What’s even more shocking is that it all works together flawlessly, links to an online service to share and compete with others and is completely reasonable in price. It may not be a personal jetpack or teleportation, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. With respect to Apple in this scenario, it’s a testament to the restraint to adopt and innovate new and existing technologies to make complex ideas into simple and compelling features for the end-user. It’s not about being first to market or designing a device that wins on a spec sheet alone; it’s about offering features that translate into practical usability.

And speaking of usable futuristic technology gone mainstream, how about that iPhone 4 FaceTime ad? Or Face/OffTime, if you will.

The company had many challenges ahead of it as BlackBerry hit the big time, securing not only the enterprise and SMB markets but also achieving success in the consumer space with the Curve and Pearl models, and Apple who released the iPhone in 2007 which spelled doom for last generation touch devices like the Treo.

In January 2009, Palm announced its answer to the competition and placed its future in the hands of its new webOS software. Early adopters and investors seemed impressed but unfortunately it failed. Palm was acquired by HP (HPQ) on April 28th, 2010. The failure is three fold: business and marketing, software, and lastly hardware. In this post, I’ll cover the business aspects of the situation.

Palm chose Sprint Nextel as their launch partner of the device in 2009. The exclusive launch partner. It made sense, somewhat. Sprint was still hemorrhaging customers because of its divided attention after the Nextel acquisition, lackluster customer service, and deficit of focus. Palm expected that it could divide marketing costs with Sprint, receive more prominent placement in stores and have the Palm Pre, the first webOS device, serve as the flagship device for Sprint’s rebranding campaign. Having announced the device five months before it would actually ship, the hype machine was in full force and many were hopeful for its resurgence. Palm was trading at $1.42 as of December 8th, 2008 on the NASDAQ and by the launch of the device, it was at $13.01 in early June.

The single carrier exclusivity strategy was ill-fated. It limited the audience of the Pre to just too few consumers. In the quarter leading up to the release of the device, Sprint reported that it had lost 1,250,000 postpaid customers, 531,000 from the Sprint CDMA side of the business. That meant that at launch time, Palm had an possible embedded sales base of just 25.3 million customers, because remember, even though Sprint had 49.3 million subscribers, only a little over half are on post-paid CDMA contracts. Sprint led the industry in the worst way possible with 2.25% postpaid subscriber churn. Sprint bet, and most likely made concessions for the exclusivity, to draw in and keep high-ARPU smartphone users who would want the Palm Pre.

Yet Palm, even riding the wave of pre-CES hype in 2009, didn’t have a magical and lust-worthy device like the iPhone which would lead to customers ditching their old wireless providers in droves. Apple didn’t have that problem; even though they were new to the phone business, they picked a huge carrier and had a built in audience that would pay an early termination fee just because Steve Jobs blinked in their general direction. Palm had no such luxury, and they blew it. It wasn’t until the following CES in January 2010 when Palm announced the device would land on its second US carrier, Verizon Wireless, which would prove to be too little too late as the momentum in the smartphone space had shifted to Android and BlackBerry for other carriers and to iPhone for AT&T.

Much of this analysis deals purely with the business aspects of the failure of a reinvented Palm, but a significant part of the dismal sales numbers had to do with the marketing of the launch device, the Pre. The ads were, to put it succinctly, creepy and perplexing.

This ad did little to show what the phone was capable of and instead gives us an alarmingly creepy woman that seems to be fond of prolonged pauses during her allegory about how jugglers can juggle many objects with ease. This wasn’t just one poorly focus-group tested ad, it was one in a series of about seven ads featuring the same themes. It took Palm until early March 2010 to produce a strong ad which displayed in an easy to internalize way just what the new operating system could do and its particular strengths like unobtrusive notifications and aggregation of personal information across cloud services.

And here’s the kicker, Palm had a case study in great and effective advertising for a phone from their chief competitor: Apple. If there is one thing that Apple had proven is that the can market anything and do it well. Their ads for the iPhone, for each successive iteration of the device, have shown exactly what it can do, how simple it is to operate, and who makes it. Even if you hate Apple, you couldn’t fault them for not communicating the what, why and how of their product.

As a quick aside: look at BlackBerry, another company which is struggling in the branding and advertising space. Back when it was chiefly a business brand, they didn’t have to do much advertising outside of print and online ads targeted at their core audience, IT managers, C-level executives and those who aspired to be them. Now, with their half-decade long foray into consumer devices achieving moderate success, they decided they needed to position themselves as a lifestyle brand. With the marketing tagline “BlackBerry: Love What You Do“, Research In Motion jumped the shark and almost made it to the moon. The 30-second spots featured break dancers, a punk band, and a poor cover of a beloved Beatles track as a means of selling an push email device that was still two generations behind Apple in terms of usable software.

Coming up next this week, how Palm failed with software and hardware and what the HP acquisition means.

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

Well, you put the effort into sending me the book. Might as well read it. Wow, this Edward fellow sounds like a dreamboat.

Turning the page to page 54… Wait, what?

Page 179.

Page 293.

That just happened.

I believe in the magic illusion business, they call this misdirection. Try as you all might, but I don’t believe there will be a Secret Santa gift for this year that will be able to top this. It has everything. Mystery, suspense, brooding vampires, Star Trek, Adam Sandler, and a battle-scared iPhone. Dennis (coderascal), that was awesome. Higher-resolution images are available by clicking each photo or by going directly to the Flickr set.

Apologies in advance to my Secret Santa recipient. It doesn’t have one tenth of one percent the creativity that this did. And now it’s time to go watch Funny People.

Luckily, this week – Apple decided to offer a matte “anti-glare” display option on the 15″ MacBook Pro. I purchased one Friday night from the Apple Store and am posting a few pictures here since it seems to be mildly elusive and CTO MacBook Pros from the website haven’t shipped yet. Thus far, I’m really enjoying it. Take a look below.

It looks very similar to the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. Wider bezel than the 17″.

You can find more pictures over on my Flickr photostream.

I won’t begin to claim that Apple reinvented the music industry or make any sweeping claims, but it must be acknowledged the impact that this company has had on the the creation and consumption of music. With iTunes + iPod, Apple introduced a new and simple way for the younger generation to experience their music. Physical media was obviated through the digital distribution channels that were created through the iTunes Store. As of the last reported quarter, Apple has sold over 170,000,000 digital music players worldwide. Other consumer electronics manufacturers attempted to break into the market for digital music like Rio, Creative and iRiver – yet Apple succeeded because of attention to ease of use and aesthetics. As of January 2009, nearly all tracks on the iTunes Store are free of DRM. OTA song downloads to mobile devices is now possible without a premium price.

Apple, on the both the professional and consumer level, has simplified the creation of music. Through applications like Logic Studio (acquired IP) and the in-house developed Garage Band, creating music from pre-recorded loops and real instruments is approachable to the masses. Through the iLife suite of applications, Apple did not position Garage Band as a niche product – by offering it for free on each and every OS X machine, it took the position that music is not an exclusive art. The latest edition offers interactive lessons from renowed artists to extend this metaphor to helping anyone take on an actual instrument. No other company has done anything of this magnitude (reference the next entry).

I want to take a bit of time to really nail down the problems that Windows has with usability and UI design that seem to never be addressed, or just seem to get worse with each revision. This is not meant to be the usual Windows v. Mac argument that happens so often — rather, it’s a summation of the fundamental interface issues that plague Windows and prevent it from being a truly usable operating system.

One thing that OS X, and iPhone in particular, have demonstrated is a full understanding of the spatial relationships that must exist in computing. While the animations and visual effects present in Mac OS make for a great in-store demo, they serve a greater purpose – they’re visual cues that show where windows emerge from and move away to, as well as establish relationships between the windows themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is Exposé. When using Exposé, you can easily view the desktop, all application windows, or just the windows related to the foremost application. It’s a useful feature that is implemented perfectly. When invoking the ‘view desktop’ key, all windows visually slide to the corners of the screen and the corners dim to reflect the temporary view scenario.

Viewing all windows or a single application’s windows dims the background, bringing focus to the windows you called upon. Each window slides into view so you know where it came from and where each will return once you’ve completed the interaction. Exposé takes a difficult UI design issue and offers an elegant and simple solution that works better than in any other OS I’ve seen to date. Minimizing and maximizing windows to and from the dock illustrate the same concept of spatial relationships and managing lots of individual windows in a graceful manner.

In the same vein, Windows suffers from one key UI design flaw – it is incapable of hiding applications. Windows offers no way to simply “hide” an application and its windows, nor does it offer a simple way to minimize a single window. This is crucial to being able to use more than a handful of applications at once and maintaining an uncluttered workflow. For example, say I’m using three Microsoft Office programs, Firefox, iTunes and Skype. In this scenario, each application has two windows open, so we have twelve windows in total. I want all of these applications open, but not all of them are relevant to the task at hand, so I’d generally have to minimize everything in Windows and rely on Alt+Tab to let me work. The taskbar would be full of individual windows squished together and navigating around is just plain cumbersome. Vista made this slightly easier by adding window previews into the application switcher, but the UI problem remains. Mac OS and other desktop environments have solved this long ago by allowing one to simply hide an application and all related windows, via menu item or keyboard shortcut, such that they aren’t visible until called upon from the dock and won’t show up in Exposé. It’s a simple idea that makes using ten to fifteen applications at a time extremely easy. Without this, Windows remains particularly unwieldy when the information you need is scattered in different programs and you have five or more Explorer windows open.

Which leads us to the culmination of the problem: Windows wasn’t originally designed to multitask effectively. As it stands, Windows retains the antiquated taskbar that lives at the bottom of the screen which becomes nearly unusable once you amass more then six windows open at a time. Some developers have tried to get around this problem by offering the option to minimize to the system tray, but it still reflects a generally poor and ill-conceived interface design. The answer to this is not increasing screen real estate as many suggest – this only encourages continuing a poor design paradigm from Microsoft. Windows has never had a great way to organize and present multiple windows. When Windows 95 came out, the taskbar and Start menu were revolutionary as a way to keep different processes in check and accessible quickly, but the flaw in the ultimate utility of this was exposed when protected memory and powerful computers made multitasking possible and painless. In its current form, the threshold of how many applications one can use at a time quickly is rather low. Some may argue it’s that there isn’t a need to keep programs open, but that is an idea borne of the usability limitations inherent in Windows.

And this speaks to the general problem that Microsoft faces today – they’re unwilling to innovate. Microsoft has such a large install base worldwide that breaking compatibility and instituting a more functional UI would draw ire from business customers and users that are set in their ways. Apple faced this same issue with the transition from OS 9 to OS X but they solved it in the most logical way they could which was allowing users to continue to boot the older OS for legacy applications. The reason that I feel this isn’t such a big problem for Microsoft is their success in the virtualization market. With Windows Server 2008, they included Hyper-V which is their superb virtualization environment where you can create virtual machines and run any x86 or x64 OS you wish. If Microsoft truly wanted to fix Windows and create a 21st century OS, they would redesign Windows and offer virtualization of Windows XP and Vista environments for older applications that haven’t been updated. This is the way enterprise has dealt with the interfacing with older database systems that don’t fit in their current infrastructure and it’s why Citrix is company with yearly revenue measured in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has demonstrated that they try to keep backwards compatibility when they can, but programs still break between revisions of Windows yet and there is little payoff in terms of security and usability. To put it plainly, Microsoft needs to quit ‘half-assing’ change and pull an Apple.

I’m disappointed with Apple. I’ve been using their machines since I was four years old and have been buying them personally for the past seven. It has been my preferred platform of choice and I’ve never been unhappy with the hardware choices available to me until now. I see a glaring hole in their portable line-up, a small prosumer notebook. This void had been previously filled with the 12″ PowerBook but has never been replaced since its discontinuation in early 2006. One might suggest the MacBook Air as it’s successor, but that’s not paying attention to what the 12″ PowerBook was – a small, lightweight notebook that made almost no compromises in performance and connectivity to achieve it’s minuscule footprint. I do not mean to suggest that there is not a spot in the marketplace for a thin and light MacBook Air, however it’s clear that Apple is leaving money on the table from consumers like myself searching for that elusive perfect computer in a perfect size.

But I have a dream. A dream where there is a speedy and capable notebook running Mac OS X that fulfills these wants and needs. All Apple needs to do is build it. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up spec. sheet of what this computer should be. I give you, the perfect laptop…

MacBook Pro (13″) – Coming Soon from Apple

• 13″ 1440×900 LCD (LED-backlight)
• Discreet Graphics (Dual-Link DVI)
• Intel Core 2 Duo (Montevina)
• 2-4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
• 64-128GB Solid-State Disk
• Gigabit Ethernet Networking
• 802.11N Wireless Networking
• Integrated Sprint/AT&T WWAN
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• iSight Webcamera
• Backlit Keyboard
• 9-Cell Battery*
• SDHC Reader

This would not require a feat of engineering, although I’m certain that Apple could work their usual magic and include some tremendously innovative features in this notebook. These features exist in many notebooks available today (such as the Sony VAIO SZ, ThinkPad X200/300) but prove to be flawed choices as they do not run OS X and lack the polish I expect from a laptop, which is why I’m an Apple buyer in the first place. An optical drive? Who cares about an optical drive? The world’s thinnest notebook? I don’t need it. Simply put, I want a small and powerful laptop that can handle a long day of on-the-go use and be backed by the operating system I can’t live without.

* To keep with the svelte and clean design of Apple notebooks, a smaller battery can be included and the larger 9-cell high-capacity battery would be left as a CTO option.

When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?

(click to view full-size)

Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 – great ad by the way.

In order to watch a few events of the 2008 Olympics that I wanted to see from nbcolympics.com, I was forced to install Microsoft Silverlight on OS X. I had resisted for quite a while, but I guess the Beijing Olympics are the huge foot in the door that Microsoft has been looking for. After installing, I was pleased to see that there is a whole freaking tab just for digital rights management. I’m glad that the competitor to Adobe Flash makes it clear out of the gate what it’s about – keeping the content provided in control and a user experience second. Kudos.

Hi Carlos,

Thought you’d want to know – we just got word of a slight delay with your shipment. We hate waiting for new gear too, but it’s always better to know what’s up than be in the dark.

So here’s the deal: your package is on its way with a modified delivery date. The report from UPS says that since you were not available for delivery, UPS will make a 2nd attempt very soon.. To get the full details on your shipment’s progress, call UPS at 800-742-5877. We appreciate your patience, and can’t wait to get that brown box full of gear into your hands.

When you touch base with UPS, have your tracking number and order number handy to make your call quick and effective. We already did the legwork – check it out:

UPS Tracking Number: 1ZR7V93XXXX655XXXX
Backcountry.com Order Number: 44XXX62

I’ve never received a notice from a retailer after the order has shipped before. They went one extra step to make sure that the customer is aware of the status of their package rather than leaving it to them to dig up the tracking number had UPS not left a note. Good on Backcountry, and I anxiously await my new laptop messenger bag.

This morning, I was looking for a Quicksilver-inspired Windows application to use in my coming experiment (details to come soon – I have to check with Amnesty International to verify whether or not it falls in the realm of torture), and I found a new one that tries in their own special way to do the same. Dash is one that really caught my attention as it seems to best capture the basic nature of Quicksilver’s search, but it led me to another facet of the Windows developer problem which is how they market their software. Take a look at the seven reasons they suggest I use Dash at their product page. Item two on that list (because everyone loves reading lists) is “Reduce Repetitive Stress Injury”. Seriously, go look, I’ll wait… Rather than the pithy “act without doing” tagline adopted by Alcor, the developer of Quicksilver, Dash takes it in the opposite direction and is positioning this as a marvel of modern medicine. I say this in jest, but the problem is that it’s not addressing a problem they can solve or the strength of their product – it strikes me as something they pulled out of their butt to fill the empty space on the site.

And then there’s price. Dash is set at $50.00 except if you purchase now, you can get their “pre-release offering price” of $19.95 saving you $30.05. Let’s skip right past how this is on par with infomercial level “buy in the next thirty minutes and get a second free!” silliness and look at how it’s they’re establishing value. Software isn’t designed to be inexpensive and offering excessive discounts can make it seem as though you’re diminishing the worth of a product; a great example of this is Transmit from Panic Software for the Mac – it’s an FTP client, but it’s billed as the FTP client. As such, Panic doesn’t discount the software to entice those who undervalue what they offer, which is a fantastic user experience and just well-designed software. Cyberduck and Fugu are free, but I saw the value in the product that made $29 palatable. What the makers of Dash are doing is, in my opinion, either mispricing their product or using used car salesman tactics to win over customers. Ignoring the fact that Quicksilver, a vastly superior product to this knock-off, is completely free – Dash is selling an application at their ‘regular price’ that pushes it into the range of what full-fledged productivity apps cost. Launchbar, a product similar to Quicksilver for Mac is priced without the gimmicks, at $19. Fair.

I could continue, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll end this here. Windows developers and software vendors have so much to learn from the Mac developer community about creating better applications, but even more importantly, about marketing. If it can be summed up in a sentence or two, it would be this – stop selling simple consumer apps the same way Microsoft and Oracle sell enterprise CRM software. Home users don’t want to see how many different ways you can say the same thing on your “features” page, they want to see you solve a problem they have and do it elegantly.

Early last week, the same problem occurred again – however I do not have the luxury of a recent backup to revert to. My most recent was from the beginning of June and I had made significant changes to the entries in the database since then. I emailed customer support from the Wallet developers and ten days later, I’ve heard absolutely nothing. As such, I’ve spent the better part of a day resetting various passwords via e-mail and reentering data into my new password/data management application of choice, 1Password.

1Password takes a much more logical approach to storing this data. It uses the existing secure keychain feature of OS X and repurposes that in a powerful interface. In my week of toying with it, it has worked quite well and is looks like it will be far more flexible a solution than Wallet for organizing and securing data. To migrate the old backup over, I exported the database as a tab-defined text file and imported it into 1Password. A cursory amount of reformatting of the data fields and notes and I’m good to go. My only concern is the GUI isn’t as pleasing to the eye as most other applications for OS X, but it could look like Lotus Notes on OS 9 for all I care as long as it works reliably.

My advice is that other Wallet users out there either keep ridiculously frequent backups of their database or to switch over the 1Password. I have no regrets at all about purchasing 1Password which is more than I can say about Wallet.

Fix it, Apple.

On the other hand, I’m not having nearly as bad a time as most others are reporting with the new software and third-party applications. I’ve only had one random crash which happened with the WHERE application, but otherwise it’s been smooth sailing. The finance application from Bloomberg is fantastic – it gives charts and stock quotes alongside their news headlines in a simple and speedy interface. It’s one of the few that doesn’t seem to be simply a mobile-optimized website as its own application (I’m looking at you – BofA Mobile Banking). Here’s hoping that iPhone 2.1 software is released with a slew of bug fixes before I buy my iPhone 3G.

‘iPhone Dev Team‘ released the latest version of their Pwnage Tool yesterday which meant that I could finally upgrade my iPhone 2G to the 2.0 firmware. With the 2.0 firmware comes the biggest addition, the App Store – which allows third party applications developed through the iPhone SDK to run on users phones. Free and paid applications are available and the starting line-up of software is actually rather good.

Thus far, I’ve installed AIM, AOL Radio, Bloomberg News, Bank of America Mobile Banking, Evernote, Facebook, Mobile News by AP, NetNewsWire, Pandora, Remote, Twitterrific, Where, Whrrl and Yelp. In the short time I’ve played around with it, it seems that Bloomberg, Pandora and Remote will be the most useful. Bloomberg’s application offers a better way to interface with their news stories and market data (with support for landscape charting!). Pandora is a user-friendly client for the Pandora online radio service which works wonderfully. Lastly, Remote is an application from Apple that allows one to remotely control their iTunes library or Apple TV from the iPhone.

The firmware itself has been rather stable albeit a bit more sluggish that 1.1.4 but I assume that will be fixed in time. This software update will hold me over until I can buy the iPhone 3G (16GB white, yo).

It’s a pretty easy fix although.

Open ‘Activity’ Manager and show all processes (even root)
Quit the process named ‘ps’ (you will be asked for admin privileges)

You should do this while the PwnageTool is open. Also, you will need to ensure the folders \<user>\Library\iTunes\Device Support and \<user>\Library\iTunes\iTunes Software Updates  exist on your machine.

To be quite honest, I’m not certain what the ‘ps’ process does and you should always take cautiou when fiddling with processes on your machines; however I have used this will no ill effects however I did restart once I finished ‘pwning’ the phone. Good luck!

EDIT (7/21): This bug has since been fixed in version 2.0.1, read here.

You’ve most likely used Commnand+Tab to switch between applications on your computer, but a similar shortcut, Command+` (the key next the ’1′ key) will switch between application windows. This is quicker than using Expose if you just want to keep flipping back and forth between two large spreadsheets. Continuing with the window management theme, perhaps the most powerful shortcut is Command+H – hiding an application. OS X allows you to hide all and application’s windows until you call bring it back from the dock or by switching to it via Command+Tab. The main use of this is to keep your workspace clear and so that you don’t have to worry about how much you have open at any one time – for me, I have about ten to fourteen applications open at one time, some with multiple windows. Without using Command+H to hide some apps, using Expose would be unwieldly. Another related shortcut is Command+M which minimizes the foremost window. This is convenient if you want to leave some documents open but are otherwise distracting to your current work.

When you have multiple windows associated with an application open, you can close the current one by typing Command+W. This works in the Finder or just about anywhere else. This shortcut, combined with the four others previously mentioned tackles most of the common tasks related to window management in OS X and once you get used to them, will make you more efficient and quicker. The point of using keyboard-based shortcuts is to reduce your reliance on the mouse which in almost all cases is disruptive to your concentration and workflow.

In the next howto, I’ll take on the most useful and powerful application for OS X ever made – Quicksilver.

First, quit CoverSutra. Launch Terminal and type or copy and paste the following…

defaults write com.sophiestication.CoverSutra gender 'female'

Once you relaunch, you’ll see the old icon and all will be right in the world again.

For those who haven’t yet seen or used the application, you should definitely try it out. It’s basically an iTunes remote/Last.fm companion that also displays album art on your desktop. Snazzy and incredibly useful when you delve into the keyboard shortcuts. It’s at Sophiestication Software.