Although rumors often cast him as an apoplectic, purple-faced tyrant stamping through his Cupertino headquarters, Apple’s Steve Jobs is the most beloved of any major tech CEO by his employees, according to a Silicon Valley Insider chart.
Ranked by his own employees, His Steveness hovers at the 95% mark as far as employee approval ratings go, relegating the naysayers as a small minority of malcontents.
Beatle mania continues on iTunes: after the Fab Four launched on Apple’s store, selling some two million downloads in the first week, a course about them on iTunes U is also soaring in popularity.
Liberal Studies class “The Beatles: Popular Music and Society” from the University of Illinois Springfield has been available on iTunes in podcast form since 2005, but just this week it came in as the second most popular course on iTunes U. (Number one? Oxford’s “Critical Reasoning for Beginners.”)
Half a million people have downloaded the 39 podcasts – a crash course in 1960s music for people not born when John Lennon was killed in 1980? — and another two million have previewed it.
The share of Internet-connected devices powered by Apple’s iOS platform grew 216 percent in November, compared to a year ago, researchers at NetApplications announced Friday. The iOS operating system, which powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod, accounts for 1.36 percent of Internet traffic, leading Android’s 0.31 percent.
Although more PCs are online than mobile devices, the shift to portable Internet products is noticeable in the new NetApplications numbers. Windows’ share is down 1.8 percent to 90.81 percent, compared to 92.52 percent during the same period in 2009. The portion of Macs connected to the Internet fell the same percentage (1.8), pulling Apple desktops to just 5.12 percent of the share of online devices.
If you want to get rid of the number pad on your iMac desktop, you now have no choice but to go wireless: Apple has quietly discontinued its compact wired keyboard, making either the $69 Apple Wireless Keyboard and the $49 Apple Keyboard With Numeric Keypad the only (official) keyboards in town.
The compact wired keyboard — part number MB869LL/A — was introduced in early 2009 with the new iMac revision. Neither it nor its wireless brother (which came in the same design, albeit without the compact wired keyboard’s two USB ports) have ever been my style: I’ve never been able to grow accustomed to the lack or miniaturization of some important keys, let alone the omission of the number pad.
Still, if you like keeping your desktop as compact as possible but don’t like changing batteries on your keyboard, it’s a bit of a blow. Better stock up: Amazon’s still selling the old wired keyboard for $49.
Could Apple be planning on signing a deal with legendary radio shock jock Howard Stern to exclusively host a new iTunes show? That’s the rumor amongst Sirius investors, and it’s food for thought, if not terribly likely.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is making a bigger splash in the U.S. than even its makers initially predicted. Since its launch two months ago and the Nov. 10 U.S. start, the iPad rival has sold one million devices. Although Apple sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, the Galaxy Tab is the first real competition for the Cupertino, Calif. company.
The new number comes just two weeks after Samsung announced it had sold 600,000 Tabs amd predicted its tablet would sell 1 million units by the end of this year. However, buoyed by holiday sales, the company now is predicting it will sell 1.5 million Galaxy Tabs when 2010 comes to an end.
What it is: MediaPad Pro is fantastically well designed software for the iPad that allows creative people of all types to easily place multiple portfolios of work — including audio, video, still images and websites — onto Apple’s tablet device and present them in professional, fully customized, brand-able fashion to potential clients, agents or patrons, to virtually anyone they’d like to view their work.
A small publishing company called Peter Pauper Press today announced an iPad version of a print book called The Little Black Book of Kama Sutra.
The book is part of a continuing series of “Little Black Books” and “Little Pink Books.” Other titles include The Little Black Book of Cocktails and The Little Pink Book of Etiquette.
The Kama Sutra book is very much in line with a growing trend of publishing books as interactive apps instead of as e-books. The only trouble is that the book is sexual in nature and illustrated with photographs. The publisher isn’t even going to try to get it past Apple censors, but instead intends to distribute it independently rather than through the iTunes App Store.
The Kama Sutra puts Apple in an awkward position.
Next week’s release of the Unreal 3 Engine based Infinity Blade is likely to set a new graphics milestone for iOS when it’s released next week, but it’s not likely to be the exception: Epic Games have just announced that they will soon release the Unreal Development Kit (or UDK) for iOS to developers, allowing them to use the next-gen Unreal 3 Engine in their games for free.
Apple has made their first step in providing point-of-sale, or PoS, systems to other retailers. The systems are modified iPod Touches that allow employees to ring up purchases, accept credit signatures and wirelessly print receipts to stationed printers through the store; if that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same EasyPay system Apple uses in many of its own retail stores, albeit rebranded as “ZipCheck.”
A private pilot is using an iPad to help stay on course, in addition to the standard navigation system.
Jeff Curl has loaded up his iPad with worldwide charts and says it helps him make better decisions in the air.
“I can see the route structure and see what kind of rate I want to file, I can also pull up my radar and see I don’t want to go straight, I’ve got a huge line of thunderstorms,” he said.
Last month, Verizon’s CEO said that his network would have to “earn” the iPhone and strongly implied that their upcoming rollout of their 4G network would be what would do it.
Maybe so, but they are off to a shaky start when it comes to servicing the Apple faithful: Verizon has officially launched their 4G network by offering their first LTE modem to the public… but don’t expect it to work on your Mac.
Short of your old Friendster or Myspace accounts, Ping is probably your least-used social network. Heck, if bits and bytes could collect dust, Ping sure would have on my machine.
So my guess is that not even the biggest Apple fan will get too indignant about Business Insider listing Ping amongst their fifteen biggest flops in the tech industry in 2010.
Fuze Box, the company behind the groundbreaking meeting and collaboration tool Fuze Meeting, raised the bar for easy multiparty videoconferencing Thursday with the announcement of its private beta for Fuze Presence — bringing multiparty high definition (HD) video to Mac iOS and Android mobile devices.
With many video conferencing solutions tied to a desktop-only experience featuring unreliable video quality and poor latency, Fuze Presence moves the current collaboration space into the realm of H.264 codec technology promising multi-party collaboration delivered at 720P, with high fidelity sound and under 200 ms latency. The technology also supports VoIP, screen sharing, content sharing and a full suite of collaboration tools.
FireCore, makers of aTV Flash, a popular commercially available hack for the original Apple TV have announced a Mac OS X only public beta for the next generation Apple TV hack.
The new hack, aTV Flash (black), only works with Apple’s second generation Apple TV running iOS 4.0. That’s unfortunate since most of us have already updated to iOS 4.1, but an update to support that version of iOS is coming soon. This renders the beta completely useless for most of us, myself included, making the release of this public beta a bit awkward and ill-timed.
The guys at Evernote have just unveiled some new goodies in Evernote 2.0 Beta for Mac.
First up is sharing, and this includes some sweet new features. You can share any notebook, either with named individuals or with the entire world. These public notebooks have a URL (which you can keep to yourself, or tell the world – and search engines – about), and an RSS feed.
Software bundles are a great way to get lots of apps for cheaps, but quite often you end up paying for apps you have no need of and no interest in.
That’s where Give Good Food to Your Mac is different. In a style similar to the MacBundles we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Good Food deal is flexible.
You get to browse the list of apps on offer and pick out the ones you like the look of. The more you buy, the better the deal and the more money you save overall. Buy more than seven applications and you get 60 per cent off.
There’s a decent selection of apps on offer including lots of games. The store closes on December 10th. Happy bundle shopping.
Apple has squeaked by RIM’s BlackBerry, giving the iPhone 27.9 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, versus 27.4 percent for the Canadian handset maker, according to Nielsen Company researchers. Meanwhile, Google’s Android platform has 22.7 percent of the American market, with Microsoft Windows Mobile hanging on in third place with 14 percent.
Earlier this month, RIM’s CEO blamed “Apple’s distortion field” for talk that the BlackBerry maker had fallen behind the Cupertino, Calif. firm lead by CEO Steve Jobs. “We’ve now passed RIM, and I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future,” Jobs had remarked.
Bryan Shlager bought an iPad from Best Buy in Dorchester, Massachusetts that he suspects is a fake – and says also claims the store knows there are at least five or six other fakes sold from the same store.
Neither he nor his college freshman son, for whom it was a gift, could get the iPad to turn on.
Shlager took it back to a Best Buy near his son’s Florida campus – where he says Geek Squad employees told him it wouldn’t work because it was a fake.
Punch drunk Adobe has just released the latest beta of their Flash Player for Mac, and while we wouldn’t be caught dead installing it on our new Airs, for the rest of Mac owners, it may very well represent a substantial performance improvement over Flash Player 10.1.
The biggest new feature in Flash Player 10.2 is “Stage Video” which Adobe claims will allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Basically, Stage Video is a full embrace of the GPU, offloading the entirety of the video rendering pipeline — from H.264 decoding to color conversion and scaling — to your Mac’s graphics chip.
Unfortunately, Stage Video has a hitch: it’s not backwards compatible, so websites will have to update to use the latest APIs for their video players before you see any improvement using Stage Video.
If you’re interested in giving the latest Beta a try, it can be downloaded here.
Search engine ask.com may have its days numbered, but in 2010 people who used it to ask burning questions about tech had questions about Apple.
Three of the top five questions were about Apple products:
What is the best online game for iPod Touch?
What is the best iPhone app?
Is Apple coming out with the iPhone 5?
The answers?
According to the search engine, the best online game is old school arcade favorite Bomber Online and the best iPhone app is either game Trace, photography app Infinicam – described as a Hipstamatic killer — or iFart Mobile. On the release of the iPhone 5, the search engine isn’t much help: the first answer is July 2010.
Though it doesn’t have a rep for being the favored search engine of geeks, the Ask.com community ask and answer section named nerd-com “The Big Bang Theory” as this year’s best new TV show.
Via Yahoo
Despite wild speculation and user interest, Apple has yet to launch any cloud-storage and streaming functionality to iTunes, but that’s not to say you’re completely out of luck if you want to access your music no matter where you are: a new cloud-based streaming site named Mougg has just launched, and best of all, it’s free to try out.
The iPad is eating into the Kindle’s market, prompting analysts Tuesday to announce the Amazon e-reader has a “rapidly diminishing lead” over the Apple tablet. The iPad’s e-reader market share doubled between August and November, while the Kindle’s 62 percent fell tpo 47 percent over the same time.
In a poll of consumers, ChangeWave found the iPad’s market share rose from 16 percent in August to 32 percent in November. At the same time, 75 percent of iPad owners said they are “very satisfied” with the tablet, versus 54 percent for the Kindle.
Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.
Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.
Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.
Has your iPhone’s battery been lasting longer through the day since you updated to iOS 4.2.1? There may be a reason for that: Apple’s using network-controlled fast dormancy in iOS 4.2 to better optimize the way in which the iPhone connects to the cell network, which results in a noticeable bump in battery life.