Links for Thursday January 14th, 2010
An Amalgamation of Predictions and Questions Regarding the Apple Tablet: Nice rundown of Tablet issues from Shawn Blanc. I hadn't considered this:
"No doubt the Tablet will come with an accelerometer, but what the default orientation of the device is will say a lot about how Apple sees it. Simply put: if the default orientation is portrait then the Tablet comes across as an oversized iPhone; if landscape, then as a touch-screen laptop."
Even to this day, there are large swaths of the iPhone OS that don't work in landscape mode. I wonder if the Tablet OS will support either landscape or portrait on every possible screen of every application? That sounds like a lot of software engineering effort.
Intel's MacBook Pro update slip: what to expect: The interesting bit about the next set of MacBooks will be what GPU Apple uses. I think that the MacBook Pro line will have a dedicated GPU (even the 13" model — Apple will find some way to make it fit). But what they're going to do with the MacBook, I don't know.
Apple Becoming More Serious About Corporate Acquisitions?: I think this is going to be the real story of Apple in 2010. It's time for them to inject some fresh blood into the corporate culture, and acquiring some startups (that also happen to offer capabilites that Apple needs, *cough* Dropbox *cough*) is totally the way to go.
Win Mobile 6.6 due in February with capacitive touch?: What a joke. Windows Mobile 7 is quickly becoming the "Duke Nukem" of the mobile software industry.
Hands on: Boxee beta is brilliant, still not quite stable: Although it seems like the Boxee beta is flawed, they have done significant work on the interface, including this:
"...you can now go to a universal video library that allows you to browse content from all services. When you select an item that you want to watch, it will let you choose whether you want to stream it from the recommended source or use another service that has it available."
This is how it's supposed to work. And by "it", I mean the future of TV.
Investor Avie Tevanian on the importance of creating great platforms: Short, informative interview with Avie Tevanian (formerly of Apple). I like this quote:
"VB: It seems like industrial design has really taken off. Where will that go?
AT: One of the things we did at Apple, and Steve Jobs was one of the first to pick up on this, was that industrial design mattered to a whole lot of products. Purchasing decisions have moved from being based on technical specifications to a world where decisions are based on an emotional connection to the device. A lot of that emotional connection comes from industrial design and how the software works. Here we are, many years later, and everybody else is finally starting to figure that out. Everyone now knows that is important."
Official Google Blog: A new approach to China: Wow. If Google had to shut down their office in China, I think they would be sacrificing quite a lot of engineering talent. (via Daring Fireball).