Article: iOS Not-As-Low-Hanging Fruit

While watching the coverage of Google’s I/O event, I got grumpy. It may be easy to jump to the assumption that I’m mad that Google took some digs at Apple, or created some sort of feature that is easily dismissed as useless or something that would be appreciated in Eureka. A year ago, John Gruber mentioned some obvious improvements that Apple could make to the then-next version of iOS, and I thought I’d argue what Apple could do with the next big update…

Link: BlackBerry Messenger Coming to iOS ⚛

Chris Welch for The Verge:

BlackBerry has just announced that its hugely popular BBM messaging service is going multi-platform: it will be released for Android and iOS as a free app this summer. BBM will support iOS hardware running iOS 6 and above; the Android version will be compatible with version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above. “It’s time to bring BBM to a greater audience,” CEO Thorsten Heins said in announcing the expansion, “no matter what mobile device they carry.”

I actually appreciate the interoperability aspect (I’d love to ditch SMS messaging for those few friends who are using Android), but have a feeling this isn’t going to take off as wildly as those in Waterloo hope. I may give it a shot, especially since I skipped the BlackBerry craze a few years back. Still, maybe I could find a few folks and use it ironically?

Link: Dear Apple, Let’s Talk About Photos ⚛

Peter Nixey (via John Gruber):

I want the canonical copy of my iPhoto library in the cloud. One iPhoto library in the cloud, many devices with access to it. I want to edit, organise and delete photos on any device and see the same changes on all other devices. No master/slave setup – just straight cloud access…

…Get rid of photo streams. Make the camera roll a single photo stream that shows up in iPhoto (on all devices). I want a single camera roll that all devices feed into. I want to take photos, queue them in my camera roll then pull them out as I organise and sort them into my library. Let me explain: photos and videos have two phases 1. on the camera roll 2. in my photo library. Nowhere else.

He has some other suggestions, but I love those especially. I take a lot of photos with my iPhone, edit some on my iPad, and hoard them on my Mac. The “optimized” copies that take up space on my Mac are pointless, much like requiring backing up apps to my Mac when I do everything else with iCloud and the App Store (over 30GB of my drive is wasted on backups of iOS apps).

Patent Pending: 21: Better Than a Winklevoss ⚛

In the latest episode of Patent Pending, Matt and Eric catch up on a few things, discuss living away from the Internet, talk about self-publishing, Eric’s next Mac revisited, and much more…

Link: Apple Demos the Power of Creativity ⚛

Ken Segall figures out why I liked the new iPhone ad:

What this commercial does so well is capture the human side of technology. It’s a reflection of daily life, and it’s easy to see ourselves in it. The ad shows us how essential our phones have become, enabling us to capture the people, places and images we don’t want to forget.

Link: The Future of Adobe Fireworks ⚛

Adobe PR:

While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows. As more specific details on the next version of Windows and Mac OS X are made available, we may adjust these plans.

After eight years, this is another casualty in the Adobe/Macromedia merger—joining FreeHand, Authorware, and GoLive. Not surprisingly, one could still argue that the real products that mattered to Adobe were Dreamweaver and Flash. Maybe that’s why they’re still pushing Flash so hard…