Leander Kahney - page 28

Steve Jobs is on medical leave and now one of his key lieutenants reportedly wants to return to his native U.K.

Apple’s head designer Jonathan Ive wants to return England to live, reports the Sunday Times. Ive, of course, is one of the key geniuses behind Apple’s string of blockbuster hits and is perhaps the world’s most influential industrial designer.

British-born Ive has reportedly proposed a plan to “commute” to Cupertino, Calif., from his $4 million manor house in Somerset, but Apple’s board is none too thrilled with the idea. Ive is said to be at “loggerheads” with the board, reports the Sunday Times.

A friend of the family told the paper: “Unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.”

According to The Times, Ive has just reaped about $30 million from a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal signed in 2008, which has now expired. He and his wife Heather want to educate their twins in their native country.

Apple refused to comment on Ive’s employment status and said it was “speculation” that he wanted to return to the U.K.

The Sunday Times: I created the iPad and iClaim my £18m (Story behind pay wall).

Via Daily Mail.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, was moved to tears by a play about the working conditions of Apple’s factories in China.

Woz went to see “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey on Tuesday night at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The one -man show, which describes the working conditions in the massive factories that make gadgets for Apple, Hewlett-Packard and others, made Wozniak cry.

The Apple cofounder told the New York Times’ Bay Citizen website:

“The shocking things that Mike said which brought me to tears were so because they came as a first-person story,” Wozniak said. “Mike was living the pain of what he was describing as he told it.”

The monologue describes Daisey’s trip to Shenzhen last year, where he met workers at Foxconn’s plant as young as 12 and 13, and heard tales of the long, repetitive work. As many as 17 workers have committed suicide at the Foxconn plant.

Wozniak also said: “I will never be the same after seeing that show.”

The Verizon iPhone 4 has the same antennagate issue as the GSM version, Consumer Reports says. And even though the iPhone 4 is one of the publication’s most highly-rated smartphones, it can’t recommend it.

The Verizon iPhone 4 has a problem that could cause the phone to drop calls, or be unable to place calls, in weak signal conditions, Consumer Reports engineers have found in lab tests.

That’s all weel and good, but in real life, Verizon’s customers aren’t complaining about dropped calls or signal degradation. On Verizon’s network, the antennagate issue is largely theoretical. Even though it’s possible to show signal degradation in the lab — as Consumer Reports claims it did — you can put as many fingers as you want across the gap and it still won’t drop a call.

Consumer Reports: Mind the gap, our tests show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX928KC8jiA

Here’s a quick video tour of the new Mail client in OS X Lion. It’s got a three-pane view, nicely threaded “Conversations,” and a goes full screen. It’s very good. Mail alone is a good reason to upgrade to Lion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC4cguWNFlg

Here’s a quick overview of Mission Control and Launchpad in OS X Lion, Apple’s upcoming major update to OS X.

Mission Control is like Expose, Spaces and Dashboard on steroids: Hit a hot corner and all the open windows fly away. You then get an overview of all the running applications, with thumbnails of open windows. There’s also your Dashboard widgets and virtual desktops in Spaces. When it was first previewed by Apple last year, critics said Mission Control was a mess, but I think it’s pretty good. It works really well. It’s much clearer than Expose, and I can see it becoming a central part of my workflow.

Launchpad, on the other hand, won’t be. Launchpad is like the Home screen on the iPad. Icons for all your apps are displayed in a grid. But it suffers from the same problem as the iPad — it’s hard to find the app you’re looking for among the clutter. Much easier to launch a search. Same in Lion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPzRWca53Is

As you’ve probably heard, touchpad scrolling is backwards in OS X Lion. Instead of pulling your fingers down to scroll down a window, you know push your fingers up.

Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this?

It’s easy: because of iOS. It’s the same gesture you make on the screen of an iOS device when you scroll up and down the screen. You want to scroll down? You pull the content up.

It’s another example of the influence of iOS on OS X.

The HappyBirthdaySteveJobs.com tribute website is going gangbusters.

Thrown up a couple of days ago, the site has survived attacks from malicious hackers and has seen more than 45,000 visitors from 147 countries.

It is currently displaying more than 13,000 birthday wishes to Steve Jobs, whose birthday is today.

One of the site admins, London student Raoul-Gabriel Urma, says he’s been up for 48 hours trying to keep the site running. Here are the stats:

Apple is adding several auto-saving features to Lion, including Auto Save, Versions and Resume.

“Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to,” says the company.

One of the most interesting implications is that you may never have to quit an application again, or go hunting for the file you were working on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jbOZvNidCA

Apple has posted video of OS X Lion’s new gesture controls in action. Look how iPad-ish the whole experience is.

Lion features several new multi-touch gestures, including rubber-band scrolling, page and image zoom, and full-screen swiping.

All Things D: Apple Shareholders Reject Proposal to Disclose Succession Plan

It’s official: The iPad 2 launch will be March 2.

Apple is issuing press invites to a special media event on March 2 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, according to Loopinsight.com.

“Come see what 2011 will be all about,” says the invite. Looks like Apple is pretty confident about the iPad 2.

The event starts at 10:00 am. It’s the same venue Apple traditionally uses to introduce products.

We all know that Steve Jobs is obsessed with crafting top-notch customer experiences. Of course, he’s famous for being dismissive of focus groups, but did you know he spies on customers at his local Apple Store?

If you’re wondering were all the comments went, they’re currently being imposted into Disqus. We’ve switched to Disqus, a commenting platform with all kinds of great features, including great social integration, notifications and multimedia.

When it’s up and running, it promises to be a great system. However, importing the old comments can sometimes take a while: maybe even two or three days.

That’s for existing comments. New comments should post immediately. Fingers crossed it’s up and running quickly. In the meantime, please leave any questions, comments or complaints in — you guessed it — the new comments system.

And thanks for your patience — Leander.

Raoul-Gabriel Urma writes:

We are computing students from Imperial College London and created a website dedicated to Steve Jobs allowing members of the public to leave their birthday comments and this way to support him while he is currently dealing with serious health issues.

Our aim is to allow as many people to wish him a happy birthday this way letting him know he has a back-up of so many.

Leave your best wishes here: Happy Birthday Steve Jobs.

Apple is helping finance a major remodel of Stanford Hospital (where Jobs was photographed by the sleazy National Enquirer). But is Apple also helping design the $2 billion facility, perhaps based on the design of its retail stores?

Check out the rendering of the atrium above. Look familiar? Note the massive skylight, the marble floors. Is that a Genius Bar on the right?

Most important, the brains behind Apple’s stores — Ron Johnson — is intimately involved.

The new MacBook Pros expected later this week will boot off solid-state drives, claims Boy Genius Report, citing unnamed sources.

In addition:

• The new MacBook Pros will feature larger glass trackpads. It’s hard to imagine how this is possible, but they’ve been growing with each successive machine, so maybe so.
• The lower-end models will have 8GB-16GB SSDs for Mac OS X, and will also come equipped with a regular hard drive. This will offer the benefits of SSDs — instant on and super fast performance — while also providing lots of room for power users’ files (video and Photoshop).
• The higher-end models will be SSD only, just like Apple’s new MacBook Air line.
• The new machines will be up to a half-pound lighter than curent models. Again, hard to imagine how this is possible given that Liquidmetal rumors are unlikely.
• The report also note there will be five different SKUs, jibing with previous rumor reports.

Boy Genius Report: New MacBook Pro models imminent; we’ve got some new details

It looks like Apple’s all set to launch new MacBooks next week, but the launch day is — a Thursday?

What’s up with that? Apple’s big product launches are almost always on Tuesdays. (It allows reporters on the East Coast to fly into California on a workday instead of the weekend).

So why would Apple launch new MacBooks on Thursday February 24?

It’s new MacBook Pros next Thursday February 24, according to MacRumors, citing a “reliable” source.

We’ve since heard reliable confirmation that this information is accurate and that the expected release date is next Thursday, February 24th. The move would be a bit unusual for Apple to launch new machines on a Thursday. So, if you are about to buy a new MacBook Pro, wait until next week.

MacBooks were last updated a year ago with Intel Core i5 and i7 chips. The new machines are likely to get Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge processors, which are faster and a lot less power hungry. Rumors that the machines will have cases made  of Liquidmetal are unlikely, but they will probably will be lighter, thinner and have higher-resolution screens. A big price drop is predicted too.

Apple’s said to be releasing five new models, which will include two new 13-inch versions, two new 15-inch versions and one new 17-inch version.

Years ago, the Sun tabloid newspaper kidnapped a donkey and kept it in a Spanish hotel room for a story. Yesterday, Gizmodo hired a plane to take aerial photos of Steve Jobs’ demolished mansion.

Demolition began Monday of the abandoned mansion. Jobs won a long legal battle to have the old pile torn down. He wants to build a smaller, greener place on the property.

More demolition pictures below:

And here are some really beautiful pictures of the Jackling House before it was demolished, courtesy of photographer Jonathan Haeber, who sneaked in one night.

Steve Jobs is sitting next to President Obama. He’s wearing a black turtleneck!

This is an official White House photo. Here it is zoomed in:

Both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that a smaller iPhone nano was in development, but now the New York Times says a shrunken iPhone is NOT on the cards.

Apple is developing a budget iPhone, the NYT says, but the device will not be any smaller than current models. Instead, it will scrimp on internal components, like memory, as we exclusively reported on Monday (More Detail On Apple’s iPhone Nano).

Keeping the iPhone nano’s screen size the same as current models makes perfect sense. Developers won’t have to code apps for different screen sizes, like they do on other platforms.

The Times did corroborate our report earlier this week, also reported in the WSJ, that Apple is planning a major overhaul of MobileMe. MobileMe will put a lot more media and files in the cloud, allowing users to stream and sync to all their devices without using cables.

The budget iPhone will make more use of voice commands, the NYT says.

Here’s the cover of the March 2011 edition of Wired magazine, which just showed up in the mail:

1 million workers

90 million iPhones

17 suicides

This is where your gadgets come from. Should you care?

Yes, you should care. We do. Kudos to Wired for shining a much-needed spotlight on this important issue.

On Monday, we reported how Apple is working on a streaming-only iPhone. The smaller, lighter device will have limited storage. Media and data will be streamed to the device over the network, like the second-generation Apple TV.

In November, we reported that the iPhone 5 will use a Near Field Communications chip (NFC) to enable an ambitious remote computing system. Wave the NFC-equipped iPhone near any compatible Mac, and the user’s entire Home directory will be loaded onto the guest machine — files, photos, music and even the same desktop background. It will be as though the user is sitting in front of their home computer. Apple has even patented the system.

How are the two related?

It’s unlikely that Apple will use Liquidmetal for the new MacBooks that are expected any day now, but it sure would be sweet. Check out how svelte the machines would be if Apple used the extra-stiff material.

Mockup by designer Dario Crisafulli.

Via SagiaMente.

Who wants one?

If Apple shrinks the iPhone to nano size with a screen that runs edge-to-edge and no Home button, how will users quit apps and return to the Home screen?

Developer Max Rudberg suggests that users could squeeze the sides of their iPhone to close apps. He writes:

This could be a real wow effect. Seeing how the phone reacts to your grip and then having the app vanish in the palm of your hand.

To avoid ‘squeeze to go Home’ from happening by accident, a visual cue could show that pressure is being applied. In this concept, the app begins to shrink to reflect the pressure that is being applied. When the pressure goes over a defined threshold, the user is returned to the Home screen.

The strength of a users grip will of course vary. Therefore, a setting for how much pressure that’s needed before an app is exited could be a good idea.”

Rudberg, who runs Max Themes and created popular jailbreak themes Glasklart HD and Serious SBSettings HD, suggests the iPhone nano have a pressure-sensitive body. He made a cool video showing how it would work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7uk_sxYW98

[via iPhone Download Blog and MacStories]