C API: - Android: closed - WebOS: closed - iPhone OS: managed (250,000 apps with only 0.03% of apps rejected, which is a smaller percentage than the Windows blacklist or Google's Web blacklist)
So it's great that you can replace the kernel on WebOS or Android if you want to. But if I'm the developer of a Mac/PC app or console game, iPhone OS is by far the most open mobile system because it speaks my C language, it can accommodate my existing C app 90% unchanged, and the tools are free and very sophisticated. Which is why iPhone OS has so many apps and the other systems don't. C apps are even more important as the screen gets bigger because almost all of the world's big screen apps are written in C.
Also, in the eyes of a consumer who has great iPod skills and only fair to none Mac/PC skills, iPhone OS is also the most open. You can walk into an Apple Store and there is lots of help to buy and use an iPhone OS device, and plenty of free in-person support later. iTunes installs OS updates without killing your data, it backs up the device automatically when you plug it in, it's easy to get your existing music and movies and books on there, or buy new ones. The interface is optimized to be painlessly easy to use in every single way. People are buying iPads for their grandmothers and little kids who have never owned a PC, that's how open iPhone OS is to consumers.
So to both developers and consumers, iPhone OS is the most open. That is why it has the most apps and sells the best out of Android, WebOS, iPhone OS.
Yes, it's a slightly different open than you're used to, and what is talked about on Slashdot. It's a different kind of device and market, though. And even so, iPhone OS has an open source HTML5 browser, uses all open, vendor-neutral formats, and the core OS is open source, too.
So it's actually iPhone OS devices that are the best of both worlds already. They are very much both computers and consumer devices. Both Android and WebOS have a lot more opening up to do for developers with C apps consumers with ease of use, app selection, music movies books, and comprehensive in-person support.
But people should feel free to keep using a 20th century definition of "open" if it makes your Apple-bashing any easier.
Yeah, but without C you can't port iPhone apps to WebOS. You can't port Windows apps, Mac apps, PlayStation apps, Wii apps, and so on. This is a full-size screen. There are many developers with full-size C apps.
Also, on the tiny CPU's in mobile, the devices really benefit from highly-optimized, compiled C code. And if I want to run Web apps, I can do that with HTML5 and client-side storage on iPhone and Android already. We are long past the time when you can pretend that HTML+JS+CSS is a "native" app.
The wall that all mobile systems are going to run right into as they go to 10-inch form factor is the lack of a desktop class API. Once your screen can support desktop class apps your API needs to be able to. The baby Java apps on most phones and fake Web apps on Palm are just not going to cut it on 10-inch screens. iPad has real PC and console apps on it and it runs at incredible speeds.
The number of iPhone users who are unhappy they can't root their phone is so small as to not be measurable. On the other hand, the number of iPhone administrators who are happy that users can't root their phones and neither can malicious interlopers is fairly high.
WebOS has such a small installed base, and so few apps, fragmentation is not at all their chief concern. HP needs to outsell all previous WebOS devices by far in the first few months just to keep making HP Slate. They need to get more apps made for Slate than have ever been made so far for WebOS or the project is a failure.
When Pre first shipped, iPhone 3G was $399. Then just a few days after Pre shipped at $299, Apple introduced iPhone 3GS for $199 and iPhone 3G for $99. That was Apple killing Palm for the second time.
So if you are a Palm user, this is another rebirth for Palm, as part of HP. Things not only will change dramatically, they have to change dramatically.
The killer app on phones is calls. On tablets, it's apps. If they don't expose a full C API, they will ultimately be toast. Developers need to be able to port their big screen Windows, Mac, iPhone, and PlayStation apps to HP Slate. All of those are written in C.
So when this ships, iPad will be running iPhone OS v4.1 with multitasking of 300,000 C apps, including about 100,000 games, a game network, encryption with remote wipe, remote find, thousands of accessories, the whole iPod music and movies experience, about 25 bookstores, the fastest and most responsive mobile experience, and between 10 and 20 million installed base. Plus a line of iPhones and iPods that can run many of the same apps, and a line of Macs with the same core OS and free iPhone developer tools.
So many questions:
- how are they going to compete without apps? - are they going to expose a comprehensive C API so developers can port iPhone apps? (weird how the Android C API is locked down but people call it "open", huh?) - will they get 10 hours of battery life? - will they have Flash, will it work, will anybody care? - will the onscreen keyboard suck? (so far, all WebOS devices had hardware keyboards) - will there be a single feature that iPad doesn't have? (iPad already has cheap USB and SD card accessories and will likely have a video cam accessory by October) - will they have no contract unlimited data for $30/month? - will they have a 16GB Wi-Fi only model for less than $499? (an unsubsidized Pre is $599, the original HP Slate was $549, and Nexus One with 4GB costs $529) - why wouldn't this just be iPod versus Zune all over again? - will all the PC enthusiasts who are still at this time ranting about how "useless" iPad is and how much better the original HP Slate was going to be now rally behind this because it's from HP, even though it has many fewer uses (apps) than iPad and no longer runs Windows?
I definitely think HP are going in the right direction dropping Windows for Unix and dropping 3rd party software for 1st party. But they are so far behind. Apple worked on iPad for 7 years before releasing it, and HP will have had less than 7 months. WebOS has been shipping for a year, but when Apple started iPad 7 years ago, OS X had been shipping for 3 years. Along the way, Apple started making their own batteries and CPU's to get to where they could make iPad.
The key thing with iPad is the apps morph it into about 100,000 niche devices. So people buy them for very different reasons. It's like for any particular user, the killer app is completely different, but iPad has it. The killer app on iPad is apps. Not the Web, not email. All that stuff is a free extra. I know people who bought iPad just for WebEx, others who bought it just for the art tools, others purely as a camera accessory, and others who bought it only for Netflix and iTunes.
Even though I have an iPad and am really happy with it, I can't help but sort of root for HP because at least they stopped, turned around, and starting going in the right direction. And it's kind of fun to see Microsoft jilted and Ballmer shown up as a stooge again. But they have a long way to go from generic DOS boxes to competing with iPad.
There is no "Web standard" for video. Video is bigger than the Web. The Web is just one place that video plays.
W3C HTML5 standardizes markup. How to write a video tag, and how a browser interprets it. ISO MPEG-4 H.264 standardizes video. How to encode it and how a player should decode it. W3C doesn't know anything about video encoding, and MPEG doesn't know anything about markup. W3C did not spend the last 20 years developing advanced video encoding and playback technologies and putting them on every platform so that the world can share video. And MPEG didn't invent the Web and develop a way for every computer in the world to run the same applications and documents.
Similarly, there is no "Web standard" for photos. Photos are standardized by JPEG, not W3C. There's no "Web standard" for text, you use UTF-8. You have to respect probably 20 standards to make a single Web page that is universally playable. HTML5, JPEG, MPEG, PNG, SVG, HTTP, UTF-8, and more.
We're in a time of user-generated content. Users with H.264 camcorders, H.264 video editors, H.264 video libraries, and H.264 video players in their phones, pocket media players, set-top boxes, PC GPU's, game consoles, and more. Users who also have an H.264 playing browser in their Mac, and very soon will have an H.264 playing browser in their Windows PC. Ubuntu even includes MPEG-4 now. They are not going to transcode their video to a nonstandard format so it plays in Firefox, especially not when Firefox plays H.264 via FlashPlayer or QuickTime Player, and especially not when that video doesn't play in all their friend's Web browsers. They are uploading video from their smartphones in H.264 already. 70% of the video on the Web is H.264, including all of YouTube, and that is rising as proprietary formats like Windows Media and VP6 are replaced by H.264.
And users got all of that compatibility for free. The only people who pay anything to the MPEG patent pool are those who sell content and those who sell encoders. In either case, you pay so little that H.264 pays for itself. If you sell video, you sell so many more copies because everybody in the world has a player than you would sell in a nonstandard format. It's like the choice between selling DVD-Video discs or selling DVD-ROM with an Ogg file on there. The former sells so many more copies than the latter that you don't mind paying 2 cents per disc you sell. That is much less than what you would tip a waiter.
Mozilla is a commercial entity now. They make $50 million per year from their user's Google searches. If they lose 10% of those users because they regularly encounter video tags with H.264 and can't play them, then they have already cost themselves more than MPEG-4 could possibly cost. The Web is turning into more of an interactive TV than interactive print magazine. If Mozilla can adapt to making money off Google searches, they can adapt to paying money to play the world's video library.
Google is not a standards body. Even if VP8 were not a ripoff of H.264 that is vulnerable to submarine patents, it's not appropriate for use to publish video. And the confusion around video standards that Google is contributing to benefits them and puts other video publishers at a disadvantage. YouTube is big enough to support multiple formats, and they already do. Other publishers are not. If I can't just put up the video from my camcorder or video editor, then I'm more inclined to upload it to YouTube and let them deal with the extra complexity. Not to mention this is Google's format.
But of course, there are many nerds who know nothing about video, are completely unaware of the how many people have already benefited greatly from MPEG (for example, if you play your iTunes-purchased music on your Android phone) and are nostalgic for a time when the Web was PC-only and nerd-only and you could just tell a user to download a plug-in or update a library and run another codec in software. So you will wrongly label H.264 "proprietary" (look the word up and look up what MPEG is) and you will
If you're standardizing on a single platform, make it Unix, like the rest of the world. That means you run anything but Microsoft software. That will also increase your security, and decrease your maintenance costs dramatically.
Unix is also dominant in science. Genentech is an all-Apple shop.
If you want to teach the kids something useful for the future, iPhone/iPad programming is probably a billion times more relevant than any kind of XP programming. The Apple tools are free and include simulators for both devices.
You have to be about 40 to think Windows is relevant today. I can't imagine a worse thing to do to high school kids than saddle them with Windows. Might as well get them a Selectric and an abacus.
If Apple owned Facebook and wanted to make it less private, instead of gradualling making the whole thing public, they would have just created a public page for each user and made it 1-click easy to share anything from your private page on it. Apple added 1-click publishing of photos to iPhoto a long time ago, they didn't just ship a new iPhoto version which put your whole photo library online.
One of Facebook's de-privacy updates exposed Zuckerberg's photos to the Web, including one of him clearly high next to a bong. A lot of typical Facebook users could have been fired or arrested for that. If we're not going to have privacy for the sake of billion dollar corporations, we need to scrap the drug laws and we need laws that protect people from being fired for their personal lives first. Police departments and employment agencies have already admitted they troll Facebook and make lists.
Ultimately, an entrepeneur has to offer people something they choose to buy, not bait and switch like Facebook.
> It makes perfect sense to have a high quality, rapid application > development system available for the iPhone and iPad.
We already have that with Xcode. It's the same rapid application development system that a physicist used in 1990 to create the World Wide Web. A non-programmer was able to create the fucking Web with these tools. You don't have to program in it if you don't want to, but at minimum you have to Paste in your C code and compile a native app. Only native apps can be sold as native apps. It's pretty straightforward.
If Xcode is really too hard for you, then prototype your app in RevMobile (or Flash) and hire a developer to program your app in C. Then your app won't abuse the hardware of every iPhone you run on, you won't be ripping off users who have paid for your app expecting it to be native, and you will sell more copies and pay for the C developer.
This is the same thing that happens in Web development. A designer makes a fucking Photoshop mock-up and instead of just converting that to a huge PNG and plopping it in the page, we give the mock-up to an engineer who creates a real Web app.
On iPhone OS, we prioritize the end user over the developer. The developer has to work a little harder to make things much better for the end user. Yes, you have to make C to get paid.
If you don't like all that, you have 2 great options:
* run in iPhone's open API, HTML5 * run on another manufacturer's native platform
If you want to play baseball, show up at the diamond with your baseball glove and play baseball. Everybody is welcome. But don't show up at the baseball diamond in football gear and expect to play football.
You can't tell me how wrong Apple is for having a closed store with strict app approvals and how other mobile makers will outdo Apple with their open stores and then wrote a malware-scare article about how app stores are too open and lump Apple in with everyone else. It's one or the other. Everyone else has Jas apps you can install from the Web and Apple has C apps you can't.
Apple has an actual record here. They've been malware-free 100% for 2 years, 200,000 apps, over 1 billion downloads, with consumer users who don't know what malware is, doing 1-click installs.
How you can write an article like this saying "app stores should be more closed" and not mention Apple's is closed is beyond me.
And there has been no native malware on iPhone. Also bullshit.
And although Apple may not strictly guarantee zero malware, they are actively policing every app. To pretend that's like having no cops, as on the other platforms, is ridiculous.
Awful article. Just fucking awful. Do some fucking research!
That is bullshit. They not only check for malware, they even check for privacy violations and use of unfinished API's that may break in a future OS release. The whole app platform was designed for approvals.
You can't say iPhone is doing it wrong because it's not open on one day and then say it's just as vulnerable to malware as Android the next. We know Apple is not as vulnerable because they have not had any malware through 2 years of a billion downloads and over 200,000 apps, while Android Market has served malware with significantly fewer apps and downloads. And most of Apple's users do not know WTF "malware" is, which is why they do it this way.
All you have to do is either plug your iPhone into your MacBook with USB or pair them over Bluetooth and the MacBook will be using the iPhone's Internet connection and both devices remain fully functional.
I can't see how your idea or the Acer solution is better.
For the past year, I've been doing projects where I convert Flash video presentations from VP6-encoded video to H.264-encoded video, which also plays in FlashPlayer. Then the website code is modified so that if there is no FlashPlayer, the H.264 video is served without Flash, so it works on mobiles. None of the people I work for has anything but H.264 on their radar, because it plays in Firefox via FlashPlayer. This is happening all over.
The problem in the near term for Firefox is that they're going to be dependent on FlashPlayer when other browsers aren't, they can play the video without Flash. So users with Firefox and a Flash blocker are very vulnerable to a Chrome or Safari switch.
Long term, the problem is that sites are dropping their Flash stuff entirely when they do a redesign, and Firefox will lose inline video altogether. In one of those projects, we show HTML5/H.264 video with a fallback to a poster link to the same video. So in Safari you see inline video, but in Firefox you click a static image to see the video in a helper app. Firefox misses the DOM-based interactive video altogether. Users are going to see some very cool things in Safari and Chrome and be vulnerable to switching away from Firefox.
Almost nobody is going to make nonstandard video just for Firefox. Suggesting Ogg as a substitute for MPEG-4 is like telling a Linux user "you can just use DOS 3.3 instead of Linux, they are both operating systems!" It would be cheaper to take up a collection and pay Mozilla's MPEG-4 license fees than to double the world's video encoding costs.
So yes, I think you're right. Firefox is killing itself if it doesn't have MPEG-4. It's a conceit to pretend Web video is just starting. The fact that W3C and browser makers washed their hands of audio video and gave us the failed XHTML experiment in HTML4 doesn't permit them to pretend that MPEG-4 is not a successful, almost 10 years old standard. Most of the video that plays in Firefox today is H.264 (via FlashPlayer) and it will be for some time to come. If they can compromise to take $50 million from Google they can compromise to give a much, much smaller amount to MPEG-4. The Web is becoming more like interactive TV rather than an interactive printed magazine, so a Web browser that can't play standard video is just going to become less and less of a Web browser.
You have to be an idiot to not get that "freedom from porn" means when you don't want it.
The HTML5 Web is right there on all Apple devices and they all play video. You can get all the porn you want if you want it. Everyone knows this.
App Store is supposed to be an alternative to the Web. It's supposed to be different. It's supposed to be managed because the Web is unmanaged. One is ying, one yang.
I'm really tired of the totalitarianism of "open technology." The fact that App Store is managed opens it up in a different way: it's open to consumers, businesses, technophobes.
The stupidest part is you have people who are knocking Apple praising Google for Chrome OS being open, even though the C API on Chrome OS is Google-only, totally closed, and all of Apple's systems have HTML5. So if you get an iPad and ignore App Store, you still can run all the HTML5 apps that run on Chrome OS.
The thing is, the PC industry is full of failure. Monopolies (Microsoft, Adobe), viruses, technical bottlenecks (e.g. BIOS, XP, IE) and a complete lack of design and ease of use. Anything that's done differently in mobile is welcome. Try anything other than just porting the fucking PC to a phone. I don't see how anybody has a right to criticize App Store when nobody has come close to competing with it.
Basically: prove Apple wrong or STFU. That goes for App Store, and for the completely vaporware FlashPlayer for Mobiles. Make a phone app platform so good that Apple copies your "openness" and make FlashPlayer for Mobiles so good that Apple pleads to have it on their devices or just STFU. The whining from the PC industry is incredible.
The baby Java apps on Android aren't going to cut it against Windows and OS X either. Most of the world's application code is in C. If you think native apps are necessary, you should be calling for Google to create a C app platform. They don't seem interested in native apps, though, judging by how ill-treated Android's has been.
In the late 1990's, Linux users complained they could not see Internet video because it was all QuickTime format with commercial Sorenson codec.
So Apple gave the QuickTime file format to MPEG for standardization, and it is now ISO/IEC standardized. A vendor-neutral codec was created. MPEG-4 replaced the DVD. Apple's iTunes Store did not ship QuickTime, they shipped MPEG-4.
Now, Linux users can see Internet video. But now they're complaining that it's not in the nonstandard Ogg they prefer. Never mind that on a technical level, this would be like demanding that Linux users switch to DOS 3.3.
MPEG-4 is totally free for non-commercial use. If you don't make money from it, you don't pay. If you make money, you kickback a tiny portion of it to fund development of the codec. It pays for itself because you can sell more video to people who can see it than otherwise. The fees are very low. Nobody has built a better alternative. Nobody can say "here is how you should have done it" because nobody else has done it. These Ogg fantasies are embarrassing. Show us the fucking code! You can't, because Ogg has atrophied for a decade while people in audio video built and distributed the equivalent of an online DVD and made the world rich with online video. Ogg is just the WMV of Linux.
This debate really shows that you can't please political extremists and religious fundamentalists.
MPEG-LA does not prevent non-commercial use. They are only interested in commercial use. If you make money from MPEG-4, you pay a very, very small amount to fund the development of the technology.
If you are using MPEG-4 non-commercially, you get a great codec in all the hardware, from cameras to players, you get support in editors, you can publish to the world and they can view it, all for $0.
> iPads are pretty good visual media consumption devices, but they're not designed for creating content, well even typing emails gets awkward extremely quickly.
I could just as well say: PC's are pretty good visual media consumption devices, but they're not designed for creating content, well even painting artwork or making music gets awkward extremely quickly.
Text is just one kind of content, and not even the most important kind. The typewriter keyboard is not the most important thing in the world. Even so, we're talking about netbooks with 89% scale keyboards that are fundamentally awkward. If the iPad onscreen keyboard isn't right for you, you simply carry a tiny Bluetooth keyboard with you like I do. Apple has one that is ridiculously small and light. Together with iPad they are both much lighter and smaller than a netbook. There is a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, many, many writing apps on iPad. It's a fantastic tool for writers because you have a 10 hour writing tool that's well under a kilogram. And it has a built-in speller, it has a 3G connection to online references. It has apps to make research easy.
The thing with iPad that makes it a surprisingly good production tool is it can morph into various other devices. For example, a multichannel audio recorder and mixer, or a complete set of painting tools, or a sketchbook, or a musical instrument. It can also act as a controller for a full recording studio, or a DJ setup. It can turn into other devices, many of which are content creation devices. And it does all that wirelessly, and with very long battery life. It's very at home in art studios and music studios and so on. I've written hundreds of songs on an iPhone, which has a 4-track app that is just spectacular. I have a 48 track Logic Pro setup in my MacBook Pro but it is still better to write the songs first on the simple 4-track I always have in my pocket and which can be started with 1 tap. You would not believe how many songwriters do this today. I sold my dedicated portable 4-track because iPhone and a $10 app was simply better.
My friend is a photographer. He shoots now with a Canon SLR connected via USB to an iPad in a big pocket inside a vest. He can stop at any time and look at what he's been shooting at full-size, as if he just printed it. He makes better photos now, he corrects mistakes in camera settings or lighting early on. He doesn't know how he got by without it before. The 64GB storage is also twice what any 1 camera card can hold.
So the lack of a keyboard is nothing. You can fix that via USB or Bluetooth with any keyboard you have lying around. The addition of touch and the 200,000 apps and the audio video savvy of OS X makes it a great content creation tool. The idea that it is for consumption only is just plain wrong. In most cases, you take the work from the iPhone or iPad to a Mac to complete your production work on it, but iPad is great for writing, sketching, the time when you actual are creating the content.
> Isn't that actually the stated purpose of netbooks... providing a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor?
The purpose of a netbook is to take the "net" with you in a "book". It's to have a portable Web browser and email and video with you.
Yes, iPad is better at this than netbooks are.
People fucking hate PC's. Nobody wants to take a PC with them except PC hobbyists. People want to take the Web and email and video with them.
> the iPod Touch was really just Apple's (2nd) attempt at a Palm Pilot. It did pretty well
iPod touch is one of the best-selling consumer electronics devices in history. It's today's best-selling game console. It outsold PlayStation, XBox, and Wii combined. It has absolutely nothing to do with Palm Pilots.
> most people actually think there is a functional difference between "iPods" and "mp3 players"
There is, it's called "iTunes".
> Through the magic of advertising, Apple has made [iPad] seem attractive to a huge number of people
The most amazing part of that was how they somehow got that to happen even before they started doing ads.
> but the success so far has been pretty stunning, and there's a good chance the lustre will fade once > early buyers realize it's too big to fit in a pocket
OMG. You mean it doesn't fit in my pocket! I'm taking it back!
They were selling iPhone and iPod touch, the pocket versions of iPad, for 3 years before iPad. Nobody, but nobody bought an iPad to go in their pocket.
Netbooks don't go in a pocket either. They are twice the size and weight of iPad.
> the next generation of netbooks brings to the table. I'd much rather have the keyboard,
I carry an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with my iPad. Together, they are much smaller and lighter than any netbook. I mean, much, much smaller. The keyboard fits into a pocket of my bag that is meant to hold a passport, and it has full-size keys, not netbook-sized keys.
> if somebody sells a model with 1080p HDMI out and an SSD at $500 I'm going to be a very happy camper.
That's a Blu-Ray player, not a mobile.
iPad has those features, but only at 720p. In mobiles, HD is 720p, we're not even close to 1080p yet. Not just because of the screens but because of the size of the movie files and the bandwidth of the Internet. Waiting for 1080p is a terrible, terrible reason not to have an iPad. We are talking about iPads and netbooks, these are 10 inch displays. You don't gain anything with 1080p on a 10-inch display.
> Transcode over 150 GB just because one device doesn't support a standard?
There is only one standard for video: ISO/IEC MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. It's the almost 10 year old successor to the DVD. You'll find it on Blu-Ray, in iTunes, in YouTube, in camcorders and iPods and set-top boxes and so on and so on. It's built into the hardware of all the video players just like MPEG-2 is built into the hardware of DVD players.
If you encode in a PC hobbyist format, you can only play on PC's. And, you can only decode video on the CPU, leading to poor performance and lousy battery life. NVIDIA GPU's have an H.264 decoder. So even if you only play on PC's, you're still better using H.264.
H.264 is also the highest-quality codec available today. So there really isn't any excuse for your nonstandard video collection.
Because we have very, very small screens and very, very large screens, the best thing to do is encode an SD and HD version. Essentially creating both a disc-less DVD and disc-less Blu-Ray.
Video is bigger than the PC. The PC is also lousy at vendor-neutral standards, whereas in audio video we are religious about it. So yes, you are suffering now because you didn't follow the standard, not because Apple didn't follow the non-standard.
I recommend not answering any emails or voicemails or any kind of mails. If it's important, they'll call or come around in person. Then when they do, no matter who it is, or what they need, be totally proactive, help them get it accomplished. You'll have time for it because you're not answering any bullshit mails. Pretty soon everyone will have a story about the time you pulled their ass out of the fire.
Also, learn the favorite cookie of everyone on your team, and from time to time, bring in a bag of fresh-baked cookies and give everyone their favorite. People love this. Friday afternoon is a great time for a cookie break.
The problem is, they have something that's non-commercial, so to make it commercial, they keep selling their users out. It would be better to just have the government buy it and turn it into facebook.org with the privacy settings as they were in 2005.
The only problem would be a lack of fidelity, i.e. shitty gray screens, or a like of diversity, i.e. not having access to the whole bookstore or library.
Alice for iPad is a step in the right direction. Books for kids that age are mostly picture books.
And iPad itself can represent the full-fidelity of all of the paper books. And electronic books can also enable kids to get access to more books. Not just kids in rich countries.
We spend too much time talking about this shit and not enough time building. Kudos to Apple for creating the first useful electronic reader. The fact that they already outsold all the others is great news for publishing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're missing something really important.
C API:
- Android: closed
- WebOS: closed
- iPhone OS: managed (250,000 apps with only 0.03% of apps rejected, which is a smaller percentage than the Windows blacklist or Google's Web blacklist)
So it's great that you can replace the kernel on WebOS or Android if you want to. But if I'm the developer of a Mac/PC app or console game, iPhone OS is by far the most open mobile system because it speaks my C language, it can accommodate my existing C app 90% unchanged, and the tools are free and very sophisticated. Which is why iPhone OS has so many apps and the other systems don't. C apps are even more important as the screen gets bigger because almost all of the world's big screen apps are written in C.
Also, in the eyes of a consumer who has great iPod skills and only fair to none Mac/PC skills, iPhone OS is also the most open. You can walk into an Apple Store and there is lots of help to buy and use an iPhone OS device, and plenty of free in-person support later. iTunes installs OS updates without killing your data, it backs up the device automatically when you plug it in, it's easy to get your existing music and movies and books on there, or buy new ones. The interface is optimized to be painlessly easy to use in every single way. People are buying iPads for their grandmothers and little kids who have never owned a PC, that's how open iPhone OS is to consumers.
So to both developers and consumers, iPhone OS is the most open. That is why it has the most apps and sells the best out of Android, WebOS, iPhone OS.
Yes, it's a slightly different open than you're used to, and what is talked about on Slashdot. It's a different kind of device and market, though. And even so, iPhone OS has an open source HTML5 browser, uses all open, vendor-neutral formats, and the core OS is open source, too.
So it's actually iPhone OS devices that are the best of both worlds already. They are very much both computers and consumer devices. Both Android and WebOS have a lot more opening up to do for developers with C apps consumers with ease of use, app selection, music movies books, and comprehensive in-person support.
But people should feel free to keep using a 20th century definition of "open" if it makes your Apple-bashing any easier.
Yeah, but without C you can't port iPhone apps to WebOS. You can't port Windows apps, Mac apps, PlayStation apps, Wii apps, and so on. This is a full-size screen. There are many developers with full-size C apps.
Also, on the tiny CPU's in mobile, the devices really benefit from highly-optimized, compiled C code. And if I want to run Web apps, I can do that with HTML5 and client-side storage on iPhone and Android already. We are long past the time when you can pretend that HTML+JS+CSS is a "native" app.
The wall that all mobile systems are going to run right into as they go to 10-inch form factor is the lack of a desktop class API. Once your screen can support desktop class apps your API needs to be able to. The baby Java apps on most phones and fake Web apps on Palm are just not going to cut it on 10-inch screens. iPad has real PC and console apps on it and it runs at incredible speeds.
> you can get away with pissing people off
The number of iPhone users who are unhappy they can't root their phone is so small as to not be measurable. On the other hand, the number of iPhone administrators who are happy that users can't root their phones and neither can malicious interlopers is fairly high.
So an un-rootable phone is indeed a feature.
WebOS has such a small installed base, and so few apps, fragmentation is not at all their chief concern. HP needs to outsell all previous WebOS devices by far in the first few months just to keep making HP Slate. They need to get more apps made for Slate than have ever been made so far for WebOS or the project is a failure.
When Pre first shipped, iPhone 3G was $399. Then just a few days after Pre shipped at $299, Apple introduced iPhone 3GS for $199 and iPhone 3G for $99. That was Apple killing Palm for the second time.
So if you are a Palm user, this is another rebirth for Palm, as part of HP. Things not only will change dramatically, they have to change dramatically.
The killer app on phones is calls. On tablets, it's apps. If they don't expose a full C API, they will ultimately be toast. Developers need to be able to port their big screen Windows, Mac, iPhone, and PlayStation apps to HP Slate. All of those are written in C.
So when this ships, iPad will be running iPhone OS v4.1 with multitasking of 300,000 C apps, including about 100,000 games, a game network, encryption with remote wipe, remote find, thousands of accessories, the whole iPod music and movies experience, about 25 bookstores, the fastest and most responsive mobile experience, and between 10 and 20 million installed base. Plus a line of iPhones and iPods that can run many of the same apps, and a line of Macs with the same core OS and free iPhone developer tools.
So many questions:
- how are they going to compete without apps?
- are they going to expose a comprehensive C API so developers can port iPhone apps? (weird how the Android C API is locked down but people call it "open", huh?)
- will they get 10 hours of battery life?
- will they have Flash, will it work, will anybody care?
- will the onscreen keyboard suck? (so far, all WebOS devices had hardware keyboards)
- will there be a single feature that iPad doesn't have? (iPad already has cheap USB and SD card accessories and will likely have a video cam accessory by October)
- will they have no contract unlimited data for $30/month?
- will they have a 16GB Wi-Fi only model for less than $499? (an unsubsidized Pre is $599, the original HP Slate was $549, and Nexus One with 4GB costs $529)
- why wouldn't this just be iPod versus Zune all over again?
- will all the PC enthusiasts who are still at this time ranting about how "useless" iPad is and how much better the original HP Slate was going to be now rally behind this because it's from HP, even though it has many fewer uses (apps) than iPad and no longer runs Windows?
I definitely think HP are going in the right direction dropping Windows for Unix and dropping 3rd party software for 1st party. But they are so far behind. Apple worked on iPad for 7 years before releasing it, and HP will have had less than 7 months. WebOS has been shipping for a year, but when Apple started iPad 7 years ago, OS X had been shipping for 3 years. Along the way, Apple started making their own batteries and CPU's to get to where they could make iPad.
The key thing with iPad is the apps morph it into about 100,000 niche devices. So people buy them for very different reasons. It's like for any particular user, the killer app is completely different, but iPad has it. The killer app on iPad is apps. Not the Web, not email. All that stuff is a free extra. I know people who bought iPad just for WebEx, others who bought it just for the art tools, others purely as a camera accessory, and others who bought it only for Netflix and iTunes.
Even though I have an iPad and am really happy with it, I can't help but sort of root for HP because at least they stopped, turned around, and starting going in the right direction. And it's kind of fun to see Microsoft jilted and Ballmer shown up as a stooge again. But they have a long way to go from generic DOS boxes to competing with iPad.
There is no "Web standard" for video. Video is bigger than the Web. The Web is just one place that video plays.
W3C HTML5 standardizes markup. How to write a video tag, and how a browser interprets it. ISO MPEG-4 H.264 standardizes video. How to encode it and how a player should decode it. W3C doesn't know anything about video encoding, and MPEG doesn't know anything about markup. W3C did not spend the last 20 years developing advanced video encoding and playback technologies and putting them on every platform so that the world can share video. And MPEG didn't invent the Web and develop a way for every computer in the world to run the same applications and documents.
Similarly, there is no "Web standard" for photos. Photos are standardized by JPEG, not W3C. There's no "Web standard" for text, you use UTF-8. You have to respect probably 20 standards to make a single Web page that is universally playable. HTML5, JPEG, MPEG, PNG, SVG, HTTP, UTF-8, and more.
We're in a time of user-generated content. Users with H.264 camcorders, H.264 video editors, H.264 video libraries, and H.264 video players in their phones, pocket media players, set-top boxes, PC GPU's, game consoles, and more. Users who also have an H.264 playing browser in their Mac, and very soon will have an H.264 playing browser in their Windows PC. Ubuntu even includes MPEG-4 now. They are not going to transcode their video to a nonstandard format so it plays in Firefox, especially not when Firefox plays H.264 via FlashPlayer or QuickTime Player, and especially not when that video doesn't play in all their friend's Web browsers. They are uploading video from their smartphones in H.264 already. 70% of the video on the Web is H.264, including all of YouTube, and that is rising as proprietary formats like Windows Media and VP6 are replaced by H.264.
And users got all of that compatibility for free. The only people who pay anything to the MPEG patent pool are those who sell content and those who sell encoders. In either case, you pay so little that H.264 pays for itself. If you sell video, you sell so many more copies because everybody in the world has a player than you would sell in a nonstandard format. It's like the choice between selling DVD-Video discs or selling DVD-ROM with an Ogg file on there. The former sells so many more copies than the latter that you don't mind paying 2 cents per disc you sell. That is much less than what you would tip a waiter.
Mozilla is a commercial entity now. They make $50 million per year from their user's Google searches. If they lose 10% of those users because they regularly encounter video tags with H.264 and can't play them, then they have already cost themselves more than MPEG-4 could possibly cost. The Web is turning into more of an interactive TV than interactive print magazine. If Mozilla can adapt to making money off Google searches, they can adapt to paying money to play the world's video library.
Google is not a standards body. Even if VP8 were not a ripoff of H.264 that is vulnerable to submarine patents, it's not appropriate for use to publish video. And the confusion around video standards that Google is contributing to benefits them and puts other video publishers at a disadvantage. YouTube is big enough to support multiple formats, and they already do. Other publishers are not. If I can't just put up the video from my camcorder or video editor, then I'm more inclined to upload it to YouTube and let them deal with the extra complexity. Not to mention this is Google's format.
But of course, there are many nerds who know nothing about video, are completely unaware of the how many people have already benefited greatly from MPEG (for example, if you play your iTunes-purchased music on your Android phone) and are nostalgic for a time when the Web was PC-only and nerd-only and you could just tell a user to download a plug-in or update a library and run another codec in software. So you will wrongly label H.264 "proprietary" (look the word up and look up what MPEG is) and you will
If you're standardizing on a single platform, make it Unix, like the rest of the world. That means you run anything but Microsoft software. That will also increase your security, and decrease your maintenance costs dramatically.
Unix is also dominant in science. Genentech is an all-Apple shop.
If you want to teach the kids something useful for the future, iPhone/iPad programming is probably a billion times more relevant than any kind of XP programming. The Apple tools are free and include simulators for both devices.
You have to be about 40 to think Windows is relevant today. I can't imagine a worse thing to do to high school kids than saddle them with Windows. Might as well get them a Selectric and an abacus.
If Apple owned Facebook and wanted to make it less private, instead of gradualling making the whole thing public, they would have just created a public page for each user and made it 1-click easy to share anything from your private page on it. Apple added 1-click publishing of photos to iPhoto a long time ago, they didn't just ship a new iPhoto version which put your whole photo library online.
One of Facebook's de-privacy updates exposed Zuckerberg's photos to the Web, including one of him clearly high next to a bong. A lot of typical Facebook users could have been fired or arrested for that. If we're not going to have privacy for the sake of billion dollar corporations, we need to scrap the drug laws and we need laws that protect people from being fired for their personal lives first. Police departments and employment agencies have already admitted they troll Facebook and make lists.
Ultimately, an entrepeneur has to offer people something they choose to buy, not bait and switch like Facebook.
Put Xen Desktop on your big honking Linux desktop and remote access it for 10 hours at a time using Citrix Receiver on iPad.
RunRev CEO:
> It makes perfect sense to have a high quality, rapid application
> development system available for the iPhone and iPad.
We already have that with Xcode. It's the same rapid application development system that a physicist used in 1990 to create the World Wide Web. A non-programmer was able to create the fucking Web with these tools. You don't have to program in it if you don't want to, but at minimum you have to Paste in your C code and compile a native app. Only native apps can be sold as native apps. It's pretty straightforward.
If Xcode is really too hard for you, then prototype your app in RevMobile (or Flash) and hire a developer to program your app in C. Then your app won't abuse the hardware of every iPhone you run on, you won't be ripping off users who have paid for your app expecting it to be native, and you will sell more copies and pay for the C developer.
This is the same thing that happens in Web development. A designer makes a fucking Photoshop mock-up and instead of just converting that to a huge PNG and plopping it in the page, we give the mock-up to an engineer who creates a real Web app.
On iPhone OS, we prioritize the end user over the developer. The developer has to work a little harder to make things much better for the end user. Yes, you have to make C to get paid.
If you don't like all that, you have 2 great options:
* run in iPhone's open API, HTML5
* run on another manufacturer's native platform
If you want to play baseball, show up at the diamond with your baseball glove and play baseball. Everybody is welcome. But don't show up at the baseball diamond in football gear and expect to play football.
You can't tell me how wrong Apple is for having a closed store with strict app approvals and how other mobile makers will outdo Apple with their open stores and then wrote a malware-scare article about how app stores are too open and lump Apple in with everyone else. It's one or the other. Everyone else has Jas apps you can install from the Web and Apple has C apps you can't.
Apple has an actual record here. They've been malware-free 100% for 2 years, 200,000 apps, over 1 billion downloads, with consumer users who don't know what malware is, doing 1-click installs.
How you can write an article like this saying "app stores should be more closed" and not mention Apple's is closed is beyond me.
And there has been no native malware on iPhone. Also bullshit.
And although Apple may not strictly guarantee zero malware, they are actively policing every app. To pretend that's like having no cops, as on the other platforms, is ridiculous.
Awful article. Just fucking awful. Do some fucking research!
That is bullshit. They not only check for malware, they even check for privacy violations and use of unfinished API's that may break in a future OS release. The whole app platform was designed for approvals.
You can't say iPhone is doing it wrong because it's not open on one day and then say it's just as vulnerable to malware as Android the next. We know Apple is not as vulnerable because they have not had any malware through 2 years of a billion downloads and over 200,000 apps, while Android Market has served malware with significantly fewer apps and downloads. And most of Apple's users do not know WTF "malware" is, which is why they do it this way.
All you have to do is either plug your iPhone into your MacBook with USB or pair them over Bluetooth and the MacBook will be using the iPhone's Internet connection and both devices remain fully functional.
I can't see how your idea or the Acer solution is better.
For the past year, I've been doing projects where I convert Flash video presentations from VP6-encoded video to H.264-encoded video, which also plays in FlashPlayer. Then the website code is modified so that if there is no FlashPlayer, the H.264 video is served without Flash, so it works on mobiles. None of the people I work for has anything but H.264 on their radar, because it plays in Firefox via FlashPlayer. This is happening all over.
The problem in the near term for Firefox is that they're going to be dependent on FlashPlayer when other browsers aren't, they can play the video without Flash. So users with Firefox and a Flash blocker are very vulnerable to a Chrome or Safari switch.
Long term, the problem is that sites are dropping their Flash stuff entirely when they do a redesign, and Firefox will lose inline video altogether. In one of those projects, we show HTML5/H.264 video with a fallback to a poster link to the same video. So in Safari you see inline video, but in Firefox you click a static image to see the video in a helper app. Firefox misses the DOM-based interactive video altogether. Users are going to see some very cool things in Safari and Chrome and be vulnerable to switching away from Firefox.
Almost nobody is going to make nonstandard video just for Firefox. Suggesting Ogg as a substitute for MPEG-4 is like telling a Linux user "you can just use DOS 3.3 instead of Linux, they are both operating systems!" It would be cheaper to take up a collection and pay Mozilla's MPEG-4 license fees than to double the world's video encoding costs.
So yes, I think you're right. Firefox is killing itself if it doesn't have MPEG-4. It's a conceit to pretend Web video is just starting. The fact that W3C and browser makers washed their hands of audio video and gave us the failed XHTML experiment in HTML4 doesn't permit them to pretend that MPEG-4 is not a successful, almost 10 years old standard. Most of the video that plays in Firefox today is H.264 (via FlashPlayer) and it will be for some time to come. If they can compromise to take $50 million from Google they can compromise to give a much, much smaller amount to MPEG-4. The Web is becoming more like interactive TV rather than an interactive printed magazine, so a Web browser that can't play standard video is just going to become less and less of a Web browser.
You have to be an idiot to not get that "freedom from porn" means when you don't want it.
The HTML5 Web is right there on all Apple devices and they all play video. You can get all the porn you want if you want it. Everyone knows this.
App Store is supposed to be an alternative to the Web. It's supposed to be different. It's supposed to be managed because the Web is unmanaged. One is ying, one yang.
I'm really tired of the totalitarianism of "open technology." The fact that App Store is managed opens it up in a different way: it's open to consumers, businesses, technophobes.
The stupidest part is you have people who are knocking Apple praising Google for Chrome OS being open, even though the C API on Chrome OS is Google-only, totally closed, and all of Apple's systems have HTML5. So if you get an iPad and ignore App Store, you still can run all the HTML5 apps that run on Chrome OS.
The thing is, the PC industry is full of failure. Monopolies (Microsoft, Adobe), viruses, technical bottlenecks (e.g. BIOS, XP, IE) and a complete lack of design and ease of use. Anything that's done differently in mobile is welcome. Try anything other than just porting the fucking PC to a phone. I don't see how anybody has a right to criticize App Store when nobody has come close to competing with it.
Basically: prove Apple wrong or STFU. That goes for App Store, and for the completely vaporware FlashPlayer for Mobiles. Make a phone app platform so good that Apple copies your "openness" and make FlashPlayer for Mobiles so good that Apple pleads to have it on their devices or just STFU. The whining from the PC industry is incredible.
The Mac will get touch for free soon, in the same way it got Exchange for free, and ARM compatbility for free.
iPhone and Mac OS sit on the same OS X core. They share successes.
The baby Java apps on Android aren't going to cut it against Windows and OS X either. Most of the world's application code is in C. If you think native apps are necessary, you should be calling for Google to create a C app platform. They don't seem interested in native apps, though, judging by how ill-treated Android's has been.
In the late 1990's, Linux users complained they could not see Internet video because it was all QuickTime format with commercial Sorenson codec.
So Apple gave the QuickTime file format to MPEG for standardization, and it is now ISO/IEC standardized. A vendor-neutral codec was created. MPEG-4 replaced the DVD. Apple's iTunes Store did not ship QuickTime, they shipped MPEG-4.
Now, Linux users can see Internet video. But now they're complaining that it's not in the nonstandard Ogg they prefer. Never mind that on a technical level, this would be like demanding that Linux users switch to DOS 3.3.
MPEG-4 is totally free for non-commercial use. If you don't make money from it, you don't pay. If you make money, you kickback a tiny portion of it to fund development of the codec. It pays for itself because you can sell more video to people who can see it than otherwise. The fees are very low. Nobody has built a better alternative. Nobody can say "here is how you should have done it" because nobody else has done it. These Ogg fantasies are embarrassing. Show us the fucking code! You can't, because Ogg has atrophied for a decade while people in audio video built and distributed the equivalent of an online DVD and made the world rich with online video. Ogg is just the WMV of Linux.
This debate really shows that you can't please political extremists and religious fundamentalists.
MPEG-LA does not prevent non-commercial use. They are only interested in commercial use. If you make money from MPEG-4, you pay a very, very small amount to fund the development of the technology.
If you are using MPEG-4 non-commercially, you get a great codec in all the hardware, from cameras to players, you get support in editors, you can publish to the world and they can view it, all for $0.
> iPads are pretty good visual media consumption devices, but they're not designed for creating content, well even typing emails gets awkward extremely quickly.
I could just as well say: PC's are pretty good visual media consumption devices, but they're not designed for creating content, well even painting artwork or making music gets awkward extremely quickly.
Text is just one kind of content, and not even the most important kind. The typewriter keyboard is not the most important thing in the world. Even so, we're talking about netbooks with 89% scale keyboards that are fundamentally awkward. If the iPad onscreen keyboard isn't right for you, you simply carry a tiny Bluetooth keyboard with you like I do. Apple has one that is ridiculously small and light. Together with iPad they are both much lighter and smaller than a netbook. There is a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, many, many writing apps on iPad. It's a fantastic tool for writers because you have a 10 hour writing tool that's well under a kilogram. And it has a built-in speller, it has a 3G connection to online references. It has apps to make research easy.
The thing with iPad that makes it a surprisingly good production tool is it can morph into various other devices. For example, a multichannel audio recorder and mixer, or a complete set of painting tools, or a sketchbook, or a musical instrument. It can also act as a controller for a full recording studio, or a DJ setup. It can turn into other devices, many of which are content creation devices. And it does all that wirelessly, and with very long battery life. It's very at home in art studios and music studios and so on. I've written hundreds of songs on an iPhone, which has a 4-track app that is just spectacular. I have a 48 track Logic Pro setup in my MacBook Pro but it is still better to write the songs first on the simple 4-track I always have in my pocket and which can be started with 1 tap. You would not believe how many songwriters do this today. I sold my dedicated portable 4-track because iPhone and a $10 app was simply better.
My friend is a photographer. He shoots now with a Canon SLR connected via USB to an iPad in a big pocket inside a vest. He can stop at any time and look at what he's been shooting at full-size, as if he just printed it. He makes better photos now, he corrects mistakes in camera settings or lighting early on. He doesn't know how he got by without it before. The 64GB storage is also twice what any 1 camera card can hold.
So the lack of a keyboard is nothing. You can fix that via USB or Bluetooth with any keyboard you have lying around. The addition of touch and the 200,000 apps and the audio video savvy of OS X makes it a great content creation tool. The idea that it is for consumption only is just plain wrong. In most cases, you take the work from the iPhone or iPad to a Mac to complete your production work on it, but iPad is great for writing, sketching, the time when you actual are creating the content.
> Isn't that actually the stated purpose of netbooks... providing a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor?
The purpose of a netbook is to take the "net" with you in a "book". It's to have a portable Web browser and email and video with you.
Yes, iPad is better at this than netbooks are.
People fucking hate PC's. Nobody wants to take a PC with them except PC hobbyists. People want to take the Web and email and video with them.
> the iPod Touch was really just Apple's (2nd) attempt at a Palm Pilot. It did pretty well
iPod touch is one of the best-selling consumer electronics devices in history. It's today's best-selling game console. It outsold PlayStation, XBox, and Wii combined. It has absolutely nothing to do with Palm Pilots.
> most people actually think there is a functional difference between "iPods" and "mp3 players"
There is, it's called "iTunes".
> Through the magic of advertising, Apple has made [iPad] seem attractive to a huge number of people
The most amazing part of that was how they somehow got that to happen even before they started doing ads.
> but the success so far has been pretty stunning, and there's a good chance the lustre will fade once
> early buyers realize it's too big to fit in a pocket
OMG. You mean it doesn't fit in my pocket! I'm taking it back!
They were selling iPhone and iPod touch, the pocket versions of iPad, for 3 years before iPad. Nobody, but nobody bought an iPad to go in their pocket.
Netbooks don't go in a pocket either. They are twice the size and weight of iPad.
> the next generation of netbooks brings to the table. I'd much rather have the keyboard,
I carry an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with my iPad. Together, they are much smaller and lighter than any netbook. I mean, much, much smaller. The keyboard fits into a pocket of my bag that is meant to hold a passport, and it has full-size keys, not netbook-sized keys.
> if somebody sells a model with 1080p HDMI out and an SSD at $500 I'm going to be a very happy camper.
That's a Blu-Ray player, not a mobile.
iPad has those features, but only at 720p. In mobiles, HD is 720p, we're not even close to 1080p yet. Not just because of the screens but because of the size of the movie files and the bandwidth of the Internet. Waiting for 1080p is a terrible, terrible reason not to have an iPad. We are talking about iPads and netbooks, these are 10 inch displays. You don't gain anything with 1080p on a 10-inch display.
> Transcode over 150 GB just because one device doesn't support a standard?
There is only one standard for video: ISO/IEC MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. It's the almost 10 year old successor to the DVD. You'll find it on Blu-Ray, in iTunes, in YouTube, in camcorders and iPods and set-top boxes and so on and so on. It's built into the hardware of all the video players just like MPEG-2 is built into the hardware of DVD players.
If you encode in a PC hobbyist format, you can only play on PC's. And, you can only decode video on the CPU, leading to poor performance and lousy battery life. NVIDIA GPU's have an H.264 decoder. So even if you only play on PC's, you're still better using H.264.
H.264 is also the highest-quality codec available today. So there really isn't any excuse for your nonstandard video collection.
Because we have very, very small screens and very, very large screens, the best thing to do is encode an SD and HD version. Essentially creating both a disc-less DVD and disc-less Blu-Ray.
Video is bigger than the PC. The PC is also lousy at vendor-neutral standards, whereas in audio video we are religious about it. So yes, you are suffering now because you didn't follow the standard, not because Apple didn't follow the non-standard.
Mostly just be yourself, and try to be helpful.
I recommend not answering any emails or voicemails or any kind of mails. If it's important, they'll call or come around in person. Then when they do, no matter who it is, or what they need, be totally proactive, help them get it accomplished. You'll have time for it because you're not answering any bullshit mails. Pretty soon everyone will have a story about the time you pulled their ass out of the fire.
Also, learn the favorite cookie of everyone on your team, and from time to time, bring in a bag of fresh-baked cookies and give everyone their favorite. People love this. Friday afternoon is a great time for a cookie break.
The problem is, they have something that's non-commercial, so to make it commercial, they keep selling their users out. It would be better to just have the government buy it and turn it into facebook.org with the privacy settings as they were in 2005.
The only problem would be a lack of fidelity, i.e. shitty gray screens, or a like of diversity, i.e. not having access to the whole bookstore or library.
Alice for iPad is a step in the right direction. Books for kids that age are mostly picture books.
And iPad itself can represent the full-fidelity of all of the paper books. And electronic books can also enable kids to get access to more books. Not just kids in rich countries.
We spend too much time talking about this shit and not enough time building. Kudos to Apple for creating the first useful electronic reader. The fact that they already outsold all the others is great news for publishing.