Filed under: Other Events

Steve Jobs recently held a Town Hall meeting for Apple employees, and according to Wired, he had some very choice words for both Google and Adobe. While these likely aren't direct, word-for-word quotes, as they come from employees who spoke to Wired and MacRumors on condition of anonymity, if they're even in the ballpark of what Jobs said, Apple's response to both Google and Adobe can be summed up in two words: "Bring it."

On Google: "We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them [...] This don't be evil mantra? It's bullshit."

Snap. Maybe a tad belligerent there at the end, Mr. Jobs? I wonder what brought that on?
On Adobe: "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5." Sounds like the petitions can stop now. If that's really what Apple's CEO thinks of Flash, then make no mistake: Flash is never coming to Apple's mobile devices.

Some other tasty tidbits from the Town Hall courtesy of the folks at MacRumors:

- Jobs considers the iPad on a par with the iPhone and Mac as one of the most important products he's worked on
- Apple acquired Lala because they wanted to bring Lala's people to the iTunes team
- The next iPhone is "an A+ update" that Android won't be able to keep up with
- New Macs this year will take Apple "to the next level"
- Apple is still playing "wait and see" with regards to Blu-Ray, and won't implement it until/unless Blu-Ray sales take off

In the course of Apple Events, there comes a time as FCC approvals draw near, and announcements hang in the balance, that the store goes down and a great hush goes through the land. It is a time of great reflection and contemplation as each of us stands with 'bated breath, anticipating the technology shortly to debut.

Who are we kidding?

Can'twaitcan'twait! Puppies! Rainbows! Unicorns! Tablets! Are you as excited as we are? Is the iPad going to be ready for pre-orders? Maybe this is *it*?

Let us know in the comments.

Update: As of about 5:40 PM ET, the store was back up! Thanks for all of the tips from readers.

Apple has posted QuickTime streams of its "Latest Creation" keynote on their webpage, just in case you missed all the festivities earlier today. That latest creation, as we many had speculated, turned out to be the iPad. So you can watch Steve sit in a cushioned chair and browse the Internet (along with all of the demos from participating developers) with your own eyes. The streams, available in low, medium, and high bandwidth flavors, can be found here.

And if the keynote stream doesn't completely pad up your iPad appetite, check out TUAW's iPad page, a portal for all things iPad. If you see anything in the stream that we missed, definitely let us know.

Yesterday we pooled our predictions together to try and predict what would happen at the iPad presentation today. How did we all do?

Sang Tang:

Sang was the closest in terms of the iPad's screen size -- 9.6" prediction vs. 9.7" actual size. However, the iPad has neither wireless HDMI nor a front-facing camera (or, indeed, a camera of any kind). Score: 1/3.

Erica Sadun:

Erica was off on screen size, but was correct in predicting that the iPad would look and function much like an iPod touch. However, by all appearances the iPad doesn't add any new revolutionary gestures, and without a camera of any kind, any augmented reality applications are going to be very limited in scope. She was correct in saying there'd be no "mind-blowing new tech onboard" and optional nationwide wireless with a monthly fee. Score: 3/5.

David Winograd:

David was also off on screen size (though just barely), cameras, and new gestures. He was correct in predicting a keyboard dock and an optional data plan, but wrong about iPhone tethering and iPhone OS 4.0. Score: 2/7.

More scores and the TUAW total after the break!

Thank you again everyone for stopping by and sharing this live event with TUAW. We really appreciated how many of you stuck around after our CoverItLive connection died. Thank you all! We really appreciate your support for TUAW.

11:37: And it looks like we're out of there. I think I'm going to have to soak my fingers in ice water. Yikes!

11:35: iPad is up on Apple, and video!

11:35 "Thank you so much for coming."

11:35 GIZ Jason Chen: And here's IPS: In Plane Switching. Click here if you want a better explanation of the technology.

11:34: "Go to the store. Get your hands on an iPad. Once you get your hands on an iPad you'll never go back."

11:33: "We fit the users. User don't have to come to the device. We come to the users."

11:33: "We always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. Be able to get the best of both. Extremely fast products."

11:33: Jason Chen: "We are ready for the iPad."

11:32: "Most advanced technology", "Magical and revolutionary device", "Unbelievable price".

11:31 Back to Steve. iTunes Store, App Store, iBook Store, all on the iPad. Over 125million accounts. One click shopping. (One tap, really) 12 Billion products. At scale, and ready for iPad.

11:30: (via Macworld) Monitoring The Twitter, I see a lot of people blown away by the price here, and also a bunch of people sold on the keyboard. Fraser Spiers, a Mac developer and a schoolteacher, says the 16GB wi-fi only model with keyboard extra makes it an amazing product for education.



11:30 "If I was a college kid and most of my textbooks were on here, I'd be pre-ordering right now" -- Megan Lavey

Are you as excited as we are about the upcoming Apple announcement? Join us in this open chat prior to today's liveblog. All we ask is that you keep things civil and suitable for all ages. C'mon and join in the excitement as we monitor Twitter and analyze the latest rumors, leaks and stories.

Update 11am ET: Logins appear to be working again for the iPhone Dev Center, at least from the East Coast. If you're still having trouble logging in, try using Firefox rather than Safari. Still hearing reports of intermittent issues (Namely "Can't connect to application instance")

Isn't it weird that Apple has taken down the iPhone devcenter a day before their big "newest creation" announcement? Normally we expect site outages on the day of announcementpalooza, not the day before. Maybe it's a maintenance/infrastructure thing that needs to go live and be tested before the big day. Maybe it's 3.2. Maybe it's an attack of rainbow unicorn puppy dog devs. We don't know. All we know is that the site has been down since about 5AM Eastern. (I write this at about 10:30 Eastern). iTunes Connect remains unaffected by this outage.

Macworld is reporting that their partner Network World recently did a poll and came up with the figure of four out of ten Network World readers willing to buy a tablet on day one sight unseen. That's an interesting result (and it's not the only one seen along those lines), but I want to know what you TUAW readers think. We've got a pretty good group of professionals, "pro-sumers" (ugh, sorry, I'll never use that word again), and just plain Mac fans in the audience here, and I think we represent a pretty good cross-section of Apple's core audience. Jump in on our poll below, and let us know, if the impossible became possible, if you'd plunk down the rumored $1000 for a tablet even before Steve's demo, or if you'd rather wait and see (or maybe not even buy a tablet at all, no matter what it does).



Personally, I'm more of a "maybe," though I can totally understand the belief that this is already a revolutionary project (we've certainly been waiting long enough for it). Or perhaps those of us who already have an iPhone and a MacBook aren't really as interested in the in-between as Apple might think.

The news that Apple is going to announce something on January 27th has the stock market in a tizzy. At one point this morning, Apple shares were up to $214.16, up $8.23 or about 4.0%.

Apple set a 52-week high with a share price of $215.59 on January 5, 2010, up 275.6% over the 52-week low set on January 20, 2009.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, by comparison, was up only .95% shortly after 1 PM ET today, and the NASDAQ index was up about 1.17%.

It should be noted that Apple share prices traditionally fall after an announcement, but it will be fascinating to see if AAPL is able to hit a new high prior to the January 27th event.

[via MacDailyNews]

With the Apple tablet announcement growing closer by the day, we at TUAW have been putting on our thinking caps trying to brainstorm out exactly what the new device might be called. Of course, since we don't have a clue to base our guesses on (aside from the thin support of domain name registrations), we decided to turn over the decision and brainstorming process to you, the TUAW reader. What do you think the new device will be called? Place your vote in the following poll, and add your guesses to the comments. Let your imagination free -- but do remember we're a family friendly site.

Speaking of thin support & quite amusing -- It's not much to go on with respect to a name, but as suggested by reader Nicholas, we did take a closer look at Apple's invitation copy. "Apple's latest creation," without the spaces, becomes "Appleslatestcreation," which of course does contain the phrase "Apple Slate." Yes, well, it seems pretty silly and inelegant to me too, and not something Apple would do... and yet. [Editor's note: OK, we went and looked again -- the exact phrase "Apple's latest creation" isn't there, it says "our latest creation," so this bit of pipe-dreaming goes from silly to ludicrous... don't blame Erica, blame the editing.]

All the big guys have been receiving their golden tickets this morning. So what can little sites like TUAW do to play along? Why, Zapruder the heck out of the invite of course. Zaprudering, as the SciFicast explains, "is a neologism derived from the Zapruder film, the amateur 8mm film that is the only known visual record of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It's used here to indicate painstaking analysis of the trailer." Zaprudering refers to a detailed extraction of evidence from a limited set of image data.

As you can see in the image at the top of this post, several features stood out to our TUAW team. Mike Rose was first to notice that the art used spray paint rather than finger paint, as you might expect for a tablet event invite. "Could this be a hint of MacPaint Pro?" asked Steve Sande. "That would harken back to the original Mac (MacPaint) and be very cool."

Dave Caolo noticed that the Apple logo front-and-center, along with the thin (tablet-shaped?) border pointed to a Macbook-like presentation. It would be awesome if the tablet really could mimic and/or replace many laptop features, although all early Humint rumors point to an iPhoneOS-only system.

So what does the art-styled presentation hint at? To most of the team, this seemed a vote for augmented reality interaction a la Excelitech's Virtual Graffiti app [iTunes link]. Maybe we'll be able to interact in new ways with maps and images through a touch-based interface.

Will the target audience differ from the anticipated Kindle crowd? Maybe this touch-based creation will be aimed more at tangible creative media than at simple video and book display? Maybe the rumors about gestures gone wild with a high-powered CPU we've been reading about give a better sense of who Apple is aiming their "latest creation" at.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Commenters point out that the colors used almost perfectly match the current nano line.

Update: TUAW's Megan Lavey adds "I think Apple is announcing the release of its interactive paintball set. It uses the built-in iSight camera. You mad at someone? Click a button on iChat and the paint color of your choice blasts that person in the eye." *hee*

Are you an App Store developer? Looking to learn how to promote your application? Join us on Friday, January 15, 2010 at 12PM Eastern Time (9 AM Pacific Time) for an informal marketing clinic right here on TUAW. We'll be chatting about marketing and promoting apps. On hand, we'll have experts Brian Akaka of Appular and our own Steve Sande to offer advice and answer questions.

Brian Akaka's Appular focuses on providing Marketing and PR strategy and execution to iPhone App developers, helping them to gain visibility for their Apps in a quickly growing and maturing market. TUAW blogger Steve Sande has worked with iPhone developers to improve the marketing of their apps.

This will be a Q&A and participation clinic (like the Hackintosh clinic we ran a few weeks ago), so expect a lot of interaction with the greater TUAW community. We'll see you there!

Macworld reports that the 2010 Game Developers' Conference will include an 8-class track on iPhone games. The iPhone Games Summit, which takes place over two days, replaces an older format where panels on the iPhone were mixed in with those on gaming for other mobile platforms or independent development.

Classes appear to be aimed toward niche development ("A Big Dash of Success: How to Capture the Female iPhone Gamer") and utilizing social networking and multiplayer capabilities for iPhone games. The two most interesting classes to me is a case study of one company's year in the App Store and a class aimed at covering the finer points of the iPhone contract. Given that this is their first year, it'll be interesting to see how these are attended and what changes they make next time around as well.

The Game Developers' Conference will be held March 9-13 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

When iTunes Connect returned after its Christmas break, developers noticed that things had changed quite a bit on the App Store approval front. Applications that had formerly taken ten to fourteen days to work through review were now getting processed in a couple of days or less. The upshot? Happier developers, better bug releases for users, and a healthier App Store ecosystem.

There's another consequence of the new, speedier approvals: the tablet. With the device due to ship March/April (late Q1, early Q2), and no announced 4.0 SDK, developers were left wondering how they'd have the time to bring their software up to date. Under the old review process even a single procedural rejection, which are quite common for small GUI details, would have exhausted nearly all of February in non-productive "wait mode".

With the enhanced review system in place, it's likely that developers will be able to spend those extra weeks refactoring their software, allowing it to ship in a timely fashion once the actual device appears on-scene. Apple is expected to push their SDK to developers within two weeks of their late January product announcement, probably by 15 February. Assuming a 2 April product launch, that leaves nearly six weeks to update and test software.

Not that developers are waiting. Many devs are already working on resolution independent versions of their applications. They are tasking their designers to re-imagine screens, to test hand-held cardboard prototypes, and otherwise start the process of scaling their products to new dimensions.

It should be noted that some of the App Store heavyweights have suddenly become quite tight-lipped in recent days, refusing to talk in any specifics about how their upgrade process is proceeding. The rest of us will have to get by on guess work, at least until the product announcement at the end of this month.

Without specific leaks regarding hardware changes (for example, will there really be a front facing video camera? and if so, will expanded Image Picker/Media Player classes support access?), it's hard to pin down exactly what new features can be leveraged in third party software. But it's a fairly safe bet that nearly all features available on the current iPod touch line will be in play on the new tablet. And that alone is enough to hedge some safe business bets about pushing forward with large screen development.

It's still too early for most of us to start playing -- those tight-lipped folk have a bit of the wild "Apple will kill me if I speak" look around their eyes -- but it's not too early to begin planning and working. Even without specifics, there are ways to move forward on the development front. Carpe diem. There's not much time left before the yet-unannounced tablet ships.