Monday, June 13

Apple iCloud: How vs What

Apple iCloud: How vs What | Technology | guardian.co.uk

A well written piece by guardian.co.uk, written by Jean-Louis Gassée.

Bit of background for those of you that don't remember:
Back in 1985 Steve Jobs was in a fight with John Sculley, Apple's then-CEO. (This was shortly after the Macintosh, Steve Jobs's baby, came to market.) At the end of this power struggle Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as the head of the Macintosh Division, and Jobs sold all stock in Apple (save for 1 share) and left the company, eventually buying Pixar and starting NeXT computer.

Well, after Steve Jobs left, Sculley appointed Jean-Louis Gassée to head the Macintosh division. Just an interesting tidbit there.

Anyway...

There's a couple of tidbits that I thought were very good in this article, but namely the points that I've been struggling with a bit, so I'll outline those.

Google Docs -- Everything is stored in the cloud, accessible via the browser, and you can work on a single document with others, simultaneously. I love this approach, but only for the last part. The simultaneous part. It's the best group-work collaborative product there is. Sharepoint is plain awful, as so is the mailing of documents back and forth trying to get them right. Google Docs, right now, is the answer to that.

iCloud/Documents in the iCloud -- Apple views this differently. Instead of having a browser to access your documents that are "stored" in the cloud, they view the experience as having the documents stored locally, but also pushed up to the "iCloud" and then back down to all devices. That way keeping the documents on all your devices in "sync" all the time. (Apple doesn't use the word sync.) The only thing that this defeats is the collaborative simultaneous work-part.

Apple has had iWork.com around for awhile, in beta, and I've used it a couple times with my co-workers. Upload a document, and then the people who have access to the document can download it, view it, make comments on it, share it, etc. But they can't EDIT it.

It's the only foothold I think Google has right. Otherwise, I like Apple's approach. I hate editing documents in the browser. But it works.

We'll see.




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Sunday, June 12

Mac OS X Lion beta reveals "Restart to Safari" browser-only mode

Mac OS X Lion beta reveals "Restart to Safari" browser-only mode

From Engadget.

As the article says, in OSX Lion there is apparently a way to reboot your machine into "browser only" mode. Could be useful in a couple of situations.

A) If you are going to leave your computer unattended, maybe at home, and you want to allow people to check their email.
B) Kiosk mode. Maybe a computer sitting in a public area?

I don't think they are going for a play against ChromeOS here as the article sort of implies. Either way, interesting.


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Friday, June 10

Some pictures of the All-Ford Carlisle 2011 Event

For those of you that read the blog and are interested in cars.  Thought I'd show a few pictures of the All-Ford Carlisle 2011 Event that I attended last weekend.

http://gallery.me.com/joel.esler#100342


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A shortcut to make a PDF out of a webpage and save it to Notes.app

While on MacOS (and iOS) you can use the Share Sheet from Safari to share a webpage to Notes, it only shares the title, URL, and the favicon...