Apple has a wonderful page tucked away on their website titled “ Designing Cases for iPod, iPhone, and iPad.” The page gives dimensions and drawings of all the company’s mobile devices dating back to the iPod mini for use by case designers. Pretty neat.
Category: Apple
On Choice
Louis Gray, on switching to Android:
I also will never tell you that Android is perfect - in software or in hardware.
[…]
The momentum is clear and the option of multiple choices is clear. If I like Android and hate my new carrier, Sprint, I can switch to Verizon and get the Incredible. If I have an aneurysm and love AT&T, I can get the Aria. If I want a small screen, I can do that. If I want a physical keyboard, I can find a device that does that. But for iPhone, I simply would have to take whatever Apple offers and believe that their choices are right for me. I’ve chosen Apple many times and will again in the future, but I don’t think I should buy into a system that restricts my choices when another one is out there that enables my choices.
Fortune Names Jobs ‘Smartest in Tech’
iTunes reinvented music. Pixar, now part of Disney, elevated animated films. The iPhone changed telecom. And the new iPad has other computer makers scrambling to respond. Rocking one industry could be luck, but upending four? That’s smart.
He is a visionary, a micromanager, and a showman who creates such anticipation around new products that their releases are veritable holidays.
Jonathan Ive got named “Smartest Designer” this year. Both awards are well-deserved.
New Apple Touchscreen Questionable
Arnold Kim, on a leaked Apple-branded screen that has been making the rounds this morning:
We’re not sure what to make of it. The screen isn’t the right proportion to be used in the current iPod nano, though Apple could change the design. We’re also taking their word on it that it’s even a touch screen.
I’m not sure a touch-based iPod nano makes much sense, especially if Apple is going to continue to push it to runners using Nike+.
MobileMe Calendar Beta Offers Look Into Future of the Desktop Version of iCal and Other OS-Bundled Applications?
Chris Foresman at Ars Technica, on the new MobileMe Calendar beta program announced today:
The current Calendar looks very similar to iCal on Mac OS X. The new Calendar Web app gains new views for month, week, and day, as well as a handy list view. These seem to map very closely to the Calendar UI on the iPad. Along with the UI changes, Apple is adding private calendar sharing with other MobileMe users, public sharing via CalDAV and a read-only Web view, and event invitations with RSVPs. Like the new Mail, Calendar will also gain performance improvements as well.
Flash Running on Jailbroken iPads
The Friend Bar
Another brilliant Apple-related Onion piece.
On Day One Greatness
The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.
Apple tends to do that a lot. It’s deeply ingrained in their culture, priorities, and product development practices. In brief, their philosophy seems to be to ship only what’s great and leave out the rest. That’s why, instead of having a bad copy-and-paste implementation for the iPhone’s first two years, we just didn’t have one at all.
iPad Passes Android in Browser Share
In just three months on the market, Apple’s iPad has come to represent 0.17 percent of all Web browser traffic tracked by Net Applications. The iPad’s June total managed to exceed Android, which represented 0.14 percent of all Web browsing traffic.
Behind both of them was another iOS-powered device from Apple, the iPod touch. In June, the iPod touch took 0.12 percent of the Web browser share, according to Net Applications.
Gruber Translates Aforementioned Apple PR Piece
iPhones Showing Too Many Bars?
The Apple PR Machine, on the iPhone 4 signal dropping thing:
We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.
iPhone Customer Gets Stranger’s Data
Maria Avila had an old iPhone. It was time to give it some of that new 4.0 flavor. So she went to her local Apple store in Modesto, Calif., to have the iOS 4 software installed and came back with an installation she hadn’t quite expected. Yes, a slide show of strange photos, 110 of them.
Thumbing through her new pictures, Avila told CBS13 in Stockton, Calif.: “I don’t know these people.”