Smalltalk with James Robertson

That's the shorter version of this post by Jeremy Dillworth. As I said earlier today, Scratch being booted off the iPhone OS is an unintended consequence of the new policy. And as to this:

While it would obviously be more convenient if Apple allowed Scratch to run on the iPad as it does on other platforms, that approach is a non-start because of Apple's developer agreement. John McIntosh (author of the iPad/iPhone version of Scratch) should have known that before he even started tinkering with a version of Scratch for the iPad.

Except.... John had a few apps approved, and they only got booted under the new policy. Emphasis on new.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, apple, iPad

When Apple banned "meta platforms" from the iPad/iPhone recently, I don't think they expected to get a raspberry from educators and Alan Kay - but that's what ended up happening:

Jobs this month personally mailed an iPad to Kay, who praised Apple’s tablet as “fantastically good” for drawing, painting and typing. But Kay declined to give his full evaluation of the iPad to Wired.com until his question of whether Scratch or Etoys, another educational programming language Kay developed for kids, would be usable on the device.

This is a consequence of Scratch being pulled from the app store, which itself was collateral damage from Apple's war on Flash. Now they've ended up in bad place, because they are getting bad PR from sympathetic people (children and educators). If they carve out an exception for Scratch, on the other hand, the rule starts looking even more obviously aimed at Adobe - "If that's ok, why not this?"

I suppose they could go with "meta platforms are ok for educational apps", but that will end up looking silly, too. When they created this rule as a way of targeting Adobe/Flash, I bet they thought they were being pretty clever. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

It's not just Wired that's noticed, either - the NY Times' Gadget blog has the story, too.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad, smalltalk, squeak

Steve Rubel thinks that Apple wanted that prototype to be found:

It's been reported that Apple allegedly has teams in the company working on prototypes that will never see the light of day. It does so, it's been said, to maintain secrecy and to occasionally throw people off the trail. That's what I think is happening here. If that's not enough, consider this - Apple appears to strive to maintain the news flow after a product is announced yet before it's available. After the iPad was revealed, it's been reported that Apple kept the few that were in the wild chained down to special tables. So this isn't a company that lets important unreleased devices anywhere near the wild... unless, that is, they want someone to find it.

With any other company, I'd laugh and move along. With Apple, he could easily be right.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone

Looks like Gizmodo got lucky:

It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing, and here are all the details.

Later they quote John Gruber (Daring Fireball):

So I called around, and I now believe this is an actual unit from Apple — a unit Apple is very interested in getting back.

It's always a good idea to be wary of Apple rumors, but this one looks more solid.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone, 4G

I have to part with Andres on this one:

Sigh. Just because things look cool, it doesn't make them good. For example, somehow it's a good thing to carry 1000 books in our pockets. What's the point, since we cannot meaningfully deal with even 5 serious books at a time? Moreover, 25% of Americans don't read books at all, and the rest reads about 1 book a month. Are Kindles or iPads worth so much just to read 1 book a month?

This all depends on where you sit. For instance, if you sit on a plane a lot, being able to carryv a lot of books on one small device is a huge win. Years ago, on a trip to Australia, I weighed myself down terribly with a bunch of books for the long flight. On another trip there, I bought a large book in Australia, and then had to figure out how to fit it in my bag for the flight home.

Now, does everyone travel regularly? No, but that's certainly one target for whom such devices make a lot of sense. We bought one recently, because my wife wanted to be able to read the same book upstairs and downstairs. Simple, you think - just cart the book, right? Except, with her knees, she doesn't like to carry stuff up and down. The iPad is small enough for her to handle more easily - and the Kindle app for the iPad and Mac synchs her reading position between the two devices quite nicely.

Ultimately, what makes or breaks any gadget is whether it makes the users happy. It's early days for the iPad, so we don't have a solid idea. Give it a few months, and I think we'll know a lot more - like whether the new restrictions on development irritate enough developers that the irritation flows down to users.

Technorati Tags: travel, iPad

So is this an actual shortage of iPads, or the kind of clever rationing that Nintendo did with the Wii to make sure that demand was always kept on edge?

Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad(TM). We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.

Apple runs a pretty tight ship, as does Nintendo. I'm guessing that this is a carefully orchestrated marketing plan in action.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad

I like the dispassionate take that Jean-Louis Gassee has on the Apple/Adobe thing, and - when I sat back and thought about it - this made a ton of sense to me:

Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation.

He goes on to say that allowing cross platform tools leads to other people winning the platform battle and low margins. While I'm not so sure of that (it depends on how much value those tools bring to the party), I do get the baseline worry about having outside tools effectively control progression.

Years ago, back in the VW 2.x and VW 3.x era, the source control tool of choice for Smalltalk (across multiple dialects for a time) was Envy. It was available for VW, for Visual Smalltalk, and for IBM Smalltalk. What both Digitalk and ParcPlace noticed was that customers were mostly oblivious to vendor upgrades; they waited until a new version of Envy was available. The process of "Envy-izing" VW or VS was involved and invasive, and both vendors let OTI do it. Eventually, Digitalk decided that was a problem, and they shipped their product with a built in version control tool. After some initial angst from customers, the upgrade lag stopped. ParcPlace=Digitalk did the same thing (later) with Store, and again - after some initial angst - the customer base stopped lagging upgrades so much.

That's what Apple is worried about - say they allowed the new Flash cross compiler, and Flash ended up staying as the standard video system. Skip forward a bit, and Apple wants to ship OS 5 for the iPhone - but for reasons of their own (maybe they have a crush of other projects), Adobe can't get to updating the Flash project for, say, 6-9 months. The new release falls into dead air, and "everyone" stays on the old release. Apple gets pressure to keep supporting the old release, and things are generally slower.

So I understand where they are coming from. That doesn't mean I have to like it; but heck, it also doesn't mean that I (or anyone else, for that matter) has to write apps for the iPhone/iPad ecosystem. I said yesterday that this policy might be "a bridge too far" for Apple, but today? I'm not so sure.

There's a flip side danger for Apple though; it depends on how things play out. Consider:

Adobe has readily courted most other mobile OS designs and has ported Flash to Android, webOS and eventually Symbian and Windows Phone.

Right now, Apple is the clear leader in the mobile space, and they are helped (ironically) by Google's desire to get HTML5 (which, in part, will obviate Flash) as the standard for web content. But... what if these other devices end up, in the aggregate, winning? At that point, Apple ends up lagging, as too much content simply wouldn't work on the iPhone (but would on the other devices). If Google weren't pushing so hard on HTML5, I suspect Apple's chances in this battle would be a lot lower. As I write this, it looks like they'll win this battle.

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad, iPhone, Adobe, flash

Wow, Adobe's evangelist, Lee Brimelow, is really unhappy:

Me deciding not to give money to Apple is not going to do anything to their bottom line. But this is equivalent to me walking into Macy’s to buy a new wallet and the salesperson spits in my face. Chances are I won’t be buying my wallets at Macy’s anymore, no matter how much I like them.

Meanwhile, I have to differ with John Gruber's take on Kindle on Mac:

Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turd that doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app.

I just asked my wife, who's used both, and she didn't say anything like that. In fact, her initial take is that the Mac version is easier to use. Gruber is the classic tech weenie who doesn't ever talk to actual users, but is convinced that he knows what they think.

hat tip Rob Fahrni

Technorati Tags: apple, adobe, iPad, iPhone

It looks like Apple is really closing off development choices for the next gen OS for the iPhone and iPad - John Gruber quotes the new developer agreement:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited

That certainly puts John McIntosh in an awkward position.

I guess they really, really want to completely control the user experience...

Technorati Tags: iPhone, apple, iPad

PC World notices what Arden pointed out a long while back:

The general design and specs for Apple's magical tablet were first outlined as the 'Dynabook'

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad