Category Archives: apple

apple, mobile

Document security and Apple iCloud

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I have just set up iCloud on three Apple devices: a Mac, an iPad 2, and an iPhone 4.

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On the iOS devices I was asked if I wanted to use iCloud, and when I agreed, watched as all my documents were transferred from the device to iCloud.com.

I then went to the iCloud website, signed in with my Apple ID – username and password – and saw that all my documents were there ready for download.

I also tried editing a document on the iPhone. In moments, the edited document was also updated on the iPad.

All very convenient; but I realised that I’d just sent up to the cloud a couple of documents that include information I do not want to share. How safe is it on iCloud? Does Apple encrypt the documents?

I looked at Apple’s iCloud information and on the support site and found nothing about security on a quick look, other than that traffic is SSL encrypted, so here are my own observations.

First, access to iCloud.com is protected only by the username and password which form your Apple ID. Sony recently reported a breach of 93,000 accounts on the PlayStation network, apparently based on a list of username/password combinations that a hacker found elsewhere. In other words, some other popular site(s) suffered a security breach, and the hacker automated an attack on the PlayStation Network on the assumption that the same credentials might be used there. The majority failed, but 93,000 succeeded, demonstrating that this is not a small risk.

Second, I wondered if I could mitigate the risk by encrypting my iCloud documents. I cannot find a way to set a password on a Pages document in iOS, but I can do so on the Mac. I password-protected a document, and then uploaded it to iCloud. Next, I opened this on the iPad. I was prompted for the password – good. However, I then modified the document in Pages on the iPad. This automatically updated the document on iCloud, but it was no longer password protected. I do not recall seeing a warning about the password protection being removed. It looks as if password protection does not iWork if you use iOS.

Third, I found this statement in Apple’s terms of service for iwork.com. It is repeated in the terms for MobileMe, and which I cannot yet find terms for iCloud.com it may well be the same there too:

Access to Your Account and Content

You acknowledge and agree that Apple may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your account information and Content if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, disclosure, or preservation is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with legal process or request; (b) enforce these TOS, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Apple, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.

I guess what this means is that if you have confidential documents, iCloud.com is not a sensible place to keep them.

I would like to see some way of disabling cloud sync for specified documents, but as far as I can tell there is no such feature yet.

Further, if your Apple ID is the same username and password that you use on dozens of other sites on which you have been required to register, it would be worth changing it to something long and unique. I would also suggest reviewing the insecurity questions, which are not for your protection, but to reduce the number of password reset requests which support have to deal with. The best answers are those which are not true and therefore potentially discoverable, but made-up ones, as essentially these are secondary passwords.

apple, cloud computing, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, windows

A few observations on Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”

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I received a Windows Phone running version 7.5 “Mango” for review yesterday. Here are some initial observations; I am not going to call it a review after such as short time.

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There is still no screen capture utility – well, there is this one but it requires a developer accounts. So no screens, sorry. Microsoft should fix this – how difficult can it be?

Microsoft says there over 500 updates in Mango, and it does feel like a significant update, though retaining the look and feel of the first release. A half-version upgrade is about right.

Some things I noticed:

  • Task switching. Press and hold the back button, and swipe through running apps. This is excellent, better than iPhone or Android.
  • Voice control. This is expanded in Mango to include web search, text messaging and more. Tip: to see the commands, hold down the Windows key to go into speech mode, and click the help icon.

    It has great potential, especially with a bluetooth headset for true hands-free. I have a Plantronics Voyager Pro bluetooth headset, reviewed here. Using this guy, I can press and hold the call button on the headset, to put the phone into speech mode.

    I found this works well for calling people or simple searches, but general speech to text is not too good. I tried texting someone the message “Your parcels have arrived”. After several attempts, all of which were interpreted as various strings of garbage starting “George”, I gave up. I would still use it for making calls though; it seems that when the scope is narrowed to people in your contacts list, the interpretation is more reliable.

  • The search button is no longer contextual – it always takes you to Bing search. I think this is a retrograde step.
  • Local Scout is a feature that is meant to find restaurants, shops, things to do, and other handy information based on your location or the current map location. This is a neat idea, but when I tried it for my home town it did not work well. The first problem: I found that tapping the Local Scout tile is unreliable, and sometimes reports that Bing cannot find the location even when the location button in Bing Maps works fine.

    Fortunately you can also use Local Scout from Bing Maps. The Local Scout listing was not good though. Of the top 20 food and drink places, one had been closed for years, others were duplicated under old and new names, and there were hardly any ratings or reviews. Tap “Suggest changes” and you can submit changes to the address details or report closure, but you cannot add a review or rating, which seems a severe omission.

    I downloaded the TripAdvisor app which is a great deal more useful, mainly because of the amount of user-generated content.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that Microsoft needs to join a few dots here; Local Scout is only as good as its data.

  • Office and SharePoint integration. As soon as I gave Windows Phone my Live ID, it picked up my SkyDrive account and was able to open, edit and save documents there. I also hooked up Outlook to my own Exchange server, and added an Office 365 SharePoint account as well.

    SkyDrive support is new and a huge feature, especially considering that it is a free service. Editing features on the phone are limited, but you can include basic formatting.  More important, you can easily access what could be a large document repository.

    OneNote support is good, and notes made on your phone sync automatically to SkyDrive, where you can further view and edit them in a browser, or in desktop OneNote. I guess I can show a grab of the browser, which shows that the voice memo is inaccessible:

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    I discovered a few oddities. I was unable to link Windows Phone to my own SharePoint 2010 test server, receiving a message “We don’t support this authentication scheme”. Later I found this information:

Unless your organization uses a Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) server, you can only access a SharePoint 2010 site if you’re in the office and connected to your organization’s Wi-Fi network.

That is a considerable limitation. It did work OK with SharePoint on Office 365, except that for some reason I can find no way to create new documents on Office 365 – well, maybe in the browser. The Office Hub can create new documents on SkyDrive, but not on SharePoint, which is odd as the two have a lot in common.

Despite these issues, you get a lot out of the box for using Office on the move, particularly if you use a supported SharePoint configuration or SkyDrive. The on-screen keyboard is good too.

  • Music search. This is a fun feature. Go to Bing search, click the music icon, and it will try to recognize what is playing. It had no problem finding Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream. It struggled a bit with the more obscure Strangely Strange but Oddly Normal by Dr. Strangely Strange; but on the second attempt it found that too.
  • The social media features seem strong to me, though you are limited to the baked-in services which are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Windows Live (no Google+). You do have to link each service to your Live ID for full features; for example, you give permission to Windows Live to post to your Twitter account. The integration is smooth and if you spend your time juggling with these four services then this may well the phone for you. For example, you can post a message to all of them at once. I found the People hub good enough as a Twitter client.
  • Apps are still lacking. The issue is not the quantity of apps available, but their quality, and the lack of certain key apps. There is no official Dropbox app, for example, so you will need to use the web or a third-party workaround. On the positive side, the free Guardian app is great, especially since you can pin a section to the Start screen – I did this for Technology – and there are apps for WordPress, Amazon Kindle, the ubiquitous Angry Birds and some other essentials.

    I noticed that TripAdvisor has 61 ratings on the Windows Phone Marketplace, whereas the Android version has 39,930. That illustrates the scale problem Microsoft is facing.

  • Still no Adobe Flash.
  • Microsoft’s new Windows Phone site is clean and informative. Not always the case with Microsoft’s sites. The My Windows Phone site lets you find your, lock or erase your phone, once configured.
  • Internet sharing, which makes your phone into a wireless hotspot, is coming but subject to operator support and approval. This means you will likely pay extra for “tethering”. I have a free app which does this on my Android phone and find it useful, though whether it is worth paying extra every month is another matter.
  • Microsoft has introduced some features aimed at enterprises. In particular, Information Rights Management is now supported for Outlook and Office mobile documents. Another important feature is the ability to deploy custom applications as hidden apps, which do not appear in Marketplace searches, but can be downloaded from a link circulated internally. There is now a Lync (business messaging and conferencing) client for both Office 365 and on-premise Lync servers.

Future of Windows Phone?

My guess is that Microsoft is badly disappointed by the sales performance of Windows Phone to date. The problem is not so much the phone itself, but that it has failed to convince either the operators, or the retailers, or the general public, that it is something special and worth choosing ahead of either an Apple iPhone or Google Android device. In fact, typically retailers have few if any Windows Phones on display, and even customers asking specifically for one may be redirected to something else. The truth is, there is a disadvantage in having a minority-choice device, most obviously in the selection of apps available, but also in features that rely on user-generated content.

I asked about this problem at the Mango press launch and was told that the Nokia partnership will be the solution.

My review device is a first-generation HTC Trophy, and while it is decent enough it is not outstanding. Give Windows Phone some truly desirable hardware and a few must-have apps, and its fortunes will change, but that is not an outcome that I take for granted.

I do like the SkyDrive and Office 365 integration though, with the caveats noted above, and if I were Microsoft I would be pushing the value of those features.

.net, apple, linux, microsoft, mobile, windows

Miguel de Icaza talks about Windows 8 and the failure of Linux on the desktop

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At Microsoft BUILD earlier this month I arrived early to hear Anders Hejlsberg talk about the future of C#, and found myself next to Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the GNOME desktop and of Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft .NET. I took the opportunity to ask a few questions, which I have his permission to post.

I recall that when .NET was first announced in 2000, it was not long before de Icaza announced Mono. I was interested therefore to know his reaction to Windows 8 and the new Window Runtime which powers “Metro-style” apps. Will we get an open source implementation of Metro-style on Linux?

I don’t think so. To be honest, with Linux on the desktop, the benefits of open source have really played against Linux on the desktop in that we keep breaking things. It is not only incompatibilities between Red Hat, Unbuntu, Suse, but even between the same distribution.  Ubuntu from this week is incompatible with the one nine months ago. And then there are multiple editions, the KDE version, the Gnome edition, the one that is the new launching system.

When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10. You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We’ve managed to piss off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time.

I’m heartbroken, that’s the bottom line.

What about compiling your Metro app for iOS or Android?

I think that Linux has a tough time on the desktop. And the desktop is starting to not matter any more. On the other hand, building WinRT is going to be a significant amount of work. A large chunk probably could be reused from Moonlight. But it is a lot of work, to be able to reuse existing Windows apps, and in the case of iOS they already have their own stack, and Mac has its own, Cocoa is really nice and we have .NET bindings for it.

So I think we’ll learn interesting lessons from Metro. There is stuff that will be useful on other platforms like the JSON reader. But I’m not going to spend any time on WinRT for other systems.

And we can speculate about how well Metro will work in the market …

They are Microsoft, it’s going to succeed. In three years they are going to have this thing on half a billion computers, so it will be out there.

It seems like they are going to use their muscle for two things. It’s going to be a tempting space [for developers], but if you want to go into the right distribution channel for that half a billion computers, you need to abide by the Metro guidelines. They are not going to give you full API access, they are going to give you the sandboxed version. Which is good, because it can finally fix the security problems on Windows. They are going to use their muscle to reset the rules for Windows.

Especially on ARM

Right, and it is needed, they definitely need to fix this mess, a lot of malware, spyware, and the fact that everybody is sysadmin, and has to reinstall their machine every so often.

I’ve heard the word “safe” a number of times.

Right, and think of an iPad, you don’t need to be a sysadmin.

Now, you could argue that by WPF not being available to everybody and being bound to .NET they limited the effect WPF would have had, whereas Metro gives this to C++ developers, but they’re saying, hey, you can’t call Win32, there is all the Win32 stuff you can’t call. You have to use Metro. So they might be repeating that [mistake], but maybe it’s eclipsed by the fact that there’s going to be a rush to the app store. It seems like there is a big enough carrot now.

How are you getting on with the Windows 8 tablet?

I have to say, I actually like Windows 8. I am not a Windows user. It’s probably the first time that I would use a Windows machine.

Miguel de Icaza is now at Xamarin, providing cross-platform tools for using C# and .NET to build apps for Apple iOS and Google Android.

apple, mobile, tablets

Android tablets ahead of Apple iPad on Amazon

Following Gartner’s report on the expected dominance of Apple’s iPad2 in the tablet market throughout 2011 I took a quick look at Amazon’s sales and user ratings.

My guess is that Apple stores and direct sales online account for a large proportion of iPad sales, so no doubt the iPad is ahead overall. Even so, I was interested to find  the iPad at number 7 on Amazon.co.uk, not only below three cheap 7” cheapies from little-known brands, but also below the Asus EeePad Transformer and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, both of which are at iPad-like prices.

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Buyers on Amazon.com seem to have less enthusiasm for the cheapies. At the time of writing, bargain prices have pushed HP’s discontinued TouchPad to number 1, followed by the EeePad and the Motorola XOOM. Apple iPad is at 4, with Galaxy Tab 10.1 at 5 and 6.

When you see nearly 500 user reviews and a four star average rating, as for the Eee Pad, it shows that these things really are selling and being enjoyed.

Of these I have only properly tried the TouchPad and the iPad. I did not much like the TouchPad, though apparently firmware updates have considerably improved it.

apple, mobile, tablets

The closest I got to Windows on ARM at Microsoft BUILD 2011

A couple of the stands in the exhibition at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last week were showing Windows on ARM. This one was on the NVIDIA stand and was most likely running its Tegra 2 SoC (System on a Chip) though Tegra 3 (code-name Kal-El) is apparently now in production. The tablet was displayed under a plastic shroud which could only be lifted when someone from Microsoft was present, though I was able to get this snap of the machine sans shroud. I was not permitted to handle the machine.

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I have blanked out part of the background because it was black on black.

My main observation: it looks just like the Intel version. This screen shows a Metro app running side by side with the Windows desktop, and showing the “charms” on the right.

Gartner reports that Apple will have the tablet market almost to itself in 2011 (73.4% market share). I believe Windows on ARM is critical to Microsoft’s strategy to compete. In principle, it should be cheaper and more efficient than an Intel device, and one that is more locked-down in the style to which Apple has made us accustomed.

If Microsoft and its hardware partners can get the size, weight and design details right, I suspect I would rather have a Windows 8 tablet than an iPad. One advantage is the ability to have two apps side by side. Microsoft’s new user interface works really well with touch. I will expect to find a Windows remote desktop client there by default, and better support for Microsoft Office and SharePoint than I find in the iPad.

By the time Windows 8 comes out though, we will likely have iPad 3 with who-knows-what improvements; Apple has all the apps; and breaking into this market will not be easy.

apple, mobile, software development, web authoring

Appcelerator opens component marketplace for mobile developers

Appcelerator has launched its Mobile Marketplace, offering software components for mobile and web developers using Titanium, Appcelerator’s cross-platform toolkit for Apple iOS, Google Android, and others – though only iOS and Android seem to be supported in the Marketplace currently.

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Developers create modules using the Titanium Module SDK, and get 70% of revenue.

I took a quick look and found it thought-provoking. I am a fan of user reviews, and one nice feature of the Mobile Marketplace is that it supports reviews and ratings. Finding out what other developers think of a particular component often involves trawling through Google searches, asking on forums and so on; a marketplace with authentic hands-on reviews has real value.

That said, when I checked out an example, LucidChart, which is a diagramming component with 5 star rating and four reviews, I was not impressed with the review quality, and puzzled that some of the reviews date from July, before the Marketplace opened. Still, developers can make their own judgment about the reliability of a particular review.

Many of the components are on a monthly subscription, on a per seat, per month basis. Some developers are uncomfortable with this model and the likely costs:

… charging such high monthly fees is a complete rip off. My entire Apple developer license only works out at $8.25, are you seriously thinking that a module is worth more than what Apple provide to developers for a fraction of the cost?

Another issue is that some of the products are not really code components, but developer services like TeamworkPM.

Some components are free though, and if the Marketplace attracts a reasonable level of traffic and interest then it could prove an excellent resource for Titanium developers.

apple, delphi, professional, software development, windows

Delphi team focusing on FireMonkey, VCL winding down?

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Julian Bucknall at componnent vendor DevExpress writes a thoughtful post arguing that Embarcadero will focus on Delphi’s new cross-platform FireMonkey framework in future, and that the VCL (Visual Component Library) which has been at the heart of Delphi since its first release will receive little future investment.

Bucknall notes that ex-Borland employee Danny Thorpe tweeted about 1/3 of the Delphi VCL and IDE team being laid off in Scotts Valley, USA; while Embarcadero’s Tony De La Lama blogs about new posts in Europe. FireMonkey was originally developed in Russia.

The VCL is a mature framework by any standards (Delphi was first released in 1995), and now that the 64-bit VCL has been released the most pressing demands of developers have been met.

Further, Microsoft itself is slowing development of the Win32 API on which VCL is based, in favour of the mobile and touch-friendly Metro user interface and the new Windows Runtime on which it is built. The VCL will never adapt to Metro, but FireMonkey might do so. The Windows Runtime has an API which is represented by metadata in same format used by .NET’s Ildasm. If Embarcadero can adapt Delphi to read this metadata so that you can easily call the API, then a Delphi for Metro seems plausible, but it would not use the VCL.

Delphi already works well for Windows applications, so from Embarcadero’s point of view, growth will come from cross-platform and mobile development using FireMonkey.

The main snag is that unlike the VCL, FireMonkey is far from mature, and developers are complaining about lack of documentation as well as limitations in the current implementation.

There is also a philosophical difference between VCL and FireMonkey. VCL is a “heavyweight” GUI framework in that it depends on native Windows controls, with the advantage that you get a truly native look and feel in your Delphi application. FireMonkey is a “lightweight” GUI framework which renders the UI entirely through custom drawing, which is great for cross-platform consistency, but poor if you want a native look and feel. Performance-wise, and despite the name, heavyweight frameworks often feel faster because native controls are optimised for the operating system.

The key question then: will FireMonkey be as good for cross-platform, as the VCL has been for Windows? Based on my first experiments I am not sure at the moment, though I expect it to improve. I would be interested in views from others who have worked with it.

amazon, apple, cloud computing, mobile, multimedia, software development

Amazon entices Android developers with $50 incentive

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Amazon is offering Android developers $50 of AWS (Amazon Web Services) credit if they submit an app to the Amazon Android app store.

Although the announcement refers to apps that actually make use of AWS, this does not seem to be a pre-condition:

September 7 – November 15: Android developers who submit an app that is approved to the Amazon Appstore for Android through October 15 will receive a $50 promotional code towards the use of AWS products and services

The move ties in with reports of Amazon developing its own Android-based tablet/Kindle. Exactly what Amazon will offer is still under wraps.

Amazon is an interesting contender in the mobile wars because it has its own instant ecosystem – millions of customers who are already signed up with accounts and stored credit card details. Add in Kindle eBooks, the MP3 store, and the Amazon Instant Video Store for streaming video, and it amounts to a comprehensive content offering that approaches that of Apple.

The AWS element is also significant, and in this respect Amazon is ahead of Apple. Of course there is nothing to stop you using AWS with apps for iOS or other platforms, though there is synergy when it comes to payments.

The relationship with Google is interesting, in that Google controls Android but Amazon is not hooking into Google services or the official Android Marketplace. Amazon is showing no sign of developing its own search engine though, so Google will still get some benefit if Amazon devices are popular, provided Google remains the default for search.

apple, delphi, software development

Hands on with Delphi XE2 for Apple iOS

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Last week Embarcardero released RAD Studio XE2. RAD Studio is the suite of tools based on Delphi, a language – originally called Object Pascal – and visual development tool which still has a loyal following. XE2 is the most interesting new release for years, introducing a 64-bit compiler for Windows and cross-platform support for Apple’s OSX and iOS.

I have been trying the final release, paying particular attention to the iOS support, bearing in mind the importance of Apple’s mobile platform. The RAD Studio IDE only runs on Windows, so the most convenient way to target Apple’s platform is to install on a Windows virtual machine. I used a Parallels VM running Windows 7 64-bit, hosted on OS X Lion.

Setting up for iOS development with RAD Studio XE2 involves several steps. First, you have to use the new FireMonkey application framework in order to do cross-platform work. FireMonkey emerged after Embarcadero acquired the intellectual property of a company called KSDev early in 2011, along with its founder Eugene Kryukov:

KSDev’s intellectual property has been purchased by Embarcadero Technologies, the makers of Delphi and C++Builder Rapid App Development Tools. I am excited to announce that I have joined Embaracadero’s next gen frameworks team leading a very exciting project. As a result I will no longer operate the KSDev company and will not be accepting any further orders for KSDev products.

The products in question were Delphi frameworks called VGScene and DXScene, and these seem to have been melded with remarkable speed into what is now called FireMonkey. FireMonkey controls such as buttons and listboxes are all custom drawn, which is good for cross-platform consistency, but bad if you want your application to look and feel truly native. FireMonkey is not compatible with Delphi’s VCL (Visual Component Library), though the basic controls like TButton and TEdit are similar. FireMonkey applications can be either 3D, with the emphasis on Flash-like visual effects, or HD, used for more traditional user interfaces.

Support for Mac OSX is more fully integrated than for iOS. You can easily add an OSX target to a FireMonkey application, but for iOS you have to create a new application that only targets iOS. Another difference is that Embarcadero has its own Mac compiler, whereas the iOS support depends on the FreePascal open source compiler. If you are targetting OSX, you can code and debug entirely from the Delphi IDE, whereas for iOS you have to export your project and compile in Xcode.

In order to prepare for iOS development, you first need a Mac with XCode and the iOS SDK installed. Next, install RAD Studio XE2 on Windows. Then find the FireMonkey-iOS folder in the directory where RAD Studio XE2 is installed. This contains FireMonkey-iOS.dmg. Copy this to the Mac side, mount it and run the FireMonkey iOS installers to add FreePascal and the FireMonkey libraries to your XCode setup.

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If you are also doing OSX development you will also need to install the Platform Assistant on the Mac, but for iOS this is not required.

Now you can go over to the Windows side, start a new application observing all the tasty new options, and choose a FireMonkey HD iOS application.

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This creates a new form sized for an iPhone 4.0, though of course you can amend this. There is a tool palette which looks well-stocked with components, but note the following warning:

While you are designing your iOS application, you can only use components that are supported on iOS devices. However, the Tool Palette might contain components that are Windows-only or otherwise not supported on iOS.

That is an annoyance, and contributes to a feeling that iOS support is a little, dare I say, unfinished. Still, undaunted I built my sample app, following the path I have trodden before by creating a simple calculator.

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You might wonder why all the buttons are green. I did, too, and played around a little trying to change it. This seems to involve creating a custom style. I started doing this, but decided it was not necessary for my simple test. It does make the point that the default appearance does not have the iOS look and feel.

There is what seems to me a small bug in the designer. If you select more than one control, the sizing tabs disappear and there is no visual evidence that the controls are selected, other than a heading in the Object Inspector that reads “n items selected.” At first I thought it was impossible to select more than one control, but this is not the case. However, there is no clipboard support in the visual designer. For example, if you want several buttons that are exactly the same, you need to add them individually, then multi-select and set the properties as needed.

While developing an iOS app, you can test it by running it on Windows within the IDE. When it is ready to test on iOS, you need to export the project. To do this, you need a command-line tool called dpr2xcode.exe, which is in the RAD Studio bin folder. Running this from the command-line is inconvenient, so the usual approach is to use Configure Tools from the Tools menu to add it to the IDE.

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It is puzzling that Embarcadero has not included this by default.

Running the tool creates an xcode sub-folder in your project directory, with an .xcodeproj project file along with some default icons. I then copied the entire project folder to the Mac. It is also possible to use a shared folder accessed from both Windows and Mac, though I found this does not work if the folder is on the Windows side, so I simply copied it back and forth.

I opened the project in Xcode, and was prompted to “Modernize” it in Xcode jargon, to no ill effect. At this point I could successfully build it and run in the iPhone emulator.

Of course I wanted to test it on an actual device. I attached an iPhone 4 and did the Apple provisioning dance. After the usual messing around with certificates, it worked.

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and here it is on the iPhone:

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It works, and to that extent I am impressed. That said, I am disappointed with the performance. This is subjective, but I am talking about the responsiveness of the UI. There are perceptible pauses, which for such a simple app is surprising. I have created this same app numerous times using different development tools, and had expected that the Delphi version would be up there with the best, but while it is acceptable it is less responsive than some of the others.

Let me add though, a Delphi developer will find the process described above a easier than learning Objective C, and I was able to create this fully working app in an afternoon so I should not complain too much.

Maybe when Embarcadero comes up with its own iOS compiler there will be some improvement.

apple, microsoft

Thoughts on Apple and Steve Jobs as he resigns as CEO

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Steve Jobs has written to Apple’s board of directors:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

Apple is at times an infuriating company, but it is infused with genius that Jobs has inspired and nurtured.

I do not know how the computing landscape today would look without his influence, but I am convinced that it would be very different and largely worse.

Under Jobs, Apple refined personal computing with successive versions of the Mac, reinvented the music industry with iPod and iTunes, made the first mobile phone that was a delight to use and freed us from the tyranny of mobile operators so that the promise of the mobile internet could be fulfilled, and created the first tablet computer that is sufficiently useable and affordable to bring touch computing to the mainstream.

I count that as four milestones, any one of which would be enough to make Apple a great company. Most companies live forever on their first and only breakthrough idea or technology; only Apple has continued reinventing itself.

Apple inspires devotion from its users not only because of its delightful products, but also because Jobs has fought on our behalf as users, rejecting who-knows-how-many ideas and features that were not quite there and would have spoilt our experience. These are the ideas that most companies deliver as version 1.0 of their product.

Jobs remains at Apple, but his letter suggests that his health is failing so my guess is that his role will be greatly reduced.

Apple after Jobs will be a different company and is unlikely to be a better one, though its strong culture and many brilliant engineers and designers remain. New CEO Tim Cook has been acting CEO for some time so the transition will be smooth.

Thank you to Steve Jobs for making computing better.