May 14, 2012
Blizzard Entertainment will release Diablo III at midnight on May 15, 2012. Some retailers are offering special store hours for people who don’t want to wait until the sun rises before getting their hands on the game.
Diablo III is the long-awaited sequel to the hit dungeon crawler action RPG game series. It’s available for both OS X and Windows.
“Twenty years have passed since the Prime Evils were defeated and banished from the world of Sanctuary. Now, you must return to where it all began – the town of Tristram – and investigate rumors of a fallen star, for this is the first sign of evil’s rebirth, and an omen that the End Times have begun,” explains Blizzard.
Five hero classes are included with the game, which sports randomized 3D environments, guaranteeing you’ll have a different experience each time you play. A “real money auction house” has been set up to let you buy and sell rare items for real world currency.
The game is already available for digital pre-sale: customers can download the game and activate it at midnight. But if you’d like to mill about with other Blizzard fans, the company has coordinated launch events at retailers throughout the world. A special launch event site has been set up with details.
System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later, Intel Core 2 Duo-equipped Mac with Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT or ATI Radeon HD 2600 or better, 2GB RAM, 12GB hard disk space, DVD-ROM, broadband Internet connection and 1024 x 768 resolution. The game is rated M for Mature by the ESRB.
Written by Peter Cohen
Brian X. Chen for The New York Times:
Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.
Says a lot about the cable industry when the CEO of one of the most important players in the business has no idea how Apple’s technology is disruptive to his own.
Written by Peter Cohen
Stuart Sumner for Computing:
Apple has invited security company Kaspersky Lab to advise it on the security of its Mac OS – according to the security provider’s chief technology officer. Speaking exclusively to Computing, Kaspersky CTO Nikolai Grebennikov said his firm had recently begun the process of analysing the Mac OS platform at Apple’s request.
Kapersky made headlines recently for claiming that one in five Macs was hit with malware – stretching the truth, perhaps, since that number included Macs that have received malware spam, which doesn’t direct affect the Mac operating system.
UPDATE: Turns out that like the previous story, Kaspersky was full of shit when it said that Apple requested its help.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Reverse Engineering Rock and Roll: Capo is a revolutionary tool that helps you learn the music in your iTunes library. Available for your Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
Download the free trial for the Mac, and check out the new mastering-quality slowing engine that retains the detail in your music all the way down to quarter-speed!
May 13, 2012
Written by Peter Cohen
Kara Swisher for AllThingsD:
Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation.
The stink over Thompson’s falsified credentials has been led by Yahoo shareholder and hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb, who’s fighting for control over Yahoo’s board of directors.
AllThingsD reports that Thompson’s successor is probably going to be Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s EVP of “Americas.” Levinsohn formerly was president of Fox Interactive and managing director at Fuse Capital.
May 12, 2012
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states the following:Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.Ian Betteridge explains his theory as follows:The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
If you post crap, but post it first, it’s still crap.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
“The team decided to make available patches for Photoshop CS5.x, Illustrator CS5.x, and Flash Professional CS5.x.” The time frame for availability of those fixes is unclear. “We are still in the process of finalizing the timeline for the patches,” the spokesperson said. “We will update the respective security bulletins once the patches are available.”
It’s good that they did this, but the original decision to not issue updates and force people to upgrade to CS6 left a bad taste for many users.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Kim-Mai Cutler:
Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, says it does quality assurance testing with about 400 Android devices. Again, that’s testing with four hundred different phones and tablets for every app they ship!
What a bunch of shit to make your developers go through.
The Iconfactory has announced the release of their hit game Astronut on the iPad. It costs $1.99.
The planet-hopping game has you using gravity to get where you need to go, avoiding space invaders and gathering star shards.
The iPad version is fully optimized for new iPads’ high-res “retina” display. The iPhone version is available for free. In a novel twist, Astronut lets you remote control that version.
For more details, bounce to the Web site.
You know it’s a slow day when the media is picking up on the fact that Siri is using WolframAlpha’s search to return a query for the “best smartphone ever” as the Nokia Lumia 900 4G. Here are a couple of points that only a few have picked up on so far.
From AppleInsider:
The Nokia Lumia 900 4G from AT&T, with a cyan exterior, is recommended by WolframAlpha based on a total of just four user reviews, with an average score of 5 out of 5. The site offers an extensive list of details on the Windows Phone-based device, including its price, dimensions, features, and comparisons to other smartphones.
Four user reviews. Let’s not forget that the iPhone isn’t even listed as a choice by WolframAlpha.
Nokia is also being sued because the Lumia 900 sucks.
Good times people. Siri has always been honest with me.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Federico Viticci:
A few minutes ago, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted a photo showing a “beta” login page for iCloud.com, Apple’s suite of web applications to access iCloud services like Mail and Calendar. The photo showed Apple’s icon-based navigation for iCloud.com, with the addition of Reminders and Notes icons in what appears to be an internal version of iCloud.com carrying future features.
With iCloud being at the center of Mountain Lion and iOS, this shouldn’t be a big surprise.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
You can choose to manage your ringer by time-of-day or your current location. By time-of-day, set the ringer “Off” and ringer “On” times using a selection wheel and press Start. By location, just tap Start and choose the desired “Ringer-Off Zone” size. That’s it. RingMindMe does the rest. No account set-up required. RingMindMe does not override your ringer/silence switch. It just reminds you to change your ringer/silence switch based on the time-of-day or your current location.
I’ve had this happen to me a number of times. Simple, yet intuitive, the way an app should be.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Yoni Heisler writing for NetworkWorld:
On May 1, Apple filed a motion in the Northern District of California alleging that Samsung intentionally destroyed documents it was obligated to hand over as part of the discovery process, an act referred to as “spoilation of evidence” in the legal parlance.
Not good Samsung. Maybe RIM is heading up Samsung’s legal team.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Thanks to Bare Bones Software and BBEdit for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
BBEdit 10 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better, with more than one hundred new features. Download the demo and see for yourself!
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Robert Wright:
Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of “frictionless sharing.” In this world, if you’re on a website that permits frictionless sharing (theatlantic.com doesn’t), every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.
Things like this are just creepy.
May 10, 2012
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I laughed at Marco Arment’s response to this commenter.
Written by Shawn King
Adobe:
We’re pleased to announce that Lightroom 4 is now available via the Mac App Store in North America.The Mac App Store offering is the same product offered on Adobe.com in terms of features and functionality but has been modified to comply with Mac App Store requirements. There are a few important pieces of information you should be aware of.
It’s $149.00, same price as if you buy it at Adobe.com but there’s no upgrade price if you own previous versions of Lightroom (there is if you buy it from Adobe.com). The Mac App Store version is for Mac OS X only – the version you buy from Adobe.com is Mac and Windows. The Mac App Store version can only be updated thru the Mac App Store. Adobe says that means they could update it on their web site but it may not happen at the same time, or at all, on the Mac App Store.
There’s more.
Adobe says there is no guarantee that upgrade pricing will be available to Mac App Store Lightroom 4 customers when Lightroom 5 and future versions of Lightroom are released and that Lightroom 4 is available only on the Mac App Store in North America.
Remind me again what the advantages of the Mac App Store are, Adobe?
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Drafts is the quick, easy way to capture and share ideas on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Very clean interface with support for Markdown, TextExpander, Twitter and other services.
Have you struggled with developing an effective paperless workflow? If so, author David “MacSparky” Sparks has published a field guide to going paperless which you might be interested in. It’s available for download from iBooks for $5.
Topics covered range from optical character recognition, naming, indexing and storage conventions, best use cases, and a variety of resources that can assist you in developing your own working system.
This is no glorified PDF: Sparks’ book takes full advantage of iBooks Author, which Sparks used to create it: it contains over 26,000 words, along with 32 screencasts, four movies and other rich media content – over an hour and a half of video, all told (which explains why it clocks in at more than 800MB).
It’s available in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Germany, and France, with more countries coming soon.
Feral Interactive announced the forthcoming Mac release of Tomb Raider: Underworld. It’ll debut on May 31, 2012 and will be available or $24.99 via download from various services including the Mac App Store.
The latest Lara Croft game to hit the Mac, this title follows Lara as she embarks on a quest to find the Norse underworld – and an answer to a mystery from her past. Along the way she journeys to Thailand, Mexico and under the Arctic sea.
System requirements include a 1.8GHz or faster Intel-based Mac with at least 3.0GB RAM, 128MB or better graphics card and Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later. Some restrictions apply on graphics cards – visit the Web site for more details.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
My latest article on TechPinions looks at RIMs latest failed marketing campaign, “WAKE UP.”
