I never knew

Apple announcements galore today.

First, the best news of the day, iPhone SDK coming (I’m linking the index page because for some incredibly stupid reason, Apple doesn’t use permalinks):

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.—Third Party Applications on the iPhone

[Update] Gruber archived a permalinkable copy of the text.

In the very interesting department, unlocked french iPhones are coming!

The Apple iPhone will be sold in France by Orange, which is owned by the dominant telephone company, France Télécom, for €399 ($560). And since French law bans phones being locked to a network for more than six months, Orange will also sell an unlocked version, reports International Herald Tribune. However, Orange spokesman Béatrice Mandrine declined to reveal the price when unlocked.—Official unlocked iPhones will be sold in France

Too bad they’re selling for roughly $160 more than in the US (and that’s locked), I’d be looking for someone going to Paris to pick one up for me.

Nettwerk with no DRM on iTunes:

Apple® today announced that it has expanded its iTunes® Plus offering to over two million tracks and lowered the price of all iTunes Plus tracks to just 99 cents. All iTunes Plus tracks feature DRM-free music with high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings (www.itunes.com). The iTunes Plus catalog is now the largest DRM-free catalog in the world, and includes artists from Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orchard and many others, along with EMI’s digital catalog.—iTunes Plus Now Offers Over Two Million Tracks at Just 99 Cents

Not an announcement but:

In comparison, Apple has seen a 37.2% increase in growth over the same period. As a result, Apple’s individual marketshare has grown from 6.2% to 8.1% year-over-year.—Apple’s 3rd Quarter 2007 U.S. Marketshare Up to 8.1%

So Apple held a little event and launched a bunch of new iPods. My thoughts:

• Although in pics they look like shit, the new iPod nanos are actually not that bad in person (where “in person” means on video in the keynote and in the ads). The pictures look photoshopped or rendered or something and the colors suck. Better in the ads but they still look unworthy of Ive design imho.

















• The iPod touch is fantastic at first glance but: no email?? WTF Steve? W effing TF man. Also, no maps and no camera. I know it’s supposed to be an iPod, not a phone or PDA but come on, once you’ve put the Wifi and Safari, got all the way buddy. 8mm thin though? Impressive.

















• iTunes Wifi store is kinda cool, I’m surprised it wasn’t out right away when the iPhone came out.

• WOW on the iPhone price cut. I actually said “wow” out loud as I was watching the keynote. At that price I think I’ll get one as soon as there’s a truly proven, on sale, reliable hack out. Fuck Rogers and their possibly upcoming selling of it.

So the iPhone has been completely unlocked and can seemingly be used on any compatible network. Of course here it still would mean Rogers and no good data plan and for me having to cancel my Fido account so still no go.

Yes!! Oh yeah Stevo! According to Apple Insider the next Apple flagship store, their 10th, will be in Montréal. A ginormous store downtown, biggest in Canada (inyourfaceToronto)! Saliva pooling on my keyboard right now.

Although Apple presently operates four retail locations in Canada, none of the stores are designated as flagship locations. Montreal would represent just the 10th high-profile location for Apple, joining its eight existing flagships spread across the U.S., U.K., and Japan, as well as a ninth under development in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district.

Today Apple announced a bunch of stuff, most notably gorgeous new iMacs that look like huge iPhones. Interesting detail hidden in there for Canadians though. First off, the site is now up to date look wise (about fucking time), second the smallest iMac is only $100 more here than it is in BushLand!! Now obviously that’s owing to the most excellent exchange rate we have, not Apple, but it’s something I’m super pleased with. Third, that same exchange rate is so good that iWork is the same price in Canada and the US!! When’s the last time you saw that?

One more thing, iWork now includes Numbers, a spreadsheet application and John Gruber has the best quote about it: “Translation: Microsoft, go fuck yourselves. This is the “bring it on” release of iWork.”

I’ve mentioned this before, the most recent Mac laptops don’t go to sleep like they used to, they use something called “Safe Sleep” where the content of the memory is copied to hardrive before the MacBook is trully considered asleep, something like 10-12 seconds for mine, sometimes more. I hate it. Hate.it.

Joe Kissell has the solution. As he mentions, this is a weird choice for Apple because the functionality would be required only if:

• After inserting a charged battery or connecting an AC adapter, you expect your computer to return immediately to the state it was in before it went to sleep.

  This never happens to me. So the solution:

  sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

  That’s it, I now have a Mac that sleeps instantaneously. Thanks Joe.

I haven’t really read them yet and I’m sure most interested people have found them already but there you go, for my own future reference, iPhone reviews and (US) plan details.

• Steven Levy for Newsweek.

















• Mossberg and Boehret for WSJ.

• David Pogue for the NYT

  From the skimming I did do, they all seem to like it and it mostly lives up to the hype.

  The plans are out, all unlimited data and starting at $59.99, not tooo bad. I’m surprised SMS isn’t unlimited too but, you know, can’t get them to catch up to Europe in one go I guess.

  Interesting detail, it seems you will activate through the iTunes Store so you can just pick up a box, go home and complete the process there. Nice.

  Now for Canada, when Steve? When?

There was an Apple keynote last Monday at the WWDC, nothing that particularly interested or excited me and I’m pretty busy so I haven’t written anything yet and now I won’t, just read Michael Tsai’s account, that’s pretty much what I feel about the announcements. Two things though, do have a look at the stevenote video for the first few minutes, the intro with John Hodgman is very funny. While you’re there, you can also have a look at the new website which is a looooot better than the previous (why no love for the Canadian version do?).

The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. A number of “web 2.0 people” have recommended this book, some citing it as a huge influence. Coming at it with those expectations, I was somewhat dissapointed, not at the concept itself—how decentralized organizations can wield great power, how they happen, what they do well, etc.—but rather in the way everything is glanced over and at the transparent retorical devices they use. Some of those glances could have been more detailed, even if only a little, so that when the glancing is done on something you’re interested in, it doesn’t look too thrown together and detract from the subject (which it did for me).

The first such thing that bugged me is when describing the use of P2P networks to share music, the language they use and the way they explain the issue is almost out of the record labels’ talking point handbook where everyone on P2P networks is a pirate, stealing. It’s largely true but P2P is also used in other ways; it can help in getting the word out for smaller bands who do want people to share their music, is used to share computing loads and for legal downloads. Some mention of that and of the abuse of artists that major brands do, while not required for their main point, would have been more balanced without induely slowing down the book.

Another example is when talking with an investor who, in 1995, was repeatedly asked by french investors who was the “president of the internet”. The authors come back again and again with “the french”, “the french investors”, using the oh so easy negative bias most of their american readers will have towards the french to illicit snickers and laughs. Lame.

The last such glancing that bothered me was when explaining how Apple hit the “sweet spot” mix of spider organization and starfish behavior. They say;

Apple also realized that users wanted to share content with one another. It therefore encouraged users to “podcast”, or broadcast their own programming to other users.

Not wrong per se but not quite it either, podcasts existed before iTunes and iTunes launched without podcasts, they simply list them now alongside music. A sharp move, a great success and, yes, arnessing starfish (decentralized) crowd behavior but their phrasing makes it sound like Apple created the whole podcasting thing.

Getting past that, they do otherwise present their theory pretty well, using examples in a variety of fields from Alcoholics Anonymous to IBM using open source through the anti slavery movement in England during the eighteenth century.

Centralized organizations (spiders with a head) have some advantages but can more easily be targeted and defeated by chopping off the head while decentralized organizations and phenomena (starfish) are almost impossible to stop. (fyi: starfish can regrow cut off arms or even, in some cases, a whole starfish from that same arm). The authors present both types well, detail rules on how to build starfish structures, how to promote them, attack them, use them. There’s also a few interesting chapters on catalysts and champions and a very good finish where they show and suggest some solutions on mixing both models like eBay, Amazon, Apple and even Toyota have done.

Conclusion: mild recommendation.

Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, and for not aggressively or properly recycling its old products. Upon investigating Apple’s current practices and progress towards these goals, I was surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas.—A Greener Apple

For those using GTD and working on the Mac, especially kGTDers, there’s a pretty interesting screencast about the upcoming Omnifocus. Looks very promising.

Found a couple of tips about getting Macs to sleep in recent months, one I just find useful and the second you really should pay attention too if you have a Macbook or Macbook Pro.

When using the power button to get your Mac to sleep you get a prompt for “Restart – Sleep – Cancel Shutdown”, it’s pretty quick to choose something but you have to reach for the mouse to click on sleep since “Shutdown” is pre-selected. I can’t remember or find the exact post where I got this but you can hit Apple+Shift+Eject (without touching the power button) to go straight to sleep. It saves fractions of a second!

The important one has to do with how the Macbooks sleep. It’s especially relevant if you had a Powerbook or iBook before. When putting those to sleep, the pulsing white light on the front edge would light up only once the Mac was actually sleeping and it would only take 2-3 seconds so you easily knew where you were at in the process.

On the Intel based laptops, it takes quite a bit longer to get to sleep* but the light comes on right away so you might think it’s gone to sleep. Not knowing wouldn’t have been a problem when it was taking 2 seconds. Nowadays though it can take 7-8 seconds and the hard drive is usually in use during that time. On a couple of occasions I’ve actually heard the clink of the hard drive emergency parking when flipping my Macbook Pro vertically to slide it in my bag. Not good.

The tip is a simple one; the Intel Macs are ready to sleep not when the light comes on but when it pulses so make absolutely sure it does so before moving it around. Hard drives are a lot more rugged then they used to be so chances of damaging them at that moment (especially with the built in accelerometer parking the drive) are slim but you might mess up your session being put to sleep if you don’t let OS X finish the job. Plus, if you remember the time when bumping into a table with a PC on it could result in hdd problems, you’ll also keep yourself from cringe inducing hard drive noises.

* Some people I’ve mentioned this to raise the point that it’s probably that most recent ones have more RAM which is longer to put on disk before sleep but a) sleep doesn’t dump the RAM on the disk, it just keeps the content of the RAM live with very low power. It does do something on the hard drive too because you hear it spinning while waiting but I’m not sure it’s 100% related to RAM. b) I went from 1.5Gb to 2Gb and the time difference is a lot more than 33%.

Now this sucks ginormous monkey balls, Apple switches resources around resulting in Leopard being 6 months late… to get the iPhone out on time. Considering I can get 10.5 as soon as it’s out and the iPhone in Canada at some undetermined time in the futur on a crapass mobile provider, the decision does not please me.

United Artists and MGM have now joined Lionsgate, Paramount and Disney in selling movies on Apple’s iTunes Store.—MGM and United Artists Join iTunes Store

Individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads and without any digital right management (DRM technology). Pricing will be $1.29/€1.29/£0.99.—EMI to Offer DRM-Free Online Music

Lionsgate and Apple® today announced that movies from Lionsgate will be available for purchase and download on the iTunes® Store starting today.—Lionsgate Movies Now on iTunes

I’m sure you’ve already seen this on a hundred blogs and on news sites but here goes again; Steve Jobs has written an important article, Thoughts On Music, in which he argues against DRM and joins us on the right side. This is pretty momentous and is sure to cause quite a stir with the idiots at the RIAA.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system… So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.

As is often the case with things Apple, Gruber has an excellent analysis of the article.

Is it a challenge to the major record labels? An answer to the increasingly hostile European governments (Norway, France, Germany) that are pressuring Apple to “open up” the iTunes Store? A message to the press to clarify Apple’s stance on DRM? A big fuck-you to Microsoft? … It is all of these things.

That lock-in provides a competitive advantage is undeniable. And if no one were complaining, I doubt we’d have seen this essay from Jobs. But as Jobs points out, with an average of just 22 iTunes Store songs sold per iPod, DRM-protected songs amount to a small percentage of the total music stored on most iPods. Jobs is saying that Apple doesn’t need it. Apple is not Microsoft; the only competitive advantage Apple needs is the quality of its products.