Apple vs Adobe: a messy divorce

Anyone just entering the world of animation technology in recent years could be forgiven for thinking Apple and Adobe have always been at odds.  Their escalating battle over Flash gives all the appearance of two hardened combatants who have had difficulty sharing the same planet, much less overlapping technical spheres.

But in the distant past, in computing years anyway, Apple and Adobe were a cozy couple.  Apple’s Mac computers were seen as the must-use platform for graphics and desktop publishing, a niche Adobe has for all practical purposes owned forever.  Macs received Adobe’s doting attention, and other platforms such as IBM-flavored PCs were lucky to get a second-rate look.

Over the years this has turned around as Microsoft’s Windows advanced in capability and PCs proved to be the default corporate workhorse of choice.  The market spoke, Adobe listened, and Apple found itself in the lesser suitor role.  Surely this didn’t sit well with the Cupertino crowd.

Why the first MeeGo device needs to launch BIG

With each major variant in the Maemo Device line, Nokia enjoyed incrementally increasing success.  Its conservative “test the waters cautiously with a toe tip” approach cultivated a small but determined community eager to demonstrate that mobility and open source were a match made in electronic heaven.

This is okay for skunkworks and limited release projects.  Not so much for paradigm-shattering advents.

The relatively tiny Maemo citizenry found themselves strongly challenged by the Apple iPhone and its committed evangelists.  Few in the burgeoning Apple ecosystem have been overly concerned with the default restrictions (that grow steadily stricter), including developers.

You see, commercial developers are largely concerned with one thing:

Sales figures.

Nokia rediscovers America

http://maps.ovi.com/

In December 2009 a New York times opinion editorial asked if Nokia could recapture its glory days (my own assessment is here).  That describes the time, not really that long ago, when the company’s offerings dominated customer desire.  As we surely all recognize by now, Nokia appears to have hit its general market penetration peak in 2008.  Much of its sales decline since then can certainly be attributed to the global economic decline, but that can’t explain why Apple, Google and Research in Motion have been able to grow and even create share in the same period.  I won’t get too deep into the successes of the latter but instead will focus on challenges and recent moves by Nokia.

MeeGo: the premise and promise

The shock of the Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo development has subsided and I think I’m now ready to offer some analysis as I see it.

Religious battles over application packaging aside, much of the conversation has centered on what this melding means for cell phones… dragging in Apple’s now-venerable iPhone and Google’s up-and-coming Android operating system for contrast and comparison.

But in poring over the OS framework (below) tonight it hit me harder than ever that mobile computing really isn’t just a buzz phrase for Nokia– it’s the real deal.

MeeGo Software Architecture Overview

Dear amazon.com: your service is great, your website not so much

As a longtime devoted user of amazon.com I have just grumbled occasionally about its Rube Goldberg-ian website but online holiday shopping has me irritated enough to blog.

Over the years, merchandising warrior Amazon has steadily added extremely useful and compelling features to its shopping experience.  The powerful search, review and recommendation aspects have saved me a tremendous amount of time over raw Googling and have introduced me to people and items I might have otherwise never known existed.  That keeps me coming back and building a wishlist that scares even Santa.

Why I love Nokia’s internet tablets

The wild bunch at maemo talk know well by now that I’ve been a hardcore advocate of Nokia’s internet tablets ever since a fellow engineer quietly placed a preproduction 770 on my desk a few years ago.  I have been on a rabid one-man mission to promote the touchscreen tablets ever since.

At least, it felt that way in the halls of Nokia, where as a quality engineer I found myself the sole evangelist for getting the tablet technology into corporate and industrial uses.  This was a consumer experiment, I was told, and the product agenda was very limited.  The same applied, I soon found, to the size and scope of the hard-working Nokia developer team involved.