MacWorld 2005: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Twice a year, Apple fans like me take the first half of the workday off to watch the semi-annual ritual that is Steve Jobs’ MacWorld Expo keynote speech. When Apple is nice, they provide a live Quicktime feed for us to get our drool on. When they are cruel, they provide no video and force us to watch text-based accounts provided by the nice folks at MacNN, Engadget, MacMinute, and others. Either way though, we eventually get what we’re after: a first glance at what’s coming out of Cupertino this year.

UPDATE: The archived keynote is now available here.

I thought this year’s announcements were quite good and filled with several things to be excited about, but at the same time, I feel Apple is still behind the game with regards to a few lines of business they should be in. Let’s talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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iPhone Update

Alright, it looks like there’s a good bit of both optimism and pessimism surrounding the upcoming Apple/Motorola phone since the Forbes article was published last week. We’ll never know for sure what this product is all about until we see it, but we can be sure it’s an substantial step closer to what a lot of people (myself included) are craving in a cell phone: the industrial design and user experience of an Apple and the convergence of voice, data, and music in one device.

Some of the reader comments in my previous post rightly point out that we should be conservative with what we expect at MacWorld, and I think this is a good idea. In other words, don’t expect an iPod Mini that can dial… at least not yet. Instead, expect something cool that has Apple’s fingerprints on it.

At the low end, it will be a mere shadow of what I’ve been predicting: A purely Motorola phone with nothing more than a self-contained iTunes application to interface with PCs and Macs. Even the Forbes article expects more than this, however, as it mentions Apple having a say in both the price and overall user experience of the product.

At the high end, the industrial design will be Apple’s, the branding will be at least partially Apple’s, and the entire user interface will be skinned in legendary Mac fashion.

If we hit the high end, I’ll be happy. If we hit the low-end, I’ll definitely be a bit disappointed, but if you told me a year ago that Steve Jobs would have finally gotten Apple into the cell phone game, albeit with one foot, I’d have thrown a party. Does that mean much more significant products aren’t in the works? Absolutely not.

In fact, I’ve learned a few other things this week through readers that make me think things are on the right track. Firstly, the new iPod Photo uses a QVGA display (220 x 176, 65,536 colors) which is the exact same display that appears on many next-gen cell phones. Might some of the interface work being done on the iPod Photo fit nicely on a QVGA phone display? I think so.

Secondly, we learned that Apple, on December 13th, filed suit against unknown individuals for leaking information about unspecified products very recently. This could be one of several things in my opinion: a flash-based iPod, a firewire-based enhancement to GarageBand, the infamous “train conversation” with a Motorola engineer about the Apple/Motorola phone, or something else entirely. Who knows.

And finally, this isn’t really news but some of the comments from the last post got me thinking about the situation that Apple and Motorola will put themselves in even if they merely put iTunes inside a phone. Specifically, there is this notion out there that cell carriers are dead set on forcing users to download music over their networks and that Apple and Motorola would be circumventing that goal with their device. While it is true that carriers would like to impose such a system, that doesn’t mean it will ever be practical enough to actually happen. It takes me two minutes to download an album to my laptop and then another two minutes to transfer it to my phone via SD card. Know how long that would take over a GSM network? Hours. And besides, even if one does download an album directly to their phone, would they not then want it on their laptop as well? The music-via-cell-network plan is a non-starter and the first network that realizes that will probably be the first network to do a deal with Apple. How about it T-Mobile?

“Get the Apple phone for $99 with purchase of a two-year voice/data/.Mac plan, and we’ll throw in a free 1 GB SD card to store all your music.”

T-Mobile could then use their data bandwidth for more important functions like .Mac synching, web browsing, e-mail, news aggregation, and instant messaging. Users could still download music over the network, but maybe there’s an extra fee for that.

I see something like this coming soon, and January will either be a small step or a giant leap towards towards this sort of offering.

iPhone Prediction Confirmed

Way back on July 25th, I told you Apple was coming out with a cell phone. This was before any preliminary Motorola announcements, before any recent rumor mill gossip, and a full four months before Russell Beattie’s and Ross Mayfield’s great articles on the subject. I even told you the exact month: January of 2005.

Lo and behold, via today’s announcement in Forbes magazine (which was via this article at Engadget), Apple has confirmed that not only will they be releasing a full-fledged Apple-inspired phone with Motorola circuitry, but it will likely be shown off in January to an eagerly-awaiting public at MacWorld Expo.

I, personally, can’t wait.

While I am very excited about the official announcement, the revelation that it will be a “mid-range” device probably means that I won’t dump my Treo for it. Once you’ve tasted the sweetness that is the high-range, full-featured phone, it’s tough to imagine going back. However, we all know that Apple is not in the business of producing anything “mid-range”, so I’d bet a large sum of money that this initial iPhone release is just the tip of the iceberg. Might we see a “PowerPhone” shortly thereafter? We most certainly will. The only question is when. Want another prediction? Same time next year.

So what is the moral of today’s iPhone announcement?

• I am all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-sure… at least when it comes to technology predictions. :)
• Where there’s a cool product to be made, rest assured Apple will make it.

Now if only Steve Jobs could get over his hatred for television, maybe we’d see a damned Media Center Mac already. I know I’d pay a healthy sum of money for one.

Note: The photo illustration above is obviously not representative of what the Apple phone will look like. It’s the product of two-minutes worth of Photoshop work.

Referrer Spam is the New Amway

Ever since I found out about Amway and other network marketing schemes many years ago, I’ve always considered them the lowest form of commerce in the world. I mean, you’re not creating a damned thing and you’re using your friends and personal contacts to move generally unneeded goods around the economy. All to make a profit for yourself.

I think we have a new winner now in the “lowest form of commerce” category though: referrer spam. I simply don’t understand the point of this silly practice. If you don’t know what referrer spam is, here is the “technology” in a nutshell:

Websites maintain automatic lists of other web sites which link to them. This is useful, for instance, if I write an article and I want to see who is linking to my article and what people might be saying about it. So every day or so, I check my “referrer log” for new links. Well, what referrer spammers are now doing is polluting my log file with obviously fake referrers like “vicodin-for-free.info” and “sex-with-jenna-jamison.org”. So as a result, I have to wade through hundreds of these links in order to get to real referring links.

What I don’t understand is what the point of it is. The referrer log is only accessible by me and surely nobody technical enough to be checking their own referrer logs would actually click on one of those links. I’ve heard another reason spammers do this is because some people display their “most recent referrers” live on their sites. If you’re doing this, STOP. It provides no value and only perpetuates the myth that referrer spam has a chance achieving its intended effect.

As an aside, the best way I’ve found to get around the referrer spam problem is to use Refer 2.0 to check your referrers. Refer 2.0 can sort referrers by frequency and most referrer spam has a frequency of one, so you can easily ignore any referrers who haven’t provided you at least two referrals.

Also, for a more complete statistical tracking package, make sure and check out Shaun Inman’s ShortStat. Shaun’s working on a spicy new beta right now which is quite nice, but in the meantime, feel free to use the current version. You can have a look at what the output looks like here.

Bosworth on the Tragedy of the Commons

My nomination for Technical Opinion Piece of the Year goes to Adam Bosworth’s recent talk at the ICSOC04. Adam’s speech is enlightening on a great many levels and reminds us that above all else, the success of any technology is directly related to how forgiving it is to the human condition.

The next time you find yourself arguing about something like XHTML vs. HTML, validation, or the semantic web, give this article a read. It really brings the focus back to what matters. It’s not about who can follow what rules. It’s about who can solve what problems.

* Also see Sriram Krishnan’s excellent follow-up post here.

Jonesin’ for Some 8-Ball

As many people know, the next version of Flash — codenamed “8-Ball” — is currently in beta and has been previewed at Macromedia conferences in the last several weeks. I have beta-tested versions of Flash in the past, but unfortunately, I neglected to register for this one. I am the worst kind of beta tester. I download the new builds and never end up providing much feedback to the development team. I’ll be the first to admit, I beta-test mainly to plan future content releases as opposed to actually helping fix bugs. I suppose it would be better to help out with the bugs and all, but as a major content provider, I figure just helping to push the technology is my contribution to Macromedia’s success.

Anyway… after seeing what’s in store with 8-Ball, I’m regretting more and more that I never signed up for the beta. It looks like the most exciting update to Flash since Flash 4 and the introduction of ActionScript. Here is what I’m really excited about so far:

• Live Photoshop-like effects such as drop shadows, glows, and strokes
• MUCH faster rendering and better processor management on both Macs and PCs
• A better anti-aliasing engine for text (codenamed Saffron)… sIFR will benefit greatly from this
• Fully alpha-maskable video, with much better compression as well
• Much much more…

There are two videos I’ve seen which demo various parts of 8-Ball. Have a look:

• Josh Dura’s Video From The New Orleans Conference
• Colin Moock’s Video From The Tokyo Conference

Firefox and the Back Button

Yes, I know… this is hardly worth dedicating an entire post to, but has anyone figured out how to use the backspace button as a way to move backward through browser history in Mac Firefox? This shortcut exists in IE, Safari, and I believe possibly even PC Firefox, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to make it work on a Mac. There doesn’t seem to be a preference item for it, and I haven’t heard of any extensions to enable it either.

The backspace key is by far my most used web browsing shortcut, and I simply cannot switch to Firefox without it. I will say that I am thoroughly impressed with the 1.0 release and at least for me, it is much much faster than both RC1 and the latest version of Safari (which was already quite fast). I am simply amazed at how quickly all sites load now, but without this crucial bit of seemingly trivial functionality, I just cannot make the switch.

Ideas anyone? I’m hoping there is something very simple that I have overlooked.

Can We Speed Up Browser Evolution?

So I just read the statement from the Mozilla Foundation which predicts 10% of the world’s web browsers will be Mozilla-based by the end of 2005. While some people seem pretty excited about this development, I can’t help but wonder if we are settling for too little here. 15 months? 10%? By comparison, every time a new version of the Flash plug-in is released, we get a predictable 80-90% penetration rate at the 15 month mark. Why can’t we expect this sort of development pace with browsers? Several reasons… some perhaps solvable and some perhaps not. This article will discuss several of the issues involved and recommend possible solutions.
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A Brand New Movies.com

The #1 movie site on the internet just got a facelift yesterday. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Chad Roberts and the Movies.com team upstairs along with some Flash and video work from our own group, Movies.com now has themselves a CSS-driven, standards-based site which is quicker to load, easier to use, and ten times more flexible than its predecessor.

The Movies.com relaunch is the first of several major relaunches you’ll see out of Disney in very near future. While not the biggest site in Disney’s portfolio, Movies.com represents other example of a category leader moving towards web standards in a very meaningful way. Where ESPN.com led the way a year and a half ago, other Disney sites are now following suit as part of their normal redesign cycles.
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ESPN Motion for Firefox Launched

Hot on the heels of the ESPN Motion for Mac release a couple of days ago, we’ve now enabled Motion for PC Firefox users as well. Just head to the ESPN.com front page and you’ll see your video selections in the sidebar running down the right side of the page. The sidebar, of course, follows you from page to page on ESPN so you can really access Motion from anywhere on the site.

Although I’m not really supposed to comment on these sorts of things, let me just say that the initial release of ESPN Motion for Internet Explorer a little over a year ago had nothing to do with the sorts of nefarious theories put out by a few ill-informed reporters. One reporter attempted to knock ESPN for not supporting web standards because Motion didn’t work on Firefox, when in reality, not only do we lead the charge towards web standards in our category, but Motion was clearly a “bonus” feature to the site and it was only made possible by technology not available in Firefox. Another reporter falsely concluded that the setup had something to do with our then partnership with MSN. Again, not true.

The initial release of ESPN Motion for Internet Explorer was strictly an issue of prevalent technology. ActiveX, for all of its shortcomings, provides a clear filesystem I/O which allowed us to download and store high quality video on users’ machines without any detrimental side effects… the downside being that it was only implementable in Internet Explorer.

Anyway, enough of that. Motion is now freely available to all. Happy?