At Work On a Mac

If you are a registered iPhone developer, you can now download the beta version of the OS. The beta was unfortunatly released under NDA, so I cannot yet comment too much on it, but you can watch the full presentation by Scott Forstall (Senior VP iPhone Software) and Greg Joswiak (Senior VP iPhone/iPod Marketing) to get an idea of what’s coming.

As someone who now owns an iPhone, an Android G1 and a Blackberry curve, I can say that I’m really excited about what 3.0 will bring. To me, it really feels like Apple managed to fix 75% of what was clearly missing from the platform. Stuff like Copy/Paste was an obvious flaw, but the “1000 new APIs” that Apple announced will certainly have the biggest impact on the future of the platform. I really believe that applications will be quite a bit better once a few weeks go by and developers have a chance to update their applications.

I must say, I really wasn’t expecting this much and don’t take the (relatively small) amount of new end-user features alone when judging the 3.0 update.

I have an iMac running Parallels with Windows XP for various reasons, mostly because at the time, I couldn’t wait for Boot Camp and Parallels had beaten Apple to installing Windows on a Mac. Why Windows? I sometimes need to verify compatibility issues for business presentations, I tried and used some financial software that will only work in Windows and, mostly, I do not want to lose my Windows touch even though I have distanced myself over the years from that environment and way of thinking the user space. Parallels 4.0 would warrant its own review. Coherence, the ability to run Windows applications under Mac OS X and the possibility to run simultaneous Linux distributions, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 on virtual desktops makes this product amazing.

After hearing, reading and experiencing horror stories, I skipped Vista altogether, like a lot of people preferring XP over Vista any day. Since I read only good things about Microsoft’s Windows 7 and that I wanted to experiment with Boot Camp’s performance over Parallels, I decided to install the Windows 7 Beta on one of my MacBooks.

Because this is a blog, I’ll make an effort to keep it short and spare you an unpleasant downloading experience. It made me realize how different Microsoft and Apple were. I am sure both companies employ very bright engineers but, Microsoft seems to always manage to leave out the user in its design strategy. Downloading the Beta is a testimonial to that.

What if I were not new to Beta testing?

What does that have to do with anything? Microsoft wants to make sure you have a Windows Live sign on. I’m downloading a Beta, willing to invest my time to test it out. I would have giving you a false email just to make sure I miss an activation code? Also, it would be nice to always know how many steps are involved in any online transaction ahead of its completion, especially when superflous steps are added.

Now that’s a good one. I’m using Hotmail, a Microsoft product that cannot recognize an email stemming from— Microsoft. Attachments, pictures and links in the message have been blocked to protect me. Considerate, considering.

You don’t really need the product key for the install. Just hit return when you get to it. Microsoft, can you rethink this whole Product Key thing from scratch, putting yourself in the user’s seat? For future reference, it’s an annoyance, we always have to reinstall the system and end up losing the key. It’s a pain to enter even when we have it. Find another way. Diminish the unpleasant experiences of contact points with your brand and your products. Think different to paraphrase a famous Apple adage.

Yikes, go figure. In Microsoft I trust, in Akamai I… oh well, do I have a choice?

Microsoft is using a JAVA applet to manage the download, tsk, tsk. Thank you Sun. (couldn’t resist that one )

Now for some positive aspects of Windows 7. It installed relatively quickly, far from the over 2 hours I had spent installing XP and its updates and Parallels. It feels funny to see my MacBook wearing Windows. The Intel processor, Boot Camp, FreeBSD and Mac OS X transforms the Mac into a unique development machine. I like it a lot.

It boots very fast, finally (Apple take notes). To boot off Windows and to run Boot Camp at start-up, hold the “alt or option” key. Windows 7 looks very promising and has an intuitive feel to it. I like the way it manages networks. I don’t like another long key we have to write down for future pairing of computers with this local network. Email anyone?

I will now proceed to install software and see how it runs. As I said, I like the performance, the look and feel and the speedy start-up. The interface is well done and flowing. I’ll keep you posted when I really try it out.

We live in interesting days. For the past couple of years, we’ve been slowly moving toward Web applications and our operating system is becoming less and less important. Obviously, we still have quite a way to go before we can say web applications are polished as desktop apps, but from time to time I come accross Web applications that are quite impressive.

280slides.com is a keynote replacement made by ex-Apple employees who decided to recreate the cocoa API in Javascript. The result is, in a word, impressive. Oh, and it’s also free. The application doesn’t support even 1 third of the features that Powerpoint or Keynote support, but it does have all the basic features that perhaps 80% of us need when creating a slideshow.

When done with your presentation, you can save the result to a local file in either Powerpoint, PDF or Open Document format so that you can run it locally as you would a normal presentation. The service is still in Beta but the application works quite well and allows you to publish your presentations on SlideShare (also for free).

We may not yet be at a point where we can say Web applications are replacing our Desktop-based business apps, but a site like 280slides.com is proving that we’re getting there quite quickly.

One thing that can be frustrating these days is that even though the Internet has removed borders and we now have immediate access to anything that’s happening around the world, we’re still bogged down by real-world laws and limitations. One area where it especially hurts is availability of medias on the internet.

TV Shows are starting to be distributed on the Web (I’ve been saying traditional TV is dead for a while now) but at least here in Canada we get a lot of US TV shows on TV but then of course these are not always available on the Web for us Canadians. The solution to that has always been finding a proxy server in the US to make it look like you are coming from the US, but they rarely work well enough to stream video.

If you’ve been looking at a site like www.hulu.com thinking you would love to be able to watch it, the solution is quite easy and its name is Hotspot Shield. This “software” is really just a web interface to enable and disable te proxy setting on your computer. Once you enable it, you’ll be anonymous on the Web and it’ll look like you are in the US. It’s a simple software that gives a simple solution and it works really well so far for me.

It’s also hard to argue with the price : free. Highly recommended.

We’ve covered many search applications and options here before for your Mac. There is yet a new one and it is very nicely done by the search experts themselves— Google. QSB is part of the Google code project and is still at an experimental stage but shows promise. You can get it here. I like the simplicity of the interface and its powerful options. Give it a try.

The news over Steve’s health is taking its toll. Now former fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons a technology columnist at Newsweek is apparently banned from CNBC for criticizing a CNBC reporter on air. While he might not have acted properly, I think he had a point.

Apparenlty CNBC reporter Jim Goldman kept repeating what Apple PR was saying to him, i.e. that there was nothing wrong with Steve’s health. But here’s the catch, he allegedly knew about Steve’s declining health for a week but failed to report on it. It does not make sense and Lyons said that CNBC might as well repeat Apple’s press releases. The PR spokeperson at Apple’s is apparently a former CNBC employee, adding to the drama. This is beginning to sound like a genuine saga. Only in America.

Steve just sent this email to close friends and Apple employees.

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Last week, Steve sent a public note saying he was sick and wanted to reassure everyone that he would be Ok. The time off will benefit him and it’s important to keep in mind that he remains the CEO and while he won’t be there day to day to take every decision, he will be there to guide the company. Looking at Twitter this afternoon, a lot of people are panicking and saying that Jobs is basically stepping down, but let’s reserve panic when there’s something important taking place. This is not Steve’s first leave of absence, and just like last time, until further notice I expect him to come back to Apple.

In the meantime, I’ll wish him best of luck with his health. With all he’s done for Apple (and Pixar), he has certainly earned it.

As I said earlier, the biggest announcement as far as I am concerned for Apple at MacWorld 2009, was the removal of Digital Rights Management for iTunes, commonly known as DRM. Apple had hinted at that in February 2007 by publishing a letter to the Apple community.

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.

Well consider this a done deal with the big four major labels: Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner.
Apple says that songs can now be downloaded onto the iPhone over 3G without surcharge (and saving steps along the way). They also announced three price points— 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 for songs based on future Apple cost. You can upgrade your current library of purchased songs to the higher quality DRM-free iTunes Plus format for 30 cents per song.

Finally, I’ve caught up with my PC friends who have been using Picasa for years to share pictures online. Google just announced a Mac Beta version. It’s obviously intended for those who don’t already have a mobileme account, formerly a “dot” Mac account. It integrates well with iPhoto. A must have in the digital age. You can obtain Picasa 3 here.

I have to admit I am pretty impressed by the features that are packed in Picasa. It searched my hard drive in seconds to find my pictures. It automatically preserves the iPhoto library. It allows you to find duplicates across the drive. It has a simple to use, one button upload to the Web. It can export and resize pictures on the fly. It can email pictures at the click of a button. It can post pictures into your Blogger account. It can do a lot more, not bad for a famous Google “Beta”.

What will future digital archeologists do with the millions of pictures taken everywhere in the world at every instant? They will share their findings in Picasa no doubt.

As much as it may have looked like, I’m not actually dead. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at Mac software to demo for the Montreal Mac User Group and once again the quality of the Mac shareware scene as astounding.

The first one I bought in 2009 was FlickrExport for Aperture. It’s a really nice plugin for Aperture (also available for iPhoto 08) that makes it easy to upload photos to Flickr. I’ve been playing with it a bit and it seems to works really well so far.

The second one I bought, a few days later was EventBox. If you’re at all like me, you’ve been spending a lot of time online on various social networks and EventBox is a neat piece of software that ties together Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Redit and generic RSS feeds. It’s not perfect (I wish I could manage more than 1 twitter account with it), but it’s at a resonable price and it’s made by a small company. I just love encouraging up and coming developers like this.

Finally, I just bought Things for Mac OS X to help me better manage my task list. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of OmniGroup and I bought OmniFocus the day it came out because I was convinced OmniGroup would again come up with a great piece of software. In a way, they did, but the interface feels a bit weird to me and because of that I never really got into it. The iPhone application for OmniFocus is nice and all, but the synching feels clunky too. Things is a new piece of software by Cultured Code, another new developer. Just a quick glance at their site will convince you that these guys know how to create a Mac application that actually feels like one.

Since I’ve only tried the software for a few minutes, I’ll report back in the next few days with more impressions of the software. One quick note though, the company has a coupon code for 20% off valid until January 15. Use the code THINGSPRESALE20 to get the rebate.

(Oh, and I also bought iWork 09. I’ll post on it in the next few days, but I must say I’m liking it a lot so far!)