All Articles Tagged jobs

Marc Edwards is one of the well known team behind Mac Dashboard Widget aces iSlayer and iPhone development house bjango, whose apps include Jobs, Cities, Darkness, and Phases, and he was kind enough to sit down and talk App development and ecosystem with TiPb.

TiPb: Your team is famous for their Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, was developing for the iPhone really the easy transition some have suggested?

Marc: For us, yes. Our widgets have used Cocoa plugins for quite some time. A lot of widgets are straight HTML, Javascript and CSS though, which is very different to what’s needed for iPhone apps.

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Though somewhat morbid, if only in a stock manipulation market sense, due to both Apple’s phenomenal — and resurgent — success under the leadership of Steve Jobs, and the health issues faced by Jobs in the past, every time the man behind the Apple steps up on stage looking… well… whatever the vegan opposite is to Steve Ballmer’s manbull big, rumors and speculation they begin to fly.

But how do you choose Steve Jobs’ successor? What if you miss? Fortune shows us, joining the fray this time with a “Usual Suspects” type list, complete with PR pics and wikipedia hits, but wrapped together well and each given a somewhat considered ranking in the Jobs pool. (And for those of us who don’t park outside Cupertino with a surveillance van, a few surprises might lurk in the sequence as well).

Of course, if they’d combined the crazy rumors of Ballmer getting the heave-ho from Microsoft following the PR disaster of Vista and stalled Micro-Hoo! negotiations, and pegged him as Jobs’ obvious, if in first name only, successor… well that would have at least been ballsy and quite a bit more entertaining.

In the end, however, while Jobs is no doubt worth billions in ever-fickle market cap to increasingly capricious investors — perhaps more than any other CEO active today — the whole topic still comes off as a little on the gossipy side of TMZ.

Besides, we all know Kaiser Jobso will just whip up a clone eventually anyway, and show these would be successors what succession really is… And like that — boom! — they’d be gone.

Read

Steve Jobs was voted the #2 most important person in technology in the last 25 years by the Computing Technology Industry Association by pulling in 73% of voters. Bill Gates, the #1 most important person, pulled in 84%.

Details of the iPhone’s launch in the UK is spilling out rapidly, and O2 are making some last changes in preparation for iPhone’s arrival. Their CEO granted an interview that gives a peek into Apple’s carrier selection process. O2 has changed the way that they deal with limited “unlimited” plans — they still limit them, but at least they will give users a warning before they punt people away. And lastly, UK gadget magazine tried out the iPhone for a while, and they have information about the 1.1.2, the upcoming firmware update and iTunes 7.5.

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While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

There’s a big article in the New York Times that includes an interview with Steve Jobs about the excellent shape that Apple’s in nowadays. Apple is 3rd in computer shipments overall. They might slip to 4th when Acer buys Gateway after Gateway buys Packard Bell, but Apple will still have more growth than the resulting top three. The Times did an interview with Jobs, and he of course has some choice things to say about everything — Leopard vs. Vista, Ultimate Editions, the iPhone’s multitouch interface, the delays of Leopard, and the Newton.

‘Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.’

I’ve written about what Ars Technica called the ‘New Frontier’ of the SDK, and I agreed with Ars that it was coming. Anyone that gripes about the availability of the development kit for making apps on the iPhone doesn’t give enough credit for what Apple has created with multitouch.

Steve Jobs has confirmed the rumor. It looks like this won’t be just widgets — it will be full, system-level native apps. It will be interesting to see how they perform this — as the iPhone stands, everything is running in ‘ring 0′. My guess is that they’re going to have to redesign the iPhone to run in multi-user mode. That is, some things will be running as root, other things will be running as ‘radio’, and some things will be running as ‘Mike Overbo’, for example. From http://www.apple.com/hotnews/:

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:

“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”

The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.

There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:

1. Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
2. Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
3. AT&T has a website to get developers on all of their development platforms except the iPhone.

figure 1: dirty hippie 3rd-party-developing AppTapp Installer.app-installing AnySIM-unlockers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

Though Jobs’ Apple Support crew would void your warranty for installing them, Steve went as far to say that some of the 3rd party apps were being looked at very closely by Apple:

“Meanwhile, Jobs acknowledged that third-party developers have started to produce several intriguing, yet unofficial iPhone applications. He said Apple is looking at some of them closely, especially those that don’t require a connection to the Internet. It’s likely that those applications would be the first of any to receive an official endorsement from Apple, according to Jobs’ comments, as those that require Internet access could threaten the ‘high standard’ of experience customers have come to expect with the iPhone.”

Steve Jobs was asked at “Mum is no longer the word” press event why there was no 3G on the iPhone. His response was telling; it’s important enough that I transcribed the money quote of his response:

“We’ve got to see the battery life for 3G get back up into the five-plus hour range, before it’s really suitable for [the iPhone]. I think we’ll see that hopefully late next year. But right now, you make a really big tradeoff to go to 3G, and that’s really bad battery life.”

I think it’s safe to say that by “late next year,” he doesn’t mean January or something. Some analysts were predicting a 3G iPhone would be announced at today’s UK media event. I bet those same analysts are thinking “Perhaps he’ll announce some new hardware at Apple Expo Paris next week….”