Apple Computer's shares took a small hit this afternoon when Gizmodo reported a rumor about CEO Steve Jobs' allegedly declining health. More than any other company I can think of, Apple is identified with its leader, so the link between concerns over his health and the health of the company are understandable.

They are not, however, either inevitable or accurate. I'm certain that Apple is more than Jobs. I'm certain that their product mix is brilliant and solid. I'm confident that if I were still in the market, I'd be buying Apple right now. But Apple Computer, Inc., needs to get out from behind the "Steve Jobs' health is a private issue" bullshit line they spout when the issue comes up. That means:

1. Steve Jobs' health is decidedly not a private matter. You can't be the very image of the company as Jobs has always chosen and pressed to be and at the same time be entitled to privacy on any matter that affects your tenure in the leadership role. No way, Jose.
2. The company needs to articulate its succession plan and start giving the heir apparent some face time.
3. Investors need to chill. Jobs is a survivor of pancreatic cancer. That's good news but it's not a 100% healthy outcome. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most invidious forms of the disease and beating it takes a lot out of the patient. Even if he is in very good health considering that, the phrase "considering that" carries a certain amount of baggage. Deal with it.

It's hard to imagine a personal computer industry without a strong Apple in it. I don't think that's because I have deep feelings for the company; I think it's part of the reality of the scene.

I just ran across this very interesting site called 99designs.com. Actually, they ran an ad in one of my favorite newsletters, the SitePoint Tribune. If this site works as it says it does, this could be a real find for me...and for you if you're a graphic designer.

Here's how it works:

1. You post a design brief and pay $39 to start the contest.
2. You set a prize price that you're willing to pay for the winning design.
3. As many designers as want to compete for the prize provide concepts, comps, layouts, whatever.
4. You work with the designers, rating the designs against your needs.
5. You pick a winner and pay him or her the prize.
6. They give you the design and copyright to it.

I'm not clear if, for example, it's OK to reject all the designs or if you are contractually obligated to pay someone for the winning design. The contest is supposed to run just seven days but it's not clear what happens if you and one or more designers want more time to reach a final decision.

But conceptually at least this is a very cool idea. I'm going to give it a try one of these days soon. I'll let you know how it goes.

I found this post on a relatively obscure blog to be hysterical and uncannily accurate. It identifies a great number of programming languages and compares them to modern and ancient spiritual and religious traditions. It's a nice bit of fluff reading. Though it is more enjoyable if you're a programmer, it's entertaining even if you're not.

I'm a PHP and Python guy these days and I found those descriptions to be very close to on-target provided one keeps one's tongue firmly planted in one's cheek.

(Thanks to Asher Snyder of NOLOH fame for the pointage.)

I've been working for about two years now without Microsoft Office. It has been difficult at times as I've encountered people who can't seem to figure out, e.g., how to save documents from MS Office into RTF format so I can open them in NeoOffice, my OpenOffice choice as a substitute. But I'm pretty stubborn. I just can't see paying the exorbitant prices MS charges for Office.

Recently I had a need to print a slide presentation set of handouts so that the projector operator at our church would have the slides in reasonably readable format and in the proper sequence without wasting a ream of paper. (Our weekly slide presentations run upwards of 50 slides, perhaps 70 if speakers use build slides like I do.) Someone else builds the PowerPoint presentation, mostly on Mac but occasionally on Windows. I've been getting them, opening them in NeoOffice, adding my talk slides (when I'm the speaker, which is about once a month or so), and then putting them on a USB drive for showing at the church. Works fine.

But to print the handouts, I need to try to get 9 or 12 slides per page to conserve paper and ink and there is no way I can see to make that happen with NeoOffice. Some complex interactions take place between NeoOffice and the OS X native print routines that simply prevent it. Clearly a bug but not one that is apparently easily fixed.

I think I may be able to solve this particular problem in Apple's brilliant Keynote product but I'm not sure doing so won't have other, perhaps more dire, consequences.

For most of what I do in an Office product, NeoOffice works pretty well. But if it simply doesn't work right with PowerPoint presentations, I may have to abandon it. (See Follow-Up below.)

Anyone else have any insights or ideas about other Office replacements that might work better? My experience with Apple's Numbers (worksheet) and Pages (word processor) are good but not extremely compatible with Office.

FOLLOW-UP: Patrick Luby, principal NeoOffice developer (when's the last time you had an MS developer take interest in your plight?) and a long-time user named Fran have been trying to help me with this. When they were unable to reproduce the problem, I decided to try it on another system. Much to my surprise, this printing works on my MacBook Air running an earlier version of NeoOffice. So it would appear that NeoOffice isn't the culprit here. Wonder what is?

Apple Computer's recent acquisition of chip house PA Semi strongly suggests that the company plans to put proprietary chips to work in existing and new products. PA Semi was widely believed to be working on a new chipset for Apple's iPhone and related product lines.

I don't see Apple being terribly interested, in the near term at least, in the Netbooks category. This is a fairly nebulous product definition and one for which demand has yet to be demonstrated. I do think, though, that Apple may have some interesting offering in the wings for the tablet notebook category. I see more and more tablets in use in meetings and conferences I attend and my suspicion is that this is a category on the verge of market viability.

Finally! Voice command control of my iPhone arrived today, courtesy of vlingo. This free app downloadable from the Apple iPhone App Store has apparently been available for the Blackberry for a while but now it works on iPhone. Worked flawlessly the first time I tried it.

This is Apple's second biggest shortcoming on the iPhone design, the biggest being the lack of copy and paste.

It's time someone solved the problem of the Amazing Fragmenting Address Book. Unless, of course, someone already has and I just don't know about it. Which is certainly possible.

This morning, an acquaintance sent me an email informing me of her new email address. I use gMail, so I was able quickly to update her record in my Contacts list in that program. As I edited her record, I realized that gMail would also allow me to have a full address book with addresses, phones, etc., if I wanted to use it that way. I'm not sure what value that would have, given that all I use my Google Contacts for is email, but the realization triggered a cascade of queries.

I have my Address Book from Apple which was always my main repository for such information until I started using gMail and it was easier to store peoples' email addresses in my email program. (Yeah, I realize I could have stayed with Apple Mail and had cross-integration there, but Mail just isn't as good as gMail in a number of ways. Besides, I do like the idea of having my contact info in the Cloud.) The Apple Address Book is where I keep mailing addresses, company information, and miscellaneous notes about people.

Then I have Skype, which I use for at least 90% of my phone conversations. Guess where peoples' phone numbers are most likely to be current? Yep.

Finally (I think), I have IM contact identifiers in my Adium application, which is my current choice for a multi-protocol chat client. And I spend a lot of time on chat, from which I derive a great deal of value and convenience.

Now it would be interesting to contemplate a means for synchronizing all of those applications' data together, but my guess is that's a very messy and difficult task. But it does seem to me that it should be possible to solve the problem by:

1. Establishing a central repository of all contact info in the Cloud
2. Expecting these individual apps to obtain their contact info from that source when and as needed.

AIM, e.g., appears to store all of my AOL IM clients on a server so that when I open a new copy of the chat client on a computer I've never used before, the buddies list populates automatically. I assume other IM clients have similar features.

I think Skype does the same thing (though I'm less certain of that and haven't actually asked or investigated).

What I'd really like is the ability to have all my apps draw from a central repository just the data they need to populate their subsets of contact info (emails for gMail, IM handles for Adium, phone numbers and Skype user IDs for Skype, etc.). Then I just maintain that one database and all the others draw from it as needed. They could keep a local copy, of course, and check for updates at intervals.

Of the services I know about, Plaxo seems best positioned to do this, but their technology is strictly push; if someone I know updates their contact info through Plaxo, I get a notice. But there is no API for me to connect to even if I wanted to write a program to do this, which I don't necessarily want to do.

Pointers anyone? If you don't want to join my blog and post a response here, you can email me: dan at danshafer dot com.

There are days that the fact that I get to spend most of my day working on and with incredibly fascinating technology just wells up inside and I feel so grateful. Today is one of those days.

I was just arranging several open windows on my 23-inch screen when it occurred to me that I hadn't expressed my appreciation to by 23-inch iMac lately. This is a beautiful, wonderful piece of technology -- or rather, holistic collection of technologies -- that makes my life not only easier but far more enjoyable just by doing what it was designed to do.

Now if we could all learn that simple truth: doing what we are designed to do (love and forgive one another) simply and elegantly brings us and others such joy!

A few days ago I noticed that in my MobileMe calendar page, none of my subscribed calendars were updating. They always had so I was a bit bewildered. But there have been so many "issues" with this service (why did Apple have to replace .mac before this stuff was working right?), I just figured I'd watch it for a few days.

Tonight I got tired of watching so I went to figure out what's happening. Under support at Apple's site is the "explanation," quoted here nearly in its entirety:

When syncing subscribed calendars to MobileMe, the calendar information and settings for the calendar is synced, but all of the downloaded events are not. This is done to help streamline the syncing process with MobileMe, as it prevents syncing redundant information to other computers with an Internet connection.

What kind of bullshit explanation is that? "We couldn't figure out how to get this syncing stuff working with shared calendars like it should so we disabled it and called it a feature." Sheesh. The old Apple would at least have been honest about the reason for this idiotic choice.

MobileMe is rapidly reaching marginal value and utility. Too bad. It's a great idea and the parts of it that work are quite useful.

I'm not a gamer, so I won't try to pretend I have any expertise in this area, but I find it interesting that Apple's iPhone is drawing huge attention as a game platform. I'm not shocked, because even though I am hardly a serious game player (except for my Wii, which is about to come out of mothballs now that I'm recovered sufficiently from my heart surgery), I have three games and a half-dozen other apps on my 3G iPhone.

Evidently, people really like the graphics and programmers delight in the fact that it's relatively easier to develop games for the iPhone than for other cells and hand-helds, principally because it runs basically the same OS X as the Mac computer lines. But the real key, experts say, is the existence of the Apple App Store, which provides a ready channel to developers for 30% of the proceeds.

One of the games I have is a bowling game that uses the iPhone's built-in accelerometer so that it's a motion-sensitive game. That's the thing that makes games more intriguing to me on the Wii than on other boxes I've played with (admittedly rarely) over the years.

(Caveat: I hold Apple stock.)