Apple’s Ping – Great new spam tool!
Well done, Apple. Not only does Ping not add anything of use to the social space other than providing you a great new way to sell new music, but the first of your featured artists’ profiles on which I happen to click — Yo-Yo Ma — gives me this perfect example of broken social. Sure, [...]
Thoughts on Apple ‘Antennagate’ Press Conference: Apple throws Blackberry, Nokia, Samsung under bus
AppleInsider | RIM, Nokia respond to Apples “Antennagate” press conference Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has [...]
Rumors spike about CDMA iPhone again — Recommend holding of all horses, people
Pegatron lands Acer notebook orders for 2011 Even the rumor of a CDMA phone in 2010 is going to piss people off. Q4 isn’t that far away, and with all the fervor over iPhone 4 sales this week — and all those freshly-minted 2-year AT&T contracts — that there’s even a remote chance for a [...]
Jobs outlines case against Flash on mobile, now we wait for reciprocal hand-wringing
Thoughts on Flash From Jobs missive on Flash today: Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Of course, Adobe is going to make a great product for authoring in HTML5 and so on, because a great-big-non-trivial-part-of-the-business exists to do [...]
The iPad Review
In which I wax on most everything but books on the device. It’s been over two weeks that the iPad has been on the market in the US. I’m writing this post on the iPad, in fact, in a moving car on the way to Canyonville, Oregon for a lovely weekend at the casino with [...]
iPad’s really are charging — they’re just trying to fool you
iPad Not Charging? Not Really. Yeah, I didn’t get bit by this myself, but it’s a big deal. It amounts to a smack on the wrists for Apple UX people who didn’t button this issue up tight pre-launch, but it’s something that we should all remember. From RWW: Generally speaking, RTFM is not enough. Thinking through [...]
Pure art in the iPad – Teardown pics from iFixit
iPad Teardown – iFixit I don’t have my iPad yet so I’m doing my very best to reserve judgement on just how it’s going to change things. But based on iFixit’s teardown, I think I can safely say that there is an equal amount of engineering inside this thing as there is pure art.
The Google Phone Cometh
Technology blog Techcrunch.com has long held the banner that there will one day come a “Google Phone” — a phone branded by Google itself, bearing the Android operating system, not offered in partnership with a wireless provider. This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, [...]
Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S.
From NPD this morning: According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. [...]
Engadget on the HTC Hero
I haven’t seen the Hero, and likely won’t get my hands on it for some time now. But judging by the videos in Joshua Topolsky’s review that hit today, I’m not in a hurry. And neither, as it would appear, is Flash: So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone [...]
webOS 1.1 out for the Pre, Breaks Apple’s break of webOS 1.0 break of iTunes device authentication lock… got it?
The Official Palm Blog: Palm webOS 1.1 enhances support for enterprise — and beyond And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed. Oh, and [...]
iTunes 8.2.1 Breaks Palm Pre Sync
Apple Blocks Palm Pre iTunes Syncing | PreCentral.net No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones [...]
Why the iPhone Succeeds as a Platform
This, right here, is why the iPhone has succeeded as a platform in the ridiculously crowded handset space. From MacRumors: Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by [...]
Apple WWDC Keynote, iPhone3G, and Snow Leopard
Steve Jobs can do what he damn well pleases, thank you very much. If he — and team Apple — demonstrated anything in yesterday’s WWDC Keynote address, it’s that. Because frankly, they took their stage time yesterday to demonstrate a whole lot of old news, and they buried the hidden gems. WWDC Keynote Snooze Part [...]
Damon Wright Apple Switch Video Rears its Ugly Head
“My name is Damon Wright, and I’m a business writer.” That’s true. My name is Damon. It’s my middle name, used six years ago the hide my participation in the Apple campaign from my then-day-job. I had thought that I’d exhausted my 32 weeks of fame, but someone has just posted all the old “Switch” [...]
Apple.com: Robert Lang profile “The Art and Science of Paper Folding”
My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar [...]
Edward Tufte on iPhone Human Interface Design
Interface Design and the iPhone I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices. It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart [...]
Rarity: Apple Employee Talks!
Jens Alfke writes a great insider post on his decision to leave Apple and move into life as an independent developer. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that gets to me is this: It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade [...]
Apple Reduces iTunes+ Prices, Brings Parity to DRM’d Tracks
Today, the WSJ reports that Apple has reduced prices on all their DRM-free tracks to $.99, making the per-track price equal to that of tracks with DRM throughout the store. In addition, they have launched a wide new selection of indie artists and labels under the iTunes+ moniker, making Apple the new champ in volume [...]
Radiohead Retraction
Wow. Did I ever misjudge this band. I hereby take it back — almost everything I said about them a few weeks back.If you’re not following the Radiohead saga, several weeks ago, the band made news when they announced they would not sell their new album on iTunes because the store refuses to sell albums [...]
New iPod Classic Busts Apple’s Product Introduction Scheme
For years, Apple’s made waves by wholly replacing successful products with radical revisions that truly evolve the product line. Today’s “Classic” announcement is an interesting departure. I’d fully expected the company to discontinue the current larger iPod with Video in favor of an iPhone-form factor phoneless iPod. They did introduce the phoneless iPod, the iPod [...]
Using Gmail on the Apple iPhone Solution — When Good Intentions Go Bad
By all accounts I can find, Apple has sold roughly a million iPhones since it launched on June 29. That makes a million people setting up the new phones in the US alone, and what is likely a healthy percentage using the Gmail email service. Personally, I have about six Gmail accounts including those through [...]
iPhone Debuts — In My Pocket
I was one of those people. I was one of the who-knows-how-many standing in line at the Apple Store for a brand new iPhone. And, I did it on vacation in Buffalo, NY, meaning I got it a full three hours before all my peeps in Portland. Was it worth it? Now that I’ve had [...]
