Robert X. Cringely sees a bleak future for us consumers and the stuff we’ve owned and stored on our own computers up until now:

And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.

Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever.

This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total.

With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party, with much of Redmond’s market cap transplanted eventually to Apple and Google.

ReadWriteWeb: You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Apple’s Disappointing Music Announcements at WWDC

At first blush, the thought of having your entire music collection available through iCloud sounded like an amazingly awesome deal. And for those of us who have amassed large record collections outside of the iTunes marketplace, it felt as though we were being pardoned for sins against the $.99 download – whether we came across our mp3s through ripping, legal filesharing, or piracy.

But it’s important to note that Apple’s new offer does not involve music streaming. True, you can have your music collection synced across devices (up to 10 of them). But you will still have to download the music you want to play on to your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch or Mac. You won’t be able to access your entire collection and randomly shuffle between all the glorious gigabytes.

Even in today’s world of super-convenience, it never ceases to amaze me how often people are disappointed in technological announcements like iCloud. Now I wouldn’t say Apple’s products are ever perfect (even Jobs poked fun at the failure that was MobileMe) and I’m the first to be cautious about putting all your content on remote servers, but it amuses me Audrey Watters at RWW thinks Apple’s music announcement is disappointing.
Ms. Watters, you have a rough life.
It’s not enough that we have have 500 gigabyte hard drives to store our entire music collections on and it’s definitely not enough to have a measly 16 to 32 gigs of space on our iPhones (Ha! I can only fit 30 albums on my phone, it’s bullshit!).
Now it’s not enough to store your entire collection on iCloud, because shit, I can’t stream my entire collection wherever I am, whenever I want. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Now. Bigger. Everywhere. I’m reminded of Umair Haque’s Opulence Bubble I posted earlier this month.
It’s make me wonder if people who are this easy to disappoint also expect relationships with no fighting, cars that never run out of gas and perfect weather everywhere.

When the iPad was announced in April of 2010, the jokes didn’t stop.
Of all the great names to use — “Slate”, “Canvas” (via Daring Fireball), hell even plain “Tablet” is good — I find it amusing how many other “Pads” are on the market now:
MSI WindPad
Viewsonic ViewPad
HP TouchPad
LG Optimus Pad
Asus Padfone
The advice you usually get when launching a new product is to set it apart from the competition. This isn’t the case in the tablet market because none of the iPad competitors have a value-add or anything they do better than the iPad (OK, the TouchPad looks good, if it ever launches).
So instead of making themselves unique, even if it’s on the surface, they’ve all decided to blend in with their main competitor.

ComputerWorld: Amazon challenges Apple with Mac app download store

Amazon today launched a Mac-specific application download store that will compete with Apple’s nearly five-month-old Mac App Store.

The new subsection of Amazon’s massive online store, dubbed “Mac Software Downloads,” kicked off quietly Thursday. Amazon has long offered software downloads for both Windows and Mac customers, but this was the first time that the company called out its Mac-centric “store.”

Yeah! Take THAT, Apple! We challenge you!
. . . by providing people with another marketplace download software for your operating system and help increase it’s popularity.

The Telegraph: HP talks up forthcoming Touchpad tablet

Speaking at a press conference in Cannes, Mr Cador said that “In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.” Apple’s iPad is currently the best-selling tablet around the world.

One plus?
What are we, five years old?
Just put something on shelves already.

Scott Jensen over a frog design talks our current obsession with seeing every possible solution in the mobile space as an app, he calls it app myopia:

Default Thinking comes up frequently when discussing technology, but a particularly virulent form of it has taken hold in mobile: App Myopia. This is a paradigm that sees every possible mobile opportunity only as an exercise in creating an app. This is a rather useful myopia, to be sure, as some people are making lots of money selling apps, but it is beginning to feel like a local maximum and a paradigm that can only get us so far. As Thomas Kuhn might say, we are in need of a revolution.

Scott has a great point. Sure it’s wonderful if everyone is using an iPhone, because that means they can all talk to each other because they share a common platform, but we don’t live in that kind of world. There’s many different phones with different operating systems, and in the ideal world they would all be able to talk to each other and their surroundings.

Ars Technica on the unified design and code view in XCode:

Apple’s developer tools used to consist of two separate applications–Interface Builder for designing user interfaces, and Xcode for writing, debugging, and compiling code. With Xcode 4, Apple has essentially integrated Interface Builder into Xcode itself. Along with the integration, Apple has morphed Xcode into a single window app, using tabs to switch between design, code, and debugging views. Separate panes allow access to various source files, error logs, code templates, interface objects, and other media.

I’m an amateur programmer at best, but the idea of a unified view for code and design is beautiful and poetic.

Bill Gates was interviewed on the BBC last week to talk about everything he’s up to, as well as what Ballmer is making a mess of at his old company:

When the interviewer suggested that we’re in a post-PC era, with most of the innovation happening today on smartphones and tablets, Gates replied:

“The PC is the tablet….You’ll see devices and say ‘is that a PC, is that a phone?’ The words will change because innovation is happening so fast.”

Bill, you can cut with the semantics bullshit. When someone says PC, there’s no confusion they’re talking about their personal computer sitting on their desk with a monitor, hard drive and keyboard and not their phone, tablet, alarm clock or television. We get it, everything has a computer in it nowadays, but the fact remains that Microsoft is way behind in mobile and tablet computing.
Nice evasive maneuvering.

Electronista: Huadian promises to directly clone iPad 2 (my emphasis):

Chinese electronics maker Huadian has stated it will soon build a tablet that will mimic many of the design features of Apple’s very popular iPad 2. These include an alloy contstruction, 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen and identical 8.8mm thickness. According to GizChina, the device will be noticeably inferior on the inside and sport an 800MHz AMLogic CPU, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of flash memory. There is no word on the OS, but it’s likely to be Android or a freely distributed system.

Imitation is the first phase of the creative process, it’s how you find your voice – be it music, design, or art, but as a final output? Yes, I know about the Chinese culture of shanzai, but I still think direct duplication like this is bullshit.

From a comment on Phillip Greenspun’s review of the Motorola Xoom (via Daring Fireball):

I invented a drinking game a while ago.
For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:

“Open” (take two hits for this one)

“expected to…”

“soon”

“when ____ arrives…”

“will be able to when…”

“update will enable…”

“in the next few ____…”

I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they’re nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it’s inconsistencies and excuses – like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn’t always perform great.

Engadget: The Daily generated 800,000 downloads, $10 million loss in first quarter of operation
I love the dichotomy between how much money the iPad has made for Apple and how much The Daily has lost.
To borrow a phrase from former Senator Ted Stevens, the iPad is not a dump truck. You’re not going to make money with mobile apps and and digital magazines if you just dump your content onto it. Even including videos and pictures doesn’t cut it.
It’s a new medium and it requires new thinking.

Ben Brooks reacts to Justin William’s reasoning on why Apple’s going to keep it’s lead in tablets for a while:

Justin Williams has a nice take on why Apple won’t be losing its lead in tablets anytime soon. The bottom line is that too many companies are shipping incomplete products with the promise of updates that will fix all the problems to come later — except that those updates are shipping.

It reminds me of photographers that snap a picture, look at it and realize it isn’t very good — then go on to state: “Umm, I’ll fix it in Photoshop later.” Except that “fixing” a photo in Photoshop takes just about as much talent as creating a great photograph to begin with would — often it takes even more talent in my book.

Ars Technica: Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS
I used Flash as a tool to create great interactive experiences for clients for many years and it’s still superior to HTML5 & Javascript for creating said experiences, but i have yet to read an article that has convinced me that having Flash on my iPhone or iPad is a good idea.
Seems Flash and portable computing weren’t meant to be.
I’m sorry Adobe, but you and Flash don’t own online video. I’m glad you’re coming to realize this.

Despite rocky intiatives like it’s new paywall, it’s good to see there’s interesting work happening at the New York Times:

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

The team had access to a trove of usage data for Times stories, and wanted to figure out a way to see and understand the life those stories adopt once they leave the newsroom’s confines and go out into the world. The tool, which focuses on Twitter and uses information from the Bit.ly URL shortener, is their solution. “What it attempts to do,” Zimbalist says, “is dimensionalize and make really physical and tangible the way that news is shared.”

via FishbowlNY