Apple? Google? Who cares? You need to know Dropbox | via CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Andy nails perfectly the beauty of Dropbox.
It’s a simple idea with far-reaching consequences. I can make some changes to this column here on my desktop, grab my netbook from the living-room sofa where I left it, and flee the house. If I want to keep working on it some more on the train into town, I won’t need WiFi: by the time I got up from my office chair, the file had already been updated to the netbook’s hard drive. That’s often the failure point of cloud storage, or worse, services that encourage you to use webapps for productivity. No access to the Internet means no access to your files. Not so with Dropbox.
Dropbox is hands down the best cloud computing tool I’ve ever used.
Categories: Asides.
Tags: Andy Ihnatko, Dropbox
Categories: Asides.
Tags: Apple, iMac
As is so often the case, John Gruber gets better goods than the rest of the world…
UPDATE: Arnold Kim has a few more tidbits. And one DF-reading little birdie emailed to say that while the gist is right, the Wired transcript is clearly paraphrased: “He actually said ‘teams at Google want to kill us.’ He never said it in a way that made it sound like the whole company did. Mostly just the Android team.”
UPDATE 2: Another little birdie in attendance tells me, “The quote was actually, ‘Don’t be evil is a load of crap,’” and that Jobs was nostalgic about the kick-ass Adobe of old.
Makes what was said sound a whole lot less bombastic.
Second-Hand Reports From Steve Jobs’s All-Hands Town Hall Meeting at Apple Last Week | via Daring Fireball
Categories: Asides.
Tags: Adobe, Apple, google, Steve Jobs
Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs | via Wired.com
Far be it from Steve to mince his words:
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Categories: Asides.
Tags: Adobe, Apple, google
The Times Herald Record, a local newspaper, reported yesterday that the mayor of the City of Newburgh, a town about 5 minutes from where I live and the place where I used to work, wants the 9/11 trials in his city. He says:
‘I look at it almost as a tourist attraction. The international attention would put Newburgh on the map.’ an excited Valentine told The NY Post.
Newburgh is a once great manufacturing city, with big city style drug and poverty problems, that is slowly trying to pull itself out of the mire. It appears, though, that the mayor has been finding his way downtown and is sampling the local vendor’s wares.
Tourist attraction? You’re freaking kidding me right?
I should note that, now that NYC is no longer going to be the location for the 9/11 trials, Newburgh’s military base is one of the new locations under consideration.
I should also note that the whole idea of these trials taking place outside of a military tribunal is a political clown show that’s going to come back and bite us in the ass.
Categories: Asides.
Tags: clown show, please try this in Guantanamo, stupid people, stupid politicians
Great demo on SlashGear TV of the new iPad.
Categories: Asides.
Tags: Apple, demo, iPad, SlashGear
Amazon Removes Macmillan Books
Amazon removes Macmillan books | via CNET News
It has long been held by those in the music industry that Apple, via the iTunes music store, was selling music for far less than it was worth—but, of course, far more than the zero they were making on illegally downloaded music. It will be interesting to see if the publishing industry, after the iPad is released, feels the exact opposite of those in the music industry. That Apple, while still keeping prices low, kept them high enough for publishers and authors to make a reasonable profit.
This also begs another question. Will Amazon update the Kindle app and the Stanza app for the iPhone so that it competes directly with the iBooks? (Amazon acquired Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, early last year.) And, since these two apps now compete directly with Apple created apps, will Apple allow the Kindle and Stanza apps on the iPad?
iBooks is a very elegant app, and some people will use it and buy books using the new Apple bookstore simply because they like Apple and they like the iBooks app. But others, if given the opportunity via other book apps on the iPad, will buy books based solely upon their price.
I know that I’ve done this very thing. I have both the Kindle app and the Stanza app on my iPhone, but the books that I’ve purchased have mostly been from Amazon because the price for e-books on Amazon is several dollars less than the price for the same book on Stanza’s store. (Why these stores are not exactly the same since Amazon bought Lexcycle is anybody’s guess). So, if there’s a Kindle app for the iPad along with the iBooks app on the iPad, and prices are less on the Kindle app than they are on the iBooks app, will Amazon ultimately force prices down on e-books? Or, if the iPad becomes as ubiquitous as the iPod, will some publishers eschew the Kindle, as Macmillan is presently being forced to do by Amazon, in favor of the iPad?
I think the end result, again, only if Apple allows other e-book readers on the iPad, is some combination of the two. Just like I still buy MP3s from both Amazon and iTunes it’s quite possible that I will buy books from both Amazon and Apple. (The only fly in the ointment of this argument is that I still only use one app/device for listening to this music… iTunes/iPod. Unless Apple is able to read Amazon’s e-books, you will require two different apps for reading. And if there is no Kindle app on the iPad, two completely different devices.)
My hope is that Apple’s entry into the book market will force everyone to up their game in both the quality and features offered in the e-book apps and, more importantly, in how the content works. I’ve said a couple of times (here and here) that if I can subscribe to magazines using a book app I’m in. But the subscription scheme needs to be intelligent, not lame, which is exactly how it is on the iPhone right now. All my reading, all my subscriptions, all in one place, and incredibly easy to access, and I think that it’s a win for all.
Now I just have to sit back and wait.
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Categories: Commentary, Featured.
Tags: Amazon.com, book prices, e-book reader, iPad, Kindle