Apple has just reported that it has fixed a glitch that’s been plaguing app developers and downloaders today, rendering app updates downloaded today or late yesterday useless. The apps refused to launch, and no amount of re-installation would fix the issue.
Apple just issued a statement to All Things D that calls the all clear. The initial corruption was linked to Apple’s Fairplay digital rights management (DRM), and Apple said it only affected a small number of users.
When I saw that well-regarded audio company, SRS, was offering a new Mac-compatible version of their Audio Essentials software, I headed – nay, rushed – over to their website to grab the free demo for the new Mac version.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one, as the message that greeted me when I (finally) found the Mac download page: “Our servers our currently jammed due to the popularity of the new release of Audio Essentials. Downloading will take a little extra time. Thank you for understanding. We are working quickly to resolve the issue.”
Yep, it’s a hot download.
Once you’ve laid down a solid rhythmic foundation with your drums and your bass, it’s time to sweeten things up with some different sounds, like guitar or keyboards. GarageBand for iPad makes this sincerely easy, with Smart Keys and Smart Guitar, letting you widen the range of harmonic counterpoint in any arrangement, regardless of any experience with real instruments.
All the work is done by your iPad and the GarageBand app, just like with the Smart Bass and Smart Drums functionality discussed earlier. Simply launch GarageBand for iPad and follow the steps below, and you’ll be listening to your own sweet tunes in your own sweet time.
GarageBand for Mac OS X is a full recording studio for your Mac. It allows musicians to connect microphones, guitars, basses, and other instruments for a fully analog recording session. It has MIDI playback and recording capabilities as well, allowing anyone with a MIDI capable keyboard to record right along with those instruments.
One of the less-touted features, however, is the Loops section. GarageBand comes with pre-recorded MIDI and sampled audio that fit together in various ways. Without knowing to play a single instrument, you can create amazing sounding music with GarageBand, simply using Loops.
Apple and Samsung already narrowed the field of their California-based lawsuits against each other back in May of this year, pending a July 30 trial. Late yesterday, however, both parties filed a joint statement about narrowing the complaint field further in response to Judge Lucy Koh’s request they do so.
This makes perfect sense, especially when she already restricted their court time back in June. As Florian Mueller (FOSSPatents) points out, each of the large number of intellectual property (IP) arguments is already fairly complex. Trying to argue a ton of them at once would be unmanageable.
After all the back and forth-ing going on between Apple, Samsung, Google, and the US District Court lately, it’s hardly a surprise that the Nexus phone has undergone some changes on the Google Play website’s “Devices” sales page.
The target of Apple’s successful request to ban US sales of was taken down earlier this evening from the Play site, as reported on 9 to 5 Mac, and is currently back, but only as a “Coming Soon” item.
Author Malcolm Gladwell made some waves when he said that history would remember Microsoft’s Bill Gates more fondly than it would Steve Jobs. The remark was founded on Gates’ philanthropic bent of late, and was meant to praise Gates more than villify Jobs.
Yesterday, talk-show host Charlie Rose posted an interview with Bill Gates. The interview is an hour long, and touches on a lot of issues, including technology, as we would suppose. When Rose brought up the comments of Gladwell, though, Gates showed more class than most.
Apple won a preliminary injunction against US sales of the Galaxy Nexus phone last week. Today, Samsung was denied a stay on the ban by Judge Lucy Koh, the main judge in the current case brought to court against Samsung’s smartphone as well as its Galaxy Tab.
It may not matter as much, however, as Google and Samsung have readied a patch to address the specific grievance, according to a post on The Verge.
With GarageBand for the iPad, Apple has brought an inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right to your favorite mobile device. This fantastic $5 app lets anyone with an iPad create, record and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
With a killer beat in place, it’s time to add the second (mostly unsung) hero of modern music: the bass. Whether your tastes run to big, fat and bottom-heavy or quick, snappy and distorted, GarageBand has you covered. With GarageBand for iPad, you can create bass tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
Let’s take a look at the simplest way to do that: Smart Bass.
Ringtones, right? How can you be the coolest kid on the bus without your own custom ringtone? You can’t, that’s how.
With GarageBand ’11, it’s very simple to make one, and we’re here to show you how.
All you need is the latest copy of GarageBand, iTunes 7.5 or later, a Mac that runs OS X, and some music. Oh, and an iPhone, of course. You can use music that you create with Magic GarageBand, record yourself all fancy-like, or import an MP3 track to GarageBand to make your ringtone. Here’s how.
The last couple of weeks have seen quite a few wins for Apple in court. Bans against US sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and new Galaxy Nexus phone, for starters, were successful.
Apple’s request for an “emergency ban” for HTC phones, however, was denied today, allowing smartphone manufacturer HTC to continue to sell its latest devices while the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) investigates Apple’s patent infringement claim against the Taiwanese-based company.
In another setback for Samsung today, a US judge rejected Samsung’s request to lift the injunction against United States sales of the Galaxy Tab, a tablet computer than runs Google’s Android and competes with the iPad.
As we reported last week, US District Judge Lucy Koh granted Apple’s request to block any US sale of the tablet. Apple claims that the Galaxy Tab infringes on several of Apple’s patents that apply to it’s iOS devices and operating system. Samsung had appealed the court to stay the injunction pending resolution of an appeal, but today’s judgement seems unequivocal.
With GarageBand for the Mac, Apple created something no one else had – a relatively inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right on the computer. Several iterations later, GarageBand came to the iPad, doing the same thing for mobile musicians in a big way. For $5, anyone with an iPad can create, record, and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
The foundation of any good rock, dance, or pop song is the beat. Creating a drum track that stands out will take your music from “meh” to “wow.” With GarageBand for iPad, you can now create drum tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
GarageBand for OS X changed the way mere mortals create great music on their Macs. The latest version, GarageBand ’11, makes things even easier with Magic GarageBand. Essentially, this will guide you through the steps needed to create a great music track for video projects, ringtones, or just your own music to share with family and friends. Here’s how to begin your journey.
There are tons of ways to manage business, school, and home projects. Tracking things like timelines and schedules, resources like people, materials and tools, and keeping it all in an easily read format is quite the challenge, however. We took a look at three different types of software for managing projects on the iPad, starting with the powerful (and premium priced) OmniPlan for iPad. We also took a quick look at iScope, a less expensive yet unique piece of software for managing projects with a more personal feel, as well as the free Wunderlist, a great and free app for just managing tasks.
With software like OmniPlan, both the trained and untrained can manage personal and work projects with relative ease. It does help, however, to know what you’re doing before trying to organize a mission critical project, even if it is one for home, like building a dog house. All projects are made up of similar things, like timelines, human resources, financial considerations, and the like.
Let’s take a look at how to use OmniPlan to create a new Project – the first step to managing it.
When you launch OmniPlan, you’ll start in the Document Browser. Tap the plus button to begin your next project.
Double tap the project name (in the title bar) to edit the project title. Then, tap the project info button (second from the right near the top – it looks like a suitcase icon) to bring up a dialog box in which you can set all the details about your project. If your project is an abstract concept, still in the planning stages, tap on the Dates area and set it to Undetermined. Then the timelines can say T+1 days or T+2, to refer to relative timing, rather than specific dates. Tap Direction to set whether the project will be planned backward from a big end date, like when planning a conference, or forward from a big start date, like teaching a class. Tap Granularity to set how to schedule the tasks that will make up your project, choosing Daily, Hourly, or Exact time periods. If your tasks will mainly be completed within single days, try Hourly. If the project is a longer one, try Daily. These will round your task due dates and times to the nearest hour or day, respectively. If you want to schedule things using more specific times, use Exact.
Other options include things like setting Duration and Effort units, or Effort Conversions, if your project isn’t part of a standard eight hour workday or 40 hour workweek. You can also tap the Calendar tab at the top to set the normal workday hours, which will help when planning to allocate resources that include other people.
Once your project is set up, tap out of the info dialog to return to the timeline. You can tap on the View menu at this point to Filter by Resource, Status, Type, or Visible Date Range (once you’ve populated your project with tasks), toggle OmniPlan to track any changes, and even choose a Light or Dark Theme.
Let’s look at creating a timeline for your project. In project management circles, such a chart is called a Gantt Chart. It basically places your tasks, goals, and project milestones on a timeline chart, to help project team members know what to do first, second, third, etc. This visual system helps managers know when things are getting behind.
When you launch OmniPlan for iPad, you start in the Document browser, where you can edit any older projects or create a new one. The default OmniPlan projects are for a Concert, Moving House, New Product Development, and Project Trilobite, whatever that is. To start your own project, tap the plus button, located in the upper left of the OmniPlan screen.
You’ll be given a new, unpopulated project file, cleverly named “My Project,” and your first task: Task 1. Double tap the project name, and you can type in a new one. Like, “Your Project,” or, “Vacation.”
Tap on the plus button in the upper right, this time, and a new task will show up. Type in a name for this new task, as it has been highlighted for you. Then tap on the Done button on the keyboard. You can adjust the duration of your new task by dragging the sliders on the left or right of the blue duration bar. As you slide, the display above the tasks will dynamically adjust, showing you how long you are allotting a specific task.
Next, tap once on your newly created task to toggle the connection bars. The handles will now look like arrows. Drag an arrow from the front of your new task to the end of Task 1 to see how they work. The second task should end up connected to the end of your first task. Tasks defined as dependent will automatically change when the items they are depended on change.
Tap and hold on the plus button in the upper right to add a milestone. This is a flag to help project managers know when things are working well (milestones are being reached in a timely manner) or when they are not (milestones are being utterly ignored). Name your milestone something interesting, then tap Done to lose the keyboard on screen.
While projects are typically more complicated, including resources and asset allocation, making a timeline of things you want to do in a given project is a great way to start projects both large and small.
Resources are important to any project. They are the people, equipment, and materials necessary to complete a project. Even you’re just building a treehouse for the kids in the backyard, you still need to track the lumber, nails and screws, types of tools you’ll need (like a saw, hammer, etc.), and the people you’ll rope into helping you.
OmniPlan for iPad can help track the resources for projects that are smaller or larger. Let’s look at how.
Launch OmniPlan on your iPad, and launch a project that you’ve created, a template, or create a new project. Tap the icon that looks like a person silhouette to manage the resources for that project.
Tap the green plus button next to New Resource to add another one. To add a human resource, type in their name, email and their work hours (if applicable). You can also use the plus or minus buttons to adjust their Units, Efficiency, and Cost per Use and Cost per hour, if that matters to your project.
Equipment and Material resources are added and managed the same way, though Materials do not have a Unit or Efficiency measure. You can also group Resources together and manage them all in one fell swoop/tap.
When it’s time to assign tasks, simply select the task or group of tasks in the main OmniPlan window and then tap on the Resources button again. This time, though, tap on the Assign Resources tab at the top, choose a Resource to assign, and se their percentage of assignment. If you have two people equally assigned to the same task, you can choose 50% assigned to each of them.
OmniPlan for iPad allows you to balance the load of resources automatically every time you make a change to the people or things that are needed for your project. In addition, you can set options to have OmniPlan adjust the duration or the effort numbers depending on the kind of project you’re managing.
With the tagline, Gantt 4 Humans, iScope promises to give you the benefits of a centralized project management suite like OmniPlan ($50) for a lot less money ($5) and a lot less hassle. While I’m not reviewing the app here, I do like what I see so far.
iScope uses what it calls horizontal rails, which are basically Gantt chart-style tasks and schedules.
Download the free version of iScope from the iTunes App Store and launch it. You’ll be shown a quick tour of iScope via a yellow sticky note (incongruously pinned at the top). It’s a very friendly way to start the process. Swiping through the tour shows typical project management activities – creating a project, adding tasks, building a team with human resources, and then add notes and images for details and documentation.
iScope uses Dropbox to store its files, so they’re easily shared with others. It integrates with iOS notifications as well as nice touches like auto-completion of tasks, logo customization, and the ability to import and add images. There’s even a simple project browser to see all the planned projects within your purview.
The free version is upgradable to full with a $4.99 in-app purchase, so you can try before you buy. Their website has a form for any support needed.
Even just a quick glance at the free version of iScope was enough to make me want to share it as a tip. The interface is fairly clean, easily parsed by the eye. If a deep, professional project management program like OmniPlan is overkill for your situation, but a task management app like Wunderlist is not quite enough, you might want to check out iScope, which seems to fit firmly between the two extremes.
Keeping your projects organized is hard; whether they’re for home, school, or work, projects tend to take on a life of their own. A good task manager can be essential to keeping the project moving, on time, and with a minimum of stress. Wunderlist is available for the iPad, is free, and has some great features to boot, making it an obvious choice for many of us who need to manage our projects better and don’t need a more complex piece of software, like OmniPlan or iScope, above.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed wunderlist, it should open to a dual-paned view, with Lists on the left and tasks on the right. The Inbox has tutorial tasks set up in it already to show you the ropes.
Tap the first task in the list, “Tap to edit me.” The Edit Tasks window will show up, allowing you to tap through and rename the item, add a Note, Due Date, or Reminder to the item, toggle the Priority label, and put it in a list. That’s a lot of stuff for one tap, right?
Add new tasks with a tap on the Add a new task input field at the top, or by tapping on the plus icon in the upper right. Either one will add a new task, but the plus icon will give you all the edit task fields, while the input filed just gives you the title to input, which might make things a bit faster. To delete a task, simply swipe across a task item with your fingertip. To change the order of the tasks, tap on the Pencil icon (near the plus icon in the upper right) and drag items into any order you like. You can also delete items from this view.
Adding new lists for task organization is easy as well, with a quick tap on the plus button above the Lists pane. There’s also a Pencil icon for rearranging and deleting lists of tasks.
Down near the bottom, you can sort the tasks you see with different filter buttons. The infinity sign to the left shows all tasks and the star button shows only starred tasks. The first calendar icon shows tasks due today, while the second calendar icon shows tasks for tomorrow. The ellipsis icon will pop up a menu with a filter for completed tasks, tasks due in the next 7 days, later than a specific day, or ones with no due date.
wunderlist also syncs via iCloud, and your tasks will show up on the wunderlist website, so you pretty much have your stuff with you no matter where you go. It’s a bit similar to Apple’s own Reminders, but it has a few more features, like the filter buttons described above, that will help any project, large or small, stay organized.
If you give it a try, let us know what you think in the comments. It’s free, so you can check it out for yourself. There’s also a version for Mac, Android, and Windows, as well.
The Wall Street Journal today has a report on how the e-book industry is paying close attention not only to what books people read, but how they are reading them. Do readers skim the intro, skip around in the chapters? Do they read straight through? What are readers’ favorite passage to highlight and share? This kind of data mining is happening now, even on your iPad.
Should we be worried?
You know we all wanted to call it the iPad 3. It would make a lot of sense, given that they named the previous model the iPad 2.
But no, Apple decided to call the latest iteration of their magical tablet device “The New iPad.” Ok, fine, Apple, have it your way.
But then they filed a case with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) saying that they should own the domain name www.ipad3.com.
What?
Three days after we reported an Apple win in regards to the Samsung Galaxy Tab, US District Judge Lucy Koh just handed Apple another, possibly temporary, victory.
Erica Sadun writes at TUAW about a new, possibly first of its kind ebook, one that includes American Sign Language (ASL) videos embedded along with the electronic text and pictures.
While bilingual education has been around for a good long while, the concept of prepackaged ASL translation is a relatively new one, as the tools to embed quality video in an eBook haven’t been mainstream enough. Until now, of course, with iBooks, the iPad, and iBooks Author.
Author Adam Stone released his new book, Pointy Three, on the iBooks store last week. From the iTunes description:
Presented in American Sign Language (ASL) and English! The story of a fork who’s missing one of his prongs, but not his brave spirit. Follow Pointy Three on his journey through the land of Dinnertime as he meets characters left and right and looks for a place where he belongs.
Sadun interviews Stone and talks with him about his motivation to do such a book. “I want to show everybody that it can be done easily, quickly, and cheaply,” he said on his blog. “You don’t need to talk to a publisher; you are the publisher.”
Stone works as a first grade teacher at an ASL school in New York. He was inspired by the introduction of iBooks Author and came up with the idea for the story with ASL elements on the way home one day. He typed up the treatment on his iPhone in the Notes app, he says.
When asked why he hadn’t created an app, Stone reveals that he has no skills as a programmer. With iBooks Author, anyone can create an interactive story for their unique audience and situation.
This is the disruptive success of Apple, one that hearkens back to the original computer club and Steve Wozniak. Apple devices are all about empowering people to actually create and do things – wonderful and unique things – with the powerful technologies inside.
Source: The Unofficial Apple Weblog
With the tagline, Gantt 4 Humans, iScope promises to give you the benefits of a centralized project management suite like OmniPlan ($50) for a lot less money ($5) and a lot less hassle. While I’m not reviewing the app here, I do like what I see so far.
iScope uses what it calls horizontal rails, which are basically Gantt chart-style tasks and schedules.
If you use your MacBook with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with not one, not two, but three different ways to do so.
You can do this with the laptop lid shut, but with ever more powerful MacBooks out there, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the Mac through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.
So, yeah, like clipping the white 30-pin docking cable to the bottom of my iPad and iPhone is SO difficult. You kids these days have it easy. Back when I got my first iPhone, the docking cable had little freakin’ buttons you had to press on the sides just to disconnect it. Man, those were the days.
Wait, where was I? Oh, yeah. Patents. One specific patent, in particular.
There’s a whole new class of app these days centered around lending out cars, bikes, and even homes via iPhone apps like AirBnB, Relay Rides, Getaround, and others. They allow people looking for a short term rental car or living space to connect with other people who have spare space or vehicles and pay a fair yet small fee for doing so. It seems like a good idea, on the surface.
A new app, called SideCar Passenger, takes it up a notch. The app not only connects you with a spare car, but with a spare driver as well. Think of it as peer-to-peer taxi cab and you’ll be close. Users download SideCar, register and account, and then either search for rides or offer their own services up.
Does this strike anyone else as potentially creepy?
Gizmodo reported today that their new MacBook Air was crashing something fierce. They turned to their own forums and the Apple Support forums and found that many other users of the MacBook Air also had the crashing issue. Both parties saw improvements when they stopped using Google’s star web browser, Chrome, but no one could be sure.
They even checked on the MacRumors forums, finding the same issue. Then, they heard from Google.
Resources are important to any project. They are the people, equipment, and materials necessary to complete a project. Even you’re just building a treehouse for the kids in the backyard, you still need to track the lumber, nails and screws, types of tools you’ll need (like a saw, hammer, etc.), and the people you’ll rope into helping you.
OmniPlan for iPad can help track the resources for projects that are smaller or larger. Let’s look at how.