2011 is already over. It seems like just yesterday we weren’t getting excited for yet another CES and Macworld Expo. Since Apple decided to stop showing up in 2010, Macworld has been devoid of interest for most people and 2012 won’t change that. That name change certainly isn’t helping. CES 2012 will be the last one Microsoft will provide the keynote for. Unfortunately, the company has taken the habit of showing off gadgets during their yearly keynote that never seem to materialize. I’m sure we’ll all miss Ballmer’s yearly snooze-fest. He has a rare talent of making you yearn for the good old days where Bill Gates was hosting the keynote.
In 2011, we saw Android 4.0 released on exactly one phone and zero tablets. We also saw the release of iOS 5 on three models of phones, three models of mp3 players and two models of tablets. Funny how one of those OS is supposedly open and sees the release of many tens of devices each year. Based on availability, it’s not the one you’d think. Still, as I said a few weeks back, Ice Cream Sandwich is actually pretty nice.
2012, much like 2005 was supposed to (remember those rumors ?), will perhaps see the release of an Apple television set. Since Apple has successfully tackled the previously stagnant industries of the MP3 player, the cell phone and the tablet, it’s exciting to think what Apple might be able to do to the television industry. This isn’t an easy market to change though. Much like cell phone where Apple had to learn to work with carriers and their (often) ridiculous way of doing things, a television set needs to work with an existing infrastructure that Apple will have to try and work with (or perhaps, around). Don’t expect this to be easy.
Of course, the big question when it comes to Apple’s next big move is what’s Apple going to do without its iconic founder. As I said in my Thank You Steve post in october, Jobs didn’t take decisions because it would benefit Apple immediately. He took them because it was the right thing to do for the company long term. He was a visionary that will be impossible to replace and it’ll be interesting to see what Apple will release in 2012 and beyond now that Steve is no longer there to guide them. The iPad 3 might well be the first big product announced early in the year by Tim Cook and his team. No doubt that product will sell very well (and let’s all hope for a retina iPad), but I’m sure we’ll see a bunch of articles saying that a Jobs-led Apple would have released so much more. Make sure to grab the popcorn for this one, the idiots will come out in drove.
Speaking of popcorn, we close the year with the Lodsys debacle still not over. Ars Technica published an interesting article just a day or two ago on this and it’s really too bad indie developers still have to fight over such ridiculous patents. Hopefully in 2012 Apple and Google will be able to quell that fire and everyone will be able to move on. Still, you can’t able but wonder when the next patent-troll will come around with a different obvious software patent. As a device that was meant to promote innovation, patents are doing a great job of killing it. The patent system was not designed with the fast-changing world of computers and software in mind. It clearly doesn’t work.
Let’s not forget about everything Apple did in the cloud in 2011. The Mac App Store has quickly become my place of choice to buy apps for the Mac. iCloud has been really impressive so far for a free service. It’s been working flawlessly for me so far. The recently released iTunes Match is also quite amazing. I’m very excited to see what 2012 will bring. Expect to see greater integration in Lion. The lack of an updated iWork for iCloud is especially puzzling. When the App Store launched early in the year, everyone was expecting a new version of iWork, yet it didn’t happen. It’s long overdue and I’m really curious to see what’s happening with iWork.
So let’s all hope for a great 2012. Hopefully the Kindle fire will become available worldwide and maybe we’ll see the release of Windows Phone 8. Nintendo will release the Wii U and will continue its trend of ignoring its biggest fans by releasing a console stuck 5 years behind everyone else. Speaking of everyone else, we should see an announcement for the next Xbox and probably the playstation 4 in june at E3. Wether you game on consoles or not, these new consoles are much needed, if only to move the world of gaming forward. This generation of console is now 5-6 years old and PC gaming is suffering because of it. Time to move on.
As a developer, I often need to get my external IP address and while there are numerous widgets, websites and apps for this, I wanted a nice, quick bash script to do it. I’ve adapted the script from a few internet sources (including a message on Ars Technica) and modified & enhanced it for my own uses. Put this in your .profile and you’ll then be able to type “ip” to get all the internal/external IP addresses. The external IP will then get copied to your paste board.
You can download the script here in text format.
function ip() {
local ETHERNET=`ipconfig getifaddr en0 2> /dev/null`
local WIFI=`ipconfig getifaddr en1 2> /dev/null`
local EXT=`curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | grep -o '[0-9][0-9]*.[0-9][0-9]*.[0-9][0-9]*.[0-9]*'`
if [ "$ETHERNET" != "" ]; then
echo -n -e "Ethernet:\t "
echo -e $ETHERNET
fi
if [ "$WIFI" != "" ]; then
echo -n -e "WiFi:\t\t "
echo -e $WIFI
fi
echo -n -e "External:\t "
echo -e $EXT
echo -e $EXT | pbcopy
echo ""
}
I was speaking to a crowd of about 85 people when I heard the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. 85 die-hard Mac users, all members of the local Mac User Group I run. We stopped for a minute of silence and I spent the rest of the evening not quite as focused as I usually am but managed to get through. As though as it was, I feel like this is perhaps the way it should be. I was able to share my sadness with a lot of friends.
Like many others have, I want to take a moment to give my thoughts on Steve and today’s news.
My friends all know my attachment to Apple, but for me it goes further than a business. To say that this company has changed my life is not an overstatement. I now earn my living entirely using Apple products and have earned almost all of my money these past few years developing iOS applications.
I agree and even love most of Apple’s philosophies when it comes to building products and running a business. Steve never took any decisions because it would benefit Apple in the short time. The decisions he made, he made because it was the best for Apple in the long run. Because it was best for the users. The products he helped create were sometime revolutionary, often amazing and always passionately built. When he introduced the iPhone in 2007, he was introducing his 3rd life-changing device. From the Mac in 1984 to the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, Steve has changed the world several time. All these products had and continue to have a dramatic impact in their industries and likely will for quite some time.
When the creation of a company as revolutionary as Pixar, the most successful animation studio since Disney 60 years ago is but a side note in your biography, you know you’ve done some pretty amazing things in your life.
Steve, thanks for all you’ve done. You’ve not only changed the world of technology forever, you helped build the foundations and then moved it forward in several areas many times.
The Lodsys debacle over the past 2 weeks as really shaken up our little (or not so little) community of iOS developers. The patent itself is now obvious to anyone who has ever done any kind of programming over the past 10 years. The concept of an “Upgrade” button after all is pretty simple. Especially in 2011 where we now have app stores and complex frameworks abstracting the work for us.
Beyond the validity of the patent and wether or not Apple has the right to sub-licence their rights, this case for me is the perfect example of why software patents as they exist today are ridiculous. Now we could argue that software patents should not be possible at all, a position I’m more than willing to agree with, but at the very least, the current 20 years period of protection in the US for a patent makes no sense in the insanely-rapidely evolving world of technology.
When the patent law was drafted in the US, those kinds of periods made sense. It works beautifully for example with the pharmaceutical industry where developing a new drug can take billions of dollars in research. Where it doesn’t work however is when a software developer thinks of a new algorithm to fix his problem. Regardless of how imaginative the solution is, protecting it for 20 years makes no sense on the Web.
This particular case affects me and my clients greatly so I’m obviously eager to see what will happen, but beyond that, I hope this example will be the drop that overflows the bucket and will convince the US congress to re-examine the law. It’s much needed. In fact it was much needed 2 years ago.
The beauty of an App Store is that you sometime stumble upon neat little gems and Textastic (iTunes Store link) certainly is one for me. Despite the hard to pronounce name, the app is amazing if you are a programmer that wants to edit text files either locally or on remote servers. The app supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP connections, with a password or a private key.
It also supports Dropbox and it does syntax highlighting for a ton of different file types and programming languages. The app is well done, well designed and, in my opinion, well worth the 10$ price tag.
Today is the international launch date for the iPad 2 and as usual with Apple product launches, there seems to be a lot of demand for the new gadget. It seems every store in the city that had some had lines in front of it with a ton of people hoping to get their preferred model.
I was lucky enough to be in the US 2 weeks ago to get mine. I ended up visiting a Best Buy in Vermont to get it on launch day and today I was once again in line, this time buying it as a gift for my parents. The difference between the two is astonishing. This is of course completely anecdotal, but it shows the difference in a well organized store and a disorganized one.
In Vermont, the Best Buy had pre-printed coupons. One coupon per iPad in stock. At around 4PM, they distributed the coupons and it took maybe 20 minutes to get through the line. At the Futureshop downtown here in Montreal, employees had no idea what to do, coupons were distributed using the most complicated way they could find. The wait, which should have been painless ended up taking 3 times as long as it should have.
When people ask me where they should buy their Apple gear on day 1, I always say the Apple Store. The lines are often longer, but Apple knows how to handle popular product launch.
Anytime there’s a discussion these days about the iPhone and its competitors, Flash is usually mentioned early on in the discussion along with Multitasking. Today I want to address Flash because it’s something I strongly believe we need to kill. The topic came to me last week when the news came out that Adobe was blocking the adoption of HTML5. We still don’t have all the details there, but it did remind me of my hatred for Flash in general.
Flash is a weird product. On the one hand, it did things very well. When Macromedia (now Adobe) introduced it in 1996, they managed to make it so ubiquitous that it now has 98%+ install base. That’s quite the achievement.
On the other hand, Flash is terrible and that’s something most people agree with except perhaps for Flash designers. It’s being used today mainly for 3 things : video streaming/playback, entire or parts of web sites and banner ads.
It’s too bad Web standards are so slow to be adopted because for video streaming, there’s already a much better solution than Flash. Youtube, UStream and many others are (slowly) moving to it as more and more browsers are supporting it. Of course, as always, Internet Explorer will be the one slowing us down for this. For Web sites, the “new” technologies like the latest revisions of Javascript and DOM scripting can absolutely compete with Flash.
There are 3 major problems with Flash. Let’s review:
First, the flash player is very poorly implemented on OS X and Linux. Performance is terrible and it sucks battery life out of your laptop in record time since it pegs the CPU to 100% in seconds. That makes it inappropriate for things like cellphones in my opinion. If you visit a site with banner ads and a few flash movies, does this means you will lose 20-30% of your battery life in minutes?
As a second issue, I would point out that the flash authoring app is way too pricy. In a world where everything gets pirated, it may not seem like a big deal, but Flash, unlike Visual Studio from Microsoft and XCode from Apple has no free versions for people at home to play with. Coupled with Adobe’s usual upgrade routine every 18 months, it make Flash to be extremely expensive.
The third problem is that Flash is controlled by one company. That company decides if the Mac OS X version will be performing well. That company alone decides when a new version is released.
Add to these 3 problems the fact that many Flash websites are terribly designed and would be hard to see on a smaller screen and that these sites are usually badly (if at all) indexed in search engines and you start to understand why Apple is refusing to include it on the iPhone.
Because of all this, I’m actually happy Apple is doing this. It has forced some sites to reconsider the use of Flash and I hope it’s a trend that will continue.
Hopefully more companies will be bullish like Apple and take a stand.
