John Brownlee - page 126

The weird revelations coming from the AP’s bizarrely “purchased” early copy of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio continue. Here’s another one: he hates Bill Gates!

Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs is due out on Monday, but already a sad revelation from the book has come to light: Steve Jobs delayed the first operation on his pancreatic cancer back in 2004, ignoring the urgent pleas of his wife, friends and colleagues.

On May 4th 2012, Marvel is scheduled to culminate its last four years of superhero movies with The Avengers, the Joss Whedon helmed ensemble super hero movie starring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Chris Helmsworth as Thor and Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.

But did you know that parts of The Avengers were shot on an iPhone? Yup. Apple Fans Assemble!

Ever since Apple started them in 2008, Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk World Tours have been wildly popular with developers… little mini-WWDC’s that travel the globe where Apple reaches out to devs, answers questions and facilitates in networking with all the app makers who make iOS great.

Hot on the heels of iOS 5’s release, no surprise, then, that Apple’s launching another one. The iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011 will be held across Europe, Asia and America starting next month and continue until January in the following cities: Berlin, London, Rome, Beijing, Seoul, Sao Paolo, New York City, Seattle, and Austin, Texas.

That’s a pretty good line up of cities, making it likely a Tech Talk will be within driving distance from most devs. Even better is the price: unlike the $1599 ticket required to attend WWDC, the Tech Talks are free.

Register today here.

Thought the iPhone 4S’s new camera is impressive, to say the least, it does share one issue with any other camera phone or pocket digicam: the tiny sensor means it simply can’t deep focus, making the background artistically blurry while the subject is kept crystal sharp.

If you want shallow depth-of-field like a SLR while using your iPhone, consider giving Big Lens a try. It will allow you to give your iPhone photos a super depth of field, just like those fancy pants pros use.

Siri’s an amazing advancement in the way that we interact with out iPhones, but it doesn’t exactly do everything you want it to do out of the box. In fact, three conspicuous abilities absent from Siri’s feature set include the ability to make a Facebook status update, send a message to Google+ or even tweet… doubly absurd given iOS 5’s native Twitter integration.

Don’t worry, though. It’s easy enough to hack any iPhone 4S to Tweet, Facebook or Google+ through Siri. Here’s how.

With yesterdays memorial ceremony to Steve Jobs comes some semblance of closure, and so it is back to business. This morning, Apple removed the Steve Jobs in memoriam from its official home page, with the only mention now made to Apple’s charismatic and iconic co-founder being a link at the bottom of the page to Apple’s now domain, rememberingstevejobs.com, which collates all of the messages Cupertino received from grieving Apple fans around the world after Steve’s death two weeks ago.

Coming up on 15 years ago, I tied my first tie with the help of a tiny little Geocities web page, and if I had to pinpoint one moment when I first realized the true extent of the ocean of digital information at my finger tips, it would be that one.

I wonder if TieSight will prove to be an identical sort of watershed moment for some other pimply teenager headed out on his first ‘fancy’ date… not for the web, but for the App Internet. It’s just that wonderful.

I think Apple fans watching the brawl between Cupertino and Samsung can sometimes just be confounded by what is going on. Why is Samsung taking a risk of alienating its biggest manufacturing customer just to release some crummy iPhone knockoffs? Madness, right?

Wrong. While not exactly ethical, Samsung is playing it smart: the Korean electronics giant knows that the potential margins on selling smartphones dwarf the margins on any parts it sells Apple. But the proof is in the pudding, so check this out: Samsung actually shipped more smartphones last quarter than Apple did.

CBS Helicopter and Cnet captured some incredible aerial footage of Cupertino HQ’s memorial to Steve Jobs, where both Norah Jones and Coldplay performed for an audience of tens of thousands of employees around the world. Look at the size of the family that Steve built.

Apple has promised that iTunes Match will launch for US customers by the end of the month, and now they are starting to roll out preparations for it to users of iOS 5, namely by turning on the iTunes Match setting under the ‘Music’ settings pane for both developers and us plebs.

Of course, for regular users, this won’t mean much: Apple has yet to allow normal users to pay the $24.99 and sign-up for iTunes Match. In fact, iTunes Match isn’t even baked into iTunes 10.5, with the functionality shuffled over to the 10.5.1 Beta instead.

So iTunes Match is coming, probably within the next week or so. Of course, whether it is ready for prime time is a very different question, as issues with the service abound for developers. In fact, internally, most of our writers have not been able to get our libraries to dependably sync with iTunes Match. The launch of iCloud might have gone well, but expect a bumpy ride when iTunes Match goes live.

[via RazorianFly]

According to reports on Twitter, Apple’s Steve Jobs memorial event is well underway, and it’s already looking like a touching tribute to a great man by the company he built.

A tweet by Rodger Lizaola says ex-Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore has already arrived.

Meanwhile, Nora Jones is reportedly playing a tribute song in memory of Steve Jobs that Kevin Rochowski says “really sets the right tone.” The song she played was Forever Young.

Coldplay also performed, according to Twitter user Larley.

Tyler Stone tweeted: “Wonderful speech by Tim [Cook]. Wonderful speech by Bill Campbell. Wonderful performance by Norah Jones. This really helps bring closure.”

We’ll be updating this post as we get more.

Apple Stores around the country are tastefully drawing white curtains across their windows and observing the life of co-founder Steve Jobs streamed live from Apple HQ. We’re trying to get insider reports on what will be going on inside, stay tuned.

[image via ohwaititsmango]

Wow, big news! The iPhone 4S is officially coming to a fourth American network in the coming weeks!

Bad news for the millions of T-Mobile customers using their jailbroken iPhones on the fourth-largest American wireless network, though: the iPhone 4S is coming to a network you’ve probably never heard of.

It’s always said that Steve Jobs lived and breathed for Apple, up until the very day he died, but it’s easy to discount how literally true that seemingly trite adage actually was. A new anecdote from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son puts Steve’s dedication to his company in stark relief, proving that Jobs was working on Apple’s next product up until the day before he died.

This isn’t the best way of showing the speed increases that come along with the iPhone 4S, but it is one of the ways that the iPhone 4S’ faster A5 chip will immediately be felt: in significantly shorter app launch times.

In case you needed proof that dropping your iPhone 4S face down on the concrete from six feet up without a case was a bad idea.

[via iClarified]

Here’s a great tip posted up by the guys over at AppAdvice: if you give Siri a voice command and it doesn’t quite get it right, you can just tap in the text of Siri’s transcription and edit the text. Perfect for the people who find that Siri just can’t stop telling them about Linda.

Hey, what a shock! The weak link in Apple’s iPhone 4S launch, for the fifth year running? AT&T? Reports abound on Twitter and in the blogosphere that AT&T’s servers are being hammered, preventing users from activating their devices. During this time, the iPhone 4S will return a message saying that “It may take up to 3 minutes to activate your iPhone”… a message which displays for over half an hour in some cases, then falls over.

We’re not seeing similar reports about Verizon or Sprint. Anyone having problems with those two carriers in activating their iPhone 4S? Let us know.

[image via iDownloadBlog]

Check out the amazing difference the iPhone 4S’ new camera makes compared to the iPhone 4’s. Not only are the colors richer and more vibrant, the brights brighter and the darks darker, but the image stabilization is just out of this world. If you rely on your iPhone’s camera a lot, this might be more important than Siri.

[via AppAdvice]

How long are the lines for the iPhone 4S outside of Apple’s iconic 5th Avenue Store? Not that long, actually… well, comparatively. They stretch around the block to FAO Schwartz, but they are nothing compared to the iPad 2’s launch lines: 75% shorter, in fact, TUAW estimates. Then again, the iPad 2 couldn’t be pre-ordered in nearly the abundance of the iPhone 4S: most of the people in line this morning are either there because they want to be, or there because they put off ordering one online for too long.

Apple and Samsung have been trading punches in courts around the globe, with Cupertino claiming that Samsung has ripped off almost every conceivable aspect of their iPhone and iPad intellectual property. Apple has made a strong case, even getting a sales injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, but it may be Samsung’s own lawyers who just delivered the K.O… to their own jaw.

How? Reuters is reporting that Samsung’s own lawyers told a US District judge that they couldn’t tell the difference between an iPad and a Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Let’s put Antennagate behind us: the new iPhone 4S finally eliminates Death Grip issues once and for all, at least according to iSpazio. Having moved over to a dual antenna design, the iPhone 4S shouldn’t plague anyone with dropped calls just because you “held it the wrong way.”

Looking at our iPhone 4S, it does seem like attenuation has drastically been improved with the new model. What about you? Can you get your iPhone 4S to drop its signal just by holding it the wrong way? Let us know in the comments.

Siri has a problem with broad, comical foreign accents.

Not that the guy in the video has one, you understand. He’s just a non-native speaker.

Our fearless Cult head Leander, on the other hand, speaks exclusively in Cockney rhyming slang, and he’s always going on about how he wants to have a butcher’s down at Tottenham Court Road to stick his hampton in some Berkeley Hunt. How’s Siri going to deal with that, I wonder?

In light of that, something tells me Leander’s iPhone 4S review (coming later today!) isn’t exactly going to be glowing.

Still, Siri’s a work in progress, and Apple’s not going to rest until it can talk to everyone.

[via 9to5Mac]