Leander Kahney - page 17

When I was a kid, my dad had a book of record covers called “The Album Cover Album.” It was a big, glossy coffee table book of the classic LP covers from the 50s to the 70s.

My brothers and I spent hours copying the trippy Grateful Dead covers by artist Rick Griffin or making paper models of the San Francisco Victorians on Jefferson Airplane’s “After Bathing at Baxter’s.”

Growing up in Britain in the 70s, at the height of Two Tone and punk, everyone was music mad. Music was everywhere. It determined how we dressed (as punks), where we went (punk concerts) and who our friends were (other punks). Culture rotated around music.

These days, culture is defined not by music, but technology. The bull’s-eye logo of The Who has been replaced by the Angry Birds icon. The cover of “London Calling” is the cosmic wallpaper on your iPhone.

Apple’s iOS 7 is a big step forward in that evolution. Gone forever are the vestiges of interfaces of old; the skeuomorphic references to desktops, trashcans, leather and wood. iOS 7 is another step towards interfaces of the future. And with 500 million almost-overnight downloads, it’s going to be everywhere.

For me, one of the most interesting things about iOS 7 will be watching it bleed out into the wider culture. Just as the iPod launched a million gadgets in white plastic, iOS 7 will inspire countless website redesigns and scores of apps with minimalist interfaces. We’ll see lots more of that fashionably slim Helvetica Neue font and transparent tickers on TV shows.

Earlier this year I talked to Professor Andrew Hargadon, a design and innovation professor at University of California at Davis. Hargadon told me that when the iPod came out, it showed everyone what a good MP3 player should look like. Likewise with the iPhone. Everyone hated their cell phones before the iPhone. Not any more.

“Nowadays, we expect many things to have better designs,” he told me. “Because of Apple, we got to compare crappy portable computers versus really nice ones, crappy phones versus really nice ones. We saw a before-and-after effect. Not over a generation, but within a few years. Suddenly 600 million people had a phone that put to shame the phone they used to have. That is a design education at work within our culture.”

I’m hoping that iOS 7 will also be a design education. I’m hoping it’ll inspire new DVR menus and the telemetrics system in my car. I’m hoping it’ll inspire my kids to make paper models of their favorite app icons.

They’re already fans of The Clash.

Leander’s new book about Jony Ive and the Apple design studio is out in November.
“Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Behind the scenes, it’s been a long time coming, but welcome to the first issue of Cult of Mac Magazine!

Cult of Mac Magazine is a weekly news magazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we’ll bring you the best of what the Cult of Mac blog does on the Web, in an iPad-friendly format.

Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner has been welcomed as a “major step forward” by Biometrics expert Philip Smith, whose company pioneered the technology a decade ago.

“It’s a huge milestone in bringing fingerprint-based biometrics to the mainstream,” he said. “I’m thrilled to see this.”

Of course a biometrics would welcome an advance like this. But Touch ID has already set off a firestorm of controversy among privacy advocates who say there could be lots of Big Brother implications, especially following revelations by Der Spiegel Online that the N.S.A. already has the ability to capture photos, GPS data, contacts and texts from iPhones.

Sir Jonathan Ive likes to recycle good ideas, as the Counternotions blog notes with the image above. The “Blue Dalmatian” iMac from 2001 is “separated at birth” from the brand new iPhone 5c.

Likewise, Jony Ive wanted the original iPhone to be a glass-and-metal sandwich with the antenna running around the middle. But his design and engineering teams couldn’t get the electronics to work. Everything was too new and untested. The design was shelved until things could be made to work, and it was reborn four years later as the iPhone 4.

A newly discovered Apple patent reveals how the iPhone’s redesigned Home button will work as a fingerprint scanner.

It’s widely rumored the iPhone 5S will include a fingerprint scanner built into the Home button. But putting a fingerprint scanner into the Home button presents Apple with a problem. The Home button is used as the primary navigation device. Pressing the Home button quits apps and returns the user to the Home screen. If the fingerprint Home button is used as an authentication device, to conduct a secure online purchase say, the user needs to avoid accidentally pressing it. The last thing they want is to quit the browser and be returned to the Home screen.

The solution is a capacitive ring built around the Home button that detects the user’s finger without a button press.

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac’s weekly Newsstand magazine. Check it out here.

Apple takes color very seriously. You might say the Cupertino company is obsessed with it. Sir Jonathan Ive, the head of industrial design, is most famous for his restrained approach to color.

After the first iPod in 2001, most of Apple’s products come in plain colors: black, white or silvery aluminum. But behind the scenes, his design department has long created prototypes in a dizzying array of hues, including hot pink. Some prototypes are mocked up in up to 64 different shades.

“You can imagine a Crayola box with 64 colors in it,” Gautum Baksi, a former Apple engineer who worked closely with Jony Ive’s industrial design group (IDg), told Cult of Mac. “They’ll go through the gamut of making prototypes of all 64 to iterate until they find the ones that they want.”

Welcome to Cult of Mac Magazine: a weekly newsmagazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we’ll bring you the best of what the Cult of Mac blog does on the Web, in an iPad-friendly format.

But there’s a twist.

Cult of Mac Magazine is the first news magazine devoted to the world of Apple technology. It’s like a Sunday newspaper magazine, but focused on Macs, iPhones and iPads and the people behind the news.

We’ll be doing a lot of original, long-form journalism. The world of technology is changing at a breathtaking pace. We’re in the middle of one of the biggest technology shifts ever; from desktop to mobile. Apple, of course, is at the very heart of it.

To help you with this change, we’ll have special editions devoted to different topics, from iOS gaming to cooking with an iPad. These special editions will be a mix of reported features, product reviews, app roundups and killer how-tos.

We’ll have new weekly features, like our “Ask a Genius” column, in which a genuine Apple Genius answers your thorniest technical questions.

We think a weekly iPad magazine is a great way to package and organize the stuff we are publishing every day on the website.

With news about Apple breaking 24 hours a day, it’s easy to miss stories on the web and hard to find something once it’s cycled down the site’s front page.

There are several forces at work that make it a great time to be publishing a blog-like magazine. The iPad is a reading machine. We’re already seeing tens of millions of page views in apps like Flipboard and Zite that syndicate our content. The web is good for breaking news or brief product reviews. The iPad is better for deep dives that explore a subject in depth.

We’ll be publishing four issues a month for a $1.99 monthly subscription. We think it’s going to be great. We’d love for you to check it out.

Many thanks, Leander.

Want proof that Scott Forstall blocked Jony Ive’s vision for iOS? Here’s an early prototype for the iPhone, made in 2005 by Jony Ive’s industrial design lab. On the back it says “iPod” because it was based in the design of the old aluminum iPod Mini. Remember that dinosaur? But check out the icons on screen. Look familiar? The icons on the prototype’s screen look just like iOS 7!

Apple’s Find My iPhone led San Francisco police on a 90MPH car chase last night which ultimately led to the arrest of three suspected armed robbers.

My normally sleepy neighborhood in San Francisco has been plagued recently with a string of violent and scary armed street robberies.

For the last week or so, a gang of violent perps have been robbing people of gadgets like their iPhones at gunpoint. But last night, an iPhone hit them back.

Actor Ashton Kutcher tweeted out this photo from Sundance, where his new JOBS biopic is premiering. It’s a montage of Kutcher and the iconic picture of the older Steve Jobs. It’s an uncanny picture.

Reviews from Sundance are sharing mixed opinions about the movie, but they all seem to agree that Kutcher portrays Jobs well.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – MakerBot just announced the Replicator 2X, an advanced 3D printer that’s can print complex 2-color models and is optimized for ABS plastic.

In addition, MakerBot released a printer API and expects third-party software makers to create software for the iPhone and iPad to run its printers.

“I expect we’ll be building the moon base with them,” said Bre Pettis, MakerBot CEO after introducing the Replicator 2X to a scrum of press. “That’s where it’s going.”

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Poor Ronnie Khadaran.

It’s the first day of CES, and already visitors are destroying his booth. They keep ripping the display items from their stands. Instead of talking up his company’s new products, Marware’s director of marketing is busy trying to stop CES showgoers from destroying his booth.

One of the new items on display is Marware’s MicroShell Folio, a $35 hard plastic shell with a magnetic cover that doubles as a stand.

It shares the same name as an earlier product, but is a better design. I got a chance to play around with one on the show floor, and thought it was a nice, relatively inexpensive case for the iPad mini.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – The biggest problem I have with my iPad is the speaker volume. Every time I try to watch a movie or TV show, I have to cup my hand around the bottom by the speaker. I feel like an old codger in reverse: cupping my hand around my iPad instead of my ear.

Here at the Consumer Electronics Show, Kubxlab is showing off an iPhone case that works really well at boosting volume acoustically.

On Tuesday I went to a party at San Francisco’s Cafe Du Nord to celebrate the launch of Fuze For Mac, a nifty cloud-based videoconferencing tool from FuzeBox.

I heard several interesting things about Steve Jobs and some intriguing Apple TV rumors. One of the rumors made me think that Tim Cook’s new Mac — the one that is going to be made in the U.S.A. — might actually be a big-screen Apple TV.

Here’s what I heard:

• The software was developed at the behest of Steve Jobs himself, who persuaded FuzeBox to make the software not just for the Mac, but for an upcoming Apple TV.
• Steve Jobs gave the company a special dev lab on Apple’s campus.
• According to FuzeBox’s CEO, the upcoming Apple TV has a 60-inch screen. It has no inputs whatsoever, except an AC power cord. No wires. You can’t plug in a cable box or a game console. Nothing.
• It does have Gigabit wireless Wi-Fi and gesture controls, equivalent to Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox.
• And finally, the story of how FuzeBox got an ultra rare meeting with Steve Jobs is worth telling — details below.

Now, I’m the first to admit that not all of this adds up. I got it from Jeff Cavins, FuzeBox’s CEO, who told a good tale, especially after I’d had a couple of pints. While I was fascinated and entertained, it didn’t get to pin him down on details. The party was loud and crowded, and we were constantly interrupted. So mostly for entertainment purposes, this is what he said:

GIGAOM ROADMAP, SAN FRANCISCO — Back in 2000, no one wanted to buy Apple’s products. Steve Jobs realized that potential customers needed to see and play with Apple’s offerings before they could be persuaded to buy them. So he launched a chain of retail stores in malls across the country. It was risky, but it paid off handsomely.

Now Tesla, the electric car maker run by Elon Musk, is trying to do the same thing. Instead of a traditional dealership, Tesla is building a chain of car showrooms right inside shopping malls.

To build out the chain, Tesla tapped George Blankenship, Apple’s former Vice President of Real Estate, who helped to roll out Steve Jobs’ mega-successful chain.

GIGAOM ROADMAP, SAN FRANCISCO — Nest Lab’s smart and sexy thermostat is becoming the iPhone of home heating, says its designer, Tony “the Podfather” Fadell.

Speaking at the GigaOM Roadmap conference, Fadell described how a Texas utility called Reliant is using the Nest Learning Thermostat to attract customers.

“Nest is to Reliant what the iPhone was to AT&T,” said Fadell. It’s a killer piece of hardware that’s attracting customers to the utility in droves.

SAN FRANCISCO, GIGAOM ROADMAP CONFERENCE — Hurricane Sandy was the largest event ever documented by cell phones, said Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of the photosharing app Instagram.

Speaking at the GigaOM Roadmap conference, Systrom said there were nearly one million photos on Instagram with the #Sandy hastag, making it the largest event documented by ordinary people using their cellphones.

“Sandy was a really interesting event for us,” said Systrom, who grew up on the east coast. “Sandy was the single largest event captured on Instagram — and the largest event captured on cell phones ever.”

I just got an iPad mini a couple of hours ago from the UPS guy. I took it to lunch and we’ve been playing around with it here in the office.

Couple of observations:

The screen is not great: John is absolutely right about the quality of the screen. It is manifestly lower resolution than newer Retina Displays.

Even though it’s obvious that Scott Forstall was canned by Tim Cook, he’s being kept on for a year as an advisor to the CEO.

This seems to make no sense, but here’s why:

Why is the iPad mini $329 instead of $200? In the promo video above, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, the venerable Sir Jonathan Ive, gives an implicit explanation. The iPad Mini is not a reduced iPad, he says, but a concentrated one.

Here’s his rationale:

The iPad mini is amazingly thin and light but not at all undersized. That’s the first impressions of reporters at Apple’s press event.

Reporters got their their first look at the iPad mini this morning, and the results are trickling in. Most emphasize how light and thin it is, and the quality of the build. And while it’s smaller than a regular iPad, it’s by no means tiny.

Here’s a sample of reporters’ first impressions:

Pictures of a new and improved front-facing camera have emerged, but whether it’s for the iPad 3 or a future model is unclear.

BGR has posted photos purporting to be a new display assembly for the iPad. It features a bigger opening for the front-facing camera, suggesting a HD camera is coming.

Apple’s Maps app is a bomb. A stinker. A sign of the company’s impending doom at the hands of Tim Cook, the CEO who replaced the irreplaceable Steve Jobs.

Landmarks are in the wrong place. Roads are missing. The 3D Flyover view looks like a collapsed sponge cake. There are no directions for buses, bikes or pedestrians. Entire cities are marked as hospitals, the Golden Gate Bridge is in the wrong place, and even Apple’s own retail stores can’t be found. It’s such an embarrasment, Tim Cook apologized for its suckiness.

But if you live in San Francisco, the Maps app rocks. I’ve been using Maps for weeks and I’ve fallen in love with it. I use it even if I’m *not* using it, just to watch the gorgeous 3D display unfold as I’m driving around.

Apple’s Maps app is by far the best maps sofware around. Tim Cook is a wussy. You’d love Maps too — if you lived in a geography where it works.

The first thing you notice about the 2012 fifth-generation iPod touch is how beautifully it’s made. Crazy thin, ridiculously light, yet sturdy as a slab of slate.

The fit and finish are extraordinary. There are no seams, screws, gaps, cracks or openings. It’s literally seamless. The buttons look like they’re part of the iPod’s case, not nubbins that poke through. Who makes stuff this good? Oh yeah, Apple.

Other reviews have complained about the price (it starts at $300) and some reviewers seem unimpressed by the touch. Who is it for, they wonder? Especially if you already have an iPhone.

Well, it’s for the kids. It’s a kids’ computer. Their first computer, if you like. It’s a relatively cheap, highly portable, extremely capable little handheld computer for children. It plays games, music and movies; surfs the net; communicates via text and Facebook; and hosts a bazillion apps for entertainment or homework. It also displays e-books, though let’s be honest: reading is the last thing it’ll be used for.

But $300 is a lot of money to spend on a kid. Is it worth it?

This is a guest post by Ken Segall, a Silicon Valley advertising executive who worked closely with Steve Jobs. Among other things, Segall put that little “i” in front of the iMac and helped develop Apple’s famous Think Different ad campaign. Segall is author of Insanely Simple, a very readable insightful account of what makes Apple tick.

Last time Apple went heavy on advertising in a sporting event, it didn’t exactly end well.

But let us not speak of the Genius anymore. All traces of that campaign have been hidden from our sight.

Now the baseball playoffs are here. And once again, Apple has made a very expensive media buy. This time, it’s blanketing the games with the new iPhone 5 ads.

But look. Someone else has moved into the neighborhood. Samsung showed up for the playoffs with equal force, in the form of its Galaxy S III ads. You know — the ones that make fun of the lost souls who line up to buy an iPhone, when they could just as easily have a much cooler Samsung phone.