I am the worst singer in the world. I know this, but I still went on stage to sing at The Beard Bash last week at WWDC. If you really want to punish your ears, press play. I’d recommend moving on though.
Blues song I wrote about developers
Voodoo Child
Apple Inc. won a $30-million contract Tuesday from the L.A. Unified School District, paving the way for the company to provide every student with an iPad in the nation’s second-largest school system.
The Board of Education voted 6 to 0 on Tuesday to approve the contract after hearing senior staff laud Apple’s product as both the best in quality and the least expensive option that met the district’s specifications.
This is great news for students.
Apple on Wednesday updated one of my favorite and most used products—Apple TV. In a software update released today, Apple added a number of new “channels” to the including including HBO GO and WatchESPN.
According to Apple HBO GO gives users unlimited access to HBO programming, including bonus features and special behind-the-scenes extras. You will need an HBO subscription through your television provider.
WatchESPN provides users with live access to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3 and ESPN Buzzer Beater/Goal Line to those who receive ESPN’s networks as part of their video subscription from affiliated providers. Sports fans will also get curated on-demand content from ESPN.
Apple also added Sky News on the Apple TV for users in US, UK and Ireland; Crunchyroll, a video service for Japanese Anime and Asian media; and Qello, an on-demand streaming service for HD concerts and music documentaries. You can sign-up for Crunchyroll and Qello on the Apple TV.
According to Apple, iTunes users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date, and they are purchasing over 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day.
Those are incredible numbers and I think it shows Apple is on the right track with its iTunes and Apple TV offerings. It also shows that there is a lot of room for growth in this market and it’s good to see Apple taking advantage of its infrastructure to bring new programming options to users.
The Apple TV is one of the most used entertainment devices in my house. My entire family takes advantage of movie rentals, TV show purchases and channels like Netflix on an almost daily basis. Adding this type of content will only further that usage for us.
If you’re not a Masshole like me, a bunch of the references are going to go over your head. But if you are a Masshole, I bet you’ll laugh.
The beard and I had this conversation with my daughter’s boyfriend.
It’s always interesting watching Steve.
The Dinky-style body is my favorite from Jackson. Today they released two 7-string and one 8-string model. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a 6-string too.
Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it now has 1 million active advertisers globally who used the platform in the last 28 days, a milestone for the company that is seeking to revive its revenue growth.
That is just a mind-boggling number of active advertisers.
I love this song.
This is funny.
For reference, if you haven’t seen it, here’s Apple’s original video.
Adobe Systems Inc, which makes the Photoshop and Acrobat software, reported a higher-than-expected adjusted quarterly profit as demand rose for the subscription-based version of its flagship software package.
Great news for Adobe. It seems clear they made the right decision going with Creative Cloud, even though not all users are behind it.
These are huge awards in the music industry.
The story of the Pippin reads like a geekier, technological version of a Greek tragedy. It has its heroes and its villains. There’s a strange artifact with supposedly untold magical powers. And like all good tragedies, it’s a story filled with its fair share of hubris, with characters who were destined to fail almost before they even began.
I remember this.
Please, please WordPress don’t kill Poster.
Whenever I see “Presented by Samsung Galaxy S4” I have to wonder. I don’t remember Josh ever being so brutal—some might say unfair—on an Apple product that is clearly not finished. And you know, it’s not like Samsung hasn’t pulled dirty tricks in its campaigns before.
If you use Messages or iChat, you probably know that searching messages to find important info from past chats can be frustrating. Perhaps you couldn’t find what you were looking for, or your Mac slowed down so much that you gave up.
Chatology makes it easy.
I’ve been testing this for the past few weeks and it really is easy to use. Finding messages couldn’t be easier.
Invited over to Hong Kong by a young industrialist, he brought along a small entourage, including photographer Christopher Makos, who documented Warhol’s journey to Beijing, Tianamen Square, and the Great Wall.
It’s amazing all the little extras you can hear in the isolated track.
I do this for real every day.
We couldn’t be more pleased to announce that our new family of Creative Cloud desktop apps, and many of the powerful publishing and collaborative features that we announced at Adobe MAX in May, are now available.
Major changes and new features to Creative Cloud apps, and support for Behance, the creative social network that Adobe acquired last year.
If there was any doubt at all about how pathetic Forbes has become, just take a look at the latest bit of drivel posted to the Web site.
Forbes’ Eric Jackson asks the question “Why has Apple AAPL overpriced iCloud so much?” Okay, pricing is a subjective thing, so let’s take a look at why he thinks it’s overpriced.
That might have been a great deal for storage a year ago when iCloud was first rolled out. However, Yahoo!’s new Flickr storage pricing certainly catches your eye.Yahoo! is giving you 1 terabyte of storage for free. That’s 1,024 GB of free photo space.
Wait, what?
The whole basis for this article is that iCloud is overpriced because Yahoo is offering more space for photos? Clearly Jackson doesn’t know much about iCloud, but let’s address his main complaint first.
From Apple’s Web site:
Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not count against your iCloud storage.
So, what the hell is he whining about? He has no idea.
Let’s get to the more obvious point. iCloud is a collection of services that allow you to sync information—and images—across multiple devices. That includes contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and other data. I recently discovered a link for recommended bookmakers saved among my synced bookmarks, reminding me how seamlessly Apple’s ecosystem preserves personal preferences. Over the years, Apple’s cloud services have also expanded to include iTunes music and videos, providing easy access to media from anywhere. In short, a completely different service than Flickr.
According to his bio Jackson is “the Founder and Managing Partner of Ironfire Capital LLC, which runs a tech-focused hedge fund and angel fund.”
People, call your broker and make sure none of your money is with guy.
I didn’t want to link to Forbes so I wouldn’t reward their stupid story with traffic, but if you want to read the original, you can here.
Just bought tickets for this. My son and I are going. Megadeth, Godsmack, Black Label Society and many others will be playing over two days.
Like Peter Kafka said on AllThingsD, these little tidbits will have no bearing on the verdict, but I find them interesting.
Matt Drance on iOS 7:
Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don’t need the deception of “photorealism” anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real. The parallax effect conveys an entire living world under that glass, not just abstract pictures and icons. This is reinforced by the launch and quit animations: your eye never loses sight of where you’re going, or where you came from.
John Moltz with a very important distinction in my “Don’t worry about iOS 7” article from earlier today.
I really like the new Mac Pro and since I use mostly external rack units and other gear, the lack of expansion slots is fine with me. Many studios won’t be upgrading right away, and when they do, there will be a lot more gear that supports Thunderbolt and other I/O options. Peter Kirn has a nice look at what the audio industry thinks of the Mac Pro.
Great article by Darby Lines, a.k.a. The Angry Drunk.
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Judging from my inbox, Twitter and Messages, people are losing their minds over iOS 7 and some of the changes Apple introduced at WWDC last week. Here is my advice to you—sit back, take a deep breath and relax.
There are a few things you need to remember about iOS 7. First, it’s nowhere near finished in terms of design or functionality. Apple engineers stopped adding or changing the operating system before WWDC so they had a stable build to show during the keynote. It’s not done 1.
Second—and I’m surprised I even have to say this—it’s a beta for developers. This is not a build any individual user should install—ever. It wasn’t meant for you and installing it shouldn’t even be on your radar.2
The developer beta of iOS 7 is meant as a way for developers to see the new APIs and to see how their existing apps work.
This is also an important opportunity for developers to make decisions about upcoming apps. Will future apps be iOS 7-only so they can tap into new functionality in the operating system? What design decisions need to be made? There are many more things that developers need to consider.
These are important decisions that will affect the apps that we buy in the next year or so.
This is not the time, as a user, for you to decide if you’re going to upgrade to iOS 7. You shouldn’t even be considering that yet. Let Apple do its thing with the operating system, let developers work on their apps and you be calm.
Don’t worry about iOS 7.