Hooray! Apple’s iPhone developer NDA will no longer cover released software.
It seemed inevitable that this NDA change would be made, but I admit I thought the change would come in January 2009.
It’d be easy to overlook that this doesn’t include an App Store policy change, but maybe that’s on Apple’s schedule too.
Thoroughly disguisted by the clutter on my desktop, I decided to delete all of it. I selected everything, deselected a few things I wanted to keep, and hit command-delete (the keyboard shortcut for Move to Trash).
Yes, WxFPP_EN is indeed my Windows XP CD, left over from a failed/aborted attempt at installing Boot Camp. And Mac OS X really is asking me if I want to delete it immediately. Clicking Delete caused this error to appear:
Error -61 looks familiar, so I looked it up: wrPermErr. Yes, that’s right: the Leopard Finder is actually trying to delete files off the CD.
Okay. Bad enough. But at least it didn’t crash, right? I click OK:
After all of that my desktop is still a cluttered mess.
Apple, if Finder stability is one of your goals ur doing it wrong. Hitting command-delete on a volume shouldn’t actually try to delete the files form it. This is laughably bad.
Wil Shipley on the iPhone App Store. This is mostly the same thing I’ve been thinking, with the exception that I’d have removed the $999 I am Rich/I’ve been scammed! application without apology or even reason, even if the App Store offered some sort of price warning.
Duplicating Apple functionality? Well, not so much.
The new Microsoft commercial starts with a John Hodgman dressalike (You can’t really call him a lookalike, but at the distance the camera is at it doesn’t matter) saying “I’m a PC and I’ve been stereotyped.” It then goes to various people asserting they’re a PC. It’s interesting at first, but after a few seconds you realize: This is all Microsoft’s got for this commercial. After a minute of droning, the commercial blissfully comes to an end.
It makes slightly more sense than the Gates & Seinfeld commercials, but replaces the quirkiness of those ads with banality.
The commercial shows Microsoft doesn’t get the concept behind Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads. Hodgman is not the personification of Windows, and Justin Long is no the personification of Mac. Hodgman is a PC, like he says. Long is a Mac, like he says.
What does that mean? Well, it means that the difference between Long and Hodgman is the ability to run Mac OS X. Long can, and Hodgman can’t. PC’s secret motivation — an undercurrent running through all the commercials that Apple will never vocalize — is that he’s jealous. He knows he can do all the things a PC can do. He wants to do all the things a Mac can do, too. His motives, then, are minimizing the value of Mac OS X: It isn’t really that simple. It isn’t really that easy. You don’t really need that, you can do it without a Mac.
But PC doesn’t really believe it. He knows he can do everything Mac can do. He just also knows he can’t do it as easily. So the secret behind the motivation he won’t state is this: He wants to run Mac OS X, too. And Apple will never vocalize this, because it inspires the question to the masses: Why can’t PC run Mac OS X?1
So Microsoft runs this ad, showing all the things PC can do. Great. Each one of them is something Mac can do, too.
Microsoft needs to focus on promoting their product, not someone else’s product. And Microsoft does not sell generic PCs. But what does Microsoft sell, really? What are they going to brag about on Windows? Why do they need to?
Every time Microsoft puts out a commercial, they blink. And they don’t have to at this point.
I hope he’s wrong, but it’s probably a vain hope. Some Geek In Tennessee recaps the disappointments Apple’s App Store.
Fraser Speirs is dropping out of new application development on the iPhone, and I don’t blame him:
Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle - submission to the App Store - is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it.
This is something I’ve been struggling with as well. Every time I convince myself that I have a good product idea, another developer goes public with an iPhone application rejection. You’re fooling yourself if you think we’ve heard all of the rejections.
Apple has really screwed this up.
The Big Picture rages from mildly interesting to incredibly cool. Most recently: Hurricanes, as seen from orbit. Definitely on the incredibly cool end of things.
With a surprising lack of anger, The Angry Drunk absolutely nails the good and bad of Google Chrome.
Since it’s as much a proof of concept experiment as a real browser, the overly simplistic interface isn’t a surprise, but it’s still gone too far and become inconvenient to use. And like our drunk or soon-to-be-drunk friend, I found the tab names condescending — though unlike him, to me it was a subliminal thing that irritated me without me being able to explain why or even that it was the tabs doing it. So I’m grateful he was able to put into words what I didn’t like about the options screen.
I’m very curious where this will go when Google ports this to a system where hiding the menu bar isn’t really an option.1 Implementing the right subset of standard browser commands in the menu bar is going to be critical.