Community Blog

Greetings from Singapore. I started this post on a fairly state-of-the-art bus just outside of Kuala Lumpur, with my laptop plugged in to the power adaptor provided at every seat...and am finishing it in a hotel in Singapore with free wi-fi access. Why is it that when you go to amazingly expensive hotels they charge you for broadband, but drop down to a cheaper location overseas and access is often free!?

I'm on a 5-day holiday in Singapore, after being invited to attend and present at the Adobe Education Leadership Forum in Kuala Lumpur. It was a real delight and honour to be invited to present and I was amazed by the conference. My thanks to Adobe.

It was a delight to meet so many people from the Asia-Pacific region, but even more so, to meet so many important people from Adobe. I'm not trying to patronising when I say that...the people I met from Adobe were people with significant roles in many of the applications that were being discussed, and we also got to see a sneak peek at Acrobat 9 (sorry, we had to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement so can't say much) and learn more about the next version of Adobe Connect and Adobe Presenter. My presentation was about these two functionalities (part of the Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional server system) that I introduced into Massey University and have responsibility for.

The effort they put in to entertaining us meant that we were very well looked after. Of course I had to take advantage of the shopping in KL and am now the proud owner of a completely fake and unnecessary Rolex that cost me around $28 NZ and three DVDs that cost around $2.40 each. One of the most amusing discussions was with a stall owner over what type of DVD I would like....I was offered a cheap version of a movie filmed by a camera in the cinema, a slightly better DVD quality version or the full featured DVD we'd mostly expect.

It wasn't until I got back to the hotel and looked at the cover of one of the DVDs that I cracked up. It is a very recent movie, but the cover states that Siskel and Ebert (famous Film Critics in the U.S.) gave the movie two thumbs up.....which is pretty amazing considering Siskel died in 1999!! I've not actually tried the discs as I think just the cost was hilarious, so I'm not overly concerned if I've been done.

Last night we visited a well-known plaza for IT gear and a chap from Adobe came with us.....we kept hassling him as to what he would do if he found illegal Adobe products on sale, and he commented he'd be even more surprised if it was a future release. As it was, software was scarce as it was all hardware.

I did see a number of authorised  Apple dealers selling genuine products, as well as a few iPhones for sale for about $740 NZ....I didn't buy one. But what surprised me the most was a few shops claiming to be an Apple resellers, with iPod lookalike products in their window. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of them, but they looked like old and new Nanos, as well as shuffles...complete with the menu and click wheel layout.

I can't really go into detail on what we saw with regards Acrobat, but I'm thoroughly impressed with what is coming. PDFs are something that have always been on the periphery of my interest. I use them, make them...and even 4 years ago read a 500 page book about how you could use Acrobat. I was amazed....but hardly did much with the possible functionality beyond that point. That started to change recently when I started playing with the embedding of multimedia in to PDFs (yes, that's right...multimedia into PDFs) and things in that area are going to advance considerably in the next version.

What really impressed me with the Adobe staff was their enthusiasm for their products and the understanding of the education needs of the institutions that were present...and their absolute willingness to listen. This perhaps couldn't  have been highlighted to me any more significantly by being asked by someone heavily involved with the development of Adobe Presenter (a PC only plugin to PowerPoint that enhances presentations significantly) to sit and chat for 45 minutes at the end of the conference on what I would like to see come out in the version after the next (the next version about to come out soon).

Do you get the significance of that? That's the equivalent of someone at Apple asking me to sit down and spend 45 minutes saying what changes I'd like to see in Keynote!

The depth of organisational detail and the desire of the Adobe staff to communicate, chat and debate their software in an open, friendly, fun and professionally rewarding way, was worth the trip alone.

So thank you Adobe. The invite, the organisation, the conference, the company, the food, the fun, the contacts I hope will be established and the valuable discussions all just staggered me.

Wow Adobe.....keep up the amazing good work. I'm looking forward to what you're bringing out next!!

If you've been reading the news about Apple you'd know that over the last few years Apple has been hit with numerous court cases regarding patent disputes. Apple has in fact settled on some, most notably the Creative case where Creative reckoned it had the patent on the iPod's menu system.

You may remember during the launch of the iPhone Steve Jobs said Apple had patented the hell out of it. It's an interesting situation because up until this Apple hadn't really taken out a lot of patents on account of the fact that they like to just get on with the job of developing great tools (and a Mac is a tool on account of the fact it allows us to do work as opposed to a PC running Windows which tries its damnedest to prevent us from doing work). But the patent system of America has rewarded morons the ability to take Apple to court to try and milk it for money these morons don't deserve.

Some drongo managed to pass a bill in the late 90's that allowed people to patent ideas and software. While I can sort of understand the idea of patenting software the ideas thing irritates me because the very idea that someone would never have the same idea as you is somewhat arrogant in nature. Okay, I admit that I'm pretty sure no one has had the same idea as me with regards to how Hannibal Lecter's face wearing tendencies could benefit society but I come from a planet called Kashyyyk so I have a certain degree of leeway on that. But humans by nature have a tendency to invent, it's what made New Zealand a great nation in the past (although thanks to globalisation I believe we're losing those skills), and because humans are the only creatures that have the ability to think on many planes it stands to reason that two people will have the same idea as to how to achieve something. So the very idea of patenting an idea with nothing to prove the idea is dubious at best.

So on Thursday Apple supplied developers the tools to create native apps and in doing so made the iPhone and iPod Touch the next computing platform. One of the most interesting aspects of this is that both these devices can now become what Palm and Windows Mobile have failed to achieve, truly great portable platforms. Don't get me wrong, Palm and Microsoft have been around for a long while and have huge development resources but clearly have a long way to being great multipurpose tools. Don't get me wrong I love my Palm (as dodgy as that sounds) but the software available for it has left me feeling this device is going the way of the Dodo which is ironically mostly due it it's own undoing. Don't even get me started on how pathetic Windows Mobile is. But the iPhone and iPod Touch are interesting. I read on Ars Technica this gem of a quote: [quote]Jobs asserted that Flash ran too slowly on the iPhone—which is another way of saying the iPhone isn't fast enough to run Flash—and suggested that something else was needed.[/quote]

Clearly this was BEFORE the SDK launch because if the iPhone and iPod Touch can play 3D games like the one invented by Apple and Spore from EA so very well then clearly that speaks of the incompetence of  Adobe to build resource friendly apps.

My favourite app that was shown in the Event video was from a company called Epocrates. This medical app pulled of some absolutely mind blowing things all done in two weeks utilising one of the lesser known parts of Mac OS X that of SQL Lite. The app was able to store the entire database of pills within the builtin SQL Lite database meaning doctors and nurses could get all the information in one place without needing to be connected to the network. Considering the policies against cellphones in hospitals this is very handy.

There's a couple of flaws in the views of Phil's. Firstly to say that the timeline allows more power is actually not true, in fact quite the opposite. While iMovie '06 does allow for a better volume adjustment, the fact that it only allows for two audio tracks + whatever audio is in the video means it is woefully inadequate.

My comments were going to be too long for the comment system so I decided to make a blog post in reply to Phil's post here:

The timeline does matter - to me and Apple!?

When Apple released iMovie '08 this year it caused one of the most vocal attacks that has ever happened in Apple history. Why? Well, Apple changed its interface so vastly it took people by surprise. It seems not many people like surprises. But is iMovie's lack of timeline really a problem and should Apple carried iMovie's interface to Final Cut Express if this is their new thinking?

I've got one word for it, FUD. Oh wait that's three words, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Bill Gates got really good at using FUD and I fear that Steve (formerly Steve of the Reality Distortion Field) is giving it a spin as well!

It's been a month since the bombshell and the dust has settled but has the FUD? Not for me it hasn't.

What were the two major announcements at this years 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference again? Oh yeah...The next version of the Mac OS will be called "Leopard" and Apple will be using intel chips in the entire Macintosh range by 2007.

I'm no Lawyer, but I do think that the "man in the street" has it over the lawyer in one respect. He or she has not had to study law and therefore some things are still "Common Sense" to him or her. What I hope to do in this "article" is demonstrate how fancy lawyers now claim to own the rights to some things that they patently (sic) do not own the rights to.

Firstly, The Open Group, a San Francisco company that claims ownership of the Unix trademark, is suing Apple Computer. They have a beef with Apple for using the term Unix in conjunction with its Mac OS X operating system and want to license it to them.

Some say that is was Apple who started the trend when they tried unsuccessfully to sue Microsoft for stealing the "Look and Feel" of the Macintosh Operating System. Apple had in fact been invited to the Palo Alto Research Center to see what Xerox had come up with after Xerox had paid several scientists to sit around to research new way of doing things. Xerox invited the boys from Apple over to "have a look" in return for some cheap stock options. Apple scooped up the ideas they saw on that day and ran with them, first utilizing them in a computer called Lisa, then later on in the Macintosh.