Hello, Arthur D. Levinson

When I first saw a picture of Arthur D. Levinson I thought ‘hey, that’s Bill Gates’. Levinson has been promoted at Apple so that now he is the company’s chairman – the role has been empty since Steve Jobs died. Levinson has been at Apple for years and is also the chairman of a load of other companies but nobody seems to have heard of him because he doesn’t do much public stuff at Apple. Bob Iger (you might of heard of him – he’s CEO of Disney) has also been given a place on the board.

On the bright side Tim Cook says Art, say I guess I won’t have to type Arthur D. Levinson all the time…

 

 

Steve Jobs and ARM

This is going to be one of those blog posts where I haven’t had a chance to write one for a few hours so I had better write one now kind of thing. The first thing that is worth talking about is Steve Jobs getting nominated for the Time Magazine Person of the Year. The Person of the Year award is generally given to a person or group of people that have made the most impact on the year whether dead or alive. Last year it was Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Jobs should have got the award years ago.

It makes complete sense for Steve Jobs to be awarded because he has not necessarily changed the world the most in the last year, but he has certainly changed the world the most in the last decade with the various different iThings. Because he has been nominated it is now pretty much guaranteed that he will get it regardless of who else gets nominated.

The next thing to talk about is ARM. ARM make the chips that power almost every smartphone on the planet and a day after Adobe announced they were going to stop making Flash for mobile devices (thus meaning that faster chips aren’t really needed…) ARM have announced a new bunch of quad core processors for smartphones providing incredibly fast performance – the iPhone 4S is only dual core. They have also announced a bunch of incredibly powerful GPUs that are almost capable of desktop performance. Here is an incredibly cheesy video demoing that:

The next four years of Apple

Apparently Steve Jobs set out a four year plan for Apple before he died – a rumor that seems reasonable. The question is, however, what the next four years will bring.

The next product that Apple is rumored to be launching is some sort of update to the MacBook line – either a more affordable version of the MacBook Air (i.e. sort of bringing back the regular MacBook) or producing a thinner, smaller MacBook Pro. These do seem realistic and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did come about in the next few months.

Next year Apple will probably launch the iPad 3, though rumors online seem to be fairly quiet and I would suggest that Apple won’t update it until summer (new iPads normally come in spring). It’ll probably be thinner, have an A6 processor and Siri built-in with iOS 5. I don’t think they’ll be changing much largely because they don’t really need to.

Another one that I would bet on for early next year, probably earlier than the iPad, would be a new Mac Pro or iMac. Neither will be major updates, they will just have faster processors.

Around this time next year I think that we’ll probably begin to see OS X 10.8, OS11 or iOS 6 – they are almost guaranteed to be the same thing and according to MacRumors Apple are already developing it due to an increase in the number of visitors to their site from ‘Intel 10.8′ which is what the next version of Mac OS X would show up as. Of course, people could be using a User Agent switcher to trick them. It seems likely that iOS and OSX will merge in someway because loads of updates were thrown at both, and it seems difficult to go beyond Lion – the biggest cat of them all.

Late 2012 or early 2013 (provided the world hasn’t ended) will probably bring an iPhone update with the next version of iOS regardless of whether it is merged with OS X. The iPhone 5/6 or whatever Apple call it will probably have 4G connection built in and will probably use Apple’s A6 chip (which hasn’t actually been announced, we can just assume they’ll make it) and probably finally have a boost to 1GB of memory.

After that the future is unclear because people aren’t even making predictions for where anything will be, but I would be prepared to bet that there will be another big product range  - like the iPhone or iPad. The technology probably doesn’t currently exist for whatever the mystery 2013/4 Apple product happens to be, but I bet the only person to have come up with it (and written it down) was Steve Jobs.

How the people of ’55 would change the world

February 24th 1955. June 8th 1955. October 28th 1955. On these three dates three men were born that would go on to change the world. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee would go on to revolutionize portable music, put a computer on every desk and create the World Wide Web. 1955 may have been a regular year – nothing major happened.

Steve Jobs started Apple. He helped to make the company before leaving and then coming back in the 1990s. The company is currently one of the most valuable in the world. Bill Gates started Microsoft and it created Microsoft Windows – the Operating System used on many of the world’s computers. He retired after having become the richest man in the world to go into philanthropic activities. Tim Berners-Lee is perhaps the lesser known of the three men but he is arguably had the most influence over the modern world by creating the World Wide Web whilst working at CERN and today it is used by almost every company and individual on the planet.

1955 was a pretty damn good year for making people. Perhaps there has been another year like that – though we might not know it because the people of that year may still be children. Perhaps it will be 1984 – the year that Mark Zuckerburg was born. Perhaps it was just coincidence that three of the greatest innovators of the last century were born within months of each other.

RIP Steve

*sob*

Chris Espinosa

The world has lost a visionary.

Barack Obama

I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death… For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.

Bill Gates

I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary.

Steve Ballmer

We’ve lost a unique tech pioneer and auteur who knew how to make amazingly great products.

Paul Allen

Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.

Mark Zuckerburg

Today is very sad for all of us.

Eric Schmidt

Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesnt just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement.

Dick Costolo

Woke to the news of Steve Jobs’s death. He changed the world. I knew him a little and admired him entirely. Love to Apple and his family.

Stephen Fry

In Steve Jobs, we have not just lost a person, but we have lost a revolutionary.

A friend

Steve Jobs was truly incredible. He was, I believe, like no other CEO. He was the force that turned Apple from a company in loss to the richest in the world. He was the person that gave the world the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone and the iPad. He changed and formed every industry that his company touched. The success of Steve Jobs, and Apple under him, was like no other company.

His death has been the most reacted to thing in the history of the internet. Right now, I am among many thousands of bloggers on WordPress alone. Twitter had its records broken once more, with almost 10,000 tweets per second. Google’s homepage mentions him. Apple have set up a dedicated email address for people to remember Steve Jobs with. He is deservedly the most remembered person of the computer age today. He may not have been the one that put the computer on every desk, but he was the one that put the music player in our pockets.

Steve Jobs was perhaps the most successful CEO too. He created a community of customers that have remembered his death so solemnly today. There are already pictures flying around the internet of ‘iPhone vigils’ at Apple stores – BBC News has a slideshow of these.

He put his mark on everything Apple did and I have no doubt he will be remembered in the hearts of Apple, his family, his friends and his fans for years to come. RIP Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs

I’ve been trying to think of a title for this post. I’ve been trying to think what I was going to write. It’s been seven hours since Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO, replaced by Tim Cook, and became Chair of the Board. So what’s happened in those seven hours?

Firstly, the internet has got confused. Steve Jobs is not dead. He is alive and well, just not Apple CEO. Despite this people are mourning him.

Secondly, Wall Street got confused, and Apple’s share price dropped. I think that this probably shows quite well how important Steve Jobs was to Apple. He was the public figure that has made Apple awesome. He led Apple through the development of the iPod, Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad. He isn’t like other CEOs. A few years ago, Bill Gates left Microsoft. It was planned, but much the same he remained Chair of the Board after that. The share price fell with Microsoft too, but remained steady with Ballmer, rather than climbing as it had with Gates before.

I think that it is important to remember that Microsoft has survived without Bill Gates. They managed to get Windows 7 and Kinect out, which significantly helped profits – Windows 7 is by far the best version of Windows ever.

I am not sure what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs as CEO. The recent success of Apple hasn’t been down to Jobs entirely, although he is given a great deal of credit, however he has certainly contributed towards it. It is very true, however, that he picked the right time to leave. With share prices and valuations and record highs, Apple have been going from one success to another, and Steve Jobs needs a rest.

I think that Apple share price will remain steady until around September, and it will be a possible turning point for Apple: the next release of iPhones and iPods. If the new devices are good (this is Apple, they probably will be) the share price will begin to climb again. If it isn’t good, Apple have a problem…

After Flash

The internet seems to have come to the conclusion that Flash is dying. Which is interesting really, considering that Flash is used by 99% of the internet linked computers on the planet. I don’t use it much, but then again most of what I do involves coding. If you look at Adobe shares on Yahoo! Finance (the only thing I use Yahoo! for) you see that they have grown since 2000 – which is before they owned Macromedia, but have fallen since last year – perhaps suggesting that Flash is no longer as successful as it would like to be.

Adobe has been rolling out Flash since 2005, but it hasn’t been as easy as they might like. At first it was a success when they customised Macromedia’s tools into things that looked more like the other Adobe tools. Designers were thrilled. However, Flash would soon gain itself some enemies that would eventually lead it into the state that it is in today.

In early 2007 two things happened: Microsoft released Vista, no big deal because it turned out to be rubbish. Meanwhile, Apple pulled out all the stops and announced the iPhone. It was a device of beauty, something unlike anything either company had ever produced before. Adobe were keen to get in, but Steve Jobs wouldn’t let them: there would be no Flash on the iPhone. This lead to users wishing for Flash on their iPhones and iPod Touches.

Later the following year Flash had another announcement came to set back Flash: Google would be releasing a browser based on the open-source WebKit project called Chrome. This browser was different because it would be based on giving maximum HTML5 support for all users. Interestingly, it did include the Flash runtime, however it was the HTML5 support that was the main problem.

Adobe didn’t understand that HTML5 is the way forward. They didn’t understand that Flash would soon die thanks to the efforts of their competitors. At this point it is interesting to consider another competitor: Microsoft. Microsoft had not voiced any public opinion on HTML5, and had their own rival to Flash called Silverlight. Silverlight wasn’t particularly successful and has penetrated very little of the web. In early 2010 Microsoft began to drop Silverlight slightly to encourage more HTML5 with previews on their new browser: Internet Explorer 9. You could say that it was only Flash that kept IE users happy enough not to switch to something else.

Something else happened in early 2010 that probably got Adobe’s hopes up: the iPad. Perhaps now that Apple had developed a cross of the desktop and mobile they would be happy to have Flash on the device to continue having a more desktop experience? No. Apple had begun to realise, however, that it need to support HTML5, but perhaps a little to late. They began to develop tools to ship with Dreamweaver and Flash CS5 that would allow Flash projects to be exported, ready for iOS. However, in April 2010 they had their biggest drawback: a neat bit of revenge from Apple’s boss. If you click here you can read through Steve Job’s personal view on Flash: he hates it and there will be a blanket ban on all apps submitted to the App Store that have been created by ‘third party’ applications.. But he is basically right: Adobe has been wrong to continue to develop Flash when they should be looking onto to a more realistic future where Flash is not the market leader for Rich Media presentation on the web.

In the next few months iPad users began to discover something new. The HTML5 web experience. Websites were now building dedicated ‘iPad friendly’ versions of the site with new features that made it more dynamic and all without Flash. People were getting a better experience. After a few months Apple lifted this ban, perhaps because people were keen to use tools like C# (MonoTouch) and Java to develop apps – and they had no problem with that. By this point it was too late for CS5 because the feature to export to iPhone was quickly removed when Apple made the announcement, resulting in the feature being included in Flash Pro CS5.5.

Dreamweaver CS5.5 also purposely included extra HTML5 support with templates included to make iOS web design even better. This wasn’t done to support the HTML5 standard or to encourage developers to use it; they just wanted in on Apple. Perhaps Apple only began to realise a few weeks ago it needed to support HTML5 by announcing Adobe Edge. Edge is basically a design tool for HTML5 animation, however it is based off of a JavaScript library, and I would prefer it was more pure HTML5.

The problem with the future being HTML5 is Dreamweaver. HTML5 could be described as an open mix of Flash and Dreamweaver, but ultimately all design will be in Dreamweaver because it will be the only way that Adobe keep users. Dreamweaver is the world’s most popular web design tool (I handcode in NetBeans) and if it is to stay that way it will be extensively HTML5. There is, however, the possibility that Dreamweaver will be knocked from the podium by an open-project. I agree with this: there ultimately needs to be an open-source web design program that can take on Dreamweaver.

Unfortunately Apple

Today The Wall Street Journal discovered from a group of former Apple Store employees that they are not allowed to say words such as ‘unfortunately’ to customers and should try to be as nice to customers as possible, trying to help rather than sell products. During the employment process it is said that Apple show a bias towards prospective staff that have strong brand loyalty. It’s like a religion. Here’s my list of things that are examples of where an Apple employee should probably say unfortunately (please feel free to add more in the comments);

• Unfortunately you need to stay in this shop because Macs are better than PCs, don’t get elsewhere
• Unfortunately I don’t have a clue how to copy and paste a file in Finder. Sorry.
• Unfortunately your [Apple device] is dead forever
• Unfortunately we can’t given you a refund because your two-year-old jailbroke you iPad and then puked on it
• Unfortunately I don’t really like you or Apple products, its just a false pretense
• Unfortunately you can’t spray paint your old iPhone 4 white, but fortunately we now sell iPhone in white!
• Unfortunately I don’t understand you
• Customer: I’ll build a Hackintosh if you don’t say Unfortunately
• Unfortunately I don’t know Steve Jobs’ e-mail address
• I’m sorry you can’t handle bright stuff, but unfortunately we don’t sell anything that isn’t shiny
• Unfortunately you can’t buy real Apples in here, but I’m told the iPod Shuffle is particularly tasty. Do you own a Mac?
• Unfortunately we do have to block certain websites such as Microsoft.com because it isn’t shiny enough
• Unfortunately I, an Apple Genius, have to refuse to fix your Hackintosh. Google it