November 15, 2011
Apple on Tuesday named Arthur D. Levinson as the Chairman of the Board.
Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apple’s board since 2005, has served on all three board committees— audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation, according to Apple. Levinson will continue to serve on the audit committee, the company said.
“Art has made enormous contributions to Apple since he joined the board in 2000,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “He has been our longest serving co-lead director, and his insight and leadership are incredibly valuable to Apple, our employees and our shareholders.”
Cook also announced that Robert Iger, Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, will join Apple’s board and serve on the audit committee.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Christian Zibreg for 9to5Mac:
Dag Kittlaus, a 44-year-old from Norway, is living an American dream with his wife and three kids in a nice Chicago suburb. His life took a turn for the better following a special phone call from Apple last year. Norwegian publication E24!, which profiled the entrepreneur in a lengthy article, explains that Steve Jobs himself bothered to give Kittlaus a buzz.
That must have been an amazing phone call.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Scorecerer 5.6 for iPad works seamlessly with any DAW, including Cubase, ProTools, Logic and MOTU Digital Performer. For solo musicians using a DAW sequencer to play backing tracks, for example, it’s easy to insert a program change into the Scorecerer track that will trigger the correct page to be displayed automatically at exactly the right moment so there’s no need to tap the screen or fumble with a foot switch.
Amazing. The apps for musicians on iOS devices just keep getting better.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Florian Mueller:
I’m starting to see a pattern. For any intellectual property issues facing Linux (or at least the most popular Linux derivative, Android), Linus Torvalds has a standard answer at hand: after admitting that he doesn’t know the facts, he claims that “this [whatever it may be] seems completely bogus.” Or, interchangeably, “totally bogus”.
Great article from Florian.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Tabletop is the first musical environment designed from the ground up exclusively for the iPad. The heart of Tabletop is a modular environment where you can mix and match different devices. Each device has its own uses, characteristics, personality — ranging from classics like drum pad samplers to touchscreen effects. Buy only the gear you need from an expanding catalog and share your creations quickly and easily on SoundCloud
I am really enjoying watching SoundCloud expand. They’re in Pro Tools 10 and countless other apps. It’s all about integration and they get that.
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
November 14, 2011
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Daniel Eran Dilger:
Research by Morgan Stanley involving NPD figures reported by analyst Katy Huberty indicate Apple’s thin new MacBook Air models lacking an optical drive now account for more than a quarter of the company’s notebooks.
I just love my MacBook Air. It’s powerful and so light, it feels more like you’re carrying a magazine than a computer.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Corey Tamas at Macgasm:
The sheister in question approached his mark in Dark Lane, Bentley and offered to sell him an iPad. Once agreeing on a price, they went off to a cash machine together and completed the transaction. After leaving the scene, the buyer discovered he had been sold a bag of potatoes (because why would you ever buy an iPad off a guy on the street and check what’s in the bag before parting ways?).
People, people, people.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
For the first time in the entire history of Unicode standard, the full encoding range for dingbats (U + 2700 – U + 27BF) is now covered by a complete, contemporary quality font. Erler Dingbats is a spin-off of the distinguished FF Dingbats 2.0 family, and was designed as a special collaboration between designers Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Macworld’s Jason Snell has more details on how you can identify your music in iTunes using iCloud status icons. Worth a read for everyone using iTunes Match.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Apple has an explanation for all of those icons you see in your iTunes library after activating iTunes Match.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Andrew Richardson on how he thinks Apple’s new EasyPay feature may work:
Combine the authorized-by-EasyPay transaction record, the customer’s location within the store as reported by the app, and an RFID tag inside the product box. An automated system can determine which products may pass through the security portal without sounding an alarm and which cannot. The key is the customer’s phone.Hand the paid-for product to your buddy and hear the alarm sound as he walks out the door without your iPhone in hand.
I have no idea how it works and how they stop people from stealing.
Written by Peter Cohen
GamePro:
HealthCanal reports that a new study of nearly 500 12 year olds found noticeably increased creativity among those who played video games, while use of cellphones, the Internet and computers (for non-gaming purposes) were unrelated to that particular branch of the imagination.
The gauge for creativity is the Torrance Test, a broadly accepted academic gauge used to measure creative thinking.
Core Research last week issued an advisory saying it found a security hole in the way Apple sandboxes applications. The problem is what they reported is not actually a security hole.
I’ve done some digging over the past few days and here’s what I found. What Core uncovered was a mechanism that’s only used by Apple for its internal system daemons. This isn’t something that developers would actually use for an application, so it doesn’t affect them — or the user — at all.
In fact, Apple’s documentation doesn’t even point to this mechanism to develop with.
What’s more, this is a blacklist mechanism, meaning that you would have to specify, in detail, everything you didn’t want your app to do. If it’s not specified, then it would be allowed to do it.
This is completely unlike the API that developers will use to sandbox their applications. That is a whitelist API, where you have to specify exactly what you want the app to do — everything else is not allowed.
Core also mentioned that the pre-defined profiles don’t properly limit access, but as far as I can tell, they weren’t supposed to. Not even Apple uses the pre-defined profiles because you must specifically blacklist the things you don’t want it to do.
This has nothing to do with the way the Mac App Store will sandbox apps in 2012. Developers will specify what the app should do and it will work as expected.
There was a lot of talk today about how a new survey rated the Amazon Kindle Fire as the number one Android tablet among developers in North America. While that may be true, it is not the number one mobile OS that developers want to program for — that distinction goes Apple’s iOS.
The report, compiled by Appcelerator and IDC, asked 2,160 Appcelerator developers which platform they most wanted to develop apps for. Apple came out on top with 91 percent saying they were interested in the iPhone. Coming in second place was the iPad with 88 percent saying they wanted to develop for that device.
While Apple saw interest in its platform go up, Android saw a 4 percent decrease in interest among developers, to 83 percent. The release of iOS 5 is thought to be the reason that Android fell.
Now, about the Kindle Fire. It came in at 49 percent of developers showing interest in developing apps for it. Hardly close to the interest shown towards iOS.
The number one drawback of developing for the Kindle, according to developers — fragmentation of Android.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Pixelmator — beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X.
It may come as a surprise to many, but Apple’s iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS are the top two selling phones on the market in the US as of the third quarter.
A new study from NPD shows that Apple’s two previous models topped the list and were followed by the HTC EVO 4G, Motorola Droid 3 and the Samsung Intensity II. According to the report, price had a big part to play in buying decisions.
“Among U.S. consumers who considered purchasing phones in the $200 to $250 price range, 64 percent ended up purchasing a phone for less than $200,” the report reads.
NPD said that the share of U.S. mobile handset sales that were smartphones reached 59 percent in the third quarter of 2011, an increase of 13 percent since the same quarter in 2010. The report also noted that the average price for smartphones has fallen for four consecutive quarters and is now at $135.
Apple on Monday released a new version of iTunes that includes iTunes Match.
iTunes Match will set you back $24.99 per year. The software scans the content of your music library and matches it to the music available on the iTunes Store. Music that doesn’t match is automatically uploaded, so you can play any of your music on any of your iOS devices.
Your iTunes music will also be available from your Apple TV, as you can see from these screenshots. Apple missed its self-imposed deadline of October 31 for the release of iTunes Match, but typical of Apple, the company releases products when they are done, but not by deadlines.
You can download the new version of iTunes from Apple’s Web site. It isn’t available via the automatic software update in OS X yet.
Gruber shares his views on Apple.
John Gruber – Çingleton 2011 from Çingleton on Vimeo.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
At the top you’ll notice categories for Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and the Web browser. With the exception of Docs and the Browser, each of those menus also include direct links into Amazon’s digital store for that content.
November 13, 2011
Written by Jim Dalrymple
TNW:
The UAE is now turning its attention to Apple’s iMessage service as well as Facetime, with Mobile carriers Etisalat, followed by Du, suspending the Apple services.
November 12, 2011
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Absolutely incredible. Thanks for the link Brian.
Apple is warning users of its 1st generation iPod nano of potential overheating problems.
According to Apple, the nanos in question were sold between September 2005 and December 2006. While the problem only happens in “very rare cases,” Apple does recommend customers stop using the 1st generation iPod nano.
Apple posted a note on its Website with instructions on how to order a replacement unit. There are also instructions on how to identify your iPod as one of the affected models.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I mentioned last night that I didn’t get why the world’s most expensive photograph sold for so much, so I thought I’d show you so photos that I do like. These are shots from self-taught photographer Joshua L. Smith.
November 11, 2011
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I’d like to thank Sparrow for sponsoring this week’s RSS Feed on The Loop.
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Written by Jim Dalrymple
Michael Zhang:
Titled “Rhein II”, it’s a 1999 photograph by Andreas Gursky showing the Rhine river. Last night it sold for a whopping $4,338,500 at Christie’s.
Shawn King sent this to me tonight. I have to say, I just don’t get it.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
My friend Anthony Stauffer takes a break from Stevie Ray Vaughan to teach us a Blues lick from one of my favorite guitarists, Jimmy Page.
Following today’s entirely unsurprising revelation that Logitech lost $100 million, in part, because of its Google TV partnership, Google’s nature as a business partner has (rightly) come into question.
Techcrunch’s Jason Kincaid writes:
Now, Logitech was obviously overambitious when it came to launching the still-unproven product, but they aren’t the only manufacturer that was burned by Google’s overeager desire to ship software before it was ready. Motorola’s Xoom, which was released early this year as an iPad competitor, was one of the worst devices I’ve ever used at launch. That was partially because it was a little too bulky compared to the iPad, but it was primarily because Honeycomb — the tablet version of Android — was a buggy mess.
Kincaid makes an excellent point — hardware manufacturers are coming under fire for software that is largely out of their hands. Google’s primary partners have been putting out products using Google’s software, and virtually all reviews of said products highlight the same, buggy software problems. Accordingly, these products flop. While this is certainly not the only cause of failure, it is certainly a contributing factor, and it may prove costly for Google in the long run.
The response has already begun in the shape of the Kindle Fire and Nook Color. Both Amazon and B&N’s offerings have foregone messy ties with Google in favor of their own revamped flavor of Android, and have substituted Google’s ecosystem with their own.
For the Kindle Fire, at least, its deviation from Google’s vision has become one of its key selling points. Amazon has built a stable, capable operating system for the task at hand (or so impressions indicate), and they are attributing none of it to Google. A quick glance of the Fire’s product page reveals one reference to Android, and it comes merely as a portion of Amazon’s app store name, the “Amazon Appstore for Android.”
If the Kindle Fire finds mainstream success, I would not be surprised if other hardware manufacturers began to adopt a similar approach in future, and that could be extremely damaging for Google.
Although Google has steadily axed and revamped much of its product line in recent weeks, the uproar surrounding some of its decisions is difficult to ignore.
The next test for Google will be its just announced Music event — what will be its first post-Google+ attempt to introduce a new, working, integrated marketplace into its ecosystem. If done correctly, it may inspire some further confidence, but if it simply sinks into the background along with its ebook sibling, don’t be surprised if more questions arise.
Without shaking its “beta” reputation, and the apparent overeagerness to ship products, Google is likely facing a sincere examination of how exactly it deals with its partners and its products, and an ever-increasing amount of scrutiny and hesitance from its customers as well.
Matt Alexander is the owner and editor of ONE37.net, a writer, a technology enthusiast, and a contributing writer for The Loop.
Update: Clarified that the $100 million was not all attributed to LogiTech’s relationship with Google. 3:08 pm PT
With the release of iOS 5 on Thursday, Apple fixed bugs that caused battery issues with some users, but Apple said the investigation is ongoing.
“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop. “We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”
Apple confirmed earlier this month that it had found some issues in iOS 5 that caused batteries to not perform properly. While it affected some users, not all users saw the problem.
