How Pixar Created the ‘Wall-E’ Visual Style

Fascinating Animation World Magazine story on the steps Pixar took to make Wall-E look and feel like a traditional film by mimicking the limitations and optics of real-world cameras. Director of photography Jeremy Lasky: We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away. It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with...

Fascinating Animation World Magazine story on the steps Pixar took to make Wall-E look and feel like a traditional film by mimicking the limitations and optics of real-world cameras. Director of photography Jeremy Lasky: We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away. It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with Panavision lenses. We looked at lens flares and how to focus lights in the background. There’s that shot in the truck [his home] when EVE’s looking at the lighter for the first time from WALL-E’s POV and you see the bouquet stretched in the background. And this is the kind of thing we discovered doing those tests. (Via Daily Kos.)  â˜… 

  • ★ More Notes on Notes

    Some thoughtful feedback from readers regarding my analysis of the UI design of the iPhone’s built-in Notes app. Creation vs. Modification Date Sorting Regarding my assertion that sorting notes by modification date was the right choice, Glen Raphael1 writes: That would be fine for me if it were sorted chronologically by note creation time. That is what the Newton NotePad did and what the Palm notepad app did — quite sensibly. However, what Apple chose to do here was sort by note modification time. Which is insane. If I take notes in a variety of contexts over time, my notes are nicely sorted in historical order — the older notes are further down the list and notes taken at a similar time are in proximity to one another. So I can use my temporal memory to find things. Paper notepads in the real world work like that too. But on the iPhone if I ever go back to review my old notes and make any changes, those notes spontaneously jump to the top of the stack. That has two negative consequences: After reviewing and revising old notes, my notes are in a random order. Given that the chronological ordering has been violated and there’s no search feature, you simply can’t find old notes in a large stack. It doesn’t scale the way the Newton/Palm/everybody-else -in-the-known-universe approach does. If I scroll back to find an old note, revise it, and want to continue scrolling back to look at or revise the next note before that one… I can’t find it. Because the note I just changed has moved, it’s no longer adjacent to the one taken before it. This means lots of extra scrolling if I want to try to find the next note in series. In notepad apps on other platforms, I could easily scroll to the 40th newest note, delete a couple parts of that note I no longer care about, click/tap/button press once to get to the 41st newest note, fix a typo there, click/tap/button press once to get to the 42nd note and read it to refresh my memory, and continue down the stack — reading and revising as I go along. Try doing that with iPhone and you’ll want to throw the thing against a wall. As a result of this “feature” I no longer use Notes. I’ve switched to MagicPad and wish I could just delete Notes. Yeah, MagicPad has got copy/paste and font stuff, but for me the killer feature was simply that it allowed me via a settings preference to sort by note creation time, which is clearly the correct default. These are strong points. I don’t keep a ton of notes in my iPhone around at a time — I carry a paper notebook with me wherever I go, and which is where I jot most transient thoughts/items. I use Notes on the iPhone mostly for reference material I’ll want to come back to many times (which is to say, over a long enough period of time that I’ll have gone through several paper notebooks over that period), and for very specific temporary material like my airline flight reservation number for a trip. If you’re the sort of person who uses Notes for everything — say, if you’ve got dozens of notes — I can see how sorting by modification date might be maddening. It also occurs to me that sorting by creation date would fit better with Notes’s “looks like a paper tablet” visual metaphor. With a paper notebook, it’s easy to find something you know you jotted down “about a month ago” just by flipping back to the right spot in the notebook. In short, switching Notes to creation date sorting seems like a good idea. It would work better for people like Raphael, who keep a large number of active notes — and it would work just about the same for people like me, with a small number of active notes. Light users of Notes almost certainly wouldn’t even notice the change. Apple’s Private ‘default.png’ Cheat iPhone apps typically take at least a few seconds to launch, sometimes more. Developers can include an image to be loaded immediately after the app launches, named “default.png”. You can use this as a splash screen (more or less as a title card for the app), or, you can display the empty skeleton of the app’s UI (making it look like the real UI is starting to load, when in fact it’s just a screenshot of an empty UI). Apple’s own apps — which don’t have the same restrictions as third-party apps — have another option available, which I’ll call “dynamic default.png”. What many Apple apps do is take a screenshot of the current display when you quit, and overwrite the default.png file inside the application bundle with that screenshot. Then when next you launch that app, you immediately see the entire contents of the screen from when you previously quit — but it’s still just a screenshot, a static image. It looks like the app has launched instantly, but in fact you’ve still got to wait a few seconds for the app to restore itself to the point where it’s actually ready to use. I’ve seen third-party iPhone developers complaining that this trick is only available to Apple; they want to use it too. The technical reason why they can’t is that because application bundles are cryptographically signed, you can’t modify the contents of the application bundle (by, in this case, changing the default.png resource file) without breaking the digital signature. Apple could enable this feature for signed applications by providing for a way to specify a dynamic default.png that exists outside the application bundle, somewhere in the application’s private Library folder. But I don’t think these dynamic default.png files are a good idea in the first place. I fully realize that the user’s perception of performance is often more important than actual measured-by-a-stopwatch performance, but in the case of dynamic default.png files, I think it goes too far. It is frustrating to see a complete UI that looks usable but isn’t. Dynamic default.png files make application launch times look faster, but they don’t make them feel faster. I feel like a dolt every time I get tricked into uselessly tapping UI elements on a default.png screen. Notes uses this dynamic default.png cheat, and there are only very subtle indications to tell when the actual UI has replaced the screenshot (and is therefore ready to use). Several readers wrote in to complain about their frustration at not being able to tell when Notes is actually ready to use. Keshuv Prasad writes: The splash/loading screen for the list view is identical to the loaded view and gives no indication when one becomes the other. In note view the background lines blink when the loading screen turns into a loaded screen, but the pre- and post-loaded screens are identical. Photos, for example, displays a blank list as its splash screen and only shows the individual items (Camera Roll, Photo Library, etc.), after the app has loaded.  This makes it easy to tell whether the app is loading or has already loaded. Applying this same design to Notes would reduce frustration with not knowing whether or not the screen is responsive or not upon loading the app (note view would show a blank note, with the appearance of text indicating that it has finished loading). I too find the Photos model — where you just see a more or less empty shell of the UI upon launch — to be superior. That way, as soon as you see actual content, you know the app is ready to use. Prasad has another good suggestion: My second issue is how the notes are displayed in list view. There are up to 8 notes listed and the bottom one’s row fits exactly on the screen.  To use Photos as an example, it only displays 7 full rows, with the 8th row cut off.  Yes, the number of notes is in parentheses after Notes, but having the last row cut off (Contacts does this as well) would be a nice visual indicator that there is something below to scroll.  This is a minor quibble, though. In other words, because iPhone list views don’t show persistent scroll bars (which, on the Mac, provide an indication when there is more content below what is visible), it’s helpful if the row height is such that an even number of rows don’t fit exactly on screen. Good suggestion. In a previous Apple handheld platform universe, Raphael was the developer of NewtPaint. ↩

  • ★ Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3

    After a few weeks in the arms of Firefox 3 betas, I’ve returned to Safari as my daily browser. Unsurprisingly, it’s the interface that drove me back. But I’m not talking about cosmetic issues — or at least not only about cosmetic issues. The new default theme for Firefox theme looks pretty good, especially when you switch the toolbar icons to the small size. The Safari-style “GrApple” Firefox themes I linked to last month makes Firefox 3 look even better, albeit mostly by mimicking Safari. But cosmetic appeal is just the surface. Steve Jobs, in a 2003 New York Times magazine interview, said: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And that’s just it. Firefox 3’s shortcomings as a Mac app are behavioral, too. The main issues that drove me back to Safari: Background Window Appearance — Starting with Leopard, standard application windows follow a simple, consistent rule: the frontmost window of the current application gets a medium gray color while all other windows have a lighter, flatter look. The idea is that with several windows visible at once, giving the active one a darker look makes it easier to pick out visually. (One of the long-standing gripes regarding the late brushed metal theme — Christ, remember that ugly thing? — was that its windows barely changed appearance when switching from active to inactive.) Firefox 3 doesn’t do this. Its windows all have the darker “active” look even when in the background. And I believe that its theming mechanism does not allow for it. Text Editing Shortcuts — Firefox 3 still doesn’t support certain standard Mac text editing key bindings. For example, in a one-line text field, the Up and Down Arrow keys should move the insertion point to the beginning and end of the line, respectively. Drives me nuts. Dictionary — Firefox doesn’t support the system-wide dictionary. In Safari (and most other apps), you can hover the mouse over any word and use Command-Control-D (by default) to display the definition of that word right there in the current window. Services — Firefox doesn’t support the Services menu. Safari does, and I use this all the time for invoking text filters I’ve made using ThisService, and for sending the current text selection to LaunchBar as input. Tabs — Firefox 3 does let you drag to reorder tabs within a window, and drag tabs between windows, but it doesn’t let you drag a tab out of a window to create a new window with just that tab. Safari 3 does. Picky-picky, I know, but I use this feature in Safari every day to group related tabs together in their own window. Location Field — The new Firefox 3 location field, the so-called “AwesomeBar”, is too clever. When I click the mouse in the middle of a URL, I just want to place the insertion point. I don’t want to select the entire URL. If I wanted to select the entire URL, I’d double-click. Click to place, double-click to select — just like any other text field. Auto-completion in Firefox requires the use of the Down Arrow key to select something from the list of suggestions. In Safari you can just use Return to accept the first suggestion. It might just be habit, but it feels to me like Safari’s auto-completion works a little better. Also, in Firefox, during auto-completion, the Tab key acts like Down Arrow — it selects the next suggestion in the auto-completion list. In Safari Tab moves the focus to the Search field, as it should. In Firefox’s favor, its new location field does some very cool things that Safari does. For example, when matching what you’ve typed against the URLs in your bookmarks and history, it looks anywhere within the URLs, not just at the beginning as Safari does. This means you can type “foo” to match the URL “example.com/foo/”. You can’t do that in Safari. History — I like Safari’s hierarchical History menu. What Safari does is list the 20 most recently loaded URLs, followed by sub-menus for each of the last seven days. Firefox only lists the 10 most recent URLs in the History menu. You can get more done right from the menu in Safari, whereas in Firefox you’ve got to open the History window. Page Load Progress Indicator — Every time I dally with another browser, I immediately miss Safari’s in-location-field progress meter. Back in January 2003 when Apple released the first public beta of Safari 1.0, I described this feature as follows:1 Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it. Over time, the feature has not just grown on me, but I’ve come to appreciate the cleverness of its design. I was wrong, and whoever designed this for Safari was right. The truth is that page loading is the slowest and most unpleasant aspect of using a web browser. It’s important to know whether a page has finished loading yet, and so a browser’s progress indicator deserves a prominent spot. The best spot is nearly the location field, because that tends to be where your eyes are when a page starts loading. You can’t get any closer to the location field than being inside the location field itself. But, once a page has loaded, there’s no reason for a progress indicator to remain on screen. Firefox 3 has a small spinning progress indicator in the toolbar. It’s too subtle, and as a simple spinner, offers no indication as to how far along the page load has progress, only that it is still loading. Firefox does offer a proper progress bar in the status bar footer, but (a) it’s far, rather than close, to the location field in the toolbar; and (b) the status bar is optional — if you turn it off, the only progress indicator is the spinner. This one’s a total win for Safari. New Tab Shortcut — In Safari, Command-T always creates a new tab, even if a browser window isn’t frontmost; it does the Right Thing and creates a new tab in the frontmost browser window and brings that window forward. In Firefox, invoking Command-T just beeps if, say, the Downloads window is frontmost, or if there is no open browser window. Inline PDF Viewing — An obvious win for Safari. AppleScript Support — Firefox 3 has almost none. Safari’s is pretty good. Firefox 3 does have a lot going for it. Yes, it’s still in beta (b5 at this writing), but even in beta it is far better, at least Mac-wise, than Firefox 2. It also unquestionably offers certain advantages over Safari. For one thing, it does a far better job managing memory. The main reason I switched from Safari to Firefox in the first place was memory consumption on my PowerBook G4 — after just a few hours of my use, Safari 3 inevitably consumes at least 300 MB, often more, of private memory. In the same usage, Firefox 3 never seemed to use more than 90 MB, even after a few days. On a machine like my PowerBook with “just” 2 GB of RAM, Safari’s memory consumption was a system-wide performance bottleneck. There are few better ways to slow down Mac OS X than to force the system to start swapping. But last week I switched to a new MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM, so while Safari still uses significantly more memory than Firefox, it doesn’t lead to VM swapping on my MacBook Pro like it did on my PowerBook. I love Firefox’s auto-restoration of tabs and windows. Quit Firefox, relaunch it, and your previously-open tabs and windows are restored. Safari 3 has this feature, but makes you do it manually via the “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” command in the History menu. I’m sure most Safari users have no idea this feature even exists. At least as a preference, Safari should offer the ability to do this automatically. Another very cool history-related Firefox 3 feature: the History → Recently Closed Tabs sub-menu. If you accidentally close a tab in Safari, and that tab has been open for so long that you don’t know where it is in your history, it’s a pain to fish it out. With this Firefox feature, you get two histories: (1) the main, traditional one, which stores pages by when they were opened, and (2) a second one, which stores pages based on when they were closed. Both are useful. Firefox also has a shortcut (Shift-Command-T) for restoring the most recently closed tab — perfect for the common scenario of recovering from an accidental tab closure. Perhaps the biggest difference between Safari and Firefox is that Firefox offers an official, supported extension API. Safari supports “Internet plugins” for things like QuickTime and Flash, but offers no extension API for modifying to adding feature to the application itself. Thus, anyone who seeks to modify Safari must resort to unsupported input manager hacks for things like ad-blocking, fancier search, etc. With Firefox, plugins such as these are fully supported. It does seem to be the case that many Firefox 2 plugins don’t yet work with Firefox 3, but it’s a tremendous advantage for Firefox that this extension mechanisms exists. This is so big a part of Firefox that it’s arguably downright criminal that I’ve buried mention of it at the bottom of this review. But the one I want most, FlashBlock, doesn’t yet work with the latest Firefox 3 betas.2 Most of my reasons for preferring Safari to Firefox are Mac-specific details. Camino gets some of them right, but not all, and it’s missing the best thing about Firefox — the extensions. For users new to the Mac, who aren’t aware of these details, Firefox 3 might be as good or better than Safari in nearly every way. (For anyone more used to Windows than the Mac, the text editing behavior in Firefox might feel right rather than wrong, as it does to me.) In short, competition in the Mac web browser space is strong and getting stronger. Firefox isn’t just a great web browser, but it’s a pretty good Mac web browser, too. Nearly all my other complaints regarding that initial public release of Safari have since been rectified. Famously, Safari 1.0b1 didn’t support tabbed browser windows; Safari’s current tab support is my favorite of any browser. AppleScript support was non-existent; now it’s pretty good. Brushed metal windows are gone. And Safari’s location field auto-completion is much improved. ↩ Also excellent, perhaps even downright amazing, is the Web Developer extension. But it’s not something that’s generally applicable for daily browsing. I suspect there are many web developers who use Safari for regular browsing but Firefox for development, because of the Web Developer extension. ↩

  • ★ The iPhone 3G

    Pt. 1: Macro Let’s just say it up front: the iPhone is the greatest piece of consumer electronics that has ever been made. If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc. None of these features is quite what an imagination of the ’80s would have predicted. The TV, for example, is far from the imaginary “pocket TV” of my youth, which was rooted in the concept of broadcast TV channels. But it is a TV. In some ways it is worse; you cannot use an iPhone to, say, watch a live broadcast of a sporting event. In many ways, though, it is better; it stores content, including full-length major motion pictures, which you can watch whenever you want. A pocket full of movies was simply unimaginable 20 years ago. And it’s all in one easily pocketed gizmo. Each of these features is of course available in devices other than the iPhone. A checklist of the iPhone’s features is not, in and of itself, impressive. Some competing devices, in fact, offer all the same fundamental features of the iPhone. The difference is in the overall experience. (Even a $10 Nokia dumbphone, combined with today’s worldwide cellular and satellite phone network, can do the Star Trek-wireless voice communicator trick. That alone would be impressive compared to the brick-sized fabulously expensive cellular phones of the ’80s.) Everything Apple as a company has ever stood for, good and bad, was to get to the point where they could make this. It’s a computer you can take with you everywhere, so small you wouldn’t really even want it much smaller, even if it were possible. In software, Apple went back and rethought certain priorities with the iPhone compared to Mac OS X. On Mac OS X, scrolling prioritizes visual fidelity but can be painfully slow. (Not so much with today’s Mac hardware, but in the early days of Mac OS X, scrolling or resizing windows could be molasses slow. iPhone scrolling, on the other hand, is almost always fluid and perfectly responsive, but the content often doesn’t keep up. The checkerboard background in MobileSafari is the most obvious example of this. The illusion that your thumb or finger is actually moving the screen contents is astoundingly effective. Mac OS X values the visual over the feel; iPhone OS is vice versa, and I prefer it. In hardware, the radical reduction of physical buttons has proven to be genius. The iPhone not only eschews a keypad and keyboard, but also those green/red place-call/end-call buttons that you see on nearly every other phone in the world. The iPhone has just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and home. That seems just right. I’ve gotten satisfyingly proficient typing with the on-screen touch keyboard. My single biggest gripe is that my right thumb often hits the Return key when I’m trying to hit the space bar. In another five years, one of today’s iPhones will be no more than a sentimental curiosity, painfully slow both in terms of networking and computation. The iPhone has significant and obvious shortcomings. But it is an order of magnitude better than anything that came before it. Pt. 2: Micro I bought my original iPhone on day one. When the iPhone 3G arrived, I figured I could wait. In early August, one month after they went on sale, I upgraded. In a nut, the iPhone 3G is aptly named, in that it isn’t much more than the iPhone plus 3G. If they’d called it “iPhone 3G (and GPS)” the name alone would have completely described what was new, technically at least. The iPhone 3G uses the same CPU and has the same amount of RAM (128 MB) as the original. It is an iteration. If you’ve got an original EDGE iPhone, the only factor that really matters with regard to whether you’d be happy after upgrading is the quality of the 3G service where you live. I, apparently, am lucky. 3G service in center city Philadelphia, the surrounding suburbs, and at the New Jersey shore has been terrific. Even before the 2.1 OS update, I had few complaints about dropped calls, and network speed has far exceeded my expectations. Browsing with 3G on the iPhone generally feels just about as fast as browsing with Wi-Fi — the CPU often seems to be the limiting factor in MobileSafari’s rendering speed, not the network. In addition to the faster data speeds and higher-quality audio, 3G offers one additional advantage over EDGE: 3G can take an incoming phone call while simultaneously using the data network. I missed a surprising number of calls on my old iPhone while dicking around waiting for pages to load in Safari. The main problem I initially ran into with 3G networking was that it would occasionally get stuck. I’d try to load a web page, and the inside-the-location-field progress bar in MobileSafari would simply never get past the “h” in “http:”. In most cases, turning the iPhone completely off and back on would fix this. Even better: I have not seen this problem once since upgrading to the 2.1 OS. Tethering my 3G connection with NetShare — sadly, no-longer-available from the App Store — my MacBook Pro achieves download speeds of 700-900 kb/s, and upload speeds of 200-400 kb/s. Tethering with EDGE, I see download speeds of about 200 kb/s. Thus, for me, networking far exceeds Apple’s marketing claim of “double the speed”, and for that alone the upgrade price and slightly higher monthly plan are well worth it.1 (NetShare is simply remarkable, and deserves a full digression. After just one month of owning an iPhone 3G, the $10 I spent on NetShare is some of the best money I’ve ever spent. The multi-step process required to get it working, which you can only partially automate, is a hassle. If Apple can build a feature like this into the iPhone itself, it will be a smash hit feature, and, if it were something that only worked with Mac OS X, yet another impetus for iPhone/iPod users to switch from Windows. (My use of “can” is a reference to the challenge of getting phone carriers on board with it, not any technical hurdle.) The biggest limitation using NetShare is that because it’s a SOCKS proxy, it mostly only supports HTTP/HTTPS networking traffic. iChat can be configured to use a SOCKS proxy, but I’m aware of no way to get Apple Mail to use a SOCKS proxy for IMAP or SMTP, which means Mail doesn’t work using NetShare. But for web surfing, NetShare is a spectacular success. Yes, I’m aware that you can buy external Mac-compatible EVDO dinguses from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, but those are separate services that cost like $60 per month. With NetShare, I paid $10 one time and I can use it with my existing iPhone data plan without paying one additional cent. Performance is way better than the Wi-Fi service in most hotels.) The 3G’s ringer is louder. (I sometimes missed calls with my original iPhone because I didn’t hear or feel the phone ringing in my pocket.) The speakerphone sounds much better. As noted shortly after the 3G shipped, the color temperature of the display is different — warmer if you like it, yellower if you don’t. I prefer the original (cooler) temperature, but it’s only noticeable to me when compared side-by-side. Temperature aside, the screen seems identical to that of the original. Looking at the front face, the form factor is practically unchanged. The 3G is slightly wider overall, but since the display is the same size, there is now a small black border between the screen and the chrome, where previously the screen ran nearly chrome-to-chrome. The back is completely different, plastic instead of metal, and differently shaped. (I chose black, of course.) Aesthetically, I prefer the original iPhone case on all counts: shape, appearance, touch. The original iPhone is, to put it bluntly, sexier. I even liked the black plastic panel at the bottom of the original iPhone — it made it easy to tell which way the phone was oriented without looking at it, such as when pulling it from a pocket. From a practical standpoint, however, the all-shiny-plastic 3G has one significant and perhaps very valuable advantage: it is not slippery. There’s a tackiness to the iPhone 3G in hand. There is something to be said for the fact that the phone with the strongest brand in the world has no visible branding whatsoever on its front face. The home button on the 3G seems to require a more forceful push. The clickiness of my original iPhone’s home button is better. On the other hand, the clickiness of the 3G’s volume and sleep buttons is better. Apple sometimes seems to be the lone consumer electronics company that pays any attention at all to the tactile response of buttons. Battery life is the single biggest shortcoming. The simple truth is that the iPhone pushes the limits of what a device this size can do. Power consumption is perhaps Apple’s single-biggest engineering concern with the iPhone — both in software and hardware. Last year, when criticism of the original iPhone centered on the lack of 3G, Steve Jobs said it was about power. He was right. The iPhone 3G consumes power faster. However, the 2.1 OS update improved battery life dramatically. In particular, after upgrading to OS 2.1, the iPhone 3G does not seem to lose much power while idle. Part of it, too, is that because 3G is faster, you can do more in the same amount of time. So if you measure by time, yes, one hour of web browsing on EDGE will leave you with more battery life than one hour of browsing on 3G. But if you measure by the page, I think loading and reading, say, 15 web pages on 3G stands up just fine against loading the same 15 pages on EDGE. It just happens faster. Pt. 3: Coda “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” — Andy Warhol So too with the iPhone. A billionaire can buy homes, cars, clothes that the rest of us cannot afford. But he cannot buy a better phone, at any price, than the iPhone that you can have in your pocket today. Once you get used to 3G performance, you’ll agree with this tweet from Adam Lisagor: “They should change the symbol for EDGE to stink lines.” ↩

  • Leadership

    Last week's column on bad IT management and the strong response from readers that followed show this to be a huge issue. There are WAY too many IT managers who either can't or shouldn't manage technical teams. Last week I maintained that having a firm technology base, or at least the ability and willingness to acquire one, was essential for good managers. While readers got carried away with which technical test is the best, I don't think there is much dispute that there are certain aspects of technical management that are helped by the manager being a code god. But that's far from all there is to the job. So this week I want to go deeper and look at what's really missing in nearly every instance of such bad management, which is leadership. The distinction between management and leadership is a critical one. Management is -- at its very best -- an exercise in coping while leadership is so much more. Last week's simple idea that the manager ought to at least be able to tell good work from bad is exemplified by Bill Gates, who liked to claim that he could tell good code from across the room and that whatever task a team was facing was something he could code in Visual Basic over a weekend. Both statements are nonsense, of course, but Bill knew he had to talk the talk, making him at least an adequate manager. Does it make him a leader? I don't think so. But let's not blame Bill for that. Let's blame Charles Simonyi. Charles is the guy who came up with Microsoft's development process -- an outgrowth of his research at Xerox PARC. I covered this extensively in my book, Accidental Empires, but the short version is that Charles came to advocate a strong program manager as the central controller of any development group. One person made all the decisions and as long as that one person was correct 85 percent of the time, it was better to have a dictatorship than a democracy or even a meritocracy. This was an effective way to extend Bill's will to Microsoft programmers Bill would never even meet. And to Charles' credit the system worked well enough if the dictator was really, really smart and the task at hand wasn't too complex. It was perfect for the 1980s. But it is far from perfect today and represents one of the fundamental reasons why Windows Vista was so late to market and such a mess when it finally shipped. Vista had plenty of management, but not very much leadership. When I think of leaders what comes to mind first are political and military leaders. We use the term "leadership" to describe those roles far more than we do for what ought to be similar roles in business or technology. This week former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and Joe Biden were all ill-suited to be CEOs of major corporations. However badly the statement went over (Carly supports McCain, by the way), her real point was that there are different skill sets for leaders than managers. And she's right to an extent, but it also says a lot about her own tenure at H-P, which was long on management and short on leadership. Management is telling people what to do, which is a vital part of any industrial economy. Leadership is figuring out what ought to be done then getting people to do it, which is very different. It is a vital part of any successful post-industrial economy, too, but most managers don't know that. Let's use the U.S. military involvement in Iraq as an example of the difference between leadership and management. As more books are written and stories come out we can see that there is a lot of arguing that goes on inside the military. Officers are onboard or not. They are proposing various strategies and taking positions generally advocating what's perceived as safest for both the mission they have accepted and the preservation of life among their troops. Eventually someone makes or imposes an order, but even then there is a lot of second-guessing in the military, which has to be ready with Plans B through G just in case they are needed. This is a lot different from the image many of us have of General Patton pointing toward Berlin, imposing a singular view and forcing it through. In contrast to the military, most businesses do a lot less explaining and pondering and a lot more laying down edicts. That's management, which works fine on an assembly line, but not at all well building a big software application or winning a war. Janna Raye is someone I worked with at InfoWorld half a lifetime ago who has built a consulting career on understanding this stuff and helping companies to transcend 20th century corporate hierarchies and become what she calls "fractal organizations." Janna's consulting business is called Strategems and here is her take on this issue: "Modern corporations suffer from systemic-level issues that emerge in top-down hierarchies. Managers are there to control staff and budgets, not to lead. Although you can make valiant and often successful attempts to control things and processes, you will never again be able to control people. We've evolved, basically, and the information age has had a lot to do with it. So we still "manage" companies the same way as when we actually operated assembly lines in America--the good old days! Now, people need leaders, not managers, and that's what a fractal organization enables. "In fractal organizations, it's the staff deciding how to continuously improve processes in their functional areas for efficiency of time and resources. These organizations thrive with a new pay model also, based upon results or value of work delivered and not how much time it takes to do the task. Those who are really good will get to go home early! These are not the organizations that are shrinking. Like galaxies, they continue to expand, actually aided by a strong gravitational pull of the leaders at the center. Those who do it well create a compelling vision and keep it alive. They allocate resources to projects that align with the vision, and reward arm- and team-cluster leaders for the creative ideas their staff bring to the organization. It's a shared vision and collective goals that are missing from the vast majority of organizations, which is why failing projects continue to drain resources. Really caring about what you do and feeling proud to be a part of something special and wonderful is what every human desires, even if they say they don't." So what's Janna's model for the ideal 21st century organization? Pixar. "They let creativity run wild at Pixar!" says Janna. "Ed Catmull, Pixar's president, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on their collective creativity. Ed and John Lasseter (and sometimes Steve Jobs) are in the center of the galaxy, keeping the gravitational pull strong and the company rotating, so to speak. Around them are the directors, who in the fractal org model lead the arms (no more divisions!). Each film team or cluster, from the storyboard artists to the renderers, goes through the iterations necessary to achieve the best results. Everyone is on board with creating exemplary films and they are relentless in demanding only the best. But in this process, as they say, they have to get all the "sucky" ideas out first. If they don't reveal all the ideas, they don't get all the perspectives and therefore might miss something important. In quantum physics and information theory, this relates to the observer effect and the importance of acknowledging the perspective influence of everyone in a scene. "In top-down hierarchies, the opposite occurs, yet the people on the front lines are the ones dealing with the evolutionary changes going on around them and are the best source of ideas for solving tactical issues. You wouldn't need "change management" if you made continuous improvements at the functional level the responsibility of every individual and team cluster. Yet Pixar makes incredible films in this manner, so you could certainly accomplish it anywhere, even in a supermarket! In fact, some of Whole Foods' leadership practices are fractal -- in-store teams make decisions about products and their placement, based on their observations of customer patterns. "Most start-ups are fractal in their nature, especially those that have exciting visions and get everyone on the same page with collective purpose, goals, and objectives. Most investors, however, are bought into the conventional org chart; when the company devolves into top-down, the turnover begins. That's because of the internal competition that emerges in top-down organizations. The perception is that there's only so much room at the top. At each level of management, the competition increases as cooperation decreases. Thus are created the ubiquitous "silos" of information that thwart collaboration and encourage redundant, wasteful business practices. "Managers are supposedly promoted because of their ability to outperform others and not because of an intention to provide inspiration, guidance, and mentoring to their staff, nor are they openly rewarded for this behavior, even though it usually produces a healthier bottom line. The usual way of rewarding based upon meeting financial goals and managing budgets keeps the focus on short-term financial results only, whereas continuous improvement leadership by frontline staff creates more long-term successes. "When managers don't mentor staff, focusing only upon numbers and bossing people around, it leads to an illusion of control, of which there's no such thing. In these situations, they begin to feel they must continually prove their worthiness and so defend their territories against possibly brilliant staff working "beneath" them. This is a systemic issue, not a personality quirk, though some personalities are more susceptible than others. In most companies, the idea of climbing over others on your way to the top and throwing people who get in your way under buses is de rigueur. The top-down hierarchy was designed to manage industrial-age processes, not information-age challenges. You didn't want the door guy getting creative when attaching the door. Nor did he need to collaborate with the bumper dude. The information age is vastly different. Each scene we're in presents new circumstances and opportunities. "Pixar claims they have a meritocracy. This is a good description of the atmosphere that emerges in fractal organizations. Google was likely more fractal in the beginning, before they brought in managers trained in top-down hierarchies and engrained with the accompanying behavioral patterns, such as knee-jerk resistance to ideas they haven't thought of themselves. Not everyone is like this, of course, but usually those who aren't have had confident mentors themselves who encouraged creative participation. In Catmull's HBR article, he says they insist that everyone in the company contribute ideas, across all functions and levels, or they will perish. Interestingly, he mentions the difficulty in getting new hires to feel comfortable with this process. This results from cultural-level systems that keep people in competition rather than cooperation. Though Catmull tells readers what they do at Pixar and why, he doesn't instruct on how to make the organizational changes that enable this approach to creativity." I guess that last part is Janna's job. All this fractal stuff is interesting, but I'm guessing it is also difficult to implement, because it may describe Pixar but it DOESN'T accurately describe Apple -- the other place where Steve Jobs is king. Still, Apple's product success shows that something is being transferred from one company to the other. It's just that at Apple, Steve Jobs can't make himself stay out of the way.

  • Forbes' Fake Steve Jobs Is Also Fake On Apple

    Daniel Eran DilgerDaniel Lyons is the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog and a columnist at Forbes. After developing a reputation for attacking bloggers, open source, and any alternatives to Microsoft, Lyons has shed his skin to escape from one scandal while at the same time squirming into position to choke the truth out of his next victim: Apple.Reader Marc Elson sent in a link to Lyons' “Snowed by SCO,� an article Lyons wrote to both apologize for and marginalize his years of articles in Forbes that misrepresented the issues in the SCO Groups' attack on Linux. He blamed his reporting on bad information he'd been fed by SCO. It's easy to backtrack now that SCO is toast; in fact it's rather impossible not to. However, neither Lyons nor Forbes can erase the years of false information and misleading spin they published, which not only idealized SCO but also lambasted any individuals critical of the company. He described anyone supporting Linux as religious folk "convinced of their own righteousness."While fighting for SCO, Lyons also attacked “bloggers� in a front page article in Forbes that screamed, “they destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?� as if everyone who writes on the Internet operates as a class that can be summarily judged and dismissed at once. [Snowed By SCO - Forbes]Daniel In the Lyons Den Again.Lyons' lack of hesitation in throwing out poorly conceived attacks is getting him into trouble again. He seems to be working frantically to spin together a bizarre new tale of how Apple is going to simultaneously be torn apart by the can-do-no-wrong Microsoft while also turning into a shadow of the evil monopolist itself, threatening us with its fearsome dominance.Lyons resurrected the identical, wholly illogical conundrum of a paradox posited last year by Windows Enthusiasts, principally Paul Thurrott, who spoke in fear of a threatening monopoly position achieved by Apple's iTunes while--puzzlingly--also describing Apple's music business as a pitiful failure that could never withstand the market dominance of Microsoft. Is it part of a new Forbes campaign? Lyons' new work echos other regular articles from Forbes writers, all attacking Apple and reality in the same breath:Presenting Apple TV a supposed flop, despite its profitably outselling the TiVo this year without incurring the tens of millions in losses TiVo has suffered in the last quarter and in every one of the last several years.
Promoting MusicNet Digital's failed Microsoft partnership in selling music against iTunes and describing the Zune as something other than a spectacular failure. Even the most giddy Zune fan sites are appalled by Microsoft's lack of support in providing updates and fixes for the Zune's major failures. How is Forbes framing it as some kind of sleeper hit?[The iTunes Monopoly/Failure Myth][Scott Woolley Attacks Apple TV in Forbes, Gets the Facts Wrong][Forbes Prints Insanely Self Serving Attack on iTunes by MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade]When Cost Is No Object: Microsoft Media Center.Reader Robert de Bie forwarded a link to Lyons' breathless accolades over Microsoft's Media Center software, which opened with the line, “Guess who's got the slickest software for handling TV, movies and music? Not Apple.�Lyons compared using a Mac and Apple TV with a PC running Vista Ultimate with Media Center features and an Xbox 360 to relay content to a TV. He raved that the Microsoft solution “can do things with digital media that even Apple can't match.� That's true, as Media Center is principally a DVR, a software version of the TiVo; Apple doesn't sell anything the works like a TiVo to record TV. However, Lyons only noted in passing that “Microsoft charges $400 for Vista Ultimate--$300 too much,� failing to add up that a Mac comes with free Front Row features. Apple TV hardware costs $300; it supplies ultra fast 802.11n wireless and, at a minimum, a 40 GB hard drive.In contrast, an Xbox 360 with a 20 GB hard drive costs $350, and another $100 for slower 802.11b/g wireless. So as a wireless media extender, the Xbox 360 costs $450 (50% more), but gives you half the disk capacity and slower networking.Additionally, the required Media Center software that costs another $400 in Vista Ultimate doesn't magically provide you with a TV tuner, so you still have to buy one.In other words, all the money you throw at Microsoft only gives you software that is otherwise free. Without having to pay for all that software licensing, you can go buy whatever TiVo-like TV tuner for the Mac fits your needs, and solve the problem for hundreds of dollars less.Of course, what Apple wants you to do is go without a TV tuner and an expensive cable subscription and simply buy the TV and movies you want to watch from iTunes. Of course, that's not necessary to use Apple TV; you can also rip your own DVDs or even use it to manage your home movies and free podcasts, something Media Center isn't really designed to do because there's no money in it. Don’t forget that there are more fees involved with Xbox Live services, and that TV downloads are more expensive. You’ll also need to pre-purchase Microsoft’s points, converting your cash into Microsoft Live currency that’s subject to change. And once you buy Xbox Live TV shows, don’t expect them to play on your Zune or Windows Mobile phone the way iTunes content plays on Apple’s iPods and iPhone.Of course, when Microsoft sends writers all this equipment to try out for free, then it’s easy to gush over how great it all works and report, "No crashes, no reboots, no blue screen of death. Stunning," as Lyons did. Had he actually been forced to pay the $840 premium to actually use Microsoft’s system, perhaps he’d sing another tune.While Lyons is certainly entitled to his opinion, he should at least present the facts correctly. Outlining any Microsoft product without a consideration of its true cost is always a mistake, because the true cost is almost always hidden. Lyons also wrote “Microsoft's system supports high-definition video; Apple TV does not,� a line that isn't true. Content from iTunes isn't yet available in HD, but the Apple TV does support HD video from other sources and comes equipped with support HDMI, which only the newest Xbox consoles have. Considering that Microsoft has barely sold any new Xbox 360 units this year, fewer than 20% of installed Xbox users even have HDMI outputs. [Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV][Forrester Research: Epic Terror of iTunes and Apple TV]Big Brother Says: Apple is the New Microsoft.Since publishing that “Media By Microsoft� article a couple weeks ago, Lyons has ramped up his attack on Apple into a web of false information that approaches his SCO shilling. He even exploits his popular Fake Steve Jobs blog for dramatic effect.Lyons starts his newspeak reporting, ironically enough, in an article titled “Big Brother,� with a comical juxtaposition of Apple's 1984 Macintosh ad and a modern screenshot of Jobs presenting the new 3G iPod Nano against a huge video screen of his own image. Lyons had earlier published the images on his Fake Steve Jobs blog after a reader had submitted them.This is funny stuff, because in both images, there's a greying white man with glasses on a huge TV screen talking. But in 1984, the man is talking about universal ideology to a numb audience, while in the modern scene, Jobs was talking about changing the market for mobile video with a 6.5mm device, and the crowds were enthusiastically applauding.There was one other amusing similarly however: shortly before eating the hammer thrown by the Macintosh girl in orange hotpants, the 1984 Big Brother screen says, “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!�In 2007, Jobs has said some similar things about Microsoft, but the Macintosh hammer is actually being thrown at Vista. So while it’s not exactly the same thing, it is a funny coincidence. Along those lines, Lyons provided some examples of how, as an enemy of Apple, he can talk himself to death and be buried in his own confusion.[Big Brother - Forbes]Here's What You Believe.So far, we've just covered the photos on the article. Once Lyons started writing, it was like SCO all over again. He says early iPhone buyers “were threatening to take to the streets again--only this time with pitchforks and torches. They were furious because Apple Chief Steve Jobs slashed the phone's price to $400 from $600, making early adopters look like suckers.�If Lyons really wants to make up garbage and rewrite history, he should confine himself to Wikipedia where he can't do any damage. The people complaining about getting what they paid for were a whiney minority amplified by a desperate press trying to find something wrong with the most successful electronics product launch in history.Anyone who thinks buyers who paid $600 for the iPhone to get the hottest new device available--and who ended up with a phone that cost less overall than even the $99 Motorola Q, and further got a $100 refund credit--are “suckers� needs to reevaluate what being a sucker might mean. Perhaps paying Microsoft $850 for the equivalent of a $300 Apple TV with less storage and a slower network, and then still needing to buy a TV tuner is a better example of being a “sucker.�The only difference is that Lyons didn't get a free iPhone from Apple, but did get a bunch of Microsoft Media Center stuff to try out without having to pay for any of it as the rest of us would have to do, were we inclined to let Microsoft control our TVs.[Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 1 - Phony Rage About iPhone Price and Profits]The SCO Shill Lines Up Behind Microsoft, AT&T, and the RIAA.It might not be a surprise that a writer who identified SCO as safe to cheerlead for because of its seemingly legitimate corporate position would similarly jump at the opportunity to weep crocodile tears for some of the other most reviled companies doing business on the planet. Lyons is apparently not very smart about picking corporate favorites.“It looks like an anti-Apple backlash has begun,� Lyons wrote, noting that NBC Universal pulled out of iTunes to partner with Microsoft's Windows Media DRM-based Amazon UnBoxed store. He didn't mention that NBC also partnered with Fox in setting up a joint Microsoft store, and then went solo on its own website trying to offer ad-encrusted, Microsoft DRM-ed, exploding content. No doubt all of those efforts are going to work out well for NBC.Lyons also said “Vivendi's Universal Music Group also reportedly won't renew its contract with Apple,� without clarifying that only refers to its long term contract; Universal music hasn't budged from iTunes. He also cites unhappy noises from Hollywood about Apple's desire to lower prices to make content more desirable to consumers, who can already obtain movies and TV programming free over the air or via unauthorized downloads.Omitted from Lyon's one-sided overview of the iTunes Store is CBS executives' comments that they are very happy with its deals with Apple, and that both CBS and Fox are offering free season premieres through iTunes.And what about Viacom billionaire Sumner Redstone, who was recently cited by BU reporter Jessica Ullian as saying that “iTunes has 'resurrected the music industry' by creating a legal, affordable, instantly gratifying purchasing system for fans. The challenge now is for the film industry to catch up, he said, and for competing companies to work together to establish new standards and practices.�[CBS and Fox offer free TV through iTunes US - iPod/iTunes - Macworld UK][How iTunes Saved the Music Industry - BU Today]Pity the Poor AT&T.Lyons wrote that “Jobs isn't known for treating partners well,� noting that the iPhone doesn't sell AT&T's worthless media services or overpriced ringtones. That's really an example of Jobs treating the customer well, and the Fake Steve Jobs should know that. Why repeat the “Apple can’t partner myth?� AT&T is making a major turnaround, funded by record numbers of headlines fawning over the iPhone. Apple has propelled Cingular from a middle of the road brand into its new AT&T name, which the company purposely rolled out in conjunction with the iPhone to benefit from the excitement surrounding it. Should we be aghast that Apple declined AT&T's own overpriced MEdia Net TV clips and ringtones? Is AT&T even worried about it?The service provider reported that the iPhone has outsold any phone it has ever introduced. Does that make Apple a bad partner? Would it be better if Apple really was the New Microsoft, extending its support and then yanking it back in a PlaysForSure/Zune style move? Does Lyons really have the extra credibility to burn in making such ridiculous comments? [How AT&T Picked Up the iPhone: A Brief History of Mobiles]More of the New Microsoft Meme.After noting some of Apple's recent successes, Lyons wrote, “the flip side of Apple's success is that Apple has started to seem scary.� Scary, uncertain, and doubtful! “No longer is Apple the plucky underdog out to save the world,� Lyons fears. Oh really? Has evil been vanquished? Is there not still the inky black bile of Windows Media DRM dripping from every alternative store in the universe? Does not Microsoft still have the remains of that $50 billion it took in last year from its monopolies--real monopolies, not the imagined fantasy kind pinned on iTunes by the media? You know, the monopoly in PC desktop operating systems held by Windows, the monopoly in servers, and the monopoly in desktop Office software? The monopolies that earn Microsoft overall profit margins as high as 81% on products that are over a half decade old? From that perspective, Apple could really turn evil over the next twenty years and still not compare to the wrongs we've suffered from Microsoft. Even so, Apple really isn't doing wrong by its consumers. If the best Lyons can do is to suggest that some RIAA labels and Hollywood executives are miffed by Apple's push for low prices, he'd better scramble to find something more problematic than that. I like low prices in content. I don't long for access to AT&T's expensive ringtones.iPhone Price Problems.Apple's iPhone was a better deal at $600 than Microsoft's Windows Mobile Motorola Q at $99, because Apple twisted AT&T's arm to provide lower priced service, making the iPhone around $200 cheaper across two years of use. Apple then dropped the iPhone's price by another $200, making it now almost $400 cheaper than the nearly free phones on the market.Is this wrong? Did Apple harm those of us who recognized value in the iPhone back in June? Did Apple defraud a million people who bought the iPhone at a good price when it lowered the price afterward? [Apple's iPhone Price Cut Unleashes Complaints]Apple TV Only A Flop For Forbes' Frauds.Lyons repeats in passing--without any factual backup--that the Apple TV is a flop. Oh really? Is that because it profitably sold a quarter of a million units with little advertising? Incidentally, that's nearly double the number of new customers TiVo signed up, as reader Timothy Bandy pointed out. He noted that “TiVo-owned subscriptions totaled 1.71 million, up 136,000 on an annual basis compared to the year ago-period.�If Apple sold 250,000 units of the Apple TV, “it's already doubled the amount of new customers Tivo made last year,� Bandy wrote, “or to put it another way, they already have 1/7th of Tivos' customer base without hardly trying. And as you pointed out, I doubt they've lost several million bucks in the process.�TiVo lost $19 million in the last quarter, and $50 million last year. Apple sells the Apple TV at a profit, although not much of one. That's because the company is working to sell content that works on the Mac, and Apple TV only serves as a contributing part of that strategy. Apple is working to expand the market for fair priced Internet downloads, in opposition to high-DRM, high-priced alternatives.Microsoft has lost billions in its consumer electronics products, including the Xbox 360 that Windows Enthusiasts like to compare against the Apple TV. Microsoft also stomped on efforts by Linux users to recycle the old Xbox as a media playback system. Where's the outrage? Where's the “suckers� blubbering? Where's the reporting that “Microsoft regularly betrays its partners?� It's certainly not in the pages of Forbes. [Brent Schlender's Apple TV: Fortune Dud or Fortune FUD?]It's all Downhill From Here.Lyons then complained that iPhone sales must be fading because Apple dropped the price, neglecting to account for the fact that Apple met its million unit sales goal three weeks early. “The next version of OS X, called Leopard, has suffered delays,� Lyons wrote, again failing to compare its 6 month delay to the six year delay of Vista. I guess Apple isn't the New Microsoft after all.Lyons begged for forgiveness after beating on Linux users for years and glorifying a bunch of greedy SCO investors trying to exploit intellectual property rights the company didn't even own. In describing his partnership with Rob Enderle, I downplayed his SCO role after he pleaded for evenhanded coverage of his past, noting that he did publish some correct information after the writing was on the wall for SCO.However, for his shameless attempts to present the same kind of one-sided, half-truth, negative-spin that praises the worst corporations on Earth while reviling the only company that seems to share any interests and values in common with its customers, Lyons has lost the bits of credibility he begged to retain. Shame on him, and Zoon on Daniel Lyons' head. [Daniel Lyons: Fake Steve Jobs and the SCO Shill Who Hated Linux]Thanks to John Schmidt for the “Big Brother� link.What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • The gutsy marketing and strategy behind Apple's iPhone price cut

    The iPhone price cut appears to be the story that will never die. Leander Kahney at Wired News and I had a great discussion yesterday about the what and why behind the iPhone price cut. Some of what we discussed ended up in the Wired article here, titled, The Perils of Taking the IPhone Mainstream. But there was actually some background and analysis that Leander didn't use, so I thought I would fill in that back story here.First, here's one of my quotes from the article:According to Howe, Apple initially priced the 8-GB iPhone at $600 not to milk early adopters, but to purposely constrain demand. While production ramped up at its Asian factories, Apple wanted to restrict buyers to the relative few happy to pay $600 for the phone. Nonetheless, Apple went on to sell a million iPhones in the first two months –- a clear indication of the device's popularity.Then, as it became clear there was enough factory capacity to produce millions of them in time for the crucial holiday season – when sales explode -- Apple dropped the price to take the gadget mainstream.With Tuesday's launch of the iPhone in Europe, it's clear that Apple is confident it can satisfy demand in multiple countries."(Apple) said they'd like more time before dropping the price," says Howe, "but you can't move the holidays. Clearly, Apple's gearing up for a big holiday season."Apple has good reason to be gearing up for this holiday season based upon its experience with the iPod. Steve Jobs made an incredibly gutsy call last year in the spring when he told manufacturing to gear up to make more than 20 million iPods to sell over the holidays. Why was it gutsy? Because Apple had never sold more than 14 million iPods in a quarter before. Yet the decision had to be made, and Jobs and his team made it. And it is sounding like Jobs has recently made that same decision with the iPhone by doubling iPhone production for this holiday season too.But back to the price cut. One London analyst firm has asserted that next year's average selling price for the iPhone will be $200:"In our projection, we believe there will be about 18 million iPhones sold next year at an average selling price of about $200, and that means a very sizable portion of total handset revenues will move from other manufacturers to Apple. (It) will be in the vicinity of 5 percent that Apple will steal from incumbents."Not to be outdone, the New York Times asserts that the price might go to zero:"The iPhone could have an overall impact on the economics of the phone industry. It has put a hardware manufacturer in a highly unusual position of strength relative to the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, etc.). They’re accustomed to calling the shots about what devices get access to their network; not so with the iPhone. It carries its own weight with consumers.Mr. Saccanaghi, after discussing the issue with various players in the mobile phone ecosystem, estimates that AT&T could afford to pay Apple $15 a month over the lifetime of a two-year contract. That adds up to $360 in payments. And that’s considerably more than the $200 to $350 that AT&T pays other retailers (like Best Buy, Radio Shack) for customer sign ups, Saccanaghi writes.What does it mean?Apple could conceivably sell the iPhone hardware at a substantial loss while still generating greater profit per iPhone than it does from the highest-end iPod.Sounds like a good deal for Apple, with a caveat. If Jobs decides to drop the price of the iPhone, he might consider offering a rebate to existing customers beforehand."So with production ramped up for the holidays, is Apple going to follow Motorola into the downward price spiral of death?Oh sure. And it will happen right after Steve Jobs attends an ice skating party in hell with bad Musak.What people don't get is that Apple is waging a marketing war to reshape the value chain for the mobile phone industry. Everyone is trying to figure out which trench Apple is occupying, when Jobs is flying in jet fighters for surgical strikes.Consumers value what they pay for. They don't value things the perceive as free. And that's the marketing blunder the US mobile phone market has bought into over the last 10 to 15 years. By bundling "free" and generic phones with cell phone service, mobile carriers have devalued both the brand values of the handset makers and their own services. The handset makers are hurt because the low values that carriers will pay for free phones eliminates the incentive for those manufacturers to do anything but cut costs. The carriers are hurt because they have to pay subsidy fees to the handset makers of anywhere between $150 and $250 over a two-year contract to actually buy those free handsets. You've heard of a win-win deal? This is a lose-lose deal.What Apple has done is inverted the value proposition. It has created a phone that consumers see as sexy and desirable, so desirable in fact that they will actually pay $400 to $600 for one (depending on geography). And because the device is desirable, Apple can demand exclusive deals with carriers, which creates valuable differentiation for those carriers that have iPhones and disadvantages for those that don't (yes, I'm talking about you, Verizon and Vodaphone). Because Apple is providing valuable carrier differentiation, Apple can then capture the subsidy revenue stream that the carrier would have normally paid to the handset manufacturers anyway for "free" (and undesirable) phones.Now, if Apple were to cut the iPhone price to zero, would any of this be happening? Not a chance. So Apple is going to use its iPod playbook all over again. The original 5 gigabyte iPod went on sale for $399 in 2001. Today, a 16 gigabyte iPod touch sells for -- you guessed it -- $399. Apple chose the price points based on consumer demand and interest. A constant set of features will move down the price scale to more value-oriented price points, but Apple will introduce new and even more desirable products at the old price points. And so long as it can keep that engine going, it will make money hand over fist. And the rest of the handset makers will bang their heads against the wall trying to figure out how they do it.Don Reisinger at CNET's Crave recently recently asked the question, "Is Steve Jobs really smarter than anyone else?" in this way:"In the United States, GSM carriers are not the only option, and more often than not, people are willing to go with Verizon Wireless or Sprint Nextel, regardless of the inability to easily switch between the aforementioned companies.But in the U.K., the economical landscape is much different. In fact, most Britons are more than happy to change carriers and are keenly aware of the terms 'unlocking' and 'SIM cards.' In fact, many people in the U.K. have already purchased an iPhone in the States, brought it home, unlocked it and added it to their own carrier.Steve Jobs knew that the U.K. is rife with unlocked phones and exclusively GSM coverage. And by looking like the best friend to O2, he's effectively pulling the same trick out of his bag: tell everyone they can only have an iPhone on one carrier, ignore unlocking, take the revenue from O2, and enjoy higher hardware sales due to simple unlocking procedures. Once completed, head to France and Germany, rinse and repeat.It's amazing to me just how much control one device wields all over the world. Can you think of any other product that could command such respect from a massive cell phone carrier and create a whole new way of doing business in the cell phone industry? I certainly can't.I can't either. That's because Apple combines award-winning designs with some of the best strategy and marketing in the world. And as long as the press and Apple's competitors keep focusing on the price cuts instead of the strategy and consumer desires, it will continue to reshape the mobile phone industry to its own advantage -- and in the process make its investors a lot more money than anyone wedded to the old mobile phone business expects.Full disclosure: the author owns Apple stock.Technorati Tags:Apple, ATT, Brand, Customer experience, iPhone, iPod, iPod touch, Marketing, New York Times, Price cut

  • How Open will the iPhone Get?

    Daniel Eran DilgerThere is obvious interest in iPhone development, and users of the device have good reason to demand a vibrant software ecosystem growing up around it. There are a lot of applications Apple doesn’t have the time or inclination to deliver, but which would greatly increase the value of the phone and subsequently expand sales. Apple needs third party help.At the same time, I have taken it upon myself to act as the tiny minority voice in explaining why I think Apple isn’t simply being foolish and shortsighted in the way that it is rolling out its iPhone software platform. Back in January, I explained why Apple might face resistance from third party developers, and why it might be best suited following a managed platform strategy in the model of video games, where Apple would developing its own apps and work with developers to co-publish, without setting up a wide open development platform like the Mac or Windows. [Inside the iPhone: Third Party Software]I also defended against the market-speak droids that came out in a vengeance against Apple’s so called “closed platform� by highlighting the absurdity of ABI’s claim that not running third party software made the iPhone “not a smartphone,� pointing out that the overwhelming majority of today’s third party mobile software either:solves problems in Windows Mobile that shouldn’t exist.fills voids left by Windows Mobile that Microsoft should have covered.exists without reason as frivolous garbage-ware.is overpriced trash.or will work on the iPhone already.[More Absurd iPhone Myths: Third Party Software Panic]With Journalists Like These, Who Needs to Report a Factual Story?In May, I went to Apple’s shareholder meeting (just barely; they use metal detectors for security and I have a metal plate in my arm from a motorcycle accident), and used the opportunity to ask Steve Jobs about iPhone development In front of all those rich stockholder and media types.“While Apple's closed platform policy may make sense for consumers,� I asked, “does Apple recognize the needs of large, institutional buyers who are excited about the prospect of applying low cost, handheld computers with their own custom development?�Jobs went on record to answer that Apple was working to balance the needs of software security and deployment with demands for custom development on the iPhone. The “real� press, including Ellen Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle and Troy Wolverton of the San Jose Mercury News, failed to ask any interesting questions or even note the interesting answers. Instead, Lee published a diatribe about how Jobs was “feisty� and “fired back� at anyone who dare ask any questions. Lee also described an unhappy shareholder contingent based entirely upon--as reader David Barnes noted--conversations with two union leaders with clear political goals. She may as well have invented that story from her desk and saved herself a trip.Wolverton turned in a tepid report in May, but then tried to retell Lee’s story in August, in an incendiary article that spun the meeting’s vote--three months later--as a hotbed of shareholder outrage and discontent. Wolverton still hasn’t got back to me as promised to explain away his documented record of half-truths and negative spin on all things Apple. What a coward![Answers from Steve Jobs at Apple's Shareholder Meeting][RoughlyDrafted Forums - Answers from Steve Jobs at Apple's Shareholder Meeting][Troy Wolverton Documents Faux Apple Shareholder Outrage]An iPhone SDK at WWDC?Prior to WWDC in June, I explained why I didn’t think Apple would release a software development kit for it, and that it would likely orient apps around the web as Dashboard-like widgets instead. I outlined reasons why, in addition to pointing out that being “closed� did not necessarily mean being a completely locked down black box, and that Apple’s viewpoint was subject to change as the surrounding circumstances did. [Mobile Disruption: Apple's iPhone and Third Party Software][An iPhone SDK? Predictions for WWDC 2007!]An Open iPhone Software Plan.Days before the iPhone’s release, I pointed out that Apple had already gone on record about its plans for the iPhone back in an April earnings report:CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated, “We believe the iPhone is a revolutionary device that is years ahead of the competition. At Macworld, we demonstrated a number of the iPhone's breakthrough features, including its pioneering multi-touch display and user interface, visual voicemail, desktop class e-mail and web browsing, and of course, the best iPod ever. “We plan to build on this incredible foundation by continuing to develop new software features as well as entirely new applications and incorporate them into the iPhone. Since iPhone customers will likely be our best advocates for the product, we want to get them many of these new features and applications at no additional charge as they become available.“[Apple's Secret iPhone Application Business Model]Since then, I’ve pointed out the same thing: the iPhone isn’t likely to become a Mac-like open platform anytime soon, but its really not accurate to call it a closed platform either. Two recent articles presented more details on why, integrating in the historical events of the Office Wars.[Six Reasons Why Apple May Never Open the iPhone][How Closed Is the iPhone?]Reasons for Wanting an Open iPhone SDK.Reader Ken Tozier responded with three main reasons he thinks Apple should open up the iPhone to developers. He wrote:“A supported SDK would eliminate the negative ‘hacker’ stigma for third party applications. Since Apple never partners with anyone but large corporations, under the closed model, the little guy will never get a chance to legitimately write applications for the iPhone. Without this legitimacy, only a miniscule proportion of iPhone users will ever take the risk on hacked applications. The average user will just be too scared off by the label ‘hacked.’
“A supported SDK would bring a large percentage of developers, who want to create iPhone/iPod-Touch apps under Apple's control. It's just easier and faster to use Apple's Cocoa classes than plod through open source SVN trees trying to  stitch together disparate code fragments into your own ‘big idea.’
“Small developers are the ones who will be writing the most creative iPhone apps. Fleshing in the iPhone universe with myriad stars, that are just too small for Apple to bother with. Bar code readers based on the camera. Foreign language flash cards, Road trip license plate games for kids where, when they see a new license plate, they could press a button for info on that state. Lava lamps, virtual fish tanks. Carpenter's levels. Nail finders. The possibilities are endless and Apple will never do any of them.“The iPhone already contains a large chunk of ARM adapted Cocoa classes with the exact same method prototypes that have been in use for years in OS X. Apple isn't going to change classes like NSDictionaries, NSStrings, NSURLs etc for the simple reason that it's battle tested, ‘just works’ and changing these would break all their stuff too.“So, that just leaves a handful of high level iPhone specific classes. For example, I'd be a happy camper if, in addition to file read/write, Apple gave us the following iPhone hardware accessor classes:NSBasebandServiceNSBasebandClient
NSBluetoothServiceNSBluetoothClient
NSWiFiServiceNSWiFiClient
NSMultiTouchClientNSAccelerometerClient“With NSBasebandService and NSWiFiService, it would be possible to create a wireless modem application where your laptop talks to the phone in WiFi-ese and the phone talks to another phone on the other side of the world through the baseband. Teleconferencing from a camp site.“With NSMultiTouchClient, you could use the raw coordinate (and pressure?) data however you wanted. Keys on a virtual instrument, pads on a virtual drum kit, whatever.“With NSAccelerometerClient you could create really cool multi-player games and physics demonstrations for the classroom.“Apple needs to do this. I can't put an accurate percentage on it, but my gut feeling is that third party apps could increase iPhone sales by 10 to 15 percent. Maybe even more if someone comes up with something revolutionary.�The Hacker Stigma.Tozier raised some good points. However, regarding the hacker stigma, what great or useful applications do people not use because of such a stigma? Mac the Ripper, Handbrake, and torrent apps and sites are wildly popular, even though they are known to be "grey area" and require thwarting of laws and jurisdictions just to host them. People might be afraid of putting unknown third party software on their mobile, but they should be. If Apple rubber stamped its approval on all third party software to remove this stigma, it would only confer all rage related to glitches, battery loss, spyware, and other problems directly upon Apple. Why would Apple want to take responsibility for a bunch of hobbyist apps when it faces regular petty lawsuits over "whether it adequately informed users that batteries might wear out" and other frivolousness?Frozen Cocoa: Tastes Great But Doesn't Flow.The hackers are already working to use Apple's Cocoa classes. There is no alternative system on the iPhone to use. Just as on the Mac desktop, many apps are existing Free and Open Source Software wrapped in nice Cocoa interfaces. That's what iPhone apps would largely be as well. But for Apple to offer official support for this, it would have to freeze its Cocoa frameworks and make them public.Apple already maintains private frameworks in Mac OS X; developers can't really use these, not because Apple wants to reserve them for itself, but because they are in flux. Apple commonly develops a framework privately, then after testing it in production and refining it, opens them up for developers to use in the next release of Mac OS X. If developers were allowed to build against the closed versions, their work would break as Apple made improvements. It's the same on the iPhone. If Apple opened up its internals as a public API, it would then be hamstrung to make any changes.We already know that Apple plans to make major changes to a number of things, particularly Notes and Calendar in relation to Leopard. If Apple allowed developers to go out and build a "Notes+" they would be angry after Apple released its own plans related to Notes, and "outraged Mac users" would be paraded around offering their opinion that Apple shouldn't step on developers shoes and should pay third parties before offering a similar solution to the same problem. Think of Watson and Konfabulator.An Expanding iPhone Software Ecosystem of Small Developers.At the same time however, Tozier raises salient points about the breadth and depth of software that Apple will never provide solutions to. I have an iPhone. I want to install cool things on it. I can imagine things that would be incredibly useful and powerful and fun. I'm surprised Apple hasn't made any allowance to even package up "local web apps" that developers could distribute that could do things without a network connection. It would be great if Apple could deliver a sandbox environment that would skirt around all the problems I raised and deliver a vibrant software ecosphere for the OS X devices.I can also think of a dozen other things It would also be great if Apple could tackle. Unfortunately, market realities mean that the company's abilities are constrained and it has to focus on the most valuable opportunities. As the company builds the iPhone platform, I think it will make sense to progressively allow increased access to third parties. Steps Toward Open.I think "local web apps" would be an extremely important first step, along with simpler Dashboard-like widgets similar to the iPhone’s Maps, Weather, and Stocks. Put them on a separate set of pages behind "Dashboard" or something. Very little risk.A second step would be to allow access to the cooler stuff via the web, so local web apps could access sensors and Bluetooth and other things. This begins to raise security risks and liability risks. The first apps are going to be used to copy around songs and pop up ads; there is too much money in "not paying for content" and "pushing messages at people." Look at Windows: open ubiquitous platform, satiated with software piracy and viral adware.I agree that the idyllic paradise is flowing with the milk and honey of third party software, but there are real threats to defend against as well. Which is why I brought up Mac OS licensing. Who would have guessed that software licensing would cost Apple more money that it made? Good ideas are sometimes really just ideas.But ideas are so much fun to speculate about. Let’s play Reverse Bingo for iPhone Software, by trying to correctly guess which icons will fill up the iPhone’s home page. I have a few ideas, but there’s still time to suggest your own.What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • The Next Killer App

    Any successful information technology requires a killer app — an application so compelling that it can, all by itself, justify the purchase of a given device. When it comes to personal computers, there have been many killer apps, starting with the spreadsheet, but there haven’t been any new ones in a long time, which is a problem. This column is about a potential new killer app for the PC platform, perhaps its last one. What do you know about telepresence? I have for the last several months been shooting for Maryland Public Television a new PBS documentary about how information technology has transformed our lives and businesses. It is an esoteric and very close look at a few technologies. Some, like the rise of office automation and the personal computer, are obvious: secretaries and telephone operators have disappeared while all the rest of us learned to type. Others, like RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips, are harder to see but just as transforming by creating a real-time distribution system in which we can know where everything is moving all the time, taking just-in-time inventory from a goal to a reality. One of the most striking of these technologies, which has yet to achieve wide use, is telepresence — high-definition video conferencing as a substitute for business travel. Telepresence is not far from being here on a wide scale and the effects — even beyond business — should be profound. I see telepresence shortly invading our homes. The way vendors tend to implement telepresence today is fairly uniform if inconsistently interoperable. A special conference room is built that is actually half a conference room, half of a table set against a wall that is all video screens. Typically three big projection or LCD displays are side by side in landscape mode with a third landscape screen mounted higher on the wall above the middle lower screen. The three lower screens are used to show the remote participants in the meeting. Sometimes all three screens are devoted to participants at a single location, but up to four locations can be linked if needed. The top screen is used for meeting materials like PowerPoint presentations or videos intended to be seen by all the participants. A couple weeks ago I used a system of this type (in this case it was from Hewlett-Packard but there are similar systems from Cisco and other vendors) to interview the people who designed it. I was in Palo Alto and they were in Corvallis, Oregon. In addition to the telepresence system (called Halo, whatever that means) I had a camera crew at both ends to record the action in each room. These rooms are not cheap to build or run. The HP systems cost either $249,000 or $349,000 to build, depending on the model, and $18,000 per month to operate. This gets you a DS3 connection (45 megabits per second) to a low-latency global network and 24/7 support. Each of the lower screens uses six megabits per second, with the remaining 27 megabits per second for that fourth upper screen. If this seems like bandwidth overkill for PowerPoint, understand that this HP system was co-developed with the Dreamworks movie studio specifically to allow dispersed groups of executives to review 1080p HD footage from upcoming films and for dispersed editors to actually work together to edit films without having to be in the same city. With feature film production budgets now averaging $50 million, $18,000 per month for editing support is nothing. With just over 100 such rooms now in operation for HP, part of the high price is also simply investment recovery. If HP were selling 10,000 of these rooms per month the price would be substantially lower. Video conferencing has been around for a couple decades, but telepresence is different from that. You can see the entire other side of the conference table, for example, and the people who are sitting across from you appear to be life sized. They can see you and you can see them. When another person speaks to you they can look you in the eye. Body language and emotions are easy to detect and the sound of each participant seems to come from his or her direction. You can watch the people who aren’t talking to see if they are even paying attention. It really is tele-PRESENCE and the fact that you are looking in a video screen is forgotten after a minute or two. Here are some lessons I learned from the experience. For one thing, size really does matter. The big screens changed for me the entire experience, though I think a home telepresence system could do fine with a single big HD screen instead of three. Eye contact is important, too, and that is generally accomplished through two techniques — mounting the camera as far as possible from the subject then using some subtle video morphing software to make it seem as though the camera was actually mounted behind the screen. For a home system I believe most of this effect could be achieved by simply increasing the distance from subject to camera, reducing the angle at which the camera is seen above the screen. This is the major failing in video chat systems where the camera is mounted on the display. Using the system I quickly came to understand that the real power wasn’t in bringing together groups of big shots for huge powwows at which sweeping global decisions would be made. The quintessential telepresence meeting lasts 10 minutes and involves a group of people at any level who simply need to come to a concensus. Nobody flies 10,000 miles for a 10 minute meeting yet everybody walks down the hall for one. Being able to hold such a meeting is what can make a widely distributed group of workers function like people in the same building, which has been one of the nagging problems of global development and outsourcing. The fact that it already has eight rooms up and running in India may give HP some advantage in that respect. We’re early in this process, but I think telepresece is going to be a big deal. It comes down to a big, high-resolution screen, good sound, mounting the camera far enough away to simulate eye contact, and of course throwing lots of bandwidth at the problem. Some of these components, like relatively cheap high-def big screens, are here today. The processing power required is here, too. The only significant obstacle to us having our own telepresence systems is bandwidth, and we can predict with some accuracy when we’ll have that. This bandwidth calculation involves applying some variation of Moore’s Law in two dimensions. Available bandwidth at a reasonable price is always increasing over time. The second dimension involves changes in compression technology and increases in processor power that over time reduce the amount of bandwidth that will be required to carry a high-res video signal. With the passage of time, then, available bandwidth increases while, at the same time, bandwidth requirements decrease. This has the effect of amplifying Moore’s Law, accelerating that point at which telepresence at a reasonable cost is possible. So when will it happen? When will we have telepresence capability in our homes? Some of us are there already and don’t even know it, the only remaining problem being one of integration. The home embodiment of that HP Halo system would be a single big screen, which using even the current HP technology would require six megabits-per-second. Millions of Internet users in Asia and Europe already have that kind of upstream bandwidth and hundreds of thousands of U.S. residential customers (mainly Verizon FiOS users) do too. But HP’s Halo system is old-tech, using MPEG-2 compression that is more than a decade old. A home system built around a more powerful codec like H.264 and using more powerful hardware could reduce the required bandwidth for home telepresence by at least half, making the likely barrier three megabits-per-second. That kind of bandwidth is nothing to users in Korea or Japan and it is nothing, too, for fiber-to-the-home users in the U.S. (mainly Verizon) and wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, either, for fiber-to-the-curb vendors like AT&T. Giving two megabits upstream to every cable modem user wouldn’t be trivial, but it is possible and could be — I think WILL BE — spurred by competitive pressures from DSL. So the bandwidth is coming and millions of people will have it, even in America, by 2008. What’s missing is both consumer demand and painless satisfaction of that demand through easy-to-use high-volume products, which come down to big screens, cameras, and PC systems running the right software. The part of this that is both hardest and easiest is stimulating demand. People aren’t demanding telepresence because they have never experienced telepresence. If you show them they will come. This is 100 percent analogous to the introduction of color TV in the 1950s. People didn’t know they wanted color TV until they saw color TV. But once they saw it, the lure of color TV was instant and obvious. What was difficult with color TV was that it required a large and very expensive video production and distribution infrastructure that cost tens of billions of dollars and required major financial commitments from vendors like RCA, which had to build transmitters, receivers, cameras, an entire TV network (NBC) and even subsidize the production of color programs like Bonanza to seed the system. Home telepresence requires almost none of that and, in fact, actually leverages the huge investment already made in HDTV, since that’s what those big telepresence screens will no doubt be used for when nobody wants to visit with Grandma or play video strip poker. All that’s required to sell consumers on home or small business telepresence, then, is allowing them to experience it. And, of course, making it affordable. I think Apple will be the first PC-only vendor to embrace the telepresence business. Steve Jobs would like another killer app. His last attempt at creating one — video editing — was only somewhat successful. The iPod of course qualifies for killer app status, but I don’t think it has actually sold many computers, though lots of iPods. Apple had big screen TVs ready to introduce a year and a half ago but cancelled them at the last moment as too mundane. You could buy an HDTV from HP or Dell and Apple apparently didn’t have that much more to offer. But this time it will be different. Imagine one of the new aluminum and glass iMacs only instead of a 24-inch screen make it 42 inches. The familiar iSight camera will be there in the bezel. but this time the camera will have HD resolution. This hang-it-on-the-wall iMac would establish yet another category of computers, which is what Apple loves to do. They’ll sell a million units to the faithful and all it will take is putting an active telepresence system in every Apple store connected to every other Apple store for prospective users to play with. This gets Apple into the big screen TV business with a system that has higher margins simply because it isn’t just a TV but is also a Mac. Look for all this after Christmas along with refreshed Macs featuring the H.264 encoder chip I pre-announced a number of months ago. Look for Apple to also facilitate telepresence by turning it into a service as it has more and more wanted to do. Then imagine that system connected to a 3G iPhone. For Apple the point is to create a platform to allow more natural implementation of “lean back” content. Apple TV was the first push in this direction, but this telepresence system will be both easier to use and more expensive, two attributes near to Steve Jobs’s heart.

  • ★ Private

    There has been much discussion lately regarding the use of private iPhone APIs. First with Google Mobile’s publicly acknowledged use of a private API to access the proximity sensor, then again with Landon Fuller’s report of having an app rejected from the App Store for appearing to use the private Cover Flow framework, when in fact Fuller created his own Cover Flow implementation from scratch because the iPhone’s system implementation has no public API. A software platform provides a number of functions that software running in the environment can call. A public API (Application Programming Interface) is a list of these functions that are documented and supported for use by third parties writing software for the platform. The complete list of functions (or methods, classes, libraries, frameworks, or whatever specific technical terminology applies) available on the platform is usually, if not always, a superset of the functions published in the public APIs. Functions that are not in the public APIs are called private APIs or SPIs (System Programming Interface). On the iPhone OS, like Mac OS X, APIs are divided into frameworks. Public frameworks are those with a public API for third party developers. Private frameworks are those with no public API whatsoever. Even the public frameworks, however, sometimes contain some private API calls. There is no real technical barrier, at least in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, that prevents third party software from calling private APIs. The public/private distinction is a social barrier, not a technical one. The difference, from a developer’s point of view, is that public APIs are more than just a list of what works now; they constitute a promise, a commitment, from the platform provider of what will continue to work in the future. A private API call is subject to change or vanish in the future. There is some reason why a private API is private. Could be that it is here to stay, that the platform vendor simply hasn’t gotten around to documenting it yet. But it could just as easily be a stopgap that the vendor intends to completely replace. And when the platform vendor in question is an opaque entity such as Apple, you just don’t know. With the iPhone, there’s the additional issue of the App Store license agreement, which could not be more explicit regarding the use of private APIs: 3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs. App Store guidelines aside, my take on the use of private APIs is not absolute. If you, as a developer, want to use private APIs for non-essential aspects of an app, and take care to check for their existence before actually calling them, and write code that fails gracefully if they don’t, then maybe it’s OK. But if your app depends on private APIs, or you don’t test for their existence before calling them, you risk having a mess on your hands (and your users’ hands) in the future, when a system update appears where the private APIs on which you’re relying are changed or removed. Google Mobile is an example that may well be doing this right. The private API which I publicized their use of is for the iPhone’s proximity sensor, which they’re using to enable the “just lift the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and speak your query” feature. If they’re doing this right, they’re checking for the existence of the proximityStateChanged method before actually calling it, and then if that method goes away in a future OS update, the lift-to-talk feature will no longer work, but the app won’t crash. Google Mobile does not depend on the lift-to-talk feature — there’s a button you can tap to initiate a voice prompt manually. The point being that private APIs should be handled with extreme caution — they’re the programming equivalent of explosive material. What has interested me all along regarding Google Mobile’s use of the private proximity sensor API isn’t the technical aspect, but the social one: the question of whether Apple has a double standard in place regarding private API usage by Google versus typical iPhone developers. The Theory That Some Laws Are Meant to Be Broken After I published my initial piece on Google Mobile’s use of private APIs, Erica Sadun published a piece at Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop investigating the issue. Sadun has been a prominent iPhone developer going back to the jailbreak era, and is the author of the recently-released iPhone Developer’s Cookbook published by Addison Wesley. Sadun, in her Infinite Loop piece, espoused the theory that “there are two very different ways that developers use non-standard calls” (where by “non-standard” she meant “unpublished or private”). These are: Linking to private frameworks. This is the bad, the evil, the Sauron of App Store. Apple offers two sets of frameworks, or libraries that contain linkable routines for developers. There are Public Frameworks, which are fine and dandy to link to, and Private Frameworks, which are not. […] Using unpublished APIs. If linking to private frameworks is unacceptable, unpublished APIs play the role of a minor jaywalking. You might get a ticket, a citation, and a talking to, but you’re not going to jail forever. The App Store is absolutely littered with unpublished APIs. I’ve learned to spot them pretty well. When you see applications doing things that you know they can do but that they’re not entirely supposed to be doing, you can lay odds that the developers have gently called unpublished but public routines. This distinction was novel to me. And, upon further consideration, I deem it nonsense. The public iPhone APIs are those which are documented by Apple in the iPhone SDK. Everything else is private, whether it is a method in a public framework or a method in a private framework. They’re both just as much undocumented, just as much subject to change, and just as much in violation of the iPhone SDK license agreement. A few days later Sadun wrote another piece for Infinite Loop, “Dumping the iPhone 2.2 Frameworks”, with instructions showing how to extract Objective-C header files listing many of the private APIs in the iPhone SDK. She published these header files on her personal web site. Her header-dumping post does contain a cursory warning that the use of these APIs violates the SDK agreement, and that software that uses such APIs is subject to break under future iPhone OS releases, but there’s an implicit “Go ahead and use them in your own apps if you want to and it’ll probably work out just fine” attitude that pervades. Why else publish such a piece if not to encourage the use of private APIs? And why not a single word encouraging developers to file Radar bugs requesting that desired private methods be made public in the future? Boom This general disregard for the division between the public and the private carries over in Sadun’s book. The book contains an entire chapter on how to use the iPhone’s private Cover Flow framework. (The use of private frameworks, of course, being in Sadun’s own words, “the bad, the evil, the Sauron of App Store”.) The chapter introduction contains far more encouragement than warning: Although Cover Flow is not officially included in the iPhone SDK, it offers one of the most beautiful features of the iPhone experience. With Cover Flow, you can offer users a gorgeously intense visual selection that puts standard scrolling lists to shame. This chapter introduces Cover Flow and shows how you can use it in your application. Boom! It is one thing for me to lecture in the abstract regarding the dangers of using private APIs — to warn against the fact that the underlying frameworks in the iPhone OS are undergoing significant changes between releases, and that apps which make use of private APIs really are more likely to crash when running on future OS releases. It is another thing to be able to point to a specific example where this has occurred. An example like, say, Safari Bookbag, the iPhone client for the Safari Books Online service from O’Reilly. When iPhone OS 2.2 shipped, Safari Bookbag began crashing on launch. iPhone developer Landon Fuller investigated, and found that the source of the crash was a called to a method in the Cover Flow framework that Apple removed between iPhone OS 2.1 and 2.2: It’s clear from the disassembly that Bookbag is using the private UICoverFlowLayer API. When Apple released iPhone OS 2.2, the -[UICoverFlowLayer initWithFrame:numberOfCovers:] method was removed, and Safari Bookbag started crashing. It ends up that -[UICoverFlowLayer initWithFrame:numberOfCovers:] is exactly the method which Erica Sadun’s Cover Flow chapter in The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook begins with. Fuller, as previously mentioned, is the author of Peeps, an iPhone application that provides a Cover Flow style interface for browsing your address book. After a 33-day wait in the App Store submission queue, Peeps was initially rejected by Apple on the grounds that it was using the private Cover Flow API. What made the rejection noteworthy is that Peeps was not using the private framework. Fuller had done the right thing: he wrote his own Cover Flow implementation from scratch, without the use of any private APIs: The last thing I would do is deliver time-bomb code to a paying customer. Private API can be broken or removed at any time by the vendor, and relying on it is unfair to your customers — they rarely have any idea that the application they just purchased may not work next week, or next month. So Fuller took the extra time to do the right thing and had his work rejected anyway because whoever it was at Apple who reviewed the submission saw “Cover Flow” and assumed, incorrectly, that it was using the private Cover Flow framework. (Fuller’s story has a happy ending: Peeps was accepted into the App Store over the weekend.) Given the situation with Safari Bookbag, and presumably, any other application which uses the private Cover Flow framework as prescribed in The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, this wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable assumption on the part of the App Store reviewer who initially rejected Peeps. Incorrect, unfair, and frustrating, yes — but not altogether unreasonable. Bookbag was not the only iPhone app that was caught in this framework change. Here’s a comment on Erica Sadun’s weblog from a developer who used Sadun’s Cover Flow code for an application named Yoga Trainer Pro. The version of Yoga Trainer Pro currently in the store crashes on iPhone OS 2.2 (see the customer reviews), and the updated version submitted by the developer has been rejected by Apple because it continues to use the private Cover Flow framework. The more widespread the use of private iPhone APIs becomes, the more likely it is that the iPhone will become the sort of platform where users resist installing OS updates, on the grounds that previous OS updates “broke” third-party applications they had installed. But so while Erica Sadun’s judgment regarding the use of private APIs may be suspect, she is no hypocrite — Sadun herself is credited as the lead developer of Safari Bookbag. Boom, indeed.

  • An Objective, hands-on, look at the T-Mobile G1

    Yesterday afternoon I stopped by the local T-Mobile store to get some information about the T-Mobile G1. Sure, I've seen pictures online, and I've read the specs and all of that - but I was hoping to actually get a chance to use the phone. Much to my surprise, they not only had one on hand, but they handed it to me and let me play around with it for as long as I wanted. It wasn't tethered to a wall or weighed down with any type of “don't steal me” security - so I got a good, honest, idea of what using the phone would be like. Thus far I have been fairly critical about the phone. No multi-touch, no headphone jack, and a market place with no rules - seems like it could spell useless disaster to me. So I obviously approached the G1 with a critical eye. The first thing that I noticed was the size of the phone. Compared to the iPhone it looks like a brick. It's very thick, but not much longer than an iPhone. At first that seemed like a big deal, but honestly, the phone feels very good in your hand, and the added weight of it makes up for the “cheapness” of the plastic casing. It's certainly not as elegant as the iPhone, but it didn't feel like a cumbersome brick either. The screen on it is big and beautiful. It doesn't feel cheap like the LG Dare. It is a touch screen, but not a multi-touch device - and that's a hard thing to get reacquainted with. A certain amount of the intuitiveness of the iPhone comes from its multi-touch capabilities and not having them almost feels like you have one hand tied behind your back. Non-iPhone users are not going to have this problem - but it's definitely an issue for me. Still, navigating the screen was easy enough to do. Android has a slightly different way of organizing your applications, and I love the use of folders, and how there is a “drawer” to pull your apps from and create shortcuts on your desktop. It feels slightly Windows-like — but Windows if it was done correctly. I think the draw may draw some inspiration from the Dock in OS X, but it's a different delivery method of the concept, and it works very well. There are some features that I would very much like to see on my iPhone. Wallpapers, for example. That's certainly not a feature that would make me choose this phone over an iPhone - but it's something I would like to see on the iPhone in the future. The web browser is nice. It's not quite as smooth as the iPhone, but T-Mobile's 3G network as actually substantially faster than AT&Ts (at least in my area). I was impressed with the speed. I also tried out the trackball for playing Pac-Man on the device and it was a nice experience. The trackball also looks like it could be very useful if you need to navigate the phone with one hand. That was something I hadn't thought of until I actually tried the device out. I went from a flip-phone to an iPhone - so I never had the “real” qwerty keyboard experience on a mobile device, so using the “real” keyboard on the G1 was actually kind of difficult for me. The buttons seemed really small…but I would imagine that's only because I'm not used to that. I think fans of “real” keyboards are going to be very happy with this…and I'm sure I could get used to it if I had to. To me the phone has looked kind of flimsy in pics online, and I almost expected the pop-out screen to be loose, or to not feel like it was snapped in properly, but it doesn't. Overall, the phone is mostly impressive. The OS seems intuitive and well thought out - the device itself is missing a few key things to make it truly great…like a headphone jack. I'm also not partial to the choice of SD card storage - but I see where it could be a benefit for people who want to expand their storage further…and it certainly helps keep the cost down. Cost is another very important factor. The phone is $179 vs. $199.9 for the iPhone - and while the iPhone gives you more in style and storage for just a few bucks more, the G1 has a $20 a month unlimited internet plan, versus the iPhone's $30 a month plan. That makes the G1 substantially cheaper over time - and I wouldn't be surprised to see some people who are on the fence about which one to purchase heading toward the G1 based solely on price (storage and style be damned). All in all, I have to say I was impressed with the G1. I think it's an interesting phone, and it will truly be a contender for top dog in the mobile market. I wouldn't trade in my iPhone for it, but if I lived in a place where AT&T simply had no coverage, or if I was already locked into a T-Mobile contract - I think I'd be happy with what the G1 has to offer.

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