John’s Blog

about time for DRM-free mp3 downloads. how long until an itunes plug-in that makes this all seamless? greaat, great news.

Pogue writes what I’ve been thinking. It takes a fair bit to get consumer-me worked up (like the $200 price drop on the iPhone doesn’t bother me a bit), but I think paying more for songs you already own to be turned into a ringtone is just an incredible ripoff. Bah.

CNet’s Crave has a great writeup on performance of Fusion versus Parallels for Windows virtualization on the Mac. I’ve been excited since Parallels came out about this — especially for my work at Mozilla, it’s fantastic, as it means I can take a look at Windows builds of Firefox, other apps, etc — all with my MacBook Pro. As much as I like Parallels, though, I’ve found its performance erratic — and at times it overwhelmed my system resources. I’ve been trying Fusion lately, and my experience has been a lot better. It seems to perform better, and it’s much better behaved with respect to running other applications. Parallels has a better UI, I think, and its “coherence” mode seems to be better than Fusion’s “unity” mode. But I found using Parallels that I’d often have to restart my machine to get performance back okay — Fusion so far seems a lot better, so I’m going to stick with it for a bit.

i’ve been playing around a bit with the new iWork for a few minutes to get first impressions, but only have a few minutes left on my battery…

but my first thoughts are these:

1) keynote is mostly the same. the auto-alpha stuff is going to be really, really handy for cleaning up graphics

2) pages seems to have been considerably de-sucked. in fact, it may not actually suck anymore, although i’m not prepared to pronounce it non-sucking. word processing mode is a huge leap forward, if not actually an innovation, and change tracking looks like it works (and it looks beautiful, fwiw)

3) numbers is going to take some time to get my head around. i *think* it’s a spreadsheet that’s more about communicating than figuring, but we’ll see. the expressiveness there is shockingly good, and, as usual, it looks fantastic.

anyway, more soon. this release is going to be a little brutal for the Mac BU of Microsoft.

(i still would really like these rich client apps to auto-save to something like Google Apps on the server side.)

I’ve got about 15 different posts half-written in my head about my first 3 weeks with my iPhone, but wanted to write quickly about how human a device it is. It’s hard to explain why, but when I get a call, say, from Kathy, and there’s a large, high quality picture of her & SPL on my phone, my emotional reaction is wonderful. And I feel that way about a lot of the phone — Kathy & SPL & I routinely flip through photos from the past few years — even SPL, who just turned 2, can flick from picture to picture, and back again. It’s stunning, actually. Flinging pictures, lists, web pages around — it’s really fun — and it feels direct. It’s making using the mouse with my desktop feel extremely intermediated — like I’m not really interacting with it at all, but directing some robot to do it.

I have a feeling that it’s going to cause a very funny consequence — I think that all sorts of software/hardware vendors are going to start making their UIs flickable, flingable, draggable — and, very often, in incredibly inappropriate ways. Sort of like when everyone thought that “drag and drop” was always appropriate for everything, when sometimes it just wasn’t (isn’t).

Anyway, after 3 weeks, I have a high level of attachment to the iPhone. I’m about to get on a plane to London, and will need to switch back to my Blackberry Pearl — more about that in a posting soon — and already I’m feeling a little sad about it.