Posts from — June 2008

Daniel Eran Dilger
The Street’s Jim Cramer, looking close to imminent death as colleague Farnoosh Torabi watched in concerned horror, recently talked about Steve Jobs’ health in the context of Apple’s future viability as a company. Torabi set up a clever stock manipulation scam conversation with Cramer entitled, “Without Steve Jobs, There is No Apple,” where she introduced her boss by insisting that the iPhone 3G introduction was overshadowed by worries about Jobs’ lack of obesity. “Most of the attention right now is going on the health of the founder and the CEO of Apple!” she intoned.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
In response to my articles outlining the potential of the SproutCore framework in developing a new type of desktop class web applications, a number of critics have attacked the technology based on poking at some simple demos on the web from odd versions of Internet Explorer or the Camino browser. That forces me to point out that not only has Apple been using SproutCore to drive the slick .Mac Web Gallery for several months, but SproutIt has been using the framework in production in Mailroom, which has been used to manage email for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
I did an interview with Justin Young of TalkingHeadTV.com, where we talked about what SproutCore does and how it relates to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Here’s the YouTube links:

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple’s limited comments on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due in about a year, have opened the playing field for rampant speculation. Here’s a look at a series of myths that have developed around the upcoming release. The second myth of Snow Leopard:

Apple is dropping support for 32-bit Intel Macs because Snow Leopard is 64-bit.

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One of the biggest revelations at WWDC was quietly unveiled in a session on Friday morning entitled “Building Native Look-and-Feel Web Applications Using SproutCore.” While Apple maintained high security during the entire NDA-sealed WWDC session, the secret of SproutCore is out because it is an open source project and people can’t stop talking about it.

Continues: Apple’s open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web

Myths of Snow Leopard: 1 PowerPC Support
Apple’s limited comments on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due in about a year, have opened the playing field for rampant speculation. Here’s a look at a series of myths that have developed around the upcoming release. The first myth of Snow Leopard:

Apple is dropping support for PowerPC Universal Binaries, so software will dry up for users of PowerPC Macs.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Regular readers will recall that when Safari for Windows shipped, I suggested Apple was likely looking to move its Mac OS X Cocoa development model into the Windows arena in order to broaden Cocoa’s visibility and adoption.

Over the last year, I’ve also outlined Apple’s efforts to starve Adobe’s Flash and AIR (and by extension, Microsoft’s me-too Flash plugin called Silverlight), at a time when pundits have insisted that Flash was a vital missing element on the iPhone and that Apple could/should/would be scrambling to port Flash to it. It might be a surprise to find that Apple’s air supply attack on Flash and its interest in dusting Windows with Cocoa are actually related.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple’s public introduction of Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, was decidedly brief at WWDC, with only passing public mention of its new feature set. That’s in part because the company is delivering something nearly unheard of in the consumer software industry: Apple is advancing a new software product that improves upon its fundamentals rather than advancing a lot of marketing features.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
In addition to offering Mac and iPhone users the equivalent of a hosted, 20 GB Exchange Server mailbox with additional photo and video sharing features and better file management tools at a price far lower than any vendor could afford to offer hosted Exchange mailboxes, Apple is also building upon Mac OS X Server to deliver an Exchange and SharePoint alternative for companies who want to host their own messaging and collaboration services at a far lower cost than Microsoft charges.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Coyly billed as “Exchange for the rest of us,” Apple’s new Mobile Me targets consumers with a subscription service that offers a suite of web apps paired with push web services to keep users in sync between their computers and mobile devices. It’s the new .Mac, and offers something Microsoft has yet to match in its plans for Live Mesh.
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