Rubénerd!

It's as inevitable as the WiFi failing at UTS: I go to an anime club screening or to one of my classes, and someone jeers at me for having a Mac laptop and/or an iPhone. When I ask why, they say I'm a tool of advertising, and that I should be using an Android device with three words in its name, or something.

I use Apple products

There are practical and personal reasons why I use Apple devices. Having tried the rest, Apple have the best after sales support and student discounts, absolutely no competition. The iOS platform runs the best of breed software for my needs. OmniFocus is the best GTD organiser, NetBot and TweetBot are the best ADN and Twitter clients, Sleep Cycle is the best health application. If I gamed, I'm pretty sure they'd be on iOS too.

Then there are reasons I don't use the competition. Android's anaemic and patchy font offerings don't please a typography nerd like me, and the platform is made by an advertising company whom I've increasingly lost trust in. I don't like the UI direction Windows Phone and Windows 8 are taking. Tizen could be appealing, but it's not mature enough yet. Blackberry has nice hardware, but not the software I need. My beloved Palm has all but died.

Foam foam foam!

Reading Marco Arment's Magazine article on the issue, I can relate to his experience. You shouldn't ever read blog comments anyway, but if you unfortunately do by accident, the web is saturated with angry Android fans.

As I said in the intro, this isn't just limited to the web, I get this iRL too. I have a hoodie with an Apple logo on it, and have even been accosted by Android users while waiting for a train, telling me with colourful language that I brainwash people and that their phones are better. The irony of their mob mentality was seemingly lost on them.

I'm not a sociologist, and am not aware what it is about the Android platform that breeds this vitriolic, knee jerk mindset in a larger subset of their users. I think it goes deeper than simple logical reasoning.

Whatever the case, it's a sad state of affairs when people like @TypeDom have to specifically say they're platform agnostic, then explain why. I should be able to just say I use Apple products without having to say I also run Linux and BSD to take some of the heat off. Having Tux on the lid of my MacBook Air seems to have helped a lot. Because yes, shock horror, I also use Linux. I must be pretty brainwashed by advertising.

Ultimately, people will use the devices that suit their needs and budget. For a large percentage of people, that's an Apple device.

John C. Dvorak (the guy who also wrote this):

It is the notion that the phones will be in short supply that attracts my attention, though. This is because the whole idea screams "marketing ploy!"

Bloomberg:

"Apple is facing significant production constraints due to a move toward in-cell display technology [from LG and Japan Display]," Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays, wrote in a research note yesterday. "Apple is struggling to keep up with demand."

The popular myth that Apple intentionally causes supply bottlenecks is conjecture at best, and belies a lack of understanding about manufacturing. My two cents, which I'd put towards buying an iPhone 5 if I weren't looking to head back to BlackBerry.

As well as seeing a friend off in the wee hours of the morning, the other reason I didn't get much sleep last night was due to staying up until 02:00 to watch NASA's Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory launch!

Best. Mission title. Ever.

From NASA's website, accompanying their photo of the day of the launch:

The Atlantic Ocean provides a backdrop as the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket clears the tower at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Sealed inside the rocket's protective payload fairing is NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft, beginning a 9-month interplanetary cruise to Mars. Liftoff was at 10:02 a.m. EST Nov. 26. MSL's components include a car-sized rover, Curiosity, which has 10 science instruments designed to search for signs of life, including methane, and help determine if the gas is from a biological or geological source.

You read that right, the size of a car. Whereas Spirit and Opportunity were far larger than the original little Mars rover, this is another step up entirely. I'm quivering with anticipation over what it will teach us, assuming it's voyage to Mars is without incident. This is the stuff of dreams right here ^_^.

Live from bed

Whereas during STS-135 I watched with baited breath on my MacBook Pro, this time I elected to witness the event on my iTelephone, which the NASA site accommodated with an iOS link next to the primary video feed.

Despite being roughly half a minute behind the live picture during the feed, I got a quiet, giddy thrill from watching the launch in a darkened room, from my bed, with my iTelephone in hand. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was living in the future.

The most breathtaking screenshot I took above was unfortunately burdened with all the chrome of the iPhone superimposed on it, but the shots below I got without anything else. The picture quality was incredible.

That Topolsky has no major gripes like this about the Galaxy Nexus makes me think Android 4.0 might really be the first good version of Android. Which in turn makes me think Steve Jobs wasn’t far off at the 2007 iPhone introduction when he claimed the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition. ~ Daring Fireball

Makes sense then why it's taking Microsoft an age to formulate a response with Windows Phone. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board during the iPhone's development and had access to all that inside information, and it still took Google this long to develop a polished competitor.

Still, if all the reviews of Android 4 are as positive, I might give it a look again. My beloved WebOS seems to be sinking fast, and as much as I'd love to have a MeeGo/Tizen phone or tablet, I don't hold out much hope for that either.

It's just hearsay in the press for now, so let's not celebrate prematurely!

Ah why not? *throws confetti, then vacuums it up*

From a report in Wired:

In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.

I'll be waiting for official confirmation from Adobe on this before getting too excited. If a journalist receiving the email misinterpreted it or jumped the gun in a desperate attempt for a scoop, it wouldn't be the first time.

Still, if its true Adobe really is ceasing development of Flash plugins for mobile devices, it's absolutely fantastic news and hopefully signals the end of this whole sordid debate that has been raging for years.

"Sordid" sounds like a "soggy sword", which makes no sense. Unless they were made of cardboard, which makes even less sense. Why would you have a cardboard sword?

We're being open by facilitating closed plugins!

Apple of course famously didn't include Flash in its iDevices, and copped more heat for it even than folks like me who defended their decision on our blogs. Never mind that Adobe didn't have a working prototype for mobile Flash for years after the iPhone's release, or that half the user interactions weren't possible on capacitive touch screens, or that when it was finally released it worked poorly. As far as the tech press was concerned, this was just Apple being all control-freaky.

Control freaky. Super freak. Super freak. She's super freaky!

Still, that didn't stop the competition advertising their support for it in an attempt to differentiate their iClones, even when they predictably failed to deliver (surprise, surprise!). Google even went as far as to advertise their platform as being more free by including Flash, presumably employing the same reality distortion field that allowed them to claim Android was open source. Hey, they're not Apple, so it's okay!

If this story is true and Adobe are ending mobile Flash plugins, I have new found respect for them. I can haz Flash removed on the desktop too now? :D

Madoka Flashica

As an addendum, I started putting Kyubey in all my posts about Flash; not entirely sure why, he just seemed to fit XD. Anyway, with the end of mobile Flash, we can presume it will cease to be included in Android soon, which means I may need to revert my Kyubey/Android icon too. Darn, more work to do!

RT @monochroma: I just came across a Japanese tweet that was really sweet. That the iPhone 4S really stands for 'iPhone for Steve'

Westfield Group, one of the largest shopping centre operators in the world, has launched a find-my-car iPhone app. The system uses a series of license plate reading cameras dotted throughout their multi-level car parks. Westfield said police could also use it to find stolen or unregistered vehicles. (Hello, slippery slope.)
~ skegg on Slashdot

I take public transport, so people track me with my purchased tickets. In Singapore with proximity stored value cards, this is even easier. As a kid I went all the way out to Jurong East and Pasir Ris just to muddy and confuse their "downtown expat" profile of me. I was a wild, out of control teen ;).

As to this Westfield story, it rubs me the wrong way but I suppose it was only inevitable.

"Looks like another Apple employee left an iPhone prototype in a bar. [..] Once might be an accident, but two unreleased iPhones lost in bars starts to look like a strategy" ~ Slashdot

Makes sense, Apple are unable to generate hype or buzz any other way.

Pinch and a punch too, while we're here!

We've all read the claim that Apple will repeat history and lose their iPhone/iPad dominance the same way Mac OS lost the desktop. Initially I dismissed such claims on the grounds that Android devices and the iPhone earned their market share rather than being handed it by a large install base of IBM clones, but it turns out...

Repeating itself, repeating itself

We know Android devices are being activated by the truckload:

Eric Schmidt has just announced that Android has reached 350,000 activations each day. After doing some dirty and quick math, that comes out to about 10 million per month. And in a year? 127,750,000. That number is huge, isn’t it?

Yet Apple's profit share on handsets continues to rise:

Apple's share of profits raked in by the world's top publicly-traded mobile phone vendors rose once again this quarter, as asymco's Horace Dediu notes in the latest edition of his quarterly tracking reports. According to Dediu's calculations, Apple's share of profits among the eight companies tracked rose to 66%, up from 57% last quarter.

How could these two things be true at the same time? One word: volume.

As was played out on the desktop, Android (playing the role of Windows in History 2.0) is becoming the race-to-the-bottom stuff, iOS (playing the roll of Mac OS) takes the profitable top, and everyone else from webOS to MeeGo squabbles over what's left over (the year of the Linux desktop!).

So history is repeating itself. Repeating itself. Repeating itself!

But wait...

I'd argue though there are two small differences. On a personal level, the Android UI is to varying degrees a flagrant knock off of the iPhone (or of the BlackBerry before Schmidt saw the iPhone prototypes), but it's a better executed knock off than Windows was of the Mac OS.

Historical flamebait aside though, on a technical level it's hard to argue that we don't all benefit from the large install base of standards-based Android browsers (ignoring their support for Flash!) compared to the horror that was IE on the desktop. Microsoft was able to stall development of the web for close to a decade with their inaction (malicious or otherwise) but at least Google are good online citizens.

If this error message pops up for you, right click your iDevice in the left iTunes column, click Transfer Purchases, then try syncing again. Learned that after running around several circles today!

I tell you what, the iTelephone made syncing a smartphone/PDA with the Mac easy again since the late Palm lost interest, but it's still far from perfect.