Posts tagged: APPLE

My first week with the iPt has been a thorough validation of my decision to jump ship from the Palm platform. The things this new device doesn’t do are still a problem, but the things it does do it does incredibly well. I won’t gush over those because they’ve all been thoroughly gushed over. But anybody who thinks the success of the iPhone/iPt platform is primarily based on superficial factors of appearance or brand image likely hasn’t used one for more than two minutes.

I bought my Palm TX in December 2005, a few months after it came out. In my blog post where I weighed the pros and cons of the device and the platform, I grumbled that “Palm has successfully crushed any optimism I might have had for fixes appearing in the form of a free, downloadable OS upgrade.” My grumpy intuition was right – in fact, the Palm platform has pretty much just stagnated since that time, punctuated with spastic feints toward Linux that you can read about elsewhere or in my old Palm-related posts.

From Apple’s release notes on the latest QuickTime update (emphasis mine):

QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:

• Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
• Updates to the H.264 codec
• Numerous bug fixes

Finally! Now Steve Jobs can rest easy, knowing that nobody is going to pour boiling-hot coffee on him. Not over this, anyway.

Hacking the iPhone! Perfect reddit/slashdot/digg material. Except that the site’s owners have requested that the link be kept off of those services, for fear of being overrun with traffic.

Update: I misread their request – it covers puny blogs too. Which makes this post a lot less exciting. So all I can suggest at the moment is checking out the hackers’ IRC channel (#iphone on irc.osx86.hu) or doing some googling.

I love how this effort has taken off. It seems futile now for companies like Apple to release a microprocessor-based product with no developer kit. People will always want to get under the covers, and they’ll clearly do it with or without you.

Perhaps ironically, one of the great technological advances of OS X over previous versions is the availability of a command line. Someday we won’t need this, but today it turns out that the pure point-n-click GUI was something of a premature optimization, and that in fact certain types of users find they work faster and better when typing commands.

While its simplicity is part of its charm, terminal applications invite tweaking. One of the earliest celebrated novelties of OS X was Terminal.app’s option for translucent windows. I initially thought this was useless, but have come to really appreciate it. With the right opacity setting, you hardly notice the background, yet when you refocus your attention you can see it easily. It’s like having on-demand X-ray vision!

Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the disputed “iPhone” trademark, and – surprise – Apple gets to keep using it. From the Cisco press release:

Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world.

To further differentiate brands, the Apple iPhone will also be known as “the real iPhone”, with the Cisco model being referred to as “Oh, I thought you meant the other one.”

It a rather astounding open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” posted to the Apple website today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple “would embrace… wholeheartedly” a music marketplace free of of Digital Rights Management schemes.

The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.