Should Apple Allow Installation of iOS Apps From Other Sources?

The Mac App Store won’t be the only way to install apps on a Mac. As Steve Jobs confirmed at the “Back to the Mac” event, the Mac App Store will be the best way to discover and install apps, but not the only one. You’ll still be able to purchase apps directly from developers’ websites and run installers or .DMG files just fine. Can you imagine what could ever happen if Apple turned the Mac into an App Store-only “closed” system with no possibility to download software from other sources? After 20 years of regular installations?

So in a matter of a few months you’ll be able to install apps on your Mac in two different ways, and one of them will likely take over the other one in a very short period of time. If Apple understands the natural differences of the Mac from iOS and consequently adjusts the Review Guidelines in a way that developers won’t be forced to water down their apps, the Mac App Store will be huge. Both for users and devs.

Should Apple do the same on iOS? Read more

Apple’s North Carolina Data Center: 1 Million Square Feet?

Interesting tidbit from John Paczkowski at Digital Daily this morning: according to his sources, Apple is considering doubling the size of the massive data center they’re building in Maiden, North Carolina, thus bringing it to 1 million square feet.

Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that’s to be the case, the machine — and Apple’s ecosystem — needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.

This being Apple we’re talking about, that evolution is likely already well underway and perhaps — perhaps — being engineered at the company’s massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) that facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.

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Mr. President, Sign My iPad

Not only President Obama got to talk with Steve Jobs at a private meeting last night to discuss Silicon Valley, technology and America’s issues with people losing their jobs, he also had the chance to sign an iPad a few days ago at a really in Seattle, WA at the University of Washington.

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iPad: Scroll or Card?→

iPad: Scroll or Card?

You often hear the argument that the iPad is all new and the Internet is all shit (too cold, too technical, not pretty enough), so the nerds should be ignored. After all, the iPad is closer to printed magazine than that damned Internet, right? No, it’s not. It’s a touch screen device. Touch SCREEN device. The fact that you touch it doesn’t mean that it’s like print. As a matter of fact it’s lightyears away from print.

Amen.

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RIM Losing Both Inches and Enterprise To Apple

With its upcoming “Playbook”, RIM aims at redefining the rules of tablet devices and ship a tablet that’s both fun and focused on “serious” productivity tasks for businesses.

Many things had happened before RIM finally realized it was about time to take a second look at the mobile in Enterprise, and Apple has taken off.

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A Peek Inside The New MacBook Air

That was fast, iFixit. As usual when a new Apple product comes out, these have taken a look at what’s inside the new beast from Cupertino, and here some interesting notes:

Apple apparently doesn’t want you inside this thing. They decided to use 5-point Security Torx to attach the lower case.

This battery is 35 watt-hours. Previous revisions of 13” MacBook Air machines have included 37 or 40 watt-hour battery packs. Since this Air has a smaller screen and lacks a spinning hard drive, we’d expect run time to be somewhat better than earlier Airs.

Although in a different form factor, the new MacBook Air uses the same Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip as the current lineup of MacBook Pros.

Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown→

Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown

Nilay Patel at Engadget takes a look at Apple’s review guidelines for the Mac App Store. This caught my attention:

6.2 Apps that look similar to Apple Products or apps bundled on the Mac, including the Finder, iChat, iTunes, and Dashboard, will be rejected. This one’s quite odd, as there are lots and lots of Mac apps that look like Apple’s own apps – DoubleTwist looks like iTunes, for example, and almost every FTP app looks like the Finder in some way. And what about an app like Delicious Library, which actually inspired Apple apps like iBooks and iPhoto 11’s new books interface? This one’s going to be hard to enforce in a reasonable way.

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