Comments on: What Will Apple Borrow Next?

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:59:29 +0000

I wanted to comment on the “Twitter won’t last 6 months” comments. It’s getting pretty close to six months, and as far as I know, Twitter is still alive and going strong.

As for Apple borrowing or acquiring, everyone does it. Apple and Microsoft are both incorporating ideas from each other– as well as Linux, BSD, and whoever else has a good idea. The biggest difference is that if Microsoft does it, they’re hung on a rope for it, and if Apple does it, they’re celebrated or just given a “wink and a nod” about it.

I don’t intend for this to sound like an Apple-bashing comment, rather that it should be held to the same standard as Microsoft. If you’re going to hang Microsoft for stealing, then you need to hang Apple right next to them. Since they both do it, and neither does a very good job of hiding the fact.

Have a great day:)
Patrick.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:47:26 +0000

Well, they will probably have to borrow from companies like Apple, which has over $30B in reserves. Surprisingly, the really successful high tech companies, like Cisco, MSFT, and Apple have been very frugal and have very conservative CFOs that they will laud one day for giving them the financial resilience to survive the economic storm we are now JUST entering.

By: Daniel Gerber

Daniel Gerber — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:21:45 +0000

I think that many companies will begin to borrow more money due to crisis soon!

By: James Dempsey

James Dempsey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:20:39 +0000

Unfortunately, I wrote this article PRIOR to WWDC, but it wasn’t published until after.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:32:07 +0000

Hasn’t the screen recording already been confirmed rather than simply speculated?

See here: http://www.apple.com/ca/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html#quicktime

By: NG

NG — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:09:01 +0000

I was fanatic about Claris Emailer back in the late 90s, and violently resisted its total failure to continue working on my iMac in early 2000. I understand that Mail.app is from NeXT, but I always had a hunch that Apple was trying to get the feel and functionality of Claris Emailer, which they also owned.

By: Captain

Captain — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:08:38 +0000

That’s the one thing that truly annoys me in the world of IM – I have to use the likes of Trillian (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo), just to be able to keep up with all the people. And, agreed, MSN is Europe’s standard – more or less.

By: Captain

Captain — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:04:00 +0000

Completely agree – social networking sites will eventually decline in their usage, so I don’t think we should be trying to incorporate them everywhere. The internet is (mostly) about being selective, exclusive, and cool. With facebook and twitter quickly becoming the AOL chat of the 21st century, maybe it’s time to look at other ways of networking people. OFFLINE networking. What a radical concept. Meet up with friends, a good bottle of wine…

By: geotopia

geotopia — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:43:21 +0000

This is a good point by Dave and Torbjørn (cool name!) and it doesn’t matter if Apple sees MSN as a direct competitor, MSN should be one of the networks supported in iChat, similar to Exchange Server being supported by the OS.

By: Torbjørn Vik Lunde

Torbjørn Vik Lunde — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:06:21 +0000

As much as I like Twitter I don’t think it’s mainstream enough for Apple to actually include it. Besides: there are already many good Twitter-clients for the mac. (Try finding one for Windows that isn’t shit.) If I remember correctly iChat was released in a time where good Chat-clients where very scarce on the Mac.

And since I was talking about iChat. I agree with Dave on MSN support for iChat. I think in a lot of Europe(at least in Norway) MSN is the de-facto IM-standard. It’s what people actually use. (And don’t get me started on the official MSN-client for Mac.)

By: mathue

mathue — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:14:21 +0000

Borrowing, such as it is in the computer world is dicey. Very little of what we see as an interface today was completely new or novel when it was incorporated. Colour, antialiased fonts, sound, cameras and desk layouts all were around in some shape or form, either electronic or physical before computers came along. As was noted on an episode of the Simpsons years ago; “You wouldn’t have the Flintstones without the Honeymooners.” Personally, I feel Twitter, being that it appears to have no long term profitability will go the way of other such ventures did. As it is, it’s basically a texting service, they just have a slightly novel way of going about it. As a feature it certainly wouldn’t be a make or break item for me or probably a great number of OSX users.

Apple has in the past incorporated features it needed from others, probably the best known was ‘Sherlock’. Once might notice it has vanished today, its functionality long since generic and fully available via the web.

Many functions we use today were at one point individual applications from third parties.

Also, I didn’t notice if someone pointed it out, but Quicktime has had editing abilities for a while now (I think Tiger), mind you, it’s only in the pro version.

By: Mick

Mick — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:15:35 +0000

MacBreak Weekly talked about http://www.flexibits.com/ that stopped their app camera because it will be incorporated into Snow Leopard

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:35:45 +0000

I wish Apple would integrate MSN capability into iChat, i love the iChat interface, and living in the UK, AIM isn’t widely used. The MSN Messenger application for Mac is terrible, and doesn’t even have features built into the versions of Messenger available 7 years ago. I know you can make MSN contacts available via a jabber client, but its a long and laborious process that isn’t secure, and doesn’t always work. I know that Apple must be able to do it, because there is obviously multi client apps available for OSX, it would just make one of those little things easier, not only for Mac natives, but for switchers used to windows.

By: spoonbender

spoonbender — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:48:23 +0000

I think it would be great if apple incorporated a ‘twiiter like’ capability into ichat or some other app. Then again Im biased on both counts. I love apple and twitter so…
S.

By: James Dempsey

James Dempsey — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:18:43 +0000

Yeah, that would be nice. Mail’s “To Do List” doesn’t really cut it.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:17:06 +0000

GREP based renaming with some simple serialized numbering would be a great addition to the Finder, but there are already some tools that get pretty close to doing that through CMI and faceless (no dock icon) apps. I’d like to see SpeedDoubler (CopyDoubler) where simple dragging gave you an option to “Smart Copy” new items when a folder already exists in the target location. There have been some RSync type apps, but no integration and the apps always end up back up applications when all I want is a folder-by-folder ad-hoc tool.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:14:04 +0000

C&G was a pretty diverse publisher, fonts, tools, apps, and SoundJam. I don’t think they OWNED SoundJam, but were just the publisher. If they sold the distribution rights to Apple, then they must have gotten paid a fair price but I don’t think that put them out of business, they must have either decided to close up shop or made business mistakes elsewhere because an acquisition would have meant cash, not a loss.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:08:51 +0000

KHTML was the genesis of Webkit which is in Safari, and the browser behind Android, Adobe AIR, and a few other great browser applications. I believe some folks might have gotten WebKit working on the Sigma SOC platform which would put WebKit on 90%+ of desktop, portable, mobile, and set top box solutions. I wouldn’t be surprised if web metrics started showing Webkit surpassing FireFox, if it was all counted as a group, between Safari, Android, iPhone, and AIR. In the shift from desktop to portable, IE could find it’s own base seriously eroding as well.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:02:43 +0000

Unknown secret, the main programmer for Final Cut might have joined Apple directly from Macromedia, but originally came from Adobe’s Premiere team. Awesome programming genious – reminds you that it’s not hoards coding in Redmond that give us breakthroughs, but individual talent working in the right environment.

By: geotopia

geotopia — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:59:01 +0000

You rush too quickly to judgment. Some aspects of social networking, like the over-bling of MySpace or the too-real-time triviality of Twitter quickly become tedious, but Facebook and LinkedIn are proving themselves as worthy endeavors that actually serve a social function. Saying ALL “social networking is dumb”, would be about the same as calling telephones dumb when the first phones were being installed. Maybe they needed some spit and polish, but life was never the same after A.G. Bell.