What’s disappointing to me though is that Apple had a clear choice here.

They could have chosen to implement Siri securely, but instead they decided to default to a mode which is more about impressing your buddies than securing your calendar and email system. →

You see what he did there?

Ever notice how an expert in a certain field will only ever see choices from the perspective of that field? Interesting how there is the assumption that the only options were secure and insecure. It’s like he just assumes that nobody will ever try to use a phone while driving, something that seems like it would gain a huge safety improvement by reducing phone interaction.

On my lowly iPhone 4, if I want to call my wife while I’m on the freeway to see if I need to stop at the store, I’d have to:

• Pick up the phone
• Press the home button or the power button
• Swipe across the bottom of the screen
• Tap in my passcode, or, as suggested in the Sophos article, my complex alphanumeric-with-symbols password
• Tap the Phone icon
• Tap the Favorites button if it’s not already on the Favorites page
• Tap my wife’s entry

With an iPhone 4S and Siri, I’d presumably need only to:

• Pick up the phone
• Tap the button that activates Siri
• Speak: “Siri, call my wife.”
• Acknowledge Siri’s confirmation of my request by saying, “Yes.”

I wouldn’t ever have to look at the phone. The only touch target I’d need is a physical button on the phone, which is easy to locate without looking. It’s only marginally more complicated than asking a real person sitting in the car with you to dial the phone for you, because you have to push a button two times. I’m reasonably certain it’s this use case which Apple designers and engineers had in mind when setting the default options on the iPhone 4S, with the assumption that the security-conscious people could find and disable the “enable Siri while iPhone is locked” option themselves.

After all, while the iPhone is a popular device for businesses, it’s not the only market Apple sells to. Apple is going to make the choice, every time, to make it’s products easy and delightful to use for its primary customer base.

You know, ordinary people.

My last source of confusion (on this matter, at least) is that people are going after Apple on this at all. Until the iPhone there was never an expectation that phones should either run Flash or be open. A phone is not a personal computer. It’s a phone. All smartphones are just phones. They play by a whole different set of rules. And that set of rules is much longer and stricter than that of a personal computer. No one ever complained that Nokia’s phones weren’t open. Or Motorola’s. Or Samsung’s. Why now is it completely offensive that Apple’s phones should be? Moreover, there are no phones in existence today that can display Flash content because of all the reasons cited by Jobs in his letter. Google’s phones don’t. Neither do Palm’s. So why is everyone going after Apple? It’s just crazy. →

Quick update: About the only thing that has changed since he posted this, I think, is that Google has announced with Adobe that they’re going to get Flash on the Android platform. We’ll have to see how that turns out, but I honestly don’t have high hopes, primarily because touch is not the same as keyboard, monitor and mouse, and I’m not sure Flash content designed for web-on-PC will translate well.

I won’t go into the details here (though this guy can explain it in great detail), but because I very occasionally need features of Adobe Reader, I still keep it installed on my Mac, while I use Preview for all my other PDF needs. I’ve gone so far as to install the Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac for when I use Firefox, just to avoid Adobe Reader. And, really, there’s no point in Adobe Reader for most cases where you just want to be able to view or print PDF files. Doubly so, since Mac OS X lets you print any document to a PDF file as a default feature of the OS.

There are, though, edge cases where having Adobe Reader installed and available are useful. So I have it installed, but I refuse to use their web plugin. Adobe doesn’t care, though, and will periodically, sometimes randomly, and sometimes even without my consent, re-install the plugin. Even though I’ve told it not to. Adobe Updater, I’m looking at you, here.

Sadly, my solution is heavy-handed. I created a launchd task that will forcibly remove the Adobe Reader plugin from /Library/Internet Plugins whenever it’s created. It’s fast, efficient, and works.

And, as soon as I can figure out the new wordpress theme, I’ll post it here in a legible form

UPDATE: Thanks to Lynne and Chad on Twitter for suggesting the Preserve Code Formatting plugin!

And now, the Launchd config. Save this as:
"/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.unnerving.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin.plist"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.unnering.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>rm</string>
    <string>-rf</string>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>QueueDirectories</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>WatchPaths</key>
  <array/>
</dict>
</plist>

The first is “Reopen Last Closed Window.” This is very useful.

The second is “Reopen All Windows From Last Session.” This takes care of my biggest concern regarding session restore.

So I guess maybe a “Reopen Last Closed Tab” option might be about all I could add to that to be truly complete.

I do still look with great envy at Firefox’s extensions system, particularly for Adblock Plus, FlashBlock and NoScript.

I was happy to discover, this evening, that Saft had been updated to support the latest version of Safari. Despite my general revulsion for running InputManager-based hacks (let alone other system behavior modification software, like Haxies, that hook in even deeper to the system), Saft offers a subset of functionality that I simply don’t like doing without. A couple of the features, I feel, really should be integrated into Safari proper.

I’ve already mentioned my strong desire for one of the features, session saving and restoring. Firefox has this nailed, and it’s a built-in feature. I feel strongly enough about it to mention it again here. Hey, Apple, are you listening? I want full session-saving, like what Saft does now, built into Safari.

Another feature Saft gives me is (rudimentary) ad blocking. The various Firefox extensions (namely Adblock Plus) that exist give tremendous power in blocking ads on the web pages you view. I don’t know that Saft will ever approach the power of something like Adblock Plus, but it does a good enough job for the moment.

Here’s a question worth investigating: Is it possible to write an Adblock Plus-like Safari plug-in using the official Internet Plugins API? My understanding is that API is restricted to the content of the page, and doesn’t allow for any behavior modification of Safari itself. That should be enough, right? This is something I’ll have to investigate.

I’d definitely like to stop having to install InputManager-based hacks on my system, though. Safari is, in my opinion, an excellent browser, but the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Firefox does seem to have a mighty green lawn around their extensions garden.