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.
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.
I’ve been insanely busy for the past 2 months (gotta love moving), but I should be back on track for regular posting now. Since my last post the iPhone 4 has been released to the world and has been selling very, very well. 3M units in 22 days is nothing to scoff at.
Of course, the release was covered by just about every tech outlets in excruciating details, but before the iPhone had become old news, these sites got a gift : the AntennaGate. I don’t plan on spending too much time on the problem itself, although I have to say that as someone who has an iPhone 4 and who has a friend who has one (in Canada, the phone isn’t out yet so it’s not common), I have had no problem with the signal. The proximity sensor issue is much more prevalent in my opinion.
That doesn’t really interest me though, I don’t care about the issue enough to spend a lot of time discussing wether or not there’s a problem. As I said, I have no problem and it seems there’s a lot of people that are quite happy with their phone. Then again, the signal degradation does exist under certain conditions (if your signal is weak in the first place).
My biggest issue is the coverage of the problem. The problem with tech journalism is that it’s all on the Web and everything on the Web these days is driven by the number of clicks you can get. Because of this, Techcrunch, Mashable, Endgaget, Gizmodo, Twit.tv and all the others decided they needed trashy headlines and incendiary content. Thus was born the “AntennaGate”. It’s not enough anymore to just report the news, you have to drive clicks. You have to create a problem where there is none or make a small issue a big one. After all, who would read a story titled “iPhone 4 antenna can be attenuated under certain condition. Might affect some users.”.
And I’m not just saying this because it was bad coverage against Apple. It’s true for every tech businesses out there, from Microsoft to Google to Apple to others. I really wish there was a respectable tech news site out there, one that isn’t about getting the most clicks. It’s sad that we’re to the point where tech journalism is at the same level of professionalism than tabloids in Hollywood.
Today, the great team over at 37signals launched their first iPad app : Draft for iPad. It’s a nice little app, that allows you to quickly draw on a black background using either white or red pen color. The key feature in this case is the tight integration with BaseCamp. The kicker? The 10$ price point for the App.
That’s an interesting move because there are some very good competitors that are much less expensive. Penultimate is my current favorite, but there are others. Twitter users quickly reacted to the price, with many saying it was too expensive. @dhh (37signals co-founder & Ruby on Rails creator) actually answered me with this line:
Thanks, Jonathan. We built Draft for us. Selling it at a higher price means less customers w/ poor expectation fit. That’s good.
37signals are not the first to use that strategy. Apple is doing this very same thing in a way. If you want to buy a computer, it’s easy to find one cheaper than even the cheapest Mac. On the App Store, the also-excellent OmniGroup also used this strategy with OmniGraffle for iPad (50$). Last I heard, OmniGroup was quite pleased with their results.
So is the strategy good? Well, certainly I suspect 37 Signals will sell a lot less units, despite strong initial sales. Once the buzz goes down, they’ll sell a steady stream of units to their customers, but have a smaller set of customers is not always a bad thing. As long as you make money on the App and that your customers are happy, then why not? Less noise, less distraction.
At 0.99$, the app would have attracted a lot of new customers to 37signals, but how many of these would have been good fit with the rest of the services offered there? At 10$, you’re attracting professionals, users who need Basecamp as a tool to do their work.
The other point to consider is product valuation. A great local software developer here in Montreal is Druide Informatique. They create the best french-language dictionary and corrector for the Mac & PC. When they launched their app for iPhone a year ago, they decided to price it at 20$. The reason? The “real” (desktop) version is priced at 129$. It’s a very good product and it’s well worth its price tag so for the iPhone version, they didn’t want to devalue the desktop product and price it at 0.99$. The result? The president of the company told me several months ago they were very satisfied with sales.
So the strategy is maybe not for everyone, but it can certainly work. Are you better off with a few sales at an higher price or many sales at a lower price? Let’s wish the 37signals team the best of luck. These guys are talented and deserve the success they’ve been having.
Whenever flash on iPhone is debated, one of the thing that’s mentioned is that Objective-C is really terrible and Flash (or Action Script) is a much easier language to learn and to use. Of course, Action Script is loosely based on Javascript, a scripting language and Objective-C is a layer on top of C, so that does confer Action Script an advantage when it comes to ease of use.
What people seem to be forgetting however is that there’s more to life than ease of use. By using Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch APIs, Apple has a set of technology that’s not that hard to use (really, try to learn it, you’ll see) but also, a set of technology that while open, is also pretty much only used by them. I’ve said this before in my last post, but forcing people to learn Apple technologies is not a bad thing. It’s certainly a bad thing for flash developers looking to make quick bucks by quickly porting existing code, but for the rest of us, it means the developer has to spend some time on the Mac, learning how it works, what the UI paradigms are and why things work the way things work. Ultimately, this leads to a developer that might spend more time thinking about the UI issues and how to really optimize the interface for an iOS device.
Objective-C has been pretty successful for Apple on the desktop for years. When Apple “forced” developers to ditch Carbon APIs (C APIs) for Cocoa APIs a few years ago to benefit from the latest advances in the OS, many balked and predictions of doom were also thrown by many. As far as I can tell, my Mac seems to have survived and so did all of the apps I’ve used. Certainly it means that companies like Adobe and Microsoft had and have a lot more work ahead of them rewriting large portions of legacy code. You know what though? At the end of the day, we get stuff like Outlook for Mac, a newly written app that takes full advantage of Mac OS X instead of Entourage.
During WWDC, Apple announced that Farmville was coming to iOS. It’ll be interesting to see if that version will take advantage of iOS 4′s Game Center feature when it launches. By being a native app, it certainly has the potential.
Meanwhile, iOS 4 is coming out today for all users. Grab it, it’s a great update.
Today, Apple announced a new version of the iPhone OS, the software that powers their mobile platforms like the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the newly released iPad (I’ll have my review soon). As part of that announcement, they have released a beta version of the SDK for us developers to play with but so far, the biggest news to come out of this is a little something they added to the license agreement.
John Gruber on Daring Fireball has a couple of post on this. To sum it up, Apple seems to have banned the use of Adobe’s Flash CS5 to iPhone technology or anything similar to that. What Apple has done basically, is force everyone to use their standards and their tools to code on their platform. Anything else is forbidden. That also impacts other tools like the Mono to iPhone stuff that’s also available.
John makes the point that it’s in Apple’s best interest and his arguments are good. I highly recommend you read the article in question but I’m going to go one step further here : I’m actually glad they did it and I think it’s a great thing for everyone involved except of course for Adobe and Flash-only developers. Here’s why.
If the Mac is known for anything, it’s for being a platform where attention to details is important. On OS X, we’ve seen a lot of application succeed because of the look and usability alone. The name “Delicious generation” was used to describe apps like these. Mac users expect apps to not only function well, but to look good, to act like a native app and to work like a native app. As such, the vast majority of apps available on OS X today are apps coded using Apple’s standards.
So what about the iPhone OS then? Well, by forcing people to use Apple’s tools, it forces people to be Mac users to develop for the iPhone platform. By doing so, it at least forces people to have a minimal knowledge of what it’s like to be on that platform. With any luck, that’ll end up improving the quality of apps on available on the App Store. Most people switching to Macs in my experience tend to become addicted to nice Apps anyway even if that was never really a concern before. It’s just part of the Mac mentality I guess.
I can understand why Flash developers are not happy and I can certainly sympathize with them, but I’m glad Apple did this. Let’s face it, Flash apps and Flash sites are not known for their great usability. They are known for flashy animations, terrible performance and for being generally harder to use.
From the start, the iPhone platform has never been an “open platform”. There are other platforms out there that are more open and equally great like Android. This is a closed garden. That comes with big advantages, but it also means you need to conform to the rules if you want to play in it.
If you’ve been creating sites for a while, you know that domain names started become difficult to find years and years ago. I remember brainstorming with a full team of 8 for hours before finally finding a domain name (barely) suitable for our business 10 years ago. Of course, new TLDs have since helped with this a bit, but it’s still an issue since everyone wants a .com. Of course, now you want not only the domain to be available, but also the Twitter and Facebook name and let’s face it, it would be best for the name to fit on an iPhone/Android home screen.
But that’s just the beginning.
With everyone and their mother now online, a new fight has begun : the fight for your digital identity. Businesses are now fighting to be the one representing you online. A year ago, when Facebook opened up custom URLs for profiles, their goal was obvious. What they wanted, and what every businesses like Facebook wants is to be your identity. If you have www.facebook.com/yourname, it might just that this is the URL you’ll give to people instead of your own domain name (if you even own one). This is huge for these sites.
Twitter has done the same since the beginning and there too registering your name is important. Google is now trying to do the same with Google Profile. Once you have such an identity, you can then increasingly use them to login on other sites with things like Twitter’s @anywhere, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. In a way, these services are achieving what OpenID was supposed to do years ago. OpenID’s problem though, was that the name isn’t known at all. What’s an OpenID? Sure you can use your Gmail account as an OpenID, but who knows this? Because of this, it never caught on.
New social networking services come and go, but if you’re not registering your name on each of them, you’re potentially making a mistake. We live in a world where your online identity is vital. Who wants to be John4576? Register on each of them as early as possible. Some will die quickly, some will never become important, but when one of them becomes the next Twitter or the next Facebook, you’ll be good to go.
Oh, and if you’re having kids, I’m honestly sorry for you. If your parents thought finding a name was difficult before, you have quite the task ahead of you. If you name your son John Smith, wish him luck in the future. He’s going to need it. Googling that name won’t be easy.
