ross rubin
Latest
Switched On: Apple's brash Flash clash rehash
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: For all the attention on the love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft, there's another software superpower with which Apple is increasingly butting heads. Apple was an early investor in Adobe and an early supporter of PostScript, which drove the first LaserWriters and launched the desktop publishing market. When Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, that company used Display PostScript as the imaging engine for the company's black boxes.Photoshop and other members of Adobe's Creative Suite remain some of the most popular creative tools on the Mac. For years, Photoshop made cameos at Apple keynotes as the company argued the superiority of the PowerPC architecture.But the relationship has been strained at times as well. After going on lots of minor quests involving the slaying of forest creatures, Adobe released PostScript Level 2. But Apple surprised nearly everyone when it partnered with Microsoft in 1989 to position TrueType and the now-forgotten TrueImage as a rival to Adobe's technology. Apple would later try again to surpass Adobe's font technology with QuickDraw GX before adopting PDF as the graphics lingua franca for Mac OS X.
Switched On: It browsed from another dimension!
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: Microsoft named its browser a humble explorer; Apple encompassed a whole safari. Do you get the sense that the developers of the 3D browser "SpaceTime" are setting their sights a bit higher?Most 3D browsers from the early days of the web, such as those from ActiveWorlds and Blaxxun Interactive, became best-known for avatar-based chat, in many ways the precursors of Second Life. 3B, a more recent effort, allows its users to set up web pages and photos on walls or billboards in various 3D environments such as Tech (think bridge of USS Enterprise), Beach, Lounge and what the developers call "Girly" (sort of a pre-teen girl's bedroom) presumably located in Hannah, Montana.SpaceTime, though, differs from all these avatar cyberplaygrounds, using 3D instead as a means to more visual web navigation. Large thumbnails of web pages float in front of a slowly drifting Cirrus cloud background; double-clicking them travels through space and brings them full-screen. Alone, this would be little more than eye candy, but SpaceTime's design goals kick in when you choose a search from one of its partners, which include Google and YouTube, Yahoo and Flickr, Amazon and eBay, among others.
Switched On: Comparing Apples and Blackberrys (Part 2)
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: Last week's Switched On discussed the iPhone's controversial software-based keyboard in the context of its phone, media playback and Web-surfing features in which text entry plays only a walk-on role. (Note how no one seems to be bemoaning the iPhone's lack of handwriting recognition.) But email is another important part of the Internet experience. And while here, too, time reading generally outweighs time writing, email is one of the most compelling justifications for a good keyboard on a mobile phone. It's no accident that RIM's Blackberry was one of the earliest phones to have a thumb-typable keyboard. Indeed, Blackberry supported such a keyboard even before it supported phone calls (and even on the Blackberry's predecessor, the RIM 950 "interactive messenger"), operating on a two-way paging network. If it's consistent with its desktop cousin, the iPhone's version of Safari actually does a good job of Outlook Web Access. However, the iPhone is not optimized for the level of Microsoft Outlook synchronization that the Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices are. If you need your phone to be your lifeline to your business communication and you work for a company where IT appropriately protects the Exchange server like The Lost Ark, you will have bigger problems using your iPhone for searchable offline email than its keyboard until Apple support Exchange ActiveSync as other Microsoft competitors Palm and Nokia have.
Switched On: Comparing Apples and Blackberrys (Part 1)
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: Apple has just introduced an incredibly promoted portable touch-screen device touted as revolutionizing an entire industry. Lines formed in anticipation of its release. The most controversial aspect of it, though, is its text-input method. And one more thing, the year is 1993 and the product is Newton. The disappointment of Newton's handwriting recognition resulted in negative reviews that left Apple with egg freckles on its face and the bold Newton MessagePad and its successors all but doomed. Will history repeat itself with this year's model? The first sign that the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard may have a learning curve came during the Steve Jobs interview at the D: All Things Digital event when Apple's CEO offered to buy Walt Mossberg dinner if he wasn't happy with the iPhone's keyboard after coming up to speed on it. Reinforcing that, in Apple's video walkthrough of the iPhone, the black-shirted narrator notes that "it's easiest to begin typing with just your index finger" but encourages that "as you get more proficient, migrate to using two thumbs" for the payoff that "in about a week, you'll be typing faster on iPhone than any other small keyboard. Perhaps the keyboard's tag line should be, "Give us a week. We'll take off the wait." Fortunately for Apple, most reviewers have not thrown Apple's baby out with its backspace.
Switched On: Mainstream music hits a mainstream price
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:
