Engadget has posted the third installment of the Engadget Show. In this episode, Joshua Topolsky interviewed HTC’s director of user experience Drew Bamford who discussed HTC Sense and the design problems his team ran into when designing their product. It’s a great look at how sketches turn into something millions of people use everyday.
AOL’s New Branding Shows Just How Out of Touch They Really Are
Apple Defends AT&T in New Ads
Apple has launched two new iPhone ads, touting AT&T’s 3G network and it’s ability to handle data and a voice call at the same time.
Verizon’s 3G network operates like AT&T’s EDGE network in this regard — to access data, you have to disconnect from a voice call.
While the ads’ message is well-received and a good point to make, it is interesting to see Apple defend AT&T’s network. I think Apple realizes that the public’s feeling towards AT&T — which is increasingly negative — has the potential to hurt iPhone sales. At least as long as the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T.
Is the iMac Eating the Mac Pro’s Lunch?
And other than a few specific tasks in which the most expensive Mac Pro’s 8 cores proved beneficial (Handbrake, Cinebench, etc), the iMac outperformed the competition or kept things close enough not to be relevant, plus it straight-up won in the eyes of Speedmark 6.
Performance-wise, the base Mac Pro makes no sense at all. The 8-core Mac Pro offers a touch more power, sometimes, and other times (in many day to day tasks) even it is outgunned.
Of course, any Mac Pro still allows multiple internal hard drives, three PCI slots, more FireWire ports (four vs one) and more room for RAM expansion (32GB vs 16GB). But once again, even in the worlds of professional media creation, that’s a pretty questionable upsell, especially with external storage solutions and the fact that most high, high end media pros (like special effects artists) turn to dedicated render farms to do their heavy number crunching anyway.
With the new iMac, Apple has shrunk the Mac-Pro-needing niche even smaller. And I can’t tell anyone with a straight face that a handful of expandability is worth $300-$1100 with no monitor, no matter how deep their pockets are.
Simplenote Going Pro
The upcoming version of Simplenote allows you to buy a premium subscription at a competitive price. If you use Simplenote in your daily life, a premium subscription will give you additional power, reliability, and flexibility.
Our goal with the subscription is to add significant value to your experience. Of course, buying a subscription will also help us pay for our costs, and support future development.
Microsoft Wooing News Corp.?
Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.
This is a step in the wrong direction when it comes to net neutrality. Search engines already act as news gatekeepers. If news organizations give software companies control of who sees what news, we’re all in trouble. It’s just another logical step until ISPs control the news we see.
AT&T Losing iPhone Exclusivity in June?
CNN Money is teasing us all.
Phil Schiller on App Rejections
BusinessWeek has a good behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s App Store process.
The Problem of File Formats
Kevin Lipe, describing a problem he ran into during NaNoWriMo:
Here’s the deal: I’ve been using this as my main word processor for a year and a half now, for everything from school papers to poems to a novel. It hasn’t let me down yet in terms of doing what I ask of it—that is, up until now. I’ve started using a MacBook (Mid-2007) as my main writing machine instead of my MacBook Pro (better keyboard) and I also have a Thinkpad X60 tablet with the gargantuan 8-cell, six-hour battery that I love to write on. As a result, I’m moving files around from machine to machine and also from operating system to operating system, and RTF is hideously inconsistent between programs, and especially between operating systems. Something’s always missing, whether it’s page numbers, the footer, whatever.
[…]
This is frustrating because so many OS X word processors live and breathe RTF. In a world where the standard format for document interchange (besides PDF, which I’ll discuss when I get to Pagehand) is Microsoft’s binary, crufty pre-2007 Word format, RTF would appear to be the last, best hope for having some sort of standard method of interchanging documents without relying on Microsoft’s crap. The shame is that no OS X word processor I’ve tested yet has flawlessly opened an RTF document created by another word processor, and none of them can produce an RTF file that opens identically under OpenOffice. I’m not holding my breath for this to ever get worked out, and so I’m going to pretend that these problems don’t affect my judgement of all of these word processors, but I sure wish they had everything worked out.
Lipe’s problem highlights an inherent weakness with open formats. Since most open formats don’t have any specific developer in charge of their development, there is no one to say what can and can’t be done with it. Microsoft’s formats — as goofy as they are sometimes — are strong because Microsoft controls them.
The Difference Between Journalism and Editorial Content
This video is from Jon Stewart’s interview with Lou Dobbs, former CNN anchor. Go watch it, and then come back.
I’ll wait.
Done? Good. Welcome back…
The part that kills me about Dobbs is his inability — or unwillingness — to remove his opinion from the journalism he is supposed to be conducting. He calls infusing news with his opinion “advocacy journalism.” All programs like his are just editorial content disguised as news. It’s disgusting.
Not to say there isn’t a place for opinion — opinion is fine, as long as it is labeled as such. Mixing news and opinion — like FOX News, Dobbs and others do day after day — confuses viewers, colors the news and affects public opinion.
These aren’t the roles journalists are supposed to fill. In school, journalism students have “Leave your opinion out of it” drilled into their heads time after time. It’s great to see CNN starting to remember those lessons.
Sure, shedding people like Lou Dobbs will mean shedding some viewers, but CNN seems committed to real, middle-of-the-road news reporting. In a world where FOX News is wildly popular, it’s refreshing to see a major news corporation putting their foot down when it comes to separating news and editorial content.
Apple Denying Coverage of Smokers’ Macs?
According to separate reports, Apple denied coverage for two users in 2008 based on the fact that OSHA lists cigarette smoke as a biohazard. Both techs refused service to the computers not because the smoke damaged them, but because it’s considered hazardous to a tech’s health to work on a contaminated unit.
I can attest to how gross the inside of a computer can get after being used in a smoking household, but I’ve never seen anyone deny warranty coverage because of it.
iPhone Sales Per Quater
Those numbers are in millions, mind you.
