Hasta La Gadget!

Since we’d rather not attempt to pick out a birthday present for the retail store that has everything, we’re breaking out the home movies to see just how far it’s come in the past decade. Here’s some footage from Macworld 2001, in which a chipper Jobs takes us behind the wood barricade for a “little private tour” of the first ever Apple Store in Tysons Corner, VA, showing off a rear-projection screen for playing commercials and debuting the hyperbolically-named Genius Bar. All said, not that much seems to have changed with the stores in the past ten years, save, of course, for the inventory — of particular note are the MP3 player and PDA sections, both populated with third-party hardware. Apple would scorch the earth of the music player market later that year with introduction of the iPod. The personal organizer still had a little time left, but surely even back then the iPhone was a twinkle in old Steve’s eye.

Continue reading Nostalgia: Steve Jobs tours the first Apple Store at Macworld 2001 (video)

Nostalgia: Steve Jobs tours the first Apple Store at Macworld 2001 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 May 2011 12:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs demonstrates the iPhone 4 at WWDC 2010. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Revealing how Steve Jobs runs Apple is like exposing the secrets behind a magician’s tricks. And several of the magician’s “assistants” just broke their code of silence.

In a lengthy feature titled “Inside Apple,” Fortune magazine’s editor at large Adam Lashinsky paints a clear picture of what it’s like to work at Apple, based on dozens of interviews with current or former employees at the company. In a nutshell: It’s a lot like working for a giant startup with a low tolerance for imperfection.

Take for example, the launch of Apple’s MobileMe web service in 2008, which was riddled with bugs and an embarrassing e-mail blackout for thousands of customers. This product release was so poor that critics labeled it “MobileMess.”

Jobs didn’t take it very well, according to Fortune.

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Jobs reportedly asked the MobileMe team after the fumbled launch. When he received an answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Jobs didn’t stop there.

“You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he reportedly told the team. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.”

Jobs immediately named a new executive to run MobileMe, and shortly after the meeting, most of the team was disbanded.

Apple’s mercurial CEO is well-known for running the company like a ruthless dictator, on a level of secrecy comparable to the CIA. Fortune’s article does a thorough job unraveling the company culture at Apple, which recently surpassed Google to become the most valuable corporation in the world.

The last ambitious piece analyzing Apple’s culture came from Wired alum, Leander Kahney, in his 2008 cover story “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong.” Kahney interviewed several former employees, including Guy Kawasaki, who described Jobs as a manager who proved that “it’s OK to be an asshole.”

Kahney elaborated on why Apple’s culture of secrecy is good for the company: “… [T]he approach has been critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals.”

Adding more details to the Apple picture, Fortune offers a rather interesting nugget on an elite group at the company known as the Top 100. Jobs gathers these exceptional individuals to attend a top-secret, three-day strategy session at an undisclosed location. This event is so secret that members of the Top 100 are told not to mark the meeting on their calendars, and they’re not even allowed to drive to the location.

During the Top 100 meeting, Jobs and his top leaders “inform a supremely influential group about where Apple is headed,” Lashinsky writes. Here, some members of the Top 100 get on stage to present strategies or products that signal the company’s future. According to one employee, Jobs first showed the iPod to employees during a Top 100 meeting.

Outside of the theatrical Top 100 events, Jobs meets with executives every Monday to discuss important projects, and on Wednesdays he holds a marketing and communications meeting, Fortune claims.

There’s no excuse for employees to have any confusion after a meeting. An effective Apple meeting will include an “action list,” and next to each action item is a “DRI” — a directly responsible individual who must ensure the task is accomplished.

As for senior employees such as vice presidents, Jobs reportedly gives the same speech to all of them. Basically, when you’re a high-level employee, you have no excuses for screwing up:

“When you’re the janitor,” Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

And perhaps the most fascinating tidbit from the article is about a program called Apple University.

Before his second medical leave three years ago, Jobs hired Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management, to lead Apple University. Podolny has hired a team of business professors to write a series of internal case studies about Apple’s most significant decisions in recent history.

The purpose? To ensure that Apple will remain Apple, in the event that Jobs were to depart. Investors and technology observers have debated for years whether Apple can continue to be so successful without the visionary leader that has shaped the company from day one.

That remains an open question, but Apple University’s sole purpose seems to be preparing for the day that the show must go on without the magician.

This article was written on May 09, 2008 by CyberNet.

Fun Friday

A couple of weeks ago I got an email forwarded to me and it was a list of rules that Bill Gates gave in a speech at a High School. When he gave the speech, he said they were not things that would be learned in school, and he talked about how “feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real word.” I read through the rules (view here) and they were extremely interesting and gave me the idea to try and find other bits of advice that people in the tech industry have given.

In the process of finding more advice, I learned that these “rules” weren’t actually written by Bill Gates, rather they were written by a man named Charles Sykes in a book called “Dumbing Down America.” This was one of those situations where whoever started the email didn’t exactly get their facts straight, but they were still interesting bits of advice nonetheless. Keeping with the theme, I figured I’d seek out some of the best actually given by Bill Gates, and add to it with advice from Steve Jobs, and Mark Shuttleworth (known for his leadership of the Ubuntux Linux distribution). At least one of these men has played an extremely important role in the computer experience you have, and so we thought it would be worth seeing what kinds of advice they’ve given.

Bill Gates

The bits of advice/words of wisdom/questions to think about from Bill Gates come from a commencement address that he gave in 2007 at Harvard University.

• Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discovers – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.
• The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
• From those to whom much is given, much is expected
• Take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it
• Don’t let complexity stop you
• Be activists
• Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
• Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
• For every person in the world who has access to technology, five people don’t…

Steve Jobs

The bits of advice/words of wisdom from Steve Jobs come from a commencement address that he gave in 2005 at Stanford University.

• Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith…
• You’ve got to find what you love.
• The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
• Don’t settle.
• Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
• There is no reason not to follow your heart
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life
• Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition
• You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future…

Mark Shuttleworth

The bits of advice from Mark Shuttleworth come from the following sources: Dist rowatch.com , Freesoftwaremagazine.com, Phoronix

• A small group of passionate people is all it takes to change the world. In fact, if you look through the history of humanity, they are the only ones who have ever changed anything.
• When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. When is the second best time? Now.
• I think we are all driven to push ourselves in one way or another – to explore some idea or activity that’s interesting
• Before launching Ubuntu, I asked myself: where do I want to be? Do I want to be on the sidelines, reading about these changes, or do I want to jump straight into the action and help shape the future?
• You need to look into the future and see what is really interesting and then pursue it. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be successful as nothing in life means you’re going to be successful
• Know very clearly what it is that you are excited about. Partly that means reading widely and know what is going on in the world and just being honest about what you really enjoy, and doing that because you will be a hell of a lot better at it then if you follow someone else…
• In the technology game, you need to pick things that are inspiring, challenging, and interesting

The best advice is…

With that, we wanted to throw the question out to you and find out what the best piece of advice is that you have received?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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At Apple’s tablet event last week, there was one noticeable absence: games.

Apple frequently uses games to show off the computing power of its mobile devices, but this time, Steve Jobs was driving home the message that the iPad is a tool for creation, not just a fancy plaything.

“This is not a toy,” Jobs said after a demonstration of iMovie for iPad. “You can really edit movies on this thing.”

Later, after a demonstration of GarageBand for iPad, Jobs repeated it: “Again, this is no toy.”

Priced at $5 each, iMovie and GarageBand were the only apps demo’d last Wednesday on the iPad 2. These apps aren’t brand-new, because they were previously Mac apps, but bringing them to the iPad is a significant move.

Historically, iMovie and GarageBand have been popular on the Mac because of their affordability and ease of use. With these two apps, Apple pioneered tools for Joe Schmo to create music and movies — skills that were previously exclusive to professional musicians and moviemakers with expensive hardware and software.

As a professional Final Cut Pro videomaker myself, I was personally frustrated that Apple kept making it easier and easier for anyone to replicate my technical skills with much simpler tools. (To be clear, beyond my selfish needs, I did view iMovie as extremely beneficial for creators.)

Now Apple’s making these same creative tools more accessible to an even broader audience, on an even more affordable device, the $500 iPad. The touchscreen interface is so intuitive that even children and grandparents have been able to pick up iPads and figure out how to use them in a few minutes. Now they could potentially launch iMovie or GarageBand and create some movies or music.

While touchscreen tablets are less than ideal for typing out long blog posts or writing novels, they may become an ideal platform for multimedia creation with tools like these. For that reason, these apps may be even more important than the iPad 2 itself.

But Apple still has a lot of room to improve if it wants the iPad to be a platform for creation. Going forward, one key area of creation that Apple should focus on is a tool to create apps.

Creative Coding

Programming is one of the most creative things you can do with a computer, and the iPad could potentially be a powerful tool to introduce this form of creativity to many people, particularly children.

Currently there is no way for people to use the iPad to make programs. Furthermore, the touchscreen interface already doesn’t seem ideal for traditional coding, and there’s no easy way to look under the hood of an iPad to understand how to create software.

Without a proficient programming environment readily accessible on the iPad, Apple’s tablet paints a bleak portrait for the future of programming.

“I think the iPad generation is going to miss out on software programming,” said Oliver Cameron, developer of the Friends iPhone app. “Kids don’t need Macs anymore.”

It doesn’t help that Apple enforces strict rules around how iOS apps must be programmed, which occasionally results in some collateral damage.

Take for example Apple’s rejection of Scratch early last year. Scratch for iPhone was an app for kids to view programs coded with MIT’s Scratch programming platform.

Apple rejected the app, citing a rule that apps may not contain code interpreters other than Apple’s. This rule appears to be specifically designed to prevent meta platforms such as Adobe Flash from appearing on the iPad, thereby allowing Apple to keep its iOS platform to itself.

The young community of Scratch programmers, however, doesn’t pose a threat to Apple’s business, and the rejection of the Scratch app shows how Apple’s developer rules can harm the art of programming.

“I think it’s terrible,” said Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab and lead developer of the Scratch online community, when Scratch was rejected April 2010. “Even if the Scratch app was approved, I still think this sends a really bad message for young creators in general. We have a forum where kids post comments, and they were really upset about this.”

Furthermore, Apple has especially frowned on the act of hacking iOS devices. It’s worth noting that programmers can still tinker on the iPad by writing code for “jailbroken” (i.e., hacked) devices.

But Apple has created the sentiment that hacking iOS devices is a criminal activity. Jobs has described Apple’s cracking down on iPhone hacks as a “game of cat and mouse.”

In the past Apple vigorously fought attempts to legalize jailbreaking on mobile phones. The company eventually failed in that effort when the U.S. Copyright Office added jailbreaking to a list of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions, making jailbreaking cellphones lawful. However, the iPad is not covered by that exemption, because it’s not considered a phone, and therefore the lawfulness of hacking an iPad remains uncertain.

The criminal stigma surrounding iOS hacking is disappointing, because many of our best coders learned a great deal by thinking outside the box, breaking the rules and hacking around with systems. Take for example, Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter.

“The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today,” Payne said in a blog post last year when the original iPad debuted. “I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents.”

And then there’s software programmer Mark Pilgrim, who reminisced about the days when personal computers were truly “personal,” meaning a user could do anything he wanted with his device without feeling like a rebellious rule breaker.

“You could turn on the computer and press Ctrl-Reset, and you’d get a prompt. And at this prompt, you could type in an entire program, and then type RUN, and it would motherfucking run,” Pilgrim said in his post last year when the iPad launched. Pilgrim and Payne agree that children learning to program with an iPad won’t get the enlightening tinkering experience they had.

That’s unfortunate, because in our digitally driven economy, programmers are more important than ever before, and it’d be beneficial for people of all ages to learn some code.

If Jobs really wants the world to view the iPad as a platform for creation, it seems like an opportune time for Apple to release a suite of basic programming tools for iOS devices. This could be a simple tool that creates some rudimentary iOS apps (plenty of apps in the App Store would be considered subpar anyway), and purchasing it should include a free developer’s license for kids to get started programming.

It’s great that Apple’s iPad will give birth to some more musicians and moviemakers, but we can’t forget the people who make hardware extra special: the programmers.

Missed Steve Jobs’ surprise reappearance to unveil the iPad 2 this morning — or perhaps, are you an Apple fan who just can’t get enough? Well, it just so happens that Apple taped its latest magic show for you to watch at your leisure. Find it at our source link below, and imagine a time before 9.7-inch tablets hit the gym and slimmed down to just 1.3 pounds light. Oh, and we’ve also got a comprehensive liveblog, if video’s not your style.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Apple’s iPad 2 keynote video ready for your viewing delight originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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