Earlier today Apple kicked off it’s annual developer conference with it’s usual keynote address from Apple’s commander in chief Steve Jobs. Lots of announcements this time around as they talked OSX, iOS, and their new cloud venture known as iCloud. I wanted to touch on a few of the announcements and give my two cents.
Please note, that I was pretty happy with the round of announcements for OSX and so I won’t be covering those too much here.
Twitter iOS Integration
This was a popular one that was rumored in the days leading up to the keynote and picked up some heavy steam over the weekend. While much of this is nice, I think that it greatly demonstrates the key differences between iOS and Google’s mobile offering, Android. With iOS, Twitter had to work directly with Apple to bring in such deep integration into their mobile OS. The contact sync, tweet photos from the photos app, etc, all have been in the Android version of the Twitter app for some time now. Why? Twitter didn’t have to wait to work with Google. Twitter could do it all themselves with the APIs provided by Google for the Android operating system. Apple however had to bake it in for their users to see such deep integration.
iOS Notifications
The notification system on iOS today sucks, badly. Anyone that has used Android devices, knows that its notification system has long been superior to iOS. It was non-intrusive, and easy to manage. With iOS 5, Apple is introducing a notification system that looks very similar to Android’s. But really, it’s about time for this change. They’ve needed for so long, and from the looks of what I saw, it seems like a good system even if you can tell it’s largely based on Android’s way of doing things, with some Apple flair thrown in.
iOS Goes PC Free (Cutting the Cord)
Apple was the one’s that said they were ushering in the “post PC era” when they announced the iPad2. However, if you bought an iPhone or an iPad, the first thing you had to do was connect it to a PC or Mac computer. That’s not very “post-pc” is it? But with iOS 5, new devices are ready to go without the need for connecting it to another device. This is good stuff, considering that even pro-iPhone himself, Robert Scoble, has said this was one of the things where Android was winning.
Apple also announced wireless iTunes syncing, and cloud based connectivity to get content on all their devices, so getting a new i-device will be similar to getting a new Android device. Activate, login, and your stuff downloads to the device.
iTunes Match
With iCloud, Apple also announced iTunes Match, which scans your iTunes library, matches any tracks you haven’t purchased with those in the iTunes, and uploads anything it can’t match. Giving you access to your entire music collection. However, it costs $24.99/year. The price isn’t horrific, but if I can upload my collection to Google Music for free, there’s not exactly a value add for that $24.99. Especially since I’m okay with having that initial upload period (yes it sucks, but after it’s all there it’s just uploading new stuff which goes much faster). However, I’m willing to bet bucks to dollars that the yearly fee is mostly going to paying the labels for licensing.
What I do like is the matching technology and I really thought Google would come out with something like this for their service, but since they didn’t reach an agreement with the labels, I’m sure that’s why they haven’t done something similar. So there’s some good, some bad here. But I would expect Google, Amazon, and even Microsoft to start offering a similar service soon.
I recently spent some time setting up my *nix configuration files for Bash and VIM in a 
Michael Koby 
Why Robert Scoble is Wrong (And a Little Right) About Apps
Robert Scoble is no stranger to opinions. He has several of them, and he posts them on Twitter daily. Sometimes his opinions are valid, other times they can come across as blatant fanboy. That’s okay though, that’s what the internet is for. But he has recently taken the stance that the success of the platform is based solely on the number of native applications it has available.
While this view isn’t completely incorrect, it’s the only truth. What Scoble will constantly say whenever he comes across a new device (say Android tablet, or Nokia’s newest MeeGo device), he’ll say something like “cool device, but no apps so I won’t use it”, which again is his prerogative. But he often ignores one glaring fact. The iPhone became a successful platform without any native apps. When the iPhone first launched you could only do web applications, there was no native development kit to write native apps (outside of Apple). However, even without the native apps, the iPhone became an incredibly popular device. When native iOS applications arrived over a year later, it only further cemented the iPhone’s popularity.
So the iPhone, Scoble’s goto argument, was itself without native applications for the first year of its existence, but it was a good platform (the first of it’s kind actually) and this is why it gained the attention of developers (it’s popularity didn’t hurt either). Yes, now the iPhone has a large number of iOS applications in it’s app store, so do Android phones (yes, I realize Android tablet apps are lacking, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being worked on), and MeeGo will probably do okay as well. While MeeGo probably won’t be as large in market share as iOS or Android, Nokia sells most of its stuff outside the United States where there are a good amount of people who actually buy Nokia products.
Consider another argument of Nokia and the Symbian platform. Nokia and Symbian owned a nice chunk of the mobile phone market, especially outside the United States (this is something people forget about Nokia when they try to discuss its “irrelevance”). In fact up until recently, Nokia had more market share worldwide than Apple or Google’s Android. However the platform became meaningless in a market with iOS and Android. This happened mainly because Nokia was slow to catch Symbian up to what people were loving about iOS and Android and as a result people stopped developing for Symbian devices.
So Robert, apps are important, but what matters is a solid platform to develop those applications on. Android, Windows Phone 7, and MeeGo (iOS too) offer such platforms. Without a platform that is attractive to developers, there will never be any applications for it. MeeGo has the attention of developers. It might not be the ones in Silicon Valley, but they’re not the only developers on the planet. The platform is important, because the platform brings developers who then write the apps.