The man who lead the creation of iOS may have found his next calling in an unlikely place: Broadway.
Scott Forstall, a veteran Apple executive who was famously ousted in 2012, has been co-producing a hit musical that’s already doing very well for itself.
Apple Watch, inbound! And now that it is, we’ll take a look at some of the most useful Watch apps available, and just for fun, some of the stinkiest. Plus: the noteworthy differences between the Sport and steel editions; why those “scratch test” videos shouldn’t trouble you; and finally, you’ll never believe what our ol’ pal and ex-Apple exec Scott Forstall is up to now…
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Full show notes ahead!
We’re starting to learn more about what excommunicated Apple executive Scott Forstall is up to after years of flying under the radar. The former head of iOS is an advisor to Snapchat, and although he will likely continue to be involved in the tech scene, his interests are quite eclectic.
The man who was famously kicked out of Apple after numerous disputes that ended in the Apple Maps disaster is now a Broadway producer.
The greatest Apple mystery of the last few years hasn’t been the next iPhone or Apple Watch, but a man named Scott Forstall.
Since getting kicked out of Apple in late 2012, the former head of iOS and friend of Steve Jobs has had absolutely no profile in the tech scene whatsoever. He rarely even gets spotted in public. It’s like he’s fallen off the face of the earth.
Until now.
“It just works.”
Those three words are synonymous with Apple. It’s the slogan Apple fanboys use when trying to convince their Android-loving friends that iOS is a better option. And it was used over and over by Steve Jobs as he unveiled new products at Apple keynotes.
That makes it even more embarrassing for the Cupertino company when things don’t “just work.” Especially when it royally screws things up — as it did with the hideously half-baked iOS 8.0.1 update that rolled out to millions of users Wednesday morning.
Phil Schiller and possibly Scott Forstall are expected to make witness appearances for the next round of the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the two companies return to court in California in late March.
As Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Schiller was the highest-profile witness to take the stand during the first jury trial in the patent case between Apple and Samsung in August 2012.
The City College of New York is investigating its use of former Apple exec Scott Forstall’s photo in advertisements for the school’s student ID card.
Cult of Mac contacted the college Wednesday afternoon about Forstall’s strange appearance on the promotional materials. “I’m not commenting,” said Ellis Simon, City College’s public relations director, who added that he was aware of the situation but needed time to “get all the facts straight” before talking about the apparent mixup.
The big intrigue in the tech world today is why Google bought Nest Labs for $3.2 billion and Apple didn’t.
A lot of the speculation is paranoid: Google wants to track everyone offline as well as online, and Nest’s thermostat and smoke alarms give the Googleplex motion sensors right in peoples’ homes.
But wouldn’t Apple be a more natural fit for the home-automation startup? Nest was co-founded by two former Apple staffers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Fadell was one the fathers of the iPod — a key hardware engineer who led the music player’s development over 17 generations. Rogers was one of Fadell’s top lieutenants.
With great design and easy interfaces, Nest’s combination of hardware and internet software services makes its products very Apple-like. And as home automation is poised to take off (thanks largely to the iPhone and iPad), Apple is surely interested in this potentially huge market.
So why didn’t Apple didn’t pick up the company? Maybe it’s because Jony Ive, Apple’s head designer, was responsible for getting Tony Fadell pushed out of Cupertino.
All’s quiet on the Scott Forstall front — and pretty much has been since the former SVP of iOS was unceremoniously fired from Apple back in October 2012 for refusing to sign an apology for the Apple Maps fiasco.
Well, there’s an update on the horizon for Forstall watchers: and it involves the former Apple exec spending much of the last year traveling to Italy and South Africa, advising a handful of startups, and getting more involved in philanthropy work — mainly focused on education, poverty, and human rights.
Continuing its slow purge of felts, leathers and woodgrains the UI of iOS 7, Apple released an iBooks for iOS update today that finally dismantles the woodgrain shelves championed by former iOS Cheif Scott Forstall, and tosses them in the woodchipper.
The update features the same minimalist UI that Apple has embraced throughout iOS 7 and its other apps, though it doesn’t look like Apple actually added any major new features. Apple also released an update for iTunes U today with an all-new look and feel. Both app updates are available for free in iTunes now.
Source: iTunes
Apple and Samsung are headed back to San Jose on November 12 to clash again over the retrial of their billion-dollar patent lawsuit that Apple won in 2012, and it looks like Scott Forstall might be coming back to testify as a witness for Apple.
The jury originally rewarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages, but after finding some errors in the awards, Judge Lucy Koh has cut $450 million from Apple’s award. Samsung and Apple filed a joint pretrail statement that listed the potential witnesses that might be called and both Scott Forstall and Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller appeared on the list after both were witnesses at the orignal trial, before Forstall was fired.
In just a few short days, everyone’s iPhone is going to look a hell of a lot different now that Scott Forstall’s felt and wood grain reign is coming to an end. To celebrate rise of Sir Jony Ive’s flat and parallax world, GadgetLove created one of the most incredible iOS 6 vs iOS 7 comparison GIFs we’ve ever seen. The best part is staring at Forstall’s shrinking smile as Jony’s designer scowl quickly morphs in and out.
Source: Gadget Love
Apple has acquired Locationary, a small Canadian startup that crowdsources location data, according to a report from AllThingsD. Apple has refused to comment on its plans for the company, but the acquisition will undoubtedly help improve Apple’s widely criticized Maps service.
Steve Jobs used to take care of Apple’s biggest product unveilings prior to his passing in 2011, and since then, they’ve been shared around among the top company executives. Scott Forstall handled everything iOS, but his departure from Cupertino last year left the door open for someone else.
At WWDC on Monday, Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, took to the stage to present iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and he’s now being hailed the perfect frontman for Apple, with developers, fans, and even investors impressed by his pitch.
Passbook’s virtual ticket-shredder was one of the little touches in iOS 6 that wreaked of ugly skeuomorphisism. Now that Jony Ive has declared war against all of Scott Forstall’s tacky skeuomorphic UI elements, the Passbook ticket-shredder is now a thing of the past.
When you delete a card in Passbook now it just zaps away into the digital ether, rather than sending your virtual card through a virtual paper shredder that virtually obliviates your ticket so you know it’s deleted and no one can rummage through your virtual trash and piece together all the shreddings to steal your identity.
Here’s a GIF of the new iOS 7 animation in action:
Ever since Tim Cook ousted Scott Forstall last year, the Apple CEO has preached a lot about how collaboration within Apple is one of the most important aspects of the company’s culture.
Speaking at a reunion for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Tim Cook outlined what kind of attributes he looks for in employees and what it takes to be a great collaborator.
Here’s what Cook had to say about collaboration:
There’s been a lot of hullyboo about skeuomorphism in the Mac and iOS community right now. Ever since the debut of iOS, Apple’s software has become increasingly ornamented with unnecessary textures and details that many people consider tacky, such as the fake Corinthian leather in Calendar or the green felt background in Game Center. This style of design is called skeuomorphism, and outed ex-Apple VP Scott Forstall was one of Cupertino’s main proponent for its wide spread use in iOS and OS X.
All signs point to Jonny Ive getting away with a lot of skeuomorphic details in iOS 7, adopting instead a more modern, ‘flat’ design.
The way people talk, though, it’s like skeuomorphism is a unique problem of the digital age. It’s not. In fact, the ancient Greeks had a problem with skeuomorphism too. So before you revile Scott Forstall for using it too much, keep in mind, it’s a design technique as old as civilization.
Six months after taking responsibility of software design, Jony Ive is hard at work overhauling Apple’s upcoming iOS 7 operating system. And according to sources for Bloomberg, the changes he is making are so significant that they run the risk of delaying the update’s release.
Alan Kay is a bit of a legend at Apple. A computing pioneer, Alan Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC led Steve Jobs to commercialize the concept of a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, and Alan Kay’s philosophy that “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” is one of Apple’s core principles.
But Kay doesn’t think much of Apple these days, and in fact, seems to think the company has always been broken.
John Browett, who spent nine months as Apple’s senior vice president of retail before being ousted alongside Scott Forstall last October, has admitted that he “just didn’t fit” in with the way Apple ran its business. Browett still feels Apple is a fantastic company and says he loved working there, but he told The Independent that he was “rejected for fit rather than competency.”
I’ve never given much thought to Apple’s FaceTime icon, but it really doesn’t make any sense. Like seriously, what is the trapezoid on the right? It can’t be the lens because there’s a lens in the box. Is that the back facing camera and the triangle trapezoid is the front camera?
It’s supposed to be an old video camera glyph with the lens superimposed, but it’s so redundant that it still doesn’t make any sense for FaceTiming purposes.
The FaceTime icon should probably look something like this instead:
Apple Maps has been the butt of an exhausting number of bad jokes. People in Australia have been stranded in the outback thanks to Scott Forstall’s mishap.
For most of us, glitches in Apple Maps are just a minor inconvenience and you can just switch over to Google Maps when you have a problem. But for one restaurant in Portland, Oregon, Apple Maps has cost them about $50,000 worth of business since it was released in September.
File under: Rampant Speculation. Apple Maps is pretty bad compared to Google Maps, and they need to get it fixed in a hurry, by either chaining their engineers to their desks, or buying another company with enough talent to fix Scott Forstall’s biggest snafu.
There was a ridiculous rumor last month that Apple might acquire TomTom to fix Maps, and now the web has sprouted another crazy rumor that Apple might acquire a different mapping company to fix Maps: Waze.
2012 was a very different year for Apple. For starters, it was Tim Cook’s first year as CEO. While much of Apple has remained the same, Cook has definitely shown that he is a different type of leader than his predecessor. Apple is evolving into something new.
Between four press events and the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple announced an unprecedented slew of new products in 2012. Every single major product was refreshed to some extent, which leaves even more speculation as to what Apple has up its sleeve for 2013.
There have been key executive firings and hirings, heated lawsuits, and scandals. In the midst of everything, Apple managed to become the most valuable company on earth.
While there are many big Apple moments from this past year, we’ve gathered what we think are the 10 most notable stories. Here they are:
from Vimeo.
So you wanna be the next Jony Ive and make beautiful and intuitive products that are just like Apple’s? Good for you. But figuring out how to replicate Apple’s design philosophies isn’t all that easy – look at RIM.
To help you out, Online MBA created this two minute video that boils down all of Jony and Steve’s design insights into five bite-sized nuggets. Maybe you won’t invent the next iPhone but if you follow their advice it should at least prevent you from becoming the next Scott Forstall.
