software and opinions
Launch your application, oh look, an update! Clicking “Update” takes you to the Mac App Store web site. Click “View in Mac App Store” since apparently I’m not doing that yet, but wait! Tell my browser that it’s okay to do what I just told it to do. We’re launched into the Mac App Store …
Continue reading “Updating software on your Mac in ten easy steps…”
Since the Chrome OS announcement the other day I’ve been thinking more about what a world with rich enough web APIs to support all general purpose applications might look like. I’m not sure that it’ll happen, but it sounds like Google is putting their weight behind it and they’ve been successful in the past at …
Continue reading “A brighter future for mobile applications?”
This post began as a comment on Matthew Gertner’s blog post The Browser Platform Wars. It’s a rant not an article, don’t take it personally. In my experience (8 years building Mozilla based products and playing with WebKit since it was first released as WebCore in 2003) there are a few clear technical and social …
Continue reading “Mozilla and WebKit, browser platform wars.”
Six months ago I predicted: This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share …
There were two interesting announcements today. First the Sidekick ID which had been previously leaked was formally announced and reviews have started to show up. Secondly Apple announced that the OS X Leopard will ship three months late – more than two years after the previous release of OS X. This slip is being seen as evidence that Apple is having trouble building as many products at once as it wants to.
In the four years I was at Danger we were building exactly one product at a time. We failed to separate the development of the hardware, the OS and the applications. Separating the client and server schedules was a slow and painful process. In the two years since I’ve left things seem to have improved. The fact that they’re able to ship two products (even if they are quite similar) is really exciting. That Danger is succeeding where Apple, with their 30 years of experience, is beginning to stumble is cause for congratulations.