Create a fun visual snapshot of your life. Life is not a static bio; it’s an evolving story.
Biogrify is a new web app where you can create an interactive infographic about your life. I have to say, this looks really interesting. You can sign-up to beta test — no guarantees you’ll get accepted.
Reuters:
Research In Motion, still smarting over having to change the name of its yet-to-come operating system, faces a similar trademark challenge to its popular instant-messaging service BlackBerry Messenger.
Because things are going so well for RIM, they just needed someone else to jump in the ring and clobber the shit out of them in court.
Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
Win.
[Via Ars]
Matt Alexander:
Rather than building the best device for the user, manufacturers are intent on differentiating themselves from increasingly similar products. Absurd product names, enormous screens, and LTE connections cannot, and will not, disguise the fact that all of these devices are running the same operating system and have largely similar internals.
BOOM!
And Gruber nails it again.
Merry Christmas Peter.
MacKozer notes today that 500 iPads are being purchased by the government. Here is the original, untranslated story.
When I relaunched The Loop in September 2011, I offered readers the opportunity to become a member of the site. With your $3 monthly membership you got access to a full text RSS feed, but mostly, you helped offset the cost of running the Web site. I thought it was time to let you know where that money is going.
Thanks to the membership payments, The Loop is running on brand new cloud servers. Over the past month or so I tried a few of the big name server companies, but they didn’t work out very well. Finally, I found CleverKite, a startup cloud server company with very reasonable prices and great equipment.
The Loop now runs on SSD-equipped servers, so any bottleneck with hard drives is virtually eliminated. Speed has become an increasingly important feature for me and being able to deliver that to the readers is paramount.
Back in October, when Apple held its iPhone 4S event, the traffic on the dedicated Web server I had at Liquid Web was too much for it to handle. Within minutes of the event starting, my server went down and stayed down for much of the event. Unfortunately, Liquid Web could offer no solution to the problem.
I left the event, angry and frustrated, vowing to never let that happen to me or you again. I believe I’ve found the solution.
The page load times for The Loop before September 1, when the site design changed, were in the 10-15 second range. After the site changed, page load times dropped to about 3-5 seconds (in the US). While good, it wasn’t good enough.
With CleverKite and the use of world-class CDNs around the world, I now measure page load times in milliseconds.
In North America, pages load in under a second. While Europe, Australia and Asia take a little longer, after a couple of weeks of testing, pages are being delivered in under 2 seconds to those regions as well.
Between the servers, CDNs, optimized coding and of course, the help of reader’s membership money, The Loop is more stable and faster than it has ever been.
Peter and I are committed to bringing you the most interesting content we can, everyday. We appreciate your support in helping us pay for everything, reading the site and sharing with your friends.
Never doubt how much your $3 can help.
BGR:
In what is something of a serious allegation, our source told us that Mike Lazaridis was lying when he said the company’s new lineup was delayed for that reason. ”RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason, they don’t have a working product yet,” we were told.
Of course RIM has denied what BGR’s source said. But then again, I don’t believe much of what RIM says these days.
They also said the PlayBook would deliver an amazing tablet experience. Amazingly bad.
NASA:
Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth’s horizon in this nighttime image photographed by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station on Dec. 21, 2011.
MPVHub Magazine features the latest in music software tutorials, gear reviews, industry news, interviews with audio experts, and more. It’s where music makers come to learn, with the experts, by the experts.MPVHub Audio features over 100 pages of content in each issue. Featuring the largest selection of Audio DAW tutorials available in any magazine, each issue has at least 20 different tutorials for Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Reason, Live, Cubase, Native Instruments, & Spectrasonics software.
The first issue was available for $0.99. I bought it.
If you were wondering which companies were supporting SOPA, MediaBeat has a complete list.
MacTech Magazine announced today a massive event line up for 2012. Where in 2010, MacTech did a single event, and in 2011, MacTech produced seven events; in 2012, MacTech will hold FIFTEEN events spanning the country. MacTech’s event line up includes a combination of well received MacTech Boot Camps for small-to-medium sized business consultants, its new MacTech InDepth series for deep dives on single topics, and its heralded three day MacTech Conference for IT Pros and Developers.
Nice to see MacTech expanding again next year. The Loop has once again signed on as a sponsor of these events for 2012.
Steven Slate:
Imagine having 100 of the world’s best sounding drumkits at your disposal. From punchy tight rock kits, to fat and sizzly vintage kits, and just about everything in between, Steven Slate Drums 4.0 Platinum is the most complete drum instrument on the planet.At the heart of Steven Slate Drums 4.0 is the SSD Player, a state of the art Mac/PC (VST, RTAS, AU) Drum Sampler built from the ground up by the award winning development team behind our TRIGGER drum replacement processor. The SSD Player is extremely easy and intuitive to use. Loading kits, customizing kits, mixing kits, loading and auditioning MIDI grooves, customizing MIDI maps, and routing discretely to your workstation are all a breeze with the SSD Player. It even lets you load your own drum samples to mix in with the Slate drumkits.
I have used Steven Slate Drums since they were first released and love them. One of the best drum samplers on the market. I’ll definitely be upgrading.
Lex Friedman discovers a solution for a problem discovered by Ars earlier this week that would allow iMessages to be sent to your iPhone even after it had been wiped:
Macworld can confirm that perhaps the easiest way to ensure that a stolen phone stops receiving iMessages is to remotely wipe the phone, and then call your carrier and instruct them to deactivate your old SIM. The third and final step? Activate a new SIM in your new phone.Completing those three steps—wiping, deactivating your old SIM, and then activating a new one—ensures that your iMessages will get sent only to you and your iOS devices, and not anywhere else.
A new study from the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) shows that Apple’s iPad continues to satisfy its customers.
According to the research, 83.65 percent of respondents to the survey were satisfied with the iPad. The survey also asked to rate the user-friendliness of the device — The majority of the respondents rated the iPad as “Excellent” (62%). A smaller percentage reported it to be “Good” (21%) and “Best Imaginable” (10%). The remaining reported it to be “Fair” (4%), “Poor” (2%), or “Awful” (2%), according to SURL.
Asked what they liked best about the iPad, respondents noted the variety of apps available, overall ease of use, the larger screen size, and portability. What people liked least was the poor quality of some apps, the inability to play Adobe Flash, and problems typing with the keyboard.
A total of 13 perent of people said they only used the iPad for work, while 52 percent said they use the device at work. That would indicate some personal use as well.
“Overall, it seems as though Apple is listening to its customers,” wrote SURL. “Many participants from the original study mentioned the lack of a camera and ability to multitask as being the LEAST liked features of the iPad. These were not mentioned as frequently in the current study, as Apple introduced cameras in the iPad 2 and made multitasking abilities available for both the original iPad and iPad 2.”
As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs’ innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.
Very nice.
Nicola Armellini:
Retracing the steps you’ve taken is a helpful way to understand how well you’ve executed your vision – whatever that might be. What could you have done better? What should have been avoided? Today, I’ll share what we’ve learned (and are still learning) while crafting Gradient. It’s an experience that has changed everything for us.
Mac Rumors:
Until now, users have generally had a window of 180 days from the date of their first individual track purchase from a given album within which they could upgrade at the discounted rate using the Complete My Album program… But the updated support document posted by Apple today reveals a different answer, and it now appears that the 180-day deadline has been removed entirely.
More great iTunes news today.
A friend of mine called me today and asked about an app to help him make an app. I recommended AppDesigner, a Mac app made by a good friend of mine. He was so impressed with the app, I figured I’d mention it in case anyone else is looking for a way to make an iPhone app.
The Atlantic:
Out of an estimated 1,500 active volcanoes around the world, 50 or so erupt every year, spewing steam, ash, toxic gases, and lava. In 2011, active volcanoes included Chile’s Puyehue, Japan’s Shinmoedake, Indonesia’s Lokon, Iceland’s Grímsvötn, Italy’s Etna, and recently Nyamulagira in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Hawaii, Kilauea continues to send lava flowing toward the sea, and the ocean floor has been erupting near the Canary Islands. Collected below are scenes from the wide variety of volcanic activity on Earth over the past year
These pictures are just stunning.
This was a great commercial. Nielsen has the complete list of top commercials of 2011.
Matt Gemmell on the AllThis hubbub.
Jacqui Cheng:
Those who have had a phone lost or stolen are familiar with the horrors that follow: the thief (or the person he sold your phone to) starts to send texts as you to your family and friends, leaving you scrambling to de-activate the device as soon as possible. For modern iPhone owners, though, such a phenomenon should be in the distant past thanks to the advent of remote wipe capabilities, right?
Oh, this is not good.
Networkworld:
The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Microsoft and Nokia have toyed with the idea of making a bid for RIM, whose stock has plummeted (from about $59 to start the year to about $14 in mid-December) and whose management team has been under fire from investors. The Journal reports that the status of any talks between Microsoft, Nokia and RIM are unclear. Other scuttlebutt is that RIM executives have hit up Samsung and HTC about possible licensing deals.
I may buy RIM with the spare change in my car.
Marco Arment made a great chart detailing the features of each device. It’s hilarious.
I have two border collies — they’ll win every time.
Eric Slivka for Mac Rumors:
That appears to have changed this week with the addition of a “Complete My Season Pass” feature now available in the iTunes Store. When logged in and viewing an iTunes Store page listing for a single season of a TV show, the Season Pass purchase price will be reduced by the amount of previous single-episode purchases…
Great new feature.
This is not how you launch a startup.
I used to watch this every year. The video certainly brings back memories.