I wrote back in March 2009 about my hopes and dreams for a tablet from Apple, all of which came true on January 27, 2010 with the release of the new iPad. But in late fall 2009, I decided to get into ebook readers since I was reading a lot more books for some research. I ended up purchasing the Kindle DX, the largest of Amazon’s ebook reading devices. I also downloaded Kindle for PC to run in Parallels on my Mac, and also ran the Kindle for iPhone application. Here is a table that shows some of the key differences. And I’ve added in the iPad to begin comparing it to the three I have already been using now for many months. I thought that my own learning might be valuable to others looking at making the same decision.

I was asked, “what are you comparing though – the value of the device / software as a reader or as a multi-purpose tablet?” Another person asked me “is this a platform competition? What if I leave the “reading” app and go outside? Doesn’t that still count as using the device?”

I admit I struggled with that until I realized what I was actually trying to figure out was the following: which combination of stores and devices will let me do as much as possible in as few devices as possible while maximizing my access to great low-cost ebook content? So to that end, as I started to compare options, I shifted from “is it a good reader” to “is it a good device to let me see all the content I want to see, regardless of application or viewer?”

Let’s look at use cases:

Multi-day: On a multi-day business trip, I already take my laptop, Kindle, and iPhone. So the question I am really trying to answer is: can I use the iPad as a replacement for the DX I always carry on trips like that for reading on long flights, and since it can do more generally, will it become a full-on replacement?

Day trip: Currently I mostly head out on day trips with just my DX and my iPhone. It’s okay but honestly I don’t want to read a book on the iPhone, it’s too small. It’s okay for taking teensy-weensy notes but not much more. Typing notes on the DX is like poking sharp needles into your eyes. It’s really lame. And besides, those notes are only allowed in the books themselves. It also has no wifi and my US version doesn’t have cellular coverage in Canada. So all in all, it really just ends up being like carrying a novel around that I can read in between meetings. Could the iPad be the “tween” device that lets me take slightly longer notes if I want? Why not get a netbook so I don’t have to lug around my 7 pound MacBook Pro? Because, like Steve Jobs, I hate netbooks. I hate their tiny poor-quality screens and cramped little keyboards. And sure, you can hack them to make a Mac but I hate hacking things. I just want to unveil them out of the box and have them magically work.

Pure reading: I use the Kindle a lot for reading at home or at the cafe. I can toss it in my backpack, go for a coffee and sit and read and write notes and think. But the slow speed, clunky highlighting, and annoying clipping limits do grate me a bit. It was the best I had and it was a great luxury so I have certainly enjoyed it. And it has been nice to be able to have all my books with me. There is also a blissful simplicity in having a device that sucks at absolutely everything except reading a page of text. It acts as a constraint to let you focus better. But I really think that’s a bit of human post-hoc rationalization and reframing – the same thing we say about “the good old days when things were simpler” which is nowspeak for “we had no food or water or money and the war was on but life was still good.” B.S. that’s just wearing rose-coloured glasses to reframe your experience. The current Kindle if you look at it truthfully can’t “flip through pages” quickly. It’s a painful 3-5 second lag per page. The 5 way toggle is clunky. Everybody I hand the device to tries to “swipe” the pages and then looks confused. It’s SLOW. The PDF viewer is horrendous and unusable for powerpoint decks. It sucks at everything on earth except basic text pages.  So I love the books, I love reading on a tablet in a cafe or at home, but I hate the actual user experience of this particular Kindle DX. It’s a blessing and I’m not giving it away until I have a replacement but my iPhone Kindle app spoiled me. It’s so fast and smooth and elegant…just too darned small.

For my uses above, I want the iPad. It is a reader but it’s so much more. It has wifi and 3G so no matter where I am or which country I’m in, it will function without me having to worry about 3G coverage. And it’s just so lickable and fast and clean and iPod-like. I’m already sold. But it may not be the answer for you. Here is a table to help you examine it for your own needs. I’ve also added in the Kindle for iPhone application (which I’m hoping will be expanded to become the Kindle for iPad application) and the Kindle for PC application. The Kindle for Mac app is not out yet. Hopefully it will be better than the PC version which is poor.

	Apple iPad	Amazon Kindle DX	Kindle for iPhone	Kindle for PC / Mac (coming soon)
Reader Price	$499-829 USD	$429-$489 USD	Free	Free
Screen size (diag)	9.7″	9.7″	3.5″	variable
Resolution	1024×768 @ thousands of colours	1200×824 @ 16 greys	480×320 @ thousands of colors	variable
Weight	about 1.6 lb (5 iPods)	approx 1.2 lbs (4 iPods)	approx 0.3 lb
Storage	16/32/64GB flash only (no hard drive!)	4GB internal hard drive (3500 books)	depends on model	n/a
Battery life:	Apple says 10 hours. I don’t buy it. Call it “a day”	Days. I often get 2-4 days of reading out of it	Ha. Don’t get me started. Google “iPhone Battery Life”	n/a
Screen type	LED backlit multi-touch IPS with wide viewing angle. Great for everything.	Non-backlit e-ink display that is easy on the eyes, and very energy efficient. e-ink is COOL. But slow and	standard iPhone screen	n/a
Readability	Demo looks good; looking forward to using it; unknown in bright light	Very easy on the eyes; EXCELLENT in bright light/sun.	Easy to read; just too damned small	depends on your screen
Application fit and finish and quality	Demo looks great. If it works as well as it demos, then Apple’s reader is pretty awesome.	Clunky app from Mac Plus circa 1990; home screen is an awful set of pages in a list. Reading once you’re in the book is great though.	Tight, clean application	Dog’s breakfast slapped together in an afternoon. Missing search field; wacky text line resizing; feels half-baked
Read Amazon store books	Yes, via Kindle for iPhone or iPad	Yes	Yes	Yes
Read iBook Store books	Yes, via iBook app	No	?	No
Total Paid Books available	Current: 400,000 Amazon Uknown? Apple iBooks Out of print: 1 Million+ Google = 1.5M?+ books??	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.
Read Text files	Yes, in other apps	Yes	Yes, in other apps	Yes, in other apps on the PC
Read PDFs	Yes, in the email app	Yes, but poorly. No pan or zoom. Rotate only works with some docs. Landscape PDFs from PPT are horrible and “2 paged” in landscape mode. Small print PDFs are illegible. Slow.	Yes, in the email app. Small but readable and zoomable.	Yes, in your PC PDF viewer
Read .doc files	Yes, in the email app	Yes, with conversion	Yes, in other apps	Not in the Kindle app
eNews?	Soon. NYT to start, others to follow.	Yes but it’s a horrible “news reading” experience, with limited graphics and horrendous indexing	No	No
Wifi	Included	n/a. I actually think this was clever of Amazon for their first move given the device’s limited complexity and UI.	Included	depends on PC
3G cellular	optional: requires higher end model starting at $629USD and $15-30/mo	included free in purchase price of books	Included in phone; Kindle app uses it	depends on PC
Screen rotation	Auto; no option to turn off	Auto or fixed	Auto	n/a
Hardware speed	freaking fast if the video demos are accurate	Mac Plus era painful (2-5 seconds per action – kill me)	fast; love it	depends on PC
Native book store DRM restrictions	Unknown; hopefully Steve will push for lenient or no DRM like with music before it	limits to # of downloads, # of clippings/highlights, number of devices, ALL of which are undocumented and set by individual publishers	see left	see left
Native bookstore eBook format	ePub format (same as the 1M+ old books Google is in the process of scanning)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)
Audio	Full iPod (woohoo!)	clunky beta audio book and mp3 player not worth using	n/a	n/a
Font	multiple to choose from	single font type	single font type	single font type
Font size	variable	variable	variable	variable
Interaction tool	Multi-touch	clunky 5 way toggle	Multi-touch	Mouse/Keyboard
Dictionary	Unknown	Included	n/a	n/a
Search library	Coming	Yes	No	NONE!
Search book	Coming	Yes	No	NONE!
Highlighting	Coming	Yes but limited in VERY stupid ways	multi-touch highlighting; nice!	NONE!
Annotations	Coming	Yes, with built-in keyboard that is horrible to use.	Yes, but there’s not much screen real estate left!	NONE!
Colour?	Yes	16 greys	black, white, sepia	16 greys
Video can be embedded in book	Yes	No	No	No
Web browser	Safari and it looks like it screams	Beta crappy test browser that barely loads pages	n/a	n/a
Best Use Cases	Apple fanatic who wants a multi-purpose tablet, browser, email, video, content watching thingamajig. Me. Fan-boys/girls. Kids. Gamers. Movie-lovers. Book-lovers. *Education. Web-surfers. The market for this thing is stinking huge. Edu	Book lover who just wants to read huge volumes of text on a super light, very easy to read reader that doesn’t have to be recharged all the time and who doesn’t want to fuss with complicated technology.	Good for catching up on your reading in those spare moments in between meetings.	Good for scanning books quickly on very large screens. I use it on a rotated 24″ screen in portrait mode and it’s great for that!
Summary (Device)	This multi-function mobile device is a game-changer and will add huge new revenues (and hopefully great margins) to Apple’s top and bottom lines. Best for people who don’t mind the added complexity (and weight) and shorter battery life to have a lot more functionality.	The world’s best ebook (only) reader with an excellent collection of current books that you can access quickly and easily in 100 countries with no fuss. This is a great device for book-lovers wanting a portable book.	good for 2nd or 3rd reader to supplement a primary reader.	Poor attempt at a PC app; should have been finished before being released.

As you can see there are really a few decisions that are sort of coupled and that depend on your own needs:

• Which is the better reading device?
• What are the best sources of content for my needs?
• How many devices do I want?
• What do I want to do with them?

The Device: iPad vs. DX

Amazon is not a hardware company. They only launched the Kindle because hell, they HAD to. Their hardware had some very specific design criteria (long battery life, easy on the eyes, and low cost) and the further (unfortunate) constraint that hardware is not in their DNA like it is at Apple. They’re a low margin high velocity retailer, not an Apple clone. Having said all that, I love Amazon. I love their service. I love their efficient systems. I love the fact that whenever I look up a book on their service, it’s almost always available for $9.99. I love that they make it so easy for me to read and because of them, I’m reading a LOT more. I love them despite the Kindle hardware, not because of it.

Apple is a hardware, software, services, content, engineering, design company and that shows up in this beautiful tablet. Unequivocally I would trade my Kindle DX in and use the iPad instead. Because then I could read but I could also do a lot more. Their device is hands down a better device. I do not buy the marketing messaging from Amazon that their e-ink screen is “easier on the eyes”. I doubt that’s been proven. They’re both operating at similar pixel densities (130-150 pixels per inch) and my understanding has always been that it’s pixel density plus good anti-aliasing that makes the difference, not “lack of backlight”. The second reason is that the Kindle feels like operating a painfully slow Mac Plus from twenty years ago in grey scale. It takes forever to flip pages, jump through chapters, highlight large sections of text or generally move at the speed of thought. You can’t think/do. You think, do……wait….wait….wait…..oh rats, I wanted to do something ELSE. It’s painful.

Winner for devices: iPad without question in my mind

eBook Store: Amazon.com vs. iBook Store

Interestingly the eBook Store is not as coupled to the device as you might initially think. The iPhone is the single largest ebook reading platform for Amazon.com’s titles because so many people have them in their pockets and have downloaded Amazon.com’s excellent little “Kindle for iPhone” application (which is much much better than their half-baked “Kindle for PC” application.)

Amazon has north of 400,000 titles in their own custom .azw file format but they’re the most popular and most current titles on earth and they’re adding to that list rapidly. Because I read current work, this is the most important source to me today. Barnes & Noble and Sony don’t come close so I never looked at them once I had figured that out. So as long as Apple let’s Amazon play nicely by letting them release “Kindle for iPad” that operates at full pixel density (and you don’t have to just run the “Kindle for iPhone” app in 2x double-pixel mode (which would make it awful), then my first preference probably for most of 2010 would be to read Amazon titles on my Kindle for iPad application on the iPad. Next, Google is scanning a million out of print books and making them available in ePub or PDF formats. This is great news for iPad users since it will use ePub and presumably will be able to access these books. I’ve looked at a couple (from the early 1700s actually) but they make up 0.1% of my reading so they’re almost not relevant. Great humanitarian project, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not the material I want as somebody on the bleeding edge of technology and business. Thirdly, Apple’s iBook store will take a while to get going, as it did with their iTunes catalog. But they have the money and the people and the will so I think it will happen and be great. So I think that at least for 2010 I’d end up reading books from both the Amazon store and the Apple iBook store on the iPad. Best of both worlds!

But in the long run, “defaults count”. The store that is shipped on board the device will have the greater network effect and will eventually overtake the Amazon store (which would require a separate download if Apple doesn’t block it entirely at some point.)

Winner: Apple & Amazon.com! (since I’d be buying titles from both) but with Apple pulling ahead in the long run (2-3 years)

What will Amazon do to counter the iPad?

They are trying to build a developer community around the Kindle. I think that with the current crappy hardware, that’s a non-starter. It’s just not an interesting device to build apps for. I think developers would build for anything BUT the Kindle. And that really blows up Amazon’s key message about it being a single-function device.

I think that they have the will and finances to build a next generation colour e-ink display and to keep pushing on the idea of faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and non-backlit. That’s their key set of design priorities. I think it remains to be seen how many people will be attracted to that vision vs. spending the same amount of money to get a device that not only looks better for books but also does everything else. I never think of these things as either/or. There will be room for Kindles and Nooks and all the other dedicated ebook readers. But I think the iPad will eat a major part of what would have been their market share, very quickly marginalizing them to the edges of the market. If they do continue to push the boundaries of the technology, it could be interesting. But good hardware is just not in their DNA (yet) so it could take a very long while.

Amazon seems to be best when they can build massive global systems that efficiently distribute “stuff” (virtual or physical) at low margins and huge volumes. They are the world’s largest e-tailer and they’re insanely great at that. I know they’ll continue doing that. The Kindle will hopefully just continue to be a set of applications that run on all devices.

Black Swans

Here is a perfect world scenario for me but it’s a bit of a black swan – a low probablility, high impact event. Apple and Amazon strike a deal and Apple can ingest all of Amazon’s content and ditch their proprietary DRM (just like Apple did with the music labels over a four year period) until eventually you can read all of Amazon’s, Apple’s, and Google’s ePub books in the iPad reader with minimal or no DRM. Please Steve, make it happen.

My final decision

I’ll order an iPad as soon as one is available, (not sure if it will be the wifi or I’ll wait for the 3G) and then if I can read all of my Kindle content on there it will probably become my tablet of choice and the Kindle may go away. I know that it will be a more effective device for carrying on day trips and for hanging at the cafe. I’ll just have to remember to bring a charger since I don’t believe Apple’s battery claims.

In the meantime, where is my DX so I can sit down and do some reading? Man this is slow, and clunky and OLD feeling today. Sigh. Makes me realize how true this Onion story is.

Holy cow, did I ever call this one right back in March of this year. Scary right. Apple has reinvented the mobile industry…again.

Apple’s new iPad is a radical game-changer, a disruptive competitor to Amazon, a disruptor to the software business and a great leap forward in terms of user interface. It’s freaking awesome. This will be Steve Jobs’ legacy:

• Apple update:
  • they just had their larget quarter ever
  • their gross margins are up over 40% while the rest of the industry is collapsing while fighting it out in the netbook category
  • They have over 140,000 apps in the app store that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.
  • They’re now a > 50B company.
  • Apple is the world’s largest mobile product company: bigger than Nokia, Samsung, or Sony. Holy crap.
  • 125M credit cards that have downloaded over 12 Billion products.

• The iPad
  • “netbooks suck at everything”
  • we decided to create a tablet
  • 9.7″ diagonal
  • custom processor
  • <1/2″ thick; less than 1.5 pounds;
  • auto-rotation, GPS, compass, 3G, WIFI
  • all new iTunes
  • all new iPhoto
  • all new calendar
  • all new address book
  • It’s a full on replacement for the old “day-timer”
  • multi-touch everywhere
  • 10 hours of work time and a month of standby time
  • insanely fast graphics
  • run all 140,000 existing iPhone apps at regular 1x size or at 2x full-size;
  • new apps can be built to run at full screen
  • soft keyboard is almost the same size as a real keyboard
  • plugs into a projector and a portable keyboard and has its own cover

• iBooks
  • 5 major publishers on board, more coming
  • beautiful display
  • iTunes like bookstore built in
  • Editorial notes from me:
    • as a user of the Kindle DX, I can’t wait for this. I hate the low speed and crappy hardware of the DX but love having my books with me eveerywhere I go.
    • They have only said “we have 5 major publishers on board” but haven’t said anything about how many titles they have. Amazon has 400,000 and counting and content is king.
    • I would also be happy to use the “Kindle for iPhone” application from Amazon if they release one. I can see having my e-books split across the two libraries which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world.

• iWork – all new iPad apps for $9.99 each (WHOA).
  • brand new apps
  • multi-touch
  • incredible app for a portable device
  • Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations.
  • [I'm floored by this $9.99 pricing. They've just disrupted the entire personal productivity software pricing model.]

• Accessories:
  • we have built a dock so you can plug in and type and recharge
  • we have a great case built for it

• Pricing:
  • DATA PLAN
    • USA:
      • $14.99 = 250MB/mo (good for most people) with no contract; cancel anytime you want [this is great because so many people were so pissed off at AT&T)
      • $29.99 unlimited
      • Both include free use of AT&T wifi hotspots
      • Cancel anytime is a great feature
    • Rest of world:
      • July 2010 pricing coming soon
      • but you can use a micro SIM to run it on your own local carrier with our permission before July
  • IPAD (wifi only pricing / wifi + 3G) [kind of like the iPod Touch / iPhone]
    • 16GB: $499/$629
    • 32GB: $599/729
    • 64GB: $699/829

SUMMARY thoughts:

As usual, Apple has knocked it out of the park. They have built on their successes that came before: iPhone, app store, iPhone economy, app store, iTunes, and now iPad. This is the beginning of the next arc for Apple and will add another $50B/yr to their revenue. You can see their follow-on areas to add: video camera for skype/camming.

The price models illustrate the best pricing strategy I have seen. They chose the price to go to market with $499 and also had margin requirements (knowing Steve and team from a distance) and as evidenced by their increased margins from this last quarterly earnings call. They then engineered it to be producible at that margin and at that market price. It’s staggering.

This will cause yet another Cambrian explosion in application development and a (temporary?) bump in the publishing realm as all of the struggling newspapers move their content onto this platform.

Fan-boy glow aside, this is a technology and business game changer across mobile, netbooks, and laptops and will fundamentally restructure things AGAIN like the iPhone did.

I”m shocked at how well Apple has consistently executed on their business from the Macbooks to the iPhone/iPod Touches, the App Store, the iTunes store, and now the iPad. This is the beginning of something huge for Apple.

Nice work Steve and team!

Sign me up!

For more information see:

• iPad Main Page
• Features
• Design
• Gallery

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

I just heard today that you’re gone. Sorry to hear that mate. I enjoyed working out with you at Crossfit Vancouver. We called you “Nutts” for short because you were a big dumb-ass, always clowning around, but you always worked your ass off too.  We were sad to see you go but knew you had to go find something important to do with your life.

I like the official photo. You cleaned up nice. I noticed that you managed to sneak in that sly grin of yours even on an official pic.

Good luck where ever you are Andy. I know your crew in the military and your family and your crossfit family will miss you.

The CBC article is below:

CBC News – British Columbia – Military procession to honour B.C. soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Here is a CrunchGear review of the new Vibram Five Fingers KSO Treks. I can’t wait to get and try a pair. I have the Classics and the regular KSOs and they’re great but I need more grip for the snow and also the mud in the trails near my place.

I disagree however on the terms. I think that startup founders should be able to get visas without having to secure VC funding. VC funding is not always appropriate for all ventures. I think that another filter could be applied, something along the lines of “it must employ __ Canadians within ___ period of time” or risk revocation. Otherwise, this just becomes another point of leverage between the funder and the entrepreneur.

Having been in need of this visa myself in the States, I definitely see the value in creating this.

Please head on over to Bootup Labs petition site here to sign it.

Startup Visa Canada | Bootup Labs Blog.

Unlike most social sites that are pretty specific like LinkedIn for business, Facebook for…well…everybody including your grandma, and dating sites that are specific to your partners of choice, this is about the full expression of humanity. Here’s an example of how you categorize yourself with their site:

In short, it’s a new type of site that hasn’t really existed before, for all orientations, relationship combinations and lifestyles to find each other and meet – online and offline.
There is a system of vouching for other people that also helps to make it less anonymous and weird, a problem with many dating sites.

I know that the BlackBox Republic team have been working hard to create this new kind of community. I highly recommend you go check it out.

At BlackBox Republic, you can:

- be yourself, whatever THAT might mean;
- find people who fit your mood;
- freely express yourself and make that public or private;
- post subsets of your information to Facebook or Twitter;
- find events and people to hang with.

It’s invite-only so here is a link to join.

Let them know what you think of their fancy shmancy new site!

The CIO blog post is here, the release notes are here, the press release is here and the map is here.

(By the way, I’d like to thank Felipe (at) Liquidbook.com for his kick butt work on the flash application. If you need any development done, call him. He was a treat to work with.)

As I look at two trends that I’ve been part of in the past couple of years, I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which was about reaching out beyond the firewall and interacting across boundaries, and I see cloud computing which is about moving systems and applications outside of the firewall into “the space in between.” Now we have both desire/intent (enterprise 2.0) and ability (cloud) to enable much broader and deeper integration of networks of actors, be those vendors, suppliers, partners, or press.

What’s surprising and saddening to me is that, at least according to the Guardian article, this has gotten much much worse since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

While much of Europe (and Canada) allows same sex marriage and the United States struggles with the issue, there are countries like Iraq where gay men dare not express themselves for fear of abuse, torture, and death.

As William Gibson is attributed to saying, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” Here is to the future getting here a lot sooner for many other countries.

I’m as guilty as the next person of always wanting to move to the next next thing from Apple or pretty much any brand company I’m associated with. I was one of the first adopters of Mac OS 10.0.0 (what a nightmare that was), I had one of the earliest iPhones, I got rid of my CDs about a hundred years ago. I stopped using desktop applications about two years ago. I am the ultimate tech savvy early adopter.

The issue is that there are two important factors to consider:

• your buddhist wanting mind will never ever ever ever ever go away and you will constantly crave the next next thing from Apple (or BMW or Ford or Walmart or Amazon or …)
• Apple and most technology companies have pretty well established patterns of releases and if you know them, you can ride them appropriately so you stay productive.

Buddhists call the part of you that seeks to find new experiences and that drives the shopping urge the “wanting mind”. It is the bottomless pit of desire that says “if I just buy that one thing / upgrade to the new O/S, get that new app for my phone / etc., my life will be complete and I PROMISE I’ll be happy.” Don’t believe the lie. You can choose to be happy with nothing. Satisfying that urge gives you momentary relief until your seeking mechanism picks a new target. We’re wired this way in our DNA. Don’t listen to it. Or at least be aware that’s what is going on when you irrationally crave the leap to the new O/S, even when you don’t really know what it will do for you.

I’d like to suggest that Mac OS X 10.5.8 (the most up to date version of 10.5) is probably the best we’re going to get from Apple in the next nine months. With the leap to Snow Leopard 10.6.0, Apple is putting in a stronger foundation but breaking a lot of stuff above ground. That’s because of this pattern:

• Mac OS 9.0….9.x.y: the development years;
• Mac OS 9.x.y (the very last release of Mac OS before adopting the new NextStep O/S foundation):this was the penultimate Mac OS 9 O/S – fully featured, fast, multi-application. It was a thing of beauty.
• Mac OS 10.0: the nightmare beta. Unix based but they threw out 10 years of UI and started from scratch.
• 10.1.0: It sucked less
• 10.2.0: They sped it up.
• 10.3.0: Getting better! (but more apps broke)
• 10.4.0: Hey this thing is fast, solid, and runs really well (and some apps broke)
• 10.5.0: Wow, I love this stable, fast, lovely, beautiful Mac and all of my apps run so well.
  • 10.5.8: Even all the little patches and glitches are fixed!
• —— big O/S. foundational break point——–
• 10.6.0: WHOA – a whole bunch of applications broke here. The finder was rewritten from scratch (a good thing) but alot of applications are now borked. If your drive was partitioned incorrectly, you need to clone it to an outside drive, format/partition it to GUID partition tables (wtf are they? yes, exactly my point), and restore the drive and THEN upgrade it to 10.6. Quicktime is a frankenmonster and now has a crappy poorly thought out UI and still requires Quicktime 7 to live on the drive anyway. It now only runs on Intel macs so if you have multiple generations of Macs and move your cloned copy around to different machines or want to use them as emergency spares, you can’t do that with OS 10.6 unless they’re all Intel based. They gave us a few new features (like Exchange integration which is great for those who need it) but broke a lot of cool tools like Widemail/Letterbox that give  you 3 pane views in Mail.app or Windows Live Sync or Parallels Desktop and the list goes on and on. This is a big foundational change and not a user release. It is Apple’s attempt to defray engineering costs of their new O/S by getting a bit of revenue in now which is brilliant on their part.

If you want to stay productive, update your system to 10.5.8, run Alsoft Diskwarrior on your machine, free up as much hard drive space as you can so your virtual memory works better and stay happy and productive on 10.5.8 until 10.6 hits at least 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 or maybe even 10.6.3.  Unless you’re an Exchange user, in which case you should just suck it up and live with the pain and upgrade. The upside of having Exchange integration will far outweigh the minor UI niggles and the upgrade path pains. But for everybody else, I recommend staying where you are.

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

Part 1
Part 2

I have been thinking about this a lot as I’m currently living in Canada, but working with two clients in the U.S. For the most part, because so many teams are distributed, including their client’s teams, there is no “there” to go to, even if I did want to fly somewhere. The only way to have a “there” is if we all meet in the middle somewhere. So I might as well live in the country side surrounded by fresh air, mountains, stream, squirrels, and birds or go live in Costa Rica for a month as be in an office park in Silicon Valley. I have to say…I’m all for this.

<rant>

The iPhone rocks. The iPhone 3GS rocks even more. AT&F******T (AT&FT) is absolutely awful but people put up with them in order to use the iPhone. Google, while not always perfectly un-evil, does their part by making some cool stuff and giving it away at low cost, like Google Voice which I’m liking more and more. Then you have app store developers, a hardy lot who write cool apps and who deserve all the credit and money they can collect.

So after 14 calls to AT&FT, I went from a pre-paid plan (we don’t support those on the iPhone OS 3.0) to a monthly pre-paid plan (oh, sorry, we just cut off your data plan because we’ve decided not to support data on that plan with OS 3.0 and shouldn’t have sold you the first plan) to a 2 year contract (which I despise since I hate them already) but I was okay with it because I have Google Voice in front so even when AT&FT screwed up my phone number transfer and killed my old cell phone number (exactly as I predicted they would), I was fine because I had only given out my Google Voice number. Google hadn’t gotten around to releasing a Google Voice client yet but a savvy young entrepreneurial developer named Sean Kovacs saw an opportunity and wrote GV Mobile. Finally a single button so I can dial from my address book but make long distance calls at 1 cent per minute instead of at $2.50 or $1.00 or whatever price AT&FT wants to charge for international long distance on my current plan. It was a nearly perfect solution.

So today, Apple and AT&FT have killed it. They have removed the app from the app store and broken its connection so it no longer works. Why? Because it will “confuse users with the similar dialing functionality.” That is such corporate double-speak bullshit. I have a dialpad in my skype application and that’s not confusing. I could dial from my address book with GV Mobile and that was a lot less confusing than looking in my contact app, then remembering the number, then dialing Google Voice, then inputting the number.

This is completely disingenuous and was no doubt prompted by AT&FT feeling like it was too easy for Google Voice users to bypass their usurious long distance dialing charges and pay 1 cent per minute instead of whatever they want to charge. The press release should say, “Dear users, AT&T is making us pull your pants down and hold them there so they can screw you again because you’re bypassing their incredibly profitable long distance charges.”

Well, frack you AT&FT, I will continue to phone Google Voice and dial remote and I will continue to own cell phones in other countries so I pay you as little as possible in the next 2 years. And by then hopefully Android phones won’t suck so bad so I will have a replacement for my iPhone and your insanely poor network.

In the meantime Apple, stop being AT&FT’s bitch and put the GV Mobile app back in the app store. Jobs, you have bigger balls than they do. You’ve SAVED that company. Stop kow-towing to them. And while you’re at it, tell them to stop fracking around and fix internet tethering. If they’re going to charge $30/mo for data, then they can suck it up and absorb the costs of tethering like the other iPhone telcos around the planet.

</rant>