Tag apple

The job history of Jens Alfke

A developer of AppleScript, Stickies, MRJ, iChat and Safari RSS. You'll find some clues as to why iChat seemed so promising at first, and ended up being such a disappointment ever since. Let's hope that Jens' ideas for Leopard got approved and are more exciting than what we've seen in the WWDC'06 preview and the numerous rumour sites ever since. Otherwise Leopard seems to be a very, very minor release for users --- Objective-C 2.0, significant improvements in the kernel and API additions make it quite interesting for developers anyway!

The 'Hackintosh' experience.

These past few years have been part of a period in which the computing industry, for the first time after many years, has been in flux. The importance of web applications is growing everyday. Alternatives to well-established platforms and application software, often powered by open source software, are challenging the status quo and there was […]

This might be a repeat of 2005

The next version of Mac OS X, Leopard (10.5) and the 'missing' January software updates (iLife and iWork) will probably be out by late March or April, according to ThinkSecret. Since iLife and iWork weren't released in January it's reasonable to expect that they'll be released alongside the new OS. That's good news for all of us waiting for Leopard to come out before shelling out for a Mac laptop. One with a proper display that is.

Usability and Eye Candy: The UI Impasse

Microsoft Windows Vista came out just a few days ago. This is a major update to the world’s most popular Operating System and comes with numerous ‘improvements’ in both its underlying frameworks and components and its appearance and user-oriented features. One of the hightlights of Windows Vista, according to Microsoft, has been its renewed æsthetics […]

Adium 1.0

AdiumX

After many months of development and many more β releases, Adium 1.0 was released today! It's got loads of fixes and improvements and it's based on libgaim 2.0. Yay.

Is (Un)FairPlay condemned?

If Norway's ruling is followed by EU members France and Germany [1] it might. On the other hand, Johanssen's work on reverse engineering FairPlay might push Apple towards licensing its technology to third parties anyway. But then again all this might just be wishful thinking.

This all in one abomination is an insult to gadget lovers

Stephen Colbert comments on the iPhone. Wow! :)

Almost 14!

The Apple Newton may have been canned by Steve Jobs as part of his efforts to get Apple out of the red in the late 90s, just when the most powerful and promising models were coming out. It might also have been criticised early on for its quirks. Many have openly stated that it was […]

[Apple is like] Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there.

Back in 2004, in a previous incarnation of this blog, I wrote a small piece on how I believed that Apple was gradually losing their newfound 'Open' policy and returned to their 'old' practice of total control, a closed platform and proprietary technology. Like many others, I always believed, and still do, that Apple's closed, monopolistic approach is one of the main reasons that caused their demise in the 1990s, and the reason why it may hinder the huge potential that its current hardware and software offerings have this decade. Tim O’Reilly puts it very succinctly in this late 2004 interview, when he describes how Apple promises computing 'nirvana' and lets economics and marketing screw it all.

You don’t want your phone to be an open platform

Absolute Bullis allegedly what Steve Jobs told Newsweek and continued: "Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up". Even Jobs can't make plain-ol' BS look good. It's so absurd it's not even funny. Surely Stevey has heard of restricted well-defined public APIs and I'd think he'd be the first to consider iPhone as something more than just a 'phone'; something like the 'Ultimate Digital Device', perhaps? I bet Apple will start selling 'approved' apps sometime in 2008 on their online store. I don't even want to think how much it'll cost to get the SDK (if that's ever possible) and how easy it'll be to get your app approved. 'Sorry We're Closed'. Update: An interesting report on the iPhone lock-down by the British Macworld.