Apple has contacted developers to inform them that Mac applications will soon be eligible for its Volume Purchase Program, which gives businesses and educational institutions the ability to purchase software in bulk at a discounted rates.
Thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iOS devices and the Cupertino company’s knack for product marketing, you don’t have to be a regular Siri user to recognize her voice. Two years ago today, she made her debut alongside the iPhone 4s, and she’s been our virtual personal assistant ever since.
But who is the real Siri? Who provided that voice that we’ve all become so familiar with?
Her name is Susan Bennett, and she’s been a voice actress since she was young. She recorded the Siri voices back in 2005 — six years before Apple unveiled the feature — but she had no idea they would ever end up in the iPhone.
Apple has bought a personal assistant iPhone app called Cue for between $40 and $60 million, according to a report from TechCrunch. Originally called Greplin in the App Store, Cue specialized in using data from multiple social networks and users accounts to create a daily agenda. Cue recently pulled its app saying “the Cue service is no longer available.”
Cue was doing Google Now-like contextual notifications before Now and Siri were introduced. The purchase of Cue probably has something to do with enhancing the contextual awareness of the iOS calendar and Siri itself.
If you’ve ever wanted to code iPhone apps, then join the club. There are plenty of developers already out there delivering content to the App Store every day – and tons of budding developers who are chomping at the bit to do so. If you’re going to compete in this saturated marketplace you’re going to need a solid foundation to build on. And you’re going to need to have it fast.
Cult of Mac Deals has an offer right now that will get you well on your way to building and designing killer apps. For a limited time you can get The iOS Foundations Video Course Bundle for only $69 – a savings of 65% – and this course is geared towards giving you what you need to bring your app ideas to life.
Apple’s new “Spaceship” campus has received approval from the Cupertino planning commission ahead of a city council meeting on October 15. The new building, which will become home to 14,000 Apple employees, is now another step closer to fruition, and providing there are no hiccups, Apple will be able to make a start on it next year.
Apple reported some system outages early Wednesday, with multiple services going down between 9:30 and 11:00 am. Game Center and FaceTime were also down for a shorter period of time around 9:30, an outage lasting till 9:45 or so. Here’s what that looks like:
Multiple Services – 9:28 AM – 10:57 AM – Some users were affected
Users may have been unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, Mac App Store, or iBookstore. Users may also have been unable to access iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, or restore purchases from an iCloud backup.
If you were trying to connect to the App, iTunes, or Mac App Stores during this time (or the iBookstore), you may have had trouble. You may have had trouble accessing iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, or restoring purchases from an iCloud backup. It wasn’t you, luckily, but Apple.
Here’s how to find out in the future whether it’s you, or Apple, that’s not letting you use the services.
There’s not many people out there who can claim that their iTunes library is in pristine shape. In fact, more people will admit that it’s a bit of a mess – or even a chaotic one. That’s where TuneUp Version 3 can come to the rescue…no matter how messy your iTunes is. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $29.99 for a limited time.
The big screen biopic Jobs opened this summer to mixed reviews, primarily over the film’s lack of accuracy in depicting events from Steve Jobs life and Apple’s history. It’s not the first movie out about Jobs and it definitely won’t be the last as filmmakers strive to tell a celluloid version of the life of the mercurial Apple co-founder.
A lot of Apple old-timers have commented on the accuracy of the movie, but it took a Mountain View, CA local-access TV show called John Wants Answers to get Steve Wozniak, Daniel Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld together to dish fact from fiction. Host John Vink has a long history with the Cupertino company; he was an engineer at Apple from 1996 to 2012 and currently heads Macintosh desktop engineering for Nest Labs.
The two-hour discussion went through the film scene by scene, peppered with entertaining banter and some surprising recollections from the panel. Dan Kottke, who also worked as a script consultant on the movie, noted that “in making that film, it was a huge choice of where to start it and where to end it…I thought the movie did a pretty good job of getting the emotional notes right.”
Read on to know more about why no one ever got fired over kerning, had to ask what a Macintosh was and why you should watch TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.
The general consensus was that events, dates, facts and fiction were occasionally conflated to tell a better story. Many scenes were partially correct, but key details were altered. Some events portrayed were complete fiction, and the chronology wasn’t always right.
One example is the story of the Apple I and the Homebrew Computer Club. In Jobs the film, a young Steve Jobs stumbles across Wozniak’s new creation – a computer with a keyboard and screen – and becomes mesmerized staring into the TV monitor. He then sells the idea of a computing revolution to a reluctant Woz and convinces his shy companion to bring his system to the Homebrew Computer Club.
Woz spoke at length about what really happened:
“Steve and I both had gone over to a friend’s house, Captain Crunch, John Draper of the old blue box phone phreaking fame,” recalled Wozniak. “He sat down at a terminal, a teletype, and he started typing. Then he began playing chess with a computer in Boston.” Woz and Jobs were dumbfounded.
“Whoa!” said Woz. I thought: “this is just like Pong. I have to have this ability.”
Woz got some chips, an expensive keyboard ($60 – uppercase only) and wired the thing into his TV set. “This was not a computer, this was a terminal,” said Woz, “But it was a very short step before that terminal just got a little addition that made it a computer.”
Soon Woz made those additions and while Jobs was off at college, he started going to the HomeBrew computer club. Every two weeks, Wozniak hauled his TV set in the car, set up everything on a table in the lobby and started programming in earnest. Soon crowds began gathering and he started showing off his creation.
The buzz was growing, so Woz recalled that during one time Jobs was back home, “I pulled him to the club and showed him all the people around me. And he got the idea that we could sell them. I would have given them away for free.” The HomeBrew computer club already was full of people who wanted to change the world and Woz wanted to help.
“This is the complete opposite of the movie,” interjected show host John Vink. “In the movie we had Steve Jobs trying to convince you [Woz] to come to HomeBrew and you said ‘Nah, I don’t wanna go.'”
“Oh no,” replied Wozniak, “I’d been there since day one.”
The development of Lisa and Macintosh were seminal events for the future of Apple. The group concurred that the scene where the Lisa team was chewed out for not having multiple fonts in the word processor was complete fiction. Nobody was fired for a lack of typefaces or kerning, but they did note that a different engineer at Apple was fired around that same time for not wanting to undertake the effort to build a mouse for the system.
Many of the celluloid scenes did portray parts of events accurately, with dramatic effect added for flair. One clip included in the trailer portrays Jobs drafting a young Andy Hertzfeld for the Macintosh team. When Hertzfeld asks for more time to continue working on his Apple II project, Jobs yanks the computer off his desk and says “you’re working on the Macintosh team now.” Then a quick cut to Apple employee Bill Fernandez, who asks “What’s a Macintosh?”
Via email I asked the panel if that was how things really happened, or just good theater?
All three agreed that the Mac project was not a secret around Apple engineers and management at that time.
Nobody would ever have asked “What’s a Macintosh?” That line was just tossed in for dramatic effect, and Fernandez was actually working in Japan at that time. But Hertzfeld did confirm that he lost his computer in the transition.
“[Jobs] came by my desk and said “you’re working on the Mac now’,” said Hertzfeld. “I had just started this new OS for the Apple II, DOS 4.0… and I wanted to get it in good enough shape that someone else could take it over. Steve said ‘Are you kidding? The Apple II’s obsolete, the Apple II’s gonna be dead, you gotta work on the Mac!”
Hertzfeld pleaded for more time, but ultimately to no avail. “Then he unplugged my computer and carried it away. So I had no choice but to go after him!”
Some of the most animated discussion centered around Jobs departure from Apple in 1985 and the initial failure of the Macintosh project. They felt the movie didn’t accurately portray why Jobs was removed from the Mac team.
Woz: “The real situation was that the Mac failed terribly. Totally. We built a factory to build 50,000 of them and we were selling 500 a month. Steve had cancelled projects because they could only sell 2,000 a month.”
“I think he was taking it real hard that he’d failed for a third computer he’d tried to create and his vision really didn’t understand you have to build a market, it takes time, you aren’t going to sell 50,000 on day one. And meanwhile, we had to save the company.”
Jobs wanted to cancel or hamstring the Apple II in favor of the Macintosh, but it was important to continue selling and marketing the older system for a few more years. It generated most of the revenue. That was the primary business decision.
Hertzfeld chimed in: “I tell that story a little bit differently. The Mac did sell a lot of units initially, because of its novelty, because of its positive qualities. In June of 1984 it sold over 60,000 units. So they upped the forecast because Christmas was the big time and they thought they’d sell 80,000 units.”
But sales fell off steeply after the back-to-school rush in early fall, and by the end of the year sales were down to about 1,000 a month.
“When the Macs weren’t selling, a major mistake they made was trying to focus it on the office market,” recalled Hertzfeld. This was the time of the Lemmings commercial, a disastrous followup to the wildly successful 1984 spot. “The whole Macintosh Office thing never really got developed. The Mac needed a hard disk, that was really the biggest single design mistake that we made.”
Kottke: “And meanwhile Lisa had a hard drive.”
Woz: “Patience, patience, patience. Don’t put out a machine when it’s not a good enough machine for the price you’re selling this year. Work on it, work on it, work on it, and put it out when it is a good enough machine to sell at the price you’re offering.”
Steve Jobs and Apple clearly learned that lesson in the post-NeXT period.
Woz: “The Lisa was the right machine, with the right amount of RAM, but it was the wrong year for pricing. We finally got the Lisa back when we got OS X, actually, that’s what I like to say.”
The panel generally thought the that TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was a better portrayal of events of this period. Regarding Jobs, “there was no sense of suspense about this movie” said Wozniak. It didn’t show Steve’s thought process, how he reasoned and argued with people.
Hertzfeld noted that both movies had good acting, but Pirates had the better script. He felt that Jobs often felt like a laundry list of incidents instead of something which would show a deeper meaning.
Kottke said the producers of the film faced many decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, such as details about Pixar and NeXT. He said the filmmakers had tried very hard to get things right.
But one of Kottke’s most surprising memories might have been a quick quip to Woz: “Did you not love the Apple III? Because we all thought it was great!”
For more fascinating details, you can watch the entire two hour episode of John Wants Answers on YouTube. Source: John Wants Answers
Image: Photos: Jeff Lee
Apple has today restored push email services on iOS devices in Germany almost two years after it had to be shut down following a legal battle with Motorola. The Cupertino company announced the change in a new support document, which explains how users can restore push services on their iOS devices.
This afternoon President Obama addressed the nation to talk about the recent government shutdown, as well as to promote the rollout of the new U.S. healthcare coverage website that just launched today.
During his remarks President Obama addressed criticisms that HealthCare.gov is full of bugs and loads too slowly. Obama deflected most of the blame toward the more than 1 million people that visited the site before 7AM and bogged down the servers. The President did admit there are a lot of bugs that need to be addressed, but then he used Americas Most Valuable Brand, as an example of why rollouts don’t always go to well by comparing the Healthcare.gov rollout to glitches in iOS 7:
Samsung’s Galaxy Gear has been on sale for a number of weeks now, but today the South Korean company lifted its embargo on reviews. If you’ve been trying to decide whether or not you should spend hundreds of dollars on one, then, now’s the time to find out.
To make things a little easier for you, we’ve put together a roundup of the biggest and best reviews so you don’t have to trawl through them yourself.
Over the last couple of years Samsung has earned itself a reputation for using Apple products as “inspiration” and then copying them in the most blatant ways possible.
The fury of Apple fans was ignited again last week as Samsung was caught shamelessly copying the Apple’s new golden iPhone creation – the golden iPhone 5s – when the South Korean smartphone maker announced it would be selling a gold variant of the Galaxy S4. Apple fans were quick to dismiss the smartphone as another copycat move,but Samsung took to its corporate blog to explain that it’s totally not copying the gold iPhone because they’ve made tons of gold phones in the past (kind of).
The new iPhones have arrived and there’s no time like the present to ensure that you protect your new device from wear and tear. Cult of Mac Deals has a great offer lined up for those who’ve picked up an iPhone 5S (or have an iPhone 5) so that they can protect from even the worst of scenarios.
Spigen has been developing some top-notch products (check out a review of one of its screen protectors here) and for a limited time we’ve got the latest offering from the company: The iPhone 5S Tough Armor Bundle – featuring the Tough Armor case & popular all glass screen protector (GLAS.t). And, we’ve got it for 50% off the regular price – just $36.99.
Coca-Cola is often held up as that most American of brands, but it’s certainly not the most valuable American brand. In fact, that upstart Apple — a company 90 years younger than Coke — has just pushed the sugar-water purveyor off the list of most valuable brand in the world.
So let’s say for a second that Apple doesn’t ship a Retina iPad mini this year… but still decides to release a low-res iPad mini 2. How would they update it without a Retina Display?
Touch ID, son. 64-bit support. And, of course, by spraying it gold.
According to Derek “beefcake with a brain” Morgan from Criminal Minds, “sitting is the new smoking,” and too much of it will kill you. But who wants any boring old standing desk? Yes, you could put a couple of milk crates onto your regular desk and prop your MacBook on top, but why do that when you can spend $3,900 on the Stir Kinetic Desk, a standing desk with a touch screen?
Looks like Apple’s Maps app is in the spotlight again, as it is directing folks directly across a taxiway where airplanes take off in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaska Dispatch reports that at least two out-of-town drivers relying on Apple’s navigation system for turn-by-turn directions to the Fairbanks International Airport (FAI) were directed across the runway to the airport ramp side of the passenger terminal.
That could be pretty dangerous if a plane was taking off or landing.
Samsung has traditionally offered its smartphones in a whole variety of colors, but one we rarely see is gold — until Apple announces a gold smartphone. Just two weeks after the Cupertino company unveiled the gold iPhone 5s, Samsung has begun showcasing its gold Galaxy S4 in the United Arab Emirates.
Does this company have any shame?
Back in May, we reported upon a seemingly ridiculous rumor that Apple would release a 12.9-inch ‘iPad Maxi’ in early 2014. We dismissed the report pretty much outright, saying that not only did we think that Apple would avoid naming a tablet that had already been ridiculed at launch for sounding too much like a feminine hygiene product after a Maxipad, but pointing out that the iPad mini was outselling the iPad since debut. People want a smaller tablet, not a bigger one.
We assumed that was the last we would hear of the rumor, but we were wrong. The 12+ inch iPad rumor is back with a vengeance… and now it has a manufacturing partner.
PopCap Games free-to-play Plants vs. Zombies 2 is a contentious game to many. If you’re our own good friend Buster Heine, you probably think it’s a masterpiece of a sequel, proof-positive that free-to-play can be done well in the right hands. If you’re me or my girlfriend, though, you likely think it is inferior to the first game in pretty much every way, and a perfect example of how free-to-play mechanisms can ruin an otherwise great game.
Whatever your feelings on the matter, you have to admit that getting Plants vs. Zombies 2 exclusively to iOS is quite the coup. According to EA, it’s a coup that Cupertino (get it?) was willing to pay buckets of money to get. But is that the truth?
Apple’s iMessage service is pretty terrific, but it has one big limitation, and that is that it’s only available on Macs and iOS devices. At least officially. But there is an unofficial app that brings iMessage to your Android-powered smartphone. It works just as advertised, but we strongly advise you not to use it.
The iPhone 5s might be the closest any smartphone’s ever come to perfection, but none of its shiny glass, metal and chamfered surfaces really matter if they can stand up to some daily wear and tear. To see which new smartphone is the most durable, the gadget insurance company SquareTrade pitted the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c against the Moto X and Samsung Galaxy S4, in a series of damage tests, including getting dunked in water.
In the end, Moto X came out on top, with the iPhone 5s coming in a close second. The Galaxy S4 on the other hand didn’t fair too well, and was dominated by everyone, including the cheaper the iPhone 5c.
Watch the full results below:
Every time a new iOS device is released, there’s going to be new adopters. With new adopters come new opportunities to create apps that appeal to them. iOS 7 is an all new look for the devices, and there’s a lot of new things to learn about it. This offer from Cult of Mac Deals and iOS Centric is going to help you learn everything you need to know about iOS 7 so that you can make the best use of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
This deal gives you a lifetime video subscription to iOS Centric – and for the low price of just $19.99. That’s a savings of 80%!
You’ll be blown away by the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s the first time you use it. You’ll be prompted to set it up when you first start up your iPhone, and you’ll have to scan your fingerprint numerous times at different angles before your iPhone is happy with it. Once it’s recorded, you can use the tip of your finger to unlock your device and authorize purchases from iTunes and the App Store.
Update: It looks like Jimmy is the one who got the first two iPhone 5s, one for himself and one for his mother in Indonesia. What a nice guy! The Herald Sun has a nice article on Jimmy and his bit of fame.
