First they came for the creepy almost-porn apps, and I said nothing because I wasn’t into creepy almost-porn apps. I’m sure this makes sense to businessmen, but I am really fucking uncomfortable with Apple being in charge of what is considered “overtly sexual.”
This is purely “I know it when I see it” fascism. There is no defense for it that doesn’t start and end with “they can do what they want so shut up.”
Subtitle: “Apple’s 10 Biggest Problems” and featuring Steve Jobs Mortality, which is a great name for a band.
You can always count on Zeldman to say things like
As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows, developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash.
But it’s still good to have him say them.
(photo sources: douglubey.com, chris.pirillo.com, deconcept.com, adobe.com, cutesoft.net, adrianparr.com)
A beautiful, gigantic, speaker for Apple’s beautiful, little, device. Starting at $4,495.00.
Cleversimon gets to the heart of Charlie Booker’s strange rambly piece from earlier this week:
Finishing the sentence “I’ll never buy a Mac because” with anything but “it doesn’t meet my needs” means you don’t get to accuse Apple users of making irrational purchasing decisions based on slavish adherence to an ideology.
It’s not surprising that Booker’s view is purposefully self-contradictory. He makes his living being a contrarian. For him It doesn’t have to make sense so long as it is rabble-rousing.
Not a story from the Onion. I don’t know where to start on this, I really don’t.
In no particular order:
App recommendations: Wholly necessary, but we aren’t out of the woods yet regarding App Store curation. I bet there’s a good deal of money to be made just doing that: Curating collections of apps. Boing Boing got huge during the blog boom for curating other blogs, why wouldn’t it work for applications on a still-new platform? Someone’s going to get rich digging down on serious Touch applications.
iPod Touch No camera, no mention of 3GS-type speed bump. Kinda got the shaft. I can’t think of a single good reason for not including a camera that doesn’t involve trying to trick people into buying a Nano. Surely they aren’t afraid a (not that great) camera is going to steer fence-sitters from the iPhone to the Touch? Update: It’s now come out that the 8gb ($199) iPod Touch has the older, slightly slower, hardware, and all the others in the Touch line have the upgraded “3GS” innards. You’ll notice on the “Compare iPod Models” page on Apple’s site, the 8gb is sectioned off from his higher-capcity and speedier brothers.
iTunes 9 Now with more bloat and cumbersome, non-portable, versions of the extra features that people who illegally download albums already get in more useful formats. Still a 32-bit Carbon app. Gruber was right about WebKit.
If there is only one 10.6 review/recap you read, it should be this one. John is the best at this. It is part history lesson, part analysis, part commentary.
You have to admire either their balls or their total disconnection from reality.
Probably a good idea to consult this before you take the plunge tomorrow.
Apple’s latest incredible move: Censoring a fucking dictionary. Apple’s conduct re: the App Store has long since passed the yardstick of “stupid” and into “utterly inept.”
If they cannot be trusted to stick to the rules set forth by human society, then fuck ’em. NOBODY censors dictionaries. Not Wal-Mart, not Borders, nobody. Censoring reference material is not just stupid, it is dangerously stupid.
This is super not cool, Apple. How is GV Mobile (the App’s name) not okay, but Skype is?
For all Windows PCs, ASP was $515 in June. For Macs: $1,400. Desktop Windows PC ASP: $489. Mac desktops: $1,398. Windows notebook ASP was $520, or $569 when removing all those nasty, margin-sucking netbooks. Mac laptops: $1,400.
If you use your computer more than an hour a day, you’re wasting your time with a cheap/flimsy/poorly made one.
I was going to post this with the title “Tortured iPhone Worker Commits Suicide”, but then I realized I don’t work for TechCrunch. That seems to be what happened, though:
According to various Chinese media reports, the worker at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn committed suicide last week after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype for which he was responsible went missing.
Word is that the worker was then tortured by Foxconn security, which led him to snap and take a leap off the building. If this is true, Apple needs to step up and tell Foxconn to fuck off.
Update: Fake Steve says it’s fucked over there, and we all knew that already. He’s basically right.
Very expected, but sooner than I thought. What are the odds on an Apple/Palm legal showdown over iTunes lockout? Seems like Palm would have a good chance.
According to their tests, the new 15″ MBP lasted almost TWICE as long as the previous model– a total of about 5.5 hours to a charge. That is a huge jump, and as far as I can see it is unprecedented. They say:
There’s only a 46% increase in battery capacity, there shouldn’t be a ~100% increase in battery life…ever.
I figured Apple must’ve had a damn good reason for making the battery internal, and it looks like this is it.
A handy little shell script to handle the (tedius) task of renaming XCode project files.
John Gruber on the new Pre’s integration with iTunes. He’s, as usual, pretty right. The real crime here, though, is that Apple doesn’t provide a good way for third party devices to do this without this kind of chicanery.
There’s another thing here, too: maybe Palm is using their position to force Apple’s hand? Obviously, the market that Palm is gunning for is going to have a lot of iTunes users, and for many (including me, if I owned a Pre) easy, smooth, syncing with iTunes isn’t just a feature, it is an essential.
Phil Nelson 