As reported by Daring Fireball and others, Steve Jobs has posted another “open letter” on the Apple Hotnews site announcing that there will be an iPhone SDK after all, next February. Wish there were more details. And of course I have to point out that this is really just a followup to the news announced last May, but now they are pinning a date on it four and half months away, and more than 9 months after the original announcement they work working on it. Still, it is good to see Apple do the right thing here, especially since I complained so often and so loudly in the past.
Good standards
•08Oct07 • Comments Off on Good standardsA nice post on making standards by Dave McAlister of Adobe: Good Standards. I posted on the same topic last April, and what I said there still stands:
Contrast that with the process by which Adobe is submitting PDF to ISO. We’ve bent over backwards to ensure that the submission is as clean as it can possibly be, and as a result the feedback we’ve gotten has been extremely positive. If Microsoft believes their own stuff is so great, they should follow our lead and make it into a standard the right way: by proving the value of their solution, responding to constructive criticism, and building a consensus.
I have something I need to SHARE
•30Sep07 • 5 CommentsWow. So much to talk about. The last 3 weeks or so have been a whirlwind – working long hours to ship our software, getting added to the MAX keynote, the Buzzword acquisition, talking to a ton of bloggers, and, to top it all of, finally getting notice of our adoption going through and having to get ready for a trip to Vietnam on short notice. Amazing.
But here we are late Sunday night – I just arrived in Chicago for MAX and our product’s press release has hit the wires. So now I get to talk about what I and a great team of talented folks have been working on for the last half year. Its a web service that makes it easy for you to collaborate on documents, code-named “SHARE” (it was a last minute name change, in case you were wondering). SHARE allows you to store your documents on the service and share them with others, either via email, via a link to a URL, or by embedding a preview in your webpage YouTube-style. Here’s a screenshot of the main interface (click to view fullsize):
But the coolest part of the product, in my opinion, is the previewing technology. When you are logged in you can preview documents just by double clicking them, but we also support previewing for people you share the document with:
Right now the previewer works for PDF and image files, but in the near future we’ll add support for MS Office and OpenDocument formats. We also make it possible for you to embed a previewer in your own web pages. I’d show you one now, but wordpress doesn’t allow flash embedding (rats!). I’m going to have to go talk to them about that…
I’m also very proud of our REST APIs, which we think will let people do all kinds of interesting things with our service. I’ll have more on that in a future post.
We’ve got other cool stuff coming: integration with buzzword, a printer driver that lets you print directly from any application to SHARE as a PDF, an AIR application, and much more.
The release right now is a limited beta, in the true sense of the word: the software is still rough around the edges. But we’re releasing it now because we think that its pretty usable even in its current state, and we want to get feedback on the UI and start talking to people about the integration possibilities. But give it a try: there may still be some slots open:
Shebanator 