The New York Times asks, "With so much going for them why, eight months after the iPad's release, is the design of so many of those apps so boring?"
To which I answer: They're boring because the iPad is boring.
Rather than create an environment that was specially tailored to the unique iPad form factor, Apple instead chose to simply stretch the iPhone UI out to meet the size of the new device, making only small changes to accommodate the additional onscreen real estate. And now app developers are aping Apple, as they always do.
Put another way, there's no real innovation on the iPad, just a desire to sell stuff from one place in another place. And that's as true of Apple as it is of the developers. Raise your hand if you paid, again, for an "HD" version of an iPhone app on the iPad.
--
Google rocketed to fame and fortune must faster than did Microsoft. And now its running into a wall much faster than Microsoft did, too.
Google, which only 12 years ago was a scrappy start-up in a garage, now finds itself viewed in Silicon Valley as the big, lumbering incumbent. Inside the company some of its best engineers are chafing under the growing bureaucracy and are leaving to start or work at smaller, nimbler companies.
But my favorite quote comes, as always, from Google's curiously stupefying CEO. He makes Steve Ballmer look calm and rational by comparison.
"We hire more people in a week than go to Facebook in its lifetime," Mr. Schmidt said, dismissing the idea that Facebook was poaching Google's best people.
It's about quality, not quantity. Obviously.
--
Microsoft has finalized its Visual Basic add-on for the Windows Phone Developer Tools.
--
Kenny Kerr has released Window Clippings 3, the new version of his popular screen capture tool for Windows Vista and 7.