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“Steve Jobs has already gone on record to say he doesn’t believe that single-purpose dedicated devices will be a big market. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device,” he told The New York Times.

So what is the iPod touch? Just an MP3 and video player? No way. It’s also a gaming unit that runs a full universe of apps, including email and Web browsing. One day it’ll eventually get a camera like its smaller iPod nano sibling. That’s right: general purpose. It’s safe to say that any new Apple device with a larger form factor than the iPod touch, regardless of its name, will be designed to play games, movies, television shows, surf the Web, run apps, and maybe even navigate the world.

An iTablet would be so much more than an e-reader.”

Finally, someone got the point. Stop talking about the iTablet as the Kindle killer, or whatever Apple needs to re-invent the press industry. It’s a tablet computer and you know, sometimes you just need a new hardware to create a new software. That’s what Apple is doing.

Is it that hard to understand?

“My question is: why won’t Apple allow me to try an app before I buy it? The availability countdown works great for content rented from the store like movies. I can play all I want for 24 hours, and then it’s deactivated. That would be ideal for apps too. I download it, see how it works, and after some time the app prompts me to purchase when launched. The prompt has a link to the app’s page in the store and I can make my decision. This is often how it’s done on the desktop. Why not the iPhone?”

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It’s not up to Apple to provide a demo version of each application. Every developer should release lite versions of their apps to let the users test them before purchasing the full version.

But with the recent in-app purchasing system, things could become a lot more interesting: what if every app is free for - say - 3 days then the user must buy it in order to continue using it? This method would have the huge pro of deleting all those Lite / Free apps that clutter the App Store and most important, would allow us to test and then decide to purchase. Much like David Klein writes in his post, a “limited-time demo”.

There an interesting debate which is going on since many years about how Mac apps should be distributed an installed. Back in September John Gruber wrote this interesting piece, outlining the pros and cons of three popular formats of delivering Mac apps: .zip, .dmg and installer. He was inspired by this post where Alexander Limi (founder of Plone, working at Mozilla now) discussed the problems of the installation process of Firefox on the Mac platform.

In this post I’ll discuss all the possible scenarios, referring to other articles found on the web to give you my idea of how Mac applications should be distributed.

Read more

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“We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust,” he says. “You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.”

Hey Phil, do you understand that the problem is in the backend, with the developers? I know that the apps I download do what I’d expect, but go tell this to those devs who had to wait 4 months for their app to be accepted.

You know, it’s the approval process that doesn’t work as I’d expect.

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“For example, the simple act of entering text via an on-screen keyboard. When holding the device in portrait orientation then the on-screen keyboard could be essentially the same as the iPhone’s in concept, but what about when you’re holding the tablet horizontally with two hands? How does the keyboard work in that scenario? If you stretch the keyboard across the device’s screen when in landscape orientation then your thumbs won’t be able to hit the middle keys without stretching and reaching. This orientation works on the iPhone because the screen is only 480 pixels wide but what happens when the horizontal dimension of the screen is 800px or 1200px? This same layout just doesn’t work.”

Great read. Though I believe the OS will be something entirely different, both from iPhone OS and Mac OS. Apple doesn’t like to mix stuff, usually.

I have tested the developer build of Chrome OS. I’ve read many articles about Google’s latest creation. I tried to believe Google.

For me, Google Chrome will be a fail.

So, turns out Google wants to push all our computing life onto the web: every application is a webapp, you login with your Google ID. This is a good thing, everyone wants to be more connected with the internet, and this is where the industry will move. The problem is, what Google is developing and plans to launch next year, could only happen in a perfect world. In the real world, the world where many people still have a fucking dial-up connection, the world where my dad is barely able to open a Word document, the world where people believe the monitor is the computer, this is impossible. Well, not that impossible, it’s just a fail. Or at least, this could work fine for a few people.

Let me explain better. Say you’re a professional graphic designer who needs Photoshop to be open all day plus tons of other apps. Google wants you to push everything into the web. Google wants you to use an online image editor.

WTF.

Yeah, pretty much what I was thinking. Now, let’s calm down and think about: I don’t think Google is that stupid. They know that people who know how to use a computer will use Chrome OS. Just like the Nintendo Wii, their target are casual users, those who stand between my dad (total n00b) and my friends (average users). And obviously, Google fanboys (pretty much nerds). But let’s make a step backward: I said “I don’t think Google is that stupid.”.

Hmm.

What if Google actually believes Chrome OS will become the system of choice for everyone? Or , what if Google really believes the web OS can replace a desktop OS? Let’s quote this Mashable post:

“Google cares more about the browser becoming the OS than it cares about Chrome OS being the OS of choice on the computers of the world”

Indeed. They want the browser to become the OS. Ok then, this could be deinitely interesting, but it will fail. I told you before, this could happen in a perfect world where everyone has a 200Mbit connection and where webapps allow you to work with 2GB documents. Google is building a skyscraper upon a big foundation of mud. By mud, I mean Internet in 2009 (and it won’t be so different next year) where webapps (earth)  are good - no doubt about it - but they sure can’t replace desktop apps in most situations (water). I can surely send my invoices with Freshbooks, but I can’t manage MacStories with an online version of Coda (which by the way, doesn’t exist). I can manage my photos with Picasa, but I can’t work with Final Cut Pro Online. I could, with a faster connection and better webapps. Google seems to ignore that fast connections are not so common, that’s an elite thing. Maybe they have a blazing fast connection in Mountain View, but we haven’t.

So, who’s Google’s target?

Hope.

And ignorance.

Grackle68k is a Twitter client which supports Mac OS 6 to Mac OS 9. Here are some screenshots:

And here’s a mockup of Tweetie running on Mac OS 9:

I remember I heard of someone many years ago who was tryin’ to port Nintendo GC games to the old NES. They called him “crazy”.

Is this the beginning of retroapps?

Very interesting blog post from Louie Mantia, icon and user interface designer working at the Iconfactory.

Here’s an excerpt:

“We’re quick to blame the App Store for not having an easy way to browse thousands of applications, but we never had that on Mac OS X, and our products sold just fine over there. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t “browse” websites for software. If I need some software for my Mac, I search Google for keywords on what I am looking for and find relevant results. So I don’t think there’s much browsing on the App Store as we all seem to think there is.

So what’s the problem? Why are we worried about the App Store if it’s just a download link? Well, simply put, I think we’re all jealous. We’ve seen “success” stories of people who have developed apps that made it into the Top 10. We’ve seen ridiculously stupid applications make it up there and make “tons of money,” but how is that different from any other kind of business?

In my hometown of Webster Groves, there’s a nice local bar and grill type of place that has some really great burgers. They’re like $5-10 or something like that, depending on what kind and what toppings you get. Quality stuff. But right across the street, there’s a McDonald’s. Now, of course, that McDonald’s has people rushing through the drive-thru and walking in and out of their store, bags in-hand. Those burgers can cost from $1-5, for example. They’re not really quality, but they’re a cheap, faster alternative.

My point is, just because that McDonald’s has all these people buying up their cheap burgers doesn’t mean that place across the street can’t sell deliciously better seven and a half dollar burgers. They might not sell as many, but it’s not about that. Again, success is measured when you can turn a profit. As long as those guys are making money and can run their business, they’re successful.”

Overall, I agree with Louie. Many developers seem only able to complain about the flaws of the AppStore instead of working hard to create better applications and better websites. Sure, the AppStore may have many problems, but the change should start from you developers, guys.