Darwin's Theories - apple tag

Apple and OpenJDK

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:37:00 GMT

Lest anyone doubt Apple's committment to working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project, Apple just emailed me back on a bug that I filed against the Mac implementation of Java... way back... in... 2003?!? Yup. Apple BugID #3179542 has finally been closed, a just about eight years to the day after I filed it.

"Engineering believes that this issue has been resolved. Java 7 for Mac OS X as provided by Oracle will offer the directory structure that you seek."

I'd actually moved on from OS X on my desktop many of those years ago, and had utterly forgotten sending this report, but it's good to see them finally taking Java seriously, or at least making an effort.

Islands in the Stream

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Some will say that Apple's iPad is the be-all and the end-all of portable computing. I say nay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Apple. But look at the history. Datapads are not a new idea - Alan Kay's DynaBook and Mark Weiser's ideas of Ubiquitous Computing - both from the 1980's, with Weiser explicitly using the term Pad - predate the iPad by almost three decades. As much as I generally dislike Microsoft, their push for the "Tablet PC" probably led to some advances in hardware. Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader both pushed hardware makers to build better screens and raised the bar on users' expectations.

And one important thing that Weiser advocated in the 1980's is still missing (full disclosure: I admit to being in the field long enough to have read his papers when they were originally published). In Weiser's world you could just slide a task you were working on from a handheld pad to a wall-sized whiteboard or to a wristwatch-sized device for storage, and things like active TCP/IP connections would automatically move onto the new computing platform. While you may be able to drag a project from a Mac OS application to a USB stick for storage, this is a far cry from having running applications movable from one computing device to another. People are indeed working on this problem, but a general solution is not yet at hand, as far as I know. It's not something you can buy today from Redmond or from Cupertino, at any rate.

Until this happens, our computers will remain isolated islands in the stream. Even if they are iPads.

iBrick

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:08:00 GMT

What can one add to this? I like a lot of Apple's technology, but their decision to make a customers' iPhone into an iBrick at the drop of a hat is leaving a lot of people puzzled. And it sends an ominous picture of the future of cell-phone tech; I'm glad there's OpenMoko and other open source phone projects.