Category: Apple

Categories
Apple Mac

Hey Mac

Bringing in the HarvestJust some quick takes from around the web on Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup.

iMore: “So, is this new 13-inch really a lean and mean upgrade for MacBook Air owners, or is it just an artificially crippled MacBook Pro meant to lower the cost of entry?

A bit of both, depending on your point of view.”

Charged: “Touch Bar is a great example of this. First, it feels like an excuse to not just add touch to the Mac in the first place. While Microsoft is busy letting you touch the entire display, Apple’s making you look down at your keyboard to interact instead — bizarre.”

JavaScript Scene: “People are losing their minds. Like many MacBook fans, I’m feeling seriously let down. I’ve been waiting a long time for a great MacBook Pro with touch screen.”

512 Pixels: “Desktop Macs didn’t get a single mention, or a silent hardware update after the announcements were done. While last-minute rumors claimed that the iMac wouldn’t be ready in time, it — and the Mac mini — would have been well-served with CPU bumps and Thunderbolt 3. The 27-inch iMac has become a workhorse for professionals like me, and in a world where the Mac Pro is in the shape its in, annual updates should be a must on Apple’s part.”

Ars Technica: “Phil Schiller quickly breezed by the Apple T1 during the presentation yesterday, but the company later confirmed to us that it was its first custom-designed SoC built for the Mac. And developers who have dug into the software and documentation (particularly the tireless Steve Troughton-Smith, whose recent Twitter sabbatical made my feed much more boring) have confirmed that it has an ARMv7 CPU core and is actually running an offshoot of watchOS, all of which helps it interact with the rest of the Mac.”

I was a bit hard on the announcement yesterday, of course I’d like to have a new MacBook Pro 15in even if one of its main features is thinner and lighter. The Touch Bar is going to be fun for developers to play with and I have a feeling some apps will do some amazing and creative implementations. I mainly develop stuff all day and touch type so I don’t see how this helps me in any way, but that’s ok. It’s not for me to use, it’s there so I can create for it. That’s a good thing.

Also, what is James Thomson up to?

Categories
Apple

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.Dave Rogers [permalink isn’t working, sorry]: “My tech obsession with modern Apple and its current products is definitely and completely over. There’s little “special” about Apple anymore. They’re simply the latest incarnation of the 600-lb gorilla. First there was IBM, then there was Microsoft, now there’s Apple. Eventually it’ll be either Google or Amazon. Apple today is just another Microsoft, and there’s little that’s going on there that’s exciting, or even very good. Siri is a joke. Photos is a cruel trick. I actually stuck up for Apple Maps in Colorado, using it to navigate whenever it was my turn, as none of my traveling companions trusted it. I was rewarded for my loyalty by a total mapping clusterfuck on our last day, as Siri tried to get us to ‘take an immediate right’ from an interstate at 70mph.”

Scrappy companies, like Apple pre-iPhone, are able to move a bit more quickly than big companies. IBM went through its own growing pains, so did Microsoft, and now it’s Apple’s turn. From the inside there is probably a bit of grumbling from the ranks, but nothing too bad. I’m sure there are folks on the ground, in multiple groups, that would like more time to improve their efforts. This ties right into something I spotted on Twitter last night.

https://twitter.com/stevenf/status/789980689592487936

Steve Frank is a Panic co-Founder and by all accounts a fantastic software developer, just look at their well regarded lineup of applications as proof. I have a great deal of respect for Panic and its team, just as I do for Apple and its teams. I’m a nobody but I have worked on a couple complex software systems through the years. When you’re working on a system with dependencies on other teams it slows things down and introduces strange behaviors and bugs. As much as everyone cares about the end product, it happens.

I’ve never worked at Apple and I don’t know how it works on the inside. But you can bet it’s full of software engineers that know their craft and care deeply about shipping a quality product. Big systems are inherently difficult to maintain and change.

Apple has been making moves over that last few years that introduce greater complexity and deeper integration between their own hardware and services. These are the same moves Microsoft was making in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Deep integration. When this stuff works, it’s like magic, when it fails it’s often times extremely frustrating for the user. You have no idea where things went sideways. Was it the client, the service, or somewhere in between? Which piece of hardware blew it? Why did my notification arrive an hour late, or not at all?

Like other big companies that take these deep dives Apple will work itself out of the weirdness.

Is Apple the new Microsoft? That’s a question for you to answer.

P.S. – I completely understand the place Steve is coming from. He wants to dig in and not come up for air until he’s solved big problems. That’s very admirable.

Categories
Apple Indie

Dash

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.iMore: “At this point, though, it’s time to forget working it out. Mistakes were clearly made on both sides, and there may be no way for the real truth to ever be known, or for everyone to win. But there’s a way to stop anyone else from losing further: Fix it, unilaterally, because you’re Apple, and you can.”

I was going to write about this, but Rene Ritchie capture my feelings perfectly. Mistakes were made on both side.

It would be nice for Apple to forgive and forget.

Categories
Apple

Battersea Power Station

London Evening Standard: “Apple will occupy the top six floors inside the former boiler house around a huge central atrium. There will also be three floors of shops, 253 apartments around a “garden square in the sky”, a 2,000-seater auditorium and cinemas in a scheme designed by London architects Wilkinson Eyre.”

If you know me you know I love seeing companies move into an area to refurbish an iconic building. I wish more companies would do stuff like this instead of buying a piece of land and putting up a new building.

I have a thing about downtown Fresno and Detroit. I’ve witnessed some great moves in downtown Fresno thanks to the leadership behind Bitwise Industries. They have big ambitions and I’m hopeful they’ll pull a rabbit out of the hat. I’ve heard Detroit’s once glorious downtown is making a comeback.

I’m more interested in this project than the new spaceship, if you can believe that.

Categories
Apple iOS

Apple Watch in the Hospitality Industry

Eater: “When Meyer’s 30-year-old Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will be wearing an Apple Watch. And when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert via the tiny computer attached to their wrist.”

This is pretty nifty. One thing I notice when I’m moving about, doing something physical, I may miss taps. It’s rare, but it does happen on occasion.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Categories
Apple iOS Mac

Future macOS Frameworks

Duct Tape, fixer of all things!I stumbled upon an interesting conversation between some well know Apple Ecosystem Developers this morning discussing, maybe lamenting, the lack of UIKit on macOS. I’m afraid I may have pushed these fellas to take their conversation private, I am sorry if that was the case.

Here’s the tweet that started the conversation:

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/779726806727491584

I’m not known in any development communities. I’m what you’d call a nobody. But I’m a nobody with years of experience that has seen changes to my development ecosystem.

Having experienced a dramatic shift in Windows Development technologies I have opinions about what I would expect to see from Apple. These opinions and $10.00 should be enough to buy you any item on a Starbucks drink menu. Take if for what it is. An opinion of a nobody.

What I Expect

Given Apple’s love and focus on Swift I fully expect Apple to put their effort into moving their frameworks to focus on Swift while continuing to allow App developers to use Objective-C with anything new. I’ve written about the idea of Swift only Frameworks. I believe we will eventually arrive there. For now we have excellent UIKit support for three different devices; iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Odd man out would be macOS. It doesn’t make sense, at least to me, for Apple to spend time back porting or adapting UIKit to the Mac. Their bread and butter is their  iOS based trio of the phone, watch, and cable like device. Since iPhone accounts for around 60% of revenue it makes sense for the iOS Platform to be their primary focus. That begs the question, will the Mac ever receive the attention we’d like it to receive? Probably not.

In the end I’d expect Apple to push iOS forward while keeping the Mac as a primary development system for iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS developers with the latter receiving very little attention from a new Frameworks perspective.

A Brief History of Windows Development

Like I said above, I’m opinionated and I’ve been around the block a few times. I know Apple isn’t Microsoft and people tend to hate those comparisons. But I do see similarities between the Microsoft of the 90’s and the Apple of today. That’s a discussion for another time.

The discussions around Frameworks reminds me of Microsoft’s transition to .Net and C# as an easier way for developers to create Windows Apps. Apple is making such a big push with Swift a new framework targeting Swift developers feels like a natural progression.

It’s taken over 15-years to really push app development into a .Net world. I suppose some could argue it took less than 10 and I wouldn’t fight that. The point is Microsoft managed to push an entire development community to a new technology while allow old technologies to continue to not only function but grow. Look at the Microsoft Office Apps and Adobe Photoshop among others. They continue to be very relevant today and continue to add new features while the Windows API receives much less attention than does .Net and C#.

Ultimately the point is I know Apple could choose to push toward a Swift only framework and allow legacy Objective-C/Cocoa apps to continue to grow and thrive. Microsoft is a prime example of how a company could pull it off.

I think it’s kind of nice being a new developer to Apple’s platforms. I don’t have 20+ years of baggage like I do with Windows. It’s been so much easier to move from Objective-C to Swift because of it. Well, that and being most familiar with C++ made the transition to Swift feel more natural to me.

Whatever Apple has in store for us, be it the growth of Cocoa, a new Swift centered framework, or a Swift only framework, I’m ready for it and welcome it.

Categories
Apple

macOS Sierra and my MacBook Pro

I recall listening to a podcast I really love a few months back and one of the hosts described his late 2011 as unusable. That statement is completely hyperbolic. I’m writing this post on my late 2011 15in MacBook Pro and it runs just fine.

If you’re an Indie dev and looking for a MacBook Pro laptop to get started I’d recommend considering a late 2011 15in MacBook Pro. When you get it add some additional RAM to it and pickup a nice big SSD for it. It’ll server you well, just like mine continues to serve me.

macOS Sierra

Categories
Apple

Tim Cook’s Spinal Tap Moment

NDTV: “Well we launched a pencil not a stylus, first of all, and there’s a big difference”

When I heard that all I could think of was Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel explaining how their amps go to 11.

I know, I know, Apple Pencil is different because it has some smarts in it.

It’s still funny.

Categories
Apple iPad

iPad Pro and Developers

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.Moshe Berman: “But expecting app developers to build professional apps with the current UIKit is like asking a chef to make a pizza with only flour, and water. Without more ingredients it’s not pizza.”

This is a really nice piece by Moshe and I’d encourage you to read the entire thing. Moshe has some really good suggestions for Apple, but overall the responsibility to create great professional apps lies with developers. I’m guilty of putting too much blame on Apple for poor App Store sales. It all comes back to the developer of apps to figure out their audience.

When I think of Pro applications for iPad my mind instantly turns to drawing, diagramming, and design applications. Things like FiftyThree’s Paper, Sketch, Acorn, Photoshop, Flinto, and even Adobe’s new Experience Design. All of the apps I just listed, with the exception of Paper, are Mac only.

There is definitely a feeling amongst App developers that people don’t want to pay for Apps. It’s proven to be true time and again as Indies fail with solid applications. Some shops, like The Omni Group in Seattle, have managed to keep their apps in the App Store (Mac and iOS) and by all accounts continue to do well. Something you’ll notice about Omni is the price of their iOS Apps. They actually charge real money for them, not some silly $0.99, more like $99.00 for the Pro version of OmniGraffle for iOS.

There are signs that even the best of software shops struggle to keep revenue for their iOS Apps where they’d like them. Panic, another of the best Mac developers in the business, noted in their 2015 report.

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

As a result they mentioned raising prices. That’s not a bad thing. People that depend on Panic software to conduct their day-to-day operations will happily pay more for their awesome software.

That brings me back around to the Pro angle. We have shops like Omni and Panic creating Pro level applications with the existing features of UIKit. In the end it’s all up to developers to build Pro apps, find a pricing model that works for them, and market their apps.

Categories
Apple

iPad as MacBook Pro Replacement

On a Slack channel some friends were having a discussion about using the iPad as a daily driver replacement for a MacBook Pro. This is how I feel about the idea. Is it an impossible notion? No, not at all, but it would have to be a true replacement, it would have to change to fit me, not the other way around.

“If I could get an iPad Pro (9.7) that was as powerful as my 15in MacBook Pro, could run Xcode fine, and would detect proximity to a full size keyboard, monitor, and mouse and let me use them? Sign me up.

Until then. Can’t use it as a daily driver.”

That’s it in a nutshell.