Apple’s issued an invitation regarding its September 12 announcement.

Although it’s possible Apple could throw a curveball and not call its next iPhone the iPhone 5, that would be curious when taking this invite into account. There had been speculation with the iPad dropping a number (simply being dubbed ‘the new iPad’), the iPhone would follow suit. This doesn’t appear to be the case, which suggests two things.

First, the iPhone still requires clear sales differentiation in terms of device naming, meaning at least two other numbered models will remain on sale. Given that iOS 6 works (in a feature-limited fashion) on the iPhone 3GS, it’s possible Apple’s line-up next week will include the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. Fast forward a couple of years and dropping the number would leave you with the iPhone, the iPhone and the iPhone, and all kinds of sales problems.

Secondly, the iPad road-map apparently does not need sales differentiation in terms of device naming. This suggests the iPad 2 remaining on sale is short-term plugging of a low(ish)-end price-point hole. Although I still struggle to see the point of a 7-inch iPad, I now reckon there’s a good chance we’ll see such a model this year or early next year, and older models of the iPad will be removed from the channel as new ones appear, rather more like the iPod touch or Apple’s laptops/desktops than the iPhone.

In case you’d not noticed, Twitter’s management are being jerks. New API rules have brought in arbitrary caps for third-party clients, and this has already impacted on Tapbots, who had to pull the Tweetbot for OS X alpha. Elsewhere, Twitter no longer reveals what client someone is using to post. These things are linked to Twitter no longer wanting competing clients at all. Instead, it wants smaller apps linking in to its system, in order to boost ‘social CRM’, ‘social analytics’ and ‘social influence ranking’. So-called ‘traditional Twitter clients’ are out as the company seeks to remove from the equation apps that ‘engage with the consumer’; instead, devs should ‘engage with business’, or provide business/consumer analytics. In other words, in order to control the Twitter experience and finally make some money, Twitter needs to run everything through its own clients, rather than enabling the third parties that created the service to flourish to also flourish, despite many of them defining Twitter standards—something Twitter itself didn’t do until surprisingly late on.

Right now, Twitter’s playing a cruel game—a death by a thousand cuts. Developer David Smith earlier today said we should “be considerate of 3rd party twitter developers by revoking access from apps you never intend to use,” thereby enabling them to claw back some room in their arbitrary Twitter cap. While it’s a nice sentiment, it starkly showcases the absurdity of the situation—users should not have to revoke app access, in order to enable an app to continue through people gaining access to unused slots. Most users won’t even know how to revoke an app’s access anyway.

It’s clear why Twitter’s taking this path, though: it’s relatively low-risk, spreading out the fallout over a long period of time where people are also hoping things will change. By the time Twitter does pull the ‘no third-party clients’ switch, it will undoubtedly issue a press release stating that only a very small number of people use them anyway, neglecting to mention those who’ve left the service because of being squeezed out, or those ‘forced’ to switch because yet another of the dwindling number of alternative clients by that point had been effectively killed by Twitter’s own rules.

I’d like to propose Twitter therefore at least be honest about the future.

At the end of June, we reported about how we’re working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. In order to achieve this and roll out all the exciting features we’re planning, we are going to transition our users entirely to our own Twitter clients.

On March 31, 2013, traditional third-party Twitter clients will no longer have access to the API. In order to facilitate the transition and ensure a consistent experience for our users, we will on or before January 31, 2013 be rolling out new Twitter clients for iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. We realise that client developers have made a huge impact on the service, and we’d like to thank them for their efforts, but we now have to move on and do what’s best for Twitter, thereby ensuring the service’s long-term future.

Brutal? Perhaps. Likely to piss off a bunch of people? Undoubtedly. But at least it’s honest and doesn’t leave people hanging on, hoping for a future that will never come.

There’s a story on the BBC about Tory MP Louise Mensch resigning, and it talks about her ‘Not Twitter, honest’ social network, Menshn:

Mrs Mensch was a prolific user of the micro-blogging site [Twitter] with 102,000 followers.

But she said recently she had grown “frustrated” with it and has set up a rival site – Menshn – which aims to keep conversations on topic and allow people to post 180 character messages – 40 more than Twitter.

There have been plenty of reports that have either failed to qualify the 180 character thing or have cited it as some kind of added value. Even all this time after Menshn launched, I find the 180 character decision arbitrary and odd. I can only assume Mensch and co. didn’t want to go for 140 through fear of being sued (or it being even more obvious about the service’s attempts to ‘clone’ Twitter). And so 180 was presumably plucked out of the air, because more equals better equals value equals PROFIT!? But Twitter chose 140 characters for a specific purpose: to enable compatibility with SMS.

Twitter’s now looking likely to move away from its roots, with things like expanded tweets, but the 140-character limit remains, enabling people using feature phones to still engage with the service. Menshn on the other hand remains lodged in a broken version of Twitter’s past, and lacks the ability to embrace what Twitter foresees as its future. It’s a strong lesson that decisions need to be more than arbitrary in order to make sense but also provide a service that enables more users to become involved.

The Mac App Store’s in people’s thoughts of late. Marco Arment recently wrote about how sandboxing (essentially, a much stricter set of entitlements every app—bar Apple’s own, naturally—has to abide by) has impacted on available apps. Some developers have had to reduce the functionality of their product or remove it entirely. Arment said he’s now

lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.

This, he argues, has the knock-on effect of causing problems beyond the world of geeks. Pretty much any user who suddenly finds an app no longer available on the Mac App Store might get annoyed at the developer, but they’re at least as likely to lose trust in Apple. Arment:

To most of these customers, the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software. This jeopardizes Apple’s presumed strategic goal of moving as much software-buying as possible to the App Store. By excluding so many important apps and burning the trust of so many customers, the App Store can never become ubiquitous.

Neven Mrgan adds that the Mac also isn’t iOS. With casual users increasingly opting for iPads over Macs, there’s the possibility Mac users will skew slightly away from the casual end of the spectrum, but they’ll be faced with a Mac App Store lacking advanced apps, apart from Apple’s own or those neutered to work within Apple’s sandboxing rules:

[Put] the two facts together—the loss of casual users to iOS, and the loss of non-casual apps on the App Store—and it starts to look like a problem.

In a follow-up post, Arment argues against the assertion that the issues currently being experienced will only affect geeks, and Lex Friedman for Macworld today also suggested customers should be wary of the Mac App Store.

My own thinking with the Mac App Store has been the biggest U-turn I’ve had since first owning my own Mac in the 1990s. I started off loving it. It was, I thought, the future, especially when setting up a new machine. No more hunting for DVDs and installer files! Just type in your Apple ID, download your software and—boom—sorted! And then a critical Coda update arrived for the direct version but only for the Mac App Store release a week later. And then the new version of Moom was direct-sales only. And then WriteRoom started to suffer annoying sandboxing issues regarding switching formats and saving a file. And. And. And.

My confidence has gone in what should have been Apple’s biggest and best feature from the Lion era. I had planned to rebuy apps on the Mac App Store and transition to it as fully as possible; now, I just don’t see the point. I’d sooner deal direct with developers, because then I won’t run the risk of an app I use daily being forced to cut itself back or be removed entirely at the whim of Apple. But this isn’t due to me being a geek, but through being repeatedly burned by a store I thought I could trust. That’s something anyone can and will empathise with, not just people who live, breathe and eat Apple.

According to Apple, today is OS X Mountain Lion release day, which means tomorrow will be “OH GOD MY HARD DRIVE JUST WENT TO CRAP AND I’VE LOST EVERYTHING” day for quite a few people. Here are some facts: hard drives sometimes die; installs—especially for entire operating systems—can go horribly wrong; data is very easy to lose. To be fair, relatively few people suffer from such problems, but that won’t be comforting if you lose all your movies/music/photos/email/documents.

Here’s one more fact: if you back-up and/or clone your Mac, each data copy reduces the likelihood of permanent data loss. And another: doing so is relatively inexpensive and not that difficult.

My advice when it comes to a new version of OS X is much the same as it was last year: buy an external hard drive (which can cost as little as £40) and ensure you at the very least have a full back-up of your Mac before upgrading to Mountain Lion. If possible, I recommend using software that clones your Mac’s hard drive rather than simply backing up the data, because that leaves you with a bootable drive if something goes very wrong. (Time Machine does enable data restoration, but the back-up drive itself is not bootable.) The steps are:

1. Format your drive using Disk Utility

Launch Disk Utility and select the back-up drive from the sidebar. At the foot of the window, check its Partition Map Scheme is GUID Partition Table, which will enable you to use the disk to start-up an Intel Mac. If it shows something else, click ‘Partition’, select ‘1 Partition’ from the ‘Volume Scheme’ menu, click ‘Options’ and select ‘GUID Partition Table’. Click ‘OK’. Name the volume using the ‘Name’ field and then click ‘Apply’ to reformat your disk.

Use either SuperDuper! ($27.95) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) to clone your Mac. If using SuperDuper!, select your Mac’s hard drive from the ‘Copy’ menu and your back-up drive from the ‘to’ menu. Select ‘Backup – all files’ from the ‘using’ menu. Click ‘Copy Now’. If using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your Mac’s drive from the ‘Source Disk’ menu and the back-up drive from the ‘Target Disk’ menu. Click ‘Clone’. The process may take several hours and it’s best to not have any active apps running (i.e. do not work on projects and save things, nor download anything while the initial clone is being made).

3. Reboot and test

Once the clone is complete, restart your Mac while holding the Option key (also labelled ‘Alt’) and choose your back-up drive as the boot volume. It will take longer than usual for your Mac to start from this external drive. Ensure the back-up works: test some apps and launch some files. Once you’re done, reboot back into your Mac’s drive.

Should your Mountain Lion install not work, you now have a bootable clone that will enable you to continue working, or from which you can clone everything back to your Mac. However, once you have a clone, you should continue safeguarding your data daily by using incremental updating (whereby only files that have changed are cloned to the external volume). SuperDuper! refers to this feature as ‘Smart Update’, accessed in the main pane’s ‘Options’ button; Carbon Copy Cloner has an ‘Incremental backup of selected items’ setting within ‘Cloning options’. Both apps have automated scheduling capabilities.

As noted earlier, more back-ups and clones reduce risk, and so if you can afford it, use multiple cloning drives and switch them regularly. Add a Time Machine back-up alongside your clones. Also consider online back-up services such as CrashPlan. This might all seem a little paranoid, but for the sake of a couple of hard drives, a piece of OS X software, an online back-up service and a few hours of your time, your data will be as safe as it’s ever going to be. Really, that’s not paranoia, but common sense.