Tech Pragmatist

From the department of stating the blindingly obvious.

Mr Gruber:

And, most importantly, Apple needs to do a better job emphasizing what HTML5 mobile web apps are capable of, and that such apps are completely open for both developers and users. To use the walled garden metaphor, Apple needs to make more people aware that right across the street from the App Store’s beautiful but tightly controlled and regulated walled garden, there’s a very nice public park, open to everyone.

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital:

Unfortunately, the continued verbal jousts at Apple (AAPL) by many Google (GOOG) execs - including CEO Eric Schmidt - onstage at the San Francisco developers conference got tired pretty quickly and soon felt petty and juvenile, and ultimately made Google look needlessly defensive.

It is interesting watching world beating CEOs having playground spats.

The best possible retort that Apple could make now is to not mention Google or anything to do with them during WWDC. That would probably hurt more than some over the top, carefully thought through response, no matter how subtle it is.

Note to Mr Jobs: Rise above the playground, ignore them completely.

I have been asked by others why I deleted my Facebook account. I did it because of security concerns of mine and data protection concerns - I don’t like giving away rights because I post my photos, or worse just click links, on a website.

However this article summarises why I am pissed off (it is quite techy, WSJ has a more prosaic article). I voted with my feet and am no longer on Facebook. I have received an email from Facebook’s systems telling me my data will be deleted permanently within fourteen days. I hope it is true, but I won’t hold my breath, my faith in Facebook is as strong as their security track record.

As usual, my links come from the daringfireball.net link blog, the most useful of all the feeds I have in my google reader account by a country mile.

Update: Facebook have changed their stance on this, however I am still off Facebook. I’ll never say never, but I’m certainly not going back for now.

Last night I spent far too much time perusing the iPad app store on my iPad, as it was finally made available in the UK recently. It took me until now to get round to using the killer application for my new toy.

Two things struck me, they are obvious:

1. The apps are much more expensive than the iPhone predecessors. This is to be expected and is a good sign that developers are getting real about the amount of time, effort and expense that goes into creating good software. (I am not an Objective-C developer, but I have written lots of software for my daily bread).
2. There is a much healthier crop of ‘business’ and ‘productivity’ apps than I expected. I was really encouraged by what developers had come up with.

My current dilemma is that I have a long business trip coming up. Do I risk it and just take my iPad and bluetooth keyboard or do I take my trusty MacBook Pro?

In the end I didn’t buy any apps, although I did download a bunch of free ones. Having really only used the built in apps to date, I feel I need to use the free ones for a while to work out what I am going to need and what features are nice-but-not-needed. I was also a little non-plussed by the lack of choice. Apps for the iPhone are far more numerous and therefore much more varied. The top 10 highest grossing apps for iPad were mainly games — not what I’m interested in.

The biggest takeaway for me though was that what we are seeing now is very much what Google would call ‘labs’ and anybody else would call ‘beta’.

My conclusion was to stick with my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on this, it feels like the future.

Steve Jobs himself personally deflects the media away from the lost iPhone saga.

… but Apple, please can you enable the iPad store for those of us who dragged ourselves over to the USA to buy one early?

(I know I could set up another iTunes account, but I want it to just work)

Thanks to SwissMiss (Ms Eisenberg) for the link.

I am struggling to think of another company that has (or would) put an obituary on their homepage. Here is an image of the Apple homepage for later reference.

The text on the left hand side reads as below.

Jerome B. York, 1938-2010

With deep sadness we announce the loss of a member of our corporate family and dear friend, Jerry York. Jerry courageously joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997, when many doubted the company’s future, and contributed his extraordinary character, business expertise, and leadership to help guide Apple for over a decade. Jerry was one of a kind - and we’re going to miss him dearly.

Me too. (Thanks to Mr Carmo)