This video of Steve Jobs from 1990 is an interesting artifact for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, it’s the clip in which Steve pioneered his famous “bicycle for the mind” analogy, which I’ve always felt is one of the most beautiful things ever said about computers.
What is also interesting, though, is how gung ho Steve Jobs is about video games in this clip, even going as far as to suggest that video games are the future of learning, and even the future of the Library of Congress.
Remember the infamous Steve Jobs put-down of 7-inch tablet screens, telling reporters buyers would need to file down their fingertips in order to use the darn thing? Although we don’t see tinier fingers becoming the in-style for Christmas, suppliers are pumping out more 7-inch screens for the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet and fewer 9.7-inch displays for the iPad 2.
Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with a DVD of a roaring fireplace looping on your television? Tacky!
Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with an 8-bit interactive fireplace roaring on your Mac? Awesome!
We’ve long loved Skitch, the screenshot and image editor that we’ve been using on our Macs in one way or another since 2007. A few months back, the guys behind Evernote bought out Skitch, which raised some questions about its future as a stand-alone app, but we needn’t have worried: not only is Skitch its own Mac app, but it’s now become a shiny iPad one as well.
Remember how digital cameras did in film? That progression appears now to be in its second-generation as the iPhone and other smartphones seem destined to do away with the ubiquitous point-and-shoot digital camera. A new report finds phones take a third of all photos as phone-based photo quality dramatically increases.
Does talk of the Euro economic crisis make your eyes glaze over? Perhaps this will get your attention: The down European economy is costing the iPhone marketshare as consumers keep a tight hold on their cash. The bright side: the U.S. and U.K. love of everything Apple has become stronger.
So you wanna be the next Zuckerberg, eh? But, let me guess, you’re a “business guy” who doesn’t know how to program? You’ve thought about it, but you don’t even know where to start, or you just “don’t have time”. Stay on this path and you may end up finding yourself seeking out a code monkey! Trust us, nobody wants that.
Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to help you out by introducing you to the HTML/CSS guru himself, Mark Lassoff. The man is energetic, skilled, and a dynamic online presenter; plus, he’s provided programming instruction to some of America’s largest corporations.
This course is a stellar opportunity to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS you need in order to whip up that creative, high-quality website you’ve been mulling over for years! Normally this course costs $49, but we negotiated a sweet deal with Mark. For only $29, you’ll get Mark’s HTML and CSS expertise jam-packed into nearly 4 hours of video instruction that includes highlighted lab exercises, so you can apply the very skills taught from the course.
Can Apple save print journalism? That’s the question in our minds upon learning the parent company of USA Today has hoarded thousands of iPhones and iPods to provide newsrooms in January. The aim is to help journalists focus on a faster news cycle, including increased use of video to tell stories.
Presumably, it takes intelligence to become rich, which is what makes it so mystifying to me that so many “luxury products” are things that only swollen-tongued mooncalves would actually buy. Take, for instance, Gresso’s custom iPhone, which costs $30,000, and tries to justify that with three in-laid clocks with ten year time reserves apiece… despite the fact that if you just turn it on, the iPhone has an infinitely more accurate clock for as many time zones as you care to throw at it. Oh, there’s also the ubiquitous slathering of Swarovski crystals, if crushed glass floats your boat. Horf.
Apple is unlikely to convince German courts to block sales of Samsung’s newly-revised Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet. That’s the opinion of one report, citing comments that the device “has moved sufficiently from the legally protected design.” In this instance, looks are everything and the South Korean company appears to have dodged a legal bullet using cosmetic sleight of hand.
Although he couldn’t play the guitar or drums to save his life, few individuals have had as much of an impact upon the business of music than Steve Jobs, and now he’s being posthumously recognized for it by the industry he helped save by getting his own Grammy.
This is turning out to be a gamer’s Christmas on the Mac App Store. Following yesterday’s surprise release of Limbo for Mac, Firemint’s beloved Real Racing 2 has also arrived on OS X, with all of the best features of the iOS version, including a 16 car grid, Quick Race and Career modes, 15 racing tracks and over 30 officially licensed cars including the 2010 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500, 2010 Nissan GT-R (R35), 2012 McLaren MP4-12C and more. In our eyes, though, the killer feature is the ability to steer your car using your iPhone or iPad. Get Real Racing 2 here.
Here’s a quick trick that lets you open files in the application you want, even the app in question thinks it can’t understand that file type. This can be useful with some older word processing files, for example.
The iPhone 4S is out for blood this holiday season.
Apple has never shown favor to emulators in its App Store (with the exception of examples like the Commodore 64 app), so it’s surprising to see iMAME available in the App Store for free right now. iMAME allows you to run thousands of classic arcade titles if you’re lucky enough to have the original ROMs.
The emulator app includes 9 less-than-popular arcade games to run, but the possibilities are pretty endless if you know what you’re doing.
The International Trade Commission (ITC) recently placed an import ban on several HTC devices in the United States for violating an Apple design patent. The ban wasn’t set to take place until April of 2012, but Apple’s win would effectively end HTC’s short-term business in the US if HTC failed to develop a workaround.
Noting that it was already working on “alternate solutions” to sidestep the patent infringement issue when the ITC’s ban was announced, HTC has today confirmed that it has already developed a fix that will keep its Android-powered devices safe from Apple’s lawyers for the foreseeable future.
It’s been a long time coming, but the award-winning, multi-platform platformer Limbo just hit the Mac App Store for $9.99. The story of a boy searching the afterworld to find his sister, Limbo’s an atmospheric puzzler from Playdead studios, most well known for its challenging gameplay and atmospheric aesthetic, Limbo’s one of the best indie games to have been released on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in recent memory, so it’s delifghtful to finally see it available for Macs. I know what I’m playing this afternoon.
Some people’s affinity for Angry Birds goes way beyond that of normal standards, as well as some people’s love for Christmas lights (Clark Griswold). The person who made this video seems to suffer from both. Introducing the Angry Birds Christmas light game.
Photo Frame is a nifty feature on the iPad that allows you to show off your photo collection by turning your device into a digital photo frame when it’s not in use. By default, the feature cycles through all of the photos stored on your device, which could mean that an embarrassing image can pop up at any time and spoil the afternoon tea you were enjoying with friends.
Did you know that you can set Photo Frame to display images only from selected albums, or disable it completely to stop unwanted access? Here’s how to customize your Photo Frame and prevent that shot of you in your Justin Bieber pajamas from popping up again.
We’ve been hearing a lot about pod2g’s upcoming untethered jailbreak for all iOS 5 devices, but the latest blog post on the hacker’s site makes clear just how close to completion the jailbreak is for distribution. In fact, according to pod2g, it’s “near ready for prime time,” and to prove it he’s showing the jailbreak running on a stock iPhone 4.
As Apple once did at Macworld, Microsoft has headlned the CES keynote for years now, but when Steve Ballmer takes the stage in 2012, it’ll be for the last time… and the reasons sound very familiar.
Remember the recent story about the App Store being worth more than all of RIM? Here’s another astounding factoid: Just the top 200 most-grossing App Store entries generate four times the revenue than everything offered by the Android Marketplace. A new report also pegs China as a major App Store user, accounting for 30 percent of overall downloads and nearly half of iPad apps.
We’ve been seeing references to HiDPI display modes in OS X Lion for a while now, which has helped cement rumors that Apple will release a Retina Display MacBook Pro, at least, in 2012.
As such, today’s report that Apple left a big reference to HiDPI mode intact in developer builds of OS X 10.7.3 isn’t a big surprise. The functionality can be seen in Finder’s “Get Info” window, and allows you to open a file or app in HiDPI mode, which (while non-functional right now) would presumably user higher-definition fonts, graphics and other UI elements. Retina Display Macs seem like a shoe-in in 2012 at this point, don’t you think?
We’ve seen a couple good hacks that allow you to use Siri and the iPhone 4S to control your Mac, but Vocal is the best and most feature-rich one we’ve seen yet, allowing you to use your iPhone 4S to control apps, perform searches, copy-and-paste text, control iTunes, lookup words and much, much more.
Are you ready for 2012? Tighten your seat belts, here comes the start of chatter about an iPad update and iPhone 5 Part Deux. The 2011 iPhone 5 that morphed into the iPhone 4S, plus a wider range of iPads could set Apple up for either just a good 2013 or a spectacular 2013. Either way, don’t expect a repeat of the monster revenues predicted to end 2011.