Category: General Tech

Jon Gilkison over at InterfaceLab, on Wired’s iPad edition:

There are certain interactive elements to the articles, but – and I apologize to all of the people who put in a lot of back breaking work into this – they’re pretty lame. Tapping on a button-looking element switches out part of the page with another image. You can drag your finger across certain images to make them sort of animate like a flipbook (and in truth, that’s what it is – a series of PNG or JPEG images). There are videos you can tap on to view fullscreen. There are audio clips that you can play. The interactivity in the Wired application is very 1990’s. I am not trying to be insulting either, it’s simply the truth. The Wired application has pretty much brought back image rollovers.

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It’s quite interesting. Here’s Brian Lam, in response to a question the criticism voiced about the leaked iPhone story:

I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I notice it’s usually Apple-only press. I don’t know how they see their jobs, but I think reporters have to be critical of their subjects and hungry for stories that expose the truths that companies may not want in the light of day.

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Andrew Munchbach at BGR:

One of our AT&T Ninjas just hit us up with some news that will excite those of you who have a chronic case of the dropsies and own an iPhone. AT&T will be launching a new insurance service starting June 6th, named MobileProtect, designed specifically for the Apple iPhone. The insurance plan, which will be run by Asurion, will carry a price tag of $13.99/month and will be available for purchased through Apple’s App Store. The charges will be billed to the credit card on file with Apple.

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Earlier this month, Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry set forth a challenge:

Low end Mac users are masochists. There’s no easy way to take a classic Macintosh and do modern, enjoyable work without some pain or effort involved. Everything is a project.

[…]

I’m undertaking a bit of an experiment: spending an entire week with nothing but my low end Macs. I’m leaving my new 21.5″ iMac switched off, using my iPhone 3G for phone calls only, and relying only on Apple products that were released in the 1990s.

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The Apple-following portion of the Internet blew up earlier today when an analyst floated the rumor that part of Steve Jobs’ keynote would be set aside for Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer. Eric Savitz with Barron’s Tech Trader Daily:

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

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Joshua Topolsky:

There is a missing link in our computing experience that has recently been made painfully clear thanks to the current onslaught of highly advanced mobile devices, and I believe the solution to this problem is simple. Allow me to set the stage. Just now, I was reading one of my favorite blogs on my laptop, but I wanted to relocate to my couch, and I wanted to switch to reading on my iPad. Of course, this required starting a new browser session, calling up the web page, and finding my place once again. This same situation now occurs constantly with Twitter (where I’ll have to read and re-read timelines depending on whether I’m checking on my phone, laptop, or iPad), Facebook (a mess similar to that of Twitter), and even in my IM sessions (different locations, different conversations, different logs). There is no continuity in my call logs, text messages, or notes when seated with my laptop or desktop, and there is no way in which to continue working on something in an application on two platforms without tremendous effort. Frankly, it’s a mess.

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The New York Times:

In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $282 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

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MSNBC:

Atlantis returned to Earth Wednesday, wrapping up the final mission of its 25-year career. Once the shuttle program ends, the United States will rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to carry its astronauts to the International space station until a commercial US launcher can be developed.

I’m sad I’m too young to remember NASA in its heyday of Mercury, Gemini and the moon landings.

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Kevin Soh for Reuters:

Hon Hai Chairman Terry Gou, one of Taiwan’s best known businessmen, on Wednesday led a rare media tour of the Chinese complex, part of an unprecedented publicity blitz to counter a growing backlash over the suspected suicides.

“I’m very concerned about this. I can’t sleep every night,” said Gou. “From a scientific point of view, I’m not confident we can stop every case. But, as a responsible employer, we have to take up the responsibility of preventing as many as we can.”

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Chris Anderson:

The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor’s recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar crafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3.

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From the Howard Forums:

It has a 4.1" screen, OMAP 3630, 8 GB Internal, 8 GB MMC, 8MP camera and HDMI out.

There has been speculation this device is actually the Droid 2. I have it on good authority it isn’t. The Shadow doesn’t have a physical keyboard and may end up running Motoblur, while the Droid 2 will run stock Android. The Droid 2 will ship a little later than this device, and is basically just a refreshed Droid — smoother edges with better physical keyboard.

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Back in April, Apple announced that the annual Apple Design Awards would only be given to mobile app developers at this year’s WWDC.

Well, one of Panic’s customers wasn’t too thrilled with that. From the Panic blog:

Transmit 4 was a long time coming, and it was well worth the wait. The UI is possibly the best on the Mac, Transmit Disk has instantly proven invaluable to my work, and even the purchasing page on your website is gorgeous. The progress bar and transitions on the credit card icons were something I’ve never seen, and it proves that no developer pays attention to detail as much as Panic.

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