Steve Jobs to Headline iPhone-Centric Apple Developer Conference

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Apple this morning announced that CEO Steve Jobs will be emceeing the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on June 7 in San Francisco.

Continuing his trend of doing one-to-one e-mail marketing for his $43 billion (revenue) company, Jobs himself helped tout the conference with a personal e-mail to a customer over the weekend.

The developer’s conference attracts greater than usual attention because, for the past two years, Apple has used the venue to announce the latest version of its iPhone. Gizmodo may have spoiled the surprise this year by leaking what has been confirmed by Apple legal as a prototype of the fourth-generation iPhone. However, in an e-mail exchange with a customer over the weekend, Jobs said the event would still pack a punch.

“I hope you have some good WWDC announcements to blow [Google] out of the water,” a customer wrote to Jobs on Saturday.

“You won’t be disappointed,” the CEO responded, according to a report published on MacRumors.com.

As usual, the keynote address will be held in the Moscone West conference center to kick off the five-day WWDC conference, which includes hands-on sessions for software developers to become familiar with iPhone OS 4 and Mac OS X.

In addition to new iPhone hardware, Apple is expected to give further details on its next-generation mobile operating system, iPhone OS 4. The company in March previewed iPhone OS 4, which introduces support for multitasking and the ability to group apps in folders, among other features.

Apple’s 5,000-seat WWDC 2010 event sold out in eight days. The conference is designed to recruit and educate developers supporting Apple’s iPhone OS and Mac OS platforms.

The importance of WWDC continues to increase as Apple’s rivalry with Google becomes more fierce in the mobile space. Google last week held its sold-out Android developer conference, Google I/O, where executives spent a generous amount of time delivering potshots on Apple’s iPhone platform.

“If Google didn’t act, we face a draconian future. One man, one company, one device would control our future,” Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering of Google, told attendees at the conference. “If you believe in openness and choice, welcome to Android.”

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com


Apple Announces Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote

apple logo.jpgHear that? It’s the sound of your iPhone 3GS becoming rapidly obsolete. Apple today announced that it will be opening its annual World Wide Developer Conference with a keynote from Steve Jobs.

Jobs will take the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Monday, June 7 at 10am

No word on exactly what Jobs will use the platform to announce, but the smart money is on the final version of the 4th-generation iPhone, prototypes of which seem to have been showing up all over the place in the past couple months.

The event, which is targeted at Apple developers, sold out in eight days. It features “five key technology tracks,” including Application Frameworks; Internet & Web; Graphics & Media; Developer Tools; and Core OS. For the last couple of years, however, the key draw for the general public is the announcement of the latest version of the iPhone.

Steve Jobs will be front and center at WWDC 2010 for keynote duties

Just in case you were wondering if Steve Jobs would manage to show up to WWDC 2010 and totally party on the Apple faithful… yes. As you would expect, Steve will be rocking the keynote address on Monday, June 7th at 10AM Pacific. Afterwards you’ll be wondering where you’re going to find the money for that new iPhone. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Steve Jobs will be front and center at WWDC 2010 for keynote duties

Steve Jobs will be front and center at WWDC 2010 for keynote duties originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 May 2010 08:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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5 Things Apple Must Do to Look Less Evil


It’s appropriate that the Apple logo on the iPad is black. The Cupertino, California, company’s image is taking on some awfully sinister tones lately.

For a company that made its name fighting for the little guy, it’s a surprising reversal. In the past, Apple touted itself as the computer company for nonconformists who “Think Different.” Now the company is making moves that make it look like the Big Brother it once mocked.

First Apple tightened its iron grip on the already-stringent iPhone developer policy, requiring apps to be made with Apple-approved languages, which disturbed some coders and even children. A short while later, Apple rejected some high-profile apps based on their editorial content, raising journalists’ questions about press freedoms in the App Store. Then, police kicked down a Gizmodo editor’s door to investigate a lost iPhone prototype that Apple had reported as stolen. Even Ellen DeGeneres and Jon Stewart have mocked Apple’s heavy-handed moves.

Plenty of us love our shiny iPads, iPods, iPhones and MacBooks — state-of-the-art gadgets with undeniable allure. But it’s tough to imagine customers will stay loyal to a company whose image and actions are increasingly nefarious. We want to like the corporation we give money to, don’t we?

Here are five things Apple should do to redeem its fast-fading public image.

Publish App Store Rules

As I’ve argued before, the App Store’s biggest problem is not that there are rules, but that app creators don’t know what the rules are. As a result, people eager to participate in the App Store censor themselves, and that hurts innovation and encourages conformity. The least Apple can do is publish a list of guidelines about what types of content are allowed in the App Store. After all, Apple has had nearly two years and almost 200,000 apps to figure out what it wants in the App Store. Tell people what the rules are so they know what they’re getting into, and so they can innovate as much as possible. That would also tell us customers what we’re not getting on our iPhone OS devices.

Formalize Relationships With Publishers

Publishers are hypnotized by imaginary dollar signs when they look at the iPad as a platform that could reinvent publishing and reverse declining revenues. But after recent editorial-related app rejections, journalists are slowly waking up to our forewarning that Apple could control the press because news and magazine apps on the iPad are at the mercy of the notoriously temperamental App Store reviewers. If Apple wants to look a little less like the Chinese government, it should work with publishers to ink formal agreements regarding content to guarantee editorial freedom to respected brands.

Tweak iPhone Developer Agreement

Apple’s stated purpose of its revised iPhone developer policy is to block out meta platforms to ensure a high level of quality in the App Store. Also, from a business perspective, there is no lock-in advantage if you can get the same apps on the iPhone as you can on other competing smartphones. Fair enough, but Apple would be silly to think it can keep the mobile market all to itself, and its developer agreement comes off as a piece of literature holding developers hostage.

It’s hard to create new rules, but it’s easy to abolish existing ones. Apple should loosen up its iPhone developer agreement by snipping out a part of section 7.2, which states that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store. That implies that if you originally create an app with the Apple SDK, you’re not allowed to even modify it with different languages and sell it through another app store like Google’s Android market. In other words, iPhone apps belong to Apple. This rule is basically unenforceable to begin with, and Apple should just remove it, along with other similar policies.

Apologize to Jason Chen

Reasonable people can disagree over whether it was ethical for Gizmodo to purchase the lost iPhone prototype, but the police action — kicking down Jason Chen’s door to seize his computers — was overboard. It was self-evidently a clumsy move: After damaging Chen’s property, the police paused the investigation to study whether the journalists’ Shield Law protected Chen. The proper action would have been to issue a subpoena to get Chen to talk about the device first. Apple, which instigated the police action by filing a stolen property complaint, should publicly apologize to Chen (no relation to the author of this post) and reimburse him for the damages.

Get Gray Powell on Stage

When Apple accidentally leaked its PowerMac G5 a couple of years ago, Apple’s legal team forced MacRumors’ Arnold Kim to pull down his post containing the information. But a humbled Steve Jobs joked about the slip during his WWDC 2003 keynote, calling it a case of “Premature specification.” (See the video below.)

He should do a similar thing when he officially unveils Apple’s next phone, by having Gray Powell — the engineer who misplaced the next-generation iPhone prototype — make a stage appearance. Powell could walk out and hand Jobs the phone, saying “Hey Steve, I found your lost phone,” or something similar. Some comedic relief, provided by the engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in a bar, can remind us that Apple is still a company guided by a man with a sense of humor.

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Adobe CEO, Ex-Adobe Engineers Weigh In on Jobs’ Flash Attack

In an open letter published Thursday, Steve Jobs outlined a half dozen reasons why Apple is not supporting Flash on its mobile platform. Adobe’s CEO has defended Flash in response to Jobs, but some ex-Adobe employees interviewed by Wired.com shared many of the Apple CEO’s thoughts.

In his letter, Jobs highlighted the major reasons Apple is leaving Flash behind. Most relevant to users, Flash is the top cause of application crashes on the Mac, Jobs said, and Flash’s video-decoding method is a major battery drainer.

If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street Journal. He added that claims about Flash draining battery life were “patently false,” but he didn’t appear to elaborate.

Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday.

“Walter and I, being the lead architects for Flash Lite, we were seeing the iPhone touch devices coming out, and we kept saying ‘Hey, this is coming along,’” Icaza said in a phone interview. “You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasn’t doing anything about it.”

Icaza and Luh have a vested interest in this dispute: After leaving Adobe, they launched a startup, Ansca Mobile, which produces a cross-platform solution called Corona that competes with Flash.

They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.

The relationship between Apple and Adobe dates back years, as Jobs acknowledged in his blog post. Apple in the past has relied heavily on Adobe’s Creative Suite to market the Mac as a platform for creative types. But the relationship has been eroding ever since Apple introduced the iPhone and opted against supporting Adobe’s Flash platform on the mobile device. Tensions increased when Apple released the iPad, which continues Apple’s steadfast lack of Flash support.

Adobe last year announced it was developing a work-around for Flash developers to easily port their programs into iPhone apps. But this month, just a week before Adobe was scheduled to release the feature, Apple issued a new clause in its developer policy, which stipulated that iPhone apps must be coded with Apple-approved programming languages (not Flash).

Adobe’s 2007 decision to focus on Flash Lite and feature phones instead of iPhone compatibility is the reason Adobe is behind and still has not offered a fine-tuned version of Flash for any smartphone, including the iPhone or any Android device, Icaza and Luh said.

The pair echoed many of the same concerns expressed by the Apple CEO.

“Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS,” Luh said. “It wasn’t designed with that in mind at all.”

Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that because Adobe’s iPhone Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. For instance, apps made with Packager are much larger than they would be if they were made with Xcode. A simple “Hello World” app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode, according to James Eberhardt, a mobile developer who has tested iPhone Packager.

Macromedia, the original maker of Flash, was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Luh said it was disappointing that Adobe failed to translate Macromedia’s success into a compelling mobile platform.

“The biggest irony of all is that Adobe Macromedia was so far ahead of the game, it was unbelievable; it was a billion-dollar industry,” Luh said. “Macromedia was essential to that entire ecosystem…. The fact that through Adobe, they couldn’t find a way to convert that to the rest of the world through smartphones, they really kind of just lost sight of what was really important.”

Adobe declined to speak on the phone with Wired.com in response to Jobs’ and the ex-Adobe employees’ statements. However, a representative provided a written statement:

Adobe/Macromedia launched its mobile business about eight years ago to bring a version of Flash (Flash Lite) designed specifically for phones with very limited performance, memory and web-browsing support. Since then Flash has enabled rich user interfaces, mobile data services and access to some of the rich content on the Web on more than 1.3 billion mass market handsets worldwide. From 2002 thru 2007, device capabilities for supporting the full web or desktop versions of Flash Player were very limited. Smartphones capable of rendering the full web began reaching interesting volumes in 2008, which led Adobe to begin the important and complex optimization work with mobile platforms partners including ARM, Intel, Broadcom, nVidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others. With Flash Player 10.1, which was unveiled at MAX 2009, numerous improvements have been made to enable a rich, compelling, web experience. We are now in the final stretch and are excited to make the full Flash Player available on first mobile platforms including Android in the first half of 2010.

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Photo: Brian Derballa/Wired.com


Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions (update: video)

There’s no official transcript yet, but the Wall Street Journal just live-blogged an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, in which he responded to the Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash” letter posted this morning. Substantively, Narayen didn’t offer much we haven’t heard Adobe say before, but his frustration with Apple is palpable even in summary form: he called Jobs’ points a “smokescreen,” said Flash is an “open specification,” and further said Apple’s restrictions are “cumbersome” to developers and have “nothing to do with technology.” What’s more, he also said Jobs’ claims about Flash affecting battery life are “patently false,” and suggested that any Flash-related crashes on OS X have more to do with Apple’s operating system than Adobe’s software.

Perhaps most importantly, Narayen reiterated that Adobe is fundamentally about making it easier for devs to write multiplatform tools — a stance Jobs specifically took issue with in his letter, saying multiplatform tools lead to bad user experiences. Apple and Adobe and the rest of us can argue about battery life and performance all night, but that’s clearly the central philosophical difference between these two companies, and we doubt it’s ever going to change. That is, unless Adobe absolutely kills it with Flash 10.1 on Android 2.2 — and given our experiences with Flash on smartphones and netbooks thus far, we’ll be honest when we say that’s going to be a major challenge. We’ll link over to the full transcript when it goes up, but for now, hit the source link for the liveblog.

Update: We’ve now embedded video of the interview for you after the break. Much better than a transcript, don’t you think?

Continue reading Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions (update: video)

Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions (update: video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple’s position on Flash, going back to his company’s long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. Here’s the breakdown:

  • It’s not open. “While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.” Man, that’s some strong irony you’re brewing, Steve. Still, we get the point — HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript are open web standards.
  • The “full web.” Steve hits back at Adobe’s claim of Apple devices missing out on “the full web,” with an age-old argument (YouTube) aided by the numerous new sources that have started providing video to the iPhone and iPad in HTML5 or app form like CBS, Netflix, and Facebook. Oh, and as for flash games? “50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free.” If we were keeping score we’d still call this a point for Adobe.
  • Reliability, security and performance. Steve hits on the usual “Flash is the number one reason Macs crash,” but adds another great point on top of this: “We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” You’ve got us there, Steve, but surely your magical A4 chip could solve all this?
  • Battery life. “The video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software.” Steve Jobs is of course H.264’s #1 fan, and it’s hard to blame him, since he cites 10 hours of H.264 playback but only 5 hours with software decode on the iPhone. Still, those “older generation” sites that haven’t moved to H.264 yet are pretty much the exact same sites that aren’t viewable with HTML5, which means we’re being restricted in the content we can access just because some of it doesn’t perform as well.
  • Touch. Steve hits hard against one of the web’s greatest hidden evils: rollovers. Basically, Flash UIs are built around the idea of mouse input, and would need to be “rewritten” to work well on touch devices. “If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” That doesn’t really address the Flash-as-app scenario (that’s point #6), but it’s also a pretty silly sounding solution to a developer: your website doesn’t support this one UI paradigm exactly right, so why not rewrite it entirely?
  • The most important reason. Steve finally addresses the third party development tools situation, but it’s really along the lines of what we were hearing already: “If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.” We doubt this will end all debate, but it’s clear Apple has a line in the sand.

He concludes in saying that “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice.” Basically, it’s for the olds. And you don’t want to be old, do you? Follow after the break for the whole thing in brilliant prose form.

Continue reading Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs to Speak at All Things Digital Conference

Steve Jobs will appear as a guest speaker at the All Things Digital conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles.

The Apple CEO is scheduled for an onstage interview on June 1, the opening night of the tech conference.

There is much to talk to Jobs about, obviously, including the new iPad, the mobile market and the iPhone, its tense relationship with Google (GOOG) and the next innovations from the Silicon Valley computer icon,” wrote All Things Digital columnist Kara Swisher.

Jobs has appeared a number of times at previous All Things Digital events. In 2007, Jobs and co-founder Bill Gates spoke in a joint session about their long history in the technology industry.

These onstage interviews tend to be interesting, as Jobs rarely speaks at events other than those carefully planned (and scripted) by his own company. At the 2003 All Things Digital Conference, for example, Jobs told writer Walt Mossberg that Apple wasn’t planning to produce a tablet, among other sneaky statements demonstrating the businessman’s knack for masterful misdirection.

This year’s All Things Digital conference takes place from June 1 to June 3 near Los Angeles. Other guests include director James Cameron, Microfot CEO Steve Ballmer and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com


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Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell [Apple]

During last week’s iPhone leak saga, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, reached out to us with a story: The morning of the iPad launch, an engineer showed Woz an iPad for two minutes. For this he was fired. More »