Domain Helper currently works in cases where a URL includes a properly-spelled top-level domain (such as “.com”) at the end and where the site name is not a registered domain name. When activated, Domain Helper redirects users to a comcast.com page that is powered by Yahoo Bing search. The layout of the results, however, suggests that the goals are less about helping you find your intended destination and more about presenting you with ads.
Category: General Tech
Apple Repsonds to Ninjawords Issue
Phil Schiller of Apple responded to John Gruber after Gruber’s piece about Apple censoring Ninjawords — an iPhone dictionary app — made the rounds Tuesday.
Schiller:
You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers’ actions, not Apple’s. I believe that the Apple app review team’s original recommendation to the developer to submit the Ninjawords application, without censoring it, to the App Store once parental controls was implemented would have been the best course of action for all; Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.
The iTab Mini
I stumbled across this set on Flickr today of a tablet Mac created from remnants of a 12-inch PowerBook and a MacBook. It’s pretty impressive.
On Word
Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called “Draft” that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to “Print Layout”—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to “know” what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.
The Backlash
On the Apple Tablet and Snow Leopard
Cult of Mac has published an interesting article discussing the rumored Apple tablet:
The tablet is Apple’s answer to the exploding netbook market, but it won’t be a piece-of-junk netbook. The last thing Apple will do is glom a touchscreen onto a low-cost laptop. It won’t even put a touchscreen on a regular desktop like an iMac. It makes little sense to touch an iMac’s screen when it is sitting upright. But drop the iMac into your lap, and touching objects on the screen makes perfect sense, and seems perfectly natural.
Head of English Catholic Church Warns About Email and Texting
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.
Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.
AT&T Slams Apple to FCC
TUAW:
Yesterday, AT&T responded to press questions about this by sending a P.R. email:
“AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.”
Ouch. It is going to be fun to watch how Apple handles this.
On Google Voice, the FCC and Bad Choices
Google Voice, of course, is Google’s new online service that allows you route all your calls through a new, independent phone number. The service also transcribes and stores voicemails, SMS messages and more. It’s quite handy, but it’s complicated to use from the iPhone, as it requires a user to launch Safari and use a somewhat painful mobile site to make calls and send texts.
To remedy this, a couple of iPhone developers created apps that replicated the functionality of Google’s site but in a way much easier to use.
NetNewsWire to Support Google Reader
From today’s NewsGator press release:
You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator’s best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.
In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.
Apple Warns Against Jailbreaking
As designed by Apple, the iPhone OS ensures that the iPhone and iPod touch operate reliably. Some customers have not understood the risks of installing software that makes unauthorized modifications to the iPhone OS (“jailbreaking”) on their iPhone or iPod touch. Customers who have installed software that makes these modifications have encountered numerous problems in the operation of their hacked iPhone or iPod touch.
Examples of issues caused by these unauthorized modifications to the iPhone OS have included the following:
Microsoft and Yahoo Ink Deal
The terms of the agreement – which covers search only – is 10 years, in which Microsoft will have an exclusive license to Yahoo’s core search technologies as well as the ability to integrate them into Bing, the companies said.
Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo sites, but Yahoo will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business, in particular its display advertising. In fact, each company will continue to maintain its own separate display ad business and sales force, they said.