Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 6:03AM Last week we took a look at the first iPod commercial, in all its dated glory. This week, we look at another aspect of the iPod launch that hasn't changed as much: the accompanying product launch. Here's how Phil Schiller and friends described the iPod:
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 7:02AM It's amazing how quickly things can get dated. I can remember when I first saw this commercial, I thought it was a cool way to get people to understand the concept of the iPod. In retrospect, I have to agree with one YouTube commenter who said it looks like the iPod makes you dance like an idiot.
Here's a look at how far the iPod, and Apple's ad campaigns have come:
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 7:02AM I have no doubt that in twenty-odd years, we (and our kids) will look back and giggle at what we considered cutting edge technology. Still, that's no reason to keep us from looking back now, and laughing at the state of the art 20 years ago.
In 1989, Apple was ready to unveil the Macintosh Portable, with a blazingly fast 16MHZ processor. That's megahertz, folks... Still, looking back there were some cutting edge features like stereo speakers, save sleep state, and according to Apple''s numbers, 10-12 hours of battery life.
Given the increases in processor efficiency, you could probably operate a modern laptop for a month if we were all willing to lug around something the size of the Macintosh Portable. In this clip, we get prescient prediction that portables could lead to an explosion of the use of animated presentations in the business sector. Kudos to Microsoft for also sensing the growing market, and purchasing a then Mac-only piece of software called Presenter, which would later become what we know today as PowerPoint:
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 2:09PM 
Today's keynote at Apple's WWDC in San Francisco brought plenty of cool tweaks to both the desktop and iOS devices. Rather than go through the extensive list of impressive features (which will be available on Apple's website shortly, I wanted to focus on one (relatively) hidden gem: Reminders. At first glance, Reminders is nothing more than a to-do list. However, it happens to be a location aware to-do list, meaning it can remind you of specific tasks when you arrive/leave a certain place, or happen to be in the vicinity of another place.
Imagine the possibilities if the APIs that make this work are also available to developers: You could set your phone to automatically text someone you're headed home at the end of the day, maybe even fire off emails when you're somewhere you don't want to be bothered, etc. It could almost be a location-based, mobile version of Automator.
Sure the other features will get more press, and will be more key in the ongoing market share battle with Android, but for me, this is the feature that makes it most feel like we're living in the future.
Is the personal webpage dead?
In one of those terse email replies this week, Steve Jobs allegedly confirmed that iWeb will be a thing of the past once iCloud is completely rolled out. This will potentially leave thousands of creators of web pages on MobileMe scrambling to find an alternative offering.
I'm reminded of the time Apple eliminated the floppy drive when introducing the original iMac. There were howls of protest from those that thought it was impossible to practically use a computer without a floppy drive. Of course a few years later, just about every manufacturer was producing computers sans floppy.
Given the popularity of Facebook, maybe the concept of having your own webpage for photos, video, and a blog is equally outdated. Do we still see value in a page that is designed with personal flair, or is content king, and therefore we don't mind having our data presented in Facebook's drab white and blue going forward?
Conversely, when is the last time you went to the personal homepage of someone you know? I know when I have in the last year or so, I went to their facebook page, then clicked on a link. The age of remembering URLs for personal content is disappearing: going to a friend's profile on Facebook is the way a vast majority of people connect these days.
However, there are plenty of people for whom Facebook just won't work as a MobileMe replacement. Take small business owners, for example. MobileMe enabled fast creation of slick websites. The GoDaddy's of the world offer a few templates when you register a domain, and it is doubtful that these types of sites will ever offer as robust of a web creation tool as the iWeb/MobileMe combo.
To be clear, Apple's solution was never for everybody. In fact when we launched this site, the plan was to create it in iWeb, then host it on MobileMe (then called .mac) It was quickly apparent that even our humble site was beyond the scope of Apple's solutions. Just as iMovie allows anyone to quickly edit video though, iWeb/MobileMe allowed anyone to quickly build a basic website.
Is Apple making a mistake by eliminating a user-friendly web option, or is it merely moving a few steps ahead of everyone else, in seeing a future in which most people rely on massive social networking sites like Facebook to share their personal info? Only time will tell, but in the meantime, look for several services to crop up to help ease the transition to another service.