gavinshearer.com

July 11, 2009

Awesome Augmented-Reality NYC Subway App

Jeff pointed me to this super-cool, terrifically exciting video on YouTube that shows how you might use the iPhone (along with its GPS and camera) to experience an "augmented reality" that helps you navigate stations in the New York City subway.

If you've ever had that moment in a big, complex station where you're wondering where the heck to go to get to the right train (Chatelet-Les Halles, I'm lookin' at you), this will get you all hot and bothered. (It's also a Taste Of Things To Come in the mobile world, I think.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 11, 2009 8:42 PM.
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June 8, 2009

iPhone 3GS

Awesome ... and ordered.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 8, 2009 11:42 AM.
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January 18, 2009

My Crazy Week In San Francisco

Macworld Expo was last week, which meant I spent the 4th through the 11th in beautiful (and sunny! and cold!) San Francisco working the show (and enjoying a bit of sightseeing toward the end of the week).

A few notes from the trip:

• Unlike my gig in Planning, Program Managers don't travel all that much, and it'd been a while since I'd spent time sitting at an airport gate. Turns out they're fantastic for getting caught up on a huge backlog of video podcasts (which may have built up while, say, the city of Seattle was buried under a blanket of snow).
• In addition to being a winged child-care center, Alaska 316 was a pretty bumpy ride. I'm generally relaxed about flying, but the plane was shuddering violently for protracted periods of time, and I found myself looking out the window, wondering if the damn wing was going to fall off.
• (Not to be too morbid, but it was one of those flights where I was glad I'd told Elaine I loved her before boarding.)
• After landing (safely!), I gathered my things, waited my turn, and exited the plane, only to be greeted by the overwhelming smell of bacon in the concourse. This is, I think, a good omen.
• Things That Make San Francisco Awesome, #4566: the mayor's first name is Gavin.
• The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system was expanded to the San Francisco Airport a few years ago, and I was excited to give it a try. BART's a bit different from other transit systems I've used. For starters, they don't use "zones" to determine fares (where travel inside one zone is one price, going between zones is another price, and so on). Rather, every BART stop has a table that lists all the stations, and shows you the price to get from your current station to your destination (in my case, it was $5.40 to get from SFO to downtown, one way). This is confusing and cumbersome.
• Second, BART tickets aren't single-use; they're stored-value, which means you buy a certain amount of credit from the machine, and the machine spits out a ticket with the credit encoded on it. Again, strange - it means you, the passenger, carry all the risk with the ticket. If you store your ticket too close to a magnet (or a cell phone!) which strips the encoding, well, you're out of luck. This wouldn't be so bad for a single-trip or day-use thing, but these are the same cheap cardboard tickets you get everywhere else (think "bake sale/raffle"), and they don't exactly hold up over time.
• Another note: when buying your ticket, the machine will want to sell you $20 of credit right off the bat. That's not such a hot deal if you're only using the system to get in and out of the city over the course of a week. Just buy what you need, when you need it.
• (Oh, and the damn machines don't take AmEx. Not so friendly for the business traveler.)
• The ride into the city was about as uneventful as you might imagine. Trains run every 15 minutes; the trip is almost exactly a half hour (we were under way at 7:42 PM; we arrived at my stop at 8:11 PM). Easy-peasy.
• (Reminder: Link Light Rail opens July 3 here in Seattle...)
• The Macworld people held a two-day "Power Tools" session on Monday and Tuesday, focused on helping people get more from their Macs. Microsoft agreed to participate, with Program Managers from each of the Mac Office applications giving a 60 - 90 minute talk about advanced or overlooked features. Stuart and I split the 90-minute Excel session on Monday afternoon, and it seemed to go fine - no major gaffes, no f-bombs from the podium, nothing caught fire. As I understand it, all the Power Tools sessions were videotaped and will be made available on YouTube sometime soon. I'll post a link when I get one.
• The big news from the Apple keynote on Tuesday was, to my mind, the end of Digital Rights Management in iTunes. The labels have, apparently, realized that DRM annoys legitimate customers, adds complexity to how people enjoy music, retards interoperability (and innovation), and, most damningly, doesn't do a thing to help stop piracy. They've finally hit stage 5. I never thought I'd see the day.
• (Since the announcement, I've dumped a good $50 stripping DRM from songs in my library, and will finish the process once Apple's entire back catalog is re-encoded.)
• Other keynote thoughts: the new iLife is incredible. I love the "Faces" stuff in iPhoto, but feel bad that Apple just shot FlickrExport in the head. iMovie, it seems, has long since abandoned any pretense of being an "entry level" application. I mean, yes, it's easy enough to use, but holy cow it's powerful. The stuff you can now do with the app - free with every Mac! - is astonishing. And finally, the new GarageBand is a classic example of what Apple does best. First, start with a great app. Then, identify the reason(s) people aren't using/can't use it (in this case, it's because people don't know how to play an instrument). Third, develop a slick system to teach people how to play, thus a) overcoming a market obstacle, and b) differentiating your offering from all of the other music apps out there. Finally, add a bit of sex appeal by having celebrity musicians teach you how to play the songs that made them famous. So cool.
• Overall, the Macworld show was much less trafficked than in previous years, seeming to run about at about 60% - 70% of last year's population. I wonder how much the down economy is driving this, or if enthusiasm is waning now that Apple isn't coming back.
• For all that, I love working the booth (the Excel kiosk, natch), and had some great conversations with people about Office, Excel, and Mac stuff at Microsoft generally. People are using Office 2008, and really like it - I was surprised at how sophisticated some of the questions were, and got some wonderful suggestions for ways we can improve future versions. Customers rock.
• Elaine flew down Wednesday night, so we could stay over a few extra days and enjoy a mini-vacation. (She was a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.)
• We decided to use San Francisco MUNI for sightseeing. MUNI has a solid bus system, but it's a bit arcane to get used to. Bus stop information, for example, is spray-painted on light poles, which I'm sure saves the city money but a) is hard to see unless you know what you're looking for, and b) even when you do see them, they look fake. Grr.
• Thank God for Google Transit on the iPhone. The new iPhone Maps application (with the 2.2 firmware) introduced "transit" directions, which meant we could simply enter our starting point and destination, and Maps would tell us which buses (or other rail systems to take). Awesome, awesome, awesome.
• Another good resource: NextMuni.com, which is much like MyBus.org here in Seattle. Just tell the system which stop you're at, and it'll let you know how soon the next bus will be along.
• Operationally, the buses seem safe and well-thought-out; I counted 5 video cameras on the bus itself; each bus also has a nice digital reader board next to the driver that lists the next upcoming stop. Seattle Metro could learn from this.
• San Francisco is a really wonderful city to see from a bus. Packed with people, vibrant, something interesting happening every 10 feet. You miss it when driving. Trust me.
• One of our stops was the Palace of Fine Arts. It's gorgeous at 4:30 PM - the light is perfect - and it's got a nice small lake and running path. With all the strollers, joggers, and birds, it's got the same general feel as Greenlake (only smaller).
• The cafe in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes a damn good omelette.
• Our friends Kim and Steve took us up to Twin Peaks (by Sutro Tower) for some amazing views of the city, followed by a trip to the new California Academy of Sciences. The Academy is a recently-rebuilt science museum, and it's just incredible - modern, smart, wonderful. We only got a few hours in the place, but it's the sort of thing that's genuinely don't-miss.
• (Oh, and the fish and chips in the cafe are really yummy.)
• Our hotel had a pretty good selection of cable TV channels, including two I don't watch a lot: CurrentTV and BBC America. Current is a lot like watching YouTube - it's all user-submitted content - and its sheer randomness (you never know what's coming next) is hypnotic (Exhibit A: "Internet Porn & You", which I kind of can't believe made it on television). BBC America, on the other hand, was running a lot of the new Dr. Who, and, again, I got sucked in.
• The flights home were simple, fast, and easy. Which made me think about the crazy-bumpy ride down, and the damn wing falling off all over again. Grr.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 18, 2009 10:45 AM.
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December 19, 2008

"Grand Unified Weekly"

SlateV is one of my favorite podcasts; (much) more than a video version of the Slate Daily Podcast, V has evolved as a kind of variety hour of short-form video programming - some segments recur, others are one-off. And each morning, I find myself looking forward to whatever the new segment is like it's a present under the tree.

One of their newest segments, however, dazzles. Called "Grand Unified Weekly", it's a smart science show with pop-culture sensibility and unique production values. The content is first-rate, but even more than that is the art direction: the whole thing is done as if screencasted from a Mac; the talking-head hosts appear as QuickTime movies, new content is summoned from the Dock, visual effects often come ala Stickies.

Worth checking out, doubly so if you're a Mac person.

(And get SlateV into your podcast rotation!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 19, 2008 2:18 PM.
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December 10, 2008

Some Simple Suggestions For Saner Spreadsheets

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

If you're like me, and spend a lot of time building spreadsheets to model or budget or crunch a set of numbers, you have probably had the following experience.

One day, you have a bright idea. You fire up Excel and begin working to express it. After hours and hours of constructing and tweaking and changing and modifying your spreadsheet, you find yourself sitting at your desk, brow sweaty, with a goofy look of happiness on your face - "Aha!" you think. "That's it! I've done it!"

You then save your work, quit Excel, and head off for a much-deserved snack.

Three months later, you remember your genius spreadsheet and want to update it. You locate the file on the drive, double-click, and ... find yourself staring at gobbledygook. The spreadsheet is, well, unreadable - you can't tell which cells do which, what math is being used where, and quickly find yourself starring in an episode of CSI: Excel, relying on clues, fingerprints and guesswork to determine what the heck is actually going on in your workbook.

This "unintelligible workbook" situation is not uncommon - and not even that surprising, if you think about it. Unlike the art of writing, where there are defined conventions (sentence structure, paragraph structure, document structure, story structure), spreadsheets are as varied as the minds that create them. On one hand, this is great - spreadsheets are fantastically flexible tools - but on the other it can lead to confusion, error, and misunderstanding. Without standards for what a spreadsheet "should" look like, the reader of a spreadsheet is often left scratching their head, wondering just what it is they're staring at.

(This by the way, is doubly true in large organizations, where some long-departed employee once built some hairball of a spreadsheet back at the dawn of the last Ice Age, and now your boss wants you to "update it a little bit". I've been there, and, well, good luck with that.)

Enter the concept of spreadsheet "best practices".

As spreadsheets become more integral to our work (and, consequently, more complex in their design and function), a clear need has emerged to have a set of principles around which spreadsheets are designed and developed. There are a number of distinct methodologies and approaches, such as FAST ("Flexible, Accurate, Structured, Transparent"), but in my view the important thing is to find a few guidelines that make sense for you (and the people you work with), and then ... just follow 'em.

My first personal experience with best practices came when I was in business school. My Quantitative Methods coursework was done entirely in Excel, and my professor, Dr. Hillier, insisted that people follow some guidelines when laying out their spreadsheets so he could understand what the students were doing. His guidelines were simple, straightforward, and made a lot of sense; years later, I find myself still using them and saving my sanity. (Dr. Hillier, incidentally, credits Duke University professor Dr. Robert Nau for inspiring him.)

Of the tips I've seen for sane spreadsheet design, the most valuable have been:

• Each cell does one thing, and one thing only. Any given cell on the spreadsheet should be responsible for doing exactly one thing, whether it holds data, calculates something, or merely provides visual space between other cells.
• Use intermediate steps. If a cell is doing one thing and one thing only, then you'll need to use intermediate steps to complete more elaborate calculations. That's OK - subtotals are your friend.
• Separate data from formulas. Formulas should always reference other cells on the worksheet for their input; they should never have hard numbers embedded in the formula itself.
• Use labels. Never let a number sit on a spreadsheet without a text label next to it that explains what it is or what it does. These labels will boost the "readability" of your spreadsheet, and help you spot errors.
• Use color. Use splashes of color to color-code certain cells on the spreadsheet. There's no hard-and-fast rule, here; I personally use blue for cells that contain facts that affect my model (think: tax rates, discounts or fees), yellow for cells that are considered inputs to my model, and orange for just one cell - the ultimate conclusion, or "answer" cell.
• Remember the "rule of thumb". As a rule, no formula should exceed about a thumb's worth of horizontal space on the spreadsheet. If it takes more, break it up. This will act as a forcing function to ensure you're using intermediate steps properly.
• Flow from top to bottom. Spreadsheets should read like the page of a book - start at the top and let the eye trace down the page to get more detail. The conclusion - the ending to the book - should be at the very bottom of the page. Your "reader" will know where to find it, and, if you've observed the other rules correctly, the build-up to your conclusion should be obvious and logical.

Now that we're armed with all these rules, I'll give a simple example of how we might use them.

Say your boss wants to throw a pizza party for the office and asks you to figure out what it will cost beforehand. There are 30 people in the building, so you fire up Excel and quickly build a model. It might look something like this:

Figure 1 - Pizza For 30 ... But How?

Let's go ahead and expand these cells to reveal their internal formulas (Excel has a nifty keyboard shortcut for doing this: hold down the CONTROL key and then tap the "tilde" key (~)).

Doing so will yield something like this:

Figure 2 - Pizza For 30 ... The Mystery Revealed

Wow, that's some crazy formula there in B4, huh? Let's see, I'm seeing the CEILING function, some addition and division and multiplication, a few numbers I don't know the origin of ... spaghetti, basically. There's a nearly 0% chance that anyone who didn't create this spreadsheet - create it recently - would be able to figure out what any of this means.

Let's try this same example, but following some of the tips from above. We might wind up with something that looks more like Figure 3 (Figure 4 shows the underlying math):

Figure 3 - Pizza for 30, Take 2

Figure 4 - Pizza For 30, Expanded View

Going back to our tips, a few things jump out:

• Each cell is doing one thing only. Some cells, like "Number of Attendees" (C4), contain just the number of attendees. Others, like "Sales tax" (C10) contain just one math function. Everything is nice and simple.
• We are using intermediate steps. We have a "pizza subtotal" at C9, and a full-blown total at C12. Both help us to see what steps we're taking as we proceed through the model.
• Data is separated from formulas. Every variable we're using - sales tax, the amount to tip, the number of people attending, the number of slices of pizza we think they'll eat, and so on - has its own cell. The formula cells crunch those numbers, but they rely on the visible information on the spreadsheet to do their work.
• Labels are present. Virtually every number on the spreadsheet has a label next to it that explains what it is. This dramatically improves the readability of the spreadsheet.
• Color is being used. As expected, we are using blue, yellow and orange. Blue cells are things that are assumed to be true about the model - the pizza place charges $15 per pizza, for example, or we get 8 slices per pizza (we are ordering mediums). Yellow affects those things that are under our control - like how much we tip, or how many people are coming. And orange is used for the grand total.
• We're following the "rule of thumb". The longest formula on the sheet (on cell C7) is no wider than my thumb, which means it's much easier for someone who's never heard of the CEILING function to understand what that cell is doing. (Incidentally, CEILING rounds up for us; on its own, the math says we'd need 11.25 pizzas. Since we can't order a quarter-pizza, we instead round up to the next whole pie.)
• We flow from top to bottom. We start with our assumptions up top, and then flow down through the spreadsheet until we hit our conclusion.

So that's it - some simple suggestions for saner spreadsheets. This might seem like a lot of work at first - it did to me, for sure - but, as a loyal and regular practitioner of these techniques for the past few years, I can only attest to my own happiness and productivity after having adopted them. Your mileage may vary, but the next time you open a spreadsheet and go, "What was I thinking?" you might do well to adopt a few of these habits.

If you're interested, my spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 10, 2008 10:11 AM.
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November 25, 2008

Going To MacWorld? Come Say Hi!

MacBU is gearing up for the annual pilgrimage to MacWorld Expo in January; a good chunk of the team will be in San Francisco for the entire week of the show, meeting customers, taking questions, and showing off our products.

In addition to working in the booth (which, truth be told, is a ton 'o fun), I'm participating in two public sessions:

• The two-day "Power Tools" session called, "Getting the most out of Office 2008 for Mac" (Monday and Tuesday), and
• A "Birds-of-a-Feather" called "Office For Mac: After Hours" on Wednesday, January 7 from 6:30 to 7:30 PM.

Both should be pretty interesting for productivity-minded Mac folks.

If you're attending the show, please swing by and say hello!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2008 10:09 AM.
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October 24, 2008

Under-Appreciated Excel Feature Of The Week: Goal Seek

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

Last month's post about Data Tables generated a surprising amount of e-mail from readers. Lots of people, it seems, are interested in learning how to get more out of Excel.

In that spirit, I thought I'd take some time to discuss and showcase a companion feature to Data Tables, called Goal Seek.
As I wrote about Data Tables:

Put plainly, Data Tables let you do "what if..." analyses in Excel. They let you see how the results of a formula change as its underlying variables change. Data Tables let you see an entire range of solutions, rather than just one single answer.

In that post, we explored Data Tables through the frame of taking out a large loan. The feature let us see how our monthly payment would vary if we changed the length of the loan or its interest rate. Our end product was a matrix of numbers that lets us see, clearly, how rates and terms affected our monthly payment.

However, there are a number of times when we're not looking for a table of results, but instead are concerned with optimizing around a single variable. For instance, if I go out to buy a car, I have a certain amount of money - say, $350 - that I can afford to put toward a payment each month. In cases like these, I'd much prefer not to look at a matrix - instead, I'd like to just know how much I can get for my money.

This is where you use Goal Seek.

Like Data Tables, Goal Seek lets you do "what if..." analysis, but it will solve for a specific, single answer. Here, I'm really only interested in one question: given that I have $350 a month to spend, how much car can I afford?

I'll walk through an example to show how it's done.

We first need to set up our spreadsheet. Just as we did with Data Tables, we will make a few assumptions about our loan. (If you want to grab the finished spreadsheet from the Data Tables exercise (download here), it will save you a bit of time.)

Just to plug in some numbers, let's assume that we're borrowing $25,000 for 4 years at 7% interest.  If we set up our spreadsheet as follows and use the Excel PMT function (=PMT(B4/12,B3*12,B2)), we will get a monthly payment of ... $598.66.

A payment of $598.66 is quite a bit more than the $350 I have to spend every month. So now it's time to figure out how much car I can actually afford.

Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Goal Seek..." (it's about 2/3 of the way down the list). The Goal seek dialog will appear:

There are three variables to worry about, here: set cell, to value, and by changing cell. The nice thing is that they work as a sentence:

In other words: you're asking Excel to change the value of cell Z until cell X is equal to some value, Y.

With that in mind, filling out Goal Seek is pretty easy. On our spreadsheet, we want to set cell B5 ("Monthly Payment") equal to the value of our monthly payment ($350). And we want Excel to do that by changing cell B2 ("Amount To Be Borrowed").

Setting Goal Seek to these values, we get:

It's worth noting that "to value" is set to minus 350 (-$350). This is because a monthly payment is a cash outflow - it's money you're giving away each month. This is how the Excel PMT function thinks about monthly payments, and, since we're relying on the PMT function to do all our heavy lifting in the math department, we need to make sure we're speaking a language the function understands. (It's a quirk, but an important one.)

Click OK, and Excel will crunch the numbers. Goal Seek will come back and let you know if it found a solution:

Click OK again, and this dialog will vanish. You'll find yourself back out at your workbook, which should now contain the answer to our question:

Looks like I can afford to borrow $14,616 for my new car  - which means I'm looking less at a new Mini Cooper, and more at a shiny Toyota Yaris. Pretty cool, huh?

So that's Goal Seek - yet another under-appreciated Excel feature. As you might imagine, it's a pretty powerful (and profoundly useful) tool. Personally, I use it all the time for situations like this (which seem to crop up in business pretty regularly).

If you'd like to see my spreadsheet, I've attached it to this post - just click here.

Best of luck!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 24, 2008 10:24 AM.
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May 13, 2008

Office 2008 SP1

I'm happy to report that my colleagues at MacBU shipped the first service pack to Office 2008 (2008 SP1) today; you can get the bits directly from the "downloads" section of our Web site, or you can wait a day or two for it to appear in AutoUpdate.

All the product teams worked incredibly hard on this release, and I'm very proud to see the results getting out to customers. If you're interested in the scope of what got done, check out the KB article.

It's also worth pointing out that Office 2008 is a barnburner, sales-wise:

Office 2008 launched at Macworld Expo 2008, and sales for the productivity suite continue to soar, selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years.

..."The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004,” said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU.

(Awesome.)

UPDATE: Schwieb has a great post on SP1 on his blog. Check it out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2008 7:15 PM.
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February 5, 2008

I Heart CosmoPod

One of the (under-appreciated) benefits of taking transit to work is being able to watch video on your iPod or iPhone while someone else does the driving. I love watching TV shows (I'm kinda addicted to "Entourage") or movies - particularly on the way home - as a way of unwinding after a long day.

Problem is, there's a lot of great video on the Internet that I'd like to see, much of it on YouTube, and I've been somewhat stymied about getting that stuff from YouTube's Flash-based video player into a format that my iPhone can understand.

Stymied, that was, until I discovered CosmoPod.

CosmoPod is this kick-ass plugin for Safari that detects a video clip on a Web page you're looking at, and, with a click:

• Downloads the file to your drive;
• Converts the file into iPhone/iPod-compatible QuickTime; and
• Adds the newly-converted file to iTunes.

In short, it rocks.

I find it incredibly useful for longish (40+ minutes) clips on YouTube - the sort I never have time to sit down and watch, uninterrupted, in front of my MacBook. (For some reason, these all seem to be taken from the "Talks @ Google" series - Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, "The Secret History of Silicon Valley").

CosmoPod detects this stuff, downloads it, and pops it on to my phone - fantastic.

The product isn't free, but it is cheap - about ten bucks. If you're a commuter, it's well worth a look.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 5, 2008 3:13 PM.
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January 25, 2008

Office 2008: The 10-Minute Walkthrough

The fine folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog have posted an interview with MacBU's own Amanda Lefebvre.

Shot at Macworld, Amanda spends a good 10 minutes talking about Office 2008 and showing off a number of the new, cool things you can do with the suite. It's a solid primer for folks thinking about upgrading.

(Nice work, Amanda!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 25, 2008 4:35 PM.
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January 13, 2008

Off To Macworld

Macworld kicks off tomorrow, and a good chunk of the MacBU (including yours truly) are heading down to San Francisco to meet customers, take questions, and show off Office 2008.

I'll be working the Microsoft booth during the week, so if you're at the show, be sure to stop off, introduce yourself, and say hello!

(And, if you're at the show, don't forget to print your Keynote Bingo card!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 13, 2008 8:52 AM.
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January 9, 2008

"How The iPhone Blew Up The Wireless Industry"

Wired has a fascinating, must-read article on the birth of the iPhone:

The conversation about which operating system to use was at least one that all of Apple's top executives were familiar with. They were less prepared to discuss the intricacies of the mobile phone world: things like antenna design, radio-frequency radiation, and network simulations. To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.

(Thanks to Bill for the link!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 9, 2008 9:26 PM.
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January 3, 2008

NetFlix To Make A Set-Top Box

Fresh on the heels of my predictions about AppleTV v2:

DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. will begin delivering movies and other programming directly to televisions later this year through a set-top box that will pipe entertainment over a high-speed Internet connection.

...Netflix's streaming service is the cornerstone of the Los Gatos-based company's strategy to retain and attract customers as technology makes it easier to rent and buy movies within a few minutes instead of waiting for them to be delivered through the mail.

Although Netflix says its subscribers have watched more than 10 million movies and TV episodes through its "Watch Instantly" option so far, the streaming service has been too constraining for many subscribers.

That's because all the streaming service's programming must be watched on a personal computer, unless the viewer knows how to link a high-speed Internet connection into a TV monitor.

The battle over the living room is going to erupt into a full-fledged shooting war in 2008.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 3, 2008 11:51 AM.
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January 2, 2008

Macworld 2008 Predictions

Macworld is less than two weeks away, so it's time for the annual magic-8-ball-shaking routine.

This year's show feels a touch more stable than last year's, if only because the rumor mill isn't being stoked as hotly by crazy-ass theories that Apple was going to get in to the phone business (I mean, really - can you imagine?). This cycle, it seems like people have a few pet theories about what Apple is going to launch - I hear "a Mac Tablet" a lot - but there's not the same crazy, "oh-God-what-is-it?!" kind of fervor.

Frankly, I think 2008 is all about Apple building on their franchises, and I expect their product announcements to reflect that. Specifically, I think the big news will be a new, super-thin laptop, the iPhone software upgrades, and a substantial rev to AppleTV.

(As with most of my Apple posts, the usual disclaimer applies to this one - I may work for MacBU, but I don't know anything special. I'm just throwing darts at a board like everyone else.)

Since the name of the show is "Macworld" (as opposed to say, iPhoneworld, or AppleTVworld), it makes sense to start with...

Macintosh
The Macintosh business is on a tear right now, and I expect Steve to do some well-deserved gloating. Sales are up, market share is up, and Apple gets to spend millions of dollars on TV ads tweaking Vista. It's good to be Steve Jobs right now.

Both the iMac and MacBook product lines are really strong at the moment (and both have been completely refreshed recently), so I don't expect any notable changes to either.

Friends of mine who follow the Mac Pro market (I don't, generally) tell me that the thing is getting a bit long in the tooth, and is ready for some processor and motherboard upgrades to whatever latest-and-greatest Intel iron is available. (And, anecdotally, my coworker Kurt swears that Apple will refresh the Mac Pro because "he just bought one." I trust Kurt on this.)

The MacBook Pro, however, is going to be the big change.

When it was first introduced, the MBP wasn't much more than an Intel processor in a G4 PowerBook case. In fact, the current design of the MacBook Pro line was introduced at Macworld 2003 - five years ago - which is an eternity in the world of Apple design.

I'm betting that the MacBook Pro line is about to get a stylistic refresh, becoming thinner and lighter across the board. And I'm also betting that the rumors are true, and the current 15" and 17" models will be joined by a holy-crap-that's-small 12" or 13" model. Might be flash-based, might not be; might have an optical drive, might not. Whatever. It's going to be small, light, gorgeous, slip-it-in-a-bag-and-never-notice-it cute.

It's worth pointing out that Apple has never replaced the gap in its product line caused by the demise of the 12" PowerBook. The 12" seems to still be in fairly wide use today. I know lots of people who love their 12" PowerBooks, despite the fact that they're woefully underpowered. This unit longevity and loyalty speaks to a decent market for small machines, and, given Apple's relentless focus on design and miniaturization, it makes sense that they'd do a fantastically tiny Mac laptop to serve it.

iPod/iPhone
The iPod just turned six, and the product is still selling like crazy. I expect the Christmas numbers to be astronomical, based on various pieces of analyst coverage and my own holiday shopping experiences at the madhouse that is the U Village Apple Store.

I don't expect new hardware in either the iPod or iPhone area - the iPods just got refreshed with the introduction of the "fat" Nano and the Touch, and iPhone v2 - one with 3G, and more memory - feels more like a late-Spring delivery, timed to coincide with the product's rollout in Asia.

That means iPhone announcements will be all about the software.

We know that the 1.1.3 update to the iPhone is imminent - GearLive, among others, has some great video footage of new enhancements to the product. I'd wager that we'll get a walk-through of some of these new features, as well as availability of 1.1.3 by the end of the show.

The big news, however, will be the iPhone SDK. I've already talked about what I expect from the SDK, so I anticipate that Steve will spend a lot of time talking about their partner value proposition is - especially for small developers. I also expect one or two handpicked folks - people with early access to the SDK - will be on stage to talk about their experiences with the kit, and to pump their products. (Think Theo Gray doing his Universal Binary talk at the Intel announcement, and you've got the right idea.) And I fully expect that at least one of these folks will be someone like EA or PopCap.

See, the iPhone needs games.

I miss games on my iPhone. I started goofing with my iPod a bit over the holiday and fell in love with Zuma all over again. My brother-in-law is addicted to Vortex on his Nano. Casual games are such a natural, wonderful fit for Apple's consumer market that their absence from Apple's high-end portables is quite jarring. I think this is mostly a timing problem - the SDK just isn't out yet - but if Steve talks about any apps at all for the iPhone, I'm betting he'll talk about games.

AppleTV
Despite the iPhone's natural ability to attract hype and headlines, the really big news of the show will be AppleTV.

Launched last year, AppleTV has been a modest success, lauded by many of its users for being an elegant, simple, and ridiculously-easy way to watch iTunes content on your television. Apple needed the AppleTV to support the launch of its movie download business, and the product delivered.

Problem is, despite its excellent execution, the consumer promise of AppleTV is a bit too thin at the moment. There's no "second act", no "one more thing..." to drive sales beyond the market of people who a) have content in iTunes, and b) want to watch that content on their television. Unlike, say, the Xbox 360, AppleTV doesn't play games; unlike, say, a PlayStation 3, the AppleTV doesn't play DVD or Blu-Ray discs. As such, people who might want the capabilities that AppleTV offers are stuck looking at the prospect of putting One. More. Freakin'. Box. into their home-theater system - they can't pull one out because they're replacing functionality (as they did to their VCR when they bought a TiVo), or make the case that it will get a lot of use from other members of the household (as you can when you watch DVDs on your game machine). AppleTV, today, is an "additive" thing to the media console. And many people feel like their media consoles are stuffed to the gills already, thankyouverymuch.

AppleTV's problem is, basically, that its use-case is too specific: the product needs to offer more options for content playback. Therefore, I predict that AppleTV v2 will come with DVD - and that there will be a higher-end AppleTV that does Blu-Ray or HD-DVD (although my money is on Blu-Ray). This will be the first step in a series of moves to evolve the AppleTV from "one more box" to the nerve center of the living room - the true "digital hub."

The living room is a natural next step for Apple (and not just to protect the iPod/iTunes business). Technologically speaking, the living room is a nightmare for most people - three or more different remote controls, each driving a television, receiver, DVD player, TiVo, and so on. Getting the system set up at all is a Mensa test; making it work for everyone in the family requires a ton of training and a real comfort with technology.

(And if you think I'm overstating the problem, invite a nontechie fortysomething relative over to your high-tech home for the holidays and ask them to "turn on the TV." Point at your basket of remote controls next to the coffee table, and start the timer on your watch. They'll be asking for help in less than 2 minutes.)

It's just this type of problem space - confusing interfaces, lots of interoperability challenges, impenetrability to the non-propellerhead consumer - that Apple has a special penchant for solving. The living room isn't just an opportunity for Apple to sell a few more copies of "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" through iTunes; it's an opportunity to knock Sony down in the dirt, and make a lot of money doing it. Don't forget: Apple's new business model is to launch new consumer-electronics (read: hardware) businesses that intelligently leverage the Mac. That's AppleTV.

So AppleTV v2 will be a bit cheaper (maybe $199 or $249), and come with DVD/Blu-Ray. That makes it an easier sell for a lot of people, especially people who are thinking about getting a Blu-Ray player anyway.

But what about software?

Well, again, we're hearing rumors that Apple has cut deals with studios to offer on-demand rentals of movies through iTunes. If true (and I think it is), this will be a huge advantage for AppleTV, because it will turns the box in to an on-demand movie (and, eventually, television) service. For people who don't like the selection of their cable company (or who don't have cable), this will be a real boon. In effect, this is the first step toward Apple building a private, iTunes-and-Internet-based TV network. AppleTV is the set-top box, content comes direct from the studios, and Comcast/DirecTV/Blockbuster/Unbox/Netflix can suck it.

(And - long shot here- if Apple is really savvy, they'll encourage users to get their video content into iTunes by incorporating a DVD ripper/encoder into iTunes 8. This is, in effect, the same strategy they used with the iPod, letting people "rip, mix, burn" their already-owned CDs into the iTunes jukebox. Nothing really does that today, other than Handbrake, and Handbrake is Propellerhead Central. Apple might be able to get the studios to go along with it, too, as long as the newly-ripped files were encrypted with FairPlay, to prevent distribution. But this really feels like an AppleTV v3 thing to me.)

If they make a really compelling AppleTV v2, then the next step is to move it up the chain in v3 and beyond. Make no mistake - Apple wants their media technology to be as necessary to your home theater as a HDTV and good speakers. It'll take 'em a while to get there, but I expect we'll see a big step toward it on January the 15th.

So that's what my magic-eight-ball says. What about yours?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 2, 2008 9:52 PM.
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December 21, 2007

Birth Of A Platform

Welcome to late December! Work is winding down for the year, holiday parties are being thrown, shoppers are scurrying around the malls looking for a Wii. And, for the Mac community, this is the usual time of year to pause, reflect, and begin making predictions about what will be announced at Macworld San Francisco in January.

This isn't my Macworld prediction post (I'll get to that after the holiday), but I did want to take a bit to reflect on the forthcoming iPhone software development kit (SDK).

This SDK is critically important to Apple; getting it right will transform the iPhone (and iPod Touch) from a fantastic piece of consumer electronics into a bona-fide platform, the kind of place where consumers can get a particular software itch scratched, developers can build a business, and everyone makes money. If done correctly, the iPhone SDK will become a huge strategic asset for Apple, driving sales and ancillary revenue, boosting customer satisfaction, and helping Apple ward off competing mobile platforms.

So ... what will it look like?

First, a disclaimer: while I work for Microsoft's Mac team, none of what I'm writing in here has been informed by any inside information, and certainly nothing is covered by NDA. I don't know anything special. This post is fueled by being a Gruber-reading, MacBreak Weekly-listening, Apple guy from way back in the day.

Set the wayback machine for June: roughly 15 nanoseconds after the iPhone was launched, developers were trying to crack it open and figure out how to write native applications for it. This was fiendishly difficult work, both because a) Apple wasn't supplying any documentation on how to do this, and b) Apple was going out of their way to stop people from doing it. A game of cat-and-mouse evolved - developers would find a way to crack the phone, and, once they did, Apple would release a software update to prevent their break-in from working.

Finally, in October, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be supplying a native SDK for the iPhone in February 2008. This served two purposes - first, it took a lot of the fight out of the hacker community to keep finding new-and-novel ways of breaking in to the iPhone (I mean, what's the point? Just wait for early '08), and second, it bought Apple the time it needed to get the SDK finished and out the door.

One question on people's minds was, "why February?" I mean, it's clear that Apple has an SDK for the iPhone - otherwise, they'd never be able to create Mail, Mobile Safari, or any of the rest of the applications that come on the silly thing. Why not just make that available?

My bet is that these new, third-party iPhone applications will only work on a new version of the iPhone operating system - call it v1.5 - which will be based on Leopard. And while v1.5 wasn't ready in October, it will be by February.

Why Leopard? Well, aside from the obvious advantage of synchronizing the versions of OS X in the iPhone and on the Mac, Leopard has a number of new technologies that are great for your desktop iMac, but fantastic for mobile applications. Specifically, I expect that all iPhone applications will make use of:

• Garbage-collected Objective-C. Apple added garbage collection to their flagship development language, which is good in two ways. First, it makes it easier for developers to write code (there's one less thing to manage or worry about). And second, it reduces the likelihood that a given application will have a memory leak. Memory leaks are never good, but they're deadly on a small device like a phone, which is both resource-constrained (less RAM) and designed to never be turned off. Requiring the use of Objective-C 2.0 will mean that the iPhone - and its applications - run more reliably.
• Code signing. Code signing allows iPhone applications to be "tied" back to a particular developer or company, which gives users (and other parties) an audit/accountability trail if an application does something malicious or bad. I expect that the iPhone will require all its applications to be signed; if your application isn't signed by an authority Apple recognizes, it won't run. Again, this protects the overall iPhone experience by dramatically reducing the attack vector for malware, trojan horses, and the like.
• Sandboxing. Sandboxing is a security technique that prevents your application from doing certain things on the operating system - writing files to the disk, say, or talking to the network. In Leopard, certain Apple services and applications (Bonjour, Safari, Spotlight) are sandboxed to prevent them from compromising the rest of the system. I expect that any third-party iPhone application will also be sandboxed - developers won't be able to access the phone internals, willy-nilly, but will instead be given access to certain services and systems - and nothing else. (In this regard, it won't be too unlike Java.) Protects the system, protects user data, prevents bad things from happening.
• Core Animation. The iPhone user experience is nothing if not gratuitously flashy - this zooms, that bounces, this other thing shimmers. People love it - it's fast, it's fluid, it's fantastic. Historically, Apple has provided this kind of eye candy in its own products by employing an army of graphic artists and OpenGL gurus; in Leopard, you can simply add a few lines of code your application and the OS will make the flashy animations happen for you. It's very cool stuff, but critical for a nascent platform like the iPhone that's trying to develop its own visual language. (I mean, could you imagine an iPhone application that didn't feel as ooey-gooey fluid as the built-in stuff? Ick.)

What this means as well is that iPhone applications will be Cocoa applications. No Carbon (and certainly no Classic), no Java, no Python or PHP.

OK, so now we know how these applications will be built - the next question is, how do users get to them? Will this be like the Mac shareware market, where people just offer downloads off their Web sites? Or will this be classic commercial software, sold in a box through Amazon or the local Apple Store?

The short answer, I think, is iTunes.

Today, people get a ton of content for their phones or iPods by going to the iTunes Store. You can get music and movies, as well as podcasts, TV shows, and iPod games. And, I suspect, when Jane Developer wants to put her newly-created Widget 1.0 for iPhone in the market, she'll do so much like she would with a podcast - she'll park it on a Web server somewhere, fill out a form on the Apple site, and, within a short period of time, the product will appear in the iTunes Store for purchase. Like podcasts, Jane Developer will be able to pick a handful of categories that apply to her app ("Games", "Productivity", "Utility", etc.), write some marketing text, have a cool icon. Like everything in the iTunes Store, users will be able to rate Widget 1.0 and leave feedback for others to see. And the whole transaction will take place in the iTunes environment, with Apple collecting a cut of the proceeds.

For users, this is about the slickest thing ever. It extends the iPod shopping metaphor they're used to, and lets them use their current payment preferences (via their Apple ID) to just ... buy more stuff. I'd even wager that iTunes gift cards will be applicable toward third-party software, as well.

If I'm right about this, there's a lot of goodness here for prospective iPhone developers. Because the phone is based on OS X, they get a modern, object-oriented codebase, a lot of world-class system services and features, and a high-quality desktop development environment. They also get a simple hardware target (for today, at least, the iPhone is the iPhone is the iPhone), which dramatically reduces the complexity of testing. Small developers will love the fact that iTunes handles marketing, payment, distribution and installation.

In fact, this approach neatly solves a lot of long-standing problems in the mobile phone market.

Consider the plight of a smartphone developer today. Let's say Jane Developer wants to write Widget 1.0 for Symbian or Windows Mobile - great. Here's her problem - her prospective user base is highly fragmented:

• Some (most!) phones have a traditional 12-key keypad; others have full keyboards.
• Some phones have touchscreens; others will not.
• Some phones have WiFi or Bluetooth; others don't.
• Some phones have data plans associated with them; many do not.
• Some phones have cameras. Some have video cameras. Some have neither.

And so on. Now layer on a little more complexity - different installation techniques for phones. Some carriers (such as AT&T) want you to buy software "over the air" from them (paying data fees, of course) and install it in your phone that way. Others might want you to download programs off the Web (hello, Palm!) and "sideload" the installation.

And so Jane, poor developer that she is, is stuck writing lowest-common-denominator products for the widest possible audience, or is going to have to pick a relatively scoped market (e.g., PalmOS machines with color screens) for a higher-end application.

Marketing Jane's software might be difficult, too - she's got to build herself a Web site, come up with a payment-processing system, and then fight to get the attention of prospective buyers by using search-engine optimization techniques, buying AdSense ads, or both.

In short: being a small software developer is hard; being a small software developer for a mobile platform is hellish.

The iPhone turns a lot of this on its head.

In many ways, the business model for iPhone development has more in common with video game consoles - the XBox 360, PlayStation 3, or Wii - than it does with the traditional PC. For developers, the value proposition of a game console is simplicity - an Xbox 360 is an Xbox 360 is an Xbox 360. Each 360 has the same processor, the same video card, the same amount of memory. If you can write a game for one 360, it'll run on all of 'em. And because developers know what kind of hardware their prospective customers are working with, they can push it - really make the most of the platform they're on. It's one reason that second-gen video games for a given platform always look so much better than first-gen games - the developers have figured out how to tweak and push the hardware in new ways, get more out of it.

The iPhone is very much like this. Every iPhone has a fantastic color screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, a data plan, 8 GB of memory, a camera, and is linked to a PC or Mac with great desktop software called iTunes. This means that developers will go crazy making the most of this hardware/software combination, pushing the phone to do things that other phones simply can't do - or, at least, can't do in sufficient numbers to be interesting, market-wise, especially when the iPhone is already outselling all Windows Mobile devices combined.

(And yes, future iPhones will undoubtedly bring more capabilities - more storage, 3G data connections, etc. - but I believe the basic form factor is unlikely to change for quite some time.)

In short - the iPhone platform is going to bring the trifecta of 1) a stable, known hardware platform, 2) desktop-class development tools and technologies, and 3) dead-bang easy software marketing, distribution and installation to a fragmented market. And, I predict, it will be the dominant mobile development platform in less than 24 months.

I certainly wouldn't want to be Palm or Nokia right about now.

On a final note, I'm intensely curious to see what the success of the iPhone platform will mean for Mac users. Apple has stated that they plan to sell 10M iPhones by the end of 2008; based on current sales trajectories, I see no reason they won't hit it. That represents roughly 10% of the 100M-unit smartphone market; as Apple attempts to convert the majority of their 110M+ iPod customers to iPhone customers, it's eminently reasonable to assume they'll have 30M phones in circulation by the end of 2010.

Read that again: 30M phones. As a point of contrast, that's roughly the size of the Mac installed base (!).

Remember that iPhone developers are actually OS X developers, and remember that iPhone developers are using many of the same tools and APIs that you would use to develop for the Mac. Suddenly, as the iPhone attracts talented developers, many of those developers will find themselves with a lot of knowledge about how to create great Mac applications, too.

I predict that the iPhone developer community will be a steroid for Mac development in general, and we are going to have a flood of new Mac applications hitting the market after the next year or two. New products, new ideas, new companies - all made possible because the delta between iPhone development and Mac development is much smaller than, say, the delta between Palm development and writing for Windows. (And, if you're a Mac rock star like Cabel Sasser or Wil Shipley, the iPhone is a win-the-lottery kind of new-market opportunity.)

This flood of Mac apps isn't the point of the iPhone; rather, it's the spoils of victory. If Apple really manages to harmonize its developer story across its devices and desktops, really manages to crack the marketing, distribution and commerce problems, and really delivers a viable, vibrant market by selling the hell out of its product - then they've got it.

One way or the other, it'll be fascinating to watch.

(And frankly, I think they're going to pull it off.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 21, 2007 11:21 AM.
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December 17, 2007

"oPtion$: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs"

I'm a regular reader of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (if you like snarky tech, it's a must-read), and recently finished the book by FSJ, called, "oPtion$: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs". Bill had snagged a copy when it first came out, and just raved about it, so I placed a hold through SPL.

Now I know why Bill loved it so much: it's laugh-out-loud funny. Really, really great.

First, the basics: "oPtion$" isn't some kind of tell-all book about Real Steve Jobs or Apple. Instead, it's all about Silicon Valley, unchecked egos, and narcissism. In fact, FSJ is sort of a geek Paris Hilton - he's famous, yes, but mostly famous for being famous, and woefully free of any actual talent.

The book's got zingers a-plenty, mostly run through the lens of people doing things that annoy Steve:

Suddenly the air feels really, really cold, and it's so quiet that I can hear the air conditioning whirring in the walls, and I'm thinking to myself, Holy friggin mother of Jesus, I am so going to kill the a-holes who did the HVAC work in this place. Because I specifically told them I want this place silent. Not quiet. Silent. Like a friggin tomb, I told them. Yet there's this whirring in the walls as if we're up in a jet at thirty thousand feet. How am I supposed to concentrate? This is how I'm supposed to work? I can't even hear myself think.

Or consider this great example of how FSJ and Larry Eillison spend their weekends:

Rat Patrol is what Larry calls it when we drive his Hummer up to the city and cruise the Tenderloin in the middle of the night, wearing balaclavas and commando outfits and firing Super Soakers at transvestite hookers. You get points for how many you hit, with bonuses for letting them get as close as possible to the Hummer before you leap through the roof and open fire. We've done it a few times and I'll admit, it's pretty fun, especially when the trannies get all pissed off and start shouting and swearing. Larry aims for the face, and tries to blow their wigs off.

We learned this game from Arnold. He and Charlie Sheen invented it in Los Angeles with a couple of other guys. They call it Commando.

The book's plot revolves around Apple's stock-options scandal from earlier this year; Jobs is tortured by an incompetent board, rebellious iPhone engineers, and a Zune-toting, Windows-loving prosecutor who thinks Steve is a poseur.

It's fantastic.

FSJ, if you don't know, is really author Daniel Lyons from Fortune. Lyons did an appearance at Microsoft earlier this year (we regularly host speakers on campus), and the talk was videotaped ... it's damn funny (and not remotely safe for work - the guys swears a lot). Check it out (note: requires Windows and Internet Explorer).

The book's a definite recommend.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 17, 2007 11:13 AM.
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December 13, 2007

Office 2008 Released To Manufacturing

It's official: Mac Office 2008 has been released to manufacturing. The product launch is January 15 at Macworld.

(And, I know I uh, work for MacBU and all that, but I really like the software.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 13, 2007 7:15 AM.
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November 16, 2007

Awesome Apple Ad Parody

Valleywag carried a link this morning to this outstanding Apple ad parody. Any Apple fan who listens to the lyrics will immediately start giggling.

And, if you're interested, the original ad can be found here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 16, 2007 4:42 PM.
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October 16, 2007

Leopard Arrives Oct. 26

It's official: Apple has announced that Leopard will be available on October 26. The online store is taking pre-orders now; retail price is $129 for individuals, $199 for the family pack.

Get 'em while they're hot!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 16, 2007 7:03 AM.
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September 6, 2007

Apple: Early Adopters Get $100

Yesterday, Apple announced that they were slashing the price on the iPhone by $200 - the 8GB phone, formerly priced at $599, was now $399.

This is clearly great news for Apple (they'll sell a gadzillion of them), great news for phone buyers (a great phone is now cheaper), and bad news for people who ragged on Apple's pricing.

However, a number of people in the Mac community lost their shit about the price cut, feeling, in no small way, that they were victimized/gouged/screwed when they bought their iPhone for its formerly-suggested retail price.

I am not one of these people. The iPhone was worth $599 to me, I paid $599, I'd pay $599 again. It's an amazing product. I've also been around long enough to know that a) v1 is never as good as you think it'll be, b) capacities/capabilities will go up, and c) prices will come down. It's the nature of being early.

Well, today, Apple announced that they're going to give an $100 Apple Store credit to all the early iPhone buyers out there:

I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

...Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple's website next week. Stay tuned.

Clearly, I'll take the $100, but I'm really surprised by this. The goodwill Apple is buying with this move is astounding, and, frankly, cheap - they're going to give away $100M (1M iPhone customers x $100 per customer) to basically protect their brand.

Wow, is all I can say. Smart move, folks.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 6, 2007 12:57 PM.
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July 26, 2007

Switching To The Mac(BU)

As of August 13, I'm starting a new job here at Microsoft. I'll be a Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU - pronounced "Mac Boo"), working to help design and build the next generation of Microsoft Office for the Mac.

I can't even begin to express how thrilled I am.

When I've shared this news with people over the past few days, I've received one of two responses. They are:

1. It's about damn time. Pass the sugar.
2. Whaaaaaaaaaa? I thought you liked Product Planning!

I'll take each in order.

First, it's no great secret that I'm a longtime Apple fan. I won't bore you with the usual discussion of my bona-fides, like when I got my first Mac (1990) or what model it was (SE/30); suffice to say that I've been doing my Amateur Apple Pundit Thing on this blog for a good three years now, and the company is clearly a passion of mine. I like their products, like their focus on the customer experience and think they're producing some of the hottest stuff in the industry right now.

MacBU is the largest Mac development shop outside of Apple (the Seattle PI did an article on the team a few years ago, called, "The Mac Lovers Of Microsoft"), and our flagship product is Mac Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, and Messenger). So if you want to have an impact on the software that a lot of Mac users use (which, uh, I do), Microsoft is an excellent place to do it.

Second, I do like Planning. I've been "living the dream" in Office - doing an interesting job with great people - since I connected with the Product Planning team as an MBA intern in 2004. Planning has been nothing but nice to me, generous with their trust and their resources. I've learned a lot, met wonderful folks, and done some work that I'm very proud of (and which you all will be able to see when Office ships next).

So why change?

Well, I've seen Microsoft VP Robbie Bach speak on more than one occasion, and whenever he talks about career development he invariably talks about building your "portfolio of skills." Broadly, this means you should look at what you do and don't do well, what parts of the company you have or have not worked on, and so on. In Bach's view, it's smart to do a 360-degree analysis of your skills, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and plug the gaps by trying new stuff from time to time. He counsels you to go give yourself experiences that seem interesting (work abroad, do a stint in sales, dabble in operations, etc.), and that pull you out of your comfort zone.

I find this model compelling. One reason I went to business school was because I wanted to try working for a big company. Office Product Planning was my first taste of that, and the experience has been well worth having. But as time has gone on, I've found myself yearning to own more and more of the product, take things from idea to execution, bring new stuff to market. It's something I've done in a startup context, but never with, you know, serious budgets and millions of customers. And of course, if I'm going to build something, I'd like to be building something I'm emotionally invested in, that I really care about. In my world, that really boils down to Internet stuff and/or Mac stuff.

Hence, I've been sniffing around the MacBU for a good while now, doing informational interviews and generally making a pest of myself. I heard earlier this year that the Program Manager gig might be coming, and, when it got posted, I went for it - submitted the resume, did the interviews, the works.

And now, well, you're reading about it.

I'm jazzed. Just .... jazzed. Jazzed about the job, jazzed about the Mac, jazzed about learning new skills, jazzed about getting to work on products that I'll have in my Dock. Jazzed that I'm going to get paid to attend things like MacWorld and WWDC, jazzed that my primary work machine is a MacBook Pro, and jazzed that I'll need to partition it for the Leopard beta, cause, you know, I need to know about that stuff for work. But mostly, I'm jazzed that I get to work on crazy/cool new software ideas that will, undoubtedly, keep my brain running full-speed.

Drawbacks? Yeah, a few. Elaine and I just finished moving (Megaproject #1), and all of this happened a lot faster than I thought it might. In my mind, any kind of job transition was going to kick off after we got back from our honeymoon in September. This would let us use the summer to plan the wedding and get married (Megaproject #2), and then figure out what to do, career-wise (Megaproject #3). But life kind of has its own schedule. This came up early, I realized I wanted it, and the tumblers all clicked. So #3 happened second, and my summer is going to be even nuttier than expected.

One thing I've been particularly impressed by is how open the process has been, internally. My lead and I had our mid-year career discussion back in February, and I told her I was planning to make a play for a Mac job if one became available. We've kept in touch on the issue over the last few months; I let her know that the job was getting posted, let her know when I applied, and so on. Being transparent has helped both of us plan for a clean, clear transition. Planning has been nothing but great about all this - Microsoft's got a strong commitment toward keeping people in the business, and working on projects that make 'em want to get in to work every morning.

(Which, uh, this does.)

So I'm winding down my Planning activities, transitioning my work to others, and, as I understand it, my MacBook Pro is on order. And about two weeks from now, I'll be reporting to work in Building 115.

Watch this space for details.

(Jazzed.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 26, 2007 9:16 AM.
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July 11, 2007

Convenience Samples: A Pictorial Representation

In market research, a convenience sample is defined as follows:

A convenience sample is a sample where the patients are selected, in part or in whole, at the convenience of the researcher. The researcher makes no attempt, or only a limited attempt, to insure that this sample is an accurate representation of some larger group or population.

Convenience samples are generally bad, because the researcher winds up gathering data from people he or she knows. Since people generally (but not always) associate with people who are like them, that often results in the survey data reflecting the researcher's own biases - and not the tastes of a larger population. Which, when you're gauging something like, oh, say, the public's appetite for a new product, is pretty damn important.

I bring all of this up because Richard and Melissa were kind enough to throw Elaine and me a wedding shower on Saturday, and, as our friends arrived, they'd generally toss their keys and cell phones on the kitchen counter.

The photo kinda says it all:

We had quite a lineup: 6 iPhones, 2 BlackBerries, and a RAZR.

(I guess I really do live in a bubble.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 11, 2007 10:21 PM.
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July 1, 2007

My iPhone Adventure

I did, indeed land myself an iPhone on Friday.

There was a lot of debate amongst my friends about where to go to be assured of getting product at launch. Richard, for instance, was a proponent of finding the small, out-of-the-way AT&T store in, like, rural Idaho - someplace without much of a line. For my money, though, the U Village Apple Store was the only place to go: as the flagship Seattle store, it was guaranteed a good supply of the phones ... and it's where the party was going to be. (I mean, waiting in line for Star Wars is as much the experience as the movie itself, right?)

We weren't disappointed.

Bill and I got to the U Village around 2:45 PM and took our places at the end of the line. Adrian was happily sequestered up front (#36!), but I managed to land at #195. The line would later grow to about 350 people before the doors opened at 6.

The mood was, well, happy. People were settling in, enjoying themselves, chatting with their friends and one another. One guy brought his ClearWire Internet service and was broadcasting it over WiFi for the benefit of the public. Another guy ordered pizza, and shared slices. There were three TV news trucks, plus newspaper folks walking around, doing interviews, shooting footage. The Apple employees would walk the line every 30 or 45 minutes, handing out bottled water and thanking people for coming; other folks would also walk the line, handing out flyers for their Mac-troubleshooting businesses, or four-color postcards advertising their new Web sites, games, or iPhone accessories.

(And, in perhaps the funniest, least-effective expenditure of marketing dollars ever, a Verizon Wireless billboard truck cruised the parking lot for two hours before launch. The crowd started laughing - loudly - when it arrived.)

I was surprised at the number of people I ran in to, or who showed up to join me in line. Bill and Adrian were there, of course, but over the next few hours I found myself joined by Richard, Melissa, Hessan, Pete, and Jeff (kids in tow). Elaine came, too. (Best. Girlfriend. Ever.)

The doors opened at 6, the cry went out, people started clapping. And, by 6:45 PM, Elaine and I were standing outside the Apple store, phones in hand, smiling and blinking in the sunlight. Four hours, start to finish.

I got home, opened the box, and plugged it in to my MacBook. iTunes came up and did what it was supposed to. I switched my current Cingular account over to the iPhone (it even detected my corporate-discount plan through Microsoft), entered my Apple ID, and clicked "OK" on the terms and conditions for both Apple and AT&T. It then tried to process my activation, but came back and said it was taking too long, and the system would e-mail me once it had been completed.

Twenty minutes later, I was up and running. I gave the phone a name, and the system auto-synced my calendars and contacts from my Mac. I then checked some options for the photos, music, podcasts and movies I wanted to have on the device (even with the 8 GB iPhone, I can't fit all of my media on it), hit "apply" and waited for the file-copy to finish. Bing, bang, boom.

So what's it like? Four words: holy crap, it's cool.

Some notes:

• The thing is gorgeous. The product shots don't do it justice. It's smaller than it looks, and the finish and polish are just stunning. The screen is the nicest, brightest screen I've ever seen on a small device. It has a great heft in the hand. It practically oozes high-tech sex appeal.
• The various systems on the phone are all tightly integrated in incredibly smart ways. The contacts engine, for instance, is available to applications elsewhere. When you're making calls you can easily look people up by name, of course, but you can also look up people's addresses when you're in the Google Maps application, or people's URLs when you're in Safari. This level of interconnectedness makes the phone super-useful, because you're not being forced to re-enter data that the operating system already has.
• The "home" button is mechanical, so it gives a nice, satisfying click when you touch it. Like the iPod, the iPhone works on the idea of getting people "up" to the top level of the menu in order to make choices about what to use. It's slick, slick, slick. I've been lost in the Cell Phone Maze Of Confusing Screens And Dialogs on other phones (*coff* 8125! *coff*), but that's just not possible, here -- if you're done with SMS and want to browse the Web, just go Home and then touch Safari. Clean.
• Making calls is simple (especially because of the contact list). Calls sound great, too. The speakerphone works as advertised (and yes, you can play iPod audio - music, podcasts, etc. - through the speakerphone). The gem, however, is the included earbuds; they have a small microphone on the wire that lets you use it as a headset. It's incredibly pleasant and simple - say you're walking along downtown, listening to music, and you get a call. Just click the button on the headphones, and take the call. When you're done, your music starts playing, right where you left it. I honestly don't see a need for a Bluetooth headset with this device.
• Scrolling through lists with your finger and "pinching" to zoom in or out is the most natural thing in the world. The fact that Apple has animated these systems so playfully means that it's fun, too. I honestly have found myself scrolling through lists just for the hell of it.
• As an iPod, the iPhone just rocks. The music player is fluid, fast - paging through singles and albums is far more fun than it ever was with the scroll-wheel on the iPod. As Jobs says, you can "touch your music" and it's true - CoverFlow and all the animation work really make it seem like you're reaching through the screen to touch the album art or playlists. It's addictive. And the phone sounds terrific, too.
• Safari is the phone's under-hyped feature. It's a full-blown, honest-to-God Web browser in your pocket, which means you can go, uh, anywhere on the Internet without having to use some kind of crappy, mobile-only interface. Suddenly, that cool Web site with bus arrival information is at your fingertips, as are Mariners schedules, traffic flow maps, magazine articles, live news, you name it. The Internet is with you everywhere. And since the iPhone Safari syncs with the bookmarks on the Mac, it's easy to build a list of links that are handy on the go, and then just drop 'em into an iPhone folder.
• Despite all the whining and hand-wringing, I find the AT&T EDGE network to be OK. It's not super-fast, but it's acceptable. And the WiFi works great, so when I'm home it's damn fast.
• Nobody seems to have noticed that Apple is now shipping an iPod with WiFi (and Bluetooth, and EDGE, and GSM) -- they've gone from no wireless at all to four different types of wireless communication in one release. This sets the stage for, well, all kinds of interesting things. (Welcome to the social?)
• The keyboard works great. The predictive-text thing makes text messages and e-mail a breeze. Some kinds of data entry are trickier, however - URLs come to mind - because the auto-correct logic doesn't work on them. Whatever -- it's still a hell of a lot easier than triple-tapping my RAZR to send an SMS to Elaine.
• Don't sell that Video iPod just yet -- the iPhone doesn't seem to work with my iPod accessories, like the Belkin TuneTalk. It also doesn't work with iPod games (e.g., Zuma).
• Parts of the phone are decidedly undercooked. The calendar, for instance, is clean, but lacks any kind of to-do information. This means I can't sync my daily tasks out of iCal and then check them off on the phone. As it is, the calendar shows you your appointments, but not what you need to accomplish. There's a way to go before it's a DayRunner.
• The notes, too, are just ... primitive. You can take notes on your iPhone, but you can't sync them with your Mac. This is absurd - what we all want is the ability to copy text files, PDFs, and other documents onto the iPhone so they're at hand when we need them. Think of your hotel or flight confirmations, a shopping list, or other things you'd like to have on your person as you go about your day. I mean, ideally, I'd get my Yojimbo archive copied into the phone, so I just have all my information, wherever I happen to be.
• The user interface is a bit inconsistent. The "edit" button jumps around a lot (on the top! on the bottom! Upper right corner!); some of the applications use the Widget-like "i" button instead of "edit." It's not a big deal, but it does seem like the sort of thing that Apple will smooth off and fix in subsequent releases.

And that's the big thing, here -- the iPhone is an amazing product (and doubly so for a v1), but the real excitement lies in what it will become over the coming years, as Apple enhances it with ever-more-clever software. They'll finish some of their applications (Notes, Calendar), smooth out the UI, and enable exciting new functions.

I can think of a good half-dozen interesting applications I'd like to see on (or build for!) the iPhone. I'm sure smarter guys than me have longer lists of more-interesting ideas, too.

Apple clearly has the heat in the market. Nokia, et. al. are going to have to work very, very, very hard to keep up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play with this thing for a while longer...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 1, 2007 10:46 AM.
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June 29, 2007

Off To The Circus

OK, so Bill and I are taking off for the U Village Apple Store - we're meeting up with a gaggle of fellow geeks to wait in the oh-so-growing iPhone line.(Rumor has it there's a good couple hundred people there already.)

Adrian's been there since 5:30 this morning -- he's #36. (Talk about hard-core!)

We should be situated by 3 PM or so. If you're heading down to see the show, look for us and say "hi"!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 29, 2007 1:39 PM.
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Out Of The Box

Earlier this week, Apple posted a video that shows how you activate the iPhone. As I plan to buy an iPhone tonight (provided, of course, that supplies are available) this was of no small interest - I mean, I'm a current AT&T/Cingular customer, and was curious about how the whole buying experience was supposed to work.

I have generally found the process of buying a new cell phone to be, well, laborious. Usually, even if you know the phone you want, you're going to sink 10 or 20 minutes working with the rep behind the counter as they activate your new phone, switch over your account, validate your credit card, run a credit check, take a blood sample, have you sign the new two-year agreement, switch the SIM card from one phone to the other, and so on. I've had some great experiences of late at the Cingular store at Pacific Place Mall (they're very pro down there), but even those experiences tend to be far, far more time-consuming than, say, buying an iPod (walk in, grab box, pay nice man, walk out).

This 10-to-20 minute transaction overhead for cell phones was spookin' me - there's going to be a gazillion people waiting in line for iPhones across the country, and, in my mind's eye, I envisioned crazy pandemonium at Apple and AT&T stores as rabid would-be buyers tried to get the attention of harried clerks, each of whom was already working to serve 4 or 5 different customers by getting their phones sold/activated. Cell phone stores have the luxurious, languid feeling of a country club at, like, 3 PM on a Sunday - nowhere else to be, nothing to do, have another highball - whereas tonight is going to be something more akin to Christmas shopping during Cabbage Patch Kid/Tickle Me Elmo season. Put frankly, the cell industry has never seen demand for phones that looks anything like this.

So it pleased me to no end to see that Apple, apparently, knows that the cell-phone-activation experience could be improved, and has elected to reboot it. Rather than activate your iPhone at the Apple/AT&T store, you just buy the box, take the phone home, and activate it there.

Over the Internet.
Through iTunes.

This is genius.

I'm unbelievably impressed with how smart this is, and am also agog at, once again, how much flexibility Apple is able to wring out of its business partners while improving its customer experience. A few thoughts:

• Assuming the activation works as advertised, this may be the best phone-buying experience ever. The iTunes assistant walks you through the necessary steps to turn up the account ("Are you a current AT&T customer?"), helps you add a line or switch your account over to this new plan, and so on. It's simple, it's easy. And it also lets people on Verizon, et. al. easily port their current mobile numbers over to their new account.
• Apple is using their iTunes music store account/Apple ID to verify your personal information, and also to ensure that, if you're already an Apple customer, your data-entry requirements are minimal. Again, slick, and again, a great user experience.
• The sales model for iPhones is totally frictionless. Most cell phones (at least, non-prepaid phones) require some assistance to buy - that's the reason you see those Cingular and T-Mobile kiosks at every mall you go to. Selling a phone requires trained staff and dedicated activation equipment. iPhone doesn't need that. Rather than sell you a "phone" in the conventional sense, Apple is going to sell you a "box" that you take home to do the important stuff. This also means Apple can sell iPhones anyplace you can buy a box, which is pretty much anywhere - Fry's, MacMall, Best Buy, Target, you name it. Adding retail partners is trivially easy - no special training or equipment necessary - and it also makes the phone-buying experience similar to the iPod-buying experience. Smart, smart, smart - and it also lets Apple reach consumers away from the naysaying voices of the dudes at the Sprint/T-Mobile/Verizon stores.
• iPhones will be an easy, easy item to give at Christmas.
• AT&T's cost of sales is going to go through the floor. I can just imagine AT&T CEO David Dorman rubbing his hands with glee when he sees how many people have switched over to his network after this weekend - and he didn't do anything except watch the money roll in. AT&T will be able to scale sales to an unprecedented volume for a fraction of their traditional, per-transaction variable costs.
• It's hard to overstate how much of a strategic asset iTunes has become. It's a jukebox, a synchronization engine, an e-commerce front end for music, movies, TV shows, and games, a podcast and radio directory, the hub of AppleTV, and, now a seller of wireless services. It's also Just Great Software. The Nokias and Motorolas of the world are so far behind on this score - handset-maker PC software has always sucked, and as a result the experience of pairing a phone to your PC for, well, anything has been strictly for propellerheads. They're really behind.
• (Note to makers of cell phones everywhere: it's great that your phone can play music or look at pictures, but if your sync experience blows, nobody's gonna do it. And thus, your functionality might as well not exist. This is one of the big iPhone lessons, right? There's a difference between checkbox-feature and useful-feature. For some reason, people prefer to pay for the useful features.)
• I'm pleased with the cost of the data plans. Apple and AT&T did a good job of making the call+data rates competitive (cheap, actually), adding roughly $20 a month to the standard cell plans. This will only drive more smartphone adoption. Back when the iPhone was announced, I predicted that this was the best thing ever to happen to Cingular's data business. Hoo, boy it's true: let's say Apple & AT&T sell 3M iPhones by the end of this year. That means there are now 3,000,000 people paying $20 a month to AT&T for data - that's $60,000,000 a month ($720M in annual revenue). That's three-quarters of a billion dollars a year in (mostly) new contribution, against a system that's basically all fixed costs. The finance MBAs must be peeing themselves with excitement.
• It's also interesting that Apple sells the rate plans, and brands them as 'iPhone plans."
• I wonder if anyone at AT&T has thought about what happens when their exclusive deal with Apple is up. I mean, it's pretty trivial to imagine Apple cutting deals with Sprint, T-Mobile, or any other GSM wireless carrier and then simply offering those providers through iTunes in 2010 or 2012 or whenever. Apple owns everything here - they own the experience, they own the customer, they own the brand, they own the technology. The future relationship of the cell provider to iTunes will be identical to the relationship between music labels and the iTunes store - just one more thing Apple sells to add value to its products.
• The Outlook and Entourage (yay!) integration are nice, nice touches. Apple could have easily just supported its own stuff (Mail.app only), but instead took an inclusive route and supported our stuff, too. Bravo.

Really, as boring as an "activation video" might be - check it out. The sales model for the iPhone may well shake the industry as much as anything else: "just buy the box and use the Internet to do the rest."

I'm in line for the 8GB version this afternoon.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 29, 2007 7:53 AM.
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June 24, 2007

Same Planet, Different Worlds

One thing that's surprised me about the whole moving-in-together thing has been how much time I spend checking my calendar.

Elaine and I are both pretty social, and as such we're forever trying to schedule ourselves or the other for dinners, lunches, walks around Greenlake, barbecues, Storm games, and the like. Until about a month ago, we generally did this with e-mail, which was like this extended game of Battleship:

G: "I'd love to have Bill and his wife over for dinner. How's the 18th?"
E: "No, I can't do the 18th. I have a thing with [insert group of friends here]."
G: "Hm. Weeknights are tough for them, so it's gotta be a weekend. How about the next week?"
E: "Uh ... well, Sunday might work, but we have that party with [insert group of friends here] on Saturday night."
G: "Drat, I forgot about that. And Sunday won't work, because I'm going out with [Microsoft people/MBA people/others] for drinks."
E: "Well, we could try ..."

So the conversation continues like this over several more exchanges, and, eventually, we locate a date that seems to work ("You sank my battleship!"). Then I just have to see if Bill's OK with a) the weekend we've chosen, and b) being scheduled out two years.

And then, a month ago, we tried switching from e-mail to using a series of shared Google Calendars.

It's like going to heaven.

If you've not tried it, Google Calendar is a terrific Web-based calendar. It's very simple, very usable, and very powerful -- a great Web application that feels a lot like a desktop app. However, the secret sauce of Google Calendar (much like the secret sauce of most of Google's Web applications, like Docs & Spreadsheets) is that Calendar makes it possible to share your calendars with others.

The scenario breaks down like this. I log in to Google Calendar and populate a calendar with a handful of my personal appointments. I want to share this with Elaine, so she knows where I am (and whether to expect me for dinner). So in the Calendar, I click on the options drop-down, select 'Share this Calendar' and then enter Elaine's e-mail address. She gets an invitation in e-mail to look at my calendar, which, when clicked, adds my appointments to her Calendar interface. Simple.

We've set up a few different calendar files, based on the context of what we'll be doing. Our "big three" are:

• At Home. (What's goin' on at the house?)
• Social Engagements. (Who're we hanging' with?)
• Travel. (Where are we?)

We also have the Storm Home Game calendar, and I've put up a calendar for my hobby stuff (e.g., singing).

Since we're now both working on the same calendar file, we have a need to let the other one know if a given event is for one or the both of us. Thus, we flag appointments with "[G]", "[E]", or "[G+E]" to indicate whether the appointment involves me, her, or the two of us. (Entries have titles like, "[G] Drinks with Jon".)

We're about a month into using this system, and I can't go back to e-mail. Having everything consolidated into a single view (that I can get from any Web browser!) is fantastically convenient, and saves time. Bill can walk in to my office, talk can turn to that dinner we've been trying to plan, and I can give him some good dates right away, rather than playing the, "Uh, let me e-mail Elaine and see what her calendar is like" game.

Now right about now, I'm sure a few of you are asking, "But what about iCal? I thought you were all hot on your GTD, iCal-as-dashboard system! How does iCal know what's going on with your Google Calendar?"

This is a great point. One of the big challenges I've had with Google Calendar has been interoperability with iCal - out out of the box, iCal can subscribe to calendar items in Google Calendar (change it in Google Calendar, and iCal gets the change), but this is a purely one-way relationship - I can't use iCal to change what's on my Google Calendar.

And then came along Spanning Sync, and everything got better.

Spanning Sync closes the loop between Google Calendar and iCal. It's a Mac OS X Preference Pane that keeps selected Google Calendars in sync with the calendars on iCal, and vice versa. As a practical matter, this means I can continue working in iCal as I usually do - dragging around appointments, changing things - and Spanning Sync lets Google Calendar know, so Elaine gets the latest, freshest, most-up-to-date information. When I'm at home, I can work on my Mac; when I'm at work, I can use Google Calendar through the Web. It's seamless, slick, and, like all great Mac software, Just Works. It also allows me to keep using KGTD, MailTags, and all the other great stuff I rely on to manage my projects. Spanning Sync isn't free (I pay $25/year for it), but it does come with a 15-day trial to let you know if you'll like it or not.

(I liked it.)

So there it is. I know a lot of my fellow Geek Couples wrestle with this problem, too, so folks, lemme tell ya - give it a try. I predict you'll be able to leave "Battleship" where it belongs - at Game Night.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 24, 2007 10:57 AM.
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June 22, 2007

iPhone Guided Tour

If you want to see how-freakin'-unbelievable the iPhone is, take 20 minutes and swing on over to Apple.com for this guided tour. It's a shockingly good walkthrough of the product ... and now, of course, I can't wait to get my hands on one.

(Not that, uh, I was waiting very patiently before. Who else is waiting in line at U Village next Friday? Raise your hand...)

This is going to be a monster home run for Apple.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 22, 2007 11:04 AM.
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June 13, 2007

Thoughts On WWDC '07

I've been peppered with e-mail (and involved in an inordinate number of Mac-oriented conversations) over the last 48 hours, mostly relating to Monday's hotly-anticipated WWDC keynote. Generally, the question has been, "What did ya think?"

Now that I've had a day or so to noodle on it, here's where I come down.

• Generally, the keynote underwhelmed. Last August, Steve Jobs stood up at WWDC and made a big deal about how they were going to show Leopard, but were holding a few things back, ostensibly to delay being ripped off by Microsoft:
  

  So let me start off with some of the stuff that we can't show you. There's some top secret features to Leopard that we're going to keep a little close to the vest and we're not going to show you today. I just want you to know they're there. [Laughs] We don't want our friends to start their photocopiers sooner than they have to, and so we're going to keep a few things a little secret.

  So of course, the Mac community was all atwitter on Sunday to see what these goodies - now a year in the making - could possibly be.
  
  And when the answer came down, we wound up with a new Finder, a translucent toolbar, and Quick Look.
  
  Uh ...
  Hm.
  Really?
  
  Clearly, there's "top secret" and then there's "Top Secret!"
• The only conclusion I can draw from Apple's profound lack of a "wow" new announcement? They're maxed out. Like, they're firing on all cylinders, yes, but ultimately there are only so many great engineers, so many smart designers, so much time in the day. The iPhone absolutely, positively MUST be perfect - a good $7Bn of new revenue rides on that sucker - and so Steve and Bertrand Serlet made the hard call to cut some planned, kick-ass features from Leopard and shift those engineers over to iPhone. The much-ballyhooed Leopard Delay of April is just part of the story - the other part is that Leopard is likely not what it was originally intended to be.
  
  If true, I give points to Steve for being the one to put on the suit of armor, step on stage, and demo all the same stuff they showed last year. He didn't make some minion do it, and he didn't soft-pedal. In the software business, you ship what you've got ("Here's your Time Machine demo, and you'll like it ... Boom!")
• (Of course, depending on just how done some of these now-unreleased features are, this may mean that 10.6 will be sooner to market than expected.)
• There's a lot to like in Leopard, but most of the goodies are buried underneath the headlines. I'm personally most excited about Time Machine (automated backup bliss), Spaces (a non-retarded virtual desktop implementation), and Core Animation (fantastic-looking, cinematic applications).
• We have a new Finder, at long last (somewhere, John Siracusa is weeping with joy). While I've not had a chance to play with the Finder, I am optimistic that it won't, uh, suck as much as the current one. And I also find its resemblance to iTunes - playlists on the left, search on top, and frickin' Cover Flow, for Pete's sake - uncanny. The Finder, in effect, is the newest tool for getting Switchers to the Mac. I can almost see the demo in the Apple store, circa November: "If you have an iPod and use iTunes, you'll find navigating the Mac to be a similar, intuitive experience..."
• The new Desktop looks an awful lot like Vista, what with the translucent menu bar and reflective Dock. As someone who's' not too enthusiastic about Vista's look, this seems to be a step backward.
• StacksPiles look amazing. As a project-manager kind of guy, I can't wait to try 'em out.
• The new Mail got short shrift in the keynote, but I love the new (old?) Data Detectors functionality. It will be wonderful to have Mail be able to smartly talk to iCal or AddressBook when it gets formatted data in messages.
• Another under-the-hood investment - making OS X better on multi-core processors - is potentially very exciting. Mac apps should get pretty damn fast on Intel's increasingly-parallel architectures.
• While the eye candy (iCandy?) in iChat is all nice n' stuff, the ability to integrate presentations, movies, and other media into collaborative sessions is very exciting.
• Finally, the Safari thing -- at first, it was a bit of a headscratcher for me. I mean, why would Apple put money in to developing a free product that doesn't add value to their own platform? Doing iTunes makes perfect sense - it's free music software that sells iPod hardware - but what's the revenue model for Safari on Windows? Why do it?
  
  Gruber has some thoughts on this (it's all about Google ad revenue), but I actually think that Safari on Windows is about the iPhone.
  
  As Apple builds an increasing number of post-PC devices (e.g., iPhone and its descendants), a good Web browsing experience becomes increasingly critical to these success of these devices. Shipping a browser in the iPhone that's incompatible with some percentage of Internet sites (as Safari is today) is a glaring hole in the vaunted Apple Customer Experience. Apple customers need to have a first-class Internet experience, so Safari on Windows is about giving Safari a seat at the Web standards table - since it's no longer "just a Mac thing," we can expect that Web sites will be tested against it. Plus, by making the Windows Web browser market more than a two-horse race (no disrespect intended, Opera), Apple can potentially make Web standards more important to site developers.
  
  I'll be curious to see who the customers are for Safari on Windows. Will they be IE customers? Certainly there could be a set of people in the world that use (but aren't crazy about) IE, don't much like Firefox, and therefore are sticking with IE for the forseeable future. Will Safari grab 'em? Or, will Safari customers be Firefox users who dislike IE, but aren't crazy about Firefox, either - they just dislike Firefox less than they dislike IE?
  
  Or - perhaps more scarily for Apple - will anyone care that their browser is on Windows?
  
  One group of people who might care a lot are Mac users like Yours Truly who have Macs at home and PCs at work. If Apple did something smart with dot-Mac integration across platforms, they could conceivably offer me a set of remote services on Windows that let me get to my Mac data - bookmarks, sure, but perhaps files and other things, too - from anyplace with a Safari browser installed. And since Safari is going to come with iTunes (genius move, guys), that might actually be a huge number of machines in a very short period of time.
  
  (Oh, and is it worth pointing out that Google Docs & Spreadsheets now works in Safari?)

So. Leopard looks like a strong release, and I'll be right in line with my $129 for the "Ultimate" edition when it ships this fall.

But I can't help but wonder -- what on Earth did they cut from the product?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 13, 2007 10:20 AM.
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May 25, 2007

podSwapping, Reloaded

TUAW has a bit about an article from the Ocala Star-Banner called "The great iPod exchange" where two reporters swapped iPods to gauge one another's musical tastes:

The Star-Banner's Dave Schlenker and Brian Thornton traded iPods for a few days and assessed each other's taste in music. Because both iPods are Shuffles, there are no digital read-outs revealing song names, thus the listeners often had no idea what they were hearing.

TUAW asks:

I'll save the dramatic results for your own reading, but the concept is an interesting one: in a world where we increasingly are keeping more and more - or perhaps the entirety -of our music libraries in our pocket, what would happen if you temporarily traded your collection with a friend, co-worker or that guy you just can't meet eye-to-eye with on [insert band here]?

This, of course, gave me a fantastic sense of deja vu ... because Richard was suggesting something like this two years ago (today!). We called it "podSwapping":

While cooling down, we got in to an interesting discussion about the Shuffle as a new-music discovery device. The idea is simple: when you see someone else with an iPod Shuffle, stop and trade. Just pop the Shuffle out of its armband, exchange with the other person, pop their Shuffle into your armband, and keep going. Bingo! An entirely new set of music. Life is, indeed, random.

Its' still a great idea, and I've still got my 1GB Shuffle. Anyone wanna swap?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 25, 2007 1:06 PM.
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May 13, 2007

Airport Extreme, Super Duper, And A Good Night's Sleep

Last month, I upgraded the 'ol home WiFi network to the (allegedly) so-fast-it-hurts 802.11n standard, courtesy Apple's new Airport Extreme base station. I went with the Extreme for a lot of reasons - the speed was attractive, of course, as was my ability to collapse a bunch of older, loose pieces of Linksys network equipment (some of which was left over from my Vonage adventure) into one compact, gleaming, glowing chunk of Apple tech.

But the big reason I went with the Extreme was for its ability to share a hard drive across a network.

See, I'm a bit fanatical about backing up. Ever since my old PowerBook threw a drive in Orlando last July I've become that guy who backs up early and often. My usual routine involves a good, weekly dump to an external disk using SuperDuper!. Saturday morning rolls around, I plug in the drive, and then I'm off running errands for a few hours.

But I do a lot of work on my computer, and weekly really isn't good enough. The thought of losing my machine on a Friday night - and wiping out a week's worth of work - has been nagging me, and I've wrestled with good ways of solving the problem. SuperDuper will allow for regularly-scheduled backups (e.g., "please back up my machine every night at 9:30 PM"), which is great, except that at any given moment in time during the day, my MacBook is as likely to be on my lap as it is on my desk. And if I'm not at the desk, I'm not next to my backup drive ... and so the backup doesn't get done.

(This problem is going to get even worse when Time Machine comes out, as it creates a continuous backup of your machine, saving copies as you modify individual files or resources.)

So. Backing up more frequently is a really, really good idea, but to make it practical I needed a centralized data store, accessible over the wireless network.

Enter Airport Extreme.

Seriously, the Extreme is fantastic. I just plugged my external, 500-GB USB drive into the base station, turned on sharing in the Airport Utility, and - bingo! - the drive is available on my network. Mac OS X mounts the drive when I sign in to my home network; the network volume works just like you'd expect it to. (Which means that when I'm on free coffee shop WiFi, there's no network volume, but when I come home the thing mounts automagically.)

Performance isn't bad, but it's not as speedy as advertised. 802.11n, like 802.11b or g has two speeds: the "theoretical" transfer limit and the "real world" performance. Theoretically, 802.11n can deliver speeds up to 600Mbit/second. In the real world, transferring a 1.02gb QuickTime file took me a little less than 10 minutes in one test, and a little more than 15 in another - or 13Mbit/sec and 8 Mbit/sec, respectively. (I'm doing some tweaks to see about boosting this.)

But truthfully, the performance is acceptable, and the peace of mind from having a reliably-backed-up MacBook is well worth the expense. When Leopard comes out, I fully expect to point it at my network volume, and let OS X simply park my changed files on the backup store. And, of course, there's a lot of flexibility, too - if I need more storage space or a greater degree of robustness, I can swap out the standalone 500-gig disk for a multi-drive RAID array.

Peace of mind is wonderful.

(PS To My Fellow Computer Users Who Don't Back Up Regularly - as one who has lost more than one drive to the Angry Gods of Data Loss, please believe me when I say that you will curse the universe when your hard drive sloughs off this mortal coil. Back up, back up, back up. Unless you can afford to lose all your photos, music, e-mail and so on ... in which case, what are you using your computer for, anyhow?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2007 2:48 PM.
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April 7, 2007

Basis Of Competition

So the big tech news this week - at least, to me - was Monday's announcement from Apple and music publisher EMI that EMI songs would now be available on the iTunes Music Store without any form of DRM or copy protection.

As Keanu might say: whoa.

This is a very big deal, not least of which because it signals a sea change in how the music industry is dealing with the Internet. Historically, music executives have treated their Internet customers in a pretty shabby fashion - first by refusing to recognize the existence of an Internet marketplace at all (Napster changed that), then by building consumer-hostile music stores with poor selection, and, finally, suing people. Put bluntly, none of this has worked. CD sales are in free-fall, dropping 20% in the first quarter of 2006. The only bright spot in the music business has been music downloads through services like iTunes - which, incidentally, reported its 2-billionth song download in January.

So the market has spoken, and it's said that the future of music is digital. But the problem is: how do you deal with piracy?

It's no great secret that music piracy is rampant. It's trivially easy to share music files with people across the globe, and, as a result, people do so, swapping hundreds of thousands of files with one another each and every day. If you want a popular song for free, just fire up your peer-to-peer client of choice and go to town. It's illegal, but it's fast and convenient. And, as we all know, "fast" and "convenient" tend to be the winning attributes of most products these days.

The "solution" to piracy has been to put music in a format that prevents its being shared - e.g., DRM. And the music industry has embraced DRM with the strength and tenacity of a drowning man gripping a life preserver. When you buy music from virtually every legitimate service on the Internet (iTunes, Real Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music), your music comes in a "wrapper" that dictates how you can enjoy it. Depending on the complexity of the wrapper, you might be prevented from copying the song to a CD or to an iPod; might be prevented from "streaming" the song to another device (like an AppleTV or an Xbox 360), and so on. DRM adds complexity, and this complexity is hard for people to manage. As BusinessWeek's Steven Wildstrom recently wrote ("Now Playing: Digital Disarray"):

Imagine a bookstore that sells only works published by Random House. If you want a HarperCollins title, you have to go to the store down the street. In this world, you're permitted to read Penguin (PSO) books either on the train or lying in bed, but Vintage books can only be read on the couch. It's absurd—but no more so than the world of video downloads as they exist today.

All this complexity stands in stark contrast to the utter, beautiful, sheer simplicity of the Compact Disc: pop it in your computer, rip it to the drive, and enjoy your music, well, everywhere. And so continues the piracy problem, where thieves can easily and quickly get DRM-free music that is more convenient and less encumbered than stuff they'd otherwise pay a dollar for.

Steve Jobs has captured the sentiment and the problem quite eloquently in his February essay, "Thoughts On Music." And, it seems, he was serious about his closing statement:

Convincing [music publishers] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Steve clearly wasn't kidding, and, apparently, EMI decided that the current strategy (DRM, lawsuits, putting fingers in the ears and saying, 'la la la la la') wasn't working. So EMI have done a bit of corporate judo and changed the way they're going to deal with piracy. Rather than trying to eradicate piracy (an impossible dream), EMI has decided to stop selling its legitimate, paying customers a second-class product ... but to charge a little more for it ($1.29 per non-DRM track, vs. $0.99 for one that's DRM-encumbered). EMI is basically offsetting its piracy-related losses by charging an extra $0.30 per track to its legitimate customers.

This is pretty smart. I expect some marketing genius somewhere in EMI Intergalactic HQ finally did a customer segmentation study, and realized that the Venn diagrams of "paying customers" and "hardened pirates" were pretty much non-overlapping -- there's people who are willing to pay a fair price for music, and people who will never give a red cent to anyone for "Stairway To Heaven." And, if that's true, the trick for EMI is to treat those two groups as distinct segments, and to do a better job catering to those who are actually willing to part with their VISA number for the new Pet Shop Boys album (e.g., me). By charging a little more, EMI both earns greater revenue from its customers and gets some invaluable market data about which customers - and how many - are willing to pay more for DRM-free music.

If this takes off, expect the other labels to follow in very, very short order.

The second, less-discussed piece of Monday's announcement has been more surprising to some - namely, that Apple would be willing to sell DRM-free music in the first place. Bill Thompson of the BBC laid it out shortly after Jobs' announcement ("Why I Don't Believe Steve Jobs"):

I don't believe him. If Apple switched off [DRM] then they would probably sell a lot more songs, on which they make very little money, and a lot fewer iPods, on which they make a lot.

(Thompson has since admitted he was wrong - something I give major props for.)

Thompson's initial point, however, is a good one: Apple has been seen as benefitting from DRM even as it decried it. By selling DRM'd songs on iTunes that - mysteriously - only worked with iTunes, AppleTV and the iPod, Apple has built a nice little ecosystem for itself. Music is software, right? So just as a good selection Windows-only software reinforces the desire for people to buy a Windows PC (and reduces the ease of switching to a rival product) so too does iTunes/iPod-only music reinforce your desire to buy an iPod (and reduces the ease of switching to a rival product). It's called "lock-in".

So why give it up?

Well, near as I can tell, Apple has determined that it doesn't need DRM lock-in to win in the music market. And, apparently, they're so convinced of it that they're willing to roll the dice.

Apple is effectively saying that their value proposition without DRM is good enough, and that they're willing to compete on any other axis you like. They're going to compete on brand, on price, on SKU, on form-factor, on design, on hipness, and, of course, on experience.

This actually seems like a good bet to me.

Look, there have been MP3 players in the market for a long, long time - well before the iPod. The thing is, they all sucked. And, until the iTunes Music Store came around, the iPod was competing quite handily with these other players, thank you very much. The product was better, slicker - an integrated experience. And it's worth pointing out that here we are, six years after the iPod launch, and there's still not a product in the market that can touch it.

The experience piece is interesting, too. By ditching DRM, Apple is extending an olive branch to an entire class of musician and label - small indies, mostly - who have not been willing to deal with DRM on iTunes. This market has been ably led to-date by eMusic, and their catalog is a respectable collection of artists you might not have heard of, but who are willing to have their songs shared as a way of gaining exposure. Apple has said that they will be working with these small guys to get them into iTunes - which just makes the iTunes store more of a complete destination, a better experience.

This is phenomenally bad news for the business strategies of non-iTunes music stores, and for other music file formats (read: Windows Media) in general. Other storefronts are basically reduced to competing on selection (hard to do), or experience (even harder to do), while the value of exotic, DRM-laden file formats has just declined sharply.

If I were Samsung or Sony, I'd be making damn sure my player works with iTunes.

The next six months ought to be really, really interesting.

PS - it's worth pointing out that there's software lock-in, and there's partner lock-in, where your business partners add value to your offering that makes it more compelling. In this case, iPod partners include accessory makers who do add-on speakers or iPod cases, as well as people like airlines or car companies who make it easy to add an iPod option to your transportation. Apple hasn't given up their partner lock-in, and I don't expect them to any time soon. Since these partners all offer iPod connectivity through Apple's proprietary Dock Connector - which doesn't work with your Creative Zen Whatever - people will still have substantial incentive to buy an iPod, if only because they can play it through the stereo in their BMW or whatever. Don't cry for Apple just yet.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 7, 2007 6:42 PM.
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February 21, 2007

It's The Contract, Stupid

There's a great old story about Bob Metcalfe - the inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and former employee of Xerox PARC. It goes like this.

One day, Metcalfe invited a bunch of young, college-age electrical-engineering types (young Bobs, basically) over to his palatial Valley estate, which is all Roman columns and high ceilings and Sub-Zero freezers and Koi ponds. The geeks, of course, are doing what normal people do in these situations - they're standing, slack-jawed, staring around at the opulence and trying not to remember that their beat-up '86 Hondas need a new fuel pump sometime soon. One of them, sufficiently awed, says, "Wow. So this is what you get when you invent Ethernet."

Metcalfe, standing nearby, says, gently, "No. This is what you get when you sell Ethernet."

I love this story for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's a great reminder that, at the end of the day, technology is a business, and businesses must sell. Successfully bringing a product to market is as much about the product attributes/engineering as it is about how the product is brought to market - the customer segmentation, the message, the distribution channels, the partners, the pricing, the deal.

And at the core of every deal is a very, very good contract.

Bob Metcalfe understood this, and worked his tail off to ensure that Ethernet became the standard in the industry. His house (and his yacht, and his New York apartment, and his jet, and his small island in the Bahamas, yadda yadda) was the prize for making "the deal" happen by hook, crook, or skin of teeth.

Most big fortunes in the tech industry have been made because of superior dealmaking, rather than superior technology. The classic example, of course, is the deal Microsoft cut with IBM in the early '80s that licensed their (arguably technically inferior) MS-DOS to Big Blue for inclusion on the IBM-PC. The popularity of the PC ensured a nice chunk of direct revenue for Microsoft, but the fortune was made on one particular quirk of the deal - namely, that Microsoft would retain the rights to DOS, and was allowed to sell it to other firms. So when the PC clones arrived courtesy Compaq, et. al., well, Microsoft sold to them, too, and thus became the industry standard for the next 20 years.

To repeat: it was the deal, not the technology, that provided that first fortune. And in contracts, knowing what to ask for, and why, is huge. It's the ball game. It's knowing what you can give up, and what you have to hold fast on.

Flash forward to 2003. Apple unveils the iTunes Music Store, bearing (a whopping) 200,000 songs for purchase and download. While other online music stores existed before iTunes, none of them had serious traction in the marketplace, largely due to the bizarre/capricious pricing and licensing terms their purchased songs came with. Some songs might cost $0.79 per, but only be playable on a single PC, and not permit CD burning, other songs might cost more, and have more rights - e.g., burning but no portable music on one, portable music and sharing on another (but no burning). Consumers were, therefore forced to become very informed as a prerequisite to purchasing music, and, unsurprisingly, many chose not to buy in the new medium.

The iTunes Store, conversely, benefitted from a simple, direct value proposition to its customers: all songs $0.99, all songs playable on several computers, all songs burnable to CD a certain number of times, all songs playable on the iPod. This was not a technical innovation, but a contractual one - Apple deftly navigated the record industry, secured what they needed to make the iTunes Store successful, and drove that value deep into the market. Today, the iTunes Store is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the online music marketplace, aided, in no small part, by the fumbling of its rivals as they sought to get similar contractual terms for their own customers.

Again: the deal, not the technology, provided the fortune. And again, Apple knew what they needed to stand firm on - and where they could give - to write a very, very good contract.

I mention all of this as a preamble to the larger point of this post, which is about the contract Apple and Cingular struck to bring the iPhone to market. Back when the iPhone was announced, I commented in my post ("The Sound Of The Starting Gun"):

The Apple/Cingular contract is pretty interesting to me. Apple agreed to give Cingular exclusive carriage of its phones in exchange for design freedom. This, too, is huge. Historically, phone makers like Motorola and Nokia have designed cool features into their phones (WiFi, Bluetooth, PC syncing), only to have them stripped out or crippled by mid-level managers at Verizon, T-Mobile, et. al. because those features were perceived to be competing with some ridiculous service that the carrier wanted to sell to the consumer.

As details of the contract have come to light, it's clear that Apple has done something rather unprecedented (in a contractual sense): They have wedded themselves to the Cingular network in exchange for the unfettered right to make the phones they want to.

I predict that, for as cool as the iPhone is (and it is very, very cool indeed), the real home run for Apple will be in this contract. Apple has, with the stroke of the pen, given itself the kind of competitive advantage that no handset maker had been able to secure before now. Apple now has an enormous amount of flexibility and control over its fledgling handset business, and is free to make and sell the kinds of phones it wants to, without needing to go through traditional gates and channels. This will speed innovation in the market (barriers to innovation have been removed), but it will also give Apple a rather remarkable head start in designing - and selling directly - iPhone v2, v3, and so on.

Nokia, Motorola and others will surely be demanding deals from the carriers similar to "the one Apple got" but it's unclear what their leverage is to obtain it. And without such leverage, it's hard to see why Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon, et. al. will feel the least bit inclined to change their relationships with other handset makers. If the iPhone is a hit, then, yes, Verizon will feel the need to respond by loosening up the reins a bit ... but by then, the iPhone brand will be established, the phones themselves will be popular, and the other phone makers will have an enormous burden to explain to consumers why they ought to be purchased in lieu of an iPhone. In many ways, it's the music space all over again.

It's fascinating to watch an organization learn from its past mistakes (namely, the failure to protect the Mac GUI) so visibly, and so vibrantly.

As Metcalfe might say: "it's the contract, stupid." And the cell phone business never felt so exciting.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 21, 2007 10:06 PM.
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January 21, 2007

Death To Distractions!

Productivity guru Merlin Mann (he of 43 Folders) was on MacBreak about a month ago, doing a segment on how to reduce the number of distractions on your computer so you can focus and get work done.

I can certainly relate. Reducing/eliminating distractions has been the single most effective technique I've found to boost both the volume and quality of my work (see also: "7 Rules For Maximizing Your Creative Output"). Study after study show that a distracted worker is an unproductive worker; sadly, most snazzy new tech (chat clients, RSS readers, e-mail software) seems to be focused on interrupting you on a regular basis.

Be like Merlin: shut it all down.

When I've got to crank on something creative - a blog post, say - I tend to isolate myself. E-mail? Off. Chat software? Off. RSS reader? Off. Phone? Off. And so on. (I then put a nice, thumpin' stream of Groove Salad in my ears so I can get into flow, but your mileage may vary).

I've had good luck with Merlin's suggestions. Turning off the Dock has been valuable (although I'm annoyed at the slight delay it requires when I try to use it again); setting my desktop picture to something neutral has been good.

I'd like to just suggest two other products for his list.

First, I know the Mac Digerati are forever hot on Quicksilver as their application launcher of choice. I've tried it, and, personally, found it to be a bit too sluggish. My launcher of choice is LaunchBar - fast, fabulous, and, while not free, certainly worth paying for. I can keep my hands on the keyboard and zoom around my machine with ease. This makes it easy to get the resource I need, right when I need it, and helps me stay in flow.

Second, if you're sick of mousing to the Dock every time you want to bring up a window, you might give a look to Witch. By default, the alt-tab routine in OS X brings up an entire application; Witch, conversely, dices everything up into specific windows. In English: Witch lets you get access to that one window you had in that one app, without bringing every other window owned by that app along for the ride. Again - what you need, when you need it.

Do check out the segment (and heck, check out Merlin's podcast, too). At a minimum, it'll make you think about how your work environment might be working against you.

UPDATE, December 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 21, 2007 1:16 PM.
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January 12, 2007

A Quick Bit On Mac Office 2008

Todd Bishop's (must-read) Microsoft blog has a great write-up (and some sexy screen shots) of the forthcoming Mac Office 2008, due out later this year. It'll be Intel-native, and from the looks of it the team has done a great, great job. (Nice work, folks!)

CNET also has coverage.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 12, 2007 1:03 PM.
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January 11, 2007

The Sound Of The Starting Gun

Boy, when Steve Jobs wants to dazzle, he doesn't screw around.

It's 48-ish hours after the iPhone bombshell, and, truthfully, I'm still a bit in shock. The product is awesome, groundbreaking, controversial - everything it needs to be, and then some. People are arguing about its features (or lack thereof); others are frothing at the mouth in anticipation so vigorously that they'll probably need to be hosed off before they're let back in the house.

(Candidly, I'm probably closer to the second category than the first.)

Since the keynote, a few thoughts have crystallized. In no particular order:

• The cell phone business is forever changed. One of my co-workers, Joe, showed me his Blackjack at work last night, and asked what I thought of it. "I thought the Blackjacks were pretty cool," I replied, "Until about 24 hours ago." He laughed, but truthfully - who can look at a Q or a Treo today with anything other than pity? They're black-and-white TVs in a color world. You just can't see them the same way anymore.
• The iPhone is some of the best FUD ever. Seriously. I'm predicting a big chill in smartphone sales between now and June while the world holds its breath and waits for the iPhone to come out. If it sucks (it won't), people can still buy their Treo or Q or whatever, but if it's cool (it will be), who would possibly want to drop coin on the old stuff?
• (The market seems to be agreeing with me on this - Research In Motion's stock got hammered on the iPhone announcement.)
• The touch-screen interface on the iPhone is, itself, a dazzler; I don't know if you saw this ass-kickingly-cool "Multi-Touch Interaction Research" video from a year ago, but it's one of those things that just causes your jaw to ... slowly ... relax as you realize the power and possibility that physically interacting with a screen offers. We've all worked with crummy touch-screens, of course, and as a result Bill has expressed some skepticism to me about the iPhone's implementation ("I need to see it in person before I comment"). For my part, knowing Jobs' high standards for UI, usability, fit and finish, I can assure you that the thing is ready for prime time.
• If you need further proof of this, watch Phil Schiller demo the thing to CBS News. It's fast, fluid, sexy as hell. (For a slight counterpoint, read what David Pogue has to say.)
• Steve talked at some length about how "smart phones aren't very smart" and how difficult it is to make phone calls with them. This is classic Apple, where the company sets out to ensure that the basics are done well before doing the 'cool' stuff. My own abysmal experience with the Windows Mobile-powered Cingular 8125:
  

  Let's start with the basics: the 8125 is a bad phone. Period, full stop, end of story. The phone functions seem to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Consider the basic task of dialing a number. You can try to dial by using the touchscreen (which is error-prone and clumsy), or you can use the stylus on the touchscreen (which now requires you to fetch the stylus and poke at the screen, consuming two hands and your full attention)...

  Smartphone experiences are lousy. Everything takes longer than it should, and the promises of the devices (data and e-mail anywhere! Your calendar in your pocket! Only carry one device!) are usually compromised with a series of "yeah, but..." statements when you actually try to do the thing in question. The iPhone seems to have been designed to fix a lot of this, and, even if it's not perfect (it's a v1 product), it's still a giant step forward.
• This is a huge growth play for Apple. HUGE. Let's assume that Apple is serious about selling 10M phones in 2008 (it's doubtful they would have announced specific targets if they weren't confident of hitting them). Since we know that the phones sell for $500 and $600 with 2-year contracts, it's likely that true retail on these puppies is closer to $700 or $800 - if not more. Let's call it $700, just to be conservative; it still puts $7Bn in new gross revenue into Apple's coffers. That's not a small chunk of change for a firm that did $19.3Bn in 2006.
• The Apple/Cingular contract is pretty interesting to me. Apple agreed to give Cingular exclusive carriage of its phones in exchange for design freedom. This, too, is huge. Historically, phone makers like Motorola and Nokia have designed cool features into their phones (WiFi, Bluetooth, PC syncing), only to have them stripped out or crippled by mid-level managers at Verizon, T-Mobile, et. al. because those features were perceived to be competing with some ridiculous service that the carrier wanted to sell to the consumer. A classic example of this is music: carriers would love to sell you a $0.99 song for your phone (for $1.99) that you download over their network - you pay for the song, you pay for the bandwidth, and the song is stuck in your phone, not your iPod. Phones that competed with this model by allowing "side-loading" (copying songs to your phone from your PC directly) were crippled until the Motorola ROKR.
  
  Apple's overwhelming desire for control would never allow this to happen with its own phones. And Cingular, apparently, agreed, giving Apple a huge amount of room to innovate and try new stuff on its platform. This, I imagine, will cause some (ahem) uncomfortable (ahem) conversations between Nokia, Moto, et. al. and the carriers about which new features they'll be putting in to their phones. (Bring on the innovation!).
• The iPhone is the best thing that has ever happened to Cingular's cellular data business. Can anyone envision buying one of these things without a data plan?
• In keeping with Apple generally, the iPhone doesn't give a damn about the corporate market. It's not an Exchange server play (it only interoperates with Exchange over IMAP), and it doesn't run any kind of productivity app like Pocket Excel or Pocket Word. Instead, the iPhone seems to be made for reasonably-well-heeled professionals who don't have (or don't want) a lot of corporate infrastructure behind them. It's for doctors, lawyers, realtors, geeks and small businesses. This is a market that's under-served, and will reward Apple's design sensibilities. Yes, some teenagers will want these things (and will buy them), but that's not the real target. Instead, the iPhone is the next RAZR - that gotta-have-it phone that everyone has to have.
• Future versions of the iPhone will undoubtedly follow the iPod technology curve. Like the first iPod, the iPhone is (necessarily) expensive; as component prices come down and volumes go up, new models will spin off with greater and greater capabilities. Remember, iPod 1.0 was a single model, had a 5GB drive, came in white, only supported the Mac and FireWire, and retailed for $499. Five years later, Apple has three core models of iPod, and you can get in to the product for as little as $80. If you've got a bit more coin, every $50 you have gets you a little more, all the way up to $349. They'll do the same thing with iPhone, guaranteed.
• The fact that the iPhone runs OS X is really, really cool (and surprising), and it's got some tantalizing strategic implications. Sadly, these implications are going to stay dormant for a while (the iPhone is not open to third-party developers just yet), but imagine how much better the value proposition of Mac development would be if developing for the Mac = developing for the phone market. Certainly, Widgets and other lightweight, Internet-connected stuff are a natural fit, but there's a whole set of applications that you might want to have on your desktop and pocket simultaneously. I expect this to get very, very interesting over the coming years.
• Steve has clearly learned a few things from the Mac/Windows lawsuit in the '80s (the court found that the "look and feel" wasn't patentable, but was copyrightable; Windows was found to not violate that copyright). Since then, Apple's innovations are heavily protected by reinforced, double-strong competitive barriers - the Dock Connector in the iPod, and Multi-Touch technology in the iPhone.
• Apple continues to find - and fix - the structural problems in the industry. As we know, digital music sucked because the manufacturers of the music players didn't make the music jukebox, and the jukebox people didn't make the operating system or drivers, and, of course, the online music stores didn't control anything other than the "BUY NOW" button because the music publishers kept 'em tied up in knots. Ultimately, the entire, creaking, brittle thing collapsed under its own weight next to the simplicity and reliability of iPod + iTunes + iTunes Music Store. The phone business is no different (lots of moving parts, lots of consumer pain, no market accountability), and there are zillions of other problem spaces like that that Apple is likely to be looking at as the consumer electronics and computing worlds continue to blend and blur together.
• Ultimately, with the iPhone, they just nailed it.

Apple is right to change its name: it's not a computer company, as much as it's a consumer electronics company with a computer business. They'll use the Mac as their anchor business, of course, but the Mac is more valuable for being the touchpoint - the hub - for all these dazzling consumer-electronics devices that the firm is planning to produce going forward.

I'm ordering the 8GB version.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 11, 2007 1:09 PM.
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January 2, 2007

iKaraoke (I Do, I Do, I Do)

During my post about Christmas in Vancouver, I blogged an aside about having received an iKaraoke for Christmas from Elaine's mom. Well, I've had a bit of time to play with the silly thing over the past few days, and lemme tell ya - it's a blast.

(In fact, I'd wager that it's the first-ever iPod accessory with a two-drink minimum.)

If you've never seen an iKaraoke before, it looks a little strange - basically, it's a skinny microphone with a two-foot cord that terminates in a small, 1" plug. To use it, you snap the plug into the Dock Connector on the bottom of your iPod.

What the product does is simple enough: it allows you to play - and sing along with - the music you've loaded on your iPod (aka, "your favorite songs, the ones you sing along with in the car or hum in the shower"). What makes the iKaraoke special is that the Dock-plug-thingy has a chip in it that reprocesses the sound coming from your 'Pod, such that it suppresses the lead vocals of the song you're listening to. Suddenly, the full-fledged version of "Regret" becomes an instrumental, and, well, that's where the plug-in microphone comes in. Pick it up, and make like you're on American Idol.

(Note that the public humiliation and/or embarrassment you may experience while using iKaraoke is purely a side effect, and one that manufacturer Griffin, maker of fine iPod accessories, provides to you free of charge.)

Now, as this is a semi-product-review, let me be right up front about something: the idea of what the iKaraoke does is far, far better than the reality. The digital suppression of the lead vocals is imperfect (and, at times, obnoxious); you will hear trace amounts of Simon LeBon or Bernard Sumner or whoever you're down with going on in the background. Some bands (James, for instance) seem immune to the iKaraoke's processing. The device isn't magic; it's a plastic $50 doohickey.

But for all that, it's my new favorite toy.

See, the iKaraoke is awesome if you're trying to learn to sing, and need some accompanying music while you warble and emote. It's the bomb when you want to practice your vocal stylin' in the privacy of your own home.

A big part of my singing lessons is making the time to, well, sing - sing tunes that I love with Sarah playing piano or strumming the guitar alongside. We warm up with the usual "la la la la la" and then move into the fun stuff, where I try to sing things like "Sit Down" or "Speed of Sound." She provides the tune and the time, and I provide (ahem) amusement.

But the thing is, practicing on your own is a challenge. A big part of learning to sing is simple repetition -- practicing (sucking) over and over until the good stuff (finally) comes out. And, while it's true that the "la la la la la" school of rehearsal gives you some practice, nothing - and I mean nothing - is more fun than beltin' out songs you know and love by heart.

Of course, singing alongside The Real Thing is just too hard - you're competing with a studio-perfect copy of the song you love, and that's just unfair. But with the iKaraoke, all that changes. Suddenly, it's easy to practice at home, and even easier to experiment with new songs to see if you're any good. (For instance, I've discovered that I can nail Death Cab's "The Sound Of Settling" ... which has been making me happy for the last 24 hours.)

Heck, Sarah and I even used the dang thing at singing practice tonight. We hung up the piano for the evening and let the iPod drive.

I bet it's also fun at parties. Kristen and Aaron have Karaoke Revolution for their Xbox, and, rumor has it, played until well past 2:30 AM with friends at New Year's. iKaraoke's the same basic idea.

So there it is - my new favorite iPod accessory. Plug this puppy into your iPod, have a few drinks with friends, and sing your guts out.

Awesome.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 2, 2007 10:29 PM.
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December 27, 2006

Some Thoughts On The New Parallels Beta

The dealers-of-lightning over at Parallels put out a new beta (build 3094) of their must-have Desktop For Mac product last week.

Holy smokes, it's cool.

First, a bit of history. Parallels Desktop for Mac ("Parallels" for the rest of this article) is a program that lets you run Windows (and, more importantly, 3rd-party Windows programs) on your shiny new Intel Macintosh. As such, it's been of keen interest to Mac folk like Yours Truly who love their OS X, but have need to run a Windows program or two from time to time.

Back in January, I wrote a piece ("Prediction: XP Is The "New Classic" Under 10.5") where I talked about how Apple's move to Intel processors was, in no small part, calculated to allow much easier 'switching' to the Mac platform by longtime Windows folks. Virtualization - the ability to run Windows on your Mac - was the centerpiece technology in making this happen:

By going to Intel (as opposed to the Sparc, or the Cell, or any one of a billion other chip designs Apple could have selected), Apple now has binary compatibility with Windows, and, by extension, the entire family of Windows applications that exist in the world. This is the centerpiece of Apple's strategy for the next 5 years.

At the time, I assumed Apple was going to bake seamless virtualization into Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5):

And on the experience side, well, I suspect that Apple is working to make that pretty seamless. And the only way they can do that is to build compatibility for Windows software right in to the operating system directly. As it happens, Apple has a lot of experience doing this - namely, with Classic and with X Windows. In both cases, Apple made it possible for programs written for other operating systems and environments to work natively, and seamlessly, on Mac OS X.

Subsequent public statements by Apple management - coupled with the release of Boot Camp, a non-virtualization approach for running Windows on the Mac - have proven me wrong. Apple is not going to put Windows apps side-by-side on the Mac.

Instead, Parallels is going to do it.

Parallels has delivered some astounding innovation in a fairly short period of time. The product started life as a straightforward virtualizer - run Windows in a window on your Mac, and call it a day. The performance of Windows under Parallels is pretty damn snappy, and, for those of us who (un)fondly remember the sluggishness of Virtual PC, it was both eye-catching and habit-forming.

What's impressed me to death about the new Parallels betas, however, is that their product team clearly has a vision of seamless integration between Windows applications and their Mac counterparts. Their first effort toward this end - introduced just a few weeks ago, with Beta 1 - is called Coherence Mode, and it effectively erases the "Windows in a window" experience of virtualization. Coherence isn't perfect (yet), but it's damn good; watch this video to see how it works. (Cats and dogs living together ... mass hysteria!)

After the shock and awe of Coherence wore off, I sat down with Jeff and we talked about a few of the shortcomings. I mean, Coherence is damn cool, but if it's going to be really seamless, Parallels needed a few more things. Specifically:

• Dock launching. Going in to the Windows environment, popping up the Start menu, and launching a Windows app is just too jarring for most people. What we really want is a way of launching Windows apps from the Dock, just like Mac apps.
• Mac-like window management. Under Coherence, minimizing a window in Windows throws it into the Windows Taskbar, not the Dock. Again, this is jarring and strange; what's needed is the ability to minimize a Windows window into the Dock (presumably via Genie or Scale effect) and summon it back out again.
• Common file system. Today, Windows files (e.g., that .doc file you're editing) must live in Parallels' virtual hard drive, which means you're forever copying files from your "real" Mac to your "virtual" PC. This is a pain. Parallels should simply mount your MyDocuments folder in Windows as a network share, and then point that at your ~/ folder on the Mac. Voila! You can now work on a Mac file from a PC app, no copying/file management required.

And then Parallels Beta 2 came out, and what did it have? Dock launching. Better window management. And a stronger, more seamless Coherence. (If you want to see a LifeHacker HowTo for Mac/Windows integration, go here.)

I tell ya, these guys get it.

(Heck, Apple might as well be funding these folks. With all the new business they'll bring to the Mac, they're practically the Aldus of this decade.)

Of course, true seamlessness between Mac and Windows applications points to a rather interesting existential question about the future of the Mac application market. To wit:

If you can run any full-blooded Windows application on your Mac ... why buy a Mac app at all?

Now, in fairness, I think this is a question with an obvious answer. I mean, if you wanted to just run Windows applications all the time, why buy the Mac in the first place? And indeed, I think about all the great Mac apps that I use and love like NetNewsWire or OmniOutliner or Yojimbo, and there's no way that I'd switch to a Windows counterpart -- assuming one even existed. A lot of Windows software is clunkware - ugly, rudely functional, designed for people with too much free time. Great Mac applications like Delicious Library or Transmit have nothing to fear from the likes of WS_FTP.

Of course, what makes these applications great is that they take smart advantage of the Apple platform - the system services (like AddressBook) and UI conventions that make the Mac the Mac. And those applications that Go Native - not in an Intel-processor sense, but in a Chewy Mac Goodness sense - have nothing to fear from Parallels.

But there is an entire class of applications that I think are officially on the endangered species list.

I'm talking about PC ports.

As a "for instance", let's take the statistical package SPSS. It's an industry-leading product, with a thriving market for third-party developers and others who want to integrate statistical analysis into their business. We worked with SPSS in business school; I've been trained on the product through some classes SPSS offers. It's cool stuff.

SPSS even has a Mac client. And you know something? It sucks. It's inferior to the current Windows version (generally, a generation or two behind - currently it's at v13, while SPSS for Windows is v15), and many/most of the third-party partner applications won't work on it.

So, if I'm a Mac user who can suddenly run the full-throttle maximum-red-hot SPSS for Windows alongside my Safari and Mail.app, am I gonna settle for something that's two generations old?

Not on your life.

There are also good Mac products that happen to have Windows counterparts on different ship cycles. Mac Office is one of these. There's been a recent kerfluffle over the new, XML-based file formats used by Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007, and the fact that there are no converters available for the Mac (yet), while Office 2003 for Windows has 'em now. Rick Schaut over at the MacBU writes:

Lastly, can we port the Win Word converter? Well, actually, in a way, porting the Win Word converter is exactly what we have been doing, but we’re still faced with having to wait until Win Word ships before we have the final source code to merge into what we’ve already ported. Once that merge is done, then we still have to go through several months’ worth of testing and bug fixing before they’re ready for public use.

And that is precisely why there’s a delta between Win Office 2007 shipping and the full availability of converters for Mac Office.

Of course, in a world of seamless virtualization, Mac customers have another choice: simply buy the Windows version of Office 2007, today, and run it as a first-class peer on your Mac. If you need the file format converters more than you need the Mac experience that Mac Office offers you, you're no longer in the ghetto - you've got choices.

StuffOnFire (great name, BTW) even takes this a step farther and asks, "Does Office:mac Still Have a Place In The Universe?":

But I argue that any Mac user who gives two shits about opening Office documents is working at a company that uses Office for Windows. Seriously: why else would you care?

While I may disagree with some of the points of the post (I rather like Mac Office, and don't think of it as a "hulking Carbon beast running emulated in Rosetta on my MacBook Pro"), I have to admit that the guy's got a point. If you want the latest-and-greatest Office - including products that don't have "official" Mac counterparts, like Groove or OneNote or Visio - well, you're good to go. Get thee to the Fry's and load yourself up.

For developers, I daresay the handwriting is on the wall: if your Mac app isn't sufficiently Mac-like, it will simply collapse into its Windows version, or, in the case of terrible Mac apps, simply cease to exist when competition comes to town.

The Parallels guys are very aggressive about their updates, and I'm really eager to see what they've got up their sleeves for 2007. They're killing bugs, incrementally adding features, and eventually will get the product where it needs to be. My wish list contains the three items I listed above, plus a couple small ones: smart hyperlinks (clicking a link in a Windows app should spawn Safari, not IE) and support for sync services (so I can sync with Outlook, or whatever). But those are coming, I'm sure.

$5 says Parallels gets 5 minutes on stage with Steve at January's MacWorld.

UPDATE, December 29, 2006: Parallels Beta 3 (3106) is now out. (Jeez, do you guys ever sleep?)

UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 27, 2006 10:42 PM.
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December 11, 2006

Just Say Yo

I've previously posted about David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology, and how it's saving both my time and my sanity. GTD helps me get stuff out of my head (where it tends to rattle around, noisily, and then pop up from time to time when I'm least in need of it) and into a System - a comprehensive project list that makes sure I'm not missing details or dropping ideas.

GTD is, fundamentally, an identification and tracking system. It helps me pick out projects or tasks that need doing (or, at least, warrant future attention), and then lets me schedule those tasks at times when they're most efficiently done.

What GTD (or at least, my software implementation of it) does not do is help me track a lot of the qualitative 'stuff' that surrounds any given project or task.

Let me give you an example. Whenever I'm working on my column, I invariably have to go through the following steps:

1. Locate an appropriate question. This usually means that I'm reviewing the list of e-mails and other column ideas that have been submitted to me over the past few months.
2. Draft an outline of the answer to the question. I then identify areas where I'd like to do a bit more research, or things I'd like to check on.
3. Conduct the necessary research, keeping track of the various pages or citations I think I might need.
4. Write the actual column.

GTD is great for ensuring that I'm reminded when a column is coming due, and also great at scheduling tasks around the column itself (e.g., "phone my editor"), but it's not great for keeping track of the questions, the Web research, and other aspects of the project itself. Effectively, what I need is a 'repository', a place to store, categorize, and locate the bits and pieces of the project when they're needed.

There are software products that do this, of course - it's just that none of them are very good. Historically, I've used AquaMinds' NoteTaker; while it's kinda clunky (I often find its interface to be just ... strange), it does a credible job of letting me keep 'pages' for my projects, and 'folders' to bundle like pages or projects together.

Problem is, I find myself getting frustrated with NoteTaker on a regular basis (about every 6 or 8 weeks or so). This is usually triggered when it (often) does something to annoy me, at which point I convince myself that There Just Must Be Something Better Out There, Dammit; then I'm off and downloading demo after demo of software programs that, frankly, aren't that great, either.

I feel like I've tried 'em all: Circus Ponies' NoteBook (which shares a codebase with NoteTaker, but is a bit different), StickyBrain (Cintra likes this, which was major points in its favor), DevonTHINK, a handful of others. They all fall short, for a variety of reasons too banal to get in to here.

And then, recently, I tried Yojimbo. And, finally, NoteTaker has been kicked to the curb.

I don't suppose I should be terribly surprised by this. Yojimbo is made by Bare Bones Software, they of the Mac-only, fabulouso-text-editor-extraordinaire BBEdit (to use BBEdit is to love BBEdit, as the old saying goes). Bare Bones makes great stuff, and with Yojimbo they brought their usual philosophy of Not Sucking and focused it on how to capture, retain, and find information easily.

(Sounds about perfect, doesn't it?)

Yojimbo is a 'repository' in the same way that all the other products are, except that it makes it really, really easy to pipe your data into its system. Here's what I like about it:

• Yojimbo has a sidebar that sits along the right side of your screen. Dragging a file or URL to the sidebar causes it to pop out, at which point you'll see a list of folders for your projects. Just drop the file or URL into the folder, and a copy is put in the appropriate place. This makes it super-easy to do Web research -- you just drag-and-drop the URLs of Web pages that you're interested in into the appropriate Yojimbo folder for later review.
• Another nice innovation: Yojimbo lets you drag plain-vanilla URLs into the system, but it also lets you drag Web archives - cached versions of the page. This lets me keep offline copies of everything on my Mac, and lets me access information I might want when I'm not connected to the Internet (aka, "The Airplane Scenario").
• The search engine in Yojimbo is amazing - lightning-fast, compatible with Spotlight, very granular. The experience is much like that with iTunes - just start typing, and all the relevant stuff comes right to the top. This is a nice change from NoteTaker, who would often offer answer my queries as if it had trained under The Sphinx from Mystery Men ("He who questions training ... only trains in asking questions").
• Yojimbo supports custom tagging, labels, and flags on any item in its database. It also supports custom 'project' folders (think: "Smart Playlist" in iTunes) based on these criteria. Wanna see all the flagged items in the system with a "wedding" tag (I mean ... hypothetically, you understand)? No problem. They're all in one place.
• Yojimbo deals natively with PDF files, and makes it simple to park a PDF of any file or Web page you're looking at in its store with PDF services. Just 'print' your file and select "Save PDF to Yojimbo"; the system does the rest.
• There's a handy-dandy quick-input panel (hit F8) that lets you easily take notes from a phone call, meeting, you name it without leaving your current, running, frontmost app.
• Heck, the silly thing even supports storing serial numbers and passwords - and offers encryption to protect them from prying eyes. (Yes, I've converted over from PasswordMaster, and I'm in heaven.)

Yojimbo's still got a few places it can go - for instance, it would be great if I could highlight and annotate a PDF in its database, for research/review purposes - but that's a quibble. I've had a much easier time tracking the various little constituent parts of my projects ever since I started using it - and given how many projects I'm generally managing, that's really saying something.

There's a free, 30-day demo. If you're running on a Mac (and you are running on a Mac, right?), I strongly, strongly recommend you give it a look.

Way to go, Bare Bones. My hat is off to you folks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 11, 2006 9:44 PM.
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November 18, 2006

Two Weeks With A MacBook Pro

Two weeks ago, I bade fond farewell to my trusty PowerBook G4, and welcomed - with very, very open arms - a shiny new Intel (Core 2 Duo-based) MacBook Pro.

Without putting too fine a point on it, this is the machine I've been waiting for.

When Apple began shipping Intel iron earlier this year, I was one of the holdouts who sat, patiently, on the sidelines and watched others take the plunge. Nearly two decades of being a Mac fan has taught me one simple, incontrovertible truth about Apple hardware, which is: never buy the first generation. Ever.

And so I waited. I waited and read the boards on Macintouch, observing as others experienced the teething problems; waited as Khan bought a MacBook (and sent a fair amount of tauntin' my way), waited as other friends and associates bought machines. And, as the winter turned to spring (and spring to early summer), it was clear to everyone that Apple had been continuously revving their firmware and hardware designs and had ironed out the bulk of the problems much, much more swiftly than anticipated.

Then, as they are wont to do, Intel announced the successor to the Core, and I realized, well, a few more months of waiting wouldn't kill me. The chip shipped, Apple slapped it in the machine, I had a nice interaction with store.apple.com, and, now I'm a few grand poorer.

I've had the machine two weeks now, and in that time have come to get a pretty good handle on what it can do. Friends have asked me three big questions, over and over:

1. What's my impression of the machine?
2. How does it feel?
3. Do I recommend the upgrade?

In order:

1. It's fabulous. Easily the best Mac I've ever owned (dethroning even the mythical, much-admired SE/30 from its perch as Best Mac Ever).
2. It feels like a Mac, which, when you think about it, astounds. This is the third processor I've bought with a Mac wrapped 'round it, and, if I just came to the machine cold, I'd never be able to tell that it wasn't just a better, faster PowerPC. The fact that an Intel chip is under the hood is, well, invisible - a Mac is a Mac, regardless of the processor it's hosted on (and that, ladies and germs, is some damn good engineering).
3. I definitely recommend upgrading, with two important exceptions. First, if you need to run Classic, you should stick with PowerPC (Intel Macs don't support it). And second, if you have a high-performance application that's not Intel native (e.g., Photoshop), you might want to wait until it's ported over. For everyone else, feel free to pull the trigger whenever your checkbook permits.

A few random notes from the experience:

• Migration from my old machine to the new one was a total piece of cake. I used Apple's Migration Assistant to go from the PowerBook to the MacBook; basically, you just run a FireWire cable between the two machines, click "OK" and then go to dinner. When you come back an hour later, the computers have swapped brains - apps are moved, prefs are copied over, printers and network settings are all set up and ready to rock and roll. It's cool-scary voodoo, is what it is, and its's doubly impressive when you layer the fact that Migration Assistant needs to make good choices about which binaries to keep (PowerPC? Intel? Universal?) on each machine. (The Wintel PC world needs something like this, and needs it badly.)
• As mentioned, Intel Macs do not run Classic. Period. (Hell, there's not even a "Classic" Preference Pane in System Preferences.) This is somewhat momentous, in my opinion: it represents the total, utter victory of Jobs' vision for OS X as a replacement for OS 9, and is akin to a Wintel PC not running DOS applications any more. When OS X shipped back in 2001, Classic was a critically-important bridge to get people on the new operating system, in much the same way that people ran DOS applications on Windows 3.1. Since applications had to be updated to run on OS X, and Apple had such a terrible record getting new operating systems out the door (Pink, anyone?), several developers groused that they might not be willing to invest the time and effort in moving to X. Today, of course, OS X is such a runaway success (and enjoys near-universal respect among technical communities - something OS 9 never had), that Steve can turn the lights out on Classic with nary a whimper.
• The MacBook Pro is slightly thinner than the PowerBook G4. It's sleeker, cleaner. Sitting one next to the other actually makes the PowerBook look chunky, which is not something I'd ever thought possible.
• The machine screams. I bought the (entry-level) 2.16-ghz flavor, and, aside from boosting the RAM to 2 GB, the machine is stock - standard 120 GB drive, etc. Day-to-day use is noticeably quicker, with applications just zapping, "poofing" and zooming nearly instantaneously (Mail.app, in particular, has a new lease on life). When you move to processor-intensive stuff (like mixing down Confab in GarageBand, or ripping CDs in iTunes), the differences just widen. I remember staring, slack-jawed, at how fast the progress bar in HandBrake was moving when I started ripping video content down for my iPod.
• Intel-nativity has a nice benefit if you're a gamer. I'm not much of a video game enthusiast, but I do enjoy RollerCoaster Tycoon; the PowerBook ran RCT just okay, and my Intel-based Mac Mini ran it pretty well. The MacBook, however, is a no-compromise experience from start to finish - just astoundingly good. I doubt that the machine would satisfy the hard-core gamers out there (Keith, for instance), but for someone like me it's heaven.
• The battery life is fair. Two and a half hours of normal use, more if you dial down the screen brightness and stuff and just want to do word processing.
• The built-in iSight works fine, but its picture and light sensitivity isn't nearly as good as the stand-alone model Apple has sold in the past. I was always astounded by the fact that the stand-alone iSight could do great things with color and brightness correction, even in low-light situations. The built-in camera doesn't do nearly as well, and often can look grainy. That said, I find myself videoconferencing - and doing multiparty conferences - much, much more frequently now that there's nothing to plug in to the computer.
• (RollerCoaster Tycoon at 35,000 feet will kill your battery really, really quickly.)
• Before you migrate, it's a good idea to profile your system and see what applications you've got that are PowerPC or Universal. One easy way to do this is to use Apple's built-in System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app). Switch to the Software -> Applications section and wait a moment (it will need to index your drive); then, maximize the window. You'll see a complete list of apps on your machine, their version, modification date, and "kind". This last is what you want; just sort by kind to see what PowerPC applications you've got installed. Then, you can just visit the developer's Web site(s) to see if they have upgrades available.
• At the time of this writing, the only PowerPC applications I have on my drive are Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. Everything else has a universal or Intel-only build available.
• Speaking of Intel-only builds -- I found that some programs (for instance, VideoLAN Player) don't offer Universal binaries, but instead have PowerPC and Intel-specific builds. Just be aware of it when you're poking around for upgrades.
• I did buy Parallels, and have a full copy of Windows XP running on my MacBook. The performance is truly astounding. Parallels isn't as polished as Virtual PC in terms of its user experience (there's no drag-and-drop from the Mac desktop to the PC desktop, for instance, and the software just looks 'chunkier' than VPC), but the Parallels team has done an astoundingly good job of iterating and improving the product since launch. Copy-and-paste works great; there's no need to "capture" and "uncapture" the mouse any more (just moving it beyond the borders of the PC window will return it to the Mac environment); Shared Networking and Shared Folders work fine. And, while I've had a few small issues with USB keychain drives (I can't seem to get 'em to work), these are issues that I'm sure will be worked out in due course.
• The overwhelming convenience of a two-for-one computer cannot be overstated. There have always been a handful of Windows-only applications that I've either had to live without or keep on a separate PC; today, everything is unified on one machine that I can keep with me. It's fantastic.
• With Parallels working as well as it does, I have no idea why anyone would consider buying a laptop from HP, Sony, or Toshiba. As I wrote back when Apple announced Boot Camp ("The First Boot Drops"):

  So if I'm a consumer, and I see a Sony laptop for $2000 that runs Windows alongside an Apple laptop for $2000 that runs Windows and Mac OS X, well, which is the better value? The Mac is. No question. It's the no-compromise choice.

  Apple has an incredibly good story to take share from those companies, and, given how aggressive Apple's pricing is on these machines, I daresay other PC makers should expect to lose sales.

Overall, I couldn't be happier. Apple has pulled off an amazing feat of engineering, managing to preserve both the core experience for their customers (a Mac is a Mac is a Mac) while adding some astounding new capabilities (Windows compatibility) and keeping prices competitive with other PC kit.

(Now we just need to get Office and Photoshop moved over, and we're in the New World for sure.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 18, 2006 11:01 PM.
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October 11, 2006

Tape Is Dead

As I've mentioned previously, I've started taking singing lessons. (And, for the record, I love it.)

When I first started, Sarah, my instructor, asked me to get some blank audiocassette tapes to record our sessions. At the time, I gave her a bit of a blank look (tape?), and then asked if the tapes were for her, or for me.

"Oh, they're for you," she said. "It's really important that you have a record of how you're improving over your sessions."

Ah, gotcha, I thought. And then I promptly popped down to the Apple store.

See, I don't have anything that plays tapes in my house. Nothing. Nada. In fact, near as I can tell, the only two tape players in my world these days are the ones embedded into the dashboards of Richard's and Elaine's respective automobiles. (And there ain't no way I'm stressing either friendship by playing my session recordings in their cars. No way, no how.)

So instead, I sprang for a wicked little iPod accessory: the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo.

The TuneTalk snaps on to the bottom of the Video iPod, and uses the dock connector for power and to communicate with the iPod itself. It allows me to make great-sounding recordings (referring to the quality of the audio, not the singing) that are dumped directly to the iPod hard drive as WAV files. When I get home and plug the iPod in to my Mac, the files are converted and moved into a playlist called "Voice Memos."

It's hot cool voodoo.

In practical terms, the TuneTalk lets me get together with Sarah for my lesson, slap the iPod down on top of her piano and capture my "la la la"-ing, pausing here and there as needed. When the lesson's all done, I've got a directory of files, time- and date-stamped, ready to go.

It also means that I have a complete archive of my lessons on my 'pod, so I can go back and listen to old lessons (trying to hear what I did well, or - more often - poorly), and use some of our warmup exercises to practice with.

And thus, here I am tonight, standing in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, iPod in pocket, earbuds in ear, "la la la"-ing away, and getting ever-so-slightly better at this newfound hobby of mine.

In fact, the slickness of the Belkin product really made concrete to me the value of the iPod as platform, a device that is, in theory, extensible in a dizzying number of ways. The dock connector offers a lot of flexibility - you can already plug your digital camera into your iPod, or plug your iPod into your Mini Cooper. But what about GPS? Or hooking up a keyboard? Or a joystick for games? Or any one of a million other cool uses for the device? It's a large hard drive and generic operating system, right? So ... why not?

In fact, makes me wonder just how far away the much-rumored Apple "iPhone" might actually be. It's just another extension to the platform, right?

(Oh, and if you get a TuneTalk, a quick word of warning: WAV files are big, and they accumulate fast. After the first month of lessons, I had 1,430 MB of files sitting on my 'pod. So take a moment to rip your WAVs into AAC or MP3; doing so dropped the space footprint of that first month to just 135 MB.)

Tape is dead, baby. Tape is dead.

UPDATE, November 11, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 11, 2006 9:34 PM.
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October 3, 2006

The GTD Explosion

Back on the 21st, I wrote about about David Allen's "Getting Things Done", a system for managing projects and tasks in a hyper-efficient way. In the post, I talked about some of the great digital tools on the Mac for GTD, such as OmniOutliner Pro + Kinkless GTD.

Well, as it happens, the software developers dealers of lightning over at Omni are working on their own, native, GTD application, called OmniFocus

So: OmniFocus. It has a name. It has a team of engineers working on it, a user interface guru mocking up modes and widgets for it, and a product manager whose Herculean job it is to herd this whole mess towards an elusive ship date.

Now, you might think that Ethan, the author of Kinkless GTD would be, shall we say, a mite hacked that Omni is building an application that may well render kGTD obsolete. Not so:

OmniGroup has been very supportive of kGTD from the beginning, clearly making code tweaks and additions to support this nutty venture. At some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. Having the chance to take everything I'd been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it's like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for "a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky" and "a few more peasants in that bit on the left".

Turns out Omni flew Ethan and 43 Folders' Merlin Mann out to Seattle for a GTD summit earlier this year, asked their opinion, and basically used that to guide their development and thinking.

This is great, great news. Omni is so good at Mac software, that if they're investing in GTD, the app is going to rock.

And if that's not enough for you, Midnight Beep just released 0.95 of Midnight Inbox, which is their Cocoa-native GTD application - and available now.

(I'm telling ya, this GTD thing might just catch on one of these days!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 3, 2006 7:03 AM.
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August 29, 2006

Pimp My Mail.app

One of the new, touted-at-WWDC features of Leopard comes in the form of an upgraded Mail.app. Apple has taken some pains to integrate iCal and Mail, which allows us mere mortals to do handy things, like turn an e-mail message into a calendar to-do reminder - dang useful when you need to remember to, say, reply to someone's mail at a particular point in the future.

In my opinion, these new features really point to the centrality- primacy, really - of e-mail as one's way of managing the world. I, for one, am dead in the water without my e-mail - it's a conversation tracker, life scheduler, serial-number-keeper and bad-joke conduit all rolled into one.

When I moved to Mac OS X back in 2001, I did so whole-hog, and decided to use as many of Apple's bundled products as possible. Part of this was driven by availability (back in the early-transition days of OS X 10.1, there wasn't a whole lotta choice in the 'ol application space, if you know what I mean), and part was driven by a desire to try out some of the highly-regarded NeXT apps that were finally available on the Mac- Mail.app among them. And so, with a slight tear in my eye, I kicked Eudora on Mac OS 9 to the curb and went with Apple's built-in solution. On the whole, it's been a pretty seamless transition.

But.

Mail.app has been slammed by some, and justifiably so, as being a good "80% solution" to people's mail needs. In English, that means it does the basics - but not much else. So if you're checking and sending generic IMAP e-mail, it's great. But once you need robust rules support, or are managing gi-normous e-mail archives, or want integrated calendaring and contact management, well, you were either forced to grit your teeth or switch to competitive products like Entourage. Problem is, Mail.app is nicely integrated with the rest of Mac OS X, which means that switching from Mail also means that you're switching from AddressBook, giving up iChat integration, and likely losing Spotlight support. It's a big cost to bear.

I've been gritting my teeth.

Lately, however, two new products have come on to the market that have a) made my Mail.app experience about 2,000,000% better, and b) given me real hope that a thriving, vibrant market for add-ons and plugins to Mail is just on the horizon.

I'm talking about Mail Act-On and MailTags.

These programs extend Mail.app through some (undocumented) APIs, and, broadly, allow you to pimp your Mail.app today, in a way not too unlike what Apple will offer, built in, with Leopard.

The first of these, Mail Act-On, allows you to associate a keystroke with a mail-processing rule. This lets you create and associate a virtually unlimited number of mail "rules" that can be invoked with a keystroke. For instance, I am forever finding myself spending time mousing around in Mail, filing e-mail from friends in their respective folders. With Mail Act-On, I can create a rule that says, "When you see a mail message from Richard, file it in Richard's personal folder on the hard drive." Then, once I'm done replying to a message Richard has sent me, I just hit the "Act On" key and the message is zapped to its home.

Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to build a pretty comprehensive list of Act-On rules for people I e-mail on a regular basis. So today, when mail comes in, I can zoom through my Inbox in record speed. It's just wonderful. (It's truly astonishing how much time you can spend goofing around in an interface, as opposed to Getting Work Done.)

MailTags, on the other hand, lets me link a mail item to iCal, much as Leopard will. Let's say that message from Richard needs some followup or action from me in a few weeks' time. All I have to do is tag the mail and give it a date; MailTags will file it in iCal as a to-do. Then, when the relevant date rolls around in iCal, I see both the to-do and a link back to the original mail message. This has helped ensure that I'm not missing to-dos, or forgetting some relevant piece of information on the date when I need it.

Which rocks.

There is a growing number of plug-ins for Mail, but Apple really ought to unlock its developer community through better documentation for plug-in authors. I can guarantee that Mail.app, as the incumbent/default mail application on OS X, will be taken much, much farther by the wisdom of the user community than Apple can take it on its own.

In the meantime, feel free to get the jump on "Spring 2007" by pimping out your Mail.app with some slick add-ons.

(Big thanks to the folks over at Mail.app blog HawkWings for all the tips!)

UPDATE, December 31, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 29, 2006 9:51 PM.
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August 26, 2006

When It Rains...

...it pours. At least with technology problems.

Just five days after getting my PowerBook back and happy, it turns out that the battery in the silly thing qualifies for Apple's recall program (short version: Sony's batteries are, shall we say, explosively good, and Dell is recalling 4-some million batteries, while Apple is recalling 1.8M)

If you have a PowerBook G4 or iBook G4, get yourself checked.

Looks like my laptop is a de-facto desktop computer until my new battery arrives. Pity.

UPDATE, January 3, 2008: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 26, 2006 2:17 PM.
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August 21, 2006

PowerBook: Back In Action

Apple was kind enough to return my PowerBook late last week, all shiny and fixed. The techs replaced my failed hard drive, and also swapped my screen with a brand-new one. (My old screen had been suffering from the dreaded white-spot problems, and I just have to say: wow, is this new screen bright! It's like someone cleaned my glassses (and I don't wear glasses). Crazy.)

With the PowerBook back in town, I invested a few hours late on Thursday in migrating my files off the Mac Mini and back to the laptop. The Mini is a fine computer and all, but it's way too underpowered to be productive for serious work. With just 512 MB of RAM, the poor thing is forever swapping to disk, which brought performance to a crawl. So, to keep the Mini stepping smartly, I was only able to run a small number of programs at once - which, for a guy like me that routinely keeps 8 - 12 programs running concurrently, sucks.

I'm always amazed at is how easy it is to migrate from one Mac to another. Given the clean architecure of OS X, it just takes a simple copy of my Home folder from one unit to the other (FireWire Target Disk Mode is a handy thing, here), a simple reboot, and BANG! - migration. It's a Good Thing when your biggest bottleneck is the speed of the cable you've strung between your machines.

(Having recently upgraded at work from my much-reviled Tablet PC to a new Toshiba Satellite, I can tell you, unreservedly, that the Mac experience is so good it's almost like voodoo. I hope the Windows guys take notes.)

So I'm back on the mobile iron, and I'm loving it. The screen's great, the machine is snappy, and I'm dreaming of upgrading to one of the new, Core2-based laptops that are due in a few short weeks.

(Oh, and let this be a lesson, kids - buy yourself the 'ol AppleCare!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 21, 2006 11:12 AM.
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August 13, 2006

Apple Thinks Vista Is Going To Slip

Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference was this last week, and, while I spent as much time with my eyes glued to the QuickTime stream as the next Mac fiend, I've needed a bit of time to digest the announcements and think about what everything "means."

One problem with taking the better part of a week to chew on this stuff is that other (often better) writers will have already chimed in with their opinions. In one corner, we have Leander Kahney over at Wired ("Has Steve Jobs Lost His Magic?"):

Steve Jobs' keynote speech on Monday was the most uninspiring he's given in recent memory.

The sneak preview of Leopard was underwhelming. For what seemed an interminable time, Jobs and Co. showed off one yawn after another. There's no way I can get excited about virtual desktops or a new service that turns highlighted text into a "to do" item. Oooo.

In the other, we've got a gaggle of gurgling, happy developers who are cooing over the features that didn't make the keynote. If you're hot on garbage-collected Objective-C, resolution-independent display systems, and the infinite eye-candy possibilities of things like Core Animation, then WWDC was very good news indeed.

Personally, I'm delighted with some of the features of Leopard: I can see myself making immediate use of Spaces, and a more-powerful iChat, Mail and iCal are most welcome. (And Time Machine is a stunningly cool solution to a decidedly un-sexy problem - it's as if brushing and flossing became hip).

But for all the announcements made on (and off) stage, I think the big one was strangely missed or overlooked by a lot of the attendees. What am I talking about?

Well, it's clear that Apple thinks Vista is going to be delayed. Again.

Steve made a big deal during the keynote about new, "Top Secret" features of Leopard that weren't being shown:

Today, we want to give you a preview of Leopard.

So let me start off with some of the stuff that we can't show you. There's some top secret features to Leopard that we're going to keep a little close to the vest and we're not going to show you today. I just want you to know they're there. [Laughs] We don't want our friends to start their photocopiers sooner than they have to, and so we're going to keep a few things a little secret.

You know something? This doesn't make any sense.

(Oh, my usual disclaimer, here - yes, I work at Microsoft. No, I don't know anything. OK?)

Back in March, it was announced that Vista would be rolled out for businesses in November, with retail availability in January 2007.

If you know how software is built, you can whip out a calendar and start figuring some things out. First, if Vista is being rolled out in November, then Vista's bits would have to be frozen - go Gold Master - in mid-to-late October. That's roughly 60 - 90 days from now. With so little time between now and the final release, the developers, testers, and program managers who are building the software aren't going to add anything to the product. Instead, the focus is in making the software as high-quality as possible, and that means killing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. New features add complexity, and complexity increases the chances of bugs. No program manager worth her salt is going to add a single thing to a major, major product that's on a glide path to be done in the next 60 days.

So why withhold information, Steve? Why not show off every last bell and whistle in Leopard, and make us up here in Redmond grit our teeth and bear it? If our cake is in the oven and comin' out in two or three months, there's precious little we'd be able to do to match the stuff Apple is showing off.

Unless, of course, Vista is going to be late.

This isn't exactly a new suspicion. Gartner came out in May and said it believed Vista wouldn't be ready until 'at least the second quarter of next year':

"Microsoft's track record is clear," the firm says. "It consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases. We don't expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least 2Q07 (second quarter of 2007), which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2."

Adding fuel to the fire, Bill Gates was quoted as saying last month that he's giving Vista an 80% chance of departure this year:

"We got to get this absolutely right," Gates told the Associated Press in Cape Town. "If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it."

(Sidebar: Bill's comments led Mac guru Wil Shipley to publicly bet Bill $10,000 that Vista wouldn't ship this year; Microsoft declined to comment, which I think is a mistake. Take the bet, Bill! If Vista ships, we look great and pocket ten grand; if we're late, $10,000 is the least of our worries. We gotta stand behind our product.)

I think Apple agrees with Gartner (and is parsing BillG's comments to mean "Vista is going to be late"). But they don't know how late the product is going to be, and that means they have to be cagey. An extra month without Vista won't allow Microsoft to add anything to the product; an extra six months (July 2007) would presumably allow some feature teams to get to work on adding new stuff.

So Apple has to wait. They're holding off the eye-popping stuff until MacWorld (January), and have given themselves a good 4 months of wiggle room to deliver Leopard with their "Spring 2007" delivery date.

(Sidebar #2: I've had some people suggest to me that there are no "Top Secret" features, and that Apple is instead way behind on Leopard. This is, without putting too fine a point on it, absurd. Barring some unbelievably liberal vacation policy, it wouldn't take Apple's well-tuned engineering department the last 16 months - let alone another nine - to deliver a backup utility, MailTags functionality and systemwide animation. It just wouldn't. Yes, I know that’s a dramatic oversimplification of WWDC's announcements, but let’s be honest – the stuff they showed certainly won't take until "Spring 2007" to deliver.)

I think the Vista-is-late non-announcement is interesting because it shows the increasing brinksmanship between Microsoft and Apple over platform customers. Anyone who remembers the launch of Windows 95 will also remember that, aside from some snarky advertisements, Apple was pretty much deer-in-the-headlights roadkill against Microsoft's marketing machine. By the time Win95 came to market in August '95, the GUI war had been decided, and Microsoft was the victor. Apple went into a downward spiral shortly thereafter, ultimately leading to Dr. Amelio and Steve's return.

This time around, Apple is planning to surf the Vista wave. Being nonspecific on the release date allows Apple to time their release around Vista's availability. Guaranteed that Apple has a timetable they’re working from, where if Vista ships on Date X, Leopard will be Date X, plus or minus, and they’ll be able to work their messaging and positioning around ours. They're waiting and seeing, so when the Microsoft marketing machine goes into hyperdrive this time around, Apple can piggyback, and entice would-be Vista PC buyers into getting a Mac.

Heck, the plan is probably already written and safely sealed inside an old mayonnaise jar that's buried under Phil Schiller's porch.

In the meantime, WWDC was a big 'ol vote of no-confidence in the Vista ship schedule. (And, as an employee and shareholder of Microsoft, I'm hoping it's wrong.)

2007 ought to be interesting.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 13, 2006 3:36 PM.
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July 28, 2006

My Involuntary Intel Transition

So my primary Mac is now powered by an Intel chip.

(Dammit!)

Yes, my venerable, trusty PowerBook G4 has gone to Apple for repair. The drive problem that materialized in Orlando was terminal pneumonia, rather than a passing flu, and as a result I had to drop the thing off with the resident Apple Geniuses for shipment back to the mothership. My efforts to rescue the drive with DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and even Data Rescue came to naught – I’ve been high-sticked back to my last backup (which, fortunately, was only 96 hours or so out of synch with my live drive). Yes, I lost e-mail, Quicken records, and some digital pictures from the trip. Yes, that sucks. But it could have been much, much worse.

In the interim, I’m up and running on my Intel Mac Mini. The Mini is a fine machine, but it’s feeling seriously underpowered relative to the G4. The problem is RAM: the G4 has 1,024 MB, and the Mini has just half that. Since Mac OS X needs about 256MB just for basic housekeeping and keeping the lights on, that’s left me with only a quarter-gig to use for day-to-day tasks before stuff gets paged to disk. Add in the fact that some of my apps aren’t native (like, oh, say, Mac Office) and you also need to factor in Rosetta – which isn’t exactly known as being resource-light. I can pretty much guarantee that any Intel Mac I wind up buying for myself (fingers crossed for the Core2 at WWDC) is gonna have at least 2 GB of memory in it – anything less and the machine can’t do more than about three things at the same time without running slooooooowly.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. After all, I was able to get back up and running within an hour once I’d given up on resuscitating the PowerBook. And I lost just a few days’ worth of data, not all of it (thank God for SuperDuper and cheap-ass, large hard drives). Back up, folks. Seriously. I know it’s about as sexy as flossing, but it’ll save your sanity when bad things happen.

And: if you’ve sent me an e-mail between 2:46 PM on Sunday, the 16th and 10 PM (Eastern) on Thursday, the 20th and you’ve not heard anything – please re-send your message. It’s been lost.

I’m off to watch the Storm kick the hell out of Detroit.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 28, 2006 5:37 PM.
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July 9, 2006

Leopard Virtualization: Maybe Not?

A blurb in Friday's MacWorld News ("Analysts: Windows on Macs will not open corporate doors") has a quote from Charles Wolf of Needham & Company about Leopard - and specifically, whether or not Leopard will run Windows virtually:

I am so pleased to see [Apple promoting Parallels]," said Wolf. "I had a talk with Phil Schiller at the opening of the 5th Avenue Apple Store, and I asked him the question, 'will Apple include a virtualization solution in [the next version of Mac OS X] Leopard.' He said 'absolutely not, the R&D would be prohibitive and we're not going to do it. Our solution is dual boot.' When I saw Parallels come out, I thought Apple would dis it, but this page suggests that Apple will actively support it." [Boldfaced emphasis mine]

Well, phooey.

For those of us who have been convinced that Apple is about to offer virtualization in Leopard, this is pretty bad news. Of course, I could try explaining this statement a few different ways:

• Needham misunderstood Schiller. This seems pretty unlikely. "Absolutely not" is one of those phrases that, unlike, "It depends on what your definition if 'is' is" that doesn't allow for a lot of subtle parsing.
• Needham has been brought in to the fold, and is now part of an elaborate misinformation campaign until WWDC. Again, unlikely. Yes, we know The Steve's RDF is phenomenally strong, but if it came out that Needham was actively helping spread misinformation on behalf of Apple, his career as an analyst would be pretty much over.
• Steve and Phil are bickering. More Enquirer-esque, this theory would claim that Steve and Phil aren't getting along right now, and as such Phil's not being invited to the right kinds of meetings any more (and consequently, doesn't know about the Secret R&D Windows Project). Steve might even be feeding Phil bogus information to make him look bad to folks like Needham. (Tip for you, Phil - if Steve is referring to you as "Gil" in front of other people, polish your resume.)
• Schiller lied. I actually kind of like this theory, if only because it might suggest a new, brazen, risk-taking, let-it-all-hang-out Phil Schiller. I mean, he is, after all, Phil Schiller. Who the hell else are you going to call when you want to know the scoop on the Mac? Steve? Be serious. If Phil wants to lie to you, you'll smile and ask for seconds. (Somebody should check and see if Phil got a Harley and/or tattoo in the last six months.)
• They're really not going to do it. Yeah, it hurts a bit. I was so sure virtualization was on deck for Leopard. Ah, well.

WWDC is August 7. Let the speculation continue! (And in the meantime, Parallels desktop is just $50.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2006 10:54 AM.
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June 26, 2006

Best. iTunes. Playlist. Ever.

It goes like this. Of late, the music I listen to has been feeling a little stale - the same stuff (Chicane, anyone?), over and over. So, making use of the iTunes Smart Playlist feature, I told iTunes to start serving me up some stuff that I liked, but hadn't listened to in a while. Specifically, I told it to give me songs that hadn't been played since last year, and that I'd rated with at least two stars or more.

(I'm a little embarrassed to note that some 45% of all my songs fit into this classification.)

Now that I've had this playlist for a bit, I can recommend it unreservedly. It's fabulous. Listening to it keeps delivering moments of, "Oh! I love this song!". I feel like I'm reconnecting with my music in a big, big way.

If your iPod is starting to feel a little repetitive, you might try this yourself. Just do the following:

• Boot iTunes.
• Go to the "File" menu and select "New Smart Playlist...". A window will appear.
• Select "Artist" from the pop-up list and change it to "Last Played". Set the criteria picker to "is before" and give it a date that represents how far back you want to go (I chose 1/1/06).
• Click the plus sign.
• In the new pop-up, select "My Rating". Set the criteria picker to "is greater than" and then give the system a minimum-star threshold. Note that the star you pick will not be played - and you have to have rated your music for this to work. (You've rated your music, right?)
• Click the plus sign.
• In the new pop-up, select "Kind". Set the criteria picker to "does not contain" and then type "video" in the box. This prevents iTunes from adding video files (movies, TV shows, music videos) into the playlist.
• Click OK, and give your Playlist a name. (I called mine, "Stuff I Like, But Don't Listen To That Much.")

Enjoy!

UPDATE, November 10, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 26, 2006 8:45 AM.
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June 13, 2006

Touche, Indeed

Apple's recent "Get A Mac" ad campaign (starring the deadpan-awesome John Hodgman and the hip-yet-puppy-ish Justin Long) has generated a lot of buzz over the past couple months, most notably because it's a) funny, b) does a great job of talking to the genuine advantages of the Mac, and c) seems to be a reload of Apple's failed "Switch" campaign of a few years ago.

I've argued since January that, despite Apple's failure with "Switch", it was going to keep on trying to woo Windows users as a way of growing its business. Specifically, my theory is that one big reason Apple chose Intel chips to power future Macs was because they would also be able to run Windows.

Well, last night Apple came out with three new ads in the "Get A Mac" campaign - "Work vs. Home", "Out of the Box" and "Touche." My immediate reaction upon seeing "Touche" (2.4MB QuickTime) was pretty immediate:

Holy crap! Could Apple be more blatant that it wants the Windows business?

The intro to the ad goes like this:

Mac: Hello, I'm a Mac.
PC: And I'm a PC.
Mac: And I'm a PC, too.
PC: And I - what?
Mac: Yeah, now you can run Mac OS X, or Windows, on a Mac. So in a way I'm kinda like the only computer you'll ever need.

If there was ever any doubt - any smidgen of anything, lingering back there - that full-blooded, 100%, gen-you-eyne Windows compatibility was a core part of Apple's strategy for the next five years, well, it just evaporated. Right this moment, this very second, Apple is pouring tens of millions of dollars into TV time, convincing people that they don't have to give up anything if they buy a Mac. As I said back in April:

So if I'm a consumer, and I see a Sony laptop for $2000 that runs Windows alongside an Apple laptop for $2000 that runs Windows and Mac OS X, well, which is the better value? The Mac is. No question. It's the no-compromise choice. In one fell swoop, Apple has just captured all of the value of its rival PC makers, while continuing to provide the same great stuff (iLife, OS X) that comes with their own machines.

And today, in a case of serendipitous timing, AppleInsider reported that analysts at Needham & Co. upgraded Apple stock to "Buy" (from "Hold") due to the firm's new ability to go after the Windows market:

In a recent survey commissioned by the firm, 8 percent of Windows users in the U.S home market said they would switch to a Mac if it could also run Windows. Such a shift in consumer preference would effectively increase Apple's share of the US and European home markets to 12.2 percent, the firm said.

"An increase of this magnitude would almost triple Apple’s share in the home market and increase it 75 percent worldwide," said analyst Charles Wolf. "Although a seemingly small percentage, it nonetheless dwarfs Apple’s current share of the home market."

For me, though, the interesting bit is when you divert your attention to the other ad ("Out of the Box" (2.4 MB, QuickTime), that you start to see the threads of what's going to happen.

Apple prizes itself on its superior out-of-the-box experience, and rightly so. Unfortunately, Boot Camp, great as it is, is not for garden-variety consumers. And although the ad says, "Purchase of Windows XP required" in the corner (and in small letters), you must know that today, right now, you can't just take a Mac home and run Windows apps on it. This puts the message of "Touche" in direct opposition with the message of "Out of the Box" (which is - in case you haven't guessed from the title - that Macs just run once you plug 'em in, while PCs need all kinds of setup time). Today, getting Boot Camp to work consists of:

• Understanding the product and its limitations;
• Installing it (doing appropriate firmware preflight, partitioning your drive, burning a CD, and whatnot);
• And then installing XP (SP2 only, please).

This is hardly a set of instructions that can be followed by Jane and Joe Consumer.

So, Apple being Apple, I predict they're going to simplify it. Clean it up. Do the iPod routine on their Windows experience. Today, "Touche" builds awareness, helps prospective customers harmonize Apple's message with what they're seeing in the press. But tomorrow (oh, say, when Leopard comes out), I fully expect that you'll be able to yank your '07 iMac out of the box, plug it in, and just start installing Office 2007. It'll Just Work(tm).

I'd like to close on an anecdote. Some folks have suggested to me that Boot Camp is really just a way of helping the Mac faithful hold on to their dignity ("You can actually buy software for that funny computer of yours!"), and won't grow the Apple market in any significant way. While the Needham report points out how silly that is, my personal experience disconfirms it, too. Long-time Windows-using friends of mine are now asking me all the time about buying Macs.

And then, yesterday, I'm at a TechEd presentation where one of the (non-Microsoft) presenters gave his spiel on a 15" MacBook Pro running XP under Boot Camp.

At TechEd.

Really.

That's gotta be some kind of sea change in Apple's perception by the Windows-using community, huh?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 13, 2006 8:15 PM.
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May 20, 2006

More On MacBooks ... And Intel Core2

I've had a pretty busy mailbox since my post earlier this week about the MacBook; opinion on the new machine is overwhelmingly positive, and is summed up by this wonderful snippet from the folks at ArsTechnica:

I found it very hard to come up with a list of negatives about the MacBook—while I am usually pretty fond of Apple stuff, I am still usually able to cobble together a list of annoyances I encounter during my use and from around the web. In contrast, I've developed a high opinion of this machine and my anecdotal research for this review seems to indicate that many others are of a like mind. With that in mind, I am giving the Apple MacBook a solid nine.

However, one reader did send me a small nugget of info that I'd previously overlooked: release and performance characteristics for the new Intel Core2 processor.

The current Intel Macs use Intel Core ("Core1") processors. Core2 is the second generation of Core, and it's got a few key attributes:

• 20% more performance than the current Core, but with the same battery life;
• Drop-in compatibility with the current Core socket;
• The same "thermal envelope" as the current Core.

In other words, Apple (and others) can simply deploy this new processor and get faster performance without a lick of redesign or engineering on their machines. Oh, and these new Core2 chips? Coming in August.

Given that Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is August 7, I think there's a very high probability that we'll see an announcement of new, Core2-equipped laptops (in addition to the already-expected, ho-hum announcements about Leopard and the new Intel-based Power Macs).

So, much as I want a MacBook, I can hold off for another few months.

I think.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 20, 2006 9:14 AM.
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May 17, 2006

The New MacBook

Yesterday, Apple replaced the venerable iBook with the latest entry in the all-Intel, all-the-time lineup: the MacBook.

(Note that this is not the shipping-since-January MacBook Pro. Apparently, all Apple laptops are MacBooks, now - some are just more "Pro" than others.)

The (non-Pro) MacBook is a smokin' machine. It's a glowing example of Moore's law, managing to cram in nearly all of the features on my 17-month-old PowerBook G4. Both systems have AirPort Extreme (802.11g), USB 2.0, Bluetooth, and the ability to burn CDs and DVDs. So let's dig in and consider the differences:

Bottom line: you can get a smaller, thinner, and lighter version of my venerable PowerBook G4 - including roughly the same number of pixels in the display - with a 20% boost in clock speed and - wait for it - a second core for half the price I paid just a year or so ago.

(Holy crap!)

[Note: yes, the drive and RAM configuration are more generous on the PowerBook; however, I got the G4 as a grad student - and at student prices - so I think that comes out in the wash.]

"But wait!" I hear some members of the Mac community hollering. "There are differences! The PowerBook has FireWire 800 ... and has a dedicated video card! The new MacBook uses crappy onboard video!"

This is true. And yet, I say - so what?

First, FireWire 800: Yes, the G4 has it. I use it solely for backing up. I won't miss it.

Second: video. Yes, the MacBooks use Intel's onboard video architecture instead of a dedicated graphics card from ATI or Nvidia. This is the same decision that was made for the new Intel Mac Mini, and it means, simply, that the Mac video system shares RAM with the rest of the computer, as opposed to having its own, dedicated pool of memory to draw from. Shared-memory video will be slower than dedicated video. But I don't think it's enough to worry about, or even notice. Yes, if you are someone who primarily uses their MacBook to play 3D, rendered video games then this isn't the machine for you - but, frankly, you're not really in the market for a laptop, anyhow (and if you are in the market for a laptop, then it's unrealistic to expect a modestly-priced consumer machine to be the pinnacle of performance).

But you know something? The shared video is good. Not just "good enough" - actually good. I've got an Intel Mini, and it feels plenty peppy when playing DVDs ... and when playing "Roller Coaster Tycoon" under Windows. It turns out that shared video's come a long way in the last decade, and the delta between inexpensive onboard video and dedicated video cards just doesn't exist for 95% of users.

And, along with the "drawback" of shared video and the "loss" of FireWire 800, I'm gaining a built-in iSight camera (hooray!) and a remote control that drives FrontRow (hooray!). These are not minor features.

So yeah - I'm going to buy a MacBook. There are a few small things I'm waiting on (like Intel drivers for the Alesis multi-channel mixer we use for podcasting, and - yes - the Mac Intel version of Roller Coaster Tycoon), but, by and large, this is the machine I'm drooling over right now. Sure, I'll slap a larger drive in it (100 GB sounds good) and pump up the RAM (1 GB is good, 2 GB is better), but honestly - these are minor quibbles. This is seriously sweet hardware.

Oh, and I'm gettin' it in black. 'Cause even though it's $150 more ... it's cool.

Anyone want a used PowerBook?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 17, 2006 9:50 PM.
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April 12, 2006

The Mac Mini Personality Transplant

I'm pleased to report that I'm back from the UK, have caught up on my sleep (well, mostly), and have managed to slice off enough time to install Boot Camp (as well as Windows XP) on my Intel Mac Mini.

It works great.

No, really. It works great. Like, "so great it's almost boring" kind of great.

I thought I'd use this post to talk about a few of the things I was worried/anxious/curious about before I began the install, and how they worked out. I hope it's helpful.

Installation
I honestly don't know what I was expecting - smoke to start pouring out of the back of the machine? - but the Boot Camp software really does make it brain-dead-easy to prepare your Mac for a Windows installation. At a high level, Boot Camp does three things:

1. It lets you burn a CD containing Windows drivers for your Mac hardware;
2. It dynamically partitions your hard drive so Windows has a place to live on the disk;
3. It reboots your machine, thus allowing your boot loader to see the new partition and put Windows on it.

That's it. The rest of the process is handled by the industry-standard Windows installer, and the experience of installing XP on the Mac is (surprise, surprise) identical to the experience of installing XP on some generic white-box or Dell PC.

Interestingly, this means that the most challenging part of getting XP up and running was XP itself. I had a bit of a Keystone Kops moment while I tried to locate both my original XP product key and an XP Service Pack 2 installer CD. Boot Camp is very specific that it needs an XP SP2 CD, and thus it won't work if you have an older XP or XP SP1 disc. (Fortunately, working for Microsoft has its advantages when it comes to procuring stuff like that. <grin>)

After XP is running, you pop in the Mac driver CD you made with Boot Camp, and click "Next" a few dozen times to get all the various bits and pieces installed. You do the final reboot ... and you're up.

Performance
My dual-core Mac Mini is a damn fast little PC. I didn't do hard-core benchmarking, but it feels very snappy and zippy. I installed Office and ran PowerPoint, Word, Excel - they all launched instantly, worked great, did the job. IE works great. Firefox works great. Yadda, yadda.

As a rough performance test, I downloaded and installed the demo for Roller Coaster Tycoon. RCT is a simulation game (much like The Sims) where you own and operate a theme park. The game is graphically-intensive, and makes good use of higher-end video cards and system components. One of the cool things you can do in RCT is to build - and then ride - virtual roller coasters, seeing the coaster from the point-of-view of one of your park guests. (It's awesome - if you're curious what it looks like, check out this Space Mountain virtual ride-through.)

Now, I have the Mac version for my PowerBook, but (sadly) have had to dial down some of the high-end graphics effects and whatnot to make the silly thing playable. So I was curious to see how well RCT would run on the Mac Mini. I mean, on the one hand, the Mini has two cores (as opposed to the PowerBook's single G4); on the other, the Mini lacks a dedicated video card (the PowerBook has one), instead relying on an onboard graphics chip and shared RAM.

So how'd the Mini do with Roller Coaster Tycoon? It rocked. The game was plenty fast, and the ride simulations ran with very few stutters and hiccups. I even set the screen resolution to its maximum (the Mini is hooked up to a 20" Apple Cinema Display), and RCT continued to perform like a champ.

Moving Files Back And Forth
I'm pleased to report that, provided you format your XP partition with FAT (and not NTFS), you will be able to see, browse, and manipulate the contents of your PC hard drive when you're booted back in to Mac OS X. The Mac sees the XP partition as a second hard drive (title: "NO NAME"), and you're free to do whatever you like with it.

This is great news.

My fear had been that Apple's dual-boot scenario would isolate data between the two machines - Mac OS X and XP would each have their own partitions, and na'er the twain shall meet. (That would, to put it mildly, suck.) There are times when you want to move files between the Mac and the PC - like opening an Excel spreadsheet in WinOffice so you can use a PC-specific add-in for analysis (a scenario I dealt with that all the time in business school). However, if the two envrionments are walled off from each other, then you're stuck schlepping files onto a neutral storage medium, like a keychain drive or file server. Hack, hack, hack.

Instead, I can now do work on my Mac, and, when I want to put something into the PC environment, I just drag the file to the /Documents and Settings/Gavin Shearer/Desktop folder, and reboot. When Windows comes up, I work on my files ... and switch back to the Mac when I'm done. It's simple, it's elegant, and it's the Way It Should Be.

Overall, I'm delighted with XP on my Mini. In fact, the performance is good enough - and the experience seamless enough - that I am going to move forward with migrating all my various applications and whatnot off my Vaio notebook and onto the Mini. Provided I don't run in to any hiccups with the new system over the coming weeks, I really do plan to sell the Vaio and collapse my hardware down a bit.

(I mean, what's the use of having a machine that can only run Windows?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 12, 2006 6:33 PM.
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April 6, 2006

Daring Fireball On Boot Camp

Daring Fireball has a (typically) great piece today on Boot Camp ("Windows: The New Classic"):

Boot Camp is not about world domination or a direct frontal assault on Microsoft's Windows monopoly. No matter how cool Boot Camp is, it's not even going to make sense to most people out there, let alone actually get them to buy a Mac. You try explaining "boot loaders" to your mom. ...

But there are all sorts of uses for Boot Camp for nerds. Any sort of Windows-only software, for example, is no longer an excuse not to buy a Mac. Like, say, games. And for many of these people (i.e. the enthusiast/nerd/"into computers" market) using Boot Camp is free because they already have Windows XP installation discs sitting around.

It's definitely worth a read. And as far as the phrase "New Classic" (with respect to Windows), I think I've heard that somewhere before... <grin>

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 6, 2006 10:42 PM.
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April 5, 2006

The First Boot Drops

Yesterday (or today, depending on your time zone), Apple revealed the first stage of their Windows strategy with the immediate availability of "Boot Camp", a product that allows you to run Windows XP on an Intel Mac.

Given my previous predictions, I've been flooded with e-mail from friends like Keith that have titles like, "Try not to gloat too much". I'm actually not gloating right now, mostly because Boot Camp is not actually the scenario I believe Apple is ultimately working toward.

Clearly, Boot Camp is cool (hell, I'm salivating over it even though I'm eight hours away - anyone wanna buy a two-year old Vaio notebook?), but it's a trial balloon: Apple is wading into the Windows ocean, one step at a time. Boot Camp does one big thing: it lets you reboot your Intel Mac into the Windows environment. In this regard, it's no different than other dual-boot systems, like those used by Linux enthusiasts who keep XP on their hard drive to play the occasional round of World Of Warcraft (or - as I prefer to tell myself - they're creating snazzy diagrams in Visio). If you wanted to be a bit snarky, you could even say that Apple's announcement is ho-hum, because Boot Camp does nothing fundamentally different than the hack 'narf' and 'blanka' published about two weeks ago (and received about $13K for their trouble).

The difference, of course, is that this isn't a solution from two guys named 'narf' and 'blanka'. This is, instead, from Apple, which changes things substantially.

Because it's from Apple, it's much easier to implement than the 'narf' hack: Apple provides some very nice drive-partitioning software for Mac OS X (no reinstall/reformat needed), an equally nice boot-time OS chooser (If you want Windows, hold down the Option key while starting up), and a handy, burn-your-own-CD routine that lets you get Windows up and running on your Mac hardware.

And, because it's from Apple, it's a clear strategic shift that, yes, confirms some of my earlier thinking about how Apple plans to grow. Apple is rebooting their "Switch" Campaign for 2007.

First of all, is Apple in the Windows business? No. Or at least, not yet:

"Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple's superior hardware now that we use Intel processors," Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. (Source: Seattle Times)

This is actually quite a change from what Apple used to say about running Windows on the Mac, back when the Intel Macs were first announced:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." (Source: News.com)

Now that is quite a distance in just two months. Let me get this straight: in January, Apple adopts the Sergeant Schultz defense to users who want to put Windows on their Macs ("I know noz-zhing! Noz-zhing!!!"), and today, less than 90 days later, they're putting polished software into the market that lets you do just that?

Give me a break. This has been in the pipe for a while.

Where is this going? Well, Apple candidly admits that Boot Camp is a prelude of Things To Come:

"To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today."

Of course, the final form of "letting you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac" is yet to be announced. My bet is that the reboot-to-use-Windows strategy is just a temporary solution, one that gives guys like Keith and Will the ability to buy a new iMac and still play their PC games. But rebooting sucks, and so it's not a good solution for the mass market. Virtualization is what's needed, but Leopard - and its inevitable support for virtualization - isn't out yet. So for today, you reboot. Tomorrow, it'll be, well, more Apple-like.

Boot Camp is basically nine months of free marketing for Apple. Between now and January (when Leopard finally comes out) the public is going to hear nothing except "Macs can run Windows!" from the popular press, the blogosphere, and their geek friends. And guess what? By the time Christmas rolls around, a lot of those people who are in the market for a new PC are (finally) going to consider an Apple computer instead of one from HP, Dell, Toshiba or Sony.

And this is the big point to remember, folks: it's all about Toshiba and Sony. This is most emphatically not about Apple vs. Microsoft - instead, this is about Apple taking a nice, big slice of the high-end Windows PC market to double their share. If I'm Sony, and I sell high-end Vaio laptops, Boot Camp is Steve Jobs' way of telling me that my customers are now in play. (Frankly, skywriting it would have been more subtle.) After all, Apple makes the tastiest hardware in the computer business and it's priced competitively with other quality PC brands. So if I'm a consumer, and I see a Sony laptop for $2000 that runs Windows alongside an Apple laptop for $2000 that runs Windows and Mac OS X, well, which is the better value? The Mac is. No question. It's the no-compromise choice. In one fell swoop, Apple has just captured all of the value of its rival PC makers, while continuing to provide the same great stuff (iLife, OS X) that comes with their own machines.

If I were Sony, or Toshiba, or HP, I'd be freaking out right now.

UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 5, 2006 9:57 PM.
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April 2, 2006

BusinessWeek's "Top 50"

Oh, real quick - last week's BusinessWeek (Did I mention I love having time to read on the plane?) had their annual "Top 50," which is a listing of firms that are leading their industries. Number one on the list? Apple. In the in-depth article ("iPods, Sure. But Don't Go Dissing Macs"), there was a pretty interesting quote from analyst Charles Wolf of Needham & Co.:

Apple has some wild cards it can play to goose the Mac's market share, as well. While Apple won't comment, Needham's Wolf believes that the Intel-based Macs will be able to run Windows programs right along with Mac titles by yearend. (Boldface mine.)

I'm telling you, it's going to happen. I would expect an announcement during the Leopard preview at WWDC in August...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 2, 2006 10:21 PM.
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March 24, 2006

Uh ... What He Said

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has posted a typically elegant essay ("The iPod Juggernaut") about the iPod, and, more precisely, how Creative et. al. better start packing it in Real Soon Now:

In short, not only does Apple’s iPod/iTunes business not show any apparent weaknesses, they’re flat-out kicking ass in almost every way that matters.

So the interesting question is this: What happens if the next four years are like the last four years? How much bigger can Apple’s iPod business get?

Of course, one reason I might love John's essay is that it sounds shockingly familiar. I suspect this meme is starting to get out...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 24, 2006 7:49 PM.
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Mac OS X Turns 5

Mac OS X was introduced five years ago today - March 24, 2001 - and John Siracusa over at Ars Technica has a very nice piece about it:

In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it's really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century.

Yep, five years. I was in line to buy Mac OS X when it launched (and all I got for my $129 was a slow OS and a t-shirt). The product was, to put it mildly, under-cooked; as Khan and I played with it, we both agreed that the single best thing in the OS was the "system update" utility.

And "update" Apple has, indeed. It astonishes me how far the Mac has come in the last 60 months. 10.0 came out in March, and 10.1 (a significant speed-bump) came out in August. And then the real race started: in the time since Microsoft launched Windows XP (late 2001), Apple has iterated through three significant releases of Mac OS (10.2, 10.3 and 10.4), moving its platform from the ancient, creaky Mac OS 9 architecture to the modern and sleek OS X. At the same time, Apple has added can't-live-without-'em innovations like Spotlight, Dashboard, and Expose.

So happy birthday, OS X. I can't wait to see what you'll do next.

(Now for the interesting question: will Leopard beat Vista out the door?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 24, 2006 3:35 PM.
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March 18, 2006

Omar Buys A Nano

Fellow Microsoftie Omar Shahine put up a post this last Monday about the iPod - specifically, how he's come back to it after a crazy odyssey with non-Apple music players:

I am now reunited with the iPod. I feel happy and enjoy using it. My wife is EXTREMLEY jealous so I’ll have to get her one too. I really don’t feel bad about this. You see I now had a reason to go to the Apple store rather than be a bystander. I’m part of that cult of the Mac again, but this time it’s the cult of the iPod. As I was walking to the store, I heard a bunch of people say, "lets go to the iPod store". That’s right, they don’t even call it the Apple store.

Interestingly, I found out about Omar's post through the blog of another Microsoft guy, the prolific Dare Obasanjo (because, you know, I've got nothing to do at work except read blog posts from people in the company). Dare adds to Omar's piece with the following:

When I was chatting with Omar and some coworkers last week, I remember someone pointing out that when a product has gotten so much market share that hotels have a "free iPod charger" service for people who've forgotten theirs then it's game over. I got an even better example a few days later. My mom is visiting from Nigeria next week and the only thing she's asked me to have waiting for her when she arrives is a video iPod. I tried to talk her out of it by arguing that she wouldn't be able to easily purchase music or videos from the iTunes store from Nigeria and she responded that there are people in Nigeria who provide services related to getting content on your iPod.

I find these anecdotes interesting because they confirm my thinking about the state of the portable-music market.

First of all, Omar's odyssey is illustrative, if only because it shows how bad the consumer experiences are on anything but iPod+iTunes. When you have smart, techie, educated guys like Omar going waaaay out of their way to make it work - and failing - well, that's a damning critique of the market's offerings. Yes, Creative makes players, Microsoft supplies the file formats, MusicMatch offers a jukebox and Yahoo! sells music. But getting all these folks to work together perfectly is like watching elephants try to do the tango. Problem is, when one of the elephants makes a mistake, it steps on a paying customer.

NEWS FLASH: Paying customers don't like being stepped on by elephants.

Dare's comments capture my second point. As I wrote in February ("Fighting Over A Fifth Of The Market"), I think the portable music player war is over, done, finished. Apple won. The iPod is now the IBM PC of portables, enjoying (and, I believe, will continue to enjoy) IBM PC-esque market share.

Part of what made the IBM PC the dominant design in computing was the presence of partners in their ecosystem - software developers, printer manufacturers, folks that made video cards. These partners were the ones who did the hard work of tailoring the generic PC to the needs of particular customer groups, thus broadening the appeal of IBM's product and making a buck or two for the partner in the process.

As Dare points out, hotels are providing iPod chargers to guests. Freakin' Nigerians are offering services around content on the iPod. That's the kind of ecosystem that made the PC successful, and now it's working for Apple. Right now, if you buy new a car in the United States, you're virtually certain to be able to get an iPod connection kit that works with the factory stereo. Will you be able to hook up your non-iPod device? Maybe. And maybe, to consumers, means risk. Consumers don't like risk. And so they choose the safe bet.

That's the platform at work. And when you see that kind of diversity supporting your platform - and when your competitors can't even get the basics right - well, it's done. War's over, folks.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 18, 2006 4:47 PM.
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March 4, 2006

Intel Core Duo Mac Mini: The First 96 Hours

Back in January, when the new Intel iMac and MacBook Pro machines were introduced, I wrote a post ("Why I'm Not Buying A MacBook Pro") that laid out the reasons it made sense (for me) to skip this first generation of Intel-equipped Macs, and wait for the next generation.

In the intervening months, however, I've had occasion to play with the new iMacs (they're damn fast), and the Mac blogosphere has exploded with people raving about the performance of their newly-arrived MacBooks. Performance of Universal binary games, for example, seem to be off the charts. (And personally, Safari on the new dual-core Intel machines is the fastest Web browser I've ever used. Period.) All this has made me very curious to see what an Intel machine would run like in the real world.

So this Tuesday, when Apple introduced the new Mac Minis with Intel Core Duo processors, well, it seemed like a perfect way to dip the 'ol toe in the Intel waters without breaking the bank. So Richard and I invested in a coff! test unit coff! to see what the damn things are like.

(Yeah, I backslid a bit. Mea culpa.)

First thing's first: for $800 the Mini is loaded: 1.66ghz dual-core Intel processor, 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB drive, 802.11g, Bluetooth, dual-layer DVD burner, and an Apple IR remote control for FrontRow. (More on that last one in a minute.)

How fast are these new machines, relative to the current PowerPC iron? Well, the benchmarks are coming in fast and furious from the various Mac fan sites, but I thought I'd share the findings from one specific test that Richard and I have conducted.

We use GarageBand to record Confab and Podcasting Liberally, and we generally record six people for an hour, which results in roughly 1.5GB of raw audio. To turn that raw audio into a Podcast, we export to iTunes from GarageBand, at which point the software does two things: it mixes the six channels down to one, and then converts that one file to AAC. This tends to take a long time on my 1.67-ghz PowerBook, so we stacked up the new Mac Mini against my current stuff:

I've got just two words on this, and they are "Holy" and "Crap".

(Now, if they'd just release a Universal Binary of Roller Coaster Tycoon...)

The other thing I've had a chance to play with is FrontRow. It's slick, but it's not "done" yet, as near as I can tell. Yes, it's nifty to be able to kick back on my couch, browsing through my music or photo collections (or playing a DVD). But the product just doesn't feel very polished - it's not as fast as it should be, and seems to pause or stop at odd times. Furthermore, the remote control feels cheap, and its pushbutton interface is clunky for driving long lists of pictures or music. Apple really ought to implement a remote with a scroll wheel, much like the iPod has, and move to something with a little more heft.

Overall, though, the new Mini ROCKS. I'll share more as I learn about it.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 4, 2006 6:36 PM.
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February 28, 2006

More On Apple, Intel, & Windows

There's an interesting, long-form story in the Sydney Morning Herald today about Apple, its switch to Intel processors, and what it all means ("Why Apple bet its future on Intel union"). While a good chunk of it is speculative and anecdotal (e.g., some long-time Apple watchers now see "a greater readiness among corporate buyers" to use Macs), there were two bits in it that I thought were interesting in light of my prediction last month that Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") will run Windows applications. In my post I talked about the three big benefits of moving the Mac to Intel. They were:

1. Performance per watt;
2. Reduced point of difference with the PC world;
3. Binary compatibility with Windows.

The article supports me on #2 and #3, respectively. In an interview with Jason Castan ('principal of Emperor's Mind, a systems integrator working in corporate and specialist graphics markets in Melbourne and Sydney'), Castan says about the reduced point of difference:

"The whole megahertz thing has gone away," says Mr Castan. "It has vanished. All of a sudden, your MacBook Pro Duos notebook is running as fast as or faster than the Toshiba or HP equivalents."

And on Windows compatibility? Well, he sees that, too:

"But I am interested to know if a Mac with Intel could have a Windows emulator in it," Castan says. "Not like Virtual PC, which just gives you a window of Windows, but something like Rosetta, but for Windows. That would put you in a really weird world where you could run your Windows applications in your Mac OS. I am not sure it is technically feasible at all, but the change raises all of these interesting questions."

This is precisely my prediction, and I'm glad to see that others are waking up to the possibilities as well. And while it's certainly possible I'm wrong (I've got the flame mail to prove it), I'm not as wrong as, oh, say, John C. Dvorak is.

WWDC ought to be interesting.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 28, 2006 1:08 PM.
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February 8, 2006

Fighting Over A Fifth Of The Market

I've been super-heads-down at work this week (I'll get in to that in a different post), but I saw a couple of news items that I thought were pretty significant.

First, CNET reported on Monday that our good friends at Dell are exiting the market for hard-drive MP3 players:

Like other hardware makers, Dell has been unable to compete with Apple Computer's success in the MP3 player market. Several have tried--notably Sony, Samsung and Creative Labs--but none have hit on a combination of hardware and software as winning as Apple's wildly popular iPod and iTunes, said Richard Doherty, principal analyst at The Envisioneering Group.

Then today, the friendly folks at Napster posted their third-quarter numbers, losing $17M on $23.5M in revenue. (Oh, and they deny that they're for sale.)

These two stories are interrelated.

It's not exactly news that the iPod is the 800-lb. gorilla of the portable music player market. Depending on whose numbers you believe (I'm going with The Register from last month), the iPod has roughly 80% share:

Jobs claimed 42m iPods have been sold, with 32m players shipped during 2005 alone and 14m during the fourth quarter of 2005 - the magic holiday shopping season for retailers and technology companies. iTunes, meanwhile, has sold 850m songs at a rate of three million songs each day, giving Apple 83 per cent market share.

Interestingly, these numbers have held constant - or even gone up - in the last two years. Back in October of '04, Bloomberg was reporting that the iPod was over 80% as well:

The iPod had an 82 percent share of the market in U.S. retail stores in the 12 months ended in August, up from 64 percent in the same period a year earlier, and 33 percent two years ago, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group Inc.

So why are these articles about Dell and Napster significant? Because Dell is only the beginning. I fully expect a few other firms to exit the MP3 market here in the next few months. Why? There's no money in it.

Look, Apple's got 80% of the market. For every $1.00 spent on MP3 players, Apple gets $0.80. That remaining $0.20 is split up between ... well, between everyone else. Creative? Dell? Sony? Brand X? They're all competing for that fifth of the market. And it's not exactly cheap to play in the space; they're all spending money for advertising, for shelf space, for sales commissions, for R&D, for inventory, for supply chain management, for technical support. And at the end of the day, $0.20 just isn't enough to keep the lights on. Dell, being a well-managed company, saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to get the hell out. Anyone else dabbling in the market is sure to join them.

(And poor Napster, bless their heart, is the canary in the coalmine - they're only able to sell their wares to that remaining 20%. Is it any wonder that they're having a hard time making a go of it?)

I have a bet (stakes: a nice dinner) with one of my coworkers that Apple's iPod share will actually be higher two years from now (or, more properly, two years from when we made the bet, which would put it at October 2007). And these news articles are telling me that I'm going to win.

We are watching a the birth of an industry standard. It's really kind of amazing, like being there when Windows 3.0 shipped. At some point, it's all over but the cryin'. Are we there? You be the judge.

This last Christmas, Apple posted blow-'em-out-of-the-water sales results. These are the kinds of share numbers that executives fantasize about - numbers where the Market Speaks, and Blesses Thy Product. Here, it's obvious that the market has selected the iPod/iTunes combination as the dominant design in the music space, much as Windows is in operating systems, or the internal combustion engine is with automobiles. With this kind of share (sustained over two years!) it's just not worth the economic risk to Dell or Samsung or Brand X to try to catch Apple. To win, Dell or whoever will have to dramatically change the game. And, frankly, when you're stuck scrapping for that leftover twenty cents on the dollar, you don't have a lot of funds left over for game-changing.

Of course, while Dell is getting out and Napster is trying to figure out how to lose less money, things are damn good in Cupertino. Apple is enjoying the kind of glow that the Blessed Company always enjoys - strong sales, lots of partners, money for everybody. The iTunes Music Store is about to sell its billionth song. What many people miss about the iTMS is that music is software. Music may not be terribly "sticky" in the way that, say, Office is, but when you add music videos, TV shows, and eventually movies -- well, the world starts to get more interesting. And that means for every dollar iTMS sells, it's just ... that ... much ... more ... resistance to switching to a different product when that customer goes to buy a new music player in two years.

Furthermore, the rest of the world has aligned around the iPod standard as well. The New York Times did an article on the size of the "iPod Ecosystem":

...making add-ons for the iPod is a $1 billion business. Does that sound like hyperbole? Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory, estimates Steve Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group, a research firm. That works out to three or four additional purchases per iPod.

Most major car manufacturers now sell "iPod connection kits" that use Apple's (proprietary) iPod dock connector to talk to the music in your iPod. That dock connector, by the way, is something that's not duplicable by competitors without incurring the Holy Wrath Of Steve (and His attorneys).

Even people who have held off coming to the party are acknowledging that, in truth, it's not worth holding out:

Why did I jump to the Apple music ship? Simply put, I'm tired of waiting for Microsoft and its partners to get their act together. iTunes simply has features that the competition can't match, and it doesn't look like they're going to catch up anytime soon. It's got the best overall interface, the best-designed music store, and some easy-to-use features that I really care about.

IBM wasn't the first to make a PC, and their PC wasn't even terribly innovative - it was standard parts, but with two twists. First, IBM owned the intellectual property around its BIOS, which is how the parts of the computer talked to the PC's software. And second, it had a new operating system inside that it'd licensed from a small little firm in Redmond. The intellectual property in the BIOS prevented anyone from copying the IBM design and stealing its sales - at least for a while. And the licensed operating system, being blessed by IBM (and its high-volume sales) became a new industry standard. We all know how that turned out.

Well, today, Apple's got the dock connector as its BIOS and the FairPlay technology (think: DOS) to keep its music (read: software) compatible with its platform.

So yeah, it's 1981 all over again. The difference is that reverse-engineering the dock connector is much harder than it was in 1981 (thanks to the DMCA), and I'm pretty sure Apple managed to get an exclusive license for FairPlay (unlike IBM, who didn't bother to demand that with DOS).

Any bets on who's next to exit the non-iPod music market? My money's on Samsung: they do a lot of business with Apple (memory chips for the Nano), and they're diversified enough that they can get out without any fuss. Some Samsung exec is going to realize that the MP3-player money could be put to something more productive - like CDs or a money market account.

Creative, however, is probably stuck. Good luck, guys.

Amazing.

UPDATE, November 10, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 8, 2006 10:17 PM.
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January 22, 2006

Prediction: XP Is The "New Classic" Under 10.5

Since the unveiling of the Intel Macs, the Mac blogosphere has been all atwitter about the possibility that the new iMac and MacBookPro (it's two weeks later, and I still hate that name) will run Windows.

Most of the conversations are focusing on the technical details of such a move, looking at whether or not Windows supports Apple's new EFI BIOS (XP does not, but Vista will), and how hacks might conceivably allow one to get around any technical challenges. But the envisioned scenario - installing some kind of shim to dual-boot between Windows and OS X - requires a fabulous level of geek knowledge in order to work. While the Alpha Nerds among us will certainly make this happen (just as they've managed to poke and prod OS X for Intel so it runs on, say, a Dell), Ma and Pa Mac User will certainly never go to these lengths in their day-to-day lives.

Most of these conversations, I think, are missing the point. There is absolutely no doubt that the new Macs will run Windows. In fact, I predict that Apple is working on a system to make this happen, and it will ship with the next iteration of Mac OS X - 10.5, or "Leopard".

(Quick disclaimer: Yes, I work for Microsoft. But, no, I don't know anything about any of this from my job. This is just a best guess, based on my having watched the Mac market for a long, long time.)

Apple's decision to select Intel processors for its machines has three big benefits. Of these, Apple has only talked about one of them. They are:

Benefit #1: Performance Per Watt. Yes, Steve got up at WWDC in June and waxed rhapsodic about Intel's "performance per watt" - for each X of juice the chip takes in, it pumps out Y amount of performance. The thinking here is that the Intel iron allows Apple to provide G5-class performance with substantially less energy (and, thus, heat) than the G5 itself. Theoretically, this will allow Macs to be smaller, offer better battery life, and sport more innovative designs (big, chunky heat sinks tend to be a design constraint, you know?).

I expect some new, kick-ass designs from Apple later this year.

Benefit #2: Reduced Point Of Difference With The PC World. A secondary, but little-discussed benefit of going to Intel is that Apple no longer has to shoulder the burden of proof that the PowerPC is a good processor. Apple has spent hundreds of millions of marketing dollars working to convince people that the PowerPC chip gave Macs a performance edge. This was, ultimately, a losing battle. Consumers only have so much attention to give any one company, so every precious moment Apple used to defend the PowerPC was one less moment it had to talk about what makes the Mac experience better. By and large, people don't care about processors - they care about buying something that works as advertised. And for a lot of people, something that's too different - namely, a different processor plus a different operating system - feels risky, which then makes them averse to buying your stuff. Most people feel safe in numbers, so they tend to go with what "the crowd" goes with (e.g., Dell). It's the "When Harry Met Sally" principle of computer buying: "I'll have what she's having."

Apple no longer has to fight this fight. Instead, its message can be 100% focused on what makes the Mac a better computer. The debate is now about features, benefits, and ease-of-use. I think Apple is well-suited to fight that battle.

Benefit #3: Binary Compatibility With Windows. This third point is at the heart of this post. By going to Intel (as opposed to the Sparc, or the Cell, or any one of a billion other chip designs Apple could have selected), Apple now has binary compatibility with Windows, and, by extension, the entire family of Windows applications that exist in the world. This is the centerpiece of Apple's strategy for the next 5 years. Leopard's going to exploit this benefit like nobody's business.

Look, it's been possible to run Windows on the Mac for at least the last decade. Programs like Virtual PC have allowed you to install and run Windows as a Macintosh application. The big drawbacks of the Virtual PC approach were performance and experience. Performance-wise, since Windows is compiled for the Intel processor, Virtual PC had to translate the Intel instruction into a PowerPC instruction (much as Apple's Rosetta technology does, but in the reverse direction). This translation process takes time, and makes applications feel sluggish. And on the experience side, all your Windows programs run inside your single Virtual PC window, which means you have to drag-and-drop your files and whatnot between your "real" Mac and your "virtual" Windows machine. This is not optimal for lots of reasons, but the Virtual PC team did an amazing job of making it as seamless as possible.

Today, all that's out the window.

With binary compatibility, we don't need to worry about emulation any more - it's Intel all the way down. Thus, a Windows application running on an Intel Mac will be as fast as it would be running on the same-speed machine from Dell.

And on the experience side, well, I suspect that Apple is working to make that pretty seamless. And the only way they can do that is to build compatibility for Windows software right in to the operating system directly. As it happens, Apple has a lot of experience doing this - namely, with Classic and with X Windows. In both cases, Apple made it possible for programs written for other operating systems and environments to work natively, and seamlessly, on Mac OS X.

"But why?" you ask. "Why would Apple want to embed Windows compatibility into Leopard? Isn't that just sleeping with the enemy and helping Microsoft?"

First, as far as "sleeping with the enemy," let's be clear. Apple and Microsoft have a deep and complex relationship. Microsoft develops some great software for the Mac, and Apple cross-licenses patents with Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have known each other for decades, and built this industry together. Yes, Apple and Microsoft compete in a lot of areas, such as operating systems, digital music, and video standards, but the technology business is one where everything's in a shade of gray, rather than black-and-white. So if Steve's strategy to grow the Mac business makes Bill a few million in new Windows licenses, well, Steve'll do it. No question.

But as to "why?" - Apple wants to build binary compatibility into the operating system because it's necessary. Getting consumers to switch to a Mac is much, much harder than anyone at Apple originally thought it would be. The "Switch" campaign of a few years ago is regarded as a failure not because the message was wrong, or the ideas were bad - "Switch" failed because nobody at Apple really understood what they were asking consumers to do.

Your PC is a crazy thing, a thicket of programs and data files that you rely on to get your work done. And, generally, every program that exits for Windows exists for the Macintosh. But while "generally" existing is good enough to keep the platform viable, it's not enough to get people to jump ship. People get used to one specific thing, and the "general" replacement just doesn't cut it.

Here's an example. Let's say your grandmother is sick of spyware and all the cruft of her PC. So you say, "Hey, Grandma, let's get you a Mac." She does e-mail, of course, writes the occasional letter, balances her checkbook and browses the Web - should be no problem. The Mac does all that stuff.

But as you get in to talking with her, you then find out that she also uses her computer to play solitaire, and has developed a real love of Sudoku puzzles. And furthermore, she loves the programs she's using to play these games on her PC today. Suddenly, your "simple" migration to the Mac is now a hairy pain in the ass - your grandma doesn't want the Mac if she has to give up her favorite solitaire game. And so, after much hemming and hawing and thinking about it, you buy her a new HP laptop and double up on your antivirus subscription. No switch for you.

Trust me: this scenario has played out millions of times over the past few years. There's always that one damn application that the potential switcher loves, or cannot live without. And that's what's been killing Apple's potential for growing the Mac base in any significant numbers.

By including Windows compatibility in Leopard - making it, in effect, the "new Classic" - Apple can now sell a machine to your grandmother. She'll use Safari for the Web, Mail.app for her e-mail, and will run Windows (as a process) for her Solitaire game ... until she finds a new, better Solitaire game for the Mac, and then kicks the old Windows one to the curb. (And, I should point out, that Windows on a state-of-the-art Mac will feel smokin' next to a couple-year-old PC.)

Apple's gonna migrate Windows users to Mac OS X the exact same way they migrated Mac OS 9 users to Mac OS X: through embrace and extend. Take the old OS, run it as a process, make it seamless. Then sell users on the beauty and power of native Mac applications.

Legally, I predict that Apple will get Windows on the Mac the same way Connectix did with Virtual PC - they'll just license Windows from Microsoft. This has the advantage of providing a higher-quality Windows experience, and also ensures that Microsoft is making more money (and, hey, we like to make money) on the Mac.

In terms of migration, Apple will probably offer something like their migration assistant to make it dead-bang-easy for people to move their files from a PC to the Mac. I envision some kind of bootable CD that turns your old PC into a big USB Mass Storage device. From there, you'll simply run a USB 2.0 cable between your Mac and PC; the Mac'll suck over the entire drive, creating a disk image in the process. The disk image will be a freeze-dried copy of your PC data, files, and whatnot; this prevents any kind of nasty commingling of files in the Mac OS X file system, and also prevents disk formatting problems.

If Apple's really sharp, they'll take this migration one step farther, ala Move2Mac, and import your IE favorites, convert your Outlook Express mail to Mail.app, and even set up users on your Mac that are similar to those on your PC. (They might even be able to move your Windows license, too, which could save you some money.)

So yes, Virginia, you'll be able to run Windows on the Mac. And soon, I'd wager - Leopard is due in "early 2007" (which sounds like a MacWorld keynote to me). And from there, I predict that Apple will see their market share double in about two years. The barriers to switching will be, for all intents and purposes, gone.

Interestingly, the new Intel macs are the first Mac OS X machines not to run Classic. In its place, Apple is going to introduce the "new Classic" - Windows XP. It's funny how things work out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 22, 2006 4:52 PM.
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January 12, 2006

Why I'm Not Buying A MacBook Pro

So MacWorld was on Tuesday, and His Steveness dropped the (much-rumored-in-advance) bomb: Intel Macs are now shipping.

This is, by most accounts, a good six months ahead of schedule. Last June, Steve stood up at WWDC and announced that the company would be shipping Intel machines "by this time next year." In the chronically-late-to-market computer industry, that's usually code for "by this time next year, we will have announced specific products that use Intel processors, which may or may not be available for sale at the moment we tell you about them."

So to get actual for-sale, get-'em-while-they're-hot Intel-based Macs (or "IBM" - funny, huh?) here in January is, well, remarkable.

So what'd we get? Well, we've got an iMac and a PowerBo- excuse me, a MacBook Pro (potentially the most artless name in the history of Apple Computer, and certainly one whose artlessness is competing with "Snakes on a Plane" in that department).

I've watched the keynote, of course, and, as you might imagine, the machines look damn good when they're up on stage, being bathed in the soft glow of the Reality Distortion Field. (Speed gains of 4 to 5x on the MacBook? Holy crap!)

And yet, despite my enthusiasm ... I'm not going to buy 'em.

Richard thinks I'm crazy (like, craaaaayyyyyy-zeeeeee) for taking this position (oh, if you're interested in his old 17" PowerBook - for a good price - contact me), but my thinking is pretty straightforward.

It goes like this. First, my current, one-year-old G4 PowerBook is a pretty damn good machine. So I don't need to buy anything. Buying now is all about want (which, when you think about it, is still enough to keep me in new iPods, but it's going to give pause when I'm thinking of dropping a few grand.)

Second, these new machines are brand new: Apple has never shipped a machine with Intel processors before. And, as one who has bought more than his share of Macs over the years, I'm here to tell you that the First Rule Of Fight Club is: you do not buy the first generation of Apple hardware. Ever. There's something in Apple's v1 product that isn't quite right, or seemed like a good idea in the lab. It'll be fixed in v2, guaranteed. In the meantime, save your money and let someone else get the kinks out.

Third, the speed gains on these new machines comes with an asterisk: thou shalt be running Intel-native applications in order to receive the increase. Yes, Tiger is now Intel-native, as is the iLife suite and a number of other day-to-day apps (BBEdit, for example). But the vast majority of apps (Photoshop, Office, Firefox, etc.) are still PowerPC binaries, which means that they'll be running under Rosetta for the forseeable future. This blunts the appeal of the machines a bit, because you have to pay a performance penalty for the emulation.

Fourth, these machines have a lot of unknowns. How long does the battery in the MacBook last? Can you install Windows on the drive and dual-boot between Mac OS X and XP (or, for that matter, Linux)? (The guys over at Unsanity have a long post about what's being lost in the MacBook.) And so on. Yes, some of this will be addressed when the reviews come out in MacWorld, but see Point #1, above, about buying v1 Apple hardware.

Fifth - and finally - I'm not buying because I suspect these machines aren't really that important. Oh, I don't mean "historically important" or anything - these computers will be known as The First Intel-based Macs forever more.

Instead, what I'm talking about is a bit more subtle.

When Steve announced the Intel transition, he talked a lot about "performance per watt" as the key performance metric of the Intel iron - that is, the Intel chips use less electricity to produce X amount of CPU power than the PowerPC does. Steve also talked about how this was going to allow Apple to "build the machines we want to build."

And then, when we take the wraps off, we get ... two current machines with Intel processors.

No, really. It's the same damn iMac that you could buy a week ago, but with an Intel chip. And the MacBook Pro, aside from the crappy name, is the same styling and finish as the current PowerBook, albeit with a built-in video camera and an Intel chip.

These are the "machines we want to build?" Really? It sounds very "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," donchathink? ("Behold! We transitioned to Intel so we could produce machines identical to ones we were producing with PowerPC processors!")

Yeah, right. Trust me: this is dipping the proverbial toe in the water.

A little history: back in the late 1990s, as the PowerPC 601/603/604 architecture was getting long in the tooth, Apple had a popular 603-based PowerBook, the 3400. When the G3 processor came out, it offered substantial performance advantages over the 60x-series architecture, and Apple engineers promptly crammed it into the 3400 chassis, christening it the "PowerBook G3." It ran hot, but it ran, and for power-hungry early adopters, it was a wicked-fast laptop.

Not much later, Apple introduced radically-redesigned G3-based laptops, code-named "WallStreet" that blew away the industry with their industrial design and performance. The v1 G3 PowerBook, for all the hoo-ha on introduction, was just a placeholder. And so, too, I suspect, are these new machines. (Interestingly, some parts of the blogosphere agree with me.)

The true purpose of these machines is to goad the Apple developer community. "Look," Apple is saying, "We're not kidding about this Intel thing. Get on the stick and convert your application to something that works natively on Intel. We're moving fast, and you better keep up." Now that Apple has real, live, paying Intel-based customers, the folks over at Adobe et. al are far more incented to get their conversion groove on. And that's what Tuesday was all about.

Mark my words: the next act is the really good one. We're going to get something different and special. And that's a show I'll buy a ticket to see.

UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 12, 2006 9:50 PM.
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November 20, 2005

Evening At Adler

Back in October, a group of small Mac developers (including Delicious Monster's Wil Shipley and Rachero's Brent Simmons) got together in Chicago for a panel conversation about ... everything - the software business, Apple, Mac OS X (things we love, things we hate), the future of the Internet, blogging, and how to make it as a small software company. The session was hosted by noted Mac blogger DrunkenBatman, and, conveniently for the rest of us, videotaped. And it's now available for download as a H.264 video file.

The video is great, if you're in to this sort of thing (and I am); geeks nattering at one another may not be the most engaging thing for a mass audience, but I found the conversation interesting, lively, and engrossing. It's a long session - about two and a half hours - but well worth the time investment. Give it a look.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 20, 2005 2:29 PM.
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October 31, 2005

10.4.3 Is Out

Apple released the long-awaited 10.4.3 update today; it's rumored to fix more than 500 bugs. For me, however, the most exciting feature is that Safari is now able to pass the Acid2 test. Bring on the stable, standards-based rendering, baby!

(And, in a fun bit 'o irony, these new "stability improvements" forced me to reboot my machine for the first time in 3 weeks. It's always a good sign when your restarts are caused by the platform vendor doing some under-the-hood hooey, and not some errant/runaway application.)

If you're in to the details, the Knowledge Base article has 'em; otherwise, fire up Software Update and download at will.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 31, 2005 9:00 PM.
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October 23, 2005

Video iPod: The First 96 Hours

My new iPod arrived late Wednesday, and I've been putting it through its paces.

The thing is seriously wicked.

First of all, I'm amazed at how much larger the screen actually is. The picture you're seeing is my 30GB iPod Photo, side-by-side with Richard's new 60GB Video iPod. The new iPod is the same width, but it's thinner, with a flatter finish along the front. The feeling of a spacious display is amplified by the smaller scroll wheel, as well.

(The reason I photographed Richard's new iPod is, well, mine's black. And the side-by-side is more dramatic when you're not also changing colors and whatnot.)

Apple has really gone all-out to show off the screen across all the iPod applications. As usual, it's the little refinements that show off the elegance - the Calendar has a cool "raised date" effect in the month view; addresses now mimic the look of the Mac OS X AddressBook application; album art is larger, Aqua progress bars are more elaborate. As one who's had (and marveled) at a color iPod for some time (feel free to read my effusive praise of the device, if you're so inclined), I have to say that I've found the new Video iPod to be a source of continuous delight - every feature, it seems, has been polished to a high shine. Rather than simply slapping a larger LCD on the chassis and shipping the sucker, Apple's design team has taken the time to think through the ramifications of the extra pixels, and used them to good effect.

I'll give you an example: podcasts. I have a Podcast playlist in iTunes that's kept up-to-date by the iTunes software itself. Every morning, iTunes runs out to the Internet and checks to see if any new podcast episodes have materialized; if so, iTunes faithfully fetches them, downloading the new files into their respective folders (e.g., "Diggnation", or "Left, Right and Center"). The folder is then marked by a small blue dot to let me know there's something new for me.

Well, under my iPod photo, the podcast files would sync over to the iPod just fine, but the blue dot wouldn't come along for the ride. (Want to listen to a new show? Figure it out on your own!) This meant, in practical terms, that I would sometimes find myself scrubbing through folders of podcasts, trying to remember if I'd listened to a given show or not. This wasn't a huge deal, but it was a touch annoying; clearly, iTunes knew if the show was new or not, but the iPod just couldn't tell me.

Well, with the Video iPod, the blue dot is now putting in an appearance on the iPod. The extra pixels freed up the screen real estate, so Apple put it in. And that's the kind of refinement I'm talking about.

The iPod seems faster, too, and the larger screen also helps with photos (natch). But the big question is: what about the video?

Well, I'm pleased to report that the video rocks. Works as advertised: no compromises, no fuss, no mess.

To test the iPod, I purchased a few music videos from iTMS; they synched right over, came right up, and looked fabulous on the 2.5" screen. Richard invested in an iPod TV cable, so we've tested the device while it drives his 35" Sony TV. And that looks fine, too - roughly VHS quality. It won't win any DVD bake-offs in the picture-sharpness department, but that's OK.

Small complaint: I'd like to be able to build 'video playlists' that would let me gang together a string of music videos, say, so I could drive a TV (or group of TVs) at a party. (I fully expect this capability in future versions of iTunes.) Right now, iTunes will let you drag videos into standard playlists, but the iPod only plays their audio track. If you want to see video, you have to go in through the "Video" menu on the device, and spin 'em up one at a time.

Richard, ever exuberant for shiny new stuff, has been toying with all manner of content (and is now officially hooked on "Lost", which kills me - he bought two episodes to see what it was like, and then wound up purchasing the entire first season), and we're both surprised to see how quickly the blogosphere has embraced the iPod video format. As I've posted previously, Cinecast now does an iPod-compatible video podcast, and the guys at Diggnation are going to support the iPod, too. And while it might seem silly to have these kinds of one-off, super-niche broadcasts available in video on your iPod, it's actually really cool. I watched the interview with Bill Joy on a recent NerdTV while on the bus. It's great.

And, in fact, I suspect that short-form, two-to-five minute content ("snackable content" as the guys from AtomFilms put it at Web 2.0) will be the rage on iPods. Think of funny, short-form Flash animations (JibJab, anyone?) or quickie segments from Cartoon Network like the Aqua Teens. This stuff will quickly be converted and made available for iPod download, and then you can share it with your friends. Each of you gets an earbud; both of you get the laugh. Anywhere. No laptop or desktop PC needed.

(In fact, given the proliferation of home video cameras these days, I expect fun short films from friends to find iPod/RSS distribution in no time. It's like a grassroots cable or satellite TV network.)

For my part, I've been converting a bunch of fun videos to keep on my 'pod - news clips from Pacific Rim Network (5.7 MB QuickTime) or KUGS (7.3 MB QuickTime), as well as that time I went bungy jumping with Cale.

So, yeah, I've fallen in love with this thing. If you're on the fence about buying one, I strongly suggest you get one in your hands. It's hard to do it real justice until you're holding it yourself.

(And, by the way - if you want an excellent, in-depth review of this puppy, check out Ars Technica. They da bomb.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 23, 2005 8:51 PM.
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October 14, 2005

Reporters And Apple, Sittin' In A Tree...

This morning's Slate Daily Podcast (podcasts: will commuting ever be the same again?) is all about the fawning, fall-over-themselves-and-beg-for-more relationship the media have with All Things Apple these days. You can read the article here, or listen to the MP3.

The writer of the piece, Jack Shafer, is funny, a little bitter, and makes a few pretty good points:

I don't hate Apple. I don't even hate Apple-lovers. I do, however, possess deep odium for the legions of Apple polishers in the press corps who salute every shiny gadget the company parades through downtown Cupertino as if they were members of the Supreme Soviet viewing the latest ICBMs at the May Day parade.

A favorite quip:

Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint

While I agree with some of Shafer's argument (Apple tends to come in to a category - such as handheld video players - and get automatic credit for inventing it, rather than being critically evaluated by the media against other, competing products that already exist) and disagree with others (in 2005, talking about the Lisa and the Newton as examples of "Apple failures" just isn't relevant ... it's like predicting the next Office is going to tank because we, you know, shipped Bob that one time).

Love from the press is cyclical. Back in the '90s, Microsoft was the darling (Windows 95!), and then it was Netscape (browser wars!), and then it was the dot-coms (new economy!). Throughout all that, Apple couldn't catch a break - every article published about Apple from 1994 to 2002 seemed to have the word "beleaguered" in it. But here we are, 2005, and Google's now the oh-so-hip, "evil? US?" company. This, too shall pass.

So don't worry, Jack. Apple's positive glow will fade eventually. And then, people will take about Steve Jobs as a "control freak who failed to keep with the market" or some such thing. Until then, I'll be screwing around with my new iPod.

UPDATE: Due to a typographical/transcription error, the word "odium" was originally captured as "odeon". This has been corrected.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 14, 2005 8:31 AM.
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October 12, 2005

OMG! VIDEO iPOD!!!!!!!!!

So, as it turns out, the rumors were true, and Apple launched a video-capable iPod today.

(Let's just get it out of the way right now - Richard and I have each already bought one. Mine's a 60-GB black jobbie. I think this rates as the shortest elapsed time ever between Jobs announcing something and my credit card statement increasing by several hundred dollars.)

I've been in more than my fair share of debates with people about the utility of video on the iPod. Historically, I've come down against it, not really "getting" the point of having postage-stamp-sized video on a pocket player. But then, when I got my iPod Photo, I saw the light - having media with you 24/7 is a Good Thing.

But Apple also did a couple of important things with this incarnation of the iPod to make the video thing more palatable. First, they increased the screen size. And second, they shrank the thing - my new iPod has double the capacity of my current 30-gig model, and is actually thinner. The prices are nice, too - I'd expected them to come in around $500, and go up from there. Instead, you can get in to a video iPod for less than $300.

The kicker, however, is Apple's choice of music videos as the primary vehicle for iPod video playback. They're not selling movies - they're selling Madonna.

(Note to tech marketers: Madonna is a good person to have in your corner.)

If you download the new iTunes 6, you can browse through 2,000-some music videos. And whoever put this library together is a frickin' genius - there's more 80s music in here (which intersects nicely with the target demographic, I'd wager) than you can shake a stick at. A brief sampling:

• Anything Box, "Living In Oblivion"
• Cyndi Lauper, "She Bop"
• The Fixx, "Secret Separation"
• Madonna, "Lucky Star"
• Martika, "Toy Soldiers"
• New Radicals, "You Get What You Give"
• Psychedelic Furs, "Heartbreak Beat"
• Scorpions, "Rock You Like A Hurricane"
• U2, "Where The Streets Have No Name"
• Wang Chung, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight"

They've also got Coldplay's "Clocks" (a personal favorite), and Fatboy Slim's "Weapon Of Choice" - also known as the "music video where Christopher Walken dances."

I'm in, like, '80s heaven, here. I know I'm gonna spend $100 or so on these damn things.

Alas, still no Duran Duran, and the catalogs from notable Apple-friendly bands (U2, Madonna) are suspiciously light. That said, this is an outstanding showcase of the technology.

I can't wait to watch video podcasts on the bus in the morning.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 12, 2005 8:19 PM.
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September 10, 2005

Switching to iCal

Now that I've decided to move to the Motorola v551, I also need to change my calendar software.

This is not something that's done lightly. Calendars, like e-mail, are one of those funny classes of applications that one becomes emotionally welded to. E-mail brings tidings and opportunities and all manner of human things into your life; calendars allow you to keep yourself on track, ensuring you don't miss that wedding on Saturday, your Tae Kwon Do practice on Tuesday, or forget to pick up cash and some Chardonnay on the way home tonight.

I've been using the same calendar software - Palm Desktop (formerly Claris Organizer) - since 1998. So you could think of my brain as having well-worn pathways that conform to the keyboard shortcuts, idiosyncratic quirks, limitations and power of the product.

Sadly, Palm Desktop is a snob. It only likes to talk to - wait for it - PalmOS-compatible devices. I can't easily go from my Palm Desktop to my iPod or my phone. In English, this means that I'm going to...

• ...not have any personal information with me while I'm at work (because it's safely ensconced on my PowerBook, at home), or
• ...need to print my freakin' calendar on a daily basis and take it with me (which, aside from being horribly, horribly low-tech and wasteful, this also only gives me one days' worth of data), or
• ...have to find a new calendar program.

Guess which one I chose? Right.

So I'm no lover of iCal (I think it's one of the weaker pieces of software that Apple produces), but it's about my best choice. I explored using Entourage, but I don't want to give up my address book and e-mail, and besides, the software feels like it weighs about 800 lbs. I can practically hear my PowerBook going, "UUUUGGGGHHHHHHH!" with the effort when I ask it to open a new Entourage window.

So I'm switched over to iCal. And it's not terrible, but it does suffer from a few small problems. Not the least of these is that iCal won't let you create a to-do with a repeating occurrence. If you want to put a note in your calendar that says, "take out the garbage" that pops up every other Tuesday, well, iCal won't let you do that.

Naturally, there's a hack. The hack is to take items that are recurring and put them in the calendar as time-based events. This means you can be reminded to "take out the trash every other Tuesday", but only as long as you agree to do it at 6:30 PM or something. Hack, hack, hack.

Another silly iCal thing is that "to-do" items sit apart from the calendar when synched to an iPod (I acknowledge that this could be a weakness of the iPod, but I love my iPod and think iCal is a bit crap, so iCal gets the blame). Again, this means that you might look at, oh, Monday the 12th, and see your appointments (8:30 AM - Coffee, 9:30 AM - More Coffee, 11 AM - Lunch), but you won't see the bit that says, "Call Bill Gates; Discuss Raise" from your to-dos. Instead, you have to scroll down to a special to-do menu and then - and this is the part that kills me - find the damn to-do ... in alphabetical order.

Yeah. They don't sort by date.
Jesus.

(One thing I do like about iCal is that it allows you to associate free-form notes with just about anything. That means you can put all kinds of crazy pieces of information alongside a to-do or a calendar item. This is quite handy; it means I can associate confirmation numbers and whatnot with my air travel, for instance. Bully for that.)

So while, yes, it's cool that my calendar is on my iPod, and it's cool that it'll be on my swank new phone as well, if there was ever an argument against bundled software, well, iCal is the poster child.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2005 7:52 PM.
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September 9, 2005

John Gruber Is A Genius

I'm running out the door here in a second, but I wanted to brighten a few days by calling attention to a hee-ster-eye-cal essay over on Daring Fireball this morning: "The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme"

What is it? Well, imagine Apple's "brushed metal" look-and-feel as a pampered movie star, having a conversation with his agent ("Mike") about the new look-and-feel in iTunes 5.

It's an awesome laugh.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 9, 2005 6:58 AM.
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August 11, 2005

My Evening With iChat

Given my recent Mambo project launch, that someone would be me.

Tim lives in Anacortes, Dave is holed up out in Issaquah, and I'm in Seattle. Rather than try to work out some kind of in-person, we instead opted to try a multipoint video conference, hosted by Tim (you need a G5 processor to do multipoint iChat, and neither Dave nor I have burly-enough machines. A point, truth be told, of which Tim reminded us. Several times.).

So what did I think?

I think it's easily the best, most productive use of videoconferencing I've ever seen.

A lot of my friends have iSights, so I videochat a lot. But most of this conversation is point-to-point, one-on-one stuff, which makes it (more or less) a glorified VoIP call. It's cool, it's fun, and it's nice to see the whites of someone's eyes (I love videochatting with my Dad, for instance, because I don't see him in person very much). But it's not necessarily a "better" experience than using the telephone.

With a multiparty chat, however, all that changes.

I think everyone's been on a bad conference call at some point in their lives. You have some group of people - 4 or more - who are "on the call" to talk about some issue. The problem is that nobody can see one another - no body language, no visual cues, nothing - to know who's actually paying attention or involved in the meeting. As a result, conference calls tend to be herky-jerky conversations, punctuated by long, dead silences. They're not very helpful, but they're inexpensive relative to the cost of getting disparate groups of people in a room. So we use them.

With multiparty videochat, the world changes. You CAN see if people are nodding/smiling, frowning/confused, or surfing for porn while the conversation progresses. Hand gestures are possible (including - yes, Marnie - "finger quotes"). The conversation crackles; you get more done. And even though our chat was kinda blurry (Tim, despite his burly G5, apparently has a cheap-ass Internet connection), it didn't matter. The necessary visual information came through just fine.

(Oh, and the reason there's four of us in the photo above is that we brought Richard in midway for some technical advising.)

I wish we'd had something like this back in the Media Access days, because it would have made our remote collaboration about 1,000% better. It's honestly that good.

(It also makes me want to buy a G5, but that's a whole other story.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 11, 2005 10:30 AM.
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August 9, 2005

MSN Messenger 5.0

The hard-workin' folks over at the MacBU have released MSN Messenger 5.0 for the Macintosh this morning. Downloading now...

UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 9, 2005 11:37 AM.
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"Heeeere I Come To Save The Daaaaaayyyy!"

My new Mighty Mouse arrived yesterday, and I've been playing with it for the last 24 hours. It's cooooool.

(Oh, go ahead and say it ... "Big. Apple. Whore.")

In all seriousness, I've been in the market for a new two-button mouse. I've got a great little Microsoft optical mouse that goes with my PowerBook, but I'm forever plugging, unplugging, wrapping, packing and unpacking the poor thing whenever I take the laptop someplace (which is, you know, often). So I thought it might be nice just to have a mouse that stays at my home office, and one for the laptop bag.

And then, as if by magic, Apple announces this new two-button mouse...

So the thing's really slick. I love how smoothly it glides across the desk, and the overall "feel" of the unit. I really like the innovative "scroll point" for scrolling up and down on the page; it's far easier (and more sensitive) than the traditional scroll wheel. Plus, the fact that it can act as a button (summoning Dashboard, in my case) is pretty slick.

I also like the side-button system, but it's taking some getting used to. Basically, you "squeeze" the sides of the mouse together, and some user-defined action occurs. I've programmed my Mighty Mouse to summon the Application Switcher; this seems to save me a lot of time going down to the Dock.

One bitch - and it's really minor - is that the driver software for the mouse required a restart. What's that? Uptime is precious, guys - let's develop some dynamically-loading libraries, huh?

So yeah. It's "just a mouse", but I dig it. Thumbs-up.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 9, 2005 11:19 AM.
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August 2, 2005

Hell Is Officially Frozen

So, earlier this year Apple announced their impending switch to Intel processors.

Today, it rolled out a two-button mouse called "Mighty Mouse".

It's like Steve is taking one sacred cow at a time, talking gently to it, patting it on the neck, and then leading it to the slaughterhouse out behind 1 Infinite Loop. At this rate, Slashdot will be a ghost town in 90 days or so ... they won't have anything left to complain about!

Oh, wait. Maybe I spoke too soon...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 2, 2005 1:42 PM.
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July 20, 2005

Taaaay-ke Ohhhhhnnnnnn Meeeeeee...

Tim blogged about a "creepy" Web page he found on the O'Reilly server. Basically, the page is a proof-of-concept that uses Tiger's Quartz Composer and an iSight to turn on your iSight simply by browsing a Web page.

(Note to self: unplug iSight when not in use.)

So of course, I visited the page, which features a link to another page that does the same sort of thing, but applies an effect to the video image so it looks all cool and hand-drawn-y. Exhibit A: the picture attached to this post. (Yes, that's me, as taken by the iSight.)

I've always wanted to see how I'd look in an a-ha video! If you have Tiger and an iSight, it's pretty wicked.

(Thanks, Tim!)

[UPDATE, 23-July, 12:19 PM]
I got an e-mail from George Mckinlay about this post:

"You need to make it clear that this is not a "proof-of-concept" or a leak or anything that requires you to unplug ... it is a localized it goes no where else but your browser as a QC..."

Still, the idea that a Web page can turn on your video camera and pipe the feed anywhere is still pretty striking.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 20, 2005 6:34 PM.
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July 12, 2005

pearLyrics

pearLyrics is a new, gotta-have-it Widget that I installed today, and have fallen deeply in love with.

What does it do? Why, it simply looks at whatever song you're playing in iTunes, and looks up the lyrics for it ... AutoMagically™

Like all great tools, it's simple - it does one thing, and does it well. If you're a music lover, get it on your Dashboard!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 12, 2005 4:37 PM.
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10.4.2 Is Out

The long-awaited second update to Mac OS X 10.4 (10.4.2) hit the Internet this afternoon, and is available through Software Update as of now. The "delta" updater from 10.4.1 is weighing in at 21.5 MB. From Apple:

"The 10.4.2 Update delivers overall improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users. It includes fixes for:

• file sharing using AFP and SMB/CIFS network file services
• single sign-on authentication and reliable access to Active Directory servers
• autologin for managed user accounts
• AirPort and wireless access
• Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, including updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
• Finder updates including finding on Kind and using Slideshow
• synchronizing your iDisk with .Mac
• installation reliability
• managing Dashboard widgets
• Address Book, Automator, iCal, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Stickies applications compatibility with third party applications and devices"

Installing now...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 12, 2005 4:11 PM.
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June 30, 2005

Podcasting!

OK, so this podcasting stuff in iTunes really kicks ass.

I've been subscribing to a few podcasts using my RSS aggregator (NetNewsWire - made by Ranchero Software in Ballard) over the last few months, but have never really gotten in to the phenomenon enough to download, say, Transitr and go to town with it.

(Confession: the podcast I love the most is called "Inside The Magic" which is produced by this guy, Ricky Brigante, who lives in Winter Park, FL. Ricky is a Disney maniac; he and his wife have annual passes to Disney World. The pair of them go to the park every week, at which point Ricky does his show about their experiences - restaurants, new stuff, construction, general happenings, and so on. I can just imagine this guy in his basement in Florida, doing his 20-minute radio show about this thing he's totally passionate about and throwing it out on the Web for everyone to hear. It's super low-rent, and utterly hypnotic. But I digress.)

The iTunes podcast interface is identical to that of the iTunes Music Store, which makes sense, given that podcasts are technically a subset of iTMS. You can browse for podcasts through iTunes, and, when you find one, simply click "subscribe." iTunes adds the podcast to a special "Podcasts" playlist.

From there, it's all automatic. iTunes regularly checks to see if there's a new podcast file available, and, if so, grabs it for you. The next time you plug in your iPod, the updated podcast is synched.

In English, this means that iTunes does all the hard work of making sure you have the latest, greatest, and most current podcast on your 'pod, all the time. It also means you can, say, catch the morning BBC news while riding the bus to work.

The iTMS interface offers a "Podcast Directory" that dramatically simplifies the process of discovering podcasts. Since it's gone live, I've started subscribing to Inside Mac Radio, Disney Insider, The Al Franken Show, and ThrillNetwork.com. And, given that Apple is aggressively pushing to let indie podcasters get into their directory, I expect an explosion of new, cool content.

As an ex-radio guy, let me tell you - this rocks. And given that Apple just announced that they've had more than 1 million podcast subscriptions in the first 48 hours of the service, I think this thing is gonna be huge.

I'm sure Richard will be disappointed that Art Bell is not yet in the directory, but ... baby steps, right?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 30, 2005 6:11 PM.
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June 28, 2005

iTunes 4.9 Is Out

Apple released iTunes 4.9 this morning, with podcast support.
Downloading now...

UPDATE, November 18, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 28, 2005 6:15 AM.
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June 18, 2005

iPod Photo: The First 48 Hours

I've had the iPod Photo for just two days now, and I'm in love.

In fact, I'm so in love that I now believe Apple is screwing up the core marketing message of the thing. I'll explain about that in a second.

First, the device is just gorgeous. The color screen makes an enormous difference in so many little ways - fonts have depth, the menus are easier to read, and the unit just feels more polished and professional. (Heck, the progress bars and whatnot actually use aqua widgets.)

Second, the color screen allows you to view a thumbnail of your album art. (If you have any. As I'm a huge nerd, I scraped Amazon about a billion years ago, which means pretty much all my stuff has artwork.) This is awesome - albums have always been an audiovisual experience, be it a CD's liner notes or the cover of a famous record. While playing a song, you can just press the center button on the 'pod to switch to an enlarged view of the artwork.

Third, the performance is excellent. The thing feels snappy and responsive.

Fourth, the games are cool. Solitaire looks killer in color.

But fifth, and finally, this is the device that will actually make you fall in love with digital cameras all over again. And this is the point that Apple is totally, utterly, and completely screwing up.

So. I unwrapped the Photo, and plugged it in to my PowerBook. iTunes comes up, offers to let me name the iPod ("Waiting For The Siren's Call"), and then offers to synchronize all my music ... as well as any pictures I have in iPhoto. I click OK and go get some coffee.

When I come back in 20 minutes or whatever, the thing is all loaded up. So I start poking around. I'm dazzled by the color screen, delighted to listen to "Speed Of Sound" for the 100,000,000-th time, and am tickled to play the "Parachute" game.

And then I click on "Photos" and I'm presented with this big-ass list of items. I blink at it, and then I realize what I'm staring at.

It's the complete list of the "film rolls" I've put in iPhoto over the years.

No, stop a sec. Think about that. Every digital picture I've ever taken is on this thing. My trip to see Kim in San Francisco in 1999? Yes. My trip to Surf Camp in 2000? Check. The Media Access trip to Disneyland in 2001? Got it. Disney World in 2002? Last Christmas? Storm Playoffs?

It's all there. All of it. And I'm suddenly scrolling and clicking my way through years of happy memories, pictures of friends, killer roller coasters, graduations, weddings. All of it.

And then it hits me - with the Photo, I can now take - and actively show - my photos to friends in a way that's just not been possible before. I mean, yes, you can print pictures and take them with you. Yes, you can share on the Web with Flickr or whatever. And yes, you can cart around your laptop and fire it up to show people this or that snapshot. But all of that is a colossal pain in the ass relative to whipping out a music player and scrolling your way to the picture you want.

In other words, the iPod Photo does for digital pictures what the original iPod did for digital music. It gets the stuff out of your frickin' PC and in to the real world, where you can enjoy it and share it and make it part of the conversation. I'm now carting around the equivalent of a shoebox of pictures with me, all the time.

It makes me want to take more pictures. It makes me want to get a better digital camera.

And yet, Apple is marketing the Photo like it's "music plus album art." What is that about? It's kind of like marketing the original iPod as a "smaller, lighter" CD player. Certainly true ... but kind of missing the point, yes?

This thing is wicked.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 18, 2005 10:21 PM.
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June 16, 2005

I Have The Coolest Friends...

So I saw my my very good friend (and unofficial Media Access "den mother") Laura yesterday. As we sat at her office, drinking coffee and chatting, she presented me with a graduation gift.

It was an iPod Photo.

(Holy cow, Laura! Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.)

I've lusted after the Photo since last summer, but never popped for the thing because, well, I had other things to do with my cash. In the intervening months, Apple came out with the v2 Photo, which was thinner and lighter. It's a perfect replacement for my current, aging, 3rd-generation iPod.

Actually, this raises an interesting point. Now I've got three iPods (my Shuffle, the old 3rd-gen, and the new Photo). That's at least one more than I need (and two more than most people probably think I need).

Marnie IM'd me: "Now you need to start one of those technology hand-me-down programs, too!"

(Anyone want an iPod?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 16, 2005 5:14 PM.
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June 14, 2005

The Cat Gets A Spring In Its Step...

Tiger needed a good ass-whuppin, apparently.

The clean install of Mac OS X 10.4 has been, without question, a resounding success. My PowerBook is snappy, responsive, stable and (once again) a pleasure to use. My uptime continues to delight. Some specific niceties:

• Spotlight now returns results in a reasonable period of time. Previously, one could get a cup of coffee, watch a "Seinfeld" rerun and do two complete laundry cycles before usable results would appear. No, really.
• Dashboard no longer randomly seizes up when you, you know, have the audacity to try to use it. (Unrelated Dashboard note - a cool-ass Dashboard Widget is Dashflix Mini. If you have Netflix, download immediately.)
• The Activity monitor confirms that the CPU is now only doing things that I ask the machine to do, as opposed to watching some crazy-ass runaway process get up and start stomping all over, thus reducing my 1,670-mhz G4 to the effective performance of a 1993-era 66-mhz PowerPC 601.
• Screen redrawing no ... longer ... takes ... forever ... at ... random ... times.

So, yeah - a big success. If you're having teething issues with Tiger, you might wait for the 10.4.2 update (rumored to be imminent, and the installation of which will ruin my ever-ascendiing uptime ... grr), or go for the clean install. Two thumbs up.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 14, 2005 4:50 PM.
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June 9, 2005

Tiger Market Share

One WWDC note: Steve mentioned during his speech that the two millionth copy of Tiger was expected to be sold this week, and that Tiger was installed on 16% of Mac systems.

Putting those numbers together (letting 2,000,000 = 16%), we figure out that the installed base must be 12,500,000 units.

No major insight - just kinda interesting.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 9, 2005 9:49 AM.
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June 7, 2005

Why Buy PowerPC?

My friend Bill Hays and I traded e-mails today about all this MacTel business. As a pragmatic, skeptical older guy who doesn't buy in to all this gadget-of-the-moment hoo-ha, he had a few questions. Specifically:

First, when I said in my "Two Year Transition" post that:

"...it's a safe bet Apple will be building for the PowerPC until 2012, at least."

How does that jibe with Apple's official party line of:

"Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007."

His second question was, "I was also about to buy an iMac, probably the 2 GHz 17-inch version, but I'm wondering now if I should limp along with my current stable of aging Macs and wait for the new Mactel versions, out in a year if Apple can keep its promise."

My response to both is interrelated.

First, when I said Apple would be "building for" the PowerPC, I meant software, not hardware. Apple is clearly exiting the PowerPC hardware business. However, since the last PowerPC Mac is slated to ship in 2007, a conservative guess would say that Apple will ship PowerPC binaries for a good five years beyond that point. Hence, 2012.

Why will they continue to ship binaries? Indeed, as MacInTouch and others are pointing out, Apple put poor MacOS 9 out to pasture as quickly as possible. Why won't they try to ignore the PowerPC business in the same way?

There are three reasons for Apple to show the love to PowerPC customers.

1. Economics. There are a lot of us out here (indeed, we represent 100% of the user base), and it's just not conceivable that Apple will tell us to pound sand without reaping the whirlwind. Even OS 9 has taken a good five years to die from 2000/01 until now - except you can still use OS 9! Indeed, support for 9 is excellent under OS X. Apple didn't cut their own throat back then, and they're not going to do it now.
2. Ten Is Not The New Nine. OS 9 had substantial challenges. Chief among them was that it was, in effect, an architectural hack from 1983 that simply kept going, like some zombie from a George Romero film. There was no way to make 9 a modern operating system, so Steve decided to get busy replacing 9 instead of patching it. It's like that old car you love, but that needs $10,000 worth of body work to give it a new lease on life. And even if you spent the ten grand, you still wouldn't have a new car. Why not drive the old car until your custom-ordered Lexus is ready, and put the cash into something with a future?
   
   Conversely, PowerPC OS X is still OS X. It's just got a PowerPC processor under it.
3. Strategy. Apple's decision to move the developer community to XCode gives them the ability to not just offer Intel/PowerPC binaries of products, but to - conceivably - add other processors and configurations at some point in the future. Want SPARC? MIPS? Cell? Apple can add the checkboxes. If the code is written to the right specifications, multi-targeted binaries are possible. (It's interesting to note that this is a feature offered by NeXT in the early 1990s.) Apple, therefore, is morphing from a supplier of a tightly-coupled hardware and software system to a supplier of an operating system (and applications) that are platform-agnostic. I would be willing to bet that if Rosetta can do PowerPC on Intel, it can do a hell of a lot of other processors on other hardware.
   
   So if Apple might be birthing a bunch of different machines with a bunch of different processors in the future, why not continue to build for PowerPC? It's just a checkbox in XCode. And those "old" customers might be willing to drop an additional $130 on Max OS X 10.8 ("Tabby Cat"?) instead of buying new hardware.
   
   (Hardware, by the way, has a gross margin of ~28%. A copy of OS X has a margin three times that. They'll keep liking us.)

Taken together, this means that if you have your eye on a PowerPC Mac (Richard, for example, has been panting to use his soon-to-expire student discount on a dual-proc G5), buy the silly thing. It's certainly true that the new, Intel-based Mac customers are the ones who will be beta-testing all this stuff. My sense is that PowerPC customers are in for a smooth ride ... at least for seven more years.

Buy the iMac. But get the 20" - it's worth it.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 7, 2005 8:47 PM.
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June 6, 2005

"A Two Year Transition"

They actually did it.

You can watch for yourself, if you like - the stream from Steve's WWDC keynote is now available. (QuickTime required, natch).

Steve is calling this move to Intel processors a "two year transition", meaning that we're starting today (all PowerPC, and a promise of what's to come) and ending at the end of 2007 (all Intel, and much back-slapping and high praise for the hard work).

Broadly, the strategy is this: by this time next year, Apple will be (or plans to be, more properly) shipping Macintosh computers that are powered by Intel processors. These Intel-based Macs will be sold alongside Macs that are powered by traditional, PowerPC chips. By the end of 2007, Apple will have all of its machines running on Intel kit, and will no longer be in the business of making new PowerPC machines.

This last point is important. Just because Apple is going to start shipping Intel-based Macs (or "IBM" for short, which is a hysterically funny initialism, given the circumstance) does not mean that it is going to forget about its installed base. Indeed, given the amount of love and kisses showered on the PowerPC customers during the SteveNote, it's a safe bet Apple will be building for the PowerPC until 2012, at least.

So that's the news - and Gruber was right.

Apple's solution to the transition is for its developers to create something they call a "Universal Binary" - basically, a smart bundle of bits that feature both X86 and PowerPC code. The appropriate code is invoked depending on your platform. No fuss, no mess.

And we were right, by the way, about the Transitive bit. Apple has an emulator in their Intel machines called "Rosetta" that will allow un-updated PowerPC applications to run - with a slight performance hit - on the Intel hardware. Interestingly, Daring Fireball pored through Apple's "Universal Binary" documentation and found that Classic, along with other types of processor-specific function (AltiVec, anyone?) is not supported by Rosetta. Rosetta was shown off during the SteveNote by launching PowerPC-based Word, Excel, Photoshop (with plug-ins!) and Quicken. They Just Worked(tm).

So, let's see ... "fat binaries" (excuse me, "Universal Binaries") and a processor emulator built in at the operating system level.

Oh my God. It's 1994 all over again.

I kept waiting for the missing piece in all of this, the thing that connects the dots and makes me go, "aha"! But it didn't come out, at least not explicitly.

I mean, yes, Steve talked about how, "as we look ahead, we don't know how to build the products we want with the PowerPC roadmap" and how Intel has a power-consumption edge. Apple is (apparently) a big believer in "performance per watt" (the image at the top of this entry is the PPW chart for PowerPC and Intel, respectively - longer bars are better), and they say Intel does it better.

But ... is that enough? I mean, this essentially feels like Steve is saying, "We're gonna bet our entire Mac franchise, and, therefore, our company, on Intel. And we're doing it for the sake of a few more megahertz, and a slightly-less-heat-intensive set of processors."

That seems like insanity to me. So I say this is not the whole story.

One thing that struck me as odd is that the entire presentation reiterated that Apple is "moving from PowerPC to Intel." But this makes no sense. PowerPC is a processor family, while Intel is a company that makes processors. It's kind of like Mazda saying, "We're moving from Wankel Rotary Engines to Toyota."

Huh?

Apple, therefore, has not publicly committed to a specific Intel architecture. Yes, the machine Steve showed on stage was a Pentium 4. And yes, the demo machines Apple is selling to the developers as a "Developer Transition Kit" also feature Pentiums. But - interesting tidbit - Apple wants those Transition Kit machines back at the end of 2006.

My bet, here, is that Intel is supplying a 64-bit chip to Apple that isn't shipping yet - one that will be available about a year from now. And I have no idea what the performance characteristics of that chip will be, except to say that it might be X86 compatible, and it might not. If it is X86 compatible (which I suspect it will be), X86 performance will almost certainly be a secondary characteristic.

So maybe we're building on X86 systems in the same way developers for the Xbox 360 are building on Power Mac G5 systems.

I'm still not satisfied. Steve is up to something grander, here - he has to be. So I did some digging through my e-mail (and found where I still owe Khan a dinner from losing my 'Apple is going to Intel' bet in '02), and found an I, Cringely article:

"The Power of X: How the Best Thing for Apple, for Users, and Even for Microsoft, Would Be an Intel Version of OS X"

Steve said something really, really interesting at the end of the presentation. I've transcribed it verbatim because I think it's so important:

"...Because more than the processor, more than even the hardware innovations that we bring to the market, the soul of a Mac is its operating system. And we're not standing still."

Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") is due "around the time Longhorn ships" at the end of 2006.

Makes more sense now, huh?

UPDATE, March 12, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 6, 2005 10:02 PM.
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The Rumors Are True

Holy cow!

From Macworld:

As the Intel logo lowered on the stage screen, Jobs said, "We are going to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors, and we are going to do it for you now, and for our customers next year. Why? Because we want to be making the best computer for our customers looking forward."

More as this breaks...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 6, 2005 10:50 AM.
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WWDC

Jeff is down at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, taking place in San Francisco's Moscone Center. His Steveness is going to kick off WWDC with his much-speculated-about keynote in roughly 45 minutes.

Jeff IM'd me to say there was "a zillion!" people at Moscone, and then followed up with this photo from his Treo:

There's no live Quicktime stream of the keynote, so I'm stuck here in Seattle, waiting for blogger coverage.

I'm jealous as hell.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 6, 2005 9:23 AM.
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June 5, 2005

Daring Fireball: "I'll See You Intel"

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a typically excellent essay this morning on the Apple/Intel business:

So this one’s going to have a short lifespan, given that come Monday’s WWDC keynote, all of this weekend speculation is moot. But, come on, how can I resist?

His conclusions:

• It's going to happen;
• "Going to Intel" is not the same as "going to X86";
• X86 makes very little sense for Apple, but Intel might be getting in to the PowerPC business.
• The news outlets don't have the whole story.

One really interesting nugget that I've not yet seen before is at the bottom of the column under "Emulation."

MacRumors.com, for example, points to a company called Transitive Technologies, whose slogan is: “Our software allows any software application binary to run on any processor / operating system.”

And, as pointed out by Christopher Ong on the MacJournals-Talk mailing list, Transitive’s board chairman is Peter van Cuylenburg, who — according to his biography on the Transitive web site — was the president and COO of a certain company called NeXT Computer in 1992.

And that, my friends, may be the missing piece.

UPDATE, July 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 5, 2005 9:14 AM.
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June 4, 2005

Soul Of A New Machine

I have finally tired of Tiger's quirks. The OS hangs, acts oddly, and spontaneously gives birth to runaway processes. Spotlight searches take an inordinate amount of time. Dashboard can freeze the whole system for 20 seconds at a time. It's making me crazy.

Richard had experienced something similar over the last few weeks, and ultimately elected to do a nuke-n'-pave on his PowerBook. Reports since his clean install have been spectacular. Performance is up, reliability is up, and he's happy.

So tonight, I invested about four hours of time and did a hard-core memory wipe on my laptop. I paved the drive, put a fresh, 10.4 install down, and then reinstalled all my applications and whatnot from their original sources. My data files, safely parked on an external drive, then fled to their new homes. And so far, results are encouraging.

(As this activity tends to cause apps to forget their serial numbers, I can only say, "thank God" for PasswordMaster).

This is hardly the full-tilt, full-power, maximum-red-hot way to spend a Saturday night, bit if it helps me do away with the annoyances, it's time well spent. I'll let you know how it all goes.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 4, 2005 11:36 PM.
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Intel-Based Macs

The Web is alive (freaking out, really) with the News.com report that Apple is planning on unveiling a new generation of Macs with Intel chips at Monday's WWDC conference:

Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel's chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

I had planned to stay out of this for a few reasons. First, I agree with John Gruber at Daring Fireball that this rumor is a seasonal one ... it's the tech equivalent of Halley's Comet. Second, I believed this would happen back in 2002, and lost a bet to Khan about it (once bitten, twice shy). Third, given the diversity of voices out there, it's hard to know just what I'm adding to the conversation.

Oh, hell. Here goes anyway.

First of all, a new chip is not something that's done lightly. This isn't like Diet Coke with Splenda or something, where the new ingredient in the product has a slightly different performance characteristic, but has no other impact. In this case, a non-PowerPC processor will impact every segment of Apple's value chain. Everyone who writes code for the Mac will have to engineer, recompile, test, and support at least two binaries for their Mac customers - the old, PowerPC binary, and the new, (presumably) Intel-based one. This has the very real chance of turning away some developers (developers don't like needless complexity), and also confusing the hell out of customers. Apple likes simple messaging in its products (an iMac is an iMac is an iMac), so to suddenly make people pay attention to the FLAVOR of iMac they're using (e.g., "Now with Splenda!"), with the attendant software compatibility issues (only some developers will make software for the new machines, especially at first) will violate their simple messaging. In practical terms, this is a nightmare.

But it can be done. Apple did it in 1994 with the transition from the 68000-based architecture to the PowerPC. I know, because I bought one of the first Power Macs (a 7100, running at a sizzling 66 mhz). At the time, the transition worked because Apple had an emulator in the operating system that allowed older, 68000-based code to work with acceptable performance on their new hardware. In that case, new customers could buy machines without worrying about compatibility with the established software base. In fact, Apple's messaging was that customers should move to the new hardware or risk being left behind (not unlike today's "why you should move from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X" message, for that matter). The promised payoff for the pain - the reason for the transition - was performance. The 68000 was tapped out, and PowerPC was the future. So we held our noses and jumped off the cliff.

And it worked. For a decade.

It's not at all clear, however, that Apple has the same kind of performance gain here. The G5, for all the whining about clock speed, is a damn fast processor. My Pentium machine often feels slower than my G4(!)-based PowerBook, despite its numerical superiority in terms of clock. And so we have to ask - what will a PowerPC emulator look like on this new chip? It has to have one, or Apple is committing suicide. If the performance sucks, it will only damage Apple's brand and the perception of the new machines. That's a hard pill to swallow when Apple has finally turned the corner in terms of people's beliefs about the company's long-term viability.

An Intel rumor is also coming at an odd time. The Pentium architecture is seemingly approaching the end of its useful life - the chips run hot, they're huge, and it's not like Intel is pushing 6 ghz or something while the G5 is poking around at 2.7 ghz. There's a lot of new, radical thought going in to chips these days - Exhibit A being the Cell Processor - and since a processor transition is such an enormous deal, switching to an ancient architecture seems like a very bad idea - it's like going back to the 68000. If Apple were doing a deal with Sony to put the Cell in a Mac, well, I'd buy that. But Intel? Hm...

But the rumor might be true. If anyone in the industry is gutsy enough to make this move, it's Steve Jobs. Steve has done a number of things since coming back to Apple that looked stupid (or garnered a "huh?") and, in retrospect, were genius. The iMac, the transition to USB, Mac OS X, the iPod - each was widely criticized upon introduction, and yet they worked out.

Steve has a very specific direction for Apple, and a new processor puts the Mac franchise at risk in a very concrete, tangible way. If the rumor is true, the payoff must be spectacular - there's no way he'd accept that kind of risk just to get a few mhz here and there.

Monday's gonna be interesting. Here's hoping.

UPDATE, September 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 4, 2005 12:31 PM.
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May 28, 2005

marsEdit Rocks!

So I paid for marsEdit today. It's really excellent software!

I've found that using a weblogging application - one that allows for you to keep track of several, concurrent drafts on your hard drive, works offline (like, when you're waiting for the bus), offers OS-level niceties like spell-checking, and so on - to be just an excellent experience. Typically, I have managed my blog by authoring in a text file on my hard drive, and then uploading, testing and refining through the browser.

marsEdit allows me to do all that, but in a single, unified interface that's slicker n' anything. Let me give you an example. I try to hyperlink to relevant stuff when I'm writing, and my usual technique for that is to pull up a browser, navigate to the relevant page, copy the link, and then go back to my text file and type in the 'a href' stuff needed to make it work.

With marsEdit, once I've got the URL on my clipboard, all I have to do is highlight the text I want to hyperlink and hit command-option-A. A sheet drops down, pre-filled with the clipboard. Click "OK" and bingo! The hyperlink is ready to rock.

(This sounds like a small thing, and it is. But 'small things' are additive; get enough of them, and you make people smile.)

If you're thinking of getting in to blogging, look for an app like this one that works with your OS of choice. It's a great experience.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 28, 2005 3:53 PM.
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May 25, 2005

podSwapping

Richard and I went running yesterday at Greenlake.

One thing that pops out when going around and around the loop is that everyone seems to have a music player. Lots of iPods, of course, but also CD players, AM/FM radios, tape decks, you name it.

I've noticed iPod Shuffle is becoming more popular, and Richard's noticed it, too. While cooling down, we got in to an interesting discussion about the Shuffle as a new-music discovery device. The idea is simple: when you see someone else with an iPod Shuffle, stop and trade. Just pop the Shuffle out of its armband, exchange with the other person, pop their Shuffle into your armband, and keep going. Bingo! An entirely new set of music. Life is, indeed, random.

We're calling it "podSwapping."

It makes a certain amount of sense, right? The Shuffle is a simple little solid-state device that holds a few hundred songs. Since the player is loaded randomly by iTunes, the owner of the Shuffle often doesn't even know what music is on it. By podSwapping, you can literally get an entirely new music collection to try out and listen to. If you discover new music you like, then you're home free. And if the other person has a Britney fetish, well, you can flash-format the player when you get home.

There's precedent - Disney geeks do this sort of thing time with their pin trading activities. And the Shuffle, given that it doesn't support iSync, has no personal information in it. It's just a stick 'o music.

There are some challenges, of course. First, you have to make sure you're swapping with someone who has an iPod Shuffle of the same capacity. Second, there's some (low) risk that you'll get a bum Shuffle from someone else (e.g., the internal battery is freaky or something). Third, given that each Shuffle has a unique serial number, all this trading will give Apple's product-registration scheme fits. And finally, the way that iTunes handles a "foreign" Shuffle is to (unfortunately) offer to format it. This means that you can't look at the list of artists and songs to find out the name of something on the Shuffle that you really like.

But, still -- it seems like there's something to this.

Thoughts?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 25, 2005 11:46 AM.
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marsEdit

I'm trying out a new Weblog editor - MarsEdit, from Ranchero Software. It's a Mac app that handles a lot of the "little things" in blogging - spell-checking, drafts, and so on. It works with MovableType software as an XML-RPC Web service.

It may break something, so let me know if you notice anything odd with the blog.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 25, 2005 9:27 AM.
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May 22, 2005

PowerBook Battery Recall

Almost forgot to mention - if you're a PowerBook user, Apple has a battery recall going on for several of its 15" and 12" models. My new machine was affected (the replacement battery is on its way now), so be sure to get yourself checked out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 22, 2005 1:17 PM.
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May 16, 2005

10.4.1 Is Out

Hot on the heels of my Tiger review - 10.4.1 is out. Software Update's got it - upgrade at will!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 16, 2005 6:01 PM.
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Rumor: AirPort Express To Bundle Remote Control

Further evidence of the forthcoming iTunes Movie Store infrastructure: AppleInsider is reporting that a veeeery interesting dialog box has been found in the new iTunes:

'If a user has configured a firewall, the first time iTunes 4.8 is launched a dialog will read, "Your computer is using a firewall software that prevents you from sharing music or using a remote control for AirTunes."'

(Looks like those pesky dialog boxes are giving away the future again!)

The idea of a remote control in Airport Express (paired with a video-out) would be the missing piece in Apple's living room strategy. The video-out would give you the ability to browse your iTunes library, movies, and whatnot right from your television. Suddenly, your TV is the primary interface to your entire media collection. And you don't need to have the PC in the living room.

This makes all the sense in the world. And, if it's true, it's hot. Sign me up.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 16, 2005 3:42 PM.
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May 14, 2005

Thoughts On Tiger

As a Mac geek, I've (naturally) been running Mac OS X 10.4 since it was introduced late last month. During that time, I've had many of my Mac-using friends ask me what I think of it - should they upgrade? Is it worth the cash?

I thought I'd take a moment to put down some of my observations about Tiger as a summary for those who care. Clearly, the OS has been covered to death in the media.

(If you want a comprehensive review of what's new in Tiger, check out Daring Fireball's excellent blow-by-blow.)

Overall, Tiger is great. It's noticeably faster than Panther on the same hardware, which means you'll feel like your computer has a bit of a new lease on life. The performance boost isn't going to quench your jones for that new, dual-processor G5 or anything, but it is good enough to make you feel like your machine has become a bit swifter of foot.

Tiger's most dramatic new features are Dashboard and Spotlight. Of these, Dashboard is the one that gets the "ooh, aah" factor from other people (it does look cool), but Spotlight is the one that seems to hold the greatest promise of new productivity. Surprisingly, in terms of day-to-day use, I have found Dashboard to be a bit more useful than expected (especially when equipped with third-party widgets, like Package Tracker, Air Traffic Control or TV Tracker), and Spotlight a bit less so.

In fact, Dashboard is so interesting that I'm actually doing some Widget development on my own. There's a million little bits and pieces of information on the Web that I need to check from time to time (think: eBay auction status, bus times, and so on), and Apple's dead-bang-easy development approach means that savvy users can, quite quickly, write themselves a custom app to do pretty much anything. It's very exciting.

Spotlight is not nearly as fast in finding things as I'd been led to believe from Steve's demos; in fact, I sometimes feel like it's much faster just to go to the silly file in my mail or file system or wherever if I happen to know where it is. On the other hand, being able to pick out obscure text in some long-ago-forgotten file that's nested deeply on the drive is really great. I assume Spotlight will get faster and better with subsequent releases of 10.4, so for the moment it's fine, but it doesn't rock as hard as I'd like.

Tiger comes with the new QuickTime (version 7), which includes the much-vaunted H.264 video codec. This codec is now at the heart of most applications, including iChat. I mist say that my video conferences with folks have looked great, and been much faster and snappier than they were previously (for instance, audio/video sync problems seem to have vanished). One annoyance about QuickTime 7 is that it no longer respects QuickTime 6-era "Pro" codes; if you're a QuickTime Pro user, Apple wants another $30 from you to renew your license. (I felt a bit nickel-and-dimed with that one.)

The OS is full of refinements - it feels more polished and smooth than Panther just about everywhere. In iChat, for instance, you now have the option to display your "Current iTunes Track" as your status (possible under Panther with a third-party utility, but now it's built in). If you have a problem connecting to a Web page, Tiger brings up a "Network Diagnostics" program to help you figure out the problem.

The new Safari is faster and better than ever. I don't use the RSS features (instead, I use the excellent NetNewsWire from Ballard's own Ranchero software - Safari and NetNewsWire integrate seamlessly), but the rendering is outstanding (it fixes some odd, long-standing bugs with some Web sites).

Tiger is not perfect, however. One oddity is that the OS will just ... hang .... there ... for ... a ... moment ... while ... it .... does ... something. And then it will be fine. This problem seems to occur in the most bizarre places - opening a Word file, switching to a new spreadsheet, double-clicking something in the Finder, clicking on a menu item. I assume that it's somehow related to Spotlight (which indexes your drive all the time), but I can't prove it. Tiger's overall reliability is excellent (I've never had a system crash), but the performance flakiness is really aggravating.

Is it worth the money? Yes.

Tiger offers a lot of new functionality, but it's the kind of thing you don't really appreciate until you live and work with the thing for a few days. The niceties make the Mac ever-more Mac-like; the annoyances will go away soon enough. And Dashboard, like Expose before it, promises to change the way you work with information. Spotlight, once performance improves a bit more, will do the same.

I paid student pricing ($70), but regular mortals are parting with 130 bones for the upgrade. My counsel for most people is to wait for 10.4.1 (due this month), which, rumor has it, fixes a bazillion little bugs and annoyances. This is normal track record for Apple, who constantly improved and refined 10.3 over nine different point releases.

So, yeah - upgrade. It'll make you smile.

UPDATE, January 3, 2008: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 14, 2005 8:00 PM.
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May 13, 2005

Cringely: Apple's "Missing Piece" For Video Is Airport Express

Bob Cringely has a typically terrific column this morning, talking about the importance of three different efforts in tech that surfaced last week - XBox 360, Google Web Accelerator, and Apple's iTunes Movie Store.

I'm still digesting all the XBox stuff (and I haven't touched the Web Accelerator yet), but on Apple he says this:

"The more interesting item in this Slashdot post, however, was the idea of Apple doing a video equivalent of its AirPort Express WiFi repeater that has audio output to link iTunes to your stereo system. This AirPort extension is the last piece needed for Apple's video service and answers a lot of questions."

Indeed. Suddenly, my prediction about needing a modified Mac Mini looks ridiculously overblown. Build AirPort Express with video out, put in some buffering so an errant cordless phone won't take out your viewing of "Die Hard", and you're good to go.

Wow. Christmas, you think?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2005 8:13 AM.
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May 12, 2005

IP Over FireWire

One of the non-sexy features in Mac OS X is a little thing called "IP over FireWire."

Without getting too geeky, this feature allows you to use FireWire cables (which run at speeds of 400 or 800 megabit, or millions of bits per second) to connect one or more computers to one another. You can then share files, printers, and the like very easily.

This is way, way, way, way cool.

Here's my application. Periodically, I want to work on some large file on my Sony Vaio laptop. Since my PowerBook is my primary machine, that often means I'm taking the file from the PowerBook and transferring it to the Vaio. As long as the file is 128 MB or less (the size of my USB keychain drive), there's no problem - I just copy the file to the keychain on the Mac, and then plug the keychain in to the PC and go.

However, for larger files (say, a half-gigabyte video clip or something) the keychain won't work. Instead, I need to copy the file from one machine to the other using the house wireless network. And, since I'm limited to 802.11b on the Vaio, that means I run at a theoretical speed of 11 megabits. Often, I get a more realistic speed of 5 megabit or so. And big files take a loooooong time to transfer at 5 million bits per second.

IP over FireWire changes this. Dramatically.

So I currently have my FireWire cable running from my Mac to an external hard drive. All I did was - wait for it - run a cable from the back of this hard drive to my PC. I then set a couple IP addresses in XP and Mac OS X, and turned on sharing.

I was able to copy 2.1 gigabytes in about 5 minutes.
This rocks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 12, 2005 8:42 PM.
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May 10, 2005

iTunes 4.8: Now With Video!

Apple released iTunes 4.8 yesterday, representing an incremental upgrade in the product and its features. Most interestingly, the blogosphere has noticed that Apple has quietly built support for video in to the product. Indeed, you can play videos in iTunes very easily at the Movie Trailers section of the store, or you can get exclusive artist videos associated with an album.

MacRumors has a thread here.

What's interesting to me is what this technology may point to. Bob Cringely postulated in his most recent column that Apple will be shortly introducing the iTunes Movie Store, based on H.264 technology. Such a store would allow consumers to purchase and download films to their personal computers, doing an end run around Blockbuster (and Netflix) in the process.

While I've no doubt that mass-market video-on-demand is something Apple is contemplating, the critical, missing piece in the whole jigsaw is how to easily (this is Apple, after all) get the video from your PC or Mac to your TV so you can watch it. (Yes, there is a market of people who watch DVDs and whatnot on their computers. Yes, I'm one of them. And yes, it's still a pain in the ass relative to flopping on the couch with a big-screen TV and home theater.)

So. Wireless connection? Undoubtedly. A set-top box? Maybe. Tivo? Doubtful.

Modified Mac mini?
$5 says yes by Christmas. Who's in?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 10, 2005 12:20 PM.
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May 4, 2005

Blueteething

Now that I have a shiny new (to me) 20" Cinema Display, my way of working has changed a bit. As a PowerBook guy, I've historically used the keyboard and trackpad built in to the unit. However, with this gigantic (to me) screen dominating my desk, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to get a mouse and keyboard, hook 'em up, and work off the Cinema as my primary display, using the PowerBook as second monitor.

I hate wires, so over the weekend I invested in an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

This morning, I returned them.

Bluetooth may be a fine technology for connecting cell phones and cameras to your Mac, and it gets raves from Khan (he uses his phone as a clicker and iSyncs over Bluetooth all the time.) However, as a technology for input devices, Bluetooth blows. The wireless connection has far more latency than a traditional wire, which leads to a feeling of the keyboard being sluggish - slow responses, slow key repeat rates, and so on.

Further, since the Bluetooth devices are battery-powered, the designers of the keyboard and mouse have the devices take little naps from time to time to conserve power. This means that the "sluggigh" feeling is even more pronounced, because you put your hand on the mouse and the cursor doesn't move right away. This means you move the mouse more in response ("Hey! Wake up!"), which culminates in the cursor doing this wild dance around your screen when the signals finally arrive in the Mac's CPU.

Sheesh. What a pain.

Props to the folks at the University Bookstore, who were about as fantastic with my return as anyone could hope for.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2005 1:59 PM.
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May 3, 2005

Dashboard Widget: TV Listings

If you're in to TV and you're also running "Tiger" - Monkey Business Labs has a TV-listings Dashboard widget in beta for free download. It's slick. You can download it here. (621k)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 3, 2005 1:34 PM.
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April 28, 2005

Siracusa On Tiger

And, not to be outdone, the always-insightful and ever-verbose John Siracusa of Ars Technica has weighed in with a detailed, tech-oriented 21(!)-part Tiger review:

"Mac OS X started its life as the most ambitious consumer operating system ever produced. Apple abandoned its existing, 16-year-old code base for something entirely new. Out of the gate, Mac OS X was a technical curiosity with few applications, and a performance dog. A scant four years later, Tiger is a powerhouse that combines the best Unix has to offer with a feature-rich, user-friendly interface. The increasingly capable bundled applications are just icing on the cake. We've come a long way, baby."

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 28, 2005 1:41 PM.
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Mossberg Reviews Tiger

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has posted his review of Tiger, and it's great:

"The new release, called Tiger, is the latest version of Apple's excellent Mac OS X operating system. Its key feature, called Spotlight, is the first universal, integrated search system ever offered as part of a mainstream consumer PC operating system. In seconds, Spotlight can peer inside e-mail, office documents of all kinds, photos, songs, address books, calendars, and all manner of other files to see which ones match a search term you type in."

"Overall, Tiger is the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks."

The line-up at the U Village Apple Store starts tomorrow at 5 PM. C'mon down!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 28, 2005 1:26 PM.
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April 12, 2005

Tiger On April 29th!

It's official: Apple has announced that Tiger will be available on Friday, April 29 at 6 PM. I'm sure there will be a large group of us hitting the U Village Apple Store that afternoon.

If you want to join us, drop me a line!

[UPDATE]: Apple has a complete list of new features in Tiger available on their Web site. Definitely worth a read. Personally, I can't wait for Spotlight and Dashboard!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 12, 2005 9:17 AM.
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March 19, 2005

AppleCare Comes Through

My PowerBook G4/667 came back from Apple's customer care department earlier this week. I finally had some time this afternoon to open the box and see what was done to the the 'ol boy.

I just have one word: WOW!!!!

In addition to replacing the various, relevant innards of the 'book, the good folks at AppleCare took it upon themselves to give the exterior of the machine a cosmetic overhaul. My PowerBook had been through a lot over the last two years; the case was scuffed, paint was peeling, and the palm contact points (you know, where your palms rest while you're typing) were shiny and bright from the thousands of hours of use.

It's all fixed. All of it. Cosmetically, the machine looks like it rolled off the factory floor yesterday.

And the best part? It's all covered under the AppleCare contract. I'm not out a cent. I say again: WOW!!!!

Apple: thanks a million!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 19, 2005 2:43 PM.
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March 15, 2005

eWeek: Tiger On April 15th

eWeek is reporting that Mac OS X 10.4 (aka "Tiger") will be shipping on Friday, April 15. This provides confirmation of a rumor ThinkSecret ran last week.

This is very cool news. Apple has been promising Tiger "in the first half of 2005" since last summer, and has been notoriously tight-lipped beyond that. If we really are getting Tiger in a few more weeks, that handily beats the "Thursday, June 30, 2005" ship date that some (sour) pundits were predicting.

Looks like my tax weekend is officially spoken for...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 15, 2005 7:18 AM.
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January 24, 2005

Buy Your Mac A Drink

The Macintosh turns 21 today: January 24, 2005.

Some folks in Germany tracked down Mac programming legend Scott Knaster (I remember buying Mac programming books by the guy when I was a CompSci major at UPS in 19-frickin'-90), who just happened to have a videotape of the launch event. Jobs, all of - what? 28? - at the time, dressed in a suit, is clearly more excited than anyone ought to be.

The video servers are overloaded, of course (Slashdot effect), but I had good luck with this mirror (20.9 MB QuickTime).

21 years. My god. And today, as Woz says, "Pretty much every computer is a Macintosh."

CNET has coverage, too.

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 24, 2005 8:26 PM.
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January 20, 2005

Mac Mini: Hands On

MacWorld's Dan Frakes is back with another Mac Mini piece, this time talking about his "hands on" experiences with the new machine. Conclusion?

"For the money, I predict it's as complete a system - hardware and software - as you'll find for this price."

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 20, 2005 5:44 PM.
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Mac Mini, Unwrapped

A number of folks are getting their Mac Minis, and a few are taking photos of the "out of the box" experience. You can take a look at two: uneasysilence.com and tombridge.com. (It's so TINY!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 20, 2005 3:31 PM.
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January 19, 2005

Mac Mini: Comparing Apples To Oranges

MacWorld has an interesting, side-by-side comparison of the $500 Mac Mini versus a $400 Dell system. It's a good read because it does a good job of elaborating on what low-end PCs (and, IMHO, PCs in general) don't give you with their "bargain" sticker price (like, oh, say, a freakin' video card). I'm perpetually shocked that some modern PC laptops don't come with WiFi, Bluetooth, FireWire, DVD drives, or even modern (2.0-era) USB. Instead, these technologies are sold as add-ons, and it's up to the user to a) figure out why they want them, and b) make them work. Messy, messy, messy. And bad for the industry, because it retards technological progress in general.

(NOTE: This is not true of good, higher-end PC brands like Sony or HP. However, if you compare good, higher-end PC brands to Apple product, the prices generally tend to cancel. You get what you pay for, no matter what operating system or processor you choose to use.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 19, 2005 9:00 PM.
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January 17, 2005

Delicious Monster Hangs At Zoka

Wired has a fun article about Wil Shipley and the gang over at Delicious Monster:

"As well as creamy lattes, the coffee shop offers wireless internet access and big, bench-like tables that several people can gather around. Often, Delicious Monster's entire seven-person staff will work there."

For the record, I love their software. And if you want to meet them, Zoka can be found here.

(Thanks to Khan for the link!)

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 17, 2005 8:18 AM.
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January 12, 2005

Thoughts On MacWorld

So I wanted to get this out yesterday, but events conspired against me. Apologies.

Well, the MacWorld keynote was one hell of a show - even by Jobs' usual standards. We got product introductions (Mac mini, iPod Shuffle), pro-style updates to the core iApps (iLife '05), a new Keynote, and the long-rumored AppleWorks successor, called Pages.

iPod growth is off the charts and profits are at record levels. Apple is not just firing on all cylinders, but has actually achieved liftoff.

It's amazing what Jobs has pulled off since 1997.

News coverage is pretty comprehensive, but I wanted to call out a few things that I think are pretty interesting.

• First, Slashdot has officially freaked out, in positive way, about the Mac mini. Apple posts on Slashdot usually attract a mixed bag of responses, but this is, hands-down, the most overwhelmingly positive I've ever seen. We'll see if that enthusiasm translates into sales, but initial reports are encouraging.
• The iPod Shuffle is genius. Positioning it as a "shuffle" means it has a point of distinction from other music players. It also positions the hard-drive iPods as "primary" devices, with the Shuffle as the "on-the-go" player for walking, working out, or whatever. The fact that it has no moving parts makes it perfect for exercise. And I note that the 512MB model holds 120 songs; at 4 minutes per song, that's 8 hours of music ... which is more than enough time to run a marathon.
• I'm buying a 1 GB iPod Shuffle for running. I was going to buy the $99 one, but as it turns out you can use it for a thumb flash drive. So if I buy the $149, I can get a half-gig flash drive PLUS my half gig of songs. I suspect that the iPod Shuffle is going to quickly scoop up sales that would go to "vanilla" thumb drives - the logic will be, "for an extra $20, I can get an iPod AND a thumb drive?"
• Jobs claimed that the iPod market share doubled in 2004, primarily by scooping the high end of the flash-player market (his exact comment was, "the iPod Mini worked.") The iPod Shuffle is, I think, perfectly designed to go after the remaining flash market. It's the right product at the right time, with the right brand and the right marketing. If Apple can pull off an 80+% share of the MP3 player market (that's based on total units, not dollar-denominated or some subgroup, such as hard-drive-based players), it will be a HBR-worthy coup. Amazing business strategy and execution.
• Mac mini? Three words: About. Damn. Time.
  
  Apple has been knocked for a long time for the "expense" of their hardware, but when you compare their stuff to comparably-equipped Wintel hardware, the prices are always super-close. Sometimes the Mac is $50 more, sometimes the PC is more. Part of it is that Apple always puts the "extras" in to their stuff (Wifi, Ethernet) while on many PCs this stuff is third-party (or of lower quality). The Mac mini, on the other hand, is stylish, small, and hits the price point that gets people to genuinely re-evaluate the "expense" issue in their minds. I mean, yes you can tart the thing up with more RAM, a DVD burner, Bluetooth, etc., and boost the price close to a grand, but that's the user's choice. If you want to walk out of the Apple store with a brand new Mac for less than $500, you can. Outstanding. And unprecedented. Look for Mac mini prices to inch downward over time ... and for the addition of things like TV tuners and whatnot to make it a living-room box.
• The big surprise, however, was Pages, which has been rumored for a super-long time and finally arrived. While a lot of Microsoft haters were hoping that Pages (and, presumably, a complement of other Office software) would shoot Mac Office dead, if anything Pages has just confirmed how good Office 2004 really is.
  
  Pages is clearly an AppleWorks replacement, period. It's an entry-level, visually-dazzling word processing program. Yes, it reads and writes Word files, but it's ultimately a way for home- and small-office users to produce church newsletters and the like without a lot of hassle. The integration with the iApps is genius, but the focus on templates really tells the story - Pages is all about customizing an Apple-designed layout to your specific purpose. In that way, Pages is not dissimilar from Microsoft Publisher.
  The reason this is significant is that, despite Pages' long-overdue arrival, Office 2004 still is, and will continue to be, the pre-eminent productivity solution on the Mac. Spending time in Spreadsheet Modeling class has shown me, more than ever, what a fantastic product Excel is. Word is a staple. And, while I'm a Keynote fan (I find PowerPoint kinda clunky), there's no denying that the Office apps work and feel very Mac-like. The folks in the MacBU at Microsoft bust their asses for the platform, and the quality really shines through.

One more quick note: Gizmodo had a hysterical Apple parody (iProduct) on their site, which spawned a parody of the parody (iProduct rebuttal). Be sure to check 'em out.

UPDATE, March 12, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 12, 2005 10:04 PM.
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January 11, 2005

Live MacWorld Coverage...

I'm in Brand Management right now, but I'm totally distracted by the live keynote coverage of MacWorld expo over at MacCentral.

Updates and thoughts later today.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 11, 2005 10:49 AM.
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November 11, 2004

Mmmm .... Delicious!

I'm having such an "I Love Software" kind of morning.

The swoon-inducing application is called "Delicious Library." It's the first (and, thus far, only) app from Seattle software company Delicious Monster.

Conceptually, Delicious Library is very simple: it allows you to track what books, music, movies and video games you own. It also lets you "loan" books to friends (and, given that one of my pals has had my "Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration In 24 Hours" for about a year now, this is somewhat close to my heart).

"So what's the big deal?" you say. "Just put all that stuff in a spreadsheet."

"Ah," I reply. "But what makes Delicious Library super-easy is that it uses Web services and - get this - barcode scanning to make the data-entry process unbelievably simple."

Works like this. Say I want to add a DVD to the library. I simply grab the movie off the shelf and flip it over to expose its UPC. I then point my iSight video camera at the UPC. Delicious Library makes a "beep" noise to let me know it scanned OK (just like in the grocery store), and then runs over to Amazon to grab all the details - artwork, title, recommendations, you name it.

Slick, slick, slick.

So I've been sitting here this morning, running around the apartment with my PowerBook and iSight, cataloging everything. It's addictive and fun - Zap! Zap! Zap!

The software does other cool stuff, too, like integrating with Address Book (so when I loan a book to someone, I don't have to retype any of their details) and iPod (so I can take a list of my stuff with me on the go - no more duplicate DVD buying!).

It's hot. If you've got a Mac, download the demo - it lets you add up to 25 items without a license.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 11, 2004 11:05 AM.
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October 27, 2004

Fetish

Apple introduced the long-rumored iPod Photo yesterday. And it's gorgeous.

The Slashdot crowd is abuzz, of course, and the camp seems evenly split between the "this kicks huge ass" and the "yet another overpriced gadget from Apple" crowds.

My vote is simple: I can't wait to get one.

Back in 1999, I embarked on a "photo a day" project - I wanted to take a picture every single day of the year that represented some particular thing I was doing. (Caveat: this is not an original idea. I got it from Joe Krause of Excite, who told Bob Cringely about it during the "Nerds 2.01" video.) Some days lent themselves to fantastic photos - spectacular sunrises in Bellingham (when I had a morning meeting in Blaine), travel photos, and so on. Others are more mundane (generic photos of Greenlake, or of my trip to the grocery store). In all, it was a cool thing to do. I now have a photo book that represents an entire year of my life - the interesting ... and the not-so-interesting.

The project was somewhat expensive. Not counting the cost of the camera, the hassle of driving to the store, logistics, etc., the film and developing set me back a good $1200. It also turned me in to a shutterbug. So, in 2001, I switched to digital photography, buying a 3.2-megapixel Sony DSC-P5. I took it to Disneyworld in January of 2002, shot the vacation from start to finish, and didn't spend a nickel on anything other than the cam. I've never looked back.

So now I have, literally, gigabytes of photos sitting on my PowerBook hard drive, and, while I love them, it's a pain to do slideshows and the like. I mean, yes I can put them up on the Web, and yes I can make prints through Ofoto or something, but what I really want is to keep my photos with me, on my person, for easy display or sharing.

The iPod does all this. And it does it in a nice, glossy sandwich of solid-state marvelousness. The fact that you can plug it in to the TV to display your photos just takes it to the next level. SO great.

Anyone want a deal on a used, year-old 3rd generation 20 GB iPod?...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 27, 2004 2:04 PM.
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August 10, 2004

iTMS Hits 1 Million Songs

And in other iTunes Music Store news, the catalog now offers more than one million songs(!).

Of course, their New Order collection is still incomplete, so perhaps some back-catalog improvements would be called for as a valid next step?

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 10, 2004 8:21 AM.
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DNC Speeches on iTunes

Okay, this is just cool. Apple has taken many of the speeches from the Democratic National Convention (Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Dean, etc.) and made them available for free download through the iTunes Music Store. They plan to do the same for the Republican National Convention later this month.

Slick intersection of technology and politics, huh?

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 10, 2004 6:43 AM.
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August 6, 2004

Virgin Sues Apple Over FairPlay

The assault on Apple's DRM continued this morning with news that Virgin Mega has filed a lawsuit in France claiming Apple's FairPlay is anticompetitive.

Interesting. Does Virgin Mega have a "right" to sell music that works on the iPod? Or is it their competitive burden to produce (or support) a music player that competes with/is superior to the iPod?

Of course, as I've said previously, there's no limitation to bringing music (MP3) files on to the iPod, except that they're unencrypted, and it's unlikely that Virgin Mega would be permitted to sell unencrypted music by the labels. Perhaps Virgin Mega ought to sue the labels for insisting that they use a DRM scheme in the first place.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 6, 2004 8:26 AM.
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August 2, 2004

Steve's Out Of Action

I've only had sporadic online access during my travel to San Francisco today, but I saw this news blurb about Steve Jobs' surgery for pancreatic cancer. It looks like they caught it early, and the type is pretty rare, but still - cancer. Yikes.

Get better, Steve. We need you. =)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 2, 2004 6:39 PM.
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July 30, 2004

Real's Response: Kiss Our A--

Vunet: Real is responding to Apple, "That is why so many consumers have welcomed the news of Harmony. Consumers, and not Apple, should be the ones choosing what music goes on their iPod."

Of course, all of this is getting silly. No one is telling people they can't choose what music to put on their iPods. Go to the music store, buy that Hootie CD (someone has to), take it home, rip it, and BOOM! it's on your iPod.

Really, the issue comes down to consumers being able to choose which DRM goes on their iPod -- an entirely different question. Is anyone, other than manufacturers of different DRM schemes, asking for this? Anyone at all?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 30, 2004 2:08 PM.
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July 29, 2004

Color Me Shocked

CNET: Apple says "It is highly likely that Real's Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods.."

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 29, 2004 9:51 AM.
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July 28, 2004

CNN on iPod and Real

CNN:

"The question the company now must answer is, Is it strategically more important to preserve its closed system, or is the iPod the future profit machine for the company? In the latter case, it should pump up sales numbers at any reasonable cost. It's quite a pickle."

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 28, 2004 2:45 PM.
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July 26, 2004

Is RealNetworks Playing Fair?

The Web is atwitter today with the news that RealNetworks has reverse-engineered Apple's FairPlay digital rights management scheme, and plans to use its implementation in its music store.

In English, this means that songs purchased from online stores operated by RealNetworks (or from companies to whom Real has licensed its technology) will now be playable on iPods.

Why is this a big deal?

Well, first let's clear up some confusion. iPods play MP3 files just fine, whatever their origin. If you have an MP3, then you can park that puppy in any iPod, no sweat, and play it to your hearts' content.

The problem, of course, is that MP3 is an unencrypted file format. Once a song is in MP3, you can copy it, give it to friends, swap it on the Internet, you name it. I'm speaking from a technical standpoint, here, not a legal one (don't steal music). The recording industry HATES this, which is why digital rights management, or DRM, comes in to play. DRM is designed to take the music file and "seal" it in a digital envelope so it can only be played by the person who actually buys it. There's a billion and one different DRM schemes out there, but Apple has chosen a technology called FairPlay for the iTunes Music Store.

If you want to play music on the iPod that's got DRM, the only DRM you can use is FairPlay. Real bas basically cloned FairPlay, and is now selling its clone technology to others.

This raises several interesting questions.

First, is this good or bad for consumers? Well, my first inclination is to say that Choice Is Good; that is, the more outlets you can get selling music, the better it is for online music as a whole and individual choice in particular. However, I am troubled by the fact that Real has chosen to reverse-engineer the technology (rather than licensing from Apple ... and yes, I know Apple has refused to license), because it means that the quality of the experience for Real's consumers is not guaranteed. Should Apple decide to make small changes in FairPlay (and this is something tech companies do all the time), then it's very possible that Real's technology will break, and anyone who is buying music based on that technology will be basically screwed. So while I applaud Real for their Engineering Kung Fu, you wouldn't catch me building my business on their stuff.

Second, I'm not sure that what Real is doing is even legal.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a law passed to protect the rights of copyright holders. It basically says that reverse-engineering is, while not outright against the law, now a very murky area.

This law is playing out in interesting, and unexpected ways. In the brutal inkjet-pritner business, for instance, manufacturers like Lexmark give away their printers at cost to make money on the ink cartridges. Lexmark, like a lot of companies, now embeds chips in Lexmark-branded ink cartridges so they work with Lexmark printers. No special chip in your ink cartridge? Won't work in your Lexmark printer. Or it'll work poorly.

Lexmark actually sued a small company, called Static Control Components, who reverse-engineered their chip technology. Static Control was selling this reverse-engineered implementation to other ink cartridge manufacturers, who in turn could now undercut Lexmark on price in the ink cartridge market. Static Control has ceased making their chips.

So it seems that something similar is about to happen in music. Pardon the pun, but stay tuned. This could get ugly.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 26, 2004 8:36 AM.
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July 23, 2004

Worship My Radiant iPod

Kim sent me a link to this riotously funny screed on SF Gate:

"Because now you -- yes, you -- can say you were there for the advent of the Apple iPod. The very first one. The red-hot must-have gizmo of Now. The smooth white plastic love lump of Yes. The Gadget That Changed Everything even though everything was pretty much already completely changed and everyone was pretty much already like, damn, can things even change much anymore? And then the iPod hit and the answer was a clear, delicious, hell yes."

Kim and I share a high school, a long friendship, and a love of Smoove B. When Kim sends you a link, you share it. End of story. (It's kind of a game rule.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 23, 2004 1:38 PM.
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July 21, 2004

Birth of the iPod

Wired has a fascinating article about the birth of the iPod:

'...while Fadell may have had the business plan, Apple CEO Steve Jobs molded the device's shape, feel and design.

"The interesting thing about the iPod, is that since it started, it had 100 percent of Steve Jobs' time," said Knauss. "Not many projects get that. He was heavily involved in every single aspect of the project."'

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 21, 2004 10:03 AM.
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