Today Apple announced their plan on changing the way the textbook industry works. To achieve this they’ve released a new tool called “iBooks Author” which provides a WYSIWYG interface to building ePUB files. Essentially the rub is that while you can use it to build content and you can give it away for free in any of the formats you want, if you want to sell it you have to use the iBookstore. But let’s take a look back at the product for a second.
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You know the part before the upgrade where they tell you to check all of your applications before you upgrade? Well, last night I decided that it would be a great idea to upgrade my Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion. Turns out that perhaps wasn’t so great an idea after all when my Huawei USB 3G modem dongle decided that it wasn’t going to work since it wasn’t relevant for the new 64-bit only kernel. Oops, I should have checked first. But it isn’t a complete disaster!
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At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2007, Steve Jobs came on stage to announce a launch date for the very first iPhone and to announce how developers would build applications for the iPhone. His announcement was that his suggested way of developing for the iPhone was to write web apps (it is a couple of minutes in). So what was the reaction to that?
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My day job is in theory based around development, primarily web application development. Whilst lately I’ve been doing far too much infrastructure stuff, most of what I do lives in a web browser eventually. I am also an Apple user. I have an iPod Classic, an iPod shuffle, an iPhone, I got my Dad an AppleTV and I have a MacBookPro, convinced my ex-gf, her father, my father and my sister to get Mac. Probably a few other people along the way. I came to a Mac because it was the cheapest laptop I could buy that would reliably work well. I was a Linux user at the time (still am to a point) so the UNIX functionality and X11 features in Mac OS X appealed to me. Worst comes to worse, I reasoned, I could run X straight from my computer when I’m at home and hopefully the browser and text editor choices would be fine. I’ve come a long way from that.

So Apple lately have been doing a lot nifty stuff. They’ve released the iPad, their tablet PC. In the announcement the other day they said they’d sold 450,000 of the devices. To be honest that is impressive. That is a lot of tablet PC’s sold, probably a significant portion of the market now are Apple after a week. They also announced iPhone OS 4.0 which has some curious things.

The first change with it isn’t technical but legal. They’ve changed the Terms of Service section 3.3.1 from:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

To:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

So basically if you’re not writing Objective-C, C, C++ or JS (HTML5/CSS/etc) then you’re not welcome. Bye bye CS5′s funky Flash Export to iPhone App feature. I’m not going to comment on this in general however Apple have consistently said those four languages are it. Using or developing tools to get around it was seriously tempting fate given all of the announcements Apple made. I’m not surprised, I’m not sure if it is a good or a bad thing (Flash shares a special loathing in my heart) but given Adobe have lately made their Flash player on Mac a piece of crap and not improvement (don’t get me started on Linux support), I can see where Apple have come from. Some argue that there way it handles it’s fast switching blah blah won’t work with quasi emulated apps because it doesn’t know data structures blah sounds to me like crap. The observation that Adobe’s write once run anywhere CS5 deployment could mean that Apple’s extra features aren’t supported until Adobe deem it to be included is a problem. That would mean any cool features would be unavailable to a portion of the developer community potentially never. It would potentially give Adobe control over the platform in a way Apple may not like. At the end of the day Apple is a public company and what makes them a profit is why they are there, so this is where their decision takes them. And whilst many claim Apple owe Adobe for their heritage, it is clear that recently Adobe haven’t been supplying a good experience for Mac users of their software anyway. Titanium keeps being included in the list of tools that might be excluded but I’m not entirely sure, it is certainly a border case.

The other interesting feature they added is multitasking. But nowhere do I see that people are understanding that it isn’t multitasking, it is just services. Apple aren’t giving people the ability to run what they want in the background, they’re offering services that will handle what they need for them. Other comments like the platform can’t support true multitasking and Apple’s design is flawed have come up in a few places which miss the point of the services. Apple doesn’t want your trashy code chewing memory and CPU, potentially going rogue and killing the users battery like it can on other platforms. That is unfriendly. The iPhone OS runs a system more than capable of multitasking it is just Apple prohibiting access to do so. The services they’ve got seem to meet the criteria and also permit reasonable flexibility. Will it be enough? Perhaps, but it is a start. They’ve got seven services: background audio (Pandora), VoIP (Sykep), background location (anything that watches your location), push notifications (yawn), local notifications (think alarm clock), task completion (the closest to true multitasking, example is a photo upload takes a while) and fast app switching (my old Palm worked like this in some respects). I think these will work well and solve a number of needs on the device and bring it up.

The other features announced included folders (better categorisation really) which reminds me in part of how stacks works as well. The next was improvements to mail for a unified inbox. Apple Mail on the desktop has this and I’m not a fan of it (I use the per mailbox inbox). Other Mail enhancements included threading and opening attachments in other apps. The last useful feature is the multiple Exchange account functionality, this will mean I can use Google’s Sync toy with my work’s Exchange account whilst still retaining some other identities I have. I have things sort of working but it could be better. Their book app is also coming to the iPhone which is more than predictable.

From the enterprise front they’ve beefed up support. Some of it already sounded familiar but the wireless app distribution is going to be useful for work (the current method involves connecting it to a desktop and loading the apps manually or App Store, this is a third option). Game Center seems interesting and a bit late to the game but better late than never as they say. They’ve also got an advertising framework built in. Not sure how this is going to play out but we will see. Hopefully they won’t nuke the third party advertising frameworks but I don’t see them as making that mistake, a regulator would surely snap them for that. Including it in the framework will probably mean the demise of most alternatives and they’re doing it in a way that can be relative unobtrusive compared to how it is handled now. Time will tell.

All in all there are some things that people don’t like (TOS Change) but I can see the Apple progressing slowly and improving. They’ve got a head start over every other platform and it appears that only Google have been able to come close to match them. Microsoft have pulled out all stops with Windows Phone 7 to create something that looks cool but they’ve almost left it too late, those burnt by Windows Mobile are perhaps wary of the next operating system. The Apple ad with the PC going “Trust me” over the ages rings true. My iPhone will miss out on a lot of the cooler stuff with services because of it’s age which is annoying but life. How application developers will handle this will also be interesting.

Of course now the iPad is out, maybe they will update a whole heap of other things.

I must admit reading the article this morning on Slashdot about how Microsoft is building their own “App Store” really did sound of Microsoft copying yet again. Now I don’t believe that everything Apple has done is necessarily new or unique, they’ve got their own photocopiers somewhere but you have to wonder after Steve Job’s WWDC keynote comparing features of Vista to Mac OS X you start to wonder where Microsoft is really innovating. A lot of its infrastructure to be honest is copied from previous implementations and there rarely appears to be something new coming from Microsoft. When I look at the Vista desktop is a mashup of what I have available from Compiz Fusion on Linux, parts from Mac OS X and some parts from a Sun research project called ‘Project Looking Glass‘.

But if you look at an old Gizmodo article you’ll see that Apple have been cheeky for a long time now, even suggesting two years before Vista’s release date that Tiger was it. Funnily enough by the time that Microsoft got around to releasing Vista for retail in early 2007, Apple had already released Tiger in April 2005 and was on its way to Leopard already releasing a beta of it at WWDC2006 and a feature complete edition for WWDC2007, releasing later in 2007. Apple haven’t stopped there and are already releasing betas of Snow Leopard at WWDC2008 with new and interesting features, some of which copied themselves and some interesting approaches at doing things as well as interoperability features including primitive Exchange support.

And now we’re seeing Microsoft push forward their plans for “Windows 7″ which from all accounts appears to internally think that its Windows 6.1 (you can Google for comments on the general confusion on which Microsoft appears to determine that this is version “7″ of their product as well as people doing the maths and not finding ’7′ as the number). With any luck we’ll see Snow Leopard and Windows 7 come out at around the same time and we can do a comparison between the two without much difficulty.