Little known gem - Superuser.com

For regular readers of our blog, I believe most of you (if not all) would be considered as power/super/enthusiastic computer users.

You are probably a computer geek, opinion leader among your friends and family.

What you probably don't know about is a great resource for you exchange and sharpen your skills even further.

Introducing Superuser.com, an Q&A site specifically designed for the rest of us! Meet thousands of other friendly, helpful, knowledgeable super users around the world. It's unbelievably good.

Only caveat - you would feel sorry that you didn't know about this earlier - it's THAT good.

Why The Apple Tablet will work

The Apple Tablet has gathered so many buzz now. However, unlike many other Apple products, people cast doubt with it. Some say it’s too big for mobile computing, some suggested it will be too expensive. But I think the Apple Tablet is going to be the most important piece of computer equipment for the next decade.

Solid Platform
What the iPhone has bought to the market, is more than just an exceptional mobile smartphone, Apple also bought its top-notch, highly stable, highly capable platform, the iPhone OS to the industry. It’s fancy & easy for the customer to use. And with it’s lucrative channel, the App Store, has gathered a huge crowd of talented developer. This provides the perfect foundation that every computer company hoped for. And the iPhone and iPod touch is just the beginning of what Apple is going after, the embedded computing.

It’s all embedded
Remember all those bar-code scanner that built on-top of palm? Or all those fancy touch screen kiosk you see everywhere? Almost everything device out there with an LCD, can be a potential target market for the Apple Tablet. Traditionally, development of these devices requires a computing unit, and a screen. There are tons of options to choose from, but none of them give them a good operating system. Apple is here to give the industry the best package ever.

The iPhone OS advantage
The palm OS is considering legacy now and the new Palm Web OS is not going to help. The Windows mobile, well, it’s just unreliable for anything serious. Many developers, therefore, choose to start with Linux. The problem with Linux, however, is that open source community is not fast enough to provide all the support needed for a platform. The drivers are slow and it won’t work with some display card, some touch screen sensor, or some of the networking feature. It’s ugly, and the developer are change it by copying from Apple.

iPhone OS, while it’s not open source, but it already provide a package of things that works. The Apple Tablet, or the iPod Touch, provide an excellent standard package for these developers. The iPhone OS provides the industry a very robust platform and save them hardware development cost by using the iPod Touch. Imagine this, all the touch screen applications, movie playing kiosks, Bluetooth controller or GPS logger, everything will just work!

Apple Tablet, the standard package for every gadget
TomTom is a perfect example of how business can transform from traditional device maker, to a service provider. Consider all the money saved from hardware development, now TomTom can get more profit from selling the software and data alone. They don’t even need to find all the sales channels, the App store give them perfect international exposure to millions of iPhone users out there. While TomTom won’t give up the traditional GPS device model now, but I won’t be surprise that they ditch this old market once the iPhone model can give them more profit than before.

Embedded to everyday life
The iPhone and iPod touch is already doing magic in many applications. For the starter, there is the GPS software and also the Nike+ integration. There are many people who designed application to allow iPhone to control their RC car, or even military drones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlbEbQ6TJMc

The Apple Tablet

The Apple Tablet, therefore, is an extension of the iPhone, giving developer the same advantage of using iPhone and iPod touch. This new product line-up, will therefore give Apple the flexibility to release multiple variant, and therefore, serving the different need of the embedded market. Maybe a small iPod Touch for your desktop machine, and the Apple Tablet for the large medical device, soon, there will be always be an Apple powered iDevice around you.

Windows 7 Sins

• Education
• DRM
• Security
• Monopoly
• Standards
• Lock In
• Privacy

On the verge of the launch of Windows 7, the Free Software Foundation re-wraps Bad Vista 6.1 and launched Windows 7 Sins to attack Microsoft and proprietary software in general. Interesting web site - new bottle, old wine.

Read

Apple must let go App Store approval

There is no doubt that Apple has a successful App Store. It is so successful that it served 1.5 billion downloads in 1 year. That's hard to catch up as their CEO put it.

However, the biggest hurdle to the growth of the iPhone/iPod software market and the iPhoneOS platform in general lies in the App Store itself. I am not going to discuss how easy/difficult you can find a good camera enhancement app out of the 100 others doing pretty much the same thing. I want to focus on why the App Store approval saga has become a bad idea and that Apple should abandon it altogether.

App approval is damn slow.

Take Twitterrific as an example, according to the developer, they submitted the 2.1 version for approval on Aug 6. It finally escaped from the black hole appeared on App Store on Aug 19. That's 13 days of delay before getting into the hands of customers. Please be reminded that it's year 2009 and that we've long been used to instant software and security updates within mins. What if a critical bug is found after publishing? Wait for another 13 days?

Can Apple swallow them all?

OK, we know there are 50,000+ apps on the store. Even if there is just 5% of them having a new version pending approval, Apple has to process 2,500 apps in backlog. That's a lot of apps! Take our example of "13 days". That's 192 apps per day if working non-stop over the weekend. Apple, can you swallow them?

App approval is hindering technology innovation.

Now if a typical approval takes 13 days, and we assume that an app has 5 updates in a year (which is pretty conservative). We are talking about 5 x 13 = 65 days of waiting time in the dark! Software developers are losing vast amount of precious time that could have been well spent in the hands of thousands, and in some cases, millions of customers to test, evaluate and give feedback to their product - not to mention the delay in locating bugs, security issues, and delivering fixes and improvements.

App approval is anti-competitive.

Now, if Twitterrific has to wait for 13 days, I want to challenge whether Apple's Keynote Remote or Texas Hold'em are subject to the same rules and process as Twitterrific. Please remember, Apple released iPhone 3.0.1 in just ONE DAY after an SMS security vulnerability is made public at Black Hat.

Another highly popular app, Facebook 3.0 is believed to be pending approval. According to the author, he has absolutely no ideas on when it will appear publicly. Now, while the (FB x iPhone) world is waiting, we'd like to ask Apple, it's time to Think Different.