iPhone4 + FaceTime ≠ Open Standard

For crying out loud Apple… You have this wildly popular new shiny thing (iPhone4). Congrats by the way…

You go on this big screed about “open standards”. While…

In your other corner you have this wonderful but 1/2 forgotten platform called OSX (which was notably absent from this years WWDC by the way) which you graced with a pretty nice iChat protocol.

Now, why have TWO proprietary (ie. NOT open or otherwise known as CLOSED) Apple protocols when they could be made to work great together over public internet?

Is it because selling two iPhone4’s is that much better than giving us a little OSX/iOS cross-platform compatibility?

Is it because it’s planned to be an iOS5 feature?

Is it because it’s going to be melded into ONE protocol? Which one wins out? When?

Is it because you really have in mind to FINALLY come out with a Windows version of iChat that will work with Mac iChat and iOS FaceTime? (I’m full on delusional at this point to think this might happen)

Guys, it’s genius you have this FaceTime thing going on. But jeez Louise! Make your shiny new thing work with your other shiny things! Please?!

HOWTO: Create iChat Links

I’ve always wanted to post or share my iChat link. But, couldn’t because of various obstacles. Either the email client didn’t know what to do with it or the web-based platform (in this case WordPress) didn’t.

There is a little known protocol ichat:// (much like http) which you can call from a URI. Example: ichat://geraldb28@mac.com (see? WordPress yanks the ichat:// part off and wraps it up in an http://)

THAT should have created a verbatim link. But, it didn’t. See, WordPress doesn’t play nice with that protocol (or at least recognize it and treat it with the respect it deserves… grumble, grumble).

So, I’ve tricked WordPress into accepting a different input but achieving my end goal. Wolf in sheep’s clothing, sort of. By going to http://www.tinyurl.com/ (see THAT created a link didn’t it!?) and plugging in my ichat://geraldb28@mac.com and creating a TinyURL… See!? That WORKS and you can simply click to launch iChat (if not already running) and voila! we can simply get on with our chit chat.

Share the joy. DIGG it. Whatever. I’m just glad to have taught myself something new today… even if the rest of you already knew how to do it. 🙂

iPredict iChat For Windows

It’s going to happen: iChat for Windows will be announced at Macworld Expo next week.

There’s just too much going on in that one app to remain bottled up for OSX alone. You wait and see. Next week. iChat for Windows. Oh, and one more thing

Auto-accept iChat Screen-Share Script

Graydon Stoner had the fine idea to whip up a script to automatically accept screen-share requests via iChat (Leopard version only). Why would one wish to do this? Hmm?

Apple Remote Desktop, as much as I like it, has too much screen lag for my liking. Most of the time all I’m wanting to do is take remote control of the screen on the far end. For this, iChat is FAR more responsive and lithe at the task… to the point it all but dissolves the arguments MS remote control is vastly superior in the responsive dept. I don’t know how much more responsive Apple could make this.

Problem is, until Graydon’s script popped up on the interweb… there had to be two consenting peeps involved. No longer. Now, with this script installed and waiting for the proper Apple Event… I can now substitute ARD in favor of iChat if I really wanted (or needed) to.

Graydon, thanks for a cool solution. Hope you get lots of link love for your hard work.

Patrick Scoble & Leopard iChat

Had the pleasure of a voice chat and screen share with Patrick and his dad (you might have heard of them).

Right out of the box two stock systems are sharing screens. No special settings. No NATing, no firewall rigamarole. It just works. That’s the beauty of what OS X represents to me these days. Stuff just works.

Little Leopard iChat Anyone?

Anyone want/need to test out their Leopard iChat chops?iChat me at geraldb28@mac.com

[EDIT: Two chats later… I’m VERY impressed with the quality of the first. Stable and delivered everything as expected. Voice. Video. Screen share. File share. Fair bit of physical distance – central US to one of the coasts…

The second one… not so good. LOTS of physical distance. Connection hiccups galore.

So, a little better than 50-50 in my book. ANY OTHER TAKERS?]

LiveBlogging WWDC 2007

Please, consider adding the gwhiz blog to your RSS feed reading. Thanks!WHAT!? No John Mayer to play out the keynote?ONE LAST THING… iPHONE. Developers? Now have an innovative solution… Via Safari browser you can write AJAX apps running like desktop apps. Instant distribution. No SDK necessary. Live June 29. Author to Safari for look and feel of the phone. DEMO of “The Apple Directory”. LDAP powered. One man-month to dev. THAT all looks like it’s running off of the TEAMS Leopard Server… Hmmm…ONE MORE THING… SAFARI. At 5% and growing. 18M Safari users. IE at 78%, FireFox at 15%. OOOOHHHH Safari for Windows! Makes sense: They did it with iTunes. Doing it for Safari. Leopard. XP and Vista. Benchmarks look good. Rearrangeable tabs. Tearoff tabs. Fastest browser on Windows. Distributing by way of http://www.apple.com/safari/October. $129 (for Premium edition, Ultimate version AND Business version) :)Only developers at WWDC gets a beta copy of Leopard!? I hope that doesn’t mean what it sounded like!…10) TIME MACHINE. Autobackup. Just does it. Getting something back easy and not onerous at all. Restore one file or a whole Mac. Intuitive tools to go back in file’s lifetime. Find it. Restore it.9) iCHAT. Video conferencing is HARD. Photobooth has sexed up iChat. Tabs. DEMO. Phil again… iChat Theater’s nice, shares real time transition, effects with other parties. Show video too. If it works with QuickLook… works with iChat. Backdrops are like greenscreen and keying.8) DASHBOARD. Since Tiger. Widgets at 3,000 or so. Movie Times will be Apple’s newest widget with Preview, Fandango tie in. (Probably teeing up an iPhone thing). Webclips via Safari DEMO. Makes Dashboard widgets directly from Safari.7) SPACES. Easily segment apps into seperate screen views. Move apps between views. View all available spaces quickly. Looks nicely done… audio plays only though active space for instance although audio might be active on another hidden space.6) BOOT CAMP. Built in. XP and Vista at native speeds. Easy to install drivers (on CD/DVD).5) CORE ANIMATION. Simple to implement. High yield, low effort. Remember the AppleTV intro… done with Core Animation. VERY sexy stuff.4) FULL 64-BIT GOODNESS. Through Cocoa. Totally mainstream. First ones there. Apple will only have ONE os and it WILL run both 64 and 32-bit apps. Handled differently. Still works fine though. 64-bit goes straight to memory. 32 to disk. 64 LOTS faster (x5). DEMO on large pic 32k/32k pixels (zooming, filters, etc). VERY fluid.3) QUICKLOOK. Peek inside any file on your Mac. Plugin architecture available. In coverflow just press spacebar. DEMO: Boom, Boom, BOOM! 🙂 Can do in full-screen too.2) NEW FINER (YEAH! x2) Cleaned up. More powerful. Spotlight searches YOUR mac. Finder searches other Macs. Coverflow in Finder (fourth ‘view’ button). New sidebar remininiscent of iTunes. .Mac integration updates IP’s etc. Smart search… smarter (“today, “yesterday”, etc). Shares are much more like iTunes shares. ENCRYPTED! Browse home computer from anywhere. Smart icons (finally) hint at document contents. DEMO. New tabs in .Mac prefs pane… Sharing between Work and Home.Stacks are kinda cool for file and folder cleanup. Newest doc on top of fan of stuff. Use it as launcher. Special download stack for Safari.1) New Desktop – (YEAH!) Transparent menu bar, new dock + angled edges, STACKS?, consistency, brushed metal is DEAD. Active window prominence. High res/resolution-independent. DEMO.Tiger’s new FEATURES22 million mac users. 67% Tiger. 23% Panther. 10% other.Id Games… New stuff ID Tech 5. Virutal worlds looking stuff. Quake video running in realtime. Dev’d in last 10 days.Electronic Arts is coming back to Mac. Big! Gaming migration back to Mac in general. C&C3, Battlefield 2142, N4S Carbon, Harry Potter + Phoenix (all in July) Simultaneous release schedules. Apologizes for the trash talk. Impressive demo of Harry P. Madden and Tiger Woods in August.Paul Otellini gets a stainless steel award of some kind… Knife set!? Paul O, “Apple partnership is best of my career.”((Apple Store is DOWN))Last year was “Intel”. Lots of Universal apps now. Intel busted their tail making this a successful transistion. Extraordinary. Intel CEO onstage.Real Steve… 159 sessions this week. 94 hands on labs. 1 engineer per four attendees.PC guy’s fake Steve on video. Closing apple down. Vista, Zune outgunning Apple. Tossing it in. Lots of fun.”Welcome” over P.A. Here we go!Are those brushed metal iMacs on the podium!?9:45 and all are seated. Muzac playing.What could it be? Hmm…t-minus 30 mins. Smoke em if you got em. The MASSIVE keynote line’s moving.

Leopard’s Crucial Role? Fooey!

Piper Jaffray keeps saying Vista’s going to put the crunch on Apple to step up and deliver in the OS space.

To that I say, “DUH! Do ya think?” Seriously folks… They must have spent their whole Christmas break thinking up that one.

Vista’s a fine move forward for Windows and brings some serious stuff to the PC and the inevitable patches and upgrades are going to further build on top of what Microsoft has released (and, yes, I spent my Christmas break thinking THAT one up). Things that don’t yet work like, oh, iTunes and EVDO drivers… WILL, eventually. Apple’s hoped for announcement of the release date is going to probably be accompanied by a demo of where things stand in their development cycle. I can’t see an announcement of that sort (if any is to come at all) without a show and tell. But, to think it’s the be all end all, pivot point of the success of the platform. No way Jose. Not buying that bit.

So, what DON’T we know?

• We don’t know what the secrets are yet
• We don’t know the ship date
• We don’t know if FTFF has been addressed
• We don’t know if ZFS is going to be fully supported
• We don’t know if iChat will have VoIP
• We don’t know terms of who will qualify for no-charge upgrades
• We don’t know if Alex (the Voice Over voice) is going to work on Server
• We don’t know if Mail.app will have multi-part mime mail.
• We don’t know if torrent support will reside in the OS
• We don’t know what shape “Illuminous” will take. If any.
• yada, yada, yada

There’s a LOT we don’t know. What we DO know is when Leopard does eventually arrive (boxed or torrented) that it’s just the starting point. Cupertino’s going to have to build on top of, what I’m seeing so far, to be a sweet upgrade. It’s by no means a Vista killer. It’s just one more step in a long march in the road called OS Bloat.

Skype goes v2.5 for Mac

Briefly… If you’d like todownload Skype for Mac the new features you will find are SMS messaging and 10-way conference calling.

I’m GeraldB28 on Skype. Feel free to add me to your contacts list if you like.

I’m also GeraldB28@mac.com and am available for video and audio iChats. You might even catch me online with the Leopard iChat client sometimes… who knows.

Leopard’s Evolution To Date…

This post will be edited until Apple’s official release. Ground Rules: I am under NDA with Apple as a developer and will only point to that which is posted elsewhere and comment on THAT. However, I’d highly recommend becoming an ADC Select developer. You’ll get in on all the early goodness, get discounts that easily pay for the membership AND you’ll save a good deal of time roaming about trying to make sense of the latest gossip 🙂

That said, please bookmark this page. It’s going to morph into the best single spot you’ll find regarding Leopard’s GUI as time rolls on.

LINKS

• Apple’s Official Leopard start page – A good early primer on what’s up at Apple with their next gen OS.
• Apple’s Leopard Developer Center – If you’re as hooked as a lot of us… THAT link is indispensable. Behind the login is an AWESOME display of content from WWDC06: Full sessions; the mini-keynotes; the whole shooting match. VERY NICE!
• A bit less glamorous but worthwhile is the Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview. Probably nothing you didn’t already know… just a little more detail before you have to pony up and spend some $ to see the show.
• Technorati link for apple AND leopard results (good for an RSS feed anyway)
• 9A321 Developer release link (Technorati feed)
• 9A326 Internal release link (Technorati feed)
• DIGG and Leopard

ILLUMINOUS – As of 12/10 I hadn’t heard boo about “Illuminous”. Apparently MacShrine and MacGazette are reporting their respective angles on a supposed new GUI of Leopard and have either dubbed it Illuminous themselves or are privvy to some code name we’ve not really heard of yet. I’ve downloaded both of the developer seeds and will not give credence to either of these reports that an Illuminous GUI appears in the build. However, Macshrine’s subsequent posting might be of interest.

SIGHTINGS

• MacRumors Leopard page are appear to be sporting pics from previous builds. There might be more coming (or not).
• Less of a sighting and more of a yearning… There was nothing of note regarding Leopard at the MWSF07 show. Instead, the iPhone and iTV dominated stage center. And, despite my “Tuesday” release predictions… there was no new Developer seed during MWSF. Odd.

EMERGING “FEATURES”?
Mr. Jobs’ keynote tipped us off that we weren’t going to see all the neat new bells and whistles at WWDC06. There were a lot! But, we were left with the sense, “There’s definitely more you’re not seeing…” I’m endorsing/expressing/implying ZERO warranty of the tidbits below. Yes, there are a LOT of speculations out there. Yes, I’m editorializing by cherry picking and not posting them all. Still… I make no claim to the validity.

• iChat answering machine
• Looks like XAR is going to be coming. Interesting…
• ZFS is an on again, off again rumored deal. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
• DVD Player may sport some nifty new UI.