Building The Perfect Beast

I saw this earlier today in a post on The Loop by Peter Cohen, whose one word response is probably all that was necessary on the subject. But I can’t help but wonder where the heck the New York Times picks up clowns like Nick Bilton.

The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation. The keyboard on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typing anything over 140 characters. There isn’t a built-in pen for note-taking, either. Of course all of this is intentional by Apple. Although there are hundreds of third party products available, Apple doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a creator, but more of a consumer.

No content creation? Seriously? On what planet?

“Paper of record”? Not anymore…

Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was. Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

Brilliant analysis. And, of note… I almost never use anything other than Pages or a straight text editor to write now.

Microsoft’s Biggest Miss | minimalmac.com, via daringfireball.net

My Word for Mac 2011 review posted this morning on Macworld.com. In a word? Impressed. This is the first time in many years that I’ve come away from a Word review and felt like Microsoft wasn’t treating the Mac like some kind of second class citizen. The new Word is great, especially if you’re in a business where MS Office and PCs are the word processing tool of choice.

The NY Times today has an interesting article about how law enforcement officials in Russia are using anti-piracy laws to confiscate computers owned by those who are speaking out against the government. In the case cited in this article, those groups whose computers have been confiscated have all owned legal copies of the software in question.

To their credit, Microsoft is promising to “review its policies in Russia” but they have not stated that they will not prosecute these cases that are clearly designed to limit free speech in Russia.

Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent | via NYTimes.com

If Apple was still using the I’m A Mac campaign this might make a very interesting ad.

Interesting response from a Daring Fireball reader about the leaked screenshots of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and the fact that these shots still show Save buttons that use a now rather anachronistic floppy disk icon.

Here are a couple more interesting points:

Pages doesn’t even have the option to add a save button. Note that a “Save” button appears nowhere in Pages’ customize toolbar sheet.

ForeverSave, an app that I use for autosaving files, shows a small arrow pointing to a computer.

WriteRoom, no save button.

Acorn, no save button.

In fact, the vast majority of the programs that I use on a daily basis have no Save button. Seems to me that it’s not the floppy disk icon that’s outmoded, it’s the idea that you need a button to save your files that’s outmoded.

Not quite as brash as initially reported, but interesting nonetheless.

Daring Fireball Linked List: Journalists Told Not to Use or Mention Apple Products at Windows Mobile Event in Germany.

Ina Fried has an interesting interview with Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky up at CNet news. In it Sinofsky offers up what appears to be a new philosophy of development and release, at least as far as OSs go, at Microsoft:

“Everybody wants to know what’s coming and what’s next.” But, he said, talking too soon, too early is actually a bad thing that just leads to frustration.

That’s in sharp contrast to the prior version of Windows, which was first shown as Longhorn back in 2003. It ultimately suffered through numerous delays and significant changes before being released as Vista.

From the sounds of it, gone are the days of announcing an OS and its yet-to-be-nailed-down feature set years before it’s ready to be released. Which, perhaps, means that they’ve stolen another page from the Apple playbook.