Egg Freckles

The iBooks Platform

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The iPad became the dominant tablet because of the application ecosystem it shares with the iOS and the media ecosystem it shares with the iPod. It has not had a runaway hit of its own. Apple is prepared to leverage the success of the iPad and enter the textbook industry with the same controlled platform strategy that have made the Mac, iPod, and iOS a success.

Apple’s previous successes were won by controlling the platforms they created. The Macintosh rose from the brink of death to become the premier personal computer because of Apple’s tight control over the Macintosh hardware, the Mac OS X operating system, and Xcode suite of developer tools¹. Apple, not Microsoft or any hardware manufacturer controls the Mac’s destiny, and this helps Apple stay one foot ahead of the competition.

The iPod became the world’s most popular music player because of Apple’s control over the iTunes software, and the iTunes Store that delivers music, movies, and television shows straight to customer’s iPods. The innovative, easy to use iPod hardware might have helped get the iPod off the ground, but its ties to accessible digital media through the iTunes ecosystem ensured users remain with the iPod platform.

The iPhone may have been destined to become the world’s most popular smartphone due to the amazing multitouch technology it introduced, but Apple’s control over the iOS operating system, Xcode developer environment, and App Store distribution model have made the iPhone the central member of a new application ecosystem that can’t be beat.

Yesterday’s introduction of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author were significant announcements because they complete the platform pyramid Apple needs to enter the Textbook Market with the same control as its previous successes.

The first point on the pyramid is the iPad. The success of the iOS application ecosystem has already the iPad the dominent tablet², but the iPad’s 9.7 inch screen and multimedia capabilities make it the perfect host for the rich learning experience of modern textbooks. No other tablet has the popularity of the iPad, and no other technology company has the same connection to education as Apple. It is hard to think Samsung, Google, or even Amazon could produce a tablet with the same impact in schools as Apple can.

The second point on the pyramid is iBooks. Taken straight out of the pages of Apple’s iTunes and App Store playbook, iBooks is the one stop shop for users to discover, purchase, and organize their reading collection. iBooks 2 offers support for the kind of interactive experiences Apple needs to sell if they hope to close the cover on paper textbooks.

Introducing an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, current, engrossing, and truly interactive. A textbook created by publishers using a new authoring tool from Apple. A textbook brought to life by iPad.

If iBooks becomes the same smash hit as iTunes and the App Store, then its easy to purchase and DRM restricted content will keep users coming back to the iPad. It is important to remember that iBooks is only available on devices running iOS, and textbooks can only be displayed on the iPad.

The final point on the pyramid is iBooks Author, an electronic book development environment that makes it easy for almost anyone to create books for the iPad on Mac OS X.

Available free on the Mac App store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.

iBooks Author is the Xcode of book creation. It is a free tool provided by Apple for creating content specifically formatted for the iBooks ecosystems. By giving iBooks Author away Apple is lowering the barrier of entry for content creators. Even Amazon, with its long lasting relationship with book publishers, will have a hard time competing with iBooks multimedia textbooks without a content creation application of their own.

As the past has shown controlling the platform matters. Apple is prepared to enter the textbook industry as a dominent player because they control the device, the distribution method, and the content creation tools. No other company can say they own all three. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon might try to follow Apple’s lead, but until they possess a platform pyramid of their own the battle is over before it began. Game, set, match.

Recently Apple has extended their control into the distribution of applications by way of the Mac App Store. ↩
You know you have a dominent lead when your model of tablet is classified in its own category just so that analysts can quantify the market share of competitors. ↩

What's Wrong With Sopa

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I built Egg Freckles as a platform for sharing my experiences with technology. Many of the quotations, and icons I use to tell my story were created by someone else. If you would like to have your work removed from Egg Freckles please let me know, but don’t support SOPA, a dangerous new anti-piracy bill that would give the U.S. government the ability to silent free speech on the internet. If you are a US citizen and would like personal websites like Egg Freckles to remain active please take the time to stop internet blacklist legislation. The life of my MessagePad depends on it.

From the EFF Website:

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) is a dangerous new “anti-‐piracy” bill being debated in the House of Representatives. Supporters claim that SOPA targets “rogue” foreign websites that encourage online infringement, but the bill’s vague language would create devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the web.

In spite of historic opposition from a diverse coalition including civil liberties and human rights organizations, tech industry leaders, security experts, legal scholars, bipartisan legislators, and many more, the bill is moving quickly through Congress, fueled by massive infusions of cash from big content companies.

What can we do to stop this disastrous legislation? It’s time to pick up the phone and call your Representative in Washington, and let her know that we won’t stand for this Internet blacklist bill. Here’s some facts to help her understand why:

SOPA gives individuals and corporations unprecedented power to silence speech online. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could send a notice to a site’s payment partners, requiring those partners to cut the site off – even if the site could never be held liable for infringement in a U.S. court. Since many sites depend on this revenue to cover operational costs, even one accusation of infringement could be ruinous.
SOPA gives the government even more power to censor. The Attorney General can “disappear” websites by creating a blacklist and requiring service providers (such as search engines and domain services) to block the sites on the list.
SOPA uses vague language that is sure to be abused. The bill targets nearly any site that hosts user-‐generated content, or even just has a search function, by failing to provide protections for legal speech.
SOPA would not stop online piracy. The powerful tools granted to the Attorney General would present major obstacles to casual users, but would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.

Please call today and make your voice heard on this important issue. Find your Representative’s number at https://eff.org/sopacall. There are plenty more reasons why SOPA is bad news for the future of the Internet: it will undermine human rights efforts, interfere with important Internet security initiatives, and balkanize the Internet. For more information on these dangers, find our ongoing coverage of the bill at https://www.eff.org.

The Life and Death of Camino

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

By July 2002 Mac OS X was just over one year old, Safari was still several months away, and very few web browsers took advantage of the innovative new features and bold aqua interface of 10.1 Puma, the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. Opera looked like it belonged on Windows. iCab looked like it belonged on Mac OS 9. OmniWeb was the first Mac OS X browser developed in Cocoa, but all three lacked a modern rendering engine capable of displaying the world’s latest websites. Mozilla and Netscape weren’t much better. Both were bloated, unstable, ugly, and slow. Internet Explorer had been shipping as the default browser on Macs since 1997, and was the only browser included with Mac OS X. It’s Tasman rendering engine was state-of-the-art when version 5 shipped in early 2000, but since then Microsoft had lost interest, updates were few and far between, and page rendering had slowed to a crawl. Looking back it is hard to think Apple could sell Mac OS X as “the world’s most advanced operating system” without a world class browser, but that is exactly what they were doing during the Summer of 2002.

In late 2001, Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application. In early 2002 [Dave Hyatt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Hyatt), one of the co-creators of Firefox (then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.

At the time Gecko was a very robust rendering engine, and when it was stripped out of the bloated Mozilla/Netscape suite it ran quite fast. By combining Gecko with the stylish performance of a native Cocoa interface Chimera became a world class browser in the making.

Quick to load, intuitive to use, I learned about Chimera in July 2002 during the release of version 0.4. This was an important update for the Chimera project because it marked the first time Chimera could open a URL from an outside application, and the first time Chimera could load content into new tab without the need of additional windows. The ability to quickly open websites from NetNewsWire in a row of organized tabs instead of a mess of stacked windows motivated me to replace Internet Explorer with Chimera as my default browser that summer.

Hyatt was hired by Apple Computer in mid-2002 to start work on what would become Safari. Meanwhile, the Chimera developers got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology preview for the January 2003 Macworld Conference. However, two days before the show, AOL management decided to abandon the entire project. Despite this setback, a skeleton crew of QA and developers released Camino 0.7 on March 3, 2003.

The name was changed from Chimera to Camino for legal reasons. Because of its roots in Greek mythology, Chimera has been a popular choice of name for hypermedia systems. One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name. Camino is Spanish for “path” or “road” (as in El Camino Real, aka the Royal Road), and the name was chosen to continue the “Navigator” motif.

Safari was first released as a public beta on January 7th, 2003, it became Apple’s default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 Panther on October 24th, 2003. During the Beta period and into 2004 I stuck with Camino because its Gecko rendering engine displayed pages more accurately than the up-and-coming WebKit rendering engine used in Safari. As WebKit’s popularity grew, and developers became accustom to its features, Camino lost much of the dominance it had over Safari. Safari 2.0 was released on April 29th, 2005 as the only web browser included with Mac OS X 10.4. This version was touted by Apple as possessing a 1.8x speed boost over Safari 1.2.4, and a noticeable speed increase over pre 1.0 versions of Camino. Safari would go on to become Acid2 compliant with the release of version 2.0.2 on October 31st, 2005. It would take the release of Camino 2.0 on November 18th, 2009, to reach that same milestone.

After the release of 0.7 progress on Camino slowed as development was taken over by the open source community. The Camino website was moved from the Mozilla Foundation’s domain mozilla.org to the Camino Project’s domain caminobrowser.org. In September 2005, Mike Pinkerton accepted a position at Google where he worked closely with Google’s Firefox team and continued to work on Camino during his “twenty percent” time. Mike would go on to develop the Mac port of Google’s Chrome browser, a direct competitor to Camino.

Camino 1.0, released on February 14th, 2006, was the first browser of the Mozilla family to appear as a universal binary. It included many important new features and advancements like a new tab bar, download manager with pause and resume, built-in ad blocker, history search, and the ability to autofill forms from the address book. Thanks to improvements in the Gecko rendering engine Camino 1.0 also adopted SVG, the <canvas> tag, and JavaScript 1.6, as well as improved CSS 2 and CSS 3 support.

My daily use of Camino stopped with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.4, because of Safari 2.0’s superior Javascript performance and RSS handling. Camino continued to be an important browser for users of older versions of Mac OS X. While Safari 2.0 dropped support for Macintosh operating systems older than 10.4 Tiger, Camino 1.0 continued to support 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.

Camino improved integration with Mac OS X while Firefox and other browsers were demonstrating their platform independence. Instead of using an independent spell checker, RSS reader, and password manager, Camino uses the dictionary services, Mail RSS reader, and Keychain in Mac OS X. Camino’s Keychain compatibility makes it an excellent second browser because it shares the same saved credentials with Safari. Camino 1.5 introduced session restore on June 5th, 2007, more than four years before Safari would gain the same functionality in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Because Camino is developed exclusively for Mac OS X it is able to adopt some Mac OS X specific features before any other browser including Safari.

Camino 2.0, released on November 18th, 2009, introduced many new interface features to the browser including movable tabs and tab preview. It was the first Camino release to be Acid2-compliant. Two of my favorite features from Camino 2.0 are the Growl support, and enhanced annoyance blocking features. With Growl you are notified when downloads begin and finish, helping you keep track of the content you want. The enhanced annoyance blocking features allow you to enable Flash animations on a per-site basis, helping you avoid the content you don’t. Camino 2.0 introduced a updated AppleScript dictionary that includes vocabulary for downloading the raw HTML source, or text from any webpage or selection. This feature is still missing from the latest version of Safari, and makes Camino a valuable part of many of my AppleScript workflows. The greatest new feature in Camino 2.0 may be the inclusion of version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. It is this rendering engine that allows Camino to pass the Acid2 rendering test, and brings Camino up to date with Firefox 3.0 released over a year earlier.

One year behind Firefox, and more than four years behind Safari, Camino was showing its age even before it reached 1.0. Camino is no longer the world class browser it promised to be in the Summer of 2002. The latest version of Camino, 2.1, was released on November 29th, 2011 and brings Camino up to date with Firefox 3.6 released eleven months earlier. The Gecko rendering engine reached 2.0 on March 22nd, 2011 with the release Firefox 4, but Camino may never grow old enough to adopt it. Starting with Firefox 4 Mozilla announced the end of Gecko embedding, which Camino uses to include the Gecko rendering engine inside of a native Cocoa interface.

While embedding has long been relatively low priority, being officially unsupported is a significant change. As important parts of embedding stop working, core Gecko contributors will longer be fixing them. Such breakages are unfortunately common—in fact, making sure that embedding breakages were resolved was a significant amount of the work that went into the release of Camino 2.0, as well as the upcoming Camino 2.1. Without support for embedding, releases of Camino using newer versions of Gecko—like the one used in Firefox 4—won’t be possible.

The development effort that was used to maintain Gecko embedding is being refocused to rapidly bring Firefox up to par with WebKit browsers like Safari and Chrome. The volunteers who develop Camino are too few to maintain Gecko embedding on their own, or put forth the major effort required to port Camino to WebKit. If nothing is done Camino will continue to receive security and stability updates as long as Gecko 1.9.2 is supported, but it will never see full support for Acid3, HTML5, or CSS3.

Camino will continue to be a viable browser only as long as the web works with Gecko 1.9.2, but as I write this many webpages are passing it by. Earlier this year Egg Freckles adopted a new MessagePad background that is rendered using advancements in CSS3 such as rounded corners and drop shadows. Visitors using the latest version of Camino are greeted with a boxy green frame that shows none of the sleek curves or beveled edges of the MessagePad I am trying to imitate. Even though I still have Camino installed on my computer it fails to qualify as a modern alternative browser less than two months since its last update. I am saddened that Camino must die in the effort to save Firefox, a browser that has gotten just a bloated as the Netscape Suite it once replaced. By losing Camino we will not only see the end of a browser that once made the Mac great, but the end of a development community focused solely on the advancement of a great Macintosh application.

Today's Mac Genius

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I worked as a Mac Genius from mid 2003 to early 2006. During that time Apple’s customers were still making the transition from Mac OS 9, Intel powered Macs had yet to arrive, and the iPhone and iOS were still on the drawing board. The very best of the Apple IT community lined up to becomes Mac Genius and work for the company they love. A lot has changed since I stood behind the Genius Bar¹. Today’s Genius are no longer required to have the same deep understanding of the Mac OS, its UNIX roots, or classic past. They can no longer troubleshoot the same impossible set of hardware symptoms with ease while customers watch bar side. Their lack of knowledge into the depths of Apple history and lore is embarrassing for anyone who grew up with Clarus the Dogcow, HyperCard, and the 1.44MB SuperDrive. The Mac Genius who knew all these things have either moved on, or burned out. Replaced by a new generation of Genius every 18 months who are eager to take their place.²

The Genius that work the bar today are different from the Mac Genius of the past. They see more iOS than Mac OS X.³ Their customers are delivered one by one using a reservation system while an assistant holding an iPad keeps order. Their troubleshooting techniques are predetermined, and the proper diagnosis codes must be achieved before parts can be ordered. Today’s Genius work at a faster pace with more monotony, and less time for conversation⁴. They are replacements, excited to fill in the role I once coveted until I we all burn out in the end. There is no path of advancement for a Genius. For a long time I was angry Apple couldn’t find a place for more of the great Mac Genius from past generations. But after reading the “The New Genius Bar” on Stephen Hackett’s 512 Pixels I began to understand that todays’s Genius are just as good at their jobs as my generation was with ours.

The Genius Bar has changed, and by letting the older Genius go Apple was doing us all a favor. No matter how much we love the company, no one wants to be a Mac Genius forever.⁵ There are better jobs out their with double the pay, better hours, and working behind the bar at an Apple Store is a great way to start a career.⁶ When you see a Genius complain about the nature or the business, the retail schedule, the ever increasing assembly line of work it is time for them to go.⁷ The magic of the position has worn off. I will always miss the good times I had working for Apple, but too much has changed both behind the bar and within myself for me to ever go back.⁸

Even at training (Early 2009) our instructor warned us about ‘Old School vs. New School’ Geniuses. His emphasis was that the needs of the business change. ↩
Oh, and it is often said that the average lifespan of a Genius at the company is a mere 18 months. ↩
Tasks like replacing a display, swapping a phone, or updating software don’t require the same skills that isolating a failed video card or manually recreating a user in OS X do. As iPhones and iPads continue to fly out the door, the role of a Genius shifts. ↩
These customers don’t want to ‘hang out with a genius’ — they want their phone to work. NOW. ↩
Most Geniuses are emotionally invested in their jobs. Their ability to assess and react to any situation with skill, tact, and empathy keeps customers ranking Apple support so high, year after year. ↩
I always saw the Genius role as a stepping stone into other IT jobs. ↩
Every 3 or 4 months you have to look hard at yourself and the current incarnation of the job and ask, Am I the best fit for this job? Am I willing to deal with the problem of the week and offer feasible solutions? Is my mental health in a state where I can enjoy this? Would I want to work with me with my current attitude? If the answer is no, I hope a manager helps you through that tough time and out the door if need be. ↩
As you get better at the job, your ability to assess and react to unspoken tension improves. This is great on the job, but hell when I would go out in public. I couldn’t turn that part of my brain off. I wanted to fix every problem I perceived. I had panic attack. This inability to interact normally was a major reason why I had to leave. ↩

Zapping the PRAM

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you have ever encountered a problem with your Macintosh you might have been advised to zap/reset the PRAM, but what is the PRAM and what does it do?

The PRAM, or parameter random access memory, is a small amount of non volatile storage on your Mac’s logic board. It uses a built-in battery or capacitor to retain specific system settings even after the power to your computer has been turned off. Macs with Intel processors use a similar system for storing these settings called NVRAM, or non-volatile random access memory. For all intents and purposes PRAM, and NVRAM are the same thing, and can be zapped the same way.

Shut down the computer.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. (You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.)
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

Zapping the PRAM has always been a simple procedure to perform, and depending on your Macintosh the list of system settings saved in PRAM could be rather extensive. The PRAM on a Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS can retain any of the following system settings.

Status of AppleTalk
Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
Alarm clock setting
Application font
Serial printer location
Autokey rate
Autokey delay
Speaker volume
Attention (beep) sound
Double-click time
Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
Startup disk
Menu blink count
Monitor depth
32-bit addressing
Virtual memory
RAM disk
Disk cache

Back when the Classic Mac OS was more common, zapping the PRAM gained the notoriety of being a miracle cure because it returned so many important system variables to their default values. As time went on, and the Classic Mac OS evolved more of these important system settings were moved out of PRAM and retained in preference files stored on the hard drive. By the time Mac OS X came along only a small selection of system settings were still retained in PRAM, and zapping the PRAM lost the miracle cure title it never truly deserved.

Display and video settings such as refresh rate, screen resolution, color depth
Startup volume choice
Speaker volume
Recent kernel panic information, if any
DVD region setting¹

Unlike prior versions of the Mac OS, Mac OS X does not store network or memory settings in PRAM. If you experience a network issue, resetting the PRAM will not help. Many of the memory conflicts that crashed the Classic Mac OS and gave zapping the PRAM its miracle cure reputation are no longer an issue in Mac OS X. Zapping the PRAM on a computer running Mac OS X has no affect on system stability because memory settings are no longer stored in PRAM.

Zapping the PRAM should never be used as preventative maintenance. Recent kernel panic logs are sometimes stored in PRAM and their routine removal could make tracking down a hard to diagnose issue even more difficult.

Zapping the PRAM is best used to diagnose or repair video, sound, or startup issues in Mac OS X.

If your computer is not displaying video, or is displaying a unusual refresh rate, resolution, or color depth, zapping the PRAM is a good first step. Issues with undetected auxiliary monitors can often be corrected by zapping the PRAM.

If your computer stops producing sound, or is unable to detect additional analog audio hardware like headphones, zapping the PRAM is a good first step.

If your computer takes a long time to boot, can’t find a startup volume, or attempts to boot over the network without cause, zapping the PRAM is a good first step.

Zapping the PRAM is an important quick fix for diagnosing certain Mac related issues, but it is not a miracle cure. Before zapping the PRAM know what it does and does not do in order to better target your diagnosis and discover the true remedy to your Mac’s ailment.

Mac OS X stores your preselected DVD region choice in PRAM for easy access. Resetting PRAM does not allow you to change the DVD region. ↩

Apple's Greatest Year

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Now that 2011 has come to a close, we are able to look back at Apple’s greatest year. Not only did 2011 show record profits and important product updates, but new technologies were released, and brand new versions of all of Apple’s operating systems were unveiled. Customer’s experienced new ways of purchasing products, while taking advantage of innovative cloud-based storage solutions. Developers learned a new integrated development environment for coding applications across all of Apple’s state-of-the-art operating systems. Creatives explored new techniques for editing video, and creating music on Macs and mobile devices alike. And during the midst of it all, Apple became the world’s most valuable company while losing the greatest leader it has ever known. As we look back at the past 365 days it is easy to see why 2011 was Apple’s greatest year.

Mac App Store

The year started off on January 6th with the release of the Mac App Store, a new way to buy applications on any Mac running Snow Leopard. With more than 1,000 free and paid apps, over one million downloads were made during its first day of business alone.

Revealed during the Sneak Peak of Lion event in October 2010, Apple compared the Mac App Store to the ease of purchasing applications on iOS.

The Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to OS X, making discovering, installing and updating Mac apps easier than ever. Like on iPad™, you purchase apps using your iTunes® account and they download and install in just one step. App updates are delivered directly through the Mac App Store, so it’s easy to keep all of your apps up to date.

By January 22nd the Mac App Store had received more than 10 million downloads, securing its future as the preferred method of buying applications on the Mac. One of the secrets of the Mac App Store’s success was its prominent position in the Mac OS X Dock. After updating to 10.6.6 users found the Mac App Store icon sitting right next to their favorite applications at the edge of their Macintosh’s screen. Never before had a software update placed a application in such a leading location for users to discover.

The release of Lion as a downloadable upgrade from the Mac App Store in early July only helped to solidify the Mac App Store’s success. Billed as a “tentpole” feature in Lion, the Mac App Store was promoted heavily leading up to Lion’s release. As Apple’s customers upgraded to Lion in record numbers many discovered the Mac App Store for the first time. Physical boxes of software at Apple Stores started to disappear overnight as more and more developers released their applications exclusively for the Mac App Store. By December 12th, Apple’s online strategy for software marketing and sales had become the dominant way to buy software on the Mac with over 100 million downloads.

ThunderBolt

Thunderbolt might be Apple’s most important hardware advancement in the last decade.

Developed by Intel with collaboration from Apple, Thunderbolt enables expandability never before possible on a notebook computer. Featuring two bi-directional channels with transfer speeds up to an amazing 10Gbps each, Thunderbolt delivers PCI Express directly to external high performance peripherals such as RAID arrays, and can support FireWire and USB consumer devices and Gigabit Ethernet networks via adapters. Thunderbolt also supports DisplayPort for high resolution displays and works with existing adapters for HDMI, DVI and VGA displays. Freely available for implementation on systems, cables and devices, Thunderbolt technology is expected to be widely adopted as a new standard for high performance I/O.

In the past significant hardware advances have always been implemented on desktop computers first. This was true for FireWire, USB 2.0 and the G5 processor. Starting on February 24th, Apple’s pro line of portable machines were the first to offer the high performance I/O and expandability of Thunderbolt.

On May 3rd Apple’s iMacs adopted Thunderbolt with their latest revision, marking the first time a consumer desktop has seen a major hardware advancement before its pro counterpart since the Bondi Blue iMac boldly adopted USB. No fact is more damming to the Mac Pro’s continued irrelevance than its lack of Thunderbolt support.

On July 20th, the world saw the release of Lion and with it came new MacBook Airs, Mac minis, and the Thunderbolt Display. No computer would benefit more from the addition of Thunderbolt than the MacBook Air. Combined with a Thunderbolt Display the new MacBook Air gains all of the ports of a full-featured MacBook Pro, while retaining all of the travel portability of a three pound notebook. Not since the age of the PowerBook Duo has Apple released a mobility minded portable with the expandability of a desktop computer. Thunderbolt made it possible.

On November 4th, Bare Feets performed a speed test of all shipping Macs comparing their ability to run pro applications against a Mac Pro. Bare Feets found that the performance gap between the Mac Pro and high-end Macs was narrowing towards the point of irrelevance thanks to the latest Intel i3, i5, and i7 processors shipping with every new Thunderbolt enabled Mac.

iPad 2

The iPad 2 may have been the most anticipated product of 2011. Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance during his second medical leave to reveal the iPad 2 on March 2nd.

iPad 2 features an entirely new design that is 33 percent thinner and up to 15 percent lighter than the original iPad, while maintaining the same stunning 9.7-inch LED-backlit LCD screen. iPad 2 features Apple’s new dual-core A5 processor for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics and now includes two cameras, a front-facing VGA camera for FaceTime® and Photo Booth®, and a rear-facing camera that captures 720p HD video, bringing the innovative FaceTime feature to iPad users for the first time.

The iPad 2 was later released on March 11th, but Apple has never reported its sales numbers. Analysts put sales of the new iPad in the range of 400,000 to 600,000 units during its first three days on the market, about the same range as the original model sold in its first week. In the most recent quarter Apple reported the iPad 2 contributed 17% of Apple’s $26.7 billion in revenue, or an estimated 7.5 million units sold from late June to September 24th.

Alongside the iPad 2 came new versions of iMovie and Garageband for iOS. These mobile applications would help creative professionals and curious amateurs create movies and music on the go thanks to the iPad 2’s improved processing power and multitouch interface.

The most unheralded feature of the iPad 2 might be the introduction of AirPlay, a wireless technology that allows you to stream what is on your iPad 2 to your HDTV via an Apple TV. AirPlay would quickly make it to all of Apple’s iOS devices running iOS 5.

Xcode 4

Xcode 4 was a major update to Apple’s integrated development environment, and a mixed blessing for developers who had become accustomed to previous versions. Apple released the final code for Xcode 4.0 on March 9th over the Mac App Store, but many developers were weary to adopt it, citing poor performance and a steep learning curve.

Some of Xcode 4’s biggest changes were in its user interface. For the first time many of the windows and auxiliary applications used to perform development tasks were consolidated into a single application window. This was most likely done to make Xcode 4 more compatible with Lion, which encourages the use of full screen, single window apps. The addition of Navigators and the Jump Bar help Xcode 4 developers navigate the new interface, while the Assistant feature keeps track of what code is being edited across multiple files.

The new Apple LLVM Compiler 2.0 in Xcode 4 means software is compiled quicker and the resulting applications run faster. It also means many existing applications had to be tweaked as new bugs were discovered and compatibility changes had to be made. The new Apple LLVM engine helps by constantly working in the background to understand a developers code. It alerts developers to coding mistakes as they type, and highlights common mishaps and potential fixes without the need to click the build button.

Xcode 4 was a sore spot for many developers who had become accustomed to the previous way of building applications, but thanks to a new versioning system, steady performance improvements, and continued Xcode 3 backwards compatibility many developers were able to make the jump to Apple’s latest IDE on their own schedule.

Final Cut Pro X

Final Cut Pro was another professional Apple application that received a major update last year. Like Xcode 4, Final Cut Pro received both a major upgrade to its underlying architecture as well as a completely new user interface. Creative professionals were stunned to learn that Final Cut Pro X would not open their previous Final Cut Pro Projects. Many snubbed the new iMovie inspired user interface that required them to relearn basic editing skills. And although several reviews confirmed Final Cut Pro to be the fastest nonlinear editor in existence, professional editors were shocked by the absence of so many professional features including support for third-party hardware, tape media importing, and the import or export of content to other editors or finishing systems.

It helps to think of FCP X as not an upgrade of Final Cut Studio, but rather an entirely new application that shares the same name. 64-bit support, a Cocoa foundation, GPU acceleration, and a new rendering engine were all long awaited features that will give Final Cut Pro a solid foundation into the next decade. Many of the FPC X’s deficiency’s can be summed up as the result of 1.0 release, and if you think of it as an entirely new application the results are very impressive.

No one forced creative professionals to upgrade to Final Cut X, but when Apple released FCP X on the Mac App Store they stopped selling the previous boxed version of Final Cut Studio. The lack of professional features, and the abrupt change in workflow caused enough of an outcry that Apple began selling the remaining copies of Final Cut Studio in early September. Update 10.0.1 followed twenty days later, and helped fix some of superficial deficiencies plaguing Final Cut Pro X. Version 10.1 has been promised for early 2012, and I am confident that future updates will only make Final Cut Pro X more compelling as tape-less editing becomes the norm.

Lion

Mac OS X Lion was the most anticipated software upgrade of 2011. Announced during the Sneak Peak of Lion event in October 2010, Apple revealed several new features like the Mac App Store, Launchpad, Full Screen Apps, Multi-touch gestures, and a newly designed Mail application that would be making their way back to the Mac from iOS.

Lion brings many of the best ideas from iPad back to the Mac, plus some fresh new ones like Mission Control that Mac users will really like,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Lion has a ton of new features, and we hope the few we had time to preview today will give users a good idea of where we are headed.

The first developer preview for Lion was released on [February 24th](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/24Apple-Releases-Developer-Preview-of-Mac-OS-X-Lion.html, 2011). Many non-developers participated in the preview because the annual entry fee to the Mac Developer Program had recently been lowered to $100.

Lion was released on the Mac App Store on July 20th, 2011. It offered users 250 new features and sold over 1 million copies on its first day. Reviews for Lion were positive, but many long time Mac fans found issues with Lion’s Resume and Autosave features which took control away from the user. With the release of Lion Apple has made it clear that the future of the Mac is headed towards a convergence with iOS. No one knows when that convergence will take place, but as the two platforms align ease-of-use and reliability will triumph over the customization and extended capabilities of the former Mac OS.

Apple Campus 2

On June 7th, Steve Jobs addressed the Cupertino City Council to present his ideas for a new Apple Campus. If the proposal goes through Apple will be relying heavily on its experience building futuristic retail stores to produce a 2.8 million square foot circular building made out of curved glass. The new campus will be four stories tall, have a diameter of about 1615 feet, and house 12,000 employees on a 175 acre plot down the street from Apple’s current headquarters. Amenities will include…

an enclosed courtyard
a cafeteria capable of feeding 3,000 employees in one sitting
a auditorium capable of seating 1,000 people
an on campus fitness center
a 60% increase in landscaping
underground parking
300,000 square feet of research facilities
and a natural gas power plant capable of producing all of the campuses power.

Apple plans on a 40% increase in Apple corporate employees going from 9,500 today to 13,000 in 2015 when the new campus is scheduled to be completed. Even though the new campus was not built in 2011, its announcement was a significant milestone for Apple, a company that continues to grow far past anyones expectations.

Steve Jobs

On August 10th, under Steve Jobs guidance, Apple surpassed Exxon Mobil to seize the title of world’s most valuable company.

On August 24th, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple.

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

He asked to remain as Apple’s Chairman of the board, director, and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

As planned Tim Cook took the reigns as Apple’s CEO. He successfully launched the iPhone 4S, iOS 5, and iCloud before a packed crowd at Apple’s Town Hall auditorium on October 4th, 2011. There was one reserved seat left unfilled in the audience.

On October 5th, Steve Jobs passed away.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

After hearing the news Apple’s shares fell less than a dollar.

On October 18th, Apple reported their forth quarter results showing an all-time record for Mac and iPad sales, and the highest September quarter revenue and earnings to date.

On October 19th, Apple closed all of its retail stores for several hours as Apple employees gathered at Apple’s headquarters to celebrate Steve’s life. Memorials were erected on the windows and sidewalks outside of every Apple Store, and at Steve’s home in Palo Alto.

On November 15th, Arthur D. Levinson became Chairman of the Board.

Steve Jobs will always be missed, but his vision will live on in the company he founded. Apple will forever be his greatest product.

iOS 5

iOS 5 was first announced at Apple’s annual WWDC keynote address on June 6th. iOS 5 includes more than 200 new features, but the highlights of the keynote were Notification Center, iMessage, Newsstand, and PC Free Activation.

Notifications Center was a long-awaited feature that replaced the stacked dialog box notifications found in previous version of iOS with a pull down sheet that resembles the notifications on Android.

The introduction of iMessage was unexpected by customers and carriers alike. With it Apple hopes to reproduce the popularity of the BlackBerry Messenger service by creating a cost free communication network Apple customers can enjoy across all of their iOS devices.

Subscriptions made it onto the App Store early last year on February 15th, but iOS lacked a centralized place to browse, purchase, and collect periodicals. Newsstand brought the bookshelf interface and integrated store of iBooks to newspapers and magazines, and allowed the delivery of new content overnight as a background process. Apple may not have the same selection of Amazon’s Kindle service, but starting with Newsstand they have all of the pieces they need to build a powerful competing readership.

PC free activation is the most important feature from iOS 5. It sets the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad apart as independent devices free from the cables of personal computers. Android has long benefitted from PC free activation, and the abundance of Google cloud services. Now with the introduction of iOS 5, and iCloud Apple’s users will benefit from a similar liberation. The Post-PC era has begun.

The improvements in iOS 5 were significant, because they matched the long heralded strengths of competing platforms with an attention to detail and polish only Apple could provide.

iOS 5 was released alongside iCloud on October 12th.

iCloud

iCloud was introduced on June 6th by Steve Jobs. It was the last product presentation he would ever make, and arguably one of the most important for Apple’s future success. iCloud is a collection of free and paid services that aim to preserve a single set of data across all of a user’s Macs, PCs, and iOS devices.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

As a replacement to MobileMe, iCloud includes all of the basic personal information services a user might expect from an online platform including contacts, calendar, and email. These free services directly compete with the online offerings of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! without subjecting the user to unsightly ads.

iCloud include the automatic downloading of media, books, and apps to all of your iOS devices and computers running iTunes.

The automatic backup of iOS devices including purchased music, apps, books, photos, videos, device settings and app data is the iCloud feature that makes the PC Free Activation in iOS 5 possible.

iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all of a users’s devices. When a user changes a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all of their devices. The iCloud Storage API will become iCloud’s most powerful feature as soon as more developers start taking advantage of it. We are already starting to see cross platform applications that are replacing the filesystem with iCloud’s Storage API, but more applications are needed if iCloud is to be considered a success.

The Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos users take on their iOS devices to iCloud so they can be streamed or imported to any iOS device or computer. Photo Stream might be the best example of iCloud’s ability to keep a single set of data across all of a user’s devices.

For $25 a year iTunes Match scans the songs a user’s music library, including music not purchased on iTunes, and matches it to the more than 20 million songs available on the iTunes Store, offering them high-quality, DRM-free 256 kbps AAC encoding. Any unmatched songs are uploaded to iCloud so users can play any song, album or playlist from their music library on any of their iOS devices without syncing. iTunes Match may not replace the convenience, or low cost of tethered syncing, but geeks love it for the upgrade in quality it gives their music.

iCloud is more ambitious than services like Dropbox that rely on comparing files in the filesystem to synchronize data. With iCloud, Apple wants to replace the filesystem with a single destination for user’s data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. For iCloud to be successful more developers need to take advantage of its services. Apple is doing everything they can to make iCloud popular by releasing it as a free service, but developers are proceeding with the same caution they used to support iCloud’s inconsistent predecessor MobileMe. Only time will tell if iCloud can overcome developers fears and become the future of data storage, or another just entry in Apple’s long list of online failures.

iPhone 4S

The iPhone 4S was unveiled by Phil Schiller on October 4th just one day before Steve’s death.

Apple today announced iPhone 4S, the most amazing iPhone yet, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri, an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

At the time of its announcement many people on the internet were expecting the new iPhone 5 case design they saw on rumor sites. When the rumors failed to materialize these same people felt disappointment regardless of the new iPhone’s dual-core A5 processor, advanced optics, or intelligent voice enabled assistant Siri. The disappointment didn’t stop the iPhone 4S from selling over one million pre-orders in the first 24 hours, or over 4 million units during the first weekend. The success surrounding the iPhone 4S shows that Apple no longer needs to impress people with flashy new form factors to sell products. Gone are the days of the candy colored iMac. Apple’s new approach is a timeless elegance that does not need to be updated every year. Not a single Apple hardware product saw a significant redesign this year, and yet Apple still showed record profits. Today’s Apple relies less on being seen, and more on being heard.

One way Apple is being heard is with Siri. Siri is the new voice enabled digital assistant that ships with the iPhone 4S. It listens to a user’s natural language and performs simple tasks based upon their instructions. Siri was released in beta, a rare move for Apple, because it needs to learn from a large sample size of users speech patterns. As Siri improves and changes the way we control our computers it might prove to be the most important advancement in 2011. The introduction of the mouse changed personal computing in 1984, The scroll wheel change portable music in 2001, and multitouch changed the mobile phone in 2007. What will Siri change in 2012?

The Mac App Store, Thunderbolt, iPad 2, Xcode 4, Final Cut Pro X, Lion, Apple’s New Campus, Steve Job’s Life, iOS 5, iCloud, and the iPhone 4S all helped make 2011 Apple’s greatest year. And even though we will probably not see the record number of amazing advancements in 2012 I am still looking forward to it just the same.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. — Steve Jobs (August 24, 2011)

Apple's First Digital Camera

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

During the holidays many of us gave and received the gift of photography. Digital cameras, family portraits, and photo greeting cards, are all part the holiday tradition. The accessibility of digital cameras has helped to strengthen the importance of photography during family gatherings, but the prevalence of digital cameras has helped make photography a year round event. Before there were digital cameras there was an aunt, uncle, mother, or father who took all of the families photos. Now that digital cameras are inexpensive, easy to use, and included in most popular electronic devices people are taking more pictures no matter the time of year.

With devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch it is easy to see why Apple is such a popular consumer electronics company, but it is often overlooked that Apple is a giant in photography. Every mobile device Apple makes contains a camera. From the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, to the entire MacBook lineup Apple’s most popular products include a lens for capturing the world. At this time the iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr, and it may be the most popular camera in the world. But Apple wasn’t always a huge success in photography. Starting back in 1994 Apple released the first line of digital cameras aimed at consumers, and failed miserably at gaining brand recognition or marketshare. Just like the Newton MessagePads, released at the same time, Apple’s QuickTake line of digital cameras were a series of products developed before their time.

QuickTake 100

The QuickTake 100 was Apple’s first foray into photography, and the first digital cameras consumers could take home and connect to their desktop computers. Released in January 1994 the QuickTake 100 was designed by Kodak in the United States and built by Chinon Industries in Japan. Its unique shape resembles the pair of futuristic binoculars Luke Skywalker used to gaze across the sands of Tatooine in the first Star Wars movie. Weighing one pound, the QuickTake 100 originally sold for $749.

Marketed as easy to use, the QuickTake 100 had a built-in flash, but no focus or zoom controls. Shutter speed was limited from 1/30th to 1/175th of a second, and the camera’s available apertures fell into the f2.8 to f16 range. All settings except for the flash, timer, and resolution were chosen automatically. It was powered by three rechargeable AA batteries that could last for 120 shots, and included a Macintosh style serial cable for connectivity. The viewfinder was optical, and the built-in LCD screen was for status information only. Captured images had to be viewed on a Mac using the included QuickTake software. The QuickTime 100 was capable of storing up to eight photos at 640x480 resolution, 32 photos at 320x240 resolution, or a mixture of both sizes on its 1MB Flash EPROM. The QuickTime 100 had no upgradable memory. All photos were stored with 24 bits of color in a proprietary QuickTake PICT format that can not be read in Mac OS X. Every photo taken with the QuickTIme 100 had to later be converted into a JPEG, TIFF, or BMP before they could be shared. The QuickTake 100 produced photos with quality similar to today’s most primitive camera phones.

QuickTake 150

In 1995 Apple released the QuickTake 150, an improved version of the QuickTake 100 that featured a macro photography add-on lens, PC compatibility, and support for TIFF, BMP, PCX, and JPEG using the included PhotoFlash software. PhotoFlash was an early ancestor to today’s iPhoto. It allowed for the easy organization, enhancement, and publishing of photos from a single application. With PhotoFlash images could be captured on a QuickTake camera and sent directly to a computer using the built-in serial connection. By controlling the camera from the attached computer many businesses used QuickTake cameras to take employee photos for IDs or security badges. The QuickTake 150 sold for $700 replacing the QuickTime 100.

QuickTake 200

The QuickTake 200) was a dramatic departure from the binocular style form factor of previous QuickTake cameras. Built by Fujifilm for Apple Computer, the QuickTake 200 offered a substantial improvement in image quality by addressing the shortcomings of earlier QuickTake cameras.

Instead of a 1MB Flash EPROM, the QuickTake 200 shipped with a 2MB removable SmartMedia card. Apple sold an optional 4 MB card, and even larger capacity cards were available from third-party vendors. Removable media cards allowed QuickTake 200 users to take more photos before returning to their computer to offload images. Instead of saving photos in a proprietary PICT format the QuickTake 200 recorded all of its photographs as PC compatible JPEGs. The QuickTake 200 was restricted to the same 640 x 480 maximum resolution as earlier QuickTakes, but the lossy JPEG compression meant more photos could be saved in the same amount of space.

Unlike previous QuickTakes the 200 could focus on one of three specific ranges without the need of add-on lenses.

Close-Up: 3.5 to 5 inches
Portrait: 17 to 35 inches
Far: ~ 35 inches to infinity

This made pictures sharper even if there was no discernible increase in sensor quality over earlier QuickTake models.

The 1.8 inch LCD viewing panel greatly improved the usability of the camera. Instead of returning to a desktop computer to view your images the QuickTake 200 could show you what shots you had already taken, and a live preview of images yet to be captured. For the first time in the QuickTake’s history, shots could be deleted individually from the camera without the need of a computer, and exposure and composition could be judged before the photo was taken. The 1.8 inch LCD viewing panel replaced the integrated optical viewfinder found on earlier QuickTakes, but a snap-on viewfinder was also included. This optional viewfinder was especially useful for shooting a series of photos because of the slow 30fps refresh rate of the 1.8 inch LCD viewing panel made tracking moving subjects difficult.

Another QuickTake first was the 200’s user selectable aperture modes.

The QuickTake 200 has two aperture settings (light settings). The user can switch between f2.2 and f8.0. f2.2 is used in low light settings and f8.0 is used in bright light. If the camera thinks you are underexposing or overexposing the image, it will warn you by suggesting you switch to the opposite aperture setting.

By the time the QuickTake 200 shipped in 1997 Apple had already abandoned the photo software business. The QuickTake 200 shipped with Adobe PhotoDeluxe 1.0 to enhance images, Adobe PageMill 2.0 to create web pages, and PictureWorks NetCard 1.0 to send Internet postcards.

The QuickTake 200 was considered a good overall camera in 1997, but Apple was not a familier brand in the photography market.

Traditional photography equipment makers like Canon, Kodak, and Nikon began to flood the market with brands that consumers more readily associated with photography. Furthermore, even though the QuickTake cameras were all Windows compatible given the right drivers and cables, in the mid 1990s Apple was extremely paternalistic and increasingly viewed as a niche player so the QuickTake cameras never really gained a reputation as being anything more than a Macintosh peripheral.

Apple sold the QuickTake 200 for about a year before Steve Jobs discontinued the QuickTake line of cameras in an effort to streamline operations and focus all the company’s resources on reviving the waning Macintosh.

In many ways the QuickTake camera is like the Newton MessagePad. A product released before its time, that would invent an industry, and ultimately die at the hands of Steve Jobs before being reborn as an essential technology in Apple’s modern day success.

Siri's Server Side Advantage

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I work in the radiology department of a large hospital. Here the Radiologists use dictation software to translate their spoken diagnosis into written reports. Before accurate dictation can begin, each Radiologist must read several passages of predetermined text into a microphone connected to a computer. This one-time process is called voice training, and it helps the computer get a jumpstart understanding the voice characteristics of each Radiologist by listening to their unique pronunciation, accent, and tone. After voice training is complete the computer generates a voice profile for each Radiologist. The voice profiles are stored on a central server and can be accessed from any computer the Radiologist is dictating from. Over time each Radiologist’s voice profile is improved as mistakes are corrected during the course of normal dictation. After months of use, the dictation software makes very few mistakes, and the voice profiles of all users can be analyzed to make the next version of the dictation software even better.

Good voice recognition depends on a large sample size of users each contributing their own unique voice characteristics. Today Nuance makes the best voice recognition software, but rivals such as Google are catching up by capturing the voice profiles of every user who dictates into Android phones, makes calls to GOOG-411¹, or leave a voicemail message with Google Voice. Apple may be using Nuance’s software as the basis for Siri’s voice recognition, but without capturing the evolving voice profiles of real world users Siri would be slow to improve.

Siri is Apple’s first serious attempt at voice recognition². Apple has no previous voice profiles to build upon. In order for Siri to live up to the Apple’s high standard of excellence, additional voice profiles must to be obtained. Apple introduced Siri to the world in beta as an attempt to capture these additional voice profiles more quickly and help Siri grow. Each time a user makes a request of Siri, or dictates into their iPhone, Siri’s voice recognition improves. Siri will never stop learning, but by releasing Siri early Apple has a greater chance of perfecting Siri’s performance before competitors catch up.

Apple has had some experience with interpreting the analog output of humans in the past. The Newton’s handwriting recognition required a similar method of user participation in order to improve. Prior to the release of the first MessagePad Apple employees donated a sample of their own handwriting to the Newton recognizer in an attempt to make it more accurate. The difference between the Newton and Siri, is that the Siri was born into a world where server-side learning exists. The beta version of Siri benefits from a much larger sample size than all the 1993 Apple employees who scribbled their handwriting onto a prototype MessagePad. Today Siri is learning from every user with an iPhone 4S. Steve Wildstrom of Techpions sums it up best when he says.

The server-based learning creates a very different situation from the troubled handwriting recognition that helped doom Apple’s Newton 15 years ago (and to which some critics have compared Siri’s troubles.) Newtons were products of a preconnected age, so there was no way for the community of MessagePads to learn from each other’s mistakes.

A Newton could adapt to the unique characteristics of its owners handwriting, but those adaptations could never be shared with the greater community of Newton users as a whole. The Newton’s handwriting recognition only saw significant improvement when its developers made a change, and that change was only delivered to the community with the release of updated hardware. Compared to Siri’s continuously evolving server-side voice recognition system the handwriting recognition of the Newton never stood a chance.

Apple’s decision to release Siri in beta was the right choice because it exposed Siri’s server-side learning to the largest possible sample size of users in the shortest amount of time. Siri’s voice recognizer may learn in a way similar to the Newton’s handwriting recognizer, but due to the advent of server-side recognition, Siri is not limited by the same constraints of the Newton. Siri may have other benefits that the original Newton didn’t. A CPU faster than 20MHz helps. But it is the server-side learning process, and not the processor speed, that will enable Siri to outgrow its “Egg Freckles” moments far faster than the Newton ever could.

Siri icon courtesy of PXM-Tuts.

GOOG-411 has been discontinued. ↩
Apple’s first attempt at simple voice recognition. ↩

A Brief History of QuickTime

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In 1984 the original Macintosh introduced the graphical user interface and proportional width fonts to the personal computer. For the first time home computer users could print a document and have it appear exactly as it did on screen. The desktop publishing industry was born. Twenty years ago yesterday, a multimedia add-on called QuickTime brought the magic of color video home to the computer desktop, and introduced the world to multimedia playback outside of their television sets. Before QuickTime, motion pictures on the computer screen were limited to crude animations with choppy playback and synthesized sound. Today computers can playback high definition video with multi-channel surround sound and interactive onscreen elements. Video can be scaled for the cinema, personal computer desktop, mobile phone display, or streamed everywhere in between. QuickTime makes the playback of our multi-thousand track music collections possible, and the over-the-air delivery of full-length high definition films a reality. QuickTime transformed the capabilities of personal computers just like the original Macintosh, and without it we wouldn’t have the multimedia rich world we live in today.

QuickTime 1

Apple released the first version of QuickTime on December 2, 1991 as a multimedia add-on for System Software 6 and later. The lead developer of QuickTime, Bruce Leak, ran the first public demonstration at the May 1991 Worldwide Developers Conference, where he played Apple’s famous 1984 TV commercial on a Mac, an astounding technological breakthrough at the time.

Before the introduction of QuickTime, only specialized computers with dedicated graphics hardware could playback color video. In 1991 very few people had access to such a computer, let alone own one. QuickTime brought personal computer video playback home to the masses, and it did so using software.

Apple released QuickTime 1.5 for Mac OS in the latter part of 1992. This added the SuperMac-developed Cinepak vector-quantization video codec (initially known as Compact Video). It could play video at 320×240 resolution at 30 frames per second on a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU. It also added text tracks, which allowed for captioning, lyrics and other potential uses.

Looking back it is easy to dismiss the postage stamp size video, and scratchy low bit-rate sound inherent with early versions of Quicktime, but the technology was genuinely groundbreaking at the time.

In a rare move Apple contracted San Francisco Canyon Company to port QuickTime to the Windows platform in 1992. Version 1.0 of QuickTime for Windows provided only a subset of the full QuickTime functionality. All movie playback functions were restricted to the standard movie controller. Apple hoped that the cross-platform compatibility would increase QuickTIme’s adoption, while bringing more developers over to the Mac. The following year, Intel hired San Francisco Canyon Company to optimize Video for Windows for its latest batch of x86 processors. Some of QuickTime’s code made it into the competing Microsoft product and Apple started a lawsuit that wouldn’t be resolved until Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997.

QuickTime 2

QuickTime 2.0 was released for Mac OS in February 1994, and was the only version ever sold for a fee. It added support for MIDI music tracks, which could drive a sound-synthesis engine built into QuickTime, and produced sounds using only a small amount of data.

QuickTime 2.0 for Windows appeared in November 1994 and brought with it a subset of the Macintosh Toolbox programming language to Intel and other platforms as the enabling infrastructure for the QuickTime Media Layer. The QuickTime Media Layer would later become the foundation for the Carbon API which allowed legacy Macintosh applications to run on the Darwin kernel in Mac OS X.

QuickTime 2.1 and 2.5, reverted to the previous model of giving QuickTime away for free. They improved the music support and added sprite tracks which allowed the creation of complex animations based on instructions that took up a fraction of the size of a conventional movie. QuickTime 2.5 also fully integrated QuickTime VR 2.0.1 into QuickTime as a QuickTime extension. The popularity of the world wide web was just about to explode, and QuickTime would bring multimedia to the browser a year before the advent of Flash.

QuickTime 3

The release of QuickTime 3.0 for Mac OS on March 30th, 1998 brought a new revenue model to Apple’s multimedia software. Instead of shipping a single version, Apple offered QuickTime’s playback components free of charge while requiring end-users to unlock QuickTime’s “Pro” authoring components by purchasing a $29 license code. This revenue model helped support the licensing costs of the numerous third-party codecs included in QuickTime, but since the “Pro” features were the same as the existing features in QuickTime 2.5, many users continued to use the older version of the software.

QuickTime 3.0 added support for graphics importer components that could read images from GIF, JPEG, TIFF and other file formats, and video output components which served primarily to export movie data via FireWire. Apple also licensed several third-party technologies for inclusion in QuickTime 3.0, including the Sorenson Video codec for advanced video compression, the QDesign Music codec for substantial audio compression, and the complete Roland Sound Canvas instrument set and GS Format extensions for improved playback of MIDI music files. It also added video effects which programmers could apply in real-time to video tracks.

QuickTime 4

Apple released QuickTime 4.0 on June 8, 1999 for Mac OS 7.5.5 through 8.6, and all popular versions of Windows. It introduced features that most users now consider basic such as the ability to export a collection of static graphics formats and playback MP3s. QuickTime 4 was the first version to support streaming. It was accompanied by the release of the free QuickTime Streaming Server version 1.0. QuickTime 4 Player introduced brushed metal to the Macintosh user interface. Later versions of QuickTime 4 saw the introduction of AppleScript and the requirement of a PowerPC processor for Mac OS systems. (QuickTime 4.1 dropped support for Motorola 68k Macintosh systems.) QuickTime 4 saw the introduction of iTunes, and Final Cut Pro on the Mac.

PictureViewer, a component of QuickTime 4 and later, was the fastest way to open still images on the classic Mac. It was replaced by Preview in Mac OS X.

QuickTime 5

QuickTime 5 was one of the shortest-lived versions of QuickTime, released in April 2001 and superseded by QuickTime 6 a little over a year later. This version was the last to have greater capabilities under Mac OS 9 than under Mac OS X, and the last version of QuickTime to support Mac OS versions 7.5.5 through 8.5.1 on a PowerPC Mac and Windows 95. QuickTime 5 brought playback enhancements including a new QuickTime VR engine, realtime rendering of effects and transitions in DV files, multiprocessor support, and Altivec enhancements for the PowerPC G4 processor. Today it is hard to believe, but version 5 introduced Flash 4 playback and export to QuickTime. QuickTime 5 saw the introduction of the iPod on the Mac.

QuickTime 6

On July 15th, 2002, Apple released QuickTime 6.0. Over the course of several years QuickTime 6 would see the introduction of several new file formats including MPEG-4, AAC, Flash 5, JPEG 2000, 3GPP, the Apple Pixlet codec in Mac OS X 10.3 and greater, the Apple Audio Lossless codec, and MPEG-2 playback via the purchase of a separate Apple MPEG-2 Playback Component. The introduction of MPEG-4, instant-on streaming, and protected AAC playback in QuickTime 6 helped make the iTunes Store possible.

The native file format for QuickTime video, QuickTime File Format, specifies a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (e.g. for subtitles). Each track either contains a digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific format) or a data reference to the media stream located in another file. The ability to contain abstract data references for the media data, and the separation of the media data from the media offsets and the track edit lists means that QuickTime is particularly suited for editing, as it is capable of importing and editing in place (without data copying).

It is a little known fact that the MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001. Unlike the simple file-as-stream approach of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 relies on the QuickTime multimedia file container method to capture, edit, archive, and distribute media.

QuickTime 6 was the last version to support the classic Macintosh operating system and Windows 98 and Me.

QuickTime 7

Initially released on April 29th, 2005 in conjunction with Mac OS X v10.4. QuickTime 7.0 featured improved MPEG-4 compliance and support for Core Audio, a set of Application programming interfaces that supports high resolution sound and replaced Sound Manager. QuickTime 7 also featured support for using Core Image filters in Mac OS X v10.4 on live video, and Quartz Composer animations. Version 7.0.4, released on January 10th, 2006 was the first universal binary version. But it suffered numerous bugs, including a buffer overrun which affected many users. The 7.2 update brought full-screen viewing to the free of charge version of QuickTime. (It was previously a Pro only feature.) Apple dropped support for Flash content in QuickTime 7.3, breaking content that relied on Flash for interactivity or animation. Security concerns were the primary motivation behind the change.

QuickTime 7’s most important feature was the ability to playback and encode video encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. H.264 has since become one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video. It is the standard behind Blu-ray Disc players, and is also widely used by streaming internet sources, such as videos from Vimeo, YouTube, and the iTunes Store.

QuickTime X

QuickTime X was initially demonstrated at WWDC on June 8th, 2009, and shipped with Mac OS X v10.6. It includes visual chapters, conversion, sharing to YouTube, video editing, capture of video and audio streams, screen recording, GPU acceleration, and live streaming. In addition, a screen recorder is included which records whatever is on the screen. However, to prevent bootlegging the user is unable to record any video that is played on the DVD Player or purchased through the iTunes Store.

The reason for the jump in numbering from 7 to 10 (X) was to indicate a similar break with the previous versions of the product that Mac OS X indicated. QuickTime X is fundamentally different from previous versions, in that it is provided as a Cocoa (Objective-C) framework and breaks compatibility with the previous QuickTime 7 C-based APIs that were previously used. QuickTime X was completely rewritten to implement modern audio video codecs in 64-bit. QuickTime X is a combination of two technologies: QuickTime Kit Framework (QTKit) and QuickTime X Player. QTKit is used by QuickTime player to display media.

QuickTime X was a controversial release because it does not implement all of the functionality of the previous versions of QuickTime.

When QuickTime X attempts to operate with a 32-bit codec or perform an operation not supported by QuickTime X, it will start a 32-bit helper process to perform the requested operation.

QuickTime 7 may still be required to support older formats on Snow Leopard such as QTVR, interactive QuickTime movies, and MIDI files. A compatible version of QuickTime 7 is included on the Snow Leopard installation disc and may be installed side-by-side with QuickTime X. Users who have a Pro license for QuickTime 7 can activate their license using QuickTime 7. The QTKit allows multiplexing between Quicktime X and Quicktime 7 behind the scenes so that the user need not worry about which version of Quicktime they need to use.

QuickTime 10.1 for Lion was released on July 20th, 2011. It improved QuickTime X’s new capabilities while moving more editing features over from QuickTime 7. Users can now merge clips into a single movie. QuickTime will automatically scale and crop the clips so they match the destination dimensions of the movie. Audio can be exported as separate AAC files, and entire movies can now be rotated. The screen capture utility has been enhanced with a highlighted cursor and visual click indication. Capture can be restricted to a specific portion of the screen, such as the front most application window. The sharing options have been increased to include Vimeo, Flickr, Facebook, iMovie, and Mail.

QuickTime has come a long way since the postage stamp size video, and scratchy low bit-rate sound from 20 years ago. QuickTime has seen the adoption of desktop video. The rise of multimedia playback on the internet. The incorporation of high definition video and multi-track surround sound in the home theater. The introduction of interactivity, multi-client streaming, digital rights management, and real-time video conferencing all while making the move from 68k to PowerPC, Classic Mac to Windows and Mac OS X running on Intel. QuickTime has played just as important a part in the Mac’s history has the GUI and proportional width fonts, and given the success of the iPod and iTunes Store I would say that QuickTime was a more important player in Apple’s recent resurgence than any other Apple technology. Multitouch applications and the iPad may be the catalyst for Apple’s future successes, but QuickTime still plays a very important part capturing, editing, archiving, and distributing the multimediaia elements that make those experiences great.

Time Machine on AirDisk Does Not Fly

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Speaking of backups, OWC has a blog entry detailing some of the dangers of performing Time Machine backups onto a USB drive connected to a AirPort base station.

They do not work reliably – it may work at first but they are NOT RECOMMENDED. I tried doing it at home on my wife’s machine and had to cease. Worked fine for a month or more and then stopped working – would always fail backing up after that.

I put the same drive on my Mac mini entertainment center, set it as her backup volume, and it’s been rock solid since.

I have experienced similar issues using an AirPort Extreme’s AirDisk as the destination for my Time Machine backups. At first everything was alright. My Mac created a disk image on the drive connected to my AirPort Extreme, and proceeded to make copies of all my files onto that image. Modifications were saved in the usual way, and the restoration of specific files using Time Machine’s Galaxy UI proceeded without a hitch. Then after a couple of days of seamless backups the Time Machine disk image on the AirDisk got corrupted without warning and refused to accept any additional data. Luckily for me the contents of my would be “air backup” were recoverable, but in order to keep using Time Machine on AirDisk the entire backup process would have to be started again from scratch. Many others have suffered the same fate. This is not the kind of backup you want your data to rely on.

My recommendation? Pony up the price of a Time Capsule for responsible wireless backups of multiple Macs, or purchase a reliable external drive for tethered backups of a single Mac. When it comes to archiving your data you don’t want your backup method to be a hack.