Apple has been in the news a lot lately, and they've definitely had some things to be excited about. And others not so much.
First of all, the new iPods are amazing. The touch models are just logical upgrades, but holy crap on the Nanos. While the loss of video is slightly disappointing, but logical given the size, it's pretty crazy that they're squeezing that little touch screen in there. If they had a 32 gig version, I think I would, without hesitation get one as a dedicated iPod for my car. That is just all kinds of awesome.
Meanwhile, they've completely turned the AppleTV into something I find incredibly useless. It's a dumb streaming box. I've already got several of those (Xbox, computer). The old AppleTV, the one that I have, is essentially an iPod for your TV, and that's awesome. We can control it with our phones. If you get one of these new deals, you need a computer somewhere to stream the music to it, and that's lame. I'm really scratching my head over this.
The new 27" Cinema Display is shipping, and it's drool-worthy. I completely don't need this, but it sure would look nice next to my 27" iMac. Fortunately, common sense kicks in here. No one really needs 54" combined of computer monitor.
While the iPhone 4 announcement left me feeling indifferent (and remains "meh" after seeing them in real life), it's about time they reversed their completely asinine decision on what development tools you had to use to develop apps. That means Adobe is back in the game with their Flash compiler, and presumably MonoTouch is back in too.
This is really something I've never understood about Apple, the way they treat the development community. Their attitude tends to really be, "This is how we do it, and if you don't like it, go fuck yourself because we're where it's at." Of course, I work for the part of Microsoft that does everything it can to make sure people understand our tools and can give us feedback, so my view is a little skewed. I suspect the momentum of Android was a real wake-up call. I know or follow a lot of people so turned off by Apple's process that they literally ran to Android. Hopefully things are smooth sailing with Windows Phone as well. Without a doubt we've got the best tools, so here's hoping people buy the damn phones!
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