The papers in question comprise the contract which formed Apple Computer Company on April 12, 1976, and are signed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the Pete Best of the computer revolution who got cold feet and bailed on the company before it got off the ground. And the timing could not be better: The recent passing of Jobs and the elevation of Apple to one of the most valuable companies in the world makes these particular documents quite something just now.
Pretty stunning, just for some papers of limited historical significance. I mean, I’m an Apple enthusiast, but this seems rather ridiculous. The papers sold for $1.35M – $1.6M after fees – to an unidentified telephone buyer.
Rich people and their money. I just don’t understand sometimes.
The Federal Communications Commission will pass regulations today to limit the volume levels of TV commercials and penalize broadcasters that bombard consumers with loud ads between televised shows and programs.
We live in a fairly small house with interior walls that have an unfortunate tendency to reflect noise, and quite often if we’re up late watching TV, the sound of the ads will wake one or more of our kids up. So I was delighted to learn about the CALM act and that it would soon be the law to quiet these ads down, because they’re obnoxious.
Matt Alexander is the owner and editor of ONE37.net, a writer, a technology enthusiast and a contributing writer for The Loop.
When Google released its iOS Gmail app, I argued that it was a woefully missed opportunity for the software giant. With Gmail for iOS, Google had a unique chance to impress iOS users with a well-designed app for a widely used service. Instead, as we all know, Google released a pathetic implementation reliant on UIWebView, and squandered a phenomenal Trojan Horse moment.
In stark contrast to Google’s well-publicized folly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to impress iOS users.
The unifying theme between all of these apps? Well, frankly, they’re all fairly well done.
Accordingly, the chatter amongst bloggers about Microsoft is growing. Posts about the impressive Nokia Lumia 800, the HTML5 demonstration of Windows Phone, and the growing number of well-executed iOS apps are not uncommon. When watching The Verge’s talk show, On The Verge, John Gruber even indicates that Windows 8’s Metro UI implementation looks interesting.
I have criticized Microsoft rather heavily in recent weeks (particularly following CNET’s coverage of the the Courier’s demise) but I cannot help but feel somewhat positive about the company’s prospects today. Renewing its focus on its existence as a platform company, Microsoft is embracing alternate platforms, allowing its unique Windows Phone 7 platform to blossom unhindered, and is somewhat ahead of the curve in terms of its media implementation with the Xbox 360.
Honestly, I’m cautiously impressed.
Rather than pushing poor products, Microsoft seems to be aware of its status as the underdog in the mobile operating system arena, and is acting accordingly. Scrappy attempts to chip away at competing platforms? Well, that just doesn’t seem representative of the modern Microsoft. That is the behavior of a humble, young, and reactionary company — the Microsoft of the early 90s.
Of course, Microsoft still has a propensity for utter foolishness, thus rendering this current streak of positivity as being somewhat tenuous. With Ballmer at the helm, even the most impressive idea out of Microsoft seems volatile and at risk of dramatic collapse. Even so, I find myself quietly rooting for Microsoft at the moment. Just as I romantically rooted for webOS, I want the well-designed underdog to gain traction and support.
The latest versions of Android strike me as uninspired and third party implementations are incessantly flawed. Even Google’s own products on competing platforms are half-baked and careless. But Microsoft’s efforts are different.
Rather than resting on its laurels, Microsoft appears to be taking an uncharacteristically humble path, and is doing what it can to redeem its image and to gain support. That is an admirable endeavor, particularly when you consider the company in question. I never thought I’d see the day, but in his interview with The Verge last week, Paul Thurrott had something remarkably apt to say about his beloved Microsoft:
At its heart, Microsoft is a platforms company, not an OS company. So even if Windows fell by the wayside–which I don’t see happening–the company still has some stunning platforms to push forward, including Office–which should be ported to the iPad, Android, and any other popular OS, the Xbox, and of course its various cloud initiatives. What Microsoft needs is to recapture the sense of constant fear that characterized its early days. It’s gotten too comfortable.
Any progress could easily collapse, but for now, I’m cautiously optimistic. Microsoft used to be a reactionary competitor, but has recently relied all too heavily on its enterprise dominance. Seeing the Redmond giant take a step back, swallow its pride, and produce some forward-thinking products? That’s certainly a good way to regain some support from even their most staunch opposition.
I’m certainly not going to up and leave OS X any time soon, but at least knowing creative competition for Apple exists gives me confidence that innovation can, and will, continue in the industry. Whether you agree or not, I’d argue that even Apple can use some competition.
So we contacted Apple and it has confirmed to us that the numbers released about the iOS App Store, currently at 18 billion downloads, with 1 billion downloads a month, are uniques.
Yesterday I contacted Apple and confirmed that the 100 million Mac App Store downloads were unique and did not include Lion, updates or downloads to other Macs. Panzarino took it a step further and confirmed the same for the iOS App Store.
Amuse, Inc. today is pleased to announce My Living Desktop 5.0.1 for Mac OS X, an upgrade to their critically acclaimed application that includes dozens of unique, high definition videos to create soothing visual and aural environments on the Macs desktop. In addition to videos of natural beauty shot from all over the globe, the application also allows the user to import their own home movies.
The holidays are approaching fast. It’s the time of the year where we take stock of the good (and bad) things that happened over the last 12 months, and figure out goals for the next year.
I would like to personally thank RIM’s co-CEOs for their complete and total incompetence in 2011. Without your lack of attention to the market and the details that would make a great product, my year wouldn’t have been so successful.
In February, when I first went against the mainstream media and called RIM out for its ridiculous PlayBook claims, I had no idea it would turn into an 11 month journey. Even I thought RIM would snap out of it sooner or later.
In fact, things got so bad for RIM that I stopped looking for things to post. The incompetence of the co-CEOs was so profound that they delivered all of the fodder that I could possibly hope for.
When the PlayBook finally was released it lacked basic features that almost every device in the world has — email and calendaring.
Responding to ridicule and complaints RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that people were “overplaying one aspect that really isn’t a core element that we’ve seen from our enterprise customers or webmail people.”
Kinectimals was a launch title for Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing peripheral for the Xbox 360, involving playful virtual pets you could interact with. Now it’s come to iOS, and it’s available for $2.99.
Released as a universal app that runs natively on the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, Kinectimals for iOS follows the format of the original game – you visit the mythical island of Lemuria and play with and care for your own baby animal cub. If you have the game for the Xbox 360, you can use the iOS version to unlock five new cubs on your console.
The following collection is a one-stop-shop for CSS. From the official home page of W3C to gradients and button generators — each of these resources has been carefully reviewed and tested. With these tools, you can accomplish any CSS design task that you want using CSS as the primary, if not only, system for implementing the look and feel.
Take the blog Daring Fireball. It offers some solid analysis. But in the end it’s a fanboi site, assailing the misinformed or pointing out how wrong or disliked the Android competition is. That kind of attitude gets in the way of informed insight.
I’ll tell you this — If there was a panel talking about technology, I’d stand beside Gruber over anyone at CNET. See my definition of a fanboy from yesterday.
Think no one knows what you’ve downloaded off the Internet with BitTorrent? Think again.People have privacy delusions about the Internet. They seem to think that just because they don’t sign their real name to a site that no one can see what they’ve been doing on it. Oh dear. So dumb, so wrong.
Feral Interactive announced Tuesday plans to publish the Macintosh version of Tropico 3: Gold Edition on Thursday, January 26, 2012. The game will be available for $34.99 and will be available for download from various sites including the Mac App Store.
Tropic 3 is a strategy game in which you build a Caribbean island government – a “banana republic,” if you will. It’s up to you if you rule with the iron fist of a dictator or try to create an industrial empire, commercial haven or island paradise. But you must maintain your popularity, and your people’s happiness, if you want to avoid a coup that will put your head in a noose.
The game features 15 missions, and incorporates the “Absolute Power” expansion pack with another 10-mission campaign, additional islands and “Megalomania” edicts that change the balance of the game.
System requirements call for a 2.0 GHz Intel Mac with 2GB RAM, 256MB or better graphics and Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later. Some Intel GMA video chipsets are not supported – visit the site for complete details.
Drop caps have been around for years in the print industry, but they are still pretty rare in the web world despite the :first-letter selector having been around for a fair few years. Let’s take a look at how we can create a cool drop cap for our web designs and spice it up with some stylish CSS3 text-shadow effects.
It is interesting that we don’t see this more often on the Web.
John Paczkowski talking about the four things RIM had to deliver to Indonesia, including a regional data server:
RIM delivered on all four. But evidently it didn’t carry out the fourth in quite the way the BRTI wanted. It put the data center in Singapore, which is not geographically all that far, but a different country and not nearly as “regional” as the BRTI would like. Aggravating matters further, Indonesia has been asking for a local server for nearly three years.
Now Indonesia is threatening to shutdown RIM’s operations. Seriously folks, I could not make this stuff up.
It probably wouldn’t come as a surprise if the FBI were to use data from Carrier IQ, but there’s no need for alarm, just yet. However, that’s contrary to what’s being reported elsewhere, so let’s take a moment to clear the air.
These early adopters are running into an experience that is often clunky, a touchscreen that isn’t super responsive, a Web browser that struggles on many websites and head-scratching hardware omissions. (There are no volume buttons.)
The Best App Ever Awards were created to celebrate the best mobile apps and games available, as chosen by our readers. Our goal is to help gather together the very favorite apps of the real users, not just the best-selling ones. This year we are making a big change, including Android applications and games in the mix. For each category there will be winners in iOS (both iPhone and iPad combined) and Android divisions.
A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.
I haven’t seen a completely positive review of the Kindle Fire yet. Most people are having problems with it and Amazon needs to get that fixed. The company says they have an update coming and many expect a new device next year, but I don’t know if that will be enough.
The tablet market has mercilessly chewed up everything except the iPad.
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According to Apple, over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store in less than a year. Here’s where things get really interesting — those are unique downloads.
Apple confirmed for me today that those 100 million downloads do not include downloads for its newest operating system OS X Lion. The figure also doesn’t include updates to apps delivered to users from the Mac App Store.
Finally, the figure doesn’t include apps that users downloaded to other authorized Macs. Can you imagine what that figure would be if all of those numbers were included?
Here’s something else to consider. According to market research firm NPD, sales of boxed versions of software in the US reached 50 million copies in the last year.
I’m making a pretty safe assumption that the majority of Apple’s Mac App Store sales come from the US, meaning that Apple is the largest software distributor in the US.
Apple fanboy: Someone who is tired of technology being difficult and knows there is something better; someone that loves to get the job done instead of working on their machine; a person that isn’t afraid of breaking the status quo; someone that appreciates quality design and workmanship; a person that realizes cheapest isn’t always best.
Apple fanboys are commonly confused with the sensible people of society.
A person that calls you a fanboy: A person that can’t handle the fact that Apple, not Microsoft or Google, is the company that is bringing all of the above to the world. These people often hack their devices to make them look like Apple’s devices.
Apple today announced that over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store in less than one year. With thousands of free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the App Store experience to the Mac so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, and download and install them in just one step. Apple revolutionized the app industry with the App Store, which now has more than 500,000 apps and where customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps and continue to download more than 1 billion apps per month.
The prevailing wisdom in web has been to design for the most common screen resolution that most people use and at the time of writing, it has been 1024 x 768 for quite a few years now. However, there is a relatively new and important factor that designers need to account for and that is the rise and prevelance of hand held devices. The popularity of the Android device as well as iOS (Apple’s operating system for most all things they manufacture — starting with the letter ‘i’) and the slow rise of Windows 7 devices, cannot be ignored and must be accounted for. These devices can be phone sized or tablet sized devices and their design size needs to be included in our new ‘guidebook’.
Last week Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” broadcast a segment on an iOS game called Tap Fish. They pitted the developer against a parent whose children ran up huge charges purchasing virtual goods inside the app. Now the developer wants to set the record straight.
“Video Game Dealers” was, by all accounts, a typical Daily Show field report. Correspondent Aasif Mandvi played the comedy for all it was worth, portraying the developer as greedy and exploitative and the consumer as an innocent rube. But it should be no surprise to anyone who watches The Daily Show regularly that all wasn’t as it appeared to be.
Tap Fish developer Gameview Studios’ co-founder Rizwan Virk has posted to his own blog, Zen Entrepreneur, to describe how the segment was shot, and it may give some insight to people unfamiliar with the process as to just how selective The Daily Show is in their interviews. Virk debunks some of the claims in the segment and notes that the parent had his money refunded (by Apple) long before the segment was shot. He also says that The Daily Show misrepresented why they were interested in interviewing Gameview Studios to begin with.
Jon Stewart is the first to admit that The Daily Show is there to entertain, not inform (in fact, the affable host has said a number of times that he’s a bit horrified that his show is cited as a primary news source by some of its viewers).
From where I’m sitting, Virk is mainly guilty of incredible naïvety. Anyone who’s approached by The Daily Show for an interview and who is even cursorily familiar with the show’s contents has to figure that the footage is going to be heavily edited for comic effect.
It’s good that Virk is clearing the air, but his sour grapes over being made to look a fool shows that while he’s a self-described serial entrepreneur, Virk’s Sloan Business School experience apparently didn’t prep him for media relations.
New details are emerging about the rowdy behaviour of two Research In Motion executives who were fired for disrupting an intercontinental flight — including that they managed to chew their way out of restraints after being handcuffed by crew members.
Clearly these two worked on the PlayBook. What else could possibly account for such frustration.
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HP today announced it will contribute the webOS software to the open source community.HP plans to continue to be active in the development and support of webOS. By combining the innovative webOS platform with the development power of the open source community, there is the opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.webOS offers a number of benefits to the entire ecosystem of web applications. For developers, applications can be easily built using standard web technologies. In addition, its single integrated stack offers multiplatform portability. For device manufacturers, it provides a single web-centric platform to run across multiple devices. As a result, the end user benefits from a fast, immersive user experience.
In-app purchases in iOS games have been the subject of media scrutiny, since children often play them and there have been cases where kids have spent huge amounts of their parents’ money to get virtual in-game goods. Apple has put safeguards in place to help reduce these instances, but that hasn’t stopped such incidents from occurring entirely.
On Thursday night’s show, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” zeroed in on one such case, with their typical humor:
The Loop reader Mike DeFrancesco was at the Grand Central Terminal Apple Store this morning and sent us these pictures and comment from the opening.
The energy was enormous. If you’ve ever been to Grand Central Terminal, you know that NOTHING shakes this place. It’s always loud and always bustling. Well, this morning the whole place just about came to a stand still and the volume was concert like.
