[Sponsor] Virtuoso Piano

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 10:03:45 PM. © Daring Fireball

A $10,000 piano for your phone. It is as real as it can get. Loved by composers, artists, celebrities, parents, children, all around the world. Even if you’re not into music, it’s fun to fiddle around with a grand piano during commute. Plus, it has a broken, twisted piano, from an Irish pub too. It’s free in the App Store. Worth a try.

Read The Full Article:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virtuoso-piano-free-3/id391994966?mt=8

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Winning

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 07:03:32 PM. © Daring Fireball

Yours truly, last week:

What I find interesting is the tacit admission from Sprint that itis at a competitive disadvantage without the iPhone. Seems obviousto me, of course, and probably to most regular DF readers. But howdo the Android supporters who insist that Android is ?winning?square that belief with this?

Aaron Pressman argues that I was “deliberately obtuse”:

Some customers want to buy an iPhone and Sprint can’t sell themone. Some customers want to buy an Android phone and Sprint cansell them one. There are in fact far more people choosing to buyAndroid phones than iPhones. But there are still lots of peoplebuying iPhones. If Sprint could sell Coke but not Pepsi, they’d belosing some business even though Coke is the bigger brand. I mean,come on. Don’t be such a jerk.

Pressman is right, in a way. I was too flippant with the aforequoted question. What I mean by “winning” needs more context.

What I’m talking about is the argument that Android is, more or less, the new Windows¹ — that what Windows was to the PC industry in the 1990s, Android is going to be in the mobile industry in the 2010s. It’s certainly not true that all Android proponents subscribe to this theory, but it’s definitely common.

Keep in mind what Windows did to the PC industry. It effectively killed all competing platforms save one, the Mac, and it left the Mac with but a niche of the overall market. When I say Android isn’t “winning” I don’t mean it isn’t doing well or isn’t growing, I mean that it isn’t relegating iOS to a ’90s Mac-sized slice of the market.

Statement of the obvious: if there exist a number of people who want to buy iPhones, any carrier that doesn’t sell the iPhone will get none of those sales. The same was true with the Mac, back, say, in the early ’90s, for stores that sold computers. But there’s an enormous order of magnitude difference in the number of people who want iPhones today and those who wanted Macs back then.

Computer stores which didn’t carry the Mac in the 90s were not at a significant disadvantage to those that did. What Windows did was destroy most of its competition, and reduced those that survived to marginal relevance. Macs accounted for a small percentage of total PCs sold, but, the bigger difference between then and now is that Mac profits accounted for a small percentage of the profits for the PC industry as a whole.

The iPhone, on the other hand, currently accounts for two-thirds of the mobile phone industry’s total profit. Mobile carriers need the iPhone today. Computer stores did not need the Mac.

It’s easy to pick and choose the numbers you want to back up the theory you prefer. So if you’re rooting for Android to dominate the industry, it is tempting to focus on unit sale market share, and to attribute Windows’s historical dominance to its massive unit sale market share. But you can flip that around, and argue that because I am rooting for the iPhone, I cherry pick the data to fit the story I want to see unfold — and so I say profit share is what matters, not unit sales, only because that’s the figure that puts Apple’s position in the best light.

But I like the odds that I’ll be proven right. Money is how you keep score, because it’s the one thing whose value everyone agrees upon. That’s what money is. The Wintel platform dominated every metric — market share and profit share. That’s where almost all the hardware profits were, and it’s where almost all the software profits were. Market share without profit is a Pyrrhic victory.

I’m not arguing that iOS is the new Windows; I’m arguing that there is no Windows in mobile.² The market is fundamentally different. Android is thriving market-share-wise in the phone market. iOS is doing well market-share-wise, and dominating in terms of profit share. Both platforms are succeeding, albeit in very different ways. Pressman’s Coke/Pepsi analogy is a poor one in many ways, but first and foremost it fails because Coke and Pepsi have the exact same goal, and compete with each other on the same terms: selling soft drinks for profit. Google and Apple, on the other hand, are playing different games from each other with Android and iOS.

I’ll close with this, though: With its purchase of Motorola, Google seems a lot more interested in playing Apple’s game than the other way around.

Perhaps I should say “DOS/Windows” rather than just “Windows”, because it’s always been my belief that Microsoft secured its dominance of the PC industry in the DOS era. It was Windows when PC sales exploded, but Microsoft was in a position of OS market share dominance because of DOS. ↩
You might argue that while iOS will never attain Windows-like monopoly dominance of the phone market, it might in the tablet market. But I think fundamentally, tablets like the iPad are simply portable computers. Tablets are a segment of the computer industry, not an industry unto themselves. Perhaps I’m underestimating the magnitude of the iPad, though. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning

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The New Boston Globe Website

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 07:03:32 PM. © Daring Fireball

Fascinating new website for The Boston Globe — resize your browser window and you’ll see what I mean. There is no need for an “iPhone” or “mobile” version — the layout simply reflows naturally on small screens. The design is uncluttered and reader-friendly. How many newspaper website designs can you say that about?

The business model is radical as well. It’s free for September, but after that, you’ll have to pay:

For the rest of September, BostonGlobe.com will be free, but afterthat readers will have to pay $3.99 a week for a digital-onlysubscription. Home delivery subscribers will not have to pay extrafor the site but will need to register online to gain access.
The newspaper?s existing site, Boston.com, will remain free andwill offer breaking news, blogs, photo galleries, sports coverage,and a limited selection of stories from the paper.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/

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BostonGlobe.com Redesign

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 06:03:31 PM. © Daring Fireball

The business model is radical as well. It’s free for September, but after that, you’ll have to pay:

For the rest of September, BostonGlobe.com will be free, but afterthat readers will have to pay $3.99 a week for a digital-onlysubscription. Home delivery subscribers will not have to pay extrafor the site but will need to register online to gain access.
The newspaper?s existing site, Boston.com, will remain free andwill offer breaking news, blogs, photo galleries, sports coverage,and a limited selection of stories from the paper.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/

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Machinarium, iPad Game Built With Adobe Air

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 05:03:34 PM. © Daring Fireball

Speaking of Flash and tablets, Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow is proud that the current top-selling paid app for the iPad is Machinarium, a game developed using Adobe Air’s iOS cross-compiler. It’s easy to see why it’s popular — the game looks beautiful.

But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.

Update: The game’s description on the App Store includes this: “NOTE: If the game crashes, RESET your iPad, the problem does not have to be on our side!” Such instructions are not unique to games built using Adobe Air, but still, it doesn’t speak well regarding the game’s resource consumption.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.leebrimelow.com/?p=3000

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WordPress and High Traffic

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 04:04:05 PM. © Daring Fireball

Ben Brooks defends WordPress:

I have been linked to from Gruber and other high traffic sitesbefore and never once has this site crumbled under the pressure —even when I was on the cheaper Grid-Service from Media Temple. Thefact is that if you properly cache and administer your site, well,you can handle a ton of traffic.

True, but no one is arguing otherwise. The problem is that I think that’s a big “if”.

It’s worth noting up front that WordPress.com hosted sites perform admirably under high traffic. The problem is with self-hosted WordPress installations that are not cached — which is the default. People choose WordPress for their self-hosted weblog software because it’s easy to install, and easy to configure with “just put it into a folder” installation of additional themes and plugins. But such an installation can’t handle large amounts of traffic. If I link to an uncached WordPress site, it will go down.

I’ve never used WordPress, so obviously I’m no expert on administering it, but if a smart guy like Dr. Drang has enough trouble getting it to run smoothly with caching that he goes back to running it uncached, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not easy.

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Read The Full Article:
http://brooksreview.net/2011/09/fireball-wp/

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Delayed by Flash

post from Daring Fireball on 12 September 2011 04:04:05 PM. © Daring Fireball

Speaking of the CrunchPad, Fusion Garage, the company formerly known as “JooJoo” that hoodwinked Arrington out of the project, has pushed back the release of their Grid 10 tablet:

The company also added that the Grid 10 will experience a slightshipping delay, being pushed back to October 1st due to a “newcriteria in [the] Adobe Flash Player (FP) 10.3 approval process.”

Remember when people used to argue that Apple should add Flash Player to iOS?

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/12/fusion-garage-hacks-200-off-of-grid-10-tablet-
aims-to-play-the/

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AOL Shitcans Arrington

AOL:

Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to moveon from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund.

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Read The Full Article:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/deciding-to-move-on/

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CS Odessa Updates MindTweet

CS Odessa Updates MindTweet, the Visual Solution for Twitter Messaging in ConceptDraw MINDMAP. The ConceptDraw MindTweet solution has been updated in the Collaboration Area of ConceptDraw Solution Park; the updated MindTweet Solution allows one to publish an entire ConceptDraw mind map or any selected portion of the map to Twitter. ConceptDraw MINDMAP is a powerful mind mapping application that assists with brainstorming, building business documentation, and constructing presentations.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-30740.htm

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iBook Stars Timid Kid Who Beats Back Bully,
Becomes Backyard Impresario

Just in time for back-to-school, Electric Eggplant announces their iBook, "Are You My Friend?" is now available on Apple's iTunes iBookstore for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Friendship issues plague kids of all ages. Stories that entertain while providing insight into shyness and bullying are part of the solution. This new digital story book for 4-8 year olds is written by internationally known author and anti-bullying activist Annie Fox and illustrated by Academy Award nominee Eli Noyes.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-30739.htm

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