I get how companies have to big up their products, but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie needs to lay off the crazy juice. As reported by AppleInsider and others, Balsille got a little over-excited and bullish when RIM beat Wall Street expectations with its quarterly earnings call, and, not for the first time, he decided to take a pop at Apple. The iPad was the target, with Balsille claiming RIM’s PlayBook is “way ahead” of Apple’s device. This being the PlayBook that’s not actually out yet, and won’t be out until March, according to Macworld, an entire month before the iPad 2’s likely to show up.

But what, specifically, makes the PlayBook so special? Balsille eludicated in a rant that some poor bastard at Yahoo transcribed in full. Some highlights follow.

I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do.

Fair enough. It’ll be great to have some massive competition for the iPad, to kick Apple’s arse and ensure it continues to innovate. Do tell us exactly how you’re ahead…

I think we’ve articulated some elements of it

You’ve “articulated some elements of it”. Uh, OK. That sounds… positive.

and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps—though there’s a huge role for apps—I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly.

Those would be the unnecessary apps that are selling like hot cakes? And the proprietary SDK demanded by devs furious at Steve Jobs when he initially told them to bugger off and make web apps? Uh, OK.

And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity.

Areas the iPad utterly fails in, what with its excellent web browser and consistent, usable interface, along with increasingly strong support from the likes of Google with web apps designed to work better on the iPad than any other platform.

Now, how do you align or go over the top on carriers and content providers? Well, we have different strategies, and that’s fine, and there may be room for more than one model, who knows.

It’s good that you’ve thought this through. You’re making Steve Jobs’s responses during Apple’s earnings calls look shoddy and ill-prepared by comparison. (Top tip: “Who knows?” doesn’t make for a confident-sounding co-CEO when you use it once. When it’s seemingly your favourite phrase, you need to be locked in a cupboard until you can learn to speak without embarrassing your entire organisation.)

And, you know, it’s a very dynamic market. Plus, there’s enormous growth and shifts happening around the world, you know.

The biggest shifts being from analysts who said the iPad would fail and who are now trying to pretend that they knew from the start it’d be huge, along with people who claimed Android tablets would immediately wipe the floor with the iPad, despite, in the main, not actually being much better than something you’d wipe from your arse.

How many fronts people want to take on contention, that’s a question you can ask. Do you want to go over the top of banks, do you want to go over the top on content, do you want to go over the top on carriers, do you want to go over the top on video content providers? I mean, who knows, you know? What part of it’s good strategy and what part of it’s a bridge too far? I mean, who knows?

And who knows what you’re talking about at this point? I’m pretty sure I don’t. More worryingly, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

There’s a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re just well ahead on the PlayBook, well ahead internationally, and extending very very well.

This being the PlayBook that’s being released in March 2011, remember.

And so, people can have their views on sentiment, but when is it a good entry strategy, and when is it a bridge too far? Who knows? We have turbulent ecosystem right now. How do you work with banks, how do you work with carriers, how do you work with content, how do you work with enterprise ecosystem?

How do you work with a co-CEO who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Still, RIM’s certainly ahead in terms of babbling, ‘something exciting that might happen in the future, if its own bluster is to be believed’ and in looking at something successful in a market it wants to enter and yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ while the competition makes money hand over fist.

Oh dear, Joshua Kors, ‘Investigative Reporter’, if only you could find your way to investigating a manual. Then you wouldn’t have had to tell everyone why you’re returning your iMac.

Kors’s story is more than a little astonishing, because it reads like something torn from a Microsoft marketing exec’s wet dream, but it’s so unbelievably bad and stupid that it’s the kind of thing even Microsoft wouldn’t run with, because they’ve too much class. Really. And yet Kors’s Onion-like article made the Huffington Post’s tech section.

The journey begins when Kors got bitch-slapped by a news director. Kors said he was working with a video editor to compact a hearing into a YouTube clip, and the director said even his interns can edit videos. Thinking video-editing skills could give his career a shot in the arm, Kors decided to invest in a Mac. (Why at this point he didn’t buy Premiere Elements for his PC is never explained. Maybe Kors thought he could grab a Mac, learn Final Cut Pro in eight seconds, and then go back to the news director and yell WHO’S THE DADDY NOW?, while rubbing his nipples in the director’s face.)

But things went wrong right away for Kors when he booted his Mac:

Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture.

This is true—all Macs with a camera do this. (I’m not sure they’re overtly feminine though. Maybe Kors got a ‘special’ iMac, with boobs.) It also happens to be optional and a really nice touch. But Kors seemingly considers this neat idea for a little personalisation of your computer some kind of BIG BROTHER EVIL.

Next up, Kors discovered that those bastards at Apple hadn’t installed Microsoft Word on his computer, for free:

I had an article to write, but the only word processor I could find on my iMac was TextEdit, essentially a stripped-down version of Notepad.

After all, PCs are well known for arriving with suites of high-end software. I’m sure if you pick up a cheap Dell, it will be bursting at the seams with all the Photoshops and Offices of this world. (Also, TextEdit is, if you’re not a befuddled idiot, a surprisingly capable text editor. It can happily open basic Word documents, and it forms the text layer of many Mac writing tools. Of course, you actually have to learn how to use it, rather than dismissing it out of hand as somehow being inferior to Notepad.)

At this point, Kors also decided he hated the Mac mouse and had began to miss his old, five-button one. Oddly, it never occurred to him to plug said five-button mouse into his Mac. After all, he had more moaning to do:

I booted up my bank account before realizing the Mac keyboard had no number pad and was heartsick to learn that the thesaurus WordWeb, every author’s best friend, didn’t work on Mac’s OS. Neither did Ipswitch FTP, my file-uploader.

Man, Apple really are bastards, in not providing a full compatibility layer with software designed for their (formerly) biggest rival in software terms, Microsoft Windows. I personally find it hell EVERY SINGLE DAY having to dodder through life without a thesaurus on my Mac (apart from the built-in one) and an FTP client (apart from the several I have installed). It’s like some kind of tech nightmare.

Following Kors’s software pains are some simply bonkers claims. Unlike on a PC, he said, he knew he wouldn’t be able to connect one computer to another and transfer over documents. This is fair enough, because if I totally ignore all the many times I’ve happily connected Macs to Windows PCs, I know it’s literally impossible to connect Macs to Windows PCs. Kors decided to use an external hard drive to move files about, presumably while making burbling noises, ringing up his editor and yelling: “I’m technically incompetent! Why the fuck are you having me write for the tech column of your paper, you total dick?”

Next, Kors made more exciting discoveries:

Even moving over my iTunes playlist, I soon learned, was going to take intricate coding tweaks.

Last time I moved iTunes content between platforms, it did indeed take intricate coding tweaks. Mind you, I’ve suddenly decided that I’m a programmer and intricate coding involves ‘dragging a folder’ and intricate tweaks involve ‘dropping a folder’. Man, I’m such a great coder. Maybe the Huffington Post will give me a series of columns!

Oh, wait—Kors isn’t done!

My frustration beginning to boil, I figured I’d cool down with some swing dancing videos stored on my hard drive. But QuickTime wasn’t in the mood to play. My .flv and .mkv files triggered only error messages, and some of my .mpg clips opened to blank screens.

And, my, a moment of non-crazy. The lack of compatibility for Kors’s porn—sorry, swing dancing videos—is stupid. It’s not Apple’s fault—it’s down to the horror that is video codecs—but it is frustrating. I’ll now ignore the many apps and add-ons you could install for the Mac that would make said videos play, obviously. After all, I don’t want to make Kors look like he’s hopelessly out of his depth writing a tech column about using a Mac. No, wait:

I opened Mac’s Thunderbird, and my jaw dropped again. The font on every email was so small, I was going to need the Hubble telescope just to answer my morning mail.

This bit is followed by semi-comprehensible babble about font sizes and how they’re apparently really small on the Mac but giant-sized on a PC. Fonts do differ across platforms, but not to that extent. I’m guessing he was running his PC on blind-o-vision. Later in the article, he claims an Apple Store employee reckons:

Yeah, that small-font thing really is a problem. We have a lot of people who face that, then come back to return their computers.

First I’ve heard of that one, but we should all take Kors’s word for it; after all, the rest of his article is clearly full of win.

I had battled the QuickTime player, which proved unable to make playlists, […] and grimaced at the dock shortcut to my MP3 folder, which malfunctioned after one day, topping the inert folder icon with a question mark.

I can’t make playlists in QuickTime Player either, to be fair. Mind you, I can’t make toast in Photoshop. Question marks instead of Dock folders? That’ll be Kors either deleting the source or having it on a disk no longer connected to the Mac, then. Mind you, I do hate the way Macs cannot connect to things that they’re no longer connected to. Steve Jobs and Apple and Macs and unicorns really suck like that.

The final straw came when Mac’s Firefox took me to my website. To my horror, all the spacing was askew, the graphics tossed left and right like the wreckage of a hurricane. I asked myself: As a web designer, how can I design web pages when I can’t see what 90 percent of my viewers are seeing?

I asked myself: as a web designer, I wonder whether Joshua Kors is a web designer, or whether he threw together some shit in Dreamweaver years ago, and has in fact left it to fester on the internet, like a mouldy cabbage. I then discovered, as a web designer, that, indeed, Kors’s website looks the cat dragged it kicking and screaming from 1998, and then the cat thought “You know what? I’ll just put it out of its misery” before shooting it through the head. Twice. Kors: as ‘a web designer’, perhaps explore some trends and technology that’s standards-compliant as of this century.

For a second I thought, well, I could load Parallels, the Mac OS program that allows you to run Windows applications on your iMac. But that plan was squashed fast. Before I could complete Parallels’ installation, it asked for a copy of the Windows CD. I shook my head in disbelief

Yeah, those bastards at Parallels are nearly as bad as the ones at Apple. What they hell are they thinking in not giving you a free copy of Windows with their inexpensive, powerful and hugely impressive virtualisation software? Kors: you should sue. Hell, you’re American, so you probably already have.

I’m returning my iMac, then headed to Best Buy to snag a PC, one four-times faster than my current computer and $400 cheaper than that iMac. I’ll spend the difference on a video editing program, a new haircut and a first-rate pair of swing dancing shoes.

Maybe you should spend the difference on getting a clue.

Some of the devs on my Twitter feed have started complaining about the Mac App Store approvals process. Like the equivalent for iOS, it’s down to Apple what makes the store and what doesn’t, and mistakes are already being made.

The latest victim is LittleIpsum, an application that provides a quick and easy way to copy ‘lipsum’ text to the clipboard; while not something every Mac owner needs, dummy text is used by most designers at some point, and this seems the kind of 59p app that would work very nicely in a Mac App Store, but that would be pointless from an admin/infrastructure standpoint elsewhere.

Apple’s response is that LittleIpsum does not meet the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

What’s ‘not useful’ or doesn’t provide ‘lasting entertainment value’ is subjective and is the heart of the problem with the approvals process. Myriad games I’ve reviewed for iOS offer zero lasting entertainment value, yet the iOS App Store is littered with the things. And yet here is a Mac app that clearly has both a use and an audience being rejected, presumably because some poor sod at Apple is reviewing dozens of apps per hour and didn’t get why the app might be handy to have if you’re a designer.

Bloomberg reports that network operators have finally totally lost it. “Wah wah wah,” says the CEO of one or the other or France Telecom, Telecom Italia or Vodafone ‘we don’t pay our taxes’ Group. “iPhones and Android devices are being used LOADS now, and it’s JUST NOT FAIR!”

The argument appears to centre on the fact that mobile operators are whiney bastards who don’t have the balls to charge users by the MB of data downloaded, instead competing with ‘unlimited’ plans; and so rather than charging users proportionately, they’ve come up with a CUNNING PLAN.

Unfortunately, the cunning plan is this: have Apple, Google and Facebook pay for the billions of dollars of investment requires to sort out their shoddy, under-strain networks. No, really. Good luck, guys! I’m sure this idea will pan out swimmingly!

Of course, this level of stupidity has precedent. We’ve already had idiot ISPs saying the BBC should pay them money for having the audacity to create the wonderful iPlayer that loads of people love using (rather than, say, killing unlimited broadband and charging people on the basis of the amount they use, like with electricity and gin).

So, well done, network operators. I’m sure Steve Jobs and his pals are nearly dead through an inability to breathe properly, due to laughing non-stop for several hours.

Hat tip: Matt Gemmell’s hat.

Apple’s soon to unleash its Mac App Store. Similarly to the App Store for iOS devices, it will provide a central location for Mac apps to be bought, and Apple will take a 30 percent cut. In return, Apple will deal with hosting and billing, along with potentially providing visibility for apps from a range of developers.

Lots of people have said this is the Worst Idea Ever, presumably not fully understanding that most computer users never buy an application, and many of those who do get hugely confused during the install process (often running applications from disk images that they never unmount). A one-click purchase followed by a single-click ‘update everything’ button has the potential to revolutionise software purchase and installation.

The problem I have with Apple’s plans is that the existing App Store is horrible. Ignoring for a moment its terrible search and sluggish performance, the service is a bug-ridden mess. Every single time I try to redeem a promotional code, I am greeted with six error dialog boxes. Every time I try to update my apps, I’m told the information being displayed is ‘outdated’ and that I should refresh the page. Often, I’ll find that I’m being presented with an update to an app that’s no longer available, meaning the ‘update all’ button doesn’t work. Connection errors are commonplace. If this was just me, fair enough, but Apple’s support forums are littered with people suffering from the exact same problem—and when one error is fixed in an iTunes update or ‘behind the scenes’, another appears.

For me, this is a head-banging-on-desk kind of frustration, but for the typical iOS device owner it utterly destroys the user experience. If the Mac App Store suffers from similar errors, it won’t be enough of a step-up from the existing software purchase and installation model. For most companies, that would be fine, but for Apple this shouldn’t be good enough.