Apple Briefs

I was tempted to write something about Gizmodo’s handling of the “lost” iPhone this past week. But I am glad I waited.

As usual, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball says it much better than I could have ever said it myself in his well-researched and thoughtful writeup on the matter.

I have been very disappointed in Gizmodo’s behavior through this whole process. Publicly naming the engineer who lost the device was completely classless. As John Gruber puts it:

The people whose identities I’d like to know are those who obtained and then sold the phone, not the guy from Apple who lost it. There is no interest served by outing him other than taking sociopathic glee in making a public spectacle of someone who made a very serious but honest mistake.

For Gizmodo it’s all about the spectacle. It’s one thing to dedicate yourself to finding out the latest scoop on Apple products. That’s what news organizations do. But it’s quite another to turn it into a game. The writes at Gizmodo seems pretty proud of themselves right now. They even claimed success against Apple in this made-up game of theirs:

A controlled leak? The lost iPhone planted by Apple? You have no idea how Apple PR works—and how, like it or not, Gizmodo finally beat them at their own game.

It seems odd for a company that reports on Apple so much to have such an antagonistic attitude towards Apple. I guess this is what Think Secret has been replaced by – a website that is more interested in making noise than it is in the technology itself.

Our firm has used Billings for invoicing for a couple of years. It’s got a nice interface and produces great-looking invoices. The one thing that’s been holding it back is that it’s a solo app, not a small firm app. iBiz has a pretty good multi-user version called iBiz Professional. But Billings has been decidedly single user.

All that’s about to change, though. The Marketcircle website is now offering up a teaser for Billings Pro, a multi-user version of Billings. There’s not much to see so far. But they’re holding a closed beta in a “month or two” so hopefully more details aren’t too far off.

I woke up on Saturday, April 3 thinking I had a zero-point-zero percent chance of landing an iPad. And then something magical happened. I can’t explain it (and it would be confidential even if I could), but I found myself at the Apple Store that afternoon trying to convince my wife that we should get the 64GB iPad instead of the 16GB one (or coming back in 3 hours for a 32GB model).

First, let me say that I am very impressed with the iPad. Everything I have done on it has been a joy. I have messed around with the iWork apps, purchased and used Things a little, and watched some Netflix streaming movies. My only gripe so far is that there’s really no easy way to sync iWork documents between the iPad and a desktop/laptop. It’s back to the dark ages with a several step process to copy files each way.

The only thing I haven’t done is figure out how I am going to use it for work. But, as always, Ben Stevens came through. He’s posted a few links to iPad blogs, including:

• iPad Notebook
• Legal iPad
• Tablet Legal

And I even think Ben mentioned somewhere that he was going to be starting up a legal iPad site in the near future too. Could that be the “rumor” he is referring to? Maybe this new blog will show the rest of Ben’s head!!