Nice quote on emusic from Colin Newman (of Wire, whose new album is out now), about the tools an artist needs:

The number one tool that any artist needs is the ability to spontaneously come up with something. The number two tool that you need is the ability to go through all those ideas that you come up with and know which ones are any good. If you don’t know that, then you’re not really an artist.

DOS emulator iDOS arrived on the App Store last year and was swiftly removed once it became clear the author had ill-advisedly bundled commercial games with it that he didn’t have the rights to. Apple was also apparently pissed that iTunes file sharing enabled you to upload your own games to the app. This, apparently, is bad and totally different from, say:

• File-sharing books to iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza and the like;
• File-sharing comics to Comic Zeal;
• File-sharing documents you’ve written to Pages;
• File-sharing practically anything to Air Sharing.

So in iDOS 2, the author removed file-sharing, resubmitted and the app found its way back to the store. The author reports it’s been pulled again, “because the ability to run custom executable is violating the appstore [sic] policy”.

These ‘custom executables’ (i.e. third-party games) can only be installed by using a third-party utility to access app bundles. Applications like iPhone Explorer and PhoneView enable users of non-jailbroken devices to mount an application bundle and access its /Documents and /Library folders. In iDOS, you could shove old DOS games in there, then fire up the command line on the app itself and load the games. Apple considers this evil, even if you, say, own the rights to the games, or they are freeware and you therefore legally have the right to run them.

My worry is that Apple will now close the backdoor to app bundles, somehow blocking access to the aforementioned folders. Few people know they exist and that you can access them, but they are massively handy, because backing up these folders is the ONLY way you can back-up content from apps and games before deleting them, and the ONLY way you can reinstate your data after a reinstall. I’ve done this myself many dozens of times—it’s the only way I can have a usable device but also not ‘lose’ the many hours I put into the likes of GTA.

Apple clearly doesn’t care about this. When you wipe an app, the data’s gone for good. This is absurdly stupid, putting iOS games on a par with cheap, nasty DS carts that don’t have battery back-ups. If Apple automatically backed up game and app states to iTunes and provided the option for reinstating this data on a reinstall, blocking backdoors would be fine, but it doesn’t. Here’s hoping I’m wrong, but knowing Apple, it favours locking down wherever possible, even if there’s really little or no reason to.

Phil Libin’s guest post on TechCrunch is an eye-opener. The day the Mac App Store launched, the Mac leapt from bringing in about three per cent of new Evernote users to 52 per cent, and although this figure slid over the following days, it’s still high.

Libin thinks this proves desktop software remains viable, but that user experience is key, as is discoverability. One thing Apple got very right with iOS was in placing the App Store front and centre and encouraging users to buy software. The same’s now true on the Mac. One can only hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention, because a Windows equivalent would be fantastic (and potentially cut down on malware/virus issues if the store was properly curated).

Libin also reckons the experience has cemented his thoughts regarding users gravitating towards the best user experiences, justifying the company’s native-apps approach:

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.

In Why Apple Will Be OK Without Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney bucks the trend and suggests the Cupertino giant will be fine, even if Jobs never returns to the company. He notes that Jobs is hardly alone in dreaming up and refining products (they’re not suddenly ‘discovered’—they come through a process of robust iteration and prototyping), that Tim Cook’s been a fine ‘acting CEO’ before, and that Jobs has turned his personality into Apple’s business processes.

He gets one thing wrong though, stating the following in his conclusion:

Apple will be fine without Jobs, although it won’t be the same. It won’t shine quite as brightly. It’ll be like the Rolling Stones without Mick Jagger.

Apple won’t shine as bright without Jobs, but it won’t be like the Stones minus Jagger, which would be nothing. The only musical analogy I could think of is unfortunate, in that it involves a death (which I surely hope doesn’t happen to Jobs), and it’s Joy Division.

When Ian Curtis left this world, the band suddenly found itself without its charismatic, amazing front-man. No-one really knew the other guys, and everyone in the press predicted disaster. One of the band (Bernard Sumner) got the ‘job’ of taking over, a new recruit (keyboardist Gillian Gilbert) came in to bolster the team, and they set to work. The first album was shaky (although I like it) but within a couple of years they’d put out Blue Monday, the biggest-selling 12″ of them all, and this was followed by critically acclaimed album after critically album.

There’s no reason to think that an Apple without Jobs couldn’t find itself in a similar place, especially if the company finds its own Blue Monday without him.

Steve Jobs is taking medical leave. There are now about a billion articles online, including a gem from SFGate, where Henry Blodget claims this wording that Jobs used is “not encouraging”:

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.

Blodget argues:

those are not the words of someone taking a short leave who is confident he will be back at the company soon (or ever).

FAN THOSE FLAMES, BLODGET! FIRE THAT LINK-BAIT SKY-HIGH AND FAR AND WIDE! I DON’T THINK THEY HEARD YOU ON THE MOON!

Oops. I appear to have left out a link. TSK! STUPID ME!