Apple Archive

Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title "Innovation" attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth--akin to the second law of thermodynamics, Boyle's Law, or Moore's Law. But ask these same people if they understand exactly how Apple comes up with their ideas and what approach the company uses to develop blockbuster products--whether it is a fluky phenomenon or based on a repeatable set of governing principles--and you mostly get a dumbfounded stare. This response is what frustrates me most, because people worship what they don't understand.

As I was casually browsing around today, I came across this blog post. It's about the recently released VLC media player for the iPad, which you can use to play just about any video under the sun on your iPad. The blog post is a complaint about a bit of help text that's not properly rendered inside the application - annoying, but no dealbreaker. Until I actually read the text - this is how you're supposed to get content on your iPad?

The iPhone jailbreak community is on a roll lately. Not only did the US Library of Congress do the right thing by adding the jailbreaking DMCA exemption, the two major jailbreak application stores - Rock and Cydia - will merge into one. Cydia will acquire Rock, an all Rock applications will be moved into Cydia. There's also some impressive statistics in here that indicate just how popular jailbreaking really is.

Yesterday's back-pedaling from Apple has been very well received in the industry. Two companies who were bitten pretty hard by Apple's policies - Google (through AdMob) and Adobe - have both responded to yesterday's changes, and as you can expect, they're both pretty happy.

"Yesterday's release of iOS 4.1 was good news for iPhone gamers and iPhone 3G owners who had performance issues post-4.0, but bad news for jailbreakers, with the Dev Team themselves warning users not to upgrade to 4.1 as there was no known way to reverse the baseband post-update. As usual, though, what's true in the cat-and-mouse jailbreaking scene one day is not true the other, and now there's good news for jailbreakers, at least in theory. iPhone hacker pod2g has revealed on Twitter that he has successfully discovered a new bootrom exploit, and even better: all the new iOS hardware including the iPhone 4 and new iPod Touch is vulnerable to it."

Apple has released the first major update to iOS 4. "The iOS 4.1 Software Update is the first major update to iOS 4, bringing Game Center, new iTunes features, high dynamic range photography, and more to iPhone."

Ping would have been a great thing for Apple to have done about 3-4 years ago, but at this point, the Social Networking thing has pretty much played itself out, picked its winners, and we've all moved on. Apple went to all the trouble to make a deal with a golf company, and all we got was a third rate social network? First of all, in what is probably just a temporary setback, Ping is choked with spam, but more importantly, it's just a sucky social network.

Well, this is an interesting double standard. Remember Apple's reaction to Palm trying to tap into iTunes? They were pretty pissed, right? Well, it seems that in Apple's world, it's not okay to access their services unauthorised, but when Apple needs to do the same to someone else's services, it's suddenly not a problem. As it turns out, Apple violated Facebook's terms of service, knowingly, and willingly.

"When it comes to Apple products, the iPad and the iPhone get all the headlines. But in recent years, the company's Macintosh line of computers has enjoyed a remarkable revival that has been vital to Apple's emergence as the most valued technology company on Wall Street. In the latest sign of that comeback, Autodesk plans to announce on Tuesday that it is bringing its flagship AutoCAD design and engineering software to the Mac for the first time in nearly two decades."

Since interesting news that I'm actually knowledgeable about is still a little hard to come by, I have to work a little harder. This is something interesting to discuss: John Gruber, rather famous Apple blogger, is now arguing that Apple is in fact not fighting the jailbreaking community. Wait, what?

So, now that jailbreaking is easier than ever, right now is probably the best time to dive into the vast array of possibilities that lay ahead in shackle-free land. I've already tricked my iPhone out pretty substantially, but there's always somewhere further you can go. Yes, Flash had already been ported to the iPad, and now the iPhone has received the Flash treatment as well. Jailbreaking required, naturally.

The "Macs are too expensive" argument is one of the most tiresome and long-lived flamewars in internet history. Obviously, Apple makes a premium product and charges premium prices, and you can always find a computer from another vendor that seems to match or exceed specs that costs less. But if you look at Apple's Mac Pro line, and compare it not so much to other vendors, but to the past lineup of Mac Pros, you discover some very unpleasant truths that help explain why Apple is enjoying record earnings for their Mac line, but doing so to the detriment of some its most loyal and valuable customers.

In a move that should surprise nobody, Apple has sort-of admitted to iPhone antenna problems in their press conference this morning, claiming it affects a small number of users, but they claim to be working hard to fix the problems that they have confirmed. They've offered free bumpers (that have until now been a $30 accessory) to all iPhone buyers, and are offering to waive any restocking fees for anyone who wants to return their iPhone 4. Whether or not there's going to be a hardware fix for future iPhones, Steve Jobs says he doesn't know yet whether that will happen.

Apple has just released the first beta of iOS 4.1. While no official changelog has been posted by Apple, we can expect to see improvements in the way the iPhone calculates signal reception, a flaw which was found by Apple recently during testing. You must be a registered developer in order to access the download, but if you have an account, you can get it here.