Posts tagged: apple
I love the way Apple (Steve) wrote this:
We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.
If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.
If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.
Yeah yeah, go ahead and call it contemptuous towards developers. Fine. It is. And I love it. This is the kind of thinking that makes Apple great, in my view. They are very simply and stubbornly NOT going to do things anybody else’s way.
(Source: daringfireball.net)
I’m telling you, the craftsmanship and detail on these things is awesome. I love mine.
(They are on Tumblr too, so go follow Tuch!)
This is the Tuch for iPhone. It is a leather case for your iPhone made from one single piece of leather. It is cut out with a laser and has no stitching and no glue. It’s designed to work as a minimalist wallet as well. There is a little “pocket” on the back side of it where you keep 4 or 5 credit cards, some cash or whatever. It’s an ingenious design and it works great.
I’ve been using mine for a while and I absolutely it. Check it out.
I hereby interrupt this scheduled logout to tell you about the gorgeous simple minimal leather cases for iPad/iPhone/MacBook Air/etc. that my friend Darrin is making. They are called “Tuch” and they are amazing.
I’ve been using both the Tuch for iPad and Tuch for iPhone for a while and I absolutely love them and highly recommend you go check them out. Especially you iPad owners—trust me, your iPad wants to be carried around in a case this nice. ;)
Borrowing a Magic Mouse for a couple days to try it out. I’m smitten. It’s hard to quantify, but the scrolling-with-momentum thing is just glorious. Weird how a little piece of hardware can dramatically change how it feels to use your computer. (I guess it’s not really that weird considering my hand is on that thing about 8 hours a day on average.)
There is lots of buzz going around about Apple’s imminent tablet. I’m going to go way out on a limb and re-assert my hope/off-chance-but-who-cares-prediction regarding the name:
The New iBook™
WHY I THINK THEY SHOULD
iBook is just a great name. Easy to say. Easy to use. “Slate” & “Tablet” just don’t feel quite right (to me). Especially since they are words that Microsoft has used on their pathetic attempts at this THING. iBook was a hugely popular and instantly recognizable name — that stuck. People continued calling MacBook’s “iBooks” for years after Apple changed the name. Plus, they have redefined names before. iMac has been drastically changed, twice, but retains the iconic and classic name it was given. iPod has seen many iterations and the name hasn’t lost it’s punchiness. This new iBook could simply be the quantum leap forward from the lightweight, trusty, fun, and very portable computer that begat its name.
And more practically speaking…
Apple has cultivated two “tracks” of computers in the last few years. The Mac products, and the “i” products. It’s not nearly as simple as pro and consumer, but it’s along those lines. On the Mac side you have the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, Mac Pro. Notice a common naming theme? Mac. Which is short for Macintosh, which is the name of the Operating System, which harkens to these grand days of the traditional personal computer that we’ve been living in for a number of years now. Even aside from their names, these devices are all, fundamentally, computers as we know computers to be. They have keyboards, ports, drives, mice, etc. They also share very common physical characteristics (mainly aluminum, glass, etc.)
Then you have the “i” products: iPhone, iPod, iMac and iLife (software, but is still very relevant to this discussion), etc. These products have come to embody the “new” Apple in many ways. They are not, for the most part, conventional computers (the exception being the iMac, more on that in a second)… They are entirely original computing devices that abstract away nearly all of the parts of the interface that that the user doesn’t need and which make the computing experience easy, fun, ultra-portable, and still very powerful.
(Here’s the note on the iMac: I see it as just what its name suggests: straddling the line between these two very different concepts of what a computer is. It is BOTH. An “i” and a “Mac”. It cannot get any simpler physically, yet its software is still fully Mac.)
If the rumors are true (and it only makes sense), that this new tablet will be in the same abstracted-interface, multi-touch vein as the iPhone, then I think the “iBook” moniker makes perfect sense. In fact, it seems a natural and easy choice. It is a brand that Apple created, owns, and could resurrect and re-sculp to represent whatever this new thing is. It also could bear extra significance in light of the publishing industry implications that seem to be nearly certain to be a big part of this device’s appeal.
WHY THEY PROBABLY WON’T
It’s been used. By them. And although they do have a deep respect for where they have been, Apple has never been afraid to murder it’s darlings or just plain leave stuff behind. They may not want to compete with their own history, or run the risk of in any way conjuring up a sensation of “old” or “nostalgic”, when this thing has the potential to be The Future. And physically, the “book” part seems to imply “something that folds to close”… which is almost certainly not going to be the case.
So what do they call it then? The iTablet? Meh. The iSlate. Yuck. Sounds like “isolate” if you say it more than once. The Apple Tablet? Not bad, but not likely if you ask me. The MacSlate? dumb. MacPad? hm, not the worst ever, but a little cheesy.
I think the name that rings true and sounds like it fits just right is simple: iBook. Here’s to hoping.
iDisk gets file-sharing. Finally.
For those of us that are MobileMe subscribers, the iDisk just got a lot more useful. This is such good news. Any file in any sub-folder of your iDisk may be easily shared with anyone else. This share can be for a limited time if you wish and can be password-protected. This feature, although announced initially as part of the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition, never quite made it into the first new version. For me, that was very disappointing. I think this implementation is really nice, and I’m very glad to see that Apple is not just neglecting MobileMe, but seriously moving forward to continually improve it.
On the other hand, the fundamental syncing and file transfer system that is iDisk is still NOWHERE NEAR as dead-simple and useful as Dropbox. I guess I’m just glad to see it move in the right direction. I still maintain that if Apple were smart they would take some of that mountain of cash they have stockpiled and BUY DROPBOX outright, integrate it as the new-and-improved iDisk system, keep a free version available, keep it cross-platform, and instantly be the undisputed leader in this whole file-sharing-syncing category.
