China meets the iPad

China isn't just another market, much as the iPad isn't just another gadget.

China is the most populous country on Earth and has one of the fastest growing economies. So much for the obvious.

While China's economy is rocketing upwards at an annual rate of eight percent, the spending power of most individual citizens is still modest, which makes the affordable iPad a good match.

What makes it an even better match is the touchscreen input, which doesn't discriminate against character-based input, providing the iPad an even greater advantage over keyboard-based netbooks in China than elsewhere.

The advantage the iPad has over other touchscreen tablets, running other operating systems, is more subtle but still substantial, deriving from factors such as attention to detail in both hardware and software, a fast-maturing application software market, and the goodwill Apple has gained through its efforts to improve conditions for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers involved in manufacturing its products (even though it turns out those conditions weren't so bad in the first place, aside from the economic incentives for workers to put in exorbitant amounts of overtime, or to end their lives for the compensation their families would receive as a result).

The iPad is destined to be a particularly huge hit in China, but the whole world will benefit from this.

AutoCAD returns to the Mac, and comes to iOS in the bargain

As before, I merely pass along a pointer to Architosh's report, which discusses the iOS companion program as well as AutoCAD itself.

Architosh also reports on what appears to be a 60-second TV spot, produced (or at least paid for) by AutoDesk, the company behind AutoCAD.

perseverance and pride

I've already said most of what there is to say about the event itself here, but what I only mentioned briefly there is that it's been a long, long time coming, with the project going through metamorphosis again and again. I had a need to do something that would contribute to bringing the world of music back around to an appreciation of the role of harmonics in melody, not just in harmony, or at least that's how it began. Arguably, I've accomplished that.

Along the way it also became an issue of pride in craftsmanship, as an amateur programmer with experience in Apple's approach to supporting application software. That and avarice may collaborate to drive the project further, perhaps much further, but for now I have a sense of contingent satisfaction, the degree of satisfaction being contingent on the degree of traction my creation manages to garner.

Of course, a free app with no ad revenue doesn't do much to feed avarice, so I'm left with pride in craftsmanship, for now, which is probably just as well; it's what drives me to do my best work.

party politics in a nutshell

I'm registered to vote, but not affiliated with any political party, at the moment.

That said, here's what remains of my impressions of the two main political parties.

The Democrats have a huge investment in appearing high-minded, and consequently manage to be right about what should happen a little more often.

The Republicans have two distinct constituencies, for one of which they must appear to be at least adequately morally upright, and for the other of which they must make it clear that morality doesn't extend to the wholesale confiscation and repurposing of wealth. It's a delicate dance, and, as a consequence, they manage to be right about what will happen a little more often.

Both are people, with all that means, good and bad.

how to improve upon Mac OS X 10.6?

Update: John Siracusa weighs in

From my perspective, that looks like a tall order, but so far it's looking like a slow news week, and Cristopher Ryan, writing in the Apple Blog, has asked What Could Make OS X 10.7 Great? so I'll have a go.

Without really understanding the issues involved, let me echo Ryan's call for a new file system. Everyone who followed such developments seemed encouraged by the hope that ZFS was just around the corner, when it appeared to be so, and then Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and suddenly we were back in bed with HFS+, with no realistic alternatives on the horizon. Meanwhile, whatever Apple is using for a file system in iOS devices is fairly free to evolve, since iOS apps are sandboxed and only have access to the narrow slice of that system that relates directly to them. Also, being flash memory devices with no hard drives, they have different abilities and requirements as compared with a desktop machine. One possibility for the future is that iOS's refined handling of flash memory might be grafted into HFS+ at about the same time that Macs other than the MacBook Air get a bank of flash memory or a solid state drive to augment their massive (but slower) hard drives. Granted, this probably won't be enough to satisfy those who really understand file system issues.

Another iOS capability that might be brought to Mac OS X is the full-blown touch interface, not just the trackpad gestures supported by the Magic Trackpad (which I love!). (If you think the possibility of touchscreen Macs isn't even on Apple's radar, check out this and this.)

Something not yet implemented in iOS, that I hope to see sooner rather than later is low-level support for machine vision, stereo machine vision to be precise, meaning dual video cameras atop MacBook screens and Cinema Displays, or, perhaps better, a dual camera accessory, also sporting stereo microphones, with motorized pan, tilt, and zoom, as well as automatic focus and aperture, benefitting from the same attention to detail as the original iSight. It would be enough if it could do good quality stereo video recording, editable in iMovie, to begin with, leaving any machine vision applications for the following year.

Mostly, I'd like Apple to continue with the transformative process that was the main selling point of 10.6 over 10.5, making the next version even more coherent, robust, and svelte.

whichever comes first

An Engadget article on the relationship between Apple and AT&T cites a legal action as confirming "the handset was originally locked to AT&T / Cingular for a full five years." In reading that it occurred to me that there might have been another factor written into the original contract, some number of iPhone activations, that would automatically shorten the period of exclusivity if it were to be reached before the full term expired, without any renegotiation of the contract.

Given that iPhones have out-sold everyone's expectations, such a clause could be expected to fire, but the exact timing would remain indefinite until just a few days remained.

new version of Safari feels faster

I've got nothing to compare them with, but here's my SunSpider JavaScript results (late '08, 2.4 GHz MacBook, running Mac OS X 10.6.4).

breaking Windows dependency, a stepwise approach

Apple is beginning to invest in outreach to small businesses, but for this initiative to enjoy maximum success they'll need to understand the constraints that keep businesses dependent on Microsoft's inferior Windows platform.

Mainly it's a matter of time, or the lack of it; Windows keeps IT personnel too busy to investigate alternatives. Ironically, some IT departments still have a Windows-only rule, to avoid having to spend the extra time to learn to support other platforms, even though doing so might pay off in the long run, through reduced need for support.

Of course, time is just another word for money, and money is perpetually oversubscribed in any small business, the upshot being that it takes an iron will to consider total cost of ownership above initial price. Support somehow becomes a separate issue, subsumed under the necessity of having an IT department at all, and is effectively rendered a non-issue by (mainly voiceless) repetition of "that's what we pay them for."

So how to break into this circle of nonoptionality?

The first step probably has to be taken by the company (or IT department) itself, rescinding their Windows-only policy in principle. Until that happens, the best arguments in the world fall on deaf ears.

Once they've taken that step, other platforms can compete for their business on the merits, and once that's true new opportunities appear, as if by magic. Many of those opportunities will take the form of workstations that can easily be replaced by something else (a Mac mini, for instance), either because their users have no need for specialized software or because what they do need happens to be written in Java or some scripting language that will run just as happily on other platforms, or it runs on a web server and they can access it through any modern browser.

Those are the easiest sales, but there's another category that doesn't involve substitution but rather the insertion of a new layer, workgroup servers, into the company's network. I can say this with confidence, because Windows Server is so expensive only the most successful small companies will have seriously considered providing a dedicated machine running Windows Server for each workgroup. Others might be aware of the potential benefits that groupware running on workgroup servers can bring, but for most the cost of Windows Server will have proven prohibitive. Not so with other platforms. Apple's Mac mini server, for example, costs $1000, no matter how many client machines you connect to it, and it comes with the basic categories of groupware already installed.

Another selling point (for Macs) that shouldn't be overlooked is the relative ease of development of custom applications, presenting the possibility of crafting what you really need, whatever it might be, in-house, rather than making do with what you can find elsewhere. Microsoft has made the creation of simple databases and automated spreadsheets fairly easy, but beyond that you're pretty much on your own. Anyone with the skill to create an automated spreadsheet of more than trivial complexity can learn to build practically anything on the Mac, and well written Objective-C is self-documenting, so if they leave someone else should be able to pick up where they left off.

Of course, for the really tough cases, Macs run Windows just fine.

wisdom regarding the value of failure

a notion regarding Apple TV

A strange thought just crossed my mind. What if Apple, rather than combining the AppleTV with the the Mac mini, were to instead combine it with the Time Capsule? The result would be an AirPort base station, plus a largish, reliable hard drive, plus video hardware and ports to allow wired connection to your TV or home theater setup. One product, three complementary uses. Make that four complementary uses, as such a device would surely also run iOS Apps, including games.

The hard drive could automatically be divided between maintaining a media library and preserving Time Machine backups. The AirPort functionality would work equally well to stream media to another device, or to allow you to connect controller hardware for games, or enabling your laptop or desktop to send incremental TM backups, or simply as a means of connecting to the internet.

Really, if your starting point is the AppleTV, all that's needed is a faster CPU and GPU, something adequate for games, a larger hard drive, and the software in a Time Capsule. The A4 chip is probably an adequate CPU, although a dual-core variant or something based on the next generation ARM design might be preferable given the need to drive a 1920 X 1080 display, but these parts shouldn't be prohibitively expensive.

Hmmm...