Businessweek has a lengthy feature on Scott Forstall:

The iOS chief is a lot like his mentor Steve Jobs: brilliant, presents well, a tenacious infighter—arguably just the taskmaster Apple needs to stay on top

The feature has depth and good writing, and yet it falls short in parts through being seduced by ‘sources’, like so much other press these days:

Then there’s the other Forstall, the one former colleagues say wielded his relationship with Jobs as a bludgeon to expand his authority, and sent other talented execs packing. These include iPod chief Tony Fadell, who they say left Apple after clashing repeatedly with Forstall, and Jean-Marie Hullot.

‘They’ in this case are, note, former colleagues who aren’t speaking on the record and who aren’t named. Skip to the end and you get this:

Fadell’s Statement
“I inherited the competitive iPhone OS project from Jon Rubenstein and Steve Sakoman when they left Apple. I quickly shuttered the project after assessing that a modified Mac OS was the right platform to build the iPhone upon. It was clear that to create the best smartphone product possible, we needed to leverage the decades of technology, tools and resources invested in Mac OS while avoiding the unnecessary competition of dueling projects.”

Still, at least Businessweek put up that statement/correction—too many sites these days don’t.

The Loop quotes The Seattle Times, interviewing Gabe Newell, head of Valve:

Newell expects Apple to disrupt the living room platform with a new product that will challenge consoles, although he doesn’t have any particular knowledge of that new product.

“I suspect Apple will launch a living room product that redefines people’s expectations really strongly and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear,” he said.

I don’t think Apple will offer a new product specifically for gaming, because the building blocks already exist in AirPlay and iOS devices. Firemint’s recently showed off Party Play for Real Racing 2, which works over AirPlay to an Apple TV, enabling four-player split-screen racing on an HDTV, using iOS devices as controllers.

Here’s how I think things will play out for Apple in 2012:

• The next iPod touch revision will include an A5 chip and, with that, video mirroring/AirPlay gaming support;
• The Apple TV will retain its price point or perhaps even drop in price;
• More games devs will take advantage of AirPlay, offering TV modes and multiplayer.

You then end up in an interesting and seemingly somewhat absurd reversal of traditional gaming. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have affordable consoles and fairly cheap controllers. With Apple, you have a cheap ‘console’ (the Apple TV, priced similarly to the Wii, but cheaper than an Xbox or PS3), and expensive ‘controllers’, in the shape of iPods, iPhones and iPads. The Apple system isn’t one you’d buy from scratch, but once you realise families will increasingly own several iOS devices, Apple’s system becomes less crazy.

I’m not sure Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will be significantly challenged by this model, should my three assumptions come to pass, but then people argued iOS wouldn’t get anywhere in handheld gaming, and it’s since punched the DS and PSP squarely in the face.

Earlier today, I was noting that Apple rumours tend to be bull. And then I happened across a whopper, courtesy of John Dvorak at PCMag.com:

Data indicates that early Christmas shoppers are preordering the Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet faster than you can say “Tickle Me Elmo.” Various tablet computers will top nearly every Christmas wish list. Therefore, it is very likely that—

A hack will make a really stupid guess?

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Oh no you didn’t.

*rechecks*

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Dvorak tries to argue his case with extra lumps of crazy, in part involving immediate part shortages forcing “lines around the block”. Um, yeah. To be frank, he could have written a slightly more sensible article by copying and pasting the following 500 times:

Argle wargle iPad bargle fargle fweeeee.

Stupid Apple Rumors:

When the “most accurate” site can only get 17% of their own sourced rumors accurate, it speaks volumes to the nature of Apple rumors.

Quite. As you’ll have noticed, we—SHOCK!—didn’t get an iPhone 5 with a curved screen, Apple didn’t kill the iPod touch, and the iPad 3 didn’t show up. And, yeah, those links are all to this blog, but they showcase one thing: if you’re smart, you’ll either ignore Apple rumours or take the piss out of them. You’ll gain pretty much no credibility for having any faith in them, because they are rumours and not facts.

Hat tip: Brooks Review.

Dan Frakes last night on Twitter linked to J. Eddie Smith, IV’s Think of Microsoft Word as the internet. Smith argues:

Word is not a writing application. It’s a desktop publishing application. When I start a writing project of any size in Word, it feels like I’m starting to build a house by first worrying about wall colors.

I’m not sure I’d go that far. If Word is a DTP app, it’s a pretty bad one. But I do agree that there’s a tendency with any ‘advanced’ office-style app to worry about presentation and formatting too much while writing. There’s also the issue of lock-in. It’s unlikely Office is going anywhere, but then I once thought the same of other applications I used for writing, such as ClarisWorks. Those old files I wrote years ago are now hidden from view, underneath layers of incompatibility. When DOCX first appeared as a format in a recent version of Word, but first on Windows and not on the Mac, I made a decision to switch to RTF or  TXT, depending on the project. I’d already realised by that point that I disliked Word (bloated, crashy, too much junk on screen) and had been looking for and testing alternatives for a while.

Today, I primarily use two applications for writing:

Scrivener is used for large projects (such as magazine cover features) and also ongoing ones where I have a collection of smaller files, such as the daily news I write for .net’s website. Its container is proprietary but you can easily enough access the package and yoink individual RTFs if you need to.

For shorter pieces, I favour WriteRoom, an efficient, simple full-screen editor. These have become all the rage of late, and the Mac App Store has at least a half-dozen competent alternatives, most of which are cheaper than WriteRoom. But WriteRoom offers, for me, the best balance of usability and customisation. iA Writer’s also pretty good, but its not working with OS X window managers limits its usefulness for me. I also hear good things about Byword, although I’ve not used it myself, and one of my editors swears by Nisus, although that to me feels a little too much like returning to a Word-type app. (This is, of course, in part down to how you set up Nisus, which is a powerful, usable app, but I nonetheless prefer the stark ‘words, count and nothing else’ default WriteRoom set-up.)

As Smith says:

When it comes to writing, I think of Word as the internet. It’s a destination, not a vehicle.

[…]

Words aren’t worthy of cosmetics until they say something. More importantly, each second you spend fiddling with the aesthetics of your document is a second spent not writing. Accumulated over just a few days, that can be a tremendous number of seconds.

I admit I spent some time faffing about with Scrivener and WriteRoom’s aesthetics, to get the defaults the way I wanted them. But after that point, I’ve not touched them, and so I spend my time writing and not worrying about anything else. Because of the efficiency and clarity of the apps, I also concentrate more on the words than anything else, whereas Word was always for me a source of distraction.

Your mileage might vary, of course, but if you enjoy writing or do it as a job, I’d strongly recommend you at least check out alternatives if you’re still using Word. Perhaps you’ll find you prefer Microsoft’s app after all, in which case you’ll at least know you’ve made the right choice for you. But you might also discover better, faster ways of working on words, which don’t involve Word.