They [Apple] suspiciously shaved a few gigabytes from the size of Mac OS despite the crazy-stupid-low price of disk storage, and they’ve emphatically promoted full-screen app user interfaces at the API level, an option which makes the iCloudBook’s weird little 11-inch display way more practical.

This made me think about another, more fledgling market that Apple is trying to conquer: TV.

Today, CNN announced live streaming on iOS devices. This is among a series of services that have come out recently that allow people to watch live TV through the web (e.g., HBO Go).¹

I think the biggest thing missing is apps on the Apple TV, which are probably coming sooner rather than later. The other thing missing is content (e.g., Netflix’s streaming library is obviously not full enough).

Though, with the coupling of the Apple TV and these content providers (everyone from CNN to Hulu), the dream of watching content purely digitally (i.e., over the web, without optical media) is coming together. Soon, hopefully.

¹ Incidentally, there is a fundamental difference between services like HBO Go and Time Warner’s live TV service–the latter has an extra layer (Time Warner in this case) between the end user and the content provider. It’ll be interesting to see whether that added layer will survive in the end.

I was disappointed with the AppleTV, however. If it ran iOS, had an app store and a marginally more exciting remote, I would’ve definitely bought it for $99. The reason I’m holding back is that a lot of the content I want to watch is in Xvid format. If, however, Apple opens up AirPlay to the Cocoa Touch API, then maybe app developers could stream whatever they wanted to the AppleTV, just like an external display. Now that would be amazing.

[P.S. Sorry that I haven't updated in a while. I just moved.]

And for a long time, processing speeds kept increasing each year. But then, things leveled off. The Pentium 5 never came out, and instead, Intel started from scratch. Eventually, both Intel and AMD admitted to the megahertz myth: despite what people think and how the two companies used to market their products, the clock rate is not a good indicator of performance when comparing across processor models. That’s because engineers have come up with tons of ideas that get the CPU to execute more instructions per cycle.

Hence, the processing speed plateaud. This is the best graph I could find, from Tom’s Hardware. It’s old, but you get the picture.

The reason I bring this all up is because I think that the iPad has put another nail in the coffin of the megahertz myth. This became crystal clear to me when I wanted to buy a new single (“Crossfire” by Brandon Flowers) a couple of days ago. But iTunes on my Macbook Pro wasn’t open. That’s when I realized that I wanted to use my iPad because it would be so much quicker than firing up iTunes.

This is ridiculous if you think about it. The iPad has a fairly simple 1GHz processor, while my Macbook Pro has a sophisticated, multicore 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. (Also, the iPad has 256 MB of RAM, and my Macbook Pro has 2 GB.) And yet, iTunes on the iPad does almost everything you can do on the Mac, and it does it much faster and wastes a lot less battery power. Not to mention the fact that it uses a much better interface.

This is certainly not a new revelation. But it’s one that I think deserves some admiration and thought. While Intel and AMD are out trying to squeeze more raw performance out of their newer and newer processors, Apple has built a device that transcends that war.

And that’s why they never market the specs of their iOS devices (unlike Verizon with their Droids). They understand that the “speed” of the computing device does not depend so much on the raw processing power of the CPU, but on how quickly end users can finish their tasks.

At the same time, it has a few faults. First, I am definitely experiencing the proximity sensor problem, where it doesn’t sense my cheek, and as a result, my cheek keeps hitting Mute and End. For me, this is an even bigger problem than the iPhone “death grip” problem.

About the death grip: I haven’t been able to perfectly reproduce the problem, but I have definitely noticed it in some places I’ve been, which leads me to believe that Gruber is right when he says that the problem is exacerbated by a location with a weak signal. Speaking of Gruber and the death grip problem, this article he linked to is insightful.

In response to one of the emails people have been sending to Jobs, he reportedly wrote “There is no reception issue. Stay Tuned” (link). I don’t know what that means. He certainly is implying that this can be fixed with a software update, but I’m skeptical for now. I think, at best, a software fix will ameliorate the problem, not wipe it out.

But the worst part of all of this is not even the fact that the iPhone is yet again plagued with reception issues. (Which is pretty bad. I think everyone always assumed that it was all AT&T’s fault. Now I wonder how much of it was Apple’s fault.) No, the worst part is this reply from Steve Jobs:

Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.

His characteristically short responses are sometimes hopeful (like when he affirmed that there will be wireless syncing in a future version of iOS), sometimes funny (like when he responded to someone’s conspiracy theory about supply with “Are you nuts?”) and always great to read. But not in this case. This is a big problem that is plaguing people’s ability to fundamentally use the iPhone.

And this response was made right before Apple’s official statement which implicitly admits it that it is an issue (it just recommends simply holding it another way or using a case).

This is not a “non issue.” This is certainly an issue. Having to think of how to hold a phone or having to buy an ugly bumper case for the beautiful iPhone are not the elegant solutions to problems Apple is known for. Plus, Apple’s internal documentation reportedly says that employees are not to promise free bumper cases to people who are experiencing the issue. That’s ridiculous. The least they can do is give away those cheap pieces of rubber that make the phone workable for all those people who are routinely affected by this problem in engineering.

Now, I’m not being melodramatic here: this doesn’t, in my opinion, unseat Apple from its position as the making the most well-designed phones and devices in the market. And it also doesn’t, in my opinion, represent the first of many problems that will lead to the demise of Apple. I’m very weary of people who make those sweeping statements as soon as Apple (or anyone else who is successful for that matter) makes a mistake.

Apple, like all other companies, makes mistakes. Even engineering mistakes. For instance, I think everyone has forgotten how horribly buggy iPhone 2.0 was.

But that’s why I’m not griping so much about the engineering mistake (which deserves griping), but more about Jobs’ flippant and disrespectful reply. The fact that other smartphones are affected by this is a good point. But trying to pass this off as a “non issue” is not.

Ironically, in Part 1, I linked to an Ars article commending how great the Cocoa API was compared to the Windows API. Today, however, I’m going to link to an Ars article that says quite the opposite: this one, by John Siracusa, states how much Cocoa and Objective-C have lagged behind .NET and C# and other competitors’ platforms. I highly recommend reading this article. An excerpt:

The fate of individual competitors aside, the fact that the most dangerous players are all coming out of the gate with languages and APIs a generation ahead of what Apple offers should be a huge warning sign. And again, this is all happening in the memory-starved, CPU-constrained mobile world. On the desktop, Apple is even farther behind.

The most important way it’s lagged behind: memory management. As I said in my article and Siracusa says in his, I think it’s an absolute waste of time for a developer that is focusing on a UI-based app to have to worry about micro-managing pointers and memory. Obviously developers of games, operating systems, professional editing tools and other niche performance-driven software have to focus on such minuta. But a guy who wants to make a simple RSS reader in his spare time?

And even the classic performance-driven argument is basically disproven now. As Siracusa states, Google has proven you can have high-level abstraction and performance too. (He links to the video of a phone running the newest Android beating the iPad in JavaScript performance.)

The only reason Apple can pull this off, I believe, is because of how vibrant the App Store has so quickly become. That means that developers, especially newcomers, simply have to bite the bullet and accept Objective-C’s old ways in order to tap into the great App Store market. Otherwise, I’m sure newcomers (e.g., kids who start programming at an early age) would be averse to using Objective-C.

It’s interesting to note that it’s very clear that apps in the iOS App Store are leaps and bounds ahead of Android’s app in terms of UI design and aesthetics. I wonder if the steep learning curve does a good (albeit imperfect) job weeding out the amateurs and people who simply want to make a quick buck.

Despite having spent more time in Objective-C since my article two years ago, I still am annoyed by these things:

• No garbage collection in iOS. And for Mac, it’s off by default and hidden away in a setting that you have to actively hunt for. Siracusa contrasts this with .NET in which garbage collection is fundamentally a part of the system, and you even have to use the keyword “unsafe” to start doing memory management yourself.
• Lack of generics: When I know that my array will only hold strings, I want to not have to do casts when I retrieve objects from the array.
• Xcode’s lack of controls for linking “.h” and “.m” files (headers and implementation files, respectively) smartly. How hard is it to make a button that says “Implement,” so that whenever you create a method signature in the header file, the name and arguments are automatically copy-and-pasted into the implementation file? Or how about automatically-generating “synthesize” statements for all properties?
• As Siracusa mentions, you can’t access objects in collections with a simple [] as you can in other languages. So list[0] in C# becomes [list objectAtIndex:0] in Objective-C.
• Why does every string literal have to have an @ symbol before it? Come on.
• No overloaded operators for string manipulation. Again, C#:

String s = "Hello, " + username + ". How are you? Today is " + date + ".";

and Objective-C:

NSString *s = [NSString stringWithFormatting:@"Hello, %@. How are you? Today is %@.", username, date];

Of course, the great thing is that C# offers you the option of doing it the Cocoa way if you want to. (Instead of “%@” you put in “{0}”, etc.)

• I mentioned this in my previous article, but it still bugs me so much: instead of having hierarchal name spaces delimited by periods as in .NET, you just have really long names of things. So, instead of System.Animation.FlipFromRight (made this one up), you have constants like UIViewAnimationTransitionFlipFromRight. Luckily, the code completion works just as in .NET, so the end-result is the same, but I can’t help but feeling period-delimited namespaces are more ordered and neat.

Obviously, these huge deficiencies and disappointments in Cocoa haven’t in any way impeded its success. But it’s hard to reconcile how forward-looking Apple is with regards to everything consumer-facing with how backward-looking their developer platform is. As Siracusa writes:

It is 2010, after all. “The future” or not, it’s getting a bit silly for GUI application developers to perpetually be one bad pointer dereference away from scribbling all over their application’s memory. The world has moved on; Apple should too.

Personally, I’ve read more newspaper articles with the iPad than I have in the last several years. Why is that? Surely the novelty of the device played a role initially. The iPad was my new toy and I wanted to use it.

But now I’ve had it for almost three months and I’m still at it. That’s because I simply enjoy reading on the iPad. Holding the comfortable device in my lap is completely natural. The fact that I needn’t fold and crease an oversize paper as I read is actually a bonus. Reading on a computer is the polar opposite. A laptop’s size and shape deny that cozy feeling of sitting down and reading. Yes, I called a computer cozy. If you’ve tried it, you know what I mean. I believe that, years from now, we’ll see that form factor had a lot to do with why people weren’t reading newspapers online and, even more importantly, how the renaissance of newspapers began.

I agree.

Also, the fact that the status bar only shows up when you need it is pretty clever. But now there are Safari Extensions that do the same.

Reeder for iPad is finally in the App Store. A while back, I thought the iPhone version (and even the official website) was very nice-looking, but I didn’t end up buying it. I gladly purchased the iPad version though, because RSS reading is the primary use of the iPad for me.

Although I’ve only been using it for a day, I wanted to point some things out.

First, I think this app will do well with the “Instapaper crowd” (i.e., people who are meticulous about design and typography). The app looks and feels great (it borrows the pinch to expand/contract gesture from the Photos app). The animations are smooth and subtle. And the multitude of ways to export the article (to Instapaper, Twitter, Instapaper Mobilizer, etc.) is very useful.

Like in many well-designed apps, the devil is in the details. For instance, when you hold down on a link in the built-in web browser, you get the same menu to export the link, which is very useful. It also has back and forward browser buttons for the built-in web browser, which some other RSS readers lack. Moreover, it makes use of a lot of gestures, which I feel like not enough app developers are leveraging (e.g., you can swipe up and down to view the next or previous article).

This is a welcome respite from what I had been using as my primary RSS reader: FeedlerRSS. Not only is it not beautiful like Reeder, the latest version of FeedlerRSS is more buggy than the versions before it. (It’s so annoying that every time you exit the article view, the list of RSS feeds pops up for a split second before disappearing. It quickly erodes the general experience and a user’s trust in the app.)

However, there are a couple of things that I don’t like about it. It’s actually already crashed on me a couple of times, but that’ll most likely be ironed out. More importantly, the fact that you drag things left and right to mark them as read or to star them is quick and fun (just like the rubber band scrolling in iOS). But the problem is that sometimes when I’m scrolling up and down, I’ll get “caught” in the left-and-right motion, which stops it from scrolling up and down.

In addition, I think the difference between read and unread articles is way too subtle. The headline turns the same grey as the description, a small grey dot disappears from the description… and that’s it. Click the picture to see it larger:

I personally prefer for the distinction between read and unread articles to be a little larger, so I can quickly scan the screen for only unread articles. (I have it set to show only unread articles, but the unread articles don’t disappear until you refresh the view. I suspect this is a feature rather than a bug.) Fortunately, though, the distinction is definitely there, so it’s not a big deal.

I’ll take this time to also talk about Instapaper: I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of using it. Obviously, it’s very well-regarded among the tech community (that cares about great design and typography), so I want to give it a shot. I’m going to start sending articles to Instapaper through Reeder and use the Instapaper website to read them, but this kind of defeats the purpose of the great-looking iOS app (which looks significantly different from the website). Since Reeder itself looks great and has a way to pass an article through the Instapaper Mobilizer though, I may not end up investing in Instapaper.

So, overall, the app is very well-designed and quickly has become my default RSS reader (FeedlerRSS has been ousted from the dock). I still intend to use Early Edition as an accompaniment though. It’s nice to use these well-designed apps. That’s what makes the iOS App Store so great. I don’t have any official numbers, but I would venture to guess that people have bought a lot more software through iOS in the past 2 years (and especially the past 3 months with the iPad) than they did in the prior 10 years of the desktop.

One is from Marco Arment’s blog, and the other from Kyle Baxter’s (both via Shawn Blanc). From the latter:

Although Apple is certainly padding the iPhone’s feature list with this release, they aren’t attempting to compete with Android phones feature-by-feature. Instead, they are trying to continually redefine exactly what a smartphone is, and thus force their competitors to compete on Apple’s terms. They’re trying to make everyone else respond to them, rather than the other way around.

I also wanted to agree wholeheartedly with this post about Droid ads in relation to Apple ads:

That’s the thing about Apple marketing. They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments… [Droid's advertising:] The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight.

The stark contrast is almost comical: Apple’s ad is warm, full of human beings and shows how these human beings connect through Apple’s technology. The Droid’s ad, however, is grainy, gloomy and describes how you can use the Droid to look up star constellations. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: While Apple’s ads describe how their phone allows you to check flights, book hotels, listen to music, take great photos and connect with people through video across the world, Verizon’s ads describe how you can look up star constellations. (To be fair, there is now another ad that shows off some other app, but the star constellation ad was the only one I kept seeing for a while.)

Not to mention that the Droid Incredible’s ad explicitly lists the specs:

I consider myself a “techie” and even I don’t know what AMOLED is exactly. Obviously they’re trying to make their app seem futuristic and cool (and possibly “out of this world”). But all the gloomy imagery just makes me associate the Droid brand with, well, gloominess.