Sigur Ros by richjm
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the iPhone camera is technically rubbish, but I’m endlessly impressed by the ingenuity and creativity people show with it.
This morning I browsed around Flickr for images of gigs and concerts taken with iPhones; there are some really atmospheric shots to be found.
Stuff Tech 1 from Stuff Tech on Vimeo.
This is ace. James Jobs and Louis Mirra are junior video podcasters who know what they like and know how to tell the world about it.
Things I like about Tech Stuff Podcast episode 1:
Things I don’t like about Tech Stuff Podcast:
Things that concern me about Tech Stuff Podcast:
Have your kids made a rockin’ tech podcast recently?
I followed a link to this CrankyGeeks url because it tempted me with information on “how to get out of your Sprint contract to buy an iPhone.”
I should have known.
The video is pretty good evidence that some FCC regs regarding broadcast standards are there for a reason. Of course, the Internet remains a bit of a final frontier and so you never know (or, as I mentioned, you should know) what you’re getting.
The best advice three guys sitting around drinking can come up with for getting out of your cell phone contract? Complain.
I’ll remember not to ping CGs with a real problem.
Here’s some news for you:
Mac OS X is, and always has been, vulnerable to trojans.
The whole point of trojans is that they exploit the most serious security problem of all: gullible users. A trojan does not take advantage of any holes in the code, all it needs is to persuade someone to click an “OK”, or to run an installer, and it has done its job.
The problem with a lot of the reporting of malware, especially by traditional media, is that the word “virus” is widely used to mean “malware”.
Most of us who are half-way to computer literate know the difference between a trojan and a virus, but most of the rest of the world has no idea.
That’s why we’re seeing news articles about “Mac viruses”, and we shall continue to see them in future. That’s also why your Windows-using friends are going to be smirking at you, saying: “Heh. And you said you didn’t get viruses on your Mac. Bet you feel stupid now, huh?”
Any computer is vulnerable to trojans. The security hole they exploit is not in the operating system, it’s the one sitting in the chair and tapping on the keyboard.
Wanna keep your computer clean? Next time you’re surfing some random porn site and a pop-up tells you to “Install a codec” so you can watch the movies, it’s a good idea to click Cancel.
The HP TouchSmart laptop computer will get attention from curiosity seekers when it debuts on November 28 because it is the first consumer-grade full touch-screen-capable notebook computer. If you watch the video demoing the the device above, however, you’d be forgiven for thinking HP may be in a bit of an awkward position once the actual sales numbers from this product start to get tallied.
Watch how taking advantage of the touch screen’s functionality requires two hands – one to hold the open screen steady at the side or the base, and another to actually perform the touch gestures on the screen. It also seems from this demo (which is apparently not a final release version of the product) the screen is not especially sensitive to touch gestures, that many “commands” have to be “repeated” twice and three times before the screen registers them. The screen itself is high-gloss and, well, I know how I feel about finger oils on a glossy glass surface. If these machines do end up taking off for some reason, there ought to be a bull market in screen wipes.
When Apple introduced the iPhone in June 2007 it rocked the mobile computing world almost as much as it rocked the mobile phone world. And with the launch of the AppStore this past summer, Apple’s business and iPhone software development exploded, with both continuing to outpace a clearly struggling global economy.
I don’t expect HP is going to have nearly the impact iPhone has had, despite introducing the kind of product many have been clamoring for from Apple.
Babies? Yes, babies! That’s all it is! Babies!
Isn’t there a law against this or something?
Wait – there’s two apps here. Babies and Babies Free.
The only difference I can see between them is that Babies costs a dollar and is described as: “Look at babies until you cannot look at babies no more! There is no end to the babies!”
Whereas Babies Free is merely “All the babies you will ever want to look at!”
I see, so there’s a clear functionality difference here. The free Babies app imposes restrictions on the amount of baby viewing. Users are limited to just the babies they will ever want to see; to see babies until you can no longer do so requires the pro-level upgrade. Figures.
So that’s all cleared up then.
The AppStore “is causing a sea change in both the mobile phone industry and the gaming industry that threatens the viability of all competitors,” according to technology stock analyst Jason Schwarz at Seeking Alpha.
Calling the AppStore bigger than the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone, Schwarz points to comments made by Steve Jobs during Apple’s recent earnings conference call with industry analysts, in which he pointed out that the company is now benefiting from being at the center of a cycle in which cool applications beget more sales, thereby creating an even larger market which will attract even more software development.
Schwarz writes that Apple and the AppStore have “brought the Internet to the level…everyone expected during the tech bubble…[with] efficiency of distribution [that] is impossible for the traditional model to compete with,” and goes on to identify Apple stock, trading in the $80 range, as “a unique wealth building opportunity.”
Some Cult of Mac readers have lately complained about the preponderance of iPhone and iPhone app-related coverage we have been publishing, but the fact of the matter is that AppStore development is exploding. It represents where much of Apple and Mac oriented creativity exists right now. And if Schwarz is right when he says “Modern day society values its computers and phones above all else,” then AppStore news and product development are likely to increase and not fade away.
(I know we’ve covered Ocarina here before, but I’m a latecomer to it and I’m so blown away, I had to have a rant about it. Forgive the indulgence.)
It took me a few days to grok what’s so wonderful about Ocarina, the $0.99 app that’s been taking the App Store by storm in recent days.
It’s not just about playing music. It’s about sharing it. Globally.
When you switch on Voice Search in Google’s Mobile App for iPhone, you see a little bit of warning text underneath which reads:
“Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents.”
Tish and piffle, I thought to myself when I read that. I’m sure it’ll understand my humdrum Estuary English accent perfectly well.
But you know what? The warning was put there for a reason. Because so far, every search I’ve done has failed when I use my normal voice, and worked when I put on my appalling attempt at an American accent.
So thank you Google for giving us voice search, which is officially the New Best Thing Ever (better than the last Best Thing Ever, at any rate). But curse you, Google, for making me sound like a complete idiot every time I want to do a voice search for something in public.
Late last night I made the mistake of staying up to listen to a talk radio show on BBC Radio 5 Live. The host, Richard Bacon, used the final hour of the show to generate some calls from listeners with the simple call to arms: “PC or Mac?”
Talk show radio shows love topics like this. Ones on which everyone has an opinion.
Sadly, most of last night’s opinions were painful to hear. Not because the PC crowd were dismissing Macs and Mac users wholesale, but because they were using such age-old arguments to do it.
The Fail Whale enjoying a well-earned break, yesterday.
Today’s big question: what is the best Twitter client for iPhone? I asked everyone in my house, but neither of them had an opinion. So I asked Twitter instead.
At the time of writing, there’s a lot of praise for Tweetsville and Tweetie (not actually publicly available yet, it seems) and Twittelator.
My favorite right now is Twitterfon. I only discovered it a few days ago, while discussing iPhone software over a pint in the pub, but it as soon as I’d got it installed, it replaced Twitterific as my daily quick-must-check-my-Tweets-else-I’ll-probably-die app. (Did someone say something about time and attention? No? Good.)
Why do I like Twitterfon? Mainly because it’s fast, also because it looks like an iPhone app. Twitterific was too pokey, too cramped, too dark, for my liking.
Annnnnyway. What’s your fave iPhone Twitter tweet-o-tron, oh lovely Cult reader? Hmmm?
Dave at Newton Poetry makes a good point in his post One Used Mac Per Child about the culture of throw-it-away that pervades our society. We throw away so many old computers and monitors – still functional, most of them, but no longer fashionable – that we end up “poisoning another country and its people.”
What happened to the “make do and mend” attitude? It got swept away by cheap deals in malls, deals that made making do seem dumb.
It’s no secret than I’ve been a less-prolific blogger over the last, oh, six months or so. Part of this is fairly dull personal life details (marriage, etc. Hi, honey!), but a bigger part of it has been the very quiet development of my first book, Wired to Care, which I co-wrote with my dear friend and colleague Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. The book won’t be out until January, but our new blog is live now.
Now, far be it for me to avoid any shameless self-promotion, but I bring it up for another reason. The top post of the moment is my epic manifesto on why it is that Apple has never made significant in-roads in the enterprise space, while IBM remains the machine of choice more than 30 years after Steve Jobs declared war on Big Blue. It’s tied tightly to the theme of the book, but I think it can be regarded most as a guest appearance by Cult of Mac at the Wired to Care blog. Plus, it has the Apple Lemmings ad:
“Steve Jobs doesn’t have a clue about how to sell anything to business customers. From 1981’s defective Apple III to the $10,000 NeXT Computer to Apple’s current efforts, the offerings that Steve Jobs has created for enterprise technology customers have universally flopped. The company’s current high-profile effort in that arena is the xServe, a sleek metal computer meant to handle the file-sharing needs of a small or medium business. While beautifully designed in the way that all of Apple’s products are, the xServe screams to the world of business that it was not designed with them in mind. People working in technology at companies want to buy something that looks reliable, fast, and, most importantly, too complex-looking for ordinary people to manage. Simple hardware doesn’t connect with its intended audience, and the xServe has no traction whatsoever with business customers.”
I have a lot more to say on the subject, and I hope you do, too! Let the argument begin in the comments thread at W2C, and I’ll keep you updated whenever there’s more Apple content over there!
Like most nerdy types, I went through a phase of being the family tech support guy. Back in the days when I knew a few tricks to make Windows co-operate, this was occasionally a productive use of my time. These days, it’s a complete waste of it.
So I’ve refused to take on tech support jobs for family and friends over the last couple of years. To avoid causing offense, I’ve usually just shrugged my shoulders and said in a regretful tone: “Sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to help. I’ve not used Windows for years and I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.”
This get-out sounds even better because it’s the truth.
So this has popped up in the feeds this afternoon, and after my initial excited clicking all I can say is “Oh.”
Because it really isn’t a proper keyboard, it’s a tiny clip on thing that does little more than recreate the built-in software keyboard in plastic. The typing’s slow, and all thumbs anyhow.
I know I’ve been banging on about iPhones and keyboards recently, but this? This is not what I was banging on about.
Wait, what? Barack who?
(Via CrunchGear)
Image credit: Josh Helfferich
Back in October, blogger John Gruber wrote off the Apple Retail Store Field Trip program for K-12 schools, calling the taint of education with consumer advertising “sickening” and “appalling.”
Over the weekend, however, Fraser Spiers, a teacher in the UK, posted an account of the field trip his class took to an Apple Store across the pond that makes Gruber’s dismissal seem mean and wrong.
According to Spiers’ account, “The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at.” Students were provided a half dozen computers in the store and given instruction on making podcasts in GarageBand, including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes. At the end of the trip each student came away with a CD of their finished podcast and a free t-shirt.
While it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical about corporate interests getting too closely involved in education, Apple’s field trip program isn’t exactly egregious on the scale of, say, ChannelOne, the 12-minute television program seen daily by an estimated eight million public school students in the United States. Studies of ChannelOne programming found that 20 percent of its air time is spent on coverage of ”recent political, economic, social and cultural stories,” while the other 80 percent is advertising, sports, weather and natural disasters.
Given Apple’s longstanding relationship with and loyal embrace by the K-12 education market in the US, together with the fact that kids get what Speirs described as “a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from,” I’d have to come down on the side of giving the company props for offering a unique and valuable service.
Just a few days after announcing that Mac support for Netflix’s Watch Instantly service was on the way, the company has opened the door to its public beta here. With a quick install of Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, you’ll be good to go — not even a browser restart was necessary for me. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now, and I’m really impressed. At least on my (admittedly brand-new) MacBook, it loads almost instantly, the video and audio quality is great, and the suggestions really do mesh with my taste. And none of the bizarre error messages I’ve seen in reviews of the older Windows version.
The site suggests that a 1.5 Ghz Intel chip is the minimum for Mac support. Anyone with an older machine had the chance to put this service through its paces?
Possibly in a fit of friendly rivalry with its competitor Fortune magazine, atop whose list of the 50 Most Admired Companies in the world Apple sits for 2008 at #1, Forbes magazine featured its list of the 10 biggest Apple failures this week, a gallery of which we reproduce for you below.
There are at least a couple of items here that grabbed a few hearts, but what do you think? Are these all Apple strikeouts? Let us know in comments.
Japanese mobile telecom provider Softbank announced Thursday it will offer iPhone customers a peripheral digital TV tuner slated for arrival by mid-December. With sales of the iPhone in Japan already looking to be only half what the company once expected, Softbank appears to be hoping the availability of high quality One Seg TV broadcasts will lure more buyers to the Apple phone in the saturated Japanese mobile handset market.
The device, with a footprint only slightly smaller than the iPhone itself, is expected to cost about $100 and will also feature the ability to extend the iPhone’s battery when connected to the iPhone by a dock connector.
Color me skeptical that the vaunted Japanese consumer’s love of gadgetry will make this a game changer for iPhone’s fortunes in Japan.
Via Crunch Gear
For some time, you could hardly read about Apple without “iPod-maker” following closely behind in press and analyst comments. However, that symbiotic description is dated, according to one of the rising stars among unpaid Apple watchers, Andy Zaky.
Zaky, who watches Apple sales figures from his post at Bullish Cross, wrote Monday iPod sales contributed just 14.2 percent to the fourth quarter revenue of the Cupertino, Calif. company.
By this time in 2009, the iPhone will replace the iPod as the second-greatest revenue generator for Apple, next to Mac sales, the blogger wrote. Last week, Apple reported selling 6 million iPhones for the quarter.
The blogger is among a new breed of Apple analysts not employed by financial houses to provide estimates and insight. Fortune recently gave bloggers the nod over pros in predictions on Apple’s recent Q4 report.
A nice article by Mark Hachman at PCMag.com looks at Steve Jobs’ comments during the quarterly earnings conference call, and comes up with a promising line of thought.
Jobs, as we suspected and made plain here at the Cult a few days ago, doesn’t have anything against a netbook style Mac per se; he simply cannot see how Apple could produce one that wouldn’t suck. Or to put it another way:
“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”
Jobs is waiting patiently to see what happens next to netbooks. I postulated last week that the Air would morph into a cheaper device (which I’ve no doubt it will), but perhaps I missed something more obvious: the iPhone will morph into a more flexible device. It’s already cheap (well, affordable at any rate).
There’s no hurry, at least not from Apple’s perspective. It is already making plenty of money from the products it has on offer right now, especially iPhones. And as John Gruber points out today, might soon be putting more focus on its phones than on any other part of the business – simply because that’s where the money is, and will continue to be for some time yet.
Which means Apple has time to watch how netbooks evolve, particularly how they evolve with regard to connectivity options, and this is an important factor, I think.
The first gen netbooks appeared with simple wifi connectivity, which is fine for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But the old fashioned “road warrior” (yuk, what a horrible phrase) needs connectivity from anywhere, and cannot depend on the availability of wifi networks. They need to be able to open their computer at a moment’s notice, and just get their online stuff done.
Right now, the only feasible way of managing that is via the telephony data network, 3G or otherwise.
So we’re now seeing new generation netbooks with 3G cards, and what’s interesting isn’t the tech inside, but the shop windows they’re appearing in. These netbooks are being sold from phone stores.
As the phone companies start selling contracts (and with them, heavily subsidised netbook computers), Apple will be watching to see just how much the whole arrangement sucks. Some people will end up with two contracts – one for their existing phone, one for their netbook. Some will have one contract, but still be using two devices, carrying around a separate phone handset.
So when Steve says: “We’ll wait and see how that nascent market evolves, and we have some pretty good ideas if it does,” – what ideas does he have in mind? Something that makes ownership of a tiny portable computer easier. The iPhone’s got the connectivity and the computing power to do what’s needed. All that it needs to get it competing with the netbooks is a keyboard, or something that makes the keyboard redundant.
Might Apple let us use normal Bluetooth keyboard with the iPhone? Possibly. Personally, I’d love that, but Apple doesn’t care about me. It wants to me products that really sing with cool, and I think that Steve Jobs would consider an iPhone propped up on a tabletop and controlled with a Bluetooth keyboard to be uncool.
In the Cold War era, a cottage industry was created around determining the geopolitical significance of Khrushchev or Brezhnev not appearing at the May Day reviewing stand. For silicon valley, it is Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Tuesday’s new product announcement.
Was Tuesday’s announcement of new MacBooks a cryptic message to investors worried about Jobs’ health? We all remember the dive Apple’s stock took when a rumor (which turned out to be false) spread that the Apple leader had been rushed to the hospital for heart trouble.
So, when Jobs shared the stage with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive, speculation began that Apple was sending a message to Wall Street: don’t worry, we have a plan.
Now we’ve seen them, now we know. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are quite nice in some respects, and quite frustrating in others.
What amuses me about the whole thing, though, is how astoundingly far-out some of the pre-event speculation was. It’s always part of the fun, exploring the gamut of people’s expectations and imaginations as they dream up the kind of product they’d like Apple to create for them.
My favorite this year was the iMac-as-docking-station concept, which showed an iMac-like monitor with a huge hole in one side, into which a folded MacBook could be slotted. A nice fantasy indeed, but still a fantasy. And Apple’s not in the business of fulfilling every fanboy’s fantasy.
No, Apple’s in business to make profit, like every other computer manufacturer. As such, it’s product development decisions are, and will be, driven by the profit they can be reasonably expected to generate.
New laptops weren’t the only thing Jobs unveiled today—Apple’s also finally provided a new external display. And it’s a strange one.
More information’s available at Apple’s website, but the gist of it is this: the 24″ display is super-thin, uses advanced LED technology, has integrated power with easy connectivity, and includes an iSight, microphone and speakers. All this for the same price as the existing, aging 23″ Cinema Display.
That sounds great until you dig and think a little more. $899 is hardly great value for a 24″ display these days. The display is gloss-only, which will make pros flee. And those that won’t had better have laptops, since unless I’m very much mistaken, this display requires one of Apple’s new laptops to work—it needs a machine with a Mini DisplayPort. So you guys who just dropped $2799 on a new Mac Pro had better look elsewhere.
Apple’s a great company, an innovator that goes where few others dare to tread. But flashes of the old sneak through now and again, and only Apple would dare release a nine-hundred dollar MacBook accessory in the middle of global economic turmoil.
With Apple’s announcements still ringing in the ears of the Mac faithful, it looks like I wasn’t far off the mark a month ago when I asked “Is Apple going to ditch the ‘Pro’ from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a ‘standard’ MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to 50-dollar bills?”
The revamped line offers a new (and much prettier) MacBook Pro, with a precision-engineered, environmentally friendly case, advanced NVIDIA graphics, and a no-button multi-touch trackpad (which, given Apple’s penchant for incrementing the number of fingers required for gestures will by the next revision also require toes).
It looks like a triumph of engineering, and although the enforced move to glossy displays irks, it’s hard to see how Apple could have improved on today’s announcements, especially when you consider the MacBook also gets to play with the new toys. In fact, bar the different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood (more powerful graphics for the Pro, a lack of FireWire for the MacBook), these machines are more twins than distant cousins.
The one major glitch for me is that it’s so painfully obvious that Apple’s laptop range is now in the middle of a transition. The white MacBook clings on as a much-needed (relatively) low-cost option, but sticks out like a sore thumb, screaming “I’m the cheap Mac–DON’T LOOK AT ME!” while hiding its face behind its pale hands. And in Pro land, the 17″ model looks like its smaller cousin has rapidly beaten it with an ugly stick. However, I suspect this now slightly confused line is a temporary aberration, something somewhat confirmed by Apple’s new Which MacBook are you? page that ignores the old MacBook and MacBook Pro entirely.