Screw You, Gizmodo

I wasn’t planning on saying anything here about the recent iPhone leak and Gizmodo’s handling of it. In my opinion, Gizmodo reporting on the iPhone was something that was well within their rights.

But last night, Gizmodo (I’m not linking to it as I don’t want to reward their behavior) posted an article on the Apple engineer who allegedly left the phone at a bar. In the article, they revealed his name, his photo and even parts of a conversation that they had with him. And then earlier today, they posted another article with portions of his Twitter stream and more details, including that it was his birthday when the phone was lost. At this point, it appears that Gizmodo just doesn’t care that we are talking about an actual human being here and has instead decided to go for pageviews at all costs.

Apr 20, 2010 Read More »

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Cocoa Box Design’s Penultimate

This little app on the iPad might be able to replace the piles of composition books and moleskins that I buy. The only thing that I would suggest would be an iPhone version as well. But for $3, I can certainly be happy with this.

Apr 16, 2010 Read More »

Adobe

I’m fairly agnostic about the whole Adobe-Apple scuffle. But I can certainly see why Apple wants to keep Adobe from controlling the user experience for their product. Adobe sees their user’s machines as something that belongs to Adobe, not the user. The user is just a way for Adobe to make money and you can just about see the contempt Adobe has for them.

Case in point – I just got a notification under Windows that Adobe Reader had an update. As part of the installation, it placed a shortcut for Reader on my desktop. I noticed this while the installation was going, so I removed it right away. As the installer was exiting, it noticed this and placed another shortcut on my desktop.

Apr 16, 2010 Read More »

I picked up a new iPad case last night –Incase’s Neoprene Slip Case. It doesn’t have a built in stand like the Apple case, but it did come with a cheep little piece of plastic that can apparently be flexed into place to serve as a stand. Oh well.

Compared to the Apple case, this one is a vast improvement. I will miss the ability to prop up the back of the iPad in the landscape orientation for typing, but not having dirt collect on the display and the case will more than make up for it. As an additional bonus, the inside of this case is soft material that Incase describes as a “faux-fur lined interior”. This means that any fingerprints that the iPad has picked up while in use get wiped away when you slip it back in the case. Very nice. I have been able to put away the microfiber cloth that I was carrying with the iPad because of this feature.

Apr 15, 2010 Read More »

Neven Mrgan’s tumbl: Malicious intent

Neven Mrgan has an interesting anecdote about the headphone jack on the original iPhone. Dunno if it’s true or not, but given how complex it is to get a consumer product out intto the market and the fact that they fixed it in the next iteration of the design (iPod touch just a few months later) gives it a lot of credibility in my mind.

Apr 15, 2010 Read More »

Marco.org: iPad case woes

I’ve been using my Apple case for the entire week now, and I have to say I’m rather disappointed with it myself. It’s only redeeming value is having the ability to prop up the iPad quickly for typing.

Besides the dust, I also managed to get a couple of small hairline scratches on my display as well while in the case. These appeared after only a days worth of usage.

Apr 09, 2010 Read More »

iPhone OS 4.0

Good set of announcements yesterday from Apple. Nothing earth shattering, but overall it’s good progress for the iPhone OS. I was a bit disappointed that the iPad isn’t getting 4.0 at the same time as the iPhone, but given the circumstances, it’s not really surprising.

As for my predictions, I really only got the multitasking right – though some of the implementation details are off as well. I will be very interested in seeing how the new OS alongside any new hardware that comes out this year will perform with multitasking. On paper, it looks really good. But just like all new technologies that Apple has introduced into the iPhone OS, I expect there to be a couple of iterations before they get the right balance of battery life and performance.

Apr 09, 2010 Read More »

The big event starts in a little over half an hour from now. Oh wait, that’s not the big event everyone is waiting for?

Apr 08, 2010 Read More »

Marco.org: iBooks and private APIs

iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my…

Marco makes some good points here, but I think the APIs that iBooks is using might only be private until 4.0 comes out. A lot of people have been asking for a system dictionary and access to the brightness controls. I think Apple will do the right thing and make these available to everyone.

Apr 06, 2010 Read More »

My Own iPhone OS 4.0 Predictions

Since we have a couple of days before the big iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, I’ve decided to follow in the grand tradition of making a fool out of myself on the Internet. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to make a few “predictions” about iPhone OS 4.0 here. For those of you playing at home, come back in a few days to either laugh at me or wonder just how I had this wonderful insight. (I’m expecting laughs myself…)