If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?
These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.
Notable for two reasons. First, H.264 hardware decoding will not be available on OS X. Disappointing, but Adobe claims it’s because Apple doesn’t provide the appropriate APIs. Second, and on a better note, while it doesn’t use hardware decoding, it yet provides significant performance improvements:
Going from roughly 450% down to 190% (or a bit over 10% of total CPU utilization across 16 threads) made full-screen Hulu playable on my machine. In the past I always had to run it in a smaller window, but thanks to Flash 10.1 I don’t have to any longer.
Flash Player 10.1 is scheduled for a release in the first half of next year. Bring it on.
Ever wanted to get rid of the scourge of the web that is Adobe Flash, but still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want?
If you surf with Safari on a Mac, get this plugin. It is software gold. A Safari equivalent to the equally awesome Flashblock for Firefox.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to a TechCrunch story this morning about Wolfram Research pricing their Alpha “computational knowledge engine” iPhone app at $50. Next to TomTom’s navigation app (which costs $100), this is the most expensive iPhone app I know of. This has (once again) temporarily refueled the argument about how much iPhone apps should cost.
The whole issue with the price of iPhone apps, which is to say any app priced above five bucks, is due to a widespread incomprehension that the iPhone is actually a computer. Normal, everyday folks are accustomed to paying tens and hundreds of dollars for software. But that software always had to be “installed” on their “machine” at home with a disk. The idea of buying expensive software for what in their minds is just a fancy cell phone is something completely foreign to them, especially given that all it takes are a few taps and your password, and bingo, new application. The painlessness of adding new “apps” (which just sounds like “toys” to most people’s ears) makes it seem like they should be cheap. The intangibility of software, and how to put a value on what it does, has never been more apparent.
The challenge Apple and any other company serious about competing with the iPhone faces is how to change people’s perception of what a “cell phone” is. Sure, “smart”-phones have been around for a while, but the iPhone was the first that actually broke the mold and showed what a real smartphone can do—become a real pocket computer.
One of my favorite pieces of software keeps getting more and more awesome.
There’s a good chance you’re familiar with the term “beta” by now. Most (in)famous of all betas is Gmail, Google’s email service that has been in beta since its launch in April 2004. Five years later, millions upon millions use Gmail, but “beta” is still right there in the logo.
If Gmail is beta software, which is to say “unfinished,” what then constitutes a finished product?
Before, there wasn’t an Internet around to let people kick the tires. But now, when even a digital camera can get on the web, “beta” is just another way of saying, “we’re working on it; what do you think?” Many software developers have willfully contracted this beta epidemic for the sake of opening the development process to incorporate user feedback into the “final” product. Apple, Apple has even gotten in on it with iWork.com.
And you know, why not? Instead of working on a product as if you lived in a vacuum, why not push out a beta when it’s in working condition to get users’ input on how it could be improved? The users tell you what they want from it to use or buy it, and you use that feedback to steer the remainder of the development cycle. It’s a solid idea.
But there’s a catch: in a beta culture, the first impression is the most important.
Imagine the scenario. You hear about a new product (in beta) that attempts to solve a problem affecting you, or that’s just plain cool. You sign up, fiddle with it, find something you don’t like about it, and move on.
If you’re the developer, unless you captured an audience during that time, you’re screwed. Competitors will learn from your mistake, avoid them in their products, and if you don’t act fast, you will be forgotten. At the very least, your reputation takes a hard hit. For the rest of your product’s life, you’ll be trying to convince people how everything’s better now, all the glitches were sorted out, and now it’s awesome. But you’ve lost that initial momentum. It makes no difference how many places and how many ways you described everything as “beta.” If Gmail had not rethought the email experience, and had they not introduced it with an astronomical 2GB of free storage (thought to be a joke at the time), people would have stayed with Yahoo and Hotmail.
Look where they are now.
The point is this: a beta release is just as important as the “final” release. If it is facing the public, it is not really a beta. You’ll get the urge to do it because everybody else is, but carefully consider what you put out there before slapping a beta sticker on it and waiting for the feedback. You may have just tripped over your laces at the starting line.
