDog, which was a fantastic set of tools (web browser, mail client, etc ) unfortunately chained to the technological boat anchor that was OpenDoc.

Mike, is that you? Mike Pinkerton, who went on to create Camino, was the only person I knew who used CyberDog. I remember him as being very enthusiastic about it, but it was about 10 years ago, so I could easily be wrong. It did indeed look cool, but I recall the setup as being kind of daunting, and OpenDoc was kind of a pain in the neck. Also, CyberDog came out in 1996, and by then Microsoft had already moved in.

Thanks to the commenters -- I like responding, and it's a good way to get a post, so by all means, keep writing.

Apple Dot Net

What is it about us tech fanboys and Apple... I've always found them interesting, even when I wasn't a regular Mac user. Infuriating, sometimes. But interesting.

So here's another thing about Apple, circa 1995... That was right about the end of something like a two-year period where Apple was way ahead on internet integration and didn't really make anything out of it. By the time the internet really started to escape out of academia, the Windows world was well on it's way to catching up, and by the time it all really went mainstream, Macs would be a fading memory. (I remember as late as 1995 impressing non-techy visitors to my grad school office with demos of a web browser. But a year later, the cat was largely out of the bag.)

But in 1994/1995 it was all Macish. Just accessing the internet was much easier (although it was a separate software purchase initially). And all the best software was on Macs (well, some of it was Unix, too) Eudora was the standard email client, and it was still Mac-only, for some reason the Windows version remained ugly forever. The Mac version of Netscape (and before that Mosaic) were much prettier than the Windows versions. (In my memory, the Mac versions came out sooner, particularly for early Netscape, but I can't find a source that backs that up).

On top of which, Microsoft was in the middle of a totally clueless stage. Win 95 did not, by default, ship with a web browser, and the big Microsoft internet initiative of 1995 was something called Blackbird, which was going to be a proprietary replacement for HTML. That worked out about as well as you'd expect, evidenced by the fact that Blackbird doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Making it less important than even the most minor anime character...

Putting that all together, in the months before the Win95 launch, Mac had about a 12-18 month lead in Internet apps and Microsoft was distracted by an attempt to privatize the nascent WWW. There's clearly some room there for Apple to have maneuvered themselves into a better position than they wound up in. Being the best internet platform around would have been an interesting counterweight to the Win 95 launch, and while I doubt they could have stopped the upcoming onslaught, they probably could have mitigated it somewhat.

Instead, Apple didn't really do anything in the space, except release an email client (Claris Emailer -- which does have a Wikipedia article, which charitably refers to it as "popular"). Microsoft, on the other hand, turned on a dime, and gave up the futile attempt to take over the internet by co-opting the authoring tools. They switched instead to the more lucrative method of taking over the internet by co-opting the client tools. Apple wandered around in a fog for a few years, until they attacked the opportunity to go after digital media. But you probably know that part...

Apple Summer of 95

As I may have mentioned here, back in 1995 I spent three months as a summer intern at Apple HQ in Cupertino.

I was buried deep in the educational technology research group so, trust me, I didn't work on anything you've heard of. It was a fun summer, though. They stuffed about 15 of us, a mix of grad students and contractors, in a room that was really long and narrow. They tried to make up for the cramped office space by supplying us with Nerf toys (the admin assistant for our group would sometimes come in and announce a Toys R' Us run, and did anybody want anything). I got about a dozen free T-shirts in three months. I also experienced my first earthquake, which went like this:

A slow rumble, like a truck going down a slowdown strip

All the non-California people: What was that?

All the California people: What was what?

None of which is why I brought this up. 1995 was near a low point for Apple, but even at that there were three or four good-sized company parties during the few months I was there. I'm talking about food, music, drinks, some entertainment, all in the inner courtyard of the Infinite Loop campus. I may be slightly exaggerating in memory, and I was assured that it was small-scale by later Valley standards, but it sure seemed elaborate to me.

In August 1995, Apple held what you'd have to describe as an anti-Windows 95 launch party. More of a morale booster, I guess. The thing I remember most is a screen projecting Windows 95, while some Apple guy pointed out it's flaws. As in, "Windows 95 will only let you have 256 characters in a path name, but if you have more than 15 directory levels, you can cause it to give you a really weird error message." Thin stuff, but enthusiastically received by a lot of people who wanted to whistle in the dark together.

Everybody there, I think, knew that Apple lost something big that day. Prior to Win95, the visual differences between Mac and PC were so clear that you could see the difference in a store just by looking at the two. Afterwards, you actually had to use them both for a while to learn the difference. This was a big change in the Mac/PC dynamic, and it took Apple about five years of flailing before they would come up with a decent response.

Obligatory Apple Post

Since what every tech blog reader needs is another round up of Apple's Showtime event...

Overall, nice incremental stuff, perhaps a little disappointing to those who were expecting a radical new mainline iPod.

• New Shuffle: This is getting close to being jewelry, actually is starting to look like a cufflink to me.
  
  
• New Nano: Smaller, bigger drive, better battery life, colors. Solid incremental upgrade.
  
  
• New iPod: A very small incremental upgrade. It's very irritating that the new search function is not being backported to existing video iPods.
  
  Here's my bold prediction -- the widescreen, touch panel iPod will never be released as it is currently rumored. My guess is that there will be practical troubles either keeping the screen clean and scratch free when people are putting their grubby mitts right on it and/or having a touch screen wheel UI that is actually usable. More likely the former, but I think the latter might be a problem too. Just wait for me to be wrong!
  
  
• iTunes UI Enhancements: Mostly quite nice. The album art view and the cover flow view are both very pretty. They don't really mesh with how I use iTunes, but I can see where they will be useful. Points to Apple for actually buying CoverFlow rather than just ripping it off. The library enhancements and the iPod view are nice (although the iPod prefs aren't that much nicer than they were in the Preferences screen). As usual, the UI is in a state of flux, it's a bit more subdued, but some elements (like the tabs in the iPod screen just look weird.
  
  
• iTunes Movies: Best seen as the beginning of a long term strategy than a goal in itself. Although if I were the manufacturer of a portable DVD player, I'd start getting a little worried. Still, I can't imaging genuinely sitting through a full-length widescreen movie on an iPod screen unless I was trapped on an airplane.
  
  
• iTunes Games: Kind of underplayed, but in some ways the most interesting potential. If, that is, Apple releases an SDK such that the open source hackers of the world can get their hand on it. That could be very, very interesting... UPDATE: Looks like Apple has "no plans to offer an SDK". Bummer. Developers should be agitating for this.
  
  
• iTV: I get where they are going with this, and I really want to like it, but absent DVR capability (even if it was on the networked Mac) I really can't see this being a major player.
  

Python tie-in (what with it being Python Week and all...): nothing really. I do have a pretty cool and obsessive Python script that creates fancy random playlists for iTunes/iPod, including things like, randomly pick albums, randomly play multiple songs in a row from the same artist, play songs in specific genres more often, etc., etc. I'll post it here someday, but the code really needs a good sweep first.