The question has been, how do they prevent people from just grabbing products off the shelf, pretending to scan the barcode, and walking out the door with stolen goods? After asking a few of the retail employees at my local store, and thinking about it for a while, I think I have an answer.

They don't.

The difference between the old way (grab something off the shelf, find a blue-shirt who doesn't have 10 people waiting to talk to them, and pay) and the new way (grab something off the shelf, do some iPhone shenanigans, and pay) isn't much. What was stopping people from grabbing things off the shelf and walking out before EasyPay? If your Apple store is anything like mine, it's like this pretty much all the time:

iPad crowd at Apple Store by niallkennedy, on Flickr.

Someone could easily walk in, grab an iPhone case and walk out without being harassed or questioned. As best I can tell, EasyPay changes nothing about that. It simply makes it easier to pay for a product, rather than put it down and walk out because you can't find someone who will take your money.

One last point I want to make: This only works for items on shelves. You can't grab an iPad or a MacBook Air and walk out; those are pretty well protected by Apple staff. These items tend to be on the less expensive side, but not entirely; at my local store, the $500 Time Capsule sits right on the shelf, and presumably works with EasyPay.

• Windows 8 will run on both ARM and Intel
• Both Metro and the "classic" Windows desktop will run on both architectures
• There will not be a "compatibility" layer for ARM, akin to the Mac's Rosetta. Apps compiled for Intel will need to be rebuilt for ARM.

To me, this looks like a move to prop up Intel against a smaller, lighter, more power efficient competitor in a new market.

Here's why. A consumer walks into a store, wanting to buy the latest Windows 8 tablet. There's two models available, the ARM model and the Intel model. They look the same, they run the same OS with the same features, and if you plug a mouse and keyboard in you'll get the same old familiar Windows desktop. But, the ARM model has, let's say 10 hours of battery life, and the Intel has maybe 7. (These are fake numbers based on the idea of ARM power management being way better than Intel, by the way. Please don't write letters.)

However, if you've been using Windows for a long time, which is likely if you're buying a Windows tablet, you probably have a bunch of Windows software kicking around. Old software, most likely. The ARM tablet might run it, if you upgrade to the latest version and they've bothered to build an ARM version (which as John Gruber points out, is not a trivial thing to do). The Intel tablet will run it. Likely, all of it, back to your ancient copy of Photoshop 3 or whatever. If it runs on Windows 7, it will probably run on Windows 8 Intel tablets.

If there was an ARM compatibility layer, Intel tablets would be way behind. It seems to me like Microsoft is making moves to keep Intel on a level playing field in the tablet space.

Today, Steve Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. It's not a surprise, he hasn't really been running things day to day for almost a year now. Tim Cook is completely qualified to run the company and continue its incredible, unprecedented streak of success. And Steve will still be there, as the Chairman of the Board, and will still be involved, most likely at a similar level as he has been over the last 8 months. (For example, I would not be all that shocked to see him walk out on the stage to announce the iPhone 5.)

But that's not what this post is about. This post, rather selfishly, is about me. If you're looking for posts about Steve Jobs and his legacy and so on, oh there are so many good ones that have been written in the last 7 hours. This is my reaction.

My dad is my first (and probably greatest) hero. He's been gone for ten years now, lost to brain cancer in late 2001. With the baby on the way, he's been in my mind a lot lately. I had a long conversation with my mom about him recently, about what makes a good father of course, but also about how he would have felt about my life and my business. He's the one who gave me my entrepreneurial streak, which he had himself but never managed to make it work. So far, I have, and the thought that I'm carrying on that torch gets me through the tougher times.

My uncle is my next hero. He's the one who got me started in programming, gave me my first shot, working for him when I was just a young teenager, fixing bugs in Access 2.0 databases for his consulting company. He's currently very sick, fighting a rare and dangerous disease called Wegener's granulomatosis. I think about him every day.

My third hero is Jimmy Buffett. Go ahead and laugh, I've gotten that reaction before. His music means a lot to me though. It drove me out of Connecticut and into Florida. It makes me happy, inspires me to create, follow my heart, and design and live the life I want to live. He is, fortunately for me, still going strong and making new music, and one of my biggest hopes in life is that one day I'll get to meet him and thank him for the inspiration, even though I'm sure he gets it all the time.

And finally, of course, there's Steve Jobs. I've built my business, my career and a vast portion of my life around the products he's created. He's called a visionary quite often, and he is, but he's also the guy who drives the vision and makes it actually happen. What can you say about a person like that?

You'll see a lot of inspirational quotes from Steve. Here's my favorite from his 2005 Stanford speech: "[H]ave the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

One of my heroes stepped back today. But there he is, telling me and anyone else who cares to listen: have courage, follow your heart, follow your intuition. He took a lot of risks in his career; smart, well thought out risks, but risks just the same, and he had the courage to do it because he knew, in his heart and in his gut, that it was the right thing to do. It's time for me to follow that advice. It's time for me to build on what I've already done, and have the courage to follow my heart and become what I truly want to become.

My heroes are fading away. That just means it's time for me to step up, take their place, and try to be a hero for someone else.

Biggest change lately, Nicole and I are expecting our first baby in late November. It's a girl, and her name is Madison Debi. Expect many pictures when she finally arrives.

Second biggest change is I've joined forces with Apparent Software and I'm working on the next version of their amazing social network aggregator app, Socialite. This doesn't mean my Pocket Sevens software is going anywhere though! I have some cool things planned for Conspire soon, and some new stuff in the future, so stay tuned.

Lion:
More of the same. I think that Steve will go through the major features again and hopefully deliver a true beta to replace the developer previews we've been working with. I expect this to be the shortest part of the keynote, besides the standard big number updates. There was some speculation (I think it was Marco on the Build and Analyze podcast) about a defense against malware in the form of an "Only install apps from the app store" switch somewhere. I think it's a cool idea, but in practice it strikes me as a lot harder than it looks. I'd like to see it but I'm not holding my breath.

iOS 5:
All the usual better faster smarter stuff, of course. Updates that will take advantage of the multicore A5 in the iPad 2. Maybe even garbage collection for iPad 2 only apps (and most likely whatever the next version of the iPhone turns out to be, of course). I think a new notification scheme is nearly a lock in iOS 5, they have to know it's a major frustration for users right now. Tight twitter integration is all the rage in the rumor mill right now, and I can see that too. I also think we will get a developer preview or a true beta on the day of, and a vague launch date of "September".

On the more speculative side, I would love to see a deal with Nuance announced. If it happens, I think it will be either an exclusive license, or they will announce they're attempting to outright acquire the whole company. Presented as a new framework (VoiceKit?) developers will have access to speech recognition easily in all apps. I'd also like to see Siri's natural language technology integrated as a framework (LanguageKit?) but I feel like this is a lot harder. Apple bought Siri over a year ago however, and this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce it into the OS. The possibilities for those two frameworks working together would be endless. Lastly, and this is 100% pipe dream, but I'd like to see more developer access to app icons from running code. Something inspired by Windows Phone 7's live tiles. Might be cool.

iCloud:
iCloud is the great unknown of course for the keynote. I think an online music locker is a given. I expect automatic sync to all devices, including Macs, iPads and iPhones, and streaming to AppleTVs. The real meat though will be live file and state syncing to all devices. Developers will be able to enable their apps to store information on the iCloud service and access it live from any device, and also store the information locally and resync it easily when the device comes back online. I see two possible ways to handle this: straight file access, which I think is the easiest and most likely, and some kind of remote Core Data access, which i'm sure is harder but would be really cool, and probably would include the file access as well anyway. MobileMe would be rolled into iCloud, everyone with an Apple ID would get some amount of free storage, current MobileMe subscribers would be rolled into an iCloud Plus (or whatever) subscription for $99/yr. Frameworks for developers available today with iOS 5 and Lion betas, test sandbox available now, real service goes live in September with the expected iOS 5 launch.

These predictions are colored by what I'd really like to see, of course. However I also think it's a natural move for Apple to be making. We all have these devices, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and I know one of my biggest frustrations is not being able to move seamlessly between them. My iPad only syncs with my MacBook Pro, where all my music is. I can't sync with my Air, I'd lose it all. That's just silly. If I've listened to a podcast on my iPhone while I was out, iTunes on my Mac should know and mark it as played. Or if I've paused it in the middle, it should know where I stopped and let me continue it on my AppleTV.

For the first time in a long time, Apple is updating all it's major software platforms at once. They have a huge chance here to drive home the idea of complete integration between all devices with an Apple logo on the back. They can take the "everything in the cloud" concept that Google has pioneered, and make the experience completely seamless. I think that's what this keynote, and this WWDC, will be about; linking all of your devices together so that you always have access to everything you have, wherever you are in the world.

I love the idea. But I can forsee a problem, and it's not the common "US Govt will shut it down eventually" one, although that may come up. The problem as I see it is one of limited popularity.

Here's a screenshot of the current official Bitcoin client: 

This is what you get when you download the client and run it for the first time. Any idea what to do now? You could "Send Coins", if you had any to send. Here's the interface for that:

Not the prettiest, but straightforward I guess. Paste the address in, then the amount, click send. Done.

But how do you get bitcoins to send around? I'm just some guy who just heard about this new internet currency called Bitcoins, and I want to get some so that I can spend them. There's a "Generate" menu option that claims to start generating, but nothing else seems to happen. (In reality, it's doing a make-work procedure on your computer that may grant you some amount of coins if your CPU, or much more likely GPU, happens to be the one that solves the problem. Or something like that.)

So, next step: Google. First result is Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange service. Great! Sign up for an account, easy enough. Fund the account, more trouble. There's a few options for using some other services as another go-between, all of which remind me, unsurprisingly, of trying to fund an online poker account just before the crackdown. There's no way to punch in a credit card number, or a Paypal account, and get bitcoins.

This leads us to the real problem. Bitcoin is for nerds. It was a nerdy concept, written by nerds in a nerdy way. There's nothing user focused, anywhere in the process. Just the concept of sending money to someone by using a long string of meaningless characters: great for anonymity, but not so great if I want to send a couple BTC to my buddy for last night's bar tab.

I want Bitcoin to succeed. There's a lot of good stuff built in, and it's a great foundation to build on. But right now, it's very, well, linux-y. It needs simplification and a much lower barrier to entry. Otherwise, it's going to hit a plateau and won't make it to the widespread acceptance that it could achieve.

Here's what I'd like to see:
• A way to translate email addresses to bitcoin addresses, so I can send money to steve@gmail.com instead of 2LZ4pQFWhatever.
• A simple way to buy bitcoins. Obviously. A one-stop solution should be available.
• A better client. All the details are already in the current client, but it needs better presentation badly. Find a UX designer who will work for Bitcoins.
• A simple way to accept Bitcoins at POS, for real goods. If people tie some money up in Bitcoins, they're going to want a way to buy a hot dog, or a video game, or an iPhone with them. Right now, it's a hack at best.
• A simple way to integrate Bitcoins into standard web shopping carts. For convinience.

I think it can be done. But people who can make the above things happen need to get involved now, while the platform is still young and growing. I'm willing to help however I can. I'm also willing to take on freelance work in Bitcoins. It's the only other way I can think of to get Bitcoins in my wallet!