Apple joins an exclusive club that includes Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Wal-Mart Stores. But some analysts are starting to wonder if now may be a good time to sell the company’s stock.

Right before the iPad is released? Those analysts are fucking stupid.

Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.

I’m serious. It sucked last year, and it’s going to suck again this year. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. The idea that SXSWi is a conference – or even a festival – for people doing interesting and useful things in technology is a fallacy. In reality, it’s just a non-stop orgy of bullshit fanboyism – a chance for people with stickers on their laptops to go and add more stickers to their laptops; an opportunity for sweaty dorks in Diggnation t-shirts to line up for two hours in the hope of getting Alex Albrecht to – I dunno – sign their laptop, I suppose, or maybe give them another freaking sticker. Even the parties – which are basically the only reason to go – are horrible: the free bars runs out too soon, and they’re always rammed with the kind of people who you could be forgiven for assuming have never been inside licenced premises before.

Try WWDC instead. It’s like SxSW, except the parties are accessible, the community is friendlier, and the people who attend actually make money at what they do.

(Via Turing Eret)

Dragging through thousands of words of prose isn’t skimming, isn’t navigation… it’s laborious. You’re paginating by hand.

Without the collective network of millions, Facebook would not exist. We are the customers because we’re paying with a different (and arguably, more sparse) currency: attention.

We are the product. Advertisers are the customer. This may seem like a semantic distinction — at least in context — but there is a fundamental difference in how customers and products are treated, even if both groups are made up of human beings.

And yeah, it’s been a weird, crazy year. I look at the list of my fellow speakers and I feel both honored and humbled.

KeyGrinder isn’t the most visually attractive app you’ll ever see, but it doesn’t need to be pretty.

As the designer of the app, it would be easy for me to read this the wrong way. While I maintain that the UI is good-looking, Sande is right in that the app isn’t flashy or heavy on the visuals. Not only does it not need to be pretty, a core requirement is that the app not be overwhelming.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I read his comment as a compliment. I designed KeyGrinder to be simple, easy to use, and most importantly, fast. There is nothing in there to distract the user from the task at hand: generating and using a secure password.

Alex King once told us that he wished someone would make an iPhone app based on the PwdHash project at Stanford to make it easier to use secure passwords on the iPhone. Rather than just rush something out, we decided to put some thought into the interface, how users would really want to use the app, and how refined the process could become. Should KeyGrinder save passwords? Should there be a bookmarklet? Should there be a web version? Should access require a password?

The end result is something that I feel is an elegant approach to the problem. There is no need to store passwords because they’re so easy to generate, but bookmarking of URLs provides a fast way to re-grind. The bookmarklet should be as easy to install as the iPhone will allow (tip: not very). And passwords should be easy to recover even if you lose your iPhone or iPod touch². And because no critical information is stored, no thief can steal your passwords even if they get their hands on your device.

We’re happy with this app. We hope everyone uses it and creates better passwords.

1. iTunes link
2. KeyGrinder.com

You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard – in other words a netbook – will be the mainstream on that[...]

Yes, users are clamoring for more pen interfaces.

So it’s not too much of a stretch to see Apple’s ad platform in the future being the best way to deliver ads in apps, which might offer perks like, say, location-based targeted advertising, or more dynamic ads than you can do now on an iPhone. It’s also not crazy to think Apple’s way is going to be the only way to get some of those features, like location-based ads.

The point is easy to miss, so I’ll spell it out a bit. Apple’s plan isn’t to remove anyone’s ability to use location data for ads. What Buchanan is suggesting — and the conclusion I came to myself — is that Apple wants to provide those ads themselves.

Rather than pulling ads from any of the countless mobile ad providers, it would be more suited to Apple’s interests for you to get your ads through a framework. Core Advertising, if you will. Developers include a few lines of code and get ad supported lite versions of their apps which conveniently pay out through the same system that cuts the checks for App Store revenue. A single point of payment.

The Gizmodo article also points out Apple’s use of the word primarily. If the only reason you’re using Core Location is to serve ads, you will be rejected. Why? Simple, Apple recognizes the danger of allowing app developers to control overall user experience. Right now, a modal alert pops up when you launch a location-enabled app for the first time. As a user, I see this alert as a layer of privacy protection. My iPhone correctly assumes that I don’t want to share this information with just anyone, and cautions me on a per-app basis.

Now imagine this alert pops for every app.

What Apple doesn’t want is for users to be conditioned to hit OK without consideration, and even less so for users to be inundated with alerts (shades of Windows).

By providing advertising functionality by way of a developer framework, Apple can take a cut of the money, make the process of creating ad-supported apps easier for developers, and distill the user experience down to a single “allow advertising based on your current location” option within settings.

So long as ads not based on location can still be pulled freely from third-parties like Fusion and The Deck, I would view this as a fair compromise.

I’ve always been a user advocate; what professionals consider to be “stupid” is really just a demonstration that not everyone knows what you know. If you make a living doing design work, you should be glad that people aren’t, by default, as knowledgeable as you. Their ignorance pays your bills. And don’t blindly assume that you would be good that their job.

That said, some of these are pretty stupid.

(Via Nick Harris)

No, I’m not trying to run Linux on the thing. It runs a perfectly acceptable *NIX operating system already, and in fact has a fantastic GUI (for almost every purpose) and software installation procedure (for almost every case) already. I just want to run my instant messenger /and/ Pages.

Craig Hockenberry offers an alternative philosophy:

What I find most interesting is the inclusion of the iWork applications. I suspect that we’ll all benefit from working in Pages, Numbers and Keynote without the distractions of the web, Twitter or chat. And in the long run, we’ll prefer it.

I think that the extreme focus of a single application is a pleasant side-effect of single-tasking, not an intended feature.

No camera.

This seemed like a strange omission at first glance, but really, what good would the camera be? The point of having a camera on the iPhone was to enable the user to take pictures quickly on-the-go. The iPad isn’t the same kind of device. I’ve heard the rumors about video conferencing, with some even claiming that the tablet would have two cameras, one in the front and one in the back. Assuming that wouldn’t be confusing, expensive, or harmful to industrial design, video conferencing on the iPad would still suck.

When we imagine iChat or other traditional web conferencing solutions, we imagine seeing a video window with the smiling face of a loved one. Now put the camera on a tablet.

I love my friends, but I don’t want to stare up their noses.

The alternative is uncomfortably holding the damned thing in front of you. Nothing about this experience sounds pleasant to me.

I’m reminded of copy/paste on the iPhone. It was considered to be a near-unforgivable sin that it wasn’t included in the first release. Yet the iPhone sold well into the millions without it. When 3.0 was announced, there was a collective cry of “finally” from the technical community, but neglected was the fact that it was — and still is — the single best implementation of copy and paste on a mobile device. Do you think this happened at the last minute? That Apple’s designers and engineers were sitting on their asses playing Trism for two years, then haphazardly stumbled upon a best-of-breed solution completely by accident?

I suspect that Apple had the exact same idea for video conferencing. After all, they did file for a patent on technology that would allow them to place a camera behind the screen of a device. But if a nice-to-have feature doesn’t work perfectly, you throw it away and ship without it.

My concern, though, is that people may think that Mac apps should include every possible feature and preference. The reasoning would be like this: “It’s not an iPad or iPhone. It’s a computer. Therefore it’s for power users. Therefore it should be totally customizable and have every feature anybody might want.”

That would be a big mistake.

My hope, instead, is that Mac users and developers (all developers are users too, by the way) learn even better the virtues of focused, opinionated software that pays attention to experience more than to long feature lists and heavy preference windows. I hope we see even better Mac software.

Brent his this ineffable ability to be opinionated, strong-willed, and forceful without being even the least bit offensive.