Cook took the opportunity to reflect upon the lessons he learned from Jobs before his death last October, explaining that the founder never wanted Cook to dwell on what he would have wanted after he died. Instead, Jobs wanted Cook to avoid thinking about the past and instead look to the future, focusing on creating the next great thing.
"When he called me to his home to talk about being the CEO and subsequently the discussions we had, he told me, 'I witnessed what happened at Disney when Walt passed away,'" Cook said. "He said that people would go to meetings, and all sit around and talk about, what would Walt have done? How would he view this? And he looked at me with those intense eyes that only he had, and he told me to never do that, to never ask what he would do. Just do what's right. And so I'm doing that." [1]
What would constitute a "step forward for mobile computing"? For me, it'd be having the computing power of MacBook Pro on an iPhone. For example, I would hook up—or more likely, wirelessly connect—this hypothetical iPhone to a desktop monitor and run OS X. Arguably, this is 3-5 years down the line and only if Apple pursues this line of thinking.
Well here's a list of directions, with the caveat that you'd actually have to try some of these to see what worked. Improving safari with smart 'readability'-esque relayout engine. Safari performance for webkit. Widgets. Lock screen apps. Built in speech-to-text api. Flutter like non-touching gestures and interaction. Augmented reality api - with maps data. A todo app and api/data store (ok you'd make a million app developers cry with that one). iCloud for data.
Of course some of these are available as third-party apps and apis. Some would suck (widgets for one probably). But I don't believe we're anywhere near running out of things to innovate on to make mobile computing worthwhile/suck-less.
I was thinking on phone processing of speech, not sure how much difference it would make. The point of that list isn't that those things don't exist, but they are areas where Apple could push hardware, operating system and web services in order to do something innovative in mobile computing.
The biggest problem with iOS is the siloing of apps. A task-centric UI just makes so much more sense and sharing information and functionality among different apps is so incredibly awkward for the user and developer.
Both Android and WP are much better in this regard but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Please god no. Xcode is miserably slow on a 2011 Macbook Air. I don't even want to think about running it on something with a small fraction of that horsepower.
There's not much stopping Apple from enabling this right now but maybe they see the developer market as a way of generating more Mac sales? Look at the $35 Raspberry Pi - it has a HDMI port and runs Linux, with a fraction of the power of the iPhone 5.
Is there anything left to be done by NASA HQ? For example, are they still controlling the trajectory of the probe to Mars or is that mostly done by probe's onboard computers?
I'm genuinely curious about what kind of things the HQ is doing right now. I've been watching the live stream and there's not much activity besides milling around screens and resizing windows on the huge screen.
"Mission control contemplated sending Curiosity one last "parameter update" on Sunday, hours before atmospheric entry, giving the vessel an exact fix on its position in space. But NASA engineers said they would likely forego that transmission because the vessel has varied so little from its ideal course.
Otherwise, controllers will have little to do but anxiously track Curiosity's progress as it flies into Mars' upper atmosphere..."
it is said, that 08:23:00 PM was the last time at which they could change the trajectory 'manually.' (So I assume, that they have just very good seats to watch the show in the HQ )
Plenty to do, since monitoring and understanding all of the incoming data is most of what operations is, but in this case, no commands were sent while the stream was live.
Dashboard is actually one of my favorite features; I can't live without it. I use the dictionary/thesaurus widget every time I write (or read) and I take down short, temporary notes on the sticky notes. Besides that, I use the clock (to keep tabs on different time zones), weather and calendar widgets, and iStat Pro.
[1] Example here: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8486795/the-harden-dilem...