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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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Why Apple Should Buy Adobe

The rumors of Adobe being bought by Apple come up every so often. Apple could easily afford such a purchase and the results would be interesting. I would love to see Adobe restructured by a company like Apple. Adobe has many applications that are the gold standard but it seems to lack focus. These are my thoughts on what Apple could do with Adobe’s biggest apps and make everyone’s life a lot easier.

Video

Adobe’s video market could be trimmed down. Anything that can already be done in Final Cut Studio should be gone, including Premiere and Soundbooth. I’m not sure if After Effects would even be worth it in the end. Most believe that Final Cut is a very nice video suite on the Mac platform and in the PC world, AVID holds the crown. Why is a program like Premiere needed? It’s not quite AVID but way better than Windows Movie Maker. Now throw Sony Vegas in there and it’s starting to get crowded. Apple could create Final Cut for the PC or forget about them altogether. This would come down to money in the long run. I personally don’t think Apple needs to worry about the PC side unless they are going to legitimately compete against AVID for dominance.

Design

Photoshop and Illustrator go hand in hand with Apple. The general public thinks of Apple when Photoshop is mentioned and vice versa. This is known as one of Apple’s strongest markets. Most believe that these design apps run better on a Mac but as we know, Adobe is slow in keeping these flagship apps on the cutting edge. Apple could force them to be designed for the latest and greatest environments. While they’re at it, stop releasing new versions every year that don’t have any significant improvements. Adobe needs the money to keep rolling in through yearly revisions but Apple wouldn’t have this problem. Make a new version when real features are created. In an educational environment, we are forced to upgrade every year because the textbooks only cover the newest versions. This puts a large strain on software budgets.

Documents

Acrobat should also be restructured and brought back to its core purpose. Every other week we hear of an exploit in PDF’s and it’s because they don’t do the simple task they were conceived to do. Strip out all the extra junk and just make PDF’s do what they need to do. Reader should be killed for the Mac OS also, Preview is way quicker and does the job just fine.

Flash

Then there’s the elephant in the room, Flash. Oh my dear old friend, you were once so cool. Animations, games, crazy navigation menus and long site intros were such a treat. Now I have grown bored with you.

The problem is that Flash is so ubiquitous with the web that it can’t just be tossed out into the street. Apple would need to clean it up significantly and keep it around until HTML5 took over. They should only provide security fixes but no new features. This would allow it a peaceful death.

Adobe has so many products that it’s kind of ridiculous. Most of them could either be worked into existing Apple products or forgotten forever. If Apple did purchase Adobe, what about the PC side of Adobe’s business? They would have to crunch the numbers to see what products are worth the extra cost of development, but Apple could really limit what’s available for Windows. Whether that would that be a good or bad thing, I’m not really sure. In Apple’s mind, if it sells more Macs then it’s worth doing.

I believe Apple could really improve Adobe’s products and make them more reliable than they ever have been. It would end the grudge that they have against each other and hopefully get applications like Acrobat and Flash back to their roots. Adding useless features just to sell a different version every year will not win you any fans. Make it a worthwhile upgrade or inexpensive and I will gladly support you.

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First Look: FileMaker Pro 11

A year after the launch of FileMaker Pro 10, the Apple-owned database company is back to debut the latest version of its franchise product. FileMaker Pro 11 introduces long-awaited features and builds on the interface and engine improvements to create new capabilities. I have been taking the product through its paces for the last few weeks and I am left with the impression that this is what FileMaker Pro 10 should have been because the changes made to the interface and the scripting engine are really evident in 11. The update includes a variety of improvements that will benefit both users and developers.

A New Start

When greeted by the redesigned Start Screen, among the starter solutions offered as a template is a new Invoices solution. This solution allows you to track customers, products, and invoices in a single database. Invoices implements multiple tables and relationships on multiple keys and provides a great introduction to a moderately complex database. I recommend peaking under the hood to get a feel for how things are done if you are new to FileMaker. Beyond the starter solutions, you can also create a new database by starting with data from Bento, XML files, Excel spreadsheets and other sources.

Once you are up and running in a database, there are a few interface changes that will jump out at you immediately. First up is the new Quick Find feature. Quick Find adds a Spotlight-like search field to your toolbar that will search through multiple fields on the current layout.

This feature is handy if you are looking for something like a phone number, but are not sure if the number is in the home, office, mobile, or fax fields. You can set which fields are included in the Quick Find index to limit the search and the size of the indexes. Quick Find works like an “AND” search across multiple fields and matches on the start of strings only. It does not do partial string matching so a search on “maker” will not match “FileMaker” at this time.

Layouts

One small refinement is Text Highlighting. You can mark text with a yellow background in a field to bring attention to the highlighted section. More significant changes have been made to improve the ease of working with layouts. The new layout assistant makes setting up table-based report layouts a breeze. The assistant walks you through choosing fields, setting the sort order and adding sub-summaries. In the table view itself, you can now directly add fields and records with convenient + buttons and change the sort by clicking on column headers. Layouts themselves can now be organized into layout folders to make it simpler for both users and developers to work in a database with a large number of layouts.

Another layout option is Portal filtering. Portal filters allow you to limit related records that are displayed in a portal by either fixed or calculated criteria.

When designing layouts, new Inspector palettes grant immediate access to common formatting functions and settings. The Inspector has three tabs, but you can open up multiple inspectors and have each tab visible. The addition of the Inspector may seem a minor change, but it does bring the database product into better alignment with the iWork applications. Inspectors are packed with detail that might be overwhelming to some users, but they do add a bit of convenience and expose some features to discovery that may have been hidden deep in menu options.

Charting

The biggest visual change to Filemaker Pro 11 is the addition of the new charting feature. You can create pie charts, bar charts (vertical and horizontal), line graphs, and area charts and include those directly in your layouts. The charts provide an opportunity to not only create better reports but also design completely new interfaces for dashboard views and other ideas.

Snapshot Links

Another new user-focused feature that takes a bit of explaining is Snapshot Links. You can take a snapshot of the current records that you are viewing and send those to a co-worker with access to the same database. The snapshot includes the current found set, but also remembers the selected record, the current layout, the focused tab on a layout and other information. Previously, you may have printed a report to PDF or saved a search in FMP 10. The problem with those approaches is that the PDF is completely static and the results of the saved search may change between the time you look at the records and send those to someone else. The snapshot link always shows the current information in the database, and keeps the found set intact even if the underlying data changes. It took me a while to fully grasp the implications, but the more I think about it, the more uses I find to use this feature in a workgroup environment.

Other Improvements

Recurring import will watch an external file like an Excel spreadsheet and update the data in FileMaker as the watched spreadsheet changes. You can set script triggers on this file as well to have it update every 15 minutes or some other interval.

You can copy and paste scripts to make it simpler to bring tricks over from other solutions. External file protection improves the security of Filemaker databases. The server version has new diagnostics to help find out which user has issued the query that is bringing the system to a crawl. Filemaker Pro 11 Server Advanced also removes user limits in this version.

System requirements are substantially the same.

Pricing

All FileMaker 11 products are immediately available. FileMaker Pro 11 is $299/$179 upgrade (U.S. suggested list price) and FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced is $499/$299 upgrade. FileMaker Server 11 is $999/$599 upgrade and FileMaker Server 11 Advanced is $2,999/$1,799 upgrade.

For a limited time, FileMaker extends upgrade pricing to licensed users of FileMaker 8 and 8.5 products. This offer expires September 23, 2010, and details are online.

Recommendation

There is something for everyone in this update to FileMaker Pro. Users will love the convenience of Quick Find, the visual enhancements in charting and layouts, and sharing snapshots. Developers will love the Inspector for quickly making layout changes, the scripting improvements, and the flexibility of using portal filtering and charting to create great layouts and reports without extra plugins.

I see great possibilities to use these new features to create solutions with FileMaker Pro and I am probably more excited about the future of the product now than I have been over the last few years. It feels like the investment in previous versions has paid off and everything is firing on all cylinders to move ahead.

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Analyst: Apple "Disrupting" iPhone Competitors With Legal Threats

Via Apple 2.0, Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner asserts in a research note that Apple’s lawsuit with HTC over the iPhone interface was the culmination of “blunt talks” with other phone manufacturers.

According to Reiner, starting in January Apple began closed-door discussions with OEMs regarding the company’s “growing displeasure” with the theft of Apple’s intellectual property.

That displeasure was first noted a year earlier at a conference call. Apple COO Tim Cook responded to a question about the Palm Pre by stating that “we will not stand for having our IP ripped off,” though Cook wasn’t necessarily talking about Palm, or just Palm, anyway. Earlier this month, Steve Jobs publicly accused HTC of theft in a press release associated with the iPhone lawsuit. Unfortunately, that lawsuit may not ultimately protect the iPhone the way Steve Jobs thinks.

However, in the short term tough talk and legal action has, according to “industry checks” by Reiner, resulted in hardware manufacturers reassessing their positions regarding Google’s Android operating system.

Rival software and hardware teams are going back to the drawing board to look for work-arounds. Lawyers are redoubling efforts to gauge potential defensive and offensive responses. And strategy teams are working to chart OS strategies that are better hedged.

Ignoring the negative impact on consumers from stifling innovation in the name of intellectual property rights, the real-world implications of driving hardware manufacturers away from Google is that they will be going towards Microsoft. With Windows Mobile as good as dead, and Windows Phone Series 7 not to be released until the end of the year, it could have been argued that Microsoft was close to being pushed out of the mobile market entirely. Don’t count on that now.

Microsoft has been quick to sniff out this burgeoning opportunity and has begun to aggressively promote the strength of its own IP portfolio, as well as its willingness to join battle with customers that come under IP attack.

It’s one thing to threaten a relatively small company like HTC, but quite another to go after Microsoft, as Apple found out once before. While temporarily disrupting Android through lawsuits isn’t going to make that problem go away, it might just help Microsoft get back in the mobile business.

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Not Every iPhone Apple App to Get the iPad Treatment
Apple has a default set of apps that come with every iPhone and iPod touch that you can’t remove from the device, and that provide some basic features that are likely to appeal to a wide swath of users. The iPad will have a default set, too, but it won’t necessarily include all the familiar apps you know and possibly love.

According to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, apps that Apple didn’t show off during its iPad unveiling event weren’t just left out because there weren’t many major changes made to them, they actually won’t appear on the platform at all. Or, if they do, they won’t ship with the product and instead will be downloadable after the fact via the App Store.

The apps in question are Calculator, Stocks, Weather, Clock and Voice Memos. According to Gruber’s sources, the apps won’t be included not because Apple has deemed them any less useful or appealing to consumers in terms of function, but because Cupertino couldn’t come up with iPad-complementary large-format designs for their user interfaces.

Personally, I’m not too upset about the omissions. I barely ever use Calculator and Voice Memos, and I’ve opened Stocks maybe once or twice. Weather I’ve replaced with a much more functional third-party app. Clock is the only one I use regularly, but I suspect it won’t be that hard to replace it via third-party sources if necessary, either, and I probably won’t have the iPad at the gym anyway, which is where I use Clock the most for its stopwatch functions.

I’m still of the opinion that Apple should make all of its native apps downloadable content, aside from the iPod and phone-related apps on the iPhone, so this is probably as close as I’ll get to that coming true. But it raises an interesting question about third-party apps: if Apple can’t see a way to make some of its content work on the iPad, how are developers going to be expected to cope?

Changing screen size doesn’t only change the amount of space you have in which to display things. It changes a user’s expectation of what a piece of software will be able to do, and the way in which the program will do it. Games may be able to escape this expectation gap, since they provide roughly the same thing whether portable or not (hence the success of PS ports on the PSP), but utilities and other apps likely won’t.

It’s fine for existing iPhone and iPod touch owners, who will probably just find using old apps dissatisfying, but know to wait for iPad-specific programs. But what about users new not only to the platform, but to iPhone OS as a whole? Ill-fitting apps could sour these new customers against the iPad right out of the gate, conceivably alienating some so strongly that they might not return to Apple for future products.

There’s two ways Apple can fight this: from launch, it should highlight and drive new customers to an iPad-specific section of the App Store, possibly through a modification to the App Store application itself on the device. I’m almost certain this will happen anyway, but the app should default to iPad-only titles at launch to make certain that inexperienced users will only be exposed to those if they don’t understand App Store navigation fully off the bat.

Finally, Apple needs to better encourage developers to convert existing apps to the iPad’s dimensions, and alter their UIs accordingly. I’m not sure yet how Apple is planning to deal with developers wanting to offer iPad and iPhone-specific versions of the same app, but making that process as simple as possible for consumers looking to choose one over the other will be key to establishing developer good faith, and convincing users that the iPad isn’t jut the big iPod many detractors are making it out to be.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro:
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Apple's iTunes LP 6 Months Later: LP What?
When it was first unveiled, Apple's new iTunes LP format -– codenamed "Cocktail" and introduced at a "rock and roll event" in San Francisco -– promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs. Offering expanded cover art, lyrics, videos, animation and other digital goodies, iTunes LP was intended to evoke the feeling of spinning an LP record and holding the jacket in your hands. Especially when paired with a tablet computer (then rumored, now real) that would provide a new way to view large-format art, consumers were promised a digital experience that mimicked a physical one.

Six months later, however, iTunes LP doesn't prompt much consumer recognition, and none of the industry sources with whom I spoke said they viewed it as being anywhere close to game-changing from a format perspective. Rather, it's considered more of a curiosity. Read the full article on GigaOM →

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My iPad Wish List: 10 App Requests

Watching the iPad's first television spot on the Oscars Sunday night, I got giddy all over again in anticipation of getting my hands on this hot new product. Though it's still a few weeks away, I'm even more excited for the applications that will be coming to the platform. Here's my top 10 list of apps that I want to see developed for the iPad.

Coda

As a graphic designer and web developer, Coda is a staple in my workflow. It features a built-in FTP system, which could be problematic to port to a mobile device, considering there isn't a traditional file structure to store data. However, perhaps the iPad's new file storage system will provide an adequate solution. Regardless, as someone who codes, it would be awesome to sit next to a client and modify code and push changes to a site all from my iPad while they load and test the revisions on their own desktop.

Photoshop

Before you laugh, remember that Adobe has already released Photoshop Mobile for the iPhone, and all things considered, it's not such a bad application. A larger iPad version could allow support for opening and manipulating native Photoshop files as well as working between multiple files. CS4 introduced a new tabbed approach to viewing multiple documents at once. A similar setup could easily be implemented on the iPad.

Katamari Damacy

What's a fun touchscreen device without a fun game? Katamari already exists as an iPhone app so it'll scale up decently on the iPad. But given the advanced graphics of the iPad and the larger screen, a native iPad version is a must. If you've never played Katamari, check out this clip below.

iMovie

Call me crazy (it doesn't hurt to be wishful) but the feasibility of an iMovie-like app is certainly within the realm of possibility. I would have never expected Apple to introduce video editing on the iPhone. Nevertheless, along with a video camera, the iPhone 3GS allows for simple video edits. Why couldn't we have a larger implementation of this on the iPad, provided it gains a video camera at some point? With the larger screen, there's plenty of room to view a larger timeline, add transitions or effects and with one tap, upload your masterpiece to YouTube.

iChat

I'm actually quite surprised this app still hasn't made it to the iPhone yet, but as a platform that's designed to be "the best way to experience the web, email, photos and video," the iPad seems like the perfect device for iChat, especially if a future model gains a video camera.

Screen Sharing or Remote Desktop

There have been a number of third-party developers that have created similar apps for the iPhone, but I'm honestly shocked to see that Apple hasn't implemented its own solution yet. With a larger screen and almost full-size keyboard, remotely accessing and interacting with other Macs on my network would be a breeze on the iPad.

Preview

While the iBooks application will open books that are in EPUB format, I'd love to see a more robust implementation of Preview available on the iPad (and iPhone). Specifically, an app that is capable of annotating PDF files and provides support for links within PDFs. Since I'm also an academic, some of the journals I read (as PDFs) contain bookmarks to other articles or chapters and currently, none of the built-in applications on the iPhone support interacting with them.

Hulu

I don't care how it has to happen or if it involves Flash or not. Who doesn't want Hulu on the iPad? Even if it required a small subscription, I would love to be able to access my Hulu queue on the go. Better yet, since the iPad is a closed system, the app could download and cache content so it wouldn't necessarily have to be streamed in real time. This could be a great solution to save AT&T's crowded bandwidth for 3G models and allow WiFi-only models to still play even if a network isn't around. I'd pay for that; would you?

Bento/Filemaker

Now that we have iWork, how about a real implementation of Bento (or FileMaker if that's not too much to ask)? The current iPhone version is pretty pathetic and really hard to use to manipulate larger databases. While FileMaker may be a stretch, I'd put serious money on seeing an iPad version of Bento before the year is out.

An Improved iTunes App

It looks as though the new iTunes app represents a step ahead of the current iPhone version, but there are still some missing features that would make this app a rock star on the iPad. Adding support for Internet radio, browsing my other libraries by Home Sharing or support for iTunes Extras and LPs would be amazing. Honestly, why hasn't Apple announced support of iTunes Extras and LPs? The specs call for a viewing area of 1280×720 (the 720p high definition standard). They also call for building your iTunes Extras with what's called a bleed graphic, or a graphic that can "fill in the extra space" if you're viewing it at a size greater than 1280×720. Now given that as a way to compensate for a difference in aspect ratios, if you were to scale down an iTunes Extra for the 1024×768 display, wouldn't it just make sense? Come on, if the Apple TV can do it (and we all know how excited Apple gets about that product), shouldn't the iPad as well?

What are your thoughts on apps you'd like to see? Share your thoughts in the comments below. The great thing about Apple's developer community is that they keep up with what's discussed in the blogosphere. You never know; a developer might see your suggestions. So, share what you'd like to see on the iPad!

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