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It's unfortunate Jobs never showed an interest in games, imagine how different the industry might look had Apple played a bigger role.

We've all been profoundly affected by his life's work in one way or another, but I quite literally owe my career to his innovations. Thanks, Steve.

The 4S is a nice, comprehensive update to the iPhone 4, but the real magic, to borrow a phrase, is in the software. I've been using iOS 5 for months now, and despite having to deal with some incredibly annoying bugs and a raft of broken apps, never once considered downgrading to iOS 4.

Great new products all around at Amazon's event in New York, but the Kindle Fire looks stellar:

The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch display and sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad, Amazon executives said in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek.

...

The Kindle Fire doesn’t have an embedded camera or a microphone. The device offers Wi-Fi connectivity, though not 3G access, and comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year membership service that includes streaming video and free two-day shipping. Amazon has painted over the rough surfaces of Google’s Android operating system with a fresh and easy-to-use interface and tied the device closely to its own large and growing content library of movies, magazines and music.

Amazon's using the strategy Google should have followed, and encouraged their OEMs to follow, all along — don't try to mimic the iPad, create a unique product that plays to your company's strengths.

Joe Hewitt:

I'm beginning to see that some parts of the Web we take for granted are not what actually defines it. The Web is not HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's not DOM, SVG, WebGL, PNG, or Flash. The Web is really just HTTP over TCP/IP. What gets transported over HTTP does not define the Web.

Read the whole thing.

400 icons, in both regular and retina-display sizes, for $25. If you're an iOS developer who cares about the quality of your app and you don't have this set of icons, shame on you.

Microsoft will restrict general distribution of Metro apps to the Windows Store, but grant exceptions to enterprises and developers, allowing them to side-load applications onto Windows 8 devices. While Windows 8 will be an operating system for both desktops and tablets, Microsoft is creating two sets of rules for traditional desktop apps and Metro-style apps, which are optimized for touch screens but will run on any Windows 8 device.

Fascinating. So, with Windows 8 on a desktop, the only way for most consumers to acquire Metro apps is from the Windows Store.

To be very clear, Jobs, while seriously ill, is very much alive. Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day.

The thing to keep in mind is this: Apple tomorrow, a week from now, and next month is the exact same Apple from yesterday, a week ago, and last month. Tim Cook wasn’t named “CEO” until today, but he’s been the chief executive at the company since Jobs started this — his third — medical leave back in January, and probably even before that. Whatever Steve’s role is going forward, it’s only different in title than what it has been, in effect, for some time.

Pitch-perfect.

It'd be worth simplifying the US tax code just to expose how foolish Republican rhetoric on taxation can be.

It's nice to see a outside perspective on Ireland's not insignificant contribution to the global community.

CharMap 1.2 is now available on the App Store!

New features and changes include:

• A dedicated font viewer (with font previews)
• Enable and disable the system-wide Emoji keyboard
• You can now filter sections using a search bar, which greatly simplifies navigation
• The settings tab has been completely overhauled to make more sense
• Some new icons and tweaks to the existing graphics
• Performance improvements when viewing fonts

Dublin dodged a bullet.

It's incredible that this clown hasn't been discarded yet.

Marco Arment in response to John Gruber:

Developers are being shown that their apps — and their months or years of hard work, and in many cases, their entire businesses — can be yanked by Apple’s whim at any time for reasons that they couldn’t have anticipated or avoided. This invokes fear and anger from many, and I think most of the “30% is too much” arguing is a misdirected side effect of this frustration not at the number itself, but at the seemingly arbitrary and greedy nature of the rule.

Well said. For the record, I'm almost certain Apple will tinker with the subscription policy before the June 30^th deadline to officially exempt services¹ from the rule. That aside, it's still a troubling precedent which leaves the door open to further abrupt rule changes — what if Apple decides that they’re entitled to 30% of all ad revenue, or simply outlaw third-party ad providers altogether?² Plenty of people seem to think they'd never go that far, but nobody really expected them to demand 30% of all subscription revenue, along with mandated price-matching.

1. Jobs said as much in a characteristically thrifty email, but nothing's been made official. Also, if they do make certain exceptions, how are they going to delineate content subscriptions (National Geographic) from service subscriptions (Dropbox)? If they never intended to include paid services in the new rules, why not say so from the start?

2. Realistically speaking, they’d have to ban other ad providers: it’s the only enforceable solution.

Alongside the speedier, aesthetically unchanged Macbook Pro line, Apple also seeded a beta of Lion to developers with a couple of unannounced changes:

• a new version of Mail, with an elegant, widescreen layout inspired by the iPad; Conversations, which automatically groups related messages into one easy to read timeline; more powerful search; and support for Microsoft Exchange 2010;
• AirDrop, a remarkably simple way to copy files wirelessly from one Mac to another with no setup;
• Versions, which automatically saves successive versions of your document as you create it, and gives you an easy way to browse, edit and even revert to previous versions;
• Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
• Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work; the all new FileVault, that provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives, and the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously; and
• Mac OS X Lion Server, which makes setting up a server easier than ever and adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone®, iPad and iPod touch® devices.

All good stuff, but "Resume" is most interesting — the suspend/resume technology is straight out of iOS 4, and could be incredible with an SSD.

If you've ever wondered what the hell a Pilcrow (¶) is, Shady Characters gives a comprehensive history:

The pilcrow is not just some typographic curiosity, useful only for livening up a coffee-table book on graphic design or pointing the way to a paragraph in a mortgage deed, but a living, breathing character with its roots in the earliest days of punctuation. Born in ancient Rome, refined in medieval scriptoria, appropriated by England’s most famous modern typographer and finally rehabilitated by the personal computer, the story of the pilcrow is intertwined with the evolution of modern writing. It is the quintessential shady character.

The whole thing is worth reading, especially for typography enthusiasts.

I don't necessarily agree with Lucey's conclusion, but it's a well-argued position.

I can't remember the last time I read a convincing argument by Niall Ferguson.

Interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that we're only getting half the story.

Remarkable.

Excellent news. The fact that they recognise the problem is a great first step towards curing it.

I'm with M.G. Siegler. Google's been subjected to a lot of pointed criticism from numerous quarters lately — some gripes are more valid than others, it should be said — and a change in leadership might be just what's needed to refocus the company. I don't know if Larry Page believes Google should be more conservative with what they release, if he recognises that search is losing the fight against spam, or if he thinks Android would benefit from more focus and discipline. In my opinion, these have all been substantial company problems that have festered over the last year, and I sincerely hope Page has a plan to address them. I guess time will tell.

Page has got his work cut out for him.

Quarterly revenue was almost $27 billion, representing $6 billion in profit — not too surprising considering they shipped 20 million iPods, 14 million iPhones, 7.3 million iPads and 4 million Macs. Business Insider has more, the press release is available here.

According to Bump CEO, David Lieb:

Bump says that 10% of its users are still running some form of iOS 3.0, and just two percent of users are stuck back on iOS 2.0. Within the 4.0 crowd, 52.89% are running the latest version of 4.2.1, with 27.5% still running 4.1.

Excellent news if true, but very surprising considering iOS still doesn't support over-the-air updates.

A perfect example of corporate doublespeak. Absolutely pathetic.

So cool.

Isn't it amazing that Newt Gingrich still captures anyone's attention?

Lame.

Odds are that Apple will show off the fifth iteration of iOS in just a few months, so it's surprising to read that iOS 4.3 will land with such a hefty list of features. My guess is the new stuff was supposed to be a part of 4.2 but didn't make the cut: not surprising considering the size of that release.

Developers can download a beta here.

This closes a major gap in iOS's feature-set. Most carriers will probably abuse it, though.

Handy.

Great news for developers; anyone who's released an app knows that the US is by far the largest App Store market so broadening it only be a good for us.

The mobile hotspot support is interesting; I don't know if it's going to be brought to AT&T — the GSM iPhone 4 is technically capable — but I'd be shocked if international carriers weren't given the option to offer a mobile broadband package to customers.

This is such a maddening bug. UISplitViewController really needs a lot of attention.

Ars Technica:

Intel and NVIDIA have announced a six-year, $1.5 billion dollar technology cross-licensing deal that marks the end of a long patent dispute between the two chipmakers.

...

"The cross-licensing agreement allows Intel to integrate NVIDIA technologies and those that are covered by our patents into their CPUs, such as Sandy Bridge, for example," said Jen-Hsuan. "And a cross-license allows us to build processors and take advantage of Intel patents for the types of processor we're building—Project Denver, Tegra, and the types of processors we're going to build in the future."

This is definitely a win for consumers, but especially Mac owners: had Intel and NVIDIA failed to come to an agreement future MacBooks would have been forced to adopt inferior graphics technology — like Intel's integrated solution¹ — instead of the current Intel/NVIDIA combo.

1. Mac Pros and iMacs have already transitioned away from NVIDIA to AMD (formerly ATI) cards, but it's extremely rare to find an Intel processor coupled with an AMD/ATI graphics card in notebooks so I don't think this something Apple would consider.

This is an incredible article from Matt Gemmell; it should, along with Apple's Accessibility guidelines, be required reading for all iOS developers.