“I’m just wondering why your marketing group can’t do something to try to rein in this next generation, because you’ve got a real bad image out there.”
So said a Microsoft shareholder to CEO Steve Ballmer at the company’s shareholder meeting yesterday. TechFlash reporter Todd Bishop notes that the same shareholder added that Apple’s TV commercials make Microsoft look “like a buffoon.”
I’m relieved to hear this. I often look at Microsoft and wonder if its shareholders are as out-of-touch as the company itself seems to be. In just the last few weeks here’s what’s getting the most enthusiastic coverage in the tech press at a time when it ought to be 100 percent about the newly launched Windows 7.
A Microsoft manager claiming Windows 7 — Microsoft’s flagship product — is inspired by Mac OS X
Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s bewildering assertion that “apps don’t matter” — despite everyone else on Earth knowing otherwise
Further redundancies that include long-time evangelist Don Dodge, and his subsequent post that, now that he’s free from Microsoft, he can admit, yeah, he has iPhone envy
And let’s not forget the bizarre PR misfire that saw the staff of Microsoft’s flagship retail store ignoring their customers for a full five minutes in favor of stomping their way, awkwardly and embarrassingly, through a dance routine
The take-home message? It ain’t just the Apple commercials making Microsoft look like buffoons. Read the rest of this article »
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office yesterday published a patent application Apple made way back in 2008 for “Pushing a User Interface to a Remote Device.” So, then…Smart Remotes. Cool!
MacRumor’s Eric Slivka reports that the patent’s lead inventor is William Bull, now Yahoo’s Senior Director of Mobile User Experience, but once upon a time Apple’s iPod User Interface Manager. The so-called “father of the iPod,” Tony Fadell, is also credited.
The idea is simple; portable media devices — such as iPods and iPhones, for example — have their own on-board Graphical User Interface (GUI) and, usually, a built-in screen. Thing is, we don’t always want to take our iPhone out of our pocket when we’re listening to music (or, if you’re me, catching up on podcasts while washing the dishes). Read the rest of this article »
Gotta love that Steve Jobs. He never was one to hold back, and even now, when he’s the CEO of the Universe (or something like that), he won’t be found spouting corporate speak.
CrunchGear tells the story of a small software development company called The Little App Factory. It made an app for the Mac called iPodRip, one of those tools for transferring music from an iPod to a computer. A law firm representing Apple sent The Little App Factory a letter, informing the company it had violated some of Apple’s trademarks, and instructed it to stop using the “iPod” bit in the app’s name.
iPodRip has been around for nearly seven years and CrunchGear’s Daniel Brusilovsky says it has been downloaded more than five million times. You’d think Apple’s legal sniffer hounds, Baker & McKenzie, might have acted a tad sooner… Read the rest of this article »
According to a report this week on The Mac Observer, Apple and AT&T have been presented with a class action lawsuit by a customer who accuses them of misleading the public by advertising the MMS capabilities of the iPhone 3GS despite not making those capabilities available in the U.S. when it launched.
(Yawn.) I’ll let you mull over whether the accusation is fair; the plaintiff, Francis Monticelli, says in the suit that “MMS functionality was one of the reasons people chose to buy or upgrade… it has [become] clear that AT&T’s network does not support MMS.”
TMO points out Apple made it quite clear MMS functionality would not be available in America at the launch of the iPhone 3GS. Surely you remember the hilarious (and embarrassing) murmur of amusement and derision from the audience at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference when Scott Forstall introduced MMS? “29 of our carrier partners in 76 countries around the world will support MMS at the launch of iPhone OS 3.0,” Forstall announced, then, trying to keep a straight face, added, “In the United States, AT&T will be ready to support MMS later this summer.” Read the rest of this article »
I spend an awful lot of time poking around in the App Store in both iTunes and on my iPhone, just in the hopes of finding something new and exciting to download and use on my device. It’s not an ideal situation, and I often wish Apple would throw out its tired model and completely restructure the App Store from the ground up.
There’s little chance of that happening, but a new Facebook app could help make the App Store more navigable, and do so with a little help from your friends. Mplayit is a new service being offered on Facebook that aims to bring some sense to the jungle that is the 100,000-strong App Store using a more intelligent browsing system based on recommendations and demos. Read the rest of this article »
I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain about the poor, unfair treatment they get, carrying their bleeding hearts in their palms while claiming Apple is bludgeoning the life out of them.
Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform.
The first headline, Facebook Developer Turns Back on iPhone relates how another high-profile developer has thrown their hands up in disgust over how Apple’s closed system runs against their principles. A direct quote from Joe Hewitt, developer of the popular Facebook application can be found on TechCrunch, and is most relevant. I will come back to this later:
I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process.
Ever entertaining—if unreliable—DigiTimes has not one, but two big tablet rumors today. The mythical device (subscription required) has been delayed from early 2010 to the second half of next year, and there will an OLED model. Seriously.
According to anonymous sources inside that the electronics supply chain, Apple changed the launch from March—as opposed to January—to “switch some components” and to add a model with a 9.7″ OLED screen. The OLED model will be manufactured with a display from LG Electronics, as part of a $500 million dollar contract with Apple. That model would be in addition to an LCD tablet with a 10.6″ display. Read the rest of this article »
Speaking yesterday at the Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie explained what’s really important when it comes to the smartphone business, and it’s apparently nothing at all to do with the number of apps available on any one platform.
All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them. It’s a completely different situation from the PC market, where software’s built to run on a Windows or a Mac. Mobile apps require very little development, so it’s much easier to bring them onto every platform.
Yeah. That’s why there are more than 100,000 apps in the iTunes Store and, what, five in the Windows Marketplace? And that’s why quality apps like Facebook or Tweetie 2.0 have been ported, feature-complete, from the iPhone to Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS? Oh, wait… Read the rest of this article »
Is it possible that the Mac is making inroads with Enterprise IT? Intel Capital announced at CEO Summit that it is leading a Series A investment round in Active Storage of Torrance, CA, which builds high-performance storage solutions for the Mac platform. Other investors in this round include Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners. Intel Capital invests in companies that drive demand for Intel products, but it also looks to make money and apparently it sees money in enterprise-class solutions for the Mac.
Active Storage was born out of Apple’s decision to discontinue the Xserve RAID. Alex Grossman, CEO of Active Storage, and the other founders were previously executives in the Servers and Storage products group at Apple, Inc. They left to form their own company that would produce storage solutions of the same quality. While Apple has been pitching the Promise VTrack RAID as a replacement solution, Active Storage has developed its XRAID product line to be a lot more Mac-like with brilliant Mac-native management software. This is high-end gear for serious business — fibre-channel, redundant controllers, redundant power supplies, redundant cooling, etc — with an emphasis on performance. The XRAID comes in two flavors, the original XRAID with 16TB capacity expandable to 32TB and the XRAID ES with 4TB, expandable to 16TB. Read the rest of this article »
Earlier we reported that the next generation of iPhone might have an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader built in, if rumors prove true. Well, there’s no need to wait that long, if near-field communications (NFC) is what you’ve got a hankerin’ for. Wireless Dynamics has announced a device called the iCarte that will add both RFID and NFC capabilities to the iPhone.
The device adds functionality to the iPhone via the dock connector, to which it connects without adding too much bulk or without being too much of an eyesore. In fact, it looks like the iCarte’s designers went out of their way to make sure the add-on looks like it’s a natural extension of the iPhone itself, rather than an apparent third-party accessory. Read the rest of this article »
If you’re still running an old Mac PowerBook 550c or something similar, it must be really annoying to not be able to use Twitter via a native client. That’s probably your No. 1 concern, in fact, on your OS 8.1-running machine. You could always use the web interface, but that’s not really a fair solution, is it?
Now, thanks to Grackle68k, Mac users who are still running Macintosh System 6, 7, 8 and 9 can have a dedicated Twitter client of their very own. Personally, I think the release of this app was just timed to steal the spotlight away from Seesmic for Windows. Obviously this is much bigger news! Read the rest of this article »
With Black Friday rapidly approaching, the time of the year for spending is upon us. Although I’m sure all of us Mac lovers are considering which Apple product we’ll be blowing our budget on (mine will be a Magic Mouse), there are also the other gadgets in our lives to consider.
One of the most important gadgets for Mac users is often the digital camera, what with all those wonderful iLife tools we can use to manipulate and share the photos and videos we take with our digital cameras. As such, here’s a quick guide on picking the right digital camera for you. Read the rest of this article »
Snow Leopard has barely gotten its paws wet, and now news comes that Apple is already working on its replacement. It’s not really surprising, since Apple is basically always either working on the next iteration of its products or releasing them, but still, it does whet the appetite for the next version of OS X.
The suggestion of the new operating system appeared in an entry posted early this morning in a change database for “launchd,” an open source framework that controls the booting of OS X and administers running processes. The new entry includes an error message with the string “11A47″ in it, which is a reference to what version of Mac OS X is being used. Read the rest of this article »
Today, on CNN.com I noticed a new online Get A Mac ad that I’ve lovingly named “Surveillance.”
Apple has done these sort of multi-banner ads on large news sites like CNN and NY Times before where the two ads cleverly interact with one another.
In this ad, Mac and PC are talking about Windows 7 and above them a number of surveillance cameras are showing people going in and out of Apple stores presumably switching from PC to Mac. PC can’t stand the thought so he runs to one of the stores and is observed on one of the surveillance cameras stopping people form going in to the Apple store.
Apple is fairly reliable, but not the most reliable company of all when it comes to notebooks, according to a new study by research firm SquareTrade. The top honor goes to Asus, which surprised me, but I suppose shouldn’t have when I consider the build quality of my fairly inexpensive Eee PC. Toshiba and Sony rank next most reliable, with Apple coming in a close fourth.
I remember a time not too long ago when IBM and Apple would top the list every time, with other manufacturers coming in a fair distance behind them. IBM sold its hardware business to Lenovo, which seems to be having some effect on quality, but is Apple also slipping as it grows? I don’t think there’s enough data to identify a trend, but it is a little worrying.
The iPhone isn’t capable of true multitasking if you’re running a legit, non-jailbroken device, so you can’t do something like, say, have Facebook and Twitter open at the same time. Thanks to the latest update, though, for TweetDeck for the iPhone (free, iTunes link), you can experience most of the advantages of that hypothetical situation using only one app.
The newest version of TweetDeck for iPhone has lots of new features, but by far the most significant is the ability to add columns that show updates from your Facebook friends (and MySpace, too, if you’re a musician or a 13 year-old who somehow got transported to the future from the year 2000). You can read updates, yes, but you can also do wall posts, comment on things, and update your own status, all without leaving the app. Read the rest of this article »
If you’re planning your holiday shopping but want to get a good grasp of the budget available to you in advance, it helps to know what kind of deals you’re going to get. Luckily, Apple’s Black Friday discounts have been leaked early, so you can factor in those price reductions while you’re figuring out how pinched you’re going to be financially come January.
Boy Genius Report got the early tip-off, from an anonymous source. It comes in the form of what looks like a flyer image, detailing some pretty significant discounts on all things Apple, basically. They’re deep enough that you’d probably do well to hold off any Mac or iPod-related purchase for at least another 10 days just in case. Read the rest of this article »
App Store developers now have more to contend with than just the fickle tastes of the humans Apple has reviewing submissions. Now, submissions also go through an automated filter that determines whether or not the app is obeying the rules and not using any of Apple’s private APIs, which is a no-no, according to the developer agreement.
The news comes via a conversation that occurred between developers on Twitter. Craig Hockenberry, best known for Twitterific, guessed that the App Store now contains a mechanism to check submitted code against proper framework use, and John Gruberresponded that Apple has in fact recently begun to do just that. Read the rest of this article »
Scheduling a Genius Bar or One to One training session appointment has never been that difficult. Just go to Apple’s web site, enter some information, and you’re done. But a new rumor over at AppleInsider suggests that it’s about to become even easier, thanks to a new in-house developed iPhone app that could be forthcoming soon from Apple.
News of the app comes via a “source that has proven reliable in the past,” though no further information is given. The app is said to be able to create appointments for both Genius Bar and One to One, and to view membership details for programs that require a subscription. No word yet on a street date for the app. Read the rest of this article »
OnLive made a lot of noise when it first appeared on the scene way back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference of 2009. It’s a service that’s said to be able to make a gaming machine out of any computer that can run the latest browsers, which would effectively end the madness that is PC gaming hardware upgrades. And now, it looks like it might be able to work on the iPhone, too.
What OnLive does is bypass the normal hardware barriers involved in PC gaming by streaming the game live to a user’s browser window from a server farm located nearby. The server farm deals with the game’s performance demands, and all the end user needs is a good enough connection to stream the content smoothly. Read the rest of this article »
I spend an awful lot of time poking around in the App Store in both iTunes and on my iPhone, just in the hopes of finding something new and exciting to download and use on my device. It’s not an ideal situation, and I often wish Apple would throw out its tired model and completely restructure the App Store from the ground up.
Earlier 
If you’re still running an old Mac PowerBook 550c or something similar, it must be really annoying to not be able to use Twitter via a native client. That’s probably your No. 1 concern, in fact, on your OS 8.1-running machine. You could always use the web interface, but that’s not really a fair solution, is it?
Snow Leopard has barely gotten its paws wet, and now news comes that Apple is already working on its replacement. It’s not really surprising, since Apple is basically always either working on the next iteration of its products or releasing them, but still, it does whet the appetite for the next version of OS X.
The iPhone isn’t capable of true multitasking if you’re running a legit, non-jailbroken device, so you can’t do something like, say, have Facebook and Twitter open at the same time. Thanks to the latest update, though, for 
If you’re planning your holiday shopping but want to get a good grasp of the budget available to you in advance, it helps to know what kind of deals you’re going to get. Luckily, Apple’s Black Friday discounts have been leaked early, so you can factor in those price reductions while you’re figuring out how pinched you’re going to be financially come January.
App Store developers now have more to contend with than just the fickle tastes of the humans Apple has reviewing submissions. Now, submissions also go through an automated filter that determines whether or not the app is obeying the rules and not using any of Apple’s private APIs, which is a no-no, according to the developer agreement.
Scheduling a Genius Bar or One to One training session appointment has never been that difficult. Just go to Apple’s web site, enter some information, and you’re done. But a new rumor over at 
