February 2011
45 posts
Gruber’s position is that Apple shouldn’t care, because they don’t “need” Readability. But they most assuredly do, in the aggregate; Apple needs Readability, and Pandora, and Netflix, and Instpaper1, and Rdio, and all other businesses put in a precarious position by Apple’s new rules. Apple needs them because a large part of the platform’s value is in having access to all kinds of media and services.
This isn’t just because it’s nice to have Netflix and Pandora: it’s because the iPhone and iPad’s magic is the idea that it becomes whatever application you’re using. What good is it if you can’t use a number of services that you really love using? Not much. The iOS platform will become dramatically less useful and exciting if there are only a limited number of services available.
” —Gruber: “Apple Doesn’t Need Readability.” Yes, They Do. | TightWindvia someone on Twitter (sorry).
Kind of eery given yesterday’s terrible earthquake.
I’ve got one charge left. Only a few minutes of battery on this laptop, and a cacophony of thoughts to spew out before the screen goes black. I left my charger in the hotel room 3 hours away. Stupid. STUPID. But still, here we are. Type, type. Clickity clack.
I’m sitting in the airport in Nelson, New Zealand, and when I look around me, everyone is relaxed. “This is not how airports are supposed to work,” I say to myself. Airport security was an airline employee weighing my bag to see if I needed to check it or not. Her name was Glenda. She smiled at me. Thank you, Glenda.
A cool breeze blows through the terminal. Everything is fresh; the air is new. There is no recycled air here. The gate is a sliding glass door to a sidewalk that leads to a plane. Security is a room beside the gate where a guy is solving sodoku puzzles with a pencil that has one of those crazy rubber pencil toppers over the eraser. He probably doesn’t make mistakes. How could he? Everything seems right here.
