waffle

Funnier the more panels you remove from the end.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

After so many years slumming, they finally have something substantial again. Welcome back, Palm.

Welcome, also, to the first phone to actually build upon the iPhone, rather than just trying to look desperately like it.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

It was the best of keynotes, it was the worst of keynotes.

Let’s recap with my predictions:

• iPhone nano. ✘
• Mac mini remade. ✘
• 10″-ish tablet with something that qualifies as “full Mac OS X”. ✘
• Apple TV ignored or dramatically revised. ✓
• iLife ’09, even if it’s not released immediately, or only works with Snow Leopard. ✓
• Snow Leopard preview. ✘
• More DRM-free iTunes music. ✓
• MacBook Pro 17″ in a unibody case. ✓
• Steve Jobs on stage some time during the keynote, possibly to present “one more thing”. ✘

4 of 9. Partial fail. Given Gruber’s 4 of 10 or the big rumor sites’ definite lock for a new Mac mini and a new iMac, I think it’s okay. And of course, there’s no “iMovie Web App“.

What was bad, then? Far too little hardware. I can understand that the really new hardware was left out, but there would have been ample space even within the constraints of “only the Mac”. No Snow Leopard.

What was good?

Out of the meager lineup, iPhoto’s upgrade stood up as an even more humanized way of organizing photos. Scrolling through chronological lists has never been optimally effective for dealing with that many photos, and while Events helped that, mostly it just cut the list length in 25. It was low-hanging fruit. Locating people and places isn’t, but solves real problems. I tried once to tag every person in every photo in my library. It took me five hours, and I couldn’t maintain it. People are supreme pattern matchers, but computers aren’t half bad either. A trainable face recognition system is genius.

iMovie ’08, post-reboot, was tremendously good at something no video software I’ve used has been good at – picking quickly, out of a big corpus, which clips you want. It’s at the editing stage that everything started to fall apart. People missed the timeline very clearly. I have no idea whether the new features are good enough for the people who have been bitching about ’08, but it seems to have been a good decision to start over in order to get the selection part right.

The 8-hour battery, if it is an 8-hour battery, is brilliant. With a 17″ laptop, you have room to spare. If a regular battery starts degrading after 500 charges and lasts a theoretical maximum of 5 hours and this serves people without issue for at least a year, then an 8-hour, 1000 charges battery will last for at least just over three years. Chances are if you buy a 17″ laptop, you can either afford a new battery or a new laptop at this point. It’s good enough to make the limitation irrelevant to most people.

And of course, I applaud the labels for having come to the conclusion that DRM-free music must be available through every channel. The music part of iTunes will be DRM-free very shortly, and if I wanted to, I could already buy several albums that I’ve for the past few years chosen to acquire in a non-DRM-encumbered format via other sources, even though the completely unnecessary upgrade fee to DRM-free formats is, well, completely unnecessary.

You still aren’t off the hook, though, either of you. The established, old media industry is still fucked, and is still convincing our lawmakers that they should be able to establish a private police in order to hunt down ordinary people for humming a song on YouTube without paying a license or extort sums without perspective or reason for supposedly destroying musical careers in civic court, where the burden of proof will be on the accused. The least I’d ask from this bunch of assholes is something that’s not more encumbered than what I can download. And Apple themselves has DRM to remove from audiobooks, films, TV shows and connectors.

I can’t say I was overwhelmed by this keynote at large. There’s been better, by far, and there’s been worse, and Phil Schiller remains a great presenter. He’s no Steve Jobs, but to the extent that this show was a dud, the presenter’s performance wasn’t one of them.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Phew. What I suspected was true. Steve Jobs was and is visibly sick, but far from dying.

Hormone imbalance is not something to take lightly, and there have been people in my extended family for which this has been hell; say, sweating all night. But there’s a difference between the untreated sickness being hell and it being deadly. If he was in fact dying due to sickness, it’d be irresponsible of him to not report it. There’s only ever been one day when, due to a medical diagnosis, he thought he was dying, and that was during the day he didn’t know what kind of pancreatic cancer he had.

I appreciate the vigor with which the press has followed up on this, but I think that it’s been misplaced. Repeat after repeat, the default has been to announce the return of his cancer or, in some cases, heart attacks or death. Cancer does tend to return to some people — that’s just the way it works, and I know a man who’s battling the fifth return of his cancer.

But when the cancer does return in a directly deadly form, withholding that information would be not only likely illegal in terms of the draconian disclosure laws for public companies in the US, but also very hard on a person. I don’t know of anyone who’s been struck by a deadly disease and in the long run has managed to keep quiet about it. Steve Jobs is a personality, but he’s not that much of a personality.

Relax, Steve, and everyone else. I hope the book can finally be closed on this subject. To misquote Marvin, “Death’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

“Moreover” intentionally omitted.