marco f dot net

Wow, reading my daily apple blogs there's nothing else than "oh no, the world has come to an end" about the announcement of Apple that 2009 will probably be the last Macworld Expo they'll join. And to add more salt in the wound, 2009 won't see Jobs talking at the keynote. No, Phil Schiller will take the stage. Rumors abound about Steves' health again. To be honest, this has been coming for a while now, so people shouldn't be surprised. The timing sucks, that's true, but that's all the Apple way.

But here's the good part: instead of having a fixed schedule where Apple is kind of forced to show up with new products, from 2009 on, you'll probably have more "special events" dedicated to a single product, with probably more interaction with the public and developers.
 
There'll be no fixed schedule for product announcements. Apple will announce them whenever they feel they're ready. Which, to me is good.
 
And for the Macworld Expo 2009 keynote: Phil is a nice guy, and he also knows how to do great presentations. He is not Jobs, but he can be just as entertaining.

Now for the challenge: spot the repetition in his speech... Jobs has his "Boom!" thing.. What'll be Schillers knack?

Been running iPhone 2.2 for a few days now and some things I noticed:
- Mobile Safari UI change
- obvious Google Maps changes: street view, send location, different
route options.
- Mobile Safari seems(!) more stable
- IMAP email advanced preferences are screwed after the update from 2.1
to 2.2. You need to go inside and change the Sent/Drafts/Trash to be on
the server, instead of iPhone to prevent annoying errors.
- iTunes podcast downloading. Too bad you can't subscribe to a podcast.
- Appstore application now has an "update all" button for application
updates. So you don't need to go into the appstore, update one app, go
back again, update another, etc.

- Apps are updated in place instead of main home screen and moving to
the old place.
- Single click home button moves to first home page when you're in
another.
- Spell checker/auto correction can be switched off. However, i belive
the auto correction works pretty well, but in the wrong order. It should
give me a proposed correction, but when I continue typing, not replace
the "wrong" word with the proposal. It should ignore the correction
unless I say it not to. On the other hand, using english as language you
can really speed up typing at the moment since the auto-correction e.g.
replace Ill with I'll etc.. Maybe the behaviour/order should be
configurable for the user per language?
- No more scrolling provider logo (like that is important..)
 
Things I'd like to see in future versions:
- the ability to organize your home screens in iTunes. I find moving
icons around on the iPhone itself annoying and tedious. I wish I'd be
able to drag groups of icons or better use iTunes to organize the
screens
- cut&paste
- horizontal typing in all apps
- taking a screenshot that shows all home screens in one big image.
- more bluetooth functions: sending data for instance.
- voice controls

If this is the direction we're going in, I'm going to ditch my apple stuff, switch to linux and never ever buy any movies or albums anymore! fuck restrictive DRM, and fuck all those who implement it in such a way users are being limited to the extreme in their freedom. I don't mind that I am not allowed to burn more than 5 copies (I mean, I can't even remember when I last burned a CD, so who gives a shit) or use my stuff on no more than 5 computers (okay, I'm at that limit, but only because I'm a nerd), but don't start fucking about when I want to play MY content on any type of display.

Mobile Me is still in a state of flux. Somehow the authorization doesn't
stick, and I get spontaneous reloads of the website for some weirdo
reason.

And funnily enough, the buttons have all gone blank..

Apple, fix this! My subscription is about to expire, but I'm having
serious doubts to extend it with the current problems.. (I probably
will, since I depend on it heavily... Sigh)