Below is Apple explaining an important feature — FaceTime — of the new iPhone 4:

These, they are saying, are the many ways in which this feature might be useful to the public. Straightforward, if a bit cloying.

And below are Google/Verizon/Motorola informing us of their mobile phone called the Droid:

In case the bizarre imagery and geek-fi sounds do not make it clear (how could they not?), leaving you wondering what exactly they are talking about, the voice over makes it clear: “It’s a robot”. Ah, yes, a robot, of course.

There are other Droid ads that are worse, and others that are better. But generally speaking, what is depressing on average is the unwritten marketing mantra that the user (“consumer” if you prefer that label) has to be treated as if she were an idiot. That is indeed a requisite if you are trying to sell her something she does not need, like gasoline or “high-definition” television sets. But so ingrained is this instinct that even when given a decent product (such as an Android phone) the mentality remains.

In his translation of Apple PR speak to human language, John Gruber offers an interpretation, of Apple’s placing blame on the bars calculation formula, that I too have strongly suspected to be the case.

Apple writes:

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars.

Gruber interprets (and I agree):

We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as it “gets more bars”. That decision has now bit us on our ass.

I think this and a few other recent events point to a state of above-the-law hubris on the part of Steve Jobs’s Apple. A distinctly unpleasant turn.

// From Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple’s Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the ‘Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4’

A strange thing happened on the way to Safari Extensions. I lost interest in (or the need for) extensions of any sort. I still love Firefox. I still think the cornucopia of Firefox extensions is a wonderful thing. But since I switched to using Safari (mainly because of the Web Inspector), I seem to have learnt to toe the Apple line, living off of the crumbs that Jobs is willing to throw at his users in all his infinite wisdom.

Safari 5, and Extensions in particular, were to me the coolest unannounced feature (at the recent WWDC). If I didn’t quite exactly jump in joy, in consideration of my advancing years, it would not be an exaggeration to say I had erotic flashbacks of life with Firefox and my myriad extensions, now with Safari. And off I ran to the various unofficial extension galleries where the fine efforts of various developers are listed. Each extension sounded better than the previous one. I even installed a few. But admit I must: I use none!

Apple has won. I have been assimilated.

In a climate where the market reigns supreme and the mantra “nothing succeeds like success” has never been truer, it should be unsurprising to see someone write:

Thomas Fitzgerald responds to Ted Landau:

I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice.

It occurs to me that the App Store’s restrictions and control are to this coming mobile era what Windows’s inferior user interface was to the PC era: something that offends some critics to a degree such that they will insist for years, despite the success and popularity of the platform, that it’s a fatal flaw that will ultimately doom it.

That’s John Gruber, and his distaste for certain types of FOSS is not new (see: 1, 2), though his growing stridence in defence of most things Apple is a bit disappointing. The real confusion here seems to be on the part of Gruber and Landau:

Landau writes that “not liking… closed nature of the App store … doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed”. That is correct – not liking something does not imply that said thing is “fundamentally flawed, but that’s a strawman since nobody I can think of would claim such an implication. Landau has performed a causal sleight of hand, for in the real world, it is often a fundamental flaw that makes people not like something. And what is the possible fundamental flaw of the App Store? That it is closed. One could argue the merits of such a claim (“closed” = “fundamentally flawed”) but that would mean stifling the penchant for personalising arguments.

Gruber, for his part, equates the success of a platform with the absence of fundamental flaws in it. The choiceless and information starved consumer and mindless corporate IT tsars have rendered the verdict. And Microsoft Windows is the winner. The emperor cannot be naked, for he is the emperor. Gruber knows better than that: he spends a good part of his output (including the very post quoted above) defending Apple, a “loser” in this desktop game.

[Link: Daring Fireball Linked List: ‘I Want Choice, but Only if I Agree With Your Choice’]

Slipcover is a free Mac OS X app that can be used to “create custom case icons for all your media files”. In other words, customise the icons of your files, typically media files. Its a slick app and provides means for creating custom “cases”. Worth a download.

Despite the heresy of it, I want to consider the question of what part innovation plays in Apple’s recent success(es).

Three things can be credited with returning Apple to glory: Mac OS X (to a lesser extent), iTunes/iPod and finally the iPhone. Mac OS X, rather than being an innovation, is a bit of a throwback (if I may), abandoning Mac OS “Classic” for the tried and tested Unix’ish base of FreeBSD and Mach. Lest you consider that quibbling or even misleading, let me suggest that by the turn of the millennium, the fan base for Apple computers/laptops was growing most significantly not among the graphic designers and hipsters who had previous embraced the brand, but among geeks and übergeeks, the very types who could appreciate and take advantage of a Unix back-end and all that that implies. They don’t make up much of the population; one reason for the low market share of Mac OS X.

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Doseido, makers of Headline have announced that they have something new on the way. Hope is low that it’s a new version of Headline that fixes some of its minor annoyances. Why? Because if you are a Mac app developer, you know which side your bread is buttered these days. (The answer, if you are not an iPhone developer: it’s the iPhone side. When’s the last time Tweetie updated their Mac app?)

From John Gruber today, a quote from MG Siegler on the superiority of the iPhone:

MG Siegler on the Nexus One MG Siegler: Perhaps the single biggest reason that I like Apple products, and their software, in particular, is the attention to detail the company puts in. In my mind, that’s exactly what still separates the iPhone from all the Android phones. It’s the little things. The things that are almost too small for you to even notice, but which make the experience subtly better.

Which is all fine, but it seems to me that history (even Apple’s own) has demonstrated that design, “attention to detail”, and so on have rarely fared well against buzz, FUD, user entrapment, collusion and other tactics (different subsets of which are the advantages enjoyed by Apple’s two primary competitors: Microsoft and Google). The difference in the “smartphone” market is, of course, that Apple for once is the most successful and advanced device, but let us see how this pans out three years from now.

[ link: Daring Fireball Linked List: MG Siegler on the Nexus One ]

If you recently got a Magic Mouse either because it came with your new Mac or because you got excited by the hype and bought one, only to find that the dratted thing is missing the third and fourth buttons which you had so cleverly bound to Expose and Spaces, there is good news. A free application calledMagicPrefs lets you not only add this functionality to the Magic Mouse but lets you define gestures and perform other kinky mods that should be worth a lot more than the millions that Apple paid to acquire Lala.

UPDATE: TUAW has a pointer to another free tool called BetterTouchTool.

Take a look at the screenshots from iTunes 9. It looks like Apple is (regrettably) returning to the white look (also note the blue hues for the checkbox). As well as (again regrettably) adopting the grungy buttons look pioneered by YouTube and adopted, with predictably shiny excesses, by Windows. Or is this just a conservative aesthetic instinct on my part? On the potential plus side, one day perhaps we will see the candy/lozenge scrollbars in Mac OS X replaced with the more subtle ones that iTunes has been sporting for a while.

iTunes 9