Macgasm

During the fourth quarter earnings call this past Monday, Jobs put forward a number of strong statements that were highly critical of a number of Apple’s competitors. Yesterday, a number of those competitors fired back, refuting Jobs’ comments and offering a different opinion. Here’s a summary of the backlash.

Google VP responds in code

Jobs criticized Google’s claim to openness on the call, suggesting that Apple’s “closed” system is the better approach. Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, and the “father” of Android, posted the following on Twitter:

the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.

A small caveat to this response is that it came from a new and as of yet unverified Twitter account. If Rubin’s post is G[r]eek to you, essentially he provided the code for a Linux machine to compile Android, demonstrating that Android is accessible to anyone.

TweetDeck CEO: fragmentations is not an issue

Jobs pointed out that the Android model results in fragmentation due to the multiple devices and software versions available, which he suggested was a challenge to developers, pointing specifically to TweetDeck.

The CEO of TweetDeck, Iain Dodsworth, denied that this was an issue over Twitter: “Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”  He also later commented: ” We only have 2 guys developing on Android TweetDeck so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is.” Looks like Jobs may have overstepped just a little bit on that point.

Like a gentleman, Dodsworth did not bring up the fact that Jobs’ didn’t even get the name of the application correct, referring to it as TwitterDeck.

RIM wants people to think for themselves

Jobs took two jabs at RIM. First, he stated that 7-inch screens are too small for tablets – RIM’s upcoming tablet, the PlayBook, will have a 7-inch screen. Jobs also provided some stats that indicated the iPhone had surpassed the Blackberry in the smartphone department, selling 14.2 millions iPhones to RIM’s 12.1 million blackberries.

Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, disagreed with Jobs, asserting that 7-inch tablets will be a part of the tablet market, and then he took the offensive, criticizing Apple’s decision not to support Adobe Flash:

For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience,” Balsillie said in his response. “We also know that while Apple’s attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of web sites that use Flash.

He also indicated that Apple is leading its customers by the nose, and that customers are “getting tired of being told what to think by Apple.”

In terms of Apple’s iPhone outselling RIM’s blackberry, Balsillie criticized the stats that Jobs provided:

RIM has achieved record shipments for five consecutive quarters and recently shared guidance of 13.8 (million to) 14.4 million BlackBerry smartphones for the current quarter,” Balsillie said. “Apple’s preference to compare its September-ending quarter with RIM’s August-ending quarter doesn’t tell the whole story because it doesn’t take into account that industry demand in September is typically stronger than summer months, nor does it explain why Apple only shipped 8.4 million devices in its prior quarter and whether Apple’s Q4 results were padded by unfulfilled Q3 customer demand and channel orders.

Again, Balsillie took an opportunity to fight back, going on to state: “As usual, whether the subject is antennas, Flash or shipments, there is more to the story and sooner or later, even people inside the distortion field will begin to resent being told half a story.”

A few thoughts

At the end of the day, even though the back and forth is not necessarily the most friendly, I think its great to see these conversations going on. Both Apple and Android’s approaches have merits and limitations, and pander to slightly different audiences. Choice is never a bad thing, nor are discussions about how to do things better.  But that being said, Jim Basillie’s known to have his own reality distortion field (see the NHL debacle), and who doesn’t look at this graph, provided by TweetDeck, and think “what a mess.”  Pot, meet Kettle.

Article Via AppleInsider

Photo Credit: SaddoBoxing.com

It’s the big day, and a lot of people are scrambling to figure out what Apple’s going to be releasing before it actually gets released. Apple made our jobs just a little bit easier this morning by accidentally updating their Apple Discussion forums a little too early.

An over-excited employee has created brand new sections in the Apple Discussions forum titled iMovie 11, iPhoto 11, and “MBA (Need official name).” So, it looks like we can cross these rumours off our lists before the event even starts.

Article Via Engadget

If you thought I was done wasting time, energy, and good will in my last post, you were sorely mistaken. Never content to leave well enough alone, I decided to drudge forward and attempt to play a five-year-old video game via virtualization. The worst part? I knew that it wouldn’t work. I told everyone that would listen that it wouldn’t work, but that didn’t stop me from going down the ridiculous rabbit hole that is Windows on a Mac.

I launched my copy of VirtualBox, and I installed my copy of Windows 7. I updated, installed drivers, fiddled, tweaked, and cried for well over five hours, and I eventually gave up on trying to play my game. About twenty minutes later, in my infinite wisdom, I decided that I should try playing the game under Windows XP. Hell, it wasn’t designed for Windows 7. That’s the problem, right? RIGHT?

Lather, rinse, repeat, and I now have Windows XP installed in VirtualBox. I install the game, and I now have DRM problems. SecuRom now thinks that I’m trying to emulate the game disc. Despite having completely legitimate versions of all of the software I want to use, it still refuses to work. I think I very well might have a nervous breakdown at this point. Somebody stop the madness.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating the issue, but I have wasted countless hours fiddling with this project with absolutely no positive results. I’m frustrated, and I’m just about ready to throw in the towel. If you know what I’m doing wrong, please let me know in the comments section, although I’m pretty sure I’ve tried everything possible except for a complete wipe of my drive.

Photo Credit: Joe Loong

Tomorrow’s the big day, but sadly, we won’t be there. So, instead of pretending like we will be, and having meta-live-blog-chatroom-shenangigan coverage, we’ll be writing up articles in the traditional fashion of a new article per topic that comes up. Feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments. We’ll be actively monitoring them, and making sure the conversation is flowing.

We assembled a team to cover the event as news gets announced, and we’ll be providing immediate posts with the facts, and then later round out the posts with opinions on the announcements, once things settle a bit.

So, make sure you’ve subscribed to our RSS feed, followed us on Twitter, and check back often for up to minute updates on the site. The party starts at 10am PST and 1pm EST, so make sure you’re ready to rock and caffeinated, news will be flying fast and furious.

We’ve had an insane traffic explosion over the last two months, so many of you are probably pretty new to the website. I thought it would be smart to fill you in on our post philosophy, and point out the anatomy of our posts a little bit.

On citations

We’re really big on making sure we properly cite our sources. We come upon news in two particular ways, Twitter and our RSS feeds. Should it be the previous, we link to the tweet along with the account in the footer of the post. But, if we find and publish news based on our RSS feeds the process is a little bit different. First, we add an Article Via Source link in the foot of the post. This is to give proper credit to where we found the story. This source might not have uncovered the news themselves, but we found the information through them. It’s important to us, to make sure you know that. There’s a lot of people who work really hard in this business, and robbing them of a proper acknowledgement is something we’re not willing to do.

Once we find something that we think is newsworthy, we’ll track the sources back as far as we can until we arrive at the original source, reading articles along the way. Throughout the course of our post, you’ll see links to these original sources. It’s important to make sure that we get the story right, and let you know where we’re getting our information from.

You should expect these two things, and outright demand them if you don’t see them. We’re not perfect, but we strive to make sure we do the best job we can. If you want, or need more information on something, feel free to let us know in the comments of the post. We’ll be sure to fix the problem as soon as possible.

On the social links and search

Social networking is our bread and butter. Most, if not all of you have probably stumbled on our site from Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, or some other form of social network. It’s worked insanely well for us, and we continue to embrace these technologies where we can.

If you’re interested in sharing our article, you can click the links in our header bar that pops up as you scroll, in our title bar for a particular post, or by clicking the recommend button at the end of the post. We’d really appreciate it if you continued to use these in the best way you see fit. It would make our day. :)

We also found that not many people were using our search bar, so we moved it to the social media toolbar that pops up when you scroll. It works better than it did before, and it even gives you the ability to search externally for information.

If you want to search for information from within one of our posts, just select the text you want to search for, then click the “Learn More” button that should popup. You will be met with Apture results with information from articles on the site, as well as from Google and Bing. It works insanely well, so use it when you need to.

Thank You

Thanks for putting up with us, and more importantly, thanks for interacting with us and making this the best job on the planet. If it wasn’t for your comments, suggestions, and repartee, we wouldn’t be here. You really do make this an enjoyable experience.

As of the 16th, Mobclix has reported that Apple has blown through the 300,000 barrier for the number of apps on the App Store. The number is pretty staggering, although Apple has not officially confirmed it. It is predicted that Apple may announce a 275,000 app figure at tomorrow’s Back to the Mac event. 148apps.biz have some interesting stats, namely:

• The total number of apps seen in the US App Store is 334,639, though they list the number of active apps actually at 278, 723 – so not quite the 300K we are reading about. Currently, Android is thought to have hit 100,000 and RIM is listed at 10,000 BlackBerry apps.
• Within those numbers, games are at 40,026, with books at 48,171, so books are overtaking games slightly.
• The number of inactive apps are at 55,916, which may account for the discrepancies in the figures.
• App submissions to Apple are on average 83 games and 568 non-games every day.

If we think of the numbers in real terms, and consider the number of apps we actually have on our devices, then we can put it into some kind of perspective. I think of myself as a pretty big app user (see image left for one of my game screens), and have over a thousand easily – a huge percentage of those are not worth the download, and I think this could be representative of the number of apps on the store. As it continues to grow, this may become a larger problem as good apps have to fight for a spot on the first few pages of the App Store. For me, the current means of navigation through what is on there isn’t good enough. I patiently wade through pages and pages of apps, but most people wouldn’t. Showing 180 apps at a time isn’t really working.

Whether there is currently 300,000 or not isn’t really that relevant. What is worth watching are the predictions of Apple selling as many as 45 million iPads in 2011. The more devices they sell, the greater the demand for apps will be. I hope the developers that are currently making awesome apps continue to do so. There are some real gems on the App Store.

Navigating through 180 apps at a time on the App Store is going to take you a while.

How many apps do you keep on your device? Do you have any apps that you find yourself using a lot more than the others? How often are you getting new apps? Is 300,000 enough – or do you want more?

Article via iPodnn

From a person in the know, to AppleInsider, to MacLife, the rumor has travelled quickly that iOS features might find their way into OS X 10.7, and this will be featured in Apple’s upcoming Mac event on Wednesday. When we saw this rumor starting to catch on, we thought we’d pass it along and let you guys decide for yourselves, while giving you our opinions.

iOS features in OS X have been rumored for years now, and a lot of people have speculated that iOS apps might replace the apps in dashboard sooner rather than later. So, this isn’t really all that new of an idea. Surely iOS and OS X will start to merge at some point down the road, but just how far down the road that happens to be is up in the air. It’s speculation at best until we hear some official announcements.

The iOS features that are rumoured to be coming to OS X aren’t really all that exciting. Macstories, the rumor originator, thinks we’ll see “elastic scrolling” in some apps. What they mean by elastic scrolling is what happens when you scroll a window too far in an iOS app, and it reveals the background of the app window and then snaps back into place when you release your finger from the screen. You’ll also be able to “pull to refresh,” allegedly. Not exactly the iOS features most are hoping for, are they?

I’m not exactly sure why we need Apple to give developers access to this kind of functionality on the desktop, but that’s just me. Surely developers could have integrated similar functionality already, on their own.

Anyone who has a Magic Trackpad, or has even looked at one, knows Apple’s working hard to figure out how to bring touch gestures to the Mac. There has even been an iMac Touch patent published in Europe. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots. Touch gestures in OS X are coming, and Apple has to make that first step in some way. Maybe this rumour is the first step, and maybe it’s not, but either way, it’s a safe bet to make that iOS and OS X will lean on each other quite heavily moving forward.

Article Via MacLife

Yojimbo, the venerable ”catch-all” software for the Mac has been updated to version 3. While the change notes are lengthy, the headline features are built-in scanning support and the ability to sync with a new iPad app.

The new iPad app — the first for Bare Bones — syncs with Yojimbo on the Mac via Bonjour, but it just syncs one way. Information in the iPad app is read-only. In an interview with Cult of Mac’s Giles Turnbull, Bare Bones’ Rich Siegel said two-way sync is coming:

Two-way data sync is a complicated problem to solve, but we do intend to solve it in time. There are certain things that iOS doesn’t support yet, but when it does, we shall make use of them.

The iPad app is $9.99 on the App Store.

Article via Cult of Mac.