If you haven't seen the video for this app it's kind of amazing. Not so amazing that you need to own an ipad, but I would like to have a digital art frame that played these types of animations in my house. I painted a version of Starry Night in High school, if I'm not retarded I will get to posting a picture of it below the video.
--Update--
Here is my painting from High school
So this festering pile of shit article lit my fuse this morning. An ode to how nothing was ever made nice before Steve "Aka God" Jobs descended to earth and made them nice. My first problem is that Jonathan Ive designs Apple products, seriously look at the mans resume. If you want to jump on someone's dick there is the man that makes these things look the way they do. Period.
Next point Compaq before it was subsumed and defiled by HP made this product, now for the fan boys at Gizmodo that literally picked every ugly tablet that existed and ignored the best of class product for the time frame before iPad's existed I say I loathe your failure of an editorial process. Now the downside it had a Transmeta processor, and as much as I would love for that company that paid Linus Torvold a ton of money to basically not work there to have put out a great product, it wasn't a good processor. The revision that boasted an intel mobile processor was much better and share basically the same design. Omitting this from your little glamour shot was shitty.
Last night my wife was watching The Pixar Story on Netflix and I could have wanted to gag at all the people that where falling all over themselves about how amazing Steve Jobs is. Then I have to read on every fucking gadget website about how much of a Genius Steve Jobs is, and how cool all of his stuff is. So when I saw this on Geeks are Sexy, god I wanted it to be true. I really, really wish that Sean Connery gave Jobs the kiss off. I just don't think this passes the bullshit-o-meter test.
See the previous post
And there you have it folks, Apple admits that they where doing it and will fix it in an upcoming software update.
It seems a little convenient that its a "bug" that caused the phone to keep so much info, but Mr. Jobs hates to get called out for anything so I assume this is a face saving measure. Call it what you will, it was and is a concern so don't be to blasé about the importance of customers information Apple. Also, I'm curious for those with capped data plans, how much and how often the data that is sent to Apple in an "anonymous and encrypted form." It seems that this should be an opt-in given that you are using iPhone owners data (and data plans) to build services. Don't assume that because most people will want this that everyone will want to participate in making your traffic service. iPhones are not just millions of data nodes for the company to utilize as they see fit, the devices are owned by customers and Apple needs to respect that. This isn't just another part of the Fiat Jobso. Just ask, your customers are very loyal (sickeningly so), but don't assume you have can just take it.
In case you've been living under a rock recently there has been some hubbub over the tracking information a researcher found in some unprotected file on the iPhone. Google and Microsoft have come out and said how they collect this data and what it is used for, Apple is taking a bit more time to answer why there is an open ended collection of location based data from where the user has been.
The trouble I have with Steve Job's "we don't track anyone" line (the same trouble I have with Google's "accidental" war driving) is that features of software don't just happen. Someone wrote that piece of code, that piece of code was checked in and added to the test and then approved and moved into production. Software isn't magic.
------Follow up post----------
Man the internet is dominated by 800lbs gorillas lately. I was just starting to use LaLa to share links with people so they could listen to the song online. I setup an account a few days ago and now not only has Apple bought LaLa, they are shutting it down on May 31st of 2010.
I think with the release of the new beta with atom support re-enabled the move to disable atom was one of three things
I have been trying to think of anything at all to say about the new iTunes LP's and really all I keep coming back to is Who still buys albums? I have been trying to think of the last album that I loved each and every song on, so much that I wouldn't have been better off buying the songs that I did like individually. The best I could come up with is Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins but on re-listening to it recently I figured out that I really only love about 10 total songs and less than half of them ever made it on the radio. I cannot say that given the choice now that I would have even bought the song that I really did like because of the video on MTV. Another album I swore was amazing was Sixteen Stone from Bush, but again on re-listening, I am not sure I would have bought the whole album, just all the songs that got radio play. I still think of both as having songs I that where a part of my high school experience, but I won't say that with different buying options available to me now that I would buy either as a whole album. I don't buy into the whole Apple Ecosystem mostly because I think that Apple disrespects their customers and retail partners.
Apple disrespects their customers and their accessory partners with pretty much every release of the iPod and iPhone. By breaking pin compatibility with previously released accessories they are forcing customers that have invested in their ecosystem to purchase new docks, charging stations, and other accessories. Some in-dash decks that boast iPod compatibility have to have the little * and tell you what generations they support, my wife's speaker dock and charger works for the iPod classic (aka 6th gen) but not for the iPod touch 2nd gen. This isn't rocket science people they did it to prevent unapproved iPod accessories, not because these devices might damage your device but because they where not paying Apple to make these devices. Who suffers in these cases though? Not the knock off manufactures, they just design around it, while people like me that bought my wife a Iluv 1155 dvd player with iPod dock to go with her fancy iPod only to find out that the manufacturer was unaware that it wouldn't work with the new generation of iPod that launched around the time it did. It turns out after reading recently they issued working replacements, but did nothing to remedy the affected users. I choose to not return the unit only because it was a decent dvd player, but it deffinately is a sore spot for me and Apple.
Zune, man do you get some hate out of the Apple fanboy camp. I will wager that few if any of them have used the damn device, and all they can say is that it sucks. I can say from using both that either will play your music, and games with the only real difference being the software and pricing options for music. The Zune pass is pretty damn compelling for the younger set, I remember buying several cd's a month in High School I have to imagine that there are several parents that would find this a cheap alternative (though Pandora and Last.fm may make this moot).
The analyst in this article thinks MS should buy Palm and try to emulate Apple seems all kinds of off base with his recommendations, given that the Zune software is not a mobile telecommunications device, and Palm's historical response to those types of situations (remember HandSpring) is not positive. Couple all of this that the stand alone media player may be going the way of the Dodo Bird even the Zune HD coming, we may see the Zune device folded into Mobile offerings I doubt much would come of Palm talks or at best a partnership with Palm so that their device can sync with the Zune software.
This is a photo of the reset button that was located under the battery of a Creative Zen Media Center Portable that I am getting ready to sell. The reason I show this is that I was struck by the things that I just do, that would have overwhelmed most consumers, to keep electronics running. This device has not been plugged in for such a long time that it was fully dead, it wasn't in deep power sleep or something it had no juice. I plugged in the power supply and the charge light did not come on, so I started by checking the voltage output on the charger to ensure that it hadn't gone bad. I got out my multimeter and striped a wire because the charger was a barrel connector type that required positive voltage to be measured from inside where the probe on my multimeter would not reach. After verifying that the charger was giving steady 5v output, I pulled the batter cover off and lifted the batter to see if the posts on the battery had corroded. Realizing that Li-poly batteries don't corrode, I started looking for a hard reset button and found it while I had the cover off. This immediately started the unit and the charge light came on when I re-inserted the battery. I didn't read a manual or do a google search on why there was no power I started to troubleshoot, and was totally fine with not only the process but the outcome.
Most consumers would have come to the conclusion that it was broken, and called the manufacturer. Given how far out of warranty this device is, they would have been frustrated by the general lack of support they would have been offered, and likely would have pitched it into the landfill or sought help from a whiz-kid via craigslist (assuming they even knew that you could get that type of help). I came to own a Samsung Media Center portable under very similar circumstances, the owner never figured out how to turn it on. Apparently the device shipped in "locked" state. Flipping over the device there was a cover that exposed a hard "on/off" switch, sliding the switch to on, and pressing the power button on the front brought the device that he thought was broken to life. These are engineering decisions that lead the consumer to be confused and annoyed, often to the point that they give up. Apple certainly makes CE devices that are better about this than most. They are not flawless for instance because there isn't the familiar power button leave my mother baffled how to turn off her iPod. Sure it will go to sleep eventually so you could just lock it and it will time out, but she didn't know that.
These type of design logic flaws come up again and again, the 30gig Zune for instance when you plug it in after the battery has completely drained does not begin charging, but rather displays a image on the screen that does not mean anything to the user. After unplugging the device and getting it to power on you can plug it in to resume charging, the device will not charge fully with the unintelligible symbol displayed. This is a design/logic flaw, that took me a few minutes of troubleshooting after letting the device charge for half the day, and booting it up to find that I did not have anywhere near a full charge! After the device was up and running it started to rapidly take a charge, but not until the software had initialized. Never having owned an iPod, I asked and was not tickled to hear that they handle the low power state much more elegantly. I own the original 30gb zune so I cannot speak to if the new ones handle it better, but it is a pretty glaring error in my opinion.
I hope that this insight sticks with me for a while when I think about the consumer experience with Electronics. I have classified most of the experience as acceptable up until recently, but everything needing to be fiddled with is starting to get old.
Slow again I know, but I did love this article and thought it deserved a share.
Apps for the Apple TV by Gizmodo is probably one of their best original/idea pieces the blog has produced. Not only is original and a great idea but there was no mention of boobies or anything else that makes them the blog of choice for people that are as mature as middle school kids.
Boxee on the Apple tv shows that there is value in this type of setup, and I believe makes what is a marginally underpowered, but pretty good for the price media device and makes it into the iPhone type of game changer. I think that Apple lacks the vision to pull this off, and only has the attention span to pull of one "killer product" at a time. This is likely due to Mr. Jobs egomaniac micro-management need to control the moment style of product dev that leaves little room for them to innovate simultaneously. Don't get me wrong I think that this style of management has netted them some big wins in the design of products (The original aluminum MB Pro laptops for instance) but doesn't seem to sustain great products over the long haul (current non-aluminum macbook pros), so with the iPhone been the Apple of Apple's eye I doubt you will see native app sdk on the AppleTV even though I would probably buy one.
UPDATED
So for those keeping track recently Apple decided that the update utility was the ideal way to leverage itself some market share in the browser wars and tried to jam it down the throats of windows users. Apple stated to decline the update all you have to do is uncheck it, however unchecked updates continue to show up waiting for you to accidentally forget to decline that update and stealth its way on to your computer.
I for one don't want the piece of software that was the reason that the Mac was "the easiest [platform to hack] of the three" running on my machine for any reason. Here is all that it takes to permanently decline this update.
It appears I was wrong, this will not keep Safari out completely. Other Safari updates will nag in the future. The reasonable option for non-quicktime users is to delete the task in Scheduled Tasks. iTunes has the good sense to check for updates every time you run it so your covered there, Quicktime is another matter. I suggest trying the Quicktime Alternative or another media player (VLC maybe?) until Apple cleans up their act.
At the corporate level you can block the safari.msi; at the proxy block access to apple.com/*.msi, or for us running (Sophos Antivirus), we will block the exe and/or path to executable and flag it malware.
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