Yesterday while snagging a bagel at the VMware seminar there was something interesting on the restaurant’s TV. ESPN posed the question, “Which 23-year-old has a better life: LeBron James or Mark Zuckerberg?”
Answering the question is like answering, “what would you do if you won a million dollars?” It’s just plain fun to think about the wealth and enjoyment these guys have.
Keep that question in your back pocket for a good conversation starter.
Quick facts:
I was very pleased by a question in today’s press Q&A at Apple’s iPhone SDK release announcement. I posted the other day about the iPhone SDK being in development since before WWDC ’07. The question pertained directly to my thoughts, “Why did you change your mind about the iPhone open SDK? How long will apps be vetted before being published?” (actually, two questions).
Steve answered, “We change our minds a lot. The web apps have worked well, but developers wanted to do more. And we heard that. Creating an SDK is a lot of work, you want to make it something you can live with for 20 years, and yet update it without breaking apps. This is an elegant and clean system.”
I’m certain Apple had the SDK in development since before WWDC ’07. As Steve said, it takes a long time to develop an SDK. They just weren’t ready to announce it yet last year and covered by offering web apps. Their marketing machine and product release practices entice us to want more. We hated Apple last summer for it!
The remainder of the question was handled by Phil, “Second question. Electronic submission will be very fast, and this is a whole new process.”
A lot of people are screaming bloody murder about Apple controlling this process. While I don’t really like the idea of only getting Apps installed via Apple’s system, it could be a lot worse. Apple will be CHiPs, not the DMV. There will undoubtably be apps which make it possible to download and install while being untethered anyway.
The impression I got during the sign-up process to develop for the iPhone and download the SDK was impressive. Not because of the smoothness of the process (I hit terrible snags due to the server congestion), but because it’s obvious they’re going to allow developers to easily publish apps. What I got out of it is they’re making it better and easier to write software for the iPhone than for Windows Mobile or other handhelds. Apps will be as easy to publish as an album of music… Same model.
Dave Winer has been leaning towards the negative side of Apple’s plans, but he likes the idea of an untethered podcatcher. I’d love to talk to him about that… It’s something I expect iofy to work on.
Above screenshot taken from http://developer.apple.com/
The iPhone SDK was released today as predicted. Either there were errors in Apple’s push of the site updates or, more likely, developers are so hungry for this SDK that developer.apple.com is down.
I’ve been hammering on ‘Refresh’ for an hour. Could everyone please stop so I can get started on some code!?
Cart dropped a note about long anticipated API addition at Google (so long that most people forgot about they might even still be working on it). Google now has a contact API. This is huge news because up until now only Yahoo! offered a good synchronization service.
I’ve been a Yahoo! Address Book fan for years because of their service, especially how it integrates with their Go service. With Google’s API we’ll see apps that start synchronization between these two, as well as any other service out there. This is fantastic!
Rather than letting long must-read articles interrupt my flow, I’m using Safari and tabs to keep things organized. Lifehacker got me thinking about this with their Firefox Serial Flow article, but I find it even more efficient in Safari (and I’m on the whole WebKit thing).
I simply keep a separate window and open pages I want to review later in a new tab within that window. Periodically I save the set of tabs (Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark For These X Tabs…) to a bookmark, “ToRead”, in the Bookmarks Bar. One click on that tab opens all the ToRead bookmarks when I have to time to review.