Timeout
I have to admit: I didn’t have the time recently to work on Readomatic. I have a lot of plans for things to include: Google Gears integration, a menu bar, auto-updates via sparkle, external updating of the stylesheet, support for online readers besides Google Reader and many other things. But for the time being, this release just sets a new expiration date: It’s July 15 2007 now.
The Reality Distortion Field just crashed
I guess, that when you constantly ride on a wave of success, and have to meet very high expectations, you will most certainly disappoint at some point in time. That’s a good chance to get in touch with reality again. Seen this way, Apples WWDC07-Keynote was a huge underperformance, and I hope Apple listens to the critics. Because there are many.
First of all, the 10 new Leopard features. Don’t get me wrong here, Leopard is awesome and I agree that it is the biggest step forward in any OSX update. The stuff under the hood, like some new frameworks and the new developer tools are amazing. But if you claim to have “super cool top secret features” that you hold back almost a year, you better deliver. But out of the 10 features presented, only two were new: The new Desktop and the new Finder. It was about time that these two areas get their updates, that was the minimum one could expect. But is there more, than could have been expected? I doubt so. CoreAnimation and Quicklook have been announced last year, and as great as they are (and they truly are) they are not new. Next time please keep the expectations low, maybe you then keep the disappointment low, too. Leopard will be awesome when it’s released, one can write great Apps for it, but this Keynote was WWDC06 reloaded but without the “Wow”.
The next thing is Safari 3. I like it. I used it in the Leopard seed I got last year, and thought it would be great to have it now, on the Tiger system that I use for most of my work. Now I have this, and so far it works great. But there are some things:
- Safari is not the worlds most innovative browser. Look at how many people crash Safari 3 right now, because they have incompatible extensions installed via obscure input managers. Look at how elegantly Firefox solves the problem of extending the browser. To be truly innovative, you need to do something like this. Right now, Safari is not as innovative as it could be, and you have your existing userbase complain very loudly that this thing crashes, because they made up for that lack of innovation.
- Safari on Windows seems to be very, very unstable. Apple alienates its future userbase with such an unstable release. Yes it’s beta. But it shouldn’t be “public Beta” at this point, Apple needs to find some way of testing software between the two choices “closed alpha for a handful of people in cupertino” and “public beta for everyone”, because if done wrong, the latter may crash your reputation. The word “beta” means nothing these days. If you release it to the public, it better works. Safari on Windows doesn’t work at all.
- On another note, I’ve got a question: How did Apple port Safari? Webkit, the rendering engine – ok, that’s clear. But how did they port the rest of the app, the windows, tabs and menus? It’s either a completely different codebase or they have finally ported the Objective-C runtime and some of the CoreFoundation and Appkit Frameworks to windows. Because, unlike iTunes, Safari is a Cocoa Application.
But Apple saved the worst for last. I have to agree that claiming Websites are like native apps, no matter how ajaxy and web2.0 they might be, is an insult to app developers. When I first heard this, I thought: “Well they will expose some functionality via Javascript and give us Google-Gears- or Apollo-like functionality that bridges the gap between what you can do with a web app and what you can do with a standalone app. Like having your data and application logic offline. Or do what they do in Dashboard Widgets: They let us make custom Plugins that have access to the system.” Well, they don’t. We can’t even go to the icon dashboard with our apps, they are just websites, you access them via the bookmarks, and they run in the normal Safari.
Apple misses a big opportunity here. With multi-touch and CoreAnimation a whole new class of applications is possible. These things are the beginning of a huge revolution in interface design, and we’ve literally only touched the surface. We as developers want to be part of this, we want to contribute and make things that even Apple could not have imagined. That’s why everyone asked for an SDK so loudly, and I think – and hope – that those voices will even get louder.
What Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall have to get, is that their target group is a lot bigger than “Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg”. Apple has a lot of professional customers out there that want to do more than just email their photos. And if they provide their developers with the right tools to make amazing apps instead of feeding them bulls**t like they did at the keynote, the developers will build things that will please these professional customers as well as Steve and Walt and push the iPhone even more forward.
Apple themselves are not using the web technology they claim to be “sweet” anywhere on their iPhone applications, their Apps are all native. They know why. So please, Apple, hire some security engineer, add some sandbox layers, or in any other way, get your phone secure. So that you can be brave enough to let third-party developers start making real apps for it. It will be worth it. If you don’t, the developers will find a way to hack your system, and do it anyways. But as you see right now, just by looking at the disappointed Safari 3 users that hacked their old Safari to make it a little more “innovative”: That is not the best way to go.
Announcing Readomatic.
As I stated before, I started a little experiment using Jon Hicks’ Stylesheet for the Google Reader in a Standalone Application. The preliminary name for this project is Readomatic.
This is the first release and it’s in the early alpha stages. It’s been assembled on one evening and two train rides. Obviously, there are a lot of things it does not do, and a lof of ideas for improving it. We will come to those later ;-). So far, it does the following things:
- Display the Google reader in a beautiful mac-like way, thanks to Jon.
- Show the number of unread messages in the Dock. You can turn this off, if you want.
- Act as the standard newsreader on OSX. Whenever you click on a Feed in Safari, it opens in Readomatic and you can subscribe to it if you want.
- Open links in the browser in the foreground or in the background.
It does not, but will:
- have a beautiful icon.
- handle connection problems better.
- have a better name. Readomatic really is a “codename”, if anyone comes up with something better, please post it here.
Without further words, here it is:
This is an early alpha release and will stop working on May 30th, 2007.
Barcamp Frankfurt und ein kleines Projekt
Vielen, vielen Dank an die Organisatoren und Sponsoren des Frankfurter Barcamps, die eine wie ich finde sehr gelungene Veranstaltung auf die Beine gestellt haben! Viele nette und interessante Leute, sehr gutes Essen (und Saft!) und nicht zuletzt Vorträge und Gespräche, die man so eigentlich nur auf Barcamps findet, und wegen denen ich immer wieder gerne da bin :-)
Da das Konzept vorsieht, dass sich jeder ein bisschen beteiligt, und sich am Besten sogar mit einem eigenen Vortrag einbringt, habe ich mich entschieden, bei den “Lightning Talks” einen kleinen 5-Minuten-Vortrag über ein kleines Nebenprojekt von mir zu halten:
(Video auf Sevenload, gefilmt aus einer seltsamen Froschperspektive von Gerrits MacBook )
Ich denke mit einem Verhältnis von Vortragslänge zu Vorbereitung inkl. Produkterstellung von 1:3 liege ich ganz gut ;-). Ich plane, wenn ich ein paar Stunden Zeit finde, das ganze Projekt zu einer sinnvoll nutzbaren Applikation auszubauen und hier zu veröffentlichen. Wer Ideen hat, oder sich gerne beteiligen möchte, ist herzlich willkommen!
(... und zu den Barcamp-Fotos gehts hier.)
Wiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Ich habe zwar schon seit Weihnachten eine Wii aber ich habe immernoch nicht meinen Wii-Code veröffentlicht, damit ihr mir eure Figuren schicken könnt:
5539 2528 8963 6844
Man kann das irgendwo im Adressbuch bei den Nachrichten eintragen. Und dann passiert irgendwas. Ich bin gespannt.
Suchen in CoverFlow
Weil ichs noch nirgendwo gelesen habe: Wenn man im neuen iTunes 7.1 Coverflow im Vollbildmodus hat, kann man durch “blindes” eingeben eines Bandnamens zur jeweiligen Band springen. Sehr praktisch ;-)
Die Web 2.0-Selbsthilfegruppe tagt in Köln
Ich erzähls zwar fleissig rum, werde auch als Tippgeber verlinkt, aber poste es selbst nicht auf meine Seite…
Das hol ich hiermit nach: Am 25. und 26. November findet in meiner neuen Heimatstadt Köln das zweite BarCamp in Deutschland statt. Das erste in Berlin war klasse, ich werde also vor Ort sein :-)
The Disco Icon
The icon for the disc burning software Disco is considered by many one of the best icons in a recent Mac application. Here Jasper Hauser explains how it was made.
Hyperscope 1.0 released
Read/Write web has an excellent article on today’s launch of Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope project. I had the pleasure to listen to Eugenes presentation on the Webmontag Silicon Valley just after I presented my own project. If you want to know more, please read the article since I can’t really add much to it. The underlying idea of individually addressable nodes is great, though I’m still not convinced about the UI. But as this is just the beginning I’m looking forward to what follows next.
(via Dave Winer)
Totally baseless speculation
So it’s finally official – there will be an Apple press conference on the 12th of september, and my favourite game of totally clueless and useless speculation (I have no inside knowledge) begins anew:
- They will introduce a movie store, you read it before, blabla. It will be way too expensive.
- There will be a fullscreen iPod, that resembles the MacBook fun, my clueless speculation from february. But it will be widescreen (movies!), maybe a bit smaller than 10” and it will have all those cool patented features like showing the controls when the finger is near the device, etc. The nano will be mostly unchanged, but they will increase the capacity.
- iTunes is for music, not for films. Movies in iTunes just don’t feel right, and I’m sure many folks at Apple agree. So there are two choices: Either make iTunes a media-center app for films, music, DVDs, etc. and move the focus away from music. That requires a mayor overhaul of the interface. Or (and I think that’s more plausible) make iTunes a music-only platform again, and introduce a new program for video and movies.
- So whatever happens, we will see iTunes 7. And maybe a new program. If I had to propose a name for it, I would call it “Showtime”.
Ok, let’s see If I got something right. 7 days to go…