So here it is, the BlackBerry 10 OS no the BlackBerry Z10 hardware. It’s taken RIM FOREVER to get here, but I’ll say this, I have not seen anything that really looked competitive with the iPhone like this since the Palm Pre OS (was it called Web OS I think?). Yes Android folks, you read that right.

The one thing though is, I’m not sure about all these swiping gestures for key features — they just aren’t discoverable. That said, this looks like it has real potential. Also, this is notifications done right. I mean seriously, I don’t have many complaints with iOS, but one of my big ones is that Apple STILL doesn’t have notifications right (and again for you Android people, neither does Android). But I like the look of this notification system.

In spite of the fact that the world is moving “post-PC,” and that consumers are flocking to tablets and smart-phones to consume content, someone still needs to create this stuff.

For developers and media creators, speed, power, flexibility, interconnectivity are still critical. While it is nice to create a home movie on an iPad, I would certainly not want to create Avatar on one.

As I’ve written, the new iMacs are fast and well-suited for most computer tasks. But not everything.

If Apple cedes the high-ground of computing power to Windows/Linux systems, they lose the ability to control what developers develop or media creators create. If a developer is creating media on a Windows system, they will naturally tend to want to make sure that content plays first on Windows devices. Same thing for Android.

It seems obvious to me that Apple’s long-term health requires it to provide developers and media creators with high-performance hardware tools that keeps them on Apple hardware.

As Paul Isbicki wrote in his posting: “What will the future bring for editing, Grfx, 3D, Photoshop, Illustrator, animation? How ’bout CAD and CNC, architecture, design, a thousand apps relying [on the power of a professional system.]?”

This!

This is exactly right. What does Apple expect it’s iOS developers to use? Sure they can and do use iMacs and MacBook Pros, but many want and need professional towers — Mac Pros.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: for me as a professional, the Mac is the Apple product I use the most, and not just by a little bit. Because I am a creative professional using Macs, all of my household runs on all sorts of Apple products. My TV is powered by the Apple TV, my wife has a MacBook, my WiFi router is an Apple AirPort, we both have iPhones. And my immediate family has a nontrivial amount of Apple hardware. My mom has an iMac, my dad has a MacBook Pro, my sister has a MacBook Pro, several members of my family have a varying amount of iPods and iPod Touches (iPods Touch?). This can loosely be related to the fact that I as a creative professional use Apple products and recommend them to others and actively encourage others to get Apple products. If Apple stops serving my needs and I am forced to use other computing solutions, the halo effect goes away. Apple has a lot of consumer traction and it would be hard for them to fail completely — to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as it were — but should Apple start getting really stupid about serving the professionals, in many ways the market drivers, then I think we will see a slow erosion of everything Apple has built.

Side note: whatever Apple does with the Mac Pro or it’s successor, I really hope they move away from the sharp-edged cheese grater look and feel.

Yes, this is me linking to a link post, and I certainly encourage you to read the post Marco also linked to, but what Marco had to say is what I’m interested in.

In my anecdotal experimentation, serifs are more readable in some contexts, and sans-serifs are more readable in others. I like Lyon Text (serif) on Retina iPad, Elena (serif) on iPad Mini, and Ideal Sans on iPhone. I don’t like dark backgrounds with light text anywhere except on iPhone, and only with sans-serifs.

Personally though, I don’t like dark backgrounds with light text in any regular reading context — not on my iPhone, not on my computer, not on paper (obviously) not anywhere. It hurts my eyes something terrible when reading for more than a few seconds.

So, I was having this exact problem:

The biggest problem I’ve been having with this machine on Lion (didn’t have it on Snow Leopard) is to do with kernel_task. Instead of splitting all of the underlying kernel operations into their own individual processes (and associated threads) they are all consumed by a single ‘task’ (more of a representation of the underpinnings of the microkernel architecture) that appears in the process list. What I’ve been noticing is that this ‘task’ sometimes goes out of control, consumes CPU resources with the utmost priority. For a long time I wasn’t sure what it was doing, it seemed to be kicking in when I was doing something that was relatively intensive (for a Mac anyway), e.g. YouTube.

(emphasis mine)

Mine was intermittent, and has only been happening for the last two weeks or so, but seemingly getting worse. Today was the last straw. I was trying to do some heave duty work in After Effects, and the CPU would suddenly spike and get out of control and all input would become sluggish, but it was the Kernel spiking the CPU, which means of course that it takes top priority. And these spikes usually last at least five minutes, during which time the computer is practically unusable. It’s maddening!

And long gone are the days that I care to wipe out my hard drive and do a clean install. I just want the computer to work, I want all my settings and user info in place, and I don’t want to go through the pain of getting everything back just the way I like it. So I was pretty motivated to find a fix that did not involve formatting the hard drive. I finally I found this piece I’m linking to:

Thankfully, this “feature” is built into a kext, in which each model identifier specifies how to control the temperature of the CPU via this invasive action. The simple fix is to remove the entry for your model identifier from this kext- if it “doesn’t know” what to do with your particular model, it won’t take any action. Now, here comes the disclaimer… by taking the same action as I will outline below, I take absolutely no responsibility for any damage or loss caused to you or your property, you do this of your own free will. You’re over-ruling functionality that was designed to prolong the life of your equipment, despite the fact that it’s invasive and very annoying it’s there for a reason. Anyway, on to the fun stuff…

Click on through for the full details of the fix. Be warned, you will need to muck about in the terminal a bit. It involves diving into an Apple provided Kernel extension and deleting the system management plist file for your specific model of Apple computer. I’m crossing my fingers but, but it seemed to fix my computer completely. I’ve been keeping an eye on my CPU and GPU temps and such, and working the computer pretty hard, and have not seen any adverse effects. And honestly, the hardware should take care of itself without the Kernel getting all interfery like anyway.

This is probably a completely niche thing that 10 other people in the whole world are running into. And seriously, OS X is such a dream to use, and has such low maintenance needs, that when something like this comes up, you feel like your world is collapsing. I was extremely glad to find this fix.

Skeuomorphism – the use of real world design in a digital context – has been a target lately. It’s also been lumped together with heavy design, or skin, to the point of being completely misunderstood. At the extreme, this “skeuomorphic” melange has been held up as an example of iOS being boring, outdated, and bereft of innovation. In more reasonably terms, it’s looked at as something that can be useful, but has perhaps been overused. I’ve gone on record as saying I think there are far more important things Apple needs to do in iOS 7 than wiping the world clean of skeuomorphism, both here on the site and in a podcast rant. But let’s imagine for a moment it is on the agenda. That Apple’s new head of all design, hardware and software, Jony Ive, was set to impose a new, unified, Aluminium theme. That, just like the Scarlet Witch in House of M, he whispered “No more Skeuomorphs.”

Instead of arguing in the abstract about how much better or worse it would be, let’s mock it up and see what could that look like…

And:

I’m still of the opinion that it’s less about skeuomorphism or it’s opposite, digital authenticity, than it is about usability. In some cases, skeuomorphism helps make things discoverable, approachable, and engaging. In others, it just gets in the way.

I’m really pretty much in love with the mockup of Game Center. Yes, as pointed it, it’s a little more generic, but much, much easier on the eyes!

Also, I loved Stephen Hackett’s comments on Rene’s article:

The silver UI in Rene’s post can be found in iOS’s built-in Music and Maps app now. While I’m all for Apple getting rid of stitched leather and linen, remember what happened before Apple unified an OS so tightly?

Oh God.

Let’s play a game, how many of these do you remember? I remember quite a few of them. Several of them were before I was paying attention to Apple or even the internet.

Still, kind of fun.

Seems about right.

Everyone was clapping that Apple embraced open source. Happy, happy, happy. And they were just certain what was coming next. Then Steve moved a new slide onto the screen. With only one word, “KHTML” — six-foot-high white letters on a blue background.

If you listen to that video I posted, notice that no one applauds here. Why? I’m guessing confusion and complete lack of recognition.

What you also can’t hear on the video is someone about 15 to 20 rows behind where we were sitting — obviously expecting the word “Gecko” up there — shout at what seemed like the top of his lungs:

“WHAT THE ****!?”

KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all. And that moment was glorious. We had punk’d the entire crowd.

Don Melton has been posting some stuff about his time working on Safari and it’s awesome stuff. While I think Firefox and the Gecko layout engine sort of jumpstarted the browser revolution, Safari is still, despite some of it’s flaws, my current daily driver. My fall back browser is Chrome, which is also based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. Firefox is a very VERY distant third at this point. I also really enjoyed going back and watching Steve introduce Safari to the world in the Macworld 2003 Keynote. This was the beginning of Apple’s heyday.

Headlines are whirling this week with talk of a cheaper iPhone, but Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller is apparently balking at the rumors.

Schiller allegedly admitted to the Shanghai Evening News (translation) in an interview that his company is not developing a cheaper smartphone to “grab market share away.” He reportedly said the iPhone 5 is the best iPhone for Apple and his company is not concerned with market share.

…

He indicated cheap smartphones are popular, but they will never be the future of Apple’s products.

I’m not a fan of theory that Apple is going to produce another, less expensive iPhone. I believe their strategy of selling last years iPhone at a bargain, and the 2 year old iPhone free on contract is a really great one. That said, I would like to pont out that he said “cheap” smartphones will never be the future of Apple products. He did not say “inexpensive”. They are never going to make cheap junk, that’s just not Apple.

Awesome! I want this on my next iPhone… not that I’ve had any problems with breaking glass on any iPhones I’ve had so far, but there can’t be anything wrong with even stronger glass.

I do have one question, when can we have this in our cars? It seems I am constantly getting cracked windshields due to flying rocks and the like. It’s really annoying!