Benjamin Brooks on why Comcast having a monopoly of high speed internet service is bad:

If Comcast decided that they wanted to charge $100 a month I would have to pay it. If they decided to throttle internet speed to 5 mbps, I would have no choice but to be OK with it.

This is the United States and even with all of our laws and controls I am somehow forced into only having one cable Internet provider.

That’s a bad monopoly, that’s something that we must change if we want to advance the adoption and speed of our Internet services to the masses. To move the U.S. and it’s millions of households into the future we mustn’t be at the mercy of one ISP per area.

I’m in the same situation living in the suburbs of Jackson, MS. Comcast is the only viable option for me. Thankfully, I have decent internet service. I’ve no real complaints (about their cable, yes, but not internet). That said, having options and competition would likely improve what Comcast offers in the realm of internet service.

In short, an RSS reader, a Twitter client, and a couple news apps are all I need to remain informed about the news. I no longer subscribe to any news magazines or newspapers, because my iPad always gets the stories first. It’s possible my iPad newsreading habits will change a bit once Apple formally releases iOS 5. Among its many other features, the next iteration of Apple’s mobile OS includes a few features geared toward iPad newsreaders. The most prominent of those is Newsstand, which will behave a bit like a super folder; it automatically downloads the latest issues of your iOS subscriptions, and displays the current covers for each on an iBooks-style shelf.

This mirrors much how I consume news, though I do subscribe still to the NYT. I dropped the WSJ and went to the free Washington Post. I much prefer the WSJ app but the Post pricing is far nicer. My news apps now include: NYT, NPR, BBC America and CNN. (I also read The New Yorker, but I consider that separately for whatever reason.)

From my personal blog, where I discuss how Apple is changing the way users approach file management:

If iCloud works as advertised, Apple will take a huge step in changing the paradigm of file management. Just as they created the “desktop” metaphor with the Mac, they have already started to change it with iOS.

Earlier today I linked to a Forkbomber piece comparing the approaches to cloud computing between Apple and Google. In my commentary on the link, I said file sharing was one of two hold-ups I had with leaving Google Apps. The other is this:

The ability to send reply emails from a personalized domain via MobileMe from my iPhone.

This ability was brought to the Web interface of MobileMe in an earlier revision. I can forward my domain email address to my MobileMe address and then send and reply from that domain address via the web interface with no problem. Using only one keyboard shortcut and a simple workaround, the same can be accomplished with Mail.app.

But the iPhone is still problematic. To simply send email from the domain address is no problem. It’s the same as sending from any account. Create a new email, select the account you want to send from, write the email and send.

The problem comes in the ability to reply to a domain email from that same account. On the iPhone, it is impossible to do it automatically like on the web and Mail.app interfaces. The iPhone does not read the address to which the email was sent but instead the account that received it. Therefore, to reply to an email sent to a personalized domain but forwarded to MobileMe, I have to manually select the domain address with every reply. Given the number of emails to which I reply, that’s just not workable.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that this simple change will be made, but I’m not really counting on it. I’ve not seen anyone write about this issue in relation to iOS5, and since I don’t have access to a developer’s account I’ll just have to wait until this fall to see.

What Apple has done here is to sit down and say: “what bugs me and ideally how should it work”, then they turned that into WWDC’s announcement. These changes don’t feel like bug fixes or feature upgrades, they feel like a rethinking of computing.

A look at the way things should have always been done, but weren’t for one reason or another. That starts with all devices (PCs, Macs, Phones, Tablets) being seen as equal — what it ends with I have no clue.

This is what is exciting to me. I’ve been thinking about how the new idea of your documents residing with the applications versus the documents residing within a file structure will work. It’s really not much different than what I do now. I’m working on a few tweaks to my workflow based on this principle. I’ll share shortly.

Of course, the true magic comes with Lion and iOS5, just as Ben writes:

I don’t know of a single other way to take a document I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having the document up-to-date and the cursor in the same position without pressing an extra button — to me, that is magic. It’s magic because logically that is how everything should have always worked, but in reality it is how nothing works.

July and then this fall can’t get here quick enough.

Google’s services are free. iCloud is free, with the exception of iTunes Match. However, the age old debate concerning Google crops up here yet again — ads.

Google shows ads because it is the only way it makes money. Apple, however doesn’t have this issue. During the keynote, Steve Jobs said that they built iCloud as something that the people at Apple themselves wanted to use, and they didn’t want to look at ads.

I think it is pretty clear that Apple sees iCloud as an investment in its operating systems, even if iCloud — as its own entity — loses money.

Of course, ad-supported free service really isn’t free. Users are paying to use Google’s services with their personal information. That is something that a growing number of consumers are uncomfortable with, and with iCloud being a free service, I think this aspect of Google’s personality will become more apparent.

This is a great comparison of philosophies between Apple and Google and how they approach cloud computing. The entire piece holds a lot of truths.

But what I quoted really hits at the heart of where my mind is. I’ve been waiting for Apple to take the next step in integrating file sharing between my devices. It was one of two hold-ups from me finally leaving Google Apps. I might can get over the second hold-up, but I’ll wait to see iCloud and iOS5 email implementation first.

TUAW has the video of Steve Jobs’ presentation to the Cupertino City Council. This is a 21 minute video, but it’s fascinating. You can tell how important this is to Apple because Jobs himself went before the council.

And I love his answer to the councilwoman’s question of what building this new complex will do for Cupertino.

Well, as you know, we are the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we’d like to continue to stay here and pay taxes.

He then made a not-so-veiled threat to move Apple to Mountain View.

Love it.

When I watched the video of Tuesday’s WWDC Keynote, I was struck by how similar Apple’s Twitter UI looks like the Twitter UI in Camera+ from Tap Tap Tap.

First up is the Camera+ UI:

Now, take a look at upcoming UI in iOS 5:

When listening to the special WWDC edition of The Bro Show Podcast, they mentioned the same thing.

So I decided to go back and check it out. In comparing the two, about the only real similarity is the use of a paperclip to “attach” a photo to the Twitter window. The other elements are all pretty standard:

• Send/Share button
• Cancel button
• Character counter
• Location button

All things considered, I’m a much bigger fan of Tap Tap Tap’s integration than Apple’s UI choices. (Particularly, I don’t like the rule lines in Apple’s text window.)

Certainly one could make a good case for Apple “being inspired” by the paperclip graphic, but that’s about it. In fact, Apple would have been better served to borrow a bit more of the UI choices — something I usually don’t say about Apple designs.

We’ll have to wait until the fall to give iCloud a real workout. But iCloud looks like an example of something that Apple does best. They’re not the company that might be first with a product or feature. They’re not out to win a bar bet.

Their goal is to tell a story with their technology.

That’s a trademark that the best tech companies share. They don’t rush to be first, or just to have something in a given market. They work according to their timeline and toward their personal goals. There is a fine line between being late to the game and taking the right amount of time to get it right, but Apple walks that line with grace.

“If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul. This year, we’re here to talk about the soul…”

—Steve Jobs

When I linked to the keynote yesterday, I said this:

Apple has redefined computing with what they announced today.

That may sound like a bit of hyperbole, but I don’t believe it is.

With the release of the iPhone in 2007, Apple disrupted the smartphone market and redefined cell phones by blurring the lines of consumer and enterprise offerings. Just look at the state of Nokia, once a powerhouse of consumer cell phones, their stocks plummeted to an all-time low at the first of this month. They lack direction, vision and innovativeness.

In 2010, Apple ushered in what Jobs calls “the post-PC world” with the release of the iPad. In just a little over a year, the iPad has shattered the expectations of mobile computing. Luxury cars dealers put their user manuals on iPads and give them away with new purchases. Hospitals manage patient files and diagnostic work on them. Musicians compose and mix on them. Children adore iPads for books and games. And people like me use our iPads for any number of tasks — reading, writing, watching movies, social media, calendaring, email, web surfing and even as a personal assistant. My iPad is my Bible, literally.

Consider now the more mainstream apps on these devices.

I’m thinking of apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. These are superb apps that have two things in common:

1. Their iPad offerings are as good, if not better, on the iOS platform as their Mac offerings are on OSX.
2. Document management between the iPad, iPhone and Mac sucks.

For me, GoodReader is a God-send. Ditto for Dropbox. And as good as these two apps are at serving up the documents I shuffle between my iPad, iPhone and MacBook, they are still one or two steps away from making the iPad a truly integral part of my workflow.

That could all change this fall when iOS 5 is released and iCloud comes fully online.

As excited as I am about having my music and my photos shared across my Macbook, my iPhone and my wife’s iMac, nothing announced yesterday has me more excited than document sharing.

I’ve little doubt that most serious developers will adopt the iCloud API. It seems a no-brainer for a company like The Omni Group, which I consider the best iPad developer out there. Between iWork and the Omni offerings, I’ll be set.

And if Apple succeeds in making documents omnipresent across all of our devices with no workarounds or patches, then computing will certainly be redefined.