The Register:

Like network computers and netbooks before them, Chromebooks are sure to get fatter, stealthily slipping in local storage and even a second OS.

This is the world Apple knows, and it has taken a good stab at modernising its offering to take account of cloud behavior, while in fact delivering a largely localised apps environment.

This puts even more distance between Apple’s world view and that of Google and the pure web players – though of course, there will be room for both.

★ Sunday, 12 June 2011

John Gruber, on Andy Ihnatko’s BlackBerry PlayBook and LG G-Slate review:

But down this path, we’d never get rid of Flash. The baseline experience for online video would forever remain crashy, lesser-quality, less-power-efficient, insecure, and in the total control of a single company — Adobe — that has shown itself to be incapable of addressing any of these problems.

Emphasize by me.

★ Wednesday, 27 April 2011

The difference between iOS and Android, design-wise, can be summed in a single word: magic. iOS aims for it. Android doesn’t want it.

★ Tuesday, 26 April 2011

Nonetheless, these devices show some of the gaps in the iPad’s armor. Some day, someone’s going to make a 7-inch or 9-inch Android tablet that can play Flash videos and they’ll sell it free-and-clear for $200 less than the cheapest iPad. Or, they’ll add a mix of features that Apple isn’t interested in but which this company has incorporated flawlessly.

★ Tuesday, 26 April 2011

“I was nowhere near as good an engineer as Woz,” Jobs freely admits. “He was always the better designer.” No one in the neighborhood, however, could match Jobs’ entrepreneurial flair and his instincts for the big score. It was Jobs who badgered local electronics suppliers for credit; Jobs who arranged for payment (“They’d say, ‘Well, how’s 30 days net?’ We said, ‘Sign us up.’ We didn’t know what 30 days net was”); Jobs who attracted a first-class industrial p.r. firm and a team of experienced managers; Jobs who organized the early manufacturing; Jobs who finally persuaded Wozniak to leave Hewlett-Packard; and Jobs who gave the fledgling company a name (“One day I just told everyone that unless they came up with a better name by 5 p.m., we would go with Apple”). In 1977, when the Apple II was introduced, the company receipts were kept in a desk drawer. By 1980, when Apple went public, it had sales of $139 million.

(Via Kottke.org)

★ Tuesday, 26 April 2011

I understand that Mr. Allan and Mr. Warden are valued researchers for O’Reilly, but they have completely missed the boat on this one. In the spirit of academia, due diligence is a must to determine who else has done such research. Mr. Allan, Mr. Warden, and O’Reilly have overlooked and failed to cite an entire area of research that has already been done on this subject and claimed full authorship of it.

★ Thursday, 21 April 2011

For Android and the other alternatives to succeed, they need to move beyond the Apple-knockoff market and become desirable to consumers on their own merits. They can’t just be the most iPhone- or iPad-like alternatives for people who dislike Apple’s products — that’s not a large enough market.

Any platform that copies Apple too closely will never move beyond that limited position.

★ Tuesday, 19 April 2011

You’re not going to beat Apple by copying Apple, and initially I thought RIM might be the company to compete by creating something original. A business tablet for the Wall Street PowerPoint-loving crowd, perhaps? Not only does RIM’s PlayBook fail to compete with Apple it fails to compete in the very niche it calls it’s bread and butter: the business user. Sure BlackBerry might fix these flaws over the next few months.

But first impressions matter.

★ Tuesday, 19 April 2011

Web Intents are the simplest way to make the Tweets you display on your website interactive.

★ Thursday, 31 March 2011

“While the A4 clock speed was steady at 1 GHz,” Yogasingam said, “the A5 clock speed varies depending on the application being run. This would indicate an advanced power management circuitry controlling the clock speeds of the cores—something new for the A5 and may explain the use of a different power management IC from Dialog Semiconductor.”

★ Monday, 14 March 2011