Good grief. Adobe’s unleashed a ten-minute moan about Apple (YouTube), blaming Apple for having the audacity to not sit in the 1990s and continue driving its company into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing— (That’s enough of that — Ed)

The video starts in innocent enough fashion, saying how fab it is to credit Adobe’s programmers on the Photoshop splash screen. Then, approximately all of Adobe’s programmers spend most of their screen-time bitching about Apple.

Russell Williams:

At the WWDC, Apple announced that they were not going to do a 64-bit version of Carbon. Carbon is the programming environment on the Mac. They introduced this other framework, called Cocoa.

Yeah, that Cocoa API that was introduced in 2007 at WWDC, and not, in fact, at the very beginning of Mac OS X (based in part on frameworks from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep). Man, there’s no way Adobe could have realised that was the direction Apple was headed in, apart from Apple having said that from the beginning and stating that Carbon was really a ‘bridge’ for temporary backwards compatibility.

John Penn II:

They yanked the carpet out from under the entire industry at that conference.

Aside, you know, from Apple having said for the previous six years or so that developers should be moving applications to Cocoa. In reality, then, Apple yanked the carpet out from people who’d been going “LALALALALA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU” for over half a decade.

Really, the entire whine-fest is summed up best by Seetharaman Narayanan:

It is not practical to rewrite Photoshop.

In other words, the application had 20 years of built-up crud that needed sorting, streamlining and rewriting. It pretty much sums up too much of Adobe these days. Instead of innovating, it adds crap on top of crap. Instead of working with operating systems, it fights against them. And on the sheer horror of a rewrite: given the choice, it’d presumably still be churning out a PowerPC version for the Mac and running it under Rosetta (and then saying Apple “pulled the carpet out from under the entire industry” when the Rosettaless Lion yomped on in).

Every 18 months, I keep hoping the Adobe of old will return, the one that was full of fire and creativity. I keep hoping that Photoshop in particular will be streamlined and Mac-like on the Mac and Windows-like on Windows. But it’s like watching that great band you loved in the 1980s; you always check out the new album, but you only need to listen to the first couple of tracks to get that sinking feeling and realise you can never go back.

Hat tip: Peter Cohen

Duncan Wilcox tweets:

I get that GarageBand has the best UI of any iPad app ever built. Laid back music? Sure. It’d just never be music creation device of choice.

I disagree with this, not because there will suddenly be loads of bands using iPad GarageBand to create a new album (there will be one or two, purely for the gimmick, hoping to propel themselves into the day’s news), but because your ‘device of choice’ depends on your circumstances and way of working.

I’ve been writing and recording music since the 1990s, using the Project Noise moniker for well over a decade. I have a new, comically delayed album in the works, for which I’ve mostly used GarageBand to record and produce. (Despite what some people might think, GarageBand is a powerful piece of software, akin to Logic Express Lite, and it’s great if you avoid loops and concentrate on recorded audio and MIDI.) However, GarageBand is on my work Mac, which is inevitably used for work purposes. Distractions are many, and while I’ve spent something like two years tinkering with my new album, I haven’t written much new material on the Mac in that time.

Enter NanoStudio. Blip Interactive’s mini recording studio for the iPhone was a revelation. I’ve always been the person who got the idea for a song while walking along a street or watching TV, not while sitting in front of the Mac. Hundreds of songs have been lost to poor memory over the years, and scribbling down a beat or trying to sing a tune into a dictaphone really isn’t optimal. NanoStudio, on the other hand, enables you, through its fantastic interface, to rapidly get a song sketch down. You can overlay drums, bass, samples and synth lines, using live playing and pattern writing, and the entire lot can later be spat out in various formats. I’ve noticed that even when I’m at home, the iPhone (with NanoStudio) has become my ‘creation device of choice’, because I’m more relaxed and creative when lying on the sofa, noodling around with a focused app, than I am sitting bolt upright in front of my office Mac.

This is where I see GarageBand for iPad fitting into my musical creativity. NanoStudio already works brilliantly in 2x mode on the iPad, and GarageBand offers an additional means of getting ideas down. To that end, I’ll be shocked if the iPad doesn’t become my ‘creation device of choice’ for music. It will be where I work on and evolve riffs, creating song stubs that can then be developed and fully produced back on the Mac. To that end, I’m echoing Steve Jobs’s thoughts, in that the Mac becomes the workhorse—the ‘truck’ of music creation, primarily for weighty tasks and production. But the iPad is where the creative spark will happen, and this will increasingly be the case across all kinds of artistic and expressive fields, not just music.

Issue three of the rather spiffy Tap! magazine hits UK newsstands today. It’s another chunky 132-page tome, packed full of reviews, tips and features about the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Yours for a fiver, guv.

This issue, in my role as Contributing Editor, Games, I lead the games section with the excellent World of Goo HD, and we also cover another 30 titles, including Helsing’s Fire HD, Dead Space and Real Racing 2.

Elsewhere in the mag, there are the usual helpings of Matt Gemmell, Ian Betteridge and Caitlin Moran, an in-depth feature on using your iOS devices to watch tele, an interview with an indie company using iOS devices and social media to compete with global brands, and more app and kit reviews than you can shake a stick at.

The Guardian reports that Spotify has now convinced a million customers to pay for the service, a figure that represents about 15 per cent of active users. This is pretty important for the company, since it’s a loss-maker at present, which has also found it tough to attract advertisers. (It’s also not exactly hugely popular among musicians either, since the per-play payments they receive from Spotify are extremely low.)

But what still surprises me about the service is its price-points. The company has simplified things of late and removed options, in order to encourage you to pay. Gone is the 24-hour ‘for a party’ option and the unlimited ad-free version—Spotify Open now restricts you to five hours of listening per week (unless you signed up before the restriction came into force). However, there are still two options for those willing to pay: Unlimited and Premium. The former is the free service minus the aforementioned restrictions, for £4.99 per month. The latter is the same, but with the addition of mobile-app support and an offline mode for playlists, but for £9.99 per month.

It’s well known that people are often reluctant to part with cash if they’re afraid of making an error. Sometimes choice can be a bad thing. In the case of Spotify, I wonder whether more people would sign up if the company just provided two options: ‘limited and free’ or ‘unlimited and not free’. Most people I know who are keen on Spotify but haven’t signed up consider a fiver the sweet spot, but they’d want the mobile service too. They’re just not prepared to pay an extra fiver to get it, and so they don’t pay anything at all.

Whose Line Is It Anyway? remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows. If you’ve never seen it, the show starred four comedians proficient in the art of improvisation. Host Clive Anderson would have the comedians perform in various games, with loose themes and behaviours, often based around suggestions from the studio audience.

Although initially a little pedestrian, the show found its stride during the second and third series, and although it was heavily biased towards American performers by the time the run ended in 1998, it never lost its edge (even if some of the regular performers showboated for laughs a little too often).

The show was reworked for the US in 1998, lasting for around a decade, but the format surprisingly never returned to British screens (although many Whose Line performers appear live as the Comedy Store Players in London). That hasn’t stopped various producers trying to shoe-horn in the concept elsewhere though. Thank God You’re Here made its way over from Australia to ITV in 2007, but lasted only six episodes. Perhaps this was down to the overly regimented structure, based around lengthy scenes and a single game (performer enters unknown scene and has to improv their way through). Whose Line creator and producer Dan Patterson also clearly tried to bring some of the show’s magic to news panel show Mock the Week. Quickfire rounds like Scenes we’d like to see (where performers are given a basic scenario and have to reel off one-liners) are almost direct lifts from Whose Line, but the overly scripted nature of Mock the Week (the performers are stand-ups who typically cut-and-paste most of their responses from their stand-up routines) makes the show a fun enough watch (at least if you don’t actually go to any of the performers’ gigs and realise you’ve heard all the material before) but unsatisfying in terms of a comparison to Whose Line.

The latest attempt at the genre is Fast and Loose, a BBC Two show helmed by Hugh Dennis, devised by Dan Patterson, and with a set-up quite similar to Whose Line. Having heard promising noises about the show, I’d had most of the series sitting on the PVR for weeks, but was thinking it’d suffer by comparison to Whose Line. And it does, but this is the best shot yet at a spiritual successor to Patterson’s original improv show. Its plus-points are many: the performers have a lot more freedom than in similar shows, there are more games and there’s clearly more actual improvisation. There’s also some innovation, not least in a game called Sideways Scene, where the performers improvise on a set flipped ninety degrees by the magic of television—in other words, they’re lying down, but it appears to the audience like they’re in a basic room. The set-up provides plenty of potential for turning basic routines into something surreal and funny.

It’s not all good news though. In an attempt to not rip off Whose Line wholesale, there have been some odd additions. Every other game has host Hugh Dennis ‘finding out more about the performers’ by asking them questions—time that would be better spent on actual games. And of the games themselves, there aren’t enough of them. There’s also a bit too much scripting evident, and some of the performers forget themes when they switch genre, instead moving directly into basic parody of a movie or TV show (rather than integrating ideas from said shows into the improv). This would be fine if the same genres and shows didn’t crop up regularly throughout the show.

Still, it’s early days yet, and the show’s had a mere eight episodes to make its mark. In those eight episodes, it’s managed to beat the first series of Whose Line in terms of laugh-out-loud moments, if not in terms of balance. It’s the first time it’s felt like Whose Line was alive again and I’d certainly like to see more (especially with extra games and fewer scripted moments), although I remain wondering why no-one’s bothered to resurrect Patterson’s original show, since it’s clearly a concept that still has legs.