My Playground of Thought

• Rich-Text APIs: If Apple could offer a UIKit component that acted like the Pages document editor, it would kickstart a whole new era of productivity iPad apps. At the moment, creating a rich-text editor is really, really, hard. The only real option is to use an embedded Webkit view with a <textarea>, but that is clunky and feature-limited.
• Siri APIs: Third-party Siri integration would be fantastic; "Siri, are there any new films in my Netflix queue?" is just the start.
• Simpler iCloud APIs: The iCloud APIs are powerful, but (seemingly unnecessarily) complex. UIDocument is a great class, but the necessary side-work of handling the filesystem (using setUbiquitous... etc) is very involved and generally confusing. Having separate spaces for local and iCloud-managed storage is awkward. A developer should be able to make a new file at a URL and change one file attribute to make it ubiquitous.
• Lower-level Core Animation APIs: Developers should be able to access the more-advanced Core Animation APIs, to create even more beautiful apps. The 'filters' property on a CALayer should actually work, for instance. The number of Core Image filters could also be extended, to more closely match OSX. Moreover, access to CA3DMeshTransform would allow for developers to do cool effects like the "trashcan slurp" seen in the Mail app on iPhone.

The Samuel L. Jackson spot was aired today during ESPN’s Sportcenter and the Zooey Deschanel spot was aired in a couple of different slots, including this evening on Fox. The videos are embedded back-to-back below. The spots have appeared with a variety of logos appended, with the carriers being touted independent of the content.

It is weird for Apple to use celebrities in their commercials. Usually their adverts focus on the products; notably, the original set of Siri ads chopped the actors forehead off.

Walt Mossberg and I could not be more thrilled to announce that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will be the opening-night speaker at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

Instead, he suggests the much-anticipated television could be called “iPanel” to reflect its potential as a hub for gaming, media and more (and likely to avoid a costly naming rights deal with a U.K. television network), and more importantly it could arrive before the year is out.