John"Daring Fireball" Gruber has a good list of observations about yesterday’s announcements from Apple. A few comments on his comments:
The combination of what seems to be a smaller click-wheel with the wider screen “makes it look as though the width and height of the iPod have grown” – I agree. When I saw the first spy shots, I was sure we were in for a bigger, heavier iPod. Hopefully Apple will clean this up in the next revision.
Tim Lee has posted an excellent missive addressed to the record labels on the iTunes Music Store:
…every customer who buys your products from the iTunes Music Store becomes locked into Apple products. If that’s not changed, that will soon make Steve Jobs the most powerful man in your industry.
Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: when you renew your contract, you should demand that Apple remove the digital rights management (DRM) technology from the iTunes Music Store.
There’s a fine line between collecting and just not knowing when to throw stuff out. Sometime in the last few years I switched from the latter to the former – in the realm of vintage computer hardware, anyway. Because the OCD aspects of collecting kind of freak me out, I don’t get too organized about it. I like portable stuff; I like Apple stuff; I like stuff that’s cleverly designed. I like stuff I’ve actually used; I like getting stuff really cheap on eBay.
I’ve always wanted to like AppleScript more. Even though I’ve occasionally been paid to write AppleScript code, and always have a few little snippets gluing parts of my work environment together, I’ve never really gained facility with it. I’ve always summarized its flaws this way: It’s very easy to read for general sense, but damn hard to write. Sort of the inverse of Perl – which, probably not coincidentally, is the world’s most popular glue language. So while this characteristic of AppleScript may have been a conscious decision on the part of its designers, I’d argue it hasn’t served us all that well. (I’d also argue that Automator is a partial acknowledgement of those failings.) John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums it up nicely in his recent posting:
Sometime in recent weeks, store.apple.com picked up some Ajax. If you didn’t know this either, go play with the online configurator. Notice that as you make changes via the pop-up menus, updates to the “Summary” box in the upper right are made without a page load. The items that are added or altered by your selection are briefly highlighted in blue, which then fades out.
Examining the source reveals certain telltale signs as well.