Orangutans at the Miami Zoo are using the iPad:

“We’ll ask them to identify ‘Where’s the coconut?’, and they’ll point it out,” Linda Jacobs, who oversees the Jungle Island program, told Wired. “We want to build from that and give them a choice in what they have for dinner — show them pictures of every vegetable we have available that day, and let them pick, giving them the opportunity to have choices.”

When you’ve built a device that can be used by humans for a nearly unlimited number of tasks, and even primates, you’ve built something incredible.

Time Warner’s CEO hasn’t heard of AirPlay:

Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer.

Don’t assume a conspiracy as the cause for something when simple incompetence fits just as well.

9to5Mac reports that Apple will drop Google Maps in iOS 6.

It was only a question of when. This won’t be easy, though—Apple’s maps and directions must be really, really good, or this is going to create a lot of issues for users. Imagine using the Maps application when its maps and directions are worse than Google Maps.

But it makes sense. Apple doesn’t want to be beholden to another company—especially a direct competitor—for something so integral to their devices.

James Montgomerie:

I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.

Building lasting organizations that can repeatedly build great products—and the right products—is difficult for reasons like this. You have to learn how to build this into your organization.

(Via Buzz Andersen.)

Instacast 2.0 is out, and it has a new pricing model:

I thought a lot about this issue and decided to change the pricing model. The first thing I will do is to lower the initial price from $1.99 to $0.99. I hope this will convince more people to try out the app. Second, I added an in-app purchase for features that novice users won’t need most likely, but power-users will appreciate when using the app on a day-to-day basis. It’s called Instacast Pro and it’s for sale at $1.99. For now it includes the ability to manage playlists, add your own bookmarks, configure settings on a podcast-by-podcast basis and receive push notifications for new episodes.

I hope this is a success for Vemedio. Not only is Instacast my favorite podcasting app, but this is an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, so I’m glad to see someone experimenting with pricing. App sales alone is not sufficient in many cases to sustain a business, unfortunately.

Tim Cook puts the iPad’s growth in perspective:

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”

Wow. It’s very easy to underestimate exactly how important the iPad is for Apple and the future of computing.

Brent Schlender’s piece on his recently found audio tapes of interviews he did over the years with Steve Jobs:

There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. “The technology we’ve been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer,” he told me once. “But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don’t think anybody’s going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.”

How do you make it so products are more meaningful to people in the same way? Or if not the product, the company itself?

Tim Ricchuiti:

To all those who tout “make a compelling app, charge for it” as the be-all and end-all in “sustainable” business models, read that again. In its current iteration, the App Store really doesn’t allow for a “sustainable” business model any more than giving something away for free does for one very simply reason: developers can’t charge for upgrades.

I think that’s a point that’s been lost in this furor over Instagram’s and, now, Pocket’s business model: the App Store’s “sell once, give free upgrades for life” model isn’t very good, either. Low average prices for applications (99¢ to ¢2.99 or so) mean that developers have to sell a lot of copies consistently just to stay in business, let alone make a substantial profit. While it’s true that taking advantage both of the platform’s tremendous number of users and its blistering growth rate can make this model workable, that depends on creating a rather sizable hit of an application. For the growth to continue, the application has to be well-known. That means a relatively small group of people will realize that kind of success, and it creates two very distinct groups: a small group who are seeing long-term, sustainable success with their application(s), and the rest—a much, much larger group that isn’t.

This dynamic also concentrates development in more popular categories like productivity, because larger categories have a greater chance for that success. As a result, more niche applications are less likely to be created and sustained over long periods of time. The end result is we have an App Store focused on big hits with much less diversity.

I don’t know if charging for upgrades is the answer, nor whether Apple is even interested in implementing it.¹ But we need to figure out better ways to sustain applications as a business. I think in-app purchase and subscriptions can help. Small up-front prices for applications (or free, even, like Paper) with additional features or content available through in-app purchase could be much more sustainable, because not only does it have the potential to increase total revenue per user, but it also spreads this revenue over a period of time rather than lumping it up-front. By spreading revenue over time, it should make the business much more predictable and consistent for a larger number of businesses.

1. It is something they should be thinking heavily about, though, because a healthy third-party development community is one of the main factors that has made the iPhone and iPad so successful. Maintaining that strength is important for Apple. [↩]

Tony Fadell explains what, in part, made Steve Jobs so good at finding the right solution to a problem:

At the time, Fadell simply said “Steve had a way of scoping the problem bigger. He could just look at a problem and find the solution by thinking larger.”

Sometimes, obstacles we run into while designing something are because we have our eyes so close to the ground, the detail blinds us to a larger truth. It’s useful all of the time, but especially when you can’t seem to figure out a design issue, to consider the greater intent of what you’re designing. What is it meant to do for the user? What is it ultimately doing for them? Answering that question, and thinking through the design problem within that context, often will make the answer immediately obvious.

I announced Basil three weeks ago, and the response has been terrific. People seem to “get it”—a no-nonsense application that makes cooking easier. It’s incredibly gratifying to hear from customers that it’s the recipe app they’ve been looking for and they love cooking with it.

I want to talk a little about why I chose to make Basil.

Why a Cooking App

Simple: I love to cook, but couldn’t find the app I wanted, so I built it. That’s not the only reason, though—that bit of frustration was the catalyst, but there’s more to it. Making a cooking app doesn’t seem very exciting; it’s not pushing the boundaries of what the iPad is capable of, it’s not one of those apps that’s going to blow the minds of geeks (like me), and it doesn’t promise to radically change how we work or communicate with people or anything like that. It’s a cooking app.

In his review of Basil, though, Federico Viticci concisely explained what excited me about it and these sorts of apps. He wrote:

Basil is one of those apps that bring a solid, concrete meaning to Post-PC.

The iPad is a device that can make tasks that haven’t changed much in a while—like cooking recipes—better and more enjoyable in a way the PC never could. There are a number of recipe applications for the Mac, and of course there have been recipes online for a very long time, but the problem was that using a PC while cooking isn’t very nice. You have to find room for it on a crowded tabletop, and you have to use a trackpad while chopping, mixing, cooking on the stove and in the kitchen, often with hands covered in food. Using a trackpad or keyboard while in the kitchen just isn’t fun, and it’s not something many people want to do, so even for people who saved recipes from the web on their computer, many just printed them out on paper before cooking.

Effectively, while the PC and Internet gave us incredible power we never had before, it didn’t apply to the kitchen.

The iPad completely changes that. With its small footprint, it’s pretty easy to find a place on the table, and with its large screen, it’s perfect for viewing recipes. And, of course, touch is a much better interface when you’re focused on something else. What this means is that we can bring computing into the kitchen, and we can use it to make cooking a little easier and more enjoyable. People can store all of their recipes and the recipes they find in one place, the recipes are always organized, and they can see the recipe in big, readable text so it’s easy to reference when you have five different things going on at once.

In other words, I see an opportunity to use the iPad to make something a lot of people do better and more enjoyable for them. It’s not going to change the world, but we can make it better for a lot of people. That’s awesome.

What’s unique about the iPad, too, is that it doesn’t feel like a computer, cold and abstract. When done right, applications begin to feel very physical to users, visceral and human. They can mold themselves to how people think, so they don’t have to think. They can just do. I wanted to create an app that starts to feel like that.

That’s what excites me about the iPad: we can build applications which make things regular people do all of the time better, easier and more satisfying for them. We can make people’s lives a little better. That’s why I built Basil. That’s why I love this platform.

Jason Snell:

If Apple’s going to embrace the cloud wherever possible, it needs to change iTunes too. The program should be simpler. It might be better off being split into separate apps, one devoted to device syncing, one devoted to media playback.

Fixing app syncing alone would go a long way. I can’t always figure out what iTunes is going to do, and if I can’t figure it out, regular users certainly can’t.

Apple’s goals should be to make “syncing” with a computer as superfluous as possible.

Interesting new iOS app called Pop for iOS from Colin McFarland and Patrick Rhone. Here’s the idea:

A place to capture and idea as quickly as possible and worry about what to do with it later.

I bought it, and for 99¢, there shouldn’t be any hesitation. It isn’t going to be the most beautiful app on your iPhone. It isn’t going to blow your friends away because it’s so advanced. It’s not going to make your work better.

But here’s what it does: it launches fast so you can get your thought down immediately. No need to move through an interface, create a new document and think of a title. Just launch and start typing.

I love that. Currently, that’s all it does. You write in Pop, copy the text and put it somewhere else. I’m glad that’s all it does for now, though, because it works very well for its intended purpose, and now they can deliberately think through its future.

I’m not sure where they’re planning on taking it, but one place I could see this going is a sort of quick-entry for SimpleNote: you launch Pop, get your idea down, and then when you have time, you can send it to SimpleNote. Or perhaps it uses SimpleNote’s API and does so silently in the background, all on its own.

Charlie Kindel thinks Google will abandon the Android brand for “Play”:

I predict Google will go so far as to push the Play brand over Android even with developers. They’ve already started this with marketplace submission and you can bet there will be a new, more stringent, app certification program under the Google Play moniker in an attempt to raise the quality of apps for the new Google Play tablet. Watch for Google Play specific APIs and services as well.

Kindel believes that rather than try to combat Android’s fragmentation, Google should abandon it and build their own cohesive, end-to-end platform based on Android. Doing so would make a lot of sense, because there’s no way they’ll be able to rein in device makers and make Android a cohesive platform.

Of course, it would also dampen device manufacture and carrier interest in Android. If “Android,” the open source operating system that anyone can use, (1) doesn’t include important APIs that Google’s Play version does, and (2) Google is directly competing with their devices by selling and heavily pushing their own devices, I would expect less devices to use Android as we know it, and more use of Android as a base to build your own platform on, like Barnes and Noble and Amazon have done. Effectively, I think a move like this would kill Android as the relatively open platform that we have today.

Which, of course, may be better for Google.

(Via John Gruber.)

Horace Dediu analyzes Charles Arthur’s report that Android has only generate $2.5 billion of revenue since 2008:

My take is that it’s not a bad business. But it’s also not a great one. As long as there is exponential growth in units, Android will improve its position inside Google relative to iOS. But from Google’s perspective, iOS is today a bigger business. And iOS is not standing still. It’s growing not only in terms of units but in revenue per unit.

Dediu figures that Google only makes about $3.50 per Android device sold over its lifetime, and that revenue per device has decreased since 2009. As usual, outstanding work by Horace.

Charles Arthur:

Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011, if figures provided by the search giant as part of a settlement offer with Oracle ahead of an expected patent and copyright infringement trial are an accurate guide.

Ouch. Last December, I speculated that Android could be contributing as little as $833m in revenue to Google over the course of a year. Google just confirmed that estimate was wildly off—Android is contributing much less than my estimate.

Remind me again, please, what Android is providing Google? Because it certainly isn’t revenue from mobile devices. They have Apple to thank for that.