Today was a historic day in computing history. While the techno-geeks will argue for the next several months what this really means and what the Apple iPad is missing or why it’s only a large screen iPod Touch, I’m going to be focused on what I think this really means to some key industries and how Appcelerator can help. From my perspective, web developers are talking up and overwhelmingly are planning new application experiences for the new iPad. We surveyed just a small sample of our community of developers and found that over 90% of them plan on building an iPad application in the next 12 months.

But what’s probably more interesting, and certainly makes sense seeing the iPad today, is that this new device offers new innovations that could be much different (and quite possibly, better) than the existing iPhone/iPod.

We are seeing huge opportunities for developers to build applications that really leverage the unique and native device features of the iPad. Today, Steve Jobs demonstrated the new ebook system built-in to the soon-to-be-released iTunes “bookstore”. But, think about the application possibilities for publishers, media companies and companies such as ad agencies and interactive digital agencies can create. In fact, Steve Jobs might have single handily gave a life-line to the entire media world as it struggles to find a monetization model as they move from traditional print to digital. With over 175 million users ready with credit cards in the iTunes ecosystem and more than four years of micro payments of .99 and beyond, Apple may be able to turn over an industry struggling to find a path to transactions. The iPad offers an experience and consumer base that is already purchasing digital content and an compelling advantage that the normal web doesn’t offer. Users on the desktop web have had over 10 years of conditioning of “Free”, adding “Paywalls” to their websites are already offering significant challenges for some publishers. The iTunes ecosystem may be their new savior.

What’s also different spending the day with the Tablet SDK is that most of the current 100K apps will be completely re-tooled for the new device. While Apple is reporting (and in fact, in today’s testing with the SDK, fulfilling) that they’ll run all apps in the App Store unchanged, it’s very clear that apps will need to be rebuilt completely to take advantage of the new UI, new native features and the use cases that will be more appropriate for the new iPad. In fact, I think in less than 6 months after the devices are available for purchase, most of the apps that are used on the device on a day-to-day basis will be new iPad versions. It’s clear from the way the “emulated” iPhone apps are running on the tablet that developers will quickly move to change their apps to better adapt and that user’s will quickly find paths to one’s that take full advantage of the new device. This offers both a challenge and huge opportunity – not quite the same opportunity as the original iPhone – but close.

I’d advise developers and publishers that are on the iPhone today to start now at moving their apps. If you’re not on the bandwagon, you’ll really want to get on to it today. In either case, you’d really benefit from checking out Appcelerator as a way to help you move quickly to the new device and preserve your existing investments.

What are we doing at Appcelerator to support the iPad?

Like all iPhone apps, your Appcelerator Titanium-based apps will run on the iPad as-is in emulation mode. Today, we verified that the upcoming 0.9 release runs great both under emulation mode as well as the full native mode. We’ll have more details about that soon but we’ll be fully supporting new iPad projects in the 0.9 release and expect full support for the iPad native features soon thereafter. Because of the Apple NDA, we’ll not be able to talk specifically about the native features we’re working on for the iPad, but they’ll be awesome.

So, I’ll have more on this soon. I promise to try and blog more these days…

I’ll leave you with some parting thoughts I shared with Robert Scoble the day before the announcement.

Today was a very busy day. I spoke about Appcelerator Titanium at the O’Reilly/360 Inside Mobile Conference in San Jose and later served on a discussion panel with Daniel Brusilovsky (Teens in Tech, Techcrunch), Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) and Christian Sepulveda (Pivotal Labs).

I then spoke tonight at the iPhone Business Meetup in Santa Clara. Tonight, I spoke a little bit about iPhone and the Enterprise and gave some perspective on the opportunities and challenges for developers considering iPhone in the Enterprise.

Below are my slides from the presentation. As always, I generally try and post all of my public presentations on my Slideshare Slidespace.

iPhone in the Enterprise offers a lot of interesting opportunities and some big challenges today. However, some of the challenges are not just inherent in iPhone – they are overall challenges of a rapidly changing marketplace. We’re seeing a massive change in the dynamics of the mobile ecosystem. These changes aren’t just with the emergence of iPhone and Android – new mobile devices that have changed the smartphone marketplace almost overnight – but also in how these new entrants are disrupting carriers and handset manufacturers. In addition, we’re seeing new mobile handset entrants like HTC and Dell Computer also come into play. Of course, we’re also seeing old players like Palm make a play with WebOS in a very exciting way.

It’s an exciting time to be a web developer. I believe web technologies will continue to emerge as the most important pieces of the technology landscape. It’ll be fun to watch how this emerges. I think in the next 24 months we’ll see some pretty big ecosystem changes.

If you’re considering building an iPhone and/or Android application, please consider taking a look at our Appcelerator Titanium product. Titanium allows you to build native mobile applications using web technologies. That’s right – HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These are technologies, tools and skills you have today.

We recently moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Mountain View, California and during the move I had a chance to go through some old boxes I’ve had for years — twenty years to be exact.

Tonight, I decided to open up some of the boxes and try and see if I could find some old pictures after seeing some of my high school friend’s pictures on Facebook.

I came across a Newsweek magazine in almost perfect shape from almost 20 years ago to the date: October 24, 1988. Spooky?

And on the cover, today’s hero was the wonder kid 20 years ago: Steve Jobs. Yep, that’s right, the man on top of Apple (once again) and by far, one of the world’s most influential technology snobs.

The title: “Mr. Chips”. The subtitle: “Steve Jobs puts the ‘wow’ back in computers.”

How apropos for then, and today.

As an aside, another big box read: “Why Bush is winning: The GOP’s Campaign Machine”. Yeah, that was Bush senior. 20 years later and we’re still talking about a Bush in the white house. But, that’s another story.

Flipping through this issue was literally going back in time. A number of computers advertisements, several cigerrate ads and an article on how “more consumers are ducking the price of perpetual interest by paying off bank cards in full”.

This was the IBM 280 PC. It ran DOS, had VGA graphics, 4MB of memory on the system board, proprietary PS/2 devices and could be configured to run IBM’s OS/2.

You don’t see cigarette ads anymore. This article predicted: “Heads you win. Tails you win.” However, fearing thousands of separate, costly lawsuits from customers with smoke-related health problems, the major U.S. tobacco companies and 46 states signed the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) on Nov. 23, 1998. The MSA placed restrictions on future tobacco advertising and cigarette sales practices and also provided for a $250 Billion settlement.

The Epson PC? This one was the Equity ET with the tagline: “I don’t need a laptop computer. I need a desktop computer that fits on my lap.” Great vision, terrible execution.

Walmart was on the leading edge of technology stores with this tagline: “Name brand electronics. Always at lower prices: The switch is on to Wal-mart electronics”.

Let’s first start with the cover article on Mr. Jobs – the whiz kid, 33 years old back then.

The article is mainly about Steve Jobs’ comeback after Apple Computer with the NeXT computer. “Love him or hate him, people in the computer world couldn’t wait to see what Jobs had secretly worked on for three years in his Palo Alto headquarters.” The price tag for the initial model (with a university discount): $6,500.

Even Esther Dyson, back then the publisher of the Release 1.0 newsletter, said: “It’s a neat, neat box.”

And Steve Jobs was aimed “where the smart money is going”: the workstation market was $2.5 Billion and broken into the following market leaders:

25.5% – Sun Microsystems
18.6% – Apollo Computer
17.8% – Digital Equipment Corp
17.2% – Hewlett-Packard
17.0% – “Other”
3.9% – Silicon Graphics

Notice anybody missing? IBM, Toshiba, Sony, Dell, Apple?

Notice some that are gone? Apollo, DEC ? I would imagine Sun and SGI together probably own less than 3.9% of the workstation market these days.

The article also had a very familiar name in the article, Bill Gates, with an awesome photo. Back then, Gates was only 32. The article states that Gates is “a virtuoso software engineer with virtually zero charisma, he is the ultimate entreprenerd.” According to the article, Jobs invited Gates to contribute software to the NeXT, but Gates declined, saying there wasn’t enough money in the narrow market Jobs was pursuing. It also has Gates saying: “Steve always yells at me.”

Well, NeXT didn’t exactly take over the computer world, but Steve Jobs did and he did regain control of Apple (along with a number of key people and technologies from NeXT) after Apple bought NeXT only 8 years later for $429 million. Jobs returned as CEO in 2000 and NeXTSTEP was the foundation for the next generation of Apple operating system, OS X.

In this same issue, they outlined some interesting predictions for the future of technology.

Let’s see how we did 20 years later.

Education

Grade school
Prediction: Desktop computers will replace pens and papers.
Reality: Not only do classrooms have desktop and laptop computers, most students now have the full power of a handheld computer in their pocket.

Language
Prediction: Voice simulation will make it possible to learn foreign tongues from mechanical tutors.
Reality: Rosetta Stone, one of the leaders in language tutoring uses voice recognition and a computer to teach foreign languages.

Libraries
Prediction: Buildings full of books will be stored on optical disks.
Reality: Not only stored on optical disk, but stored in the global computer network and instantly available by keyword search thanks to the Google Book Search Library Project.

Programming
Prediction: Flexible software will make it easy for students to create their own computer programs.
Reality: With languages like Squeak, Ruby and HTML, students have a variety of programming languages they are learning way before they reach college.

Business

Design
Prediction: Everyone from architects to dressmakers will be able to make simulations of products – in 3-D.
Reality: Computer Aided Design (CAD) software has become common-place and producers and consumers worldwide can use software provided by companies like MFG.com to work with each other to build just about anything.

Secretarial work
Predictions: Machines will take calls, write memos and organize the busiest of executive schedules.
Reality: Secretaries? The secretary pool has been retired and replaced by the PC, Gates’ multi-billion dollar Office productivity suite and email. Only venture capitalists are the dinosaurs left that still use secretaries.

Networking
Predictions: Using groupware, machines will talk with each other.
Reality: Not only will machines talk with each other all over the world, called the Internet, but people also communicate in social and virtual reality networks.

Travel
Predictions: Laptops will be small enough to slip into a vest pocket.
Reality: Laptops aren’t quite that small, but full-fledged mobile devices from computer pens, mobile phones and RFID chips are fueling the nano revolution.

Science

Medicine
Prediction: Doctors will walk through surgery beforehand – on screen.
Reality: Doctors, even one’s across the world, can now operate on patients using computers and sophisticated video conferencing systems. We’re even now starting to see biocomputers which can enter the body to perform certain medical tasks.

Technology
Prediction: Sophisticated imaging will revolutionize high-tech design.
Reality: Imaging in all parts of science have revolutionized the world. Pocket cameras and mobile phones have more sophisticated imaging software and lenses than expensive professional photography equipment less than a decade ago. 3D ultrasound imaging can produce an almost photorealistic image of a fetus in utero.

Meteorology
Prediction: Computer “models” will track weather patterns and predict major shifts far in advance.
Reality: Computers have become more advanced at tracking weather patterns and creating more accurate prediction models.

Criminology
Prediction: Police will be able to recreate the scene of a crime – and simulate the moves of the criminal.
Reality: Police are using more sophisticated technology – from chemical analysis to DNA to find and prosecute criminals.

The Arts

Graphics
Prediction: Any artist will be able to do super-sophisticated animation or create images that look real.
Reality: Computer software gives artists the ability to create and mash up music, video, animation and photos and produce and distribute them at very little cost.

Music
Prediction: Compositions will be written and stored on computers.
Reality: Not only are they written and stored, music is distributed, re-mixed and stolen all over the world by millions of people each day with the click of a button or mouse.

Video
Prediction: High-resolution screens will revolutionize the field.
Reality: High-resolution video screens are everywhere, from the football field to the local bar to the airport check-in desk. High-definition television is available in many homes.

Games
Prediction: Home computers will be able to generate sounds and special effects of a “Star Wars” movie.
Reality: Not only have home computer games been able to generate sounds and special effects, the gaming industry has grown larger than Hollywood and music labels combined and has bigger production budgets than most movies. Multi-player interactive games can be played on-line at any time of the day, worldwide.

Alan Kay of Xerox’s PARC fame predicted that “portable computers will require built-in cellular-telephone connections – so you can tap into big data banks while sitting under the apple tree.” (The “apple” keyword has a particular significance today as the Apple iPhone takes a predicted 25% of the smart phone market share after only one year on the scene).

Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame said: “We need to build a national infrastructure that will be the information equivalent of the national highway-building of the ’50s and ’60s”. The World Wide Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee one year later in 1989.

Wayne Rosig, at the time at Sun Microsystems, predicted: “It’s a waste to have hundreds of computers in a building that share nothing but AC power.” The article predicted that “Groupware will permit an officeful of people to collaborate on, for example, a magazine advertisement, with artists, copywriters and salespeople all contributing, via computer, to the project. When a writer changes a line of copy, it will instantly show up in the layout on the designer’s computer screen.” Today, we have applications like Google Docs and Zoho that have similar capabilities.

John Seely Brown of Xerox’s PARC fame, envisioned “meetings at which every participant has a computer – and the meeting’s progress appears on a ‘decision spreadsheet’ projected on one wall, on which the pros and cons of the argument are analyzed for all to see.” In most meetings today, it’s not uncommon for everyone to have a laptop and mobile device during a meeting. Today, virtual meetings are commonly held online using services like WebEx.

My favorite prediction was from Lawrence Tesler, then the VP of advanced technology at Apple and now at Yahoo: “Sooner or later, more people will carry their computers around than keep them fixed to a desk.” With more than several billion mobile computer devices worldwide in use today, this was probably the one prediction that was difficult to understand in its impact. In some countries like Japan, there are more mobile devices than personal computers. And, with the price of computer chips, storage and memory continuing to fall and with the advent of modern nano technology, we’re seeing more and more miniaturized computers in all sorts of products.

And, as a final bonus, the political carton section from this issue:

Even then, Donald Trump ruled the world. After a rise, and fall, and rise again, he’s back on top just like Steve Jobs. Funny how much things have changed, and in some ways, they’re still the same.

What will the next 20 years bring us? Any predictions for the next 20 years you’d like to share?

No matter how ridiculous marcf is about the Mac – I still love it. However, in the past week I’ve had some really strange stuff happen to my Power Book. It’s not been pretty. Something has just gone completely wrong with the hardware driving the keyboard and mouse. It’s almost impossible to explain.

Put it this way. Typing this short blog post would be impossible. For every several letters, the mouse (and thus the focus) would jump to some other location randomly. Or, better, the “backspace effect” would happen. What’s that? Well, imagine if you’re typing away and then all of a sudden your last sentence just was erased and in a stroke, your next letters overwrote what you had just typed. Gosh, thank God for undo.

I think there’s some circuitry problem underneath the keyboard/mouse area. It started off about a month or so ago where my mouse area starting sticking. The nice little click you get when you press the pad was gone replaced with more or less a hard dull. Sometimes, I have to hit it pretty hard to get a click.

At this point, I’m taking my laptop in to a local Mac authorized repair center tomorrow. I’ve tried the Apple store before on a different problem I had (my internal fan died about 3 months ago) and it was useless. The store insisted I had to give them my computer for 2 weeks (best guess, maybe three they claimed) while they shipped it of to a regional center for repair. After jumping up and down and trying to explain to the store manager that my job depended on the laptop – she offered another solution. A wonderful little company here in Atlanta called Onyx Consulting.

I called Onyx and explained the situation. I told them, I absolutely couldn’t give my computer up while they shipped it off and asked what options did they have. They were very pleasurable with their response:

No worries. Just bring it in, we’ll check it out and if we require some parts we don’t have in inventory – we’ll order them and you keep the computer until they come in. Then, when they come in, just bring it in and we’ll repair it and give it back to you within a few hours.

Wow. That makes perfect sense. It’s under warranty and they’re an authorized repair center. Heck, even Dell will do on-site repair of your PC. And usually, their service sucks these days.

Unfortunately, in my current situation – my laptop is unusable. Luckily, there’s nothing wrong with the data or the physical hard drive or critical components. It’s just impossible to type more than a single character at a time without some delay between characters (like a very slow, deliberate keypress).  Hard to blog or write software under those conditions.
So, I broke down, and got a backup Mac Book this afternoon. I figure I have the extended Apple Care Protection Plan so they’ll fix the problem. However, my guess is this problem will take some time (and maybe several iterations of parts replacement while they try to figure out the problem) and I can’t be without a functioning computer for that long.

However, no matter what, understand this: I absolutely will not buy (or use) a Windows Vista PC.

technorati tags: apple, mac, powerbook

Or is that URIs? I can never seem to keep them straight – even after more than four years on the W3C and IETF. But, don’t worry, Mike Schinkel will be coming to SoCon07 and I’m sure he can help explain it.

You see, Mike’s really into pretty URLs – if there really is such a thing. If you’re RESTful or just doing a simple web page for your pet dog, Mike can help you name your URL as if it was your first born.

One of the cool things about the upcoming SoCon07 not-so-conference is the fact that I’ve heard a number of people planning on announcing their hot new idea. It started out with Tony Stubblebine pre-announcing CrowdVine – and we already have over forty people networking together. You see, maybe stuff is happening around here.

And now, Mike Schinkel and Ben Coffey plan to announce T.oolico.us – the toolbar cousin to del.icio.us or something like that. The idea is that Toolicious will provide users with a row of hyperlinks to useful page-specific functionality – all embedded nice and neatly (and I’m sure, named properly) into the top of each web page.

Wow, now that sounds pretty interesting. And, that’s a Good Thing.

P.S. if you’re a Mac lover like me, go and tell Mike not to listen to marfc and buy a Mac.

technorati tags: socon07, toolicous, crowdvine

If you’re not reading the blog FakeSteve, you’re really missing some very funny stuff. I swear, this guy’s acts so much what I believe the real Steve Job’s would act like.

And I love his favorite statement:

I’m friggin Steve Jobs! I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?

It’s funny to hear a satirical (but almost true) statement in his latest post about Bill Gates’ comments about Apple stealing their user interface from Windows (oh yea, right….):

But the real howler is when Bill says that Vista isn’t a cheap knock-off of our Apple OS X, that in fact Apple stole its ideas from Microsoft. Riiight. We saw those super-cool early Vista ideas, liked them so much we raced into our time machine and went back in time and used Bill’s ideas to build the NeXT operating system in the 1980s. Then we used those same ideas again when we made OS X in the 1990s and released it in 2001. Just like in “Back to the Future.”

The entire post is just too good to not enjoy yourself. Set your RSS reader to this subscription for a daily joy of laughs.

technorati tags: apple, stevejobs, billgates, microsoft

The big talk tonight at a local networking social was Apple’s hay day yesterday. I think I’m still a little mind boggled over the announcement. I know some people are not impressed – c’mon, please. Regardless of the price, you have to appreciate the innovation, technology superiority and typical wonderful user interface that Apple introduced. What’s more amazing is how they are packing some amazing applications in such a natural form factor with some amazing capabilities, such as the gesture recognition. Apple is one of the only companies that can do what was done.
Of course, Cisco has spent the day filing a trademark lawsuit against Apple. Blah blah blah. OK, Cisco, yet another 800 lb gorilla that has morphed into a big blob of crap, is mad at Apple for infringing on the name “iPhone” which they received when they acquired InfoGear. I get it – it’s fair, and given apple’s own record on suing people for using “podcast” – I guess it’s to be expected.

At this point, I really don’t care what they call it – I’d like to see them just call it the “Awesome Apple Phone” and make the tag line say “Try and Beat This”. Either way, I’ll be buying it in June.

technorati tags: apple, iphone, cisco

By now the whole world is watching the amazing unfolding of the new iPhone by Apple. If you’d like to see some of the photos and for some reason you’re not yet clued in – check them out live from Macworld 2007.

Big question now, when? I’m sold and ready to buy.

technorati tags: apple, mac, macworld, iphone, stevejobs

Oh man, tomorrow’s the big day for Macworld 2007. The front page of Apple has a very gripping teaser with:

OK, that sounds big. iTV? iPhone?

If you can’t be there, the (almost) next best thing to play-by-play blogging is the Flickr group. It’s almost like being there live (okay, not really but better than nothing).

If you’re not reading the Fake Steve (Jobs) blog, it’s a funny read. Sometimes I wonder if this guy is really SJ – he’s too much like what I would believe him to be in real life.

technorati tags: macworld, apple, stevejobs