John Brownlee - page 98

Steve Jobs dressing up as Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rally Apple’s troops is one of the weirdest bits of ephemera about Apple history.

The internal video — which followed Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial and was meant to motivate Apple’s international sales force — features Jobs doing a bizarre caricature of the beloved four-term president that borrowed just as much from FDR’s real mannerisms as it did from Burgess Meredith’s interpretation of the Penguin.

How the heck did something this weird come about?

Would you like to share your monthly data allotment between you and your partner, or your iPhone and your iPad? AT&T and Verizon have been hemming and hawing about shared data plans since 2011, but recent comments by Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s mobile business, seemingly indicate that for Ma Bell’s customers, shared data plans may be coming very soon indeed.

Tony Stark — otherwise known as the Invincible Iron Man, as seen in this weekend’s mega blockbuster hit The Avengers — is probably the superhero mentioned most often in the same breath as Apple. Apple’s LiquidMetal is often called Tony Stark stuff, and Iron Man’s perfect amalgam of advanced tech and cool style is rightly compared to Apple’s own design ethos.

That’s why we love this awesome video by Matt’s Macintosh, showing Tony Stark “designing” his Iron Man armor using StarkPaint on a 1984 Starkintosh… which just happens to look pretty much identical to a vintage 1984 Macintosh.

Source: YouTube
Thanks: Thomas F.!

It hasn’t been a good year for Mac security so far, at least PR-wise, and it’s about to get a lot uglier: an Apple programmer forgot to turn off a debug switch in OS X 10.7.3’s security settings before the update was distributed to the public.

The result? If you’re running OS X 10.7.3, your login password might be stored in plain text on an unencrypted, easily accessed section of your hard drive.

Greenpeace likes to target Apple every year or so to keep them environmentally honest, and lately, the environmental access group has been going after Apple’s giant data supercenter in Maiden, North Carolina, claiming that it helps make iCloud one of the dirtiest things on the planet.

What Greenpeace is upset about is how much of the data center’s power comes from non-renewable resources, particularly coal. And they don’t think that Apple’s going far enough with its plans for solar energy plans.

Now the protests are getting real, with seven Greenpeace activists blocking train tracks used by Duke Energy and Apple use to ship coal.

The screenshot above might look like the typical UI mess of an Android phone, but it’s actually an iOS reflex game called Slide To Unlock, in which the only goal of the game is to eponymously unlock slider after slider in all directions — up, down, left and right — but not through multiple dimensions, like time and space. It’s like a lock screen Simon.

Yesterday, Samsung announced their new Galaxy S III smartphone, a 4.8-inch monstrosity that doesn’t look a thing like an iPhone, but of course rips off Apple in many other particulars.

But let’s not pay attention to that. Instead, let’s ask ourselves what we can glean from the first Samsung Galaxy S III ad, especially when comparing it to a thirty-second iPhone 4S commercial.

When Apple first released iPhoto for iOS, it quickly became clear that the new app was Apple’s first app to distance itself from Google’s Maps API in favor of OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative online project aimed at making a free and complete map of the world. When you checked in iPhoto where a photo had been taken, you were seeing maps built upon the foundation of OSM. The only problem? Apple wasn’t bothering to credit them.

Now with the latest update to iPhoto, Cupertino’s decided to do the right thing. OpenStreetMap is credited in the app’s acknowledgement section.

What you’re seeing above are Steve Jobs’s speech notes that he brought with him on January 9, 2007 when he announced the original iPhone, and they are in many ways a telling encapsulation of the man himself. Jobs was a natural showman who needed only the barest outline to announce the changing of the world, and his notes here are so simple that they could have been scrawled on the back of a napkin, but Jobs was also a perfectionist: he had them expertly type set, printed out and bound.

Amazing. Also, if you’re wondering what those three devices are below the notes on Steve’s podium, they’re actually iPhones with special attachments so they can do video on the big screen behind him. Steve would only use one; the others were probably backups.

Source: Wahaha
Via: Reddit
Image: Flickr

Text editing on iOS isn’t bad, but it’s definitely fiddly. Make an error or want to delete some words and unless you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard, you have to take your hands off the keyboard, tap the words you want to select or where you want to insert your cursor, adjust the boxes manually and more. A pain.

YouTube user Daniel Chase Hooper had a better ideas, as illustrated in this video concept below. What if to edit text, your hands never had to leave the keyboard area on the iPad? To move the cursor, you swipe in the keyboard area left, right, up or down. To select a bunch of text at once, you swipe in the keyboard area while holding down shift.

As a bunch of professional underpants bloggers, the editorial bullpen at Cult of Mac drinks a lot of beer. Seriously. When you’re taking your first sip of coffee in the morning and pouring your cornflakes, we’re already a six pack up on you, and by the time at the end of the day when the last words come trembling off our fingers, that’s about the same time the DTs are setting in. In fact, Cult of Mac’s San Francisco headquarters isn’t even a proper office, but rather a skunky, wobbling skyscraper made up entirely of our empties. You might have seen it towering on the horizon off of the local garbage dump.

The point is, basically, we’re all just sheets to the wind all the time, and can open a beer with anything. Pen. Knife. Our teeth. Another bottle. The curb. Anything. So why the heck didn’t we ever figure out you can use an iPhone, iPad or MacBook power brick to bust a beer open? How did OS X Daily of all people outscoop us?

Source: OS X Daily

Whether or not Foxconn’s running sweatshops is some matter of debate. The China Labor Watch says Foxconn’s iPhone assembly lines are sweatshops, while the Fair Labor Association says that factory worker conditions are much, much better than at actual sweatshops.

Now Foxconn CEO Terry Gou is trying to settle the debate. Yes, Gou says, Foxconn may well be running a sweatshop… but what’s wrong with sweatshops anyway?

iLounge has had decent luck predicting new iOS devices recently, managing earlier this year to correctly prophesize most of the details about the new iPad (although consensus had pretty much agreed upon them already).

Now iLounge is doing the same for the iPhone 4S, and while they echo a lot of the current speculation about a thinner iPhone 5 with a longer 4-inch display, the professional renders iLounge has put together are absolutely top-notch. This would be an incredibly attractive iPhone.

This is just awesome. Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” as performed entirely by OS X system sounds. The only slight quibble we have is that it really should be using Siri to sing the lyrics… or, since Siri’s nowhere to be found on the Mac, at least the Samantha voice in OS X’s Text-To-Speech mode.

[via MacMagazine]

Do you use Amazon’s Cloud Drive over any of the other cloud clients du jour like Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, Google Drive, and so on? Congratulations: you’ve somehow managed to be a die-hard user of the service despite the lack of a native Mac app. You had to upload and download files through the browser like some kind of sucker.

Now Amazon’s about to reward you for your patience with the native client they probably should have shipped in the first place. Yup, the wait is over: Amazon’s Cloud Drive Desktop App for Mac is now here, allowing you to easily upload your files to Cloud Drive by dragging them to an icon or simply right-clicking on a file or folder.

Just don’t expect Dropbox-style syncing. Cloud Drive’s a different kind of beast, and if you want to download your files, you’ll have to do so manually.

“Unopened! Still sealed in original retail box!” cry the Craigslist ads advertising “new” iPhones and iPads at lower-than-retail prices, but the truth is far more insidious: many of the “new” iPhones you see on Craigslist and eBay are actually old, used iPhones repackaged and sold as new using the hardware equivalent of meat glue.

Last week, Eugene Kaspersky — the eponymous founder of the industry leading Kaspersky security company — made some waves by claiming that OS X was “at least 10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security.”

Since Kaspersky’s eyebrow-arching claim, there’s been a lot of bickering about whether what he said was true, or whether his comments were self-serving. Maybe Kaspersky’s right, though, and Apple should follow in Microsoft’s footsteps and outsource OS X security to the anti-virus industry?

Think that Apple is already making Macs as tiny and tightly-packed as they possibly can? Think again. Intel is showing off a new demo spec that could shrink down Thunderbolt-compatible, Sandy Bridge Mac minis to the size of the current Apple TV.

This is a rather beautiful concept for what the next-gen iPhone could look like, courtesy of French designer Antoine Brieux. . It’s fanciful stuff, of course, featuring a Liquid Metal casing, but what I find most interesting is this idea that the home button could be replaced with a “virtual home button” that displays on a larger 4.5-inch widescreen display.

We can all surmise that urinating upon your Mac will not be covered by your AppleCare, but here’s an interesting question: if you stand up right this second, unzip your fly and hose off all over your MacBook, can you even pay Apple to service the machines?

The answer is no, because Apple looks at micturated-upon MacBooks as a biohazard. Along with an obnoxious 11-year-old’s full bladder, the obscure fact above is what ended up costing a Pennsylvanian school district upwards of thirty-six thousand dollars to replace a cart full of thoroughly soaked MacBooks.

When Windows 8 debuts as a tablet OS later this year, it will have one major advantage over the iPad for people who want to use a Windows 8 slate as a laptop replacement: you can run apps side-by-side, consulting a document in one pane while writing up an email, say, in another.

I’ve been saying since last year that this is a killer feature Apple should try to lift in iOS 6, but up until now, all we’ve seen are jailbreak hacks sloppily emulate the functionality. No longer. A hack has finally come along that does it right.

High Fidelity, Say Anything and Brat Pack star John Cusack not only met with Steve Jobs to discuss starring in the very first iPod commercial, he got to play around with an early iPod prototype and got an early look at the iPod and iTunes rollout plan, according to a new interview.

Benedit Cumberbatch may look like a Reptilian straight out of David Icke’s worst nightmares, but he’s an incredible actor who not only plays the world’s greatest detective in the BBC’s surprisingly watchable series Sherlock, but will also play the dragon Smaug in Peter Jackson’s upcoming The Hobbit. He also happens, just happens, to be The Most British Man Alive. Oh, and the kind of cool guy who films his audition tapes on an iPhone too, as it turns out.

I hate jogging, but if popular culture has taught me anything, it’s that come the inevitable zombie apocalypse, a trim physique, muscular calves and a five minute mile might be the only thing between me and having my guts stuffed into the rotting maws of some reanimated ghouls. Maybe you won’t run to lose weight, but will you run to save your life?

That’s the idea behind the awesome looking “fitness” app Zombies, Run!. It’s like Runkeeper with a twist: you’re not jogging to burn calories, but running to escape the undead.

By all accounts, the Infinite Loop cafeteria has such great food that it’s pretty common for all sorts of Silicon Valley types to drop on by to visit a friend and catch some lunch.

The only problem? The constant influx of outsiders at Caffe Macs prevents Apple employees from actually talking about what’s going on and what they’re working on while they chow. That’s why Apple’s building an all new, off-campus restaurant, and only employees are allowed in.